FF7 Remake - What a Ride
I played Remake over five months on three screens, and I finished it with questions about the ending that I'm still reading up on.
I wanted to play a JRPG, and the internet pointed me to Final Fantasy VII. I had no idea about the franchise at all, and no idea that I was in for a journey. It started on a Sunday morning in April 2026 on the ultrawide monitor, and it ended on a Wednesday afternoon in September on the Steam Deck, 34 hours and five months later, with work in May and the dissertation in July in between.
I loved this game. What didn’t land is Sephiroth’s lines, and the ending arc after Aerith’s rescue, which I’m still trying to make sense of.
Table of contents
- The story, chapter wise
- How I played it
- The intro chapter
- The combat
- The soundtrack
- The character building
- Shinra and Avalanche
- Aerith
- What didn’t land
- The questions I still have
The story, chapter wise
The whole game is Midgar, told in eighteen chapters, and this is what happens in each.
Chapter 1, The Destruction of Mako Reactor 1. Cloud, hired as a mercenary by Barret’s Avalanche cell, goes into Reactor 1 with Barret, Jessie, Biggs and Wedge to plant a bomb. He has a vision of Sephiroth on the way down. The Scorpion Sentinel guards the core, the bomb is set, and the explosion is far bigger than anyone in the group expected.
Chapter 2, Fateful Encounters. Cloud walks out into the burning streets of Sector 8 alone. He meets Aerith, selling flowers, and the Whispers appear for the first time around her. He sees Sephiroth in the flames, fights his way through Shinra’s troops, and jumps onto the last train to the Sector 7 slums, where the others are waiting.
Chapter 3, Home Sweet Slum. The Sector 7 slums, Seventh Heaven, and Tifa. Cloud takes odd jobs around the neighbourhood while Barret decides whether to keep him on. Jessie says her bomb was far too small for the blast they saw. Tifa has her own doubts about the bombing, and the group plans the next one, on Reactor 5.
Chapter 4, Mad Dash. A night run with Jessie, Biggs and Wedge up to the plate above. Cloud and Jessie ride a motorcycle through the tunnels, chased by Roche, a SOLDIER who treats the fight as a game. Jessie steals blasting agent from her father’s house, and we learn she wanted to be an actress.
Chapter 5, Dogged Pursuit. Barret, Tifa and Cloud take the train towards Reactor 5. The ID check catches them, they jump, and they follow the Stamp graffiti through the tunnels and the train yard to the reactor’s underside, past the Crab Warden.
Chapter 6, Light the Way. The way into the reactor goes through the Sector 4 plate’s interior. Sun lamps have to be switched to move the platforms, and the three climb to the reactor’s cargo entrance.
Chapter 7, A Trap Is Sprung. The bomb is set in Reactor 5, and Heidegger’s trap closes. The President speaks to them on a screen, the Airbuster is sent against them, and when the walkway gives way Cloud falls from the plate.
Chapter 8, Budding Bodyguard. Cloud lands in the church in the Sector 5 slums, in Aerith’s flowers. Reno of the Turks comes for her, the Whispers interfere, and Cloud agrees to be her bodyguard. They walk through Sector 5 to her house, meet her mother Elmyra, and do what the slum needs doing. At the end they see Tifa being taken by cart to Wall Market.
Chapter 9, The Town That Never Sleeps. Wall Market, where Don Corneo picks a bride each night. To get in, Cloud has to be dressed as a candidate. The road there runs through Chocobo Sam, Madam M, the Corneo Colosseum with the Hell House, and Andrea Rhodea’s Honeybee Inn and the dance. In the mansion Corneo gives up the plan: Shinra is going to drop the Sector 7 plate and blame Avalanche. He drops the three into the sewers.
Chapter 10, Rough Waters. Corneo’s trapdoor drops the three into the sewers under the city. Abzu is down there with them, and the way back towards Sector 7 is a long climb through the aqueducts.
Chapter 11, Haunted. The way into the slums runs through the train graveyard, and the ghosts there answer to Eligor. They get through it and come out into Sector 7 with Shinra’s helicopters already circling the pillar.
Chapter 12, Fight for Survival. They reach the support pillar while Biggs, Jessie and Wedge are fighting the Shinra army on it. Reno and Rude hold the top. The pillar comes down and the plate falls on Sector 7. Aerith gets Marlene out before it does, and is taken by Shinra.
Chapter 13, A Broken World. The ruins of Sector 7. Elmyra tells them what Aerith is, an Ancient, and why Shinra wants her. Under the ruins is a Shinra test site, where they find Wedge alive, and a Failed Experiment.
Chapter 14, In Search of Hope. Cloud dreams of Aerith. Leslie, Corneo’s man, leads them through Corneo’s secret passage and hands them grappling guns. They go up.
Chapter 15, The Day Midgar Stood Still. They climb the collapsed plate to the upper city. The Valkyrie hunts them on the way up, and at the top they see Midgar from above for the first time.
Chapter 16, The Belly of the Beast. The Shinra Building: the lobby, the exhibit of Shinra’s own story, the long stairs, and Hojo’s lab, where Aerith is held. They find her, and Red XIII, and Cloud collapses at the sight of Jenova.
Chapter 17, Deliverance from Chaos. The Drum, Hojo’s laboratory, where Red XIII explains the Whispers. Jenova’s body is gone, and what it leaves fights them. Sephiroth kills President Shinra on the roof, Rufus arrives and fights Cloud, Barret is run through and the Whispers put him back, and they escape.
Chapter 18, Destiny’s Crossroads. The Midgar Expressway, Motorball, and Sephiroth waiting at the end of the road. The Whisper Harbinger, the fights inside it, and Sephiroth’s seven seconds. Zack, elsewhere, survives. The party walks out of Midgar.
How I played it
I mostly played over the weekend or when I had some free time. There were days when I finished my riyaz and then had nothing to do, so I would pick this up and finish a portion of it. Steam kept the dates, and there were two chapters that first Sunday, then a chapter every day or two until the middle of May, and then two long gaps.
Life got in the way twice. I got busy with work in May, and in July I was wrapping up the dissertation. What got me back each time was the joy of playing video games, and FF7 itself: the story, the action, the music, the gameplay.
The three stretches were on three different screens, and each gave a different experience. Until May I played it directly on my PC, on the 34 inch ultrawide. That gave an immersive big view, although the game has no ultrawide support. Then I made the PC a headless system, streaming from Sunshine, and the next segment was on the MacBook Pro at 120 fps in HDR, which gave the highest graphical and visual fidelity of the three. The final section I finished on the Steam Deck, once Moonlight was completely set up on it, and that gave the most convenience. The streaming to the Deck was fantastic. The PC is wired on gigabit ethernet, the Deck is on WiFi 6, and the router is roughly five feet from me, so the experience was like playing it natively. There were occasional audio cracks, and they didn’t break the immersion. I enjoyed playing on all three.
Whichever screen I was on, the side quests felt like a typical open world game: as you visit a new part of the city you get some quests to complete, to understand more about the characters and the vibe of the place itself. Wherever I enjoyed a city and its side quests, I truly went all in and finished everything. The Wall Market chapter was one of those detours, hilarious and very light hearted, with a dance off that was really impressive for the timed inputs it asks for, and outfits that were genuinely gorgeous. It’s a nice detour from the complete action pacing before and after it. Towards the end I lost much of the interest in the side quests and focused on the main story. I’m not here to convince anyone that spending time in this world is better than anything else, that’s up to each person’s taste.
It’s not the longest game I’ve played. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla took me over 200 hours to finish the main story and all the DLCs. I would not play the hard mode, as I’ll be moving on to Rebirth.
The intro chapter
There are many grand sequences in this game, and the intro chapter really sold it for me and got me hooked. The pace of it did that: the immediate hack and slash gameplay, the immersive cutscenes, the grandness of bombing the reactor, and then the boss at the end of the chapter, which took me maybe five attempts to beat. The background score was something else, and it added to the immersion of the plot and the scene.
The combat
I absolutely enjoyed the combat system: the rotation of characters, the abilities and skills, the materia and summon system, the items to heal and to revive the squad. It’s a very intricate fighting mechanism. I played the whole game on the normal difficulty and never changed it.
Fighting a normal enemy is still hack and slash. Just spam the skills and abilities and you’ll be fine. The boss fights don’t reward that at all, and the best way through them is to use the squad really well. Tifa punches her enemies, which can quickly stagger them. Aerith uses her staff to deal magic damage, and her skills are mostly about healing the squad. Cloud is close range sword combat with fast, aggressive attacks. Barret is long range, like Aerith, with his shooting abilities. Using all of that to your advantage and playing strategically really helps in the boss fights.
The one I distinctly remember is the boss that is a house, in the fight with Aerith on the way to rescuing Tifa. It took me at least ten to fifteen tries to narrow down its moves and its weakness. At each of its phases it seems to have a different elemental weakness, so I had to use the countering elements, and I had to research it and prepare my inventory accordingly. Rufus’s fight was magnificent and elegant, and his fighting style represents his character well.
The soundtrack
The soundtrack is world class. It’s honestly one of the best soundtracks I have heard in a video game, and the theme music for each character stuck with me. When I was playing the Aerith segment, one track, Collapsed Expressway, immediately caught my attention, and it’s the one that has gone into my library.
As a musician, what I really love about it is two things. First, the theme music for each character is aptly representative of that character. Second, the music conveys the grandness or the tenderness of a scene so well that if I listened to a track standalone, I could guess what sort of scene it was made for. The combat music is adrenaline pumping.
The character building
The character building is amazing. The game starts with Cloud being distant from the entire Avalanche group and their motives, with this lone wolf energy, and towards the end you can clearly see him caring about their motives and stepping in to help. He is not just another mercenary any more. Barret is not very trusting of Cloud in the beginning, then begins to grow fond of him, and you can see their camaraderie well in the ending arc. Tifa and Cloud go way back, and their relationship grows too. Aerith was very receptive of Cloud from the start, and he always kept his distance, but towards the end you can see him ease around her as well. By the end all the characters understand one another well, like they are a family.
Around those four, Wedge is a very cheerful buddy who always has your back. Barret being a father, he would do anything to protect his daughter Marlene, and Tifa’s doubts about the bombing show her own thoughts about how they proceed with such a huge responsibility. Red XIII feels like a good companion to have, and I still haven’t formed a connection with this animal.
Shinra and Avalanche
Shinra and Avalanche are really a perspective. When you walk through the Shinra headquarters, their narrative is that the world has a lot of this energy and they are using it to make the world a better place. Avalanche’s perspective is that Shinra is draining the planet of its resources and it is suffering, and that the quest to find the other side is harming everyone. It’s a typical mirror of the real world. I did catch that the explosion was bigger than it should have been, and I suspected that someone might be behind it, but when it was revealed that Shinra was behind the amplification, it still took me by surprise.
On Shinra’s side, Rufus really had the aura of the successor of Shinra. Hojo is the true madman, who really cares about science and his experiments on life forms, and he laughs as he sees the tracks Sephiroth leaves as he breaks out of the main chamber.
Then Shinra dropped the plate on Sector 7. The plate crashing down was huge for me. Biggs, Jessie, and Wedge are fending off the Shinra army while Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith escape the sewers and get to Sector 7. Jessie dying had me feeling bad. We get to know her parents and her ambition of being an actress, and she really seemed to like Cloud, so her death had an impact on that whole chapter.
Aerith
When Aerith was taken in by Shinra, I was more focused on rescuing her than on doing all the side missions. That’s how deeply I was involved with the story and the characters. During this time I had watched Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and I saw the sort of experiments they did on Jean Grey in it. I realised something similar would be in the cards for Aerith, and I really wanted to prevent that. None of this is real, and the story is already predetermined, which is all just logical, but this is the level to which this world had captured me.
Aerith seems to know a lot more than she says, and it’s always mysterious. She says to Sephiroth, “You are wrong.” That is something someone says to another person when they have understood the other person’s stance properly, and the player still has no grasp of how wrong Sephiroth is. It doesn’t feel fearful on her part. Once she is revealed as the last Ancient living, it is expected of her to possess more knowledge than a human.
What didn’t land
Sephiroth’s lines themselves. All the other characters talk like humans do, and Sephiroth talks like a philosopher, in phrases, and it felt very artificial. I don’t remember a single line of his, only that feeling. So the ending arc after rescuing Aerith, and the fight sequences with Sephiroth, kind of went over my head. I did not skip any of the cutscenes. I just watched through them, and I’m still reading through the analysis online to make sense of it. Cloud’s own past I was able to follow, and by now we know that he is ex-SOLDIER, but since it all happens in pieces I still haven’t pieced together how it all fits.
The questions I still have
Finishing it felt surreal and disorienting at the same time. It felt surreal to finish this game and to have been a part of this world. I liked the credits, where they show cutscenes from all the chapters in order, and watching some of those scenes made me go, oh yeah, that happened no? This was an absolute blast of a game, and I really enjoyed the essence of a JRPG in it.
The ending is the part I’m still working out. I kind of understood what the whispers are. But then each of the characters gets a memory of them, and Sephiroth takes Cloud to the edge of creation and says, “You have seven seconds. What will you do with it?” Then we are taken back to the scenes after the fight, and there is an overlap of Zack rescuing Cloud and the Avalanche party at the same location, which did not make any sense to me. I had no idea who Zack was in the story. He seemed to be fighting the Shinra soldiers, he says that he is a SOLDIER, and in the next scene he is carrying a tired and wounded Cloud. Does it point to an alternate reality? Is it a parallel universe? Or is it some old memory? Maybe all these answers will come in Rebirth and the third part of the trilogy.