Final Fantasy VII Remake
PS4
Play Final Fantasy VII Remake without having played the original and you’ll probably enjoy it more. The setting, Midgar, is one of gaming’s greatest, if least subtle, social metaphors: a vertical city split between gentrified boulevards and slums quarried from trash heaps hundreds of feet beneath. This is a dystopia fuelled by toxic Mako energy supplied by Shinra, a comically evil megacorp. Beginning in the middle of a raid on a Mako reactor, you take charge of Avalanche, a band of ecowarriors fighting to save an ailing planet. There’s Barret, the group’s over-muscled leader; Tifa, a big-sisterly martial artist; Aerith, a flower peddler touched by destiny; and Cloud, a dour super-soldier who is afflicted by mysterious flashbacks. These hallucinations often feature a swordsman named Sephiroth, a fallen war hero turned creature of the apocalypse.
Decked with flourishes but faithful to the designs of their 1997 forebears, the remake’s cast are possibly the most photogenic characters you’ll see this generation. More importantly, they are engaging personalities, with simple but gripping motivations and plenty of team chemistry. Cloud is a mixed-up youth struggling to play hero, Tifa the childhood friend trying to thaw his reserve while wrestling her doubts about Avalanche’s methods. Aerith is a haunted sweetheart whose tale reaches far back into the planet’s past. Even Barret, a blaxploitation caricature Square Enix would have done well to overhaul, is likeable for the ferocity of his principles. Captivating in conversation, the characters set the screen on fire in battle, each bringing a distinct style to a fussy but engrossing wedding of real-time and turn-based combat.
Even as a newcomer you may detect the mistakes Square Enix has made in revamping its best-loved RPG: lots of filler, a distracting emphasis on superficial puzzles and a vivid but obnoxious ending. The first thing you notice as a returning player, meanwhile, is the loss of the original’s fixed perspectives, which cultivated a variety of moods from wonder to claustrophobia. The remake compensates with a greater sense of continuity and bustle – areas flow into one another organically, and the streets are a blur of gossiping NPCs and picturesque scrapyard architecture. Mileages will vary over which approach is better; in any case, the real issue is runtime. This remake is the first in a series: the 35-hour story spans the opening of the original game, ending with the cast’s departure from Midgar. Splitting one story into several was a business decision, not an artistic one, and while the writers and designers have worked hard to justify Remake’s bulk, the stretch marks are conspicuous.
In the original FFVII, Avalanche mounted two Mako reactor raids in swift succession. In the remake, those core missions are separated by hours of character development and sidequesting. Cloud’s first brush with Aerith was once a handful of dialogue lines; it’s now a lengthy sequence featuring the gloating apparition of
Sephiroth. Everywhere you go, the geography and chronology have exploded. Areas that once spanned a few backdrops have become murky labyrinths of lever puzzles. Two-step quests have been padded out into chapters.
Much of this is welcome. Avalanche’s visit to Wall Market, Midgar’s red light district, is now a cracking night out reminiscent of Sega’s Yakuza games. The idea is once again to infiltrate a crime lord’s mansion by dressing up Cloud as his bride-to-be, but the remake adds some charismatic new characters, arena fights with diabolical robot houses and a stupendous dance sequence, while clearing away much of the original’s lazy discrimination. Aside from fleshing out locations, the remake adds layers of personality to the core cast, and strengthens side characters, like Avalanche underlings Jessie and Wedge, who were little more than talking signposts in the first game. Wedge is a walking fat joke, unfortunately, but there’s a lot to like about Jessie, a bomb-maker after Cloud’s heart (or whatever else she can get). The addition of another romance interest beside Tifa and Aerith creates a slightly cloying harem anime feel, but the flirting is amusing – Cloud is about as emotionally articulate as a cabbage, and reacts to being hit on with palpable terror.
Above all, Remake’s story marks the triumphant rebirth of Aerith, one of gaming’s most celebrated damsels in distress. Given her role in the story, it would have been easy to portray her as a tragic princess, so it’s delightful to find that she can be sarcastic, coarse and a prankster. One of the loveliest sequences is an unassuming walkand-talk through a ruined town, Aerith pretending to fall off things while Cloud struggles to make sense of her.
For every such moment, however, there’s a generous dose of filler. If some expanded locations are worthwhile, others, like the sewers, are extravagantly boring. The next plot point flies endlessly backward like the exit door in a nightmare, as you search for keycards and switches. Dungeons are clogged with puzzles, most simplistic to the point the accompanying tutorials feel insulting. You’ll move giant robot hands around so that Aerith can hop onto ledges, aim Tifa as she swings from light fittings, and use Barret’s machine gun to blast open passages in a new laboratory area. These questionable pace-changers aside, each Midgar district offers a dreary shopping list of secondary quests such as finding lost cats, justified by Cloud’s skin-deep ‘merc’ persona. There are also X-of-Y monster research missions to complete for new types of materia, the orbs that confer spells and abilities.
The combat, at least, is absorbing all the way to the finish. Square Enix has spent decades trying to adapt FFVII’s Active Time Battle system for modern audiences; this is one of the stronger attempts, though not the best. You control one character at a time, switching with the D-pad (the enemy AI tends to target whoever you’re controlling) or giving orders to offhand characters in
While the writers and designers have worked hard to justify Remake’s bulk, the stretch marks are conspicuous
menus. Regular attacks and evasive rolls are performed in realtime, care of a fiddly lock-on system. Hitting X triggers slow motion so you can pick abilities and spells that consume chunks of each character’s ATB gauge.
You can perform a small selection of these in realtime using hotkeys – handy against small fry, but it’s better to slow things down when fighting bosses with intricate, element-based defences. In particular, you’ll want to get the most out of the stagger mechanic, whereby picking the right attacks eventually stuns enemies while increasing the damage they receive – an idea lifted from the divisive but influential Final Fantasy XIII. It’s as entertaining as it is awkward, a halfway house between beat-’em-up and party-based combat. Team management isn’t difficult, but it always feels like a chore. Offhand party members move around and attack under their own steam, though they’ll keep spells and abilities in reserve. It’s easy, amid the blizzard of special effects, to lose track of where everybody is and who they’re fighting.
To a degree, this confusion reflects one of Remake’s strengths: each character is a very different fighter, and their signature moves from 1997 have been beautifully adapted. Cloud has two duelling stances, one offering speed and reach, the other brute force and a tide-turning parry. Tifa’s trademark ability is Unbridled Strength, which extends her combos and overclocks her heavy attacks. Barret is the default ranged fighter, but his real asset isn’t his gun-arm but his massive health pool, especially given an ability that absorbs damage in place of allies. Aerith, meanwhile, is no wallflower: her staff projectiles hit hard, and she can surround herself with an Arcane Ward that doubles offensive spells cast inside it.
Backing all this up is the returning materia system, with spell and ability orbs plugged into equipment sockets, gaining levels as they are used, which motivates you to master each one. The lack of class restrictions on materia use allows for different builds without compromising each character’s particular flavour. Cloud can spec to sabotage enemies with magic or focus solely on damage; Aerith can be a glass cannon or a tanked-up healer. The sore spots are equipment upgrades, which reveal Square Enix’s continued obsession with bombastic visualisations of rather basic unlockables. These can be automated, though it’s wise to dive in at least once to assess each weapon’s capabilities.
Sadly, there’s no side-stepping the clumsiness of the ending. Having mostly followed the original plot right up to a climatic assault on Shinra HQ, Remake torpedoes the mood with a Kingdom Hearts- like crescendo that turns the concept of a remake into metaphysical soap opera. The idea is intriguing, and the associated battles are a blast, but it’s a terrible disappointment given the delicacy of the rewriting elsewhere. All the goodwill generated by the handling of Aerith, Wall Market and the ATB system evaporates in a blast of sub-Kojima franchise navel-gazing. Even the fetch quests seem appealing by comparison.
The ending marks a split from the events of the 1997 game, pointing towards greater departures in episodes to come. There’s still a planet to save, but we are otherwise in uncharted territory, new and returning players alike. A breathtaking way to polish off the definitive videogame nostalgia project, certainly – padding aside, the first 30 hours of Remake suggest that this is change for the better. By the conclusion, though, you may feel like things are going off the rails in more ways than one.