What follows will occasionally ride off the rails. It’s why I’ve started writing it about eight times over the last three years, and why I’ve not written it before now.
Anyone who has ready my blog or social media feeds knows that I speak out against remakes of video games. Movies too, but we’re going to stick to games here, because the problems I’m going to be talking about are unique to video games. This seems like the right time to tackle this subject, with the follow up to That Game I Didn’t Like coming out this month, and renewed begging from a certain corner of the Final Fantasy fandom asking for a remake of Final Fantasy VIII. Rather than blocking another dozen Twitter users for their opinions, it’s time to just…put it all on the page so I can point to this wall of text in the future so people can continue to ignore me.
But the fact remains that this is a sensitive topic to me for a number of reasons. I do see video games as an art form. I think that it’s an interesting medium for narrative, both in terms of literal storytelling and ludonarrative alike. This means that original texts are going to be far more compelling to me than a revised text. The meaning can get lost in constant translation – something that anyone who has played Working Designs release can attest to.
This isn’t to suggest that remakes are universally bad. Some remakes are genuinely inspired works, such as Resident Evil. The Gamecube reimagining of the original 1996 game has been ported to modern consoles continuously for a reason.
But what about the original?
Replacement and Erasure
Resident Evil released in the US in March of 1996 on the PlayStation and Sega Saturn. The original long box release is a gem amongst collectors for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being the ridiculous art work on the tall CD box. But as I learned from a fantastic video by Stop Skeletons From Fighting, there’s more to the original version of the game than the box, or even the original soundtrack.
In the process of localization, Capcom introduced numerous changes to the original release of Resident Evil, all of which made the game harder. This measure was taken to pull players away from renting the game and finishing it in a weekend, a fact that’s hilarious given the sheer volume of people who have finished the game only using the knife. Ink ribbons came in smaller allotments. Auto aim was removed. Following the jewel case printings of the original game, the game would go through its first modification in the form of Resident Evil: Director’s Cut. Most of the changes would be considered to be for the better, since the game now had multiple difficulty levels and aim assist. Unfortunately, it would not be the last time that the game would get modified. The Greatest Hits release of Resident Evil: Director’s Cut would see the original score abandoned and replaced with one that is…let’s be charitable and call it experimental.
By 1998, there were three versions of Resident Evil. Sure, this is somewhat typical of Capcom given how their fighting games get numerous revisions. I would argue that this is different though. For one, I can play pretty much any version of Street Fighter II on my Switch right now using one of two different cartridges. I can not do the same with Resident Evil.
The 2002 remake only compounds this problem. A further revision on the Nintendo DS is yet another wrench in the works.
If you can hear terrible MIDI trumpets right now, I am sorry.
In 2024, you have two legal options to play Resident Evil on modern hardware. You can play a remastered version of the 2002 remake, or you can play Resident Evil: Director’s Cut Dual Shock Version through a PlayStation Plus subscription. There is no legal avenue to play with the original soundtrack, or to tackle the unique difficulty of the original release. Admittedly, this isn’t a worst case situation. But it does reflect how a remake or revision can push an original version out of the view of players.
Far worse is Silent Hill 2.
The original Silent Hill 2 was released on the PlayStation 2 in 2001, less than a year after the console launched. As recently discussed on this blog, it remains a revered classic. Months later, an expanded version would release on the original Xbox, akin to the Substance version of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. These versions eventually made their way back to the PlayStation 2. A poorly developed remaster of Silent Hill 2 released on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2012. There are also PC ports of the original, but…
There are no legal avenues to place the original version of Silent Hill 2 on modern hardware. Instead a remake is in the works from Bloober Team. If you’ll allow me to editorialize a bit: it looks completely terrible.
With the release of the remake, newcomers to the series will only have the newest version of the game to take into account. This is the case for games like Resident Evil 2, any number of classic Final Fantasy games, and dozens upon dozens of others. The only avenue to play original texts is often emulation or the purchase of expensive original pressings.
Preservation in a Time of Erasure
According to the Video Game History Foundation, 87% of video games are no longer available. I’d have to do a bit more digging to find out, but I do wonder if examples such as the ones I’ve listed above are included in this.
As more and more games are delisted from digital platforms, and the concept of ownership is further and further pushed into the trash, access to legacy titles is slipping through our fingers. Certainly, if you have the money, you could indulge in the hobby of retro game collecting, but that bubble never seems to burst. This leaves piracy, but not everyone is comfortable with the concept, or wants to learn the ropes associated with emulators and such. But this isn’t a problem for a number of younger players, who were raised on live service attractions first and foremost. That’s the market of the future, and the one that major publishers want to attract.
I’ve acquired so many sets like this on Switch for a reason…
The death of preservation, the erasure of classic games, is nothing but good for those who hold the money at the top of the industry. An industry that generated 347 billion dollars in 2023 has little interest in the past – it isn’t worth as much money as a digital t-shirt in Fortnite. It is a net negative for the potential of video games as an artform, however, to attribute success of the medium to the amount of money it has generated in revenue when most of that money comes from predatory microtransactions, not to mention the quality of life for the people who created everything that generated that money.
The ongoing push for remakes from an incredibly vocal public suggests that while the interest in classic games is there, there isn’t enough interest in playing the original texts. Certainly, you could go play Final Fantasy VIII Remastered on any modern platform, but this hasn’t stopped a number of people from taking to social media to demand a remake in the vein of Final Fantasy VII Remake.
Remakes Are Ultimately Uninteresting
For the sake of consistency, I will reuse one of my previous examples.
I know what Silent Hill 2 was about. I know what happened, I know how it played, I know what I saw and experienced. I know what the Red Pyramid Thing is and what it represents. Silent Hill 2, as a text, is a brilliant work of art that utilizes the medium beautifully.
This game is going to be bad!
The remake can not repeat the successes of the original text by the simple merit of the original text already existing. I have played the original, and there are no surprises to be had from playing a remake. The changes depicted in the existing trailers point to a game that seems to be alien to the experience I had while having no ideas of its own. The promise of a Red Pyramid Thing origin story isn’t appealing. As Patton Oswalt so perfectly put it, I don’t give a shit where the stuff I love comes from.
I’ve been following video games for 24 years at this point, and have played hundreds of titles. This includes a number of remakes, revisions, etc. It’s almost impossible to avoid, largely due to the way that video games were developed and ported and released over the first twenty years after the NES revived the industry. Good remakes, such as Ys Memories of Celceta, only cause me to have interest in the original texts. This entry in the Ys series is not a remake, but the canonical telling of Ys IV, as the original games Dawn of Ys and Mask of the Sun were outsourced to HudsonSoft and Tonkin House respectively rather than developed in house by Falcom. Celceta references both of these games. And, given that I quite liked Memories of Celta, I want to know more. I want to play these games.
Also, that 90’s anime box art. Yes.
Which means that I have to play original versions, emulated, patched for translation. And…I will. I have a Polymega now. I will be buying these games off of eBay and playing them using fan translations to experience the original texts.
But that’s not ideal at all. It’s not something that everyone will do, not something that many will be willing to do. It’s the kind of thing that obsessive enthusiasts and historians do, and I’m definitely of the former category. While I’m okay that Falcom has created their canonized Ys IV, I lament the fact that the originals are doomed to obscurity, much like the okay-at-best Ys III: Wanderers From Ys.
To press it further, I feel like there isn’t enough consideration for the practical costs of a full remake of an a idea. The cost of video game development is extraordinary at this point, and games like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth aren’t cheap to produce or promote. Asking for more of those means that the money goes to remakes, not new ideas. I may have thought thatFinal Fantasy XVI was mediocre, but I’ll gladly accept that over the ongoing rehash of VII. The original text should be maintained and rereleased on modern platforms, but I don’t expect a studio to pour tens of millions of dollars into “updating” a game when that original game is perfectly fine as it is. Even bad games deserve to be maintained in such a way. We have plenty that we can learn from bad games.
Revisionist History
Before I wrap this up, I want to address one of the common talking points I see in online discourse regarding remakes. This is the idea that a remake allows a game to “live up to the original vision” or something along those lines.
It’s still an incredibly captivating experience because the writing is superb.
I could spin an entire thread about how this ultimately gets us things like the Star Wars Special Edition trilogy, but I’ll keep this simple: A finished text needs to stand up to scrutiny. I’ll gladly point players to Xenogears as an example of one of the most fascinating JRPGs, an ambitious and incredible game that still isn’t celebrated as much as it should be because of a flawed second half. And as much as I’d like to step into the parallel universe where Xenogears was finished to its original spec, I can’t. I have to play the version we have. Thankfully, it’s very good, and worthy of study and dissection. See the incredible video from KBash that released in 2023 for one such discussion.
It may be true that Kazushige Nojima wanted Final Fantasy VII to be an endless battle between Sephiroth and Cloud in the original game, but that isn’t what the original text boils down to. The original text is about spirituality, grief, environmentalism. It isn’t about Sephiroth. If it was, in fact, about the spiky haired amnesiac fighting the silver haired guy with the long sword, there would have been more of that in the game. Instead, Sephiroth is just a villain to frame the adventure around, a means to bring the player to each beat in the story. He doesn’t do much of anything in the original game because it would interfere with the themes being explored through each character’s story. This idea that the original text would have been better with 80% more Sephiroth is grotesque to me.
I can’t imagine that Stephen King imagined the final chapters of The Dark Tower unfolding as they did before his traumatic accident in 1999. The accident informs the work, changed the way he envisioned it. Whether or not you think the final books in King’s epic are good are beside the point because they are what the author wrote, and it is there for us to experience as it is.
Final Fantasy VII Remake spoiler ahead.
This is a bit unfair. I really just think Zack is an awful, boring character.
Zack Fair walking through a portal at the end of Final Fantasy VII Remake was a Greedo Shot First moment for me. It completely undermines the meaning of the original text and reveals the remake to be exactly what it is: fan service, or even more accurately, fan fiction. You might like fan fiction, may enjoy writing it, but you have to admit that, on some level, you don’t get fan fiction without the original text existing.
That anyone thinks that Nojima meant for Zack Fair to be alive in the original game is appalling to me. It’s revisionist history. It’s deeply boring and cynical. It’s exploitative. It appeals to fans and no one else.
The Golden Age of Remasters
As I write this, Limited Run Games has collected remasters of Rocket Knight Adventures and Felix the Caton sale, marking the first time these games have been legally available since their original releases. Similarly, the boutique publisher and developer has sold a remastered rerelease of the obscene and awfulPlumbers Don’t Wear Ties, which launches digitally in March 2024. Konami has released numerous collections of classic games, Atari and Digital Eclipse released a monstrous documentary-esque collection with Atari 50. For all of the doom and gloom about the 87% of lost games, there is an effort being made in some corners of the industry to preserve and revive games that were left in the past. It isn’t difficult to play a game as bland and lifeless as Cybermorph or as challenging as Gimmick in 2024. The work is being done to keep these games alive.
Don’t skip this game! It’s great!
When the topic of games being remade comes up online, I immediately say “remaster or port only” I do not want a reimagining. I do not want remakes. I do not need games to have up to date graphics and retooled gameplay. Turn based games do not need to be made into action games. Action games, likewise, don’t need to be turn based. The original games were the way they were for a reason, top to bottom, and should retain those decisions as they are rereleased for modern players. I will give a pass to things like save states and rewind features. They are staples of emulation platforms, and can ultimately be ignored.
If you’ve reached the end of this piece, thank you for reading. Please understand that I’m not out to take the fun away from you, nor am I suggesting that the old video games are somehow better than new ones. They are different. The past isn’t wholly good or bad for any medium. But video games, like any art form, have a rich enough history that there will always be lessons waiting for the next generation to tap into. When we demand a remake, we are, in some form, asking to erase the original texts. To make them hard to access. The remake will be on new code, more likely to be retained and reused to sell the game again in the future. A remaster, port, or emulated rerelease may have problems, but they will give a player a far more interesting look into a work than a remake ever can. Because the art is in the original text. The remake is just tracing the outlines.
Spoilers throughout for Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Twin Peaks, The Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, and The Rebuild of Evangelion. My review is largely my own read of the game, but I do discuss the general reaction to the game as this review is not written in a bubble, and I have to make concessions about my opinions where needed. I don’t discredit people who like certain things about the game even if I don’t.
Dale Cooper, Margaret Lanterman, Harry Truman at the RR. Damn fine coffee.
Before we begin, let’s talk about Twin Peaks.
Original going on the air in 1990, David Lynch’s weird little small town murder mystery featured a cast of eclectic characters, and the murder mystery was just a McGuffin to tell stories about the lives of the denizens of the town. It is, in turns, a mournful exploration of shared grief, a surrealistic horror about otherworldly entities waging a war of good and evil, and a slice of uplifting Americana where coffee and cherry pie are the solution to whatever ails you.
The ending of the original series, as it was cancelled by ABC, shows us murder victim Laura Palmer telling the heroic FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper that she will see him again in twenty-five years, after which he is possessed by the demonic villain BOB.
And, about twenty-five years later, Twin Peaks returned. But not like anyone expected.
Gone was Angelo Badalamenti’s slimy lounge jazz soundtrack, replaced by a largely droning industrial score. The color palate is darker, more sinister. It’s a more violent, horrifying show now, something only vaguely hinted at in the finale of the original series. Most of the show doesn’t even take place in the pleasant town of Twin Peaks. The finale is so jarring and disconcerting that anyone who watches the series will spend ages speculating on what ultimately happens in the last moments of the show.
The horse is the white of the eyes and the dark within.
It’s a critically acclaimed work of television, and no one could have expected what David Lynch and Mark Frost created.
Depending on what you wanted from “more Twin Peaks”, you might be disappointed by the absence of Dale Cooper, or from the hellish depictions of America that are on display throughout. Thankfully, The Return is a masterwork of television. It’s one of the best works of fiction that I’ve seen in recent years, and it’s stuck with me in a way that is probably starting to annoy all of my friends.
I mean, no one laughs at my Phillip Jeffries jokes on Twitter.
Fans of any property are, by and large, the worst authority on what should happen to a piece of media. Take the recent Star Wars trilogy. After the first trailer for The Force Awakens, fans were picking every frame apart, complaining and finding fault with every frame. Note, I didn’t like the trailer, but it’s because I didn’t like the photography in it – that’s a valid opinion unlike the bigots complaining about Finn. But theories came and became the center of discussion surrounding the film, rather than the artistic merits of the film. Sure, it’s a entertaining film, but it also rushes through it’s third act and is kind of a mess after the Hosnian system is destroyed. But that’s not the conversation surrounding the film.
Because Fan Service
It was all about Rey’s parentage. How is she powerful? She’s gotta be someones child, that’s why she’s so powerful!
This type of discourse dominates pop culture over that of thoughtful criticism. When The Last Jedi released, fans were actively furious about what Rian Johnson had done to follow the first film. Meanwhile, those of us who watched the movie without the need for nebulous questions to be answered, found a rather beautiful film about growing through failure.
It’s one of my favorite Star Wars films.
I mention all of this because Final Fantasy VII Remake does not exist on an island. It is the result of over a decade of fan demands, a further supplement to an original game amidst other official supplements tot he original game. It is something that I do not agree with the general zeitgeist about, and frankly, it’s not because it’s different from the original. I like different. I like to be surprised. I want to be challenged. And I feel like I need to defend myself from the incoming comments that already decided why I feel the way that I do without having looked at this from the angle that I have. Final Fantasy VII is not my favorite game in the series. It’s not even in my top five. I have played it several times, and I think that it holds up very well. I was giving this game the benefit of the doubt because I am apparently willing to let Square-Enix rip my wallet to pieces in hopes that I’ll eventually get a Final Fantasy game that excites me the same way the old games do.
Final Fantasy VII Remake is not that game.
Understand, it’s not that this is a 100% bad game. I’m going to get in the weeds here, but I don’t hate the game. The new script has some strong moments that outshine the original. The dated and potentially offensive depiction of LGBT characters in the original has been refreshed in a way that is, according to my LGBT friends, better than the original – and I do agree with them, but I lack the authority to confirm this for them. The voice acting is mostly very good. Also, obviously, the graphics are stunning. but that’s nothing new for Square-Enix. They use particle effects to try to distract us from how small their games really are.
Summons are now earned in arena combat.
Those Who Fight
Final Fantasy VII featured a turn-based combat system that was the next version of the ATB combat that fans had loved since it’s implementation in Final Fantasy IV. Magic and combat skills were determined by the use of materia, each orb containing it’s own set of spells and perks that could be swapped out throughout the game.
Final Fantasy VII Remake does retain materia for skills and magic, but gone is turn based combat. Instead, we have a reiteration of the combat from Final Fantasy XV, where the player is using the square button to unleash physical attacks. The change from XV come from how guarding has been switched on the controller, and is far less simple to utilize in combat. There’s also a dodge roll, but I found that it was usually slower than just running away when playing as Cloud, who is the focal character in combat for most of the game. Players have the option of choosing the character that they want to bring into combat, and each has their own sets of skills learned from weapons, as well as the powerful limit breaks that we all remember from the original game. Boss fights, in line with this layered action-oriented combat, are endurance trials, based around a new version of the Stagger mechanic from Final Fantasy XIII. Do the right kind of damage to build the stagger meter, and once the foe is on it’s knees, unleash your most powerful attacks to bring it’s health down, and in most cases, bring about the next stage of the encounter.
The ATB concept is here in name alone, representing a timer that can be used to cast magic, use skills, or drop an item for healing. There is a classic mode that reduces gameplay to just the ATB menus, but that’s cold comfort to old school Final Fantasy fans who were hoping to use the ATB menu instead of the button mashing combat of modern Action-RPG Final Fantasy. It’s entirely based on the Easy difficulty, and is kind of an insulting fan to those of us who enjoyed the strategic nature of ATB combat, even at it’s most challenging.
You spend a frustrating amount of time in the sewer.
Everything functional enough for me to have finished the game, but I personally don’t like the combat. This is due in part to the fact that I never got any more proficient in combat. Some of these large bosses went better than others, but for the most part, I dreaded every boss encounter in the game. Each one represented one gummy bullet sponge that was going to take up a chunk of my time while I tried to discern how best to undo it’s immunity to damage, or drive up it’s stagger meter, etc. Boss fights were tiring, and towards the end of the game, there were so many of them that none of them feel special anymore. For example, the final dungeon of the original game featured three boss fights, and I can knock the trio of them out in less than ten minutes with mid-level characters and a solid materia setup. I spent the better part of thirty minutes on the final two bosses of the new game. This is partially because I never got comfortable with combat in the new game. The other is that the fight against a literal god (and yes, that’s how it’s depicted) drags on for an eternity even though it’s really kind of a pushover.
The problem that I see in the boss fights ties to a problem that Final Fantasy VII Remake deals with now and will continue to have a problem with in later installments. There is no sense of escalation going through the game. The scorpion robot in the original game offers a tutorial about how to read boss combat. What follows over the course of the next 40 hours are increasingly difficult bosses leading up to a battle against a veritable god, in the tradition of the series thus far.
Battling a god in Final Fantasy VII Remake is merely a prelude to fighting Sephiroth.
But we’ll get to that later.
Midgar as a Game
I played through Final Fantasy VII over two weeks in March as a refresher before going into the remake. I wanted to know what a straight shot through the game looked like, how long the game really was when boiled down to its essence. At the time, I was under the impression that I was in for an eighty hour excursion through a city that I found could be knocked out in about five hours of total game time in the original. This suggested run time has always been of concern for me since the remake was announced. Square-Enix was adamant that each installment would be the length of their contemporary Final Fantasy games, which usually run me about eighty hours with their side quests. I was happy to see people finishing the game off in around half of that time, with side quests, because it wouldn’t be as padded as I expected.
The majority of the second half of the game takes place in a loop of Sector 5 and Wall Market.
But, you might be asking, was it padded at all? Absolutely.
There are so many little design choices that slow the game to a crawl, and even UI choices that impede something as simple as healing your character with potions. Let’s break the UI issue down. In most RPGs, you open the menu and use potions on your characters. In an Infinity engine game it might be a little slower because you are using potions that take up one inventory space to heal one character, but JRPGs usually have a stack of potions to draw from, and you use multiple potions on one character until you are satisfied with their health. Final Fantasy VII Remake requires four button presses to use one potion, and then you’re out of the menu, starting over. Potions come at something of a premium, as money is largely scarce until the later parts of the game, and using the cheaper potions outside of combat to prep up for continuing the game takes a significant amount of time. This is nitpicky, but it annoyed the hell out of me on more than one occasion because NES games had this under control over thirty years ago.
There are extensive sections where the player walks at a crawl between story moments, where small amounts of dialogue are delivered. Players are more or less railroaded to the next story beat during these moments. Even when there’s a sense that the player could walk off and take in the color of the expanded areas, they are stuck on a predetermined path, and a stop sign flashes on the screen until they turn around and go to the scene instead. These moments should just be cut scenes if control is going to be taken away. The illusion of player agency is already shattered, and being able to push forward on the stick while the characters walk through another junk filled tunnel on the map isn’t rewarding from a gameplay perspective, and it does little other than to slow the game down. I’m all for quiet time. I was wondering if there would be any moments where I wasn’t slicing up nameless Shinra soldiers after the first two hours, but when I got to Sector 7, I felt constrained by the way that the game wanted to deliver the story to me.
The Sphinxaur from Final Fantasy VIII.
Simple design decisions could help to maintain the illusion. Put a crowd having a fight at the mouth of the path that I want to go down. Put a car in the way of another path. Do something to give the illusion that I can’t go somewhere instead of a UI indicator. The UI indicator is a sign that the director wants to direct the player rather than the game, and when the 23 year old game that this is based on does this without a hitch, I have to wonder why I’m able to come up with solutions that aren’t a flashing stop sign.
Okay, that’s enough for design flaws, let’s talk side quests.
I’ve long said that modern Final Fantasy has some of the most incredibly dull side quests I’ve ever played. Long gone are world spanning efforts to breed the Golden Chocobo, or lore expanding efforts to craft a satanic choo-choo train (Christ, I love the world building in Final Fantasy VIII…). Instead, modern Final Fantasy pads out its run time with Hunts or fetch quests. Final Fantasy XII introduced the hunts, and it’s easily the best version of this concept. It ties into the setting, and you have to go and talk to the denizens of the world before you go and kill a giant thing and get rewarded by that same character. Final Fantasy XIII and XV cut out the NPCs and it was just something you did for experience and items. The hunts are nowhere to be found in Final Fantasy VII Remake, and I’m thankful for that. Instead, we have Odd Jobs, which most resemble Lightning’s efforts to save everyone’s souls in Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII.
Longtime readers know how much of a sore point this is for me.
While the writing for these quests is a few steps out of the pit that is the tedious garbage that was Lightning Returns, everything still boils down to either “get thing and return it” or “kill thing and come back”. You could argue that all RPG quests boil down to these functions, the writing doesn’t make any of it meaningful.
Seriously, go play FFIX. It’s amazing.Let’s take Final Fantasy IX as an example.
About 3/4 into the first disc, players come across the first Chocobo Forest, where they start a mini-game called Chocobo Hot and Cold. Playing this game nets players Chocographs depicting hidden treasure across the entire world map. Through this, they improve their chocobo’s skills. Eventually, this side quest crosses over with the Mognet quest, a sequence where players deliver mail between the moogles that serve as save points throughout the game. The narrative that flows along the Mognet story bits meets a treasure hunt in a way that deepens the world building; a species of social creatures whose system of communication has shut down and the player solves that mystery as a result of their exploration.
By comparison, the best that Final Fantasy VII Remake has to offer is the Angel of the Slums. It’s still a pretty dull quest line.
Otherwise, you spend your side quest time looking for cats and children, and killing the occasional ROUS. The paths between the items searched for by the player and the source of the quest are usually pretty long, and it artificially stretches out the time players spend in designated “dungeon” areas attached to the hub areas of the map.
All things considered, Midgar is a very small area, and there aren’t many “new” locations. The proposition of freely exploring Midgar was pretty appetizing, but the fact is that there isn’t much new here. One junkyard area looks and feels like the other junkyard areas. One metal corridor feels like another metal corridor. The tiny bestiary does little to alleviate this feeling. The monsters from the original game have been designated either cannon fodder for the hallway paths that connect the hubs, or they’ve been given steroids and turned into bosses. Midgar in the the original game is also pretty small, but you don’t spend forty hours there. It’s linear by design so that the reveal of an open world has a physical weight on the player. It feels large because its the first truly 3D space in the game, rather than a 2D pre-rendered image.
All the world’s a landfill.
For me, it all comes down to how older RPGs utilized abstraction to give scale to everything that takes place. The backgrounds gave us a portrait of the world that the player walked through, and each step wasn’t supposed to be 1-to-1 with how we interact with our own world. As a result, a small character walking into the frame of a long city street felt like we were guiding Cloud and company across one of the long streets of Junon. The train graveyard, despite only being two screens, felt like a massive maze of twisted metal. But it doesn’t take long to explore. Nothing did, not even the final dungeon. It was the sense of adventure that made the game more fun to play. When the setting has little to no variety, exploration feels empty. And when the doesn’t allow exploration when it feels fresh, it’s just frustrating.
Before we get into the plot, there’s just one more level design thing I want to talk about…
The Red Light District
Wall Market is a the notoriously wretched chapter of Final Fantasy VII where Cloud and Aeris try to appeal to a crime lord of ill repute to get into his bedroom, and question him about why he’s investigating Avalanche. Let’s reexamine this for clarity: the heroes of our story attempt to sell themselves into sex slavery to get information.
In Final Fantasy VII, Wall Market is the red light district of Midgar, a decaying slum where most of the shops are tents, and the only brick and mortar buildings are supporting the local sex trade. While the original is problematic, the setting and people therein mostly match the tone of what is ultimately taking place.
One could be forgiven if they don’t see through the glitz and glamour of the Wall Market of Final Fantasy VII Remake, an entertainment district now, with a gym, hotel, color Vegas-esque dance bar, and massage parlors.
But I’m me, and I read the scene completely differently than literally the entire internet.
Trailers for the game had the internet reeling because of how sexy they thought Tifa and Aeris are – and Cloud too, if you’re into that. I rolled my eyes because I remember Wall Market as a half hour fetch quest in the original game, and I wasn’t looking forward to doing it again in the new one – little did I know how deep that rabbit hole was going to be with nine different dresses to collect. I had to mute so many hashtags and users on Twitter because of the people who ship these characters and talked about how hot they all are.
The finished game makes it worse.
The internet objectification of these characters was already gross enough, but once this got started in the game, I felt genuinely uncomfortable playing on. First, there’s a huge crowd walking around Aeris as she approaches Don Corneo’s mansion, the place where she would be physically used and disposed of had he gotten his way. They were all talking about how gorgeous she is, and how envious they were of her. The camera pans around her breasts. The entire scene glorifies what is happening.
It got worse when I returned to the Honeybee Inn to have my dance with new character Andrea Rhodea, who is trying help me get Cloud on the menu for Don Corneo’s lust. If you explore the Inn before your dance, there’s an item chest sitting in the dressing -room.
There’s a vial of sedative inside.
You could pass this off as mere game design, where the game offers you an item for use in combat as part of the level. However, this reads as part of the culture of Wall Market. It’s a date rape drug. In the sexy dance bar. That usually filters women into be the Don’s sex slave.
Game design on this level is telling you part of the story. Beneath the sparkling lights and upbeat music of the Honeybee Inn, Andrea Rhodea is helping to send women into sex slavery. He isn’t heroic, even if he works with white haired Noctis for revenge against the Don. People are still enabling sexual torture and slavery in this setting, and it’s played for fun and laughs with a dancing mini-game. Say what you want about effeminate musclemen that you have to compete with to get a wig, at least they aren’t actively complicit in feeding Don Corneo’s lust.
Pair the fact that women are sold into sexual slavery and probably tortured in the Don’s dungeon with the trap door in his bed room. What happens to those women?
They aren’t walking out of his mansion when he’s done.
Again, this is true of the original, and it’s a problem there as well. But it’s not an upbeat, fun and colorful dancing minigame in the original. It’s played for laughs. But the lack of visual realism, the lack of sedatives in the Honeybee Inn…it’s just not as quick of a read to just how horrifying it all is in the remake. Wall Market of the original is the red light district, through and through. There aren’t reputable people to be found. But the Wall Market of the remake is bustling with dozens of people, NPCs that you eventually do quests for in chapter fourteen.
There are even children living there. And they’ll grow up thinking that it’s appealing to go to the Don’s mansion.
Interlude – On Evangelion
Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion ran for twenty-six episodes before meeting a surreal, almost nonsensical conclusion in a two-part episode made up almost entirely of still shots and seemingly unfinished animation. The rumor I always heard was that money had run out, and this was the best that could be done on the remaining budget. More recently, I’ve read that this was what Anno had intended at the time of conception. Later, the series would be summarized in the film Death and Rebirth, and given a conclusion with The End of Evangelion, a controversial film that is an anime nightmare if I’ve ever seen one. I think it’s kind of amazing to watch for the visuals alone.
It’s even weirder with context!
Later, the series would be revised as Neon Genesis Evangelion Platinum, and later, Rebuild of Evangelion would be announced. Unlike the edits of the television version that Platinum represented, Rebuild of Evangelion was to be a remake of the original story into four feature length films. The first volume, You Are (Not) Alone plays pretty close to the first few episodes of the original series. The second volume, You Can (Not) Advance is instantly different from the original series, and concludes with the apocalyptic Third Impact.
I can’t say much to defend Evangelion from criticism on any front. It’s a wildly ambitious concept that doesn’t land, largely in part to oversexualized teenagers delivering fan service amidst a rumination on depression and anxiety. It’s a weird series that I think is more interesting than good. But I have to note that when I heard that the series was being redone for Rebuild I couldn’t help but be interested because Anno has a history of reiteration with this series that would make George Lucas blush. The fact that the second film ends with Third Impact, a world changing cataclysm, genuinely blew my mind. The third film, You Can (Not) Redo is such a strange departure as a result, and it’s a movie that I couldn’t stop looking at even though it was kind of a mess.
All three films are currently streaming legally for free on youtube. Go check them out.
With the release of the series on Netflix in 2019, I saw a video where it was explained that Hideaki Anno sees all of the numerous iterations of Evangeliion as canonical, and occurring in an endless cycle. This is why the seas are all blood red in Rebuild, because it follows the events of The End of Evangelion, wherein human instrumentality is achieved, and all of the souls of the earth merge and exist as one inside of Rei, who is literally the size of the planet.
Didn’t I say it was a sight?!
I just want you to keep this entire section in your brain as we get into the plot of Final Fantasy VII Remake. Because I couldn’t stop thinking about it once I thought about the similarities between these two projects.
Cloud Strife – Mercenary Douchebag
Cloud Strife has never been a nice guy. The pushy jerk who we meet right before pulling a terrorist attack on Mako Reactor No. 1 isn’t friendly to the our cheerful eco-terrorist band, and he demands money from them despite how poor they are as soon as the mission is over and they’re back at the hideout. However, there are opportunities in the original for Cloud to say something that isn’t rude. He has the option to be polite to Aeris, who sells him a flower for one gil. He has the option to give it to Marlene or Tifa, and the player gets to make this decision, one of the many forks in the narrative that leads to how the game decides who take’s Cloud out for a date at the Golden Saucer later on.
Final Fantasy is rarely a true roleplaying experience. At best, players get a few branching decisions that have no impact on the plot, but dictate and reveal small character traits. But Final Fantasy VII Remake strips these decisions away, leaving Cloud as an asshole to everyone he meets. He even scares Marlene when they meet in the bar for the first time. Sure, this is because Barret has taught her to avoid strangers like the good dad that he is, but it’s a moment that softens Cloud in the original, and makes him more endearing.
“Uh…am I supposed to eat it?”
It’s a small player choice that defines Cloud as a character. It’s quickly followed up by Tifa challenging him in regards to their shared past back in Nibelheim. When Tifa pushes him about the promise that he made to her years before when they were young and living in a small village on the other side of the world, the player is prompted with a second decision that gives Cloud another layer.
The absence of options means that this scene is relegated to a flashback later rather than in the moment. In retrospect, Cloud realizes he could be nicer to her. It’s supposed to be an indication about the character growth he is supposed to see going forward in Remake, but it just comes across flat when he’s still a complete jerk to everyone he does the aforementioned boring quests to throughout Midgar.
It’s hard for me to ever feel bad for the traumatic flashbacks that Cloud has because they do not reflect the character we see in literally every other scene in the game. When he’s not being a prick to the poor, he’s doing wheelies on a motorcycle, spinning donuts and killing soldiers with his bike while almost ripping the flesh off of Shinra top-brass Heidegger’s face. He spins his giant sword around in a show of bravado and spits out pithy one-liners.
The original Playstation couldn’t render this sort of thing outside of cutscenes, and the most animated event of this type in the original is Cloud riding down stairs on the motorcycle. Sure, he did the sword spin as part of his combat victory pose, and that’s played for a laugh for the Junon military parade. But through the power of the PS4 and modern game design middleware, Cloud gets to be an action movie hero, cold, mean and totally bad-ass. We have the movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children to blame for this depiction, as well as the modern obsession with turning Final Fantasy into a series of action games with ridiculous, over the top combat animation.
That the entire cast of characters seem to want to get in bed with Cloud is probably the most baffling thing about this entire game.
My problems with Final Fantasy VII Remake started when Sephiroth walked onto the scene after the mako reactor bombing. The story takes Cloud from zero-to-acid trip in the first hour. It’s a visually striking scene, but there are a few problems. One, it leaves no room for escalation because Cloud has already gone really far here. Two, it’s never this severe for the rest of the game.
Payoff
Final Fantasy VII Remake has never heard of Chekhov’s Gun.
Checkhov’s Gun is a principle that states that if you see a gun on the stage during a play, it eventually has to be fired. There are numerous moments that come up in Remake that never pan out and pay off. For example, there’s Roche, the motorcycle riding member of SOLDIER that challenges Cloud to a race in chapter four. This is a boss fight, something of a tutorial for the boss fight on motorcycle at the end of the game. Roche shows up again during the raid at the Shinra warehouse, but he then vanishes from the game. He doesn’t die. You just have a boss fight with him, he flirts with you, and disappears from the plot entirely. A scene in Shinra HQ where he either contests you again or helps you would have bridged his inclusion in the story somehow, but he’s just gone. Dropped from the story like the padding that he was.
Nomura’s Self Insert Original Character Do Not Steal
There’s a scene with Jessie’s parents that is pretty well written, but falls on a boring JRPG trope that also does Wedge a disservice. This is forgotten pretty fast after chapter four draws to a close. It’s good world building, but it does nothing in the end. Jessie dies, her story incomplete. While Biggs survives, a character that we get little to no establishment for, a character we spend time developing is killed and her expanded story dulled.
When Cloud, Tifa, and Barret tour the Shinra Museum and watch the video about how the ancients were masters of crafting materia, I couldn’t help but compare the entire delivery of this story to Rebuild of Evangelion. I expected that the massive world reveal at the conclusion of this first installment would completely redefine everything I expected about what is coming in the next games.
And in the absence of resolution for these moments, we have the arbiters of fate.
On Destiny
Final Fantasy XIII was the story of a group of character that barely knew each other bound by their destiny to bring about the end of the world, as dictated by godlike entities known as l’Cie. I think that’s what it was. It’s hard to remember if that’s the case when even the characters spent twenty hours complaining about not understanding their mission. The story of Final Fantasy XIII was and is so widely derided as being among the worst in the series that not even the two sequels could help it. Fabula Nova Crystalis was an ambitious project that didn’t have the right driver at the wheel. No one knew what the game was even supposed to play like until a demo was created as supplemental material for the Japanese blu-ray release of Advent Children. This meant that the finished product was…heheh…unfocused.
Surprisingly, this blond haired jackass isn’t the Cloud stand-in. Lightning is.Get it…it’s a Final Fantasy XIII joke…like the characters had a focus and they…
Anyway, let’s get into the most egregious spoiler territory of the entire piece.
The Arbiters of Fate are the most obvious addition to Final Fantasy VII Remake appearing like a mob of Dementors from the Harry Potter stories, giant cyclones of evil black cloaks. In their first scene, where Aeris and Cloud meet, it’s unclear if anyone else can see them. Later, when they attack Sector Seven, it’s pretty clear that other characters can see them as well. It’s weird.
Their place in the plot is, at best, vague until the end of the game. They are called whispers, and they are agents of the true Arbiter of Fate, a literal god that dictates the events that are supposed to take place when they will. They do magic or something on the characters in the late game and reveal story spoilers from the original game. The party has to destroy this arbiter of fate to prevent their future, defying fate.
“Ugh, your breath smells like garlic and rotting flesh.”
What they really are is a plot device for Nomura to drive the story off of the rails of the original game and deliver as much fan service as he possibly can.
That Final Fantasy VII Remake takes a page from the reviled FFXIII is seriously baffling. It fits my belief that this is more akin to Hideaki Anno’s Rebuild than a remake, but here’s where I have to give credit to Anno for what he did with his series of films:
He never acknowledges it directly.
Nomura’s Arbiter of Fate is an acknowledgement of intent, a thumbing of noses as the people who expected a familiar remake. It’s self-congratulatory, and makes the subsequent scenes painful to watch.
As this sequence plays out, the party faces off against Sephiroth…first they fight a literal god, and then they fight an anime pretty boy. In the aftermath, Cloud and Sephiroth are in an extradimensional realm where he says something to the tune of how it is “always going to be them”.
…
Let’s get back to the original.
Series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi conceived of the Lifestream and the plot elements of Final Fantasy VII after his mother died during the development of Final Fantasy VI. As a result, every character’s story (other than the characters who suck like Cid and Yuffie) is about grief. Even motionless NPCs in the end game have a story of grief to tell if you talk to them.
I know that Remake is trying to have it’s own identity and meaning, but I swear to you, this doesn’t come across as meaningful. It’s Nomura disrespecting the theme of the original game in order to have his way with the characters. It’s a screeching “fuck you, got mine” moment that isn’t concerned with subversion because it’s thumbing it’s nose in your face and telling you what the fiction is supposed to be now.
It’s now about Cloud and Sephiroth, fighting in increasingly absurd settings, throwing each other through the air. It’s tropey anime violence. It’s a betrayal of the more grounded setting that is established by literally everything that led up to that moment. Even the Arbiter of Fate plot wrinkle is less offensive than the Sephiroth scenes at the end because they’re established to be a supernatural entity.
Final Fantasy VII Remake is bad fan fiction. It comes from the pretense of understanding of what made Final Fantasy VII great, but misses the point entirely. It’s got the hallmarks of what is wrong with Advent Children, Crisis Core, and Dirge of Cerberus, and it went from being something I was okay with, and was interested in seeing the outcome, to being incredibly frustrated.
And what could prove that more than a reality where Zack Fair lives. Where more members of Avalanche survive the plate falling. Our character’s losses are diminished and the root of their growth is gone.
Any character in fiction is defined by the events that setup their story. Cloud and the rest of the party of Final Fantasy VII are defined by loss. Barret lost his family and friends in Corel, later losing everyone in Avalanche except for Tifa. She literally watched her father die and her home town burn to the ground, an image that haunts her to her very core. You could say that Cloud also lost his home town, but we never see a single moment of his regret about losing his mother. We know she exists, she even has a name now. But she’s not a character of import in either version of the game.
Zack, Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge were all that Cloud could have anchored to as losses. But now, that means nothing. He doesn’t mention Jessie once after the plate falls, and that’s criminal considering how much time they spent together. But he didn’t care.
I joked on my Twitter that Cloud had more chemistry with Andrea Rhodea than any other character in the game, but that wasn’t something I saw as a positive. Even excusing my read that he’s assisting in sex trafficking, Andrea Rhodea is not a member of your party. He’s supporting cast, someone who is only in a fraction of the game. They have a more positive relationship than Cloud gets with any other character because they rarely speak, giving Cloud less of a chance to be a dick to him too.
I’m at a loss for what this game is supposed to mean. Instead of forging it’s own identity separate from the original, it plays the third act of Final Fantasy XIII and tries to pretend that the character arc for Cloud is that, deep down, he’s really just a nice guy. The game says this to your face as well, in the moments before he, Barret, and Tifa start climbing the plate to get to Shinra HQ.
If the script has to take a moment to tell you that the character is really a nice guy, then it’s failing as a piece of fiction.
What Square-Enix has Accomplished with Final Fantasy
We’ve reached a point where most gamers have come to Final Fantasy by way of XIII, XV, or the Kingdom Hearts franchise. It’s been almost twenty years since Final Fantasy X and XII went into development and/or released, and those represent the last vestiges of Squaresoft creative decisions for the series. Since then, we’ve seen direct sequels, movie accompaniments, attempts at a series of shared universe games, DLC supporting the story of a finished work, and now, a multi-chapter remake of one the most revered titles in the franchise.
What once was a scrappy little studio that took massive financial risks to make their biggest game to date with Final Fantasy VII has become a massive publisher. The design philosophies changed as the creative leads moved to company leadership or jumped ship due to their own failures. Final Fantasy XIII and XV were troubled developments that were mismanaged and launched to iwancial success for the company, despite middling to awful critical response that has only soured over time. The patching of XV’s plot with DLC is its own ill omen about how Square-Enix wants to handle their flagship series.
They’d only fail you now, Vivi…
And in the wash, Final Fantasy feels like it’s lost its identity.
The first eleven games in the series take place in their own unique worlds, featuring a cast of characters going on a life changing journey. Themes of environmentalism, industrialization, and self-identity ran through the series from the fourth game up to the tenth – Final Fantasy XII is excluded because it leans more on the ideas of Final Fantasy Tactics, but it’s still damned good game.
Now, the focus has shifted away from the core tenets that made up those early games. The tried and true turn based combat stopped being industry defining and shifted to being action oriented, driven by visual spectacle. Instead of creating features that would be copied by the competition – just look at any game made during the PS1/PS2 era to see how true this – they’ve floundered with different systems to try to ape the visuals of the fan beloved Advent Children.
Can’t wait to get back to this game…
Change happens. It’s inevitable. But progress has meant different things for Final Fantasy than it has for other Square-Enix properties. For example, the Dragon Quest series is celebrating it’s growth in the Western market and the most recent core entry, Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age is one of the most critically acclaimed JRPGs in recent memory. Octopath Traveler released to praise from critics and sold through several print runs in Japan, where stores could barely keep it on the shelf. The Persona franchise, while not owned by Square-Enix, is now considered a gold standard, blending visual novel storytelling into surrealistic dungeon crawling adventures with tough as nails turn based combat.
Oh, and those other two games…yeah, they’re turn based too. The kind of games that everyone complained were boring and dated during the PS3 era are back in now.
It’s hard to believe that anyone at Square-Enix really knows how to make a Final Fantasy game at this point. The development cycles are notoriously long, and have led to more mediocre games than great ones. Internal management at Square-Enix has no doubt interfered in the franchise to its disadvantage. Industry pundit Jim Sterling reported ages ago that Square-Enix wanted more games to be episodic, leading to the chopped up releases of Hitman and Deus Ex games. No doubt that had an effect on the production of Final Fantasy VII Remake. I will not forget reading that Square-Enix was disappointed that the Tomb Raider reboot only sold seven million copies. They, like so many other publishers, are reaching for the kind of numbers that AAA shooters get, that sandbox action games see, rather than focusing on their market and trying to succeed at making great games in those genres. I’ve written in the past about how you could compare Final Fantasy XIII to a Call of Duty game because of the adherence to a linear path while the story is played around you instead of the world being designed to look open while directing the position that you move the players. You could make the argument that this is partially due to writer and director Motomu Toriyama’s belief that linear game design is needed to keep the player focused on the characters – his belief is contradicted by the early Final Fantasy games. While Final Fantasy VII Remake isn’t quite so strict, the level design still adheres to those constraints.
It’s difficult to expect my ideal Final Fantasy now because it’s tied up in the way that those games feel to play. The worlds of the first nine games in the series feel massive because of how you move through them. Final Fantasy X had to find a new way to make a Final Fantasy because they were moving into 3D, but they never tried anything new after that. Every game since, aside from Final Fantasy XV, feels like it takes place in a series of small boxes rather than in an actual world. The world map, for as dated as you may want it to believe that it is, is a functional abstraction because it pits you against monsters to slow your progression as you move a token across a wide space at a slow speed. Now, our characters walk through narrow paths with small splinters that lead to treasure rooms or side quest boss arenas. Sure, that could sound like dungeon design, but it’s the entire world now. And that, to me, doesn’t have the scope and scale of the first nine games.
Weren’t You Reviewing Final Fantasy VII Remake?
Okay, let’s get these threads connected.
The end of Final Fantasy VII Remake is the point where the player would step out into the massive 3D world map for the first time, and have to navigate their way to Kalm. The original game spends very little time in most of the locations that follow Midgar. Kalm is the setting where Cloud tells the story of what happened in Nibelheim five years earlier. There’s a materia cave with a small scene with the Turks. You can stop by Fort Condor for a mini game. But ultimately, the next big stop is Junon. After Junon you get a small sequence on the ship that takes you to the next continent. This all lasts for less than three hours in the original game, but covers the majority of the continent. All said, you spend eight hours on 1/3 of the world map.
I lay this out for two reasons. One is to remind you of how an old Final Fantasy scaled the adventure. You go back to most of these places for different reasons throughout the remainder of the original game, whether for side quests or another story beat – the return trip to Junon after the Weapons awaken is still pretty incredible. Considering the structure of remake, I’m left wondering how the next game is assembled.
I can easily speculate that it’ll follow the design methodology of Final Fantasy XV. The first installment already follows that design for combat, town interactions, and how NPCs act – I wouldn’t be surprised if they reused some of that code and modeling to save time. That means we’ll probably get hunts to go on, we’ll get some side quests in each of the towns, and the flash back scene in Kalm would likely be more interactive and act as a long sequence all of it’s own. And this is all assuming that they utilize any of the original game’s story.
Part of what drives the experience of Final Fantasy VII is the chase. Following Sephiroth brings the characters to each new location where the story unfolds. These scenes are rarely about Sephiroth, however. This is how we learn about Barret’s backstory. About Nanaki’s father. It’s how we meet Cid and learn that he’s a walking trash fire. It’s a similar narrative device from another legendary 7th entry in an RPG franchise, Ultima VII: The Black Gate, which has players doing a lot more roleplaying than you get in a Final Fantasy game as they track down Elizabeth and Abraham, two missionaries who are murdering people while trying to bring an interdimensional god through the titular black gate and have him ascend to leadership. By the way, Ultima VII is awesome and you’re missing out if you haven’t played it.
One of the remake’s greatest mistakes is putting Sephiroth in early. He’s a far more effective villain in the original because of how much he’s hyped up over the course of fifteen-to-seventeen hours of game prior to actually seeing him unearthed in the crater. Players have already beaten him in combat once, so seeing him deal maximum damage to a green dragon in the flashback isn’t going to have the same impact. He’s already beat the hell out of a city to give players a flashy boss fight at the end of the first game. He’s old news now. Fighting him several times is going to have diminishing returns, akin to the seven or eight battles against Caius Ballad in Final Fantasy XIII-2.
I’ve played so much Final Fantasy in my life…
Regardless, between the shoebox size of the supposedly expanded Midgar and stunted escalation, I can’t see what really follows at this point. I’m interested to see what happens next, more from an artistic point of view rather than a narrative one. The narrative jumped the shark as far as I’m concerned. You can’t just kill a proper god and then expect me to be impressed by Sephiroth for the rest of five or however many games. The lack of clarity in regards to how many installments we should expect also bothers me. I could easily see this series making less money per installment and a rushed finale being pushed out to cap the experience so they can start selling it all in collections. There is precedence for these actions. Just look at all of the Kingdom Hearts collections that have come out in the past decade.
Well, What Would You Have Done?
I’ll keep this short because this is the part that no one is really interested in. First, expand Midgar into a full city. Make it a proper open world. Get your Just Cause teams involved because they’ve already made several open world games, and that experience means that they can help you flesh out the city and make it full and large and alive in a way that doesn’t resemble a games from several years ago. Second, switch back to turn based combat, but have it look lively. Use the passive implementation of chip damage and animation from the maligned Classic mode and have all of the strategy tied up in the menu options instead of staggers, guards, and dodge rolls. Lean in on what Persona has accomplished because those games look stunning. Three, since it’s just Midgar, don’t start the game with Cloud. Cloud doesn’t have much truck with Avalanche anyway. Start the game with Tifa, and coordinate with the team to perform different attacks on Shinra to discredit them and damage their plans. This means that the game uses the alternate Shinra cells as something other than a deus ex machina for that one scene. Make Avalanche mean something to the player, something personal, so that the plate dropping scene hurts that much more. Four, since Tifa is the central focal character, we can see her internal struggle with keeping what she knows about Cloud from him as we see him put himself back together leading up to the attack on Mako Reactor No. 1, an event that wouldn’t happen until…2/3 through the game. From there, it’s largely the same as the original, except the character story is about Tifa’s perspective, something that we don’t get enough of in the original despite her knowing what was jacked up about Cloud from moment one.
To Be Continued
I’m sitting here, having written over thirty pages of self-indulgent ramblings about a Final Fantasy game that most people think is incredible, and I’m wondering why I’ve even bothered. This will change nothing about the future of the series, how most fans perceive it, or even the course that JRPGs will go down going forward.
Final Fantasy VII Remake is not a bad game. It’s actually a decent one. It makes some silly plot decisions that unseats the rest of the game and it all comes across feeling like fan service rather than a legitimate recreation of a classic game. But fan service is in with the JRPG crowd, and Square-Enix has Play Arts figures to sell to them now that the game is out. The good scenes are truly great though, and Elmyra’s soliloquy still made me cry like a four year old with a skinned knee. But it’s the visual language that’s weird, the return of Final Fantasy XIII’s railroad game design, and the sheer stupidity of how the plot twist is delivered. I didn’t get a world physically devastated and changed by the meteor of old. Instead, I got dead characters walking around, playing to the needs of Crisis Core fans.
This isn’t a subversion of expecations. This isn’t surprising. This is what I expect from Tetsuya Nomura, the creator of Kingdom Hearts, the director who sold the events of the climax from the finale of his ten part epic as a $30 DLC after listening to fan feedback rather than having the balls to make the game as he saw fit and put it on the market with no need for input.
This could have worked if Sephiroth hadn’t more or less broken the fourth wall to tell players that they weren’t getting a direct remake. If there wasn’t a superimposed text saying that the future is unknown. That’s now how subversion works.
Twin Peaks: The Return is a subversive masterpiece. It barely resembles the source material, but supplements that original 29 episode series with a haunting, mesmerizing work of fiction that is so unflinching in its depictions of evil that it’s hard to watch. Never once with Lynch have his characters explain anything about this unusual direction. In fact, he challenged his viewers, new and old, with an indescribable world tethered to the one that they believed that they knew.
Similarly, Hideaki Anno threw his teenage heroes into a state of failure half way through a story that seemed familiar. Third Impact destroys the world they knew. I didn’t expect that this was going to happen because everything before that moment was so familiar. But all that happens at the end of the film was a credit roll. No explanation. Just a see-you-soon-goodbye, and we’re left to ponder what the hell we just saw.
No, it’s not nearly as good as The Return.
Final Fantasy VII Remake is going to be an interesting artifact of what Square-Enix has done with Final Fantasy from 2006 when Final Fantasy XII released, up to 2020, when the long awaited remake finally reached the public that had begged for it for so long. It’s an uneven mashup of design methodologies of games that are, at the very least, divisive among fans of the series. My cynicism questions if this game would be as celebrated as it is if the characters were all completely new and the scenario altered enough to not be immediately recognizable as a remake of Final Fantasy VII, but instead, a project entirely designed to be a new start to a multi-part series. The third wall break would still irritate me, as would the lack of functional tension. But I know that it would bother me less because this is treading existing ground. Those grounds have already been milled for a series of games, movies, books, and manga that are of pretty weak quality, entirely designed to profit off of the largest quadrant of the Final Fantasy fan base. I dread what this means for the future of the series as well, as all things must now meet the standard that Final Fantasy VII Remake supposedly sets.
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WordsThing 