Final Fantasy VII Remake’s new script and some added scenes flesh out characters who were previously nothing but faces and names—most notably, the Avalanche members Jessie, Wedge, and Biggs (voiced by returning Final Fantasy actor Gideon Emery, which can be a bit distracting—I just kept hearing Final Fantasy XII’s Balthier). In the original game, these characters were paper-thin and exited the story just as quickly as they entered. Here, they’re nearly as important as your main team. It’s far easier to empathize with the class struggle of Midgar when the people feel real—especially now that their faces actually have noses.

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Fans might be baffled by the addition of some strange new characters—what, you don’t remember Chocobo Sam?—but they all serve either to help develop the main cast or to add life to Midgar itself. Only a couple of these new chunks of game feel superfluous, like one late-game sequence involving a Don Corneo henchman whose emotional arc is never quite as poignant as the game thinks it is. (He’s presented as an aloof pseudo-villain with a tragic backstory, but his personality is so stoic, he’s just boring.) Other scenes, like a chapter in which Cloud goes to the flirty, agonized soldier Jessie’s house and learns why she’s fighting against Shinra, are delightful additions to the story, enhanced by top-notch voice acting and stunning views of Midgar.

Final Fantasy VII Remake hints at old mysteries, giving Cloud plenty of hallucinations and flashbacks (much like the original game), while adding some fascinating new questions. Early in the story, your heroes are introduced to a group of dementor-looking spirits who appear and disappear throughout the game. Their identity is a big question throughout Final Fantasy VII Remake. The answer—and the resolution—changed my perspective on everything.

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Sometimes, the goal of a video game remake is to make a game more palatable to modern audiences—to update the graphics, fix the controls, and get you playing it on whatever new Xbox or PlayStation came out most recently. Final Fantasy VII Remake is different. Final Fantasy VII Remake invites you to think about what, exactly, should be remade.

Take Aerith, for example. In one chapter of the remake, Cloud and Aerith scamper across the ruined rooftops of Midgar’s Sector 5 as they escape from a group of pursuing Shinra guards. In the original game, this is a cute little moment—10 seconds of flirting as Cloud teases Aerith for getting tired as they jump. In Final Fantasy VII Remake, it’s breathtaking.

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The old
The old
The new
The new
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Aerith is one of the most improved aspects of this project. In 1997, she was presented as a spritely ally, but the garbled English script lost many of her best lines. In the remake, she feels like a brand new person—a lively, spiritual florist who’s as comfortable cracking a joke as she is connecting with the planet. Final Fantasy VII‘s Aerith was charming—Final Fantasy VII Remake’s Aerith is a lovable goofball. The remake gives her more time to speak and to interact with the other characters, including some wonderful buddy-buddy scenes with Cloud’s childhood friend Tifa. Through those moments, you get a chance to get to know her in a way that the original English Final Fantasy VII never quite pulled off.

Or, take combat. Final Fantasy VII had random encounters and turn-based battles; everyone knows that. But was it something its developers wanted to include or something they felt compelled to add to the game because of technical restrictions? Was it just a Final Fantasy tradition to which they had to abide?

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Combat in Japanese role-playing games started off as something of a metaphor. Memory restrictions on early video game hardware made it impossible to render every single enemy on the map, so they took place on a separate battlefield. Each of the first 10 mainline Final Fantasy games had invisible random encounters—as you were walking around in a dangerous area, the screen would suddenly shake, then transition to a battlefield screen on which your characters lined up opposite your enemies, each attacking when it was their turn.

Final Fantasy VII’s battles included some fun flourishes, like special victory poses for each character, but they mostly unfolded in the same way as the previous six games. Final Fantasy VII Remake says: Screw that. No more turns. No more invisible monsters. Technology has advanced past graphical metaphors.

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Combat in this remake takes place in real time, much like Final Fantasy XV or Kingdom Hearts, against enemies you can see as you roam Midgar’s slums and tunnels. You hack away at enemies using short-ranged attacks for Cloud or Tifa and long-ranged attacks for Barret or Aerith, building up an “ATB gauge” (named after the classic Final Fantasy combat system: active time battles) that allows you to cast spells, use items, or execute special abilities. Your effectiveness in combat is augmented by your gear, your weapon upgrades, and your materia—small crystals that can be attached to weapons and armor to enable magic and enhance your abilities.

Spamming skills like Cloud’s uber-powerful Triple Slash will do you just fine, but the most efficient way to take out enemies is to stagger them. Staggering opponents, a mechanic adapted from Final Fantasy XIII, knocks them to the ground and paralyzes them for a few seconds while boosting your damage by a significant percentage (typically 160%). Different enemies in Final Fantasy VII Remake are susceptible to staggering in different ways. Some will just fall down when you do enough damage to them, or when you cast a spell targeting their weak point. Others require more unique strategies—one flying enemy, for example, will be more prone to staggering if you dodge their aerial attacks.

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It’s a strong combat system that only occasionally drags during a bullet-spongey boss (there are oh so many robots with oh so many phases) or filler dungeon (did we really need more sewer levels?). The wrinkle is that you can only control one party member at a time. Whoever you’re not controlling spends battles standing around, occasionally hitting monsters but mostly waiting for you to order them to use spells or abilities. The goal of this system is ostensibly to make you feel like the main character is the one in command—characters even shout lines like “It’s my turn” when you switch to take control of them—but in practice, it just feels like your friends are idiots.

There are some ways to automate ally behavior, like a useful Auto-Cure materia that will make a party member heal anyone who’s in the red, but it’s not ideal. Some sort of rudimentary AI (or at least more materia like Auto-Cure) would have done wonders. As I played, I found myself badly missing Final Fantasy XII’s elaborate Gambit system, in which you can craft your own contingencies for each character (ie: “if you see an enemy, immediately steal from them”). Granted, that was a very different game, but Final Fantasy VII Remake’s ineffective party members feel like a regression.

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It all makes one wonder: Is this better than turn-based combat? Is it worse? You won’t find yourself mindlessly mashing the attack button—as I have while revisiting the original Final Fantasy VII for comparison—but you might miss some of the more strategy-heavy aspects of the original game’s bosses. (The game’s semi-turn-based “classic mode” is a poor facsimile.) Warping to a new battlefield for each encounter and selecting options from a menu screen would have certainly felt antiquated alongside these cutting-edge production values, but it’s still fascinating to see a video game remake choose to completely overhaul its namesake’s core mechanic.

Image for article titled Final Fantasy VII Remake: The Kotaku Review
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And Final Fantasy VII Remake’s production values really are impressive. The soundtrack, a brand new take on Nobuo Uematsu’s stirring original music, is full of straight bangers including some wonderful spins on the themes of characters like Aerith and Tifa. Some of the setpieces feel straight out of Uncharted, complete with death-defying leaps across falling debris. Midgar is as beautifully gritty as anyone might hope, and this remake offers a close-up perspective that helps you see the city’s class struggle more intimately.

During one sequence, late in the game, as you climb one of Midgar’s pillars in hopes of reaching Shinra’s headquarters in the center of the city, the views are hard to believe. Over the past two decades, plenty of fans have tried to imagine what a complete 3D remake of Final Fantasy VII might look like. Aesthetically, this game surpasses even the loftiest of expectations, aside from a few quirks.

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There are texture loading issues, for those who pay attention to that sort of thing, which can lead to some weird-looking doors and walls. There’s also a persistent, annoying audio glitch that cuts off characters’ voices when you’re not facing them as they talk. During battle, some of the stock lines of dialogue can get grating, although I did enjoy hearing Barret yell “Asshole!” at a Fat Chocobo.

Final Fantasy VII Remake ran at a steady framerate on my launch PS4, and although the console sounded like a jet engine, I didn’t mind. I just cranked up the volume. Midgar was calling.

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For the past few years, I’ve been loudly cynical about the nature of the Final Fantasy VII Remake project. I’ve been skeptical of the decision to break this game up into episodes, and was especially worried when we learned that the first game took place solely in Midgar. After all, I’ve played Final Fantasy VII half a dozen times. Midgar is burned into my memory. How could they possibly make an entire game out of that four-hour sequence?

Playing through Final Fantasy VII Remake, then, was a surreal experience. As I fought through endless waves of Shinra soldiers and helped do chores for the residents of Midgar’s slums, I felt in some ways like I was going through the motions. Okay, just got off the train—now we go to Sector 7. Then it’s time to blow up another reactor. And so on. And so on. Even as I enjoyed the new cutscenes and marveled at the sights and sounds of Shinra, I always knew what was coming next. Cloud’s fall. Wall Market. The train graveyard. The big escape. It’s a weird feeling, playing a game that feels brand new yet utterly predictable at the same time.

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I marveled at the small moments—the challenging fights, the lovely dialogue exchanges, the explosive new set-pieces. I spun around the camera and tried to take in all of Midgar’s sights and sounds. Final Fantasy VII Remake is unquestionably a good video game, and on a moment-to-moment level, I was really enjoying it.

But I was also confident that by the end of it all, I’d feel unsatisfied. Every flashback to Cloud’s razed hometown of Nibelheim or hint about Sephiroth’s clones joining together for Reunion was just a reminder that we wouldn’t actually see those scenes in the game. Every new character or extended dungeon felt like it was taking away time that could have been devoted to chunks of Final Fantasy VII that I knew wouldn’t be in here, like Junon, the port city built around a giant cannon that you visit shortly after Midgar. I wanted to see Final Fantasy VII Remake’s take on the beach resort Costa del Sol, or that glorious flying theme park, the Golden Saucer. I was prepared to burst into tears at… well, I won’t ruin that one thing. (You probably know the thing.)

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Then I got to the end and realized that, without spoiling anything, the game’s developers were more or less asking what it means to remake a video game. How faithfully do you have to stick to the script? Just how much, if anything, do creators owe their biggest fans, the ones who have spent so many years begging for a release like this?

By the time I reached the credits, Final Fantasy VII Remake had left me simultaneously thrilled and confounded. I still want to see the rest of the game, but, taking in the sweep of things and noticing the cumulative effect of a succession of surprises, I think I understand what the developers are trying to do—and why it had to be presented and released this way. The answer, of course, is that a remake can be whatever its creators want it to be.

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Final Fantasy VII Remake is not what I expected. It’s a grand, ambitious, beautiful experiment, a bold new take on a game that millions of people remember fondly. It sometimes feels shackled by the weight of two decades worth of expectations, but it handles those restraints with aplomb. I certainly can’t wait to see what’s next. As a great man named Barret Wallace once said: There ain’t no getting off this train we on.