Post Script

The implications of remaking a story about the political power of stories

Judged as an anti-capitalist fable, the original Final Fantasy VII is too obvious to convince. Released in the same year as the Kyoto Protocols, it reflects both the ecological and social anxieties of its era in a spellbinding but superficial way. The heads of Shinra Corporation are a clownishly evil bunch, cackling at their own dastardliness and filled with contempt for the little people below. While the painted urban backdrops suggest a more nuanced analysis – wandering amongst them, you may feel as though you’re trapped in a machine that has taken on a life of its own – your attention is drawn to these gloating arch-villains rather than the hierarchies of exploitation that enable them. Instead of a structural critique, the story of Midgar thus becomes an exercise in beheading the hydra.

There are times, however, when the game invites a little more thought. One of your companions on the train during the opening reactor assaults is a nameless Shinra manager, who complains about sharing the car with “riff raff” and gets into an argument with Barret over giving up his seat. If a character like President Shinra is the kind of cartoon villain you find on propaganda posters, the manager represents the lowgrade I’ve-got-mine acquiescence to an unjust world that, when multiplied by a few million, offers a more tangible obstacle to change.

Remake expands the manager’s scene, and makes this arrogant pencil-pusher a more sympathetic and difficult figure. In the retelling, we find him gossiping with two other Shinra employees about Avalanche’s tactics. He subsequently stands up to the enormous Barret – a man who, let’s not forget, has a Gatling gun for a hand – arguing that Shinra is a benevolent organisation. “We will not submit to intimidation or violence, but work together for peace and prosperity,” the man stutters. “That is how civilised people change the world!” With Barret looming intimidatingly over him, he adds: “It’s what we believe. We all have to follow our conscience, don’t we?”

The remake is most successful at justifying its own existence when it develops such interactions and themes, rather than just treating this best-known of stories to a costly audiovisual upgrade. Able to portray dozens of chatty NPCs (whose conversations now unfold without your intervention) rather than the scattered, inert bystanders we met in the 1997 game, it presents a more elaborate, if still familiar, vision of capitalist society – and especially of how people cling to a malign reality when they’re taught that there’s no alternative. It also explores how those with the ability to resist authority might be forced to hurt their fellow oppressed, both directly and indirectly, in the name of a kinder tomorrow.

After Avalanche bombs the first Mako reactor, you’re turned out into streets filled with hurt, desperate citizens, trying to reach loved ones through burning wreckage. You’ll overhear people asking one another who would do such awful things. It’s easier to brush this off when it comes from the affluent, but Avalanche’s efforts to make Shinra abandon Mako usage also affect those on the breadline. The second reactor attack involves a maze puzzle where you must deactivate massive lamps on Midgar’s underside to power up an elevator – turning off the daylight for the poor in their shacks beneath. It’s common to find crowds of workers in the slums gathered around community broadcast screens, lamenting the cost of Avalanche’s adventures to their livelihoods.

The core cast aren’t oblivious to these repercussions. For all her bouncy manner, Jessie is consumed by remorse about the collateral damage from her bombs. Tifa, who runs a bar when she’s not high-kicking robots, is dubious throughout about the ethics of direct action, only accompanying you on the second reactor raid when circumstances leave her with no other option. Barret’s binary morality, however, simply cannot process the fact that civilians might take issue with Avalanche’s methods. He is outraged, later in the game, by the suggestion that Midgar’s citizens are knowingly complicit in the planetary endgame that is unchecked Mako extraction. The character least moved by the mounting fallout is Cloud, the corporate thug turned mercenary, whose ruthlessness scares his eco-warrior allies at times. But even Cloud gets drawn into the discussion, arguing with Barret about the benefits of Shinra’s rule during a tour of a company museum towards the end of the game.

These are complexities the overblown finale kicks to the curb. And yet there is a resonance between the concept of a dystopia propped up by the anxious consent of the many and an ending that, without giving too much away, casts the most demanding fans as antagonists – guardians of the canon who see the events of the original game as sacred, and are fearful of alteration even when it might be for the better. Final Fantasy VII Remake isn’t just a story about efforts to revolutionise a miserable world. In dramatising the challenges and frustrations of remaking such a cherished game, it also links that need for revolution to the retelling – and perhaps, reworking – of such stories. Only belatedly does it occur to Barret that blowing up Shinra’s reactors means little while the company controls the overarching narrative, and is able to portray Avalanche as terrorists. Social change isn’t just about disruption, after all; it’s about weaving a more hopeful tale than the one you’re given.

Presents a more elaborate, if still familiar, vision of capitalist society – and of how people cling to a malign reality