Final Fantasy VII

Oh yeah, I finally played this one.

I played this on PC, with mods (which I'll detail later).

So, Final Fantasy VII. There are certain games that, let's just say, have a reputation, and Final Fantasy VII sure casts a long shadow. It's often talked about as not only one of the best JRPGs or best PSOne games, but as one of the best games period. I try to approach things with an open mind but it was hard for me to not have at least somewhat raised expectations for this. I mean, it's FF7! Another part of me was, admittedly, skeptical. After all, not every PSOne or N64 game has aged gracefully and there was a chance that the praise thrown at this was due to blind nostalgia from people who played it back in the day.

Well, it didn't disappoint.

This game has a great intro.

I don't even know where to begin. I guess I'll start with the basics. It's a pretty standard JRPG, at least structurally, so that means you've got a party to manage and turn-based combat when you randomly encounter enemies. You've got elemental weaknesses and gear you need to equip, all the essentials are there. One of the main wrinkles here is something known as "Materia", which are effectively perks or modifiers to gear that, generally speaking, will allow a given character to either cast a spell, use an ability, or gain some sort of buff or stat boost. Further complicating things is the fact that the combat uses what's referred to here as "ATB", or "Active Time Battle".

ATB is effectively the same system that was present in Chrono Trigger, and I described it a bit there but I'll summarize here: you navigate menus the way you would in a traditional turn-based game, but rather than a strict "we go, they go" back-and-forth to the combat there's a more fluid interweaving of actions due to each character having a set speed. This speed dictates when you can begin navigating their menus, or when the enemy attacks, and after each action there's a corresponding cooldown/reset to their action timer. In practice, this means that combat never fully stops. At almost every moment, either the enemy is acting, you're navigating a menu, or you're watching an animation while waiting for the next action to become available. I believe you can toggle the speed of this in the settings (and perhaps even disable it entirely) but I left everything at the default options and had a good time.

Keeping her name as "Aeris" felt right.

Combat feels dynamic, much more-so than other turn-based RPGs I'm used to. Because there's a real-time element to things, you're incentivized to act rather than hesitate or hem-and-haw over the perfect choice. Sometimes I'd just pick a random attack because I knew that, if I didn't, the enemy might get a turn in when all I was doing was (effectively) delaying my turns. Adding to things, this is a 3D, polygonal game and the camera takes full advantage of that. While the standard camera angle apes Final Fantasy 1, with the party on the right facing an enemy on the left, the camera swoops around, zooms in on relevant characters and, frankly, just rarely sits still. Yes, it's fundamentally still a turn-based RPG but it doesn't feel as stilted as, say, a Pokémon game might.

It's not just the combat, though. This game has an energy to it because it moves. It's paced in such a way that you're almost always going somewhere new, or doing something new, or getting some important lore, or having something significant happen pretty much constantly. It starts in-media-res during a reactor infiltration and honestly just never really lets up. There are slower periods, yes, and sequences where you have freedom to explore, but unless you really feel the need to grind for money or XP there's not much of a reason to waste time. It's go, go, go in this.

Because this is a PSOne game, they're able to do so much with relatively limited resources. Midgar feels like a sprawling city despite the fact you barely see any of it, and each location is similarly represented with fairly little. This breadth of content means that while no one place is incredibly deep, the world feels, well, like a world. Each location seems like a lived-in place despite most of them being a screen or two with only a handful of NPCs. 

Even random NPCs will have fun dialogue, sometimes.

I can see why they've had such a hard time adapting this for the Remake trilogy. People expect so much more from modern games (unnecessarily so, if you ask me) so Midgar, a section that took me about nine or ten hours, "needed" to be fleshed out into a 40-hour thing with loads of NPCs and so so so many high-fidelity assets. A PSOne game can get away with far less, and I'd argue it's about as effective as doing it "the real way".

Speaking of doing a lot with a little, I just love the way this game looks. Sure, the pre-rendered backgrounds and cutscenes weren't made with modern resolutions or standards in mind so they look rough at times, but I think the low-poly models are incredibly charming. I think of them almost like caricatures of the characters, they may exaggerate or skip over certain details but they're able to capture the essence of whatever they're representing incredibly well. Yes, it may not age as well as the clean sprite art of the SNES, and a lot of games from this era do look fairly poor, but this game has a charm to it that I never quite got over. I think there's a reason this aesthetic has started to come back into style with games like Crow Country fairly explicitly evoking the proportions of this game's models.

The gang's all here.

Before I get into the story, I should mention that I played this with a few mods enabled. One of them apparently fixed some UI bugs, but there are two that I think are worth mentioning. The first (called "PSX Shadows") essentially makes the PC port look worse so as to better match a PSOne copy of the game, meaning the game is rendered at a lower resolution and there are aliased edges everywhere, as well as adding the sort-of-shimmering you'd get with PSOne textures. The other mod, the more significant one, fully reworks the game's script and text. The original localization of this game allegedly had... issues and a friend suggested I play this game with the new translation, so that's what I did.

The Shinra Archaeology Cut (linked here) attempts to both more closely represent the Japanese version of the script and create parity across the various games in the FF7 Compilation. This means that nearly all of the dialogue is different from the original localization, with some quotes that have relevance in future entries maintained (and, due to an option in this mod's settings, some notoriously bad lines that may be kept as well). Having not played that original, and only seeing cherry-picked examples of why it was bad, it's hard for me to say whether or not this is a "better" way to play the game however.

Tifa's original line here is... less good.

I know certain... problematic changes and additions to that original localization have been removed or modified, but there are also editorial decisions by the translation team that I'm not sure I agree with. Much like any fansub, there's a fair amount of cursing in this and it almost always feels out of place to me. Maybe it's the aesthetic or just the tone of the story, but this doesn't seem like a game that should have as many @#%$s and $&#@!s thrown around as this translation does. There are also some easter eggs thrown in that I don't think I like. Editorializing and adding in stuff that wasn't initially there just doesn't feel in the spirit of what this mod should be doing, you know?

With all that said, some of the swears are funny.

Now, if I'm talking about the plot I suppose I should talk about the elephant in the room. I've been circling around it for a while, but if you somehow don't know about The Big Plot Point that occurs in this game, I'd recommend stopping now, because if you've made it to 2026 without knowing it I sure don't want me to be the reason this game gets spoiled for you.

 

 

Last chance...

 

 

Ok, are we all on the same page? I'm going to continue. 

 

 

No turning back...

 

 

 

Aerith dies. This is something I've known for over twenty years. I grew up on the Internet in the early '00s, and subsequently spent a lot of time on forums, so between those, webcomics, and Flash animations this plot point was inescapable.  It's, like, common knowledge as far as I'm concerned, up there with the meaning of "Rosebud" in Citizen Kane and what Darth Vader reveals to Luke at the end of The Empire Strikes Back.

Despite going into this game knowing exactly how her story would end, I got attached to Aerith. She's a fun character with a lot of personality who seems vitally important for the plot, and who also has Limit Breaks that make her a great mechanical addition to the combat. Even knowing her role in the story, watching her get cut down when she did was a genuine shock. Yes, I knew it would happen eventually, but on Disc 1? Even the circumstances of her death, and Cloud's... involvement, were a surprise.

Man.

The rest of this story was honestly entirely fresh to me, to my delight. I knew the broad strokes, such as Aerith dying and the general characters involved in the story as well as the vague structure of the game, but I had no idea where this plot was going. I somehow didn't know what Cloud's deal was before I started, and truly didn't know a whole lot else. Sephiroth's arc was particularly fascinating to me as we still don't know Sephiroth I was surprised that this character who I've built up in my head for 20+ years as an "edgy anime swordsman" really does come across as a scary guy in the original game. Sephiroth is cool, man, and people were right to put him up on a pedestal!

Something else worth noting is that this game is funny. Not just in the immediate sense where a character or enemy will make a joke, but in a structural, mechanical sense as well. There are multiple times when the game will play a prank on you, the player, and all you can really do is laugh. Why am I mentioning that now? Well, almost immediately after the aforementioned Aerith dying bit, you're snowboarding down a mountain and doing sick backflips.

It's what she would have wanted.

The tone in this game is weird, because you'll alternate between dark-and-edgy Sephiroth scenes and the goofy Saturday-Morning-Cartoon henchman that are the Turks. You'll be disguising Cloud as a woman to sneak into a mob boss's lair one minute and escaping from a genuinely horrific catastrophe the next. I don't know whether all of this was deliberate, whether these lighthearted scenes are there to make the dramatic ones more impactful or if they just had a lot of stuff they wanted to try and cram into the game, but the end result is a game that really runs the gamut in a very fun way. It goes back to what I mentioned earlier about this game being just chock-full of stuff. It's a comedy, it's a romance, it's an adventure, it's a dark-fantasy story, it's a sci-fi, it's kind of a whole lot of things at once. Because of the aesthetic though, and because nobody bats an eye at any of the technology or the odd locations, it kind of works?

This sequence was, surprisingly, not (overly) transphobic!

As always, I've included a screenshot of my last save screen to give you a rough approximation of how long this took me. I spent quite a while grinding XP for Limit Breaks, breeding Chocobos, and fighting (and DEFEATING) the optional bosses that show up in the final act so it took me quite a bit longer than it would have if I'd just been following the critical path, but I had a great time and I enjoyed seeing basically all there was to see so I don't regret it. 

There was about a half-hour of game/cutscenes after this final save.

As I've mentioned a few times now, I've been hearing the merits of this game for decades. It's been pretty much unavoidable, at least in the circles I frequent. So I went into it with very high expectations and, somehow, it met or even surpassed them. It's always a strange feeling for me when I finally get to a thing (that I've heard nothing but good things about) and independently come to the same conclusion that, "hey, this thing is good!". I know I should take people at their word when it comes to these sorts of things but, I don't know. I like to form my own opinions on things and, maybe just out of a sense of self-preservation (in the sense that I only have so much time I can spend on things) I'm always at least somewhat skeptical of near-universal praise.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that I really, really, really liked this game. It's such a fantastic game that it makes me want to see more of the series, just to see if any of the other FFs are as inventive and surprising as this one. Before that, however, I have some homework to do. You see, I intend to see all of Final Fantasy VII. That means I'll get to the Remakes, yes, but I also plan on playing as many of the spinoffs as I can (and watching Advent Children). It'll be some time before I get to any of the other-numbered Final Fantasys as a result, but playing this one has certainly piqued my interest in a way that the other entries I've touched hasn't necessarily done. This game is just so dang good.