Final Fantasy VII Remake Review

Oh boy is this going to be a challenge! You’ll have to forgive me as I do my best to both frame this review and get through it with little to no spoilers. It’s going to be lengthy and sometimes roundabout, but as specific as it can be. This is a tough review to tackle as it’s a game that has a lot riding on it for both fans and the developer, being a pipe dream release so long in the making. Hopefully, I get my thoughts across as clearly as possible – but this is going to be a lengthy one!

If there’s one thing that we’ve got plenty of to go around these days, it’s nostalgia. This is especially so when it comes to video games as developers rapidly remaster, remake, and rerelease just about any title that has enough rapport with gamers to turn a buck. The results have been hit or miss with some fantastic recent releases like Resident Evil 2, and some not so fantastic releases like Warcraft 3: Reforged. It’s not easy, bringing these beloved games up to today’s standards, and it’s especially challenging to know when to make changes, what to change, and how much to change it – if at all.

If there was a guide developers could follow after so many of these releases it’s that, if nothing else, being faithful to the original and respectful of the source material earns you the most points with fans and critics alike. As with anything, there are exceptions to the rule of course, and some franchises are inevitably going to sell well out of the gate short of catastrophic failure. Bethesda, for example, has a seemingly endless supply of get-out-of-jail-free cards and continues to successfully monetize Fallout 76.

Final Fantasy 7 is not just one of the most beloved Final Fantasy games of all time, it’s one of the most beloved games of all time. Love it or hate it, Final Fantasy 7’s staying power in the hearts of its fans is second to few if any other games in history. When it comes to remasters or remakes, fewer still have been more requested by fans over the years. In the infancy of the remaster era, the prospect of an updated Final Fantasy 7 was enough to put hordes of fans into a frenzy. Forums, articles, and comment sections abounded with fans begging to see their favourite characters brought to life with modern technology as they began seeing other franchises get the same treatment. Unfortunately for the fans, Square Enix’s response at the time wasn’t exactly what they were hoping for.

Square Enix heard the fans loud and clear, but their stance on the idea of remastering Final Fantasy 7 was grim. Though they’d dearly love to give the fans what they wanted, the project was preached to be too expensive and too time-consuming. Final Fantasy 7 was a product of its time, and a remaster just wasn’t feasible. Eventually, and over the course of years, excitement around the idea of a remaster was brought from a roar to a whisper as fans accepted that they would likely never see their dream become reality. Then, much to the surprise of just about everyone in the game industry, Final Fantasy 7 Remake was announced at E3 2015. Showed in the trailer were familiar faces and places set to the timeless tunes of Nobuo Uematsu, all in glorious HD. The fans rejoiced, the excitement was back, and now the pressure was on Square Enix to deliver what they had once said was impossible.

As the release approached and marketing ramped up, fans had more questions about what this game was supposed to be. Square Enix wasn’t exactly being clear with their messaging, and it resulted in a lot of rumors and speculation about what would remain in the game and what would be changed. Even the title added to the confusion as fans tried to decipher what Remake really meant, and if this would be a singular game or if it would be broken up into parts. While we now know what they meant by Remake, we still don’t know how many parts this release will have as of this writing.

I say all of this because it’s relevant to the lens through which I played and will now review this game. I will warn you now that, despite my best efforts, some of what I say here may be considered a spoiler. For those who have never played the original, I will do my best not to require you to have previous knowledge to understand what I’m discussing.

The opening kicks off in all but the same way the original did before. A short cutscene leads to you taking control of Cloud Strife, a cold and distant mercenary for hire. Equipped with his unmistakable, almost comically enormous Buster Sword, you begin your journey on contract with a band of members from a cell of the eco-terrorist group AVALANCHE.

Headed up by a gruff, no-nonsense leader named Barret, the group aims to bring to an end the mega-corporation Shinra as the company mercilessly drains the planet of its life force (known as Mako) to power the city of Midgar. Aside from your hired help, the group under Barret includes the rest of his usual AVALANCHE team: Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge. Your first mission is to take out one of Shinra’s many reactors powering the city, and so after some short words from Barret and crew, you’re off to do just that. What plays out in the early throws of the game is largely like the original with only a few changes that allude to more sweeping narrative shifts down the line, and oh boy are they sweeping. Before all of that though, fans of the original are met with the first major departure from the original – the combat.

While the original game featured turn-based Active Time Battle (ATB) combat with the Materia system, Final Fantasy 7 Remake borrows heavily from the more recent Final Fantasy 15’s action combat stagger system but retains the use of Materia and the ATB bar.

Outside of standard attacks, just about every action requires one or more bars of your ATB gauge. Your ATB gauge will fill slowly over time, but primarily you’ll be running it up by using standard attacks and other actions depending on your equipment. Materia are orbs that grant you the ability to cast spells, gain abilities, add resistances, bring summons to the battlefield, and more. Depending on your equipment, you will have access to a certain number of Materia slots, so you can’t simply use whatever, whenever.

Weapons themselves level along with you and gained experience points for weapons can be used to expand their capabilities. This can mean more attack or magic power, higher defensive stats, extra Materia slots, and more. In most cases, the newer the weapon the better it is as the game gives you your previous weapon level experience points for use as soon as you acquire them. It isn’t always the case that you’ll use newer weapons, but it is often the way it goes, and the gifted experience points ensure you don’t have to grind out every weapon you pick up which is a welcome decision. On paper, this all sounds like the groundwork for a thoughtful and tight combat experience and while Remake’s combat does have promise, it doesn’t quite translate as well as it should for several reasons.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s combat suffers from an identity crisis that results in engagements that range from mindless to frustrating, rarely attaining what it sets out to due to an awkward implementation of the stagger system in combination with its real-time action combat. The stagger system, for those who aren’t acquainted with it, is an interesting concept that revolves around funneling players toward defeating enemies in a specific way almost as if they’re a puzzle. This is accomplished by dramatically reducing the damage a standard attack may do until the enemy is staggered, usually by finding the attack, spell, or other condition that increases the stagger bar. Once the stagger bar is tripped, the enemy is vulnerable to attack and the real damage can be done.

This system made its major debut in Final Fantasy XIII but was utilized in a vastly different way within the confines of a turn-based ATB system not dissimilar to the original Final Fantasy 7. In XIII, the stagger bar works on the same principle, but you’re allowed to swap between different combat modes that are made for different situations that arise in combat. While not perfect, it resulted in fast, on-the-fly combat that was fluid in its strategy and had very little downtime or menu juggling. This is most specifically because of the fluidity it allows in changing between combat modes. Take away the ability to adapt in combat on the fly to run that stagger bar up and you lose perhaps the best part of that mechanic – if not the reason the mechanic is particularly usable in the first place. Remake unfortunately does just that, and the combat suffers because of it.

By nature, Materia is not something you can change on the fly. You swap your Materia out in the main menu while outside of combat. This means that, for the most part, you are presented with two options: stop and swap your Materia loadout for every battle you see coming or find a more standard set that works for the vast majority of enemy types in a given area so you’re not spending so much time in a menu. Thankfully, for those with previous Final Fantasy experience and/or those paying close enough attention, most areas are relatively easy to figure out what’s going to work as a sort of one-size-fits-all all loadout. For better or worse the common enemies you come across are rarely so difficult that you need to be hyper-specific with your loadouts and can be cleaned up even when playing to their strengths. If then, the encounters are so easy you don’t have to worry about your loadout a great deal what’s the problem? Well, other than that in and of itself being a weakness in the system, the combat has some more glaring issues.

While load-outs can be haphazardly put together for most, if not all fights, there are a handful of battles you’ll find yourself a part of that will be far more difficult without a halfway decent load-out tailored to the enemy’s weaknesses. Worse, however, is that most of these situations aren’t particularly difficult at all in the usual sense, but instead simply result in extraordinarily lengthy battles that aren’t meant to be – or need to be. Fights that would normally take five or so minutes can become nearly 20-minute marathon matches that do little but test your patience and not your actual skill as you slog through slow or nonexistent stagger bar damage.

The solution to this problem can be a few things – none of which are particularly efficient, engaging, or fun. The first is blind process of elimination – just you and a list of attacks, spells, and timings to pick at as you try to find success. The second is a combination of looking for enemy tells and processes of elimination. This is what you’d expect in most action games Remake is partially borrowing from, but it is exceedingly rare for an enemy tell to be truly useful information beyond perhaps what element(s) may work best against it. Not all, but many tells have extremely short windows to exploit, and that’s assuming you see them at all which is something we’ll get to shortly.

What Remake would most prefer you do, however, is make use of the Assess Materia. Assess does pretty much exactly what it sounds like it would, assessing one and eventually all the enemies in battle to give you a detailed description of them including their weaknesses. Once you’ve assessed an enemy, you permanently have access to that information in later encounters. The game actively encourages its use further by planting you in front of Chadley, a Shinra employee who isn’t particularly pleased with the company’s actions as of late and who is experimenting with creating new Materia. Chadley will sell you the Materia he creates but he needs your help gathering battle intel which comes in the form of challenges or tasks to complete in combat before reporting back to him. One of those tasks is collecting data with Assess. You can obtain some particularly useful Materia doing these tasks, but the Assess tasks aren’t extraordinarily rewarding.

There are well over 100 enemy types in Remake, and though like I mentioned before while it isn’t likely you’ll need to know the inner workings of every enemy to be successful, some battles all but necessitate it if only to save you needless slog. This creates a situation where you must decide if you'd rather lose a valuable Materia slot to Assess at all times or wait until a battle requires it. With the latter, you can escape the battle or reload the game depending on the enemy so you can swap the Assess back out for something more useful along with the now known counters. Thankfully, the menus and navigation – save the weapon upgrade screen which is a mess of UX/UI – are well done and easy to use, but if this doesn’t sound particularly well thought out it’s because it isn’t. Sadly, the issues don’t stop there.

As I mentioned earlier, exploiting enemy tells is all well and good if you can see them, but Remake doesn’t always make doing so particularly easy thanks to an absolutely awful camera. In the settings, you will find an option for camera distance, but the difference between the furthest and closest settings are barely noticeable to the point I wondered why it was even implemented. My best guess is that it has to do with the framerate in that they struggled to lock the game to 30fps and pulling the camera back too far would bring them below the target frame rate.

Regardless of the reason, the camera is likely to be the most common complaint players have as it actively gets in the way of combat and hinders your ability to do any number of things well more often than it should. You’ll find it bouncing around off pillars and other obstacles awkwardly, dive in when stuck on walls in confined combat spaces, and more. Due to the tight distance, it has to maintain, you also rarely get a particularly good look at the battlefield around you, and losing track of enemies is not uncommon – often leading to getting interrupted or attacked from off-screen.

Unfortunately, while there is a lock-on feature, it arguably should only ever be used in specific situations as it frequently provides the worst view of the battlefield and, ironically, the enemy you’re targeting. Worst of all, the lock on camera does not allow you to rotate the camera around the locked enemy, leaving you stuck with whatever poor angle the game gives you. Inevitably I only relied on the lock on camera when absolutely necessary, otherwise using the free camera to the best of my ability. The camera is something you just have to learn to manage, but eventually, you’ll get the hang of making the most of it – much like you’ll learn to make the most of managing your AI partners.

Like the original Final Fantasy 7, Remake allows for up to a party of three, while sometimes reducing that to two or one depending on what’s happening in the story at the time. You can of course only actively control one character at a time, and since this is a real-time action combat base your allies are controlled by AI when you’re not using them specifically. You can bounce between them whenever you’d like or issue them commands from the action menu that all but stops the combat while you choose your next move. The AI will simply dish out standard attacks and do their best to dodge the enemy when you’re not controlling them, though there are a couple of Materia that you can equip to have them do specific actions automatically such as following up the leader’s attack when prompted. Sadly, unlike in similar games or even past Final Fantasy games there is no way to give your AI any basic behaviours like setting them to mostly defend, mostly attack, attack a specific enemy, etc.

While most common fights don’t require you to even switch between members to plow through them, during the fights that matter this lack of AI control becomes cumbersome. Your partners often attack slowly, and even with Materia made to help build the ATB faster you’ll almost always need to take control to toss out several standard attacks to get an ATB bar that your off-characters can use in a timely manner. What’s more, they often find themselves taking damage unnecessarily – like standing still in a gravity well instead of walking out of its pull or standing right next to a dead enemy that explodes once defeated. Only being able to control one at a time means you will be in situations where you can’t avoid it all, and even if it isn’t something that gets you killed often it does show that the AI needs some work if they’re going to keep the system as it is.

They’re not unaware of the issues their system presents in combination with the AI, as you’ll likely notice early on that enemies tend to focus their attention largely on the character you control. This becomes an exploitable tactic in some fights, as you may find yourself having trouble getting off spells with longer casting times if you’re controlling the character doing the casting. All of these issues lend themselves to what I mentioned earlier about the combat having an identity crisis that is made most apparent by one thing: the combat excels most when you’re a party of one.

When the game does put you in situations where your party is simply a single character, combat is allowed a lot of breathing room and it is far more fluent, engaging, and fun. Without needing to worry about managing one or two off-characters and their AI, and with battles tuned more for a single character, you get to appreciate the action combat side of the equation a lot more. When I say tuned for a single character it’s because instead of enemies tuned for two or three character battles all focusing on the one you actively control, it’s simply enemies tuned for one character focusing on you. This makes things like dodge rolling more frequently usable beyond triggering a counterattack and blocking a more sensible solution to weathering individual attacks where both are less frequently useful in standard three-party combat. What’s particularly nice in this instance is that you get a much better appreciation for one of the game’s high points – its animation. There is an almost uncanny amount of work put into the combat animations of every single character, though Tifa specifically has some truly spectacular work done for her move set.

Speaking of move sets, every character has a wholly unique combat experience. I was super impressed with the depth of combat characteristics each character has, and while their individual skills are rarely called upon in battle as a strategic decision, seeing the work put into making everyone feel and play differently is inspiring. It honestly feels as though you could pull any one of them out, put them in their own action game, and they’d be ready to go without much added work – they’re that well executed. It’s such a shame then that these positives grapple with the issues mentioned to give that end result of an identity crisis. Final Fantasy 7 Remake doesn’t know if it wants to be a pure-bred action game or a turn-based strategy game. While the system can be, and hopefully will be dramatically improved upon for the game or games to come, its current iteration is simply wasted potential. The challenge often isn’t in fighting the enemies, it’s fighting the combat system itself.

What’s just as disappointing is that for what potential the combat system does have but rarely achieves, some key battles are just plain poorly designed and make little to no use of anything the system has to offer. Some fights are so badly done that even after you’ve figured out what you have to do to be successful, you may question if you truly have figured it out or if you’re only getting part of it. It’s not uncommon to exploit an enemy’s weakness but still build the stagger bar so slowly that by the time it’s full you’ve all but killed them. Some may also find the pacing of boss battles awkward as the stagger bar becomes more of a way to separate stages of the fight than work as it normally does against other enemies.

Personally, while I feel they could tune the current system to be far better, I’d almost rather them simply choose to lean closer to an updated and improved Final Fantasy XIII combat system to make better use of the stagger bar, or go purely action combat and remove the stagger bar altogether – relying on a more simple elemental weakness system like the original game had. For all its issues Remakes combat will likely get a pass from most players because they will rarely be challenged, and the combat is flashy in all of its well-animated glory. Whether that means the combat is good or not is debatable, but it’s certainly not what I’d use as a benchmark. There is a higher difficulty available to be unlocked that will force you to be more mindful of the intricacies of the combat for those interested, but the issues presented here likely only become more apparent when you’re forced to more actively use the system to survive despite perhaps giving you more appreciation for the potential it has.

What just about everyone will agree on, however, is that Final Fantasy 7 Remake sounds and looks fantastic overall – though of the two, the audio is the clear winner. In a bit of a twist, Remake takes an almost completely opposite approach to how it spends its resources graphically compared to the original. In the original release, most of the resources were spent on beautifully rendered backgrounds and higher fidelity environmental assets, leaving little for the character models that were barely more than a handful of polygons. Remake flips that, putting the vast majority of its resources into the character models to help properly bring the characters to life.

Environments, however, get the short end of the stick to achieve the level of fidelity the character models enjoy – including the majority of non-essential NPCs. It seems that the game’s distribution of memory was largely decided by the early game areas that are at night or inside in dark spaces. These areas allow for heavy shadow and the game’s solid lighting system to cover up the low-res assets and textures that make up the world around you while allowing them to highlight the character models and particle effects in combat. Enter any of the game’s daylight or brightly lit interior spaces and the reality of the PS4 limitations becomes apparent, with few exceptions.

Ultra-low resolution assets are not uncommon, and texture pop-in can range from simply noticeable to severely slow. Non-essential NPCs, and even the majority of those you are required to interact with for side quests, look like they came from another game and generation entirely. What’s particularly perplexing is that normally you expect these things to be the case outside of the player’s cone of focus – stuff that’s most likely where the player is looking at any given time – but here, there doesn’t seem to be any effort to do so, bringing the worst of the game’s visuals to your attention with surprising frequency.

Most of the game’s cutscenes are done in-game, which thanks to the carefully attended to character models, often looks fantastic. There are sparse fully CGI cutscenes, but they are there and in usual Square Enix style are beautifully done and strikingly high fidelity. There are a number of times, though, that you’ll likely wonder why you have control of a character instead of it continuing a cutscene, like walking a handful of steps in between a pair of them, but in general the pacing of the game isn’t disrupted as can frequently become the case with the genre’s reliance on cutscenes to push the narrative along.

The voice acting is also a high note for Remake, with arguably not a single weak performance in the cast. Voices generally match perfectly the characters they belong to, and what really stood out to me was how the voices almost all were representative of the voices I gave them in my mind when playing the original some 20 years ago. They’re so well done that you almost don’t notice because they just fight right in. Despite their best efforts, though, the voice actors and actresses can only do so much when the writing is so rough, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

The real star of the show in Final Fantasy 7 Remake is the soundtrack. Final Fantasy 7’s music has a number of the most recognizable, most iconic, most respected songs in gaming history. Nobuo Uematsu’s legendary songs return both in their orchestral forms, as well as modified and remixed versions that are all well done. Also contributing to the soundtrack are Mitsuto Suzuki and Masashi Hamauzu, with all three gentlemen putting an astonishing amount of work in to bring everything in Midgar to life. There is a staggering amount of audio work done here, with numerous multiple-layered recordings done for many of the tracks to ebb and flow with your progress in battle and more. If there is one thing that will disappoint no one in Remake, the soundtrack is it. Conversely, if there was one thing that will be largely divisive for those who play Remake, it will be the writing and story.

So here we are. If you’ve made it this far, bless your heart, but we’ve still got more to go. I will do my best to avoid any spoilers while navigating the minefield that is Remake’s story, but everyone has different opinions on what is and isn’t a spoiler so just be aware that there may be something here you don’t want to see. The long short of it is that the changes made to the original story will likely be divisive and how you feel about them personally will come down to how you value the original story and the expanded universe built around it up to this point. Ok, let’s get into it.

The original Final Fantasy 7 story was quite dark, and it wasn’t shy about slamming in some pretty overt opinions on consumerism, industrialism, and the discourse of humanity at the time. At the same time, it was a case of having great ideas that were hindered by occasionally awkward pacing, and particularly campy writing due to both stylistic choices and the challenges of translation. It was a time when voice acting wasn’t particularly common, and character models were but a handful of polygons strung together to loosely resemble a person outside of cutscenes. These restrictions meant that more intentionally campy or cheesy writing with simple archetypes were valid methods of getting your point across. Similar to how live plays require actors to over-emote to play to those viewers further back in the audience, Final Fantasy 7 relied on these principles to overcome its limitations.

The Remake, on the other hand, has none of these limitations. Characters are fully voiced now, and models are a lot more than a handful of polygons. Characters don’t have to be starkly black and white and bounce around the screen like a cartoon to be able to understand them. They don’t have to emote like C-tier anime characters every time they finish a sentence or repeat themselves a thousand times to make sure you understand their most basic motivations. Like it or not (and many will be fine with this I’m sure), Final Fantasy 7 Remake not only makes no attempt at maturing its methods but mostly doubles or triples down on just how full-blown anime they get in everything from the characters to the story beats. To put it more plainly, at its core, Remake is an even more simplified and often childish telling of its story and characters.

The dialogue especially is particularly bad, even by JRPG standards. Some characters are graced with the odd flash in the pan, but generally speaking, the dialogue is ripped right out of a mid to low-tier anime. This is punctuated by endless selfie poses, kawaii waifu close-ups, and awkwardly placed exclamations. It’s obvious how much they especially wanted to show off the new models of the female cast of characters, and there are several scenes that flat-out feel uncomfortable to watch. I get that there is a market for this kind of thing, but it does nothing for the tone of the story here and mostly feels out of place or out of touch with the reality of the story or individual character arcs. This disconnect is seen as well in Midgar as a whole.

Originally Midgar was grimy, downtrodden, and grim. There was little to be happy about in the slums, and only a handful of places brought levity to the communities around them. Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s Midgar tries to use this conceptualization but what it shows the player feels woefully disconnected. Technically you’re in the slums. Technically you’ll hear people griping occasionally. Technically people are largely forgotten. However, at almost no point did I feel that way while exploring and working within Midgar in Remake. The stark contrast between how you know it’s supposed to be and what it presents itself to be really gets in the way of building any sort of emotional connection to the situation at hand that forms the basis of the Midgar portion of the narrative.

This isn’t made any better by the NPCs scattered around the city. Midgar has a handful of people going about their business, but few if any help bring the city to life. You spend a lot of time running around the slums between story beats, especially when you’re chipping away at the short list of mostly throw-away side quests the game presents you. Nearly every NPC has one voiced line and man do they ever make sure you’re aware of it. Few things pull you out of a game faster than walking past an NPC twice in under two seconds only to hear them say the same thing both times with no break in between. As a result, Midgar feels lifeless and barren but not for the reasons it should. I will note, however, that there are a handful of wonderful NPCs that are quite fun and well done – they're just so rare they almost feel out of place.

It’s not hyperbole when I say that nearly all of the game’s short list of side quests are throwaways. There are scant few that add anything to the story or characters. A couple of quests meagerly add to the world-building, but otherwise, you’re staring down the barrel of the lowest level MMORPG type questing you can think of. You’ll enjoy such classics as round up some kids, kill some rats, and round up some kids part two. They mostly feel like an afterthought that were put there because someone felt you have to have side quests, and not because they would serve any great purpose. It’s a real shame because the main reason we’re getting this Remake split into numerous releases is so they could more deeply explore what they didn’t have the capabilities to originally in 1997 – or so they told everyone, anyway.

Recall that before release, information began cropping up about what changes would be made to the story, though most of what was floating around were rumors as Square Enix was being tight-lipped or vague about it. As we got closer, they started to talk a bit more openly about their direction, but generally speaking, the communicated idea was that this was going to be closer to a Director’s Cut than a complete reimagining. Even the trailers, until nearly the point of release, largely showed only characters and locations in the original game. Discussions around changing specific elements like Wall Market resulted in Square Enix reassuring everyone that it would still be part of the experience and wouldn’t be a massive departure from the original. Just shy of the entirety of the discussions, press releases, and general marketing, they leveraged the nostalgia of the characters and story in the original game with scant clues that they would dramatically meddle with the story. Indeed, most people I know, myself included, were under the impression that this was simply going to be largely the same story but flesh out characters and world-building in such a way they weren’t able to all those years ago. That’s not what Remake is.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake takes the absolute core concepts from the original and up front makes relatively minor changes. Some reveals and character mentions, however, are shuffled around or moved up with one character reveal in particular being handled in a wildly different manner. The changes to the core story are mostly inconsequential for those who know the original, but for those without prior knowledge some of these plot points are going to seem confusing or ring hollow. As for the goal of fleshing out world-building or characters more than they originally were able to, the additions are barely noticeable. Jessie gets the most attention here, with a relatively lengthy story piece added for her benefit. It doesn’t particularly add much given the amount of time dedicated to it, however, and so it just ends up feeling like a lot of filler. Biggs and Wedge get far less attention and are relegated to passive absorption of fun facts you see and hear about as you do other things. They also include a new toss-away character that is apparently going to be saved for another game that accomplishes naught but hijacks one of the more iconic segments of the original. Almost nothing else is done to expand Midgar as a location, or to explore the characters we didn’t get a chance to the first time around for the remainder of the game.

Perhaps the most jarring experience the game presents you with is the dramatic switch in direction during the final acts of the game. Players will undoubtedly come out of this thing with a serious case of whiplash. The first three quarters or more of the game roughly follow the original story and all ties together but if you have previous knowledge you’ll see that something is coming. I promise you that nobody who plays Remake will have the slightest idea where Square Enix is taking this series entering the last acts, and how they feel about the game from that point forward has a high chance of flipping for better or worse. It feels like SE handed the game off to a totally different set of writers and directors in the eleventh hour and the result is a mixture of embarrassing and insulting.

It’s embarrassing because it’s some of the weakest writing I’ve seen in years. It writes in the most epic narrative crutch I’ve ever seen in a game and uses it not only to protect themselves from making hard narrative choices in the future but also to semi-break the fourth wall to call out a segment of the fan base. It then all but makes frivolous the entire story leading up to these final acts as well as other canonical elements external to the original game. What’s perhaps its most tragic error, is that for those who haven’t played the original game or at least have a passing knowledge of the story and characters, they’re likely to be confused at best and completely lost at worst due to making particularly specific callbacks and references. These aren’t just references tied in to appease those who have played the original, these are nearly imperative pieces of knowledge to know what is going on. They managed to write a story so poorly that they both alienated a segment of the original fans while also alienating newcomers to the series.

The only people likely to be ok with any of this are those who are interested in something new and don’t care how that happens or at whose expense it comes. For all intents and purposes, someone decided that Remake should just be a rehash or extension of Kingdom Hearts in an entirely unoriginal way. Critically speaking, at the very least, whoever wrote and directed the last acts of Final Fantasy 7 Remake should probably not have a leading role doing so in another game for a very long time.

Herein lies my biggest gripe with Final Fantasy 7 Remake. Square Enix went through a lot of effort to capitalize on the nostalgia of the original game and its characters but essentially pulled a bait and switch. It adds almost nothing to the original story or characters while bastardizing them and adding some of the most poorly written narratives I’ve seen in a long while with some of the worst execution. The side quests are minimal and inconsequential, the combat while promising is saved only by the nearly complete lack of difficulty and flashy visuals, all of which leave you with a particularly awful experience if it wasn’t for one magical ingredient – nostalgia. If this was any other game, with any other title, while wholly being the same, it would undoubtedly be seeing far less favourable reviews from its players and critics alike. In my opinion, Square Enix is getting more than a few get-out-of-jail-free cards with this one thanks to a nearly unmatched level of nostalgia for a game that many people involved in making it likely never had a hand in or perhaps even played.

Fantastic character models, phenomenal music and voice acting, and a combat system with promise are not enough to float a remake of this magnitude. At the very least, there is little to no justification for why this has become a multi-part release short of a money grab that leaves the possibility for the project to go unfinished or rushed out the door towards the end. Nobody asked for this, and the original deserves a lot more respect than it received here. Does this mean the next release can’t be made better? Of course not, and what issues are here are not unfixable, but much of it – like the writing – is less likely to improve. Like Final Fantasy 7 before it, Final Fantasy 7 Remake is a product of its time and the company behind it. Unfortunately, this time around that isn’t a good thing.