Why I’m not excited about the Final Fantasy VII remake

I’m sure all this has been posted before by other, more recognized/successful/better people, but I’ll also say it: I don’t think the Final Fantasy VII remake is a great idea. It’s being hyped like crazy, but let’s examine just two reasons why the next FF7 might not be very good (except for Square-Enix’s bottom line, maybe, because they could sell a box of dog shit with the Final Fantasy name on it and it would still fly off of the shelves and get a 9/10 from IGN.)

1) Final Fantasy VII is kind of a goofy game

Final Fantasy VII is goofy as fuck. Yeah, it has a serious theme – the end of the world. And yes, Cloud gets both his brood and his ellipses on the whole time, and he’s a super-serious protagonist.

But consider all the bizarre parts of FF7 that don’t fit the story. There are plenty of weird little bits of dialogue that read like jokes, and even during tense situations, like when the whole party is on the ship heading out from Junon and everyone has to disguise themselves like sailors, even Red XIII, who’s awkwardly trying to stand on his hind legs. There’s even a joke character in the form of Barrett, a/k/a Mr. T. Finally, there’s the whole Wall Market sequence, where Cloud famously crossdresses and also gets gangbanged by several burly men in a bathhouse, all of course to save Tifa from creepy fuck Don Corneo. (Well, it’s possible that such a scene could be some kind of take on gender fluidity and sexual identity, but the original FF7 played the whole thing off as a weird joke.)

I guess my question is whether Square plans on including all that stuff in the remake. If they do, the new FF7 is going to have serious tone problems. All the goofiness kind of worked when I was playing this game at 10 years old because the graphics were blocky and Cloud and co. were running around with their pipe cleaner arms and big heads and it all seemed to work in a strange way. With the realistic style of newer FF games, I feel like it wouldn’t work so well.

Of course, Square might go the other direction and change a lot of FF7 for the remake. Which brings me to problem #2:

2) The latest Final Fantasy games haven’t been very good

FF7 was released in 1997. That was 18 years ago. The FF series (and JRPGs as a whole) have changed a lot in that time. Looking at the series’ recent history, the last main numbered non-sequel game in the line was Final Fantasy XIII, released in 2010. I mostly hated that game because of its linearity. It was a pretty game and the music was great, but the actual experience of playing it was lousy. And yeah, the game world does open up after a while, but having to grind through hours and hours of the same characters saying the same things and fighting the same fights over and over again really wears you down. Who looks forward to a bowl of ice cream after being forced to eat a gallon of creamed corn?

I know a lot of people will disagree on this point, but if the new FF7 ends up anything like FF13, it’s going to 1) suck and 2) not be much of anything like the original FF7. Tetsuya Nomura is directing it apparently, and he hasn’t directed an FF game before as far as I know, so that could be interesting, but I’m still bothered by it. Then again, maybe it will be more like the soon-to-come Final Fantasy XV? Who knows if that would be a good thing.

So that’s all I have to say about that. The new FF7 could be great, and it’s definitely a good move for Square-Enix as far as accumulating money goes, but it could easily be a big fuck disappointment as well.

Edit, seven years later: I was completely wrong from what I’ve seen played of the FF7 remake, anyway. Seems like they really did well with it. But I really hate a lot of the writing I did seven years ago, even if I feel the need to preserve it for whatever fucking stupid reason, so please — if you’re reading something I wrote seven or eight years ago and you want to argue with it, that’s fine, but just know that I might disagree with my past self too. I may even want to beat him over the head.

I still prefer the original soundtrack, though.

• final fantasy
• hype
• nostalgia
• playstation
• sony
• square-enix
• video games