Final Fantasy VII: Review: How a niche title became a timeless masterpiece

After years of supplication from fans and an almost endless development period, the long-awaited moment is finally within reach: the remake of Final Fantasy VII is about to be released. The demo recently released in the Playstation Store brings excitement to the boiling point, because the remake looks damn good, looks contemporary and promises to meet all high expectations – expectations based on a classic from 1997, at the ravages of time did not pass without a trace. And even then Squares RPG had to deal with a few quirks. A review.

It is no coincidence that fans have been asking for a Final Fantasy VII remake for ages. The memories of Cloud, Tifa, Barret and the rest of the hero's squad may be benevolent, of moving storylines, captivating rounds of fighting and pompous magic. Only that no longer corresponds to the gaming experience if you put the old ham back in the original after all these years. It looks sluggish, lengthy and expansive. Even the PC version, the loading times of which are minimal compared to the original Playstation version, is at risk of patience due to its random battles and eternal appeal spells. Not to mention the chunky graphics and rigid backgrounds.

Nostalgia and prioritized details often fill the blank spaces on the memory map, so it is not surprising that legends suppress facts. For example, did you know that Final Fantasy VII could not inspire many fans of the saga from the start? That it looked retrospective in the eyes of some role-play experts? At least up to a certain point in the course of the game. Interestingly, it was primarily RPG newbies who immediately took Square's role-playing epic to heart – especially the European genre beginners.

Nerd RPG

To understand this in retrospect, you have to keep an eye on the gaming landscape in the mid-90s. In 1994, Nintendo was still the undisputed leader in the gaming sector. Square had made a decent contribution to this. The Final Fantasy series has been a mega seller on American and Japanese territory since the days of the 8-bit NES. Only Europeans and Australians looked into the tube for a long time. It was too demanding for average knowledge of English, too complex and memory-intensive for translation into all European languages - according to Nintendo's European branch at the time.

Only one Final Fantasy game officially made it into our realm, and it wasn't even a real one. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, known here in Germany as Mystic Quest Legend for the Super Nintendo, spoiled those interested in the game with an extremely simplified, completely underwhelming gameplay. The enclosed game advisor – a fully illustrated, high-gloss all-in-one solution – was not necessary to crack the game within a few hours. Moreover, the childish translation deterred. In the German version, opponents were fought with silly names like "terror diaper", whose fearsome attack methods sometimes consisted of folk music.

Only enthusiasts who were motivated by tests from game magazines at the time imported super hits like Final Fantasy 6 (titled Part 3 in the USA) or Chrono Trigger for exorbitant D-Mark sums, but received a lot of ridicule for their joys that they did not understand how sophisticated and moving the material was. Many saw only tiny cephalopod characters and strategic menu pushes without the action component of a Zelda or Secret of Mana.

In many ways, Final Fantasy 5, Part 6 and Chrono Trigger were the preliminary high point in the development of the J-RPG genre. Especially when it came to character management and history. Weapons with secret functions, cursed shields that were converted into super items with a lot of effort, armor parts that, in combination with certain other components, released legendary powers … simply crazy! Or how about professional branches with their own talent tree, tag team attack methods, transferable talents or escalating spells? Everything was already there towards the end of the 16-bit era.

Years before European average gamblers mourned Aerith's death, events such as Celes Chere's failed attempt to commit suicide, Chrono's death, or the heroism of a frog warrior brought tears to RPG friends. It was always about an epic epic with a complex plot and an overwhelming soundtrack. And yet, those who enjoyed such games were in the freak zone. Even in the US, role-playing games of this caliber were only attributed to hard-boiled nerds.

Japanophile

This is not surprising since the flowery and sometimes over-affected Japanese anime narrative style met with little understanding in European culture at the time. In the period before the first Pokémon wave, Sailor Moon was the best-known Japanese format, apart from the anime versions of Heidi or Sindbad, which were tailored specifically for the western market and were already on ZDF in the 80s. Films and film series such as Akira, Ghost in the Shell or 3 x 3 Eyes were only found at exotic import dealers and in video stores.

The fear of contact with anime-typical material would have remained with a high probability if Sony's sales strategy had been as conservative as that on Nintendo's side. While Big N didn't dare to speak to a more mature audience and chew less content until just before the turn of the millennium, Sony fired from the start when it came to cultural diversity. Worldwide and in all conceivable facets. The success on the part of the third party manufacturers proved them right.

Games like Resident Evil, WipEout and Command & Conquer paved the way for greater acceptance, but they were by no means the tip of the iceberg. Freak software like Densha de Go including the railway cockpit controller? Not even Sega would have waved such a highly specialized thing about internal quality assurance. But Sony gave publishers a certificate of no objection right from the start: Get out what you want!

What does all of this have to do with Final Fantasy 7? Quite a lot, because Sony's seventh prank was by no means predestined to be a sure-fire success. The development of the game started as a 2D RPG on the Super Nintendo (including a switch option to Big N's next-gen console), but with the recent breakthrough in 3D graphics, the desires of producers grew quickly.

After Nintendo initially spurned CDs as a data carrier and also threatened to charge Ultra 64 licensees retroactive gag contracts like in NES times, Square was looking for an alternative distribution platform. Even the prospect of Nintendo's 64-bit floppy drive was rated insufficient because the weak compression methods of the mid-1990s made the adventure very short. So Square soon landed on the brand new PlayStation.

The next Mystic Quest Legend?

32-bit technology and the storage mass of the CD met all requirements, and yet Square played with fire. 3-D graphics and pre-rendered intros were the latest craze, but knitting a 70-hour role-playing game from them? With so many locations that it had to be spread over 3 CDs? With loading times that add another patience factor to the already time-consuming random battles? And with an action that ran the risk of anime-typical overaffection to scare off average western players? An unprecedented and, not least, expensive venture on the console of a newcomer to the industry who had just taken on the market's two big brawlers.

Square had no choice but to expand to Europe, even if the seven behind the title caused confusion. To minimize the risk and to adapt to the new technology, Square was forced to make the final fantasy formula more manageable at the lowest conceivable level – not to say mainstream-compatible.

In plain language means: the once celebrated party management has been reduced to the bare minimum. Helmets, shields and the second accessory flew off the grid, which halved the armor options of the series, which had been established for years, while the controllable party shrank to three members.

When final fantasy veterans got wind of it, doubts grew for the first time. Would Part 7 degenerate into a second Mystic Quest Legends in favor of the West's adaptation? Had Square got tangled up in his presentation madness and sacrificed the depth of the game? Style over substance?

The ingenuity of the substances

Maybe a little, but not half as serious as initially feared, because Final Fantasy 7 should compensate for much of the lost complexity with an interesting, talented system that can be learned by beginners. Colored balls, called materia (in the local version they were called "substances"), could be coupled with the equipment, but also combined with each other, whereby heroes learned simple spells on the one hand, but could also use clever special talents when used skillfully.

While the introduction to the Materia system was still a bit sluggish so that bloody beginners can cope with it, the endgame was almost free of fools. With the right combinations, the actions of party members were copied endlessly, without wasting magic points, not only did fallen comrades resurrect, but also avenged themselves in the same breath with an invocation magic parade and much more.

Even the dreaded WEAPON super bosses, who were stronger than the final boss Sephiroth, lost their fear thanks to sophisticated strategies. Strictly speaking, when used correctly, there was no need to press a single button on the controller to bring a colossus like Ruby WEAPON or Emerald WEAPON to its knees if you understood the system.

It's strange that, looking back, Final Fantasy 7 conveys exactly the opposite of what the die-hard fans once feared. Nobody would still describe the game as graphically outstanding or even timeless. In contrast, nobody complains about the Materia system. And to be honest: even then, the graphics didn't look really round. As impressive as the pre-rendered backgrounds may have been, the chunky, non-textured characters stood out even then and with their rough gestures still strongly reminded of the 16-bit era. Apart from some video sequences, they didn't even have real hands, but rather stumps at the end of the arm. But maybe it was precisely this contrast between the pompous table-top world and the polygon-poor characters that made Square continue to focus on exciting twists and original side strands in the narrative part.

The jump from the steampunk intro to the overwhelming fantasy world came in chunks, so you never felt overwhelmed by the outside. On the contrary, the further you got, the more fun side jobs and humorous interventions loosened up the action. See Cloud's travesty episode, the little play or mini-games like the Chocobo race. The game designers showed a lot of sensitivity here.

A remake with residual risk

Who knows how many Europeans played Final Fantasy 7 until the end? In any case, it is a fact that both the substance system and the extensive but digestible action guaranteed the breakthrough in our latitudes. A few weeks after its release, Final Fantasy mutated from a nerd game to a mainstream phenomenon that even casual gamers knew and loved, even though you had to bring a lot of patience with you for some things.

Would you like some examples? The most powerful of all calling spells – Knights of the Round Table – demoted the player to a spectator for over a minute. Countless grind battles were necessary to bring at least the most necessary set of substances to the master level. Chocobos had to be bred and trained so that they could win races and take the heroine to remote islands … Square could no longer impose such extensive tasks on anyone without provoking endless shitstorms.

Get in touch with the classic – Event report on Final Fantasy VII Remake

Kuro was in Berlin and was able to get very close to the Final Fantasy VII remake. We were of course there for you with the camera.

This is exactly where the remake lies. It's completely clear that Final Fantasy 7 in its old form has no chance of reaching the mainstream a second time. Too much adjustment, however, could distort the magic of the original, if not make it unrecognizable. The fact that the first episode of the remake takes place in Midgar and is supposed to be the size of a full RPG shouldn't taste like every fan of that time, after all, everything really started when you left the steampunk city. Once again it will be important that Square conveys the story in an appealing way and keeps it exciting with small distractions.

But there are also new opportunities. Will we find out more about Aerith this time before she dies? Are we experiencing new facets in the friendship between Tifa and Cloud? Are we experiencing Cloud's hero's career more intensively this time? His role reversal, his doubts, his existence as an isolated clone? We will soon know whether the conversion has been successful.