Final Fantasy VII arrived in Europe in November 1997, and I remember the specific texture of that moment better than I remember most of the game: the Amiga had gone quiet under me, the PlayStation had turned up carrying the future on three discs, and a Japanese role-playing game about a mercenary with a comically large sword was suddenly the thing everyone had an opinion about. Midgar — the opening city, the bombing run, the plate, the slums — took maybe six hours. It was the best six hours on the console and then the game left it behind and went off to be a world map.

Final Fantasy VII Remake, released for PS4 in April 2020, takes those six hours and makes them the whole game. Forty of them, give or take. This is the fact that decided most people’s reaction before they had played a minute of it, and it is the least interesting fact about the thing.

The combat is the achievement

Start here, because the combat system is the part that deserves study, and it is a genuinely clever piece of hybrid engineering rather than a compromise.

You control one party member directly in real time. Attacking builds ATB — the gauge from 1997, now a resource rather than a clock — and spending ATB is how you cast, use an item, or fire an ability. Opening the command menu drops the game into Tactical Mode, where time slows to a crawl while you choose. You can switch to any party member instantly, and the ones you are not controlling fight competently and build ATB slowly on their own.

The read: this is an action game whose action generates the currency of a turn-based game, and whose turn-based game happens inside a bubble of slowed time carved out of the action. It sounds like a fudge. In play it produces something quite precise — you are always simultaneously executing and planning, and the slow-motion menu functions as a held breath.

Then Stagger. Every enemy has a stagger gauge, filled by pressure — pressure being generated by doing the specific thing that enemy dislikes, which the scan spell will tell you. Staggered, they take a burst of extra damage for a window. This mechanic did not come fromFinal Fantasy VII. It came fromFinal Fantasy XIII, and the people who built it are the people who made this: Motomu Toriyama on scenario, Naoki Hamaguchi on game design, both veterans of the XIII trilogy, under Tetsuya Nomura’s direction.XIII was pilloried for a combat system that most players never got far enough in to understand.Remake takes that system’s actual idea — combat as the management of a vulnerability window rather than an exchange of numbers — and wraps it in something you can touch.

That is the real ancestral trace, and it is more honest than the one the marketing wanted.Remake’s fighting isKingdom Hearts hands welded toFinal Fantasy XIII’s brain, made by the people who had both. The 1997 game contributes the Materia system, which returns almost unchanged and remains one of the best build systems anyone has designed: spells are objects, objects go in slots, slots are in gear, and therefore your entire capability is portable between characters at any moment.

Where the design fights itself

Forty hours of Midgar is not, in itself, a crime. Midgar can hold forty hours; the concept is strong enough and the art direction is comprehensively magnificent. The problem is thetexture of the added thirty-four, and specifically that Square Enix appears to have solved a large fraction of them with corridors.

There is a category of moment in this game that everyone who played it can describe: the gap you squeeze sideways through while the level streams, the ladder you climb at a fixed speed, the arm you hold out to a robot claw, the pair of levers that must be pulled in sequence in a room built exclusively to contain two levers. The Train Graveyard chapter and the long descent through the Shinra building are the usual examples cited, and they are cited because they are correct. These are pure duration, purchased at the cost of your goodwill.

I take this seriously because forty hours is a real thing to ask. A game asking for a working week of somebody’s life owes them a reason for every one of those hours, andRemake has stretches where the reason is plainly that the chapter needed to be longer than the content in it. The side quests are the same instinct wearing a friendlier face — go and find some cats, go and kill some rats — and they exist to buy you affection scenes and a slightly better relationship with characters the game could have simply written more scenes for.

What rescues it, and it does mostly rescue it, is that the expansion isspecific where it counts. Jessie, Biggs and Wedge are three names and a death in the original. Here they are people with a flat, a family, opinions about Cloud, and a plan; when the plate falls the arithmetic has changed, because you have had dinner with them. Wall Market is no longer a joke and a dress — it is an economy, with Don Corneo sitting on top of it and a genuinely superb set piece built around a piece of 1997 comedy that could have gone very badly and instead goes big, sincere, and slightly magnificent.

The thing it is actually doing

Here is the read that matters. Every remake has to decide what it is faithfulto, and the available options are the text or the memory of the text.Dead Space’s 2023 rebuild chose the text and treated the job as restoration — clean the varnish, fix the joints, do not repaint.Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 chose to argue with its original about tone, and won some of that argument.

Final Fantasy VII Remake chose something stranger and considerably riskier. It is faithful to thememory — to the way Midgar is bigger in your head than it ever was on the disc, to the way Aerith is more important in retrospect than she is in her introduction — and it treats that gap between the game and the recollection as the actual subject. The forty hours are the game rendering your inflated memory at the size your memory has it. That is why the added material is nearly alltexture rather than plot: the plot was never what got exaggerated.

And then it goes further, in a way I will keep below the line.

The verdict

This is a magnificent, sincere, overlong thing, and the overlength follows directly from the ambition. Play it. Play it on PC or PS5 where Intergrade’s performance mode makes the combat legible at the speed it wants to run — the PS5 version arrived in June 2021 with the Yuffie episode attached, and the PC release followed later that year, reaching Steam in 2022. Turn the difficulty to Normal and use Assess on everything; the combat only opens up once you accept that scanning is a verb.

And then decide, honestly, whether you have another eighty hours forRebirth, because the 2024 sequel doubles everything here including the problems.

If you want the argument about endings and structure taken somewhere weirder,Nier: Automata is Square’s other great swing at making the shape of a playthrough into a statement.

Spoilers below

The Whispers. Let us have this out.

From very early on,Remake has ghosts in it — spectral figures who appear whenever the story deviates from the events of 1997 and physically shove it back on course. They stop Aerith from saying a thing. They block a road. They intervene at the moment Barret dies in a way he did not die before, and undo it.

The obvious reading is that they are the game’s own canon, personified and armed. The obvious complaint is that this is Nomura being Nomura: a metafictional device bolted onto a story that did not need one, resolved in a final act where the party fights the concept of fate in a sky arena while a dead character from a spin-off walks past.

I have gone back and forth and I have landed here: the Whispers are the honest expression of what this project is. Square Enix could not remakeFinal Fantasy VII straight — the original exists, is playable on everything, and is better than a straight remake would be at the only thing a straight remake could offer. What they could do is make a game about the pressure of the original’s existence, in which the characters are pushed around by a force that wants events to go the way you remember. The Whispers are the audience. They are the wiki. They are the decades of accumulated players who know Aerith dies and will riot if she does not.

And the ending — the party choosing to fight that force, and the game closing on a Midgar that has explicitly diverged from the one on the discs — is a studio saying out loud that it refuses to be a museum. I think the execution is muddled. The sky arena is bad. The Sephiroth escalation arrives about six hours before it has been earned. But theidea is the boldest thing a major publisher has done with its own back catalogue, and the alternative — a respectful, tasteful, identicalFinal Fantasy VII with better shaders — would have been a much safer game and a much emptier one.

The thing you remember is not the thing that happened.Remake knows that, and builds the knowledge into the plot. Whether it can land the consequences across three games is a question for the third one.