A quick recap of FFVII Remake and Rebirth

Final Fantasy VII Remake is the first part of the Final Fantasy VII remake project and the first instalment of an intended trilogy of games, acting as a partial remake of Final Fantasy VII, originally released for the PlayStation in 1997.

You play Cloud Strife, a cynical spiky-haired mercenary who has been hired by an insurgent group called Avalanche to infiltrate and bomb a reactor. In this world a fascistic megacorporation called Shinra has pioneered a way to suck the lifeforce out of the planet and convert it into an energy called Mako. The discovery has given rise to marvels like Midgar, a vast circular dystopian metropolis, built upon a base of polluted slums, which provides the setting for the first act of the game. For Avalanche’s leader, Barret, a burly zealot with a gun for an arm, ridding society of Shinra’s reactors – a mission not without collateral damage – is the only way to save the planet from environmental collapse.

The first instalment in the remake trilogy, released in 2020, covered events in Midgar, where Cloud, having taken on another job for Avalanche, finds himself caught up in the fight against Shinra. He blows up another reactor. He falls from a great height, crashing through the church of a flower girl called Aerith. He becomes her bodyguard. He dresses up as a woman to rescue his childhood friend Tifa. He witnesses an atrocity. He storms Shinra’s headquarters to save a captured Aerith, revealed to be the last of an ancient race with powerful magical abilities. He discovers that a man from his past, the legendary supersoldier Sephiroth, is somehow still alive.

The second part of the trilogy, titled Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, follows Cloud and his ragtag crew of companions (Barret, Tifa, Aerith, and a four-legged lab experiment called Red XIII) as they leave behind the suffocating concrete of Midgar and step into a wide, open world. The original game portrayed this vast landscape as an abstract miniature, with its various towns and cities resembling toy models. For Rebirth, however, it has been recreated as a living, breathing ecosystem.

“The sheer scale of the world was the most difficult thing about this game,” says Rebirth’s director Naoki Hamaguchi. “We had to rethink the original’s geography, dig deeper into what these places are, the people who live there. We had to make it feel like a planet, like a journey.”

Rebirth adapts what is arguably the most significant segment of the original game: in which Cloud, now on the run from Shinra, travels in search of Sephiroth, a former hero who has become a threat to the planet. The world our heroes find is as magical as it is melancholy. For every sunny seaside resort or glitzy amusement park, there is a polluted fishing village, or a town traumatised by a tragic reactor accident.

In classic RPG-style, you visit these places, learn their stories, fight monsters, invest time into making your characters stronger (levelling up), meet new companions (including a precocious ninja and a talking cat) and bond as a fellowship.

The beauty of Final Fantasy VII’s storytelling is how deftly it marries the personal drama of these characters (the identity crisis of Cloud; the romance that begins to bloom between him and Tifa, the secret past of Aerith’s ancient race; the destroyed coal mining village that inspired Barret’s activism) with tightly paced plotting and steadily escalating stakes. The fight against an evil corporation becomes the fight against an aspiring god, Sephiroth; the fight against an aspiring god becomes the fight against an ancient extraterrestrial evil, against enormous Kaiju-esque monsters, against a meteor called forth to end the world. And then, suddenly, in the midst of it all, it happens: Sephiroth descends from the heavens and plunges his sword through Aerith’s back.

There is also the intriguing possibility that this time, Aerith doesn’t die at all. The first instalment of the remake trilogy introduced the idea of Whispers: spectral beings that try to intervene whenever the storyline of the new game is in danger of deviating from that of the original. Some have theorised that they represent the fans who don’t want anything other than a direct scene-for-scene recreation.

Yet their apparent defeat at the end of the first part suggested two things. The first is that this trilogy is something of a meta-sequel: a remake commenting on the challenges of remaking an iconic game. The second is that Kitase, Hamaguchi and their team are now free to take big creative risks. This is something that is both exciting and new which players are looking forward to in the final game of the trilogy that has yet to have a title and date announced.