As shown at our MKZ site, The piano composer Frederic Chopin is going to star in an RPG called Trusty Bell: Chopin's Dream. This is a game that has caught my serious attention, especially in a gaming world where you could hardly go one paragraph or even through 1/8th of a gamers top games list without hitting the Final Fantasy series. Along with Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior, they basically set the idea that RPG fantasy must be medieval and even more apparent, setting the standards of how most VG cinemas must be.

Even after the technical demo of what FF7 would look on had it been done on PS3, there is still much speculation that a FF7 Remake is on the horizon, being secretly done and created. Me personally I don't have any enthusiasm to see a FF7 remake. Granted many people say that it's a game that has not aged well graphically, this leads to a problem to what can it be? To me a video game remake as always been along the lines of:

An entire revamp of the story/content much like Castlevania 4 (Super Castlevania).

The same content in the origin game but with extras i.e. FF-GBA versions, Tales of Phantasia, Resident Evil 1, etc.

To me the entire concept of a FF7 seems to be a doomed propect from the beginning. It's like trying to remake an classicly reknowned film ever where there is no reason at all to do a remake. This reminds me of an article on the now defunct Whatever-Dude website, lambasting of then power couple Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck's plans of doing a Casablanca remake with themselves playing the main characters. Refrain from laughing please. It was quite a strong rumour at the time, bordering on rumbling to be true. Had it not been for the complete meltdown of their relationship in front of every tabloid reader's and magazine program viewer's eyes, Casablanca could have easily been the spiritual sequel to Gigli.

Granted FF7 is in good hands. It's by no ways able to be totally fucked up by some hack (or hacks) like say...Electronic Arts, Midway or 3D Realms. Now I don't consider FF7 to be perfect, not as widely acceepted as the beforementioned cinematic acheivement I've referenced. It could be the fact that I ruined most of the game by already knowing the worst kept secret in video game history, that I've played through most of the game with a gamefaq in hand (all 100+ pages printed out at the time), or like most haters of F7 I just jumped the bandwagon because it is cool to hate. My apprehension for the game aside, what I do recgonize is the impact that FF7 had on the gaming industry. Most importantly that to most gamers, new gamers, first time rpg-players; to them FF7 is perfect, it is their Casablanca.

And therein lies the rub. Why would we want to have lightening strike twice? From the remake methods I've mentioned, if you try to change the story as a reimagining of the story such as method 1, you are basically tampering with a great storyline and thus piss off a lot of fans. If you take the route of method 2, then all you are really left is a neater looking FF7, with a playable FF7: Advent Children part and some slight bonuses. I suppose the most obvious one is the ability to revive Aeris, where in fact it would just go back to method 1 and piss off a lot of fans. Hardly worth spending millions of dollars for a blatent amount of fanservice, much of which is already being used towards a gaming collection called Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. IMHO, Advent Children is the FF7 remake that a lot of people were waiting for. In some form though, Square Enix has pidgeon holed themselves into a very bad situation.

If a FF7 remake were to surface, I imagine that Square Enix will have to produce the game with Advent Children quality graphics. Great. Just what we need. Another foray of hyper realism into a gaming industry. I'm not entirely against realism in gaming, but it gets to a point where when a character's belt buckle has more polygons than the previous generation's entire character model, does it matter so much when all I still see is a yellow square on someone's pants? When for all the effort put into this design actually doesn't improve on either atmosphere or animation of the character who's probably using the same animation it was 5 years ago. When you can boast about the amount of pores on a character's CG rendered face where in just gaming reality you probably will never see that detail aside from 3 scant seconds of some intro movie? Basically said, why make something real over making something fun?

I've always thought that it isn't FF7 who needs a remake, but FF6, heck FF4 - FF6 because unlike FF7, there is something that can be tampered with. This isn't because I'm some old school purist who wants a FF6 remake to be made because I love it. But because as great as those stories are, they do have the leeway to be reimagined unlike FF7's beloved storyline. Basically said there is more that can be improved upon the games other than just a graphical facelift. When Kefka killed General Leo in FF6, had it not been for the glaring red screen we would have never known that a murder took place instead of a Brokeback moment. Then again with anal ruptures, who's to say the red isn't so specific only to murder? But just imagine that Sqaure-Enix could really challenge how games look graphically. That games could even look much like Amano's artwork. Instead of hard anatomically correct polygons, we can possibly get artful even wispy looking characters and design.

However I am getting to a point here. For once I am excited about a game. Not by the fact that it looks great, but by the fact that it is different and in some ways it does push the idea of design beyond what we've seen before. Much like Mother or Xenogears (not to be confused with the Would you like some game with your movie snorefest Xenosaga) Trusty Bell is appealing to me because it looks different and even acts different from RPGs. And even though I'm not exactly a graphics whore, there is something to the attention to detail that can't help but bring it out in me: