Today Square Enix have shared the entire intro movie for the game and it’s a whopping five minutes that goes almost shot-for-shot with the original. It does have some new bits of its own added in, you know, to show that time has passed. Alright, first thing’s first, go ahead and watch it. It’s five minutes but I’ll wait. You deserve to sit through all that re-orchestrated music that Katharine gushed about in the throes of her Final Fantasy 7 remake hype. If you played the original, you’ll recognize a lot of the shots. Aerith Gainsborough and her basket of flowers are lurking in a dark alleyway in Midgar. It pulls back showing off the scope of the immense, circular city—cutting back and forth between the city and the arriving train where Cloud and co jump off. The new bit is mainly the first minute and a half showing the deserts outside the city and normal human life going on as it does around the wilting flora. Here’s the original intro, a much shorter two and a half minutes, to refresh your memory. It is neat to see the two back-to-back, highlighting how our expectations have changed over the years. What was made to look like a massive modern city in the original FF7 looks quaint now, but the remake has given us a new version that looks just as impressive to the modern eye as I imagine the original once did. It makes me wonder what a remake of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion’s intro would look like with today’s tech. Anyhow, there it be fresh off the press and whatnot. Final Fantasy 7 Remake will be exclusive to PlayStation until April of 2021, Square Enix confirmed earlier this month. They’ve yet to actually confirm that a PC release will follow on the heels of that exclusivity period, but you’d imagine they wouldn’t bother reiterating unless there were plans for some non-PS release after.
