For some reason, the Final Fantasy games haven't interested me much. There's 16 of them at this point, they're one of the most critically acclaimed franchises in the world yet I've never played a single one of them outside of the MMORPG. The 20 minutes I played Final Fantasy 8 at a friends house doesn't count either. JRPGs just hasn't been my thing.
Well, the day is finally here. Let's play the Final Fantasy 7 Remake.
First impressions
I was quite excited to boot this up as I've seen a lot of footage from this game that looks absolutely stunning. It didn't disappoint on this during the first few hours of gameplay either. The game looks visually stunning, the areas are beautifully crafted and the cast of characters are all likable and well made. The detail in facial animations has perhaps been my favorite thing about the game yet.
The combat did take some getting used to. It's action oriented but you can pause the game mid combat to open menus and cast spells. That's something that I generally don't like. I very much prefer a free flowing combat without pausing and menus. The game does however have systems to prevent to much of that and once you learn all the menus and buttons the combat starts to flow a lot better.
The story seems to be quite interesting as well. We play as the iconic Cloud Strife who acts as a mercenary for a group of eco-terrorists who's trying to save the planet from being sucked dry of its essence. They also give quite a lot of time to character development which is something I like.
Iconic cast
It's cool to be playing a game containing so many iconic characters from gaming history. Cloud Strife, Tifa, Sephiroth, Barret and more. These are all characters I've seen and heard of a million times so it's cool getting to know them for more than just how they look.
For some reason I expected Cloud to be more of a classical teenage character but he's actually more of a hard soldier. I expected Tifa to be harder and tougher but she's actually more of a cute and innocent high school girl. I expected Sephiroth to be evil and so far that seems to be true even though he's barely had two minutes of screen time.
There's several other characters that are quite important to the story but they don't seem to have gotten the cult status that the above mentioned have. Still, I'm enjoying getting to know them.
One made three
I'm roughly 3-4 hours into the game and I'm having a blast. I also found out that this isn't actually the whole game. They've taken the original Final Fantasy 7 that was one game and split it into three. Only two has been released so far and the last isn't expected to release until 2027. i wish I had known this before so I could have waited, but oh well. We'll see if I end up liking this one enough to play the other two.
I've barely scratched the surface with this game so I'm excited to jump back into it. It should have roughly 30 hours of good times in it for me still.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.