"Final Fantasy 7 Remake" Review - I would die for Aerith

Available for: Playstation 4

Reviewed for: Playstation 4

Final Fantasy 7 is something of a legend in the game industry. Lauded by most fans as the best installment in this long-running saga, the game pretty much officially made Final Fantasy a household name in its time. Not only that, but as far as I can tell, it was one of the first games that truly emphasized its story and characters and proved that games could do both of these things well. People were so devastated by a particular character death that back in the early days of youtube, there were as many sad Evanescence music videos centered around it as there were Naruto AMVs set to Linkin Park. Yes, I think it's fair to say that Final Fantasy 7 was one of the game industry's biggest triumphs.
It's also a game that I never played.
As some may know, my first foray into this saga was Final Fantasy 15 a couple of years ago, and it reached spot #3 on my GOTY list in its year. So while I've enjoyed the miniscule amount of Final Fantasy experience I've had, I didn't have any dogs in the fight when the remake of 7 was announced. I wasn't even going to get it, but after watching a couple of videos I thought the story looked interesting and that the game itself looked beautiful. So, I decided to give it a shot. Worst case scenario, I'd get to look at some beautiful women and begrudgingly-equally-beautiful men for 30-40 hours. Now that you know this about me, you'll know that I don't have any sense of how the story or moment-to-moment action went in the original game. I'm aware that this 30-40 hour experience actually only covers about the first 5 hours of the original game and there's plenty more to come, but that's the extent of my understanding. So, what did I think as a newbie to this legendary title?
Well, first I need to make an amendment to what I've already written. Better form would've been to simply edit the previous section, but I figured it wouldn't add much to the experience to change phrases like "I'm aware" to "I was aware." During my initial playthrough of this remake, I was, as I said, a complete newbie. However, after finishing the remake, I got my hands on the original game and have since been playing an hour or so of it followed by a couple hours of a second remake playthrough every night. As I write this, I've gotten past the first "continent" in the original game, meaning that I've experienced the hours that the remake covers and then some, and I now know how the original played (and as an aside, I'm also looking forward to the inevitable swimsuit fanservice section that will happen when the remake gets to Costa del Sol in a couple years). As a direct result of this, I've been enjoying the remake much more in this second run. I'd say that taking the time to get some more knowledge of what the original was like raised the final score I'll be giving this remake by at least a full point. So, back to the question I posed before going on this tangent: What did I think of this legendary remake years upon years in the making?
Well. It's been a long, long time since I've gotten my hands on a game so remarkably brilliant...yet simultaneously so remarkably unpleasant....to experience. I spent a fair amount of time in this game just groaning, rolling my eyes with as much simulated teenaged attitude as possible, and saying "oh you have got to be kidding me" aloud. I never really say things out loud to myself when I'm alone with my dog and playing a game, but just about every time I had that thought while playing this game, I would say it aloud. Yet when the game was running on all cylinders, I was on the edge of my seat. FF7 (which is what I'm going to be calling this Remake, and I'll be calling the original one "the original one", just like in my Doom Eternal review) had me consistently bouncing back and forth between loving it and actively cursing it for so unrepentantly wasting my time (kinda like how I did in that previous paragraph). With that in mind, I won't waste any more of your time, let's just jump right into it.

FF7 takes place in the hyper-advanced city of Midgar; a dual-leveled (top level for the rich, bottom level for the poor, that type of thing) city run by the Shinra Electric Power Company, which harnesses an energy source called Mako to keep the city going. But not all is well in Midgar. An eco-terrorist group called Avalanche claims that Mako is the lifeblood of the planet and that continued use of this energy will cause the planet to die. You play as an ex-soldier of Shinra turned mercenary, Cloud Strife. At the start of the game, Cloud has been hired by Avalanche to assist in the destruction of one of Shinra's Mako reactors. He and a small sect of Avalanche personnel eventually succeed, sowing seeds of fear and chaos in the minds of the ordinary townsfolk. And still, this is only the beginning. Because this is about 5 hours of the original game's plot expanded into about 30-40 hours, needless to say, there is quite a bit of extra plot thrown into the works, and while it's (almost) all enjoyable, it's also very meandering and covers more than a little bit of extended ground, so in terms of actual plot details, that's about all I'm going to say. Because, while enjoyable, the plot in this remake comes second to its key players. On the surface, Cloud seems to be your average pretty boy anime protagonist who feigns indifference in just about every scenario and is completely oblivious to the hints dropped by the many women who follow him around and tell him they want him to impale them with his massive sword. But as you get to know him, you realize that he's more socially awkward and stoic by default than oblivious and indifferent, and getting to watch him slowly come out of his shell is pretty rewarding! Then there's the leader of the Avalanche sect in question, Barret. Barret is an impassioned eco-warrior who could instill green party sentiments into even the most skeptical of minds, but when he's not being inspiring, the adorable way in which he dotes on his young daughter, Marlene, had me smiling from ear to ear and "awwww"-ing. But I think we can all agree that Cloud and Barret, while enjoyable characters, aren't the characters people are coming to this remake for. It wouldn't be a JRPG without some kind of love triangle between the protagonist and two beautiful women with flawless personalities, and both of these characters in FF7 are enjoyable in ways that transcend tropes. The first one to enter stage right (in any meaningful way, I mean) is Cloud's childhood friend, Tifa. A tough-as-nails fist-fighter and bar owner, Tifa avoids the tsundere traits that you might expect given how I opened up that description. As a member of this particular Avalanche sect, Tifa agrees that the planet needs to be saved from excessive Mako usage, but she's not so blindly idealistic as to believe that it's worth the cost of human lives or the demonization of pencil-pushers or bean counters who happen to be working at Shinra. She's a character deeply conflicted between her humanistic interests and the lengths to which her ideals may one day have to extend. She manages to be a "tough girl" without being an all-out tomboy or sadistic domme...y'know, kinda like she's written as a person? But I digress. The second beautiful woman vying for Cloud's affection is Aerith. After Cloud and Aerith first connect, a sequence ensues where they walk through Aerith's home sector and everyone says hello to her and thanks her for helping them out the other day, then the local restaurant owner thanks her for volunteering her time to help him out when things get busy, then he tells Cloud what a complete saint Aerith is, then they happen to pass by the local doctor who just can't thank Aerith enough for going out and finding him the life saving herbs he needs to keep the people of the town healthy, then they pass by the town orphanage where all the little boys and girls come running up to Aerith because they love her so much and because she's so sweet to them and makes them feel special, at which point Aerith offhandedly mentions to Cloud that she helps out the kids at the orphanage from time to time right before the two are stopped by a pair of orphanage workers who go through another round of thanking, and then they get to Aerith's house, wherein our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, having popped in for a cup of tea, says hello to her and reminds her that "the offer still stands," but she says "no thanks, I don't need to be an actual saint, I'll settle for making as many people smile as I can!" The only part of that blurb that I made up was the last part. The degree to which Aerith is established to be too good for this world is almost comical, in all honesty (especially when they get to the orphanage). But like Tifa, Aerith is written as a person in spite of what I've just said. In anime-esque properties like this, characters like Aerith tend to come with an unrealistic degree of purity, heavy underlying insecurities, an unwillingness to stand up for themselves, or all of these things. Aerith, in contrast, has none of these. While most characters like this tend to say things like "darn" and "shoot" at worst or blush themselves to death at the thought of anything as lewd as *gasp* hand-holding, Aerith's language tends to go into the realm of PG-13, she actively teases Cloud in ways such as telling her mother "wanna know what I offered him if he got me home safe?", and at one point she straight up threatens to rip a man's balls off. It feels like an odd couple of things to emphasize, but you just don't see that kind of thing in Aerith-like characters. While the kindness of most characters like this tends to be rooted in deep feelings of worthlessness and just trying to be of some use, Aerith is simply a good-natured optimist with a healthy, realistic dose of self-doubt the likes of which we all have. And while most characters like this tend to be doormats who fall in love with the protagonist when they inevitably step in to defend them, in addition to the aforementioned ball-ripping threat, Aerith tends to respond to threats or misogynistic comments with something along the lines of "Cloud...permission to kill?" She's a genuinely good person, but she's a genuinely good person with personality beyond just being good. Neither Aerith nor Tifa are flawed in any way that I can tell, so it's not realistic in that way, but...like...in the original game, Tifa's boobs were infamously, comically large...so are you telling me I was supposed to expect any nuance in this remake? I wasn't, so the fact that the two characters people are here for were so well-done was a welcome surprise that I knew I just had to talk about. Even the game's supporting characters are pretty good, but we've already dwelled on this topic for too long. So, suffice it to say that the story here works, but the major draw is the characters.

In terms of gameplay, FF7 continues Square Enix's ever-evolving effort to mesh the fundamentals of turn based and hack-and-slash combat, and the result is possibly the best version thus far. Some people (myself not included) thought that the combat in FF15 was too far in the realm of action, and combat in FF7 represents an ever-so-slight walkback that integrates just enough strategy to (I believe) satisfy all tastes. The moment-to-moment gameplay is mashing the square button to have the character you're controlling land basic attacks, pressing the triangle button to have them initiate an alternate attack/attack mode, or pressing R1 or circle to either block or evade enemy attacks. As you do any of these things, you build up your "ATB" gauge, which is split into two bars (or three if you use certain spells or abilities). When you have at least one bar of ATB filled, you can use an item, cast a spell, or activate an ability, with the most powerful abilities requiring both bars to be filled. When you're controlling a character, the ATB gauge fills pretty quickly, so it isn't like it's a chore to do it, but what it does mean is that you can't just fire off spells or use a bunch of healing potions in quick succession. If a character gets knocked unconscious and none of the surviving characters have a bar filled, then there's nothing that can be done until they attack or evade for long enough. What you'll want to do when you have bars filled will depend entirely on the situation, as I hope goes without saying. In some cases, it's as simple as healing a party member at a crucial moment. In others, it can be a matter of saving up your uses for decisive maneuvers. See, as you attack enemies, you'll both chip away at their health and gradually build up their "stagger" meter. When that meter is full, the enemy becomes unable to move or attack, and it takes a minimum of 160% more damage from any attacks you throw at it. Unless you're up against weaker enemies, this is a gauge that fills up slowly, but by exploiting weaknesses, you can put enemies in a "pressured" state that causes the gauge to fill more quickly for a limited time. Some abilities can be used to easily pressure an enemy, some can be used to apply more staggering on an already pressured enemy, and some are custom made to be used on enemies already in a staggered state to make their lives even worse. At any given moment where you don't need to heal up or anything obvious like that, it's a matter of figuring out how you want to take an enemy out: do you bank on maximizing pressure to get to staggering as soon as possible, or do you want to bide your time and fill the stagger gauge normally then unleash all hell when it's time? This is just one example of the kinds of decisions you'll be making in the flow of combat, and it's a beautifully realized marriage of direct button mashing combat and the strategic mindset needed for a turn-based system. What's more, this already great system is made even more awesome by your ability to switch between party members at will. You never have direct control over which characters are in your party at any given time, but when you have someone besides Cloud on your team, as I said, you can swap between controlling them on a whim without having to worry about, say, needing a bar of ATB filled to do so. Each character plays distinctly and has their own unique abilities and alternate battle modes. For example, while Cloud is pretty much a protagonist kind of gameplay experience where he slashes things with his sword and has abilities centered around slashing things with his sword, Tifa, being a fist-fighter (and therefore lacking the kind of damage output that...a giant sword would have), has abilities that do things like increasing the damage percentage increase on a staggered enemy when she attacks it, allowing her and other characters to deal enhanced damage. But these baseline features of party members are just the foundation, as you have plenty of customization options on top of that. Each party member uses one type of weapon (Cloud uses swords, Tifa uses gloves, etc), and you find about four of each weapon type as the plot progresses, each version having different strengths and weaknesses. One sword might have a higher attack stat but lower magic attack stat, one might have the opposite, one might have incredibly high attack and magic attack stats but not very much room for "materia" (which we'll get to soon), one might have lower stats overall but plenty of room for materia, etc. When you take a step back, it becomes clear that there's a weapon for any kind of play style you want for any character. If you want them to be an offensive juggernaut, you'll want to go for the weapon with the highest attack stat, if you want them to be a jack of all trades that can use as many types of magic as possible, you'll want the weapon with the most room for materia, and so on and so forth. Every weapon can be upgraded as you level up, and the specific upgrades you get for each weapon both benefit the playstyle they're meant for in some way and in some cases minorly make up for potential shortcomings. A weapon with lots of materia slots might have an upgrade to add one extra slot, but most of the upgrades will center around improving magic. Conversely, a weapon with few materia slots might have a few upgrades that add materia slots, but few of the upgrades will improve magic in any way. Furthermore, every weapon comes with its own unique ability, and once you've used that weapon and utilized the ability enough times, the ability becomes usable no matter what weapon you have equipped. There's simply a ton of options to tailor the playstyles of not just Cloud, but all your party members.
Now, all that said, what is materia? Think of it as an orb that, when placed into an equipment slot, imbues its user with a certain magic effect. In some cases, it gives the user the ability to cast spells (fire spells for fire materia, ice spells for ice materia, various kinds of buff and debuff spells, etc), and in some cases it simply ups stats such as luck and magic damage. So, what spells and non weapon-related abilities a party member has depends on the amount of materia slots in their equipment and the specific pieces you choose to give them. As you go through the combat motions, regardless of whether or not you use specific abilities granted by materia, the materia itself gradually gains "experience" alongside the characters involved. With enough time, materia pieces will level up, either upping the bonuses they provide or unlocking more powerful versions of the spells they come with, and the kicker? All progress a piece of materia makes is permanent, and materia can be swapped in and out of equipment slots and between party members with no issue. So if Cloud uses a piece of fire materia and gets it up to level 2, you could take that materia away from him and give it to Tifa, and she'd be able to use the level 2 spells and continue the leveling up process. Depending on how you play your cards, you can end up grinding up multiple versions of multiple materia types so that they're all max level, and make it so that you're always in a position to have whatever weakness exploits or buffs you need at their most effective, no matter how the party roster changes. Again, there's simply a ton of options to tailor the additional abilities of all your party members. Combat in FF7 is just a masterful skyscraper of customizable gameplay experiences built on the foundation of several unique, set-in-stone playstyle aspects, and it makes it so that the aforementioned marriage of turn-based strategy and hack-and-slash chaos is all the more engaging....
Engaging...except for a few things. While this is a quite good blending of the two aforementioned game styles, it isn't a perfect one. The first problem that comes to mind is a head-scratcher because it's only a problem with characters you're directly in control of. See, when you command a party member you aren't controlling to use one of their abilities, they'll chase down whatever enemy you told them to use it on and then use the ability when they're well within range, ensuring that the attacks always hit. But when it's a character you're controlling, the character just unleashes the ability right in front of them in the general direction of the enemy you want. A good...7 out of 10 times this isn't a problem, as the enemy will be within range in the first place, But those other 3 times the enemy will have jumped slightly out of range the millisecond before you confirmed the attack, causing the character to simply swing at the air in front of them. There's no attempt at all to close the distance, even though every character seems to have that in their AI when not being controlled. This can be extremely frustrating; I recall one time I was controlling Cloud and had him use his super strong "limit break" attack, which comes with a not-short animation with the camera focused on him as he winds up. The attack would've ended the battle easily, but as the camera cut away and the animation ended, I found he was slashing at air. Turns out, this animation doesn't stop combat, so the enemy had just walked out of the way while Cloud was posing for the camera. This is made all the more confusing by the fact that the not-short animation to utilize a summoning materia does stop combat and, not to mention, when other characters are commanded to use these "limit breaks," once again, they close the distance. The other problem to bring up is flying enemies. There are flying enemies, and there are enemies that are situated outside of the battlefield (say, on a wall overlooking it). The latter doesn't typically move from its spot, and they signify a need to shift to ranged tactics, as you 1) can't physically attack them and 2) are guaranteed to hit them no matter the spell type). That is the kind of enemy that adds flavor to a battle. The flying enemies, on the other hand, are just an annoyance. When attacking a flying enemy, you have to be sure to attack while close enough. When you're in range, the character will leap up into the air and launch the next couple of attacks without falling, but after about three of them, they'll fall back to the ground. So if you're needing to build up ATB, it'll be a constant rinse and repeat of leaping up for a couple attacks, falling down, then leaping back up again. And all of this is assuming that you're actually still in range by the time you reach the enemy's height. A lot of the time, you'll leap up and the enemy will have flown just far enough back that none of your attacks land, and later in the game there are times when they will be flying just far enough off the map to look reachable when they actually aren't. Oh, and also, abilities and spells can't be activated in the air. Spells can be cast into the air from the ground, but there's no way of having a character leap up to perform a physical ability. Of course, switching to ranged tactics is obviously the best course of action for these kinds of enemies, but you'd figure that mid-air combat would be something that a game with anime-style graphics might be able to do right.

Unfortunately, these little bumps in gameplay aren't where the problems with FF7 end. In my introduction, I mentioned that the game was at times incredibly unpleasant to experience, and it's time to delve into that. This being a game that stretches the first five or so hours of the original game to 30-40 hours, it should come as no surprise that there's quite a bit of padding involved to reach that length. Sometimes, that padding works. When the game is providing extra story beats such as dance-offs, trips to the higher-class sectors to break into a friend's house while she distracts her mother, and boss fights against a cackling, sword-wielding, mulleted, homoerotic villain on a motorcycle, I found myself more than on board! Even most of the game's side quests (which are among the most uninspired side quests of all time) are enjoyable to do because they essentially act as vessels for more interactions between Cloud and whatever female companion he happens to be with in that particular chapter (plus you're rewarded with a full additional, satisfying interaction if you complete every side quest in the chapter before proceeding too far). When the game is padding itself out with extra story and intentional blue-balling (don't @ me, Square Enix knows what it's doing), it absolutely works...but the issue is that the majority of the padding isn't that. To give an example of the kind of padding that doesn't work, I'd like to bring up the absolute worst part of the game. After a lengthy, lengthy sewer level ("wait, the sewer level isn't the worst part?" I hear you ask), Cloud and company emerge from underground in a race against the clock to prevent an act of unspeakable cruelty about to be visited upon the innocent civilians of one of the slum sectors. They emerge in what is called a "train graveyard," which local folklore says is haunted. The entire level is a brief bit of train yard followed by a small maintenance building followed by another extremely brief bit of train yard, and it constitutes a full chapter of content (there are 18 chapters, 30-40 hours total, you do the math). The crew make it through the first bit of train yard pretty quickly, but upon entering the facility, they find that the level is indeed haunted............
...............
...............
by little ghost children who want to play. Just about the dumbest bit of plotting they possibly could have thought up to extend the train yard portion of the original game. Now, these ghost children, being mischievous little turds, mess with our heroes every step of the way, to the point that this teeny tiny maintenance building takes up 90% of the chapter's content. The crew will get in a train car that connects to other train cars that connect to the outside, but the ghosts will activate a crane to lift up the next train car (because heaven knows they can't just...climb up into the NEXT train car or anything). Then they'll climb the stairs to reach the crane, but it'll be out of power, so they'll need to get to the little booth overlooking the rest of the building on the other side, but the door to the little series of rooms that leads to it will be locked and they'll have to fight ghosts that either make themselves immune to physical attacks or magic attacks the whole battle. Then they'll find that the paths are too deteriorated so they'll need to find their way to another series of locked doors, then they'll get to the booth where they can restore power but the door to that will be locked so they'll need to go down another flight of stairs (because lord knows they couldn't just hop down onto the tracks then hop back up the other side from the first level or anything) to look for a key. It's just roadblock after roadblock after roadblock, and it's done in the service of a stupid little plotline. Eventually Aerith gets spirited away by the ghosts and has a flashback to other kids not playing hide and seek with her and she starts crying and I guess we're supposed to feel sorry for her at that point but did I mention that the crew are racing to prevent mass genocide during this chapter? Pair that with the fact that the section ends with easily the worst boss in the game, and whamo, you've got the worst chapter. Now, I kind of went off the rails (no pun intended) with that explanation because I actually got through that whole part in my second playthrough the day before I started writing this particular section, so I'd like to re-emphasize that that this chapter was an example of padding that didn't work and was actively annoying. While it was the worst example of it, there are plenty of other stretches of the game that were almost as irritatingly pointless and overextended. A lot of chapters come with one-time gimmicks that almost always contribute to the sense of padding. The sewer level has you draining water levels to look for ladders and keys, one segment sees Cloud having to maneuver giant robot hands to move boxes and Aerith between 1 or 2 specific points in the area, the second Mako reactor mission has the crew picking up keycards and interacting with computers on opposite sides of the room from each other to alter the boss at the end of the level in completely indistinguishable ways, and there's one chapter that contains non-optional side quests with Johnny, the worst character in the game. None of these things are difficult or require any sort of strategy, and they exist solely to waste time, as they never again come into play at any point throughout the rest of the game. Even in levels that don't have gimmicks like these, more often than not the ground will happen to drop from beneath your feet or a door will be locked, ensuring that the roadblocks found in the train yard chapter are never too far away. I spent far too much time in FF7 groaning and saying "no, no, not another gahhhhhh......," when seeing a computer or "hnnnnnnngggggg it's gonna break..." when seeing an extended stretch of ground in front of me. I've heard fans of the original game complaining about that because it feels like the game is dangling plot events in front of them and saying "oh, you want to get here? Psyche!" and here I am complaining about it as a newcomer because it's a waste of my time. I sincerely hope the remaining installments of this remake aren't filled to the brim with this much time-wasting.

That brings us to the technical side of things. The first thing you'll likely notice about FF7 is that it's breathtakingly beautiful. The environments, the characters, the animations, everything is as beautiful as possible, and when you take into consideration the fact that most of this game takes place in disheveled slums, that's saying a lot! The visual effects that come from abilities and spells are equally beautiful, making this game easily 2020's best looking game to date! In addition, I never experienced any crashes (hard or soft), framerate dips, texture pop-in, animation glitches, or lip syncing mistiming, and given that exactly 99% of the game's budget went into making all the major characters (male or female) as breathtakingly beautiful as possible with the PS4 hardware, it's amazing that everything else holds up so well! That being said, the game isn't without its technical head-scratchers. By far the biggest technical problem is how the camera can sometimes operate when you're locked on to an enemy. It has a tendency to go a little haywire depending on where you are in a battle area, but in spite of the fact that this is the biggest technical problem, it isn't all that prevalent. Beyond this, the audio tends to be quite inconsistent. At the start, I noticed that the music was completely overpowering the dialogue, so I set the music to be at, say, level 7/10 to allow character voices to come through. Yet, at several points throughout the game, the music would once again overpower everything else in spite of the fact that my settings had been saved. Finally, there are some miscellaneous technical oddities such as: 1) the fact that you have to physically exit out of the game after you change the dialogue language in order to get the change to stick and 2) the fact that saving your game can take as long as a full minute. All-in-all it's a solid package, but there are notable issues nonetheless. Before I move on to the conclusion, I'd like to bring up a technical positive that I haven't yet mentioned. I made a point of saying that the music has a tendency to overpower everything else, but it's worth noting that the music doing the overpowering is always excellent. I've always heard about how great the music in Final Fantasy is, but my only experience with it was the pretty standard JRPG soundtrack of FF15. Now I can see what all the fuss is about. The music in FF7 is incredible and varied. Even when themes get repeated in combat encounters, it's always the kind of theme that gets you pumped up, and when the tearjerking moments start, half of their power lies in the soundtrack. Even that stupid part of the game where Aerith remembers that nobody wanted to play with her as a kid while the crew are trying to stop mass genocide is made somewhat impactful because of its music. So, a bit of a silver lining to that technical oddity I mentioned.

Folks, if I had to guess, you already bought FF7 if you were going to in the first place. So, the chances of this review having any practical purpose aren't great, but hey, Yahztee Croshaw is still in business even though nobody comes to him for actual recommendations, so whatever. As a fledgling Final Fantasy fan and a complete newcomer to this particular story, I had a blast with FF7, and I can only hope to help others like me make informed decisions. If you're more of a strategic player or more of an action kind of player, you're bound to find something to like in the gameplay. If you're the kind of gamer who just wants an excellent story, this game will waste your time, but there's a lot to like regardless. And if you're just a dude bro who wants to look at some women whose body language took up 70% of the budget, hell, you could do way worse than this. FF7 is not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination, but there's so much to like about it that so many different kinds of people can agree on, and I, for one, will be awaiting the next installment with bated breath.

Let us review:
Combat annoyances - 0.5
Time wasting - 1.0
Technical issues - 0.3

The final score for Final Fantasy 7 Remake is...



8.2/10 - Great
Great work, Square Enix, great work