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.
I took a bit of a break during my editing this morning to watch the latest Nintendo Direct. It was good! Great at times! Nintendo is about to make a lot of money.
But, from a promotional angle, Nintendo is definitely preparing for new hardware next year.
The winter lineup for 2023 going into 2024 is a set of safe bets from Nintendo. There’s a lot of Mario coming our way in the form of remakes/remasters of Mario RPG and The Thousand Year Door alike. Two new platformers in the series are on the way. WarioWare, Luigi’s Mansion…it’s a bit much, really. But the diversity in gameplay styles means that there’s something for everyone if you like Mario games, and that’s great for Nintendo. I…will not be buying some of them. I have my eyes on the RPGs (obvously) as well as both Mario Wonder and the newly unveiled Princess Peach Showtime. However, none of this captured my attention as some of the other news.
First up, Horizon Chase 2 is an absolute must-have for me. I spent dozens of hours on the first Horizon Chase Turbo, reveling in the stylish visual, tight controls, and massive series of races. A sequel is a safe bet in my book, especially since even the DLC for the first game was stellar. If you’ve not played the first, squeeze it in before the sequel drops. It’s a great throwback to 90s arcade racers.
SaGa: Emerald Beyond is a title I’ve been waiting for more information on. A brand new SaGa game is somewhat unbelievable for those of us who watched the series get snuffed out by Square-Enix in the PS2 era, and since I’ve actually played some of the games now? Absolutely. Give me all of your weird, Square-Enix. I much prefer it to your fan-bait loaded Final Fantasy VII rehashes! The trailer looks nice, but the combat UI is absurdly overwrought. I hope that gets tweaked before release. Or that it earns its keep. Whichever. I’m still in no matter what. The series is great. And weird. And hard!
And while I talk about enjoying difficult games, a trailer for a set of remastered Tomb Raider games was announced, coming from Aspyr. I’m pretty happy about this one: you can switch their ugly updated visuals back to PS1 level, and Aspyr is, in my experience, the kind of studio that hashes these ports out as quickly as possible. What does this mean?
It means that they didn’t actually change the game and it’s going to be just as jank as the originals! And that’s fantastic!
Video game history and preservation is important to me, and remaking everything to “bring it up to a modern standard” usually means that the edges and quirks that make the classics interesting get sanded away to be easier for modern players. And…accesibility is fine, but those games should still be accessible in the original format. And Aspyr will do that. Even if it means the game is kinda awkward in adaptation like their Jedi Knight remasters on the Switch. Those are direct PC ports. There is a software registration button. I have no idea how they got that through quality control!
I am using an irresponsible amount of exclamation marks tonight…chalk it up to me trying to hammer this out before bed.
The biggest surprise for me out of the entire show was the announcement of a new title from VanillaWare. If you aren’t familiar with VanillaWare, you have some amazing catching up to do. The developers of some of my favorite 2D games ever are currently working on a strategy RPG called Unicorn Overlord, a game lush with beautiful visuals. And…yeah, I’m the same person who likes to wax about how graphics don’t make a game great, but VanillaWare creates the most beautiful 2D games out there. And they’re damn fun to boot. This is a day one pick up for me. If you want to know why, go play Odin Sphere or 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim.
Beyond this…well, there’s a pair of League of Legends spinoffs that I snoozed through, a new Contra that I’m hesitant to get excited about, a lot of games that slipped off of my brain as soon as the trailer was over and I’m not going to recount despite their presence in my notes, and even some things that I need to go read up on, like Another Code!
This has been a sloppy recount of the entire event. But that’s fine. It’s late. I’m tired. I spent hours editing a story today and then even more time trying to do house related stuff while spending time with my daughter. It was a fine day, and a fine Direct. I just haven’t got any sense left.
I do want to close on a bit about F-Zero 99. First off, I haven’t played it yet, though I intend to. My comments aren’t going to be about the quality of the game that is currently out, but more so the conversation that I knew would surround the game as soon as the trailer shifted from the SNES footage to the new game. F-Zero fans have waited literal decades for a new game from Nintendo, and this definitely isn’t what any of them had in mind. I’ve seen some genuinely nasty comments about it online, including several comments comparing it to the dreadful Metroid Prime: Federation Force for 3DS. While I think that such comments are beyond extreme, I can understand being disappointed.
But, the reality is pretty simple F-Zero isn’t a known money maker for Nintendo. Neither is StarFox. Both series have been surviving on scraps for decades, and Nintendo doesn’t seem to know what to do with either of them to draw an audience that isn’t people in their thirties who enjoyed the N64 or GameCube releases. However, remakes and rehashes aren’t going to draw that audience, nor are games with experimental controls like Star Fox Zero had.
We’ve been pretty fortunate during the Switch’s lifespan to see what many people refer to as The Switch Effect – games with historically weak sales having record sales on the Switch. This is partially due to the massive install base for the Switch, as well as the fantastic games that have come out on the console, like Metroid Dread. The time for such a game is drawing to an end, as Nintendo starts their transition to new hardware over the next eighteen months (this is likely a stretch). I think that Nintendo is being careful, and testing the waters with F-Zero 99. I think that, with enough interest, the next Nintendo console will feature a new F-Zero.
But everyone needs to relax with the rage. Have a little bit of common sense.
…
What the hell am I talking about? The internet doesn’t know what common sense is.
Anyway. It was a fine Direct, and I am going to drown in Switch cartridges by the time this console is finally discontinued. Thanks for reading.
Hello, everyone. This blog is not going to be about video games. Actually, it’s a little bit about video games. But it’s mostly about writing!
It’s been a somewhat productive year. I’ve gotten back to work on a novel, and I have two short stories in various states of editing. I hope to look for a home for one of them over the next month, and the other is…well, it’s certainly a first draft. Sad as it is to admit it, it is the most fiction writing I’ve done since 2019. The last short I wrote before this was wrapped up in February 2020, and due to the Events That Followed That We Will Not Be Talking About In This Post, I will not ever try to sell that piece. Ever. No. It’s not going to happen. Maybe the one I wrote before that deserves a second look though…
I’ve waited a while to write this post in case I had other updates to offer, but that’s the major stuff for my fiction writing. As for non-fiction…
I Was Published This Year!
First up, I contributed an article to GameBook by Paul Murphy. GameBook is a gorgeous retrospective of Nintendo’s little gray brick, complete with the history of the console and several essays from a variety of writers on famous games across the series history. I’m still in the middle of reading my copy, and it’s a fantastic tome, filled with magnificent art and articles both personal and thought provoking.
My contribution to the book is about The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and its origins in Twin Peaks. Of the three pieces I’ll tell you about in this section, it’s definitely my personal favorite. Also, Twin Peaks inspired games are a subject I’m still thinking about to this day. You might see more here in the future after I’ve played a few more from my shopping list.
I even opened it with a quote from the Log Lady Monologues!
If you’re reading this, Paul, thanks for the amazing opportunity. I have been utterly annoying to everyone in my life talking about this for the past nine months.
But this isn’t the only writing I did for the fine folks at Ninty Media. I contributed articles to the (sadly…) final two issues of Switch Player magazine. The first of these articles was about Metroid Prime and the second was about Final Fantasy. If you’d like to see me romanticize pixel art or dig into the idea of the bounty hunter, these are fine ways to do so. Also, none of these articles will be added to the blog, so this is the best way to read them. And you should! Not because I wrote in them, but because Ninty Media produces lavish books and magazines, and your support means they get to make more books in the future. Their next release will be a follow up to GameBook, covering the Game Boy Color. If you follow me on social media, I’ll no doubt be running my mouth about this when the time comes, regardless of my involvement in the book.
I picked up Star Ocean: The Divine Force for PS5 back in late March. I’d seen the middling reviews, and still figured I’d enjoy it enough to warrant the purchase. It was one of numerous Square-Enix releases that dropped to less-than-great reviews. And, to be completely honest, I bought most of those as well. I have Valkyrie Elysium, Forspoken, and even a copy of Balan Wonderworld sitting on my shelf. You can blame that last one on the excellent video from Austin Eruption and the GameStop clearance price of $5.
I haven’t finished any of those games, mostly just tried them for a bit before going back to things I’ve been working on for ages. Like Soul Hackers 2, a game I’m still inching my way through. But one thing stuck out to me from the night I first put the Star Ocean disc in, and it had nothing to do with the game itself.
This is the status screen for Star Ocean: The Divine Force, and contains the description A Star Ocean 25th Anniversary Commemorative Product. The label stuck in my brain. It’s a terrible description for a work of art. Video games, despite any commercial objectives, are still art, and to see such a reductive phrase being used in this way is…well, let’s just say it – it’s gross. It’s offensive.
I start my review of Final Fantasy XVI with this for a few reasons. First, it’s not a bad indicator of the creative goals of Square-Enix. Someone at the top doesn’t see what they are doing as art. It’s product. It’s content. It’s the same kind of tripe we are hearing from people like David Zaslav at Warner Bros. It is the idea that as long as they get money out of their audience, the output of their studios doesn’t matter. I’ve been critical of Square-Enix for a long time, but I’ve always held out hope that new games would come from the studio that speak to me the way that they have in the past. Occasionally, they still do. And then other times, they are Final Fantasy VII Remake.
Still, I’m willing to meet them halfway. I’m willing to continue trying to play their games despite the fact that they don’t want Final Fantasy to be an RPG series anymore. I’m willing to try despite my skepticism regarding the news that the studio was made to watch the first four seasons of Game of Thrones to “inspire” them – and we will definitely get to that. I played through the game on Action-Focused difficulty, and did not use the assistance items except for to experiment with their usage for the sake of this review.
Okay. Now that I’ve put any of those early comments to rest – let’s talk about Final Fantasy XVI, a game that I enjoyed but have some complicated thoughts about.
I. Swords and Sorcery
For better or worse, most of the gameplay in Final Fantasy XVI is tied up in combat. A blend of character-action spectacle and the over-the-shoulder perspective borrowed from The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, the chaotic, particle effect spouting fighting players will engage in over the course of the 40-70 hour game continues the goals set out inFinal Fantasy XV. There’s an decent amount of depth to the system, with swappable special attacks set to cool down timers and complex combo potential. It’s a cathartic, weighty system that proves enjoyable whether fighting as Clive or as an Eikon.
The Eikon battles are a new wrinkle to action oriented combat from Square-Enix. Swapping into the body of the hulking Ifrit and casting spells feels right. You can feel the size of the beast and the animation windows for his attacks emphasize that physical weight.
I’m not going to delve into this too much, though. Admittedly, I didn’t get to experience the depth of it very much. The game doesn’t on-board players into a deep mode of gameplay until very late in the game, and there isn’t much incentive in doing so through most of the game because…well…it’s a pretty easy game on the whole.
Players who don’t want to engage with the complexities of the difficulty will rarely see a point to doing so unless going for specific challenges such as the chronolith trials. Even the high level hunts can be blasted through with decently timed dodges and implementation of specific skills. Moreso, they can equip a set of items that handle dodging and combos simply by pressing the attack button on repeat. I thought the game was pretty easy by dodging and parrying attacks while hitting strong foes with the skills I chose to improve across the game, and it carried me through the entire experience. While I am happy that this is the case, and I didn’t have to reinvent the my entire method every few hours, I think there’s something to be said for choosing to have a deeper action combat system and not require the player to engage.
Note, I’m not referring to the accessibility items here. I’m referring to being able to play through comfortably without having to learn the combat well enough to play well. It wasn’t until I experimented with the accessibility items that I saw that there was more complexity to the inputs that could be used, that there was a more intricate level of play that was possible, and it looks brilliant. However, I didn’t figure out how to do it myself, and wouldn’t know exactly where to begin with shifting into that playstyle to be honest. Seventy-plus hours of play puts a lot of muscle memory to work.
It’s fairly disappointing, though, because I would have appreciated the ability to play at that level earlier in the game, to develop a stronger level of control of the system while facing greater challenges. However, despite Action-Focused being this game’s normal difficulty, it isn’t possible to push the difficulty until repeat runs of the game. Dark Souls this is not. This game doesn’t demand much of the average player.
This is all a bit nit-picky, though. Clearly the goal is to be as palatable as possible for the largest possible audience of players while delivering the spectacle of flashy eikon battles and the clashing swords and magic spells that lines the run time in between. Combat difficulty isn’t key to enjoying the experience, nor is it the metric I would use for discussing a roleplaying game – not even one as combat-centered as Dark Souls.
II. Just Watch the Fireworks
Roleplaying games should involve player input beyond combat.
There are a number of ways this can be a part of the gameplay loop. Exploration can yield new items or magics. You can learn more about the world through those same explorations. Maybe you hear something interesting from an NPC and take a trip somewhere to find out more. Perhaps snooping around a castle can lead to a room full of treasure. And these are the facile possibilities.
But the fact is, there isn’t much to be gleaned from much of the world of Final Fantasy XVI outside of what is explicitly said to the character in text. Most NPCs don’t have anything to say to Clive, partially due to the story’s slavery metaphor. There is almost no input to dialogue either, which would have given the player something to do during the dozens of hours of cutscenes and dialogue breaks. The level design is scaled to imply vast locations, but most doors are there for show. Every area in the action stages is built to keep the player on a straight path to their objective with small splinters along the way to collect a bit of unexciting loot. Objects on the screen glow brightly, but float over to Clive, requiring no input. Even then, you’re lucky if it’s a potion. I can’t imagine anyone being excited over the couple of gil those glowing spots usually imply.
Admittedly, some of this marks a sign of the times. Creating small, lived in spaces inside of the larger areas that make up a games world is no longer as simple as the placement of sprites on top of other sprites. 3D art assets require loads more time to create, and the costs associated with productions with as much polish as Final Fantasy XVI are already astronomical, whether measured in labor hours or financial cost. However, the choices made in development mean that there is no roleplaying in this roleplaying game.
While limited narrative input is common in JRPGs, there is usually a wealth of character development choices that players get to make. The gear and magic that the player brings to the combat portion of the game is enough to insert some level of expression to the play, moreso if party management is part of the play. Final Fantasy XVI has party members that follow Clive into battle, but they are mostly there for the visual aspect of having other characters contributing to the chip damage. They are not actively part of how the player is playing the game, their equipment and magics do not change. At best, they keep enemy mobs distracted and occasionally get a kill of their own. At worst, they are invisible to the experience. Neither, however, is particularly involving.
There are a vast number of side quests whose associated cut scenes provide a lot of heavy lifting for the world building, but much like everything else in the game, the play associated with those quests is minor, illusory. You walk between cutscenes and get a small reward. Repeat ad infinitum. It is a far cry from the immersive discoveries made while exploring the world of Final Fantasy IV and meeting the blacksmith who can craft the the Excalibur for Cecil if you can track down the materials, or bringing the MogNet back up in Final Fantasy IX, a process that required a completely separate and seemingly non-related minigame. Nor is it reading Occult Fan magazines in Final Fantasy VIII and learning how to summon big massive demonic train.
I can easily compare the experience to a swords and sorcery version of something like Uncharted. The story is entirely told through cinematic language, and the gameplay loop is centered on its combat. It’s a pleasing experience in the play, but it has all of the flash and glamor of fireworks, and is just as shallow to experience. It is a world built for the spectacle, the action, but the complete lack of verisimilitude steals the immersion.
So, the combat is fun, but the world is flat, and everything is there to service a story. How is the story?
III. Prestige Fantasy
I want to expouse first and foremost that there is much to love about the writing and characterization on display in Final Fantasy XVI before I start beating this game up again. So many of the NPCs are genuinely wonderful to experience, and I found their stories engaging in a way that I’ve not seen from a Final Fantasy NPC in some time. Coming off of Final Fantasy VII Remake, it’s a revelatory experience. While it’s a shallow experience akin to the problems I mentioned in my review of that game, I can say that I liked the cast and their adventures.
Unfortunately, I can’t say that for Clive. And that’s a problem because he’s the main character.
I’ve been thinking this review over since finishing the game, trying to figure out the cleanest way to say all of this without just dwelling on the things that bothered me about the game, it’s story, etc. I can’t say that I had a terrible time with the game. But a lack of meaningful player input paired with a frequently empty protagonist like Clive finds the story grinding against the medium and the themes of the text in some really nasty ways that hurts the total experience. I guess I will start with tone.
As mentioned above, the team at Creative Business Unit III started their production with a screening of the first four seasons of Game of Thrones. Thankfully, they stopped before the show careened into hell. The intent was to imply the type of story that they were assigned to tell: historic and political dark fantasy that skirts the ideas of magic against a realistic conflict, cast with flawed characters.
Why they didn’t just look within at Final Fantasy Tactics, we shall never know.
As a result, we have a story about magic being used to divide the classes, complete with an abused slave class, the bearers and dominants, that get tortured, mutilated, and usually die painful deaths due to their magical curses. During which, we hear our hero talk about how his family didn’t treat their bearers badly. He admonishes the people who continue to murder and abuse bearers even as a freedom fighter for those bearers rather than coming to their active defense. The player doesn’t get to make this decision. They are not an active participant in storytelling. Clive has no agency in the plot. The story happens to him and around him.
However, the rest of the characters in this story do have agency. They act and make the movements that lead the plot forward. They are keeping the story interesting while Clive pretends to be Jon Snow for most of the game, grunting and stabbing things while doing what other people tell him to do. The grand drama plays out across long cut scenes, and it’s presented with all of the grit and gore of a prestige drama. When the story is focused on the characters in micro, it’s fairly engaging even if I spent all of that time with the controller siting on the arm of my chair. It’s fine television.
But this is a video game, and I don’t play games to watch without input for fifteen to twenty minutes at a time.
Final Fantasy XVI seems to want to be a television series first and a game second. It wants to tell an involved story about strife along social divisions, but cant be bothered to allow the medium to help express these ideas. This is a criticism long aimed at Final Fantasy in whole, but it is far more tangible when control is wrenched away so frequently.
It was a poor solution to a problem that Final Fantasy should not have. It is the appropriation of an identity that ultimately clashes with the cornerstones of the series they’ve plastered over. What remains is fan service – a moogle gives you hunts to track down, the dragoons pose, classic games are referenced. Like so much pop culture, it screams “hey, guys, remember this?”
And Final Fantasy deserves so much better.
IV. I Lost the Original Ending
WordPress glitched out like mad when I was trying to post this a few weeks ago. So, now you get a completely new ending.
Final Fantasy XVI is by no means the only RPG I’ve played this year. I replayed seven of its siblings on the Switch over the months prior to release. I’ve played two entries in the Kiseki franchise, and am currently playing Sword and Fairy: Together Forever on PS5, and am kicking around a run of Divinity: Original Sin II.
Many of the quirks in the design of Final Fantasy XVI are present across other narrative focused RPGs from Japan. Hell, Sword and Fairy plays like a mirror universe version of Square-Enix’s bleak epic. They’re not damning enough to write off the entire experience, but they are indicators of the numerous problems that Final Fantasy has been going through over the last fifteen years.
I enjoyed Final Fantasy XVI, but I feel like I can’t recommend it over the other things happening in the genre that it claims to be from. It’s a poor RPG, and a fine action game. It’s a discounted fantasy novel dressed in a sparkling dust cover.
If you want a game with fraught political strife that is fairly recent, play Trails from Zero and Trails into Azure, the Crossbell arc of the Kiseki series. It’s got razor sharp turn based combat with a significant amount of depth and choice behind the mechanics. The characters are richly defined across the combined 160 hours you’ll spend with them, far more than could be expected from their archetypical introductions. The isometric world has a lot to offer, tons of little side adventures and side quests that beautifully weave into the central narrative. They’re two of the best RPGs of the last twenty years, and you can not go wrong. If at any point you said “but it looks anime,” I want you to step back and ask yourself why you would want to play Final Fantasy XVI, a game that is still very anime.
If you need more action to your combat, check out Sword and Fairy: Together Forever. The combat is similar to Final Fantasy XVI in that it’s a mashier affair with skills set on timers and a lot of colorfully animated magic. Where Sword and Fairy succeeds is that the mechanics are more engaging, your party actually matters – you can even play as every one of them! The localized script, however, is very messy, so you might feel like you’re experiencing the story through a sheet of wax paper. It’s still a unique specimen of a game, one worth playing simply for its qualities. Also, it’s the first time this series has ever been formally localized. It’s a Chinese series dating back to PCs from the 90s. Also, it’s a gorgeous game, flush with color and vivid natural settings. Yeah, it’s a messy experience, but one that’s all the more interesting as a result of its flaws.
Want something that directly responds to your actions? Play a western RPG. I keep hearing that Baldur’s Gate 3 is incredible. Go play that.
If you think that Final Fantasy XVI is the pinnacle of the series because it’s finally a dark and has action game combat, then you never really wanted to play a Final Fantasy game. And that’s fine. Just understand that some of us mourn the series continuing to lose its identity for the sake of a wider audience. It’s not about the turn based combat. It’s about the entirety of the experience feeling compromised, ultimately hollow, glossing over all that’s lost with particle effects and quick time event laden boss fights that were dated a decade ago.
Still the best in the series, 23 years and running…
I spent my evening playing the recently released Final Fantasy XVI demo. What follows is mostly a barely organized dump of my thoughts about the demo, played up through the dragoon fight. It seems like that’s about half of the demo, but I need to get these thoughts on paper now. This isn’t an edited and cleaned up post. Enjoy? Doubtful.
Let’s get the positives on paper first – It’s absolutely gorgeous, the writing is solid, and the combat is snappy and enjoyable. The voice performances are stellar. The music is…well the music is fine. It seems like a game that, so long as it’s not overwrought with endless hunts replacing meaningful side quests, it could be a solid game.
But it’s not an RPG.
This critique has drawn me some genuinely exhausting comments online, and playing the game has further cemented my opinion that this game has about as much to do with roleplaying as most contemporary action games that stick a set of meaningless RPG stats on their menu screen.
Statistics alone can not make an RPG. Role playing means that your actions can have any impact on the world, other characters, etc. Typically, JRPGs don’t lean much in to roleplaying, so their reliance on statistic based gameplay is their link to their lineage in tabletop games. Final Fantasy XVI has very little to do with its stats. You have a few pieces of gear, but the combat is all based around dodging, mashing damage in, and doing the occasional QTE. It’s fun. It is! But it doesn’t suggest any depth at this stage. Again, this is a demo, so it could garner some depth. But when I can’t even look at the stats and equipment of my “party members”, depicted with cute little sprites on the menu screen, I don’t have much confidence that I will.
This means that it’s an action RPG at best. Well, I’m not happy with that label either because you have zero influence on the character or the world around you.
During the titan attack sequence in the mountains, the player is given control for a moment. Running Clive down through the showering rocks presents a split in the path, and a massive stone slams into a gap that I’d moved to jump over. An invisible wall blocked my path.
During the flashback, Clive has to walk to the castle, going through courtyards to get there. There are only a couple of NPCs who will speak to him. Random item pickups require no interaction. The castle has numerous doors that can’t be opened. Clive can only go from story beat to story beat.
There are also no dialogue options. Even if they didn’t have incredible impact on the outcome of the story, a few classic Final Fantasy games would at least let you choose the dialogue for a moment.
Not from the demo. I didn’t take any screencaps. This is stolen from google!
Every moment of the game feels static, and we are far, far past the age where its based on technological limitations. I’m not asking for “open world sandbox” nonsense. I’m looking for anything that makes the game feel like I’m playing a character in a world, rather than a character in a video game facsimile of a place made up of little boxes that I push them through to get to the next cut scene.
None of these elements on their own make the game bad. Please understand m – the game isn’t bad. But there is a distinct disconnect between the any kind of player expression and the story. The reliance on cut scenes to deliver the story means that control is frequently taken from the player while the cast gets to perform for the player. And these cutscenes last a long time. I’m pretty sure that I only got to control the game for maybe half an hour out of the two hours that I played, and that’s extreme even in the context of the genre.
I play a lot of JRPGs. I play a lot of RPGs. Hell, I play a lot of games. This little control of the game is egregious. Even the Trails series, which sits the player down for extended periods of time to read loads of text, will eventually let the player have a couple of hours of gameplay between the story beats. I’m sorry to harp on this, but I feel like I didn’t play a damn thing tonight. What I did play was genuinely good, and I want to play more, but I find myself concerned about what a full game of this will be like.
Final Fantasy games don’t have level select screens, and this one seems to be structured around a level select screen. They tell the player about the world through NPC dialogue and even books found on the backgrounds. They are games that reward exploration. But if the treasure flies over to Clive like he’s a sentient Hoover, how am I supposed to feel attached to the exploration? If most of the NPCs ignore my presence, how am I supposed to feel like the world is alive around me? If I have a party of characters who I can not in any way interact with in the context of the game, what is their purpose?
They are set dressing. Because Final Fantasy means having party members, even if they are vestigial at best. It means finding items on the field, even if you aren’t finding them by searching for them. It means grandiose melodrama, even if the game takes a backseat for it to play out.
Well. That last one has always been true.
So much of this nonsense I’ve just scribbled out is rooted in a larger conversation I want to have about roleplaying games in the video game medium, centered around the origins of the concept, how videogames have extrapolated on the mechanics of a tabletop game, the abstractions required to render such a game, etc. It’s too much to contend with tonight, a night where I’m extremely deprived of sleep and moving entirely on the power of coffee. But I’m getting those thoughts organized for a time when I’m ready to bring them to paper.
But I digress.
Final Fantasy XVI: Fun game when you get to play it. Otherwise, it’s like watching any of the fantasy television shows that have come out since Game of Thrones.
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.
At this point, there are few retro Final Fantasy games that I haven’t played at some point in some shape or form. The numerous ports and reissues that made up the earliest days of my JRPG obsession allowed me to experience games that were hard to find and painfully expensive to a high school student in a small town where there were no retro game shops to speak of. Some titles, of course, hadn’t been brought to the modern day, and many of them are still stuck on black and white Game Boy cartridges, much to my chagrin. After all, the prices don’t seem to be going down, and I still don’t have a good retro shop even though I live in a major metropolitan area now.
This is why I jumped as soon as I saw that Square-Enix announced that the Seiken Densetsu Collection was being brought stateside as Collection of Mana, I was ready to launch my wallet directly at them to get a physical copy. After all, I’ve bitched and moaned about not getting this since the year the Switch launched and the Japanese gaming public got this magnificent collection of JRPG classics. It wasn’t for Final Fantasy Adventure that I was excited, though it was a decent bonus. I could get a copy of that online if I wanted it, and it would be in English. I had Secret of Mana on the SNES Classic, so I was covered for that particular classic. But getting Seiken Densetsu 3 in English was only an option if I wanted to pick up a repro cart. This was much cheaper and far more legal. Thanks, Square-Enix. Now update more of your back catalog without doing more pointless ugly remakes.
You can also choose from three different versions of monochrome!
Of the three games, I had the least to expect from Final Fantasy Adventure, a game that looked like it had more Zelda in its blood than Final Fantasy, but it wasn’t off putting. I love Zelda games. So I eagerly started from the top with the Collection of Mana on the day I picked it up. I wasn’t expecting much from the least praised title in the collection, but I’m happy to tell you that I found myself enjoying it more than I could possibly have expected.
Final Fantasy Adventure opens with a protagonist I called Kain (because FFIV and character limits) busting out of the castle prison and spying on Dark Lord before being cast to the bottom of a waterfall. When he rises, he is tasked with defeating Dark Lord and defending them Mana Tree. You might be wondering why I didn’t put a “the” in front of those Dark Lords but that’s how the game handles his name.
The story is far from deep. Link’s Awakening would eventually become a gold standard for storytelling on Nintendo’s white brick, but the adventure feels grandiose thanks to early 90’s grade Squaresoft melodrama and a well designed world map that takes you through winding paths between story beats and dungeons alike. Each section of the adventure is bite-sized to meet the normal play demands of an old Gameboy game and even allows players to save anywhere, which neuters the difficulty spikes for those of us who save frequently. This isn’t to say that the game is hard, but it’s definitely nice to have the option.
So, the localization is a little dodgy…
What makes Final Fantasy Adventure special is how it tries to live up to its namesake. The original Japanese title of Seiken Densetsu includes the Final Fantasy Gaiden subtitle, a tie to the revered franchise that seems to have been dropped for Secret of Mana and each subsequent title in the series. Moogle status effects, the hunt for a chocobo, and old school Final Fantasy mainstay super weapon Excalibur make for decent window dressing, but it’s the sense of desperation that drives home the Final Fantasy vibe. Early attempts at “serious” storytelling in Final Fantasy were marked by frequent character deaths, the ongoing dominance of the villain over the actions of the hero, and blunt melodrama – mind you, I think the melodrama is a feature of the genre rather than a bug. Meeting the guardian of the Mana Tree at the scene of her mother’s death is a moment that plays like a tiny echo of any character death in Final Fantasy II.
As I’ve mentioned before, gamers who cut their teeth on early Zelda games will be ready for the basics of combat in Final Fantasy Adventure. Players use the D-Pad to navigate around monsters and evade projectiles, and attack with a variety of weapons. In addition to this, there is a meter that fills up over time that increases the amount of damage that an attack can deal. This increases in speed as players level up. Leveling up allows the player to allot points to different stats. It’s a simple enough system of progression, and doesn’t give much room for experimentation, but such is to be expected of an early Gameboy JRPG, unless I’m unaware of a game, and in that case please let me know. Anyone new to this game and system but have played Secret of Mana will be surprised by how slow the meter is at the start. It’s barely worth allowing the meter to power up early on, but as the game draws to its conclusion, it becomes necessary to wait for the heavier damage of a full meter. Thankfully, the meter fills quickly by this point. In addition to melee weapons, guest characters will jump in and out of your party and reward your progress with a variety of magic spells
For a more authentic experience.
A standout feature of this game is a delightful score full of catchy melodies that I’m still humming two weeks later. I was thrilled to discover that there does exist a full CD soundtrack for this game. This is one of the best Gameboy soundtracks I’ve ever heard. The somber intro over the story text sets the tone of the game and there isn’t a single bad track to follow it.
I have a reputation for being a SquareSoft snob, and it’s rightfully earned to be honest. I hold up their work in the 90s over other examples of the genre, and harp on about how I wish Square-Enix would make games as charming and engaging on a near daily basis. I’m pretty sure the modern Final Fantasy fandom wishes I would shut the hell up and get out of their circle. A portion of these people probably think that it’s nostalgia that drives my obsession with classic SquareSoft, and that probably explains some of it, such as my love for Final Fantasy VIII despite it’s flaws.
But it isn’t nostalgia that made me love Final Fantasy Adventure. It’s a tightly made adventure with all of the hallmarks of a classic entry in the series. It’s not complex, but it does what it sets out to do with aplomb. I don’t have nostalgia for Final Fantasy Adventure because I’d never had the opportunity to play it until now, as an adult, and it’s a game that has aged beautifully.
Instead, Final Fantasy Adventure set me off on my journey through the Seiken Densetsu series in the best way possible, with a gem of a handheld game that now holds a place among my favorite Gameboy titles, a change that hasn’t occurred in a very long time.
This looks painfully generic.
I am aware that there is an iOS remake of Final Fantasy Adventure, as well as the GBA remake Sword of Mana. I’ve not played either of these games, and I don’t need to. I will probably play Sword of Mana in time, but as it stands, I wholeheartedly recommend the original Gameboy title over either remake.
EDITOR’S NOTE : Hah, I called myself an editor. You will soon know just how funny that is.
The following article was written over the course of several months following the gameplay reveal for Final Fantasy VII Remake, a highly anticipated title that everyone on this planet was begging for except for me. I wrote a lot of the noise in my brain down just trying to quantify how I feel about this game coming out and all of the news surrounding it. I don’t even think I managed to say everything. But I want this thing out of my queue at this point. Interested in why I’m wary about the remake of one of the most revered JRPGs of all time? Have a read! Want to dispute my feelings about Square-Enix in the comments? Bring it on! I prefer a straight fight to all this sneaking around! Just understand that this is my opinion. Get hyped for this game if you want. But my concerns come from a place of love, and I guess that having this outlet means that I hold my stupid opinion in high enough regard that I want to blast it all over the internet. Don’t get defensive unless you’ve read through to the end.
After all, it’s just a video game. The world has far worse problems than a potentially mediocre remake of a classic video game.
***
E3 2019 was certainly an E3 event, wasn’t it? Days of news designed to inspire us all to open our wallets and dump cash on a rich industry have led to ongoing discussions about heavy hitters like Watch Dogs Legion (it’s certainly Watch Dogs again!), and just how tone deaf Todd Howard was at the Bethesda conference. But there is one game that I’m seriously incapable of describing how I feel about it in less than 140 characters on Twitter and that’s the remake of the PS1 classic, Final Fantasy VII.
Long time readers of this space know that I can run my mouth about a Square-Enix game for days, and your average Final Fantasy game for weeks. I’m sure it’s at least half of the reason that hardly anyone reads this bloody thing, the other half being that I’m not just on YouTube doing the same thing instead like the rest of the people who realized that blogs were dying. You could call me overly critical. You could call me obsessive. I’m not sure that either is exactly right. It’s more that I’m a fan of the series in an older sense. I’ve played every single roman numeral single player game to completion and done the same with a ton of the spin off games. I’ve watched all three of the movies and I didn’t even hate The Spirits Within. I’ve dumped more hours on this series and speculated on its future far more than is probably healthy. No, I don’t have seventeen copies of each game from various countries, or figures and statues of every character I like. But I’ve played the games. Some of them several times. They are the games that have shaped my preferences in the medium, and several of them are among my favorite games ever.
And yet, I’m somewhere on the outside of the raging hype train that most Final Fantasy fans seem to be on in regards to the remake of Final Fantasy VII, a game that I have a complicated history with in regards to how the fandom treats it. Is it a good game? Certainly. Very good even. The story is written pretty well, is thematically sound, and the gameplay is tight and rewarding – and I’ll eventually get back to that, somewhere in this rant when I get into why the older Final Fantasy games feel more rewarding. However, if you were going to ask me if it needed to be remade from the ground up, expanded, turned into several sixty hour games, with real time combat and some new creatures called The Watchmen of Fate (seriously, this was revealed as I wrote this part)?
No. It doesn’t need a remake. But we’re getting one anyway, so let’s talk about this thing.
Why Don’t You Want a Remake?! Are you crazy?! Why don’t you like anything!?
I think Yahtzee Croshaw said it well during an E3 interview where he played the demo of the remake: “I think games should stay as capsules of the time they were made in rather than continually brought up to date every few tech generations.” Now, I realize that I fawned over the remake of Resident Evil 2 earlier this year, and to point out such a thing would be well within your rights. It’s a damn fine remake of one of my favorite games, but when you pick the remake apart, there’s not a lot that changed. The map is a little bit different, the script is not as cheesy, you can aim your gun and move while shooting. But the meat of that game is no different when you describe it; explore various places while solving simple puzzles, manage your resources, survive. The ability to aim a gun didn’t make it easier. In fact, everything took more of a beating than ever before, which displaced the fact that controls were inhibiting in the original, which heightened tension, which added to the horror vibe that Capcom was aiming for on their not-really-that-scary zombie games. We already know that VIIR isn’t this. It’s a new game. Rather, it’s several new games.
No. I don’t want a remake of VI either. And it’s my favorite FF game.
I’ve played the updated versions of the several other Final Fantasy games. The 3D remakes of III and IV were pretty good in their own rights. III looked nice, and it was great to finally get a localized release. But for my money, the original had a better pace to combat. IV was a stellar update, with a sharp increase in difficulty, solid voice work, and, honestly, it’s another reason to replay IV. Neither game replaces the original for me, but I felt like Matrix did fine work overall. Previous rereleases on GBA and PS1 were the first time I got to play some of the earlier titles in the series as well. Changes from 8-bit to 16-bit style sprites were to be found, as well as softened difficulty levels. Still, the experience was usually true to the original games, with updates to the translations enhancing the games as well. The fact that Squaresoft, and later Square Enix, revitalized these games and made them available to a new fanbase was and still is excellent. I wish they’d had the same level of care put into later ports, as the Steam/Mobile versions of V and VI look like garbage. Ports of VII and IX have kept this tradition up as well with VIII headed to consoles later this year. While we could use new releases of 1-6, it’s not a bad time to get into Final Fantasy. XV is the best new entry since the PS2 era, and you can pick up copies of the beloved 3D titles in the series on every system now.
The promise of a Final Fantasy VII remake has always rung odd to me. The tech demo shown at E3 2006 sparked an flame in the fan base that couldn’t be smothered, but it came mere weeks after I first saw Advent Children, a ninety minute snooze of a movie that had one narrative function, and that was to give Cloud and Sephiroth an excuse to fight again. The idea of a fully voice acted remake of VII was enticing…but Advent Children soured the idea. Dirge of Cerberus soured the idea. Most of Crisis Core ruined the idea outright for me – the game underneath all of that fan service and Gackt was still pretty good though.
But that was then. Years have passed. I replayed Final Fantasy VII with my wife, which was wonderful. I found my love for VII renewed where the Compilation seemed determined to kill it. Enough time passed that the remake seemed unlikely, and the Compilation faded into memory. I stopped seeing near constant praise for Advent Children.
And then the remake was announced.
The first trailer was damn nice looking. Square has frequently had amazing tech behind their games, and this was no different. I was interested, to say the least, to see what this game would eventually be. The first screenshots of combat hit, showing ATB meters, and I was cautiously skeptical, because I knew it was no longer going to be turn based. The bigger concern came from the fact that it was going to be an “episodic” game. The original ran about sixty-five hours total if you did every side quest and got all of the trophies listed in the PS4 port that released the year before the remake announcement. Then they said that each episode was the size of a single game. At E3 2019 we find out that the first volume was going to be a 2 disc monstrosity that only contained Midgar. So, the first five or six hours of the original game. The goal was to make Midgar a living, breathing city, and there would be all kinds of new side quests and such to flesh this section out.
Let’s talk about Lightning Returns for a moment.
The Worst Side Quests I’ve Ever Played
I know this game has its fans. I know you’re out there guys and I’m genuinely sorry if this bothers you. I’ve got a bone to pick with this game. It is a festering wound for me. I spent over sixty five hours hacking this one out, doing almost everything in the game. I did every little fetch quest that every character gave to me. The only thing I didn’t finish was the Last Ones quest, which would have required more time playing the game. I put the time in. I finally finished the game.
And it’s offensively bad. It’s not just “I don’t like this” bad. The story is awful, poorly written, and the side quests only deepen how bad it all is.
There are three quests to herd sheep. There is a two-part quest to collect “adornments” for a character. There are countless, meaningless fetch quests where you take one barely-descript item from one town to another, or worse, to someone in the same town. There are no skill checks blocking your progress. It’s a game full of busy work.
The fact that you are “saving the souls” of these NPCs is where this busywork becomes insulting.
I have a lot of trouble accepting the woes of a character who can’t walk a quarter mile across town to talk to someone. Much less the shallow girl that will fade into nothingness with the apocalypse because she didn’t have a sack of barettes and hats before the world ended.
Clearly their souls will live on into eternity.
And this was how Lightning Returns handled side quests.
Final Fantasy XV would do this better, but the majority of the sidequests were basic fetch quests that were completely unmemorable and uninteresting. The rest were hunts drawn almost directly from Final Fantasy XII. The fact that they were merely unmemorable was fine compared to Lightning Returns.
The Gold Standard for side questing in an RPG is currently The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, a game that made going into a shack to get a frying pan engrossing. Square-Enix hasn’t touched reached this caliber of side quest since the PS2 era, and even then it wasn’t that good.
A good Final Fantasy side quest is one that deepens our understanding of the world in which the game takes place. The NPCs who hint us into those quests don’t make the quests interesting. Truthfully, the average NPC in a Final Fantasy game isn’t that important in our memory of the games. They don’t have to be, mind you, but it’s a trait that I enjoyed in the aforementioned Wild Hunt. I think about hunting for UFOs in Final Fantasy VIII and how it ties into the running Occult Fan magazines and how those perodicals build on the world. Or maybe being a mail carrier for moogles while their mailing system is on the fritz. The rewards are usually mythic weapons, like the Excalibur II from Final Fantasy IX that requires the player to speed their way to the finale in under twelve hours. It’s not a ten HP increase and a sack full of gil. It’s not a sack full of barrettes.
One of the most charismatic side quests in the series history.
I know that VIIR is a new game, and that the opportunities are there for some excellent side quests as we make our journey through the newly massive Midgar. I can even tell you what I would like to see. I would love to see a longer run as Avalanche, doing some ‘community service’, if you follow me. Punishing corrupt politicians, weakening the stronghold of Shinra over the various communities – that’s what I want to see happen in those early hours of the game. Build up Avalanche’s presence in this story and hold off on what we’ve seen in the trailer.
Because this game isn’t wholly about Cloud vs. Sephiroth. And the fifteen year blitz of media that precedes the E3 2019 trailers sure as hell made it look like it was.
Let’s Break Up The Doom Train by Saying Something Nice For Once!
I don’t think the game will be bad.
The fact is, the majority of gaming press is singing praises about how the remake plays. As much as I love ATB combat, I know that I’m in a shrinking minority. I could go on and on about how the JRPG genre was built on turn-based combat and how the dwindling number of titles that continue that tradition shatters my cold black heart. But I played XV and liked it, and I’ve played other action driven JRPGs and I liked them. I have played through and finished every single Kingdom Hearts game except for 358/2 Days and have a mostly positive relationship with that series – I just think that they’re written poorly.
Look! He did the thing you remember! Isn’t that what you want?!
It’ll be fun. I’ll probably have a good time playing it. I’ll probably get the platinum on it and enjoy earning that pointless gaming achievement. I’ll dump upwards of a hundred hours getting deep into it and playing it to death and getting every penny of my $80 out of it. Yeah, I’m getting the Deluxe Edition of it. I want the CD and the art book and the steel book isn’t too bad either. I wish it didn’t have Sephiroth on it, mind you. Something more interesting, like a new piece of art from Yoshitaka Amano would be far more lovely. Just look at the XV steelbook for more on why I would prefer that.
I have a pretty crap reputation for being negative about things but here’s a fact for you; it’s possible to be skeptical and hopeful in the same turn. It’s possible to think that something is good while not thinking it’s a sparkling diamond of perfection. It’s possible to think something isn’t very good without thinking it’s utter trash. Koudelka for PS1 is a flawed game, with clunky mechanics and I still think it’s an adventure worth taking if you can get it for less than $40 because my God it’s not worth $80 (and upwards to $100 plus at current going rate!). I think Kingdom Hearts III is a richly fun game but the story literally takes a back seat for forty hours while you go to the Disney worlds for the bulk of the game – a problem with all of the KH titles after the first one, if you want to get serious about how the KH series tells its stories.
But the reality is that I go into anything hoping for the best. I’ve played a lot of games, seen a metric ton of movies, and listened to hours upon hours of music. I want everything to be great because, otherwise, why am I spending my time and money on it? I’ve enjoyed mediocre games. I’ve enjoyed FMV games without a lick of irony (I genuinely love Rebel Assault II despite how crap it is overall). But most people see my concerns and jump right to calling me a bastard.
Compressed with love in the 90’s.
As you can see from the previous section, I overthink everything. I’ve been writing an essay on the thematic storytelling in Final Fantasy VII and how I pray that Nomura doesn’t use a single second of the Compliation in Remake because of how those games betray the tone and narrative of the original game – and remember, I enjoyed playing Crisis Core.
The biggest problem I’ve had with the news we’ve had from the Remake so far boils down to the fact that all of the trailers have been driven to please the fans rather than reveal what we are doing in this new and massive Midgar. And don’t be a smartass and come into my comments to say anything to the tune of “duh, it’s FFVII”. We’re getting an extra sixty hours of Midgar this time, and we don’t know what that means. Sure, it’s going to be gorgeously rendered and full of new stuff to fight, but what are we doing in between all of the familiar parts. What kind of questing are we going to get to do? I can’t get excited about doing loads of tedious busywork for boring NPCs, and as I said above, that’s what I’ve come to expect from Square-Enix and their attempt at open world RPGs.
I’m not looking for story spoilers, and I’m not asking to see more character images and the like. I don’t care what HD Sephiroth looks like, and I’m pretty disappointed by the ongoing discussion about Tifa’s bra size because it makes the lot of us look pathetic. I’m not sold by shiny graphics and flashing numbers. That’s not a game. If all we wanted was a CGI movie adaptation of Final Fantasy VII, they might be in good shape. But it’s a game, and we still know nothing about what we’re doing for the majority of that game.
But it’s early. E3 2019 marks the first time we’ve seen the game in motion, and E3 is still a trade show at its heart. The fact that people lost their minds over the trailer means that the trailer did exactly what it was designed to do; it got the average and “hardcore” Final Fantasy VII fans excited and talking about it and encouraging their stock value to go up. I’m not even being cynical. That’s what E3 is meant to do, and Square-Enix nailed that. But I’m not a stock holder. I’m some guy who is going to buy their game and just wants that little bit of stuff that is usually shared on the show floor.
And the game itself is getting an incredible response from the press. People who have actually played the game say that the hybrid of ATB and real time combat works perfectly, and is a great compromise between the two systems. I want to believe it works like an idea I’ve had myself about how to make ATB combat look more interesting, where the characters have ongoing action on the field while combat commands shift their actions during that phase of action, akin to what’s happening in a tabletop RPG where players actions are taking place in a frame of time dictated by each players turn. Will I prefer ATB to the new system when it’s all said and done? Sure. I’m an old fart who is always going to prefer my characters taking turns and listening to exactly what I say and also killing Sephiroth in less than two full turns thanks to a nicely stacked material array. But I’m not closed to the idea of the new system, nor am I able to judge it based on a video despite how much it looks like the attack button is constantly pressed in demo videos – and it is, because you can see the graphic flashing constantly.
Oops. Got gloomy again. Let’s change the header.
Open World Games Rarely Tell Stories Well
There are exceptions, of course, but your average sandbox game is full of fluff. They call this “content”, and that word is a plague on the gaming experience because of how it presents the material in what we are arguing to be art. “Content” is what a publisher sells to you in order to put some inconsequential stuff in their game in order to get a few extra bucks out of you. “Content” is weightless and has no meaning except they spent some extra hours to create it instead of putting the effort into a proper expansion. An arena to engage in some extra boss fights in XIII-2? That’s “content”. The Hearts of Stone story is an expansion. It’s an amazing work of fiction that actually stands on its own outside of the events of Wild Hunt.
The “content” problem isn’t exclusive to Square-Enix. It’s a greater problem with how game are sold now. Extra “missions” are sold in pizza packages for new Assassins Creed games. Preorders are required to get items and quests that should have been in the game in the first place. Little effort is put into the add-ons, because it’s not necessary. Very few people will actually play the Hot Pockets DLC for AsCreed, and as such, it’s just some filler that someone wrote for the game knowing it’s not vital to the establishment of the world or the plot.
Modern side questing.
And this is an extension of the problem with modern sandbox games. There’s a lot of empty space to fill on these giant world maps, and in order to maximize player engagement, there has to be enough stuff per square mile to make it work. The Witcher has an easy out, however. Witchers, by profession, are monster hunters. The player is tasked with doing that job in game because that’s the role of the player. You go to a town, the people who live there are likely to be stalked by some manner of nasty beast, or are killed by a nearby nest of something or other. Pair this in with the fact that The Wicher has a setting packed to the brim with human horrors as well, you have a wide series of options for engaging side stories in the game. And those events do unfold as small stories. See the frying pan side quest mentioned above. It’s seriously great.
But racing across rooftops doesn’t make sense in Assassin’s Creed II because you’re supposed to be keeping a low profile. Performing assassinations? Sure, that tracks, but who cares about the people who you’re contracted to kill.
These moments away from the story are part of the problem of how open world games tell stories as well. Because the narratives in your average Assassin’s Creed aren’t that strong to begin with, it’s hard to remember what was important about the plot when you come back from taking out towers and performing an assassination or upgrading your brothels or what have you. The rest of the game is so much larger than the story that it envelops the stuff that you should be there to experience rather than enhancing it.
I recently finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2 for the Switch, and have seen some decent examples of side quests in a JRPG open world, so I’m able to return to this ongoing rant with some renewed positivity. Learning why Nopons have cutesy stuffed animal dialogue was hilarious, tongue in cheek, and brilliant. Helping a guy get a beautiful beach ready to propose to his girlfriend? That was sweet, memorable. For the faults I saw in Xenoblade Chronicles 2, it was written so well that even when I was digging through the oceans of side quests, I wasn’t noticing how flat they were. Sure, there’s a lot of fetch questing still in the mix, but the writing helped distract from that. And that’s the goal in the end. The mechanics of your typical JRPG don’t usually lend themselves to a broad range of side quest. Xenoblade seems to have been taking notes from Geralt of Rivia, because there’s even a few tracking quests that lead players into battle with a number of giant monsters.
It can be done. It has been done. But I need to see it before I can believe it. Even Octopath Traveller,one of my favorite games of this generation, didn’t pull off great and memorable side quests. But it fit the bill for something else that Square-Enix doesn’t do enough of – new and interesting IP.
That Game You Like is Coming Back into Style
Now for the most complicated video game thing I’ve ever tried to tackle – how I feel about remakes and rereleases.
Video game preservation is a must. It’s a young artform, and we need to keep the history of where we came from alive in whatever form that we reasonably can. Some of the earliest works of cinema will never be recovered, others we have fragments of. But what we have is part of the foundation of our understanding of how cinema has developed over the course of more than one hundred years. Commercially released video games have a little over fifty years to keep track of, and its a challenge for those who seek to archive that history.
Video games have and will continue to exist with the primary goal of making money. It’s commercial art, driven by capitalism to drain every last one of us of as much money as they possibly can. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t an art form, or that we can’t learn from the thousands of games that came before. If anything, we probably have a lot to learn from how the earliest adventure games were designed for the Atari 2600. Raiders of the Lost Ark for 2600 is absolutely baffling to look at, but the creativity that was utilized to cram the Spielberg classic into that little black cartridge and function at all is astonishing. Could I play through it? Probably not without hitting the net for information, but I have to respect the work regardless.
Again, the remakes I want from Square-Enix.
Early console games are at risk in many ways. For every site that Nintendo shuts down for carrying Nintendo ROMs, we lose access to the vast number of games that publishers aren’t rereleasing in retro collections like the Atari Flashback carts for Switch, or the dozen or so repacks of Genesis titles. I can’t argue their position; it’s a legal matter, and they have to protect their IP – that’s just how it is. But we risk losing these games, for good or ill, and that’s not acceptable to me.
Worse are situations like the Sega Saturn. The Saturn is notoriously difficult to emulate, and hardware failure is a prominent issue even with the advancements in bypassing the consoles lockouts. The Saturn is home to a number of fantastic exclusive titles, and the cost of these games for Region 1 originals is painful to most collectors with several titles costing at least $300. Many of these games are too obscure to see a rerelease in any form, and even the famous ones aren’t frequently in the discussion of what games “need to be remade”. So when the question is asked about what game needs to be remade, I usually say Panzer Dragoon Saga. It’s outrageously expensive, fairly rare, and exists only on hardware that is already uncommon due to poor sales in the US.
The industry has profited greatly on existing works, as well as the ever power tool of nostalgia, and publishers are continuing to exploit this for profit. Remasters and collections seem to be more common than new IP. I am far more interested in the continued availability of the original versions of classic games. Final Fantasy Adventure being in the Collection of Mana is far more exciting than the mobile remake, or the critically blasted PS4 remake of Secret of Mana.
One Last Hurrah Before I Close This Up
Looking over this mess one last time before throwing it online in an act of pure exorcism, I saw that I mentioned early on that I find the earlier Final Fantasy games to be far more rewarding than their action oriented modern brethren. Amidst all of the overthinking about a video game remake in the rest of this mess of words and stupidity, that is probably something that I can expound on and get some fun out of.
I’ll try to explain this. It’s something where each player’s experience is different, and I’m speaking specifically from my experiences.
Turn based combat is largely strategic and preparatory. It feels like something that belongs in the context of a stat-driven roleplaying game because the outcome of events is tied up in the mathematics happening beneath the on screen animations. Utilizing different variations of skills and abilities to draw the right outcome from combat is rewarding because the choices prior to and during combat led to the victory. Making a mistake in a pitched battle against the Omega Weapon meant a swift death and a trip to the start screen.
I always recall things like the pairing of the Genji Glove and the Offering in Final Fantasy VI, or the materia arrangement that I used to counter Sephiroth into a quick death as my favorite examples of the rewards from understanding the systems in these games. Nothing in any game after X has offered such a feeling – note that I’ve not finished my second run through XII, a game I just kinda finished without getting deep into the side content.
XV, for all of the merits I will note in it, is not a game that feels good to play. You hold the attack button or hold the block button, dodging accordingly. It looks exciting, and gives the feeling that combat is this exciting event. But you aren’t doing much to control it on a moment-by-moment basis. It’s not as dreadful as XIII, which did all of the work for you, but I don’t feel involved. I’m guiding one guy in and out of combat with the flashy teleportation move and then flying through the air to stab something seconds later.
Meanwhile, we’ve gone from controlling a party of characters to just changing their equipment and choosing their stats in between combat. Control over the battle is now gone. The strategy is gone.
I know that turn based combat isn’t as appealing to the masses as an action game, but there was once room for turn based games. These were turn based games, and that was their identity. Squaresoft continued to experiment with action games, but their classic series was still a turn based game. Even when XII experimented with limiting direct control to one character, you could establish a strategy for the other two party members to enact. It wasn’t my ideal, but strategy was still baked in.
XV is the end of strategic combat. VII seems to want to be on both sides of the line, but I want to know why turn based combat has to have such a stigma attached to it.
I suspect the popularity of Kingdom Hearts plays into the obsession with making Final Fantasy more action oriented. The rampant button mashing combat of Kingdom Hearts was the gateway drug to a new audience of JRPG fans upon its original release, a time when the JRPG was rising to some incredible excesses. The Final Fantasy characters made those classic games look interesting to those new fans, but their expectation may have been set by their love of Kingdom Hearts, and when they tried their hand at ATB meters and three-to-four people standing in a row to fight, they might have been incredibly disappointed.
I’m extrapolating, mind you. I’ve seen so many Final Fantasy fans decry turn based combat and it does confuse me. That kind of gameplay is at the heart of the majority of the core entries to the series. Even a large number of the spin offs are turn based games rather than action games. The demand for action oriented games in the series has overtaken the desire for turn based games.
And this is odd to me. Persona 5 is a hit. Octopath Traveller is likewise a critical darling. Dragon Quest XI is a beloved title to pretty much everyone I’ve seen that’s played it. The new Yakuza game is going to have turn based combat, and it was an open world sandbox game with retro brawler combat before this.
The time has come that we should be able to get both. I know that the hybrid combat of FFVIIR is going to try to scratch the itch for everyone, but I can’t help but wish that someone would throw that much money at a hi-def 3D game with turn based combat. The PS1/PS2 era was ripe with top of the line graphics being used in games where three people stood in a row and waiting their turn to stab things.
And Now I’ll Stop…
I’ve ultimately accomplished nothing in this piece other than ranted and rambled about a game that isn’t out. A game I haven’t played. But it’s out of my brain, and maybe we can all have a nice chat about it, and you’ll at least know where my skepticisms come from.
But I’m going to pick the game up, like the rest of you, and I’ll play the hell out of it for a while. I’ll pray every day up until release that it doesn’t call back to anything from Compilation of Final Fantasy VII and doesn’t try to play to any obsessed Advent Children fans. But it’s going to have to stand on its own and be worth a damn. I’m not going to cut it slack because it has HD renders of characters I liked in a game that I played when I was in high school. If anything, it has more to prove because a it’s trying to be a larger version of an existing piece. It has to prove that it has any right to be made, because otherwise, it comes across as a work of greed and exploitation. There is no reason why VII needs to be remade. It’s an artistic dead end. The fact that it will be multiple 80-100 hour games now just sounds like Square-Enix wants to make a fortune off of the still-massive fandom for a game that came out over twenty years ago.
And from the studio that once bankrolled Chrono Cross, that’s incredibly disappointing. They used to be good at this. Their sequels could be as rich and fascinating as Chrono Cross. And now I can only think of Lightning Returns and an ocean of cheap mobile games when I think about how they try to please their fans.
There were two thought processes that came into play when Square-Enix and Tose collaborated on 2016’s World of Final Fantasy. First, Square-Enix wanted to celebrate the legacy of their monolithic franchise. Second, they wanted to hook younger players. Directed by series veteran Hiroki Chiba, the goal was to write a lighthearted and comedic story that still retained the darker tone of classic Final Fantasy. Chiba was old hat with the series by this point as the Event Planner and Event Director on some of the series most celebrated entries (VII, VIII, X), and Scenario Writer on one of its absolute worst, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. Chiba opted for the chibi character designs from mobile spinoff Final Fantasy Pictologica to help drive home the lighthearted vibe, and borrowed monster collecting mechanic from Dragon Quest Monsters to hook the kiddies with some Pokémon flavor. Tetsuya Nomura was brought in to design the “jiants” that drive the cast to bring the story at the heart of the experience closer to the tone of classic Final Fantasy. Thankfully, they didn’t let him write anything.
The idea of making a Final Fantasy game for new players isn’t unique. Square has been trying to pull this off since the series infancy, when they dialed down the difficulty of games like Final Fantasy IV for their American localization, and created Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest as an “introductory RPG experience”. These efforts have been widely criticized in the past, due to the fact that Final Fantasy II US is hilariously easy and without challenge, and Mystic Quest is actually insulting in how it holds the players hand. We were even skipped for the initial release of Final Fantasy V until the PlayStation era because it was deemed too difficult. The fact that the series ever broke here in the states is almost a miracle in its own right.
As a result, I have a hard time seeing World of Final Fantasy outside of the context of being the product of a board meeting where Square-Enix executives were trying to find a way to sell their largest brand without making much of a creative effort. We’re still going to talk about the game itself in a moment, but consider the nature of this game’s conception before we dive deep into the tasty chocolate layer cake that it ultimately is. Pieces of other Square-Enix titles were brought together to slap together a product that has the widest market appeal possible within the context of what is ultimately a narrowing subgenre of video games; a Final Fantasy Pokemon clone with an attempt to the cutesy caricatures of legacy characters alongside a melancholy plot featuring the latest spiky haired teenage protagonists with a dark past.
It certainly sounds like a cynical cash grab from the company that brought us All the Bravest, doesn’t it?
Pride Cometh Before the Amnesia (Mild Spoilers Inside)
The JRPG is guilty of the utilization of tropes. The prison break, the amnesiac hero, the hometown exile – if you’ve played more than one game in this genre, all of these tropes are familiar to you. World of Final Fantasy rolls out of the gate with the amnesia trope falling on not one but two characters, Reynn and Lann. Enna Kros, obvious god character for this world, tells them that they have to get out of the coffee shop that no one visits (this isn’t a joke), and venture through the world of Grymoire with a talking fennec fox named Tama in order to recover their memories – a fitting phrase, given that every world in Grymoire is a modified tale from a past Final Fantasy. Their magical fantasy tour carries them through over a dozen locales drawn from the series, where they meet all of your favorite characters and even Tidus from Final Fantasy X and Shulke from Dirge of Cerberus.
The tone of the story is played light over the course of the adventure. Lann and Tama joke around throughout the game while the actual lead character, Reynn, does the work. Your mileage will vary with the comedy in this game. I personally wanted Lann to never speak again, and Tama was the-annoying for the entire run time of the plot. No, that wasn’t a typographical mistake. That was a prelude to how terrible Tama’s dialogue is.
Underneath the surface, however, the game is setting up a dark current about the Crimson Prophecy, which refers to our two heroes as either saviors or destroyers. Given how the third act unfolds, I’m thankful that this text is part of how the story is told. The third act of World of Final Fantasy goes full-tilt PS1 era, with a fairly dark twist on the events that led to Reynn and Lann’s solitary lives in Nine Wood Hills. It’s a decent setup, and one that is mostly effective. If I had anything negative to say is that the twist paints the heroes in a pretty terrible light, and it’s hard to find them endearing after the reveal. But I have to give the game credit: it’s the most Final Fantasy part of this Final Fantasy game. Given the nature of the series as it has been over the past decade, it’s nice to see that Chiba actually tried to make something that aligns with the traditions of the series, for good or bad.
But I’d be doing you a disservice if I was to disregard where this story fails. First off, to handle the narrative with tongue-in-cheek humor and silly jokes for forty-plus hours and then throw The Cloud of Darkness at you (see, Square, I can make references too) is to create a bit of tonal whiplash. Final Fantasy VI balanced some jokes into its script but the narrative was still mostly somber. Gau was a wild child who hunted along the Veldt, and bringing him into your party was a light story beat in between the heartbreaking Phantom Train sequence and starting Locke’s backstory in Mobliz. A well told story ebbs and flows between emotions, allowing the highs give the audience a break between the lows. World of Final Fantasy stays on the upper turn of the first lift of a roller coaster before dropping the audience down a three hundred foot drop into Bleaksville.
This is in no way helped by the overreliance of fan service that makes up this game’s body. The modification of existing Final Fantasy character beats to fill out this games emotional core is lazy at best and cynical at worst. Rydia losing her mother to a bomb at the opening of Final Fantasy IV was a great bit of character drama not just for Rydia, but also Cecil. It’s the inciting event for that game’s entire story arc. Here it’s a beat in the middle of another story, and the root of a joke for one of the games numerous side quests. Terra is saved by Maduin in a secret scene if you manage to win one of the abysmal mini games during the conclusion to the plot. She recognizes him as her first summon. But fans of Final Fantasy VI know exactly who Maduin is. And this secret scene frustrated me as a result.
The problem inherent in basing your entire narrative structure around references to games that a lot of us have spent our lives playing is that you run the significant chance of pushing the wrong buttons. Nostalgia is a tricky bastard, and it’s something that Square-Enix has rarely handled with the care that it ultimately requires. The fact is that if I’ve taken the journey that these characters were originally known for, I know what it meant for those characters in that context, and I can’t divorce them from their original tales. Being attached to those characters meant being attached to those stories. I can’t imagine coming to this collection of references unequipped, but at the same time I wonder if it would make me accept the way this story is written any better than I am now. For me, it’s a bust though. But readers of this page will already be aware of how I feel about fan service and fan games.
Having read this, you’ve probably decided that I hate this game and are about to click out of the page. The fact is that I enjoyed the game despite the writing, which is something I’ve said about other modern JRPGs. I can see what’s being attempted and understand why it is being done, but it just isn’t going to work on me. I see the wires being pulled and how they hope to get someone like me to have a good time. But the fact remains that if I wanted to see Tidus and Yuna meet for the first time, I’d much rather see their relationship grow while Tidus comments about a city that Yuna knew to be dead for hundreds of years rather than after he’s ridden her summon Valefor to defend Besaid from invading spaceships from Squaresoft classic Einhander.
The game that bot comes from is expensive…but sooooo good.
Oh, and Square-Enix can piss off with their references to Einhander. I can’t even afford a copy of that game and they won’t make it available here in the West for those of us who enjoyed their 2.5D take on shoot-em-up glory. The Xenogears reference in the bonus dungeon was actually played off pretty well, and I got a even chuckle out of it.
World of Fantastic Gameplay
So the plot is a mess of fan service and melancholy. You might be wondering how I still plugged over ninety hours into a game when the story rarely touched my cold black heart. Well, pull up a chair, friends, because I’m about to tell you how Square-Enix accidentally made one of the best playing Final Fantasy games of the past decade.
The return of Active Time Battle gameplay is the heart of the experience. In lieu of the button mashing brawler combat made popular by Kingdom Hearts or the pseudo-turn based designs of XII/XIII, this is a game that returns to the heart of the series with a derivation on Hiroyuki Itou’s F1 racing inspired combat timers. Players can implement additional abilities through the development of their Mirages, the collectable beasts that drive the gameplay. Summonable mega mirages are available to deal extra damage for a limited amount of time. Similarly, Champion Medals can be activated at a cost for damage and buffs. I would like to say that, played at normal speed, combat never reaches the feel of classic ATB gameplay, so hold that R1 button down to get through the slowness.
Ride the Giant Claw, no bucket seats included.
However, the newest feature in World of Final Fantasy are the mirage stacks. Utilizing Reynn and Lann in their chibi or “jiant” forms, players assemble stacks of monsters around or on top of the characters to fill out their ability sets and make them capable of fighting bosses or collecting mirages that require certain buffs, debuffs, or magical attacks in order to open an opportunity for their capture. Establishing different builds provides the player an opportunity to get a lead on combat in different settings, or it can be a detriment, as some builds get positively wrecked in some situations. For a game aimed at new players, advanced players will find that there’s actually a surprising amount of depth to the system. Customization is king here, as mirages have blank slots in their ability trees to add skills from outside of their specialization, as well as several options for additional boosts when those ability trees are maxed out late in the game. Opening slots in the ability trees also reward the player with Mirajewels, which add abilities to Reynn and Lann outside of their current builds. The amount of customization makes this game a feast for anyone who likes to micromanage their party. The variety of skills that can be brought into play make the end game even more of an absolute joy.
As Final Fantasy has a legacy of excellent systemic gameplay, it’s genuinely exciting that a game built on the foundation of a fan service game has a system underneath all of the banal referencing that is genuinely spectacular. It’s the best combat design that the series has seen since the PS2 era, and I don’t say that lightly. This game is a joy to play.
My tiny tank battalion.
But it’s not all roses. The fact is, since this game is designed with new players in mind, it’s also easy to stumble into a build that can bulldoze the difficulty. During the D-District Prison sequence, players are introduced to the method of capturing machine units. It is during this time that I assembled a party of a Searcher and a Magitek Armor. I developed this part for the rest of the game and rarely swapped out of it unless I needed a specific mirage to handle a capture. It was this party that absolutely decimated the most difficult bosses in the game with light item use. I was hoping that as I made my way to superbosses like XG and series favorite Ultima Weapon that I’d find myself in relatively intense challenges. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much challenge for my miniature armored tank division. This is likely a result of the attempts to make a more inviting game for newcomers, but I think that this is still a missed opportunity. Final Fantasy VII is widely known for making the series popular in the U.S., and part of the appeal was the endgame. Players across the world were trying to breed a Gold Chocobo, collect that Knights of the Round materia, and maybe, just maybe, survive the Emerald Weapon battle. Rekindling that fire would have pushed this game into much larger discourse online because there were loads of people talking about how to kill the Adamantoise in Final Fantasy XV, a game that launched in the same window as the fan service game that recently added Noctis to its ranks. Brand synergy at work. No, I’m not going to buy the expansion.
The Platinum Experience
I’m guilty of trophy hunting when it comes to Final Fantasy games. I’ve collected platinum trophies on several entries of this series. I’m still not done with X/X-2 (because I got plenty sick of those trophies), but I knew that I was going to take the ride to completion with World of Final Fantasy as soon as I finished the story. The endgame really is where I had the most fun, thanks to bonus dungeons and the monster collecting challenges. There was a lot of grind to be found working through this games PSN trophy selection. Maximizing out abilities on what ultimately proved to be most of the monsters in the game was a light chore that took about a dozen hours of running around in circles fighting things thanks to the lack of experience points found in the Coliseum. But it was less obnoxious than the Gillionaire trophy from Final Fantasy VII, so I’ll give it a pass.
On the other side of this coin, however, are the mini games. Unlocked during the Cogna attacks towards the end of the game, there are four mini games that players have to play in order to unlock not just the last four trophies of the game, but the ability to develop the Maduin mirage.
The worst game of Minesweeper.
The Blitzball Ace game sees a completely motionless Tidus riding on Valefor lobbing Blitzballs at invading Einhander ships. Despite the winged monster and his ability to chuck volleyballs at people under water, Tidus is locked in place, and tosses these balls those spaceships like his arm is made of rubber and the balls weigh roughly seventy pounds. The lack of logical consistency is astonishing, and the horrible controls take this from merely challenging to outright obnoxious. This would have been much better if it was a simple side scrolling shooter, which would have been a far more fitting tribute to the forgotten PS1 game that birthed the Einhander ship.
There’s also a clunky Cactaur catching game that is terrible during the plot but passable during the endgame, and the annoying Nether Nebula game, where Lightning has to whack monsters as she runs through an early game dungeon. The collision detection during this game is terrible, and getting the time under a minute is a challenge I’m still working on.
The Sandstalker minigame is a variant on Minesweeper, and is both the most difficult and decipherable challenge of the lot. In order to unlock the valuable Maduin Memento, players have to finish this game with no fatalities in less than ten turns. Pulling this off takes no small degree of luck, and as a result, has spawned a sizeable amount of rage in the community playing the game. It’s hilarious to me that when I googled these games for assistance how many posts were being made specifically to trash the minigames that plague this game.
Building the Old into 3D
I wanted to take a moment to discuss one more aspect of the game design that sticks out to me. While I could take or leave the art design of this game, the level design is worthy of deeper discussion. While playing the game over the past two weeks, I couldn’t help but notice how constrained the level design truly was. For a 3D game on modern hardware, it feels restricted, small. Not small in the same way that Shining Resonance: Refrainwas, but still smaller regardless. It wasn’t until I was revisiting some of the early dungeons to work through some trophy related challenges that I realized why the game felt the way it did.
The dungeons of World of Final Fantasy are 16-bit 2D dungeons. They aren’t designed for 3D.
This matches the history of Tose’s involvement with the franchise going back to their ports of classic games for the GBA and DS. World of Final Fantasy saw the team embrace their experience with classic game design as they created a new 3D game. It’s an odd choice, but as long as you understand the framework that they’re drawing from, the design of the game makes far more sense than it would have otherwise. It’s a compromise for the long time fans that I actually admire, and it pairs well with the ATB combat.
An Unusual Recommendation
The fact remains that World of Final Fantasy is a difficult recommendation coming from me. On one hand, it’s a pretty okay narrative experience overall, with only a few standout story beats to speak of. The comedy is ham fisted and pretty awful with, again, a few exceptions. But the gameplay is head and shoulders above the rest of Square-Enix’s fan service output, and it’s something that long time series fans really shouldn’t miss out on. For all of its faults, I’m extremely happy that I gave this game a proper shot.
Let’s start out by celebrating the staff at Dark Horse for bringing books like the Ultimania Archive to the states. I’ve been interested in the Ultimania books for a long time, so it’s nice to have a slice of what Japan has been enjoying for ages. This isn’t the first Dark Horse publication to provide translations of sought after video game books. Their localization of the Hyrule Historia is likewise an excellent book. Consider this little preface an endorsement for that book as well. While I’ve not been able to peruse the rest of the Nintendo oriented works (even though I’d love to), I can say for certain that the Historia is an excellent book for Zelda fans.
I can remember scrolling through eBay listings of Final Fantasy games and guides while I was in college, and coming across a book that was roughly as thick as the phone book for a major metropolitan area, the cover illustration depicting Tidus and Yuna in Macalania Forest. The book was called Ultimania Omega. More than a simple strategy guide, the amount of information contained in the Ultimania books towers over their American counterparts from Bradygames and Prima (may they rest in peace…). This was the kind of book that revealed a connection between the worlds of X and VII. It was the sort of thing I’d never seen before, and I lamented that we didn’t get books like this in the U.S. Recent guides from Piggyback have tried to bridge the gap in recent years, but the absence of a video game textbook like that found in the Ultimania books was noticeable for turbonerds like myself. When Dark Horse announced that they were localizing the Ultimania Archive books for US release, I knew that I’d be there as soon as my wallet would allow it.
Covering the first six entries in a series that I’m sure my readers are tired of me running my mouth about, Ultimania Archive Vol. I leaves out the strategy guide aspect of the Japanese books and is reminiscent of the Hyrule Historia. Each section covers one game, breaking down the ports, characters, world, and some design documentation. Rereleases such as the DS remake of Final Fantasy IV receive extra materials relating to their changes, such as storyboards and illustrations from the new CGI cutscenes. Long time fans of the series will likely relish in some nostalgia looking through the character sections, which contain quotes, illustrations from various versions of each game, and little blurbs about their stories. However, what’s most interesting in the character sections are is the illustration of how each character evolved from an original Yoshitaka Amano illustration down to a sprite or polygonal character. This, of course, extends across to the Monster sections for each game. It’s amusing to me to see that these beautiful black and white ink drawings that were then turned into pixel beasts for NES games, complete with side-by-side examples. Also worth noting is the fact that Ultimania Archive is the rare art compilation that prints work not produced by Amano or Tetsuya Nomura. The styles depicted in the monster illustrations are drastically different from Amano’s lush ink and watercolors or Nomura’s manga inspired work. Sometimes it’s fascinating, sometimes it’s just weird. These illustrations demand to be seen.
The World section for each game is usually short, breaking down the world maps for each game, labeled for the locations of each town and dungeon. Making up for this is the Extra Content section. More than anything, this is where my interests mostly lay in the Ultimania books. Seeing how the games were crafted, sometimes on a sprite-by-sprite breakdown, impresses me deeply. The section for Final Fantasy III goes so far as to include a breakdown of formulas for how the battle mechanics operate. Aspiring game designers interested in RPGs might find this interesting. I know it’s fascinating to me. Closing out each section are a Memories section, showing fan favorite scenes.
These archival documents, like the screenshots, are translated into English, simulating handwriting with typed text to maintain the feel of what I’d assume the original book would have looked like. The only time the translation looks odd on the page is on the screenshots, where the text doesn’t look like it matches the fonts I’m familiar with in the games that I’ve plated. Obviously, this is excusable simply because I don’t expect Dark Horse to replay six dense JRPGs in order to grab screenshots from the US games when they could just translate the text on the existing images and allow the look of the book to maintain a style.
There is little I can fairly comment on in regards to the quality of the translation. I didn’t notice any significant issues with the quality of the writing on display. The book is cleanly laid out, and the graphic design is cohesive and respectful of the material it’s there to frame. The build quality of the book is on par with other video game publications released by Dark Horse, which is to say, it’s superb. Beautiful and stylized Amano pieces are blocked out on the front cover, and a crystal themed logo is the sole image on the rear. Traditional Final Fantasy white makes up the background, akin to the classic games this book is here to celebrate.
If I have any complaint about the Ultimania Archive, it is that it’s simply not long enough to sate all of my curiosities about the development of these spectacular games. I would love to have seen more of the original versions of II and III, given that these are the only games in the series never to have been released in their original form here in the U.S. This doesn’t reflect badly upon what is here. Dark Horse has delivered a lovely document about the origins of one of gaming’s great legacy franchises, and I am extremely thankful for their efforts. I’m anticipating the release of the next volume, which covers the PlayStation era. Based on page count alone, it seems likely that each game will see more attention than was provided in the first volume.
If only we could get a much needed print copy of the Xenogears Perfect Works…
Special thanks to my wonderful wife for providing this book in commemoration of our ninth anniversary, our fourth wedding anniversary. I love you, Jo. ❤
Images from the book are taken from the Dark Horse website. Buy the book here.
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