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Game Title: Final Fantasy VII
Platform: PSOne
Developer: Square Enix
Publisher: Square Enix
Genre: Role Playing
Age Rating: PEGI: 16+, ELSPA: 11+, ESRB: T for Teen, CERO: B
Release Date: 31st January 1997 (Japan), 9th September 1997 (US), 17th November 1997 (Europe)
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Game Score: 9.0/10
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Summery:
Final Fantasy VII's battles, characters, storyline and CGI cutscenes still make the game still enjoyable and memorable.
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Final Fantasy VII came out as the game that helped bring the series towards the mainstream audience and since it's release critics had loads of great things to say about it. At the same time gamers today say that the game is overrated and say also that it hasn't aged all that well. It was also one of the first games in the Final Fantasy series to ever see a release in the European countries if you do not count Mystic Quest on the Super Nintendo and Gameboy since they do not use the Final Fantasy name over here. Since everyone is having mixed feelings about the upcoming Remake I figured I put my heart into giving my opinions and feelings I had with the game since childhood, after all when everyone mentions Final Fantasy they always mention how popular FFVII was. While I can agree with some small things that some people have with the game it still has it's fantastic moments that many of it's players found enjoyable and memorable.
The storyline follows Cloud Strife who joins forces with a small resistance group called AVALANCHE who takes up the fight against the Shinra corporation. They plan on draining the life out of the planet with their Mako reactors as well as seeking a hidden place called The Promised Land for their own entire purposes. Final Fantasy VII is set within a post-industrial science fictional fantasy where the technology in the human society is more advanced with the usage of the aforementioned reactors, modern looking houses and machinery. Cloud his aided by other characters like Barret who is in charge of AVALANCHE, Tifa who is Cloud's childhood friend, Aerith a flower girl who lives in the slums as well as a few others which have their purposes for wanting to aid Cloud. The party will also encounter a man named Sephiroth who also seeks the Promises Land whilst doing things his way such as becoming one with the planet so that he can become a god. He will kill anyone who gets in his way even the people who believed in him and people of Shinra and Soldier making him a great villain. Without spoiling anything the storyline is great and there are plenty of tense and shocking moments that either spook the player or leave them crying in tears. The character dialogue is decently written but what I can agree with is the overall English translation, for example one of the characters Aerith is actually translated as Aeris and you can also see a few typos here and there. It's an example of early Japanese video game translations at it's finest before developers even proof read the translation or use a more reliable translation tool. One thing to note is the amount of bad language that is used in the game, the game is rated for teens yet the game gets away with using the s word and the amount of bad words that humorously gets censored. Still the storyline is really enjoyable to sit through and like I said it has plenty of plot twists that will surprise players.
Final Fantasy VII is a Japanese Style Role Playing Game which has both gameplay elements of exploration and combat. In the fields you get to visit towns which serve as resting places and shopping for new equipment and items you need and also dungeons where you find items and battle enemies in random encounters. You start out walking on foot but soon you can capture a yellow creature called a Chocobo which is good for fast travelling on foot, you can also a submarine for travelling underwater and lastly an airship which can be used to fly anywhere. Aside from using a Buggy which you can also get, any method of transportation will give you no enemy encounters which is nice when you want quick travels.
When exploring around you will enter into a random encounter which takes place in turn based combat. You give commands to your characters to either deal physical attacks, use magic spells or use recovery items to heal up. Now I already reviewed Final Fantasy IV and V which introduced the Active Time Battle system and Final Fantasy VII uses the system as well. Basically enemies attack relentlessly and you have to wait for the ATB bar to fill up so that you can give your characters commands, that means you have to enter commands quickly if you want to minimize damage. It makes the battles engaging and importantly challenging. Upon winning battles characters earn EXP which getting enough will level them up and increase their power as well as Gil (which is the in game currency) which is used to purchase equipment and items.
Final Fantasy VII uses magical orbs called Materia which gives characters different abilities when equipped. These include offense, healing and defence magic spells, call forth giant beings, give you commands like analysing enemies stats to look at what their weaknesses are, stealing and giving a character a percentage boost in stats. What that means is for some Materia equipping one has it's benefits and also it's downsides. For example equipping Magic based Materia increases magical stats while also lowering physical stats so it's usually it's easier to equip the Materia you really need for certain situations. You also equip Materia in various combinations which will allow you to use offensive spells to attack all enemies at once which makes group fights easier, give elemental resistances and other stuff which you will have to figure out for yourself. Weapons and Armour have their own Materia which are either alone or can be used together with another so again deciding the right Materia to use is best advised. Materia can also gain AP from winning battles in which after gaining enough they level up and grant stronger abilities, if one Materia reaches max it will make a new Materia of the same kind which you can give to another character if you so choose.
Final Fantasy VII introduces Limit Breaks which are special attacks that your characters can use when their Limit Break bar reaches full. This meter fills up whenever a character gets attacked by an enemy. Each character has their own set of Limit Breaks which deals massive damage and characters can learn new Limit Breaks by fulfilling conditions in battle or through sidequests. Just be careful not to let a character die or else the meter drops back down to 0% if that happens.
What you will need to take into consideration is some enemies have different strengths and weaknesses and it's usually best to take advantage. Some enemies will also cause status effects like poison, petrify or worse be turned into a toad. These can be cured with a curative item or magic spells if it's high levelled enough. You can also equip accessories which can protect a character from status effects depending on the type.
Final Fantasy VII does require plenty of level grinding and thankfully in some way the random encounter frequency helps with that. For the majority of the game it's reasonably fair until you get to some of the optional boss fights. Their damage ratio is insane, they can sometimes do multiple attacks and their counters can be very annoying to put up with plus their stats are a little uneven. I died numerous times against Emerald and Ruby Weapons (two of the games hardest bosses) because of their cheapness. The boss challenges in the main story are actually quite reasonable and I like how some boss fights have some requirements where you need to watch the enemies actions. The game's first boss for instance puts up his tail and if you attack it while that's up it will counter attack with its Laser. Some of those fights require you to make careful decisions when you plan your attacks and it does give the battles some depth while also rewarding the player with experimentation.
Final Fantasy VII is the first game in the series to be released in 3D and the way the presentation looks pretty much shows. Now to be fair for what is now almost a 2 decade old game it does look visually impressive for the most part, the overworld map is reasonably well rendered with grassy, rocky and snowy landscapes while town and dungeon areas are all pre-rendered which don't honestly look all that bad even if the smoke and water effects are poorly animated. What really got players attention where the CGI cutscenes which play out several times throughout the game at first glance they look incredibly gorgeous and it took advantage of the PlayStation hardware. Many of the cutscenes like I said are both incredibly enjoyable to watch and also without spoiling has some of the most shocking moments in gaming. What I can agree with what people say about the game's overall graphics are the character models, in the town and dungeon portions the character models look like a complete mess of polygons which makes them look rather ugly but when battles start the graphics fair so much better because the character and monster designs are really cool, the various attack and magical effects and animation are impressive. Some areas can be rather difficult to navigate sometimes because of the pre-rendered nature of the environments it can be hard to tell where your supposed to jump down or where you're supposed to run to. You can summon a hand with the Select button when in Towns and Dungeons which helps point out where you're going if you're in part where you have no idea where you are and arrows pointing where you're supposed to go or use a ladder but there are times it won't show up at all and you're left on your own to figure out where you should be heading. One area almost towards the end of the game in particular has an area of no return meaning that you can easily leave behind missable items on a first time playthrough if you're not careful unless you utilize saving and loading. It's not bad design just something I've noticed. Despite this Final Fantasy VII is great looking game.
Nobuo Uematsu composed some outstanding and truly memorable tracks in the franchise. A lot of these are heart pumping tracks with elements of tension, tear dropping and horror which really fit the mood and situation of the story. My favourite track in the game is One Winged Angel that plays during the final boss encounter, it's a tune that has lyrics in Latin playing with a strong sense of tension and build up, combine that with it's beats and drumming make it one of the best tracks in the game let alone the whole franchise.
Final Fantasy VII does have some small optional sidequests that you can do and the best of those are playing several minigames which can be played once throughout the story but can be played again in an area called the Gold Saucer. That place has plenty of enjoyable minigames like the Motorcycle Chase which is quite enjoyable despite it's hit detection issues, a Snowboarding game, a Mog game, a Submarine game which to me is the best of the minigames, an arm wrestling game, a game where you shoot a Basket ball into the hoop to score points, a Chocobo Racing minigame where you place your bets and in one instance in the storyline take control of one. You also have a Battle arena where you challenge tough monsters and earn battle points to use on rewards, these battles also throws in different handicaps like breaking your characters weapon reducing it's damage output, breaking your Materia, inflicting a status effect at the start of a round, cutting your HP/MP in half and so on. These only happen temporally and revert to normal after the battles are over so it's nothing too much to worry about. These minigames are quite enjoyable and so do serve well as a time killer whenever you want something else to do in the game.
Overall while the graphics haven't aged gracefully everything else about Final Fantasy VII is still just as enjoyable as was those many years ago. The battles are challenging and importantly enjoyable, there is customization you can do with each Materia and it's fun to find out the various combinations you can do with them. The storyline is still one of the more memorable in any Final Fantasy game and the characters are really cool, Cloud Strife and Sephiroth will forever live on as unforgettable characters in gaming and the popularity that the PSOne game has has managed to spawn a large fanbase that is still being supported to this very day. It also spawned a movie called Advent Children which wasn't bad alongside two spinoff games that managed to get an English release, Dirge of Cerberus Final Fantasy VII on the PS2 and Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII on the PSP which I will cover both of those games in the future. The original game also got ports on PC, PS4 and iOS which all play as identical to the PSOne original. These ports aren't bad cause at least they do fix the English translation but the PC port has horrible graphics (yeah worse then the PSOne version) and a terrible midi remixed soundtrack. The PS4 and iOS look no better then it was originally but both those versions have stupid easy to access cheats like having maximum stats and disable random encounters making the game unchallenging and super easy to beat while the PC version on Steam has a Character Booster feature which fells unnecessary. If you can hold off from using cheats through then you can unlock some achievements on the PS4 and PC versions which will give you more time to complete. The game will take 40+ hours depending on the amount of grinding you do to go through the game alongside some of the small sidequests and minigames you decide to do.
Now for the words on the upcoming Final Fantasy VII Remake that Square Enix is finally doing, at the moment it doesn't give a good first impression so far. The battle system to me looks like a mix of Kingdom Hearts or what I hope doesn't happen a battle system that's similar to Final Fantasy XIII. I also heard talk that the game is going to be separated into different episodes selling at such a ridiculous price tag. Now I understand that Final Fantasy VII was a 3 disc game on the PSOne but separating the entire game into different episodes just sounds really questionable and I personally feel angry about it. It means that I have no idea how Square Enix is going to even make the price of all 3 episodes even worth sitting through. One Episode is going to be sold for £49.99 while all 3 episodes together will sell for £149.99 which to me sounds like a total rip off. I could do better paying 3 copies of the upcoming Tales of Berseria which so far makes better impressions then any of the upcoming Final Fantasy games I've seen so far instead. Rather or not I should recommend the remake is all dependant on wither or not into this far into the series by now. Final Fantasy VII will still expand really well cause it's still hailed as one of the most popular games in the franchise while everyone says one of the most popular J-RPGs ever made. Some honest gamers call it a very overrated game but honesty I can agree with some small things I don't like about the game you have to understand what the game has done for the audience. It helped popularise the J-RPG genre for the west and it allowed older Final Fantasy games to come state side as well as having other developers release their own J-RPG titles which did come to Europe like Breath of Fire 3, Azure Dreams while America got ones that Europe didn't get like Parasite Eve 1 and Tales of Destiny. So in case anyone says I should recommend the PSOne orginal release of Final Fantasy VII, yes you should before you should try the remake for yourself, wither or not the remake turns out either good or bad Final Fantasy VII will always live on as the most important game of the PSOne era and still an enjoyable gem that everyone who likes RPGs must play.
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The Good Points:
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1. Amazing characters and storyline
2. CGI cutscene and battle graphics are well done for PSOne quality of the time
3. Loads of different Materia to customize your characters with
4. Really challenging and enjoyable battle system
5. Cutscenes have some tense, character development and tearful moments which make them great to watch
The Bad Points:
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1. Rough English Translation
2. Character models in the field look like a mess of polygons
3. Optional boss encounter difficulty is insane
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Reviewed by: Anthony Hayball (AQWBlaZer91)
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