 I've had a little run where most of the games I've played I have generally agreed with the consensus opinion. I loved Ori, even with its flaws, and I think Doom Eternal is nearly perfect. I thought the Resident Evil 3 remake was good fun even if it was less amazing than its predecessor. Today however, we're going to talk about a game where I just kind of fundamentally disagree with the critical reception. I've been promising to do a shorter video for a while and I am determined to make this that video, not because I don't think it will be worthwhile to go through everything this fairly long game has to offer, but rather because I think its strengths and its flaws are so clear they don't require too much in-depth analysis. And while I often passionately hate this game, it does have many impressive strengths. It does something so well I was compelled to continue playing to the end and it's good enough that it's easy to recommend people give it a shot, but its flaws are also so tremendous that I have a very hard time understanding how anyone could bring themselves to grade it a 9 or a 10. So let's take a look at the partial remake of Final Fantasy 7. We'll talk about its obvious qualities which mainly relate to its story and characters. Its hit-and-miss combat and its completely indefensible level and quest design and why in my opinion its flaws are so egregious they're impossible to overlook completely. And hey, if you like what I have to say or at least how I sound saying it, do me a favor and like, comment, or subscribe. I believe I'm obligated to suggest that you click the little bell thing. I'll be honest, I don't think I've ever clicked the bell because I watch on my shield TV and you have to like minimize to get the bell and that's a huge hassle. But you know what, if you can click the bell, like you know you're watching on your phone or something, I guess click it. As long as it's not a big deal or a pain in the ass, I mean I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm only here to shit on games you love or love games you hate. After the logo. That a commenter recently told me to call an intro. So after the intro logo. The history of fantasy. Let's get this started by allowing me to talk about expectations when we play games. My recent spec ops video had me get an eloquent email from a viewer questioning my opinions and conclusions. I plan to get around to addressing that but I've thought a lot about it and what I ended up boiling it down to is that our expectations have a tremendous impact on how we receive a game. Also if you're watching this, thank you for the crisis of confidence. This was an important email because it's really easy to conflate our immediate response with objective fact. Now I don't like the idea of just saying well it's my opinion because ultimately that's a cop out. Of course it's all my opinion. But if I didn't believe my opinion was worthy of being discussed, I wouldn't even bother doing this right? This matter of expectation is probably even more important when we're dealing with a game like the Final Fantasy 7 remake. How am I supposed to approach this thing? Is it to be judged as a remake? I don't see how that can be possible when the game is entirely different in form and mechanics and I never played the original anyway. Still we should probably touch on what my expectations are when I hear Final Fantasy. What does that title imply? I played several of the early Final Fantasy games back in the NES and SNES days, but they weren't particularly memorable for me outside of looking really good. The series never stuck with me probably because turn-based combat was never my thing. Still when I think about Final Fantasy, this is what comes to mind. Excellent graphics, especially character models and facial animations. A story that is as heavily focused on the characters and their relationships as it is the big bad they're fighting. And maybe most importantly, a story that's a kind of modern fairytale that takes old fantasy tropes and reimagines them in a sort of techno-magical sci-fi setting with big swords and shit. They're generally adult themed Final Fantasy games. I don't expect a particularly amazing plot as much as I expect an engrossing journey, and I don't expect excellent gameplay. So all of that is to say I can't judge Final Fantasy on what its triumphs for in the 1990s. I don't have any preconceived expectations about quality or legacy, and I don't have any positive memories for the series in the way I do for say the first Zelda game or the early Mario games or the early Madden and NHL games even. And I don't even do nostalgia at all, man. I have barely any memories of the first 35 years of my life. It's like I can recall the last few years and everything else is a hazy mess of gray nothingness. I don't even like looking at photos because I don't like feeling old. I have no nostalgia. Everything sucked and has always sucked. So I'm coming at Final Fantasy 7 as a totally new game set only within this current era of gaming. It's not a remake to me, it is Final Fantasy released in 2020. Any of my praise will only be because of what this specific game does well right now, and any of my criticisms will be solely on what this game does badly, independent of his role as a remake. I'm feeling generous, so let's start with what this game does well, before moving on to what's inconsistent and or awful. Story and characters I was warned in the comments of my last video not to do this because Final Fantasy fans love their games and don't take kindly to criticism and I think I know why that is. Final Fantasy 15 and this remake of 7 are very flawed games, but they can each do something extremely, almost incomparably well. Each of them makes you genuinely like and care about the characters you're playing. I'm a cranky and cynical dude in many ways, but I have to say that the bromance in Final Fantasy 15, that shit got me all invested. When I first began Final Fantasy 7, I found Cloud Strife to be annoying. And let's pause and reflect on how ridiculous a name that is, Cloud Strife. Why wouldn't you just name him Conflicted McDuff guy? Anyway, the remake starts out in media res, with characters fighting their way to plant a bomb and blow up a reactor, and early in the game it is very hard to notice anything about these characters other than that they are stereotypes. The stoic mercenary, the smooth operator, the fat guy comic relief, the plucky gal, and clubber lang with a gun for a hand. And while the game does some backstory in all of them eventually, like clubber lang has a daughter he loves, fat guy and smooth guy or orphans, plucky gal is the daughter of middle-class chindra employees with a dying dad. These backstories don't really do all that much to flesh them out. Characterization isn't so much about where characters come from or what they've done, it's about how they react to the situations that arise during the plot. With that out of the way, there's no denying something. Somehow, the people at Square do get you to care about these assholes. The dialogue, acting, and plot are all good and that helps. But the bigger thing is that each of these characters is so ridiculously likeable they are impossible to resist, and of course they're all good looking, even fat guy. It's through dialogue, banter, and sheer plucky positive vibes that you become attached. That and just masterful animations. Aerith is perhaps the most lovable video game character ever, and the way her walk is animated is unbelievably endearing. It is very hard to physically control a character and move them around like this, and fight with her like this, and not very quickly fall in love with her. This is a significant accomplishment and it's important to note the game would fail if Square couldn't figure this out. Cloud is slowly falling in love with Aerith and you are right along with him. She is impossible to resist. This sounds silly I know, but it's real and it happens. She's so freaking lovable it would be just devastating if something were to happen to her. I don't think I could handle that. I'm sure it'll all work out for her in the end, right? Facial animations are extremely good in cutscenes, and the banter while walking around builds an honest to goodness connection. At the start of the game, Barrett's stick is extremely grating, but by the end it is endearing. Cloud's cliche tough guy act is annoying, but it does work at setting a baseline so that when the facade cracks, you actually feel it. This ability to start characters as lifeless but easy to understand cliches and then slowly flesh them out into actual people you care deeply about is a tremendous triumph and it's a triumph that only slowly reveals itself. So unfortunately, anyone who quits early because of the game's many painful flaws will never get the payoff that's waiting at the end. These character moments are what this game does best, just like it's what Final Fantasy 15 did best and making you actually care about characters is very rare in gaming. It's the kind of thing films almost always do better than games, because subtle body language and facial features go a long way towards how we connect with other people. Think about the way your wife or kid walks, or the subtle way you can tell what they're feeling without them speaking. These are the things that separate your acquaintances from your loved ones. Square has always been on the very cutting edge of character animation and games, and though their films have generally been commercial and critical failures, the technology and techniques developed in those efforts leave them basically the very best in the business of this stuff. And this all extends out into the other characters as well. The vast majority of main characters you will encounter are some flavor of stereotype it's true, but they are animated and voiced with such care and art that they land in a way most other games can only dream of. Don Corneo is viscerally sleazy and gross. Andrea from the Honeydianne is probably the best representation of a drag performer ever in a game, and Aerith's adopted mom is animated so remarkably well you can feel her seething, tension, fear and resentment the moment you come into contact with her. Barrett's daughter is ridiculously cute, Jesse is ridiculously likable. The characters and cutscenes here are top notch examples of cinematic animation. It's as good as anything that comes out of Pixar or Dreamworks or Disney. It is remarkably good. Even the villains who are comically villainy have a certain degree of depth and a laudable amount of character, from the lady using soldiers as footstools to the grim heartless president to the stereotypical man scientist. Pretty much every single significant character not only works, they're some of the best examples of characterization you will ever get in a game. Unfortunately, the main villain of the plot doesn't get this kind of love because for some reason the remake is only a remake of the beginning of Final Fantasy 7, but the characters you engage with here are done so well, I think it's safe to assume that this quality will extend to the rest of the trilogy. To sum this up, characters are amazing, just amazing. Okay, that's what the game does well. It does it so well it's as good as any game has ever animated characters and achieved an emotional connection with them. Animation alone isn't enough to do that, of course. You need a plot and a story and the results there are more mixed, so let's touch on that. Remaking a plot The Final Fantasy 7 remake is, um, long. It's a long game. Too long, I'd argue, especially considering this 50-plus hour game is roughly one-third of the original. Now, if your PG is filled with vast amounts of well-written characters, gripping side stories, and complex twists and turns, well, by all means demand 50 hours of my time. If, however, your plot could be accomplished in a gripping well-paced 25 hours, and the rest of the time I'm finding lost kids and feeding lost Chocobos and wandering aimlessly around cluttered confusing levels, well, then things are different. The actual plot point on offer here is good, really, really good. It boils down to a few missions of eco-terrorism, meeting Arith, building trust with her, rescuing Tifa from sexual slavery, trying to stop the murder of an entire part of the city, and then rescuing Arith from the bad guys before fleeing and trying to stop Sephiroth. Each of the main things you're tasked with doing flow well one into the other, and it feels like a rollercoaster journey that is compelling and serious enough to really make you feel invested. Big things happen, and they directly affect the characters you're playing, and these main missions are, for the most part, really engaging. There's even a surprising amount of moral complexity, as the whole idea of doing acts of terrorism to save the planet is questioned, and the actions of the heroes have terrible consequences at times. Tifa even points out how troubling it is that many of the employees of Shinra are decent, normal people, trying their best to get by. This shit is also super rare in games. Very, very few games have any degree of moral ambiguity. Almost all of them have good guys who do good things, and bad guys who do bad things, and never the twain shall meet. It's a testament to how well written the story is that the game bothers to reflect on this stuff. It's great, but still there's no getting around that this game shouldn't be 50 hours. You can remove all of the wandering around, and things would be improved. You could remove all the pointless traveling, and things would be improved. And most importantly, you can safely remove every single side quest because they are miserably awful. And there's at least 20 of them, and they're just terrible. Not only are they stupid and pointless and just serve to slow everything down and bore the shit out of you, they're designed horrendously. I let out a 15 minute stream of expletives as I mindlessly wandered around finding people who were vomiting with barely any hint as to where they are. Another has you finding songs that make people happy, with absolutely zero clue where these songs are. The game just wants you to walk around combing the entire level until you stumble on them. Why? Why are these even in the game? They're just objectively terrible. Terrible writing, terrible layout, terrible context, pointless, mindless, garbage, busy work of the very worst variety. This game doesn't need them. It's got a kick-ass 25 hours of actual content, so why pour another 20 hours of needless garbage over it and dilute what you do have? I actually pondered this because I found it so confusing. Like, why would the developers choose to have this stuff in the game? The only two things I could come up with are, one, quote, because these are the things we have in other Final Fantasy games, and that's a terrible reason. The other possibility is because we need you to spend time with the characters so that you'll love them. Now, I understand that a crucial part of this game is making you care about the characters and that requires we spend a bunch of time with them, but can I spend time with them doing something other than finding people throwing up in bathrooms? Can I not have to cross the entire map to find a flower? Can you not have the quest Giver stay as a waypoint on your map so you get confused and circle back to them only for them to say, hey, have you found that vomit yet? There's no defending this stuff. It is pure, unadulterated filler of the fetchiest, questiest variety, and the worst part is it takes a plot that is really quite good and busts it all the hell as it drains any of the momentum out. You'll be tasked with saving the world, and then your NPC partner will say, hey, are you sure we should leave? People might need our help finding a fucking cat. So while the plot and story are more than good enough to accomplish the game's goal of making you love these characters, it is hurt. Not helped, hurt. Badly hurt by all these minimal effort video gamey garbage quests. I hate them, and they made the game piss me off for a significant chunk of hours. They are terrible enough to warrant a significant lowering of a score. They're so bad it actively ruins big chunks of the game. Level design. Okay, here's where things get annoying. The art design of the world here is simply fantastic. Amazing even. It is dense with geometry, and the game uses these levels and the banter of people in the background to fully ground you in something that feels very real. It doesn't take long to fully understand the universe of Midgar simply by looking at its art and sky boxes and walking about its maps. The visual design of the maps and world here is simply amazing. It's how these things act as spaces for gameplay that starts to show some cracks. Final Fantasy VII is not an open world RPG, and that's good hypothetically. I've got an entire video, which I think is my best ever, so it's a shame nobody's seen it. It's up here, hint hint. I've got an entire video about how open world games fail. That doesn't mean the entire concept of open world games don't work. Anyway, this is not an open world game. It's a game that is trying to kind of reimagine the old JRPG elements where you had story missions and an overworld. But the overworld here is just kind of like hallways. Final Fantasy VII Remake might have the most linear levels I've ever seen. They're like early 2000s corridor shooter levels. In fact, I'm honestly positive that these are the most linear levels I have played in any game in the current generation. Nearly every level is a long hallway, with the occasional small hallway that branches off to end with a chest that has one potion in it. Now, that might be okay if every chest only had something like a potion in it. But unfortunately, every 50th chest has something massively useful, like new weapons or 5000 gill, so you are compelled to open every damn chest, which again feels like a waste of time in a game that is full of high-stakes scenarios you should be rushing to deal with. This design works well enough in the main mission dungeon type areas where it's important to keep the momentum going. But it is terrible when you're doing the side quest and it boils down to literally taking a circular corridor around until you find an item or kill a monster. It is downright mind-numbing, and I spent at least a dozen hours thinking, okay, can we get to something better here? Why am I running in circles finding cats? Why am I being asked to find kids? Again, what's added to the game by asking me to do this? It would be one thing if this was two hours of the game and these sections boil down to like travel sections similar to crossing an overworld and older RPGs, but that's not what this is. You don't use these corridor levels only as a way to travel between the towns and dungeons. These corridors contain probably about 20 hours of quests and combat. I find myself thinking that a very small open world map would have worked far better here. There is something extremely frustrating about being contained in levels so tight that turning around means bumping into your AI companions. It's claustrophobic and makes this huge city feel like it's one city block wide. This game would have worked far better taking something like Final Fantasy XV's open world and shrinking it way down and laying it out like that. It's just very odd to play a game like this and have it be so incredibly restrictively linear. And I'm always saying that I prefer linear games, but this is kind of insane. It's a major problem and the amazing thing is that even in this incredibly small, tightly linear design, the game is a mess of loading. It is truly stunning how many load screens are hidden behind ladders, elevators, shimming across a ledge, opening a door, flipping a switch, or climbing under a rock. Now these things are often done seamlessly in other games, but something is wrong here. You'll encounter these things literally within view of each other. You'll hold triangle for literally a full three seconds to open a door. You'll walk down a hallway and have to climb under a rock, walk down the rest of the hallway and have to shimmy across a ledge. It's insane. By the end, you've easily spent an hour in these things and if you go the wrong way, well back through the door and back through shimming over the ledge. When you play this game, you will see that you have never played another title that does this even close to as much as Final Fantasy VII. This sounds like a nitpick, I'm sure, but it's really not. It's a significant part of the design that sticks out like a sore thumb. How is it that this game can only load one hallway at a time? Movement and Combat Let's wrap up with this. Movement first. It is really bad. I harp on this a lot, but the game feel of moving your character around is such a huge part of whether a game is enjoyable moment to moment. One of Nier Automata's greatest strengths is it's just a joy to move the characters through the world. Doom Eternal or Titanfall games are the same. Red Dead Redemption 2 suffers badly on this count because it's a pain in the ass to get Arthur to move upstairs or through doors and one of the main reasons Dark Souls 2 is less enjoyable than the other titles is it feels shitty to move around in 2. It's just off. I understand that this is difficult to quantify, but it's just as Stuart once said of obscenity, I know it when I see it and I see it here. The remake just feels frustratingly clunky to move around. You will consistently have trouble getting Cloud to sync with a ladder or maneuver through a door or to get up a staircase. He's annoying to turn and the game is constantly taking your ability to sprint away for some reason. It'll decide either for loading or because it thinks you should be walking all cool and shit and now you have to slowly walk this hall or you've got to very slowly climb these steps or you gotta be looking over here so we're gonna rip the camera away from you. It's annoying. In a game that has a shit ton of walking I'd prefer to be able to decide for myself when I can and cannot sprint. I hate when games do this. It never feels good to move in Final Fantasy 7 when it actually did in Final Fantasy 15 and when you combine the sluggish movement with these ridiculously tight levels it gets very frustrating very quickly. This is the kind of thing that seems small almost not noticeable but over 50 hours tiny little annoyances add up to a real problem. Levels are too tight controls are too stiff and the camera is way too close to the character's back which is annoying while moving and frustrating when fighting which brings us to the combat. The fights in Final Fantasy 7 are flashy and the animations are stupidly good like thousands of hours of people spending sleepless nights in their cubicle good. The combat animations are about as good as is humanly possible to currently achieve. This makes the fights viscerally enjoyable at times and combined with the flashing lights great music and excellent sound design it makes the base combat really fun except when it is fucking awful. When you fully get the hang of switching up your characters and firing off spells and special abilities it can be quite satisfying but there is so much of it and certain design decisions end up making it very frustrating at times. The particle and spell effects are so amazing but they can also make it impossible to even see what's going on. Still that's a reasonable trade-off okay the real issue is how this game is a strange blend of genres so this game uses the same system as Final Fantasy 15 but it's improved in several ways. First of all having full control of your entire party is a massive step forward from 15 but one of the things that saved 15 was the excellent mobility you had there. That teleport ability made it so you could avoid damage fairly easily. Here you have a dodge button and a half-assed parry mechanic but they don't function the way you'd want in a game like this. If you're going to give a character a parry ability in a modern game players will expect it to be a reactive mechanic where you're rewarded for timing but Cloud's parry happens automatically if you're attacked when guarding. There's a noticeable delay when trying to block which means you're supposed to sit there standing in place holding guard and hoping the enemy does a physical attack. If he does you get a big damage bonus. If he targets when he relies you just stand there doing nothing. If they do one of their unblockable attacks or magic attacks or a sleep spell or grab or any number of other things then you just get damaged or killed or staggered or knocked to the ground. It's a bad mechanic that's boring when it works and frustrating when it doesn't and then there's the dodge. When given a dodge button it is incredibly frustrating when dodging doesn't work to mitigate damage. Now there's no iframes or anything here and the dodge itself is a very small evade. It's like they kind of wanted to have the flashy near type dodge but then realized a skill player would be able to avoid damage so they just made it pretty much pointless aside from the dodge materia that automatically hits enemies if you dodge into them. These are just kind of examples of why the combat often feels very random. But beyond these there are three big problems with the combat here. 1. With the camera so close and the particle effect so insane it is impossible to see what's going on especially because the game just throws tons of enemies at you at times. This means you'll constantly be hit by things that you can't see which is very frustrating. 2. A ridiculous amount of enemies have staggering combos or grabs or knock downs or sleep spells or a huge variety of things that take control away from the player sometimes for up to like 15 seconds. It is totally common for all three characters to be asleep at once. What's worse is these spells literally follow you. You can't dodge them or block them. You can only react using a specific item to get rid of them or by putting up a spell like ward or something which you get way later in the game and you might not have equipped. This is fine in old JRPGs or say persona because in those games when you get a sleep spell on you it's just a lost turn. It's frustrating but not viscerally annoying. It's a whole different thing when you are playing a game where you control an avatar. When you're controlling a character in real time with a dodge button and an active combat system and suddenly a tracking spell that you cannot dodge literally puts your character to sleep and then has them instantly killed by a one hit kill attack. It feels so bad. This makes any encounter with enemies who take control away from you incredibly frustrating and this sin is not rare. It will happen hundreds of times through your playthrough. Even if you have the item to debuff it it's just annoying. It's something that should have been removed in the switch to real time combat. Finally, the difficulty settings in Final Fantasy 7 are terrible. Amazingly terrible. I am a big believer in having a wide variety of difficulty options in all games and even though I generally play games on the hardest difficulty I think that they only benefit from having many options. My Doom Eternal video talks about how perfectly balanced playing on the hardest difficulty feels but that game is better for having so many options that any player of any skill can find the difficulty that's most fun for them. Final Fantasy 7 by contrast has two modes. Normal, which is annoyingly difficult at times and makes all fights just take forever. Like enemies are stupidly beefy in this mode making every single fight take minutes and boss fights take no joke like 15 minutes in some cases. Then there's easy which is ridiculously pointlessly easy. So fucking easy it may as well just remove the combat and make it a movie. Why are these the only two choices? Frustrating and so easy it's impossible to fail is terrible balancing. After 40 hours I was ready to see the end of the game and switched permanently to easy and while I found myself less frustrated it took what could have been a good combat system and ruins it. In fact, I would say the main problem with this entire game is the lack of good difficulty choices. The vast majority of your time in Final Fantasy 7 is in cutscenes and combat. So it's important that combat feels good for most players. I didn't enjoy the game on normal like half the time because it felt frustratingly slow and occasionally far too hard. But on easy it's like baby's first video game and just think of that. How many other games do you know that only have two options? Why? Why on earth doesn't the game offer easy normal and hard? I don't see how anyone on earth can defend this design choice. There's no defending it. I don't even understand it. It makes no sense. I can't even recommend a setting for you to play on. I mean I guess the way to go is to play on normal until you come to something so frustrating you want to throw the PlayStation in a trash compactor but that's an awful solution. You cannot adjust difficulty in combat and you can't adjust your loadout in combat either. So if not when when you come to a fight that requires a specific spell not to be infuriating you've got to fight, die and tinker in your menus before deciding whether to try again on normal or turn on the auto win easy mode. This sucks especially when the fights can take 10 minutes or more. This is the game's greatest flaw and the one that breaks it in many ways. When easily half the game is combat and there's no way to get a satisfying difficulty level, for at least for me and I am a player who bought the game so whatever you thought of it I couldn't. Well then your game is fundamentally flawed at its core. It is incredibly rare for me to play a game where I can't find a setting that feels best. Okay? Almost every game I play there are many settings and I can find the one that I like best. Even something like Dark Souls you can just play and level until it's at the proper difficulty. Okay I actually said I would keep this relatively short so let's wrap up with this. Is Final Fantasy 7 worth playing? Yes. Yes it definitely is. The story and characters are truly amazing and the combat can actually be really fun when it's not being the worst thing in the world. But there's no getting around admitting that the game has serious flaws that will leave you frustrated or bored or angry at times. Guaranteed. Like the game has an annoying habit of repeating itself. It'll do something like this. And the first time you send red 13 across a gap to flip a switch and watch that animation you'll think wow that's awesome but then you do it again and again and again. The game does nothing once. Maneuvering mechanical hands to let Aerith drop a ladder is endearing once but by the fifth time it is very annoying. Every little puzzle or combat encounter is repeated over and over and over and it just bloats the game to easily twice the length it should be. Now if you're at a point where $60 doesn't matter all that much then yeah buy it but be prepared to be really annoyed fairly often. But in the end I think the positives at least match up to the negatives and make it an interesting game with a masterful story. But if you're at a point in your life right now where $60 means not buying another game you're looking at then no. Because unless you loved Final Fantasy XV or are just a huge fan of the series there are major problems here and it's just too freaking long and too insistent on repeating itself and far too linear to justify 50 hours of your time. Alright. Thanks for coming. See you next time. Bye.