Final Fantasy VII Remake (2020)

After 33 hours and three attempts to finish this game, I’m left with a mix of admiration and frustration.

It starts strong, with a compelling eco-terrorism story exploring inequality, ethics, and friendship. But as the game progresses, it devolves into a poorly paced slog. The second half is bogged down by filler—crawling through vents, jumping chandeliers, and climbing nonsense—before ending in an over-the-top boss rush and confusing “meta” finale.

The combat system sits awkwardly between turn-based and action gameplay. It’s not terrible but fails to excel at either.

Despite its flaws, the game shines in its stunning art direction, intriguing setting, and well-crafted characters. By the end, I grew to love Barrett, Tifa, Aerith, and even Cloud.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake is a love-and-hate experience. For every impressive moment, there’s one that’s dull or frustrating. It’s a 3/5 for me—saved by its visuals and characters. Here’s hoping Rebirth delivers on its promises.

Edit: I never played the original.

I finished this beauty about a week ago. It has left quite an impression on me. Believe it or not, this is my first Final Fantasy game EVER. I never played the original and didn't know much of the story, but it is safe to say that it has left me entranced.

Midgar was so stunning with its hues of greens. The music was so memorable that I know I will be having flashbacks to this first playthrough whenever I hear it. The combat was the most fun I have had in a while. The character design is MWAH. Everything was superb.

My biggest gripe with the game, and the only reason it is getting a 4 out of 5, is because of its ending. I was left very confused and underwhelmed. I almost felt that the whispers should have been left a little more mysterious and that the exiting of Midgar should have been handled differently. I am not one to get enraged when a story ends with more questions than answers (I love the mystery) but I felt as if I WAS left with the answers. Answers that are a little half-baked. After digging deeper I can better see the intentions of the ending but it still didn't change the fact that it deflated my experience a little bit.

The ending cinematic and song were what saved the story for me. The excitement I feel when I think about playing Rebirth is incomparable to anything else. I really enjoyed my time with this game. It has led me to further explore the Final Fantasy series and really made an impression on me.

When Final Fantasy VII Remake is operating at its peak, it's really something special. I often found myself marveling at the way they adapted the events and characters from the beginning of the original game. However, Square Enix aimed to have the total playtime of this game roughly match that of the original while only using the first 6ish hours of story. That means they needed to stretch out the Midgar section to six times its original length and there are portions of the game where it really shows.

First off, this game is gorgeous. I played the upgraded PS5 version, but I can only assume it looked pretty damn good on the PS4 as well. Straight up one of the prettiest games I've ever played, I think. Sometimes this clashes a bit with the setting of the Midgar slums, and the main cast looks almost a bit too perfect. Not a single blemish anywhere on their skin, which seems odd given how often they're in combat and/or living in impoverished conditions. Realism aside, Midgar is lookin' good. If you ignore the low quality NPC character models and lipsync, this game is pure eye candy from start to finish.

The combat is also very fresh feeling. I found the combat system in the original FFVII to be a bit lacking after having played Final Fantasy VI, which plays a lot more with the possible mechanics the ATB system. Here, we've transitioned into something in between a hack n' slash and the ATB system of the original. It can make combat a bit more frustrating at times, since they lock using abilities, spells, and items behind hitting enemies with basic attacks, but it does a great job of making moment to moment combat more tense and exciting. I'm a big lover of turn based combat and systems built off it, but I'd take the remake's combat system over the OG any day. It's just really fun overall.

While I think the game does a great job of adapting locations and events from the original game while putting its own spin on some of them, the new additions are a bit more hit or miss. Hojo's lab near the end of the game is a great example of this. I love the fact that they really expanded on the lab to showcase the extent of the twisted scientist's fucked up experimentation but the section is sooo much longer than it needs to be and overstays its welcome, which kind of sours it as a result. That's the issue I have with many of the game's big segments, actually. There's almost always some sort of bit where the party gets split up and need to spend time finding each other again before the story can actually move forward. I'd wager you could shave maybe 4-5 hours off the playtime of the game by cutting down these segments.

The architecture of the lab makes a lot more sense which is nice. Jenova would definitely warrant having its own room, given its importance in Hojo's experiments. I feel like the updates to Jenova's design are mostly good (why was it pink originally?), but the presentation of the scene loses a lot of the disturbing atmosphere the original game managed to accomplish with so little. What tension there is is also totally shattered by... sigh... another Sephiroth appearance.

Its clear that the devs really wanted to expand on Sephiroth's involvement in the story. This could be in order to ensure they don't lose momentum between the releases of the trilogy or maybe just for fanservice reasons. Either way it really hurts this first game. I think some additional scenes featuring him were deserved to help flesh him out as the primary villain of the series, but man, they really blew their load early with this. They managed to shove some sort of hallucination or reference relating to Sephiroth into pretty much every major scene in the game. Hell, by the end of the game, which again only covers Midgar btw, you've already seen as much of him as you do in the entirety of the original. Especially with how this game ended with a major Sephiroth fight, it's hard for me to feel like they're going to be able to get the same level of payoff in the next couple entries because they went too hard in this one.

The game also kind of fumbles the start of Cloud's character arc. Where the original game managed to be fairly subtle with little clues that something isn't lining up with Cloud's history in SOLDIER, this game is constantly having him hallucinate, experience crippling migraines, and even kind of spoils the twist to come later in the story entirely in a conversation with Hojo and by showing Zack early. It's a little disappointing to be honest, but I still think it's possible to salvage if they chill out a little with the foreshadowing and let it happen more naturally rather than writing in a reference to it during every major story moment.

I'm not sure what content from the original the second game will cover, but it has a lot of heavy lifting to do from a storytelling perspective, because so much happens during that segment of the story. I think with the first entry we're off to a mostly great start minus some hiccups when it comes to unnecessary padding and iffy character writing.

As someone that didn't play Final Fantasy 7 previously, there were large parts of this game where I was either dumbfounded and confused or just felt entirely disconnected. But, I thought that was cool! I think this is the most interesting way to make a remake of Final Fantasy 7, even if it did completely fuck me in particular. While there were large sections of the story where I stared at it pretty blankly (most stuff with the foreskin ghosts on screen and the entire ending I'm mostly like, "yeah dude, ok, sure", about) anything to do with the characters and this cast of chucklefucks I adored.

To me where this game shines is just in how good this party this. Barret, Tifa, Aerith, Cloud and even with a late introduction: Red XIII are extremely compelling and I can watch them cook soup I enjoyed their interactions so much.

Which is great, considering how about half of the game is watching them drag their feet around and cook the worst soup you've seen. Truly brain-numbing stuff for about the whole middle of the game before it really picks up again. There's lovely character moments here but I wish it didn't insist on being so completely dull and dry for such large parts of it.

Playing the game luckily is pretty good, there's a lot of running around and doing the combat, and even if the combat is piss easy on the Normal difficulty (I could often get through a boss fight before it had played all the dialogue for it by just pressing Punisher Mode -> Square Square Square TRIPLE SLASH TRIPLE SLASH) it's still pretty fun to click the buttons. How much of that is carried by the sick battle themes that kick in every battle? Truly hard to say. Unfortunately it is just truly cursed by the most amount of Filler I have ever seen in my life in a AAA game. I do think this game could have been literally half the length if they cut the constant running back-and-forth, weird crane puzzles and squeezing-through-gaps-every-5-seconds.

Overall I found the Intermission DLC pretty disappointing for similar reasons. The characters continue to be great, Fort Condor was pretty fun as a diversion, but the whole 2 chapters are just in areas/sections that you already explored in the main game which seems like a frankly insane choice for a $30 expansion.

For all my gripes and complaints, I love these cast and will follow them to the ends of the Earth (literally) even if it's just to watch the cutscenes I love, but I do hope the next game can piss me off a lot less.

Like many who played this remake, I also played the original on my PS1. While the 2020s version didn't have the same effect on me as the 1997 one, it's definitely a good game: great graphics, fun fight mechanics, quirky mini-games, it's all there.

But, to me, the pacing really felt off in the later part of the game: Chapter 14 is basically just a string of not particularly interesting side quests you have to do to level up your characters for what's to come. The whole Shinra building section is a drag and once you get close to the end it's just a seemingly never-ending series of cut scenes and boss fights. If I want to watch people with funny hair perform super-human feats for 20 minutes I watch anime and if I want a boss battler I play Cuphead, at least there the bosses are original and challenging.

I don't regret playing this but I also don't feel like I would have missed much if I didn't. I'll probably still pick up part 2 though.

Sound

I have played with English voices and it was totally fine. I heard that Japanese voices are even better but English was fine.

The OST is brilliant. That's it. I know it was not that hard, they only had to take the original one and just renew it. The result does not disappoint, although I have to say that they replaced some songs from the original FFVII. The new songs fit totally with the environment but it was a little bit sad to go to some places and not hear the original music.

The only bad thing I can say from the music is not as much as important as the original. Just think that the original was a game without voices or a lot of effects. The music was everything. In this reboot, when you are fighting, with the characters, explosions, and effects, you cannot hear the music that much. You can only enjoy the music on the menus or while you are exploring.

Graphics

Graphics and visual effects are great. They did a great job with this and seeing the characters, enemies, and environments with these details is awesome. Still, not everything is 3D, some elements in the background are just ultra-defined images, and in most cases, it works fine, but there is some exception where it is just... embarrassing to see it. An example is when you are going to the reactor and you can see the suburbs at the bottom. It is awful.

Still, everything works. The problem is with the design of environments. The original material is good but the new zones are not that fresh and do not totally fit. They feel like they put it there just for filling and make you waste some extra time. For example, between suburbs, you just had some corridors just to make you run and waste time. There is some exception, for sure, but this is a general feeling.

And this not only happens with environments, side quests feel the same. Irrelevant, boring and you can just avoid them. It surprises me how Square Enix managed to fill a 5-hour zone in the original up to 40 hours. Sadly, not all the 40 hours feel like quality hours of gaming.

Gameplay

I sincerely don't understand how this game has good ratings on this. I am not going to say that Square Enix should have maintained the turn-based system (they should have), but even with the new system... it just does not work fine.

The classic mode was born from the fans because they didn't want an action game. The problem is that they could not create a new system in the advanced status of development, so they just made some slight changes to the 'action' mode and changed the name. Surprisingly, they even made the wrong changes to the system. They created a monster that feels terrible.

First, you have an ATB that goes faster if you attack, but as the character attacks when he decides, it gets really slow to have an ATB. They could just make the bar advances at the same speed no matter what. Second, the ATB goes faster on your selected character. This forces you to change the character and makes you think harder. Why force you to change to Aerith to have an ATB when you only want to use it for some magic? I just want to attack with Cloud meanwhile! This could be just a mention but combined with the Agro system, it just attacks your selected character makes things harder.

But the main problem is AI, which is really stupid. An absolute disaster.

1. Is too conservative and it prioritizes covering. So if there are many enemies attacking you cannot attack and just see your character dying as you cannot bake your BTC to increase.
2. As the AI prioritizes covering, even if he can just avoid the attack, the character just receives that damage.
3. The AI does not know to run from area attacks properly. Special mention to gravity magic, where the AI just stays receiving damage instead of running away.
4. The AI does not know how to position. If there are obstacles between you and the enemy, it attacks the obstacle.
5. If the enemy moves and you enter a command, your character will start running to catch him forever.
6. If the enemy is in counter mode, your character still attacks, causing the counter from the enemy and damaging you.

All of these, plus the game is designed to be an action game, makes you think: f*** it, I am just playing action mode. Although all of this happens in Action mode, you are not aware of that because you are focused on controlling your character.

If this is not enough, Summons and Limits are, in my opinion, wrong The summoning option appears once per combat and when the game wants. The limit is reset every combat. Both things cause you to use Summoning and limits no matter what, just not to lose the opportunity. For the limits, you need to be careful because you can miss the limit and make no damage at all.

So in summary, the gameplay has a lot of issues and it is not fun at all.

Plot

Careful! Spoilers!

Everything is great at the beginning until the 'ghosts' appear. By the way @TestuyaNomura, please be more imaginative. Everything feels too much like Kingdom Hearts.

Basically, the ghosts are the fans, wanting desperately the game to be the same as the original, and the characters have to defeat this 'destiny'. They have to beat us and follow their path. We, the fans, are the final enemy to beat, and with this meaning... you can imagine that Nomura and Square Enix thinks about it. They just don't care what Final Fantasy means to the fans. They want to do whatever they want without us criticizing them.

If the game was a spin-off, a parallel universe, or whatever... I can buy it. But naming this remake is just lying to everyone. It is not a remake, it is a reboot. It is not the same game.

Conclusion

It does not worth playing it. If you are a new gamer you will find bad gameplay and combats, boring and irrelevant side quests, and a lot of things that do not feel right. If you are an FFVII fan, avoid it too. You will hate it.

I do not know what else to say... it was really disappointing. I won't play the Yuffie DLC or the next parts.

To elaborate, the combat is awesome and engaging. I had a blast with each boss fight and as the game progressed there was a satisfying sense of mastery and challenge. The recreation of the original game moments work because they were good to begin with. Everything else added is superfluous and incompetent. There is so much bloat in what should have been 5 hours of game play, that it ruins any semblance of pacing or stakes and diminishes the impact of the original games 'good' moments.

There are droves of bullshit side quests that revolve around "go here and kill this" or "go here and collect this." While this is optional, even the primary new quests feel just as inane and force the games pacing to an abrupt stop. Tetsuya Nomura bends over backwards to try to "fix" the sad and gritty moments of the original that elevated its storytelling. For example, the original game ends the first reactor with AVALANCHE blowing it up. This results in the deaths of innocent civilians and guards. It is never shown, but heavily implied as you watch the smokey inferno of the reactor. To remove this level of nuance and moral ambiguity, there is instead a very convoluted explanation around a bomb with a small non-deadly but debilitating explosion. The reactor still explodes though, killing innocents, because Shinra decides to blow up the reactor themselves to make AVALANCHE look like the baddies... This leads to a very stilted quest involving getting to know Cloud's new manic pixie girl interest in the form of Jessie... When fighting fascism, like AVALANCHE was doing, you can't expect all roses and walking off peacefully into the sunset. The added layer of moral ambiguity made these characters more believable and elevated the stakes of their actions. They had to live with the consequences of their actions, but they believe losing a part of their humanity was worth saving the world as a whole. That's compelling storytelling.

I have more to say, but I will try to keep the rest of this succinct. This goes even further with the convoluted time spirits that heavily hint at removing the death scene of Aerith, which is arguably one of the most important gaming moments in history. By the end of the game, I just didn't care. Nothing mattered. No one was at risk. Nothing bad happened to anyone but the bad guys... On top of this poor pacing and incompetent storytelling, the writing and acting were even more horrendous and stilted. I found myself cringing every time someone opened their mouth.

I get Midgar is supposed to be a large metropolis. The original game sold that with it's limited hardware. While there is merit in wanting to bring it to life, games like Witcher 3 or Skyrim have cities as expansive without killing the pacing.

Even the graphics aren't great. The version of the game I played had plenty of low-res environmental textures. I think they did a good job with character design and I liked the detail of materia appearing on your weapons. Additional, one issue with the original game that this one fixes is character variety. Each character in the original was basically the same except for their limit breaks. In this version, each character plays very differently which is cool.

Still... meh.

I am a Final Fantasy fan on the base surface level. I love the style and details of the games, but I've played very very few of them. That being said, I never played the original Final Fantasy VII. My only real interaction with the monolithic FF7 series/franchise is watching Advent Children as a pre-teen and loving every bit of it despite understanding NOTHING, and playing through Crisis Core on the PSP when I was about 13.

That all being said, this game welcomed me in regardless of my inexperience with the franchise. Midgar felt alive and thriving, or at least as thriving as the slums can feel. I'm so glad this game exists as a way to modernize one of the quintessential RPG's.

The combat, while it takes a second to get used to, feels so good once you're able to start queuing up commands between multiple characters to start racking up insane damage on enemy's. It feels like the perfect blend between Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy XV's combat. The only thing I'll say is that I feel like with how much fun it was to synchronize attacks, this game would've benefit from a "Wait Mode" like FFXV had, to strategize attacks on separate enemies easier.

I won't say much on the story because it's such a narrative-heavy game, but I will say that I am eagerly awaiting part 2. From the experience I DO have with FF7, I'm extremely intrigued where the story is going to go. Play this game if you have a modicum of interest in RPG's and JRPG's.

I beat this two days ago and wanted to give some time to let it breathe before I wrote my semi-final-ish thoughts.

I think that sidequests are largely superfluous time sinks that harm the pacing, with the last batch of them especially really harming the narrative flow; speaking of flow, Shinra HQ has an entire fucking dungeon inserted into the middle of it that serves no purpose other to destroy the pacing in what was one of the best-paced and most memorable sections of the original.

Counterstance is broken as fuck and I think that its inclusion at all is odd, considering how the punisher mode counter is fairly strong but has its own upsides and downsides inherent to its properties that counterstance entirely ignores and lets you bust the fights in half. Said fights occasionally dip into questionable telegraphing and I'm not sure how I feel about hard mode's changes until I play it myself.

However, outside of the pop-in (which I pray is patched sooner or later), it's one of the most graphically impressive games I've ever played and it ran rock-solid on my PS4 slim. The gameplay has fantastic kinaesthetics and I think it's an amazing way to make ATB combat interesting moment-to-moment. The encounters surprised me in that you had to actually interact with a lot of the game's systems in order to survive in them on Normal, which is a bar that most JRPGs I've played have failed to reach.

There is a deep and abiding love for Final Fantasy VII that creeps into every inch of its meticulous world and the characterization is incredibly spot-on, with the voice acting, writing, and area designs really making the setting and its inhabitants feel fully-realized.

The music is more varied than I could have ever hoped for, blending an incredible amount of genres and dynamically mixing between them, and the game's cutscenes made me age regress into a twelve-year-old again and be joyfully, unironically enjoying its chuuni - and I didn't play even a bit of FF7 until last year.

Any review of this has to touch on its ending, I think, and its narrative holds genuine promise and pleads for faith in them for future installments. On the back of how they handled this first part, I think they understand the bones of FF7 enough for me to have that faith.

Doom Eternal is still probably gonna be my GOTY because it's one of the best FPS games of this millenium, but I think that FF7R is an incredibly enjoyable experience and if you're at all interested in returning to the world of Midgar you should jump on it.