Default attacks barely do any damage against the huge machine. Just cast Bolt, heal up when necessary and you’re done within three or four minutes.īy contrast, Final Fantasy 7 Remake breaks the battle up into stages. While it has more HP than the enemies you’ve fought up until this point, and can dish out more damage, it doesn’t take long to beat. In FFVII, you confront a giant scorpion-like robot that guards the reactor’s core. When I reached the Mako Reactor’s boss, the Scorpion Tank, I realized that boss battles were going to be the biggest point of divergence from the original game. As the game progresses, you’ll also have to manage party members and summon spells. Every battle is an active affair that requires you to manage basic attacks, special abilities, magic spells and limit breaks (ultra-powerful attacks that you can unleash when you take a lot of damage). It’s hard to level up by fighting the same enemies over and over again in FFVIIR, so it’s not possible to simply attack a few times and end a battle in seconds. You won’t just be mashing the “attack” button you’ll have to learn the ins and outs of Barret’s special abilities and play style.įor the record, none of this is inherently better than the original FFVII’s gameplay, but it is a much more dynamic and difficult system. When Barret joins the party much later in the mission, you can take control of him directly, and his skill set is totally different from Cloud’s. As you distract the realistically rendered Shinra guards, Biggs, Wedge, Jessie and Barret sneak behind them, vaulting over subway turnstiles as they go. Then it’s right back to real-time swordplay.
When you need to activate a special ability or a magic spell, you can essentially pause the game while you make your choice.
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Most of the mission - like most of the reactor itself - was implied.Ĭompare and contrast: In Final Fantasy 7 Remake, you’ll zip around the battlefield, slashing at enemies and dodging fire. That was about it, save for a few brief dialogue exchanges. You fought a handful of blocky-looking enemies in turn-based battles. Machine-gun-toting Barret Wallace joined your party a few screens later. You met supporting characters Biggs, Wedge and Jessie during a static cutscene. The sense of scale is incredible, and watching the mission unfold through naturalistic action rather than a handful of stilted cutscenes makes a big difference.įor example: In the original game, you took control of protagonist Cloud Strife, then fought a few battles on your own. Rather than traversing a few screens and fighting a handful of battles, you’ll make your way through every room of the reactor, all in real time. (Image credit: Square Enix) Final Fantasy 7 Remake combatĪs such, when you play the first mission in FFVIIR - infiltrating an energy-sucking Mako Reactor and planting a bomb - you’re not going to be in and out in 10 minutes. It’s still a good game, but during my replay, this is about where my interest started waning I put it down completely about halfway through. Once FFVII’s world opens up, it turns into a much more typical “go from town to town, save the world from an evil madman” Final Fantasy narrative. However, if you were going to increase any part of FFVII tenfold, Midgar is easily the best candidate. When you consider that it takes about four hours to leave Midgar in the original game, that’s quite a lot of extra content.
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Instead, it carves out the Midgar section and expands it into a full 40-hour RPG. Imagine my surprise, then, when five hours later, I left Midgar and found myself on an enormous world map, ready to start a much bigger story.įinal Fantasy 7 Remake isn’t a remake of the entire original game. In fact, when I first played the game, I assumed that was what the whole story would be about.
At first glance, Final Fantasy VII appears to be a story about a group of freedom fighters taking on an evil corporation. And finally, the game loses a lot of steam after Midgar.įor those who have never played FFVII, the game begins in the dystopian, cyberpunk city of Midgar where the rich grow fat off the lifeblood of the planet, and the poor can’t even see the sky. Second: The in-battle graphics don’t look bad at all. When I started replaying FFVII after E3, a couple of things about the game struck me right away First: The music is still absolutely top-notch, two decades later. (Image credit: Square Enix) How does Final Fantasy VII compare to the original?