This is the the first Final Fantasy game I ever attempted to play. I had heard so much about the series, and this was overwhelmingly acclaimed as a “must-play” game. Sadly, with years in-between, it took 4 tries for me to complete it.

I think this is a good game. I do. Please keep that in mind as you read this.

Those first 3 attempts actually put me off of the series as a whole for a long time. I thought, “if this is their best, will I even be able to stand the others?” It wasn’t an issue with the genre. I’d played and loved plenty of JRPGs before. It wasn’t an issue with the age of the game. I loved and still love plenty of games from the 90s and early 2000s.

Eventually, I got pulled into Final Fantasy XIV when some of my friends started playing it. It’s now my favorite MMO by far. Since that game is essentially a giant theme park of Final Fantasy references, I figured out that I actually did like Final Fantasy as a series. It made me interested in going back to play all the games it was referencing. That’s what got me started on this full-series retrospective. The whole time, I was looking ahead at FFVII. I knew that this time, I was going to force myself to finish it. I didn’t know if that meant I would finally get to the part where I would fall in love with it, or if it would finally drive me to hate it. Somewhere in the middle, it turns out.

This game has some really good ideas, though not all of those ideas are executed to their full potential. Unfortunately, it had a lot of bad ideas too. Beyond the things that I think were poorly executed or were outright bad decisions, there are some matters of personal taste that made this one harder for me to get into.

Still, there’s a lot of iconic stuff in this game, and I can see why it sticks out so strongly for so many fans. The good ideas that it has are really good. In the future, the bad parts may fade from my memory and all that will be left are the good parts.

I can see why this game is getting the full remake treatment first. Yes, it’s because it’s very popular—but it’s also because the only way to fix the bad parts was to rebuild the game from the ground up. I’m glad the remake series is so successful. I look forward to the trilogy’s full release.

The Review#↑

Visuals#↑

This was a really mixed bag for me.

I find it absolutely baffling that the out-of-combat models made it into the final game. I don’t see these as a product of their time. They aren’t ugly because they’re old. We know this, because the combat models look awesome. If they had used the combat models for everything, it would have been instantly a better game. I’ve seen mods that do this, and it’s such a direct upgrade.

But maybe they needed to use simpler models because the environments were more complex! I really don’t think so. In fact, in combat is usually much more complex. The backgrounds in most of the game are an illusion: a pre-rendered 2D image or sometimes a short, looping FMV. There are some small bits of 3D here and there to help sell the illusion, but very little 3D rendering is actually going on. Additionally, there are usually very few character models on screen, even out of combat. Combats usually have more characters on screen, and are rendered in full 3D environments. Yet, combat gets to use the better 3D models! FFVIII and FFIX would also release very shortly after this, on the same hardware, and would use the same models in both places.

This leads me to think that it was a stylistic choice. This game released right after pixel art games, which all had the same chibi proportions. I think they were used to working in that style, attributing it as an iconic element of the series, and assumed it was what fans wanted. I’m not a fan, though. I think these chibi models look really ugly, and they did twice as much modeling work to make the game look worse. It’s even more awkward when some models are combat-style out of combat, because they didn’t make a chibi model, and make the chibi models look even worse by comparison.

Now that they’ve remade the game in the future, they aren’t switching back and forth to chibi models anymore, are they? I think this shows they decided this was one of those bad ideas they left in the past. It’s not actually critical to the game. It was a misplay.

The rest of the game looks great though. Combat animations are awesome, as are the models. Enemies are super cool looking and frequently terrifying. Summons are more badass than they’ve ever been, with incredibly cool animations that I never minded waiting for. I dedicated a whole character to holding as many summon materia as I could, because they were just so wicked.

The pre-rendered backgrounds are a fantastic trick and really pull the whole game together (with the exception of the character models sticking out like a sore thumb). It’s especially cool when those backgrounds are animated. I got on and off the Junon elevator a few times when I first got there, because it was so cool to see Cloud walking around on top of a movie.

I liked the 3d world map. I honestly had it in fixed view mode most of the time just to make navigation easier, but the world felt so much more real with the third person camera. I often threw it on just to take in the sights and walk around.

I also really appreciated the rendered cutscenes. They helped make the game feel much more cinematic and provided a lot of extra weight to critical moments. Some of them had a scale that reminded me of Neon Genesis Evangelion, in the best way possible.

Overall, I really liked how this looked. There’s a ton to love about how this evolved the Final Fantasy style going forward. I just really wish they had skipped the chibi models. Without them, it would have been the best looking Final Fantasy game so far, in my opinion. With them, I think FFVI beats it.

Audio#↑

It’s a Nobuo Uematsu soundtrack. What more is there to say?

The soundtrack was fantastic. I think overall, the best in the series so far. There are a few standouts in FFVI that I like better than anything in FFVII, like “Dancing Mad”, “Terra’s Theme”, and “Aria di Mezzo Carattere”. If we’re comparing the entire soundtracks though, I think the average quality in FFVII is higher. It’s real close though. That’s just a testament to how fantastic the soundtracks of both of these games are.

I’m listening to the soundtrack as I write this, and Uematsu simply never missed. Every single one of these tracks is extremely solid.

The sound design outside of music was pretty decent too. Spells and attacks all had very satisfying sound effects. I could really feel the power of critical hits through the extra vicious sounds along. Summons were especially good in this regard. There were occasionally some screeches that were just a little too irritating, but those were outliers. Far better than anything else in the series so far.

Story#↑

This might be the most controversial part of my review. I’m sorry.

This writing is a bit all over the place. I’ll break it down into sections, and clearly mark spoilers.

The Excess#↑

Let me start with a very convoluted, contrived analogy. Imagine a wall, covered in gears. One gear is the start of the game, at the bottom of the wall, and another is the end of the game, at the top of the wall. The gears are all different sizes and are scattered without any obvious pattern. Every gear connects to at least one other gear, so when one turns, they all turn. However, only ony line of gears connects the beginning to the end. The others just spin uselessly, needlessly adding weight and friction to the system.

Okay, let me try again: This story is a maze, but it forces you to go down every incorrect path first, and then abandons all those dead ends once you complete the correct path.

That’s this story. Let me explain.

There are so many ideas thrown into this world and story that are superfluous. You stumble onto them because they are part of the world and the story makes sure you experience them, but they don’t actually serve the story directly. Some of these ideas are just setpieces that the plot moves briskly past, but that you’re forced to spend time in without really accomplishing anything. Some are spun off from the ideas of the main story without contributing anything back to it. Some feel like random things the devs thought of and included for no other reason than they thought it was a cool idea. Sometimes these things are contrived entirely for gameplay reasons, and make the whole world feel a little cheaper.

What’s extra funny is that some of these elements have become absolute icons of the series. The Gold Saucer, for example, is a big deal. I wouldn’t remove it from the series. However, in the context of this game, it drags out several sections of the story that were already stretched so thin they were on the verge of tearing apart. Even the famous date pales in comparison to what FFVI accomplished along similar lines. The Weapons also drag the story out and needlessly complicate it, even if they did lead to some extremely badass scenes. The part where I gave up on this game several times was during the early wild goose chase, leading you from location to location, chasing vague leads without getting any closer . Absolutely zero plot happened in that section. It’s pure padding. I loathed it.

It’s frustrating being baited time and time again by this writing.

The Heroes#↑

I think this party was just a little too large, even ignoring the optional characters (and actually, I loved the optional characters). It very frequently felt like these characters weren’t part of my party because of the story, but rather that I was experiencing the stories of these characters because they happened to be in my party.

It felt like the main plot was designed first. Then the party was designed. Then stories were written for each of the party members. Then those stories were tied into the main plot. Except they weren’t really part of the main plot. It’s more like the main plot happened to take you near a location relevant to each of them, and then you were taken on a diversion from the plot to go experience a completely different story. More baffling, some of the characters with more plot relevance had their stories hidden away in secret areas with steps I had to look up guides for.

Those stories were very touching, though. I enjoyed them all.

It just really hurt the pacing to keep getting sidetracked. It would have been nice if they were optional, or able to be pursued at my own pace, or almost anything other than how they were included.

These forced sidequests didn’t really feel like they had any impact on the main story, because they were forced. In FFVI, I felt like I really cared for all of the characters. So I went out, I did all the quests, and when I had moments of full support from the cast, it stirred some real emotions in me. These characters who were just along for the ride, benched for most of the game, sticking with Cloud because they had seemingly nothing better to do that day—really didn’t do much for me. Hell, even FFIII and FFIV accomplished this feeling of unity better.

There are exceptions, of course. Some characters were way more plot relevant and emotionally impactful during the main story than others. No spoilers on who. I think the game would have been better if they were the only party members. The party didn’t need to be this big. Those few characters would have been more than enough. Honestly, one of the reasons I think FFIV’s story impacted me so much was because of how its party worked. It’s a shame to see the series take a step back in this regard after the last 4 games before it all had better party systems and writing.

Individually, and completely separated from the context of the story, I did really like the party. They had fun personalities, interesting stories, and cool designs (Especially Yuffie, she’s literally the best ever). The only characters I didn’t love were Cait Sith and Red XIII. I guess I just found it harder to connect to their more cartoonish fantasy designs.

The Villain#↑

Time for the one-winged elephant in the room.

Sephiroth is almost as iconic as the entirety of the Final Fantasy series. His design is fantastic. Probably the best single character design in the series so far. Confidence pours out of him like a flood, and he instantly dominates any scene he’s in. He’s got several incredible themes. Even his name is memorable and fun to say. What’s not to like?

Unfortunately, I found him to be a somewhat boring villain—but hold on! Put the pitchforks away!

I don’t think Sephiroth ever was the true villain of FFVII. He’s merely a mirror. I’ll explain more below, in spoiler blocks. For now, I’ll just say I think that’s actually a good thing. Sephiroth serves his purpose perfectly. It’s not his or the writers’ fault that his design goes so hard that he overshadowed the rest of the game in the public conscious.

General notes on Sephiroth:

With most of his time spent as a villain, Sephiroth is written fairly weakly. He’s a big bad, absolutely mad guy. He has gone completely insane, and is driven entirely by hate. That hate starts as a seed of injustice, and he’s fairly understandable at that point. Definitely a villain, for how strong his hate burned and how much pain he was willing to cause to others because of it, but at least you can see the connection from his history to his hate. Very quickly, however, that hate seems to get taken over by Jenova’s will. This too, makes some sense. Sephiroth is either killed and made a part of Jenova, or merges with Jenova while on the verge of death. It isn’t perfectly clear. It makes a lot of sense that Sephiroth would change greatly from this. However, it makes Sephiroth himself a lot less understandable, which is intentional as he becomes more alien, but it makes him harder to work with as a villain. He essentially becomes a sentient natural disaster (unnatural disaster), with goals beyond our understanding. This is interesting from a horror standpoint, but I feel like the game didn’t have enough time to explore those ideas to their full potential. Hopefully the remake series does more with this. The result in the original FFVII, whatever the intention, is a fairly boring “motivated by pure, senseless evil” villain.

Compare that to the masterpiece that is Kefka, and it’s a hard sell. Especially only one game later.

On his true role in the story, and the real antagonist:

This is a story about mental health.

Sure. You save the world. There’s a great and terrible danger, and Cloud is the hero that stops it, along with his closest allies. But that’s not what the game is really about. You know what I mean?

Sephiroth is a mirror of cloud. Sephiroth was always somebody, but he never really knew who he was. Upon discovering the truth, he is filled with hate that burns so bright he becomes the focal point of the end of the world. He lets his demons dominate him, and he in turn becomes a dominating demon. Time and time again, he torments Cloud. I think he was trying to spark the same fire inside Cloud that burns in himself. He was trying to justify himself by showing that anyone would do the same, given the circumstances.

Meanwhile, Cloud was nobody, who desperately wanted to be somebody. He hid behind a mask that he didn’t even know he was wearing, even though it didn’t fit right. Where Sephiroth radiated confidence, Cloud was steeped in insecurity. He brushed off any offer of help. He sought to prove his strength on his own. He was distant, and kept his emotions buried. He took up Zack’s story, at the cost of his own. He was experimented on, and parts of that story ultimately came true. Cloud did get the strength of a SOLDIER, even if he was a “failed” Sephiroth clone. This caused him pain, time and time again. This reality that Cloud wished for proved to be a debt, cashed in by Sephiroth as he took control of Cloud’s actions and caused him to do terrible things. Cloud was not only causing pain to himself, but to those around him. This was true even emotionally, as Tifa knew something was wrong even without the full picture. It was only when Cloud accepted himself for who he truly was, only when he embraced his emotions and let others in, that he finally gained the strength to save the world.

The main stakes parallel this in interesting ways. Jenova seeks to use the planet’s lifestream for hateful purposes, but the planet merely wants to heal and chooses to protect humanity. Ultimately, that healing, spurred on by the voices of the many dead souls floating in the lifestream, won the day.

So, Sephiroth was not the true antagonist at all. He was merely an analogy for mental anguish.

The World#↑

Outside of the excess of ideas that overcrowded it, I really loved the base concepts of the world.

I’m a huge fan of both dieselpunk and fantasy, and they mix together super well here. It’s an especially relevant mix with the ecological disaster themes that run through the story. There’s a really interesting tension between the towering structures of industry and the soft magic of nature. Throw in the third element, Jenova and the tension ramps up even further. Any one element dedicating resources to dominating another means the third will swoop into the newly formed void.

I also loved how much Neon Genesis Evangelion influence I could feel. The Weapons are absolutely Evangelion-coded, and I could almost hear Decisive Battle playing during some of the cutscenes involving them. Shinra powering up the Sister Ray to pierce through th Weapon and hit the dome far beyond, all while the Weapon’s attacks rained down on Shinra HQ and killed the president is a scene straight out of Eva. Shinra also seems very much inspired by NERV. Especially with how many characters have tragic familial ties to Shinra employees, including family members and loved ones being the subjects of experiments. There are even a few direct Eva references in there.

This world also probably has the best sense of history in the series so far. FFVI comes pretty close, but literally every town in this game fits into a sprawling history that’s all connected, and you can really feel it. You can tell that something happened here. You can look into who, what, and why. You can find other places connected to that history. It’s impressive that they pulled it off in such a short development time. It’s likely that I notice this more because there’s so much supporting material for FFVII that explores that history, but that leads us to a chicken-and-egg situation: Is there a ton of supporting material because the lore potential was there for it, or does the lore exist because the game was popular enough to get more writing resources? I think, from playing, it feels more like the former.

Gameplay#↑

Combat was really solid. Not quite the best in the series so far (I think FFV still takes the lead), but this was very good.

Materia is an interesting system. There are some things I liked, and some I disliked.

I’ll start with what I disliked. Materia has the same problem that magicite had in FFVI, except it was even worse this time. With such a large cast of characters, I hoped I could get some build variety going across them. Instead, the characters were just containers for Materia. Barely any combat abilities or even stats come from the characters. I could turn anyone into a mage. I could turn anyone into a tank. I could build anyone around attacks or counterattacks. No investment I put into any character mattered, because I could transfer their entire build over to another character in moments. I was already having trouble attaching to some of the characters due to their treatment in the story—this was the nail in the coffin, making it virtually impossible for me to get attached to almost any of them. I cared more about my materia than my characters. That’s a failure of the design, in my opinion.

You can also make anyone into anything in FFV, which has my favorite combat and progression mechanics so far. However, the progression is local to each character. I can’t simply transfer job levels from one character to another like I can with materia. If carrying materia slowly permanently learned abilities on the characters and altered their stats, it would be an improvement. Well, it would be essentially the FFVI system, which is also flawed, but still an improvement.

However, the materia linking system really made it shine. Some equipment has more slots. Some has more links. Some has more raw stats, but few slots. They managed to fit quite a lot of interesting gear variation into a very simple and easy to understand system. That’s elegant game design right there. Some of the support materia was also super satisfying to build around. It’s so cool that you can trigger abilities off of things like taking damage. It’s awesome that you can turn single target spells into AoEs. It feels like cheating to cram two abilities into a single turn. Yet, the game never felt trivialized, no matter how hard I felt like I was optimizing my setups. It also never felt insurmountable. As long as I didn’t get too many levels, the game maintained a satisfying level of difficulty. That’s a real feat with how flexible the build system is.

Speaking of progression—the only real character-specific things were limit breaks, and I found that progression disappointing too. They’re just poorly designed and don’t entirely fit into the system. For most characters in the game, their most powerful limit break is one of the lower level options. The other characters avoid this problem by having limit breaks so bad that the characters almost aren’t worth using at all. It feels like these limit breaks were designed by animations first, and then somebody went through later and assigned values based on how hard the animations looked like they hit. There’s a damage cap in the game. By the time you unlock the “super huge single hits”, you’re severely bottlenecked by that damage cap. It doesn’t matter if the limit break would have done 50k damage, 10k is the cap for a single hit. Sorry. This means that all multi-hit limit breaks are inherently better. There are only a few max level limit breaks that take advantage of this.

Additionally, they’re just a pain to unlock. They progress based on a system never explained in the game that’s actually split into two completely invisible progression tracks that reset each other. The conditions are also hopelessly complex, thanks to enemy spawn RNG, and there are multiple theories online that all seem to only be partially correct. Your only option to unlock them is to either hope to stumble into them randomly, or to do tons of mindless grinding. I completed all combat-related side content in the game, and most of the non-combat side content too. I got lost in the world map for hours, triggering hundreds of extra random encounters on top of what is necessary to beat the game. I unlocked all limit breaks on only a single character. That character’s best limit break wasn’t even their final unlock, so I barely used it.

Additionally, you must use your limit breaks a lot to level them. You must take significant damage to trigger a limit break. You must grind if you want to get limit breaks. However, as you grind, you’re earning xp and leveling up. This makes you take less proportional damage, charging the limit breaks slower. There are also a ton of options to mitigate or prevent damage. Killing enemies faster also means you take less damage. Essentially, playing the game well in any way or even happening to reach too high of a level severely hinders your ability to progress your limit breaks.

I also hope you didn’t want to level your support characters’ limit breaks, because they need tons of kills as part of the requirements.

I mentioned getting lost in the map. Honestly? Trapped feels like a more correct term. It’s probably the single most player-hostile world map I’ve ever seen in a JRPG. It’s a maze specifically engineered to trick the player into going down dead ends at every opportunity. Trying to head to your destination, just around those mountains over there? Sorry, there’s a 10 foot gap right next to the destination on what should be the shortest path. Time to go all the way back, then circumnavigate the entire world to approach from the other side. Oops! Sorry you actually need a specific vehicle to take that route. Time to go back across three continents to get that vehicle. Oh no! That vehicle can’t take the route you took to get in it back to your destination. It’s gotta take a longer route. Gotta also pull that vehicle into a town, so you can run across 20 different loads screens inside that town to get to the place where you can take a boat across the ocean. Finally there? Cool. Next destination is across the map again. Have fun. Oh, in case you were moving too quickly, have random encounters every 10 feet.

That frustration was amplified by most of this being a problem during the slowest, least interesting part of the story. I was already frustrated with the story wasting my time with constant red-herrings. The map pulling constant tricks on me was just too much. I lost the will to play for a month during this section.

The minigames were neat. They sometimes felt a little long (I feel like snowboarding could have been literally 1/3 the length it was). I was also annoyed when forced into minigames that I didn’t like, but that’s common in plenty of RPGs. I got tired of the Fort Condor minigame and started throwing them to challenge the boss instead, but I enjoyed it the first few times I played it. The good minigames were really good. The motorcycle chase was peak gaming, and absolutely insane for a single-time event in a PS1 RPG. The average quality and sheer number of minigames were really impressive compared to earlier entries.

Final Thoughts#↑

Rating: 8/10
Playtime: 34 hours

I’m really glad Square Enix took the opportunity to experiment with this game. They came up with a lot of cool ideas that clearly evolved the series and have left a lasting impact on it. Not everything was a hit, but there were more hits than misses. This is one of the most iconic games in the series for a reason.

I’m glad I played it. There were times I dragged on. It took me a month to get through one of the slowest sections in the middle of the game. However, the beginning and end are both fantastic, and the high points more than make up for the lows points.

I don’t necessarily recommend playing this game, but I recommend experiencing it. Jump onto the remake train instead.