Category Archives: Final Fantasy VII Remake

Articles about Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and whatever comes next.

Final Fantasy VII Remake

Some final thoughts on Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

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I finally beat Final Fantasy VII Rebirth! It took me a grand total of 101 hours, and while I didn’t do absolutely everything in the game, I did a significant proportion of all the available stuff.

I enjoyed it a lot, overall. It’s a well-crafted game that pays nice homage to the original while doing a lot of new things that are distinctively its own. And while I won’t spoil the ending in this introduction, it was an intriguing and thought-provoking conclusion that we’ll talk a little more about later in this piece in a clearly spoiler-demarcated section.

So let’s have a look back over the game as a whole, and see what’s what, shall we?

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Final Fantasy VII Remake

Did Final Fantasy VII Rebirth need to be a humongous, obscenely long open-world game?

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I’m not going to bury the lede here: yes, I firmly believe that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth did need to be humongous, obscenely long open-world game. So let’s spend a bit of time talking about that.

It’s become fashionable to bash open-world games in the last few years, at least partly because for a good long while now, big-budget developers and publishers have been using them as something of a crutch. Rather than providing a carefully structured, well-paced experience, a lot of developers seem to believe that offering the player what they consider “true freedom” (which in practice is rarely anything of the sort) will make up for the game’s shortcomings in other areas.

While there are a lot of companies out there who are very much guilty of that, when Square Enix has made an open-world game — particularly, but not exclusively, one in the Final Fantasy series –it has usually come out rather well. And Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the best to date. Let’s take a closer look.

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Final Fantasy VII Remake

Some spoiler-free early impressions from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

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I’ve been eagerly awaiting Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and it actually arrived at my house a couple of days early! As such, I’ve been playing it for the last couple of evenings, and wanted to share a few initial thoughts.

I’m not going to spoil anything about the plot in this piece, because I’m not very far into said plot, and there are seemingly some very interesting things going on. We’ll talk about all that another time; today I wanted to focus particularly on the gameplay that unfolds after about two or three hours: the point at which the game properly “opens up”.

And yes, in a marked contrast from its predecessor Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth really does open up. So let’s take a closer look at that.

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Final Fantasy VII Remake

Final Fantasy VII Remake Episode INTERmission: short and mostly sweet

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After clearing my Hard mode playthrough of Final Fantasy VII Remake, I was keen to try out “the Yuffie DLC”, also known as Episode INTERmission.

After my initial annoyance that Square Enix didn’t bother to include the damn DLC on the disc for the “Intergrade” PS5 version of Final Fantasy VII Remake — “Project Ten Dollar” is alive and well — I settled down to enjoy this additional episode, with absolutely no idea what to expect.

The entire thing took about 10 hours or so to play. You can extend that a fair bit if you do a Hard mode run through it and are a bit more fastidious about clearing up side activities, but the whole thing felt like it was a good length — and it left things on a nice teaser for Rebirth. So let’s take a closer look.

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Final Fantasy VII Remake

Reflections on Final Fantasy VII Remake Hard mode – a solid New Game Plus implementation

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“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.

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Final Fantasy VII Remake

Revisiting Final Fantasy VII Remake ahead of Rebirth’s release

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At the time of writing, we’re counting down to the long-awaited second part of the Final Fantasy VII Remake project, which we now know is called Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

That’s not all we know, in fact; we know that this second game is going to conclude in “The Forgotten Capital”, which is where the first disc of the original game ended. Yes, with that scene — though as we’ve previously discussed, Final Fantasy VII Remake took great pains to point out that “the future is a blank page”, and that game’s final encounter was literally facing down the concept of “Destiny” itself.

Anyway, long story short, I’ve been revisiting Final Fantasy VII Remake ahead of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s release, so I thought I’d talk a bit about my experiences so far.

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Final Fantasy VII Remake

Final Fantasy VII Remake: The Future is a Blank Page

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To say that the Final Fantasy VII Remake project was hotly anticipated is something of an understatement.

Ever since the run-up to the PlayStation 2 launch, where one of the promotional videos showed a cutscene from Final Fantasy VIII apparently being rendered in real time by the new system, fans have been wondering what would happen if one of the world’s most beloved RPGs were ever to get remade.

Well, we’re starting to get some answers now… and a whole bunch of questions, too. Let’s explore!

Spoilers for both the original FFVII and FFVII Remake (yes, there are differences) ahead.

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Final Fantasy VII Remake

Final Fantasy VII Remake Demo: Yes

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Sometime in 1997. I am in my last year of compulsory education. My brother, ten years my senior, has come home from America to visit, on vacation from his job on Electronic Gaming Monthly and the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine. I always enjoy this, because he tells me all about the interesting new games that are coming out for exciting new platforms like the Sony PlayStation.

“Have you heard of Final Fantasy VII?” he asks. I respond in the negative. I had a feeling I’d heard the name Final Fantasy before, perhaps in the Super NES magazine Super Control that his ex-girlfriend used to work on back before they split — and before he left our green and pleasant isle for pastures new — but I’d never really paid it much mind. He seemed excited, though — and given that his position meant that he saw a lot of new games each and every day, this was enough to make me pay close attention.

“It’s the only game that I’ve ever seen make someone cry,” he said. I knew immediately that I had to play it. And thus a switch flipped, and what would become the Pete of today was born.

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