Final Fantasy VII Remake turns Midgar into a real place, then makes you walk it. Square Enix’s 2020 action role-playing game rebuilds the opening section of the 1997 PlayStation original as a full-length RPG, and the result is the rare remake that justifies its own existence. It scores 8.7 out of 10.
Trailer, via Square Enix.
Cloud Strife and the Mercenary Job
You play Cloud Strife, a former member of SOLDIER, Shinra’s elite warrior unit, now working as a mercenary. His childhood friend Tifa Lockhart pulls him into a job for a splinter cell of AVALANCHE, the ecological resistance group led by Barret Wallace. Barret believes Shinra’s mako harvesting is killing the planet, and he opens the game by bombing Mako Reactor 1.
The setup is simple. The execution is not. Cloud is haunted by memories of Sephiroth, an enigmatic former SOLDIER, and meets the florist Aerith Gainsborough in the bombing’s aftermath. Strange ghost-like entities alternately help and hinder him, pushing the story somewhere the original never went.
Real-Time Combat That Still Makes You Think
The overhaul from turn-based combat is the smartest thing here. Exploration and battle both run in real time, closer to Final Fantasy XV than to 1997. The altered Active Time Battle system fills gradually, or faster when you land attacks. Once a segment fills, you can halt the action and spend it on magic, items or special moves, or map them to shortcuts and never pause at all.
Each party member plays differently. Cloud hits close with melee. Barret hits at range. You can switch between them at any time mid-fight, and each carries individual skills, magic, summons and a Limit Break gauge that charges toward a heavier attack. Strategy survives the shift:
- Weapon and magic loadouts per character
- ATB segments spent on abilities
- Party switching mid-battle
- Limit Breaks saved for the right moment
The Plate Falls on Sector 7
The story expands character development and adds plot the original skipped. Shinra plans to drop a piece of the “plate” onto the Sector 7 slums. AVALANCHE fails to stop it. Aerith gets most of the population out, including Barret’s daughter Marlene, then Shinra captures her.
Cloud, Tifa and Barret infiltrate Shinra headquarters and rescue her from Hojo, the company’s scientist, who wanted her as an experiment. Aerith reveals she is the last descendant of the Cetra, a near-extinct precursor race tied to a “Promised Land” Shinra covets for its mako reserves.
Every element has been remade, using real-time polygonal graphics as opposed to the pre-rendered environments of the original.
That line is the whole project in miniature, and the game mostly delivers on it. Tetsuya Nomura directs, Yoshinori Kitase produces, Kazushige Nojima writes, Motomu Toriyama co-directs, and Nobuo Uematsu returns on music. The character redesigns balance realism and stylization, and the cast is fully voiced.
Where It Drags
The linearity is the cost. Midgar is a corridor dressed as a city, and the side-quests repeat themselves without adding much. The expanded story earns its length in the back half; the middle stretches thin.
None of that undoes the battle system, which is the best argument for the remake existing at all. It keeps the planning of the original while letting you play it like an action game, and the swap between the two never feels like a compromise. The graphics, narrative and music hold up their end.
Final Fantasy VII Remake is the first in a trilogy, and it covers only the opening of the 1997 game. That is a gamble. On this evidence, it is a good one.
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