Final Fantasy VII: I have a long and complicated relationship with this game. My first encounter with FFVII was more directly responsible for me wanting to make games than any other event in my life (the fact that I've spent the following twenty years actively avoiding doing anything about this is an issue for an entirely different kind of post). I'd never been predominantly a fan of the RPG genre before this. I'd played a few and enjoyed them, but never thought of the genre as my specific favorite. But it was instantly apparent from just a few minutes of watching my cousin play FFVII at our grandparents' house that there was far more potential for creative storytelling in the medium than I'd previously considered. And that was just the Cosmo Canyon dungeon, arguably one of the low points of the game (the prison is the worst part, just like in FFVIII and XG and wow, I guess I could go on like this). It'd be a year or more after that before I could find a chance to play it, but finally doing so more than confirmed that if you wanted to tell a complicated and involved story in a videogame, RPGs were the way to do it, and FFVII was a sterling model for how. I don't think it ever enjoyed official place as my favorite game (because Star Control 2 existed), but opinion that this was one of the peak quality examples of the genre, and a prevailing influence in the field of Perpetually Undeveloped Cid Game Ideas, persisted for a long time.
I don't remember precisely the last time I replayed it, but I would estimate sometime during college (so 2002 at the latest). A great deal has changed in the interim. Years of internet fanboy exclamations of "Sephiroth greatest villain ever!1" and the like gradually ate away at my affection for the game--as well as, quite possibly, developing a degree of elitism from DL association. Anyway, this was the PS2 boom era of console JRPGs and I had too many new things to play to go back and revisit FFVII again. After a while, I concluded it couldn't possibly live up to its reputation and the visuals would look so painfully dated that it would be best to just stay away.
Sometime in 2016 or 2017 (it grows difficult to tell, the awfulness of real life events since late 2015 all blending together now into one everlasting scream), I read the FFVII LP. That four-year labor of love made the case, I would say very convincingly, that FFVII is a smarter game than we tend to give it credit for, and the reasons it was great tend to get lost or misidentified by its fandom. The FFVII LP is a fantastic read and I strongly recommend it; I will probably be reading it again after I finish the game. But ultimately I had to wonder what exactly my prevailing opinions were based on, and whether that patina of faint distaste for the game might be wholly unwarranted.
Lately, for the same fundamental reasons that I've been rereading Terry Pratchett and Carl Sagan, I've found it attractive to revisit what I regard as formative influences. That road could only lead back to FFVII (PSIV is probably on the agenda afterwards). These days, feeling inspired or moved by anything is profoundly difficult, but it
isn't proving difficult to see what made FFVII appear so revolutionary to 18-year-old Cid. I'm enjoying it so far, and not giving much of a damn that Square is trying to tell a deep and moving narrative with Lego people, because few things earn my suspension of disbelief more winningly than earnest sincerity of purpose. Midgar is an outstanding introduction to a story.
The most obvious consideration playing something this old for the first time after multiple console generations have passed is "How has it aged?" And the most immediately obvious way in which games as a medium prove their age is indeed graphically.
For a long time, I figured FFVII would just look godawful in the 2010's and avoided replaying it partly for this reason. This turns out to be only partially true. Actually, the prerendered backgrounds are very endearing. There's a lot of character crammed into these, and I don't find them offputting for visually showing their age because the hand-drawn look is more the peak of a style that wasn't used much past this generation than the blocky first experiments of a new style. This is basically the same reason that I consider Valkyrie Profile the nicest-looking game of the PSX era (except VP did it one better and used sprites instead of polygonal character models). The way that the Lego people interact with these backgrounds is not always spotless--as impressive as the introductory sequence is cinematically, one can't help but be distracted by the way the Shinra soldiers at the train station wobble as the camera zooms in on their location--but the backdrops themselves are actually still quite nice to look at. I love seeing even throwaway NPC houses crammed with all the extraneous bricabrac of everyday life. The world map is substantially less great. And I'm still on the fence about the character models themselves, but I tend to regard work like this as just of its time and no more in need of a remake than Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is of colorization.
Combat remains the most braindead that I've encountered in a mainline FF title. Oh, whoops, Hobocat's pestering me for food because it's after dinnertime and I'm still sitting here playing the game, okay, no problem, I don't have to stop playing the game at all to fix this, just take the controller with me to the kitchen and hold down X. When I plan RPG combat systems, FFVII is usually the model for what I don't want to be. Given how much experience Square had by this point, I have to assume that FFVII having the simplest (and therefore most accessible) combat was a deliberate design decision. It's forgivable in-context because I care about the narrative, boss fights are basically just an excuse to listen to Still More Fighting while the Turks say pithy nonsense (FFVII's only dangerous bosses are the plotless ones), and this makes complete sense on a design level for a pre-sceneskip production that's loaded with lengthy cutscenes around boss fights. But if there's any specific aspect of the game I deliberately seek
not to emulate, it's the battles. Surrounding narrative makes them good for drama, but the battle design never makes the player feel pressured technically.
The soundtrack makes me wonder why I've never nommed anything from this game for a music tourney, because Uematsu's themeing work is at least as on point as it was in FFVI. God, just listen to the main theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UARM4q7hHU It's exactly the right mood roller coaster for this narrative, and every musical motif gets taken apart and repackaged for use again right when the game needs it. There was probably a time somewhere in the PS2/PS3 era when I would've counted the mid-90s synth quality a mark against the game, but that seems pretty stupid by this point. Guys, I listen to ELP.
The translation is certainly a thing. If there's anything in the game that could use a fresh coat of paint, it's this. Even mid-90s localization can't disguise how clearly drawn the cast is, though (at least the Midgar quartet; I'm inclined to say things get a little fuzzier from Red XIII on, but we'll see). Unreliable narrators are great and I love the Footage Not Found effect every time Cloud's brain scrambles to cover the gaps in his memory. I just got out of Midgar and saw The Flashback. When I played this in college, I never picked up on the fact that Tifa knows there are huge inconsistencies in Cloud's story and can't figure out how to address this problem for like the entire game (in part because she isn't the assertive one--Aeris, working against type, is that). As the LP points out, the reasons that FFVII fanboys think it's a great game aren't always the reasons it's actually a great game--and the way that they remember and celebrate character personalities isn't always all that accurate, which is a little comical considering the nature of Cloud's character arc.
I'm not really sure why I set out to do this with dialogue options, but Tifa is getting friendzoned hard.
Presently have to get a chocobo to cross the swamp (and boo to the game making you scrape together money for this right after you probably spent all your money on new materia and weapons in Kalm).
