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The in-game music is still synthesized MIDI, which may come as something of a surprise to PC gamers used to redbook CD audio quality. This was a deliberate decision for the PlayStation version, according to Fujimoto: "Recorded sound needs time to read, while we want the music changes to take place quickly and smoothly no heavy load times to interfere with the gameplay." This priority remains the same for the PC version and is also the reason why there is no spoken dialogue in the game. Fujimoto suggests that this might change with future Final Fantasy games with technology like DVD-ROM, but only if there is the possibility of accessing two locations on the disc at the same time.
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Despite being at a pre-alpha stage, the game was running very smoothly under OpenGL (the final version will support both Direct3D and OpenGL) and is very pleasing to the eye. That had been one of my worries no matter how playable, a game that was conceived for the 1997 console market might look terribly dated. FFVII doesn't. The rendered backdrops, shifting camera angles, and polygon-shaded characters are looking very tasty indeed by anybody's standard. The switch (or lack of it) as the game takes you seamlessly from FMV into gameplay and out again, time and again, is without a doubt one of the most impressive bits of graphical work I've seen in any game, PC or console. It's like all those interactive movie pipe dreams where you could literally walk into the action made real.
