Final Fantasy 7: Retrospective

 

   In the past five or so years, the band Paramore has made a huge comeback. They have a new sound and are bigger than ever, but when they go on tour people still want to hear the breakout mid-2000s hit that made them famous, “Misery Business.” “Misery Business,” a pop punk inversion of “Jolene,” is a gloating anthem about sticking it to The Other Woman after the singer character successfully waits her out and re-secures the affections of a man. The singer character also calls the other woman a “whore,” and Paramore endured a controversial uproar over the line where lead singer Hayley Williams eventually resolved to stop saying the word live.
    A theme that defines Final Fantasy 7 Remake (FF7R), then, is the next evolution of this impulse. Not a version of “Misery Business” with one word excised, but a rewrite of the song where the singer character and Other Woman overcome their differences. I’m not the first to say this, but Final Fantasy VII (1997) is incredible. A fun, propulsive, bizarre wonder of a game that deserves the adulation it receives. Since it is as old as I am and has loomed large over conversations about video games for equally as long, I thought I would need a sufficiently archeological approach to playing it but “merely” had a great time instead. For almost as long, a widely anticipated remake has lurched through the gaming news cycle in various forms and stages of development. Every mobile port or spinoff announcement for Final Fantasy VII came with gentle assurances that this wasn’t “the big one,” the one to capture all the majesty and the years of accrued acclaim of the original.
    It’s somewhat startling that FF7R is not so much a game remade for modern sensibilities, then, as it is a game remade for precisely 2020 sensibilities, and the distance between release and my playing of it is revealing as to what those differences are. Every rough edge of the narrative is smoothed out. AVALANCHE does the exactly polite amount of bombing, and the full scope of the disasters are false flag Shinra operations used to justify their retaliation. Leaving the concern over the bomb’s strength as an ambiguous single line from Jessie on the train gave it a lot more weight. Our freedom fighters probably should be asking if they’re really doing the right thing, even and especially if they decide that the fight against the Shinra regime is still worth fighting anyway. The people of Midgar externalize racial animosity towards Wutai in the aftermath, but it’s being fed to them through Shinra media and agents. Cloud joins in a dramatic rhythm game stage show to sidestep the homophobia and crudeness towards sex workers that the original Wall Market sequence exhibits. Hell, the Don’s main enforcer, Leslie, has a pretty face and a tragic backstory about how he actually was wronged by and hated human trafficking all along. He’s performing an entirely parallel infiltration/assassination to save us from the trouble of being a scumbag who does a good thing.
    Much of the first half of the game is left to this kind of filling in the cracks of narrative, expanding on small innuendos and implications in throwaway lines from the original game. Biggs, Wedge, and especially Jessie receive a lot more charerization, since their tragic deaths (or, their capacity to evade the fate we know is supposed to befall them, more on that later) are the dramatic lead-up to the big finale. Our heroes’ backstories are leapfrogged to the front, as well, and this makes for a strange rhythm of priorities. Cloud ventures up to the top plate to help Jessie and there recalls the promise he made to Tifa that he would protect her. It feels less like a thematic connection and more like Cloud only knows two women (soon to be three).
    There’s a lot more weight placed on the Cloud-Tifa-Aerith love triangle, but it often feels like the FF7R version of this tweet:

Rewatching Invincible and I just got to the part where a villain notes that Atom Eve's outfit is kinda sexist to which the character responds they designed it themselves so it's not sexist actually and realising it was written by a man about a costume also designed by a man. pic.twitter.com/zhEj2l71wa

— Karl Smallwood (@KarlSmallwood) January 25, 2023

“Of course every woman is throwing herself at Cloud!” The game says. “The original had that Golden Saucer date gag and flirty one liners, so now it’s even bigger and better as a recurring theme of several subplots! FF7R is expanding on what everyone loved about ‘97, and one of the most enduring things people love is having a crush on Tifa and/or Aerith.” It creates the sinking feeling the Persona series does with its women characters in knowing that their interactions are carefully modulated so that they seem open to but not required to date the protagonist. Contrast that with ‘97, especially since I got the Barrett date scene in my playthrough, where the women in Cloud’s life seem perfectly willing to hold Cloud at a contemptible distance romantically despite any flirting or teasing, because Cloud is a bit of a neurotic weirdo. This isn’t a move that FF7R feels capable of sincerely making. Even the lightest punches are pulled.
    For instance, Wedge survives the battle at the tower, foreshadowing the kind of dialogue FF7R is creating with ‘97. The fact that he loops back around to help with the corrupt Midgar mayor means maybe there will be more to his arc but for now he proves what Cloud and friends and FF7R as a game are doing in a smaller stakes situation. When the party finally confronts President Shinra to make him pay, Barrett flinches and Sephiroth appears dramatically to stab him anyway. This isn’t a huge literal change from the original in literal terms. In ‘97, Sephiroth had already killed Shinra and fled by the time the team got there, but it has a very different character when Sephiroth is following through on what Barrett couldn’t instead of beating him to the punch. It feels like an excuse to have a scene visually reminiscent of his most iconic moment early enough to make it into part one of three. The climactic battle that Sephiroth is seemingly orchestrating at the end of the game is a commitment to challenge destiny itself, represented through cloaked Whispers that appear bound to enforce the story beats of the original game, as if to say that maybe this time Cloud can really save Aerith and get away with both arms full of girlfriends.

It's not particularly subtle.

    The changes are not all bad. Even though the wall market in this game has a clumsy messaging of its own about being inspired to be true to yourself by fabulousness, it wouldn’t be better served by clutching tightly to every decades-old stereotypical joke or uncomfortable out of place slur. The Wall Market of Final Fantasy VII (1997) isn’t a low point where our characters learn an important lesson, it’s a loosely connected gag reel between the serious parts. What leaves me wanting more is that every bit of narrative friction was removed in this way, and the game loses some complexity in that, no matter how much bigger it is. Sephiroth needs to show up in strange visions to keep the game focused and connected to the overarching story of the rest of the trilogy, and it’s undeniable that a 40 hour expansion of what was previously 5 -10ish hours of game needs that to not feel endlessly meandering. But it’s hard not to be cold when one of the most famously idiosyncratic mainstream series in video games is sanding down its own charms. Worse than that, it’s harder to take FF7R seriously as the “more mature” interpretation of the politically charged opening of Final Fantasy 7 when it can promise that only the bad guys are miraculously responsible for every bad outcome and our heroes are the squeaky clean relatable chums you’ve developed twenty years of fandom fondness for.
    The consequences of this new instinct are mirrored in the mechanics of the game as well. The opening reactor bombing remains basically the same, which is to say, great, with some nice expanded supporting cast moments and several enjoyable instances of Barrett calling Cloud “Soldier boy.” Then the gang gets back to Seventh Heaven and Tifa convinces Cloud he needs to do odd jobs making deliveries and killing random monsters to impress shopkeeper townies who already hate him? The entire game is plagued by this pacing problem. Cloud and friends are accomplishing real goals that push the story forward until someone says, “Actually it would be nice to hang out in the sidequest play-pen for a while.” Except the game won’t make you stay long because many players obviously aren’t interested in that, but everything is so firmly directed that most of the quests are locked to the first time you encounter them. If you move on with the main story, you’ll abandon them. This is so consistent that the few times it isn’t the case, and you do get opportunities to come back to something multiple times, it was confusing and I had to check guides to make sure I wasn’t accidentally missing something I wanted to do.
    What’s giving me some hope for FF7 Rebirth, though, is the brief sequence of visions everyone has in the final battle against the Whispers. What’s revealed to them as a possible future that Red XIII explicitly calls the consequences of them failing to defy fate is the ending to the original game. What works about the end of ‘97 is that the stories of Cloud and the gang are deeply uncertain, most likely deadly, but the planet is saved, and that’s what matters. It’s unclear who, if anyone, lives in overgrown Midgar, or if the red dog panther creatures running across the cliffs are Red XIII and his family or some future descendants of his that have populated a new world. If a retelling as fanservice-y as this lets Cloud alter fate and save his girlfriend(s) and run away happy together, and then it turns out this having-your-cake-and-eating-it is an act of selfishness that destroys the world, that would be much more new and incisive than any Sam Elliott pastiche Chocobo wrangler.

Lighting, or arrows? Which way, western man?

    So does this mean I’m ready to rail against games being dumbed down and yellow paint? Not exactly. You can see above they're clearly using both, anyway. Final Fantasy VII (1997) is no stranger to problems with too-beautiful, too-busy environments that required rubbing Cloud on every vertex to navigate. Combined with random encounters, it’s an infamous pain point of the genre. But this drive for perfect frictionlessness in games is what has commenters talking about graphical fidelity like a horse race instead of an aesthetic decision with trade-offs. Yellow Paint Disliker and Which Graphics is Best Asker don’t usually see themselves as tilting against the same windmills, but it’s the same tech product reporting flavored coverage that has clouded conversations about video games forever. They’re in an ahistorical arms race that isn’t capable of considering what games actually are or what they’re doing when we play them. FF7R is anything but ahistorical, and being so deeply entrenched in the gaming trends of 2020 prove that the indulgent, nostalgic fantasy of going back in time and finally making things right is something we might leave behind in 2020, too.