Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade Review

To add context to this review, it might be useful to know what my position was on the first installment of Final Fantasy VII Remake. For those who haven’t seen that review, I’ll just revisit some ideas so that you can have an idea of the lens I have when playing through this multi-part project. To put it plainly, if you take away the nostalgia of seeing the iconic characters be brought to life with such amazing love and detail, you’re not left with much more than a mediocre game that takes an originally mature story that focused on mature themes and turns it into a straight to DVD anime special with a confused ending that could only be described as uninspired, derivative, and amateurish. That’s not to talk about the bugs, production quality issues, and other blemishes that serve to further weigh down a game already trying to climb a nearly sheer cliff out of that mediocrity.

Like many of you, I suspect, Final Fantasy 7 was one of the cornerstones of my early gaming life, and while that is obviously not unique, it does mean that I have a certain attachment to the original. I am not a fan of how Square Enix spent years saying that remastering, let alone remaking, Final Fantasy 7 would be too expensive and time-consuming, only to then decide to not only do it but make it a far more expensive and convoluted project than nearly any fan ever wanted (and to be honest I don’t know if I’d believe anyone who said this is what they wanted 10 years ago). Making a single game remake into what will inevitably become a nearly $500 investment, stretched further with these interspersed DLCs, is so flippantly opposed to their decade-long narrative that it’s hard not to see it as taking liberties with the fanbase’s nostalgia. Add to that, the announcement they’re remastering and releasing the entirety of the Final Fantasy 7 anthology on mobile, and you might be able to see why I’m unimpressed with their handling of this project. To be completely honest, because of how they’re attacking this whole thing, it has made me even more critical of the end product.

I say that because there are a lot of people who are and will continue to be happy with what they get because they’d rather get what we’re getting versus nothing at all and that’s totally fine – it’s just not my stance. I think Final Fantasy VII should be treated with a certain level of respect given what it did to position Square, and by extension, Square Enix for the future. At this point, based on what I’ve just talked about, I’m not seeing a lot of respect beyond those tasked with bringing the audiovisuals of an over-20-year-old game up to date for a new generation. With all that being said, it’s not that I don’t still hold on to some hope that this doesn’t become something far more praiseworthy from my own perspective, and I went into Intermission with that same hope.

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade Intermission (which I will from here on out simply call Intermission in the interest of this review not being an extra 500 words long) sets out to do what the original game didn’t take the time to do: give us more Yuffie. Intermission accomplishes this in the most literal sense, but not much more beyond that. It unfortunately doesn’t do any more than the original to place Yuffie in a particularly meaningful spot in the grand story – an impressive feat for a 6-to-10-hour game. You could remove all of the events from this expansion, and it would barely change a thing, if at all. What’s more, the writing is often painful – frequently blurring the line between campy and just plain bad. A good chunk of scenes boil down to Yuffie doing the thing and Sonon visibly face-palming, and that runs its course pretty quickly as you can imagine. It’s akin to the worst kind of filler, but let’s talk about what else we get for our $20.

A fiery go-getter, Yuffie is a materia hunter and ninja from Wutai who has set out to restore her home to its former glory. Doing so means taking on Shinra and taking on Shinra means teaming up with other Wutai agents in Midgar. We’re first treated to Yuffie making her way into Midgar, stopping along the way to give the folks at home an elaborate monologue in practicing for her grand entrance at the Wutai headquarters in town. Rumour has it that Shinra is sitting on the Ultimate materia, something that Yuffie is convinced they’ll be able to use to win the war, and so after briefly meeting (and I mean briefly) the rest of the Wutai resistance, you and your new companion but totally not brother Sonon set out to obtain it.

Before you do that, however, you might be seduced into burning a good chunk of time playing Intermissions take on the Fort Condor minigame. If you never played the original Final Fantasy VII, Fort Condor was then part of an actual event, but in Intermission, it has been reduced to a minigame that you can play with various characters around town. It’s a tower defence of sorts, operating on an ATB system similar to the original game’s combat. Both sides go to battle having selected a board which determines your maximum ATB charges, the speed of the ATB gauge, the number of units you can take into the match, and what spells you’ll be able to cast on the field. There are three unit types, each besting the other in a rock-paper-scissors type system, with various units costing more or less ATB charges based on their relative power. With two lanes leading into the other player’s territory, placing units must be done within a zone relative to your furthest forward unit once they pass the midpoint. Beyond that, it’s as simple as playing the right units at the right time to counter your opponent and either do the most damage or destroy their main fort within the time limit.

It’s a simple game, and fun enough to play through until you’ve bested all available opponents, but its real value lies in the fact that you can farm Condor coins by beating opponents multiple times over. Condor coins can be traded in at a shop for various items, including the incredibly powerful elixirs, as well as other items and Fort Condor-specific goodies. While elixirs only sell for a single gil, the higher-end potions sell for a fair chunk of change, and so you can amass a lot of gil without much effort to buy up any materia, weapons, or accessories you’d like right off the bat. You don’t really need to do this, as combat isn’t so crushingly difficult to necessitate it, but doing so does mean you don’t have to rely on forcing battles to respawn to get the money to fund your efforts.

Speaking of the combat, Intermission is much the same as Remake’s first installment, save for some specific mechanics for Yuffie as well as Yuffie and Sonon interactions. Yuffie’s iconic and enormous Shuriken can be used for both long-ranged attacks that help keep your distance, as well as up close and personal punishment. Pressing triangle sends the Shuriken to your targeted location, and from there pressing square will inflict damage to a small area around it. Pressing triangle again dashes Yuffie to the Shuriken to allow her to follow up with close-quarters combat and set her up for her abilities. For an ATB bar, you can also change her Ninjutsu to apply fire, ice, wind, or lightning to her basic attacks to counter your enemies more easily. In practice this works relatively well, but because the targeting system is just as an unruly mess as the first installment’s it can often result in attacking the wrong target, not being able to reliably change targets, or throwing your Shuriken into the sun.

What’s more frustrating, and please someone tell me if I’ve missed something obvious, but there’s no sensible way to return your Shuriken short of dashing to the target or running around in circles until it returns after some time. I personally had a hell of a time amid the very flashy combat sequences, being able to reliably tell when my Shuriken was sent out or if I had it in hand, and I definitely ended up in awkward situations because of it. Throw in the continued horrific camera that has a real knack of giving you the worst view of the field imaginable at the worst possible times and you’ve definitely got your hands full. Smaller enemies are still tough to read, making dodging and blocking when up close an exercise in futility, though larger enemies are still obviously easier to read. Even still, some attacks being all but impossible to properly evade or block means by default it’s not uncommon that simply keeping your distance and spamming ranged attacks is the appropriate winning strategy with the fewest headaches. Again, the combat itself is not particularly punishing, and since the combat isn’t exactly complex, much of the difficulty is fighting the combat controls and mechanics more than fighting the enemies.

The stagger system also perpetuates this and still doesn’t do what Final Fantasy XIII did properly. Most enemies, even if you use the appropriate tactics provided by the assess skill, will die before being staggered. Bosses and other beefier enemies are less likely to suffer this same issue, but that’s not a guarantee. Furthermore, just like the first installment, some enemies have phases that are health percent triggered, meaning you’re often trying to guess when a new phase will begin so you don’t use a limit break or summon and have it be completely wasted. Frustratingly, there were even times when battle events would clear my buffs despite having just been used but wouldn’t replenish my mana. There was even one battle that took my summon off the field early without it getting to use its finishing attack despite my characters not dying and I’m still not sure if that was an intended mechanic – not that it would make me any less frustrated were that to be the case. For as impressive as the combat can look when everything is in motion and it’s firing on all cylinders, Intermission doesn’t do anything to address the issues the combat had in the first installment while introducing other annoyances in the process which was disappointing to see. It still feels like the combat’s playability and user-friendliness is at odds with the want to make every battle somehow fluid but over-the-top cinematic at the same time.

One of the more common complaints about Remake’s first go was that while characters looked great, you definitely didn’t want to look too hard at just about anything else – especially if it was well-lit. Being a PS5 exclusive, Intermission was understandably expected to be a pretty significant leap in visual fidelity and clean up a lot of the mess left behind by contending with PS4-era hardware. While Intermission certainly does spruce up the place – even that famous apartment door has a texture now – I wouldn’t say it’s an enormous step up visually but I did appreciate what was done. What I can say is that the performance mode that brings you up to that 60fps mark is undoubtedly the mode to play in.

Playing in the “turn everything to 11” mode loses you 50% of your frame rate for a barely perceivable sharpness increase – at least from what I saw between the modes. Some modern games have a really distinct visual difference that at least gives you an appreciation for the frame rate drop but that’s not the case here at all. In the Wutai hideout, for example, not even the text in the room was dramatically sharper and I couldn’t walk away from double the framerate for such little improvement. Whatever minor boost in visuals you may get would only be noticeable when stationary because the moment you start moving, that 30fps blur is going to all but eliminate that advantage. What is of course most apparent is the blistering load times thanks to all that fancy new PS5 hardware, and for those who haven’t experienced a top-end PC load time versus the older consoles I’m sure it’ll be jarring in the best way possible when they first see it in action.

One of the more…unique aspects of Intermission is its musical score. To call it eclectic would be bordering on an understatement, but it’s accurate enough to say so. There are a load of genres in here, but the meat of the episode is bathed in experimental jazz. While I do love me some jazz, with many areas you’ll visit in Intermission, the music just doesn’t seem to fit what’s on screen. It’s not to say the tracks are bad because in fact, they’re all very good – especially a couple of battle themes – it’s just that it isn’t uncommon to have them feel out of place. Voice acting continues to be well delivered despite the English translation and/or the writing in general still making the characters sound ridiculous more often than you might like. I’m still not a huge fan of how voices always sound like they’re in a perfect studio environment and not engineered to fit the character’s environment very well but that’s nitpicky and nobody else likely cares. Sound effects in battle are satisfying, and when the music and on-screen action come together just right – it’s a phenomenal audiovisual experience. This is mostly reliant on your summon doing the epic thing at the most epic time, but all the same, it’s wonderful when it happens.

I was really hoping for something quite substantial with Intermission – not necessarily substantial in terms of length, but substantial in terms of content. Yuffie being an optional player character in the original Final Fantasy VII meant that you didn’t get to know too much about her or what she was up to before you ran into her outside of Midgar. Considering how heavy-handed the team has been with completely reworking the story and by proxy the story of many characters thus far, it was surprising and disappointing to see that they didn’t at least extend that same courtesy to Yuffie in her own DLC. It was the perfect opportunity because she didn’t even really need to be reworked so much as just given more screen time to explore her character. Giving her a meagre story to take part in and stretching it to fill 6-10 hours is technically giving us that but not in a particularly satisfying way. Truthfully, this DLC felt like it was less about Yuffie and more about using Yuffie as an excuse to weave in a couple of other embarrassingly bad villains to this new Final Fantasy VII tapestry.

While Intermission brings the Final Fantasy VII Remake project fully into the new generation, it does so more with a limp than a full sprint. Still encumbered with the flaws of the first installment, Intermission doesn’t do much more than give us another fantastic visual update to a beloved character while failing to provide anything particularly interesting or meaningful. If you’re already along for the ride then you may feel obligated to play through Intermission (assuming you even have a PS5 at this time), but for those who aren’t as invested, it’s likely just as fine to wait for the next full installment.