I must be unusual of my generation of video game nerds in that I never played Final Fantasy VII. When it came out I was just getting into console gaming, and I only had Nintendo systems, on top of being in a Mac family. So all the avenues to play this now-beloved game were closed, and I never got around to it.
But it was hard to escape the existence of the game and its plot being the kind of nerd who would eventually have a gaming blog, and so I've had this vague sense of the game for a long time (a friend had it on PC, and I remember seeing the Midgar freeway escape sequence).
2020's Final Fantasy Remake, which had been announced like a decade prior, brought these beloved characters into a hi-res, modern game, which I thought did an amazing job combining SquareEnix's drive toward more action-oriented gameplay while retaining the strategic menu-based gameplay of classic Final Fantasy (something that Final Fantasy XVI I think failed to do, leaning so far into the action side of things that I grew bored with it as it was basically just about using any and all of your abilities as soon as they came off cooldown).
But Remake only remade the first section of the game - the adventures taking place within the city of Midgar. What had, I'm given to understand, been only the first three or so hours of the original game was blown up into a full game in its own right.
Beyond this expansion, though, Remake also introduced some new plot elements - a notion that this was not going to be the same story, precisely, but a kind of alternate timeline.
Er, spoilers ahead.
There are elements of the plot of the original game I never could have escaped given its age and popularity, and the biggest of them was the death of Aerith. But with this changing of the path of time, the biggest question on everyone's minds is whether Aerith might be saved in this new version of the story (and furthermore, if her survival would paradoxically prevent the victory achieved in the original game).
The first game didn't reach that point in the plot (though Rebirth seems like it is likely to - give me time, as I've just started the thing). But we have seen some major differences:
Here I'll betray a certain ignorance, but I'm given to understand that one of the big reveals in FFVII is that Cloud's memories are not entirely his own - that he was never a SOLDIER, but was instead implanted with the memories of Zack Fair. Zack died in a hopeless battle, but after we finish Remake, we see the aftermath of that battle in which Zack does survive, bringing Cloud back to Midgar.
Zack, I'm given to understand, is Aerith's boyfriend, and served as a connection between her and Cloud.
Rebirth opens in a scene that is extremely confusing.
We see the chaos wrought by the weird fate tornado and the Whispers at the end of Remake, all while Zack is returning to Midgar... with Cloud leaning on him. When he sees a news report that shows a wounded Aerith, he charges in, fighting Shinra forces to get to them. Among the injured are also Tifa and Barret, and Red XIII, though Red has enough strength to take down the pilots of their helicopter.
Zack finds Aerith, but she seemingly dies in his arms, dropping her white materia.
But... when and where and how is this happening? Because the team got out of Midgar, and the next thing we know, the whole group is at an inn in Kalm, and Cloud is talking about his first encounter with Sephiroth.
The notion that there are multiple timelines seems heavily implied, but how the game's story will navigate that is anyone's guess.
Still, we get what I assume was more or less the original story in Nibelheim. Cloud, Sephiroth, and two unnamed Shinra grunts (more on that later) travel to Nibelheim to check in on an old Mako reactor. The journey there is dangerous - one of the grunts is swept away by a river and presumably drowns. But the biggest problem is that Sephiroth, who mentions offhand that his mother's name is Jenova, finds that the core of the reactor has that name printed in giant letters on a sealed chamber. Sephiroth spends several days in the spookiest freaking manor house I've seen (really hitting a lot of gothic horror tropes) reading research about Jenova, and discovering that he was the creation of an experiment with the Ancient being.
And this makes Sephiroth go nuts. He slams Cloud into a wall and burns Nibelheim to the ground, killing most of its inhabitants, including Cloud's mom and Tifa's dad. Tifa goes to confront Sephiroth, but is slashed across the abdomen with his insanely long sword (Cloud even says that he killed her, though I don't know if it's just that he thought so at the time - clearly Tifa's one of the people he's telling the story to, so it's not like this would be another timeline... probably) and then Cloud faces him and... blanks out, not remembering the rest.
Now, while all this is happening, there are some weird inconsistencies, and the reason is pretty apparent if you know the big twist. When Cloud visits his mother, she mentions he's in uniform, which... could be the case if his armor is a uniform, but we don't see anyone else wearing clothes like that.
Another hint is more on a meta-level: there's an awful lot of focus placed on one of the grunts - the one who survives falling into the river. He's never named, but when the village is burning, he's crawling toward the Strife household, and even calls out for his mother. When Cloud falls down and is crawling toward it as well, we have a brief flash of his arms wearing the standard Shinra grunt armor.
So... basically I think what we actually play as in this intro is Zack, with Cloud misremembering it as being his own actions, only with periodic flashes of the real events.
In the cutscene that follows this intro, Tifa and Aerith are in their inn room and Tifa notes that, despite all the details that Cloud got right, that he wasn't actually there five years prior (also apparently he was sixteen? I sometimes have to remind myself how insanely young JRPG protagonists tend to be).
Anyway, the real meat of the game hasn't really started yet, as far as I can tell - I'm given to understand it becomes a fairly open world with a metric tonne of sidequests.
But while I'm definitely a bit rusty on the combat system (which has also gotten a few additions to it that I'll have to explore) that's the joy of playing video games - that feeling of mastery you attain. (I have to say it felt pretty great to go from being curbstomped by the first Lynel I met in Tears of the Kingdom to being able to essentially farm them later in the game).
I did kind of dig the Gothic Horror vibes of Sephiroth locking himself in a library in the basement of a ruined manor house, driving himself mad with the truth of his origins (which is obviously more of a Cosmic Horror idea, but the two play very nicely with one another - Lovecraft desperately wanted to be Edgar Allan Poe). FFVII is kind of a great example of genre bending and genre blending. I adore its modern-technology (well, near-future I guess) world that is still resolutely fantasy.
Anyway, I'm happy to have another game to dig into after getting, frankly, more out of Tears of the Kingdom than I expected to.
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