Final Fantasy VII: Remake ending thoughts

[superheroine]

Just some thoughts I put together after I finished FF7R. Spoilers, obviously.

 

Shinra HQ + Sephiroth

 

I didn't realize how important the Shinra HQ sequence was for me, but I guess also didn't expect it to be something they'd ever cut. I think the sequence where you wake up in the prison cell and discover everyone has been slaughtered is one of the most tense and scary sequences in the original game. It would have made an incredible climax to this one. After fighting your way to Aerith and failing to escape, having fought your way through it all, you walk around this empty place with an incredibly tense and eerily quiet soundtrack. There is blood everywhere and you find Jenova's body has been stolen, and even crazier, President Shinra is dead. A katana is stuck through him.

 

Shinra was your target for the entire Midgar chapter and you thought he was your main villain. He SHOULD have been the main villain of his game and given his full arc. Having Sephiroth snatch him from your hands is important because you THINK Shinra is your enemy; you've only had tiny snippets of Sephiroth. You have no idea who he is or what he wants, and you think you're going to defeat President Shinra, but this unknown person gets to him first, and he has utterly decimated the HQ, which you previously just struggled to get through. Their power is incredible, and they are your real enemy. The team escapes Midgar and goes to Kalm, and Cloud tells the Nibelheim story.

 

They could have ended FFVIIR there, because that's when the player finds out who Sephiroth is, and that he was supposed to be dead, and that he's fucking crazy and is back for revenge, and we don't know what he's going to do next or what he's planning but we'd better do something about it, especially because we have some connection to him.

 

Initially when the press for Remake started showing off Sephiroth, I kind of groaned. I admittedly didn't like it when he appeared in like, the first couple hours of play in Remake, but I did grow to like the idea that he was hauting Cloud, at least. Those sequences were all very well done, even if I would have preferred to leave Sephiroth a mystery. That was alright! 

 

But then everything went off the rails. My interpretation of Sephiroth's massive inclusion went from "well, everyone knows Sephiroth, there's no point in hiding him" to "I guess they just felt he owned the show."

 

Listen... I don't care about seeing Sephiroth and Cloud face off, especially not this early. Square Enix has not earned a Cloud vs Sephiroth fight in probably decades, probably since the original game. In every single bit of media with a tangental FFVII connection, Square Enix feels the need to be like "Sephiroth is BACK!" and have another Duel of Fate where Cloud and Sephiroth are Destined to Fight Each Other In Every Fucking Universe. You can't just have Cloud fight Kadaj and the other clones, you need Sephiroth Himself show up again! You can't have Sephiroth merely haunt Cloud, you need to have some dramatic face-off! There's Sephiroth with his big fucking black wing, everyone ooh and ahh!

 

I have seen this so many times that it is devoid of all meaning to me. I thought that the Remake series would eventually culiminate in fights that felt earned, that felt scary, that made me feel like I was up against this force who would destroy me. I was thinking about this the other week; the first time you see Sephiroth in battle, he's fighting at your side, in the Nibelheim incident. You are puny and weak and he shows up and devastates your enemies in one blow, and it's incredible. This is a real SOLDIER, like you aspire to be. You are nothing next to him... but you know that in the future, you will have to face him and his almighty power.

 

That is so fucking juicy that I am salivating at the idea of seeing it play out in Remake, but you know what? I never will. Because this is fucking Final Fantasy VII: Kingdom Hearts and for some fucking reason we need to end the game with this giant bombastic sequence in outer space where we are running on floating ruins and giant walking metaphors are attacking us and we have to fight this thing that's larger than a city and we are flying in the air and jumping through the cosmos and there's Sephiroth with his stupid wing and now we have to beat him.

 

Sephiroth. We have beaten Sephiroth in the first 4-5 hrs of the OG game.

 

Yeah, obviously you face off with Sephiroth a couple times in the original and fend him off. You survive the encounter and beat him back and he flees.

 

This does not feel like that. This is a climax.

 

I understand that this game needs a climax, but we could have had it in Shinra. You know how Assassin's Creed II's final battle works? A fistfight. It's not bombastic. It's not crazy shit flying anywhere. It's a fucking fistfight and it has emotional resonance -- all this shit you went through, everything, all the death, the carnage, and you are facing down this guy as a man, rather than as the face of an entire shadow-religious institution. 

 

I would have given anything to just end the story with Sephiroth in the fires of Nibelheim, losing his fucking mind, knowing the next game would have us up against him.

 

And on that note: please, riddle me what the fuck newcomers to FF7 are supposed to think of Sephiroth. Who the fuck is he? Why would this make ANY sense at all to new players? I truly don't get it.

 

 

 

Jessie, Biggs and Wedge

 

I thought these characters were incredible. 

 

Initially I had my doubts about Avalanche being framed for the bombing. When I saw that in the demo, I was really concerned about the softening of Avalanche; this idea that they didn't actually bomb the reactor, and that Shinra did it themselves to much more dramatic effect in order to turn public opinion against the eco-terrorists. In the end, I actually kind of liked that. The intent was always there, and failure didn't matter too much when the resulting carnage gave Jessie some serious pathos as she struggled with the idea that she'd overdone it on the bomb and was personally responsible for the deaths of so many people. I thought it would be nice if she had some absolution in that, but sometimes life is unfair like that.

 

Their inevitable deaths did not bother me; in fact, I kind of relished the idea that I might actually get to know them better through all this carnage, all this horror, and then feel the full weight of their loss. Their sacrifice in their fight to protect Sector 7 from death and destruction. I was even okay with it when Wedge survived; I thought they could do something interesting with him, and it wasn't unreasonable to me that he might live, while Jessie and Biggs died in the tower and had no chance to escape. Jessie had also been given a dramatic amount of depth and backstory, and the sequence where the group went to her house was touching and funny and benefited Cloud's character a lot too, because we got to see him on the fringes of bonding with these people. We got tidbits about Biggs having connections to the orphanage. If Wedge lived, it was because we still had backstory to come from him beyond him liking his cats. 

 

Oh wait, did I say inevitable deaths? Never mind! Wedge survived, then nearly died again, and Biggs apparently did not die before my eyes, somehow his body (miraculously uncrushed) was not only rescued, but he was nursed back to health at Elymra's, where we'd left Wedge and Marlene. And Jessie's headband and glove are on the side table, so apparently someone at the very least found her body. So either they're all alive or just the girl died. Cool. Thanks!

 

Star Wars -- where Biggs and Wedge get their names from, coincidentally -- starts on the premise that a lot of people died to get the Death Star plans to the Resistance, in order to see the galaxy saved from greater evils. Regardless of what you personally feel about Rogue One, the fact that we walked into the theater knowing they'd all die did not change the fact that the characters had a story to tell and that their actions informed the rest of the series. Is it a story that needed to be told? Not really. But telling Biggs, Wedge and Jessie's story also doesn't mean they can no longer die, or that their deaths are now a cheap gotcha.

 

 

Aerith

 

I was re-listening to that FFVII video series that breaks down the translation between the Japanese and English version, and they were talking about the nuances of her character that were kind of diminished in the English version. Not gone, not entirely, but just little things -- it stressed that she was a city girl, and that she's comfortable raising her voice and moving around these bustling places. She moves around on her own boldly. She flirts, and not just with Cloud. She's pushy, and delightfully so.

 

It's not really that Remake changes those things. I think her voice direction is too little-girl and cutesy to me -- I think she could have been fun and flippant and coy without sounding so Disney Princess -- and maybe that would have been okay if the tone of her character hadn't changed so radically. In the original game, she doesn't find out about the Cetra and details of the Promised Land until she meets Bugenhagen in the Cosmo Canyon, and it adds a whole different weight to her then. Growing up, she had her strange moments, like sensing the death of Elmyra's husband, and she had a connection to the planet, but her childhood in Shinra's laboratory didn't really inbue her an understanding of her communion with teh planet.

 

But in this one she's known her entire life that she's the last of some ancient beings. She knows their lore and that they're her people and she knowingly communes with the world, and she has ugly bagworm ghost pals. I think that is a huge tonal difference, especially when they whip out Chapter 18 and she basically starts speaking in Destiny Tongues. The Remake basically took her more ethereal and spiritual qualities and put them on steroids. The end result is that I felt less connected to her. Her alienness and connection to the earth is so aggressively done that she doesn't really feel human or relatable, and she herself seems to know it. You haven't  met this girl with a mystery, you've met this girl who is an avatar of Destiny, and the game pretty much explicitly tells you that she is so massively important that her impending death must be avoided at all costs. I liked her a lot more when she was more or less a regular person who discovered the depth of her own strength and ability when she was an adult who had already decided to embark on this journey -- I feel part of her story in the original was her self-discovery, and that's been stripped away here because she seems to have always known what her future was, even if she was afraid of it. Aerith knowing what lies ahead of her is far less interesting to me than an Aerith who looks into herself and finds something incredible and decides to embrace it.

 

I did like that scene with Zack and Cloud going to Midgar, though. I thought that was a perfect little touch in line with her sense that Elmyra's husband had died -- that she sensed the loss there. But I don't like the implication that she knows Cloud knew Zack personally. That's another thing that doesn't necessarily change the plot or story, but radically shifts the tone of her character. I don't want Aerith to be all-seeing because characters who are all-seeing no longer have agency; they're forced into playing Frogger, just dodging truck after truck after truck as they see them coming down the road.

 

 

Cosmo Canyon and Future Cuts

 

Yeah, this wasn't even in the game, and it wasn't supposed to be, but I'm going to talk about it anyway because it's a pretty beloved sequence in the original. In the original, in Cosmo Canyon, Aerith finds out she is a Cetra. They all find out about the Promised Land, and they find out what impact the mako drilling has had on the planet, and what materia is, and that the use of materia is hurting the planet. There's also a sequence where the characters glide through the cosmos using a 3D hologram screen.

 

They did all this in Remake already. From Shinra's perspective, obviously, but Aerith has that information, as does Barret; Barret simply starts to take it literally when Aerith confirms it for him. The hologram sequence is done. It was beautiful, certainly, but it leaves me wondering what's left to Cosmo Canyon -- Red XIII backstory and  some details on the Lifestream, probably?

 

I think Cosmo Canyon will probably be reduced in the next game, or else it will get entirely new content to replace what was nabbed from it. I think that's going to be the case with a lot of it; the party goes to 10+ locations before Aerith dies, and while a lot of things of significance happens in small pieces, part of me is a little perplexed at how huge things get if you decide to give it all the same treatment as Midgar got. Are we really going to see Dyne and Barret's story played out? What about Cid and Shera -- their story is probably the least related to the original plot. What about Yuffie and Vincent, who are optional in the first place? I'm not saying they'll remove these characters, but I am somewhat suspicious of how much of the rest of FFVII will stick around, let alone be given the treatment Midgar did. Part of the plate collapsing was that it said people are dead and we can't go back here. But Remake has decided that not only has pretty much everyone survived, but also we are endeavoring to make sure things going forward happen differently. 

 

The question of how they're possibly going to do all of FFVII in modern games with that level of sprawl and detail has been thrown around a lot and at this point I truly think the game is just going to streamline the most "iconic" things and try to go full AU. It's extremely sad to me, here's why.

 

 

Capital D Destiny

 

Red XIII, the exposition machine, informs them that when Aerith touched him, she imbued him with some sort of supernatural knowledge of the Whispers, the big ugly bagworm looking dicks that fly around every 3-4 hours. He says that the Whispers exist to safeguard destiny, and Tifa says "you mean Capital-D Destiny?!"

 

This is where I hopped off the train because I do not like destiny plotlines. On a good day, I like destiny as a concept that a universe might lean into with time travel, like in Fire Emblem Awakening, where something bad has happened and going back in time allows characters to act with that knowledge and avoid it, but I don't love that nearly as much as characters simply having agency. FFVII Remake has now decided that there is a "canon" future for the story, and that it must be avoided.

 

Oh no.

 

That last sequences frames so much around Aerith's death but not really much on what actually happens in that future otherwise; Cloud fights Sephiroth and Meteor is summoned, but the players know that Cloud and company win the day at the end, even if it came at a significant personal loss. So when Sephiroth asks Cloud to join him to prevent that future, we know that Sephiroth wants to divert that future because it gives him another chance to win, and Cloud declines him –– I haven't yet really puzzled out why that is other than a rejection of Sephiroth, or what, exactly, Cloud knows –– but the entire last chapter is talking about everyone avoiding their destiny and changing their future. That's the whole premise of the Whispers; the Whispers are the original Final Fantasy VII and you, as Remake Cloud and Company, must struggle against them to establish an alternate future.

 

But as someone who has played FFVII before, I know that they're struggling against a future where Sephiroth was defeated and the planet was saved. Why? Because Aerith died?

 

The biggest problem I have with that is that it's kind of saying the future of FFVII must be avoided, and that Aerith's death is somehow some lynchpin on it all. If we save the girl, we avoid... what? The established successful ending? There's a lot of strife in the FFVII universe, but I feel that's because Nomura and co have insisted on layering on peripheral media over and over and over again in ways that kind of beef out the universe but don't necessarily heighten how compelling the original game is. I like lots of IDEAS in the Compilation but I truthfully cannot say any of those games have meaningfully strengthened FFVII or improved on it for me. The idea that the original game itself now has to be "corrected", like the original was some sort of unideal ending simply because Aerith didn't make it out alive... completely tragic.

 

This idea that maybe things would be better if Aerith didn't die is hollow to me because her death put weight and gravitas on the story. At this point I don't think they can still kill her without now saying "you CAN'T change your destiny" or "you can't avoid your fate" -- and even if that's the intended message, that Aerith was Destined to die, then it takes the weight out of her death. Capital D Destiny determined it. You can't do anything about it. "Oh well."

 

I can't imagine them diverting entirely from the original at this point, but I think we're going to see very faithful recreations of a lot of scenes and then places that very suddenly diverge from the original. I don't think they've written an entirely new game; I think they'll do what they've done for this one, which is use as much of the original script as possible, and then throw in some bonus chapters and elements that put a Shyamalan-style "twist" on it. Chapter 18, if cut from this game, more or less leaves the original story with a couple unappealing changes but largely whole. I feel like the next game will be kind of similar. If I can close my eyes and ignore that chapter, it really is a good and enjoyable game, even if it made some decisions I don't entirely agree with, but the reality is that... it is there, and that's going to change how I feel about the rest of it. It really feels like The Rise of Skywalker; like maybe I fundamentally misunderstood what this story was about and that the things that resonated with me were just coincidences and not the true intent of the author, and now everything that came before it is changed. You can't unring that bell.

 

But then again, I have come to realize that I haven't truly enjoyed a story Nomura has told since FFX. The guy is amazing at character design and conception and worldbuilding and plot ideas, but you have to cut him off there. He tells a good story once and then he must be evicted immediately, lest he work it to death. That the first seventeen chapters of this game exist as coherently and lovingly as they do is nothing short of a miracle.

 

This game makes me doubt if I ever understood FF7. FF7 never really struck me as a literal messiah story. I thought the whole point was that regular people were positioning themselves as gods ruling over the planet and they disrespected nature in the process, and that Sephiroth's campaign was an act of hubris he was not actually entitled to. That oneness with the planet did not mean ruling over it, and that humanity could still innovate and learn and explore without draining the planet of its life force. Cloud is special because he was just a boy who set out to become great, got chewed up by the machine on the way, and then decided to go up against the systems that had a direct hand in his personal suffering (as well as those around him) and fight to protect the people. It takes away his agency to just make him a pawn to Destiny who was supernaturally pinpointed to defeat Sephiroth, and that ripples outward for me. At this point in the game, he's only made baby steps to connect with the people he lives and works amongst, and he's just started to rekindle his friendship with Tifa and forge new ones. He has agency in that and he develops as a person. He has known Aerith for a couple days; in the original game, they've struck up this connection and they are drawn to each other because of who they are as people, and how their past experiences informed how they approached each other.

 

But it's not so in Remake! They meet in a whorl of Whispers that we later find out are the arbiters of fate, trying to protect their meeting. Their meeting is suddenly a cosmic imperative, the development of their relationship a matter of Destiny. Aerith compares Cloud to Zack not because they are both SOLDIERs; she senses their connection. They set out after Sephiroth not because he is threatening the world, but because they have a destiny to do so, and they must prevent Aerith's death. That just isn't a human story to me, and it tries to supercede what I liked about Cloud's development, and what I liked about Cloud and Aerith's relationship.

 

And now we have to change the course of FFVII's story.

 

Who actually wanted that?

 

 

Who Is Asking For This?

 

This isn't really what I wanted out of this, personally.

 

I just wanted a remake. I just wanted to experience this game in full HD with beautiful sets and graphics and voice acting and some fleshed out characters and a better translation. I wanted to see the story filled in a little for time and logistics, to see things that were suggested in the original but could not be shown with 1997's technical limitations. I don't think anyone wanted it to be revolutionized or changed. 

 

Every FF7 fan I've ever talked to just wants to experience FF7 in glorious HD, and every person who hadn't played FF7 wants to experience the game for the first time in a way that is accessible and modern. 

 

All they had to do was recreate the game in HD and add some filler content. That's it.

 

I didn't necessarily want Remake to REPLACE VII, and it didn't need to, but I definitely did not want it to be a branching story, like some sort of FFVII Multiverse.

 

I'm sad that this actually makes me struggle with playing the next one. I know it will; I want to give it a fair shot to see where the story is going. But when Kingdom Hearts 3 happened, I did kind of wash my hands of it. I'd had enough of Nomura. I didn't play the DLC. What was the point? 

 

I don't know.