I Think I Actually Hate the Final Fantasy 7 Remake Now…

One of the first things I wrote on this blog was a post gushing over how much I loved that Final Fantasy 7 remake.

In the two months that have passed since then, that love has turned to ambivalence, then annoyance and now I think I even hate the game.

I feel that it may be mutual as well.

First of all. I haven’t finished the game, and for reasons that I will soon make excruciatingly clear, I am unlikely to do so.

I think I may be on the last boss but, then again, I thought that four or five bosses ago as well so there’s really no way to tell.

Or rather, I think I was on the last boss, then I was so fed up I just wanted to play Persona 5 for a while. If I were to return now I’d have to continue from the last save, three hours of endless boss fight ago.

Yeah, I’m a bit angry.

Lack of Respect for Your Time

But let’s back up a bit.

In the last post I did mention some things that I didn’t quite like. Specifically I said:

Sometimes it feels artificially lengthened. Where even in the original (in which battles were very frequent) you just had a quick climb up the Section 7 pillar, for instance, here it’s a much larger undertaking with combat encounters at each floor.

As the game progressed this is probably what became my biggest issue: its utter disregard for your time!

Not only are existing sections, like the one above, artificially lengthened to a frankly absurd degree where something that only took a few minutes in the original will now take literal hours. Like, I hope you liked that one motorcycle minigame, because now there are two of them, each taking an hour. They’ve got boss fights as well.

There’s probably not a single corridor in the original that the remake hasn’t managed to somehow turn into an hour-long combat sequence.

The game will also often just make up an excuse to take up even more time. For instance, after you meet Red XIII in the Shinra building, you suddenly need to spend an hour or more fighting through a gauntlet because now Hojo wants to collect combat data!

I guess watching people fighting lab specimens somehow produces super useful scientific data because this makes him so happy! I sort of wonder what measurements are taken, how they’re taken and how they’re put to use in practice, but I digress…

Anyway, it seems to me that they’ve decided that now that they’re making this long-awaited remake, they’re going to make the most humanly possible out of it.

Where Did All the Characters Go?

As a silver lining to all this, I wrote:

At least it gives the characters time to talk.

Yeah… about that…

As I wrote, I had been worried the characters would just turn into generic anime stereotypes, so it was such a relief to me when it turned out they’d actually got their personalities right!

In the last post alone I linked to a bunch of my favorite character moments. Their lines were so funny, the new, detailed, expressions gave them even more personality, I thought.

Well… they’re kinda just generic anime stereotypes now…

I’m not sure when it happened, but for some reason all those scenes I linked to and quoted were also probably the last times I actually remember feeling the need to quote anything at all…

Difference For Its Own Sake?

Another thing I really enjoyed in the beginning was seeing all those classic scenes from the original plaid out with lifelike characters and full voice acting!

I’d be looking forward to hitting the next one of these story beats, thinking “soon we’ll get to the part where Cloud meats Aerith in the church”, or “soon we’ll get to the showdown with Don Corneo!” etc.

Well, more and more, those moments were being changed, or even removed.

I mean, I get that this is more of a re-imagining than a straight-up remake, but when your game’s primary selling point is nostalgia, then you kind of have to make good on that nostalgia, don’t you?

Spoiler Warning: This is where I start spoiling late-game scenes with reckless abandon!

For example: remember the scenes below from the original? Did you like those?

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Misty water-colored memories of the way we were

Well, I sure hope not, ’cause you ain’t getting them this time around!

Exhibit A:

Remember how Red XIII was trapped with Aerith in some weird attempt at inter-species cross breeding, then the containment chamber is opened and he pounces on Hojo all scary and beast-like. Only… wait, he talks? And is like super-calm and eloquent and stuff?

Well, here you rescue Aerith and then you meet Red XIII in a corridor. He gives his “I can speak all you want later” line and then proceeds to be the least interesting character in the game. You don’t even get to control him in battle.

Actually, I guess, thinking back, a lot of his character came down to looking like a beast and then speaking calmly and eloquently, which I guess he does. Only this time he seems more uninterested than anything else.

Exhibit B:

OK, so you remember how after you’d met Red XIII you’re all thrown in prison, and as everyone’s locked into different cells with no choice than to just sit there, you get some insight into their character and their thoughts?

Well, no more prison. They escape to some room where Aerith used to hide with her mother when they were both research specimens.

(To be fair, maybe speaking through the prison walls only made sense when the characters were just blocky lego men and the camera view was a top-down cutaway)

Exhibit C:

Remember how you met Rufus on the roof and he gave you his speech about how he would now rule by fear, and Cloud sent everyone away claiming that “this is the real crisis of the planet” before facing off with him.

Well, no more speech from Rufus or Cloud. The gang runs off, Rufus fights Cloud in a three-stage boss fight.

Exhibit D:

Remember how you reached the president’s office at the top of the Shinra building, only to find the president dead, with Sephiroth’s sword ominously stuck in his back? (Wait! Did he carry multiple swords? Did he just leave his eight-foot sword stuck in the guy’s back and buy a new one?)

The party is shocked to learn that Sephiroth is still alive and we get some nice foreshadowing for what will eventually become the main villain of the game.

Well, this time around, the president’s alive. He’s hanging from the roof of the building crying for help. Barret saves him only to be held at gunpoint, at which point Sephiroth appears and attacks them both. We get a boss fight and then learn that this was one of the Sephiroth clones.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Sephiroth either, because…

The Sephiroth in the Room

Do you guys mind if I just invite myself in?

In this version we’re introduced to Sephiroth after the introductory mission. Granted, Cloud is probably just hallucinating, but he appears and talks to Cloud very early in the game.

We also see Sephiroth steal the Jenova sample from the containment chamber. We’re no longer ominously presented with a broken chamber and a trail of blood to follow up to the President’s office.

In fact, Sephiroth is all over this game.

I think it’s a consequence of splitting the game up into multiple parts. Once the opening hours became its own game, they probably didn’t want to leave the main villain out of it.

But I think it ruins the build-up and foreshadowing when he’s just showing up all the time.

Also, remember how in the climactic final battle of the original, Cloud is finally strong enough to take on Sephiroth in a one-on-one duel? Something that would have been impossible at the early stages of the game?

Well, they jumped the gun completely and let the first part of the remake end (or does it, I probably won’t find out) with an epic multiple-stage boss fight against him!

Which brings me back to…

Ross Rush Bonanza!

Hey, kids! You know what’s fun? Bosses!

You know what’s even more fun? Hours of bosses!

You know what’s not fun? Saving between bosses!

So, first you fight Rufus on the roof, right? That’s a three stage boss battle. The final part of which is a lot more difficult, so be prepared to do it all over again a few times (and also wait for that cinematic you’re gonna skip anyway to load)

Once he is defeated escapes without a scratch, you make your way down the stairs where you fight a giant robot.

Robot dispatched, it’s time to escape on motorcycle. This is like in the original except it’s dragged out way longer. There’s also a boss fight on the bike now.

So far those bosses were all in the original, except I feel that much of the interesting dialogue between the boss fights has been removed or simplified to the point that the characters mostly just point out the obvious in whatever way suits their stereotype.

And it’s at this point in the original that you leave the starting town of Midgar and venture out into the world.

Not so here.

You need to pass through the veil of fate or somesuch and on the other side is… Hours of continuous boss battles without an option to save!

Only it needs to be epic! So now you’re on top of debris flying through the sky above Midgar, as the city explodes and you fight bosses big enough to throw parts of the Shinra building at you (this actually happens).

After each battle you need to run to the next, but you’re technically always in combat mode, so the save option never becomes available.

And, like I mentioned, after these bosses you fight Sephiroth in a multiple-stage battle complete with unskippable cutscenes in between. The first stages are easy. Then it becomes stupidly difficult and you must spend ten more minutes going through the easy parts before you can figure out why you can’t dodge or parry any of these attacks that drain half your health and…

Oh Yeah, I Don’t Like The Battle System Anymore Either

Oh, another thing I mentioned enjoying in the original:

Another thing I was extremely suspicious of was the real-time battle system. I quite enjoy turn-based battles, you see.

Well, I like what they’ve done here too. It’s not better than a turn-based system, and I’d have been very happy with one of those as well, but I’m definitely enjoying it for what it is.

Quick recap: you fight in real-time and fill up a bar by inflicting or blocking damage. Once this bar is filled you can use magic or other skills you have equipped in the form of materia (basically magic gems that you put into your weapons or armor).

Greatly Reduced Viability of Magic and Abilities

And well… suspicions confirmed I guess, because as time went on I really started to notice how the turn-based parts as well as the materia system were simplified and downplayed in favor of the real-time combat system.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

Firstly, there aren’t many materia combinations available any more. You can add elemental attacks to your weapons, or make your magic affect adjacent targets and that’s about it.

In the original you could, for instance, have equip a character with the counter materia, making them automatically counter-attack. Then you could give them the cover materia to make them take hits for their team-mates, counter attacking every time they did so. This is just one example of combinations no longer available.

Secondly, a lot of the new materia is only there to customize the real-time combat system.

Some of it will affects the real-time combat attacks, and some will be dedicated to allowing characters to do stuff like heal or cast magic even when you’re not directly controlling them. I’d prefer if they just did this anyway… as it is they don’t do much at all, leaving everything up to the character you control.

This in turn means that they don’t fill up the bar needed to actually bring up the menu and cast magic etc.

Thirdly, if you get hit when casting magic it will fail and you will need to fill up the bar again to get another attempt. So even when the bar is filled up, you often can’t use the menu anyway.

And with all of this focus being shifted to the turn-based system…

Unresponsive Real-Time Combat

…said real-time system isn’t really that good to begin with!

It certainly isn’t anywhere near good enough to work as a stand-alone system in a character action game such as Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. It just feels too clunky and unresponsive.

It lacks a proper lock-on system that actually focuses all your attacks on the selected enemy and keeps them center-screen. This in turn makes dodging a lot less precise.

Your parry amounts to holding down the block button leaving you unable to move quickly or attack, which makes sense I guess, except it doesn’t activate quickly enough for you to actually be able to use it reactively, so it seems designed for you to stand around guarding and wait for the enemies to attack.

Which brings me back to that Sephiroth boss battle, because I don’t know how the game expects you to use these systems to avoid damage, and unlike the original it doesn’t allow you to actually heal reliably either since you cannot cast magic while being attacked.

I’m willing to accept that this is me being bad at the game and I should just git gud, but:

1. The game does a very poor job of teaching these skills, or indeed indicate which skills are required
2. The system still feels unresponsive, like you’re fighting against the limitations of the control method just as much as against the actual enemy.

Wait, Didn’t You Die?

Also, for whatever reason… Wedge is alive in this game.

Hey guys, I’m fine! I know you were super worried about me being dead because I have tons of personality and stuff! Who wants some pizza?

He doesn’t do anything interesting, he just sort of fails to die when Shinra crushes the slums, and from then on he just turns up from time to time.

In the original he was just a random sidekick whose personality more or less began and ended with him being fat because he liked to eat a lot.

I wouldn’t say much has changed. We do get a whole side mission when we hang out with him in town early in the game, but I still don’t feel that he has much of a personality.

He likes cats now, I guess.

So I’ve no idea why he’s still here, really… I mean good for him that he survived I guess, but… I was totally on board with him having his tragic death as part of Barret’s character arc and then we wouldn’t have to actually… you know… hang out with him and stuff?

At least he’s not around much anyway.

(Also… what are those armored shoulder plates attached to? Are they sewn onto his T-shirt? That doesn’t seem very durable. They’d fall off just from their own weight!)

TL;DR: I Am Disappoint

Accidental picture taken of my face moments before quitting the game.

So very disappoint.