Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade

Final Fantasy VII was my first Final Fantasy and first JRPG in general. After so long, it has been remade in modern graphics, voice acting, and a whole lot of other good stuff. So this my review of Final Fantasy VII Remake, the Intergrade edition that comes with the INTERmission DLC. This review will be broken up into multiple parts. This first part will be all about the game, how it plays, how it presents and all that. The second part will dive more into my thoughts about the comparison between the Remake and the original and all of the new stuff that they added.

So come with me on my Final Fantasy VII Remake adventure. Find the game on Steam, or on Play Station 5’s.

FFVII takes place inside a most wondrous city of Midgar. The entire place runs on mako energy with eight reactors powering everything. There is an upper plate where the well off live and the lower slums, which barely get any light due to being underneath everything. They also have to suffer all the pollution and trash from those above. Using mako also may or may not be killing the planet as it is the lifeblood of the planet. So a group called Avalanche has taken it upon themselves to blow up the reactors and to stop Shinra, the company that runs Midgar, from continuing to drain the planet dry.

Combat in the game feels somewhat like an action game. There’s dodging, blocking, and avoiding attacks. However, trying to play it like a normal action game won’t work well. The game is an RPG, so character levels matter, as is figuring out weaknesses to exploit.

By doing basic attacks, you’ll build up a gauge for special attacks or spells. That is where the real damage comes from, by using elemental attacks and doing special attacks to fill up a stagger gauge.

You also control a full party of up to three. During combat, you can choose which character to play as. Now this makes the game challenging, whomever your not directly controlling will fight automatically. The AI is more passive and defensive. They survive well, but they don’t build up special gauge well. You’ll need to change control to different people if you want to effectively use everyone’s skills and magic.

There is a lot of care put into the enemies of the game. Not only are there a huge variety, all of them behave differently with different tactics needed to bring them down. The bosses are all highlights of the battle system where you must strategize and utilize different tactics to come out on top.

You can customize you character’s abilities by using a materia system. Basically, your weapons and armor has slots in which you can put in things like spells or different commands. The system does get more complex, and finding good materia setups for different fights will really help.

Moving on to the world, Midgar is a lively and amazing city full of detail and wonder. If you take the time to look around, there’s always something happening. I still get lost wandering around, though, since there are a lot of tiny passageways full of garbage in the slums. Through most of the game, you’ll be hanging out in the poor parts of the city trying to hide from Shinra and taking on odd jobs.

The game is mostly linear, where you go from story scene to combat section to boss and back for more story. The game is divided into chapters, so in each chapter, you have a limited part of the game to explore, some more than others. During certain chapters, you get to slow down and just hang around and do some sidequests. Note that sidequests change per chapter, so if you don’t do them, they’re gone.

The stories for the sidequests are fun and fill out the world more beyond Avalanche versus Shinra. You get to see what normal people are going through and what they think about everything going on.

The characters are where the game really shines. The main character is Cloud Strife, a former SOLDIER (yes, the capitalization is important) turned mercenary. He originally was just hired by Avalanche as muscle, but soon gets drawn into the whole conflict. The character interactions between the main group is just fantastic all around. Tifa and Aerith have a great friendship. Barret is funny and boisterous. Cloud is the one reluctantly getting dragged into everything.

The many combat sections may feel long, but they do add in a lot of fun character moments over that time.

I do feel disappointed that you can’t choose who you control when walking around in the world. Yeah, Cloud is the main character, but everyone else is already designed to be controllable since there are story sections where you can control them. It would be fun to have someone else doing the running. At least have the entire party sit down on the resting bench instead of just having them staring at the main character sitting down.

The story is also great as it soon becomes apparent something more is going on. What may start as a battle against Shinra will turn into something more. But what? Well, this is only the part one out of three (I believe). So this game will set up a lot of questions and future conflicts.

Great as the game is, I do have some user experience complaints. They may seem minor, but they happen at enough of a frequency to make them moderate annoyances. Every time you finish resting or open up a chest, there is an extra one or two seconds where you can’t go into the menu. You can control your character, but pressing the menu button just takes you into a generic pause screen.

Also, while exploring, there will be boxes you can destroy for random drops. For some reason, every time you attack a box, you need to stop, swing your sword and then sheath your sword before you can do anything else. No continuous swinging to get boxes you missed.

There is also weapon upgrading. Every time you upgrade your weapon, you need to go through a short animation, and weapon upgrading happens frequently. Sure, it may be hiding loading, but I would say simplify your weapon upgrading screen to not need loading. Also, when upgrading, I would like to just go up and down a visible list of what’s available to be upgraded rather than hiding that information while I bounce around a bunch of nodes. There is auto upgrading, but I prefer to manually choose how to improve my stuff.

Now this one last complaint is particularly nitpicky, but I’m going to do it anyway. I play on the PC with an XBox controller. There is a minigame where you need to press buttons. Now, the button prompts will show the correct XBox buttons, but the colors all match the Playstation controller. So I need to basically ignore the color-coding shortcut set up and just focus on the button being displayed. In fact, I need to actively disengage my color recognition. The minigame only happens once, but I did notice it.

Ready to dance.

There are some good user experience stuff they added, though, such as the ability to pause during any cutscene. There is also a photo mode that I didn’t play around enough with, but it seems pretty cool.

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade is meeting and exceeding my expectations. The combat system is engaging. The characters are all great. The world is detailed and makes me want to explore more. And I can’t wait for Part 2, Rebirth. Find Remake Intergrade on Steam.