I'm enjoying the game a lot so far, I've arrived at chapter 14.
For a little historical context: I've played Final Fantasy 7 once, at the tender age of 12, after playing Final Fantasy X and VIII. So it being my 3rd Final Fantasy, it was never the mind-bending, formative experience it was for so many others. So I'd say, I'm a loose fan of the original. I've forgotten big parts of the storyline, retaining only in the broadest of strokes of how the story unfolds; so I wouldn't even notice most deviations from the original plot line. Yet I was worried, because so much could go wrong - from an over-adherence to the original, to veering too much into edgelord realism for the sake of it, ditching the amazing mood of the original in the process, to completely going off the rails into the deep end. It's not easy to rebuild a lighting in a bottle, I guess. But, amazingly enough, despite my huge skepticism, they really won me over big time.




tl;dr
I was very skeptic about this whole endeavor, BUT the staff really showed us that they understood what made FFVII so fun in the first place and took great care to elevate the experience to the current generation by putting careful additions where they made sense. And even being wary of the changes in the beginning, I came away thinking that they are implemented rather nicely, carried through phenomenally strong story-telling. I came away liking them!






Now, a mega interesting conversation would be comparing VIIR to Final Fantasy XV... as gameplay wise, FFVIIR's Midgar section would have been the part of Insomnia, which was cut (if that makes sense, what I'm trying to say...?) Like, both games have the same overall structure, but while FFXV chose to cut chapter one and give us a broad-strokes bullet-point rund-down of the rest of the story, FFVIIR goes all in witch chapter One. The archetypical FF, in a way starts in a huge metropolitan city, and then expands out into the world.

Today's Remake Ultimania released seems to confirm they still don't know how many parts Remake will be but "3 parts" has taken on a life of its own, LOL. Just wanted to point that out. The tweet above does mention a vaguely referenced super spoiler in the ending, so use caution. I'm just here to provide sauce with this pasta.

tweet-body

— twitter-user (@username) date

Also if datamining leaks of the game proper are true, things are bound to be very interesting and mindboggling! All wait and see for context, though.

Oh my... Wall Market was craaaaazy!

Just passed the sector 7 event (chapter 14)... Bold choices there

Specifically...

Also...



UPDATE
Finished! Let me know when we can start overanalyzing and discussing

Just finished the FF7 Remake and it was pretty fun! Great visuals, great music, a fun and easy to grasp combat system and a good story, even if I don't fully grasp it(I don't know anything about FF7 other than a certain character dying) Quite challenging at times too, even in the standard normal difficulty.

Now, I haven't played the original. I know, I know, how is that possible? Well, the PS1 was just before my time, so only recently have I begun to play some of the PS1 classics, like MGS or Symphony of the NIght and I just haven't gotten around to playing FF yet.

That said, it's obvious that I'm missing lots of stuff they put in for the fans, but that's OK, I'll get around to tackling this massive franchise one day.

See you in 2025 when they release the trailer for the second part.

Also, Tifa is cute.

I finished the game as well, and towards the end, the screen went blank for about 10 seconds. A little notice then appeared saying that gameplay was paused due to a "blocked scene." When everything started up again, another notice popped up delcaring that I'm not allowed to take screencaps. Did this happen to anyone else? Did I miss something?

^
That often happens with JRPG, to bar people from uploading spoilers of the endgame.

I'm so happy to hear y'all finished Remake! For those curious about WTF is going on, well, the Remake Ultimania recently dropped and the translations here: https://twitter.com/aitaikimochi Easier way to find it here: https://twitter.com/hashtag/FF7RUltiman ... ick&f=live Spoilers though so you've been warned. Character bios (including finally getting ages for the Turks and Rufus!!), interviews with Nojima / Nomura / Kitase, the works. I hope we'll actually get an English translation!! I contacted Squenix recently and they (of course) couldn't give an answer but would forward it to the right department—Square translates a lot of their books in-house these days, so maybe.

Personally I enjoyed Remake's ending and I'm curious as hell to see where Part 2 (hopefully out in 2-3 years, fingers crossed??) will go on from here. I'm taking a rather straightforward approach of the ending rather than the popular timeline theories, but of course Remake is vague. Sephiroth, though, has some pretty interesting stuff going on, which is why I'm forever irritated why Remake's English localization was poor since it messed up a lot of the Japanese characterization and intent. (It uhh reminded me very much of Advent Children's "dubtitles" where the English dub was how the Japanese audio was "translated"....SIGH.) Like, Aerith for instance has quite a few Crisis Core and Zack references that the English didn't reflect. For instance, that Chapter 9 scene before Cloud mysteriously tears up, she said " 'Cause I want to spend more time with you!" which in English became " 'Cause I'm not sick of you yet!" Pretty ??? stuff, here.

^
That is intriguing, if you find time I would be curious as to what they‘ve changed for Sephiroth‘s dialogue!



I‘ve never bothered with the extended stuff, so I wouldn’t get all the allusions to it either way, but I‘ve heard about the rather loose approach to translation in the English version, which is weird since they went through the trouble of matching the lips but the dialogue is still pretty animesque?
Like... it’s the worst of both worlds. Either keep it literal with all the weird anime noises and Japanese diction, or be lose and try to make it sound good in English?
Either way, I‘ve switched over to the German Lokalisation and while it’s still terribly anime (the cognitive dissonance is real), they at least stayed closer to the original text.

Generally this localisation is not bad, but a markedly step down from FFXII and even FFXV

Touching a bit on the localization as well, I was surprised at how many "big fans" of the original FF7 choose the English voices over the Japanese. I mean, wouldn't you want the Japanese game made by Japanese people to be in Japanese? I could only find a single person on youtube playing with the original voices, in a no commentary play through.

And naturally, the english dub sounds awful. Even if you choose the Japanese voices you still get the eng voices subtitles, witch leads to the dialogue not matching up with the subs like 70% of the time! I should be used to this, the same happened in VC 1 and 4, but it's still infuriating.

I used the word Japanese 5 times in this post

I'm playing it in Japanese, and while I'm a beginner level at best, I can tell there's a lot of differences between what is said and what the dub titles are saying.

I wish there was a way to import fansubs, but I'm sure people are going to be translating the dialogue and putting it online.

In regards to "big fans" playing it in English.... A lot of these fans don't seem to even acknowledge that this game was made in Japan by the way people were talking about it online when it first released.

Justacrazyguy wrote:Touching a bit on the localization as well, I was surprised at how many "big fans" of the original FF7 choose the English voices over the Japanese. I mean, wouldn't you want the Japanese game made by Japanese people to be in Japanese?

Hi, "big fan" here.

Played it in English 'cuz
A) I dislike Japanese voice-over in games...
B) Don't understand Japanese, so I won't notice differences between subs-audio...
C) Can't pinpoint subtle changes in Japanese intonation as well as I do in English

If anything of significance was lost, someone else will pinpoint it later and I'll read it online after that... No biggie...

SEELE-01 wrote:
Played it in English 'cuz
A) I dislike Japanese voice-over in games...
B) Don't understand Japanese, so I won't notice differences between subs-audio...
C) Can't pinpoint subtle changes in Japanese intonation as well as I do in English

Well, I can't argue against any of that.
It is obviously more enjoyable if you have some knowledge of Japanese (just to make myself clear, I don't know Japanese, but the words and sentences I picked up watching anime were enough for the differences to be very noticeable) It just confuses me because I'm so used to always seeing or playing any media in their original language.
Just makes no sense to me to choose a dub over the original, even if the dub is considered superior by several people.

I'm sorry if my current reply isn't more in-depth, kinda drained today.

hui43210 wrote:In regards to "big fans" playing it in English.... A lot of these fans don't seem to even acknowledge that this game was made in Japan by the way people were talking about it online when it first released.

97 fan here, and this honestly kills me inside. People are free to play however they want, that's ultimately up to them, but it irritates me, yes.Especially when I'm seeing various online (fandom) criticisms of Aerith and Tifa in-game, which has been completely unfair to either girl. (Poor Jessie's been shat on, too....sigh. The Staff (via Remake Ultimania) made a point that she was playful in Japanese rather than "thirsty"/crazy since it's hard to play her straight.)

None of that was a voice actor/dub issue, it's a localization issue.

People enjoy foreign films in their original language, so why are anime or video games somehow different when the option for Japanese is available? And why does Japanese have to be treated as some mystical language when it comes to translating, when it's like any other language with it's own set of rules/how things make sense?

Hopefully those Ultimania tweets I linked to can shed some light on the various differences. Anybody needs any more particular examples, Zap and I have been looking through the JP dialogue so we'd be happy to help. Just reply to this post

robersora wrote:^That is intriguing, if you find time I would be curious as to what they‘ve changed for Sephiroth‘s dialogue!

In one Cloud freak out scene, we get "Who are you?!" Which Sephiroth coolly responds "I...am your master." (As in, Cloud is the Puppet) which in English wound up "I am...your everything."

If you need more examples, let me know. (This below Spoiler tag includes super important Ultimania Sephy stuff from end of the game!!)

Justacrazyguy wrote:It just confuses me because I'm so used to always seeing or playing any media in their original language.
Just makes no sense to me to choose a dub over the original, even if the dub is considered superior by several people.

Sailor Star Dust wrote:People enjoy foreign films in their original language, so why are anime or video games somehow different when the option for Japanese is available?

There are many, many factors at play in this: personal choices, availability of media, faithfulness of subs, etc.

For something like Evangelion it makes sense, because I've seen official subs, fansubs, original Japanese audio and English, 2 versions of Spanish and French dubs, not to mention the several details I've picked up in this forum. When you know the story and its lines up and down, Japanese with subs makes perfect sense, because I have internalized many possible permutations of the audio.

However, videogames have an important issue: unless you read Japanese, you are stuck with wichever localization you get. Games such as OG FF7 (that have no dialogue) are effectively language-locked.
We could argue that fan translations of games exist, but those are nowhere near as abundant and indeed, were not even a thing until a few years ago. If I had the chance I would definitely play all the compilation in Japanese, but Alas, I can't, so... Dub it is!

Sailor Star Dust wrote:

MASSIVE end of game spoilers  SPOILER: Show

This https://www.reddit.com/r/FFVIIRemake/co ... sephiroth/ is a great thread, which goes into the ??? Sephiroth (never yet scene in Compilation, according to Ultimania) is using Ore. Very good read!

Interesting! I'll have to check all those links and hope for a localization (sigh) of the Ultimania...
And another example of my point!
Is there a way you can differentiate between watashi, boku and ore in English?

^
I mean, you could choose English text and Japanese voice over...
From what I've listened to, the Japanese dub isn't much better than the English one, but when something as vague as FFVIIR's dialogue I'd rather have more literal translation choices.

SEELE-01 wrote:Is there a way you can differentiate between watashi, boku and ore in English?

There's some work arounds a good localization team could definitely take into account. You'd have to rewrite the dialogue so that the shift becomes noticeable. Translation is always about translating intend and meaning, not words.

I finally started playing FF7R about a week or so ago. Bare bones normie version of the game; I wasn't paying attention to all the pre-release stuff. Full disclosure that I played the original right around when it was released, and replayed it at least two times after that. I have AC:Complete, and I'm kinda sorta familiar with DoC (let's all point at it and laugh), but I still haven't played CC because I suck. In Remake, I'm currently Underneath The Rotting Pizza, shutting the lamps off -- which chapter that is, I forget. Miscellaneous thoughts:

• Everything is beautifully reimagined. In the visuals department, I don't have any real complaints so far, aside from the occasional shitty texture. I don't keep up with modern games even a little, so my own "wow!" factor is based solely on old fogey nonsense like "look how much better the in-game graphics now look compared to the FMVs way back when! incredible!!".
• Music I'm a bit iffy on. I haven't listened to the soundtrack outside of the game yet. So far, the music has just kinda been "there" and hasn't popped at all. This might be because it's designed to play on a fancy sound system, I dunno. I was expecting to have sat up several times by now and gone "HOLY SHIT THAT'S AN AWESOME ARRANGEMENT OF [insert extremely memorable FF7 track here], I MUST HAVE IT NOW", but... nope.
• Battle system is a bit fast-paced for me. I've been able to adjust better than I thought I would, but there's just so much shit going on at once and I struggle to process all the information being thrown at me while feeling like I have any meaningful control over what's going on. I realize the feeling of "no control" is partly an illusion -- as very clearly demonstrated by the difference between my laughably disastrous first attempt at the guard scorpion and my much smoother second attempt -- but very pervasive.
• I, naturally, put the dialogue on "Japanese", and I've become irritated by the very obvious dubtitles as well. I know enough that good subtitles can function as a learning tool for picking up more of the language. Here, that's obviously out. Sometimes the localization leans so hard into vernacular, too, that I have no idea what they're talking about.
• Complete inability (AFAIK) to control the flow of dialogue is extremely irritating. As far as I know there's no way to pause so that one can more easily catch up on a screenful of text, either. With the eavesdropping of random NPCs, yeah, I kind of get what they're going for; but on the other hand I would rather just read through all their dialogue at my own pace, instead of being forced to stand there and wait for them to finish talking, then come back a few seconds later and see if they have any more dialogue. Why speed up the battle system by a factor of 1000% (possible exaggeration but it sure feels like it) but make scoping out NPCs SOOOOOO much slower?
• I know what the stupid robes things are, but even if I didn't they would feel completely out of place and "lol nomura gb2kh". Two thumbs down.
• My mind must recognize on some intuitive level that Cloud got "fixed" (i.e. his character was re-railed from AC, etc.), because I didn't care about him at all before, but now he's... cute. To the point it's distracting! Back in the late 90s, I was a filthy teenage Vincent fan, but I can already sense my allegiances shifting......
• Tifa's boobs are ginormous and anyone who complains about THOSE not being big enough is clearly deranged.

robersora wrote:^
I mean, you could choose English text and Japanese voice over...
From what I've listened to, the Japanese dub isn't much better than the English one, but when something as vague as FFVIIR's dialogue I'd rather have more literal translation choices.

I tried playing some chapters in Japanese in the second run, but the difference felt... Off... Like, you are watching non-Japanese people speak Japanese... So it in turn feels like a dub...
Something like this happens when I watch Pixar's Coco... I've tried watching it in English, wich is the original language. Thing is, everything is so Mexican it feels like English is the dub...

robersora wrote:^There's some work arounds a good localization team could definitely take into account. You'd have to rewrite the dialogue so that the shift becomes noticeable. Translation is always about translating intend and meaning, not words.

Hmmm... Sounds like a lot would need to change for that to be effective... And then you'd have fans complaining dialogue is too different...

robersora wrote:^I mean, you could choose English text and Japanese voice over...From what I've listened to, the Japanese dub isn't much better than the English one, but when something as vague as FFVIIR's dialogue I'd rather have more literal translation choices.

The issue with this, though, is Reichu's example here:

Reichu wrote:[*]I, naturally, put the dialogue on "Japanese", and I've become irritated by the very obvious dubtitles as well. I know enough that good subtitles can function as a learning tool for picking up more of the language. Here, that's obviously out. Sometimes the localization leans so hard into vernacular, too, that I have no idea what they're talking about.

which makes it quite distracting and I can only hope that there's some fan translation patch for the PC port in 2021, because ugh. Which relates to a lot of character personality and intentions getting confused or misunderstood. Keeping things spoiler free: a lot of Sephiroth and Aerith's dialogues and overall knowledge has been misunderstood by Western fans. That's the biggest example that comes to mind, and sucks because those are such important plot points.

But again, sadly this kind of localization isn't anything new for Square, nor how Advent Children was treated back in the day. At least with the AC Complete Bluray, I can turn off the subtitles and understand most of the plot points. Remake with no subtitles on (I'm so annoyed we can't System Switch to have Japanese text for the subtitles) makes it a bit harder to 100% fully comprehend, being a quite involved video game.

Maaya-san and the others are on point as always, which made me super happy. (I'm still upset we lost Fujiwara-san about 2 days after Remake came out. I wonder if they'll get Sephy or Laguna's seiyuu to take over as Reno since both have filled in for his voice within other programs.)

[*]My mind must recognize on some intuitive level that Cloud got "fixed" (i.e. his character was re-railed from AC, etc.), because I didn't care about him at all before, but now he's... cute. To the point it's distracting! Back in the late 90s, I was a filthy teenage Vincent fan, but I can already sense my allegiances shifting......

I've always liked Cloud and Zack pretty equally (this was before and after CC) but really:



And I highly recommend you play CC's undub version (DM or email me if you need a link!!), once you're done with Remake. The biggest irony there is that FF7 and CC were at least translated (despite any errors) rather than localized...which makes a big difference, for sure.

[*]Everything is beautifully reimagined. In the visuals department, I don't have any real complaints so far, aside from the occasional shitty texture. I don't keep up with modern games even a little, so my own "wow!" factor is based solely on old fogey nonsense like "look how much better the in-game graphics now look compared to the FMVs way back when! incredible!!".

Honestly? The crappy door textures I've kinda ignored so I think that maybe whenever a patch drops, that could be fixed? BUT there is a game freezing bug at Shinra HQ (when climbing the vents) so be sure to manually save often just in case things glitch out. And here's a very insightful read about the possible game future by a fan + game developer guy, but definitely read this once you're finished to avoid spoilers: https://thelifestream.net/lifestream-pr ... he-future/

and I'm kinda sorta familiar with DoC (let's all point at it and laugh)

If it was its own IP, I wouldn't care too much? But is all kinds of wrong!

I'd recommend too for better context of Advent Children Complete is Nojima's two novels:

https://www.amazon.com/Final-Fantasy-VI ... 975382358/ On the Way to a Smile (This official translation really helped me comprehend things better than the fan translations did and honestly puts AC in a slightly better light for me. I mean, I overall ignore Compilation in my fanfiction writings, but yeah.)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1975382366/ The Kids Are Alright: A Turks Side Story. And this Turks novel has several familiar faces you'll meet (again? before? era differences!) in Remake's Sector 7 & 5 Slums and Wall Market, too.

[*]I know what the stupid robes things are, but even if I didn't they would feel completely out of place and "lol nomura gb2kh". Two thumbs down.

Wait, if you mean Important 23 years old plot point from Disc 2, they've always been around, so I'm a little confused?? Back in '97, Nomura was just the character designer / story planner. In his own words (paraphrased) "low on the totem pole". If you mean they're redesigned and I'm simply misunderstanding you, yeah, I get it. Especially wonky when, so it makes me curious how Remake'll put things off in the future....Hm.

[*]Tifa's boobs are ginormous and anyone who complains about THOSE not being big enough is clearly deranged.

I know, I hate it =_=

But we have the technology, Cloud and her will have all sorts of fun under the Highwind this go around!

Anyway, you'll definitely want to check out the Ultimania stuff I linked to above once you're done with your playthrough (it's completely worth this game to fully take your time, haha).

SEELE-01 wrote:Hmmm... Sounds like a lot would need to change for that to be effective... And then you'd have fans complaining dialogue is too different...

You always get naysayers, when something gets to be so big like Final Fantasy is as a franchise, it's a given. And changing dialogue to reflect a shift in personality (albeit seemingly only being the lazy anime trope of changing pronouns) is better than changing the word "master" into the needlessly vaguer "everything" (which sounds cooler and kyaa~ SephiCloud! I guess)

Sailor Star Dust wrote:But again, sadly this kind of localization isn't anything new for Square,

The translation for FFXII was stellar, FFXV was fine as well. After bettering for so long this is a weird and sudden decline in quality. The German voice work and translation is ok, for the most part tho.

Wait, if you mean Important 23 years old plot point from Disc 2, they've always been around, so I'm a little confused??

She's talking about the Whispers, I assume.

SEELE-01 wrote:Like, you are watching non-Japanese people speak Japanese...

Some of the characters look SUPER Japanese, including our main. The names don't match, no, but the expectation that they should is the same kind of double standard you get with people complaining about Japanese anime characters looking "white" (and meanwhile they will never complain about cartoon characters from their own country that don't even look reasonably human). It's the whole "they're not MY PEOPLE -- who are the default, of course -- so they're defined by their Otherness; and when they don't define THEMSELVES by that Otherness, it's WRONG!" thing. I'm not saying you're doing any of this stuff on purpose; it's just useful stuff to keep in mind.

robersora wrote:She's talking about the Whispers, I assume.

Very yes.