Living in a Materia world.
It’s hard to imagine a playthrough of the original Final Fantasy VII and not choose to have the energetic young ninja, Yuffie, join your party. While optional, she was always someone who remained a memorable core character of the series for me. When Final Fantasy VII: Remake - Intergrade was announced, we were treated to a sampling of what to expect with the game’s first expansion; INTERmission. This short 5-8 hour escapade, starring Yuffie, is a delight, and while it’s over before you know it, it leaves a lasting mark on you due to its smart use of her character and the expanded world established in the FF7 Remake. That said, some aspects of this add-on do feel a tad too thin in their offering.
INTERmission runs parallel to parts of the story in Remake, often showing you the slums during a key part in the story, and wrapping its short playtime during a very pivotal moment towards the end of that adventure. You’ll run into a few familiar faces, both significant and minor, and see what the main crew is up to during a quick moment, but for the most part, INTERmission leans into its own cast of characters, for as brief as you see them. While it will likely be years before we see the gang back together again, and, of course, how Yufiie will play into the mix, this little brief escapade does whet the appetite for more, even if it sometimes doesn’t feel enough of a bite to satiate that hunger.
Set on a mission to steal a top-secret Shinra Materia, on behalf of the Wutai, Yuffie meets with members of Midgar’s Shinra resistance group, Avalanche. While she doesn’t interact with the key members of Avalanche, such as Barret or Tifa, the new characters introduced here do the job as her initial contact, before Yuffie then meets up with Sonon, an older and more experienced Wutai operative. While you don’t take manual control of Sonon at any time during the story, you can instruct him in battle, and perform synergy attacks that work well alongside Yuffie and her rambunctious nature. As for the rest of combat, I’ll get to that shortly.
The two chapters present here are a bit light on a story that will, unfortunately, matter little in the long run. While it can, at times, be interesting, it is meant to be a snack while the main course is cooking. The mission to infiltrate Shinra does feature a familiar face, but the repercussions for this story are likely only going to affect Yuffie than some big gesture that affects the rest of the cast. There is nothing inherently wrong with what INTERmission offers in both its narrative and its gameplay, but it feels like Yuffie, albeit her efforts here, has some aspect of being optional to the series yet again.
Where INTERmission suffers the most is retreading half of its length in areas we have already explored. While sure, we get a few new areas to explore around the Slums, and a whole new underground facility within Shinra itself, it doesn’t feel like a tremendous amount of new content, despite the low cost for the expansion. Some of your time running around the slums is by interacting with characters you’ve met before, challenging them to a game of Fort Condor, or the quick conversations you can have with people here and there. Streamlining this content can likely set you back around 4 hours, but digging into everything it has to offer will see you pushing around 8 hours at most.
Likely the biggest change to how the game plays is through Yuffie's personality and energy flowing through not just her movements and pacing, but the music as well. The FF7 Remake had a wonderful score, but the poppy jazz-like tones of what is here just flows with the youthful and kinetic energy from the young master ninja. Every beat and note just captures the tone of what they are trying to do here perfectly, and while we get some fantastic themes that feel more up the Remake’s alley in the game’s second chapter, it was great to have this music diversity at play here with what Yuffie brings to the series. Adding to that, Yuffie herself is charming, and quite over the top in who she feels herself to be; a famous Materia hunter and all-around master ninja, something that is part of one of the best moments in the first chapter.
Due to the length of this content, we don't get to really know Sonon past a few moments that illustrate why and what he is fighting for. I think he had the potential to be a more fleshed-out character, given those reasons, but will how brief this content is, he only gets a few scenes to really shine. While Yuffie does see some change from rambunctious ninja to something a bit more serious, it’s very likely that much of her character development is being saved for her involvement in Remake’s second chapter. That’s not to say we don’t get anything here, because we most certainly do, but given we only get to spend a few hours with her, I wasn’t expecting much in the way of a complete character arc occurring here. Yuffie was such a memorable character to many for several years, and this little bit of content does a lot to hopefully make her memorable to a whole new generation of gamers.
Where much of this content is going to excite players is through some of the deep cuts from the extended FF7 games of the past coming into the mix here, with a few characters and encounters that are pretty damn exciting, even if they feel more like teases for something to be fully developed a bit more down the road. Again, this content likely isn’t meant to make drastic waves for the full story going forward but is mostly meant to be an interesting addition to what will be fully complete and yet connected experiences that likely won’t come to rely too heavily on what happens here in INTERmission, but I hope I am dead wrong about that.
While much of the combat here is as it was in the Remake, Yuffie’s encounters here do shake up some aspects of the wonderful combat we’ve experienced already. As a Wutai ninja, Yuffie has a Shuriken that works well as a close-range weapon, and one that she can toss out. In fact, there are a few moments in the DLC where you’ll use it to attack boxes that are out of reach while traversing on a platform. You can also throw it at enemies and then slingshot towards them to reclaim it. This is all done with some breathtaking animations and energy that Yuffie has in spades here. By having both close range and distance covered, Yuffie is a ball of kinetic energy in combat, and honestly, I probably had more fun with her combat here than I did in the main game, so here is hoping that we see some of these combat additions added to the next installment.
One change to how combat works here is that you cannot control Sonon himself. Instead, you’ll give him instructions while remaining in control of Yuffie. However; where INTERmission differs from Remake is that Yuffie and Sonon can team up with wild and engaging Synergy attacks. Synergize is a status buff that allows the pair to perform big elaborate attacks together, as well as pull off special abilities and even perform two limit breaks at once. During these attacks, Sonon will stay close to Yuffie, and each will attack the same foe. That said, this attack causes the ATB gauge to build slowly, so you’ll need to strike a balance here. It is a very engaging system that I hope will find its way into the second installment of the Remake due to just how fun it really is to use. In fact, I could see them having you pair together certain characters in some sort of bonding system seen in other JRPG’s.
Apart from the narrative, Yuffie will have a few side activities to take part in, as well as adding some content to the main game as a fun bonus. This is where my estimate from 5-8 hours comes in because it can at times feel like content to pad the game’s length, at least in some small way. There is a combat challenge that has you running a timed gauntlet of smashing boxes, some of which add time to a ticking down timer, as well as Fort Condor, a strategy game that has you ranking up battles against some of the more well known NPC’s of the Remake, as well as some complete nobodies as well. You’ll also have a new summon to challenge, and completing the DLC will not only unlock a harder difficulty but a special boss encounter that you can challenge via Chapter 16 of the main game in the simulator.
While the Fort Condor featured here feels more like an active board game when compared to the one found in the original FF7, it is something that you can find enjoyment from, even if I feel it’s more filler than I’d of hoped for. Fort Condor has you picking units to place into a shuffled rotation that acts off a rock, paper, and scissors-type combat system. You have three towers to protect, and you will send out units to combat theirs and hopefully turn the tide to have them progress into enemy territory to destroy their towers within the time limit. You’ll track down new units as you explore the Slums, and then challenge other characters as you rank up.
Fort Condor and much of what you do in the Slums feels like very thin content to pad out the game until you get to the Shinra building, where the bulk of the new content exists. The new additions to the Slums are nice, especially its boss encounter, but the bulk of the story and the purpose of this content doesn’t really seem to start until you are the better part of halfway through. Had INTERmission featured a few more side quests, maybe another new area or two, then it would be something I think that would have satisfied a bit more than the few hours we get here.
Now, the biggest issue with what INTERmission does isn’t something related to the game, but rather the PS5 in general. While this content is currently PS5 only, at least for what appears to be six months, there is quite the hassle of getting it up and going for those who are migrating from PS4. Now, first off, if you claimed the free PS Plus version of Remake, you won’t be able to upgrade and instead, you’ll have to purchase the whole Intergrade PS5 version which does come with INTERmission. Now, those who upgraded from PS4 to PS5 will get the Intergrade update, but it won’t contain INTERmission, meaning you’ll have to buy the $19.99USD add-on to play it. To add further insult to injury, the upgrade is only available to those who either purchased FF7 digitally or those who have the disc, meaning if you have the disc and a discless PS5, you are out of luck my friend, time to buy it again.
And, as you migrate your save, as well to even do the upgrade, you’ll need to have both the PS4 version of FF7 Remake to even start the upgrade download, as well as the PS5 version of FF7 installed at the same time. Given the small amount of hard drive space on the PS5, that is pretty damn ridiculous. But, in order to even transfer your saves, you need to load up the PS4 version, pick one save at a time and upload it within the game, load up the PS5 version, again with just one save at a time, and save it to a slot within the PS5 version, and then repeat that process for each save. So, if you are someone who has over a dozen saves, then I am so.. so sorry for you. This was the same case with Marvel’s Avengers and is further proof that this sort of cross-gen support seems to be something Sony likely didn’t plan on and is something put in place as a last resort. Hell, even the new Doom Eternal upgrade for PS5 doesn’t even allow save transfers, but still requires the PS4 version to be installed to even start the upgrade.
Regardless, I had a good time, I just wish my adventure wasn’t over and done with so soon. The visual enhancements given to the PS5 version cause this game to soar to even more visual heights that it simply looks beyond gorgeous. The vast amount of detail can often make character models look better than most other game’s CG cutscenes. I personally can’t wait for Yuffie to join up the main cast, it’s just going to be a long wait until that dream comes true. It’s just a shame of all the hoops you have to jump through to even play the damn thing and the restrictions of how you purchased the game, and the platform you are playing on having such convoluted limitations.
Lastly, the bizarre nature of getting this DLC going, and how it affects owners of various versions and platforms will have NO bearing on my score as that rating is for the content itself.
Developer - CyberConnect2, Square Enix. Publisher - Square Enix. Released - June 10th, 2021. Available On - PS5. Rated - (T) Blood, Language, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco, Violence. Platform Reviewed - PS5 Review Access - FF7: Remake - Intergrade: Episode - INTERmission was purchased by the reviewer.