Final Fantasy 7 Reborn never misses a beat, but its interpretation of the original game sometimes lacks appeal

There are plenty of places in Remastered and Reborn to point out things like this; the new games lack the flavor of the original games.

The most obvious example so far is FF7’s “Blood Trail,” a truly iconic and gruesome sequence from the original game that has been replaced in the modern version with a strange glowing purple that was previously shiny and sanitized bloodstains in corporate offices. Alien slime. The music is the same, but the mood is ruined by the change; the sequence is ruined.

To be fair, this is the best example because it’s the worst example. Most of the time, Square Enix’s meticulously recreated Final Fantasy 7 scenes work perfectly, even with modifications. In fact, Rebirth, the second installment in the remake trilogy, never really missed a beat. Having said that, it’s also fair to say that in many cases the events it depicts lack the weight and punch of the original.

There are plenty of new examples of this in FF7 Rebirth, a game that covers several pretty traumatic incidents for the FF7 cast. I could talk about many examples – but as an example, I want to zero in on one – Barrett and Dyne’s storyline in Chapter 8, about halfway through the game.

Therefore, from here on, this article contains Spoilers for “FF7 Rebirth” Chapter 8 and before. You have been warned.

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The storyline of FF7 is of course about saving the Earth from evil corporations and malevolent aliens, but there are important character vignettes sprinkled throughout. Barrett’s big moment came when the team visited the Gold Saucer.

Along the way, he passes through his hometown, where he’s subjected to inexplicable abuse—and then eventually comes face to face with the best friend he always thought was dead. Over the course of the story, we learn about the origins of Barret’s daughter Marlene (who is a different race from him, which is currently unresolved) and learn about his involvement in Shinra’s destruction of his homeworld.

This is an important moment. We learn a lot about Barret’s origins and motivations, and can see exactly why he was so angry at Shinra so early in the story. It’s also an emotional story – about brothers who are torn apart and ultimately forced to fight against each other by the forces of evil.

All of these events are present in Rebirth – but they’re all subtly tweaked – and in many ways made worse.

Rebirth tweaks things a bit here. For one, in the original game, the hatred for Barrett wasn’t explained until later. In Reborn, Barrett reveals his story to the team in a flashback. This introduces you to Dyne, reveals that both he and Barrett were seriously injured, and also makes it clear that Silla is to blame, not them. The flashbacks changed other small details, too; even before the disaster, Corel was depicted as a crumbling mountainside shantytown—whereas in the original’s flashbacks, Corel was clearly a much more prosperous town. But once you get to the Gold Saucer, the real changes start to happen.

In the original FF7, Barret arrived at the Gold Saucer in a bad mood, having had an unpleasant experience visiting his destroyed hometown and being rejected by the local residents as a traitor. Barrett storms off without a word, and the next thing you hear is a man with a gun shooting up an area of ​​the giant theme park you’re in. The game sorted this out. : Can Barrett do it? Did he go into a rage and murder a bunch of innocent people? In our hearts, we knew the answer—it was unlikely that the members of the RPG Party would transform so absolutely, so quickly—but there was a flicker of doubt.

Here rebirth reaches out subtly; edge must This narrative was polished off..So in Rebirth, we see a cutscene of Barrett announcing other The man holding a gun as an arm in the golden saucer, forward We learned about the massacre. Barrett followed the man. When news of the mass shooting broke, partisans worried that Barrett was responsible, but we as the audience already knew the truth: It was another mysterious guy who did it.

It turns out that man is Dyne, Barrett’s long-lost hometown friend. The injury that resulted in Barrett’s arm being amputated and replaced by a gun was also suffered by Dyne in the mirror – Barrett lost his right arm and Dine his left arm. Both men independently had guns grafted onto their bodies for the same reason – revenge. It turns out that Marlene is actually Dane’s biological daughter, adopted by Barrett after the disaster that destroyed the town of Corel, and led to the others in Barrett’s life – most notably Dane, who Eun’s wife and his own wife – both died. As it happened, Dyne did survive.

In both games, the Dyne we meet in Shadow of the Gold Saucer has lost his mind, ruined by the loss of his wife, daughter, and family, as well as the brutality of the years that followed.

However, in the original novel, Dyne has a clear goal. He says he wants to “destroy everything” – which is why he heads to the Gold Saucer and massacres a bunch of random innocents. Basically he was acting. When Dain discovers that Marlene is still alive, he has only one thought: his daughter must die. He believed that she should be with her mother – it was Dain’s responsibility to “take her” to her late mother. This is the ultimate reason why Dyne attacks Barrett, and why Barrett fights back – Barrett prevents Dyne from killing Marlene.

In “FF7 Rebirth”, the scene is obviously different. Dyne ended up attacking Barrett because he was just angry about what had happened in the past. He also saw Cloud’s uniform and mistook him for a Shinra soldier, which made him even more angry. Barrett and Dyne. It wasn’t until after they fought that he discovered that Marlene was still alive.

From here on, the sequence really becomes clear to me. Suddenly, Shinra soldiers appeared in large numbers. At first I thought this was to distract the other actors from the showdown between Barrett and Dine. It certainly served that purpose – but the soldiers also moved towards the gun-wielding duo. An emotional scene between two broken friends is undercut by a platoon opening fire on them.

In the end, the reborn Dyne snatched a large number of bullets from the Shinra soldiers, essentially saving Barrett’s life, because when the soldiers showed up, Barrett’s gun arm was unequipped and he was shot down in the duel. In that sense, Dyne walked out in a blaze of glory, to a certain extent. Also, in the insane state the game presents, coupled with his hatred for Shinra, he would attack these soldiers anyway to save Barret or something. The original game’s Dyne had a very different ending; when he came to his senses a little, he decided that he had done too many bad things and had blood on his hands to be reunited with his daughter, or to be a danger to her. Dyne then jumped to his death from a cliff.

Interestingly, the rebirth scene is certainly not bad. John Eric Bentley, the voice actor for Barrett in the English version, gives an incredible performance here. As Dyne lay dying, Bentley’s Barrett let out a heart-wrenching cry that turned into sobs. It gave me a lump in my throat. The direction of the cutscenes is beautiful. The twilight time in which the incident took place was perfect for a Wild West showdown between two gunslingers.it is really good.but it is not the truth as It’s great, you know?

Never mind that the next thing that happens after that heart-wrenching scene – literally a minute later – is a boss fight against a comic villain in a giant frog-like mecha.on site itself It just feels diminished.

I can understand why the developers might have taken a step back and decided to make attempted infanticide a major plot point, something they might not want to do in 2024. Likewise, Dain took his own life rather than have it destroyed by enemy forces in a desperate last ditch effort. But, to be honest, as much as I enjoyed this new scene, I still think the original, more raw version was ultimately better.

I felt similarly about a lot of moments in the game – like how Jenova’s bizarre circumstances on the freighter gave way to more exaggerated sprints and a series of escalating battles. It’s mostly a bloodless affair – although I say that because I think the cutscene that precedes the boss fight is one of the best in the game.

Like Trials of Blood in Remastered’s nerfs, or the watered-down body horror elements of Jenova’s existence, a lot of this feels like a decision made to avoid anything in the game being too original. Final Fantasy XVI may be a damn M-rated title, but FF7 Remake and Rebirth are downright T-rated for teenagers. Is this a good thing or a bad thing.

FF7 Remake bosses also explained this indirectly. At a recent British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) event, original FF7 director and remake series producer Yoshinori Kitase actually bought ratings and made them a key goal of Reborn and committed to gain wider acceptance.

“I’m not criticizing that at all, I think you do need these more extreme expressions of things and depictions of things that are a little bit bizarre, a little weird,” Kitase said of more overtly violent games. . “But I think to be widely accepted by mainstream culture we also have to walk the middle ground and create more universal, mainstream depictions of normal and average things and try to make those depictions as realistic as possible.”

“That’s what we’re striving for in Final Fantasy. Again, all that extreme, outside stuff — that’s great and we need it. But we also need more balance.”

Kitase’s words make sense. In fact, it doesn’t do much harm to Remastered or Reborn in general. But at the same time, I do mourn the original versions of scenes like “Bloodstain,” “The Freighter,” “Barrett and Dine’s Confrontation,” and more. I also wonder if a mainstream-focused development team could make a game as texture-rich as the original FF7.

Times have changed, and I love what we have—but still miss what we’ve lost—and it’s a perfect reminder of why the original is always untouchable.