Please don't remake Final Fantasy VII! You might ruin it.

Love Final Fantasy VII? If you’re a gamer of a certain age then of course you do. You probably want to see it remade as well right? Well it’d be nice, but it wouldn’t be FFVII if it was.

I finished FFVII for about the fifth time a few months ago and came out of it with the absolute conviction that it is perfect exactly as it is. For all its cube shaped hands, its midi music and curious little translation gaffes, I couldn’t see it being any better if it was remade.

Would seeing it with flashy HD graphics actually make the same impact as it did all those years ago when Cloud stepped off the train and blew up the reactor with a foul mouthed dude called Barrett? Probably not. If it was released like that today, it would just be an antique with some admittedly really nice graphics.

Besides, can anybody remember when a remake of anything was actually better than the original? Something that stood on its own merit, bringing new ideas and a competent reimagining in its own right. Something that made you look at the original in a new way and made you appreciate it slightly more for what it was, when what the original did was so far ahead of its time that it warranted a fresh attempt with technology that could keep up.  How about if we narrow that down to just games? Sure, it might run in 1080p and have smoother textures, but was the game actually better than the original? I can think of one. Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, and that was mainly down to the huge step up in power between the PS1 and the Gamecube. Okay, the step between a PS1 and a PS3 is as wide as the English channel, but Final Fantasy doesn’t need first person aiming and lip syncing to make it any better.

Take a look at today’s remakes. Is Shadow of the Colossus HD actually any better than the PS2 version? No, but it looks how your rose tinted spectacles make you remember it. How about the impact it made? Again, back when it was released, Colossus made a huge splash. It didn’t sell well, and shame on you if you didn’t buy it first time round, but the sense of scale and desolation of it just blew people away at the time. Fast forward to today, and nobody really bats an eyelid at any of that. It’s been seen before. The same goes for most remakes of last gen games. A lick of HD paint doesn’t cover up the fact that they are effectively still exactly the same game as what they were when they were first released.

Final Fantasy VII is its own thing. Everything about it adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts. Change any part and it wouldn’t be FFVII anymore. Could you imagine what would happen if Square tried bringing it up to date? Would you like to see the battle system changed? What about the overall look? What if they decided certain parts of the game didn’t need to be there and cut them? What if hardware limitations meant that they had to run it through an FFXIII style tunnel? Worse still, what if they replaced FFVII Cloud, who may not have been the perkiest of guys but was at least relatable, with the silent, sullen non character he became in Advent Children and Kingdom Hearts?

The final nail in the coffin would be voice acting. Square voice acting ranges from mostly excellent (Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy X) to godawful (Vanille and Hope in Final Fantasy XIII). I have a genuine fear that any voices added to FFVII would degenerate into the anime clichés that plagued the voice work of FFXIII. Yuffie would clearly be voiced in the same terribly annoying style of FFXIII’s Vanille. This logic states that as the sorta-kinda comic relief, Barret, like FFXIII’s Sazh will inadvertently receive an amazing actor and become the one redeeming feature of the whole sorry affair. FFVII is gaming’s Metropolis. It’s silent and the silence is integral to the experience. You read the script and this wonderful thing known as imagination lets you hear the characters, despite the lack of voice. Nobody would dare desecrate a work like Metropolis, why do the same to Final Fantasy VII?

These things happen when something is remade and the people making it decide to bring it into line with what they think modern audiences expect. We only have to look at the movie world to see this. Whilst there are undoubtedly some good movie remakes out there, there is a whole litany of poor ones. From pointless exercises like the Italian Job, Get Carter, Poseidon, and any American version of a J-horror flick to just plain bad ones like The Pink Panther, and Clash of the Titans. And Hollywood just keeps going with them. Look at the forthcoming remakes of Robocop and Starship Troopers. Remakes show laziness and a dearth of creative imagination at the studio that is making them. Two accusations I’d rather not see levelled at Square-Enix, one of my favourite developers.

Besides, modern audiences are the people who buy the yearly Call of Battlefield and hurl abuse at each other over multiplayer through teh interwebz. Do you really want FFVII to be remade to satisfy the tastes of that lot? I didn’t think you would. Luckily it was recently documented by IGN that Square CEO Yoichi Wada has said that there won’t be a remake until they make a game that “exceeds the quality” of FFVII.

Good luck there guys.

Final Fantasy is Oldskool. It should remain that way. And if someone who comes to it today can’t appreciate the merits of it just because it’s old, well screw them. It’s their loss. One day, they’ll see the light.