The Weird Reason I Loved Final Fantasy VII Remake
[VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]
The credits are rolling on Final fantasy 7 remake and I loved it… But maybe for reasons you don’t expect
I avoided playing Final Fantasy VII Remake for a long time. But not because of some unhealthy affinity for the original. I believe change is almost always good. Loving something isn’t a reason to keep that something from evolving into something else. That’s basically Munchhausen syndrome by proxy. You know, that mental condition whereby a healthy person is tricked by a crazy person into feeling unhealthy. By loving the original Final Fantasy VII to the exclusion of Final Fantasy VII Remake you’re defining something so specifically that it depends on you in order to be relevant. That’s a selfish outlook.
Who am I angry with here? Why did I make up a protagonist to argue with in this video? I’m sorry everyone. That was weird.
No, I avoided playing Final Fantasy VII Remake because I played the demo and I found that experience quite difficult. I thought well if just the demo is this painful the rest of the game must be strapped to a chair with a car battery clamped to its nipples. But as it turns out, I must have been sick or something when I played that demo, because the full game is actually quite fair and not always difficult.
It’s strange. I think at the time I was playing the demo I knew I wasn’t sick I mean, I didn’t think I was sick, but the game kept telling me that I wasn’t strong enough to succeed, it kept punishing me for moving, It kept insisting that I was weak and I shouldn’t try so hard and, oh my god, the demo was Munchhausen syndrome by proxy-ing me! I was making up an antagonist for this video but there was a real one this entire time.
But curiosity eventually took over and I gave the full game a chance, and I fell in love. I was hooked from the very beginning. The very beginning. In fact, if you charted the path of my love on a map you’d start with the map and the way it charts my path.
See this footpath trail on the mini-map? That simple, innocuous inclusion does so many helpful things simultaneously. It confirms my movement. It affirms my direction. It shows me where I’ve been. And It shows me where I haven’t been. In an environment as detailed and as craggy as Midgar, time could easily be wasted backtracking through already-explored nooks and crannies, but our friendly persistent path helps keep us moving forward. This simple path keeps us from switching back on ourselves, keeps us from getting caught up in the environment, which is especially important considering the in-world design of the slums is such that there’s meant to be no conscious architectural design philosophy. The player is literally navigating a dump site, where design is ignored in favor of convenience. The mini-map path keeps us focused on pushing forward, much like, perhaps an ex-soldier like our main playable character Cloud might act. That’s right, our bond with our main playable character is strengthened, even if subconsciously, through a simple navigational design choice, and with that strengthened bond the player’s trust in the game’s design direction increases. I’ll talk more about trust in a bit.
The designers could have resorted to the standard in-game mini-map, one with just a central retical to connote the player’s position, but they didn’t. They recognized something that could waste the player’s time, and therefore diminish trust, and they addressed it.
But what I really love about this decision is that when it’s taken with other design decisions that serve that same anti-time-wasting end we start to have confidence in the game’s design direction. Simply put, when a game has a design point to make and is able to support that point across many different aspects of the game, the player is able to get comfortable with the game, the player is able to lower their guard a bit and just let the game happen. This magical moment of absolute trust from the player is what every game designer strives for and it can be quite difficult to accomplish, especially for games that have staff numbering in the hundreds. It takes strong organization and trust within a giant development team to create a product that can earn this level of trust from the player.
That persistent mini-map path plus the ever-forward story momentum plus the lack of grinding opportunities plus the dedicated materia switch button, design choices like these all come together to build trust so that when I, as the player, start to question the game’s pacing I do so only briefly because I know I’m in good hands, I know the game cares about removing barriers, so when a barrier does exist I trust that it’s for a reason. And the real magic here is that this trust doesn’t have to happen consciously. When the player doesn’t experience friction, when the player isn’t having difficulties with the menu options, when the player isn’t thinking about the game’s problems, that’s when trust grows.
You may have noticed earlier I said that this game lacks grinding opportunities. I shouldn’t gloss over that. A JRPG that doesn’t really want you to grind for experience. It’s weird. I wouldn’t have been skeptical if you’d have tried to sell me on it before I played the game, but it works. The game is so finally balanced that grinding isn’t necessary. Again, this game is about forward momentum.. And for a JRPG to try to sell the player on action-driven progress over careful character building the game must earn the player’s trust and that trust, for me, was seeded with this simple persistent path innocuously placed into the mini-map. Thanks to the hero who made that design decision. I’m going to guess…Takeshi Mouri (2:01)
Thank you for reading. Let me know in the comments below if you thought this hard about the persistent path in the mini-map. Also, let me know if you think I’m crazy. That way I can just claim that I’m being Munchhausen syndrome by proxy-ed again.
Music credits
- Bossa Antigua by Kevin MacLeod, Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3454-bossa-antigua, License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Pump by Kevin MacLeod, Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4252-pump, License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
