I haven’t played the game since it came out on PC but leaving Midgar was that “Holy Shit” moment where you realize how big the world is. Not unlike the moment where you get kicked out of Los Santos in GTA: San Andreas.
I had exactly the opposite reaction. I walked out of the city and thought, “Aw, hell - the world is this small?” In four steps I had covered as much ground as the entire city occupied and large swaths of landscape were just deserted and completely devoid of life that didn’t make my screen flash and try to rip my endocrine system out of my body.
Don’t you just love the net.
The post above by Mattkeil makes it seem like the games crap, sucks and should never have been released or is the worst thing ever.
The point is, i played it when it first came out and loved it and am playing it again now and am loving it again.
Sure you may not like it and give a good list of reasons why for YOU it sucked donkey balls, but there are many of us who loved the game and still do and no i’,m not going to do a big list explaining why I like it, i mean will it make you like it as well, nope thought not, no more than your post makes me hate it.
Heck i am still waiting for a decent RPG on the 360, i know most of us are really hoping FF13 is it but who knows.
All i can say is get off your soap box :D
Maybe it’s because I never really played a Final Fantasy game before 7. I was starting to think the whole game would take place in Midgar.
Well, it had been a while for me, too. My game history contains a large gap right around the PS1 era when I pretty much stopped doing it before my asshole coworker Jake decided to get me all wound up again in college. The first game he forced me to play was Final Fantasy 7. Honestly, it kind of hurt my eyes because it was blurry, but I remember the time when I was in Midgar thinking that this was a totally awesome different kind of role playing game from anything I had done before. Then I walked out of Midgar and it looked like a pimple on a generic green landscape. Which was weird. Then I headed to the next city and there was a vast stretch of nothing which broke verisimilitude so hard for me that I might as well have just stopped playing at that point, because that gargantuan city, I expect, would have a suburb or two. Or a road to the next city. Something. ANYTHING. The landscapes in my Civilization games made more sense.
Then the game got better and I enjoyed the story for what it was, though I was disappointed that it wasn’t what I thought I was getting.
Then I spent twenty hours racing damn chickens in robot Las Vegas while a meteor patiently waited for me to get out and fight it. I like to think that it was tapping its foot and checking its watch. And the best part is that by the time I got around to trying to fight the Ruby Weapon, the event was so ridiculous - so painfully stupid - that I just said screw it and went and did the boss fight and saw the ending, such as it was. That part was bad.
I’m still goggling at the guy who hated on the music. Man, I love the music from that game. JENOVA and Those Who Fight Further are still holding pride-of-place for being among the most epic music I’ve heard, especially when redone by the composers live in The Black Mages.
The story actually had depth, unlike 99% of the other JRPGs I’ve played.
Last time I played through it (game still in progress, actually) it was using a passel of mods to improve the music (through additional soundfonts), graphics, playability on Windows XP, break max damage and HP, and best of all, make the game mind-blowingly harder, because the game as shipped is stupidly easy. Even though you can break max damage/HP, it’s still really hard with this mod.
The best thing about the hardmode mod was what it did to the characters’ stats, as well, making them much more focused on their “primary” stat, and the additional damage you take from enemies means that backrow/frontrow actually matters. This means that instead of Barret just being like Cloud with a different limit break, he hits harder, does much less with magic (whether curative or damaging), and can be put in the backrow without Long Range and still hit for full damage.
It makes your character choice actually matter. Makes it actually make a difference what weapons you use, too… more damage? more materia slots? And makes a difference what materia you use, if only for the HP gain/loss, or magic+/str- that Magic materia have.
I love you, man.
FFVII is a hell of a divider. For me it was the first game I ever put down and decided not to finish because the storyline actually got too stupid for me to tolerate in the second disc. I’ve never, ever felt tempted to pick it back up and see it to the end, either.
It didn’t help that the gameplay has become pretty much the standard I use for deciding whether or not an RPG’s combat is boring and whether the battle system is balanced. FFVII’s game balance is terrible even by FF’s lax standard. Even when I was a teenager it was impossible for me to derive any satisfaction from winning battles in it-- the optimal strategies felt too degenerate and even optional bosses generally felt too easy.
Translation: After you fix the music and gameplay with mods, the music and gameplay are great!
I think I feel tears welling up at the sight of so many fellow FF7 haters.
Or possibly just more hate. It’s hard to say.
OK, “hate” is probably too strong a word to use. I liked it at first: with its ground-breaking graphics (the demo helped sell me on the PS1), cool-if-absurd fantasy steampunk setting, and over-the-top effects (particularly the summons), it was a novel change of pace from bog-standard elves-n-orcs fantasy RPGs which I was completely burned out on. But once the initial novelty wore off, the pacing was so slow, the plot was both nonsensical and retarded, the characterization was so minimal (plus Cloud was just a tool), and the combat was so repetitive and boring (I never even noticed the system was exploitable or the characters were interchangeable - I just fell asleep on the Attack button), it’s a minor miracle I made it through the game at all. But it left such a bad aftertaste in my mouth, I not only swore off FF games (except for Tactics), it almost single-handedly ruined JRPGs for me. Didn’t help that it felt like every PS1 JRPG released post-FF7 was trying to be The Next FF7 - and were usually as bad if not worse (Legend of Dragoon, anyone?).
Thankfully, Grandia 2 & Skies of Arcadia came along a few years later and proved JRPGs didn’t have to suck.
On second thought, maybe “hate” isn’t too strong a word to use.
Grandia 2’s story and characters were just as retarded as FF7’s, it just had an incredibly awesome skill/battle system.
And yeah, fuck LoD, I got like 3 hours in then quit that shit game.
You don’t need to fix the music or the game itself (vis-a-vis crashing bugs and suchlike) if you play it on the PS2.
Of the six mods I use, four of them deal with problems with the PC port. Which sucked, by the way.
I have the PC edition and you all make me wonder if I should take it off my backlog. I thought I’d check it out for historical purposes. Haven’t finished a JRPG since I was a kid.
I can’t even make it through the Last Scenario. The story is relatively interesting but it’s the same stuff over and over.
I would rank it among the top five worst things to ever happen to videogames, yes.
Sure you may not like it and give a good list of reasons why for YOU it sucked donkey balls, but there are many of us who loved the game and still do and no i’,m not going to do a big list explaining why I like it, i mean will it make you like it as well, nope thought not, no more than your post makes me hate it.
I would think this is all pretty obvious to anyone. The point of a thread on a discussion forum is to discuss the game, right? I hate it and am happy to say so. I’d be glad to listen to counterpoints, but generally most people who like the game just say “I just really like it, okay?” and leave it at that. If someone really thinks the SPOILARS!!! Aeris death scene END SPOILARS!!! is a tremendous piece of emotional storytelling, I’d love to hear an explanation of why they think that.
All i can say is get off your soap box :D
No. You’re welcome to get on one, though.
A thousand times yes. Skies of Arcadia brought back the feeling of adventure, exploration, and a main character that was actually interested in being part of the world-changing events he was caught up in. Grandia 2 reminded us that RPG battle systems didn’t have to be stone-dead boring.
I would also throw in the Suikoden games as counterpoints to FF7’s legacy, as they told epic-scope stories that still featured solid characterization and always made sure the way the story unfolded was interesting and engaging.
It’s time for… CONFLICT!
I liked FF7. I could probably play it again, and while I agree with some of MattKeil’s criticisms…
I sure hope you listed this as a major criticism of Oblivion as well, because I found it even more brutally blatant. In fact, it completely destroyed Oblivion for me, because it was so much more in your face. FF7 at least covered it up because the story tended to lead you around in your chase for Sephiroth. So yes, you could raise giant chickens… but why the fuck would you? If you did, that’s more on you than the game. I didn’t, and I beat the game handily.
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.
You know, story-wise, I think you are colored by the fact that you have a degree in english. I mean, if you are, say, 18 when it comes out, and you’ve spent little time with classics in either movie or book form, the story was awesome simply because it was darker and more violent than usual, and tied in a lot of really cool stuff (which appeals to you at that age). Yes, in retrospect, it’s pretty bad, but the mind-fuck of finding out you aren’t who you thought you were is pretty awesome. I consider it grandfathered in, honestly, and I’m not afraid to say I really enjoyed it at the time. Would it hold up today? I don’t know. Also, go choke on a dick with respect to the soundtrack. It was meant to sound the way it did, otherwise it would’ve sounded different. Maybe you’d like to tell Nobuo Uematsu that he doesn’t know his art, but I sure as shit wouldn’t.
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.
Yeah, but if you are holding decade old games up to Shakespearean standards, maybe you are doing it wrong. FFIX story did meander like a motherfucker, but ultimately it was a fairly simple and enjoyable fairy tale, given the caveats that I mentioned previously.
Anything I didn’t respond to I pretty much agreed with.
This. I really enjoyed the time I spent in the first disc of FFVII, when it honestly looked like Square was going to go balls-out and have the game’s “world” just be one enormous city that you got to explore in great detail.
Instead, I got to the second disc and I was in a fucking bogstandard JRPG fantasy world with a bogstandard JRPG plot to pursue-- one that was frankly a lot duller than the ones I’d already explored in FFVI and FFIV.
Didn’t help that it felt like every PS1 JRPG released post-FF7 was trying to be The Next FF7 - and were usually as bad if not worse (Legend of Dragoon, anyone?).
Legend of Dragoon was just FF7, but with a combat engine that decided to go from “boring” to “outright terrible in every possible way.” People designing RPGs should be forced to play through portions of it as a cautionary exercise.
Lets hear the other four. Because JRPGs weren’t exactly the bastion of innovation and genius storytelling you seem to think they should be, with a few notable exceptions. In general, they were all stagnant boring pieces of shit with retarded stories. You can blame that on FF7 if you want, but I’m pretty sure you must have dealt with a very narrow slice of JRPGs in the SNES generation if you truly believe that.
edit: Also something I forgot in the previous posts – I think discounting the amazing art and graphics (and yes, the cutscenes) is doing the game a disservice as well.
Also, Matt, I’m glad to hear your Aeris / Phoenix Down story. I’ve never been able to reconcile the fact that people had an emotional reaction to Aeris’s death with the fact that there is absolutely no reason to expect she’s dead “for realz” when it happens.
Playing through it after the first time is when it gets really funny, because (if you’re at all like me), you’ll always strip a character naked before they leave your party so you can redistribute their good equipment, etc. to other characters.
Me: "Hey Aeris, before we go into that church, how about you take off all your clothes and materia and give them to me?
Aeris: “Um, why?”
Me: “Oh, no reason, just you know, so I can hold onto it. In case.”
Yeah, that was my reaction to her death too. “Bitch had materia.”
SPOILARZ FOLLOW
My emotional reaction came about an hour later when not one, or two, but ALL THREE OF MY FUCKING PARTY MEMBERS WERE TAKEN AWAY FROM ME.
That’s when you get to find out how much the materia system sucks and how bad the background leveling for your secondary characters is. Because all of a sudden I’ve got Mr. T and the B-List while my lead fighter sits in a chair working on his Stephen Hawking impression and my second fighter decides to try and cheer him up with her enormous gargantuan tits. Oh, and my third was dead. So my emotional reaction was to shout obscenities for a few minutes. Surprisingly, I still suffered through the horrible to the end of the game, but that seriously chapped my ass.