Most Overrated Games #1
Final Fantasy 7 (PSX/PC, 1997)
I know, I know. You all knew it was coming. Well, why the fuck shouldn’t it be coming? What kind of list of awful, overrated sacred cows would this be if it didn’t top off with the awfulest, overratedest one? And Final Fantasy 7 fits the bill perfectly: it is praised around the internet constantly, to this day, for being the absolute pinnacle of the video game field. And it is thoroughgoing crap.
First, let’s start with the obvious: it looks bad. I mean, really, really bad. Even for a Playstation game it looks bad. I guess Square wasn’t able to master the art of making models out of more than six polygons, and the results are not pretty. The prerendered cutscenes look better — when they actually work. There’s one that is completely broken and won’t load.
Which I guess is maybe fine, since the entire game is prerendered cutscenes anyhow. I mean, the entire game. Did you just get on an elevator? Time for a cutscene of the elevator going up! Did you get on a plane? Time for a cutscene of the propellers spinning! And so on and so on. I know I bitch about cutscenes a lot, but Final Fantasy 7 probably has a greater density of utterly useless cutscenes than any other game ever.
The story is what people really praise about this game, though. And that is because they are stupid. Here it is in capsule form: a mysterious, angst-ridden amnesiac joins a group of eco-terrorists. They blow up some stuff, and a lot of people die. They’re the good guys, though, because they’re Fighting The Man. The evil corporation they’re fighting against tries to have them killed over and over again while they just, like, wander around a bit. Then a crazy dude decides to blow up the whole world because he figures out that he’s an alien (which, by the way, he actually isn’t). Meanwhile, the earth is spitting out giant monsters to murder everybody in revenge for environmental damage caused by heartless corporations. The heroes kill everything, and then everybody dies except lions. The end.
Sound good to you? Of course not. Because it’s awful. And to make matters worse, the translation is nearly incomprehensible; you might suspect that I’m just missing something because it’s so awful, but ha ha at you: I’ve played it on the PC too, with the "corrected" translation, and the story isn’t any better. It’s just a lot easier to figure out why it sucks is all.
So, okay, it looks bad and the story’s stupid. But you know me: I’m happy to forgive trivial faults like those as long as the game’s fun. And I promise you that if Final Fantasy 7 were a fun game, I’d forgive it all the "this guy are sick" it wants to print on my screen. But it isn’t. It plays a lot like any other Final Fantasy game, except you only get three characters at a time. That’s enough, though, because none of them are actually any different from any others; they all have pretty much identical stats (Cloud is like 10% better overall than anybody else), pretty much identical gear, and exactly identical skill sets: Fight, Item, and Defend. So, hey, all the characters are the same, and nobody does anything fun? Awesome!
You wander around the world in pretty much a straight line (at the very very end of the game there’s a tiny amount of optional content, but, except for that, it’s 100% linear), fight repetitive battles, solve really boneheaded pseudo-puzzles, and then play awful minigames like the chocobo races and the stupid tower defense thing. Meanwhile, you’re being interrupted by cutscenes every few minutes.
Why people think this game is good is a mystery to me. It is not. Final Fantasy 6 was better in every conceivable way. My only guess is that they all like it because it’s just one of those things that the idiot gaming press tells us we’re supposed to like. I honestly wonder if most of the people who rave about this game have even played it. I suspect that, if they had, they would maybe reconsider their adoration for it.
Oh, final quick note: if you tell somebody that Final Fantasy 7’s story is garbage, prepare to be rebuffed with some snooty nonsense about how you just don’t understand "Japanese storytelling." Fuck that. It’s garbage, and that’s not a matter of cultural differences. It’s a matter of angst not being nearly as awesome as fucking teenagers think.
