Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis & Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
on vibes
I’m not discussing anything I’d consider a spoiler in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth today, outside of the first hour-ish of story from the game. Today is not the day where I go into “is the first hour of a video game a spoiler? Are the first 25 pages of a book a spoiler?” Fear not. Today I go into the much much more normal topic of playing Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis in between Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and why one could possibly need so much Final Fantasy VII in their life.
I already have conflicting feelings about the free-to-play, 6-month-old, “good for a mobile game”, gatcha game Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis, a game that mostly plays itself and eats your phone battery in between little baby kernels of a questionably coherent retelling of the original Final Fantasy VII, its spinoffs, and also brand new prequel content, why not. This is further complicated by February 29’s new release of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the second game in the trilogy of games remaking Final Fantasy VII, as indicated by it being a sequel to a game titled Final Fantasy VII Remake, which is further further complicated by not being a faithful remake with modern technology, but a full-on self-reflection on its own cultural weight.
Yes, there are two simultaneous, in-progress remakes of a 26-year-old video game with extremely different goals. Why am I playing both of them, exactly? Especially when 99% of people would look at the two titles and simultaneously point out the same one as “the good one”. One of them, by virtue of being a last dying gasp of an industry faltering under the weight of the unsustainable expense imposed by its own technological advances, is definitely, probably, the “better” one. The other is the other side of the coin of the state of the video game industry in the 2020s: built around a predatory gatcha system and thus maybe inherently worse.
We can go on like this. Rebirth is an exemplar of bloat and excess of triple- if not quadruple-A game design; Ever Crisis is the cash-in. Rebirth is where they let a bunch of writers get meta and go fucking wild writing a story about a story they told 26 years ago; Ever Crisis is where the writers are trying in vain to neatly summarize the plot of a game that game out 26 years ago, a spinoff that came out 14 years ago, some new content featuring the antagonist as a lil baby, and maybe other spinoffs one day eventually, while also catering to the unending churn of a forever game that must shit out new side stories every month that aren’t canon yet nonetheless have to keep up with how far along the story has progressed anyway. Rebirth is the one with the brand new story that will take somewhere between 40 and 200 hours to finish; Ever Crisis is the one with (one day) ALL the old stories that, ideally for the developer’s quarterly projections, you will never finish. Rebirth has one of the most intricate, complex, and dare I say fun combat mechanics I’ve ever played; Ever Crisis you mostly hit auto and then hit auto and wait until a battle is done then do it again until you’ve run one number down for the day.
Measured up like this, Ever Crisis doesn’t have a clear case for itself, replaced by a better, other remake of the same thing. Ever Crisis is the one where you watch characters from games you liked and new characters who are not remotely interesting do the same battle on autopilot so that various numbers go up, but if you played the slot machine right during a seasonal event a few months ago, you can make the hot one wear a thong.
While Rebirth is the one where… you can make– ok scratch this point.
And to boot, Ever Crisis is the one where they’re just sexy for the sake of enticing you to spend real money to unlock sexy costumes before a deadline, while Rebirth seems to be the one where they’re sexy because – and while this isn’t the entire story of Final Fantasy VII – the story of Final Fantasy VII isn’t not about a bunch of hot people who cannot deal with hot how they all are.
Also then also to boot to boot… joking aside about how horny all this is, we’re getting closer to why, given my limited time with my one real life, I am still playing two different remakes of a game I have also played, one of which is markedly lower quality than the other. When all of this hits, “bloat” doesn’t quite convey what these works are, but “indulgent” does. Trying to explain the game I just bought a PlayStation 5 for to a non-gamer in my life, what came to mind was Twin Peaks.
Twin Peaks is also a complicated story, both because the actual synopsis of what is going on in the story is borderline inscrutable but also because it has spread out across so many different pieces. There’s the original 2-season run marred by a sharp decline in quality and losing the plot in season 2, a movie that is 90% prequel 10% time-bending sorta sequel, and a revival third season that came out 25 years later that mostly kind of finally gave the thing an ending while also doing something new with the whole thing to send it off with. But the plot, while perfectly compelling, isn’t really the star of the show for Twin Peaks. It’s the characters, well developed and hangoutable, oftentimes just vibing.
It’s a similar deal for Final Fantasy VII. These are characters with a 20-plus–year span of stories behind them. They are fleshed out. They got stuff going on. Even if the story doesn’t progress much while you spend time with them, the joy is just spending the time with them. Maybe I don’t super have to care if one of the hangs is kinda shallow. Strong friendships in the real world are counterintuitively built on a foundation of “wasting time” together; time spent doing nothing together is a common component of friendships forged in one’s youth and often a missing component of active attempts to make new friends later. If the vibes are solid enough, it’s kind of fine if why you’re hanging out with these characters sometimes doesn’t appear to make much, or any, sense.
Ok now to just scream about the opening of Rebirth for a minute, cool? Spoilers for the opening of Rebirth now:
The absolute indulgence of this game not only having left things off at the end of Remake with a flashback chapter to conveniently use as a tutorial, but also the new alternate timeline where they give you Zack to control?! The indulgence.
Just absolutely screaming about what on earth is going on in the new Zack timeline, which is apparently everyone is dead. Super interesting the Avalanche gang still has Aerith and Red XIII though, despite not having Cloud, which is how they crossed paths with Aerith, who gets kidnapped and then while rescuing her how they cross paths with Red XIII who is also in captivity. But they’re both here! And it’s all gone to shit! It’s like the episode of Community where it branches off into different timelines to make a point about how the group dynamics are altered depending on who’s missing. Which gives us the wild implication that somehow Cloud is the Troy of Final Fantasy VII.
The big question mark after the whole defeating destiny thing at the end of Remake (aside from Aerith’s fate) is how much of this alternative Zack-is-alive timeline are we gonna get. What narrative purpose does it serve to have a parallel timeline where Zack is alive and Cloud maybe doesn’t get set on his road to recovery, maybe doesn’t even have the same reality problems because the dead guy he pretends he is and then forgets he isn’t isn’t dead? WHAT HAPPEN WITH THAT?
After the Zack intro tutorial – which is clearly going to be of enough narrative significance that we got a title screen drop during the Zack section and also Zack is on the box – and after the Nibelheim flashback tutorial, we finally end up back in “the main plot” and immediately we get a new, subtle twist where Tifa tells Aerith her account of Nibelheim, which is that Cloud wasn’t there. This is wildly ahead of schedule! Last time around, Aerith was long dead before Tifa revealed this doubt to anyone. This kind of makes some sense to me in that the narrative pacing needs of a trilogy are a little different than they are for a single long game, it probably makes sense to move this part of the plot along a little differently. STILL WACKY THO WHAT HAPPEN WITH THAT.
I mean, I’m lowkey excited about that because the Cloud–Tifa memory question is kind of my favorite part of the original story? She doesn’t remember him being there, but he knows so much stuff only someone who was there would know, she almost died, maybe it’s her memories that are wrong and he was there? And also this person is a childhood acquaintance suddenly back in her life and he’s hot now and maybe there’s romantic tension? JUICY. And they do this well in the Nibelheim flashback – those who played the original game know that the real Cloud is just the random nameless guard wearing a huge-ass, face-obscuring helmet on the mission, just a grunt there as extra manpower. Every time that guard shows up, we know that’s Real Cloud. Every time he protects Tifa, we know that’s Real Cloud protecting Tifa <3 Every time Tifa complains about him and asks does this guy ever talk WE KNOW WHY. LUXURIOUS.
Standard Plugs Zone
Yeah, I have had an extended period of not much to plug, what with my various other projects being very much in between anything sharable, assuming you don’t live in literally New York City and saw my band in concert. So, here’s some old hits of where you maybe might know me from:
Heavy Feather Review published two poems I wrote about horror movies back in 2022
I wrote a review of two poetry chapbooks by Ashley Cline for Kissing Dynamite last year
Do you remember Kill Screen? I wrote about Kentucky Route Zero for that once.
Really digging back to like a decade ago, I wrote about Rocky Horror shadow casts for NPR in 2013.
I still like the semi-unintended final word sendoff essay I did for Bad Books Good Times about Ready Player Two and Barack Obama’s A Promised Land