Spoiler free review: A game you should play before you die. I am writing this less than an hour after completion ... simply wow. The central themes of FF VII are more prevalent today than at the time of release, it has one of the best villains - in fact one of the best stories in gaming …. ever – I’m actually going to say ever. I’ve played a lot of games, almost 500 and a lot of these include metacritics top 20 games for each console. I would honestly rank this tale among my top three. Final fantasy VII is so good it made me write my first game review. It has the pace of a movie, and despite its age the story has a way of getting under your skin. There is an awesome sense of escalation and tension, you will feel attached to the quirky characters, and want to see this game to the end. The game just oozes Japanese quirkiness and the writing made me actually laugh out loud on one or two occasions! It just has a sense of ridiculousness and charm that is hard to nail down. It will make you feel a wide array of emotions throughout the course of the runtime. There are some long cutscenes, and some extended character dialogue scenes, so if you aren’t a fan of these you’ve been warned! For the time the visuals were amazing, and while obviously games of this era don’t hold up graphically the backdrops and cutscenes do a great job of immersing you in the world and putting you in the intended mood for whatever is happening on screen. The music – oh man it’s god tier. This is on the same level as the Halo 2 and Elder Scrolls Oblivion soundtracks. Theres a reason why the soundtrack is still played at video game orchestral concerts to this day and its worth hearing to see how it inspired the remakes soundtrack. I'm not going to say too much about the story for the sake of spoilers, but epic does not even begin to describe this narrative.

In terms of gameplay the fundamentals are solid, you will battle a wide variety of enemies, and traverse a good number of locales with respective cultures. Its very scifi/steampunk inspired and the world design really stands out overall. The game is structured in a bit of a unique way by today’s standards. The first 8 or so hours are a tight linear affair. Just as you begin to tire of this approach it opens up nicely and you can then explore through an overworld. Its not completely open, but it has plenty of points of interest to explore and battles to fight. Things do get linear as you enter a story passage but then it isn’t too long before the game opens up again. It’s a good way of balancing the two, what I like is that there are usually one or two side quests to consider but you never get bogged down with them. This keeps the games pace tight in my opinion. The bulk of FF VII is turn-based but in a break from the norm there are also some substantial minigames to break up the adventure, and the developers did not skip on the budget with these. One of them was so good it even became it’s own mobile game! I won’t say too much more, but these are much more extravagant than your typical minigames.

The famous materia system is a great rpg mechanic, allowing you to tailor each of your three characters with a number of spells, and probably thousands of unique combinations. What I like about this system is that you are properly rewarded for putting some thought into your builds and how one character will interact with another. While 50% of the monsters can be defeated in any number of ways (your typical elemental weakness allowing you to beat them faster) the other monsters and the bosses often have unique mechanics to keep you on your toes. There are some “bull&£$%” one hit death mechanics, but most are interesting and it will often at least make you consider which order to take on certain enemies in a group. There are some decent spells as well, and you can make some seriously broken builds if you link some of their effects together! So overall the turn-based mechanics sits somewhere between Pokémon and Persona in terms of complexity.

However, there are some caveats to enjoying this game properly in 2024. If you do decide to give it a try - get the switch copy or otherwise a version that allows you to disable random encounters and 3x speed etc. As this is an old game there are some design quirks which may necessitate turning these QoL improvements on from time to time. These lessen issues such as being punished for backtracking and some slow animations/battles being not as acceptable in 2024. This isn’t a game that supports or even needs save states, so in that regard it isn’t a total dinosaur.

What is more problematic (and an issue even for the time) are some aspects of the navigation towards the later stages of the game. Often when you are directed to the next area the game handily highlights these in blue text. However, if you forget these directions, there is no way to find them again aside from opening an earlier save file (or using the switch’s screenshot feature). This isn’t so much of an issue for 2/3 of the game as by trial and error you can approach various hubs to see if it triggers a story event. However, this becomes a serious problem in the later stages of the game because 1. Trial and error no longer work because there are too many options to explore, and 2. You most likely will have forgotten the names of the towns/hubs and how to get to them by this point. My advice generally speaking is use the ign guide if you do get stuck for more than 10 mins on where to go next. However, I would say that I used the guide only 5-7 times and this was for pointing me in the right direction. So the game hasn’t aged like some where you have to look at a guide every 5 mins.

Overall that issue and the inventory screen not being tight as it could be brought this down to a 4.5 instead of a 5. The upshot is that overall FFVII is totally worth playing today, provided you pickup a copy with the aforementioned quality of life improvements. If you are anything like me and became curious about the mystical original after playing the remake, my advice is go for it. YouTube footage of the original FF7 makes the game look unappealing but actually playing it is a completely different matter. I’m annoyed this put me off playing for literally years. You will get some good playtime out of the adventure, my final save clocked in at around 42 hours. That’s 42 hours of mostly lean action (provided you use the QoL features!) so no flabby excesses of open world games here. The last thing I’ll add to this review is that its rare to finish a game and be in absolute awe of what you just experienced. Think the end of silent hill 2, of bioshock, ocarina of time... Simply put, Final Fantasy VII deserves a seat among gaming legend, and a space in your game collection.