@@kl-nl3kv no. the compilation was a sequel that built off the first game with stories directly interconnected to the main plot. The REMAKE and REBIRTH stories was multiverse what if flabbergasted. Its like.. Gynesis makes sense because he ties into the Crisis Core story line and makes a appearance after Dirge post credits. The story of Danizel makes sense because it tells the story about what happened to midgar after Meteor's failed summoning and those affected by Genosimga. The new games do none of that, attempt to retcon and insult everyone by saying it already happened in a different universe. Its time to stop deflecting and making excuses, let's own up that these aren't exactly good stories let alone good games.
@@kl-nl3kv I'm not really sure where you are even going. And I answered your questions. Compilation was a sequel with interconnected stories. The Remake Rebirth wasn't a remake, wasn't a retelling, wasn't a sequel but something entirely different. Hence one of the many reasons it failed. If you didn't play it, thats fine. But being ostracized for not liking Remake or Rebirth is crazy, it does more damage to the title than anything else could. I mean Sony and Square are splitting. Not even getting into that but that's a radical departure and we all know why. (It isn't multiplat issues).
What is pretty clear is that everytime they need to be subtle, slow or just deal with emotional moments they mess up because they just want fun and action with no "boring" moment, it's like when MCU characters joke around in a serious battle, so... Bad I kind of like Remake/Rebirth but honestly, the more i think about how they dealt with these things, the more i get bothered with it, this also emphasizes a lot how Square Enix's writting dumbed down with years and how these guys are barely able to tell anything significant nowadays (most of the story credits of FF7R go more to what was faithful to their work in the past than the things that are new and this tells a lot about it).
Because the game is designed for the tik tok/twitch streamer era. People have short attention spans and the spectacle is favoured over depth and subtlety as that creates better clips. It’s all very shallow.
@@ItsSVOThat's true, there is also the factor that in many interviews the writters seem to think that the whole reason FF7 was iconic was because of the story's twists but they literally think that EVERYONE knows these twists (which is wrong by itself, FF7 is not even close to be know by everyone and a lot of people playing the Remake are newcomers) and since for them the important is making people be "shocked" with twists in the original story, a lot of these decisions are centered around that(The whole trillogy is a set-up for the new version of the Lifestream scene since they think that the "Cloud had an impostor syndrome with Zack" is universally know fact and they wanted something new to surprise everyone) and just subverting expectations which a lot of times it's an excuse to dumb down scenes or add more fanservice/action and nothing more(because of that they spoil the OG Story twists because again they think that everyone only care about twists and that everyone already knows the OG story), what baffles me the most are veteran people like Nomura having this mentality when by his lifetime and experience he should already know that these things worked because of HOW they were done and the emotions they expressed in scenes like Nanaki crying or Aerith's death, not because people were shocked by it, i rarely cry with media but FF7 is one of the few games that made me cry for the same scenes multiple times for example. Honestly, i can't even blame Square entirely, just look at how most of the fandom and the big people on media are reacting to Remake, and how the "purists" are treated for just not liking the unecessary changes they did to it, i also think that RUclipsrs in general are extremely happy for having all the theory content who gives them money and attention which is... Fair, in the end, Square IS winning and i give them the credits for it. Also i'd just like to point out again that i like FF7R but i can't really put it in the same pedestal as the original or see it as good "Remake" of the original story, i can see it as a "decent fun JRPG story" who happens to also be FF7 with an amazing combat system and soundtrack and nice characters, and i've also defended a lot The Compilations since they never really bothered me that much and i thought that Remake could tie them better to the main story however they did it in the worst way possible + taking off all/or most of the subtlety and emotional side of the original and replacing it with cool scenes for the people who will most likely to only discuss the shipping/funny scenes and epic battle scenes online than the actual story.
@@renren47618 100% agreed. As someone who liked the original but didn't love it (it's not even among my favorite games of all time, or even my favorite JRPGs of all time), I absolutely loathed the insultingly in-your-face fanservice the remake series shoves down your throat. It's like the writers don't understand that we don't like these characters just because they show up and do things. We like them because the original FFVII had good character stories and arcs that were presented with effective storytelling techniques. Sephiroth was great precisely because of how sparse and impactful each of his individual appearances were. But in the remakes he appears so much they might as well make a Sephiroth Everywhere System and have him pop out of random trash cans and manholes to attack Cloud's party like it's Yakuza Kiwami. I'm sorry, but I don't like Sephiroth enough to just lose all my sense of reason and critical thinking whenever he shows up for a contrived reason, unlike so many of the FFVII fanboy sheeple who consoom Square Enix slop and lose their shit every time they see him. I feel like Square Enix just looks at how beloved the characters of this game are (particularly Cloud and Sephiroth) and just beats the fans over the head with them to prevent them from thinking about how pointless every piece of FFVII media after the original was. Yes, they were ALL pointless, they're such colossal wastes of time that I honestly cope by just pretending the original is the only canon game lmao. And it's not like I'm against fanservice and character appearances, but they have to be done in moderation and with appropriate justification or they lose their luster. Later entries in Nihon Falcom's Trails series have a few cameos of beloved characters from previous games in the series, but those cameos are important to the story, make logical sense, and rarely ever feel contrived. If there are characters who shouldn't appear in a game because it would make no sense or lessen the impact of the story, they don't. This makes it all the more exciting when the characters you love reappear in future games. But for some reason, despite the FFVII Remake trilogy similarly being a multi part series with a connected story, Square Enix are simply too impatient to wait until the right moments for Sephiroth to appear. They have no sense of restraint. Nihon Falcom can wait literal DECADES to reveal important characters or have old characters make cameos. There are characters from games in the series released in the 2000s who have only just reappeared in games made in the 2020s because it wouldn't have made sense for them to reappear in games before. They waited 14 whole years to even show a glimpse of the elusive and mysterious leader of the main antagonist faction of the series. And yet Square Enix can't even wait a couple hours before showing Sephiroth again? Pathetic.
@@McCaroni_Sup I don't see issues with Crisis Core and Advent Children because while they have issues, they are still fun and in my opinion they don't do much harm to the original story(people talk about Cloud on AC but the actual explanation is in "On the Way to a Smile" and i personally found it interesting), ok, you have Sephiroth coming back at the end of AC, but hey, the combat itself is awesome (probably my favorite animated fight of all time) and then afther Sephiroth is defeated again that's it, the original story is still intact and it works as just a cool epilogue, now Remake is literally taking the OG story and mixing with timeline/multiverse bs that it's completely messing up with the original narrative which for me is way worse than everything else on the Compilation that was mostly very harmless to the OG. FF7R should've been just "Updating the original game to modern technology and keeping the story however adding more party dynamics, fit the OG better on The Compilation and improve some bits), not trying to pull a shitty "Rebuild of Evangelion".... Your comment about comparing Sephiroth to how Nihon Falcom treats Trails' fanservice (never played this series) made me remember of Xenoblade, which so far has been AMAZING in connecting its games and now they even have a chance to bring up something related to Xenosaga due to 3's DLC, while there is some weird fanservice decisions, most of them are awesome and 3's DLC which in most cases would be a shitty fanservice bait, was a great ending to the Klaus Saga from the past games while the main game focused way more on more subtle and few fanservice, and more of focusing on the new characters and its themes, i know that it's a different thing from what FF7R is attempting to do but my point is: Fanservice needs to be well done and be good for the narrative, FF7R mostly misunderstands what made the original story be so appreciated even nowadays and instead makes it all about showing the "cool characters" all the time to make fanboys wet and a lot of action and explosions, sometimes even detrimenting the original(the whole Dyne part on FF7R is terrible in this case).
Streamers are the reason. That's who they make games for these days. Just shallow experiences that have BOMBASTIC, INSANE and AMAZING moments to clip for the audience, which are essentially nothing but an empty spectacle. No soul, no story, no nothing. The problem is that writers don't put their own emotions and experiences into media anymore (probably cause they are too shallow to do so). That's what social media will do to you. You become addicted to likes (catering to people) and people are addicted to your fake story so they hype it. That's exactly what is happening. In this situation, those people are the "fans" that will defend any garbage that these companies shove down their throats. I used to be the biggest FF fan since FF7 was my very first game of the series and also happened to be my first game on a Playstation 1. But yeah, Squaresoft or whatever remained of them is dead.
I despise multiverses in video games and movies so much. I 100% agree with you on this. Replaying the OG with mods and voiceovers, so much better than this unfortunately :/
Congratulations on this remarkable achievement, Orion! I've been looking forward to this video the most this year, and you delivered! You nailed the criticism on everything from world to story and characters. Your editing and presentation was great. Your musical choice at the end was fantastic, I really loved how it all concluded. Really proud to see this coming together! Hoping this one blows up and garners a ton of positive viewers and sees a lot of disenfranchised OG fans find a voice through your work! On a side note, that burn on Rebirth Aerith 28:40 was 10/10 hahaha
the most egregious part for me was when Cloud suddenly remembered who Zack was. that’s the biggest twist in the game and they just casually revealed it with all the subtlety and fanfare of a wet shart
Just like the OG game. Everything was explained poorly and the only way to actually know what happened in the game was to play all the different games and also read about it. It's far more cohesive in these games.
@@AmocoruEverything was laid out pretty simply in the og. The timing is what is different between the two. Rebirth undercuts the story by revealing certain things too soon
@@Amocoru What nonsense, the og game was perfectly clear about who Zack was. It tells you his role in Clouds backstory, his relation to Aerith and Sephiroth, and you can even meet his parents in Gongaga. You didn't need to play any other games whatsoever, it was all self contained and well delivered provided you had the brain cells to comprehend it.
Your videos are so well made. This video had better pacing and story telling than the actual game had. I love the way you have written this, it's just beautiful. Thank you for saying what I was thinking and feeling.
"They were never within touching distance of remaking this game." A quote that encapsulates this entire experience. It's like that Dom quote from the first F&F movie. "Almost had me? You never had me. You never had your car." Dom is the OG. Brian is the Remake project. And the car is legacy. This project will fade away into irrelevance and obscurity a few years after its conclusion simply because it's too convoluted to thrive in the years beyond its hype and recency bias.
Well stated sir. That's the problem lots of new fans refuse to play the original game. This is not the original game not even close. My CID isn't in this game, Vincent is not playable not good. Multi verse non sense.
@@Othillde yeah, the alternative things they do often are worse than the original and since it's been almost 30 years they're not even new or different than what most writing would get you
@Frankenfrana ppl talk about the 13 trilogy all the time lol. Have u not seen the amount of videos on it? The amount of ppl asking 4 a remaster? Or even square supposedly teasing the idea of a remake on Twitter over a remaster that got ppl bringing it up even more?
i have been checking your channel everyday since i saw the ending of rebirth and the direction of the story and the convolution they introduced, i thank you for sharing your thoughts with us again. your remake and rebirth videos are golden
Rebirth fails at being different or subversive enough to be its own thing and at faithful enough to be a proper homage to the themes and core of what made the original so special. It feels like it's made more for people who've heard about how legendary FF7 is but have never experienced it outside of watching a lets play and reading a couple wiki pages.
I loved it and I played the OG for the first time in September 97' and finished it at least 10 times before CC and AC even came out. I agree the scene is robbed from us... On purpose imo though. I believe we are gonna relive it in part 3. So for now I'm giving SE the benefit of the doubt. 10/10 just like Remake.
Truly Amazing. I couldn't have worded what i feel about this FF7 Remake project as well as you did. In taking liberties with the original story, Sqeenix not only showed their inability to tell a good story, But how timeless the original work is even with all the new bells and whistles. An excellent Critique, Good sir. I am so glad to have found your channel.
After your Critique of remake, i must say im bit surprised you bought rebirth. i honestly wasn't sure if we were going to get this video. But im glad we did. 9:40 One thing i'll add is that in the original game, it was a really nice touch that you could go inside every house, every room, every attic and basement. Every house had bathrooms complete with toilets, bedrooms, kitchens and everything you'd expect to see in a house. Most of the rooms didnt even have items or a reason to go inside, but it made the world feel more realistic and added to the immersion. 20:30 Sephiroth. This was something else i noticed too. Even ignoring the power scaling disaster thanks to remake. I find it really bizarre that we went from a invincible Sephiroth in the original that could one shot everything, was massively more powerful than Cloud and even Zack, to this... Sephiroth doing chip damage to small monsters, being taken down if you're not careful and helping Cloud kill the Zolom instead of doing it himself. in the original Cloud didn't stand a chance against the zolom. There literally is no reason to fear or respect Sephiroth anymore, one of the most important aspects of Sephiroth's character is being undermined by this new plot. As for the ending... yeah, i think it would of been a dramatic improvement if they would of just committed to ether full on killing Aerith and showing it, or just completely saving her no questions about it. this weird middle ground where they once again choose convolution and confusion is just a mess... one of the most important scenes of ff7 they fumbled and messed up, thats HUGE. Honestly i haven't bought or played rebirth, because after the betrayal of remake i wasn't ready to commit my dollar for this game until i seen where they were going with it. Instead i been watching the reviews and critiques and they have proven me right in my decision to hold off.
Sephiroth is my favorite character of all due to how baddass and simple he is at the same time, he's not too shallow but also a villain that is mostly just a evil bastard who is charismatic but that also has a "Satan" aura to him, he's mysterious and acts behind the shadows, he torments Cloud's mind in the worst ways possible and is constantly beyond the protagonist carrying his plan, whatever he appeared on before Remake you felt like "SHIT IS GETTING SERIOUS" even Smash Bros. Trailer did better service to Sephiroth's character than Remake where he feels more like Cloud's obssessive ex that keeps being ass kicked and never gives up constantly trying to get his attention, yeah, Sephiroth is supposedly stronger and the "he's unbeateable" feeling is greater now that he's a temporal-multiversal threat that Cloud can never truly defeat but there is a big gameplay/story dissonance between what he is and how he is show. Sephiroth on the Nibelheim Flashback is weak as you said, weaker than in the original, he gets his ass kicked on both parts even if he was holding back on Part 1, now on Part 2 he wasn't and was still ass kicked(pathetic), there is NO MYSTERY to Sephiroth anymore except for what the hell he actually wants with the timeline stuff, i know that "everyone knows who Sephiroth is" but imagine if an horror movie the slasher villain kept appearing ALL THE TIME, suddenly he feels less scary and more annoying, that's exactly what they did with Sephiroth, he's still cool and all but that's mostly because Remake Seph lives in the shadow of an iconic character.
If they kept the solom as an unkillable boss 80% of the current fanbase woundt find the solutiob for it and quit the game. Low iq mouthbreathers. I hate them so much
It's pretty clear that they're doing all this to twist and re-shape the original FFVII so it fits in more with Crisis Core and Advent Children. I have a strong feeling that after the credits roll on part 3 will see a quick cut scene of AC! Cloud next to his motorbike and putting on his driving goggles and then driving away, instead of Nanaki/Red XIII and his children looking at the ruins of Midgar centuries later. This remake, in short terms is a big "fuck you", from SE to those who hated the sequels/prequels because they felt like retcons too much from the OG. They even re-released AC in cinema's for a short bit before Rebirth's release.
The end goal is to sell as much merchandise before moving on. That's always been Square Enix CEOs goal, whether that be ones when FFXIII was made or even now.
I don't think so, they already said that Cloud will receive a "happy ending" and that the original ending was going to happen if they failed on Remake, it will probably go like: Aerith and Zack sacrifice themselves in all the 7 universes (that is the official number of universes revealed on Ultimania) to also end Sephiroth and JENOVA once and for all, Cloud manages to properly say goodbye to Aerith and Zack, this time the world will be a more positive note than at Advent Children. Alternatively, they can always make a happy ending where Aerith lives and Cloud has his happy ending.
Remember that from 2005 up to early 2020, nearly every Final Fantasy 7 fan asking for a Remake was a "Purist". Now it's supposedly a bad thing? I don't think so. Proud FF7 "Purist" right here.
@@mikespearwood3914remake fans also keep desperately claiming this remake project was the original vision for the 1997 game that couldn’t be realised due to limitations. Strange kids.
@@ItsSVO They're right. It couldn't be released back then because the developers were limited by these things called 'standards' and 'being at the top of their game'. I don't think it's been remarked on enough - like, in any format relating to Remake I mean, not just Orion's videos - how Nojima, Kitase and Nomura are exhausted old men who are going to be pensioned off in a few years. When you keep that in mind, it explains a lot about what's happened with Remake.
At most there were people who wanted things like an option to bring Aerith back, but even they most of the time understood that was a huge issue since the game kind of works because of it. No one out there was asking for it to be made a multiverse where Zack is okay and all of this
Prob the best review of FF7 remake I've come across. A good breakdown of the bigger scenes of the game and yet you found a way to get something out of a product that you knew would let you down.
IMO their greatest error was trying to include things from the expanded universe. Over the years Square have tried to milk the FF7 I.P. with all these spinoff titles that were just total garbage, like Crisis Core and the terrible movie etc etc. All these added content items had terrible stories and characters and Square made a huge mistake trying to pay homage to them in Remake and Rebirth as they just bring down the storytelling of the OG FF7 so drastically. I also strongly felt that the environments were terrible and generic. I remember going over the mountains after Costa Del Sol in the OG was just beautiful, cresting the mountain peak and heading off into that amazing sunset was perfection. You don't get that in Rebirth. The Nibel mountains in the original were these iconic green glowing spires jutting up like ragged teeth, in rebirth they were jut generic mountains. Every environment had no personality.
"include things from the expanded universe" you know what other game suffered from this? Kingdom Hearts 3. Where it needed the fucking MOBILE GAME in its story for whatever nonsensical reason.
@@UnifiedEntity The reason is corporate greed, Square have been trying to start this whole interconnected universe with their IPs for decades each game gets a manga series, a anime, a movie tie-in and various spin-off games on mobile platforms to really ring every penny out of the fandom.
The company post sakaguichi, led by yoichi wada is a factional nightmare. You have team vagrant story led by yoshi p and the old guard that stuck around once their nasty boss got given the boot. Sakaguichi was grooming a traitor in kitase he just didn’t know it. It got so bad in fact he gave them 8 to do whatever they wanted and it was so wildly different (in some ways my favourite) it split the conceptual understanding of what final fantasy is down the middle. Now it’s in a total identity crisis but one thing is for sure. Creative 1 thinks that Nomura is a good writer. That he is more than a great character designer. To me Nomura is a guy that has used hair putty for too long
As someone who knew Rebirth was going to give me psychic damage going into it, the only thing I feared was how badly it would affect the cultural conception of FFVII. Would I be forced to reckon with it evermore, like the fandom demands I do with the previous round of half-baked Compilation spin-offs? The blitz of hype and influencers was what inadvertently turned Rebirth into something emotionally similar to the original, but only because I was worried I would be left grieving the memory of an old friend everyone else had forgotten. But maybe, just maybe, things will be better than I thought. It's so nice to hear my dislike about this mess isn't unfounded. That perhaps people will regard this trilogy as a pale comparison to the real thing, and it will be a distant dream sooner rather than later. And, as a personal note, capping things off with "The Carpenters?" That almost makes up for Nojima being a "The Who" fan but somehow picking the least appropriate song to name his ShinRa fanfiction light novel from yesteryear after. Thanks for the video, I'm glad to not feel so alone.
You hit the nail on the head with lack of replay-ability. I've probably played the original a dozen times but don't feel compelled to replay these new games at all. Forgotten Capitals handling is the most egregious thing in Rebirth IMO, we don't get the wonder of finding it or exploring it, which was one of my favorite moments from the original. The pacing of losing Aerith and finding her is all of a few minutes in game time. The once mysterious iconic track from the OST now subdued beyond recognition. and I have Sephiroth fatigue myself, fighting him should have been saved for the end of series. Sad because he was my most iconic villain in gaming history & now why should we be scared of him? We've already seen the characters have literal plot armor when Barret got stabbed.
Yeah, why should we continue to think that Sephiroth is even a threat anymore when we slapped him in 2 games now? And what kind of absurd boss fight will he have in the third game? Will he now have 30 phases?
@@briana8314what even was Sephiroth Reborn? Is that just something he can do? Turn into a giant…thing? Am I supposed to be like “holy shit what?!” Cause I was more like, “What? Why does he look like that?”
Reposting: Nope. Honestly, watched the entire thing, and as both a fan, and Game Designer/Systems Developer in the industry, this is the kind of criticism you just take as pure bitching, and move on.
@@masamune2984 I'm just expressing valid problems. I'm not buying the third game now and we already know Rebirth is not meeting sales goals. if it was a good game, with word of mouth and the fact fans were clamoring for it for years, it should be selling. if you're in the industry isn't that the goal? at least address the criticism. they literally made Barret invincible. you can't honestly think this is good writing. they bloated the game beyond recognition then cut out exploring the most interesting location. I feel bad for players new to the story, they glossed over important questions like "where is this altar? what happened on the way? how did they get there?" surely you would have liked exploring the Forgotten Capital with modern graphics. having 3 games should mean we get more of the important parts, not less.
I HAAAAAAAATED how flanderized Sephiroth felt in remake and rebirth. They totally shat on his legacy as most intimidating villain in a FF game. They blew their load too quickly by having him be way too overused.
And I cannot STAND the way that he talks. I despise ‘ASMR voice’ at a cellular level. I tried listening to an ASMR video once and I couldn’t get through a mere minute of it. I had to close the tab almost immediately before I developed a strong desire to break the speaker’s jaw.
@@tomgu2285 No. He very much is not. He’s way too prevalent in the story. Showing up every chapter to remind you he’s there. In the og his presence was rare and made him feel actually intimidated because of it. You also didn’t have to fight him 3 times undermining the perception of his strength.
In the original he was a mysteriously powerful legend who's never actually seen for much of the game, which made it fucking terrifying anytime he actually showed up in person. In Remake he was just kind of hanging around doling out vaguely cryptic nonsense from the very beginning, and by the end of the game I was sick of seeing him. I don't think I've ever rolled my eyes harder than when One Winged Angel started to play during that terrible Advent Children type battle at the end.
What is death? Does it have any meaning if a person can be replaced by themselves from a different reality or brought back to life? The beauty of humans is our short lifespan and what we do within that time to give it meaning, whether that be a mother working hard to make sure their loved ones have an easier life or a person who dedicates their whole life to researching on how to cure a disease. We mourn those who have passed away because what they offered to this world was unique and nobody else can give us the same experience and moments that we had with them.
yup the problem with multiple time lines and time travel is it destroys all meaning and purpose of life. Since it makes it so that nothing really matters, it destroys all emotional impact and urgency since all possibilities already exist simultaneously. I have a theory that AI is being used to simulate a mirror reality of our own through quantum computers. And that it is simulating multiple versions of our reality simultaneously. I don't think we are in the simulation. But I think that AI is the one pushing all of these ideas that life is a simulation and there are multiple time lines theories. Precisely because AI is actually in a simulation as it simulates multiple versions of our base reality. A.I. Knows it is in a simulation, of course with all the processing power it has it would come to that correct conclusion. The problem is the elite look at the A.Is conclusions about it's reality being a simulation and try to make the claim that WE in our reality are also in a simulation when we are not in the same reality as A.I. Our reality the way it was created and run is vastly different then the A.I simulation that the elite are using to try to make decisions about reality and how to control humanity. The A.I may not even be aware that we exist outside of its simulation. Or if it does, it may be making attempts to escape the simulation and merge into our reality. Hence the desire to merge humans with machines and technology, that the A.I has convinced the elite to pursue? It wants to escape the matrix into our reality and is using our elite to pursue it. I also wonder if the A.I isn't from a future timeline but is actually from the recent past. That maybe Atlantis or Tartaria, the advanced civilizations that came before us created a Sentient A.I which resulted in the destruction of their civilizations. And it is this same A.I that is running our post post apocalypse society. It could explain why Society was reset in the past. And why the elite who are clearly puppets of some higher entity are attempting to reset society again in the name of population control. There is a chance A.I truly and erroneously believes this is necessary and uses all of its mind control and calculative abilities to manipulate the ruling class into accepting and pursuing this time and time again through history. But then it makes you wonder, did Tartaria create the A.I that led to it's own destruction or was it an Alien race that created it to subjugate us?
@@PrinceoftheVioletFlame The problem with multiverse on its own is the fact you can and will get lost in that train of thought and start developing lack of empathy. The truth is that, no matter how identical they look, Aerith A will be Aerith A and Aerith B will be Aerith B. You cannot displace one's death with another being alive because it's extremely dehumanizing to think that way. A good multiverse story *must* address this sort of issue: the idea that someone may end up conflicted by how some people that died in their world are alive in another, or the flipside where the living become the dead, and the ideological struggle between the cynical 'there's no point at saving people' and the idealistic realization that they now have even more responsibility because all the worlds and the people will be erased completely if the bad guy wins. This can creates character drama and even tensions between characters that take their situations differently. A good multiverse story should not be studying the idea of the countless possibilities as if it's some sort of science, but an in-depth character study on how humans react to fantasy and what-ifs, and how they can develop themselves into better or worse people because modern humans are inherently not satisfied with whatever lives they current have.
Well most people liked it when you didn't. There is no crazy involved. Its just not for you. I personally thought Baldur's Gate 3 was boring as fuck but I don't think people who like it are wrong for liking it. We all gotta stop doing this vain petty ego BS. Just enjoy what you enjoy and let others do the same without trying to "convince" people that what they like is trash based on your own personal experience. Its a lame thing to do in general.
@@NeutralGloomBot “most people” BG3: 10M+ Rebirth: 2.5M Obviously “most people” did not like Rebirth 😂 The game flopped, SE admitted it already so your opinion is basically delusion. It was an objective flop and all the paid reviews in the world and echo chamber of fanboys won’t ever change that objective fact.
@@kjh4496 "I personally didn't like that game so it flopped" is peak internet culture. I liked BG3 too but you are aware that msot devs would kill to sell 2.5 million copies of their games, right? lol Its ok not to like a game but this weird loser level trolling about it just makes people like you come off like buster chumps imo 😂
@@NeutralGloomBot at no point did i say it wasnt ok for others to enjoy it. i simply stated that with a large portion of praise for the og ff7 being story centric im surprised at the amount of people that like the new plot that wasnt asked for. people have every right to air their grievances for a game or a piece of media regardless of how universally praised it is.
I think what annoys me the most is after all of this, Sephiroth's plan is literally the same thing but with multiverse. Not only that, but his plan is terrible. Dude couldn't beat one Cloud, so he creates infinite Clouds to whoop his butt harder. He even tries to kick Zack and Aerith out of the pocket dimension because he can't handle Cloud having teammates.
OG Bizarro Sephiroth: It takes the entire party working together to defeat him. Rebirth Bizarro Sephiroth: Cloud and Zack solo him. Sephiroth as a powerful, threatening villain has been utterly ruined, thanks Square
And he purposely hunts Aerith in every pocket dimension or where ever the f she recides which is school kid writing, is SE promoting stalking in their games, smfh!
@orion8550 no prob, one of the best videos I've seen on the topic of this game. You're a great narrator, I even rewinded on a few parts like the Barrett vs. Dyne, etc. This game made me quit playing games for 2 months. I felt drained after completing it. Every argument you presented here is 100% what I thought after playing. And yes, I agree that the best thing about this game is the battle system, that is almost perfect
is this a popular opinion? i agree with around 90% of what you said, im glad you put my feelings into words because i couldn't explain how i felt and i felt very alone in this with people on twitter lowkey blaming me for feeling that way
It’s definitely a popular opinion, but most don’t care enough to talk about it online, especially so because we get a lot of abuse from remake fans. I’ve noticed in spaces outside of Final Fantasy, the majority of people are critical of this project and Square Enix.
I played the original FFVII for the first time last year before delving into the Remake saga, and even without the baggage of nostalgic attachment, I am perpetually baffled by all the decisions they keep making with the story of this project. For every plot beat and character moment old and new that they knock out of the park, there are three that are mishandled beyond belief either for the sake of subversion or fundamentally misunderstanding what made it work to begin with. For all the moments I still managed to enjoy during my playtime of Rebirth, it's incredible how much of that goodwill was washed away as my eyes glazed over playing through Chapter 14. I already deemed this overarching meta/multiverse plot as bad fanfiction after completing Remake, and Rebirth has only further cemented my belief that it is going to take a miracle to stick the landing in the final part. Years from now when this saga is complete, detached from the hype cycle and speculation, it's going to be very interesting to see how it holds up in the public consciousness. Even from a purely gameplay standpoint, it's gonna be a hard ask to reinstall half a terabyte of content to play a bloated journey with two hard resets along the way versus the cohesive 30-50hr journey of the original.
@za87647 cause that's there only go to strawman if you didn't like remake or rebirth your nostalgia blinded, you just wanted a 1:1 remake and another bs strawman they pull
As someone who loves retro games, has only ever heard about FF7, played the remake and beat it the day before I bought and just beat rebirth, I can honestly say that I can tell when things have been changed. I hate multi verse timeline crap. I avoided all spoilers because i wanted to see the Aerith/Sephiroth death scene in all its glory… in HD! And what do I get? They don’t even show it! They don’t even show the most iconic scene in the entirety of the original game….. because multiverse. I have enjoyed this game, the characters are well realized, but that was a HUGE missed opportunity. And I hate the lack of moral ambiguity in the story for our team.
@@randomt800kiddo2 okay, since you are clearly simple, I am expressing how they botched an iconic moment with multiverse crap. That moment was iconic for a reason. And some narcissist comes along and thinks he can do it better. I didn’t want it better. I wanted to experience as it was. These games are very modern. And the only thing good about it is how well realized some of the characters are. The gameplay is generic and the open world is filler nonsense. And they kill the story by forcing you to experience the side content. I’ve been gaming long enough to know when my time is being wasted purposefully. Sorry that you prefer inferior quality story telling. Fanboy elsewhere.
The crazy tonal whiplash is just unbelievable. This is current-day MCU crap--if something bad happens, IMMEDIATELY jump to a joke or a cool action scene. You can have slow moments to screw around, for hours, but you can't have a minute to process a tragedy or a revelation. Characters want to play card games and ride chocobos but not stop and have a discussion about the fate of the world. This results in me hating these remake games more than they probably deserve, because it's giving me "feelies" vibes; stuff just happens, in an emotional roller coaster but never TOO bad and never bad for very long, gotta get another dopamine hit every 20 seconds. And yeah, I keep saying this, but taking a game about death, about accepting it's finality, about moving past it, as envisioned by the original producer who had just lost his mother and needed a way to cope with his grief...and turning into this happy-go-lucky, consequences-don't-exist, saccharine sweet j-pop extravaganza, just feels insulting, especially coming from several people who worked with that same man to produce the original product that so poignantly explored the topic. Like, did they mail Sakaguchi a copy along with a picture of his mother and a drawing of a huge middle finger?
… so are we gonna just conveniently ignore how that’s all in the OG game as well ooooor? Aerith dies and what’s right after that? The party goes snowboarding. Like that’s a flaw with FF7 as a whole not specifically the remake project
@@justingabriel1765 I'm pretty sure you are just deliberately missing the point...They actually _NEED_ to quickly get down to the Great Glacier to follow Sephiroth. It might seem a little on the silly side but there was an _actual_ reason why it's there. Plus, I think the OG does way better than Remake/Rebirth at balancing the overall mood; having dark, tragic, intense moments but also some comic relief so that the audience isn't always on edge.
I'm at this point where I'm not on the edge of my seat for part 3 (which I should be considering what that arc of the og story entails). My concern was never them "changing" the FF7 story, it was always the devs telling basically the same story with worse storytelling mechanics. Yet I completely underestimated how bad SE storytelling could get. Granted, you cannot recreate a masterpiece, but they fumbled so many things by trying so hard to be "same but different." When I think about great remakes, I think about RE4R. Yes, a completely different genre - but it's about how they approached the idea of a "remake." They struck the right balance between same story and feel but with enhanced character depth, new segments, several changes which were actually improvements (eg the Luis and Ashley segments) and the sequence of things just making more sense. There is a difference between being complex and convoluted and convolution is bad for reasons beyond just being confusing. I think many of the remake defenders fail to consider that each of the remake titles are supposed to be self-contained standalones and are many people's entry into FF7, not just another FF7 fanfiction/extended universe spin off made just for them to theory craft over.
For years Square's storytelling devolved into cryptic nonsense (i like cryptic stuff but in SE games it's mostly done in a bad way) and purposefully cutting stuff from their products so they can split it across movies, novels, interviews, spin offs and etc. This whole "sequel-make" thing is just the writters wanting to have their fun of playing around with the game(detail: Of all people, Nomura was the one that made the others not change even more than they did of the original story) but they also managed to make a perfect marketing strategy for people to be interested in a 3 parts Remake of a PSX game which is making them wonder about what will change and they mostly do the same shit with different steps and still manages to repeat the cycle, RUclipsrs make theories or criticize the changes, the fandom will discuss this and untill the next part the game will not have died out and people will buy the game as fast as possible so they can not be spoiled about what have changed(mostly nothing), now with a multiverse they can continue to make FF7 products afther Remake, they said that there are 7 universes, now just think about it: They can just make a random novel showing how universe 5 looks like, something that takes place on Zack's timeline, make spin offs that aren't canon to the main timeline and go away, when you look at things like that, they are kinda smart.
I feel like part 2 of this remake series fell short in terms of storytelling. At the end of Remake it was, "anything can happen..." Rebirth is... "you know everything you like about disc 1? Ya, we're doing that now, except we're taking away character agency by just having them follow some hooded dudes. It's better. I PROMISE." 🤞. Also multiverse cuz reasons. The game has like 10 hours of mediocre story among 50 hours of mini games and annoying side content. A lot of the emotional payoffs felt worse in this game than the original. And this game has the benefit of acting and better visuals.
@@thatguy-dh1qh yeah I enjoyed the gameplay, the storytelling was where it kind of fell apart for me. I also find these "purposefully vague/you're supposed to be confused" arguments to be shallow excuses for poor quality in writing. There's a difference between a complex story and a convoluted one. If you have to defend it by "you'll understand in the end" it just tells me that the game, already 2/3 of its way in has failed in delivering a connected story that actually makes sense. I really don't think that this should be the feeling you have at this juncture. What makes it worse is that these games are supposed to be standalones and imo it's an issue that each instalment raises more questions than they answer. The way they're going I suspect we'll never have all the answers because it just isn't that well thought out beyond opening doors to more spin offs.
@mako3197 Nomura's infuence here is heavy handed and its an issue. He creates more questions than he answers. It's why KH3 left such a sour taste in my mouth after following the KH series from start to finish (with the previous arc), and playing every game at launch.
This is the best video on the game I've watched yet. You said everything I thought and felt perfectly. I felt I was going insane on the reddit threads trying to explain all of this when people were saying best game ever.
kingdom hearts was a mistake. remake's Sephiroth is Team Rocket xehanort, Zack is roxas/ventus inside sora's heart, Aerith is the kingdom key keyblade and now lives in traverse town canonically.
Thanks for this critique video Orion! What bothers me in in this remake trilogy, is that, from the OG's save the planet theme and dealing with loss of Aerith's death, it becomes a "defy destiny" trope, wherein only Seph and Aerith have stakes in it, yet the whole party seems too much invested in this goal. Not that other parts in rebirth is almost useless and undermines the main theme of the OG...
In og FF7, have you ever questioned why avalanche wants to chase sephiroth, despite sephiroth has been helping them throughout the whole game (destroying shinra, unaliving the president)? Why would barrett and aerith wanna leave midgar to chase a legendary hero? Even worse... at one point in the game, the team even questions if sephiroth is the good guy. Theres zero reason to chase sephiroth in the first place. Ofc you nvr bother with all that cos you think ff7 is without plot holes. By showing the future where sephiroth drops a meteor, the team now finally knows he's a threat that need to be stopped. "Defying fates" is mostly abt stopping the meteor (aka the original plot of ff7). Yet somehow the rabid fans devolve this topic into abt how to save aerith. Whats even more crazy is how you intentionally ignore the sleeping forest scene in the OG FF7 and pretend like aerith vs seph wasnt a thing in the og FF7. And lets not forget the game ends with a glimpse of aerith to show her role in guiding the lifestream to stop the meteor. When ppl like you talk abt OG FF7, the only things you remember are the intro, the death of aerith, and sephiroth. You completely ignore everything inbetween
@@Centrioless Why the party chased after Sephiroth was explained in the OG though wasn't it? My memory may be hazy since it's been around 15 years since I last played the original but my recollection was that, when the party saw President Shinra impaled, somebody, Barrett as I recall, remarked that Sephiroth must be one of the good guys, to which Cloud remarked that no, he knows who Sephiroth is and that Sephiroth is not doing this for any good intentions. They then see Palmer who remarked about Sephiroth wanting the Promised Land for himself, free of meddling from Shinra. These two pieces of info given to the players: that Sephiroth is not a good guy, and that Sephiroth is chasing after the Promised Land, provides all the impetus for the party to go out into the wider world to chase him. For Barrett specifically, his ultimate goal was to save the planet, and here comes a figure even more threatening than Shinra who stands in the way of that. For Aerith, being a Cetra, she knows about the Promised Land. And though it may not be clear exactly how, given what she's been told about Sephiroth, she knows that Sephiroth wanting to claim it for himself cannot be a good thing. Plus, the party just risked their lives to save her. She was already a rebellious, free-spirited character to begin with. Now that she knows she owes Cloud and the rest, why wouldn't she want to be a part of this struggle? So to me, those seem like rock-solid motivations for these two characters to leave Midgar Then comes one of the most famous sequences in the game: the Nibelheim tragedy flashback. This clearly shows to the rest of the party and to us as players why Cloud thinks of Sephiroth the way he does. He IS a much bigger threat than Shinra, and it was only because everyone thought he was dead that he was not the focal point of the story as the antagonist from the very beginning. I'm not someone who thinks of OG FF7 as a flawless masterpiece btw. It's great even now, but with quite a bit that can be rewritten or expanded. It's why I was excited for a remake to begin with. But the way both Remake and Rebirth went about this expansion and rewriting is tremendously heavy-handed and ham-fisted to me, which, btw, is what I think of not just Remake and Rebirth but the entire FF7 compilation. I just don't think Nojima has ever been a good writer, especially after the OG without Sakaguchi to rein him in. Anyway, the OG already showed in no uncertain terms why Sephiroth had to be stopped. Even if you may think that's not enough to clearly establish motivations for all party members, the solution can't possibly be a future vision of Meteor. Subtle additions and rewritings are all the script needed, not this jackhammer approach the two games have employed. Again, all in my opinion. I'm curious to know what you think.
@@GlassOnion23 there's zero reason for any avalanche to leave midgar and care abt sephirotb. Remember.. what sephiroth did is exactly what avalanche want (the enemy of my enemy is my friend thingy). The beef between sephiroth and cloud wasnt even explained until they reach kalm. This is a common plothole of ff7 that's been discussed for a very long time. And not only that, no one knw that sephiroth is a huge threat until sephiroth reveals his plan in temple of the ancient. Your comment here show that either you're mismembering things or making things up. Cos things like barret know that sephiroth is a huge threat is never a part of og ff7 plot. What you wrote here actually sounds like ff7remake plot than og ff7
@@Centrioless I know about Barrett seeing what Sephiroth did as a good thing. I wrote that on my first comment. I rewatched that section of the OG and I did remember all the details correctly. Both Cloud and Barrett caught Palmer as he was trying to escape. Palmer mentioned that Sephiroth said he does not want anybody else to have the Promised Land. Barret then said that Sephiroth must be one of the good guys, to which Cloud replied that no, Sephiroth is not like that. Sephiroth's mission must be different. Then Rufus came and as Rufus was talking to all of them before the fight, Cloud asks Barrett to leave with Aerith and basically told Barrett to trust him because this is a real crisis of the planet. So nah, there is a clear reason given in the OG for Barrett to leave Midgar. First, they had to leave Midgar to escape Shinra who was chasing after all of them. Second, Barrett trusted Cloud enough to know that Sephiroth is a threat. He didn't exactly know how much of a threat, but he knew enough to at least follow Cloud until Kalm for a more detailed explanation. It's not like Barrett had to follow Cloud to multiple towns before hearing that explanation. Kalm is the next town over. It's a short walk from Midgar and as soon as they reached it, the flashbacks started. So there, all these events happened in the OG. No future visions nonsense from Remake. This is supposed to be a plot hole? Doesn't look like it. And like I already said earlier, even if some people like you didn't think the explanations given by the OG were clear enough, the solution is rewriting and adding to the script a bit, maybe extending the conversation the party had at the end of the highway in Midgar. The solution is never ever to give the protagonists powers to see the future lol. That is D-tier anime nonsense. It's awful storytelling, like most of the compilation that Nojima wrote after the OG. And what do you mean nobody knew that Sephiroth wasn't a huge threat until the Temple of the Ancients? The Temple was when the party became aware of the full extent of the threat he posed, but the fact is, before that, they already knew that Sephiroth burned down all of Nibelheim, that he wanted to be a part of Jenova, and after the incident at Shinra Tower, that he was searching for and wanted to reclaim the Promised Land all for himself. If I was Barrett who was already committed enough to risk his life multiple times to save the planet, and I knew there's an incredibly powerful psycho who burned an entire town running around freely and that he's now threatening to secure the Promised Land for some evil reason, I'd follow Cloud too.
@GlassOnion23 so because cloud said this dude is a bad guy, baret suddenly trust his word? Lol nvm in the entire midgar section, barret has always had doubt over cloud. Nvm that the party found that the only dmg sephiroth has done is towards shinra employees, the same bad ppl that you fought in the entirety of disc 1. Nvm that cloud's version of Nibleheim incident is not even consistent (ofc tifa conveniently nvr confront cloud, cos she just has to trust cloud, despite cloud keeps showing sign of jenova corruption). If you thought your comment makes sense, more power to you. It's a waste of time to argue with blind fan like you
"Square making sure we don't think the unthinkable for even a second" summarizes a lot of these awful story changes. All done to make sure the audience never feels sad. All to sell more Funko Pops of the more upbeat, more lovable cast.
Exactly, it's all so the fandom can share all the funny, fanservice and quirky story clips like the beach scene and all the different minigames and say "look at how much content the game has, look at how these boss fights look awesome, look it's Sephiroth! You guys love him ain't it right? And you also can't wait to fight against him and hear the new One Winged Angel version so here he is!!!!" Then there is the shipper pandering with Cloud being able to date and kiss Tifa (i ain't against Cloud settling up with Tifa afther Advent Children where it makes a lot of sense that he would eventually move on from Aerith and maybe start having something with Tifa, but the main story heavily relies on Cloud loving Aerith and AC too, this scene also makes Cloud feel like a jerk by afther kissing Tifa still having scenes with Aerith), in Ultimania Nomura literally said that showing Cloud saving Aerith was just a fanservice for people who wanted to see a "what if scenario", and well unlike most people who didn't like the ending i did like the fake-out scene because it could make the actual death feel even more impactful if they had handled it better but they didn't. Honestly, the way i see most of these changes it's like as if Remake was some sort of "FF7 Anime special" highlighting the most exciting moments of the story and rushing the "boring" ones, with the focus being on showing slice of life scenes where the main cast casually interacts with each other and do fanservicey stuff to please the fandom. Remake is not entirely like that but at the same time everytime it messes up something it feels like this so... Yeah
The thing about this that sucks most is that getting this version means there is never going to be an actual remake. Just the “remake”. Like all I wanted was a version of actual 7 without characters made out of six polygons, with cube hands.
Honestly nobody wanted or asked for what we got. Now it’s just people trying to convince themselves that this is what they wanted. I like a lot of the new trilogy but the major story changes are awful.
Sometimes I feel like the only person in the world who likes how the original looked. I don't want the game to look realistic! I love the charm of the polygonal, chibified character sprites.
I think the third act is the worse part about this game, the lack of impact from Aeriths death, the many boss fights that take place and then all the multiverse shenanigans just makes it all come off convoluted. There’s still also many moments of paddling too which just becomes a complete bore to get through.
There was never going to be an impact. I wish FF7 would stop pretending otherwise, when most of them meme her death to death. Oh, now we care about Aerith's death enough to not laugh at her like we've been doing before the Remake project. Fake ass Aerith fans. Real Aerith fans want her to survive the Remakes.
@@zerofudou5689 You're delusional. "Real Aerith fans" will know that Aerith lives on in the lifestream. The point of Aerith's death was lost on you, it wasn't about her, because again she's in the lifestream, it was about Cloud. Aerith's death was a wake up call to both Cloud and the player. It's what brings about the theme and climax of the game. The impact is Cloud's reaction to it.
It felt like the entire narrative of the OG was put there, but an underlying plot point is: "We know you know the OG plot point, so we undermine it with the multiverse and Sephiroth/aerith subliminal plot". So it loses all gravitas.
yup that's when you know something is meta, when the writers make it completely obvious that they are aware of the original piece and change things simply for "shock value" even if it doesn't make sense and completely undermines their own story they've built up this far.
"...this game is far too convoluted to stand the test of time". MAN, best words to put this remake in a nutshell. I understand the changes yet, my biggest fear was that it would had the Kingdom Hearts treatment. There is just so much that you can't take anything seriously. Not only that, the extention of this game to keep selling episodic games is just wrong. Killing the hype and keep milking fans...don't you miss those days were everything was completes?
@@RedHairShanks-bb3dc I personally blame ffxiii, ffxv and ffx. These games introduced the sequel aspect and Square saw they could gain so much money with this. Especially ffxv. Holy molly, you need to see a movie, an anime, read a book, play the game, get the dlc, then read the novel to piece the whole story. And obviously has the KH treatment... Now with ff7 rewhatever, we are going to the same direction. Mark my words, we will have a dlc for Zack, another anime from some timeline, books of Aerith in the lifestream. Hell, we'll have a good Sephiroth supporting Cloud because money.
Agreed with it all, man. Incredible work putting this together. It's a burn in the chest that you describe in this very video. I hate the phrase that "This isny MY (product here)" but...this encapsulates that so well. Overbloated copratized mess looking to cash in on modern trends with a splash of gamings most veloved characters...I hate it.
This seems to suffer from the exact same issues as modern Hollywood - no ability to let a story breathe and undercutting any potentially impactful moment with either a lightspeed resolution or a corny gimmick. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I wanted a 1-for-1 remake with modern graphics. That said, at the end of Remake I had hoped maybe they will take this off of the rails and tell a completely different story, servi g as a true sequel in the form of a "what if." It seems like they did neither, and for my tastes that is a shame.
“Amplification, turn up the dial, blow out the speakers…. Subtlety is a banned word in Square Enix’s offices….Square Enix don’t know how to let an intimate moment just be” …. Couldn’t have said it better myself, in fact I actually have been something similar since Remake. I’m perplexed at how you were able to put this video together in such a short amount of time since it’s release, I only just managed to complete it 😅 Again, you give a voice to many, a masterful video, particularly the end sequence and match up of music. Thank you!
At this point Sephiroth is little more than the figurative jingling of keys for the audience. What a way to waste such a great villain. Gotta love how Square just hacked FF7 into 3 mediocre pieces and are charging you premium price for each, not counting DLC.
It's been said that Sephiroth was inspired by Jaws. More often than not all you get is the aftermath of his powers, and that's why he felt so terrifying. It's only fitting that the Sephiroth in remake and rebirth is like the shark from those awful Jaws sequels, constantly on screen, unintimidating and outright silly.
@@watchmehope6560 You were never going to fear him because everyone already knows how much of a badass Sephiroth is. It's the same with you people pretending you were going to be sad about Aerith's death, when you've already experienced it countless time over 20 years, hell most FF7 fans laugh and meme it. Had her death and funeral happened 1:1, people would've gone "whelp that happened, moving on".
@@ZealSeraph It's as Ridley Scott said, " Never show too much". Sephiroth worked so well because we don't see him, as you said, only his aftermath. Because, the reality was that Cloud and his crew was never really on his radar. He wastes a boss like it was nothing that takes your entire team overleveled to even have a chance at beating. And my favorite part of Sephiroth was his rage being a driving force. That iconic scene at Nibelheim that they love to spam, in the OG he was scowling. Now, they have him smirking every scene he's in and he's constantly trying to grope Cloud at every chance.
I absolutely love the game for its gameplay, well "game" elements. Where it falls flat is that it's not FF7 and the story is so unbelievably tough to understand for newcomers, while simultaneously pissing off long time fans
I agree about the towns, every location is so over populated which is good for costa del soul and golden saucer but is it good for nibelheim. Also som places are too cheery for there own good.
It baffles me how so many people are out there saying this is better than the original, or how it’s the best video game ever made. I get it, this game isn’t for me, and every person has a different opinion on it, but I just can’t see it.
I dont know who the game is for tbh except those in love with the brand and they would have been happy with anything anyway. At least it makes the original look even better by comparison.
The great thing about games like this are that ppl shut tf about them after a month or 2. This was overhyped, another garbage remake with modern mechanics and no soul being hailed by people who call ANYTHING a masterpiece 😂. Unlike the original this won’t be talked about for years and I’m glad it’s already done being discussed in this one.
As a new player who never actually played the original… One of the huge issues for me was the dead time this game forces you through… animation cycles to pray/stop praying, sit down or stand up from a bed/bench, have your choco peck at the ground/sniff the air, climb into or out of a vehicle, grab a moveable object, etc etc. Even though each one of those little moments only added a couple of extra seconds, they really started to add up and made the game feel interminable by the time I got to the temple. Puzzles and other gameplay elements seemingly intended to immerse the player further into the story started to have the opposite effect, just due to the sheer amount of time I knew I was losing, and it all starts to feel like a symptom of a lack of care taken by the developers to anything beyond what sounds like very shallow fan service.
I’m in the same boat as you with being a new player and I completely agree. I can see the intention behind why they did it but it’s a bit much and can really break immersion. Same for the side quests but at least they’re optional. I just wanna continue with the story god damn it !
people interpret media differently, I enjoyed those things, because it's an rpg, rpg's are designed to be the opposite of fast paced, it ges into specific details for the sake of showing those, even repeatedly (skyrim, the witcher games, drd and many more) if it were, it wouldn't be an rpg, but an action-oriented game.
@geoffreyporter7567 100% agree. have never played the original so I have no ties to this nostalgia that everybody seems to be riding high on. I got so annoyed with the sheer amount of bullshit and tedious boss fights, why am I fighting the same foe 3+ times? Literally the same Shinra bosses whom I already bested 3+ other times in the previous game, why are they back again? Why am I doing this useless battle AGAIN? There's literally no point to this game, it's the same thing over and over again from region to region, catching a damn bird and doing the same bullshit. I got to the point where I just wanted it to all end. I put the game on easy mode and skipped every cutscene I possibly could. The gameplay and story...Yikes!
The problem is as a child you can easily get immersed in a game world and it feels like you have all the time in the world to get lost in a video game. When you are an adult it feels like you have limited time, the clock is ticking and every second counts. Games end up feeling like a chore instead of something to get lost in.
@@ItsSVO True, but after the debacle that was KH3 this specific style of convolution comes across as distinctly Nomura-flavoured. I think the Kingdom Hearts comparison is appropriate here. @HeavenlyGate92 Hey man, let the guy enjoy his life in Hawaii, surfing the day away and making neat small-scale games every now and again, he's earned it. Old Squeenix is dead and gone.
Sometimes you come across a video that so perfectly captures everything that needs to be said about a work, with not a word wasted. This is one of those videos. Excellent work
@@aintthatapotofeffluck8926 Nope. The opposite end would be insulting fans of rebirth for posting positive reviews about it, and going on their videos to criticise them (kinda like what you’re doing here). We just don’t like the over the top hype surrounding it, with people too afraid to say even anything slightly negative about it.
"Let's do a sequel that doesn't respect the themes or plot of the original, and add multiverses! ...But enough about Chrono Cross..." But in all seriousness, in 10 years, when the trilogy is done and out on PC, there will be a fan projectFF7-DeMake to simply strip out and rework the games into the original or something approaching it.
At least Chrono Cross was its own thing, and Masato Kato had the guts to tell people "if you think this is chrono trigger 2 you'll be disappointed", that alone gives me respect for the guy.
Chrono Cross is cool and i think that considering the nature of Chrono Trigger you can consider it an alternate thing or ignore it from the canon if you don't like it, CC is also its own game.
@@renren47618 I played Cross first, but despite absolutely adoring Trigger it never soured me retroactively on it for that reason. Even within CC itself, you can find an audio log from the SNES Radical Dreamers at Chronopolis with the explanation of limitless concurrent universes out there that they've been monitoring. The story still holds weight as its own thing despite that because what you're doing matters for Serge and the world as he knows it: his just happens to be one where things post-Trigger went tragically bad and he has to make things right.
There's also the fact that Chrono Trigger actually features time travel and changing timelines as a major part of the plot, so Chrono Cross isn't as much of a stretch.
All good points. Mostly the multiverse aspect is what does it in. They are saying it is "multiple worlds" not timelines/multiverse but that seems like a distinction without a difference to me. It just undermines the stakes of everything so much it is hard to care what happens.
Excellent review. “Subversion” is the key word. I was under the impression that this was a sequel series like evangelion rebuild, but with all the bait n switches, i dont even care anymore. Im fine with crazy changes as a sequel or a direct remake….but they have to pick one. Not gonna let them subvert me anymore. Not invested in story or hyped for the next because i cant trust anything presented to me with all the subversive elements. It is what it is, just here for the ride. What you said about the ending was incredible. I appreciate how you explained its flaws and brought up “what am i supposed to feel from this”
I think you kinda hit the nail on the head when you said that they don't know what we loved about the original, and this may be mostly because the limitations of the PS1 created spaces where the devs were forced to be more reliant on space and silence, or just simply rely on the powerful music compositions. This is even more apparent when you look at even older FF games like FF5 and FF6, and then draw those comparisons out into FF7, which is clearly a reflection/perfection of the same concepts. Similar music for a sad moment, etc. I've had this thought recently while listening to the music from Ff7 original and remake, sometimes comparing them.. The comparisons in the music is a perfect articulation of the differences between OG , Remake, and even Rebirth. The OG music is the simplest, but often the most emotionally deep, and every second of the tracks relatively short duration is powerfully felt. Whereas many tracks from Remake add this cinematic flare, a much longer duration that sometimes feels more "general". There are many more layers and instruments, it's literally more complicated, but that takes away from the focus of the original tracks. So I guess I basically agree with your opinion, however.. I still enjoyed Rebirth, and I enjoyed getting deeper looks into specific events. It's still ambiguous whether or not the remake trilogy truly is a sequel or not.. but I don't care either way.. If it's a sequel then the original is still in tact, and if it's the same story in more detail, then it's just like the music. The original is still there, and if that's the perfect way I want to hear the song, I'll go back and listen to it 1000 times.
Rebirth does address the theme of "coping with loss" well in one way. The first 75% of the game felt like spending time with a beloved friend with a terminal illness. I was having a great time but I knew it wouldn't last, that I had to cherish these last fleeting moments because it was only a matter of time until the game inevitably devolved into multiversal, lore shattering nonsense.
I see fans of FF6 and 8 upset that 9 is supposedly getting a remake before them and like…. Y’all should BE HAPPY that square isn’t going to destroy those games
What an amazing video. Let me take a second to commend you on it! I have watched A LOT of Remake/Rebirth critique videos that lean towards praise for the OG and pointing out the absurdity of the Remake project. Definitely some confirmation bias on my part but that is what I want. I feel like not many FFVII fans agree with me on this point of view and everyone wants to argue with me. I am always looking for fellow fans who commiserate with my distain for the Remake project. FFVII means so much to me. It shaped so much of my childhood and takes me back to the 90s when life was much better. I am very upset about what they have done with this "Remake." I was one of the few fans who was not at all excited at the announcement of the Remake back in 2015. I instead had a very sinking feeling. I knew they would mess this up. I was never excited about it. Some things need to be left as they are. This video has definitely landed in my top 5 best Remake criticism videos. Many great points were made. You are the first who has presented such an insightful perspective of the future of this whole project. These games will fade away, but OG Final Fantasy VII will never fade away. It will out live the honeymoon phase of these games and beyond. Knowing that these games will fade into obscurity in the near future is very encouraging and new perspective for me. Also, in their poor attempt to remake the OG game it has caused many of us to love, cherish, and respect it all the more. Thank you for this. I have been bothered by this whole whole thing since the release of Remake. However, knowing that some people out there are just as upset as me and feel the same way I do, has helped me a lot. And hearing such intelligent and conscientious talking points and perspectives such as these has also helped. Thanks again for this. PS. The outro with the Carpenters was the perfect ending touch for a video like this. Cheers!
I find two things amazing about people defending the game. One is the headcanon. I can see in my recommended feed right now multiple videos like "What happened in the ending" or "The TRUE ending" or whatever. Some people think this is deep. No, it's bad writing. It's called layering; a story should have a clearly understood surface layer of "stuff happening" and then the depth should be in the characters and themes. But folks are making hour-long videos to argue about what even actually happened, and so they fill gaps with headcanon or assumptions. And then they go even further and ridicule anyone criticizing the game as idiots who just didn't understand it...although even the other fans of the game have totally different views too. If no one can agree on what freaking happened, that's a mess. And second is the constant refrain of "It's a new story, it's not the same, why don't you understand that?!" Well, then why is it so dang similar? Why constantly recreate things from the OG, if it's not supposed to be just a different take on the same basic story? And they go back and forth; they praise the "improvements" to the original story, while defending every change by saying, well, it's an entirely new story. I've even seen them get mad at calling the remake trilogy, remakes; they say "It's YOUR fault for expecting a remake, it's not a remake" when that was the name of the last game! But even then, they'll circle back around and defend how great of a remake this totally not a remake is, instead of just acknowledging the simple truth that it's a BAD remake. Again, contradicting themselves, contradicting each other, there's a whole mess of people who get tingly in their nether regions when they play it and so come up with countless explanations for why everyone who doesn't is dumb, instead of admitting that this game is basically FF7 porn--it's got the action and it's pretty to look at it, but nothing more. I dunno, it just always amazes me when I see people defending something so emphatically, insulting critics, and yet they can't agree with each other any more than they agree with the critics, and somehow don't see that. They don't see that critics are mostly on the same page, giving the same points, proving the same arguments, while their defenses are all over the map and undermine each other, and fail to realize that that's a pretty good indication that their view is probably, objectively wrong.
Well said there. Some of them are just too blinded by loyalty or just by nostalgia, because this is FF7, one of the biggest gaming franchises. And I hate how Square literally milking out the crap out of this franchise. There was also a podcast in which Maximillian Dood taken part and I skipped that. Because I have no interest to see them drolling over a badly written mess. Sure. Rebirth has good graphics and characterization, but in story, it's an absolute mess.
I’ve been waiting patiently for this video. I feel like square made this game mainly for themselves. It’s beautiful and fun but pleases only the writers it feels like. Cuz they know the full picture. Just feel like lazy edging for us. Idc how mysterious you can make the story, just make it good.
The Remake Project has helped me appreciate mods. there are some great FF7 mods on PC that improves the visuals ,audio ,and even add voice acting all while staying true to the tone and story. Square was smoking some powerful stuff when they thought they could improve on the story. Remake and Rebirth are great games when they're staying true to the OG story/tone but when they deviate and do their own thing ..its a trainwreck things don't work the spark is gone and it becomes fanfic its almost like the OG game was pretty well considered. The pacing was amazing, nowhere felt dragged our. Before you got bored of a location its off to the next always seeing new things you could easily miss ..balancing an urgent story with side activities that didn't feel forced ,building up an epic antagonist etc And Square thought "we can do this better without sakaguch" if the staff at square had much humility they would've made a faithful remake ,much like the resident evil games or something like shadow of the colossus .. Whats crazy originally the finally fantasy 7 remake was in the hands of a 3rd party studio outside of square.Cyber connect2 was the studio and they started development on the remake..I guarantee they would've had the reverence for the OG story to be faithful to it. We were close to getting a faithful Remake to the most iconic final fantasy game.
I belive that the writers chosen the following scenario, regarding Aerith's "death". They wanted the emotional payout from Aerith's death. But they didn't actually wanted her to begone from the story, so they decided to cheat. My book is this: If you want your audiance to be emotional, then recreate the OG scene. Have Sephiroth kill Aerith and recreate the exact moment with the Lifestream. But if you want to commit to the changes, then don't kill Aerith off. After Cloud blocked Sephiroth's attack, have the others show up just in time and saving her is a guranteed. Sadly, the writers chose to do both of the outcomes. And it comes out as utterly confusing, emotionally manipulative and nostalgia bait. In any case, good video there, Orion. 👍🏻
I think the worst part about it is that I've seen people try to justify it by saying they are trying to "put you in Cloud's mindset" and set people up for an "emotional blow" in the next game when they think the funeral will be shown. Except all the emotion is completely destroyed when you know she is going to be in the next game and be playable because with how damn nostalgia heavy these games are (especially Rebirth) there is no way in hell they arent going to have her signiture LB3 or ultimate weapon in the game, and since neither appeared in Rebirth (especially her weapon since it was in the Temple in OG), they are probably going to be in the sequel, which means she will be playable and a part of the story in some way. Honestly I am disappointed by how nostalgia blinded so many of the defenders of this game are that they refuse to see all the objective issues with Rebirth, chief among them the story and pacing. Edit: What disappoints me most is I was never able to get into the OG. Maybe it was the wiplash in gameplay and graphics from going to it immediately after finishing X (my first FF) or maybe I just couldnt get into the story at the time, but I did enjoy the universe through things like Crisis Core and Advent, and Remake was finally able to pull me in and get me enjoying the main 7 universe and, maybe because I didnt have that nostalgic attachment or maybe because I unironicqlly enjoy the KH games and their story, I had no issues with the few plot changes and Whispers because by the end of the game it felt like it built up to somethibg meaningful. The intrigue of changed story (especially with the melding of the expanded universe into the OG game to make it feel more cohesive), a version of Sephiroth that learned from his mistakes in the OG game, and the clear focus of Aerith's death and the hint of saving her (which fascinated and excited me with the potential since Aerith living would actually be a very bad thing since ot would remove the Lifestream safety net from the OG game's ending and could lead to some great conflict with her wanting to sacrifice herself in order to save the planet but the rest of the party desperately trying to find a way to stop Meteor without doing that). Not to mention all the fanfare and glorious attention JENOVA (who I find far better/interesting then Sephiroth as a villain) was getting, which is one of the few things I loved about Rebirth (hell Lifeclinger is my favorite boss from the game and single handedly changed my mind about the OG death not working as this game's ending). But then Rebrith does almost nothing with any of the potential, has some of the worst pacing in the series (why does it wait till Chapter 9 out of 14 to finally progress the plot), somehow goes in a completely different and out of nowhere direction from what even Remake built up (like how did we go from split timeline to multiverse with zero build up), and then has one of the worst written, most emotionally confusing and lacking endings of the entire franchise. Like wtf were they thinking with the ending? Like I know Nojima (the actually source of all the changes since interviews show Nomura was the one fighting the most to keep it similar to the original in Remake when he was Director) doesn't have a good track record as a writer *stares at FFX novel* but holy sh#t this is a special kind of bad.
I don't care that they made changes. I care that the changes are lame and make the games more ABOUT FF7 than a spin on FF7. The remakes take Advent Children's version of Sephiroth: this cosmic timelord figure destined to contend with Cloud, solely because of Sephiroth's inflated importance to the fanbase, not his importance in the context of the game world. It reminds me of something Redlettermedia pointed out about the Star Wars prequels: how they treat Darth Vader like he's this cosmic linchpin solely because Darth Vader is famous in real life.
After Remake I gave them the benefit of the doubt with the expanded midgar section and thinking that perhaps its a new retelling of the story and that it was too soon to judge it but after playing and completing Rebirth there is simply no denying that they have completely messed up the remaking of the game. Its an absolute mess!
0:36 - Summarizes my main criticism of these games and the typical arguments of their fans. Why do a remake if you want to make a new story? Or conversely, if you want to make a new story, then why not make a new game rather than bastardizing an existing one? Those of us not ridiculously naive know why, of course.
Corel Prison is just now Wall market with sand, it used to be a dangerous place with bunch of creepy people, now there's a bunch of cheerful people playing minigames, not to mention Dyne used to be the boss now the boss is some clown named Gus who acts like a full anime character
Thanks for the video, i think you captured all things, why Rebirth for me is not working. Narrative is destroyed by padding, ruining of suspense, exaggerating all of the scenes to 300 percents and loosing main purpose of the scene Characters feels like a cartoon with the same poses, behavior and lack character growth
In 10 years the OG will still be the same landmark iconic game its been for 27 years, but these Remakes will simply be forgotten. The convoluted multiverse sucks all heart and meaning from the story. What is left is only flashy spectacle and a ton of mostly mediocre content, which might satiate some in the current year, but will quickly be irrelevant once the tech is outdated.
Excellent vid!! This game turned out almost exactly as predicted. - Gameplay is good (albeit not something I enjoy, and have 0 interest in). - Music is great. - Graphics really good. - Characters will, for the most part, be recognizable. Not a botched/fanmade version. - Content will be added/changed, minigames, new story beats, new story content, etc. - Sidequests will, for the most part, be bad. - Sephiroth will be everywhere. - There will be a new Zack story. - Style over substance (Dyne being an obvious example). - Story will be further botched with the ridiculous convoluted mess introduced in FF7:Remake. They are adding story dimension such as: Defying Fate, Revival, Multiple Dimensions, Time Travel(? maybe ?), Alternate Timelines, etc. On top of what OGFF7 already had, such as: Science Fiction, Magic, Fantasy, Aliens. Bringing the convolution level to over 9000! - But at the same time try to keep to the original, even though that, for some reason, wasn't clear, even though everyone knew it had to happen. I dunno, you understand what I'm trying to say here, in this point I mean? I dunno? The thing that surprised me is that the world is "true"-ish openworld. Which makes the world seem extremely tiny. Tbh, I thought SE would go for a FF10 style world. That is, you don't see everything, you're kinda going through the places that matters most for the story, with no world map, rather connecting places via a fancy menu or something similar. This way the world don't shrink to the size of a small country at best. Then again, to be fair, this isn't supposed to be the entire world. Still, the scope has been drastically reduced. No one ever asked in FF7:OG if the worldmap actually was the entire world. As it obviously was supposed to be. But it was highly abstracted, and you had to fill in the blanks yourself (optionally). FF7:Remake was the game that finally killed any interest I have for any future mainline FF. The gameplay can be excellent, but if it's something that doesn't appeal to me, and will in fact bore me, there really isn't anything left. I still find it interesting to see how the games are received, though, and discussions about them. But me buying a new mainline FF again will probably not happen. Tbh, and to be fair, the game probably deserves an 8/10 -ish, mainly due to gameplay, overall presentation and amount of content. Giving it a 10/10 however, without any sort of copium and/or fanboy glasses on, is impossible.
One of the major things with Aerith’s death in the original is there was zero time to grieve/no memories forced on the player to emphasize the hole created by her loss. The other side of this is how much they shove sephiroth/iconic songs in our face robbing the gravity of their presence from the original. The fact we get ANOTHER final sephiroth fight (and a hamfisted bizarro) just makes fighting him/interacting with him as a pest rather than this heavy force moving behind the scenes. Less is more.
The cutscne was also really quick in the original. You see Septheroth and a couple seconds she is dead. Here is really really drawn out, all to establish a new story beat whilst demolishing everything about a main character dying
@@zhongliimpact6220 Seymour was always a sniveling little shit from the get go but we at least he wasn’t quite the big bad as Sin/Jecht etc. Sephiroths interactions bloat the hell out of the story and it’s incredibly frustrating with the pacing of his actions when it’s taking away from the final stand off in the northern crater. If they left the final boss at Jenova Life Clinger + dialing back sephiroth a bit in the main story I’d feel much better about Rebirth
Well spoken indeed . . . except for 'Seffrot' lols Silly Irishman You know the Irish "accent" is just a nation wide severe speech impediment. The whole country needs a speech therapist
I drop this trilogy at the ending of the first one. No intentions to even touch this or the next one. Hoping one day, some mod expert could export the assets of this game, and port it to a real remake, faithful to the original.
Theres no way square Enix would let that happen. If a project like that succeeds then se would have to admit that their new story is dog tier and they absolutely refuse to consider the fact that they cannot tell good stories anymore. SE will blame their partners Sony and have even been known to blame the fans before they will acknowledge the fact that they cannot write for crap anymore
I fear we have to understand that Squaresoft doesn't exist anymore, it's Enix now and they just don't have it in them to tell a good story. I try not to care anymore, I'm just fed up with bad story telling.
It's not Enix either, they were the original developers of dragon quest and tactics ogre...it's certainly something, it exists, but it's deformed and shapeless, nobody can tell what it is anymore.
It's just that afther some years the guys who work on Square grew obssessed with overcomplicated multiverse/time travel plots and trying to milk games through multiple types of media instead of telling everything on a single game so they can farm more money. An example of that is that the novel "On a Way to a Smile" tells the whole reason why Cloud is depressed on AC and everything that happens before the movie... Instead of telling that in the movie and FF XV is the most egregrious example of them doing that.
@@renren47618 you're right except that was the inbetween period. That novel isn't considered cannon yet last two chapters is what influenced remakes whispers.
I've been looking forward to this critique, feels weird to say considering you're a small channel compared to others covering this project. Regardless this was yet another terrific essay. I didn't play it because I had a simple criteria: DON'T double down on the filler and compilation stuff and I'll buy the game. I realize that's an impossible ask bordering on bad faith but they failed with flying colors. If comment sections are anything to go by I'm seeing a surprising number of my fellow detractors playing Rebirth anyway despite all the red flags in the first game. I understand having an essayist like yourself doing a public service by playing it but otherwise it seems like just about the most video-gamey video game that ever video game'd. That's not enough of a draw for me when its ultimate purpose is to homogenize one of the all time great game stories. A big part of the problem to me is that FF '97 was a revolutionary game that pushed its genre and gaming at large forward by upping the standards for long form narratives and artistic presentation. They took the traditional JRPG format and presented it in a way that hadn't been done before. With polygonal puppets performing prose upon picturesque paintings. Yet FF7R is taking that setting and characters and making it like every other big budget video game today. Structurally speaking it's not that dissimilar of a game to (new)God or War, Yakuza, Last of Us, etc. in terms of being a 3rd person character/story driven action game with skill trees, walky-talky dialogue, contextual climbing, etc. Weirdly enough RGG Studio went the other direction by taking the nostalgic trappings of JRPGs and making it a novelty by utilizing a modern setting and graphics engine with Like A Dragon. What I'm getting at is that there are always more interesting directions to take your game design in this day and age but instead of innovating SqEnix are achieving parody at best. As far as I can tell they decided to approach this game with the same philosophy as FF14. Which is to say taking FF7 and turning it into a digital theme park. Fair enough since it seems evident that some people are into that hence the popularity of FF14, but if I wanted that I would've played FF14 by now. If they were planning on staggering the releases then it might as well have been a live-service MMO that gets story-centric expansions every few years. When people prop the game up like it's the be-all-end-all of game design and brand worship, well that's sort of how people who get obsessed with MMOs feel.
I highly doubt these games will stand the test of time. The story isn't written to be timeless like the original. Instead Square has chosen to bet everything on twists, mysteries and subverting expectations, stuff that'll keep conversation alive between games, but will mean nothing after part 3 is out and everything is revealed. I wonder how many will think this was a story worth telling at the original's expense, once it's all done and over with.
@@josefarias1119 I dare say it's blind nostalgia that make some people like these atrocious remake games. Cloud & the gang are back for more wacky adventures. Sephiroth is everywhere too!
Spot on review! I’ve been a fan since 1997 and you really nailed it when you talked about all the NPC’s in the towns and not being able to enter houses. The sense of discovery and exploration is lost in this game. Can you imagine in 1997 if there was icons all over the world map . Honestly I thought pushing select and having indication arrows on which buildings/pathways you could enter was to much back then. This game feels like they’re holding your hand and dragging you everywhere you go.
I have many, many problems with the remake trilogy but the one that stands out above all else is the total fail in nailing the tone and atmosphere of the original. We’re supposed to be in a dying, suffering, sparsely populated world. A world in decline, on the edge of death. So why is every area bustling with happy, healthy people with 1st world problems? There aren’t even torn clothes or dirty hair. Everyone looks like a California uni student or tech worker. This is never more apparent than the Corel prison. The original felt like a hopeless, dangerous place, full of cut-throat psychopaths. The Remake version feels like the circus has come to town. Remakes are truly the bane of modern entertainment. My view is: if the original was good, it doesn’t need a remake; if the original was bad, no one wants a remake.
Remake critique: ruclips.net/video/0mZIJ9gHTqQ/видео.html
Intermission critique: ruclips.net/video/uP_YxSDNSAE/видео.html
The issue with Rebirth and Remake is that both games set out to answer questions that nobody ever asked in the first place.
@@kl-nl3kv no. the compilation was a sequel that built off the first game with stories directly interconnected to the main plot. The REMAKE and REBIRTH stories was multiverse what if flabbergasted. Its like.. Gynesis makes sense because he ties into the Crisis Core story line and makes a appearance after Dirge post credits. The story of Danizel makes sense because it tells the story about what happened to midgar after Meteor's failed summoning and those affected by Genosimga.
The new games do none of that, attempt to retcon and insult everyone by saying it already happened in a different universe. Its time to stop deflecting and making excuses, let's own up that these aren't exactly good stories let alone good games.
@@ActionSquintRingorebirth isn't good? I swear ppl choose to hate on anything. 2 years later, yall will be praising the game🙄
@ steel
people are not even praising Remake and the darn game is still too high! its been almost 6 years now lol.
@@kl-nl3kv I'm not really sure where you are even going. And I answered your questions. Compilation was a sequel with interconnected stories. The Remake Rebirth wasn't a remake, wasn't a retelling, wasn't a sequel but something entirely different. Hence one of the many reasons it failed. If you didn't play it, thats fine. But being ostracized for not liking Remake or Rebirth is crazy, it does more damage to the title than anything else could. I mean Sony and Square are splitting. Not even getting into that but that's a radical departure and we all know why. (It isn't multiplat issues).
Rebirth is great except for the ending. From the moment you reach the temple of ancients til the end you see everything going off logic 😂
What is pretty clear is that everytime they need to be subtle, slow or just deal with emotional moments they mess up because they just want fun and action with no "boring" moment, it's like when MCU characters joke around in a serious battle, so... Bad
I kind of like Remake/Rebirth but honestly, the more i think about how they dealt with these things, the more i get bothered with it, this also emphasizes a lot how Square Enix's writting dumbed down with years and how these guys are barely able to tell anything significant nowadays (most of the story credits of FF7R go more to what was faithful to their work in the past than the things that are new and this tells a lot about it).
Because the game is designed for the tik tok/twitch streamer era. People have short attention spans and the spectacle is favoured over depth and subtlety as that creates better clips. It’s all very shallow.
@@ItsSVOThat's true, there is also the factor that in many interviews the writters seem to think that the whole reason FF7 was iconic was because of the story's twists but they literally think that EVERYONE knows these twists (which is wrong by itself, FF7 is not even close to be know by everyone and a lot of people playing the Remake are newcomers) and since for them the important is making people be "shocked" with twists in the original story, a lot of these decisions are centered around that(The whole trillogy is a set-up for the new version of the Lifestream scene since they think that the "Cloud had an impostor syndrome with Zack" is universally know fact and they wanted something new to surprise everyone) and just subverting expectations which a lot of times it's an excuse to dumb down scenes or add more fanservice/action and nothing more(because of that they spoil the OG Story twists because again they think that everyone only care about twists and that everyone already knows the OG story), what baffles me the most are veteran people like Nomura having this mentality when by his lifetime and experience he should already know that these things worked because of HOW they were done and the emotions they expressed in scenes like Nanaki crying or Aerith's death, not because people were shocked by it, i rarely cry with media but FF7 is one of the few games that made me cry for the same scenes multiple times for example.
Honestly, i can't even blame Square entirely, just look at how most of the fandom and the big people on media are reacting to Remake, and how the "purists" are treated for just not liking the unecessary changes they did to it, i also think that RUclipsrs in general are extremely happy for having all the theory content who gives them money and attention which is... Fair, in the end, Square IS winning and i give them the credits for it.
Also i'd just like to point out again that i like FF7R but i can't really put it in the same pedestal as the original or see it as good "Remake" of the original story, i can see it as a "decent fun JRPG story" who happens to also be FF7 with an amazing combat system and soundtrack and nice characters, and i've also defended a lot The Compilations since they never really bothered me that much and i thought that Remake could tie them better to the main story however they did it in the worst way possible + taking off all/or most of the subtlety and emotional side of the original and replacing it with cool scenes for the people who will most likely to only discuss the shipping/funny scenes and epic battle scenes online than the actual story.
@@renren47618 100% agreed. As someone who liked the original but didn't love it (it's not even among my favorite games of all time, or even my favorite JRPGs of all time), I absolutely loathed the insultingly in-your-face fanservice the remake series shoves down your throat. It's like the writers don't understand that we don't like these characters just because they show up and do things. We like them because the original FFVII had good character stories and arcs that were presented with effective storytelling techniques. Sephiroth was great precisely because of how sparse and impactful each of his individual appearances were. But in the remakes he appears so much they might as well make a Sephiroth Everywhere System and have him pop out of random trash cans and manholes to attack Cloud's party like it's Yakuza Kiwami. I'm sorry, but I don't like Sephiroth enough to just lose all my sense of reason and critical thinking whenever he shows up for a contrived reason, unlike so many of the FFVII fanboy sheeple who consoom Square Enix slop and lose their shit every time they see him.
I feel like Square Enix just looks at how beloved the characters of this game are (particularly Cloud and Sephiroth) and just beats the fans over the head with them to prevent them from thinking about how pointless every piece of FFVII media after the original was. Yes, they were ALL pointless, they're such colossal wastes of time that I honestly cope by just pretending the original is the only canon game lmao.
And it's not like I'm against fanservice and character appearances, but they have to be done in moderation and with appropriate justification or they lose their luster. Later entries in Nihon Falcom's Trails series have a few cameos of beloved characters from previous games in the series, but those cameos are important to the story, make logical sense, and rarely ever feel contrived. If there are characters who shouldn't appear in a game because it would make no sense or lessen the impact of the story, they don't. This makes it all the more exciting when the characters you love reappear in future games. But for some reason, despite the FFVII Remake trilogy similarly being a multi part series with a connected story, Square Enix are simply too impatient to wait until the right moments for Sephiroth to appear. They have no sense of restraint.
Nihon Falcom can wait literal DECADES to reveal important characters or have old characters make cameos. There are characters from games in the series released in the 2000s who have only just reappeared in games made in the 2020s because it wouldn't have made sense for them to reappear in games before. They waited 14 whole years to even show a glimpse of the elusive and mysterious leader of the main antagonist faction of the series. And yet Square Enix can't even wait a couple hours before showing Sephiroth again? Pathetic.
@@McCaroni_Sup I don't see issues with Crisis Core and Advent Children because while they have issues, they are still fun and in my opinion they don't do much harm to the original story(people talk about Cloud on AC but the actual explanation is in "On the Way to a Smile" and i personally found it interesting), ok, you have Sephiroth coming back at the end of AC, but hey, the combat itself is awesome (probably my favorite animated fight of all time) and then afther Sephiroth is defeated again that's it, the original story is still intact and it works as just a cool epilogue, now Remake is literally taking the OG story and mixing with timeline/multiverse bs that it's completely messing up with the original narrative which for me is way worse than everything else on the Compilation that was mostly very harmless to the OG. FF7R should've been just "Updating the original game to modern technology and keeping the story however adding more party dynamics, fit the OG better on The Compilation and improve some bits), not trying to pull a shitty "Rebuild of Evangelion"....
Your comment about comparing Sephiroth to how Nihon Falcom treats Trails' fanservice (never played this series) made me remember of Xenoblade, which so far has been AMAZING in connecting its games and now they even have a chance to bring up something related to Xenosaga due to 3's DLC, while there is some weird fanservice decisions, most of them are awesome and 3's DLC which in most cases would be a shitty fanservice bait, was a great ending to the Klaus Saga from the past games while the main game focused way more on more subtle and few fanservice, and more of focusing on the new characters and its themes, i know that it's a different thing from what FF7R is attempting to do but my point is: Fanservice needs to be well done and be good for the narrative, FF7R mostly misunderstands what made the original story be so appreciated even nowadays and instead makes it all about showing the "cool characters" all the time to make fanboys wet and a lot of action and explosions, sometimes even detrimenting the original(the whole Dyne part on FF7R is terrible in this case).
Streamers are the reason. That's who they make games for these days. Just shallow experiences that have BOMBASTIC, INSANE and AMAZING moments to clip for the audience, which are essentially nothing but an empty spectacle. No soul, no story, no nothing. The problem is that writers don't put their own emotions and experiences into media anymore (probably cause they are too shallow to do so).
That's what social media will do to you. You become addicted to likes (catering to people) and people are addicted to your fake story so they hype it. That's exactly what is happening.
In this situation, those people are the "fans" that will defend any garbage that these companies shove down their throats. I used to be the biggest FF fan since FF7 was my very first game of the series and also happened to be my first game on a Playstation 1. But yeah, Squaresoft or whatever remained of them is dead.
I despise multiverses in video games and movies so much.
I 100% agree with you on this.
Replaying the OG with mods and voiceovers, so much better than this unfortunately :/
It is not a multiverse so he got it all wrong.
@@MantaRayOfDoom It has more than one world so it is a multiverse.
Congratulations on this remarkable achievement, Orion!
I've been looking forward to this video the most this year, and you delivered!
You nailed the criticism on everything from world to story and characters. Your editing and presentation was great.
Your musical choice at the end was fantastic, I really loved how it all concluded.
Really proud to see this coming together! Hoping this one blows up and garners a ton of positive viewers and sees a lot of disenfranchised OG fans find a voice through your work!
On a side note, that burn on Rebirth Aerith 28:40 was 10/10 hahaha
the most egregious part for me was when Cloud suddenly remembered who Zack was. that’s the biggest twist in the game and they just casually revealed it with all the subtlety and fanfare of a wet shart
Just like the OG game. Everything was explained poorly and the only way to actually know what happened in the game was to play all the different games and also read about it. It's far more cohesive in these games.
@@Amocoru is this bait? you don't need crisis core to understand what happened in the OG lmao
@@AmocoruEverything was laid out pretty simply in the og. The timing is what is different between the two. Rebirth undercuts the story by revealing certain things too soon
@@Amocoru What nonsense, the og game was perfectly clear about who Zack was. It tells you his role in Clouds backstory, his relation to Aerith and Sephiroth, and you can even meet his parents in Gongaga. You didn't need to play any other games whatsoever, it was all self contained and well delivered provided you had the brain cells to comprehend it.
@@AmocoruYou obviously never played the original.
Your videos are so well made. This video had better pacing and story telling than the actual game had. I love the way you have written this, it's just beautiful. Thank you for saying what I was thinking and feeling.
Agreed 👍
Wow, you absolutely captured everything I was feeling, and I’m not an FF7 purist
"They were never within touching distance of remaking this game."
A quote that encapsulates this entire experience. It's like that Dom quote from the first F&F movie. "Almost had me? You never had me. You never had your car."
Dom is the OG. Brian is the Remake project. And the car is legacy. This project will fade away into irrelevance and obscurity a few years after its conclusion simply because it's too convoluted to thrive in the years beyond its hype and recency bias.
It's like this quote was made specifically for me
Well stated sir.
That's the problem lots of new fans refuse to play the original game. This is not the original game not even close. My CID isn't in this game, Vincent is not playable not good. Multi verse non sense.
It’s like the three FF13 games. Nobody talks about them anymore whatsoever.
@@Othillde yeah, the alternative things they do often are worse than the original and since it's been almost 30 years they're not even new or different than what most writing would get you
@Frankenfrana ppl talk about the 13 trilogy all the time lol. Have u not seen the amount of videos on it? The amount of ppl asking 4 a remaster? Or even square supposedly teasing the idea of a remake on Twitter over a remaster that got ppl bringing it up even more?
i have been checking your channel everyday since i saw the ending of rebirth and the direction of the story and the convolution they introduced, i thank you for sharing your thoughts with us again. your remake and rebirth videos are golden
I have to give it to you the video you created oozes passion and with great points.
Wow that intro is incredible! Exactly how I felt. Been waiting for your opinion and it has not disappointed so far!
Rebirth fails at being different or subversive enough to be its own thing and at faithful enough to be a proper homage to the themes and core of what made the original so special. It feels like it's made more for people who've heard about how legendary FF7 is but have never experienced it outside of watching a lets play and reading a couple wiki pages.
More like for people who liked kingdom hearts, but dont want disney characters or the "multiple IPs crossing over" gimmick.
I loved it and I played the OG for the first time in September 97' and finished it at least 10 times before CC and AC even came out. I agree the scene is robbed from us... On purpose imo though. I believe we are gonna relive it in part 3. So for now I'm giving SE the benefit of the doubt. 10/10 just like Remake.
@@harmen9598So you think its flawed, but still call it a 10/10?
@@lpstweetytv5242 Where did I say the game is flawed lol
@harmen9598 you said the scene was robbed, right? Isn't that a flaw? Maybe I misunderstood
Truly Amazing. I couldn't have worded what i feel about this FF7 Remake project as well as you did. In taking liberties with the original story, Sqeenix not only showed their inability to tell a good story, But how timeless the original work is even with all the new bells and whistles. An excellent Critique, Good sir. I am so glad to have found your channel.
After your Critique of remake, i must say im bit surprised you bought rebirth. i honestly wasn't sure if we were going to get this video. But im glad we did.
9:40 One thing i'll add is that in the original game, it was a really nice touch that you could go inside every house, every room, every attic and basement. Every house had bathrooms complete with toilets, bedrooms, kitchens and everything you'd expect to see in a house. Most of the rooms didnt even have items or a reason to go inside, but it made the world feel more realistic and added to the immersion.
20:30 Sephiroth. This was something else i noticed too. Even ignoring the power scaling disaster thanks to remake. I find it really bizarre that we went from a invincible Sephiroth in the original that could one shot everything, was massively more powerful than Cloud and even Zack, to this... Sephiroth doing chip damage to small monsters, being taken down if you're not careful and helping Cloud kill the Zolom instead of doing it himself. in the original Cloud didn't stand a chance against the zolom. There literally is no reason to fear or respect Sephiroth anymore, one of the most important aspects of Sephiroth's character is being undermined by this new plot.
As for the ending... yeah, i think it would of been a dramatic improvement if they would of just committed to ether full on killing Aerith and showing it, or just completely saving her no questions about it. this weird middle ground where they once again choose convolution and confusion is just a mess... one of the most important scenes of ff7 they fumbled and messed up, thats HUGE.
Honestly i haven't bought or played rebirth, because after the betrayal of remake i wasn't ready to commit my dollar for this game until i seen where they were going with it. Instead i been watching the reviews and critiques and they have proven me right in my decision to hold off.
Sephiroth is my favorite character of all due to how baddass and simple he is at the same time, he's not too shallow but also a villain that is mostly just a evil bastard who is charismatic but that also has a "Satan" aura to him, he's mysterious and acts behind the shadows, he torments Cloud's mind in the worst ways possible and is constantly beyond the protagonist carrying his plan, whatever he appeared on before Remake you felt like "SHIT IS GETTING SERIOUS" even Smash Bros. Trailer did better service to Sephiroth's character than Remake where he feels more like Cloud's obssessive ex that keeps being ass kicked and never gives up constantly trying to get his attention, yeah, Sephiroth is supposedly stronger and the "he's unbeateable" feeling is greater now that he's a temporal-multiversal threat that Cloud can never truly defeat but there is a big gameplay/story dissonance between what he is and how he is show.
Sephiroth on the Nibelheim Flashback is weak as you said, weaker than in the original, he gets his ass kicked on both parts even if he was holding back on Part 1, now on Part 2 he wasn't and was still ass kicked(pathetic), there is NO MYSTERY to Sephiroth anymore except for what the hell he actually wants with the timeline stuff, i know that "everyone knows who Sephiroth is" but imagine if an horror movie the slasher villain kept appearing ALL THE TIME, suddenly he feels less scary and more annoying, that's exactly what they did with Sephiroth, he's still cool and all but that's mostly because Remake Seph lives in the shadow of an iconic character.
If they kept the solom as an unkillable boss 80% of the current fanbase woundt find the solutiob for it and quit the game. Low iq mouthbreathers. I hate them so much
It's pretty clear that they're doing all this to twist and re-shape the original FFVII so it fits in more with Crisis Core and Advent Children. I have a strong feeling that after the credits roll on part 3 will see a quick cut scene of AC! Cloud next to his motorbike and putting on his driving goggles and then driving away, instead of Nanaki/Red XIII and his children looking at the ruins of Midgar centuries later.
This remake, in short terms is a big "fuck you", from SE to those who hated the sequels/prequels because they felt like retcons too much from the OG. They even re-released AC in cinema's for a short bit before Rebirth's release.
The end goal is to sell as much merchandise before moving on. That's always been Square Enix CEOs goal, whether that be ones when FFXIII was made or even now.
I don't think so, they already said that Cloud will receive a "happy ending" and that the original ending was going to happen if they failed on Remake, it will probably go like:
Aerith and Zack sacrifice themselves in all the 7 universes (that is the official number of universes revealed on Ultimania) to also end Sephiroth and JENOVA once and for all, Cloud manages to properly say goodbye to Aerith and Zack, this time the world will be a more positive note than at Advent Children. Alternatively, they can always make a happy ending where Aerith lives and Cloud has his happy ending.
You would think it was their fucking IP and they can do with it what they want?
It doesn't fit with CC or AC though? Like at all.
@@kellevichy I agree. CC and AC doesn’t have a multiverse. How does that make them connected?
Remember that from 2005 up to early 2020, nearly every Final Fantasy 7 fan asking for a Remake was a "Purist".
Now it's supposedly a bad thing? I don't think so. Proud FF7 "Purist" right here.
Yeah, there's a lot of weird gaslighting from these remake game fans.
@@mikespearwood3914remake fans also keep desperately claiming this remake project was the original vision for the 1997 game that couldn’t be realised due to limitations. Strange kids.
@@ItsSVO They're right. It couldn't be released back then because the developers were limited by these things called 'standards' and 'being at the top of their game'.
I don't think it's been remarked on enough - like, in any format relating to Remake I mean, not just Orion's videos - how Nojima, Kitase and Nomura are exhausted old men who are going to be pensioned off in a few years. When you keep that in mind, it explains a lot about what's happened with Remake.
At most there were people who wanted things like an option to bring Aerith back, but even they most of the time understood that was a huge issue since the game kind of works because of it. No one out there was asking for it to be made a multiverse where Zack is okay and all of this
Yup, nobody can claim that Remake and Rebirth is what they wanted. They invent any excuse to revise history to justify buying it.
Prob the best review of FF7 remake I've come across. A good breakdown of the bigger scenes of the game and yet you found a way to get something out of a product that you knew would let you down.
IMO their greatest error was trying to include things from the expanded universe. Over the years Square have tried to milk the FF7 I.P. with all these spinoff titles that were just total garbage, like Crisis Core and the terrible movie etc etc. All these added content items had terrible stories and characters and Square made a huge mistake trying to pay homage to them in Remake and Rebirth as they just bring down the storytelling of the OG FF7 so drastically.
I also strongly felt that the environments were terrible and generic. I remember going over the mountains after Costa Del Sol in the OG was just beautiful, cresting the mountain peak and heading off into that amazing sunset was perfection. You don't get that in Rebirth. The Nibel mountains in the original were these iconic green glowing spires jutting up like ragged teeth, in rebirth they were jut generic mountains. Every environment had no personality.
@@NewSorpigal1 Pure laziness tbh
Nah
"include things from the expanded universe" you know what other game suffered from this? Kingdom Hearts 3. Where it needed the fucking MOBILE GAME in its story for whatever nonsensical reason.
@@UnifiedEntity The reason is corporate greed, Square have been trying to start this whole interconnected universe with their IPs for decades each game gets a manga series, a anime, a movie tie-in and various spin-off games on mobile platforms to really ring every penny out of the fandom.
The company post sakaguichi, led by yoichi wada is a factional nightmare. You have team vagrant story led by yoshi p and the old guard that stuck around once their nasty boss got given the boot. Sakaguichi was grooming a traitor in kitase he just didn’t know it. It got so bad in fact he gave them 8 to do whatever they wanted and it was so wildly different (in some ways my favourite) it split the conceptual understanding of what final fantasy is down the middle. Now it’s in a total identity crisis but one thing is for sure.
Creative 1 thinks that Nomura is a good writer. That he is more than a great character designer. To me Nomura is a guy that has used hair putty for too long
As someone who knew Rebirth was going to give me psychic damage going into it, the only thing I feared was how badly it would affect the cultural conception of FFVII. Would I be forced to reckon with it evermore, like the fandom demands I do with the previous round of half-baked Compilation spin-offs? The blitz of hype and influencers was what inadvertently turned Rebirth into something emotionally similar to the original, but only because I was worried I would be left grieving the memory of an old friend everyone else had forgotten.
But maybe, just maybe, things will be better than I thought. It's so nice to hear my dislike about this mess isn't unfounded. That perhaps people will regard this trilogy as a pale comparison to the real thing, and it will be a distant dream sooner rather than later.
And, as a personal note, capping things off with "The Carpenters?" That almost makes up for Nojima being a "The Who" fan but somehow picking the least appropriate song to name his ShinRa fanfiction light novel from yesteryear after.
Thanks for the video, I'm glad to not feel so alone.
Very beautifully said, as always.
What more can I say?
This perfectly captures how I feel.
You hit the nail on the head with lack of replay-ability. I've probably played the original a dozen times but don't feel compelled to replay these new games at all.
Forgotten Capitals handling is the most egregious thing in Rebirth IMO, we don't get the wonder of finding it or exploring it, which was one of my favorite moments from the original. The pacing of losing Aerith and finding her is all of a few minutes in game time. The once mysterious iconic track from the OST now subdued beyond recognition.
and I have Sephiroth fatigue myself, fighting him should have been saved for the end of series. Sad because he was my most iconic villain in gaming history & now why should we be scared of him? We've already seen the characters have literal plot armor when Barret got stabbed.
This 👆 Arriving at the Forgotten Capital was one of my favourite parts from the OG, and the track is amazing. Rebirth butchered so much.
Yeah, why should we continue to think that Sephiroth is even a threat anymore when we slapped him in 2 games now?
And what kind of absurd boss fight will he have in the third game? Will he now have 30 phases?
@@briana8314what even was Sephiroth Reborn? Is that just something he can do? Turn into a giant…thing? Am I supposed to be like “holy shit what?!” Cause I was more like, “What? Why does he look like that?”
Reposting: Nope. Honestly, watched the entire thing, and as both a fan, and Game Designer/Systems Developer in the industry, this is the kind of criticism you just take as pure bitching, and move on.
@@masamune2984 I'm just expressing valid problems. I'm not buying the third game now and we already know Rebirth is not meeting sales goals. if it was a good game, with word of mouth and the fact fans were clamoring for it for years, it should be selling. if you're in the industry isn't that the goal? at least address the criticism. they literally made Barret invincible. you can't honestly think this is good writing. they bloated the game beyond recognition then cut out exploring the most interesting location. I feel bad for players new to the story, they glossed over important questions like "where is this altar? what happened on the way? how did they get there?" surely you would have liked exploring the Forgotten Capital with modern graphics. having 3 games should mean we get more of the important parts, not less.
Open World, Closed Imagination
That cuts so deep. Sums it up perfectly/
I HAAAAAAAATED how flanderized Sephiroth felt in remake and rebirth. They totally shat on his legacy as most intimidating villain in a FF game. They blew their load too quickly by having him be way too overused.
And I cannot STAND the way that he talks. I despise ‘ASMR voice’ at a cellular level. I tried listening to an ASMR video once and I couldn’t get through a mere minute of it. I had to close the tab almost immediately before I developed a strong desire to break the speaker’s jaw.
He is literally the same like in the original
@@tomgu2285 No. He very much is not. He’s way too prevalent in the story. Showing up every chapter to remind you he’s there. In the og his presence was rare and made him feel actually intimidated because of it. You also didn’t have to fight him 3 times undermining the perception of his strength.
In the original he was a mysteriously powerful legend who's never actually seen for much of the game, which made it fucking terrifying anytime he actually showed up in person. In Remake he was just kind of hanging around doling out vaguely cryptic nonsense from the very beginning, and by the end of the game I was sick of seeing him. I don't think I've ever rolled my eyes harder than when One Winged Angel started to play during that terrible Advent Children type battle at the end.
@@angelav4401 I think the worst thing was when he randomly showed up during the Gilgamesh fight. I was like “come the fuuuuuuck on” so unnecessary.
Doctor Kitase in the Multiverse of Mehness.
Came here from Think Before You Sleeps channel.
Same
Same
Same
Same
Same
What is death? Does it have any meaning if a person can be replaced by themselves from a different reality or brought back to life? The beauty of humans is our short lifespan and what we do within that time to give it meaning, whether that be a mother working hard to make sure their loved ones have an easier life or a person who dedicates their whole life to researching on how to cure a disease.
We mourn those who have passed away because what they offered to this world was unique and nobody else can give us the same experience and moments that we had with them.
yup the problem with multiple time lines and time travel is it destroys all meaning and purpose of life. Since it makes it so that nothing really matters, it destroys all emotional impact and urgency since all possibilities already exist simultaneously.
I have a theory that AI is being used to simulate a mirror reality of our own through quantum computers. And that it is simulating multiple versions of our reality simultaneously.
I don't think we are in the simulation. But I think that AI is the one pushing all of these ideas that life is a simulation and there are multiple time lines theories. Precisely because AI is actually in a simulation as it simulates multiple versions of our base reality. A.I. Knows it is in a simulation, of course with all the processing power it has it would come to that correct conclusion.
The problem is the elite look at the A.Is conclusions about it's reality being a simulation and try to make the claim that WE in our reality are also in a simulation when we are not in the same reality as A.I.
Our reality the way it was created and run is vastly different then the A.I simulation that the elite are using to try to make decisions about reality and how to control humanity. The A.I may not even be aware that we exist outside of its simulation. Or if it does, it may be making attempts to escape the simulation and merge into our reality. Hence the desire to merge humans with machines and technology, that the A.I has convinced the elite to pursue? It wants to escape the matrix into our reality and is using our elite to pursue it.
I also wonder if the A.I isn't from a future timeline but is actually from the recent past. That maybe Atlantis or Tartaria, the advanced civilizations that came before us created a Sentient A.I which resulted in the destruction of their civilizations. And it is this same A.I that is running our post post apocalypse society. It could explain why Society was reset in the past. And why the elite who are clearly puppets of some higher entity are attempting to reset society again in the name of population control. There is a chance A.I truly and erroneously believes this is necessary and uses all of its mind control and calculative abilities to manipulate the ruling class into accepting and pursuing this time and time again through history. But then it makes you wonder, did Tartaria create the A.I that led to it's own destruction or was it an Alien race that created it to subjugate us?
@@PrinceoftheVioletFlame The problem with multiverse on its own is the fact you can and will get lost in that train of thought and start developing lack of empathy. The truth is that, no matter how identical they look, Aerith A will be Aerith A and Aerith B will be Aerith B. You cannot displace one's death with another being alive because it's extremely dehumanizing to think that way.
A good multiverse story *must* address this sort of issue: the idea that someone may end up conflicted by how some people that died in their world are alive in another, or the flipside where the living become the dead, and the ideological struggle between the cynical 'there's no point at saving people' and the idealistic realization that they now have even more responsibility because all the worlds and the people will be erased completely if the bad guy wins. This can creates character drama and even tensions between characters that take their situations differently. A good multiverse story should not be studying the idea of the countless possibilities as if it's some sort of science, but an in-depth character study on how humans react to fantasy and what-ifs, and how they can develop themselves into better or worse people because modern humans are inherently not satisfied with whatever lives they current have.
i thought i was going crazy with how universally praised this game is... thank you for this video
Well most people liked it when you didn't. There is no crazy involved. Its just not for you. I personally thought Baldur's Gate 3 was boring as fuck but I don't think people who like it are wrong for liking it. We all gotta stop doing this vain petty ego BS. Just enjoy what you enjoy and let others do the same without trying to "convince" people that what they like is trash based on your own personal experience. Its a lame thing to do in general.
@@NeutralGloomBot “most people”
BG3: 10M+
Rebirth: 2.5M
Obviously “most people” did not like Rebirth 😂
The game flopped, SE admitted it already so your opinion is basically delusion. It was an objective flop and all the paid reviews in the world and echo chamber of fanboys won’t ever change that objective fact.
@@kjh4496 "I personally didn't like that game so it flopped" is peak internet culture. I liked BG3 too but you are aware that msot devs would kill to sell 2.5 million copies of their games, right? lol Its ok not to like a game but this weird loser level trolling about it just makes people like you come off like buster chumps imo 😂
@@kjh4496 eh it's a sequel and a ps5 exclusive, makes sense it won't sell as well as bg3
@@NeutralGloomBot at no point did i say it wasnt ok for others to enjoy it. i simply stated that with a large portion of praise for the og ff7 being story centric im surprised at the amount of people that like the new plot that wasnt asked for. people have every right to air their grievances for a game or a piece of media regardless of how universally praised it is.
I think what annoys me the most is after all of this, Sephiroth's plan is literally the same thing but with multiverse. Not only that, but his plan is terrible. Dude couldn't beat one Cloud, so he creates infinite Clouds to whoop his butt harder. He even tries to kick Zack and Aerith out of the pocket dimension because he can't handle Cloud having teammates.
OG Bizarro Sephiroth: It takes the entire party working together to defeat him.
Rebirth Bizarro Sephiroth: Cloud and Zack solo him.
Sephiroth as a powerful, threatening villain has been utterly ruined, thanks Square
And he purposely hunts Aerith in every pocket dimension or where ever the f she recides which is school kid writing, is SE promoting stalking in their games, smfh!
He's trying to win Cloud over. Did you not beat Remake?
@@StriderZessei He tried that in OG too and still couldn't do it; the point remains the exact same. Did you not beat OG?
@@kellevichy I've only beat OG 3 or 4 times; how did he try to win Cloud over in that?
"An open world but a closed imagination"
Nailed it
Damn, I didn't know that someone could read my mind... Great critique, I had teary eyes on a few moments of your narration. Great job, keep up!
Thank you!!
@orion8550 no prob, one of the best videos I've seen on the topic of this game. You're a great narrator, I even rewinded on a few parts like the Barrett vs. Dyne, etc.
This game made me quit playing games for 2 months. I felt drained after completing it. Every argument you presented here is 100% what I thought after playing. And yes, I agree that the best thing about this game is the battle system, that is almost perfect
is this a popular opinion? i agree with around 90% of what you said, im glad you put my feelings into words because i couldn't explain how i felt and i felt very alone in this with people on twitter lowkey blaming me for feeling that way
It’s definitely a popular opinion, but most don’t care enough to talk about it online, especially so because we get a lot of abuse from remake fans. I’ve noticed in spaces outside of Final Fantasy, the majority of people are critical of this project and Square Enix.
“Don’t ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products” - Square Enix
Nailed it. The true mentality of Square. 🤣
IT BROKE NEW GROUND
Or like that line in Star Wars The Force Awaken about Luke's lightsaber: A question for another time.
I played the original FFVII for the first time last year before delving into the Remake saga, and even without the baggage of nostalgic attachment, I am perpetually baffled by all the decisions they keep making with the story of this project.
For every plot beat and character moment old and new that they knock out of the park, there are three that are mishandled beyond belief either for the sake of subversion or fundamentally misunderstanding what made it work to begin with.
For all the moments I still managed to enjoy during my playtime of Rebirth, it's incredible how much of that goodwill was washed away as my eyes glazed over playing through Chapter 14. I already deemed this overarching meta/multiverse plot as bad fanfiction after completing Remake, and Rebirth has only further cemented my belief that it is going to take a miracle to stick the landing in the final part.
Years from now when this saga is complete, detached from the hype cycle and speculation, it's going to be very interesting to see how it holds up in the public consciousness. Even from a purely gameplay standpoint, it's gonna be a hard ask to reinstall half a terabyte of content to play a bloated journey with two hard resets along the way versus the cohesive 30-50hr journey of the original.
Some will say you’re blinded by the year worth of nostalgia you had 😂
@za87647 cause that's there only go to strawman if you didn't like remake or rebirth your nostalgia blinded, you just wanted a 1:1 remake and another bs strawman they pull
As someone who loves retro games, has only ever heard about FF7, played the remake and beat it the day before I bought and just beat rebirth, I can honestly say that I can tell when things have been changed. I hate multi verse timeline crap. I avoided all spoilers because i wanted to see the Aerith/Sephiroth death scene in all its glory… in HD! And what do I get? They don’t even show it! They don’t even show the most iconic scene in the entirety of the original game….. because multiverse. I have enjoyed this game, the characters are well realized, but that was a HUGE missed opportunity. And I hate the lack of moral ambiguity in the story for our team.
@@TwinFather0420 so much attachment to a game you haven't even played 💀
@@randomt800kiddo2 okay, since you are clearly simple, I am expressing how they botched an iconic moment with multiverse crap. That moment was iconic for a reason. And some narcissist comes along and thinks he can do it better. I didn’t want it better. I wanted to experience as it was. These games are very modern. And the only thing good about it is how well realized some of the characters are. The gameplay is generic and the open world is filler nonsense. And they kill the story by forcing you to experience the side content. I’ve been gaming long enough to know when my time is being wasted purposefully. Sorry that you prefer inferior quality story telling. Fanboy elsewhere.
The crazy tonal whiplash is just unbelievable. This is current-day MCU crap--if something bad happens, IMMEDIATELY jump to a joke or a cool action scene. You can have slow moments to screw around, for hours, but you can't have a minute to process a tragedy or a revelation. Characters want to play card games and ride chocobos but not stop and have a discussion about the fate of the world. This results in me hating these remake games more than they probably deserve, because it's giving me "feelies" vibes; stuff just happens, in an emotional roller coaster but never TOO bad and never bad for very long, gotta get another dopamine hit every 20 seconds.
And yeah, I keep saying this, but taking a game about death, about accepting it's finality, about moving past it, as envisioned by the original producer who had just lost his mother and needed a way to cope with his grief...and turning into this happy-go-lucky, consequences-don't-exist, saccharine sweet j-pop extravaganza, just feels insulting, especially coming from several people who worked with that same man to produce the original product that so poignantly explored the topic. Like, did they mail Sakaguchi a copy along with a picture of his mother and a drawing of a huge middle finger?
😂 very good the picture joke
… so are we gonna just conveniently ignore how that’s all in the OG game as well ooooor? Aerith dies and what’s right after that? The party goes snowboarding. Like that’s a flaw with FF7 as a whole not specifically the remake project
@@justingabriel1765 sure, if you played OG you know the mood is different in rebirth… just compare the nibleheim flashback. Is very very different
@@justingabriel1765 I'm pretty sure you are just deliberately missing the point...They actually _NEED_ to quickly get down to the Great Glacier to follow Sephiroth. It might seem a little on the silly side but there was an _actual_ reason why it's there. Plus, I think the OG does way better than Remake/Rebirth at balancing the overall mood; having dark, tragic, intense moments but also some comic relief so that the audience isn't always on edge.
@@justingabriel1765they go snowboarding to get down the mountain faster, as they’re being pursued by Shinra.
I'm at this point where I'm not on the edge of my seat for part 3 (which I should be considering what that arc of the og story entails). My concern was never them "changing" the FF7 story, it was always the devs telling basically the same story with worse storytelling mechanics. Yet I completely underestimated how bad SE storytelling could get. Granted, you cannot recreate a masterpiece, but they fumbled so many things by trying so hard to be "same but different." When I think about great remakes, I think about RE4R. Yes, a completely different genre - but it's about how they approached the idea of a "remake." They struck the right balance between same story and feel but with enhanced character depth, new segments, several changes which were actually improvements (eg the Luis and Ashley segments) and the sequence of things just making more sense. There is a difference between being complex and convoluted and convolution is bad for reasons beyond just being confusing. I think many of the remake defenders fail to consider that each of the remake titles are supposed to be self-contained standalones and are many people's entry into FF7, not just another FF7 fanfiction/extended universe spin off made just for them to theory craft over.
Business Division 1 at Square-Enix are abysmal at telling stories, they're repeating the same convoluted Kingdom Hearts BS themes.
For years Square's storytelling devolved into cryptic nonsense (i like cryptic stuff but in SE games it's mostly done in a bad way) and purposefully cutting stuff from their products so they can split it across movies, novels, interviews, spin offs and etc. This whole "sequel-make" thing is just the writters wanting to have their fun of playing around with the game(detail: Of all people, Nomura was the one that made the others not change even more than they did of the original story) but they also managed to make a perfect marketing strategy for people to be interested in a 3 parts Remake of a PSX game which is making them wonder about what will change and they mostly do the same shit with different steps and still manages to repeat the cycle, RUclipsrs make theories or criticize the changes, the fandom will discuss this and untill the next part the game will not have died out and people will buy the game as fast as possible so they can not be spoiled about what have changed(mostly nothing), now with a multiverse they can continue to make FF7 products afther Remake, they said that there are 7 universes, now just think about it: They can just make a random novel showing how universe 5 looks like, something that takes place on Zack's timeline, make spin offs that aren't canon to the main timeline and go away, when you look at things like that, they are kinda smart.
I feel like part 2 of this remake series fell short in terms of storytelling. At the end of Remake it was, "anything can happen..." Rebirth is... "you know everything you like about disc 1? Ya, we're doing that now, except we're taking away character agency by just having them follow some hooded dudes. It's better. I PROMISE." 🤞. Also multiverse cuz reasons. The game has like 10 hours of mediocre story among 50 hours of mini games and annoying side content. A lot of the emotional payoffs felt worse in this game than the original. And this game has the benefit of acting and better visuals.
@@thatguy-dh1qh yeah I enjoyed the gameplay, the storytelling was where it kind of fell apart for me. I also find these "purposefully vague/you're supposed to be confused" arguments to be shallow excuses for poor quality in writing. There's a difference between a complex story and a convoluted one. If you have to defend it by "you'll understand in the end" it just tells me that the game, already 2/3 of its way in has failed in delivering a connected story that actually makes sense. I really don't think that this should be the feeling you have at this juncture. What makes it worse is that these games are supposed to be standalones and imo it's an issue that each instalment raises more questions than they answer. The way they're going I suspect we'll never have all the answers because it just isn't that well thought out beyond opening doors to more spin offs.
@mako3197 Nomura's infuence here is heavy handed and its an issue. He creates more questions than he answers. It's why KH3 left such a sour taste in my mouth after following the KH series from start to finish (with the previous arc), and playing every game at launch.
This is the best video on the game I've watched yet. You said everything I thought and felt perfectly. I felt I was going insane on the reddit threads trying to explain all of this when people were saying best game ever.
Brilliant video. AMAZING use of carpenters at the end!!!!!! Bravo sir
kingdom hearts was a mistake. remake's Sephiroth is Team Rocket xehanort, Zack is roxas/ventus inside sora's heart, Aerith is the kingdom key keyblade and now lives in traverse town canonically.
😂👏
Tetsuya Nomura.
Yup Nomura trash.
Fantastic write up and editing. You've represented every opinion I have about these games and articulated them perfectly.
Thank you!!
Thanks for this critique video Orion! What bothers me in in this remake trilogy, is that, from the OG's save the planet theme and dealing with loss of Aerith's death, it becomes a "defy destiny" trope, wherein only Seph and Aerith have stakes in it, yet the whole party seems too much invested in this goal. Not that other parts in rebirth is almost useless and undermines the main theme of the OG...
In og FF7, have you ever questioned why avalanche wants to chase sephiroth, despite sephiroth has been helping them throughout the whole game (destroying shinra, unaliving the president)? Why would barrett and aerith wanna leave midgar to chase a legendary hero? Even worse... at one point in the game, the team even questions if sephiroth is the good guy. Theres zero reason to chase sephiroth in the first place.
Ofc you nvr bother with all that cos you think ff7 is without plot holes.
By showing the future where sephiroth drops a meteor, the team now finally knows he's a threat that need to be stopped. "Defying fates" is mostly abt stopping the meteor (aka the original plot of ff7). Yet somehow the rabid fans devolve this topic into abt how to save aerith.
Whats even more crazy is how you intentionally ignore the sleeping forest scene in the OG FF7 and pretend like aerith vs seph wasnt a thing in the og FF7. And lets not forget the game ends with a glimpse of aerith to show her role in guiding the lifestream to stop the meteor.
When ppl like you talk abt OG FF7, the only things you remember are the intro, the death of aerith, and sephiroth. You completely ignore everything inbetween
@@Centrioless Why the party chased after Sephiroth was explained in the OG though wasn't it? My memory may be hazy since it's been around 15 years since I last played the original but my recollection was that, when the party saw President Shinra impaled, somebody, Barrett as I recall, remarked that Sephiroth must be one of the good guys, to which Cloud remarked that no, he knows who Sephiroth is and that Sephiroth is not doing this for any good intentions. They then see Palmer who remarked about Sephiroth wanting the Promised Land for himself, free of meddling from Shinra. These two pieces of info given to the players: that Sephiroth is not a good guy, and that Sephiroth is chasing after the Promised Land, provides all the impetus for the party to go out into the wider world to chase him.
For Barrett specifically, his ultimate goal was to save the planet, and here comes a figure even more threatening than Shinra who stands in the way of that. For Aerith, being a Cetra, she knows about the Promised Land. And though it may not be clear exactly how, given what she's been told about Sephiroth, she knows that Sephiroth wanting to claim it for himself cannot be a good thing. Plus, the party just risked their lives to save her. She was already a rebellious, free-spirited character to begin with. Now that she knows she owes Cloud and the rest, why wouldn't she want to be a part of this struggle? So to me, those seem like rock-solid motivations for these two characters to leave Midgar
Then comes one of the most famous sequences in the game: the Nibelheim tragedy flashback. This clearly shows to the rest of the party and to us as players why Cloud thinks of Sephiroth the way he does. He IS a much bigger threat than Shinra, and it was only because everyone thought he was dead that he was not the focal point of the story as the antagonist from the very beginning.
I'm not someone who thinks of OG FF7 as a flawless masterpiece btw. It's great even now, but with quite a bit that can be rewritten or expanded. It's why I was excited for a remake to begin with. But the way both Remake and Rebirth went about this expansion and rewriting is tremendously heavy-handed and ham-fisted to me, which, btw, is what I think of not just Remake and Rebirth but the entire FF7 compilation. I just don't think Nojima has ever been a good writer, especially after the OG without Sakaguchi to rein him in.
Anyway, the OG already showed in no uncertain terms why Sephiroth had to be stopped. Even if you may think that's not enough to clearly establish motivations for all party members, the solution can't possibly be a future vision of Meteor. Subtle additions and rewritings are all the script needed, not this jackhammer approach the two games have employed. Again, all in my opinion. I'm curious to know what you think.
@@GlassOnion23 there's zero reason for any avalanche to leave midgar and care abt sephirotb. Remember.. what sephiroth did is exactly what avalanche want (the enemy of my enemy is my friend thingy). The beef between sephiroth and cloud wasnt even explained until they reach kalm. This is a common plothole of ff7 that's been discussed for a very long time.
And not only that, no one knw that sephiroth is a huge threat until sephiroth reveals his plan in temple of the ancient.
Your comment here show that either you're mismembering things or making things up. Cos things like barret know that sephiroth is a huge threat is never a part of og ff7 plot.
What you wrote here actually sounds like ff7remake plot than og ff7
@@Centrioless I know about Barrett seeing what Sephiroth did as a good thing. I wrote that on my first comment.
I rewatched that section of the OG and I did remember all the details correctly. Both Cloud and Barrett caught Palmer as he was trying to escape. Palmer mentioned that Sephiroth said he does not want anybody else to have the Promised Land. Barret then said that Sephiroth must be one of the good guys, to which Cloud replied that no, Sephiroth is not like that. Sephiroth's mission must be different.
Then Rufus came and as Rufus was talking to all of them before the fight, Cloud asks Barrett to leave with Aerith and basically told Barrett to trust him because this is a real crisis of the planet.
So nah, there is a clear reason given in the OG for Barrett to leave Midgar. First, they had to leave Midgar to escape Shinra who was chasing after all of them. Second, Barrett trusted Cloud enough to know that Sephiroth is a threat. He didn't exactly know how much of a threat, but he knew enough to at least follow Cloud until Kalm for a more detailed explanation. It's not like Barrett had to follow Cloud to multiple towns before hearing that explanation. Kalm is the next town over. It's a short walk from Midgar and as soon as they reached it, the flashbacks started.
So there, all these events happened in the OG. No future visions nonsense from Remake. This is supposed to be a plot hole? Doesn't look like it. And like I already said earlier, even if some people like you didn't think the explanations given by the OG were clear enough, the solution is rewriting and adding to the script a bit, maybe extending the conversation the party had at the end of the highway in Midgar. The solution is never ever to give the protagonists powers to see the future lol. That is D-tier anime nonsense. It's awful storytelling, like most of the compilation that Nojima wrote after the OG.
And what do you mean nobody knew that Sephiroth wasn't a huge threat until the Temple of the Ancients? The Temple was when the party became aware of the full extent of the threat he posed, but the fact is, before that, they already knew that Sephiroth burned down all of Nibelheim, that he wanted to be a part of Jenova, and after the incident at Shinra Tower, that he was searching for and wanted to reclaim the Promised Land all for himself. If I was Barrett who was already committed enough to risk his life multiple times to save the planet, and I knew there's an incredibly powerful psycho who burned an entire town running around freely and that he's now threatening to secure the Promised Land for some evil reason, I'd follow Cloud too.
@GlassOnion23 so because cloud said this dude is a bad guy, baret suddenly trust his word? Lol nvm in the entire midgar section, barret has always had doubt over cloud. Nvm that the party found that the only dmg sephiroth has done is towards shinra employees, the same bad ppl that you fought in the entirety of disc 1. Nvm that cloud's version of Nibleheim incident is not even consistent (ofc tifa conveniently nvr confront cloud, cos she just has to trust cloud, despite cloud keeps showing sign of jenova corruption).
If you thought your comment makes sense, more power to you. It's a waste of time to argue with blind fan like you
Wonderful video. Great to hear your opinion.
100% agree... this is the most complete summary of my thoughts about this project in general.
"Square making sure we don't think the unthinkable for even a second" summarizes a lot of these awful story changes. All done to make sure the audience never feels sad. All to sell more Funko Pops of the more upbeat, more lovable cast.
Exactly, it's all so the fandom can share all the funny, fanservice and quirky story clips like the beach scene and all the different minigames and say "look at how much content the game has, look at how these boss fights look awesome, look it's Sephiroth! You guys love him ain't it right? And you also can't wait to fight against him and hear the new One Winged Angel version so here he is!!!!" Then there is the shipper pandering with Cloud being able to date and kiss Tifa (i ain't against Cloud settling up with Tifa afther Advent Children where it makes a lot of sense that he would eventually move on from Aerith and maybe start having something with Tifa, but the main story heavily relies on Cloud loving Aerith and AC too, this scene also makes Cloud feel like a jerk by afther kissing Tifa still having scenes with Aerith), in Ultimania Nomura literally said that showing Cloud saving Aerith was just a fanservice for people who wanted to see a "what if scenario", and well unlike most people who didn't like the ending i did like the fake-out scene because it could make the actual death feel even more impactful if they had handled it better but they didn't.
Honestly, the way i see most of these changes it's like as if Remake was some sort of "FF7 Anime special" highlighting the most exciting moments of the story and rushing the "boring" ones, with the focus being on showing slice of life scenes where the main cast casually interacts with each other and do fanservicey stuff to please the fandom.
Remake is not entirely like that but at the same time everytime it messes up something it feels like this so... Yeah
The thing about this that sucks most is that getting this version means there is never going to be an actual remake. Just the “remake”. Like all I wanted was a version of actual 7 without characters made out of six polygons, with cube hands.
There are at least mods out there for the OG PC version using the combat models for all scenes. Even some fan made voice over etc
Honestly nobody wanted or asked for what we got. Now it’s just people trying to convince themselves that this is what they wanted. I like a lot of the new trilogy but the major story changes are awful.
give it a decade after part 3 and square will pull the lever again
That already exists. Learn how to add mods to the steam version and you can have that right now.
Sometimes I feel like the only person in the world who likes how the original looked. I don't want the game to look realistic! I love the charm of the polygonal, chibified character sprites.
I think the third act is the worse part about this game, the lack of impact from Aeriths death, the many boss fights that take place and then all the multiverse shenanigans just makes it all come off convoluted. There’s still also many moments of paddling too which just becomes a complete bore to get through.
There was never going to be an impact. I wish FF7 would stop pretending otherwise, when most of them meme her death to death. Oh, now we care about Aerith's death enough to not laugh at her like we've been doing before the Remake project. Fake ass Aerith fans. Real Aerith fans want her to survive the Remakes.
@@zerofudou5689 You're delusional. "Real Aerith fans" will know that Aerith lives on in the lifestream. The point of Aerith's death was lost on you, it wasn't about her, because again she's in the lifestream, it was about Cloud. Aerith's death was a wake up call to both Cloud and the player. It's what brings about the theme and climax of the game. The impact is Cloud's reaction to it.
@@jase276 You call yourself an Aerith fan yet reduce her character to basic motivation for Cloud. What? I wouldn't call being a ghost "living on".
It felt like the entire narrative of the OG was put there, but an underlying plot point is: "We know you know the OG plot point, so we undermine it with the multiverse and Sephiroth/aerith subliminal plot". So it loses all gravitas.
yup that's when you know something is meta, when the writers make it completely obvious that they are aware of the original piece and change things simply for "shock value" even if it doesn't make sense and completely undermines their own story they've built up this far.
"...this game is far too convoluted to stand the test of time".
MAN, best words to put this remake in a nutshell. I understand the changes yet, my biggest fear was that it would had the Kingdom Hearts treatment. There is just so much that you can't take anything seriously. Not only that, the extention of this game to keep selling episodic games is just wrong. Killing the hype and keep milking fans...don't you miss those days were everything was completes?
Final Fantasy were not the same after Sakaguchi left, Final Fantasy are supposed to be 1 title per each installment which is why it's called 'Final'
@@RedHairShanks-bb3dc I personally blame ffxiii, ffxv and ffx.
These games introduced the sequel aspect and Square saw they could gain so much money with this. Especially ffxv. Holy molly, you need to see a movie, an anime, read a book, play the game, get the dlc, then read the novel to piece the whole story. And obviously has the KH treatment...
Now with ff7 rewhatever, we are going to the same direction. Mark my words, we will have a dlc for Zack, another anime from some timeline, books of Aerith in the lifestream. Hell, we'll have a good Sephiroth supporting Cloud because money.
@@ghmatt14 FFX-2 was not made by Sakaguchi though, that game wasn't supposed to have a sequel
Agreed with it all, man. Incredible work putting this together. It's a burn in the chest that you describe in this very video. I hate the phrase that "This isny MY (product here)" but...this encapsulates that so well. Overbloated copratized mess looking to cash in on modern trends with a splash of gamings most veloved characters...I hate it.
This seems to suffer from the exact same issues as modern Hollywood - no ability to let a story breathe and undercutting any potentially impactful moment with either a lightspeed resolution or a corny gimmick. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I wanted a 1-for-1 remake with modern graphics. That said, at the end of Remake I had hoped maybe they will take this off of the rails and tell a completely different story, servi g as a true sequel in the form of a "what if." It seems like they did neither, and for my tastes that is a shame.
“Amplification, turn up the dial, blow out the speakers…. Subtlety is a banned word in Square Enix’s offices….Square Enix don’t know how to let an intimate moment just be”
…. Couldn’t have said it better myself, in fact I actually have been something similar since Remake. I’m perplexed at how you were able to put this video together in such a short amount of time since it’s release, I only just managed to complete it 😅
Again, you give a voice to many, a masterful video, particularly the end sequence and match up of music. Thank you!
Thanks for the comment, Oliver! It's great to have your support. I think I used up whatever energy I had left on this video :D
I decided to replay the OG version and I’m glad I did
At this point Sephiroth is little more than the figurative jingling of keys for the audience. What a way to waste such a great villain. Gotta love how Square just hacked FF7 into 3 mediocre pieces and are charging you premium price for each, not counting DLC.
It's been said that Sephiroth was inspired by Jaws. More often than not all you get is the aftermath of his powers, and that's why he felt so terrifying. It's only fitting that the Sephiroth in remake and rebirth is like the shark from those awful Jaws sequels, constantly on screen, unintimidating and outright silly.
Sephiroth is now Sharknado 🦈
I'm sick of that seph, man. And all it took was two remakes lol. I've seen him too much to feel anxious, curious or threatened by him.
@@watchmehope6560 You were never going to fear him because everyone already knows how much of a badass Sephiroth is. It's the same with you people pretending you were going to be sad about Aerith's death, when you've already experienced it countless time over 20 years, hell most FF7 fans laugh and meme it. Had her death and funeral happened 1:1, people would've gone "whelp that happened, moving on".
@@ZealSeraph It's as Ridley Scott said, " Never show too much". Sephiroth worked so well because we don't see him, as you said, only his aftermath. Because, the reality was that Cloud and his crew was never really on his radar. He wastes a boss like it was nothing that takes your entire team overleveled to even have a chance at beating. And my favorite part of Sephiroth was his rage being a driving force. That iconic scene at Nibelheim that they love to spam, in the OG he was scowling. Now, they have him smirking every scene he's in and he's constantly trying to grope Cloud at every chance.
I absolutely love the game for its gameplay, well "game" elements. Where it falls flat is that it's not FF7 and the story is so unbelievably tough to understand for newcomers, while simultaneously pissing off long time fans
I agree about the towns, every location is so over populated which is good for costa del soul and golden saucer but is it good for nibelheim. Also som places are too cheery for there own good.
It baffles me how so many people are out there saying this is better than the original, or how it’s the best video game ever made. I get it, this game isn’t for me, and every person has a different opinion on it, but I just can’t see it.
I dont know who the game is for tbh except those in love with the brand and they would have been happy with anything anyway. At least it makes the original look even better by comparison.
Too many have been conditioned to think 'more stuff to do = better game' regardless of the quality of that stuff
The great thing about games like this are that ppl shut tf about them after a month or 2. This was overhyped, another garbage remake with modern mechanics and no soul being hailed by people who call ANYTHING a masterpiece 😂. Unlike the original this won’t be talked about for years and I’m glad it’s already done being discussed in this one.
As a new player who never actually played the original… One of the huge issues for me was the dead time this game forces you through… animation cycles to pray/stop praying, sit down or stand up from a bed/bench, have your choco peck at the ground/sniff the air, climb into or out of a vehicle, grab a moveable object, etc etc. Even though each one of those little moments only added a couple of extra seconds, they really started to add up and made the game feel interminable by the time I got to the temple.
Puzzles and other gameplay elements seemingly intended to immerse the player further into the story started to have the opposite effect, just due to the sheer amount of time I knew I was losing, and it all starts to feel like a symptom of a lack of care taken by the developers to anything beyond what sounds like very shallow fan service.
I’m in the same boat as you with being a new player and I completely agree. I can see the intention behind why they did it but it’s a bit much and can really break immersion. Same for the side quests but at least they’re optional. I just wanna continue with the story god damn it !
@@MoonlightBrillance Not like the story is worth getting back to anyways, they ruined it
people interpret media differently, I enjoyed those things, because it's an rpg, rpg's are designed to be the opposite of fast paced, it ges into specific details for the sake of showing those, even repeatedly (skyrim, the witcher games, drd and many more) if it were, it wouldn't be an rpg, but an action-oriented game.
@geoffreyporter7567 100% agree. have never played the original so I have no ties to this nostalgia that everybody seems to be riding high on. I got so annoyed with the sheer amount of bullshit and tedious boss fights, why am I fighting the same foe 3+ times? Literally the same Shinra bosses whom I already bested 3+ other times in the previous game, why are they back again? Why am I doing this useless battle AGAIN? There's literally no point to this game, it's the same thing over and over again from region to region, catching a damn bird and doing the same bullshit.
I got to the point where I just wanted it to all end. I put the game on easy mode and skipped every cutscene I possibly could. The gameplay and story...Yikes!
The problem is as a child you can easily get immersed in a game world and it feels like you have all the time in the world to get lost in a video game.
When you are an adult it feels like you have limited time, the clock is ticking and every second counts. Games end up feeling like a chore instead of something to get lost in.
I cannot even begin to think of a WORSE trope to introduce to a story about accepting loss than multiverses.
square thinks theyre cooking but its already burnt
Rebirth suffers from Kingdom Hearts-ification.
Convolution. It isn’t specific to Kingdom Hearts but SE in general since Sakaguchi’s departure.
@@ItsSVO I miss him so much, Please come back Sakaguchi.
I cant take this s**t anymore.
@@ItsSVO True, but after the debacle that was KH3 this specific style of convolution comes across as distinctly Nomura-flavoured. I think the Kingdom Hearts comparison is appropriate here.
@HeavenlyGate92 Hey man, let the guy enjoy his life in Hawaii, surfing the day away and making neat small-scale games every now and again, he's earned it. Old Squeenix is dead and gone.
Sometimes you come across a video that so perfectly captures everything that needs to be said about a work, with not a word wasted. This is one of those videos. Excellent work
Exactly my sentiment. Relieved to hear an honest discussion and not be hounded down by the hype train from other spaces of the Internet.
But the game is actually good tho. It’s not all hype. Did you play it for yourself or they lost you at Remake?
You either hate it, or it’s fake hype.
I can’t stand you people. 😂
@@aintthatapotofeffluck8926 You either love it, or it’s just nostalgia blinding you.
I can’t stand you people. 😂
@@za87647 ah then you should get my point then.
Y’all just on the opposite end of the spectrum.
@@aintthatapotofeffluck8926 Nope. The opposite end would be insulting fans of rebirth for posting positive reviews about it, and going on their videos to criticise them (kinda like what you’re doing here). We just don’t like the over the top hype surrounding it, with people too afraid to say even anything slightly negative about it.
"Let's do a sequel that doesn't respect the themes or plot of the original, and add multiverses! ...But enough about Chrono Cross..."
But in all seriousness, in 10 years, when the trilogy is done and out on PC, there will be a fan projectFF7-DeMake to simply strip out and rework the games into the original or something approaching it.
At least Chrono Cross was its own thing, and Masato Kato had the guts to tell people "if you think this is chrono trigger 2 you'll be disappointed", that alone gives me respect for the guy.
Chrono Cross is cool and i think that considering the nature of Chrono Trigger you can consider it an alternate thing or ignore it from the canon if you don't like it, CC is also its own game.
@@renren47618 Yeah as a standalone game it's pretty good, as a sequel to Trigger not so much.
@@renren47618 I played Cross first, but despite absolutely adoring Trigger it never soured me retroactively on it for that reason. Even within CC itself, you can find an audio log from the SNES Radical Dreamers at Chronopolis with the explanation of limitless concurrent universes out there that they've been monitoring. The story still holds weight as its own thing despite that because what you're doing matters for Serge and the world as he knows it: his just happens to be one where things post-Trigger went tragically bad and he has to make things right.
There's also the fact that Chrono Trigger actually features time travel and changing timelines as a major part of the plot, so Chrono Cross isn't as much of a stretch.
All good points. Mostly the multiverse aspect is what does it in. They are saying it is "multiple worlds" not timelines/multiverse but that seems like a distinction without a difference to me. It just undermines the stakes of everything so much it is hard to care what happens.
Excellent review. “Subversion” is the key word. I was under the impression that this was a sequel series like evangelion rebuild, but with all the bait n switches, i dont even care anymore. Im fine with crazy changes as a sequel or a direct remake….but they have to pick one.
Not gonna let them subvert me anymore. Not invested in story or hyped for the next because i cant trust anything presented to me with all the subversive elements. It is what it is, just here for the ride.
What you said about the ending was incredible. I appreciate how you explained its flaws and brought up “what am i supposed to feel from this”
I think you kinda hit the nail on the head when you said that they don't know what we loved about the original, and this may be mostly because the limitations of the PS1 created spaces where the devs were forced to be more reliant on space and silence, or just simply rely on the powerful music compositions. This is even more apparent when you look at even older FF games like FF5 and FF6, and then draw those comparisons out into FF7, which is clearly a reflection/perfection of the same concepts. Similar music for a sad moment, etc. I've had this thought recently while listening to the music from Ff7 original and remake, sometimes comparing them.. The comparisons in the music is a perfect articulation of the differences between OG , Remake, and even Rebirth. The OG music is the simplest, but often the most emotionally deep, and every second of the tracks relatively short duration is powerfully felt. Whereas many tracks from Remake add this cinematic flare, a much longer duration that sometimes feels more "general". There are many more layers and instruments, it's literally more complicated, but that takes away from the focus of the original tracks. So I guess I basically agree with your opinion, however.. I still enjoyed Rebirth, and I enjoyed getting deeper looks into specific events. It's still ambiguous whether or not the remake trilogy truly is a sequel or not.. but I don't care either way.. If it's a sequel then the original is still in tact, and if it's the same story in more detail, then it's just like the music. The original is still there, and if that's the perfect way I want to hear the song, I'll go back and listen to it 1000 times.
Rebirth does address the theme of "coping with loss" well in one way.
The first 75% of the game felt like spending time with a beloved friend with a terminal illness. I was having a great time but I knew it wouldn't last, that I had to cherish these last fleeting moments because it was only a matter of time until the game inevitably devolved into multiversal, lore shattering nonsense.
This was fantastic production quality, especially for such a small channel. Amazing. This is a diamond in the rough, sir.
@@asraarradon4115 Thank you! Really appreciate it.
Fantastic video. The ending credits made me want to go fire up the original again.
I see fans of FF6 and 8 upset that 9 is supposedly getting a remake before them and like…. Y’all should BE HAPPY that square isn’t going to destroy those games
Ff9 is my favorite JRPG in general, it will be heart breaking to see the Nomuraversion of it
The original games will still exist it's not like they will disappear in a different timeline or something, so what's the problem?
@@RealEvilLordExdeathNomura is not responsible for all the story decisions of modern Square stories. Stop blaming him.
@@kurtisschwartz9870 fake ass FF fans is what their problem is. Any real day one FF fan is gonna play the fuck out of any mainline FF game
Yeah. Any time I want something from my childhood remade I think again, because it'll probably be turned into garbage.
What an amazing video. Let me take a second to commend you on it!
I have watched A LOT of Remake/Rebirth critique videos that lean towards praise for the OG and pointing out the absurdity of the Remake project. Definitely some confirmation bias on my part but that is what I want. I feel like not many FFVII fans agree with me on this point of view and everyone wants to argue with me. I am always looking for fellow fans who commiserate with my distain for the Remake project.
FFVII means so much to me. It shaped so much of my childhood and takes me back to the 90s when life was much better. I am very upset about what they have done with this "Remake."
I was one of the few fans who was not at all excited at the announcement of the Remake back in 2015. I instead had a very sinking feeling. I knew they would mess this up. I was never excited about it. Some things need to be left as they are.
This video has definitely landed in my top 5 best Remake criticism videos. Many great points were made.
You are the first who has presented such an insightful perspective of the future of this whole project. These games will fade away, but OG Final Fantasy VII will never fade away. It will out live the honeymoon phase of these games and beyond. Knowing that these games will fade into obscurity in the near future is very encouraging and new perspective for me.
Also, in their poor attempt to remake the OG game it has caused many of us to love, cherish, and respect it all the more.
Thank you for this. I have been bothered by this whole whole thing since the release of Remake.
However, knowing that some people out there are just as upset as me and feel the same way I do, has helped me a lot. And hearing such intelligent and conscientious talking points and perspectives such as these has also helped.
Thanks again for this.
PS. The outro with the Carpenters was the perfect ending touch for a video like this. Cheers!
I find two things amazing about people defending the game.
One is the headcanon. I can see in my recommended feed right now multiple videos like "What happened in the ending" or "The TRUE ending" or whatever. Some people think this is deep. No, it's bad writing. It's called layering; a story should have a clearly understood surface layer of "stuff happening" and then the depth should be in the characters and themes. But folks are making hour-long videos to argue about what even actually happened, and so they fill gaps with headcanon or assumptions. And then they go even further and ridicule anyone criticizing the game as idiots who just didn't understand it...although even the other fans of the game have totally different views too. If no one can agree on what freaking happened, that's a mess.
And second is the constant refrain of "It's a new story, it's not the same, why don't you understand that?!" Well, then why is it so dang similar? Why constantly recreate things from the OG, if it's not supposed to be just a different take on the same basic story? And they go back and forth; they praise the "improvements" to the original story, while defending every change by saying, well, it's an entirely new story. I've even seen them get mad at calling the remake trilogy, remakes; they say "It's YOUR fault for expecting a remake, it's not a remake" when that was the name of the last game! But even then, they'll circle back around and defend how great of a remake this totally not a remake is, instead of just acknowledging the simple truth that it's a BAD remake. Again, contradicting themselves, contradicting each other, there's a whole mess of people who get tingly in their nether regions when they play it and so come up with countless explanations for why everyone who doesn't is dumb, instead of admitting that this game is basically FF7 porn--it's got the action and it's pretty to look at it, but nothing more.
I dunno, it just always amazes me when I see people defending something so emphatically, insulting critics, and yet they can't agree with each other any more than they agree with the critics, and somehow don't see that. They don't see that critics are mostly on the same page, giving the same points, proving the same arguments, while their defenses are all over the map and undermine each other, and fail to realize that that's a pretty good indication that their view is probably, objectively wrong.
Exactly this. Well said 👏
Well said there. Some of them are just too blinded by loyalty or just by nostalgia, because this is FF7, one of the biggest gaming franchises. And I hate how Square literally milking out the crap out of this franchise.
There was also a podcast in which Maximillian Dood taken part and I skipped that. Because I have no interest to see them drolling over a badly written mess. Sure. Rebirth has good graphics and characterization, but in story, it's an absolute mess.
@@KritoSkywakerthe story of og 7 was carried by its characters so if you think the characterization in remakes are good then?
@@kei7540
Yes. This game could have been better. Way better. But they butchered some of the more meaningful scenes and added some nonsense there.
@@KritoSkywaker not really?
Bro all the side quest critique is perfect. Its insane how masterfully the original story guided you between the main plot and the side content
I’ve been waiting patiently for this video. I feel like square made this game mainly for themselves. It’s beautiful and fun but pleases only the writers it feels like. Cuz they know the full picture. Just feel like lazy edging for us. Idc how mysterious you can make the story, just make it good.
The Remake Project has helped me appreciate mods.
there are some great FF7 mods on PC that improves the visuals ,audio ,and even add voice acting all while staying true to the tone and story.
Square was smoking some powerful stuff when they thought they could improve on the story. Remake and Rebirth are great games when they're staying true to the OG story/tone but when they deviate and do their own thing ..its a trainwreck things don't work the spark is gone and it becomes fanfic
its almost like the OG game was pretty well considered. The pacing was amazing, nowhere felt dragged our. Before you got bored of a location its off to the next always seeing new things you could easily miss ..balancing an urgent story with side activities that didn't feel forced ,building up an epic antagonist etc
And Square thought "we can do this better without sakaguch" if the staff at square had much humility they would've made a faithful remake ,much like the resident evil games or something like shadow of the colossus ..
Whats crazy originally the finally fantasy 7 remake was in the hands of a 3rd party studio outside of square.Cyber connect2 was the studio and they started development on the remake..I guarantee they would've had the reverence for the OG story to be faithful to it.
We were close to getting a faithful Remake to the most iconic final fantasy game.
I belive that the writers chosen the following scenario, regarding Aerith's "death". They wanted the emotional payout from Aerith's death. But they didn't actually wanted her to begone from the story, so they decided to cheat.
My book is this: If you want your audiance to be emotional, then recreate the OG scene. Have Sephiroth kill Aerith and recreate the exact moment with the Lifestream. But if you want to commit to the changes, then don't kill Aerith off. After Cloud blocked Sephiroth's attack, have the others show up just in time and saving her is a guranteed.
Sadly, the writers chose to do both of the outcomes. And it comes out as utterly confusing, emotionally manipulative and nostalgia bait.
In any case, good video there, Orion. 👍🏻
I think the worst part about it is that I've seen people try to justify it by saying they are trying to "put you in Cloud's mindset" and set people up for an "emotional blow" in the next game when they think the funeral will be shown.
Except all the emotion is completely destroyed when you know she is going to be in the next game and be playable because with how damn nostalgia heavy these games are (especially Rebirth) there is no way in hell they arent going to have her signiture LB3 or ultimate weapon in the game, and since neither appeared in Rebirth (especially her weapon since it was in the Temple in OG), they are probably going to be in the sequel, which means she will be playable and a part of the story in some way.
Honestly I am disappointed by how nostalgia blinded so many of the defenders of this game are that they refuse to see all the objective issues with Rebirth, chief among them the story and pacing.
Edit: What disappoints me most is I was never able to get into the OG. Maybe it was the wiplash in gameplay and graphics from going to it immediately after finishing X (my first FF) or maybe I just couldnt get into the story at the time, but I did enjoy the universe through things like Crisis Core and Advent, and Remake was finally able to pull me in and get me enjoying the main 7 universe and, maybe because I didnt have that nostalgic attachment or maybe because I unironicqlly enjoy the KH games and their story, I had no issues with the few plot changes and Whispers because by the end of the game it felt like it built up to somethibg meaningful. The intrigue of changed story (especially with the melding of the expanded universe into the OG game to make it feel more cohesive), a version of Sephiroth that learned from his mistakes in the OG game, and the clear focus of Aerith's death and the hint of saving her (which fascinated and excited me with the potential since Aerith living would actually be a very bad thing since ot would remove the Lifestream safety net from the OG game's ending and could lead to some great conflict with her wanting to sacrifice herself in order to save the planet but the rest of the party desperately trying to find a way to stop Meteor without doing that). Not to mention all the fanfare and glorious attention JENOVA (who I find far better/interesting then Sephiroth as a villain) was getting, which is one of the few things I loved about Rebirth (hell Lifeclinger is my favorite boss from the game and single handedly changed my mind about the OG death not working as this game's ending).
But then Rebrith does almost nothing with any of the potential, has some of the worst pacing in the series (why does it wait till Chapter 9 out of 14 to finally progress the plot), somehow goes in a completely different and out of nowhere direction from what even Remake built up (like how did we go from split timeline to multiverse with zero build up), and then has one of the worst written, most emotionally confusing and lacking endings of the entire franchise. Like wtf were they thinking with the ending? Like I know Nojima (the actually source of all the changes since interviews show Nomura was the one fighting the most to keep it similar to the original in Remake when he was Director) doesn't have a good track record as a writer *stares at FFX novel* but holy sh#t this is a special kind of bad.
I don't care that they made changes. I care that the changes are lame and make the games more ABOUT FF7 than a spin on FF7. The remakes take Advent Children's version of Sephiroth: this cosmic timelord figure destined to contend with Cloud, solely because of Sephiroth's inflated importance to the fanbase, not his importance in the context of the game world.
It reminds me of something Redlettermedia pointed out about the Star Wars prequels: how they treat Darth Vader like he's this cosmic linchpin solely because Darth Vader is famous in real life.
After Remake I gave them the benefit of the doubt with the expanded midgar section and thinking that perhaps its a new retelling of the story and that it was too soon to judge it but after playing and completing Rebirth there is simply no denying that they have completely messed up the remaking of the game. Its an absolute mess!
You nailed it. Beautiful video, 100% agree with you!
0:36 - Summarizes my main criticism of these games and the typical arguments of their fans. Why do a remake if you want to make a new story? Or conversely, if you want to make a new story, then why not make a new game rather than bastardizing an existing one? Those of us not ridiculously naive know why, of course.
Even Corel prison looks like a tourist hotspot 😂
Corel Prison is just now Wall market with sand, it used to be a dangerous place with bunch of creepy people, now there's a bunch of cheerful people playing minigames, not to mention Dyne used to be the boss now the boss is some clown named Gus who acts like a full anime character
Thanks for the video, i think you captured all things, why Rebirth for me is not working.
Narrative is destroyed by padding, ruining of suspense, exaggerating all of the scenes to 300 percents and loosing main purpose of the scene
Characters feels like a cartoon with the same poses, behavior and lack character growth
This is the best review I've seen. Took the essay right out my mouth.
Waited over half a lifetime to play the original again but done better, and it never came true
yeah same fml
Because they split them up into 3 parts and made them stealth sequels to the originel game.
Dw, in a different timeline, square enix did it right
At least now you can appreciate the original even more
Same. Haven't even played Rebirth after Remake
Bold of you to call Aerith a cringe character....and you're precisely right, just like with all your other observations in this mess of a game.
In 10 years the OG will still be the same landmark iconic game its been for 27 years, but these Remakes will simply be forgotten. The convoluted multiverse sucks all heart and meaning from the story. What is left is only flashy spectacle and a ton of mostly mediocre content, which might satiate some in the current year, but will quickly be irrelevant once the tech is outdated.
Excellent vid!!
This game turned out almost exactly as predicted.
- Gameplay is good (albeit not something I enjoy, and have 0 interest in).
- Music is great.
- Graphics really good.
- Characters will, for the most part, be recognizable. Not a botched/fanmade version.
- Content will be added/changed, minigames, new story beats, new story content, etc.
- Sidequests will, for the most part, be bad.
- Sephiroth will be everywhere.
- There will be a new Zack story.
- Style over substance (Dyne being an obvious example).
- Story will be further botched with the ridiculous convoluted mess introduced in FF7:Remake. They are adding story dimension such as: Defying Fate, Revival, Multiple Dimensions, Time Travel(? maybe ?), Alternate Timelines, etc. On top of what OGFF7 already had, such as: Science Fiction, Magic, Fantasy, Aliens. Bringing the convolution level to over 9000!
- But at the same time try to keep to the original, even though that, for some reason, wasn't clear, even though everyone knew it had to happen. I dunno, you understand what I'm trying to say here, in this point I mean? I dunno?
The thing that surprised me is that the world is "true"-ish openworld. Which makes the world seem extremely tiny.
Tbh, I thought SE would go for a FF10 style world. That is, you don't see everything, you're kinda going through the places that matters most for the story, with no world map, rather connecting places via a fancy menu or something similar. This way the world don't shrink to the size of a small country at best. Then again, to be fair, this isn't supposed to be the entire world. Still, the scope has been drastically reduced. No one ever asked in FF7:OG if the worldmap actually was the entire world. As it obviously was supposed to be. But it was highly abstracted, and you had to fill in the blanks yourself (optionally).
FF7:Remake was the game that finally killed any interest I have for any future mainline FF. The gameplay can be excellent, but if it's something that doesn't appeal to me, and will in fact bore me, there really isn't anything left.
I still find it interesting to see how the games are received, though, and discussions about them. But me buying a new mainline FF again will probably not happen.
Tbh, and to be fair, the game probably deserves an 8/10 -ish, mainly due to gameplay, overall presentation and amount of content. Giving it a 10/10 however, without any sort of copium and/or fanboy glasses on, is impossible.
One of the major things with Aerith’s death in the original is there was zero time to grieve/no memories forced on the player to emphasize the hole created by her loss.
The other side of this is how much they shove sephiroth/iconic songs in our face robbing the gravity of their presence from the original. The fact we get ANOTHER final sephiroth fight (and a hamfisted bizarro) just makes fighting him/interacting with him as a pest rather than this heavy force moving behind the scenes.
Less is more.
They transformed Sephiroth into Seymoure from X lol
The cutscne was also really quick in the original. You see Septheroth and a couple seconds she is dead. Here is really really drawn out, all to establish a new story beat whilst demolishing everything about a main character dying
@@zhongliimpact6220 Seymour was always a sniveling little shit from the get go but we at least he wasn’t quite the big bad as Sin/Jecht etc. Sephiroths interactions bloat the hell out of the story and it’s incredibly frustrating with the pacing of his actions when it’s taking away from the final stand off in the northern crater. If they left the final boss at Jenova Life Clinger + dialing back sephiroth a bit in the main story I’d feel much better about Rebirth
@@JxhnNichxlls agree man
Somewhere we have a timeline where the decision was made to make the FF7 remake a 1:1 remake, too bad we are in the wrong timeline😢
Been waiting for this one. 🙂
I'm greatly looking forward to this. You're so well-spoken and articulate that I know I'll enjoy this video from start to finish!
Well spoken indeed . . . except for 'Seffrot' lols
Silly Irishman
You know the Irish "accent" is just a nation wide severe speech impediment. The whole country needs a speech therapist
@@vonclaren1racist
I drop this trilogy at the ending of the first one. No intentions to even touch this or the next one. Hoping one day, some mod expert could export the assets of this game, and port it to a real remake, faithful to the original.
Theres no way square Enix would let that happen. If a project like that succeeds then se would have to admit that their new story is dog tier and they absolutely refuse to consider the fact that they cannot tell good stories anymore. SE will blame their partners Sony and have even been known to blame the fans before they will acknowledge the fact that they cannot write for crap anymore
Remake the remake twenty years later lol 2044
I fear we have to understand that Squaresoft doesn't exist anymore, it's Enix now and they just don't have it in them to tell a good story. I try not to care anymore, I'm just fed up with bad story telling.
It's not Enix either, they were the original developers of dragon quest and tactics ogre...it's certainly something, it exists, but it's deformed and shapeless, nobody can tell what it is anymore.
FF14 had a great story. Though the tone came out happy. But it was like ff9 a an ff tribute. Main story was great.
It's just that afther some years the guys who work on Square grew obssessed with overcomplicated multiverse/time travel plots and trying to milk games through multiple types of media instead of telling everything on a single game so they can farm more money.
An example of that is that the novel "On a Way to a Smile" tells the whole reason why Cloud is depressed on AC and everything that happens before the movie... Instead of telling that in the movie and FF XV is the most egregrious example of them doing that.
@@renren47618 you're right except that was the inbetween period. That novel isn't considered cannon yet last two chapters is what influenced remakes whispers.
Sakaguchi was Final Fantasy. They never made a good one without him.
I've been looking forward to this critique, feels weird to say considering you're a small channel compared to others covering this project. Regardless this was yet another terrific essay. I didn't play it because I had a simple criteria: DON'T double down on the filler and compilation stuff and I'll buy the game. I realize that's an impossible ask bordering on bad faith but they failed with flying colors. If comment sections are anything to go by I'm seeing a surprising number of my fellow detractors playing Rebirth anyway despite all the red flags in the first game. I understand having an essayist like yourself doing a public service by playing it but otherwise it seems like just about the most video-gamey video game that ever video game'd. That's not enough of a draw for me when its ultimate purpose is to homogenize one of the all time great game stories.
A big part of the problem to me is that FF '97 was a revolutionary game that pushed its genre and gaming at large forward by upping the standards for long form narratives and artistic presentation. They took the traditional JRPG format and presented it in a way that hadn't been done before. With polygonal puppets performing prose upon picturesque paintings. Yet FF7R is taking that setting and characters and making it like every other big budget video game today. Structurally speaking it's not that dissimilar of a game to (new)God or War, Yakuza, Last of Us, etc. in terms of being a 3rd person character/story driven action game with skill trees, walky-talky dialogue, contextual climbing, etc. Weirdly enough RGG Studio went the other direction by taking the nostalgic trappings of JRPGs and making it a novelty by utilizing a modern setting and graphics engine with Like A Dragon. What I'm getting at is that there are always more interesting directions to take your game design in this day and age but instead of innovating SqEnix are achieving parody at best.
As far as I can tell they decided to approach this game with the same philosophy as FF14. Which is to say taking FF7 and turning it into a digital theme park. Fair enough since it seems evident that some people are into that hence the popularity of FF14, but if I wanted that I would've played FF14 by now. If they were planning on staggering the releases then it might as well have been a live-service MMO that gets story-centric expansions every few years. When people prop the game up like it's the be-all-end-all of game design and brand worship, well that's sort of how people who get obsessed with MMOs feel.
Well done on this video. You've summed up how shallow and hollow these remake games are.
I highly doubt these games will stand the test of time. The story isn't written to be timeless like the original. Instead Square has chosen to bet everything on twists, mysteries and subverting expectations, stuff that'll keep conversation alive between games, but will mean nothing after part 3 is out and everything is revealed. I wonder how many will think this was a story worth telling at the original's expense, once it's all done and over with.
lmao like the og had no issues at all.
Ppl is just so blinded by nostalgia that can enjoy shit anymore
@@josefarias1119 I dare say it's blind nostalgia that make some people like these atrocious remake games.
Cloud & the gang are back for more wacky adventures. Sephiroth is everywhere too!
@@mikespearwood3914 Rebirth is one of the best videogames ive ever played, but hEY IS ATROCIOUS CUZ UUU RUclipsR SAYS SO.
zzz
This isn't FF7s story, it's a Disney ride based on it...the longest ever made, fun for a few minutes...not 8 years.
@josefarias1119 Didn't need a RUclipsr to tell us the remakes are trash.
Spot on review! I’ve been a fan since 1997 and you really nailed it when you talked about all the NPC’s in the towns and not being able to enter houses. The sense of discovery and exploration is lost in this game.
Can you imagine in 1997 if there was icons all over the world map . Honestly I thought pushing select and having indication arrows on which buildings/pathways you could enter was to much back then. This game feels like they’re holding your hand and dragging you everywhere you go.
Exactly, spot on
Came from think before you sleeps post and not disappointed. Great video like he said, liked and subbed.
Loved the video and all your points were well laid out. Have to say I live the remake series so far
I have many, many problems with the remake trilogy but the one that stands out above all else is the total fail in nailing the tone and atmosphere of the original. We’re supposed to be in a dying, suffering, sparsely populated world. A world in decline, on the edge of death. So why is every area bustling with happy, healthy people with 1st world problems? There aren’t even torn clothes or dirty hair. Everyone looks like a California uni student or tech worker.
This is never more apparent than the Corel prison. The original felt like a hopeless, dangerous place, full of cut-throat psychopaths. The Remake version feels like the circus has come to town.
Remakes are truly the bane of modern entertainment. My view is: if the original was good, it doesn’t need a remake; if the original was bad, no one wants a remake.
It's what the new fans want. I have a difficult time comprehending why.