When Square Enix finally threw its hands up, gave in to the fans, and cried "Fine! We'll remake Final Fantasy VII! Now get off our backs!" there was a palpable feeling of excitement. Fans of FF7, the Final Fantasy series, JRPGs, pretty anime boys and girls, giant swords, and video games in general were overjoyed with the announcement. Anticipation steadi🅷ly rose over the 5 years it took for the remake to be finished and as improbable as it may seem, the game is finally out and can be enjoyed by all. Needless to say, it's received a pretty positive reaction due to its fun action RPG gameplay and the lethal dose of nostalgia♛ that it provides.
It's also kind of a mess.
Don't get us wrong, there are things to love about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy VII Remake. But the team 🍒behind this project wanted to expand and build on the original story to make it more engaging for modern audiences. Instead, they made a bloated, inefficient, and perhaps unnecessary remake that doesn't feel like the shiny, perfect retel🍸ling of Cloud, Barret, Tifa, and Aerith's adventure that we were hoping for. It's far from terrible, but there are a lot of decisions that were made for the sake of keeping the player playing rather than keeping the player invested.
Who Can Forget That Time You Gathered Cats?
There are plenty of memorable moments from the original game that have been burned into our brains to this very day. Many of those moments are recreated in FF7 Remake. The opening scene with Cloud, Barret, and the rest hopping off the train and blowing up the reactor. Crashing through the church and meeting Aerith. Cloud wearing a dress to get to Don Corneo. The plate falling on Sector 7. Collecting cats for a little girl for no apparen🧜t reason.
Wait, that last one wasn't in theౠ original game, was it? What about the time you found missing children for a teacher who turns to be a burlesque dancer? No? What about breaking into Jessie's parents' house while everyone eats pizza? That wasn't in the old game either? Well, at least these moments add valuable insight and flesh out the story in significant ways....Oh, hold on, they don't? Huh, it's almost as if they were put in to make the story seem longer than it really is. How about that?
Final Fantasy VII Remake's goal of expanding the story is a worthy cause as there were several plotholes or loose threads left in the original's tale. B🅘ut some of these additions seem so superfluous. Did we really need to meet Tifa's landlord? Why is there a Robin Hood-esque thief in the slums? What is with Wedge's unhealthy fixation with cats? These new tidbits of information don't add anything important to the narrative or answer any pressing questions. They're just there to establish how Tifa can afford her rent.
The plan for this remake was to expand on Midgar and allow us to get a better look at one of the most famous cities in JRPG history, but that doesn't really happen. We only stick with Sector 5, 6, 7, and Wall Market, with only occasional glimpses of other nicer or new areas. We don't even get to know the people in the slums as most of them are just forgettable, identical NPCs with little to no character aside from featured players like Marle or Johnny. Despite being prettier and expanded, the Midgar of FF7 Remake somehow💮 feels more cr🎀amped and less interesting than the original game.
Eco-Terrorism Shouldn't Be This Much Of A Slog
This padding bleeds into the gameplay as well. There are side quests galore in FF7 Remake, but few of them hold any real substance. So many of them are simple fetch quests, requiring you to travel to one area, fight some enemies and/or talk to an NPC, and then return to the quest-giver to receive an item or piece of materia. Lather, rinse, repeat. These are the only real optional activities available aside from fighting in the Corneo Colosseum or Shinra Combat Simulator. They add nothing to the game aside from giving the player some extra busy work and a chance to get to kno🌱w the guy who runs the item shop in Sector 7.
The feeling of the developers struggling to stretch the game out to a reasonable length is evident in the actual m👍issions as well. It's a common occurrence for your party to be close to their objective only for the ground to crumble beneath them forcing them to find an alternate route or for there to be an arbitrary obstacle blocking the path. This then leads to a long and often tedious process of having to perform some kind of chore, like turning off sun lamps or activating switches to open doors. This is sometimes made even worse by enemies or bosses that aren't difficult, but instead, just soak up damage like a sponge and take forever to defeat (looking at you Hell House!) This definitely adds more playtime since you have to run all over the place, but just because you can find a way to add 10 hours to a game by making the player do menial, repetitive tasks doesn't mean you should.
Even the most delightful new moments usually have something dull tacked on for the sake of extra content. The whole Andrea dance sequence tꦗhat leads to Cloud winding up in a dress is enjoyable, but did we need to suffer through a mostly dumb side quest from Chocobo Sam or Madame M to get to that point? Getting to see Cloud goof around in a playground is swell, but did we need to manipulate giant mechanical hands to allow Aerith to cross a gap in the Collapsed Expressway just to get there? The꧙ Colosseum contains some great battles, but why did we have to fight Hell House? WHY DID WE HAVE TO FIGHT HELL HOUSE?!
All this padding ruins the pacing of the game. 🔴It can sometimes take hours to get through a boring dungeon just so you can finally arrive at fun or interesting sequences and areas. Some of the best moments feel less impactful becaജuse we have to jump through more hoops to get to the parts we know. It's hard to muster up some enthusiasm about the big climactic Sector 7 plate drop when you've spent the better part of the prior few hours wandering through a sewer and fighting ghosts in a Train Graveyard.
Please, No More Filler, We're Already Full
There's simultaneously too much and too little to do. Yes, some of the rewards for completing these simple side quests are quite good, but that makes them feel like work that we have to do so Tifa can learn Firaga rather than something we want to do for fun. The main reason people wanted a remake of Final Fantasy 7 was to see the world they pictured in their heads brought to life with stunning graphics and exciting gameplay. No one signed up for this so they could do annoying timed button presses or help orphans fight off Hedgehog Pies. When it isn't trading in on our collective nostalgia, there's a distinct lack of substance to most of what you do in FF7 Remake.
As everyone knows, FF7 becomes far more open-ended once the party leaves Midgar. In order for this whole Remake endeavor to be worthwhile, future installments need t🐭hat feeling of exploration and wonder. If all we end up doing in Wutai or Cosmo Canyon is finding herbs for doctors and searching for cats then it's going to start to feel like the nostalgic cash grab we all feared this project would be.
FF7 Remake is still a worthwhile experience for the most part. The gameplay is fun, the scenery is beautiful, and there are some good moments that successfully invoke those fuzzy warm memories. There's just too much filler in this part of the series. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The next part i🐲s currently in the planning stages - so, guess we'll☂ see it in 2025? - and we hope that Tetsuya Nomura and his team decide to devote more effort to make the n𓂃ew content worth our time instead of a waste of time.
Also, serio�🌺�usly, that Hell House fight sucked. Don't do that again.