Final Fantasy VII Remake is both ambitious AND controversial. It’s a love letter to the original game, but it still deviates in some major ways. Which ways? If only someone made a video about it…
Transcript:
I’ve always found it kinda sad that we can’t go back in time and experience games when they were released.
That period of a game’s history is so important. What other games were coming out, what technology existed, what was happening in the world, these all play a part in how the game is perceived years after its release.
And once that time passes, you never get to experience it again.
Elden Ring just came out and the whole community surrounding this game is fascinating. People are out there making videos on updated mechanics from the Dark Souls games, secrets are being found, glitches are being exploited for speedruns, we’re in the discovery phase.
All this community interaction is important. It’s part of the Elden Ring experience. You join a discord and share something you learned or add it to the wiki. A singleplayer game turns into a communal experience.
But by the time this video comes out, a lot of that hype will have died down. The wiki will document secrets and obscure items that took weeks to find. Once people know how to find those secrets, that information is out there. The game becomes less of a mysterious experience that everyone’s currently going through and more of a known quantity that everyone already went through.
You’ll be able to replay Elden Ring in 2029, but it’ll be a different beast then. Everything’s been figured out about the game and the new hotness will be Sekiro: Shadows Die Thrice. Then that game’ll get documented and the cycle repeats.
Lesson of the story, appreciate what you have in the moment.
And my goal here, is to document Final Fantasy VII Remake’s moment. We know they have crazy stuff planned for the next games, but we don’t know what direction they’re gonna go in. It’s such a bizarre and ambitious game, that I just have to talk about my thoughts on it. Where we are right now, part 2 hasn’t even been announced, but it seems like we’ll see some news on it this summer. I’m hoping to have this video out before then, so my thoughts will be untainted by whatever trailers they show off.
Before I talk about Remake, I wanna poke and prod at the original real quick. That’ll give you some important context before I move on to the juicy bits.
The original Final Fantasy VII is a beefy game. It’s got more stuff to do in it than previous Final Fantasy games, and on top of that, was an impressive graphical showcase at the time. All these burgeoning technologies came together to build something that people hadn’t seen before. Most classic RPGs, and even ones on the PS1, looked like this. But Final Fantasy VII looked like this. It speaks for itself.
And yet the gameplay was familiar. It was turn-based, just like the others before it, and just like the ones that would come after it. Final Fantasy was known for being turn based, at least until the early 2000’s.
I had no problems playing the Playstation 1 version of Final Fantasy VII in the current year. There are some weird quirks, like how Cloud moves really slow when you aren’t holding circle to run, but overall, it’s aged pretty well.
The graphics are another story.
The footage you’ve seen in the background looks fine to me. This is the Playstation 1 version at the native resolution. It’s a little pixel-y, sure, but that’s how old games are. This is perfectly acceptable.
This. Is not.
This is the modern port of Final Fantasy VII, and if you ask me, this is grotesque. And I’m only being a little hyperbolic.
If you can’t tell what’s wrong with this image, and you want to continue living in blissful ignorance like I wish I could, then mute the video for a bit. Once you notice it, you won’t be able to live a happy life again.
The characters are rendered at a crisp 1080p. Look at these beautiful, sharp lines. They’re well defined and look great. They are appropriately rendered for modern displays.
On their own, the backgrounds don’t look too bad, but then you see how they look with the character models, it’s just awful. The character models are rendered in real time, that’s why they look so crisp. The backgrounds though, those were pre-rendered back in the mid-90s. Square doesn’t have the original assets anymore, so they can’t re-render them at 1080p or 4k or whatever. All they had access to when working on the backgrounds for this port are the same assets you’d have access to if you just took a peek inside the PS1 game’s files.
So what did they do to these backgrounds when they decided to port FF7 to modern consoles?
They put a nice, smooooooth filter on it. A filter that makes you feel like you need glasses. A filter that breaks the illusion of the game’s world.
In this footage of the PS1 game, the characters and the background are rendered at the same resolution. They match. In footage of the Switch version, the characters and backgrounds don’t mesh together. They clash and remind you that you’re playing a game with faux-3d environments. Where characters just walk on top of flat images made to look like real 3d areas.
Okay, okay. That’s enough rambling. I promise I won’t ramble any more in this video. If I do, I give you full permission to grill me in the comments.
The original Final Fantasy VII, despite all the flaws it may have, is a game that holds up surprisingly well. But all those tiny little flaws make you wish that Square would make an updated version. One that fixes all those pre-rendered background problems. One that becomes the definitive version… of Final Fantasy VII.
So. You’re the head of Square Enix, and you decide its time to break the emergency glass and start work on the Final Fantasy VII remake. Its one of the most important games of all time and whatever you make is gonna sell like hot cakes.
How do you do it?
The best way to look at this situation, is from a business perspective. How much effort and time (i.e. money) do you wanna spend on the project? What should the scale be?
On one end of the spectrum, you have the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy Definitive Edition. That’s a remaster bordering on remake. It uses a lot of the same code, but they also spent a ton of time updating old assets. Some might argue it’s not really a remake, but I think this release is the absolute bare minimum of what could be considered a remake. This is the cheapest option.
And on the other end, you have Resident Evil 2’s remake. The original game is basically reference material for making a brand-new game. New assets, new code, maybe some new sections, everything is built from the ground up. This is the most expensive option.
Well, you can’t really do a borderline remaster. A barebones port is already out, and people might not buy the new game if its too similar to the one they already own.
You could go take the Trials of Mana route. Trials of Mana is a remake of Seiken Densetsu 3 on the SNES. For what it is, it seems like a game with a pretty big budget. The whole game was translated into 3d, and that doesn’t cost nothing. Though when compared to your Resident Evil 2s, you can see it ranks a bit lower in the scale department.
But we’ve seen remakes like that before. What if… there was a way to surpass your average big budget remake? Is that even possible?
A way to go… even further beyond?
Square Enix has gone into uncharted territory.
Not only are they remaking Final Fantasy VII from the ground up. They’re expanding it to massive proportions. All the way back before release, they announced that the Remake was gonna be split into multiple parts. The first part of the game, the only one that’s out right now, covers the original game’s plot until the group leaves Midgar for the first time.
No joke, that’s like a fifth of the original game. 7 hours of that game is expanded to 33 hours of Triple A content. That’s just under the length of the PS1 version.
Let that sink in for a second, that’s nuts.
And that’s just the first part. I doubt we’re gonna get 4 more games, probably more like 2 or 3, but either way, that’s ambitious as hell.
So how do you pad a 7 hour experience into 33 hours? That’s the main question a lot of people were left with before release. And now that the game has been out for a while, I’m still not sure how I feel about that decision.
There are parts of this game, new parts to the Final Fantasy VII story, that feel well done. Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie have a ton more lines and the added screen time they get is much appreciated. The way you get to see more of those characters and learn about who they are just feels right. The added moments with them blend seamlessly into the scenarios we’re all familiar with.
And I really enjoy when Remake takes a step and shows off some new characters. Sonon from the INTERmission DLC is great and the Trio of Wall Market are all iconic.
Not all of the new stuff is great though. There’s a handful of other characters and scenarios that feel out of place or unnecessary. Roche is a character that doesn’t really vibe with the existing cast. It’s hard to really put my finger on it, but he doesn’t really “do” anything. He just shows up, battles Cloud a few times, and dips. Nothing he does has any relevance to the main thrust of the plot, and as such, feels like a character just added for variety’s sake.
And that’s to say nothing about all the time spent in areas you quickly pushed through in the original game. This game has hub areas that you spend time in during the game’s chapters. Chapter 3 has you hanging out in the Sector 7 Slums and Chapter 9 is when you go to Wall Market. In areas that you’d visit for 20 minutes in the PS1 game, you now spend an hour minimum. And on top of that, you have like six side quests per major hub.
Now before I started writing this script and replaying the game, I remember hating the side-quests. I just viewed them as pointless filler that didn’t really do much for the world or the player’s journey. I remember just pushing through them for completion’s sake so I could move on to the next area.
But after replaying it, I learned I had it mixed up.
I ENJOYED the time spent in the hub areas doing side quests. It’s the one area of the game where you get freedom.
To be fair, Midgar in the original was extremely linear as well. In fact, I’d say that which areas were linear and which areas were open in that game match up to what’s linear and open in this game. Wall Market was always an area where you could dick around and learn about Midgar.
But now, those sections are elongated. Remake is 4.7 times longer than the original game’s Midgar. So it stands to reason that each of the sections is roughly 4.7 times longer.
Now of course that doesn’t perfectly apply, cause there’s a lot of wholly new stuff towards the end of the game to beef up the run time, so let’s just say you’ll be in any area in Remake 4 times longer than you would in the original.
For some sections, that’s great.
Chapter 8 is where you meet Aerith and spend time with her in the Sector 5 slums.
Thinking back to what that was like in the original game, I can’t even remember. All I remember was bee-lining it straight to Aerith’s house and not interacting with any of the slum-dwellers.
Oh, of course, how could I forget the guy that are sick.
And I cheated there. I looked at my footage to even see what that area looked like, because I forgot about everything between the church and Aerith’s house.
Look at this area. There’s nothing memorable here. The only notable characters are the foreboding guy with a typo and the kid who’s allowance you can steal.
Contrast that to Sector 5 in the Remake, and it’s night and day. I could tell you all kinds of things about that area off the top of my head.
There’s the big TV screen in the middle of town where you watch Scarlet dom a camera guy, there’s Mireille, the orphanage, the kid’s secret area where they don’t allow adults, the arena where you fight Rude and the Tonberry, this town is brimming with life and character.
The side-quests you take on in this chapter flesh out the world.
You learn about the Angel of the Slums and how she avoids the watchful eyes of a tabloid reporter. You gain the respect of the orphaned kids by saving some of them and they let you in their “no adults” area freely.
Of course there’s the more direct quests that basically boil down to “go kill some bad guys in this area then report back to me”, but I don’t mind those. It’s good to have those in between 20 minutes of talking.
Chapters like this are where you get to truly appreciate this game as a remake. What was maybe 10 minutes in the original game is like an hour and a half, and it, for the most part, is really meaningful. I played through most of that chapter in one sitting, and I felt really satisfied after having completed all the quests and fully exploring the Sector 5 slums for what they are.
If you don’t remember what started me on that little tangent, allow me to rope you back in. I was mixed up in my thoughts before starting this second playthrough. I thought I hated side-quests in this game. And how I just wanted to move on to the next area and get out of Midgar as quickly as possible. But after Chapter 8, I discovered I really enjoyed the side quests. And I hated that I had to move on.
If you’ve played this game, you know what’s coming.
The long walk from Sector 5 to Wall Market.
Now don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t tank my opinion of the game. And for what it’s worth, these treks between hub areas aren’t THAT long. This one is only 30 minutes.
But that 30 minutes really does feel like an eternity.
You spend 30 minutes walking down straight tunnel. There’s the occasional 15 second detour you can take to get an item, but it’s basically a linear path to the playground scene from the original.
One screen from the PS1 game is turned into a 30 minute, boring, linear segment.
And it gets worse. Not only is it a linear path. Not only is the environment boring. NOT ONLY do the slow animations start to really grate on you. You have pointless, long, annoying, box rearranging puzzles. These really piss me off and make this whole section feel longer than it actually is. You gotta slowly move the crane arm thing to pick up a container, slowly move it to its destination, slowly move it back, slowly pick up Aerith, then slowly place her down at the ladder and she kicks it down for you. And if you put one of the containers in the wrong spot, you gotta reshuffle them around again.
To me, puzzles are only as fun as they are to execute. If I can come up with a solution in 3 seconds, but it takes me a minute to actually get all the pieces into place to complete it, then I’m not having fun.
In Portal, you can place portals as quick as you can think. Thinking and trying solutions doesn’t have a time penalty to it.
But the containers in this, it takes time to shuffle them around. You spend such little time thinking about what to actually do and so much time just going through the motions, it’s frustrating.
Now, despite what you might think, I’m not dumb. I know this isn’t Portal. The only container puzzle you even have to think about for longer than a millisecond is the last one, and that one only requires 4 milliseconds. They aren’t meant to mentally stimulate you like Portal or The Talos Principle. They just give variety to a mostly combat heavy section.
But I’d rather have no variety than bad variety. This 30 minute section could have been 10 minutes shorter, cutting out all the container puzzles and some of the combat, and I’d be fine.
I’d say that’s this game in a nutshell.
They could have cut off like a third of the filler content of this whole game and had a concise 22 hour experience. That way, there’s still enough time to add onto parts that benefit from being expanded, like the towns. But we also keep the linear sections between those areas in check. No more crane container shenanigans.
I have a lot more to say about the story, but I’ll save that for the spoiler section. Let’s touch on the gameplay real quick.
Not long after it’s announcement, Final Fantasy VII Remake was announced to feature action-based combat, not turn-based.
I’m of two minds when it comes to stuff like this.
Remakes can be a lot of things. Resident Evil 2’s remake plays absolutely nothing like the original. It’s still an amazing game, but its not the same game. It doesn’t replace the original.
The remake of the first Resident Evil is a different story. They replicated nearly everything about the PS1 version, including the gameplay. For all intents and purposes, the remake replaces the original. There’s nothing you get playing Resident Evil on the PS1 that you wouldn’t get playing the Gamecube remake.
You can’t say the same for Resident Evil 2’s, and especially 3’s, remake. They cut out and add new stuff to the PS1 game to the point where they’re fundamentally different experiences.
And I think that’s a cool idea!
I can appreciate that Resident Evil 2’s remake isn’t really a remake, more so a reimagining. And for what it’s worth, Capcom doesn’t use the word “remake” on the game’s store page anywhere. The Resident Evil 2 we got appeals to a lot more gamers than a remake similar to the one the first Resident Evil got.
But. We also have to deal with the fact that we DIDN’T get an RE1-esque remake. And we likely never will.
For as unappealing as this gameplay might look to your average Fortnite player, it still has it’s merits. Fixed camera angles and pre-rendered backgrounds give the game a certain feel, y’know? One that’s impossible to recreate with an over-the-shoulder camera. I’ve heard a lot of people say the Resident Evil gamecube remake is the best remake of all time. People really liked how they modernized some parts of the game, but kept the core of it intact. The game looks nicer and the voice acting is a hell-of-a-lot nicer, but you still see the same camera angles you did in ’96. It’s THE definitive way to play the first Resident Evil.
But Resident Evil 2 is never gonna have that. Now that Capcom put all their eggs into the action-y third person shooter basket, they aren’t gonna go back and give us a remake like RE1’s gamecube version. That ship already sailed when they decided where they wanted their game to fit on the remake scale.
So as good as Final Fantasy VII Remake is, it’s most definitely NOT a replacement for the PS1 game. And that’s for more reasons than just the gameplay, but again, I’ll talk about that in the spoiler section.
Similarly to the Resident Evil 2 situation, Final Fantasy VII Remake plays nothing like the game it’s based on. It’s less Dragon Quest and more Kingdom Hearts in that department.
On a purely descriptive level, they did an amazing job with the new combat system. Hits are meaty, items and magic are fun to use, and your party members have their own unique playstyles. Though it’s important to note this isn’t quite Bayonetta. There aren’t a ton of different combos you can activate by doing all kinds of crazy inputs, you’re gonna be doing all your physical attacks by mashing one button. The different characters all have mechanics specific to them, but they don’t change the fact that you’re still gonna be mashing the attack button and throwing in the occasional ability.
In that way, they kinda maintained some link to the original game, however small that may be. Like I said, this isn’t a Platinum game, you aren’t tested on your memorization and execution of combos. You’re tested on your stats and equipment. You do have a little wiggle room for being tested outside of that by physically dodging attacks, but offensively, your success is still determined by the stuff you have equipped and how you choose to use them, just like in the first game.
Though I can’t help but find myself a little sad when I think about a full blown FInal Fantasy VII remake with traditional turn-based combat. You don’t see very many of those nowadays. Dragon Quest XI is the only big one I can think of and it was a breath of fresh air.
So I sympathize with people upset that this game wasn’t turn-based like the original. But I don’t really hold that against the game either. Like I said earlier, I can appreciate when a remake takes some creative liberties in adapting its source material.
And oh boy, does this game take some creative liberties in adapting its source material. The majority of what I wanna talk about for this part is gonna be rotten with spoilers. And trust me, this game is way more than a beat-by-beat remake. So in case you’re thinking you’re okay not worrying about spoilers because you played the PS1 game, think again. This game goes places nobody was expecting.
Check the chapter markers to skip past the spoiler sections if you want. I’m gonna broaden out a bit before I close out the video.
Okay? Okay. We’re going in.
Man, where do I even start when talking about spoilers in this game? There’s so many little additions and changes, I’m getting overwhelmed just thinking about it.
I guess I’ll first start with the ties to all the Final Fantasy VII spin-offs. Way back in the mid-oughts, Square Enix had their first go at bringing Final Fantasy VII back into cultural relevancy. They were making new games, new books, a feature length-film, they weren’t holding back. The compilation of Final Fantasy VII was in full-force.
All those pieces of media explored different parts of the Final Fantasy VII world. Advent Children was the film that told the story of Sephiroth’s return 2 years after the end of FFVII. Dirge of Cerberus was a third person shooter starring Vincent taking place after Advent Children.
And Crisis Core… what a bizarre little game.
It tells the story of Zack Fair and the role he played in the years leading up to Final Fantasy VII. You got to experience so many moments that were only hinted at in the original game. And these were important moments. Moments that truly enhanced Final Fantasy VII.
Advent Children is okay, don’t get me wrong, but it and the other spin-offs don’t quite feel the same as Crisis Core.
Crisis Core feels like the writers are finally getting to expand on stuff they wanted to from the beginning. I guess it speaks to how much they held back when talking about Zack in the original game that this game feels so core to the Final Fantasy VII experience. I know my first time playing FFVII, I was very confused about Zack. At that point in the game, Sephiroth is playing some serious mind-tricks with you, so its very hard to discern what actually happened. This guy that looks near identical to Cloud is introduced and he has his Buster Sword? What’s the deal with that? There’s one very important cutscene you can easily miss that explains A LOT about Zack and his relationship to Cloud.
In Crisis Core, we get to see all that first hand. We see what really happened at the mako reactor on Mount Nibel. So much mystery in FFVII is built upon you not knowing what happened, and even after learning what happened, it’s still kinda confusing and you don’t know what to believe.
All of that is to say, Final Fantasy VII Remake is being made WITH the spin-offs in mind. The original script for the PS1 game was written WITHOUT any of the plot-points from the spin-offs in mind, those came a decade later.
Remake is basically a chance at a do-over for the story. They get to tidy up the plot around the fact that they wrote some backstory for the original game after its release.
They sprinkled a lot of bits from the spin-offs throughout this game.
In the lead up to Part 2 coming out, I’m trying to consume all the bits of canon Final Fantasy VII stuff, because it’s clear Remake is pulling from all corners of the different FFVII stories that are out there. It even references the fuckin game made for flip phones back in 2004.
After playing Remake when it came out, and reading The Kids are Alright just recently, I didn’t realize how much it pulled from that book. Kyrie, Mireille, AND Leslie are from that book. Mireille is Kyrie’s grandmother, and Kyrie and Leslie work together alongside the protagonist of the book, Evan Townshend, who wasn’t really brought up in Remake. That book is great in it’s own right, but it was really satisfying reading that after having played Remake.
It would have been nice to have read the book before I knew they were in Remake, but regardless, it does a fantastic job at tying their lives in the game into their lives 2 years later during the events of the book. The connections are subtle, as to not draw too much attention to themselves. I knew Kyrie was from the book before reading it, but I didn’t know Mireille AND Leslie were from it. I thought they were wholly original characters.
That speaks to the strength of the writing. You aren’t feeling like you’re missing out on something when Cloud meets characters we already know.
In the book, Leslie hints about how his wife Merle had some unfortunate dealings with Corneo in the past, and how he even worked for him. In Remake, you get to see that first hand. If you’ve read the book, you know he’s good at heart and will probably back up Cloud if he gets in a tight spot. But if you haven’t read the book and just assume he’s your average bad guy lackey, then that’s all the more satisfying when he helps your party out in Corneo’s mansion.
It works on both levels. I think it’d be very easy to slip into writing that’s self-referential soley for the purpose of evoking nostalgia or whatever. But this is a true connection to previous work. Leslie said he used to work for Corneo and that his wife got into some trouble with him, and we see that in this game.
It’s not like Evan, the most important character of that book, shows up and chats up Cloud for some reason. He’d have no reason to do that. He’s laying low after his mom left Midgar. In fact, he actually meets Cloud for the first time in the book, so if he did meet him in the game, then their interactions in that book wouldn’t make sense.
The writers for this game have a respect for existing material in the universe.
The beauty of this game is seeing how the expanded universe of the spin-offs post-FFVII are written back into the original story.
But this game isn’t just old content. Oh no, they’ve written a bunch of new stuff. Taken the story in new directions. And boy, does it get really convoluted. In a fun way, I might add.
So I’ll just start with the Whispers.
A lot of people seem to be hung up on the Whispers, and for what it’s worth, I don’t think these people DON’T understand what they are.
I remember thinking shortly after release, that people who didn’t like the Whispers didn’t get it. They didn’t understand that the Whispers were intervening in the story to try and cause the events of the original game. Remake’s timeline of events isn’t necessarily the original game’s, what happened in that game isn’t set in stone.
For whatever reason, Barret decides not to bring along Cloud for their second bombing mission in Remake, something he tagged along for in the original. Then, the Whispers cause a ruckus, eventually hurting Jessie to the point where Cloud needs to substitute for her. They made sure that Cloud went on the bombing mission, so he’d fall down into the Church and meet Aerith.
People that didn’t like the Whispers didn’t get that. They didn’t understand what the writers were going for and I could help them see the way.
Of course, that was naive of me. I think nowadays, most people understand FFVII Remake on that level at least. They just think it’s stupid. They wanted a more traditional remake, one that really stuck to the plot points of the original.
So to those people, I hear you. I see where you’re coming from.
I just think this is so much more fascinating. I didn’t play Final Fantasy VII when I was a kid, I only played it for the first time like 2 years ago. So there’s not really this angle of them “messing with my childhood” or whatever. I see this game as an excuse to tell a new story in the Final Fantasy VII universe. One that’s masquerading as a remake of the original story.
Even ignoring the whispers, you can tell something’s up. Characters aren’t acting quite right. Aerith is saying cryptic statements and Sephiroth is acting kinda different. What’s up with that?
At this point, we don’t know for sure. But speculation is rampant.
My favorite theory, is that the Sephiroth we see in this game, is the Sephiroth from Advent Children. Like, literally the same character. Via some time travel nonsense.
In the timeline before the release of Remake, Sephiroth had fully lost. He had his chance at taking over the planet in both the original game, and some years after that in Advent Children.
Sephiroth’s last words in the Final Fantasy VII timeline as it is right now, is at the end of Advent Children. He tells Cloud “I will never be a memory,” as he fades away.
Considering that line, I think it’s possible that the Sephiroth in Remake is the Sephiroth from that continuity.
After all, he spends so much of this game talking about destiny, and at the end, he asks Cloud to join him and defy destiny together. There’s so much evidence that supports some type of timeline shenanigans, that has to be the case.
During my first playthrough, I thought these three bosses in the final chapter were based on Cloud, Tifa, and Barret, considering they use a sword, guns, and their fists respectively. But after reading their description, I think it’s more likely that these are representations of the remnants of Sephiroth from Advent Children. That almost definitely seems the case considering the enemy intel for these three state they’re, “An entity from a future timeline that has manifested in the present day.” According to the wiki, this ability from the gun guy is actually called Velvet Nightmare in the Japanese version. The same name of the gun from one of the remnants of Sephiroth, Yazoo.
And I haven’t even touched on Aerith in regards to this theory. She’s practically a flashing neon sign drawing attention to the fact that there’s some time travel stuff going on.
After some short small talk in their second meeting, they’re interrupted by Reno of the Turks. She insists that Cloud be her bodyguard, noting that it’s not too different from merc stuff. But she wouldn’t have known he does mercenary work, he didn’t bring it up. Cloud makes a sound, and she quickly adds, “Uhh. I guessed! From the sword?”
Later on, Cloud and her are admiring the flowers at her house. Then they have this exchange.
Did you catch that face she made? I read that as she knew she was gonna meet Cloud on that day, and she almost let it slip.
Perhaps the most interesting example, is in her first interaction with Cloud. She gives him a flower.
Yeah. That’s a foreshadowing bombshell the writers just dropped on us.
Cloud goes through a somewhat similar thing. He doesn’t seem consciously aware of things to come, but he has these short little visions.
There’s obvious ones like where he sees Aerith’s white materia fall like it did in her death scene in the original game. And then there’s the more subtle moments.
There’s one that happens just as Cloud sneaks out of Aerith’s house to go to Sector 7. He gets out and thinks he left her behind, but just as he’s about to leave that section, Aerith leans out from behind some rubble.
This is a callback to the first game. It happens in a dream sequence after she leaves the party in Disc 1. Cloud is in a forest. Aerith pokes out from behind cover, in an all too familiar manner. She tells him she’s going off to handle Sephiroth on her own. She runs into the light and Cloud tries to run, but he’s stuck in place. She gets further and further until she fades away. Then Sephiroth appears, claiming “we must stop that girl soon.”
In the remake, after she does the little lean and they have a short conversation, she walks away to guide Cloud to Sector 7.
Cloud freezes up. He watches her as she walks away from him. He grabs his head in pain and he sheds a single tear. How his mind could be connected to a future event like that, I don’t know, but it seems like they’re obviously drawing a parallel here.
Whatever’s going on with him is separate from Aerith’s situation. She seems to have full knowledge of what’s to come, and can even grant that knowledge to other beings. When she meets Marlene for the first time. Marlene is scared and crying. She hugs Aerith, and there’s the weird little camera/sound effect associated with Cloud’s visions. Marlene pulls back to look at her, and Aerith just does this.
Once they’re in the Shinra building and come across Red XIII for the first time, she calms him down by doing the vision touch thing. Later on, Red states that he found knowledge of the whispers when Aerith reached out to him.
So like I said, they’re in two different positions. She seems to have full knowledge of future events, and Cloud is receiving little visions that he can’t make much sense of. Importantly, these are visions of events in the original game. Like I said earlier, this game takes place in a different timeline where things happen slightly differently. In the original game, Red XIII was only pretending to be angry at the group to trick Hojo, but in Remake, it seems like he was actually angry until Aerith calmed him down.
That’s where the whispers come in. They exist to usher in the events of the original game. But Sephiroth doesn’t want those events to happen. He exists in this game as opposition to the events happening as they did in the Playstation 1 game.
Notably, he stabs Barret in Chapter 17. But he’s key to the events of that original timeline. So after Sephiroth stabs him and leaves, the whispers heal Barret up and he’s ready for battle not a minute later.
All this conflict with fate and free-will culminates in the group fighting a literal embodiment of the concept of destiny itself. They kill the weird remnant of Sephiroth whispers and deal the final blow to the Whisper Harbinger. It dies and the whispers are scattered to the wind.
The group literally ended the concept of fate in their timeline.
The whispers are no longer able to usher in the events of the original timeline. What happens next is a mystery. The game literally closes out with the words, “The unknown journey will continue.”
And boy howdy, is the journey ever unknown. There’s a lot of predictions I’m confident with, but there’s just as many events that make no sense. How are the remnants of Sephiroth tied to the Whispers? What’s Sephiroth’s goal? Zack is alive, but in another timeline? I don’t have a single prediction for that, I have no idea what’s going on there.
There’s many questions left with the threads of fate being torn.
One stands out above all though.
Is Aerith gonna die?
I don’t know if there’s any evidence in part 1 to suggest either way, but I have my prediction.
Think about Aerith’s death in the original. It’s, quite literally, the most iconic death in gaming history.
The first 20 hours of the game builds Cloud’s relationship with her. They become friends and it feels like there might even be a hint of a romantic connection between the two. Beyond that, you appreciate her in a gameplay sense. Her first limit break heals your entire party. I bet for most people, she becomes the dedicated healer of the group. I know that limit break saved my hide a time or two in some tough battles.
The way she was built up as this lovable AND useful character made it all the more painful when she was taken away from you.
Aerith’s death became this cultural touchstone. It was an important moment in gaming history. Just like the nuclear blast in Call of Duty 4 or “Would you kindly?” in Bioshock. Aerith’s death is a moment that’s been remembered for decades and WILL be remembered for decades to come.
So how does Square Enix follow up on that?
Do they have her die the same way she did in the original? I’m sure it’d tug at your heart strings, but I don’t think the writers of Remake would do that. At the end of Part 1, they’ve set it up in a way where we don’t know what to expect. The whispers were there to make sure everything happened like in the PS1 game, but they’re gone now. Cloud and friends have gone off-script.
You know where I’m going with this.
You’re gonna be able to save Aerith.
That’s the first thing I thought about once they started talking about going their own path. Her dying is an unavoidable moment in the PS1 game. But people sure did want to avoid it. Hundreds of forum threads have been made over the decades asking for ways to save her. Nowadays, we know its literally impossible, but back in the day, I’m sure people were coming up with all kinds of nonsense about making sure she’s this exact level, has this exact materia equipped, and knows all her limit breaks, then just go to this area before blah, blah, blah.
Square is finally gonna let us do it. Everyone’s gonna be able to live out the dream they had as a kid and save Aerith.
But what if they didn’t?
What if they tricked you? Just like I did.
I think Aerith is still going to die. Being able to save her would be the obvious choice. That’s what everyone’s thinking about. They want the emotional satisfaction of stopping Sephiroth from killing her.
But if they want to be clever. If they want to surprise everyone. If they want to make a new moment that’s just as memorable as the original, they’ll make it so you think you can save her, but you won’t be able to.
I don’t know much about the specifics, but I feel like they’re already toying with your expectations. There’s multiple sly references to her death in this game, they want you to be thinking about it. They want you to question if you can succeed where you failed over 20 years ago. Only to kill her again and rip away that hope.
I don’t know for 100% if they’ll do that, but I really hope they do. Based off my reasoning, it might seem like a development like that would only be for shock value, but I think they could write it in a really emotionally satisfying way. She could still sacrifice herself, even knowing that the threads of destiny are broken. I don’t think they could really reach the cultural highs that Aerith’s original death could, but they could still surprise older and newer fans in an interesting way.
Before I go on, I’ll quickly talk about the INTERmission DLC. Check the chapter markers if you wanna skip this part, it’s not too long.
INTERmission is a fascinating little piece of content. I kinda knew what to expect going into it, based off the announcement trailer, but it was still engaging. Seeing Tifa head off as she decides to get information from Corneo and hearing Avalanche’s opinion on Barret’s splinter cell are lovely to see. The original, and to a lesser extent, the base game of Remake, don’t spend a lot of time showing or talking about the group that Barret splintered off from. There’s the occasional reference to them in the original game, and they have a bit more screen time in Remake, but being able to actually see how they work from the inside is important for world-building. You get perspective for why Barret split off. And I love it.
And how can I talk about this DLC without bringing up Dirge of Cerberus?
Dirge is the black sheep of the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, and having played it before I played INTERmission, I can understand why. It’s very much a product of it’s time in terms of writing and tone, and it doesn’t even feel like it takes place in the same world as the other games at points.
Which is why I, and I’m sure a lot of Dirge of Cerberus-knowledge-havers were a bit concerned seeing Deepground and Weiss in the trailer for INTERgrade.
Fortunately, I think they handle the material well enough. It doesn’t get into the utter nonsense that the finale of Dirge does, and mostly stays with the more grounded elements of that game’s story.
So I am mostly happy with my experience playing INTERmission. Though I can’t help but wonder if I would have preferred them holding off on Yuffie’s introduction. You can meet her not long after leaving Midgar in the original, but you don’t see her at all up to that point. Tifa and Barret don’t interact with her in this DLC, so that continuity is kept intact, but you, the player, is introduced to her. I guess I’ll withhold judgement and see how part 2 introduces her to the party. Maybe Cloud and everyone meeting her will still feel impactful, even though the player has already met her.
I also thought it was kinda weird they threw in the Fort Condor minigame. It’s not QUITE the same RTS minigame as in the original, but it feels like it in essence. It has me wondering, is there really gonna be a more fleshed out Fort Condor? I feel like that’d be weird, to have two different strategy minigames with identical theming. I hope it shows up like it did in the original. I thought it was some neat world building, helping out a small little group of people inhabiting an old Mako reactor defend from Shinra. I guess it plays a bigger part in the story later on when the Huge Materia comes into play, but early on, it’s just a nice thing you can do in the world to help some people out.
I don’t know why they would pull the thing people remember Fort Condor for in the first place, a silly strategy minigame, and turn it into a boardgame completely separated from the actual place in-world. Maybe they’ll do a bigger scale Fort Condor minigame later, I don’t know. Just the fact that they’d do this at all kinda worries me.
That ties into my biggest worry for future parts of Remake.
I’m worried that they might have blown their load a little too hard and too early.
Final Fantasy VII Remake, despite ostensibly being part 1 of a multi-part remake, really goes out of its way to pull from parts of the PS1 game that occurred past Midgar.
Of relevance to spoilers, is Sephiroth.
Remake goes out of its way to show off Sephiroth in areas where the original didn’t. Now it makes canonical sense that he’d be showing up, assuming the theories about time travel are true, but I can’t help the feeling that he’s TOO invovled.
He only really has a physical part in the story when the group gets to the Shinra building and learn about Jenova. But in Remake, he shows up within the first couple hours, taunting Cloud and babbling on about the planet.
I like how the original game had a real progression in the way threats are revealed to you. In that game, you first learn of him when Cloud says he wants to be like him when he grows up. So he’s introduced as this childhood hero. Then there’s a flashback later on where we learn he did something villainous, but we don’t know what exactly. All of that happens in the background though, the main focus of the first part of the game is stopping Shinra.
Remake doesn’t quite feel that smooth. Sephiroth is introduced as his usual, foreboding self. He taunts Cloud, bringing up how he killed his mother as she begged him to spare Cloud. It’s only after that you learn he was a childhood hero of Cloud’s.
I think you could make an argument that learning he’s some bad guy, THEN learning he was a hero of Cloud’s is more interesting than the way the PS1 game did it, but my point is, they showed him off a lot more early on. And I think that detracts a bit from the mystery. Part of Sephiroth’s intrigue in the original game is how infrequently he’s shown early on and how little he says. Introducing him right off the bat takes away some of that magic for me.
And the focus on him only becomes more prevalent at the end of the game, where you realize he’s the final boss.
There’s this moment in the PS1 game that does a really good job at highlighting Sephiroth’s strength. Right after you escape Midgar and head to Kalm, Cloud recounts his previous experience with Sephiroth. You get to play as Cloud with Sephiroth in your party. This takes place not long after Cloud was accepted into Soldier, so he’s pretty weak. Sephiroth on the other hand, is godlike. He does a magnitude more damage than even present day Cloud, killing a dragon in one hit. You get into a few more battles with him, and in my playthrough, I didn’t even get a chance to hit any enemies. He’d wipe them all out instantly. You look in the pause menu and he’s level 50.
That’s some powerful storytelling through gameplay. You get to SEE how powerful he is, in addition to hearing about it. This is the first time you’re seeing him in action and it’s inspiring. Not only to Cloud, but to you. You realize how powerful you’ll become by the end game. But it also puts into perspective how weak Cloud is in comparison. He can’t even hold his own, Sephiroth has to do the work for him.
All the time spent in the original game building Sephiroth as this unbeatable force, culminating in you defeating him in the last hour of the game, is played out in it’s entirety in Remake. You end this game with Cloud jumping through the air, flying around, holding his own against Sephiroth himself. You even best him in battle. Of course, that’s framed as him holding back and deciding to just leave, but that doesn’t matter. The writers can frame it however they want, the player just dropped Sephiroth’s health bar to zero after a 15 minute long boss fight. They’re gonna feel like they quote “defeated” him.
Now I can’t say how they’ll handle the scene of Cloud partying up with Sephiroth in the flashback in Part 2 of Remake, but if they try to do the same sorta thing, it won’t have a similar effect on the player. We’ve already seen how powerful he is, seeing him do 3000 damage means nothing when he was throwing buildings at us at the end of the last game.
Who knows? Maybe they’ll surprise me and take Sephiroth in a direction even I wasn’t expecting. That’s what I’m excited for. I wanna watch this video after Part 3 comes out and feel like a moron for complaining as much as I did.
Maybe I’m giving the writing team too much credit, I don’t know. I feel like they can work it out.
Okay spoilers done.
For those that skipped ahead, I was just talking about how I feel like Remake kinda went all in on giving the player narrative satisfaction that was supposed to happen later in the original game’s timeline. I also feel that way about the game mechanically.
In terms of the story, most of what you see in Remake happened in that section in the PS1 game. But in terms of progression, you experience all of Final Fantasy VII. You get a bunch of weapons that were placed way past Midgar in that game. You get a majority of the materia and level it up all the way. You go all the way up to level 50.
It’s painted them into a peculiar place.
Going into this game, I was hoping that all the stuff I collect and level up would transfer to later games. I want however many parts there are to feel like one connected experience and less like 2 to 4 separate games. But after seeing how they handled progression in part 1, I don’t know what they should do going forward.
Like I said, I like the idea of transferring EVERYTHING over so it feels connected, but you can’t realistically do that. There’d be no progression left considering the player might have maxed all their materia and weapon upgrades.
Then again, you can’t really just wipe all the player’s progress. If experience is really an abstract of how strong a character is in universe, what does it mean for Cloud to go back to level 1? Even beyond that, on a surface level, nobody wants to go from max level to base level for no good reason. That’d feel like shit. Considering they maxed the level at 50 and not, like, 99, I feel like they’re priming to just let you continue part 2 at whatever level you were and raise the max to 99.
But what do you do about the materia and weapons?
How do you rid the group of their extremely powerful supplies at the end of that game so progression feels good in this game?
Fortunately, they have an out.
In the PS1 game, you can encounter an optional party member pretty soon after leaving Midgar. Yuffie is a ninja thief who’s obsessed with materia. Some time later in the game, you can have yet another optional encounter with her where she steals all your Materia and you have to make do with just your weapons for a while.
So if I were a betting man, I’d wager that they’re gonna have Yuffie steal your materia at the beginning of part 2. You’ll get to keep the weapons you upgraded with their special abilities, but you’ll lose all your materia. She’ll sell or lose them and you’ll have to level up new Fire and Healing materia from scratch all over again.
Even with that solution available, it still doesn’t feel good. You’re still ripping away progression people already went through in part 1.
That said, I don’t know what I would have done if I had to make a choice regarding that at the start of the project.
You can’t really keep the progress of the original game and stretch it out to the length of this game. You’d probably just be getting the second level of Fire at the end of Part 1, or maybe not even that. It’d be too gradual for how long this game is.
Regarding equipment, the only weapon accessible to Cloud outside of the default throughout Midgar is one you can steal during the attack on Shinra, which would be in the later fifth of Remake.
So they just yoinked weapons from later areas of the game and give them to you in Remake’s Midgar. I’m sure they’ll put brand-new weapons in those spots, but if that’s the case… If they let Cloud keep all the weapons, how many is he gonna have by the end? Are there gonna be 18 weapons for Cloud to equip at the end of Remake part 3 or whatever? All with very slight stat differences, but are otherwise the same?
I don’t know. There’s a lot of questions I have about how the future parts are gonna play, and I can’t really think of a good answer. None of the solutions I can think of really feel right.
Maybe they don’t care about cross-part progression. Maybe Cloud and friends’ materia, weapons, and experience will all unceremoniously stripped away.
I really hope that’s not the case, because after all these parts are out, I want the full Final Fantasy VII Remake experience to be seamless. This is maybe a little pizza-pie-in-the-sky of me, but I think it’d be amazing if, when all the parts were out, you could download one MASSIVE 250 gigabyte game and play it all from beginning to end. As soon as the group leaves Midgar at the end of Part 1, we immediately progress into Part 2.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about this whole time. Sure, Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 1 is nice… But what’s Final Fantasy VII Remake gonna play like in 10 years? The choices they’re making now in how to sew these effectively separate games together is how the experience as a whole will be viewed for decades to come.
We don’t judge Final Fantasy VII based on the contents of each disc, we judge it as a whole.
And I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little worried they’re gonna miss the forest for the trees. They’ll focus on making the individual games good at the expense of playing them all back to back.
In regards to the story, there’s little bits of them obviously setting up for future reveals. Predictions I made in the spoiler section may or may not come true, but either way, they have some plans.
And here’s the fun part.
You might already know what happened.
I’m recording this on April 15th 2022 at 4 o’clock. Some remake part 2 news will probably come this summer, and some concerns I’ve had might have already been addressed through coverage of that. If you’re watching after that, then you’re already more knowledgeable than current me.
And who knows? You might be watching this in 2032. You can probably buy a remaster of the complete Final Fantasy VII Remake for the Playstation 7. All of what I’ve said might have been utter nonsense to someone from your time.
But hey, that’s the fun in doing a video like this. You future people got to watch the ramblings of a madman, as he speculated about a game he thought he knew a lot about. As I talked about in the beginning, this is a game ripe for discussion. The questions raised by the narrative changes have me REALLY excited for what’s to come. It’ll either be an innovative remake, paving the way for others to follow in Square’s step or it’ll be one more game to be pointed and laughed at when he who shall not be named is brought up.
Leave a comment about your own theory for future games. Or even tell me what you think about my theories (as long as you’re agreeing with me).
I’m sure I’ll be commenting on every little step Square takes with Final Fantasy VII Remake, so get subscribed if you wanna see my review of part 2 in a year and a half.
Thanks for watching, and I hope those of you in 2032 have found shelter from the giant, fire-breathing ants that were released on June 3rd 2028 at 3:34 A.M PST. Stay strong and stay together.