
I think my favourite thing about the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy so far is the specific ways in which the developers at Square Enix inject nostalgia. The games launched to date – Remake and Rebirth – manage to nod warmly towards aspects of the original RPG without it ever feeling trite. You can see it in so many aspects of the way the games are curated: the way certain musical sequences are teased as motifs, and then brought in, full-throated, for certain boss fights; the redesigns of (in)famous monsters, and how certain major enemies are deployed in slightly remixed ways for maximum effect; the reinterpretation and reimagination of dialogue to better fit the bigger, more complex world of ‘the Planet’ in 2020’s version of the world compared to 1997’s.