Final Fantasy VII Remake is, as the title suggests, a remake of Final Fantasy VII. However, a re-imagining would be the more appropriate description since it is not a complete remake of the game. It only covers the Midgar portion of the story, which wasn’t that long in the original game. Instead, this game expands upon the story in order to give us a 40 hour game, as well as changing a few things along the way. It’s got amazing reviews and the consensus is that it is a great game, although there is some divide with many not liking it.
The original was a PS1 game and now, three generations later, we see the same locations but using all of the advancements in over twenty years. Boot up the game and from the very first scene it looks phenomenal. It’s actually really exciting to see updates of locations that you remember, which looks familiar, and yet so much prettier.
The story starts off pretty much exactly the same as the original. You follow Cloud, a SOLDIER mercenary for hire who is paid by Avalanche in their quest to bomb a mako reaction. Avalanche is described by many as eco-terrorists, they have the best interests for the planet but is misguided. Their goal this time is to stop the abusive usage of mako, the planet’s life energy, and prevent Shinra from harvesting it as an energy source. After this exciting and explosive first chapter, it’s when all the filler starts coming. While it isn’t all bad, it does make the game go at a much slower pace than the original.
The combat system is nothing like the original. Instead, it’s like a massive improved version of Final Fantasy XV’s. It is real time and pressing square will have your character attack. As they attack, this builds up the ATB gauge. Once you have at least one full block then you can either use abilities (special moves), magic or items. Those actions will use up the ATB gauge and having items and magic tied to that can be inconvenient at first. You are also able to hotkey four actions for quick access, otherwise you can pull up the menu which will cause the onscreen action to slow a crawl, allowing you time to select.
The other major element to the combat is hitting the enemy enough to pressure them and then eventually stagger them. Normal attacks do chip damage, while abilities and magic do a normal amount of damage. Once you stagger an enemy, it stops them from blocking or attacking, as well as giving you a damage multiplier to pile on the damage. Additional features of the combat system includes being able to dodge and block. the ability to swap to other characters is instantly available and is crucial since each character has a unique role distinguishing them from other party members.
Magic is tied to the materia system. Which spells you can use is determined by which materia you equip the character with. Fighting with them equipped will level them up and give you access to higher tiers of the spells. You will constantly need to adjust your materia load-out to cope with bosses, which is fine most of the time, but can also feel tedious at others. It’s an addictive system that is replicated with weapons. Use a weapon long enough and it will permanently unlock one ability unique to that weapon for the character to use, no matter what is equipped.
As flashy as the battle system is, it has a high learning curve. You can’t brute force your way, you can’t button mash and tying item use to the ATB bar is overly restrictive. Given enemies seem to have high agility and have ranged attacks, you feel like you don’t have much control over when you take damage or not. Boss battles are difficult, especially with their own gimmicks, high use of unblockable moves and their insane speed of unleashing attacks at times which makes it tough to actually land a proper hit with decent damage. You can’t be aggressive at all sometimes, which slows down the pace of the game.
The hybrid turn based action battle system works part of the time. In others, it is a mess that is too fast paced for the turn based aspect to work as it gets too hectic, but it is too slow paced for the action aspect to work as the dodge and block abilities aren’t as strong as you would expect in an action game. As a result, boss battles can feel like a mess and a massive damage sponge thanks to the stagger mechanics.
The game is at its worse when it constantly takes party members away from you and you’re forced to fight using only one character. All aggro is on you, and when you had a proper party, at least you can swap characters but here, you’ll get stun-locked. Even normal mode will have massive difficulty spikes.
Aerial combat has one of the worst implementations ever. They’re okay when you can use a ranged character but there will be plenty of times when you are forced to fight them using a melee character. These enemies fly out of range so that character becomes absolutely useless. If you use magic, it might accidentally hit an obstacle and so you’ve wasted your ATB bar and MP. Or how about using ice magic only for the enemy to roll away since there is a delay in the damage being applied? It’s frustrating.
Enemies roam the environment so you are never surprised when you enter combat. There is no separate battle screen although this can make you fight the camera in tight spaces. The camera is horrendous at times, especially when you’re in a restricted area. This happens even with boss battles so you can’t easily dodge since you can’t see. The game loves to force you to fight multiple enemies at once without giving a good option for crowd control attacks.
The game may look like it is huge and presents you with options but it is still effectively a linear corridor walker. This isn’t necessary a bad thing but when it is so obvious that the developers want you to play in a very specific way, THEIR way, in both exploration and combat, it can feel overly restrictive. It doesn’t help when the corridors are extremely narrow.
The padding is very real since the game extends dungeons to three to four times what they should be. What doesn’t help is that Midgar is bland. It’s a city so there are a lot of enclosed areas, walls and corridors. We get none of the open world vistas which make travelling through dungeons so enjoyable. Here, every train tunnel looks the same and every mako reaction is similar, it gets bogged down after a way. There are annoying gimmicks like holding down triangle to high five or sneaking out without hitting a loose object on the floor and making a sound. How is this essential or fun? The game wants to be taken seriously but you get these stupid idiotic moments that breaks the immersion with its instant fail mechanics. While it’s a call back to the original game, it’s just so overly sensitive that it’s not fun.
The game continues on the trend that started with Final Fantasy XV where during certain sections, your characters are forced to slow down in order to squeeze in tight spaces, crawl, climb up ladders or just walk for no reason. It’s pointless and aims to waste your time. Forced slow walking for no reason at all feels like padding, especially with all the filler story elements. The frequency at which the forced walking or shimmying occurs, and not for an atmospheric reason, or even for hiding loading, is obnoxious. It can’t be even called masking loading screens because it is so frequent and obvious when it happens every minute or so in a linear corridor dungeon with barely any enemies.
There are a number of sidequests but they’re not designed very well. They’re infinitely better than than the banal fetch quests of Final Fantasy XV, but it’s still stuff like finding unmarked objects on the map, or go to this place to grab an item. While the maps are small enough that it usually isn’t too difficult, its aim is still to waste your time like so many other things of the game and that can be quite insufferable.
Despite only being around 35 to 40 hours in length, things feel like they are dragged on for too long and the plot is overstretched. It ends up being muddled and lacks focus. You don’t know what the objective is because it keeps getting distracted with pointless crap. This isn’t even mentioning the changes made to the story to insert Sephiroth earlier, or add some random mystique, which can feel like a lame attempt at fan service. The finale is a massive ten hour long dungeon, filled with annoying “puzzles” where you just flip levers and run through the same corridors. Then it is a boss rush, which at this point, completely burns you out and feels so tedious.
The ending completely changes the story. While it was hinted upon throughout the game, the additions, the final chapter, and the boss, is Kingdom Hearts level of ridiculousness. It’s a typical convoluted mess of that game series that aims for visuals rather than sense or gameplay. Adding this sort of deus ex machina type of plot device is extremely lazy since it shows that the writers couldn’t figure out how to properly close the game, or find a good way to actually re-imagine the story.
Overall, Final Fantasy VII Remake is a bloated game with way too much filler. It stretches four to five hours of the original into forty hours and not in a good way. A bit of expansion would be good but in the hopes of making a “typical” forty hour RPG, the content is stretched out way too thin filled with pointless fluff like climbing ladders, shimmying on ledges and other “expanded” content. The combat system is unique but takes a lot to get used to and doesn’t quite work as a turn based or an action game since it is lacking functions in both areas. The game is extremely pretty although when it is just based in Midgar filled with dreary run down shanty town like structures, sewers and corridors within buildings, everything eventually looks the same. It is typical Square Enix to focus so heavily on the flash but not the substance and it shows in the game’s cutscenes, writing and combat.
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