Why FF7 Remake’s Early Side Quests Are So Tedious (But Get Better)

The early side quests in Final Fantasy 7 Remake are painfully tedious, but later optional missions are way less boring. It’s a matter of narrative framing: Square Enix wrote itself into a corner with Cloud’s money-minded personality, dooming Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s Chapter 3 and 8 side quests to be terrible, and a simple change made Chapter 14’s quests much better.

Side quests are new to Final Fantasy 7, added in Remake as part of Square Enix’s fleshing-out of the original’s Midgar section into a full-length game. Side quests provide rewards like unique Materia, money (Gil), and equipment, supplementing the player’s arsenal. The new missions are part of broader Final Fantasy 7 story changes made in the remake, adding more context to certain areas and characters of the game’s world.

The problem with the early-game side quests is the lack of substance in this added context, as well as the specific objectives and rewards of each quest. Some of Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s best character moments and rewarding late-game side quests are locked behind these missions, but the game doesn’t tell players that. Instead, they’re meant to trudge through the early quests purely for the fun of it, and they aren’t very fun at all.

How Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s Side Quests Improve In The Late-Game

Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s Chapter 3 and 8 side quests are given to players with a simple goal in mind: get money and earn reputation. FF7 protagonist Cloud Strife is introduced as a cold-hearted mercenary who will only do anything if there’s money involved, which means other characters have to convince him to help with the promise of cash. When players enter new neighborhoods full of characters they’ve never met before, that means side quests are framed around by the incredibly motive of earning enough money and renown to be arbitrarily “good enough.” Players never really struggle to afford anything in Final Fantasy 7 Remake, so the desire to earn Gil is one they don’t share with Cloud, and there’s no in-game system that quantifies “rep,” so they literally can’t share that goal with him. Sure, completing certain side quests unlocks others, which could be seen as a consequence of earning NPCs’ respect. But there’s no excitement to doing so, because the unlocked quests are more of the same, and most side quest objectives are tedious in themselves.

In Chapter 3, for example, Cloud will be asked to do things like walk a few paces to an empty lot, kill some rats, wait for some slightly more powerful rats to show up, and then kill those. It’s simple fetch and kill quests, with lots of running back and forth, in exchange for mostly boring and unhelpful rewards. Square Enix tried to make things a little more interesting by having Tifa and Aerith accompany Cloud as he runs these errands, but their dialogue does little to make the quests more palatable, only really paying off towards the end of the quest checklist.

Chapter 14 fixes nearly all of these issues. Because of recent story events, everyone giving Cloud missions is in genuine need of help, and Cloud’s party members encourage him (and, thus, players) to complete quests for that reason – not for money or rep – even though they know there’s a chance he doesn’t care. To that end, Cloud has already met most of the characters he’s helping (or at least knows they’ve recently been met with a significant hardship), which goes a long way towards making players actually care about the quests. What’s more, Chapter 14 quest rewards are better, giving players access to fast travel, powerful end-game weapons, and a key to unlock more useful goodies hidden elsewhere. They also often tie into each other, where following one quest’s objective leads players to another’s, which makes completing them quicker and more satisfying.

Cloud has always started off as a seemingly uncaring warrior-for-hire, so it makes sense that Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s early side quests involve a lot of doing things for people he doesn’t care about in exchange for money. But Square Enix could have written around this in a number of ways, developing side characters’ backstories in order to make players care, creating more interesting quest objectives, or simply just holding off on side quests until later in the game, when Cloud has established more of a connection to the people around him. With all the narrative changes in Final Fantasy 7 Remake, the developer had ample room to make the adjustments needed for its side quest set-ups to be more compelling than, “Hey, you’re that merc I heard about. Can you help me with this problem I’ve got?” Instead, players got a slew of boring missions sure to make some newcomers bounce off side quests entirely.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake released for PS4 on April 10, 2020.

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Camden Jones
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Camden Jones is one of Screen Rant’s gaming features editors. He loves video games, but he’s even more interested in the people who make and play them.

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