The Cetra Girl

A little Fan Art of my favorite Final Fantasy girl, Aeris Gainsborough.

I've been holding back a bit about my thoughts on the latest trailer release of the FF7 remake. I'll be honest to tell you I was surprised that Square Enix is a lot farther than I expected. Shortly afterwards, we've received further information from the Remake's director, Tetsuya Nomura, that the game will cut into episodes. This decision was made so the Remake could hit the PSN quicker and give the developing team more time to flesh out the everything.... and they were also going to change around the story a bit so today's generation of fans.

I'm.... Optimistically Cautious about all of this.

Remakes can be a hit or miss in the Gaming Industry, with several of them being misses. This usually is the result from having a completely different development team handling the remake and them changing things around in order to appease the the newer generation of fans more than the older ones. This tends to backfire on the remake and the team behind it as it tends to tick off bother types of fans. The older ones look at it as the remake being a disgrace of the legacy the original had, while the new generation looks at it wondering why the original had a legacy in the first place.

Now this is not true for all remakes, some have actually had teams who were had some of the original game developers in charge and guiding the newer team to make a game that would appease the Older and Newer generation. A good example of this is Pokemon Omega Ruby, which added features from the newer games in the series, while making a few touch ups that they didn't have the technology to do with the original.

The reason I'm being Optimistically Cautious (and something I should urge ANY fan to do so too) is that well.... there's a strong chance this could just be one of the bad remakes that'll gain a profit just because it has Final Fantasy 7 in the title. The only reaction I had to the recent trailer was just... Meh. The style is trying to be realistic with character designs straight out of Advent Children (which was just bad), you have a battle system that seems to be more Dynasty Warrior than RPG, and we're probably going to be looking at unnecessary cutscene porn out of the whazoo.

Now granted that RPGs these days are going to be cutscene heavy because hey, there's a lot of stories in RPGs and no one wants to read a lot of text.... which is ironic because text-heavy RPGs actually help me expand my reading skills, so take that for what you will. And to hear that the remake will be cut into episodes and that the story will be change for the newer fans doesn't feel right. 

The story of Final Fantasy 7 even though it feels dated, still holds up to this day. Especially when you gets to the last eight or twelve hour of the game where questions about the Holy Materia is really the Salvation for humanity against Meteor. It doesn't really need any changes to it unless they're going to add to it. Which in itself is unnecessary padding added. As for it to be cut into episodes just doesn't seem like a good idea. Granted, that works for Tell Tale games because their games feel like episode to a show, with an RPG like FF7.... leaving off of a cliffhanger and worrying that all that grinding and gear you've found might not crossover to the next episode. Now it might work if the developers did something like Mass Effect did with letting your character crossover all three games and the episode being a month apart from each each other; but reality is, we might looking at a Trilogy episodic like they did with Final Fantasy 13 (which would be nice nod to the original three disc set, all be it an annoying one)

And this is just a pet peeve of mine, but I really don't like the realistic style the remake is trying to make. It just doesn't work. The original game design was simple for the time, but you knew right off the bat who was who. And it displayed more expression than what the newer games did in the series.

I know I sound like a grumpy old man talking about 'back in the old days' and I should wait to play it and find out if it's good or not.... but chances are I'm going to be waiting for a long time until Square Enix makes a collection Disc of the episodes. I mean, why should I fork up forty bucks for an episode of the remake, when I can buy the whole Original game on PSN for sixteen bucks?

But hey what do I know, I'm just someone who doesn't want to waste their money on just a Game Title.