The new trailer for the much anticipated, oft-delayed Final Fantasy 7 remake is finally here! Optimist and superfan Sam Brooks breaks it down, moment by moment.

Final Fantasy 7 is, indisputably, the most popular RPG of all time. It’s one of the biggest selling video games of all time, too.

When the remake was announced, Obama was president, John Key was prime minister and the reigning Best Actress was Julianne Moore. It was a different time, you guys.

When the first trailer came out, two years later and two years ago, I lost my mind. This isn’t even my favourite Final Fantasy, and definitely not the one I would choose to remake, but my childhood nostalgia took over and I started crying. I pre-ordered the game at EB Games, despite the fact it didn’t even have a release date yet. I might as well have booked a beach vacation to Miami in 2050, that’s how close it was to throwing money down the drain.

Until today, there’s been literally one minute and forty-nine seconds of footage released for this game. But today, ladies and otherly identifieds, we’ve got a whole extra minute!

Let’s get into it.

0:03–0:05: Well, it’s not going to get further away! That’s not how time works.

0:10-0:12: It’s Aeris/Aerith! But for real, in this screenshot alone, you can sense the attention to detail that a hundred animators have put into this. That looks like a real jacket someone might wear, y’all! That looks like a real jacket I might wear. Someone give me that jacket, please. I have nearly a thousand followers on Instagram, it’ll be worth it for you.

0:14: “Halt! Hands up!” Less a reaction, more just what they’re actually saying.

0:15: Literally the first fight of the game. Should it be concerning that a game that’s been in development for roughly five years has only shown us footage for what could be, generously, called the first maybe four hours of the game? Of course not! This is gaming, the world’s most reliable industry!

0:16: Okay, there’s actually a lot to break down, so let’s do it in quadrants.

Top left: Rocket!

Top right: Rocket tail!

Bottom left: It seems like this will be an action-RPG, which I think we already knew, and I would bet as much money as I spent pre-ordering this game ($90) that it will use some of the Kingdom Hearts 3 engine. I’m okay with that! That game was fun.

Bottom right: This is, again, from the first hour of the game. Cloud and Barret started off the original game with HP in the low hundreds, and MP in the mid-fifties. This is very different! Does this matter, as this is almost definitely from a demo and pre-release build? No, but you’re the one reading a second-by-second breakdown.

0:17: Strong brow game, Jesse! Updated graphics, glowed up brows.

0:19: This is the first Mako Reactor! Also, those greens you guys! Bringing me Wizard of Oz realness.

0:23: This is from the second dungeon of the game, Mako Reactor #5. The characters still have way too much HP, and not enough MP. This is stressing me out.

More importantly, it looks as though you can switch characters and play as them, which is cool!

0:26: Biggs, also every guy I had a crush on in high school.

0:27: Barret! Do we think that Square Enix is going to handle the character’s race this better around, and not turn him into an unfortunate stereotype? Probably not! Yet we soldier on anyway, blinkers on.

0:28: That’s a Stephen Marr haircut right there.

0:31: And Cloud, those are some Les Mills arms.

0:36: I’m no graphics queen, but the detail on that flower is astonishing, y’all.

0:39: This is the third boss of the game, Aps. Which isn’t important.

What is important is that this hopefully means that the remake includes one of the most bonkers sequences in an RPG ever – the entirety of Wall Market. That’s the part of the game where Cloud has to gather items so he can dress up like a woman and infiltrate the mansion of mob boss/sexual predator Don Corneo and rescue his oldest friend, Tifa, who has been captured by her. It’s also the part of the game where Cloud has to go to a brothel, get a massage from an oiled up muscle man and is rewarded with fancy underwear.

I need this game, you guys.

0:42: More gameplay. Who cares about gameplay? Where’s Yuffie? Give me that character trailer.

Real talk: No way Yuffie is going to be optional this time, right? They’d never let it happen.

0:43: Second boss of the game.

0:44: Confirmed: This game will feature explosions.

0:48: The first boss of the game! Attack while its tail is up.

Do you think the game is going to keep all the errors of the original? I think people might genuinely revolt if we’re missing ‘this guy are sick’. Because people are idiots.

0:51: Again, the detail of this is incredible. Real care has been put into it, and if they can put it into, you know, the entirety of Final Fantasy 7, which is a fifty hour game, then it’ll be one for the record books.

And if not, everybody will be angry! Why does anybody want to make games, again?

0:55: Cloud has an earring! Didn’t notice that.

Also, those are literal bolts on his armour! Why?! Isn’t that awkward? Don’t they get caught on things, like, you know, his big blonde spiky hair?

0:57: “Can you bear to see the planet suffer, Cloud?”

This is important (importance is relative) for three reasons:

1. This line of dialogue is not in Final Fantasy 7, as far as I can remember. This means that they’re doing rewrites of this game, adding stuff and taking stuff away. This was always going to be the case, because Final Fantasy 7 was a bit of a rushjob of a translation – as you can see in Tim Rogers’ excellent video series on its translation – but this confirms that yes, this is not the same script as the original.
2. Sephiroth is in this game, and he has his long, flowing Garnier locks. Thank god.
3. Sephiroth’s voice actor in this game is likely not George Newbern. He’s also not Lance Bass, of N*Sync and homosexuality fame, who voiced him in the first Kingdom Hearts game. This means that they’re probably not sticking with all the original actors for these characters, which include Rachael Leigh Cook (yes, She’s All That), Mena Suvari (yes, American Beauty) and Christy Carlson Romero (yes, Kim Possible).

Again, importance is relative and I am very, very dumb.

0:59: My son! My yoked, spiky-haired, blonde son!

1:00: Put it in my veiiiins.

1:05: Okay, so another nerdy deep dive.

The kicker here is ‘character design’ Roberto Ferrari, who was a sub character-designer on Final Fantasy XV and Type-0. Whatever your beefs with those games are, I think the design is pretty amazing. For him to be promoted to character designer proper, shared with Tetsuya Nomura, is a big deal and for me, bodes well for the game.

Anyway, see you here in June, what will probably be like, another 45 seconds of footage maximum!