If I was given one word to define Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII reimagining project, it would be “ambitious.” To take a game so culturally beloved and dare to blow it up in a way that would require three installments (Final Fantasy VII Remake, Rebirth, and an unnamed third entry) over a likely decade-long period takes real stones. Square has doubled down on this and expanded their scope even further. The long-forgotten Playstation Portable prequel was remade for modern consoles; a gacha game stormed its way into the wallets of tens of thousands of people. Final Fantasy VII even had its own battle royale game that has since been relegated to the sands of time. The project has become so gargantuan that it has arguably eclipsed its parent franchise’s spot in the zeitgeist—there are potentially people at Square who will spend their entire videogame career immersed in developing some installment of the Final Fantasy VII reimagining. So yeah, it’s ambitious.
What, then, is born of this ambition? The most cynical would say that the project serves as little more than the capitalist’s wet dream: an unstoppable money-printing tour de force; a no-brainer for a company sitting on one of the most cherished titles of all time. There’s a grain of truth to this thinking—it’s the same logic inspiring the leagues of remakes and adaptations plaguing most media industries—but it ignores the conversation that this project is most interested in having. Final Fantasy VII Remake, at its core, wants you to question what it means to be a remake. This isn’t a new idea for me to write out: the first game tasks you with slaying the literal manifestation of fate, a force hellbent on ensuring the events of the remake play out according to how the original game ordained they would. Square makes it clear that they are aware of fan hopes and expectations, proves that they can match those and still ask the player to trust that they can surpass those to deliver a wholly familiar yet entirely new experience. Final Fantasy VII Remake then becomes not just a justification of itself, but a justification for remakes as a whole. They’re an opportunity to tread new ground and tell new stories, and a chance to more fully realize the themes and messages that laid in the heart of the original work.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth demonstrates this realization, to me, with Red XIII’s defining moment in Cosmo Canyon. As a pup he learned a harrowing truth: the night their idyllic settlement was terrorized by the Gi tribe, his warrior father Seto abandoned his post to save his own hide. Carrying the weight of his father’s cowardice, Red XIII strove to become the hero that Seto wasn’t. Facing the threat of planetary extinction at Sephiroth’s hand, Cloud’s party ventures to Cosmo Canyon, where Red XIII learns what truly happened to his father that night. He fought desperately to protect his home, and was turned to stone as the Gi’s poison arrows took hold. Red XIII proclaims his father a hero, howling in his honor, and Seto’s makeshift monument weeps upon hearing his son’s affirmations.
It’s a touching scene, and the power afforded by modern development allows for a presentation the original game could only dream of: As Red XIII swallows his hubris, the camera closes in on his face; as Seto cries tears of pride, the musical accompaniment swells to eruption. Filmic grammars are on full display to finally elevate this scene to a proportion that likely mirrors what the scenario writer imagined in their head as they penned it. The team at Square did a brilliant job realizing this moment, and it alone could stand testament to the idea that it’s worth revisiting works to escape the technical limitations they were originally restricted by.
This idea stands in contrast to an all too familiar issue that remakes or remasters encounter: the pursuit of graphical fidelity can often mean the loss of artistic identity. There’s a spectrum in ways of which this is true, and I want to point to one of the least egregious examples first. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD took advantage of two generational leaps of processing power to deliver some stunning bloom lighting effects, and this upgrade drew the ire of some. While the game still utilizes cel-shaded expressionism to render its world, the new lighting jars with the solid-colored storybook presentation that frames the game’s narrative, potentially upsetting the original vision of this world. As mentioned, it’s fairly harmless. The original art direction remains mostly intact.
A slightly more damning example comes from Bluepoint Games’ Shadow of the Colossus remake—a game that, when I played it in 2018, had me losing my mind at how gorgeous it looked. For all the beauty and splendor that The Forbidden Lands are rendered in here, something is missing. The original game painted its scenery in washed grays and low contrast. The PlayStation 2 wasn’t as powerful as the game needed it to be, and a compromise was made to decrease the render distance from the player. All of this created a dream-like world, a mystic haze that wrapped around the player as they explored a vast and empty land. The remake uses the Playstation 4’s superior processor to increase graphical fidelity across the board: the contrast is increased, the lands appear more vibrant, and you can see for miles ahead of you. Gone is that subtle intrigue, and even though it’s no more drastic of a change than Wind Waker HD, it lessens the experience ever so slightly.
I think the paramount example of this, however, comes to us via the Silent Hill HD Collection. The perpetual unease one feels when walking through the streets of the titular city owes a lot to the eerie fog it drapes itself in. It’s an iconic mark of the franchise, and just as with Shadow of the Colossus, it was born from a need to disguise the hardware limitations and render distance the developers were working with. When the games were ported to the next console generation, there were many, many things that players took fault with—they were not good ports—but there’s one key issue that fans remember above the rest: the fog isn’t there, at least not in a way that feels meaningful. In escaping the confines of the weaker PlayStation 2, there was no need to cover up the jagged far off landscapes that would break the player’s immersion, so the need for the fog went away; the series forgetting its own world-building in the quest for graphical realism.
The legacy that remakes and remasters leave behind is often informed by this pursuit of realism, and paints the idea that these creative decisions—cel shading, low contrast environments, fog—were not artfully minded inclusions, but concessions. It’s corporate revisionism, and leaves the taste in one’s mouth that these companies are ashamed of their past works because they aren’t as aesthetically elegant as their descendants. There are more and more remakes now that seek to dispel this revisionist approach, and engage with their audience in a meaningful way. It feels so odd to call this an “anti-revisionist” approach (not to be confused with the Marxist–Leninist political movement, though oddly sharing similar ideology), as the remakes that do this are often completely revisionist—I will never forget the playful dialogue that Capcom builds with the player in the Resident Evil 4 remake: should the player attempt to cheese the opening encounter by hiding in the village’s watchtower, the floor will collapse under Leon. This was a viable strategy in the original game, but the developers want you to know that this is a different experience. The game you played 20 years ago is merely that; this is a new game. In turn, Resident Evil 4 becomes this anti-revisionist idea: it does not replace the original work, and offers a greater understanding to those familiar with it.
The Final Fantasy VII remake project exists as the perfect distillation of this anti-revisionist design, keeping the authenticity of its design out of the question by engaging directly with it. It’s simultaneously a remake and a sequel to the original: the idea that things will transpire according to a 20-year-old game is the final boss of Final Fantasy VII Remake! It doesn’t eschew the somewhat goofy tone the 1997 game could take at times, pretending that it’s better off making Cloud the ever-brooding recluse he is in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. His awkwardness is often played for laughs. This game takes strides to retain itself, and delivers unadulterated spectacle while doing it.
It’s phenomenally brilliant—it’s just not for me.
I want to walk you through the way that the original Red XIII scene plays out. It’s always been my favorite. The plot is exactly as I’ve described it above, so let me instead focus on how it feels to experience this scene. We see a single pre-rendered background; all of our action unfolds against this. There’s no voice-acting, just text on a screen to read, progressed with the tap of a button. The music is a single looping track, a softer rendition of the main Cosmo Canyon theme. The only move the camera makes is to pan upwards, revealing Seto.
It’s… rather lonely. I can’t think of a better way to describe it. It feels like sitting in the audience of a theater, watching the actors take a beat to pause. They haven’t spoken in what feels like way too long, and there’s anticipation for the next word uttered. The tame score feels less like an accompaniment and more like set-dressing. These simple elements don’t hinder the scene—they transform it. It’s sad because there is space given for an overwhelming melancholy, and we as the audience are privy to another human experiencing that. We forget that an entire world exists beyond the stage: all we see is Red XIII in a solipsistic moment. The howl is the only sound we register, and it cuts through the silence of the rest of the scene; it is the moment the actor speaks again. When the scene has finished, the curtain falls. The screen fades to black, and we are given a moment to reflect on this performance.
Maybe I’ve romanticized this scene beyond its intended gravitas, but it feels like in the lonesome silence through which this scene unfolds, there’s beauty that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth fails to capture. This isn’t to say the new scene is bad. It’s very effective at communicating the emotion Red XIII is feeling. The camera dynamically captures every action and reaction with fitting focus. The score swells as Seto cries and Red XIII howls. Every cinematic element highlights the emotion you are meant to feel in this moment. I just can’t shake the feeling that the moment isn’t allowed the same presence that the original extends. That one ends on a fade-out. The new scene cuts to Barret shedding tears before a member of the Gi tribe reveals themselves, disrupting the moment. This isn’t Red XIII’s scene anymore. In taking this moment and running away with it—in learning to fly—Final Fantasy VII Rebirth forgets how to breathe.
The loneliness that the original scene imparts frames much of how I view Final Fantasy VII. It’s a thematically rich text that asks the player to examine love, environmentalism, terrorism, capitalism and so much more, but it’s also about loneliness. On leaving Midgar, the player is granted access to the world map for the first time. In other Final Fantasy titles, this moment is treated with the excitement that adventure brings, or a general indifference that implies this was always what you were meant to see. In Final Fantasy VII, you’ve spent hours til that point in Midgar, and only Midgar. It’s a busy and chaotic environment. Stepping out into the wider world separates the player from that chaos. Coupled with the uncertainty the party feels with regards to their next move, you feel isolated. You aren’t surrounded by NPCs. Just a vast, foreign land. You are alone.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth doesn’t communicate this loneliness. How can it? It’s a sprawling open world game. Around every corner is a sidequest, a Remnawave tower, monster intel, etc. There isn’t a moment to spare on breathing room, because any given second is spent under the weight of this design.
When we talk about remakes and remasters, we concern ourselves mostly with the act of comparison. We talk about the cel shading, the low contrast environments, and the fog. We talk about the pursuit of graphical fidelity and how it harms artistic intent. Depending on our allegiances, we spurn or praise older hardware based on the capabilities they provided or denied. Regardless of any of these talks, we ultimately look at the ways we felt when playing one game versus another. It doesn’t matter if the Resident Evil 4 remake subverts the idea of what it means to play Resident Evil 4. It will always be just another revision, communicating different ideas through a different approach.
That’s okay. In fact, that’s welcome. Stagnation breeds complacency, after all—and we don’t need games that only strive to be mediocre. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth doesn’t communicate loneliness, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad game. When we examine the degree to which every minute detail from the original is blown up, and how the flow of the game is geared towards players encountering all of them, we reach a new conclusion. This is a game about discovery. In the wake of killing fate, what can you do but venture forth and discover what lies in store for you? Red XIII’s scene can’t end on a fade-out anymore, because it cements a finality the game isn’t interested in communicating. There is still more to seek, so go forth and seek it.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth shouldn’t stand as some anti-revisionist take on how we discuss remakes and remasters. The fact that it’s willing to engage in a conversation with itself shows a humility and respect that would betray the somewhat cruel accusation implied within revisionism. It echoes the ideas of New Criticism more than anything else: that a work’s merit is valued by what it is, rather than what it’s not. Final Fantasy VII is about loneliness. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is about discovery. Neither one of these things is more valid than the other. This is the lens that we should bring to all discussions regarding remakes.
As for me, I will personally always prefer how Red XIII’s pivotal scene unfolds in the original game. I will also always appreciate the remade scene for what it communicates within the larger context of that game. Neither one of these moments is more valid than the other.
And that’s okay.
Perry Gottschalk is a Paste intern, thinking about games and the way they make us feel. For more feelings, follow @gottsdamn on Twitter.