Video Game / Final Fantasy VII Remake

Though this is a remake of a game from 1997, there are enough differences in the plot that spoilers from that game may not necessarily apply here. Whether you know the events of the original Final Fantasy VII or not, tropes below will spoil some of Remake's new twists and turns. Read on at your own risk!

The Legendary Becomes Real

Long ago, we looked upon a foreboding sky. The memory of the star that threatened all burns eternal in our hearts. In its wake came an age of silence. Yet with each fond remembrance, we knew those encountered were not forgotten. That someday, we would see them again. Perhaps it was no more than wishful thinking. But after the long calm, there are now the beginnings of a stir... The reunion at hand may bring joy. It may bring fear. But let us embrace whatever it brings. For they are coming back. At last... The promise has been made.

— Announcement trailer, E3 2015

Final Fantasy VII Remake is the first entry of a three-part Episodic Game Video Game Remake series of the teeth-shatteringly popular 1997 PlayStation RPG, Final Fantasy VII, developed by Square Enix for the PlayStation 4 and released on April 10, 2020. It is the fifth entry in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII and the first one in nearly 11 years, with the last entry being Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete released in 2009. Multiple members of the original FFVII team are involved in the remake, including Yoshinori Kitase, Tetsuya Nomura, and Kazushige Nojima. External developer CyberConnect2 originally worked on the game, until Square Enix moved the game's development in-house.

Remake takes yet another step closer towards Square's dreams of making Advent Children's cinematic combat a player-controlled experience. Abandoning its turn-based roots, the game goes full Real-Time with Pause Action RPG. There's a Manual Leader, A.I. Party, and players are limited to attacking, dodging, parrying, using each character's Signature Move (Cloud's Stance System, Tifa's Charged Attack, etc), and switching to control of another character. To use Materia, Items, Summon Magic and other abilities, characters must expend a charge from their segmented ATB bar, which fills with attacks, parries and time. The game enters Bullet Time while the player is issuing orders. The ATB bar forms the heart of the combat engine's tension: you can take the safe, slow way and dodge a lot, or you can rush in... and expose yourself to counterattack. Each foe also has a Break Meter to exploit. Remake also features new exploration systems, completely new graphics in Unreal Engine 4, new assets, redesigned areas, additional characters, Evolving Weapons and Equipment-Based Progression, and new story content.

Expanding the first 5 to 8 hours of the original game, Remake's story follows the adventures of mercenary Cloud Strife as he works for an Eco-Terrorist cell that includes machine gun Arm Cannon-wielding revolutionary Barret Wallace and his Bare-Fisted Monk childhood friend Tifa Lockhart as they fight against the Evil MegaCorp literally sucking The Lifestream of the planet dry, Shinra, in the corporation's Mega City of Midgar. Along the way he crosses paths with a mysterious White Magician flower girl named Aerith Gainsborough and a fiery talking wolf/lion like beast called Red XIII as well. However, while familiar characters are swept up in a familiar story, it also becomes clear that the plot is being actively pushed Off the Rails, even as an opposing force attempts to railroad the story back on course — ending with a Sequel Hook that suggests Nothing Is the Same Anymore... and that the plot of this re-telling may turn out to be substantially different than the original.

An Updated Re-release titled Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade was released for the PlayStation 5 on June 10, 2021, and PC via Epic Games Store on December 16, 2021 and later via Steam on June 17, 2022. The rerelease features improved graphics, a photo mode, additional Superboss fights, and the new "Episode INTERmission" chapter, a short sidestory centered around self proclaimed materia hunter Yuffie Kisaragi as she infiltrates Midgar during the reactor bombings, planning to carry out a mission for her homeland of Wutai to steal a rare Materia from Shinra's possession.

A tie-in novel titled Final Fantasy VII Remake: Trace of Two Pasts was released on July 15, 2021, with an English translation released in March 2023. It explores Tifa and Aerith's pasts.

The second part of the Remake trilogy, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, launched on February 29, 2024 for PlayStation 5.

Previews: Teaser, PSX 2015 Gameplay trailer, 2019 State of Play trailer, 2019 Orchestra Trailer, E3 trailer, Tokyo Game Show 2019 Trailer, The Game Awards 2019 Trailer, Theme Song Trailer, Opening Movie, Final Trailer.

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The game contains examples of:

A-F

• Absurdly High Level Cap: The maximum level is 50, in a game where the player will be around level 35 when facing the Final Boss, even if they did all of the sidequests and optional content. New Game Plus even includes a flat Experience Booster to make reaching this cap a little easier.
• Absurdly Long Stairway: The choice between either taking the elevator or climbing a ridiculously long staircase at the Shinra Headquarters returns. However, a new version of the scenario and dialogue is presented, providing new entertainment for those who make the choice to venture up all those stairs.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade:
  • Sephiroth effortlessly cuts through a metal catwalk with his Masamune — a nodachi longer than he is tall.
  • Cloud's swords are capable of effortlessly slicing through steel and concrete without losing their edge.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Chapter 10, Rough Waters, takes place in the run-down monster-infested labyrinth of tunnels and cisterns beneath Midgar.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: The game allows you to change the equipment and Materia of characters not in the party, or remove them entirely. As the alternative would be characters taking their stuff with them, this allowance prevents players from losing valuable gear for prolonged periods of gameplay.
• Action RPG: Plays this way à la Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts. Normal gameplay flows seamlessly into battle with enemies, players can freely move their character around the battlefield attacking, blocking, and dodging in real-time. Opening the menu to issue special commands like Abilities, Magic, and Items triggers Bullet Time while the player inputs their selection.
• Actionized Sequel: Compared to the original, the game has a lot more action. And as the events of the original game are implied to have happened in a previous timeline, this makes the game a bit more of a sequel than most remakes. Not only thanks to its Action RPG design, but also several segments of the original game who were quite calm or saw no combat were actioned up. For example, the climb up the plate to Shinra's HQ in the original has almost no combat encounters, being mostly just traversal puzzles and minigames. Here the team has to fight and evade kill teams, negotiate collapsing debris and the segment ends with a boss fight.
• Adaptational Badass: The country of Wutai becomes this via their new lore. It was established in the original game that it lost the war with Midgar, fell under Shinra imperialism, then steadily robbed of its resources until reduced to a mere shadow of its former self; a struggling vassal state forced to rely on tourism to keep its economy afloat, far too weak to be of anymore concern to its oppressive conquerors. The remake takes a radically different approach by portraying the Midgar/Wutai war as only recently "resolved" between the two countries, and Wutai still poses a threat to Shinra's present day activities through terrorism. How much of this is propaganda and how much is truth is unknown, but Avalanche (the main group, not Barret's splinter faction) are tied to and supplied by Wutai. And Rebirth reveals that the Wutai military, first seen in Crisis Core/Reunion, are still present (the original version has no military at all).
• Adaptational Ugliness: Heavily downplayed, but certain characters are a bit less attractive than their extremely pretty Compilation of Final Fantasy VII designs, bringing them more in line with what the characters were originally conceived to be like:
  • While Cloud is still depicted as good-looking with a lean yet muscular physique, he now has very pale skin, lines and slight discoloration under his eyes. It results in enough of a stressed, sleep deprived appearance that his landlady, Marle, will ask more than once if he is getting enough rest.
  • Barret, compared to his hunky Advent Children look, has more prominent and disfiguring facial scars, harder facial features, and musculature with more veins. His gun arm also looks more like a rough amputation and a hack job.
• Adaptation Deviation: The party do not get captured and arrested in the Shinra tower after rescuing Aerith; in fact, they instead take shelter in Aerith's old room after Cloud has an episode.
• Adaptation Expansion: The game as a whole expands on the original scenario with new areas, new character interactions, new scenarios, etc.
  • Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge get much more screen time than in the original game to show off more personality and dynamics, and Jessie gets a healthy amount of Ship Tease with Cloud. An early chapter has a new motorcycle section, with Jessie riding behind Cloud as they flee from Shinra soldiers down a set of train tracks.
  • Sephiroth shows up much earlier, as Cloud is escaping Sector 8, and Cloud experiences hallucinations and flashbacks much earlier as well, the first occurring while setting the bomb in the reactor.
  • There is an entire subplot added regarding the Arbiters of Fate, shadowy figures who are Invisible to Normals, and control destiny itself.
  • Tifa has new dialogue in which she expresses discomfort with the lengths that the other members of Avalanche are willing to go to, telling Cloud she feels trapped between two impossible choices — letting the planet die by doing nothing, or helping to hurt and kill people by doing something. She's also given more dialogue where she struggles with the destruction of Sector 7 and the loss of her bar, bringing back to the forefront old wounds when she lost her family and town in the Nibelheim Incident. In the original, it's mostly Barret who struggles with the aftermath of this, due to losing Jessie, Biggs and Wedge.
  • Cloud, Barret, and Tifa having to jump from the train to make their way to the Sector 5 reactor is just a short series of screens in the original. Here, it gets its own chapter, where they are hunted by Heidegger who is remotely directing efforts to have them found. The period below the plate is also significantly longer, and sheds light on how the slums operate with a plate blocking the sun constantly.
  • The idea that Mako is the life of the planet, and that people's souls return to the planet upon dying, was all sorta just accepted in the original game. In the remake, all of these ideas are treated more like a religion, specifically being called "Planetology", and some characters seem to consider it BS. Likewise, the writings of the Cetra are explicitly referred to as scripture, with Tseng talking about how writings of the "Promised Land" are alternately considered either just fairy tales or allegorical instead of a physical place.
  • In the original game, the Train Graveyard is just a short area Cloud, Aerith, and Tifa cross on their return to Sector 7, notable for having a bunch of undead enemies. Here it's expanded into its own chapter with backstory about children having gone missing in the graveyard, the ghosts of those children playing pranks on them, and the trio confronting the monster that's been killing the children.
  • In the original game, Tifa told Aerith to go to Seventh Heaven and save Marlene before the Sector 7 plate fell, and Aerith got Marlene out off-screen. In Remake, this section is playable, and it shows how Aerith was able to get Marlene out so quickly: she made a deal with Tseng to come along quietly with Shinra in exchange for Marlene's safety.
  • Tifa gets an entire chapter where she helps Cloud get settled into Sector 7 and set up his reputation as a mercenary. Aerith similarly gets a section where Cloud accompanies her in Sector 5 as she helps the locals. Cloud's relationship with Aerith and Tifa is also much more expanded upon than it was in the corresponding section of the original game.
  • Some of these changes such as showing Cloud finding a place to sleep, as well as Biggs and later Tifa mentioning that they haven't had a chance to have a one on one chat, clarify the timeline much better. In the original game you can easily be led to believe that Cloud has continuously known Tifa since they were kids or that he's lived in Sector 7 for years now, now it's clear that he just recently showed up there.
• Adaptation Name Change: Many spells and commands were renamed from the original game's localization. This is in part with modern naming conventions for the FF franchise as a whole, which steadily began with the localization of FFVIII, released in 1999. In turn, Remake keeps up these consistencies, one of which being the FF naming system of spell tiers. As an example, the 2 last tiers of standard fire spells are no longer called "Fire2" and "Fire3" like in the original game. They're now called "Fira" and "Firaga" respectively.
• Adaptational Early Appearance:
  • In the original game, you don't receive your first summoning materia until after leaving Midgar. In the remake, you get your first one before you even go to bomb the second reactor. And on top of that, your first summoning materia is Ifrit instead of Choco Mog. (The Summons provided by the Deluxe Edition and pre-order bonuses are a variant — you can unlock them at the very beginning of the game, but for the purposes of the plot, characters will not acknowledge that Cloud is using the Carbuncle, Chocobo Chick or Cactuar, and will instead speak to him as if he'd never used one before.)
  • The Nail Bat, previously found in the Temple of the Ancients, appears here as a reward from the kids of Aerith's hometown after you defeat the "Toad King".
    • For that matter, almost all of the weapon upgrades especially Cloud's. In the original game weapon upgrades in the Midgar section were extremely scarce as it was really just the prologue of the game. Barret gets an Assault Gun off the first boss and that's all he gets for the entire section, while Cloud is stuck until almost the end of the Shinra building with his starting Buster Sword and can only get a new weapon if the Hardedge is stolen from a random encounter. Here you can buy the Hardedge in Wall Market and there's several other weapons for both of them that aren't acquired until past the Midgar section that can be gotten here such as the Mythril Saber and Steel Pincers (Atomic Scissors in the original)
  • The cloak-wearing Sephiroth Clones didn't appear as such in the original game until your party reached Nibelheim, though an uncloaked one appeared with ambigious foreshadowing (he's the "This guy are sick" guy, he's uncloaked but has a number tattoo.) Here, two are shown inhabiting the slums beneath Midgar.
  • Sephiroth himself. It's easy to forget considering how famous he is now as one of video gaming's most iconic villains and his many, many appearances in spinoff media, but in the original game he wasn't so much as mentioned until the plot had gotten quite underway, and an actual appearance from him came even later. Here, he's already appeared and spoken in Chapter 2 in Cloud's hallucinations, and continues to make regular appearances until the end.
  • Jenova. While its physical body first appears as it did in the original game in the Shinra HQ, the Remake adds an original boss battle against "Jenova Dreamweaver" in President Shinra's office; the first incarnation of Jenova fought against in the 1997 game didn't happen until crossing the ocean much later.
  • In the Intergrade DLC, Yuffie Kisaragi appears in Midgar around the same time as the opening hours of the original game and goes on her own adventures with some new characters.
  • Also in Intergrade, Deepground of all people, including Weiss appear even though they wouldn't show up until a certain spinoff. And the Ultimania confirms that the laboratory Cloud, Tifa, and Barrett explore in Chapter 13 is a part of Deepground.
• Adaptational Modesty: Tifa's updated appearance plays with this. She has a visible black sports bra on under her white tank top, black bike shorts under her skirt, and her original short socks have been replaced with black thigh-highs that send her into Grade A Zettai Ryouiki territory. That being said, her new tops still cover as much as her original did in regards to her cleavage, cover less in regards to her midriff, and her new thigh-highs still show off her shapely legs.
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • Barret. While the original version genuinely cared for his fellow AVALANCHE members, he tended to be harsh with them, calling them "screw-ups" after their successful reactor bombing mission, reacting with anger when Wedge asked about his pay and sending Biggs flying during an impromptu sparring session back at their hideout. Here, Barret is far more pleasant and openly affectionate with his crew. He also intended for them to simply sabotage Reactor 1's Mako pump, rather than blow up the whole reactor like in the original; it got blown up anyway because Shinra was setting them up.
  • Cloud in the original is a lot more standoffish. Here the game makes it much more evident how his tough guy, detached mercenary thing is a facade, and several times he shows a willingness to be supportive, reassuring or helpful to other people that the original character never displayed during the Midgar segment.
• Aerith and Bob: With the release of Intergrade, we now have both the Trope Namer herself and the Avalanche HQ member Billy Bob.
• Agent Peacock: Roche is incredibly flamboyant, hammy and spends his screentime basically flirting with Cloud as they duel. He's still a SOLDIER at the same time, and as such, dangerously skilled in combat.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Discussed if you hit the Hell House with its current elemental weakness. Scotch comments that "the architect must've had one too many when he designed this thing!"
• All for Nothing:
  • In the first half of Chapter 9, Cloud and Aerith detour through the destroyed Sector 6 Expressway to avoid going through Wall Market. Then Don Corneo gets his hands on Tifa, and they end up heading to Wall Market anyway.
  • The entire Corneo subplot ends up being a waste of time. Tifa, Cloud, and Aerith spend an entire day trying to get intel on what Corneo knows, but by the time they get back to Sector 7, the entire Avalanche organization already knows the villains' plot and is actively fighting Shinra's attack. The heroes are too late to save most of their group and fail. If they had been there at the beginning, things might have been different.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Exactly how much Sephiroth and Aerith are in the know regarding everyone's fates (ie what happens to them in the original game). Aerith's case is particularly notable because we don't know if she's aware of anything that happened after she was killed, which is incredibly important context.
  • Due to how early in this story we are, it isn't exactly clear in Remake whether or not Sephiroth is even affected by the Whispers' attempts to ensure the timeline follows the original game. His ultimate goal for Remake is to have the heroes kill the Whisper Harbinger (something he should be more than capable of doing himself), yet when he kills Barret, the Whispers revive Barret rather than try to stop Sephiroth from killing him in the first place. The only logical explanation is that Sephiroth needs the protagonists to be unbound by fate to enact his plan, and uses his very threat and presence to force them into killing the Whisper Harbinger.
  • Pretty much everything involving Zack managing to survive his final stand in Crisis Core. Is this in the Remake timeline, or a unique third timeline? When he gets to Aerith's church, is it right after Crisis Core, or a year after during the time of VII? Is Aerith missing because she's with Cloud and co., or is she now dead in this altered timeline?.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Out of combat, the player primarily controls Cloud, even if he's not made the designated leader in the menus. As with the original FFVII, control temporarily switches over Aerith, Barret and Tifa at specific set pieces.
• Antepiece: The bike chase contains several of them. The first few enemies are easy to beat, allowing you to get the hang of the controls for the sequence while taking them out. Then, an armored truck pulls up which targets you with a machine gun, letting you know both that there will be enemies that take several hits to defeat as well as showing you that there will be things you need to dodge. Finally, just before reaching the tunnel, a helicopter fires warning shots to let you see how its shots work and how they're going to land. Red XIII fully heals you when you get to the tunnel, which is where the training wheels come off and multiple elements you just learned about get thrown at you all at once.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The game tracks progress for battle intel records even if you haven't unlocked the battle intel quest yet. Thus, it's potentially possible to complete a battle intel quest as soon as you get it if you've already incidentally fulfilled all of the requirements.
  • During cutscenes that precede a boss battle, a button prompt will appear asking if you wish to access the menu. If you do, you're given access to the menu just as the fight begins, giving you a chance to change your equipment or upgrade your weapons, since you won't be able to do that once the fight starts. This is particularly handy during consecutive battles that are fought with different parties that don't give you a chance otherwise to change your equipment. Reloading the checkpoint also loads from this moment, in case you forgot to swap or changed your mind.
  • Every time a new weapon is acquired, it automatically has the current max amount of SP gained, allowing you to use them right away with no issues. Also, the materia you have equipped is automatically transferred to the new weapon if you want, provided it has enough slots to fit everything.
  • During periods where you can't use your full party, they still gain levels and SP, allowing them to stay up to date in power and avoid a situation where they Can't Catch Up.
  • The game hands you the Assess Materia (the equivalent of Libra/Scan) early on, letting you view an enemy's weaknesses, affinities, stats, and advising on how to approach fighting them. Assess will also specifically point out, with different-colored text to catch your attention, if an opponent has an attack you can learn with the Enemy Skill Materia as well as the one time a boss has a unique weapon to Steal (Eligor has the Bladed Staff for Aerith, and it's the only place you can get it).
  • Unlike other close-quarter fighters, a melee-equipped Barret can't leap up in the air to deal with flying enemies. So the game allows him to use his ranged abilities with his melee-type arms to shoot enemies anyway.
  • A sidequest in Chapter 14 requires you to find three specific items from other locations for a doctor. You can find these items even if you haven't acquired the sidequest yet, saving the need to backtrack to an area you've already done everything else in.
  • If you take a long time on a puzzle, like the robot arm puzzle with Aerith, the game will give you a hint on how to solve it so you don't remain stuck.
  • If you fail the stealth mini-game of sneaking out of Aerith's house too many times, the game will remove some of the obstacles you have to avoid so that it's easier to complete.
  • Whenever you die, you're given several options on where to retry. Retrying the current fight usually puts you at the position right before it so you can change your equipment. You can also retry from the last checkpoint or load your last save file. Died at the end of a sequence of bosses? You can retry the current fight or start at the very first one. The penultimate battle is one major exception as there are no checkpoints; lose at any point and you'll find yourself at the game's final Point of No Return to do the entire thing all over again.
  • The Chapter Select function after beating the game allows you to go back and pick up items and quests you missed, avoiding Permanently Missable Content. It also allows you to redo choices in the game, instead of needing to load an earlier save, or start a new game entirely.
  • For those who disliked the motorcycle minigame, the game allows you skip the segment in subsequent playthroughs even on Hard Mode without missing any rewards from beating it.
  • The in-game timer will pause after being left idle for about a minute, allowing players to look away from the game to check a walkthrough or do other things without disrupting the ability to tell how long they've actually been playing.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: As in the original game, you're limited to three party members in battle at a time, even on occasions when all four of them (and Red XIII during the late-game) are present.
• Arc Number: Seven, following the tradition of Final Fantasy's numerical symbolism:
  • Tifa's bar is called Seventh Heaven, located in the Sector 7 slums.
  • The house of Jessie's parents, as well as the warehouse she infiltrates, are on the Sector 7 plate.
  • When the pinball machine elevator at Seventh Heaven is used, the score that shows on the machine is 777,777.
  • There are seven top-level executives in the Shinra Electric Power Company: President Shinra, Rufus, Heidegger, Scarlet, Hojo, Reeve, and Palmer.
  • Marco, the hooded figure who lives next to Cloud's bedroom, has the number 49 (or 7²) tattooed on his arm.
  • The Shinra Building has a total of 70 floors.
  • During the End of Creation segment at the end of the game, Sephiroth says "Seven seconds till the end" to Cloud.
  • The various weapons used by Cloud, Barret, Tifa, and Aerith are eventually able to hold seven materia slots.
  • In the darts minigame at Seventh Heaven, one needs to throw seven or fewer darts in order to claim the high score from Wedge.
• Art Evolution: In stark contrast to the original game's blocky, anime art style, Remake goes with the stylized realistic look that the Final Fantasy series has been rolling with ever since VIII. Characters overall have had their designs overhauled or updated to fit with the new style, as well, and the end result is something that lies at around the midpoint between characters' original designs and the designs they were subsequently given in the Compilation.
  • Cloud's outfit, rather than being the darker purple it was in the original game, is now mostly pure black. His famous Anime Hair has also been toned down to be a bit more realistic, though it's still obviously there.
  • Barret has had a massive wardrobe update. While his vest is still ripped at the sleeves, it now looks more stylized rather than improvised. He has more tactical gear added to him, like a bulletproof vest and some cargo clothing, as well as an overhaul of how his Arm Cannon is attached. In the original game, it was seamlessly attached to the end of his arm. Here, it has a large cloth covering to hide the spot where his gun connects to his arm.
  • Tifa has had her overall design made to look a bit more sporty. She now wears stockings, she wears a proper gauntlet on one of her arms rather than just an elbow pad, and she now wears a sports bra beneath her shirt.
  • Aerith has seen only subtle changes, as opposed to the overhauls of other characters, mainly in regards to her jewelry. The original game had her wearing some large metal bracelets, whereas here she now wears two sets of three more colorful bracelets. Her dress has also been given some additional details toward the bottom.
  • In INTERGRADE, Yuffie's signature arm cover is now segmented to resemble armor, rather than just being one large piece of clothing. She now wears a holster on one leg and now also wears a belt, too.
• Artistic License – Physics: As per usual, Cloud's iconic BFS, the Buster Sword, is not portrayed realistically. A Real Life version made primarily out of aluminum, with the heavier steel only used for the cutting edge, still weighed 80 lb (36 kg), but Cloud is seen swinging it as though it's a traditional BFS of about 7 lb (3 kg). Downplayed in that Cloud is explicitly a Super-Soldier with Mako infusion, so Super-Strength is not out of the question; nonetheless, it sticks out because FF7 is actually a rather hard science fiction, with The Lifestream being its One Big Lie.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie were relatively minor characters in the original game, but throughout the first several chapters get a significant amount of development. Jessie, in particular, gets a section where her parents are shown, and her dreams of being an actress are introduced.
  • The Hell House, Eligor, Brain Pod, and Sword Dance were basic random encounter mooks in the original game. Here, all four are boss battles.
  • Side characters Kyrie and Leslie are the protagonists from the novel The Kids are Alright: A Turks Story. They never appeared in the original game.
  • In the original, summons were strictly a gameplay element and had no bearing on the story. While that is still mostly true here, late in the game it's shown that Shiva was actually the one who initially defeated Jenova 2000 years ago, and that in general summons were important in the times of the Cetra; see Olympus Mons below.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: The penultimate boss, Whisper Harbinger, is a colossal amalgamation of Whispers, formed by them in a last ditch attempt to stop Cloud and the others. It's so huge that you don't actually fight it personally, instead having to defeat the creations it summons to get you on the ground.
• Attractive Bent-Gender: When Cloud is forced to crossdress in order to get into Don Corneo's mansion, not only are Tifa and Aerith apparently very into it, but several men in Wall Market make passes at him. Even Chadley is flustered if you talk to him.
• Authority in Name Only: The Mayor of Midgar's responsibilities are to serve as the Shinra archivist, and to allow Shinra to pretend that the city isn't entirely corporate-owned. The Mayor actually helps Avalanche out of disgust at this state of affairs.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Cloud's Nail Bat weapon gives fantastic increases to landing a critical hit. Unfortunately it has poor stats and in Punisher Mode, it will uniquely not have a combo. Instead Cloud will only do a single strike (though this can send an enemy flying back).
• Backported Development:
  • Sephiroth can manifest his single black wing that he had in Advent Children and several spin-off appearances, although he never did this in the original game.
  • The skull tattoo on Barret's left arm is the redesign from Advent Children and Dirge of Cerberus, rather than the original.
• Badass Biker:
  • One of the new characters is Roche, a renegade SOLDIER 3rd Class obsessed with motorcycles, high speeds, and battling strong opponents — earning him the nickname "Speed Demon". In Chapter 4, he is shown picking a fight with both Shinra's security officers and Avalanche and is particularly interested in dueling Cloud.
    Roche: Hahahahaha! Aren't we havin' a wonderful time kickin' the hornet's nest! You know what I want... a second dance. Just the two of us...
  • Cloud is no slouch on a bike, as in Chapters 17 and 18 he pulls some insane stunts with his motorcycle that go far beyond what he did in the original game or even in Advent Children.
• Badass Longcoat:
  • Sephiroth's style is once again complete thanks to his domineering black coat.
  • Rufus Shinra's fabulous white trenchcoat returns and is resdesigned to be decked out to the brim with belts. Impractical? Yes. Imposing? Absolutely.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Sephiroth convinces the party that the Arbiters of Fate must be stopped via context-less visions of the future that will happen if they "fail to stop them", thus freeing destiny up to be changed - just as Sephiroth intended. Not only that, in the resulting fight with Sephiroth, just when it seems that they were winning the fight, Sephiroth draws Cloud into a one-on-one battle and easily beats him, meaning that Sephiroth walks away at the game's end with the win, having gotten everything he wanted. The only thing that keeps this from being a full Downer Ending is that this is only the beginning of the party's quest to stop Sephiroth.
• Balance, Power, Skill, Gimmick:
  • Balance: Cloud has solid attributes all around, and his giant swords and agile combat style make him suitable against large crowds despite fighting at close range.
  • Power: Barret sports naturally high defense and HP, as well as abilities that make him Immune to Flinching, but he moves and dodges very slowly. Ranged weapons make him a Stone Wall with poor damage output in exchange for long reach, while melee weapons turn him into a Mighty Glacier with extremely slow but powerful attacks.
  • Skill: Tifa can zip around the field and quickly damage and/or stagger single targets, but has low HP and defense and struggles with fighting multiple enemies at once.
  • Gimmick: Aerith is more proficient than the others at spellcasting in terms of both stats and support abilities, but prefers to fight at a distance and cannot deal physical damage outside of very niche circumstances.
• The Baroness: Scarlet fits this to a T. A glamourous Lady in Red with strong dominatrix vibes such as using a soldier as a footstool and delights in war and violence.
• Batter Up!: The Nail Bat, which is a baseball bat with nails in it, returns as one of Cloud's weapons. Fittingly, it alters the animations of his Punishment mode attacks, winding up before delivering a powerful swing as though he was a baseball player.
• The Beforetimes: The Planet was once home to the Cetra, a group of people capable of communing with the Planet and manipulating the Lifestream, but who were all-but wiped out when the Calamity from the Skies arrived two-thousand years ago. Shinra's HQ has a virtual reality simulator that depicts the Cetra's civilization at its height as looking like something out of medieval fantasy.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Aerith can go through Corneo's rape mansion, an Absurdly Spacious Sewer, a Train Graveyard, and have helicopters explode in her face, and by the time she gets to Marlene, she still smells nice, like a flower. Contrast Biggs and Tifa, who both frequently proclaim their need for a shower. Clearly a Cetra power now.
• Begin with a Finisher: The Götterdämmerung grants you a Limit Break at the start of combat, allowing you to open up with your ultimate move.
• BFS: Cloud's iconic Buster Sword returns, and he has no problem spinning it around and hefting it over his head. In addition are the other swords you can equip for him: The Iron Blade, Hardedge, the Mythril Saber and the Twin Stinger.
• Big Bad: As the game is adapting the first third of the original, President Shinra is the primary target of Avalanche due to being the leader of the Shinra corporation and this time, he displays far more direct antagonism towards them. Unfortunately for him though, he is still only the Disc-One Final Boss.
  • By the climax of part 1, Sephiroth and the president's son, Rufus Shinra, share the position. The former's new impending goal involves altering fate so that he wins and the latter assumes the role of leading Shinra to the Promised Land.
• Big Bad Wannabe: The Sahagin Prince. According to the description provided by the Assess Materia, he believes the only way his species can thrive is to conquer the surface world. Those are some pretty bold plans for what's ultimately a King Mook to some sewer-dwelling turtle-men that the protagonists slaughter without a second thought.
• Big Damn Heroes: While the Whispers are an ambiguously neutral force that only serves to protect the Planet, they do come to the heroes' aid multiple times during the end of the Shinra HQ segment, including saving Barret's life and protecting the heroes from meeting a messy end several times during the motorcycle chase sequence.
• Big Good: Once again, Aerith takes over the position when the party begins to pursue Sephiroth, being the one with the most knowledge of his plans and the power to alter them.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Bad Guy Wins, as Sephiroth has successfully manipulated things so that the protagonists destroy the Arbiters of Fate, freeing him from an inevitable defeat Because Destiny Says So. That said, this is only the beginning of the story, so there's still hope that they'll stop Sephiroth from becoming a god. And while Sephiroth is no longer destined to lose, this goes both ways, freeing characters from inevitable deaths, since Biggs and Zack are shown to be Spared by the Adaptation.
• Black Dude Dies First: Turned into a meta-joke. Sephiroth kills Barret near the end of the game, but the Whispers resurrect him on the spot because he was never supposed to die. In an interview dating back to the original's release, Barret was a candidate for getting killed off by Sephiroth, but the developers chose Aerith instead because they believed Barret would have been "too obvious".
• Blade Lock: Cloud leaps at Sephiroth with his Buster Sword in an attempt to cut him in half, only for Sephiroth to nonchalantly block his attack with the Masamune as a Mythology Gag to the beginning of their duel in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children (which was itself referenced in Crisis Core, which would be rather recent in the minds of players in a chronological playthrough). They lock blades once again as a lead in to the final boss battle, and once more during their confrontation at the "edge of creation".
• Bland-Name Product: In the final chapter, the motorcyle Cloud is riding is named as a "Hardy-Daytona," an obvious spoof of the real-life Harley-Davidson motorcycle company.
• Bloodless Carnage: Through all the fighting done with a variety of weapons, not a single drop of blood is seen. Not even when Cloud slashes Shinra troopers across the torso with the Buster Sword in a few cutscenes.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The playable cast's starting weapons (Buster Sword, Gatling Gun, Leather Gloves, and Guard Staff) are all fairly straightforward to use, don't have super high stats, and lack the visual appeal of some of the other weapons. At the same time, they have a balanced attack and magic stat, a decent amount of Materia slots and learn mostly straightforward upgrades, while also avoiding changing the characters' moveset too dramatically like some other weapons do. As a result, they remain reliable and useful the entire game, if not as powerful or unique looking, and only really need to be replaced by weapons with more specialized stats or movesets.
  • On Hard mode, Chakra. An easy-to-acquire materia that allows you to restore a percentage of your HP and cures poison. While not as useful as items and not as potent as healing spells, items are restricted on Hard, meaning both your HP and MP cannot be restored on the fly. Chakra, which uses no MP and only one ATB bar, becomes a quick and easy way to heal yourself. The removing poison effect is a major strength as well at late game fights.
• Boss Battle: Naturally, the game has plenty, and its bosses can be roughly organized into tiers. Aside from stronger-than-usual normal enemies, there are Mini Bosses that may be Elite Mooks or King Mooks, or the party's first encounter with a higher-level enemy that will be treated as a normal enemy later. Above them are the bosses who may not be particularly important to the story, but are a distinctly stronger foe than other encounters you've faced, and will take a bit more effort to bring down. At the top of the pyramid are the Climax Bosses who tend to be very long, difficult fights against foes who are built up by the story, and they tend to come with their own boss music (or a unique remix of the normal boss theme) and a big action setpiece for the fight to take place in.
• Boss-Altering Consequence:
  • Rude will refrain from using most of his attacks against Tifa and Aerith, just as he did in the original version of the game.
  • If you use a Fire attack against Abzu, it will set it ablaze and it will jump into the water to quell the flames.
  • The Airbuster can have its moveset altered prior to the battle. By gathering key cards scattered throughout the control rooms, you can alter how often the boss uses certain attacks depending on which terminal you use.
• Boss Bonanza:
  • At the end of Chapter 17, you fight four straight boss fights against Swordipede, Jenova Dreamweaver, Rufus, and the Arsenal without any regular combat in between. You can save and heal between the first three, but Rufus and the Arsenal are fought consecutively.
  • In the final chapter, after completing the main portion of the bike segment, you are thrown into three back-to-back fights in a row against M.O.T.O.R., Whisper Harbinger, and Sephiroth, and may only save between the first two.
• Boss Remix: Some of the boss battles use a remix of the main battle theme instead of the theme regularly used for boss battles in the original. The boss fights against the Turks and Rufus Shinra even incorporate elements from the regular Shinra theme.
• Boss Rush: The final Shinra Virtual Combat Simulator mission has you fight your way through every previous summon battle (plus Ifrit) before fighting the game's ultimate Superboss.
• Both Sides Have a Point: Both Aerith and Sephiroth are attempting to save the Planet from something. Sephiroth believes the best way to preserve the planet is to sacrifice those living and return them to the Lifestream while Aerith firmly believes that's not what the planet wants.
  Aerith: He'd tell you that he only cares about the planet. That he'd do everything in his power to protect and preserve it. But this isn't the way it's supposed to be.
• Bragging Rights Reward: Averted with the Gotterdammerung, the ultimate accessory acquired by completing all Colosseum, Battle Simulator, and Battle Intel missions, then beating the Superboss that's unlocked in the Battle Simulator. It grants the equipped character a full Limit gauge at the start of every battle and regenerates said gauge at a rapid pace. While getting it requires beating the game's toughest individual battle, it doesn't require beating any of the game in Hard Mode except the Superboss itself, making it extremely useful for completing the rest of the game.
• Breaking Old Trends: Due to Cid Highwind not appearing until past the part of the story that VII Remake covers, this is the first Final Fantasy game since the original NES Final Fantasy where no character named Cid appears or is even mentioned.
• Break Meter: The Stagger Gauge is below the Health bar, when this is filled your enemy is knocked down and helpless, taking at least 160% damage (this can be raised well beyond 400% with certain abilities). If they take too much damage, get hit by an attack they're weak to, or have a body part broken, a conscious enemy will get the "Pressured" status applied to their Stagger Gauge, "pressured" increases the rate that the Stagger Gauge fills.
• Broken Heel: Jessie of Avalanche in trips and gets her foot stuck while trying to escape from the exploding reactor. Cloud stops to help her and they make it out right as the reactor explodes, even if the timer has not run out yet.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: According to Reno, SOLDIER is an entire group of them. While at first he doesn't believe Cloud's claim of being ex-SOLDIER, he admits Cloud is certainly weird enough to fit in.
• Busby Berkeley Number: The Honeybee Inn hosts lavish nightclub-style productions featuring the famous bumblebee-costumed ladies paired with men in top hats and tails, fittingly named Honeyboys, within a honeycomb-decorated lounge. While Cloud's routine to impress Andrea is just the two of them, it's bookended by a grand theatrical spectacle.
• …But He Sounds Handsome:
  • When you do the Angel of the Slums quest, you encounter a village gossip in Sector 5 named Mireille who provides you information to help you on the quest, though she wouldn't give a Shinra reporter the time of day before. After you complete the quest, if you talk with her again, she comments that "You know, there's a rumor that the Angel of the Slums is as radiant and beautiful as she is daring. I think that one is true." The game drops several hints that Mireille is the Angel of the Slums and outright confirms it if you complete another quest much later in the game.
  • During the "Tomboy Bandit" sidequest, when you confront Kyrie, she denies being Kyrie before claiming that Kyrie is a cool name.
• But Thou Must!: Played with in the gameplay and the narrative. There is a surprising amount of choices available (Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith have three different dresses each based on choices you make, and there's a "date" scene with Tifa, Aerith, or Barret towards the end of the game that also is affected by your choices), but the narrative itself is linear. However Sephiroth's plan is to destroy the status quo and create a future where he wins, which involves manipulating the main characters to destroy the Arbiter of Fate. There are strong implications that Aerith and Red XIII understand that they are potentially making things worse by destroying the Arbiter, as while Tifa, Barret, and Cloud are all confused by the flashes of the future, the other two seem to understand the implications much better. However, it appears that they also think that there's a possibility to make things better, even if they don't know what will happen.
• Butterfly of Doom: Inverted; Johnny's father overstocking on grappling guns leads to Biggs getting some for the rest of the Avalanche gang, which leads to Wedge having a means of surviving the fall from the Sector 7 tower that killed him in the original game, his survival then leading to him being able to convince one of the security officers to open the gates into Sector 6 before the plate falls, and the gates being open leads to countless lives that were lost in the original being saved.
• Call-Forward:
  • In the opening cinemantic, a child looks towards the rather violent expulsion of mako out the top of one of the Mako reactors, which then crossfades to what looks like a starscape, visually reflecting the climax of the original game where the Lifestream expels out of the planet to repel Meteo.
  • Once again, a man in black's phone goes off at the end of the battle, using the Victory Theme as its ringtone to signify their opponent got the best of them. In Remake it's Rude, while in Advent Children it's Loz.
• Casting Gag: One of the weapons Cloud can wield is a baseball bat with nails. His Japanese voice actor, Takahiro Sakurai, voices one of the two main characters in Ace of the Diamond, a popular baseball series.
  • Once again, the powerful main villain Sephiroth is voiced by someone that played Superman.
• Central Theme: Predestination. Throughout the game, characters discuss the uncertainty of the future, feelings of being trapped doing something they don't want to do, following a path they cannot or will not deviate from, and if things are fated to happen or if they can be changed. Sephiroth's goal is directly stated to be "to defy destiny". The main party has sliding stances on fate. Cloud hates it because he believes he has no control over anything as it is and that fate only exists to make his life miserable, Barett is initially frustrated with it due to the seeming hopelessness of the situation in Midgar but becomes more hesitant of going against it after he's brought back from the dead by the Whispers on the order of the planet, Tifa is scared but somewhat accepting of it, and Aerith takes much comfort in it but also is more and more guilty defying it because she's afraid of her constant visions of being impaled to death by Sephiroth that she knows will happen if she doesn't do anything to stop it.
• Cerebus Retcon: The addition of Aerith's fear of abandonment does this to Crisis Core, where her lover Zack goes missing for four years without explanation. At face value she seems rather brave-faced in her letters to him, but now one can only imagine where her thoughts went during that time, only to suddenly sense his death one afternoon.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Early on, you can see a Shinra recruit get reprimanded for being too soft with civilians. It's played for laughs, but when the Sector Seven plate falls, that recruit goes against orders to open the gates and let people escape.
• Climbing Climax: Three of the final four chapters involve the heroes ascending the ruins of Sector 7 and the Shinra HQ building, and Cloud's final battle of the segment takes place on the HQ building's roof.
• Clock Roaches: The Whispers are essentially this, interfering whenever someone tries to alter the fated course of events, i.e. the plot of the original game. They mostly do this by simply swirling around the target and creating an obstructing force, though occasionally they actually attack as well.
• Close-Knit Community: One of the things that separate the slums of Sector 5 and 7 from the Den of Iniquity that's Wall Market. Sector 7 may be impoverished with many people making a living from scavenging but they're tight with each other and the local watch. Sector 5 is basically a retirement home with an orphanage, it's the small town of slums and both sectors have one of your main female characters as the local sweetie. In contrast, Wall Market has Don Corneo and his lackeys though the Trio do provide some stability.
• Coin-Targeting Trickshot: One of Rufus' attacks in his boss fight involves throwing coins into the air, then firing his shotgun at them so the bullets ricochet off the coins and hit Cloud.
• Combat Commentator: The arena battles Cloud and Aerith take part in when in Wall Market feature commentary by two of Don Corneo's lackeys, Skotch and Kotch, who use it to hype the audience up.
• Continuity Reboot: The remake has been stated to not be connected to the original Compilation, and while it mostly follows the original game's plot with some Adaptation Expansion that doesn't contradict any established canon, the ending implies that will not be the case with future parts.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: Since the boss fights are much bigger, more drawn out spectacles, any undead boss you fight is immune to Revive Kills Zombie - you can still damage them with cure spells, but phoenix downs and Raise won't instantly kill them. The game simultaneously downplays this trope, many players of other Final Fantasy games are pleasantly surprised when they find out that major bosses have a far more restricted range of immunities and resistances, such as Rude and Reno can be easily poisoned with the Bio spell series. This makes the Assessment ability a great help in fighting bosses.
• Controllable Helplessness: Much like in the original, there's points where the player loses virtually all control of Cloud, who can only stagger in a particular direction until the sequence ends. Unlike the original, these points happen much sooner in the story, since Sephiroth's now aware of the importance of Cloud's actions in Midgar and actively trying to manipulate him. There's also a version that's Played for Laughs if the party chooses to take the stairs to climb Shinra Headquarters instead of the elevator, with Cloud's movement gradually getting slower and harder to control alongside the soundtrack slowly turning warbled and mushy.
• Cool Shades:
  • Barret sports a pair of fancy sunglasses while blasting through enemies and bosses with his guns and brazenly narrating that he would "take the load off your shoulders!".
  • Rude has his iconic shades back that serve to make him look stoic and coolheaded. Just like in Advent Children, he keeps extra pairs in his suit just in case one gets damaged.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: President Shinra, CEO of the Shinra Electric Power Company, is a greedy and ruthless tyrant who rules over Midgar through fear, crushing those who oppose him with his corporation's private army and the Turks. During the opening bombing run when Avalanche cripples Mako Reactor 1, Shinra orders the robots to destroy the reactor itself, causing massive property damage and chaos and panic across Sectors 1 and 8, to make Avalanche seem responsible and paint them as terrorists.
• Cosmic Retcon: Apparently in connection to the defeat of the Arbiters of Fate in Episode 1, Zack somehow survives the Shinra ambush that killed him in the original FF7 timeline.
• Cosmetic Award: Doing great in the dance sequence gets you Andrea's Earrings... which do nothing.
• Counter-Attack: Cloud can do one automatically by guarding in Punisher Mode, and a fair number of opponents are most easily defeated by simply turtling up and letting them beat themselves up.
• Cover Drop:
  • At the start of Chapter 16, Cloud gives Shinra Headquarters a steady gaze as he readjusts the sword on his back.
  • When Sephiroth disarms Cloud during their duel, Cloud's sword sticks into the ground in an identical fashion to the title screen.
• Crapsaccharine World: Midgar. On the surface it seems to be a city with all the modern amenities of an early 21st city, one of the most advanced locations in the world, and its citizens who get to live above the plate speak of it as a utopia where they enjoy peace and security with a quality of life far beyond anything any other town could offer. Of course, Midgar is built above the slums, which are shantytowns built out of piles of scrap left behind in Midgar's construction and are horribly polluted and infested with dangerous monsters, mako-mutated animals and science experiments, and berserk robots. Even when it comes to life on the plate, Midgar's infrastructure areas are poorly maintained, parts of the city are still under construction and have been abandoned in a half-finished state, and the mako reactors can't power every part of the city, just the most important ones. While Midgar seems like it would be a great place to live on the surface, it's made pretty clear that it's started to fall apart even without Avalanche's intervention. Part of this may be because Shinra has already set its sights on building Neo Midgar in The Promised Land and thus have little care for the original, "proof of concept" Midgar.
• Creative Closing Credits: After the song "Hollow" ends and shortly after an orchestrated version of "Aerith's Theme" begins, the closing credits show cutscenes from the beginning of the game to the very end.
• Crossdressing Voices: Exaggerated In-Universe. When Don Corneo picks Cloud for his date, Dude Looks Like a Lady but doesn't change his voice. Corneo does not comment on this whatsoever, which could be explained either by the devs not wanting to commission custom voice lines for that outcome or Corneo being into that.
• Cry into Chest: Happens between Cloud and Tifa in Chapter 14 if their affinity rating is high enough. Tifa, whom had until this point maintained a relatively stoic and forward-thinking attitude following the destruction of Sector 7, finally breaks down and cries into Cloud's chest after reflecting upon all that she has lost in her life (note that the aforementioned loss marks the second time that her home and livelihood have been taken from her). Cloud—himself also being a Stoic Woobie who has difficulty connecting with others—finally opens up and hugs her in response; enough that Tifa soon has to interrupt him for holding her so tightly to the point of nearly hurting her.
• Cutscene Incompetence:
  • The characters are often pinned down by gunfire from Shinra's forces but, in actual gameplay, most firearm-wielding enemies just deal Scratch Damage you can ignore. Justified however in Hard Mode where said gunfire can really add up and you'd want to have as much HP as possible.
  • On the flip side, you could make a drinking game out of how many times Shinra's troops have their guns pointed squarely at a target but don't actually try to shoot them, or prefer to chase their target instead of trying to shoot them. They only remember to use their guns when the plot calls for it.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: In cutscenes, characters can perform all sorts of fancy acrobatics and attacks. The gameplay is much more restrained — characters can't even jump unless performing a special attack, but they can leap unrealistic distances when a cutscene requires it.
• Cyberpunk: Like the original game, it has super-soldiers, bio augmentations, metropolis, and corrupt enterprises. However, it's less noticeable since the technology of today and the one from the world is similar. It's still a sci-fi game though.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The triangle button no longer opens the menu. If you've played the original, you'll probably find yourself pressing that button a lot to open up the menu.
  • If you're playing the remakes in timeline order, this game will invoke this if you're coming off the Crisis Core remake, Reunion. Many commands are mapped differently, including the Map, the Block button and the Attack button, not to mention the menu-based combat in Remake that's not present in Reunion.
• Darker and Edgier: While the original Final Fantasy VII was pretty dark, Remake goes into slightly darker territory. A few characters die on-screen instead of by implication, the more graphic aftermath of Shinra's atrocities are shown, political propaganda plays a big part in making Avalanche out to be terrorists, and the main characters are much more vulgar in their speech patterns (including swearing more often). Then there are the Arbiters of Fate trying to keep characters that were Spared by the Adaptation from coming back, along with Sephiroth getting a complete victory by the game's ending. Many events from the original game are also treated with a more appropriate gravitas, due in part to the writers being more aware of the real-world implications:
  • The bombing of Mako Reactor 1 is more visibly destructive for an explosion of that size, leaving rubble everywhere, wrecking infrastructure, and setting several blocks on fire. The loss of power in a chunk of the city is also directly highlighted.
  • The lead-up to the Sector 7 plate drop has a new section for Aerith recovering Marlene, showing terrified civilians desperately trying to escape as their home falls apart, children getting lost from their parents, and so-on.
  • The aftermath of the Sector 7 plate being dropped is given far more weight: many background characters will despair at the loss of their home, feel Survivor Guilt, or fearfully wonder if all the plates can be dropped, whether you interact with them or not (in the original, you can not talk to any NPCs and miss all of this). In one particularly harrowing instance, a woman will suffer an outright panic attack and has to be guided out of it by another civilian.
  • The rather extreme methods of Barret's Avalanche cell are called out much earlier on and more severely than before: several characters rightfully point out that while his cause is just, his actions still make him a terrorist depriving a city of basic needs like electricity and public transportation. Further, many topsiders know that the Mako Reactors are draining the planet and don't care about it regardless, making Barret's actions the wrong approach and ensuring his message falls on deaf ears.
• Dash Attack: One of Cloud's new combat abilities is the "Focused Thrust", which allows him to lunge forward several yards in a single stab attack. Also Dash Attack is really what the Parry Materia is, Cloud does a cartwheel rush, Tifa does a Slide Attack while Barret and Aerith will shoulder charge the enemy.
• A Day in the Limelight: After being absent for four chapters in a row ^note After Cloud gets seperated from Avalanche in Chapter 7, Barrett doesn't physically reappear again until Chapter 12. Barrett suddenly becomes the primary focus and even the main playable character of Chapter 13.
• Deadly Upgrade: The mako infusion process that turns people into SOLDIERs has serious long-term health implications (namely the Degredation from Crisis Core), something the public as a whole isn't told about, though recruits are - when they've reached a point that they're no longer willing to back down.
• Death Glare: Cloud (Disguised and Dragged Into Drag) gives one to Don Corneo right before being dragged off to his private room as his newest chosen bride; not that this terrifying glare does anything to stop the Don. Knowing how quickly Cloud resorts to violence, it's no surprise when he makes good on his silent threat a few minutes later.
• Deconstruction Game: The first episode is a deconstruction on what a "remake" is. The idea is primarily represented by the Whispers, who practically represent the concept of Railroading — several points in Remake differ from the original game, but any time a significant divergence would occur, the Whispers intervene and force characters to do things as they did in the original game. This includes stopping characters from going places they shouldn't, forcing characters to go places they weren't intending to, killing characters who otherwise might have been Spared by the Adaptation, and saving characters who otherwise would have died before their time. The intent is to demonstrate that Adaptation Expansion means that certain plot events would likely unfold in different ways than the original game, and such minor changes can ripple out and cause larger shifts to the tone and direction of the narrative.
  • It can also be interpreted as deconstructing what the purpose of revisiting the story should be. The Whispers can be seen as representing the fans, who would prefer an authentic, 1:1 remake of a beloved story, while the characters (Sephiroth included) represent the writers, fighting against this notion for a new story in the same setting that they'd find far more interesting. By the end of the game, the characters win and are "freed from the script", throwing the door open for complete divergence in the sequel.
• Defrosting Ice King:
  • Cloud starts off the game being very cold and distant towards the other members of Avalanche, clearly only being interested in the money. His only soft spot is Tifa and eventually Aerith, who encourage him to break out of his shell and interact with more people as well as to have some fun. By the end of the game, Cloud is a lot more open and caring of those close to him and eventually of the planet itself.
  • The unnamed Gatekeeper in the Corneo Colosseum starts off as dismissive and indifferent towards Cloud and Aerith, but after their second victory in the Corneo Cup, he begins openly rooting for them.
• Delusions of Eloquence: Beck, the self proclaimed leader of Beck's Badasses, clearly doesn't understand what he's saying half the time. The Assess materia even states that his special ability is Feigning Intelligence.
  Beck: How stupid can you be? It's crazy simple! "Compensatory damages" is like... Compensation... For damages!
• Demoted to Extra: Red XIII is not playable in the first part of the game, even when he joins the party. It is justified, in that the Shin-Ra HQ is the final dungeon of the part. Even in the original, you only really got to use Red for at least 2 mandatory fights (a third, if you used him for Motor Ball) before the overworld.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • During the fight with Rude, he only actively attacks Cloud because he is under orders to take Aerith in unharmed. If the player switches to Aerith, Rude will throw an item at her that puts her to sleep, ensuring she cannot fight but also won't get hurt. Furthermore, Rude will only hurt Aerith if his attacks end up hitting her by accident.
  • A few quests will adjust their dialogue if the player already has a missing component before you're required to get it. For example, one side quest involves going to the Sector 5 cemetery and killing the monsters there, but you need to buy the key from an NPC using Moogle Coins. If you bought it beforehand, Aerith will comment that you already have it.
  • Combat commentators Scotch and Kotch have multiple lines of unique dialogue during Cloud and Aerith's fight with the Hell House. If you manage to get a summon out while fighting it, they will acknowledge it and have a unique dialogue about which summon was called out, including summons that would normally be impossible to have at that point of the game on the first playthrough, although all DLC summons have the same quote.
• Diabolus ex Machina: Possibly. The ending reveals that the Sephiroth whom Cloud and the party have been encountering at specific points throughout the game may or may not be the same Sephiroth from after the events of Advent Children, having somehow gained the ability to time travel in an attempt to avert his defeat at the climax of the original game's plot.
• Dialog During Gameplay: The party banters both in battle and while navigating the maps. You'll also hear passing conversations among townspeople, who also call out to Cloud regarding what missions he has accomplished as his reputation as a mercenary builds.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: Barrett will sometimes yell out the original game's victory theme after finishing a battle. It also appears in the Wall Market colosseum as in-universe fanfare each time you win a round.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Madam M's "massages." We see enough to know she is massaging Cloud's hands, but the atmosphere, the way she talks, Cloud's reactions to what she's doing, and the camera angles which conceal exactly where her hands are, all scream "this is a stand-in for another kind of massage that we can't depict." After the massage is over, Aerith serves as the temporary playable character because Cloud is exhausted from the massage.
  • The events of Chapter 12 call to mind 9/11, particularly with the rather fraught and panicked response by the public before fall of the Sector 7 plate that's present in the Aerith section, which was not present in the original game. The aftermath invokes this too: the player can pan the camera up and see the Sector 7 plate is no longer there, painfully revealing the sky behind it.
• The Don: Don Corneo, a lecherous crime-lord in Sector 6's slums who takes a new woman as his "bride" each night before feeding them to his pet monster Abzu when he's done having his way with them.
• Double-Edged Buff: The Sedate and Fury statuses both affect the player in positive and negative ways. Sedate raises the target's defense but lowers the Limit gauge fill rate. Fury raises the target's Limit gauge fill rate but lowers their defense.
• Double-Meaning Title: Remake refers both to the fact that it's a new edition of a game that came out in 1997, and to the fact that Sephiroth is trying to remake history so he'll win.
• The Dragon: Heidegger, being the man in charge of Public Security (i.e. Shinra's military), serves as this for President Shinra himself. In contrast, Tseng is this for the president's son, Rufus Shinra. By the end of the game, once Rufus assumes control of the company, Heidegger shows hints of jealousy towards Tseng for being favored.
• Dual Boss: In a slight deviation from the original game, Reno and Rude both fight Cloud and the gang on top of the Sector Seven pillar instead of Reno on his own.
• Dub Name Change: Several bosses have their names changed, such as Guard Scorpion to Scorpion Sentinel, Hundred Gunner to The Arsenal, Heli Gunner to The Valkyrie, and certain enemies also had their names changed such as Chuse Tank to Terpsicolt, or Rufus' dog who had his name changed from Dark Nation to Darkstar. However, the Japanese version of the game retains virtually all of the original enemy names.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • At the end of Chapter 2, Kyrie Canaan (the main female protagonist of The Kids Are Alright, a novella that was published before the release of Advent Children and acts as its prequel) can be spotted in the train, and at the start of Chapter 3 she can be spotted in the background of a cutscene stepping out of the train. Her presence is left unspoiled (with the subtitles referring to her as "???", reserved for important characters), but she appears again in Chapter 14, with greater prominence and her own sidequest.
  • Leslie Kyle, another character from The Kids Are Alright novella, appears as one of Don Corneo's enforcers before turning on him and setting out to search for his missing fiancée.
  • At the end of Chapter 12, Cait Sith makes a brief unvoiced appearance racing to stop the Turks from dropping the Sector Seven plate, only to see he's too late and collapse in grief.
  • By looking through a keyhole, Palmer can be found in the Honey Bee Inn, entertaining himself, long before we meet him at Shinra HQ.
• Elevator Escape:
  • When the party first makes Hojo their hostage at his lab, he manages to distract them by releasing Specimen H0512 and then making a quick exit via the elevator.
  • When they encounter him again after freeing Aerith and Red XIII, Red charges towards Hojo with the intent to kill, but Hojo manages to get into the nearby elevator, and the door slams shut in Red's face Just in Time.
• Empathic Environment: Used in the Twist Ending. In the original Crisis Core, the weather turns dark and rainy at the end of Zack's Last Stand as he is ultimately overrun and killed by the last of Shinra's forces. In this game's ending, the weather remains bright and sunny as he holds out, manages to bring down the entirety of the enemy army, and limps off to Midgar with Cloud in tow.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • When Hojo suggests torturing Aerith to get the location of the Promised Land out of her, President Shinra and the department heads (minus Reeve) are so enthusiastic that they almost sound like children planning a surprise party. However, the moment he suggests forcibly impregnating her to produce "backup" Ancients, their reactions range from merely uncomfortable to outright disgusted.
  • A cutscene featuring Reno, Rude and Tseng reveals that the former two are expressing regrets about their role in the Sector Seven plate collapse. Tseng attempts to ease their minds to no avail.
• Evolving Weapon: Unlike the original game, each individual weapon is now upgradeable and grows alongside the characters themselves, allowing even the starting ones (like Cloud's Buster Sword) to remain viable throughout the game.
• Everything Fades: Compared to the red fade of defeated foes in the original, the remake has the enemies you genuinely slay fade away into the Lifestream on the spot, falling in line with how death has worked in the Compilation before and serving as an optimization method for performance at the same time.
• Everything Is an iPod in the Future: Shinra's simulation of Neo Midgar depicts it as a sleek white-and-black high-tech metropolis, as opposed to the dystopian Diesel Punk/Cyberpunk aesthetic of the current iteration of Midgar.
• Extremely Short Timespan: In total, the game takes place over a period of 3-4 days, only adding an additional day to the original game's Midgar sequence. Despite the short timeframe, the characters can come off as lifelong friends.
• Fake Longevity: Both mitigated and played straight with Chapter Select. While it's possible to jump to any chapter in the game after viewing the ending, the player can only start at the beginning of each chapter, when most of the diverging content for side quests and other 100% Completion factors don't begin until about halfway through most of them, requiring having to replay many of the same scenes/dungeons over multiple times without anything changing.
• False Flag Operation: Made more explicit here compared to the original, but Avalanche's bomb merely made Mako Reactor 1 inoperable; it was Shinra themselves (more specifically Heidegger, under President Shinra's orders) who went the extra mile and obliterated it, causing untold death and destruction, and all just to frame Avalanche and ruin their reputation. After Heidegger sets off the bomb on Mako Reactor 5 himself, Shinra claims that Avalanche is being bankrolled by Wutai so that they have an excuse to declare war.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Midgar is based on New York City, with it having similar architecture and being a massive metropolis dominated by capitalism with great class division amongst its population. The remake furthers the comparison by emphasising how the city is a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities from all over the world.
• Fantasy Counterpart Religion: Planetology, a religion based on the faith and teachings of the Cetra, is alluded to throughout the game. While many believe it to just be stories of a time long-past, Shinra is attempting to pervert its message to hunt for the "promised land" mentioned in its scriptures. Barret is a true believer, Jessie studied it for a bit, and Aerith is indicated to be a practitioner as well, as her skill point upgrade items consist of Planetology tomes.
• Fed to the Beast: After he's finished using his brides, Don Corneo will drop them into the sewers where he allows his pet, Abzu, to feast on them. He does the same to Cloud, Tifa and Aerith after he reveals to them Shinra's plans for taking care of Avalanche.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Throughout the opening cinematic, Sephiroth's iconic One-Winged Angel theme is heard (in the original it didn't appear until the final boss at the very end of the game), and at a certain point it spooks Aerith out of the LOVELESS Street alleyway due to his implied presence, rather than her calmly walking out onto the street. This foreshadows Sephiroth's far greater involvement early in the game to manipulate the story, as well as Remake being far more metatextual than the original game.
  • In the opening cinematic, after some of Aerith's flowers are knocked on the ground, one of them is trampled by a careless passerby. Later, when she meets Cloud and shows him her materia, he has visions of her kneeling in prayer and the materia bouncing away. Both foreshadow her eventual fate from the original game.
  • In Chapter 2, one of the Security Officers recognizes Cloud's sword and tries to get the others to hold their fire. This is an early clue that Cloud wasn't a member of SOLDIER, but a rank-and-file grunt. The Buster Sword is deeply tied to Zack Fair and Angeal Hewley, both SOLDIER First Class, who many Shinra grunts would recognize. For Cloud to have it is the strange part.
  • Near the end of Chapter 2, after Jessie has explained the workings of the train system, Cloud has an internal monologue about how everyone is just like the train - following the tracks with no deviation. This metaphor ends up being proven entirely untrue when Sephiroth manipulates the cast into defeating the Whispers, sending the entire timeline Off the Rails... this line existed in the original game as well, but oh boy does Remake recontextualize the significance of it.
  • In Chapter 3, Cloud has a hallucination of a chunk of Sector 7's plate crashing down onto him, foreshadowing Shinra's eventual plan to collapse the plate and crush Avalanche.
  • Moments later in Chapter 3, when Cloud offers Tifa the flower he received from Aerith, he mentions how people can change in 5 years, to which a confused Tifa gives a very quick "Huh?" before the subject changes. In the original game, Tifa and Cloud have a similar exchange that isn't shown until later in the game, to which Tifa reveals that it's actually been 7 years since she last saw Cloud. This helps hint at Cloud's status as an Unreliable Narrator.
  • In Chapter 8, an optional piece of dialogue has Aerith tell Cloud that he needs to be more outgoing if he plans on making a living out of his merc business with Cloud deferring to her as the better face of the two. Aerith lightly reprimands him, saying "don't think you can rely on me forever, mister." When Cloud reassures her that he's not planning to, Aerith very somberly replies "That's good" before perking up and clarifying "Because I demand a very good salary." This exchange not only foreshadows Aerith's terrible life expectancy, it also heavily implies that Aerith is aware of the fact that she's now walking towards her death.
  • In Chapter 16, the holographic recording of Reeve in the Shinra exhibit hall explains that an expressway to connect all the sectors together is under construction. This is the very expressway the party uses to escape Midgar in Chapter 18. And since it's under construction, there's no civilian traffic on it.
  • The nature of the Whispers, the Arbiters of Fate, is obvious only in retrospect, but very clear on a rewatch: any time the game seems to be about to go off the rails from the original game (Cloud is about to miss Aerith, Jessie is going to go on the Sector 5 Reactor mission instead of Cloud, etc.), the Whispers show up and do something to get things back on track. This first feels like things getting fleshed out in the first few chapters, giving more nuance to scenes that were quick in the original game, but it gets more explicit after falling into the Sector 5 Church: Cloud is clearly getting the best of Reno, but he's literally dragged away by the Whispers, and they keep him from going back to finish the fight. When they start showing up in the Sector 7 Tower, and looming menacingly over characters destined to die who are actually winning (the camera cuts away), it's clear that they are doing something to make sure that things go the way we "know".
  • An example that carries into Rebirth, the second game, during Cloud's interaction with Sephiroth shortly after the opening bombing mission, Cloud is initially clearly afraid of Sephiroth. But Sephiroth says a certain line that rouses Cloud to anger to the point he actually tries to attack Sephiroth. At first, it seems that Sephiroth is just taunting Cloud which pisses him off, but the opening flashback of Rebirth reveals that Sephiroth was quoting Cloud's mom's dying words at him, which makes Cloud's sudden anger much more understandable.
    Sephiroth: Which is why I must ask you this one favor. Don't worry, it's a simple thing. Run, Cloud...run away. You have to leave...you have to live.
    Cloud: You bastard!
• Forgotten Fallen Friend: Cloud doesn't outwardly display any recollection of Zack despite the two knowing each other from the war. Whenever Cloud is reminded, he experiences strong migraines. This is due to intense trauma and memory suppression relating to Zack's death in the unaltered timeline.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: In the scene where Zack survives the Shinra ambush, there's a brief shot of a chip bag depicting Stamp blowing by in the wind. However, this Stamp is a terrier instead of the beagle depicted in the rest of the game, another indicator that the timeline has been altered.
• "Friends" Rent Control: In a crowded slum where most buildings are cobbled together out of scrap metal, Aerith lives in a relatively small, three-story wooden house with a large landscaped lawn. Elmyra lived there with her husband before she met Aerith, but it's implied that the girl's presence is what lets the flowers and plants near her house grow with such vigor, especially in the middle of the mako-draining ecological dead zone that is Midgar. That's no explanation for the house itself, its well-kept condition, and its location along one of the only natural creeks in the slums.

G-O

• Gameplay and Story Integration: The Turks are supposed to keep tabs on Aerith and keep her safe until she agrees to come to Shinra. So when fighting Rude with Cloud and Aerith, he'll very rarely uses his abilities against her, preferring to stun and/or sleep her, forcing you to switch to Cloud.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Getting any of the pre-order bonus Summons (Carbuncle / Cactuar / Chocobo Chick), which can be unlocked and used at the very beginning of the game, can play havoc with later cutscenes, as other characters (like Jessie, Barret and Tifa) introduce the concept to Cloud like he's never found or utilized a Summoning Materia before.
• Gang Up on the Human: Very visible when switching characters, the enemies will stop attacking their targets to focus on the one you're controlling now. It's still possible for them to finish their combos or deal a few attacks to other characters, but they'll almost always focus on you.
• Gatling Good: Besides Barret, another example was during the rescue where an Avalanche strike team saves Cloud, Biggs and Wedge from the rush of Sweeper mechs. The first Sweepers are gunned down and an Avalanche trooper emerges from an alley with a massive minigun mowing down more Sweepers. Then more Avalanche forces come out with assault rifles and annihilate the rest. This shows much military might the mainline Avalanche can field, unlike Barret's group who're funding themselves by selling water filters and helping the neighborhood watch.
• General Ripper: Heidegger's animosity towards Avalanche is now extra pronounced. He was once a high-ranking soldier in Shinra's army and now presides over Public Security with an iron fist, determined to wipe Avalanche out until there's nothing left with narry a care for what happens to his own men.
• Get a Room!: In Chapter 9, as Aerith is fishing for Cloud's opinion on her outfit, Madam M quickly loses patience with their antics.
  Madam M: Look, just... take it outside the parlor, would you?
  Aerith: Sorry, we'll stop.
• Goldfish Poop Gang: Beck's Badasses, a group of thugs that reside in the Sector 6 tunnels and come into conflict with Cloud and the gang several times. They're really not as badass or as clever as they think and end up getting humiliated each time they're encountered.
• Groin Attack:
  • Aerith delivers a sudden kick to Scotch's groin when she and Tifa are taking out Don Corneo's men.
  • The famous "cut 'em", "rip 'em" and "smash 'em" threat returns immediately after when Cloud and co. are extracting information out of the Don.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • The Proficiency unlocks for some weapon abilities are somewhat unspecific. They tell you that you need to do a specific thing — the Hardedge, for instance, requires you to "Strike a staggered enemy" — but never clarify that you are supposed to do that specific thing with that specific attack (in this case, Infinity's End). In some cases, it's implied (Cloud's Triple Slash requires you to "Strike three or more enemies"), but in other cases, it's not (Cloud is good at hitting multiple enemies even if you're just pressing Square).
  • The Stagger Effect Part 1 intel. Good luck figuring out what the description means by "using a unique ability on a staggered enemy" without looking it up.
  • All of the mechanics behind the dresses for Cloud, Tifa and Aerith are never called out during the game, let alone explained. While this is purely cosmetic, you get a Trophy for seeing each character's full trio of dresses. Even with Chapter Select it requires replaying almost a quarter of the game two extra times, assuming you get the desired results both times.
  • The night-time meeting scene before the Shinra HQ operation also counts, since it ties to completing side quests in Sectors 5 and 7 plus a "tiebreaker" choice after Wall Market, which again require replaying almost a quarter of the game (since alterations don't actually stick until the Chapter is completed).
• Guns Akimbo: In the second phase of his boss fight, Rufus splits his shotgun into a pair of Hand Cannons to unload bullets onto Cloud. It's even the skill name.
• Guns Are Worthless: Played with. Cloud, using a giant sword, has no problem fighting guards with machine guns. However, there are some long-ranged enemies he can't reach with the Buster Sword, prompting players to switch to Barret and use him to get them with his gun-arm. This is lampshaded by Jessie the first time the player encounters such a problem.
  Jessie: There are some places a sword just can't reach.
• Hannibal Lecture: President Shinra gives a stinging one to Barret when he tries to take him hostage, pointing out even though Avalanche is opposed to the use of mako reactors, they still haven't given any thought to what would happen if Midgar were to be suddenly deprived of its sole source of energy. The people would immediately turn on them the moment the power shuts off.
• Happy-Ending Massage: Madam M's "Luxury" hand massage is treated as one, as she uses Pressure Points to stimulate the nerve ending on Cloud's hands, and the way Cloud grunts and moans heavily imply he's experiencing an unexpected orgasm. After the massage is over, he walks out of the room in a trance-like, almost euphoric state and a confused Aerith serves as the temporary playable character until he "recovers".
• Have a Nice Death: Dying to the Hell House has Scotch and Kotch narrate the player's defeat with an appropriately dramatic line during the Game Over screen.
• High-Five Left Hanging: On the way through the tunnels to get to Sector 7, Aerith attempts several times to high five Cloud, who doesn't register what she's trying to do. He finally gives her one after they make it out of the area, and again later on after they defeat the Hell House.
• HP to One: Sephiroth performs Heartless Angel by throwing his sword into the ground, which emits a large field. Anyone who isn't able to escape in time will instantly have their HP reduced to one and temporarily stunned, which Sephiroth won't hesitate to take advantage of.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: When Tifa and Aerith are fantasizing about going shopping after saving Sector 7, Tifa jokes that they'll make Cloud carry all their purchases. Aerith plays along, saying: "He'll be our pack chocobo!"^note rather than the typical beast of burden, a pack mule.
• Hopeless Suitor:
  • Jessie quickly establishes that she finds Cloud very attractive and flirts with him throughout the bombing mission, but he either ignores her comments or responds with annoyance. It then gradually downplays during Jessie's moment in the spotlight, but Cloud never fully opens up to her before her death.
  • Like in the original, Johnny is this to Tifa, albeit played more for comedy than Jessie to Cloud.
• Hotter and Sexier: Despite fears of Tamer and Chaster due to changes in the social landscape of The New '10s and The New '20s, the Wall Market Section of the Remake is definitely this to the original, with the caveat that the homoeroticism is changed from being rather homophobic in the original to something that's more about embracing one's own sexuality. The overall atmosphere of the area is also devoid of the blocky characters of the original in favor of much more conventionally high-resolution characters using modern graphics, who are of course more visually appealing than the low-poly and almost entirely untextured originals.
• Humanoid Abomination: Jenova, a planet-eating alien entity that manifests as a female-looking humanoid. One of her more monstrous boss forms is fought against in Shinra's headquarters.
• Hypocrite: The main branch of Avalanche has cut ties with Barret's cell before the events of the game, ostensibly because their actions are too extremist. This is despite the fact that, as Biggs bitterly points out, they're the ones who run around in full mil-spec gear. And if players know about Before Crisis, that game revealed that the original Avalanche was actually more extremist then Barret's cell.
• I Shall Taunt You: During the Airbuster boss fight, Heidegger's hologram floats overhead and taunts Avalanche about their supposed inevitable defeat.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Much like the original game, President Shinra is killed by Sephiroth this way. Unlike the original game, Sephiroth also does this to Barret immediately after, although due to a strong deviation from the original story the Whispers quickly intervene and heal his wound.
• Impractically Fancy Clothes: Should Cloud be able to get Aerith the most expensive dress, he and all other onlookers are blown away by how good she looks in it as Johnny rolls out a red carpet for her. Appearances aside, Aerith complains about how difficult it is to walk around in.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The Twin Stinger is initially the best balanced stat sword that Cloud has. It starts with 4 materia and pretty decent stats, and it's the final weapon Cloud unlocks normally. When you get it, it's a pretty good weapon. But by the time you've gotten all of the skill tomes and maxed out your weapons, the Twin Stinger is inferior to the Buster Sword, Cloud's starting weapon, in every category except extra MP, and not by much.
• Informed Equipment: Zig-Zagged. Each playable character is shown wielding their equipped weapon in real-time. Adding onto that, some materia is also shown being visibly slotted in the weapons and armor. That said, if weapons are modded to have extra materia slots, those are not visible, and armors and accessories remain invisible.
• Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: The party members are able to perform all sorts of acrobatic jumps in battle and in cutscenes, but out of battle are helpless to hop over railings or across small gaps, and there's no jump button at all. Cloud can slice apart crates of wood and steel without effort, but small stacks of items of the same materials completely block his path and are indestructible, and locked wooden doors might as well be adamantium.
• Interface Screw: The screen itself glitches, is covered with a pale green, and the sound is overlaid with static when Cloud realizes a contradiction between his true memories and Zack's.
• Jiggle Physics: Don Corneo of all people is given jiggle physics for his belly.
• Just Before the End: The aptly named 'End of the World' where Cloud and Sephiroth face off. The area itself is a place where time has stopped and should time resume, the world would immediately meet it's end in seven seconds.
• Kimono Fanservice:
  • Madam M is styled after an Oiran, and so wears a loose, off-the-shoulder kimono to match the sensual aesthetic of her massage parlour.
  • One of Tifa's new outfits you can select for the Wall Market sequence is a shortened black kimono.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: Tifa and Aerith beat up a room of Don Corneo's men while wearing fancy dresses. If you make the correct choices, those dresses will be reimagined versions of the ones they wore in the original game during this point in the story.
• Laser Blade: In Chapter 16 and 17, Shinra's Armored Shock Troopers use "beam swords" that look suspiciously similar to lightsabers.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The game is resplendent with Continuity Nods, Mythology Gags, and Call Forwards to the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII — including many that were plot twists in the original game, such as Cloud having a vision of Aerith's death, or Cait Sith being affiliated with Shinra.
• Later-Installment Weirdness: The change of format from a three-disc game to a full-on trilogy of separate games caused this game to be the first released after Final Fantasy II that doesn't feature any mention whatsoever of a character named Cid.
• Laughing Mad: Professor Hojo lets one out in the aftermath of Avalanche's assault on the Shinra building when he observes the now ruptured and empty tank Jenova was kept in.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • The narrator of the reveal trailer, who is heavily implied to be Sephiroth. In context, his monologue is presumably referring to the time that has passed between the destruction of the Cetra and summoning Meteor. On a meta level, it's a clever allusion to the impact the original game has made and fan frustration and speculation over the intervening years over whether or not a remake would happen, even acknowledging that it may not work out.
  • One can certainly view this in the Whispers, if you see them as representing the perspective of the fans wanting an authentic remake and the main characters representing the perspective of the writers wanting something more creatively interesting.
  • In the beginning of the Intergrade DLC, Yuffie's reveal starts with her saying, "Well guys, your girl finally made it to Midgar," almost like she's addressing the fans who have been waiting for her debut in the Remake.
• Left the Background Music On: In the opening cutscene, while Aerith is crouched in an alley examining a broken mako pipe, an eerie female voice interjects into the background music singing "Estuans Interius",^note The first lyrics of Sephiroth's boss theme, One-Winged Angel. and she is visibly alarmed and looks around before hurriedly exiting the alley.
• Lens Flare: A prominent lens flare effect is present in Chapter 15 as Cloud, Barret and Tifa stare down at the remains of Sector 7.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: Cloud makes it clear that this is how he views wearing drag to get into Don Corneo's mansion. The instant it's brought up after the fact he immediately shuts it down.
• Lighter and Softer: While still maintaining the overall gravitas and seriousness of the original, the aesthetic of Midgar is a lot less grungy. While the denizens of lower Midgar in the original often looked like punks and thugs, in the Remake, they are just everyday people trying to get by. This is particularly noticeable with Wall Market (and PARTICULARLY noticeable with the Honey Bee Inn). In the original, Wall Market felt like the scummiest place on earth, filled with all sorts of lowlifes, while Wall Market in the Remake is more of a "legitmate" adult entertainment district (with the shady stuff occuring in the side alleyways). And as far as Honey Bee Inn goes, it was all but stated to be something of a brothel in the original, while in the Remake it's a more classy cabaret. Aside from that, multiple events end up with happier results than they did originally. While basically everybody from the Sector 7 slums died in the original when the plate fell, the party is able to return to the slums fast enough in the Remake to begin an evacuation that gets most of the residents out alive. On top of that, Biggs and Wedge survive the dropping of the plate (though Wedge may have been killed by the Arbiters of Fate later) and it's implied Jessie did as well in the Remake, where they most definitely did not in the original.
• Limit Break: The Limit Break system makes a return, albeit reworked a bit. Fighting in battle fills up the ATB Gauge, which can be expended to perform special attacks (among other actions), some of which are the character's original Limit Breaks, like Cloud's Braver. But characters still have actual Limit commands and a Limit gauge that fills up as you fight and can then be expended to use a Limit Skill, but this takes much longer than the ATB Gauge.
• Locked Out of the Loop: While President Shinra was the one who masterminded the False Flag Operation to destroy Sector 7 by targeting its support structure, it's clear that only a very small number of those who actually work for Shinra (mostly the board of directors and the Turks, and maybe a select number of mooks who were there at the time as well as those close to the Shinra top brass) are aware of the truth, and the rest are fed the same public lie that Avalanche was responsible.
• Long-Runner Tech Marches On: The original Final Fantasy VII, and the Compilation, which rolled out over the course of the mid 2000s, featured cell phones that were bulky flip-phones with keypads and small screens. Remake, released in 2020, instead has slim touchscreen smartphones. This is partially justified for at least Crisis Core because it took place five years earlier and Shinra is always on the bleeding edge of technology, but makes less sense regarding Advent Children and Dirge of Cerberus.
  • Subverted and played straight regarding TVs, to highlight the disparity of living conditions in Midgar. On top of the plates, and in Shinra HQ especially, all the displays are sleek flat-panels or even holograms, while the Slums have CRT "tube TVs" from the time the original VII came out or even earlier.
• Lost in Translation:
  • In the original, one notable case was translating a Japanese word that is more like "acquaintance" into English "friend", causing players to think Cloud and Tifa were closer than originally implied in childhood. In the remake, in chapter 1, when Jessie asks Cloud about them, this time English dodges this by only saying Cloud "knows" Tifa, but Chinese still used "friend". On the other hand, during the childhood flashback, both Japanese and Chinese specifically have Tifa saying Cloud is ignoring her again, which is lost in English.
  • At the end of Chapter 2, as Cloud is surrounded by Shinra grunts, one of the troopers pauses and remarks "Wait, I know that-" right before Cloud experiences a headache which blocks out the rest of his words. Much later in the game, in the Shinra HQ, a trooper outright recognizes Cloud and talks to him like an old friend. Most gamers made the assumption that this was the same trooper. However, the English and Italian versions of this Chapter 2 scene failed to include the word sword in the trooper's words (for example, "Hey, that sword is-" in Japanese^note "Oi, sono ken wa-", "Hey, but... that sword..." in French^note "Hé mais... Cette épée...", and similar among other languages). The very plot-heavy implication is that the actual reason for Cloud's headache is that the trooper didn't recognize Cloud, but rather recognized the Buster Sword as belonging to Zack and said his name out loud, which triggered Cloud's memory problems. This means the two troopers are not the same person... which is something that got lost on English and Italian players.
  • At the beginning of Chapter 10 after defeating Abzu, Aerith makes a weird-sounding laugh that sounds something like a cross between "Mmm-hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm!" and a horse whinnying. However, in Japanese, the sound Maaya Sakamoto makes is more akin to a high-pitched "Ho-heeee!" This is the sound Don Corneo frequently makes in Japanese and also supposed to be a Japanese onomatopoeia for the sound a pig makes, thus likening Don Corneo to being a disgusting pig. This change was so confusing that Aerith's English voice actress, Briana White, had to spend almost five minutes explaining the laugh is supposed to be a mocking parody of Corneo's laugh when she was streaming the game on Twitch.tv.
  • The slightly infamous "Mine!" scene, where some find Aerith to be a bit catty and possessive over Cloud, is an invention of the English dub. Even the sound Tifa makes is more disgruntled than scared in the English dub, which overall plays up the love triangle more.
  • In Chapter 14, during the dream sequence with Aerith, her response to Cloud's promise to come save her in English is "If that's what you want... thank you" which can give off the impression of being dismissive and/or resigned. The original line in Japanese is much more appreciative and reciprocal toward the other party's feelings, as it is along the lines of "This is so frustrating... but I'm so glad"^note "Kuyashii kedo... ureshii".
  • During the elevator escape scene in Chapter 17 while the group is separated, just before the boss fight against the Arsenal, the English dub depicts Barret and Aerith having a brief exchange where Barret quips that they gotta believe the others made it out okay, Aerith responding "I hope so" in a rather neutral voice while clasping her hands in prayer. The original Japanese line, however, has Aerith simply say Cloud's name and in a much more worried tone, making it clear that she's primarily concerned for his wellbeing.
  • The scene in the final chapter immediately after the final boss battle is over has a subtle vocabulary change in Japanese that is impossible to translate into any other language: during Cloud and Sephiroth's confrontation at the End of the World, also known as the "edge of creation" (in Japanese, the "leading edge of the world"), Sephiroth addresses himself as ore instead of watashi which is the personal pronoun he'd been using for the entirety of the game up to that point. What this means for the story is pretty significant: ore was how he spoke of himself before he went insane and is a strong indicator this isn't the same Sephiroth who has been haunting Cloud's visions. In fact, this slight change is so big that it easily qualifies as a Wham Line for Japanese players.
  • The final line of the game in English was Aerith saying "I miss it. The steel sky." The meaning being that she is now outside of Midgar in a big, wide world that is overwhelming her, which calls back to her conversation with Cloud in Chapter 8 on the rooftops. However, her line in Japanese evokes a very different emotional response: she says "The sky... I hate it."^note "Sora... kirai da na" An interview with Tetsuya Nomura in the Final Fantasy VII Remake Ultimania artbook explains that for Aerith, the (natural) sky is a symbol of sadness to her, as it is blocked out by the plate (ironically, the "steel sky"), both her mother and Zack died underneath the sky, and the Calamity From The Sky destroyed the Cetra. All this adds up to almost sounding like the complete opposite of her line in English. Shortly before Rebirth's release, a patch changed this line to "This sky... I don't like it." which is a much closer translation of the Japanese line.
• Lovable Rogue:
  • Yuffie in the DLC is still the shifty materia hunter she always has been, with an adventurous and daring personality to suit her line of work.
  • The remake introduces Kyrie, a local thief whose sidequest involves tracking her down to get back a wallet she stole from Johnny, and who is as plucky as Yuffie is.
• Luck-Based Mission: The difficulty of the workout minigames (especially on the highest level) can fluctuate depending on when in the round the computer controlled opponent fumbles. Too early and they'll build up momentum again and overtake the player. Too late and they may have too great a lead to surpass.
• Mad Scientist: Professor Hojo, the head of the Shinra Corporation's Science Research Division and mastermind behind the SOLDIER Program. A man who values an exceedingly twisted view of science and experiments on various specimens, humans included. His new introduction pretty much compounds what kind of person he is, in which he passionately taunts Aerith about retrieving and dissecting her mother in graphic detail.
• Magikarp Power:
  • The Pedometer materia does nothing at first. Should a player walk five thousand steps with it equipped, it becomes the AP Up materia, which doubles the AP gain of any materia that it's linked to.
  • The Buster Sword is forced to wait a long time for decent upgrades, with the bulk of its good stat boosts crammed into the last three Weapon Levels and the final two Linked Materia Slots coming in at Weapon Level 6, which you usually won't unlock until New Game Plus. Fully upgrade it, however, and it becomes a powerful Jack of All Stats weapon that is viable pretty much anywhere.

• Make Wrong What Once Went Right: Sephiroth's plan. He knows that in the plot the Arbiters of Fate are enforcing, he's going to lose (he seems to be from the future somehow, possibly because linear time is less meaningful in the Lifestream). By manipulating the heroes into destroying the Arbiters for him, he opens up the possibility of his plans succeeding this time.
• Manipulative Editing: Effectively what Sephiroth is doing to the heroes at the end, showing them negative-looking visions of events from the original timeline out of context. For example, a vision of Red XIII running in a wasteland is actually from the Distant Finale after the heroes had won. He also does this with Cloud, only taunting him after abject failures (even when they were "meant" to transpire) so that Cloud gets frustrated with how things are going, and thus is motivated to kill the Whisper Harbinger as Sephiroth intends him to do.
• Manual Leader, A.I. Party: This is how the party works, to a point. While your party members are controlled by the AI, you can still issue them direct commands in Tactical Mode if they have enough ATB to do so, and you can swap the character you're actively controlling on the fly with the D-pad.
• Marathon Boss: The penultimate boss fight against Whisper Harbinger is a massive doozy. Cloud, Barret, and Tifa start by fighting Whisper Rubrum, Whisper Viridi, and Whisper Croceo, then once you deplete their health to a certain point, the fight moves onto another platform where the trio fight Whisper Rubrum alone. Upon defeating it and depleting Harbinger's health, Aerith and Red XIII rejoin the party, only for Tifa and Aerith to get separated from Cloud, Barret, and Red XIII, leaving them to fight Viridi and Croceo. After defeating them and depleting Harbinger's health further, the party regroups and Barret and Red XIII leave while Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith fight Whisper Bahamut. After defeating him, you then have to defeat Rubrum, Viridi, and Croceo once more each to allow Barret and Red XIII to chew through Harbinger's HP, then go for the kill once Harbinger collapses. The kicker is the fight is a one and done deal; die at any point and you have to restart the entire sequence.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Wall Market is so named because the government decided to just wall it in rather than try to deal with the lawlessness there - out of sight, out of mind.
  • The title does indeed indicate it's a remake in more for the fact that the plot is literally being remade as the story diverges heavily from what happened in the original and now seems to be the focus of Sephiroth's new plan.
• Mecha: Shinra's army is comprised of not only soldiers, but large mechas as well. They were used in the previous war against Wutai (and against Genesis' forces in Crisis Core), and now serve as security for their bases. A good percentage of boss fights in the game are against these machines.
• Meta Twist: The fact that this is a remake hides the fact that Nothing Is the Same Anymore after the ending, completely changing how the next chapter of this saga is going to go. Characters who were supposed to die end up spared, characters who appeared at certain points in the original story either appear much earlier or not at all, new characters are introduced, and what's going to happen to any of them is entirely up in the air. The ending even starts with the words "The unknown journey will continue". In some aspects, the game has been compared to Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty due to both having meta-narratives that start off with what people expect (the Tanker Mission in MGS2 and the Bombing Run in FF7Remake) but by the end turn out to be deconstructions to what people expect out of a game sequel or remake.
• Middle-Management Mook: Shinra's department heads, most of whom are ruthlessly ambitious and cruel:
  • Heidegger — the Shinra Company's Head of Public Safety (read: the military) — is shown advocating for the use of extreme force against Avalanche and disparaging his more benevolent colleague Reeve Tuesti for protesting the civilian casualties that would ensue.
  • Scarlet — the Shinra Company's sadistic Head of Weapons Development — is shown forcing a Shinra security officer to serve as a footstool while she reclines in an opulent chair.
  • Palmer — the gluttonous head of the Shinra Company's space program — is shown gushing about how much he loves to put butter in his tea.
  • Professor Hojo — the head of the Shinra Corporation's Science Research Division — is stated on the game's Twitter page to have no regard for human life in his highly unethical experiments, and is shown spying on Cloud following his brief clash with Sephiroth and gleefully remarking that his hypothesis has been proven correct.
  • Reeve Tuesti — the head of Shinra Company's Urban Planning Division — is shown to be the Token Good Teammate and Only Sane Man among the department heads since he has genuinely good intentions and abhors his colleagues' disregard for human life.
  • There's a recurring minor NPC encountered in the early parts of the game explicitly called "Shinra Middle Manager" who repeatedly gets into arguments with Barret about Avalanche's methods, and while clearly intimidated by the Scary Black Man still stands his ground defending who he thinks are the good guys.
• Mirror Boss: The penultimate fight involves a battle against future entities who wield a sword, a gun, and their fists, mirroring Cloud, Barret, and Tifa. You even have that exact party for the first phase of the fight.
• Miserable Massage: To convince Madam M to help Aerith get into Don Corneo's manor, Cloud must pay for a hand massage. If Cloud opts for the cheapest option, the "Poor Man's Course" he ends up visibly in pain and his health bar actually shows that he took damage. This is taken up to 11 when mixed with the subtext of that particular option, making it seem more like a prostate massage than a hand massage. The fact that the camera never shows where Madam M's hands are in any of her "massages" help to bolster the imagination.
• The Mole:
  • Chadley is an assistant scientist at Shinra, but is secretly trying to bring them down. Once you meet him, he starts making new materia for Cloud so he can gain the extra skill to topple the corporation.
  • There are some hints throughout the game that someone is helping Avalanche with their operations from behind the scenes. It turns out to be The Mayor of Midgar himself, the self proclaimed "man on the inside". He assists Avalanche out of anger for Shinra using him as little more than a figurehead.
• Money for Nothing: Averted for a while due to Chadley's Materia increasing in price with each copy purchased, but eventually played straight. As Chadley only has a limited number of copies of each unique Materia, and all other Materia can be found on the ground, the only other thing to use money on late in the game is consumable items, which are disabled on Hard Mode. Once Chadley's stock is exhausted, the player's gil count is liable to quickly spiral out of control. The moogle medal alternative currency doesn't fare much better, as nearly everything that can be purchased with medals is a one-time purchase, and a certain late-game sidequest makes it trivial to acquire dozens of medals.
• Mood Whiplash: The State of Play trailer cuts from Barret being told to give orders while a fire rages in the background to Aerith offering Cloud a flower. And then cuts back to a combat system showcase.
• Moving the Goalposts: Cloud and Aerith enter the Corneo Colosseum with the intention of winning the tournament so that Madam M will get Aerith a fancy dress. After Cloud and Aerith win despite all of their opponents clearly cheating, Don Corneo says that Cloud and Aerith need to win one more match against the Hell House before he'll actually pay up.
• Muscles Are Meaningless:
  • Cloud has the musculature of a fit young adult, while "too small" to swing around the Buster Sword the way he does, let alone heft it. Justified by the fact he was in SOLDIER and has Super-Strength.
  • Tifa has no real explanation for how she got strong enough to smash through armored robots with her bare fists while looking like an ordinary fit woman.
• Mythology Gag:
  • During the opening bombing run, Heidegger remarks that Avalanche may be the same group that once tried to assassinate President Shinra, a reference to the first iteration of Avalanche attempting to do so in Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII. The group actually appears later in the game, where Biggs explains they're a precursor group to the Avalanche Barret leads.
  • In the Corneo Colosseum and VR missions, the characters will use their victory poses from the 1997 original every time they win a battle. They'll even be lined up in a row with the camera rotating around the front of group, matching the angle used in the original game where these animations were originally seen.
  • Following victory in battle party members make comments that depend on how well / badly the player performed. If Barret is present one possible response is to hum the victory tune from the original Final Fantasy VII. Yuffie can also hum the victory tune after battles in the Intermission DLC.
  • Moggie the Moogle Medal collector's theme music is a near-perfect replica of the Golden Saucer background music from the original game.
  • When President Shinra is informed that Cloud is a former member of SOLDIER, he mockingly states that SOLDIERs have greatly decreased life-expectancy due to the experiments performed on them and that Cloud probably doesn't have long to live — a reference to the cellular degeneration that Genesis and Angeal underwent in Crisis Core.
  • Not only does Rude carry spare sunglasses in his jacket pocket, he also uses the same German Suplex move he used on Loz in Advent Children during his boss battles.
  • After Wedge gets his butt chomped on by a Shinra guard dog, Wedge quips that at least his ass wasn't set on fire — a reference to Wedge's pants being ignited after the Sector 1 Reactor bombing mission in the original Final Fantasy VII.
  • During the first battle with Reno, if you step on the flowers too many times, Aerith tells you that you are going to catch holy hell. In the original, when Reno tells his soldiers not to step on the flowers (while doing it himself), his soldiers start ribbing him, one of them saying that exact line.
  • The Wall Market quest to help Johnny is actually made up of several smaller sidequests from the original game strung together via a Chain of Deals plot (revolving around retrieving the dressmaker's Honey Bee Inn VIP card, which was also an important item in the original). In both games, Cloud's effectiveness in these quests determines the quality of the dress he wears to infiltrate Don Corneo's bride selection.
  • The uniforms worn by SOLDIER operatives in the Shinra Building have a rather different design than before, looking more like biker coveralls. This is perhaps a way to fix the continuity error caused by Crisis Core, which used different color palletes for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Class SOLDIERs compared to the original game.
  • If you take the stairs up the Shinra Building, Barret complains that he'd prefer a hopeless last stand because at least that would have an ending compared to climbing the stairs. He says this when he reaches the 47th floor, the SOLDIER floor serving as the hub for Zack in Crisis Core, who dies in a hopeless last stand in said game.
  • While in the Shinra building, Cloud runs into a Shinra guard who recognizes him from when Cloud worked there and says he's going to go get Kunsel. Kunsel was a friend of Zack's in Crisis Core, another SOLDIER.
  • During a Shinra executive board meeting, Professor Hojo mentions the S and G SOLDIER variants from Crisis Core while suggesting they force Aerith to reproduce. Later, he contemplates Aerith and Sephiroth being bred as well, a subtle reference to Aerith and Sephiroth being conceptualized as lovers at one point during the development of the original game.
  • In Shinra HQ it is possible to find a picture of the company's founders. The character in the middle of the picture, presumably the first president Shinra, is wearing a suit and a gas mask. The gas mask is identical to one worn by a character named Shinra in Final Fantasy X-2 who develops an interest in studying the Farplanes as he believes it has limitless lifestream energy flowing through the planet which can be extracted and used, even if it would take generations to develop the technology. Since FFX-2's release, it has long been a fan theory that FFVII and FFX take place in the same universe, just not on the same planet.
  • In Shinra Tower, Mayor Domino (an Avalanche plant) tells the group that another Avalanche sympathizer in the building will respond to the code phrase "The Mayor" by saying "...is the best!" enthusiastically. In the original game, to get the Mayor's keycard one had to solve a puzzle whose answer was a four-letter word (determined randomly for each playthrough). One of the possible answers was BEST, which would cause Domino to enthusiastically crow about how awesome he is.
  • The boss on the top floor of the Shinra building is a piece of Jenova, and during its third phase it begins dripping black sludge very reminiscent of Geostigma from Advent Children.
  • Hojo now has his own leitmotif, called "Cultivating Madness", and it's effectively a slowed-down version of Jenova's boss theme "J-E-N-O-V-A". This makes sense, because in the original game Jenova's boss theme played when Hojo was fought as a boss at the end of Disc 2, due to him having injected Jenova cells into his own body.
  • During a confrontation with Sephiroth at the Drum, he blocks Cloud's attack in the same manner as the beginning of their duel in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.
  • During a confrontation with Sephiroth, Cloud's left arm begins to ache — the same arm that was afflicted with Geostigma in Advent Children.
  • In the Shinra building's The Drum section the player has to command two separate parties, switching between them at terminals. In reference to the original game's system for changing party members, the terminals are called "PHS Terminals".
  • In the original VII's development, Barret was originally going to be murdered by Sephiroth, but this was changed because the developers thought his death wouldn't sting enough. Near the game's closing as things go off the rails, Sephiroth does kill Barret this time. Thankfully the Arbiters of Fate don't let it stick as part of their attempt to right the rapidly spiraling out of control series of Screw Destiny the crew is unknowingly undergoing.
  • In Chapter 18 during the escape from Shinra when Barret asks Red XIII to smile, it's reminiscent of Tidus asking Kimahri to smile and getting the same result.
  • The end of the Jenova Dreamweaver boss fight has the monster revert to a deceased Sephiroth clone, referencing "Advent Children" when a defeated Sephiroth reverts to a dying Kadaj.
  • The semifinal boss of the game is against three Whispers who fight with a single sword, twin guns, and a large fist. The Ultimania confirms that they're a reference to Kadaj, Yazoo, and Loz from Advent Children, who had the same fighting styles. These bosses also fuse into a copy of Bahamut, and in Advent Children Kadaj summoned Bahamut SIN.
  • In the final chapter, the cutscene showing Zack preparing to make his last stand is almost a shot-for-shot remake of the same scene as it appeared in Crisis Core, complete with Zack having the exact same dialog. With the exception of Arbiters of Fate swarming the battlefield and surrounding Midgar in the distance being different.
  • Whenever you complete Chadley's requests, he will exclaim "I've done it. I've developed a new materia!"
  • Since summons work like temporary party members instead of a single big hit, they've been given new moves to work as their Summon Abilities. Almost every single one of their abilities have the same names as attacks used by the Primal boss fight versions of said summons in Final Fantasy XIV, with a few also perfectly translating the effect and animations of the attacks.
  • A few locations have stills from the original game hanging on the walls as paintings; most prominently, Seventh Heaven and the Gainsborough household both have pictures of their 1997 incarnations.
  • Sephiroth's attacks in the Final Boss fight are based on his appearances in Dissidia Final Fantasy and Dissidia Final Fantasy (2015), including Telluric Fury, Aeolian Onslaught, Scintilla, Octaslash, and Hell's Gate.
  • Intergrade features combo attacks where Yuffie can use Sonon's staff as a springboard to launch attacks from, very similar to the kind of combo moves Gladiolus and his sister Iris could pull in Final Fantasy XV.
  • The new ending scene from Intergrade features the party walking from Midgar to Kalm, as they did in the original game. However, the background of the landscape looks extremely similar to Leide, the desert/badlands region that serves as the very first area of Final Fantasy XV. It also visually matches the wasteland where Zack made his final stand in Crisis Core.
• New Game Plus: After beating the game, the player can use Chapter Selection to go to any point in the story that they wish while retaining levels, items, equipment, and materia. The game also gives a flat Experience Booster of double EXP and triple AP across a chapter-selected game.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • While Avalanche is primarily concerned with saving the planet, they also fight to protect and better the lives of the people living in the Sector 7 slum. However, their bombing of mako reactors tends to cause a lot of problems. Disruptions in the rail network caused by the bombings means residents who commute from the slums to the upper plates can't go to work, and the slums suffer severe supply shortages when they can't ship goods in from the upper plates. As a result, even the undercity residents are heavily divided over whether Avalanche are saviors of the planet or a terrorist menace.
  • Cloud and his friends completely play into Sephiroth's plans and destroy the Arbiters of Fate. In doing so, they've destroyed the timeline where Sephiroth is already established to have lost, and gave him another opportunity to destroy the planet. It's also implied that this Sephiroth knows everything his counterpart went through in the original game, while the heroes (with the slight exception of Aerith) are improvising as they go just as the same as before.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Sephiroth's plan isn't completely without unintended side effects, even if it keeps the timeline where he was defeated from happening and allows him another chance at his plans. This clues in Aerith very early that something isn't right to begin with (as early as the opening cinematic, note that she runs from something in fear rather than just walk out of the alley as in the original), as well as somehow created a timeline where Zack survived his initial death and made it to Midgar with Cloud. Notably, Sephiroth playing the heroes into destroying the notion of fate means that they are just as free to defy fate as he is, they're all aware of what his intentions are, and Aerith seems to be aware of how things are supposed to transpire to some degree. Indeed the future isn't set in stone, but that likewise goes for his plans as well and he may have allowed for changes that he wasn't intending.
• Nice Mean And In Between: In the original, Tifa is the nice one, Barret is the mean one, and Cloud is in between. In the Remake, it alters this trope so that Cloud is now the mean one, continually getting into pointless arguments with people, pushing people away for trying to help him, having to be restrained from killing unnecessarily, and being flat out told by Tifa that he's scaring her, while Barret is still loud and confrontational but in a much friendlier, more community-spirited way. The thread about him punching his men is dropped in favor of him being A Father to His Men, and his initial conflict with Cloud is played more like he's trying to make friends with Cloud but keeps rebounding off Cloud's awful personality. Notably, Tifa, in the original, takes Cloud's side and defends him in front of Barret, but in Remake she's most likely to take Barret's side and appeal to Cloud's better nature to control him.
• No Endor Holocaust: The game does this for the Sector 7 plate falling — while it was devastating, many citizens were able to evacuate in time, some people actually survived in the rubble, and the ending gives hope that the refugees are starting to rebuild. This is a sharp contrast to the original game, where the incident was presumed as having obliterated the area and everyone living in it. This is primarily because the sequence with Aerith on the ground level shows a proper evacuation attempt, where in the original game the few people you could talk to appeared reluctant to even leave, nor was it clear how many people were even aware they were danger to begin with. Further, the "plate" no longer drops as a single solid piece that squashes the slums in one action, but in chunks that fall individually, which is still devastating but not nearly to the extent of the original depiction.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • The reason why many players had some difficulty understanding what the Deadly Dodge and Parry materia were for. Deadly Dodge just allowed a character to tack on a fairly potent area attack at the end of their dodge sequence, however characters can attack almost instantly after dodging without the materia. Parry materia can be used even when you're not under attack, and what it actually does is allow the character to do a Dash Attack that's difficult to interrupt - so you can "parry" someone whose back is facing you.
  • An odd, minor example in the form of the shop menu: the "sell weapons/armor" subsection, specifically. Despite what it says, you cannot actually sell any of the weapons in your inventory, only the non-unique armors. Each character's weapons are one-of-a-kind items that can only be found or bought once, and can never be discarded upon acquisition.
  • The game's very title could be considered this as it's not entirely a remake of the first game, so much as it is a continuation of the story by way of going over the original events in a world changed by time travel.
• "No Peeking!" Request: When Aerith goes on to try on the dress for Don Corneo's bride contest, Madam M shoos him away from her parlor and warns Cloud not to peek or she'll "poke his eyes out". The player can ignore her and walk up to the curtain to try to peek, which will cause Madam M to verbally admonish Cloud.
• Not His Sled: The game was billed as an expanded retelling of the Midgar portion of the original game with modern graphics and gameplay. While The Stations of the Canon have been encountered, the ending serves to set up how the follow-up will not guarantee that the post-Midgar plot will play out the same way.
• No OSHA Compliance: Jessie's father is in a long-term comatose state because of poor safety procedures causing him to collapse in a radiation hazard zone, and then go for hours without anyone noticing and getting him out. An even more blatant example is that Shinra allows Hojo to develop his bio-weapon crimes against nature inside corporate HQ instead of outside city limits where the damage they could do if they escape could be limited. Justified by the fact that Shinra pretty much owns the city, and Reeve is the only member of senior management who cares about the population as anything other than tools and sources of revenue, so nobody can force them to take any precautions regarding worker safety.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Wedge manages to pull off not just one, but two of these. He singlehandedly convinced Avalanche HQ, who had already effectively cut off Barret's group, into coming to their aid by assaulting the Shinra building (apparently by asking "super-duper nicely"), AND snuck into said heavily guarded building on his own just to inform Cloud and the others.
• Off the Rails: The major twist at the end of Part 1. The heroes are going the extra mile to save people, including many that died in the original game, such as the Sector 7 casualties, Avalanche, Aerith and even Zack, culminating in them punching out what is essentially fate itself to make it stick. Unfortunately, the positive twist comes with a big negative: the one who influenced Cloud and co. into defying and defeating the Arbiters of Fate was Sephiroth himself, averting his own death at Cloud's hands at the end of the original game, and everything short of recruiting Cloud to his "cause" went off without a hitch. Just as Cloud now has a better chance to save everything, Sephiroth now has a better chance to destroy everything.
• Olympus Mons: Several of the entities conjured by the Summon Materia — namely Ifrit, Shiva, Leviathan, and Bahamut — were worshiped as deities in the time of the Cetra, and some are still worshiped at the time the game is set.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: An eerie chorus chants the lyrics to Sephiroth's theme song, "One-Winged Angel", throughout the opening sequence. Amusingly, Aerith appears to react to it and is visibly unnerved.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • The Arsenal's Desperation Attack, Cry Havoc, deals 9999 damage if it hits.
  • One of the game's secret enemies, a Tonberry, will one-shot anyone it tags with its Chef's Knife.
  • Using Raise on most undead enemies, outside of bosses, will defeat them instantly to the point the damage counter instead of stating the amount of HP done, will just say "Dead"
  • One of the superbosses (Weiss the Immaculate) will hit your entire team with an undodgeable 9999 damage attack if the player takes too long to defeat them.
• Open Secret: The kids of the Leaf House in Sector 5 have a secret hideout that they don't allow adults to come in to. The way that adults around town talk about the kids makes it clear that they know all about the "secret" hideout, but say nothing to let the kids have their own space. Aerith is more-or-less the only adult the kids let into the hideout, but that's because she's One of the Kids.
• Outside-Context Problem: Sephiroth, to a far greater degree than in the original game. He is mostly exempt from the influence of the Whispers (when he kills Barret, the Whispers revive him rather than try and stop Sephiroth first), while the heroes are bound by the Whispers to follow the road of the original game, severely limiting their ability to fight him until they kill the Whisper Harbinger.

P-Z

• Permanently Missable Content: Zig-zagged. Within a single playthrough it's possible to miss items and quests, but the Chapter Select function after beating the game allows you to replay a chapter so you can go back and obtain what you missed.
• Pet the Dog: It's no secret that Cloud isn't accustomed to animals or children. During the Sector 8 sidequests, he assists a band of kids with various missions around town, but is still unable to talk to them properly. When they ask Cloud if he can help get rid of the Toad King that's harassing them, he at first demands a sum of money they obviously cannot pay, before changing his mind and only asking for a measly three gil when he sees how distraught they are.
• Phantom Thief: The Angel of the Slums, who robs the wealthy of Shinra and gives to the people in the slums. There's a few sidequests involving the Angel, including Cloud trying to throw off a nosy reporter from finding out the Angel's identity. Doing all of the Angel's sidequests earns Cloud an Elemental materia before crossing the Point of No Return.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: The infamous Tonberry makes an appearance as a secret boss fight. Though small and slow in its pace, it delivers an incredibly powerful punch, capable of taking you out in an instant.
• Plot Twist: The game banks on the fact that many of those playing it are familiar with the original story and think they know how things will pan out however little differences there are. For the most part it is beat for beat of the original Midgar chapter with some new and fleshed out encounters... until the raid on Shinra base, then it pulls the rug out from under those players by showing that, no, this story isn't going to follow things to the letter and beyond this game, this version of Final Fantasy VII is going to be much more different.
• Point of No Return: There are several prominent ones across the game, but they count as the Polite version, since the game always gives you a prompt for whether or not you want to continue.
  • Right at the end of Chapter 14, once you begin climbing up to Shinra HQ, there's no going back and you're locked out of any remaining side missions. However, you still get the opportunity to save and buy items from vending machines after this point.
  • The last Point of No Return is just before the final boss. You get one last chance to save and buy items, and the game asks you if you're ready to go forward. Once you say you're ready, it's a straight shot to the end of the game with a series of boss battles. If you die at any point during this sequence, you have to do the whole thing all over again.
• Poltergeist: Many of the attacks the Ghoul boss in the Train Graveyard Control Room uses are this. You spend the battle trapped in a small room filled with debris, which it won't hesitate to toss at you. On the flipside, however, it has other attacks such as hitting the party with energy blasts or screaming at them, some of which can be blocked by hiding behind debris.
• Pose of Silence: In the tenth chapter, Tifa assures Aerith that Cloud can carry all the stuff they buy on their shopping day once they exit the sewers. She bends toward Tifa so Cloud can't hear her what she's saying; presumably because he'd be opposed to the idea.
• Post-End Game Content: Several encounters and items only become available once the player has beaten the game and started a New Game Plus:
  • Most of the characters' Manuscripts (items that add weapon upgrade points or unlock Limit Breaks) are only unlocked in Hard Mode.
  • Additionally, playing the Hard Mode campaign is the only way to unlock the Superboss, the Pride and Joy Prototype in the Shinra Combat Simulator, as well as see the conclusion of a certain story — Chadley, who reveals that he is a Shinra-created android that has broken free of his programming.
• Power Echoes: SOLDIER 3rd Class enemies have a distinct, deep echo to their voices that the rest of Shinra's troops lack. Same deal with the Helitroopers and Elite Helitroopers, who are a cut above the regular Shinra Security Officers. Roche, despite being a SOLDIER 3C, doesn't, but that's because he doesn't wear a helmet.
• Power Glows: Some special attacks create glowing particle effects when they make contact with an enemy.
• Power-Up Letdown: Played with: since every weapon and Materia is already available in Normal Mode, and many of the most valuable Materia can only be acquired once, the only benefit a player gets from playing Hard Mode (other than the normal EXP and AP), is a single Manuscript for a pre-determined character dropped by each major boss or for each sidequest completed on Hard. These can be useful for getting an extra edge against the extremely brutal Superboss fights, but this will make their reward, the powerful Gotterdammerung accessories, into a letdown because there will be nothing left to use them on. Conversely, getting the Gotterdammerung early will make the Manuscripts from clearing Hard chapters superfluous for everything except completionism. The player is essentially given the decision over what's going to end up being the Bragging Rights Reward versus what's going to actually be useful for the final hours of playtime.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Shinra uses this as their general methodology. They will do plenty of evil stuff but completely avoid Card-Carrying Villain to avoid the population trying to rise up against them. Do what you need to do to advance Shinra's goals, but don't get caught and make sure there's someone else to blame, or Plausible Deniability.
  • Shinra exploits the fact that Avalanche is going to bomb their reactor to set up a False Flag Operation. Rather than stop them, the company uses the opportunity to exploit Patriotic Fervor among Midgar's citizens to support Shinra. Since they're planning to abandon Midgar entirely and create Neo-Midgar in the Promised Land once they find it, Shinra uses Avalanche's bombing as a golden opportunity to make themselves look good.
  • Reno explicitly orders his soldiers not to shoot at Aerith, since he has orders to bring her in unhurt. When one of his mooks shoots at Aerith anyways, Reno orders him to stop and threatens that he'll be reprimanded for it.
  • After capturing Aerith and planning to torture the location of the Promised Land out of her, Shinra employees are ordered to not physically harm her, as Aerith is too valuable. Psychological torture by breaking speeches or showing off her friends' corpses is fine, as long as she's not permanently harmed.
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: Any member of your party will announce one of these as you rush into a battle, either during gameplay encounters or a cutscene, from Barret's "Gonna make your eyeballs pop!" to Cloud's "I got your number!". Special mention goes to Tifa just before she delivers one final kick to Eligor:
  Tifa: (looking up at the Sector 7 pillar) Hold on guys. We're coming. (turns to Eligor) And you can go to hell!
• Precision F-Strike: Aerith, of all people, drops a single curse after a ladder in the Sector 5 slums breaks off and starts to collapse while she's still climbing it.
  Aerith: (to Cloud) You worry too much. I'm not some princess who needs to be coddled. (the ladder breaks) Shit.
• Precursors: The Planet was once home to the Cetra — colloquially known as the Ancients, a group of people capable of communing with the will of the Planet and manipulating the Lifestream.
• Pre-Rendered Graphics: It wouldn't be Final Fantasy without 'em! Just like how the original game pioneered the practice of FMV sequences, this game keeps the trend going strong. In addition to that, clips from Advent Children are used during the fight against the Whisper Harbinger.
• Prolonged Prologue: The Game. The Remake only covers the Midgar chapter of the original game, which was itself a Prolonged Prologue that typically lasted for about five hours, and stretches it out into a massive 40+ hour campaign, ending right when the protagonists leave the city and officially begin their epic globe-hopping adventure.
• Punch-Clock Villain:
  • The game makes a point of showing that Shinra's soldiers aren't just Faceless Mooks to be mowed down by the player, but average joes that are simply trying to earn a paycheck. They frequently work under less-than-savory conditions, from having to interact with uncooperative civilians who hate their guts to being abused by their superiors like Heidegger, and even Cloud, who has no love for Shinra, considers them to be guys just doing their jobs.
  • The Turks are also out to do their jobs as Rude and Reno testify. Despite being direct underlings for Shinra, it's clear they have reservations about their more immoral tasks.
    Rude: No, I'm not bad. But like it or not, I sometimes have to do bad things.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: Rufus Shinra, the vice president (and eventual president) of Shinra as a whole, is brought up to a whole new level of fighting prowess. He is exceptionally skilled with a gun, being able to use it in various creative ways to knock Cloud around if you're not careful and proves to be on the same level as him despite not even being a SOLDIER.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil:
  • Don Corneo is known all throughout the slums to take "wives" that he hides away in his mansion to have his way with until he grows bored of them, whereupon he feeds them to his pet Abzu and goes about looking for a new wife. He also allows his men to have their way with the failed candidates. Nobody likes him, but his money, power, and being a henchman for Shinra make him immune to reprisal.
  • Even the Shinra execs don't take kindly to what Hojo suggests to keep Aerith's Ancient bloodline going.
• Real-Time with Pause: A subtle variation: opening the Command Menu causes gameplay to enter Bullet Time.
• The Remnant: Members of the first incarnation of Avalanche from Before Crisis are still active, and come to the rescue of Cloud, Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge, in Chapter 4.
• Relationship Values: Similar to the original game, Remake keeps track of your relationships with the rest of Cloud's party. In Part 1, this determines which version of a scene you get in Chapter 14. Namely, a dream sequence where Aerith warns Cloud not to fall in love with her, Cloud comforting Tifa, or Barret fondly reminiscing about some friends he'd like Cloud to meet.
• Resources Management Gameplay: Magic Points are much more strictly rationed in this game than in other franchise titles. In the original game, Cloud had about 1 MP for every 6 HP; here, he has 1 for every 20. It takes Remake Cloud until about Lv.30 to have as many MP as Original Cloud did when he started the game at Lv.6. There's also no efficient way to restore MP; Ethers are expensive, Turbo Ethers are rare, innate regeneration is slow, and benches often require backtracking. The end result is that use of Magic is something you have to be very cautious about.
  • Even more so in Hard Mode, which disables benches from restoring your MP and blocks item use entirely. Consequently, health also becomes a valuable resource - besides in-battle healing abilities like Pray and Chakra, the only way to heal between benches is to spend MP. Those "Battle MP Regeneration +10%" weapon skills go from being nearly worthless to absolutely essential.
• Revive Kills Zombie: Using healing spells or items damages the ghosts in the Train Graveyard. That said, Obvious Rule Patch is in place; the bosses you encounter No-Sell Phoenix Downs to avoid turning the fight into a Zero-Effort Boss.
• Rewatch Bonus: For fans of the original, they may notice something rather peculiar when the spirits show up at certain parts. This is because the spirits that everyone keeps encountering are literally trying to keep the original plot on track. Notice how any time the plot diverges, the spirits intervene and force things as was originally intended such as Aerith's first meeting with Cloud or when Tifa nearly backs out on an Avalanche mission she had no reservations for in the original game and where Jessie almost takes her place. The game tricks first timers into thinking they're part of the remake aesthetic. But it's not till the end at Shinra's HQ their purpose starts really having more prominence.
• Rhythm Game: The Honey Bee Inn dance performance that Cloud is required to do in order to win Andrea's approval and become his selection for Corneo's girls is designed as a rhythm minigame. Doing well nets you Andrea's earrings and a trophy.
• Right-Hand Attack Dog: Rufus' hound, Darkstar, whom you have to fight alongside him. Taking Darkstar out first is essential as not only will Rufus sic it on you endlessly, but it will heal him as well.
• Ripple Effect Indicator: In the closing cutscene, after Zack has been shown surviving his "last stand" from Crisis Core, a bag of Stamp-branded potato chips blows by the screen — except now Stamp appears to be a terrier, whereas throughout the game he'd been a beagle, suggesting that history has been altered on an even grander scale than previously implied.
• Roll Out the Red Carpet: Done lovingly straight as Johnny reveals Aerith in her best dress (a reimagined version of her dress from the original game, but with the red pumps swapped for white sandals) to Cloud by rolling out a carpet for her to walk up.
• Rolling Attack: Mostly what the Deadly Dodge materia does. The characters except Aerith (who instead does a hop) will roll and launch a Herd-Hitting Attack. Barret (with Melee or Gun weapons) and Cloud are the best with this because of their greater attack range, though Tifa is pretty decent here too. Fighting Fat Chocobo means you'll be in danger of getting rolled on by him.
• Romantic Ride Sharing: Invoked by Jessie Raspberry when she hires Cloud to help her on a solo mission to the upper plate. Biggs and Wedge join them, and both pairs travel on motorcycles. Jessie takes every opportunity to play this trope up, hugging Cloud from behind more than once. It's implied that at least part of the reason she does so is because Cloud's responses amuse her.
• Rotating Protagonist: Much more than the original game. While Cloud is still the main player character outside of combat, multiple sections of the game involve controlling other party members with Cloud as either an NPC or off elsewhere.
• Ruder and Cruder: As far as the English localization goes, there is much more swearing and vulgar language than there was in the original game, where the majority of the swearing was mostly done by Barret and Cid. Barret still has his share of harsh language (and Cid hasn't appeared yet), but what's notable is that Cloud spews out more profanity than he does throughout the course of the game (one particular eyebrow-raising moment is him saying "Bring it on, bitch" in Chapter 18), and even Aerith has a major memetic moment when she yelps "Shit!"^note She says this only in English. In Japanese she says "Uso!" ("No way!" or "Come on!") and the European translations of the game go for either "Oh no!" or "Hey!", while Reno is probably the foulest-mouthed member of the cast as far as Part I is concerned and much more vulgar than his original 1997 self.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: As the Sector 7 plate threatens to fall, two Shinra security guards block a gated exit that would allow some civilians to evacuate to safety. Thanks to some prompting by Aerith and Wedge, one of the Shinra guards defies his superior's orders and opens the gate.
• Security Cling: Both Aerith and Tifa cling to Cloud's arms during the Train Graveyard sequence. The latter at least partly out of jealousy over the former.
• Seers:
  • Multiple characters have this ability, with Cloud having early hallucinations of events that take place later on in the plot (such as a vision of Aerith kneeling on the ground before her materia falls off in Chapter 2 or seeing the Sector 7 Plate fall in Chapter 3) and Aerith having an as-yet unexplained ability to know future events before they happen (exemplified in an early conversation, where she identifies Cloud as a mercenary without him ever saying as much, or occasionally predicting a line of dialogue someone used in the original game). Cloud's power is heavily implied to come from Sephiroth using his Jenova cells to torment Cloud with visions of the future without context that make the originally Bittersweet Ending of the original game look like a Downer Ending to trick Cloud into doing what he wants, meaning Sephiroth somehow knows the future/original events too
  • The Arbiters of Fate have this ability, showing a series of visions to the party in the final chapter (which include Red XIII's cubs (from the opening of Advent Children), Meteor nearing the planet, and Cloud using Omnislash on Sephiroth during their climactic fight), which they perceive as being visions of a Bad Future.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Why the party ends up going along with Sephiroth's plan to destroy the Arbiters of Fate. Aerith, and to a lesser extent Red XIII, seem to have specific knowledge of what's coming, and by the end even Cloud, Tifa, and Barret are at least vaguely aware that they got a Bittersweet Ending rather than an outright win. Sacrificing their guaranteed win doesn't mean they now have a guaranteed loss, it means there are no more guarantees. They're willing to risk it for the chance of doing better this time.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: While Aerith was never unattractive to begin with, her makeover in Wall Market, courtesy of Madam M, makes her look extra stunning... if she wears the second and third-grade dresses, that is. If she gets the first-grade dress, it's actually a step down from what she normally wears!
• Shmuck Bait: When making your way up Shinra Tower, you're given the option to ride the elevator to the 59th floor, or take the stairs. If you opt for the stairs, you will have to walk Cloud up ALL THE STAIRS. The sequence takes about 10 minutes. By the end he will be reduced to a snail's pace from fatigue, and you'll gain no advantage for it other than the hilarious dialogue as all the characters' mental states gradually deteriorate (and you get to skip some fights, but whether that's a benefit or not depends on whether you'd rather miss the fight or gain some extra XP).
• Shout-Out:
  • Aya Brea as she appeared in The 3rd Birthday can be seen on a billboard in Midgar.
  • A picture of the older members of the Shinra company can be found in-game. One of the members is wearing Shinra's Mask.
  • The ghosts in the Train Graveyard have pyreflies when they manifest.
  • Marle, Cloud and Tifa’s landlady, looks like an elderly version of a certain other Marle.
  • A sidequest has the kids of the Sector 5 Slums asking Cloud to kill a Hedgehog Pie King called the Toad King which has been menacing their hideout.
  • Neo-Midgar resembles Balamb Garden.
  • In the Shinra video about the Ancients, at one point you can see the Enterprise, Cid's ship from Final Fantasy XIV flying in the background.
  • Chapter 15's English title is called "The Day Midgar Stood Still", despite having no relation to the film itself (the Japanese title of the chapter is "The Setting Sun").
  • When The Valkyrie appears in Chapter 15, the name of the mission objective to run away from it is called "Flight of the Valkyrie."
  • One of the quests in Wall Market is titled "Shears' Counterattack".
  • Two of Rude's attacks, Shockwave and Spirit Geyser, are clear homages to Terry Bogard's Power Wave and Triple Geyser, respectively.
  • During Cloud's duel with Rufus, there's a brief shot of him holding up coins that looks almost like a shot of Vergil unsheathing the Yamato in Devil May Cry 5.
  • Another Devil May Cry 5 reference is in Chapter 18 when Sephiroth uses his sword to slice through the wall of Whispers and creates a dimensional rift, just like Yamato's dimension-hopping powers.
  • In chapter 9, one of Sam's sidequests, "The Party that Never Stops", has Cloud delivering medicine as part of the Fetch Quest in order to get back the tailor's "inspiration."
  • Completing half of the sidequests in Chapter 8 leads Aerith to wear a cute pink number with hair extensions for the Don Corneo mansion rescue, making her look almost exactly like how she appeared in Kingdom Hearts.
  • At the entrance of Wall Market, one NPC will say "Welcome to the world of tomorrow!".
  • In the Intergrade DLC, Yuffie will sometimes mutter to herself while referring to the super-powerful Materia she was tasked with stealing for Wutai as "My Precious..." in reference to Gollum from Tolkien's Legendarium.
• Sidequest: Notably compared to the original, this game goes to greater lengths to categorize Cloud as a mercenary, as the party and members of Avalanche encourage him to do odd jobs and slay monsters for the citizens of the slums, building up his reputation and expanding his client pool.
• Skull for a Head: Jenova's boss form has a fanged skull with sunken eyes for a face.
• Sliding Scale of Beauty:
  • Tifa is a World Class Beauty, semi-famous in the city for her good looks.
  • Aerith is a Common Beauty. She's noted by several NPCs to be... sort of pretty, much to her own chagrin. It's put down to a rustic and "down to earth" look. If she gets the best dress for the Wall Market sequence, however, she's definitely World Class Beauty - a crowd gathers to take pictures and admire her (and Johnny has to physically fight some people back) and Cloud the mercenary hardass is left stunned and utterly speechless for a minute until he gathers himself.
  • Yuffie is a super-hot babe... in her head. Everyone else treats her as Average - she's too skinny, and Just a Kid besides.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat: Cloud and Barret spend most of the opening mission trading barbed comments, with Barret growing increasingly frustrated and angry at Cloud's apathetic and disdainful attitude towards the Planet's suffering and Avalanche's mission.
  Barret: [in the middle of a Motive Rant] You gonna stand there and pretend you can't hear the planet crying out in pain? I know you can!
  Cloud: [unimpressed] You really hear that?
  Barret: Damn straight I do!
  Cloud: Get help.
  Barret: Say that again!
  Cloud: I'd worry less about the planet and more about the next five seconds. Save the screaming for later.
• Soapbox Sadie: Kyrie's first major appearance is her spreading lies to an audience of people in Sector 5 about Avalanche for money.
• Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Unlike the original game, where weapons you can get later are almost strictly better than the weapons you can get earlier, this game twists it heavily with the introduction of skill trees for weapons. Each weapon has an individualized grid in which you can spend Skill Points to unlock enhancements for those weapons, such as stat boosts, percent damage modifiers, and extra Materia slots. The trick is that while weapons you get later start out better than the ones you get earlier, the later weapons also have far fewer upgrades to purchase and have more expensive costs to begin with than the earlier ones. The end result is that with enough upgrades you can get some pretty strong early-game weapons; for example, the Buster Sword starts out as the weakest sword and ends at one of the strongest swords in the game.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • After the Sector 7 plate collapses, Biggs explicitly survives this time around, being shown in bed in the Sector 5 Leaf House with severe injuries but alive. Wedge also survives the plate collapse, but the Whispers may or may not have killed him. And while we see her death, it's also implied in the ending that Jessie might have survived thanks to a Cosmic Retcon.
  • Also during the destruction of Sector 7; while in the original, we see the inhabitants of the Sector 7 slums uselessly gather around the pillar before its collapse, each giving some flimsy excuse as to why they aren't fleeing, the remake includes cutscenes of the slum inhabitants, led by Wedge and Marle, organizing an evacuation, many of them escaping and a playable section where the player, as Aerith, helps more of them escape while saving Marlene.
  • In a Wham Shot close to the game's ending, Zack also survives, thanks to a Cosmic Retcon orchestrated by Sephiroth and carried out unknowingly by Avalanche. Instead of making a Last Stand against a Shinra platoon, Zack takes out all of the soldiers by himself, albeit looking pretty beaten up after it's over.
• Stealth Pun: At the start of the game, when Tifa is helping Cloud build his rep in the area, Wedge proclaims that he'll let everyone in Sector 7 know about Cloud and his talents. Shortly after, you can hear chatter from people nearby asking if Cloud is the merchant they had heard about, with one asking if he's the guy who is selling swords. They misunderstood Wedge when he said Cloud was a sellsword.
• Stealth Sequel: As the game goes on, the various characters gain an increasing number of visions of their future "destiny" in the original 1997 game, which in turn causes their actions to keep diverging from said destiny, despite various attempts by ghostly defense mechanisms of the planet known as the Whispers / Arbiters of Fate to keep the story on its original track. This comes to a head in the finale, where the heroes destroy the Arbiters to take on a now far earlier appearing Sephiroth - and in the process leaving the entire story free to go Off the Rails and inadvertently undoing Sephiroth's original fated defeat.
• Strong as They Need to Be: Cloud's physical abilities seem to wax and wane as needed for the plot. In some situations, he can cut through robots with ease and jump about 10-20 feet in a single bound from a falling platform. Other times, his sword catches on a presumably wood and plaster doorframe and he is unable to make a 6 foot jump, requiring Aerith to save him with her staff for him to grab on to.
• Stylistic Suck:
  • Should the player choose to take the stairs up the Shinra building, the music gradually gets less and less musically coherent as the party continues to climb. It's done to show how tired the group is getting and how bored they are of just climbing stairs.
  • The museum in the Shinra Tower leaves a lot to be desired for something made by the biggest MegaCorp in the world. The hologram presentations for Scarlet and Heidegger's exhibits don't work at all, Palmer is obviously and awkwardly reading a pre-written speech and can only mumble at how little his division has actually accomplished, and Hojo doesn't even bother giving a presentation for his department, choosing instead to just contemptuously insult the would-be tourists. Only Reeve's hologram is natural-sounding, and even then it's somewhat awkward, including an apology for delays caused by construction — not exactly what you might expect from a propaganda museum.
• Sunglasses at Night: Barret wears his sunglasses even in the middle of the night, in a section of the city under an iron plate that never sees the sun in the first place, despite his weapon of choice being a gun. Why? Cause it looks cool.
• Superboss:
  • Bahamut, the ultimate summon, who is unlocked by completing all of the other Battle Intel missions and is the strongest opponent you can fight on your first playthrough.
  • Pride and Joy Prototype, who is unlocked by completing all Corneo Colosseum matches, all Shinra Virtual Combat Simulator matches, and all Battle Intel missions, and is the ultimate final opponent in the game.
  • In Intergrade, Weiss the Immaculate is an extra boss in the Battle Intel missions.
• Surprisingly Creepy Moment: In-universe, this is Barret's impression of the Cosmos Theater's presentation. After the propaganda video ends, he, Cloud, and Tifa are then treated to a nightmarish vision of Meteor destroying Midgar. Barret, thinking it was All Part of the Show, says the exhibit really should have come with a warning for that.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • It's more clearly shown here that the bombing of the first reactor was a False Flag Operation by Shinra; after Avalanche disables the reactor, President Shinra has the entire reactor destroyed just to frame Avalanche for it. Even so, Avalanche never finds out that it wasn't them. Jessie believes that she's responsible for the reactor's destruction, Avalanche become wanted terrorists in the public's eye, and Jessie carries this guilt to her grave, as she dies before she can find out that she wasn't responsible.
  • The size of Cloud's BFS becomes a problem at a few points. When Cloud first investigates the apartment next to him, he tries to draw his Buster Sword against an apparition of Sephiroth. Given that Cloud's standing in the doorway, his sword hits the door frame. Also, when Cloud rests, he has to either remove his sword entirely or tilt it out of the way so he can sit down.
  • In Shinra HQ, the mission to rescue Aerith from Hojo's experiments on her, as well as finally come face-to-face with President Shinra can involve climbing 59 flights of stairs. Even with the party's physical prowess — an ex-SOLDIER, a martial artist, and a walking tank of a man — fatigue gradually sets in as they climb the stairs. Everyone starts going slower the further they go up, they speak to each other between heavy breaths, and they're exhausted by the time they get to the 59th floor, needing a few moments to get their wind back. Even the background music sounds tired.
  • Falling down even a short set of stairs can hurt you pretty badly as Jessie finds out: the Whispers knock her down the front steps of 7th Heaven, taking her out of commission to force Cloud to take the next reactor job.
  • Someone like President Shinra, who is targeted for assassination by Avalanche, will most emphatically not turn up in person to mock them, especially when their members include someone who has a BFG for an arm and a super-soldier.
  • Even when you remove the Super-Soldier aspect of his character, Cloud beating Jules and his bodybuilder friends in a battle of squats should not come as a surprise. Those who practice bodybuilding are actually short on endurance compared to other athletic disciplines, let alone soldier training, which is known for its unforgiving focus on building up stamina and endurance. Jules, Ronnie and Jay are but simple gym hobbyists, whereas Cloud is a frontline military veteran in peak condition. It's not even close.
  • Don Corneo might be cowardly when outnumbered and beaten, but as a crime lord, he is not someone to be underestimated, pulling off an impressive disarm when threatened at gunpoint. Aerith even points this out to get Cloud to rescue Tifa; when Cloud claims that Tifa can look after herself, Aerith says that it doesn't matter how strong or smart you think you are, Corneo will find a way to turn it against you. Leslie even warns Cloud that the Don has a very effective way to prevent anyone from just busting in and trying to take him on: if Cloud tries to do so, the person who will suffer most will be Tifa... or, it could be a random person he doesn't even know.^note This is similar to how big organized crime groups in real life keep entire communities under their control, such as cartels in Mexico, which will murder a dozen innocent civilians chosen at random if some vigilante tries to take action against them.
  • Dropping an object as massive as the Sector 7 plate from such an enormous height does a lot more than just demolish the slums directly beneath. The damage from the plate drop extends all the way to Sector 5, with aftershocks and sinkholes continuing to form hours after the drop itself.
  • If you take the elevator to the 59th floor of Shinra HQ, you spend the first couple of stops fighting off Shinra security, just like in the original. When you hit the 30th floor, the chime sounds and the trio prepares for battle. The doors open and Cloud draws his sword... on a completely harmless civilian employee, who immediately freaks out. Tifa is shaken by this, and reminds the others that Shinra has innocent people working for it.
  • Being the only good person on a board of the most morally bankrupt people in the world results in Reeve's department being perpetually neglected and ignored. As such, Midgar is falling apart in places and the slums are half-buried in literal mountains of junk and scrap. Since he doesn't agree with Shinra's decisions, Reeve himself has about as much power as Midgar's figurehead mayor despite being in an executive position, and he and his entire division are kept as a showpiece to convince the populace that Shinra cares about the city when they obviously don't.
  • Avalanche leaves a bomb at the heart of Mako Reactor Five and head for the exit. When they reach the outside after a fair amount of time, Heidegger shows them that Shinra forces have already gotten to the bomb and overridden the remote detonator frequency. They obviously weren't going to just ignore something like that and let Avalanche detonate whenever they wanted.
  • The slums underneath Midgar do get sunlight, especially during the morning and evening, rather than experiencing the perpetual night they had in the original. This makes sense, since the platform above would only obscure the sun during part of the day, and even then there'd be indirect sunlight from the surrounding area.
• Suspicious Videogame Generosity: See a bench and a vending machine where you can regenerate HP and purchase supplies? Nine times out of ten, it's either a difficult section of enemies, or an upcoming boss. Or a difficult section of enemies and a boss.
• Sword Drag: When Roche challenges Cloud to a duel, he's shown dragging his longsword along the ground.
• Tagline: "The legend returns for all generations."
• Talking in Your Sleep: At the beginning of Chapter 14 you can interact with a sleeping Wedge to hear him talking in his sleep. Besides general grunting, he'll also mutter "Cheeseburgers" and "Mister Smalls," the name of one of his cats.
• Team-Based Tournament: Part of Cloud and Aerith's "date" involve fighting together against various teams in the Corneo Colosseum.
• Teen Genius: Chadley is only 15 years old yet he is working as a scientist for Shinra and is dedicated to studying the world around him. Not only is he able to develop new battle materia for your party to use, but he's also able to create summons, something heretofore thought impossible.
• Theme Naming: Wedge introduces Cloud to three cats he names Biggums, Reggie, and Smalls. Big, regular, and small.
• Theme Music Power-Up:
  • Rare villainous example. The second-to-last chapter adds a Boss Fight against someone from the original game, Jenova, which takes place in three phases. The first phase uses this character's standard motif, but in downplayed orchestral arrangement, at slower tempo, and with the actual melody at half speed. The second phase amps it up a bit with the addition of some snare and normal-speed melody, but still holds back. It's only at the third and final phase when the tempo kicks back up to full, the four-to-the-floor percussion comes in, and the Epic Rocking commences. And, despite being the power-up of a bad guy, it still has the same exhilarating effect because of the nostalgia hit.
  • The final battle against Sephiroth does the same, with One Winged Angel beginning as just the instrumentals and the vocals picking up more with each stage of the fight.
• This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!:
  • Used by Reno when assuring Cloud that "it's nothing personal" to emphasize that, yes, it fucking is.
  • Cloud makes a quip in this fashion during a Blade Lock in the penultimate boss fight.
    Cloud: Bring it on, bitch!
• Time-Limit Boss:
  • The fight against the Airbuster has a rather generous time limit of twenty-one minutes due to Shinra hijacking the bomb Avalanche placed in the 5th mako reactor.
  • Sephiroth's boss fight, however, is not so generous. During the final phase, he'll begin slowly counting down from ten as he summons a meteor upon the arena, incentivising the party to take him down as quickly as possible.
• Time Police: What the Arbiters of Fate essentially are. They attempt to ensure events play out exactly like they did in the original 1997 game. Sephiroth has the party take care of the Arbiters of Fate so that the future is now unwritten.
• To Be Continued: Similar to how the original game is formatted in 3 discs, Remake ends as a "Disc 1", given that the story has only progressed a fraction of the way. The fact that the "unknown" adventure will continue on the other hand...
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: As in the original game, Aerith and Tifa, and you would be forgiven for thinking at first glance that the Bare-Fisted Monk was the Tomboy and the pink-wearing Magical Girl as the Girly Girl.
• Ultimate Job Security: Palmer is still employed as head of the Shinra Space Division despite the fact that Shinra hasn't had a space program for years. All he does is show up to board meetings and ask for a restoration of his budget - which never happens.
• Undead Child: The ghosts that inhabit the Train Graveyard are the spirits of children who wandered into the area and were subsequently taken by Eligor. Though they appear to be hostile, they're really only trying to "play" with Cloud and the gang.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: The presence of the flying "Helitrooper" enemies in Chapter 12 can leave the player in a problematic place. These enemies attack you as you climb the Sector 7 pillar, and because they're flying and try to dodge your attacks mid-air, they can get clipped through the ceiling onto the next floor up, where they cannot be struck by the majority of attacks. Despite this, the game remains in its "combat" state, which means that the Triangle button is used for its combat function (Punisher Mode / Tifa's special attacks), rather than to ease your way through debris. If you happen to be on a floor where the only way to reach the stairs is via that Triangle button, you're stuck. Additionally, Thunder spells will still hit the Helitrooper... if you have that Materia equipped. If you don't, you're not going anywhere. Downplayed by the game's auto-save function: even if you do have to restart, you probably won't be set back very far.
• The Un-Smile: After your party breaks from the Shinra building, Cloud on a motorcycle and everyone else on a truck, Barret says that they're home free. Red XIII tells him that he wouldn't celebrate just yet as Shinra is still on their tail and Barret replies that he needs to lighten up, that he might even try smiling. Red gives a grimace that causes Barret to say that maybe frowning suits him better. Red is not amused.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
  • Nobody seems to be concerned about the fact there's a guy walking around with a minigun attached to his arm, only his aggressive demeanor. Same with Cloud to a lesser extent; though people do comment on his sword, they don't seem perturbed by him wearing it all the time, just that it makes him more recognizable. This was somewhat justified in the Shinra headquarters, as personnel in the upper lounge assumed the team were hired as mercenaries to combat the terrorist activities.
  • Cloud's attire deserves special mention because, as Crisis Core shows, he's in an outfit extremely close to that used by Shinra's SOLDIER operatives (and "fellow" 1st Class SOLDIERs Sephiroth and Genesis wore Custom Uniforms that deviated quite far from the standard attire worn by Angeal and Zack). Further, he carries a highly distinctive weapon associated with Angeal and Zack, both of whom had prominent fan clubs due to being 1st Class celebrities. Despite this, strangers think of Cloud as a mercenary first, and not once does anyone exclaim "Is that a SOLDIER?" as he passes by.
  • Jessie's mom doesn't seem too concerned that Jessie and her friends are wearing body armor when they visit her, with Biggs having 2 loaded magazines strapped to his shoulders. She still assumes that they are stagehands at the Golden Saucer, since that's what Jessie has been telling her.
  • In a universe where magic has pretty clearly defined rules, being limited by mana and materia, the fact that Aerith can clearly break those rules by using magic missiles as her main attack with no limit, without needing materia for her abilities, and summoning her staff at will should be incredibly interesting to everyone. However, it goes without comment by the heroes or villains.
• Uptown Girl: Jessie originally came from the plate above Sector 7 and while her former home looks like an eyesore from the '70s, it's better than anything in the slums. Aerith may also count, she comes from the more pastoral Sector 5 slum instead of the hard-knocks Sector 7 and she lives in a nice big house that a lot of middle-class people in our world would envy (not to mention her huge garden area).
• Urban Fantasy: Midgar now features even more real-world city touches like speed limit signs, brick and mortar apartment buildings, and so on. But the characters still fight with swords, staves, and magic spells.
  • Many of the lights, especially topside, are now tinted the famous mako / Lifestream turquoise color associated with Final Fantasy VII, driving home the connection that the electricity comes from a magical energy source.
• Variable Mix: In areas where exploration and combat can coincide, such as Mako Reactor 1, the music changes depending on the situation the player is in, adding more suspense if the party is exploring and getting bombastic during combat.
• Vice City: The Midgar slums are an unpleasant place to live. Most people live in squalor literally under the plates and metaphorically under immense corporate overreach. It has a sleazy red-light district run by a wealthy pervert crime boss, and muggers roam the under-streets looking for easy marks. Most people are tough, clever, and anti-social, and they have to be to survive.
• Video Game Remake: The game follows the same basic story and characters as the original game, with a completely new graphics engine, gameplay systems, set pieces, and so forth. Though there are changes to the story, some more impactful than others.
• Villain Has a Point: President Shinra says that the ecological effects of Mako as a power source are known to the public and that they don't care so long as they have cheap power and their lives are made convenient. This is Truth in Television to a degree: the push to transition to sustainable energy in real life didn't get much traction until people were promised that they didn't have to make any sacrifices to their comfort or convenience, the expenses of the sustainable alternatives became at least somewhat comparable to the less environmentally friendly ones, and the economic and environmental costs of climate change became significant enough to impact people's comfort, convenience and economy in their own right.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Shinra. It helps that they own the only news station in Midgar which they use to their advantage when dealing with Avalanche. The public museum present within their headquarters paints them in an almost reverent light and is admittedly very impressive, which only propels their image further.
• Was Once a Man: The Failed Experiment boss and its smaller bretheren encountered within the underground facility and in Hojo's lab are revealed to have been former humans who were experimented on and subsequently mutated into monsters.
• Wham Episode: Chapter 12, "Fight for Survival", features some of the most intense moments made even more painstakingly detailed for the remake. Not only are the stakes the highest they've been so far with Shinra attempting to bring down the Sector Seven plate which would kill at least tens of thousands of people, but Biggs is put out of commission and Jessie is killed. Aerith is finally taken by Shinra and to top it all off, Shinra succeeds in dropping the plate, wiping out the entire sector and causing widespread devastation.
• Wham Line: "Wait... Was that all of 'em?" as Zack stands in the middle of the wastes outside Midgar surrounded by fallen Shinra troopers, exhausted but alive.
• Wham Shot:
  • It was heavily downplayed in the original, but here, you get to see the aftermath of Mako Reactor 1's destruction. Seeing the ruined city streets, burning skyline, and the panicked people, hearing their confused, scared, and angry dialogue, as well as the explicit knowledge that the explosion killed scores of people, really makes it hit home. The fact that it's casually revealed Shinra was responsible as part of the False Flag Operation really highlights how reprehensible they are, but for the characters (who don't share the player's awareness of that fact), it comes off as shock and horror that they are responsible for this - especially Jessie, who created the bomb and sadly carries that false guilt to the grave.
  • Related to the above, the first time the player pans the camera up to see the Sector 7 plate is missing from the skybox, a reminder of the tragic event even when at Aerith's church on the exact opposite side of the map.
  • As the party fights the Whisper Harbinger, they're suddenly given a vision of Red XIII and his cubs using Stock Footage from Advent Children. This, and subsequent visions in the same fight, carry very heavy implications for what the party may be doing by accident, and what the future of the VII Remake saga could hold.
  • One of the very last scenes before the credits is Zack surviving his last stand against Shinra's troopers and heading back to Midgar with Cloud in tow. Where the following parts will go with this pretty major change in the story is yet unknown.
• What Is This Feeling?: If you talk to Chadley, the Shinra materia researcher and secret helper to your party when Cloud is in his dress, he will comment, "Forgive me, miss, but the way you're staring at me is rather... O-oh goodness. I'm experiencing an emotional response." If you speak to him again, he'll ask "What is this emotional response...?"
• What Measure Is a Mook?: The rank-and-file Shinra security forces are mostly literal Punch Clock Villains. Some of them seem to be reasonable, maybe even friendly people, Cloud comments a couple times that most of them are normal people going about a regular day job, and most of them have no idea what Shinra is up to — from their perspective, Avalanche are terrorists who are destroying mako reactors and causing chaos and disruption around Midgar. In a couple specific cases, a few of them don't even want to fight Avalanche and value their lives and stand down rather than fight, and in a particularly important scene, one of them recognizes Cloud from when he was in the infantry, chats with him for a moment and is glad to see Cloud is still alive after all these years. However, the party never shows any hesitation about killing them en masse throughout the game, and whenever they express any remorse for the things they've done, it's usually framed as being the destruction of the mako reactors and the harm it's done to Midgar and its citizens, not the dozens and dozens of security guards they've murdered. Barret for his part espouses that in his eyes, those who work for Shinra are just as culpable for the crimes of the whole company since they're all helping to prop them up.
  • This is also highlighted in the Shinra HQ if you take the elevator: after two attacks by Shinra troops, Cloud pre-emptively swings his sword as soon as the door opens a third time... stopping right in front of an innocent woman who works in the office. As Tifa notes, it's easy to forget that Shinra is run by mostly by ordinary people trying to make their way in life and support their loved ones.
  • This is discussed during Intermission, where Sonon explains that there's a difference between the executives running Shinra and the innocent civilians who happen to live in Midgar and work for them to make ends meet. Growing up in the wake of the Wutai War far from Midgar, Yuffie struggles to make the distinction.
• What the Hell, Hero?: After the bombing of Mako Reactor 1, Cloud is forced to navigate through Midgar's streets to link up with the rest of Avalanche. He (and the player) are forced to witness firsthand the massive collateral damage the bombing caused and its far-reaching effects on the people of Midgar. The people themselves are pretty evenly split between supporting Avalanche's environmental activism and denouncing them as terrorists who do nothing but make life harder for everyone else. Sure, Shinra deliberately exacerbated the damage to use as propaganda against Avalanche, but it was Avalanche's idea to bomb the reactor in the first place.
• What the Hell, Player?: Aerith's quality of dress during the infiltration of Don Corneo's hideout is determined entirely based on how many side missions (if any) the player completed for Sector 5 in Chapter 8. If you failed to complete any, then Aerith is given a completely unremarkable dress, little different than the blouse she typically wears and the scene with her walking up to Don Corneo's mansion is highlighted with a bunch of stray animals pestering her. Aerith will later imply that the quality of the dress is directly the result of the player's laziness.

  Cloud: Doesn't really matter if you get picked or not anyway.
  Aerith: Yeah, but still... You put a lot of work into this... [Beat] Did you put a lot of work into this?

• With a Friend and a Stranger: The classic Final Fantasy example. A tough mercenary, his childhood friend, and a flower girl he just met.
• Xanatos Gambit: Sephiroth's plan at the end. As it is, Sephiroth is notably not troubled at all by the Whispers, meaning he can act "off-script" while the heroes are stuck following the path of the original game. To escape this, the heroes kill the Whisper Harbinger and remove the idea of fate completely, freeing them to act as they wish... but this means Sephiroth can manipulate them in entirely new ways for whatever his plan is this time.
• Your Size May Vary: When characters handle Materia orbs in cutscenes, they're about the size of a softball. When equipped, they become more like marbles so that they're small enough to slot into the characters' weapons.

Intergrade

• Adaptational Early Appearance: In the original game, Yuffie first appears as a Random Encounter after the party leaves Midgar. Here, her DLC episode has her enter the story sometime after the events at Mako Reactor 5. Nero and Weiss, who were created for the sequel Dirge of Cerberus show up as bosses. Chocobo Bill makes a brief appearance in the DLC's ending to give Cloud's party a lift to Kalm. In the original game, Bill never leaves his ranch, which Cloud's party has yet to visit in Remake.
• All for Nothing: In INTERmission, Yuffie and Sonon's infiltration of the Shinra Building turns out to be pointless, as the "ultimate materia" they planned on stealing is still in development and useless in its current state. While they do get Scarlet to reveal that Shinra intends to drop the Sector 7 upper plate on the undercity below, by the time Yuffie manages to escape it's too late to stop that.
• Ambiguous Situation: It's unclear how Wutai and Avalanche found out about Shinra's "ultimate materia" that they're working on, which is evidently a top-secret project conducted in their Advanced Weaponry Division beneath their headquarters. Scarlet speculates if Wutai just has really good intelligence operatives, or if there's a mole in the company, and both are plausible. It's also unclear what the "ultimate materia" may have been; it may refer to the Huge Materia, which Scarlet was also interested in in VII, but it may also be something different, as there are a lot of special and exceptionally powerful materia in the expanded universe.
• Arc Villain: Scarlet serves as the primary antagonist of the DLC, being indirectly involved in Sonon's life and more directly when she attempts to kill him and Yuffie after they enter the Shinra building.
• Ax-Crazy: Nero. A sadistic nihilist who not only derives pleasure from murder, but in his own pain as well and even begs for more during his boss fight.
• Because Destiny Says So: The only time you'll see a Whisper in Yuffie's mission is if she tries to enter 7th Heaven. That is strictly a nono. The Whispers care nothing about anything else Yuffie and Sonon do.
• Bittersweet Ending: Very heavy on the bitter. Yuffie's mission turns out to be pointless since they can't steal the unrefined materia and Sonon dies protecting her from Nero after it seems like they had beaten him. What's more, once Yuffie escapes, the Sector 7 destruction plan goes into motion and, unknown to her, Nero claims Sonon's body for an unknown purpose. There was nothing more Yuffie could've done except flee and get back to Wutai, though she regains her optimism and vows to make Shinra pay.
• Book Ends: Yuffie's story in INTERmission begins and ends with her practicing a speech to introduce herself to her new allies.
• Continuity Nod:
  • You can complete a quest line for an old man from Wutai running a shop called The Happy Turtle, which was unlockable in Crisis Core. The quest also revolves around promotional posters, and The Happy Turtle in the original game was running a promotional campaign requiring players to find posters dotted across the world map.
  • Yuffie begins equipped with a Steal Materia, just like she did in VII.
  • Yuffie mentions she wasn't sure about trusting Avalanche after "what happened in Wutai", a reference to the events of Before Crisis where Avalanche was hiding out in Wutai and fled the town and let their base, one of Wutai's pagodas, be blown up.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: The episode begins with Yuffie humming her own character theme.
• Downloadable Content: The Intergrade has Yuffie's story called "INTERmission" which can be played if you purchased it.
• Foregone Conclusion: Yuffie and Sonon hear the news from Zhijie of Shinra's plan to destroy Sector 7, confirmed by Scarlet after the duo defeat her. Unfortunately, by the time Yuffie escapes thanks to Sonon saving her from Nero's attack, she witnesses Sector 7's destruction with her own eyes.
• Foreshadowing: Sonon has an ability called "Self-Sacrifice" whereby, whenever Yuffie is K.O.'d, he will immediately sacrifice his remaining health to get her back up. At the end of the story he intercepts a blade being thrust toward her and dies.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Sonon sacrifices himself to keep Nero from skewering Yuffie, staying alive long enough to get her out of the Shinra lab.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Sonon is quite built and a whole head taller than Yuffie, a skinnier, younger girl. It turns out to work very well for them in combat as they utilise each other's body types to their advantage.
• Irony: When we see Barret, he is once again extremely pissed about how Shinra propoganda is linking Avalanche to Wutai, claiming that Avalanche isn't doing anyone's bidding. About 10 feet away are members of the "true" Avalanche that Barret's cell defected from and Yuffie and Sonon, two Wutai agents working with them.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Yuffie comments "I'm the leading lady."
• Mini-Game: INTERmission features new and updated mini-games:
  • Fort Condor: A board game where you summon various combat units (Which have a straightforward rock-paper-scissors dynamic) and watch them go to battle, using both the units themselves and materia. The objective is to win by either taking out the opponent's towers (Which in a further nod to the original game are crowned with large condors), or by dealing more damage by the time the timer reaches zero.
  • Shinra Box Buster: This game is just like Whack-a-Box. The difference is the game took place in Shinra's training room instead of the Sector 5 Slums and Whack-a-Box is to get 30,000 points while Shinra Box Buster is to get 50,000.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: When playing Fort Condor on Hard Mode, the rules are openly changed to make it more difficult for the player to win: they can only win by destroying their opponent's headquarters, and if the game proceeds to Sudden Death, it only lasts a minute, and if the opponent is still standing when time runs out, it's considered a loss. Your opponents have no such requirements, and has more powerful boards than you can use to boot.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The Happy Turtle Ad Campaign sidequest has you locating six posters around the Sector 7 Slums. This is a direct reference to the Turtle Paradise sidequest from the original game where you needed to locate six posters across the world to win a prize at a bar in Wutai.
  • The Fort Condor minigame from the original game returns here as an actual board game that's played by several people across the slums, which Yuffie can partake in.
  • Yuffie refers to herself as "a rare bloom" and "the single white rose of Wutai", the boastful title she gave herself in Dirge of Cerberus.
• One Degree of Separation: It's revealed that Yuffie, Sonon, and Nayo were spying on Barret and his splinter cell of Avalanche when they returned from the Sector 5 mission, and they briefly considered introducing themselves but decided against it since the reactor bombing was attracting attention to them. Sonon later remarks that Barret's more militant Avalanche and their goals and views seem a better fit for Wutai than the "soft" cell they're working with, and figures that if they hadn't contacted the cell they had for their infiltration of Shinra, they'd probably have gone to Barret instead.
• Photo Mode: Added to the main game with a variety of filters.
• Railroading: In-Universe. If the player attempts to enter 7th Heaven as Yuffie, a barrier will appear to lock her out of entering. This is because Barret's AVALANCHE cell (minus Cloud, as this takes place while he's in Sector 5) is in there, so The Whispers are preventing her from meeting them before she's "supposed" to.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Discussed and deconstructed. Yuffie and Sonon work with the main branch of AVALANCHE in Midgar, which is much less militant than Barret's cell and more interested in outcomes like free elections and fair distribution of wealth than Barret's more extremist desire to obliterate Shinra and with it most of Midgar outright. To the Wutaians, who've experienced the bloodthirsty ways of Shinra's military firsthand, the main branch comes off as too soft and civilized, having swung too far in the opposite direction from their very uncivilized predecessors. Sonon quickly discerns that the main branch were quick to cut a deal with Wutai because they feared they would meet Barret first and find his beliefs much more to their liking.
• Sequel Hook: Ends on three separate notes.
  • Sonon dies protecting Yuffie, and she escapes Shinra HQ having failed her mission. Nero claims Sonon's dead body for an unknown purpose; meanwhile, Yuffie searches for Avalanche.
  • Cloud's party leaves Midgar completely and hitches a ride to the next town with Choco Bill, not knowing where their journey will lead them.
  • And finally, Zack shows up at the church in Midgar, preparing to talk with Aerith. When he enters, he finds several citizens mourning someone, much to his confusion. It's ambiguous if this is following the Remake storyline or the original game's.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Yuffie's DLC story mode is rendered this when it turns out the super-powerful Materia she was tasked with stealing doesn't even exist, Sonon is killed protecting her, and she can only watch in despair and horror as Shinra drops the Sector 7 plate onto the slums — seemingly killing the Avalanche members she'd befriended as well.
• Shout-Out: Though it comes in chunks, Scarlet referring to Yuffie and Sonon as "teenage ninjas" after Yuffie had made an offhand comment referring to herself as a "mutant," itself after a sidequest where a turtle featured heavily certainly seems deliberate.
• Synchronous Episodes: The INTERmission story involves Yuffie as The Protagonist along with a new character named Sonon that takes place after the attack on Mako Reactor 5, and multiple plot points from the base game, like the Avalanche splinter cell run by Barret blowing up the reactors, is relevant to the plot of INTERmission. The main cast (plus Zack) reappear near the end of INTERmission but that is simply an extra ending scene taking place after the base game's events.
  • Chapter 1 of INTERmission is during Chapter 8 of Remake, which is where Barret, Tifa, Jessie, Biggs and Wedge appear. This allows the player to see their reactions to Cloud's disappearance and Tifa learning about Don Corneo looking for her to join his audition and her running off to take the chance (which later leads to Corneo's lackeys giving up on harassing Nayo).
  • Chapter 2 of INTERmission takes place during Remake's Chapter 9-12 at night (the journey to and adventures within Wall Market, the train graveyard, and the fall of Sector 7), but doesn't directly overlap with the main story aside from a moment at the end, and is rather contained withing the Shinra Building.

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"This sky... I don't like it." ^note Originally in the English localisation this was "I miss it. The steel sky.", which was changed shortly before Rebirth's release.