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| An enormous amount of personal nostalgia can't make up for Final Fantasy VII Remake's shortcomings |
Note: My screenshots are rather poor since this is a console game rather than a PC release.
I played the original Final Fantasy VII in 1997. As you can see from the photo above, I still have my original black back discs and jewel case. Some parts of the Remake game carried for me on pure nostalgia. Others were not so good. Others still were so awful that I have no idea how any adult making the game could have examined them and thought, "yes, this is good, this should go in our game."
I'll start with the good stuff. Some parts of the Final Fantasy VII Remake are really exceptional. Number one is that it starts off amazingly well, and feeds fans of the original tons of fan service and nostalgia right off the bat. A tear came to my eye playing the opening few hours. The new combat system, although far different from the ATB of the original, is pretty fun! Animation is amazing- really stunning, and that extends from combat, to NPCs, to cutscenes. Great soundtrack, of course, as the original was fantastic as well. And the art direction is fantastic. Despite the PS4 showing its age and several areas featuring really bad, low-resolution textures, Midgar has come alive for me. It looks phenomenal and feels like the city in the original game did. There's also an exceptional level of polish here. There are very few bugs and there's a deep attention to detail in every part of Midgar.
However, a lot of the game is a complete mess narratively whenever it's not re-creating scenes from the original.
The only time the writing was hitting for me and felt good was when depicting the original characters. Square Enix has a lot of character designers from the original working on this team, and it shows. Not once did the characters say a single line of dialogue that felt out of character for them. The writers clearly still know these characters deeply, and the voice actors nail every single one of them and are casted perfectly.
But that's where the good stuff ends. I won't spoil the game here, but suffice it to say that almost all of the new content added to flesh out the original story is bad. It's full of inconsistent rules and plot holes (being stuck in the area in Chapter 17 after falling and having to spend the entire chapter climbing back up, and then just next chapter watching Cloud jump literal hundreds of feet), full of MacGuffins (Chapter 4 is guilty of this, along with Chapter 13 which makes zero sense whatsoever, and Chapter 14 which could have been cut completely and the game would have lost nothing), and rampant use of deus ex machina for anything and everything whenever the ghosts show up, culminating in an event near to the end of the game that made me roll my eyes and literally groan aloud because of how awful it was.
The real problem with all of the stuff they've added is that it completely torpedoes the pace of the Midgar portion of the original game. I expected this bloat to be represented by the side quests, but those were actually fine. This bloat shows itself in the main quest, which I did not expect. Entire chapters of this game feel like a complete waste of time, and a lot of the writing in these new chapters is so amateur as to feel like fan-fiction. The moment-to-moment scenarios are often just cornball video game nonsense that's impossible to take seriously, eg. "monster stole the key, go chase him down", or "this bridge you are crossing just fell down, now you have to go through this entire level, routed through conspicuous combat rooms with enemies". Lots of random nonsense to move the plot forward that feels contrived and unnecessary and impossible to care about. Compare this to modern story-driven games like Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, or God of War (2018) which are using every single moment, every single line of dialogue, either to tell a compelling story or develop their characters further. Final Fantasy VII Remake feels bloated with tons of fatty, disposable content when you compare it to other titles that strive for great storytelling. It's extremely disappointing, because I consider the original Final Fantasy VII to be fantastic at storytelling, tone, timely comic relief, and pacing. And the Remake fails in all of these aspects.
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| The textures are absolutely awful in certain cases (click to maximize) |
Despite how good this game tends to look, a lot of these failures make it feel old and outdated, which is ironic, of course, because it's a remake of an old game! These are the exact problems the remake was supposed to fix! But these arise not just because it's a remake, because this flaw primarily exhibits itself in the new stuff. The classic scenes from the original game which are re-created here are as timeless as ever and work really well. But the structure of the new portions they have added for the remake feel like they've been designed by a bunch of guys who are stuck with '90s video game design philosophies—Everything feels way too gamey and arbitrary, put in place by a developer's decision rather than organically arising from the story and characters, and because of this it becomes impossible to take seriously and fails to have the emotional heft that good storytelling often does. Look, I don't mind if you make me chase a MacGuffin every once in while, but it has to serve either to develop the mechanics of the game and teach me something new, or develop the core characters or story further, or even lead to a relevant, specatcular set-piece. Too much of the pitfalls of Remake lead to none of this, and the game feels like it spends half its length spinning its wheels as a result.
So a lot of this game is a mess and inconsistent from moment to moment with what it wants to be, whether it wants to be a faithful remake head nodding to its original fans, or a new story all its own. I thought they executed on the former very well, the latter was pretty disposable, standard video gamey stuff. This is very relevant to the game's ending, which I won't spoil here, but suffice it to say that the ending was the culmination of this kind of poor writing, as it seems to go completely off the rails with the most obvious, heavy-handed pseudo-artistic statement to the point where I'm not even really interested to continue playing the next episode. I've heard that Nomura is famous for this kind of stuff, which does no favors for his talents as a director and a writer in my eyes. I really hate disliking the ending because I just know people are going to rag on anyone who doesn't like it for being perpetually angry gamers or whatever, but it's seriously bad. Think Game of Thrones Season 8 bad. I honestly cannot believe that the game got out the door with this ending. Someone high up at Square Enix needed to tell whomever was responsible for writing this ending that it was not going to work. It's a failure of epic proportions.
To summarize: All of the best stuff is from when they re-create the original scenes, most of the stuff I didn't like was new writing injected into the framework of the story which already exists. So if they're going to tell their own story now with these characters, from here on forward, I'm really not interested in that, because I don't find their storytelling up to par in most cases and the bombastic, campy style with which they tell it is really not for me. Others may feel differently.
Basically, it's neat that this thing even exists, and it's got a lot of polish. But it's very inconsistent, and I'm surprised it's been so well-received both critically and among fans new and old. Maybe it's because it starts off so well, and ends so poorly, and most of the hearsay surrounding the game is taken from statements made when players are still in the first half of the game? Nevertheless, if you were a fan of the original, it's still probably worth playing—warts and all. But it disappointed me greatly by the end.
So a lot of this game is a mess and inconsistent from moment to moment with what it wants to be, whether it wants to be a faithful remake head nodding to its original fans, or a new story all its own. I thought they executed on the former very well, the latter was pretty disposable, standard video gamey stuff. This is very relevant to the game's ending, which I won't spoil here, but suffice it to say that the ending was the culmination of this kind of poor writing, as it seems to go completely off the rails with the most obvious, heavy-handed pseudo-artistic statement to the point where I'm not even really interested to continue playing the next episode. I've heard that Nomura is famous for this kind of stuff, which does no favors for his talents as a director and a writer in my eyes. I really hate disliking the ending because I just know people are going to rag on anyone who doesn't like it for being perpetually angry gamers or whatever, but it's seriously bad. Think Game of Thrones Season 8 bad. I honestly cannot believe that the game got out the door with this ending. Someone high up at Square Enix needed to tell whomever was responsible for writing this ending that it was not going to work. It's a failure of epic proportions.
To summarize: All of the best stuff is from when they re-create the original scenes, most of the stuff I didn't like was new writing injected into the framework of the story which already exists. So if they're going to tell their own story now with these characters, from here on forward, I'm really not interested in that, because I don't find their storytelling up to par in most cases and the bombastic, campy style with which they tell it is really not for me. Others may feel differently.
Basically, it's neat that this thing even exists, and it's got a lot of polish. But it's very inconsistent, and I'm surprised it's been so well-received both critically and among fans new and old. Maybe it's because it starts off so well, and ends so poorly, and most of the hearsay surrounding the game is taken from statements made when players are still in the first half of the game? Nevertheless, if you were a fan of the original, it's still probably worth playing—warts and all. But it disappointed me greatly by the end.
⭐⭐
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