u/sonofaresiii

I played the original (for the first time) and the remake back to back. I went over the original in a separate post, but it left me highly disappointed. That game did NOT age well.

But this game?

I adore this game. It is, in my opinion, the perfect example of what a remake should be. It fixes the major errors. It recontextualizes the stuff that doesn't make sense, in a way that makes more sense-- in the original, when Barrett would go on a rant about eco-terrorism, due to bad translation I had no idea what to make of it. Is he supposed to be making a poignant impassioned plea? Is he hallucinating? Is he actually a villain? No idea. In the remake, Barrett goes on a rant and Tifa and Cloud give each other knowing eye-rolls, perfectly nailing the tone.

GRAPHICS Amazing. Of course they are, because it's Square, but it's more than that-- seeing the world of Midgar come to life was INCREDIBLE. I have to imagine it was even more impactful to fans of the original. It felt to me like seeing Cap, Iron Man and Thor on screen together in the first avengers-- this thing that I had an image of in my mind, only seen represented as a kind of cartoon implication, finally existing as I imagined it.

COMBAT I loved it. One of the game's shortcomings is that the materia system is clearly designed for an open world, because the original was one-- and this game isn't. So a lot of the upgrades felt underwhelming, like I never really got to experiment with a ton of different materia load-outs because there just wasn't enough reason/opportunity to.

PADDING This is the biggest complaint of the game and I get why. There is ABSOLUTELY a lot of out of place dragging down of sidequests and whatnot. But I will say that to me, it didn't feel like padding, it felt like an earnest and sincere attempt to expand the world, that just failed. This game wanted to be open-world but shoved onto an on-rails story, and instead just switched back and forth in a way that didn't work. But a lot of the other expansion, like the trip to Jessie's parents, worked really well for me.

THE STORY One of the most controversial parts, and the thing that has me singularly most excited, is the idea of the whispers and changing fate. I LOVE the idea that this isn't just a reboot into new continuity, but it's breathing more life by becoming a meta-sequel to the original. I am so excited to see where things go, and whether the heroes can break out of fate fully.

The worst parts of this game felt like sections where it felt like the devs were just trying to appease fans of the original-- like the final sequence has this really time consuming, not-fun motorcycle chase with bad mechanics that really hurts the pace, because you just escaped an exploding shinra building and you're hunting down sephiroth but I need to swing my sword at a giant road-mech for 20 minutes with mechanics that barely make sense. But if they had cut this, I get the feeling people would have just complained.

Overall, this game is an incredible remake, and a pretty great game on its own.

I want to add that these games get hard to talk about because the fanbase is absolutely rabid while simultaneously looking at the original exclusively through nostalgia goggles. I looked through some other opinions, and a highly-touted one is that the remake is bad because it has goofy moments, while the original was filled with a dark and serious tone and barely had any silliness whatsoever. What. Come on.

My post with the original is here

I missed out on FFVII when it was released, and finally got around to playing it, then played the remake.

The short version is FFVII is WAY WORSE than you guys led me to believe, and the remake is WAY BETTER than popular discourse has it. I think nostalgia is doing a lot of heavy lifting for both accounts here.

Some thoughts:

I think what I played was the 2013 re-release that had a few updated cutscenes. It did NOT have the quality of life improvements the consoles had, and holy shit you guys this game NEEDS those QOL improvements. I suspect my opinion of this game would be way different if I had those.

First, I understand this game was very much of a product of its time, and I do view it through that lens. But it's still a really tough game to get through by modern standards. It has a LOT of random minigames that are janky and hard to get through-- they totally kill the pace for the heavy action-driven RPG, when suddenly i have to stop and try to time commands for a parade, or do... whatever that weird tower defense thing at fort candor was.

THE STORY The translation was BAD. Not charming, not a few mistakes, it was BAD. They even get the names of characters wrong part of the time, so I'm just left totally confused. In a normal game this would be irritating, in a game about nebulous stuff like the life force of a planet mixing with a hallucinogenic alien who crash landed and then a scientist decided to exploit it to create mutant experiments that somehow made the main character both a clone and not a clone of Sephiroth who has memory problems (or might have just been lying??), this game is nearly impossible to follow without supplemental material/a guide.

The pacing also was just not good. The game hit an emotional highpoint and climax on Aeris's death, and I was ready to run into the final stretch and hunt down Sephiroth for what he did. Nope, there's still like twenty hours of fucking around, snowboarding and exploring the sea and shit. The game just drags the ending out SO MUCH.

EXPLORATION The real problem I had was how annoying and irritating it was to explore (because of all the random encounters and slow pace of the fights-- QOL improvements!!! Need them!!) paired with how MUCH exploration the game demanded of you, because of how ambiguous it all was. There were MANY times the game gave you no real direction or indication at all of where to go or what to do. Just.... go explore, and eventually you'll find the next part of the story. And the next part wouldn't be in anywhere close by or obvious, but just way on the other side of the world in some random part of town. Once, all I had to go on was "Go somewhere the sun doesn't shine." It was the bottom of the ocean, but it could have been ANYWHERE. A random closet, a cave, no way to know.

This is 100% a result of when it was released. I get that. Exploration was new and exciting, and the game absolutely EXCELS at having meaningful secrets for you to uncover-- one of the few areas this game is way better at than most games released today. There were whole ENTIRE CHARACTERS that you could uncover just by exploring. But when exploration and traversal is a pain in the ass and a huge slog from the random encounters, I was just reaching for a guide instead of sinking hours and hours and hours into wandering around aimlessly.

IRRITATING MECHANICS Last note, the fight mechanics also haven't aged well. You never really know if a boss or monster is immune to a status effect, or it just didn't work that one time. The bosses also have a lot of secret mechanics that aren't really explained and can easily party wipe, so you're just left with total trial and error, with a long slog to get back to where you were. This might have been fun in the 90's when you were a kid and had unlimited time, but as an adult in 2026 it just felt like an arbitrary waste of time. Eventually I just presumed ALL bosses were immune to ALL status effects and didn't even bother, which kneecapped a significant amount of game mechanics. And there's no reason to use status effects on most ocmmon enemies, because you can just wreck through them with normal attacks. So what's the point of all the cool shit you can do when it's irrelevant to everyone?

All in all, this game was a huge letdown.

3/10 by modern standards, probably 6/10 with QOL improvements. 7/10 if the translation was better.

I'll share some thoughts on the remake in a separate post

My post with the remake is here