How my distaste of Rebirth helped me realize that this series (beyond the original, that is) is just not for me and that's probably for the best

In 1997, Final Fantasy VII launched...on a console I did not own and outside of watching a friend play it, I had no way of interacting with it even though I desperately wanted to. I was stuck waiting for a PC port.

I don't think it's an understatement to say that this game's release on the Playstation was a flashpoint for people my age who grew up with the SNES-era of Final Fantasy games. This isn't to say that everyone today who is 40 and up like, loved the game at launch or anything but the conversation around mainstream video games pretty solidly shifted as a result of this game's marketing if nothing else; going from 16-bit pixel art chibi sprites to these big budget cinematic TV commercials (that didn't show any actual gameplay lmao) was a pretty fucking big deal!

And dude, I sank my life into the game when it did finally get a PC release that following year. Yes, the Eidos one where all the songs from the soundtrack were ripped out and replaced with MIDI files; I spent extra time making sure my fucking SoundBlaster drivers would work with the packed-in Yamaha Software Synthesizer to make it somewhat listenable, even if it was still pretty bad.

But like, FF7 is a game I played through more times than I can count at this point in my life. A rare game that I actually went about 100%-ing; finding the replica soldier figures, everyone's ultimate weapons, every materia and limit break, gold chocos, trying all the weird playground rumors (like naming Aerith a specific thing would allow her to be playable after Disc 1) etc etc.

Prior to the game's release, I'd have been hard pressed to say if Final Fantasy VI, EarthBound or Chrono Trigger were my favorite game of all time. VII definitely entered that running and stayed there for a long time.

With that game's somewhat "open to interpretation" ending, naturally I was excited when they announced a sequel in the form of a film! But watching Advent Children when it released lead immediately to this foreboding feeling of "Oh...they don't know what they're doing".

Then the barrage of Compilation of Final Fantasy VII games started getting released and it became more of a...shall we say pronounced "Oh they REALLY don't know what they're doing" mounting dread; little did I realize that this would essentially continue for the rest of my life.

When the very FIRST teaser for the remake project dropped at E3 2015 I was pretty fucken blown away:

I remember watching the PS3 tech demo from 2011 showing off what a (then) "modern" FF7 would look like...and this 2015 E3 presentation confirming they were actually making as a full game beyond just a technical experiment knocked me on my ass.

And then! History repeated itself!

In 2020, Final Fantasy VII Remake launched...on a console I did not own and outside of watching a friend play it, I had no way of interacting with it even though I desperately wanted to. I was stuck waiting for a PC port.

I sank my teeth the fuck in a year later when that port launched and like, I really enjoyed it! I found a few of the deviation decisions confusing and didn't think that some of the shall we say extended sections needed that level of expansion (Train Graveyard? Sewer? Wall Market Fight Club?) but it felt like it did an interesting job at making Midgar feel alive. Remake gave the main characters some much needed moment-to-moment beats that the original didn't really have the scope to handle. Like, it was really cool seeing the relationships between the people (agnostic of Cloud) happen; getting to know the members of Avalanche better was fantastic and as a consequence made the plate drop sequence that much more fucked up¹.

All in all, Final Fantasy VII Remake was a good game in my eyes, despite a One Winged Angel battle with Sephiroth when it made no sense for that to be taking place this early.

Like Remake, dude I was legitimately hyped up for this game. I watched all the trailers, I tried to theorycraft what the plot changes would be, I hyped myself about moments from the OG we'd get to see in the updated graphics...but like, what's the ol' Rob Zacny thing? "Do not give into astonishment"?

Fuckin top tier life advice, man.

To say this this game dropped the ball would be an understatement.

I get that plenty of people love it but for me, it fell short in such interesting ways!! We could be talking about the Ubisoftification of the open world, the shoehorned minigames, the "turning a fifteen minute segment from the original into a four hour slogfest full of generic unreal engine NPCs" from Remake taken to a magnified extent that doesn't seem possible, or hell the easy ones like Chadley and his manufactured clone/girlfriend...but one of my main issues is that the writing decisions for this game are fascinatingly bad.

I tempered expectations pretty early on with the way Kalm was handled; by Costa del Sol I had hit some pretty hard fatigue of even wanting to load into the game. It was an uphill battle (lol) and then I finally made it to a place I'd been looking forward to seeing realized in "high fidelity" since the late 90's: Cosmo Canyon; the birthplace of Avalanche, the study of environmentalism, Gaia theory, the hometown of one of my favorite characters.

Rebirth turned this place of spiritual importance and learning into effectively a fucking Disney resort² with a five star hotel.

This shouldn't really surprise me from the people that shoehorned in a plot point where Barret "The planet is dyin, Cloud!!" Wallace became a fucking oil baron in Advent Children.

But what I kept finding while playing Rebirth was that every moment of "that thing you love is here!!", every piece of enjoyment is, like some sort of metaphorical mako or oil, buried deep in the crust of a bunch of absolute shit that is better off not digging through to extract.

Final Fantasy VII: Forever

What sparked this post a few day ago was that I'd seen some trailer footage from State of Play for the final installment, Revelation³. I haven't even watched the whole trailer - but those snippets and the lack of joy I felt from seeing them got me started writing. I had a whole original ending about how it's ok that this isn't for me (a common refrain but like, a good one to have) and how at some point (per Yamaguchi's words) the VII Remake project will end and we'll all move on with our lives.

But uhhh then PAX happened and, well

Like, I get capitalism is gonna capitalism but is nothing allowed to end anymore? Evangelion had a similar remake/rebuild project that ended with a very definitive "Goodbye to all of Evangelion" message - and a new series is already in production. Today as I make these edits, Ocarina of Time's remake is getting shown off by Nintendo and kicking off its own firestorm of "remake vs original" arguments.

But I guess back to the main point - I don't have to engage with any of it. I can accept that it's not for me and move on with my life; I've done this with other franchises⁴ and it's not like the original game isn't there for me any time I wanna revisit (fun sidenote, while waiting for Rebirth to have a PC port, I re-played VII again and god damn it's such a good time) but there is a part of me that's just sad to see a thing I care about be endlessly put through the wringer by an increasing number of people who either don't seem to understand what it was that made it good to begin with, or who are restrained by corporate number crunching.

Hell they're on the record saying a remake of Final Fantasy VI would take them twenty years to complete, and with all of the bloat and nonsense they've done so far with VII? I believe them. I also think it would be a fundamentally horrible experience.

I'm not all hater though! In case you missed it, I wrote a whole thing about what could make the future of single-player Final Fantasy games more interesting, and none of it involves retreading old ground.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Here's your end-of-post cat; his name is Smokescreen Chip and his godmother (should anything ever happen to Della or I) is the former mayor of Minneapolis because we lead very strange lives.