Can you believe it? After tantalizing PlayStation 3 technical demo, a surprise announcement in 2014, and six years of waiting: Square Enix finally remade (a part of) Final Fantasy VII. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the original, but my appreciation for the game and its world grew over time. I found myself enjoying Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII immensely. I found Advent Children to be a fun watch. Before I realized it, I was looking forward to Final Fantasy VII Remake.
My primary reason for wanting a Final Fantasy VII remake was to establish visual coherence. The limitations of the PlayStation hardware dictated what was possible in 1996. The mish-mash of pre-rendered backgrounds, CGI movies, realistic, and unrealistic proportioned characters made it tough for me lend gravity to the events that transpired.
The Final Fantasy VII Remake achieved much of what I hoped for with its presentation. It’s not flawless due to some awful texture loading issues and garish pre-rendered skyboxes, but as a whole, I felt they successfully recreated the look and feel of Midgar in real-time. Despite all the advancements, the characters still ended up being standouts with impressive attention to detail and graphical budget dedicated to them. They looked too good in some scenes which gave me flashbacks to the original PlayStation classic and how its polygonal characters stood out from the backgrounds.
I’m not certain if it was a coincidence or intentional, but the wealthier sides of Midgar were both technologically and aesthetically more pleasing than the slums. The texture issues were isolated to the poorer areas of Midgar whereas Shinra’s HQ and other plate dwellings were spared such technical issues. Square Enix really wanted to hammer home those themes of inequality, huh?
This instalment of Final Fantasy VII Remake was about steeping in the game’s themes and messages. I spent a lot of time familiarizing myself with Midgar and its people. I experienced Midgar slum life. I spent a bit of time in the quiet Midgar suburbs. And I even visited the Shinra Power Electric Company’s HQ and loved how swanky that was. Square Enix made it abundantly clear who the haves and have nots were.
Some will describe the errands and side quests as meaningless fetch quests. I didn’t mind them because I enjoyed the opportunities to interact and see more of Midgar. My familiarity and affinity with the sectors 5 and 7 slums grew with each passing hour. It takes time form an affinity to a place and even though the side content could have been more meaningful, I felt they achieved something worthwhile by asking me to go on wild Chocobo chases.
It also took a bit of time to grasp the combat. It was an evolution of the ideas presented in Final Fantasy XIII where the key to success was to build pressure and stagger enemies to inflict more damage. They layered those concepts on top of real time combat while allowing me to indefinitely slow down time to issue commands. I found it a bit cumbersome at first, but after reading ability lists and exploiting enemy weaknesses, I grew to really enjoy the systems implemented. My only complaint was the threat management which was too easy to exploit. If I didn’t want a character to fall in battle, all I had to do was to avoid direct control of them.
I found the action so enjoyable that I toyed with the idea of going for the Platinum trophy. Maybe I will revisit that idea when the next instalment nears. But ow long of a wait is that? I have no idea and that’s a point of contention for some. I understand that this remake is marching at a snail’s pace compared to the original but at the same time, I cannot describe it as a legitimate remake. They’ve diverged from the source material in numerous ways and introduced elements that make this take on Final Fantasy VII look like a sequel. I’ve seen comparisons to the 2009 Star Trek movie and the way it plays with established events and there’s enough hints to say that Square Enix was and will be toying with our expectations.
Square Enix have always been excellent with their soundtracks. I expected faithful modernizations of the classics and I wasn’t disappointed. There was a lot of music in this game but not all of it was found in places in the usual places. For thematic reasons, they shoved the goofier tracks like the Chocobo theme in jukeboxes which can be found in 7th Heaven and other relevant places.
Finding places to ground the goofiness without entirely ignoring it was a concern on many people’s minds. How would they handle all the mini-games? The bike combat sequences were easy enough to integrate, but what about the squat competitions? They had no troubles with that one. In fact, they went all in on the mini-games by increasing complexity while keeping the spirit of them alive. They even embraced the cross dressing Cloud and I was all for it. The flip flopping nature of the game reminded me of Sega’s Yakuza games. We have this serious matter to tend to but first we have to find some missing cats. It worked for Sega and Square Enix made it work with Final Fantasy VII Remake.
Final Fantasy VII was never going to be an easy game to remake. How faithful is too faithful? Will these new ideas diverge too much? I believe Square Enix struck an excellent balance. They managed to acknowledge the original while walking their own path. If they simply made a like-for-like remake, we wouldn’t have gotten to know Jessie, Biggs, or Wedge like we did. In fact, Final Fantasy VII Remake is making me look at the original more fondly. Some remakes supplant the original while some do them a disservice. Final Fantasy VII Remake is one of the first ones that compliments it.
Verdict:
I love it
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