I often think about how much Square's 2005 Final Fantasy VII tech demo cursed the company to a decade of fans groveling at their feet for a remake, something that prior to that demo was not really talked about all that much. At least not at such a scale, or to the point that every E3 came with people joking about its supposed appearance or lack thereof, something that Metroid Prime 4 has more or less embodied today. Repeated attempts to quell fans and explain in no uncertain terms that it was just a demo did little quiet the discussion, and Square eventually changed tact and asserted a remake would not be possible unless it could top the original, a proposition they framed as being so risky and improbable that it'd just kill the company.

While selling IPs for pennies on the dollar to invest in NFTs right before a market crash, an insider trading scandal, and flops like Forspoken have put Square in a bad position, they've been able to weather these hits and stave off total ruin. For now, at least. Modern game development is fucked. It's so fucked that Final Fantasy VII Remake is a project Square is now willing to take a chance on, but it is only sustainable as three separate projects aiming to cover the entirety of what was a 40 hour mid-90s video game. It is not simply a matter of being able to top the original creatively and financially, it's replicating a game from an era where less got you more in a time where more means less.

And in a lot of ways, Remake both succeeds and fails at this. All the key beats are here, like storming the Mako reactor, the Sector 7 plate falling, the high speed motorcycle chase out of Midgar and into the wide open plains of Gaia... But what was originally a three to five hour segment of a much larger game has now been pulled like rubber, stretched so thin it is nearly transparent to suit a full gameplay experience. Midgar is a big place, you simply cannot invest in the amount of assets needed to portray it in the modern day and have enough time and budget left to design a whole open world and numerous dungeons and towns with their own bespoke aesthetics, and the cost is that Remake at times feels bloated.

Portions of the original that took mere minutes are now elongated into full chapters, like the Sector 5 underpass, which has mutated into a dungeon the player must traverse several times. Pre-existing dungeons like Shinra HQ are so massive that they have a tendency to overstay their welcome, and moments of urgency in the story are broken up with prolonged periods of downtime that adversely affect the pacing.

Square has had a real side quest problem for a while now. They often feel dry and inorganic, presented as checklists of things to do rather than being an obscure but natural part of a larger, living world. Though they are not mandatory, they're often presented in a way that feels it, a nagging green icon and the promise of a reward too good to pass up if only you're willing to put in some work. Aerith is probably being dissected (or worse) by Hojo but uh, I gotta run this Uber Eats order to Chocobo Sam.

This is something I hope Rebirth will address by covering a comparatively much larger portion of the original's story. I also hope it further explores Remake's most interesting aspect, which is it's almost Cabin in the Woods-like meta narrative about being a remake.

I often see people complain when a remake deviates from the source material, but provided the original is still readily available - as is the case with Final Fantasy VII - then the idea of a 1:1 remake becomes profoundly boring to me. A reverence for and understanding of the original is of course necessary, but I'd prefer a remake actually say something new rather than be a straight retread. And so Remake to me is perfectly titled, not just in how it embodies being a remake as a product but by exploring how self-aware characters are attempting to remake their own story.

Sephiroth has apparently already lived the events of Final Fantasy VII, and spends much of this game coercing Cloud as he had in the original, using him a puppet and setting him against the fates so that hey may break causality. This doesn't just benefit Sephiroth by helping him avoid eating shit in the Northern Crater a second time, it also presents Cloud and his company the opportunity to fight him without facing the same consequences they did the last time, even if they may not be as acutely aware of what those consequences are.

Except for Aerith, who subtly displays her own level of awareness for the original timeline, knowing people's names before they're given and generally displaying a level of precognition over minor aspects of her world that seem unimportant on a surface level but nevertheless betray her placement in Remake's continuity. For her, the opportunity to defy destiny is a decision made with considerably less confidence as she knows what her sacrifice accomplishes.

Naturally, the fates, or "whispers" as they're known, physically intervene when events begin to deviate. Wedge survives plate fall, so that fucker's gotta get thrown out a window. Hojo nearly spoils Cloud on the reveal that he's not a member of SOLDIER, so he gets whisked away while going "Ohhhh my, how faaaascinating~" like a weird like freak. In a way, the whispers represent the very boring fans that want Final Fantasy VII but more prettier, who dislike any chance taken with the material and will react violently when presented with something different. For Square to move past the baggage of FFVII, they too must destroy the expectations placed upon them and venture into uncharted territory.

Suffice it to say, I'm pretty happy with these creative choices and found myself far more invested in Remake because of them. It's a good counterbalance to all the bloat and actually left me interested enough to push through some of Remake's more tedious lows just to see where everything was going.

On the more mechanical end, Remake is pretty solid. A complaint I had about of the original is that characters largely felt the same despite ostensibly slotting into traditional job classes, with the key differentiating factor being what materia was equipped to them. Conversely, Remake provides each party member their own play style, and it adds a lot of diversity to combat. The materia system remains largely unaltered, serving as a sort of common point between the games to keep players grounded early on, while the new take on the ATB system feels like a near perfect answer to Final Fantasy moving away from turn-based gameplay.

I think Remake also deserves a lot of praise for how well it translates the visual design of the original. There's an alternate reality out there where this game was made for the PS3 and adopted a more grounded aesthetic akin to Advant Children, and thank god I don't live in it. I also adore the soundtrack. Subtle things like making sure the bits of metallic percussion in the battle theme are still there, the incorporation of the Shinra theme in Crazy Motorcycle Chase adding a nice narrative tie, or just my own Pavlovian conditioning resulting in me getting hyped as hell anytime J-E-N-O-V-A starts playing... it's good stuff.

Final Fantasy VII Remake would not exist were it not for that tech demo, and I don't mean that to say the possibility of a remake wasn't there until E3 2005. Rather, its themes are a direct response to the albatross that hung from Square's neck in the decade following. What artistic value would there be in doing a by-the-numbers remake, going through the motions from start to finish? It'd make a lot of people happy, sure, but I can't imagine it being anything other than bloodless.