With a Remake, What Does the Narrative Owe the Audience?

There are going to be big spoilers for Final Fantasy VII Remake.

It's true, the game is based on one that came out 23 years ago, but not everyone has played that. Indeed, a large number of gamers were not even alive yet when it came out. I, myself, was 11 (or 10 if it came out in the first half of the year) but given that I has only just gotten my first console (an SNES) and would have to save up a lot of weeks' worth of allowance to get an N64, the notion of getting a Playstation to play a game in a series that I had not yet even come to know about wasn't very likely.

FFVII was also oddly hard to come by - even when I went to college and picked up a cheap PS2, allowing me to play ports of old SNES games in bundles that came out for the original Playstation, FFVII copies were rare and going for over a hundred bucks.

So this was actually my first time experiencing the story of FFVII.

Spoilers to follow:


I've picked up a number of details about the game through pop culture osmosis - I know Aerith dies by Sephiroth's hand in a cutscene, and I know that the climax of the game has the party fighting Sephiroth in a one-winged angel form, trying to stop him from destroying the Lifestream with the Meteor spell (possibly Aerith's spirit ends it by casting Holy?)

And I know that Cloud's memories are a lie, taken from predecessor Zack Fair and implanted in him.

So going in, I had a pretty good sense of where the story of FFVII Remake would go, especially given that it only covered the opening chapter of the original game.

Naturally, with a whole 60-dollar release covering that chapter, the game expands, making characters like Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie more complex and interesting, and taking each beat of that chapter and making it into a more significant thing.

FFVIIR makes Midgar feel very lived-in, and gives you a strong sense of the class divide manufactured by the evil Shinra corporation to hold onto power. But I'm given to understand that things pretty much unfold as they do in the original game - except for the Whispers.

Introduced first when Cloud is separated from the rest of Avalanche while escaping after the initial reactor job, these odd, hooded ghosts attack Aerith. It becomes clear that they want things to go in a particular way, and Aerith seems to be aware that they are trying to keep the timeline intact as it is.

This would work as an original story, but it creates an interesting metatextual spin on the story of a Remake. Essentially: the original FFVII is its own timeline, and this remake represents a branching, alternate timeline in which there are forces (Sephiroth, it seems) that wish it to change.

These Whispers, which we later discover are either manifestations or agents of the Arbiter of Fate, a sort of godlike time-police entity that serves as the game's penultimate boss (seriously, there are a few bosses you think are the final boss before you actually beat the game). But in beating them, the party is, presumably, free to change the course of fate.

Now, clearly, Sephiroth would want to change fate given that, canonically, the good guys defeat him in the end of the original game. But new, seemingly positive developments begin to come into focus. For example, Biggs and Jessie are pretty firmly established as dying after the Sector 7 plate falls on the slums beneath it. Wedge, in fact, is also shoved out the window of a high floor of the Shinra building by the Whispers, presumably because he was supposed to die. But we see in the end-montage that Biggs is actually alive and recovering, and it's even possible that Jessie - whom we very clearly saw die - might have been spared.

More dramatically, though, Zack Fair, whose presence in the original game was a bit like Rhaegar Targaryen, being very important even if he's dead long before the story begins, is shown surviving the ambush that killed him in the original timeline.

What could this imply? Is Zack out there? And if so, how does Cloud carry his sword if he still has it? Also, what of the future? Could Aerith be saved?

As a sidenote: I absolutely love the characterization of Aerith in this game. While at first she seems like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl - kooky and too good for this sinful earth - it becomes clear over the course of the game that her positivity is a conscious choice she has made, perhaps in response to her apparent prescience and awareness of her doomed fate. Essentially, she's not dumb, and the cute persona she exhibits is a facade over a deep sadness. Subtlety like that isn't common in video games, even as the medium has matured. When the party escapes Midgar, she comments how uncomfortable she is without the steel sky (the sector plates) overhead, clearly also a metaphor for how shattering their prescribed fates throws them into a universe of unknowns - even if, without prescience, they were presumably unaware (except maybe Aerith) of what would happen.

But the players were aware. We had the prescience of experience, or rather, the prescience of adaptation.

A review I read made a very good point - this isn't so much a remake as it is an adaptation. While one could argue that adapting in the same medium is... well, a remake, the truth is that the medium has transformed so profoundly in 23 years that it feels like a totally different medium. That's an arguable point of course, but I think the key here is that, while a lot of people were expecting the equivalent of Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake (which was shot-for-shot done to be as much like the original movie as possible,) instead, Square Enix has chosen to grapple with the legacy of the original game and try to produce something new.

It's a stark contrast with the Shadow of the Colossus remake that came out... last year? (This year already feels like a decade, so it's hard to remember how long ago that was,) which truly was as direct a remake as possible. Unless one was, for some strange reason, deeply nostalgic for PS2-era graphics, there's really no reason to play the original SotC. But this Remake is, I think, almost a sequel.

The game does, still, Arbiter of Fate aside, hit the same story beats as the original's opening chapter, but the upcoming parts of the Remake series remain to be seen. We don't know how closely they will cleave to the original.

Perhaps it's because I'm less invested, having not played the original game, or perhaps it's because I like when creators don't simply crank out nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia (I liked Last Jedi for a lot of the reasons some people hated it - and that's because Star Wars was such a foundational part of my childhood), but I'm eager to see where this gutsy experiment goes.

Also, the game's fun as hell to play, which doesn't hurt. I've beaten it and am now churning through it to get all the stuff I missed. (Protip: the second boss in the Train Graveyard, the chariot dude, has a weapon for Aerith, but you need to use Steal on it, and it might take a few uses of the ability.)