Communication around Final Fantasy VII Remake has suddenly accelerated in recent weeks, with new previews of the game, a fresh demo and some details about some characters including Red XIII, which will not be playable during this first chapter. And despite all this new content, many questions remain unanswered, including two very important ones.
Is Final Fantasy VII Remake an Open world or not?
This is the big question one month before the game's release: how will the game be built? Will it continue as in chapters 1 and 2? Or, will Midgar eventually open up to give us more freedom of movement? Impossible to know at the moment, all the gameplay excerpts seen or played have always been in closed places, except for a few seconds of the last trailer that shows Cloud in the streets of the Wall Market. In any case, there's a fairly simple observation to make: everything is here.
There are countless number of neighborhoods, the Plate that separates the slums from the rich neighborhoods, the shady areas... So, while the developers have the ambition to take us on an in-depth tour of Midgar, there's a lot of stuff that wasn't exploited in the original game. As a reminder, the Midgar phase was only the very beginning of the adventure, whereas we're talking about a game on two blu-ray with a theoretical lifespan similar to the other games in the series (which is still extremely variable).
Our theory
The range of actions of the characters in the exploration phases is very limited, therefore it seems complicated to make a satisfying open-world, only with the possibility of breaking a few crates and without jumping. From what we've seen so far, we also know that motorcycle phases have been added, like the one where we see Jessie behind Cloud. Now think about another Action-RPG license for Square Enix, Kingdom Hearts, replace the Gummi ship with the motorbike and you should start to see where we're going with this.
The developers could very well "open" Midgar, while staying on hubs thought like the worlds of Kingdom Hearts. As mentioned just above, it's just a theory, we'll all be fixed on April 10th. Nevertheless if you have an opinion on the subject, don't hesitate to express it in the comments section under the article.
Rewriting the game
New characters, new script, temporality of events changed, and new encounters with Sephiroth. You can feel that this Remake is not just a collection of emblematic scenes, it goes much further than that. We had the opportunity to discover it during our preview of the game with chapter 2: while crossing a Midgar under the shock of the explosion of the reactor, Cloud crosses an area full of narrative scripts including the inhabitants affected by the accident.
Atmosphere level is really great and the game will surely be a very different way to experience the events of Midgar from the original game, we just hope that the newcomers will not be heavy handed and will integrate well into the universe of Avalanche and Shinra. There are legitimate reasons to be concerned because, despite some successes on the Crisis Core side, many Compilation FF7 protagonists haven't really made an impression.
And then there is Wutai, whose real involvement in the history of the game is still completely unknown: President Shinra mentions it during the attack on the Sector 5 reactor, but it stops there. Moreover, Tetsuya Nomura said that no character from the Compilation would be present in the game, but that the events that took place during these side projects to FF7 would be used to deepen the Remake.
Square Enix, king of pre-release goodies, offer a new pre-order bonus for Final Fantasy 7 Remake in collaboration with FF14 Shadowbringers.
