Val the Moofia Boss wrote: ↑
January 14th, 2026, 07:00
People soured on the "remake" primarily because 1. action combat instead of true command based with dramatic camera framing, and 2. it was not a true remake as people were expecting it would be. It only covered Midgar which isn't even all of disc 1 when people were expecting the whole game, and then word got out about the Nomura-isms with the Kingdom Hearts time ghosts, nobody dying in the plate drop, time traveling Sephiroth (and people in general being fed up with how Nomura has been trying to "redeem" him), etc. The trail of blood scene being removed and the white washing of Avalanche also turned off fans. The game was also launched as a PS4 exclusive and then arrived on PC as an Epic Games Store exclusive, so by the time it finally arrived on Steam a lot of the interest had diminished.
The second game did not come out in a timely manner either, releasing FIVE whole years after the first game! And once again it launched as a console exclusive, this time on the PS5 which due to the Pandemic and scalpers many people did not have, and the JRPG playerbase was buying Switches instead of Playstation as Sony abandoned Japan. Glacial JRPG devs like Nihon Falcon and Square that were still sticking with Playstation exclusives at this point paid for it dearly (see the Trails and Ys series sales collapse as the JRPG playerbase fled Playstation to Switch). Rebirth also caused consternation in that Cid would not be playable, there would be no overworld, and no controlling the airship. Rebirth also did nothing to address how fundamentally less engaging FF7 is after Midgar. When people think about FF7, they think of the dieselpunk dystopia on disc 1, and how you are constantly swept from setpiece to setpiece with Mako reactors blowing up, plate drops, the trail of blood scene, etc. After that you are meandering around aimlessly a much less appealing setting. People were already tuning out once they saw the generic Ubisoft towers in the prerelease articles.
When we discussed several months ago, I found all your points reasonable.
But also, you expect too much from current-year developers: they simply do not have the vision NOR the skillset to make a faithful remake a reality.
In the nineties, Square had a whole (small) army of geniuses, and they were making games for adults (in the nineties), who were a far cry from adults in current year. This is about a 28-year difference. That is a whole cycle of "Leave no child behind".
The themes of FF7 and FF8 - "can we insert a Hollywood-style psychological thriller in a turn-based RPG" - have been unthinkable since then.
People do not care for that level of refinement in their entertainment, but more importantly, the dev teams would not be able to achieve it.
Look at much simpler game series like Dead Island/sequels/Beast Within or State of Decay, which are zombie sandboxes. The newer devs cannot accomplish what the retired devs did. They even use AI to help with artistic vision, music vision, coding. Do you want to consume somebody's braindead efforts if they needed AI inspiration? I sure don't.
The game YOU wanted FF7R to be requires at least another thirty years to materialize, if the pendulum swings back to tradition-based civilization.
Hope that's a bad prediction.
