There's a story, probably apocryphal, definitely beloved, about a lucky fan in Japan who won the right to be personally handed the first copy of the newest Final Fantasy game, likely Final Fantasy XIII, around 2009-10.
The Fan Who Asked for More
The fan accepts the game, bows his thanks, and then immediately says, "Please remake Final Fantasy VII. Thank you." True or not, anyone who followed Final Fantasy before 2015 will recognize the feeling
immediately because for years, that was the wish the entire fandom couldn't let go of.
The Table of Contents
A Home That Was Hard to Revisit
The 1997 release of the original Final Fantasy VII was such a massive event in the lives of RPG fans that many of us spent over a decade dreaming about a remake somehow recapturing it.
The original was hard to access for a few years there if you no longer had a PS1, and it was built for D-pad-only controls, which was hard to go back to once you’d gotten used to moving with analog sticks. So FFVII felt like ‘home’ to a lot of people, but it was a home that was hard to revisit.
Why I Went Back Before Going Forward
Enter the long-awaited FFVII Remake trilogy. I won’t go into the mix of worry (that Square Enix would blow it) and excitement that I felt in the years leading up to the 2020 release of part 1, Final Fantasy VII Remake.
But when the game finally came out, I raced to fire up…the original 1997 Final Fantasy VII. Not until I had played that game through to the end of the Midgar section (about 6 hours of gameplay that Remake would expand into a 35-hour game) did I start my long-awaited Remake playthrough.
Why? First, the remake’s being split into three games gave me permission to break up my replay of the original, which made dealing with the antiquated aspects of the game more palatable.
Second, I played a version that finally had analog stick controls, which removed a big barrier to replayability. And third, because if I was going to revisit one of the most meaningful experiences in my decades of
gaming, I wanted to do it right.
I wanted to have the original fresh in my memory so I could see what was being handled faithfully, what was being deepened (to turn a 6-hour sequence into a 40-hour standalone release), and what was being added.
I wanted to revisit the whole soundtrack, so I could appreciate how that was being updated from the MIDI era to the modern experience of full orchestration, often made responsive to gameplay decisions. And fundamentally, I wanted to play Final Fantasy VII again, and the release of Remake gave me the push I needed to get over the antiquated technology hump.
What the Original Still Gets Right
I’m glad I did. The original remains delightfully bizarre, full of odd one-off mini-games, weird characters and interactions, and the kind of clunky 90s Japanese-to-English translation that left you wondering what the characters really meant to say or even what their names are (Aeris? Aerith??).
And more than that, it’s epic and heartfelt and has great emotional and thematic range despite the technological limitations of its sprites, musical instrumentation, and lack of voice acting.
Having that fresh in mind when I launched Remake made the experience better. It had reminded me of the wonder that I’d felt playing through it for the first time, as well as the incredulity at the zany moments.
This primed me for appreciating the modern graphical and audio detail of the opening Midgar panorama, the hallucinatory weirdness of the remade Honeybee Inn sequence in Wall Market, and the ambition of saving the game’s biggest plot surprises for the finale (no spoilers here, don’t worry).
A Different Approach for Rebirth
When Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (remake, part 2) came out in 2024, I knew I wanted to again experience the original first, but I had to structure the experience somewhat differently. Unlike with Remake, I didn’t know
exactly where in the original game this middle entry would wrap up, so if I played the original straight through in advance, I wouldn’t really know when to stop.
And given my exciting uncertainty about how faithful to the original plot the ongoing remake was going to be, I didn’t want to look it up and risk spoilers. Also, this middle section was going to be much longer—at least a dozen hours in the original (probably more) and probably 70-90 hours in Rebirth, given that I expected to do a considerable amount of open-world exploration and side questing.
So this time around, I decided to play a sequence or two of the original, then catch up in Rebirth, and then continue alternating between the two. Kalm and Mythril Mine. Junon and Cargo Ship. Mt. Corel and the Gold Saucer. Etc.
This kept the original fresh in my mind, struck a nice balance of me not forgetting the original’s controls and strategies but also not worrying about antiquated tech burnout, and let me make direct comparisons between the two as I went.
Why It Was Worth It
Playing the two in tandem surfaced details I'd have otherwise missed entirely, the way Remake weaves Aerith's theme into ambient background music in scenes where she's present but not yet central, for instance, or how certain lines of dialogue land completely differently once you know where the story is headed.
It deepened my appreciation for how the remakes handle the original's wide tonal range, lurching from goofy to devastating sometimes within minutes. And having the original's mid-game gut-punch fresh in my memory made sitting with the remakes' approach to that same material a richer, more complicated experience than it would have been otherwise.
They’re not perfect, but I enjoyed the FFVII remakes that so many fans asked for for so long. Perhaps what I’m most grateful to them for, though, is that they finally led me to replay the game that moved me like no other when I first experienced it so many years ago.
