Hello everyone and once again welcome to this little blog of mine! Recently I had been trying, in vain, to get through Final Fantasy 7 New Threat mod. However, that did not go to plan as my decrepit PC version has more bugs in it than an anteaters stomach. So I thought to myself: "why don't I make an ABC guide for it instead"? I did plan on only covering new games, I mean who needs a guide for a twenty year old game? But I decided to do that anyway.
"Final Fantasy 7 was a tonal shift in both aesthetics and narrative."
This isn't the first time I've replayed Final Fantasy 7 in a while, I did around four years ago and quit after watching Sephiroth's Supernova attack for the fifth time. Silly, really to bow at so close to the end. I had this sort of arrogant attitude of "oh, I've basically finished it anyway!"
I remember replaying it back then, finding the game very dated and somewhat boring. I yawned through battles and bosses alike and groaned when my mage class character couldn't handle a single attack without being wiped out. I relied heavily on overpowered physical attacks like 4x Cut and 100% accurate Deathblows. It's only now after finishing Final Fantasy 7 again that I realised I had been playing it all wrong before. You see, trying to play Final Fantasy 7 like 5, 9 or even 12 doesn't really work. Final Fantasy 7 introduced the world to the materia system, an evolution of the class system it had employed in prior games. In this iteration, the skills, magics and summons that belonged to specific classes could be spread out among all three of your party members. The idea being that you could create a versatile team that comprised all the elements of mages, brawlers and support characters. Final Fantasy 7 punishes inflexible parties ruthlessly.
I am however getting carried away already, this is hardly a structured review at this point so in a moment I shall get off my tangent and start the review proper. But I would like to say that having replayed Final Fantasy 7 again and gone in with the objective that I had this time, actually improved my view of the game and I actually understood what they were trying to do. That doesn't mean that Final Fantasy 7 can carry on boasting it's "best game ever" crown, it used to saunter around in so gleefully. Age still has not been kind to this game but regardless, it is impressive and beautiful in it's own right game.
STORY, PACING AND CHARACTERS:
If you've never played Final Fantasy 7 before you may find some of this review spoilerish, but fear not I won't divulge every detail of this games plot in the following paragraphs.
"This game does a terrific job of showing, not telling"
Final Fantasy 7 was a tonal shift in both aesthetics and narrative. It's story is one the game's strongest points, despite a somewhat shoddy translation. The plot centers around Cloud, a former special forces turned mercenary, whom is hired by a group called AVALANCHE, who strategise terrorist attacks against the Shinra Corperation, that run the mega city Midgar and are sapping the planet of it's energy in exchange for abundant energy to fuel their cities.
Through happenstance and fate Cloud meets the young lady Aeris (or Aerith to purists). Aeris is the last survivor of an ancient race called Cetra and is hunted by Shinra for their experiments. When she decides to help Cloud reunite with AVALANCHE, she gets herself abducted and so Cloud, with the remaining members of AVALANCHE Tifa and Barret, embark on a rescue mission.
From there we learn more about the Cetra and about a man called Sephiroth: Cloud's former superior who went mad years prior to the game when he learned he was part of an experiment involving Jenova; an Alien life form that impacted the planet millennia ago. Sephiroth plans to absorb the Planet's energy by immersing himself in it's life stream, a comparative sea of souls. In doing so, he will ascend to a higher plane of existence, becoming God like. The process however, will destroy the Planet.
It's a dramatic story full of interesting, memorable characters and entangled personal stories. Nothing feels forced, the characters, the world and the situations you become involved in feel organic. I really like that it's not one dimensional, much like Final Fantasy 6 with the Empire and Kefka, so Final Fantasy 7 has Shinra and Sephiroth. This creates interesting dynamics between different groups and creates it's own drama that unfolds with a sense of realism.
It's such a well paced story as well, always urging you onward and never spends too long dwelling on any one situation or weighing you down with hours and hours of dialogue and exposition. This game does a terrific job of showing, not telling and that's a lesson some later Final Fantasy games could have learned from. I'm looking at you Final Fantasy 13...
GAMEPLAY
Gameplay in an RPG boils down to two things; navigating dungeons and fighting battles. The former doesn't play as big a part in Final Fantasy 7 as it does with other JRPG games that get regarded as "dungeon crawlers". Final Fantasy 7 does choose aesthetics over function in this regard, so whilst the dungeon like areas are not particularly challenging to explore, they're short and sweet enough to never outstay their welcome and do branch off enough to give players an incentive to explore and find hidden materia and equipment.
"As you can see, there is an incredible variety of materia to find"
Combat naturally takes centre stage, I've already talked earlier in my review about what you could consider the restrictions in the materia system but I'll get into more detail on that in a bit.
Final Fantasy 7 uses the ATB (active time battle) system like 4, 5 and 6 respectively. Character's have to wait for their ATB bars to fully charge before acting and if you're groaning at the thought of waiting to act, I tell you here and now, you are always doing something in Final Fantasy 7's battles and the micromanagement only gets more frenetic as the game goes on and you obtain more materia. Also, if you're really impatient you can speed up battles in the config menu, which is a nice touch.
Each character can attack or use an item irrespective of any other factor. As for abilities and magics, that's up to you decide. The materia system is designed to unchain your characters from the pre-set classes of games before and allow you to completely customise each party member fully and on the fly between battles.
There is one issue however with the materia system and it's that it's quite a stunted system. Materia trickles to you in a rather slow process and by the time you can truly experiment with some interesting combos, it's only worth while for the end game content.
I've jumped ahead of myself here, it's important to note that materia comes in several colors: magic for spells, red for summons, yellow for additional commands, blue for supportive and purple for independent materia.
You'll accrue green materia far more than the others, but it's the yellow and blue materia that have the most interesting effects in battle. This wouldn't necessarily be an issue, but green materia is bloated with quite a few near useless materia. You have access to several elements but you'll very rarely need to exploit enemy weaknesses to get an edge. Lightning magic is by far the most useful offensive spell, as around fifty percent of your enemies will be robotic and thus very weak against bolt spells.
You can obtain materia that allows you to poison, confuse, slow, sleep and transform enemies, if they're vulnerable to such effects. Which is often, not. Generic enemies are best dealt with swiftly and I personally never found a need to inflict status effects to get me through battles and as for bosses, status immunity and weaknesses are a case by case basis, but as a general rule they're pretty much immune to every status anyway.
Green materia also includes supportive spells such as Restore that allows you to heal your party, Barrier which casts Barrier and MBarrier (now known as protect and shell), Time for the Haste spell and Revive for Life 1 and the far superior Life 2. These materia are pretty much essential to completing the game. Especially MBarrier, as there is no other way to reduce damage from magic attacks other than using this spell.
Summons are very MP intensive but deal considerably greater damage than most magic spells, but I found this to only be a case in mid section of the game. By the time I got near the end of disc two, I was able to deal far greater damage with one spell in particular, for a great deal less MP.
Yellow materia as mentioned before grants additional skills such as Deathblow, Throw, Steal and sense. Unlike spell materia that fall into the same command, each yellow materia is it's own tool in your swiss army knife. You can develop very specific and powerful character setups with clever yellow and blue materia combinations.
Which steadily brings me to blue materia, also known as supportive materia. For instance, a common blue materia is "all", when linked to most green materia it allows that materia to target all enemies or allies. Elemental materia is sensitive to being equipped in your armor or weapon, attaching it to green or red materia enhances your attacks or defense with an elemental affinity such as ice or fire.
Lastly is purple materia, known as independant. Simple speaking, purple materia awards you with passive perks or bonuses such as counter attack, cover allies and straight up stat boosts like HP and MP boost.
"It is a shame however, that a game that offers so much versatility and choice, should squander it against such uninteresting foes."
As you can see, there is an incredible variety of materia to find and equip. The game gives you the basic of tutorials when it comes to materia, so unfortunately if you don't do your homework, you can miss out on really effective combinations or straight up incorrect links that don't give you any benefit. There is no actual feedback when it comes to linking materia, which is a shame and would've been appreciated.
Time to talk about the curse of JRPGs: grinding. I am glad to say that Final Fantasy 7 requires very little of it! In fact you can just blast through areas and not worry about being completely outmatched until the latter part of disc two. The game is incredibly forgiving if you haven't prepared yourself, save points are conveniently located near bosses and it doesn't take a lot of leveling up to even the playing field. The only grind to really talk of is in regards to leveling up materia. The AP (ability points) required to level up spells can be quite staggering. In the game's final dungeon there are a couple of enemies who bestow a bountiful amount of AP on you, which I guess is a last chance to get spells like Restore up to max rank, less you be squashed like a bug against the final boss.
There are weapons with a passive bonus to AP called double growth. There is even a triple growth weapon, but again that's exclusively for the endgame. It can still take quite a while to level up some spells. Especially any of the summoning materia and most of the command materia. Which is a bit ridiculous, specially things like Steal, which levels up into Mug. It take's around 40,000 AP to get, which is obscene when you consider that Mug on it's own isn't anything write home about.
"Limits are the glitz and glam of battles"
It is a shame however, that a game that offers so much versatility and choice, should squander it against such uninteresting foes. From a strategical point of view, mind. Almost all the regular enemies you face through the story are best dealt with, with pure aggression. There is no need for status attacks, elemental weaknesses and resistances play very little roles and enemies themselves rarely act in a manner that gives you something to think about.
The only tactic bosses have is to hit ridiculously hard. The game foregoes interesting mechanics once you leave Cosmo Canyon and instead each boss just deals near one hit KO's on a consistent basis. Your only real concern is how well you can recover those lost HPs or downed allies. Speaking of downed allies, this game has a terrible habit of programming bosses to change their target's to the recently revived team mate. Unless you cue your two party members turns, one to revive and one to heal, expect to see many a pheonix down wasted. It's also why Life 2 is such an important spell to learn as it revives a downed ally with max HP!
I'm slowly coming to close when it comes to talking about Final Fantasy 7's combat, it just goes to show how layered it is and I'm about to talk about the final ability or rather, each characters trump card: Limit Breaks.
When you characters take damage in battle, a small bar will fill up. The more damage you take the greater the charge. When the bar becomes full you can use one of your character's Limit Breaks. There are two benefits to Limit Breaks, one: they're some of the most powerful moves in the game. Two: they interrupt any actions cued up by the enemy or even your own party.
Limits are fancy, powerful and complete game changers in the course of battle. A timely healing wind can save your party from the brink of death! A desperate Climhazard could be the difference between frustration and reloading or a handy Mindblow could stop that pesky boss throwing around powerful spells!
The game is also not stingy when it comes to awarding their use, especially against very powerful foes. In fact limit breaks are a core and perhaps, large portion of the damage you'll generally be dealing to bosses.
Characters, bar one, have four levels of limit breaks with two limits (bar another character) per level. The higher limit level used, the more damage you need to absorb to charge it up, but naturally you'll be able to use even more powerful limit breaks.
They've hit the perfect balance when it comes to limit breaks, they're neither overpowered or game breaking and are not so rare an occurrence that they're unreliable and largely pointless. Limits are the glitz and glam of battles and we've not seen a Final Fantasy game incorporate a similar system as well. Even Final Fantasy X's overdrives pale in comparison, being mere opportunities to deal some extra damage rather that useful tools in one's pocket.
MUSIC AND SOUND EFFECTS
"It sends shivers up my spine"
It may be considered awfully mean to pick on a game that is twenty years old, especially when it comes to it's sound design. Game's these days have nothing short of a philharmonic orchestra at their disposal, but games of the 90's had tighter budgets and smaller studios. So it is delightful that Final Fantasy 7 audibly still stands up. Some may find the sound effects a bit old and synthetic, but I enjoyed the nostalgia of listening to that strange, high pitched "plunk" sound of the gloved hand cursor moving about the screen.
The sound effects that are part of the special effects still sound good with some notable spells like Bolt 3 sounding vicious and crackling. Where spells like earth, ice and fire all sound a little flat, though summons sound very good! You can hear the deeper, complex layers of audio that give them their theatrical and bombastic presence. I still get tingles on my arms when I summon Bahamut, the Wrym King bursting from the skies screeching with fury and majesty before blasting off a Megaflare!
You also cannot, under any circumstance begrudge the sound track. The music here is still as brilliant, beautiful, solemn and jaunty as I remember it twenty years ago. I love tracks such as 'anxious heart', which is quite possibly one of the finest pieces of music I have ever heard in a videogame, period. It's the track that defines Final Fantasy 7 for me. It sends shivers up my spine and sends the hairs on the back of my neck on end. It's absolutely brilliant and stands up so well today.
The battle and boss themes are also a joy, I never tire of either track throughout the entirety of the game. That's a big compliment as well, it's so easy to fluff these tracks and ruin the tempo of battles or just plain old annoy the player. I've heard quite a few battle tracks in JRPGs that had been made with seeming disregard for human ears and can send you absolutely barmy. I've been on the verge of quitting several games just so I don't have to hear that awful music, punctuating every conflict. I will be kind and not name any offenders, but you know who you are and shame on you!
GRAPHICS
"When it comes to designs, this game is near perfect"
Oh it's the one area I do hate writing about when it comes to reviews. Yes, I love a bit of fidelity but no, I don't rate it higher than the three prior topics. But for the sake of wholeness I shall throw my opinion on this aged game.
Twenty years have not been kind to the game that was once considered the best looking thing to have ever been created. The polygon models are very basic, lacking even the simplest of details. They really didn't develop far with the character models which is strange when you look at 8 and 9 where the models are painstakingly detailed. It's black and white, night and day, ying and yang! They made no effort to even cover up joints or smooth out animations. Comparing Cloud's run to Zidane's shows the huge gap in quality between the two.
What doesn't help the horrid polygon models is those beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds! They're still gorgeous to this day, full with tiny details and bursting with charm. It shows how good an idea it was to go with that art style rather than make all the environments in polygons. I can only imagine how flat, bland and ugly that would have made the game look.
When it comes to designs, this game is near perfect. There are a few design choices that are questionable, such as the Ancient City which is a bit ugly to look at. I understand the idea behind the locale but personally, for me it doesn't work that well. I also encountered enemies in a crate that resemble tasers with legs, which is strange but then again you could say oddball enemy designs are a staple of Final Fantasy games. At least they were until Final Fantasy X, anyway.
I personally love the darker, steam punk vibe they have going in Final Fantasy 7. Actually, scrape that, it's not really steampunk. There's a definitive polarisation between Midgar, Junon and well, the rest of the world. A clash of nature against cold steel. Perhaps it felt poignant for the designers at the time, but in 2017 the mesh of old and new is so ingrained and that idea is less shocking to me.
CONCLUSION
I've spent a long time talking about quite an old game and amazingly most of what I've said has been positive! And that's because for a twenty year old game, Final Fantasy 7's high production values shine through. Some dated mechanics and design choices aside, this is game you can enjoy just as much today as you could back in 1997.
If you missed out on Final Fantasy 7 it's available in glorious "HD" on PS3, PS4 and PC! It's a steal these days and I'd recommend going for a stable PC version as there is a great and eclectic range of mods including the New Threat mod which is a definite must play!
If you enjoyed this review then please leave a +1, Follow or comment with some feedback with what like or didn't like. If you agree or disagree, I'm interested to hear your thoughts!
Have a weekend everybody!
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