I finished Final Fantasy 7: Remake. I’ve still got to do the Intermission thing with Yuffie and I’ll probably go back at some point to finish collecting the achievements by playing through the game on Hard Mode (I’ve been enjoying the extra challenge of a more difficult game mode lately and I enjoy the combat in FF7: Remake enough to figure overcoming the challenge could be a fun way to spend my time), but I think I should finally be getting to Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth sometime this weekend [this turned out to barely be true, as I only had about an hour to play it before I went to bed Sunday night]. In the meantime, though, I’m surprised by my lack of ideas to write about. Sure, I’ve got plenty to say now that I’ve fully played through both Remake and the original Final Fantasy 7, but most of that is kind of boring since it amounts to “oh, I know who that character is, now” instead of “who the hell is this Sonic The Hedgehog-looking bipedal Cat?”. Which, honestly, is still my main impression of Cait Sith since I played FF7: Remake the first time not long after I watched the Sonic The Hedgehog movie in theaters (and all that separated the two experiences was the everlasting month of March, 2020). He sure looked like a character right out of that movie. Other than that, most of my impressions of Remake have nothing to do with the original. After all, the whole point of the end of Remake is that you’re ultimately rejecting the pre-ordained future of the original game. Quite literally, given that you fight three strange figures in the lead-up to the Sephiroth fight that are, according to the Assess skill (which shows you a bit of background information about the enemies you’ve targeted, some battle strategy information in yellow text, and then a bunch of game statistics such as weaknesses, resistances, and immunities), the embodiments of people who fought for the future you’re rejecting.

That’s honestly the most interesting thing I found in this latest pass of the game. The first time I played Remake, I was doing this fight at maybe two in the morning and barely glanced over anything but the mechanical stats and the yellow “battle suggestions” text. This time, I started this fight just before midnight and took the time to read through everything, which made me really think about the fact that you’re fighting the time-displaced spirits of the people you would have become if you’d followed the fate that the weird ghostie things, the Whispers, were trying to lead you toward. They’re not just reflections of your characters. They’re the actual spirits that fought the battles I’d just fought a few weeks earlier when I played through the original Final Fantasy 7. The Cloud, Barret, and Tifa who had struggled against the end of the world no matter what it might cost them. That the reflection of Aerith was missing not because she was this strange, somewhat displaced being in the current timeline that could maybe see all timelines, but because she had died in that other timeline, before she’d been able to fight for the future she wanted. These spirits, a tough fight all on their own given their unrelenting attacks, the difficulty involved in staggering them (a game mechanic that stuns enemies, gives you the ability to deal increased damage, and has tie-in abilities that deal extra damage to staggered enemies or even increase the stagger damage multiplier), and their disparate resistances. I had plenty of time to think about what it meant to be fighting your own future in order to break free of it while I was trying to sort out what abilities and spells to use. The mechanical made narrative.

I’m not a fan of time travel as a way of “fixing” the past or undoing mistakes. So much so that I stopped playing Dragon Quest XI for almost two years after I got to a point in the game that made it clear that the only way to carry on was to go to the past and attempt to make all the misfortune of the first three quarters of the game not happen. It feels like a cop-out, to me, if you can just go back and change the past to undo your mistakes or find a way to resolve your greatest regrets. The reason Dragon Quest XI set me off as much as it did, specifically, is because you go back to undo all the death and destruction wrecked by your character’s failure to act. You were slow to respond to something, didn’t see the obvious signs, and a whole lot of people died, including one of your companions, before you were able to take out the bad guy who had become incredibly powerful as a result of your failure. One of the most moving and emotionally interesting parts of the entire game just gets undone at the three-quarters mark because–and I want you to read this as laden with every ounce of practiced sarcasm I can bring to bear–obviously, everything would be better if you could just go back in time and undo the harm. Obviously. And, as a by-product, undo all the growth and development of every single character who had to learn to live in a world that had been wrecked and deprived of all hope before each of them found the strength required to bring back hope themselves. I just couldn’t do that and live with it the first time, because it hit too close to home, and there’s no magic time travel in the real world that I could use to go back in time and either save myself or prevent the harm my brother and parents would do to me and my younger siblings. When I did eventually return to the game and play through the whole thing, I did so without deleting the original save file so I could maintain that this particular instance of playing the game ended when I made the decision to not return to the past.

Even though I finished that second playthrough of Dragon Quest XI and genuinely enjoyed it, it doesn’t change the fact that I had to do so while being unable to suspend my disbelief. You can’t go back and change things, after all. That’s not how time works as we currently understand it. That’s not how the causality of mortal lives works. Sure, you can spin off alternate timelines, but you will not have changed your own past. You’ll have simply given some people a chance at a new, unrelated future. But that primarily works in a world whose cosmology allows for warped timelines that are somehow reflections of the abandoned future rather than fully altered presents (such as the Dragon Quest world, potentially, depending on how you read some of how the time travel works). In a different world, such as the world of Final Fantasy 7: Remake, where fate exists and can deploy beings to ensure that events play out as intended, you can’t just change the past to create a new future. You can’t just a spin something entirely new out of nowhere, from one little shift in causality. You must first grapple with the weight of your intended future, which is exactly what FF7: Remake does. Those beings you fought, that were versions of yourself from the future, are invested in seeing their reality come to fruition. After all, they sacrificed so much and fought so hard to make sure that they were able to win in the end. They weren’t made aware of fate by a woman with more knowledge than she could possibly have, so how could they know that it was going to happen that way no matter what they did (other than tear a hole in reality that causes you to fight fate itself as you battle on a stage made of ripped-up chunks of various other realities that have been forever altered by your contact with them)?

All of which means that, in FF7: Rebirth, you’re fighting to change the past from the perspective of the past. You know the future is wrong and that it is literally fighting you to maintain itself, to keep itself intact, so you do whatever you can to break free of the shackles placed on you by supposedly preordained events. Honestly, it’s a pretty interesting take on the whole “changing the past” thing since it is the past trying to change the future while the future fights to save itself. An inversion of the normal process that, nevertheless, still pretty much amounts to the same thing. I’m excited to see how it plays out in FF7: Rebirth, now that events have supposedly been freed of their original shackles. The original game is still fresh in my mind, so I should be able to notice the deviations and parallels much more easily than if I was remembering something from long ago, but I’m unsure of what those changes will be. After all, Sephiroth is still a looming threat. Maybe the characters will wind up making the same decisions, despite it all, because there really was nothing else they could think to do. Maybe something even worse will happen this time.

All I know is that I’m really interested in seeing how Rebirth builds on the groundwork Remake has laid, especially given that, as far as I can tell, not a whole lot has actually changed from one game to the next. All the non-playable NPCs are still mostly dead or potentially alive but removed from the narrative, the party is still hunting Sephiroth, and Sephiroth is still mysteriously haunting Cloud. All the differences come in the nuance. We see one or more NPCs still alive that probably should have died. We already know that Sephiroth is some kind of ghost possessing people who have what the people of the world describe as “Mako poisoning.” We know that Cloud’s memory is faulty and that an important person who was dead in the first game, that we never saw in the present, is apparently still alive somehow, though maybe in an alternate world, given the imagery of the ending credits? It’s incredibly difficult to say for sure, though I hope Rebirth will grant me some insight into what is going on. Only time will tell, though, since I’ve still got the Intermission to beat and then all of Rebirth to beat before I can really say one way or another.