Gamasutra - Afterimage of Final Fantasy VII

Christian Nutt writes about the original Final Fantasy VII and how it will be difficult for the remake to hew to the same cartoony spirit of the original.

Over the holiday, my husband and I played through a nice big chunk of Final Fantasy VII -- the original 1997 PlayStation release. My reaction, and I was skeptical to it at first, was that this is a very good game that is still a pleasure to play; the next thought that came once that realization sunk in, however, was that it's going to be a real challenge to reproduce what makes this game great in that HD remake slated for 2017.

Sitting down to give the game serious time and undivided attention gave me the chance to reflect on not just what it accomplished creatively and technically at the time, but how it holds up, as a game, irrespective of when it was made -- or its landmark status in the industry.

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While the developers of the forthcoming remake of the game are still being coy about whether or not it'll be an open-world RPG, the strength of Final Fantasy VII is that Midgar comes alive in a highly impressionistic and idiosyncratic way; you can visit only a small slice of the "rotting pizza" that makes up the metropolis.

Rather than spend time modeling dozens of buildings and the ebb and flow of the crowd, under influence of Assassin's Creed, I'd rather see the developers of the new game spend time figuring out how they can recapture the colorful neon glow of Sector 6's Wall Market. In the real world, we generally only know neighborhoods well, not whole cities, after all. One tragic, crumbling section of Midgar would be a real artistic achievement.

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Mentioning the Wall Market makes it a good time to discuss something significant, which is easy to forget, these days, as Final Fantasy XV lead Noctis glares at us. Final Fantasy VII is a funny, lively, and very random game; the Wall Market is the setting of the infamous scene where Cloud dresses as a woman to sneak-attack a notorious womanizer and save his friend Tifa.

But is a scene like that even possible in a modern retelling? I don't mean because it's out-of-step with today's social mores (though this is, of course, significant.) I mean it in the sense that the original game's theatrical style and comic spirit seems most likely to be jettisoned in an attempt to make a more photorealistic game, and to live up to the series' current-day, self-serious image.