Developer: Square Enix Business Division 1
Publisher: Square Enix
Platform: PlayStation 4
Release Date: April 10, 2020
Rating: T
Price: $59.99
Final Fantasy VII is arguably one of the most important JRPGs in video game history. Coming to the Sony PlayStation at the end of January 1997, it helped bring role-playing games into homes across the country. In the twenty-three years since its release, there’s been a cry from longtime fans of the title to remake the game with modern graphics. Several years ago at E3, Square Enix finally obliged fans’ cries by announcing Final Fantasy VII Remake for the PlayStation 4. Unlike the ’97 classic, this time the journey into Midgar would be presented episodically.
Since then, fans have speculated just how many parts the remake would be and what content it would contain. While we still don’t know how many games Square Enix is planning to spread this out over, the first installment has finally been released.
Released on Friday, April 10th, 2020, I’ve had a lot of fun playing the game over the last few days and am really excited to share my thoughts. I do want to give a spoiler warning before proceeding, however. While I don’t intend to explicitly spoil major plot points for the game, I will be talking about where the games ends relative to the original, so if you missed all the times Square Enix said it, I don’t want to be the one that ruined it for you. If that sounds like you, please, PLEASE, proceed with caution.
Gameplay
Modernizing a twenty-three-year-old RPG is no easy task but I’d say Square Enix did a fantastic job. Areas that required the most updating included story and combat, two elements that are at the heart of every Final Fantasy game.
If I had to guess, I would say the story side of things is where Square Enix had their work most cut out for them. Taking place entirely in Midgar, the game takes a section of the original that lasted between five and eight hours and stretches it out to a hefty thirty to forty hours. While that length does include some filler, there wasn’t any time where the quests or side quests bored me. If anything, I appreciated some quality of life improvements added to the side quest system, the biggest being the ability to automatically return to the quest giver upon completing a task. There were times in the game where I would try and knock out a couple of quests in a row, but if I was only dealing with one at a particular moment, this was a huge time saver for me.
Likewise, there are slight changes made to the story from the original that I think will be divisive to some fans of the original. In my past experiences, I’d never actually completed Final Fantasy VII (a cardinal sin, I know) but I had played through the entire Midgar section in the game twice before, so I did have some point of reference as to where the majority of the new content was dropped in. Not knowing every twist and turn of where the story went before (though I do know some of the bigger plot points), I’m very excited to see where and how Square Enix continues this massive narrative they’ve set up.
The combat system in Remake is one of the elements that I was most nervous about going into the game. Square Enix made the decision to give the game mostly real-time combat while also integrating a modernized form of the Active Time Battle system of the original. This leads to a unique combat system where using your base attacks should be reserved primarily for filling your ATB gauge and the bulk of your attacks should come from spells and abilities. Overall, I found the combat challenging at first but rewarding when I mastered it.
One area where I felt the game struggled to find itself was with its difficulty. I initially didn’t want to bring this up, but as I’m writing this review after Kotaku published their controversial article, I fell I have to chime in. The game features three difficulties upon launching the game: classic, easy, and normal. Classic and easy are essentially the same, with one featuring the computer doing basic attacks and the other where you’re completely in control. Both of these modes are explicitly aimed at those more concerned with the story than the gameplay. With a target audience like that, I wasn’t surprised when I tried out easy mode in late-game areas and was able to effortlessly plow through enemy after enemy.
Where the game struggles with its difficulty is in normal mode. For most of the game, it’s not that bad and honestly about what I expected. Around the same point where the writer of the Kotaku article started to struggle, so did I. While I won’t get into the specifics of the battle for anyone who hasn’t read the article, let me just say that it’s BAD. There’s little in the game that prepares you for the difficulty of the battle, even if you’ve taken down the same enemy numerous times before with ease.
From that point to the end, I found myself bouncing back and forth between easy and normal, sometimes because of the challenge and sometimes just to find a point of reference. My complaint here, to be clear, isn’t that the normal mode is too hard, but rather that it ramps up the difficulty almost without warning. I’d be more forgiving of this had the increase been a bit more gradual, capping out with the final boss of the game.
Still, I’ve spent nearly forty hours in the game’s campaign and I’ve had a lot of fun along the journey. At some point in the future I look forward to jumping into the hard mode that the game offers in return for completing the game, but I think I’m going to revisit combat challenges via the chapter select to better hone my skills before I take that challenge on.
Graphics
Final Fantasy VII Remake is a beautiful game. I just want to be clear about that. This game contains A LOT of cut scenes and each one is visually stunning. Likewise, the models used for all of the game’s protagonists are some of the best I’ve seen. Watching Cloud run around Midgar, Buster Sword hanging from his back, is some of the most beautiful imagery I’ve seen in quite a while.
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the rest of the models in-game. While any major heroes or villains are presented by excellent looking models, the games NPCs are a much different story. I know that there’s a certain amount of work that goes into localizing a game from Japan over to English speaking countries, but the bland and repetitive characters are made that much worse by mouth movement that can be janky in many circumstances. Some NPCs really did stand out as having a unique look, but I cam to realize that this was only because they were unique characters to begin with.
The other area of the game I struggled to make heads or tails of were the environments themselves. On one hand, walking through iconic locations like the slums of Midgar and the Wall Market led to a certain excitement I never dreamt I would experience. On the other hand, the environments have a wide range of texture quality issues that span from generally low-quality textures to serious texture pop-in issues that I think I’ve only experienced worse in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
The further I got into the game, the more prominent I felt the texture issues became. I also felt there was a big gap between textures indoors versus outdoors. While walking the slums of Midgar, it wasn’t uncommon to see signs hanging off of buildings that looked just a little too low quality for a PlayStation 4 title, before popping into a texture that….still didn’t look like it belonged on a PlayStation 4. In indoor sections later in the game, I felt the textures looked better overall, but as soon as you were outside and something was textured in the distance, it looked bad. There were honestly a few times I likened the texture of the world below me to a texture straight out of the classic version of the game.
Normally, I’d be inclined to forgive this considering we’re at the end of the current generation and our games are really starting to push the limits of base hardware in a lot of cases, but it’s statements from Square Enix itself that makes this texture issue so hard to ignore.
Taking up almost 90 gigs of storage on my PlayStation 4, this is a large game. To justify the size, Square Enix revealed that they created custom assets for each area of the game instead of reusing content throughout. To their credit, I do believe they did this, but it still doesn’t excuse the texture issues. If anything, it makes me wonder even harder about how the low-quality textures wound up in the game at all.
Texture issues aside, I do still stand by my statement that this is a beautiful game as a whole, even if certain aspects aren’t on the same level as others. At no time was I bored by the game’s visual elements, even if I was, at times, baffled by them.
Audio
While you’re exploring Midgar, you’re going to be hearing a lot of music play around you, both from pieces that automatically triggered by events such as entering combat as well as through jukeboxes and other audio devices scattered throughout the game world. The game’s soundtrack was composed by three individuals: Masashi Hamauzu, Mitsuto Suzuki, and Nobuo Uematsu, with the latter being the composer of the original game’s soundtrack.
All of the music in the game sounds beautiful, with some being original, while others are revamped versions of songs from what came before. For the most part, all of the music works well in the context it’s presented and certain classic themes will immediately stand out. Square Enix knows the music is good too, as evidenced by the mini soundtrack included with the deluxe versions of the game. A full soundtrack release is scheduled for later in the year.
One other area of audio that really stood out to me was in the game’s voice cast. This isn’t the first time any of these characters have had voices but the actors chosen for the lead roles really helped take this game to another level. Of the cast, two particular standouts to me were Briana White as Aerith Gainsborough and John Eric Bentley as Barrett Wallace. That isn’t to say that any of the named roles had poor voice actors by any stretch, but these were the two that most stood out to me.
Stepping into the realm of smaller NPCs, I was very excited to see names such as Brock Baker and Anna Brisbane, two voice actors I’ve been a fan for years through their various social media channels.
Moving away from NPCs and main protagonists, it was also nice to see that established voice actors such as John DiMaggio (Gears of War, Futurama), Yuri Lowenthal (Marvel’s Spider-Man), and Jame Sie (Jackie Chan Adventures) all came along for the ride.
In Conclusion
Final Fantasy VII Remake is a well-done video game that takes a small portion of the original and greatly expands upon it. While graphical issues stop the game from being perfect, it’s still a fun adventure that has me excited to see how and when the story continues.
Overall, I’d give Final Fantasy VII Remake an 8 out of 10.
Pros
- Great Soundtrack and Voice Acting
- Beautiful Visuals
- Rewarding Combat System
Cons
- Texture Issues
- Intense Difficulty Increase on Normal (Late Game)
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