Final Fantasy VII Remake is a nice update to one of the best RPGs ever made.
That’s right, AJ’s reviewing another game over five years after its release. At this point I’m about ready to brand all my video game reviews as “Slowpoke Gaming”.
As a kid of the 90’s and a teenager of the early 2000’s, I spent a lot of time playing all kinds of video games. My tastes spanned across multiple genres, from platformers to shooters to sports. But one genre in particular that I loved was RPGs. I mostly enjoyed action-oriented RPGs like the Legend of Zelda series, but I also played more traditional ones, notably the Final Fantasy series.
My early years were spent playing Final Fantasy Mystic Quest and Final Fantasy IV (released in the US as Final Fantasy II) on my SNES. Mystic Quest was okay (Kaeli’s pixelated red hair really did it for a 7 year old AJ), but Final Fantasy IV was the better one. I didn’t like getting ambushed by random enemies every five steps, but I really enjoyed the intense story, the compelling characters, the sweet music, and the map, which at the time was huge. There was just so much to do and explore, you had not just the overworld, but the underworld and the moon. A lot of RPGs today follow an on-rails style of gameplay, with minimal exploration and cut scenes every few minutes. This wasn’t really a thing in the 16 bit era, free exploration was often encouraged and rewarded in most RPGs. Modern games have become almost like interactive movies in a way, and I’m not a huge fan of the concept. Storytelling through gameplay is slowly becoming a lost art.
Eventually the world upgraded to the 3D era, and so did the Final Fantasy franchise. And boy (or girl, we don’t discriminate here at AJnet), did they come out swinging.
Final Fantasy VII was the first 3D game in the franchise, released on the new and revolutionary Sony PlayStation. I didn’t have a PlayStation, but my friend did. It was at that friend’s house that I was introduced to what would become my favorite title in the entire series, and one of my favorite games of all time.
There was just so much to love about the original Final Fantasy VII. They improved upon everything that I liked from FFIV, with an even more intense story, more fleshed-out characters, a banger soundtrack, and a massive map with lots of little nooks and crannies to explore. The game was so large and intricate that they needed to break it up into three separate discs. Also, they gave us Tifa:
I was also a big fan of the Materia system the game used for magic. Even to this day, I think it’s one of the better magic combat systems that I’ve come across, and I don’t know how they went from that to the shitty “Junction” system in Final Fantasy VIII.
No, I won’t apologize. The Junction system sucks ass.
FFVII’s popularity led to Square expanding on the universe, with games like Before Crisis, Crisis Core, and Dirge of Cerberus, and even a movie, Advent Children. The characters also made appearances in the Kingdom Hearts series. While I enjoyed the expanded lore, I felt like they were starting to make the characters too brooding and edgy, especially Cloud. But I guess Cloud was always kind of brooding when you stop to think about it, having the voices and detailed animation just made it more noticeable.
So when Square announced that they were doing a remake of the game, I didn’t know what to think. On one hand, I loved the original. But on the other hand, I saw that the characters were going a direction that I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy. I also wondered what was going to be changed or omitted, since there was no way they’d simply settle for just redoing the original game with updated graphics and voice acting.
When they announced that the game was going to be split into multiple games, my heart sank further. The original game was long, but it wasn’t that long. What, were we going to get a bunch of five hour games at $60 a pop? This felt like an obvious cash grab. I vowed never to buy it, and instead moved on to other games.
Flash forward to 2025. I caught Final Fantasy VII Remake during a Square Enix sale on Steam for about $20. Coupled with the store credit that I accumulated selling those stupid trading cards that Steam gives you (seriously, you should sell them, you’re probably sitting on a small fortune), I ended up paying about $15 for it.
The game isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, it’s actually quite fun.
Final Fantasy VII Remake covers the events from the beginning of the OG game up to the part where you leave Midgar. In the original, this wasn’t really a lot of gameplay, and, unless you really cared about grinding, you could do this in about two to three hours, if not less. When I heard that Remake intended to only cover this small portion of the game, I was more confused than worried. How the hell could they justify selling a $60 RPG with only a few hours of story?
As it turns out, they added to the story. Like, a lot.
For the most part, the general storyline is the same as the original game. You join up with Barrett, Tifa, and the rest of Avalanche, bomb the reactors, fall through the church and help Aeris (note that I intentionally didn’t say “Aerith”) escape from the Turks, bust into Don Corneo’s mansion, try to stop Shinra from dropping the plate on Sector 7, and storm Shinra HQ. But, because this obviously isn’t enough to fill out an entire game, everything from missions to character interactions are expanded on.
Remake took the shorter parts of the OG game, and expanded on them. For example, during the opening mission where you bomb the first Mako reactor, rather than a relatively quick run through a few rooms and down a ladder to the Air Buster fight, you get to go through an appropriately large facility while Shinra troops are arming the robot and sabotage its weapons capabilities by preventing the troops from loading specific parts.
The part where Cloud has to crossdress to sneak into Don Corneo’s mansion also received a similar expansion. Instead of just doing some squats and helping an old guy out, Cloud and Aeris have to convince three important people in Wall Market to give Don Corneo their letters of approval, including a madam, a gay guy who owns the Honey Bee Nightclub, and the world’s best Sam Elliott impersonator who runs a Chocobo transportation service.
The game is full of these expansions to the story, and for the most part, they’re not bad. They also expanded on some of the enemies too. I especially liked what they did with the Hell House. In the OG, the Hell House was a random enemy that appeared in the tunnel between Sector 5 and Wall Market. It wasn’t particularly notable or tough. In Remake, it’s a boss fight, and it’s arguably one of the hardest bosses in the game.
My favorite part though is how Final Fantasy VII Remake attempts to explain all the changes they made to the story.
Throughout the game, you’re harassed by Whispers, these cloaked things that look like Dementors from Harry Potter. They just sort of randomly appear during the story to harass Cloud and the gang. Towards the end of the game though, you learn that they’re arbiters of fate produced by the Lifestream, and their purpose is to ensure that the events play out the same way as they did in the original game. The entire thing culminates in a battle against a giant personification of fate, where you defeat it and essentially “break free from the chains of fate”, which opens the door for all kinds of possibilities and spares some characters, like Biggs (who looks suspiciously like Charlie Sheen’s character from Platoon) and Wedge (who’s voiced by Badger from Breaking Bad) from their deaths in the original. Also, alternate timelines are established, and we get a peak at another universe where Zack survived the end of Crisis Core.
As for the gameplay, if you’re expecting random battles and turn-based combat like the original, you’re going to be disappointed.
There aren’t any sudden random battles, you’re not at the mercy of some RNG that spawns enemies every five steps. You can typically see the enemies before you engage them, which gives you time to prepare and switch Materia around if needed. Sometimes you do get sneak-attacked, but for the most part you can generally see what’s coming.
I found the combat itself to be a mixed bag. The battle isn’t turn-based (and I don’t think that many modern RPGs are anymore), you’re in control of the characters as they move around the battle area, and you can attack, dodge, use magic/items, etc. I played on PC using an Xbox controller, and the controls felt pretty smooth and responsive. Using magic and other commands wasn’t complicated, the combat slows down while you’re using the menu so you’re not rushed to pick whatever spells or special attacks you want to use. In order to do anything other than a basic attack, you have to build up your “ATB gauge”, either through using basic attacks or waiting long enough. This was kind of annoying, especially when you compare it to the original gameplay, but I understand why they did it and I got used to it pretty quickly.
The game lets you switch between control of party members during combat, and also independently issue them commands through the menu. This isn’t inherently bad, and I actually enjoyed having full control of Tifa, Barrett, and Aeris alongside Cloud. Changing between the characters was pretty easy on the Xbox controller, just a press of the d-pad.
What I didn’t enjoy was that, when not being controlled by the player, the other characters were just barely a step above functionally retarded.
When you’re not controlling the other two characters in your party, their default response seems to be “stand around and hold your dick”. Computer-controlled party members did next to nothing in fights unless you issued commands or took control of them. I get that having computer-controlled party members using their full power would take the fun out of the game, and they want the player to exercise control over all party members. But they could have made the computer do just a little more than stand there and block. I also didn’t like how the enemies aggro the player-controlled character way harder than the others. If you switch characters, enemies will literally beeline across the battle area to home in on you. Once you get used to these little quirks though, the combat isn’t too difficult, and modern RPG veterans will probably find it easy.
All in all, Final Fantasy VII Remake is a pretty good game that’s worth grabbing if you can catch it during a sale. It does the original justice while expanding on it in all the right ways to extend the story without padding it with unnecessary filler. I give it an 8/10.
The sequel, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth? Now that’s a different story…
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