Up until last week, I had never played Final Fantasy VII. I'm not exactly much of a JRPG person. But one thing has fascinated for the last few years, and that was the discourse surrounding Final Fantasy VII Remake, namely rather than being a retelling of the original game's story, it introduced changes and new elements that turned it into more of a commentary on Final Fantasy VII and its impact. Anyone who's followed my reviews on here and other sites can probably guess that this kind of discourse immediately put the remake on my radar.

Like I said earlier, though, I'm not much of a JRPG player. However, I knew that if I was going to play Final Fantasy VII Remake, I needed to play the original Final Fantasy VII first so I could appreciate it on its own before diving into the remake and trying to decipher what exactly its changes and additions meant. Which meant playing 30+ hours of one of my least favorite types of games: a turn-based RPG.

For what it's worth, Final Fantasy VII, despite being such a formative staple of the genre, actually uses a system that separates it from a typical turn-based RPG. The "active time battle" system means every individual character and enemy's turn is dictated by an individual timer rather than waiting until every single player on the field has acted. Which means that while you're busy choosing actions for one character, the enemy is already recovering and might attack you before you finish.

This system didn't really grip me at first, it seemed like a useless change that didn't solve my two issues when it comes to turn-based RPGs: my own impatience and the inability to truly react to your opponent. Impatience is self-explanatory, but by "inability to react" I am referring to the fact that when an enemy does an attack, you have no real way of intercepting or countering, you will simply get hit and there's nothing you can do about it unless there's a chance it misses or something. Of course, the player has the same advantage against enemies, but the "fairness" of the design doesn't change how frustrating it feels when an enemy just suddenly busts out a move that you couldn't have anticipated and ruins the fight for reasons that were basically out of your control because you couldn't have taken it into account on a previous turn.

Active time battle, again, isn't actually that much of a solution. There's still a lot of sitting through animations, so it's not as if battles are actually quicker than in a typical turn-based RPG. And for the most part, because the game pauses during certain animations, you're still not afforded the freedom to react. I pretty much hated the combat system for the entirety of Midgar, a 6-hour "prologue" of sorts. That is, until, I finally reached battles challenging enough where I was being asked to consider healing not just between fights, but during. In a regular turn-based RPG, when a character is low on health, although it's kind of scary, it's not truly a big deal, you just go into the menu and use a potion or have your healing character cast a spell. Your only worry is if you'll be able to heal enough to withstand the next attack, which usually isn't a problem.

In Final Fantasy VII, every frame you spend in a menu brings the enemy an inch closer to attacking again. So you don't just have to heal, you have to heal fast. Some battles got so frantic to the point where my optimal strategy genuinely came to be giving every single character a Restore Materia just to make sure I could not possibly miss a chance to heal. This worked to an extent, but once certain bosses started to whip out attacks that hit the whole party, even this lost its usefulness. The solution to this problem is where some aspects of the game's age began to show.

As with a lot of old games, sometimes the tutorializing is suboptimal. One flaw in Final Fantasy VII in this regard is how poorly it explains the Materia system, which essentially allows you to equip magic and various other abilities to characters. This is good on its own, but Materia's real power is meant to shine when you pair it with support Materia that augments it. But the actual text explaining what these support Materia items do is not always very clear. I genuinely did not consider that "All" Materia was referring to area-of-effect until the walkthrough I was using mentioned how useful it would be for an upcoming fight. It's almost essential that you have at least one character with a Restore Materia augmented by an All Materia or else you simply will not be able to prevent your party from getting wiped in some fights.

Once I realized this, of course, the game instantly became more fun. Suddenly I found myself rushing to queue up a party heal during an enemy's lengthy attack animation when I knew significant damage was coming up. It's the closest a turn-based RPG has ever come to emulating the feeling of an action game, and for that, I do have to respect the design at play, especially for a game from the 90s where I wouldn't have expected such deviation from the norm.

But enough about the gameplay. Although that certainly will be a point of comparison I have to consider when it comes to Final Fantasy VII Remake, obviously the main thing I'm here to compare is the story. So, what do I think of the story of Final Fantasy VII, one of the most highly regarded, iconic, and influential video game narratives of all time? Dear readers, I desperately wanted to have a hot take here, I cannot help but enjoy being a contrarian sometimes. But only when I'm honest about it. And here, my honest statement is - it's almost as good as people say. Not flawless, as we'll get to later, but it lives up to its reputation.

Final Fantasy VII is most well-known for its strong environmentalist themes, and that's evident almost immediately. Shinra, both a major corporation and the primary government of Final Fantasy VII's world, powers the world's technology through a substance known as "Mako", but the production of Mako is slowly killing the planet. Our protagonist, Cloud, finds himself in the fight against Shinra alongside two of our other main characters, Barret and Tifa, in the resistance group AVALANCHE just before the game begins. Although Cloud isn't much of a believer in the cause, AVALANCHE's goal is to stop Shinra from killing the planet by any means necessary. The first several hours take place entirely within the Shinra capital of Midgar as Cloud, Barret, and Tifa fight Shinra and attempt to protect their new friend Aeris who the Shinra are after.

Although I had not played Final Fantasy VII before, I did absorb a lot of discourse over the years. One criticism I've heard is that these those environmentalist themes sort of fall by the wayside after the group leaves Midgar, especially since towards the end of Midgar they lean more heavily into more traditional fantasy instead of the more sci-fi approach the early hours took. I think it is fair to say that the game certainly expands beyond that laser focus we see in the Midgar section, but I would argue everything those opening hours establishes still remains at the heart of the story for almost the entirety of the dozens of hours it takes to beat the game.

For one thing, Shinra's influence is still felt beyond Midgar. They are the government of almost the entire known world, after all, and will constantly interfere with our heroes along every step of their journey. Not to mention, their Mako reactors are everywhere. On top of that, even the more fantastical elements connect to Shinra. A crucial plot device to the world of Final Fantasy VII is the Lifestream, the combined sum of all the planet's life energy. All living things are born from the Lifestream, and everything that dies returns to the Lifestream. The reason the production of Mako causes such harm to the environment is because it essentially "uses up" the Lifestream's energy, leaving it unable to return to its source and disrupting that fundamental cycle.

And then we have the main antagonist, Sephiroth. Sephiroth himself is the product of a Shinra experiment, and now intends to destroy the world upon learning the truth of his nature. Although, he learns two different stories. The first being that he is the son of Jenova, one of the Ancients, also known as the Cetra. The Cetra were a nomadic people deeply in tune with the Planet and the Lifestream, but were wiped out in a catastrophe, abandoned to their fate by humans who chose the path of remaining in one place, destroying the environment and harming the Planet for the sake of building their cities. Sephiroth's reaction to this version of events is one of vengeance, wanting to punish humanity for their crimes against the Cetra and the Planet as a whole. Although most of this story ends up being untrue, it immediately justifies the pivot from Shinra as the primary antagonist to Sephiroth, as Sephiroth becomes more than just a singular figure, but this manifestation of all of humanity's sins coming back to haunt them.

However, the truth of the matter comes slightly later. "Jenova" is not a Cetra, nor is it Sephiroth's real mother. Rather, it's an alien entity that crashed down on the planet two thousand years ago, the "calamity from the skies" that brought about the aforementioned end of the Cetra before it was eventually defeated, leaving Aeris' family line the last remnant of her entire race. Sephiroth was created when his pregnant mother was injected with Jenova's cells by his father, Hojo, though Sephiroth does still seem to believe he is the direct offspring of Jenova. Regardless, he is aware of Jenova's true nature, and now seeks to finish what it started and kill the world, so that when the Lifestream attempts to "heal" the dying Planet, he can absorb its energy and rule the new world as God.

This new backstory and motvation does still have its merits. It makes Sephiroth an interesting parallel to our main protagonist. Cloud is a former soldier constantly looking up to others. First his hero Sephiroth, then his friend in some nebulous, undefined war, Zack, who would eventually die at the hands of Sephiroth. Cloud, though injected with Jenova's cells in an attempt to recreate Shinra's perfect soldier Sephiroth, never ended living up to his heights. He wasn't even as good as Zack. He was a failure destined to remain a nobody. So when he reunites with his friend Tifa a few years after the tragedy that destroyed his hometown and left him traumatized, he sort of tricks himself into believing Zack's feats were his own. Not maliciously, since he seems to believe the lie himself, but it's a lie nonetheless. Cloud is full of self-doubt, and he doesn't know who he is or who he wants to be, so it's easy for him to just want to be someone else.

Sephiroth, on the other hand, believes he knows exactly who he is. Sure, it's a momentary crisis when he learns he might be some kind of science experiment, but this only fills him with new drive, new purpose. Him being the product of an alien bent on destroying all life on the Planet doesn't give him pause, make him doubt what he's fighting for. Instead, it only makes him more sure of himself. Gives him a sense of destiny. He was brought into this world to become the God his "mother" never could, and he will stop at nothing until he achieves it. Such certainty is born from tremendous ego, literally exerting his will over that of the entire Planet.

Thus ends up being ironic in two ways. The first is that said ego gives him more in common with the Shinra and the humans he detests than he realizes, prioritizing his own ends over the good of all life on the Planet. The second is that as we learn, Jenova's cells exert subconscious influence over everyone who has them, slowly desiring to converge and resume Jenova's mission. Although I don't believe it's ever stated, there's no reason to believe Sephiroth is any exception. His entire sense of self is likely a myth. A puppet of Jenova's will, mistakenly believing his desires to be his own, much like Cloud did with his fallen friend Zack.

But as I alluded to a moment ago, I don't think this second version of Sephiroth's backstory is quite as tight and cohesive as the first one. I do think it is still, overall, the better choice for the story, I don't think they should have had the original version of events turn out to be the truth. Otherwise the game doesn't really have much more of interest to say than "humans are destroying the planet and that's bad." It's true, obviously, but what would fighting Sephiroth really represent other than saying that the entire human race doesn't deserve to be punished? That being said, there is something to be said about humanity's selfishness allowed them to turn a blind eye to the dying Planet, and how Sephiroth being a descendant of one of the Cetra, the people who wanted so desperately to protect it, turns him into more than an individual. How his evil is not born only from within, but from all the problems the world has been facing for the last two thousand years.

The truth of Jenova, this alien being from outside of the Planet, kind of undermines this. Jenova is a complete outsider. This is a very text-heavy game, so maybe I missed something, but it's not really explained what Jenova is, exactly, other than some sort of parasitic alien. I think this ambiguity is a strength, to be clear, but what does Jenova really represent in the context of the environmentalist themes? It's not born from the Planet, nor the abuse of the Lifestream by humanity. So for Sephiroth to be enacting Jenova's ends, either as a puppet or just trying to finish what it started, we sort of lose his connection to most of those environmentalist themes. Humanity's only real involvement in creating Sephiroth, in turning him into the man he is, is Hojo's experiments. The fault now rests entirely on individuals, rather than a broader societal failure.

This issue is compounded by the reveal of the way Sephiroth intends to end the world and remake it as God, a visual from the game so iconic it's part of the logo - Meteor. You would think at this point in the game, especially with Shinra being a presence, you'd want to find some way of tying these two threads back together. Shinra is killing the Planet through its actions, and now Sephiroth wants to kill the world so he can remake it in its last moments of life. What Shinra is doing accidentally (or rather, as a side effect of their actions that they're willing to ignore) Sephiroth intends to do with intent and malice. But it turns out, rather than killing the Planet through any of the means by which it's already dying, instead he's relying on some Cetra magic from thousands of years ago that also conveniently has planet-killing capabilities.

Obviously, I get why this happened. For one thing, going into the second half of the story, it certainly raises the stakes to have this singular impending event of destruction. And within the rules of the fiction, Sephiroth's method of destroying the world needs to preserve what energy remains in the Lifestream, which means if he destroyed the world with Mako reactors or a similar process, he wouldn't be able to become God, everything would just die forever.

But I think an answer was staring them in the face here. Perhaps this will get a bit fanfic-y, me suggesting a rewrite to a game that is nearly three decades old now. But at the same time, Square Enix and Tetsuya Nomura are clearly willing to spend millions and millions of dollars and most of the 2020s on essentially telling a high-budget fanfic rewrite of the original game, so I think I'm afforded that right in this review, too.

So, Sephiroth obviously can't just will something as powerful as Meteor into existence. As we learn shortly after the reveal of its existence, it requires a powerful catalyst known as Black Materia. In the world of Final Fantasy VII, Materia can be formed in two ways. The most common one is as one of many byproducts of Mako production, making Shinra the world's primary supplier of Materia. But also, rarely, the Lifestream's energy crystallizes on its own, which is how Materia was created and used before the time of Shinra. The oldest and most powerful of these Materia are the Black Materia and the White Materia. The White Materia is used to cast Holy, a powerful spell that essentially allows the Planet to do whatever it believes is necessary to protect the Lifestream. Black Materia, on the other hand, has the sole purpose of destruction, hence its use in summoning the world-ending Meteor.

But what if the Black Materia wasn't this ancient thing that had always existed? What if it was moreso a theoretical possibility, a thing the Planet warned about but did not come to be in the time of the Cetra? In the game, the Black Materia takes the form of an entire temple, but can be shrunk down into a usable size by completing various puzzles. This explanation is pulled almost entirely out of thin air. It's not clear how or why the Cetra built a temple out of Black Materia or how they were able to grow and shrink it like that. And I get it's magic, but this entire thing is basically born out of nowhere basically just to justify a single (admittedly important) character beat for Shinra double agent Cait Sith.

But let's say none of that happened, and once the characters learn about Black Materia, it doesn't turn out that they're already conveniently standing inside of it. Instead, it's a theoretical thing that they just know Sephiroth believes exists somewhere in the world. Where, or rather what, could the Black Materia be in this hypothetical alternate version of events? And how could it better tie into the Shinra story thread and its associated themes?

Well, all Materia is just the Lifestream's energy condensed, right? And Shinra is using the Lifestream's energy to create Mako. And here we're already telling an environmentalist story where the production of that energy is sucking the life out of the planet. What if, much like in our own world, some energy sources produce toxic waste that can cause ecological damage, Mako produces waste of its own? Spoiled energy from the Planet, unable to return to the Lifestream, left to fester on its own and, much like ordinary Materia, gradually crystalize? Rather than some random temple, this could be your Black Materia.

It's clear that the "Black" in the name isn't just referring to color, but a more metaphysical darkness or corruption. So it being born from Mako, itself a perversion of the Lifestream certainly seems logical to me. It just feels so much more impactful when I imagine that the catalyst that Sephiroth needs to end the world is something that is, once again, born from humanity's abuse of nature. Instead, it just isn't really explained why Black Materia (and the subsequent world-ending spell it casts) exists. It just does. A meaningless macguffin that the characters can toss around before it finally ends up in Sephiroth's hands once and for all, with absolutely no greater narrative significance.

And this isn't a problem because I need magic to have an explanation inherently or anything, but rather, the obligatory nature of Black Materia's existence is sort of the final nail in the coffin in terms of how the game's Sephiroth and Shinra threads don't really tie together by the end, despite being so intrinsically linked from the start. Because without this, there is absolutely nothing about Sephiroth's entire goal that has anything to do with the ecological consequences of Shinra or humanity's lifestyle. Hojo would still be a mad scientist trying to create super soldiers with Jenova's cells no matter what, which would always inevitably lead to a Sephiroth trying to finish what Jenova started long before humanity turned their backs on the Planet.

So hopefully this overly long detour about a seemingly small and insignificant plot device like Black Materia made sense by the end. It's not that Black Materia is the only way they could have fixed the problem, but it certainly seems like the most obvious one. Sephiroth's destruction being born from humanity's mistakes would even enhance the ambiguous ending. The game literally cuts to credits at the climax of this clash between Holy, a spell born of the will of humanity fighting for the Planet's future, and Meteor. If Meteor worked a little bit more like I suggested, then it becomes this metaphorical collision of the best and worst of humanity, and you're left to decide for yourself which one the Planet deemed representative of the fate of the human race. (Though, while I haven't seen Advent Children, the very existence of a proper sequel narrative set before the game's epilogue seems to definitively answer this question.)

Hopefully amidst all my complaining, I don't come across like I dislike this story, or that it doesn't deserve the legacy it has. But not even the most iconic stories are beyond criticism. That the game presented such strong ideas and themes that I was even able to talk about it in this much detail should be a testament to just how much of a landmark this was for video game storytelling. It's not some bad story because it got a few things wrong, it's a great game because of just how much it got right. It raised the bar for a reason, and I'm only more curious to see what exactly such a drastic remake of this game looks like now.

AY. People hate this game for some reason but I fw mgs4 hard. I’m all for the long ass cutscenes so I didn’t mind that at all. The gameplay was great as usual. Even though there was more emphasis on action this time, I think the stealth has never played better. The B&B bosses werent really characters but they were representations of the consequences of war, so it fit imo (and who don’t like psycho waifus). ACT V was fucking glorious. This game is all the Kojima greatness with modern gameplay, so how can it be anything but peak. The series couldn’t have asked for a better ending.