Hello! My name is Dan,
I am a professional animator, and this is New Frame Plus.
The remake of Final Fantasy VII is here,
and it is affording us all a very rare opportunity:
the chance to see a classic, beloved game updated to modern AAA standards.
To see it not just remastered, but re-imagined from the ground up.
Every single asset, every game-play system,
AND every story sequence reconsidered and built from scratch!
As an animator, that last one makes me REAL excited.
Consider the potential here!
These animators and directors and performers have the opportunity
not just to make these scenes prettier, but to flesh out their character performances
and cinematography with a level of nuance
that the original game simply was not capable of.
To show you what I mean,
I'm going to do a deep dive
into the animation of just the opening title sequence
in both versions of the game, starting with the 1997 original.
It’s easy to forget, looking at it now but,
Final Fantasy VII was a technological leap in its own right;
the first game in this franchise to leave those familiar 8 and 16-bit roots behind
in favor of Sony’s new PlayStation
and all the shiny new 3D graphics it was capable of.
But these big hardware transitions always come with some growing pains,
and Final Fantasy VII is loaded with them.
The title sequence begins as an FMV cinematic; basically a pre-rendered video.
The ability to store movie files on disc was one of the more exciting new features
of the PlayStation’s CD-ROM format.
We open on a field of stars, the camera lazily drifting around in space for…
probably 20 seconds longer than necessary.
And then we cross-fade to a medium close-up shot of a woman’s face
bathed in eerie green light.
And, I should probably just go ahead and say that
the character animation in Final Fantasy VII’s pre-rendered cut-scenes
is just... terrible.
They've got poor body mechanics, no sense of weight, dead-eyed expressions everywhere…
the craft of animation is fundamentally about taking something not alive,
like a drawing or a CG model, and creating the illusion of life in that thing,
and you will rarely see that illusion work in these scenes.
Now, this failing is COMPLETELY understandable.
CG animation was still in its very early days at this point,
And Squaresoft’s cinematic animators
would quickly find their feet over the next few years,
so no disrespect towards them!
Honestly, nobody in 1997 was delivering great CG character animation
in their pre-rendered cut-scenes.
...But yeah, this first effort is pretty rough, though.
So then we cut to a new angle,
and we see that this woman is kneeling in some sort of dark alley looking at something
(although we can’t really see what that glowing green something is)
And it’s here that we can see that Aerith’s character model is actually segmented,
constructed of several separate pieces of overlapping geometry.
You can see the most obvious seams here at her elbow joint and there at her waist.
Now, this is actually how all of Final Fantasy VII’s
in-game character models are constructed too;
it was a pretty common character-modeling approach in those early 3D days
when deforming a character mesh with an animated skeleton of joints in real time
was just a lot for that early hardware to handle.
Of course, animation in a pre-rendered movie
isn’t bound by those real-time processing concerns,
so I’m guessing that this segmented character model being used here is
just an artifact of those real early wild west days of CG animation
where everyone was still trying to just figure out the basics.
And it’s also in this shot
that we get our first taste of Final Fantasy VII’s full body character animation,
which, like I said before: not great.
You see the way she finishes standing up and THEN starts straightening her back
while her hips stay completely locked in place?
That sort of isolated motion is how machines move, but not how humans do.
All the parts of our bodies tend to coordinate together when we move.
It’s actually surprisingly difficult to move just a single isolated part of your body
without any other part moving just a little bit.
It what makes dancers like these so darn impressive.
Granted, I suspect that part of the weirdness of her movement here
might be due to the fact that the animator's having to cheat
to make her stand up AT ALL.
Look at the lower half of her body for the duration of this standing motion...
You notice how her legs don’t actually bend that much?
Here, I’ll play it back in reverse... Kinda looks like her knees bend slightly,
and then her legs just stiffly sink into the floor, right?
I’m guessing that is EXACTLY what’s happening.
I would wager that this character model (or at least her skirt geometry)
wasn’t rigged to bend that way. Or maybe there was some other technical complication
preventing her from ACTUALLY being shown kneeling on the ground,
so the animator had to cheat to make this shot work at all.
And I say, hats off to you, sneaky animator who made this impossible thing work.
You weren’t the first and will not be the last.
...oh, THAT’S why the camera doesn’t tilt down far enough
for us to see the glowing thing she’s looking at, isn’t it?
Because lowering the camera any further would reveal she’s not actually crouched down
and break the whole illusion? Aw that's it, isn’t it!
Sorry, I got distracted, what was I talking about...
RIGHT. Yes, Aerith moving like a robot. Okay.
And it really doesn’t help that her eyes are 2D textures pasted to her face
that are only capable of looking straight ahead.
Like, look at her head turn here. You see how her eyes just stay locked in place,
staring forward for the entire move? That, again, is how robots move, not humans.
I mean, try it yourself right now.
Try turning to look 90 degrees to your left
while keeping your eyes focused straight in front of your face the entire time……
is that not the most robot-feeling thing to do?
Now, I could keep nitpicking this little stuff all day,
but at this point you get the idea, right?
This is clearly a team of artists and engineers
learning their way around a new animation medium,
probably using the software equivalent of sticks and rocks compared to modern animation tools.
So, I think we can cut them some slack.
In fact, let’s say some nice things!
I really like the way this extended shot is staged;
the way it starts in close spending a quiet intimate moment with this flower girl,
and then slowly begins to pull back as she walks out into the busy street.
And then the bustle of this dark, grimey city suddenly intrudes on it,
breaking our line of sight and just taking over the frame as the camera continues to pull back
and the flower girl slowly disappears into the cityscape.
And, by the way: side benefit of having all these nameless extras shrouded
in moody shadow during this camera move? Much harder to see animation flaws!
Except on this guy. HEY.
I see that hitch in your walk cycle, random dude.
Better get that looked at.
But alright, we’re done with character animation for a bit.
The camera pulls back and back until we’re looking over the entire city of Midgar.
And just keep in mind: even though all of this does look very rough and early CG,
this one extended shot has been a showcase of cinematography
and character animation detail (relatively) that, up to this point,
Final Fantasy has never been capable of doing before.
Now it’s time for the second half of this opening cinematic,
and this is where stuff gets really interesting.
So, the camera begins its flight back into town,
inter-cut with some quick shots of a decelerating train.
We fly down, down, down until we’re back at ground level.
And the camera settles into place just as this train pulls into the Sector 1 station,
and the instant the train stops,
the pre-rendered video portion of this intro ends and we seamlessly(ish)
transition from a movie file to a static 2D image,
the likes of which Final Fantasy VII is going to have us
running around in front of for most of the game.
But before we get to the action here,
I’d like to direct your attention to these two guards.
Because you probably noticed, those guards appeared on screen BEFORE this
pre-rendered video ended.
And they were not PART of the pre-rendered video.
Those were in-game character models, being rendered in real time,
being layered OVER the FMV.
This is a pretty cool little trick they're pulling off here.
I mean when you think about it, almost every environment in this game
is just a lavish pre-rendered 2D image being layered behind the invisible terrain
your 3D characters are standing on,
and there’s no real reason that that background image CAN’T be a video.
But to make that work, the animators had to make sure that the game-play camera
which is seeing and rendering these two guards,
imitated the pre-rendered cut-scene camera’s movements perfectly
to preserve the illusion of those 3D characters being grounded in that moving 2D background.
It’s a complicated trick,
but quite effective at blurring the boundary between movie file and game-play.
Square would actually do this a lot in the PS1 days
and by Final Fantasy VIII, they were getting real extra about it.
ANYWAY. Now that the pre-rendered video portion of this sequence is done,
from here on, all of the characters are going to be rendered in real-time.
And real-time story scenes in Final Fantasy VII
have to deal with a handful of very tricky limitations.
Limitation No. 1:
Because every animation in the game takes up some amount of memory,
the devs had to try to limit the number of unique animations appearing in each scene.
Because the more animations needed in one single environment,
the longer that environment was going to take to load.
Limitation No. 2:
Because most of this game’s environments are pre-rendered 2D images,
their ability to move the camera is extremely limited,
and camera rotation is completely locked down.
So pretty much all of the action in any given scene has to be played to one angle,
kind of like a stage play.
And Limitation No. 3:
Final Fantasy VII’s characters....they don’t really have faces.
I mean, they do,
but it’s near impossible to see them at the games original resolution,
and those faces weren’t built to animate anyway.
So, unlike the character animation in the 16-bit games
(which ran almost entirely on exaggerated facial expressions),
Final Fantasy VII’s characters have to rely on gestures
and heavily-exaggerated body language.
And that's not actually a terrible trade-off in the end,
but not being able to use facial expressions is a pretty big acting limitation.
All of that to say: for the duration of this scene, the camera's barely going to move,
the character performances are going to be created by stringing together short,
re-usable animations, and nobody is going to be acting with their face.
Ok? Ok.
So first we see Biggs jump off the top of the train and throw a guard to the ground,
which reads SURPRISINGLY CLEARLY considering how far away he is from camera
and how low resolution this game is.
Next Jessie runs in and takes out the second guard with a kick,
which reads a little less clearly than the throw, despite being closer to camera,
largely because the guard's body is kind of obscuring the move
they probably could've tried to clear the silhouettes a little better here, but I'm nitpicking.
Notice how exaggerated all these animations are, though!
With render resolution this low and character models this simplistic,
there is no room for subtlety.
The animators are having to push everything to the extreme to read clearly.
Wedge hops off the train next. And then we see one of our main characters, Barret,
who looks back toward the train and gestures impatiently.
The camera pedestals up a bit for the grand entrance of our main character,
who flips down for a showy, absolutely cliche three-point landing.
And there are a couple details I really like in this moment.
First, having Barret run out, look up and gesture toward the train is great
not only for directing our attention to where Cloud’s entrance is about to happen,
but it also signals to the new player that Barret is in a position of authority here,
and it sets the tone for the early antagonistic dynamic between Barret and Cloud.
And the second thing I really like is that Cloud’s unnecessarily acrobatic entrance
is a perfectly fine way to make your player character feel like the coolest tough guy in the room
(...eh, sort of),
but in the LONG term,
it also effectively sets up Cloud as the kind of person who
would try to present himself as the coolest tough guy in the room,
which is a surprising level of nuance for a clump of untextured, faceless polygons
hand-springing off a train.
But yeah, then Barret tells you to get moving and there you are,
playing Final Fantasy VII.
Overall, as clunky as these PS1 graphics and early 3D animations are,
I’m surprised at how effective all of this still manages to be.
That’s kind of Final Fantasy VII in a nutshell, really.
This brings us to the Final Fantasy VII Remake,
a complete overhaul of the original game with the full power of modern AAA budgets,
talent and technology behind it.
And of course, there are, TONS of improvements you can just see at a glance.
The high resolution graphics, the high-fidelity character models,
the lighting, the shading, the effects... all of it gorgeous.
But the two things that interest me most are all those brand new
motion-captured character performances AND all the creative adjustments
and changes designed to help this opening achieve its story goals
in ways that the original couldn’t.
Let’s see what 23 years of technological advance can do.
We begin, once more, drifting in a star fie--
...hang on.
...yep. This is different. Okay!
It turns out the Remake diverges from the original intro sequence immediately.
This time we open with a bird flying over a barren wasteland
and we get our first look at the Midgar skyline in broad daylight,
almost completely shrouded in smog.
We get a good look at the actual city itself during the day time rush,
all of the densely-packed buildings, construction work, some kids riding bikes…
honestly, this new opening could probably have stood to cut 20 seconds too but,
they do establish some important thematic imagery in these new opening minutes:
dead landscape, a bustling smog-coated city,
dead flowers SPECIFICALLY,
and, as the sun goes down,
the bright green glow of Midgar’s mako reactors illuminating the night.
Now all of this is stuff that fans of Final Fantasy VII are already well familiar with,
but these two minutes sure do give the newcomer a lot more useful information
about this setting than 45 seconds of stars do.
And that spray of green particles from the reactor transitions us beautifully
into the classic opening sequence we know and love.
I would say we are off to a pretty strong start here.
What’s more, craning the camera down toward Aerith like this
instead of simply cross-fading affords us a much better look at
what’s actually happening in this scene; the Mako energy -
the planet’s very life force, we’re soon going to learn -
is seeping from a broken pipe in this dirty alley.
And thanks to those two extra minutes we just saw,
the new player can probably start connecting some dots on what’s happening here!
Much more easily then they could have in the original, anyway.
And when we reach that close up of her face,
we can see that she’s sort of lost in this glow,
just basking in it, almost meditative, possibly praying.
And when she opens her eyes to look into camera - just like she did 23 years before -
...man. What an incredible difference two decades and 4 console generations can make.
This Aerith actually looks alive.
Even in this tiny moment, there is so much more subtle fidelity to the performance.
The way her eyelids stir slightly before she opens them.
The way she first looks down at the pipes she was focused on previously
BEFORE her gaze drifts up toward camera.
The way not just her eyelids but also her eye brows move slightly as she looks up.
And all of those subtle eye darts...
Especially when compared to the original robo-Aerith,
what incredible realistic acting fidelity here.
Then we cut to the second shot, very similar to the original angle,
but with some better framing. Except this time, Aerith doesn’t stand up right away.
She just... stays here, gazing at this leaking pipe, lingering in the moment.
I REALLY love this change.
It’s not a radical departure from the original, but the extra time spent lingering here
gives us a chance to emotionally invest in this moment WITH her,
in a way that you really couldn’t in the original.
And immediately AFTER that, another change that I love:
Aerith stands up NOT just because it’s time to stand up,
but because she suddenly senses a threat at the end of the alley. This is so good.
For one, it gives her a motivated reason to stand up and leave this alley
she was just having that moment in.
Two, it further reinforces what the original game was trying to drive home as well:
that this city is a hostile place.
And best of all, three: if you already know a little bit about Aerith’s story,
then you know that she is ALWAYS being watched.
She is a Person of Interest in this town. And so seeing her get spooked by…
well, seemingly nothing at the end of this dark alley
helps to plant some seeds for her story WAY in advance,
and, again, the original version of this cut-scene didn’t do that AT ALL.
Also, by the way? THAT’S how you animate standing up from a kneeling position right there.
A+
Now here comes the biggest departures from the original opening sequence:
rather than maintaining one long shot from Aerith standing to Aerith walking out of the alley
to zooming out over the city to zooming back into the train station,
instead they cut to a new shot here and add an entirely new series of events.
Aerith hastily walks out of the alley,
nervously looking behind her to see if she’s being followed,
and accidentally bumps into a passerby, dropping some of her flowers.
She kneels to pick them up as the rest of the city goes about its business around her
(which is EXACTLY in line with the tone of the original).
But one of the flowers gets trampled by a careless pedestrian.
She slowly picks it up, cradles it in her hands… and lingers in this moment too,
just like she had with the broken pipe in the alley.
Now, the symbolism of this addition
combined with the shot of the dead flowers earlier is Not At All Subtle.
But for anybody experiencing Final Fantasy VII for the first time
(and a LOT of people are going to be),
drawing a direct visual parallel between how Aerith treats the trampled flower
and how she treats that broken pipe leaking a weird green light,
that I think is a worthwhile bit of thematic foreshadowing.
The flower girl is planting seeds. Deal with it.
But ok, time for that big flyover shot.
The camera pulls back and back and back… and keeps going because
the city is huge this time and we get that view of the entirety of Midgar,
looking as gloriously ominous as ever.
Then we swoop back in to Sector 1, inter-cut with those same shots of a decelerating train.
Only this time, the camera flight ends framing our main character atop the train.
Again, arguably not a necessary change, but it is a nice little hint to the newcomers that
something is about to happen when this train gets where it’s going.
And can we just take a moment to appreciate how far physics simulation has come?
We already saw a ton of it before with Aerith’s hair and clothing,
but look at that wind whipping through Cloud’s hair and shirt here.
Awesome detail.
Then we see the train pulling into the station, and right... THERE,
if I had to guess, is where we transition from the pre-rendered cinematic
to rendering this scene in real time.
Did I mention, by the way, that everything up until now was almost definitely a pre-rendered movie,
just like the original game did? Because it probably is.
And why shouldn’t it be?
I mean, everything we’ve seen so far in this sequence
is meant to play out exactly the same every time,
AND the camera has to cover a ton of ground and show all of Midgar at a couple of points.
There is literally no reason to try to make this all render smoothly in real time
when they could just play a pre-rendered movie and allow the actual level to
load in the background so we are not kept waiting.
(A lot of modern games do that, by the way.)
And, if my guess is correct, they’re transitioning from movie file to
in-game assets at almost the exact same point as the original, so that’s fun!
And if I’m wrong about the exact hand-off moment,
honestly, that's just a testament to how good real-time rendering has gotten
in modern AAA games that it's this hard to tell.
But here’s where the Remake diverges heavily from the original again,
because this game isn’t bound by any of the original’s limitations.
This is a fully 3D space being rendered in real time.
Now, the camera can move wherever the director wants,
so this time,
they can actually shoot this scene using standard cinematography techniques.
So, instead of a static angle
showing everybody jumping off the train and fighting guards,
this time, we get an uninterrupted moving Steadicam shot of the attack from the guards’ perspective.
They patrol the platform a bit, we hear one of them get taken out off camera,
the other hears this and turns to see the platform behind him now empty
so he gets suspicious and starts looking…
And watching this all play out from the guards' perspective
not only lends the scene more dramatic tension, it also gives AVALANCHE
a chance to look more coordinated and stealthy.
AND Jessie still gets to knock a dude out with one kick.
Then we get our introduction to Barret (who is looking GOOD).
Barret turns, and just like in the old days
he waves for Cloud to get his butt off the train already.
And Cloud obliges, just as before: in the most unnecessarily dramatic way possible.
And yes, this entrance IS absolutely absurd,
but, even ignoring the fact that it is a direct callback to the original train jump,
remember that performative coolness and tough-guy posturing are
CORE elements of Cloud’s character at this point in his arc.
WEDGE: "...but you know what I think?" CLOUD: "Not interested."
What we are seeing right now is a facade
which we are (hopefully) being set up to eventually see through.
And it does seems like Square’s narrative team is leaning into that setup with some intent here
JESSIE: "Ok THAT was pretty cool."
I am excited to see how they handle this.
But, yeah, that’s it! Now we are playing Final Fantasy VII, But Prettier!
Only one cut-scene into this game
and I am already really digging the creative adjustments they’re making here.
They’ve not only recreated the original sequence with more detail,
but actually added more information and nuance,
largely through the animated character performances and cinematography.
That’s what makes me so excited for this Remake:
because, good or bad, this return to Midgar represents a HUGE animation opportunity.
Final Fantasy VII’s story is PACKED with some really juicy character scenes
that the original game could only deliver through text boxes and simplistic pantomime acting.
There is so much untapped potential for nuanced, animated acting in those scenes,
and this Remake has the chance to go back and make good on that potential!
I am so jealous of the animators in charge of re-imagining the scene
where Cloud talks with Aerith in the church.
Or that scene where the party is caught in Shinra tower
and they’re all talking to each other through the walls.
OR the scene where Cloud is telling HIS version of what happened five years ago,
and Tifa’s just sitting in that room, knowing his version is wrong,
not knowing why, but not SAYING anything?
IMAGINE the blend of emotions happening in her head throughout that scene.
That is an animated acting GOLDMINE.
I’m calling it right now: whenever that scene happens, watch Tifa’s face.
That's one of the coolest character acting opportunities in this whole dang game and they better not miss it--
SORRY.... I am sorry. I got excited.
I don’t know if this game is going to be great, or a disappointment.
All I know is that this kind of opportunity for comparative animation study
does not come along often and I cannot wait to get started.
I’m actually going to be playing this Remake for the first time
over on our other channel, PlayFrame, starting Monday.
And if you have enjoyed me nerding out about Final Fantasy VII animation
and want to hear HOURS more of it? Well, I hope you’ll join me.
And thank you very much to CanvasWolfDoll for suggesting this topic!
I had so much fun digging into this.
If you’d like to suggest a topic for a future animation analysis video,
then consider supporting the show like all of these good people listed here.
Thank you very much for watching, and I will see you next time.
[music]