After really digging into the devilish details of Final Fantasy VII Remake’s excellent battle system on my second playthrough, I was really happy to see how much Intermission doubles down on the quirky complexities of those combat encounters at their best. Despite making up a whole new guy to hang out with Yuffie, she’s the only controllable character, with Sonon taking a weird support/ambient role that is unique from the way party members behave in the main game, so the challenge here became twofold: first, we’re fitting an entire party’s worth of abilities into one guy. Making Yuffie and Yuffie alone a close up and ranged attacker, a tank, a magician, a speedy guy, and an aggro manager all at once without overcomplicating her moveset or making her feel overpowered. The second is designing combat encounters that are interesting and challenging for this uniquely skilled duo, a prompt admirably filled by a significantly ramped up average combat difficulty level and several of the best bosses in the game. It’s been a question for me since this episode came out, how all of this would be handled, but it was only recently that I got my hands on a PS5 so I’m happy to find out how good it all is even if I’m a little late to the party.
Much more heartening though, is Yuffie herself, and the way her narrative is handled in such a way as to assure me that everything I liked about Remake was in fact not the fluke that I was worried it might be. I liked Remake quite a bit when it came out, but hot off the heels of my first time playing the original VII I think I was judging it too harshly for not embodying my idea of What Final Fantasy VII Is, which ironically distracted me from some of Remake’s loudest themes and best ideas. Today the entire body of Remake hits me super hard, and I’ve come around to full champion status, ready to sing the game’s praises all the way.
But if the stuff about Fate and Feeling and making A Choice to live all hit better - and I think, more uniquely to this game than the normal version of that you often see in RPGs and anime that it is often compared to but that is for another bit of writing – the stuff that I liked to begin with rang just as strongly today. The sorely needed expansion of Barrett’s character into both the game’s political core and its beating heart; the elaboration of AVALANCHE into a splintered group of infighting leftists; the bracing and genuine depiction of poverty and community in the slums, a life given no empathy in Final Fantasy VII but afforded a familiar realism in Remake; even Tifa’s naysaying – because even if she is wrong and I think it sucks that it has to be her being That Guy so hard and I do hope they calm down about it in the next couple of games, those are good conversations to make Barrett and Tifa and even Cloud have with each other.
But you know how it is, it’s fuckin Square! You want to believe!!! You do!!! But you truly never know with these guys, ESPECIALLY when it’s not like Final Fantasy VII itself was exactly on top of the revolutionary messaging to begin with specifically wrt AVALANCHE. But This game was so good dude. It was easier to write it all off before it came out and was mostly just really good. Now the fear of god is in me. Now I care whether they fuck it up. Now I want Rebirth to be good. It’s a fucking curse. So I take no small amount of comfort in the confident and graceful direction of Episode interMISSION, which in only a small handful of hours reassures me that yes, they knew what they were doing, and yes, it was all on purpose, and yes, they’re interested in the same parts of it that I’m interested in, and they might even revisit them down the road.
Remake packs a truly wild amount of character into the little conversations you overhear as you walk around its hub areas. Every npc’s dialogue updates with every major story event and it’s all voiced, sometimes playing only randomly, but many of those nameless little characters have fleshed out story arcs, whether they end up intersecting with our heroes or not. Lots of them don’t though, and are there only to further color a world in a game that is in no small part dedicated to fleshing its world out in fine detail. A lot of the dialogue you overhear as cloud, a lot of the ambient conversation, has to do with Shinra’s totally effective propaganda campaign against Wutai, the country they’ve recently won a bloody war against. We never get many details about the conflict itself, but we do get the picture of Wutai’s national character that’s been painted by Shinra and that the people of Midgar by and large believe, even people who don’t like Shinra, even people our heroes work with, and even, tacitly, our heroes themselves. The boogeyman version of Wutai is a lawless nation of honorless, bloodthirsty criminals who, having lost the war, will stop at nothing to seek revenge for their decimated nation now that their hope is lost. There’s a real bone-deep paranoia towards a culture that clearly very few people in Midgar understand and even fewer have a care to learn anything about, even from the handful of refugees and immigrants who have made their ways into their communities. These are the tidbits you pick up when you walk by people as Cloud throughout the game, a mosaic of public thought you can piece together from dozens of scraps of overheard conversation in between equally weighted comments about the neighborhood watch, or the train graveyard, or weapons shop guy’s broken water filter.
As Yuffie, this is all you hear. As a teenager from Wutai who is in fact on an anti-Shinra espionage mission representing the new government, every inch of Midgar feels hostile and alien to begin with; Yuffie doesn’t like it here, doesn’t want to be here, and wants to spend as little time in the city as possible on the way to the job she actually came here to do. It’s hard to blame her, given her history. So it’s no surprise that when you’re walking around town in Yuffie’s shoes, the snippets of conversation that she overhears don’t include the neighborhood watch, or the train graveyard, or weapons shop guy’s broken water filter. She only hears people talking about Wutai. About their spies, their plans, their awful character, how they’re behind the recent bombings, the bastards. How our neighbor down the street is from there, I heard, so suspicious. It’s such a small detail. Of course these aren’t suddenly the only things anybody in Sector 7 are talking about, but Yuffie, the actual target of this discrimination, is more tuned into it than Cloud, who is entirely unaffected by this kind of talk and at worst has to brush it off when he’s being false flagged using another victim’s identity. He’s got other stuff on his mind. Yuffie is never thinking about anything else. How could she be?
It isn’t just the small details, though. The absolute best choice interMISSION makes is to introduce us to a small slice of the AVALANCHE that Barrett’s group split off from, and they are truly the most rancid batch of little shithead assholes you could possibly imagine. When I say “the 7 Remake DLC made me feel better about liking the game’s politics the instant I realized it was about petty leftist infighting” and tell you that for the first half of it you’re hanging out with the AVALANCHE group that wants to do a peaceful protest in the street but only if they’re not blocking traffic, it conjures certain images of a Kind Of Guy and that’s exactly who shows up.
“But Ina,” I know you’re saying to me, “Yuffie and her partner Sonon are working for a government that explicitly wants to commit violent military action against Shinra, isn’t it weird that they would team up with these guys over Barrett’s group?” Well yeah, for sure it is, but we learn here that the schism in AVALANCHE was recent enough that the Wutaians don’t know Barrett’s group exist, and the second he finds out about them Sonon is like shit shit shit we teamed up with the wrong guys. As it stands their primary contact for the team they work with is pretty overtly racist to them the whole time they hang out with them and even tells Yuffie at one point that the only reason they’re teaming up at all is because they didn’t want Barrett’s group to make contact and establish a relationship with the Wutaians. Despite all this, Yuffie is like wow she’s so nice and cool. Sonon is more actively bloodthirsty than Yuffie but he’s not wrong that this AVALANCHE cell isn’t their friend, that this is a union of convenience, and likely a short-lived one.
These aren’t conflicts that will be resolved, maybe not conflicts that CAN be resolved. At first glance this feels like it’s because this is a tiny slice of a small chunk of Final Fantasy VII’s narrative tableau, one that we know will end with the Sector 7 plate dropping, one that we know results in Sonon being somehow removed from the narrative and Yuffie separated from her purpose and unsuccessful in the mission she’s been assigned. But like Remake before it, interMISSION is a complete thematic work, even if it’s a small chapter withing a larger story. Yuffie is traumatized by the war in her country and she’s old enough to be radicalized politically and to be able to act against Shinra, but she’s young enough that people being superficially nice to her or professionally cordial can throw her off the subtext of their relationships. That doesn’t make her stupid, or wrong, though. Sonon cares a lot less about casualties in Midgar than Yuffie quickly comes to, but like Barrett’s AVALANCHE before them they never truly disagree and they never try to do anything but the mission they came here for.
There’s a moment where Yuffie tells Sonon something along the lines of “Y’know before we got here I was kind of expecting everyone in Midgar to be just like the soldiers who ruined Wutai during the war. So most people just being normal and chill is kind of a relief. I feel kind of stupid for thinking that way.” And Sonon clearly doesn’t hold this opinion of the people of Midgar and especially not of the AVALANCHE members they’re working with but he does validate her feelings and he can empathize with her, even if he thinks the only good thing to do with Midgar is burn it down.
These moments, and Yuffie’s thoughts and feelings here, coexist with the racist whispers in Sector 7, with the open paranoia in the streets and the propaganda on the news, with the way Midgar natives are actively disgusted by the snack beans Yuffie offers to everyone she meets. And Yuffie and Sonon don’t get a chance to hash out their political differences, if that was something they ever might have done anyway. No one confronts their AVALANCHE cohort, because they die in the Sector 7 plate drop. Just like a lot of these moments in Remake, and in life, interMISSION asks us to sit with the discomfort of the knowledge that all of us are entangled in these kinds of thorns, these dissonance of how we think and feel in a world that we can’t ever entirely fit comfortably into, whose ills we are to some degree complicit in and others that we might have to commit further to if we’re to change anything.
So, even if they completely fuck it up, even if Rebirth whiffs huge and Remake 3 is awful and all of this praise I’ve heaped on the writing in this first installment backfires on me, it won’t really matter, because these are two complete stories. They’ll never be able to take Barrett lifting his arm and praying to Marlene in front of that portal from me. And they’ll never take Yuffie and Sonon trying to negotiate their twisted up feelings about what the future might even be allowed to look like if they dare to imagine it as they pick their way through that junk yard either.
Much more heartening though, is Yuffie herself, and the way her narrative is handled in such a way as to assure me that everything I liked about Remake was in fact not the fluke that I was worried it might be. I liked Remake quite a bit when it came out, but hot off the heels of my first time playing the original VII I think I was judging it too harshly for not embodying my idea of What Final Fantasy VII Is, which ironically distracted me from some of Remake’s loudest themes and best ideas. Today the entire body of Remake hits me super hard, and I’ve come around to full champion status, ready to sing the game’s praises all the way.
But if the stuff about Fate and Feeling and making A Choice to live all hit better - and I think, more uniquely to this game than the normal version of that you often see in RPGs and anime that it is often compared to but that is for another bit of writing – the stuff that I liked to begin with rang just as strongly today. The sorely needed expansion of Barrett’s character into both the game’s political core and its beating heart; the elaboration of AVALANCHE into a splintered group of infighting leftists; the bracing and genuine depiction of poverty and community in the slums, a life given no empathy in Final Fantasy VII but afforded a familiar realism in Remake; even Tifa’s naysaying – because even if she is wrong and I think it sucks that it has to be her being That Guy so hard and I do hope they calm down about it in the next couple of games, those are good conversations to make Barrett and Tifa and even Cloud have with each other.
But you know how it is, it’s fuckin Square! You want to believe!!! You do!!! But you truly never know with these guys, ESPECIALLY when it’s not like Final Fantasy VII itself was exactly on top of the revolutionary messaging to begin with specifically wrt AVALANCHE. But This game was so good dude. It was easier to write it all off before it came out and was mostly just really good. Now the fear of god is in me. Now I care whether they fuck it up. Now I want Rebirth to be good. It’s a fucking curse. So I take no small amount of comfort in the confident and graceful direction of Episode interMISSION, which in only a small handful of hours reassures me that yes, they knew what they were doing, and yes, it was all on purpose, and yes, they’re interested in the same parts of it that I’m interested in, and they might even revisit them down the road.
Remake packs a truly wild amount of character into the little conversations you overhear as you walk around its hub areas. Every npc’s dialogue updates with every major story event and it’s all voiced, sometimes playing only randomly, but many of those nameless little characters have fleshed out story arcs, whether they end up intersecting with our heroes or not. Lots of them don’t though, and are there only to further color a world in a game that is in no small part dedicated to fleshing its world out in fine detail. A lot of the dialogue you overhear as cloud, a lot of the ambient conversation, has to do with Shinra’s totally effective propaganda campaign against Wutai, the country they’ve recently won a bloody war against. We never get many details about the conflict itself, but we do get the picture of Wutai’s national character that’s been painted by Shinra and that the people of Midgar by and large believe, even people who don’t like Shinra, even people our heroes work with, and even, tacitly, our heroes themselves. The boogeyman version of Wutai is a lawless nation of honorless, bloodthirsty criminals who, having lost the war, will stop at nothing to seek revenge for their decimated nation now that their hope is lost. There’s a real bone-deep paranoia towards a culture that clearly very few people in Midgar understand and even fewer have a care to learn anything about, even from the handful of refugees and immigrants who have made their ways into their communities. These are the tidbits you pick up when you walk by people as Cloud throughout the game, a mosaic of public thought you can piece together from dozens of scraps of overheard conversation in between equally weighted comments about the neighborhood watch, or the train graveyard, or weapons shop guy’s broken water filter.
As Yuffie, this is all you hear. As a teenager from Wutai who is in fact on an anti-Shinra espionage mission representing the new government, every inch of Midgar feels hostile and alien to begin with; Yuffie doesn’t like it here, doesn’t want to be here, and wants to spend as little time in the city as possible on the way to the job she actually came here to do. It’s hard to blame her, given her history. So it’s no surprise that when you’re walking around town in Yuffie’s shoes, the snippets of conversation that she overhears don’t include the neighborhood watch, or the train graveyard, or weapons shop guy’s broken water filter. She only hears people talking about Wutai. About their spies, their plans, their awful character, how they’re behind the recent bombings, the bastards. How our neighbor down the street is from there, I heard, so suspicious. It’s such a small detail. Of course these aren’t suddenly the only things anybody in Sector 7 are talking about, but Yuffie, the actual target of this discrimination, is more tuned into it than Cloud, who is entirely unaffected by this kind of talk and at worst has to brush it off when he’s being false flagged using another victim’s identity. He’s got other stuff on his mind. Yuffie is never thinking about anything else. How could she be?
It isn’t just the small details, though. The absolute best choice interMISSION makes is to introduce us to a small slice of the AVALANCHE that Barrett’s group split off from, and they are truly the most rancid batch of little shithead assholes you could possibly imagine. When I say “the 7 Remake DLC made me feel better about liking the game’s politics the instant I realized it was about petty leftist infighting” and tell you that for the first half of it you’re hanging out with the AVALANCHE group that wants to do a peaceful protest in the street but only if they’re not blocking traffic, it conjures certain images of a Kind Of Guy and that’s exactly who shows up.
“But Ina,” I know you’re saying to me, “Yuffie and her partner Sonon are working for a government that explicitly wants to commit violent military action against Shinra, isn’t it weird that they would team up with these guys over Barrett’s group?” Well yeah, for sure it is, but we learn here that the schism in AVALANCHE was recent enough that the Wutaians don’t know Barrett’s group exist, and the second he finds out about them Sonon is like shit shit shit we teamed up with the wrong guys. As it stands their primary contact for the team they work with is pretty overtly racist to them the whole time they hang out with them and even tells Yuffie at one point that the only reason they’re teaming up at all is because they didn’t want Barrett’s group to make contact and establish a relationship with the Wutaians. Despite all this, Yuffie is like wow she’s so nice and cool. Sonon is more actively bloodthirsty than Yuffie but he’s not wrong that this AVALANCHE cell isn’t their friend, that this is a union of convenience, and likely a short-lived one.
These aren’t conflicts that will be resolved, maybe not conflicts that CAN be resolved. At first glance this feels like it’s because this is a tiny slice of a small chunk of Final Fantasy VII’s narrative tableau, one that we know will end with the Sector 7 plate dropping, one that we know results in Sonon being somehow removed from the narrative and Yuffie separated from her purpose and unsuccessful in the mission she’s been assigned. But like Remake before it, interMISSION is a complete thematic work, even if it’s a small chapter withing a larger story. Yuffie is traumatized by the war in her country and she’s old enough to be radicalized politically and to be able to act against Shinra, but she’s young enough that people being superficially nice to her or professionally cordial can throw her off the subtext of their relationships. That doesn’t make her stupid, or wrong, though. Sonon cares a lot less about casualties in Midgar than Yuffie quickly comes to, but like Barrett’s AVALANCHE before them they never truly disagree and they never try to do anything but the mission they came here for.
There’s a moment where Yuffie tells Sonon something along the lines of “Y’know before we got here I was kind of expecting everyone in Midgar to be just like the soldiers who ruined Wutai during the war. So most people just being normal and chill is kind of a relief. I feel kind of stupid for thinking that way.” And Sonon clearly doesn’t hold this opinion of the people of Midgar and especially not of the AVALANCHE members they’re working with but he does validate her feelings and he can empathize with her, even if he thinks the only good thing to do with Midgar is burn it down.
These moments, and Yuffie’s thoughts and feelings here, coexist with the racist whispers in Sector 7, with the open paranoia in the streets and the propaganda on the news, with the way Midgar natives are actively disgusted by the snack beans Yuffie offers to everyone she meets. And Yuffie and Sonon don’t get a chance to hash out their political differences, if that was something they ever might have done anyway. No one confronts their AVALANCHE cohort, because they die in the Sector 7 plate drop. Just like a lot of these moments in Remake, and in life, interMISSION asks us to sit with the discomfort of the knowledge that all of us are entangled in these kinds of thorns, these dissonance of how we think and feel in a world that we can’t ever entirely fit comfortably into, whose ills we are to some degree complicit in and others that we might have to commit further to if we’re to change anything.
So, even if they completely fuck it up, even if Rebirth whiffs huge and Remake 3 is awful and all of this praise I’ve heaped on the writing in this first installment backfires on me, it won’t really matter, because these are two complete stories. They’ll never be able to take Barrett lifting his arm and praying to Marlene in front of that portal from me. And they’ll never take Yuffie and Sonon trying to negotiate their twisted up feelings about what the future might even be allowed to look like if they dare to imagine it as they pick their way through that junk yard either.
7 Comments
you got me I gotta play da remake
@theia yeah I've been fucking around with hard mode and it's completely wild how good it is?? You can't use items at all and bullets fucking destroy you now so suddenly MP management materia and HP replenishing materia are hugely important and you just have to completely understand how the game works or the first time you fight like four guys at once you get obliterated, it's very cool proof that these systems all interlock really well.
I'm totally with you on Yuffie both here and in OG7, which to a larger point is I think a game with fairly weak plotting but like such extremely potent moments of character writing that it doesn't matter? Like yeah Yuffie is a frivolous character who is mostly kind of a annoying and whose content is mostly absent but when they slip that one moment you mention between my ribs it slides right in and it's cold as ice, completely killer.
I am always singing about specifically Barrett's glowup in Remake, not because he needed one but more because remake gives him the room and dignity he clearly deserved from the beginning that he doesn't really get in 7 I think, but Yuffie was probably the character I was most interested to see because of what a blank sleight she was even compared to someone like Vincent whose optional content is really informative of who he is, and I think they really nail something great with her here, super excited to see what she's like when she gets to be around for a whole game like everybody else.
Even the glimpse of her that we get here, I think they're pulling all the smartest stuff from the compilation and like her KH persona and stuff without defining her by it - something they've been good at throughout. I didn't have "the guys from Dirge are in this but they're like a powerful thematic button on the way Shinra treats the people working for them in contrast to the ways the main characters interact with each other in conflict and cooperation" on my bingo card but that's the magic of these games now I guess haha.
@MeowPewterMeow really and truly i think remake has so much going for it and you know me i'm v hostile to aaa games and to remakes usually so u now i'm risking it all for this one
I'm totally with you on Yuffie both here and in OG7, which to a larger point is I think a game with fairly weak plotting but like such extremely potent moments of character writing that it doesn't matter? Like yeah Yuffie is a frivolous character who is mostly kind of a annoying and whose content is mostly absent but when they slip that one moment you mention between my ribs it slides right in and it's cold as ice, completely killer.
I am always singing about specifically Barrett's glowup in Remake, not because he needed one but more because remake gives him the room and dignity he clearly deserved from the beginning that he doesn't really get in 7 I think, but Yuffie was probably the character I was most interested to see because of what a blank sleight she was even compared to someone like Vincent whose optional content is really informative of who he is, and I think they really nail something great with her here, super excited to see what she's like when she gets to be around for a whole game like everybody else.
Even the glimpse of her that we get here, I think they're pulling all the smartest stuff from the compilation and like her KH persona and stuff without defining her by it - something they've been good at throughout. I didn't have "the guys from Dirge are in this but they're like a powerful thematic button on the way Shinra treats the people working for them in contrast to the ways the main characters interact with each other in conflict and cooperation" on my bingo card but that's the magic of these games now I guess haha.
@MeowPewterMeow really and truly i think remake has so much going for it and you know me i'm v hostile to aaa games and to remakes usually so u now i'm risking it all for this one
yeah barret in the original was interesting and had a lot of charming moments, but kinda on the edge of being kinda problematic representation (if not outright being so; i know barret is more thoughful and fleshed out in the original japanese script, so it's probably just an unfortunate side effect of the rushed localization), but man he's so fucking awesome in remake. his relationship with marlene, and marlene's interactions in general, are a gigantic upgrade too. i feel like games and especially jrpgs usually have a hard time making kids actually believable and not just annoying simulacrums, but they did a great job in that regard throughout remake. also really like barret's relationships with the rest of the cast, like the genuine care and support he and tifa have for each other (they had some moments in the og i really liked, but it's so much better now), and his burgeoning friendship with cloud, love all their snark that turns from mildly hostile to genuinely caring
YEAH when i saw weiss and whatever the other asshole's name is in previews i was like oh no oh no oh no, but it ended up working somehow, i think it helps that scarlet was there too (which that fight gives me so much hope for her fight with tifa in part 3, make it cool as fuck this time and not the most boring and confusing kind of misogyny), and she kinda has some preestablished aspects that fit into that theme like you said. i think if they bring in any of the crisis core assholes that might be pushing it for me, but i'm halfway convinced they could probably make them work if they treat them as well as they have new characters like roche
YEAH when i saw weiss and whatever the other asshole's name is in previews i was like oh no oh no oh no, but it ended up working somehow, i think it helps that scarlet was there too (which that fight gives me so much hope for her fight with tifa in part 3, make it cool as fuck this time and not the most boring and confusing kind of misogyny), and she kinda has some preestablished aspects that fit into that theme like you said. i think if they bring in any of the crisis core assholes that might be pushing it for me, but i'm halfway convinced they could probably make them work if they treat them as well as they have new characters like roche
@theia yeah i’m extremely down on crisis core as an object, i like that game a lot less than the average final fantasy fan does and i’m not sure how much of that is going to bleed in here beyond the cute little easter eggs in remake and zack’s general characterization. Keep Gackt Out Of All Video Games Please in my opinion. If they could take all time Genesis would have had and give it to Roche the world will be better, i’m convinced.
I think the biggest factor for Marlene working is just like, casting a real life child to play her lol, it does so much for the kid to be obviously a kid, it’s that easy (and that hard i imagine).
i guess now i just want to know if cid is still a funny haha abuser lol i would very much like it if that wasnt his whole thing!!
I think the biggest factor for Marlene working is just like, casting a real life child to play her lol, it does so much for the kid to be obviously a kid, it’s that easy (and that hard i imagine).
i guess now i just want to know if cid is still a funny haha abuser lol i would very much like it if that wasnt his whole thing!!
i think with how mindful they've been of subject matter so far that cid will be toned down in some way. i imagine he'll probably still start off as a hard ass, but the outright verbal abuse aspect i can't imagine would even work with the tone of the remake project so far, and his one line in the trailers for rebirth is him being nice to a woman so that's a good sign. like thinking of how they changed the don corneo mansion scenes to be less obscene and SA-y, while giving it a familiar tone that doesn't water down the stakes of the situation. i imagine it'll be a slightly more extreme form of that with cid, maybe lean into some of his characterization from KH -- give him that tough exterior but fun uncle energy (and hopefully they excise his AC iteration from existence, yuffie was right to call him sexist in that). they'll probably also cut that one really hard to watch scene towards the end of disc 1 that's reminiscent of real life DV and replace it with something easier to digest while conveying the same dealie with cloud's mental state lol
@theia yeah, exactly, i think there’s a good character in cid and i would like to see the tension in the relationship and his misplaced resentment retained and fleshed out, i just think it would be easier to do that without making him like outright abusive specifically and then like over time weirdly hateful to women broadly haha. and given the way they’ve handled everyone else i think i probably trust this team at this point to handle it fine, i’m just like, as we’ve said, fretting more because i care again lol. the fan’s curse
theia
3 months ago
really love all the relationships the characters get in remake so far, and also for making me love yuffie. like i was kind of ambivalent on her in og ff7 cuz she's like just a kid who hangs around and says oh no im gonna puke on this airship or whatever (tho her reaction to That Scene You Know The One in the og ff7 always gets me, they've always nailed parts of these characters pretty well), but i love how the writers for the remake trilogy really bring out those distinct threads of what makes the characters great in the original and weaves them into these compelling interlocking tapestries with both the setting and other characters