Final Fantasy 7 Remake Review and Impressions (April 10, 2020)

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2020 – The Year of the Remake! 

For videogames coming out in Q1 2020, this is the year of the remakes. We certainly haven’t seen any indie titles and we’re trying to look for other games, but no matter where we search we can’t help but find remake after remake after remake popping up.

To put this in perspective, recent AAA video games that have come out this year include Resident Evil 3 (2020), a remake of the game Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (1999), and Doom Eternal (2020), a remake (and reboot, I suppose) of the game Doom II: Hell on Earth (1994).

Later this month we have Trails of Mana (2020), a remake of the game Trails of Mana (1995). And then there’s this game. In just a few months the majority of AAA video game releases are remakes! Just like how Disney is making remakes of their older titles too.

Nostalgia is probably a business team’s best friend. 

Here’s our review of Final Fantasy VII, no spoilers of this game or the original!

What we enjoyed from FF7 Remake

  • It’s a beautiful game, the graphics are amazing and it is a step over Final Fantasy 15. You can tell the developers have a mastery over the PS4.
  • They do try to keep true to the source material from the original Final Fantasy VII. The developers of course take some liberties with character designs, but you can tell they tried to keep true to how characters looked in the original title.
  • Now you can see all your favorite characters (from the beginning to when you leave Midgar at least) fully fleshed out and in 4K detail with anti-aliasing and no janky, blocky messes. Still, though the original does have ugly-looking characters, it still has some old-school charm to it. 
  • The gameplay draws inspiration from Final Fantasy 15, but makes major improvements. It’s a real-time battle system where you mash square to attack, and you can pause to select spells, items, limit breaks, or switch characters. They kept it sweet and simple. 
  • They generally keep the materia system from the original title. You can buy or find materia that you can equip to your character’s weapons or bracelet, and these materia contain a variety of spells that you can learn. With respect to the gameplay, the developers implement many quality of life improvements so that it doesn’t play like an old game.
  • It does have a classic difficulty mode that can be selected. There is a hard mode difficulty option, but unfortunately that is only unlocked after beating the game on any difficulty mode once. But, the developers implemented it that way on purpose because it seems that hard mode is really meant to be played on a new game plus.
  • The game has a chapter select, but only after unlocking new game plus mode. Chapter lengths can vary significantly from chapter-to-chapter, depending on the chapter itself and how many cutscenes or walking sections it has, some in-between chapters are 30 minutes each, some final chapters are 2-3 hours each. 
  • There are 26 sidequests, a maximum of 24 of which can be completed in the first playthrough. Unfortunately, most of these sidequests are new content and are filler content like how sidequests were handled in Final Fantasy 15. In other words, you talk to someone, exterminate a monster, and then talk to that person again. On the plus side, it is nice that all lines are voiced now, including sidequest content, but really, the sidequests are just padding and filler akin to Final Fantasy 15’s sidequests. 
  • The way FF7 Remake handles sidequest is you have about 3-4 chapters in the game where you can freely explore a city and talk to NPCs before leaving, so the game puts all the sidequests in those kinds of chapters. Unfortunately though, that does mean the sidequests aren’t distributed well in the game.
  • In main dungeons you’re forced to keep going on, and when you reach a relaxing area in a city, you’ll want to do all the available sidequests at once or you’ll miss them until you get the new game plus feature of chapter select. 

What we DO NOT enjoy from FF7 Remake

  • The game only has the beginning of the game to where you leave Midgar, which I’d estimate to be under a quarter of the original game length. Unless you read reviews, there’s clearly no indication of this from the game cover alone. The game was marketed adamantly as “Final Fantasy VII Remake” without any subtitle to purposely confuse people who don’t read/watch reviews into thinking that the game is a remake of the entire original Final Fantasy VII.
  • There will definitely be people who will buy the game expecting a full remake that will be disappointed. For those of you in favor of Square Enix’s marketing strategies and think we’re being overly-harsh, let me pose a simple question: why couldn’t they put a “Part 1” or something similar as a subtitle on the cover of the game? 
  • If the game was announced in production from 2015 or earlier and only now it released, how long do you think the other parts will take? I don’t think it’d be finished for decades or even ever, sadly. 
  • If you know the plot of the original game, you know that there isn’t too much story from the beginning of the game to the point where you leave Midgar. Yet, this game has a main story of about 20 hours, maybe 30 with all the sidequests. How did that happen? Unfortunately, the game uses a lot of padding and filler content not present in the original.
  • Now, does a remake really need to be a one-to-one remake of the original game? Of course not, I’m sure artistic liberties and compromises must be made due to changing cultures and technology. But this game really has a LOT of filler that does flesh out side characters such as Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie, and it also fleshes out the city of Midgar, which are sometimes positives, but in the grand scheme of the overarching plot, isn’t really necessary. 
  • For example, what was the point of adding the character “Roche” in? I really don’t think there was any point to that and I don’t think Roche will add to the overarching storyline in any meaningful way. I can understand adding a character like Zack in for instance, but why just add new characters for no reason? 
  • The game pads everything by forcing lengthy linear segments where you need to walk slowly for a long period of time and listen to dialogue. The gameplay has to take a back seat because the developers want to put more emphasis on world-building and narrative. What is the point of all the ghosts/spirits (“whispers”) that we keep seeing? I really don’t think that the whispers add anything useful to the plot, the plot of the original game was more than sufficient and the addition of whispers is clearly not an avenue to facilitate explaining the plot of the original game. 
  • Again, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but for us, we wouldn’t actually want to go through FF VII Remake again because it is a slog. Sure, the original Final Fantasy VII has a ton of cutscenes, but it separates the cutscenes and gameplay clearly. You can choose in the original game if you want to actually speak to every single NPC in the game, or if you just want to run through the cities and dungeons.
  • In the remake, you’re forced to listen to all the extra narrative unless you want to skip the whole cutscene. For example, you can now see lengthy cutscenes of the residents of the slums and you can see side characters help them escape a calamity. But why not just make more of the original game instead of padding out the scenes to such an extent? 
  • Playing Final Fantasy VII Remake makes us actually want to just play the original again and we believe we’d have a more fun time doing so. ALL of us who grew up on these games loved watching the FMV cutscenes, and we all wished that games would look like the FMVs, but in real-time. Well, now that day is upon us, but the game has lost a lot of its charm from the original title. Doesn’t feel as fun as it used to. As explained earlier, gameplay has really taken a backseat to focus on an epic narrative, it’s clearly going to be a franchise that will be milked for years to come
  • We explained earlier that the graphics are amazing, but I wouldn’t say the art design is. Most of the game from the beginning to the end of Midgar is just exploring giant power plants. A lot of the dungeons are just repetitive mechanical corridors and pathways.
  • Yes, there are some exceptional environments such as the church which has an amazing design and is vibrantly coloured, but otherwise a lot of the paths just look the same, it’s kind of bland.
  • The rubble that we passed looks extremely realistic, is a technological marvel, and probably took a group of developers years of work and tens of thousands of dollars, but we’re all just going to walk past it without a second glance.
  • The atmosphere of Final Fantasy VII is supposed to be dreary, especially Midgar, but now you don’t have the rest of the game to explore such as the world or the other cities, with only Midgar in this remake, the game is just bland compared to how mysterious and vibrant the whole world in the original game was. 
  • Since the game ends at the point where the protagonists are leaving Midgar, there are many characters and plot-threads left out until you buy the next game. Which begs the question, if the developers didn’t pad out the game so much, maybe they could’ve used those resources instead to make the game go further than just leaving Midgar? Seems like internal politics and poor budgeting.
  • The most interesting thing is that the original Final Fantasy VII was a game that did have to be rushed for release (Final Fantasy VII even gutted Xenogears), yet it can still hold up just fine despite many imperfections, glitches, and little goofs (and a really rushed ending!). 
  • Final Fantasy VII Remake may have the opposite problem, trying too much to polish and add things that didn’t exist in the original. Again, we don’t necessarily believe that all remakes need to be one-to-one, but we don’t really understand the mentality of adding so much fluff and padding to the game?
  • Contrast the Final Fantasy VII Remake to the Trails of Mana remake that will come out later this month. Trails of Mana puts amazing graphics and gameplay over the same world without excessive padding or adding fluff, only improvements to what had existed before. 
  • Since the game only goes up to Midgar, you won’t see a lot of party members. The party members in all sections of the game are specified; although you have 4 characters (Cloud, Tifa, Aerith and Barret), you’ll only have 2 or 3 for every few chapters of the game, you can’t actually switch the party characters around. Red XIII appears, but only as a guest character participating in battles with automatic AI, not an actual party member you can control or adjust equipment on. 
  • The remake does have its share of glitches that can be reproduced on the date of release! One that everybody can have is a vent you crawl in near the end of the game, if you choose to examine one of the grates in the vents to see a cutscene of the people in the room talking below (it’s the second grating you find), the game freezes and you can’t go back to crawling through the vents. You need to reset and reload the last save point, for me it was an autosave from half an hour earlier. How could the developers be so incompetent to let this happen? What are their QA testers doing? If I was hired as a QA tester, I’d have explored and found that reproducible softlock easily.
  • Everybody who has played the game has found that bug and has to reset, and what’s worse is you can’t see the cutscene dialog from examining that grate, you need to just move forward and miss that piece of content. What, you don’t believe that the glitch is that bad? See here and here for just a few examples of people reproducing the bug.

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