FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE (PS4)

Remake of an iconic game- too many fake reviews!
I played and finished the original FF7 in the 1990s when it originally came out and since have bought an old playstation from a charity shop and replayed it, hunting down every side quest and monster. So I’m a fan. The music, art work, playability, scope and imagination of the development team was amazing. Awe inspiring really, and like many others thought Tetsuya Nomura was practically gaming divinity. I always hoped the game would be upgraded to better graphics and it was a whoop when I heard that is exactly what happened.

When I read the initial reviews in the mags about the remake I put off buying until it dropped in price. My main discomfort, “Modernising the battle engine”. And by modernising, I mean removing the turn based, full party control and replacing it with a dumbed down version.

So I bought the remake before Xmas and set off home with my shiny new purchase to play on a new PS4 I bought just to play the game.

The game follows the same story with lots of extra padding and a lot of new features. The rendering of the scenery, characters and background is slick and beautiful. Shintaro Takai and Motomu Toriyama were faithful to the original and made it much better. I particularly liked the detail of the slums and various encounters, with detrucible and moveable equipment. You can destroy kit on one flight of stairs and discover it broken, several floors down where it fell down. Not everything is destructible or movable, but it’s just right. The Shinra HQ building looks like a movie set but seems very scripted and unfinished. There was more interaction in the original than this version where it looked like the base background was created and then they didn’t have time to add in the interactive overlay of lockers, machines, Midgar model etc.

I would say the main weaknesses of the game are the pointless mini quests and highly scripted nature of many of the encounters with freedom of character movement highly constrained. I think the developers knew this and added in the occasional quip about the Cloud thinking it was confusing and pointless. Finding stray cats and children around a slum maze left Cloud sighing on the screen and the player. I’m not sure why Kuzushige Nojima hampered character freedom so much. Veer off the path you’ve been given and you get a warning that you are off scenerio and can’t continue to explore. Freedom to explore was a strength in the original game and it’s been lost in the remake. How the world map is going work in the next installment could be problematic. I’m assuming there was a technical reason. But it looks like it was too too difficult to programme or time consuming so I wonder about the choice of underlying architecture. And whether there was a trade off that may really limit the next stages and its success.

Anyways the battle scenes. It’s a bit of a mess as it’s only partially turn based and it seems unfinished to me. Almost as if they had to do it, but the mechanics of the battle got confused. You control a main character in the party and it’s pot luck if you can control what another party member does before they do it. They are automatically hitting and not using magic. It really does hamper using the party and materia to its full advantage. You have to hit a few times to get your ATB gauge up and then you can use your materia by the main character. There are lots of added extras with weapons having added profficiences, but limit breaks have been completed undermined. Shame because it was a great part of the original. As for summoning materia dont get me started. They only appear useable for certain boss battles and even then it’s luck which one you can use and whether that one will be useful. You may have the summons materia on a character, and only one per character but for some reason only one character can use their summons…once. A bit of a pain in a multi staged boss battle lasting 15 mins. There were some great ideas about the summons themselves but its useability has been sadly lost. Maybe it’s work in progress. So boooo to Teruki Endo on that one. Great 3d battle scenes though, character movement and graphics. Too much scripting in the battles that you really notice if you replay a boss and party dynamics and summons are there but not useable to their full potential.

So the story line. Lots of padding, you do really get to understand the characters better. The structure of their stories and development is well thought through. But the story seems to be padded out in daft ways like the jaw dropping boring mini quests. I hope they don’t kill Aeris later, shame about Jessie still dying and the fat boy living. Should have been the other way round. As for all the alternative reality stuff. It’s a good ploy to be able to change the story later. As long as it is a better story and not because the technology is not up to scratch or too expensive to make.

A few extras. Lighting and storyline is superb. Music is awful. Really, really bad. Tinny cafe music enought to drive you demented. I bet you will end up turning down the sound at times. Whilst I don’t like the way the battle engine has been developed it has many pluses. The music. Ughhh. I’m not sure who the music director was, but they really did ruin it.