The Final Fantasy VII Remake is a Mistake

Originally published June 2015.

E3, the biggest game conference of the year, has been taking place over the past few days, and so far, a fair amount of big stories and impressive trailers have been released to showcase the various titles around the corner and years away. Most of it doesn't apply to me because I don't have a next-gen console, and my computer will struggle to keep up with whatever graphics they have for their PC releases, but still, I've checked out what has been shown. There have been some interesting developments, to say the least. While this E3 isn't necessarily the biggest and best it's ever been in terms of what gamers have to look forward to, it may be the most surprising. Not only is Last Guardian--the apparently not-cancelled game from the makers of Shadow of the Colossus--back from the dead after 4 years of complete silence about its production, but Square-Enix has announced that it is making the monumental mistake of remaking Final Fantasy VII, the most popular game of the franchise.

Before going any further into my argument as to why this is a mistake, I'll say that I mean it strictly from Square-Enix's standpoint. As far as gamers are concerned, they're going to get another Final Fantasy game on the shelves, the world will keep turning, and the fans will eat it up. Whether or not the fans will like it, or if it will make a big enough impact on the modern gaming market as the original is another story. I don't think the world will end, nor do I think that it's really so bad that a company wants to resell a game title that has meant so much to people. The problem is that by remaking Final Fantasy VII, Square-Enix is asking for trouble for a number of different reasons.

Square's Real Problem

The world and its people have changed since Final Fantasy VII was released in 1997.

The technological limitations of the time, how difficult it was to gain insight to other people's cultures, and the fact that the market was not over-saturated with other similar games are important factors as to why Final Fantasy VII was such a success in 1997. JRPG's and their anime inspirations weren't common in the US back then. We didn't have easy access to Japanese media and culture through a functional internet. Games and gamers were of a different breed as well. It was the home console market with people who wanted to stay inside and play on their Playstations for hours on end, because we had the time to do that.

Now, those kids have grown up and are part of the world that has seen the internet change everything. Some of us, myself included, have seen enough anime to know the cliches and tropes that are common in JRPG storytelling and have lost interest in the genre as a result. As a consumer market, we are busier than ever, with less time to play at home for hours on our consoles. It makes more sense to play a small indie game for the 15 minutes we have free, or to play games on our phones, than to jump on something like an 80+ hour JRPG with a lot of grinding. Japan's own long-standing game companies Konami and Nintendo have said that they want to focus more on mobile device gaming than ever before because that is where the market has gone, especially in Japan. Final Fantasy VII can (and will) fit on a phone, but not its HD remake.

The Purpose of a Remake

What is the purpose of a remake? I think people tend to forget the reason and impose their own self-importance into the definition. When a movie remake is announced of a classic movie, people might scoff and say, "It didn't need a remake," which indicates to me that they're missing the point. No movie or game "needs" a remake. If it exists and was good, there is no "need" for a remake and there never will be.

If the source had some good ideas, but wasn't executed well, it lacked the necessary resources, or didn't succeed in making a cultural splash, it's more (artistically) understandable why a remake should be made. It's like a second chance for its creators to realize the dream or a chance for someone else to take it to another level.

This scenario is less frequent and certainly not the case for Final Fantasy VII. Though VII is an ugly game by today's standards, when it was initially released in 1997, it was a technical powerhouse showing off what was capable of the hardware at the time. Plus, it was immensely successful immediately and has garnered countless fans who have stayed loyal for almost 20 years. These same fans have been calling for a remake ever since the technology improved beyond that of the original release.

Looks great, right?

What many don't realize is that when remakes are made of "classics," like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Robocop, or Friday the 13th, for example, the remakes are not for them. The modern remake is intended to redesign and re-purpose the material for a new audience that may have missed out on the original. In some ways, it's intended to socially phase out the original.

Kids who were born in 1997 likely have not played Final Fantasy VII and wouldn't want to based on how it looks. When they've grown up with games like Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty, why would they want to play something that looks worse than The Lawnmower Man? They are, however turning 18 this year, becoming independent and capable of making their own purchases. What better time than now to announce a version of the game they've heard so much about, in a format that they might want to play

So now we enter the moral dilemma of remake territory. Since gaming has changed so much in the past 18 years, it will be a lot tougher to hook and captivate audiences with the same mechanics from 1997--good luck getting someone who is used to the instant gratification of modern gaming to raise a golden chocobo to get the hidden Knights of the Nine summon. So to get that new audience, they're going to need to make some significant changes to how the game works, and certainly more than a simple superficial makeover.

Oh, but change is a double-edged sword when making a remake, especially with so many fans who made it popular in the first place have such nostalgic attachment to the title. If you don't change enough, the remake feels even more pointless, like the remake of The Omen from 2006 or Psycho from 1998 for instance, where practically nothing new is added to the material. If you change too much, however, you risk alienating the loyal fans who loved the original so much. I'm sure there are fans on either side of the remake change fence who think that just superficial changes are enough and the side that wants more out of the remake.

There's also the chance that they might take it a step further and present it as more of a "reboot" so that even though the title may be the same, and it may include the same characters, there is a fair amount of re-imagining taking place and that the experience is going to be very different from the original. This can have its own backlash, however, even if the finished product is good. If you want an example, look no further than DMC: Devil May Cry. Critically praised for trying to breathe some new different life into the franchise, but panned by die-hard fans of Devil May Cry, especially for the new Dante's look, DMC was considered a solid game by many. Yet, it was hit hard by the initial backlash of franchise fans. They were extremely pissed off, saying nasty things about this game before it even came out, simply based on how Dante looked. If fans of a franchise like Devil May Cry can react this way before the game even comes out--about something as minor as how a character looks--without even thinking about how the game plays, what does that mean for a game with as many fans as Final Fantasy VII?

Just seeing this makes me want to start an angry forum post

I thought it was for these reasons that Square-Enix has been re-releasing the same game over and over. I've been telling my friends for the past few years, "If Square is smart, they'll never remake Final Fantasy VII. They have a golden goose." They can keep making games, movies, and spin-offs of the title and continue to fund their reserves as long as the die-hard fans who are still aching for anything related to the game exist. They've already produced a full-length movie and two spin-off video games based on FF VII, all of which were financial successes. I didn't care for the movie myself, as it was the final nail in the coffin for my opinion on the franchise. And the spin-off PS2 game Dirge of Cerberus was a mess, but at least Crisis Core on the PSP was decent.

They've had enough press conferences about something related to Final Fantasy VII on so many platforms, with its fans assuming/hoping that it was a remake announcement, that it's become a running joke. When they announced the re-release of the original game for the PS4 not a few months ago, people were hot with excitement for a remake announcement, only to be disappointed that it's just the same game on another console, again. I think it was partially because of the social backlash of that particular press conference that Square finally caved and decided to announce they were going to do a remake. The trailer that was released at E3 was something they probably put together after one of their community managers had a panic attack from seeing the onslaught of disappointed FF fans on Reddit.

You can almost taste the disappointment

The Risk

If Square-Enix wants this remake to succeed, they can't just make Final Fantasy VII again with new graphics. They have to make a brand new game, and not only that, it has to be amazing. It has to be leagues better than Final Fantasy VII. It has to be good enough to captivate new players and make them fans today, and it has to be good enough to make long-time fans accept any changes they make.

Square has already dug its hole pretty deep with this announcement, though they may not realize it. By announcing it, they can't back out, not on a title that has been demanded for so long. They also did it really early in the game's development. So, we won't see the finished product for a few years. This means that all eyes will be on the game during its whole development, especially from the already-established fans. I suspect the new fans they're hoping to pick up from the remake won't know what to expect other than what other people tell them, but old fans will be building up their own expectations based on what they already know of the game. As more about the game is disclosed to the public, more and more old fans will likely drop off because the initial hype and excitement will have faded. Plus, the harsh reality that this is not the remake they were building up in their mind all these years will begin to set in.

I mean, I was someone calling for a visual upgrade back when the PS2 was still hot. Imagine what a person's expectations are of the game on the PS4, a whole decade later. They've had time to think about how the characters should look, behave, and sound, as well as what sections of the game are worth keeping or expanding. Final Fantasy VII is a very long game to make again with so many variables that seem rather unlikely to meet the expectations of salivating fans.

On Square's end, I imagine that, in an attempt to retain their fan base, they'll likely pull a lot of resources for development to try to make it as great as possible. I doubt they want to half-ass it at this point. They may sink more money into it than any other game they have in progress, immediately making it cost more money than easily re-releasing the same game again from 1997. Considering recent actions from companies like Konami cutting big-budget game projects (Silent Hills) along with their high-profile game directors, I wonder if Square will regret its decision to place its bets on such games like Final Fantasy VII's Remake, Final Fantasy XV, and Kingdom Hearts III.

I haven't always felt that there shouldn't be a remake. I too loved the game when I first played it and would have loved to see it with some graphical improvements. But I eventually realized how Square likely missed their remake window, due to how games and the world were changing. I saw how seemingly impossible it would be for Square to meet everyone's expectations with nostalgic glasses that were decades thick.

Think about it. Who would you ask to be Cloud's voice actor? I bet there are thousands of people who would disagree with you and not buy the game for that reason, much like how people didn't buy DMC for the way Dante looked.

Reason for Pessimism - Who is Cloud?

I didn't play VII until 2001 on my PS2, so I was late to the party, but I had heard about how great it was and had never really gotten into JRPGs before. So I wanted to give it a try. When I played it the first time, I loved it. Up until then, I was one of those kids who made the jokes, "Why call it 'Final' when you have so many of them?" When I finally realized that every game was different with its own unique story, and had the cash, I decided to give it a try. Final Fantasy VII sucked me in and made me a fan of the franchise immediately. I didn't care that the graphics looked terrible, even by 2001's standards. I didn't care that there was no voice-acting and that it was like reading a super long script for a play. I didn't care that I still wasn't good enough at video games to understand all the nuances that went with playing an RPG, like using healing items to hurt undead creatures, for instance. I thought the game had a great story, fun gameplay, and a slick art style.

I played VIII immediately afterward. I didn't feel the same way about it, but I still enjoyed it. I couldn't get a copy of IX at the time and ended up skipping it and playing Final Fantasy X when it first came out. X was the first of the franchise to feature voice acting. This was a big deal at the time. Up until then, every FF game's dialogue was all text. Considering the fact that the graphics were limited, you also had to figure out any sort of subtleties to the characters on your own, based on whatever primitive gestures they used, or what was written in the text. (More on this in a moment).

So Final Fantasy X came out and it was a big hit. The graphics and production value were unmatched at the time and everyone enjoyed it. I did, sort of. There were a lot of things I liked about X at the time and I ended up playing through the game entirely several times. But there was always a problem I had with it: Tidus, the main character. The guy was a tool. He was supposed to be our eyes and ears to the world, and to whom we related as the average guy, even though he was a dumb sports star who lacked qualities to make him likeable or interesting. Thankfully, you could still change his name, so whenever he was referred to in text, it could be whatever you could fit into the 8-character slot. This was something you could do with everyone in the games before, but since voice acting was so important to X, they had to limit the number of characters whose name you could change to just him. Naturally, every time I played through the game afterward, I dubbed him "FuckFace".

Dork

You could say this was when VII's window started to close for players like me. Everything that was Final Fantasy-related had diminishing returns for my enjoyment. they started using VII's reputation and injecting its characters into other titles to try to get people interested, like Kingdom Hearts. I enjoyed Kingdom Hearts on its own merits, but it too suffered from the common story-telling methods of JRPGs. Then they made the PS2 spin-off, Dirge of Cerberus, a sub-par third person adventure game about its other "cool" character. These games, an abundance of anime available through the internet, and the CG-animated movie, FFVII: Advent Children, formed a distaste I had for the melodrama that was so common in JRPGs.

The movie was really the eye-opener to me as to why a remake wouldn't work. It was complete fan service and super anime-ish. People were flying out of explosions, defying gravity, and being emo as fuck. That's when I realized that how I had envisioned Final Fantasy VII and its main character clashed with how Square envisioned them. Cloud was not the interesting, deep, brooding character I originally thought he was. He was brooding, sure, but it was to behave like the cliche anime "cool guy" that everyone thought was cool because he didn't say much and was so mysterious due to his dark past. Cloud was not the ruthless mercenary badass I thought he was; he was a whiny, emo, loner.

I had liked Cloud for being a ruthless mercenary type in VII; he was very cut-and-dry in his responses early in the game and didn't show much emotion until he met another character. It made sense for him to behave a certain way and to soften up over time as this was character growth. But in the entries since his game, he softened up and shrunk back into a shell. Every time I saw him in anything else since VII he felt less genuine and more of an archetype. I felt like Square wanted us to accept their laziness in character-writing as "He's cool because he's Cloud. Don't you like Cloud still?" He behaved more and more like their other "cool" character from VII, Vincent, who got his own game and behaved the same way "cool guys" behave: they say very little, and what they do say is dark and brooding based on the shit they've seen, they kick a bunch of ass, and they have a cape.

Due to Cloud's downfall in my mind as a character who wasn't as interesting as I initially thought, I thought more about Final Fantasy VII as a game. I still think it holds up relatively well and that's largely in part to the technological limitations it had. The graphics are terrible, but they remind you of the game's limitations, which then helps you cut it a little slack in other areas. You tend to forget the tedium of the JRPG grind, for a little while anyway. The limitations also force you to read the text and interpret what the characters are saying based on just the text and their weird geometrical animations. It also helps if you don't have any looming anime archetypes in your mind.

Remaking the game would take away those limitations and the goodwill one might have for the game, forcing you to be stuck with whatever Square gives you now. Considering what Square has developed lately--Final Fantasy XIII, which I thought was terrible--I don't think I want whatever Square is going to make as their new Final Fantasy VII; I'd rather leave it in the past, which brings us back to the real problem.

Final Thoughts

It's not 1997 anymore and the Square-Enix of today is not the Squaresoft of 1997. Back in the late ‘90s, there was no company that made better games than Squaresoft. The games the company has published lately, other than those of the companies they've acquired like Eidos, have been mostly mediocre. If you strip away the goodwill from the technological limitations and take away the nostalgia from your long-time fans in the modern world, you can't afford your flagship remake to be mediocre, or you'll just be left with a game that will fade into the background of the modern market, behind all the other JRPG's.

When the game is eventually released, because there's no way Square-Enix can cancel it now without inciting more fan rage, it will likely make a ton of money. But if Square-Enix considered an investment like the Tomb Raider remake a failure, after selling more than 8 million copies, I can't imagine the amount of money they'd have to make in order to make back an investment on a Final Fantasy VII remake, especially if they pour the resources into it as I suspect. Will it be what people have been asking for? Will it satiate the Final Fantasy VII fans and harbor more goodwill? Will it be worth it to Square-Enix? Or is Square-Enix making as big a mistake as their first Final Fantasy movie?