Hallo ladies and gents, tis me, the all-powerful Jim, ready to give you another absolutely true and 100% unbiased review. You may remember my reviews of Kingdom Hearts III and Final Fantasy XV, and you may recall I liked those games a lot!
Unfortunately, such is not the case for the Final Fantasy VII remake. I've already poured 3000 hours into it, and I can tell you that it is the worst remake ever made, and that it makes the Silent Hill HD collection look like the Citizen Kane of classic 1980's video gaming.
I'm not sure where to even begin with how mind-bendingly, World-War-3-Startingly, Jar-Jar-Binks-birth-ingly atrocious this pathetic excuse for a game is. Perhaps I should start with the topic that was a bone of contention from most fans: The episodic nature of the remake. As you know, this game was divided into 7 episodes, with each one costing a bank-breaking 50 cents. Square has to realize that iPhone using multiple-dog owners like me can't afford to be dishing out our entire bank accounts to fuel their money-hogging greed. They should have realized they did something wrong once they fired Troy Baker, put microtransactions into the otherwise excellent game that is "Microtransaction Simulator 2018," and started making Kingdom Hearts pachenko machines. Nobody liked them when they did that. Ugh, it makes me so mad.
Next, I didn't think it was possible in today's day in age, think of the graphics, for Yevon's sake! They're so much worse than the original! I know, you're just sitting there thinking, "You obviously haven't looked at them side by side!" But I did, and I'm posting a couple examples for you right now:
Here's the original,
And here's the "remake":
Still don't believe me? Here's another pic of the original:
And another of the remake:
That doesn't even look much like Squall! He's way too muscular! What are they thinking????
One last comparison: the original:
The remake:
If you don't believe me now, you obviously only have five eyes.
next is the gameplay, and you wouldn't believe how badly they screwed this one up. The original game made use of the ATB ("Angsty Teen Brooding") battle system to control the main characters. It worked so well, because I could literally do everything in the game without pressing any buttons. But now they changed it to a Superman 64/Kid Icarus Uprising/Smash Bros clone with RPG elements, and it completely doesn't work in any way, shape or form. The game literally runs at negative six frames per second, even when there's only one enemy on screen, so even if the battle system *was* good (it isn't), it would be almost unplayable anyway. It's so obvious that the battle system was made at the last second by a group of spider monkeys that looked at an image of Kingdom Hearts CoM gameplay once, that I'm surprised and offended that they didn't fire all of the workers immediately.
And don't even get me started with the story. I don't know how they did it, but they ruined that too and managed to make the game more linear than FFXIII while doing it. They changed all these things around in the story, and all of the changes are awful. Like, they made dumb changes like making Barret's arm a nuke instead of a gun, and making Sephiroth a male with super long silver hair and a stupid katana. SEPHIROTH'S OBVIOUSLY A GIRL, IDIOTS. It's like they couldn't figure it out even after watching that scene in the original where Sephiroth says, "Hello. I am Zidane's female love interest and I want to destroy all boys." How much more obvious could it get? The only thing I liked was when the game bugged out (it's a glitchy mess, btw) during the Don Corneo mission, and Cloud was dressed as a girl for the entire rest of the game as a result. It was the best aspect of the game, and it was all because of a glitch.
The music sounds like a two year old banging on an off-tune piano. The sound effects are garbage. The characters voice acting is so bad that it blew out the speakers in my TV. There's nothing else to say here.
If I had to guess whose fault this trainwreck was, my money would be on the director they chose. You know who I'm talking about. I will never understand why they would ask a talentless hack like Hideo Kojima to direct a remake to the greatest game ever made. It's like they wanted it to be terrible. There are so many better choices. Couldn't they have at least hired Motomu Toriyama to direct and write this game? He's easily the greatest director in the history of all entertainment, and he would have made the game not only bearable, but also amazing. He would have at least had the good sense to replace every character with Lightning and give her 3x the jiggle physics that made LRFFXIII so perfect. She's just such a great character and her games are perfect and this game is a total mistake.
I thought Square had returned to form when they had released masterpieces like FFXIII, FFXIV (vanilla), and FF All the Bravest. But apparently not, and they had to go and disappoint me again. Way to go, Square. You are literally worse than Konami.
Hallo ladies and gents, tis me, the all-powerful Jim, ready to give you another absolutely true and 100% unbiased review. You may remember my reviews of Kingdom Hearts III and Final Fantasy XV, and you may recall I liked those games a lot!
Unfortunately, such is not the case for the Final Fantasy VII remake. I've already poured 3000 hours into it, and I can tell you that it is the worst remake ever made, and that it makes the Silent Hill HD collection look like the Citizen Kane of classic 1980's video gaming.
I'm not sure where to even begin with how mind-bendingly, World-War-3-Startingly, Jar-Jar-Binks-birth-ingly atrocious this pathetic excuse for a game is. Perhaps I should start with the topic that was a bone of contention from most fans: The episodic nature of the remake. As you know, this game was divided into 7 episodes, with each one costing a bank-breaking 50 cents. Square has to realize that iPhone using multiple-dog owners like me can't afford to be dishing out our entire bank accounts to fuel their money-hogging greed. They should have realized they did something wrong once they fired Troy Baker, put microtransactions into the otherwise excellent game that is "Microtransaction Simulator 2018," and started making Kingdom Hearts pachenko machines. Nobody liked them when they did that. Ugh, it makes me so mad.
Next, I didn't think it was possible in today's day in age, think of the graphics, for Yevon's sake! They're so much worse than the original! I know, you're just sitting there thinking, "You obviously haven't looked at them side by side!" But I did, and I'm posting a couple examples for you right now:
Here's the original,
And here's the "remake":
Still don't believe me? Here's another pic of the original:
And another of the remake:
That doesn't even look much like Squall! He's way too muscular! What are they thinking????
One last comparison: the original:
The remake:
If you don't believe me now, you obviously only have five eyes.
next is the gameplay, and you wouldn't believe how badly they screwed this one up. The original game made use of the ATB ("Angsty Teen Brooding") battle system to control the main characters. It worked so well, because I could literally do everything in the game without pressing any buttons. But now they changed it to a Superman 64/Kid Icarus Uprising/Smash Bros clone with RPG elements, and it completely doesn't work in any way, shape or form. The game literally runs at negative six frames per second, even when there's only one enemy on screen, so even if the battle system *was* good (it isn't), it would be almost unplayable anyway. It's so obvious that the battle system was made at the last second by a group of spider monkeys that looked at an image of Kingdom Hearts CoM gameplay once, that I'm surprised and offended that they didn't fire all of the workers immediately.
And don't even get me started with the story. I don't know how they did it, but they ruined that too and managed to make the game more linear than FFXIII while doing it. They changed all these things around in the story, and all of the changes are awful. Like, they made dumb changes like making Barret's arm a nuke instead of a gun, and making Sephiroth a male with super long silver hair and a stupid katana. SEPHIROTH'S OBVIOUSLY A GIRL, IDIOTS. It's like they couldn't figure it out even after watching that scene in the original where Sephiroth says, "Hello. I am Zidane's female love interest and I want to destroy all boys." How much more obvious could it get? The only thing I liked was when the game bugged out (it's a glitchy mess, btw) during the Don Corneo mission, and Cloud was dressed as a girl for the entire rest of the game as a result. It was the best aspect of the game, and it was all because of a glitch.
The music sounds like a two year old banging on an off-tune piano. The sound effects are garbage. The characters voice acting is so bad that it blew out the speakers in my TV. There's nothing else to say here.
If I had to guess whose fault this trainwreck was, my money would be on the director they chose. You know who I'm talking about. I will never understand why they would ask a talentless hack like Hideo Kojima to direct a remake to the greatest game ever made. It's like they wanted it to be terrible. There are so many better choices. Couldn't they have at least hired Motomu Toriyama to direct and write this game? He's easily the greatest director in the history of all entertainment, and he would have made the game not only bearable, but also amazing. He would have at least had the good sense to replace every character with Lightning and give her 3x the jiggle physics that made LRFFXIII so perfect. She's just such a great character and her games are perfect and this game is a total mistake.
I thought Square had returned to form when they had released masterpieces like FFXIII, FFXIV (vanilla), and FF All the Bravest. But apparently not, and they had to go and disappoint me again. Way to go, Square. You are literally worse than Konami.
Score:
Graphics: 0/10
Gameplay: 0/10
Music: Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric/10
Story: 0/10
Overall: -9999/10. Three thumbs waaaaay down.