At the Tokyo Game Show 2019, when I got some hands-on time with Final Fantasy VII Remake, one thing quickly became clear: if you want to be good at the game, you need to be switching characters constantly.
The TGS 2019 demo starts about halfway through the opening dungeon of the classic game as our heroes, Cloud and Barret, infiltrate a mako reactor in order to destroy it. You fight some guards, destroy some flying drones, and eventually make your way to the boss.
Of course, while the story and location are familiar to anyone who’s played the original, the combat is anything but. Unlike the original, turn-based game, Final Fantasy VII Remake is more of an action-RPG. You move around and attack in real-time but are also able to freeze time at any point to select magic or abilities instead.
Due to this new battle system, you can only control one character at a time–though you can change who you are controlling on the fly. In fact, the key to combat is not to spend your time controlling just one character and leave the other characters to the AI, but to switch between them regularly.
Sometimes, you’ll obviously want to switch. If there are enemies in the distance or flying above you erratically, it doesn’t take a genius to know that the man with the machine gun arm will work far better than the man with the giant sword. But that’s not the only way the game rewards you for switching between the characters.
As your characters fight in Final Fantasy VII Remake, they each build up their own segmented ATB (Active Battle) bar. When a segment is full, you can use an item, ability, or magic. But here’s the trick: when you are controlling a given character, their ATB meter fills up exponentially faster.
In boss battles, it’s important for your survival that you keep everyone with at least a segment in their ATB–so they can heal themselves or others if nothing else. But that’s just the start when it comes to strategy.
Like in the Final Fantasy XIII games, you’ll need to break the boss’ guard to do any real damage. This can be done a lot more efficiently if you save up your ATB across all your characters and then unleash your powerful abilities/magic all at once. (There’s even a button to allow you to choose and activate an ally’s special abilities without even switching to them).
Likewise, you could break the boss first and then unleash those ATB attacks to get massive damage all at once. Heck, you can even line these up with a limit break (which also seemed to fill faster when I was controlling the character though I couldn’t tell you for sure) for even more damage.
If there’s one thing I learned from my short time with Final Fantasy VII Remake, it’s that constantly switching characters will be vital for playing the game–especially if there are harder difficulties. And with a cast as deep and varied as the one in Final Fantasy VII, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The first part of Final Fantasy VII Remake will be released on PlayStation 4 worldwide on March 20, 2020.
I just wanted to give out a big thanks to Joshua Ott for sponsoring this article with his Patreon donation. (At the $60 a month tier, you are allowed to pick anything up to an including a 13ish episode series to be reviewed–which is released in addition to the one article a week I normally put out here on BiggestinJapan.com.) So thanks again!
They made switching optional and that was a mistake. Most people will stay with a single character unless they REALLY need range or heals. Lot of time and money developing personal combat systems for each character to make it optional. A timer for using each character would have been ideal. That way is not all about spamming Cloud and Barret.