I never played this, is it worth it still, or has time moved on to the point where this just feel super dated? I like some classic games (OK, mostly old Zelda games) but sometimes early 3d stuff really doesn’t age well.
Did not age well.
No, it’s only carried by nostalgia at this point. If you don’t suffer from the affliction, keep your distance.
Funny thing, I started it on an emulator (randomly) on my PC lastnight and played through the intro bits. The problem with 3D graphics is that they don’t age well. Going back to FFVI over FFVII I’d say FFVI looks ‘better’ really, and if you wanna do some fun emulator work at least with the old 2D stuff you can use the Super 2xSAI stuff to make everything look cell shaded.
FFVII… I dunno, I can not imagine why Square went back to random encounters after Chrono Trigger. It’s why I effing hate JRPGs, you basically just play by their rules. I MIGHT try to get through it, but the most interesting plot point was spoiled over ten years ago so there isn’t too much motivation.
The graphics aged really poorly. It’s still one of the better FF games, though.
I didn’t really like it all that much. The protagonists weren’t interesting, the villain was boring, the music was irritating (with a few exceptions), the 3D graphics were atrocious, Chocobos annoy me, and there were too many damn cutscenes. Also, the materia system added much-unneeded micromanagement. Plus, it was too grindy.
But I love FFVI.
Final fantasy VII will always hold a special place in my heart. Though it wasn’t my introduction to the series (Final Fantasy IV(II) for the SNES holds that honor), it does remain my favorite. This is despite the fact that I played VI(III) for the SNES first.
I realize this isn’t the common opinion, but something about VII just captivated me. I loved the setting, I loved the characters, even the convoluted story was great. The materia system remains one of my favorite systems in any RPG to date, there were just so many cool things you could do with it. Not only that, but finding the rare materia was not only challenging and fun, but well worth it.
There were so many amazing moments in the game. The first visit to Golden Saucer, finally breeding a gold Chocobo, witnessing the destructive power of Omnislash for the first time, both the escape and the return to Midgar… I could go on an on; no game has provided me with so many magic and memorable moments.
Though I certainly have nostalgia on my side with FFVII, I find it surprising how many people deride the game. I played through it again a couple years ago, and in everything but graphics, it held up beautifully.
I pride myself on almost never succumbing to fanboy whims, but with Final Fantasy VII I just can’t help it. The game will always be one of my favorites of all time.
VIII has aged much better than VII, if you ever liked VIII in the first place. I did.
I have a few too many gaps in my FF playlist to say this with complete confidence, but I think VI and VII are the great villains of the series. Kefka is completely off his rocker, and Sephiroth is just damn cool. (at least until he was voiced by a member of a boy band).
I remember one cool cutscene involving the villain in VIII, but in general Ultimecia wasn’t that exciting. IX makes me all around cranky, villain not least among them, and X… Seymour? Hahahaha. (yes, okay, Sin, Jecht, etc. But Seymour’s the one with center billing.)
I just didn’t get anything memorable, villain-wise, out of what I’ve played of IV and V. I haven’t played enough of XII to have any idea who the main villain is. And FF I - III are old enough that I can’t imagine their storytelling to be up to the level that would be needed to compete with VI and VII on great villain grounds.
I’m harsh (unduly or not) on it because I blame it for the rise of gratuitous (in amount) CG cutscenes cluttering up otherwise-tolerable games.
FF’s villains have always been its weak points. A single Don Tonberry encounter in FFX had more personality and menace than any boss in the game, bar none. And Sephiroth was much better suited to the Disneyfied Kingdom Hearts 2. But I’m sure if I’d played it when it first came out that might make a difference.
I bought FFVII but haven’t had the opportunity to start the game yet. I mentioned in the gog.com thread, to paraphrase, that I’m not sure about games that are too old to have enjoyable gameplay and are still easy to view for hours on end, but if the story and characters and can carry FFVII, I should be okay. Since there’s such a lull in my gaming this year, it’s a good time to fit it in, and the price is right.
Update: I am loving FFVII! I’m really surprised that it holds up so well. It’s not just the story and characters that I’m enjoying, though; the gameplay is just as fun. It reminds me so much of my time with FF1-3 on the NES/SNES.
I bought FFXII last summer and it still waits to be completed. It isn’t half as engaging as VII, not in terms of characters, story, or gameplay. I may have to track down other FF games that can be played on the PS3 to see how the series progressed. FFVII is a gem at this early point in the game (8+ hours in).
I don’t know why people rip on this game so much. I liked it when I first played it, and I still like it now. The areas you can go to are almost all interesting, the materia system is a nice balance of customizability and ease of use, the story has its moments, the characters are great for a JRPG (no annoying characters!), etc.
I think that many people don’t like this game because it is talked about incessantly. I’ve played VI, and it was fantastic but fell apart in the world of ruin.
Don’t worry, it collapses under its own weight as soon as you leave Midgar.
It doesn’t in any way, shape, or form. Midgar is a fantastic introduction to the world of FFVII, but in my opinion, it only gets better.
The game fell apart for me at the Crater/optional WEAPON fights. The WEAPONs were just insanely strong, with some paradoxical situations involved like the little loop: defeat RUBY to get a gold chocobo, use the chocobo to get the Knights of the Nine summon to help fight RUBY. Uhm what? You could get a chocobo by other means but I certainly didn’t find chocobo racing/gambling fun at all. Or how about the various one-time-only materia access events where the only way to get critical materia is by gamefaq’ing it?
The Crater was a beast of a dungeon crawl. Every random encounter is the equivalent of a regular boss fight, and you have to place the save crystal yourself. Do you place it early and risk frustration on the way to the final boss, or do you place it right before the final boss and risk frustration while trying to get there without saving or using tents, etc. Furthermore, without a guide there is no way to know how close you are to the end so if you want to place the save crystal at the 50% or 70% there is no way to know where that is.
It’s been a while, but I recall Midgar as being the highpoint as well. I still remember my confusion and bewilderment as I was flung out of the engrossing urban landscape onto the stock Squaresoft world map once again. Ah yes, all the urgency, excitement, and tight narrative framework of the prologue – all of it thrown away in exchange for what I can only interpret as being an aimless, schizophrenic camping trip over land, forest, and sea that I have yet to make sense of to this day. I can remember hiking through the mountains, meeting a sand worm or two, visiting an amusement park, and hearing some psychobabble about the earth being in trouble – not much else. Perhaps there was a plot along the way, but I’ll be damned if it made any sense? Translation was another problem if memory serves.
Anyway, I know that every Final Fantasy discussion comes with a heaping dose of nostalgia. But by God, if you go back and evaluate strictly on the merits… you’ll find FFV and VI holding up just fine to this very day. They’re still works of genius as far as I’m concerned.
VII and VIII? Not so much.
Sorry, I missed this earlier and felt compelled to address it now that I saw it. I feel ridiculous even saying this about a 13 year old game, but since there are clearly some people playing it for the first time…
SPOILERS BELOW FOR THE AWFUL STORY.
Well-handled? Really? The music must really have done its job on you, because when I watched that sequence all that was going through my head was the fact that ten minutes earlier Aeris had been killed with a machine gun and I brought her back to life by whacking her with a phoenix feather. Now all of sudden Mama’s Boy pokes her with his penis extension sword and the composer gets all sad while we leave her to rot in a stagnant pool. Hang on, got something in my eye…
- The Materia system was very cool. Allowing players so many strategic options in building and outfitting their weapons was fun and deep without being overly complex.
If by “cool” you mean “unbelievably broken,” then I agree. It removed all individuality from the characters outside of their Limit Breaks, and was hilariously prone to abuse even by the midgame. Yes, it’s slightly amusing to destroy the final boss with one button press, but it’s also pretty boring and anticlimactic. But really, it’s the removal of individual abilities that’s the cardinal sin of the Materia system. I am to this day convinced that the Junction system in Final Fantasy VIII was created on a bet that the team couldn’t come up with anything worse than Materia.
- Good characters- especially since you typically only played with a few at a time it left you wanting to play through again with another set. The character were distinct in their powers but well balanced.
There was nothing distinct about the characters’ abilities, since that was the crux of the Materia system. Abilities were interchangeable and really only Limit Breaks were left to differentiate anyone. If you mean their personalities, I’m confused as to whether you’re praising the amnesiac twit, the hopelessly optimistic dead meat on a hook chick, borderline-racist ebonics guy, brooding vampire guy who doesn’t really show up in the main plot (or the ending movie) because he’s optional, or useless novelty character thrown in to sell plush toys out of vending machines. I’d mock Tifa, Red XIII, and Yuffie, but I can’t even remember enough about them to do so.
- Open world- There were a lot of great side quests and places to find.
As long as you ignored the story and the entire premise behind it, yeah. Sephiroth is heading for the top of the world to destroy the planet, and we’ve got to stop him! But let’s solve all our friends’ emotional home issues and raise giant chickens for a few weeks first. I realize this is an issue with just about all RPGs, but FF7 was the first I can remember that actually made a race against time the primary plot motivator and then proceeded to ignore it completely. There were far better ways to handle it, and it’s just one more example of the absolute mess that was the game’s plot.
- It hit critical mass in the US. It was in the right place at the right time and introduced a lot of players to JRPG’s. No matter how much you may prefer earlier JRPG’s this was the first many many people played.
This is true, but I can’t even imagine why you’d consider this a positive thing. FF7’s impact on the genre (and arguably the medium) has been almost entirely negative. It’s fine and dandy that RPGs hit the mainstream audience more squarely (haha), but this is like introducing someone to The Godfather by showing them Part III first.
The game hasn’t aged very well. But since it did all 5 of the above so well it really was a great game in its day. Personally I enjoyed FFIX more, but FFVII was a great game.
No, it wasn’t. A lot of people who had never played an RPG before think of it as one, but that’s mainly because they have no context in which to judge it. It was a radical and wrong-headed departure from what the series had been, and the only thing that mitigates the mistakes made in FF7 is arguably that FF8 was full of even worse ideas. It begins pretty well, but as soon as the story leaves Midgar what little momentum it had is lost and it just falls apart under its own overly contrived plot. Honestly the only thing about FF7 I feel is praiseworthy is the music composition, and even that is ruined by the most godawful screechy MIDI work I can recall on the PSone. Even in 1997 it sounded horrible. If I were Square I’d want to remake the game just to finally do in-game justice to the soundtrack.
Tangentially, I agree that FFIX is the best of the PSone games in the series, but even that one suffered from the incomprehensible plotting and awful storytelling that plagued the FF games in the 32-bit era. Vivi is possibly the most interesting character in the entire FF series, and they drop his character arc completely after the middle of the third disc, wrapping it up right before the nonsensical final battle with the personification of death by having Zidane turn to him and ask “How you doing?” and Vivi respond, “I’m okay.” Bravo, guys. That’s just how Shakespeare would have done it, I’m sure.
I’ve really been soured on the FF games from 7 on, with the notable exception of 12, which I thought was an absolute breath of fresh air with excellent characters (even if they were very derivative of Star Wars) and an interesting plot, although it sort of disappears for a long stretch in the middle of the game. 13 looks beautiful, but as it stands I have doubts that the game (made by the same team as X and X-2, not the FF12 team, I believe) will deliver a story of any quality beyond that of a middle-of-the-road anime series. With those visuals, Square could have a massive crossover casual hit on their hands if they’d ever consider hiring some writers to tell a story that would appeal to people over 12 who don’t own Naruto headbands.