Sometime in 1998, a friend sat me in front of her computer and let me play through a bit of Final Fantasy VII. As I watched her play, and later began to explore a bit for myself, I quickly immersed myself in the game. It was unlike anything else I had played before. That holiday season, I spent all of a cold, Massachusetts Christmas Day with my mind in Midgar, anxiously twitching as I waited for the last plates to be cleared from the table so I could rush upstairs to keep playing.
Video games had always been on the periphery of my life, but Final Fantasy VII pushed me over the point of no return. From there came successive Final Fantasy games, but also myriad other titles, including StarCraft and an ever-expanding journey into the world of competitive video games.
Twenty-three years later, I was handed a black PlayStation controller. Onscreen, a bird flew over a desert, through the metal beams of outer Midgar, flying into the city over a slow choral rendition of "One Winged Angel." After two minutes of new material, a familiar scene: Aerith Gainsborough, flower basket in hand, kneeling next to a leaking mako energy source as a familiar three notes heralded her introduction. The "LOVELESS" sign. The pan upward. The title splash. The approaching train. I was back in high school, listening to "One Winged Angel" to pump myself up before competing in the 2-mile at our next track meet.
Only I wasn't. I was in my 30s, seated in a corner office across from Los Angeles International airport. Palm trees were visible through the blinds, flanking a parking garage and airplanes in the distance. I was about to trial a remade version of Final Fantasy VII.
Initially, it was unsettling. My mind kept flitting back and forth in an odd game of "spot the difference" that was half sepia-tinged nostalgia and half confusion. (Heidegger lost weight! Was the original this heavy-handed? Reeve Tuesti is hot now?) One four-hour-long, playable demonstration later, I returned to my apartment and fired up my downloaded version of the original for comparison. I watched as the same music cues and story beats flew across the screen in their blockier 1997 counterparts.
When I first played the game in 1998, my greatest worry outside of acclimating to high school itself was fitting in. Or, to paraphrase one of Cloud's original lines, "Back then we only worried about scraped knees." We were aware of things like global warming, but it was a vaguely bad concept that was too large to identify or address in any practical way. Playing as Cloud felt cool and fun, which was the largest appeal to a high school student at the time. Coupled with Final Fantasy VII's pro-planet, anti-large-corporation stance -- along with major plot events that I'll refrain from spoiling here despite the original's age -- it was a unique video game experience.
Final Fantasy VII Remake is also cognizant of the current era. In many ways, it had to be. Much more than a fresh coat of paint, there are certain changes that make sense given how much technology itself has evolved since 1997. Playing the original now is charmingly anachronistic, and Remake does its best to erase these gaps by putting social media and other technology at the forefront of Shinra Inc.'s diabolical plans. The original wasn't particularly subtle, but Remake places the class and ecological conflicts of Barret Wallace and his eco-terrorism group AVALANCHE directly in the player's face, particularly in this Midgar section where the game's aim is to expand on the city of Midgar itself. To put this in perspective, it took me a meandering five hours to get through the entire Midgar section during my most recent replay this past week. The entire Remake demo was approximately four hours and covered the first two missions along with a few boss fights. There's a lot more of Midgar to explore.
What shines the most in the small amount of the Remake that I was able to play was the combat system. Not only is it fun to learn and play around with, but it also allows for characters to display their individuality through their combat, which is a triumph for any game. Unlike the turn-based original, which is identical for every character save a bit of personality via limit breaks, the combat of each individual is intrinsically tied to their specific personality, as well as their given role in the group courtesy of their weapon. Perhaps it's because I have so much of the original memorized, but the Remake battles felt like larger puzzles with multiple right answers that all came down to execution and planning.
Most importantly, each battle is a puzzle that feels worth solving, thanks to the variety of things you can do with the new Active Time Battle system (ATB). The ATB system is an excellent nod to the original while implementing a real-time combat system that makes the most of what each character can do. It also forces the player to make choices in combat that feel meaningful, something that the original definitely lacks. Summons are also significantly more interactive and are introduced early, giving yet another dimension to combat. The Scorpion Sentinel boss battle, which is now available to all through the Final Fantasy VII Remake demo, passed by in a matter of seconds when I replayed it, especially compared to the added complexity of the Remake's.
While returning to the original yet again, the thing that struck me the most was how the text bubbles allow for some particularly amusing moments or darker commentary on the current situation. The distraught couple at the train station or the presumably homeless man who welcomes you to his "house" in one of the train cars immediately come to mind, as well as the entire population of Wall Market (for obvious reasons). From what I could see of Remake, some of this dialogue is going to come from mid-battle interactions and walking interactions between main characters themselves, but I also hope for a bit more while Cloud and company are just wandering around talking to random NPCs. Final Fantasy VII is a serious game that addresses some prescient topics, but it's also goofy and hilarious. I hope Remake retains this throughout its in-game interactions. It's already on the right track with more playable character interactions rather than a few repeating one-liners.
From what I was able to play, Remake is completely accessible to a player unfamiliar with Final Fantasy VII but is also aware that a portion of the player base will be able to quote the original line by line. It definitely keeps this audience in mind. Where the initial audience was going in fully blind at a time when internet communication was in its infancy, Remake introduces a few particulars significantly earlier than the original, playing with an informed player's expectations. It's these choices that I'm most curious about from a narrative standpoint, and I'm unsure whether the entirety of this first installment will be enough to determine whether they pay off or not, never mind a four-hour demo.
However, none of this was what I was thinking as the sun set beyond the LAX skyline, unnoticed by myself and the two coworkers who had traveled to Square Enix with me for the demonstration. Instead, we were enthralled by how everything came together so well within the new combat system during our final boss battle of the day, watching as we swapped from Cloud's unnecessary (but cool-looking!) sword flourishes, to Tifa's flurry of punches, to the dance-like quality of Aerith's movement as she unleashed a barrage of spells. This joy, more than anything else, was what brought me back to that Christmas morning in high school, watching as Cloud miraculously survived a long fall through the roof of a church only to have an encounter that would change his life.