You would hardly have expected it to really happen. After several teasers, re-releases of the original and a typical Square Enix announcement that was much too early, we finally have the remake of the RPG milestone Final Fantasy VII in our hands. The expectations are huge. Can the remake breathe new life into the aging PS1 role-playing game?
Already in the intro differences from the 23 year old original become clear. Before we get started, we get a brief outline of life in the Midgar metropolis, and before the iconic tracking shot through the city, you can see the flower girl Aerith being chased by mysterious shadows.
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Shortly afterwards you find yourself in the skin of the mercenary Cloud Strife, who was hired because of his past in the elite army SOLDIER to prevent the megacorporation Shinra from exploiting the planet. Shortly thereafter, together with Barret Wallace and the ecoterrorist group Avalanche in Mako Reactor 1, the task is to blow them up and put them out of action.
Do you already know everything? I thought wrong
So far, so well known – but while the events in the reactor should still be familiar to all players of the original, the remake goes surprisingly many new ways as soon as the first chapter is completed. Final Fantasy VII Remake is not afraid to tell old storylines from scratch and to expand the known story at every nook and corner.
Immediately after the explosion in the reactor, for example, you explore the affected sector 1 in the metropolis in a much larger section and you are directly confronted with the fact that the actions of Avalanche hit not only the bad authorities, but above all the uninvolved.
Midgar now looks much busier and more believable. The size of the city in particular is now much more noticeable, regardless of whether you explore the residential areas on the artificial plate or hide them in the slums always and everywhere. But the characters also underwent a decent revitalization.
Again, the key word here is “credibility”. The basic character traits of your fellow combatants and the well-known NPCs are still there, but have been improved, expanded and improved through many new dialogues. The really successful German voice output does the rest to increase the emotional bond with the characters.
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And that's a very good thing, because it is well known that the remake only covers roughly half of the first CD of the original. The changes, expansions and, above all, the completely new plot lines and partly unexpected plot twists, which will surprise even veterans, bring together a st ately RPG, which you will not only be busy for at least 35 hours, but the emotionality of the original in many places even surpasses.
You spend a not inconsiderable part of this time completing various side quests. Of these, there are only a handful of each in the corresponding chapters, but they reward them with items, equipment or money and sometimes offer important moments of character that your colleagues will work out further.
Unfortunately, most side quests can only be completed in the corresponding chapters, because despite the sheer size of the city, with its slums, alleys and dungeons, Final Fantasy VII Remake is strictly linear like the original. You can discover smaller areas and secrets here and there, but you shouldn't expect an open world. Still, there are at least a few tasks that span the entire storyline of the game.
Action fight with obstacles
Most of the adventure, of course, is about fighting. In contrast to the original PS1, your team in the remake no longer fights turn-based, but in the style of a Kingdom Heart completely in real time.
In addition to standard attacks and combos, each character has special techniques available. For example, cloud can switch to a stronger attack mode, while Tifa gradually strengthens its special attack. In addition, of course, there is the well-known Materia system: these can be distributed in the slots of your equipment at will.
This enables you to use powerful magic, abilities or even the familiar summons in boss fights. The use of materia, as well as objects, costs one or more of your ATB bars. These automatically fill up during the fight. You give commands to your group with the shoulder buttons, but you can also switch between characters at any time to control them directly.
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In order to simplify the fighting somewhat, the new weapon modifications were introduced. With each level, you receive weapon points that you can invest in your weapons to improve their attack power and status values or to unlock new material slots. Thanks to this system, old weapons can still be used in the later areas of the game.
This new action combat system works mostly well, but unfortunately it is also the biggest weak point of the game. The camera regularly positions itself in the most unfavorable corners, and it is not uncommon for you to be hit by enemy attacks from the blind spot. That would only be half as bad if the said attacks did not interrupt your characters and throw them back again and again, which in the worst case can directly cost life, because there is no sensible way to break out of opponent combos.
The comparison with Kingdom Hearts was deliberately chosen, because some of the boss opponents would be better off in this franchise. The overall somewhat slower and more tactical combat process of Final Fantasy VII Remake does not in some cases match your sometimes very extravagant attack chains of the opponents, especially towards the end of the game.
This sometimes creates more frustration than challenge, but fortunately it is still sufficiently limited. If you don't feel like a full load of action, you can also play the game in “classic mode”. Here your characters attack automatically, while all you have to do is use skills and materia.
Technology that excites
During the fights and exploration tours, Final Fantasy VII Remake also cuts a good figure technically on the PS4 Pro – at least most of the time. While the majority of Midgar and its residents are impressively staged, here and there there are always minor imperfections like washed-out textures or mouth movements in generic NPC conversations that seem unnatural to creepy.
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Fortunately, the very strong graphic design and the beautifully redesigned soundtrack can largely make up for that. Nevertheless, the feeling remains that something has already been worked on with a view to the upcoming Playstation 5. We couldn't find any major drops in performance, even when the screen was extremely busy.
If you have completed the main story around Cloud, Aerith, Avalanche and Shinra, an extensive endgame is also waiting for you. We won't reveal too much at this point, but if you can't get enough of Final Fantasy VII Remake, you definitely have a lot to do. (Which, however, is also due to the many loading times.)
Nevertheless: Final Fantasy VII Remake is clearly more than “just” a worthy reissue of the original and is one of the essential titles of this generation. The expanded plot, the fresh plot twists and the much better elaborated world raise Final Fantasy VII to a new, contemporary level and lay the foundation for the upcoming episodes, which will hopefully form a modern masterpiece in the overall work.
