I was left with way more complicated feelings on this thing than I was expecting. It's a fun game to play, with a tweaked battle system taken far past the clumsy feel of the PSP version and a nice, compact structure that makes it a super easy game to open up when you decide you got some time to kill. Those side-missions rock and they have the same sort of goofy yakuza-adjacent tone that Final Fantasy VII Remake happens to strike as well, probably mostly due to this version's HD facelift.

The story and presentation and just... everything to do with that though, that's a different story. Zack Fair is a hilariously stupid dickhead and I like him a lot for that but I don't necessarily love him. The returning cast is kind of a mixed bag with Cloud and Sephiroth's parts being great and Aerith... well, I'll circle back to that. The new additions to the cast are genuinely baffling. Just the most bizarre personalities that never crack past a surface reading, given absolutely ridiculous importance in the story. It's really stupid in both the good and the bad way.

A lot of the character relationships don't really hold together very well. Angeal is too weird and hilarious to take seriously, Genesis basically never makes sense at all, and Aerith's friendship/hamfisted will they won't they with Zack swings back and forth between being kinda cute and incredibly forced. That forced feeling does kinda start to work on me though, as I started to read Aerith as less someone in puppy love and more as someone being a friend that everyone in her immediate circle just assumes needs to be paired up with the guy that fell through her ceiling. It's goofy but when I look at the character that way it starts to sit better with me.

Zack starts the game as a boot boy through and through, totally bought into the culture of war and capital that Shinra peddles off to its working class. He admires literal psychopaths and broken weirdos and starts off the game committing war crimes in Wutai under the vague goal of being a hero. This literally always comes off as weird and even if the game's creators dont necessarily line up with that reading, this angle keeps being supported by the game's events... so I think deep inside there really was an intent to make a sort of weird ironic hero story like this. The way everyone talks past each other. Zack barely comprehends whats going on in the first half and then suddenly his idol dies and boom, he's broken too and thus a hero to the lower ranking soldiers.

He makes friends with Cloud, in which case suddenly the dialogue is really well acted and endearing. In Nibelheim the game just ascends to a new level where the bizarre inclusions of the new characters start to bring a newfound psychosis into focus for the characters. The world is being ruined by a corporation, it's breaking all the "heroes" and now they're sick and dying with nowhere to go, and this whole time those broken people they admired continue to be a north star. It's actually unsettling stuff as the game crawls to its conclusion, a funeral rite that starts well before the heart stops beating. Zack asks if you think he became a hero. The game fucking ends! It's kind of fucking amazing, man I dunno!

This is one of the messiest, most uneven games I've played in a long time but I'll be god damned if it gets dismissed as something fans of FF7 should skip over. More people gotta learn that Final Fantasy Is Real Good, Even When It Isn't. This is a series that has been steadfast in staying interesting no matter what, and that includes this fuckin weird thing. This failed little J-Drama of a video game. Never before have I seen a game go from laugh-a-minute kusoge to actual compelling drama before, at least not on this level. I know I'm giving the game and its creators a lot of credit here but dammit this game made me feel stuff. Hats off.