Marathon Roundup and Remake Thoughts

So it's finally over, I played Final Fantasy 7 for 24 hours and surprisingly made a lot less progress than I thought I would.  Despite that, the marathon was a great success and I have to give a great amount of thanks to everyone who joined in and supported the stream, you guys are awesome.

First I'll say a couple of words about the marathon itself.  Over a 24 hour period you guys managed to donate a total of £315 to the Alzheimer's Society so congratulations to you guys for pulling off something that awesome.  As much as I enjoy playing these games, the fact that you guys are willing to take part in the charity side of things and donate make it all so worth it, so once again thank you so much.  It was a lot of fun but incredibly hard during the final few hours and I probably wouldn't have made it if it wasn't for the continued support of the fans and the dudes with me in the room.  There's actually a lot of bullshit in Final Fantasy 7 that I'd forgotten about and the pace of the game is actually a lot slower than I remember.  As enjoyable as it is I think there is a lot of nostalgia that comes into play when people give it such high praise.

This in turn got me thinking about the remake that was announced during the last E3.  There's a lot of weird stuff in Final Fantasy 7 that I can't see translating very well to a full HD release with fancy new graphics.   The biggest example of this off the top of my head is the part in disc 2 where Cloud pulls a Sonic the Hedgehog and does a loop the loop through a tunnel to reach a certain part of a dungeon.  I just can't see how that scene would look with today's fancy realistic graphics and this is just one of the more extreme examples.  There are plenty of parts in that game that I tried to envision in PS4 mode that would just be weird and after a while the idea of a remake started to worry me. 

Still, we should kind of know what to expect since we had Advent Children and Crisis Core give us a vague idea of what the world of FF7 looks like on modern hardware.   Square have a very hard line to walk between making fans cream their pants or making them scream betrayal at the top of their lungs but only time will tell which side of this fence we will be on.

Final Fantasy 7, despite all the silliness that goes down, is a great game and if there are any RPG fans that have somehow not played it then I fully recommend it.  Maybe play it in more manageable chunks than 24 hours but it's a damn good game and it's well deserving of the following that it has.  Just don't take it so seriously or else you run the risk of getting pissed off with it and putting it down.  Take everything with a pinch of salt and just enjoy the rich world and great combat and you're in for a good time.