ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS The Final Fantasy VII Remake

you won't stop telling the stories about that damn reactor hello and welcome back to video games I'm Tim Rodgers you are watching the action button review of the Final Fantasy 7 remake for those afraid to watch in full let us begin with the bottom line the Final Fantasy 7 remake is more Final Fantasy 7 than Final Fantasy 7 for those who remain indulge me with the opportunity to deliver an extended introduction I mean this is the first video in this series and I feel like it's quite important to talk to you about my process look at it this way if I tell you about my process now then I don't have to tell you about it next time this video represents the first in a series which may very well continue until the end of my mortal life I make this declaration without cynicism as a human person who just 11 months previous past the threshold into their fortieth year of life crossing over into that much-ballyhooed fifth decade and unto the precipice of middle age the darkness with which I reckoned my building past acquired a richer sheen of morbidity I first reviewed a video game in front of the amusement of the Internet at large literally nineteen years ago my calculator tells me that's almost half my life ago though I have in the ensuing life hath embarked upon and nearly died during many adventures though I have wormed my way into and eaten my fill of several careers inside and around the various entertainment industries of the world I have somehow never - usually accidentally review a videogame in public every once in a predictable while a man who used to sign my paychecks at a fortune 500 company once told me that a man in his twenties brags about women he's slept with a man in his 40s brags about meal was he's eaten and a man in his 60s brags about his bowel movements I replied to this man with an enthusiastic immediacy which might have shocked him that he was saying a man in his 20s brags about what he's put himself into a man in his forties brags about what he's put into himself and a man in his 60s brags about what he has left behind the old man shook his head and told me I'd misunderstood the metaphor back then I figured maybe he was right and I just lacked the perspective to understand why today I declare with confidence that he was wrong I was 25 years old then and I knew a lot more about everything than that old man he is literally dead now and I'm in charge in my 20s I put myself into the task of reviewing video games for my website Action Button net in my 40s today I come to you having sucked the Final Fantasy 7 remake down with a milkshake straw and on my eventual 60th birthday one of you watching this right now will take my place let these videos then serve as an education for you my eventual successor back in the early 2000s while I was working at Sony Computer Entertainment Japan in Tokyo I reviewed video games in my spare time on my website action button dotnet it started as a freak exercise in passive-aggressively smack-talking the free games I received at my job it eventually evolved into a dreadfully complicated procedure of note taking replaying and data analysis thanks in large part to this laborious hobby of mine I received an eclectic self-education one which propelled me into a job designing for triple-a video games even when I founded my own studio Action Button entertainment I did not abandon this curious hobby in fact the complexity of my bizarre pastime only blossomed thanks to emerging technologies such as video capture when my and my Action Button entertainment colleagues Brent Porter Michael Kerwin and Nicholas Wasilewski 's game video ball failed to recoup the four-game profits as worth of investment we'd gambled into it I swore to take a three-year sabbatical I determined to spend three years analyzing games again owning my skills toward the scarcest possibility of epiphany here I express my sincerest gratitude to Kotaku comm editor-in-chief Stephen toe til o for hiring me as a video content creator for three years I enjoyed a paycheck 'red opportunity to tunnel deeper into the design language of video games than I ever had today I come to you with two promises that we at action button entertainment will make our game truck heck and that I have achieved the maximum level possible of video game critical and analytical faculties introducing the action button method for video game analysis this newly refined process represents an evolution of a method I've utilized for various triple-a clients over the past decade however seeing as you all are already paying me $10,000 per month you collectively represent one triple-a client for most of the games I review on this channel I will conduct the same process I spent eight days playing a video game 12 hours a day striving to complete it as many times as possible while playing I have thoughts and take notes I arranged those notes into a rough review outline then I divided my captured video footage of 96 hours of gameplay into Adobe Premiere sequences representing what I have ascertained to be the stages of a game I spent seven 12-hour days watching and re watching the most important sequences of that footage for the sake of the Final Fantasy 7 remake for example I scrutinized two full playthroughs my first and my fourth while watching I separate each sequence of video footage into color-coded channels representing different varieties of moment this allows me to then easily compose what I call a structure Atlas while color coding each sequence of footage I take extensive log notes I refer back and forth between the log notes and my rough script outline I flesh out the outline with any new observations I make while re watching my footage when I have completed seven full days of logging night then spent three days performing various data analyses on my prepared video footage sequences the results of my number crunching work their way into my script outline with the data analysis and my script outline complete I then spend two days on the fun part during which I bury my scientific in two analytical findings under a dirt mountain of fancy prose idiot jokes I then spend one day filming and editing a reading of the script and four days assembling the video the sand so after 25 12 hour days that's 300 hours of work the action button method for video game analysis is complete and a video review program consisting of no less than 60 meticulously scripted and edited minutes of content arrives on your television yes I said television if you happen to watch this on your phone under no circumstances are you permitted to tell me that you did that I actually recommend watching action button reviews on a game console with a game controller in hand because occasionally during the video editing process myself restraint mechanisms temporarily failed me and at those times I will put on to the screen more text than any existing human can comfortably read in the allotted time in these cases I encourage you to consider whichever button on your video game controller pauses the playback on your video game consoles video playing application the action button press the action button and enjoy your Easter Egg if you miss you are not permitted to rewind if rewind you are not permitted under any circumstances to tell me that you did that you know I'm glad I took the time to outline my process before this video of all the videos I could possibly make because now I get to confess to you that I definitely chose the absolute worst possible game for this the first episode of the Action Button review video series program the Final Fantasy 7 remake is not just a role-playing game a genre already known for its generous and voluminous length the Final Fantasy 7 remake is also a new role-playing game one which I had never played prior to the launch of this video project not only is the Final Fantasy remake a new RPG it is a new RPG whose chiefest of aims is to recreate every molecule of sentimental magic installed in my brain 23 years ago by a game whose nostalgia hooks tear deeper into my memory flesh with every terrible passing day reviewing this game of all games as the first game to review in my series reviewing games upon which I am staking my career and credibility by publicly submitting to the funding whims of a crowd represents a massively challenging hail-mary gesture of either Herculean dedication or reprehensible of stupidity one might say the challenge I faced in reviewing this game was not exactly unlike that faced by Hironobu Sakaguchi and his compatriots at Squaresoft when they developed a little game called Final Fantasy back in 1987 nonetheless and - the apocalyptic disappointment of my enemies I have prevailed locked in a microscopic apartment during a miniature Armageddon during which all the local laundromats are closed and the gas has been out in my building for three months reduced to doing laundry in the cold shower while overcoming three weeks of sickness with the world's most famous coronavirus despite Domino's pizzas refusal to answer the phone or take online orders even though my TV broke while I was doing so I performed 200 hours of work in the process puncturing the stratosphere of sentimentality turning this particular decades yearned media product into quote a game I have played unquote I'm telling you I drank the Final Fantasy 7 remake with a milkshake straw I loved every second of the experience and then I spent an additional 100 hours taking that game apart one molecule at a time in a desperate attempt to learn how to hate it how did I do you tell me cowboy and with that we can at last begin the action button review of the Final Fantasy 7 remake a video game published by Square Enix for the Sony Playstation 4 Computer Entertainment System on Friday April 10th 2020 based on the 1997 Squaresoft game Final Fantasy 7 reduced by Yoshinori Kitase a directed by Tetsuya Nomura Naoki hamaguchi and Motomu Toriyama with music by masashi hamauzu meets ito Suzuki and Nobuo Uematsu many questions concerning the Final Fantasy 7 remake entered my various electronic inboxes even before I began composing this review do I need to have played the original Final Fantasy 7 in order to enjoy the remake is most of those questions it turns out that no critic of video games can talk about a video game without needing to talk about other video games much as I'd like to talk about the Final Fantasy 7 remake as though it existed in a vacuum I cannot resist your numerous similar questions nor can I resist the lure of my own memories nor can I resist the Final Fantasy 7 remake s' sinisterly sticky-sweet inclination toward temptation to ponder every god darn video game that has ever existed in summary it took me 200 hours to arrive at an answer to your questions spoilers I think you should play the original Final Fantasy 7 before you play the remake and in a shocking turn of events I earnestly believe that you should play the Final Fantasy 7 remake before you play the Final Fantasy 7 remake now you might ask what do I mean by that well take a look at the length of this video buddy that should be your first clue that the answer to that question is going to kill at least one of us because you see it turns out the Final Fantasy 7 remake is not just a remake of Final Fantasy 7 it is simultaneously every modern triple a prestige video game at once every role-playing game that has ever existed a Disneyland of itself the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the arcade game of video games and a best-selling book series based on an HBO series it also presents fascinating opportunities to ponder the foundations of the role-playing genre an interesting venue for a dissection of modern action game designs chiefest pathological lies and perhaps the deafeningly loudest multimedia punchline ever delivered unto the end of a decade's spanning joke when I said earlier that the Final Fantasy 7 remake was the worst possible video game for me to review as the first game I review in this series reviewing games I could not have been any less not joking the exceptional gravity of this game has thus necessitated a review quite longer than you should expect in future episodes also during the writing of this script I saw fit to more delicately and elaborately establish the sort of critical vocabulary I will employ with a lighter touch in future episodes so in the spirit of its inspirations this review of the Final Fantasy 7 remake spans seven discs disc one why remake Final Fantasy 7 disc 2 how remake Final Fantasy 7 disc 3 the structure atlas discs for those who fight disc 5 the Trinket ultimatum disc 6 a most delicious vacuum and disc 7 the forbidding new following these seven discs as always is the bottom line and now please insert disc 1 the Final Fantasy 7 remake is one of the most anticipated video games of all time I reckon it's even more anticipated than the original Final Fantasy 7 ever was in fact the first time I ever heard someone allude to a remake of Final Fantasy 7 was also the first time I ever saw a Final Fantasy 7 a kid in my art class was parading around a Final Fantasy seven Japanese demo disc he'd paid full price for toe ball number 1 at the only shop in Indianapolis that sold Japanese video games this kid clearly had a car that day in class he invited the girl I liked to a meeting of the Japan Club he also invited me I had never been to a meeting of the Japan club I went to exactly one meeting of my high school as Japan club during which the girl that I liked often quite outspoken that she preferred PC games vocalized the very first instance within my recollection of an allusion to a remake of Final Fantasy 7 it happened like this the kid who'd brought the demo disc navigated it swiftly to the end of the demo acquiescing to the request of a shouting crowd he began the demo once more the girl I liked and I stood with our backs to the wall she was too cool for this game I convincingly pretended to share her lack of enthusiasm aerith's big wide computer graphic to face hovered up in a bath of green light Aerith blinked and the girl I liked said and I quote like why can't the whole game just look like this again this girl had many times and all the way back in 1996 claimed to prefer PC games to console games she likely knew the rate at which video game graphical complexity evolved she was simply put just hating however her hey tourism sparked in me a yearning I'd never quite shake until today almost ten years later as a tie-wearing employee of Sony Computer Entertainment Japan I would attend in unofficial capacity a launch day event for final fantasy 12 on the ice bright morning of Thursday March 16 2006 final fantasy 12 only the 3rd final fantasy in history to have two eyes in its Roman numeral represented a new mastery of Technology Square Enix had further blurred the line between cutscene and in-game graphics here was the first Final Fantasy where you could rotate the camera with the right analog stick possessing the most complex deepest and most dynamic and rewarding battle system yet in the series fully voice acted its plot bursting with baroque political intrigue emanating iron-fisted confidence in its own Byzantine lore final fantasy 12 arrived as perhaps the most thunderously sophisticated product yet to bear its brand's name I had already played the full game at this point on a tiny 13 inch CRT television at my desk at Sony Computer Entertainment Japan the earning florescent lights overhead extinguishing from the experience any spark of romanticism even so I was able to declare it an excellent product and the worthy standard bearer for its brand's name as we moved toward the next generation of video game console hardware according to the docket I had looked over in my office at the launch day event Square Enix then-president yo Ichi wada would give a brief speech before handing a copy of the game to the first customer in line he would then pose for a photo with that most dedicated of consumers the first man in line dressed completely in black I could only see his eyes a surgical mask covered his mouth in those eyes I perceived this man's blood cold dedication and I admired him he didn't lower the mask until he stepped up to the cash register his mouth was a perfect horizontal line after Square Enix then president Yoichi wada thanked the young man and threw him the crowd for his continued dedication and consumerism he offered the man in black a bite of the microphone do you want to know what he said please remake Final Fantasy 7 for the PlayStation 3 thank you I told the guys in my office about this at lunch the younger men guffawed my favorite old dude there did not crack a smile this particular old dude had a big pompadour and a toothpick chewing habit he played guitar a Yamaha SG quote like Carlos Santana unquote in a jazz fusion band on the weekends he introduced me to Naniwa express and he called me Keith doe before he'd worked at Sony Computer Entertainment he'd been a video game critic before that he'd been a music critic he listened to my story and said what a philosophical nightmare one of the younger guys asked you mean Foursquare and the old dude said no for all of us for anyone who's ever touched a video game the younger guy asked what do you mean and the old dude said they're going to remake Final Fantasy 7 someday and it's either going to end the world or save it he was right I knew it then and I know it even louder now in summary that guy owned 14 years later it's 20/20 we have the Final Fantasy 7 remake it did not end the world and it did not save the world either on the other hand the Year is yet young in the 23 years between Final Fantasy 7 and today squaresoft has - lessly merged with their rival Enix and produced eight stylistically different numbered mainline Final Fantasy sequels none of them has ever been exactly a remake of Final Fantasy 7 so none of them has ever fully satisfied the most dedicated of their phantom line sitters I could discuss this topic at extreme length and maybe I will do so in an essay you can read on the Internet someday soon for brevity's sake today let's leave it at this the original Final Fantasy 7 was a machine that begged us to beg its makers to make it again the original Final Fantasy 7 resulted from Squaresoft into acquainting themselves with multiple new technologies every element of its presentation sought to WoW its witnesses with newness as the result of a large team of artists experimenting with a vast range of news styles and techniques Final Fantasy 7 arrived as a sort of a half-baked mixed-media project yet we who had never seen such dough did not split hairs over the completion of its baking the original Final Fantasy 7 wowed us from the moment we saw it starred a man with a sword bigger than his body and another man with a gun for an arm it was harder and harder with each new sizzling triplet of information that trickled on to the pages of our favorite glossy magazines however one crosses the fine line between anticipation and entitlement without ever quite meaning to we cartridge babies had only just entered an acquaintanceship with cd-roms suddenly you tell us a game can occupy three disks our heads explode and the instant they reform we wonder why not for two years post Final Fantasy 7 we had Final Fantasy 8 a game whose in-game character models achieved realistic human proportions suddenly Final Fantasy 7 acquired the grime of a baby's toy the seams burst every game like her in my friendo sphere called it out my dad had said one day back in 1997 after two minutes silently spectating Final Fantasy 7 over my shoulder he's got toasters for hands two years later I was saying the same thing lots of us were the Final Fantasy 7 remake achieved monolith status as an idea the moment the PlayStation 2 happened Squaresoft had announced Final Fantasies 9 10 and 11 on the same day at the square millenium event on February 1st 2000 I was at this time a friend of the Internet I saw many reactions to Final Fantasy 10 that day and at least 22% of contained an allusion to how cool final fantasy 7 would be if it also had voice acting so what is it about Final Fantasy 7 that begged us to beg its makers to make it again in truth the game contained multiple art styles one might say that the original Final Fantasy 7 began the mainstream conversation regarding the disparity between cutscene graphics and in-game graphics the girl at that fateful Japan Club meeting had clobbered the nail on the head the fatness of the line between cutscene and gameplay was far too great even in a demo nobody in that room didn't see it most of us just didn't say anything furthermore the battle scenes used realistically proportioned characters while the traversal segments used lower polygons chibi character models the actual game showcased more than one flavor of graphical disparity even between cutscenes some cutscenes used to the fanciest CG models some used to the lower polygon toaster handed models heck we could even consider the much featured angular colored pencil character design illustrations by Tetsuya Nomura as yet another one of the game's many graphical styles LP it an exterior one as we watched technology march forward in later years many of us looked back at Final Fantasy 7 and yearned for possibilities unknown the nature of Final Fantasy 7 itself loomed behind all of this the first game in the series had been famously made as a last-ditch effort requiring all of its developers as money that's how it acquired its melodramatic fatalistic name perhaps its developers had equated that financial and creative desperation with the game's ultimate success because thereafter they evidently committed themselves to reinventing the series as completely as possible with each new numbered installment always insisting on new characters a new world and even new game design mechanics the design soul of Final Fantasy has always required its makers to eschew comfort in the making process this has culminated in a series that behaves more like a fashion brand than a film franchise any smart enough critic of video games knows for a fact that Final Fantasy 6 is scientifically speaking the best one any critic of video games with a soul will allow themselves to confess that yes Final Fantasy 4 is my favorite meanwhile any intelligent critic of video games must acknowledge that Final Fantasy 7 is the most important installment in the franchise if not one of the 10 most important video games of all time when Final Fantasy 7 arrived it brought big-budget cutscenes and prestige video games with it the original Final Fantasy 7 left multiple suitcases in our living rooms and we are still unpacking them two decades later with the Thunder of its arrival Final Fantasy 7 installed deep digging nostalgia hooks in its fans as brains as much as it represented the apex of its makers as story crafting and character building techniques Final Fantasy 7 represented the beginning of their flirtation with technical artistry and stylistic risk-taking I mean they made a movie with Alec Baldwin in it so yeah you could say that for some dude to tell the president of the games publisher that he would prefer any remake of Final Fantasy 7 at all to the complex beautiful sophisticated incredible game that he had just waited in line 12 hours to pay $100 for yet had not even played yeah you could say that that represented a genuine philosophical nightmare for any creative enterprise between 2006 since 2015 rumors of a Final Fantasy 7 remake bubbled and taunted players the specter of this particular non-existent game shadowed our perception of every new Final Fantasy game to emerge I confess that I too succumbed to the joy of speculation and thus failed to appreciate Final Fantasy 13 as much upon its release as I do now in hoarse blinder where in comparison to Final Fantasy 7 every subsequent Final Fantasy does in fact lack at least a little bit of soul by the time the argan filled fuselage shaped Final Fantasy 13 released ironed loudly and in public for a final fantasy that remembered the exact character of Final Fantasy's six and seven I didn't exactly want a remake of seven I just wanted a game with relatable characters maybe three of whom formed a love triangle involved in an elevator pitch evil situation you would literally need the elevator in the Burj Dubai to break down twice in order to pitch the situation the characters find themselves in in Final Fantasy 13 and I say that affectionately Square Enix appealed to its most vocal fans by releasing an animated Final Fantasy 7 film a weird third-person shooter spin-off starring an optional Final Fantasy 7 character and a just slightly too luxurious prequel game starring a character only featured in the most hidden of the original games optional cutscenes yet because it was video games it wasn't enough the idea of a Final Fantasy 7 remake overshadowed any attempt at a new numbered Final Fantasy heck the idea of a Final Fantasy 7 remake continues even to this day to overshadow the actual Final Fantasy 7 remake itself to the point that I physically cannot stop myself from referring to it as the Final Fantasy 7 remake also Final Fantasy 7 remake doesn't even cover the entirety of the original game so until this episodic Final Fantasy 7 remake project is completely done the specter of the philosophical nightmare will continue to loom so after enough years of risk-taking a grim meeting took place in a cold windowless room in square-enix tower Tetsuya Nomura lifted a silver lid revealing a big red button those assembled gave in to the philosophical nightmare the time had come to remake Final Fantasy 7 that Square Enix chose to announce that this remake was in development before the release of Final Fantasy 15 communicated volume to the most dedicated of conspiracy theorists therefore I have presented my case that the Final Fantasy 7 remake is one of the most important video games ever released if only by spiritual accident on a deeper level however it terrifies me to report that it is also a pretty fascinating video game to talk about in a vacuum over the past three years alone I have replayed the original Final Fantasy seven sixteen times from beginning to end I did this for the purpose of making a video series comparing the games 1997 localization against its original Japanese script I have reckoned with the structure and narrative of Final Fantasy 7 in a loudly loquacious manner elsewhere than here and have largely reconfirmed to myself that the original game possesses a remarkable narrative ace and a generous variety of story themes the characters are likable the plot invests cleverly and earns its twists the game design systems are elegant and classic so now that I've disclosed my personal biases let's talk about yours or your lack of them if you come to the Final Fantasy 7 remake without any biases I salute you hopefully in this section I have illustrated that the game is indecipherable for me personally without unpacking much baggage for you however the hypothetical viewer who has never heard of Final Fantasy 7 you might find exciting moments textured interestingly and a likable cast of characters we've got Cloud Strife a cold-hearted jerk with a big sword a particular set of skills and a mysterious need for money we've gotten Barrett Wallace a tree-hugging corporation hating noble terrorists with a gun for an arm who hires cloud for a job we've got Tifa Lockheart clouds estranged childhood friend who introduced him to the eco-terrorists Avalanche as a potential job opportunity despite her own discomfort with the violent escalation of their activities we've got Aerith Gainsborough a hilarious weird girl cloud meets perfectly by accident just when he was starting to rekindle his relationship with Tifa it turns out Aerith might be the most important person in the world by a wide margin though that's getting ahead of the scope of these segments of the original Final Fantasy seven that the Final Fantasy 7 remake covers Final Fantasy 7 starts out with our characters in the middle of a job it goes well we hang out in their world for a day they embark on another job this time something interesting happens this is good storytelling 101 along the way we hang out with these relatable characters and watch their complexities emerge through situations a love triangle blossoms we learn about everybody they learn about each other the characters develop it's deceptively simple the original managed to pull this off with toaster handed Lego dolls the remake holds harder thanks to formal advancements such as bigger graphics and voice acting even on the molecular level the makers of the Final Fantasy 7 remake have tenderly placed story first for example early in the game at the end of one routine battle or another cloud might reject Barrett's thinly veiled fishing for a compliment musta missed it that was nothing in the final chapters of the game as a battle concludes cloud might initiate a compliment and now it's Barrett's turn to play cool good job whatever man let's go keep it up man yeah you do Cloudant Barrett's urging a mutual respect which eventually blossoms into a genuine friendship is one of the more overlooked aspects of Final Fantasy sevens story though it is no less integral to the games lasting appeal than the results of the infinitely more fanfictions love triangle to see evidence that the Final Fantasy 7 remake understands so essential and delicate a plot nuanced and to see it Express this understanding even in so micro-level and interaction fills me with appreciation and allows me to conclude that Wow after all these years they remade Final Fantasy 7 and they did not mess it up so it is that after two decades and three years of attempts of varying levels of evident earnestness to achieve the sales impact of Final Fantasy 7 some fly on the wall or other blab to the juice in the right place at the right time with the Final Fantasy 7 remake Square Enix has communicated to me personally that they now fully understand exactly why Final Fantasy 7 was so much more blockbusting ly powerful than Final Fantasy 8 Final Fantasy 9 and so on having said that I would still recommend you play the original first what exactly do I mean by that maybe we'll find out in the next section actually we probably won't I do not envy the artists and game designers who faced the challenge of confronting the unique philosophical nightmare remaking Final Fantasy 17 represented makers of any game of any type daily face the high probability of enraging at least one member of their audience with some offhand stylistic choice or another it's hard enough making a video game that most of the audience hasn't been playing in their heads for 20 years to remake a video game so beloved and so simultaneously entangled with the very concept of a remake is to grapple with destiny itself on the one hand chances are a remake of the game as big as Final Fantasy 7 is going to go pretty well raise your hand if you thought Square Enix was going to totally mess up the Final Fantasy 7 remake I can't see you though I'm pretty sure if I could I wouldn't be seeing a lot of hands the square Enix might be clueless enough to butcher the pixel art of every beloved ancient 16-bit Final Fantasy game and Chrono Trigger and act genuinely shocked when people notice though I reckon no one even tangentially involved with the development of the Kingdom Hearts series would dare leave a single fan unserved when it came time to make a triple-a product I found the making of Final Fantasy 7 remake series on the official Final Fantasy YouTube channel useful in mind Allison the creators is beautifully pure intentions with the Final Fantasy 7 remake I think this quote from music supervisor kg column or D cuts to the heart of it while there are many people who played and liked the original there will probably also be many new players who first encounter Final Fantasy 7 with the remake and I want those people who hear the music for the first time to think wow Final Fantasy 7 has some great tunes it would also be great if that could then inspire them to go back to the original Final Fantasy 7 and appreciate the music from them both you might say that I'm not exactly a Final Fantasy 7 newcomer while I did play a final Fanta seven from start to finish literally 16 times between 2017 and 2019 I'll admit I did so for purely scientific purposes I love the game though I'm not exactly the biggest fan of it my favorite Final Fantasy battle theme is hands down fight two from Final Fantasy four followed by blinded by light from Final Fantasy 13 followed by battle on the big bridge from final fantasy 5 followed by those who fight further from Final Fantasy 7 those who fight the vanilla battle theme from Final Fantasy 7 might not even make my top 10 however one of its several arrangements in the Final Fantasy 7 remake arrives with such loud terrific thunder that it made me yell yes so loudly that my dog came sprinting out of the bedroom to rescue me it wasn't even the first time that remix had come up in the game the timing of it just blew my mind so all my biases aside I'd say yeah kg Kawamura is probably right I'll be the first to admit that I have trouble working with people I have trouble listening to other people it's cast a shadow over my career I have trouble taking suggestions from people I have trouble thinking other people's ideas are as good as mine when someone presents me an idea that immediately strikes me as as good as or better than mine I tend to apply science and statistics until I've sufficiently proven to myself and everyone else that actually it isn't usually my proof is pretty sound though the soundness of my proof seldom stops me from feeling like a little bit of a monster every time I feel the need to do this being bad at working with others has made me more powerful at being alone though who really wants to be good at being alone what I'm getting at here is that I projected my own personal preferences onto the Final Fantasy 7 remake composer masashi hamauzu whose work I have admired for many years the man composed the definitively 2nd best Final Fantasy battle theme of all time when I thought of him being asked to compose music for the Final Fantasy 7 remake felt sorry for him rhe mixing someone else's work can have beautiful results though for a composer as accomplished as hamauzu it struck me as a tiny insult however it turns out hamauzu was in fact remix ngey composer of the number one best final fantasy battle theme of all time Nobuo Uematsu and he remixed that man his way loudly wickedly virtuosic aliy and again and again tracks in the Final Fantasy 7 remake slam almost unbearably hard one of the worst things if not the worst thing you can say to a person after their band finishes performing a show is it looks like you guys had fun up there however when I say this as someone all of whose friends told me that I had fun up there at every show I ever played you know it comes from the right place I can tell that masashi hamauzu did have fun up there he and his comrades didn't just compose remixes of Nobuo Uematsu they loved Nobuo Uematsu's music in public they wined and dined that music down to every scrupulous detail imaginable witnessed the very beginning of the game where the sound team weaves motifs of fan beloved Final Fantasy 7 final boss theme one winget angel into the opening overture just as our girlfriend Aerith and the camera slide past the visually memorable Lovelace Opera House on Midgar Main Street here the composers have staked an ethereal claim that one wing an angel is and actually was all along a song from the opera playing at the theatre the very night our story begins as a first-time audience member our response might be ok as a returning Final Fantasy 7 customer our responses I'll buy it the game rolls on with lush high concept pop song like remixes of iconic tracks from the span of the old Final Fantasy 7 narrative wafting out of jukeboxes radios and gramophones we buy them on music discs that item shops and marvel their album art delicately referencing music from a wide range of historical influences this particular track felt like city pop in the original game in the remake it's been remixed that way complete with an album art reminiscent of a Jean Suzuki's work for Tatsuya masta all this thought for a song we only hear as daya Jesus beneath environmental white noise Nikola by dime these tiny touches add up until we're either genuinely impressed or we're a born hater I feel like the Final Fantasy 7 remake as a whole comes from this same kind of a place of sweet sincerity this game exists purely as a gesture of niceness the Final Fantasy 7 remake is a sweater your grandma spent tens of millions of dollars knitting for you and stands to profit tens of millions of dollars by giving it to you the thoroughness and care the developers paid to the details shocked me numerous times throughout my first playthrough they really must have wanted to impress fans of the old game and new fans they seized every conceivable opportunity to one-up every stylistic hallmark of the original in a way that sought to also impress any new player let me tell you about one example that stuck out to me repeatedly as I logged my dozens of hours of footage of the game the original Final Fantasy 7 exude 'add extreme confidence in its transitions from cutscene to gameplay it placed several of them up front famously the CG train pulls into the station as the camera moves low-polygon station guards scale in unison with the movement of the camera the camera stops and then the train stops becoming part of a pre-rendered background upon a single frame before our low-polygon friends emerge minutes later comes the famous instance of the camera tilting up to show mockery actor number one while the player is still miraculously controlling protagonist Cloud Strife sure many players back in 1997 such as the girl I liked in my art class rightly preferred PC games and had seen pre-rendered cutscenes before however Final Fantasy 7 beat us over the head with this tiny little transition trick and those beatings added up to an ultimate impression of technological confidence the Final Fantasy 7 remake continues to bear this torch it does absolutely not stop slamming our skulls with this technique transitions out of gameplay and into cutscene happen with silky seamlessness that might not impress us immediately if we played for example Red Dead Redemption 2 however as cutscenes unfold over many cuts between multiple cinematically composed camera angles the Final Fantasy 7 remake readies its secret weapon you never know when it's coming the final shot of every cutscene of the Final Fantasy 7 remake goes to whatever contortionists lengths necessary to release its hold on a speaking character naturally find Cloud Strife and put the camera dramatically behind him the intensity applies doubly or quadruply to up pumping pre-battle cutscenes where the camera might zoom back from a boss monsters face and slide to a stop behind cloud just as his hands twist grip his sword hilt once I noticed the Rolla Fiss attea these transitions I couldn't stop somebody really really loved the idea of these transitions with an obsession tantamount to hysteria eventually I developed a monumental respect for this element of craft some of these transitions are 12 the seconds long it's such a small thing in this world where we have one take style video games like God of War 2018 though you know what I find this impressive because of God of wars dedication to the one take style not despite it I see this obsessive insisted implementation of a stylistic hallmark that let's face it the majority of players will probably never ever vocalize and I can't consider it anything other than a direct micro omage to the very soul of Final Fantasy 7 itself that's around about sort of thesis statement though hey it's the one we got in summary the Final Fantasy 7 remake smackers want to remind you of Final Fantasy 7 even when you're not looking however of course you are going to be looking at it most of the time that's why they call them video games the Final Fantasy 7 remake certainly is a game we experience by playing it and engaging with its design systems though for probably a large portion of its players it represents an experience of visual and dramatic banan's ism more so than it appeals as a game that you play the visuals of the Final Fantasy 7 remake have been deadly serious business since long before the game was officially announced visual art direction of the Final Fantasy 7 remake represents a Herculean accomplishment the artists had to reimagine not just beloved characters and world locations they had to reimagine beloved characters and world locations that players have been imagining as looking better since the first time they saw them as we've already explored perhaps too extensively the original Final Fantasy 7 presented players with a salad bar of visual styles not a one of them as pretty as the hamburger in our heads over the years since Final Fantasy sevens original release many Final Fantasy games have shown us many visual styles most Final Fantasy games after seven have exhibited uniformity and artistic confidence between their varying scenes Final Fantasy 7 lay dead in the back room of our imaginations for years a pile of half delivered promises and compromises it's almost not a joke to insinuate that Final Fantasy 7 is probably one of the main reasons people started using artificial intelligence to upscale photos fans of the game have clamored for years for at the very least a version with more expressive character models or higher resolution backgrounds in the days following the release of the Final Fantasy 7 remake I witnessed several intelligent individuals on Twitter convincingly expressed that while the remake is fine and all all they really want is the remake o mod which presents the original game with HD backgrounds and full motion videos paired with the be a cause script which presents an infinitely more English translation I only had to scroll down for about six seconds into the comments on the remake Oh mods trailer before I found a comment that said this looks better than the remake first of all bloody the difference between a remake and a remaster is huge second the remake o mod is great third as the remake has proven much to my vindication and the crushing disappointment of the haters in the comments of my own Final Fantasy 7 YouTube videos it's pronounced ma Co not Mako so how do we get to the bridge both mono storage locker also they pronounced tangs name Tsung which is how I've been pronouncing it for years and correct if you know any Chinese you let us on a merry chase eros some some some also while we're here it's pronounced Shenmue not Shenmue the Final Fantasy 7 remake is not a Final Fantasy 7 remaster in its game design its structure and especially in its visuals it represents a ground-up re-imagination of Final Fantasy sevens very soul single screen fuzzy pre-rendered backgrounds have become unreal tournament map sized nightmare junkyards teeming with downtrodden human life peppered with side quest givers a throwaway comic relief non-player character whose entire story motivation consisted of the single text box I'm leavin town has become a fully voiced recurring character who's leaving town because cloud told him to after rescuing him from Shinra guards who suspect he knows something about avalanche not all of the non player characters look so fancy Jonny looks like his dad owns a Lamborghini dealership though a lot of the NPC's look like they fell out of a Dodge Ram van from Craigslist Weimer looks like a PlayStation 3 character lots of the NPC's look like PlayStation 3 characters some of these NPCs look like they fell out of Final Fantasy 11 and are trying to treat it like spring break some of the NPC's look like they'd call the ESRB if a Dreamcast character moved into their neighborhood chocobo Sam could have been in a ps2 game look at these repetitive canned hand gestures you know I saw someone on Twitter who proposed that chocobo Sam was supposed to look like a PlayStation 2 character as a sort of throwback to the mixed media graphical style of the original Final Fantasy 7 this person theorized and I think they were being sincere though how can you actually tell on Twitter this person theorized that chocobo Sam has so many lines of dialogue and is involved in so many scenes alongside two other high-quality Triple A character models with whom he forms a trio that there's just no way he was a low tech looking on accident to this I say that as an I have met way too many developers of video games that I loved in my youth time and I have come to believe that any credit at all is generally way too much credit when you're talking about this kind of a thing in a video game the fact is probably just that the game was in development a very long time and that some characters just aren't that important I love how these water effects pay homage to the work of Ray Harryhausen the main characters look incredible Barret is clearly a ps4 character cloud is a low-key ps5 character the art direction sensibility of the new main character models astounded me the main cast all look like they belong together the overall style wisely surpasses the cinematic whis penis of the Final Fantasy 7 Advent Children film and grounds itself in a firm visual language effortlessly affecting credibility both in cutscenes and in battle action mannerisms visually these are fully modern prestige video game characters each designed to the rigorous standard we usually see applied only to one or two principal main characters in a modern game they feel like people this is ridiculously crucial these characters need to feel like people the fans may not always put it into these exact words though they only like Final Fantasy 7 because they like these characters as people the Final Fantasy 7 remake Sam algum ation of expensive and confident visual expression techniques all pulled together toward effecting a plausible impression of these people as people alongside non player characters dressed like they work at the bank in the afternoon and j.crew at night these Final Fantasy protagonists run the risk of ridiculous 'ti however the plot and pacing sell us so well on their personality quirks that it makes sense that cloud is carrying his Buster Sword down the frolicking nightlife streets of wall market we have known cloud for 16 hours at the point we first enter wall market we know a guy like him in the real world who also wears good sturdy expensive heirloom-quality cap toed work boots we know he's the type of guy who would wear his backpack to the club he can't high-five because of some effing fossum phobia or another he tells everybody to get back and offers to quote unquote handle everything he takes credit for every victory even when we're controlling another character was never in doubt even when he's dead crikey he even jumps in in the middle of a cutscene to take credit for one of the two boss fights in the whole game in which he does not participate buddy that's exactly half of them [Music] Wow he reminds me of everyone I have ever worked with in an office Barrett meanwhile has a literal gun for an arm he's a dad we know he's got a temper though he's an overall safety loving individual thank God his politics don't make me uncomfortable a good man who serves a great evil is not without sin he must recognize and accept his complicity he must open his eyes to the truth that his corporate masters are profiting from the planets pain only then can he redeem himself Tifa meanwhile looks exactly like what she is the winner of a square-enix sponsored Final Fantasy 7 cosplay contest she's got ABS I'd let her kill me she's the only one of the three characters who get an opportunity to sit on a bench who does not man spread go ahead and sprawl out buddy your lower back deserves it can we stop talking about how big her breasts are and start talking about how small her materia slots are do the materia shrink to fit the closest hole is this the Final Fantasy 7 remake or The Legend of Zelda TV show excuse me a rift Aerith also looks exactly like our hearts have always imagined her she is visually as she is spiritually clouds real girlfriend I could prove this with science just look at the way they look at each other look at the way she walks I'd let her kill me she's a girl she's a girly girl and she is powerful the original Final Fantasy 7 in 1997 presented an Erath translated with ample use of a tuning fork calibrated for Disney Princesses early in the Final Fantasy 7 remake Aerith casually in an oops moment of desperation utters an upper PG bad word princess who needs to be coddled I'll admit I laughed out loud the original Final Fantasy seven came out shortly after I had just turned 18 years old I'd seen a lot of rated R movies at that point every video game was still more or less rated G back then even as a habitual avoider of swear words my 18 year old self felt catered to by Final Fantasy sevens Barrett's use of a couple four-letter words here was a video game character who was appropriately mad at something if my theory is correct and the Final Fantasy 7 remake makers indeed wanted to one-up the original in every way even the smallest ways then surprising me personally with the timing of several profanity usages must be the result of a Nobel prize-worthy mathematical calculation the teacher of the only creative writing class I took in college told us that if you use profanity only with extreme restraint you can achieve a maximal reaction even in a complete prude just because later in this review I'm going to literally call a boss heck house numerous times does not mean I'm a prude okay I listen to k-pop almost every day and I've seen porn before the truth is I consider profanity just another type of cliche in my own writing I make every effort to avoid cliches like the flu having said that several moments of profanity in the Final Fantasy 7 remake s-- english script made me yell in triumph one of clouds Limit Breaks which you will typically keep in your pocket and execute only at times of extreme calculated opportunity following a full command & Conquer match is worth of manufacturing your proverbial tanks and pointing them at the enemy base opens with cloud inviting the opponent to a tango [Music] let's dance [ __ ] furthermore cloud telling a ghost have time for your [ __ ] made me scream every time I played through the game that's four screams perhaps most exuberant Lea I shouted at clouds incitement of the penultimate boss to many many of you have deemed me on Twitter patreon.com slash action button or discord GG slash action button to ask me if I have any plans to make a video series comparing the English translation of the Final Fantasy 7 remake against its original Japanese script first of all my video series let's mosey a slow translation of Final Fantasy 7 was actually not a video series about comparing the 1997 English translation of Final Fantasy 7 against its original Japanese script it was I think very clearly a video series about revisiting a place you inhabited long ago and now seeing it with a completely transformed world view in that video series fluency in the Japanese language stood in for a new half a life's worth of experiences around the entire world many of them profound some of them crushingly sad most of them transcending and trivializing mere memories of a childish video game if you thought it was about making fun of a rushed English translation done by a non professional translator who had only two weeks to complete a massive task I honestly sincerely do not know what to tell you now that that's out of the way no I don't have any plans to make a video series comparing the Final Fantasy 7 remake s-- english voice over to the original japanese that would be the most boring video in the world for me to make though if I did make it it would be a lot shorter than this video actually okay let's make that video in Japanese Barrett says that sure was hard and red 13 replies no time to rest we must hurry in English Barrett says damn does it feel good to be Allah and read 13 says sorry I like the English better the end the Final Fantasy 7 remake goes so far above and beyond fans expectations to remake Final Fantasy 7 that it even expands and explodes the nonsense of the original game perhaps the marquee example is the heck house boss fight a questionably ridiculous random enemy in the original game has become a shockingly long arena battle complete with genuine story relevance and appropriate eSports level commentary the Final Fantasy 7 remake at large follows through on this mission of dedication to even the weirdness and idiocy of its source material out of strangeness and antiquated game flow elements the Final Fantasy 7 remake creates a rollercoaster of high-octane drama of course it's a little hard to take some of the heavier stuff seriously when cloud insists on toppling every chair in Shinra tower man you'd think with all their money Shinra would have figured out that you can put stuff inside of cardboard boxes and to be honest sometimes I remember I'm playing a video game and I hate remembering I'm playing a video game for example where does aerith's staff go after a battle I wouldn't mind this so much if cloud and Barret didn't so prominently display their weapons at all times and where did aerith's staff come from during this cutscene what else do I have in here oh man I have a bunch of sentences I didn't finished writing I just have a bunch of weird little idea stubs why do the people in the slums keep calling of the slums the slums like when Barret and Jesse and biggs and wedge finished the reactor bombing mission they keep being like we got to get back to the slums when i'm going home from somewhere i don't say i've got to get back to my apartment in my apartment building i say i got to go home during my research stage i marked every loading time in the Final Fantasy 7 remake the game loads exactly once per chapter at the and of one chapter and before the beginning of the next though it also loads an additional time midway through chapter 13 and during one of the side quests of chapter 14 in addition it loads at every game over after you choose retry I obtained frame perfect' times for all of these loading times I fully believe that the Final Fantasy 7 remake will run at 60fps on the PlayStation 5 later this year and also that its loading times will be remarkably shorter though here's where we are right now on a PlayStation 4 pro equipped with a 2 terabyte Seagate Fire CUDA hybrid hard drive the average loading time was 28 seconds and 5 frames that's a long time to wait for revenge every time Rufus kills you in conclusion the Final Fantasy 7 remake is nice and although all I really wanted was a widescreen demake of Final Fantasy 7 using the exact pixel art and chiptune quality of the Final Fantasy 6 I have wanted this for years at any rate these graphics are great and yes I do love them yes the music does make me feel like it is my birthday and masashi hamauzu is my dad however none of that really matters it's not so much that we loved Final Fantasy 7 in 1997 in spite of its graphics being weird it's not even so much that we respected the grandiosity and the breath of the gesture it's mostly that we would have hated it had the story not been so perfectly structured we love Final Fantasy 7 we loved Final Fantasy 7 because cloud holds a big sword with Chinese letters each tin to the blade while sitting astride a motorcycle in front of a red sky on a wall scroll hanging in several college dorms of our memory we love Final Fantasy 7 because Sephiroth is a sick freak we love Final Fantasy 7 because we had never seen that much CG in a video game in 1997 we love Final Fantasy 7 because Barrett has a gun for an arm and calls a city a pizza we love Final Fantasy 7 because you can slot materia into your weapons level them up and then trade them with your party members like Pokemon we love Final Fantasy 7 because the logo is just plain good graphic design and the gradient on that meteor was ahead of its time by at least a decade we love Final Fantasy 7 because one wing at angel is a blasting hot toon and though you might feel weird listening to it in your car when you get all the way to the end of that game and it plays during the climactic battle you will make it wake the neighbors however we would not care about Final Fantasy 7 at all were it not for its perfect pacing all that other stuff is great though I promise you you would be finding out about the gold saucers rollercoaster minigame from the soul viral tweet of a kid with a soundcloud and 120 Twitter followers were it not for the games perfect pacing the Final Fantasy 7 remake proves my hypothesis beyond a shadow of my doubt the Final Fantasy 7 remake proves that even Final Fantasy 15 could have been a timeless classic if they had just written the story outline 20 years before they started May the game perhaps the Final Fantasy 7 remake makers feared their fans their fans are numerous and they do come from all walks of life Final Fantasy 7 fans carry with them a wide variety of tastes and preferences any seemingly superficial elements of Final Fantasy 7 could be an existing fans favorite thing about Final Fantasy 7 at some point in the creative life a creator may make the decision to equate their fear of their fans with a respect for them thus the Final Fantasy 7 remake sbout 'less devotion to recreating every textural syllable of the original game any event you might have imagined took place 23 years ago in that fictional city of Midgar the developers took craftsperson lee pains to implement into this 3d remake because they want to make sure you the person who liked it even as it once was have a good time the result is a full long modern video game based on one chapter of the original Final Fantasy 7 many fans initially retched with written shrillness when Square Enix followed the loud announcement of the game's development with a quieter announcement that it was the first quote-unquote episode in a quote/unquote series and that it would only deal with the Midgar segment of the original game in the five years since this announcement I have seen persons ranging from twitter users to professional video game critics toss off ballpark percentages and timestamps for the length of the original 1997 Final Fantasy sevens Midgard chapter I've seen it most commonly described as one fifth of the game or four to five hours of the game though in the weeks surrounding the game's release I perceived a deflation of that number I saw professional critics describe that opening Midgar chapter as three to four hours in their reviews of the Final Fantasy 7 remake my friend Jason Schreyer described it as one tenth of the original game one critic described Midgar as two hours I remember differently that's my way of saying I remember correctly first of all I've replayed all of the original Final Fantasy seven literally 16 times between 2017 and 2019 I did so while consulting a multilingual spreadsheet containing all of the text from every version of the game I can tell you with confidence that literally 30 percent of Final Fantasy sevens mandatory story text happens in Midgar after Midgar the game opens up much of the text after Midgar happens during optional side missions or within conversations with NPCs you might not even talk to when I tweeted that I was going to replay Midgar at a leisurely pace on twitch.tv slash action button while mind Palace channeling my 1997 self immediately my replies filled with people telling me that they had beaten Midgar in less than an hour looking at many of their profiles revealed that they had all retweeted the same gif of a funny physics fail from the Final Fantasy 7 remake let's be honest all those people were probably sentient Halloween costumes a few more reasonable people expressed that they'd recently played Final Fantasy 7 for the first time and that they finished Midgar in under three hours many of them when provoked reported that yes it was on the PlayStation 4 and yes they had in fact engaged the no random battles cheat a couple times and engaged the 3x speed cheat a couple of times as well I take a couple of times to mean most of the time when I channeled my best impression of my exact game design knowledge circa 1997 my playthrough of the original Final Fantasy sevens Midgar chapter took me 8 hours 5 minutes and 17 seconds to be honest I recall that my first playthrough of Midgar in 1997 took me 8 hours and 58 minutes my similarly twitch streamed leisurely casual idiots commentary Bonanza fide 100% playthrough of the Final Fantasy 7 remake took me 45 hours the d minutes and 54 seconds let's go ahead and round that up to 45 hours and 51 minutes that's two thousand seven hundred and fifty-one minutes of the remake versus four hundred and eighty four minutes of the original original Midgar is thus only seventeen point five nine percent the length of remake Midgar if you'd prefer that as a multiple Midgar twenty twenty is five point six eight times the length of Midgar nineteen ninety-seven in this way we can say that the Final Fantasy 7 remake represents a five hundred and sixty eight percent inflation rate applied to the original Final Fantasy seven I find this a far more interesting conversation than the conversation about what percentage of the original Final Fantasy 7 is Midgar I don't know maybe that's just me how did the remake errs achieve this well simply put they had it out the original game's story with filler though I would argue after playing it all the way through four times that its gourmet filler rather than saying they had it out with filler we should say they fleshed it out with beef remarkably the stretched out Final Fantasy 7 remake somehow retains the pacing texture of an entire PlayStation 1 role-playing game look at it this way if the original Final Fantasy 7 is all eight seasons of the HBO series Game of Thrones the Final Fantasy 7 remake is every book of the Song of Ice and Fire series published up until this point that's like a reverse adaptation I gotta say first of all it should have been 9 seasons and secondly this makes the Final Fantasy 7 remake quite unique among other mainstream entertainment products I consider this one of the most exciting topics to discuss about this game so I spent seven days breaking down the pacing of the Final Fantasy 7 remake in order to compose what I called a structure atlas my hypothesis simply put was that the Final Fantasy 7 remake was paced really weird because it's makers knew and they could get away with it this gives us the sub hypothesis that the developers did not know for a period of several years whether or not they could get away with this sort of pacing in any other game let's assume Final Fantasy 8 9 10 11 and 12 were all exactly these sorts of games square wanted them to be every bold stylistic choice every game design shift every flirtation with emerging game genres let's assume that Final Fantasy 13 was the first stealth attempt at a Final Fantasy 7 remake let's assume there was some dark sinister philosophical nightmare of a meeting during which Final Fantasies rightsholders concluded that something must be done to recapture the love the public showed and continues to show Final Fantasy 7 Final Fantasy 13 shares many superficial similarities to Final Fantasy 7 it does not however share the manga like narrative style the confident anime series like pacing or most of the game design systems long ago I theorized that Japanese RPG directors really just wanted to make years of war like adventure flavored action shooting games shortly after I publicly theorized that the developers of 2009's hot dog Ashley linear final fantasy 13 explained in an interview that among other games they've studied call of duty 4 modern warfare 4 pacing reference this shouldn't have shocked anybody RPGs have never been just about numbers going up the up going numbers always served to hold places for future graphical or mechanical richness as evidence look at Final Fantasy 4 5 6 & 7 all of these games start with a boss that has a don't attack phase you face a strict damage blast if you attack the boss during that phase these bosses appear right up front in these games as though to condition the player to expect tactical depth tied to graphical expression in older Final Fantasy games and older RPGs enemies even bosses didn't animate at all now suddenly for the missed dragon in Final Fantasy 4 you have to use the graphics of the boss as a clue for guidance of your tactical plan also this seamlessly introduces the philosophical core of the active Time battle system which is the time flows even when you're not making decisions you can just wait for the boss to come back so we can see that even as far back as 1991 Japanese role-playing games have been borrowing micro narrative techniques from action games old role-playing games contained towns and over worlds and townspeople to talk to and equipment to by simply to puff up and stretch out a world that let's face it was not real all baroque labyrinthine ornamental game design systems and meandering fetch quests and old RPGs served to help ablaze the story's world what these games lacked in graphics they made up for in length and immersion enriching systems fans of RPGs long ago were not fans of RPGs they were people who insisted on the good games we didn't want to just play games we wanted to hang out in them any way you slice it Final Fantasy 13 represented a disconnect between maker and audience I mean at least some of the audience Final Fantasy 13 made me & my pet nostalgia uneasy back in 2009 because it lacked towns and NPCs and all that hang out at OOD I'd come to love from the Final Fantasy series however my respect for it has glacially skyrocketed over the last decade Final Fantasy 13 is a shockingly texturally interesting video game in its own right though for reasons purely different from older Final Fantasy games in short with Final Fantasy 13 Square Enix replaced many of the elements that older Japanese RPGs had used as placeholders out with the towns and in with the fully voiced Hollywood quality graphics the numbers sure were a lot bigger though Final Fantasy 14 is an MMORPG and it's good Final Fantasy 15 saw Square Enix directly combating the criticisms against Final Fantasy 13 unlike 13 fifteen had a wide open world you could drive a car unlike 13 in which each character seemed influenced by a slightly different Swedish filmmaker the characters in 15 had easily graspable ninja turtle layin personalities you had a leader a cool yet rude guy a guy who did machines and a party dude Final Fantasy 15 issued the intense hallway struts of 13 in favor of a buffet bucket of side quests and quest givers loafing around many largest towns at the time Final Fantasy 15 came out Square Enix had already promised us the Final Fantasy 7 remake for some people who I know personally Final Fantasy 15 seemed like a demo for the promised Final Fantasy 7 remake so the Final Fantasy 7 remake represents its developers once again reckoning with old and new they will likely dance this tango until they evaporate and I will cry when they inevitably do however for now I have sniffed symptom spat the Final Fantasy 7 remake s' amalgamation of old new linear grandiose action-adventure role-playing and triple-a prestige I come to you today possessive of the conclusion that the Final Fantasy 7 remake possesses a remarkably unique texture yet exactly unseen in modern video game history so let's break it down it's time for the vertical slice just imagine some kind of After Effects animation there I had to kind of build this whole video series project from scratch I didn't have time to do the after effects animation or the graphic design to the logo though I will for the next time also imagine there's some kind of a sponsor logo there's some kind of like a like a knife company is there a knife company out there that wants to sponsor a sword company there aren't a lot of sword companies anymore what about like a hatchet company is there a hatchet company that would want to sponsor this segment I don't need any of your hatchets just send me some money vertical slice is a video game industry term referring to a portion of a video which contains at least one instance of every feature in the game a vertical slice serves as a proof of concept for investors wanting to fund the game for example maybe the investor wants to see a little bit of everything that's going to be in the game most investors who ask developers to make a vertical slice loved to use the metaphor of a layer cake they say a vertical slice should contain a little bit of each layer of the cake therefore vertical slices are mostly a hypothetical concept and anyone asking for a vertical slice is usually an idiot who does not understand that you do not bake a cake one slice at a time you baked a whole cake you idiot you can't say it's 1/8 of the work to make a single slice of pizza versus making an entire pizza to make one slice of pizza you have to make a whole pizza and then cut it I've decided to reclaim and rebrand the phrase vertical slice for my own personal reasons in this segment of Action Button reviews I'll observe a finished game and attempt to extract and dissect a single portion of the game that contains a little bit of everything that is in the game excluding for example one time mini games like the Final Fantasy 7 remake s-- spectacular rhythm game dance number which is absolutely one of the best things I have ever seen in any piece of media in my entire life now that I've finished defining vertical slice in this episode I won't have to do it again and I'm sure none of you will ever forget that description with all that out of the way the Final Fantasy 7 remake insidiously evaded my attempts to discern a tidy vertical slice a typical game might have an extractable hindsight able vertical slice of more or less an hour in length it turns out that the Final Fantasy 7 remake spur Plex ingly peculiar pacing incorporates elements from such a wide variety of modern triple-a video games that the briefest vertical slice I was able to discern amounted to 8 hours 2 minutes 3 seconds and 52 frames of the game as I played it on my final 100% playthrough that's a lot now that number does include every side quest of a particular side quest hub of the game I personally consider every side quest to be essential when we're talking about doing side quests with clouds true girlfriend Aerith but for the sake of argument if we consider a side quest to be one of the essential elements of the Final Fantasy 7 remake we can cut this number down to 5 hours 59 minutes 37 seconds and 6 frames that's still pretty huge what this magnitude in this number demonstrates is that the Final Fantasy 7 remake is changing moods styles and tones almost though never quite to the extent of changing genres so frequently and erratically that several of its core game flow modes get passed over during a rotation this vindicates my timid hypothesis that the game's overarching structure was never strictly speaking focused tested or workshops they started from Final Fantasy 7 1997 and said let's build a bunch of stuff on top of this to illustrate what I'm getting at here I should tell you that I played all the way through the Final Fantasy 7 remake on normal mode four times starting from zero each time I did not use new game+ I played it through on hard mode once though we'll get to that near the end of this review my first playthrough took me 38 hours and 38 minutes my second more thorough playthrough it took me 40 hours and 18 minutes I then played through the game in 26 hours into 22 minutes skipping many though not all of the cutscenes and simulating a hard mode loadout for example I did not use items in this playthrough my luxurious fourth 100% playthrough took me 45 hours 50 minutes and 54 seconds I conducted a chapter-by-chapter analysis of the vertical slice of the first and last playthroughs and each chapter by after analysis of the entire last playthrough I moved video clips to different tracks and color-coded them according to the game's quote-on-quote mode here you're looking at one sequence for reference battles are red cut scenes are yellow uninterrupted traversals to and from exact mandatory points a and points B are green minigames or puzzle-solving czar purple time spent in menus is brown i ran various analytical calculations on this data much of which falls outside the scope of this video review the rest assured I have made meticulous notes in a secret spreadsheet and I will continue to update that spreadsheet throughout this series thanks to this laborious brain breaking process I can rattle off with confidence such facts as the player spends a total of 16 minutes 14 seconds and 16 frames climbing ladders in the Final Fantasy 7 remake though only if they climb all of them at the normal speed both going up and coming down because only narcs slide down ladders I can tell you that I slid down only 18 of the games ladders I can say that I spent exactly 9 hours 27 minutes 57 seconds and 53 frames in battles and that the longest amount of time in the game between two mandatory battles at a leisurely pace with no sprinting because sprinting is for narcs is 1 hour 55 minutes 13 seconds and 32 frames the second longest time gap between two mandatory story battles is 1 hour 16 minutes 55 seconds and 7 frames both of those numbers are if you don't skip cutscenes and if you consider the motorcycle minigames battles which I guess I do though begrudgingly because they're not very good battles upon a glance at a zoomed out sequence we can generally see the way the game flows within a single chapter interestingly no single chapter of this game contains what I would define as a vertical slice when I said earlier that I picked to the worst possible game with which to start this series I was more right than even I knew going in I'd suspect that with just about any triple-a prestige game out there anything either I or the game itself would determine to be a chapter would contain at least a little bit of every core mechanic or system of the game now if I were a much more boring person I would say that the Final Fantasy 7 remake s' core features were dungeons battles towns and side quests furthermore I'd stretch this ever so slightly to include cutscenes let's face it cutscenes were a core feature of Final Fantasy 7 1997 and they are a core feature of the Final Fantasy 7 remake however I've ascertained what I consider to be a multitude of game flavors the Final Fantasy 7 remake does not just have dungeons and towns and battles it has two distinctly different types of dungeon two distinctly different types of town and four distinctly different types of battle I could actually argue that it has distinctly eight different types of battles though let's not get too technical just yet besides it does only have one type of side quest [Music] this sucks and now I'd like to present the game of flavors I was able to extract from the Final Fantasy 7 remake also if for example you represent an energy drink brand and you would like to sponsor the game flavors segments of action button reviews I have placed my business inquiry email address in my Twitter profile I don't need you to send me energy drinks I just need you to send me an SVG of your logo and some money game flavor number 1 arcade strips chapters 1 5 10 and 15 consists entirely of single locations straight ahead no-nonsense dungeon trekking this is dungeon flavor 1 of 2 if you're keeping score for these segments all of them less than an hour in length the player experience is minimal to no opportunity to get lost these feel like Final Fantasy 13 zones or Call of Duty levels guided by your party banter you move forward fighting several thrilling battles contending with a big boss at the end or at the beginning as in the case of chapter 10 of all the Final Fantasy 7 remake same flavors these are the ones that stylistically owe the most to the Kingdom Hearts series for these chapters the Final Fantasy 7 remake becomes the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the arcade game of itself seriously these chapters are as big a thrill for Final Fantasy 7 loving me at age 40 as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the arcade game was for me at age 13 I played chapter 15 literally eight times chapter 12 also almost completely consists of an arcade strip though it features an interstitial injection of a prestige tour game flavor number 2 prestige tours these scenes consist of the player simply manipulating a character through some kind of slow-paced atmospheric environmental storytelling sorta world building segments any battles are ultra light no chapter fully consists of a prestige tour though chapter 2 where in loud clambers across rooftops and firsthand witnesses the damage done by the Mokka reactor explosion comes closest the majority of that chapter has cloud walking and looking and reacting near the end there's a thrilling medium big fight against a bunch of grunts though exactly 92.4% of this chapter consists of simply moseying from point A to point B do you like how I got through that whole thing without saying walking simulator game flavor number three side quest hub chapters 3 8 and 14 of the Final Fantasy 7 remake dump the player off in a large friendly zone peppered with quest givers chapters 8 and 14 prominently featured defined ending set pieces in chapter 8 s case it's a boss battle in chapter 14 it's a retread of a previous dungeon complete with a revamped boss battle all three of these chapters focused primarily on world building we learn about the world of Final Fantasy 7 while we acquiesce to the mundane requests of Sir really uninteresting fictional individuals again here's cloud literally saying in so many words that a particular side quest sucks this sucks that's a sidequest where you literally have to find three white cats in a city that has the landmark ability of a literal junkyard the Final Fantasy 7 remake s' sidequest hub chapters require the player to complete at least one of the optional quests before their final goals open up though doing all of the side quests in a hub results in multiple small tangible benefits and at least one large tangible benefit in the case of chapters 3 & 8 doing all the side quests reflects in the narrative of chapter 9 we could loosely describe the Final Fantasy 7 remake first - side quest hubs as dates in the first one Tifa is showing her old friend cloud around town helping him earn some money by introducing him to some people who need odd jobs done there are literally two zones of their town one junkyard and one abandoned factory that are full of monsters whose population requires occasional thinning by the neighborhood watch these side quests thus contextualize grinding we could if we wanted to call them grind quests these grind quests also provide ample role-playing opportunity for the player to witness and hang out with Tifa and clouds relationship and then Aerith and clouds relationship we experience their character growth on an intermediate level through quest dialogues and on a micro level in post battle banter it's neat keep those gloves up most of the side quests are just kill a monster somewhere though and every time they try to pretend this game is the witcher 3 it's like every character involved in the dialogue throws up at the same time there's no denying you're the real deal not like these idiots with their excuses they're just doing their jobs hell with you we can take care of this town ourselves no more mercs or Shinra build up the watch and kick you all out okay then that's another solid gig in the books game the flavor number for non sequiturs and mandatory minigames chapter four consists of a deep dive into the backstory of Jesse in Final Fantasy 7 1997 jesse was a severely minor character who exists primarily to flirt with cloud in a few early dialogues giving us the sense that this lego guy with toasters for hands named cloud is sexually attractive to somebody the remakes whole thing is stretching out and beefing up so previously paper--the individuals have become robust Ian's of personality Biggs has anxiety and used to be a teacher at an orphanage school Wedge loves cats and is always hungry and jesse is both a former actress and monster horny she ropes cloud into a full excursion into territory entirely outside the original game's purview this is the game showing us as early as it can that they have added some big new stuff to impress us with the bigness of the newness the chapter opens with a high-speed action gaming motorcycle ride not present in any form in the original game during this whole motorcycle ride Jesse constantly acts like she and cloud are much closer than they really are just to make biggs and wedge jealous Wow this chapter reminded me quite uncomfortably of like half the dates I have ever been on in my life whether I'm saying I was like cloud or biggs and wedge leave that up to you they even introduce a new character who exists just in this chapter hopefully he's in the remake part too because I like him in Japanese he's voiced by the guy who voices all might in my hero academia Nate chapter four progresses from a motorcycle minigame to a prestige Tour and concludes with an arena-style action battle the game impresses the player with multiple out of right field elements of a big prestige game and then ends with an impressive boss these are quote-unquote filler episodes both literally and mechanically game flavor number 5 dungeons in Chapter 6 cloud merit and Tifa go to a huge Costco in search of one particular item just like the Costco near my apartment in Brooklyn on a Saturday the place is teeming with mutants chapters 11 and 17 also prominently features similar enormous get lost II environments these dungeons have all the Grace and symmetry of 9 doom 64 levels glued together I mean that as a compliment there's no grace and no symmetry or congruent II at all these dungeons are head aching nightmares each containing multiple quote-unquote discoveries which is what the game calls side objectives that are not quite as long and boring as full side quests discoveries require the player to scrutinize the level design a little more carefully than they'd have to in order to simply plow through to the boss in chapter 6 this involves killing some optional hard monsters maneuvering a moving walkway to access a materia maneuvering another moving walkway to knock some boxes off some shelves and exterminating some creatures inside of a ventilation fan system these dungeons all effortlessly evoke the cold kitchen sink Lee get lost eNOS of an ancient PlayStation 1 role-playing game dungeon in an impressive manner I'd thought the triple-a industry at large gave up on these kinds of meandering trial and error boxes thanks for bringing it back game flavor number six opera houses I fittingly derive the name of this game flavor from the Final Fantasy franchise itself we can largely divide the pacing of Final Fantasy stories into pre opera house and host Opera House the Opera House in Final Fantasy 6 arrived to thunderous applause back in 1994 where a large number of players had never seen anything like it in Final Fantasy Six's Opera House players play the role of a girl playing the role of an opera singer in order to attract the attention of a would-be kidnapper this sequence involves one character needing to learn the lines of the opera so as to not ruin the performance and the other characters needing to thwart a particularly violent heckler in the rafters if you're not familiar with the Opera House it is definitely an important piece of video game narrative design history Final Fantasy 6 had one Opera House set piece which just so happens to be the actual Opera House Chrono Trigger had several Opera House's Final Fantasy seven presented players with multiple Opera House's of their two four unseen to pest Ria's complexity the opening segment of Final Fantasy seven Midgar contained two such opera houses one of them being wall market where cloud has to quest around a red-light district collecting parts for an outfit so he can dress up like a girl and infiltrate a rich man's house midgar's other Opera House is the Shinra tower where our heroes Cloud Barrett and Tifa need to work their way up a corporate office building one floor at a time the Final Fantasy 7 remake presents luxuriously enormous renditions of both of these opera houses the wall market segment in particular stands out in my recent replay of Midgar 1997 wall market lasted just under one hour in Midgar 2020 wall market lasted me five hours and seven minutes and that was when I went the route that involved doing the fewest side quests that's the route where you choose to get the rich man's hand massage Wow the rich man's hand massage scene is this is a million times hotter than any Bioware sex scene I've ever watched on YouTube with arms akimbo and it's just a person touching another person's hand Opera House's are big bold multi tone set pieces containing a clockwork micro structure of interlocking side-quests these are the Final Fantasy 7 remake s-- main courses and they are spectacular in a Bioware game you might conduct quote-unquote romance by acquiescing to the conversational preferences of a sir really uninteresting fictional individual in the Final Fantasy 7 remake romance involves this you know someone told me you can make Aerith mad if you flub all the inputs in the dance mini game I sure never saw that because I'm not a freak Wow actually everyone in this game is really horny look at Reno's chest tifa's post battle banter consists primarily of two repeated lines that she's worked up a good sweat worked up a good sweat or that she'd kill for a shower would kill for a shower she really wants us to think of her wet you know fanfiction of the sexes variety did not exactly not exist back in 1997 though I feel like right here in 2020 Square Enix is confirming that they have definitely seen some of it game flavor number uh let's call it six and a half the side quests themselves they all technically take place inside the designated side quest hub chapters though can I just say that I definitely get a unique flavor out of all of them I mean most of them suck most of them are just about going to a place and killing a monster for no particular reason one of those monsters is enthralling Lee fun to kill the rest I could take or leave the Final Fantasy 7 remake bookends these side quests with stilted dialogues though there's never any enjoyable or even meaningful story being achieved the side quests are just there for world building flavor to be honest these side quests feel increasingly pasted breaking as the game goes along the first time we do side quests it's with Tifa in chapter 3 this is our quote-unquote date with Tifa at this point in the story cloud doesn't have any purpose in his life the next time we do side quests it's in Chapter 8 on our quote-unquote date with Aerith in this case cloud has places to be he really shouldn't be messing around this is proof that Aerith is of course his real girlfriend he's willing to abandon the entire narrative of this meticulously plotted extremely expensive high budget video game just so he can hang out with her then in chapter 14 we get the biggest bounty of side quests that we're also facing the biggest most mortal deadlines weirdly it feels like most of these chapter 14 side quests don't even want to be in this game at all because two-thirds of them matroyshka into each other almost like the designers knew that none of them were interesting enough to leave by itself and their placement in the game undermines the urgency of the plot big time you know what though this reminds me of the original Final Fantasy 7 in which we read racing earths despite knowing that the world was going to end in 7 days so I'll allow it anyway that's all of our game flavors each chapter showcases one particular game flavor by a third of the way through the game we've sampled all of the game flavors except the Opera House flavor which occurs in chapter 9 as the game goes on it begins weaving more and more flavors together at once accomplishing a slick feat wherein no two chapters exactly feel the same I'll say this again later though I couldn't help recalling the structure and flow of my favorite PlayStation 1 RPGs throughout this experience it's like the makers subconsciously accounted for every nuance for example in chapter 13 you backtrack through a sequence of painstakingly slow-paced puzzles that you solved back at the beginning of chapter immediately before you entered the massive meticulous Opera House Ian set PC woolmarket segment the magnitude of that set be sent the following dungeons boss battles and melodramatic cutscenes way heavy on your brain burying the memory of those glacial idiosyncratic robotic arm of manipulating riddles thus the Final Fantasy 7 remake works its trick it makes a few hours ago feel like a million years ago with Swiss watchmaker lis elegance this modern remake of an ancient game expresses with level design one of its forebears most potent sensations that of backtracking to a previous trouble zone and summarily stomping all random challengers you step back into this chamber and through a shower of recollection when you say I remember this place you are thinking of those insipid and lengthy work like struggle puzzles lo and voila what once took you ten minutes ten seconds and thirty nine frames now takes you 29 seconds and fifty nine frames now that's a character development you can take to the bank the Final Fantasy 7 remake seasons these game flavors with two spices cut scenes and battles if you're here from one you're here for the other the Final Fantasy 7 remake treats each cutscene like a major motion picture and treats every small-scale battle like nobody ever got annoyed by a random battle back in the day as I said earlier I spent nine hours 27 minutes 57 seconds and 53 frames and battles during my 100% leisurely playthrough of the Final Fantasy 7 remake that's 20 point 6 4 % of the game time if we subtract cutscenes from that that's twenty five point four eight percent of the game time that's officially more than one-fourth of the game I'll go one further if we consider the time spent in menus equipping or upgrading weapons or equipping and arranging materia battle activities then battles account for 31 point four nine percent of the game if we include cutscenes and thirty eight point eight seven percent of the game if we're talking about just the directly playable parts the game in other words miraculously the Final Fantasy 7 remake has less battle than it has other stuff if we divided up a flagship prestige game into combat and other stuff how would they do does The Last of Us contain more or less than 38% combat it does have all those latter puzzles in it though are they substantial enough to knock the combat percentage down below 38% I don't think so though you know what I'll take that challenge so for today the Final Fantasy 7 remake shows us a huge budget prestige video game where elements other than combat clearly occupied the majority portion of the game no matter how we slice it of course a lot of that other 60 12.2% of that time that's 30 minutes sent six seconds is spent climbing ladders or squeezing under rubble eight minutes and 12 seconds of that time is spent holding the triangle button for three seconds while you wait for a door to open look at this part where you have to hold the triangle button to open three doors in a row is this some kind of IQ test it reminds me of the time I slipped and are you even reading this into my homework for mrs. Parker Davis and she docked me a percentage point for using an auxiliary B verb every time you challenge the readers attention somebody punishes somebody I mean this is 8.3 seconds of holding a button down I know it's a trick for hiding loads I know the developers mean well when they ask me to squeeze under all this rubble and through all these cracks I know it's meant to heighten the drama to get me into character by letting me watch my characters involved in a quiet intimate struggle though it has an extreme tendency to get glacial I always wind up getting excited about what the game's loading on the other side of these things and you spent 46 minutes 30 seconds and 32 frames of a 100% complete playthrough of the game departing from the correct path to a dungeon or corridor level to open a treasure chest containing an item that would be completely unusable in a hard mode playthrough and then returning to the path that's three point four one percent of the playable game outside battles you spent 23 seconds and 24 frames watching and waiting for red 13 to flip a switch eight times in chapter 17 you spent 2 minutes 56 seconds and five frames crawling forward through the air vents at Shinra tower you spend four minutes 10 seconds and twenty eight frames watching Tifa perform a kindergarten Uncharted routine tifa's Tomb Raider for babies makes me feel bad about saying bad stealth segments are the worst part of Triple A games every glacial cinematic action here takes between 8 and 12 seconds longer than your brain's capacity to discern the solution you sight the goal tilt the stick and wait for the girl inside the television to graduate video kindergarten this is 0.5 6 % of the game if you get the items and point 3 0 5 percent of the game if you speedrun it I guess if you stare at anything long enough it wastes your time I don't get it the Final Fantasy 7 remake forces me to slow down for these little insipid junior crew set pieces with chandeliers and air ducts and then when I'm trying to dramatically mosey in character during some of the heaviest dramatic moments my AI buddies are in such a buzz killing hurry just let me roleplay man in other words congratulations everybody we've invented a 61.134342 of the game back in 1999 every dude on my college dorm floor at Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana NASCAR or Formula one jock or cool guy NFL or NBA liberal arts or Business College pre-med or pre-law virgin or laid Sega or Nintendo fake ID or no fake ID rock and roll door techno every dude had at least once arms akimbo spectated knights of the round in Final Fantasy seven dudes it'd be like you should check up knights of the round if you have a boot and dudes would just know that it was a Final Fantasy 7 thing at least every dude on the floor had played the bombing mission scene the final boss and ending received it burned cd-r with one wing it angel on it in addition to several songs by Everclear and Sugar Ray and they had seen knights of the round the rest of Final Fantasy 7 they could take or leave I remember for guys who reported that they had tried to get into the game yet it just didn't grab them all four of them had been lured by that sexy image of Cloud Strife holding a big sword with that but Chinese writing each tin to the blade sitting astride a fat motorcycle in front of a red sky as seen on the wall scroll hanging in two of the math majors as rooms they said they just couldn't enjoy the game at all they all complained about the random battles these guys obviously all owns Playstations all four of them owned and regularly played Madden three of them had beaten Metal Gear Solid one of them actually went on to beat the first disc of Xenogears and then somebody else on the floor had borrowed my second disc of xeno goose I got it back from him before the end of the year he never got to borrow the second disc and I kind of feel like maybe that's given him a favorable impression of role-playing games I remember each of these guys names physical attributes and musical preferences knowing what I know of today's youth I can tell you with confidence that if they had been born ten years later at least two of them with daily watch eSports on Twitch this probably has something if not a lot to do with the Final Fantasy 7 remake scam bat system the Final Fantasy 7 remake seeks to imbue each individual battle however mundane with at least a splinter of the appeal of knights of the round many battles are big lavishly designed spectacles even some of the quote-unquote random battles occur in scripted level designed locations short battles can last for between 9 seconds and 2 minutes the pace is breezy the action is crispy the weapons feel heavy and good and I distinctly recall never once being annoyed that I'd gotten into a battle I did get annoyed for a few distinct moments during some battles in fact I can recall several instances when I was frustrated that I could not find an enemy to fight when I wanted to fight an enemy each ability spell weapon and accessory is as though designed it under a fancy microscope each mechanically unique character is a full game unto themselves therefore when I say the game features eight kinds of battles I ain't even kidding cloud fights some battles alone some battles with just Barret some battles with just Tifa some battles with just Aerith some battles with Barret and Tifa some battles with Tifa and Aerith and some battles with Aerith and Barret furthermore you fight one boss as Tifa and Barret one boss as Tifa and Aerith and one boss as Barrett and Aerith I think the evidence points to the designers having meticulously tested and balanced every possible combination of two or three party members this is why you can't control Dredd 13 they weren't going to pour thousands of hours of design work into a character who only appears for one chapter the complexity of the characters is mechanical differences means that the battles stay fresh exciting and just out of the mastery grasp of your brains fingertips I wouldn't say that each Ardi lineup is a quote-unquote whole different game though I would say that each party lineup is sort of a whole different Japanese role-playing game battle system in other words this battle system gives us a whole lot to talk about so let's get to it I'll start with a quick breakdown actually I just had a ridiculously good idea for a name of this segment um for the show ready for this you ready for this because the three letters of my first name also form an acronym for the instruction manual I'll start with a quick breakdown the Final Fantasy 7 remake uses a real time action skinned role-playing combat system at the time I made this review the game was only available for the PlayStation 4 in 30 frames per second so I'm going to use PlayStation button names if you're watching this after the glorious PC version has come out well use the left analog stick to move your character press the square button to attack press the arm one button to block look at the two bars under your characters is names in the lower right corner these are called ATV bars ATB stands for active Time battle the name of the bad yet well-meaning and somehow classic Final Fantasy battle system introduced in Final Fantasy 4 in 1991 as you attack enemies or simply kill time by blocking or moving in circles these bars fill up when one is full your character has accumulated an 80 be charged you can spend 180 be bar to use an available ability magic spell or item most ATB actions cost 180 B bar some of them cost - some of them cost one to start though we'll use two for a more powerful version if you have 280 B bars available in Final Fantasy 4 5 6 7 8 and 9 the ATB bar represented a character's readiness to receive any command at all and yes I know that Final Fantasy 4 did not have visible ATB bars trust me the ATB bars were there just couldn't see them simply attacking an enemy with your regular boring weapon required a full ATB bar in the old Unruh made Final Fantasies and yes I know Final Fantasy 4 has been remade however it does not run at a silky smooth 60fps on my PC so remake it again yup hunks the Final Fantasy 7 remake in functionally speaking the visual language of action games can't have you waiting around between each sword swing only a bad game would do that your regular attacks in the Final Fantasy 7 remake send-off wonderful particle effects and build your 80 B charges faster than simply standing around your AI teammates don't build a TV very well on their own so you'll have to use the up-and-down directional buttons to change to your teammates to pull off some regular attacks every once in a while all of your teammates feel incredibly different to control by the way cloud magnetized us to the nearest enemy when you press the attack button Tifa doesn't though she runs twice as quickly as cloud she feels more like an action game character Barrett is big and slow and can confidently hit anybody from anywhere tempting you to keep him at a distance though he's also your tank so get him in there that's interesting when anyone on your team has an ATV charge ready you can press either trigger to open their action menu turning the game into a turn-based RPG for a couple of seconds like its combat design cousin Kingdom Hearts the Final Fantasy 7 remake allows players to assemble a list of hotkeys you can access these by holding the l1 button and then pressing the face button corresponding to the move you want to use I gotta say I wish they'd let me map moves to the triggers too though I guess pressing the left trigger while holding the l1 button down would feel weird to people who aren't playing on a scuf Vantage 2 controller with the l1 button mapped to a rear paddle that's luxury scuff Vantage 2 when you absolutely need to spend $200 on a PlayStation 4 controller in addition to switching 2 characters to build their a TB bars you'll also want to switch to them because each specific battle might benefit for you're directly controlling a character other than big sword guy if a battle includes a lot of obnoxious airborne enemies for example Barret has a gun for a primary weapon so use him at the core of every encounter is the stagger system this works similarly to the break system in Final Fantasy 13 actually I know it's called the break system in the Japanese version of Final Fantasy 13 I don't know if it's called that in the English version of Final Fantasy 13 I could fact check it however it would be more fun not to attacking an enemy in a specific manner will induce a status clearly labeled with big ugly text as pressured inducing pressured status requires either common sense robots hate lightning for example reading of visual cues or some light puzzle solving that requires using the scanner ability and reading a wall of sometimes imperfectly translated to text detailing the enemy's patterns behaviors and elemental weaknesses or resistances an enemy and pressured status can be quickly staggered by a few boilerplate attack abilities these are clearly labeled as focused attacks focused strike for Tifa focused thrust for cloud and focused shot for Barretts focused attacks do decent damage on their own under regular circumstances though if the stars align and you have ATB bars in the chamber when an enemy enters the pressure zone you can quickly induce a stagger state by lining your dudes up and pummeling the idiot with focused attacks a staggered enemy has virtually no defenses they can't act they're incomplete husk hit them with anything to hurt them hit them with their weaknesses to devastate them hit them with a Limit Break to feel like the real monster this is sometimes deliciously easier said than done learning to muscle memorize ATB cooldowns and attack wind-ups becomes a tug of war in your mind representing the perfect source of virtually all the pleasure you will derive or not from this game's combat system stagger is in fact so important that tifa's perma available starting regular actions exist primarily to increase the damage bonus percentage during enemies stagger face aside from a few other details that's basically the entire battle system if you're a newcomer or non game player I might have made it sound a little scary and complex that's because it sort of is every good RPG has a technical higher level of battle play it's up to the player if they want to learn it you can enjoy the Final Fantasy 7 remake as a sort of arcade game beat em up version of itself though you might not have that great of a time especially in fights that force you to pay attention like the one against the heck house or Rufus few RPGs even the most hardcore of the actual old ones require their players to generally pay as much attention to the higher-level elements of their battle systems as the Final Fantasy 7 remake does that's probably because the designers seem to have taken their inspirations from eSports as any action or role-playing game designer is want to do these days so let's break it down in a little bit more technical detail ATB charges in the Final Fantasy 7 remake occupy the role of ad familiarized esports cool down in a more complex MOBA or other eSport the word cooldown typically applies separately to a wide range of abilities of various tiers one of the first and most valuable lessons you learn while playing a MOBA like League of Legends as a complete noob is to just use your abilities when they're ready don't let them sit there you can learn the right timing to use them later you can learn to strategize with them later first you've got to learn how to just use them when you can this lesson is brutally important because when every single ability has a cool-down of a sometimes microscopically different speed attached to it you are going to need to eventually tattoo the lengths of those cooldowns onto your brain the Final Fantasy 7 remake uses its ATB bars as white-label cooldowns think of them as action coupons each of them redeemable for one fancy action of your choice some fancy actions cost to having the proper fancy actions available at the most opera times always feels like a gamble until you've bent the system and broken the system at which time it feels like eSports the Final Fantasy 7 remake scum bat design staff have clearly had their eyes on eSports for the past decade I mean the Final Fantasy 7 remake scomp at design staff literally includes veterans of Kingdom Hearts 2 if you can get even part of your head around Kingdom Hearts you can probably memorize the names of at least 10% of the League of Legends champions I yelled you sports a lot during my streams on the one hand this was a good joke on the other hand why not the Final Fantasy 7 remake represents the latest attempt by prestige game designers to adapt eSports mechanics for the mainstream unknown eSports elitist so I say this is great eSports relish in many mechanics of objective satisfaction I think we should all look at eSports for example in popularizing the almighty cool down eSports have translated the shocking thrill of a stockbrokers heart attack directly on to every game likers 240 Hertz computer monitor eSports thrill players with the sensation of a twitch speed Nasdaq successfully predicting that you will be ready to perform one exact action at one particular possible future moment makes you feel like a psychic with your ultimate and you might accidentally also jump out of a real life window in a multiplayer online game where other people's psychologies make up 94% of the soup stock this bartering bargaining and bluffing on ultra short term investments in payoffs fascinates and thrills in a manner definitively deserving of ESPN coverage in a single player game however any designer insisting on speaking in a language of warmups and cooldowns should rightly receive many Larry David squints at lower difficulties as the Final Fantasy 7 remake lowers you into its battle system toes first the introduction of every additional mechanic is good right and super occasionally triumphant later as conflicts grow hot we glimpse the face of the gremlin beneath the veneer we dig in a fingernail and what do you know it turns out this baseball is made of cotton candy a lot of times quote getting good unquote at a particular video game means getting good at dealing with nonsense the degree of pleasantness we palpate via this nonsense helps us formulate our opinion of a game as good or bad however as someone who has designed for games and even made a few tiny complete games just for myself I have seen the trick games are not real on Normal difficulty the Final Fantasy 7 remake allows casual players the opportunity to rent eSports thrills if you poke its systems full of enough holes you'll see that the game is only offering the player the opportunity to play the role of a player playing an eSports game for example if pressuring and staggering enemies is such a core part of the system why can't the enemies stagger me the simple answer is because single-player video games are liars I played through the Final Fantasy 7 remake on normal mode four times and hard mode once I insisted on replaying normal mode four times starting from zero each time because it literally has the word normal in its name this seems to me suspiciously like the developers claiming that this is the quote-unquote real mode there's a separately labelled easy mode hard mode is not available from the title screen the developers present hard mode as a treat for freaks unlockable only after completing the game on normal mode for the purpose of my analysis I considered the unlockable nature of hard mode an indicator that I should scrutinize the normal mode most heavily so I did the Final Fantasy 7 remake introduces systems and elements surprisingly quickly for a Final Fantasy game the ethereal of brain experience points you earn through completing the game on normal mode one carry-over interestingly well turning a repeat from zero normal mode playthrough into a sort of philosophical new game plus the first time I played normal mode I didn't get into the groove of always using your clouds Punisher mode to counter certain enemies as melee attacks until a few chapters in my second time through I was parrying dudes right at the start I humiliated at the chapter for boss my second time through it felt great my first time through the game switching between party members with super regularity during a battle felt exciting it felt dramatic from just a user interface perspective it satisfied me the little freeze frame as the camera perspective jumps is a wonderful flourish my second time through at some point perfectly on accident I glimpsed The Aleph under the stairs my first playthrough I'd complained maybe half a million times that my a eye buddies were too stupid to exist well the half a million and first complaint broke the bank my buds aren't just dumb they're idiots and they're not just idiots they're idiots by design by game design also it seems like the combat design gets off on making you feel bad about yourself like bosses often change phases just as you're about to stagger them which resets their stagger meter it's like the combat designers know exactly how quickly you can stagger the boss and the exact minimum amount of damage the boss can take in the process of getting to that stagger and then they set the next phase to start slightly above that check out Ruud here you can see his stagger meter reset within one frame shamelessly before the phase change cutscene it's like he's rubbing it in my face how nameís sake lees of him also here he is initiating his post battle cutscene before the final hit of clouds Limit Break what the heck man I developed a laundry list of similar complaints about the battle system by the end of my twenty six hour cutscenes skipping second playthrough I then played through the first chapter on hardmode with an end game party at around level 35 I found it a tiny bit too strict though for the most part I enjoyed myself with this experience I adjusted my perspective and replayed the game from zero on normal again simulating what I imagined to be a hard mode loadout hard mode doesn't let the player use items so for my third playthrough I did not use items well I did use to phoenix downs though only so I didn't have to redo an entire boss fight I could have done it if I had had the raze materia equipped on Barret as I thought I had my hypothesis was that a playthrough on normal simulating hard modes restrictions might enlighten me about the deepest levels of the game's design I was particularly interested in observing the difficulty curve and progression and the increased complexity of the metagame the only thing I wasn't able to simulate in this playthrough was hard modes restriction on benches in normal mode they recover your magic points in hard mode they don't I came away with two distinct impressions firstly that clouds triple slash move is overpowered secondly that a lot of stuff is overpowered though it's not quite the stuff you'd expect I had yet to consult YouTube about hard mode strategies at this point though by chapter 5 of my normal mode replay I was able to piece together the way a hard mode playthrough would have to work if benches don't restore your MP you're going to need both high MP and some healing abilities that use a tbh without also using MP this means for hard mode you need to prioritize leveling up the chakra materia which heals a percentage of the users HP and the prayer materia which heals a little bit of everyone's HP you need to fill your boys and girls with HP and MP up materia you need to give everyone healing materia in case and you need to make ample use of the haste spell which causes everyone to build a TP faster you need to be smart about your crowd control moves like clouds triple / Tifa star shower and Barrett's maximum fury you need to make ample use of aerith's arcane ward which places a field upon which any spell caster every spell twice you need to drill down hard on the correct strategies for pressuring every enemy and you need to make timely use of focused abilities to stagger enemies whenever possible during the pressuring phase you need to use tifa's unbridled strength ability multiple times to charge her triangle button ability up to maximum stagger damage multiplier percentage so you can make the most of every stagger because even every random enemy is generally on max stats in hard mode there's no shame to grinding up to the level cap of level 50 and of course since you can only play a hard mode in new game+ you get all of your late-game materia and equipment from the start when I did look at youtubers as hard mode runs I enjoyed learning that I had been mostly correct in my concept of an ideal loadout this hypothetical hard mode loadout also made normal mode breezier and dare I say more exciting however it also required me to spend 22% more time in menus fiddling with my materia configurations in hard mode I just have started out with all of those endgame materia this exercise gave me a lot of takeaways many of which we don't have time to get into in this video for example I don't care how many times you've been through the game you're constantly wheeling the camera around so much during every battle and the level designs all look like one the matrix colored shadow moses costco or another that by the end of every battle you are either completely turned around or you can play quake 2 with your eyes closed and no i am not ever going to turn the mini-map on a lot of my battle footage wound up unusable because if one character's HP enters critical status they throw this red mist filter over the whole screen developers put an option in the options menu that lets people turn off the weird you're in danger graphical effects i ended up with literally 900 words of notes about the materia menu and my script writing process i made an attempt to condense that into fewer words the materia menu is depressing materia is a beloved concept from the original Final Fantasy 7 materia our little multicolored candy bubble orbs that players slot into individual characters as weapons receiving abilities magic spells or passive traits in so doing as you fight battles you earn AP ability points which go toward leveling up the materia level up a materia to unlock new skills spells or traits for example an HP up materia might give you 10% more maximum hit points on level 1 and 20 percent more maximum hit points on level 2 you can take a material off of one character and give it to another giving that character the benefits that the materia developed as it leveled up while taking those benefits away at least for the time being from the previous character in 1997 this system represented a crystallization of the previous two Final Fantasies is character development systems in final fantasy 5 you change jobs each job has its own skills level of skill up all the way and you can equip it on your base class effectively crafting unique characters in Final Fantasy 6 you can equip each character with a sort of patron saint called a magicite in addition to permanently teaching characters spells after they earn requisite skill points the magicite also inform base level up stat percentages making them necessarily a no messing around tolerated element of character progression Final Fantasy 7 embodied elements of both of these systems in level up a bowl collectible trading card like candy bubbles called materia add into the bargain weapons that have faster or slower materia growth rates more slots or fewer slots and linked slots that allow special blue materia to affect the connected materia and you have yourself a pretty iconically robust skill progression system beats the heck out of a modern triple a skill tree the materia system however reaps the majority of its spoils over the course of a full length of the Final Fantasy 7 remake stops too early in the narrative with too few weapons armor pieces accessories and materia themselves available to players for it to possibly reach half of its full entertainment potential furthermore materia becomes more of a didactic puzzle injection than a joyful sketchpad for game designing your own unique characters just look at how plain the menu is it's like they want you to think of it as a part-time job tasks maybe they thought that making the materia menu look like Star Wars extended universe productivity software would make you take it for granted as a world building element look at how uncomfortably left-aligned everything is look how the materia aren't even in any kind of alphabetical order why can't I have tabs to swap between green yellow purple and blue materia well probably because I would then see how few blue materia there even are in the game why can't I at least compose loadouts the little gut-check dialogue that stops me before I take materia off another party member is sort of a buzzkill when that party member isn't even in the party it's like they wanted this menu to be boring on the other hand when you look at their attempt at a fun menu you'll kind of wish you were just using Microsoft Excel it's quite telling that they built this whole elaborate crystarium thing for each weapon in the game only to also give you the option to just not use it give whoever implemented that auto mode arrays getting good at the game however does not make the materia menu more exciting the better you get at the game the more time you spend second-guessing your material Oh doubts I don't exactly like myself so I counted every frame of materia menu fiddling across all four of my playthroughs by the way keep sending in your resumes everybody I am looking at all of them in my research I observed a 12% increase between my first and second playthroughs and a 22% increase between my first and third playthroughs that number decreased by 4% in my fourth playthrough the better you get the harder you think about materia meanwhile in hard mode I barely spent any time in the materia menu at all this could either be because I had gotten sufficiently good at the game or because hard mode is the real mode I stopped just short of saying that hard mode is objectively the real mode of the Final Fantasy 7 remake though I do not hesitate to subjectively declare it hard mode is the real way to play the Final Fantasy 7 remake now if you'll indulge me for just a few minutes I would like to offer an attempt to prove the inverse of this hypothesis their bomb threat has thrown our offices into chaos let alone the reactor itself it's total insanity I'm still thinking about the materia menu I'm not saying they should have made it like a wild fun minigame like they should a contracted compile to make a full-on Puyo Puyo it's just it lacks both fun and basic usability functions let me at least build decks I mean at its current state of usability you might as well just make it look fun as I noted a few minutes ago the hand tips when you consider what the developers actually did make when they wanted to make a quote/unquote fun menu this is a smoking gun clue if we witness this for the game's duration with a mystery novel enthusiasts attention to detail a pattern emerges the designers don't even actually care about this stuff it's been beating us over the head the whole time witnessed this during one particularly narrative League goofy segments of the game we chase a sewer rat who has stolen a key we stopped along the chase path at several nodes to fight battles that this stupid rat gleefully spectate s' look at this here while dramatic chase music pumps loud and hard the rat we're chasing just stands and watches us heal we might in the moment say this looks dopey yet I who long ago theorized that Japanese role-playing game developers just wanted to make years of war cannot chastise the game for this a role-playing game is more than just a video game where you can heal your dudes from a menu a role-playing game is a game whose goal is to play a role that I got to this point in my first playthrough in desperate need of healing is the fault of my bad acting not the rats thus I propose my hypothesis that to me it is crystal clear that these designers wanted to make action game yes my friends we've gotten to the point again imagine some fancy After Effects animation for this this is the part of the review where I say something that is somewhat universally interesting if you find any of this interesting you probably find this segment of each review to be the most interesting part if there are any ice pick companies out there who would like to sponsor this segment of the show I have situated my business enquiries email address into my Twitter profile I do not live in the great gatsby z-- house so you do not need to send me any ice picks just send me an SVG of your logo and some money the point of this Action Button review of the Final Fantasy 7 remake involves us investigating and ruminating on a situation I call the trinket ultimatum as Kirk Hamilton proposed once on the website Kotaku calm video games are better the second time you play them he was speaking about single-player games though he'd be just as right about pretty much any game though he's twice as right about single prestige action games because these games feature narratives and ask us usually gently to play the role of a character when we know the script we can play the role better in this way saying a videogame is better the second time you play it is kind of like saying a film is better when the actors had rehearsed now we could get philosophical and say that the permission to make meandering mistakes experiment and experience drilling discoveries for yourself comprise a huge part of any good games appeal for the sake of argument let's say that this thrill of discovery comprises 49% of a good games appeal I mentioned earlier in this review that in the Final Fantasy 7 remake the player spends and I'm quoting myself here 46 minutes 30 seconds and 32 frames of a 100 sent complete playthrough of the game departing from the correct path during a dungeon or corridor level to open a treasure chest containing an item that would be completely unusable in a hard mode playthrough and then returning to the path that's three point form one percent of the playable game outside battles I left out the fact that these departures from the clearly market main paths through the Final Fantasy 7 remake sleves almost always require the player to ignore enormous theatrical queues Final Fantasy sevens story involves relatable human characters in big world jeopardizing situations every level shoves a new crisis in our faces in the vein of every triple-a single-player prestige games since Call of Duty our comrades voice act dramatic directions we're meant to follow them as stuff crumbles and buildings blow up and our friend's life hangs in the balance somewhere inside the enemy citadel as Jason Schreyer pointed out in a post on Kotaku comm giving tips to new players of the Final Fantasy 7 remake if you want items you should simply ignore where your party members automatically go during action segments in summary undermine the painstakingly crafted drama to go the wrong way on purpose and you'll get items this casts a black light on several deep issues in modern single-player games in general though the Final Fantasy 7 remake looks particularly grody these smashable crates dispense potions like candy these glowy trinket boxes sit at the ends of hallways of length considerable enough to hype up their contents most often a higher level magic restoring item return to the proper path from your trinket snatching excursion and your quizzical stationery buddies immediately begins sprinting again toward their urgent destination the Final Fantasy 7 remake so severely conditions you young and early that departing from the path nets trinkets that when you finally do get yelled for trying to go the clearly wrong way you achieve empathy for a parent's calling the principal to protest to their child's report card yet you never stop chances are by Chapter five you've learned to always go the wrong way all the time no matter how invested you are in the plot when later you control Tifa or Barrett it's jarring to see them depart from the path to scrounge for trinkets I'm like oh that's weird Barrett is usually in more of a hurry then I remember that as always the character I'm controlling is the only person in the story who knows they're in a video game as you progress through the game propelled by your Final Fantasy 7 nostalgia as you maybe you will unconsciously develop the habit of already starting to rotate the camera away from the trinket before cloud can even complete the getting animation your brain knows this is boring eventually at the players controlling requests the screen written ly aloof cool-headed hero type Cloud Strife acquires the erratic theatrical mannerisms of a history onic kleptomaniac begging for molla security's heaviest handcuffs even as you try to soak in the atmosphere as you tried to roleplay your slowest most sword back at MOSI trinkets sing from the deep ruining the mood even at the dramatic crescendo of the game as the path forward could not possibly be any more apparent and glittery you might find that her funk thoroughly your curiosity compels you to camera check your corners for tchotchke pockets in my third playthrough in which I simulated the restrictions of hard mode as best I could I still departed from the path to obtain items most of the time old habits died hard usually it's a potion or a magic restorative item you can't use any of these items in in my simulated hardmode playthrough I had the maximum of 99 potions 6 hours into the game in my actual hard mode playthrough my dudes already had all of the best material and weapons I was able to follow the dramatically correct path through the game at a pace that felt genuinely more exciting 3.4 1% of the game experience may not sound like much though these little departures are spread so evenly scattered so matter-of-factly and splintered so joylessly throughout the main path of the game that I can't help considering them a smoking gun like the weird ugly weapon upgrade menus audacity to have an auto option or the weird little game systems stump where in specific vending machines sell a limited stock of a couple of powerful items at a discounted price the designers of this game did not care about any of that stuff hard mode is the quote-unquote correct way to play the Final Fantasy 7 remake in hard mode you equip your pre grinded dudes and gals with the hottest pre obtained equipment and pre maxed materia and you one credit arcade blast your way through the story you don't fiddle around in menus any more than you have to you don't even really diverged from a common sensical loadout rubric you play characters close to their strengths you heal during battle using a tbh as an infinitely immediate term a farmable in battle consumable currency shifting the overarching games puzzle solving paradigm toward immediate mundane game breaking so you can get on with the Breezy action just look at how few of the game's scripted battles happen inside arenas exhibiting any interest in the level design geometry the in-game contextualized grinding machine the Shinra battle simulator tips the hand first of all it costs money to challenge a battle meaning the designers think the battles are fun enough to charge you in-game currency for them second it lays bare the enjoy ability and balance of so many diverse enemy encounters even within the clean slate level design white room having said that the absolute best series of battles in the whole game occurs in chapter 15 as our heroes run down a straight corridor with no side branches one battle leading seamlessly into another forcing us to conduct our healing on the clock expending ATB charges to do so for a brief four minute stretch the normal mode player experiences the thrill of the hard mode player some of the worst battles are the ones where the combat designers seemed obliviously unaware of the geometry in which the battle would take place cloud and Tifa versus hella troopers might be fun in Shinra battle simulators white room though in this level design where the hella troopers immediately turtle out unreachable over the ledge it's soul-crushing any idiot tier enemy that forces someone to use magic or die of boredom feels dirty especially on normal mode my second and third normal mode playthroughs saw me using minimal and then no items I even challenged myself to heal using only prayer and chakra and skip benches for several chapters in hard mode battle is the medicine and the game struck me as astronomically more enjoyable this way I felt a bristles breath away from scientific proof that the designers would rather have made an action game and that all the litter e trinkets represented fear these baubles exist merely to slake the bric-a-brac thirst of that phantom the RPG fan i postulate that way back when we were never quote-unquote RPG fans we were fans of games with more hard modes Forsett reliance on ATB abilities feels like a clue that its designers considered NP magic points a concession to nostalgia this results in my imagining an alternative Final Fantasy 7 remake with all the design soul of a bravely default a game where all abilities are things the player can save up for pay for and cash out on all within the moment of a battle tifa's unbridled strength ability and Barrett's Gears of War like active reload overcharge charging animation cancel at the end of a firing bursts are signposts toward this otherwise invisible much better video game even the throwaway minigame chapter 8 and 14s whack a box exists seemingly merely to teach you the value of quickly and economically managing your ATV I hypothesize that the designers wanted to make a game that did not have trinkets hence hardmode not even allowing items this makes me wander our games without trinkets without crafting and such even viable today why do triple a game like us equate has friendly zones with needs trinkets this tendency has put us at a disadvantage 7 remake once deep down to be Final Fantasy 7 the arcade game therefore hard mode eggs us to play it this way max out hack up loadout get down and beeline through each chapter with the urgency the narrative demands if you ask me I think they should have just included a maxed stat all weapons all materia hard mode on the title screen alongside normal mode and easy mode how's that for a devil's advocate of the whole there should be an easy mode in Dark Souls movement with hard mode they've laid the stats bear stats are nonsense grinding is nonsense yet in order to even touch hard mode you need to have played normal mode they can't simply put a no stats necessary all equipment unlocked materia buff a hard mode on the title screen alongside normal mode and easy mode because that undermines the so very role-playing game like grinding experience that the hypothetical consumer will riot without in the Final Fantasy 7 remake s-- abundant trinket excursions the looming specter of Final Fantasy 13 and Final Fantasy 15 the makers fear those old complaints the makers fear not feeling sufficiently like a real RPG so they balloon to the game with junior crew II moments like red 13 flipping switches and tifa's kindergarten uncharted to inflate the illusion of grandeur the result is a game possessive of both the prestige moments we laud in and uncharted and the trinket erpg nonsense we acquired a sweet taste for back when we should have been getting our Stockholm Syndrome vaccinations I don't speak for everybody though here's what I say kill trinkets just make an action game I personally would gladly partake of it because of not in spite of the presence of enormous friendly zones then design that Tomb Raider II part a lot better and then make more like that just make a prestige game or and this is just me maybe just design a balanced and finished normal mode in which trinkets and magic spells alike are intelligently valuable where my AI party members have at least Donald and Goofy level programmable paradigms and maybe make some optional side quests that are great and then don't even have a hard mode or an easy mode in summary no Dark Souls should not have an easy mode no game should have a hard mode or an easy mode the perfect video game will not need any difficulty modes and that's the straight dope as my friend Geeta Jackson has said Twitter becomes a much different website around the time you accumulate your ten thousandth follower I myself have noted that this phenomenon duplicates for every additional ten thousand followers I could delve deeper into the exact nature of the change that occurs in the Twitter user experience however this thing has gone on long enough and it is time to end it so I'll speak instead on what effect my increasing Twitter following has had on me personally I'll just say this I have become very good at detecting deceptively rhetorical questions for example most of the people in my Twitter dm's who have asked me should I play the Final Fantasy 7 remake do not actually want to play the Final Fantasy 7 remake you see we humans like dogs usually speak just to say something we join a conversation just to be in a conversation and for a few short weeks the conversation concerned the Final Fantasy 7 remake those of you who asked a more detailed version of that question were largely sincere should you play the original Final Fantasy 7 before you play the Final Fantasy 7 remake sure should you play the original Final Fantasy 7 or the Final Fantasy 7 remake I'd say play the original and then played the remake if you really loved the original though that bald-faced rhetorical version of the question still inspires me should you play the Final Fantasy 7 remake these people again most of whom probably do not expect or even want an answer perhaps on accident present the Final Fantasy 7 remake as existing in a vacuum so we come back to that question I asked at the beginning of today's program can we talk about a video game without talking about other video games in this brief section I'd like to give it a shot first my girlfriend does not know the twist of the Final Fantasy 7 while I played through the remake she began playing through the original on her Nintendo switched light in several minutes long bursts over the course of every day knowing that I quarantine idli occupy the same small apartment with a person who does not know the twist of Final Fantasy 7 has been slowly breaking my mind she's never even played a Final Fantasy game she's never even played a complete Japanese role-playing game every observation about the original Final Fantasy 7 that she offers to me feels like it fell to the earth from space I love it it's also given me a nifty lens for assessing the remake in experiencing her opinion of the original freshly I've been able to quietly assess the remakes potential as an all-timer furthermore I've started this series to exclusively review all timers I picked the Final Fantasy 7 remake for the first review in this series because it felt like a good publicity opportunity for me to demonstrate my methods hopefully resulting in increased patreon revenue which will allow me to hire two full-time video editors so that I can make these things bigger and faster putting aside to the illness of The Omen that I am launching this video series from an angle perfectly opposed to that which I promised I asked myself as I write this not as I read it into a microphone in front of a camera later could I convince someone that the Final Fantasy 7 remake is an all-timer right about now in all of my upcoming reviews I will feature a section called take it away in that section I'll briefly summarize the absolutely crucial value and the brutally important objects of study that the game in question presents to anyone wanting to get to know videogames better this time I got nothing I did not arrive at the end of my critical analysis of the Final Fantasy and remake with any essential takeaways it is unfortunately not an all-timer on the other hand I did love every moment of my first playthrough like I said before I drank it with a milkshake straw so in the spirit of sports person ship allow me to hazard my best attempt at boiling down the essential enjoyability value of the Final Fantasy 7 remake what strikes me most looking back at all my time with the Final Fantasy 7 remake is its obsessive determination to perhaps accidentally replicate the exact structural texture of a PlayStation 1 game I recognize this as a thin icy complement to pay any game though sincerely the Final Fantasy 7 remake pulls off weird old-fashioned admissable well as anyone probably can the game's ambitious bag contains parts and systems that don't usually belong together here we have an experience as genre stretching as deadly premonition or Shenmue only without the impression of budgetary constraints or unfinished Ness an experience sort of like a Yakuza game yet in a morbidly rich fantasy setting with actually far less conventional a plot outline if you ask me from the midst of an actual vacuum whether you should play the Final Fantasy 7 remake or not my answer is I don't know I don't live in a vacuum and not for lack of trying either I think that the Final Fantasy 7 remake is well written though how much of the dialogue am i accepting because I already like the characters I love Aerith and I consider her one of the best written videogame characters of all time though can I recommend this game on the basis of her presence to someone who doesn't know the full story I considered the plot of the original Final Fantasy 7 superlatively well-paced I find it's big emotional beats remarkably well positioned its peculiar use of Enter active flashbacks is a hallmark of videogame narrative design however most of that stuff isn't in the remake which has done it's best to replicate the pacing of the entire original game within an exploded fraction of its plot I cannot in good faith recommend the Final Fantasy 7 remake on the basis of its plot if what I care about as regards the plot requires me to have played the original game 23 years ago I could tell you that the weapons feel good the main characters big sword feels good triple slash feels hot wherever you're from even the crash of the braver attack hitting the ground when it just misses is satisfying the freeze frames when changing characters the heavy sticky thumb of stop start when the guy with a gun for an arm lets out an overcharge burst it's all crunchy and delicious Final Fantasy 7 remake has studied the best action games as visual intensity amplification frictions though what does that mean if you don't play video games I can't recommend to the Final Fantasy 7 remake to a person who has never played a video game before on the other hand if you've played some prestige video games if maybe your first console was a PlayStation 3 and your first game was Uncharted and you've played most of the big hits since then I recommend this game on the basis of its historical curiosity its flow to and from game flavours its brazen effortlessness in once going to whole hours without any combat and frequently going more than one hour without combat creates an experience of inimitable texture there's a part where you fight a house and then later in town you overhear one guy telling another guy who looks like David Foster Wallace about it and the guy who looks like David Foster Wallace incredulously asks he fought a house of course the Final Fantasy 7 remake only gets away with any this because of its direct connection to the original Final Fantasy seven one of the biggest selling games of all time to play this game is to glimpse a kaleidoscope of narrative and structural possibilities that lay outside the feasibility of the typical triple-a game studio many excellent examples of this textural intimate ability come to mind for example you can summon mythical beasts to help you in battle how do you do this well they show up when they feel like it try pitching that to an executive at Electronic Arts there's a late-game boss named Rufus you don't need to know who he is all you need to know is that you can put him to sleep using the sleep spell the game does not explicitly tell you this at the time you meet Rufus you might have had the sleep spell for dozens of hours and never used it maybe you tried it on an enemy grunt at one point and it didn't work well it works on Rufus you can put Rufus to sleep and then completely trash him in like 16 seconds I've done it it's hilarious he deserves it how are you supposed to know that you can do this well similarly one character has a weapon you can only get by stealing it from a boss which you only fight once and then immediately after you get this weapon you can use it in exactly one inconsequential battle before the character it belongs to leaves the party for a period of several hours and the next time you get that character back in your party you find a new weapon for them eleven minutes before you can even control them in a battle again I mean technically in the Final Fantasy 7 remake every weapon for a character has its own strengths and weaknesses it's not a linear progression you're supposed to mix and match and personalize your loadout as the situation demands also you can play through the whole game with that stolen weapon and new game+ though if you take this at face value it's pretty bizarre the Final Fantasy 7 remake luxuriously sponge bathes your brain with the gulabi texture soap slop of full color glossy instruction manual game design this is not the structure of a quote unquote normal triple a prestige video game then again Final Fantasy seven was never exactly a weird game the PlayStation 1 library is bursting full of experimental weird artistic video games most of them Japanese Final Fantasy 7 was never really one of them even at its most experimental and interesting moments it never broke any particular mold however if you wanted to see the modern triple a prestige video game budget taffey stretched and contortionist bent into the weirdest shape we have yet seen look no further than the Final Fantasy 7 remake or death stranding though that is a lower budget game and the Final Fantasy 7 remake is conventionally a bit more fun and so we've arrived at the last disc in the spirit of the original Final Fantasy 7 I have made sure that this last disc includes less than 5% of the reviews total substance I said earlier that it's not possible for me to talk about this game without spoiling its ending so in this section I'd like to talk about the ending of the game if you've been avoiding spoilers and would like to keep doing so I have on screen indicated a time stamp for you to skip to spoiler number 1 the credits are exactly 17 minutes 56 seconds and 54 frames long spoiler number 2 I probably shouldn't have finally started watching the HBO series the leftovers a few days before I started playing the Final Fantasy 7 remake in the leftovers the former Doctor Who actor Christopher Eccleston plays a small town preacher seeing Christopher Eccleston in a church made me think of the 2005 Doctor Who episode Father's Day which also involves a church in this episode the doctor's companion accidentally changes something that happened in the past I think she saves her dad from dying in a car accident incurring the wrath of a species of ghostly alien pterodactyl creatures called the Reapers the Reapers are arbiters of time they make sure destiny stays on its course so when I saw the weird ghosts swirling around eret at the beginning of the Final Fantasy 7 remake and I thought well those weren't there before and she told cloud that the flowers she gave him is the sort of flower that lovers give each other when they're reunited I accidentally remembered remembering that dumb Doctor Who episode while watching the leftovers a few days before and I think has spoiled the whole game for myself it turns out that the weird ghosts called whispers actually are arbiters of fate someone involved in this story probably Aerith has engaged in a little bit of insider trading with the future and the whispers are the SEC come to shut them down by the end of the game has been made sledge-hammering li clear that what you just played was not a remake of Final Fantasy 7 it was a sequel to Final Fantasy 7 in the final encounter you destroyed the arbiters of fate freeing yourself to forge your own destiny in other words the title is not pronounced the Final Fantasy 7 remake it's pronounced the Final Fantasy 7 remake it's a verb not a noun ever since the game came out people have been filling at my various inboxes with expressions of hope to get my take now that it's been several weeks and the youtubers have had their way with it I can deliver my take the way my local Domino's Pizza delivers pizza personally I love it I hope they flat out call the next one Final Fantasy 7 3 I didn't love it at first then I played the game again I didn't do any deep soul-searching to get where I wound up I just got here I've seen a lot of bad opinions comparing the ending of the game to Kingdom Hearts though seriously Kingdom Hearts is not that complicated and also Kingdom Hearts owns these weird ghosts whom the game calls whispers show up at moments when the story diverges or is about to diverge from the original Final Fantasy 7 narrative the whispers is most remarkably dramatic appearance occurs at the end of chapter 4 after the player just finished experiencing a huge deep dive into the side character Jessie a deep dive not present in any form in the original game the whispers later stop cloud from killing RINO they stopped Jessie from throwing the grenade that winds up killing her they revived Barrett after Sephiroth upsettingly kills him the whispers simply will not tolerate any big or small changes to Final Fantasy sevens sacred plot they're indignant fury gradually grows such that by the end of the game they have congealed and conga rated into a shrieking mass that our party members must fight and kill in order to liberate themselves from fate both literally and symbolically the whispers are very clearly a stand-in for the Final Fantasy 7 fan community as such they represent a time-traveler Lee sleight of hand on the part of the writers and designers a magic trick these particular video game developers will only ever be able to pull off once the Final Fantasy 7 remake scree a Tiff's have foreseen every possible form of fan backlash however rather than focus test their way through a psychic minefield they turned that precognition into a metaphor and sprinted with it this is the sort of joke Orson Welles would have perpetrated if he'd been born 50 years later with Final Fantasy 7 fans on high alert as of this perpetration of what many of them considered to be a punking I don't doubt that Final Fantasy 7 3 will stick remarkably close to the original game's plot beats for at least half of its running time after that I personally don't care where it goes they can go to the moon for all I care I'm gonna say this as plainly as I can I trust Tetsuya Nomura I trust Tetsuya Nomura to point me personally toward a good time Tetsuya Nomura isn't just an artist and a video game director I consider him a fashion designer I feel duty-bound from a past life to support the narrative choices of fashion designers for example I saw both Tom Ford films in the theater twice the reason I say I can't talk about this game without discussing its ending unfortunately isn't that exciting it's just this that I might not have actually wanted to replay the game if it had not ended the way it did hearing cloud call Sapphira they butthole before a limit break during the final battle filled me with a hot fury casting a rosy glow backward upon the whole experience and if the whole story is about someone reliving something they already lived how are you not gonna play that twice that's probably why they made hardmode the way they did early in Chapter nine Chocobo Sam tells cloud and Aerith he'll give them the MacGuffin they need if they can properly guess the result of his coin toss on my first playthrough I guessed tails it came up heads knowing from ancient experience that the tiniest dialogue choices matter in woolmarket I reloaded a recent save I guessed heads the result astounded me chocobo Sam showed me the exact same side of the coin he had shown me before it clearly depicted a chocobos head he called it tails what would Rosencrantz and Guildenstern say to this reflecting on this now I wonder if gaming's big spoiler is still going to happen in part two just because everyone is now seeming to think it might not thinking about chocobo Sam I realized that the Final Fantasy 7 remake is saying that when it comes to fate heads and tails are whatever the game designer says they are well that's the end of my spoiler section and now it's time for the bottom line the Final Fantasy 7 remake is more Final Fantasy 7 than Final Fantasy 7 the Final Fantasy 7 remake is an obsessive revisiting of one of the most famous classic video games in history and an elaborate sprawling thesis contemplating the very nature of a remake it's a weird bubbly burger bucket of gloppy textured PlayStation 1 narrative structure with inimitable pacing and solid combat mechanics it is also an engine for its own sequels to play this game is to be constantly aware that it will end on a cliffhanger and you will have to deal with that when it does here and there throughout the game little stubby flourishes design systematic brokenness point the way toward a bigger Longer vaster open world lair sequel for example early in the game there's an item shop whose owner needs you to kill a rat when you killed the rat he expresses his thanks by offering you a discount then NPCs all around town will occasionally randomly exclaim glad we no longer have a rat problem glad we no longer have a rat problem glad we no longer have a rat problem no future side quest results in discounts at a shop or such specific NPC utterances I only noticed this and drilled my brain down on it the second time I played through the game it made me feel a little bit sad it made me remember that this game once existed only as a figment of the collective imaginations of video game of forum dwellers at the turn of this century then it existed as a sort of pejorative it evolved into a philosophical nightmare then it's makers accepted the philosophical nightmare and faced it this long yearned for multimedia product became a promised possibility and then we waited during that wait it somehow felt less possible than it had before its official announcement today the Final Fantasy 7 remake is real and I have devoured it and then on another go-round I hear an NPC yell glad we no longer have a rat problem what we no longer have a rat problem and it makes me remember that I have no idea when the next game in this series is going to exist if you've never played the original Final Fantasy 7 and have no interest in doing so maybe the Final Fantasy 7 remake will make you feel welcome to some club or another then again I can't exactly know what it feels like to not have played the original Final Fantasy 7 as an 18 year old in 1997 and you know what maybe I don't have to I don't have to have not played Final Fantasy 7 in 1997 and you don't have to have played Final Fantasy 7 in 1997 in order to think that this - second moment we're in cloud hits his sword on a doorframe is funny it just is as I reached the end of this review I can't help thinking about chapter 4 chapter 4 consists of new material fleshing out a previously paper-thin character and introducing a new antagonist that mission felt like DLC like the best-possible DLC it made me feel like the world of Final Fantasy 7 had always been real and that now I was going back to it and looking at it again with more adult concerns overall this game did a phenomenal job of making its relatable characters feel like people despite the escalating bizarreness of all the surrounding situations for example late in the game our mission takes us to a men's bathroom in a corporate skyscraper Barrett Tifa and cloud have detonated explosives and been responsible or responsibility adjacent for the deaths of many innocent people at this point in the story they had to kill dozens of security guards to get where they are right now yet despite her brazen involvement in mass murder what unsettles Tifa now is the thought of a man walking in and seeing a woman in the men's bathroom so can I go with you don't want to be here any longer than I have to yeah sure any professional scrutinize er of screenwriting should have an aneurysm at this point on the other hand I love it I keep hearing Tifa in my head what kill for a shower would kill for a shower when she takes a particularly brutal attack that knocks her flailing into the air before even reaching the top of her flight arc as the hideous impact sound effect has just barely begun to fade she with immediacy shrieks I'll be fine I always say if nobody asked you're probably not telling the truth similarly Barrett hyper often quips upon receiving brutal mortal impaling damage from 110-story 60-ton cosmic horrible freak fiend or another I've lived through worse has he though what has this man been through can we get a Barret prequel game because that'd shock the shoes off of Gears of War I'd play that game I've played dirge of cerberus twice simply because it starred Final Fantasy sevens been sent Valentine I know exactly what Square Enix thinks a shooting game is and I would still pay money for a shooter starring the Final Fantasy 7 remake sperrit Wallis at this point in my life I'd have to play any game involving these characters they have been with me for literally most of my life I will play the worst DLC I will play the most terrible spin-offs you definitely shouldn't listen to anything I have to say about the Final Fantasy 7 remake Wow I should have said that at the beginning of this video I could have saved you a lot of time oh well as I always say we hold these truths to be self-evident that video games are created awesome that I was born stupid however I will not die hungry video games for ever action button well that's the end of the video thank you for watching the whole thing or if you skipped to the end thank you for skipping to the end I don't know what you expected here at the end of the video though thanks I know it's a long video however it's the first video that I posted on my channel and I wanted make sure it was a big one I wanted to make sure it contained a little bit or even a lot of everything that I want to do on this channel that's why it's so big if I had unlimited resources wild amounts of resources that I could hire a whole bunch of people I would want to do that every month however I'm not gonna do that every month I'm gonna do slightly less I would die if I tried to do that again so the next game I'm doing is The Last of Us because I realized while reviewing the Final Fantasy 7 remake I said about a million times in that video that it's the worst possible game to review you know what I think it was actually a pretty good game to review because it's not a great game I loved it it's not a great game a lot of it's not even good so I had a good time picking it apart and it gave me this different concept this different relationship with the greatness that I would like to define in the other games that I review on this series so that's good oh my god I'm just thinking about the video I just finished editing the video about 15 minutes ago so I'm sitting here just thinking footage that I could have used in the video that I didn't use like I didn't I woke up in the middle of the night one night night I thought I don't have good footage of cloud climbing the stairs at Shinra tower with the buster sword on his back so I like captured that which meant I had to go through teef as Uncharted thing again for like the this the sixth time I'll tell you what I hate that part III got the the stair footage and I didn't even use it so maybe I will just have the stair footage over here maybe it's been displaying this whole time that I'm talking I wanted to thank a couple of people before this videos everyone's think first of all anyone who's backing me on patreon that's incredible when I put that patreon up I was in the middle of talking to editors at various publications I was talking to like eight different people about possibly contributing freelance articles or videos I thought that the patreon was just gonna be one of like the six things I was doing every month somehow it has turned into a full-time job which is incredible thanks for the full-time job thanks in particular to Josh Watson who sent me this microphone boosted discord GG slash action but he was a super server booster before there was even a patreon he believed in me and it was very encouraging he continued to believe in me so much that he edited the battle sequence of this this this video the the chapter for disk for sorry the disk name is kind of dumb I admit it's a stupid gimme the he added he lined up the footage in there and I gave him he asked if he could help and I gave him the most meticulously difficult weirdest one to do so he did it and that's incredible to me the footage was very specific it needed very specific footage I did a little bit of editing on it as well let's see if you can see which parts were mine I also want to say thank you to Travis Gifford who threw Alienware got me this beautiful PC that are used to edit this computer I'm not sure if it's really a good one it's got the rise in 16 core and it's like a 20 atti is that a good one 64 gigabytes of RAM is that a lot I'm joking uh no really I'm not joking I'm not a computer guy that's a joke I am a computer guy this computer is pretty good every time I edit a video I force myself to make it weirder and harder and stranger and I force myself to learn new things and just throw new stuff in there so this computer helped me make this job very difficult for myself and also in between the time that I launched the patreon and now I got this chair I ordered this chair in March I ordered this microphone windscreen in March and it's nothing ever showed up I ordered it from Amazon didn't show up ordered it from Sweetwater didn't show up ordered it from B&H photo showed up so B&H photo prior to Manhattan thank you I also got these lights to see these lights I don't even have them really set up because I don't I ain't no Cinema cinematograph err is that what they call it I ain't one of those I can probably pretend to be one later no see this mustache is it's not on purpose I tried to shave the the water went cold I cut my neck what was I even talking about I want to say thank you to a bunch of youtubers some of them don't even know me the digital foundry game makers toolkit happy console gamer night sky Prince I love watching those channels some of them don't know that I exist probably though I like those guys and they made me think while I'm sitting at my job I'm like maybe I can make a brand and and make content on the internet maybe I can try that and then I I just I didn't and then I launched that patreon while very very ill with the coronavirus I launched the patreon just to give myself sister I still can't breathe I'm sorry you might have heard me breathing a lot more through my mouth in that video than I've ever breathed through my mouth in previous videos I'm sorry about that I'm sorry I was very sick and I'm just like I'm gonna make a patreon I wrote that patreon pitch on my phone in my bed while sick you made a fire on and it's wild that you all are enabling me to do this very very ridiculous thing that I've decided to do oh well anyway I believe I owe some patreon shoutouts to people on here I believe a duty-bound I'm required by law to shout you out so I'm gonna look at the screen and then I'm gonna read it into the camera I'm gonna edit out the looking at the screen so that you think I'm doing it off the top of my head so here we go Justin's Kamarov ski Josh Watson go luck I think it's pronounced go luck Jacob Gillespie Jess Smith woody Jiang John her brand Astro Ladd Bernard King kiyose red muffler man Reza Serrano tie I know you stole my glasses I have four pairs of those did you get one of them or did you buy them elsewhere the laser girls Joshua Jarvis Anton novice Matthew Dumont Dave Brown Sam G James Schrader or Schroder sorry my glasses are I can only see the shapes of words James Schroder James Schrader Thank You Christopher Loeb a David lang staff Jacob David Shaw Nate mimsy I would like to thank mimsy for helping me color correct the game footage that my Elgato Game Capture HD 60s Plus had the footage all washed out it looked weird so she color matched it to the official trailers of the game thank you for doing that mimsy mimzy's in the other room I don't know if she heard me oh she just said that she did hear me oh that's creepy stop listening to me record my video that's a joke Ryan Lange Keith Miller Steve and Taylor sighs its Stephen errs I don't have my glasses on Steve and Taylor the coconut kid Jonathan longnecker I'm just holding this lip balm why am i doing it looks weird Scott Olson Morales Dario Burt Anja Kenny Carranza Ranger Mankin Seth Carlson Charles Schultz not Charles Scholes the creator of peanuts he wouldn't back this patreon with a ten-foot pole Sarah Sophia or Sophia Jacob Gillespie oh wait it's wrapped around it's wrapped around I can just oh I guess I owe everybody to shoutouts well I'll just I'll just duplicate this just watch it twice I'll shout you out again next time you know I've been having some difficulty with the audio here hardware software everything is just driving me wild and I hope the audio is good on this one my hair's all my hair looked okay when I started this now I'm sweating under the hot lights my Elgato key light is it's not actually a hot light now they're not hot they don't create any temperature at all in my day lights were hot well that's all I got time for today by which I mean I just spent a hundred and fifty eight hours editing this thing in two hundred hours researching it so it's kind of you know I like my steel case just your chair headrest look at this it's like being at the dentist I want to thank the heck yeah baby's forgiving me a TV when my TV broke my TV broke my TV broke and oh my god that was really loud and the heck yeah babies gave me a TV they brought me a TV beautiful thank you very much for that I don't want to thank Alistair for arranging to have his old Steelcase leap chair delivered here the day before my chair that I had paid for arrived so now mimzy's got your chair and it's wonderful we've got two wonderful chairs in here that's great I wanted to thank Germaine for his twitch chat comment where he said Tifa looks like a Final Fantasy cosplayer because that inspired me to write the line about Tifa looks like exactly what she a cosplay winner of a square-enix sponsored Final Fantasy 7 cosplay contest I thought that was funny that I mean that entertained me so thanks for thanks for giving me that and letting me steal it from you that's all I have time for I don't have time for any more check me out I'll see you next time stay tuned hey guys is that the latest hey guys ever in a YouTube video stay tuned I'm a little bit loopy I've been up for a very long time what was I saying stay tuned check me out tune in to twitch TV slash action button where I'll be streaming some fun games in the upcoming days I'm gonna start a podcast soon soundcloud.com slash action button will be one of the ways to listen to it discord GG slash action button patreon.com slash action button basically action button on all this stuff except this YouTube channel because I don't have a custom URL yet hopefully I can get one at some point someday here's what I want to leave you with I want to leave you with this montage that everybody thumbs ups in the Final Fantasy 7 remake and they all thumbs up really weird I I started to make a montage of every thumbs up in a cutscene in the Final Fantasy 7 remake started to make a montage and then I was like my god what am i doing I'm in the middle of editing this video and I just started off the top of my head trying to grab as many thumbs ups as I could I mentioned it to Josh Watson in the discord he went and made it he went had just made it a montage of every thumbs up in the game now I haven't counted them I was gonna count them and give you all a number I was I could put numbers on the screen I'm not even gonna put numbers on the screen I'm just gonna put it up count along at home I'll put some fun music under it we can just watch that's that's how we'll send this thing off but the little thumbs up montage of every thumbs so I'm gonna send you off with the thumbs up montage thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh and also weenies remake Final Fantasy 6 for the PlayStation 5 thank you

Channel: Action Button

Views: 686,481

Keywords:

Id: Hu4H5ykBP0I

Length: 198min 55sec (11935 seconds)

Published: Mon May 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TarJack]

Is this Tim’s first superreview since leaving Kotaku? I’ll need to watch in a bit, he’s been hyping this on Twitter.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/Firvulag]

His written reveiws on Actionbutton.net are also exceptionally good.

His Bioshock Infinite review where he spends the first 3000 words talking about the box art is phenomenal.

Edit: Oh my god this video is 3.5 horus long. Be still my heart

[u/Valkenhyne]

I swear Tim could review a brick wall and I'd be there for it

[u/aroundme]

inb4 people complain about its length.

I love Tim's videos and could listen to him talk about anything for hours. FF7R totally deserves this much prose. (But heaven forbid Joseph Anderson make a 4 hour video reviewing 3 games.)

VIDEO GAMES FOREVER

[u/kidkolumbo]

Around 1:17 Tim starts talking about what I've felt since I booted up Dragon Warrior as a kid, that at least part of the reason turn based games are turn based are a limitation of the tech, and hearing it from someone as invested into Final Fantasy as he is it feels validating.

Few RPGs, even the most hardcore of the actual old ones require players to pay as much attention to the higher elements of their battle systems as the remake.

Tim is speaking directly to me.

[u/KevinCow]

Oh no. This is going to be long, isn't it?

3:18:15

Dear god.

I can't wait to watch every second of it.

[u/SpagettInTraining]

I was hoping he would go in-depth with the story speculation of all the "levels" that MaximillianDood popularized on the Easy Allies Spoilercast of the game, but it was still immensely enjoyable. Can't wait to see his The Last of Us video.

[u/dztruthseek]

I didn't know he left Kotaku. There's no telling how many people unsubscribed from that channel afterwards.