🗡️ Gone Are The Dark Clouds That Had Me Blind...
Over the weekend I decided to give Final Fantasy VII another chance. Specifically, I was trying out the demo for the Switch 2 version of Final Fantasy VII Remake: Intergrade, the updated version of the first part of the remake of a now thirty-year-old RPG that still looms enormous in the genre discourse. I'd actually put off starting it until I finished up Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, because I figured that once I started I was just going to want to buy the full game and start playing. So on Saturday I played all the way through the demo, and...
And then I decided to play Octopath Traveler instead.
Yeah, I bounced off of FF7R:I pretty hard. The updated graphics look nice, and the voice acting is solid, but it still didn't work for me. The world of Midgar has been reimagined to look more contemporary, which just makes the main cast stand out, as their character designs have not changed all that much aside from graphical upgrades. When Aerith shows up in the opening cinema, it feels like she got lost trying to find a different game. Also, I don't need to hear Barret calling everyone an asshole constantly throughout the fighting, and I really don't care for the new combat system. The original combat system was pretty great, but for whatever reason they've turned this classic JRPG into a hack-and-slash game. I don't need another waify blond boy hacking and slashing his way through enemies. Did I mention that I just finished Hyrule Warriors?
I also found the combat to be oddly mystifying for what it was. There's a lot of operational complexity in mixing stances and building up to use special attacks, which makes it unsatisfying as both a menu-based scheme and as a hack-and-slash. To top this off, the levels are visually noisy, and when you're running around in physical space it can get difficult to track your location. It's easy to stumble into a fight and then wonder which door you came in so you can resume your progression. There's a map that helps, but only if you're traveling in two dimensions. I spent a few minutes (with a timer counting down!) trying to find the exit that the map indicated I was right next to. It turned out it was a floor up from me.
All this to say, Final Fantasy VII Remake: Intergrade was not my cup of tea.
(Side note: Can we take a moment to acknowledge how truly awful Square Enix are at naming their games. Remake: Intergrade? What even is this? See also Octopath Traveler. I get it, you have eight characters and they each travel down their own path, but come on, that's clunky. See also Triangle Strategy. See also Bravely Default. At least Final Fantasy has a nice vocal aesthetic, although the "finality" of it is abated now that there are roughly a hundred games in the series.)
Anyhoo...
I will confess that I've always felt like FF7 was a little overblown. It's not the best JRPG in the world—it's not even the best Final Fantasy game—but it was nonetheless a huge cultural touchstone. It won numerous awards and is still regarded as one of the most influential video games of all time. It has spawned five spin-off games, three spin-off films, numerous tie-ins with other franchises, and an entire remake trilogy that has been in development for so long that Part 1 had to be remade again to keep up with the new console generation. And Part 3 doesn't even have an official title yet!
I played the original all the way through when it was new-ish, and my overall reaction was... it's fine. It's not bad. Parts of it are quite good. But on the whole, it's fine. It just so happened to hit at just the right time and take advantage of disc-based hardware over cartridge-based. I remember there was a lot of hype well before it came out because there was a playable demo that caused quite a splash. It was very heavily marketed in the West, so it was many people's first JRPG. And it also coincided with a growing interest in Japan—specifically anime—in the broader culture. So it was a perfect storm situation, but it only sorta worked for me.
You see, the thing is, my expectations for the game were shaped by Final Fantasy VI, which is one of my favorite games of all time. So many of my complaints about FF7 are tied directly to that. FF6 came out at the tail end of the 16-bit console generation era, so it was really maxing out what the hardware was capable of, and doing so in a development ecosystem that was highly refined. The basic game engine was the same as that of the original Final Fantasy released way back in 1987. FF7 was not only built around a new game engine, it was being released on the Sony PlayStation, a brand new line of consoles. It was setting the standard for RPGs in the then-nascent 3D gaming era. So it's not really fair to compare.
But I'm going do it anyway. So without further ado, here are the things I don't like about Final Fantasy VII.
First off, and I don't think this gets nearly enough attention, it's ugly. It's an ugly game. The overworld character sprites look like polygonal blobs that were hastily glommed together. And it's really noticeable how ugly they are because the "town" locations are made of pre-rendered backgrounds that are quite detailed. The difference is jarring. And it was inconsistent, too. Characters looked great in the cinematics and the combat sequences. But then you get back to the map and they're ugly, emotionless blobs again. FF6, by comparison, was much lower res, but it was consistent! The same hero sprites were used in towns, on the overworld, and in combat. They looked like they belonged in the world. Enemies got a more painterly treatment in combat, but that's well within the norms for the genre. And, okay, fine, the chocobo sequences were janky as hell, but you hardly ever rode them anyway.
Now, it's tempting to give FF7 a pass because so many first-generation 3D games looked like crap (raise your hand if you played the original Starfox). Moving from 2D to 3D necessarily meant a sacrifice in aesthetic, as more of your resources had to be spent on, well, rendering things in 3D. And yes, Mario and Link looked pretty good in their first 3D outings, but the Nintendo 64 was a beefier machine than the 32-bit Sony PlayStation. That said, it will not get the pass from me, if only because Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy IX both ran on the exact same hardware, and they looked much better.
This next item is related, and it's rather petty, but I don't like the smaller scope. FF6 had a huge cast with 14 playable party members, 11 of whom had rich backstories that tied directly to their gameplay (for the curious, the other three are Gogo, Umaro, and Mog). They could learn any spell. FF7 shrunk the main cast down to nine (although it is a very brief window where you have access to all nine of them) and the party size down to three. I get that this is due to hardware restrictions. Every character has to be designed and animated and kitted out with special abilities and equipment. All of these things add overhead, and your per-character overhead is just a lot higher in a 3D game. And I didn't appreciate it at the time I played it, though I definitely appreciate it now, but the characters are much more specialized. Not everyone can learn every spell. It makes finding the right party balance something you have to be more deliberate about. That aside, most of the characters feel narratively under-developed, except Cloud who is so over-developed his backstory cannot be contained by just one character.
Because the story is nonsense. I'd say it's dumb, but it's mostly just incomprehensible. Who is Cloud? Is he a merc? Is he a childhood friend? Is he secretly Zack? What is Reunion? Who is Jenova? Why is Sephiroth? Who is Sephiroth's father? Why is Sephiroth's father? What are the Weapons and does it actually matter? (Not really.) God, this reads like a Q drop. I played through the game and at the end of it I had no idea what I was meant to take away from it other than "environment good." I had to look it up online afterwards just to make sense of it. Oh, Jenova is a 2000-year-old hostile alien force that killed off a bunch of ancient people. That would be nice to know if it felt like it was thematically tied to anything else going on. Maybe the breadcrumbs were there, but the plot felt busy and unfocused and it never cohered for me.
Whereas the story in FF6 resonated quite deeply. That story is also convoluted, but it was at least thematically coherent and character-driven. It is a game about grief, and the importance of perseverance in the face of unending loss. Most of the heroes have lost someone or something important to them, and few of them ever get it back. Meanwhile, the world is slowly slipping into the clutches of a fascist regime. The heroes make gains by forging new connections, only to have those shattered as well. At the midpoint, the entire world is destroyed and the heroes are splintered. To finish the game, you have to go find your characters that have spread across the world and get them to rejoin you, which frequently means forcing them to confront their grief and accept it. It's a beautiful story. Meanwhile FF7 boils down to a sad dude who stole someone's identity confronting an even sadder dude who decided to destroy the world with a giant meteor.
Which brings me to my hottest of takes: Sephiroth is not a very good villain. He's boring. He looks badass and he carries an appropriately impractical sword, but he's just not that interesting. He kills people and whinges about his mother. When he does interact with Cloud, it's to take away his agency. He's built up as this almighty force, but he mostly just whines. He cannot hold a candle to Kefka, the Emperor's rabid dog who is clearly insane but is kept around because the bad guys find him useful. He then betrays his master, consumes enough magical power to ascend to godhood, and then wrecks the world because it amuses him.
Spicy take, I know.
I should also mention the music. The music in FF7 is good, but the music in FF6 is sublime. Even composer Nobuo Uematsu has said that he stumbled onto something magical with that game. People rave about One-Winged Angel, but Terra's Theme?!
I'm being pretty hostile here, so for the sake of even-handedness, I should note that it also does things well, for sure. For starters, having your main characters be ecoterrorists (and the intro/tutorial/demo being an act of ecoterrorism) is a bold choice, and I admire that. Similarly, killing off one of the main cast members a third of the way through the game is equally bold. I also think the combat system is the finest in the series. It's basically a fresh coat of paint on the system from the previous game, but I really like the expanded use of Limit Breaks. The fact that character designs are no longer tied to flat sprites with uniform dimensions means they got a bit freer with them. I love the additions of Cait Sith and Red XIII, who would not have worked in a 16-bit game. I think the move from cartridges to discs was smart and I like the decision to move from a steampunk aesthetic to a more cyberpunky one as the games moved from 2D to 3D. I appreciate that they standardized the numbering across markets. The cinematics are nice, and there's a cut-scene after the credits that features Red XIII and a few cubs that I found quite moving.
But every time I've gone back to it, I've changed my mind and done something else instead. So, again, it's a good game, I don't begrudge it its success, but I really don't get all the fawning over it.
That's what I think anyway,
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