XBOX REVIEW | Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade

Well, it took six years, but we finally have Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade on Xbox! I’ve first played it on PS4 at release and still have fond memories of taking the full week off to enjoy my experience to the fullest.

The dream of having the full Final Fantasy series available on a single console, lives on! I just hope we don’t have to wait another eternity for FF7 Rebirth to land on Xbox.

Alongside the Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2 ports, we also get a few brand new upgrades that make it easier to dive into the game, especially if you’ve already beaten it before. And those very same options make it a lot more accessible as well. But You’ll hear more about them if you scroll down!

Things I liked!

• New Accessibility options | Let’s start with the newest addition: When you first launch the game you now have the option to begin with a “Head Start” which puts you at lvl 45 from the very beginning, making it so every fight is a cakewalk. Not an option you should pick if you want any kind of challenge, but if you’ve played FF7R before, this is a welcome timesaver to simply focus on reliving the story. Added to this, you also have settings that multiply your experience points, money earned, damage dealt and received. If you want to you can even set it so your Limit bar is always full and every damage deals 9999. It’s basically the game with Gameshark cheat codes activated (hands up if you were a kid in the 90s and know what that is)

• Visually Gorgeous | The in-game graphics are jaw-dropping and unless my eyes deceive me, it’s even sharper than when I played the Steam version at release. This is one of the most beautifully made games out there and it runs amazing.

• An amazing cast of characters | I can not overstate how amazingly cast all character and their voice actors are. All important characters are fully voiced and their English voices deliver a PERFECT job, with special mention going out to Aerith’s performance. I was always a bigger fan of Tifa, but Briana White delivers every line with such finesse and added charisma that the famous flower girl has conquered a place in my heart.

• The writing is actually funny | Rarely will a game’s writing genuinely make me laugh out loud. A chuckle or a powerful exhale through the nose at a witty remark, sure. But there were times in FF7R that I was glad I wasn’t drinking, as I’d have sprayed my screen in laughter. “Local Florist!”

• Their time to shine | It’s not just the main cast that gets a lot of attention, characters like Biggs & Wedge, but especially Jessie really get their time to shine and feel much deeper than in the original. There is even a chapter dedicated to a side-mission you undertake with them and you see them all have a nice family dinner at Jessie’s parents’ place, with her sick father highlighting just how bad Mako, the life energy the evil company Shinra has been extracting from the planet, can be for the health of everyone that handles it. There is a lot of added detail here that answers lore questions people may have after playing the original and its spin-offs, and I’m here for it!

• The combat is perfect | It may be hard to believe this statement but Square Enix really did nail the combat in FF7R. Ever since FFXIII they’ve moved towards a more action-oriented type of gameplay for the mainline Final Fantasy titles, with FFXV already making great strides but the way the characters interact with each other here is simply amazing. Tifa will launch herself off of Cloud’s sword, or she’ll duck below a swing of his Buster Sword seconds before landing a killer uppercut herself. Each character plays differently and brings their own strengths to the table. And if that wasn’t enough: turn-based purists can even play a mode where the game pauses for your every decision, so you can really make tactical decisions every second of the fight. This is JRPG perfection, and I’ll hear no one claim any different!

• Lots to do | There are a ton of sidequests in FF7R that will keep you busy and make you explore the areas in more detail. You can really tell that Midgar has been expanded upon and it never felt as vast in the original. The main side activities mostly feel like filler, but there are also plenty of mini-games that will challenge you in a different manner, like hitting boxes in a timed run, squatting or playing a game of darts at the bar. My favourite moment was the dancing minigame at the Honeybee Inn, with cloud in a girly dress and truly owning that magical moment! Now on Xbox, I’m even more motivated to go for 100% because it’s finally on a platform where I care about the Achievements.

• New Game + | You can replay the game or jump to a specific chapter to replay any content you might like. This is a feature I’d love to see in any long game, as it show respect for player time and makes it frictionless to relive your favourite moments.

• Boss Battles | Boss battles, in particular, will require a well-planned approach, with the fight against Airbuster even letting you take away augmentations from him in advance (you get to use keycards that can make him slower, stop him from using his Big Bomber attack or get items that will help you in battle). Each boss fight is a treat and I was surprised to discover that Hard Mode even gives them new abilities and modified attack patterns.

• The Soundtrack | This shouldn’t shock anyone, but the music is Freaking Fantastic. It builds upon the strong base of the original and reworks timeless classics into tracks that are more dynamic. While in boss battles, you may notice the soundtrack picking up in pace as the fight gets more intense or slowing down when you enter Tactical Mode and that must have been quite a work of labour to achieve.

• The way you move | I want to talk about the fluid way you can move through the levels: obstacles you can overcome will be visible through an indication that you can hop over or crawl under debris, and even in crowded areas, Cloud will weave through the commoners not entirely unlike Ezio pioneered in the Assassin’s Creed titles. It makes getting around fun.

• Summons | Anyone who has played Final Fantasy 7 before knows that one of the most exciting things in the game was unlocking a new Summon. These deities cost a lot of MP to call forth but they have a devastating effect on the battlefield. The only issue with them was that they had long animations you had to sit through every time and that they kind of made regular magic irrelevant. (I know I had at least 2-3 summons equipped per party member near the end of my last playthrough) In FF7R, you can only assign one Summon per character and you’ll be happy to hear that they don’t take up a regular materia slot. You also don’t have to use MP. Instead, you’ll only be able to use them during harder battles. They join the fight and diss out some big elemental damage and you can use your ATB bars to activate their bigger attacks. When their time runs out, they’ll use their signature move like Shiva’s Diamond Dust or Ifrit’s Hellfire.

• Photomode | Intergrade added a photo mode to FF7R and while it’s a bit limited in option (no free camera control, but panning around your character and tied to their physical location in the environment) it does work well and can even be activated during cutscenes. This inclusion alone adds about 10 hours of game-time for me.

• The DLC is included | Good news for Yuffie fans: you get to play her DLC episode as well in this version, but sadly she’ll never join the main cast. This does offer a nice tease at what’s to come in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and even has one of the best minigames available in Fort Condor: a tile-based tactics game that fans of the original might remember and that has been wonderfully reimagined here. CLICK HERE if you want to see that content in more detail.

Mixed & disliked!

• Pre-rendered cutscenes | FF7R originally released on the PlayStation 4 in 2020, and it kind of shows the pre-rendered cutscenes were made for that platform specifically. If you view them upscaled on a 4K or bigger tv, you’ll notice blurry edges, artefacts in smoke/fog effects and other visual inconsistencies. This is even more obvious when you compare it to the super crisp in-game graphics. Back in the original PlayStation release days, the FMVs were the visual highlights of the game, it’s ironic that they are now the worst of the bunch.

• No Hard Mode at the start | Square Enix gives us a lot of options to make the game easier at the start, but Hard Mode still requires a full playthrough on Easy or Normal before it unlocks. I can foresee some fans being upset about this (but I’m not one of them as I rarely go for challenge in RPGs)

• NPCs | The non-important NPCs that populate the world are bland and their models are copy/pasted all over the game. I wouldn’t mind it as much, but I’ve had instances where I saw the exact same person 3 times in one screen and that really pulled me out of the immersion. I do like the new system of how you see their voice lines on the side of the screen, no need to directly talk to any of them and you’ll always know which ones are important to progress a side quest or the main story.

• No control of your party | FF7R is pretty linear and will always force you to use a specific party. While you have four different party members in the main game: Cloud, Aerith, Tifa & Barret. The game will decide who’s in your party for you. The only exception being the “VR” mode, which lets you fight against tough bosses.

• Linear experience | While I didn’t mind this in my first two runs through the game, the third time I’ve seen the detailed streets of midgar began to become pretty repetitive. Now with my 4th playthrough, I’m really faced with how A to Z the story really is. I still prefer Remake to Rebirth though, in the 2nd game they went overboard and had too many (forced) side-activities, making the game feel too stretched, whereas Remake has the perfect length for an RPG.

• Some UX choices | Having played through the game twice before, I liked the fact that you can press start and skip most cutscenes. Except for when you can’t and “skip cutscene” is replaced by “go to title screen”. When muscle memory kicks in and you find yourself losing progress because of that: not fun.

CONCLUSION

Score: 100/100

I rarely give a perfect score to a game, but Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade earns it with flying colours. This isn’t just a remake of a fan-favourite game, no, it’s a love letter to the original that expands on the lore and sets up an entirely new adventure, all while introducing one of the best JRPG combat systems I’ve ever played and with a PERFECT cast of characters.

When your ONLY complaint is that there isn’t more of it, then you’ve got a perfect title on your hands.