One of the burning questions surrounding Final Fantasy 7 Remake 2 is whether or not it will feature a traditional world map. Co-director Naoki Hamaguchi told me in a recent interview that the team at Square Enix “want to challenge themselves” when it comes to recreating the original game’s world, but whether or not this will translate to a traditional world map remains to be seen.
I’ll welcome whatever the sequel ends up delivering, but part of me believes it will be stronger for abandoning the world map in favour of a more curated experience, one that still offers ample freedom but never resorts to hurling us onto an empty landmass with little purpose beyond linking up the dots. That’s what the original game did, but that was over twenty years ago, so Square Enix needs to take a long, hard look at how open world game design has evolved in the decades since then and decide whether or not Final Fantasy needs to occupy such a blueprint. I’m not sure it does, and the remake’s first chapter is proof of that.
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Final Fantasy 7 Remake is at its weakest when you aren’t on a linear path, and obvious attachments to the series’ modern identity begin to make themselves known. Upon completing the opening reactor mission, you’re thrown into the Sector 7 Slums and given a selection of mundane side quests to complete. While these are ultimately enjoyable because the combat system that defines them is downright excellent, the characters you interact with and the missions they have you embark upon are boring. They’re generic filler in service of an open world RPG experience that the game would be better off without. Watching my characters level up as I toy with materia and equipment is more than enough progression for me, having them engage with inconsequential side missions is just a blight on the pacing.
I don’t give a shit about this little girl and her selection of cats, and the last thing I want to do is revisit the junkyard and wipe out a bunch of cookie-cutter enemies. Introducing a sudden barrage of side quests so soon after the reactor section is jarring in itself, especially when there’s only a handful of hubs situated throughout the entire game that mirror Sector 7 and its cobbled together slums. Each of them is kinda dull, filled with quests I had no interest in attending to because they rid the world and its main characters of their intended mystique.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake struggled to make the secondary elements of its setting sing within the confines of Midgar, so expanding that to an entire continent feels like a recipe for disaster. The ideal compromise would be to take a similar approach to Final Fantasy 15, which provided the player with sprawling landmasses that helped connect each major city and plot development. You couldn’t turn back after a certain point, but that didn’t matter, you had seen everything you needed to see and pressed forward because the narrative became the most important thing. This is often the case with Remake, the plot is so urgent in how it impacts our characters that stopping off to perform basic chores is a tonal knife to the heart.
Doing away with the world map in its entirety could make Final Fantasy 7 Remake 2 a better game, allowing Square Enix to craft locations like Cosmo Canyon, Junon Harbour and Costa Del Sol to their full potential without risking the inconsistency that such open elements threaten to introduce. The locations outside of Midgar are increasingly more diverse, so should naturally lead to side missions that go beyond killing some rats.
The NPCs and quests you interact with in the first chapter of 7 Remake remind me of Final Fantasy 13, in how they’re unusually archaic and don’t feel like they belong in this world. I rushed past these moments, due to how they increasingly forced me to analyse cracks in a game I otherwise adore. But these flaws are worth highlighting, as are the steps required to prevent them happening again in a sequel that has the potential to be so much bigger and better.
When I talk to people about Final Fantasy 7 Remake, the discussion always lands on its fantastic characters and wondrous story sequences. Recreations of iconic locations like Wall Market, Shinra HQ, and Seventh Heaven are also fawned over. Side content is only ever brought up as a polarising negative, something that brings the overall package down because it feels almost obliged to abide by modern design conventions. It doesn’t, and the sequel has a chance to shine even brighter if it’s willing to throw such mechanics away in service of quality over quantity. If getting rid of the traditional world map achieves such a thing, then I’m all for it.
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