The Return of Final Fantasy VII… Again.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 5, 2012

Nothing “final” about it, but it seems the fantasy survives…

Soon to be downloadable with a few extra features for the PC – like achievements and cheats. Click here for more information.

Okay, I’m gonna make a confession. I can’t watch that little trailer without getting nostalgic and excited. I re-started FF7 about a year ago, and while I didn’t make it very far (just barely escaped Midgar, I think), it was still very cool. It had its faults, but the somewhat abstract character art actually helped it age pretty well after getting used to them again.

I find it amusing that in the trailer that they refer to it as “the quintessential Final Fantasy experience.” Does that mean that none of the FF games released since then have measured up? (Since I haven’t enjoyed any of them as much as FF7, I’d tend to agree…) Why is that?

When the game first came out, we’d already released a couple of games on the Playstation, and I remember looking at some of the special effects and trying to figure out how they pulled it off on that hardware. What was streamed video, and what was rendered in real-time? Some of it seemed ridiculously low-tech and simple, and others were really impressive.

But man, I sure did love this game. It wasn’t the first JRPG I’d ever played, but I think it’s still my favorite. While it’s plot was… pretty weird at times, it seemed to hit the right balance of angst and humor and melodrama and goofiness for me. The gameplay itself seemed just about right – rarely so challenging as to become frustrating, but unless you were just grinding it required some thought.

And, in case you’ve never seen the cinematic sequel to the game, where Cloud has one more adventure and a battle with an almost-reborn Sephiroth two years after he tried to “retire” after saving the world… here’s the movie in its entirety:

Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children

Yeah, like the game it has dubbing weirdness and the plot is equally bizarre, but it has some wildly imaginative fight scenes.

Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Andy_Panthro said,

I have an old copy of the PC-CD versions of FF7 and FF8. Difficult to get working right even back then, and now I’d imagine it would be impossible. The best option for a re-release would be an emulated version (which is what I ended up played for FF7, since I had issues with both the music and the video playback).

Never played any of the new (post PS1) games. Always wondered why they never did big-budget remakes (although I suppose there is a rights issue with Sony?).

Mind you, I’d much prefer a remake of FF6. Only got about a third of the way through, but it does seem to be considered the best of the bunch.

Not sure I could put up with all the grind though! That was one problem with most of those games…
Chevluh said,

There is no right issue with remake of the PS1-era FF games, but there are big budget issues. Basically, the core issue is that at best remaking one of the PS1 games in HD would cost just the same as making a new HD game from scratch.

This is because there’s next to nothing they can recycle from the old games apart from the scripts. Even the data for the prerendered backgrounds would be too simple for a modern game, and that’s if it were directly usable, and in most cases there’s been heavy 2D work on top of any 3D render for their backgrounds.

What’s more, the costs go up exponentially. Where in PS1 FF7 you could use the same random rectangle-headed guy model for one out of four NPCs and players wouldn’t mind because they were filling those near-abstract shapes with various personalities, now faces have to be detailed you need each NPC to look different if you don’t want the player to wonder why he’s always talking to the same two guys (which is notably why they avoided showing towns in FF13, or that recent FFs have less NPCs than older ones). Or take dialogues, you could have tons of them when it was just text but voices have changed the game, so to speak. Stuff like that.

—-

As for the grind, they’ve got you covered, for this new PC release there’s an integrated cheat mode to boost your team to perfect stats so you don’t have to bother with that pesky gameplay between the cutscenes.
DGM said,

Wonder if they’ll let you revive you-know-who this time? 🙄
Xenovore said,

Not a big fan of the Final Fantasy games, but this… this is actually a pretty cool thing to do.
Griffin said,

Kind of odd how the trailer shows nothing but cutscenes. Or perhaps not so odd — perhaps they just know their target audience. Personally, it leaves me wondering if the actual walking around parts and battling parts will look and play the same, or if they’ve been updated at all. Of course, I’m not very interested either way, so … well, see first point.
Chevluh said,

There’s no update to the game itself, as far as we know it’s really just the old Eidos port with added achievements
Chumpy said,

Oh boy, Advent Children… that and the follow-up spin-offs made me really worried about what they’d do to a remake. The way they reverted Cloud’s character in AC just really rubbed me the wrong way. Seems to be “safe” without any plot overhauls, thankfully.