So, the bad of this game is...well, to me, it’s pretty bad.
I remind you here that these are opinions and not to be taken for absolutes, I’m just sharing some of my greatest frustrations with the game.
We’re going to start with the biggest problem I have with this game:
The fact that it is so linear and you are leashed like a dog to literally any other person you’re supposed to be with at the time.
The best example I have of this is Chapter Eight. We open on Cloud somehow surviving a fall he had to have a parachute for earlier, including falling through a roof. He should be dead. Okay, he’s an anime boy with extreme survival powers, sure. It’s fine. Boss fight. Oooooh, Reno’s staggerable—he goes down like a little bitch if you block just one attack. No big deal. That’s fine. Now, we get to the linear part. Surrounded by NotDementors, Cloud and Aerith are literally incapable of going anywhere the plot does not allow. You see a Materia in a small room off to the side, and for some reason, you’re...not allowed? (Spoiler, it’s a Chakra Materia. Which meant nothing to me because I literally never used Chakra, despite its ability to remove poison. Chakra was useless because healing spells did so much more to heal me. Maybe it would be essential in the Hard Mode, but for a Normal game, there was no reason to tell the player they couldn’t go in a tiny room.) So here begins a slow climb through the church, where Aerith eventually slips, and Cloud has to use Monkey Bars to go across the ceiling to knock down a chandelier to try to protect her...? And it eventually doesn’t...matter? Because the NotDementors block things off, anyway, and later chapters suggest they would’ve kept Reno away, anyway? Once you get in to the attic, you can literally never go back to the floor of the church. You cannot, until a much later chapter (fourteen, I think), because any time you start to go backwards, you are physically stopped by an in-game warning, and Aerith “teases” you about where you’re going. You follow from the attic across several rooftops, down to a path that will eventually lead in to the main portion of the Sector Five Slums. You are shortly cornered in to going the long way around because you’re avoiding a handsome man in a suit (hm, like Reno? But not Reno) that you will eventually have to face, anyway. (Sound familiar, like the tropes I was talking about?) This does allow a little bit of grinding, so okay, fine.
But when you get in to the Town Proper, you literally cannot go anywhere. Aerith has Cloud on a leash so short that I’m surprised she doesn’t have her fingers curled in a collar on his neck. You’re obligated to follow her and see what a “good person” she is by being introduced to every NPC who sings her praises, and then you have to follow her to her house, after she promises to bring flowers to an orphanage. Here’s another instance of “we won’t do the thing, but we’re doing the thing.” Cloud walks Aerith home, Aerith then offers to walk Cloud back to the Sector Seven Slums (to which Cloud rightly protests “then why did we even come here?” because why would he see her home safely for her to just...drop him off, instead?) So Cloud and Aerith get talked in to not leaving until tomorrow (spoiler, Elmyra actually tells Cloud to leave in the middle of the night and never come back, no matter what Aerith will think), so Cloud has to pick flowers (why are there only three choices? With no color? Yellow, white, and pale green. Throw some oranges or reds or pinks. Because the display, choosing all three “colors,” is FULL of pink. Where did it come from? Why couldn’t I pick pink?) And only then can you actually explore the town.
But you don‘t really have a lot to do—it’s basically a case of “I’m going to drop off my data with Chadley, fight a Summon, and then go back to Aerith—and then we’re in sidequest territory.” Here’s one of those “outcome” things—by doing all of the sidequests here, you get Aerith a gorgeous dress for a particular part of the game. But...it only changes the look of the ensuing scenes, not the actual outcome of the story. You do get a weapon out of one of these sidequests, but even then, it’s the one weapon that I only ever used long enough to learn its ability.
When you finish the sidequests, or as many as you want to do of them, you head back to Aerith’s house, but not before running in to the dude in the suit you were avoiding by going The Long Way Around™. His name is Rude, but he’s not a bad guy. He’s just rude because he throws Cloud around like a ragdoll. Fun. Then Rude is “called away” and Aerith takes Cloud home for dinner and then comes the annoying sneaking mission. You budge and there’s trash everywhere that definitely wasn’t there earlier that day, so Aerith bolts from her room and shoves Cloud back in bed. But when you actually succeed in the mission, she just teleports out of the house, without her mother knowing (because, clearly, Elmyra doesn’t want her baby around Cloud, after all).
Almost every chapter has a similar layout. You cannot go back to a space in the previous chapter, you’re locked in this space for the duration of the chapter, and you have limits on where you can go and when. I didn’t play XIII, but I always heard people complaining about the linearity of that game, and yet this game is literally the most linear game I have ever played, and yet people are worshipping it.
Most of the characters that are supposed to be endearing are annoying as hell.
This is one of the things that I’ll actually bet on people disagreeing with me, but it stuck with me—the characters I liked best were Cloud and Jessie, with Tifa, Biggs, and Wedge somewhere below them, but Aerith and Barret are so utterly annoying that I did not care what happened to them by the end.
I know, I know, I’m a horrible person—Barret has a little girl, do I want her to be sad!? No, but we’re already told Barret loves the idea of getting back at Shinra as much as he loves his little girl, and maybe even more, because if she’s assured to be safe, he never thinks for too long about being gone for any period.
Because he’s such a good dad, he totally doesn’t care if she grows up with emotional trauma and abandonment issues because Daddy Cares More About His Mission Than Me. Marlene is well on her way to being adopted by someone else because Barret is shown, in-game, to never be there. There’s literally a scene of Tifa telling Marlene “Daddy might not be home tonight,” and maybe that’s just about the first mission Cloud is on, but it has some pretty heavy implications about what he’s willing to do around his daughter. And as soon as she’s verifiably safe with Elmyra, Marlene is barely a factor, other than the little scene of “Daddy will be back as soon as he can.” So...you’re just leaving your kid with a woman who’s practically a stranger? Who doesn’t trust Cloud, and is, therefore, very unlikely to trust you? You heard her backstory about Aerith, but that shouldn’t mean anything to you—you’ve known her for less than a day, and you just ditch your kid with her. Even when we find out that Wedge is in the Shinra building, Barret never flinches about Marlene being alone with a stranger. Good job, Dad.
Then, he also has enough anger that I’m surprised he hasn’t actually gotten himself killed. He never thinks about anything unless it’s him preaching about saving the planet. If that means killing people, sure! Okay! As long as we’re killing the “bad guys,” it’s fine, and even when they realize they probably killed ordinary civilians, they just brush it off. Barret would happily go out in a blaze of glory, leaving his daughter as an orphan. He doesn’t care if he survives, if he can just kill a bunch of Shinra lackeys on the way. He’s actively detrimental to most missions within the game. It’s ridiculous how much his self-righteous shtick gets in the way of him actually being an effective force for good. No one is allowed to say anything bad about Avalanche, because how DARE they blaspheme a group that has definitely murdered people! And yes, the first explosion was bigger because Shinra amplified it, but even then, the power outage would kill people who were on life support, like Jessie’s dad. There would absolutely be fallout from a power outage that encompasses an entire plate, because you lose the “sun” for the Slums, which would make people leave, and what of the people who couldn’t? What of hospitals, when backup power ran out, if a secondary supply couldn’t be found within reason? We, as the player, are just supposed to gloss over that with some mentions of, “Well, we knew there’d be consequences,” and the idea that the Greater Good™ is just inherently worth it, without thinking too hard about trying to do something other than go for the extreme solutions. (Don’t try to tell me they’ve tried before—Barret, at the very least, would not sit down and try to discuss anything. His utter lack of self-control and anger issues would leave him murdering anyone who was stupid enough to sit down with him the moment he got upset.) I understand that extremes beget extremes, but at what point are civilian casualties deemed alright? (They also try to sell us this point when they drop the plate—Shinra is willing to kill thousands compared to Avalanche’s hundreds, but at what point does one draw the line?)
I feel he was also relatively useless toward the end of the game as a party member—he moved very slowly and his magic is low, on top of his lacking MP (which, yes, can be remedied with a specific Materia), and as a ranged character Aerith tends to be more versatile. He’s actively removed from your party most of the tail end of the game, unless the party is split two-to-two.
(Also, privately, I would not be surprised if he was an abusive sort of person. I’m not saying that he definitely is, but if it was “revealed” that Barret is someone who lashes out physically when he’s mad, even if it’s not in combat, it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising to me. He’s the type to raise an open palm before he catches himself and thinks, oops, shouldn’t do that. Not meaning to offend anyone with this one, it’s just an afterthought.)
Aerith is...not as bad as Barret, but she’s also someone I just knew I didn’t like from the minute I fell through the church roof. I even told my friend that exact thing as soon as I was going across the roof: I already knew I didn’t like her. (She, of course, responded with the typical, immediate “No, I love her! Aerith is best girl!”) So I’m a blasphemous heathen or something, I suppose, but I just don’t like her. I don’t hate her, but there is absolutely nothing endearing about her.
My friend actually suggested that the actress doesn’t do her justice, and I do think that the actors for Jessie and Aerith should have been traded—I think Jessie’s actor had a lot more enthusiasm and heart in her acting and her voice was just a little lower, which I think would have made Aerith more palatable for me.
But it wouldn’t have changed the fact that I think Aerith is so fake. I know I’ll get thrashed for this, but she’s very “I’m adorable and sweet and I help people all the time! Look how nice I am!” But underneath that, she’s exactly the person who gets her way all the time because she’s just so sweet, don’t you know? She’s demanding and pushy and practically manipulative, especially if she sees that someone can be manipulated. (Going back to my talk about chapter eight, dragging Cloud by an imaginary collar because, deep down, he’s actually too soft to say no, especially if the person is a woman, and particularly if it’s a woman he’s attracted to. He does a lot of stuff out of pure necessity—“fine, hand massage by Madam M, if it’ll get me what I need,” and “fight in the coliseum even though it’s a waste of my time,” and so on. Cloud could take Corneo’s mansion without the sneaking mission, it’s just that the plot needed to inject the classic scene everybody is obsessed with.) Aerith is very pouty and simpering. In later chapters we don’t see it as much, but she’s just the sort of person that is “I’m bubbly and cheerful and I try way too hard! You have to like me!”
I hate that. I hate that when writers try to use the “this person is super perky and bubbly and it’s covering up pain! It makes them a better person and you sympathize with them! They’re so strong!” Maybe, but you’re not just strong if you cover your pain with joy. You’re strong so long as you’re still fighting, and sometimes fighting is just waking up. You don’t have to pretend you’re the most happy person on the planet. It doesn’t make you weaker to show that you’ve endured something. And I hate when a writer tries to sell you this very particular trope to win you over, because I don’t believe it. It’s actually more annoying that I have this bundle of sunshine in my party who’s just so sweet and then I’m just supposed to feel for her when she’s depressed, and then just sort of…forget it because it only matters to the plot when they’re selling you tragedy. Aerith is not well-written enough for me to forgive the trope.
There’s nothing about her that makes me care about her. Literally nothing. (She is, however, a way better party member than Barret. He’s my least favorite character and my least favorite in-party.)
Biggs is...inconsequential. He’s basically a narrative plot device with a background in “I helped some kids!” So..he sort of falls out of the range of whether or not I’d actually care about him.
Wedge is...okay. He doesn’t have much personality, other than “trying too hard” and “overenthused” and “loves food,” so he’s just kind of...cute? He’s the awkward one that wants to fit in and be a part of the group and doesn’t think he’s worth anything, and I feel bad for that, but I don’t really...care? He gets points for being a cat dad, though.
Tifa is...some weird cross between the mom and the sister. She’s very soft-hearted and seems the sort of person who gets in to something she has no way to escape—she does care about her friends but she doesn’t agree with the fact that there are clearly more people dying than the game wants to admit. She’s genuinely conflicted and she’s a good person who cares about people—she’s the player’s vehicle for humanization in the game. She’s the person with doubts, who knows that not everyone working for Shinra is inherently gunning for the death of the planet.
She’s more compelling than I gave her credit for at the beginning, with the kind of steel soul that the writers try to sell us for Aerith—she’s the “hiding pain” trope written right, in that she’s doing her best every day, and when we glimpse beneath the veil, she’s believably upset, hesitant, and broken in a way we don’t understand, but she communicates it in her behaviors. She’s a soft heart and she actually tries to pull back as far as she can from the things she’s worried about—she doesn’t like death.
The only things that holds me back about Tifa is that she’s almost muted, in a way—which is a very believable expression of her pain, but it gives me some reservations about her, and she comes across as vaguely whiny at times. She’s probably the top tier character that I can’t classify as being a favorite, but she’s still the closest thing this game has to a compelling, deep female lead. (I’d say she technically borders between a favorite and one tier down, actually.)
Now, to my two favorites (I know, this is the “bad” section, but this is all character comparison here, and I don’t want to drop spoilers before the cut.)
Jessie is my second favorite, which I’m sure is controversial. She’s not got a huge amount of depth, like Tifa, but the thing I like about Jessie is that she’s all-in in whatever she does. She’s definitely the “horny” trope when it comes to Cloud—I absolutely believe she’d get him in her bed if he let her, and she’d have a field day with it. But I also think that she’s the person who’s going to do her best with what she has—and she’s another of the “humanizing” characters. When she thinks that her bombs actually caused the fallout in those opening moments, she actively says, “No, I used a bigger blasting agent than I should have, and I’m going to fix it this time.” She would have basically led a suicide mission if not for how badass Cloud is—because she saw the damage she thought was her fault, and said, “I don’t want more people hurt.” She’s over-enthusiastic and an irrepressible flirt, but under all of that, she’s someone who cares about her impact on the missions and on the world. She’s a secondary-character, true, but she’s a secondary character done well. She can be irritating in her worst moments, but it’s tempered by her willingness to fight for the things that she believes, even if she has to go out of her way to do it. I respect her confidence and her go-get-‘em style, so she’s my second favorite in the game.
Cloud takes the top spot for me, however.
This is partially because he is, as my friend would confirm, predictably my type. He’s not super forthcoming with his personality at first—he’s standoffish and almost cold in a lot of instances, to the point of being a little bit of an asshole. But he’s got a lot of squishy, soft spots under all the ice, and he’s intelligent. I appreciate that he very slowly opens up through the game, even if he’s never actually open on the whole. (From what I understand, there are reasons for this? According to my friend, but I will eventually play the original game.) He’s very practical and never goes out of his way—he does what’s necessary and deals with it from there, but he can plan when things go sour. He’s very stiff, but when we get to see him break through his shell, it feels so nice to see underneath the iceberg that is his exterior. It feels like we, as the player, also start to earn the right to get to know him, too. I like the way he’s voiced, which sells how taciturn he can be, but when the actor really digs in to it, it’s so nice to hear some more of his more sassy or sarcastic tone break through. It’s nice to see something more than the “meh, I’m here to get paid” from the beginning. I think he has the most development in the game, which also makes him automatically my favorite, because most of the other characters have very, very little development.
So, the third giant complaint I have about the game is the padding, which means the plot.
I know I’m going to get reamed for this, but hear me out: I should not have to play the original to care about the plot of this game. This is a remake—a new game for a new console and a huge new generation of fans. You…do want new fans...right?
So I shouldn’t have to play the original to get in to this.
I shouldn’t have to play the original to give a shit about the plot or the characters. My friend actually told me it ripped her heart out and...I never even teared up. Maybe I’m cold, but like...the part that probably should’ve been devastating (the drop of the plate), I jut did not care. Biggs doesn’t have a personality, Jessie’s bit is sad but like, they kind of...told us she was definitely doomed because Cloud has to lift debris off her twice in the opening chapter. I think I was more worried about Wedge’s cats than any of the actual characters, because I never got attached to them. I literally bitched about this game to my friend until well after it should have hooked me. I was already in the second reactor and still didn’t give a shit about the plot and she told me I would get Shiva soon and that was more interesting to me than the plot of the game! I was more invested in progressing the plot to get to the point where I could get Shiva than the plot itself. Even having finished the game, I don’t actually care about the plot. At all. I’m more interested in seeing Cloud’s character development.
The entire plot of this game is stretched so thin I can see through it better than lace. We open, as I said, on “Shinra is bad, we’re sticking it to the man! Consequences don’t matter!” Then it’s an escape mission, cool. Okay. Proceed to the next chapter, which is “sidequest territory to introduce the other mechanics of the game.” Fine. Then it’s a long, dragged-out mission to get Jessie’s blasting agent, that is more a motorcycle trip than an actual mission. Then, oh, NotDementors disable Jessie, Wedge is...incapable, because...plot? To make Cloud go on the mission? Then it’s another The Long Way Around™ chapter where, of course it’s a trap. It takes three chapters for this mission, which is going through the railways, then the underplate, then the actual reactor, all because the writers padded out the plot so much that you could drop paper-thin glass on it and it’d be cushioned. You literally follow train tracks for an entire chapter. That is almost the entire run of this section. Then it’s a puzzle game where you wander a three-dimensional maze to shut off lights to redirect power. These could both be condensed, but no, they stretched it out to make it a “full game.”
Here’s the thing—Detroit: Become Human can be beat in about ten hours, depending on your choices. There’s very little padding in that game, because things can be implied.
You could have easily had us do the opening scene on the train, get kicked off, fight a little ways, reunite with Barret, and then skip to the Underplate. Then, we do a puzzle about power rerouting, have Cloud make a sour quip akin to, “We’re gonna have to do this a lot, aren’t we?” and then pan to several other lights, and then skip again, and then OH! There’s Biggs! Cool! (Yes, I know, there’s like three or four Materia scattered in the area, but...couldn’t we get those later, in the reactor? Yeah, we could.) Make each segment about fifteen/twenty minutes, devote the opening part of the reactor to about thirty minutes, then make a second chapter the escape through the laboratories/rooms as we run. You would have shaved off so much padding that was so utterly unnecessary. I never played the original game, and I’d still make the bet that that entire segment, blowing up that particular reactor, did not take more than an hour.
And there’s so much of that in the game! Places you can tell that got padded out because they didn’t take enough time to get through them, so you add a shit ton of fluff, like going “the long way around,” or the path is blocked so you have to go another way, or “we need to do this thing first!” It’s dragged out so long that it’s like we’ve got thousand-ton anchors on our feet that we’re pulling along as we just mosey through the plot.
They also spent way too much time fleshing out the backstory of characters that don’t actually matter, like Leslie’s lost fiancée that is part of the padded out we’re going back to the sewers because of Corneo bit. I appreciate the little bits spent on our secondary mains, like Jessie and Wedge, but they did it for Leslie, the “Moogle” in Sector Five Slums, almost every side-quest character, and the hundred cats in the Sector Seven Slums, the people in the gym. I appreciate it when it’s useful, but I did not need to know every person in the games.
The opening chapter is actually the best part of the game, because it punches you right in the gut from the start; you’re in it and you’re going, no preamble, no nothing, you’re just in it, and it’s action-packed and fun. I love that. Even the escape mission is fun enough, because it’s a reasonable follow up, running from security and being a badass that’s just like, “Eh, I’ll deal with this. No big deal.” But then the entire story just…stops. You’re suddenly in a piece of story that is just “Hey, here’s everything the game hasn’t told you about yet, and all the tutorials that go with it.”
It’s like the game just fucks you out the gate and it’s great sex and even the aftermath is pretty good—you’re actually ready to go again, and then it just pulls back and says, “Nah, I’m gonna leave you here for a sec, I want a snack.” And that’s exactly what it does—it takes you out of the excitement and drops you in a scenario that is just “here’s a town, explore it,” and even Cloud audibly complains about the mundane idleness of the scenario.
If my main protagonist—the one I’m literally playing as, mind you—is bitching about how bored he is, even when he’s “working,” you should take the hint from the character you wrote.
And the plot never gets more interesting. It’s almost always a variation of “our goal is to fuck Shinra over,” with a side of “let’s help our friends” in the background, but every chapter is stretched to the max so that it’s as long as possible and that is not always a good thing. It’s actually annoying and I hate that you expect padding to make up for genuine plot relevance.
This is compounded by that whole “linearity” and “leashing” I mentioned earlier—the one and only chapter that allows “exploration” is basically that way because, after you finish this chapter, it’s a beeline to the finale, and it has to give you a chance to get whatever armor and equipment you might need, and to finish whatever missions you might be working on for Chadley.
And even then you can skip all the bullshit and you still get roped in to doing another mission because nothing is free, so you wind up back in the sewers, because Corneo’s a dick and Leslie’s a softy who keeps getting stepped on because he’s kind of dumb.
You’re still forced to do bullshit to pad the runtime because the devs thought people would be unhappy if it came across as not substantial enough, and to me, this is a thousand times worse than giving me half the game that you put out. I would’ve taken the game a lot better if it didn’t drag its heels at every turn. I really would. But no, a game isn’t good if it’s short!
Fuck that.
This game’s story is so bogged down with padding that I literally never cared about what they were doing or why, because it started as “Fuck Shinra!” And then you just slog through molasses up to your neck to get to the point of the game where you actually do go through with the “fuck Shinra” idea. In a movie, that resolution would feel good. But thirty/forty hours in the game, it feels like I’ve been dragging my heels. There’s a reason why a lot of JRPGs have what’s basically a “moving target goal.”
For instance, let’s look at a personal favorite of mine—Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. Your end goal in this game is to beat the Big Bad, but its way of getting you there is the typical JRPG fashion, which is to go town-to-town, getting stronger, picking up party members along the way, and learning who you are. (Again, typical JRPG style.) The first town’s goal is “find a magic wand,” and when you finish that mission, you head to the next area. That area is “gather more information and go through some tests to prove we’re ready to move forward.” The next area is “We need a boat, so we need to convince the captain we’re serious.” When you finish any given area, you actually feel like you’ve accomplished the goal you set out to do in each area, and like you’re doing something going forward. In FFVIIR, none of the goals really feel tangible. They don’t feel like they’re anything close to progressive. You finish a “goal” within the area and you’re...still there? They just gave you something else to do, for whatever reason, until the very end of the chapter. Each chapter is confined to the space in which it begins, almost invariably, and that makes it feel like your goal is inconsequential—the chapter will end when it ends, and that’s it. You don’t have any control over the actual end of a section or any freedom of exploration. It feels so confining.
The average runtime, when I looked it up, is about a fifty-hour playthrough for Ni No Kuni. Now, let’s say FFVIIR is about a thirty-five hour game—fifteen hours less than Ni No Kuni. In FFVIIR, your goal “changes” chapter to chapter, but almost the entire time is spent either “going to your friends” via The Long Way Around™, or “fuck Shinra over.” The game feels astoundingly aimless despite its linearity. You’re dropped in to the “fuck Shinra over” idea from the get go, and then immediately get told that Cloud is a mercenary who’ll do basically any job for the right price, then you’re pulled back to the “fuck Shinra over” thing, and then the rest of the game is go help our friends!™ after that. It’s, get back to Sector Seven, save Tifa from Corneo, go save our friends by warning people about the plate (and also save Aerith from ghost memories), fight up the tower to save our friends, escape to save our friends, go make sure the tiny child is safe because of our friend, go check on our friends in Sector Seven, meet back with all our friends after we fall down a hole, then go rescue our best girl.
It doesn’t feel like we’re working toward our “fuck Shinra over” goal at all.
Why did I never get invested in the plot? Because Cloud isn’t interested in it. My main character doesn’t give a shit about it—if he screws Shinra over in passing, all good. But he’s just looking for work.
I’m not an active participant in this plot. It just kind of…happens around me. It’s just there. When we do get to the end and the head honcho is dead, it doesn’t even change anything. It doesn’t feel like I actually accomplished the starting goal of the game. Aerith even hints at it, that the plot is actually bigger than just Shinra, and the only “hints” we get to that idea are the flashes of Sephiroth, and then that whole...ending bit, which is just chaos incarnate.
Even with the little flashes of Sephiroth, the player is more likely to attribute those to PTSD, after the long opening flash of “but I killed you!” we’re given. I didn’t play the original, but I know that Sephiroth is the actual big bad, and like most in this series, his end goal is destruction and power—so at least I knew he was eventually going to be a big deal, but for anyone who might have never had any idea about that...what on earth did they think of him? Did they just think that the whole “Shinra” plot was the whole game?
I never felt like I was actively participating in the plot of this game. I never had the feeling like my actions made any impact, because Shinra just shrugs off the reactor fiascos, and then decides to murder innocents to “send a message.” We see the impact more on the citizens than the company, which is exactly what Avalanche should not want.
I feel more like I was just a random NPC in another game than a main character in this one because the plot has next to nothing to do with Cloud—he just gets dragged in to it at the end of the day.
I should not feel like that, playing as the main protagonist in the game. I should feel involved in the plot, even if it’s a very small amount, and I never did. And maybe that’s intentional, because of the end, that we’re being manipulated by fate or whatever, but that doesn’t erase the extreme detachment I felt to the plot. I was never interested or invested—it felt like there wasn’t a plot, more often than not. I was just an NPC with a slightly different goal in any given chapter.
That’s not what a “complete” game should feel like. I shouldn’t get punched in the face at the end with a, “Surprise! This game wasn’t about Shinra, it was about Sephiroth! He wants to do a Bad Thing™, and in the next installment, you’ll start working on the actual plot this game should’ve had!” The game could have easily given us something beyond a vague sense of “this silver-haired dude with a giant sword is kinda scary and is somehow involved with Cloud.” But no, we’re saddled with a plotless opening that lasts up until the last minute of the game, leaving the player going, “Huh?” at the end. I’ve seen so many videos on YouTube offering to “explain the ending.” If you have everyone and their mother jumping in and saying, “Well, this needs explaining,” you probably did something wrong.
If your ending is completely unrelated to the entire plot thus far, you did something wrong. It’s not bad to have a plot twist, but if you never have a clue as to what’s happening, and the change literally does not happen until the last two hours (being generous), leaving most of the players going, “what does this mean?,” you’ve done something wrong. It feels intensely like what I’ve done to this point does not matter. Why did the game go from “fuck Shinra over” to a very sudden “hey, this dude you’ve had random, vague, unhelpful visions of is actually a big deal.” Also, if your excuse for the ending of the game is Fate with a capital F, that it’s basically “this was going to happen and we didn’t need a cohesive plot that led to this ending,” you did something wrong. I don’t feel like this game was connected to its ending—the most vague hints don’t make good links. I knew Sephiroth would be important later, but again, I think he probably comes across as a figure of intense PTSD for Cloud to anyone who went in blind—and that maybe he had something to do with the plot, but we never know anything until the absolute last minute. It never feels like much more than a nagging reminder to Cloud, and even he tries his hardest to brush it off and ignore it, even denying that anything is wrong when someone notices his episodes. The ”whispers” are introduced but, again, not even remotely explained until the last minute of the game.
It feels so much like the first thirty (and, really, thirty-five) hours of the game mean nothing.
It would have taken very little effort to either give us better connections to the ending, or to shorten the opening so it doesn’t feel like as much of a waste. Cut it in half and take out some of the padding, and at least get us one solid connection, just one, and then bring us in to the end sooner, so that the game feels like you actually have a purpose. It doesn’t have to be a huge part of the game, but if the game is thirty-five hours (and that’s assuming you’re powering through it) and the most plot-relevant bits happen in the last five hours (and I’m being generous!), that feels an awful lot like the other thirty hours didn’t matter. Like they were the packing peanuts keeping my actual product from getting crushed in the mail, but the product wasn’t really that breakable in the first place.
I reiterate, I should not have had to play the original game to understand or care about the plot of this one.
Another major annoyance is actually the fact that, when you’re near your “goal,” the walk cycle automatically slows down—so if you want to walk away for any reason, you have to walk a certain distance away before Cloud resumes his typical walk/run cycle. It’s like your goal location is a deep puddle of molasses and Cloud is up to his waist in it—when it could easily be reprogrammed that it gives a small warning, or Cloud could just abruptly stop, as he does in several other instances. I understand that it’s a mechanic to warn the player that they’re close to a cutscene/event/thing, but it interrupts the flow of the game as much as a warning would, to me.
The one and only fight in the game, for me, that felt like hitting a wall was the Hell House fight. It felt very...tedious. Despite the “Assess” Materia’s suggestions, the entire last chunk of the fight is almost entirely reliant on patience and luck, because it puts up barriers and then flies around, and that was tedious as hell. It’s the only fight I looked up online to check to see how dumb I was being, but the videos I found all showed the same thing—biding your time through an entire segment of the fight. The only fight that caught me off-guard (as in I died very quickly) was the assignment where we’re fighting alone while Aerith is getting dressed, and the “Grungy Bandit” comes at you with a flying knee move and you’re just taken down instantly because one of the others drops a stun grenade—but then you just reset and the fight get easier. I know others had a lot of trouble with Eligor in the Train Graveyard, but that one didn’t actually get me at all. One guy I watched actually almost died several times and then gave a very large rant about how the game was bad about having difficulty spikes at random, and I can see where he’s coming from, because all three of these fights can be a pain if you’re not ready for them.
I have a good number of complaints about this game, but these were the primary ones that stopped me from actually loving it.
Now, to little things I enjoyed but can’t mention without spoilers:
I love the fact that, when he’s in the dress, they did not make Cloud’s hands effeminate—he has them crossed in the cutscenes and it actually shows that they didn’t take away the shape of his hands—they just took his gloves off.
The most satisfying fight in the game (that I’ve done, at least) was actually the Bahamut fight at the end of Chadley’s missions. It felt really satisfying to win that fight, like I actually earned the victory. It didn’t take me more than one try, but I did have to try at it—I had to use Regen and Manawall and I still wound up losing characters a couple of times, just in the process of “oh, oh, that’s how this is going.” It was the most challenging fight that didn’t have a dumb “wait it out” stage—which was amazing, because ones like Hell House and Eligor—those both had long stages of “wait it out, try not to die, do what damage you can,” which doesn’t feel like winning, it feels like a hollow victory. It literally feels like winning by being patient, which isn’t really winning in a game that encourages active combat.
I love the little nods to the original soundtrack—I’m sure that there are a lot of people who still listen to it now, so I like that they made the tracks a little collectible in the game.
I adore Cloud’s frequent expressions for the audience, like, “Weirdly perfect timing” when the ladder is withdrawn in your second reactor mission.
I like a lot of the very quiet moments of humor in the game, particularly like, when asked if the church was hit by debris, Aerith hesitates and clearly thinks, “uh, well…” before saying, “No, not debris, no.” While the audience thinks, “Uh-huh. Cloud is not technically debris.” Or Cloud clearly taking a hit to his pride and showing that squishy underbelly with an, “I’ll do it for three gil—I’m running a special on toad kings,” because that’s totally a thing, Cloud. (Plus the tiny children literally swarming him because he’s “so cool,” which is hilarious because he has no idea what to do with this particular situation.)
I admit that this game has done one job spectacularly—I will wind up playing the original game, despite never having any real interest in doing so before, (as I couldn’t, at the time, play it) and then it was overhyped, and then people began to say that it was actually kind of bad, it was just popular because it was a “first of its kind,” so I just didn’t necessarily care, after many years. But now, I will definitely wind up playing the game, just to see if it is so poorly written and directed and aimless-feeling.
I’m sure that I’m one of the very few who have this level of resentment for so much of this game, but I just...needed to get it out of my system.
I’m happy to discuss if anyone wants to talk to me about it, of course, and this was a lot of me just being a huge nitpick, but I admit that I’ve come back to this several times and my opinions haven’t changed very much as I’ve been writing it out and editing it. I am working on clearing some more of the trophies, and I intend to try the “Hard” mode of the game just to see what I can get out of it, but I think my complaints will remain.
If I make it through the game a second time, I may yet come back and make an update in a later reblog.
Thanks for sticking around if you read it all! I just needed to vent a bit. I hope everybody is doing well out there, staying safe and healthy and hopefully managing to keep some of your mental health intact!
