It’s been almost 30 years, and now the Final Fantasy 7 remake is out for everyone. I always said I’d buy the remake when it came out, but ~$500 was too much (for the game plus the console it required). When it came to PC (via the Epic Games Store), I was a Mac user. Now it’s out on Xbox and Switch, and I’ve played through it on the former.
Of course, I loved the remake from the start, from the expanded opening showing the dystopia and the lack of plant life, the extra scene where Aerith’s flower is stepped on before she can pick it back up, and of course the characters having voices. But then, shortly after the intro movie, I started to notice changes I didn’t like. I’m fine with you not being able to rename characters. All I really changed was “Aeris” to “Aerith,” correcting the translation mistake, but the remake already does this. (I also corrected “Red XIII” to [redacted] (spoiler) so when you get his real name, you get funny dialogue where Cloud asks “Who is [redacted]” and the other character says “[redacted] is [redacted].” It’s not important, it’s just funny to me, but it bothered me that after you learn his real name, you still call him Red XIII, so I always named him what his real name is from that point forward.)
Then after the first part of the training mission, we get back to Seventh Heaven, and I don’t even have the option to give the flower to Marlene. I thought that option was special in the original, but the remake doesn’t allow it. We’re not giving it to Tifa because at no point does Cloud see Tifa like that — yet. It doesn’t make sense. He has the flower because Aerith made him take it. Cloud’s basically ace at this point, and he doesn’t want to lead his childhood friend on. He just wants to get paid and move on. Aside from discarding the flower, which isn’t an option, giving the flower to Marlene makes the most sense. Cloud sees that everyone in Avalanche has hope. Marlene only sees her daddy and his friends (who she also likes) go out and leave her alone every day. So you want to give her some hope. Having Cloud give Tifa the flower by default was the first half of my first issue with the remake.
In the original, Cloud loses some of his edge around the second mission. Meeting Aerith in the church, meeting her mother, the interaction with the Turks, and the whole Don Corneo business changes him a bit, and he lets more of his human side out. Not in the remake, he just stays an asshole through the whole thing, which runs through the Shinra HQ escape. Minor spoiler, but only for those who played the original and understand the context. You escape from Midgar HQ, you do the road scene, and instead of fighting the boss after, you fight the boss still on the bike. Then you fight Sephiroth for some reason and… that’s it. It’s over. You gotta wait until June for the second part, unless you pay $700+ for a PS5. And no one has the third part yet, even if you pay the steep fee for early access. We’re not even sure if the third part will be further delayed on other platforms. So that’s another issue — even those who paid the premium to access the second part early don’t know when they’re getting the third chapter, or even that the third chapter will be the final chapter. It’s all up in the air.
What really convinced me the remake was kinda bad wasn’t just the extra mission with the new Soldier villain (which is just training you for the bike mission at the end), but it was after Aerith is taken (sorry, minor spoiler) and you talk to her mom and you get her back story. Even with the voice acting… I remember thinking this scene hit so much harder in the original. But, buying Remake on the Xbox came with the original, so after I finished Remake, I fired up the original and started playing. It only takes about an hour or two to get to this scene. To do everything in Remake takes 20-40 hours in Remake, but it only takes about 3 hours in the original, due to all the fluff that was added. (Some of that fluff is good, but most of it literally exists to waste your time.) I got to that scene, and it hurt my heart nearly as much as it did the first go-around in 1997. I think it’s the music. The music in Remake simply sucks. The music in the original was hot garbage because it was MIDI. I remember paying $40 to import the CD, then I found a 10MB pirated copy online. All the songs in MIDI except “One-Winged Angel” which was an MP3. I played the songs on the computer and the CD in my CD player. Sounded the same. But anyway, Nobuo Uematsu has since re-released music from Final Fantasy VII, with a full orchestra, and it sounds amazing. You don’t get that in the Remake. You get boring, drowned-out songs. You also get this random ass song with vocals by Yosh from Survive Said the Prophet (Japanese rock fans know who that is) but you can never hear the song, even in the trailer. You have to go on a streaming service and look up the song and play it outside the game. It’s not just weird. It’s bad. The music was such an integral part of the original game, warts and all, but they couldn’t get that right. And Aerith’s back story just fell flat. It could have been amazing with the newer, non-MIDI, orchestral recordings, but we didn’t get that.
If I said I wasn’t going to play Rebirth when it comes out in June, I’d be fucking lying. Of course I’ll play it. But I’m already to the Temple of the Ancients in the original. The original is ugly and the music is MIDI, but it doesn’t completely disrespect your time (there are too many battles, but they can be disabled, but you shouldn’t disable all of them), and it’s still a great game. And it doesn’t shut down on the train tracks leading to the town with Barret’s back story like the original PC release did. They either used the fix from the Ultima Edition (a pirate release), or they fixed it on their own. Either way, you can play past that point now. You can probably play the entire game legally now without original hardware. That wasn’t an option before — either you were emulating the PS1 version or you were running the Ultima Edition, even if you bought the PC release because no one ever played the PC release past Disc One. It just wasn’t possible to proceed due to an unpatched bug. Fortunately, digital releases such as Steam, App Store, Xbox, PlayStation, and others, do allow patches and so the game was fixed. Anyway, of course I’ll play Rebirth, and I’ll play Reunion as well — what I assume the third one will be called, given the context and the pattern — and I damn sure can’t wait to see what the new World Crisis scene looks like (that’s not really a spoiler, and neither is this: if you have to go to the bathroom when you’re fighting Sephiroth for the last time, pause during the match, because you won’t get a chance during the nine minute cut scene that follows. At least it was 9 minutes on the PS1. It’ll probably be longer in the remake. And I can’t wait to see it. And I can’t wait for someone to recut it with better audio.
Not even just types of games, but two different games entirely. I’ll try to avoid spoilers (never got to the end of Rebirth yet anyway so I dunno), but the game makes it clear by the time you reach the Shinra building, that this is not the same story that was told in the original game.
They even went as far as to personify this fact in case people were too dense to grasp it.
This might be a hot take but I don’t think the original FF7 aged well. The combat gets really repetitive and I never finished it. The atmosphere and general story is awesome, but it’s still very “of its time” when it comes to delivering that story and reading all the dialogue. Your head fills in the blanks in the story and gets over the shoddy translation.
I loved Remake, honestly. We can all agree that the side quests were filler and the story isn’t very well paced, but everything worked for me and I enjoyed it way more than the original. Rebirth felt bloated and I didn’t care for the open world stuff. Screw that card game, too.
One thing I will say is that they definitely overcooked the story in the remakes. The whole multiverse time travel dementors kingdom-hearts-ass confusing storyline was unnecessary. I guess they felt the need that they had to do something new to catch the old fans off guard.
I played FF7 for the first time a few years ago and I was honestly expecting that it might not have aged super gracefully, that the transition to 3D probably came with a lot of growing pains that would be excused as a product of its time. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how well it held up for me.
It definitely does still have some small growing pains, summons would’ve drove me insane without the Switch port’s fast forward, and every time it tries to wow the player with VFX I had to remind myself that this was cutting edge in 1997. But overall, the nitpicks I had weren’t much, it was a lot better than I expected.
I haven’t played Remake though, don’t plan to do so until it’s done.
I think it’s a fair criticism. The combat/random encounters are generally the most tedious part of any jRPG but certainly FF in particular. There are some really unique and interesting random battles or areas where the constant battling is intense and exciting rather than annoying, but they are rare.
Overall though, I think the rest of FF7 more than makes up for it. I can certainly understand not being able to get past that though, although I’m curious how far you got. The game goes through a lot of different “stages”, which is one of the things I like about it, but it means the gameplay while you’re stuck in Midgar is quite distinct from the open world, and becomes distinct again once you get access to the Golden Saucer, or the airship, or into Midgar again.
I played Remake when it was included in PS+ back in ~2020, and I played the original right after (I was very confused by the ending sequence of Remake at the time). I have yet to play Rebirth, but I’ll get to it after a replay of Remake and before part 3 comes out.
I thought very little about the story differences between the two. The part that stood out to me was, politically, why people would support Shinra at all (a change in Remake), as you hear more from the average resident of Midgar. And I thought they gave you more time to get attached to all those doomed folks in your band of eco terrorists before they die.
I’m way into prog rock, so the soundtrack was just better for me in Remake. Maybe it’s not as good as the orchestral version of the original soundtrack, but that wasn’t in the original, so I only have the MIDI to compare it to. The main theme sounds fantastic, way better than the original actually, and you still get that Kansas-esque battle theme against the robot when you’re scaling the tower. Loved it. Going from either of those back to the original MIDI is cute, but it’s a downgrade.
The story changes are because this isn’t a straight upgrade meant to replace the old game. This is a game whose story is about the reverence for the original game. Or at least, that’s what it sets up in Part 1, and I can’t speak to Part 2. As for wasting your time, yeah, it does that. I had a great time skipping the side missions in Remake, and from what I heard of Rebirth, that’s probably what I’ll do again, since that content is pretty phoned in. The original game’s version of wasting your time is a random battle encounter rate that’s set too high, plus the macguffin hunt right before the end of the game.
I’ve only played the first remake so far, but I do prefer the original game. The remake is gorgeous and definitely not bad by any means, but it adds so much unnecessary padding to what was originally a perfectly well-paced game. And the story beats they added mostly don’t improve on the writing of the original.
Feels almost mean to say it, but it reminds me a bit of the Hobbit movie trilogy in that regard.
I finally played through the game on my PS1 a few years ago. It was fantastic. I wanted to re-start and play immediately. Conversely, I have played the first few hours of Remake four times now and give up. I don’t like the combat. I don’t like the story. I don’t like how it has changed into a bog standard quest log type thing. I even tried to play again just a few weeks ago.
Ff7 remake is 100% fan-service AAA slop. Play real jRPGs, play Persona5, Expedition 33, play the original, but not that brain-rotting time-stealing remake, it’s an insult to life itself.
Although I admit it was a very pretty game. Now all they have to do is take their precious game engine and make a real game out of it.
FF has been steadily turning from actual role playing games where the gameplay was once in the driver’s seat and the scenes and story add spice and flavor, to vaguely interactive “cinematic experiences” where the story being endlessly shoved down your throat is the purpose, and the gameplay is just a repetitive distraction from the real novelty which is the crazy stories and cutscenes they come up with.
Ironically FF7 itself was probably the beginning of that trend, thanks to the ability of Playstation CDs to hold so much FMV compared to the limits of ROMs at the time. They dove in headfirst and never looked back, and that came to define the franchise from that point forward. 3 Discs of FMV was pretty over-the-top for their first release on the platform, but the franchise’s addiction to relentless cinematics never waned, it only increased. And the relegation of gameplay being put in the passenger seat, then the back seat, then the trunk, then dragged behind the vehicle to its inevitable death as the art and story become the sole focus became more pronounced with each new entry in the series.
I loved FF7 (and 8, and somewhat less 9, and even 10, and 12 have some redeeming qualities) but the steady and continuous trend away from compelling gameplay towards visual spectacle is abundantly clear.
I haven’t played an FF game since 12, remakes or otherwise, and I don’t plan to. I’ve read the writing on the wall, and I see who they’re making games for, and it’s not me. Maybe it’s other people. Maybe it’s themselves, I don’t know. All I know is it’s not me. I have no interest.
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They’re completely different types of games. It’s hard to compare.
Not even just types of games, but two different games entirely. I’ll try to avoid spoilers (never got to the end of Rebirth yet anyway so I dunno), but the game makes it clear by the time you reach the Shinra building, that this is not the same story that was told in the original game.
They even went as far as to personify this fact in case people were too dense to grasp it.
This might be a hot take but I don’t think the original FF7 aged well. The combat gets really repetitive and I never finished it. The atmosphere and general story is awesome, but it’s still very “of its time” when it comes to delivering that story and reading all the dialogue. Your head fills in the blanks in the story and gets over the shoddy translation.
I loved Remake, honestly. We can all agree that the side quests were filler and the story isn’t very well paced, but everything worked for me and I enjoyed it way more than the original. Rebirth felt bloated and I didn’t care for the open world stuff. Screw that card game, too.
One thing I will say is that they definitely overcooked the story in the remakes. The whole multiverse time travel dementors kingdom-hearts-ass confusing storyline was unnecessary. I guess they felt the need that they had to do something new to catch the old fans off guard.
I played FF7 for the first time a few years ago and I was honestly expecting that it might not have aged super gracefully, that the transition to 3D probably came with a lot of growing pains that would be excused as a product of its time. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how well it held up for me.
It definitely does still have some small growing pains, summons would’ve drove me insane without the Switch port’s fast forward, and every time it tries to wow the player with VFX I had to remind myself that this was cutting edge in 1997. But overall, the nitpicks I had weren’t much, it was a lot better than I expected.
I haven’t played Remake though, don’t plan to do so until it’s done.
I think it’s a fair criticism. The combat/random encounters are generally the most tedious part of any jRPG but certainly FF in particular. There are some really unique and interesting random battles or areas where the constant battling is intense and exciting rather than annoying, but they are rare.
Overall though, I think the rest of FF7 more than makes up for it. I can certainly understand not being able to get past that though, although I’m curious how far you got. The game goes through a lot of different “stages”, which is one of the things I like about it, but it means the gameplay while you’re stuck in Midgar is quite distinct from the open world, and becomes distinct again once you get access to the Golden Saucer, or the airship, or into Midgar again.
I played Remake when it was included in PS+ back in ~2020, and I played the original right after (I was very confused by the ending sequence of Remake at the time). I have yet to play Rebirth, but I’ll get to it after a replay of Remake and before part 3 comes out.
I thought very little about the story differences between the two. The part that stood out to me was, politically, why people would support Shinra at all (a change in Remake), as you hear more from the average resident of Midgar. And I thought they gave you more time to get attached to all those doomed folks in your band of eco terrorists before they die.
I’m way into prog rock, so the soundtrack was just better for me in Remake. Maybe it’s not as good as the orchestral version of the original soundtrack, but that wasn’t in the original, so I only have the MIDI to compare it to. The main theme sounds fantastic, way better than the original actually, and you still get that Kansas-esque battle theme against the robot when you’re scaling the tower. Loved it. Going from either of those back to the original MIDI is cute, but it’s a downgrade.
The story changes are because this isn’t a straight upgrade meant to replace the old game. This is a game whose story is about the reverence for the original game. Or at least, that’s what it sets up in Part 1, and I can’t speak to Part 2. As for wasting your time, yeah, it does that. I had a great time skipping the side missions in Remake, and from what I heard of Rebirth, that’s probably what I’ll do again, since that content is pretty phoned in. The original game’s version of wasting your time is a random battle encounter rate that’s set too high, plus the macguffin hunt right before the end of the game.
Yes, but mainly because I never played the OG and don’t have the nostalgia goggles I feel would be required for me to enjoy it as much.
I’ve only played the first remake so far, but I do prefer the original game. The remake is gorgeous and definitely not bad by any means, but it adds so much unnecessary padding to what was originally a perfectly well-paced game. And the story beats they added mostly don’t improve on the writing of the original.
Feels almost mean to say it, but it reminds me a bit of the Hobbit movie trilogy in that regard.
I finally played through the game on my PS1 a few years ago. It was fantastic. I wanted to re-start and play immediately. Conversely, I have played the first few hours of Remake four times now and give up. I don’t like the combat. I don’t like the story. I don’t like how it has changed into a bog standard quest log type thing. I even tried to play again just a few weeks ago.
Ff7 remake is 100% fan-service AAA slop. Play real jRPGs, play Persona5, Expedition 33, play the original, but not that brain-rotting time-stealing remake, it’s an insult to life itself.
Although I admit it was a very pretty game. Now all they have to do is take their precious game engine and make a real game out of it.
I enjoyed Persona 5, but looking back on it… It’s pretty fucking shallow.
FF has been steadily turning from actual role playing games where the gameplay was once in the driver’s seat and the scenes and story add spice and flavor, to vaguely interactive “cinematic experiences” where the story being endlessly shoved down your throat is the purpose, and the gameplay is just a repetitive distraction from the real novelty which is the crazy stories and cutscenes they come up with.
Ironically FF7 itself was probably the beginning of that trend, thanks to the ability of Playstation CDs to hold so much FMV compared to the limits of ROMs at the time. They dove in headfirst and never looked back, and that came to define the franchise from that point forward. 3 Discs of FMV was pretty over-the-top for their first release on the platform, but the franchise’s addiction to relentless cinematics never waned, it only increased. And the relegation of gameplay being put in the passenger seat, then the back seat, then the trunk, then dragged behind the vehicle to its inevitable death as the art and story become the sole focus became more pronounced with each new entry in the series.
I loved FF7 (and 8, and somewhat less 9, and even 10, and 12 have some redeeming qualities) but the steady and continuous trend away from compelling gameplay towards visual spectacle is abundantly clear.
I haven’t played an FF game since 12, remakes or otherwise, and I don’t plan to. I’ve read the writing on the wall, and I see who they’re making games for, and it’s not me. Maybe it’s other people. Maybe it’s themselves, I don’t know. All I know is it’s not me. I have no interest.