Patatoa

Being critical of anything Final Fantasy VII is a spicy take, but I get little joy out of playing the 2020 Remake. This is something leagues of kids my age clamored for as far back as 2000 when the PlayStation 2 launched. Sony and Square consistently teased for decades. Now it’s here. I bought a PlayStation 4 just to play it. And I find I convince myself to keep playing through it. On the one hand, it’s stunning to see locations I didn’t realize were so memorable, through a new lens. Exciting to see what tweaks are made to the engrained story beats. And on the other, I feel taxed and anxious the entire time.

The original Final Fantasy VII on the original PlayStation, along side Metal Gear Solid trumpeted the age of the cinematic game. Games were no longer puzzles, or getting from the left side to the right side of a stage, or even elaborate DnD campaigns you read through. These were movies you participated in. Metal Gear Solid has peerless stealth missions where the player constantly weighs the cost of using a weapon to dispatch adversaries but possibly bring attention to themselves, or create ways to progress while staying unseen. Final Fantasy VII presents a grandiose story, cutting-edge full motion videos, pre-rendered maps several screens wide, mixed with one of the more customizable battle and growth systems. The characters are iconic and well-written for the time. A few characters, like Barrett, get honest-to-goodness character arcs. Final Fantasy VII builds upon its direct predecessor. Where Final Fantasy VI is the ultimate 2D RPG, VII would define the RPG scene for the decade after.

Many games learned the wrong lessons from these games though. Story and cinematics became chores to get through and the gameplay was an obstacle. In a way, that’s how I feel the Final Fantasy VII Remake brings the original into the modern age. It expands on the story and simplifies the gameplay. To be fair, the cut scenes are gorgeous and some of the simplification brings true quality of life enhancements: no save points, fewer battles, less/no grinding, its always clear where you can walk and where you can’t. But the cut scenes often get in my way when all I want to do is explore and do some battles. I like grinding, and while I don’t miss the random battles every 10 steps, when the battles do occur, I am hopelessly disoriented afterward every time. This is the only time I feel there’s a choice where to go as the maps are otherwise very linear.

We get delighted to see the vast Shinra Building and several of the reactors. The slums of Sectors 7 and 5 teem with activity and teases the vast despair of Midgar. But you get one street walk back and forth through. The effort to show the overpopulation and decay feels believable, but also adds claustrophobia which only emphasizes how on-rails the "exploration" parts of the story are. Once you complete the filler fetch quests, you get to go back to the cut scenes mixed with some mission (glorified "get from the left to the right side of the stage.") The cut scenes are enjoyable — long gone are the awkward days of Final Fantasy X. I sit and watch them though as a spectator. I feel no more in control of the game than I do in the exploration parts.

The story is fine. It’s what Final Fantasy VII is supposed to be. Terrific stakes, broad, nihilistic bad guys. A hero that’s too cool for school and a host of earnest co-stars. It questions authority, entwines science and magic to answer for life. Everything a fifteen year-old would find deep. Now in high definition, the story gets recolored in ways that demotivate me. There is a hopelessness throughout that I know was always there, but wasn’t what popped off the screen when the game was Minecraft people running on top of water-color paintings.

I think it suffers similarly to modern Mortal Kombat. Back in the 90’s, the tech was limited. To be “extreme” , they had to ham it up big time. A person exploding turned into a bag of femurs of rib cages bursting in every direction, heads popped like balloons, "Animalities" in general. As we reached the Playstation 4, Xbox One era though, the verisimilitude available replaced some of that fun and camp with weight. I think the ludicrousness is still intended. As concepts the modern fatalities seem extreme in the same bizarre way as always, but the execution is brutal. Such that I feel uncomfortable to watch at times. So goes with Final Fantasy VII. What was so operatic and melodramatic back then is undercut with true to life struggle. It’s a different experience in 2020 to be interacting with a story about energy companies that destroy the planet, own the police and media, about people fighting to save the planet labelled as terrorists, over hearing citizens worry about said terrorism, see how their day-to-day lives are affected. That’s not to say that these aren’t experiences that should be edited. It’s astounding video games have reached a point where they can bum you out. It’s just something that takes me too close to the world I’m trying to escape.

It’s not just the subject-matter, the experience of "playing" leaves much to my desire. Walk straight, press triangle from time to time, battle, cut scene. The battles are troublesome early on, but become procedural too once you figure them out: mash square until you can use an ability, then a millisecond after switch to another character to repeat. I totally get that the original Final Fantasy VII can be reduced further than that, but the turn-based combat of the original felt more chess-like. Each battle was a step to levelling up your materia, or an opportunity to test a combination. Levelling up your weapons isn’t close to as open to tinkering.

The Final Fantasy VII remake succeeds on many levels. None more so than making the story of Final Fantasy VII feel like it takes place in an actual world. That they made a world with talking tigers, guys with bazooka hands, and a big golden ostrich that helps you fight robots (zuh?) feel, not just real, but like our own is astonishing. There’s no one definition or criteria to what makes a good game any more than there is one for a music, or books, or any audio-visual narrative. Even good books or music can be a struggle to get through. I can appreciate the Final Fantasy VII Remake for what it is and how it contrasts the original. For all its detail and care, and as much as I enjoy the world and its story, I wish I were allowed to enjoy it a little more.