After a massive long wait for the highly anticipated Final Fantasy VII Remake it finally came out but for me it turned out to be a massive disappointment. It's not on the same level of disappointment as the Final Fantasy XIII or XV games but the fact that it is a remake of one of the most iconic Final Fantasy game and also one of top rated video games ever made and how they managed to ruin it speaks louder than words. I'm just overly shocked how much they completely changed everything about Final Fantasy VII for the Remake and ruin it. For this list I will be talking and ranting about the many stupid things that are WRONG about this remake and giving full thoughts as to way they ruin the universe of VII. From poorly paced sequences, terrible new characters and side-stories to chapters that are pointlessly padded out unreasonably we are going to explore the Top 10 things that are WRONG with this remake.
Warning: MASSIVE SPOILERS!!!
Unless you have completed Final Fantasy VII or the Final Fantasy VII Remake please be warned this list will contain spoilers. Also this list is only concentrating on what is wrong with the Final Fantasy VII Remake not the original Final Fantasy VII game and the pre-remake universe. Understand? Good, Let's do this.
10: Low Quality Graphics and Technical Issues
Okay let's start this Top Ten list of problems is the graphics, honestly they look very low quality and environments look smaller compared to Final Fantasy XV which came out 4 years before this game and looked absolutely gorgeous. Don't get me wrong the graphics look way better than the character models of the original game but you can't help but easily notice PS2 quality textures in some areas especially the terrible sight view of Midgar.
9: Forgettable New Characters and Backstories
There are moments where the Remakes follows some of the important storyline elements of the original storyline but then other times it goes off the rails and introduce new storyline plot devices that are terrible and new characters who are honestly forgettable. These include Leslie who you meet in Chapter 9 who guards the Don Corneo Mansion entrance, he originally was working for Don Corneo until later on he is after him for what has happened with his missing fiancée or whatever. Another forgettable new character is Chadley who asks you to do all kinds of side challenges in battle to collect battle data including collecting data from Summoned Entities that the party fight against in a VR Headset that somehow creates Materia and I honestly have no idea how that is supposed to even make sense. The worst of them all is Roche who is a dude you fight during the Bike Sequence in Chapter 4 and later fight him again in the Shinra Warehouse and why he is there and way he challenged Cloud in the first place is never explained and no one ever brings him back up. These new characters have no importance to the storyline of Final Fantasy VII and are best forgotten.
8: Generic RPG Fabled Sidequests that add nothing of value
One thing that Final Fantasy VII Remake does wrong is the new sidequests that are honestly generic and don't really add anything worth of value. Most of the sidequests involve fetch quests or fighting some random monsters and the rewards for doing these are hardly worth anything. There is also a side quest where you have to find some lost cats for a little girl, the sidequest sucks so bad even Cloud remarks at it. It's like he knows how boring these quests are.
7: Chapter 6
One thing that needs to be said about the Final Fantasy VII Remake is that the game is guilty of padding rather than expanding. This is because either areas from the original have been extended to be more tedious or adds new areas that have no reason to be there in the first place. Chapter 6 is the perfect example of poor level design, in this chapter you go around deactivating generators so that you can activate the lift taking lower to the Reactor. This chapter is full of boring navigation, repetitive enemies and it just goes on and on and you just want to get to the Reactor already instead of dealing with the dumb lift.
6: Red XIII not being a Playable Character
During the Shinra Building sequence in the original Red XIII a character who you meet joined you against one of the bosses and then became a full reliable party member. In the Remake however Red XIII only joins as a guest and never becomes a full playable character for the rest of the game. I understand that this is because of the short length of the remake but really come on guys we can't use Red XII? Lame!
5: Hybrid Action RPG Combat System that suffers from the annoying Stagger Gauge Bad AI, Terrible Camera and execution
Okay now we getting into more seriously bad territory, one of the issues is how they tried to make the combat appeal to everyone. It takes the combat system of Action RPGs like Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy XV and also Tales of Berseria but mixes it with the Active Time Battle System bar and it does it all very poorly. The challenge and difficulty is often unbalanced either being fights you breeze through with button mashing or you end up facing enemies that are complete damage sponges and you can only stagger them by filling up that stupid Stagger Gauge that takes forever to fill up. Even if you do fill it up all the way you only get a few seconds to deal some serious damage to an enemy only for them to get back up and strike you back down. It also suffers from Bad AI where they often stand around doing nothing whilst also waiting deliberately to get hit and there are no options to be able to customize the AI party behaviour and you can do is give a Auto-Cure Materia which makes a party member use a Cure spell automatically but the main thing you have to do to with the party is switch back and forth between the party members just to get them to do something. Compare this to Tales of Berseria which originally it's Japanese release also came out 4 years before this game which has customizable AI Strategy that allows to change the party members AI to either help out other party members or to prioritize certain enemy types, plus the combat systems in the Tales of Games offers up fun rewarding battle systems that make use of every single mechanic possible and they can offer up a challenge in some areas especially on higher difficulties. The camera is also a pain making you look at a wall or the camera is panned to close making it difficult to see what is coming at you and it's worse than the camera in Tales of Zestiria and Final Fantasy XV. It's a really poorly executed combat system and one that is slightly worse of than Final Fantasy XV in which like I said came out 4 years before this game did.
4: Classic Mode that is Stupid and Lazy and makes the battles play itself
They did add a Classic Mode difficulty setting to the game and many people would say that is supposed to appeal to those who enjoyed the combat system of the original. This difficulty setting does NOT and I repeat does NOT make the combat system work like the original game's combat system, instead what it does is that it is Easy Mode but however the character is controlled automatically and all you have control over is the ATB bar to use your character's abilities or items. In other words if you put the game on Classic Mode the battles end up playing themselves and since the AI is so bad it makes the battles just unenjoyable.
3: It covers only the Midgar Portion of the story and the rest being divided to multiple games
Here is where I get to the main complaints I have with Final Fantasy VII Remake, instead of remaking the whole game in one go they instead resorted to splitting the whole thing into multiple games. This is honestly a ridiculous idea straight off the bat because not only does it act more like a cash grab just as a cheap way to make a quick buck but it also means that instead of a full fledged remade game we get only few short games that remake sections from the original. The Final Fantasy Remake we got this year only covers the Midgar portion of the original instead of ending at the Forgotten City at the End of Disc One in the original. It also means that we have no idea what they are going to do with the rest of the story and how many games we have to wait for to get to get the full FFVII Remake Experience. Considering that the PS5 is out now it wouldn't surprise me that the remaining parts end up only on the PS5 and people have to move to that console to see the rest of the FFVII Remake story.
2: The Arbiters of Fate and the Storyline being about changing the course of Destiny
Now we get to the second to the worst thing about the Final Fantasy VII Remake and that is one of the worst new storyline aspects added in. I already talked the forgettable new characters and backstories that are terrible and how they have no importance to the storyline but this is the worst of them all. Added into the storyline are the Spectres that are actually called Whispers who look like the Dementors from Harry Potter. Turns out that they are called the Arbiters of Fate and the new storyline involves Destiny in which these things show up whenever someone is trying to change the course of Destiny because apparently everything in this storyline has a Destiny and no one is allowed to change that. If Destiny says that the planet is going to be destroyed they will fight to ensure their own destruction. It is a stupid plot device that makes no sense in any fashion at all and it is just shows some of the worst possible writing imaginable. It just means that everything is possible just by altering the course of destiny and by doing so it leads to a different possible outcome that never should have happened plus also other plot elements that don't get introduced until much later.
1: The Ending
If you thought that the ghost like Dementors from Harry Potter and altering the course of Destiny stuff wasn't bad enough than these elements combined will seal the deal. This is without a doubt one of the worst game endings ever to be unleashed. I just said that the whole changing the course of Destiny was a stupid plot device that makes no sense but when you get to the ending and allow Destiny to be changed it ruins the whole plot and meaning of Final Fantasy VII and goes somewhere where it shouldn't be. Somehow Zack who died at the end of Crisis Core FFVII is still alive alongside Biggs and Wedge who should have died also and how is any of that possible, it is because now it is possible to change Destiny and prevent certain things from happening. It is the epitome of terribly thought up plot devices that single handily ruin the many important aspects of the original and goes into a confusing mess territory making this the pick for the Top Ten Things that are WRONG with this remake.
Written By Anthony Hayball (AQWBlaZer91)
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