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Final Fantasy VII: Remake — it's terrible
So, the full cutscenes are up on youtube, if you want to get caught up on the hullabaloo. It's technically spoilers to say that not everything remained the same, but honestly, SquareEnix has been saying this since day 1 of the remake announcement. However, how SE decided to go ahead with its remake changes is...well, infuriating. As I've previously expressed, I'm fucking pissed. Here's a more spoilerific, detailed explanation of why.
When I heard about the remake of FF7, my first reaction was, "Oh great, not more cash-in remakes!" I did not realize at the time that this was probably the best case scenario and if SE had just simply remade the original game with better graphics, the game would be infinitely better than the shit show that hit shelves today.
Later, SE announced that they were actually rebuilding the game from ground up and that it was going to tell a different story. They warned the fans that they will not be making a plot-by-plot recreation due to technological constraints and also because they want this new game to be the definitive version of FF7.
A little context: Fans of FF7 already know from interviews with the original producers that, due to technological limitations, FF7OG did not contain all the story they had written for the game and there were many world building story plots that got cut. This is the reason for the expanded universe that became the FF7 Compilation project (aka FF7 Complication), which squeezed full story arcs out of the originally dropped plot points. Some of them seemed to have worked, such as Crisis Core, while others fell flat on its face, such as Dirge of Cerberus.
Therefore, in the context of the game development, it is clear that SE was implying in their announcement that they want make a definitive game which encompassed all the crazy that is FF7 Complication and consolidate the storyline into a single game. This sounds like an extremely ambitious project and at the outset, I was tentatively excited at the implication of this project. Here was a chance to finally bring all the great ideas that got diffused through FF7 Complication into a single, coherent story. Plus, there was a chance that the nonsensical boss fights that people insist were part of the narrative canon will get removed and canon will now end the stupid ship war that's been going on since 1997 between Cloud/Aerith and Cloud/Tifa. (Hint: It's Cloud/Tifa, you doofuses. Why do you think the creators killed off Aerith?)
And then SE announced the project will be three full-sized games and the first game to be released will only go as far as the Midgar portion of the game.⚠️
Immediately, the warning flags went up in my mind. The original Midgar section of the game was only about 4-5 hours worth of gameplay. It only went about 3 hours if you didn't bother to grind and just zipped through the story. In the Remake, they're going to try to expand the section to a full 60-hour game, which raises some serious questions how they plan to stretch the game time so dramatically.
The most immediate dread that crossed my mind was that there will now be a ton of useless fluff and padding added into the story in an attempt to drag the game out. Part of me also questioned how exactly they were going to pull off the drama, given that a lot of the backstory (where Crisis Core expanded) doesn't come out until at least two-thirds of the way into the story. The first big wham moment doesn't strike until half way through the plot. Hell, you don't even get the first fakeout backstory about Sephiroth until after you leave Midgar and arrive in Kalm.
The project started to sound like a terrible idea.
And then the sneak peak footage started to come out and HOLY SHIT, SEPHIROTH. Remember, we don't actually see Sephiroth during the Midgar section of the original game. Sephiroth was barely even a mention and we didn't even realize Sephiroth was a thing until the very last dungeon where we learned that Sephiroth has killed President Shinra. Needless to say, my misgivings only grew with this news. The footage indicated that SE was going to not only squeeze Sephiroth into a section of the story where he has no business being, but also that the story is going to start revolving around Cloud vs. Sephiroth instead of the bigger conflict with ShinRa Company and the problems of capitalism.
Here's were we have to get into the meta analysis of the original game. In the original FF7, ShinRa Company was the main villain. Everything that the party did was mostly in response to ShinRa. Even when their focus changed to chasing Sephiroth down, it turned out that Sephiroth was also a product of ShinRa. Throughout the entire game, NPCs discussed the actions of ShinRa and its negative fallout. Every major city you entered (Midgar, Junon, Corel/Golden Saucer), the party comments on the a wealth gap disparity between the poor locals and the rich corporate employees. The game literally drops the character into a city of prosperity that's built on top of a suffering slum. *Three* times. It's almost like the game is repeating a theme and whacking you over the head with the message CAPITALISM PERPETUATES POVERTY.
Of course, that message is completely lost on the 12-year-olds playing the game and an entire generation of idiots thought the game was about conservation, rather than warning against the evils of capitalism, neoliberal policies, and rampant consumerism.
Bringing this back to the Remake, since the game was originally a criticism of global mega corporations and capitalist exploitation of resources, I had my doubts how well a giant multi-national videogame company was going to deliver a product that effectively criticized the very system from which they benefited. In fact, I was starting to suspect that the Remake will try to shift the focus to Cloud vs. Sephiroth's conflict specifically to avoid having to wrangle with the evils of ShinRa and dealing with the systemic injustice of privatization taken to the extreme. I was very despondent at the thought of a richly nuanced story that was dealing with systemic problems was going to get flattened to a very bland personal conflict that's been over done in videogames for the past two decades.
In actuality, it's even worse.
This brings me to what the Remake actually turned out to be.
Instead of remaking the original game, but with the original anti-capitalism message diluted or stripped out, the new FF7:Remake is actually a SEQUEL to the entire FF7 Complication. It turns out, Remake is a parallel universe that OG!Sephiroth invaded after being defeated in Advent Children and he is trying to reshape the story. Meanwhile, supernatural beings called "Whispers of Fate" are trying to keep the story on its original track. Once the party (Cloud, Tifa, Barret, Aerith, and NPC!Red XIII because SE hates you) finds out that they are but pawns to an predestined fate, they kill the arbitrators and declare that the future is unknowable, it is a blank slate and only they can determine what the outcome will be.
Aerith, the avatar of the planet, literally says that
So, not only is the game basically saying that the evil corporation is not the real threat, it's also saying that any systemic injustice can be overcome through individual will. It's just another re-packaged "pull yourself up by your own bootstrap" bullshit ideology that the neoliberals have been shilling for since the Reagan administration.
In the original game, the party has very little agency in their actions. Cloud was mind-controlled by Sephiroth for basically two-thirds of the game. The rest of the party were either stuck in a way of life they hated or resisting through urban terrorism that got most of their resistance killed. On an even more meta level, the party member was at the mercy of the player and the player's decisions were already predetermined by the game's coding. In short, the game removes agency and de-powers the gamer, putting them through essentially the opposite of a power fantasy while exploring the many ways in which our actions ARE NOT determined by our own will. The lack of agency meshes with the theme of how capitalism, modern society, strips us of truly meaningful decisions and ultimately, even the party's final act of defiance (defeating Sephiroth) did fuck all to save the planet.
The summoned meteor and the destruction of ShinRa Company and the extinction of humans with only Red XIII surviving through the ending credits was what saved the planet from destruction. Not your party or their actions.
As depressing and depowering as the original game's message was, it was a much needed criticism of the neoliberal ideology, the idea that somehow the individual, not the collective, can overcome systemic injustice.
Yet, come to Remake and suddenly it becomes an unironic embracement of that very ideology. Aerith declares to the Party that the future is undecided and only they, the individual heroes, can decide how the future will proceed. Only Sephiroth, the individual, is the real threat to the Planet, not the corporation that exploits planetary resources and enforces poverty in the name of progress. Only the individual acts of defiance, by stepping through the wormhole of dimensions, could change fate.
Hell, they, the individual party members, literally defeats the enforcers of destiny to provide a chance to forge their own. How much more can you deviate from the original game's meta about systemic injustice than to promote the idea that individual heroes can solve the world's problems?
And that's just the big picture.
In many details, there continue to be an undermining of other secondary themes that permeated the original game. An example:
The original FF7 had a very bleak vision of death. In the original game, many, many characters die, NPCs and party members alike. A consistent similarity is how unspectacular their deaths are. Biggs, Wedge, and Jesse die without preamble and aren't given heroic speaches. President Shinra died by Sephiroth's sword without giving the party the satisfaction of revenge. Aerith dies with no warning to the player and her funeral was a small, unimpressive affair. Zack's death wasn't even available unless you unlocked the hidden cutscene. Humanity is implied to have died off screen in the final cutscene as Red XIII looks over the ruins of Midgar with his cubs. The point is, the original game repeatedly made death as unpolished and brutal as possible. There's no chance to mourn, no chance to come to terms, and there's no higher purpose. It is swift, uncaring, and sometimes even meaningless.
The brutal nature of death is what makes living that much more valuable.
But in the Remake, not only do a lot of deaths get reversed (Biggs and Wedge survive, Aerith is implied to be able to avoid her death, Zack's death is retconned), those who do die also get long, drawn out farewells to give weight and gravitas and dignity to their deaths. The party even gets to torment President Shinra before watching Sephiroth kill him and derive some vengeful joy. Where once death was a meaningless product of human callousness, now death is given importance and reason and weight. Giving death meaning has always been a way for humans to sugar coat the reality of death, a way to swallow the bitter pill without having to address our despair. It's a cop-out to try to make ourselves feel better without having to question if death was actually necessary, and if it wasn't, why didn't we do more to stop it?
FF7:Remake turned a gritty, grungy, cyberpunk criticism of capitalism into a feel-good, wish-fulfillment, power fantasy for people who don't want to be forced to contemplate how capitalism systemically disenfranchises groups of people, privileging the few and improverishing the many.
But, you probably won't be seeing anyone talking about this new game in those terms. Because ultimately, 99% of the gamers out there don't care about themes or narrative. All they care is being able to save the flower girl from evil Sephiroth and this game gave into that demand.
When I heard about the remake of FF7, my first reaction was, "Oh great, not more cash-in remakes!" I did not realize at the time that this was probably the best case scenario and if SE had just simply remade the original game with better graphics, the game would be infinitely better than the shit show that hit shelves today.
Later, SE announced that they were actually rebuilding the game from ground up and that it was going to tell a different story. They warned the fans that they will not be making a plot-by-plot recreation due to technological constraints and also because they want this new game to be the definitive version of FF7.
A little context: Fans of FF7 already know from interviews with the original producers that, due to technological limitations, FF7OG did not contain all the story they had written for the game and there were many world building story plots that got cut. This is the reason for the expanded universe that became the FF7 Compilation project (aka FF7 Complication), which squeezed full story arcs out of the originally dropped plot points. Some of them seemed to have worked, such as Crisis Core, while others fell flat on its face, such as Dirge of Cerberus.
Therefore, in the context of the game development, it is clear that SE was implying in their announcement that they want make a definitive game which encompassed all the crazy that is FF7 Complication and consolidate the storyline into a single game. This sounds like an extremely ambitious project and at the outset, I was tentatively excited at the implication of this project. Here was a chance to finally bring all the great ideas that got diffused through FF7 Complication into a single, coherent story. Plus, there was a chance that the nonsensical boss fights that people insist were part of the narrative canon will get removed and canon will now end the stupid ship war that's been going on since 1997 between Cloud/Aerith and Cloud/Tifa. (Hint: It's Cloud/Tifa, you doofuses. Why do you think the creators killed off Aerith?)
And then SE announced the project will be three full-sized games and the first game to be released will only go as far as the Midgar portion of the game.⚠️
Immediately, the warning flags went up in my mind. The original Midgar section of the game was only about 4-5 hours worth of gameplay. It only went about 3 hours if you didn't bother to grind and just zipped through the story. In the Remake, they're going to try to expand the section to a full 60-hour game, which raises some serious questions how they plan to stretch the game time so dramatically.
The most immediate dread that crossed my mind was that there will now be a ton of useless fluff and padding added into the story in an attempt to drag the game out. Part of me also questioned how exactly they were going to pull off the drama, given that a lot of the backstory (where Crisis Core expanded) doesn't come out until at least two-thirds of the way into the story. The first big wham moment doesn't strike until half way through the plot. Hell, you don't even get the first fakeout backstory about Sephiroth until after you leave Midgar and arrive in Kalm.
The project started to sound like a terrible idea.
And then the sneak peak footage started to come out and HOLY SHIT, SEPHIROTH. Remember, we don't actually see Sephiroth during the Midgar section of the original game. Sephiroth was barely even a mention and we didn't even realize Sephiroth was a thing until the very last dungeon where we learned that Sephiroth has killed President Shinra. Needless to say, my misgivings only grew with this news. The footage indicated that SE was going to not only squeeze Sephiroth into a section of the story where he has no business being, but also that the story is going to start revolving around Cloud vs. Sephiroth instead of the bigger conflict with ShinRa Company and the problems of capitalism.
Here's were we have to get into the meta analysis of the original game. In the original FF7, ShinRa Company was the main villain. Everything that the party did was mostly in response to ShinRa. Even when their focus changed to chasing Sephiroth down, it turned out that Sephiroth was also a product of ShinRa. Throughout the entire game, NPCs discussed the actions of ShinRa and its negative fallout. Every major city you entered (Midgar, Junon, Corel/Golden Saucer), the party comments on the a wealth gap disparity between the poor locals and the rich corporate employees. The game literally drops the character into a city of prosperity that's built on top of a suffering slum. *Three* times. It's almost like the game is repeating a theme and whacking you over the head with the message CAPITALISM PERPETUATES POVERTY.
Of course, that message is completely lost on the 12-year-olds playing the game and an entire generation of idiots thought the game was about conservation, rather than warning against the evils of capitalism, neoliberal policies, and rampant consumerism.
Bringing this back to the Remake, since the game was originally a criticism of global mega corporations and capitalist exploitation of resources, I had my doubts how well a giant multi-national videogame company was going to deliver a product that effectively criticized the very system from which they benefited. In fact, I was starting to suspect that the Remake will try to shift the focus to Cloud vs. Sephiroth's conflict specifically to avoid having to wrangle with the evils of ShinRa and dealing with the systemic injustice of privatization taken to the extreme. I was very despondent at the thought of a richly nuanced story that was dealing with systemic problems was going to get flattened to a very bland personal conflict that's been over done in videogames for the past two decades.
In actuality, it's even worse.
This brings me to what the Remake actually turned out to be.
Instead of remaking the original game, but with the original anti-capitalism message diluted or stripped out, the new FF7:Remake is actually a SEQUEL to the entire FF7 Complication. It turns out, Remake is a parallel universe that OG!Sephiroth invaded after being defeated in Advent Children and he is trying to reshape the story. Meanwhile, supernatural beings called "Whispers of Fate" are trying to keep the story on its original track. Once the party (Cloud, Tifa, Barret, Aerith, and NPC!Red XIII because SE hates you) finds out that they are but pawns to an predestined fate, they kill the arbitrators and declare that the future is unknowable, it is a blank slate and only they can determine what the outcome will be.
Aerith, the avatar of the planet, literally says that
SHINRA COMPANY IS NOT THE ENEMY.
So, not only is the game basically saying that the evil corporation is not the real threat, it's also saying that any systemic injustice can be overcome through individual will. It's just another re-packaged "pull yourself up by your own bootstrap" bullshit ideology that the neoliberals have been shilling for since the Reagan administration.
In the original game, the party has very little agency in their actions. Cloud was mind-controlled by Sephiroth for basically two-thirds of the game. The rest of the party were either stuck in a way of life they hated or resisting through urban terrorism that got most of their resistance killed. On an even more meta level, the party member was at the mercy of the player and the player's decisions were already predetermined by the game's coding. In short, the game removes agency and de-powers the gamer, putting them through essentially the opposite of a power fantasy while exploring the many ways in which our actions ARE NOT determined by our own will. The lack of agency meshes with the theme of how capitalism, modern society, strips us of truly meaningful decisions and ultimately, even the party's final act of defiance (defeating Sephiroth) did fuck all to save the planet.
The summoned meteor and the destruction of ShinRa Company and the extinction of humans with only Red XIII surviving through the ending credits was what saved the planet from destruction. Not your party or their actions.
As depressing and depowering as the original game's message was, it was a much needed criticism of the neoliberal ideology, the idea that somehow the individual, not the collective, can overcome systemic injustice.
Yet, come to Remake and suddenly it becomes an unironic embracement of that very ideology. Aerith declares to the Party that the future is undecided and only they, the individual heroes, can decide how the future will proceed. Only Sephiroth, the individual, is the real threat to the Planet, not the corporation that exploits planetary resources and enforces poverty in the name of progress. Only the individual acts of defiance, by stepping through the wormhole of dimensions, could change fate.
Hell, they, the individual party members, literally defeats the enforcers of destiny to provide a chance to forge their own. How much more can you deviate from the original game's meta about systemic injustice than to promote the idea that individual heroes can solve the world's problems?
And that's just the big picture.
In many details, there continue to be an undermining of other secondary themes that permeated the original game. An example:
The original FF7 had a very bleak vision of death. In the original game, many, many characters die, NPCs and party members alike. A consistent similarity is how unspectacular their deaths are. Biggs, Wedge, and Jesse die without preamble and aren't given heroic speaches. President Shinra died by Sephiroth's sword without giving the party the satisfaction of revenge. Aerith dies with no warning to the player and her funeral was a small, unimpressive affair. Zack's death wasn't even available unless you unlocked the hidden cutscene. Humanity is implied to have died off screen in the final cutscene as Red XIII looks over the ruins of Midgar with his cubs. The point is, the original game repeatedly made death as unpolished and brutal as possible. There's no chance to mourn, no chance to come to terms, and there's no higher purpose. It is swift, uncaring, and sometimes even meaningless.
The brutal nature of death is what makes living that much more valuable.
But in the Remake, not only do a lot of deaths get reversed (Biggs and Wedge survive, Aerith is implied to be able to avoid her death, Zack's death is retconned), those who do die also get long, drawn out farewells to give weight and gravitas and dignity to their deaths. The party even gets to torment President Shinra before watching Sephiroth kill him and derive some vengeful joy. Where once death was a meaningless product of human callousness, now death is given importance and reason and weight. Giving death meaning has always been a way for humans to sugar coat the reality of death, a way to swallow the bitter pill without having to address our despair. It's a cop-out to try to make ourselves feel better without having to question if death was actually necessary, and if it wasn't, why didn't we do more to stop it?
FF7:Remake turned a gritty, grungy, cyberpunk criticism of capitalism into a feel-good, wish-fulfillment, power fantasy for people who don't want to be forced to contemplate how capitalism systemically disenfranchises groups of people, privileging the few and improverishing the many.
But, you probably won't be seeing anyone talking about this new game in those terms. Because ultimately, 99% of the gamers out there don't care about themes or narrative. All they care is being able to save the flower girl from evil Sephiroth and this game gave into that demand.