I Have No Clue How I Feel About Barret
There’s a lot to like about Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which just released last week. I love the combat and how lived in the world feels, I love the action set pieces and the dynamic between the characters and the music. What I haven’t been able to nail my overall thoughts down on the game’s second (or third) protagonist, Barret Wallace, and that’s largely because the game itself doesn’t seem to know.
Note: This contains light spoilers for Final Fantasy 7 Remake.
In the game, Barret is the leader of Avalanche, the terrorist group that lead character Cloud Strife is ostensibly a part of. He’s big, got a gun for an arm and a cool pair of shades. In a game full of striking character designs, he stands out; I didn’t play the original game, but it’s easy to see why he would be well liked based off his look alone. He has a daughter named Marlene who’s a sweet heart, and he’s fun to play once I figured out what role I wanted him to fill in my party. But there’s a problem that keeps me from adoring him the same way I do Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith.
The problem is his voice.
To put it simply, Barret always sounds like he belongs as the Black Guy in an 80s or 90s action movie. This has always been a sticking point with me since I first heard the character speak after last year’s E3 showing. It’s been talked about on Twitter over the last week, written about last year, and there’s even a video adding pipe organs like he’s a preacher in church. It’s a strange, baffling decision in a game that has real strong voice acting with some surprising talent behind it. (Absolutely wild that three actors from Teen Wolf play leading to supporting roles in this, and they all kill it.)
My hope was that it would change over the course of the game, but instead the game leans further into that goofy B-movie vibe for him, despite still wanting to take him seriously. Not long after Cloud and Tifa have just watched a friend die, they reunite with Barret, who says that he won’t die “til the credits roll!” with a delivery Sam Jackson would give in a Tarantino movie. Several of his lines have a “yo” or “I’mma” in them. Sometimes during the game’s many action-packed scenes, Barret will stumble or fall where the others land much more gracefully. Even in the quiet moments where he’s meant to be emotional, his voice is still in that “jive” that feels like someone asked Phil Lamaar to sound like Cole Train in Gears of War. I don’t like it.
Maybe this wouldn’t be so noticeable were it not for the fact that there’s another black person exists in this game, and that’s a semi-frequent bad guy named Rude. Rude is a Turk,(apparently this universe’s version of the CIA) and he talks like a normal black person you would see just out and about. He’s not doing an affect or sounds like he’d be a gang leader in a procedural drama. In fact, the only thing separating the two is that Rude is light-skinned, making the separation of their voices even more noticeable. And once you realize that, the optics are even worse than they are at first glance.
Not having played the original FF7 in 1997, this is effectively my first experience with the character, and that sucks because I want to like him. I like that he gets to have a wide range of emotions, I like how even when he’s not in the story, he feels like an active part of it and is going through his own tale. But from 2006 to basically now, we’ve seen the “gruff black guy voice” get gradually phased out thanks to games like Watch Dogs 2, Mafia III, or the last two Gears of War games. For a game that’s fine with remaking its own canon so flagrantly and improving the relationship between Tifa and Aerith to make them friends, it’s disappointing that the same care wasn’t given to Barret.
Part 2 of Remake will come out whenever, and when it does, I hope Barret is done better, because dealing with that voice for a trilogy or four games is not something I look forward to.
