Final Fantasy VII: Remake Intergrade

Playtime: 58.8 Hours

Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade is the best game I would not recommend you play.

There’s a lot I genuinely love about this game. It’s one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played. Every cutscene is expertly crafted, and you can clearly see the effort that went into making each area feel authentic and lived-in. The combat is a blast, and I appreciate the different variations you can switch between in the settings. The voice acting is excellent, and the game does a great job of making you feel emotionally connected to your party. It's addictive—I 100%'d it in just under three weeks.

But for all the time I spent enjoying it, the only reason I loved playing it was because I experienced it under very specific circumstances.

This game advertises itself as a Remake. This is not a remake, it's a retelling. It is a retelling of what was the first 6 hours of the original Final Fantasy 7. But the story of the remake is drastically different. Allow me to explain.

This game wasn't made for newcomers. This game is made for people who have played Final Fantasy 7 & Crisis Core. Why do I say this?

Because the story is so fundamentally different in this compared to the first bit of the original FF7. The game starts very similar to the original, but as things start to change, ghosts which represent the concept of Fate, intervene in the game to try and make things happen more similarly to the original. Not only this, there are one-off lines and such that only make sense if you know the full context of the original game. And there are even spoilers for the ending of Crisis Core shovelled into the final chapter. Oh yeah-did I forget to say that Sephiroth, the main villain, appears to have knowledge of what happened in the original timeline?

What they did to Sephiroth is a travesty. The build-up is terrible. In the original, we see the aftermath of his actions, and we begin to see just how stronger he is compared to us. We don't even get to meet him until a good chunk of hours have past. He is spoken of as a legend, and a scary one at that!

In this one he appears within the first hour.

What's even worse? If you have never played FF7, this would be your first introduction to the character. And it makes no sense. None of his actions make any sense because the only thing you have a grasp on, is his personality. Not his motives, goal, why he is so interested in Cloud, none of it is explained.

But the thing I hate the most about this game is the padding. There is so much bloat in this game, it's insane. The best way I could describe it, is the method from going from point A to point B involves a lot of extra beats. They made what was originally 6 hours worth of content into about 30 hours worth of content. And not for the better.

Chapter 16 & Chapter 17 for example. In the original, you were in and out of Shinra HQ in about 90 minutes. This involved infiltrated the HQ, getting captured, escaping, saving Aerith & riding away on a motorbike.

In the Remake, there is so much more extra content. Like there's an entire section where you have to get a keycard in the lobby that takes about 20 minutes that wasn't in the original.

Or what I found most annoying, was Chapter 17 in the remake compared to the original.

In the original,
After getting captured and then escaping from the cells in Shinra HQ, you come across President Shinra in his office with him being impaled by Sephiroth's sword. This takes all of about 5 minutes. It then takes another 30 minutes or so the escape Midgar and then you are done. 35 Minutes in total.

In the remake,
You do not get captured. Aerith shows you where she lived when she lived in Shinra HQ. You spend at least an hour of doing some of the most stupid and boring puzzles until you finally meet President Shinra. Now Shinra is still alive but this time, but he is in danger, hanging on for dear life near the helipad. You save him, Sephiroth shows up, he stabs him, you then have three back-to-back boss fights which takes at least another 30 minutes, and it's another 30 minutes to escape Midgar. Only at the end of this game, instead of moving on with the original story, you spend another hour fighting the concept of Fate & Sephiroth as well.

Not counting the fighting Fate & Sephiroth stuff, that's at least 2 hours of padded content compared to the original's 35.

The storytelling isn't as good as the original as well. The character-to-character interactions are great. Fantastic. I love those scenes.

But they really shovel in a lot of scenes where they are questioning their actions. Like thinking its their fault for the events in Chapter 13. Honestly, the person to blame first and foremost is Reno for pushing the button, and Shinra for planting the bombs.

The remake wants to convince you that while Shinra are the bad guys, you might not be any better. Avalanche are targeting singular facilities, Shinra has no issue killing thousands of civilians in order to unsuccessfully kill six guys. It just doesn't work.

So I had a lot of fun playing this game. It was really fun to explore all these areas I knew beforehand and seeing how they look being prettied up. But a lot of them overstay their welcome, and are padded with unnecessary cutscenes, areas, and minigames. And I thought this would be the same for the DLC, Final Fantasy Intermission.

I am so glad I was wrong.

Final Fantasy Intermission is a fantastic DLC, that I loved the entire way through. Yuffie is a secret character in the original game that a lot of people probably didn't even know about! I didn't really care a lot about her in the original game, but in this? She shines.

She might just be my favorite character.

Everything in this DLC is over-the-top fun. Her combat style is my personal favorite, the parkour is so much better in this DLC compared to the base game, I even liked the new mini-game they added, Fort Condor!

The music is phenomenal. While FF7 Remake has some great music, there is a few tracks I just really didn't like. I loved them all in this DLC. My biggest criticism with the Remake is the padded content. That isn't the case in this DLC. It is an entirely new story and you learn a lot more about Yuffie as a character. I love it, It's fantastic-the only criticism I have is that the final boss is a huge pain to beat on Hard Mode. but I disliked Hard Mode for nearly all the chapters, so it's more of a skill issue on my part.

While I wouldn't recommend you play FF7 Remake (At the very least not until you have played FF7 & Crisis Core), I would 1000% recommend you play Final Fantasy Intermission. The biggest issue I have with it is that it ends too quickly! Only being 2 chapters long.

If I played just FF7 Remake, I probably wouldn't have played Rebirth. After playing Intermission, I am very excited to play Rebirth. I hope the level of quality Rebirth has is on par (or even better) than Intermission. If it is, I think I'll have a great time.

But again, with this game, unless you have played Final Fantasy 7 & Crisis Core first, I cannot recommend Final Fantasy Remake on its own. Especially since it wasn't advertised that it could be played that way.