The original Final Fantasy 7 is great… until it leaves Midgar. The rest of the game is good, but nothing can live up to those opening hours in the dystopian city. It's hard to live up to, even now. That cyberpunk aesthetic is evocative in a way that games could only be when they were made with individual tableaus in mind, rather than making spaces that needed to be fully explorable with a 3D camera.
Final Fantasy 7 quickly moves on to a series of environments that aren’t nearly as compelling. Fort Condor, Kalm, Junon — I like these places, by and large, but none of them are as singular as Midgar. Worse, you travel between them on a flat, boring world map.
That's the beauty of Final Fantasy 7 Remake: it's all Midgar, all the time. The game came out in 2020 so it swaps out the fixed camera in favor of third-person exploration, and loses a bit of the mystery and wonder of the original as a result. But it makes up for that by being 30-plus hours focused exclusively on Final Fantasy 7's best location. That means that, unlike in the original, I'm into Remake's aesthetic from beginning to end. There are moments that are less interesting — sometimes you’re running through identical Shinra corridors for a little too long — but seeing the plate hovering over Sector 7, or gliding down after an adventure topside with your pals… there’s nothing better.
I love the futuristic grime of Midgar, but as the experiences of playing Final Fantasy 16 and watching the trailer for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth are reminding me, that vision of the Mako-fueled future is one tiny splinter of what Final Fantasy can be. Final Fantasy 1-6 and 8-16 aren’t cyberpunk games, and the series rarely repeats itself — the last mainline game was a roadtrip across an Americana-tinged fantasy world, after all — so I don't expect another cyberpunk FF to come along at any point in the future. I enjoy other Final Fantasy games that I’ve played, but that’s one downside of the series being, effectively, an anthology with a few bits of connective tissue.
If you like Final Fantasy 16 because it’s a lot like Game of Thrones, that's great. But that’sno guarantee that you'll like any other Final Fantasy games. You can only hope that 16 is extremely successful, so that Square Enix sees enough money on the table to do sequels or spin-offs. When 17 arrives, whatever it is, it won't be anything like this.
Even then, as a Final Fantasy 7 fan, I already got the best, most thorough adaptation of the best part of the game. There's still a good chance I'll like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. I'm invested in the series' alternate take on the events of FF7, and I love the way these characters are portrayed in this new version. But, unless Final Fantasy Rebirth has some unexpected detours back to Midgar, it just won't reach the same heights. It can't. The Plate fell, after all.