Final Fantasy VII Remake - Review

At around 41 hours of gameplay and having watched through the entirety of the credits, I realized last night that I had played through a masterpiece. I had played through the first part of Final Fantasy VII Remake.

I can throw in the towel at once and just straight up admit that I don't have the linguistical prowess to do this game justice in any kind of review. I simply don't have the words to adequately convey in what ways this game affected me and the feelings I felt throughout.

But I am going to damn well give it a good try. Let's start out with quoting myself (like all good writers) from my previous post, when I had only played a few hours of the game and gave it my first, careful thoughts.

"...a few hours into the game and I have barely anything to complain about. So far it is everything I hoped for and it gives me all of the nostalgia from the original while also infusing it with a fresh and new feeling. I am hoping the manage to keep it this good throughout, because then I am envious at myself for the absolutely amazing journey that lies ahead of me."

I doubt I have ever been more correct about anything in my life, and I couldn't be happier about it. The journey was in fact so amazing, I can't even be sad about the fact that I have completed it. I am just happy. So happy that I got to know these people, got to spend some time with them. And if I am lucky, in a not so distant future I might get to meet them again.

Did I even know these people before? Biggs, Wedge, Jesse. Aerith, Tifa, Barret. I have played through the original FFVII two times and played parts of it a couple of times more. I've always felt like I knew most of the game thoroughly. I thought I had a clear idea of who these characters were, whom I liked and whom I didn't so much. I realized as I played through this game though that not only did I not have a clue who they really were, I didn't actually like most of them that much before. For some reason I never could stand Tifa. Aerith was bearable. Jesse, Biggs and Wedge were barely in the original game enough for me to start caring about them. In fact this goes for pretty much every character in the original game, they're all kind of vague and never fleshed out enough for me to feel like I had a good sense of what kind of people they were. 

The first amazing thing the remake does is smack me over my head and go "look at them. LOOK AT THEM! They are great people! They are people you want to know. They are people you are glad you got to know. They are people that you will miss...". 

The remake takes the original game and decides to flesh out everything about it. When I first had daydreams about a remake of FFVII, many many years ago, I couldn't even really think of what I wanted them to "remake". The graphics maybe? But surely the story and gameplay are perfect the way they are? I realize now I was wrong. There is in fact a whole bunch of things about the original that was worth putting more time into, but I could've never thought that what they did to the characters would so fundamentally change the way I felt about them.

I love them all now. I love Tifa, and Aerith, Barret and Jesse and all of the others. They are multifaceted people with agency, camaraderie and humour. They will make you laugh out loud and cry into a pillow, they will make you want to hear their thoughts and make you wish they would stay around longer.

Graphically the game is far from perfect. I found many oddly low rendered objects and there were several times when I wondered if I was playing on a ps2 or a ps4. It felt weird because on the one hand there was great detail and world-building put into this game and on the other hand you could run past an object that almost looked like it didn't belong in the game because the graphics were all wrong. Some parts felt a bit rushed, but contradictively in the end the game still managed to make me feel like everything had been given the utmost care and love. I attribute that to atmosphere and probably a hefty does of nostalgia. How amazing isn't it to see and be in the locations of the game you played 20 years ago, but in completely reimagined and new graphics? 

Odd low resolutions aside, and I don't even care about them, they managed so incredibly well with keeping the feeling of Midgar, and just like with the characters they even enhanced, expanded and evolved the city. Running through it you can almost smell the dust and rust, you can feel the pressure of the plates above you. The first time I swung the camera around and looked up on the upper plate hanging over my head I was completely awe-struck. This was a feeling the original game never managed to convey to me, though to its credit it did incredibly well with the graphics at its disposal (I mentioned this in my previous post as well).

Cloud and his merry band of rag tags look great, I am absolutely on board with all the character designs which are very close to the originals anyway. I decided to go with Japanese voice acting and thought it worked great for all the characters in the game.

Overall I am completely blown away by how well they have walked the precise and fine line regarding the whole "what to change and what to keep". Hats off! I think the audio and music is an area that shows this perfectly, where they have opted to keep almost all of the original soundtrack basically intact, while letting the re-arrangements be optional jukebox tracks. Every single track that came on, with one exception, gave me a huge smile on my face. They did an absolutely amazing job with making the original soundtrack sound perfectly nostalgic and perfectly new at the same time. I've got confirmation that the soundtrack simply is timeless.

Moving on to something they went on to change quite a bit instead, the combat system. As I already mentioned in the previous post, I had my trepidations especially regarding the changes made to the combat system as I am personally quite a big fan of the FFVII ATB system. A few hours into the remake however and I wouldn't want the combat to run any other way. I can see their vision and idea that the original ATB system just wouldn't work as well with the modern concept and I think they are absolutely correct. The new system which is more active and action filled works so well and is so much fun. I almost wish this game had random encounters so I could just run in circles and mess things up.

The story too has been changed to contain so much more of everything. It almost gives me vertigo thinking about it. I read somewhere that the original Midgar section takes about 7-8 hours to complete. If this remake is any indication of the work going into the rest of the game, we're looking at a story and game time enhancing at the magnitude of five times. If the original game then takes about 75-80 hours to complete, does that mean the finished remake will take around 400 hours to complete? I swoon at the thought of it. But having played through this remake I definitely don't hold it to be impossible.

I end up not disliking any of the story changes they have done. They're barely even changes, the story keeps very closely to the original but fleshes it out with side quests and new side characters. I love it all because in the end I just want more of everything that is this world. I hope we haven't seen the last of Leslie for instance (apparently he is part of a side-story manga?)! And again, the feeling of having so many memories, and so much nostalgia for a thing and then getting to relive it in a new and fascinating way just can not be put into words. It has to be experienced. I doubt any other media can have this effect either. A movie remake or a re-telling of a good book just couldn't do what Resident Evil Remake or FFVII Remake has done.

Playing through the game on normal I never felt it was too hard or too easy. It was exactly tuned to fit me. And that can actually be said for the entire game. Is it perfect? Probably not. Am I biased and affected by nostalgia? Probably. But I can't recollect the last time I felt so strongly that this is a game made for me. I am the exact target group for FFVII Remake. Every corner I turn, every line Barret says, every fight I get into I just feel yes, yes, yes! This is exactly what I wanted FFVII Remake to be, even though I never even knew it myself. SquareEnix have managed to open up my brain and pick out every single element required to make a game that resonates so hard with me I can feel my bones vibrating.

My biggest issue here is that I can't objectively tell whether this is actually a good game or not. I am so ensnared into the nostalgia of the original game that it is impossible for me to say if these characters and this story will mean anything to anyone who doesn't have any previous history with it. I can't even tell if SquareEnix has actually tried to make it into a game that anyone would enjoy or if this is a treat just for the fans. But that's ok, right? I think we deserve it.

"Here, we made this for you. We know you have been waiting for a very long time and we hope you will enjoy it".

Oh I did SquareEnix, I did. And I will be eternally grateful to you for the experience that is FFVII Remake.