Billed as a “cinematic RPG”, it really focused on atmosphere, despite boasting an intriguing battle and equipment-tweaking system. The ideas are there, but the execution seems clumsy, and after an irritating multi-stage final boss battle, I ultimately ended up quitting it. Here’s a little bit of it in action as I thoroughly get my ass busted by a giant enemy crab.

I played through a majority of Final Fantasy VII close to its release, but I only recently did a full playthrough–from the opening cinematic to the post-credits scene. Some aspects of the game have aged piss-poorly in the last fifteen years. For some other aspects, perhaps some of my desires and habits as a game player have changed enough that I can no longer hold the same appreciation for them. But brushing away all of that, is there still a good game to be had in Final Fantasy VII?

Yes. Underneath the then-new full-motion video presentation and pre-rendered backgrounds, Square’s first Final Fantasy entry on a Sony console continues the traditions of the franchise. In some respects, it is most certainly an evolution mechanics presented in its predecessor, Final Fantasy VI–for better and for worse.

Final Fantasy VI slowly mixed in the idea that “anyone can do anything”–that is, while all of the characters technically had jobs, many of the characters: were adept at physical combat; could equip almost any weapon; were effective spellcasters; and could learn any magic spell. In Final Fantasy VII, this is even more full-blown. With the exception of one character, anyone you can recruit to your party packs a pretty heavy punch, and everyone seems to be an effective magic user.

This notion is bolstered by the Materia system. Previous entries in the series required that you either purchased magic from shops, or learned it by some means of leveling up–straight up levels in Final Fantasy IV, or by equipping “Espers” and learning via prolonged exposure to them in Final Fantasy VI. Again, the roots of Final Fantasy VI spread out in VII where characters equip stones called “materia”–each stone granting its bearer with magic spells and special abilities. Only this time, once the materia is equipped, that ability, spell, or set becomes instantly available.

Materia grows in strength as you win battles, just like you do. Materia growth is represented most obviously when a new spell becomes available–for instance, the “Recover” materia starts you off with Cure, then eventually it grants you Cure 2, Regen, and Cure 3 in (very) gradual succession. Other more subtle growth traits include increased effectiveness of the Steal command, or increasing the number of times you can cast a Summon spell in battle. If you equip that same grown materia on some other party member, the new bearer instantly has access to those benefits, whether they be a mature spell set or increased abilities.

On the one hand, I like this mechanic as it encourages the player to try different party combinations without fear of having to level-grind just to have newer party members reach parity with incumbents. It also encourages you to experiment with materia linking. There are certain materia which exist solely to provide some added benefits to your equipment and other materia, such as adding a fire damage to a sword or fire resistance to armor. It’s in this way that the game becomes more instantaneously customizable over past iterations of the series. With no fear of destroying a player’s progress, you’re free to play around with different linked materia combinations.

But one thing I’ve always been fond of in Final Fantasy is the idea of a job. Each character plays a special role, and your challenge is to build their abilities and then play them off of each other in the most effective way possible during the more taxing battles and boss encounters. In Final Fantasy VII, characters almost become nothing more than “shells” for materia. Having almost every single ability in the game–abilities that, in the past, were linked to specific jobs–accessible just by equipping some rock is what drives that sensation home. While you can choose to customize your characters in such a way that each one takes a specific role, in my experience I never felt encouraged to do that by the game. Especially because the number of characters in your party has been reduced to three, as opposed to four in previous games (or a whopping five in Final Fantasy IV), it felt more effective to just have “everyone do everything” instead. By some weird mojo, because I didn’t really care about what my characters had to offer individually in battle, I ended up not caring as much about them in the story, either. They were just “there.”

It’s a matter of preference, of course, and at least the characters aren’t complete ciphers. The most distinguishing trait that your protagonists have, mechanically speaking, are Limit Breaks. Think of them as you would in Super Combos in a fighting game: powerful, unique skills that become available when you’ve taken enough damage in battle. Cloud, the game’s central character, generally learns powerful physical attacks, as does his cohort Barret. Another character presents you with a slot machine to determine the strengh of her attacks, and her growth in power rewards you with extra slots for a maximum of eight. Still another character’s Limit Breaks are almost exclusively of the curative variety.

So, there’s just enough differentiation in Final Fantasy VII’s character abilities to make them worth experimenting with. I just wish that either there was more differentiation, or that the customization of your characters was even more granular (two things that were handled in different ways by each of the two immediate follow-ups on Playstation).

Final Fantasy VII does balance out the fact that you can equip a super-powerful Materia on a never-before-used character by requiring you to put quite a bit of time into growing every stone. Materia’s growth is handled by a rudimentary points-and-level system, just like for character growth, except it’s represented in “AP” (not EXP) and Stars (not levels). Without grinding too much, of the multiple tens of Materia I purchased or found, I only brought maybe one or two Materia to full maturity (maximum amount of stars). Granted, RPGs can be grindy affairs by nature. But with 45 hours of game time, not counting most of the optional quests and boss encounters, and with minimal grinding, I felt that the rewards were a touch too meager.

Perhaps it’s because more time than I would have liked were spent on the odd mini-games that broke up the pacing and focus of the main game, some handled in-engine and some with their own, shoddy engines. The former are silly affairs in which you press a face button when prompted so as to stride along in time with a marching band, or to engage in–wait for it–a bitch-slap contest. Some of those which require their own engine include a deep-sea torpedo battle in a submarine, snowboarding, or racing Chocobos. All of these experiences felt rushed and kludgy, and none of these felt fun at all. Final Fantasy VII’s experience as a whole would have been more focused, and as a result, better without them. But in truth, had they been developed more tightly, perhaps I wouldn’t mind them so much.

My qualms, mechanically, are largely preference-based, and aside from the minigames the actual gameplay holds up. Take away the presentation and it’s Square doing what Square does. Add in the presentation, though, and you have a big reason for why the game reached the critical mass of popularity that it does. But you also have a big reason for why the game appears to age incredibly poorly today.

The visual style is inconsistent. Your characters on the map screens, where you traverse the world and smaller environments, are rendered closer to the “super deformed” aesthetic popular in a lot of Japanese media. In battle, their proportions are decidedly human. In most cinematic cut-scenes, they also look more proportionally human–but in a few of them, particularly the ones that blend from gameplay into full-motion video, they are rendered super-deformed again. The quality and detail that goes into certain characters is also inconsistent between some cut-scenes, even if the same body proportions were used. It’s completely all over the place, and you can really tell that this was the first time Square had ever tackled something like this.

Driving that point home is the localization and characterization of the main players: It smacks of, “We’re on a new platform with a more mature audience–let’s make this a ‘mature’ game!” While the core elements of the backstory and plot are actually quite interesting and enjoyable much of the time, the way it all plays out tends to be marred by the dialogue. Square handled the localization in-house, and boy, does it show. There’s some swearing in there, but one man’s “shit” is another man’s “#(@&$”. There’s some individualization in there, but it boils down to the stereotypical, one-dimensional “angry black dude” and the “foul-mouthed (airship) sailor”. In particular, Square’s representation of the “angry black dude” just smacks of ignorance, with the oddest word choice imaginable–for instance, “Shut up!” becomes “Shu’up!” which is a characterization that even carries over to the cleaned-up translation on PC. Most characters stay one-note, and when sensitivity is introduced, it almost feels too forced. (If I’m being dismissive, I’d say that the character that feels most genuinely developed in his short amount of sidestory is a dog, but I have to admit that he’s a pretty damn cool dog.)

Still, the overarching story manages to shine through, and while it can get a little convoluted, it’s a good unique experience on its own. Yes, the world is in danger, and that’s still a cliche in games at large. But the arc that the main character goes through and the fragmented, confused memories he starts piecing together–starting with events that happened before the game–certainly had me wanting to learn more and more with each new bit of information that came out. You learn everything about him with a decent chunk of game left over, though, and the main antagonist then ceases to be interesting, but intrigue at least carries most of the way through. It’s bolstered all the way through by a classic videogame score–much more so than by visuals–that, while at times also sounds inconsistent from an instrumentation standpoint, sports memorable and well-composed melodies that manage to translate well into a less fantastic, more sci-fi setting. (Note: For all of its warts, Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core really does enrich the story experience in this game. If backstory is a priority, and you think you can stand to play through it, I recommend you do so before playing through Final Fantasy VII.)

It’s common to cite Final Fantasy VII as a favorite Final Fantasy game, favorite game overall, “best” game, or what have you. I don’t feel that way–not by a long shot. I’ve also found a surprising amount of poo-poo’ing of Final Fantasy VII, and–while I loudly pick on nits that I acknowledge are mostly the result of personal preference–I don’t actually think it deserves that treatment either. Taken into the context of its release and what I imagine to be the frame of mind of many gamers at the time, I think it’s easy to see why people appreciate it. Coming from the other end, once you let go of the cynicism–a skill I’m still trying to level-up–there’s a very solid, intriguing role-playing experience there. And for the record, if someone were to homebrew a version of it with 16-bit visuals, throw me a bone with materia growth, and fix the minigames, I might have to consider retracting my GINPA.

Verdict:

In November of 2012, I saw the storyline of Final Fantasy VII from beginning to end for the very first time. That will also assuredly be the very last time I do so.

Despite the inaugural edition of GINPA dealing with Chrono Trigger, and this second edition dealing with perhaps the most revolutionary console RPG (at least in some respects) out there, I don’t hate popular Squaresoft RPG’s–I swear!

I’m finding it difficult to pin down the underlying reasons why I have the feeling that I will never play Final Fantasy VII ever again. Unlike what I experienced with Chrono Trigger, I didn’t 100% this game. I never bred a golden chocobo, I think I only Mastered one or two materia in total (one of them was Fire; the other must have been Restore), and I certainly didn’t come close to scratching any of the Weapons. So it certainly isn’t Final Fantasy VII Fatigue.

Or is it? I know I didn’t 100% the game because *I didn’t want to*. Not because I was in a hurry to finish the game, or because the main story was so gripping that I just _had_ to see what happened next instead of going on a sidequest, or because the rewards didn’t seem worth it (for the most part I know that the rewards are pretty sweet).

The more I think about it, the closer my radar is pointing towards the grind. I know that RPG’s in general are a grind. There’s something about Final Fantasy VII that seems grindier than other RPG’s that I’ve loved and would readily revisit, though. When I found myself at several points in the game too poor to afford new weaponry or materia, I had to grind for gil. When I saw how many AP I’d need just to level up a materia by one star, but felt that I needed the additional spell to proceed past some part of the game, I had to grind for AP. (Oddly enough, I never felt like I had to grind to defeat a particularly powerful boss, but perhaps that was because the gil- and AP-grinding conveniently resulted in EXP-grinding.)

When I found out what it took to breed a golden chocobo? Hoo, boy–I said, “No thank you” to that grinding.

In an odd way, even the mini-games felt like a grind. Probably because I ended up severely disliking them, but I had to sit through them in order to proceed. Learning the button prompts to march in the ceremony at Junon; doing squats; snowboarding; sitting through a chocobo race; taking control of the slap-fest between Tifa and Scarlet (and come on, really?)… these are all things that felt mechanically sub-par, were mandatory, that I had no desire to do, and that completely destroyed any forward momentum I felt from exploring the game world or experiencing the story.

Kind of like grinding, except at least with traditional grinding, you get something out of it. I suppose.

But let’s take this objectively. Is the grinding sensation of Final Fantasy VII really any different from any other game in the series, or RPG’s in general? Probably not. Final Fantasy VI had its own AP grinding. Final Fantasy VIII had the Draw system, which completely redefined what it is to grind. If you wanted to manipulate the Sphere grid the way you wanted to in Final Fantasy X, that could be a grind. Merriam-Webster’s alternate dictionary definition for “Dragon Quest” is “level grind”. (As fate would have it, Dragon Quest IV is most certainly a prime candidate for a GINPA.) And in all fairness to Final Fantasy VII, you could probably beat the main story with no more grinding than it would take to beat any of the other Final Fantasy games–that is to say, more or less a decent amount that never becomes unreasonable.

Perhaps the lack of desire to ever touch, or even smell, Final Fantasy VII again is because while it is a good game, and one I’m glad I finally experienced all the way through (instead of stopping near the end of Disc 2), I waited too long to do so. During the delay, I experienced games which I feel are superior, both within the series and outside of the series; both within the genre and outside of the genre. That the game has aged horribly aesthetically doesn’t particularly help it, but nor does this harm it, so I’m not considering that aspect of it.

But there are other aspects that don’t seem to age well, where older games in the series–and even other games which intentionally bill themselves as “old-school”–hold up just fine. The mishmash of minigames is part of that. They destroy the focus and tightness of the game, but I feel that if they were designed more carefully such that they held up better today, I might not mind them so much. The botched translation is another–it hindered my understanding of certain objectives, or at least, my enjoyment of some of the plot threads. And some of the dungeon design seems uninteresting today–from a structural standpoint, not so much an artistic one.

Meanwhile I find that its direct predecessor, Final Fantasy VI, somehow stays better-playing, better-sounding, better-designed and even better-looking–imagine that. (Some will argue that it’s because VI is one of my favorite games all-time, but I’ll argue that it’s my favorite because of those exact reasons.)And Final Fantasy VIII–for all of its detractors and the heinous nature of the Draw mechanic–still feels like a more tightly-focused, more tactical experience that remains more interesting and forward-thinking. In my eyes, these two titles have aged much better.

I did enjoy my time Final Fantasy VII. I liked enough of the sights, I really enjoyed Midgar, and AP-grinding aside, I did get a kick out of customizing my characters with Materia as a foreshadowing of things to come with VIII’s Junction system. Some part of me really wants to be able to commiserate with my fellow Final Fantasy veterans about the trials and tribulations of beating Emerald and Ruby weapon. Unfortunately, a much bigger part of me doesn’t ever want to do the work that gets me there, nor does it want to re-experience Cloud’s tale ever again.