How Do We Make Sense Of What Happened In The Final Fantasy 7 Remake?
A generation after the landmark release, its remake is a much riskier and audacious project than anyone expected. That doesn’t mean you have to like it.
Tristan Young @talltristan
Final Fantasy 7 was an event. It was formative. It introduced not just a generation to a grander idea of what video games could be, but video games into the lexicon of pop culture. It proved that narrative scope as boundless and melodramatic as Lord of The Rings or Star Wars could exist in an interactive medium. It was compared to motion pictures. Print ads ran in Playboy. Through sheer force of spectacle and technological innovation Final Fantasy 7 seared it’s unforgettable story into the memory of millions of gamers; even non-gamers. That’s where it has existed for decades, in our memories. While the blocky polygonal character models, pre-rendered backgrounds, and once state of the art full motion videos look comically anachronistic now, Final Fantasy 7 is still perfect in our memories, insofar as we can recreate the moments in our head. The notion that all the wonders of the modern age could recreate them for us has been dangled in front of the public for over a decade.
Warning: Major spoilers for both the FF7 remake and the original coming at you.
Rumours turned into tech demos. Tech demos turned into cruel teases, which turned into disillusionment, which finally became ecstatic surprise that yes, the Final Fantasy 7 remake was happening. Seeing Cloud, Barrett, Tifa and the rest travel their fictional planet several times over to stop the nightmare that was Sephiroth was a riveting thought. The quest to confront a genocidal man from ritualistically sacrificing the planet to a meteor to attain space fairing godhood was my favourite story growing up. I couldn’t wait to replay it again, exactly as I remembered. When we finally got the remake earlier this month, things we’re different. Sort of. Events almost didn’t happen the way you remember, until they did. Characters that make it all the way to the end of the tale don’t. But then, yes in fact they do. What was going on here? Why was it going on? The remake plays heavily with abstract notions of destiny made manifest. Whispering ghosts that exist to keep the story on track. Cloud and the rest of our beloved characters begin to understand they have specific roles to play in the grand scheme of things, and act against this sense of control. Aren’t we, the player, only supposed to know that?
The Whispers, as they are referred to in the remake, make their presence known to intervene at key points of the game, sometimes even at not terribly key points. Their disruptions seem random and incoherent at first as they relate to seemingly innocuous events. When Barrett explains early on that Cloud and Tifa will not be going on the Sector 5 bombing run, we don’t think much of it. Of course they are. Surely this is merely the game’s way of padding out it’s narration, adding in some expositional wrinkles that will eventually be sculpted into circumstances that have our main characters going on the mission after all, as they are meant to. What they are meant to do is not something we consider heavily in a second telling of a piece of fiction. We don’t give it too much thought then, that the reason Jessie and Wedge bail out of the mission is they are both mildly injured in newly inserted incidents involving the Whispers. All we can discern is that these things have attacked secondary members of the good guy squad and should therefore be construed as cryptic antagonists.
It goes on like this for some time. The Whispers come and go at times both opportune and otherwise to exert their will in esoteric ways. Only towards the end of the game does a pattern in emerge from the chaos. That pattern is order and control. It begins to reveal itself after Sephiroth murders President Shinra, one of the dramatic highlights of the Midgar climax dating back to the original. This time however, Sephiroth isn’t done. He stabs Barrett in the heart, murdering him. The compulsion to put the controller down in disgust at the heretical revisionism here quickly subsides when Barrett is magical revived, unscathed, by a Whisper. While there are a couple clunky exposition dumps prior that try to explain what’s happening (failing either due to a challenging localisation to the west or due to Final Fantasy games being historically bad at this kind of stuff), the muddled concept finally comes into stark relief. The Whispers, guided by a grand overarching force, are there to ensure that destiny is fulfilled. Everything that happened in the original has to happen the same way here. Because that’s how it happens; that’s how it happened. How do the Whispers, and their attendant Arbiter of Fate, as it will soon be known as, know these things?
FF7 and its remake are not to entities that operate separately in distinct cosmological vacuums. They exist within the same continuum, at least from a perspective beyond standard space and time. That’s how, although it’s a hard thing to wrap your head around. The whispering forces of destiny and Arbiter of Fate intervene to the extent they do in the remake because FF7 did happen. Or it will happen. The time line itself doesn’t matter too much; only that destiny is able to intervene in such over bearing manners because it knows what is supposed to happen. Fate, as a construct in this game, has a meta understanding of what is supposed to happen in the remake because it has or will or is currently observing these events in the original. That can only happen if they operate within the same existential realm, at least to an extent. This is a big idea.
This is the remake intimating, that no, this is not going to go the way you think- or rather know- it should. It will not be bound to a generation of pop culture reverence. 20 years ago with Metal Gear Solid 2, at the time possibly the most anticipated game ever, Hideo Kojima used the game’s pretext to disseminate an ungodly complex message to it’s players about the nature of expectations, what fiction and information really mean in an interactive medium, and how our own biases are shaped by unseen manipulations. It did all of this in one of the most brain melting meta-narratives ever committed to a game. To this day it remains one of the most divisive, but energetically discussed games ever. The FF7 remake appears to be chasing similar ambitions, intersecting the literal experiences of the characters and ourselves to signal it will not be bound by expectations, no matter how frustrated the short term reactions may be (mine included!). Fitting for a project that is releasing through a series of instalments over an unknown period of time, the remake is playing the long game.
It conveys this message in a fascinating, albeit very messy, blend of narrative and meta-textual signalling. It’s not just director Tetsuya Normura audaciously claiming he has the creative licence to do whatever he wants. Rather those sentiments are woven ambitiously, if inelegantly, into the game’s story. Cloud and his friends have no external understanding of what their destiny is, and yet can see, interact with, and eventually challenge those forces of destiny when the time comes. The will of canonical purity is exerting itself within the game’s seemingly hermetically sealed narrative, and the characters are rebelling against that exertion as they come to understand it. Concurrently, on a meta level, the game is signalling that destiny- the way things are supposed to go- is not so abstract that it exists only outside of the game’s story and within its place in pop culture. The membrane of the two ideas is permeable. If its iconic place in the medium is something that can be observed and interacted with inside of the game, perhaps it can be altered. This is where the climax of the remake leads us. Cloud and company challenge the Arbiter of Fate, and they win. They have seemingly overcome the forces of destiny, and as Aries (I grew up with the western localization of the original so I’m going with Aries and not Arieth, let’s not make a big deal of it) intoned, set upon a path to change not just everything, but possibly themselves. When the subsequent instalments of the remake, detailing the remaining 90% of the story of FF7, release, the Whispers will seemingly no longer be there to ensure things go the way we think they should. Barrett could die. Could Aries actually live?
These are fascinating things to consider, especially given their integration into the story. However they present some problems as well. First, as far video games go, FF7 is the prefect story. What begins as tense battle between planet loving eco terrorists and a cruel, polluting corporation spirals into a grandiose tale into the very life of the planet put into jeopardy by Sephiroth and his cosmically brutal ambitions. We go from blowing up some reactors to a mystical meteor on course to crack the planet open so Sephiroth can absorb the world’s essence and become a celestial god, all living souls in his way be damned. There is already a lot going on! Sephiroth already represented an existential threat at least as intimidating as the notion of what fate means to a story and to its characters. His very existences proved antithetical to that of every other living thing on the planet by the end. The original did a very good job of conveying just how fundamentally terrifying the very idea of Sephiroth is, but that idea gets a little lost in the mix this time around (although the final moments with him in his part of the story are both original and fantastic). The problem is now his storyline is sharing time with the challenging one’s destiny storyline. At the climax of the Midgar sequence in the original, the enormity of the threat that Sephiroth represents is clearly articulated by Cloud. Sephiroth, somehow, is back, and no matter what he is up to, it will mean the end of everything; he must be stopped at all costs. Now this revelation is somewhat secondary to the team deciding it’s time to challenge destiny.
These notions also have the potential to re-contextualize our experiences playing the original FF7- for the worse. If the game posits that the forces of destiny exist to exert their will upon all aspects of this story, does that also apply to the original? If Sephiroth wants to defy destiny in hopes of ensuring he is successful in cracking the world open, does that imply that invisible hand of destiny is what prevented him last time and not the actions of the characters, and by extension of the player? I remember how hard it was take down the Materia Keeper in the Nebelheim Mountains. I died countless times before finally besting the mutated incarnation of Hojo. The trials, tribulations, and grinding that goes into surmounting the Ruby and Emerald Weapons is the stuff of legends. The inference here is that none of that was due to the perseverance of the player, but the will of destiny. That doesn’t sit right.
Furthermore, and this is more of a curiosity that may seem unresolvable than an actual problem, to what extent does challenging destiny fit in with Sephiroth’s plan to remake the world into him? Sephiroth has always been depicted as having supernatural extra sensory perception. Is he aware that destiny would ensure his plan to summon the meteor would fail, as what happened in the original? Is that why is he goading Cloud into challenging destiny? In the original, Aries’ death, devastating though it was, was integral in ensuring she could commune with the planet effectively enough to activate the holy materia which would thwart the meteor. Is Sephiroth trying to manipulate events to prevent this? How can he be aware of the meta-implications of destiny’s absence? It does allow for some excellent dramatic beats towards the end. After The Arbiter of Fate has been eliminated, Sephiroth, in seemingly and surprisingly genuine terms, asks Cloud to join him on his quest. Sephiroth once tried to explain that Cloud doesn’t need to feel sorrow or pain at the loss of loved ones because these are emotional scripts that Cloud has been freed from due to the evil legacy that has been forced upon him against his will. Similarly, he implores Cloud to consider that he does not need to follow the same path as scripted in the original; he can follow any path, even one by Sephiroth’s side. It’s interesting that due to the genetic heritage Cloud shares with Sephiroth, he considers it for just a split second.
Is this what fans want though? Surely not when they were going into the remake for the first time, but now that the die is cast, how will these narrative and meta-textual choices paly out? What comes next is anyone’s guess. As Aries says towards the game’s climax, in terms more eloquent and poetic than the rest of the clunky writing would make you expect: “Freedom. Boundless, terrifying, freedom”. Not long after we see a flash back of Cloud’s friend and mentor Zack, who died protecting an amnesiac Cloud due to the traumatic experiments done to him after his first encounter with Sephiroth, stand off against a battalion of Shinra guards. Miraculously Zack lives. He died in the original, and it was fundamental in forming Cloud’s identity. Now that Cloud has defeated destiny incarnate, the game is signalling that anything past, present and future can happen as the remake continues. Considering the game’s fiercely beloved place in history, that is indeed terrifying. FF7 is my favourite game ever. This terrifies me.
The final words of the remake’s prologue belong to Aries. She sombrely says, as the team says goodbye to Midgar, and as a much larger world opens up to them, “The steel sky, I miss it”. The direction and writing of the remake is often awkward, but here is a rare perfect moment of narrative and meta synergy. We all know and love the story of Final Fantasy 7. We want nothing more than to experience it again in greater fidelity. To stick to its rhythms, to be constricted to its preordained narrative beats, walled in by what we are familiar and comfortable with. I will miss those rigid and predictable confines very much as the remake continues and ventures into uncharted territory for its characters and its players. Freedom, as Aries put it, is terrifying; but given the potential to reach for it, how can we deny that from the characters we love? We wouldn’t want such a fate for ourselves, and as the remake insists, these characters and we are more connected than we thought. We’ve been waiting nearly 15 years to relieve Final Fantasy 7 as we remember it, but in the here and now these characters are living it for the first time. Perhaps we should want them to have that choice, even if it means we have to keep a beloved part of our past locked in our memories forever.