I'm worried (Spoilers)

[Jarvio]

As I've put 'spoilers' in the title, hopefully it's ok for me not to use spoiler tags?

Anyway, as the title suggests, I'm worried.

Worried about what? The future of this remake.

The ending, with all the changing fate stuff, makes me really worried that they won't follow the game's original story. Do you think they will follow it, or do you think they won't?

I was so hyped to see the events of Corel Prison, Cosmo Canyon caves, Temple of the Ancients, well you get the picture.

Now I am worried that they are just throwing everything out the window.

It really frustrates me. People wanted a remake. But they have to go and complicate things don't they?

Honestly, they could just remake the story in a faithful way, while adding new stuff IN ADDITION to all this. Just like part 1 did, and part 1 was doing absolutely fine until the ending got me worried.

There is absolutely no point to having Zack back. They don't need to complicate this. But now I'm worried that they've screwed the whole thing up, and we'll never get to see the original events of FFVII remade.

Am I worrying for nothing? Or do you think they will indeed axe a load of stuff?

[maybee]

Don't think you are the only one that's worried here. Some fans are okay with it at the moment though they could be possibly be going through what's called a Honeymoon phase.

[Jarvio]

Don't think you are the only one that's worried here. Some fans are okay with it at the moment though they could be possibly be going through what's called a Honeymoon phase.

Yep I've read lots of worries, honestly if we don't get to see this game remade properly it will break my heart.

It seems like a no-brainer to me, to just remake the original story but add new stuff as well, that way everyone's happy?

[maybee]

I mean, Square Enix did that with FFIII DS and FFIV twice with PSP and DS. So the company is capable at making a decent remake with some good changes mixed in. However FFVII Remake has Kitase and Nomura at the control station which might explain the creative road this remake is taking. Nomura is responsible for the crazy that is Kingdom Hearts and Kitase has done some "marmite" works too, like the FFXIII series, I believe.


Marmite meaning that you either love it to death or despise it to death.

[Wolf Kanno]

I feel like it's going to pull a Rebuild of Evangelion. It will try to follow the original plot but will eventually go off rails and turn into something new. If the dev team was smart though... they would set up future installments to give the player the option of following the original plot or give them the option to make choices in-game to go in radically different directions. There is a part of me that feels it would be interesting if you could thwart Aerith's death, but now it means Tifa dies instead. Things like that would be neat.

[Fynn]

My take on this is that the original is there, it’s always gonna be there, and I embrace the fact that they’re gonna change stuff. Let them have their way with it. Nothing fruitful of creative comes out of remake culture and in the end all it really does is pander to nostalgia. Hi wil with it. Give us a different take. I’m looking forward to seeing where this new road will take us.

[ham]

I completely agree with Fynn, we have the original well established. Though, I do understand why people are worried but the reaction people are having is amazing. Everyone is so invested into this story and whether you love the direction or hate it, it's this passion I love to see. It's rare to see people react so emotionally to a story (I.E. Game of Thrones ending but that's a different beast altogether).

I'm waiting to see the final product before I cement my thoughts on the remake.

[Shiva95]

I'm a bit worried, but on the other hand, I'm optimistic. Maybe they did this to surprise us. Maybe they will keep the major events, but change the way they happen, just to disturb both the new players and the older ones.

[tony123]

I honestly think them treating the original game like it still happened in the remake games universe was a very poor decision. Just make them entirely separate universes and do what you want with the remake. Fictional universes that try to handle 'time' storylines often turn into an inconherent mess and I totally see that happening with this game series as well.

[Fox]

My interpretation of this is that Square are making clear that this is not going to be a 1:1 remake from now on. And lets be honest, it wasn't 1:1 anyway, it's just that any time important events started to play out in a slightly different way, the whispers would come and correct it.

The visual clues in the end show us that Zack surviving his death in Crisis Core is not in the same timeline as the story we're following. So I firmly believe that he, along with Biggs, Wedge and Jessie are deceased in our story, just like in the OG. But even if 'our' past did change so he survived the Crisis Core ending... the final shot we have of Zack is him carrying Cloud towards the edge of a a cliff overlooking Midgar... which, in the original game is exactly the situation where he was killed. So whichever way you look at it, thinking he's alive and kicking somewhere is not a sure bet at all.

So I really don't think they're trying to mess with events in the story that have already taken place. The whole plot with the whispers is, in my view, more a statement of intent. A way of showing us that things may change going forward, some small some big. Obviously the big one is Aerith's death, and what they've done does open up the possibility that they let her live. I feel fairly confident that the fundamental, critical aspects of the FFVII story will be left in-tact, but the way we hit those plot points may change significantly.

Look at the Honey Bee in sequence, that was a really big deal to include. OK, it's not plot-critical like Aerith summoning Holy is, but it's an example of how there was an important objective to accomplish: 'Put Cloud in a dress.' But the way they did that was completely different to the original. The road to get there featured 4 new characters, a coliseum and a Honey Bee in vastly changed from its original form. And yet, it did exactly what it needed to do. The journey may have been different, but Cloud ended up in a dress and I have yet to hear a single fan of the original complain about it.

This is the kind of approach I'm expecting going forward. The Unknown Journey Will Continue​ - the Journey will be very different than we remember, but we'll still end up at the key destinations along the way.

[Madame Adequate]

There's no reason to think they're going to do everything differently. They know people are there for the nostalgia hits, we saw plenty of that being appealed to. And even though things seem to now be certain to go differently in the end, the party is more or less in the same situation as in the OG at this point - they've left Midgar and are chasing Sephiroth. I expect we're still going to all the same places to do a lot of the same things, but there will be important story beats that change.

[Madame Adequate]

The visual clues in the end show us that Zack surviving his death in Crisis Core is not in the same timeline as the story we're following. So I firmly believe that he, along with Biggs, Wedge and Jessie are deceased in our story, just like in the OG. But even if 'our' past did change to survive the Crisis Core ending... the final shot we have of Zack is him carrying Cloud towards the edge of a a cliff overlooking Midgar... which, in the original game is exactly the situation where he was killed.

Wait, that doesn't make any sense though. They wouldn't show us Zack if they weren't intending to include him in the story we're, like, actually in and experiencing. Same with Biggs waking up, and implying Jessie might have survived. Just from a storytelling perspective it makes no sense.

[Fox]

The visual clues in the end show us that Zack surviving his death in Crisis Core is not in the same timeline as the story we're following. So I firmly believe that he, along with Biggs, Wedge and Jessie are deceased in our story, just like in the OG. But even if 'our' past did change to survive the Crisis Core ending... the final shot we have of Zack is him carrying Cloud towards the edge of a a cliff overlooking Midgar... which, in the original game is exactly the situation where he was killed.

Wait, that doesn't make any sense though. They wouldn't show us Zack if they weren't intending to include him in the story we're, like, actually in and experiencing. Same with Biggs waking up, and implying Jessie might have survived. Just from a storytelling perspective it makes no sense.

Assuming he is still alive in the alternate timeline we saw, I suspect that might be used as a 'what-if' timeline. A way to flash into various events and show us how things might have played out if other decisions were made. I could even seen that being used as a way to keep the original FFVII events more or less in-tact.

"Hey, now we've killed destiny, ANYTHING can happen! But look at this other timeline that shows what happened when Zack lived/the plate didn't fall/Aerith doesn't go to summon holy. Look at how it always ended up with the planet getting destroyed! Guess we better follow the original events after all."

[Fynn]

Ok but this is a Kazushige Nojima script.

[tony123]

I'm really scratching my head as to why they would think it would be necessary for the remake to address the original game at all anyway. We now live in an era where reboots are extremely common and pretty much everyone understands them. They could have just rebooted the story and make certain changes without having to mess with all the stupid time issues and people would have completely understood. I really do kind of question Square's ability to tell stories that are up to the standards of modern times. Perhaps Japan isn't quite as familiar with the reboot culture we have going now as North America and Europe is.