Auly's Lengthy Thoughts/Review of FFVII Remake
Consider this your spoiler warning. That being said, it will remain fairly light on spoilers until the section about the story, so be warned!
I tried to flesh out the other sections as much as possible so that people could get a feel for the game if they haven't played it yet. That out of the way, let's make like a group of rag-tag eco-warriors and mosey!
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Tales From a Fan: How Long I Have Waited
For the longest time I was in the camp that believed Square Enix would never even attempt to remake FINAL FANTASY VII unless the company was in absolutely dire straits. A remake would have an insurmountable weight of hype and expectation placed upon it that there would be no chance of it reaching the lofty standards of fans of the original. However, as soon as that teaser trailer got shown at E3 2015, the spark of hope began to flicker in me.
I first played the original way back in 1998 and it introduced me to possibilities in gaming I'd never even considered. Up until that point the closest I'd come to an RPG was the Zelda franchise, and the majority of games I'd played where typical platformers with a very basic narrative designed to connect stages together. The idea of a video game having a cinematic narrative akin to a movie, or the depth of a book, was completely alien to me. As a 12 year old my mind was blown over and over again, this game taught me that there are problems bigger than myself, that it's ok to lean on others, not to take anything for granted. It ripped out my beating heart and forced me to deal with death and loss as the character I'd grown attached to was killed. But despite the bleak top level narrative, beneath it all there was emotion, humour, and goofiness.
So flash forward 22 years - I sat, controller in hand, watching the timer tick down until the pre-order unlocked, wondering if there was any chance that VIIR could live up to the original game that had a seminal impact on my formative years. Did it? Read on!
Exploring Midgar: An (Almost) Blemish-Free City of Wonder
The first installment of VIIR is mostly confined to the city of Midgar, the sprawling metropolis built and run by the Shinra Electric Power Company. From the moment the camera pans out from Aerith to reveal the city of Midgar in the opening cinematic, you can tell that this is going to be a very detailed Midgar. What was only a couple of dozen pre-rendered backdrops and 6 hours tops of gameplay in the original is now going to be home for the 35 or so hours the main scenario takes to finish. The "blanks" that the imagination filled in back in the 90s have, for better or worse, been fleshed out in the remake.
For the most part Midgar looks marvelous. The layout of Reactors 1 and 5 feel familiar, yet distinctly new at the same time. The Sector 8 plate looks like a European city devstated by the bombing of Reactor 1, populated with NPCs cowering in disbelief at what's happened. The slums in comparison are decidedly run down, a collection of structures cobbled together out of bricks, concrete and scrap metal - the majority of its denizens harbouring little love for Shinra, but at the same time not entirely onboard with the actions of eco-terrorist group Avalanche either. When first entering the Sector 7 slums, panning the camera to see the plate above and the gigantic central pillar really is a sight to behold. Wall Market is home to a larger than life array of neon-lights and seedy back alleys, complete with naive tourists and scummy opportunists. The Shinra building looks dark, forboding and simply gargantuan - and yes, the option to take the elevator or run up 59 flights of stairs is still there!
However, many of these locations feel very reminiscent of FINAL FANTASY XIII in that they are extremely linear in nature. Chapter 3 does allow some free roam of the Sector 7 slums, but some areas are blocked off until much later in the game. Likewise Chapter 8 allows exploration of the Sector 5 slums, but the area outside is largely twisty roads with 2 obvious beaten paths and a couple of open areas that are obviously intended for side-quest battles to take place in. However, there is so much life and personality in all of the locations in Midgar - with the exception of maybe the sewers and the connecting underplate between Sector 6 and Reactor 5 - that the game doesn't quite reach the constrained "on rails" feeling that FFXIII did. It does mean, unfortunately, that some of the more dungeony type sections such as the aforementioned sewers don't quite feel labyrinthine, and at times feel contrived simply to extend the playtime rather than serving a narrative purpose.
Unfortunately, at times Midar also shows that the game is really pushing the limits of what the ageing PlayStation 4 hardware is capable of. It does have issues with textures taking a long time to load in. While this may just be a bug (Unreal Engine 4 is known for texture problems), it is sadly incredibly noticeable in the slums during the daytime, where many of the surrounding textures look like they've come straight out of the PlayStation 2 era until the full texture pops-in. This is particularly noticeable when sprinting, while sprinting the clever use of motion-blur makes this fairly unnoticeable, but once standing still textures gradually pop-in all around Cloud. It can be particularly jarring in cutscenes when the shirt texture of the NPC turns HD midway through the dialogue, or the ground texture loads in properly during the dialogue. While this seems to be less of an issue with a PS4 Pro running on an SSD, it is till noticeable there. However, in a lot of cases this is only really noticeable if you're looking for it apart from a few glarishy in your face cases. It rarely detracts from the overall experience.
At night, Midgar looks just how I imagined it would. However, it's during the daytime sections that some of the rougher edges on the technical side really begin to come through. The slums are incredibly bright during the day time considering much of the natural sunlight above them would be blocked out by the upper plates of Midgar. While the plates are so high up that someone sunlight would naturally get in, there's very little in the way of hard shadows being cast by the plates. During the day time it's a lot more noticeable that the plates, the reactors, and the central column are actually 2D textures painted in such a way to give the illusion of being 3D but look quite pixelated at times. It's not overly immersion breaking, and is likely due to the technical limitations of the hardware, but it does detract a little from the visual experience when looking down from the Sector 6 plate to the slums below, or when making the climb from the Sector 5 slums to the Shinra Building later in the game.
Despite all this, the game ran at a near-constant 1080p 30 FPS on my ageing PlayStation 4 from back in 2014, so the technical trade-offs have been well worth it to maintain fluid performance with a mostly visually stunning experience on now quite dated hardware.
Combat: A Levelled Up Experience
When it was first revealed that VIIR would be opting to go the more action combat route, I won't lie, I gritted my teeth. Coming off the back of FINAL FANTASY XV's combat - which at launch could be described as "serviceable" at best (although subsequent patches did improve it), and the increasingly ridiculously "floatiness" of the KH games, I really did not feel confident that it could be pulled off well. After all, the original was a turn-based ATB game, and that system allowed for a depth of strategy that largely gets lost in action combat games that are more about reflexes and counters.
Somehow, they managed to pull it off.
The combat feels like a satisfying hybrid of KH, FFXV, and FFXIII. Actions and abilities can build up a stagger bar, forcing the enemy into a Pressured state and eventually a Staggered state where abilities will deal more damage for a short duration. The system starts out fairly simplisticly enough, placing a lot of cannon fodder before you that can easily be mowed down by just spamming the attack button and in the early chapters curatives like Potions and Hi-Potions are very potent. But as the Chapters progress, clever use of Elemental weaknesses, the pressure/stagger system, and even what weapons you have equipped can make all the difference and curative items become less and less useful apart from topping people up outside of battles. The combat feels fluid and dynamic, and if you think you can just get away with spamming dodge roll like you can in Kingdom Hearts, think again!
Attacking with auto attacks fills ATB charges, and the game pretty much encourages you constantly switch between characters to fill their bars (as they charge very slowly if the AI is left to their own devices if you're not playing in the rather easy Classic mode). Switching between characters is snappy and responsive, and each character brings their own unique skill set to the table:
- Cloud builds ATB charges through landing melee attacks, his first stance Operator allows him to nimbly move around and unleash barrages of quick, but weak hits, whereas his second stance Punisher allows him to land more devastating hits that rapidly fill stagger, but this comes at the cost of very low mobility, although guarding in Punisher stance will cause him to immediately counterattack many melee abilities. Like in the original game Cloud is a solid all-rounder and can (depending on Materia load-out) fill in most roles, and given the frequency of him being in melee he can also make a pretty strong caster due to the rate at which he can recover MP.
- Tifa also builds ATB charges through landing melee attacks, and is very quick and nimble, but also incredibly squishy to being with. One of the abilities she can spend her ATB bars on is Unbridled Strength, which charges up her Triangle ability up to two times with the charge staying for a fixed duration, or until spent. These charges can be used to increase the damage multiplier when an enemy is staggered or rapidly put enemies into a Pressured state outside of stagger. She plays almost like a fighting game character, where her abilities can be combo'ed into one another. Once she gets rolling she can rapidly build up ATB charges and unleahs a devastating barrage of abilities - but as mentioned this comes at the expense of her being very squish without HP UP materia so if you tunnel vision too hard you can quickly find that she'll end up eating the floor.
- Barret build ATB charges with ranged attacks. His triangle ability rapidly builds ATB charge up but takes time to reload, which can be sped-up by spamming triangle but it prevents him from taking any other actions while doing so. His primary role in a party setup is that of a tank. His Steelskin ability reduces the damage he takes, and he can also take damage inplace of other party members using Lifesaver. Combine this with Barrier and Regen later on in the game and he can soak large amounts of damage for the party. Later in the game he also gains access to a couple of melee weapons and can be built into a pretty formidable melee bruiser if you have Aerith in your party to act as the ranged damage dealer.
- Aerith also builds ATB charges with ranged attacks. Her Triangle ability, Tempest, is basically an AoE bomb that becomes more potent the longer it was charged for. She naturally fills the caster role for the group, and her one of her early weapon perks: Arcane Ward, allows anyone standing in the ward to double cast spells. This means that if you are mindful of positioning she can unleash a torrent of magic to rapidly exploit elemental weaknesses. This also naturally lends her to being the best healer candidate in the group too. However, like Tifa, due to her high combo potential she is also quite squishy at first.
The visual effects of spells and abilities going off are really on the level of those seen in FINAL FANTASY XIV. It really is a thing to behold and sounds satisfying as well. While at a glance it might seem like a simple hack and slash, abusing elemental weaknesses has a chance to put enemies into a pressured stance, which cleverly done can be used to interrupt some of the more damaging abilities. It feels incredibly satisfying when the visual and audio cues go off when you push an enemy into Staggered state where they take at least 160% increased damage. Some abilities can increase the progress of the stagger bar, others can increase the amount of damage bonus received during a staggered state, and others still do even more damage when an enemy is staggered. With careful forethought it's possible to line up ATB charges to push an enemy into stagger, unleash a barrage of damage increase modifying abilities, before landing a final crushing blow at the end of the stagger with Cloud that can hit for over 300% increased damage if things were lined up correctly. However, wait too long and the enemy can get their defenses up again taking even longer to stagger, or mistiming may mean that an entire stagger window gets wasted with very few abilities. While planning like this isn't necessary on Normal difficulty (and especially so on Easy difficulty), it becomes the difference between a struggle and a satisfying victory in Hard difficulty where item usage is disabled and the only way to recover MP is via landing basic attacks.
Sadly as the game progressed, particularly in the final acts, more and more enemies which could only be Staggered once were added. While this was fine for non-boss encounters, it really felt like a deliberate choice for the boss fights in the final 2 chapters to lengthen the encounters in an attempt to make them feel more epic, I guess. The moments when these bosses were Staggered felt entirely scripted - where the stagger bar would just go from 0 to full in an instant, and in the case of the Arsenal fight with Barret, Aerith, and Red XIII, it just made the fight become boring after a while.
Overall though, I found the combat so enjoyable that even when at the times the game presented me with the choice of taking an alternative path to avoid combat, I charged in simply because of how much fun I was having with it.
Player Character Progression: Something Old and Something New
Materia has come along for the ride for VIIR. It largely works how it did in the original game. Weapons and Armor have Materia slots, with some slots being linked. Linked slots allow for the combining of two types of Materia to produce enhanced effects - much like the original Magnify (previously called All) + an Elemental or Healing materia will make the effect of that Materia target all enemies or all allies, Warding Materia can be put into a linked socket with other Materia to enhance resistances etc. As you use Materia and win battles you earn AP which gradually level up the Materia and either make its bonuses more potent or unlock additional tiers of spells. However, even by the end of the game the basic Fire/Blizzard/Lightning/Aero spells are still fairly potent which is great as their -ra and -ga forms incurr much higher MP costs.
Enemy Skill makes a return too, but with only 4 learnable Enemy Skills and 2 of them coming from Hard Mode and not really have much applicable use after obtaining them, makes its inclusion feelk a bit redundant.
Materia can be obtained from a variety of sources, some of it is just handily laying about in the game world, some is given to you by NPCs as you progress in the story, while others come from completing "buffer content" such as Battle Intel reports, most of the requirements of which will naturally be fulfilled over the course of playing the game. There are a couple of materia that requiring completing some simple puzzles to obtain, or beating Battle Arena challenges which is where the majority of Summoning materia comes from.
Speaking of Summons, they generally work in much the same way as FFXV did. Oncer per battle, as the battle draws on or if your party gets hammered with a large amount of damage in a short window, and if you are in a area big enough to accomodate them, a summoning bar will gradually fill up in the bottom right of the screen. Once filled a character can spend an ATB charge to summon the creature from the materia they have equipped. However, unlike FFXV, once summoned the summon will stick around for a fixed duration and auto-attack enemies. Characters can spend their ATB charges to command the summon to use it's more powerful attacks. Once the fixed duration ends, the summon will then unleash it's iconic signature move in very flashy fashion. Weirld though, the core summons earned by playing the game can only be used in very large areas. Whereas the pre-order bonus summons are smaller creatures and can be used in the vast majority of battles - which is kinda odd as Carbuncle is ridiculously overpowered for much of the game with a mere 6 ATB bars allowing you to put Barrier, Shell, and Haste on your entire team as well as healing them to full when it leaves the battle.
Unlike the original however, Materia isn't the primary form of character power progression. Two new systems also supplement it.
The first being Weapon Abilities. Each weapon for each character comes with its own unique ability that are often a better use of your ATB charges than actual spell casting. Some of the more potent abilities can even cost 2 full ATB charges to use and their effects can vary from increasing stagger progress, increasing stagger damage mutlipiers, increasing damage on staggered targets, or even dealing damage to multiple targets and knocking them down. Once you've used the ability enough times it becomes permanently unlocked and you'll have access to it even if you switch weapons on that character.
This leads into the second system; Weapon Upgrades. As your characters level up they gain SP which can be used to upgrade their Weapons in a similar not too disimilar to the Crystarium in FFXIII. SP is not shared between Weapons so if Tifa has earned 100 SP, then all weapons will have their own pool of 100 SP to spend on upgrades. Each weapon has its own set of upgrades, with some weapons being orientated toward defense or magic defense, others toward physical attack or magical attack, some hybrid of everything, or in the case of Barret, turining him into a melee bruiser instead of a ranged damage dealer. The end result being, that if you wanted to, you could for example use Cloud's Buster Sword for the entire game (although it wouldn't be recommended to not unlock the other Weapon Abilities first). Generally though, at least for the first playthrough, it's best to just equip new weapons as you get them and worry about maximising their potential in subequent playthroughs/optional content.
While I liked the Weapon Ability system I'm fairly torn on the Weapon Upgrade system. While, yes, it is cool to be able (for the most part) to just use whichever weapon looks the coolest to you, having to spend time in the upgrade screen (which has unnecessary entering and exiting animations) can become choresome busy work after a while. Thankfully, if you goof up your upgrades it's relatively painless to reset the SP.
Music: Familiar Beats with New Twists
If there's anything that can instantly take me down memory lane when it comes to FFVII, it's the music. Aerith's Theme, Sephiroth's Theme, J-E-N-O-V-A, Bombing Mission etc. are all audibly engraved into my subconscious at this point.
It's safe to say that for the most part VIIR treats the source compositions with respect. A large portion of the first half of the game is composed entirely of re-orchestrations and re-arrangements of all the tracks from the opening few hours of the original game. They all sound fantastic, and the battle theme re-arrangements inparticular are well structured starting off sounding familiar enough but as phases progress they become more and more akin to the existing compositions which serves to pump you up as the fights progress with some very creative re-intrepretations such as the theme being played on an organ for the Hell House boss fight.
It all feels very grand, and very FFVII. In the second half of the game, particularly around Sector 5 Slums and Wall Market, a lot of brand new compositions or very different re-arrangements start filtering through. Some of these are interest twists on old classics, such as techno pop versions of The Oppressed People being used for recurring battles with Beck and his motley band of bandits, the instrumental version of Hollow being used in the Sector 5 slums, and Wall Market having a jazzy soundtrack that smoothly transitions between three arrangements depending on which area of Wall Market you're in.
That being said, some of the more synth and techno arrangements do seem a bit at odds when compared to the more orchestral arrangements used earlier in the game. Some of the tracks (especially the battle arrangements of them) would feel more at home in The World Ends With You than the collapsed tunnels and express ways connecting Sectors 5 and 7.
Overall though the majority of the soundtrack is a hit, with many of the classic themes from the original game receiving multiple re-arrangements some even in a variety of different styles. If you liked the original soundtrack, you'll be bopping along to this, and probably also holding back the tears and goosebumps when some of the iconic tracks kick in.
Optional Content: A Sizeable Helping, Maybe too Filling for Some
VIIR comes with a decent amount of optional content. For the first play through this largely comes in the form of side quests which can have you doing anything from run of the mill tasks like finding lost cats, right through to venturing into an underground Shinra lab (Deepground from DoC) and taking on a Mako enhanced Behemoth. The side quests often offer accessories and gil as rewards, and while for the most part many of them seem inconsequential, there are a couple of nice side-stories tied to some of them one of which involving the 'loveable' Johnny from the original. The side quests you do, and the choices you make in them, also have a direct impact on the dresses Cloud and the girls wear in Wall Market, which dialogue you see the night before making the climb to the Shinra building, and even who joins you in the final boss battle. Wall Market itself also has branching side quests so you won't be able to do all of them in one playthrough. It's also rewarding to see random NPCs treat you differently as you complete more of the sidequests.
While playing the game you can also find Music CDs which can be used to change the music on various jukeboxes around the world. These CDs feature remixes of most of the original soundtrack as well as a couple of new additions. Most of them are hard to miss though.
In terms of minigames, you can play Darts at the Seventh Heaven bar, participate in Squat and Pull-Up challenges at the gym in Wall Market, and Whack-a-Box in the Sector 5 slums. None of them are particularly in-depth (or overly challenging), but they offer some unique accessories as rewards so are worth spending 30 minutes or so on.
Besides side quests and minigames, the rest of the optional content comes in the form of the "New Game+" hard difficulty. This difficulty among other things does not allow item usage, makes enemies stronger with more attacks, and benches near vending machines will only restore HP to full, the only way to recover MP is by battling. Completing chapters and defeating bosses in Hard Mode grants manuscripts which grant 10 SP to a character, once all of the game has been cleared on Hard Mode each character will be able to fully unlock the traits on all their weapons. This leads into the two "super bosses" accessible only via the combat training system - a monster gauntlet ending in a Malboro encounter, and Summon gauntlet against Shiva, Fat Chocobo, Leviathan, Bahamut & Ifrit and ending with a fight against the super-mech Pride & Joy which is a prototype of the Proud Clod from the original game.
There's also a Battle Colosseum in Wall Market that is used to acquire the Level 2 limit breaks for each character.
Story: Peaks and Valleys
!!! SPOILER WARNING AGAIN !!!
(SPOILER)When SQEX announced that Part One of VIIR would cover just the plot of Midgar, I wasn't entirely sold on the idea. While I was down with the idea of fleshing out some of the events that happened in Midgar, I felt that they would need to put in a lot of filler to pad out the playtime. Sadly, I wasn't entirely wrong in the expectation - for the most part the adventure follows the high-level main beats of the original story but a lot of additional narrative has been placed in VIIR. At times these additions work really well to develop the world and characters, but at other points the flow feels off.
In the original there was maybe a brief 15 minute break between the bombing of Reactor 1 and starting the train ride for the Reactor 5 mission. However, in VIIR the inbetween is substantially larger, involving exploring the Sector 7 slums, then heading topside with Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie (complete with a motorcycle chase scene that goes on a little too long) to steal from a Shinra warehouse, then parachuting back down to Sector 7, before being attacked by the Arbiters of Fate, only THEN moving on to the train scene. But even after the train scene there's another dungeon crawl between the train tunnels and Reactor 5. By the time I reached Reactor 5 I was actually relieved to be there, I think the filler inbetween went on for far too long. The Sector 7 section really fleshed out the slums, and the adventure topside with Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie really developed them as characters and also saw Cloud's icy persona beginning to melt toward them a bit. This was all great, apart from the introduction of Roche who was fought twice in this section and then never seen for the rest of the game. However, the underplate section between Sector 6 and Reactor 5 felt like pure padding with only an occassional bit of dialogue about how the slums are lit at night, and how Tifa was having reservations, making it have any purpose. This could easily have been done in a cutscene.
Thankfully the flow between Reactor 5 and Don Corneo's mansion is a lot smoother. While there is also padding here, it really serves to develop Aerith more as a character and show Cloud's defensive walls being chipped away at by her playful poking. The playground scene was heartwarming to see in modern graphics. Wall Market itself was simply fantastic. The campness and gaudiness was dialled up to 11, and the reimagined Honey Bee Inn section was a spectacle to behold that had me grinning from ear to ear the whole time. Arguably the Don Corneo Colosseum section could have been cut, but the voice acting and dialogue in the colosseum made the experience entertaining.
I really liked that the Train Graveyard had its own mini-story where one of the random encounter mobs from the original, Eligor, was fleshed out to be a malicious spirit that had trapped the souls of lost children within the graveyard. The whole Train Graveyard section felt like a mini horror game. However, in retrospect I feel like this could have made for a really interesting and detailed sidequest in Chapter 3 or Chapter 15 (assuming that it wouldn't have been destroyed by the Sector 7 plate being dropped) as coming at a time when Cloud and Tifa are rushing back to Sector 7 to try and prevent Shinra from dropping the plate, it seems like an odd distraction - an enjoyable self-contained experience, but a bit out of place in the overall structure.
The whole Plate dropping section was even more of a gut punch than I expected. Spending so much time with Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie in the earlier chapters made them much more endearing as characters than in the original. It was interesting to see them show Reno and Rude hesitating about the plan to drop the plate, even questioning it at times but ultimately going along with it because if they didn't, someone else at Shinra would - a nice foreshadowing. The climb up from the Sector 5 slums to the upper plate was also every well done this time, with a lot of fitting dialogue as Tifa and Barret come to terms with what has happened and I felt this was a really nice touch and the boss fight with Heligunner (renamed Valkyrie in this) was really a cinematic spectacle to behold.
Sephiroth appears at various points throughout the story (more so in the earlier and later chapters, he disappears for much of the middle portion), which I'm sure is going to be divisive as he is substantially more in the players face now than he was in the original...
The Ending
!!! BIG TIME SPOILERS !!!
(SPOILER)Unfortunately, the biggest changes to the narrative come in the Shinra Building and I expect this will be incredibly devisive among fans. At the beginning you are forced to go in through the parking garage, but once that's cleared out you get given the choice of taking the elevator or using the stairs. The stairs option is just as well done as the original and takes nearly 14 minutes to climb all 59 floors, complete with hilarious banter, followed by a forced 1 minute of downtime at the top as the trio get their breath back. From this point on though, things start to get really weird. The group goes through a walkthrough museum of the Shinra Electric Power Company, which features an almost straight out of FINAL FANTASY X scene with a CGI short movie about the Cetra, the Promised Land, and Shinra's aspirations quickly followed by a glitch showing Sephiroth, Meteor, and the destruction of Midgar.
At this point the trio are lead to Mayor Domino's office where it is just casually dropped that the Mayor is the head of Avalanche, and Wedge is still alive. As we progress further into the building a random Shinra guard recognises Cloud and name drops Kunsel from Crisis Core. After beating the failed experiment and freeing Aerith and Red XIII, the group head to Aerith's former "residence" in the building from her childhood days. Yep, there's no being locked up and waking up to find all the guards dead - things are about to change, big time. The goal is for the group to get to the top of the building to be extracted by an Avalanche military helicopter.
We have an extended stay in Hojo's laboratory which serves to introduce Jenova (and an appearance from Sephiroth) in form only, throw in a couple of familiar random encounter enemies from the original game's Shinra building, and basically drill home that Hojo is bad. There's also a fun little nod back to the PHS system from the original game but in general the stay in Hojo's lab feels needlessly dragged out.
The final 2 hours or so are basically namedropping characters and concepts like they are going out of fashion. The Arbiters of Fate are revealed to be Whispers of the planet, who make sure that events transpire as destiny has designed and intervene when anything is causing events to go off course - this is why they have shown up earlier in the game to separate Cloud and Aerith because they shouldn't be spending so much time together, cause Jessie to break her leg so Cloud would have to go on the Reactor 5 bombing mission etc. Basically any time the events in the remake were deviating from the source material, the arbiters put things back on track. Okay...
The group then head up the President's office to find him hanging for dear life from a metal girdle outside the building, no explanation of how that happened. Barret reluctantly saves him and the two have a heated discussion similar to what happened in the original game (before the group was imprisoned), at which point Sephiroth (clone) shows up and kills the President, and then Barret quickly afterward. Cloud, Tifa, Aerith, and Red XIII are then thrown into a battle with Jenova Dreamweaver (must admit the gradual increase to the classic J-E-N-O-V-A battle theme throughout this fight is top notch). Upon successfully vanquishing Jenova, a Whisper revives Barret, with Red explaining that he was not destined to die on this day. Cloud chases after Sephiroth (again, clone), only to see the clone plunge from the top of the Shinra building, Jenova's body in arms, down to the slums below. At this point the Avalance chopper shows up, only to be shot down by a Shinra chopper carrying none other than Rufus, Rude, and Reno.
Much like the original Cloud fights Rufus solo while the rest make their escape back down the building. The elevator boss battle is replaced by a battle with the same boss in the large break room, and we head to the classic highway chase escape sequence. For the most part things play out as expected here, but we are shown that Rufus, for whatever reason, can see the Whispers - but the Turks cannot.
Once at the end of the highway, after defeating Motorball, things quite literally go off the rails. Sephiroth appears, quickly followed by the Whispers trying to prevent Sephiroth (and the group) from leaving Midgar. Sephiroth and Aerith go full on meta and explain that they are standing at Destiny's crossroads. It's been subtly hinted at throughout the game that Aerith knows more about events than she's letting on, and this all but confirms it. The scene then switches to the end of Crisis Core, with Zack about to take on the Shinra Army outside Midgar - Midgar there is also covered in by the Whispers. The scene then cuts back to the group, as Sephiroth cuts tear in reality through the whispers and walks through, telling Cloud he's waiting. Before Cloud can enter, Aerith stops him explaining that if they go through the tear to the other side, and are successful, everything will change, even themselves. It honestly feels a little bit 4th wall breaking and telling fans that from this point onward, the script of the original has well and truly been thrown out.
After passing to the other side, the group end up in an alternate Midgar that is quickly destroyed by the Whispers coalescing into the Whisper Harbinger that looks fairly similar to a Darkside from KHIII. Cloud suddenly goes full on Advent Children and casually starts slicing through debris like it's no big deal, despite being foiled by a steel door in Hojo's laboratory about an hour earlier. Once reunited with Barret and Tifa, the trio fight off a trio of Whispers - one wielding a sword, one wielding a gun arm, and one wielding melee fist weapons. Using Asses says that these Whispers are entities from a future timeline manifesting in the present day to protect the future that gave life to it. Yep, the trio are basically fighting manifestations of themselves from the future.
A few more skirmishes take place with these Whispers we are given flash forwards of events that have not yet happened in this timeline, Aerith's death, Meteor, Red XIII and the ruins of Midgar 500 years into the future. The future that will come to pass if they are vanquished by the Harbinger. The trio of whispers form Whisper Bahamut (because of course Bahamut is involved in this... out of literally nowhere). After successfully vanquishing the Whisper trio and the Harbinger the group end up in a place that seems remarkably similar to the Final World from Kingdom Hearts before Sephiroth comes in to crash the party, absorbing meteor and the Whispers. Some more Advent Children style cutscenes happen, before the final boss battle with OG Edgelord.
Once OG Edgelord falls we are transported to the "Edge of Creation" a location very similar looking to where Cloud Ominslash'ed Sephiroth at the end of the original game. Sephiroth is once again there and asks Cloud to help him defy Destiny, informing him that what lies ahead does not yet exist (again, feeling rather meta). Cloud refuses and the two engage in a fight once again, until Sephiroth eventually disarms him and says it's not time yet. He tells Cloud that there's seven second left until the end, and wonders what he will do with it, before disppearing in classic Sephiroth fashion.
The final cinematic shows Zack, having successfully vanquished all of the Shinra Army outside Midgar (much to his own disbelief) along with a crisp packet that flies past in slow motion, clearly showing us that Stamp the Dog has a much different design on it to the Stamp the Dog we've seen throughout the remake. We then see the Sector 7 slums being rebuilt, the revelation that Biggs is still alive, Marlene sensing her Daddy has returned to the planet. At this point we see the final CGI with the group resolving to go after Sephiroth, and as they walk away, they pass Zack dragging Cloud to Midgar in the other timeline and both Zack and Aerith seem to sense each other, before the ending title card "The Unknown Journey Will Continue" is shown.
So, firstly, what actual smurf?
While on the one hand I'm kind of excited to see where they go with this, and the possibilities that basically throwing the existing timeline out the window provides - maybe Aerith won't die, maybe someone else will die instead, maybe there's a bigger villain out there than Sephiroth... so many questions...
However, at the same time Nomura doesn't exactly have the strongest of track records when dealing with concepts such as multiple timelines, defying fate and destiny etc. The narrative of Kingdom Hearts (as much as I love those games) became an absolute dumpster fire, as fans we embraced the dumpster fire, but there's no denying that it was hardly the best story telling. We heard so much about his ambitions for Versus XIII as well. And that's without even touching on the plot of Advent Children which was basically a sordid excuse to bring Sephiroth back for (at the time) cutting edge visual fight between him and Cloud.
We'll have to wait until the next part to see how this plays out as they really are playing with fire at this point. But I think eventually someone is going to need to sit down with Nomura, Nojima, and Toriyama and be like - No-more-a.
Conclusion: TL;DR
FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE is for the most part a wonderful modern retelling of the Midgar section of the original game. It fleshes all of the characters out in ways that feel true to their original designs and adds some depth to areas briefly glossed over in the original. The combat system makes the majority of battles fun and engaging. The vast majority of Midgar is a visual treat to explore that, for the most part, holds onto the essence of the original game. Despite being a fun nostalgia trip, I do wonder whether this remake will capture the hearts of a generation in quite the same way the original managed.
It came very close to a perfect reimagining but due to some of the changes and blunders along the way, particularly an off the rails final act, are likely going to prove extremely divisive among fans for years to come. Either way, it's a great return to form.
Miscellany: Random Thoughts
- I loved the little throwbacks to the original game that weren't directly reproduced 1:1
- Aerith asking Cloud if he's "ready to mosey" and him replying "Let's"
- The battle victory poses from the original game being used in the Colosseum and VR training
- I'm a bit sad we never got to go down into the base between Seventh Heaven.
- Roche feels like a completely pointless character at the moment who could easily be replaced with a generic boss enemy. I'm guessing he'll have a role to play in the next part(s).
- The controls for the motorbike sections were awful.
- I hope we see if Leslie manages to re-unite with his lost wife.
- The voice acting was mostly on point.
- I'll probably drop more random observations in this thread at some point.
Also, gee this game must be so confusing for someone who has never played FFVII before, or even for FFVII players who never touched anything to do with compilation. In the final acts, so many things are just casually dropped in with no explanation.
- It's never explained what Jenova is.
- It's never explained what Sephiroth's motivations are.
- In the early flash backs the identity of the corpse Tifa is crying over is never actually revealed and what caused them to die.
- It's never explained that the cloaked figures with number tattoos are failed Sephiroth clones.
- It's never explained who Kunsel is.
- It's never actually explained who Zack is, heck his name is never even said and you'd only know it's Zack if you have subtitles turned on.
- It's never explained why Cloud keeps having the flashbacks.
Over to you
So once you've finished the Remake, or if you have no intention of playing it and just read this through anyway, I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
(Also if you really read this far, you're a legend)
