The first obvious difference is the expansion of the Midgar segment of the original game – at the time only consisting of 5 to 10 hours of gameplay – into an entire game.

The reasons for this choice are primarily technical. As Kitase said in an interview, remaking the entire original game in one release would have prevented them from going “for the highest video quality” and even forced them “to cut back on areas and scenes from the original”. The idea with the remake was, he continues, the opposite:  to go for “the highest level possible, with an expanded story” to give both fans of the original game and new players something new.

So when it comes to this story’s segment, the remake follows most of the original game’s narrative: Cloud and AVALANCHE members Barrett, Jessie, Wedge, and Biggs attack a couple of Mako’s reactors and take refuge at their headquarters in the lower section of Sector 7. There, they meet Aerith, who is pursued by Shinra and seems to have a special connection with nature. She eventually joins the group and helps them save Tifa, AVALANCHE member and Cloud’s childhood friend, from the sleazy hands of Don Corneo, kingpin of Wall Market’s entertainment district. There, they discover that Shinra’s response to their attacks is to drop the upper floor, or “plate” of Sector 7 onto the slums. The group attempts to prevent this outcome but fails, leading to many casualties in the population and AVALANCHE ranks.

 At the same time, Aerith is captured and held prisoner, alongside a strange creature named RedXIII, in the lab of Professor Hojo in Shinra’s Headquarters. The group eventually manages to save both captives after crossing swords with the Turks, and Rufus, the son of Shinra’s President. Meanwhile, we learn that Sephiroth, also a former Shinra elite SOLDIER, has been seen in the headquarters in search of JENOVA, an alien form experimented on by Shinra. The Midgar storyline ends as the group escapes Shinra’s headquarters, and decides to pursue Sephiroth.

The remake takes the time to largely develop aspects only touched upon in the original:

1. The backstory of Aerith, with a slower build-up towards her origins as an Ancient and her connection to nature.

2. Expanding on side characters with new sequences, for example, the one dedicated to Jessie returning to her family house, while the original game barely developed her.

3. More background on Shinra’s activity, in particular Professor Hojo’s experiments.

4. More weight given to the Turks, not only through stylish cutscenes offering a better glimpse at their personality but also through memorable battles with Reno and Rude

5. Exploring Midgar’s life through many side-quests, and a deeper look into the rough life of the slums

6. Revisiting some of the most classic moments of the original, such as Wall Market and its colorful residents.

7. Introducing new side characters that do not have a significant role in the main storyline, though they might in next installments. Noteworthy ones are Roche (an over-the-top Shinra soldier with a misplaced rivalry with Cloud) and Chadley (a Shinra intern scientist who becomes your go-to person for materia and invocations).

Although the remake follows the same flow of events, there are drastic changes to the original scenario, especially due to the active role a couple of entities take in reshaping the story as we know it.

1. Sephiroth, the main antagonist, is now introduced much more quickly. In the original game, Kitase wanted Sephiroth to be like Spielberg’s Jaws, “teasing this powerful presence, but never fully showing you the shark until later in the story”. This led to only off-screen mentions of him in the original Midgar segment. In the remake, Sephiroth appears within the first hour of gameplay, in what looks like Cloud’s hallucination of a burning Midgar, and the terrifying but very much visible presence of his nemesis. He then regularly appears throughout this installment, not only in Cloud’s various hallucinations but also when directly confronting the latter in Shinra’s building. A notable scene is Sephiroth’s assassination of Shinra’s president – in the original game taking place completely off-screen – but in the remake happening right in front of our protagonists’ eyes. He is also the main antagonist we pursue and fight in the game’s finale. It is hinted that Sephiroth’s early and active role in the Midgar segment of the story stems from his knowledge of the Lifestream (i.e. the planet’s vital energy possibly guiding both the afterlife and “fate” for the living), and his desire to change their outcome.

2. Whispers: In the remake, and likely in direct response to Sephiroth’s newfound time-bending quest, these ghostly figures are understood to appear whenever the course of fate is being steered away from its natural course. Sometimes they act as passive, invisible presences – most likely causing Aerith to be startled in the opening cutscene. But often they become active figures shown to delay, hurt, or save our characters if their fate deviates too much from what we know of the original narrative. For example, in the original game, the first meeting between Cloud and Aerith is attributed to chance: they just bump into one another in the busy streets of Midgar. In the remake, however, and as Cloud is heavily slowed down by his hallucinations of Sephiroth, Whispers are shown to block Aerith’s path so that both protagonists can meet when they are destined to. More tangibly, the remake’s bold move to kill Barrett at Sephiroth’s hands is quickly overturned when the Whispers revive him. The frequent interferences between Sephiroth and the Whispers are at the heart of any potential significant change in the canonical storyline. But while most of Sephiroth’s influences seem canceled out by the Whispers throughout the game, the finale, in which Cloud and his companions are pushed to defeat the Whispers, leaves things extremely open as to how even the most foundational narrative choices of the original game could be retold, or revisited altogether.

While I don’t want to explore all the theories out there, I will focus on what the remake’s finale effectively shows us.

First, the original game never acknowledged the Whispers, and Sephiroth himself was only hinted at in the Midgar section. In the remake, they’re the final bosses. As the group manages to escape Shinra’s headquarters, they run into Sephiroth who forces them into a dimensional break in which they have to fight off the Whispers. Upon defeating them, Cloud confronts Sephiroth, who transports them to a separate plane called “the Edge of Creation”. He then asks Cloud to join forces to “defy destiny together”. Our protagonist refuses, trying to fight back, but is quickly disarmed. Sephiroth chooses however to spare him, and ushers, before disappearing into thin airs: “Seven seconds till the end. Time enough for you, perhaps. But what will you do with it? Let’s see.”

The ending cutscene that follows suggests a few possibilities that will be explored in the sequel. The first few sequences don’t necessarily contradict the original story: Rufus is seen stepping up as President of Shinra after his father’s assassination, and Professor Hojo is shown laughing frantically at JENOVA’s empty vessel. The following scenes are however major twists. The original game mentioned on a few occasions Zack Fair, Cloud’s friend and incidentally Aerith’s girlfriend, we could learn through an optional flashback that he sacrificed himself to help Cloud escape Shinra’s grasp, before the events of FFVII. The remake’s ending subverts this lore completely, presenting what looks like an alternate timeline in which Zack survives, and carries on with Cloud toward Midgar. We conclude the game with hopeful scenes of Sector 7’s slums reconstruction, and yet another twist: Biggs’ survival after the plate collapses, when the original left no ambiguity as to his death.

The story, therefore, remains very open at this stage. It could mean we will effectively increasingly move away from the original story, into this new timeline. Or it could also mean that the sequels will purposefully blur the line – and have its characters move back and forth – between two or more separate timelines. What is clear is that we cannot take anything for granted when it comes to our characters’ fate in the next installments.