The trailer dropped last week. Thirty seconds of Cloud Strife staring at a burning sky, Sephiroth's silhouette, and a release window that feels less like a promise and more like a hostage negotiation: 2027. The internet, predictably, detonated. Trending on every platform. Grown adults calling in sick to rewatch a teaser for a game that won't exist for three more years.
I get it. I was there in 1997. I remember sitting cross-legged on a shag carpet, controller cord stretched taut, watching Aerith die while my mom yelled that dinner was getting cold. That moment is stitched into the fabric of a generation. It's nostalgia at its most potent — the kind that doesn't just sell copies, it sells identity. And Square Enix knows it.
But here's what's rotting underneath the hype.
The original Final Fantasy VII was a complete story. You paid sixty bucks, you got a beginning, a middle, and an end. Cloud swung his sword, Sephiroth got impaled, the Lifestream did its thing. Done. You could put the disc down and walk away changed. That was the deal.
Now look at what they've done. They split one story into three full-price games, padded each with side quests that feel like chores, and stretched the narrative so thin you can see through it. The second installment ended on a cliffhanger that contradicts the original's entire emotional logic. And the third? They're not finishing the story. They're "reimagining" it — which is corporate speak for "we'll keep selling you the same memory until you stop buying."
This isn't a video game problem. This is an American problem. We have been trained, slowly and thoroughly, to accept the infinite strip-mining of everything we once loved. Your favorite band reunites for a casino residency. Your favorite franchise gets a prequel, a sequel, a reboot, and a streaming series that explains the prequel. Nothing is allowed to end because endings don't generate quarterly revenue. The culture has become a treadmill, and we're all just sprinting to stay in the same place, paying monthly subscriptions to feel something we used to feel for free.
Meanwhile, the actual workers — the animators, the programmers, the voice actors — are grinding themselves into dust to meet these impossible timelines. Crunch culture is not a bug in the gaming industry. It's the operating system. And we cheer for it, pre-order it, defend it on message boards like it's a religion instead of a product.
The original FF7 was about a planet bleeding to death while a corporation sucked it dry. Sephiroth wasn't the real villain. Shinra was. And here we are, thirty years later, lining up to hand our money to the Shinra of our own moment, calling it loyalty.
I'll probably play it. That's the worst part. I'll buy the $70 standard edition, maybe the $100 deluxe for the steelbook, and I'll sit on my couch at 43 years old, controller in hand, chasing a feeling that no longer exists. And Square Enix will count me as a satisfied customer.
We deserve better stories. More to the point, we deserve the discipline to let stories end.
The planet doesn't need saving this time. We need to stop paying for the same wound to be reopened.