Action Button Reviews FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE on May 11th, 2020! (Patreon)

Hello, and Welcome Back to Video Games. I'm Tim Rogers. You are reading a post on the Action Button Patreon page.

First of all, thank you for backing my Patreon.

I have to admit: I have been scared to look at this page. I didn't expect the number after the dollar sign to climb at all, much less to the extent it has reached. I expected my first month's patrons to fall into the category of "early adopter." After all, my Patreon page description purposely excludes a HUGE amount of information about the exact nature of the types of videos I am going to make. You're taking a risk by investing in this Patreon without seeing what my actual product is going to be. (Spoiler: it's a two-hour, meticulously analytical review of Final Fantasy VII Remake, coming May 11th, 2020.)

However, I now remember that sometimes there are a LOT of early adopters for something. This isn't a perfect metaphor, though here it is: everyone I know who bought the original iPhone also bought the iPhone 3G the day it came out like six months later.

The dollar amount at the top of this Patreon page frightens me a little bit. It frightens me because, believe it or not, I have low self-esteem. I would not bother to make anything at all if I had high self-esteem. You flatter me Ten Thousand Times over with your money, though my low self-esteem inspires me to make sure you get your money's worth. And with the current state of the world, I can't deliver you my selfish idea of "your money's worth"--which integrally involves Stupid Field-Produced On-Camera Skits--so I instead committed to making this video something much, much, much more enormous and complicated.

Of course, I have moments wherein I realize, duh, of course I am going to satisfy my customers. You've seen me make videos before. You know that the only rule of my videos is that I barely ever do the same thing the same way twice. And you like my videos anyway! So clearly you're going to like whatever semi-rigid format I have been workshopping for literal months over here for my Patreon videos, right?

However, I won't let my rational thoughts get in the way of providing you an avalanche of money's-worthiness.

That was both a Final Fantasy VII reference, and a promise.

Today it pleases me to announce that this weekend I completed my research process for my video review of Final Fantasy VII Remake. 

In hindsight, I see that I was not joking around when I said, on Twitter, that I picked the absolute worst game on which to stake the success of my New Brand. Final Fantasy VII isn't just an RPG--it's a new RPG, and one to which I have intense personal connections. Any one of these facets would have been doable by itself. Together it's a perfect storm-mountain of work.

I want Action Button Reviews to be reliably enormous and thorough in a ridiculous manner heretofore unseen in game reviews. To this end I have developed what I call The Action Button Method For Game Analysis. Each review will contain a meaningful portion of the heartfelt, sincere, subjective criticism you already appreciate me for of the game in question, though behind all this is a disproportionately large collection of scientific data. 

For Final Fantasy VII Remake, I didn't just "play" the game. I played it four times on "normal" difficulty and once on "hard." In each of my four "normal" play-throughs I "role-played" a player of different skill levels and narrative interest. I captured footage of every play-through and performed side-by-side comparisons of several vertical slices. It turns out that Final Fantasy VII Remake's perplexingly peculiar pacing incorporates elements of so many modern triple-A video games that the briefest of its existing vertical slices amounts to a little over five hours of game. The vertical slice analysis required me to heavily scrutinize 18 hours of footage.

Furthermore, I performed The Action Button Method For Game Analysis--previously reserved only for my triple-A clients, though hey, you all collectively amount to one triple-A client now, I guess!--to every single second of footage of my two longest normal mode playthroughs (my first and, ironically, my last (interestingly, my last playthrough was the longest)).

One element of this method involves meticulously logging every second of footage. For 88 hours of game footage, this took me an entire week of seven 12-hour workdays.

The image at the top of this post shows one Adobe Premiere sequence of Final Fantasy VII Remake. This sequence consists of one uncut chapter of the game, from its first frame to its last. I have inserted edits to supply myself with  convenient timestamps for finding important moments of footage. Each video track represents a different color-coded in-game element. Yellow is cutscenes. Red is battles. Et cetera.  Using this method allows me to prepare footage for deeper scrutiny. On this project, for example, I spent six hours researching one fact that will amount to the punchline of exactly one two-sentence paragraph of my review script.

I explain this to you here, today, to demonstrate my dedication to producing videos of the weirdest, most meticulous quality density available. Does any "mainstream" review include a sentence confidently declaring an exact frame-perfect number of seconds the player spends climbing ladders in Final Fantasy VII Remake before immediately moving on to talking about something else? I don't think so. Did any "mainstream" reviewer of Final Fantasy VII Remake spend 8 hours mind-palace-channeling the game-worldliness of their 1997 self so as to obtain a pristine, exact, argument-settling timestamp for the length of the original Final Fantasy VII's Midgar segment? (Actually, I didn't check. If one exists, let me know, so I can find another career.)

I had said that my first month's video might launch on May 1st. This plan unfortunately fell through due to its extreme, idiotic unrealism. (Also, to be fair, I launched this Patreon on April 8th, so . . .)

I had intended to hire someone to help with the research process, though I was unable to find someone in a timely enough manner to make the review happen on time--much less at all. So I ended up opting to do it all myself. 

In a $9 folding chair . . . with the wrong eyeglass prescription. (I tried to buy a better chair. Steelcase took my money, though they have yet to send the chair. It turns out money is not so useful as it used to be, in this current dystopia.)

The other day, while I was finishing up logging my footage, the fancy camera I had ordered arrived. Tomorrow I will set up my filming studio for recording the reading of the script I have been writing yesterday and today. Wednesday I will record. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I will probably edit 18 hours a day until this video is done. (I said on Twitter it was going to be 97 minutes. Let's ignore that. I think it might be around two hours.)

In summary: my process is bizarrely, soul-crushingly thorough. However, the hard part is finished. Now it's time for the fun part.

Actually, let me give you some bullet points. Here's my process of making a video review:

THE HARD PART

Play game (while Having Thoughts and Taking Notes) ~8 days

Arrange notes into an outline (~0.5 days)

Watch footage while logging moments pertaining to the script notes; flesh out script outline with specific examples while doing so (~7 days)

Perform various analyses in service of the script outline (~3 days)

THE FUN PART

Write, proofread, edit, rehearse script (~2 days)

Record voiceover (and on-camera!) for script (~0.5 days)

Edit voiceover / camera recording to create the foundation of the video over which i will lay footage and graphic design (~1 day)

Edit video (~4 days)

All told, that equals about 25 12-hour days of production, or about 300 hours of work per video. 

This Final Fantasy VII Remake video, being the first video in this series, came with its own challenges--I spent more time than I'd have liked reviewing editor resumes (and ultimately not hiring anyone (yet)!), building my "brand" (graphic design, etc), discussing video series elements (music, animation) with potential collaborators, et cetera--the thing slipped. I launched my Patreon on April 8th and really, really hoped to turn my first video around in 21 days, though looking at it now, man, that woulda killed me.

So let's all be excited for May 11th, where I will finally show you what I truly believe your money is worth! (Spoiler: it turns out it's worth a lot.)

And then, in the future, let's all look forward to me hiring someone to help wrangle and analyze all this footage so that I can work 9 hours a day instead of 12. 

And hopefully, NEXT month's game won't be as big as Final Fantasy VII Remake . . . . . . 

. . . . . . . . . . . . or will it?