A great game, that's weighed down by a few flaws.
FFVII has a pretty good cast holding it together, from the honorable Red XIII all the way to cranky ol' Cid and tons of supporting characters. One of the more prominent features of FFVII is the love triangle between Cloud-Tifa- & Aerith. The dialogue in FFVII for lack of a better word... is rather sloppy, full of cliches, uninteresting quotes, or just ultimately unbelievable. Now to the core of FFVII, it's gameplay... with one of the best features in an FF game ever... the limitbreaks, simply speaking they're awesome. You slowly gain up your limit gauge as you take damage, once it's complete you can either save it for later, or unleash a devastating attack, which proves to be helpful and fun. Then you have your basic FFVII gameplay, attack, magic (all the spells you know and love)... powered by one of the absolute WORST concepts in an FF game EVER. Materia. As you progress through the game you acquire materia, little colored balls which you insert into weapons or armor to possess the spell/attack/ability that certain materia holds. Theres a catch though, you can only have a few materia in your possession at a time, so you have to choose between boss battles and such what ones will prove to be most useful, on top of that, materia possessing magic powers severely handicaps your fighting ability (cuts HP, and strength). As for the cutscenes present, they are far and few, and when they do show up they are pretty uneventful compared to the FMVs of say FFIX. It has a pretty solid difficulty level, never becoming to hard.... but it does get amazingly frustrating when you have to cover long distance and you get random battle after random battle (only game I have ever raged on, even as to throw my controller at the wall, leaving it broken). Lastly there's the notorious soundtrack, which in my opinion is lacking. The music always has an annoying ringing sound that stays in your head for days, but there are a few great tracks (most notably the character and battle themes). Overall it's an amazing game, that I can recommend to everyone but just be wary of some of it's flaws.
Pros:
- Limit Breaks = Win!
- Awesome OST
- Great Cast of characters
- Deep Story
- Long main story
- Endless amount of side-quests and minigames
- Fun puzzles
Cons:
- Poor Dialogue
- Random battles @ the most inopportune moments
- Materia... is a pain in the ass
- Graphics have aged and are very "un-smooth"
- Takes awhile to get good