Final Fantasy VII Remake: My First Five Hours
By: Brandon R. Chinn
Tags: Final Fantasy, Gaming, Video Game News, Review, Articles

The city is cold and heartless; the world with it. There is little hope left anymore, the disparities between the classes of working poor and supported bourgeoisie divided by both means and physicality. If you’re poor, you live in the slums, below the plate. If you have means then you work for the Shinra Electric Power Company, the organization that does everything from provide power to your homes to fund local law enforcement. Things seem dire, and hopeless — the world is dying and you are watching it die day by day. You have family and friends who are not only suffering to make ends meet, but suffering from the looming despair of hopelessness.

If the planet dies then there will be nothing left for anyone.

You are pushed to the brink. There is only one option left, the place that only the desperate and radicalized turn to: terrorism. It’s not terrorism to you, or your fellows, no. You’re freedom fighters. You’re saving the planet from tyrannical evil. Except, what does a casualty care about the motivations behind the fire that destroys their home?

After many, many long years, Final Fantasy VII Remake is available and playable. It’s good. While the game eschews much of the original title’s clunkier systems, it retains the feel of Final Fantasy VII down to its core, from the music to the design to the characters. The new English localization is incredible; characters feel natural, dialogue is snappy and fun, and I’ve found myself stopping more than a few times to listen as NPCs randomly fill in moments of environmental storytelling.

Your nostalgia is absolutely intact.

Before the release of Final Fantasy VII Remake, I was less concerned about the graphics or the music or the gameplay and instead wondering after something that has been bothering me about Final Fantasy VII since its release in 1997. While the original game inspired generations with its quirky characters and emotional story line, its original limitations and wonky translation left much to be desired in how it actually got its point of environmental destruction across to the player.

The story of Final Fantasy VII blurs the lines between eco-fascism, eco-terrorism, resistance and personal salvation, often to the point of muddying up individual points that should hit like a ton of bricks. None of the subject matter in Final Fantasy VII is casual; the game delves into PTSD, emotional abuse, planetary destruction, class warfare, monopoly and tyranny. The characters of Final Fantasy VII — the terrorist group Avalanche — carries on increasingly violent acts throughout the city of Midgar in order to stop Shinra from draining the planet of its precious Lifestream, the resource needed by all life.

Final Fantasy VII Remake opens similarly to the original, showing a helicopter’s view of Midgar before descending down into the labyrinthine streets of the upper plate where Cloud, Barret and the other members of Avalanche prepare for their attack on a Mako Reactor. Cloud is not a member of Avalanche but a simple mercenary, an ex-SOLDIER First Class who carries a massive sword on his back and a chip on his soldier. He’s surly and pouty, but effective; Cloud can dispatch Shinra military police effortlessly. Barret gives Cloud shit, uncomfortable with hiring a mercenary. Cloud understands the need and so retorts without care for the job or the people around him.

Cloud Strife, beautiful SOLDIER.

The invading terrorist group moves into the Mako Reactor, dispatches the enemies inside, and sets off a bomb, thinking only good will come from attacking Shinra and one of their evil, life-sucking factories.

The fallout is worse than they can imagine.

Something goes wrong. The explosion from the Reactor is worse than they estimated. Jessie, their bombs expert, is frozen with fear and guilt. Biggs and Wedge doubt their motivations until Barret reassures them that what they do they do for the planet. Cloud, to his own credit, can’t be bothered. He’s curious about the layout of the factory but the city itself seems to matter very little to him. Cloud is bogged down by his own personal demons — there are ghosts from his past that haunt him, and his military PTSD is worse than he cares to admit.

This is where the Final Fantasy VII Remake truly shines. The gameplay is fun and intuitive, the graphics and lighting are beyond gorgeous, the soundtrack is incredible. What Square Enix has brought to the Remake this time around is more that graphical updates and a gameplay shakeup. They’ve given the game much needed context that it was missing over the years, pieces of incredible environmental storytelling that felt too small on the original Playstation.

After the explosion of the Mako Reactor, Cloud returns to the streets of Midgar alone. The fallout of the reactor is catastrophic. No amount of Barret’s planet-saving rhetoric can immediately right the carnage in the streets. Buildings have collapsed, fires rage everywhere, bodies are trapped under rubble as families search for loved ones. It isn’t only the employees of Shinra that are affected, but everyone. There is no solidarity here, as Barret reasons that anyone living above the plate also has it coming.

While Cloud navigates the city streets and fights through waves of Shinra military police, he is haunted by his own demons. Cloud is not right in the head, and he doesn’t know why. He’s seeing visions of the past, visions haunted by his old mentor, Sephiroth. Cloud eventually meets up with Aerith, an unassuming but kind woman who is selling flowers on the corner of the street. Flowers have become an exceedingly rare vegetation, and still they sell for a pittance. The lives being led in Midgar cannot be bothered with things like buying flowers, even if it reminds them of a world outside that they’ve barely known. Midgar is automated, rigid, and cold. Aerith’s flowers belong to a different world.

The cast of Final Fantasy VII feel like family.

As Cloud and Aerith part ways and Cloud once again finds his way back to Barret and the others, they board a train that will take them back to the slums where Cloud’s old friend Tifa awaits with Barret’s daughter, Marlene. These slums are the only home that Barret and the others have ever known. These slums, despite their ruin and troubles, are a place that the people who live there would gladly die for. Still, these people are not SOLDIERs and they are not members of Avalanche — they are normal, everyday people who simply want to get by.

More than once during my first five hours with this game I was taken aback by how much the experience wants you to feel its small and large catastrophes. Final Fantasy VII has always been a game about the dangers of mega corporations and planetary abuse; The Shinra Electric Power Company can represent anything from Amazon to oil fracking companies. It is the characters and the movement that shine through the dialogue now, the interpersonal moments between Cloud, Tifa and Barret that showcase the struggles of working people as they sacrifice their time and energy for what they believe in. Tifa challenges Cloud’s militaristic inclinations, Cloud challenges Barret’s brusqueness, and Barret challenges Tifa’s disconnected optimism. Together, with the everyday poor in the slums and the members of Avalanche, these characters create a tapestry that adds to the realness of the world.

I’ve immensely enjoyed my first few hours with the Final Fantasy VII Remake. Despite spending much of your time in an industrial wasteland, the environments are bright and detailed and the combat is entertaining. Even the sidequests are endearing for the most part — it’s very fun to collect remixes of other FF tunes and find new weapons. In some ways, the design aesthetic of FF VII R feels like a distant cousin to what Final Fantasy XIII wanted to be, with its simplified customization options and linear — but beautiful — pathways. There is something familiar and new in every corner of this game.

So far, Final Fantasy VII Remake seems to be a wonderful mixture of the old and new, and is a bright moment amid more lackluster Square Enix entries as of late. I can’t wait to continue my file and see what new changes they have in store for this beautiful, complex game.