And there we have it! A tidy 35 hours that flew by

What can I really say? Like most people my age or older, FFVII is a formative gaming experience that I've literally never forgotten about. It's a magical game that I think deserves to be in a museum.

But that game will always exist. I wanted new, I wanted bold. I mostly got it!

To start, there will be no spoilers, so don't you worry folks!

Getting the bad right out of the way, much like OG FFVII, the middle part loses some of its footing. This is where you get the majority of the achingly outdated side fetch quests and load bearing

The broken Sector 6 highway and the Midgar sewers are probably the biggest standouts of sequences that don't really do a whole lot but look pretty (well, the sewers not so much) and serve as mostly character-building exercises. Fun to listen to, not so fun to play through!

The team here really paid attention to boss fights, and it shows: many of them are multi-layered with big flashy moments in-between that are straight out of a Hollywood blockbuster. I never had a game over, but most of them were challenges - so much so that it wears on you a bit!

Shinra is a big corporation, but they sure like their robots, and you will be fighting a lot of them! I'll get to why it's not so bad later, but some of them can be real knackers with how difficult they are to open up, and not in a fun way. Less is more, sometimes!

Lastly on that note, in-game tutorials - not great! I'm seeing people struggle with things that are perfectly within the game's limits but it does not explain to you very well how some of the mechanics work, or if they do it's quick. Blink and you'll miss Cloud's Punisher parry!

Barret takes less time to charge up his unique ability if you do it right when his regular attack burts and he has to pump it back up! Tifa's parry animation is a slide that is insanely quick and nowhere near the recovery of Cloud's! Great stuff that relies on curious players

With all those gripes aside, let's get to the good, and there's a lot.

For me, personally, huge swaths of this game's narrative sequences were dopamine shots straight to my nerves that left me with a massive smile. *Years* of painstaking headcanoning rewarded, with benefits!

Cloud not being able to fool anyone that he's cool and aloof! Barret's bluster mostly being a show for his big heart! Aerith being goofy and a bit of a trickster! Tifa having a terrible time relying on others!

This all goes without saying the re:BIRTH of some classic characters

Biggs, Wedge, and most notably Jessie all have bigger roles to play, and they endear themselves pretty quickly. Heidegger has an expanded role that makes him the clear frontrunner for most hated Shinra exec, while Professor Hojo also gets plenty of time to shine as well

Smaller yet still memorable roles definitely go to Elmyra, Aerith's mother, and Johnny, the put-upon bro from Sector 7 who is constantly getting into shenanigans that he must be bailed out of by Cloud and Co. Even Marlene gets some tooth-rottingly sweet stand out scenes

Some might be disappointed that there's only 4 playable characters, but I think the game does a great job of making these four feel like they should be a team - there's lots of in-game banter between fights and some fun moments of teamwork, particularly with Aerith and Tifa

But nothing sells the small roster than the most defining part of the game - the gameplay.

I had thought, after the demo, that Cloud would ultimately be who you play most because everyone else would serve what he does rather than be fully fleshed out.

Happy to have been wrong!

Barret, Tifa, and Aerith all play *vastly* different than Cloud, and all with standout uses well worth switching over to. Barret's tankiness and range make him a great leader, easily racking up AP and getting enemy attention so the melee fighters can get into position to strike

Tifa is so speedy and strong that she can merc single foes with her Overpower skill. Her parry and attack roll materia skills are also better.

Aerith is all magic - no physical hits! But using her wards, she'll cast double the magic at no additional cost and do bigly damage

This is a long game and it's a lot to ask you to have only 4 characters, but I think the team did a great job making sure you had 4 varied members who all had a strength but worked even better with a team.

I was also surprised at the weapon upgrade system being fairly in-depth

Basically, each character has about 6-7 different weapons in the world, and each weapon has its own upgrade tree and unique ability. Use the unique ability enough and it becomes a permanent skill and gets an additional bonus, so there's incentive to try out every weapon

The skill tree menu is the shits, but each weapon can be upgraded with SP, earned through leveling up/fighting, that can boost stats. Cloud, for example, can get swords that provide boosts to MP and magic attack, as well as big power swords that give him HP and attack strength

Like the OG, materia slots come into play too - Tifa has gloves that may not have huge attack power but they give her linked slots that allow her to add elemental strength to her attacks or give her resistance to certain element types. For a poison boss, may be worth it!

I will also never get over how cool it looks to see all the weapons visually represented on the characters, but also that the materia slots are visible in-game too. One of the things you always imagine for the game but never got to see it visually come to life. Very cool

Back to the gameplay, they really made it so that away from Easy, you cannot button mash. It takes place in real time and you have to manage ATB bar well so you can take advantage of enemy weaknesses or a necessary skill or a key item heal, etc. Reminded me of a fighting game!

It's a game that requires you to think quickly even when being overwhelmed, and while it's not even a really hard game (I died maybe once), I always had to be engaged and playing, which I respect a lot as a design choice for a really beloved title banking on nostalgia

Flipping over to the other half of the package, the band got back together on this one, and boy does it show - this game is such a love-letter to the original FF7 in so many ways that I imagine big YT compilations of all the shoutouts and easter eggs will run quite long

One of my key concerns when looking at it was if it would lose just how...odd FF7 was. Weird monsters, goofy scenarios, a *lot* of squatting...would it take itself *too* seriously with a new 2020 gloss? Would it be the edgelord game we imagined it was all those years ago?

Nope!

Almost every little bit from the first quarter of FF7 is retained, down to the weirdest parts. Shinra has weird eyeball flying monsters? Hell yeah. All of Wall Market? Hell yeah. Weird reptiles with pitchforks? Hell yeah. Mofuckin' HELL HOUSE!? You're goddamn right, folks.

They even got the goofy Magnemite-looking robots that are made out of like loose pipes. They're a huge pain in the ass, too!

Through all of this surreal bullshit, Cloud is the perfect straight man - rarely cracks a smile, his face stone cold as all this wackiness ensues

Looking through the credits, you can see a veritable who's who of VA's were involved in just *additional voices,* and it shows. Almost all of the voice work is very solidly done, and the recasting of the whole FF7 group to pave way for mainly TV actors was bold but worked out!

Aerith, in particular, deserves special praise. Her spirituality is portrayed primarily in most of the pre-Remake Compilation of FF7 works, so to see her return as the street-smart slum girl with a quick wit is so awesome, and Briana White, her VA, brings it to life so well

I have no doubt a new generation of players will fall head over heels for her

My main squeeze, Tifa, has a less showy role but I loved it still. Tifa will always put others above herself, even when she's clearly in pain, so I think the reservation is a good acting choice

The most grating I think for all will probably be Barret - fair fucks to people for putting in little moments where his bombasticism fades away for real fear and doubt, but it's subtle, and so he is a big shouty man most of the time. That said, he's incredibly funny too

Barret singing a weird diddy as you go off the beaten path to get treasure and singing the blues as you ascend the endless flights of stairs to storm the Shinra building are legendary, and his relationship with Cloud and Red XIII have a lot of good broments

The shining star though might be Jessie - Erica Lindbeck stole a lot of JRPG fans' hearts (heh) as Futaba in Persona 5, and she'll do it again as Jessie. She's voiced with such aplomb and gusto and vulnerability that I think the best FF7 girl discussion is now officially messy

Last but not least, we gotta talk OST and folks, we got wall-to-wall banger status here. The FF7 OST is itself a strange one - a compromise on Uematsu's part because he couldn't get his preferred sound to due to memory storage. It's scrappy and charming, so how does Remake stand?

With the reverence for FF7 apparent in every other aspect, the music is no exception, but with a twist: in addition to some new tracks, what if memorable FF7 songs were mashed up, or the boss fight/battle music we all know and love was remixed differently for every big fight?

The dynamism of the OST is stunning: if an area/fight has a theme song associated with it, that will become the motif when action increases in tension, usually bosses. When this hit, in the context of the moment, I literally slapped my desk in excitement

This one is a mild spoiler, but it was in the OG game, so scroll past if you *really* want to. The theme that plays for the Rufus Shinra fight has elements of at least three classic FF7 songs mixed in, and it sounds so incredible

But don't think we're simply sticking with orchestral or metal stuff - sometimes it gets a little silly. This is a remix of the old Wall Market theme, and I love it so much. Sooooooo goofy

And as yet another example of that dynamism, when you go into a fight during that time the theme above is playing, it slides right into the King of Iron Fist Tournament for a battle remix

So to finally cut this thread off, it has been a wild week running through this game, but I liked it a whole lot. My expectations weren't as high as others, so I just got to be pleasantly surprised most of the time, and I'm so grateful for it. Cheers FFVIIR team, ya done good!