Over the holiday, my husband and I played through a nice big chunk of Final Fantasy VII -- the original 1997 PlayStation release. My reaction, and I was skeptical to it at first, was that this is a very good game that is still a pleasure to play; the next thought that came once that realization sunk in, however, was that it's going to be a real challenge to reproduce what makes this game great in that HD remake slated for 2017.

Sitting down to give the game serious time and undivided attention gave me the chance to reflect on not just what it accomplished creatively and technically at the time, but how it holds up, as a game, irrespective of when it was made -- or its landmark status in the industry.

That is, naturally, hard to put to the side; however, it's a lot easier to do it when I flash myself back to 1997 and recall that, at the time, it had to earn its reputation. Taking the game at face value, rather than viewing through a lens of nostalgia and consensus, is essential. And it's a lot more fun than carrying a bunch of baggage.   

Initial reactor

Final Fantasy VII makes a good first impression. The game's in medias res intro sequence -- it begins with an infiltration mission, underscored by a dramatic soundtrack -- is among the best in not just the genre but in games, even now; it's a game that that entices you to play from moment one. It only slows down once it firmly establishes itself.

While the plot has a reputation for being esoteric, I think the latter-day Final Fantasy VII spin-off projects of the 2000s are what muddied the waters. The original game is, actually, quite easy to understand. Take the intro: Members of a resistance group called Avalanche conspire to plant a bomb in a power reactor with the help of an elite ex-soldier, Cloud Strife, controlled by the player; he doesn't care about their politics, but he's willing to help out for the money, and, it later becomes clear, because a childhood friend roped him into it.

The cause of his alienation from his former employer, the Shinra Electric Power Company, quickly becomes apparent. The clarity and purpose of the storytelling is striking. Triple-A games too often either boil things down way too far in attempt to make them comprehensible, or complicate things unnecessarily. The former is usually based on the assumption players don't care and won't remember the plot; the latter speaks to an infatuation with setting ("lore"). Final Fantasy VII's setup, meanwhile, is rich enough to be interesting but simple enough to follow with ease.

This screenshot is from the PC version of Final Fantasy VII, as are all the large images in this piece.

While the setting is surprisingly robust, especially compared the baroque and increasingly nonsensical backdrops of the last-gen Final Fantasy XIII trilogy -- try getting anything useful out of the intro for Lighting Returns -- it's easy to get lost in.

And in an era of real-world income inequality and ecological crisis, it's also surprisingly potent and directly relevant in ways mainstream game stories rarely are. It's not hard to imagine downtrodden ecological warriors taking on an exploitative power company that's destroying the planet. We may be headed there ourselves.

Visiting Midgar again

What's fun to recall is that the game's opening was generally considered strange in 1997: The player can't get out of Midgar, the city where the opening chapters of the game take place, for several hours. It was viewed as highly un-RPG-like to not let the player explore the world for so long.

Yet what you see of the city itself, and how the underclass of Midgar lives, helps the setting come to life in a way that's still rare. Nowadays, spending time and care to develop a single location doesn't seem strange at all, but the way in which Midgar is evoked is something we could use more of.

The Wall Market's brothel.

While the developers of the forthcoming remake of the game are still being coy about whether or not it'll be an open-world RPG, the strength of Final Fantasy VII is that Midgar comes alive in a highly impressionistic and idiosyncratic way; you can visit only a small slice of the "rotting pizza" that makes up the metropolis.  

Rather than spend time modeling dozens of buildings and the ebb and flow of the crowd, under influence of Assassin's Creed, I'd rather see the developers of the new game spend time figuring out how they can recapture the colorful neon glow of Sector 6's Wall Market. In the real world, we generally only know neighborhoods well, not whole cities, after all. One tragic, crumbling section of Midgar would be a real artistic achievement.  

Serious problems

Final Fantasy XV lead Noctis. "I smolder."

Mentioning the Wall Market makes it a good time to discuss something significant, which is easy to forget, these days, as Final Fantasy XV lead Noctis glares at us. Final Fantasy VII is a funny, lively, and very random game; the Wall Market is the setting of the infamous scene where Cloud dresses as a woman to sneak-attack a notorious womanizer and save his friend Tifa.

But is a scene like that even possible in a modern retelling? I don't mean because it's out-of-step with today's social mores (though this is, of course, significant.) I mean it in the sense that the original game's theatrical style and comic spirit seems most likely to be jettisoned in an attempt to make a more photorealistic game, and to live up to the series' current-day, self-serious image.  

The Final Fantasy of the 1990s was steeped in humor, both gentle and overt; of late, the games have gotten more bombastic and pompous. The majority of the humor in the largely nonsensical 2005 Final Fantasy VII film, Advent Children, was inadvertent. If anything, things have gotten worse since then. What little comic relief there is, is generally cringe-worthy, even perplexing.

I'm talking about humor here, but what I really mean is broader than that. What I'm talking about could be called "humanity," maybe -- spirit and verve. Final Fantasy VII has a lot of all of that, and it comes across in a lot of different ways. With its tale of a world divided, the original Final Fantasy XIII tried to recapture the tragedy of Midgar, but it got lost amidst a tremendously artificial setting that did a great job of painting hallways of frozen crystal and glowing trees but completely failed to portray any cohesive (or comprehensible) world at all.

At least it's pretty. 

Sure, Cloud is as cool as frost, and he's definitely got fabulous hair, but without photorealistic rendering, the focus in 1997 didn't zero in on the protagonist and his party. An eclectic spirit underpins the creativity of Final Fantasy VII; Final Fantasy XIII director Motomu Toriyama told me how the studio finds the democratic, collaborative development style of the older games nearly impossible to execute in its modern, huge-scale productions, but it's going to have to figure out a way to do so, or a remade Final Fantasy VII will end up as simply another fashion show. Without humans, there is no human element.

Belief in evolution

Playing the game today, I was struck by something else. In 1997, I took for granted the creative through-line of the Final Fantasy games. The high-spirited, character-driven storytelling style pioneered by Final Fantasy IV became the beating heart of Final Fantasy VI; its ambition is clear, yet clearly bounded by the limits of the Super NES. Final Fantasy VII was the direct inheritor of that mode of storytelling, with vast and rapid improvement coming simply by freeing it from those limitations. Final Fantasy VIII was, of course, a simple refinement of what began with VII.

The lesson of Final Fantasy VII, then, is that it was possible to revolutionize a franchise, and what it accomplished creatively, yet stay in step with where it had been in the past. It's good advice for anyone who's working on a game in a long-running series.

That would include Square Enix's developers, though it's hard to see how that's remotely possible for Final Fantasy now, since instead of a steady march, the franchise's last decade-plus has been a cacophony of distinctly different voices.

I haven't finished talking about the things that made me sit up and take notice. I talked about Final Fantasy VII's very beginning, and how effective it is, but the first significant sequence after you leave Midgar, in which Cloud recounts his memories of the Nibelheim incident, where Sephiroth goes on a destructive rampage, is also clever and effective storytelling in a different way. It sets up the big bad and his motivation, of course; it provides context, shading, and motivation to Cloud and Tifa, too.

Cloud's memories unravel.

But it also plays with the subjectivity of the narrator and interactive narrative in surprisingly effective ways. Cloud is an individual, and his experiences are his own; his memories of them, as he recounts what happened five years before the events of this game, are necessarily limited and unreliable, too.

The game communicates that through play. There's a point where you, as Cloud, can make a joke (in the form of a humorous lie). There's another part where Tifa corrects something Cloud misremembered. There's also part where you enter a house and then realize you never even went there at all. And in the midst of all of that, the game tricks the player, too, in a much more significant way -- that only becomes clear much, much later.

We need much more of that kind of storytelling in games -- personal, fragmentary, and related as experience. In fact, the game's frequent mixture of in-engine, on-the-fly storytelling with animated backdrops and relatively rare full-video cutscenes results in a livelier pacing that has fuzzy borders between narrative and play, and which flows much more naturally. In fact, it helps deliver storytelling that works much more like film than the "cinematics" we're so used to seeing, but which owe little to moviemaking.

Cloud, circa 2017.

Years ago, I wrote about what Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII got right. To be blunt, as a game, it's not great. It's simplistic, easy, barren. It certainly can't compare in scale or scope to Final Fantasy VII. Somehow, it's still the best Final Fantasy game released since the PlayStation 2. That's because it didn't forget that characters are the soul of the franchise, and tied their stories directly into its gameplay.

No matter how repetitive its dungeons were, or how irritating and superfluous its antagonist, Genesis, was to Final Fantasy VII -- and how all this presaged the creative downturn of the franchise, since it's at cross-purposes with its strengths -- Crisis Core