An Introduction

This work is in my eyes 95% complete, but that is as far as it’s going to get. The two glaring faults are the lack of a summary-type conclusion and the fact that chapter 3 remains as it was from my first draft of this essay. I made the mistake that everyone warns new writers about – I made my first project way too long and waited too long to put it out. In an ideal world, I would play the game again and then rewrite this entire thing, but one, I don’t have my copy of the game anymore, and two, I really want to get this out there so I can work on other things. In most respects though, it is a fully functional commentary of the game and I hope that you’ll find value in reading through it.

Chapter 1: The Destruction of Mako Reactor One

There’s no narration as we’re shown Midgar, a city constructed on steel plates above barren land, first through its industrial infrastructure — massive support beams, unending construction powered by the mako energy reactors juxtaposed as a reflection in a child’s eyes. The citizens offer no consolation to Aerith as they bump into her in the street, spilling her basket of flowers. One is trampled right before she’s able to rescue them. Her reaction is resigned. The camera pans out, music growing louder and grander along with it as we’re shown the sheer size of the city. Cue title card. From the cityscape we refocus on Cloud, iconic Buster Sword on his back atop a train pulling into Mako Reactor One. The train stops, Jessie and Briggs take down two security officers in unison, swiftly and quietly. Wedge appears slightly after them. They turn to Barret and with a nod of his head he signals them to proceed. He calls Cloud who leaps from the train and the camera pans over his shoulder where it’ll stay for much of the game as the player is put in control. Two more guards appear but the group slips by leaving Cloud to deal with them. After a short tutorial explaining the basics of combat, we are straight into gameplay.

I took the time to describe the opening cutscene of Final Fantasy 7: Remake to try and get across how it’s able to convey a lot of high level information elegantly. We understand the setting of a cold industrialised city and the key structures of the mako reactors. Conveyed are the moods of quiet introspection, disappointment from small unkindnesses but also the grand sense of scale and adventure, wind blowing at your hair as you ride on top of a train instead of inside it. It also does a great job of establishing characters in the scarce few seconds dedicated to each. To top it off, it does this all with no dialogue or narration whatsoever. This sets the pace for the rest of the game as well – it flows in a similar manner as a straight shot of events with next to no time skips, the transitions between gameplay and cutscene performed seamlessly. Exposition is carried out relentlessly without reiteration and character struggles are often laid out in subtext.

Chapter 1 follows the events of Barret’s cell of Avalanche, an eco-terrorist group bent on taking down the Shinra Company, attempting to destroy Mako Reactor One. Mako is the literal lifeblood of the planet thus the use of the reactors is killing the planet, which is why Avalanche wants to stop the Shinra Company. Barret makes a big deal of explaining this to Cloud as they progress through the complex, doing his best to appear threatening and imposing. His natural goofiness and lack of composure shines through in moments like him acknowledging his hands shaking as they later exfiltrate from the exploding reactor. This is what makes him shine the most in chapter one, we see past the ‘charismatic revolutionary leader’ persona that he puts on as we’re shown how he has a deep personal care for the people around him and the work that he’s doing. This brings pathos to his character and judging from the way Jessie dismisses his preaching to Cloud, the team rallies around him more so for this connection than his posturing.

Alongside the story and characters, the combat system is introduced piece by piece across the different encounters. We get two attack buttons, basic and unique. Opening the battle menu slows down time and allows you to cast skills unique to each character, spells that can be equipped universally as well as items (Four of these can be bound to a button for quick menu-less access). Defensively there’s an evade and a block. It’s important to note that the evade roll doesn’t have many i-frames (or any at all) and the block doesn’t entirely mitigate damage. Much like how it would be in a turn-based combat system, accumulating damage is unavoidable. Therefore, although most of the common mobs in the game are trivial to defeat, a macro challenge is presented in making it to the next rest bench to recover HP and MP while expending the least amount of resources. Great effort has been put into making each combat encounter feel satisfying despite the fairly low stakes through their visual and sound design. All the characters have dynamic and expressive attack animations as well as hit sound effects that come together to make the combat flashy and fast but just weighty enough to sell the swings and punches the characters are making. It also helps that the transition in and out of combat is completely seamless, so once you’re done Cloud is back sprinting off to the next destination without delay.

That’s not to say that all of the common mobs are complete pushovers though. Introduced in this chapter are the Shock Troopers, first in a type of resilient enemy that the game throws at you. These Shock Troopers dodge all normal and unique attacks until they themselves go on the offense but are very weak to magic, which pretty much instantly kills them. Despite that, they can be a momentum killer for the player as they have to decide between spamming attacks that won’t hit but allow for them to build ATB gauge to use magic which puts them in danger of being hit or putting Cloud in punisher mode and holding block, waiting to counterattack. However, I think the Shock Troopers are one of the better implementations of this type of enemy — they do force you to slow down but there is a clear and consistent way of overcoming them. They’re also introduced alone, giving the player a trial run to find out how to beat them before the following battle where they appear in a pack of three along with two sentry turrets. The sentry turrets make things more complicated because taking them out requires you to switch to Barret, though the game’s targeting system adds frustration to taking them down. Barret can destroy one sentry with a single use of his unique attack, Overcharge, but because you can’t slow down the game and select your target from a list like you can when using abilities or spells, you have to fumble with the lock on option while using the right stick to toggle targets. This leaves you open to attacks from the shock troopers and can lead you to being stunlocked as the troopers attack you one at time, making what would otherwise be a well designed encounter a pain to get through.

The boss fights are where the real challenges arise. Take the Scorpion Sentinel boss fight that appears at the end of chapter one right as Cloud and Barret plant the bomb. The Sentinel is weak to attacks from a specific element, in this case thunder as most mechanical enemies are in the game, so you’re expected to use basic attacks and blocks to fill the ATB gauge to be able to use spells and abilities to put the Sentinel into the pressured state. In this state, the enemy is generally unable to attack and the stagger gauge that’s right under the enemy’s health gauge fills quicker as you attack it. Once the stagger gauge is maxed out, the enemy is staggered and takes a lot more damage from attacks. Thus we can see the way the designers intend the combat to flow — use basic attacks to fill the ATB on characters to use spells/abilities the boss is weak against to put them into pressure, fill the stagger gauge to stagger the boss and deal lots of damage. This stagger mechanic is present with common enemies too, but their gauges get filled really quickly by normal attacks anyway and by the time you’ve staggered them they’re probably already near death. This ‘optimal combat flow’ encourages switching around your characters so that you can build ATB on the character who has the most relevant skills/abilities for the fight — playing in this way is also when the combat is at its most dynamic and well paced. Failing to catch on to this and sticking to one character through the entire combat encounter results in slower and more grindy feeling combat. Thus the combat is designed in a way that encourage switching between characters, for example Barret doesn’t use his Overcharge unique ability on his own, so you would want to periodically switch to him to make use of that additional DPS. The enemy AI in the game also handles targeting quite simply — if they aren’t currently executing a series of attacks targeted at a particular character, they will snap and target whatever character the player is controlling. As a result if the character you’re controlling drops to low health, switching away from them is a good way to keep enemy attacks off of them as well.

The Sentinel also introduces two of the boss-exclusive mechanics present in most boss fights. The first is when the Sentinel goes into a phase where its left and right legs become targetable with their own heal gauges and you’re encouraged to destroy them which causes the stagger gauge on the Sentinel to increase dramatically. This is repeated across the different bosses in so many different variants of left and right appendage, it’s pretty amusing to see what classification the game has given to each of the bosses’ limbs. These targeted areas encourage you to have to position yourself in the correct positions to hit them, which gives you something additional to worry about, and some versions even require you to use ranged attacks to hit those areas, necessitating a swap to a ranged character. The other mechanic comes in the third phase of the fight where the Sentinel charges its Tail Laser, forcing Cloud and Barret to take cover behind pieces of debris before it fires. The first time it happens it’s precluded by a cutscene and dialogue between the two party members basically instructing the player what to do. Later on, it’s a test of how quickly you can respond to the cue that it’s charging it’s laser and take cover in time. However as the attacks are so clearly telegraphed and also have a very clear and invariable mechanical result, what are visually and narratively supposed to be these ultra devastating attacks to be scared of are actually kind of dry. There’s nothing ever surprising about them, boiling the moment down to ‘did you recognise the tell in time or not’.

After defeating the Sentinel the bomb timer starts, and the team have either twenty or thirty minutes to leave depending on which option the player chose when planting the bomb. This is the first of the choices that the game offers to the player, and it takes the opportunity to reflect the decision you made very clearly in having the bomb timer displayed on the top of the screen as you make your way out. Subsequent selectable decision points come in the form of dialogue options, which have far less tangible consequences, so it’s good that the game takes this first moment to telegraph that your choices will have impacts on the game and plot in this way.

Chapter 2: Fateful Encounters

The team makes it into a utility tunnel leading out of the reactor complex as multiple explosions go off overhead. Jessie is worried that her bombs were too strong, tension ratcheting upward as the team pushes through. We share our first glimpse of the city on fire and in breakdown with our team, the game positioning us through the framing of the scene right beside their disbelief and shock. This alignment of player and protagonist perspective is kept up for much of the game. It’s not God of War where the entire game is a single shot but the effect is similar, bringing us closer and creating empathy with the characters as they go through the trials and tribulations the story takes us through.

As Cloud makes his way through a burning Sector 8 a section of highway crumbles, blocking off his way to the train station. Cloud turns and is face to face with Sephiroth, the arch-antagonist of FF7’s tale. The burning city merges with the burning hometown of Cloud’s memories. He confronts sephiroth and some truths are established for us. Sephiroth had in the past razed Cloud’s hometown and personally murdered his family. And now Sephiroth needs Cloud’s strength for something. When Cloud replies with his sword, the illusion is dispelled and Sephiroth is revealed to be merely a phantom.

Sephiroth’s appearances here and in a few other scenes a la visions in Clouds head serve mostly to build him up as a threat for when he appears in the flesh later on. But what’s more interesting here is decision to introduce him far earlier than he was in the original. FF7R’s producer Yoshinori Kitase lays the rationale for this in an interview with IGN.
(quote direct from IGN article)

“In the original players had no prior knowledge of that world or many of its characters, so I really wanted to build Sephiroth up as this really major threat. You don’t see him, you see the after effects of what he’s done. You hear rumors about him to build up the fear of this massive evil presence without actually seeing it.

“Obviously nowadays, of course, everyone knows who Sephiroth is, so I thought we didn’t really need to go quite as far to hold him back and to hide so much,” he explained.

“Looking at the the remake overall, it’s clear that Sephiroth is going to be this massive presence overarching throughout the whole of the story, and this rival of Cloud’s throughout the whole story,” he added. “So I really felt I want to include that in this first game in the project, to really have that feeling of him as a really clear presence right from the start.”

Importantly what he’s saying makes it clear that the script takes into consideration the audience’s prior understanding of the game’s characters and plot points. There’s a balance to be struck here, where too much reliance on the prior text makes for a work that’s indecipherable on its own. Sephiroth and the original FF7 may be mainstays in gaming culture, but it is always possible for someone to pick the game up with no prior knowledge whatsoever. Therefore, the game needs to make sure at the barest minimum its story beats can work independently of the original.

A few rooftops and streets later Cloud meets Aerith on Loveless Avenue. When she turns to the camera, phantom Sephiroth is next to her, smugly telling Cloud that he’s ‘too weak to save anyone.’ If you’re familiar with FF7, the implication here is obvious. Sephiroth is referencing events in the original game, where he kills Aerith and Cloud is unable to do anything about it. Cloud’s ‘powerlessness’ is twofold, Cloud being as his current self being too weak to prevent her death, and the fact that in the audience’s minds, Aerith’s death has already happened. As far as we know, the Aerith in the remake is doomed to this fate as well.

During this first meeting Aerith also gives Cloud a flower telling him it symbolises a reunion. On a pure narrative level, Cloud’s resemblance to Zack Fair (The protagonist of the prequel, Crisis Core, who was dating Aerith.) is not lost upon her. He’s dressed in the same Solider First Class uniform and he has the Buster Sword on his back, passed down from Zack. Added onto that is when he dies at the end of Crisis Core, he bequeaths the Buster Sword to Cloud making him Zack’s living legacy (this being directly stated by Zack as he dies). This makes this moment a ‘reunion’ between Aerith and Zack through Cloud. Another step further, on a meta-textual this is Aerith and Cloud seeing each other for the first time again, for returning players of the original game, making this moment in the remake ever much more a reunion.

With this scene the game keeps that balance — it’s a moment made so much deeper with all its implications and allusions if you have the requisite knowledge but it works in isolation as well. Importantly the moment isn’t any worse if you’re not familiar with FF7, it only becomes better for it. It’s in moments like these where the interplay between original and remake is at its best.

Nearing the end of this encounter, ghostly apparitions appear out of nowhere to attack Aerith. They’re invisible to Cloud until Aerith grabs hold of his hand. When Shinra security officers arrive as well Aerith runs, taking the apparitions with her. This moment is especially confusing to the people familiar with FF7 because the creatures are a completely new addition. To briefly describe, they’re entities that attempt to keep the flow of events in the world according to fate’s preordination. This ‘correct’ series of events seems to be the timeline as it is in the original FF7. They appear at key moments, both aiding and hindering Cloud and the team’s efforts, before disappearing without any trace. The Whisper’s motivations aren’t explained until the final quarter of the game, which splits the audience’s experience of these forces of fate. Those who have played the original might slowly pick up on the Whisper’s motivations as their interferences ensure key plot events from the original happen in the remake when things start straying too ‘off script’. On the other hand the other group would be well and truly mystified till the very end. We’ll come back to the Whispers in more detail when they become more prominent in the plot, but I think it’s important to describe them here when they’re introduced as well because they’re an addition to the story that symbolises the meta-textual conversation going on in the game.

On the final stretch towards the train station we face another resilient enemy, the Riot Trooper. They’re similar to the Shock Trooper in that there’s a specific way that the player has to take them down — they wield large riot shields that Cloud’s sword bounces off, putting him in a short stagger animation. The idea is similar to the Shock Troopers in that you are expected to either counter attack in punisher mode or use spells to take them down. However they are also always weak to attacks from behind so if you’re able to manoeuvre somehow behind them you can kill them without slowing down your pace like you have to with the Shock Troopers. It’s because of this that I like them more, they force you to approach them differently but don’t break the flow of combat by forcing you to wait. One gripe that I do have with them though is if they’re standing next to a regular trooper that I’m attacking, Cloud’s sword can sometimes still hit their shields and cause him to stagger. The hitbox on his attacks being large is generally a positive thing, FF7R doesn’t usually ask for precise positioning so it’s frustrating to be punished in this way in this specific instance.

After a mini-bossfight with The Huntsman, a souped up riot trooper, Cloud finally reunites with the team in a freight car after which they head into the passenger cars for the rest of the ride. The cars are full and you have to bump and weave through people to talk to each of the members situated in different parts of the car, a moment that I really enjoyed for its physicality. I might be imagining it but the range you have to be in to press triangle to start the dialogue with the team members here seems shorter than the range it usually is for triggering NPC dialogue. I’d like to think that it’s to get players to really have to manoeuvre around the space and to simulate Cloud getting in close to keep the conversations private. These touches along with the fact that this is a player controlled segment at all contribute to the way the game lets the player feel like they’re moving through a living breathing Midgar. These micro-realisms in the gameplay go a long way while being unobtrusive, which is really a testament to their careful design.

There’s a short interaction between Barret and a group of Shinra company employees which illustrates the conflict within Barret where his worldview comes into conflict with the reality that’s around him. When challenged by Barret one of the employees, identified by the subtitles as a middle manager holds his ground, insisting that Shinra works for the good of the people in Midgar. The employees eventually run off to another car, intimidated by Barret’s physical stature but he’s unable to get his point across. These workers headed back home to the slums for the night are clearly not the villains he’s fighting against. They’re the people who, in his mind, are being unfairly treated by Shinra. Seeing some of those very people defend Shinra therefore is a contradiction that he struggles to resolve.

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In thinking about these beginning two chapters, I keep coming back to the idea of ‘definition’ in the game as being one of the major things the remake adds over its original. While in a literal sense the game is now rendered in a higher definition screen output from before, there’s more to it than just more pixels in Cloud’s frowning face. FF7R adds more definition to the characters themselves, adding a whole lot more dialogue that fleshes out the character’s personalities, motivations, emotions — look at how much we get to know Barret just through his speech and actions all within the same narrative frame that was already established by the original. There’s more definition in how the game describes the space, the higher resolution textures and full 3d rendering letting us see directly how the city of Midgar looks so that we might be more immersed in all its cyberpunk inequality. And thus there’s deeper nuance, looking at the scenes with Sephiroth and Aerith, the new script uses its relationship to the original to its advantage by referencing itself. This upscaling of every element of the game is one of the remake’s greatest strengths in that it was able to take the foundation provided by original and make it better in ways significant to both new and returning players.

Chapter 3: Home Sweet Slum

The train pulls into its stop in the Sector Seven slum and the crew alight, celebrating their first success in a characteristically goofy and absolutely not eco-terrorist way. They split and go their separate ways and Cloud is left to find his way to Seventh Heaven, where Tifa is waiting, on his own, so we’re put back in control and off to make our way through the slums. This chapter is where the story slows down a little and the worldbuilding/character building takes centre stage. The game also takes this opportunity to lay down the foundations for quite a few plotlines that take off later on, but it doesn’t forget the characters they’ve already established — the shinra middle manager who stood up to Barret can be seen at the stores next to the train station with his family. It’s a nice bit of humanisation to show someone who seemed to so strongly believe in Shinra even while living in the slums, a place that’s largely ignored by Shinra, share his thoughts about the bombing with his family. It’s also good economical writing to take what might otherwise be a character that appears once and use him to tell a small story that fleshes out another part of the world. We’ll see him throughout the chapter in different situations, and it’s really satisfying to pick him out during your time here because it’s not particularly highlighted to the player (I actually missed him entirely my first playthrough.) Kyrie, a side character who appears later in the game, was on the train before and had a voice line also appears around the slums during this first night and can be heard talking about the bombings with the residents of the slums. In taking time to set up things this way, FF7 gives players who go for second playthroughs lots to pick up on and really makes the characters feel like they exist in the space outside of the plot.

Passing by throngs of people discussing the bombing Cloud makes his way into the Sector Seven slums proper. He’s met with the facade of Seventh Heaven right away where Tifa waits with Marlene for their return, the latter of whom is delighted at her fathers return. At the door Cloud gives the flower to Tifa and its meaning of reunion finds yet another significance in seeing Tifa and Cloud together again in Midgar after the events in their hometown five years ago. Inside, the dialogue between Barret and his daughter Marlene clues us into the fact that she is unaware of her father’s activities. It’s also obvious by this point that her mother isn’t around and putting that together with Barret having a gun for one of his arms it’s apparent that he’s lost a lot in his life. That’s perhaps one of the reasons why he cares so much for what he does have, Marlene, and the plight of the people around him.

Cloud’s payment is pushed back once again when Tifa brings him back outside to speak about lodging. Tifa explains that she’s arranged with her landlord for Cloud to take up the empty apartment next to her and brings him there. Inside they make plans to meet tomorrow morning back at the bar so that Cloud can help Tifa with some work that will result in him finally being paid. Cloud is woken in the middle of the night by groaning noises coming from his left side neighbour in room 203. Upon investigating he’s overcome with another Sephiroth vision, but after being brought back to his senses by Tifa he finds that he’s raising his sword against a frail looking man in tattered robes with a number tattooed onto his left arm. We won’t fully understand his significance in the story within this game, this is very early foreshadowing for events that happen in the future.

This is one of many plot details that are established in this game but left to be picked up again in a followup we’re only going to see years down the line. I’m happy for them to treat this like a first episode in a larger work if it makes them stronger together overall, but only time will tell how that pans out. As we’ll see the game’s narrative has a clear arc that works on the most part standalone and I found that the game came to a satisfying conclusion by itself as well.

The next day we’re given the tour of the slums as Cloud helps Tifa with collecting money for her water filter business. We’re introduced to their landlady as well as the two main vendors of the area, the item shop and the equipment shop owners. We’re recruited by Briggs and Wedge into helping the town watch slay some monsters nearby in comfortingly classic JRPG fashion and when we get back the game opens up for the first time allowing us to tackle the side quests helping people in the slums in whatever order we choose. There are six side quests here, four that we get straight off the bat, as well as a short main story section where we save Johnny. The player can end this free roam section after this by returning to Seventh Heaven. This idea of splitting the game between distinct open segments and more linear segments is well tread by this point and I prefer it over the true open world games. This way the player’s time in the game feels more aligned with that of the character’s, they can’t make a journey back across the map to the starting zone when the plot wouldn’t facilitate that at all. It also allows for side content to be better paced by the developers, and avoids the dissonance where the requests that the player takes on wait an indefinite amount of time for them to completed. I also find myself more likely to do side quests when they’re served up during a dip in the story, versus going out of my way to break the pacing of the main plot to do some fairly inconsequential stuff. I like to play games in a way that feels consistent to the way the character I’m controlling would act and this game structures itself in a way that facilitates that.

The side quests themselves are quite simple, literally all of them are just go here, kill or interact with this thing. But what really makes this chapter fun to play through is the way the slums reacts to your activities. The map is relatively small but I’d argue it’s better described as compact, fitting for a slum. Each section is clear and memorable, there’s the market plaza where Seventh Heaven is and the route back to the train station, then along the road to Stargazer Heights are a row of small food stalls and the item store. On the opposite end of town is the entrance to the junkyard and the equipment shop where the neighbourhood watch base is. In the middle of are lanes of homes, and it all sticks in your mind effortlessly. This space is filled to the brim with people— there’s the group of women discussing the musical “Loveless”, a woman chatting with one of the food stall owners, the apprentice working at the bike shop, the town watch members at the base, even the Shinra employees can be found around the Slums.

What really made this one of my favourite parts of the game is the way that the voice lines change as you progress through the side quests. When you return from defeating the monsters in the junkyard the other watch members groan about being one upped, when you take out a colony of wererats in an empty lot that’s been bothering everyone gradually more and more people find out about it and call out to Cloud as he walks down the street, saying their thanks. The man running the food stall starts flirting with the woman later that night. There’s an especially memorable moment where you complete a side quest by defeating a powerful drake at a nearby abandoned factory grounds and upon returning back to town a lot of the voice lines change switch to thanking Cloud for taking down the dangerous monster. All of the side quests trigger some change in the ambient dialogue, and the collage of lines tell the story of what had happened in the slums that day as well as how Cloud’s name as a mercenary slowly becomes more and more well known. The town feels dynamic in how it reacts to your actions. I love how it’s not all just related to Cloud and the main story events either, there’s a lot of chatter about just personal things that the residents are griping with — what to do about their electricity, where to go tonight, etc etc — these lines are what make this tapestry of conversations feel real and alive.

Chudley is also introduced in this chapter, one of the side quests being to use the assess materia that he gives you on several monsters. Receiving the assess materia from him is non-skippable, which is good because this is one of the most important materia that the player receives during the game. The assess materia when used on a monster fills out an info page on them complete with elemental weaknesses and a short blurb explaining how to best fight them. This assess page takes a lot of the trial and error that goes into finding the optimal strategy for defeating enemies but on the flipside does take some of the discovery out of the game. I personally like it because it saves the player the annoyance of trying to find out what status effects work on what bosses, and generally means that from the first time I fight a particular monster I’m clear on what I’m being asked to do. It’s also important to note that not all monsters have this blurb which is nice because it forces the player to have to figure some things out. It’s also not specific about certain things like if there is a specific move that significantly fills the stagger gauge it will say there is a move, but not exactly which one.

The game also makes sure that Cloud receives the sword that grants Triple Slash, characters learn new abilities in this game by finding and equipping new weapons, a move that is Cloud’s best crowd control ability. The three hits have a huge hitbox, are hard to stagger and Cloud leaps automatically between enemies if there are multiple. This ability makes fights with common mobs a breeze, ending after one or two volleys of these hard hitting slashes. I do think it’s probably a little bit overpowered in that it makes these encounters completely brain dead but without a good crowd control tool some of the encounters with higher enemy counts would have gotten very tedious.

Once you’ve completed all the requests that Cloud has to take on, Tifa asks to return to Stargazer for a short break. Back in her room, she asks Cloud about the time he spent in SOLDIER, which Cloud isn’t very talkative about. She brings up plans to later dress up and go out around town, and the player is given three ambiguous choices for what they want to see Tifa dressed up in later. Cloud warms up to Tifa here a little bit too, and she makes it clear that she’s glad to have Cloud around again. It’s not explained yet but after the incident that razed her hometown and saw her father killed by Sephiroth, Cloud is probably the only connection that she has to her past.

After their conversation they head back to the bar where the player gets another choice that affects the hidden affection system, this time with Tifa in either accepting her offer for a drink or brushing her off. Eventually the members of Avalanche arrive and all of them head into the secret base under the bar to discuss the details of their next operation — scheduled for the night after. Cloud kills time and the players have the pleasure of playing through the darts minigame which is actually pretty easy, I got the perfect score of six darts on my second try. Tifa then reappears from below before the others, clearly harried. Cloud brings up that she seems to not really be in agreement with the plans to bomb reactors, having been informed by Jessie earlier. Tifa explains that she’s in a dilemma, knowing that they needed to change their methods if they wanted to make any difference but still not being on with blowing up the reactors. Cloud shows some genuine concern here and the two of them share a moment before the rest of the team members reemerge. Tifa having problems with the team’s methods here makes sense if you’re aware that her motivation for being part of Avalanche probably has a lot more to do with getting back at Shinra for the destruction of their hometown. Her misgivings and later on her guilt surrounding her actions is actually one of the more interesting parts of her character, and it’s unfortunate that for this foreshadowing to make sense you would need knowledge from an older game, or put together the very thin threads of information that only really come together in an optional cutscene later on in the game. The way it’s presented in FF7R alone, it’s not very clear why she’s part of Avalanche in the first place.

Cloud is finally paid in full for his services by Barret who tells him that he’s not wanted for the next mission and then promptly asks him to leave. Jessie apologies, saying that they didn’t want to rely on Cloud who’s unrelated to their cause but asks to speak with him later on. If you stay around before exiting the establishment you’re rewarded with some dialogue that fills in the reason for them being so strapped for resources is from having split off from the main Avalanche organisation for a year.

Back outside, Cloud overhears a group of very obvious hired thugs asking around for a man with a gun for an arm, aka Barret. Cloud pretends to have information that he’s willing to sell to them and follows the group into a vacant lot; there are reactions from the residents too, whose attention are drawn to talk of the town Cloud walking amongst a bunch of thugs. There’s a beatdown, Cloud on the beating side, and the thugs are revealed to not be on Shinra payroll. This encounter is actually a set up for much later where it’s reveled who sent those thugs to look for Barret. This isn’t the only setup that the game does in this chapter either — Johnny, who Cloud saved earlier and drove out of town becomes a recurring character and the town watch leader tells Cloud about a rumoured secret Shinra lab under the slums.

Finally getting back to his apartment, he’s greeted by Jessie who offers him a summoning materia this time for his services. A side job that she’s keeping on the down low from the rest of the team. Cloud accepts, and the two meet by the train station but are surprised by Briggs and Wedge who had apparently caught on that she was planning on doing something topside— ostensibly Jessie wants to visit her parents before embarking on the next operation.

The four embark on motorcycles, two by two with Jessie thrilled to be holding on Cloud’s back, and they race off into the next chapter.

Chapter 4: Mad Dash

As they ride into the train tunnels up onto the Sector 7 plate Jessie explains the real reason for their excursion topside — She had used a more powerful blasting agent for the bomb than was required in the first mission and wants to obtain a weaker agent for the next mission. The only place she can get one in time is from a Shinra warehouse. After this exposition, Shinra security finally appears to intercept them and we start off the chapter with a motorcycle chase segment.

The gameplay here is pretty simple, all the player needs to do is to drive up to the side of an enemy and then hit them with Cloud’s sword basic attacks. The standard soldiers go down in one volley and the drones that have quick telegraphed ranged attacks and a small AOE attack around themselves also only take one hit. Cloud has two unique actions based on proximity, one ranged slash and a close one that sees cloud cutting in a circle around himself. The amount of health that Cloud also has through this segment is also huge making it unlikely the player will ever have to reset during it. By making the segment both easy to grasp and fairly forgiving even in the new game plus only Hard difficulty means it’s a fun deviation from the normal gameplay without getting on the player’s nerves. The last thing any player wants to do is restart the gimmick chase scene from the beginning. The lines between the team, especially Clouds light deflections of Jessie’s flirting help keep this chase lively through to the end.

FF7R does find the time to fit in a mini boss fight at the end of this sequence versus Roche – a SOLDIER with an over the top personality who has a flare for friendly fire. The fight with him moves between two modes as he either races forward to throw ranged attacks that you dodge by strafing from left to right and when the game lets you catch up to him and attack him at close range. The ranged attacks are actually fairly hard to dodge if you don’t look out for them properly and avoiding close hits while keeping your own damage going involves throttling between the brakes and the accelerator to weave between left and right of Roche. There’s even a second phase where he gets a new ranged attack of lightning which you have to repeatedly dodge pre-emptively. All this culminates in a fight that feels difficult and satisfying to overcome even if the risk of failure was still quite low.

There’s a short exchange between Jessie and Cloud here that changes depending on how well the player did during the chase scene. She rates his driving, telling him he either failed or passed her test, and her reactions range from telling him that she should drive next time to kissing him on his cheek. I think there’s actually a bit of a missed opportunity here because there’s no indication in the game that there’s any variation in these cutscenes (not even in the post-game completion log). They could have communicated to the player at the start of the section that Jessie would react to their performance which would have incentivised players to do their best despite the lowered stakes in earning a failure state. As it is now, if the player isn’t really interested by the motorcycle chase scene there’s very little keeping them engaged.

The team disembarks and emerge out onto a Shinra housing district in Sector 7. Jessie explains that her parents are Shinra employees and with some regret that she was raised here owing a part her life to the mako reactors. As the other three head in for pizza and to distract Jessie’s mother, Cloud heads around back to nick her father’s Shinra ID card which Jessie needs to get into the warehouse. Upon entering her father’s room Cloud sees the man on a hospital bed in what seems to be a comatose state. Cloud also finds a letter written by Jessie some time in the past, revealing that she was an actor who had landed a principal role in a musical. Later as the team regroups outside the house before setting off for the warehouse — Jessie forging ahead to infiltrate alone and the other three lagging a little behind to create a diversion to cover her — Briggs elaborates further on her background. Right before her debut, Jessie’s father collapsed due to overwork. He was an engineer in one of the mako reactors but contracted mako poisoning due to an incident where he passed out in the reactor and was overexposed to mako. That incident led Jessie to looking deeper into planetology, the study of mako and the lifestream, which led her to Avalanche and she’s been working to bring down Shinra ever since.

Hearing this, Jessie’s reactions to the effects of their bombing make a lot of sense. She was born and raised in Midgar and her father was a reactor engineer. She must have felt so much guilt when they saw the city in such disarray. The houses that burnt down were like the one she grew up in, the families displaced could have been hers, her father in another time could have been working in the reactor itself. Her backstory also works in that it gives her a very personal reason to be with Avalanche, just like Barret and Tifa.

There’s a really weird moment here when they’re preparing to push further into the warehouse compound, something that’s fairly time sensitive but Briggs suggests that Cloud stock up on helpful items at the vending machine nearby (which makes sense) or use the training facility that’s in the warehouse compound for some reason. For a game that’s usually serious and internally consistent between the urgency of the story and the urgency that the characters regard their situations it’s quite jarring. It’s also the only instance of this sort of awkwardness in the game, which seen from another angle is praise for its consistency of tone. However it also makes this moment stick out even further because there was really no reason for it to exist in the first place.

The set piece fight in the warehouse courtyard is where you’re first allowed to use a summon. They’re only available in specific fights and can only be summoned once for a short duration. This means that in the instances where you can use them, you absolutely want to and will spend all your ATB bar triggering their abilities as much as you can. This essentially reduces your options because it’s obvious what you should be choosing in that moment. The restriction on when you can summon makes sense from a lore point of view because they’re meant to be super powerful and not something Cloud would throw on an odd group of security troopers. However it has the opposite effect of making summons feel forced upon the player.

To cap this fight off, Roche reappears again and we have our first bossfight vs a human foe. They’re quite different from the ones against larger monsters because the boss attacks more frequently and their attacks will stagger most of Cloud’s moves. During these fights the game feels more like a soulsborne, where the emphasis is on dodging or countering the boss’s attacks and then unleashing your own flurry of attacks without overextending your reach and getting hit. The game is responsive enough to work in this style, and I really wish more of the games boss fights felt like this. They manage to capture the feeling of those epic sword duels we saw in Advent Children.

After being defeated by Cloud, Roche helps the team out by taking out a few mechs before he leaves. However the team is quickly overwhelmed again and they’re saved by the appearance of another cell of Avalanche. As Cloud and Briggs exfil, leaving Wedge who took a particularly bad blow to be helped by their comrades, Briggs explains that their cell was excommunicated as their methods were viewed as being overly extreme. What’s emphasised here is how much Barret’s team are outcasts, unwanted even by people who share their ideology. Their operation is also far more guerrilla, a contrast made stark by the larger cell of Avalanche being in full military gear.

Regrouping with Jessie outside there’s a comedic bit where we see Cloud start to loosen up and the bond between him and the rest of the team get stronger. This leads straight into a scene where the team uses parachutes to get back down into the slums, accompanied by some great music which really sells the moment. There’s a real ‘small guy gets away with something beyond them’ kind of energy here. Having come to understand more about Jessie and the others through the events of this chapter, their exhilaration at their success is really infectious and it shows the versatility of the story that FF7R tells.

As Cloud sends Wedge back home, Wedge points out Briggs and Jessie’s places as well. I like how their homes are nondescript places that we’ve probably already walked past while roaming around in chapter 3, it enhances the feeling that they exist in the space. After leaving Wedge, Cloud is supposed to head to Jessie’s place to collect his full reward for the operation but if you swing by Brigg’s place you get a short conversation with him where he worries about the other two. There isn’t a marker indicating you should go back to his place to check if he’s in, and it’s nice that the game rewards you for remembering him and where his house is. There’s one more encounter with Tifa where Cloud starts to break the ice with her a little more before the night passes.

When Cloud awakes something’s wrong. As he reaches for his sword Tifa bursts through his door again, calling him for help. Outside, the slums is swarming with Whispers. Tifa explains that they appeared and started attacking the team as they were about to set out on their mission. The two make their way towards Seventh Heaven where Barret and Jessie were holding their ground. While fighting the ‘Mysterious Spectres’ off Jessie’s leg is injured. Conveniently, the moment this happens the Whispers disappear. With Jessie out of action, the team is low on strength but Briggs had already begun his infiltration. With no way of contacting him Barret calls upon Cloud to join them on the mission once again.

It’s at this point that if you’ve played the original game that you might have some sense of what the Whispers are doing. You might have wondered earlier when Cloud was left out of the mission how things would play out this time, and seeing the Whispers create a situation that caused Cloud to be brought back aboard might have raised a flag. For now though it’s probably only a sense, one that will get stronger over time. Although if you’re like me and hadn’t played the original then you’re probably a little confused at this point. The spectres seemed to be related specifically to Aerith, with Cloud only being able to see and interact with them after being touched by her. Having them suddenly appear here gave them a significance that I was completely unable to decipher. With knowledge of the original the more the Whispers appear the clearer their intentions become, but to someone without that understanding every new moment involving them only creates more logical contradictions. The experiences of these two groups of players will continue to diverge and leading to one of FF7R’s failings in its lack of accommodation for those who are fresh to the story in regards to this meta-plotline.

Upon meeting back up at the train station, Cloud asks Barret if they really needed to do the infiltration today. Barret replies that it’s not just that Briggs had already gone in but that a bomb threat had also already been issued to the public. Barret explains that Avalanche HQ were also making a move today, and that if they didn’t shut down the reactor HQ would do it themselves. It’s clear that Barret was being pressured into moving earlier than he wanted to, but he sweeps it aside muttering to himself that Shinra was the real entity at fault here. Things are starting to slip out of his control, players like the main branch of Avalanche forcing their hand to keep a grip on things. But their strength is outmatched even just by Avalanche HQ, and none of them are professionals trained for combat and warfare. Barret himself who tries his best to play the role of charismatic leader is clearly not experienced or used to the life and death situations they’re putting themselves in. We see here how the characters deal with this pressure, Barret falling back to his black and white worldview, while Tifa grows more frustrated with their lack of agency.

Chapter 5, 6 and 7: Dogged Pursuit//Light the Way//A Trap is Sprung

I’ll be talking about next three chapters grouped as together they depict the mission to destroy Mako Reactor 5. It begins on the train, significantly less crowded this time due to the bomb threat. Tifa and Barret split up in train and we get to hear a little from each of them personally. Tifa shares her growing nervousness with Cloud and we find Barret about to pick a fight with that same Shinra manager that we encountered at the end of chapter 3. Cloud stops him just in time but it’s clear that the team isn’t in a good shape going into this mission. It’s at this moment that the team is made, a surprise ID scan identifying the three upon which the train is swarmed by drones. They leap into action, Tifa helping the civilians to the back of the train while Cloud fends them off. There’s a great moment where the Shinra middle manager asks why she’s helping him since he’s part of Shinra he should be ‘the enemy’ too. But Tifa is able to show more compassion here than Barret might, explaining their side of things that they’re just working to protect the ordinary people. This gets through to him and they come to a common understanding so he rushes off to take care of the other passengers. Now the team is isolated the drone onslaught intensifies so the team jumps off the train to face them in the tunnels instead.

As the team regroups the perspective cuts from them for the first time, showing us Heidegger, the Shinra security chief (read: army general) who’s watching the team’s progress through cameras. Through chapter five we’re treated to these sections where he commands Shinra’s defence, unveiling robot prototypes meant to kill in spectacular fashion and throwing endless amounts of men at the team all while berating his subordinates and literally guffawing to himself. Heidegger and the rest of the Shinra board members are where the game’s writing takes a nosedive into the comical and cookie cutter tropey. It’s a huge contrast to the way that our heroes are constructed, lacking any of the nuance and humanity that is very much present in them. Honestly even the side characters in the slums we meet have more pathos than the Shinra board members. They clearly couldn’t find a way to have these side villains be interesting or contribute to the thematic explorations of the game, so why give him so much screen time at all? If they wanted him to be this ultimately incompetent chuckling evil character that the audience has seen before from fantasy JRPGS to kids anime, they could have just brought him in in chapter seven where actually he does something relevant. His character is understandable in a second! Why did they go out their way to cut our attention away from Cloud and the team which the game does so rarely, if the writers aren’t interested in him either?

The only thing that comes to mind is that they wanted some more drama to spice up chapter five. And maybe for good reason too because chapter five is an hour long journey through the train tunnels, walkways and surrounding maintenance areas. It’s almost completely linear, pushing the player along from one fight to the next, most of which are against common mobs. The resilient mobs which would have provided some needed variety don’t appear here either. The tunnels all blend into each other and nothing particularly interesting happens. The dialogue between our teammates is light and fun but most retreads the same ground and we’ve already talked about Heidegger. At the end there’s a boss fight with the Crab Warden that’s really similar to the earlier Scorpion Sentinel (see a naming convention here), but instead of the Tail Laser which does a massive amount of damage, the Warden electrifies the train tracks forcing the team to avoid specific parts of the arena during the attack. It’s a similar concept to the laser in forcing the player to recognise the move and then moving to a specific spot to avoid taking damage, but differs in that the train tracks do small amounts of damage over time. The player is thus able to make a decision to cross the tracks anyways to get to a more advantageous position. This makes for less of a binary decision, which I prefer over the hide or die implication of the laser.

Despite everything it has going against it though, I can appreciate why chapter five is the way it is. The game stays committed to showing every single little step in Cloud’s story and it does its best to keep the tension high by making it one long fight between the team and Shinra security. On the first play though it’s easy to be swept up in the in the drama of the moment and breeze through this segment. It’s only on later playthroughs that the tedium starts to show once you put it into context with how often the game is going to put you through single file grey corridors.

But the tunnels do finally come to an end where in chapter 6 we’re thrust into the maintenance area on the underside of the plate. I like this a lot more firstly just because it’s a lot more visually interesting with the slums below. However I have to caveat that they’re just a flat texture below which looks pretty bad under any extended scrutiny. The game actually does this in a lot of places, rendering fairly 3d backgrounds as just flat textures which kills the spectacle. Perhaps it’s an engine limitation but it’s a glaringly obvious flaw in a triple-A RPG released in 2020. In any case, the huge slum ‘suns’ which provide light to those below, the rickety thin walkways and huge ventilation fans are a lot more interesting than the endless tunnels before. It’s also a lot more unique to the setting which ties the environment into the world-building a lot better.

This section is also a little more open, letting you explore a few walkways at a time off the critical path as Cloud and the team goes around shutting down the slum lights to restore power to the service area so that they can pass through. The map design also rewards things like noticing a moveable platform has another section it can link up to and turning corners that are obviously dead ends with items to be found. There’s even a short section where the player needs to defeat a room of enemies in a short thirty seconds to get to a completely optional summoning materia (the room clear is repeatable and gets easier as you fail it). The game does a good job of setting this up, having the characters point out the materia inside the fan as they pass by it on the outside earlier and then leaving it up to players to find it themselves. This all comes together to form an area that has strong forward momentum, keeping in with the tone of the story at the moment, and has just enough room for the player to explore without becoming tedious or detracting from the pace.

Chapter 7 begins as the team are about to make it into the reactor proper through some vents. The scene cuts away to the Shinra president’s office where he’s preparing for what seems to be a television appearance. Coupled with the title ‘A Trap Is Sprung’ the game kind of spoils its own moment here. As they descend into the reactor they find the very conveniently placed inactive robot that Cloud says they ought to run from if they were so unlucky as to encounter it, and the rest of the place is eerily quiet and devoid of resistance. When they reach mako storage again Tifa comments that the smell reminds her of something — that something being the murder of her father at Sephiroth’s hands which Cloud sees has a short flashback to. Here the player is clued further into Tifa’s motivations for being with Avalanche, and putting two and two together with how Nibelheim (Cloud and Tifa’s hometown) was shown to be in flames in an earlier vision. This is about the extent of the exposition that the game offers into Tifa’s backstory. It’s delivered in fragments and allusions without much being concretely addressed by the characters in the present, which I find to be strange choice considering that Tifa is one of the games main heroines. Even Jessie’s own backstory is explained in further detail, and even had a whole mission that was basically dedicated to fleshing her out. Tifa’s journey through the game rests a lot on her feelings of frustration at her inability to have things happen as she wants them to, that much is obvious but the game either expects you to understand what her underlying motives are from the get go or expects you to put it together from disparate chunks of information. While strange, this approach is shared with how the game addresses Cloud’s backstory — very little of it concretely described in the game. There’s a reason for this which you know if you’re familiar with the whole FF7 story, but it also makes more sense if we consider that this game only the first episode in a longer story. Albeit a thirty hour first episode.

After planting the bomb Cloud and the team attempt to extract but the ladder leading back upwards is retracted before their eyes and a pack of drones appear, projecting a hologram of Heidegger where he gloats in classic mustache twirly fashion. You’re on TV! He says, you idiots fell into my trap and now my suuuuper powerful robot is going to smash you into pieces! Cue one of his goons telling him that the said super powerful robot isn’t ready yet, and him angrily telling them he’s ‘on air’. This segment alone should have been sufficient to establish the entirety of his character which gives us an idea on how really paper thin it is.

Fighting past the shock troopers sent in to buy time, the team goes through the labs in which the robot was being constructed. Putting past why on earth there would be a whole robot construction facility in an energy reactor, there’s a mechanic here where the player is able to sabotage different parts of the robot to make the upcoming fight easier in different ways. There’s the AI cores of which discarding makes the robot slower to cycle through attacks, the bomber shells which determine how many times the robot can use a high damage bomb attack during the battle and the M units which don’t change how the robot behaves but gives you items you can use against it. I like this idea of choosing the different ways of sabotaging the robot as it allows the player to avoid the mechanics that they dislike more. If they have a hard time with reacting quickly to different moves they can remove the AI cores and if they don’t like trying to dodge high damage attacks or have to scramble to recover after being hit by one they can remove the bomber shells. There are four of the AI cores, three bomber shells and three M units, so the player gets to pick and choose quite a bit.

Outside, the team encounters the hologram drones again, this time projecting the face of President Shinra himself. He first addresses Cloud because he looks the part of a SOLDIER but Barret cuts in and finally gets a chance to deliver his speech freedom fighter manifesto to the president himself. The mako is the lifeblood of the planet and Shinra is consuming it, what does he have to say about that? The president’s response is that the real consumers are the people whose lives are fueled by Shinra’s mako reactors, that they all turn a blind eye despite knowing the truth. Barret then accuses Shinra of brainwashing the masses, which the president easily laughs off. He implies that the ordinary people, the people Barret is supposedly trying to protect, are complicit in the crimes that Shinra is committing. The game alludes to it a lot leading up to this moment with the ambient conversations in the slums and the way Jessie talks about growing up in Midgar. Barret sees the mako reactors as purely evil, which makes Shinra purely evil as well. His view is incompatible with the reality that the citizens of Midgar do benefit from mako energy. His intentions are pure but his actions and targets are built on a model of the world that puts aside the more complicated relationship the common person has with mako and Shinra. That’s not to say that Shinra is in any way a good entity within the story, they’re cruel, controlling and warmongers too, as we see in the way that the President here associates Avalanche with the Wutai to manipulate the media into creating more dissent towards their enemy. But Barret acts in a self-righteous way that depending on how you look at it is either admirable or misguided. We have allusions to some reasons why he might personally hate Shinra so much — his lost arm and the absence of Marlene’s mother — there’s nothing concrete to hold on to. Does he really believe so strongly that Shinra is nothing but evil or does he have a personal score to settle, like Tifa and Jessie? Because he and the narrative never touches on his past we’re left to judge for ourselves. And when his actions have dire consequences for the future of Midgar, we’re left to judge just how righteous his battle has been all along.

Heidegger reappears, this time to inform the team of how Shinra has been able to control the events of this mission, showing the team how the bomb was easily reprogrammed to explode on Shinra’s command. He then announces the finale, unveiling the Airbuster, and thanks the team for their involvement in this charade, which causes Tifa to lash out in frustration. Time and time again she’s had no control over how any of this has played out.

The bossfight with Airbuster takes place on a T shaped platform, with the Airbuster in the middle separating Cloud from Barret and Tifa. During this first phase of the fight the Airbuster occasionally places an electric attack blocking melee access from either side of it, forcing the player to change up characters to get in optimal damage. This is a very obvious way of forcing the player to switch around but I like how this design still pushes the player to adopt a playstyle that makes the battle more interesting. In the second phase of the battle the Airbuster moves to the long end of the T and occasionally charges an attack called the Tankbuster that works identically to the first boss’s Tail Laser. In the next phase the two arms detach from the Airbuster, destroying them fills up the stagger gauge significantly and in the next one the Airbuster is airborne for part of it, forcing you to use Barret. If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is the exact same sequence as the Sentinel fight, just presented differently. It’s doubly disappointing when we factor in the Warden fight not being very different either. The visual spectacle of it all is great, and the arena does change the way you evade attacks but at this point whenever the game has reached a climatic battle it’s played the same track three times just slightly remixed.

Chapter 8: Budding Bodyguard

Cloud demonstrates the infinite cushioning ability of a bed of flowers as he’s awoken by Aerith in an abandoned church in the slums. Just moments ago the team had defeated the Airbuster and Cloud was thrown from the plate by the resulting explosion. This is an iconic location strongly associated to Aerith herself where she also meets Zack in the prequel, Crisis Core, in the exact same way as she does here with Cloud. The parallels don’t end there — in that moment Zack offers her a date as payment for waking him up and so when Cloud ends up here Aerith offers him a date in exchange for him being her bodyguard.

Since this is Aerith’s proper introduction into the story, let’s take a moment to look at her backstory. Aerith is the last living descendant of an ancient race named the Cetra who were at one point wiped out save for a small few. They had the ability to commune with the planet and the lifestream, and as a result Aerith is able to perceive events like humans dying and joining the lifestream. She is also possesses some form of limited prescience, a plot point exclusive to FF7R, but how much this has to do with being Creta is unclear. Later in this story she becomes the one to rouse Cloud, Tifa and Barret to stand against Sephiroth and fate as part of her having foreknowledge of the calamity he intends to inflict upon the world.

If that was all you knew about Aerith, if we considered her entirely in broad strokes, she is the character in our party of heroes who fits the most JRPG cliches — last of her race, future sight and knowledge beyond her natural understanding, will to defy fate and save the world. This makes it so much more important that the game introduces her without any of that baggage. Through this chapter and the next we’re shown how she’s a playful and cheery person who genuinely loves the slums and the people in it. We see her connections here through the way people all over the slums recognise her and share their concerns with her. She can handle herself in a fight but she’s also clumsy at times and not as physically strong as Cloud or Tifa. We also see how she’s vehemently caring about those around her when she pushes Cloud to help Tifa out when they later find her heading into a bad situation alone and even going the extra mile when they’re in need of more support. We see her as a strong and engaging person without considering her larger plot role, avoiding turning her into a caricature pure heroine. It’s only after we know her as herself that we are introduced to all the other roles she will play in the story to come.

Breaking Cloud and Aerith’s moment together is Reno, the cocky hotshot Turk who’s here for Aerith. If Shinra’s SOLDIERs are their powerhouse commandos then the Turks are the special ops secret agents. His loud personality is a great companion to Cloud’s quieter confidence. The fight with him is mechanically strong too — he’s similar to the on-foot battle with Roche with the addition dash attacks which have huge range but high startup. In a second phase he also throws electric mines that move around the arena forming lines of damaging electricity if you don’t destroy them which is a nice twist that’s just the right level of annoying. It also emphasises the ‘spy’ element of the Turks to rely on tech instead of just his pure strength.

We meet Reno’s partner, Rude, later in the Sector 5 slums as well. He’s the cool ‘nothing personal’ counterpart to Reno’s flaring emotions. Aerith also pipes up to insist Rude isn’t a bad guy either. He has a funny trait with always having new pairs of sunglasses whenever a previous pair breaks. It works as a metaphor for how he distances himself from his work, and the moment where his glasses do break show the points where he has to put more of himself into his fights.

The Turks work to bring some more dimension into Shinra being more than just the evil corporation. The Turks that we see in action all come off as fairly reasonable people in their own right, the only thing against them being working for the wrong side. They’re in huge contrast to Heidegger whose cartoonishly evil characterisation brings Shinra closer to the evil entity that Barret views them as.

The battle with Rude includes Aerith which marks the first boss fight against a human enemy with two members. As a result Rude’s battle includes a mechanic where he’s able to put either Cloud of Aerith to sleep, forcing the player to switch between the two. This breaks the now familiar rhythm of using Cloud’s punisher mode to parry the opponent’s attacks. Instead when controlling Aerith the player needs to use movement to keep her at a safe distance from Rude to use her ranged attacks. He has other moves that incentivise controlling Aerith such as a short ranged grapple and high damage haymaker attack that is incredibly hard to evade on reaction. This evolution of the human vs human boss fight mechanics comes at a welcome time too, avoiding the repetition that started becoming obvious in the Airbuster fight.

Returning to the church after we beat Reno, the game throws another curveball where the Whispers reappear this time to aid Cloud and Aerith as they run from Shinra reinforcements. I like how there’s a definite effort to build the mystery behind these spectres in an interesting way, as each instance they appear they act in a slightly different way that leads the player’s understanding and expectations around. This does also mean that if the player doesn’t eventually understand the logic to how they function, they end up seeing random and plot convenient.

The rooftop sequence that comes after is a great example of how the game takes an idea established in the original game and then expands on it greatly bringing more detail and character into moment. It encapsulates what the entire game has been doing — taking a story presented in the broad strokes that the original Playstation hardware demanded it be told in and then painting a picture that’s in higher definition narratively, visually and in scope. The rooftop sequence was originally a minute long and featured one conversation between Aerith and Cloud. The rooftop sequence in the remake is six minutes long and there’s dialogue interspersed basically all the way through it. There’s a moment when a ladder breaks under Aerith’s feet and Cloud catches her from above. Then later again when she loses her balance, he saves her with a princess carry. They even slide down a pipe and there are a few chests to be opened too. At the same time various narrative points are touched upon such as the role the Turks play in Shinra, Aerith’s background and her attachment to the slums as well as geographical features like the wall surrounding Midgar. The dynamic the two have is well established by the time they reach the ground and we’ve also gained a better understanding of Aerith as a character. It’s in these moments where FF7R is at it’s best, when we’re discovering more about the world and the characters are given room to breathe.

The two eventually find their way to the main Sector 5 slums. Aerith’s house is here, situated next to a natural waterfall and the stream that flows from it. Around the small pond is beautiful garden of flowers, the only place we see in Midgar with such greenery. The whole space is pastorally lit, and the music provides a peacefulness that juxtaposes so much of the game. It also signposts the difference between the Sector 5 slums from Sector 7. Where Sector 7’s town area featured markets, eateries and its streets had a slightly maze like quality to them, Sector 5’s town area is about the calmer and more domestic community aspect of the slums — among its landmarks are an orphanage, a secret hideout the kids created for themselves and a community centre where the elderly gather. The kinds of inhabitants introduced to Cloud reflects this too, they go from children to a doctor , an orphanage teacher, and finally to Aerith’s mother herself. Contrast this with the shopkeepers and the town watch leader that we visited in Sector 5 the differences are obvious. In a sense the way we experience Sector 5 reflects how Tifa and Avalanche see the slums and Sector 7 shows us Aerith’s life and relationship to the space. It would have been fairly easy for them to present the two slums areas in largely the same way and I’m glad they took the opportunity to expand the world instead — it keeps the locations distinct and interesting in their own way, building a more varied expression of the lives of the people in Midgar and even ties back to the character’s own world views.

Sector 5 is also used to build up other parts of the story, one of the most significant being Briggs’ history as a teacher in the orphanage named Leaf House. His involvement with the Leaf House was actually hinted at in an ambient dialogue back in Chapter 4 in Sector 7 but the teacher currently here directly mentions his name as being her mentor and predecessor. There has to be something significant in his life that he went from orphanage caretaker to rebel fighter and I like the hint that there’s something deeper behind his motivations as well.

The ambient conversations in the town reveal that the angry mobs featured in the newscasts about the reactor explosions were all hired to be there, feeding into the idea that Shinra manipulating the media to further their motives. It’s small details like these that the keep what might feel like filler content interesting and relevant to the main story. The game does take a dip in pacing with this chapter, but I do feel it’s a deliberate slowness and one that the game has earned after the whole first third of the game. The time spent here in Sector 5 colours in the world more and lets the player build a relationship with Cloud and Aerith as the people they are in a more ordinary situation, bringing a lot more dimension to them we would be lacking otherwise with just endless action.

This area then becomes the hub for the second set of sidequests that the game serves to the player after Cloud is asked to stay the night so that Aerith could see him off towards Sector 7 the next morning. As a result he spends the rest of the day progressing his mercenary career. They’re largely similar to the sidequests before where it’s go here slay that. There’s even a quest where you find children who are patrolling around the town instead of the cats we searched for before. There’s a bit of a difficulty spike here with the fights, the first time I resetted to a non-boss encounter was against one of the side quest monsters in this area. But to talk about them we’ve first got to talk about Aerith as a party member.

Aerith joins the party as the last playable character the game introduces. In general her kit looks like a caster/healer hybrid as she comes equipped with prayer, a healing skill that recovers the entire party but costs all 2 bars of the ATB gauge. Her abilities center around supporting the usage of spells — soul drain is the only ability in the game that recovers MP and arcane ward allows her to place a… well an arcane ward that causes any spells cast from within it to be cast twice. She also has the highest base MP of all the party members and perhaps as a tradeoff or a tradition, her max health is the lowest too. However the battle system poses more than one challenge when trying to use her as a caster, the biggest being the way targeting works. Because monsters naturally target whichever party member the player is controlling, it’s hard for her to gain ATB safely to use spells and skills. She can barely use the max charge version of her unique ability, which put a diamond on the field which explodes doing AOE damage, without being immediately swarmed by all of the enemies. Because her defense is so low she also loses HP really quickly which forces you to switch with Cloud instead. In a game that encourages the player to switch between party members so often I think that the simplicity of the enemy AI is the weakest link. It means each character has to be able to take all their own hits while doing enough damage to defeat enemies in a decent amount of time — if we related it to MMO stereotypes, each character needs to be able to be their own DPS, tank and healer. There are lots of ways to fix this, but following the MMO analogy for a moment here as FF7R’s battle design does take a lot of cues from MMO style combat, I wouldn’t have found it strange if there was some kind of aggro management mechanic was implemented in this game as well. For those unfamiliar aggro systems in MMO dictate how mobs target player characters through rules such as calculating the ‘threat level’ of each individual player and always targeting the highest threat. There are also always consistent ways of managing aggro which adds a tactical layer to ‘how do we get the boss to attack the character with the highest defence’. FF7R having a simplified version of this kind of system would create the advantage of making character switching a more visibly important part of the game versus the ‘pick the character you want to play as’ system it’s kind of presented as right now. It would solve the aforementioned problems with playing as Aerith and even alleviate some of the annoyances the game has with health recovery.

Let’s use the example of the Monodrives that Cloud and Aerith have to take down in one of the side quests as a way of discussing the problems with combat flow. The Monodrives can buff themselves to be completely immune to physical attacks until you hit them with a few spells, and they’re most weak to wind spells specifically. This leads to a situation where you’re trying to avoid their attacks while building ATB so that you can throw magic at them which makes them vulnerable. Because of the way aggro works now, once you switch to Aerith every single enemy swarms her and because of her low defense and her less effective evade it’s very possible she’ll fall into the red, at which point you obviously want to switch to Cloud to heal her in some way. At this point he’s having trouble building ATB too because he’s getting stagged from all the enemy attacks and hitting immune targets gives you less ATB. The answer would be to switch back to Aerith but aggro just get dragged straight back to her when you do so which defeats the point. Making matters worse, the monodrives have an attack where they go underground and then strike without any tell at all. You just have to keep blocking hoping you can tank the attack. Healing in reaction to seeing the monodrive go underground is risky too because it’s very possible for it to strike within that healing time and kill you instead. It’s a fight which you have to beat in a very specific way, constantly switching between Cloud and Aerith to balance the aggro while spamming the most effective spells to take them down. Done this way, the fight is over in a short few minutes but if you don’t figure this out it takes ages and is incredibly frustrating. It highlights one of the flaws in FF7R’s encounter design, which are sometimes built to be played in one very specific way.

There’s one more way that combat can be really frustrating and that’s with how the friendly AI works. One of the bosses in this area has an attack where it spews gases that inflict either a status effect which locks a team member’s skills or one that stuns for a short period of time. It has a long startup and is very telegraphed so it’s not hard to evade. However the gas stays on the field for a while which is easy enough for the player to evade but the AI will in many occasions just run straight through, causing them to take whatever status effect that the gas contained. There’s no reason why the AI should do this, they already have a 100% chance of blocking incoming attacks on their own so there’s no other instance where you would need to switch to them to essentially babysit the other character and prevent them from injuring themselves. This particular quirk of the system can and has led to resets against this boss for me, making the fight way more annoying than it needed to be.

While the game creates frustration in certain places, it’s quite thoughtful in certain parts of its design. After they return back to Aerith’s home for dinner, Cloud is asked by Aerith’s mother to leave in the middle night and to be involved with Aerith any longer. She puts this to Cloud being a SOLDIER and how they “never live normal lives”. A minigame is made out of Cloud not bumping into any objects while in the hallway from the guest room to the front door. If you fail a comically loud clattering noise is made and Aerith comes out of her room to shove Cloud back into his. While this sort of minigame can be annoying for some, I personally like the effort being put in to use mechanics to make moments memorable for the player. What would have been a fairly forgettable five seconds of just walking out of the guestroom becomes an event that became a bookmark in my head for this section of the story. My first time through game it took me three tries to do it properly, but my eventual success wasn’t necessarily because I had gotten better at it. The game actually reduces the amount of props in the hallway you can bump into every reset. Once you get to the third time it’s almost entirely clear, so you can walk almost just straight through. This design of making the minigame easier as the player fails it ensures that it doesn’t become a frustrating moment for the player, and it’s a bit of thoughtfulness that’s repeated in all the non-optional minigames in the rest of the game.

When he does reach the front door Aerith’s mother is there waiting to send Cloud off, and upon exiting we’re treated to the sight of the garden after dark. The background music from before is gone, replaced with the sound of crickets in the night against the crashing waterfall behind the home. Little lights are placed around the gardens and you’re allowed to just linger in the space for a little while. It’s a really beautiful moment that made me recall the events of the entire game up to now as I moved Cloud through the silent slums, being rejected from the domesticity that he was told didn’t belong to him any longer. As he leaves he even bumps into the orphanage teacher who tells him how much the children loved him, and that she hopes he would stay around longer. There’s just something incredibly sad about leaving the previously bustling town with no one in the party but Cloud himself.

Which sets up perfectly for the moment that starts off the next chapter, where we discover Aerith waiting for Cloud along the road out of town who’s not quite ready to leave his company just yet.

Chapter 9: The Town That Never Sleeps

For just a moment, it’s just Cloud and Aerith walking through a city after dark, no super soldiers and no battles of fate. When they come up to a point of road where they can see the Wall Market, Aerith explains what the area is like in a way someone who’s lived somewhere their entire life explains the winding streets of their home city. Even the “shortcut” that she suggests taking down an old collapsed highway is introduced as a road she had played in since she were a child. If Chapter 8 shrinks the scope of the game and lets us focus onto the more minute details of Midgar, then this section, the highway and all the way up till the playground before Tifa reenters the scene brings it down even more, letting us see the world directly through Aerith’s eyes. The track “Midnight Rendezvous” that plays here conjures feelings of playfulness, wonder, curiosity and quietness in a way that so evokes the setting of FF7R. This section is short, maybe two or three minutes long but it sticks in my head as one of the parts of the game where I was just entirely absorbed in the world and characters and the moment that the game presented to me.

The collapsed highway section that comes after is less than stellar. This game spends entirely too much time in enclosed concrete tunnels — sure the train tunnels and insides of reactors in some sense have to be cramped but there’s no such restriction here. Instead of making this path yet another concrete tunnel we could have had a bit more of the open environments that surrounded Sector 5. The samey-ness contributes to making this feel like filler content, a low stakes traversal combat sequence that comes right on the tail of a few sidequests that also involved low stakes traversal and combat. There’s a bit of dialogue between the two which furthers their relationship and shows Cloud warming up to Aerith a little more but it’s not particularly significant. The only unique components here are the minigames where you operate robot hands to move containers and Aerith to different locations to release ladders to continue down the tunnel. But the puzzles are a non-starter and while they get out of your way pretty quick the slow speed at which the arms move becomes grating when the solutions are so obvious. The only thing I really like about this location is how it’s brought back later, and we’ll talk about that when we get to it.

The two make it to a playground where they stop for a while and it’s revealed through their conversation that Cloud reminds her of her first love who due to circumstances unstated is no longer around Aerith. This builds off an earlier moment where she asks Cloud if he has any friends from SOLDIER who he still has contact with. When she mentions her ex’s name, Zack, Cloud (and the player) doesn’t hear it because of another mysterious headache, forshadowing a deeper connection between Cloud and Aerith’s first love, something which is depicted in further detail later on.

The player is then given some time to linger in the playground where certain objects like like the rows of tires and the small slide are interactible. When the player is satisfied though, they go through a dialogue option that asks them if they want to move and head back to Sector 7 through the underground route that Aerith shows Cloud. I like how there’s this false choice here that lets the player make the decision to end the quiet moment between them and move back on with the story. But the story does move on back here and it isn’t back to Sector 7.

As Cloud is about to head into the tunnels, Tifa appears on a chocobo carriage headed towards the wall market. When Cloud speaks to her she explains that she’s heading to speak with Don Corneo, the gang boss which controls the wall market, but tells Cloud to head back instead of following her. While Cloud agrees at first, Aerith vehemently disagrees and pushes Cloud to assist Tifa on grounds that Corneo is dangerous. This is signals the game taking a turn back to the more dramatic, where a mystery is introduced and the domesticity of Sector Five is replaced with the ambient danger of the pleasure district, the Wall Market.

Let’s start by summarising the main story that takes place in this area. Cloud and Aerith arrive in the Wall Market hot on Tifa’s trail where they learn about Corneo’s bride competition, where prospective brides (who I guess would be just vying for a piece of Corneo’s riches?) get recommendations from three influential people in the town for a chance at the audition at being The Don’s bride. The three people being the chocobo ranch owner Chocobo Sam who’s a bit of a trickster and wears a cowboy hat, the hand massage parlour mistress Madame M, and the star/owner of a cabaret club named The Honeybee Inn, Andrea Rhodea. Cloud and Aerith have no idea why Tifa is supposedly auditioning but they try to enter Corneo’s mansion at the top of Wall Market through the front door to try and help her. When they’re rejected at the door they get stuck on the idea that they should get a recommendation for Aerith so she can get in, instead of infiltrating or finding some more covert means of attack. The game then sees Cloud and Aerith being rejected by Andrea and Sam, but finally landing with Madame M who gives a yes because of her interest in Cloud. She tasks the two with winning the underground fight tournament in the Corneo Coliseum which climaxes in a final round battle against the HELL HOUSE which is literally a robot in the shape of a house with arms and jetpacks that fires exploding chairs instead of missiles. The tournament payout goes to Madam M, who then uses at least some part of it to tailor a dress for Aerith (the dress actually varies depending on how many sidequests you completed in Chapter 8) which is revealed later with a literal red carpet and fireworks. Cloud is then invited to a dance-off with Andrea who’s also suddenly also interested in him. The moment takes the form of a short rhythm minigame to the background of Cloud and Andrea absolutely tearing it up on stage. Cloud’s dancing impresses Andrea enough for him to put Cloud in a dress and give his recommendation so that he can infiltrate along with Aerith. The two find Tifa inside the mansion who reveals that she came to interrogate Corneo about the gang members asking around about Barret in Sector 7. Upon confrontation Corneo he reveals that he was hired by Shinra to search Sector 7 for Barret and Avalanche and that he is also privy to the next step in their plan — Shinra aims to level the support pillar holding the Sector 7 plate and crushing the slums below with the debris, thus wiping out their cell of Avalanche once and for all. Right as he reveals this he drops the three of them into a sewers via trapdoor.

I just want to emphasise here how many set piece moments there are here — the fight with the hell house, Aerith’s dress reveal and the dance-off. Yet the main thrust of the chapter isn’t the overall plot of the game but the comedy and characters featured here. Chiefly supporting this is how the characters are constructed — the recommenders are all very obvious, but colorful and exaggerated and filled in just enough to be endearing and interesting for the short moments they’re on screen. Madame M projects a cool and alluring exterior but when she’s frustrated she swears like a sailor promoting the game itself to censor her with appropriately comedic bleeps, Chocobo Sam is a bit of a trickster who’s laidback and more interested to see things take their course and Andrea is mysterious but generous and helpful when interacting with Cloud. Corneo is appropriately cartoony and doesn’t suffer the same problem as Heidegger because its obvious he’s meant to be a caricature and not be taken seriously. Together they hold up the atmosphere of the Wall Market and sell the more zany plot beats that take place here.

This is the ‘beach episode’ of FF7R — where it’s really there just for the fun of it with less of progressing plot and narrative themes. The game plays it very straight and expects the audience to approach it on that same level and be equally interested in whatever is going on onscreen. As a result if Aerith being revealed in a gorgeous red dress as she walks down a red carpet towards Cloud with people cheering and fireworks in the background is your idea of a good time the chapter works really well. Luckily for me it’s right up my alley, so I had an absolute blast.

This section of the story is also interesting to me in the way it approaches the setting of a pleasure district with the carefree of a game made in 1997 by “taming” the space, reducing the adult element and focusing on the idea of it being an entertainment district. If the remake didn’t reinterpret the Wall Market and instead did a more one to one recreation it would have felt a lot more sleazy, the Honeybee Inn would have been a straight up brothel for instance. This more accurate rendition of what a pleasure district is would have emphasised the sex element far more than the 1997 playstation one game did. Therefore in reimagining the space, making the Honeybee Inn just a cabaret club, Madame M’s hand massage parlour being just a hand massage parlour, the cartoony lightheartedness is preserved even with the change in fidelity. The content, which arguably was more explicit in nature in the original game, had to be made less explicit because of the medium— 2020 playstation 4 realistic depictions of people and spaces — to preserve the lightness that the old medium— 1997 playstation one — lended to the content.

Talking about fidelity, the Wall Market itself is another display of how much detail the designers can stuff into one area. It’s definitely the largest town area in the game but feels the busiest and densest with every square metre of the place being stuffed with customers, tourists and workers. The area has the most obvious Japanese influence in its design, places selling potion drinks and monster burgers are side by side with the more realistic oden and ramen places you would see in a real commercial district in japan. There’s more to the pleasure district than bars and food though, along a middle section is a market where you can find a fortune teller, a medicine peddler and other mismatched stores. There’s suddenly then a bit of a Chinese influenced design motif with Coroneo and the people who are associated with him. The almost palace that he resides in is one obvious hint to that but the announcers in the colosseum also have costumes that look decidedly Chinese inspired. As a result of all this the place feels like a cross between Yakuza’s Kamurocho and an overly exaggerated Chinatown. It’s overwhelming and incredibly characteristic at once. The entire package is ultimately sold by the ambient dialogue (yes I’m talking about this again) where though it’s not so reactive as it was in chapter 3, is incredibly vivid and more varied than before. From the people on dates walking around town to the people waiting outside the ramen shop to the working girls complaining about men, there’s just so much to take in as you walk through the space. It’s not just the main streets either, there are so many small alleys and cubby holes also populated with people who are hanging around for who knows what, also voiced and saying things. Importantly, the game keeps you in the space for just the right amount of time and advances the story away from it before it starts feeling too familiar.

The game also takes the opportunity to dole out some side quests here as Cloud waits for Aerith to get dressed up. However you will only actually encounter 3/5 of the quests in any single playthrough because the game splits the quests into two routes depending on certain choices made during the chapter. This choice is entirely oblique and there’s also nothing in the game to actually indicate that there was a branching path at all, I only discovered it while reading online after I had finished the game once. There aren’t any conflicts in continuity between these two sets of quests that you get from either Sam and M either, they’re both separate scenarios that could have worked in conjunction. This makes the decision to lock two of the quests behind a second playthrough (or a reload of the chapter to its beginning) particularly strange. If it was a way to get players to want to replay the game to see more of the content, it would make far more sense to signpost it in the game, either through story or even just in the endgame completion screen. The choices that influence which path the player is put on are also hard to parse, they all sort of come down to whether you act more favourably to Sam or M, but there’s no indication that that any favouring was being cast in the first place.

To makes matters even more annoying, Chocobo Sam’s quest is far superior to Madam M’s. His quest “The Party Never Stops” begins with a request from the clothing store owner to get his drunk father back home but eventually sees Cloud going around town with Johnny and interacting with many of the people around. The quest makes good use of the environment, bringing the player to places the restaurant, item shop and inn which would otherwise have gone mechanically unused. At certain points the player is also asked to use their materia level to determine the success of some actions which is a nice way to unexpectedly tie in other gameplay elements into what is essentially just a fetch quest. This questline works really well because of the way it leverages the Wall Market setting and delivers its comedy without overstaying its runtime. It perfectly fits the kind of nonsensical tasks Cloud would do in the pleasure district while waiting on Aerith being dressed up.

Madame M’s “The Price of Thievery” advances a side story featuring a character called the Slum Angel that we were introduced to in chapter 8 a little further. It also asks the player to return to the collapsed highway to defeat a group of bandits they’ve fought twice now (just with more guards added to the mix this time) and that’s it. That’s the whole quest. If a player were to have been led onto Madame M’s route and never either replayed the game or the chapter to get the other quest, they would probably have found this side quest section to be sorely lacking. This difference in quality and duration makes me wonder if the routes were even meant to be seperate in the first place, perhaps the decision to gate them by routes was implemented later but without consideration for how differently paced the two routes would be. Whatever it may be, it’s definitely doesn’t have a good impact on the game.

To wrap up Chapter 8 and 9, I’d like to say that the reduction of stakes and slowing of pace really allowed the team to create some of the best moments of FF7R. . Cloud and Aerith are given a lot of room to breathe and be themselves, and the side characters and people we meet are all interesting and vivid. The city of Midgar is fleshed out a lot more and we’re able to see more aspects of it through the different locations in Sector 5 and Wall Market. They’re also able to bring a great amount of spectacle in to the mix in Chapter 9, as well as some really fun fanservice moments. These two chapters give us a good break from the breakneck drama and round out the experience nicely.

Chapter 10 and 11: Rough Waters/Haunted

The next two chapters mirror chapter 5 and 6 in the way that they depict the space in-between major plot points. Here Cloud, Tifa and Aerith travel back to Sector 7 in an attempt to warn the rest of Avalanche of the potential plan to take out the Sector 7 support pillar. It might make sense in theory to keep this bit as short as possible, however FF7R takes the players takes the players through the sewers in Chapter 10 and the train graveyard in chapter 11 in no less detail than it did with any of the moments before. They keep to this idea of fidelity in describing Cloud’s journey, making it feel vivid and us present within all of it. What puts these two chapters aside from 5/6 though is in how the game takes this opportunity to painstakingly raise the tension bit by bit. The dialogue keeps the moment afloat, Tifa’s constant worrying and Aerith’s attempts to keep her calm work by constantly reconnecting the audience with the stakes, and Tifa’s griping at straws hoping that Corneo might have been lying serve to reinforce the enormity and awfulness of Shinra’s plan.

To the game’s credit, FF7R does it’s best to make the sewers stand out from all the other long tunnel sequences in the game. Contrasting chapter five’s endless running through samey train tunnels, there are three distinct sections of the sewers each with a different look. the colour palette goes from the grimey brown brick suiting the utility tunnels of an old city to a more industrial grey cement area with buttons to raise or drop water levels to create the critical path. They’re by no means a puzzle, it’s 100% obvious what you’re supposed to do but the interactivity and change in environment makes the player continue to pay attention to their surroundings. The cutscenes in this section make great use of the area too, dialogue is almost always accompanied with the characters scrambling from crumbling walkways to precarious floating platforms which keeps the danger of the present foremost in the players mind; this keeps the moment to moment tension high, anchoring the player to the situation they’re currently facing. The enemy pack design is the other thing distinguishing the sewers from some of the other combat and travel sections of the game. The average pack sees the player facing the Bingfu, which if left unkilled starts channeling a stream of bubbles that puts characters to sleep which are annoying enough to warrant killing first. The crabs are resistant to physical attacks so switching to Aerith is incentivised and the Saladins are best nuked with fire spells before they’re able to turn party members into useless frogs. Together they create fights that feel challenging and incentivise using all the tools the game gives you, making these some of the better normal mob encounters in the game.

Chapter 11 takes the tension higher as the team exits the sewers into the train junkyard. They spot Shinra helis flying towards the pillar, but first they’ve got to deal with a more immediate ghost problem. The encounters here are less varied than the ones in the sewer but the ghosts by themselves are a good deviation from the usual armed goons. The game uses the ghosts and their connection to the lifestream to further show Aerith’s empathy and her connection to things magical as she’s able to hear the words of the ghost children that take residence in the area. The environmental interactivity continues here, with the team moving trains around to get across the junkyard and the abandoned train station ends up being quite a memorable space as well. The ghosts move cranes and objects around making the team take a detour through the entire building where they traverse through the ransacked offices and eventually to the control room where a boss fight against a large amalgamation of ghosts ensures. This boss fight works well because it’s constantly changing phases where you have to either hit it with physical or magical damage and the arena is a filled with objects to manoeuvre around instead of it just being an open circle or square as most of the arenas have been.

You would expect this area to be at its end when they make it to the other side of the station complex and the pillar shows signs of a firefight in the distance, but it’s not. As the team finally makes it near the gates a flurry of ghosts teleports Aerith away where she’s shown a flashback to her younger self playing hide and seek with other children but not being found and instead left alone. Those emotions are passed on to the present Aerith, who starts crying too. But unlike the child version of her she’s found by Cloud and Tifa, who pull her to safety once they actually find her. It’s a moment with very little forewarning and setup but manages to quickly expand on Aerith being the last of her kind, and how that’s changed by finding friends in Cloud and Tifa.

That’s the last of the character development we’ll get in these last two chapters however because the game has one last last boss fight to throw at us. How this goes down for you depends on how quickly you’re able to quickly grasp Eligor’s moveset and how you’re meant to beat it. The mechanical horse has a pair of wheels on each of its side which are invulnerable for the first few phases of the fight. Hitting these wheels also causes Cloud or Tifa to go into a long stagger animation, just like hitting the front side of a riot trooper. This would be fine, the design is for the wheels to incentivise attacking it from the back to avoid the stunning laser he fires in front of him, but the way that the basic attacks launch you forward quite a large distance towards the enemy makes getting good positioning a bit of a crapshoot. The wheels also become vulnerable and work like all the other right and left appendages on bosses in the last phase, which happens with no visual change or reason, adding to the frustration. This last phase can also take some time as when he starts running circles around the arena while swinging his lance around forcing you to just wait while throwing basic attacks with Aerith. Adding on to that, he’s also able to do an attack named Winds of Gehenna which pulls the party towards him and does a huge amount of damage. There’s no consistent way of avoiding this move and it’s mostly a matter of either saving ATB to heal up quickly after it or hoping you can out damage him. The fact that these mechanics come in the last phase means that if it’s your first time playing through the game and seeing his moves, you have to be really quick in understanding the new moves he’s doing or (more likely) reset on the final phase of his fight. Counteracting Winds of Gehenna isn’t even possible on reaction too, because the answer to that move is to have ATB before it actually hits to quickly heal and revive teammates. The thing is that it isn’t the moves themselves that are the problem here (aside from Winds) but the fact that they’re all stuffed into the end of the fight. If they were just spaced out a bit more, the player would have more time to react and learn to the attacks which would prevent some of the frustration.

Chapter 12: Fight For Survival

If FF7R adhered to a traditional three act structure, then Chapter 12 would come at the end of act two, bringing with it the dual crises of the plate being felled and Aerith letting herself be captured by Shinra in exchange for Marlene’s safety. But Chapter 12 is also a moment of many resolutions and climaxes for the characters themselves — the most final of which being the moments Biggs and Jessie both fall in combat defending the pillar from Shinra’s attack. Biggs’ death strikes hard because he’s been a generally upstanding character and we’ve developed picture of his motivations and backstory less through overt exposition and more through hints and snippets of conversations. Through a few ambient dialogues and one hint from the orphanage teacher, we’ve gotten an idea that Biggs once worked at the Leaf House in Sector 5. It is only right before he loses consciousness that he mentioned it explicitly, asking Cloud to check up on the place for him, confirming this piece of his past. I like this moment because when Cloud tells Biggs to go see the children for himself, it’s both Cloud expressing his wish for Biggs to continue living but also because he’s seen and formed a relationship with the children there himself already. It also makes you think of those children who are thankfully most likely safe from the impending disaster here, but also of all of the kids who aren’t that we’ve seen in chapter 3. On the other hand, Jessie’s death hurts because in her final moments she accepts it as a atonement for the lives that she’s taken during the first reactor explosion. However we know that it wasn’t actually her doing but rather Shinra’s, the very same people who have gravely injured her. This injustice unbeknownst to the characters, as well as her backstory of having lost her father to Shinra as well, strikes really hard. As for Wedge, he survives a fall from the pillar by using a grapple gun to break his momentum and is found by Cloud, Tifa and Aerith when they first get to the base of the pillar. This is actually an interesting point because in the original game he dies here from the fall. This deviation however isn’t marked by Whispers trying to prevent him from using the grapple gun or anything, it’s actually completely ignored by them whereas Biggs and Jessie were both surrounded by Whispers before they died. You could say that the Whispers that attacked Cloud and the team as they emerged from the train graveyard were trying to stop them from getting to Wedge to administer aid, but it doesn’t make sense when they could have just interfered with Wedge directly to make sure he wasn’t able to break his fall. As a plot element that has a meta heavy focus, the Whispers need to work consistently within their established rules else their metaphor starts to fall apart. To be fair the exact capabilities of the Whispers are not spelt out, but this moment sticks out as feeling the least congruent with what was established.

So Wedge survives but he’s badly hurt and regrets not being able to help more. His perception of his own inability resolves in him channeling it to inspire one of the Shinra guards preventing people from accessing one of the routes out of Sector 7 to open the gates and let people through. It’s a nice moment for Wedge who’s positioned as more of a joke character to be self-aware of his goofy incompetency and instead turn it into something positive and meaningful in the plot. On another note, we’ve actually also seen this meek Shinra guard be berated by his superior who mans this post with him before in previous chapters and seeing that small arc play out in this moment is also really satisfying because it’s pretty easy to miss if you weren’t paying attention. FF7R rewards players for paying attention to their surroundings by letting details like this guard and Biggs’ involvement with Leaf House that play out mostly in the background come to the forefront whether you noticed them before or not. Touches like these also contribute to making the world feel like it’s bigger than just the main plot.

While this happens our last member of the party, Aerith runs through a rapidly burning Sector 7 to find Marlene and get her to safety. The game actually pulls the player away from Cloud and his ascent of the pillar to Aerith and gives us the chance to control her instead. There’s a feeling of vulnerability and desperation that comes from controlling Aerith who isn’t a trained fighter like the rest of the party as she’s thrown around by explosions as the Sector 7 slums plunges into further destruction. I also like how she has to fight against the crowd as they bump and run into her trying to get to safety which is a simple touch but lends a lot more physicality to her struggle. She eventually does get to Seventh Heaven where she finds Marlene but she’s also immediately found by Tsueng, the head Turk, and a Shinra security team. Aerith is then forced into making a deal with him, Marlene’s safety for her own capture. This event laying half of the impetus for the events to follow.

Returning to the pillar, while fighting our way up works incredibly well as part of a narrative climax, the way they designed their encounters here leaves a lot to be desired. The biggest issue with this area is throwing flying enemies at the player when they only have melee characters, Cloud and then later Tifa, in the party. The drones are fairly weak and die to one or two spells but the Helitroopers are the egregious ones. They have two attacks that do a huge amount of hitstop to Cloud, meaning that fighting two might result them in chain stunning you to death. They also frequently fly out of Cloud’s melee reach, where they player has absolutely nothing they can do but wait for their pathing to maybe bring them back in. This also causes another problem that if Cloud channel’s a spell and the Helitroopers pathing takes them out Cloud’s melee range, they can get staggered in a position where Cloud can again do absolutely nothing but wait for them to be unstunned and then slowly float back to the scene. They’re also very resistant to melee attacks which means that spells are they only good way of taking them down. It’s because of this that the player’s progression through this area is constantly being brought to a grinding halt as they wait around for the troopers to fly into their reach. It clashes terribly with the otherwise high pace and high tension narrative stakes of Cloud and Tifa fighting their way up to meet up with Barret on the roof.

When they do get the boss fight that takes place as a full party (Cloud, Tifa and Barret) against the combined might of Rude and Reno is a redeeming one. It starts off as a 3v1 against a powered up Reno, going into a phase two with Rude in the heli raining bombs and then phase three where after the heli goes down the two fight side by side. The actual mechanics of the fight are simpler than the last few — part of this is because the human vs human fights all tend to be less mechanically complex — but that works to the game’s advantage too. The fight is more fluid and freeform, focusing on testing the players reactions to quick moves. It is such a refreshing break from the fights that had preceded it. As a battle that comes at the climax of a lot of tension building, it’s nice for the player to be able to just go ham and enjoy the spectacle.

Cloud and the team beat Rude and Reno but are eventually thwarted by the Whispers who defend Rude as he makes a last ditch effort to activate the plate separation sequence. At the same time it’s revealed to the team that Aerith allowed herself to be captured by Shinra for Marlene’s safety, setting up nicely for the closing act of FF7R.

Chapter 13: A Broken World

Witnessing the disaster that the collapse of the Sector 7 plate wreaked alongside Tifa and Barret and Cloud is gut wrenching in a way that disasters in games often aren’t. It’s here that we see Barret at his lowest, calling out his daughter’s and comrade’s names into the rubble that now stands before him. In the span of a few short days he went from a confident leader of a team who believed they fought for the betterment of the planet, executing their first real operation to a great success to losing almost everything that they had worked to build up. But worst of all his daughter, Marlene, seemed to be lost in the rubble too. This is the single moment where we see Barret coming close to giving up.

Tifa’s foremost question is if just maybe everything that happened was their fault. Her constant objections against the bombings have shown us that she had been dissatisfied with their course of actions from the start. It’s poignant that it’s the foremost thing on Tifa’s mind. After losing her home, her bar and her friends the thing that weighs most heaviest of her mind is guilt. The idea that Avalanche themselves are guilty of some of the devastation that was wreaked across Midgar is something Jessie was wrestling with herself too. This question seems to awaken something in Barret, reminding him of his position as their leader and bringing him back to himself. He quickly refutes Tifa’s doubts, reminding her that Shinra were the ones who razed the pillar which made them responsible. He pulls Tifa into a hug to comfort her, but she doesn’t reciprocate and just stands there. His inability to understand her feelings and support her is a final failure that tops off the moment. He isn’t even able to take care of the one surviving member of his team.

The team picks their way out of the debris, making it back to the Wall Market where the bustle of the casual nightlife is replaced with a group of people gathered at the gates gaping at the hole that had opened up in their sky. The three recommenders offer soft words and none of the gall that we had seen before. The playful BGM is gone, replaced by a sombre track that follows us all the way down the path we had walked down with Aerith just the night before. A moment that seems ages ago now. In Sector 5 people are gathered in front of the large screen in the middle of town. This time the tone is grimmer, everyone is less sure of who was responsible and for what reason. The children at Leaf House, the children that Biggs had told Cloud to check up on for him, are more amazed at the light streaming from the hole in the plate than scared. Every thing in this space has changed, driving home the impact of the disaster.

The team heads for Aerith’s house, the only place Cloud can think of that Marlene would be. On the way we retrace our steps down the path we had taken out of Sector 5 with Aerith just earlier that night. The playful BGM is gone, replaced by a sombre track that follows us into town. The chatter here is grim, everyone is unsure of who was responsible and for what reason. The children at Leaf House, the children that Biggs had told Cloud to check up on for him, are more amazed at the light streaming from the hole in the plate than scared. The melancholy of the moment sets in as we finally reach Aerith’s house. We feel her absence all the more arriving here without her. Two important revelations take place, Barret reuniting with Marlene who’s safe due to Aerith’s intervention and Elmyra telling the story of how she came to raise Aerith. It’s a sad tale for Elmyra too, the story of her husband dying in the war fits in with all the losses the characters are coming to terms with.

When the team sets off again to survey the damage that took place in Sector 7 the normal BGM is restored. The route out of Sector 5 regains a familiar sound that’s like an echo from when things were a lot calmer. When we journey down the collapsed highway again the robot hands that we used to move Aerith are there to greet us too. It’s in re-traversing this collapsed highway that it’s inclusion gains some meaning, the game stressing the loss that the team is experiencing.

The team reaches the playground, this time filled with the people who escaped through the tunnel that Aerith had shown Cloud before. Their short journey through the tunnel itself is works in a very similar way to the tunnel at the start of Chapter 2 before they emerge into the disaster zone. It builds up anticipation in a very similar way through prolonging this in between moment before the big reveal, and there’s even the same sounds of unseen explosions above as they travel back towards Sector 7. There’s a feeling of deja vu here that’s very poignant.

Emerging into Sector 7 itself is a bit of a let down. There’s no room to explore and we’re quickly railroaded into finding Wedge who’s fallen into an underground Shinra facility — the very one foreshadowed in chapter 3 in a conversation with the town watch leader — and that’s all of Sector 7 we get to see.

The secret facility section here is actually fairly short, though on my first time through it felt like it took a very long time. The reason for that being the rows and rows of destructible crates that are placed along the corridors. In this section we control Barret so instead of Cloud drawing his blade to smash boxes, we’re given the chance to blast them apart with Barret’s machine gun arm. Look, if you’re going to put rows and rows of destructible boxes in front of me you know that I’m going to break them all. This resulted in me plodding through the tunnels slowly shooting all of the boxes and getting actually very little from them. It made the facility feel more cavernous than it actually was, which annoyed me because there wasn’t anything interesting going on in the area anyways. The second time through I ignored all of them and found the section to be actually fairly short and not as much of a detour than I remembered.

The boss fight at the end of this section has consistently caused me to reset even on my second play through. It has a similar problem to Eligor from chapter 11 where the earlier phases of the fight are fairly unchallenging but the final phase suddenly throws in a few things you need to take in all at once and react quickly to. The reward for completing the battle isn’t particularly satisfying either — in the aftermath of the fight a small hole in the wall is opened up which reveals a room full of tanks with human test subjects inside. Cloud is attacked by visions again, and this time visualises himself inside one of those tanks himself, alluding that he was experimented on by Shinra too. The Whispers then appear to whisk them out of the base, as the team doesn’t actually find this secret base in the original continuity. Because the payoff here is so small and the room with the test subjects is right at the surface anyways the whole section feels like filler. It’s only redeeming feature is letting us move around as Barret for a while.

Chapter 14 and 15: In Search Of Hope//The Day Midgar Stood Still

Chapter 14 begins when the team returns to Aerith’s place bearing the injured Wedge and Cloud pleads Elmyra for her blessing to find and rescue Aerith from Shinra. She asks for some time to think, so the band retires to bed. It’s at this point where one out of three cutscenes will play where Cloud wakes up and meets either Tifa, Aerith or Barret in the garden outside in the middle of the night. Which cutscene gets played is determined by the different dialogue choices made during the game, as well as whether you do certain side quests or not. You get either Tifa or Aerith for doing more things that ‘side’ with them — doing the side quests that they accompany Cloud in, choosing to compliment them, etc. These are the two options that you would most probably get on a normal playthrough, where Barret’s cutscene requires you to be consistently cold and negative to both Tifa and Aerith, as well as skip all the side quests in chapters 3 and 8. The fact that there are three divergent routes here is clearly marked in the game’s completion log, so I don’t mind it as much as the other hidden routes in the game. That said, each scene has its own strong relevance to the plot and it sucks for some of the players to miss out on that.

Barret’s is the least impactful, he mentions names of some other Avalanche members who work separate from the main team and promises to introduce Cloud to them someday. While Tifa’s scene shows her finally letting her emotions go, approaching Cloud to cry on his shoulder lamenting the loss of everything she had built up for herself. She mentions here that they had lost everything again which puts to definite words that in the past Shinra had taken their homes — this is something only strongly implied in one of Cloud’s visions earlier. It’s significant because this understanding that Shinra was responsible for the burning of her hometown and the death of her father is the foundation for her character motivations throughout the game. It’s part of the reason she sticks with Avalanche despite having reservations against the bombings.

Aerith’s scene has the most ramifications, where she appears as a vision to Cloud in the garden. Aside from expressing her happiness at having met Cloud, she also tells him not to fall in love with her. This can be taken a hint that she’s aware of her death that’s supposed to occur later on in the FF7 story, a plot point that won’t be resolved within this game.

In any case, the team wakes up in the morning and Elmyra gives them her blessing to search for Aerith. As they leave though, there’s a bit of resolution between Barret and Marlene when she questions why Barret is leaving her once again he finally tells her that he’s fighting to protect her and the people of Midgar. I really like how the game takes the time to offer a resolution to even the smallest character stories that they develop in moments like these.

When you get into town it becomes apparent that the game has one last spate of side quests for you to take on before heading off for the final mission of the game. This one is longer than the rest, consisting of nine quests and for the first time they’re not all neatly marked on your map for you to pick up. Though honestly when I saw this on my first playthrough I immediately felt a little tired and more interested to progress the story. The traversable area spans the abandoned church, Sector 5 train station, Sector 5, wall market and anywhere in between that hasn’t been covered in rubble which meant hunting for quest givers to make sure I got them all seemed very unappealing. However it fits well narratively and the moment it comes in matches the pace we’re at. It’s one last set of jobs and prep before the final act of the game.

The game does have a few tricks to make this set of sidequests interesting though. Having the quests unmarked made it feel less like I was checking things off a list, but rather organically finding people in need and speaking to them. The game does fantastic job of using the path of each quest to lead you into discovering the quest giver or the location for another one of the quests resulting in a cascade of progression that takes the player perfectly from the very first quest they would probably see to the end. To describe it briefly:

You discover Missing Children right after the tutorial tip telling you about the sidequests, which naturally makes you search around town bringing you to the Secret Medicine quest. The Secret Medicine quest points you towards the Church which brings you out of town to Chocobo Search. Right past the quest giver for Chocobo Search is the quest giver for Corneo’s Secret Stash. That’s in the same direction as where you needed to go to find the children in Missing Children, which completes that. Heading to the point for Corneo’s Secret Stash you’re given a description of a person wearing striped stockings and a hat. As you head further down one of the chocobos in Chocobo search is right here, and in Sector 5 you meet Johnny to receive the Tomboy Bandit quest where you’re asked to find someone with the same description as in Corneo’s Secret Stash and are pointed towards the church. Going to the church progresses Secret Medicine, Tomboy Bandit and Corneo’s Secret Stash and Missing Chocobo. You’re then given a reason to head towards Wall Market where you find The Power Of Music right away, which sends you on a search around town for the music discs you need to complete it pointing you to find Wavering Heart and Malicious Goons. Completing all of these and proceeding further down to the playground gives you Subterranean Menace, completing which also completes you Secret Medicine. The only quests left at the point are Missing Chocobo and Corneo’s Secret Stash which both see players going to locations marked on their map.

I think the usage of quests that directly ask the player to search within a small area like a town to point them in the direction of other quests is a really smart one — it means the player is rewarded not just by progression in the current quest they were attempting to further but also in other new content that they weren’t expecting. The fast travel system also starts off only with three points in its network, meaning you have to take the footpaths anyways so you can’t skip all the leading the game sets out. The quests themselves tap on the good cast of previous recurring side characters which tells more of the story of how everyone is reacting to the tragedy, and the introduction of Kylie keeps things fresh and interesting. Some of the fights are quite unique, like the Type-0 Behemoth which is the most timing intensive boss so far where you need to destroy two parts of its body in quick succession before they regenerate and the fight against the Tonberry where you contend with its multiple insta-kill moves. This section does however highlight the game’s terrible map system. It’s especially weird because map screens are fairly standard by now but the way they chose to implement it in FF7R causes a huge headache for people specifically when they need it the most in this section of the game where they have the most traversable space to go through. To start off, there’s no main entirely connected map that will show you the entire space. The map is split into sections in unhelpful ways that only serve to make it hard to find what you need. Different elevations of the same area are displayed as a completely separate area of the map and have no indication of where they are actually on top of or below. The only way to properly find quest markers is to go to the quest menu and then select the quest you’re looking for on there. To top it off the scrolling speed is ridiculously slow. It’s a mess.

Returning to the main scenario, the team needs a way back up topside which brings them back to Corneo’s mansion. Instead of the man himself we find Leslie, one of the Don’s henchmen who helped us out in our last infiltration on the mansion. He leads us back down into the sewers through the trapdoor where we’re supposed to clear the path to Corneo for him in exchange for him giving us a way up. This portion of the story is excruciating because it puts us right back into the sewers, even starting us in the exact same area we started in before and then puts us through a whole long gauntlet of fights against the mobs of this area. While before the encounters were designed to provide what felt like fair challenge, returning here pits us against the same mobs but in worse configurations than before. It’s easy to be chain stunned and then destroyed by the Sahagins. We find Corneo at the end of this segment where he reveals that Shinra are planing to abandon Midgar and build a new city. The next moment he calls Abzu, the monster we fought back in chapter 10 to cover his escape. Unfortunately the boss fight is a step down from the likes of Type-0 Behemoth and even progresses in a similar way to when we first encountered it before.

After we defeat Abzu the game fills out Leslie’s backstory, providing some reason for him aiding us in Chapter 9. It feels like they were trying to hit some emotional notes without doing the necessary build up when suddenly bringing up a girl that Leslie had lost, but I like that they took the time to

Aside from Shinra’s plan, the most interesting part of this is how they take the time to fill out Leslie’s backstory, providing some reason for him aiding us in Chapter 9. It feels like they were trying to hit some emotional notes without doing the necessary build up in suddenly bringing up a girl that Leslie had lost, but I like that they took the time to also tell his story. That said, I was unbelievably glad to resurface and receive the enhanced grapple guns from Leslie which would be our ticket up onto the plate.

Chapter 15 begins when you choose to grapple over the wall that separates Sector 5 from Sector 7, beginning the team’s journey back up the plate. This section is similar to chapters 5-7 and 10-11, an in-between section that depicts the transition from one space to another. The ascent through ruined structures and destroyed industrial infrastructure is an extremely welcome change from the endless corridors and tunnels we’ve been running through the entire game. The upwards direction and scenery around gives you a better sense of progression and traversal itself is made more interesting by integrating the grapple hook. However any graphical spectacle that you might imagine is scarcely present as most of the surrounding ruins are depicted in flat textures. The render quality of the background is so bad that when the game thinks to draw attention to the scenery in a moment where the team looks out over the once bustling city and announces their hopes for the future, they’re forced to quickly cut from the view of the beautifully low res texture they’re looking at and bring the camera back to close ups of the characters.

Gameplay wise it’s back to fighting Shinra troops. It’s a familiar but still enjoyable rhythm and the SOLDIER 3rd class enemy type introduced here is finally a human enemy other than the riot troopers who don’t die in just a few hits and a Triple Slash. The boss fight at the end of this section is against yet another flying robot, The Valkyrie. It’s unique in forcing the player to use Barret to shoot at it for the entire of the first phase as it’s out of melee range, but other than that it has an interesting third phase where you’re able to bait the robot into walking into its own orbital attack, which is the only way to put it into the pressured state as to stagger it. This fight like they wanted a customary boss fight to end the chapter with, but it’s a good capstone to a short segment that comes as a warm up for the real action that comes in the chapter after.

Chapter 16: The Belly of the Beast

We are introduced to the stage for the next two chapters of the game, the Shinra Building, as the camera pans down the structure from its apex to Cloud staring up at it. The gap between the end of the previous chapter where it’s still light out to this shot where it has turned completely night is the largest continuity break in the entire game. It’s not consequential, we can assume that in that time they managed to reach the top of the plate and made their way to where they’re surveying the building, but it was still jarring enough to stick in my mind. In any other game I wouldn’t have questioned it and I think the fact that it did shows how impactful that continuity has been.

Their attempt at a stealthy entrance to the building is cut short by Barret’s clumsiness and there’s a short fight through the parking area before the team breaks into the main foyer. The game does a turn here in a change of pace from the continued escalation of action I would have expected from the game by now. There’s no combat here at all for quite a while as the team reaches the 59th floor and gains entry to the upper floors on visitor passes.

Here Shinra Company is properly depicted as an entity that many normal people also inhabit and work for, a point that the game has been not so subtly trying to make the entire game. On the higher floors we overhear conversations between distraught workers still in panic trying to get in contact with their loved ones who disappeared after the fall of the plate, the team that’s in charge of reconstruction making their plans — more of the environmental storytelling this game uses to great effect. Rounding it out we’re also introduced to the anti-Shinra elements working from the inside such as the mayor, who turns out to be the one helping the team by suppressing alarms, erasing security cam footage and is in bed with Avalanche. The space itself is designed to look like a naturalistic modern company headquarters — there’s even a company museum with holograms and speeches from all the board members that’s complete with information booths and nondescript black couches. It’s actually one of my favourite sections of this chapter because they so accurately nail the layout of exhibits, the focused lighting, the way the museum is sectioned by in between rooms of wall to wall screens that play cheery videos with equally cheery voice over. It all feels incredibly lifelike, down to the scale model of midgar that takes up an entire room which sparks a conversation between Cloud and Barret about how much good the city has actually done for its citizens. This naturalism contributes to the feeling that Shinra is that perfectly normal upstanding company that runs and provides for the city and its employees.

At the end of the aforementioned company museum tour, Cloud and the team step into a virtual reality simulation depicting Shinra’s interpretations of the Creta and the possible existence of their ‘promised land’ vibrant with mako energy. I think its interesting the unreliable source of Shinra is our first and currently only source of knowledge about the Creta and what happened in the past to wipe them out. As we find out later the existence of the ‘promised land’ is doubtful and Aerith has no knowledge of it. The player can only guess at what else they’ve gotten wrong.

At the end of the VR video, the room glitches out and the three get shown a vision of Midgar being destroyed in an apocalyptic event, which is the first vision of the future that all of the team members share. However Cloud’s experience is different from the other two, where he sees them being stricken down by an entity that flickers between the mysterious robed people we’ve seen two of this game and Sephiroth himself. The final shot of this vision intriguingly depicts Sephiroth back to back with Cloud, implying some kind of friendship or alliance between the two. We can presume that this vision is also sent by Sephiroth, and foreshadows him convincing Cloud to work with him to ‘save the world’ at the end of the game. Adding on to that, the flickering between Sephiroth and robed figure foreshadows the truth behind Sephiroth’s appearances — this is laying down brickwork way in advance for further parts of the remake yet to come.

The game also takes the time to introduce all of the Shinra company board members in cutscenes cutting away from Cloud and the team tailing the members as they come together for a meeting. True to tropes in cyberpunk fiction, President Shinra’s motivations are shown to be based in greed. He has interpreted some writing left by the Creta literally about their ‘promised land’ that’s bountiful and full of mako energy and wants to find and exploit that land to further Shinra’s power. The game doesn’t spend much time explaining this, knowing that his characterisation is a simple and understood one. The few times he has appeared in cutscenes have been more than enough to show clearly his motivations for the actions he takes. In a meeting that Cloud and Tifa eavesdrop upon, he confirms for the audience his intention to build a new, better Midgar when they do find the ‘promised land’, landing more believability to why he would level an entire section of his own city and showing why Aerith is so important to them, being the last Creta alive.

There are two other board members with more or less equally clear motivations and stakes in the story — Hojo and Reeves. Hojo is a morally corrupt scientist who has no regards for human life in his lust for knowledge and is quite plot relevant as his experiments have directly caused a lot of suffering for the characters in our cast. On the other hand Reeves is the only one on the board with a conscience.

The rest, Heidegger, Scarlett and Palmer, are weak to say the least. We’ve talked about Heidegger, who’s literally cartoonishly evil for the sake of it but he at least serves a plot role in being the general of the Shinra army. Palmer is shown his audio message in the museum to be quite literally useless as his division is defunct, and his only relevance is in seeing Sepiroth in the building as he’s walking down the corridor towards the meeting. Scarlett is even less consequential, but bizarrely has her own theme song that plays in her cutscene as she’s depicted to be watching an experiment rapidly going wrong on a velvet chair while using a Shinra trooper as a footstool. It’s possible that they come into the story more at a later juncture but FF7R does a poor job in using these characters within its own duration and doesn’t set up much more than what stereotypes the characters are draw from.

When the meeting ends Cloud and the rest follow Hojo into his lab where attempt force him into releasing Aerith. He gets away by releasing a bunch of monsters but the team defeats them easily and catches up to him where Aerith is being held. They free Aerith from her cell as he gets away, finally uniting the four of our heroes. At the same time another cell opens, one containing Red XIII, a dog-like animal. After being calmed by Aerith’s Creta powers, he’s able to speak with the party and joins them in their mission. His inclusion at this point is congruent with the original game but because FF7R only covers the Midgar portion of the overall story it’s a little awkward. All his plot and thematic relevance comes later on, so for the duration of this game he’s relegated to being little more than a plot delivering device. Shortly after speaking to Red, Cloud starts getting headaches again, this time seeing vision of Jenova — a humanoid monster that’s being kept in Hojo’s research lab. It cuts to Sephiroth proclaiming her as his mother. Cloud starts mirroring this himself, and then passes out.

Chapter 17: Deliverance from Fate

Cloud wakes up in Aerith’s old room in the lab. The space seems to be untouched, complete with a wall spanning mural that looks like something a younger Aerith might have drawn. Here two major revelations are made. The first, that Aerith herself has no idea what the ‘promised land’ is and that Shinra might be mistaken in its existence. As she begins to move on to her next point, the Whispers appear again. Red then offers an explanation to what they are. The past and the future of the planet is, already preordained by the planet itself and the Whispers are the arbiters of this fate. Entities that seek out people who might alter the planet’s destiny and attempt to prevent them from doing so. This is the most explicit the game gets about their role in the story. At this point the only difference in knowledge between someone who has played the original and someone who hasn’t is understanding that the preordained course of events are the events as they took place in the original game. Even having said that, I think it’s very possible for a new player to guess at that fact. At the very least, both camps have finally come as close as they can be in terms of thematic understanding.

Aerith attempts to continue to tell the team about a greater threat, which prompts the Whispers to circle around her, perhaps about to transport her away. She starts talking about how she feels lost, like she’s slowly losing parts of herself when she comes in contact with the Whispers. In a moment mirroring back in Chapter 11 where Tifa rescues Aerith from her memories of childhood solitude, she pulls Aerith out from among the Whispers, upon which they dissipate. The implication here is simple — while alone Aerith can’t hope to fight against fate, together they can change the future.

They are interrupted by explosions in the distance, which cues Wedge appearing on the screens. Avalanche HQ is here to ‘flush the president out’ and Wedge has arranged for the team’s extraction on the rooftop via helicopter.

Chapter 17 sees Cloud, Barret, Tifa and Aerith all together for the first time in the game which raises the question — four character parties? Having encounters with four party members would have been an interesting way to spice up combat hasn’t introduced anything particularly new since the introduction of Aerith in chapter 8. As the four return to the elevator that Cloud passed out in front of earlier, a pack of monsters leap out to engage the team. At the same time Barret and Red are diverted to move a pile of rubble blocking the way while, conveniently, the remaining three are left to fend off their assailants. The rest of this game follows this vein, finding every opportunity to divert one or two of the characters away to keep the party size at three. The remaining fight sections of the game deal with it relatively well — the lab section splits the team up two by two, Barret is out of action for the Jenova fight, Rufus vs Cloud being a 1v1 is justified, same with Barret and Aerith against the robot in the lobby and you naturally only control Cloud in the motorcycle chase. The final fight is choreographed to keep a maximum of three people with Cloud at all times and it does start to feel a little artificial at that point. Being the climatic finale I really wanted to see the four of them fighting together but that only ever happens for brief moments in cutscenes. The dramatic tension is never allowed to reach its natural high because of the limitations imposed by the gameplay system. I feel like they could have handled it the same way the game handles Red, which is to keep that fourth character in the battle but uncontrollable for its duration. It wouldn’t have been out of the question for the game to determine at different points which three characters you would get to control, giving the designers another variable to pace the encounter with. This keeps the amount of individual skills, spells and character positions at that manageable maximum — four might have been too much — while still letting us fight with all our heroes in the fray.

The team emerges into the central hub of the research facility where Cloud and Sephiroth finally cross swords. After overcoming his initial shock Cloud leaps at Sephiroth, who destroys the platform the team is standing on and then parries his attack with the Masamune, putting them in the classic crossed swords pose. Even Sephiroth’s dialogue acknowledges this, declaring the moment their ‘touching reunion’. He then pushes back at Cloud’s strike and tosses Cloud into the lower area of the facility. What succeeds this moment however, is an hour and a half long gauntlet through four sections of the lab where the team is split into two pairs. It’s tedious, drawn out and a huge killer to the momentum of the plot. Plot wise there’s reason for this section to be this long either, the time that it would have taken for them to regroup and get back to the top of the central hub would have been enough for Sephiroth to take Jenova and leave before them. Worst of all, the framing for their having to go through the entire laboratory fighting every single monstrosity it has to offer is that Hojo wants ‘data’, and for some reason is happy to just let the team go once he’s satisfied. Nothing about this section makes sense which makes it even more annoying when the game acknowledges the length of the detour at the end of it where Barret and Cloud make a joke about having made Wedge and their extraction wait a long while. It’s just pure filler.

To add insult to injury, there’s a difficulty spike in this area partly because you’re fighting in parties of two but also because the enemies have a lot more health than the ones we encounter before. Annoyances like the bloodhounds chain stunning Tifa and Aerith sometimes making it impossible to recover health. The partner AI runs into the Sledgeworm’s character freezing Torpid Strike which combos straight into Killing Blows which just straight up kills the frozen character. These lead to situations lead to frequent resets where you feel punished for impossible situations or mistakes that you didn’t even commit yourself.

The segment does finally come to an end right back where we started before Sephiroth cast the team into the depths of the lab. Jenova is gone with only a trail of purple blood as to indicate where it could have been taken. There is an immense feeling of suspense as the team follows the trail up the elevator and into the President’s office where the trail disappears right at the door. The office itself is empty too but a cry from help can be heard from outside. The glass window is shattered and the team discovers President Shinra hanging off the edge of the building. Barret helps him up and starts making demands. Shinra of course turns on him the moment he can and starts making a speech cementing his role as a pure bad villain whose motivations come down to ‘because he can’. It’s cut short by Sephiroth killing Shinra and then subsequently Barret too.

This moment is absolutely shocking, for a newcomer to the series as well as someone who’s played the original FF7 too. We’re immediately thrust into a bossfight against the Jenova Dreamweaver before being able to even process his death. It comes so entirely out of nowhere and my mind was just racing with the implications. What about the rest of the continuity? He definitely doesn’t die here in the original game so are they going to rewrite everything from here on out?

None of that comes to fruition of course, because he’s revived by the Whispers at the end of the fight. It feels both disappointing and almost expected seeing as Barret too significant of a character to die so early on, and the deviation from the original game would have been enormous. Importantly the moment tells us that while Whispers cannot directly kill people, they can save them from death. When viewed in contrast to Wedge living past the point where he would have died in FF7, it implies that as opposed to death, life is able to triumph over fate. However fleeting that triumph might be as they throw Wedge out of the building in a later cutscene, the only case of the Whispers killing a person and even in this case they resorted to conventional means like throwing him off a building, where when they revived Barret they were able to do so with their power alone.

After the Jenova fight where the monster is revealed to be another of the mysterious robed figures we’ve seen throughout the story. Sephiroth plunges off the side of the building and disappears. The sequence of the team extracting from the building features three more boss fights. The first against Rufus, the vice president, playing as Cloud. The second is against another robot, The Arsenal as Aerith and Barret, and a final motorcycle chase against another robot before the final climatic battle in chapter 18.

Rufus is by far the most interesting one of them all, requiring you to seize very tight windows where he’s vulnerable to attack to bring his health down. He starts off with a dog who you’re supposed to defeat before going for Rufus himself. The best way by far to achieve that is to parry the named moves that the dog performs in punisher mode to quickly stagger the dog. This effectively teaches you the rhythm that the game forces you to approach Rufus with in the next phase as well. If you try attacking him when he’s not in a vulnerable state where he’s reloading his weapons, he will parry counter you and receive no damage at all. It works very differently every other human vs human fight and brings a bit of freshness to the formula. It also very much feels like one logical extreme of the human boss fight design, where you’re entirely focused on parrying and using the right moves at the right time. One of the only problems I have with the fight is that the information that you get when you use assess on him vaguely states that hitting him with a certain attack when his guard is down will instantly stagger him. It’s the only time where the game is so vague about what you’re supposed to hit the boss with and particularly infuriating when the opportunities for trial and error are so few. The move that the game wants you do use is also Braver, one of two skills that you start the game with, which makes sense on because it’s one of two skills that the player will definitely have for the fight. However I find it strange that it isn’t the other skill, Focused Strike, as it’s regular effect is of staggering opponents quickly. It’s just a bit counter-intuitive and also its a lot harder to hit Rufus while he’s reloading with Braver because it doesn’t move you forward like Focused Strike does (though that might be the point). The robot fight and motorcycle chase scene boss fight are both nothing new, which really just leaves Rufus as the gameplay height of chapter 17.

Chapter 17 is the natural end for most of the remaining plot threads that we’ve been following for the entire game. Aerith is saved, Cloud finally meets Sephiroth, Barret and Tifa get to confront President Shinra. However each of these plot threads resolves in an anti-climax in some way. Aerith is freed but is still haunted by the Whispers. Cloud only barely clashes swords with Sephiroth, who flies off the building before Cloud can get to him again. Barret and Tifa manage to have a moment of power over President Shinra, but he’s killed by Sephiroth taking away once again any agency they had over the situation. Rufus takes over his father’s position, meaning that Shinra isn’t any the weaker for the death of its president. It’s for this reason that I think the end of FF7R can feel disappointing to some. All the plotlines we’ve been invested from the start conclude a chapter before the actual ending, resolved but done so in the way that has the least dramatic payoff for our protagonists. Instead, the game wants the audience to become invested in the eleventh hour shift in plot threads to the Whispers, who assume the role of final adversary for the game.

The reveal that the Whispers are arbiters of fate recontextualises a lot of the struggles the characters have in the game. One of the key moments that reads very differently is the battle at the Sector 7 pillar. When they encounter the Whispers at the bottom of the pillar, they’re fighting against fate trying to prevent them from saving the Sector. After they’ve defeated Reno and Rude, fate intervenes to render their efforts moot and defend Rude as he activates the separation sequence. In chapter 5 when they fend of the Whispers in the slums, they were actually fighting to keep their version of the events where Cloud isn’t brought on the second bombing mission, but the Whispers were triumphant in ‘correcting’ the events so that Cloud gets dragged along for it anyways. Even the first moment where Aerith and Cloud meet was orchestrated by the Whispers, and when their conversation lasted beyond how long it would have in the original game, the Whispers come back to disrupt the moment and pull Aerith away against her will. They’ve been fighting a long battle against preordination, against the fate that had been set for them and chapter 18 is the grand conclusion to that. If we really wanted to read this meta-textually, the struggle of the characters to write their own new version of the story is a parallel to the remake fighting to have its own identity and originality as a narrative. For the ending to work, the player has to understand all of this. But because the clues have been so obtuse and the revelations so short, it’s hard to have a clear view of why seemingly all the plot threads end in chapter 17 while the final chapter is centred around a fight with Fate Itself. But more importantly even if they do understand, having the audience invest in that battle when it comes as such a late and sudden change with such little overt buildup is a tall order.

Chapter 18: Destiny’s Crossroads

To properly talk about the ending of FF7R, we need to talk about Sephiroth and Aerith’s role in context of the narrative about fate and the Whispers. Sephiroth and Aerith both show clear signs of having some understanding of the events that will take place in the future. The first evidence towards this is his sudden appearance when Cloud first meets Aerith. He reiterates here that Cloud can’t protect anyone, standing between Aerith and Cloud, which is an allusion to him killing Aerith later on in the original game. Another example, after the pillar comes down Sephiroth appears to Cloud telling him that he’s failed again — this ‘again’ could either refer to him being unable to prevent the destruction of Sector 7 in this timeline, or his loss to the Whispers interventions again. Either one supports the hypothesis.

As for Aerith, the biggest flag is her telling Cloud not to fall in love with her in the end of chapter 13 cutscene. She knows that she’s destined to die, and doesn’t want Cloud to feel the pain that he would when she eventually does. Supporting this the game references her death scene directly when Cloud meets her at the start of Chapter 8 waking up in the Church. She returns a materia that Cloud dropped during his impact, and then starts to tell him about a certain materia that she owns which doesn’t do anything at all. This is the White Materia that in the original game she uses to contact the planet to summon Holy to stop Sephiroth. She’s killed by Sephiroth as she attempts to do so. Right after she mentions the materia, Cloud sees a vision of this very scene.

She is also aware that Sephiroth is the largest threat to the planet, something that she would have no means of knowing unless she had some conception of his actions in the future. At the beginning of Chapter 18 after Sephiroth appears to the team and opens the door to the Singularity and invites Cloud in, Aerith stops Cloud. She tells him that this is a point of no return, and after she opens the portal to the Singularity for them, they are at a crossroads, ‘Destiny’s crossroads’. If they challenged the incarnation of destiny within and won, they would be able to write their own destiny. And if they lost, would remain bound to the will of the planet, the events of the original game. This is why when asked what lies beyond the portal, Aerith answers ‘Freedom.’ So Cloud asks Aerith why she stopped him. In the English dub she says ‘I don’t really know.’ but in the Japanese script she says something closer to ‘I wonder why.’ Both lines work to this interpretation but the original script implies more that she’s avoiding the question. She explains that Sephiroth is the true danger to their planet, and that she believes that with the team they can defeat him. But in doing so they would change what fate has planned for them. It’s implied heavily that she knows about her impending death at Sephiroth’s hands, which gives us her reason for hesitation. For her, challenging fate is in part a self-preserving act. She’s not sure if she’s rallying her friends to save the world or simply to save herself.

Coming back into play is the idea that fate cannot be defied alone — this is also reinforced by Sephiroth’s motives in this scene. We’re given the answer what exactly he needs Cloud’s power for in Chapter 2. He knows that he’s destined the fail in his plan to destroy the planet but is powerless by himself, which leads him to opening the portal to the Singularity for Cloud and the team to destroy the manifestation of fate in his stead.

This moment when Aerith crosses into the Singularity with Barret, Tifa and Cloud is when she steels herself to trust in the strength of her friends. She decides to take her fate into her own hands and fight both to save the world from Sephiroth but also to save herself. That is where the very strong personal stake we have in the conclusion of Chapter 18. Put that aside and it’s only more generally thematic — the four heroes taking a hold of their fate from the world to write their own version of the future. But hidden within that is a struggle that Aerith has been going through the entire game, playing out through her struggle with the Whispers. If we acknowledge all of that, then Chapter 18 holds a lot of strength as a narrative climax for this game and as a defining moment for the narrative as a whole.

The finale itself is the flashiest setpiece in the game, with Cloud and the team hopping round the floating debris of the version of Midgar within the Singularity. Mechanically it’s actually quite uncomplicated, the game doesn’t demand much in terms of understanding any unique mechanics in order to defeat the Harbinger Whispers. They feel more akin to souped up standard mobs than anything else but I don’t think that’s a bad choice. The fight isn’t easy by any means, and its simplicity means that you get to enjoy the pure combat of the game while taking in the drama of its conclusion. My one complaint is where the three Whispers combine and turn into the Whisper Bahamut. In the early portion of this phase it performs the move Megaflare on very short notice which can nuke and kill a large part of your party if you aren’t healed up enough. Due to the lack of response time it’s quite easy to wipe to the move on your first run, setting you back fifteen minutes of progress because the whole final encounter is one long fight with no checkpoints. It’s not fun and not particularly challenging either because the game doesn’t give you much counterplay besides ‘have enough health’ at that specific point of time.

The team slays the Whisper Harbinger, defeating Fate itself. They’re left in what seems to be an endless expanse symbolising the boundless freedom Aerith said would be awaiting them. Breaking the spell is Sephiroth who appears and seems to absorb the Whispers into himself as a purple energy. The final fight of the game commences. FF7R wouldn’t be complete without a battle with our ultimate villain.

This fight is actually mechanically challenging in that his moves are well telegraphed and are mostly dodgeable once you learn the timing. It also takes the principle of using moves to interrupt his spell charge ups from the Rufus fight but he also changes elemental alignment during the battle forcing you to react and pick the corresponding weakness to attack. This culmination of their boss duel design results in of the best fights of the game — it’s tough and so rewarding when things go your way. The way Tifa and then later Aerith regroup with Cloud and join the battle against Sephiroth as he gets stronger and stronger is a great touch. Again, the effect would have been stronger if we had Barret and Red join in and all fight as well but they’re relegated to the end of fight cutscene which is a point where the game’s systemic limitation starts to feel artificial.

When the fight ends Sephiroth transports Cloud alone to the edge of existence where he wraps up the arc and issues a challenge to Cloud. Now that their fates are no longer ordained, what will Cloud make of the future?

This would be a great note to end it on, but FF7R still has one last bout of twists to throw at us. Back at the start of the chapter before the team entered the portal they saw a vision of Zack Fair. It’s a version of the ending sequence to Crisis Core, where Zack attempts to return to Midgar to see Aerith after being used for some years as Hojo’s experiment subject. He brings along with him a catatonic Cloud who was in the same situation as him. The scene depicted takes place on a bluff overlooking Midgar as the Shinra army corners Zack and Cloud. It’s a shot for shot recreation in HD up to the moment where he begins attacking, except for the addition of the Whispers forming a barrier around Midgar and circling around where the army. This implies them working here as well to preserve the events ‘as they should be’. In Crisis Core, Zack is killed in this last stand battle. Right before he dies Cloud awakens and Zack bestows the Buster Sword to him, which is how we come to see it on Cloud’s back in FF7.

However coming back to the end of FF7R, we see a different version of the events. The sky is bright and Zack has defeated them all, much to his own amazement himself. The Whispers forming a barrier around Midgar dissipate into a particles of shining light in the same way they did after the Harbinger fight. The shot also zooms in for a moment onto a piece of plastic packaging that features the design of Stamp, Shinra’s mascot, on it. The dog featured is of a different design as to what we’ve seen in FF7R which implies that either we’re seeing a (sigh) parallel universe where Zack is alive or that due to the defeat of the Whispers the timeline we’re following has been altered in a way that the design of the mascot is different and Zack is alive. In either case, the scene implies that Zack is going to be in some way alive and relevant to the story to follow. Following this is a scene showing Briggs apparently also alive and asleep in the Leaf House orphanage, on the bedside table are Jessie’s gloves and Wedge’s headband which brings the total of people potentially brought from death by the ending to three. We then see Cloud, Tifa, Barret and Aerith on the plains outside Midgar set out to search for Sephiroth. After is one final moment which brings us back to Zack, depicting him dragging Cloud back to Midgar which then merges with the previous shot to show him walking past Cloud and Aerith, and then fade to credits.

I was in absolute shock when I saw this. I had played Crisis Core, cleared it multiple times so the idea of seeing Zack, who has a lot more of a fun personality than Cloud, in maybe the next game was incredibly exciting. It’s a great way to tease the endless possibilities that the conclusion of the Whisper plot line has opened them up to. However, and we’re coming back to this problem again, his inclusion in this ending muddies the moment for those who have no idea of his significance in the canon. Zack’s name isn’t even mentioned in game at all, it only appears in the subtitles when he’s speaking. We’re not even shown the original scene where he dies and makes Cloud his ‘living legacy’. New players are given absolutely nothing, and this is the pivot that they end the story on. It also shifts the focus too much, making you think of the Whispers’ defeat in relation to Zacks death. It sidelines the story of Cloud and Aerith taking control of their fate and the meta narrative of the remake coming into its own as a story separate from the original. It also unnecessarily complicates things even more by making us consider parallel timelines with the Stamp design.

Let’s take a step back. I believe that the Whispers are enjoyable and understandable at least on a thematic level for someone who hasn’t played FF7 — themes of fate and people taking control of their future fit into the rest of the story and is consistent with other Final Fantasy games. There was an attempt to give it enough weight on its own. But the Zack reveal doesn’t do this at all. It requires you to have experienced Crisis Core in some way from beginning to end to feel any connection to the moment. This is made even worse by the fact that unlike FF7 which has been re-released on most modern game platforms including PC, Crisis Core is exclusive to the PSP, a handheld console discontinued in 2014. This is true at FF7R’s launch and the time of writing this, although they do have a mobile gacha game planned for release that will cover the events of Crisis Core and all the other original games in the Compilation of Final Fantasy 7 canon. What really adds to the disappointment for me is that of Cloud, the team, and Sephiroth all gaining control over their futures was a perfectly emotionally and thematically resonant note to the game on. If they wanted they could have kept the Zack reveal as a post-credits scene. But with how it’s done now, newcomers get left out of the ending of the thirty hour game they just played.

Ending words

If you made it to the end of this work, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing in the thoughts that I had when playing through this game. Thank you for finding my words interesting or valuable enough to engage with. Most of all, thank you for your time.

I wrote the first draft of this in 2020 at the peak of the pandemic after playing the game twice, then rewrote most of it early 2021. I wasn’t satisfied with it and kept procrastinating working on it, so it’s been stuck in my head till now. I’m honestly just very tired of this being in my head, so I’m releasing it in the state it is in without further alterations. To any new writers reading this, don’t do what I did, make your first project a short one. You learn so much from your first works, and the burden of finishing a 29k word mammoth like this has dragged me down for years. Perhaps you’re like me and feel the need to learn this age old lesson first hand. If so, godspeed.

I will be writing more – shorter – essays and posting them on here soon. They won’t all be about video games, but expect video games to be a large part of what I write about here. Till next time.