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After 20 years of fervent fandom, Final Fantasy VII Remake carries many of the same expectations as a Star Wars continuation. After the announcement of Redo, every detail was examined incessantly. Fans voiced concerns that were absurd (when a character’s chest size was reportedly reduced), emotional (reflecting on the story’s twist review again in high definition), and understandable (the announcement that Redo it would only adapt part of the story of the original, considerably expanding its opening hours and adapting the rest in future installments). Then it would be like a Star Wars prequel, or a Star Wars continuation? Being perceived as celebratory or dismissive admirers? The awakening of the forceor The Last Jedi?
In the end, they are both – It is not a story, but a fight against fandom. He tells the lie of a storyteller – a witty omission that lures his audience into believing it’s about one thing, only to change all expectations. But it stops at radical reimagining.
In 1997, the best way to sell Final Fantasy VII It was also with a lie of omission. The famous game was accompanied by an unprecedented marketing campaign back then, with 30-second television commercials showing a montage of shocking scenes: a motorcycle being accelerated by a man with a sword, a monster screaming from the capsule that gave birth to him, a villain plucking a strange angelic face from his sanctuary. All of these scenes were in-game, but none were representative of the more than 40 hours you would spend with them.
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They were taken from cut scenes: interstitial mini-movies that show crucial moments in the plot with much more impressive graphics than a PlayStation console could represent at the time. The actual game material was more abstract: the characters, shaped like mini LEGO-people, were not fully proportioned. The backgrounds were painted. The story was described through abstraction: The player, who saw these polygonal squat dolls spinning rigidly and read their thoughts and dialogues in text boxes, had to stretch to connect with the story.
That’s the context that outside observers can easily miss: video game stories never stand up on their own. They require investment for players to fill in the blanks, reflect, and, for many hours, worry. That is why one of Final Fantasy VIIThe meanest tricks are also one of the main reasons it has stuck with fans for so long: the revelation that the protagonist Cloud Strife, the character that the players spent the most time with and identified with, was not who He said it was. His personal story, slowly unrolled during more than 40 hours of play, was stolen: the biography of a dead friend, Zack Fair. The player does not put himself in the place of a hero, but a coward. An old literary resource reinvented for a new medium.
For video games in 1997, which is still a surprisingly young industry, just 14 years from the Nintendo Entertainment System, that kind of subversion was rare. The moments that elicited an emotional response were even rarer. For a whole generation, the first to grow up with video games, this story may have been the first to tell them that the world was not what it seemed to be, that they could have misunderstood everything, that perhaps they could give their best and It would not be enough.
Final Fantasy VII Remake it expands greatly, giving the original game’s initial premise: eco-terrorists in an ongoing campaign against a planet-killing megacorporation, a much-needed texture, as well as foreshadowing the ways in which the scope of their narrative will expand . But there is a change that is persistent and perplexing, one that does none of those things. The game waits until its penultimate chapter to identify its most significant change by name.
They are called Whispers, hooded ghosts who look like the Dementors of the Harry Potter movies – and they tell you in the final hours of the game that they are agents of fate, here to make sure that the characters in Final Fantasy 7 Remake follow a certain path. They appear en masse without warning, confining the characters in a certain place, forcing them to follow a particular route, saving some lives and endangering others. The observant gamer must have a late completion of the game that recontextualizes the entire experience, like a character in a Christopher Nolan movie. It turns out that the Whispers have only appeared at very specific times, times when the characters in Final Fantasy VII Remake had the opportunity to do something different from what they did in Final Fantasy VII. Whispers make sure everything stays the same.
This is the lie, then: Final Fantasy VII Remake is not a modern production of Final Fantasy VIIbut a fight against Final Fantasy VII, a work that converts the subtext of taking creative liberties with a new text version. More than twenty years of people who want more of their favorite game, but did they want it that way?
Video games have a unique symbiotic nature with their audiences – the necessary interaction makes it easier for fans to feel their choices, opinions, and feelings. to import. This is why Star Wars it’s a useful comparison: it’s been a pop-cultural monster for a generation, and anyone who has loved Star Wars as a child he has experienced a lifetime of validation. I like Final Fantasy Remake, a movie like The Last Jedi You can try to escape the orbit of what fans are familiar with, to reach beyond something new and expansive, but your biggest obstacle is never simply the Dark Side of the Force – it’s fandom.
There is a commendable level of bravery in protecting this tension between the fanatic’s desire for the familiar and the creator’s interest in doing something different. AND Final Fantasy VII Remake finally cut his connection to the events of the original Final Fantasy VII – Finish with your cast of characters who have defeated the Whispers. They gain some level of understanding that these events have happened before, and are now free to do them differently. But Redo He still seems to want to please fans with the familiar, even when he pushes them into something different. The events of the original game are the blueprint for the entire experience.
The history of 1997 Final Fantasy VII He is known for his tragedy, full of characters that little by little realize that they are surely going to lose, but learn that it is worth trying anyway. In Final Fantasy VII Remake, the same characters have approximately the same goal: to save the planet, but nothing supports their meta-textual sense of purpose. The first act ends with his entire cast as a substitute for the audience, embarking on a journey to see what will be different from the first game: a story to tell. RedoFollow-up (currently unscheduled).
In Final Fantasy VII RemakeAt the end of the cliffhanger, his characters know they are in a kind of sequel or parallel universe. They want to know what’s next and move into the unknown. It ends before we know what that means, but it suggests, as The Last Jedi yes, history could go to a whole new place. The curtain falls before we see how far the changes extend outward. By doing this, Final Fantasy VII Redo it makes its own history inert, suspended in limbo. It is no longer about saving the world. It’s about saving fans.
