Final Fantasy 7 Remake's Cloud's Recollections

Although its DLC may not have held up, I have to admit that the remake of Final Fantasy 7 has thus far been far more carefully, intelligently, and accurately done than I had expected.  Unlike every other FF7 spin-off we’ve seen in the last 2 decades and more, it seems like the team behind the remake may, in fact, have actually played the source material at least once in their lives.  That’s not to say that there aren’t problems with it, of course, and some sizable ones at that, but hell, FF7 was far from perfect itself, and honestly, I’m so pleased that most of the remake seems to actually value the spirit, atmosphere, approach, and character integrity of the original that I can forgive a lot more than I thought I would.  Still, there are some unfortunate changes SquareEnix has taken to their most recent approach to FF7 that are worth noting.

1 that stands out to me is the way that Cloud’s recollections are handled.  In the original FF7, Cloud’s faulty mental state is shown through the game’s course in a variety of clever and intuitive methods that combined text, visuals, music, and sound effects...moments of an unknown voice within supplying answers to questions with prompting, unmarked text boxes that Cloud would then mimic, transparent ghost-images of some other self that Cloud would be trying to copy, or be unable to pull into himself as he experienced an episode, the pulsing background music that single-handedly convinced us that Sephiroth wasn’t a pathetic pushover in spite of literally every part of his history and in-game actions, a sudden, sharp sound effect of something breaking or coming undone...considering how new the Playstation 1 was at the time, and the fact that the aesthetics and style of FF7 were equally different in their own right from most of what Squaresoft had done previously, it’s almost humbling to recognize that they managed to effectively use so many different cues to create and maintain the uneasy feeling for 60% of the game that there was something unknown within Cloud’s psyche, something indefinably but inevitably wrong with his mind and self.  In many ways, the storytelling methods of Final Fantasy 7 not only worked with great skill within the limitations of the Playstation 1, they found a way to make those limitations work for them.

Unfortunately, the remake cannot, nor seems to even be trying to, recreate this mastery of showing but not making explicit Cloud’s cerebral dissonance.  Back in FF7, when Cloud has a moment in which his delusions have to prompt his responses with a false recollection, there’d be a brief flash, maybe a momentary prompting text telling him what to say, and that would be all.  You, the audience, KNEW something was wrong, that some other voice within him was feeding him an answer, but that was ALL you knew: that something was wrong.  You didn’t know where that other voice came from, save that only Cloud heard it.  You didn’t know why it was there.  You didn’t know why this was information that Cloud had to coach himself on, or be coached on.  You didn’t know that there was anything wrong with what Cloud remembered.  The ominous ambiguity kept you on your toes about it.

And what made it even more unnerving was that ONLY you could see it happening.  It was fast, and entirely internal; the people that Cloud was speaking to didn’t and wouldn’t know the difference between this disconnected recollection and any other statement Cloud made.*  Cloud clearly didn’t even seem to notice himself that something wasn’t fully correct with his ability to reach into his memory.  You were the only one who could tell that something was out of place in Cloud’s mind, adding tension to the playing experience in the same way that the audience can’t warn a horror film protagonist of an impending danger.

This deftly understated method is replaced by clumsy, obvious straight-shooting in the Remake.  While adding voice acting is in general a good idea if you can get competent actors and more importantly competent directors--which SquareEnix is almost always several steps behind on, but they generally have their shit together in FF7R--but here it’s a bit of a problem, because there’s a hell of a lot of unnerving ambiguity about a silent text box popping up from unknown origins to prompt Cloud on what to say, but barely any such disturbing sense of the unknown behind the same line being said aloud by a highly generic voice.

Meanwhile, the brief flash of Cloud recalling/inventing information in the original is replaced with the guy, to quote good sir Ecclesiastes, holding his head like he’s jacking into the Matrix.  Before, you didn’t know what was happening, only felt that something was wrong, and you didn’t know that you shouldn’t take Cloud at his word at such moments, only that what he was saying was important to keep in mind for later because something strange accompanied it.  The Remake gracelessly raises the question that perhaps Cloud’s words can’t be trusted, calls attention to it.

And it’s also a step back in-story, too.  Before, Cloud’s discordant moments of recollection would leave no in-universe observer any the wiser.  Now, however, everyone just awkwardly stands around watching him grab his head like it’s a stress ball, and just lets it go afterward.  It’s like they’ve all already established an agreement not to say anything about Grandpa stumbling around head-in-hands because he’s sensitive about his episodes, Timmy.  Cloud’s over here stumbling around in agony like someone just showed him the ending to Mass Effect 3 for the first time, and no one’s questioning the information they’re getting from the guy?

It’s too bad, really.  I don’t know what the future holds for FF7 Remake in terms of revealing the truth of Cloud’s mind and history--I rather suspect it won’t be nearly as monumental a linchpin to the game’s plot as it was originally, which is a damn pity--but if it does still hold importance to the story that will unfold in the future (maybe**), it’s not being set up nearly as interestingly as it was in the first game.  I don’t know how avoidable this problem was, really, because a lot of the original’s methods were specifically well-suited to the aesthetic and limitations of a Playstation 1 game (no expectation of voice acting for all plot-relevant text, for example), but it doesn’t seem like SquareEnix particularly tried to lessen the Remake’s losses with this, either.











* I mean, Tifa knows, but that’s due to her having already-existing knowledge of some of the past events Cloud speaks of.  She’s not sleuthing it out from any current tells he has.


** Given how long this first chapter took, and SquareEnix’s typical level of competence, I have sincere and, I think, legitimate doubts that FF7 Remake is gonna be completed within my lifetime.