Is the Final Fantasy VII Remake Still a Mistake?

Shortly after I first started this website and started molding it into what it is now, instead of an offshoot of my band’s site, I wrote an opinion piece about the announcement from Square-Enix that they would be remaking Final Fantasy VII. For those who don’t know, Final Fantasy is one of the company’s flagship franchises, dating back to the 1980s, and if there was any game in the Final Fantasy library with the most ravenous and, occasionally, volatile fanbase, it’s VII. Other games Square-Enix has released over the years have gotten more of a response and a bigger fanbase than VII, like their online MMO Final Fantasies, the Dragon Quest series, and Kingdom Hearts. However, those who played the game on the Playstation 20 years ago, hold it in high regard and are extremely loyal and dedicated to it, despite its many flaws or dated issues. Why? There are probably a few reasons.

For one thing, the timing of its original release couldn’t have been better. Not because of the time of the year or anything, but because of the people they were releasing it to and the level of technology the industry was at. It was the first Final Fantasy to be released on a system not published by Nintendo, using multiple discs to tell an epic and long story. With 3-D cut-scenes that look ridiculous today, and 3-D models that have aged worse than most other games of that time, it was still a sight to behold back then. 3-D was the hot new thing, and FFVII showed it off a great deal. Even though Final Fantasy VIII came along a short time later and looked substantially better on the same platform, VII was the first of the series to go 3-D and it made an impact on players. Those players were of a particular type and age.

Sony’s original PlayStation was an extremely successful video game console, but video games as an entertainment medium would not really explode into the general public and become one of the most common, successful forms of media until the PS2 and Xbox 360. Video games as a form of entertainment had a big successful boom in the ‘70s and ‘80s, followed by a huge crash, in which Nintendo and Sega picked up the pieces. Even though both these companies saw a great deal of success from their markets in the early ’90s, the industry was still somewhat niche and most of the people who played video games at that time had either had a long history with the industry since the Atari days, or were kids of my generation, born in the 1980s. There’s evidence to suggest that the ripe age median of 12 years old—when a child is emerging from adolescence and entering puberty/adulthood—is when a person is the most impressionable. As a result, people gravitate towards certain pieces of media and attach something like a nostalgic stamp on it for future reference. It’s the time you grow out of the “kids stuff” and start to find your favorite things that are more “grown up” as you really start to develop your personality. People tend to remember movies, books, music, and games from that time in their lives more fondly because of how the brain had developed at that point. Think back for yourself to some of your favorite pieces of media, for which you hold the most nostalgia. Were any of those something you discovered as a teenager?

I was 12 when Final Fantasy VII came out. I didn’t play it until I was 16 or 17, but I still had a similar experience to many people who did play it when it was brand new. It was one of the first games I played that made the story central to the experience and with a story that was so long that it branched and expanded in a lot of different ways. I had already played other games with great stories, like Soul Reaver by the time I played FFVII—which is one of my favorite game franchises of all time, big surprise there—but FFVII was the first game that felt like an epic tale and I would argue it as the first game to make me want to play RPGs. Since then, I’ve played plenty of RPGs that I think are far better and sit a lot higher in my list of favorites, but for many who were around my age and looking to video games as their favorite form of entertainment, FFVII was the game.

There were plenty of those fans who loved the game unconditionally and were happy to play it over and over, despite the graphics aging poorly, almost immediately. I played it only a few years later, and it was already pretty ridiculous-looking by my teenage standards. There were plenty like me who would have preferred the Popeye arms and goofy polygonal expressions of the game to be replaced by some improved graphics if only to make the epic story and its more somber moments seem a little more meaningful and less laughable. Thus, the idea of a remake was kicked around and requested for a long time by fans. Square realized they had a rabid fanbase around this particular game, but instead of creating a remake, they made some spin-off games, injected characters into Kingdom Hearts, and made some CGI-animated films. Some of this was well-received, while some of it was harshly rejected.

As I argued in my original article, I think Square waited too long to pull the trigger on a remake. Had they done so back around the time they were making these spin-offs, they might have been able to make it for much less money and it would have been something that might have satiated the fans enough that they would not have kept asking for a remake. This year, the remake is set to be released, though it’s hit a delay already and, at the moment, is set for April. Not the whole game, of course, as it was announced a long time back that they would be doing the remake in episodes. So, just episode 1 will be out this year. From everything that’s been shown and discovered so far, it sounds like you won’t be getting far in the main plot of the game. Is that discouraging for fans? As someone who isn’t invested in the remake, it doesn’t sound that appealing to me, but you can listen to this die-hard and see for yourself how the amount of content, the delays, and the sordid history of “false promises” do not damage his optimism:

I have been as rabid as he is about a few things in my life. However, as my “death of a fan” articles have indicated how I approach entertainment these days, I don’t have that much enthusiasm or loyalty towards franchises. Maybe I’m an outlier here. Maybe I’m too much of a pessimist. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m willing to admit my prediction was nihilistic and possibly incorrect, as I didn’t expect the fans to be as loyal as and as enthusiastic as Maximilian is in his videos about the game. I predicted that they wouldn’t be open to change and too stingy with their expectations of how the game should look and play. However, games press and influencers have all said that the demos they’ve played have been fun and promising. So, I might be wrong. We won’t know for sure until the first episode has come out and see how it’s received. We might not know if it was a mistake until the following episodes come out and if they live up to or fail to meet expectations. Or, we might not know until we see the sales figures of all those episodes combined. All I’m saying is that I’m a little less confident in my prediction thus far.

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