Looking back at the far distant past of PS3 era gaming may give us an insight as to how a company like Square-Enix might approach a sequel episode to a game like Final Fantasy 7 Remake. Specifically, let’s look at the original Mass Effect trilogy and how it managed to keep the player’s story consistent along three separate entries following the same main character’s progress.
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A warning right now that this article will be stepping into Minor Spoiler territory, as the ending to Final Fantasy 7 Remake is fairly important when talking about the implications of Episode 2. However, we won’t be diving into every important new scene and revelation that the game has to offer, but rather the technical aspects that in some cases come later in the game.
How Most Sequels Handle Character Levels
More often than not, video game sequels tend to ignore past progression and start the player over with nothing, making them unlock and earn everything they gained over the course of the previous game all over again. This is often done with a short cutscene showing how everyone’s stuff has been destroyed, like in Destiny 2, or a vague plot explanation about how the protagonist has been drained of their power, like Kingdom Hearts’ long history of wiping Sora to zero at the beginning of every game. In these cases, nothing carries over from one title in a series to the next, keeping each individual game neatly tied up in it’s own package.
Of course, Final Fantasy 7 Remake isn’t exactly an ordinary game, and its episodes all connect into a singular story that was originally made to be one solid game, albeit with a number of major changes from the original. As a result, it may not be a great idea for each episode to start players off fresh every time they reach what previously acted as a new Act, rather than a new game entirely. So instead, let’s look at some games that aren’t as interested in keeping each game in a series contained, and more interested in turning every entry into an extension of the original.
Mass Effect’s Continuous Shepard
While many games use the methods mentioned above for new games in a series, a few franchises choose instead to keep player progress moving consistently from one game to the next. One of the most famous games to have this continuing gameplay is BioWare’s now dormant Mass Effect series, which allowed players to not only use the same Shepard, face and all, as in previous games, but also continued the player’s level progress. As a result, players could hop into Mass Effect 2 or 3 with dozens of abilities already available to them based on having previously played the earlier games.
In Mass Effect, this creates a powerful through line for the character of Shepard as players had experiences with their own personal Shepard for years as the games released. For that same reason, Final Fantasy 7 Remake needs to use the same feature of transferring memory from one entry to the next in order to keep the progress that players made in the first episode relevant for future entries. However, the next episode may want to take this a step further, by allowing players to hold onto their collected items and rare materia as well.
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Let players keep their progress
In short, the argument here is that players should be allowed to keep the progress they’ve made in Final Fantasy 7 Remake from Episode 1 and into future episodes, including their items, learned skills, and fully leveled materia. To this degree, we’d actually be looking less at emulating Mass Effect, which let’s players keep their level, but lose their gear, and look closer at the .hack//Infection series that behaved more like episodes than full new games. This would allow players to keep their hard earned levels and items as they continue through future episodes and all the way to the new ending of the entire story.
With Final Fantasy 7 Remake, following in the footsteps laid out in the PS2 era .hack// series, culminating in the incredibly rare .hack//Quarantine, could be exactly what the episodic releases need. This could keep fans satisfied with spreading the game out along a much longer, and much pricier, release window as chunks of the game drop one at a time. Most importantly, this would make the grind and replaying chapters for special trophies and gear feel much more useful.
Keeping summon materia
Surprisingly enough, there are some clear elements from games that have released since the original Final Fantasy 7 present in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake. One of those is the way that a majority of the summons are obtained by fighting them, as opposed to simply finding them on the ground or at the end of a quest. This is a theme present in Final Fantasy titles such as 8 and 12, and as an effect, gives players a number of powerful rewards that they likely won’t receive all of until already beating the game.
One summon in particular would be the secret fight against Bahamut and the resulting reward granted to players for beating him. Since most players likely won’t be able to earn the summon until the end of the game, that really makes this reward somewhat useless unless players are looking to start over and play through the game again. However, this wouldn’t be a problem if players get to keep their data from one episode into the next, which raises the question: How does Square-Enix plan to release the next episode?
Will episodes be DLC-like content?
At the moment, we don’t actually know how Square-Enix plans to deliver future episodes of Final Fantasy 7 Remake. In the past, games like Final Fantasy 15 have had additional episodes added later in the form of DLC. However, those were additional storylines that added to the overall world of the game, but didn’t contain the primary story itself. It’s likely that these releases will be something that can be downloaded to the original game, not unlike DLC.
With Final Fantasy 7 Remake, the difference is that these next few episodes are key moments in the story, and in fact the rest of the story of the original entirely. So, the whole point of continuing player progression may already be getting addressed if the next few episodes are set to release as a companion to the base game as opposed to separate entities entirely.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake is available now for PS4.
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