Final Fantasy 7 Remake PC review
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A future painted in classic colours.
(Image: © Square Enix)
Our Verdict
A terrific return to form for singleplayer Final Fantasy that makes the series’ future exciting, in a barebones (though functional) PC package.
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Need to know
What is it? The first part of a remake of classic ’90s PlayStation RPG Final Fantasy 7.
Expect to pay: $70
Developer: Square Enix
Publisher: Square Enix
Reviewed on: AMD Ryzen 7 1700X, Gigabyte RTX 2080 Super, 32GB RAM
Multiplayer? No
Link: Epic Games Store
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Final Fantasy 7 Remake has arrived on PC months after its PlayStation release, at a price of $70. The hope was for a definitive version, but at launch, I can’t say this is it. Which is disappointing, because in spite of Square Enix giving it the kind of PC port the publisher is infamous for—not as bad as Nier: Automata, but still underwhelming—Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade is excellent.
After the lacklustre, confused, and unfinished-feeling Final Fantasy 15, this new take on one of the most beloved games in the series feels like it truly has vision. It balances faithfully recreating the original 1997 game (1998 if you first played it on PC like I did, giving me a lasting appreciation for the MIDI soundtrack), while commenting on the source material in a way that makes it feel up-to-date. The combat system is now fully real-time, though in a way that finally manages to honour the classic RPG legacy of the series.
The biggest caveat is that, despite the title, FF7R only retells the opening of the original game—the portion set in the grimy, industrial city of Midgar, where the wealthy live in comfort on gigantic plates of metal, while the poor live in the shadows beneath next to piles of scrap and waste.
While originally the Midgar section could take about 10 hours, here it’s transformed into a 35-40 hour adventure that feels more complete in its own right. As everything reaches a dramatic climax, it makes sense to close the book there (until the inevitable sequel).
(Image credit: Square Enix)
Let’s Mosey
The broad sweep remains the same. An aloof and grumpy merc named Cloud joins a cell of ecoterrorists who target the planet-killing Mako Reactors used by the Shinra company to power the cyberpunk-fantasy city of Midgar. It’s a serious story full of environmental mysticism and melodramatic twists, undercut by goofy elements like chocobos and the infamous quest where Cloud sneaks into a bad guy’s lair by cross-dressing. (Recontextualized here as a dance-off rhythm game that basically has Cloud compete in Drag Race, which celebrates the stoic grump embracing his feminine side.)
The remake takes this original as a blueprint, and expands it with extra quests, added character depth and motivations, even whole new story arcs.
Pulling in from the original’s top-down view to a closer, third-person camera makes the extra detail feel natural. It really adds to the feeling that FF7R stands as a complete chapter.
(Image credit: Square Enix)
The Midgar portion of the original game wasn’t exactly open world, and neither is the remake. Only a handful of chapters push the brakes to let Cloud wander around a hub and take on sidequests. Others are more linear. After the destruction of a Mako Reactor early in the game, you’ll walk among the panicking populace, and really feel connected to the people around you as they desperately search for loved ones amid the wreckage. In the original game, that section was only two screens long.
Another highlight is a brand new chunk of story that has you walking a quiet residential district for Shinra employees, a kind of company town. There, you get a sense of what life is like for those who are ignorant of the planet’s plight.
While the mix of ironwork scrap yards and neon-lit streets is incredibly pretty throughout, dungeon-like areas are more mundane and static.
The extra Intergrade episode, originally DLC for the PlayStation version, has levels that benefit from a little more interactivity. It’s centred on Yuffie, a character who didn’t appear until later in the original game. Flipping switches with ranged attacks and clambering up walls like the ninja she is results in much more interesting exploration than Cloud is ever faced with. Her combat style, a hectic mix of close-range and long-range fighting, is terrific fun too. Her chapter is only short, but it shows how the remake could evolve its way towards a more interesting second chapter.
Fight or flight
Besides your first trip to the hazy red light district of Wall Market, where doing favours for locals plays into the plot, FF7R is better off for sticking to an action-packed pace most of the time. Cloud’s person-sized buster sword isn’t for show, after all. Whenever you’re not taking detours to open treasure boxes for potions (which if you’re like me you’ll probably avoid using until the final boss), you’ll be whacking enemies with all sorts of oversized weapons in real time, Final Fantasy 15-style.
However, blocking and using standard attacks charges the Active Time Battle bar, chunks of which can be spent to take special actions. Time slows to a crawl when you do, mimicking the original game’s turn-based combat as you select abilities from the menu like Cloud’s heavy-hitting Focused Thrust or Barret’s party-shielding Lifesaver, as well as magic spells. Even using items like potions costs a chunk of the bar.
(Image credit: Square Enix)
While it’s possible to hack your way through many fights, sooner or later you’re going to need to actually figure out how to get the most out of your crew. You can switch between controlling them directly, or command them to use abilities when their ATB bar fills while sticking with your favorite.
This might be the best combat system Final Fantasy has ever had.
Each party member has a unique attack. For Cloud, that’s the ‘Punisher Stance’, where blocks become auto-parries at the cost of mobility and ranged defence.
Barret’s is a charged shot that can be fired between longer bursts from his gun-arm. Keep up pressure on enemies, or hit them with attacks they’re weak to, and they’ll stagger, overcharging your damage (all the way up to 200%).
Often you’ll need to choose between going on the attack to stagger an enemy or taking the opportunity to heal. Harder fights like boss battles really lean into this dilemma, especially on Hard Mode where magic is much more limited and items are outright forbidden. Not unlocked until you’ve beaten the game once (and balanced for new game plus), it’s a great extra challenge that really shows how tactical the fighting system can be.
This might be the best combat system Final Fantasy has ever had. It takes the real-time approach of Final Fantasy 15, and mixes it with more strategic, classic-feeling elements. Fights are fast, but you have time to breathe if you need it. It’s sort of like if Kingdom Hearts 3 didn’t make me want to scream every 10 seconds.
(Image credit: Square Enix)
Abilities can be expanded by finding new weapons and maxing out proficiency with them, allowing that weapon’s unique ability to be applied to all of your armoury.
Spend enough time with your iron blade, for instance, and its Triple Slash attack can be used with any weapon. Characters improve by improving their gear, every level-up giving an equal number of skill points to all your weapons. It’s a great way of bucking RPG equipment power creep, as rather than weapons being usurped by powerful variants, they stay relevant with different uses. Finding spells more useful than melee? Equip one that buffs your magic attack.
Materia are where you can get really creative. These shiny orbs slot into your weapons, applying a variety of effects: elemental magic, parries, stat buffs, abilities, and powerful creature summons. As materia gain experience, they unlock permanent upgrades that apply even if you move them from one character to another (the classic ‘fire’ spell becoming the higher-damage ‘fira’, for example). Some materia even play together, granting your basic attacks an elemental effect when attached to a link slot next to elemental magic, or the same with resistances.
You can really play with some interesting builds to get the most out of your team, such as by combining Barrier magic with Steadfast Block to soak up massive damage and immediately turn it into ATB so you can spit attacks back out. You’ll always have way more materia than your party can use, letting you be creative in how you respond to threats. Thanks to generous checkpointing allowing you to re-spec before retrying fights, you have space to experiment.
(Image credit: Square Enix)
Unsettling scenery
Cloud is constantly asking where his money is. I find myself asking where the PC-specific options are. Final Fantasy 15: Windows Edition was a surprisingly detailed port, filled with options to tweak and enhancements not possible on its original console hardware. Here, you only have the option to choose between high and low shadows and texture quality, which barely seems to do anything, and there’s an fps cap that maxes out at 120. Stuttering has been reported on multiple hardware configs, and dynamic resolution scaling can’t be disabled.
You’ll struggle on mouse and keyboard, unless you get used to a default control system that sometimes expects you to juggle WASD, IJKL, arrow keys, and a mouse all at once. You can’t select menu options with the mouse, though you can scroll with the mouse wheel (fun for selecting attacks, but hardly worth it for the hassle of not using a controller in combat clearly designed for one). Moving the map with WASD is clunky, and sections with bespoke controls like a motorbike sequence and darts minigame are significantly harder with a keyboard than a controller. Some keyboard prompts prominently feature PlayStation button graphics. Press escape all you want, the shortcut to bring up the menu is M. The map? That’s N, of course.
Still, Final Fantasy 7 Remake feels great with a controller in hand. It ping-pongs between the mechanical mind massage of combat, and exploring an industrial fantasy world and gripping story. Newcomers get a rich world to delve into for the first time, while as an old fan, I found it impossible to resist the urge to discover what was added and what was changed.
The extra dimensions to the narrative and visual design leave me—for the first time in a long time—excited about the future of mainline Final Fantasy, and the action game fan in me keeps me coming back for the combat, something I rarely feel in any RPG.
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Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade
A terrific return to form for singleplayer Final Fantasy that makes the series’ future exciting, in a barebones (though functional) PC package.
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Final Fantasy 7 Remake on PC review: it just about gets the job done
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A great game gets a so-so rerelease
By Sam Byford / @345triangle
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There was a time when PC versions of Japanese games tended to be terrible, if they existed at all. But in recent years, Japanese publishers have put more effort into their ports. They’re not always the most full-featured conversions, but games like Monster Hunter World and Final Fantasy XV are great examples of titles that run much better on PC than their console equivalents. The days of games like Dark Souls locking PC users to low resolutions and frame rates are mostly over.
The long-anticipated PC version of Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, which launches today, isn’t exactly an example of the latter. But it doesn’t feel well-tailored to the PC either. If you’ve been waiting to play this game because you don’t have a PS4 or a PS5, it’ll probably give you a reasonable version of the console experience. It just won’t go any further than that.
Read next:
Final Fantasy VII Remake review
First, the good news. Unlike some recent PlayStation-to-PC ports, Final Fantasy VII Remake feels well-optimized for the PC from a performance standpoint. I tested the game on my own PC that I built more than five years ago, which has an Intel Core i5-6600K processor, an Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU, and 16GB of RAM, and had no problem running it at 1440p and 60 frames per second on “high” settings even though it was installed to a spinning hard drive.
This isn’t necessarily surprising. Final Fantasy VII Remake is often an amazingly beautiful game, but its linear, enclosed levels feel designed with 2013 console hardware in mind, so it would have been disappointing not to get better performance even out of an aging PC.
What is disappointing is that you won’t get much better performance out of a much better PC. This version of Remake has very few graphical options, and you’re forced to pick between fixed frame rate caps — it can run at 30fps, 60fps, 90fps, or 120fps. I tried running it at 90fps to see how things would hold up and the image quality was much blurrier, so it looks like dynamic resolution scaling is being applied.
Better PCs should be able to run the game at 120fps with higher resolution, then, but the actual assets aren’t going to look any better. Other than basic output resolution and some HDR settings, the only other options you have are low and high texture resolution, low and high shadow resolution, and the ability to limit the number of characters on-screen to between one and 10. There is also no ultrawide support at all; which, again, I’m not really surprised at given how frequently the game bounces between pre-rendered cutscenes and real-time action, but it’s unfortunate nonetheless.
Texture resolution was a major flaw with the original PS4 release, though it was improved with the Intergrade update for the PS5. You’ll still see the odd blurry texture here and there on PC, but it’s a much better situation than when I played for the first time on the PS4 Pro. Most importantly, I can confirm that Cloud’s bedroom door no longer looks like it came from an N64 game — though his sink is still conspicuously blocky.
All of this adds up to a port that does the bare minimum to run well on PC hardware. It’s not a showcase for the platform in any way — it’s a showcase for how great a console game Final Fantasy VII Remake was. And, well, I have to admit that that’s been my takeaway from playing through the PC version this week. It could have been a more thoughtful port, sure, but this game is still incredibly good and runs better than it did on the PS4, which is something. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t played it on the PS4, but I wouldn’t recommend double-dipping if you have a PS5.
Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade will be released today on the Epic Games Store.
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Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade review for PC — comparison of the port with Death Stranding, Halo Infinite
One of the most aesthetic games of our time, Final Fantasy VII Remake, will finally receive the second part — Square Enix told about this the day before. But it will have to wait until the winter of 2023.
And already on June 17, the PC version of Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade appeared on Steam, an equally beautiful version with improved graphics that repeats, changes and continues the story of the original. Kanobu author Ruslan Yarsanaev explains why this port has become one of the most disappointing — and compares it in detail with other PC versions of popular games.
What is Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade
The first part of Final Fantasy VII Remake was released on PlayStation 4 back in 2020. Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade is an expanded and improved version of the same project that includes all DLC. In the re-release, Square Enix tightened up the graphics, improved the quality of the textures and got rid of the problems with their untimely reloading, taking into account the capabilities of the PS5.
The PC version of Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade became available as early as December 16, 2021 — it appeared in the Epic Games Store.
On June 17, the same version of the game was released on Steam. You can read more about how to make in-store purchases under sanctions here.
You can learn more about the game in Nikita Kazimirov’s review, as well as in Denis Knyazev’s article about additions. Both texts are dedicated to the Playstation version of the project. But since the developers did not change anything in the gameplay, the PC version will be approximately the same. It makes no sense to repeat the pros and features of the game again — it is better to talk about its shortcomings.
Main disadvantages of
Meager customization options
The ability to customize the game on PC is one of the main features of the platform. Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that players actively use it and adjust projects to their requirements or the power of computers. But in the case of Final Fantasy VII Remake, the developers didn’t seem to care. There are very few parameters available for customization, some of which the player does not need at all, or is deceptive.
For example, you can set a limit on the number of frames per second (FPS — frames per second): values of 30, 60, 90 and 120 frames are available. It is impossible to set FPS without limits: it turns out that the game uses dynamic resolution tied to frame rate. This renders the resolution selection option almost useless. And the game does not warn about this anywhere! This makes Final Fantasy look worse than it should; Fortunately, the fans have already managed to release a mod that corrects this disgrace. The developers themselves are in no hurry to edit the version: one single patch was released in January 2022.
The shadow and texture quality settings have only two values to choose from: «high» and «low». The game does not offer other options, so it is impossible to complete Final Fantasy on «medium» settings. As well as it is impossible to adjust other parameters, because they simply do not exist — there is no level of detail, drawing distance, lighting level, etc.
You can only set the global brightness level, adjust the image for the HDR monitor, and also turn the «characters on screen» slider: this parameter is supposed to be responsible for the number of observed NPCs on the screen, but in practice it determines at what distance they will appear.
Dropping FPS and other glitches
Most of the time FFVII Remake stays around 50 fps, sometimes even delivering the desired 120 frames. Alas, these values are not constant, and depending on what is happening on the screen, the frame rate constantly jumps. Transitions from cutscenes to gameplay should be seamless, but between them there is almost always a micro-lag, if not a long freeze. Sometimes the number of frames from an acceptable 50 FPS literally fell to values of 10-15 — this made the gameplay rather inconvenient.
It was not possible to establish the reason for such a sharp drawdown. The problem is that it is not possible to measure the exact number of frames in FFVII: the game deceives the programs with the demonstration of data, giving values higher than the observed ones.
In the patch, the developers tried to deal with this situation, but even so, it was not possible to achieve stable frames. In addition, now in some scenes the game runs much more stable on DirectX11 than on DX12.
Separately, I would like to mention one more source of headache — management. Such an orgy could be forgiven during the porting of Devil May Cry 3 and even Devil May Cry 4, but not in 2021. Instead of the Esc key, the M is responsible for the pause, and the map (Map) with the intuitive M has moved to the N key.0003
And if the mess with the purpose of the buttons can still be sorted out, then the problem with the computer mouse is not. The game carefully ignores the fact of its existence, so changing the auto-target, controlling the cursor on the map, or adjusting the angle in photo mode can only be done using the keys assigned to the camera movement.
FFVII Remake Intergrade image comparison with minimum and maximum settings
Opinion about optimization was formed during the passage without mods designed to improve performance and quality of graphics. The condition of the PC port is sad, so the screenshots turned out to be appropriate: the “soapiness” of the image is present in almost every frame. And although there are very few available functions, you can still tweak something in the game. For clarity, we attach the first screenshots with the maximum image settings, the second — with the minimum.
12 photos
Comparison of FFVII Remake Intergrade with other PC ports
At the moment, Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade evokes strong associations with NieR: Automata, also published by Square Enix. The quality of Nier’s PC port was disastrously poor, and it was only with the help of an active fan community that the project was made comfortable to play. Especially FFVII Remake Intergrade stands out against the background of other projects ported to PC from consoles.
Horizon: Zero Dawn — many features, a visual display of changes
One of the main Playstation 4 exclusives was released on personal computers in 2020. The move was not painless — on the new platform, the game acquired a whole bunch of problems. On the release, there were bugs due to which, at resolutions above 1080p, the picture was processed incorrectly, and FPS periodically sagged. And the mistake with the fact that the heroine did not leave marks in the snow could be fixed only after a few months.
But calling a PC port bad is not going to work. The number of frames per second has lost the 30 FPS limit, and the texture resolution has been noticeably increased. There are many functions, they are enough to optimize graphics for your needs: both low and medium, high and ultra settings are available. Even motion blur can be turned off, something that FFVII Remake really lacks in some places.
And the game not only offers a detailed description of each parameter, but also clearly displays what will change when it is turned on.
For more information on optimizing Horizon Zero Dawn on PC, see Alexey Egorov’s article.
Death Stranding — cinematic, support for widescreen monitors
In the same 2020, the last project of Hideo Kojima was ported to the PC. Horizon and Death Stranding share the same engine, and the time difference between their releases is small. But the port of the latter turned out to be extremely successful.
The game offers many options for adjusting graphics, focusing on the cinematic image. Because of this, in Death Stranding it is possible to adjust the quality for HDR monitors, but it is not possible to set the desired camera angle. But the project supports widescreen monitors, intelligently increasing the observed space in the frame, and not stretching it.
Optimization of the game also turned out to be of high quality.
On medium settings, the project produces a picture quality comparable to the graphics on the Playstation 4 Pro. And at high settings, Death Stranding demonstrates a decent 60 frames per second at a resolution of 1920×1080 even when playing with an Nvidia GeForce 1060. Thanks to more powerful video cards with DLSS technology, both FPS and image quality can be greatly increased — the image of distant or structurally complex objects will become clearer.
Drawdowns and slight freezes are isolated cases typical of complex scenes. The exception is cutscenes — in them the frame rate is tightly fixed at 60 fps, which will be especially noticeable when playing with a higher frame rate. Alexey Egorov wrote about how Death Stranding is played on computers.
Halo Infinite — customizable and inclusive
Halo Infinite was supposed to be the flagship of a new console from Microsoft back in 2020, but ran into problems during development, due to which the release took place only in December 2021.
Developer represented by 343 Industries has stated that the Xbox Series XS version is a priority.
In our review of the game, we have already touched upon the topic of game optimization, which turned out to be quite strange: regardless of the power of computers, the game could work in completely different ways on the same settings. Fortunately, there are so many customization options in Halo Infinite that setting up the game for a comfortable passage is not a problem.
The developers have carefully approached the possibilities for customizing the image by the players themselves. Separately, you can adjust the quality of textures, shadows, lighting, detail, and even animations. In addition, if necessary, the player can turn on special modes designed for people with special health needs — the game offers to configure these settings at the very beginning of the passage.
I would like to support such an inclusive attitude towards the player in every possible way.
Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition is the best version from the same developers
The main opponent of Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade in comparison. The game is also published by Square Enix; it was optimized on PC after some time of exclusivity on consoles; part of the development team for both games is the same. But only with FFVII something went wrong.
Final Fantasy XV really used all the power of the computer, making the project almost four years ago still looks amazing. The game is well optimized and offers a wide range of options. Disabling Nvidia’s visual bells and whistles significantly increased performance, allowing you to enjoy the game at high resolutions and at high frame rates. Even on not the most powerful video frames in cutscenes and gameplay, you could get 120 frames per second at a resolution of 1920×1080. Slowdowns were observed when turning on vertical synchronization, but the problem was not widespread and manifested itself only on individual systems.
Verdict
The release of the PC versions is a good chance to stir up the audience’s interest in the game. But Square Enix turned out badly: the players got just a mediocre port without any changes and additions, and even without a number of features inherent in the platform. It looks extremely lazy and disappointing, because the problem is not so much in the game itself (the game is good!), but in how comfortable it is to play it on personal computers. Even many months after the release, the quality of the port has not been patched.
The publisher did not learn from the bitter experience of Nier: Automata, which fans repaired themselves, fixing many aspects of the game: from framerate and textures to mouse control. Apparently, Final Fantasy VII Remake is waiting for the same fate. Therefore, you should not hope that the announced sequel will receive a more successful port — Square Enix continues to demonstrate amazing and unpleasant stability.
review Final Fantasy VII Remake — DTF Games
An excellent game that only pretends to be a remake.
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Few of the licensed parts of Final Fantasy can compete with the seventh in terms of the number of spin-offs and related works. Square Enix actively tried to turn it into a franchise called the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. In terms of scope and variety of content, it is in no way inferior to what the company has deployed around Final Fantasy XV.
This is not surprising. Lore seventh Final Fantasy is really rich in events and characters. Each incarnation of the universe revealed grains of information about it: for example, Crisis Core talked about the war with Wutai and showed the internal structure of the SOLDIER squad, and Before Crisis showed the structure of Shinra.
Final Fantasy VII Remake focuses on the life and life of Midgar, the central city of Gaia. Consciously or not, but the developers managed to do what, perhaps, no work under the Final Fantasy VII brand could do — make the player believe in this world.
Remake of
The remake covers about a quarter of the original game’s story, but Square Enix was right when it said the first episode would be comparable in length to the full game. It took me about 35 hours to complete the campaign of Final Fantasy VII Remake, along with most of the side quests — not comparable to the main parts of the series, but still quite a lot for the prologue. It will take almost twice as long to “knock out platinum”.
Of course, the plot of the original game was deepened and expanded. The plot remains the same: Cloud, a former member of the elite SOLDIER squad, subordinate to the Shinra Energy Corporation, joins the eco-terrorists from the Avalanche group, which opposes this very company.
The story line hasn’t changed much either, but almost every key scene has become longer, and characters who previously played no special role have received much more screen time, which is why their personal stories now evoke a much stronger emotional response.
This means that, for example, Jessie, Biggs and Wedge are now not just extras, but full-fledged characters who can even be sympathized with.
What’s more, familiar episodes now feel completely different. Remember the weird scene at the Honey Bee Inn where Cloud had to try on a woman’s dress? So now it is perceived not as a wild filler, breaking out with its tone from the main narrative, but as a really important stage in the story, which, moreover, is brilliantly furnished. In vain, that the escape from the crowd of half-naked mustachioed men was nevertheless cut out of him.
The authors of the remake carefully transferred all the locations from the first quarter of the original to the game and filled them with interesting stories and gameplay situations. Of the total mass, perhaps, only the train graveyard stands out — it looks somewhat divorced from the main narrative (although the boss battle here is almost the best in the entire game).
It is also important how these very locations are made.
The districts of Midgar are full of life: adults, children and animals scurry through the streets, everyone is busy with something, talking about something, discussing recent events and reacting to heroes. The inhabitants of Midgar regularly remind the player of completed side quests, and when Cloud walks through the city in a dress, everyone he meets makes it his duty to comment on his appearance. Moreover, even the merchants in this episode react to the main character’s clothes. Of course, there is no talk of any simulation in the spirit of Gothic or GTA, but it seems that for the first time in 23 years, this metropolis feels more than just a decoration.
Even the most remote areas of it are full of details, although there are still questions about the level design. Almost all locations here are corridors with small forks, which, as a rule, lead to treasure chests. In terms of its structure, Final Fantasy VII Remake resembles the tenth part of the series, and not the original — it is the same long linear adventure that unleashes the player only closer to the finale.
But this does not mean at all that the player has nothing to do here, except to follow the story. For obvious reasons, Cloud will not get into Gold Saucer, but there is no shortage of various mini-games here. In addition to the “classic” squats in the gym of the Wall Market, in the remake you can compete in sipping on the horizontal bar, dance with the eccentric owner of the Honey Bee Inn and, of course, ride a motorcycle. Almost every segment of the story has some kind of unique mechanic (albeit not always successful).
This remake is very reminiscent of Kingdom Hearts, which was also developed by Tetsuya Nomura. In general, the gameplay of Final Fantasy VII Remake is much closer to KH than to the rest of the series — and this primarily concerns the combat system.
In the text with impressions from the demo, we already wrote how the battles are arranged here. The player has two modes to choose from: normal and the so-called «classic». In the first, the player needs to independently move around the battlefield, dodge, defend and attack.
At the same time, spells and items can only be used after filling a special ATB scale, which slowly accumulates on its own, or quickly when the hero attacks.
In the «Classic» mode, the characters attack and defend themselves, so all that remains is to watch the ATB and select the necessary skills from the menu. In both cases, the player is free to switch freely between the three characters in the group (although only Cloud is allowed to explore locations — with rare exceptions).
In the same text about the demo, we expressed concern that the fights might get boring towards the end if every enemy had to be «stunned» like in Final Fantasy XIII. Fortunately, nothing like this happened — it is not at all necessary to stagger most opponents, so any tactic has the right to life.
Just like in Kingdom Hearts, only one button is allocated for attack, so there is no question of a combo. But the situation here is different than in Final Fantasy XV — the remake requires the player to be more involved in the process.
It is necessary not only to look for the enemy’s weaknesses and be able to use them, but also to memorize their attack patterns, as well as learn to block enemy attacks in time and switch between heroes at the right time. Uncertainly, of course, you can also take it, but in this way you will deprive yourself of the lion’s share of the pleasure of the game. In addition, on a high difficulty, where it is forbidden to use items, this is unlikely to work.
In addition to the basic strike, each of the four central heroes has special abilities. Cloud can change stance to inflict increased damage on opponents, sacrificing his own mobility; Barret is able to attack enemies at a distance with a powerful shot, or push everyone in his path if equipped with a melee weapon; Aerith places a kind of time bomb on the battlefield, and Tifa has several special attacks available at once, between which you can switch.
The abilities of the characters also depend on the chosen weapon.
The materia system has migrated to the remake without changes — you also insert small multi-colored balls into special slots in equipment, which open access to all kinds of spells or increase the performance of heroes. However, all swords, staves, gloves, and machine guns now have a special ability. If used often enough, the character will learn it and be able to use it with other types of weapons.
In addition, weapons in the remake can be upgraded. Raising the level, the character, in addition to an increase in characteristics, receives five points to improve weapons. They can be spent on opening new materia slots, increasing its combat performance and other useful bonuses on a special screen that painfully resembles the Cristarium from Final Fantasy XIII. However, here sometimes you really have to think about the choice, because the points during the first passage are hardly enough for everything.
All this makes the remake’s role-playing system flexible and deep. There is room for experimentation and you are free to create even the wildest builds.
A Barret-Healer who prefers close combat is quite a viable thing.
More than a remake of
Overall, Final Fantasy VII Remake is a great game. Its authors carefully and with incredible love treated the original source, scrupulously recreated almost every scene from it and organically supplemented the main plot.
The original Final Fantasy VII had a huge impact on the entire industry, set the vector for the development of the genre. She, like no other JRPG, needed a remake so that newcomers could also join this story without fear of «cutting themselves on the polygons.» And now, 23 years after the original was released, we…
Didn’t get a remake.
Tetsuya Nomura and Square Enix have brilliantly fooled the fans. Contrary to the name, Final Fantasy VII Remake is more than just a remake. This is not a rethinking and not a «modern reading», but a completely different story, but only those who are familiar with the original will be able to understand this.
The game carefully pretends to be a careful remake, playing on the feelings of the fans, forcing them to walk around familiar locations and showing them characters from the «Compilation» (like the same Leslie). At the same time, almost from the very beginning, something timidly appears in the plot that is designed to turn everything upside down.
Newcomers may find the finale just wild, but Final Fantasy VII Remake, as it turned out, was not made for them. This game is not a way to join the classics, but an occasion for reflection of veterans. It’s hard to talk about this without spoilers, but whatever you expect from the remake, you’ll get something completely different. Tetsuya Nomura, who has long worked on the very conservative Kingdom Hearts, brought a metanarrative to Final Fantasy — perhaps for the first time in the series.
Final Fantasy VII Remake gracefully asks fans one simple question with a new storyline: does Final Fantasy VII need a remake at all? The very production of it can put into a stupor those who love the original and appreciate its history.
There is no definite answer here, and, obviously, Final Fantasy VII Remake can not only disappoint, but even anger someone.
Listening once again to the old story that you remember from childhood is, of course, pleasant, but you have to move on. No matter how the remake ended up, it still would not be able to compete with the original — its influence is too great. The developers were well aware of this, and therefore decided to «encroach on the sacred.» At the same time, they did it so deftly and beautifully that ignorant players will not notice the catch, and the old fans will only have to swear or reconcile in a frenzy.
The original Final Fantasy VII told a story about people tormented by their past, about how they try to find themselves and decide for themselves who they should be. The remake goes further and raises these questions not at the level of the plot, but by its very existence. In this regard, the 2020 game is much bolder and deeper than the 1997 original, and perhaps even every other Final Fantasy before it.
