Final Fantasy VII Remake
The devil’s in the detail for Square Enix’s reimagining
PS4
Developer/publisher Square Enix Format PS4 Origin Japan Release April 10
Who among us could accuse the team at Square Enix of not doing its due diligence? Remaking the most revered JRPG in history can’t be an easy task: you are, after all, contending with nostalgia. Videogames may have come a long way in the 23 years since Final Fantasy VII released, but there will always be one, indelible version of a game in the minds of many players – the one that, despite its awkwardness or its flaws, they first fell in love with.
The goal of a remake, then, is to recapture that giddy sense of recognition. “The core approach that we took to actually making the remake was we sat down and worked out all of the elements and aspects of the original game that made it what it is, and why this is such a well-loved game,” co-director Naoki Hamaguchi tells us. “We had to keep those as is, really, and we’re not going to change them, because that’s what makes the game what it is. But what we looked at was how we present that, and how that that’s s expressed, sh showing it in a way that really resonates with a modern audience.”
Our demo makes it obvious that Final Fantasy VII Remake’s developer does indeed understand much of what really blew everyone away in 1997 – the cinematic impact of those rendered cutscenes, the genuineness of the relationships between its cast of vigilante ecowarriors, the sense of awe inspired by its world. Square Enix has clearly thrown everything at the wall in an effort to translate the original spirit of the game into something that is staggering by today’s standards.
This includes an advanced method of rendering characters’ faces – not just in a graphical sense, although the painstaking detail in each of Cloud Strife’s freckles is not to be denied, but in the way they emote. Square Enix has developed an AI program that can detect how a line of dialogue is delivered by the actor, and not just align the lip-syncing correctly, but also manipulate a character’s expression accordingly. “You can generally tell the emotional content of any piece of dialogue from the intonation and patterns, if you look at it on a graph and at how
the levels of tension go up and down,” Hamaguchi explains. “So we took a number of samples from various different voice data, downloaded them into a database, and then looked for the patterns to create a system where we could get a very high level of recognition on the actual emotional content of any piece of dialogue.”
Remake’s ‘more is more’ approach to things extends to the overhauled combat
Indeed, when Barret’s voice drops halfway through his impassioned speech on Shinra’s insatiable thirst for their planet’s lifeblood to ask: “You do know what mako is, don’t you?”, the wrinkles of tension in his forehead fall too. When he laments the planet crying out, Cloud shoots back, “You really hear that?”, his eyes first widening in surprise and then narrowing sceptically with natural speed and subtlety. And when Barrett confirms, and all that advanced pretty-boy face tech lies still as Cloud deadpans back “Get help,” it’s all the funnier.
Hamaguchi tells us this technology has been in development “pretty much throughout the entire development cycle,” growing, with the help of a dedicated programmer and artist, from the lip-sync recognition capabilities of previous modern Final Fantasy games into what we’re seeing today – to such a degree that the same team also came up with a system that’s able to calculate the optimal angle and distance from characters speaking in a scene, and automatically move the camera to that spot. Just as the tech powering the original game seemed like witchcraft, so Remake’s systems leave us stunned at what today’s games – its developer doubtless given all the resources it could possibly want – are capable of.
Remake’s ‘more is more’ approach to things extends to the overhauled combat, which is at times an embarrassment of riches. In our previous, much shorter demo, the ability to switch seamlessly between realtime and turnbased action was breathtaking. But in the second mako reactor, with melee fighter Tifa added to the party, things do tend towards the chaotic. Trying to hop between three characters in the many, many small rooms and corridors is disorientating. The grunts are so plentiful and so weedy that the freedom to attack with anyone from any angle can turn fights sloppy, quickly; we find it preferable to stick with just one character. This takes some of the vibrancy out of proceedings, with mana-hungry special attacks at much more of a premium when
you’re not switching to another character to let the AI build it.
After far too much ladder-climbing and keycard-hunting, we’re able to switch our brains on again for the Air Buster boss fight. Three Avalanche fighters on one big target feels much more coherent – and, yet again, the Remake team have gone all-out in terms of amping up the tactical intrigue. One advantage you have against the mecha superweapon is the fact that, while moving through the reactor, you can liberate the machine of some of its AI cores or artillery, then collect them as items to use against it. It’s a clever detail that adds an extra layer of satisfaction to a story about sticking it to the man. The updates to the later clash with glowing-horned sewer monster Abzu, while not quite as thematically pertinent, are formidable – the horrible thing jumps all over the walls now, and so it’s a relief that Aerith can now fire magical projectiles from her signature staff to help deal with it, as well as use her Limit Break, Healing Wind, to top up her health bar and come in clutch in the last few moments of the showdown.
Aerith’s makeover outside of battle is significant, too. While running through the streets of Midgar after we blow the first reactor – marvelling at seeing the effects of our actions ripple through Midgar like never before as its inhabitants gawp and chatter panickedly, or bellyache about delayed trains to work – we bump into the flower seller for the first time. The expanded scene now makes much more of Cloud’s awkwardness. “With the original Final Fantasy VII, the way that games were portrayed back then and the graphical quality [meant] you had to fill in the gaps with your imagination,” Hamaguchi says. “When you’d move from one area to another, it would just black out and it would imply what’s in between, but wouldn’t actually show you. That was one of the big ideas that we had: to show everything there and keep that level of immersion, to make it really feel like you’re there every single moment.”
From every twinge of emotion to every detail of combat, to the mundane everyday of Midgar, it’s clear Remake wants to make explicit to players everything the original game couldn’t. But should it? Perhaps some of what makes classic games so beloved is that back then, players had to invest more in the game by mentally filling the gaps themselves. “That way of showing something through games is brilliant, and it’s got its own personality and charm,” Hamaguchi agrees. “But when you try and show things in a more realistic way, like we’re doing with Remake, it kind of rewrites the rules a little bit. When you have something that’s closer to what people are experiencing in their real lives, it does pull you out of that. What we’re aiming for in Remake is to show all of those little detailed bits, and keep you in a one-to-one relationship with Cloud, the story and the world.”
Admirable stuff, indeed. More than that, we can’t deny that we’re drawn into, and surprised by, a world we thought we already knew, a world that feels more real than ever. But the ambition on display here can’t help but feel starry-eyed: the Abzu fight comes later in Remake, but relatively early on in the original game. If Square Enix is insistent on revisiting Final Fantasy VII in the detail it feels it needs to in order to recreate that sense of wonder, we may be waiting a long time for the rest of it.
oIt’s clear Remake wants to make explicit everything the original game couldn’t