The Final Fantasy VII Remake Review

I'm sorry, everyone . . . I finished the video.

It's three hours, eighteen minutes, and 43 seconds long--though admittedly the last ten minutes of that is the on-camera special thanks and epilogue segment. So let's say it's three hours and eight minutes long.

As a large video, it's taking its time getting onto YouTube. It's been uploading on my slow internet for about an hour, and it looks like it has two hours left.

To be safe, I've set it to premiere at 7pm eastern time today! You can click "like" on the video now, if you want :-O

Or, if you're reading this post a day later: hello! You can just watch the video by clicking this link.

This review spans seven chapters, which I call "discs," in a bit of a stupid gimmick. (I apologize for the stupidity of the gimmick. I only came to dislike it about 80 hours into the editing, so maybe it won't bother you.)

These seven "discs" will present you various segments, some of which you may recognize as the "finished" form of segments I might have teased in many of my previous videos. For example, one of these "discs" features a fifteen-minute segment called "The Vertical Slice." 

Coincidentally, I consider this video "The Vertical Slice" of my YouTube channel. For the first video, I wanted to include a little bit of everything I will ever do on this channel (except for field-produced on-camera segments, of course, what with the situation in the world right now; though rest assured those are coming as soon as it's feasible for us to get on airplanes). 

I made this video hard for myself. On purpose, and for fun!

I've always done all my own editing, on every video I've ever made. Every time I make a video, I challenge myself to learn how to do one thing I've never done before. Because I'm an idiot, I never run out of things I haven't done before. (That's the reason for the "Born Stupid" part.)

For this video, backed by the power of a beautiful brand-new high-end PC proffered to me by my generous patron Travis Gafford (through his connections at Alienware), I was able to force myself to do even stupider stuff than I'd ever done before.  Editing this video (outside of the one showstopping critical Adobe Premiere error I'd never encountered before) came extraordinarily easy. The technology cooperated with my process in a way I've never been able to enjoy.

Unfortunately, due to many, many packages getting lost in the mail these past couple months, I could not acquire a windscreen for my microphone even if my life had depended on it. I ordered one in March, and another in April, and then another in April. Editing the audio on this video was a nightmare. I manually removed about 1,200 pops from the voiceover. Then, the day after I finished editing, the third windscreen I ordered arrived. I used it to record the epilogue. Wow, what a good thing to have. The audio will be remarkably better in the third video, though it won't be "perfect" until I have time to build myself a little soundproof chamber over here.

Also, by hilarious coincidence, my Steelcase Gesture chair I'd ordered in early March arrived on the last day of editing, after I'd just spent about 140 hours editing in a $9 folding chair.

I shall make my next video, then, in relative comfort. It'll also be easier to edit the voiceover. It'll also be a much shorter video--and not by accident.

I pitched you on hour-long videos, and that's what I'm going to make. I told you I made this first video enormous because I wanted to show you as much of everything I want to do as I could, in one huge burst. Like I said, please consider it a "Vertical Slice" of all my future videos.

As I say in this video, the industry term "vertical slice" is irresponsible, because it implies that making one piece of cake is somehow easier than making a whole cake. Anyone who's ever made a cake knows you don't bake a cake one slice at a time.

For this video, I wanted to bake you a whole cake.

Having (truly) said all that--you know what? This video right here is what I want to make. I want to make three-hour videos of this style and depth, with this many varied segments, and I want to incorporate field segments and running jokes and analysis that compares every game I review to each other. I want to make all of these videos as huge as this one, because I feel like each game on the list on my Patreon page (and each game I kept off the list so it'll surprise you) deserves that treatment. 

And I believe it's an exciting format. It's a format of formats! The possibilities excite me--I'd love to try to do one of these on a real budget. It's a one-stop shop, and it's a HUGE shop. If typical game reviews are a guy who works at GameStop, I want my reviews to be an entire 1990s shopping mall, with a Software Etc, an Electronics Boutique, a Babbages, a Champs, an Orange Juilius, a Taco Bell, a Suncoast Motion Picture Company, and a Waldenbooks. (Uh, maybe you'll see what I mean when you watch the video.)

However, if I made a video like this for every game, I'd die. That's why I need your continued support--so I can hire two full-time editors, then three, and then, wow: we've got us a "Channel". Until then: there's no way I can make another one like this. So please be excited for the next one, which will be of a much more reasonable length, and contain only three of the (I think) eleven segments featured in this video!

Finally, I want to thank two people--Fred Wood for designing the excellent "Please Change The Disc" splash pages, and Josh Watson for helping edit one of the "discs" of this video.

Prior to this project, I had never had any help editing a video. Naturally, as I toiled away on all those hundreds of videos that convinced you to back this Patreon before I'd even made anything, I sat in the dark in my tiny office at Kotaku Dot Com Headquarters fantasizing about what work would be like if I could afford a staff. I imagined the exact workflow. I knew it'd be great. Josh Watson helped me test that workflow--and also helped me get over my weird jerkish pride that I made all these videos by myself. Josh Watson proved to me that, yes, another person *can* match precise clips of footage of my gameplay to the words I'm saying. Yes, another person can go back into a game and capture necessary footage to patch in. He lightened the load by a lot, minimizing my input on what is, to be honest, the most complicated chapter of the review. (It's the one about the battle system. It's thirty minutes. You can probably tell which part I edited. (It's the part about my college dorm experience.))

I've mentioned here that I'm looking to hire one full-time editor as soon as possible. I've received many inquiries about this position. I don't want to choose lightly, so I've been putting off looking over applications in detail until I finish this first video. I hope to hire someone before, let's say, the fifth video. If you're interested, I'll say this: a resume is nice, though if you linked me to a big YouTube video and said "I made this," that'd be even nicer!

Well, that's probably enough from me for now! Be sure to follow me on twitch.tv/actionbutton because, oh yes: I'll be streaming this week.