Major spoiler warning for Final Fantasy VII Remake.
I'll fully admit that I wasn't aboard the Final Fantasy VII Remake train. In fact, I actively disliked the game to start, and felt it was a truncated version of something I grew up loving. Gone was the brisk pacing and tight turn-based combat, replaced with expansive bloat and a strange blend of XV and XIII's battle systems.
"Look how they massacred my boy🀅," I moaned, frantically sprinting between menus, parries, and character sh💦ifts.
It's hard to know the exact moment that I turned coat. Somewhere in the last quarter of the game, something started to make sense. Then something else. Then another thing. Soon, practically every aspect of this gamꦯe I complained about felt like reason to praise it. I finally cra൲cked the code of the combat, which made the big fight against Rufus all the more satisfying on a mechanical level. Every piece of the story had fallen into place, which made me empathize with every character and understand the gravity of their struggle. And when I understood why I was fighting, in that last sprint, every component of the game's rich world-building fell into place.
Because everything I'd characterized as bloat wasn't - it was there for a reason. Rescuing those cats, finding th🃏e Angel of the Slums, sneaking into Jessie's house... those were all there to build out the world, to make me understand the lives that were at stake in the greater conflict. When the plate dropped on the slums, sacrificing its own upper class residents just to kill the p🍒oor, I felt a tinge of anger surge up in my heart.
These were the people that I'd talked to, shared drinks with, pಌlayed darts against. The children playing outside, the teacher struggling to make ends meet by♔ masquerading as a sex worker, the kind landlady who offered comrades shelter, and so many others. Shinra deemed these people unworthy of living, and was willing to kill their own in order to purge them from existence.
Final Fantasy VII Remake makes no concessions for bootlickers. It's an unapologetic virtual riot against capitalism. When I understood that, I truly learned to ♔love every aspect of this surprisingly radical text.
Numerous mechanical and aesthetic reasons to love this game aside, the thematic heft of the narrative hits home in major ways. Watching Tifa and Barret's very different approaches to lifelong subjugation is heartbreaking, as the player is given little reason to disagree with either of their beliefs. Tifa's call fo🤡r peace comes from a place of losing two communities in the span of a lifetime. Barret's comes from a place of lifelong subjugation that prevents him from being the father he wants to be, and sparks a fire of wanting to burn it all to the ground.
While this would be a great point for a weaker game to pull a real Bioshock Infinite and say, "both sides are good and bad, the only way out is through neutrality," Final Fantasy VII Remake isn't interested in reductive and h🧜armful whataboutisms, or in playing both sides. Through the course of their fifty-plus hour journey, the player begins to realize that taking no side is untenable💦. Not only that, but the game implores people to think on Tifa and Barret's conflicting ideologies, and to truly question the ethics of the former's attempts at stymieing the latter's righteous and justified attempted killing of Shinra's president.
By this game's end, there's no ambiguity about Shinra's evil. There's no redeeming trait to the Turks. There's no "corporations are good, actually" rhetoric. What Shinra has done to a whole populace is shown as truly and irrevocably beyond redemption. And as if to drive this home, the president is ultimately killed by Sephiroth - himself 🐷a symptom of Shinra's evil and oppressive grasp.
In the early game, it was hard to see where Final Fantasy VII Remake fell. Did it respect Cloud's milquetoast and ultimately regressive apolitical approach? Did it empathize with or demonize Barret's anger? Did it give credence to Tifa⛄'s call for peace? But as Aerith rallies the gang together at the climax, insisting that they put an end to Sephiroth, everything truly clicked.
Final Fantasy VII Remake is a game about the evil that corporations do. It's a game about the subjuga𓂃tion of the working class, and the righteous uprising that must be enacted on them to protect the planet. It's a game about the natural consequences of militarized industry, reflected in its insistence to s🐼topping Sephiroth's chaotic doing before all semblance of order is lost - making the iconic antagonist a physical manifestation of political blowback.
So that early stuff? The "filler," the "padding," the "wastes of time"... I appreciate them so much more now. They were the bedrock of this game's narrative and thematic crux for me, and without them, the overꩲall game would be a weaker package. Without them, I wouldn't appreciate the true extent of Shinra's damage, and I wouldn't be nearly as invested as I wound up being.
Final Fantasy VII Remake, then, is one of the most politically charged games in recent memory - and possibly ever. And that isn't just 𒊎because of its script. It's because of the gameplay, the side content, the slow and methodical build-up to its rousing crescendo. Every moving piece of thi♏s game coalesces to achieve that rare synthesis of plot and gameplay - the synthesis that most AAA games shy away from.
Every piece o🐲f this game is radical. And every piece is vit♊al.