The technical limits of the FFVII remakes

Every year at 11am on the 11th of November across the Commonwealth, a two-minute silence is held to commemorate the Great War to remember all those who died in conflict. People who find themselves caught in this solemn flash mob of micro-grief will attest to its gravity - the silence pregnant with the memories of lives violently torn apart and cut short. 

It creates a moment worthy of their heroism and sacrifice. When the silence finally breaks it evokes perseverance: that dawn will come and life will carry on. The power of these minutes are why it's used to honour victims of tragedies and endures as a staple of school assemblies and sporting events. 

Recently, I've been sinking all my free time into Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I also played Remake in 2020 and Crisis Core in 2007. I love these reinterpretations of what is probably my favourite game. I love the themes from the OG they expand on, and I think Square for the most part got it right in how they further characterised the cast. The battle systems are a joy, and a lot of the great stuff from the original is back and ready to embrace your nostalgia stiffy. 

As remakes however, they don't capture what made FFVII so hypnotic: tone. 

FFVII's backdrop is one of apocalyptic dread and future-stage capitalism. People have been reduced to living in pipes and corrugated iron shacks in slums below structures upholstering gaudy and affluent cities. Urban decay and ruin is everywhere. The world depicts people left devastated in the wake of Shinra's relentless pursuit of wealth. Under Midgar, crime is everywhere. People and their family members die in pointless wars and acts of terror (👀). In one scene Aerith's dying mother is left on a train platform as people go about their day. 

In one of the game's more lighthearted sidequests, a crimelord pimp has trafficked the main characters with the intention of disposing of their body by throwing it into the sewers to be eaten by his pet monster (Jabba the Hut-style) after raping and murdering them. The rest of the girls he kidnaps are to be sold off to his henchmen or placed in the local brothel/gay sauna (refashioned as a camp Cabaret club in the Remake). 

I haven't got to that point in Rebirth yet, but something tells me Cid is not going to be the profoundly jaded domestic abuser from the original. 

In my view, the horror of this games' backdrop acted as a foil for the humour and humanity of our main cast. Aerith's upbeat personality shone like a light through a crack in Midgar's plate, not subtly conveyed in one of gaming's all time great meet-cutes. Cloud reclaiming his identity, humanity and autonomy felt like a natural and satisfying triumph against the grim world he's forced to survive in. Sure these facets are in the remakes, but they don't have the same effect when the characters are dancing, anime-grunting and over-acting. 

Though we go back to the same places, these places don't feel the same. 

 The truth of the matter (apart from making the game more palatable to a wider audience) is the technical limitations. An obvious limitation is character animations. Though the reinterpretations of Cloud I think are true to his character and I like how they're handled, he would convey so much with a shrug or just by putting his hand on his hip. To show excitement, he would do that 'squat'. Characters would stick out their arms parallel to exchange items. Your mind was free to fill in the blanks, and (as with anybody who has ever read the book and then seen the film) your imagination told you a better story of how the character felt and sounded. I can't really fault the reinterpretations for wanting to expand the repertoire of how characters emote. It would be weird as fuck if a triple A game conveyed laughing by looking like someone was having a seizure. But sometimes they get it wrong. De-mystifying the motivations of Yuffie for example has turned her into a bombastic sycophant - while they could've kept her as a mysterious, bewildering tag-along with unclear motivations and created tension by keeping her as someone you shouldn't really trust. She looks the same, only now she's now like a tantrum throwing princess you're there to babysit. As if she fell off her chocobo and had her personality irreversibly changed by a head injury. 

This is an obvious limitation, and so too is the pre-rendered backgrounds. Like exchanging matte-paintings for CGI in the movies, the loss of pre-rendered backgrounds has led to a loss of expressiveness. A detailed picture by a talented artist of the slums conveys more mood and tone than a 3D space full of objects. The pre-rendered backgrounds used lighting, motifs and random awkwardness to make the world (particularly Midgar) feel otherworldly. Some of the cool stuff directly from the pens of these artists in the OG are re-implemented in the remakes with renewed focus. Like the robot hand - a once unsettling yet unimportant detail gets its own minigame and backstory. There's light shone on the world to illuminate some of the nuanced mystery, similar to a bad horror sequel where the demon's origins/powers/motivations are explained rendering them much less scary. The tone of the world was better in my opinion, communicated in these pre-rendered backgrounds. 

My motivation for this blog entry came from playing Rebirth last night and encountering Dyne. The thoughts about tone that had been niggling. Check out this scene:

 This area is scene only used once in this game. FFVII often creates these amazing backgrounds for one-off moments (the City of the Ancients, Jenova Room at Nibelheim reactor to name a couple). Here you have darkness, with small spots of light illuminating yet more Shinra-made decay, framing Barret and Dyne - their conflict by extension. There's a small well, with dereliction and desert setting suggesting it is empty. Wells give life, once its dry, it is redundant. This is Dyne. In arguably one of the most obvious Christian images in the game, there are two crosses. Broadly crosses are symbols of sacrifice and redemption, but there are two here of different sizes and they're on what appears to be a hill, so they allude to the crucifixion more specifically. In the Bible, there are two thieves crucified either side of Jesus. One is kind of a dick about the whole crucifixion thing and he represents a rejection of salvation and doesn't believe Jesus. The other, is the opposite: he believes Jesus and asks him for forgiveness to save him a space in God's Kingdom (or something like that). These two crucified thieves allude to Dyne and Barret. They've both done terrible things, but Barret accepts grace. He knows what he's done and is trying to make peace with it by dedicating the rest of his life to accepting God's grace i.e. fighting to save the main spiritual force of FFVII, the Planet. 

You could also interpret these as graves but I like the Jesus thing better. 

Despite Barret's pleading, Dyne doesn't come with him. He scoffs at the offer of redemption and the salvation he might find alongside Barret, Cloud and the others. He even rejects the prospect of reuniting with his infant daughter (and actually implies he'll kill her to take her to her mother. Something absent from Rebirth obviously) he says "these hands are a little too stained to carry Marlene anymore". 

With that, he goes to the cliff edge and throws himself off. Barret falls to his knees. And all you can hear is the sound of desert wind before we fade to black. 

 Contrast that with this:

 This YouTube video had '(emotional scene)' in its title and I think it about sums it up. The actors do a decent job, but the whole thing is just melodrama. It's broad daylight in a generic junkyard and then Shinra soldiers pop out of nowhere to give Dyne a heroic last stand because the games afraid to depict suicide. This is immediately followed by non-other-than fucking Palmer in a twerking robot. Then FUCKING DIO comes in on the Dune Buggy and flexes his muscles. Then you get chased by FFVII's Team Rocket: the Turks and you have to gun down their helicopter in a minigame. What was once a really powerful scene has become completely nerfed. 

But it's the music that made me write this thing. 

The music in FFVII is so good, but sometimes it's not used and those points are really powerful. Dyne's Rebirth death is one of those scenes, and reminded me of this: 

 Zack - another shining light in an otherwise grim world - saves Cloud and is unceremoniously gunned down in the mud. Cloud crawls to his corpse and pleads towards the sky. It's completely silent. It's really powerful in my opinion. 

Contrast that with this: 

I actually liked Crisis Core and this scene isn't butchered like Dyne. BUT COME ON. He flashes back through his life and says 'for the both of us you're gonna live!!!' And then a fucking angel comes to fly him away after he's been gunned down by a million Shinra troops. I know it's a whole game's ending rather than a secret cutscene, so it needed to be a bit more of a spectacle and, to give them credit, they at least show some restraint with the music before that rubbish cheesy JPOP song kicks in. 

There's power in silence. Silence can universally convey emotion in a way subjective music tastes can't and knowing when not to use it can be just as important as using it. Just watch Country for Old Men - no soundtrack, deeply powerful movie. 

In the end, I and those thinking like me have to reconcile ourselves with a possibility that during the development of FFVII, the creators would've preferred a more lighthearted vibe full of spontaneous dance numbers between flashy Star Wars prequel level OTT fight scenes, instead of the turn-based slug matches that represent the hard-fought grind of life. That while tragic things happened to our characters they would scream, cry, grunt and tragically monologue to the soundtrack of sappy JPOP. All that was holding back the original team from this vision was technical limitations. 

There's an irony to the way the of Gold Saucer in the original game confronts us with a mirage - an oasis and a facade atop the squalor of the barely-worth-living-in world beneath. Like the Gold Saucer, the remade games don't acknowledge the grit, that at least for me, was an integral part of the original. 

And it's ironic still, that a story which explores the complicated relationship between people and technology itself proves that better technology doesn't necessarily mean an improved humanity. Sometimes, it's the opposite. (the editor) Dan