Final Fantasy 7 Remake- What Went Wrong

 Never in my life did I look forward to a game as much as I did the Final Fantasy 7 Remake. When I FINALLY got it, I was overjoyed. Then, a scant few weeks later, I was putting it down and never picking it back up again. What happened?

The game IS fun; it's got great action, graphics are drop dead gorgeous, music's pretty good, and the voice acting is superb. Basically what you expect from Square-Enix. The menu system is also easy to navigate, the Materia system is simple and intuitive, and it's not easy to get lost or to forget what you were doing. So you'd think this would be Top Ten JRPG of AT LEAST 2020, correct? And yet here I am, struggling to motivate myself to pick up the game again, and not even looking forward to the next chapter of the Remake; a game I've waited FIVE YEARS on, and now I can't even be exited to play it again!

To understand what went wrong, it is important to compare and contrast the remake with the original. A game that calls itself a remake HAS to be able to not just go toe to toe with the original at the very least. That said, a remake also has to carry the ambition to SURPASS the original in nearly every way, to turn itself into the definitive version of said game. And in that regard, FF7R fails.

The Remake's introduction alone is worthy of an observation. The camera runs over this rocky desert terrain. An eagle flies into view, and the camera follows it. Once the camera turns right, a giant structure is visible on the horizon. The eagle flies towards the structure; it's seemingly a factory. Smoke is everywhere, and soon one can no longer make any details. Even the eagle disappears for a moment, but as soon as the camera exits the smoke, BOOM! It's a major city of steel and glass! The camera follows the mundane life of the city folk. We see construction workers, cars, children riding bikes. We then focus on a wilted, dried up flower on the ground, with children playing in the background. We then focus on the children, who stop playing to stare at a green light. We then turn to this GIGANTIC chimney that's emanating a green light, which bursts right into the sky! The screen fades to black, save for some balls of shining light. We focus then on a girl in a red dress and a basket of flowers. She is kneeling in an alleyway, staring at a green light. She suddenly gets up, looks down the alley way, her body at full alert. She runs the opposite direction onto the crowded street. The camera then pans upwards, showing us a full image of the city of Midgar.

I'll be honest, this intro is VERY well done, and it holds up pretty well to the original. It not only sets the tone for the game, but it also leaves the player with a sense of awe and wonder regarding the game's world. It's this heavy contrast between the dead natural world and the bustling metropolis that leaves the player's imagination running wild. 

The original game's intro is superficially the same, missing everything before the girl (Aerith) in the alleyway. The camera pans around a black expanse with balls of light/stars dispersed all over. Then a girl appears, bathed in green light. She gets up off the floor and walks calmly down the alley way. Camera pans up to reveal a gigantic city, cue game's title.

Although both introductory sequences have similarities, they serve entirely different functions. The remake's sequence serves as an overall introduction to the world, establishing the game as belonging to the Dystopian genre of fiction. But the original game's introduction served to subvert the genre conventions of the JRPG of its time, as well as the conventions of the franchise itself.

See, until 1997, the JRPG was mostly known for being inspired by the Medieval Europe aesthetic. You had kings and queens, knights, dragons, evil monsters, and so on so forth. Final Fantasy was no different, with the very first game in the series being little more than a Dungeons and Dragons fan game. The subversion of FF7's intro isn't in just establishing that the game takes place in a more modern world, but that in establishing that the game was gonna be playing with the conventions of JRPG's. Magic exists in the game alongside rifles and guns. Secretaries and salarymen exist alongside monsters and mutants. Sword wielding mercenaries are not an uncommon sight in this world.

FF7 played with the tropes and conventions of the JRPG, but it also subverted them as well. President Shinra played the part of the wicked overlord who sets the plot into motion... except that he's a cold, professional businessman who's otherwise WINNING most of the time, and our protagonists are so below him that even when they're invading his castle and slaughtering his forces left and right, they can't even TOUCH the guy. Tifa is shaped like the badass babe of the 90's that you'd expect would be all "I don't need no man" type  of gal, but she acts like a demure love interest. Inversely, Aerith looks the part of the innocent White Mage/Maiden type, but she's coy, flirty, and street smart. Cloud isn't some hot blooded Shounen hero, he's an ASS!

The game has been released so long ago that these subversions no longer have the impact they once did. What in 1997 was considered a daring leap outside the conventions of the genre, by 2020 had long been considered overly done. A brooding JRPG hero? By 2020, it was considered a cliche. A modern setting instead of a medieval one? There were HUNDREDS of JRPG's like that by 2020! My point is, part of what made the original game as good as it was back in 1997 became impossible to replicate.

Another MAJOR subversion of the genre's conventions comes from the bombing of Mako Reactor 1. Although Barret does explain that the reactors are killing the Planet (thus tying into an environmentalist theme that is continuously touched upon through most of the game), the player doesn't SEE these effects until MUCH later in the game; without said context, the bombing of the Reactor is, doubtlessly, a terrorist attack. Instead of doing something heroic, like rescuing the princess, the main characters of FF7 are committing terrorism. Suddenly you question "are these guys heroes?" For the rest of the game, you seldom do anything particularly "heroic," but when you actually do, it's all the sweeter.

And this is where the Remake begins to falter. Like in the original, Avalanche is planting bombs in a Mako Reactor. UNLIKE in the original, the Reactor doesn't blow up; only the central valve does. It's SHINRA that blows up the Reactor and lets Avalanche take the heat for it. This takes away from the Gray Morality that the original game had going for it, which in turn makes certain later events feel less special and impactful.

Of course it's easy to see why SquEnix would make this change: can't have sympathetic terrorists in a post 9/11 world, after all. At the same time, I feel as though the direction they took wasn't the right one...

In fact, part of the "fun" (for lack of a better word) of the Remake is finding the many changes, both big and small, that SquEnix made. There are of course many big changes: new characters, new sections, new bosses, and so on. There are also smaller changes, such as Materia growth being easier, Summon Materia being accessible earlier, and so on. 

But the ONE change we wanted (more story), we didn't get. The story of FF7  Remake, when it isn't being a 1:1 remake of the original's story, is either plagued by padding, or it's so remarkably different from the original that it may as well be a new game entirely.

This is exemplified from chapters 5 to 7, which altogether constitute around five hours of gameplay. Again I need to compare to the original, because this is an example of the story being 1:1.

Shortly after boarding the train to the Upper Plate, the Shinra Security System sounds the alarm, necessitating the quick and abrupt departure from the train. Traveling across the subway tracks, the party makes their way to the lower part of Midgar's plate, where they traipse across some obstacles to make it to Reactor Number 5. After going through some security forces, the trio plant the bomb and escape the reactor, only to be ambushed by the forces of Shinra. After a fight with Shinra's latest robot, Cloud falls down to the slums below...

In the original version of the game, this whole section takes, taking into account going the long way across the tracks and fighting every random battle, about one hour. In the remake, this same sequence of events takes thrice as long! The same amount of story, but thrice as much time!

Perhaps the greatest example of how badly the Remake suffers from not expanding the story comes from chapters 10 and 11. This is a case of the Remake turning two short dungeons from the original (both of which were two screens long) into fully mapped out dungeons that took AT LEAST an hour and a half to two hours to finish, EACH! What took me AT MOST twenty minutes in the original now takes ALMOST FOUR HOURS to complete in the Remake!!!

The biggest problem here is that, by stretching the dungeons so much, the story starts lagging. In the instance of chapters 10 and 11, this works against the game because I'm supposed to be hurrying up because Shinra was gonna drop the plate on Sector 7. In the original, the shortness of the dungeons worked in the game's favor because it really helped you feel like you were going as fast as possible. In the remake? NOT SO!

I'll be honest; by chapter ten, the game feels like a slog to go through. I actually had to force myself to play through this section the first time, and it is precisely this section that ALWAYS has me dreading a replay! A game that can't be replayed, can't be called a good game!

And in the end that's what gets me about the Remake; it could never live up to the original in any way. I actually feel regretful of all those years I dreamed about remaking FF7; if anyone would have told twenty year old me that I'd be putting down the controller and actually DREAD replaying the game, I wouldn't have believed them!

As for me, I don't look forward to the upcoming episodes of the Remake anymore, but I think I'll play them when they get released. I just wanna say that I did, in fact, play the Remake in its entirety. Sunk costs and all that.