My favorite game——Final Fantasy

Like Old Hollywood Movies,Video Games Get a Polish for New Audiences

Game publishers are digging through their vaults to remake or remaster popular titles in a bid to kindle players’ nostalgia.

In 1997, Square Enix released the original Final Fantasy VII, a futuristic cyberpunk epic with multiple characters and twisting plotlines that became one of the most beloved titles in the Final Fantasy series. Visually, however, the creators had to make do with the technology at the time. For example, the game had blocky-looking characters, no voice acting and no 3-D backgrounds. After years of teasing, Square Enix remade the game to match a modern experience. Final Fantasy VII Remake used entire teams of voice actors, artists, animators, engineers and producers to create a game that could stand up to any contemporary release. The strategy paid off: It became the best-selling game of April, according to data from the NPD Group, a research firm that covers the video game industry.

Fans have largely been receptive to the reimagined game, and its modern systems have made it accessible to new players, who found the original mechanics difficult. “I tried the Final Fantasy VII remaster on Xbox; it was a little too far gone for me,” said Preston Bakies, 27, of Findlay, Ohio. “But when the remake came out — I’ve put a lot of time into it. It’s been a lot of fun.” The original Final Fantasy VII cost $40 million to make, which was considered a high sum for a video game in the ‘90s.

Given the technological demands of modern games, costs have grown considerably more expensive, experts say. “I haven’t come across a single game which took more than $100 million in Japan” to get made, said Atul Goyal, a managing director at investment bank Jefferies & Company, who pegged the budget for Final Fantasy VII Remake at up to $140 million. Others felt it was even higher. “If we assume the number of sales for Final Fantasy VII Remake is six million units, $144 million is the budget,” said Yuhsuke Koyama, a professor at Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo and author of “A History of the Japanese Video Game Industry.”

In a twist, Square Enix has broken Final Fantasy VII Remake into multiple parts, although it would not say how many. There are risks associated with this strategy, including irking fans who have to shell out more money for the other parts of the game.

After Years of Anticipation, Final Fantasy VII Fans Get Their Reboot

For nearly two decades, the idea of a remake for the beloved video game Final Fantasy VII seemed as outlandish as your neighbor’s son’s best friend’s uncle actually working for Nintendo.

But fans were given a glimmer of hope in 2015, when the Japanese publisher Square Enix announced at the industry trade show E3 that the remake was under development. Raucous applause and internet bedlam followed. Five years later, the simply titled Final Fantasy VII Remake will be released on Friday for the PlayStation 4.

For many fans, the very existence of this remake is surreal. The original game, released in 1997 for the first PlayStation, was the seventh mainline entry in a series of popular role-playing games that crossed traditional Dungeons & Dragons fantasy with robots, magical machines and giant spaceships fashioned to look like whales.

All of the Final Fantasy games have been successful, but few have sold as well as the seventh (more than 11 million copies) or lingered in the cultural consciousness for quite as long. For example, the first six Final Fantasy games inspired 924 pieces of fan fiction on the website FanFiction.net. Final Fantasy VII alone has 2,005.

Review: ‘Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV,’ Where the Bad Guys Sport Silly Hats

There’s a very real possibility that watching “Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV” could result in brain addlement. At least, that’s what it might feel like if you’ve so far managed to resist the lure of the long-running (29 years, no less), rampantly successful Final Fantasy video game franchise. Suffice to say, this spinoff from the story of a magical kingdom besieged by an evil empire is too ludicrous for words.

Even so, no movie this welcoming to silly hats deserves our complete condemnation. Apparently raiding “Game of Thrones,” “Lord of the Rings,” “Star Wars” and “Dune” (sandworms!), the writer and director, Takeshi Nozue, whips up a pop-culture pastiche that leaps from modern cities to medieval castles, and from paved roads to alien moonscapes with head-spinning randomness. But when characters are wedged in the uncanny valley between live action and computer animation (featuring motion-capture wizardry that nevertheless leaves the eyes dead and lids that close with doll-like solemnity), their ability to rescue an incoherent plot is necessarily limited. Making matters worse, the voice work (notably from Aaron Paul, Sean Bean and Lena Headey) is atrocious.

But then, so might yours be if called upon to bark wooden dialogue and names that seem concocted by a desperate Scrabble player who’s run out of vowels. I was devastated to learn, for instance, that the oft-mentioned empire was called Niflheim and not (as everyone seemed to be saying) Nippleheim. Don’t judge: With a project this misbegotten, we grab our amusement where we can.

The introduction for Final Fantasy VII remark

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