Welcome to The Backlog, a series in which we will take a look back at 12 games from 2020 that, in one way or another, had a lasting impact on the video game industry.
Final Fantasy VII is one of the most important video games in history. The game, which came out in 1997, was the first Final Fantasy to go 3D and use 32-bit graphics, a departure from the 16-bit style of (the phenomenal) Final Fantasy VI. It sold beyond anyone's wildest expectations, notching over a million sales in its first week, and introduced a host of players to the series, which had been consistently excellent but perhaps overlooked in the West. And its story, an environmentalist fable that cast the player as part of an eco-terrorist group called Avalanche, was simple yet masterfully executed. For fans of Japanese role-playing games, Final Fantasy VII was manna from heaven, a guiding step forward for the genre.
That brings us to the Final Fantasy VII Remake project. Revealed in 2015, the Remake project would serve not to just bring the graphics of VII into a more modern state, but instead rework everything about the game from top to bottom, in order to create a new way to experience VII. After a rocky developmental cycle, the game released in all of its high-definition glory on April 10, 2020, and it changed not just how Final Fantasy VII could be played, but what it even meant to remaster and, well, remake a classic.
I hate remaster culture in video games. While I understand the appeal of bringing games into the present day and onto as many consoles as possible, I feel like something is lost when a game is taken from its original state and "improved" in a variety of ways. Even a remaster like the recent Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, which changes fundamental things about how the game operates while keeping mostly the same gameplay and all of the same story, can feel lifeless. It's not that hard to play the original Oblivion; it's even easier to play games like Skyrim and both installments of The Last Of Us, which are nevertheless stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of remastering.
Final Fantasy VII Remake provided a much bolder vision of what remastering can look like: Instead of simply updating the graphics, and rushing the game onto shelves, Remake goes for something completely different. This isn't a remaster, but a complete re-imagining of what VII was. Everything is different here.
As part one of a planned trilogy, Remake needed to be a success from the get-go, and while it is a game of the utmost quality, there were doubts that Square Enix could take one of the most culturally ingrained video games of all time and turn it into something new, something stranger, while still keeping the core of what made VII such a success in the first place. Did it succeed? And what does it mean that even one of gaming's most sacred relics could be reworked into something so different and yet so familiar? Let's dive in.
What Is It?
So, what changed with Remake? Everything, really. Let's start with the combat. Like most Final Fantasy games, the original VII was a turn-based game, though not strictly so. There is a bit of variance thanks to the Active Time Battle system, which sees characters fill up a meter before acting. This meter is dictated by character speed and buffs, but generally, "turn-based" describes it aptly. Remake eschewed all of that, instead turning its combat into an action-based real-time system that still uses ATB, but mostly in name. Gone is the slower pace and more methodical combat of the original. Instead, players control one character and build up the redesigned ATB gauge with normal attacks in order to unleash special maneuvers ranging from magic spells to combos with giant, physically impossible swords.
For a series like Final Fantasy, constant reinvention of combat isn't out of the norm. Since the last purely turn-based game, 2001's Final Fantasy X, the series has slowly but surely moved towards a more active and action-heavy style of fighting the myriad enemies that the player comes across. XII had more of a strategic Gambit system, where the player programmed characters to act on their own, while the XIII saga mixed the turn-based principles of yore with a more real-time style of inputting commands. (XI and XIV also changed things up, but they were fundamentally drastic departures, given that they were MMORPGs, rather than single player games). By the time XV came around, the last mainline Final Fantasy game released before Remake, the combat had fully shifted into real-time strategy and inputs, and so Remake can be seen both as a stark departure from the original VII, and a natural evolution of where the series was going.
What's less straightforward to explain is the Remake project itself. By splitting VII and its already gargantuan length into three games, Square Enix was able to truly flesh out every bit of the original's story and setting. Remake and its roughly 40-hour length takes place in a section of the original game that was only about six or seven hours long. The revamped story fully explores the central city of VII, Midgar, and its inhabitants, expanding what was just a waystation into a fully realized setting.
The most radical change, however, came to the story itself. Square Enix built the game's narrative around the Whispers of Fate—think of them as an omnipotent writer who constantly attempts to rewrite the story of Remake so that it can match up against their outline. When the game then forces the player to fight the Whispers in the climax of the game, it isn't just a normal boss fight, but rather an exercise against the very idea of remastering a game. Remake smartly shifts its own story towards something new without creating a dissonance for those who know the ins and outs of VII and its original tale. Instead, there is an in-world reason for why things change, and when it all culminates in the final battle of the game on the outskirts of Midgar, the reveals and twists are all the more effective for how well the game sets them up.
What Went Right?
Remake succeeds because it is its own game, even if the main beats are the same. The combat system is the best that "new era" Final Fantasy had been, and really, it's better than anything that came after it. It's kinetic but still feels like it's a Final Fantasy game, one in which you cast Thundara and hit Limit Break ultimate attacks.
The game is also gorgeous in a way that a simple remaster could never be. The graphics are about as good as they can get without crossing over into strange Uncanny Valley territory, and the city of Midgar, a gray and sludgy part of the original game, is beautiful, all neon and squalor working together side-by-side. The graphical style also lends itself well to battle, as effects explode left and right with gorgeous fidelity; Final Fantasy spells have never looked better.
The changes to the story also work well, even if they are a bit confusing, thanks to the ever-present Whispers. Remake has more space to stretch its legs, and it uses this space, as well as the added graphical quality, to bolster the characters, both central and not. Sure, the main group of Cloud, Aerith, Tifa, and Barret all get more time and dialogue, but even relatively minor characters like Jessie and the comic duo of Biggs and Wedge become less two-dimensional distractions and more fully formed characters in their own right.
Speaking of characters that get more screen-time, a brilliant change comes in the form of Sephiroth, the original's iconic villain and one of the most heralded characters in video game history. In the original, Sephiroth isn't really present in the Midgar section, but Square Enix, to its credit, realized that it shouldn't have a VII game that was already changing everything about the original without him. And so, he makes constant appearances in flashbacks and hallucinations, before showing up as the last boss of the game.
What Went Wrong?
There are two main complaints to make about Final Fantasy VII Remake, and while one carries more weight than the other, both are worth acknowledging. The first, which is both more personal and less noteworthy, is that Remake is not Final Fantasy VII 2.0. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, goes the saying, and there's at least something to do that. For those who might have wanted to play the exact same game as the original only with HD graphics, Remake is a disappointment. The changes detailed above, which I consider the very strengths of the game, do alienate that type of player, and there's some validity to the complaint that stretching a six-hour portion of the original game into a 40-hour epic makes it feel artificially engorged. The change in combat was the most polarizing shift, as a vocal chunk of the Final Fantasy fanbase plays these games precisely because they aren't action games, and Remake skirts very close to that designation.
I think this misses the point of the Remake project, though. While I do understand the complaint, that an HD remake of Final Fantasy VII should still be Final Fantasy VII, I have little sympathy for those who made it. The original game is still accessible and wonderful to play, so what would a more vanilla remaster have accomplished, exactly? The more relevant complaint is about splitting the original story into three full games, and this I can empathize with a lot more. The aforementioned lengthening of the story for the purposes of selling a full game does break with the flow and pace of the rollicking start to the original game, and while Remake still comes out ahead in my eyes, those problems would crop up more thoroughly and with much more negative impact in the second installment of the trilogy.
Really, though, the main thing that went wrong with Remake is that it could never be all things to all people. For a remake that released 23 years after the original, something that was just a reskin of VII would have also disappointed. Remake tries to thread the needle in order to both give players long familiar with the original a new experience and to grab new players—this is a business decision as much as a creative one—and introduce them to the world of Midgar, Cloud, and all of the other facets of VII that have become central to video game lore.
Were People Normal About This Game?
Were people who were not steeped in Final Fantasy history and gameplay normal about Remake? I'd say so. Most reviews fell under the "critical acclaim" part of the rubric, and even the more negative ones pointed out the issues with Remake, and not just complaints about what was different. On the other hand, Final Fantasy fans have always been intense and prone to tribalism when it comes to their favorite games in the series, and given the impact and breadth of VII, this part of the fandom was the largest and most vocal of them all, and they had a lot to say about Remake.
So did the gamers who Square Enix was perhaps brazenly trying to court with the changes. "Final Fantasy 7 Remake is the worst story I have ever experienced," "I have hated my time with the final fantasy 7 remake," "Final Fantasy VII Remake is terrible"; Really, what was most notable about the reaction was the intensity of both sides.
What's Happened Since?
There have been two Final Fantasy mainline releases since Remake, and they both made missteps. First came Final Fantasy XVI, released in 2023 and serving as the series' biggest departure from its roots. Gone are the party members from previous games, replaced by a solitary protagonist, Clive Rosfield. Gone too are the RPG combat systems, replaced instead by the most action-game style fighting the series has ever seen. XVI took the real-time combat of Remake and removed even the hints of strategy, turning the game instead into pure adrenaline and button inputs. XVI is a good game, with a fittingly epic story full of crystals and big monsters, but it no longer feels like a Final Fantasy game. Its departure from the things that made this series the premier name in role-playing games left me a bit cold, even as the moment-to-moment act of playing the game was stunning in its own way. It also looks spectacular, which is not nothing.
More relevant was 2024's Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the second in this planned trilogy project. Whereas Remake was expansive in its storytelling changes but compact in its scope and setting, Rebirth explores the world outside of Midgar, and it doesn't come off all the better for it. There is just too much gameplay clutter in Rebirth, a topic I covered here on Defector, and it takes away from the thrill of playing the next part of this story, changes and all. I still have never finished Rebirth, so bogged down in its side activities that I lost the will to power through the main quest. All of the things that went right with Remake are similarly strong in Rebirth, as the combat, graphics, and characters all continue to be top-notch, but it falters because it tries to be too many things to too many people.
At some point, possibly in the near future if the Remake-Rebirth development period stays the same, a third game will come out to finish the story of the Remake trilogy. I hope that it leans more into the things that made Remake such a thrilling departure from both its own source material and Final Fantasy norm, rather than the more boilerplate open-world shenanigans of Rebirth. As for the name, the leader in the rumor clubhouse appears to be Reunion, though I am partial to Relive, as it fits the trilogy's naming conventions to date more thoroughly.
Is It Worth Playing In 2025?
Whether one should play Final Fantasy VII Remake or not depends on two factors. The first is whether RPGs are up their alley; even with all the flashy bells and whistles, Remake is still an RPG at its core, and that means a lot of inventory management, grinding monsters for experience, and a story that leans heavily into anime-style spectacle. The second is how familiar and, maybe more importantly, how precious the player is about Final Fantasy VII.
I don't think Remake requires even a passing knowledge in the original to be worth the time, but anyone who has played VII will have to make the decision on whether they want to replay one of the most important games of all time, or whether they want something new grafted onto the skeleton. For me, someone who likes but maybe doesn't love VII, this was no issue, and the changes that come with Remake are almost unilaterally thrilling. For that reason, Final Fantasy VII Remake earns a 9.7 on the Defector Replayability Ability Scale.
