While I go on about how I want the classic story to endure, I'm aware that nothing exists in a vacuum. I think that's why a 21st Century retelling of Final Fantasy VII presented a great opportunity in my point of view. We now live in a world in which "the 1%" is a common household term, a world in which anthropogenic climate change actively devastates the world instead of just being a dire warning, a world that creeps ever closer to transhumanism, late-stage capitalism, and a real reckoning with our own complacency in systemic oppression. I was really excited to see how these things would land anew in a story that has moustache-twirling villains making monsters for fun. I got time travelling ghosts instead.
Edit: If the whispers/timeline stuff represents a new thread of plot to keep interest in the game going between parts, to spark theories and to have old and new fans share in the unknown, and to have content creators on YouTube give Remake lots of free advertising, I'll concede that, from a marketing standpoint, there's something to it. This is one of the ways in which my thinking is definitely archaic, because I can't think of a way to do that that doesn't seem like an unnatural, shoehorned, very bad idea in the context of the story itself, which is where my interest lies. If that was the motivation behind the whispers and timeline stuff, I'm even less impressed than I was before. Allowing capitalist concerns to drive the writing isn't very in-the-spirit of FF7. I suppose something similar could be done with the larger Avalanche stuff (another great addition imo... so far <.<) but that's kind of abstract and wouldn't drum up the kind of "Comm-yoo-nee-tee engage-ment" they're going for. In short, I don't think I can answer your question.
This entire post is so good. I want to bring up some things.
Particularly this part:
I think that's why a 21st Century retelling of Final Fantasy VII presented a great opportunity in my point of view. We now live in a world in which "the 1%" is a common household term, a world in which anthropogenic climate change actively devastates the world instead of just being a dire warning, a world that creeps ever closer to transhumanism, late-stage capitalism, and a real reckoning with our own complacency in systemic oppression. I was really excited to see how these things would land anew in a story that has moustache-twirling villains making monsters for fun. I got time travelling ghosts instead.
Let's be real, FF7 stopped being about any of this as soon as it started having celebrities, pop songs playing over character deaths, and prioritizing rule of cool over all else.
I felt less betrayed by the "what does a remake really mean!?" discussion because... frankly, I don't think what FF7R has to say about it is all that profound. Force put it nicely when he said:
Force said:
Are you making a change because it serves the world and plot, or because it satisfies your *dons beret* needs as an artiste? Or, even more cynically, because you want people to argue about shit on twitter?
Call me cynical, but I don't know how you can see this kind of thing isn't motivated by wanting to create buzz on social media. Without even touching how stupid the execution was, that type of authorial intent is so... corporate. Which is fundamentally at odds with what makes the FF7 the story one worth retelling :/ Obviously, the elements of the story (as Ite laid out so eloquently) are ones that the creators deem as either less important, or not interesting enough of a topic to re-explore as the focus. That is absolutely wild to me.
It's why I am completely opposed to playing into theory-crafting around this title. I feel that by doing so, I am bending into the corporate side of this game - the side where the whole purpose is to generate perpetual buzz for the next title. With a story like FF7, I am sure all of you can understand why I find it all incredibly gross?
There is an entire conversation that this boils down to expectations set by a "remake," what a "remake" means, is "remake" a pun etc. That is a fine angle to approach a remake, but personally I never understood why this was a controversy with regards to this game. My disappointment never stemmed from a philosophical discussion about what a "Remake" is. The definition of "remake" has very little to do with what I take issue with. Call me naive, but my disappointment actually came more from this:
Tetsuya Nomura said:
Concerning Final Fantasy VII Remake, which is a title loaded with a lot of mystery for now, it will be different from the original Final Fantasy VII. If we make a compilation, these games will hardly have an overall coherence. It will be difficult because there is no more continuity between the Compilation and the Remake for the moment
Hindsight is 20/20, and I was definitely reading way too much into this quote. The fact is, this gave me hope that this Remake would go back to my assessment of what important elements of the story are, without as much focus on previous gimmicks. This wasn't actually a lie, but the
new gimmick for this game isn't all that different from the shit I hated from those other games. Gimmicks that have, historically for this franchise, obfuscated everything
@Mr. Ite outlined at the top of this post. All that stuff? Well, now everything else now takes a backseat to "surprise! there's time travel!! what does it mean!?"
I wasn't super in tune with the pre-release hype for the game, but this was the main thing I saw in regards to "The Compilation of FF7." Maybe it wasn't intentionally misleading, but I was misled by this. Had the game been more upfront with the fact that it was a Compilation entry, I probably would have had more of an expectation. I would have a better understanding that this game was committing to entries in the series that have historically deemed what
I consider important as less so. My significant other, who is not a big FF7 fan like I am (but has played all the games), says that if he knew the Compilation was relevant he probably would not even bothered wasting his time. I am sure this is true for many others who went into this without knowing any better.
All of this.... just comes back to cynical corporate franchising of something. Obviously FF7 was never as punk rock as it seemed to me when I was 9, but if the creators were going to do this, I really wish they didn't use
this story as their vehicle to do so.
