Final Fantasy 7 Remake is a Shit Game

If you've to publicly execute me for my opinion, at least make it quick and painless.

I do realise I am in the minority that is wholly unimpressed, and even pissed off by this game, and I also realise that a lot of my displeasure stems from personal beliefs, expectations, and perhaps unfair standards that no doubt makes me sound like a whiny, petulant child. I'm writing this regardless because maybe someone out there can gleam some use from my thoughts and opinions, but mostly because I either write to vent, or throw my controller at the TV and hurt somebody.

I've never played any FF game before 7R. I've zero context and expectations for 7R in terms of story integrity, the new things they've added to the original, etc.. I'm also writing this before having even completed the story, which I realise is unfair, but had it not been for the fact that my copy of 7R is a borrowed one, I'd have snapped both discs and burnt it in a dumpster fire, because it got me so angry with its gameplay. Safe it is to say then, that I am done with this game, and this is as fair a review and critique I'm going to be able to give.

For the most part, my criticism of 7R comes from an action game standpoint, seeing as I've yet to complete the story and can't comment on that. I've been spoiled silly by the best action game in the history of gaming: Devil May Cry V, and I will be drawing comparisons from that, as unfair as it might be. I do realise the original is a turn based RPG, and in spite of its looks, it is equal parts RPG as it is an action game. However, that shouldn't be a valid defence of the game, because half the game being good is like saying half a marriage being good is a successful marriage; both sides have to commit and complement each other to truly work in a symbiotic relationship. And I'm saying that 7R is a bad game because it attempts to marry an RPG game with action elements, which hasn't worked out in my opinion.

Minor spoilers in boss names ahead.

For starters, this game is spitefully obtuse with its game mechanics. Even if you had the patience to dig through its taverns of tutorials, there are just some things it doesn't bother to mention. The game's dodge is entirely useless, as not only is simply running away faster, but the dodge itself has no invulnerability frames (I-frames) at all, meaning that you are entirely susceptible to damage even when dodging. Why the hell is the dodge even in the game if it doesn't give you I-frames, or if it doesn't make you dodge faster? It's a complete joke of a mechanic, and the fact that there is even a Materia that works with dodging at all is just proof of how unaware the developers are of how useless the dodge is, or what makes a good action game a good action game. If you don't want to give the dodge I-frames to maintain realism, at least make it faster than simply running away! And I'm using the comparatively athletic Cloud and Tifa's dodges for this; Aerith's dodge is so pitiful, it might as well be for aesthetics only.

During the first Reno fight for example, he has a lunging attack that deals about 600 damage with a clean hit. Even if you kept running in the same direction before he even starts his charge up animation for the lunge to after he executes the move, you will be caught by it. That's entirely bullshit, because it's not like he tracks you with it or anything. It's simply too fast to physically dodge, unless you're literally on opposite ends of the arena. I can't stun him out of the animation either, be it with physical strikes or the slow ass magic spells he's weak to, so I guess my only option is to block it. But even when you're blocking it, you still take well in excess of 200 damage, and the knockback on it is so severe that by the time you recover from the knockback, so has Reno from the cooldown of his animation, which means you have no window to attack him after his cheap, spammable lunge. So I was getting stone walled there for a bit, thinking, "well what the fuck am I supposed to do?" I can't out run it, I can't interrupt it, and I can't block it. Everything the game has taught me to do, has not worked.

Asking a FF fanatic friend of mine for advice, I learned that you're supposed to block Reno's lunge, but in Punisher Mode, as blocks in Punisher Mode has an auto built in counter attack upon taking a hit, thereby cancelling the knockback you'd normally receive, and the instant nature of the counterattack means you open up Reno for follow up strikes to punish his lunge. My first reaction was, "well how the fuck was I supposed to know that?" More importantly, "what would've led me into thinking to try that?" Punisher Mode is activated by pressing Triangle as Cloud. Triangle is the "slower, stronger hit" option for all the characters I've played up to that point. I'd use it mostly to build up the pressure gauge of enemies if and when the opportunity arises, or simply to wail on an enemy I've staggered entirely. It's an entirely offensive thing, so why would I think the block works differently in Punisher Mode? It's fine for games to not outright tell you everything; in fact, I believe that games shouldn't do that, because it destroys a sense of wonder, experimentation, and discovery. But when something is required of me, I fully expect the game to either tell me it's required and how to do it, or it shouldn't be required at all. The Punisher block is required in the Reno fight. There is literally no other viable option with any merit to react against his lunge move. If you didn't know it, you'd die from death by a thousand (or, well, six) cuts.

It's instances like that that really put in the spotlight that FF is an RPG game first, action game second. 7R has been praised for its expansive pools of options it gives you with which weapon you use, how you build each weapon with enhancements and Materia, and a multitude of unique abilities each weapon can learn from their equipped weapon. It all sounds very impressive on paper, but in practice, you only have ONE option, because the action half of the formula simplifies it to that.

It's going to be very difficult to explain this, but the action genre has a few unwritten rules that make the games good and enjoyable, in the same ways that the RPG genres have their own set of rules. One of these unwritten rules for an action game is, "It must be possible to take no damage if the player is good enough". However, this is immediately thrown out the window even in the demo of the game, and the problem persists in the full game; enemies are wholly willing and perfectly happy to snipe you from off screen, with zero visual cues because, duh, they're not being depicted on the screen, and little, if any, audio cues, because they are most likely being drowned out by everything else happening around you, and are most likely at a distance from you as well. Compare and contrast this to how a series like Devil May Cry handles this situation, for example.

Even from the first DMC game back in 2002, it was a conscious decision programmed into the game that "thou who ist offscreen shalt not attack thy player". This way, only the enemies you can clearly see will attack you, and to balance this shift of power to the player, enemies that primarily attack from long range have very loud, distinctive audio cues, such that the player will hear them and be given a chance to react. If you've ever played even the first Mission of Devil May Cry 3, for example, you will know for sure the Hell Lust's cry, and that it signifies it's doing its lunging slash, because it is required knowledge. You might get caught the first, second, or even a third time, but certainly never a fourth. The game subtly teaches you its mechanics and conditions the player so well, it puts our education system to shame. The toned down off screen aggression, coupled with distinct audio cues for each enemy means that you as a player has all the information at hand at any time. If you take a hit in DMC, you have no excuses. You're never left to think, "what the fuck was I supposed to do there?", "how the fuck was I supposed to know that was going to happen?", nor are you ever left feeling like you've been hit by a cheap shot. You have all the information, and you are wholly in control.

With 7R, it is exactly the opposite; almost every hit I take left me thinking, "what the fuck was I supposed to do there? How the fuck was I supposed to know about that?" Even the first boss in the demo, the Scorpion Sentinel, fires volleys of homing missiles that you have no hope of dodging or hiding from. You're just meant to stand there block, weathering the rain of hellfire and continually eating damage. Same with the Airbuster boss. Hell, you get shot and chipped out of battle in some situations. In an action game, the HP bar of your character is a sacred thing. It is a direct representation of how well you're doing as a player, and to take away unfairly from it feels to me like taking marbles from a kid: unjust, unnecessary, and cruel. Taking damage is directly wired to my brain as, "you're doing that wrong, stop or change that", almost akin to physical pain in real life. Good action games condition that response in its players. But how and what am I supposed to do in a big, open space, with a volley of homing missiles after my face? Stand there and block like a dumbass, I guess? Again, there's only ONE plausible thing to do in that scenario, which is a complete slap across the face of all the complexity, depth, and options that the RPG side of the game gives you, unless you're telling me I missed picking up a "Missile o deflecto suru" Materia in my playthrough. I don't care what your Materia loadout is. I don't care what skills your character knows, you're blocking, and that's that. I don't know about you, but that's just not fun to me. In other instances, like when the Hell House has its God Mode up, you're literally just meant to run around like a little chicken shit until it wears off, which is in huge contrast to this strong, badass mercenary I'm led to believe Cloud is. Is that fun to you? Is running in a circle waiting for an arbitrary, spammable move by a boss to wear off fun, to you? It sure as hell isn't, for me. I'm not saying bosses shouldn't try these tricks to add variety and flair to them, but at least give the player some counter play to it as well, instead of forcing them into ONE suboptimal play that isn't even fun!

Compare and contrast this to how DMC handles its bosses. You have a multitude of movement and dodging options in addition to your standard dodge, some of which even have I-frames like a dodge. With Nero, you can deflect projectiles with an Overture blast. You have a Gerbera blast which not only swiftly chucks you into a direction of your choosing, but also has the same deflecting characteristic of Overture. You have Table Hopper, a faster, less cooldown, dodge activated by dodging at the last moment before an attack hits, and you can chain up to three Table Hoppers together to turn it from a defensive move into an offensive distance closer. Your gun shots can also deflect projectiles, and you can parry most melee strikes from enemies with your sword. Hell, even your jump has I-frames, because the game recognises that you have reacted in time and made an effort to dodge a hit, and rewards you for it. As Dante, your movement options are almost too numerous to list; so much so, truly skilled players can beat bosses as Dante without ever touching the ground, for example. Dante is made out to be the all conquering, ridiculously overpowered, never taking anything seriously badass in the game's narrative, and it is wholly backed up and represented in the gameplay, without it ever feeling easy for the player. Now I want you to compare this to Cloud running away like a chicken shit from a house chasing him, or standing there hiding behind his sword while taking missiles to the face; it really breaks the immersion when you're forced to be on the defensive like that. I keep thinking I must be doing something wrong. "There HAS to be other ways of doing this! There HAS to be a way of not taking damage! I must've missed out on an important tutorial or game mechanic!", I keep thinking. But, nope, you're just meant to run like a chicken shit and hide behind your sword in 7R. Even speedrunners are forced to wait. Can you not sense the agony and irony in that last sentence? Not only is that a slap in the face of the complexity and expansive options to tackle every problem the RPG side of the game promises, but it even eats into the narrative the game is trying to tell as well. Some kind of merc you turned out to be, huh Cloud?

Surprisingly to me, there actually are no damage boss fights of 7R on YouTube when I searched, though not no damage runs as of the time of writing, about 2 months since the game's release. I'll admit that the prospect of no damage runs in 7R is a bit ludicrous, as no damage implies that the AI controlled party members take no damage as well. But, regardless of the reasons why, no damage fights in 7R involve curb stomping the bosses, pressuring and staggering them to death even before they get to act, as if they do act, you're taking damage, no ifs, no buts. I want you to contrast this to no damage fights, or even no damage runs of DMC V. Every player has a different method to achieve the same result, because the toolbox is so large in DMC V, some of which makes me even shout "HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK I NEVER KNEW YOU COULD DO THAT!" (you ever tried parrying a rushing sword strike with a Shoryuken uppercut? No? Well, see it in action here vs the Final Boss). You can run like a chicken shit, sure. You can even hold the block button for quite a while if you have to. But those are the suboptimal, not cool, and not fun ways to play an action game. I implore you to watch any no damage fight of DMC V, and note how there isn't a wasted moment where nothing is happening, or that the player is forced into running or hiding. There is no one single "correct" way to tackle any given situation. And that right there to me is what makes games, as an interactive medium, so unique, powerful, and expressive. This interactivity, this expansive list of options with no correct answer, is what makes a game a game. If everyone is forced into one solution, I might as well go watch someone else play the game on YouTube. I might as well go back to school. What unique experience do I stand to gleam from playing the game myself?

Given the super linear, curb stomping approach of no damage running a boss, pre-emptive knowledge of not only the game's mechanics in terms of loadout, but also each boss' specific weaknesses, is a requirement. That's information and equipment you're never going to have early game. This makes the game appear to me that you either know fully and exactly what you're doing, or you're going in blind and getting your shit kicked out of you for the first few fights until you learn. While getting my shit kicked out of me is how I personally learn, I find that there's very little bridging between the two extremes, which is very discouraging for new players, and makes the learning curve very steep. I watch speedruns and no damage runs of 7R hoping to learn something, but all I see is "the boss sits there pressured and staggered while the player wails on them". In most games nowadays when you die, the loading screens give you some helpful hints and tips as to how to defeat the boss, for example. In DMC V, you're even given a training mode where you can adjust difficulty, enemy health, regenerating Devil Trigger, weapon loadout, etc., for practice, such that you don't need to play and reload the same mission over and over and fight through the irrelevant crap before you get to the one enemy or boss you want to practice.

7R not only lacks any of that, but failing, learning, and retrying each boss fight is by itself an infuriating experience. "Retry from last battle" puts you mere footsteps away from triggering the battle you previously fell to, to give you an opportunity to rearrange your loadout if need be. That's nice and all, but this also means that if you die in a boss fight, the game has to load the whole overworld out of battle, put you through the chatter before the boss battle, load the cutscene you're trying to skip because you've already seen it prior, then load the boss fight proper. There is easily a minute in wasted time from the whole process, when the devs could have just made "Retry from last battle" an instant reset button to the fight, so the game doesn't have to unload and reload all the assets of the game for a cutscene I don't want to fucking watch. I'll admit the opportunity to reslot Materia is too important to pass up on a blind playthrough, but that too seems to me like an easy fix, just give me an option that says "Retry from before last battle" or something, I know I'm no game developer, but it's very hard for me to imagine that it'd be difficult to implement.

Most egregious of all is that most boss fights are segmented into two, or even three phases. What this means is that you could be struggling to stagger a boss, and when you do, you pour all your resources into making the most of the stagger duration when the boss takes more damage and is totally defenceless. Except, if you hit the threshold where the boss switches between phases, you just lose all your hard earned stagger entirely, along with all the ATB and MP of the move that you've selected, but has yet to execute, which is entirely bullshit. I worked for that stagger. I'M ENTITLED TO MY TIME. And the game is just like, "lol, nope", before snatching it away from you. Can you imagine paying for a massage session, or even just a visit to your doctor? You pay up front with your hard earned money, and after minutes of massaging or consulting, your therapist or doctor just gets up and leaves the room? THAT'S how staggering bosses feel like to me in 7R.

Boss phase transitions are always done with an unskippable cutscene, presumably to hide load times, but unskippable cutscenes in 2020 is blasphemy in the video game industry, no matter the genre. So, imagine if you will, that you have trouble on phase 3 of a certain boss fight. You die, you reload the overworld, you sit through the unskippable chatter of the in-engine cutscenes, you load the pre rendered cutscene*, you skip the pre rendered cutscene, you fight through phase 1 of the fight, you sit through an unskippable transition cutscene, which can easily last up to 30 seconds (see: Hell House phase 1 into phase 2), you fight phase 2, and then you sit through another unskippable transition cutscene before you get to retry the part you fell to the boss. I'm sorry, but don't you get tired or frustrated even reading all that? Imagine having to sit through it all, barely in control, with the frustration of getting your ass walloped by bullshit attacks and unavoidable damage and having to run like a chicken shit throughout. It's a cycle that I almost want to say was designed from the ground up to build frustration, except I don't understand why a game developer would want to intentionally turn off a player if they aren't trying to sell me solutions paid for with real world money. Are these transition cutscenes really necessary? And if they are, why design the boss fights to require them? It really breaks up the tempo of a fight when I'm just forced to sit idle for THIRTY SECONDS doing nothing, while a boss flexes its dick reciting to me, "this isn't even MYYY TRUE FOOOOORM!" I could take a piss break in thirty seconds in the middle of an otherwise high intensity fight. Again, it completely breaks the mood and flow of the narrative. And again, I want you to take a look at what DMC V does. It also runs on the PS4. It was released more than a year before 7R. It also has bosses that transitions from phases, using different attacks. It doesn't ever take a break from the flow of the fight and groove of the player to transition. Why should 7R?

*I know the cutscenes aren't pre rendered, per se. But they're not done entirely in-engine, either. It's a weird mix of the two where you get better meshes and even properly mo-capped character and face movements with better lighting but no camera control. It's something I find jarring, because the non mo capped, in-engine dialogue moments where you have camera control look starkly worse and janky in comparison, and the in-engine dialogue isn't skippable as a cutscene, because it's not a cutscene, just a script in the game. It's not a big deal, though.

The fight that made me put down 7R was the fight with the Ghoul boss, after the Hell House and twin fireball bombs made me rage severely. It, aptly, I think is the ultimate culmination of all the issues I have with the game. The boss has unavoidable, homing cheap shot missiles at the start of the fight. It can just decide to become invincible with no startup animation or warning with Incorporeal, as and when it feels like it. It's so large that when I get right up to it to hit it with sword attacks, I can't see most of the boss' body, and hence can't tell when or what attacks its using. It uses so many attacks at once, it's impossible for you to see everything you need to see to avoid getting hit, and each hit has lasting repercussions like being afflicted with Silence, or becoming bound entirely, and most of the cues for its attacks are bullshit. Piercing Scream is a huge Area of Effect move around the boss, effectively a "fuck you stay away from me" move, but it has no indication of its range whatsoever, so you just have to run and pray you're far enough. Telekinesis brings objects so high up into the air, you can't even manually control your camera to see the objects. You're just meant to run and hide behind objects in the battlefield to avoid the objects thrown at you by Telekinesis, but I've had moments where the objects thrown by Telekinesis hit me regardless, through the objects laid out on the field. These objects also block your spells' travel, but not the boss' unnamed Ground Getsuga Tenshou move. The boss somehow expects you to look into the sky with both its homing missile shots, Telekinesis, and itself being in the air, but also somehow expects you to simultaneously look on the ground for cues for the ground based Getsuga Tenshou, Balefire, or Phantasmic Flurry, as the ground glows blue and red respectively when those attacks chase you. This boss has SO MANY "run like a scalded dog" attacks, and as with everything else, I find that you can't run fast enough to avoid it most of the time, especially if you're in the middle of an attacking animation yourself when the warning comes, and you can't cancel out of your attacking animation. All this running means you're forced to choose between looking where you're going and losing track of the boss in the process, or you keep the camera locked onto the boss while running against the camera, meaning you have NO IDEA if any of the randomly placed objects will block you as you're running from twenty million attacks the boss throws at you. Not only does your character get caught in the objects, so does the fucking camera. Most of the time in the fight, I CAN'T FUCKING SEE ANYTHING.

I am aware that perhaps I'm a shit player who doesn't know the proper strats and tools. But is that not the job of the game to convey that to me? Why should I consult other media and people on how to best consume a product? You don't buy a board game only to look up how to play it online, do you? You have my attention, now it's your job as a media form to keep it for as long as you can. Don't make me go elsewhere to ask how to play this game. You would think the product and its makers would want me to enjoy it the most out of anyone, yet I don't find that conveyance anywhere. I mentioned above how a good action game teaches its players and conditions certain responses from them, and if you don't even attempt to convey the basic rules of the game, forget out that idealistic crap like teaching and conditioning.

Yes, I'm aware the game has a Classic, and even Easy mode to simplify and trivialise fights. But here's the thing: 7R is a game. And as a game, is it not by definition, meant to be played? If I picked Classic or Easy, then the game becomes less of a video game, and more like a minimally interactive movie. And that in my mind makes it a failure of a game, especially because it isn't advertised as a visual novel. It is undeniably an action game. It is by definition of genres, an action game. And who's ever heard of, or want an action game where there's trivialised action and involvement?

This difference in focus I find is the undoing of 7R for me. To draw one last comparison to the DMC franchise, the DMC series is primarily a game, first and foremost. It knows this and never compromises on the gameplay for storytelling. It is fun to play. And while you might think that a comparison between 7R and DMC V is rather unfair, I contend that they are more similar than one might first expect. Both are released within 13 months of each other on the PS4, with strong roots to their past titles. Both have elements of RPG strength building and loadout arrangement to supplement the action based fights. You still have to unlock and buy skills for weapons you have to earn in the story in DMC. You still have to decide which weapons to bring and what order to arrange them in. The insultingly simplistic appearance of DMC's storytelling I find is its most underrated, and perhaps its most beautiful asset. At first glance, the plot can be seemingly summarised as, "this here's a bad guy. That here are are hoards of demons. Kill them because they're evil". But if you were to dig deeper into the plot of, say, 3 and V, I think you'll find a lot of things left unsaid between the lines. I find the character development and motivations of each character in 3 and 5 to be just as compelling and moving as anything as I've seen of 7R thus far, if not more. Yet, DMC never compromises on the gameplay for storytelling.

I don't care how good your music is, or how sexy the characters are. It is a game, does it play well? If I drive my car into a workshop for routine servicing, I don't care how good the coffee is in the waiting area, or if their receptionist lady is hot and single; it is an auto workshop, can it service my car? Everything else is only a nice bonus that comes after, if at all. 7R is by definition and heritage, a game, but feels to me as though it desperately wants to be a 20 hour movie instead. Given the super linear approach to combat, along with how 7R feels more like a story first and game second, I'm just going to watch the whole thing on YouTube. If I want to watch a movie, I'd rather watch it on my computer or phone, because I don't have to boot up a specialised device for it. I can multi task while watching the movie, or I could be lying on my bed not having to worry about controlling the movie.

I'm glad I didn't pay money for this.