The common narrative behind this game has been that it is the remake of an old classic and one of the best RPGs ever made, possibly the most popular entry in the most popular JRPG franchise of them all. The next thing to come out was that it is only a third of the original game, a part of the complete story with the rest to be released as separate games over time. For someone who has played the original and possibly remembers the experience, it is a lot to expect from a company to is known to deliver a lot. But even more have only heard of the 1997 entry and will ride on the revived wave of attention to play this for the first time. Belonging to the latter, the most difficult part of this was to stay away from spoilers on the internet as pretty much every big review site has praised this game and suddenly everyone is an expert on the story. But the easy part was that I got to experience it without having to compare it to the original and take it for what it is – a fantastic action RPG with almost every aspect of it fine-tuned with love and attention.
The gaming space is filled with action RPGs where the only RPG element is inventory management while the rest of the gameplay is action-focused. There are few aspects of decision-making remaining in big-budget RPGs and FFVII Remake is no different. The story is linear (and most of the time extremely so, but more on that later) and the only difference the player can make is assigning roles to the party members to tackle the combat differently. However that, for once, is not a drawback in this game. I would be understating how good the combat is in the game if I told you the action sells the game. Managing how “materia” is distributed amongst your party makes all the difference in the world as that sets each member with a role to perform during combat by giving abilities and ability points. These include major aspects of the combat like healing and elemental damage dealing, supporting abilities like barriers and improved blocking and even special abilities like assessing the enemy to find weaknesses and strengths. The distribution of these “materia” thus can create unique archetypes of the characters who will perform complex roles like both support and damage dealers and these can be freely changed allowing for extremely fluid combat tactics in each scenario. I spent a huge amount of time nit-picking abilities and assigning roles based on starting strengths and ability points and never gave up till the last chapter when it still felt equally impactful and important to the overall experience of the game. The battles are incredibly exciting to see and play, watching how your planned setup works (or doesn’t) against a huge variety of enemies across different levels. Sometimes merely button mashing might work if you’re controlling Cloud all the time but in the later stages, success will depend on effectively planning and preparing for boss fights which can take upwards of 30 minutes to complete even if your setup is right. In addition to this, the game offers two different settings for the same difficulty, classic and modern, where classic will enable the characters to strike and block by themselves allowing you to only focus on strategies during fights and modern where you control all aspects of the character during the battles. Both feel exciting to play in different stages of the campaign where once you get the hang of basic combat you might want to switch to classic to handle the more crazy boss fights (of which there isn’t any shortage) .
But combat isn’t everything to its greatness. You wouldn’t care who wins or loses especially after 3 tries at a 30-minute boss fight unless you care about the characters and the world they live in. Square Enix has done an exemplary job at facial animations, voicing and overall detailing of every single character to make them feel as real as possible while maintaining the anime-inspired look. They are so confident of the work they have done on the faces of these characters that every other shot is a close-up of their faces during intense moments which look absolutely wonderful all the time. It is perhaps upsetting to see the photo mode not take advantage of this and provide very few options to customize the shot to maximize this graphical achievement. The environment isn’t ignored but there isn’t really a lot of variety in them and almost every area is cramped unnecessarily. This takes attention away from the stiff movements and lack of traversal options which are kept to a minimum to provide for narrow lanes, ramps and pathways where you will be spending almost entirely of your time walking in a straight line to and fro between your targets. The developers did realise the shortcoming and hence kept only a few side quests to participate in which are all pretty limited in scope yet well-written and well-paced and so don’t feel like a chore to complete even though they don’t offer a lot in rewards to aid you in combat. Secondly, not all chapters have them and only the selected few open areas of the campaign will let you loosen up and explore a bit of the world which otherwise is a character in itself during the many long cutscenes. It is the expertly written characters and their individual stories that will fuel you to spend as much time as possible with them.
Usually, I don’t talk a lot about music because they are there to set the mood and not do much unless you’re playing Witcher 3, but this game has some of the best scores I have heard in this franchise known for its musical scores. There are moments in the game so captivating in the story, so emotional in the performance of the characters that the background music will become a third dimension to the picture that will be painted in your mind as you watch the story unfold in front of your eyes. The intense moments are accompanied by typical Final Fantasy music but the calm and slower moments are beautifully articulated by the music.
This leads me to think, there aren’t a lot of factors I can discuss separately about this game. The graphics are front-lined by the facial animations which are movie-like, the music is attractive and the combat is addicting and balances out the relatively boring quieter moments of the campaign. Is it all there is to this then? No. The speciality of the game is the delivery of the content and not highlighting them separately. A chapter or two aside, none of the sections feel overly long, no battle too simple and no progression too little. I used to think the perfect difficulty doesn’t exist and yet here comes this game with the absolutely perfect difficulty curve that makes every moment of every battle demand your attention but never perseverance. It requires you to learn and adapt accordingly, even helping you with permanent experience point gains that don’t lose after death and then presents you with tougher bosses to test your learning. A game based on merely combat this good would have sold me but the story is engaging and the performances by the cast prevent you from putting down the controller for too long. Despite my claims of perfect difficulty and ideal length, it would still take upwards of 40 hours to complete the campaign on medium but the journey is absolutely worth it, especially in the final moments and made me feel like going back immediately and restarting the whole journey because I knew the next time would be even better. That’s how you create an experience.