Ah memories.
The time was 1997. I was in my final year of high school (why did it feel like a low then?) and fear of what to do with the rest of my life was really the main issue of the day. I did have one distraction at the time and that was video gaming. My friends and I were followers of the Final Fantasy series since the original hit the NES in the 1980‘s and now SquareSoft (now SquareEnix) was going to drop a proverbial bombshell on the gaming world with the release of Final Fantasy VII on the Sony Playstation and not on a Nintendo system. It was not only the first mind-blowing release of its generation but it turned the tide from a “Sega vs Nintendo” debate into one of “can they survive against the new Sony Juggernaut?”
When I found out that Sony re-released FFVII on their online Playstation Network (on the PS3 and PSP) for a measly $10 I knew I had buy it again. From the start of the introduction video where we are introduced to the (spoiler alert if you somehow never played it and want to still) Act 1 tragedy-to-come Aerith the flower girl walking away from a prayer temple as it pans out to show the dark and post-industrial city of Midgar I knew I was back in 100%. Soon a train comes into the station and your main playable character and protagonist Cloud Strife jumps off and the game begins.
This was the first real merging of cinema and video game into a single package. With the advent of CD-ROM gaining mainstream acceptance as the format of choice this allowed for FMV, or Full Motion Video, to be included that made your jaw drop the first time you witnessed it. Rather than 8bit pixelated sprites the game combined CG (computer graphic) pre-rendered backdrops and 3D models that ran through from an isometric viewpoint that gave it a real feeling of space. Gone were the repeating patterns of blocky graphics, now every area you visited was a work of art, hand painted and not to be repeated again. Interlaced with the game were these FMV of epic battles, touching moments and overly-long spell animations but overall it still holds up even today, well if you take into mind these are 12 year old videos and graphics that is.
Story: 1997 - [9/10] 2009 [7/10]
The story is very standard fair for the FF series where you gain characters, all with flaws they need to overcome to be helpful later, while chasing the bad guy (Sephiroth and his whacky alien mother Jenova) who want to take over the world while slowly introducing major backstories coming into focus at different towns/events and builds to an epic final battle to save the world. Sound familiar? It should since it is the basis for 90% of all films/games/novels that deal with good vs evil but that doesn’t hamper it but looking at it a decade later it seems rather shallow. Other games of it’s day such as Xenogears (which I will write about later) had a much more fully developed universe and story than FFVII but overall it was still an enjoyable experience.
Some of the backgrounds were interesting more than others such as Aeirth being the last of the ‘ancients’ who you find out were either killed or turned into mutated creatures under the horrible experiments of professor Ghast and his insane apprentice Hojo. Other notable characters were Cid the first and only failed astronaut who finally gets to go to space (even for only a moment), Red XIII (real name Nanaki) the only remaining member of his species who learns the truth about his ancestry and the rest are fairly light backstories. An evil corporation (they exist everywhere obviously) named Shinra is sucking energy out of the planet, called Mako, and Barret (an ebonics wielding simpleton and horrible stereotype) and his group Avalanche are trying to stop them. Later you find out this Mako energy is really the souls of those who have died that live within the planet giving it energy and by Shinra extracting it is basically killing it. Naturally this leads to similarities to our oil drilling and we call it the lifeblood of our planet they took it to a literal meaning. If you want more on the story check out this link to read a longer synopsis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII#Story
Gameplay: 1997 [10/10] 2009 [7/10]
Maybe it isn’t fair to judge the gameplay by today’s standards but I will anyway. In its day this was the pinnacle of everything story, control and gameplay. It rejuvenated the role play genre and re-wrote the book on how to do it successfully and sell 9.8 million copies worldwide. The structure of equipping Materia in order to gain abilities, swapping them with other characters and combining them for better stats was a very in-depth approach to stat building. Unfortunately today it came across as mostly tedious and slow.
Constantly switching Materia and combinations to do x or y to enemy a or b does become very repetitive. In later games they have different but similar ways to learn spells etc but you kept those skills even as you progressed. In FFVII even though you can use a Level 3 version of a spell once you un-equip that Materia you lose it so you have to constantly play musical chairs with them. Combine this with having to face so many variants of monsters that can inflict confused or poison states during battles you find yourself having to rearrange your lineup on a regular basis.
Next up were the awe-inspiring Summon spells. During the game you found Summon Materia which let you unleash a massive attack from a helper character that only stuck around as long as the animation video played. The issue is that you cannot skip them! Yes they looked great the first time but after you use it for the 100th time you pray for a skip button. Thankfully later games (even as early as FF8) forced you only to watch it the first time through and allowed you to skip it almost entirely afterwards.
The last item may be your favorite part of a role playing game but it is the biggest bane for me: Level grinding. For me nothing is worse than playing along and fighting every battle that pops up but only to get to a boss character and being annihilated because I wasn’t at a high enough level. I maintain this theory today as I did back then that if I can reach Boss X I should be able to beat Boss X if I know what I’m doing. There were several battles that if you didn’t find a certain item or spell the battle would be 100x more difficult than it should have been. The final battle with Sephiroth follows this pattern where I remembered I had to equip a certain item and I pummeled him in less than 15 minutes but without it I got destroyed in 10. This lopsided punishment for missing a chest or not ‘morphing’ a creature into an item really is annoying. I know that players should be rewarded for taking the time to find/create/do side missions but there is a massive gap in FFVII. The last note is just the basic pattern of “Sephiroth went to town A so lets go there next” repeats throughout the entire game. It isn’t until the very end where it unlocks the rails you are stuck on into an actual open world for you to explore before embarking on the final mission.
Graphics 1997 [9/10] 2009 [6/10]
I won’t knock points off for the now dated CG movies because that is all they could muster back in the day. The strange thing is they had subtitles and not voices even for the videos. Nintendo did this even with the N64 versions of Zelda and Mario because it left the voices to the players mind but it seems so 1934 without the inclusion of some voice acting. Otherwise not much else can be said for the graphics, they are what they are. The big difference is that I can go back and play an SNES Final Fantasy game (or Zelda for example) and find the art style and images beautiful but it is hard to say the same thing for many Playstation games that unfortunately suffer from lack of anti-aliasing. Thankfully the PS2 and PS3 ‘smooth’ out the old gems and make it at least tolerable.
Sound: 1997 [7/10] 2009 [5/10]MIDI was great in the SNES days but I really expected some better music and effects for a premier FF game. Some of the tunes were catchy but otherwise very flat while only featuring what seemed like 5 notes per song. I hate to compare it to Xenogears again but Mitsuda found a way to create beautiful tracks using the dated PS1 era tools at his disposal so why couldn’t they? Same thing with Metal Gear Solid and especially Castevania: Symphony of the Night where music and sound effects were well above and beyond what is found in FFVII. Overall some memorable tracks but otherwise check out some of the remastered versions on iTunes of real orchestras performing the tracks to get a feeling of where I wish they could have taken it.
Overall: 1997 [9/10] 2009 [6/10]Most games get a lower score years later while few can retain the same level of awesome as they did when released. Giving credit to this game I can state that the basic structure of the game (Attack, Magic, Item, *Special) are still intact even in modern games of the genre today. Even basic RPG character building elements such as equipping items called “Materia” that allow you to learn skills, abilities and spells are used today. I think it takes a trip down memory lane to fully appreciate what this series has done to mold the role playing world into what it currently is. You can also say it is at fault for ruining the genre due to all of the me-too games that followed it over the next decade but it’s lasting value is still intact.
Overall I did enjoy replaying it for that nostalgia feeling of revisiting old friends on their adventure through Sephirothland and playing through moments like Aeirth’s departure, Red XIII seeing his father and Tifa and Cloud’s realization about their past together still remain strong points and it was great to play through them again but I did start to tire out by the 2nd disc. I continued to play it because I paid for it and I wanted to see through to the end but I found myself reaching for an old strategy guide because I didn’t want to level up for 10 hours or hunt around for ‘item x’ just to move on with the story. If you are a hard-core FF fan by all means pick it up but if you never got a chance to play it I find it hard to believe you would get through it without moving on to something else.
