A middle-of-the-road 2.5/5 rating simultaneously feels overly unfair and overly generous. In spite of its expensive, lavish, and confident sense of style and presentation, FF7R is a thoroughly confused game, a mixed bag that fluctuates wildly in quality at completely sporadic intervals throughout. It's fun, and then it's frustrating; it's entertaining, and then it's energy-sapping; it's compelling, and then it's a complete and total clusterfuck. Sometimes Remake actually feels like FF7 come to life on the big screen, and then sometimes it occurs to you that you're just playing an incoherent fanfiction of a beloved classic. Confusion and imbalance are at the core of Remake's very identity in spite of its confident and professional facade, much like its unreliable-narrator protagonist and his personal struggles that FF7R only gets to briefly touch on before coming to an anticlimactic 'end'.
The choice to adapt the famous Midgar Arc into an entire 30-40 hour game is one I can almost understand from a certain perspective. FF7's Midgar has everything going for it: it's visually striking, immediately memorable, and drenched in a weirdly evocative mixture of dystopia and realism. Midgar is a tale of societal upheaval and cyberpunk revolution told through a uniquely fantastical lens, and almost every single iconic moment from the original game can be found in Midgar. The trains, the Mako reactors, Aerith's church, Cloud's motorcycle, Wall Market & Don Corneo, the destruction of Sector 7 and Sephiroth's slaughter of Shinra HQ, just one action-packed and iconic setpiece after another in the span of like 6-7 hours. Midgar is such a compelling and well-realized location, and yet it felt like there was so much we never got to see. So I can almost understand the merit behind focusing the entirety of FF7R within the rotting pizza that is Midgar: it's an endlessly interesting and unique location with so much lore, drama, and comedy built into it that maybe, just maybe, an entire game centered around this teal junkyard metropolis might be able to sustain itself for 30 hours.
What this amounts to in execution, however, is padding. A lot of padding. Almost everything I liked and appreciated in FF7R was lifted almost verbatim from the original game. Nothing new is really done with AVALANCHE, or Shinra, or the Turks, Mako, SOLDIER, the Cetra, or anything at all, really. For the most part, you're merely playing through the Greatest Hits of FF7 bloated with often unnecessary jam sessions comprised of overlong exposition and artificial gameplay lengtheners. The collapsed tunnel in FF7 is now an entire explorable area with a dreadful robot-hand minigame. The train-graveyard sequence is now an hour long and full of confusing, plothole-y ghost shit. Every time Cloud and co. have to shimmy through a tight space, you're forced to watch a cutscene of them slowly, painfully moving their way through something that should have taken a second to clear. Every side quest is this game is either a collect-a-thon fetch quest or a kill-a-thon fight sequence that adds minimal substance to the world around you. FF7R is defined by its padding, and all of this extra fluff culminates in the truly godawful Shinra Infiltration arc which, apart from a fun motorcycle chase at the very end and the goofy staircase sequence, is a dull, frustrating chore full of stupid, boring bullshit. The party splits up and you have to swap between party members because why not, the game needs to be longer. You have to slowly lumber across some monkey bars because why not, the game needs to be longer. You have to slowly walk through a boring museum room with unskippable dialogue and then slowly crawl through a boring fucking vent shaft because why not, the game--
And when FF7R's plot isn't being let down by its padding, it's being let down by a lack of subtlety and a misunderstanding about what worked in the quieter moments of FF7. The first bombing mission in FF7 was defined by a strangely dark climax; AVALANCHE's destruction of the first Mako Reactor cause millions of dollars in property damage and likely claims dozens of lives in the process, and yet the party decides to move on to the next bombing mission regardless. It's an interesting note to open the game on. It's a morally gray and ambiguous situation that casts a complex light on AVALANCHE's justified but violent actions, so of course FF7R ruins this moral ambiguity by revealing the overwhelming destruction was an intentional sabotage plot orchestrated by Shinra because evil. There are moments like this scattered throughout the entirety of FF7R. Sector 7's destruction is reduced from an atrocious war crime into an inconvenient tragedy, courtesy of an overlong evacuation sequence that ensures most of the civilians' survival. Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie were three unlucky, nameless victims of capitalism, callously slaughtered by an imperialistic world for daring to rebel against it, so naturally in FF7R these characters are given an ultimately unnecessary amount of added characterization and depth in spite of the inevitability of their fate, added characterization that ultimately (and paradoxically) adds very little to their overall character beyond trying to make you feel more :( when they die.
And then there's fucking Sephiroth. Sephiroth, the intimidating and mysterious monster that felt more like myth than man. He was a violent, ominous force of nature soaked in mystery and blood, a grim-reaper ghost that barely ever appeared in the first part of FF7, only manifesting into the plot when it was absolutely necessary. So of course Sephiroth appears every 20 fucking minutes to smirk and be pretentious and say cryptic hogwash like "muahaha there will be consequences", a bunch of hollow gobbledygook that amounts to nothing because your final fight with him ends in a stalemate, because of course it has to, his story can't end just yet, which means all of the buildup surrounding him ends on a flat-noted cliffhanger. Sephiroth made the most of his minimal appearances in Disc 1 of FF7, whereas the game can barely justify any of his fifty thousand scenes in FF7R.
And honestly, I'm not even gonna get into the new multiverse aspects of the plot and Zack Fair presumably being alive again (thus ruining literally everything about him) and the fucking Whispers or whatever and how their presence completely invalidates the intended stakes of the story, because this review is long enough and any further discussion about Tetsuya Nomura's additions to the narrative of FF7 would just descend into incoherent rambling. I'll just leave it at this: Nomura's flair for convoluted mythos and anime bullshit was charming in Kingdom Hearts, but it has already overstayed its welcome in Remake, and I can only imagine how much worse and thinly-worn it's going to get in Rebirth.
The plot of FF7R is, unfortunately, a wash more often than not. So much of what Remake adds to the world of FF7 is either needless or convoluted. It poorly rearranges the plot of a beloved RPG and laboriously, artificially stretches it out to the point where almost every new addition just feels like 'content', poorly-contextualized filler meant to hit a quota and nothing else... at least until the final hours of the game when it throws up its hands and says 'fuck it', deciding to bank on a bland fusion of Dissidia and Kingdom Hearts in its last moments instead. It is genuinely hard to say how much of the enjoyable stuff in FF7R's story is enjoyable on its own merits, or enjoyable because someone thought of it already years ago. I'm not inherently opposed to an Evangelion Rebuild-style subversion of FF7's plot, but the execution leaves so much to be desired. FF7R falls flat in ways that FF7 never did; FF7's story was overflowing with creative ideas, whereas FF7R struggles to bring anything new to a table that's been around since before I (and statistically, a fair chunk of you) were even born.
Sometimes, though, FF7R catches you off-guard. Sometimes FF7R is really fun. The action-RPG hybrid gameplay is fluid, fast, and full of catharsis; it's clear that Nomura et al. have come a long way since Kingdom Hearts 1, and the combat in FF7R continues to feel fresh and inviting even as the game's runtime drags into the double digits. The music is fucking fantastic throughout. The character models look utterly fantastic, the perfect blend between triple-A realism and gothic anime aesthetics. Certain locales, like the Mako reactors, Loveless Avenue, Wall Market or even the dreadfully-paced Shinra HQ and Train Graveyards, actually look and feel like beloved landmarks in FF7 come to life, liberated from the restraints of outdated and limited graphics. And as much of a meandering, incomplete mess the plot winds up being, the distinctive and memorable characters that inhabit Midgar are still a lot of fun to talk to and observe. Barret, Tifa, and Aerith are still some of the most fun and fleshed-out RPG party members pop culture's ever gotten, and that hasn't changed one iota.
In fact, this is actually probably the best interpretation of Cloud we've gotten since the OG game: Nomura had gradually morphed him into a generic, angsty edgelord in the 2000's and practically all of Cloud's personality and relevance had been scrubbed off in the 2010s, so it's nice to see Cloud finally resembling his old self again: a cocky, complex, socially-awkward loner that's just as silly as he is sad and sympathetic. FF7R does a great job at reminding you of the Cloud that everyone fell in love with, the grumpy but genuinely traumatized child at heart that just wanted to be a hero but didn't quite make the cut, deciding to roleplay as someone else entirely as a coping mechanism instead of properly confronting his mental hangups. He's both a badass antihero and a wet cat of a person, and I'm glad that FF7R embraces both of these equally-valid sides of Cloud. At least the protagonist is strong even when the plot around him keeps tumbling down.
It's genuinely very hard to properly express my feelings on FF7R. I was legitimately enjoying myself for most of the game's runtime, even if I was constantly making notes in the back of my head, even if I was constantly being reminded of the game's shortcomings. For about 15 hours, I was able to stomach most of its evident flaws courtesy of the fun characters and the flashy combat and the joyous feeling of playing FF7 all over again, but the final eight or so hours of FF7R were such a fucking drag that it dissipated and shattered the already-flimsy smoke and mirrors the game had been dangling over my eyes. At times, FF7R is desperately unfun, weighed down by cynical Triple-A Game Design decisions and pointless, boring filler designed solely to artificially pad out the runtime... and at other times, FF7R is a desperately auteurist product, more of an overeager Tetsuya Nomura fanfiction than a genuinely inspired re-imagining of Final Fantasy 7. Too much of his usual theatrics and eccentric design choices seep through the seams of the plot, fundamentally altering the feel of the narrative to the point where it starts to feel more like a weirdly futuristic version of Kingdom Hearts than a grand adventure about ecoterrorism and corruption.
Maybe it's proof that FF7 was lightning in a bottle, a perfect patchwork surgery of influences, ideas, and passions that could only have been made once. Every single attempt to reinterpret or continue the story of FF7 has faltered to some degree, whether it be the edgy anime shlock of Advent Children, or the way that Crisis Core unintentionally spits on the anti-imperialist themes of its source, or whatever the actual fuck was even going on in Dirge of Cerberus... and Remake, unfortunately, is no different. When FF7R is at its best, it's merely emulating the highlights of FF7 with better graphics and (arguably) better combat. When it's at its worst, however, you see it for what it really is: a nostalgia-bait piece of Final Fantasy 7-shaped content, a legacy act carefully designed to remind you of a better game made before George Bush was even President.
But hey, at least you can't get frog-stunlocked like you could in the original game! That alone gives Remake a 3/5 in spirit.
The choice to adapt the famous Midgar Arc into an entire 30-40 hour game is one I can almost understand from a certain perspective. FF7's Midgar has everything going for it: it's visually striking, immediately memorable, and drenched in a weirdly evocative mixture of dystopia and realism. Midgar is a tale of societal upheaval and cyberpunk revolution told through a uniquely fantastical lens, and almost every single iconic moment from the original game can be found in Midgar. The trains, the Mako reactors, Aerith's church, Cloud's motorcycle, Wall Market & Don Corneo, the destruction of Sector 7 and Sephiroth's slaughter of Shinra HQ, just one action-packed and iconic setpiece after another in the span of like 6-7 hours. Midgar is such a compelling and well-realized location, and yet it felt like there was so much we never got to see. So I can almost understand the merit behind focusing the entirety of FF7R within the rotting pizza that is Midgar: it's an endlessly interesting and unique location with so much lore, drama, and comedy built into it that maybe, just maybe, an entire game centered around this teal junkyard metropolis might be able to sustain itself for 30 hours.
What this amounts to in execution, however, is padding. A lot of padding. Almost everything I liked and appreciated in FF7R was lifted almost verbatim from the original game. Nothing new is really done with AVALANCHE, or Shinra, or the Turks, Mako, SOLDIER, the Cetra, or anything at all, really. For the most part, you're merely playing through the Greatest Hits of FF7 bloated with often unnecessary jam sessions comprised of overlong exposition and artificial gameplay lengtheners. The collapsed tunnel in FF7 is now an entire explorable area with a dreadful robot-hand minigame. The train-graveyard sequence is now an hour long and full of confusing, plothole-y ghost shit. Every time Cloud and co. have to shimmy through a tight space, you're forced to watch a cutscene of them slowly, painfully moving their way through something that should have taken a second to clear. Every side quest is this game is either a collect-a-thon fetch quest or a kill-a-thon fight sequence that adds minimal substance to the world around you. FF7R is defined by its padding, and all of this extra fluff culminates in the truly godawful Shinra Infiltration arc which, apart from a fun motorcycle chase at the very end and the goofy staircase sequence, is a dull, frustrating chore full of stupid, boring bullshit. The party splits up and you have to swap between party members because why not, the game needs to be longer. You have to slowly lumber across some monkey bars because why not, the game needs to be longer. You have to slowly walk through a boring museum room with unskippable dialogue and then slowly crawl through a boring fucking vent shaft because why not, the game--
And when FF7R's plot isn't being let down by its padding, it's being let down by a lack of subtlety and a misunderstanding about what worked in the quieter moments of FF7. The first bombing mission in FF7 was defined by a strangely dark climax; AVALANCHE's destruction of the first Mako Reactor cause millions of dollars in property damage and likely claims dozens of lives in the process, and yet the party decides to move on to the next bombing mission regardless. It's an interesting note to open the game on. It's a morally gray and ambiguous situation that casts a complex light on AVALANCHE's justified but violent actions, so of course FF7R ruins this moral ambiguity by revealing the overwhelming destruction was an intentional sabotage plot orchestrated by Shinra because evil. There are moments like this scattered throughout the entirety of FF7R. Sector 7's destruction is reduced from an atrocious war crime into an inconvenient tragedy, courtesy of an overlong evacuation sequence that ensures most of the civilians' survival. Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie were three unlucky, nameless victims of capitalism, callously slaughtered by an imperialistic world for daring to rebel against it, so naturally in FF7R these characters are given an ultimately unnecessary amount of added characterization and depth in spite of the inevitability of their fate, added characterization that ultimately (and paradoxically) adds very little to their overall character beyond trying to make you feel more :( when they die.
And then there's fucking Sephiroth. Sephiroth, the intimidating and mysterious monster that felt more like myth than man. He was a violent, ominous force of nature soaked in mystery and blood, a grim-reaper ghost that barely ever appeared in the first part of FF7, only manifesting into the plot when it was absolutely necessary. So of course Sephiroth appears every 20 fucking minutes to smirk and be pretentious and say cryptic hogwash like "muahaha there will be consequences", a bunch of hollow gobbledygook that amounts to nothing because your final fight with him ends in a stalemate, because of course it has to, his story can't end just yet, which means all of the buildup surrounding him ends on a flat-noted cliffhanger. Sephiroth made the most of his minimal appearances in Disc 1 of FF7, whereas the game can barely justify any of his fifty thousand scenes in FF7R.
And honestly, I'm not even gonna get into the new multiverse aspects of the plot and Zack Fair presumably being alive again (thus ruining literally everything about him) and the fucking Whispers or whatever and how their presence completely invalidates the intended stakes of the story, because this review is long enough and any further discussion about Tetsuya Nomura's additions to the narrative of FF7 would just descend into incoherent rambling. I'll just leave it at this: Nomura's flair for convoluted mythos and anime bullshit was charming in Kingdom Hearts, but it has already overstayed its welcome in Remake, and I can only imagine how much worse and thinly-worn it's going to get in Rebirth.
The plot of FF7R is, unfortunately, a wash more often than not. So much of what Remake adds to the world of FF7 is either needless or convoluted. It poorly rearranges the plot of a beloved RPG and laboriously, artificially stretches it out to the point where almost every new addition just feels like 'content', poorly-contextualized filler meant to hit a quota and nothing else... at least until the final hours of the game when it throws up its hands and says 'fuck it', deciding to bank on a bland fusion of Dissidia and Kingdom Hearts in its last moments instead. It is genuinely hard to say how much of the enjoyable stuff in FF7R's story is enjoyable on its own merits, or enjoyable because someone thought of it already years ago. I'm not inherently opposed to an Evangelion Rebuild-style subversion of FF7's plot, but the execution leaves so much to be desired. FF7R falls flat in ways that FF7 never did; FF7's story was overflowing with creative ideas, whereas FF7R struggles to bring anything new to a table that's been around since before I (and statistically, a fair chunk of you) were even born.
Sometimes, though, FF7R catches you off-guard. Sometimes FF7R is really fun. The action-RPG hybrid gameplay is fluid, fast, and full of catharsis; it's clear that Nomura et al. have come a long way since Kingdom Hearts 1, and the combat in FF7R continues to feel fresh and inviting even as the game's runtime drags into the double digits. The music is fucking fantastic throughout. The character models look utterly fantastic, the perfect blend between triple-A realism and gothic anime aesthetics. Certain locales, like the Mako reactors, Loveless Avenue, Wall Market or even the dreadfully-paced Shinra HQ and Train Graveyards, actually look and feel like beloved landmarks in FF7 come to life, liberated from the restraints of outdated and limited graphics. And as much of a meandering, incomplete mess the plot winds up being, the distinctive and memorable characters that inhabit Midgar are still a lot of fun to talk to and observe. Barret, Tifa, and Aerith are still some of the most fun and fleshed-out RPG party members pop culture's ever gotten, and that hasn't changed one iota.
In fact, this is actually probably the best interpretation of Cloud we've gotten since the OG game: Nomura had gradually morphed him into a generic, angsty edgelord in the 2000's and practically all of Cloud's personality and relevance had been scrubbed off in the 2010s, so it's nice to see Cloud finally resembling his old self again: a cocky, complex, socially-awkward loner that's just as silly as he is sad and sympathetic. FF7R does a great job at reminding you of the Cloud that everyone fell in love with, the grumpy but genuinely traumatized child at heart that just wanted to be a hero but didn't quite make the cut, deciding to roleplay as someone else entirely as a coping mechanism instead of properly confronting his mental hangups. He's both a badass antihero and a wet cat of a person, and I'm glad that FF7R embraces both of these equally-valid sides of Cloud. At least the protagonist is strong even when the plot around him keeps tumbling down.
It's genuinely very hard to properly express my feelings on FF7R. I was legitimately enjoying myself for most of the game's runtime, even if I was constantly making notes in the back of my head, even if I was constantly being reminded of the game's shortcomings. For about 15 hours, I was able to stomach most of its evident flaws courtesy of the fun characters and the flashy combat and the joyous feeling of playing FF7 all over again, but the final eight or so hours of FF7R were such a fucking drag that it dissipated and shattered the already-flimsy smoke and mirrors the game had been dangling over my eyes. At times, FF7R is desperately unfun, weighed down by cynical Triple-A Game Design decisions and pointless, boring filler designed solely to artificially pad out the runtime... and at other times, FF7R is a desperately auteurist product, more of an overeager Tetsuya Nomura fanfiction than a genuinely inspired re-imagining of Final Fantasy 7. Too much of his usual theatrics and eccentric design choices seep through the seams of the plot, fundamentally altering the feel of the narrative to the point where it starts to feel more like a weirdly futuristic version of Kingdom Hearts than a grand adventure about ecoterrorism and corruption.
Maybe it's proof that FF7 was lightning in a bottle, a perfect patchwork surgery of influences, ideas, and passions that could only have been made once. Every single attempt to reinterpret or continue the story of FF7 has faltered to some degree, whether it be the edgy anime shlock of Advent Children, or the way that Crisis Core unintentionally spits on the anti-imperialist themes of its source, or whatever the actual fuck was even going on in Dirge of Cerberus... and Remake, unfortunately, is no different. When FF7R is at its best, it's merely emulating the highlights of FF7 with better graphics and (arguably) better combat. When it's at its worst, however, you see it for what it really is: a nostalgia-bait piece of Final Fantasy 7-shaped content, a legacy act carefully designed to remind you of a better game made before George Bush was even President.
But hey, at least you can't get frog-stunlocked like you could in the original game! That alone gives Remake a 3/5 in spirit.