[archived from a cohost post, originally made on february 25, 2024]
we talked about this for an episode of live genre chronicles. I hope you're ok with me recounting a more personal view on games we're playing for the podcast here, on top of the more mediated and measured takes I posit on their respective episodes, because different thoughts will get absorbed differently by the attention I have to give different mediums, and I'm gonna keep doing these little posts for the LGC games.
playing final fantasy vii for me happened in a funny way. when I was in middle school, one of my dipshit friends accidentally broke my nintendo ds in a way that sentenced it to a slow and inevitable death (one side of the hinge cracked, meaning it would eventually loosen its wiring and the top screen would slowly lose signal). to make it up to me, he gave me a psp that he had been meaning to sell and some assorted games and accessories and such. I ended up playing the final fantasy 1 port on the psp and had a decent time, but later realized the psp was a wonderfully moddable little machine that was capable of running any ps1 game you had the means to put on it... so I used it to play ff7!
as a consequence, some of my memories of the original are baked into me either riding the bus to school or hanging out in a math teacher's classroom at lunch, lounging on a couch with some friends, just slowly working on this game and enjoying it in small chunks. these are punctuated with memories of huge binges I went on where the plot finally kicked in and I started blasting through things. the game really supported either energy level I brought to it, even running on a shoddy psp's battery life
playing final fantasy vii remake was inevitably a slog, on the other hand. when you zoom in on a six-hour chunk of plot, you have to invent new details to justify it taking a couple dozen hours instead. you have to stretch it thin, and I say it was inevitably a slog because despite my eternal shouting about letting games breathe... they really did come up with a whole lot of stuff to try and make this its own game, the first part of a trilogy instead of the opening hours of a single coherent game. the mechanics don't help things, given that they feel all over the place, but I felt the sudden presence of New Gameplay Sections most sharply because they're all things that exist to eliminate vagueness from the setting and writing, in ways that really don't gel with what I liked about the gestalt experience of the original.
I don't know how many more ways I can say "all the cutscenes are very pretty and well-directed but playing the game is a slog that makes me regret the idea of action RPGs", but I guess that's the gist of how I feel about ff7r at the moment. rebirth comes out this week, but I don't know that I'll care for at least a couple of months. we'll see