Before this year’s E3, I doubted Square Enix’s ability to actually make good on its promises for Final Fantasy 7 Remake. The trailers seemed too polished, too beautiful to be something a studio could actually deliver; they promised an impossible dream, not a video game.
I was wrong. What I’ve seen and played of Final Fantasy 7 points to a remarkable design achievement; one that caters to long-term fans while ensuring that faithfulness doesn’t get in the way of quality or playability.
As you’ve likely seen from the highly polished footage released thus far, Final Fantasy 7 Remake has a hybrid combat system – one that swaps frequently and fluidly between typical action game sword attacks, all delivered in real time, with the ATB system that will be familiar to any franchise veteran. While it’s hard to make combat encounters flow as smoothly as those shown on the livestream, swapping between combat modes and playable characters is nonetheless both tactically rewarding and surprisingly intuitive.
7 Things We Love About Final Fantasy 7 Remake – HANDS ON WITH FINAL FANTASY REMAKE GAMEPLAY Watch on YouTube
Indeed, the hybrid system establishes a cadence that wasn’t in the original game as you swap between its two modes, and is was absolutely the star of the playable demo. For one thing, it’s easy to keep track of – personally I’ve always found Final Fantasy games a little fiddly and I’ve struggled to really get the knack of knowing when to get certain characters to perform certain actions. With the remake, however, your job is very simple from moment to moment; if you aren’t committing an ATB charge to an ability, spell or item, you’re hacking and slashing which, effectively, moderates the amount of time you need to spend thinking tactically.