Tag: ff7

Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth is genuinely impressive. When I first started playing it, I thought it would recreate Final Fantasy 7‘s open world in HD, fill it with filler, and maybe move the story forward a little. That is, it would primarily be a vehicle to generate a ton of assets for the next game to use to actually tell a story. But no. There is SO MUCH of EVERYTHING! Even after all the filler filling the regions, there’s hours of content in Upper Junon, the Temple of the Ancients, side character backstories, etc., etc. And all of it is AAA garbage at worst, the finest, most polished of trash.

Around 2005, when Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children, Dirge of Cerberus, and Crisis Core came out, Square Enix released a tech demo for the PlayStation 3 I think. It was an HD recreation of Cloud riding the train into Midgar at the opening of Final Fantasy 7. Fans got really excited thinking that it meant Square was remaking the game, but Square shot down the rumors by basically saying they were never going to remake Final Fantasy 7. It’s open world was too big and it’s story was too long to ever consider remaking it in HD.

Twenty years later, they almost freaking did it! The regions in the original game were flat plains with occasionally a forest, a cave, or a town you could enter. They not only remade every region in the original game but filled them all with so much stuff! After all that work, why wouldn’t you retell the story, too? They were so close! It was right there!

I started playing Final Fantasy 16, and it feels lazy and cliche by comparison. I don’t know if that’s true, or if Rebirth just makes decent, closed-world RPGs look bad despite its infuriating flaws.

I’m still curious to see where Square is trying to go with all this and if they’ll make it there, so for sure I’ll stick around for the third game… and hope that it isn’t all AI slop since Square Enix laid off a large chunk of their workforce a bit ago. I’m sure people out there have gone to great lengths to explain that the multiverse stuff isn’t as pointless as it seems. I’m sure there’s other ways to interpret it, but I’m fine with waiting for the creators to finish their thought before I go to great lengths to find meaning in the madness. We will have to wait and see.

Near the end of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth is about an hour and a half of cutscenes mixed with a quick time events, choices, and short battles. It’s also an hour and a half of pure nonsense, but more on that later. During this time, there’s a scene where Cloud has to choose a gift for Aerith and a type of candy to try. The result of the first choice is he gets a gift that wasn’t an option. The result of the second choice is he and Aerith get a candy that wasn’t an option, and they think it’s disgusting. At the time, I wondered if these two choices were actually a meta message from the creators to prepare the player for disappointment. My choices don’t matter, I won’t get anything I want, and what I do get I won’t like.

That’s kind of exactly what happened in the end. Because Square Enix is too cowardly to either commit to the original story or commit to pleasing the fans who wanted to save Aerith, Aerith is both dead and not dead, and both states are dissatisfying for existing at the same time. Presumably in the main multiverse storyline, she’s still dead and will continue being dead, but in another timeline and Cloud’s hallucinations, she lives on. So what if she’s alive in another timeline? She’s still dead in this one. Why introduce a multiverse at all? You don’t need a multiverse for Cloud to have hallucinations! He does that on his own! The only purpose the multiverse bullshit served in this entire game was to muddle its most emotional moments.

There’s a point in the original Final Fantasy 7 where Cloud goes crazy and beats up Tifa… or was it Aerith? Anyway, he doesn’t pin anyone down and punch them repeatedly in the face in Rebirth, which would probably be disturbing to recreate in HD, but he does throw Tifa into a pool of mako. I was totally on board with this scene being a replacement or supplement for how Cloud goes crazy… until Tifa fell into the mako and all the nonsense happened. I was so mad. I don’t give a fuck right now about the battle between the universes! If Tifa got thrown into, you know, a mako reactor and got mako poisoning, fine! Good! If you want to kill Tifa, I vehemently disagree, but make up your fucking mind and do it! Can’t I have my scene where Cloud goes crazy and attacks Tifa without alternate universe bullshit mucking it up!? God damn it!

The Tifa scene, the entire universe with Zack and Biggs, the hour and a half of nonsense, the timeline in which Aerith lives, all of it is so inconsequential that I can pretend none of it even happened, but I’m still disappointed that it exists. It’s not just adding nothing to the story. It’s detracting and distracting from it. I’m not sure how the characters got to Calm at the beginning of the game, or why they decided to reminisce about Nibelheim. I’m not sure how they got from the Temple of the Ancients to the Lost City or what prompted them to do so. I’m not even sure how Aerith died. Maybe if I didn’t have to wade through so much irrelevant crap, I would understand. Isn’t Final Fantasy 7 complicated enough without adding a multiverse side plot for no reason?

That said, I kind of hope Aerith continues appearing to Cloud and being inconsequential. Some people were so desperate for Aerith to live in the original game that they hacked the game so that Aerith could still be in their party and fight in battles. She just didn’t say anything and was kind of broken. I think it’d be funny if Square Enix made it canon. “We didn’t give you the option to save Aerith, but you can still see her all the time. Constantly. You don’t even have to hack the game anymore!”