Final Fantasy VII Remake (with nostalgia and extra content)

Husky_Khan

Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
Founder
It's not just for movies anymore, yet another high quality (or at least high priced) remake/reboot of a popular video game series is going to be released on April 10th, this time for a legend in video game history, 1997's Final Fantasy VII.



It certainly looks beautiful, though on a glance the combat does look a bit intimidating to me, but then again everything that uses a gamepad and isn't turn based is intimidating to me.

Final Fantasy VII was a pretty big landmark in video game and RPG gaming history and is probably the most famous Final Fantasy release in general with characters like Cloud Strife, Tifa, Aeris and of course Sephiroth entering the gamer lexicon. Just seeing it gives me a dose of nostalgia over a game that I was probably too young to truly enjoy the breadth of and play through all the way. But I remember the atmosphere, the sweeping story and settings and the multilayered plot and journey the very distinct and likable characters went through.

Not sure if I'll attempt a playthrough of the remake, but it's definitely making a strong argument for me to sink time into a failed playthrough.

At the very least, it'll be better then the movies IIRC.
 
I was looking forward to it, until they said it was going to be released episodically; then they revealed it wasn't going to be turn-based, and I just could not care less at that point.
 
Haven’t played any Final Fantasy games before, tbh, though I’ll hold out for it to be completed

And hopefully it doesn’t turn out like what I heard FFXV turned out with constant extra DLC’s to expand on stuff
 
Terthna said:
I was looking forward to it, until they said it was going to be released episodically; then they revealed it wasn't going to be turn-based, and I just could not care less at that point.
Click to expand...

Yeah the real time thing looks like it could be very difficult to get the hang of for me... after watching some of these early lets plays. It might just look intimidating, I dunno.

The episodic content doesn't surprise me though. The original game back in 1997 came out on three CD's or whatever and was a huuuugely ambitious RPG game with lots of hours of content and gameplay, so the fact they managed to update it as they did with such graphics and layouts really made me wonder how they could put such a big and expansive game in "one" modern updated reboot so to speak. It's world is easily as large as something like a Fallout or Skyrim game but the graphical detail here and everything is definitely a step up even if the gameplay itself might be more scripted. So the game being released in episodes is a bit of a concern in that I don't wanna buy it unless I can buy it all at once (like a episodic Telltale game or the Master Chief Collection) or after it's all released.

But I won't hold the episodic content against them considering how broad the original game was.

CarlManvers2019 said:
Haven’t played any Final Fantasy games before, tbh, though I’ll hold out for it to be completed

And hopefully it doesn’t turn out like what I heard FFXV turned out with constant extra DLC’s to expand on stuff
Click to expand...

Seeing as how it's a reboot/remake of an established game it would seem less likely that it'd be weighed down by DLC but... I wouldn't have a frame of reference. The only Final Fantasy game I've played is FFVII and one of the earlier ones... that I can't recall the number off of the top of my head... those earlier FF games had different numbering whether in Japan or America IIRC. But there will be new content apparently, which is nice... I'm assuming most of it will be in the episodic game releases as is though.
 
My brother ragequit the demo at the first boss. Mostly because his allergies were flaring up and his eyes were watery and itchy to the point of both distraction and vision impairment despite glasses. But he also found the action RPG system frustrating, and hated trying to fight the boss with all of its quirks and the unblockable and undodgeable ccharacter snatch.

I've yet to try it myself. Been too busy with FFXIV. I admit that while watching him I couldn't help but give color commentary on the characters and story. It mostly amounted to "Huh, the Avalanche crew is getting real characterization this time", "Jessie is kinda hot", "Jessie wants to bone Cloud hard, looks like the Tifa/Cloud and Aeris/Cloud shippers are facing a new challenger", and "Barret is a raging asshole zealot". The latter makes me wonder if they're going to keep his old community's central occupation of coal miner or not. :cool:
 
Avoiding going into spoilers, I recommend everyone reading this thread to play the original Final Fantasy 7 on steam or elsewhere first. The director of the remake, Nomura, couldn't resist changing the circumstances and details rather drastically.
Suffice to say, the cast didn't leave Midgar like they did in the original.
 
Our one time Youtube benefactor apparently played through the game already. Review will be forthcoming next week but one thing came up...



Looks like despite being a "third" of the original Final Fantasy VII game, it took him about forty hours to finish his first playthrough which seems to indicate the game is obviously far more fleshed out (and not just graphically) from the classic RPG it was based off of. Forty hours as a minimum game time isn't too shabby for a full priced game release, if the game is any good of course.
 
So far I'm hearing nothing but good things on this. This, plus Spiderman 4 have convinced me to buy a PS4. If only because of these two games.
 
I binged the entire game over the Easter long weekend. Not quite to 101% completion, but close enough.

The original Final Fantasy VII was a defining game of my childhood, so I'm basically the target audience I guess, so take my comments with that in mind.

I loved it.

The combat system is excellent -- they leaned a bit more into the "RPG" side of the Action RPG formula and it really works. Button mashing and rolling around will only get you so far, to really excel at the combat you need to think tactically, using the real time stuff to move around and set up positioning for your actually impactful decisions: how to spend your ATB charges. Setting up your weapon upgrades, equipping materia effectively, and actually understanding how to leverage the different special abilities are super important, especially on Hard. I've not actually tried the turn-based mode that's included, but it's really not surprising to me that the action part can be completely automated away with a little tuning.

They added a lot of extra content that isn't present in the original, added additional characters and expanded the characterizations of everyone who was in the original. This is a bit uneven in general, but averaged out they did a great job.

Cloud actually spends time trying to build a rep as a mercenary, rather than it just being an informed part of his character. Tifa has an actual personality that isn't just "vaguely nice person with cartoonishly large breasts". (Side-note, never understood the complaints about her Remake design being toned down/censored. The sports bra look squishes her chest down a tiny bit, but any time you see her even close to side-on you can see the massive back problems the poor girl must have. She's stacked. And her miniskirt is tiny.)

By far the most controversial change is the addition of the dementor-like ghosts you see in the trailers. I can get into my opinion on this whole aspect if people are interested, but spoiler-free I'll just say it's a bit annoying and lame in a few places, but you get plenty of answers by the end, it's super heavy-handed but I see what Nomura was trying to do, and I like the way it all resolves in the end. It's actually this new aspect to the story and its resolution, I think, more than anything, that makes the Remake still feel like a "complete" game, even though it ends where it does, basically in the same spot as the end of the original game's Disc 1.
 
makkapakka said:
By far the most controversial change is the addition of the dementor-like ghosts you see in the trailers. I can get into my opinion on this whole aspect if people are interested, but spoiler-free I'll just say it's a bit annoying and lame in a few places, but you get plenty of answers by the end, it's super heavy-handed but I see what Nomura was trying to do, and I like the way it all resolves in the end. It's actually this new aspect to the story and its resolution, I think, more than anything, that makes the Remake still feel like a "complete" game, even though it ends where it does, basically in the same spot as the end of the original game's Disc 1.
Click to expand...

Can it still simply jus be referred to as a Remake?
 
makkapakka said:
No but also yes. It's a difficult question to answer without getting into spoilers.
Click to expand...

Okay, that said, no offense never played any final fantasy games except Dirge of Cerberus more than a decade ago....so not really gonna be pissed about spoilers

Have seen gameplay and cutscenes though, I think Remake plans on adding other stuff from the other FFVII games
 
CarlManvers2019 said:
Okay, that said, no offense never played any final fantasy games except Dirge of Cerberus more than a decade ago....so not really gonna be pissed about spoilers
Click to expand...
Alright, well, I can get into a bit more in a spoiler box...

The Remake explicitly takes place in a parallel dimension, an alternate reality, to the original game. Further, this parallel timeline is being affected by the events of the main original timeline.

So it's kind of both a Remake and a Sequel.

The Planet in FFVII is literally a living entity, and creates powerful, monstrous antibodies to protect itself from harm (as a Dirge of Cerberus player, you're likely already familiar with this). The "Nomura ghosts" are another of these antibodies, similar in purpose to the Weapons, though instead of dealing with physical threats they're custodians of fate and destiny, who are deployed by the Planet to make sure that the timeline plays out as it should.

They interfere with the protagonists a number of times, down to outright attacking you several times, but seem inconsistent and sometimes they help you instead of hindering you. If you're familiar with the original plot, it pretty quickly becomes obvious that they interfere every time some ripple effect is threatening to majorly change the plot. I'd basically worked out what they were by the time the game actually outright explained it.

Somehow Sephiroth (the OG's main villain) is aware of the original timeline and is Taking Steps to change things and beat these antibodies, so he can actually win instead of being defeated. It's not made completely clear how, given you still interact with him very little (though still a hell of a lot more than you did at this point in the original game), though I expect the explanation to be revealed in the next game. Might be time travel -- Final Fantasy games obviously don't shy away from time travel as a plot device (see the very first game). Might just be as simple as him picking up 'echoes' between worlds. Who knows. Even Cloud is getting visions of the original game timeline, up to and including oblique references to Aerith's death.

There's a big confrontation at the very end where Sephiroth tries to convince Cloud to team up with him to defeat the Nomura ghosts and break destiny. Cloud rejects him, but once everyone talks it out they decide that the future they saw in the visions (Meteor, the destruction of Midgar, Aerith's death) isn't good enough and they want to break destiny anyway so they can try for a better result this time around. You defeat a giant manifestation of the Nomura ghosts and successfully destroy them, breaking destiny. You get a final boss fight against an incarnation of Sephiroth, manifested through one of the "reunion" black-cloaked figures from the original game, and it's basically like playing the final fight from Advent Children. The fight is pretty good.

At the end, the group resolves to leave Midgar and go after Sephiroth to stop him, following in the footsteps of the original timeline versions of themselves, but no longer necessarily tied to the original story, free to forge a new path ahead.

It's hard not to see the Nomura ghosts as a really heavy-handed metaphor for the expectations of the fans who just wanted a pure remake of the game with nothing changed, literally forcing you to follow the original plot slavishly even when it doesn't completely make sense. You (representing Nomura) reject this and break destiny, freeing yourself from the expectations/timeline of the original game.

It's not great, and it's far from the best thing about the Remake (that would be the Honeybee Inn sequence, which is amaaazing), but it's not so terribly done that it ruins the rest or anything. I finished the game with positive feelings and excited to see what is going to happen in the next game, given that they basically just broke the whole thing open and are free to basically do what they want now.

But yeah, controversial. Some people are going to absolutely hate it.
 
makkapakka said:
Alright, well, I can get into a bit more in a spoiler box...

The Remake explicitly takes place in a parallel dimension, an alternate reality, to the original game. Further, this parallel timeline is being affected by the events of the main original timeline.

So it's kind of both a Remake and a Sequel.

The Planet in FFVII is literally a living entity, and creates powerful, monstrous antibodies to protect itself from harm (as a Dirge of Cerberus player, you're likely already familiar with this). The "Nomura ghosts" are another of these antibodies, similar in purpose to the Weapons, though instead of dealing with physical threats they're custodians of fate and destiny, who are deployed by the Planet to make sure that the timeline plays out as it should.

They interfere with the protagonists a number of times, down to outright attacking you several times, but seem inconsistent and sometimes they help you instead of hindering you. If you're familiar with the original plot, it pretty quickly becomes obvious that they interfere every time some ripple effect is threatening to majorly change the plot. I'd basically worked out what they were by the time the game actually outright explained it.

Somehow Sephiroth (the OG's main villain) is aware of the original timeline and is Taking Steps to change things and beat these antibodies, so he can actually win instead of being defeated. It's not made completely clear how, given you still interact with him very little (though still a hell of a lot more than you did at this point in the original game), though I expect the explanation to be revealed in the next game. Might be time travel -- Final Fantasy games obviously don't shy away from time travel as a plot device (see the very first game). Might just be as simple as him picking up 'echoes' between worlds. Who knows. Even Cloud is getting visions of the original game timeline, up to and including oblique references to Aerith's death.

There's a big confrontation at the very end where Sephiroth tries to convince Cloud to team up with him to defeat the Nomura ghosts and break destiny. Cloud rejects him, but once everyone talks it out they decide that the future they saw in the visions (Meteor, the destruction of Midgar, Aerith's death) isn't good enough and they want to break destiny anyway so they can try for a better result this time around. You defeat a giant manifestation of the Nomura ghosts and successfully destroy them, breaking destiny. You get a final boss fight against an incarnation of Sephiroth, manifested through one of the "reunion" black-cloaked figures from the original game, and it's basically like playing the final fight from Advent Children. The fight is pretty good.

At the end, the group resolves to leave Midgar and go after Sephiroth to stop him, following in the footsteps of the original timeline versions of themselves, but no longer necessarily tied to the original story, free to forge a new path ahead.

It's hard not to see the Nomura ghosts as a really heavy-handed metaphor for the expectations of the fans who just wanted a pure remake of the game with nothing changed, literally forcing you to follow the original plot slavishly even when it doesn't completely make sense. You (representing Nomura) reject this and break destiny, freeing yourself from the expectations/timeline of the original game.

It's not great, and it's far from the best thing about the Remake (that would be the Honeybee Inn sequence, which is amaaazing), but it's not so terribly done that it ruins the rest or anything. I finished the game with positive feelings and excited to see what is going to happen in the next game, given that they basically just broke the whole thing open and are free to basically do what they want now.

But yeah, controversial. Some people are going to absolutely hate it.
Click to expand...

Okay, say

I checked the wiki before, any chance that JENOVA will be explained as to what exactly it is, or if there are more of it. I mean it seems to me that there's a good chance that if it's part of a species, there are multiple planets with life around the universe that have also been attacked
 
CarlManvers2019 said:
Okay, say

I checked the wiki before, any chance that JENOVA will be explained as to what exactly it is, or if there are more of it. I mean it seems to me that there's a good chance that if it's part of a species, there are multiple planets with life around the universe that have also been attacked
Click to expand...
It's hard to say -- they've left it very open-ended as to what they'll do going forward. JENOVA's nature being more explained is a possibility. They don't really give you much information at all about her in the Remake, likely because it's already pretty packed story-wise.
 
makkapakka said:
It's hard to say -- they've left it very open-ended as to what they'll do going forward. JENOVA's nature being more explained is a possibility. They don't really give you much information at all about her in the Remake, likely because it's already pretty packed story-wise.
Click to expand...

Okay

I always gotta say it's kinda weird for a single small planet is home to the main plot when a wider universe definitely exists
 
CarlManvers2019 said:
Okay

I always gotta say it's kinda weird for a single small planet is home to the main plot when a wider universe definitely exists
Click to expand...
I'm going to not put this bit in a box because it's not really spoilers, and I dislike it when threads just turn into nothing but spoiler boxes.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with the other games in the Final Fantasy series, but Final Fantasy X-2 has a very young technologically-minded character named Shinra, who has theories about using Spira's (their world) Farplane as a power source (in much the same way that Shinra in FFVII uses the Lifestream for power). It's implied, but not outright stated, that FFX is a prequel of sorts to FFVII, with Shinra being part of an Spiran expedition into space and presumably finding Gaia (the FFVII world) and settling it, after the Ancients were mostly wiped out by JENOVA.

The Remake has a nod/reference to this -- in Shinra Tower, can see a presentation about the history of Shinra. There's an easily-missed black and white photo hanging on the wall, a group shot of the original founders of the company, and you can clearly see a man in the middle wearing the same distinctive helmet that Shinra in FFX-2 wears.
 
makkapakka said:
I binged the entire game over the Easter long weekend. Not quite to 101% completion, but close enough.

The original Final Fantasy VII was a defining game of my childhood, so I'm basically the target audience I guess, so take my comments with that in mind.

I loved it.

The combat system is excellent -- they leaned a bit more into the "RPG" side of the Action RPG formula and it really works. Button mashing and rolling around will only get you so far, to really excel at the combat you need to think tactically, using the real time stuff to move around and set up positioning for your actually impactful decisions: how to spend your ATB charges. Setting up your weapon upgrades, equipping materia effectively, and actually understanding how to leverage the different special abilities are super important, especially on Hard. I've not actually tried the turn-based mode that's included, but it's really not surprising to me that the action part can be completely automated away with a little tuning.

They added a lot of extra content that isn't present in the original, added additional characters and expanded the characterizations of everyone who was in the original. This is a bit uneven in general, but averaged out they did a great job.

Cloud actually spends time trying to build a rep as a mercenary, rather than it just being an informed part of his character. Tifa has an actual personality that isn't just "vaguely nice person with cartoonishly large breasts". (Side-note, never understood the complaints about her Remake design being toned down/censored. The sports bra look squishes her chest down a tiny bit, but any time you see her even close to side-on you can see the massive back problems the poor girl must have. She's stacked. And her miniskirt is tiny.)

By far the most controversial change is the addition of the dementor-like ghosts you see in the trailers. I can get into my opinion on this whole aspect if people are interested, but spoiler-free I'll just say it's a bit annoying and lame in a few places, but you get plenty of answers by the end, it's super heavy-handed but I see what Nomura was trying to do, and I like the way it all resolves in the end. It's actually this new aspect to the story and its resolution, I think, more than anything, that makes the Remake still feel like a "complete" game, even though it ends where it does, basically in the same spot as the end of the original game's Disc 1.
Click to expand...

Dude, thank you. This is exactly what I was hoping for.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 1 (members: 0, guests: 1)
Back
Top