The Problem with FF7R as an Adaptation

Tl;dr: The problem with the FF7R trilogy is not that it is unfaithful, but that it cannot be enjoyed as a standalone product.

Soo this is not exactly a girl gamer™ topic, but I’m posting this here because I don’t wanna deal with FF7 fanboys, period.

Hi! You may remember me from my post on a Material Girls podcast episode on Star Wars (https://www.reddit.com/r/GirlGamers/comments/1d02602/this_was_really_eyeopening/). Today, I’m back to talk about another Material Girls podcast episode, this time on the HBO adaptation of The Last of Us, but my focus is on the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy.

I am going to try to avoid all spoilers about specific story events because I want people who have never played the games before to be able to read this. I also encourage any commenters who want to discuss spoilery stuff to use spoiler tags.

The gist of the Material Girls podcast episode (https://open.spotify.com/episode/7zA5u0sYSH6txJyrrHb2w1?si=c8732ced413e4bcc) is that they use adaptation theory to explain what makes the Last of Us television series a good adaptation. Good adaptations should be standalone products that anyone who hasn’t experienced the original work can still enjoy, but they should also include intertextual references to the original work that offer anyone who has an elevated experience.

Listening to the episode helped me make sense of a lot of my complicated feelings about the FF7R trilogy, or at least what has been released of it so far. Now, I want to preface my discussion by saying that I am a longtime fan of Final Fantasy. I’ve played the original FF7 and Crisis Core, and I’ve also watched Advent Children as a child/teenager. I also personally find FF7 Rebirth an absolutely phenomenal game in terms of the sheer time, effort, and quality that has gone into it.

I think an “unfaithful” adaptation can still make for an amazing piece of work (think of feminist adaptations of misogynistic stuff, for instance). My issue has nothing to do with the ways in which the FF7R trilogy has been “unfaithful.” Rather, it’s the fact that FF7 Remake advertised itself as an adaptation when it cannot truly be enjoyed as a standalone product.

Don’t get me wrong, you can still enjoy the first 90% of FF7 Remake without knowing anything about the original FF7. However, the significance of the last 10% of the game would be completely lost on you. It’s not even that you’re missing an additional layer of meaning: you simply won’t have any idea what is going on. In fact, if you’ve played the original FF7 but haven’t played Crisis Core, the last bit will also confuse you. You really need to have played BOTH games to be able to appreciate FF7 Remake.

Furthermore, if you’re not already a fan of FF7 who is playing the game to see the plot details you already know and love fleshed out even more, the pacing of FF7 Remake is genuinely horrendous. Compare the plot points of FF7 Remake to all the twists and turns and story beats of a game that tells a full story in 40 hours, like Xenoblade Chronicles. It feels like you’re just spending a whole lot of time for nothing to happen.

FF7 Rebirth is a curious case. It is still very much advertised as an adaptation, but there is enough general knowledge about the game that most people know you shouldn’t play it without already having played FF7 and Crisis Core, even if that is not part of the advertising.

The pacing is also A LOT better than FF7 Remake. The extra story content feels weighty and massive for character development. But it doesn’t change the fact that FF7 simply doesn’t have enough plot to be stretched across three games without running into serious pacing issues. The pacing of FF7 Rebirth is better, but still bad for anyone who doesn’t already love FF7.

But why does it matter if the FF7R trilogy doesn’t function as a standalone product, even if it was advertised that way? Wasn’t FF7 such a video-game-world-shaping phenomenon that if there’s an adaptation that deserves to demand that players have played the original, FF7 would be it?

Well, some gamers may be too young to have experienced FF7. Some may not have played video games back then. Playing FF7 now is a completely different story. The graphics were cutting-edge at the time, but they’ve aged very poorly compared to cartoon-based video games. Even if you enjoy the gameplay of FF7R, nothing about it means you’ll enjoy the turn-based combat of the original FF7.

We live in a different time when expectations and standards are higher, and it may simply be too slow and grindy to be enjoyable. Expecting people to have played the original (and invalidating their views if they haven’t) is a form of gatekeeping that almost always has classist, sexist, and/or racist connotations.

Furthermore, people were expecting FF7 Remake to introduce FF7 to gamers who have never played the original before. Because it was advertised as an adaptation, not a sequel. The resources dedicated to the FF7 Remake trilogy mean there has not been another FF7 adaptation that can function as a standalone product.

For a while, I thought Ever Crisis might be it, but the fact that they’re releasing chapters for FF7, Crisis Core, and The First Soldier simultaneously means you’re going to be completely spoiled/confused unless you’ve already played FF7 as well.

I still genuinely do think the FF7 Remake trilogy is doing something truly unique and magical by straddling the boundaries of adaptation and sequel. As an FF7 fan, it hits spots in me that I never even knew existed. I don’t know if another video game has done this before.

But it’s still a big problem for the game as an adaptation that it cannot function as a standalone product.

I don’t know. It may have been better for Square Enix to release the entirety of FF7 and Crisis Core in Ever Crisis first.