Gaming

Tifa’s Tits and The Cynicism of Final Fantasy VII: Remake

I have been looking for some games to play recently, and one title I had shortlisted was Final Fantasy VII: Remake (2020), which had been long-awaited by fans of the original PlayStation RPG Final Fantasy VII (1997). That title was probably the first triple-A video game and left quite a mark on the history of gaming, so much so that it is popular even after decades on the market, albeit this surely has more to do with nostalgia than the merits of the game. For anyone who not grew up with PlayStation-level graphics, it would be quite difficult to play such games nowadays.

The remake of Final Fantasy VII looks great, and Square-Enix also did a good job marketing the game. Yet, I found the marketing to have been quite deceptive, based on watching parts of a playthrough. To hook you, the game is front-loaded with a great 45-minute segment that recreates the original game, leading up to the first boss fight, but with vastly improved graphics and much more action-based gameplay. I think this was also the content of the demo version of this game. Once this segment is done, though, the game drops off a cliff in terms of quality as you get to do fetch quests for a few hours, and to add insult to injury the game puts you into some of the dullest environments imaginable, some kind of slum where everything is brown.

In this scene, Tifa breaks the fourth wall and reminds the player to keep looking at her tits.

I hopefully don’t spoil anything by adding that FFVII: Remake only contains a fraction of the story of the original release. It is also a much longer game, which implies that there is a lot of padding in this title. Square-Enix must have been quite aware of this, so they pair you up with big-boobed Tifa for hours. I find this utterly appalling. The game shoves tits in your face so that you keep going through some of the laziest content out there.

Cloud Strife’s character model has been programmed to always stare at Tifa’s tits.

Probably those hours upon hours of boring filler content are more interesting if you play them yourself but quite often you can tell from video footage if an action-based video game is fun to play. Probably you would agree that, for instance, Devil May Cry 5 looks like a game worth checking out if you were not already familiar with it. Granted, this is not a perfect approach but I normally enjoy playing a game I enjoyed watching footage of and if something looks like a chore to play it normally is.

Tifa’s battle armor is really effective. She is wearing a sports bra that offers +100 in defense.

FFVII: Remake may very well be a decent enough game overall, but the hours of early filler content in it are not interesting to watch at all. I would not at all be surprised if some suits at Square-Enix decided that this title needs to be 30 or 40 hours long, i.e. about as long as the original, while only covering 1/3 of the original’s story so that they can milk the franchise with sequels. This led to the problem of squeezing all this filler content into the game. Insipid filler content on its own would not sit well with fans, so the suits decided to distract you with boobs. Tifa indeed livens up the game, but even with her featuring so prominently in the game all the filler content is still yawn-inducing. I do not even want to imagine how boring these parts would be without her.

I am not at all against looking at attractive women in videogames but I value them a lot more when they are put in games that are actually fun to play. An ugly female lead can reduce the appeal of a game by a lot, as illustrated by the Horizon franchise, the second and third game of the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy, or Returnal, to name a few. Supposedly, those are all decent enough games, but they would have been better with more attractive female characters. In contrast, using attractive females to make a seemingly mediocre game look more appealing is quite cynical. This is the realm of Japanese B-tier RPGs and action games, but should not be accepted in any big game release.

6 thoughts on “Tifa’s Tits and The Cynicism of Final Fantasy VII: Remake

  1. I only got till the part where you help Jesse (One great thing I can say about the game thus far is expanding on the characters. In the original game,you don’t really see enough of Bigs,Wedge,and Jesse to really end up caring about them).

    My impression given my limited experience is good,but the fetch quests can definitely go. That said,other than the first 5 or so of them,are they not optional? Of course,its still very much valid criticism to point out these kinds of fluff content,but its not as egregious if most of them are actually not required other than achieving 100% completion.

    Regarding 100% completion,I cared a lot about this when I was a kid,but stopped pursuing this in game as I got older when I realized my time was much better spent just having fun till the end of the story then moving on.

    1. I watched a few hours of a playthrough of FFVII: Remake in the background and it was surprising how little of my attention it got after the first roughly 45 minutes. Perhaps some of the fetch quests in it were superfluous but this does not change my impression that there is a significant dip in quality early on. Unfortunately, this is getting more and more common. I think it was pioneered by God of War on the PS2 and nowadays you can almost expect that any game you play will show you its best content in the first few hours.

  2. I didn’t realize Cloud was programmed to stare at Tifa’s bazonkers. Everything I’ve seen from this game seems that it is very filler-filled, but that the main story beats are generally very well done. In many instances, they were done better. I think this shows a major fault in modern game design in that developers create these biomes and they take a lot of time to detail and flesh out. We’re seeing that with the newest Zelda sequel where they basically just took the base map and redesigned it. It would just be too time consuming to create the entire FFVII landscape in one go at this graphical level (probably).

    1. Btw, watching the Midgar Slums footage is kind of comical because all the main cast are anime’d out, whereas most of the NPCs walking around just make the city look like your typical mulit-cultural shit hole.

    2. I hope that AI will allow developers to speed up the world creation progress. The map size of BotW is quite incredible, taking years of effort. Speaking of FF VII, the original had static pre-rendered images whereas the remake attempts to turn them into fully fleshed out 3D worlds. This is incomparably more difficult. There is a connection to unlockable costumes as well. In the past, you could unlock alternative colors or costumes whereas today you often have to pay for them. However, the effort to create a detailed 3D costume is a lot higher than just recoloring pixels of a sprite. I still think that it is a dick move to charge 8 bucks for a custome as this is a bit much compared to the price of the game but I can also understand that developers cannot offer a lot of alternative costumes for free.

      1. I was taking a nature walk and thinking about this topic a bit just recently. During the Sakaguchi era of FF games things were so much simpler. Everything was low poly, text bubbles, pre-rendered environments, and one Japanese guy on a synthesizer. Nowadays you have to hire a cast to capture character speech and hopefully it doesn’t suck, painstakingly design your environments, tack on an orchestra and do motion capture as well as create all these elaborate cinematic scenes. The costs for Triple A game design are more expensive and riskier than ever, and yet the price of a game had barely gone up in comparison to inflations and production costs. Hopefully you’re right and AI can help alleviate some of these expenses and time sinks, otherwise 9/10 games will just continue to be either mediocre or downright awful.

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