Final Fantasy VII's Remake

I think I've talked a bit about how the SNES era of Squaresoft RPGs is one of my favorite periods in gaming history. I started - appropriately enough - with Super Mario RPG, which was a relatively simplified version of the Final Fantasy model that added in some Mario elements. Secret of Mana was the other big one - my best friend and I would play cooperatively and hack our way through its monsters, and played it a ton when we were in Middle School (while the N64 had already come out by then, we went back and forth between SNES and N64 games,) ultimately getting stumped on the final boss because we couldn't figure out that you needed to cast both of the weapon buffs on the Mana Sword to turn it into its final form and be able to defeat the Mana Beast. (Much later, when we were both in college, I must have read about that online and we finally finished the game.)

I actually didn't come to Chrono Trigger until college, playing it on the PS1 port on my PS2, which was great even if there was a big pause whenever combat started. Oddly, of these games, Final Fantasy VI was the one I played the least.

But since I was a Nintendo loyalist, I didn't really have a chance to play FFVII when it was new. Nowadays, the game has a lot of the hallmarks of early 3D graphics, namely that they look kind of... bad. Actually, the grimy pre-rendered backgrounds of the game feel absolutely of a piece with the mid-to-late 90s video game aesthetics that I remember from... well, a ton of games.

Still, while FFVI had pushed for a less traditional medieval feel to its world, FFVII really came to define the series' total eschewing of traditional fantasy imagery. Here was a modern or even futuristic city with trains and motorcycles.

The remake, at least by today's graphical standards (and the improvement of graphics has been slowing down as things get closer and closer to photorealism) looks incredible. And while I know a lot of the big plot twists (both the one you're probably thinking of and the other one that's more crazy) I haven't really experienced the game for myself yet.

However, it looks like Square is remaking it not as a duplication of its original gameplay, but instead going with the newer combat system of more recent Final Fantasy games (I'm counting XII as "more recent," even though it's over a decade old.) Now, XII, which abandoned turn-based combat (arguably a little similar to Secret of Mana, to be fair) basically turned me off of the franchise entirely (the annoying teenagers thrown into the story didn't do a lot of favors either, especially given that most of the adult party members were actually pretty interesting,) and I worry that what I might get from this remake is something that looks really good but is a drag to actually play.

So it's a decision to consider.

In terms of other remakes, I've been really on the fence about another, somewhat more recent classic. Shadow of the Colossus was basically why I got a PS2 in the first place, and is, I think, one of the greatest games of all time - which is high praise from me as someone who generally likes big games that take a very long time to complete. But given that I have already played that game, I've been less sure I want to pick it up. I'm not going around converting all my DVDs to Blurays either.

But with FFVII, because I didn't play the original, I wonder if it would be preferable to experience it for the first time in this new, slick and modern form.