Saturday, June 6, 2020

Eric Vs. 365 - Day 342 - Final Fantasy VII Remake

The Final Fantasy VII Remake is a weird Frankenstein's monster of pieces and parts that mostly come together but it's hard not to wish it was just a prettier version of the original instead of this new thing that is totally different from what we all grew up with. Hi, this is Eric Vs. 365 and today's game is Final Fantasy VII Remake.

I've played through the original Final Fantasy VII a couple of times. I wasn't on board with PlayStation back in 1997 when FF7 launched, but I broke free of the shackles of Nintendo fanboyism by 2000 or so and played FF7 sometime in the early 2000's. I liked it a lot, of course. It wasn't my first RPG, so I wasn't all "OMG this is the best thing ever" but I appreciated it. Great music. Great visuals at the time. Excellent characters. A solid story. Fun gameplay (though I always used a GameShark ...). 

When the Final Fantasy VII Remake was teased all of those years ago, originally for PS3, I was pretty indifferent to it. I freaking hated my PS3, so the thought of playing anything on it made me want to puke. Then FFVIIR moved to PS4, and suddenly I was more interested.

And now it's out. And it's weird. It isn't so much a remake as a totally different game entirely. Sure, the characters and locations are here, but the combat system is totally different, the story is wildly different, and instead of a 40-hour romp where you save the whole planet, it's 40-hours of doing boring pointless side quests because they had to cram in a bunch of filler to justify selling people a section of the game that originally only took, maybe, 8-hours to finish. 

I think it is pretty clear that it was a mistake to split the game up into so many potential parts. Though, since they changed the story so much, it isn't necessarily as if players should expect to hit all of the same story beats / characters / locations as the original game. They changed it so much that the next part(s) of the game could be entirely new and not have anything to do with the original game. I don't think people would be happy if they did that, but it almost seems like that is going to be the result of changing everything else so significantly - it'll be faster / easier / cheaper to just make a new world and story with only vague references to what came before. 


Personally, I'm mostly OK with the FF7Remake. I do wish it was just a prettier version of the original game - turn based combat and all. This is fine, though. I guess. It did give us the amazing new version of Jessie Raspberry, though, and she's my new favorite video game girl. So there's that.