Game Review: Final Fantasy 7 Remake

I’ll try to keep this one short.

In theory, I am the sort of person that this game was made for. I played the original Final Fantasy 7 on the original Playstation around 1999, when I was thirteen years old. I have a lot of nostalgia for it.

Unfortunately, it’s been 25 years.

Doubly unfortunately, the game, in spite of its name, is not actually a remake.

I go into a lot of games very blind, mostly because I tend to play them either right when they come out (when there’s not yet any discourse) or years after they come out (when I’ve missed everything people are saying). And then I also don’t tend to seek out discourse for things until after I’ve experienced them anyway, which means that I don’t have a lot of priming.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake does some alternate timeline fighting against fate things that are supposed to be in conversation with the original game, a path of destiny that they’re deviating from in a diegetic way. This did not at all work for me, because my memory of the original game was far too fuzzy: the game covers just the Midgar section of the original, which was a scant four to six hours that I played an entire lifetime ago.

The story sort of works without the context of extensive comparison to the original, but there’s a lot that was confusing and was clearly meant to have an impact that was lost on me. The whispers seem to show up when the game threatens to diverge from canon, and … you know, even when I had made that connection, it was just totally lost on me what canon event was being dodged. If I had known that this was one of the conceits of the game, I would have played the Midgar section of the original first. If I had done that, maybe I would have liked the game better.

Setting all that aside, how is it as a game?

I have two major gripes. The first is that this is a game that just completely disrespects my time with long, repetitive animations and significant portions of playtime that are just “hold left stick forward”. Some of this is probably to hiding loading as I was repeatedly squeezing through cracks, but I don’t care why it happens, only that it happens and is annoying. The game also liked to give me slow-moving cutscenes that are communicating nothing, and likes to slow Cloud down to a trot, and in general feels sluggish in a way that I kind of hated.

The other major gripe is the combat, which is a weird hybrid of real-time and turn-based. The original was kind of turn-based, and here they gave Cloud a dodge-roll, guard, and basic attack. I personally did not feel like this worked basically at all, but it might be because the dodge roll screams “Dark Souls” to me and then the actual combat has poorly telegraphed attacks with incredibly difficult wind ups and undodgeable stuff. The combat really seems to love long “get back up” animations, interrupts, stunlocks, and other things that take away control, which I despise. I wouldn’t say it was hard, but even toward the end I wasn’t sure I was playing it “right”. In Dark Souls, taking damage is a sign that you’re doing something wrong, but this game seems to just assume that you’re constantly being whittled down and will need periodic heals. Very possibly a skill issue here, but if it was, then the game’s too easy, since I never really had much trouble.

In terms of my overall enjoyment, I think the game was at its best when it was driving forward and being big and ridiculous. Cloud has his huge sword, Barret has his machine gun arm, Midgar is class struggle incarnate, Sephiroth has his angel wing, and it’s very fun when it’s over the top. Where the game was at its worst, it was giving me busywork and adding in filler. There’s a thing a lot of games do where they put their money into the huge set pieces and then skimp on everything else, and for this game, I could really tell, not just in the texture and animations, but the writing. I think I did about half of the side stuff, and if I had to do it over, I would have done less. When I was tearing through Shinra dudes going up the tower? That was great. When I was fighting endless enemies in the lab for not that much reason? Much less great. There was lots of stuff that could have been cut to improve the experience. The ending goes on for far, far too long, with way too many battles, some of which seem like they were added just to have another setpiece.

Since it’s been so long since I’ve played the original, I was getting reintroduced to the characters. Tifa is still the best, Cloud is much more of a nothing character than I remembered him, I think they gave Barret more clear politics, and Aerith … I still feel like I don’t have that much of a sense of her, maybe because there’s so much she’s keeping to herself for so much of the game (I had never liked her much, for reasons that are still kind of unclear to me). Aerith and Tifa are a great pair though, which I don’t think I remember from the original. The love triangle thing doesn’t work for me, however.

I’m not sure I’m going to play Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Remake was just way too slow for my tastes, roughly 30 hours of what could have been a 10 hour story. My enjoyment of the combat went from “merely okay” to “hate this”, with the one highlight being the one-on-one fight with Rufus on top of the Shinra building, maybe because it felt more controlled. Another thirty hours does not really appeal to me, at least right now. I probably will play the Midgar section of the original, especially since that should only take a sliver of time. Maybe that will retroactively make me like this game more.

I was hoping that Remake would make me feel like I felt when I was 13, which I’ve found remakes and remasters can sometimes achieve, and I only got a few flashes of that.