Method in Madness: Square fights on for its sweetest Fantasy yet

Remaking Final Fantasy VII is like having a second stab at Harry Potter or taking a shot at Sgt Peppers. There’s something about it that just feels dirty.

My rap opera combining boy wizardry with the life and times of Ringo Starr aside, there’s a reason remakes are so badly received. Some, granted, are just bad. But even before a single line is written or note played, it is not nearly an even playing field.

The people working on a remake aren’t only dealing with living up to the source material, they have to live up to the perception of that source material by fans. This is especially bad when you’re dealing with a fanbase who were especially young when they first experienced it.

It is utter madness to remake something as precious in culture as Final Fantasy 7. It’s even further madness to slice it into multiple parts.

But Square is proving that there is method behind its seemingly crazy choices. The developers have so much to get wrong, but so much to get right.

The Midgar of Final Fantasy 7 is kind of a one-note location. It does its job perfectly. It sets up Shinra as the big bad, it shows how downtrodden people of this world are and it vaguely introduces the main characters and sets them on their arcs.

But it does it for five or six hours. Through slum after slum, through hives of oppression, perversion and crime. Artificial light – usually a gaudy neon ­- hits every surface with very few exceptions – the park and the church.

The atmosphere not only invests you in the work that Avalanche is doing, but it starts making you ask little questions about the world around you.

This is all wonderfully subverted when you finally leave Midgar and find out that not only is the world much bigger than you’d expected, but that Shinra is the least of your worries. Everywhere you go, you see the poisonous effect they have on the world, but everything is changed. They’re a side enemy in the battle to save the planet.

That works well when you’re only five hours into the game. It’s going to work less well when you have to wait for years to get to the next section of the story. Even if you finish before the flashbacks at Kalm, which would absolutely make sense, you have still explored such a small amount of the original’s world that it’s not even worth comparing.

But what you lose in that very effective but slightly microwave dinner emotion, you can gain in actual, earned emotion. Imagine the pain of heading back down to the slums if you’ve explored the far more glorious area above the plate. Imagine the horror of Shinra destroying an entire slum if you have gotten to know every character there over multiple hours.

Biggs, Wedge and Jessie will become characters in their own right, not to mention the countless others you come across and barely speak to in Midgar.

And that’s just people from the original. There must be new material to make it worth a return visit to Midgar.

We will get a look at this world that could have only been imagined 20 years ago, and while that could go so wrong, the prospect is exciting.

Nearly 10 years ago, I wrote an article about Final Fantasy XIII and its effect on the franchise. This was pre-release, before all the negativity and, now, slight redemption that the trilogy eventually received.

I asked whether XIII was our final Fantasy, whether we had finally reached a point where the franchise could no longer appeal to both hardcore fans and newcomers. Was Square’s obsession with new systems and bigger and brighter set pieces creating a rift that wouldn’t so much damage the franchise as it would scare off those that had followed it the longest.

Throughout the XIII franchise and beyond, sales figures were strong but reaction flailed from wildly positive to outright anger.

The VII Remake looks set to turn that around. Combining the atmosphere of the original game with lovingly crafted new systems that echo the 1998 classic without outright copying it, we may finally have a Final Fantasy that hits the right notes. It is nostalgic and new, beautiful but without taking risks.

We don’t know how Final Fantasy VII’s remake will do. I suspect it will upset people, just because people love to be upset.

For now it is great to see the community embrace the potential, if not the product itself – something that hasn’t happened in an awfully long time.