(Note: Final Fantasy VII: Remake is over two years old now but there's spoilers for this game)
Last article was about the SNES era and my favorite titles. It seems my top 4 are all RPGs. I really began getting into this genre in 1994 with Earthbound.
Hm, so my favorite Super Nintendo Games, note the italics there, were all RPGs. It's important to iterate the italics here as after 1996 or so that system was finished.... so to say these are my top four favorite video games of ALL TIME is incorrect. The last article was about my favorite SNES games.
After that system I got a Playstation, which again, similar to the last article where I proudly recalled how I chose SNES over Genesis or Turbo Grafx16, was the correct choice to go with. There was N64 and some others that came out too but I wanted the Playstation for .... Final Fantasy VII !
I remember seeing articles on the internet about the sequel to Final Fantasy VI back in like 1996... when the internet, by the way, was much different than it is now. It was cheesy and only really for geeks and Insane people (capital I insane people).
Video game stuff on the net back then was not like now. Now, video game news is like a billion dollar business but in like 1996? I'm not even sure if GameFAQs even existed yet. It was just personal webpages on Geocities and weird forums who would talk about video games.
Only geeks like me were on the internet trying to figure out all the secrets of obscure RPGs and trying to get translated patches of like FF5J.SFC and stuff. I remember video game nerdery was my first taste of wild internet fake news and stuff. People would just say fake info about things and it would have people wigging out over it. I remember there was a big debate on the internet in 1996 about the veracity of "Gogo is Golbez!"... after some rube just said that for no reason. People were combing the game front to back to find a made-up scene someone described of Gogo admitting he was Golbez in disguise.
Don't get me started on Shadow's Seventh Dream. Oh my goodness. Someone said they got it and it made Shadow stay alive in the ending screen of FFVI... Man.... I slept at thousands of inns over-and-over trying to get Shadow's Seventh Dream. It was all fake news though.... just a dumb wild internet lie. That might even be why I from a young age knew how blatantly untrsutworthy the internet was. It was rife with fake video game information. Wild nonsense stated by weirdos and crazy people... for no reason or gain.
Anyway, yeah, I saw an article about the sequel to FFVI and it had a grainy 1996 photo of Locke, Celes, and Shadow in 3D! It said the sequel for FFVI is coming to Playstation next year! That sold me. N64? I could care less... I didn't want an N64 at all.
I wanted FF7 (which at that point I thought had Shadow in it)... oh and Metal Gear too. I saw a video about Metal Gear, a grainy AVI video in 1996 about Metal Gear... and knew I needed a Playstation when it came out.
Other people were wanting to play the new Mario things. Mario 64 or whatever. I've never actually played Mario 64. I made the switch around 1996 to Playstation after being a Nintendo man for two console generations (NES and SNES).... and never looked back.
I was really into RPG games since about 1994 but it wasn't until Final Fantasy VII (the original in 1997) exploded the popularity of the genre in the Western World that others really were. RPGs were not popular in the West prior to Final Fantasy VII. Prior to that Japan was wigging out not understanding why no one was super into Dragon Quest over here because there it was insanely popular.
Dragon Quest (Enix) was destroying Squaresoft's Final Fantasy games in sales in Japan by huge margins... until Final Fantasy VII. I mean, before the seventh installments of each game in these franchises Dragon Quest was number one in the RPG world. It was a national landmark in Japan. Kids got days off from school when the next Dragon Quest game came out. Then when they hit their respected Sevens... Final Fantasy blasted into the lead. Just compare Dragon Quest VII to Final Fantasy VII it's like.... you can't.
Final Fantasy VII? It killed Dragon Quest. It blew it out of the water. Traditionalists in Japan were slow to accept that Final Fantasy had leaped over Dragon Quest in their genre duel... but that wasn't the case in America... the West had no great love for Dragon Quest... it wouldn't surprise me if Dragon Quest VII made 100% of its sales in Japan and 0% in America.
Final Fantasy VII.... took the world by storm. The video game world was never the same again. It blew everyone away. It was the first block buster video game, the first mind-blowing master piece the video game world had ever seen.
Now over twenty years later they've remade it... and like many trusted and beloved classics... remaking them is not easy. I'm not exaggerating that this game changed the video game industry forever in 1997. It really did. It's a daunting task to take this game and re-do it.
I recently got around to playing the Final Fanasy VII Remake... and I really liked it. Man, it's good. Let's write about it!
I'm gonna think of some sections... but I mainly just want to write about one thing about this game but if it's short or I still want to write more I'll think of some other stuff.
Final Boss: Nostalgia
Just like re-making Ghostbusters or Star Wars... re-making something considered as so classic and ground breaking as this game is really playing with fire. If you make it into an obvious cash grab? You make a lot of money but upset a lot of fans... and man like Star Wars heads or other geeks... video game people are a bizarre little bunch of folks. They take this stuff VERY seriously.
If you keep it exactly as the original and change nothing but the graphics? Why not just go play the old one again and not buy a graphicsed-up version? Also, maybe things from the old one didn't age well. I remember writing on social media when I heard they are remaking FFVII... wondering how are they gonna do Wall Market in full realism graphics? I mean, I remember Cloud accidentally walking into the wrong room and then taking a bath with over a dozen surfer dudes..... as well as many other wild things that happen in Wall Market.
In cartoony 1997 graphics it was funny. All the things in Wall Market were silly and goofy.... but in full realism graphics? Are they going to do these scenes? I really wondered what they would look like. After playing it, I gotta say I really liked the Wall Market scenes. They were cool... but... also at times... odd. Cloud dropping the cool mercenary act to do some pop dancing is full-on bizarre to see.
Then the biggest problem with remaking a classic... the fans loved it for a reason, you know. Things that still have fans twenty years later have them for a reason. It is still remembered and regarded so highly because so many people loved it... you're playing with fire mostly because you can ruin a good thing. You can bring it back, a thing people loved, and make them angry that its not what they remembered.
As an amateur writer, I really thought it was interesting how they dealt with Nostalgia in this game in which...
....they made it the Final Boss!
They knew they were playing with fire and they brought it straight into the narrative itself! Not only that but it's the end boss of the game! That's very interesting to me.
I think people might've been confused by the Nostalgia Wraiths as I called them and new players must've thought it was just some whacky sci-fi gimmick... but those Fate Ghosts or whatever they were called were literally a symbolic force that represented fan nostalgia.
If you played the game in 1997 and loved it enough to play it again in 2020.... they know you know how the story goes. They know you know what happens in the narrative they are telling. That makes the story very difficult to write for a writer.
I was writing about confabulating writer/reader/concept last article, and I gotta say, I really liked how they worked with the old fans of this game's memories, emotions, pacing, and sense of tradition. It was a fun confabulation, I found.
You see, Cloud isn't having post traumatic stress flashbacks.... we are! We're remembering scenes from the past! We played this before!
Those Nostalgia Wraiths? They start ghosting around the narrative when WE knew something big was coming in the narrative!
It's a very interesting writing tool, I find. The game calls them Fate Harbingers or Destiny Harbingers or something... the plaster of the old narrative floating around the new narrative to keep it in place in a cast... and at the end of the game they gather at the center of Midgar to form a Tower of Nostalgia.... to forever keep the narrative of Final Fantasy VII in place! They are Harbingers of never-changing never-ending tradition!
That'll keep the old fans happy. Those spooky ghosts will keep the game they loved feeling like they remember it.. never changing... always pristine and clean in their wistful childhood memories...
But...
...what if the end of the original story was sad and possibly suggested that humans are a disease on our planet? Wouldn't that be the BAD ending? We have pleasant memories for the bad ending?
Did you ever think... maybe we didn't get the GOOD ending of Final Fantasy VII because the game was rushed or something? Maybe.... she could've came back?
Speaking of things like Gogo is Golbez and Shadow's Seventh Dream... the internet in 1997 was abound with fake news about reviving Aeris (she was not Aerith back then). Wild ridiculous rumors were everywhere on how you could over-level the Revive Materia and get her back... you could find the White Materia somewhere... you could do this... and that... and in the Japanese version there's multiple endings...blah bleh blah.... none of it was true. It was just internet nonsense.
Why was there so much internet nonsense about reviving her? Because it made sense and the people wanted it! The people wanted her to able to come back!
There's a bad ending in Chrono Trigger where Lavos destroys everything and then there's good ending(s) where we fly our time machine into him and destroy that no good embodiment of Evolution known as Lavos. There always seemed to be "Bad Endings" and "Good Endings" in old school RPGs.
There's a bad ending in Breath of Fire II where you sacrifice your life to turn into a dragon to sit over the mountain where Evil God lives... and then there's the good one where your dad flies your town into a mountain to bury that no-good evil God forever!
There was ALWAYS good endings that you had to work for in RPGs. Maybe this story, this frozen in time narrative of Final Fantasy VII, wasn't as good as we remembered it being... our dirty ol' Nostalgia is misplaced.... maybe this story deserves a GOOD ending like we all know it does!
I see you up there in that tower... a flock of spooky swirling ghosts! You dirty Nostalgia Ghosts you! Thinking all these Final Fantasy VII fans are just gonna sit back and mark out to the same old story again and again and again! You think we're gonna sit back and dwell on rosy memories of our youths!? You think we want to re-play Final Fantasy VII to rejoice in pleasant memories of the past!?
I don't think so, pal!
When Chrono, Marle, and Lucca went to 2300 AD and learned that a dirty alien from outer space was gonna burrow into the Earth and evolve at an incredible rate to one day rain endless fire upon us and kill all of humankind... did they just say "Okay. Cool"?
No!
They took it upon themselves to alter the course of the future by embarking on an incredible journey through time and space!
How did the original Final Fantasy VII end? Sephiroth murdered the one person, Aeris, who could save the planet ... then he rained endless fire and meteors on us, the lifestream went into high gear and stopped meteor from destroying the planet but it is highly suggested that all of human kind perished when meteor and the life stream collided... fast forward like a hundred years and who's left? Just that fire-dog and his kids. That's it.
I'm sorry but the 1997 ending was the BAD ending. We gotta work harder and get the good ending!
If the plaster that is holding this narrative in a permanent cast of sorrow, hardship, and a bad ending manifests itself as a gigantic evil purple monster who will stop at nothing to destroy all that oppose it with his many different-colored ghost minions? Well guess what... we still deserve the good ending. You can't stop this. You can't stop this train that we're on!
It wouldn't be the first time we had to work hard to get the good ending!
Did anything stop me from getting the Good Ending in Suikoden? I had to get all 108 Stars of Destiny to revive Gremio! Some of them hide in secret passages in caves and stuff in the middle of nowhere with no hint on where they are ... and there wasn't even internet guides back then to tell me where they all were! There wasn't..... but... I still revived Gremio!
Did anything stop me from getting the Good Ending in Breath of Fire II? I could've let my mother, the nice Dragon sleeping on the mountain that seals the evil Death Evans from our world stay up there a little longer and keep the world safe from evil but she's old and she's tired! She can't do it forever! She's done all she can! I could've done it... I could've sacrificed one of my friends to get the Final Dragon transformation and destroyed Death Evans... but I can't sacrifice one of my close friends, who I journeyed all over this land with, just to get the Final Dragon transformation (Affini) to destroy that no-good God Death Evans! I love my friends! I gotta get the GOOD ending! It's the Good ending or nothing with me! I'm gonna save that old man in that boss fight with the robot eye-balls.... because.... it turns out that guy is my dad and they got him strapped to some crazy eye ball machine just to power their dirty phony little church town with some evil life-sucking gadget! Sorry, but my dad's gonna power MY town NOT yours and he's gonna fly it right onto that mountain and seal that evil for good .... right after I destroy Death Evans! Even if I have to level up on that Giant Monster Island ALL DAY! I'm taking down that imposter phony God and burying him under my town! FOREVER!
I don't care how much work I have to put into it to get the Good endings! I'll get them!
I will get them.
Final Fantasy VII? I don't care if the Bad Ending from 1997 literally manifests itself in the game while I am playing it to keep the Bad Ending on-course and locked in an unalterable plaster cast! Won't stop me. The waves of Nostalgia for the past swirling around a tower of greed... forming an embodiment of sweet memories for the Bad Ending... I admit you are powerful... but...
We deserved the good ending to Final Fantasy VII over twenty years ago!
I'm sorry, Final Fantasy VII, but all of humanity doesn't perish when I play video games. I save the world when I play video games. All the time! Some mopey overly-emotional jabroni summoning a meteor to earth isn't how this one is supposed to end.
All you very emotional Sephiroth marks out there? Moping around like brats happy that he destroyed humanity like some pale nihilistic pseudo-sadistic weirdo!? Guess what? Your time in the sun is finally over. You're behind the eight ball now, fools! He won't succeed this time! I can feel it! I can feel it in my bones!
I can punish Destiny! I shall be punishing Fate! I will alter the future....
...and whenever the next episode of Final Fantasy VII: Remake comes out....
....I will GET THE GOOD ENDING!
Conclusion
Final Fantasy VII is a video game's video game.
...and what I mean when I say that is....
Let's say a video game could come to life and manifest itself as a video game yet in a corporeal form and that video game wanted to play a video game...
Now, obviously, being a video game... it would have high expectations on what it played... it being a video game themselves and all.
If this impossible scenario of a video game wanting to play a video game ever existed.... said video game would choose, of its own free will, to play a game like Final Fantasy VII: Remake.
It is, in that sense, a Video Game's Video Game.
