Twenty-three years later, the remake is here, and the results offer a striking look at how drastically video game technology has evolved over the past two decades. Although it seemed revolutionary in the 1990s, the original Final Fantasy VII looks blocky and primitive today, with noseless heroes and constricted levels. In contrast, the remake features eye-popping graphical fidelity and characters who look so realistic you can almost smell their sweat.

The script is new, and the combat is different, eschewing the original game’s menu-based battles (in which your characters would line up across from enemies on a battlefield, each acting only when it was their turn) for a more action-heavy system. Final Fantasy VII Remake feels less like an adaptation and more like a new game wearing the original game’s skin.

Despite the improvements in graphics and gameplay, there’s a catch. Rather than release the entire game in one shot, the developers decided to split it into episodes. And they have not revealed how many episodes are planned or how they will be connected.

The first episode takes place within Midgar, a gritty, pizza-shaped city that served as an introduction to the original game. Players would be out of Midgar in four or five hours, off to spend another 30 or 40 hours adventuring across the rest of the game’s world. In the remake, the first episode alone can take more than 40 hours to finish. It’s as large as an entire Final Fantasy game, yet it tells only a fraction of the original story.

To extend this first act, the game’s developers have added new scenes and expanded on old ones. Characters who had no more than a few lines of dialogue in the original game, like the gung-ho soldier Jessie and her buddies Biggs and Wedge (named after “Star Wars” characters, a long-running Final Fantasy tradition), are now fleshed-out members of the cast. Sections of Midgar that were easy to zip through are now lengthy, beautifully rendered towns and dungeons.

The trade-off for the added depth is that the bulk of Final Fantasy VII will not be included in the first episode. As a point of comparison, consider Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit,” a movie trilogy that adapted J.R.R. Tolkien’s book into an eight-hour saga. But Final Fantasy VII Remake is more like someone rewrote “The Hobbit” as a new book series, with the entirety of the first entry taking place before Bilbo Baggins has even left the Shire.