Final Fantasy VII

System: Playstation
Release Date: 1997
Published By: SCEA
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

The game that launched a thousand Playstations. I firmly believe that had it not been for Final Fantasy VII and the silly furor over it, we would not have Playstation 2s and PSPs. Which is odd, considering the game's not really any damn good.

I mean, it's not really a bad game. But it's not nearly as good as people make it out to be. Not at all as good as its fantastic predecessor. Granted, it beats the living daylights out of Quest 64, which was its competition across consoles, but that's hardly the acid test of a good game. Everything beats Quest 64, for pete's sake. The game does not, however, play terribly well; it's dreadfully easy, to begin with, plus it doesn't give you much variety in terms of characters to use or equipment to give them. All the interest the system can generate is in the materia, and even that isn't all it's cracked up to be, since the end result is that the characters become even more indistinct than they already were.

What I mean is this. Final Fantasy VI contained fourteen characters, all of whom had different strengths, weaknesses, and special abilities. They were somewhat reconfigurable if you allocate magicite correctly, but you'll never turn Strago into a tank or Cyan into a mystical wizard. In Final Fantasy VII, though, the characters are all basically exactly the same. They all have exactly the same abilites and nearly the same stats, except that some of them can do full damage from the back row. If anyone ever comes up with any reason to use any party other than Cloud with a Long Range materia and two of the natural long-rangers, let me know about it. Actually, on second thought, don't bother.

The game also isn't finished. Some two hundred people worked on this thing for three damn years, and they didn't even get around to making high-poly-count models for the NPCs, so we're stuck looking at the stupid placeholder models the whole time through the game. There are missing cinematics. The dialogue reads very poorly, as though it were translated by the good ol' babelfish and then pasted back into the game.

People tell me the story's great. I respond: which one? This game was evidently written by committee, and they couldn't agree on what it would be about so just mashed all the ideas together. The guy who was writing the bit about corporate intrigue should have gotten the job; that storyline - with the Shinra and the Turks - is good. The storyline about Cloud and Sephiroth's mysterious past sucks, and Sephiroth serves no useful purpose in the game. Rufus is villain enough for anybody, and makes sense besides. But there's still another storyline! There's one about how we all have to respect the environment or else the Earth will spit out giant monsters and kill us all. I don't need to comment on that one, I don't think.

I just don't get why people are so excited about this game. Were they just captivated by the intro cinematic? It was good, yes; Square did once upon a time know how to hook you at the start of a game. But as an antidote to that, I present the closing cinematic; if you're going to rip your ending off from a movie, that's fine, but of all movies why The Lion King?

Buy this game from Amazon.com!