I have nowhere to put my thoughts about FF7: Remake so you'll have to bear it here: am I missing something? How has this got rave reviews everywhere? There's only one published source that gave it a mediocre review and it got buried by everything else. I honestly don't know where to start with this...
Let's first get rid of the stuff that I did like out of the way: I think it looks great (beyond some low resolution backgrounds and textures), and I like the early part of the game; I also liked some of the stuff they expanded (specifically the Avalanche squad), and the re-orchestrated music is enjoyable for the most part.
...However, I was frustrated with everything else leading up to, after, and sustained from the pillar destruction. The problems kept piling on, repeating, and became more and more telegraphed. The controls are okay, but they're just the Kingdom Hearts layout but ported to Final Fantasy (something after the first two KH games, I actually rooted for). However, they weren't tweaked for finessed, so the result is too messy and the encounters too boring for a big title game like this to have let slip by.
The camera is a mess; it's the biggest enemy in the game. It's unruly and never stays in a place where you can see or track anything more than two enemies on screen at a time, and in a game that's literally one long hallway, that shouldn't be a problem. Especially because all enemy encounters are scripted.
And that leads to one of the biggest problems I have with the remake: the cutscenes. Oh. My. God. The cutscenes. It's almost every other minute with them (and sometimes less). Sometimes you literally run for a few seconds from one cutscene to another cutscene. And as many as there are doors in this game, there's double that for cutscenes: one for when you approach the door, then you get to play exciting door opening gameplay, then another cutscene to show you closing the door and approaching the next. And if it isn't a cutscene for a door, it's a cutscene for a tutorial, or incidental character interactions, or for a ladder... It drives me nuts. This game is like a long hallway that's sectioned off with doorways and every two steps, you have to watch a video about the upcoming door.
In the 23 years since the original, interactivity has changed for games. We've moved past having to watch pre-rendered cinematics for everything now. Technology allows us to make full games that already look like them and have woven those moments that we could only watch into the actual game itself. The producers of the remake are quoted as saying they've looked to the Witcher series and other "world adventure" games to get inspiration on how to handle the remake's ideas, but I think they took away the wrong impressions. This game all at once looks new but feels old. Even somehow older than the 23-year-old original.
While playing it, I just couldn't help but compare this game to another PS4 title that completely rebuilt one of its franchises and it worked: God of War. It is still my favorite game on the PS4. It was once a Devil May Cry-like hack-n-slash but it was completely reimagined---rebuilt from the ground up---and it worked. To its highest potential. Almost everything in that game worked for me; the combat was tight, responsive, and gratifying to execute (literally); everything was easily tracked, nothing ever left your field of view; and despite it too being linear, it felt big, full, and rich with every detail thought out and in its place.
FFVII: Remake doesn't do any of that. At least, not well.
Thinking on it now, the ultimate gripe for me stems from the very nature of the Remake existing. All of the problems I have with it branch from it. It's not a "complete" game. Finished but not complete. The fractured structure of this Remake to exploit its name and popularity, and the ultimate padding and sloppiness that comes from cramming dull filler to blow something of actual very little content into something bigger. Midgar was only about 4-5 hours worth of gameplay in the original before the story took you out of it, and you could return any time, until it was blocked for story reasons in Disk 2 in the original. But this game is just Midgar, and blown up into 30 hours (if you breeze through it on "Easy"). The worst of it is that there's two more parts, at the full price tag of 60 bucks a pop, which will continue exactly as this first installment has laid out. And after spending 180 bucks over the course of 3-4 years, we can finally have a faulty-but-pretty, but more importantly, complete remake of one of the industry's most lauded titles.
Great.
TL;DR - I blame Tetsuya Nomura.
