FF7 Remake

Exploring the slums in Midgar is an amazing videogame experience. In most RPGs I expect an urban setting to be mostly empty with a few generic, token NPCs standing around. Walking down the street in this game, there are people everywhere. They’re all wearing different clothes, different faces, working at different tasks that actually make sense in this context. They’re also chatting to one another, which I can overhear as I walk by, and sometimes making comments to me, or about me, including comments about things I’ve done recently. The work that went into the main characters is impressive too. The models are perfect, the animation is perfect and seamless, the voice acting is spot-on.

It’s quite a contrast from the goofy little lego-block characters of the original, who all jumped into Cloud whenever he started to go somewhere and then jumped back out of him when he got there.

The combat system is tougher but also more engaging than the original game. I’ve gotten by OK with it so far, but it’ll take me more time to fully master. There’s also an easy mode, which a lot of people complained is actually way too easy, but that’s kind of the point. It’s that way because some people don’t care about all the fighting and just want the story.

I’ve been taking it slowly. I’ve been savoring it, and I expect to playing and possibly replaying it for a long time to come, so what’s the rush? However, I know a lot of other people rushed through it as quickly as they could. I’ve tried to avoid spoilers, especially when I kept hearing about some crazy plot twist at the end, but I finally couldn’t resist anymore and had to read about it.

There shouldn’t be any plot twists. I mean, the word “remake” is right there in the title. It’s an overhaul of a game that came out in 1997. We already know this story. Or do we? Well, honestly, I never really understood much of the underlying story of the original Final Fantasy 7 game. The first part, that took place in Midgar, was pretty straightforward. After that it turned into an open world adventure, and things became far more muddled. All these characters had confusing backgrounds with secrets, memory loss, conspiracies, and mixtures of history and mythology, and much of the time even the characters were struggling with mysteries and misconceptions. There was unreliable exposition where, for example, a scientist might explain The Ancients to us, but then later we might discover his theories were wrong. Another character might have flashbacks about events in his past, but later we find out he was delusional and it never happened that way.

Compounding the difficulty was all the dialog translated from Japanese. Written Japanese is a very terse language with each symbol representing a syllable or entire word, which meant that a lot of words could be fit into a dialog bubble. For the English translation, they tried to fit the same thoughts into the same size dialog bubbles on screen, but there just wasn’t room. So, a lot ended up being shortened and simplified, turned into a sort of pidgin language. A lot of subtlety was lost.

And the result of all this was that my party, my crew, my close-knit band of adventurers fought their way across the world and somehow saved it, but I never really understood how or why. I never understood Cloud Strife’s background story, or Sephiroth’s background story, or what Jenova was, or who the Ancients were, or who the Cetra were, and whether the Cetra were another name for the Ancients, or whether Aerith was a Cetra or an Ancient, or how the Lifestream worked, and so forth.

One thing I was really looking forward to with this remake was a chance to finally, fully understand all that stuff. I figured an expanded, fleshed-out story with proper English dialog would make it all clear to me after all these years. And now it seems that’s not exactly going to happen, not the way I expected anyhow.

You see, it turns out that Final Fantasy 7 Remake doesn’t take place in exactly the same universe as the original Final Fantasy 7 game. It’s more like a parallel universe or alternate timeline. During the entire game in Midgar, our heroes are haunted periodically by ghost-like creatures called Whispers of Fate. Their purpose is to keep events on track, make sure characters do what they’re supposed to, and make sure that events broadly play out the way they did before. However, they have to take more and more forceful action, and the manipulation gradually becomes obvious to the characters — and eventually they rebel. From what I’ve read, the Whispers of Fate are defeated at the end of the game.

The implications are huge. The game ends right where, in the original game, the heroes left Midgar to explore the rest of the world. Now in the sequels that are yet to come, they’ll presumably get to explore that same world and meet some of the same characters, but events could go in very different directions. The ones who died before may not die this time. The ones who lived before may not live this time. The party may develop different objectives, and various characters in the game may take different sides. It’s all wide open.

I’ve seen multiple blogs calling Whispers of Fate personifications of the fandom, the legions who loved the original game and wanted fidelity to it. They suppose that Square saw the fandom as the enemy and turned us into an army of monsters that could be defeated in order to win their creative freedom. I don’t buy that analysis, though. From where I sit, as an author myself, it looks to me like the guys at Square just invented a carefully tailored mechanism to justify doing what they wanted: keeping the best parts of the original story (in Midgar), and redoing the parts they didn’t like so much (everything after) and knew they can do better. It wasn’t anything personal about the fandom. The Whispers of Fate aren’t any kind of veiled F-U directed at us.

The closest comparison I can make is to the Star Trek reboot movie from 2009 (which I loved, by the way), wherein the mad Romulan, Nero, went back in time and radically changed history, thus creating a new timeline where the original Enterprise crew could go off on a whole new set of adventures. It was heavy-handed but also brilliant. So, is FF7 Remake brilliant too?

I think so. I do feel a little pang that I’ll probably never understand the original FF7 story. However… I also know that it was probably a steaming pile of garbage. FF7 was tightly focused right up until they left Midgar, and it became a muddled mess after that. Now the developers have a chance to redo it all, to make it more coherent, to clean up that mess and tell a new story that is worthy to this setting and these characters. So yeah, it’s bold, it’s hugely ambitious and risky, but, based on what we’ve seen so far, the project seems to be in good hands. If they can keep up the standard that they delivered in the first installment, I’ll be happy.