Final Fantasy VII Remake spoiler-free review: Our kind of Cloud gaming

This week's Final Fantasy VII Remake, in spite of its flaws and oddities, does the unimaginable: it delivers to just about any audience who might be interested in this specific RPG series and this specific game. That's good news for anyone who has awaited this popular game's return for 23 years. But big as that niche may be, it's still a niche.

Are you a series veteran who has followed the Warriors of Light since the NES era? Maybe you're a JRPG diehard who knows your way around every inscrutable Final Fantasy spinoff (VII or otherwise)? Or, what if you're a lapsed player who got swept up in 1997's FFVII fever hoping this new game will be a cool, modernized reason to return to your PlayStation 1 heyday?

If so, you count among the millions who will likely enjoy what FFVIIR has to offer. The production values, at their best, are exhilarating. The updated combat system sees Square Enix get its closest yet to nailing battles in a JRPG, with a system that runs at a bombastic-yet-smooth clip. And it's nice to get to know some familiar faces in a stretched-out return to the iconic fantasy city of Midgar. Even better, you can rest assured that Square Enix has avoided two of its usual sins this time around. FFVIIR doesn't "take 10 hours to get good," and its plot doesn't devolve into a Kingdom Hearts-like mess of indecipherable gibberish.

If the idea of a refreshed-yet-faithful JRPG leaves you cold, on the other hand, FFVIIR's 35+ hours of combat, plot, and polished set pieces probably won't move the dial on your personal Active Time Battle meter. The dialogue is far from perfect—and, at least in English, it misses the mark too often. The old game's transition to a 3D, control-your-own-camera universe can get unwieldy. Its reliance on the original game's archetypes won't seem endearing for newcomers. And while this isn't nearly as padded a game as a '90s JRPG, in terms of making players grind through hours of random combat, FFVIIR suffers from a few obvious "let's stretch this section out for no reason" seams.

My bias is that of a lapsed JRPG fan, someone who kicked Final Fantasy games to the curb in the early '00s and rarely looked back. And at its worst, FFVIIR had me either shouting "what the heck" at the story or "go #${& yourself" while throwing a controller at a frustrating boss battle. It's not a perfect return to Midgar by any stretch.

But the ambition, the scope, and the highlights kept me gripped. FFVIIR feels like it left its development studios kicking and screaming until the very end—and the fact that this hotly anticipated, highly scrutinized game turned out well might be the craziest part of all.

What is a remake, really?

The first huge thing to get out of the way is the game's title, because it could leave you with the wrong impression of what to expect. The word "remake" implies a few things in English: a start-from-scratch recreation, like Disney's recent Lion King CGI film or a reboot of familiar characters and history into a new plot universe, like Spider-man films every six years or so.

Square Enix's take on the word lands somewhere between those definitions. To make my point, I'll refer to its free demo, which you can download right now to any PlayStation 4 console—and while this description qualifies as a spoiler, it's quite mild, and you'll see what I mean.

(Before I continue: FFVIIR does not include the entire plot of FFVII. Square Enix has already announced that FFVIIR's story comes to a halt at the moment the game's heroes escape the game's first massive city of Midgar. The developers have hinted at future games, but nothing has been formally announced. Got it? Okay.)

The game's hour-long demo contains most of what you'll find in the retail game's first chapter, and in some ways, it's a note-for-note retelling of the 1997 game's opening sequence. A camera follows a flower girl through a city, zooms out to marvel at the mechanized city of Midgar, then zooms in to another part of town, where a train pulls into a power reactor's station. At this point, players take control of familiar heroes Cloud Strife and Barret Wallace. Leap off the train, fight some guards, and descend to the reactor's core, where players must then place a bomb, fight a boss, and get out before it blows.

In FFVIIR, that basic description plays out, but everything surrounding it is different. The most obvious change comes from remastered 3D graphics, all running in real-time and looking far superior to the original game's "full-motion video" sequences. (If you want to see what 23 years of 3D-rendering progress looks like, here you go.) There's also the refreshed combat, which I'll get to.

But the biggest difference, in terms of this game's "Remake" status, is how the story flows, expands, and outright changes. In this mission's case, three helpers from the original game (Biggs, Wedge, Jessie) tag along once again, only this time, they have a lot more to say. Most of the time, they join fully voiced dialogue sequences, where we see this team, the eco-terrorist group "Avalanche," sort out its mission. Occasionally, they yammer within earshot, their dialogue appearing as a neat column of text on the side of the screen for you to peruse or ignore as you march forward. This chapter sees the game's voice actors and scriptwriters put their best foot forward for all its characters, in terms of delivering "polished anime" levels of likable cheese.

Then there's the mission's conclusion, which includes a brand-new dose of dramatic irony. Avalanche's biggest foe, the mega-corporation Shinra, appears in FFVIIR's version of events as a watchful eye. In the original game, Shinra was caught unaware. This time, its leaders watch Cloud and Barret set the bomb on their precious reactor's core. Then they add to the bomb. The explosion is noticeably bigger than Avalanche had expected.

It's that kind of remake—and mostly good

This is where the demo ends, but the retail version picks up with Avalanche asking questions about that very explosion and following those threads. Think of Shinra's meddling with the bombing as a trampled butterfly beneath a time traveler's otherwise careful steps. It's the first crack in the timeline (but not the last) on which everything moves.

Thus, the rest of the Remake follows the first chapter's archetype: following slight schisms in the original game's events to entirely new sequences and diving more deeply into the existing game's cast to expand on their relationships and lead players through new, connected quests. If an event, location, character, or enemy appeared in the original FFVII, it's probably here—but in hugely expanded form. Maybe a place you quickly ran through in the PlayStation original has become a bustling town, complete with errands and side quests. Maybe one simple problem in the original game has been turned into a laundry list of tasks. Or maybe an entirely new problem creates new quests for Avalanche (and introduces new, weird allies and adversaries along the way).

Hence, if you laugh at the idea of a "spoiler-free" review of a 23-year-old game's remake, I insist that you hold your chuckles back. I will say the spoilable stuff plays out in a few ways. Sometimes, you'll discover completely new elements, which stretch on for 1- or 1.5-hour stretches of content; these stretches are usually pretty cheesy, in line with what you'd expect from an average JRPG's side quests. Other times, a familiar scene from the original game will emerge at a different time than in the original—usually with the added bonus of additional emotional resonance, if not a smarter logical connection to the characters in question. I like how these two extremes of "new" content play out alongside each other in the course of the campaign, especially since neither requires that players have the original game memorized to appreciate them.

Opinions are obviously going to be mixed when it comes to Square Enix shuffling the series's events and characters of old, but I'd rank the shuffling's execution as one of the game's successes. With each expanded sequence, the game's designers figure out how to add the right kinds of rises or falls in excitement, whether by injecting entirely new action sequences, putting intriguing new characters into the spotlight, or slowing the stakes down with wholly optional errand quests between higher-stakes moments. In the latter cases, players are asked to run through towns and find nearby, dungeon-like paths, which usually contain hidden trinkets and varied monster battles. If you're a JRPG purist, you'll appreciate these excuses to flex your combat muscles; these missions feel like condensed takes on the "run around and grind through random combat" exercises of old, and they very rarely spam the same enemy types too much.