Final Fantasy 7 remake - first impressions

I was drunk the other night and was perusing the Playstation Store on my PS4 which is always a good idea when I am in that state. I have stated in the past that I am not the kind of person that pays full price for a game and will normally wait until the price has dropped dramatically, or it is offered to me for "free" with my Playstation Plus account.

There is an exception to this rule and that is any Final Fantasy adventure. I have always, and likely always will, be willing to pay full price for them and this is a good thing because Square-Enix doesn't normally discount anything.

That was my way of thinking when I paid $50 for FF7 remake 3 nights ago anyway.

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It seems that almost anyone you talk to that has been a fan of the FF series for any length of time agrees that FF7 on the PS1 was one of the best, if not THE best game that the series has ever had. It's not that the graphics were the best of that the gameplay was the best, but the story was the best and the most iconic characters all emerged from this one title.

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_{I think it is pretty easy to suggest graphical capabilities have improved slightly over the years}

For people like me who normally get upset when a remake of a movie just craps all over the masterpiece original, I was very worried that Squenix was going to do the same with one of my favorite games of all time. The way that they really "screwed the pooch" on FFXV didn't instill me with a great deal of confidence when after a decade of development they released a semi-broken, incomplete game with a nonsensical story.

The good news for the FF7 remake is that the story was already there, so the team could just focus on gameplay and graphics (I guess) rather than trying to figure out what works in Japan and USA because it so often is a tough translation to make.

Anyway, here are my first impressions, most are good, some are bad

Pro: The graphics are incredible

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I'm not just referring to cinematic sequences - because those being amazing are expected, I am referring to combat and also simply wandering around. The world looks real aside from the impossible haircuts that no amount of gel products could achieve, especially when jumping around and swinging a sword. But then again, Cloud's sword, if it was actually made in real life, would be impossible to wield, so let's just let that slide :P

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Con: Some voice acting is really bad

This is a tough one to pull off for any game. I suppose it is unreasonable for me to expect Squenix to be able to afford the best actors to do the voice-overs and it also might be difficult for the actors to really capture what the character is meant to sound like - especially if they aren't given enough background story on that character. I don't know the process. This is most notable in one of the characters that does a great deal of talking early on in the game.

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Barret Wallace is a gruff, enormous guy with tattoos, scars (both physical and emotion) who has a Gatling gun for an arm (Suck it Bruce Campbell!) Naturally we would expect him to have a rough and abrasive voice - which he does. What I didn't want is for every line of his to sound like Mr. T was given a script with no idea what is going on around him and told to be as angry as possible at all times.

It seems out of place in most situations and I'm already tired of hearing it and dude talks a LOT - he talks way more than "Cloud", who is the main character of the story. So far all of the women have great voice actors and about half of the men do NOT. It's a shame really.

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Pro and Con: New combat system

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I did not make this photo. It is from a Youtube video that is part comedy chastising the crazy amount of things that you have to pay attention to in this game and it is also part very informative about how to play the game. The idea is that you need to learn a ton of information in FF7.

I am a lazy gamer, I will admit this. This is part of the reason why I always appreciated turn-based games such as the way Final Fantasy was back in the 80's up to the early 2000's.

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The remake is "kind of" turn-based in that you can slow the game way the hell down at any point and switch to another player to control them - and you better - because the AI is not doing you any favors in this game.

A really important aspect of combat is gaining ATP up so that the individual characters can perform important actions such as using potions, casting spells, or using abilities - all of which do substantially more damage than just attacking. You can get away with not changing characters in the early stages of the game but later on, you will get whooped even by trash mobs if you are waiting for the AI to use some skills.... because they never will.

The amount of ATP that you collect is crucial to victory and if you allow the AI to rack this up on its own, you are going to have a bad time because the AI is intentionally terrible at this.

This has been a difficult hurdle for me to get past because positioning of characters is also very important in most battles since 50% of the characters are melee based.

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I'm only 3 hours in and this game feels more like a research project than a game but it is a research project that I am gladly taking on. There are very few game titles out there that I am willing to learn this much about in order to play, but Final Fantasy is one of them. I already feel as though this was $50 well spent and I highly recommend it to fans of the franchise.

Thus far it appears as though they fired everyone that was involved with that awful awful FFXV game and started from scratch.

There is a ton more information to cover and I have many more opinions about what is good and what is bad, but this is already 1000 words long so I'm gonna cut it short.

Do you own this game? What do you think? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.