Final Fantasy VII Remake Announced

For the longest time, players have been asking for a remake of Final Fantasy 7, and perhaps never was there a bigger tease than when the opening of FF7 was used as a tech demo for the Playstation 3. Ultimately, that turned out to really be just a tech demo, just like the old Gamecube (then "Dolphin") Zelda preview (what we got instead was the divisively cartoonish Wind Waker, though I'd argue that Twilight Princess made good on that promise.)

But it is a tech demo no more: Square Enix has officially announced a bleeding-edge, modern remake of the original Playstation classic. The teaser trailer is just that - the game is likely years away at this point - but the words "the promise has finally been made" are part of the trailer's voiceover - it's definitely happening.

So, confession time: I haven't ever actually played FF7. I played through X (and got way too powerful leveling up in the Omega Dungeon, so that I actually wound up two-shotting the final boss when I finally got around to that fight) and I played through some of VI (sadly not on my SNES, but on the PS1 port on my PS2.)

Personally, all the "most iconic" versions of major series tend to be the SNES version, because as a kid who was born in the mid-80s, the SNES was the first "current" system I was really aware of (though I didn't get mine until the N64 was out.) So to me, FFVI is "the" major Final Fantasy series. Still, the 32/64-bit era was a big part of my childhood as well, and I was certainly aware of the game.

And all in all, FF VII is probably the most famous entry in Squaresoft's, and later Square Enix's flagship franchise.

I loved their stuff from the SNES era, and I liked FFX a lot, but since then I haven't been terribly impressed with them. I thought FFXII was a total mess in terms of combat, and since then, I've kind of been put off by their abandonment of the battle system they had in the older games. The turn-based system recreated the strategy of a tabletop RPG, and I think that in trying to make the game control more like a modern video game, they wound up making it unwieldy. I never played XIII, but in a real way, I feel like the combat system was what defined Final Fantasy games.

Anyway, the thing is that I'm not personally invested all that much in FFVII, though given its popularity, I'm eager to try it out, and given that the PS1/N64 era's graphics have not aged as gracefully as their previous generation's sprites have, it might be nice to try something out that looks super-shiny. That said, I totally know the big plot twist.

One of the pitfalls, of course, of remaking a game - or any work of art, for that matter - is a question of why. Sometimes the motivation is just to update it, to make it look cleaner and more up to date. Of course, that's how we get things like Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. With games, of course, the visuals have progressed significantly the last, what, eighteen years? (Of course, as time goes on I imagine graphics will improve at a less noticeable rate. Already the difference between what I'll call 256 era (PS3) and 512 era (PS4) graphics is pretty subtle.) Another question is whether the gameplay will change, and if so, how? I'll sort of contradict myself here by raising the question of whether FF's old menus and turn-based combat can survive today. (I don't remember how Lost Odyssey did, but I haven't seen a sequel yet.) Even with new graphics, a pure remake of a game seems somewhat unappealing. So how can they remake the game and still make it feel new, while retaining the soul of the original?

It's an interesting question (if I do say so myself) that I'm ill equipped to answer. Either way, though, Square Enix stands to print a lot of money here from the massive nostalgia market.