I didn't have a Playstation when I was a kid, but my neighbor did. Reflecting back on that time, it's easier now to admit that the only reason I maintained that friendship was because he had Crash Bandicoot 2, and my adolescent mind was utterly blown by that game. He also had a few demo discs, and on one in particular was a demo for Final Fantasy VII.
You know the one, I'm sure. It was the "bombing mission" that opens the game, the single most elegantly paced slice they could press on a disc to show off the first ever 3D Final Fantasy. Sure, it wasn't nearly as impressive to me visually as Cortex's giant disembodied head, but there was a certain tension to the events in the demo that was exhilarating all the same. By the time the guard scorpion was jumping down I was already sold. It wouldn't be until several years later that I got my own Playstation, and while my aforementioned friend had long since moved to parts unknown, I had a new friend who happened to have a copy of Final Fantasy VII he was willing to trade for my Virtual-On: Oratorio Tangram.
This is the story of the worst deal I've ever made in my entire life.
This was a big deal back in 1997. The battle drums of the console wars changed in pitch and timbre when 3D gaming entered the home, and one oft repeated cry from the Playstation side was that Final Fantasy VII was too big for Nintendo's antiquated cartridges. They weren't wrong, but the grandeur of FFVII extends well beyond how many bytes it is. The game is cinematic in ways previous gen titles could not be with its lovingly rendered FMVs, stellar soundtrack, and its complex story that was so rich it needed three discs to tell. It's an important game, but it's a game from 1997 during the middle of a massive paradigm shift in the industry. There's rough edges.
Take the battle system, for example. It's still built upon the same foundation as previous games in the series but augmented through the introduction of Materia. This is something the Final Fantasy games do quite often. They don't stray too far from what makes Final Fantasy feel like "Final Fantasy," but try to give each game its own mechanical identity. The problem is that the foundation they're building upon is so dull that battles almost always break down the same way no matter what game you're playing. Pick your best attack and spam it until the credits roll. Status ailments, buffs/debuffs, elemental affinities? All meaningless. Hell, you don't even really need to summon unless you want to watch the little cutscenes that play, which are actually pretty great but also unskippable and incredibly long, so you probably won't even do that for very long.
Materia allows players to slot magic, skills, and passive abilities into their weapons and level them up over time. This allows you to build each character however you wish, no matter how much their designs might code them as being specific classes. But since this progress is tied to the Materia itself, it feels like characters end up lacking an identity in battle. My party composition usually broke down to whoever I liked the look of, because the free-form nature of Materia keeps everyone on about the same level playing field. This could be a positive for many people, but personally I like each character to have a more defined function that makes weighing team composition strategic. Outside of Limit Breaks (which are admittedly cool and I like them a whole bunch), everyone just kinda feels... samey.
So what about the story? I mean, those are pretty damn important to a JRPG too.
It's fine. It's well known by now that it suffers from a very poor translation that makes some scenes and plot points needlessly hard to follow, but it's also far from the most convoluted story in the franchise. The bare bones of what it is I think is pretty good, and I like the characters quite a bit, but I also think it's in dire need of a retranslation. The atmosphere and settings are great, though. I'm a big fan of pre-rendered backgrounds and FFVII's has some of the best. There's a style here that I really struggle to put into words... Everything feels like it's a set or a diorama, and I think the effect is unintended, a byproduct of trying to emulate the sort of overworld style of previous games while embracing 3D. This is why everyone has hooves for hands, something I'm a lot less crazy about. The music also does a fantastic job of evoking just the right mood from the player, it's easily some of the best in the series.
There's also loads of minigames, something else Final Fantasy is known for. I think most of them play pretty poorly in this with the snowboarding minigame being perhaps the biggest offender of the bunch, but they're also pretty straight-forward and don't break the pacing of the game too badly. Something Square will screw up on both fronts in their next game.
I still have a lot of fondness for Final Fantasy VII. It was the first real RPG I sank my teeth into, and I respect it for what it is and what it meant for the industry. I also just don't think it's very fun to play. You know what is fun to play? Virtual-On: Oratorio Tangram. I was swindled.
You know the one, I'm sure. It was the "bombing mission" that opens the game, the single most elegantly paced slice they could press on a disc to show off the first ever 3D Final Fantasy. Sure, it wasn't nearly as impressive to me visually as Cortex's giant disembodied head, but there was a certain tension to the events in the demo that was exhilarating all the same. By the time the guard scorpion was jumping down I was already sold. It wouldn't be until several years later that I got my own Playstation, and while my aforementioned friend had long since moved to parts unknown, I had a new friend who happened to have a copy of Final Fantasy VII he was willing to trade for my Virtual-On: Oratorio Tangram.
This is the story of the worst deal I've ever made in my entire life.
This was a big deal back in 1997. The battle drums of the console wars changed in pitch and timbre when 3D gaming entered the home, and one oft repeated cry from the Playstation side was that Final Fantasy VII was too big for Nintendo's antiquated cartridges. They weren't wrong, but the grandeur of FFVII extends well beyond how many bytes it is. The game is cinematic in ways previous gen titles could not be with its lovingly rendered FMVs, stellar soundtrack, and its complex story that was so rich it needed three discs to tell. It's an important game, but it's a game from 1997 during the middle of a massive paradigm shift in the industry. There's rough edges.
Take the battle system, for example. It's still built upon the same foundation as previous games in the series but augmented through the introduction of Materia. This is something the Final Fantasy games do quite often. They don't stray too far from what makes Final Fantasy feel like "Final Fantasy," but try to give each game its own mechanical identity. The problem is that the foundation they're building upon is so dull that battles almost always break down the same way no matter what game you're playing. Pick your best attack and spam it until the credits roll. Status ailments, buffs/debuffs, elemental affinities? All meaningless. Hell, you don't even really need to summon unless you want to watch the little cutscenes that play, which are actually pretty great but also unskippable and incredibly long, so you probably won't even do that for very long.
Materia allows players to slot magic, skills, and passive abilities into their weapons and level them up over time. This allows you to build each character however you wish, no matter how much their designs might code them as being specific classes. But since this progress is tied to the Materia itself, it feels like characters end up lacking an identity in battle. My party composition usually broke down to whoever I liked the look of, because the free-form nature of Materia keeps everyone on about the same level playing field. This could be a positive for many people, but personally I like each character to have a more defined function that makes weighing team composition strategic. Outside of Limit Breaks (which are admittedly cool and I like them a whole bunch), everyone just kinda feels... samey.
So what about the story? I mean, those are pretty damn important to a JRPG too.
It's fine. It's well known by now that it suffers from a very poor translation that makes some scenes and plot points needlessly hard to follow, but it's also far from the most convoluted story in the franchise. The bare bones of what it is I think is pretty good, and I like the characters quite a bit, but I also think it's in dire need of a retranslation. The atmosphere and settings are great, though. I'm a big fan of pre-rendered backgrounds and FFVII's has some of the best. There's a style here that I really struggle to put into words... Everything feels like it's a set or a diorama, and I think the effect is unintended, a byproduct of trying to emulate the sort of overworld style of previous games while embracing 3D. This is why everyone has hooves for hands, something I'm a lot less crazy about. The music also does a fantastic job of evoking just the right mood from the player, it's easily some of the best in the series.
There's also loads of minigames, something else Final Fantasy is known for. I think most of them play pretty poorly in this with the snowboarding minigame being perhaps the biggest offender of the bunch, but they're also pretty straight-forward and don't break the pacing of the game too badly. Something Square will screw up on both fronts in their next game.
I still have a lot of fondness for Final Fantasy VII. It was the first real RPG I sank my teeth into, and I respect it for what it is and what it meant for the industry. I also just don't think it's very fun to play. You know what is fun to play? Virtual-On: Oratorio Tangram. I was swindled.