“Demo Disk” – Final Fantasy 7 Remake Demo (2020) [PS4]

Demo Disk is a series of first impressions posts for new releases and quick opinions.

What you must understand before we embark on this adventure, my FF7R Demo review aka first impressions, is that I have had a few concerns about this upcoming game over the years. Color me a skeptic. No, this is nothing I lose any actual sleep over. I’ve merely some critical thoughts about the nature of this remake, based on questions that Square Enix doesn’t seem keen to answer.

I have to be upfront about this so you know where I’m coming from and how I approached this demo with some apprehension. It might be that there are those out there with some similar sentiment.

My four major concerns are as follows:

#1: Episodic Nature

Not titling this “Episode One” or “Chapter One”, never showing us footage beyond Midgar, and stating that this is going to be a full game are all things central to my overall concern over FF7R. How long until the next “episode”? FF7R itself took forever to create, though I think we won’t have to wait as long for the next entry. What even is in the next entry and where does it end? Gold Saucer? Cosmo Canyon? Junon? How long are they going to stretch this out? Or is the next game going to be the rest of the original game?

#2. Potentially Unnecessary Story Bloat

Show, don’t tell. It’s a fundamental storytelling maxim. The unknown does more for you than sitting the audience down and explaining everything.

One of the things that preserves the mystique of the original is how much it doesn’t directly expound, how much it leaves up to the player to figure out on their own. That’s part of its appeal. We already knew before this demo that FF7R was going to have a lot more added to it compared to the original (best to treat it as an entirely new game, then), whether that be flying wraiths or visions of Sephiroth in a burning alleyway. Of course, they needed to beef up this portion of the original game, the first 10% of it maybe?

But how much of this is a) necessary to the plot, b) going to affect the pace of the story, c) going to over-explain and over-exposit elements of the story, or d) introduce portions of the story needlessly early? Trim the fat and kill the darlings. In other words, does the very nature of a full first episode game risk doing damage to the story of Final Fantasy VII? I don’t think there’s any harm in asking that question. I’ll end this section with another maxim: bigger does not always mean better.

#3. Spectacle Over Substance

I personally haven’t been onboard with a lot of Square Enix’s recent JRPG big hitters. I (notoriously) thought that FFXV was a largely vapid, empty, soulless chore-fest, albeit with great graphics, scenery, and flashy battles, and I didn’t even get to finishing KHIII, which I thought was over-the-top, senselessly melodramatic formula, a spectacle-over-substance exemplar. My concern is that FF7R would follow in these footsteps, opting for the “animefication” of fight sequences defying gravity and shooting shonen pew pews rather than supplying any semblance of tactical or strategic gameplay. A hack and slash more than an RPG. A button masher. For hours. Or worse: hold O to win.

#4. Not Much Else Besides Battles And Walking

With everything that has been revealed about FF7R, there’s still a lot we don’t know. A lot of walking and sometimes running has been shown. I laughed when Square Enix tweeted out confirmation that HD stairs would be in this game. Of course, they were joking. Of course, that’s a bit indicative. Walking and battles have been on display, primarily. What I don’t want is a repeat of FFXIII’s hallway-cinematic-hallway-cinematic, “moving from point A to point B and then watching a cutscene” formula. Exploration, even in Midgar, was a great part of the original game, and that involved talking to NPCs rather than hearing their chatter as you pass, for instance.

Beyond that, sure, there are quibbles about creepy baby summons resembling the original Sonic movie character design and bits I could complain about like over-emphasizing Aerith to force the player to like her, but those are mere quibbles, haha!

Now, I just finished playing this demo, so here are my thoughts:

First of all, credit goes to where credit is due and the visuals and music on display in FF7R are exceptional. A lot of the gameplay in the demo (which represents the Bombing Mission and clocks in somewhere between an hour or two of playtime) has already been shown off in previews, but that didn’t stop the game from taking my breath away a handful of times. Seeing iconic sequences fully realized or occasionally reinterpreted in fresh detail and vivid color is a real treat. The voice acting wasn’t anything to write home about but hearing Uematsu’s original score lovingly recreated made my heart soar. The original was, after all, the first soundtrack I ever purchased. It’s very dear to me.

That might speak to spectacle over substance but, secondly, I want to address the battle system. It uses familiar elements of Square’s classic ATB system, which I’ve always enjoyed, and utilizes them in such a way that you can’t just spam your most powerful spells or abilities or healing.

In fact, while the fights are as flashy as they come with Cloud dashing dozens of feet to reach an enemy, swinging that comically over-compensating sword with ease, there’s a lot to maintain and be aware of simultaneously and I found the gameplay to have the kind of tension I craved. I didn’t feel like I could mindlessly kick back and hold a button down to win. No, I actually needed to adjust my strategies in real time, particularly against the reactor boss. Even against smaller enemies, their placement and behavior forced me to switch between characters (Cloud and Barret), which is all done via a nicely streamlined menu system.

Oh and magic isn’t grenades. Thank you, Squeenix. The battles were actually fun to play and tested my ability to keep up and manage systems, exactly what needed to happen. I didn’t get a game over but I did need to use a lot of potions! So that solves at least one concern: FF7R’s battle system is not, at least not primarily, spectacle over substance.

Some camera and lock-on issues with in this fight. Not a tremendous issue, though.

I can’t say that the demo taught me any more than I already knew about the nature of FF7R and it’s “episodes”, as far as that term goes in describing the series of games that will see the original title to its story’s completion. I’m still interested to learn about what’s coming after this game. My favorite character won’t even be in Midgar!

As for story bloat… there are some teases mentioning Tifa and an apparition of a black feather seen by Cloud which hint at things to come, and I’m not sure how onboard I am with so much Sephiroth so soon, but what was in the demo moved at a decent pace. One thing I am unsure about is this: in the demo, we’re treated to a scene where, after the bomb goes off, President Shinra orders extra damage to the reactor causing a catastrophic explosion affecting the city. This is most definitely done to shift blame onto AVALANCHE (curiously not capitalized in the demo) and villainize them. If I remember right, this was done with the plate dropping in the original, but on the PS1, I don’t think we knew at this point if at all that additional damage was caused by Shinra? And that led to the members of AVALANCHE wrestling with the weight of causing damage and death of innocents for the sake of their cause, injecting moral ambiguity for the player to weigh in on themselves, whereas in the remake it seems we aren’t given that luxury.

This in particular is what I am talking about when I mean that more doesn’t always equal better. There may be more story, as in dialogue and cinematics in FF7R, but is it possible that the characters will be less complex for it?

Of course the Bombing Mission itself is much longer than in the original game with scripted fights, more dialogue, and more areas to plow through. You won’t remember the laser grid from the original. Things like that seem more like time-wasters to me than anything meaningful, since the game uses the lasers to justify a tutorial on sprinting but I’d already figured that out because of course it’s mapped to L3 and the shoulders, so I don’t know if the lasers were all that necessary. Quibbles, again. What does matter is that the demo didn’t drag on and on. Well except for…

That scorpion.

The boss fight is monumental.

It’s the capstone of the demo. Multiple stages of the fight demand a change up in player strategies and switching between characters, using their selection of abilities and magic, attempting to stagger the robo-bug and hide behind debris from the most devastating attacks. It actually took a long time to beat it, long enough that I began to be aware of how long it was taking. Ultimately, it landed somewhere between dragging a bit and maintaining enough pressure to keep things interesting. It lasts for more than enough time to experiment with all of Cloud and Barret’s arsenals. I’ll look forward to seeing how other bosses are rendered in the rest of the game and if they’re really going to take this long each time.

What’s left? Oh you can do the usual: smash boxes or open treasure chests to find goodies, trigger buttons and pull levers, but the real exploring is going to have to come later in the full game. Or not. Maybe it is just walking between scripted battles and cutscenes. Hopefully not, though it remains to be seen what it turns out to be.

All in all, I enjoyed the tense, nostalgic, colorful experience of the demo. I think I’ll be pre-ordering the full game, and in that sense, this demo did everything it needed to do.

But what did you think of the demo?

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage, Mage Cast, or Story Mode.