Final Fantasy VII remake Chapter 1 – Visuals

Welcome back everyone to our dissection of the yet untitled Final Fantasy VII remake. In the first actual chapter we are going to look at the visuals. You might think there is no point discussing it because of course the visuals will be updated.

Well that's kinda not true. You see the visuals of VII can't be updated. You could do that with X and call it a day, but not with the ones before it. You see Final Fantasy VII is not a 3D game. Well not entirely. Sure the characters are in 3D, but most of the scenery is not. Not to mention the camera is fixed. It always follows you from one angle as you go from one end of the screen to the other. And yes, most areas are exactly as big as the the screen. And they don't get much bigger either. Obviously all of this will change in the remake. The environment will be viewed from angles that just plain didn't exist in the original game. So the devs will have to make sure there is stuff there to see. Pretty much every environment will have to be rebuilt from the ground up.Anda naturally everything will have to be larger. It is hard to guess the size of towns and cities when they are divided into several screens, but no such luck this time. Remember Kalm? The first town you stop at after escaping Midgar? It is there that Cloud gives his account of the Nibelheim Incident. It also serves as the first area of Dirge of Cerberus and well it is kinda at the very least ten times as big. If we apply the same size increase to all the areas the end result will mean that Nomura and co will have a crapton of work ahead of them. Also can't wait for HD Wutai.

Although I think there will be more stuff added to the game than removed there is one thing we must add to the removed part right now. And that is the overworld. Like it or not it is a relic of a bygone era. The current trends call for an open fully explorable world map like in Skyrim. Or I should say like in Final Fantasy XV. And you know what that means? That's right. Lots and lots of work on thee environment. Huge patches of empty grass, carbon copy forests and miles of sea without small islands are not fun. Appart from a few exceptions you find anything interesting on the world map is when the story requires you to do. Like when you fight Toph. Err...sorry, Yuffie. Still you can't deny that she and Miss Beifong share lots of smilarities. Anyroad as diverse as the gameplay is, the story itself is pretty linear. You go here, you do this go somewhere else and do that. As such there aren't many areas that are not relevant to the plot or areas that are only there to give side quests. Actually only Wutai comes to my mind. Now if you have a wide open world map this has to change. Now if moogles were real they could have a cave somewhere. Or the sylphs maybe. And we just slipped into gameplay and lore changes that are necessary solely because the visuals got an update. See? And this is just scratching the surface. Speaking of scratching.

Combat. Now the combat system will be discussed separately, but the combat animations are also parts of the visuals. And they need a huge overhaul. Now most of it is dependant on the combat system. For example the cover animation is pretty weird. It needs a rework. But if the game gets anything more modern than a fully turn based combat system and it might be removed completely. You know, like how you don't see party members teleporting in front of you in XIII. We will also most likely see a much wider variety of sword strikes from good old Cloud. Watching him repeat the same vertical slash can get tiresome.

And then there are the summons. Dear god, the summons. First there is the..ehmm...weird fade out at the beginning. I'm pretty sure characters won't change into their outlines in the remake. But that is nothing compared to what the summons themselves do. Sure some make a reasonable ammount of sense, like Ifrit, Ramuh or Odin. Leviathan is pushing it a bit with his (her?) tidal wave that should realisctically rearrange towns, but I'll let that pass. Titan however is charged guilty. There is probably a reason why he is getting less and less screen time as the graphic engines improve. His 'table flip' should leave a permanent scar on thegame world. And if you are in an elevator...well good luck. I'm not sure how XV will solve this problem. Titan might get an entirely new attack both there and here. Exhibit number two is Neo Bahamut. A good indication that a summon in VII is messed up is its absence from crisis core. Neo B falls into this camp along with Titan and Kujata. Table flips and making solid ground wave is trippy enough, but this particular Bahamut has probably the most messed up attack. And yes that includes Bahamut Fury weaponizing the moon.

To refresh your memories in case playing VII was a long time ago: Neo Bahamut levitates a huge chunk of the ground – without leaving a hole naturally – up into the sky. This happens even if you happen to be inside a cave or a building. Next he destroys the levitated piece of ground with a huge beam. Naturally the laser that causes solid rock blast into splinters does not immediately kill the enemies even if they happen to be a bunch of insects that you can one-shot kill with your default attack. No, what kills them is the fall from the stratosphere back to the second floor of a 50 storey building or whatever. Funnily enough this can happen to enemies that can totally fly. Sure a simple little bird might forget that it can fly after this spectacle, but definitely not Sephiroth.

So yeah. TL;DR version: The summons will most likely undergo a lot of change as in their current form some would break our suspension of disbelief, the graphic engine, the fourth wall and all sorts of physics rules.

Of course we cannot talk about the visuals of combat without mentioning blood. In the old games combat was very much bloodless even though slashing someone with the buster sword should have made every battle look like it's from Kill Bill. Type-0 has a sort of realistic take on how combat should look like. Question is: how realistic do we want Aerith's death to be? It already broke our hearts. But still, getting stabbed by a sword that size is bound to draw blood. With all the pools of water around we could get lots of stunning images. Hey Aerith, look at these pretty red flowers in the water..... Aerith?.......Aerith!!!!

One last thing before we wrap up this chapter. If you are a Final Fantasy fan chances are you have heared of HC Bailly. He is a pretty awesome guy who has let's play videos for most of the final fantasy entries. We disagree on some points (6 vs 7, how to pronounce Yuffie) but I still love his videos and watch them regularly. Sometimes because I get stuck and a lot of times just to have fun. Well me Bailly noticed something fishy when doing the Wutai quest line. As you no doubt remember Elena and Yuffie are kidnapped by Don Corneo and tied to a statue. So far this sounds like pretty standard fair for Final Fantasy girls. Most of them get tied up or chained to a wall at least once by the villains. And the villains always forget about gagging them for reasons I cannot fathom. Anyway there are several problems with this particular one. I'll let the gag issue pass as Yuffie has some pretty funny lines here( as well). The first thing Bailly noticed is that the girls have no visible restrains on them. Yuffie mentions something about rope work, but as far as we can see she and Elana are superglued to the statue. Expect it cant be superglue as after Corneo presses a button on a remote, that I don't quite remember seeing, the captives turn upside down in a way that doesn't make sense no matter how ropes - that by the way can't be operated remotely – are applied to them. As a final point Bailly draws attention to the fact that the girls are tied to an area of the statue that can't be reached no matter where you stand. This is probably a reason why their release wasn't shown on screen. This naturally needs some reworks. Although I'm pretty sure all SE has to do is organize a deviant art contest to draw 'Elena and Yuffie tied to a statue'. Problem solved. Unfortunately for Yuffie I'm not off her case yet. The whole Wutai story beings with her memorable theft of all our materia. Including those on other characters. And yes, including those you have equipped on your weapons. She does all of this by...well I'm not sure how because we never see. She never really touches the player party before fleeing the Shinra troops and by that time you are already robbed.

A nice way to solve this problem is for Yuffie convincing the party to call it a day and make camp. During the night she will have plenty of time to take all the materia and flee. Of course we would see her leave and follow her only to be bumped into the Shinra soldiers. Actually camping might be a permanent feature if it works well in XV. An existing party camp would definitely answer the question of where the rest of the gang is while are off fighting before you get the Highwind. It would also be a good place to get additional influence points for the Gold Saucer date. And whoops we are back to affecting gameplay again.

Okay, that's it for visuals. Hope you guys enjoyed it and will return for the audio discussion.