Final Fantasy VII Remake

How do you remake Final Fantasy VII? It’s a question that challenged every videogame discussion forum in existence after an otherwise routine PlayStation 3 technology demonstration in 2005. It’s a consideration that Square-Enix, in the midst of Tetsuya Nomura losing his grip on Final Fantasy XV and regaining it on Kingdom Hearts III, finally decided to take seriously with an electrifying teaser ten years later. While other high-profile remakes of beloved PlayStation games have delighted and disappointed audiences, none compare to the scope and ambition that defined the first blockbuster console role-playing game. How do you remake Final Fantasy VII?

Square-Enix has a solution: contract the globe-trotting narrative, retain the most immediate characters, and explore the dystopian mystique and sinister machinations of Final Fantasy VII’s infamous city of Midgar. The mere suggestion of Square-Enix selling individual jewels instead of the whole crown created predictable derision and cynicism, but it also revealed an honest truth. A game made in 1996 that was composed of pre-rendered backgrounds, defined by computer-generated cut-scenes, and engulfed in incongruous play mechanics could never receive a shot-for-shot, high-budget remake on modern platforms. Viewed alongside its inspiration, Final Fantasy VII Remake seems to be the product of compromise.

The next question answered is whether or not Final Fantasy VII Remake has any business being called Final Fantasy VII Remake if it only tells part of the Final Fantasy VII story. Objectively, Remake showcases a segment of Final Fantasy VII that only consumed five hours of the original’s fifty hour run time. Inside Remake’s forty hours, however, are a better developed cast of characters, a more menacing assembly of obvious, ambiguous, and enigmatic villains, and dystopian city that finally earns its reputation. The story Remake chooses to tell is compressed, expanded, and twisted at different intervals. The theme is identical even if the scope is refocused.  And it is undeniably Final Fantasy VII. All of its choices are products of sincere devotion, even when it’s grinning and trying to shake the train car off its rails.

Remake’s premise is unaffected and unmodified by the ravages of time. Cloud Strife, ex-SOLDIER from Shinra Inc’s military division, comes to Midgar as a mercenary to help Avalanche, an eco-terrorism organization, blow up the Mako reactors that consume the life force of the planet to fuel the economy of Midgar. While Barrett and Tifa try to keep Cloud busy with Avalanche, fate brings Cloud to an ordinary flower merchant, Aerith. The four of them, in different configurations, mine the depths of Shinra’s nefarious operations as they move through different sectors of Midgar.

The original Final Fantasy VII, along with Xenogears, was the unfortunate victim of a localization that was unequipped with a proper budget and/or time to deal with Final Fantasy VII’s wealth of content and context. It wasn’t just the goofy syntax mistakes, but rather a series of botched references, broken communication, and best-guess translations (and I do believe they did the best they could with the resources they were given). I didn’t care about any of this when I was sixteen because I didn’t have a critical bone in my body. When I reflect on Final Fantasy VII today, I don’t remember its localization woes. Time launders away imperfections and shapes a Final Fantasy VII as a perfect spectacle. Replaying Final Fantasy VII as an adult shapes a crueler version of that reality.

Remake doesn’t have to negotiate with that series of conditions and contradictions. Cloud’s dissociative issues and Big Time Jerk attitude feel more like the product of suppressed trauma and less like a convenient plot device for the second act. Tifa masks her pain with resolve until she absolutely cannot do it anymore, and watching her build and blossom into a character beyond Damaged Woman is one of Remake’s more subtle assets. Barret has always been tough for me to handle and understand. As the voice of a revolutionary, his creed and anger speak truth to power. As a black presence, he can feel mishandled (and, as a regular white dude, I would look toward better and more informed takes than mine).

The star of Remake’s show is still Aerith. She pops into Cloud’s world with a clever, disarming benevolence that seems impossible for a citizen of Midgar’s lower class. She’s indifferent to danger because she knows more than Cloud and her calm acceptance of the most desperate circumstances disarms everyone she encounters (and probably most players, too). While Aerith has a tendency to slot into the dreaded Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype, her infectious smile, charming spontaneity, and relentless positivity stand in opposition to Midgar’s oppressive and hostile surroundings. Like everyone else, Aerith is the beneficiary of twenty years of thought and consideration (rather than the product of raging fan service).

An expanded horizon is also in sight of Remake’s secondary cast of characters. Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie—Avalanche members who were gone before you knew it in Final Fantasy VII—are full of personality and blessed with meaningful dialogue. The Turks, Shinra’s well-dressed secret operatives, revel in their chic villainy and gesture toward a more nuanced disposition in their world. Bit players like Johnny are now fuller characters, shit lords like Don Corneo are as slimy as ever, and Shinra’s bureaucracy of sycophants and psychopaths are relentless in their evildoing deeds.

For its narrative progression, Remake takes the basic facets of Final Fantasy VII and uses them like an outline. Some sequences are entirely new; visiting one of Midgar’s upper plates and stopping in suburbia to visit Jessie parent’s was a welcome diversion. Other additions take sequences that consumed five minutes and three screens, like the trip between Sector 6 and Wall Market, and expand them into hour-long dungeons. These can often feel protracted in the length and rudimentary and their design, but, as a person who has maintained a fondness for this game for two decades, I relished any opportunity to explore more sides of Midgar.

It’s a basic observation and a practical point of interaction (and maybe hyperbole!), but it’s hard to overstate the importance of being able to look around Midgar. Final Fantasy VII’s pre-rendered backgrounds prevented any agency for their examination. Crisis Core and Dirge of Cerberus’ contributions felt more like obligatory indulgences than true compliments. Entering Sector 7 and seeing Tifa’s Seventh Heaven bar, in all three dimensions and rendered with impeccable artistic construction, filled every gap in my imagination. Remake is loaded with vistas where the player is encouraged to look around and breathe in the ambience. Impatience may interpret these sequences as filler and ignorance may remove their importance, but players who consider Final Fantasy VII a paean to their adolescence will relish every opportunity.  I always wanted to be there, no matter where it was.

Locations and events are also subject to a considerable amount of expansion. Cloud spends a significant portion of the first act in Sector 7, which presents the Midgar’s model of its lower class citizens. The populace is fed propaganda and are skeptical of the violence incurred by Avalanche. Cloud, too, sees the world only as a source of opportunity, collecting sidequests as a means to generate income. To help people is to monetize them, leaving his motivation identical to Shinra’s, an irony that hinges on Cloud’s development as a character.

Remake changes along with Cloud, and this feature is best examined midway through when he arrives in Wall Market. Instead of a seedy underbelly with questionable characters, Wall Market is now a glitzy and fashionable social city full of questionable and alarming characters. It’s comparatively huge, garishly decorated, and loaded with gross spectacles and ostentatious situations. The infamous cross-dressing sequence, a potential source of unconscious embarrassment and one of Final Fantasy VII’s sequences I was almost certain would not fare well in 2020, is now the star of the entire show. Without specifically saying what happens, Remake’s extravagant take on a deliberately silly event feels perfect for this time and place. Square-Enix found the tone it needed to sell to an audience in 2020, and did its best to make its hero, and not his circumstance, the subject of its commentary. Wall Market is Remake operating at peak efficiency.

And then we come to Remake’s most drastic departure: combat. Final Fantasy VII introduced a mass audience to its meter-filling active time battle system (ATB), a real-time progression of the turn-based combat that defined 16-bit Japanese RPG’s. While turn-based combat can still thrive today, it’s clear Square-Enix has been looking for a more active and involved combat solution for Final Fantasy for over a decade. Reinventing this beloved system presents Remake’s most significant risk. It has to satisfy an elder audience without alienating them, appeal to modern standards while not outright cloning Final Fantasy XV, and form a smart and engaging system friendly to agency and teaming with spectacle. This is a tall order.

It’s also an order Remake is, against heavy odds, fit to deliver. Remake presents the most refined and engaging interpretation of Square-Enix’s Modern Combat Thesis while leaving room for some of Final Fantasy VII’s most beloved traditions. Players can switch between character-specific versions of light and heavy physical attacks to chip-damage opponents. Those attacks build classic active-time meters. Those meters can be consumed to execute unique abilities or perform Materia-based magic attacks and buffs. Depending on your desired level participation, Remake will allow players to control as much or as little of this process as they can handle. Combat is functional, flowing, and flexible.

Combat performance hinges on the ability to stop time. Pressing the X button, at any point, brings time to a crawl. From here the player can consume meters to use items, cast spells, and execute abilities. Options can be hot-keyed to buttons (making Remake feel closer to a character-action game) or selected off of a menu (edging Remake closer to its turn-based roots). Normal difficulty can, at first, feel overwhelming. Easy difficulty simplifies the process and doesn’t demand a lot of strategy. Classic difficulty automates basic attacks and allows players to select magic and abilities off of a menu, essentially rendering Remake a variation on Xenoblade’s current modus operandi.

The creative hook of Remake’s combat system hinges on an idea that feels borrowed from, of all places, Grand Theft Auto V. Pressing left or right on the d-pad will instantaneously switch control over to, should they be present, another party member. The character left behind will start behaving automatically, and rather conservative with meter consumption. You can still micro-manage them, instantly, from the menu in the middle of whatever violent business you’re conducting with the character you’re currently controlling. This should not work as well as it does. I can’t believe it works as well as it does. The process is unwieldy at first (I got more game overs at the very first boss encounter than at any other point in the game) but becomes second nature after a few hours. It may be incomprehensible to a passing audience but it all flows naturally with practiced hands.

I do wish Remake had been better at communicating some of its more subtle combat options. Blocking and dodging felt too slow to be viable because, at first, I was playing Remake like it was Bayonetta. I wanted to react to problems instantly. I needed to react by watching enemy patterns and preparing accordingly. This is not an action RPG despite a similar set of mechanics and a visual performance that rivals the ridiculous antics of Devil May Cry. The fact that it requires a team-based approach to most combat encounters should make this clear, but I felt like learning some of its finer points was a struggle.

As much as the battle system has changed, Materia has remained largely untouched. Materia was Final Fantasy VII’s proper noun for magic and contextualized as orbs that could be slotted into weapons and armor. It could grow and form higher magic spells by acquiring AP in combat, and it could be freely traded between characters to suit different needs and fluctuating party configurations. All of this remains true in Remake, albeit with a streamlined selection of new and old Materia. It still affects stat lines, it still grows and develops new spells, and it finally glows inside of the weapons that are permanently affixed to your character. Materia is still Materia.

As beloved as Materia was, it came at the cost of distinct combat roles and diluted the cast of characters. Anyone could be anything and it didn’t matter who was doing what. Remake attempts to solve this conundrum through its unique character abilities. Each new weapon comes with a new ability and each new ability can be unlocked permanently by using it a dozen times. Cloud’s Iron Blade bestowed Triple Slash, which would attack three targets in rapid succession. Barret’s Wrecking Ball granted an area-of-effect attack with Smackdown. Tifa’s Purple Pain delivers True Strike, which massively increases an enemy’s Stagger gauge. A half dozen weapons spread across four characters creates unique potential and agency inside of Remake’s versatile combat engine.

As Remake marched across its eighteen chapters, I grew to appreciate the unique assets of its cast of characters. I played Cloud when I wanted to work on defense, make use of the Parry Materia, and dish out heavy physical damage. I played Barret and Aerith as ranged tanks and healers, respectively, when I would completely fuck up and require the safety of distance. I didn’t appreciate Tifa until late in the game, when I understood her combo abilities and her massive potential to obliterate the Stagger meter. Tifa proved to be the most enjoyable and flexible member of the team, as her ridiculous speed and quick hits made her a damage machine and, in a pinch, always have enough ATB left over for an emergency heal via the Prayer Materia.

Characters also see progression through a relatively undercooked leveling system. Each level-up increases basic stats, as expected, but it also grants points to each of your weapons. Those points can be spent on an escalating selection of stat bonuses to speed, magic, attack,  and defense, as well as opening up (or linking) additional Materia slots. Every weapon gets the same amount of points, so rationing isn’t necessary. Keeping up with all of this (at least five weapons for each character and hundreds of points among them) can be…a lot. Remake understands this and carries the option to autofill those points toward creating a balanced character or attack/defense minded builds.

As if combat wasn’t already carrying enough options, Remake also makes room for two more Final Fantasy VII hallmarks. Limit Breaks return, offering unique supers independent of ATB and delivered as soon as they’re executed. This saved my bacon more times than I care to admit. Summons also operate most closely to their performance in Final Fantasy XII. They seem to only become available in significant battles and can only be summoned once per battle. ATB can either be consumed to execute their unique, overpowered abilities or they can idle along and dish our regular damage as if they were another automated character. Summons, like Limit Breaks, are more of a lifesaver than an actual point of strategy, but Remake is better with their inclusion.

Falling into the flow of Remake’s combat yields some of its most satisfying rewards. Determining when to strike, when to be cautious, and when to go all-out present satisfying micro-challenges inside of a larger objective. You could probably set it the difficulty to easy, mash your way through all over Remake, and have an OK time. You could also over plan complex feats of timing and trigger a Summon’s final attack at the exact moment a boss slips into a Stagger. Both are satisfying to different levels of personal investment. Suffering through failure and falling victim to several instances of rotten luck (missing cure spells by being attacked at crucial points is the worst) can feel demoralizing because it’s demoralizing. Figuring out how to avoid that situation entirely provides a better sense of satisfaction. Harmonizing every variable of Remake’s complete combat system may as well be identical to conducting a symphony.

For all of the inspiration and battle-tested execution of Remake’s combat, its dungeon design can’t help but feel obligatory and badly paced. Cloud moves through the standard videogame environments composed of sewers, tunnels, and secret labs. There are switches to throw, odd machinery to operate, and barely anything to find off the beaten path. I would hesitate to label these dungeons as filler, the sequences with Cloud and Aerith together are worth their weight in exposition, but they’re prosaic at best and tedious at worst. Remake’s dungeons feel like an accessory to a combat engine.

This labored obligation to modern dungeon design is also true of Remake’s collection of sidequests. When they’re first offered in Sector 7, with the proud Cloud tasked to go locate lost cats or kill a bunch of rats, it almost feels like Remake is erring toward commentary on the futility of frivolous tasks. Then it actually makes you do them, and the other sidequests in further hubs don’t evolve beyond the objectives found in Sector 7. There aren’t very many of them, thankfully, but, for all of Remake’s strides in storytelling and combat, it feels a generation behind what games like The Witcher 3 and Yakuza are doing with content outside the boundaries of their A plot.

Washing out to neutral is Remake’s position on Final Fantasy VII’s wealth of minigames.  Riding Cloud’s motorcycle and defending your allies from rogue bikers feels as clunky in 2020 as it did in 1997; it’s a worse version of Road Rash. Remake leans on it way longer, however, and it outstays its welcome. What fares better are the goofy collection of minigames, including a set of timing challenges against the most body-positive gym bros I’ve seen in a videogame, and some Unreal Engine tech demo showcases with Cloud smashing boxes to entertain a local youth gang. This stuff is fleeting and frivolous, which is exactly how it should be.

Remake’s strongest asset is, without question, its selection and implementation of its music. Nobuo Uematsu and Masashi Hamauzu return while Mitsuto Suzuki is added for a fresh perspective. Surprisingly, Remake doesn’t make the predicable move by tossing the original soundtrack over to an accomplished orchestra and calling it a day. It uses those original tracks sparingly, and through different arrangements depending on the tone of the present situation. It can also shift music between different melodies and instrumentation at the drop of the hat, which is audible when walking around different corners of Wall Market.

I cannot possibly overstate the degree to which hearing classic music at extremely specific and extremely important times tapping into my brain and released dangerous amount of serotonin. A sequence with Tseng in Seventh Heaven made Aerith’s Theme sound dangerous for the first time in my life. Underneath The Rotting Pizza, a track I used to find irritating and repetitive, is now bursting with enough bass to make it into a banger. Remake saves Those Who Fight Further, which used to highlight every boss, for a very specific instance and when I heard it I felt a rush of emotion and instinctual need to destroy my opponent. Remake does this all the time with its classic music. It never stops, and even has to patience and trust to save its most (spoilers in track titles if you visit these links) elating and breathtaking tricks for the last chapter of the game.

Remake’s music is a model of what I wanted most out of a new Final Fantasy VII: creative and curious disruption. Remake services this need in bits and pieces through its plotline. Its choices run the gamut from questionable and confusing to intriguing and alarming. It gestures toward total revolution and pulls up just short of committing to any specific direction. At the end of Remake it feels poised to do anything. It could continue along the model of Final Fantasy VII. It could go off radar, smash the radar, and uninvent the entire concept of radar. The future of Final Fantasy VII is finally exciting. It’s in stark contrast to the last five years, in which its audience split its time between worrying if it was real and fretting if it would do right by its name. Square-Enix hasn’t been clear about what’s in store for Final Fantasy VII, but Remake earns them the trust to take their time and build something worthy of its name.

Remake removes Final Fantasy VII from its agonizing stasis and animates its objectives with modern sophistication. In spite of its curtailed debut, Remake creates characters out of archetypes, finds class struggle amid its surging environmentalism, and generates dynamic fiction from a familiar narrative. By honoring moments held sacred and defying what may be expected, Remake stays true to the radical and dangerous ambition that defined Final Fantasy VII.