We’re always on the lookout for a variety of games and genres to help people play. In this video we’re going to be looking at the controls and accessibility features for Final Fantasy VII Remake on the PlayStation 4. Final Fantasy VII Remake is an RPG about a group of characters trying to save the planet from the Shinra Corporation who wish to drain the planet’s lifeforce and harness its energy. You get to play as four characters who have their own unique abilities and controls as you make your way through the city of Midgar. These characters include Cloud, Tifa, Barret and Aerith. The game is Part One of a complete remake of the original Final Fantasy VII first released on PlayStation in 1997. The battle settings in the remake differ from the original Final Fantasy VII. In the original you enter a random battle whilst walking around an area. In the remake, the battles are not random and in most cases you can see the enemies before battling them. You initiate battle by walking up to them. The original Final Fantasy VII focused on turn-based combat where you wait for your ATP gauge, which stands for Active Time Battle, to fill up before performing an action such as Attacking, Using Magic, or Consuming Items. The remake combines action with turn-based combat. Your ATB gauge is filled up by performing Basic Attacks. You can also Dodge and Guard whilst waiting for the gauge to fill. Once you have filled your gauge you can use Abilities, Magic or Items. Some Commands require two full ATB gauges to use. The Commands and Magic all depend on what Materia you equip your character with. Materia are magic orbs that provide special powers to characters. You can choose what Materia each character has by going into the Materia and Equipment Menu in the Pause Menu. Whilst in the Materia Menu, pressing Triangle will bring up the Materia slots for a single character where you can assign or remove Materia. Pressing R1 will allow you to view the Materia slots of all characters, so you can swap Materia between two characters. You have to select your Difficulty before starting the game. You can choose between Classic, Easy and Normal. You can change difficulty at any point during the game. However, if playing in Hard Mode or changing to Hard Mode, you have to restart your current chapter. Classic Difficulty removes the action element from battles and focuses solely on turn-based combat. Characters will Attack, Guard and Dodge automatically whilst waiting for the ATB gauges to fill. The player will only have to focus on given Commands. You can still control the character and manually Attack, Guard and Dodge in this mode. The Enemy Combat is the same as Easy Difficulty. Easy Difficulty is aimed at players who wish to focus on the story rather than the combat. In Normal Difficulty enemies take less damage and provide more damage to characters compared to Easy Difficulty. Hard Difficulty is unlocked after completing the game. Enemies take less damage and provide more damage to characters compared to Normal Difficulty. In other Difficulties resting at a bench restores Health and Magic. However, Magic is not replenished in Hard Mode and you cannot use Items. This means focusing on Abilities in combat and rationing your Magic throughout each chapter. We will now go through the default controls for the game. We’ll start with the controls used when roaming throughout the levels. Left Stick moves your character. Right Stick controls a camera. Cross will bring up your Commands Menu. From here, you can use Healing Spells and Items outside of combat. Holding L1 whilst selecting Healing Spells or Items will allow you to use multiple Spells in a single go without repeatedly going into the Command Menu. D-pad Up and Down scrolls through the Command Menu. Circle comes out of Menus. Square performs a single Attack to break open boxes. This action is only available during roaming paths where you may encounter a battle. Triangle allows you to interact with objects and people. Some interactions require Triangle to be held down such as pulling a lever. L2 toggles through different ways of navigating through areas. You can choose to have a tracker at the top of the screen or a Mini Map in the top right corner. Pressing L3 or holding down R1 or R2 whilst moving will make your character Sprint. R3 resets your camera position. The touchpad brings up your Map and the Option button pauses your game. Now we will go through the default Battle Controls. Left stick moves your current character. R3 toggles Lock-On Targets On and Off, so the enemy will always stay in view. Right Stick will change your target. Cross will bring up your Command Menu. Square will perform a Basic Attack. For Barret, you will need to hold down Square to continuously use his Basic Attack. For Cloud and Tifa, holding down Square will perform their Strong Attack. Triangle will perform the character’s unique Ability. For Cloud, pressing Triangle will activate his Punisher Mode which makes Basic Attacks more powerful. Aerith’s unique Ability called the Tempest becomes more powerful the longer you hold down Triangle with the max being approximately one second. Circle will make your character Dodge. All D-pad directions will change the character you control. D-pad Left and Right will toggle between the potency of the Spells in the Command Menu. Holding down L1 will bring up the Command Shortcuts. By holding down L1 in battle and pressing either Cross, Circle, Square or Triangle a Command that has been assigned to that button combination can be used. So here, holding down L1 and pressing Square will use Barret’s Maximum Fury Attack. And for Cloud, L1 and Triangle will use Triple Slash. You can choose what Commands are set to each button combination by going into the Battle Settings in the Pause Menu. So here, L1 and Square are set to Cloud’s Braver Ability. L1 and Triangle has been set to Triple Slash. L1 and Circle has been set to Cloud’s Limit Break Ascension. And L1 and Cross has been set to Cloud’s Infinity’s End Ability. Setting Shortcuts can only be done outside of battle. Holding R1 will make your character Guard. Touchpad will bring up the Enemy Intel. So here, you can learn more information about the current enemy you are facing. Options will pause the game. L2 and R2 will allow you to issue Commands to characters who you aren’t controlling. So here I’m playing as Cloud. However, by pressing L2 I can command Tifa to use her Divekick Ability. We will now go through the accessibility features that could make the game a little easier to play. From the Pause Menu we can go into System, Options, Camera and Controls. With Camera Repositioning On the camera will automatically reposition itself around the character when moving left and right. So you can move using a single stick. However, there is one minigame that requires you to use the Right Stick to progress. So both sticks are needed to play through the entire game. With Lock-On Controls you can choose whether to use the Right Stick or D-pad Left and Right to swap between Locked-On Targets. With Horizontal and Vertical Camera Controls you have the option to invert the X and Y axis. So with this set to Normal, pressing up on Right Stick will move the camera down and pressing down will move it up. Moving left on Right Stick will move the camera to the right and when moving right the camera moves to the left. When these are set to Inverted the camera controls the opposite way. So pushing up will move the camera up. Down will be down. Left to go left. And right to go right. Camera responsiveness allows you to change the sensitivity of the camera movement. So here we’ll set it to 1 and the camera moves fairly slowly. If we go back and change it to 5, then the speed is significantly faster. If we go into the Gameplay Menu here we have the Cursor Position where we can choose to have the game remember where the last Menu Cursor Position was for Out of Battle and In Battle Menus. So here, we’ll leave the cursor highlighted on Spells. If we come out of the Menu and go back into it, it will still be on Spells. If you change it to Forget then when you go back into the Menu the cursor will always be at the top. With Combat Controls Display turned On you can choose whether to have the Battle Controls displayed in the top left corner whilst in a battle. Thanks for watching. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch.