In this month’s edition of The Dusty Shelf Reviews, dust off your copy of Final Fantasy VII and get ready for a look at one of the most beloved games ever to hit the original PlayStation system. Final Fantasy VII is perhaps the most polarizing game of the Final Fantasy series. No doubt many of you remember it fondly as the first hard core 3D JRPG you’ve ever played.
You remember Cloud with his stubborn fondness and Aerith with a little bulge in your pants. Even Sephiroth was the coolest badass son of a bitch you’d ever met (it’s the sword). Yet still others remember FFVII as a cancerous abomination to one of the most beloved RPG series of all time. I’m here, not to take sides, but to dissect these two vastly differing opinions and perhaps present some solace for fan boys and vehement hipsters alike.
The reason for the great polarization of FFVII lies in the era in which it was created. The late 90’s (Final Fantasy VII was released in 1997) was a time of transition in video games, particularly RPG’s. With the rise of new gaming systems like the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation innovations in 3D animation allowed for more realistic looking characters and settings. However, just because it was now possible to make 3D games doesn’t mean it should have happened.
Indeed, this is the sentiment of most people who despise this game, though it’s not the only reason for their hatred. Graphics, especially poorly executed graphics, are something that is very easy to complain about in a video game. After all, video games are primarily a visual experience. Although the awful graphics are not the only point of contention for opponents of FFVII, it is certainly one of the major issues that the game suffers from.
If I were to make a list, their complaints would probably run something like this: the graphics of FFVII are confused and muddled at best and downright eye-cancer at worst. The art direction is inconsistent and the varying art styles blend together in odd ways, making the environments hard to look at and even harder to navigate through. The story is confusing, overcomplicated, and I can’t relate to any of these catatonic characters who seem to be undergoing another existential crisis after every goddamn boss battle. Cloud’s a douchebag and the love story in FFVIII is better. Oh yeah, and fuck Materia.
Now, some of these are actually legitimate complaints. As I mentioned before, this was a transitional period in gaming and early PlayStation RPG’s were generally known for their shitty graphics. Honestly, I would take the simple 8-bit models and sprites of FFVI and other SNES era RPG’s any day over the crazy polygon-fest of FFVII. But without this first step, this first experimentation into 3D graphics, we wouldn’t have the amazing realistic 3D games of today.
Some of you asshole hipsters probably don’t care. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, right? Well, yes, this is at least partially true when it comes to games like this; I agree that there is no reason (at least gameplay-wise) for RPG’s to be 3D rather than 2D. It’s more or less purely an aesthetic choice to make the 2D to 3D transition, but the graphical innovation going on in FFVII is not just about graphics in RPG’s themselves. Our best-selling 3D adventure games of this decade, games like Bioshock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Skyrim, and Dishonored, owe their development to the innovation of 3D rendering and animation in early PlayStation games like FFVII.
The problem of the art direction and artistic style is a similar issue and often gets mistaken for graphics, but is perhaps the real reason why Final Fantasy VII looks like shit. Take a look at this brief cutscene from the game:
This is a pretty early part in the game when Cloud and company escape from Midgar. What we have here are 3 different artistic styles: a 3D polygon-created sprite jumping onto a separately animated 3D train which is moving through a weird pseudo-2D background, all layered on top of each other like a Picasso collage. Now, maybe I’m weird, but I don’t usually appreciate early abstract modernist collage in my video games, especially when it looks like this. But then, other times, if you’re really lucky, we get fully animated cutscenes, like this one:
Yeah it’s a bit better. The characters don’t look like bizarre polygon aliens and the interaction between them and their environment is smoother, but it’s still not great.
But believe it or not, there are actually good parts of this game. No, it didn’t age well, and yes, there were some spotty decisions in the art department, but there are many aspects of FFVII that can be appreciated as excellent game design. The battle system, for one, is still as good as any of the other games, at least up until FFX, and is loads better than the crap we get in contemporary Final Fantasy games with AI controlled party members.
Limit Break is a fine mechanic, if a little inconsistent from character to character, and the ability to unlock a final secret Limit for each character is a nice option. Materia is also not as bad as a lot of people like to bitch about. It’s actually a reasonably elegant way to construct a magic system, as it forces you to think about what spells you really want to give to your characters since each Materia directly effects the character’s stats and each weapon or armor piece only has a certain number of Materia slots. In many ways, Materia is actually very similar to the Esper system of FFVI, although without the ability to permanently keep the spells you learn (which, admittedly, is a little annoying), and is, without a doubt, leaps and bounds better than the subsequent spell-grinding Junction system in FFVIII.
When it comes to the plot of the game, the story is overly-complicated and bizarre, but honestly, the writing’s not any worse than your standard JRPG narrative arc. The beginning has an engaging hook, with the Sephiroth chase driving the early part of the game forward until we gradually begin to learn more and more about Jenova, the Ancients, and the Lifestream. The twists in the middle of the game (I won’t go into specifics for those of you who have, for some reason, still not played this game) are certainly weird and sometimes just leave you thinking “really…?” but none of it ever really detracts from the overall story. With the exception of a few of the side characters, most of the characters in the story have clear motivations for their actions, or at least, when they don’t there’s a good reason for it (blah blah clones blah blah eco-terrorists).
The music is also excellent. FFVII might even be Nobuo Uematsu’s crowning achievement, and that’s saying something, given all the fantastic music he has created for this series. The world map music is a serene and beautiful string melody, the battle music is awesome and energetic, the character themes are all varied and engaging, and the boss battle theme (Those Who Fight Further) is an amazing blend of midi synths with progressive-metal sounding organ lines.
Overall, Final Fantasy VII is a pretty solid game. It’s definitely not the nostalgia-tinged wonder-game that you remember from your childhood, but neither is it pure unadulterated garbage. Its influence on modern video gaming is without a doubt apparent and in many ways we are indebted to it as an innovator of not only the RPG genre, but of the art of video games itself. If you haven’t played the game in a while, then I suggest you dust off that old PlayStation and bust out this classic again for one more adventure with our favorite spiky-headed hero.
The Classy Wasteland 