On March 10th, I finished Final Fantasy VII Remake. It was... weird? I have a lot to say about why it was weird too. I thought about publishing this back when I finished the game, but my own anxiety and PTSD got to me so bad that I felt frozen. I feel a lot better now. Just to warn you, this review will have spoilers for the original Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VII Remake, in addition to some spoilers from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. It will also be published in two parts! You've been warned!
Now, I am not particularly beholden to the original Final Fantasy VII. I played it when I was like 12 or 13, several years after it had come out. I remember being excited for the game when I first saw the commercials and the big store displays back in the day, including the infamous cardboard cutout of Cloud and a surfboard. I didn't really know what Final Fantasy VII was; I just thought the commercial looked epic and cool! I had never even heard of the series before that, having received a Sega Genesis as my first console instead of a SNES. Sometime after those commercials, I saw a demo of the game on my friend's PlayStation. Another kid had brought it over. I really didn't like the blocky characters. Even back then, I thought it looked ugly. Back when I was a kid, I also really didn't like the look of pre-rendered stuff in most cases (Resident Evil being an exception), so the whole graphical style was unpleasant to me. It was a far cry from what I expected from those commercials! My friend and I still joke that it looked like the characters in that original game had "hoof hands".
When I finally played Final Fantasy VII, I loved it, at least at first! In the years between the commercials and buying the game, I had gotten really into JRPGs and anime, so the game had the perfect blend of styles for me! I had already played Light Crusader, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Pokémon Blue, Brave Fencer Musashi, Shadow Madness, Final Fantasy VIII, Guardian's Crusade, Azure Dreams, Suikoden, Jade Cocoon, Monster Rancher, and the first two Wild ARMs games, though I had only finished a few of those. Now I knew what I was getting into with Final Fantasy VII.
As I played the game, I remember thinking the story was actually pretty weird and not really understanding everything. I was not even in high school, so the whole Wall Market scenario was a little strange, though I understood the gist of it. The love triangle between Cloud, Tifa, and Aeris (as she was called in that original translation) was mostly enjoyable, though I really just wanted to keep Tifa and Barrett in the party. At that age, I was really particular about the characters being at the same level, so I would basically just keep the characters I started with. I think that's because Wild ARMs only had three characters in the game; you didn't switch anybody out. That was basically my basis for understanding JRPGs, so I kept to that for years. I would always hate when they forced you to take Cait Sith or somebody like that with you. I really hated having to switch all of the materia. This was true for changing weapons too! Still, the story was pretty engaging.
At a certain point, I got really confused about what was going on. Was Cloud a clone of Sephiroth? Who even was Sephiroth really, and why did he seem to teleport around? What happened back in Nibelheim? Why did one character say one thing about that incident and then another character, who was standing right there during the first story, say a totally different thing happened? I didn't understand the nature of PTSD or anxiety. I was so confused at the reveal that Cloud was a failure in his past, that he never really made it into SOLDIER, that he was just some regular grunt. Isn't Cloud a badass with a huge sword? What's with that huge sword anyway? That's when I started reading through the GameFAQs message boards to try and understand what was going on as the plot progressed. I also should mention that in that era I was very, very into using strategy guides for a lot of things. Now I basically never use them, unless, sometimes, when I get stuck for hours and hours to the point of the game not being fun anymore. Earlier this year I almost 100%'d Wild Arms 3 with no guide! I didn't complete one missable sidequest, and that's not really a huge deal because I had a lot of fun keeping notes and screenshots about what the different characters said during the game and piecing stuff together. I love doing that!
I assume I wasn't using a guide the whole time, as I got really confused when I read about Zack Fair a few years later. I got Vincent and Yuffie thanks to reading a guide, but I had no idea who this Zack guy was that was mentioned as Aeris' boyfriend. Seriously, who was that? I think I saw this post when I was looking into the deal with Advent Children. People were talking about the other games like Crisis Core and Before Crisis and mentioned this Zack character. I did research and realized that a lot of what I thought I knew about Final Fantasy VII was wrong. It felt kind of bad, like I had been gaslit by the writers. I didn't know that term back then, but that's a good way to describe it. That was how I felt as Final Fantasy VII progressed too with all of the plot twists. It just didn't sit right with me having my whole world blown to bits every few hours. Still, I would come back to the Final Fantasy VII subseries over a decade later...
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