Final Fantasy VII Remake has fresh things to say about the nature of remakes in a medium that is increasingly flooded with them but is unfortunately retrograde in more ways than one, resulting in a mixed experience.
The fact that Final Fantasy VII Remake (hereafter FF7R) exists and is as good as it is is a small miracle, given the notorious development hell of Final Fantasy XV and the mixed bag that was Kingdom Hearts III. Many fans desired but might have been afraid to expect a competent modernization of one of the most beloved games of all time. For many, FF7R did everything it had to do—namely, put a fresh coat of paint on the opening hours of the 1997 classic. The new action RPG combat system is one of the best Square Enix has produced since Kingdom Hearts II and is a great iteration on the original game's Active Time Battle system (which, for the diehards, is included here, though I have not tried it out myself to see how it compares to the original). There are some expansions of certain areas, most notably Wall Market, that work really well and help to justify the extended runtime the game gives to Midgar.
The graphical updates are a bit uneven, unfortunately. Cloud's character model looks ready to be reused in FF7R's sequel on the PS5. Other named models are generally good, and the character design choices for these folks basically all hit. For the most part, however, NPCs are a bit uncanny when they aren't outright lazy. Lips flap across stationary teeth in one too many places for comfort, and body types and faces are reused like a game from much earlier than 2020. The most egregious offenders in the graphics department are the numerous textures that bafflingly just plain didn't load upon release, including ones you're guaranteed to see very early on such as Cloud's apartment door. I am not sure if they've fixed these bugs in the intervening months, but they dampened the experience somewhat.
Where the game suffers most, though, is in its vision of what expansion is. For every Wall Market—where Cloud gets to participate in Yakuza-lite traversal and minigames and sidequests are at least entertaining for the characters and situations if not the gameplay—there is a quest hub that just wants you to run through old MMO filler sidequests. For every Shinra Tower—where you get to experience the lore of the Final Fantasy VII universe in an all-new way—there is a Train Graveyard, where a somewhat charming traversal section in the original is padded out to be hours long. FF7R genuinely deepens the experience of the Final Fantasy VII mythos in more ways than one, but it does seem like the twin goals of having a proper-length AAA RPG and focusing exclusively on Midgar led to a great amount of redundancy and wheel-spinning. For the amount of sidequests there are, it's doubly troubling that the quality is so low. There's really only a handful in each of the few quest hubs, and if this is the best Square Enix can offer from what ostensibly would have been a larger crop that got cut down, it's worrisome what we'll be doing in future installments in the series.
The most controversial part of the game, of course, is the ending and what it reveals about an ongoing story element that players of the original will note is decidedly out-of-place—cloaked figures called Whispers that seem to intervene in moments of potential digression from the plotline of the original. In the end, it is revealed that these creatures are guardians of the original timeline of Final Fantasy VII, in which Aerith dies, Sephiroth summons Meteor, and Holy saves the world, potentially at the expense of humanity depending on your view of the original game's ending. At the end of the game, Cloud, Barrett, Tifa, and Aerith march forward against Sephiroth, destroying the Whispers and apparently unshackling the world of FF7R from the original game's chronology. Sephiroth ominously shows Cloud a potential future that he wishes to work to avert. The most shocking scene for longstanding fans of the game (and most confusing for neophytes) is the reveal that in some timeline somewhere, Zack has survived the battle in which he died in the original chronology and is marching arm-in-arm with that universe's Cloud towards Midgar.
It's all very vague, and fan theories are numerous about which characters are clued into this metaphysical catastrophe, potentially because of insight from the original game's timeline or others. Without getting too far into that territory—I'm sure with Nomura at the helm, none of us will be able to deduce precisely how batshit this series is going to end up being—one thing I can say for certain is that these new additions to the plot are pretty cool to me. The Whispers are obviously a very thinly-veiled stand-in for vocal fanbases that actively resist change to beloved franchises, and while FF7R will need to stick the landing to justify this kind of glibness, it's refreshing in a space where media companies seem to be constantly hedging back and forth trying to figure out the most delicate way to give fans whatever they demand.
That said, the particular plot choices made are not without risk. The early reveal of Sephiroth has been explained as metatextually necessary given his ubiquity among video game fans, and I can buy that. But the survival of Zack is much more troublesome to the elegance with which the original weaved Cloud's character development, potentially one of the peaks of storytelling in video games up to that point and still a masterstroke to modern eyes. The potential for party members such as Aerith to have insights into the changes that are occurring in real time might complicate the ways in which this game was able to tease and poke series veterans without fundamentally damaging character arcs. But overall, there's quite a bit of new ground to chart and it could be done wonderfully.
If you want the original Final Fantasy VII, play the original Final Fantasy VII. It's a better game anyway. But I for one am excited to see where we go from here. Let's just hope that we don't have to kill too many more random rats along the way.
The fact that Final Fantasy VII Remake (hereafter FF7R) exists and is as good as it is is a small miracle, given the notorious development hell of Final Fantasy XV and the mixed bag that was Kingdom Hearts III. Many fans desired but might have been afraid to expect a competent modernization of one of the most beloved games of all time. For many, FF7R did everything it had to do—namely, put a fresh coat of paint on the opening hours of the 1997 classic. The new action RPG combat system is one of the best Square Enix has produced since Kingdom Hearts II and is a great iteration on the original game's Active Time Battle system (which, for the diehards, is included here, though I have not tried it out myself to see how it compares to the original). There are some expansions of certain areas, most notably Wall Market, that work really well and help to justify the extended runtime the game gives to Midgar.
The graphical updates are a bit uneven, unfortunately. Cloud's character model looks ready to be reused in FF7R's sequel on the PS5. Other named models are generally good, and the character design choices for these folks basically all hit. For the most part, however, NPCs are a bit uncanny when they aren't outright lazy. Lips flap across stationary teeth in one too many places for comfort, and body types and faces are reused like a game from much earlier than 2020. The most egregious offenders in the graphics department are the numerous textures that bafflingly just plain didn't load upon release, including ones you're guaranteed to see very early on such as Cloud's apartment door. I am not sure if they've fixed these bugs in the intervening months, but they dampened the experience somewhat.
Where the game suffers most, though, is in its vision of what expansion is. For every Wall Market—where Cloud gets to participate in Yakuza-lite traversal and minigames and sidequests are at least entertaining for the characters and situations if not the gameplay—there is a quest hub that just wants you to run through old MMO filler sidequests. For every Shinra Tower—where you get to experience the lore of the Final Fantasy VII universe in an all-new way—there is a Train Graveyard, where a somewhat charming traversal section in the original is padded out to be hours long. FF7R genuinely deepens the experience of the Final Fantasy VII mythos in more ways than one, but it does seem like the twin goals of having a proper-length AAA RPG and focusing exclusively on Midgar led to a great amount of redundancy and wheel-spinning. For the amount of sidequests there are, it's doubly troubling that the quality is so low. There's really only a handful in each of the few quest hubs, and if this is the best Square Enix can offer from what ostensibly would have been a larger crop that got cut down, it's worrisome what we'll be doing in future installments in the series.
The most controversial part of the game, of course, is the ending and what it reveals about an ongoing story element that players of the original will note is decidedly out-of-place—cloaked figures called Whispers that seem to intervene in moments of potential digression from the plotline of the original. In the end, it is revealed that these creatures are guardians of the original timeline of Final Fantasy VII, in which Aerith dies, Sephiroth summons Meteor, and Holy saves the world, potentially at the expense of humanity depending on your view of the original game's ending. At the end of the game, Cloud, Barrett, Tifa, and Aerith march forward against Sephiroth, destroying the Whispers and apparently unshackling the world of FF7R from the original game's chronology. Sephiroth ominously shows Cloud a potential future that he wishes to work to avert. The most shocking scene for longstanding fans of the game (and most confusing for neophytes) is the reveal that in some timeline somewhere, Zack has survived the battle in which he died in the original chronology and is marching arm-in-arm with that universe's Cloud towards Midgar.
It's all very vague, and fan theories are numerous about which characters are clued into this metaphysical catastrophe, potentially because of insight from the original game's timeline or others. Without getting too far into that territory—I'm sure with Nomura at the helm, none of us will be able to deduce precisely how batshit this series is going to end up being—one thing I can say for certain is that these new additions to the plot are pretty cool to me. The Whispers are obviously a very thinly-veiled stand-in for vocal fanbases that actively resist change to beloved franchises, and while FF7R will need to stick the landing to justify this kind of glibness, it's refreshing in a space where media companies seem to be constantly hedging back and forth trying to figure out the most delicate way to give fans whatever they demand.
That said, the particular plot choices made are not without risk. The early reveal of Sephiroth has been explained as metatextually necessary given his ubiquity among video game fans, and I can buy that. But the survival of Zack is much more troublesome to the elegance with which the original weaved Cloud's character development, potentially one of the peaks of storytelling in video games up to that point and still a masterstroke to modern eyes. The potential for party members such as Aerith to have insights into the changes that are occurring in real time might complicate the ways in which this game was able to tease and poke series veterans without fundamentally damaging character arcs. But overall, there's quite a bit of new ground to chart and it could be done wonderfully.
If you want the original Final Fantasy VII, play the original Final Fantasy VII. It's a better game anyway. But I for one am excited to see where we go from here. Let's just hope that we don't have to kill too many more random rats along the way.