[Video Game Wednesday] Final Fantasy VII – The Most Overrated Game of All Time?

Cloud wielding his buster sword.

A friend recently talked me into picking up Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII for my Sony PSP. For those who don’t know, Crisis Core is the prequel to the game for the original Playstation, Final Fantasy VII, which bears the distinction of being one of the first Japanese role-playing game that many gamers ever played. As such, FF VII has achieved a sort of legendary status among gamers as being one of the best games ever made. There are even a significant number of people who know everything about the game – its story, its characters, its places, its goofy moments — without actually having played it.

As it turns out, Crisis Core is pretty good, and I’d say it’s one of the better games I’ve seen on the PSP. But playing through it has reminded me about my mixed feelings towards FF VII, which is a good game, and maybe even a great game, but surely one of the most overrated games of all time.

So why is this game so popular? Simply put, FF VII has some cool characters. The game stars Cloud, a spiky-haired blond guy with a giant sword that’s about as big as he is. He’s accompanied by:

Barrett (a black guy with a gun mounted in his arm where a hand should be)
Tifa (a busty young hand-to-hand fighter who wears a short miniskirt)
Red XIII (a hyena-looking creature that can talk)
Aerith (a girl who wears pink and mainly serves as a plot device)
Vincent (a weird vampirish sort of character who can transform into a monster)
Cid (an inventive engineer who swears gratuitously)
Yuffie (an annoying young ninja girl whom most people hate)
Cait Sith (some… weird… cat thing riding a marshmallow thing whom most people also hate)

The cast of FF VII - Cait Sith, Aerith, Vincent, Yuffie, Red XIII, Cloud, Cid, Tifa, Barrett

As the game progresses, the characters find themselves in a fight against a villain named Sephiroth, a guy who wears a black trenchcoat with no shirt underneath, who sprouts a black angel wing and who fights with a katana that’s at least six feet long. Sephiroth was once a heroic member of the Shin-Ra corporation’s SOLDIER task force, but he went crazy and became a villain four years before the game began. There are also other villains who are part of the Shin-Ra corporation — most notably the young president, Rufus, and the strange group of black-suit-wearing corporate agents known as the Turks.

One of the reasons the main characters (excluding Yuffie and Cait Sith) are so well-liked is because they’ve all got backstories and motivations. They’re not just adventurers looking for treasure; they’re people who live in a corrupt world where they’ve lost things, either to the evil Shin-Ra or to Sephiroth himself. Cloud is probably the most complex of any of the heroes in the Final Fantasy games, since he gets his identity tangled up with the memories of his best friend, Zack, and wanders around most of the game thinking he’s someone he’s really not. He’s also one of the most angsty heroes.

And that’s the other thing people really like about FF VII … the angst. The game starts off with a rebellion against the evil corporation, but it turns into a rush to save the planet. Everything seems very grand and important, despite the fact that the story itself has more questions than it does answers, and leaves most players wondering what happened during some key moments of the game. The sense of confusion, the impending doom, and the angsty characters make this game the reckless teenager of the Final Fantasy series.

That’s where some of my gripes come in. FF VII is the Final Fantasy game that brought the series into 3D, and it’s obvious that it had some growing pains. For one thing, the game’s maps consist of pre-rendered scenes that have some very spotty collision detection. In a recent replay of the game, I found myself getting stuck in pretty often. I also found myself wandering around in places, trying to remember how to get through an area because it wasn’t immediately obvious that I could jump across a chasm or climb a ladder. How frustrating.

FF VII also did this weird thing where it made your characters small and cute during non-combat, but tall and manga-styled during battles. It made for some very odd transitions in the story, and it also gave the game an odd feeling of scale. It was particularly jarring when a small and cute Sephiroth fell out of the air, plunging his sword towards my party, and then a cutscene fired up where a fully-grown Sephiroth killed off one of my characters. (’90s gamers weren’t used to characters being permanently killed off in games, so this only added to the angst.) The whole scene was sort of surreal.

Another annoying thing about the game was the way the camera moved around. FF VII was the first Final Fantasy game to render battles in 3D, and it had a camera that would swivel around and try to make the action of characters standing still and occasionally attacking look more exciting. Unfortunately, the camera often got caught at weird angles, and sometimes behind large bosses like the Demon Door. It wasn’t a deal-breaker, but it was certainly irksome. The overworld camera, too, could work to your disadvantage, swinging away from tiny changes in the land so you wouldn’t notice that you were about to get stuck.

One of the most infamous features of the game was its tedious use of animations for special spells called “summons.” Essentially, you’d call a monster in to help you, and the game would go through a very long animation as the monster appeared and attacked. It was novel the first time, but getting into a battle and having to sit through several summon animations got old, fast. Sadly, there was no way to skip them, but they were almost always necessary to use in major battles.

I've always wondered how Sephiroth manages to hit anything with that ridiculous katana.

The most lauded aspect of the game is probably its story, which begins in the futuristic slums of a city called Midgar and which eventually takes players all over the world of Gaea. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Midgar and its Shin-Ra corporation are Gaea the world by stealing energy from the planet. But at the same time, Sephiroth is running around saying that he’s going to destroy the world because of some strange relationship he has with his mother, a woman in a tank labeled JENOVA. Every character has some secret backstory to be uncovered, and some of them (such as Cloud’s) have had to be explained in more detail through Crisis Core and the original animated video Last Order because they left too many questions unanswered in the game.

Truthfully, I found FF VII’s story to be a confusing mess, a mishmash of a futuristic manga-style story and a fantasy game jammed into a single tale. I can say this because I’d cut my teeth on previous Final Fantasy games and my favorite Square title to date, Chrono Trigger, years before FF VII arrived. Final Fantasy IV and VI both had stronger stories than VII, but they lacked the edgy “cool” factor since they didn’t have buster swords, guys with guns in their arms, and women fighting in black miniskirts. Chrono Trigger did have a lot of cool stuff going for it, including an awesome story, but since it wasn’t a Final Fantasy game, it never quite achieved the popularity it deserved.

The fact that FF VII has had two prequel games (Crisis Core and Before Crisis), a prequel OAV (Last Order), a sequel CG film (Advent Children) and a quasi-sequel game (Dirge of Cerberus) just to flesh out the story of the core game shows what a tedious endeavor FF VII’s story can be. What’s more, I still couldn’t tell you what actually happened in Advent Children since character designer-turned-director Tetsuya Nomura decided it was time to ask even more questions instead of offering some solid answers.

What this all boils down to is this: FF VII, while a good game, is unfairly called “the greatest game of all time” by many people because of nostalgia, an affection for some of the characters, and the fact that it was many peoples’ first experience with the Japanese style of RPGs. It really doesn’t deserve this title, but as the years go by, it’s only going to grow more legendary due to its enormous fanbase. Those of us who feel that Final Fantasy VI and XII were the real best games in the series can go sit in the corner and grumble all we want, because VII is going to be the one that people continue to talk about… even if they’ve never actually played it.

But if you want to learn about some games published by Square-Enix that were superior to FF VII, be sure to check back next Wednesday, because I’ll have a list of five: all of which were RPGs, all of which were incredibly awesome.

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Tags: cloud, fantasy, final, game, midgar, overrated, playstation, psx, sephiroth, video, viii

[Video Game Wednesday] | SeanJJordan | January 14, 2009 12:27 am

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by Sean J. Jordan