Just a quick head’s up: this post contains spoilers for the original Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 7: Remake. Feels a little weird to put a spoiler tag on a game as old as FF7 (it is only six years younger than I am, after all!), but it’s pretty relevant given Remake and, more recently, Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth.

For the fourth time, I started playing Final Fantasy 7. The original, I mean. I’ve only started playing Final Fantasy 7: Remake three times so far. I actually played Remake before I’d played the original. I grew up in a limited console household and none of my friends had a PlayStation around the time that FF7 came out, so I missed my opportunity to enjoy it in my youth. When I had subsequent opportunities, mostly in college and afterwards, I just never felt inclined to spend the time. After all, so much about Sephiroth and the major plot twists of FF7 have seemed into general knowledge of the world. I mean, I knew Sephiroth was a ghost, that Cloud wasn’t really in SOLDIER, and that Aerith dies no matter what you do. Hell, a great example of that is that I’ve never once had to add the word “Sephiroth” to a personal dictionary on any web browser or cell phone I’ve ever owned and that’s not even true for “Aerith” or her incorrectly spelled variant name, “Aeris.” I was under the impression that there wasn’t really much left in the game for me to experience, especially after I watched Final Fantasy 7: Machinabridged and got a lot more of the details. Still, as I picked up my copy of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and realized that my save data for Final Fantasy 7: Remake hadn’t transferred from my PS4 to my PS5, I figured I might as well give the original game another try.

The driving force behind this decision was the somewhat weird experience I had with Remake when I played it the first time. As I described to a friend today, it wasn’t that Remake was relying heavily on references to the original game so much as I spent my entire time playing Remake wondering if I was missing something important because I hadn’t played the original game. There was so much in my first playthrough that was clearly some kind of reference to the original game, but it still worked for someone who only had the general cultural sense of the original game since I had a great time playing it despite not being the target audience for all of those references. I don’t feel like I missed any important subtext or plot points during my playthrough, but I spent so much time wondering if I was missing something because the game was clearly in conversation with the original. It is an adaption, after all, not a full remake, and it felt discombobulating at times to run into one of those moments since the new game wasn’t interested in establishing the full context of the original game. Which, to be entirely fair to Remake now that I’ve played through the original game, isn’t much. The original game purposefully hides information from you as it follows the viewpoint of Cloud, a young man with gaps in his memories and an identity that is eerily similar to someone else in the world who has connections to other characters in the game. Remake doesn’t hide that information from you as long as the original game did (at least in terms of overall plot progression since Remake takes the first five to ten hours of the original game and spins it up into an easy thirty), but it instead plays around with other narrative elements in the same way the original did.

While Cloud’s identity and the information about his past that might not be true is more heavily hinted at and his potential mental breakdown is foreshadowed in a way that leaves very little hidden of the original game’s plot, Remake plays around with the expectations of the player and what it means to change a story. Now, it might do this a bit ham-handedly at times, given the tangible embodiment of the forces that you eventually learn are seeking to make this alternate version of the story play out the same way as the original did, but it still plays with that force more than with what is happening overall with Sephiroth, Aerith, and Cloud’s memory. We see, multiple times, as this ghostly but tangible force rejects the changing events of this much deeper and more expanded world we’re playing in. It repeatedly does what it can to enforce a specific sequence of events, interfering in the lives of our protagonists and the NPCs around them to twist fate such that it realigns with the original story even as our protagonists literally fight against it. Sometimes, this force interferes directly, as it does in the first few chapters of the game when it forces Aerith away from Cloud since they weren’t supposed to meet yet and then injures a member of the anti-Shinra ecoterrorist group known as Avalanche so that they’re forced to hire Cloud to help them with another mission. Other times it is actively helpful, like when Barrett gets stabbed and the ghosts show up to fix him since he wasn’t supposed to die. Ultimately, good or bad, the ghosts eventually come to be focused around Remake’s depiction of Sephiroth, either using him to enforce their vision of events or him taking advantage of their interests to further his own. It’s incredibly unclear in Remake if Sephiroth is aware of the true intentions of the ghosts and if he actually wants the story to play out the way it did in the original or if he has some kind of foresight (similarly to how the game frequently hints that Aerith does) and is trying to keep everything lined up until the very end so he can attempt to jump the rails at the last moment.

I don’t think that Remake requires you to play the original game, but I definitely think that trying to talk about Remake as a game in conversation with its original form DOES require you to do that. I wouldn’t know enough to make these comparisons or draw these conclusions if I hadn’t played through the original by now and I’m deeply interested in doing my second full playthrough of Remake to see if having knowledge of the original game adds anything. Plus, it was a pretty easy time commitment to make since I have the original on my Switch and I can just turn on the “auto full HP/MP and Limit meter” thing so I can mindlessly grind through the game until I get to an interesting plot point. It really cuts down on the amount of time this game takes to play when I can just fast-forward through everything, including all the grinding I’m doing to make sure I can just effortlessly blast through boss battles. Every fight is easy when you’ve got your limit break ready to go or can endless cast the “All” version of your strongest magic. All of which is to say that I’ve played FF7 and now I’m going to replay Remake so I can finally put to rest the quiet worry that I’m missing something important. And so I’ve got the right save data for starting Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Which will probably take another few weeks, given my game time and energy levels, but the though of cruising around on Segways is giving me the strength I need to push through.

Also, FF7 was fine. I get why it was such a big deal back in the day, but it’s fine. Definitely a very old game that maybe doesn’t stand up as much as it otherwise would without the nostalgia factor. I don’t regret spending my time on this game, but I’ll freely admit that I have no intentions of ever playing it again and I’ve skipped anything that wasn’t an interesting, story-filled side quest in my rush to finish the game.