Your basement in Nibelheim: Unpacking the new themes of Final Fantasy VII RemakeĀ
The story told by Final Fantasy VII Remake is a reconfigured one. It tweaks, adds, and cuts the original's narrative in ways that seem designed to bring something new and unanticipated to the experience. However, these alterations are neither random nor incidental. They follow deliberate themes and patterns in the same way a completely original story might. Though not as readily perceptible, the Remake has a coherent outlook that it expresses most clearly through changes to the original narrative. All of its major changes are expressions of internally consistent concerns, albeit ones that differ dramatically from the originalās. By examining the principles underlying those narrative changes, we can understand the thematic axis along which they have been made and the message the Remake ultimately expresses.
Spoilers for everything follow.
Good guys good, bad guys bad
The first major narrative change appears at the end of the first chapter. At the culmination of Avalanche's mission to bomb the Sector One reactor, we see Shinra was actually responsible for the subsequent massive explosion that claimed many lives. The bomb brought by Avalanche was several orders of magnitude smaller, only enough to destroy a few pipes.Ā
In the original game, the opening bombing mission serves as a moral orientation to the world, and as a keystone event by which that morality will later be re-evaluated. Avalanche examines the justness of their actions as early as a couple hours in and is confronted about them directly as late as forty hours onward. The moral ambiguity they express is echoed in many situations and characters in between, from the conflict between Dyne and Barret, the addition of Shinra kidnapper Cait Sith to the cast of heroes, and your frequent run-ins with the openly amoral but otherwise amicable Turks. The cast is a self-interested one and the world they navigate is tangled, often without a clear or righteous path forward.Ā
In the Remake, Avalanche is never made aware that they aren't culpable for the explosion of the Sector 1 reactor. In fact, they agonize far more about the loss of life they are no longer in any way responsible for. In doing so, they enact a kind of moral pageantry - we as players have already been assured of their innocence and each time they question themselves, we are only further reassured that our heroes are fundamentally good. The world of the Remake is morally uncomplicated, and any character it expects you to extend sympathy towards will voice their conscience clearly, up to and including the Turks before they drop the Sector 7 plate.
The corollary is that the villains have become morally uncomplicated. They no longer have any need for the sort of rumination that is regularly employed to reassert that the good guys are good. Sephiroth illustrates this with particular clarity. In the original game, Sephiroth is morally reprehensible but easy to understand and empathize with because we participated in the reflective journey of self-discovery that ultimately made him a monster. His turn toward annihilation is the highly motivated result of coming face to face with the truth about the impact Shinra has had on his life - in other words, roughly the same thing that drives the cast of heroes.Ā
He also expresses his goals in the same terms as Avalanche, orienting his actions around the hypothetical good of the Planet. There is an implicit condemnation of Avalanche's heroism embedded in Sephiroth, who clearly understands himself to be righteous. As the primary antagonist, Sephiroth is the most fleshed out, but most of the villains with any degree of screen time illustrate their own complexities. The shallowest among them, President Shinra, is summarily killed off in the opening act.
But the Remake is not a morally murky world, and neither is it's incarnation of Sephiroth. His motives are either inarticulate or entirely absent as he appears throughout the story at regular intervals to menace Cloud for menacing's sake. Evil is now one of his innate qualities, the same as President Shinraās, and adding purpose to his actions will only muddy the waters. While Tifa wrings her hands over the harm she may be inflicting by turning off Sector 4's sun lamps - a surely temporary measure - Sephiroth antagonizes Cloud for no reason in particular. Shinra's newfound culpability for Avalanche's bombing has similarly flimsy and inconsequential motivation. Ultimately, nobody's reason really matters; the point is simply to display their moral character, which is always exactly as we anticipate it.Ā
Cloud may flirt with selling his friends out for gil and Barret may wish to kill President Shinra, but neither will follow through because they are Good, as solidified by their intention. Even Cait Sith appears to sorrowfully witness the plate dropping, thus absolving Reeve for his complicity by proxy. Bad outcomes are the result of bad actors with bad intentions. The good guys may feel conflicted and responsible, but no harm can truly come from them. Otherwise, what's the point of bad guys?
Sadness is unnatural
The point of bad guys, if you're wondering, is to bring harm, suffering and loss.
The penultimate boss of the Remake is an incarnation of the Arbiters of Fate, a newly introduced concept. Ghostlike beings known as Whispers appear regularly throughout the story, often during familiar scenes from the original game, interfering with events to keep them "on track." Before the main cast squares off against their ultimate manifestation, Aerith and Red XIII explain that the Remake's Planet is one with a fixed destiny, and these creatures are its enforcers.
"But this isn't how it's supposed to be," Aerith tells us, which is the point to their presence in the first place.
Over the course of the Remake, it becomes apparent that she anticipates certain plot points of the original game, and in particular her own death. This is a point that Cloud seems to remember, albeit vaguely, as well. The implication of the Whisper's presence and Aerith's dialogue about defeating them to "put things right" supposes that the original game's most famously sorrowful moment was the product of interlopers, working on behalf of fate.Ā
To be clear, destiny is not the point of the Whispers. The point of them is that they create outcomes, and the undesirable ones can be changed through their defeat. This is further underscored by the ending of the game following their defeat, in which we see Zack, Biggs, Wedge and Jessie's deaths undone.
Final Fantasy VII was a game very informed by loss and uncertainty. Aerith's death is memetic for how shocking it was, yes, but in its original context the shock comes from the suddenness and permanence of the loss. More sorrow follows, as Cloud breaks down completely and Meteor is summoned. It hangs in the sky over the last act, the physical manifestation of a pall that Aerith's death cast over the game. Even as we approach resolution, the game underscores the uncertainty of life as one of its key themes - no one can be sure whether Holy will work or not, and if it does, what effect it might have on humanity as a whole. Mortality is a neutral and inescapable fact of life.
The sad things that happened in Final Fantasy VII largely did not happen because a being or force made them happen. The most attributable tragedy is Aerith's death by Sephiroth's sword, but her death was unique in the broader media landscape in that it's purpose was not to rally the heroes against the villain. It was to convey the suddenness and pointlessness of the death of a loved one - how abrupt and unjust it is to lose someone. Hollywood-style farewell speeches were deliberately eschewed for a more realistic and sobering finality. Cloud's emotional reaction and Aerith's funeral are the focal points of the scenes that follow.Ā
When things happen for a reason in Final Fantasy VII, the long arm of consequence is usually at play. Most tragedies in the game, including those wrought by Sephiroth, trace their origins back to the Shinra Electric Power Company. There is no fixed destiny, only the culmination of callous decisions made in hubris, greed and self-interest. All suffering wrought by Shinra pays dividends, but the only organizing point to it is that inhumanity and cruelty are self-perpetuating cycles, all the more difficult to escape once you are caught up in the pain of them. Thus, learning to deal with the pains of life truthfully and gracefully is a vital endeavour. Their ability to do so is ultimately what marks Avalanche as the heroes of this story.Ā
The Remake does not believe in the random cruelties of the universe and is not much interested in depicting them either. Death is a markedly different affair. When it happens to Biggs and Jessie, neither can be sent off without a farewell speech delivered against stirring strings. The people in the Sector 7 slums largely escape their pointlessly cruel death. Aerith's death is reconceptualized from a tragedy to a universal wrong needing to be righted, something that never could have happened if things had gone the way that they were supposed to. Loss and sorrow and suffering are not a part of the natural fabric of this universe, but aberrations visited upon it by external actors.
This is why it all must be "put right" by bringing back Zack, Biggs, Wedge and Jessie, and by implicitly averting Aerith's death. Suffering can be avoided through direct physical confrontation with whoever bears the blame. Obviously this means Sephiroth, who is actually responsible for Aerithās death and has no other narrative reason to fight you, but it also means the Whispers.Ā The concept of Fate is a stand-in for your prior intuitive understanding that Aerith and Zackās death are integral and unassailable parts of the story Final Fantasy VII was trying to tell. Loss is not so inevitable after all.
It's all about you
Of course, there is another dimension to Aerith's impassioned plea to defeat fate and set things right.
The Whispers aren't an emotionally engaging concept. The rough idea of destiny doesn't really make for good table stakes. Their meaning is only revealed at the eleventh hour, so why should you care whether or not the events of the universe are on the rails when none of the driving action in the past 45 hours has suggested you should? The answer, of course, is that you've played this game before.
The glimpses of a predetermined future and the sadness that must be defeated aren't really concerns of the characters - the "future" that needs to be defeated is in your memory. This game was written for returning players almost exclusively. Sephiroth's every appearance and the Whispers every interference hang on your foreknowledge of what is about to happen. The climax of this game is a confrontation with the most culturally enduring feeling it inspired. Namely, sadness - and sadness at Aerith's death in particular, one that fans begged for an aversion to in the many years that followed.
In one of the most memorable sequences of the original Final Fantasy VII, we're given an up-close view of Sephiroth's becoming as he transitions before our eyes from ally to villain. What happens to Sephiroth is often colloquially described as a break from reality but is better understood as a deliberate reordering. Faced with a reality he can't accept, Sephiroth reconfigures his perception of the world. His new worldview places himself and Jenova at the center, where good and evil are stark black and white and he has no more need of pain. His role is to be the chosen hero, so what is there to be sad about? Later, the same Nibelheim basement provides the site for Cloud to forget himself and undergo his own reconstruction of identity.
The world of the Remake has undergone a similar reconfiguration, but it's not Sephiroth at the center - it's you. The Remake is an incarnation of Final Fantasy VII adjusted to accommodate your hazy memories of it. But no such project can truly tailor itself to the particular and personal memories and experiences of someone engaging with a story for the first time. It engages instead with the cultural memory - evident in the emphasis on rectifying Aerith and Zack's deaths - and rounds out the rest with one key assumption about who you were when you first encountered Final Fantasy VII.
Specifically, that you were a child.
That you remember the good guys being good, the bad guys being bad and the sad parts being sad. The complexities and nuances beyond those points were difficult to grasp. To include them in the Remake would be to transgress upon your memory of the original story. The clear political and philosophical voice of the original might feel intrusive and awkward now that you are old enough to meaningfully disagree with it. The Remake wants to surprise you, but not disrupt you. "Nostalgia" is usually the word people reach for but I think even more apt in this case is "comfort."
The Remake is a comfort game, and as you sit in your proverbial basement and devour it, it tries to tell you what it thinks you want to hear. It supposes that your memory of the original, however detailed, is emotionally and intellectually straightforward, and aims to remake its story from that memory rather than from the meaning of the original game.
Engaging directly with the player's hypothetical and emotionally charged memory is the culmination of the Remakeās first episode of the Remake because it is the point of that episode. Built on acknowledging and reinforcing the memory of the player, the game naturally ends differently. The childish memories of the player is the primary concern of the Remake, and the finale naturally rearranges itself into a tacit promise to fulfill equally naive dreams that never came true in the original.
Illusions of Nibelheim
The net result is that the Final Fantasy VII Remake tells a story with a very different meaning and focal point than Final Fantasy VII, and in fact an often antithetical one. This is not surprising, as their philosophical foundations differ vastly. Where Final Fantasy VII was concerned with human mortality, changing identity and locating ourselves in a broader environment, the Remake is concerned with reflection and personal recollection, and in particular how those reflections are distributed across two very different points in time (time - a theme we are likely to see plenty of as the Remake saga continues on). The original looks outward, and the Remake looks inward.
The striking difference between the two calls to mind another of Sephirothās scenes in the original, the one that forms the cloth from which his every appearance in the Remake has been cut. Taunting Cloud and Tifa, he conjures an illusory burning Nibelheim and confronts their faulty memory of the events that transpired there. Sephirothās point is this: āWhat Iāve shown you is reality. What you remember, that is the illusion.ā
Itās an illustrative example of the gulf in meaning between two works we once believed were intended to tell the same story. In the Remake, memory is the foundation of reality. In Final Fantasy VII, memory is precious, but deeply unreliable, and never preferable to truth.Ā
