Over the decades, JRPG fans constantly beset by those who argue that their beloved genre is outdated, obscure and divorced from the gaming mainstream have been able to refute such claims by pointing at the Final Fantasy games. Square Enix’s beloved franchise is indisputably mainstream: the most recent iteration, Final Fantasy XV, for example, is close to notching up lifetime sales of 9 million copies, while as of 2019, the entire series had notched up cumulative sales of over 149 million.
It all began as far back as 1987, when the original Final Fantasy proved to be one of the key games behind the success of Nintendo’s first console, the NES. But of all the Final Fantasy games to have been released since, none has inspired such a devotional following as 1997’s Final Fantasy VII, which was originally released for the PlayStation.
An involving storyline
Final Fantasy VII was a bit of an outlier in certain respects: it was the grittiest Final Fantasy game then made, with a protagonist who couldn’t be further from the franchise’s habit of casting you as a character with some sort of royal or noble blood. Instead, Cloud Strife was an ex-soldier who had joined up – as a mercenary — with a band of eco-terrorists called Avalanche, seeking to damage the evil Shinra Electric Power Company, which had basically been leaching the planet’s life-force and converting it to energy for the masses.
After blowing up one of Shinra’s reactors (and facing the game’s first boss), the plot took a left-turn: Cloud ended up stranded in the slums of the city Midgar, and hooked up with Aerith, one of the last surviving members of a race called the Cetra. Assembling a new battle-group, Cloud and Aerith engaged Shinra in a struggle to save the planet’s very existence.
Final Fantasy VII’s eco-warrior theme was pretty revolutionary in 1997, and is more relevant than ever today. The game also took place in a world which was cutting-edge for games at the time: a steampunk dystopia studded with huge, socially divided cities and dominated by megacorporations.
What can we expect from the remake?
The recently released demo of Final Fantasy VII Remake left us feeling very optimistic about what the full game (or rather, the two instalments into which it will be divided, the second of which still has no set release date) will turn out like.
It looks absolutely gorgeous, boasting thoroughly modern production values as far as character and level design, dialogue and motion-capture are concerned. The original game’s deceptively simple battle system has been judiciously tweaked – it’s still pretty simple, relying mainly on two buttons along with the bumpers as modifiers, while an energy system which exhausts and regenerates essentially preserves its basic turn-based nature, even though it lets you position your characters carefully in battle and time your attacks in a manner which feels real-time.
The original game’s story, characterisations and dialogue were already spot-on, and the demo suggests that Square Enix hasn’t messed with those too much, beyond adding levels of polish of which the original development team could only have dreamed.
Recently, Japanese games publishers have shown the rest of the world exactly how to move forward by mining their back-catalogues for remake potential. Capcom’s 2019 remake of Resident Evil 2 set a fantastic blueprint for that, by taking a seminal game and plugging it into the technology it used to make the excellent Resident Evil 7 – itself a return to the core elements of what originally made Resident Evil so good.
And we have not a shred of doubt that the same will apply to Final Fantasy VII Remake: sensibly, Square Enix has taken its time to develop the game, keen to avoid failing to do it justice with a rush-job, and there’s plenty of evidence that it exercised some serious thought about what approaches to take, what to preserve and what to update before it even started the development process.
We’ll find out exactly how successful it has been when the game releases on April 10. But our money is on a whole new audience hailing it as a modern-day classic. Let’s hope the trend for shrewdly remaking beloved old games continues apace.
