Final Fantasy VII Remake Demake

I can’t believe Sony went through all this trouble to get Final Fantasy VII Remake running on the original PlayStation hardware. Seems kind of wild to take something that came out in 2020 and project it back to 1997. Cloud’s hair looks particularly wild with so few polygons, don’t you think? They were pretty faithful to Sephiroth’s whole vibe, though, I have to say. There’s some strange choices they made with Barret, but I guess they were going for 90s fidelity? Still, A+ reimagining, all told.

Which is a long way of saying, I had the notion to play the original Final Fantasy VII before dipping my toe into FFVII Rebirth, even though longtime readers of Backlog will know I played FFVII Remake without having played FFVII itself. (Please don’t judge the quality, or lack thereof, of that newsletter. Backlog was just a baby back then.) As you can see, I have chosen the most confusing method of consuming the sprawling media enterprise that is Final Fantasy VII, and that’s before I admit to you now, three years after that original newsletter, that my real first experience with FFVII was Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, which I watched on a bootleg DVD I got from a high school friend, despite having never played the game. So, yeah, when it comes to Cloud and the gang, I really took the long way around to experiencing all this.

When Rebirth released earlier this year, reading the reviews, I made a quick call to play the original game before starting Rebirth. I managed to get through Remake without getting too confused, but it seemed like much of the joy of Rebirth was going to be tied to knowing the beats of the original release, including who Zack is and the most spoiled character death in all of videogame history. Plus, if I’m being real, it was already weird enough to play Remake without any of the nostalgia. It felt like going with a friend to a concert of a musician you’re not familiar with. So, I decided to do my homework, and I’m here to report—well, that I am still doing my homework.

Basically, I’ve gotten to the point in FFVII where Remake ended (or, you know, reimagined). I think it took me like 40 hours or something in Remake to get to that point? Which is why I found it wildly funny than it only took me like five or six hours or something to get to the same point in the story in the original. This all makes sense, of course. I knew they’d expanded the game dramatically to make Remake into a full experience. To say nothing of the graphics, I find myself enjoying in retrospect how much they really allowed characters like Jessie and Marlene more room to be, well, characters. This is not an original take, I know, but from my vantage, it was less like watching character sketches become full-fledged characters, and more like watching a novel get compressed into a short story.

Part of the reason I haven’t yet been able to get further into Final Fantasy VII (besides, of course, my slow playthrough of Metaphor ReFantazio) is that it feels an awful lot like research. To be clear, before I am summarily roasted in the comments, there remains in 2024 much to enjoy about Final Fantasy VII. The story is still strikingly political in an era of market-tested AAA narratives. The music absolutely rules from top to bottom. And there’s a willingness to lean into melodrama and oddity that somehow all coheres. But! Given that playing Rebirth at some point remains my goal, it can be hard to muster the energy to play FFVII for the simple reason that my reward will be yet another 80–100 hour RPG.

This is of course the wrong way to be thinking about it. I should, ideally, be enjoying FFVII on its own merits, as its own experience. I should be thinking of it as a self-contained thing. After all, that’s all it was in ’97. But this many years later, it is very difficult, if impossible, to not engage with what has become of FFVII. To not recognize it as a nexus of media as much as it is a singular story. It’s not impossible, of course. You just have to be in the right mindset. But given my motivations—wanting to better understand the second part of a trilogy of flashy reimaginings of the original text—it’s very difficult to not feel as though I’m eating my vegetables.

FFVII deserves better than that. It’s a seminal title for a reason. So for now, it’s going back on the shelf until I can treat it with the respect it deserves. Not as some relic meant to be rushed through in order to experience the latest spectacle, but as a text meant to be enjoyed unto itself, just for what it is, not for what it became.