Pros: Gripping story with excellent worldbuilding, compelling characters with incredibly distinct designs and personality, and an enthralling musical score with an iconic sound direction to accompany it. The world of Gaia, the city of Midgar, all feel like very real lived-in places, and following the story events with this cast of rapscallions was certainly the highlight of this game for me. You play as Cloud Strife, joined by party members Tifa Lockhart, Barret Wallace, Aerith Gainsborough, Red XIII, Cait Sith, and Cid Highwind, with bonus optional party members Vincent Valentine (dude was so cool in the 90s, omg) as well as Yuffie Kisaragi. Each character has their own memorable backstory and motivation, and each character also has an incredibly unique character design that makes them stand out visually, and you can easily pick them apart from one another, great silhouettes, heck, even in the overworld where everyone has a very blocky simple chibi art style to them they look great! Overall in fact, the visuals and art direction in this game are fantastic! The visuals here are actually what finally got me to dip my toes into the Final Fantasy franchise, and RPG games in general. Full FMV cutscenes with full CGI models were definitely a star attraction here, with high quality pre-rendered background set pieces for the areas you traverse in to add a new dimension of immersion (I'd imagine Square learned a lot from making Super Mario RPG), and also a full 3D polygonal overworld map to explore. Then there's the battle graphics, which include higher poly-count character models, cool attack animations, and downright stunning summon sequences, which were always a push to get you further into the game just to simply see more of them! (Knights of the Round, holy shit, that was awesome!).
The gameplay, well, it's a turnbased RPG, all the tropes, but with a neat Materia system for attacks and heals and such. I found it alright, also Limit Breaks during battles for those moments where you can get some more satisfying damage on attacks, which add some spice to the otherwise monotonous turnbased battles. The gameplay was fine!! It's fine! I particularly enjoyed coming across these giant monsters in the overworld called "weapons", they motivate you to level up and get stronger to maybe one day defeat them. Kind of fun. And there's plenty of other fun to be had, like overworld puzzles, sidequests, minigames, Chocobo farming (these bird dudes were so cute, loved trying to get different colored ones for different stats, also they had a great catchy song when you rode them) great NPC interactions with fun dialogue, and plenty of compelling story to keep you pushin' along. Most compelling of all though, was the main villain, Sephiroth!! One of the most badass characters, next to Cloud himself, in gaming history! And this villain is so diabolical, he alone keeps you motivated to play until the very end, with an incredibly satisfying finale!
Cons: As great as the story in this game is, I feel like it does have a lull about three-fourths the way in, with some ehhhh... dumb "twists" that like, fine, of course they'd do that, but I don't think they needed to in order to maintain our attention and dedication to the narrative of this game. There's also the general JRPG type stuff, yeah, I'm not typically a fan, especially the random encounters here. But the enemies and characters, as well as the materia system, are so enjoyable that I'm willing to let some of the more annoying bits slide.
What it means to me: My older step brother had a Playstation, and this was the game to finally get my attention for the console. And I wasn't the type of Nintendo fan that ever felt the sting of Square ditching my camp for Sony's, I didn't pay attention to the Final Fantasy franchise at all before VII came out (hell, I barely remembered VI on SNES, even though it was III over here, I wasn't sure enough they didn't release three more titles before they released this one, I didn't pay enough attention!). But, back to VII, it immediately caught my attention with its visuals, its story, its characters, and simply put... it caught my attention by just how damn cool it was. Cloud, riding that motorcycle, with his spiky punk hair and his impossibly massive sword. Definition badass. I couldn't take my eyes off the screen... Also I was at that age where Tifa caught my attention too (sorry Aerith, you're great, but like... I was 12 years old). Heh... Great game, classic, it's iconic, and that amazing soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu, mmm, just beautiful!
The gameplay, well, it's a turnbased RPG, all the tropes, but with a neat Materia system for attacks and heals and such. I found it alright, also Limit Breaks during battles for those moments where you can get some more satisfying damage on attacks, which add some spice to the otherwise monotonous turnbased battles. The gameplay was fine!! It's fine! I particularly enjoyed coming across these giant monsters in the overworld called "weapons", they motivate you to level up and get stronger to maybe one day defeat them. Kind of fun. And there's plenty of other fun to be had, like overworld puzzles, sidequests, minigames, Chocobo farming (these bird dudes were so cute, loved trying to get different colored ones for different stats, also they had a great catchy song when you rode them) great NPC interactions with fun dialogue, and plenty of compelling story to keep you pushin' along. Most compelling of all though, was the main villain, Sephiroth!! One of the most badass characters, next to Cloud himself, in gaming history! And this villain is so diabolical, he alone keeps you motivated to play until the very end, with an incredibly satisfying finale!
Cons: As great as the story in this game is, I feel like it does have a lull about three-fourths the way in, with some ehhhh... dumb "twists" that like, fine, of course they'd do that, but I don't think they needed to in order to maintain our attention and dedication to the narrative of this game. There's also the general JRPG type stuff, yeah, I'm not typically a fan, especially the random encounters here. But the enemies and characters, as well as the materia system, are so enjoyable that I'm willing to let some of the more annoying bits slide.
What it means to me: My older step brother had a Playstation, and this was the game to finally get my attention for the console. And I wasn't the type of Nintendo fan that ever felt the sting of Square ditching my camp for Sony's, I didn't pay attention to the Final Fantasy franchise at all before VII came out (hell, I barely remembered VI on SNES, even though it was III over here, I wasn't sure enough they didn't release three more titles before they released this one, I didn't pay enough attention!). But, back to VII, it immediately caught my attention with its visuals, its story, its characters, and simply put... it caught my attention by just how damn cool it was. Cloud, riding that motorcycle, with his spiky punk hair and his impossibly massive sword. Definition badass. I couldn't take my eyes off the screen... Also I was at that age where Tifa caught my attention too (sorry Aerith, you're great, but like... I was 12 years old). Heh... Great game, classic, it's iconic, and that amazing soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu, mmm, just beautiful!