Hello Internet,
This week, we're doing a little something different. Instead of posting a finished product or a blog update, I am going to show you something that is in the works. When it is finished, hopefully you can go back and see what I have changed. So, without further ado...
"Essay 101. Final Fantasy VII REMAKE & Crisis Core: Reunion Reaction
Hello Internet,
Recently, Square Enix announced part 2 of their wildly popular Final Fantasy VII REMAKE, entitled REBIRTH. More importantly, they also announced an enhanced remaster of one of my favorite video games and the stand-out title from the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII–Crisis Core. Hearing of its coming release, I immediately went and found a trailer to confirm the announcement, and let me tell you, the only thing matching my excitement is my disappointment.
Prologue. Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core, and Me
I was in middle school when I first played Final Fantasy VII. I got it for around $10 at the store alongside a copy of Chrono Cross and played it on the Playstation I adopted from my one of my adult brothers, who had just purchased a brand new PS2 and his copy of Final Fantasy X. At the time, I also adopted copies of VIII, IX, and Legend of Dragoon. It was not the beginning of my torrid love affair with JRPGs, but it definitely established a so far lifelong relationship with Squaresoft/Enix and my forever commitment to the Final Fantasy franchise.
I played both VII and Chrono Cross a lot over the summer. While my parents and brothers were out working, I was at home alone throughout the day. In the morning, I would be outside while it was cool. As noon approached, I would return inside to watch TV and play video games. Sometimes, I would set up the systems out in the living room to play. I never beat any of the games I played, but I got very far into VII, Chrono Cross, and (on an adopted SNES) The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Those three games, alongside Chrono Trigger, defined my adolescence.
I finally beat both VII and Chrono Cross in my second year of college. Chrono Cross I beat on my own, but VII I beat with a friend from college whom we’ll call Jon, because that’s his name. Like me, Jon was a big fan of VII and X but had beat neither of them, so we decided to play them together while we were at school. We beat VII with us reading the dialogue out loud together and doing voices (he was Cloud; I was Sephiorth), and I would later go on to beat VII on my own years later. We played through X a few times but never beat it, with our best attempt being in college. We made it to just after Summoner Yunalesca and quit. Years later, we did a series of unfinished X Let’s Plays together as well as an embarrassing and short-lived podcast, all of which you can find here: link!
Crisis Core, meanwhile, was a favorite of mine from before I beat VII with Jon. I beat it in the first summer after my first year of college and met Jon in my second year. Crisis Core is one of, if not the best, games I have ever played on my PSP, and it helped get me through my very lonely and very sad first year. I remember long hours of side missions, and watching Zack Fair grow from an impulsive, brash young man into a selfless hero by the end of the game. I remember watching the DWM spinning and halting as his memories replayed for him while he faced his end. I remember it getting stuck on Aerith, who would outlive him, and I remember crying.
Crisis Core was not only fun and beautiful to look at, especially considering the hardware, but it had and still has personal value to me. While far from perfect, I love that game, as I’ve gotten older and my PSP has gotten older, too, I’ve been wanting a console port of Crisis Core for years. When I found out that it was coming to PS4, I was ecstatic. When I saw the trailer, however, I felt a rising dread in the pit of my stomach that, eventually, settled into creeping and lingering disappointment.
Chapter I. Final Fantasy VII REMAKE: The Remake Everyone But Me Asked For
I was not excited about Final Fantasy VII REMAKE, but then I was never excited about the idea of remaking Final Fantasy VII to begin with. Even back in the PS3 era, when people went nuts over the Squareenix technical demo that recreated the opening train sequence of Final Fantasy VII, I didn’t want a Final Fantasy VII remake made because I knew that no matter how good Cloud looked in what were, at the time, next-gen graphics, I would be disappointed.
You see, the problem is that people change. No matter how well-crafted a remake or a resurrection is, it will never be what a longtime fan wants it to be. Nostalgia is a powerful drug. It can delight people with simple musical cues or leave people weeping with the death of an iconic hero, and it can also take perfectly good things and make them look horrid by comparison to a memory of that very same thing (which is mostly constructed by the viewer, anyway).
The problem with remakes is two fold for me. Firstly, the remake has to justify itself by making necessary changes to the source material. If you’re not going to change what was already created, then there is no reason to recreate it. Just rerelease it with a modern port and, if you’re feeling fancy, slap a coat of fresh new paint on it to make it sparkle. If you are going to change it, change it for a reason. Say something new about the thing, if there is something new to be said.
Secondly, if there is nothing new to be said, then don’t say anything at all. That is, if you have no reason to remake something, then don’t remake it. Money is a powerful motivator but a poor justification. Fans hate when beloved things are remade not because they don’t want to visit that world again, but because they have already visited that world and see no reason to revisit a strange imitation of that world that, oftentimes, changed all of the best bits. There is no comfort in an illusion of a thing, no matter how Hollywood and the game industry try to assert that there is.
Now, having confessed that no version of a remake would ever satisfy me, I have to say that each new bit of information about REMAKE that I read following its initial announcement served only to lower my expectations. I do not remember the exact order in which the information reached me, but I do know everything I learned seemed like the worst version of what they could have done. Firstly, the game was to be directed by Tetsuya Nomura, who at that point had been the head of the notoriously troubled and unfinished Final Fantasy Versus XIII (the DNA of which is deeply imbedded into REMAKE, in my opinion). Next, it was to be action oriented instead of turn-based, and then it would be released in installments rather than as one larger game.
The final nail in the coffin for me was that the first game would take place in Midgar alone. For those of you who don’t know (which I imagine is very few if you’re reading this), Midgar was the first section of Final Fantasy VII. It is easily the longest section of the game and also the tightest from a narrative standpoint and most atmospheric. In VII, Midgar is an extended prologue that establishes all of the major characters, establishes the journey to be had, and begins sowing the seeds of the narrative which would later blossom and produce fruit. To me, making an entire game out of Midgar alone would be akin to making the first Harry Potter film be all about Vernon Dursley going to work on the day of his sister-in-law’s death (which, by the way, is kind of a genius idea, but that is a whole other cup of coffee entirely).
Chapter II. Final Fantasy VII REMAKE
So, if I was ready to hate REMAKE for its very existence, why did I even get the game? Well, the short answer is the pandemic. When the COVID shutdowns first hit, my job was good enough to send us home on paid leave for a few weeks. During that time, I spent a lot of time on social media trying to reconcile with the world as the all consuming fires now swallowing it were just beginning to burn.
I spent a lot of time–too much time, really–on Instagram. Not really knowing how social media works, I followed a lot of the game companies I liked, including SqueE. As the release date for REMAKE got closer, they would post concept art and other goodies detailing the rich world they had built to fill out Midgar, and I confess that it drew my interest. I think it was the image of Chocobo Sam that sold me on it.
See, what I imagined REMAKE to be was XV but set in Midgar. I expected a massive, open world with quick, sharp action RPG gameplay. I expected you to be able to leave Sector 7 Slums and travel to Sector 6 Slums or to visit the plate and explore, and I expected each sector to have its own distinct flavor and culture. Ultimately, I expected so much more than what I would eventually get, and I chittered excitedly to my wife about it.
In the end, I didn’t actually buy REMAKE. My wife did. She saw the world burning, and like everyone wanted to make sure her family was okay. So, as I rambled at her, she took my rising interest as desire and went out to buy the game for me in secret. She wanted to give me something fun to look forward to and bought it despite her own hatred of Final Fantasy (a story for later, I assure you). When it arrived, I was surprised but grateful, and when I put it in, I had high hopes for it.
And boy, were my hopes ever dashed.
Chapter III. The Good Things About REMAKE
There are a lot of things that I dislike about Final Fantasy VII REMAKE, but I would be lying if I told you that there is nothing good about the game. Before I get into the game’s flaws, I do want to give credit where credit is due–and there is a lot of praise about the game. Honestly, and I am not being glib, if this were Final Fantasy XVI and not a remake of VII, I would very likely like it. As it stands, I do feel it is an inadequate remake, but I do also think that there are some improvements to the base game and small successes found within REMAKE itself.
To start simple: REMAKE is fun. It looks good and it is fun to play. The battle system itself is particularly well sculpted. Combat is surprisingly smart despite appearances, and it has a great weight to it. At a glance, it might seem like thoughtless hacking and slashing, but once you play, you can see the importance of timing in combat and the clever ways you can exploit the mechanisms of the game.
Way back when, I remember reading an interview with Testuya Nomura about Versus XIII. At the time, Nomura had said something along the lines of wanting Versus to play like Kingdom Hearts only more realistic. I also remember laughing smugly at the very concept, because even at its most realistic, Kingdom Hearts is pretty floaty and loose, and all of the conceptual footage showed not!Noctis with a dozen floating, translucent swords around him. Having played REMAKE, however, I get what he was trying to say, and I can honestly say that REMAKE plays a bit like Kingdom Hearts, only more realistic.
Actions are slower in REMAKE than in Kingdom Hearts. A single button push rarely leads to a sudden and unexpected chain of attacks and swirls, and even those actions are heavier and require more precision. Furthermore, you can switch between characters as you play, and each character plays just a little bit differently. You are rewarded for learning their styles and, throughout the game, you are required to try each. These subtle changes give characters more personality as you play them, which is further helped along by their improved characterizations, which we will talk about next.
Three characters in particular are really improved upon by REMAKE, those being Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith. I would argue that in the original, these were the three who had the most pronounced arcs and growth across the entirety of the story, but in REMAKE they really shine as each are given time to breathe and have benefited from over a decade familiarity.
In VII Cloud was flat. Most of his interactions with others came across more like an interview with them than a conversation since characters rarely interact with one another whenever inside of a dungeon. Jon and I often joked that Cloud only ever did two things: repeat something said to him with a question mark at the end or give long-winded speeches about how he is the master of his own destiny. Outside of that, he doesn’t really do much. His best moments are during the Nibelheim flashback, and that just isn’t enough to hold your interest.
REMAKE!Cloud is more self-conscious but keeps up a brittle bravado around others. For people who have played before, we understand this front. Cloud doesn’t know who he really is and is playing a part forced onto him by both Zack and Tifa. He tries a little too hard to be self-assured and distant and doesn’t like the attention he seems to get everywhere he goes. You can see that in his own mind, he doesn’t feel like he deserves the attention. This is layered into both his vocal performance and his animation, and it’s delightful!
Tifa and Aerith get the same sort of care in REMAKE. Tifa is nurturing, almost motherly, but also physically powerful by the look of her. She clearly abhors violence but sees the necessity of it in their current circumstances, and while she doesn’t want to fight, she will when pushed. Her relationship with Cloud is more complex, hinting at attraction but emphasizing her natural instinct to care for others. She is the team mom, and her involvement with Cloud reads as concern as often as it reads as romance.
Meanwhile, Aerith is a sickeningly sweet white mage flower girl by appearance but also weird, off-kilter, and a bit of a tomboy. Briana White, her voice actress, does a phenomenal job with her, having a high-pitched, almost silly voice for her that makes the lines she delivers all the better. There is something mysterious about her and almost angelic to look at her, but she is headstrong and unyielding, and for me is the stand-out character in the game. Her relationship with Cloud reads much more playful and teasing, making her ‘rivalry’ with Tifa amusingly one-sided.
Anyone who has played the original VII knows that these were their basic personalities in that version, too. Here, however, they feel much more natural and better realized. Partly this is animation and partly it is in the performance of their English VAs. As previously mentioned when I praised Cloud’s characterization in the plot, this is also the benefit of over a decade’s worth of refinement. The writers had time to not only sit on the characters but to look at multiple iterations and years of fan response to these characters to perfect them, which will make the characters who were not elevated in this same way all the more frustrating in the next chapter. But that is for later. For now, let’s talk about a few more characters who get a lot of love from REMAKE: the bosses!
I’ve already explained to you that the Midgar sections of VII are easily the best part of the game. From the slums to the plate and the Mako Reactors in between, the streets and screens of Midgar bleed personality. The early sections of the game are front loaded with powerful details, with the slums themselves feeling tight, confined, and almost suffocating, which makes the clean, sterile sections of Shinra HQ that much more alien. As a result of this front loading, the most memorable time spent in VII is Midgar, and those memories include many of the early bosses, too.
REMAKE puts a lot of effort into translating old bosses and enemies into this new version of the game. Many of the most memorable bosses from VII proper who were not named NPCs (such as the Turks, Jenova, or Sephiroth) are in this area, and they are not only rendered lovingly in HD, but they are redesigned with an eye for showcasing the best parts of this new combat system. A lot of love and care was clearly put into translating them into REMAKE’s flashier, heavier style, so much so that the REMAKE-original bosses pale by comparison.
Which is one of my key praises for the game: what REMAKE does well, it does very well. I will later complain about the overall level design, but here I have to make special mention of the design of the Train Graveyard, where gameplay and narrative seem to flow seamlessly together. The atmosphere of the graveyard is better realized here than it was in VII, with its top down view. In the same way, many of the boss fights take the basic components from the original game and refine them like they do with the Train Graveyard or with Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith. They have had years to look at what makes these elements work, and once they understand those pieces, they do a great job of recreating them into the new, flashier presentation.
In fact, these sort of simple aesthetic things is where REMAKE shines. When it understands something, the game really elevates it. All of the characters look incredible, like little Anime people come to life, and their animations are smooth and solid. The music, while not as good as the original, is passable except where the original tracks are concerned. The original tracks of the game are beautiful, especially the theme song, “Hollow” (which was done by Yosh and Nobuo Uemetsu; Uemetsu still defines Final Fantasy to this day) that add a slow, thoughtful, lingering, oppressive energy to a game all about the oppressive atmosphere of Midgar.
At the end of the day, REMAKE IS fun. It is deeply entertaining and just a joy to play, even with the many complaints I have about it. It is a solid JRPG experience, and I am not at all surprised by the success it has had. More than that, I will even likely play the last remaining two in the series, but I don’t think that I could ever see REMAKE replacing the original VII as the definitive experience. Because, as good as REMAKE is, it is far, far from perfect, and there is a lot to dislike about it, too.
Chapter IV. The Disappointing Things About REMAKE
In the same way that I would be lying if I said that I didn’t like anything about REMAKE (or even if I said that REMAKE was a bad game, to be honest), I would also be lying if I said that REMAKE had nothing wrong with it. That said, flaws don’t make a thing bad. For me, flaws often define that thing and give it personality. For REMAKE, the flaws I see don’t ruin or even really detract from the game unless they are compared against VII, which I will try to do sparingly. While I will compare the two games here, I also want to make a point that this chapter is about how I think the game fails on its own, not how I think it fails as an adaptation or reimagining of the original.
If the main theme of the previous chapter is that REMAKE is at its best when it understands what made VII shine and adapts it for a new audience, then I think it is safe to say that the opposite is true for the flaws of REMAKE. REMAKE is at its worst when it doesn’t understand the original game and when the things it is trying for escapes the parameters of its mission, which was to update and reimagine the original Final Fantasy VII. What this means is that a lot of the elements of the original game that had to be changed to modernize the game or to isolate it to Midgar are also the places where the most cracks show.
As a point of comparison to help you understand, let’s look at gameplay first. Combat is where the gameplay really shines. Everything flows well and feels weighty, and there is strategy to the timing of attacks and the use of magic and summons in combat. It is surprisingly smart and deep, and taking the time to understand REMAKE’s combat is rewarding. On the other side, however, is exploration and character growth, both of which are very, very dull.
Exploration has a lot to do with the map design of REMAKE. Whereas VII had wide, open environments that are viewed from above and made smaller by limiting the amount of space you can actually explore, REMAKE has big, narrow maps that are almost perfect 3D recreations of the VII’s maps.
While these maps are fun to look at, and some of them are equally fun to navigate (I’m looking at you, Train Graveyard), most of them are linear and dull. Exploration is very much on a track, which by itself isn’t bad (and is pretty standard for JRPGs), but there is so little done to keep engagement high that exploration feels unnecessary. Older JRPGs made a point of hiding chests or putting puzzles and little details around maps. REMAKE is much more modern, though, which means that environments are pleasant to look at but often hollow, with nothing rewarding for you to root around in and very little to take you off the beaten path.
What few areas there are that feel bigger are only bigger because you’ll spend more time in them as a part of the story. Mostly, you spend your time running from one marker to another, stopping only periodically to fight a monster or to press a previously indicated button to open up an area or progress the narrative, and since we’re trapped in the Midgar slums for the bulk of this 35 to 45 hour story, we’re not given a lot of variety to look at.
This linear design can be seen in the character progression as well. In the original, materia and equipment were used in tandem to make your characters unique. Each character had special limit breaks that were all their own, but equipment and materia defined much of your gameplay experience by how you used them together. Certain weapons had more materia options, but materia weakened your physical stats, particularly health. Some materia unlocked special skills or improved specific stats, and there was a lot of variety.
In this game, since you’re only allowed to explore Midgar, and the game’s design runs entirely off of nostalgia, they couldn’t give you as many equipment options. Instead of expanding your options or using weapons acquired later in the original game, they add a weapon progression system that is just as on the rails as the exploration.
Weapon progression is done by spending points acquired in combat. Each weapon has different nodes that, when purchased, change the stats of the weapons. Weapons also have special abilities that are earned through frequency of use with the weapon. From what I’ve read, every weapon pretty much balances out by the end of the game, having equal numbers of materia slots, making each of them viable if you spend enough time grinding, completely eliminating any fun that might be had leveling your equipment in a way that benefits your playstyle.
Furthermore, most of the nodes are gated behind other nodes. What this means is that you have to spend your hard earned points to level weapons by buying upgrades you might not be interested in just to get other upgrades that you would be more interested in. This is common in JRPGs, but for a game like REMAKE where customization is actually pretty limited and characters each of their own unique playstyles, this bars players from experimenting and really customizing their characters and playstyles altogether. It is deeply reminiscent of the same problems I have with the Final Fantasy XIII’s crystarium, which looks and feels very similar.
Materia is the same way. To my recollection, materia grows in REMAKE in the same way that it grows in VII. You gain points at the end of battle that slowly progress your materia, leveling it up and making it more powerful. Growth is linear just like weapon progression, and where the combination between weapons and materia equipped created diversity in the original, REMAKE’s limited weapon selection and linear weapon growth take that away.
Another reason why linear growth of materia doesn’t work as well in REMAKE as it did in VII is that the materia in REMAKE is less versatile. In both games, materia is used by MP, but in VII every character started battle with a certain amount of MP, and using magic in combat or outside of combat requires the use of MP only. In REMAKE, magic requires the use of charged ATB bars, which limits its use in combat if you, like me, prefer melee combat. This by itself isn’t bad, but it creates a particular economy of action that casual players might not dig too deep into.
So, why would they limit the weapon options in the way that they did? I think it’s for the same reason why boss battles got so much love and attention: nostalgia. REMAKE doesn’t necessarily require you to have played VII to enjoy it, but it definitely wants you to have played VII and kind of assumes that you have played VII. As a result, the game is very light on specific details while elaborating on and developing other ideas in heavy, long-winded ways to flesh out or answer questions you wouldn't have otherwise had if you hadn’t played VII before.
This is a major weakness that a lot of adaptations or reimaginings of stories suffer from. REMAKE could have been a perfectly fine game and world all its own, but by doing a remake of VII, they have chosen to adapt something which already existed for a new audience. This means that the story and game should be able to stand up to scrutiny on its own and that the narrative beats within the story should be rewarded by the end of the game. The problem is that REMAKE doesn’t do this for you. It feels narrower and smaller than the opening Midgar section of VII and fails to adequately flesh out the world or build its own mythology without relying on your preexisting knowledge of VII.
Shinra is a perfect example of this. Look at how characters like Scarlet and Heideggar are introduced in REMAKE. They are given heavy fanfare despite doing largely nothing in the game outside of making an appearance. Introductions like these are straight fanservice that scream, “Look at these two! Remember them from VII? They’ll be major players soon!” As fanservice goes, this fine, but if this were a standalone game telling the story for the first time, it would feel like Thanos felt every time he showed up to do nothing in the MCU—unnecessary.
Wutai’s appearance on the Sector 4 plate and AVALANCHE’s appearance during that very same section felt the same way. The game just shoves names at you without giving proper context or value to them. To players of the original game, they are fun little easter eggs that hint at something larger. For first time players, they’re just words thrown into the air that have little meaning or value for them, and the most aggressive example of this is Sephiroth, who will get special mention later in this essay.
REMAKE’s story suffers from the same thing. Character progression is stuffed with grind to fill it out and make it last longer, and the story is the exact same way. What finally broke me down and got me to show interest in REMAKE was the promise of a definitive version of Midgar. I expected open exploration and instead got narrow halls filled with side quests and narrative padding. Nothing new of value is added, and what things are added often just make the world feel smaller or answer questions that no one asked.
A perfect example of this narrative padding is chapter six. Chapter six takes place on the platforms above the sector 6 slums but below the plate. The ‘puzzle’ of this area, if it can be called a puzzle, has to do with these great and mighty solar platforms which cast light onto the slums to create a day/night cycle and allow for plant growth. These details by themselves are not bad and are fine as far as world building goes, but they do nothing to enhance the narrative.
Day/night cycles and plant growth never came up in VII and so it was never addressed. Some people might call that poor world building, but I would disagree. The thing is, you’re not curious about day/night cycles or plant growth because it is irrelevant to the narrative. The poverty experienced in the slums is well-established and exposed in other ways. Food scarcity and resource disparity is implied, and so establishing it in this way was unnecessary, and while I will not punish REMAKE for adding that detail to their world, I would point out that questions of food scarcity and resource disparity between classes is something literally never brought up in REMAKE, which makes the addition of this new information pointless bloating.
It becomes more and more frustrating as this same weakness exposes itself time and time again. Every new scene or detail added to the game feels like unnecessary padding. I wanted to see the plates, and we finally get to see one of them. Except it’s a single neighborhood and a warehouse that we, apparently, have very easy access to despite coming from the slums, and this area is only used to develop Jessie’s ultimately pointless backstory as a means of making her more sympathetic, even though her death in the original VII is just as moving and tragic all things considered.
No example I can give is more offensive, however, than Hojo’s secret lab. In the original VII, after you get captured, you escape with Red XIII and Aerith and run through halls carved out by impossibly long gashes following a trail of blood from Jenova’s containment cell all the way to President Shinra’s office. The music and atmosphere make this scene tense as you go with Cloud and the others to confront his past.
REMAKE does away with this simplicity to add the coolest and most underutilized idea of the game: the drum. The drum, in REMAKE, is Hojo’s special secret research area. It is where he keeps his research subjects, and you have to navigate your way out while fighting monsters. This is an incredibly cool idea that ends up being “move from point A to point B to pull a lever and see a cutscene.” Not only is it a brilliant idea that is wasted, it is hours long and completely removes the tension that the original had at that point, thus shooting itself in the foot twice over.
With all of these unnecessary changes that ruin the pacing of the game, there is one thing which I wished they had improved upon. Earlier, I mentioned how much I loved what they did with Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith. Clearly, they understood and loved those characters, and they took great care in reinvigorating them and realizing them as more complex individuals, which is what makes it more all the more frustrating with what they did with Barrett.
Now, I should be clear: I know people mostly liked Barrett, and to be fair, Barrett is still Barrett. Which is part of the problem. Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith got a lot of love and care put into making them more than what they were. They are not just the same flat characters from the original. They have depth and nuance. Barrett, meanwhile, was taken straight from the late 90s and shoved into this game released on modern consoles in the year 2020.
Barrett is a great example of a character who is a time capsule. At the time, Barrett was pretty…audacious? He was a cartoonish caricature of a black person as represented by a Japanese people who consumed 90s media. He looked like Mr. T, cussed a lot, stood 7” tall, and had a massive gun grafted to his arm. Despite that, he had a fascinating relationship with Shinra, a daughter whom he loved, and was the leader of the group up until they left Midgar.
REMAKE’s Barrett isn’t a bad character and has all of the strengths of the original. Unfortunately, he also has all of the same weaknesses, too, and those weaknesses are only made more pronounced by the new graphics and added voice acting, which took the already tone deaf components of Barrett’s character and turned them up to eleven.
The problem with Barrett is that he is loud and enormous, a problem which is captured no better than in the train scene. In both VII and REMAKE, there is a scene in which Barrett confronts a Shinra executive on the train and yells at them for them destroying the planet. AVALANCHE is an eco-terrorist group, and this is VII’s way of showcasing Barrett’s drive and personality.
In the original, all of the characters are these little blobs of pixels with skinny tooth-pick arms and giant square hands. Barrett is a lot of ball of pixelated chocolate with one brown square and one gray square for hands. When he confronted the executive, he punched the wall while shouting censored expletives that you had to read, and the executive, also a little blob, jumped a little. It played far more comical than serious, even if what Barrett was saying was sincere.
In REMAKE, Barrett has been redesigned into an approx. 13” tall wall of muscle with cool shades and a gun that is as long as Cloud is tall. When he punches the wall and shouts, his words are not censored, and the executive that responds is not a little blue blob of pixels but a fully articulated anime!dad middle management paper pusher who is on his way to his 9 to 5 where he doesn’t get paid enough so that he can pay off his kid’s braces. It doesn’t play as funny, nor does it play as righteous, but as loud, aggressive, and maybe a bit misplaced.
Furthermore, all of this is made even more pronounced when later in the game, the public opinion turns against AVALANCHE and the slums are set against the group. Public notices are put up for Cloud, Tifa, and Barrett, all of whom are instantly recognizable, but the inability to pinpoint Barrett is made more absurd by the fact that the dude yells literally every line of dialogue in the game. So, it becomes extremely silly when the public, who openly disparage AVALANCHE, cannot pinpoint its leader despite him being a 15” tall brick building with a gun on his arm who walks around shouting about Shinra everywhere he goes while waving his machine gun in the air like he’s at a party.
This inconsistency in quality between gameplay and exploration or characterization shows that the designers didn’t have a clear idea of what they were doing as they remade the game outside of making money. A lot of the ideas seem to me to be adapted from the unfinished Versus XIII, which by all of my understanding of that game likely had its skeleton forced into this game as a basic structure for gameplay (both had four playable characters with distinct styles, and both were set in a single realistic city with Tetsuya Nomura at the helm). What things are improved in the game were not only unnecessary to fix but seem to have happened by accident due to the inconsistency of their improvements, and the idea to force it into episodes required the designers to stuff in side quests and stray details to inflate its play time.
None of that, however, really addresses the things I love and hate most about this game.
Chapter V. Whispers.
At great length, I have explained what things I enjoyed about Final Fantasy VII REMAKE and what failings I think the game has as a standalone title, but I have yet to describe both the game’s greatest success and also its greatest failure. You see, there is something which I think the game has done an exceptionally poor job at doing, and I also think that there is one thing which might save the entire series for me if properly utilized. The former can be best described by looking at Sephiroth and how he was handled by the game, and the latter can be described by one simple word: Whispers.
Better than the battle system and better than Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith, even better than the Train Graveyard, are the Whispers. The Whispers are a completely new addition to the Final Fantasy VII mythos, and they are, in my opinion, the best addition to REMAKE as a whole. They address a large, glaring issue and have the potential to overshadow everything else within the game and even fix its most obvious, glaring problems. To discuss them, however, I am going to have to dig into some deep spoilers for REMAKE, though I imagine if you’re this far in, you’re fine. Still, you have been warned.
To be short: Whispers are ghost-like entities within Final Fantasy VII REMAKE that make it their duty to weave fate. Whenever certain characters stray from their appointed goals or destinations, the Whispers act as an invisible hand to try and guide them back onto the right path. They remind me a lot of the Occuria from Final Fantasy XII, who are a personal favorite of mine from both a design and narrative standpoint, and the two entities actually look quite a bit alike.
Where the Occuria and Whispers differ, however, is in the meta of their respective games. Occuria are separate from the overall design of XII and exist as characters within the story. The Whispers, however, act as on a meta-narrative level, symbolically representing people like myself who already know the story and who chaff against the changes that the creatives behind the new version (sometimes have to) implement on the story. They are in-world representations of sweaty nerds online complaining about how their favorite thing was changed, and it’s brilliant.
Only certain characters are aware of the Whispers. In fact, at the beginning of the game, only Aerith could see or interact with them. It was on contact with Aerith that Cloud and company were made aware of the Whispers, and while their presence is minimal in the earliest parts of REMAKE where it follows VII more closely, the farther the game deviates from VII, the more the Whispers show up.
REMAKE was never going to be the same game as VII, which is part of why I was never going to be happy with it. The Whispers are a really clever acknowledgement of that problem and an even better solution for it. Instead of Shinra or Sephiroth being the primary antagonists of the game, the Whispers can take their place as the series continues, invigorating an otherwise weaker narrative and also adding a pleasant and unexpected surprise for longtime fans while justifying the existence of the project to begin with.
There is something very cathartic about having MY version of VII, the original version, acknowledged by the REMAKE and making the actual plot being us fighting against the original version and rebelling to make a new narrative altogether. The Whispers are a bit on the nose as metaphors go, but they work so well and look cool enough that I don’t mind, and their very presence within REMAKE does a lot to soften the blow of all of my quibbling little complaints that I would typically otherwise have. All that remains, however, is to see how the Whispers are used in future installments before I pass final judgment on them as a narrative device. Until then, I have one more major bone to pick with REMAKE, and it is their biggest hurdle that even the Whispers will struggle to make right: Sephiroth.
Full disclosure: I’ve played a lot of Final Fantasy games, and Sephiroth is nowhere near my favorite villain. In fact, I think he’s kind of lame. He has a great aesthetic, and he is iconic, but compared to villains like Kuja, Seymour, Vayne, or Ardyn, he just doesn’t have much depth. That said, regardless of my personal feelings for him as a villain, I know that he is easily the most iconic bad guy from the Final Fantasy roster, and I think that is very important to acknowledge as we get into what REMAKE did wrong with him.
In fact, I think Sephiroth’s popularity is at the very center of what REMAKE did wrong with Sephiroth. You see, Sephiroth is such a popular character that he can be recognized even outside of the game which he came from. Gun to my head, I’d even go so far as to say that the most popular understanding of Sephiroth is not one built off of his character in the original Final Fantasy VII, but is actually some sort of Frankenstein meme built off of a lot of popular culture and sewn together by vague permutations of Sephiroth that have been created and recreated with each new iteration of the character that exists in media outside of the original Final Fantasy VII.
Which is the problem. REMAKE sets out to remake VII, but the Sephiroth from REMAKE is not at all like the Sephiroth from VII.
To be clear, the Sephiroth in REMAKE looks quite a bit like the Sephiroth from VII. I’d even go so far as to assert that he sounds like him (Tyler Hoechlin is doing his best George Newbern), and he acts a bit like him, and as the last two games are released, I believe that he will have the same basic story. Even with all of that in place, however, he is very clearly not the right Sephiroth for this story, nor is he an elevation of the character or a permutation of him. Instead, this is the Sephiroth from popular conscious. REMAKE’s is Sephiroth as a meme.
Earlier, I said that Sephiroth is not one of my favorite Final Fantasy villains. I even went so far as to say that he’s pretty lame. Allow me to elaborate: for those of you who haven’t played VII but know of Sephiroth, the Sephiroth in VII is very unlike the Sephiroth of other popular media. He isn’t necessarily ethereal or god-like, nor is he distant. If anything, he’s absent. He does so few actual things in VII that there is good reason to suggest that he isn’t even the proper final antagonist of VII but that he was being controlled by Jenova all along.
Prior to leaving Midgar in VII, Sephiroth is mentioned only in passing. He is a word, a name that comes up but that has no real meaning. We know that he is important, but we do not know why. After leaving Midgar, we are given a lengthy flashback that illustrates exactly why he is important, and the events in Shinra HQ and in the flashback establish him as an antagonist but give him no real motivation. After that, he’s pretty much absent throughout the rest of the game until near the very end. In theory, he shouldn’t even really be in REMAKE very much at all.
Worth noting before we move forward is also Jenova’s involvement in the plot of VII and its strange and unexpected appearance as a boss in REMAKE. You see, Jenova appears in the same way Sephiroth does. It is mentioned but given very little context save for being related to Sephiroth in some way. As the game goes on, it is revealed how Sephiroth and Jenova are related to one another, and you are given multiple boss fights across the game, the first of which is on the cargo ship leaving Junon, well after you have left Midgar behind.
You fight Jenova more often and are, as you will learn near the end of the game, given more time to interact with Jenova (or Jenova’s cells, which have taken on Sephiroth’s form). The amount of time you actually have with the real Sephiroth is very limited, existing only at the very end of the game, really only in the final boss fights of the game. Sephiroth himself is mostly missing, save for the flashback and save for name drops, but that is what makes Sephiroth special. It isn’t his story or his personality, it isn’t even his design (which is pretty rad). What makes Sephiroth unique and engaging is how he is woven into the narrative.
From the very beginning of the game, we’re told that SOLDIER operatives are the best of Shinra’s military, and we’re also told that Sephiroth is the best of SOLDIER. Midgar does a lot of leg work establishing Shinra as not only the most prescient enemy you’ll face in the game, but it also presents them as an adequately dangerous enemy, as well. They do drop a plate on Sector 7 Slums, after all. So, by the end of Midgar and after leaving Kalm, you know very little of Sephiroth save for that he is powerful enough to make Shinra, a highly advanced and militarized hyper-capitalist energy company, quake.
Prior to Kalm, Sephiroth exists as a rumor. In Shinra HQ, you find Jenova’s headless body and hear of Sephiroth’s strange origins. After you are captured, you escape to silent halls with long, deep gashes left in them and a trail of blood to follow to the president’s chamber. You find the president, who had been implied to be a major player in the game, impaled by an impossibly long sword, and then Rufus takes over.
Everything about the opening of VII works hard to make Sephiroth a boogeyman. He is a phantom who haunts Cloud, and his absence is what makes him engaging. Throughout the game, Sephiroth continues to haunt you. Regardless of his motivations, regardless of whether he is in control or not, you spend the game chasing this phantom, and you end the game with Cloud finally casting off his shadows and defeating Sephiroth in a one-on-one duel, symbolically and actually taking control of his future once and for all.
In REMAKE, Sephiroth and Jenova both are all over the place. Heck, they even recreate the dramatic, cathartic duel between Cloud and Sephiroth at the end of REMAKE. That’s right. They redid the final boss fight from the original game in the first game of the trilogy, the first game which is the same length as the original but only covers the first ten or so hours of content of the original, and they pretty much recreate all of it scene for scene.
Furthermore, they also force an extra Jenova battle in before the (much better and story relevant) Rufus bossfight. The final Sephiroth boss fight follows an extremely long boss crawl where you, the player, fight your way through the Whispers, which was boring but at least thematically relevant. To make matters worse still, Sephiroth has the wing. Sephiroth has that stupid black wing!
For those of you who have not played the original but have played REMAKE, Kingdom Hearts, Dissidia, or watched Advent Children, you might be surprised to learn that Sephiroth never had a single back wing in VII. You might be surprised because his theme song is literally called “One Wing Angel,” or you might be surprised because after they gave him a wing in Kingdom Hearts, they found a way to force that thing into every appearance he had afterward.
The wing by itself doesn’t bother me. In fact, I thought it was cute in Kingdom Hearts when they did it as a little reference to his theme song. Every appearance he has had afterward that gave him the wing has been fine. It’s a bit meta, it being a reference to a reference, but I like those types of easter eggs, but it is also why I’m firm in the assertion that REMAKE!Sephiroth is not VII!Sephiroth. Furthermore, I’d go so far as to argue that he is the lesser version of Sephiroth.
Remake not only recreates the final fight with Sephiroth, and it not only inserts an unexpected and unwarranted Jenova boss battle, but it also gave us a single black wing, and it gave us yet another version of the “One Wing Angel” theme, which has been recreated over and over again for each of Sephiroth’s appearances in various media. It has already spoiled the most climactic and famous bits of Sephiroth, but it has squandered them on a version of Sephiroth that existed primarily in our popular understanding of the character but not in the original.
Which is the greatest problem that I have with the REMAKE project as a whole. The Whispers do a lot of work to justify the deviation and give a new and interesting antagonist for us to face. They might even go on to be the larger threat as the trilogy continues, especially as implications of Zack’s survival and theories about Aerith continue to settle and swirl respectively, but all of that good will goes out the window when they choose to take Sephiroth and play it safe with fanservice and fanfare the entire way.
When you have something as self-aware as and effective as the Whispers woven into your story, you don’t get to be so blatant and lazy as one-wing-angel Sephiroth, a version of the character that he himself would not even recognize. The insertion of him into the finale of the game screams pandering and padding just as much as the underutilized drum section of the game, the extended fetch quests of Wall Market, and the secret hidden tunnels beneath the Sector 7 Slums. They show an inclination toward worst instincts and illustrate, to me, a deep misunderstanding of or genuine disinterest for the source material that worries and upsets me.
Which leads me to Crisis Core: Reunion.
Chapter VI. A Long Awaited Reunion
Between the two games, I would say that I like Crisis Core more than I like Final Fantasy VII. It should be noted that it isn’t a fair competition, as what makes Crisis Core so good is all the time I spent in VII before it, but if I had to choose which game affected me most, I can safely say that it was Crisis Core. Watching Zack go from a brash recruit to a unsung hero was really moving, and I had\ve been wanting a port for some time.
Rick Gomez as Zack for me really defines Crisis Core, and his performance in the game really cements the growth which Zack experiences across the story. He could somehow take obnoxious quotes that would sound like garbage in anyone else’s mouth and make them sound, well, still obnoxious but in an endearing way. You know that it is Zack saying them, and you know that Zack will grow past them.
It is very clear that Zack is not voiced by Rick Gomez anymore by what I heard in the trailer, and that sets off alarms for me. Instead, Zack is going to be voiced by his REMAKE voice actor, Caleb Pierce. To me, it sounds like Caleb Pierce has been coached or pushed to try and sound a lot like Rick Gomez, or at least to deliver his lines with the same inflection, and it doesn’t work. That by itself is disappointing, but it also illustrates the fears that I have.
The people behind Crisis Core: Reunion clearly know how popular Crisis Core is. They also know how good Rick Gomez’s performance is, otherwise they would give Pierce more room to make the performance his own, and the fact that every line sounds like him imitating Gomez is more than a little concerning. It tells me that they are wanting to recreate the lightning in a bottle that made Crisis Core work but also that they have to try and line it up with REMAKE. It says to me that since REMAKE is their definitive timeline now, they’re going to change it.
Sephiroth also has his new REMAKE VA, and I would imagine Cloud has his. This is not bad necessarily. Both of them are fine, though I do prefer Newbern to Hoechlin. My worry, however, is the new content that is being added, some of which I guarantee will tie this all back into REMAKE. My worry is that the experience I am getting will be altered to fit the new narrative and not be subtle quality of life or UI differences to make it easier or better to play.
It sat at the back of my head for days after watching the trailer, and I had no one to share it with. My wife, bless her, listens to me complain too much about video games. My daughters tried to understand but had no idea, and everyone I know who has played REMAKE have not played VII or Crisis Core and do not have the same strong feelings I do about any of the three. The next stage of REMAKE releases approximately a year after Crisis Core: Reunion, and I worry that this port will be just as much of a chimera of new content and misunderstandings that REMAKE was.
Chapter VII. I Will Still Buy It
At the end of the day, no manner of complaint will keep me from playing this new Crisis Core. Not even Final Fantasy XIII could keep me away from Square Enix, and I have a lot of negative things to say about that entire series. So, I will buy it, and I will play it, and I will be loudly and quietly disappointed and complain at home until everyone I love is so done with me that they begin to tune me out.
The worst of what will happen to Crisis Core isn’t that it will suddenly become bad. REMAKE wasn’t bad, only unnecessary. I had fun with it, and I will have fun with Reunion, too. As I have fun, however, I will wonder how and why these things are made. I would be happy if companies like Square Enix continued porting or remastering my favorite games onto new systems and kept them there for me to play until the day I die. I do not see a reason to reinvent things that are already there, and REMAKE seems like needless fiddling, needless fiddling that was so successful that it is now incentivizing them to needlessly fiddle with other things I love.
The frustration is that these new things could be put into new things. REMAKE could have been its own story for all of the changes they put into it. It could have been a game all its own, with its own narrative, and it could have been the beginning of an entirely new trilogy. So, regardless of the fact that I will buy and play them both, I know deep down that all of the fun I have with them will be hollow as a single question lingers at the back of my mind longer than the joy I felt did: if you’re going to do so much to change and reinvent them while also working so hard to keep them the same, why even remake them to begin with?"
While I am largely happy with what I have written and how I have written it, I think I need to take the time to expand on what I liked about the gameplay in Final Fantasy VII REMAKE. I just feel like I've used a lot of vague terms to justify my feelings about the game and that I should give equal effort and precision of language to the good parts as I give to the bad parts.
Sincerely,
RWS
P.S.
-Short Rest-
Books
Tower: The Giver by Lois Lowry
0. One Piece 100% New Chapters Every…
1. Sun: Fullmetal Alchemist Vol. 1, Ch. 1: “”—?? 0% (?—?)
2. Mon: One-Punch Man Vol. 10, Punch 54: “Pumped Up”-54.1 80% (9—10)
3. Tue: Kingdom Hearts Vol. 1, Ch. 1: “”
4. Wed: My Hero Academia Vol. 10, No. 84: “From Ida to Midoriya”—89 33% (4—9)
My Hero Academia: Vigilantes Vol. 4, Ep. 32: “The Job”—35 56% (6—9)
5. Thu: Soul Eater Vol. 1, Ch. 1: “”
6. Fri: Samurai 8: The Tale of Hachimaru Vol. 1, Ch. 4: “Family Argument”—6 50% (4—6)
Boruto: The Next Generation Vol.??
7. Sat: Books
-Fiction: Pyramids by Terry Pratchett
-Library: Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender by Stef M. Shuster
-YA: The Giver by Lois Lowry
-Fan Fiction: Final Fantasy: Fated to Ch. 50 by tinygaia Ch. 46—50, 90%
-Nonfiction: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat 0% (?—??)
View from the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman 26% (130—502)
-DnD5e: Player’s Hand Book by Wizards of the Coast 0% (?—??)
-Reread
Squirrel: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle/One Piece Vol. 17 154—155
Games
Tower: .hack//MUTATION
1. JRPG: Final Fantasy X-2 39% (20/52hrs)
2. Backlog:
3. Completion:
4. Multiples: Fable: Anniversary Good 0% (0/21hrs)
5. Bioware: Dragon Age: Origins Kallian Tabris 14% (10/74hrs)
6. Series: .hack//MUTATION 74% (44/50hrs(17/23hrs))
7. Free: God of War ??% (??/33hrs)
Persona 5: Royal
8. Handheld: Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth P3 ??% (??/80hrs)
Stardew Valley
Shows
Tower: Batman: The Animated Series
1. Critical Role Exandria Unlimited Ep 3: “A Glorious Return”—8 15%
Dimension 20 Unsleeping City Ep. 3: “Pigeon Plus Ones”—17 13%
2. Anime: FLCL 83% (6—6)
Digimon: Adventure Myotismon Arc 25% (23—28(3—8))
3. Online/Owned: Archer Season 2 39% (6—13)
4. Netflix: Seven Deadly Sins Season 1 29% (5—24)
5. Disney+: X-Men Season 1 15% (3—13)
6. HBO: Teen Titans Season 1 31% (5—13)
7. Movies: Firefly 21% (4—14)
Moon Knight 50% (4—6)
X-Men
Promare
Castle in the Sky
Solo: A Star Wars Story
Dumbo
Starship Troopers
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