Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

The resistance group Avalanche has been fighting a desperate war with Shinra, the ruthless corporation that rules the city of Midgar and its surrounding regions with an iron fist. However, the return of Shinra's ex-special forces operative Sephiroth, now with his own agenda that may imperil the entire world, has caused a rethink of priorities. The Avalanche splinter cell led by Barret Wallace has joined forces with Cloud Strife, Sephiroth's former protege, and set out in pursuit of the ruthless soldier. His aims remain murky, and may extend far beyond this one world...

So here we are again. Five years ago, Square released Remake, which took the opening 5-7 hours or so of the original Final Fantasy VII and expanded it into a 35-hour long epic JRPG, complete with gorgeous (if often interminable) cutscenes, spectacular battle sequences and enhanced scenes of world and character-building. When it worked, it was brilliant, adding texture and depth to the great, but occasionally sparse, original. When it faltered, you abruptly realised you were wading waist-high through sometimes repetitive and often tedious filler which, due to the game's relentless linearity, you had no choice but to engage with.

Rebirth picks up the story immediately after the events of Remake and adapts the middle 20 hours or so of the original game into a staggering 100-odd hour odyssey. Rebirth is a lot of game, hurling so many stories, characters, quests, side-quests, minigames and cutscenes at the player that it sometimes feels genuinely overwhelming. But it also has a huge strength over Remake: this time most of the filler stuff is easily identifiable and can be avoided to focus on the main storyline.

Rebirth also opens brilliantly, with our heroes taking refuge in the town of Kalm after their flight from Midgar at the end of the first part. During this sojourn, Cloud regales his team with the story of his visit to his home town of Nibelheim with Sephiroth five years earlier, culminating in the destruction of the town and the slaughter of most of its citizens after Sephiroth discovered the secrets of his own origin, hidden from him by the merciless Shinra Corporation. This flashback sequence - fully playable as it was in 1997 - serves as a new tutorial section and reacquaints the player with the controls and combat from Remake.

From there the players can explore the town of Kalm, picking up side-quests and learning to play Queen's Blood, a popular card game. Having as much interest in digital card minigames as a capybara has in nuclear physics (New Vegas' Caravan and The Witcher III's Gwent both left me cold), I was prepared to play the required one game to advance the main quest and then forget it even existed, only instead to find the best card minigame ever put in a video game. Queen's Blood is brilliant and, to my eternal shame, I spent a nontrivial amount of Rebirth's run time enhancing my deck and defeating every player I came across. More bemusingly, Queen's Blood turns out to have an entire questline dedicated to the dark secret of its creation and the fate of its creator which brings in at least one other iconic Final Fantasy VII character and ended up being very compelling despite an abruptly anticlimactic ending, making me wonder if the final game in the trilogy will revisit it. This turns out to be a recurring theme in the game, which puts what appears to be filler candyfloss in front of you which you think you can ignore but then turns out to be unexpectedly great.

From Kalm you can venture into the first of six open world zones, each one of which replicates a distinct biome or area from the original Final Fantasy VII world map. The main difference between Remake and Rebirth is the open-world approach of the latter, with a main quest marker leading you to the next chunk of the main narrative, but a whole ton of secondary icons leading you to other objectives. Seasoned Ubiclone veterans may be surprised to see the unexpected return of that old open world standby, the Radio Tower which lights up the surrounding part of the map like it's still 2013. Each one of the zones has a distinctly similar array of side-options, including finding Mako crystal formations to scan, altars to various powerful monsters to gain the insight needed to summon them on the battlefield, and Moogle traders to convince to sell stuff to you (by collecting their wayward itinerant children; by the end of the game you really want to report the Moogle parents to some sort of safeguarding authority for cute Japanese fantasy creatures, they are really terrible parents).

None of the zones apart from Corel are truly massive and are helped by different traversal options, starting with your feet but then expanding to the chicken-like chocobos, and then later a desert buggy and an aircraft that is forcibly converted into a boat. But they are absolutely packed with stuff to see and do, which can be thoroughly enjoyable but then start leaning towards the exhausting. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth often put me in mind of Baldur's Gate III for its sheer, unrelenting assault on the player's free time and focus. Arguably Rebirth suffers a bit more from this, as its story is somewhat simpler (in the original you're basically chasing Sephiroth through these zones to a showdown at an ancient temple, with Shinra occasionally showing up to throw curveballs at you) and wholly unchangeable, without the multiple endings BG3 offered. Its side-quests are also much more of a mixed bag than BG3's mostly great side-offerings, though some of them (like Barrett and Red XIII helping a Gongaga local write a children's book based on their adventures) are very charming.

Some of these side-activities are very repetitive (scanning Mako formations or doing limited Quick-Time Events to get more Summoning intel gets boring around the third time you do them, out of forty-plus times you have to do it in the whole game) and are made worse in that they are foisted on you by disturbing boy-android Chadley, whose "man in the van" role in the first game was tolerable by a relatively limited amount of screen-time but here he is an almost constant presence, constantly yelling at you through largely unskippable cutscenes to scan things or fight things for his intel purposes. Apparently he has more dialogue in the game than any of your party members, which is ludicrous. Ignoring side-missions in favour of the main quest does mean reducing your interactions with Chadley to a bare minimum, which is a strong argument in itself for that approach.

The game is at its best when it refocuses on the very things that made Final Fantasy VII so incredibly iconic: the central narrative, with its three-sided battle between Avalanche, Shinra and Sephiroth; and the superb cast of characters. Remake focused on Cloud, Barret, Aerith and Tifa, not to mention Yuffie in the Intergrade DLC (Rebirth integrates Yuffie into the main team, but takes its sweet time about it). Rebirth furthers their stories but also focuses on Red XIII (introduced at the end of Remake but here expanded to main character status) and Cait Sith. Cait Sith is easily Rebirth's biggest success over the original game, with the fairly flat original cartoon character here enhanced into a deeper and more interesting character with an endearing Scottish accent and far more useful combat utility.

But all the characters get their time in the sun: we visit Barret's home town and uncover more of his personal history and what happened to Marlene's biological parents; Tifa gets to relive the events in Nibelheim and later makes a special connection with the planet itself; Aerith uncovers more information about her ancestors and her role in the events to come; and Cloud himself uncovers more information about his past, and his muddled memories. These aspects, all highlights of the original game, are given much greater depth here and represents the remake project at its best, enriching the original to make something better.

Combat is another aspect that Rebirth has improved on. The combat system from Remake was broadly similar to the original but, instead of your characters standing around like lemons whilst their time gauges slowly filled up, they could launch basic attacks and block, filling up their time bars faster. When the time bars filled up, they could unleash special attacks or use magic or items. That system is still the same here, but now enhanced by synergy abilities, where your party members can cooperate in carrying out attack moves in concert. Combat is certainly more complex here, as you can reach a much higher level than in Remake with access to a much vaster array of Materia and weapons, but not overwhelmingly so, with a nice array of tactical options and the game almost urging you to find broken and overpowered builds. Combat can look insane and random in videos, but when you're in the thick of them they can be surprisingly deep and tactical. That said, some boss fights (like the final one of the game) do go massively overboard in how long and gruelling they can be.

Environments are impressive, with a nicely evolving sense of locations as the game continues. You start in the medieval throwback town of Kalm and then cross the vast Grasslands to the swamps and mountains, beyond which lies the rocky coastlands around Junon. Then it's across the ocean to the balmy seaside resort of Costa del Sol and then the Corel Region, with its mixture of desert badlands and temperate woods (plus the gleaming techno-paradise of the Gold Saucer, this world's Las Vegas but only somehow more garish, fake and tiresome). South lies the thick jungles of Gongaga, whilst the vast Cosmo Canyon lies to the west. To the north lies Nibelheim and its mountains and islands rearing out of the ocean. A final journey sees you crossing the Meridian Ocean in search of pirate treasure and the fabled Gilgamesh Island (site of the game's most insane, but fortunately ignorable, battle challenges). These environments are all well-realised, and the best thing about Remake - taking those grainy 2D backgrounds from the original game and turning them into amazing 4K locations, fully explorable - is turned up to eleven here. Iconic locations like Junon Harbour, the Gold Saucer and the Temple of the Ancients are realised here on a scale and in a fidelity utterly unthinkable in 1997.

Graphically, though, the game can be a little of a mixed bag. The character models, especially of the main cast, are all incredible, with amazing detail, skin textures and hair. But the environments can sometimes feel a bit undercooked, with weirdly low-res textures on mountains, rockfaces and roads even with everything turned up to eleven. The game's graphical options are also limited (particularly annoyingly trying to turn frame generation on even if your hardware is good enough not to need it). The PC version of the game still does look amazingly beautiful at times, but Final Fantasy VII Rebirth definitely isn't quite challenging recent games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Alan Wake 2 or Baldur's Gate III in terms of consistent visual quality.

Like Remake before it, though, the soundtrack cannot be faulted. OG Final Fantasy VII has one of the best soundtracks of all time and both Remake and Rebirth faithfully recreate the original soundtrack and then enhance it with stunning and far more epic new arrangements of the classic songs, as well as wholly new tracks. The amount of music in the game will cause your brain to start melting at a certain point, especially when you realise Rebirth's most random new mission type - escort missions for certain types of cats and dogs (!) - has its own dedicated set of songs.

Rebirth does eventually come to an end, and like Remake before it, the ending is a bit too smart-arse for its own good. The remake trilogy is not just retelling the original Final Fantasy VII story but expanding it with some kind of parallel universe/alternate timeline gubbins. Some of this new material is great - a chance to play as perennial FF7 also-ran character Zack in an alternate version of Midgar in brief interstitial storyline moments is surprisingly enjoyable - but it's a ton of complicated new material on top of a game that already famously has a dense, complex storyline complete with fake memories, plot twists and intricate politics. Rebirth's endgame is even more interminable than Remake's and the crowning emotional moment of the entire FF7 narrative (you know the bit if you know) is left a bit swamped by vagueness in its retelling here.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (****) is a vast amount of video game, with a colossal amount of story, characters and gameplay. Fans of the original game with its much tighter focus and story may find the constant interruptions from new side-activities in this remake extremely frustrating, but at least this time around you can mostly ignore that material. But some of that stuff is great, and genuinely worth a look for how it enhances the original story and character arcs. There is so much in this game that I've barely scratched the surface here. I haven't even mentioned the Gold Saucer opera that you get to take part in, or the full-blown J-pop number that greets you on your arrival there, or Cloud's potential new careers as a professional photographer or Segway advertiser, or the stuff related to late-arriving party members Cid and Vincent or...you get the idea.

The game is overstuffed, sometimes too silly, sometimes too grimdark and sometimes too disrespectful of your time, but it's also heartfelt, funny, touching, action-packed and epic in a way too few video games genuinely are. It's also a major improvement over Remake, and leaves the decks clear for the third and final game in the trilogy to end things (hopefully more concisely) in style.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

FINAL FANTASY TV series in development, based on FF14

Sony Pictures Television, Square Enix and Hivemind Productions have joined forces to bring the long-running Final Fantasy video game series to television.

The series will be loosely based on Final Fantasy XIV, a multiplayer online game with a strong narrative component. The story will focus on the realm of Eorzea, which is being invaded by the Garlean Empire. The heroes are Warriors of Light, great warriors and mages called to stand against the Empire.

Final Fantasy XIV was originally released in 2010 to a middling reception; it was later rebooted as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn in 2013 and became a huge success, with over 16 million subscriptions sold. By some counts, it is currently the second-most-popular fantasy MMORPG in existence, behind only the veteran World of WarCraft.

The decision to focus on Final Fantasy XIV (with its fluid and by-design incomplete story) for an adaptation may surprise some people; Final Fantasy VII (1997) is the most well-known game in the series and is getting a huge boost of popularity next year, when the first part of a comprehensive remake of the game launches on PlayStation 4 in March 2020. However, FFXIV is the biggest-selling and by far the most profitable game in the history of the series, and many more current players will be familiar with its lore, story and characters.

The series - where each game consists of completely self-contained narratives, worlds, characters and ideas, but similar story structure and controls - began with Final Fantasy (1987), the success of which is widely credited with saving Squaresoft (as it was then) from going bust. Final Fantasy VII took the series to international success, using the-then state of the art PlayStation technology to create a much more immersive story whilst retaining the RPG customisation and battle features that had attracted players to the series. Final Fantasy X (2001) was the first game in the series to feature spoken dialogue, whilst Final Fantasy XIII (2009) was the first game to launch in HD. Final Fantasy XI (2002) was the first MMORPG in the series, running until its servers were finally shut down in 2016. The latest game in the series, Final Fantasy XV, was released in 2016.

The series previously flirted with dramatic adaptations in the form of the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2000). The film was widely seen as a failure, bombing at the box office and getting a critically mediocre reception. A straight-to-DVD feature-length film, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children (2005) was considerably more successful.

The Final Fantasy TV series will be co-written by Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton, who don't seem to have any credits of note between them. Sony are currently shopping the project to networks and streamers, although they face a tough market with many potential markets already developing epic fantasy projects of their own.

Cities of Fantasy: Midgar

Gaia is a vast and exotic world, ranging from the freezing arctic north to the lush forests and burning deserts of the Western Continent. Many interesting races and people inhabit this world, and the greatest and most famous of its cities can be found on the Eastern Continent: Midgar, capital of the lands dominated by the Shinra Corporation.

Midgar as it will appear in the upcoming Final Fantasy VII Remake.

Location

Midgar is located near the north-western coast of the Eastern Continent, north of Junon and south-west of Kalm. It is located close to the Western Ocean, which is dominated by Shinra’s warships and cargo vessels, which constantly keep Midgar supplied from the mines on the Western Continent. Cost del Sol, a beautiful port city due west of Midgar across the ocean, is a popular getaway and retreat for senior Shinra officials.

Midgar as depicted in the original 1997 release of Final Fantasy VII.

Physical Description

Midgar was originally a network of villages and towns of wooden and stone buildings, linked together by roads and surrounding relatively fertile farmland. After Shinra ascended to power and rapidly developed high technology, by pursuing a mix of scientific research and magical exploitation of materia (magical crystals), they constructed a new city directly over the old towns. The “new” Midgar consists of a massive circular dish with many buildings built on top, suspected directly above the “old” city below (which is now left in perpetual gloom). The surface-dwelling inhabitants of Midgar disparagingly refer to the new city above them as a “pizza”.

The new city of Midgar is suspended by a single, massive pillar and other supports located around the edge of the dish. The dish is divided into nine sectors, with massive Mako Reactors located between each sector. The Reactors fuel the enormous, power-hungry city, but the area around Midgar has gradually become more barren and lifeless as a result. According to the freedom fighters known as AVALANCHE (dismissed as terrorists by Shinra), the Reactors are draining the life force of the very planet itself and will eventually turn all of Gaia into a desert, but Shinra dismisses this claim.

Sectors 1-8 run around the dish, whilst Sector 0 is located at the very centre. Shinra Headquarters, a massive skyscraper and Mako Reactor, is located in the middle of the dish.

The slums below the “pizza” are where poorer residents of the city live. Climbing from the slums to the main city is possible via the central pillar or the city’s train system, which carries workers from below the city to their work places on top. There is an elevated freeway which runs around the city and then descends to ground level outside.

A subterranean city, Deepground, is located in the bedrock below even the slums. Its existence is relatively little-known.

The total size of Midgar is unclear, but it appears to be several miles across.

Population

The population of Midgar, at least prior to the Meteor/Jenova incident and the downfall of the Shinra Corporation, appears to be comfortably in the tens of thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands. Midgar is the largest and most technologically-advanced city on the planet.

Midgar as depicted in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.

History

The Shinra Corporation evolved out of Shinra Manufacturing Works, a company specialising in weapons manufacturing. When Shinra discovered how to convent the planet’s Lifestream into Mako energy, they began building Mako Reactors all over the globe. This further propelled both their scientific research and technological advancement, resulting in the development of many powerful weapons, advanced vehicles and other wonders…and terrors.

The town of Wutai rejected Shinra’s proposal to build a Mako Reactor near their settlement, resulting in a nine-year war. During this time Midgar was constructed by Shinra over several pre-existing towns in a relatively defensible part of the eastern continent, becoming both Shinra’s capital and also its greatest achievement. The Wutai War ended in a Shinra victory, but survivors of the Wutai forces and other groups opposed to Shinra’s ultra-capitalist ideology – and horrified by the growing evidence that the Mako Reactors were sapping the Lifestream of the planet – joined forces to form AVALANCHE, a rebel organisation dedicated to destroying the Mako Reactors.

The first incarnation of AVALANCHE operated out in the countryside, hitting isolated reactors (such as the one at Corel). This group become more hardline and ruthless until one member, a scientist named Fuhito, considered the sacrifice of humanity itself to be a worthwhile consequence of destroying the Mako Reactors and saving the Planet. He tried to summon a powerful magical force named Zirconiade to wipe out Shinra forever, but was stopped and killed by the Turks, Shinra’s special operations combat team.

Barret Wallace, a native of Corel, worked with the Turks to defeat AVALANCHE, but was horrified when Shinra laid waste to Corel in retaliation, killing his wife and (apparently) his best friend. Swearing vengeance, Barret moved to Midgar and restarted AVALANCHE as a freedom-fighting organisation. This second version of the rebel group avoided civilian casualties where possible, but sometimes they were incurred. During this period Barret allied with a young, canny fighter named Tifa and her childhood friend, a former Shinra soldier named Cloud Strife.

The conflict between Shinra and AVALANCHE became quite intense, to the point where Shinra destroyed the Sector 7 pillar and dropped the entire sector onto the slums below, including the districts where AVALANCHE’s headquarters were located. Most of AVALANCHE was wiped out in this attack and AVALANCHE were blamed for the cataclysm, which caused thousands of casualties. Barret, Cloud and others launched a retaliatory strike on Shinra Headquarters. During these events AVALANCHE learned of a much more sinister series of experiments going on behind the scenes, involving the Ancients, the mysterious progenitor race who nearly destroyed the world two thousand years earlier. Sephiroth, the former Shinra military commander (and Cloud’s mentor), liberates the team after they are captured and kills President Shinra before escaping with the remnants of one of the Ancients, Jenova. 

Eventually it was revealed that Sephiroth (sometimes possessed by Jenova, sometimes acting on his own) planned to use the fabled Black Materia to summon a massive Meteor to devastate Gaia. The planet’s Lifestream would respond to heal the wound and Sephiroth would seize the resulting flow of power for himself. Working together, the former members of AVALANCHE (helped, if unwittingly by Shinra) defeated Sephiroth and destroyed the Meteor; unfortunately, in the final battle Midgar was partially destroyed.

After the final battle, Midgar was repopulated. The overhanging main plate had mostly been obliterated, opening the city up to the sky once again. The governance of the city was disputed between the surviving remnants of Shinra and other factions, but eventually the World Regenesis Organisation was formed by several groups to take over governance (in a fairer, more democratic form and help the planet heal from the immense damage wreaked upon it).

Hengsha in Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Origins and Influences
The city of Midgar first appeared in the iconic, classic video game Final Fantasy VII (1997). During the writing and planning of the game, the team at Squaresoft briefly considered setting the game in the real world, with New York City being the main city. This was a significant shift from the previous six games, which were each set in a new, original fantasy world. Ultimately, the team decided to continue in this vein and created a new planet, Gaia, for the game, although some of the original ideas for a New York game did resurface in Parasite Eve.

However, the team did like the idea of starting the game in a large metropolis, not dissimilar to modern-day cities. This would continue upping the technological level of the series (which had previously moved from a traditional, medieval setting to steampunk) and give fans something new to experience. As the first game designed for the original PlayStation, it had a much more ambitious design than the previous games, with lots of complex, dazzling CGI cut scenes.

Art director Yuusuke Naora was given the task of design Midgar and early on moved it away from the New York concept. He hit on the idea of making the city look like a “pizza” early on and this went down well with the rest of the creative team. Nods to this inspiration can be found throughout the game, with Mayor “Domino” and his deputy Hart (Hut) being named after pizza chains.

Final Fantasy VII was an enormous success on its first release, selling millions of copies. Midgar was the main setting for the entire first quarter or so of the game, with several return visits later on. This made Midgar a highly iconic location. Originally, Midgar was destroyed at the end of the game and this is seemingly confirmed by a cut scene showing the city completely in ruins and given back over to nature. The prequel games Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII (2004) and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (2007) are both partially set in Midgar before the events of FF7 itself, whilst the sequel film Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children (2005) and action game Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII (2006) both show the city recovering from the events of FF7 and inhabited once more.

Some fans interpret this to mean that Advent Children and Dirge of Cerberus take place before the final abandonment of Midgar (hence the last FF7 cut scene); others suggest that the ending of FF7 itself has simply been retconned out of existence.

Although these are the only canonical appearances of Midgar, various other games feature “cameos” from the city, such as the FF7-themed battle arenas in the various Super Smash Bros. games.

In 2018 or (more likely) 2019, Midgar will return in Final Fantasy VII Remake, an ambitious, modern remake of the original game with all-new graphics, gameplay and technology.

Midgar is important as a fantasy city that eschews many traditional fantasy elements altogether, instead appearing primarily as a modern city of skyscrapers and towers (albeit suspended in the air above more traditional, medieval fantasy structures), with characters driving cars, taking trains and riding bikes into battle. This moves on even from “steampunk” into a more contemporary form of fantasy, little-explored by fantasy novelists. Square would go on to explore this theme of “contemporary fantasy” even further in Final Fantasy XIII and XV.

In terms of cities most directly influenced by Midgar, the most obvious is Hengsha in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. In this game – created by Western studio Eidos Montreal but published by Squaresoft’s successor company, Square Enix – the Chinese have built an entire utopian sky city above Hengsha Island (just off the coast around Shanghai), suspended over the city below by immense towers. The undercity has become a place of crime, squalor and corruption, whilst the city above is far more beautiful and seemingly perfect.

Midgar is an idea ahead of its time, a city of literal and geographic divisions and levels which reflect the ideological and political divisions riven through its society and through the story. It remains, twenty years on, one of the most iconic video game fantasy cities ever created.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods, which will also get you exclusive content weeks before it goes live on my blogs. The Cities of Fantasy series is debuting on my Patreon feed and you can read it there one month before being published on the Wertzone.

FINAL FANTASY IX released on PC

Square Enix have released Final Fantasy IX on PC today. This is the first time that the game - one of the most critically-acclaimed in the series - has been made available on the platform: it was first released on the original PlayStation sixteen years ago. The PC version is a port of the mobile version, but with localisation improvements for mouse and keyboard controls and some higher-res backgrounds and animated cut scenes.

Square Enix recently brought Final Fantasy XIII, XIII-2 and Lightning Returns to PC, along with new versions of Final Fantasy VII and VIII (previously released on the platform in the late 1990s). According to information in the Steam database, they are also working on PC ports of Final Fantasy X and X-II for release in the next year or two, and it is heavily rumoured that Final Fantasy XV, due for release on PS4 and X-Box One this autumn, will be released on PC as well. Fans are clamouring for other games to be brought to the platform, most notably the much-loved Final Fantasy Tactics, but this does not appear to be on the horizon at the moment.

FINAL FANTASY IX announced for PC

No, you're not reading that wrong. Square Enix have confirmed that Final Fantasy IX will be released on PC, smartphones and tablets early in 2016.

Originally released in 2000 on the original PlayStation, Final Fantasy IX initially had a muted reception. However, as time passed and the game was reappraised it found a new level of popularity for its story, setting and characters. In modern "Best of the Series" lists, Final Fantasy IX regularly swaps places with VI and VII as the best-regarded game in the entire series.

The new version of the game will feature somewhat sharper graphics and a revamped control interface. No release date has been set, given that Square don't usually announce these things too far in advance I'd be surprised if it was any later than the spring.

ETA: NeoGaf has a thread here showcasing some of the original concept art for FFIX and some of the original high-resolution renders of the backgrounds before they were downgraded for the PS1 version of the game. Well worth a look.

FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE becomes a trilogy because of money

Square Enix have announced that Final Fantasy VII Remake has been split into multiple episodes (probably three) because it needs to make more money.

Players of the original game will remember that it came on three CD-ROMs on its original release on the first PlayStation in 1997, making for a then-astonishingly huge game given its graphical prowess. However, Final Fantasy VII was also a rather modestly-sized game in overall terms by modern standards. I beat the game in 32 hours on my first playthrough (not doing all the sidequests or grinding for chocobos) and 37 on my second (doing all of the sidequests and a bit of grinding). Most of my friends finished it in around 40 hours or so, which also seems to be the generally-accepted length of the game. For comparison's sake, a complete playthrough of the two-and-a-half BioWare Baldur's Gate games could take 200 hours when all sidequests and faction-specific missions were taken into account. The likes of Skyrim and Fallout 4 have well north of 100 hours of content apiece. Even the very linear and relatively modest Dragon Age II has a length of around 25 hours.

Trying to justify the split, Square have pointed out the fact that the original game had a lot of unique art. Transforming that into original 3D graphics for each location, with limitations on how much assets can be re-used as the game moves from urban to desert to tropical to jungle to arctic environments. This, to be fair, is a reasonable point. 3D games get away with their sizes by cleverly recycling content. Older 2D games (Final Fantasy VII had 3D characters moving over pre-painted 2D backdrops) could have unique art and assets in every location as the backdrops were simple paintings.

To give more bang for players' buck, Square have confirmed that each chunk of the game will be expanded, with new story material, side-quests, perspectives and other elements added. They pointed out that Midgar will now be a large, open-world hub rather than a series of distinct, linear sections, giving you more freedom to move around. Presumably other parts of the game will get the same treatment.

No release schedule for Final Fantasy VII Remake has been set, but one piece of good news about the split is that it means we might get the start of the game sooner. Square would be silly not to be aiming for the game's 20th anniversary in 2017 for the release of the first part.

FINAL FANTASY VII remake gameplay trailer unveiled

Sony and Square Enix have released a new trailer for their upcoming remake of Final Fantasy VII, the classic 1997 CRPG that achieved a major breakthrough in boosting the popularity of Japanese RPGs worldwide.

The trailer features both gameplay and cut scenes, most of them set in the opening part of the game set in the city of Midgar. The trailer confirms that Steve Burton will be returning from Advent Children and Kingdom Hearts to voice Cloud Strife, whilst Beau Billingslea returns from Advent Children to voice Barrett. There's some interesting art direction with Barrett now resembling Blade from the, er, Blade movies rather than original inspiration of Mr. T from The A-Team, and Cloud is notably less buff than he is in Advent Children.

As far as gameplay is concerned, the game now uses an all-3D engine rather than the painted backdrops of the original, the music appears to remixed and updated from the original score and the combat options for battles (either attacking with a weapon, summoning a monster, using materia or an item) seems to be the same. Slightly more controversially (knowing the internet), the game will use a time/phase-based combat system based on the Kingdom Hearts games rather than the turn-based system from the original Final Fantasy VII.

No release date has been given for the game, although the original fan hope - to get the game out FF7's 20th anniversary in January 2017 - may have proven optimistic.

DEUS EX: MANKIND DIVIDED officially announced

Eidos and Square have announced the existence of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (formerly rumoured as Deus Ex Universe). This is the official sequel to 2011's superb Deus Ex: Human Revolution. They've put together a pretty snazzy trailer for it:

Mankind Divided takes place in 2029, two years after the events of Human Revolution. That game revolved around the growing schism between augmented humans - cyborgs and people with artificial body parts - and normal humans. The end of Human Revolution, which saw millions of augmented people killed or driven insane, has sparked this schism into open conflict. Security agent Adam Jensen, the augmented human who pretty much saved the human race in the original game, is once again called upon to help resolve the growing crisis.

Like its forebear, the new game is expected to allow you to control and develop Jensen's character as he resolves missions through means stealthy, technical, violent or some combination of the approaches (the trailer suggests homicidal ultraviolence will still be available as an option). Expect more between-mission angst and tactical deployment of built-in mirror shades at moments of maximum dramatic impact.

The spiel:

DEUS EX: MANKIND DIVIDED takes place in 2029, two years after the events of HUMAN REVOLUTION and the infamous ‘Aug Incident’ in Panchaea that resulted in the death of millions at the hands of those who had installed augmentations. This event has created a huge divide between those who have augmentations, and those who do not. Amongst this emotional turmoil are various factions looking to manipulate the public by twisting public opinion of augmentation to further their own agenda and hide the truth of what really happened.

As the social and political chaos reaches boiling point, super-augmented anti-terrorist agent Adam Jensen re-enters the fray. Empowered by brand new augmentations that bolster his formidable, strategic arsenal, Jensen will visit multiple new locations to uncover the truths that are hidden by a cloak of new conspiracies. With more choice at the player’s disposal than ever before, DEUS EX: MANKIND DIVIDED is the ultimate DEUS EX experience.

Adam Jensen may not have asked for this. But Adam Whitehead certainly has. The game is expected in late 2015 (but I wouldn't be surprised to see a slip into 2016).