Impetus: E3 announcement that Final Fantasy VII is being remade occurs, people lose their shit.
The most interesting thing about this whole thing is seeing just how much this is dividing up my friends list on Facebook. As usual, it’s a tale of extremes, because either people are rabidly excited for it, or they’re fiercely hostile towards the notion of this FF7 being remade. And then there’s the passive-aggressive bickering amongst the two factions, as well as people like me who are more fascinated with the social chaos of it all, rather than the actual news itself.
Frankly, put me in the camp that is less than lukewarm about this announcement. I feel that it’s more or less a copout by Squeenix to dust off a classic, pretty it up, and re-release it, rather than y’know, trying to come up with something new and innovative and make one more tick-mark closer to the inevitable Final Fantasy XX, which will basically mark the end of video games as a whole.
I’m pleased that this is going to make a lot of people genuinely happy, but it’s basically going to be nothing new, for anyone who had already done it before. I mean, I maxed out the clock in the game of grinding, because I wanted maxed out characters, a gold chocobo, duplicates of Knights of the Round Materia that I would then grind to max those out, and so forth, as well as finding out the ways to beat Ruby and Emerald Weapons. For all I know, I may still very well have the save file on the little collection of 8MB PS1 memory cards I still have somewhere in the attic.
Why would I want to do all of this all over again? Just because it’s prettier? Aesthetics don’t affect stories, otherwise books would cease to exist if they could all be republished in visual formats.
This is dumb. All remakes are dumb, honestly. They’re cop outs by companies too lazy to invest in good storytelling, and further contribute to the notion that the world is devoid of original ideas. Remakes are a slap in the face of creativity.
I enjoyed playing the FF4 remakes on the DS, but after beating it on a minimal effort, I saw no point in going back to try and polish everything, because there was no point. FF7 is probably going to be the exact same thing for lots of people, but at least those who never played the original might just be swept away in the amazement of a journey played for a first time as opposed to those of us who already have.
