I've been replaying Final Fantasy VII Remake on Hard Mode, a few months after I played the game the first go around. I had not actually played the original (at least, except for a small bit of it on a... phone port, which is not how I recommend anyone play a Final Fantasy game - the reasons I needed a distraction at that time are too serious to get into right now) though the singular place it holds within video game culture made me mostly aware of the gist of it. While I could name you I think one FFVIII character (Squall, right?) and nobody from IX (though I did play X at least, so I know those characters) the core of Cloud, Tifa, Aerith, and Barret are basically gaming icons, even if a lot of us in the States knew her as Aeris (something the remake standardizes, much how VII also standardized how many freaking Final Fantasy games there were, after VI was released in the US as III.)
But I knew how the game started in Midgar, how the heroes were sort of ecoterrorists, and how there was an evil Shinra corporation that was the kind of decoy big bad as Squaresoft RPGs often have.
It's an odd thing how art that really impacts us in our youth sort of shifts in our memory, sometimes becoming more sophisticated in our memory as we do. I remember being shocked when, a couple years ago, my sister and I sat down to watch Apollo 13, and something about the lighting quality, or perhaps the prints they used to digitalize the movie (which, to be fair, can make a huge difference - it's what makes the Criterion Collection so awesome,) or maybe just how freaking young Tom Hanks and the rest of the cast looked (Hanks was 39 at the time that movie was made, which is only 5 years older than I am now) that it was a bit of a shock to the system to see this movie that, in my mind, was still "new" on the virtue of having been made within my own living memory. I still think of the Star Wars prequels as the weird new movies that sullied the legacy of Star Wars, but the span of time between Return of the Jedi and Phantom Menace was only 16 years - and it's been 21 years since Phantom Menace came out.
Basically, memory is weird, and it's profoundly subjective. A lot of things we think about works of media we love (or have any really strong emotions about) is way more personal and skewed than we might think.
I find that this is very true of video games. In fact, I had an interesting experience playing Secret of Mana on the Switch last winter (my lord what a long year this has been). Secret of Mana, was, to me, a huge part of my video game heritage. When I was in Middle School, I used to go to my friend's house and play Secret of Mana in co-op mode - the game was actually pretty brilliantly designed to let additional players (up to a total of 3, which required a special splitter as the SNES only had two controller ports) jump in or drop out with the press of a button.
We spent so much time playing that game, navigating the world and fighting across all the palaces, sealing the mana seeds, fighting bosses, etc. The game felt amazingly huge an epic.
And so when I played it again as an adult, I was shocked at how, well, quick and thin it was. In fact, I discovered that the game had been rushed to a finish, which is why the last three or so Mana Palaces are these pretty quick side-quest like jaunts rather than the slow build and involved quests that the first few are. The mechanics, as well, actually leave something to be desired, with the timing of attacks pretty awkward and most boss battles just having you pause the moment you cast a spell to cast another spell, draining a boss's HP before it can do anything.
I had also played the remake of Shadow of the Colossus, which was the first game to convince me to buy a non-Nintendo console. The remake of Shadow of the Colossus is perfectly fine - excellent, even - but it remakes the game in the most literal sense. As far as I can tell, the game is mechanically identical to the original. The only difference is that it has modern graphics (and probably higher-quality sound or something else that I'd be unlikely to notice.) Certainly, if you return to a lot of PS2-era games, it can be shocking how lousy they look (GTA San Andreas, for example, looks like ass, despite being a great source of nihilistic fun during my college years.) But the weird thing is, much as I had imagined Apollo 13 looking slicker and better in my memory, Shadow of the Colossus in its remake form simply matched the updates my mind had made to the memories.
It was still good, again, but one of the huge things that made Shadow of the Colossus such a legendary game was that it was so audaciously original - a game that was, purely, 16 fantastic boss fights with practically no filler in between - just a desolate but beautiful and mysterious landscape in which to search for them. And the fights themselves were sort of puzzles to solve more than twitch-reflex situations, meaning that fighting them again was pretty quick and easy.
So, we come to FFVIIR, as I've chosen to abbreviate it.
I think that for those of us video game fans who feel great nostalgia for games of our youth, there's a sort of pipe-dream. What if someone could remake our beloved game, but instead of just upgrading graphics, they did a total overhaul? Don't just make it look like how I've made it look in my mind - make it feel the way I remember it feeling.
The FFVII Remake was in the works for a long, long time. But when we actually got our hands on it, holy crap, they actually did it.
Or, I should say, I think they did. Again, I've only played part of the game before. I vaguely remember that same friend I played Secret of Mana with showing me the motorcycle sequence in which you escape Midgar, and I remember playing through a point where you were traveling with Aerith through the collapsed tunnels fighting weird House monsters.
Ironically, this might have left me particularly well-attuned for this year's release - the game only covers the Midgar portions of the story, but expands them to cover an entire game. While Red XIII does show up toward the end, joining the party, because he comes so late, he's relegated to a follower NPC who fights with you, but is not controllable.
The ultimate rollout of the rest of FFVIIR's chapters remains to be seen - complicated, of course, by the release of the PS5 (I might be less timid to get that some time next year, especially if Part 2 of the Remake comes out on it) but I'll certainly be eager to experience the rest of the game's story.
I think the most controversial thing about Remake, given that I believe most people really like the gameplay and the additional characterization (Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie, who I think are pretty much personality-less in the original, are real characters in this one,) is that there's a suggestion that things could change, this go around.
It suggests that this is not precisely just a re-telling of the story of the original, even if it mostly is. In particular, a cutscene that plays out after you beat the game potentially shifts the entire course of the backstory in a way that I only understand because for the past 23 years people have been explaining this stuff to me.
I'd say it's almost less of a spoiler than Rosebud being a sled at this point, but in the original, Aerith is killed (though I don't know how far into the game this happens.) Her death was one of the great shocks that reverberated through the gaming community, and is one of the most iconic moments in gaming. But there seems to be a suggestion that, in Remake, she might be spared. In fact, it was one of those persistent video game rumors in the days before datamining and reddit, similar to how people thought you could find the full Triforce in Ocarina of Time, that there was some secret way to bring her back.
But FFVIIR suggests that things can be different. Whether that's actually good or bad is an open question (Sephiroth's seeming awareness of the difference in the cycle suggests perhaps he's trying to arrange things so that he wins this time. Likewise, Aerith seems to have a similar awareness of her fate, which gives her kindness and positivity a tragic undertone.)
And hey, throw in what I'm given to understand was some very dated homophobic and transphobic stuff in the Honey Bee Inn turning into a super celebratory and fabulous set piece (I freaking love Cloud's "nailed it, I know, thank you, moving on" when Tifa comments on his make-up and dress after he gets into Don Cornetto's compound.)
Basically, I didn't know that this sort of remake was possible outside of a fan's imagination before it came out.
Now, I don't think that this means everything should be a remake or something - in fact, I kind of respect that the Final Fantasy series has always (with some exceptions for X and XIII) started with a blank slate for new entries in the series. While I love a good ongoing franchise (twelve years on and I'm not sick of the MCU yet) I appreciate the FF team's commitment to creating new characters and worlds.
But I also think that this sort of game has a place too, and I wonder what other great games of the past could use a modern update.
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