Final Fantasy VII Remake and the Year I Stayed Inside

How a global pandemic helped me connect with one of my favorite video games.

(Last month I finished playing through the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series and tracking my thoughts on the evolution of the games. Here are those pieces. In the leadup to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s release, I wanted to do the same for FFVII Remake, another game that means a lot to me.)

2020 was the worst year of my life in ways that are both universally understood and uniquely tailored to my circumstances. The literal first thing that happened for me that year, we’re talking like 7:30 AM on New Years Day, is that I woke up to find that my dog AC, who had been my closest companion for the past decade, couldn’t stand up or walk anymore. I took her to an emergency vet and had to put her down three days later. Then, two weeks after that, I opened a restaraunt that I’d spent the last three years helping to build — what I would call the most ambitious board game cafe in the United States. This involved 12-14 hour days on the reg, but it was honestly welcome; it gave me something to do besides sit in an apartment that was suddenly absent of my best friend. After a soft open in mid January, the restaurant had our grand opening on February 14, and our concept was working: on Saturday, March 7, we did almost 400 covers in a night for a space that seated about 100 people. That following week, things changed: Tom Hanks got sick, the NBA got canceled. On Saturday, March 14, we decided that it was too unsafe to ask people to come in, so we cleared our reservations for the next three weeks to assess the situation. The next day, Governor Pritzker shut down all nonessential businesses. For reasons that aren’t super germane to this piece, I’d never get to experience this place the way I helped to design it again.

I say all of this to establish where my emotions were at the first time I played Final Fantasy VII Remake. After maybe the lowest and highest I’d ever felt in my life, all jammed next to each other in the span of two months, I fell into a period of near nothing, a forced statis that almost all of us experienced that year. It was jarring and painful. At the cafe, we ended up pivoting to a takeout business pretty quickly, but the high-energy buzz of hard-fought success was replaced with a muted resignation to do the best we could because what else is there? 14 hour days became 6, I guess, if you even feel like coming in. I was thirsty for something to throw myself into that wasn’t Tiger King. The blast of nostalgia promised by FFVII Remake would have been welcome even if the game hadn’t been very good. But, as it happens, this game rocks.

That House in Sector 5

There are a lot of narrative and gameplay elements of FFVII Remake I could gush about, but atypically for me, it was the visuals that made the biggest first impression.

I’m eight chapters into FFVII Remake and about a month into mostly just sitting at home. So far, though I hadn’t consciously put this together, most of the environments of Remake looked like I felt — trashy. You spend a lot of Remake’s playtime in the Midgar slums, surrounded by landfills and detritus. The game (rightly) paints a bleak picture of how the people beneath the plate live, with a color palette to match — it’s all shades of brown, with maybe a little gray for variety, if you’re lucky.

Then, chapter 8. You (via your main PC cypher, Cloud) fall from the Sector 5 reactor down to a church in the slums and meet Aerith, the local flower girl. She asks you to help escort her home, so you guide her through a winding maze of scrap and monsters, past housing encampents assembled with cast-off girders and reappropriated steel siding. Then, after traveling down a dirt path outside of town, you wander into this:

No hyperbole, friends — the first time I saw Aerith’s house in FFVII Remake, I gasped. I was not expecting something so lush and verdant hiding away in these slums. The greens of the flowers, the blue of the water — sitting on my couch staring at this in April 2020, it really felt like I had gone somewhere for the first time in months. It felt like the game took me away from the stasis of COVID for at least a few minutes, and it instantly connected me with this fictional world. I wanted to save the people of the undercity from the exploitation of the Shinra Corporation so everybody in the game could enjoy vistas like this — so that I could continue to enjoy vistas like this. The game had me where it wanted me.

Sephiroth is Nero (Star Trek’s version)

The visuals of FFVII Remake had me hooked, but the narrative sealed the deal. Spoilers ahead if you haven’t played (and please note that I haven’t read anything about the story of Rebirth yet, so anything I say about future developments is pure speculation).

Although I don’t know if this is explicitly confirmed, I think it’s pretty uncontroversial to say that the premise of FFVII Remake is that the original game’s antagonist, Sephiroth, has traveled back in time to try to literally remake the events of the game so he doesn’t lose in the end. While I completely understand that this is too meta for some folks, I love it. It feels like the game’s designers are taking a lot of care to give us something new while validating everything that came before — the events of the original game are so valid that its main bad guy knows about them and is having an emotional response to them just like we did! Of all things, this reminded me a ton of J.J. Abrams’ first Star Trek movie, which I must admit that I really dig. It’s a reboot of the franchise, yes, but the film’s villain, Nero, comes from a point in the original universe timeline just after the last Trek movie that had released. He’s seen all the same Star Trek history that we have, and he wants to change it. So he goes back in time to write himself a reality where his people, the Romulans, come out on top. To me, this feels like such a sharp way to acknowledge the franchise’s original fans while forging ahead to find new ones — yes, everything you loved has happened. But now, something new is happening too.¹

And, look, I didn’t totally understand that this is what was happening at first. My memories of Final Fantasy VII were from playing it twice before, in junior high and high school; it had been almost 20 years since I really engaged with this game, and I never beat it (the final dungeon was too beastly for me). I certainly never looked into the “compilation” media, like Crisis Core. But as soon as I got to the end of Remake and started to see what was happening, I immediately — like as soon as the final credits scene rolled — started the game again on a higher difficulty. I was so intrigued by what I was seeing, and I had to play again to try to put together what I’d missed. And on that second playthrough, I started to think that maybe Sephiroth wasn’t the only character with knowledge of the future.

That Flower Girl

This next bit of story I’m going to talk about doesn’t seem to be as generally accepted as the Sephiroth discussion above, but every time I play Remake, I become more convinced of it: Aerith, too, has seen the future. Particularly her end in it.

I don’t think Aerith is a time traveler in the same way Sephiroth is; it doesn’t read to me like she’s manipulating the course of Remake’s events as much as she’s caught up in their flow — it’s just that she can see the scope of the flow. We can see this even in her first interaction with Cloud, in chapter 1, in which she gives him a flower and explains that reunited lovers used to exchange them. From a meta perspective, this makes sense: Aerith has perhaps one of the most iconic deaths in video game history, a scene that Remake includes flashes of a couple times. It follows that a modern version of FFVII with a meta twist would highlight this plot point.

And yet, for a character immortalized by her death, Remake does anything but fridge Aerith. Instead, she’s crafted so lovingly that she became my favorite character in this whole dang thing. The way she carries herself throughout the game, voiced with incredible beauty by Brianna White, is honestly something I find inspirational. She’s sweet and a little sassy, deeply passionate for the people around her, possessed of a desire to have a good time, and despite her knowledge of gloom to come, always hopeful that the actions of her and her friends can make a difference. I love this. I think we should all strive to be a little more like Aerith, a character who, in my reading, has seen her violent end and still chooses to meet every day with optimism and good humor. Playing Remake during the pandemic — especially in those early months where there really was no sense of how bad things could get — Aerith became a lifeline. We can’t stop the plate from falling, but maybe we can save our community before it does.

Remake in 2024

I’ve played Final Fantasy VII Remake to completion 5 or 6 times now, which I’m pretty sure is a record for me (FFVI may be up there; I don’t remember if I beat it more than once as a kid). This most recent time, it had been two years since I’d gone through the game, and I will admit that a few of its seams started to show. In particular, certain segments see the game embracing linearity to the point of frustration; I find the Wall Market chapter especially challenging in this regard. I don’t know if these feelings are a result of playing Remake immediately after I-VI, or if my sense of what I want in a game has changed in the past two years, but my honest guess at their source relates back to my original point: my feelings of Remake are so tied up in the early pandemic that now, with life more or less “back to normal,” the game just doesn’t hit quite as hard. Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it — I absolutely did, and the final chapter wins me back every time. But during the fetch quest-packed intermediary segments, I did find myself wishing the game was a little more open, a little less “do this thing, watch this cutscene, repeat.”

From everything I’ve seen about Rebirth, Square Enix is aware of that criticism and has adjusted in kind. I’m really excited for this sequel, so much so that I took Friday off of work to enjoy a whole day of playing. With two whole discs of Rebirth to explore, it’ll probably be a while before I revisit Remake again.

But even though I didn’t get quite the same thrill out of Remake this time, all the things I loved about it originally still hit: the complexity of Sephiroth’s machinations. Aerith’s presence, funneled through Brianna White’s performance. Her freakin house. It’s all really lovely. To be able to play a remake of a game that made a huge impression on me as a kid, crafted with such care for the source material but also a desire to push the story forward, is really something special. It was what I needed to push me through some of the worst months of my life, and it helped me meet every day with positivity, even when it seemed certain that doom was on the horizon.

(And hey, maybe it still is. But at least I’ll get to play Rebirth!)

1. Unrelated to the point of this piece at all, but Nero’s motivation becomes even more understandable when catch that pretty much every Star Trek movie has a throwaway line or scene that exists merely to point out that the Romulans are chumps, from the very beginning: the V’Ger probe ices a squadron of Romulan warbirds to establish its power in The Motion Picture. Then, when we do get a movie that focuses on the Romulans in Nemesis (the last film before Abrams), their planet gets destroyed. I mean, yeah, I see where Nero’s coming from.