i've been following the final fantasy vii franchise for over a decade now. i first got introduced to it when cloud joined the roster of super smash bros. for 3ds/wii u in 2015. he was my main in that game so i got curious about him and the game he was from.
since then, i've known about the game generally and have kept up with a lot of the lore / characters. i saw reviews of remake when it first dropped in 2020, and in particular i got into it a bit more as well when sephiroth dropped as a dlc character for smash ultimate (his victory splashscreen with the se phi roth chant from his theme song while he's surrounded by flames is by far the coolest of any character in the game. also his reveal trailer where he kills master hand and basically almost kills mario, but mario gets saved by the esrb rating LOL). i assumed i would probably never get to play it though, because i didn't own a next-gen console or mostly buy anything other than nintendo.
that's why i was shocked (in a good way) and horribly excited when square enix announced they would be porting the ff7 remake project, starting with remake but eventually also rebirth and the unreleased third game, to switch 2 and xbox. this is particularly huge news because final fantasy hasn't been on a nintendo console since the original final fantasy vii in 1997. square enix and nintendo had a falling out because square chose to build vii for the playstation instead of the n64, and they hadn't released a mainline game on nintendo again until they released a few ports in 2019.
my overall thoughts: in my (definitely very biased) opinion, this game is a masterpiece.
attempting to be a bit more objective, i would consider this game a must-play for at least all nintendo switch 2 owners. i still have yet to see a switch or switch 2 game that matches this game in scale, or looks even close to as good as this game. the fact that this game is only slightly more than half the price that nintendo sells its own first party switch 2 games for makes it even more of a no brainer. my dad had been (fairly) making fun of me basically since i bought this console for paying $500+ for a console with games that looked like glorified ps3 titles. he stopped when he saw this game. it finally lives up to the claims that the switch 2 can handle visuals about on par with the ps4, runs incredibly, and honestly still blows my mind when i think about the fact that this is all being powered by a handheld.
i think this game is incredible, mass-appealing, and without question the most grand / visually stunning / technically marvelous game available for switch 2 as of now.
characters
easily the greatest strength of this game is the characters and world building. it's been a long time since i played a game where i genuinely got deeply attached to each and every single one of the characters, but this game is outstanding in that regard.
while i admittedly haven't played the original (it came bundled with my early release edition of remake, but i'm waiting to play all three of the remake project before playing og), i know enough about it to know that the character development for many of the side characters is greatly expanded in this iteration.
we get to see backstory for all of them, share unique moments and dialogue, learn about their backgrounds and get to see parts of their personality, and see how they interact with each other in a team dynamic. it really does feel like a tight knit group and i grew to become fond of each of them, like they were part of my own team.
particularly, i'm a huge fan of how this game wrote both aerith and tifa. one of my longstanding gripes with anime has been the way female protagonists / supporting characters are almost always written. almost without fail, they either start off as comic relief love interest, or get horribly power gapped by the main characters a few arcs in to the point where they are relegated to being damsels in distress. i really like how both of them are written, and how significant their contributions are to the overall story. they both remain powerful and relevant till the end, and i particularly love a lot of the scenes with aerith (avoiding spoilers, one with her and marlene is one of my favorites and i love how it really shows her strength of character).
story
depending on who you ask, the story of this game is either great or a mixed bag. i would say that i fall somewhere in the middle, definitely closer towards great.
before i played it, i had been reading a lot online about how this game is really more of a sequel to the 1997 original than a remake. i figured that this was just boomer talk akin to "gen-wunners" in pokemon (people who are adamant that gen 1 is by far the best in pokemon despite the obvious gameplay glitches, lackluster story, and missing features) driven by purists who were upset at the inevitable tweaks made to the story.
after playing, i can confirm that this is indeed sort of a sequel, although i would maintain that it is definitely a remake first and arguably also a sequel. i really want to avoid spoilers, but what i will say is that there are critical plot points at the end of the game that stray from the original, in a kind of meta way, through the addition of "whispers" which were not in the original game and whose existence is explained in the brand new climax. this is by far the most polarizing part of the game. i honestly thought it was super cool and something really creative that i've never seen in a game before. i can see if you're a huge fan of the original, though, why it would be off-putting, or even concerning regarding the future of where the story of the remake project will go from here vs. the original.
in terms of the actual story itself, if i'm being objective it definitely has both good and bad elements. given how incredible the game is, i'd say the story is ironically one of the parts of the game that is furthest from being a perfect experience (which is crazy to say, because this is still one of my fav stories of any game).
in particular, i heavily agree with complaints about pacing. it's kind of frustrating because the highs of this game are so high that the way some of the story beats were handled are just so jarring and break up the pace so badly they make me almost wish they were removed. the worst offender is definitely the whole wall market section in chapter 9. i'd say the entire story up until now was super high action and exhilarating, and i was absolutely hooked. then, chapter 9 happened and i proceeded to get trapped in a six hour long slog-fest that made it almost insultingly obvious that this segment of the game had been intentionally stretched out just to pad the runtime of the game.
obviously taking a 4-5 hour segment from the original and turning it into a full-length triple a game is really difficult, but i just wish that they had either added more content or just shortened the game to be honest. i don't think anyone would have complained given the fair pricing of the game, and it def would have resolved a lot of the pacing issues. or maybe even splitting the game into half instead of three parts.
other than that, i think the story is really impressive. barring some instances i thought were kind of odd because they felt like the game almost expected you to have played the og already or have some background knowledge (e.g. they never really explain what is going on with sephiroth, why he is there, why he is bad, why he is still alive, or what his relation is with cloud at all in this game), i think most people will be really immersed and will have a great time playing through it.
sephiroth
i figured that sephiroth in this game basically warrants his own section given how much i have to say about him.
sephiroth is kind of a mythical figure in gaming at this point. he's one of the most famous, memorable, and iconic villains of any game. sephiroth from the og was critically acclaimed and is still beloved to this day.
he was super polarizing in remake because his role was significantly changed. in the og, he's more talked about than he is present for a lot of the game, which kind of adds to his mythos in the game until you finally get to see him and learn about his backstory. while i haven't played it, the way people describe him really reminds of ozai from avatar the last airbender, one of my favorite villains of any media franchise. you don't get to see him properly until very late in the story, and his character is instead built up from seeing the way people describe him and fear him, almost deifying him and making his on screen reveal that much more terrifying.
instead, he is very present in the remake. he first shows up in chapter 2 of the game, about an hour in, and has many appearances as visions / ptsd hallucinations / memories in cloud's head, where he basically mocks and taunts cloud.
a lot of people were again really pissed at this change and said that the game had ruined sephiroth. by making him ever-present, they removed the mystique around him and made him less scary. i would honestly disagree with this; every scene he had on screen was riveting. he captured my attention every time he showed up and did a great job of being creepy, terrifying, and cool all at the same time, like the original. that being said, i can totally understand why the change would bother someone who'd been a long time fan of the original.
to reiterate, the one thing i did think they really didn't handle well was explaining what on earth was going on with sephiroth. he kind of just shows up in chapter 2 with no explanation as to who he is or how cloud knows him. i don't even think he gets mentioned by name until a bit later, and every time he shows up there is no explanation of whether he is alive or not, and whether he is real or a hallucination of cloud's memories (although this one is probably intentional if you have some background). most importantly, the game never explains his significance in the story or cloud's life. this is fine in the og, because he isn't actually on screen and his significance gets explained pretty soon after the events that remake covers, but it's pretty damning in remake because he actually is a part of the story as the final boss of the game, and the game never gets the chance to explain who he is.
the effect is unfortunately that within remake, he's kind of just a cool looking anime-character type villain with nothing more than a brief explanation from aerith about how he's really bad and needs to be stopped or something (some generic baddie slop). so while is is really cool, and i'm glad he was included in the game as a general fan and someone who is familiar with his character, i do see the argument that he might have been better left out of remake and instead served a role closer to og.
(as an aside, i also kinda thought the final fight with him was a bit underwhelming. i found sephiroth to be drastically easier than the boss right before him, but his theme song is still just as majestic as og so all is forgiven)
gameplay
i love the gameplay. i think it blends traditional rpg and real-time action perfectly using the atb system. it reminds me of the combat system of dbz: kakarot in a weird way, but drastically better refined than that game (LOL)
in particular, i really love the weapon upgrade system. i love that you can build each weapon into a way that matches your playstyle, and particularly that you're not locked into any one weapon because you can use the skills from one weapon on any of them once you've reached 100% proficiency (which is really easy to do).
i also love the difficulty tuning of the game. for the first few chapters, i was kind of just mashing / relying on punisher mode with cloud and basic attacking everything. however, the game's difficulty soon basically nudges you into properly leveraging the atb system and taking advantage of skills, and once you get far enough in the game, properly using materia / magic. it all felt really natural and intuitive, like i was getting the hang of the more complicated game mechanics right when the game wanted me to, without really having to try.
there are two types of boss in this game: human bosses (SOLDIERs) and "monster" bosses. at first i had a really strong preference for the human boss battles because i found them to be more engaging / "cool" but over time the monster bosses really grew on me. i thought the bosses were really satisfying (except hell house. screw hell house.) and it was fun to retry battles with different materia setups after losing to try and exploit each boss's weaknesses.
visuals and performance
this game is absolutely stunning. it looks incredible from start to finish and is cinematic enough that the cutscenes could have been a movie.
i was mesmerized from start to finish, and as a primarily nintendo gamer, this is the best looking game i've ever played.
in particular, i was shocked at how well the game ran, both on handheld and docked. it basically never dropped frames, in combat or in cutscene, and i never noticed any sort of performance hiccup to break my immersion.
based on what i've seen online, this port of the game on switch 2 looks pretty firmly better than the ps4 version and often on par with the ps5. that's insane given that its running on a handheld.
i loved the cinematics, i loved the cutscenes, and i truly cannot emphasize how well shot / beautiful this game is. the music is phenomenal, the visuals are phenomenal, and the way it's all stitched together is phenomenal.
if nothing else, this game is worth playing just for the music and cinematics alone. the ending cutscene just before the credits, and the song that played during it and the credits (hollow) is something i've been thinking about nonstop since finishing the game.
conclusion
i think this is a no brainer on switch 2 and a borderline must-play even on other consoles. its definitely worth picking up if you're looking for a new game to play.
while it's definitely not without its faults if i'm being honest, the high points of this game more than make up for them and its a memorable experience that you'll probably be thinking about long after the game is over.
i knew that rebirth had been confirmed at some point to be coming to switch 2, but i was shocked at how fast it got confirmed after remake launched. it's already been confirmed with a release date of june 3rd, and for me, that couldn't come fast enough.
final fantasy vii: REMAKE has already become arguably my favorite game of all time. its an incredible, complete package that can be fun for pretty much anyone. no matter who you are, just for the story, characters, world, and impact it will have on you after playing, i can't recommend it enough.