Final Fantasy VII Remake Review - 4/5

Weeks later and sixty-two hours of gameplay and I have finally completed my first playthrough of the Final Fantasy VII Remake and I'm ready to talk about it. I am going to try to avoid spoilers as much as possible but it will be necessary to talk about some of the concepts that come up with the story. So lets kick this off.

The Good

To start off this game looks and feels fantastic. The visuals are stunning at times. While I am certain it would look better on a high end engine or the PS4 Pro I played it on a PS4 slim and there was a decent amount of texture-pop in and a few muddy textures but overall the visuals were incredible, in particular the lighting is far and away better than pretty much anything I have ever seen in a game before. Square Enix had an entire team dedicated just to designing the lighting of this game and it shows. Particularly at night the various light-sources and colors really give each environment a distinct and impressive feel. Far more than the original FFVII the remake really makes each area of the city and slums of Midgar look unique and it is not hard to tell what sector you are in just by the structures and colors around you. Similarly the sound-track is exceptionally well done with many tracks being both new and familiar. In particular the first time Aerith's theme played in the Sector 5 Church I was just blown away and immediately transported by nostalgia back twenty-three years to the first time I ever played a Final Fantasy game way back on the original Playstation.

The combat system is also far more in-depth and engaging than I was expecting. I definitely enjoyed the combat in the FFVII remake more than the combat systems in any other modern Final Fantasy game, including XV. Positioning, the elements of equipped materia, weapon and spell choices, buffs and debuffs there is an enormous amount of depth here. If you want to play on Normal or Easy and take some time to grind a few levels when the opportunity presents itself it is not that hard to just bash through with relatively little difficulty but the system definitely rewards more care and consideration, especially playing through again on Hard difficulty.

The characters, dialogue and voice acting are also absolutely superb. In particular some of the new characters like Roche were notable standouts and even existing characters like Biggs and Jessie had much more development than I was expecting and I found myself seriously invested in them and emotionally moved when bad things happened to them. Many of the cut-scenes and dialogue segments were very well done and engaging, moving the story forward and giving the player critical information without engaging in clunky or boring exposition dumps.

The Bad

Despite immensely enjoying the experience of the Final Fantasy VII Remake and being hugely biased by nostalgia I have to bring up some of the less great details of the game. First and foremost the game definitely suffers from feeling like a sixty-hour long Tutorial mission because really, that is exactly what it is. In the original Final Fantasy VII the entire Midgar sequence was the first four to seven hours of the game constituting around five to ten percent of the total game. Midgar was essentially just the tutorial missions introducing the character to the combat system, bosses, materia, shopping, party-selection and so on. The game really gets into a swing shortly after the player leaves Midgar. Given that this first installment of the remake entirely takes place in Midgar it is little surprise that the entire thing feels somewhat narrow and constricted. The player bounces from chapter to chapter in a slightly janky way only somewhat exacerbated by the rather obvious padding that stretches certain segments of the game out. When I was heading into the ending and going into the Shinra building I expected I was close to the very end of the game and was surprised that I still had hours and three full chapters still to go. The party-members available to the player are severely limited by what chapter you are in and it is not until close to the end of the game that it opens up and provides return access to several of the town areas of the game to finish exploring, complete quests and visit the shops at will.

Likely because the game focuses entirely on Midgar the character of Red XIII, despite being introduced and joining the party, does not serve as a playable character and cannot have his equipment or materia changed. In the original Red XIII was obtained as a character shortly before leaving Midgar and is only introduced in the next-to-last chapter of the remake and so I imagine the developers decided there was not enough time left in the story to present Red XIII as a complete character and are saving him to become playable in the next installment. Cait Sith also has a single momentary cameo that I am sure confused many players who have not played the original game.

The Ugly 

Now we need to discuss the ugly, or perhaps more aptly, the things about the game that concern me. First and foremost the plot of the remake takes some notable divergences from the story of the original FFVII. The game introduces these "fate whispers" that crop up repeatedly during the story and introduces the concept of the characters having to resist the pull of a fated path ordained by the planet. Though the plot largely follows the story-beats of the original fairly closely early on it was about two-thirds into the game when the players are rushing to oppose Shinra at the Sector 7 Pillar that I began to see glimpses of a diverging plot. Impactful character deaths from the original were substantially changed, robbing Chapter 12 of a good chunk of the emotional impact it could have had, only worsened by the ending cut-scenes that further diverged the events of Chapter 12 from the original story. In particular the various themes and plot-threads introduced in the ending of the remake seem to suggest that the remake is not actually a retread of the original plot but rather a contiguous alternate reality where the main characters may be given the opportunity to change the events of the original plot and timeline. Characters who died in the original are shown to be alive, and details about Jenova and Sephiroth as well as indications of events at the Niflheim reactor are all revealed or hinted at in this game where in the original those details were not shown until considerably later in the game. Zack makes an appearance in a cut-scene clipped almost directly from Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core from the PSP, which was nice to see but was also probably somewhat confounding to non-veterans of the series. Because of the potential for substantial alterations to the plot as a result of this introduced concept of defying fate it gives me some cause for concern that Square Enix might undermine more of the emotional and daring plot points of the original as they did with the Sector 7 Pillar scene. It might even come to pass that the remake undoes the greatest plot twist in gaming history, the death of Aerith and that would not be a good decision in my opinion.

In addition to the issues with the plot changes it is also necessary to consider the timeline for the completion of this project and its story. Years of development time and a full price game release covers about five to ten percent of the original Final Fantasy VII storyline, how many installments will it take to complete this remake and how long will it take them to come out? We just do not know and it does not seem as if Square Enix even has a concrete timeline or roadmap but may well be making this up as they go along. I was expecting two to three installments but that seems on the light side if the project continues at this pace, we may be looking at four to five installments and with an average triple A game development time of around two years we could be looking at the better part of a decade to see the rest of this story come out. I hope the wait and price is ultimately worth it and the remake does not stray too far from the established plot and character development. I am interested in seeing what new content Square Enix works in or maybe seeing a new twist on the original plot but there is every possibility such changes will make the plot worse and not better, and undermine the maturity and depth of the original story rather than build on it. Only time will tell but I am still willing to give this project more of my time and money as it comes along.

In Conclusion 

The Final Fantasy VII Remake is easily the best game released by Square Enix since Final Fantasy IX in my opinion. Despite it's issues I had a blast playing it and will certainly continue to dabble with it for months to come and I may even dare to tackle a Hard Difficulty completion if I get to feeling a bit masochistic. As is I can certainly see why this game is getting very high ratings from critics and fans alike, it deserves them. Never before has a project like this been attempted by the gaming industry and it is both daring and brilliant in its execution thus far. I have high hopes that the following installments of the remake will continue to build on the solid foundation that this first release has established. It is not exactly a perfect game but it is very good and I would easily rate this experience as a four out of five star product, and I can certainly see validity in rating it higher. If you are a fan of the Final Fantasy series or someone who has always wondered what the fuss is about I strongly recommend you pick up a copy of this game and experience it for yourself.