Is Final Fantasy 7 Remake Good If You Never Played The Original

Is Final Fantasy 7 Remake Good If You Never Played The Original?

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Final Fantasy 7 Remake wowed fans with a bold reimagining of the PS1 game. Here’s what it’s like if you haven’t played the original (spoiler-free).

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Is Final Fantasy 7 Remake Good If You Never Played The Original

Square Enix’s ambitious Final Fantasy 7 Remake reimagines the original PlayStation game’s characters and world with beautiful modern graphics and a new combat system, and that’s earned it ample praise from series fans. But nostalgia is sometimes blinding, so newcomers to the franchise may be wondering: Is Final Fantasy 7 Remake any good if you didn’t play the original game? The (spoiler-free) answer is complicated.

Rather than a full remake of the 1997 game, Final Fantasy 7 Remake focuses on the original’s first section, which takes place in the city of Midgar. What was once a five-to-eight-hour segment is now a full, 30-or-so hour game. That means several big FF7 story changes, like fleshed-out character arcs and entirely new areas. Remake also sports a new battle system inspired by FF15’s combat, with more focus on action (strategy still required) and no random encounters.

These changes mean Final Fantasy 7 Remake is much easier to jump into in 2020 than the original, with its dated graphics, random battles, and sometimes-controversial content. But the fact that it’s easy to digest on the surface doesn’t necessarily mean those new to the series will enjoy it. Here’s a no-spoiler analysis of whether Final Fantasy 7 Remake is worth it for newcomers.

Will You Like Final Fantasy 7 Remake If You Skipped The Original?

Is Final Fantasy 7 Remake Good If You Never Played The Original

The short answer? Yes, probably, but with some major caveats. Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s characters and combat are its biggest draws, and many new players will enjoy both quite a bit. Its main cast members are all likable, and each is given plenty of scenes to round out their personalities and backstories. Aerith, Tifa, Jessie, and Barrett use their screen time especially effectively, but protagonist Cloud is the real star. Through the supporting characters, his hard exterior is gradually chipped away, revealing a flawed but good-hearted badass who will have many players regularly smiling, even if his past frustratingly remains a mystery.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s combat is great, and the battles only get better over time, as players unlock new abilities and slot more magic-granting Materia into their weapons and armor. It’s a system uniquely suited for a remake of an old-school JRPG, since it delivers a punchy action that keeps it from feeling boring in the moment, but it also requires players to think like they’re in a turn-based battle – especially in boss encounters, where managing health and magic points as well as enemy weaknesses is crucial.

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But while Final Fantasy 7 Remake successfully translates many of the things fans loved about the original to something new players can enjoy, it also has several archaic elements that are hard to get over. Its early-game side quests are tedious, requiring players to do things like kill a few rats in an empty lot and slog through the same sets of low-level monsters they just fought a few minutes earlier, all with the boring narrative context of making money to gain reputation as a mercenary. This is made all the more frustrating by the fact that these quests hide some of FF7 Remake’s best moments, forcing players to trudge through them if they want to see character-building story sequences. Side quests get better in the late-game, with story framing that makes them far more meaningful, but new players would be forgiven for bouncing off the earlier ones.

Traversal and puzzles can also be incredibly tedious. Often, the way forward is immediately clear, but players have to sit through long animations – a character climbing across monkey bars, a dog running along a wall to pull a lever, an extremely slow metal arm moving a box, etc. – in order to progress. One particularly obnoxious “puzzle” requires players to push the right and left thumbsticks up or down with precise timing, which leads to many frustrating do-overs and seconds of waiting through animations. (This puzzle is a cheeky reference to a similarly frustrating one in the original Final Fantasy 7, but considering the other tedious puzzles added in, its inclusion is just another annoyance.) Repeated encounters with low-level enemies in missions that drag on for too long do nothing to help these puzzles seem less like padding, especially in the game’s middle chapters, where some objectives feel unimportant to the plot or otherwise unnecessarily drawn-out.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s biggest flaw from a new player’s perspective, however, is its story. The remake’s basic plot of an eco-terrorist group’s struggle against a corporate superpower is grounded and nuanced. Characters regularly grapple with the relative morality of their actions, and it’s a simple but effective narrative. But Final Fantasy 7 Remake leaves too many questions unanswered. Mysteries about Cloud’s backstory, and particularly his relationship to FF7’s villain, Sephiroth, are teased but never explained. This was true in the original, but Sephiroth didn’t appear until much later. Here, he’s a constant presence, and players never find out who he is, why Cloud seems to hate him, or why he’s so dangerous. Eventually, players are literally just told by a character that Sephiroth is the biggest threat to the world, but it’s not clear why or how, and his status as antagonist feels undeserved as a result.

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There’s also bits of story that feel out of place. Characters move on too quickly from climactic events, barely discussing traumatic deaths or rapidly transitioning to gameplay segments that seem shoved in to expand the run time. A confusing flashback is shown early in the game, and players expecting an explanation by the end are simply shown the flashback again with no added context. A dramatic moment is completely ruined by the sudden appearance of an anthropomorphic blue cat, who looks more like a Sonic O.C. than any of the other characters or monsters in the remake and who is never shown or mentioned before or after. Worst of all (for reasons which can’t be revealed on account of spoilers), the ending loses all emotional weight if players haven’t experienced the original, with characters talking in vague terms about things new players have no point of reference for.

In general, it seems like Square Enix expected players to have played – or at least seen or read spoilers of – the original game. Almost none of the mysteries Final Fantasy 7 Remake sets up that were in the original are explained by the time it’s over, and the answers newcomers do get usually come in the form of a few throwaway lines of dialogue. Revelations seem dependent on prior knowledge, to the point where a new player will probably leave the game more confused and frustrated than fulfilled. That being said, there’s some great aspects to Remake. The characters and combat are fun, so new players will probably find something to enjoy, and the visuals are impressive throughout. Just know the ultimate payoff may not be worth the time and emotional investment without first playing the original game.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/ff7-remake-good-bad-never-played-first-original/

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