Final Fantasy 7 Remake Sucks? Boy Do I Have The Game For You

With every new announcement out of Square Enix about the changes made to their upcoming Final Fantasy 7 remake, it seems a new chorus of sorrow is born. On Twitter, on Facebook, across the vast and varied wastes of internet gaming site comment sections and forum threads, the gnashing and rending of teeth over the Final Fantasy 7 remake continues apace with each revelation of another change.

If it’s not the Final Fantasy 7 battle system being brought from 1997 to 2017, it’s the idea of a multi-part series causing sturm und drang of the highest caliber.

This being the Internet, the hysteria is often either based on either no credible source, the worst possible scenario, the most malicious of possible motives, or the wildest possible extrapolations.

Or, the worst affront possible, the idea that Square Enix might possibly want to do something so terrible, so horrifying, so repulsive to the spirit that my very soul is shriveling as I type these words convulsed in a rictus of horror: make money.

Never mind that game director Tetsuya Nomura has already pointed out, “If it's a full remake, then of course, we want to take a different approach. If we actually just upgraded the visuals -- there'd be no need for me to direct it.” Never mind his completely sensible explanation of his team’s direction: "In terms of taking such an iconic game and giving it a fresh feel, we can't go into too much detail but we're not intending for this to become a one-to-one remake, or just the original Final Fantasy VII with better graphics.”

Never mind producer Yoshinori Kitase, who directly cited “the same feeling of density of the original” and the “volume of content” as concerns the team has had in producing their remake. And never mind Square Enix itself, which stated, "As a gaming experience, each entry will have the volume of content equal to a full-sized game.”

Even if we handwave all of that away, this level of pathos over the concept of a game from 19-fucking-97 getting not a remaster, not a redo, not a do-over, but a proper bloody remake strikes me as wild. Skepticism is one thing, but grieving as though the concept of a remake is a bullet piercing Final Fantasy 7 ’s beating heart? Absurd. So I have wonderful news to bring to the people. Gather round, y’all:

You can still play the original game. You can still play it! You can still play the original Final Fantasy 7. It’s still playable. You can still play it. It’s all yours.

You can even pick your poison: the PS4 port of the original PC port is available to download, but it’s also available on Steam and has been since 2012. The Final Fantasy 7 PC/PS4 port has everything you could possibly cry about them changing: chocobo breeding, stupid submarine mini-game, antiquated turn-based battle system, charming typos and localization errors, overworld, blocky little pixels -- everything. Literally everything. You can even play the original Final Fantasy 7 on your damn phone.

If you are only looking for a relic preserved in amber and barely touched in all its creaky perfection save for a few optimization tweaks, then you’ve had the original Final Fantasy 7 available to you for a few years now. But let the people who want a remake -- not a remaster, not “change this but not that,” not a reskin, but an actual remake by the deeply invested professionals who made the game a classic the first time around -- have their moment. You will always have the original Final Fantasy 7 game that you loved so well, and no one is interested in or capable of taking that away from you.