Final Fantasy VII looms massively in the canon of modern JRPGs, and a mixture of innovations in video game narrative, excellent music and animation, and an engaging combat system have helped it to remain one of the best experiences you can have with a controller and 40 or 50 hours to kill.
Final Fantasy VII still has a ton to teach modern video games. The pacing of its plot is impeccable and has been gushed about for decades for a reason. Though the chibi graphics may be a bit off-putting to the most graphics-slobbering contemporary connoisseur, they remain charming, and the animated cutscenes are still striking and emotive decades after they've ceased to be technical marvels. The combat system deftly marries turn-based strategic RPG gameplay with a sense of furious forward propulsion with its reliance on active decision-making. Even in the less-than-ideal English translation, dialogue and exposition serve to engage the player in the world and character interactions constantly. There's really no reason to get into what makes this game so special, as it's pretty immediately obvious to anyone who's spent a few hours with it, and much smarter people than I have written about it to death.
There is one central plot element, though, that is delivered so masterfully using the specific language of video games as a medium that I simply must expand on it. It should be a fundamental building block of all video game narrative discussions and education, and I don't see it referenced nearly enough. I might just not be well-read enough. What I'm talking about here are the Nibelheim sections. They work on so many levels—plot exposition, character development, vehicles for one of the most organic yet shocking twists in a video game—but the one that is most central is player immersion in the act of roleplaying as Cloud.
Let's review. When your party leaves Midgar, they arrive in the town of Kalm, where Cloud takes it upon himself to recall his past in order to help everyone understand the origins of the mysterious Sephiroth, who has just killed President Shinra. He does this by telling them a playable story about his home town of Nibelheim, where Tifa also grew up. Right off the bat, we have a lesson I think many people have already taken from the game—plot-essential flashbacks work much better as playable moments than as cutscenes or lengthy dialogue sections. So, you're playing in Nibelheim and Cloud starts telling the story of how he, as a first-class SOLDIER, was dispatched to Nibelheim alongside the mighty Sephiroth to look into some problems at a Mako Reactor there. During this flashback, Cloud's inferiority to Sephiroth in combat prowess is demonstrated by an encounter with a Dragon who will easily OHKO the player but is handily defeated by Sephiroth. Gameplay in Nibelheim mostly revolves around visiting childhood haunts of Cloud's and exploration of Mt. Nibel and a mysterious mansion in town where Sephiroth holes himself up after coming face-to-face with Shinra experiments in the reactor.
At this time, all the player knows is that they get to participate in telling the story of what Cloud did during this visit to Nibelheim, but the experienced player knows that his foggy memory is causing him, depending on your interpretation, to obfuscate events and lie or to incorrectly recall key details. This struggle to recall is a strong in-game justification for any wandering the player might do.
Much later, the player is again required to visit Nibelheim in pursuit of Sephiroth, and the player's memory of the town and Cloud's are one. We know exactly where to go to move the story forward, as we have played Cloud's memory, and Cloud in-game has that memory. To me, this is a fascinating case study in the way that growing player familiarity with a game's world can be integrated into the experience of roleplaying a character in that world. Sure, in open-world games or virtually any game based on exploration at all, the player and the player character are both in some or many ways blank slates that grow together in their grasp of how things work, where major locations are, etc. But here, we have a cinematic moment of a flashback that is told entirely in the language of video games and has a payoff that is equally unique to the medium.
Later on, of course, we have one of the most incredible psychological setpieces in any video game ever in the rebuilding of Cloud's memory, and again the player's participation is essential to the work of the characters themselves in rebuilding Cloud's memory and identity.
Outside of this observation, I don't have a ton to add to existing discourse about Final Fantasy VII. The game still plays great and even if you're spoiled on the particular big twist moments (Aerith's death is the big one) the way the story is told cannot be missed.
For me personally, the game is a bit hurt by reliance on JRPG gameplay tropes that continue to the present day in the genre. There are some abilities and items that are not easy to find without a guide that are basically essential to overcome a massive difficulty spike at the end of the story. I think that the optional endgame content should demand that you scoured the world for certain abilities and items, but Meteor basically only being survivable if you managed to find Big Guard blind is a bit bullshit. I'm pretty insistent on playing games blind, and the entire game's difficulty curved nicely with a bit of grinding, which I don't mind, but I still haven't found a single strategy for Sephiroth that doesn't rely on Big Guard or some other easily missable materia like the Knights of the Round summon or something.
Ultimately though, that one minor personal gripe doesn't hold me back from saying loudly that this is one of the rare games that absolutely everyone who cares at all about the medium should play.
Final Fantasy VII still has a ton to teach modern video games. The pacing of its plot is impeccable and has been gushed about for decades for a reason. Though the chibi graphics may be a bit off-putting to the most graphics-slobbering contemporary connoisseur, they remain charming, and the animated cutscenes are still striking and emotive decades after they've ceased to be technical marvels. The combat system deftly marries turn-based strategic RPG gameplay with a sense of furious forward propulsion with its reliance on active decision-making. Even in the less-than-ideal English translation, dialogue and exposition serve to engage the player in the world and character interactions constantly. There's really no reason to get into what makes this game so special, as it's pretty immediately obvious to anyone who's spent a few hours with it, and much smarter people than I have written about it to death.
There is one central plot element, though, that is delivered so masterfully using the specific language of video games as a medium that I simply must expand on it. It should be a fundamental building block of all video game narrative discussions and education, and I don't see it referenced nearly enough. I might just not be well-read enough. What I'm talking about here are the Nibelheim sections. They work on so many levels—plot exposition, character development, vehicles for one of the most organic yet shocking twists in a video game—but the one that is most central is player immersion in the act of roleplaying as Cloud.
Let's review. When your party leaves Midgar, they arrive in the town of Kalm, where Cloud takes it upon himself to recall his past in order to help everyone understand the origins of the mysterious Sephiroth, who has just killed President Shinra. He does this by telling them a playable story about his home town of Nibelheim, where Tifa also grew up. Right off the bat, we have a lesson I think many people have already taken from the game—plot-essential flashbacks work much better as playable moments than as cutscenes or lengthy dialogue sections. So, you're playing in Nibelheim and Cloud starts telling the story of how he, as a first-class SOLDIER, was dispatched to Nibelheim alongside the mighty Sephiroth to look into some problems at a Mako Reactor there. During this flashback, Cloud's inferiority to Sephiroth in combat prowess is demonstrated by an encounter with a Dragon who will easily OHKO the player but is handily defeated by Sephiroth. Gameplay in Nibelheim mostly revolves around visiting childhood haunts of Cloud's and exploration of Mt. Nibel and a mysterious mansion in town where Sephiroth holes himself up after coming face-to-face with Shinra experiments in the reactor.
At this time, all the player knows is that they get to participate in telling the story of what Cloud did during this visit to Nibelheim, but the experienced player knows that his foggy memory is causing him, depending on your interpretation, to obfuscate events and lie or to incorrectly recall key details. This struggle to recall is a strong in-game justification for any wandering the player might do.
Much later, the player is again required to visit Nibelheim in pursuit of Sephiroth, and the player's memory of the town and Cloud's are one. We know exactly where to go to move the story forward, as we have played Cloud's memory, and Cloud in-game has that memory. To me, this is a fascinating case study in the way that growing player familiarity with a game's world can be integrated into the experience of roleplaying a character in that world. Sure, in open-world games or virtually any game based on exploration at all, the player and the player character are both in some or many ways blank slates that grow together in their grasp of how things work, where major locations are, etc. But here, we have a cinematic moment of a flashback that is told entirely in the language of video games and has a payoff that is equally unique to the medium.
Later on, of course, we have one of the most incredible psychological setpieces in any video game ever in the rebuilding of Cloud's memory, and again the player's participation is essential to the work of the characters themselves in rebuilding Cloud's memory and identity.
Outside of this observation, I don't have a ton to add to existing discourse about Final Fantasy VII. The game still plays great and even if you're spoiled on the particular big twist moments (Aerith's death is the big one) the way the story is told cannot be missed.
For me personally, the game is a bit hurt by reliance on JRPG gameplay tropes that continue to the present day in the genre. There are some abilities and items that are not easy to find without a guide that are basically essential to overcome a massive difficulty spike at the end of the story. I think that the optional endgame content should demand that you scoured the world for certain abilities and items, but Meteor basically only being survivable if you managed to find Big Guard blind is a bit bullshit. I'm pretty insistent on playing games blind, and the entire game's difficulty curved nicely with a bit of grinding, which I don't mind, but I still haven't found a single strategy for Sephiroth that doesn't rely on Big Guard or some other easily missable materia like the Knights of the Round summon or something.
Ultimately though, that one minor personal gripe doesn't hold me back from saying loudly that this is one of the rare games that absolutely everyone who cares at all about the medium should play.