Final Fantasy VII Remake (2020)
This game is a remake of the classic Final Fantasy VII game that was released in 1997. This remake game only covers the first few hours of the original game, but it has been expanded. Average gameplay time is 40 hours! You don't need to play the original game to play this either. Since it is only part of the story, you may be confused or lost about certain aspects in the story which is fine. If you're impatient you can always play the original game. This remake doesn't replace the original game because its quite different so I do recommend playing both if the game interests you!
Combat is action style with ATB which are bars that gets filled up and you spend them to use abilities and items. Some people will think it looks like Final Fantasy XV, but it plays completely different. Other than pressing the attack button, you can dodge and block which both are useful. The enemies can interrupt you and you can also interrupt them. You can also miss hitting enemies. Enemies are also pretty aggressive so battles can get chaotic and you will probably feel like you're playing badly. Don't worry you're not since everyone experience the same thing. Its interesting to see how different people play. Most of the enemies have a weakness or a gimmick to them. You can just brute force your way through, but it would feel frustrating and may take awhile to beat enemies. This makes battles annoying to some, but I sort of enjoy finding out how to take them down. There is an ability that gives you info on every enemy which gives you enough information on the strategy to defeat them, but some enemy descriptions are vague. You also get four characters to control: Cloud, Barret, Tifa, and Aerith. Each character has their own gameplay with their own strengths and weaknesses. You can't pick favorites either because you are forced to have to use them all so don't neglect them! There are difficulty levels too from easy, normal, to hard. There's also a special mode called classic where the character auto attack and you just focus on using ATB.
The big thing about FF7 is the materia system which are abilities that you can equip to characters. So you can make anyone have healing abilities or everyone have healing. Its fun to play around with builds with the materia system. This game also has weapon upgrades where you get points every time you level up to spend on weapon upgrades. Each weapon also has a unique ability that you can learn so that you can use it with any other weapon you equip.These abilities are very useful so its worth spending time to get them.
Music is phenomenal! I was worried that it all be orchestrated, but they really have a mix of different music styles. While there are remixes of the original soundtrack by Uematsu, there are also new songs. There's actually two composers: Mitsuto Suzuki and Masashi Hamauzu. Both these composers did the soundtrack for Final Fantasy XIII series! Uematsu did the theme song for the remake called Hollow which is a beautiful song that I recommend you to give it a listen.
The characters are great in this game! Voice acting for English and Japanese are excellent too. Since this is a Japanese game, some things do come off as awkward since sometimes the localization doesn't always match the lines with the body animations. For example, the characters gesture quite a bit and they match really well with the Japanese voices but not the English for obvious reasons. The translation is decent too. Perhaps the English has input quite a bit more swears than the Japanese but that I guess we use swears more commonly. Honestly the swears took me a bit to get use to since these characters didn't swear as much before. But overall the dialogue is still entertaining in both languages. All the characters have more personality and get more fleshed out than in the original game which is sort of expected since its been 20+ years plus the spin-off stuff to work off of. I think Aerith got the most improvement in my opinion and she had really grown on me. There's also a lot of new characters which thankfully are rather decent. I don't want to spoil them so I won't say who they are.
This game overall has been enjoyable and great. The story is faithful to the original so the plot hardly changed. There are some changes and I look forward to what part 2 will be like. There isn't any info on part 2 at the moment so who knows how long it will take. Obviously it will be on the Playstation 5 but not sure if it will work on PS4.
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