Review: Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade Is an Appreciable Detour on a Long Journey

All the things that made Final Fantasy VII Remake so great are on display here, albeit in truncated form.

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade
Photo: Square Enix

Who knows when we’ll see the next proper chapter in the Final Fantasy VII Remake project, but if Final Fantasy XV taught us anything, it’s that Square Enix has gotten very good at creating meaningful DLC to tide us over while we wait for the next big thing. So, it should surprise no one that Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade: Episode INTERmission, arriving day and date with Final Fantasy VII Remake’s fancy PlayStation 5 upgrade, is a solid piece of storytelling. It not only reintroduces a fan-favorite character ahead of her fated meeting with Cloud, Tifa, Aeris, and Barrett, but it also lets us play with a few new mechanics and fleshes out a little more of the periphery of the main game’s narrative.

Final Fantasy VII Remake does a smart thing with its world-building: positioning the country of Wutai not as a naked ploy to introduce ninjas and samurai into the game as it was in the original, but as this universe’s East Asia stand-in, a notoriously insular country unfairly blamed for the shadier aspects of society in the city of Midgar. The original game didn’t shy from showcasing the veiled racism of the elite class, and Episode INTERmission deftly fleshes that out even further. Even within Avalanche, the insurgent faction attempting to bring down the Shinra Corporation, Wutaian members are kept at a wary distance.

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This is the dynamic that Episode INTERmission’s heroine, Wutaian teen ninja Yuffie Kisaragi, wanders into, and if there’s any one prevailing issue with this game, it’s the dissonance created by Yuffie’s quirkiness being foregrounded against a rather grim backdrop of a turning point in Final Fantasy VII Remake’s plot. Avalanche hires her and a stoic, staff-wielding mercenary named Sonon to sneak into Shinra HQ and investigate a secret materia that they’re developing, which Yuffie frames as just another fun materia hunt, bouncing onto the scene wearing an adorable poncho, and being snarky and bossy in an equally adorable way.

Throughout, you’ll get sidequests that allow you to play fun board games around Sector 7—based on the tower defense-lite Fort Condor game in the original Final Fantasy VII—and hunt for posters of Yuffie’s favorite Wutaian bar in the area. All the while, her journey has her saving an informant from being beaten for information and reckoning with horrors that would set off alarms at the Geneva Convention if they occurred in real life.

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Yuffie played well as comic relief in the original game, but as the star of her own show, she sticks out a bit too much. Still, Episode INTERmission benefits more from her presence than Sonon’s, a new character whose entire m.o. is to be stoic, mourn his dead sister, and die nobly. That’s no spoiler, as one of his built-in, unchangeable mechanics is that he sacrifices his HP and brings Yuffie back to life if she dies. The gesture is appreciated, as this game features some surprisingly harsh battles, and a gratifying but much trickier set of combat mechanics than Final Fantasy VII Remake’s, involving both an element-switching Ninjutsu system and a synchronized attack mechanic that both takes more than a little trial and error to use effectively. But Sonon doesn’t add much else to the mix other than to play the straight man.

What the episode gets totally right is its villains. While the systematic oppression of the in-game world is well-implemented in the design, the second half of Episode INTERmission brings the wonderfully domineering Shinra weapons executive Scarlet to the forefront, letting her taunt, tease, and threaten her way through the second half of the episode, taking our heroes on a whirlwind tour of Shinra’s riot-busting new technology, and culminating in the return of two deep-cut villains from Final Fantasy VII spinoffs past. Yuffie’s proper mission is where things kick into gear, but getting there is a bit slower than it needs to be.

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All the things that made Final Fantasy VII Remake so great are on display here, albeit in truncated form. The threat that Shinra poses to our heroes and the planet is still tangible. Above all, the game is visually spectacular, with the PS5-exclusive upgrades to Final Fantasy VII Remake’s engine doing some excellent flexing here on the cinematic framing front, and evocative lighting appearing in all the right spots. The occasional moments of tonal dissonance stick out, but they don’t necessarily hurt the experience. And it can’t be underestimated how great it is to have a game that’s very much an allegory about Asian people fighting to be heard, and with two Asian voice actors actually playing the leads. Still, the episode is titled quite accurately. At five-to-seven hours, Episode INTERmission isn’t quite filler, but it’s also not entirely filling. It’s an appreciable detour on a much longer journey.

The game was reviewed using a code provided by fortyseven communications.

Score: 
 Developer: Square Enix  Publisher: Square Enix  Platform: PlayStation 5  Release Date: June 10, 2021  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Language, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco, Violence  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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