In a week full of VALORANT coverage, Animal Crossing: New Horizons events and League of Legends and the NBA 2K Players Tournament hitting ESPN, I didn't expect the Final Fantasy VII Remake to take up as much of my time as it did.
I'm a big Final Fantasy fan, and FFVII is one of my favorites from the series. I've completed the original about a dozen times. That said, it's an evergreen game; I wasn't going to miss out on anything by playing it a day from now, or a week from now, and everything else on my docket was a *right now* kind of deal, you know?
But I made the mistake of firing up our review copy of the FFVII Remake the night before release, and I just. Kept. Going. The combat is challenging, the reimagining of areas I memorized in my childhood is mesmerizing, and the constant question of what's new and what's next drove me to some sleepless nights (with apologies to my wife and our puppies).
What follows is a stream of consciousness from the first 8 ½ chapters of the game, from leaping off the train at the start to a fair stopping point for avoiding spoilers for new and old players.
I'd seen it a bunch of times already, but that guy stomping on Aerith's flower still gets me way more tilted than I have any right to be.
The soldiers' outfits pretty much confirm that XCOM and Final Fantasy exist in the same universe.
Showing the Materia slots in the weapons is a small but oh-so-nice touch.
CURSING?! How dare they.
Cloud being a jerk without dialogue options to be nicer like in the original hurts me a bit. Wedge is so wholesome. Stop hurting my son's feelings.
As my colleague Emily Rand said during our demo, Heidegger had a major glow-up.
I'm only a half-hour in, and if Barret never screamed again, I would be so, so happy.
Not sure how I feel about this newfound romantic tension with Jessie. If she goes from just one of the gang to a love interest, that'd be a huge swerve on the original.
"Look, I'm involved in things." Same, Cloud. Same.
Really like the adjustments to how the reactor went down and the humanizing of it. The fact that the group was just OK with people getting hurt in the original game never sat well with me. To that point, seeing Shinra employees living in the slums really hits you. They aren't some far-off villain anymore whom you never see humanized.
Chapter 3. I have finally run into a graphical thing I don't like. Gwen's mouth animations, at least on the pre-release patch, remind me of Mass Effect: Andromeda's. Her facial contortions will haunt me when I sleep.
The one-on-one "missions" like the one with Tifa are such a great addition. This is what the remake is all about: making connections with characters you didn't have before. Character-building missions and the quests to flesh this out were really cool concepts.
"Sorry to keep you thirsty boys waiting" is a hell of a line, Jessie. No one will take that the wrong way at all.
The reappraisal of Cloud as a guy looking for a quick buck rather than someone who seems like a legendary mercenary is a welcome change. It makes it clear that this guy just kinda popped up out of nowhere, which feeds into ... well ... future stuff! Spoilery stuff. If you know, you know.
Wedge is way, way, way faster than I gave him credit for. Crazy stamina, too. 10/10 would squad up again.
Seeing other SOLDIER members is pretty cool, but Roche is weird. It also makes it clear that most of the Cloud-like SOLDIER members were off the leash. Could be interesting to see what they make of this if more SOLDIERs show up.
Ooh, new AVALANCHE cells. More people to fight, or more allies?
"Why do you have to be such a hard-ass, bro?"
"I ain't your bro."
A Wedge-Cloud reality series would be a top-10 Netflix show right now.
Are ... are the cats' names references to Redman and Notorious B.I.G? Did Wedge just become my best friend?
Cloud really needs to work on shutting doors behind him.
GHOSTS.
I feel so much worse for shutting Jessie down now.
The toughest thing I've had to do in this game so far is beat Wedge's darts score. Luckily, that paid off with some Luck Up Materia.
"You can change the equipment of allies who have left the party."
So what you're saying is, I don't have to strip Aerith of everything she owns right before that big moment this time around?
"You think I care about the casualty rate?" -- Heidegger is handsome, cocky and savage all of a sudden
Every time I start thinking of muting the game just so I don't have to have Barret yell at me more, he sings the original game's fight victory song, and it makes me just happy enough to stick with it a little longer.
One of the most difficult parts of this game was, thankfully, nerfed in the new release. The lever-pressing minigame now actually has dialogue and audio cues. I am a lever-shifting master now. The excitement that Tifa and Barret have over managing to press a stick upward at the same time has to be a nod to how difficult that was in the original FFVII, right?
Gotta love the energy of the guy saying he needs the train to get home or his wife will find out where he had been post-reactor explosion. Priorities, you know?
Seeing Aerith instead of Aeris sparks joy. She also drops a "let's mosey," which brings to mind a fantastic series from Tim Rogers over at Kotaku in which he looked back at the subtle differences between the Japanese and English versions of the original Final Fantasy VII. One of the big things I'm looking for as I go through the game is how Square balances having time and past experience to get the translation right vs. making sure they don't stray too far from what a U.S. audience expects from characters it has spent so much time with in the past. I'd imagine that's why Barret is still constantly angry rather than the chill, Solid Snake-type that Rogers suggested his Japanese persona portrayed.
This completes the serious and insightful portion of this diary. Now, back to memes and dad jokes.
Look, they made Reno and Rude more than joke fodder!
Related: Even small-scale boss fights like these are pretty intense. The difficulty spike is real, especially if you don't have a variety of spells equipped. I didn't have Wind Materia for Rude, and it was rough.
I wonder what my life could have been like if I'd had an elementary or middle school teacher like Ms. Folia.
Hey, look, it's Cloud, one of the finest warriors on the planet and also an idiot who can't walk down a hallway without tripping over everything and waking people up.
I'm really glad someone at Square loves high-fives as much as I do.
While I'm very tempted to narrate through the Don Corneo portion of the story, it's way more intricate than it was in the past, and I just can't spoil that for anyone. I'll leave you with this: The Hell House is still the most annoying boss in this game.