168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Remake is five years old today, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:by the standar✱ds of its PS4 stꦍablemates, that makes it eligible for a remake of its own (or, at the very least, a remaster). More personally, it means that five years ago, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Square Enix's RPG converted me from a sporadic Final Fantasy player to a fan who will be there 𓆉on day one for each new release. A frustrated fan, that is, who will be frustrated playing any other game now, because nothing else hits quite lik༒e FF7R.

All The Time In The World

Final Fantasy 7♉ Remake arrived at just the right time for me to devote an outrageous number of hours to it. I'd been working a ton of hours through the early days of 2020, but then COVID hit. As a freelancer during a time of unstabl🐻e budgets, I suddenly found myself with a lot of time on my hands.

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Final Faꦫntasy 7 Remake quickly became an all-time favorite. I loved its characters. I'd played a bit of the original game, but found Cloud was so much more compelling here. Some of that was down to the meta-layer that Square Enix added for the remake, which had Cloud haunted by visions of other realities. In the original, Cloud often feels like a stoic badass. But in the remake (thanks to good writing and Cody Christian's layered performance) he feels more like a vulnerable kid pretending to be a tough guy.

The supporting cast is vivid, too. Party members like Barrett, Tifa, Aerith, and Red 13 make it a joy to journey through Midgar, but I was m🐟ore surprised by how fleshed out bit characters like Jesse, Biggs, and Wedge get to be. To the extent that their deaths, which felt like footnotes in the original, become loadbearing emotional scenes in the remake.

I love the spectacular bosses that take forever to fight and the hybrid real-time/turn-based combat system that keeps them fresh and challenging throughout the lengthy run-time. I love the setting, too. By focusing on Midgar, FF7R is able to give us a fully-realized cyberpunk world. I love how crowded the Sector 7 slums feel, how oppressive it is to have the Plate constantly hanging over your head. I love climbing up to take on Shinra, and seeing the world stretch out below. The moments of quiet spectacle — like when Avalanche parachutes from the Plate b♉ack down to the Sector 7 slums — provide a welcome break from the combat that forms the spine of the game.

As much as I love the characters, Midgar is the star of the show. Which may explain why I've had trouble locking in to the FF entries that have been released in the half-decade⛄ since.

Remake Remade My Relationship To Final Fantasy

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I had dabbled in Final Fantasy games at various points before Remake. I finished the GBA port of the first game, played a ton of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tactics Advance, dabbled with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Crystal Chronicles, and looked longingly at the Final Fantasy XI PC box my dad bought me before realizing it was an MMO that would require a) a subscription to play and b) that players be 13 or older. I picked up 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 many years later when it came to Switch. I played mos𓄧t of the Midꦜgar section, then got distracted and didn’t come back to finish it until I’d rolled credits on Remake.

Once I finished Remake, I dove back into Final ﷺFantasy 7 and played it all the way through. After exiting Midgar, though, I quickly realized that nothing hits quite the same way as the game's opening area. The rest of the game is good, don't get me wrong, but Midgar is as good as video game settings get, an artfully realized world unto itself that feels huge thanks to pre-rendered environments 𒁃that suggest so much more than Square Enix ever could have shown at the time.

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I went into 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth with high hopes, but ended up disappointed. Most of that was because no game ha꧅s ever been structured more strangely than 𒅌Rebirth is. But, even if it had picked a lane, it wouldn't have had Midgar, and nothing it does offer is quite as compelling. I was similarly frustrated with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 16 and that game's problems were also a mixture of structural issues (it's ridiculously linear) and a failure to⛄ deliver a compelling world and engaging leads.

Five years later, I'm waiting for something, anything, that feels like FF7R feels. Barring Final Fanta♈sy 7 Remake: Remake, I imagine I'll be waiting a long time.

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