RPG Review: Final Fantasy 7 Remake

Well finally that they ported FF7R to PC and there was a sale I decided to buckle down to play the last final fantasy game that I have not yet played. Unfortunately this port was to suffer the same fate as most of Square Enix’s other FF ports: It was terrible and put a huge damper on my playtime experience. That said, the game itself and the characters and story were great enough to make up for it that I plowed through to the end. As usual my husband’s commentary is in green.

So let’s start with the problems of the actual port. Square Enix decided to wait 2 fucking years to even put it on PC after putting on PS4, then upgrading the graphics and adding a Yuffie DLC and putting it on PS5. Finally at the end of 2021 they released the PC port and made it an epic games exclusive which made it cost like $70 for not even a limited or preorder edition. I decided to hold off until their spring sale in March and bought it for about $50. Still for $50 I shouldn’t get a game that crashes, has memory leaks and has shit graphics that require me to download a fucking mod to improve.

After spending hours installing a graphic improvement mod I continued with my adventures. This mod not only improved the graphics from looking like a PS3, but it also stopped the game from constant stuttering and lag. I also had to force the game into Direct X 11 because DX12 was basically unplayable. Unfortunately the one thing I could not fix with mods was the memory leak. Normally the game starts off with 1-2 gigs of ram (which is not great but doable). However about after 1 hour of play the game memory usage would skyrocket to a whopping 5 gigs. When I attempted to stream and use vtube software it basically caused my computer to go into a BSOD and crash. My computer doesn’t normally BSOD ever so the fact that this happened with this game is an impressive feat. Needless to say not too far into the game I had to basically quit streaming it because it would just make the whole thing unplayable completely.

Anyway now that the technical rant is out of the way I want to talk about the actual story. Unfortunately the amount of story covered in this remake is only about 1/4 of the game! Even though it took me about 2 weeks to complete we barely scratched the surface. They added a lot of new content and things that were maybe 30 minutes in the original game, ended up taking me an entire night in this game. I didn’t mind though because honestly I had fun with it. There were a few annoying and confusing puzzles but not nearly as bad as it could have been and overall I didn’t really use a guide except to complete a few side quests. The only side quests I gave up on were the ones where you have to find some drunk guy and because I ragequit the dress Cloud got for his cross dressing performance was like some fuddy duddy maid outfit xD.

As we mentioned, FF7 was the last mainline Final Fantasy game that we hadn’t played yet. So based on this, we don’t really know how to compare the remake with the original, so we had to look up some comparisons to see the differences between the two. The most obvious example was “how far into the storyline did we get” and saw that this is only about a quarter of the way through. This then prompted “wait so how long was the original game????? Because this is shaping up then to be like 150 hours long total?????” Well turns out that both are supposed to be in the 30-40 hour range, so my next investigation was into why FF7R is already so much longer.

My first assumption was that they were replacing one sentence PS1 conversations with lengthy rendered cutscenes, but it’s really because they’re heavily expanding what you actually do in the first zone of the game. There was definitely a fine line between “expanding” and “padding” here though. Having you do a bunch of goofy sidequests in Wall Market was fun, or giving some more screen time to the Avalanche B team fleshed them out a lot more, but “extremely lengthy and confusingly laid out sewer level” very much falls on the “padding” side of the ledger.

It’s been a while since we’ve played a true AAA game, so I’ve forgotten just how proscriptive the MSQ can be. The game often gives a somewhat general objective, like “go on the Shinra HQ tour”, but then what you have to do for that gets extremely specific. So we thought “okay, we’ll walk to the end of the reception area and move on”, but nope, you MUST click on all the tour guide NPCs and MUST click on all the information displays and MUST watch all the in-engine cutscenes and MUST always stand on all the exact spaces or else it won’t proceed. But then all the sidequests are the reverse of this, where the journal entries are often quite vague and frequently don’t even have map markers.

The difficulty options in the game were a bit confusing as an FYI. There’s both difficulty levels as in Easy/Normal, but then also difficulty types (which are also KINDA like difficulty levels too) in the form of Classic/Normal. The game is not really that clear at how these work when you’re selecting them, but the way they’re SUPPOSED to work in my eyes is that the “Classic” mode is supposed to be kind of like and old school Final Fantasy game where you sit around waiting for your ATB bar to fill up (while characters kinda/sorta do auto-attack chip damage to each other?) and then pick an option while the “Normal” mode is more like your typical action RPG like FFXV or Nier Automata. But Classic mode also lets you take control manually, which in turn makes your ATB gauge fill MUCH faster, like to the point where when playing as Tifa we’re able to use her ATB skills almost nonstop. So I guess you could play it like a turn based RPG, honestly it’s just way faster to take manual control (and also note that unlike the Nier games I don’t think you can let the game auto-mode all the combat.)

One thing is I used to always confuse Squall and Cloud as being the emo protags of Final Fantasy but Cloud isn’t really emo he’s just focused on the mission and is not good with people. Once he opens up a bit he becomes really cute in his jokes and honestly it really turned my view around of him. Also made me realize how annoying Squall is to me with all the whatevers lol. I can definitely see Cloud’s popularity and I can say I’m on that bandwagon along with the Cloud x Tifa bandwagon because I just LOVE Tifa. She reminded me a lot of Rinoa, though I guess less on the “kick people down the stairs” feel and more the “I’m your beefy GF who will catch you when you fall (￣▽￣)”.

The BIG difference between Cloud and Squall is that Cloud has a good reason for being annoyed at stuff while Squall never has a good reason. Cloud gets annoyed because he’s forced to do an elaborate dance routine in order to obtain a dress so he can disguise himself as the perverted crime lord’s latest brothel girl. Squall gets annoyed because someone answered the question that he asked of them. Now on the other hand Tifa and Rinoa are like polar opposites. The difference is that Tifa is NORMAL while Rinoa is WEIRD. Tifa will pick you up off a cliff while Rinoa will punt you off a cliff. Tifa fights with martial arts while Rinoa fights by shooting a dog at you. You get the picture. Aerith is honestly closer to Rinoa by virute of being a derpwaifu. 

Another image change I had of Aerith. I guess based on her personality from the first game the internet gave me the consensus that she’s a useless damsel in distress. But honestly I thought her personality in this version was great and I loved all her GIRL POWER interactions with Tifa xD.

Sorry I’m team Aeti now. Aerith joins the team and then Tifa goes “nvm Cloud I just realized that girls are better than boys so now I have a waifu.” Fortunately for Cloud, he accumulates quite the manharem in this game so he doesn’t have to worry about being forever alone after getting dumped.

@breadmasterlee

can’t hug every cat Cloud 😹 #cloudstrife #finalfantasy #ff7r #ff7remake #finalfantasy7 #cloud #wedge #videogames #rpg #cats #videogamecats

♬ Can’t Hug Every Cat – The Gregory Brothers

The only down side is I could never actually pet them and most of them hated Cloud for some reason 😂 There was even a find baby nukos for the kid quest and it was so precious. Thank you square enix for finally giving me the fanservice that truly matters.

Anyway overall other than the annoying port bugs and ram issues/crashing I enjoyed it a lot. I’m very curious about playing the original (despite the blocky graphics lol) but I’m also wary of buying anymore PC ports from Square Enix because what the fuck is this incompetence. Maybe when they release FF7R part 2 I will just get it on the PS4 (if that’s even an option) because waiting 2 years for such a shitty port was unacceptable 😦 That said I’m bummed the ps4 version didn’t have a photo mode which I used a lot throughout my play time.

There’s rumors floating around that part 2 of FF7R will come out this year so hopefully I can continue the story soon!