I have a confession to make: I used cheat codes / hacks to complete a good portion of Final Fantasy 7. The PS3 / PS4 port of Final Fantasy 7 came installed with a handful of built-in cheats you can easily turn on through pressing the L3 or R3 buttons (or both): a hack for 3x speed, a hack that turns off random encounters, and (crucially) a hack that fills up the characters' Limit Break gauges and completely refills their health every turn. At first, I only used 3x Speed intermittently because FF7 is often slow as hell, and I only really flicked on No Random Encounters while exploring the overworld and trying to figure out where the hell to go next without getting interrupted.

But here's the thing: FF7 is an old game. It is an oldass game, and in some places it has aged like milk. The aforementioned slowness of the dialogue and movement is one thing, but you are constantly being reminded of the antiquated nature of the game at almost every turn. FF7's overworld is an overambitious disaster: no landmarks on the map (which makes backtracking miserable without a guide), indecipherably weird movement, and a strange warping effect that makes walking around somewhat nauseating. Random and oft-unpredictable difficulty spikes permeate throughout the campaign; sometimes you will just killed by random bullshit and there's nothing you can do about it in the moment (froglocking). The translation is notoriously wonky and uncanny, so important mechanics are often poorly contextualized to the point of some bits of advice being outright lies ("attack while its tail is up"). And the less said about BS like climbing the frozen mountain or passing through the green whirlwinds, the better. There are so many frustrating little things pockmarked throughout the 20-30 hours the average player will spend with FF7 that start tallying up over time, and the older I get, the less patience I have for difficulty spikes and stupid bullshit.

So I caved. I turned on Infinite Limit Breaks and Restoring Health and basically never turned it off as the game's runtime stretched into the double digits... and in doing so, I felt my frustration (mostly) fade away into the ether, allowing me to appreciate what works about this classic without being reminded of what has aged about it.

Was this the right thing to do? Did my decision to turn on hacks hinder the authenticity of my critical experience with FF7? Do I really have a platform of any kind to judge this game upon compared to the thousands of 90s kids that had to put up with this game's tomfoolery and beat it through sheer force of will? I don't know... and I honestly don't care. Nerdietalk wrote a brief review of Fallout: New Vegas where she admitted to using console commands to breeze through the game, and in doing so, she got to "experience some incredible writing and worldbuilding." I kept thinking about that small writeup while playing through Final Fantasy 7, and I ultimately came to the exact same conclusion. It's possible that using cheat codes cheapened my experience with FF7 and made it less authentic and genuine than playing it as-is on the PS1, imperfections and all. But at some point during my playthrough, I stopped caring about this nefarious, ambiguous question of 'authenticity' altogether, because in the process of using cheats & hacks to streamline my experience, I got to play an incredibly creative and compelling adventure where something memorable, funny, and heartbreaking was always waiting for me around the corner.

FF7's world is an timeless one, filled to the brim with distinctive landmarks and rock-solid worldbuilding. Midgar alone is a killer cyberpunk location, an iconic dystopia so memorable and well-realized that they could well have set the entire game here (foreshadowing); the fact that we're also treated to strong, striking locations like Cosmo Canyon, the Gold Saucer, and the Forgotten City long after Midgar has been left in ruins just feels like the frosting on top of a delicious cake (or the sauce on top of a Midgar pizza). FF7 combines futuristic cyberpunk aesthetics with swords-and-sorcery fantasy so seamlessly that you don't even question why all these magic users and swordsmiths drive motorcycles, blow up power plants, and travel across the world in armored cars, planes, and airships. The way that Mako energy & "The Lifestream" as a concept is tied into the game's themes of nature & technology is brilliant, the Materia system is a flexible and customizable work of art, and the way the game's scope gradually evolves from "ecoterrorist revolution" to "fighting a godly being to save the planet" is actually pretty flawless and well-paced, all things considered. It's not hard to see why the broad strokes of FF7's alluring and creative world captured the imagination of thousands; there is something enchanting about the world of Gaia and the characters and stories found within it.

So much about the plot just works in spite of the infamously off-kilter and terse translation. The disastrous and often self-destructive impact that Shinra has on the world around them can be felt even at the fringes of the planet, creating this delightfully apocalyptic and anti-imperialist atmosphere that imbues FF7 with a crucial sense of revolutionary fervor. But in spite of this dystopia, Final Fantasy 7 is a shockingly funny game, unafraid to be silly and lighthearted and larger-than-life in places like Wall Market, the Gold Saucer, the Chocobo Farm, and Wutai. But these moments of levity and goofball comedy never detract from the mysticism and gravitas of the overarching plot about life and death and the fate of the planet. FF7 is often a beautiful game, its quieter moments defined by a strangely contemplative and damp atmosphere, and sometimes the game even does a great job at being chilling and kind of horrifying: everything about Sephiroth (a legitimately intimidating force-of-nature type of villain that makes the absolute most of his minimal screentime) and the thick, asphyxiating mystery of Nibelheim is legitimately haunting. And even though I knew the two biggest plot twists in the game coming in (Aerith's death and everything about Cloud and Zack), the fact that I still felt a genuine sense of shock, awe, and impact when those moments finally came proves just how strong the writing of FF7 is after all this time.

Though honestly, the journey that our main protagonist takes is proof enough of the story's inherent strength. Cloud Strife is one of the best and most iconic JRPG protagonists of all time for a good reason: he's cool, he has a badass sword, a badass motorcycle, he's a tough antihero that refuses to take shit from anyone, and it's all a lie. I'd even go as far to call Cloud perhaps the best JRPG protagonist of all time. I have more of a personal connection with Skies of Arcadia's Vyse, and I could easily see someone making a similar case for Mother 3's Lucas or Persona 5's Joker. But in my mind, Cloud stands atop every single one of them because of how cleverly and succinctly he subverts the audience's expectations.

Cloud is an unreliable narrator, a liar so damaged by trauma and inferiority that Cloud himself is the most devout believer of his own lies, so fooled by his own smoke and mirrors that his mind has become fog itself. The way the game gradually unravels his badass tough-guy persona to reveal the broken, hurt child underneath it all is legitimately stellar. Cloud's character arc goes through so many twists and turns that keeps the audience on their toes, and yet there's a clear throughline of trauma and self-loathing throughout. He is, simultaneously, a ruthless and cool lone-wolf hero that can take on the world alone... and an insecure, lonely boy that was robbed of his chance to grow up by propaganda and mental illness. Only through properly working through his trauma and discovering himself does Cloud become a proper hero. When he says "I'm going to live my life without pretending", you want to cry with happiness, and when he whips out the Omnislash to defeat Sephiroth in a duel that ends the entire game, you want to fucking cheer for him. Cloud is consistently great every step of the way. No one has ever done it quite like Cloud Strife, and the fact that he's surrounded by a distinctive and fleshed-out cast of memorable and well-written characters is just the cherry on top.

Final Fantasy 7 is a complex game from toe to tip. It's antiquated, obtuse, frequently frustrating, and intermittently hard to love... but it's also creative, clever, frequently funny, and easy to fall in love with. It is an exciting game, with an impeccably timeless prog-rock soundtrack with catchy, complex songs that pump you up and make you cry. It is beautiful, painfully beautiful at parts with its gorgeously textured and painterly pre-rendered backgrounds (which look fantastic even now) and the heavy sense of mysticism shrouded over everything. Its beauty and gravitas are kept in check by the game's goofy sense of humor, the humor is kept grounded by FF7's impressive propensity for psychological horror and cosmic terror, and the horror is numbed by the lovable found-family cast of characters and the wonderful, hilarious, and deeply sad things they persevere through. FF7 is hilarious, tragic, imaginative, and overambitious as hell, and it somehow manages to run the full gamut of emotional highs and lows throughout a fairly brisk 20-to-25 hour runtime that ultimately left me exhilarated and awe-inspired in spite of the numerous legitimate frustrations that hindered my progress to the action-packed finish line.

There are too many issues present in the game's DNA for me to call it a timeless classic... but these issues ultimately aren't enough to detract from how confident, clever, creative, and cathartic of a journey Final Fantasy 7 really is. No matter how often I'll sharply exhale through my nose and mutter 'fuck this', I know for a fact I'll likely keep returning to this game over and over and over again as the years go by, and no matter how many cheat codes or hacks I'll resort to in order to reduce the migraine, I know for a fact the brilliant soundtrack, the ethereal pre-rendered visuals, and the simultaneously hysterical and evocative story will never cease to capture my imagination no matter what.

To the settling of everything. Let's mosey.

Watch Dogs 2 is defined by its insecurity. From the very beginning, the game does absolutely everything in its power to tonally and aesthetically set itself apart from its darker and edgier predecessor. A squad of quirky, eccentric characters instead of a brooding, solitary protagonist; high-stakes cyberheists and Anonymous-esque exposés instead of fixer gigs and small-scale stealthy encounters; San Francisco's neon-splattered punk aesthetics instead of the sleek urban elegance of Chicago; an overall goofy and bombastic tone throughout instead of the straight-faced, byronic feel of the original. Everything is different, and yet... absolutely none of it feels authentic or genuine.

The squad of quirky, eccentric characters the plot centers around feel like hollow, depthless stereotypes designed exclusively to pander to Millenials, an aggressively samey quartet (quintet when the game remembers Horatio exists) that exist to spew out references to outdated memes, do Arnold Schwarzenegger references, and have random arguments about Aliens versus Predators. The cyberpunk element of the plot exists almost solely for spectacle; Watch Dogs 2 pretends that DedSec's hacktivism is motivated by direct action and revolutionary sentiment, but the game's politics are so shallow and so disinterested that the most definitive statement Watch Dogs 2 ever makes on its themes is a safe, surface-level "corporations suck" message that lands with absolutely zero impact given the company that made this. The graffiti-laden punk stylings of the game are equally as shallow and function as little more than colorful branding, borrowing and co-opting the aesthetics of a hack's understanding of rebellion, and the comedy and overall goofy tone of Watch Dogs 2 is, frankly, fucking awful. Now mind you, this isn't because the game isn't funny per se (though the comedy is genuinely nightmarish sometimes), but it's the sheer, utter insincerity and insecurity behind the comedy that saps all of the energy and authenticity out of Watch Dogs 2's intended tone.

Watch Dogs 2's plot is overflowing with random jokes, outdated memes, and loud, Deadpool-esque characters that exist solely to either quip, dole out references, or make funny noises. This, to me, is the sign of Ubisoft desperately compensating for the poor reception that Watch Dogs 1's plot received upon release. Aiden Pearce was often derided for essentially being the king of generic edgelords, a brooding antihero seemingly so cookie-cutter and dime-a-dozen that a lot of his critics marked him as being nothing more than a walking cliche. Now, I wrote a whole review about how I feel like Watch Dogs 1 failed to extrapolate upon the potential and hidden depths of Aiden's character; I think he was a potentially interesting villain protagonist the plot failed to do much of anything with because of its lack of creativity and nuance. I'm not about to call Aiden's critics wrong, but I'm also not about to call Marcus Holloway's fans correct, either. Aiden was certainly a very tropey and predictable character, but honestly, at least I knew who Aiden was. At least I knew what he wanted, even if it was little more than revenge. We got a pretty full picture of what Aiden was like as a character, even if that wasn't much to write home about. I've spent upwards of twenty to thirty hours with Marcus and I still have no idea who the fuck this guy even is.

Marcus does has a personality: funny, relatable nerd. Unfortunately, that is the personality of literally all of his friends in DedSec. Marcus also wants the exact same things as his DedSec comrades, for equally shallow reasons of wanting to 'stick it to the man' without ever really knowing why they want this in the first place (Horatio is the only character with a compelling premise but he is woefully underutilized). The story tells us that Marcus was falsely convicted of... something, and presumably spent some time in jail and doing community service, but that is literally all we're ever permited to learn about Marcus. We don't learn what he was falsely convicted for, we don't learn how long his jailtime was, how he was treated in jail, how expensive his bail was (if someone paid his bail at all), what his community service entailed and how long it was, or how society treats him now that he has a criminal record he never asked for. Literally none of these things matter to the overall plot, and they don't even really matter to Marcus as a whole. He goofs off and commits cyberterrorism and vandalism without a care of the world, and we never get to see what brought him to the point of radicalization beyond what essentially amounts to a hand-wavey backstory you'd probably find in the back of a game manual. Marcus is less generic than Aiden upon first blush, yes, but he's also somehow far less distinct and far less fleshed-out. I never knew what was at stake for Marcus beyond the expected punishments of imprisonment or death, and thus, it was utterly impossible to care about him whenever the game asked me to. You spend the entire game controlling an absolute stranger, and this is because Ubisoft didn't want to write a character, they wanted to make a hollow vessel for jokes, references, and memes in a misguided attempt to distance themselves from Watch Dogs 1's oft-derided darkness.

The plot absolutely refuses to take it seriously, and it doesn't want you to take it seriously... except for the moments when it absolutely does. In spite of the wackier, larger-than-life, Saints Row-knockoff tone that defines your experience with Watch Dogs 2, the game is still trying to be about the exact same intended themes of its predecessor: Big Tech, government control, conspiracy, and the way that corporations use the digital age and the Internet to manipulate and control people. These are heavy, dystopic themes that clash hard with the game's lighthearted, goofy exterior, and more often than not, the game absolutely crumbles under the weight of trying to balance these two wholly different spheres of influence.

Marcus' best friend, Horatio, is murdered by a random gang out of nowhere. It's sudden and cruel and the characters are devastated by this loss... and then one or two missions later, they're cracking unfunny jokes about 'hipster dicks' and pretending Horatio never even existed. There's a shockingly well-written and well-acted scene where the main villain reveals he's been artificially inflating DedSec's follower count with bots as a way of bringing more customers to Blume's doorstep, dropping this bombshell mere moments before calling the cops on a cornered Marcus. It's a genuinely tense moment that presents a legitimately interesting plot twist, and then immediately thereafter, Marcus and his friends dick off to the desert and get high and then hack a dinosaur statue in a hacking competition that was apparently being held in the desert because that's a thing you fucking do I guess?????? Constant, unstoppable whiplash. There are subplots about cults and human trafficking and gang violence, heavy and dramatic plot points that demand your attention alongside pop culture rants, nerdgasms, quippy puns, and an overlong mission where you fight a queer-coded SJW intentionally made to be thoroughly unlikable because fuck Tumblr, am I right? Watch Dogs 2 wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It demands you take it seriously, but it also covers itself in a thick coating of irony as a defense mechanism against criticism. Maybe this worked back in 2016, but in an era as heavily, unavoidably political as the 2020s, Watch Dogs 2's failure to commit to its themes of radicalization vs. corruption is a deeply embarrassing and deeply uninteresting reflection of the time it was made and the company who made it. Watch Dogs 2's inability to commit to either tragedy or comedy made it impossible to take either facet seriously, creating a hollow void of a plot where nothing happens and nothing matters.

Regrettably, however, the gameplay of Watch Dogs 2 is so much fun that it almost manages to make up for its disaster of a plot. Whereas 2's story and themes feel like a downgrade from even the most generic and underdeveloped plot beats of Watch Dogs 1, the gameplay loop here is a significant improvement from the decent foundation laid by its predecessor. The combat feels smoother, the infamously bad driving actually feels pretty manageable this time around, and there's so much cool and inventive stuff you can do with hacking that it makes Watch Dogs 1's hacking mechanics feel like mere waddling in the script kiddie pool (that's a hacker pun, heheheh, how do you do, fellow nerds). You can hack vehicles to swerve out of the way, you can deactivate a door and effectively lock enemies out, you can set up EMP traps, and you can even sic a gang or the police on an enemy or civilian as a patsy if you either want some backup or want to orchestrate a screening action as a decoy. You can be legitimately really smart in the moment-to-moment gameplay of Watch Dogs 2; there were several instances throughout the game where I felt like I did something very cool or very smart, and Watch Dogs 2 is very good at allowing the player to experiment and manipulate the electronic world around them. The drone and the RC car are also great additions to your arsenal, allowing you to access high and low places you were never able to see in Watch Dogs 1. Combat feels good, stealth is basically always a viable option, car chases away from the police feel exciting and dynamic, and the process is so multifaceted and nuanced now that it leaves Watch Dogs 1's already pretty-solid template behind in the dust.

The gameplay is very good, and the fact that it's forced to share living space with an obnoxiously underwritten story is a genuine shame. Watch Dogs 2 is a game defined by whiplash: its daring attempt at colorful dystopia is neutered by its cowardly sense of irony, moments of tragedy and intrigue are rendered incoherent by poorly-timed, ill-fitting "comedy", and the stimulating, entertaining gameplay is constantly hampered by the pathetic context in which the gameplay exists. It's fun to be a cybercriminal in Watch Dogs 2, but it would have been far more fun to be a revolutionary. What could have been a thrilling, pulpy take on cybercrime and direct action against the Powers That Be instead manifested as this deeply insecure and thoroughly insincere response to the mockery that Watch Dogs 1's plot received. The unfunny, performative comedy is nothing more than a shield against criticism, the punk leanings and vaguely anti-establishment themes little more than a desperate marketing strategy, and any and all attempts to say anything of merit are quickly silenced by gags, memes, and references that were outdated even by 2016 standards. In a way, it's not surprising at all that Wrench was the breakout character here, because he perfectly embodies Watch Dogs 2 (albeit not in the way they maybe intended him to): a loud, washed-up, out-of-touch, how-do-you-do-fellow-kids class clown that quickly shows his true colors of insecurity and awkwardness the moment you take his mask off.

But you can pet actual dogs in this game! You can finally watch dogs in Watch Dogs, so it honestly might be a little better than the original game just because of that.

A middle-of-the-road 2.5/5 rating simultaneously feels overly unfair and overly generous. In spite of its expensive, lavish, and confident sense of style and presentation, FF7R is a thoroughly confused game, a mixed bag that fluctuates wildly in quality at completely sporadic intervals throughout. It's fun, and then it's frustrating; it's entertaining, and then it's energy-sapping; it's compelling, and then it's a complete and total clusterfuck. Sometimes Remake actually feels like FF7 come to life on the big screen, and then sometimes it occurs to you that you're just playing an incoherent fanfiction of a beloved classic. Confusion and imbalance are at the core of Remake's very identity in spite of its confident and professional facade, much like its unreliable-narrator protagonist and his personal struggles that FF7R only gets to briefly touch on before coming to an anticlimactic 'end'.

The choice to adapt the famous Midgar Arc into an entire 30-40 hour game is one I can almost understand from a certain perspective. FF7's Midgar has everything going for it: it's visually striking, immediately memorable, and drenched in a weirdly evocative mixture of dystopia and realism. Midgar is a tale of societal upheaval and cyberpunk revolution told through a uniquely fantastical lens, and almost every single iconic moment from the original game can be found in Midgar. The trains, the Mako reactors, Aerith's church, Cloud's motorcycle, Wall Market & Don Corneo, the destruction of Sector 7 and Sephiroth's slaughter of Shinra HQ, just one action-packed and iconic setpiece after another in the span of like 6-7 hours. Midgar is such a compelling and well-realized location, and yet it felt like there was so much we never got to see. So I can almost understand the merit behind focusing the entirety of FF7R within the rotting pizza that is Midgar: it's an endlessly interesting and unique location with so much lore, drama, and comedy built into it that maybe, just maybe, an entire game centered around this teal junkyard metropolis might be able to sustain itself for 30 hours.

What this amounts to in execution, however, is padding. A lot of padding. Almost everything I liked and appreciated in FF7R was lifted almost verbatim from the original game. Nothing new is really done with AVALANCHE, or Shinra, or the Turks, Mako, SOLDIER, the Cetra, or anything at all, really. For the most part, you're merely playing through the Greatest Hits of FF7 bloated with often unnecessary jam sessions comprised of overlong exposition and artificial gameplay lengtheners. The collapsed tunnel in FF7 is now an entire explorable area with a dreadful robot-hand minigame. The train-graveyard sequence is now an hour long and full of confusing, plothole-y ghost shit. Every time Cloud and co. have to shimmy through a tight space, you're forced to watch a cutscene of them slowly, painfully moving their way through something that should have taken a second to clear. Every side quest is this game is either a collect-a-thon fetch quest or a kill-a-thon fight sequence that adds minimal substance to the world around you. FF7R is defined by its padding, and all of this extra fluff culminates in the truly godawful Shinra Infiltration arc which, apart from a fun motorcycle chase at the very end and the goofy staircase sequence, is a dull, frustrating chore full of stupid, boring bullshit. The party splits up and you have to swap between party members because why not, the game needs to be longer. You have to slowly lumber across some monkey bars because why not, the game needs to be longer. You have to slowly walk through a boring museum room with unskippable dialogue and then slowly crawl through a boring fucking vent shaft because why not, the game--

And when FF7R's plot isn't being let down by its padding, it's being let down by a lack of subtlety and a misunderstanding about what worked in the quieter moments of FF7. The first bombing mission in FF7 was defined by a strangely dark climax; AVALANCHE's destruction of the first Mako Reactor cause millions of dollars in property damage and likely claims dozens of lives in the process, and yet the party decides to move on to the next bombing mission regardless. It's an interesting note to open the game on. It's a morally gray and ambiguous situation that casts a complex light on AVALANCHE's justified but violent actions, so of course FF7R ruins this moral ambiguity by revealing the overwhelming destruction was an intentional sabotage plot orchestrated by Shinra because evil. There are moments like this scattered throughout the entirety of FF7R. Sector 7's destruction is reduced from an atrocious war crime into an inconvenient tragedy, courtesy of an overlong evacuation sequence that ensures most of the civilians' survival. Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie were three unlucky, nameless victims of capitalism, callously slaughtered by an imperialistic world for daring to rebel against it, so naturally in FF7R these characters are given an ultimately unnecessary amount of added characterization and depth in spite of the inevitability of their fate, added characterization that ultimately (and paradoxically) adds very little to their overall character beyond trying to make you feel more :( when they die.

And then there's fucking Sephiroth. Sephiroth, the intimidating and mysterious monster that felt more like myth than man. He was a violent, ominous force of nature soaked in mystery and blood, a grim-reaper ghost that barely ever appeared in the first part of FF7, only manifesting into the plot when it was absolutely necessary. So of course Sephiroth appears every 20 fucking minutes to smirk and be pretentious and say cryptic hogwash like "muahaha there will be consequences", a bunch of hollow gobbledygook that amounts to nothing because your final fight with him ends in a stalemate, because of course it has to, his story can't end just yet, which means all of the buildup surrounding him ends on a flat-noted cliffhanger. Sephiroth made the most of his minimal appearances in Disc 1 of FF7, whereas the game can barely justify any of his fifty thousand scenes in FF7R.

And honestly, I'm not even gonna get into the new multiverse aspects of the plot and Zack Fair presumably being alive again (thus ruining literally everything about him) and the fucking Whispers or whatever and how their presence completely invalidates the intended stakes of the story, because this review is long enough and any further discussion about Tetsuya Nomura's additions to the narrative of FF7 would just descend into incoherent rambling. I'll just leave it at this: Nomura's flair for convoluted mythos and anime bullshit was charming in Kingdom Hearts, but it has already overstayed its welcome in Remake, and I can only imagine how much worse and thinly-worn it's going to get in Rebirth.

The plot of FF7R is, unfortunately, a wash more often than not. So much of what Remake adds to the world of FF7 is either needless or convoluted. It poorly rearranges the plot of a beloved RPG and laboriously, artificially stretches it out to the point where almost every new addition just feels like 'content', poorly-contextualized filler meant to hit a quota and nothing else... at least until the final hours of the game when it throws up its hands and says 'fuck it', deciding to bank on a bland fusion of Dissidia and Kingdom Hearts in its last moments instead. It is genuinely hard to say how much of the enjoyable stuff in FF7R's story is enjoyable on its own merits, or enjoyable because someone thought of it already years ago. I'm not inherently opposed to an Evangelion Rebuild-style subversion of FF7's plot, but the execution leaves so much to be desired. FF7R falls flat in ways that FF7 never did; FF7's story was overflowing with creative ideas, whereas FF7R struggles to bring anything new to a table that's been around since before I (and statistically, a fair chunk of you) were even born.

Sometimes, though, FF7R catches you off-guard. Sometimes FF7R is really fun. The action-RPG hybrid gameplay is fluid, fast, and full of catharsis; it's clear that Nomura et al. have come a long way since Kingdom Hearts 1, and the combat in FF7R continues to feel fresh and inviting even as the game's runtime drags into the double digits. The music is fucking fantastic throughout. The character models look utterly fantastic, the perfect blend between triple-A realism and gothic anime aesthetics. Certain locales, like the Mako reactors, Loveless Avenue, Wall Market or even the dreadfully-paced Shinra HQ and Train Graveyards, actually look and feel like beloved landmarks in FF7 come to life, liberated from the restraints of outdated and limited graphics. And as much of a meandering, incomplete mess the plot winds up being, the distinctive and memorable characters that inhabit Midgar are still a lot of fun to talk to and observe. Barret, Tifa, and Aerith are still some of the most fun and fleshed-out RPG party members pop culture's ever gotten, and that hasn't changed one iota.

In fact, this is actually probably the best interpretation of Cloud we've gotten since the OG game: Nomura had gradually morphed him into a generic, angsty edgelord in the 2000's and practically all of Cloud's personality and relevance had been scrubbed off in the 2010s, so it's nice to see Cloud finally resembling his old self again: a cocky, complex, socially-awkward loner that's just as silly as he is sad and sympathetic. FF7R does a great job at reminding you of the Cloud that everyone fell in love with, the grumpy but genuinely traumatized child at heart that just wanted to be a hero but didn't quite make the cut, deciding to roleplay as someone else entirely as a coping mechanism instead of properly confronting his mental hangups. He's both a badass antihero and a wet cat of a person, and I'm glad that FF7R embraces both of these equally-valid sides of Cloud. At least the protagonist is strong even when the plot around him keeps tumbling down.

It's genuinely very hard to properly express my feelings on FF7R. I was legitimately enjoying myself for most of the game's runtime, even if I was constantly making notes in the back of my head, even if I was constantly being reminded of the game's shortcomings. For about 15 hours, I was able to stomach most of its evident flaws courtesy of the fun characters and the flashy combat and the joyous feeling of playing FF7 all over again, but the final eight or so hours of FF7R were such a fucking drag that it dissipated and shattered the already-flimsy smoke and mirrors the game had been dangling over my eyes. At times, FF7R is desperately unfun, weighed down by cynical Triple-A Game Design decisions and pointless, boring filler designed solely to artificially pad out the runtime... and at other times, FF7R is a desperately auteurist product, more of an overeager Tetsuya Nomura fanfiction than a genuinely inspired re-imagining of Final Fantasy 7. Too much of his usual theatrics and eccentric design choices seep through the seams of the plot, fundamentally altering the feel of the narrative to the point where it starts to feel more like a weirdly futuristic version of Kingdom Hearts than a grand adventure about ecoterrorism and corruption.

Maybe it's proof that FF7 was lightning in a bottle, a perfect patchwork surgery of influences, ideas, and passions that could only have been made once. Every single attempt to reinterpret or continue the story of FF7 has faltered to some degree, whether it be the edgy anime shlock of Advent Children, or the way that Crisis Core unintentionally spits on the anti-imperialist themes of its source, or whatever the actual fuck was even going on in Dirge of Cerberus... and Remake, unfortunately, is no different. When FF7R is at its best, it's merely emulating the highlights of FF7 with better graphics and (arguably) better combat. When it's at its worst, however, you see it for what it really is: a nostalgia-bait piece of Final Fantasy 7-shaped content, a legacy act carefully designed to remind you of a better game made before George Bush was even President.

But hey, at least you can't get frog-stunlocked like you could in the original game! That alone gives Remake a 3/5 in spirit.