“Back in the day,” as those of us of a certain age tend to say, it wasn’t unusual to replay a favourite game to see everything it had to offer.

Sometimes you’d play the game again immediately after finishing it; at others, you’d leave it a while and then come back to it fresh. Sometimes the game had additional things to discover when you played it through after clearing it once; at others, it was just a case of enjoying a story again, like re-reading a book or watching a film multiple times.

These days, meanwhile, there are so many games available that it’s relatively rare that I take the time to replay something I’ve already beaten to my satisfaction. But I made an exception for Final Fantasy VII Remake, so let’s take a look at that.

My decision to replay Final Fantasy VII Remake was based on a few factors. Firstly, I was interested to see how the PS5 “Intergrade” version differed from the PS4 version; secondly, I wanted to revisit the story ahead of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth which is, at the time of writing, a couple of weeks away. And thirdly, I wanted to play the Episode INTERmission story, which I hadn’t played before.

Essentially, my reasons for replaying Final Fantasy VII Remake were everything I described above the jump: I wanted to revisit the story and explore the additional “post-game” content it offered.

Final Fantasy VII Remake adopts an interesting take on the “New Game Plus” model in that you can carry over all your progress from your initial playthrough into a second run, but you don’t have to play the whole game through again if you don’t want to. Instead, a Chapter Selection menu opens up, allowing you to jump to any of the major moments in the game and pick up from there.

This is good for the one case of “missable” quests in the game — one chapter in the game features a minor “split point” whereby two sidequests open up according to how you responded to various characters, and there are two possibilities for this. As such, clearing the game once having completed all the available sidequests leaves you at 24/26 sidequests completed, necessitating a replay of the chapter in question if you want to tick that off your mental checklist (and/or get a Trophy for it).

When jumping to a chapter from Chapter Selection, you can play at any of the available difficulty levels, including Easy and Normal modes, Easy and Normal “Classic” modes (which take regular attacks and blocking out of your hands, allowing you to focus on issuing commands for magic and abilities) and the new Hard mode, which is another unlock for clearing the game once.

Despite the potentially intimidating name, Final Fantasy VII Remake Hard mode isn’t offensively, unreasonably difficult; instead, it’s the opportunity to play through the game again with a difficulty level that has been balanced for characters who cleared the game once already. It seems primarily intended for those who reached the level cap of 50, which means some of the early encounters (particularly the first boss fight) can seem like significant hurdles to overcome, but after reaching that cap, the rest of the game feels nicely balanced.

This is a good approach to New Game Plus, because sometimes when games allow you the opportunity to carry across all your progress from a first playthrough, it means you can simply steamroller everything in the game. This can be fun, sure, but it also often leaves the mechanical elements of the game feeling a little pointless. The addition of Hard mode to Final Fantasy VII Remake means that you can replay the game and feel like you’re having a meaningful mechanical experience as well as revisiting the story.

There are some unique wrinkles to Hard mode, too. Most significant is the fact that you’re not allowed to use items at all. This means no healing via any means other than character abilities and magic during combat, and outside of combat either magic or resting — or, in some cases, completing sidequests — is the only means of recovering HP.

There’s another big factor to consider in Hard mode, too, and that is that resting no longer recovers characters’ MP. Couple that with the fact that you can’t use items and it means you have to be a lot more careful with your magic use, because while there are a few means of restoring MP during combat through certain abilities (and very slowly via simply attacking) you will almost certainly use MP faster than you recover them. Pacing yourself is crucial.

When I first started Final Fantasy VII Remake Hard mode, I almost immediately hit a roadblock with the Guard Scorpion boss during the introductory sequence. This seemed massively, unreasonably difficult to my characters (who were, as I recall, about level 47 or so) — and making use of tactics that worked on Normal difficulty was out of the question here, because the small MP pools of even endgame characters coupled with the relatively high costs of powerful spells means that you can chew through an entire reservoir of resources in a matter of seconds.

After a couple of failed attempts, I was beginning to wonder if this was really a good idea. But then I thought about it a little, and I realised what the game was doing. It wasn’t outright telling you to be a bit more conservative with your magic use, but it was making it very clear that you should do so. I changed tack, and rather than attempting to unload Thunder spells on the mechanical monster to exploit its elemental weakness, I instead focused on protective and curative magic and made greater use of character abilities.

For those unfamiliar with Final Fantasy VII Remake’s combat system, it combines elements of action RPGs with the “Active Time Battle” system from the original Final Fantasy VII.

You can move around freely in combat and dodge attacks by stepping out of their way. You can also block to reduce incoming damage — another element of combat which becomes essential in Hard mode, while I barely used it in Normal. You can freely unleash regular attacks and a particular character-specific special ability, and landing hits on your enemy or successfully blocking to reduce damage charges a character’s “ATB” bar.

A character can stock up to two ATB bars at a time, and these are expended on anything you want to do that isn’t moving, attacking, blocking or dodging. Character abilities cost one or two ATB bars depending on how powerful they are, and they are acquired either from weapons or the “materia” crystals you slot into your weapons and armour. Magic, meanwhile, which also comes from materia, always costs one ATB bar plus a certain number of MP depending on the spell.

Reliably charging your ATB bars is thus an essential part of combat in Hard mode, because there are not many encounters in the game where just spamming basic attacks will get you through. And choosing when (and how) to expend those ATB charges is absolutely crucial, also. Just because you have a charge available doesn’t mean that you should use it as soon as possible; enemies can interrupt spellcasting and abilities, so poorly timed commands can simply fizzle.

To return to the Guard Scorpion fight, all of the above quickly became apparent once I stopped trying to cast as many Thundaga spells as quickly as possible and instead focused on mitigating damage and attacking during suitable openings. This pattern continues for the whole game on Hard mode, with the penultimate boss battle providing some of the best examples of situations where holding ATB charges in reserve rather than spooging them off immediately is the most desirable way to handle things.

Patience is key in Final Fantasy VII Remake Hard mode, because there’s no means that you can outlevel or overpower a fight. That means you actually have to do the mechanics of the various fights — including battles against regular enemies, because you better believe a standard encounter can kick your ass just as much as a boss fight if you’re not suitably prepared.

Thankfully, for the most part, Final Fantasy VII Remake is relatively lenient on you if you are defeated. After everyone in the party being KO’d, you can immediately retry from just before the battle that did you in, providing you the opportunity to fiddle around with equipment and materia loadouts as required. Not only that, but if you did defeat any enemies in the encounter before carking it, you get to keep all the experience and materia-levelling AP. This generally doesn’t make a huge difference, but if, say, something like an “HP Up” materia levelled up during the fight, it can have a bit of an impact.

However, it is worth noting that in lengthy, multi-phase battles, there are no checkpoints — at least on Hard mode, I honestly can’t remember offhand if there were on Normal. However, if an encounter is actually a sequence of discrete battles, you can restart from the battle you got to or the beginning of the whole sequence — with the latter option being there if, say, you spaffed your entire MP stock up the wall on the first fight and were then left all but defenceless for the subsequent ones.

If that sounds a little weird, let me explain using the finale sequence as an example. The finale for Final Fantasy VII Remake consists of two separate battles: one multi-phase fight against a huge thing called Whisper Harbinger, followed by a second multi-phase fight against main villain Sephiroth.

If you’re defeated at any point during any of the phases of Whisper Harbinger (and there’s like four or five of them), you go back to before the fight even started. If you’re defeated once you’re on to Sephiroth, you go back to the cutscene before the Sephiroth fight begins, with the opportunity to open your menu and tweak things if required.

If you go back to before the Whisper Harbinger fight, your character status reverts to how it was before the fight began. If you go back to the start of the Sephiroth fight, your character status reverts to how it was when the Sephiroth fight began, so if you ended the Whisper Harbinger fight in a poor position and get defeated by Sephiroth, it may be in your interest to just start the whole sequence again.

The reason I mention all this is because it’s very relevant to how Hard mode does things. You will probably get defeated a few times in Hard mode — while, for the most part, things are relatively straightforward if you have characters at the level cap with a sensible loadout of materia, there are several bosses that can be a bit of a roadblock. Off the top of my head, these include the initial Guard Scorpion fight, the Hell House fight in Wall Market’s Colosseum, the Arsenal fight in the Shinra building, and the aforementioned Whisper Harbinger.

It can be frustrating and demoralising to have to retry a long fight from the very beginning, but Hard mode is not about steamrolling enemies as quickly as possible. It’s about using the game’s mechanics — including the specific restrictions placed upon you in Hard mode — as they were intended to be used. And yes, you will need to use all of them.

And you know what? It’s really fun. Once I’d cleared that initial Guard Scorpion fight and figured out how I was supposed to be doing things, my run through Hard mode of Final Fantasy VII Remake was surprisingly smooth. I was expecting some of the fights to be “superboss”-tier difficulty, but even some of supposedly the toughest fights in the game (notably, the optional Summon fight against Bahamut) were perfectly manageable.

I came away from the experience with a new respect for Final Fantasy VII Remake, both in terms of the story details I’d forgotten about and the depth of the mechanics the game offers. It really is a very solid game, and it’s got me right in the mood for Rebirth, which I’m very interested to see based on some of the more unusual (and controversial at the time) narrative elements of Remake.

As I type this, I’ve just (well, about an hour ago) finished my playthrough, leaving me ready for Episode INTERmission from tomorrow. Apparently that’s reasonably substantial in its own right, so I don’t know if it’s going to take me right up to Rebirth’s release, but it certainly sounds like more than some of the throwaway DLC I’ve played for certain RPGs. BioWare, I’m looking at you.

I don’t know if my experiences here mean that I’m more or less likely to do New Game Plus runs in other games I’ve previously beaten; it all depends on how well the games in question handle that sort of thing.

If it’s just “play the game again but all the combat is so easy it’s meaningless”, I probably won’t bother unless it’s for the sake of a substantially different ending. (Death end re;Quest 2 was the last game I did this with, and it was worth it.)

But if it’s “get an overall better understanding of how the game works, and another run through the story for good measure”, then yeah, I’m up for it. I will probably do the same with Final Fantasy XVI on its harder “Final Fantasy Mode” difficulty when both its sets of DLC have been released.

For now, though, I’m happy with a job well done — and looking forward to what comes next.

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More about Final Fantasy VII Remake

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