It’s not surprising that Square Enix would agree to an exclusive. Sony is determined to snap up exclusives as a general rule, but Final Fantasy VII is practically synonymous with the original PlayStation — this is a chance to recreate those glory days, even if it’s very late in the PS4’s lifecycle. Still, those who hoped that the role-playing series would stay platform-independent are bound to be disappointed.

No one really wants to be digging into menus as they fight enemies, but FF7R tries to segue into them with a slick almost-paused time slowdown. This is Tactical Mode, where you access your spells and abilities. The latter seems to encompass character buffs, area of effect attacks and stronger one-hit wonders.

To access Tactical Mode, you’ll need press X after filling up active time battle gauges through standard attacks, connected to the square button. Each character’s weapon behaves differently: Barret’s long-range gun can auto-attack if you hold down the button, while Cloud’s attacks are press-by-press, taking more time and keeping guard and evasion options available as you slash away.

Your team can defend, but can also evade through circle presses, or simply steering the character out of the way. Barret and Cloud aren’t particularly agile, however. Hopefully, future characters might be a little more nimble. Speaking of your team, you can switch between them at any time, and even bark special attack (or magic) commands through the collar buttons. If you’re controlling Cloud, but Barrat’s ready to cut loose, it’s easy enough to do without switching to the gun-wielder.

When you do swap characters, the game does a slick camera pan between them. I’m not sure why this is important, but it just added to the polish and cinematic feel of the battles. In Final Fantasy XV, perhaps the closest FF game you can compare this to, while you leveled up your comrades and assigned equipment and abilities, you never got to take control of them directly (unless it was in the later updates). This feels much better.

Battles are further complicated by a stagger gauge that allows you to increase damage to your foes by stacking attacks and strong effects. There’re also Limit Breaks, too. These special, heavy-hitting attacks are unleashed once a slowly growing gauge fills up. You’ll be using these a lot less frequently, but they can often save your ass, or finish off a boss.

And boy, it really is polished. Well, polished then covered in a layer of soot and grease. Cloud’s iconic, anachronistic anime hair struggles to stay spikey at such high resolutions, which is probably the only graphical letdown I can remember from my playtime. The aliasing effect seems to persist across different parts of the game, adding a kind-of hatching effect that’s growing on me. The characters are realistic, yes, but not hyper-realistic. There’s some kind of artistic texture to everything.

After several brawls against Shinra goons and a few security drones, Cloud and Barrat reach the depths of the reactor and get blindsided by the scorpion robot from the opening act of the original game. With a rear-mounted laser, a bunch of missiles and the fact that it’s a giant robot, it was a great showcase as to how the entire battle system came together. Blocking is important; don’t burn through all your ATM gauges because you might need to heal soon; Barrat is a better character for attacking a robot on the run; Cloud is your heavy-hitter. The boss battle was entertaining without being too punishing. (I know it’s a demo, but the earlier small fry battles were so easy I still barely grasped the battle dynamics ahead of the boss fight.)

Outside of battles, there wasn’t much to report. Cloud can run around the environment, even sprinting. He can slide down ladders, smash up boxes for hidden items and talk to NPCs. That’s pretty much the extent of the interactions in this E3 demo. I wonder how a game that had some many characters and interactive parts all crammed together will expand in this remake.

There’s a lot of Final Fantasy XV DNA on show here, but the team has still kept the game incredibly faithful to the PlayStation original. Enemies match their original designs, even the Mako reactor that makes up the demo roughly translates to the static CGI screens of 20 years. I’m more confident that Square Enix can make this work, but can it maintain the thrill of boss battles across the whole game? With the promise of this episodic production taking up two Blu-rays, it’s an incredibly dense, ambitious project. Hopefully, it all comes together next March.

How is the gameplay transitioning to the PS4? While standard attacks can be unleashed at any time, a pair (!) of ATB meters will charge up, offering the ability to unleash magic, techniques and a new “tactical mode” that looks like a moment, frozen in time. Support characters, like Barrett, will offer long-range attacks, adding further a dimension to battle strategies.

To that end, we saw Cloud and Barrett face off against the iconic scorpion guard robot — an early boss in the original FF7. The battle showcased how players can switch between characters, meaning if one gets trapped by enemies, unleashing a special attack to stun and free them. When you’re not in control, characters will continue to fight, and you can issue commands once their ATB gauges fill up. Do enough damage to an enemy and you’ll stagger them, a la Final Fantasy XIII, and deal more damage. You don’t always have to hit up tactical mode to deliver abilities and magic — there will be shortcuts to speed up things. The characters each have their own defense ability to reduce attack damage, but judging by the demo battle, you’ll even be able to use the environment to defend against particularly intense attacks.

A new, longer trailer landed too — we’ve embedded that above. You’ll get to see not only Aeris in battle, but also the reintroduction of Tifa, redesigned with a more realistically-proportioned body — and still punching anything that gets in the way.

Developing…