The final novel in
my Jacques McKeown trilogy, Will Leave the
Galaxy for Good, is now available on audible.com. Tell them
Yahtzee sent ya. They won't care. Second Wind [Intro Music] Hello, and welcome to my review of Final Fantasy
7 Remake, Episode Two. Oh, sorry, I must have briefly flashed into a fucking sensible timeline
for a moment there. You know what, title namers? You win. Words officially don't mean anything.
Future video game academics will just have to intuit that Rebirth is the sequel to Remake
somehow. Guess they could always look it up, but words don't mean anything anymore so they'd
have to use the new Bullshit Decimal System where it's filed under Mangrove Underpants dot
Catalepsy. Right, sorry, got it out of my system, now. So, having progressed through a hearty .5% of
the original game's plot in Final Fantasy 7 Remake Episode Spooge, Final Fantasy 7 Remake Episode
Dingbat opens with Cloud Strife, Mr. T, Manic Pixie Dream Girl A, Mr. T's dog and Manic Pixie
Dream Girl B embarking upon what was originally the middle third of the game, which, speaking as
someone with still only a passing acquaintance with the original, seems to have consisted largely
of pissing about. There's a scene early on where Manic Pixie Dream Girl B - the wholesome one,
not the one who dresses like a crossfit-themed dominatrix - gleefully does a little skip and
goes "That's the first step on our new journey!" And I very clearly remember yelling at the screen.
"Journey to where? To do what?" We have a vague notion that our goal is to stop Sephiroth, but we
don't know how to do that or where the bugger is, the most reliable method we've had for finding
him so far is to feed Cloud expired prescription meds until he hallucinates him again. There's a
bunch of weird pale blokes in robes congregating towards something and Cloud gets it into his
head that they'll lead them to Sephiroth, but they could also be dehydrated Emperor
Palpatine cosplayers for all the evidence presented. I do note that following them just
happens to take us through a luxury cruise, a beach resort and a theme park, at every one of
which the manic pixie affiliated portion of the entourage goes "Oh hey well since we're here..."
Yeah, good hustle, girls. I've tried that one a few times. "No really, this vat of ice cream is
totally a business expense, Nick, it's research for the next time I review a Kirby game." So for
a large part the plot of Final Fantasy 7 Kumquat feels directionless and lacking in urgency.
It's Persona 3 syndrome again where the first nine hundred hours of gameplay is summarised
in one paragraph of the Wikipedia plot summary. And the lack of prevailing wind combined with the
commitment to adapting the goofier elements of the original does tend to fuck up the emotional tone.
There's a subplot in the midgame where Barrett has to confront a former comrade who's gone
insane with grief and PTSD and ends up having to put him out of his misery and it's actually
tragic and well told and emotionally engaging, but then while Barrett is crying over the body
of his friend, a fucking circus strongman in a cape and little red pants shows up in a monster
truck and attempts to alleviate Barrett's grief by strategically flexing at him. Not for the
first time, playing through these remakes as a non-fan feels like being a new boyfriend in
a well established friend group. Especially when Manic Pixie Dream Girl C shows up, the
ninja girl who gets introduced about nine times before officially joining the party, always
presented like the game was convinced I was going to fall in love with the kooky moo and her clumsy
antics, when in reality I was mostly cringing and worrying about how this was going to affect the
manic pixie dream girl tag team rota. Blimey, how much can one man be manic pixie dream
girled without going into diabetic shock? But moving on. New for Final Fantasy
7 Balustrade is open world gameplay, including having to unlock radio towers,
climb up sequences of yellow painted ledges, and crafting mechanics. And try to imagine my
face transitioning through one of those Faces of Meth photo sequences as I read those out. It's
not that I kneejerk hate yellow paint ledges like Green Lantern without a stepladder, it's that
in this game they're always laid out in flat, tedious sequences where all you do is hold
up to slowly ascend like a brain damaged parakeet looking for the cuttlefish. Who the
fuck is Chadley anyway, I looked it up and I know they weren't in the original game, who
are they to muscle their way into the remake like K-Pop Data from Star Trek and oblige us
to do all this radio tower twattery. Still, it's only an open world game in the sense that
Nicholas Cage is a good actor - it's only true about half the time. Prolonged periods are spent
away from the open world in linear story missions. Unnecessarily prolonged, perhaps, but not quite
as much as the ones in the first game were. In fact, I find I generally enjoyed the combat
more, too, I can't quite put my finger on how it's changed unless it's just that a few more of
my brain cells have died since then. But as the party continued to accrue new members, every
time I was forced by contrived story reasons to switch them around to maximize manic pixie
efficiency or whatever I'd make a noise like a frustrated walrus trying to open a ring pull tuna
can sorta like this "NYAAAAOOOOOORH" - 'cos I knew it meant having to spend another ten minutes in
the fucking menus swapping their Materia around, spending their upgrade points, managing equipment,
making sure none of them have pooey nappies, so that was annoying. But that's only for combat,
and combat seems to be something Final Fantasy 7 Porridge only falls back on when it can't
think of another bloody minigame. In the grand Final Fantasy 8 tradition one of the main side
activities is an anomalously popular collectible card game, and I tend to avoid such things in
RPGs because inevitably they'll explain the rules and inevitably I'll listen with my mouth
hanging open and the Inspector Gadget theme tune running through my head and then after the
tutorial never play it or think about it again. But then there's a whole chapter of the critical
path devoted to a tournament of this fucking game that I had to opt out of, and when I heard
the incredulous voice of the tournament manager asking if I was really quitting, my stubborn pride
forced me to back down and learn this stupid card game I didn't find fun just so an NPC wouldn't
make a disappointed face. Probably a me problem, but it's just the start of the minigame
safari. There's motorbiking, chocobo wrangling, rock'em sock'em robots, dolphin riding,
a veritable buffet of rhythm challenges, although now I'm thinking about it the
original was about as rife with minigames, and tended to be much worse at explaining
them. In fact, cards on the table, lol, I enjoyed playing Final Fantasy 7 Remake Part
Knickerbocker more than I enjoyed Final Fantasy 7 Remake Part Jockstrap, and probably
more than I'd enjoy playing the original, but I still don't *like* it that much. The
way we speed from concept to concept indulging five hundred different game mechanics makes
the game feel a mile wide and an inch thick, and every time one of the manic pixie dream girls
emphasises their feelings by holding up two fists under their chin and doing a little partial squat,
it really, really looks like they're farting.
