I’ve been steadily chipping away at Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth again and was planning to keep my thoughts to myself until I got further in the game (apparently ending the open world sections of chapter 9 just launches you into an open world section in chapter 10, unlike every other open-world section that got to have a break for some fun story time before heading back to the open world stuff again, which made me so frustrated that I turned my PlayStation off and stared at my ceiling in discontent for fifteen minutes). Instead, I’m writing this post because I saw someone writing about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth by saying that there might never be another game like it. This was meant as praise and had me wondering if the writer of that post had played the same game I did. As I chewed on this opinion, I realized I’d never really looked at reviews for the game, as it released or in the months since then, because I’d wanted to avoid being spoiled while I finished up some other games before diving into FF7: Rebirth. Uncertain, now, if my opinion was just me being curmudgeonly and unwilling to allow myself to appreciate the game, I decided to spend some time looking at reviews and discussions of the game. Which pretty much all broke down into people either loving or hating the open-world segments of the game, for good and bad reasons on both sides, and doing nothing but shouting down the people who disagreed with them. So, today, as I complained about the game to a friend, I decided I should actually talk about WHY this game doesn’t work for me, why I continue to push myself to play it, and why I feel so emotionally invested in all of this that I’m writing about it multiple times without even finishing it.
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Finding The Fun Amidst The Familiar In Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth
A few weeks ago, as a part of my on-going quest to document my time spent in the various worlds of Final Fantasy 7, I wrote about Cloud Strife and the way his character is portrayed differently between games. As I’ve gotten further into Rebirth, I’ve thought a lot about the depiction of Cloud in the original game, the way it was different in Remake, and the way it’s different again in Rebirth. The Rebirth version of Cloud is a melding of the two. The terse, non-committal version of Cloud has returned (which brought back the Classic Cloud Shrug, baybee!), but there are still moments of awkward earnestness that break through this shell. Despite that merge of the two different Clouds I saw, between the original Final Fantasy 7 Cloud and the Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth Cloud, there’s still a missing element here. Original Cloud felt like he was playing at being a cool guy. He felt like he was living out his dream and trying to fulfill the image he had in his head of what it meant to be a SOLDIER. This Cloud, the Cloud of Rebirth, feels more like he’s just a million miles away. He tunes in and out, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes seemingly involuntarily. He has moments where is is alive, his personality is a brilliant spark, and he’s driving the group forward with lateral and creative thinking. Other times, he can barely pay attention to a conversation or someone sharing a memory from what should be their shared past in an effort to connect with him. It’s disconcerting to see it play out on the screen but, crucially, the game also makes it clear that the other characters are noticing it as well.
Continue readingChanging The Past By Destroying The Future In Final Fantasy 7: Remake
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.
Continue readingFinding Logic Where There Is None In Final Fantasy 7: Remake
One of the things that always sticks in my mind about a lot of video games is the often huge difference between the abilities of a character when they’re in a cutscene and when they’re under player control. Compounding this problem is that there’s also sometimes a huge difference in a character’s abilities from one cutscene to another. Take Final Fantasy 7: Remake as an example: Cloud makes some truly impressive leaps, runs up falling debris, easily carries people while moving quickly or jumping, and then, in other cutscenes, he can’t make the small jump from one side of a channel to another (which was maybe ten feet–fifteen, tops). Hell, the dude can’t even pull himself up by his arms half the time while, the other half, he can easily support his own weight, Tifa’s weight, and Barrett’s weight without straining. Then, throw him under player control and suddenly the dude has to move slowly and carefully lest he fall into the “abyss” which is less deep than some jumps I’ve seen him make. Yes, I know the interplay between these moments is to create drama or make Cloud seem particularly heroic or cool or to maintain reasonable pathing in a video game with a lot of environmental detail that was clearly not supposed to be interacted with. But what if it wasn’t? What if there was some indiscernible but otherwise still present and consistent logic beneath it all that governed whether or not Cloud was capable of incredible physical feats from one moment to the next? There isn’t any that I know of, but sometimes I like to approach games that pull these kinds of shenanigans in a completely serious manner, as if every instance of this makes sense, to see if I can find some wild (or mild) explanation that fits what I’ve seen.
Continue readingAerith Keeps Taking The Thoughts Right Out Of My Head In Final Fantasy 7: Remake
There’s spoilers for the early parts of Final Fantasy 7 and pretty much all of Final Fantasy 7: Remake in this post. Just all over the place. The thing is lousy with ’em. Read at your own peril. Or because you’ve already played those games. Or because you don’t care and just want to read. I’m not your boss.
Continue readingI Played Original Final Fantasy 7 So I Can Critically Engage With Remake & Rebirth
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.
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