It's like the Avatar 2 of video games...

"Just...here. Take it. Take it! Goddamnit."

-Me, everytime

...except I actually kinda hope this one comes out. Then I can debate the wisdom of giving Square Enix another sixty dollars of money for a game I've already bought like three times on like three different platforms even though to this day I have never even completed it once and-huh? Yeah, I should probably explain what I'm talking about and-ok, look, there's a new trailer for the Final Fantasy VII remake-now officially and un-creatively entitled Final Fantasy VII Remake and I think we should discuss it, because, I mean, what else are we going to do? Not talk about it?

Above: me and basically anyone
else who remembers the term gametape.

Ok, so Final Fantasy VII, for those of you either younger than my FFVII game save or for those who maybe enjoyed sports and social activities, is the seventh main line game in the Final Fantasy series (they're up to fifteen now, so Final is used kind of loosely). I'll spare you the numbering nonsense, but it was the fourth one to make it to the U.S. Anyway, when it came out, despite being a huge fan of the Final Fantasies? Finals Fantasy? That particular game series, this was the first one I didn't play all the way through to the end.

It was fairly different from previous games and not all the changes were great. It had long, unskip-able cut-scenes and interminable summon animations. It just wasn't-right, I keep forgetting, you had a life. In the game, you can attack your enemies by summoning monsters. Doing this usually results in an animation that plays every time. Every time. And you can't skip it.

Using Terra Flare requires you to watch as a space dragon
nukes your opponent from orbit for a full minute. A full minute.

Pictured: the cast of Final Fantasy VI
battleing an octopus in an opera house.
Not pictured: anything that's ever topped it.

Anyway, like I was saying, Final Fantasy VII was different enough from the other entires in the series and it just didn't hook me like the earlier ones did. But it was the first JRPG to get mainstream attention. It was the one you could admit to playing without getting nerd shamed, but I just wasn't into it and have spent that last twenty years being the curmudgeonly fan insisting that the series peaked with part VI. Still though, I've been curious about what I've missed out on and have tried to go back and play it but holy shit, the graphics.

Hot garbage now, back then it looked...well,
ok, still like garbage, but cutting edge garbage.

Maybe I'm just a retro snob or something-ok, I'm definitely a snob, but 8 and 16-bit games are charming and nostalgic to me with their quaint and razor sharp pixel graphics and they even look good on LCD TV's. Final Fantasy VII on the other hand, just...I've tried to appreciate it as a product of its time, but yikes. The overworld is blurry, the characters all have Popeye arms and the models in the cut scenes are jarringly different from the ones in gameplay. It is aggressively unattractive and looks like, and I don't think I'm being unfair here, hot garbage.

It wasn't just Final Fantasy VII, or even the PS1 that didn't age well, it's the whole generation of games. The technology just wasn't there yet. Remember Goldeneye on the N64? That game was mind blowing in 1996, but, I mean:

Oh...oh no no no...this will not do.

"Huh, weirdly the 8-bit, grey market
de-make holds up better than the original."

(source: shade)

Anyway, hence the remake. The remake Square Enix has been insisting is happening for like-and I'm not kidding you-fourteen years. In that time it's been sequeled, prequeled, remastered and even de-made for the NES, but still no remake. First it was coming to PS3, now it's for PS4. At one point the developer announced that it was supposed to be broken up into several parts, presumably so we could pay them more than once. It might be an action game instead of a traditional JRPG, or maybe it's an action RPG? And as of a year ago they were still hiring staff for the project which kind of suggested that it's still a ways off. 

It's been, so far, a shit show, but today (well, yesterday now) we got the trailer and the promise of further updates next month. So maybe it's really for real coming this time? The trailer looks like an actual game, with gameplay and voiced cut scenes-in English no less-so...maybe? Hey, maybe since they're remaking it and all, they could see their way clear to rolling back some of Barrett's insensitively written dialogue? Oh, and that whole bathhouse sequence should probably go. And-huh? No? They're leaving all that in? I see...

But on the upside, the characters look like people
and not, you know, vaguely humanoid box-monsters.