Final Fantasy VII: Kind Of REDACTED In Retrospect

Chris Avellone once wrote about how Planescape was to take your standard Fallout/Bioware isometric engine, and create an entire game around the express purpose of delivering narrative. Not combat, not graphic, not customizability, the main point of the whole enterprise was constructed entirely around the story. And it showed.

Oh yeah, and Sheena Easton voices the hot lead chick.

Really.

meanwhile, we live in such times that all these guys(game creators and whatnot) can be your myspace friends.

don't those nerds know that Facebook is the new cool
fucking gamers

LOL I am going to try to friend Sheena Easton and tell her I loved her work on Planescape.

"Not combat, not graphic, not customizability, the main point of the whole enterprise was constructed entirely around the story. "

see, this is kind of a retarded design strategy

planescape totally earns points for effort, but, eh, still —

see, this is kind of a retarded design strategy

haha i just finished a game that had this goal! i dont think its retarded altho it can be... problematic? idk the best way to describe it but the games i make are way more about ways 2 approach narrative than abt mechanics

weird, i thought planescape was terrific and i thought nwn1 looked and played like shit and had a lame story, never finished it

I thought they were both great examples of different game design philosophy.

I remember, in I think nwn2, it took forever to destroy boxes
my friend and i stopped playing after a couple of hours because of how much that annoyed us

I just finished downloading Fallout 1 and 2
am excited to get home from class so i can play them for the first time

Sheena Easton's myspace doesn't seem to be all that functional, but here's Chris's:

www.myspace.com/SicilianChris

and here's Feargus's

www.myspace.com/the_fudd

Be sure to get the fan patches for FO1 & 2. They help correct a lot of problem.

As great a creative force as Black Isle was, place had some QA issues.

So, if I wanted a next-gen console for rpgs, which one should i get?

DS err, nothin'

haha

kingfish theres a new star ocean coming out for xbox thats supposed to be pretty good. still its pretty much an open qn right now :(

love the FFVII story line

i have yet to see advent children. is it any good?

― kingfish kuribo's shoe (kingfish 2.0), Sunday, January 22, 2006 6:38 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

NO

― adam (adam), Sunday, January 22, 2006 8:21 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yes

― VIDEO STRESS (blastocyst), Sunday, January 22, 2006 11:08 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

FIGHT IT OUT WITH DICKS

― kingfish kuribo's shoe (kingfish 2.0), Monday, January 23, 2006 12:33 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol @ this

FF7 still the best post-nintendo final fantasy game by far, in terms of story, form, and overall aesthetic. I preferred the blocky 3D characters to the inscrutable rendered ones of the later games.

advent children is ok until a ridiculous bossfight out of nowhere that's just to show off all the lame characters from the game

I got this when it came out for PC but never made it very far. I don't think I got to the cross-dressing part, cos this was in the day before the internet (for me) and I had no idea how wacky this game was going to get.

Well I started playing this again, with the intention of going through the whole game, and holy hell is this game amazing! Easily my favorite FF! I genuinely love the graphics and music and all the completely insane Summons and the minigames (basketball is a DAMN fine one-button distraction!) and the dolphin whistles and the chocobo racing and etc. etc. etc. The character design is wonderful and frequently just completely crazy, and I love it. Caith Sith? I love it!

Every time I get a new Summon it's like a Christmas present that takes longer and longer to open, and comes in a larger and larger box. Last one I got had lightning strike the earth, a mountain rising up from nowhere, Zeus appearing on the top of the mountain, shooting lightning at everything ever. The second Summon I got had none less than THE DEVIL appearing and throwing fire at my enemies.

The dated graphics and CGI cutscenes are quite charming in a retro way. They are very minimalist - maybe you will just see a camera pan over some wild post-industrial tower and that's it. The sparse city populations go w the post-apocalyptic feel. The early 3D is weightless and has a kind of puppet/doll look to it, which also makes plenty of sense from an aesthetic point of view. Here is a 20th Century Bestiary, with beings and creatures from myths and legends the world over, rendered as a New Romantic Anime Steampunk Fantasy puppet show.

Also as far as role playing and telling a story, this game does wonders. That bit where you perform CPR, saving the life of that girl, and she teaches you how to whistle to her dolphin friend in order to get the dolphin to jump you to the top of a tower, was pretty great. You actually do feel for these characters. I think the slower pace of these RPGs vs something like GTAV really helps in connecting the player to the story. When you do that CPR minigame, it actually requires a great deal of patience (waiting for the lungs to fill, breathing out, doing this half a dozen times) that a modern QTE would bypass. You've put in your time with this character -- which is the most valuable thing you can offer as a player -- and thus feel good when the next day your character wakes up and hears the news that she is now up and feeling better again.

The planetarium bit, where the guy is explaining souls and life energy or Planet Life or whatever it is, was amazing. Mystical, sort of cyberpunk zen fairy tale. Made me think a little of the Genesis bomb animation from Star Trek II.

I feel like there needs to be a list of all the amazing (and otherwise) things you do in this game besides fight/talk/cutscene. All the little minigames and stuff. There is probably more to do here than in most GTAs. Whistling dolphin jumps. Cross-dressing. Sword fighting while racing motorcycles. Sneaking into an air vent in the toilet. Cracking a safe. Shooting basketball. Racing chocobos. Etc.

i love this game and would play it again if they added cutscene skipping.

Right now I'm fighting in the Gold Saucer battle arena, and they have turned me into a frog and casted "Stone Stare". The makers of Final Fantasy VII probably listened to a lot of T-Rex when they made this.

Have + and - memories about this game, thought about playing it again, re-read the script online, remembered hell

enjoyed this game a lot except for the part where aerith gets resurrected. what the hell kind of bullshit was that, square?

nothing but great memories of playing this

^

played through this a couple of months ago for only the second time, first time in late 90s
played the PSN version which is pretty janky, had to restart several times due to backgrounds or menus glitching out
the disparity between the three sets of character models is pretty jarring nowadays, didn't remember that being a problem 1st time round
also: so many terrible minigames! lots of QTEs too. i hate QTEs.
still had lots of fun with it though. the quantity of different enemies was surprising, so used to recolored models/sprites in modern jrpgs
really loved the Materia leveling system too, weighing up which armor with how many slots and which gems etc
might revisit FF8 soon, all i can remember about that was loving the card game

the terribleness of FF7's minigames is my favorite thing about it

I really prefer the totally frustrating trainwreck minigames to the more polished failures like that water rugby game.

yeh that was rubbish. bet you're all excited at being able to play that in HD soon eh.

The different characters models not really a problem for me. There was always a discrepancy between your character being overhead square and in-battle sideview anyways.

I can't believe how many people knock on the graphics in this. Maybe 3d is just still too new for older stuff to be charming. Maybe this is too early in 3D to look good. Like the graphics in Super Mario Bros. are great pixel art but some old Atari game is just too crude to be appreciated. Still, i love it! I was on a rollercoaster shooting gallery with ghosts and stars and planes and it was like something out of Yellow Submarine.

Yeah, i don't think there are any QTE's. Maybe there was an event or two where you have to push certain buttons to do something you don't normally do, but it's much more involved than 'Quick push A before this message disappears from the screen'!.

nah there's definitely QTEs, i remember one specifically where you have to press X to punch some dude. the PS1 era is hardest to love i think, blocky 3D characters with low res textures smeared over them need a strong art style to be charming these days. the Popeye arms in FF7 did make me lol though.

Oh yeah, and the arm wrestling thing too.

Ok i just went snowboarding. Oh hell yes!

I think my only problem w this game is that it's a bit easy. I lost a few fights early on but every now and then I grind some levels and I'm at the point where I've just beaten Disc 01 and I'm at Level 49 and I can beat big bosses SO EASILY. Maybe i did too much power levelling? I don't know. Seems like I did far less than most (older, 16-bit) RPGs.

49's pretty high lvl for end of disc 1 iirc

also its an insanely easy game and its super mega easy to break the materia system

Yeah turns out the internet says that is way too high and also that FF7 is one of the easiest games in terms of difficulty. At any rate, once I got to the ice caves I quickly found myself back in some challenging battles again. I'll just treat the Summons like cheat codes and only break them out for the big guns.

Looks like this game has GTAV-loads of non-storyline stuff to do. I was looking at a faq and the section on catching/breeding/racing Chocobo's was the size of a Ray Bradbury short story.

Non-storyline stuff is the blessing and the curse of this series IMO. As in the best Ultimas, it's just great having lots of little things to wander into and tinker with. But I threw down FF9 in disgust when I got stuck, checked an FAQ, and in the process discovered dozens of great-sounding side quests that were now inaccessible because the towns they were in had since been blown up or whatever. ''Replay value'' my ass, takes too long to play these things ONCE and I just want to have this rich experience full of memories from the months I spent in Crystanatopia.

FF6 was pretty good on this front IIRC; most of the optional sidequests come AFTER the irreversible story break, and most (not all) of those are fairly well-telegraphed. At the least, you could build up a list of weird shit to double back and investigate before the final dungeon.

I just recently got Cloud back from schizo mental land. Wow going through some dark stuff with Tifa. Kinda wishing I had played through this as a 16-year-old (when it came out) cos it really deals w a lot of big and serious issues and teen angsty stuff in a very intelligent way. There are abandonment issues, characters dealing w feelings of self worthlessness, unrequited crushes, not being able to trust the government, multiple references to being other people's puppets vs. having faith in yourself, etc. I definitely plan on playing this through again after I beat this (maybe not immediately after but still...) and it will be interesting to see if the story holds up. Occasionally I think the game is purposefully breaking the fourth wall, or toying with it. At one point Cait Sith says "There's plenty of stuffed toys like my body around, but there's only one me!" Some mind-bending, Zen stuff coursing through this game.

Reading the plot summary, it looks and is completely ridiculous, but it's not about the plot. It's about HOW the story is told.

It's weird to read people surprised that newcomers enjoy this game, with it's 'dated' graphics, yet you never read anyone say that Super Mario Bros. 3 has dated graphics. Maybe we are still too close to the birth of 3D to be able to see the early stuff as charming. For me, I think it's not only charming but in many cases far superior than it would have been with a million polygons. All these vast, huge landscapes that you run through have a majesty to them that would be lost if they were just a big empty field you see over your character's shoulder. Plus many of the Summons animations are just JAW-DROPPINGLY-OMG-F%$K-YES beautiful. The Neo Bahamut animation is quite possibly the coolest videogame moment ever. The way the enemies look so pitifully small on that piece of land, the way it rises up into the sky and THEN THE SKY PARTS OPEN and it keeps going up and you can see dust and rocks falling off, tumbling back down to earth. Cooler than anything in Super Mario 64, that's for sure.

Pretty much all the criticism I see about this game, I can't take seriously. The shitty walking controls? Yeah I see it as like one of those maps you get at family restaurant where you have to draw your way through a rudimentary map. It's like a little puzzle. Too many cutscenes? Yeah, how much time do you spend in FFII or FFIII just clicking through text boxes? Does that really add a significant amount of gameplay that watching a 30-second FMV has taken away?

Plus this great article, on how pathfinding works as a narrative device:

http://thiscageisworms.com/2012/09/20/in-praise-of-the-worst-design-moment-in-final-fantasy-7/

I would play a remake of this instantly, but I think it's a bit crazy that anyone would want to remake this, it seems like such a perfect combo of time & place re: 3D graphics being a new technology and the pre-rendered backgrounds etc. Feel like Cloud's giant sword was maybe a response to the low resolution, and that this stands for most of the elements of this game that are so beloved.

Also, the Snowboarding and Submarine minigames are pretty damn amazing. Probably better than most actual full-fledged 3d games of the era.

Also, the music is great (I'm playing the 2012 re-release). Maybe it's cos I grew up w the PC version, but having listened to the PSX music on some youtube, I really don't see the big difference.

It's right after I got the sub and I was looking around for the Huge Materia and could not find it anywhere on the map or the screen. So i tried hitting all the buttons to see if i could come up to a menu screen or something and OMG PILOTING A SUB IN 3D UNDER THE OCEAN. Really, this game is so much more influential than just on RPG's, it's kind of ground zero for modern sandbox gaming. Only you get the feeling in most games (eg. Skyrim) that the npcs and accompanying missions are all procedurally generation, whereas here, it feels like every single thing in this giant game was hand-made, hand-painted, and written a haiku about.

love the submarine mini-game. and this revive. :)

Pretty cool that Cloud had a cell phone back in 1997!

A big theme of this game is selective memories too. This game probably influenced Inception just as much as The Matrix.

http://i.imgur.com/lIi949H.gif

How many character models are there? 3? I think the CGI ones are the same as the battle ones but there are definitely some CGI scenes that use the super-deformed lego style models.

At any rate, it's funny that the battle models are the most 'realistic' and yet the battle is the most absurd, biology/physic/religion-breaking batshit part of the game!

have you gotten KOTR yet

It's weird to read people surprised that newcomers enjoy this game, with it's 'dated' graphics, yet you never read anyone say that Super Mario Bros. 3 has dated graphics.

well the appeal of (and advertising campaign for) ff7 when it came out was mostly about a polished level of presentation which hadnt been seen before. smb3 wasnt coming on that 'just give the guys who make cartridges a cigarette and a blindfold' tip

it's kind of ground zero for modern sandbox gaming

lol