Final Fantasy 7 Remake Review - 6 Ups & 5 Downs

3. Writing & Dialogue Can Be Pretty Terrible

Another negative that stems from hyper-extending character writing from the opening of a game into a full three-act structure: Almost everyone is written badly, or comes across as nowhere near as nuanced as the original script.

Yes, that original is cited as being a mess thanks to a one-man translation team, but it clearly worked for millions of us, and there were only a handful of things to change if someone was going to re-approach.

Instead, we have a completely new script that attempts to blend the tonalities of newer Square Enix releases - the Kingdom Hearts of the world, plus the FF7 Advent Children movie AND Crisis Core - resulting in an "anime-adjacent" sensibility.

This could've totally worked, but Cloud is underwritten to a fault. For 20 hours you're stuck with him answering characters in one word grunts, or not answering at all. It's clearly to serve where his character goes in the full story, but even in the original game, he was more chatty overall.

Aerith, Tifa AND Jessie are reduced to glorified waifus for the majority, pining and thirsting over Cloud in a very "fangirl"-esque way, to the detriment of their characters overall.

Essentially, you'll either be able to go with this more "on the nose" depiction of each characters' core tenets - and it does get better towards the back third - but for me, it's a negative.

I'll also say, that in a couple of spots that should be incredibly emotional, Cloud's delivery and the way the audio is edited together, was straight-up unintentionally hilarious.