Oh, man. OH. MAN.

I know the game is a remake and the devs have had decades of modern game design experience to leverage… but, guys. I’m home. I haven’t been this giddy and excited since… I don’t even remember. Every single part of game so far is like finally finding someone who shares the same passion as you and catching up for hours. Walking around Sector 7 Slums and looking up (looking up!) just pulls the FF7 memories of my high school imagination straight out of my head and serves them right back in high definition.

And it really reinforces, to me, how groundbreaking FF7 originally was. For you see, FF7 was not my first Final Fantasy game – that was actually FF6. So this is not a “always remember your first love” situation. This instead is a recognition of how novel the pseudo-sci-fi setting was, the mind-blowing scale of Midgar, and that first time you leave the city and see it as just another town on the world map. Blew my fucking mind. That experience is right up there with first leaving the Vault in Fallout 3.

There are some other things I like. An extremely flirty Jessie. The random NPCs commenting on Cloud. The aftereffects of the reactor explosion. The extra cutscene on what really caused the reactor explosion. The well-stitched narrative in which I felt it difficult to stop playing. Not that I was going to stop playing until I reached Tifa for the first time. Tifa.

The one negative so far, and it’s kind of important: the combat system.

Basically I’m not quite sure what’s going on yet. Like obviously I’m reading the tutorial prompts and successfully navigating the fights. But it seems like I’m taking a lot of damage and I don’t know if that is expected, or if I’m supposed to not, or what. It’s “action gamey” but not in the same way as, say, Nier Automata. Controlling Barret feels even worse as none of his attacks feel particularly satisfying. Hold X to rapid-fire for some amount of time, or press Y to… speed up the charging of a special attack. But that attack can be stopped by random terrain if you aren’t careful.

Anyway, not going to let a little thing like a combat system interrupt my JRPG nostalgerbation. I am going to assume it gets better, or that I can change things around enough to make it so, or that it will not diminish the rest of the experience. Which would be quite the feat considering how much I am enjoying myself already just walking around.