Caught Up: Final Fantasy 7 Remake & Final Fantasy X HD Remaster

I messaged my brother, whose memory for these things is better than mine.

me: bro, did I finish FFX or did I watch you finish it?
bro: you watched me finish it, you never finished it.

And that was how I realized I’d never finished a Final Fantasy game. It wasn’t surprising but it was staggering. I’d started plenty of them, but never finished one. My mind was made up: FF7R was going free for PS Plus members, and I was going to finish it.

As I embarked on the first steps of that journey, Final Fantasy X + X-2 HD Remake dropped for Switch. Perfect. I picked it up as well and started playing it during downtime here and there. I was looking forward to it and dreading it at the same time. My expectations for this journey could not have been more misplaced.

I don’t remember the first RPG I finished, but my heart says it was Pokemon Red. Our family went straight from the NES to the PS1 and we didn’t have any RPGs for either. We played a lot of platformers, racing games, puzzle games. I tried playing the old NES Zelda games and bounced off. I couldn’t tell you when I first played Super Mario RPG, but I never finished it. I don’t think I finished Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door either. I don’t remember finishing Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. I can’t remember ever finishing A Link to the Past until I was in my 20s maybe. But something in me has rendered me nearly incapable of leaving a Pokemon game unfinished for some reason.

This is all to say that I have a long history with the Pokemon-style of turn-based RPG combat, which hasn’t aged particularly well in Pokemon’s case. I knew what I was in for going back to FFX and I knew what I wasn’t in for going to FF7R.

FF7R is an amazing game. The world is realized in a way that lies so far beyond what the original was capable of, it’s just mind-blowing. Seeing the pores in Barret’s nose is something that I enjoy in a way that only someone who’s followed gaming since its barely-discernible inception can appreciate. I love that Jessie became a character. I think Wedge could’ve been better written than “hungry overweight guy” but I wonder if leaning into the idea of some characters being more caricatures was supposed to make Barret’s portrayal seem less out of place.

My problem with FF7R is that I don’t think it’s fun. I wanted it to be fun, and I stuck with it even when I realized it wasn’t and it wasn’t going to be.

FF7R’s combat is complicated, and it is thoroughly engineered in a way that tries to marry the traditional ATB style of combat with action-based combat that wants to be like a clunky Devil May Cry. Sometimes you’ll try to swing your sword at a flying enemy and you’ll just fly up to them and do some cool mid-air swordplay. The dodge mechanic feels like it was tacked on and the timing feels too tight for it to be useful: anything you can effectively dodge, you could also just keep your distance and not need to dodge. The battles just felt like I was spamming one attack until my meters filled up and then trying to make my one character do useful things while I wondered why my AI characters weren’t charging their gauges.

One thing FF7R needed to make the combat feel better was the ability to set AI for your party members so you don’t have to micromanage them. The micromanagement aspect feels directly opposed to the spammy nature of combat. It almost never felt like my AI companions were doing enough unless I was jumping between characters, which isn’t fun, it’s just another button to press in the middle of spamming attacks. The game gives you the option to set hotkeys for abilities and potions and things and I never used them because you have a button that makes time slow to a crawl mid-move. Why would I take the time to remember hotkeys when I’m already forced to effectively menu to get anything done? (I use ‘menu’ as a verb here, as in how speedrunners call the act of quickly navigating menus ‘menuing’)

Some of the things the game gives you are halfhearted half-measures aimed at reducing the severity of these issues with out actually dealing with them. Some enemies can only be hit from behind, so you can’t just spam the attack button, you have to dodge roll and then spam the attack button. If you don’t do that and you just try to rush them from the front, you get hit in a way that has a solid 5 seconds of unavoidable hitstun while you collapse and then stand back up. Cool and fun. Wow. Some enemies have to be hit with spells to render them vulnerable to combos, and if you try to just attack them, you get hit with unavoidable hitstun! Hooray! Now I get to do my favorite thing from video games: waiting.

The game’s story is neat, and some of the minigames are cool. The dance scene with Andrea is great fun. The series of sidequests you have to slog through in every area is not cool. Navigating the game’s map is awkward and finding where you need to go for a given quest isn’t always clear. Trying to find the missing kids for the schoolteacher was a nightmare. As I moved into the back half of the game, I did something I never do: I turned the difficulty down. I didn’t want to spend any time in combat I didn’t have to, and I wanted to get through the side quests as quickly as I could. I wanted the game to be over.

When the game was over, I was happy for it to be over. And despite that, I still look forward to the next episode.

When I started FFX, I did so with gritted teeth. “Turn-based battles”, I thought. “What fun.”

For the first 5 or 6 hours, the game felt like a slog. A lot of cutscenes, a lot of dialogue, and then random encounters and turn-based battles.

Things picked up as I neared the Sinspawn boss during Operation Mi’ihen. The boss was tough, and my party wasn’t. I didn’t want to grind, so I played it smart instead, and the game let me. Things clicked for me. Combat wasn’t a grind anymore, because I wasn’t grinding. It was a puzzle. Every combat encounter became a puzzle where I could clearly see enemy stats (with Sensor) and turn order. At that point, it became something more akin to Into the Breach for me. Once combat fell into place, I was really enjoying the game.

Once I got the Celestial Mirror, the question was wide-open: do I want to get the Celestial Weapons? That was the first point in the game where I started looking at info online, the playthrough was blind albeit for my rough memories of the game up until the Calm Lands. So I thought, “well, I can get them but I probably won’t complete them”. I got Tidus’ Celestial Weapon, Caladbolg. I played through the Yunalesca fight (which was TIGHT, because my party was underleveled but determined) and got the Sun Crest. Well, all I needed was the Sun Sigil.

To get the Sun Sigil, you have to beat the final race against the Chocobo Trainer with a final time (after time- from balloons and time+ from birds) of less than 0:00:00. Wow, cool.

I tried it anyway. I got close. 4 seconds. I left in frustration.

A couple days later, I tried it again for the hell of it. And after a few tries, I actually got a time under 0:00:00. I was able to complete one of the 7 Celestial Weapons.

Well, why not another?

I have over 80 hours in FFX now. I’ve completed 6/7 Celestial Weapons, all but Wakka’s because I don’t like Blitzball. Yes, I dodged 200 consecutive lightning bolts. Yes, I chased down all the butterflies. Yes, I had to beat Dark Anima to get the Destruction Sphere from Macalania Temple so I could get Anima and the Magus Sisters and finish Yuna’s Nirvana. I’ve decided I want to max out every character and complete the sphere grid. I might get Wakka’s Celestial Weapon. I think I want to beat Penance, which is something my brother, who has a 1000+ hour save file for the original release on PS2, never did because Penance and the Dark Aeons weren’t in the original NA release.

I went through and finished the game once just to do it. The final bosses are trivial when you have multiple characters who can deal 99999 damage per hit. I rediscovered a love for turn-based battle that I didn’t expect to, and I’m glad I did. I think it’s indicative of where I’m at right now and what I’m enjoying at this point in my life: I’ve been playing a lot of solo games versus all the time I spent playing competitive games when I was younger. If anything, I don’t find that disappointing or disheartening, I find it encouraging, that I’ve fallen back in love with a part of my gaming history I’d become disenchanted with.