I just beat the game and right at the end of the credits when I could save I hit 30 hours exact. Overall I enjoyed it a lot. The Slums sections were probably my least favorite, although I did enjoy the chapter with Aerith in Sector 5 a lot. Maybe because I really enjoyed the music of Sector 5 Slums. The voice acting was all very enjoyable to me and made me much more interested in the characters. The level design was either a hit or miss though. Some parts looked great and felt good to traverse, while others looked awful and took forever just to get from point A to B. I don't get what was the point of all the squeezing through small spaces, it didn't even seem like it was for loading purposes... The combat was the most fun I've had in a FF game in a long time.

So I'm still trying to process the crazy ending. I didn't hate it, mostly thought it was okay. Like everybody else I'm wondering where they will go from here. It seems SE really wanted to make it clear that nothing will be the same. I'm wondering if the second game will start at Kalm or what now.

Youtube has been feeding me ending analysis vids and I'm watching most of them. I just watched this Game Informer one and I thought the bald gentleman did a great job succinctly putting the thoughts to words. The first 20 mins or so in particular. Spoilers obviously

No idea why but I can't get this song out of my head! It sounds like something from a Phantasy Star game, or maybe a little of FFXIII music? Either way, it's making me have feelings...

Masashi Hamauzu is the composer, so that explains the FFXIII similarities.

Just finished it as someone who has barely played any Final Fantasy and never touched FF7. I enjoyed myself quite a bit but story wise, I really preferred the more grounded Avalanche vs. Shinra political story to the ridiculous JRPG bullshit that happens in the back half. I had no idea what was happening at all for the last hour of the game and I had heard people mention that this remake isn't the full game but man, it really isn't the full game. I was pretty shocked when it ended, feels like they probably should have thrown a "part 1" on this somewhere because I could see myself being pretty upset if I thought this was the whole game.

Still, had a really good time with the game though. I'm still deciding if I want to go back and clean up the stuff I missed but the combat was a ton of fun and it gave off some serious Yakuza feelings during the non-combat parts, which is always a good thing.

Pretty interesting to see people saying they don’t dodge. Not to be a dick but maybe because I’m way into Souls games I’m just used to super-specific dodge windows. I did the 1st VR fight as soon as it popped up and was able to dodge a few blizzagas; felt great. Later on I’m dodging “butt stomp”-type slam attacks and easily dodging sweepers and smoggers.

Funnily enough I never block.

@casepb: I'm in the camp of people who think it would be a good idea for the next game to start with the full village flashback, just so it can be made clear in this series of games as to who certain characters are.

Finished it yesterday and I am really surprised by the positive buzz. Sometimes it looks amazing and the music is great, but the whole game left a sour taste in my mouth. My biggest gripe is how linear it is, for a JRPG there's no exploration (and yes I know the first disc of FFVII is that, but this remake is a whole game). The only part where it opens up a little and there's decent world-building is in the town that never sleeps chapter, which is my favourite part of the game.

Linear might be fine and maybe I came with the wrong expectations into the game, but the only gameplay the game has is the combat and I don't get why it's getting the positive reactions I read here. For me I found it often hard to read, this made worse that the game is really bad at telling you which attacks you can block or parry and which attacks you can't. The ennemies' patterns are often erratic which makes preparing your offense kind of impossible cause they can stun-lock you in a matter of micro-seconds. The AIs basically stand back and don't do much, forcing you to be constantly switching and micro-managing them which I didn't find enjoyable. The camera has trouble keeping up with the action, you have no control on your characters when you use spells or abilities which means that sometimes they'll just shoot into a wall instead of an enemy even though they were placed right a few micro-seconds ago. Attacking enemies in the air is imprecise, you have to hope your character jumps high enough... My worst gripe is how often it takes control away from you, the last boss was basically unplayable to me in that you get stun-locked and then it cuts to a spell cutscene and transition back to you getting pummelled.

Mind you, I'm not saying the game is too hard, I think I restarted three or four times in the whole game and got the last boss on my first try, even winning the fight I found the gameplay to be annoying. Maybe something in the combat didn't click with me and playing Nioh 2 at the same time made me expect super responsive combat, but if a game uses direct control I want it to feel good to play and this did not for me.

I started playing FFVIII right after finishing this game and I am enjoying it much more, even if it is archaic. If it wasn't that I am confined at home, I don't think I would've finished FFVII remake and after finishing it, I'd rather play the original again than this. I'm glad people seem mostly happy with it, Square pulled off something very hard in making most of its fanbase satisfied with this remake, it really did not work for me though.

@fear_the_booboo: I can appreciate where you're coming from on the combat but I enjoyed the process of figuring out what works against what enemy and how the different spells/abilities worked. Both those things made the combat feel more strategic to me. Like not only do you have to know what the "right" move to do is, you also have to do a bit of work to set it up sometimes. I'm not sure if this was a purposeful design decision or not but it definitely worked for me.

The "unresponsiveness" of the controls didn't bother me so much either because I never thought of this as an action game straight up.

I have two main complaints. One is the camera. I may be remembering wrong, but I don't think you can be locked on to an enemy and rotate the camera to see what's going on around you. Flicking the stick changes the lock on.

The other is that the stronger your characters get, the less you have to worry about strategy.

@vikingrk: I'm with you on the camera being bad. I think it was probably the most frustrating part of the game. When locking on to something it didn't give you a normal and acceptable view of it, it was always slightly off. I also wanted to zoom out way more than what they offered. The camera options gives you between 1 - 3 and I really wanted to bump it up to 10. I'm hoping once this game finally comes to PC they patched a lot of things. If not then I'm sure someone will mod the game to allow the camera to be zoomed out more.

I've played through this game three times now and I'm incredibly conflicted. The combat is fucking phenomenal and I'm so relieved someone finally figured out this hybrid system, the English voice acting was fantastic, there's a lot of fun moments and minigames, and barring the texture load issues the game and cutscenes look great.
At the same time the game is padded to hell and back with side quests that are standard fare JRPG trash and more importantly with some of the worst level design I've ever seen. Getting from place to place is incredibly slow and cumbersome, it's a mess of ladders, tight corridors and walk and talks. It's like this game was specifically made to drive home Cerny's points about load times. The beginning of Chapter 9 actually made me angry the first time I played it.

And all of those positives and negatives feel completely irrelevant after that ending. Instead of being excited about how they'll build on the mechanics in the sequel, I'm just horrified about how they opened the door to the possibility of a massive fuckup. We've seen this song and dance before, this isn't new or interesting.
The amount of confusion the last fraction of this story has already managed to drum up is so telling that I've already bought the straws I'll need for the diagrams.

I hope theyll make a PC version. Ive enjoyed the original version back when I was a kid and it would be cool if I can play on my newly bought Razer Blade Pro 17. All the games that Ive played so far on my new laptop have been amazing. I wonder how the ff remake will look like if its played on my new laptop. If your looking to upgrade your laptop to get the full gaming experience, I suggest you check out this website's review on what laptop to buy.

I can tell Chapter 14 was something a lot of people were complaining about due to its weird structure, lack of new locations and pretty uninteresting quest premises, but the fact the combat undeniably gets more complex at this point (almost every mini-boss or actual hidden boss has been a real challenge and fun puzzle to figure out without going full-on Bloodborne in difficulty...like the era the original game comes from!) has made this a really fun chapter for me.

But can I just say...as an NBA fan, I pronounce Kyrie a favorite specific way and I feel like this is a huge wink-wink nudge-nudge joke that it is not pronounced like "Kairi" because another character in another universe has that name. But...Kir-E-Yay? Even Gwyneth Paltrow would never!

What in the world...this is crazy.

@briarpack: Spoilers - I know what you mean with the Zack stuff. In a way I'm dreading to see what they change, but I'm hopeful they will be respectful of the old fans. The thought of them going into alternate timeline shit is almost depressing. But, I'm trying to stay positive about it all. I think I would be okay with multiple endings if they went that route, as long as one of the endings was very similar to the original. I'm almost positive they are going to have dialog options that let you change the course of Aerith's death. Just a gut feeling. It's like everything Cloud had a vision of they were trying to say can now be altered.

@jamesparkhurst: The PC version is a sure thing that's not something you have to even worry about. But it won't be released until next year due to the year long deal Sony made with SE.

There's no joke. That's a fairly regular Japanese name/word. That's just how it is pronounced.

@briarpack: The ending mistakes being vague and cryptic for being clever, and like you said--we've been down this road before. And that road gets us to various versions of different characters running around and possibly bumping into each other.


I don't dislike the game...and I think, there's quite a bit in REMAKE that I do like. But I think the sheen of being new and the hype machine has led people to be overly excited for the game, and more than a little lenient on its flaws.

@obcdexter: @nodima: Yeah it’s just a name that ends up rendering in a very specific way in Japanese. Have definitely heard it pronounced that way before.

Yo, a lot of these textures look they just spray painted a low quality photo and called it a day.

The fuck.

Some of the windows in Sector 5 slums look like they were hastily painted with a brush in photoshop. It's like they took the criticism from the response to those FF13 anecdotes about how they took 10 weeks to model a rock or some shit and went in the complete opposite direction.

I had the exact same experience except in reverse, playing console RPGs growing up like FF4,6, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound etc and then playing my first ever PC RPG and being completely confused and turned off. What is this iso-metric view? Why is the story so non-linear, there are too many systems ontop of systems, I hate this non-cartoon style (I also hate the artistic design of the characters), it wouldn't be until Knights of the Old Republic that I was willing to try a western RPG again.

@arcitee: Hah! Thats pretty wild but I guess expected to have someone go through the exact same experience but from a completely opposite perspective. My first ever real dive into a Japanese RPG was Persona 3 because there was a lot of talk around it during it's release and it just looked cool. Although Persona 5 is the one I really fell in love with. I did play some JRPG's over the years though - notably FFXIII which I actually kind of enjoyed for all the reasons classic JRPG fans hated it. The one game that always comes to mind which I thought was insane but I really had a fun time with - not sure if you ever played it - Resonance of Fate? Man what a crazy Japanese-ass game and it had Nolan North voicing one of the main characters!

Here's a winning materia combination I discovered online for anyone going through this game on hard (assuming all materia is max level).

Have HP absorption linked to Enemy Skill, and Elemental linked to the element your enemy is weak to. Have also First Strike and any other setup that can help you build ATB quickly at the start of battle.

Cast Algid Aura at the start, then Spirit Syphon once you build two ATB. Even though the description for Algid Aura says it'll be ice, it'll actually be whatever element is linked to your Element materia when that is applied to your weapon.

Because HP Absorption is linked to Enemy Skill, Algid Aura on top of Spirit Syphon will absorb HP from enemies around you, while hitting them with the elemental materia you linked. This way, I'm able to keep Cloud healed without using any MP. It is also good to have some Magic Up materia or accessories to increase damage.

I beat the game the other day and really liked it. I enjoyed every aspect of it except the bad textures pop-in. Folks are speculating that it's a combination of PS4 hardware and UE4 not prioritizing assets properly, which is why some textures fail to load in or some juggle between high res and low res.

They gave the main cast and supporting cast such depth and character that I was surprised considering supporting characters in the original were just one-dimensional fodder. All the VA was really spot-on and enjoyed all the performances they gave. I was a bit worried about Barret early on but post Reactor 1 you understood he was putting on a front in front of Cloud and shows a ton more depth through-out the game.

Combat was near perfect, in my opinion. Only thing that I didn't care for was the air combat. It didn't feel good at all. Even with a strengthened Tifa.

Chalk me up as someone who liked everything they did with the story and the ending. Bombastic as it was, it still felt thematically appropriate to the themes of t he game and I'm really excited to see where they go from here. More so than had this just been a 1:1 remake of the original.

Boy, this thing went full Kingdom Hearts in those closing hours. Never go full Kingdom Hearts.

@fnert_bjerglen: lol you know, I bet someone could take that whole joke and really build on it in a video, comparing other good RPGs.. and then Kingdom Hearts.. the Simple Jack of Square's library :P

Funnily enough, I was telling my friend I think they went one notch too far with Barret in the Kirk Lazarus direction hahaha I mean, if they make a live action version of this at some point, Robert Downey Jr. should play Barret.

On a different note, I finished my original FF7 playthrough last week (and now I'm on Disc 2 of FF9 /facepalm) which took about 40 hours for the first disc, 20 on the second, and then another 10 or so messing around on the third and last. Great game. Combat was still fun. Materia system is excellent. There was a number of key story details I had forgotten. And I never thought it went too far off the deep end except for probably the part literally exploring cloud's psyche.. That would need to be reworked. Gameplay wise my only real complaint would be the party management in terms of materia and gear. Having to shuffle people in and out to take stuff on and off etc etc.

Nothing like over the top, fourth wall breaking weirdness as the remake though. I can't see them remaking the rest of the game the way they did Midgar. It's just far too big. You visit so many places that I'd love to see more time spent in, and if they did that, this shit would be a ten game series. They are going to truncate this whole thing and tell some weird ass story.

Finished the game today. Adored it. Listened to the GB spoiler podcast and gonna continue to seek out discussions about the game.

Maybe it's because I went in expecting the texture problems, but they really haven't been an issue for me so far. I'm up to chapter 10 and so far I only noticed them in chapters 3 and 8. Every other chapter has been absolutely gorgeous, and I think the game nails the two important aspects (lighting and character models).

Been really enjoying the game as someone who has never touched or knows anything about the original FF7 aside from the obvious spoiler involving a certain character. The thing that really sticks out to me is the combat, it's everything FFXV should have been and more. It flawlessly combines turn-based and real time battle and just feels incredible. It definitely feels like they took some aspects of kingdom hearts and just did it much, much better.

Also holy jesus the soundtrack is absolutely incredible. It has so much variety and it feels like every track suits the situation so perfectly, it really is flawlessly crafted. It draws from the source without completely relying on it, and can switch from full orchestral bombast, to upbeat EDM, to somber tones exactly when it needs to. Might very well be the most impressive OST from a video game I've ever heard when contextualized within the game. I think it's more impressive than even titans like the Nier or Persona games.

The areas that seem to have the texture problems are the slum areas (sector 7, sector 5, and Wall Market) for the most part. But most other areas look fine; not Battlefield V levels of amazing, but fine.

Just finished it.

That was coco-bananas. I dig it.

I just finished it and I have never disagreed with the critical consensus for anything more than this. It might have been one of the worst games I've ever played? It's an amazing 8, MAYBE 10, hour game spread across 40+ hours.

• The side quests are absolutely terrible
• The NPC's and all the new characters are god awful
• Wedge was insufferable and yet he and Biggs were allowed to live to bless the next one but not Jessie??? Who was one of the better written characters (dumb boob armour aside)???
• The battle system is great, but half of the bosses are massive slogs with health bars that don't mean anything
• Graphically, 20% (if I'm pushing it) of this is amazing to look at, like literally the best thing i've ever feasted my eyes on. The rest is the worst, most inconsistent (design, assets and fidelity) looking game I've ever played
• The dungeons are bigger slogs than the bad Persona 5 dungeons, and that's saying something. There isn't 1 dungeon I'd even approach to calling good or decent in the whole game.
• The inclusion of Zack was bad and completely misses the point of the original. But I guess thats what they're trying to setup so I'm not that mad but,
• Aerith suddenly not listening to the planet at the end completely ignores the themes of the original
• That "The next 7 seconds" cryptic shit at the end is the worst kingdom hearts bullshit writing ever
• Whenever it deviated from the original in terms of design and environments it went to absolute shit and you can really tell there's a dearth of talent at SE these days. I could go on re some of the finer design choices (Rufus is now a typical silent blond bishie instead of this arrogant red head who likes the sound of his own voice, his stupid Nomura buckle cape.... etc)

So yeah. Not resenting others for liking it but I'm so confused. This was a terrible game in my opinion.

I just finished it up and aside from the bad textures, something I think will be solved by the next time they make one of these and the AI of your team being a bit dumb when you're not actually manually controlling them, there's nothing about it that I'd change.

The original game is one of my favourites of all time and I love what they've done with this re-telling/remake. I'm all in on the new characters and the ending and seeing where they go with it.

Final Fantasy 7 REMAKE will not drastically change Final Fantasy 7
"We’re not drastically changing the story and making it into something completely different than the original. Even though it’s a Remake, please assume the story of FF7 will continue as FF7 always has."

Basically it's what I figured. It's going to be Final Fantasy 7, but recontextualized to fit whatever nonsense Square Enix has in store for this franchise. Just now you get to experience it in parts.

yay.

Nomura chimes in.

When asked about how many parts the remake will compirse of, Kitase said: "We have a rough idea on that, but it’s not been completely decided yet. It’s impossible to talk about this right now. It seems that many people think it will become a trilogy."

"It all depends on how many parts we make,” said Nomura. “If we separate it into bigger chunks it will take more time, but if we take smaller portions it can be done on a shorter span. Personally, I would like to deliver it fast.”

Yup. Sounds about right. And I'm sure they'll be cool with charging $60 per part.

This was always the plan.

Funny thing I've noticed as someone who has played Persona 5 Royal for 130+ hours since it launched, holy shit there are so many P5 voice actors in this game. Besides the actress for Futaba doing pretty much the exact same voice for Jessie (which is fine, it's a great voice), I found Dr. Maruki throwing up in a back alley. Seriously, every single hub area is chalk full of voices from P5, it's crazy.

I consider myself fairly good at picking up the nuances in peoples voices, and there was one stretch of either Sector 7 or Wall Market where it was Sojiro, Kawakami, Dr. Maruki, Ann, Haru, Makoto and Shido all within 2 minutes of walking around. It's actually insane to hear sometimes just how many of them are voicing the people of the slums.

As someone who is only watching other people play this game, I'm enjoying what it has to offer.

Square-Enix's Steam prices are too much for me, in general, and I'm never going to buy a PS4, so I doubt that I will ever play this myself. I have no idea how the combat feels, though it looks a lot like FFXV's combat. I'd more than likely welcome a change, as I think the original ATB system is old hat.

I do appreciate how the game fleshes out AVALANCHE and surrounding characters more. I've played through the original twice, I think, and just recently played through the beginning, and I always wanted more with Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge. I also am enjoying the music quite a bit.

I do, however, find the enlarged anime eyes and very poor lip-syncing to be a bit distracting, and Tifa straight-up dresses like a stripper.

I wish that Square-Enix was more up-front about this being less of a remake and more of a re-imagining. I don't think that FF7's story was amazing (Pretty standard anime stuff), but I did like it, so I think that it's nice to see a new take on something that I am already familiar with. It was just a bit unexpected.

I also wish that they would announce how many episodes that this will last before people feel invested, though I'm sure that's the point. How much money are people going to be expected to shell out for this series, in the midst of a global pandemic?

All-in-all, I'm really enjoying watching this. I will probably not buy it, though, even if that means never seeing it. I'd probably pay $20 max, and even then that would only be if I'm feeling particularly generous.