It’s been almost 30 years, and now the Final Fantasy 7 remake is out for everyone. I always said I’d buy the remake when it came out, but ~$500 was too much (for the game plus the console it required). When it came to PC (via the Epic Games Store), I was a Mac user. Now it’s out on Xbox and Switch, and I’ve played through it on the former.

Of course, I loved the remake from the start, from the expanded opening showing the dystopia and the lack of plant life, the extra scene where Aerith’s flower is stepped on before she can pick it back up, and of course the characters having voices. But then, shortly after the intro movie, I started to notice changes I didn’t like. I’m fine with you not being able to rename characters. All I really changed was “Aeris” to “Aerith,” correcting the translation mistake, but the remake already does this. (I also corrected “Red XIII” to [redacted] (spoiler) so when you get his real name, you get funny dialogue where Cloud asks “Who is [redacted]” and the other character says “[redacted] is [redacted].” It’s not important, it’s just funny to me, but it bothered me that after you learn his real name, you still call him Red XIII, so I always named him what his real name is from that point forward.)

Then after the first part of the training mission, we get back to Seventh Heaven, and I don’t even have the option to give the flower to Marlene. I thought that option was special in the original, but the remake doesn’t allow it. We’re not giving it to Tifa because at no point does Cloud see Tifa like that — yet. It doesn’t make sense. He has the flower because Aerith made him take it. Cloud’s basically ace at this point, and he doesn’t want to lead his childhood friend on. He just wants to get paid and move on. Aside from discarding the flower, which isn’t an option, giving the flower to Marlene makes the most sense. Cloud sees that everyone in Avalanche has hope. Marlene only sees her daddy and his friends (who she also likes) go out and leave her alone every day. So you want to give her some hope. Having Cloud give Tifa the flower by default was the first half of my first issue with the remake.

In the original, Cloud loses some of his edge around the second mission. Meeting Aerith in the church, meeting her mother, the interaction with the Turks, and the whole Don Corneo business changes him a bit, and he lets more of his human side out. Not in the remake, he just stays an asshole through the whole thing, which runs through the Shinra HQ escape. Minor spoiler, but only for those who played the original and understand the context. You escape from Midgar HQ, you do the road scene, and instead of fighting the boss after, you fight the boss still on the bike. Then you fight Sephiroth for some reason and… that’s it. It’s over. You gotta wait until June for the second part, unless you pay $700+ for a PS5. And no one has the third part yet, even if you pay the steep fee for early access. We’re not even sure if the third part will be further delayed on other platforms. So that’s another issue — even those who paid the premium to access the second part early don’t know when they’re getting the third chapter, or even that the third chapter will be the final chapter. It’s all up in the air.

What really convinced me the remake was kinda bad wasn’t just the extra mission with the new Soldier villain (which is just training you for the bike mission at the end), but it was after Aerith is taken (sorry, minor spoiler) and you talk to her mom and you get her back story. Even with the voice acting… I remember thinking this scene hit so much harder in the original. But, buying Remake on the Xbox came with the original, so after I finished Remake, I fired up the original and started playing. It only takes about an hour or two to get to this scene. To do everything in Remake takes 20-40 hours in Remake, but it only takes about 3 hours in the original, due to all the fluff that was added. (Some of that fluff is good, but most of it literally exists to waste your time.) I got to that scene, and it hurt my heart nearly as much as it did the first go-around in 1997. I think it’s the music. The music in Remake simply sucks. The music in the original was hot garbage because it was MIDI. I remember paying $40 to import the CD, then I found a 10MB pirated copy online. All the songs in MIDI except “One-Winged Angel” which was an MP3. I played the songs on the computer and the CD in my CD player. Sounded the same. But anyway, Nobuo Uematsu has since re-released music from Final Fantasy VII, with a full orchestra, and it sounds amazing. You don’t get that in the Remake. You get boring, drowned-out songs. You also get this random ass song with vocals by Yosh from Survive Said the Prophet (Japanese rock fans know who that is) but you can never hear the song, even in the trailer. You have to go on a streaming service and look up the song and play it outside the game. It’s not just weird. It’s bad. The music was such an integral part of the original game, warts and all, but they couldn’t get that right. And Aerith’s back story just fell flat. It could have been amazing with the newer, non-MIDI, orchestral recordings, but we didn’t get that.

If I said I wasn’t going to play Rebirth when it comes out in June, I’d be fucking lying. Of course I’ll play it. But I’m already to the Temple of the Ancients in the original. The original is ugly and the music is MIDI, but it doesn’t completely disrespect your time (there are too many battles, but they can be disabled, but you shouldn’t disable all of them), and it’s still a great game. And it doesn’t shut down on the train tracks leading to the town with Barret’s back story like the original PC release did. They either used the fix from the Ultima Edition (a pirate release), or they fixed it on their own. Either way, you can play past that point now. You can probably play the entire game legally now without original hardware. That wasn’t an option before — either you were emulating the PS1 version or you were running the Ultima Edition, even if you bought the PC release because no one ever played the PC release past Disc One. It just wasn’t possible to proceed due to an unpatched bug. Fortunately, digital releases such as Steam, App Store, Xbox, PlayStation, and others, do allow patches and so the game was fixed. Anyway, of course I’ll play Rebirth, and I’ll play Reunion as well — what I assume the third one will be called, given the context and the pattern — and I damn sure can’t wait to see what the new World Crisis scene looks like (that’s not really a spoiler, and neither is this: if you have to go to the bathroom when you’re fighting Sephiroth for the last time, pause during the match, because you won’t get a chance during the nine minute cut scene that follows. At least it was 9 minutes on the PS1. It’ll probably be longer in the remake. And I can’t wait to see it. And I can’t wait for someone to recut it with better audio.