I finally finished Final Fantasy VII (spoiler: it wasn’t a Panzer Dragoon Saga killer, but as a whole I enjoyed it), both the original and the recently released Final Fantasy VII Remake for PS4. I played through the original’s Midgar section, before playing through Remake (which is just this section), before returning the original to complete the game. I found this to be a good way to experience both versions, since my memory of the original’s Midgar was fresh upon experiencing the remade version.
Overall, I enjoyed FFVII, although it’s not without flaws. Like PDS, the game features an environmental theme, but takes place in a more of a fantasy-scifi world, rather than the grounded scifi setting of Panzer Dragoon. Although they are very different games, I can see why they have been compared.
The original’s visuals hold up reasonably well, or as well as it can next to modern games. While the prerendered backgrounds and character models look dated, with the occassional silent FMV, I can appreciate the work that went into them. There’s a lot scenes, for better or worse, an immense undertaking compared to the 2D RPGs that came before it. The soundtrack and character designs are iconic.
The random battles do drag on, especially near the end where one enemy attack shows us the whole solar system for what seems like eternity before getting on with his attack. For the most part, they’re also fairly boring battles, unless you enjoy trying out and managing lots of different items, spells, and materia. That’s my biggest gripe with these old RPGs, and something which makes me prefer more tactical RPG battle systems where you position your character as well as attack. You can kind of relax and not be too engaged while exploring the world though, so I’d often just sit down for a session while drinking a coffee and controlling the game with one hand, which wasn’t always a bad thing.
The action based battle system in the remake is a vast improvement over the original’s command based system. The game still includes “guages” like the original, but only for special attacks, magic, items, etc - regular attacks are pure action RPG. There’s value in switching characters mid battle, e.g. to target enemies that a far away with Barret’s gun, making it still feel like a party based system.
The original’s story is a bit a mess too, to be honest. Without spoiling anything, the main characters backstory is fairly important part of the narrative, but much of the time it feels like the story is about someone else, rather than “you”. This appears to have been intentional, but at the expense of feeling grounded in a purpose and motivation. There’s also a fuzziness to some the events and reasons why things happen - I’d say that in part, this is because it’s supposed to be a fantasy, not a science fiction, so maybe it’s a case of we’re just meant to accept some things.
The remake does a better job of fleshing it out the story and world, albeit only a small section of it, so it remains to be seen how well the writers will handle Cloud’s backstory. There’s the question of whether drawing the story out so much was warranted: the remake is about 30 hours, covering a section of the original that was maybe 10 hours long. This gives the writers more time to explore the characters motivations and personalities, often with dialogue taking place while exploring the world more rather than in cut scenes. We get to see the point of view of the general population of Midgar, that maybe the characters aren’t the good guys, or that their position is controversial.
Did the scope of the game in Remake really need to be expanded? I’m not sure that it was required to tell it’s story, but I think it works. Sections that were just a few pre-rendered screens have now been expanded into a full dungeon. There’s a lot more opportunity to explore and interact with the world. The remake feels like a high quality TV adaption of a classic novel; Final Fantasy VII Remake has brought Final Fantasy VII to life. The game is divided into chapters, which makes it feel episodic, and there’s about 18 of these which you can revisit in any order to complete side quests etc after finishing the game.
That said, if ever there’s a Panzer Dragoon Saga remake, one game is more than enough. While likely inspired by it, Saga is very much the anti-Final Fantasy, minimalist and to the point, compared to FFVII where there’s more padding and following people around.
The good thing about the remake is that it feels faithful to the original, while greatly modernising it, which is something a lot of remakes and sequels fail to do. They’re really brought the original pre-rendered scenes to life, and the iconic places like the Seventh Heaven bar, Arieth’s house, and the playground all look just like they do in the original, but in full 3D. It helps that a lot of the original staff worked on this, I think. It probably helped that the game is so entrenched in popular culture; changing anything too radically would have resulted in a backlash. Overall, unless you want to experience the original for historical purposes, you can jump straight to Final Fantasy VII Remake which IMO improves on all aspects of the original.
Some fan response to that annoyed me because we did her story before in Phantasy Star 2 (to a degree).