FINAL FANTASY VII (NO STARS)
a review of
final fantasy vii
a videogame by evil men
published by inhuman monsters
for the sony playstation and windows 95
text by james edwards
score: zero (out of four)
Every now and again a game impacts the industry with truly seismic effect: a game which doesn’t so much draw but blast a line in the sand. These games are true benchmarks, the means by which we measure the history of this little cottage industry we’ve all taken to our hearts. Usually, it’s merely enough to ask that the games themselves be good; while they inspired a an of insipid, hateful clones it’s hard to hold anything against Mario, Sonic, Doom or Tetris. Games like this are wonderful, and it is desirable that we have them. Sometimes a game will come along and set good things in motion: Resident Evil 4 was acknowledged as an influence on Gears of War, and in turn it seems like everyone in the dev community and their mother can’t stop talking about how great Gears of War is. Well done, Resident Evil 4. You are a great game.
Sometimes we get little flakes of mana that inspire dreck and sometimes we’re even blessed with trends of positive evolution. Sometimes. Then again sometimes a game will scream into the earth like a great meteor of fossilised shit, wiping out everything in its’ path and ejecting putrid effluence high into jet stream. An extinction level event of gamedom, a thing of pure corrupt hate, an instrument of cultural demolition and pole-flipping destruction. Welcome to Final Fantasy VII.
Japanese RPGs, a magazine feature once informed me, are like the Madden licence of the rising sun: year in, year out the same people – who may or may not be inclined to dwell in subterranean storage areas of their parental home – will line up to buy the same kinds of game – bishies with massive swords and inevitable memory loss crusading against random encounters, evil empires, and probably some kind of evil god. These games can take upwards of 40 hours to complete.
Why do they play them? Is it for the immature, sickly narratives? Is it for the dismembered “strategy” gameplay of the random encounter? Is it because they’re working up some immensely pornographic fan comic based around the female leads and the most tentacle-endowed sub-boss? Is it because the joyless grinding of larger and larger numbers to make bigger and bigger damage numbers appear above their enemies provides an utterly false sense of achievement, massaging the same part of the brain that drives a rat to press on a feeder bar for a snack treat? Ding ding ding!
Final Fantasy VII represents the day this noxious genre was fired into the heart of Europe, like a rotting lump of cattle fired into a besieged medieval stronghold.
Final Fantasy VI was good, as far as these things go. It’s a nice capsule of how best to make the SNES do nice graphic effects, it had a daringly large cast of likable characters and a storybook plot that was agreeable enough to push you to the very end of the game. The same poisonous labor-sim lay at its’ core, but it had care and charm enough to make you feel like 50+ hours were a permissible sacrifice for the rewards it offered. I’m not sure what went wrong.
Final Fantasy VII is a textbook on how to make PSOne games look like unwashed arse ring, with a wilted cast of anime stereotype fucks gibbering senselessly through a deranged plot cobbled together from Evangelion, Captain Planet and the fan fiction sections of Usenet. Music is rendered via a MIDI track that sounds like a three year old jamming out with the preset fills on a Casio keyboard. The characters – the concept art for same having been downgraded from the breathtaking fantasies Yoshitaka Amano of to the Dragon Ball Z -colouring-book thrash of Tetsuya Nomura. All stabs at artistic direction, whimsy and innovation in design have been stripped away and replaced with an insipid mash of saturday morning cartoon filth. Characters are rendered as jerky, inconsistent gonks with the expression and appeal of drying shit.
Here’s the plot of Final Fantasy VII: In the part of the world they stole from Bladerunner all love and goodness is being kept in darkness and filth by the evil corporation they stole from absolutely everything, ever. Worse, they’re stealing the life force of the planet using the power of insultingly stupid pseudoscience. Now only a black man who says fuck because that’s how the designers conceptualise black men and his band of elephantiasis ravaged eco-warriors can restore justice and honor. The main character is a loathsome emoling with a stupid sword and stupider hair. He is torn between his childhood friend Tits and his newfound love, Aeris Dies. Later there are aliens and shit and one of the bad guys actively tries to force a bestial coupling between Aeris Dies and a dog-thing. Aeris Dies, but Emo Swordhair finds love and support in the arms of Tits. Black man says “damn fuck shit” a lot because apparently the scenario staff had forgotten the terrible lessons of Tom Sawyer already. This is the plot, and if you want to experience it in all of it’s horrifically ray-traced glory you will be required to spunk away scores of hours the Reaper will never return. There are glorious books, amazing films, empty pads to be filled with imagination and excitement. There are videogames that will give you satisfaction and meaningful choices in return for a relatively slender portion of your ever-shrinking life force. Why would anyone want to endure this insane, hateful snare?
I don’t know. I’ve thought about it and I still can’t work it out. But people embraced the snare. Millions of them. It changed the face of gaming, giving the Saturn the crippling body blow that would slowly kill Sega over four painful years, knocked the N64 into semi-irrelevance and infected all around it with a desire for cutscenes, incoherence and made obsessive compulsive disorder a market niche. People love Final Fantasy VII. They loved it so much the Square brood queen queefed out a suite of spinoffs a decade later, expanding the festering expanded universe to utterly needless degrees. People bond over this game. They form bands to recreate the midi blip blop bloop with gusto, aplomb and acne. When it is attacked, they fall back to protect the queen and her sweet, sweet honey. A buzzing hive, distorting our culture and debasing our standards. Drones vote this game into “best ever lists”, or make throw away comments about how it is “clearly the best Final Fantasy ever!”. The epic Wikipedia article is longer than that of World War II, Bauhaus and Ghandi. The hive make it so.
The man who made this game criticised Wii Sports for having characters “like dolls”. Someday I will piss into him for that, provided the doppler effect created by hypocrisy traveling at near-relativistic speeds does not travel back in time and negate his own birth.
Sometimes I feel like I’m the only man alive on Earth, and the Final Fantasy VII body snatchers are everyone else. A different species, with totally sweet Materia slots where heart and soul should be. Please, if anyone is left out there, get in touch before it’s too late. We can get away, go and live on an island somewhere. Raise our kids good and strong, with reasonable sized swords and normal hair. Tell the world. Tell the world I am aliv-
- james edwards
April 11th, 2007 at 613
Posting to say I disagree pretty strongly with this review!!
I will counter it with a review of my own, or something!
April 11th, 2007 at 615
oh god tim they got you too
April 11th, 2007 at 615
Spoiler: Aeris dies and the Zack plot makes no sense to anyone not on prescription painkillers.
April 11th, 2007 at 709
I disagree too, but I’m posting to say that the invective made me laugh out loud. Especially the thing about the characters looking like dolls.
April 11th, 2007 at 728
Didn’t you review FF7 already, 108? And FFDog it, too?
April 11th, 2007 at 742
This review is finely crafted to be met with opposition. Final Fantasy VII fans are a crazy bunch, but I don’t see how they’re even relevant 10 years later and 5 sequels later. I don’t even agree with the review because in 1997 I thought Final Fantasy VII was an awesome bit of gaming. Sure looking back now it’s easy to say it sucks but at the time it pretty much wrote the book for cinematic RPGs on a console. Hello…. multi-million dollar budget, bwahaha. In all seriousness though its not that bad a game. Also Cloud’s sword looks familiar….oh right the Dragon Slayer from Berserk.
April 11th, 2007 at 758
Yeah, i reviewed FFVII before. I gave it four stars! I like it because it’s just balls-out and nuts. I like that it has a story that at least tries to be like a film — it plays with flashbacks and identity and psycho-drama, which other RPGs had never dared to do. And, most importantly, they never tried to do it afterward. They just figured that the hair and the body-length blades were responsible for the game’s undulating fanbase. When really it was the . . . the nod of respect? I guess?
And then FFVIII was High School: IN SPACE!!!!!!1!!! and it all just fell to shit.
I still like FFVIII, though.
Also, yes, Gattsu, James wants as many people to oppose him as possible.
SPOILER: That’s perhaps the chief goal of this site, to invite opposition and provoke deep, fun conversation in these comments pages.
April 11th, 2007 at 808
James, I love you, dude. I never got FF7 at all, but oh well. Still, it would be nice to see you write a review of a game you love.
I can respect the ridiculousness of FF8, though I don’t think I will ever play it.
Come to think of it, the first FF is the only one I ever beat. Hm.
April 11th, 2007 at 811
FF8 is tagged as being the poor cousin, but I found it had twice that nod of respect. The ending just played with everything you’d been through… oh you don’t care about the romance plot yet? Really? Well sorry but BLOARGH all over your need for coherent enemies. It had depth and class and beauty and dared to bloody dream.
April 11th, 2007 at 815
Excellent, 108. I agree. Sometimes I think the only cool thing FFVIII did was add motion capture to the cutscenes. But I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t enough for me to complete the game.
Sad I know.
April 11th, 2007 at 823
I agree with this review.
April 11th, 2007 at 827
I liked the setting of FFVIII, I dug that there was some degree of fleshed out society, the concept was brilliant but a bit mundane which I sort of liked and the art direction was great. I’ll still probably never finish it, but it tried.
The draw system should have been kept on, that was a great idea.
April 11th, 2007 at 835
ff7 hate = good
jRPG hate = bad
I mean, come on, Vagrant Story alone makes the genre worthy of existence.
April 11th, 2007 at 908
Oh…it feels so good to know I’m not the only one. Though, despite my strong dislike of FFVII, I will give it points for one thing. It had possibly the dumbest villain motivation I’ve ever seen in a game. Poor lil’ Sephiroth the Super-Goth is basically just pissy because his Mommy is in a jar. Oh-ho….it’s still so funny, it hurts. Thanks, FFVII!
April 11th, 2007 at 912
Thank god, James. It’s good to know I’m not the only one.
Though, despite my dislike of FFVII, I have to give it points for having the worst villain motivation I’ve seen in a game. Poor lil’ Sephiroth the Super-Goth finds out his Mommy is in a jar…world destroying temper tantrum ensues. Oh-ho…it’s so funny, it hurts…even 10 yrs later.
Thanks, FFVII!
April 11th, 2007 at 940
I’d kind of like to see a fresh review of this game. Something from someone who has no idea what a “bishi” is and just wonders why Sephiroth seems so young yet has such white hair (am I making the correct association here?). If you didn’t know that this game was riding on a cresting wave of anime wierdness, you might be amused by the idea of a corporate executive that infiltrates a terrorist organization in the guise of a radio-controled cat riding a teddybear. Then again, you might find it an insult to your intelligence.
Personally, if 1 star is average, I’d give it a 2. It’s certainly a step backward from FFVI. Whereas FFVI delt with themes as human as how people comfort each other in the face of disaster, the best FFVII seems to be able to muster is that we all need a reason to fight. Well, when a magical meteor is threatening all life on the planet, that reason could be as simple as “I like cake.” I just can’t relate, you know?
I’m probably opening myself up to ridicule with this, but Final Fantasy VII is a transition game. It doesn’t really know what it wants to be: the mature, sophisticated evolution of FFVI that we all hoped for, or FFVIII (which is, completely by accident, the greatest jrpg ever made).
Damn, though, I don’t know if I could expend that much vitriol talking about George Bush. Are you folks sure this is the direction you want your site to go in?
April 11th, 2007 at 1009
man, resident evil 4 is so much better than gears of war.
that was the most irritating part of this review!
April 11th, 2007 at 1018
“man, resident evil 4 is so much better than gears of war.”
I haven’t played GoW but I love resident evil 4. It was more that everyone seems to have had to try and live up to that kind of standard, which is a good thing. I’m not sure how GoW could be better than Resident Evil 4 for a few reasons but I’d give it a fair shot.
And hey thanks dmauro!
April 11th, 2007 at 1020
the game deserves at least one star for its midgar segment – if not two!
the rest – well. dragon quest with scrap metal.
April 11th, 2007 at 1029
The first disc of FFVII is pretty up there on my list of top games ever made. The game before leaving Midgar has drive, clarity, and surprises. It trys to make some points about the way of life, in a cheesy post apocalyptic sci-fi movie kind of way way.
Midgar has a mythology to it and the parts seem to work together to make the player interested in the oucome of the over arcing story. All the elements from the Don, to Shinra, to the broken and frogotten train graveyard take part in a cohesive world that unfolds as the story progresses.
Then you put in Disc 2 and FFVII shits in your brain.
April 11th, 2007 at 1035
Resident Evil 4 is better than Gears of War???
Maybe???
I don’t know, though. I kind of like Gears of War better. More straightforward (if that’s possible — well, yes, it is: no shop, et cetera). Enthralling as hell to play with a friend online.
That’s not what this review is about, though.
April 11th, 2007 at 1049
The shop is a big part of RE4 for me. Makes it feel like some classic NES game that never was, just all grown up.
April 11th, 2007 at 1139
Yeah, count me as liking RE4 better than Gears of War.
They’re both pretty fuckin’ good though!
Also this review felt very good to read.
I’m not sure if I agree with it given that I haven’t played FFVII for like… ages. Final Fantasy VIII, however, is great, though almost entirely by accident.
April 11th, 2007 at 1143
i have never played vii. that seems reason enough to continue to not play it. altho i might jump allover a backported/downgraded gba version with vi gui.
the best part about shopping in re4 is dealing with the constrained space. diablotetris style.
i have not yet played gears online successfully. i only seem to be able to play with idiots. or i am an idiot. probably both.
April 11th, 2007 at 1144
Yeah, this was a pretty spectacularly fun read – personally, I think every Final Fantasy up until X (though 108 keeps defending it for some reason) was totally playable based on VERVE and APLOMB alone, although, yeah, I was in middle school and that was then.
April 11th, 2007 at 1343
I actually think disc 2 is the strongest part of the game. It’s where things calm down and get strange.
April 11th, 2007 at 1419
All of your heroes
Are whores
April 11th, 2007 at 1423
FF7-fandom only looks ubiquitous within certain communities. In others, you get people responding to essays like this with comments like “nobody still seriously thinks Final Fantasy 7 is a good game anymore.” In those communities, they paint authors of such essays as so desperate to be the lone wolf that they’re making up a society of villains out of whole cloth.
The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between.
April 11th, 2007 at 1450
I levelled all my characters to 99 and, worse, mastered all my Materia.
Then my inner Japan died, poisoned and dry and dead forever. Sorry, FFVII, you broke me somewhere over Knights of the Round level 3.
April 11th, 2007 at 1636
Someone tell me, is there more to Final Fantasy VII than just a guy with a dumb name and stupid hair walking around hitting things with his huge cock? I’ve only played through a bit of it and that’s all I got from the experience. That and some fly pimp with a gun stuck on his arm and his D-cup bitch.
April 11th, 2007 at 2030
Ok, the half of your criticisms for this review are based on poor graphics, and sound. On a first generation PS1 game. That’s like saying Jaws sucked because you could tell the shark was fake.
As for the story? Yes it was convoluted, melodramatic, and cliched, but it was also one of the earliest examples of a narrative in a video game that actually addressed mature themes in a serious way. And at the time, it was some of, if not the best story telling you could find in gaming. We’re talking about a time when M. Bison was a recent memory, and Link slaying Gannon with a silver arrow was considered epic. Good story telling in video games was virtually non-existent when Final Fantasy 7 came out.
I normally agree with most of the reviews on this website, but this review is just a blatant cry for attention. You don’t justify your rating, and most of the criticisms you make are unfounded. Final Fantasy 7 may not be the greatest game in the world but it was a milestone in modern gaming. It marked the point when gamers started to grow up. And for that it deserves a hell of a lot higher rating than 0 out of 4 stars.
April 11th, 2007 at 2044
[...] he can’t control what happens in the news. I did check out the site he referrenced [http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=113], and a small part of me died. Not because I liked Final Fantasy 7 a lot, not because his lengthy [...]
April 11th, 2007 at 2105
Assailing the graphics and sound is perfectly legitimate. The game isn’t just technologically limited; it is [i]damn ugly[/i] (does BBCode work here? only one way to find out), and that really is unforgivable. It’s not like it’s impossible to make a good-looking first-generation PS1 game – which, by the way, FF7 wasn’t. Warhawk and Twisted Metal did it. If you want an RPG example, take Wild Arms. Yes, it was sprites! Maybe, if FF7 couldn’t not look like shit in 3D, it should’ve stuck to sprites.
Visuals matter. Sound matters. Saying otherwise is like saying that it doesn’t matter whether or not a movie is in focus, cause like man, it’s all about the [i]emotions[/i] of the [i]characters[/i].
The plot I didn’t hate as much as james but that doesn’t mean I’m compelled to give it a free pass. It had a ton of problems – the most serious of which was internal inconsistency and incoherence – and its “maturity” doesn’t help me any. I’m mature enough already. Games ought to [i]be[/i] mature, not enforce “maturity.” It’s a subtle difference. You describe Link slaying Ganon as though it were NOT epic. If you think it’s not, you need to reevaluate your priorities. Then again, if you think it’s not, FF7 is exactly the game for you.
I’d have given it one star, myself, at least according to this site’s rubric.
April 11th, 2007 at 2127
No way in hell does FF7 get a pass for graphics just because of its age. It was a stunningly ugly game, even at the time. Even the pre-rendered cutscenes were ugly.
April 11th, 2007 at 2251
hey, 108…
read the god hand review that I sent you.
April 11th, 2007 at 2259
The PlayStation was released in 1995; FFVII was released in 1997. Calling it a first-generation game is like calling Halo 3 a first-generation Xbox 360 game… when it comes out.
Still, yeah. Personally, I love the visual approach. This is one of the only Final Fantasy games that has struck me as having real spirit. The fact that it’s so fucked-up is part of its charm. If the series just consisted of this and XII, I’d have no problem with it.
April 11th, 2007 at 2301
> Beylita
What about my whores? Is it wrong to put them on a pedestal?
April 12th, 2007 at 723
You know, one of my favorite moments was in Final Fantasy IV, when the twins sacrificed themselves for Cecil by turning themselves to stone. Hell, the party even tried curing them, with no effect. That was an awesome moment.
Then they cheapened the shit out of it by later reintroducing them and saying, “Yeah, we’re cured!” BULLSHIT!
April 12th, 2007 at 803
You know what – you _were_ totally better off with a Saturn until this game came out.
Never thought of it that way.
April 12th, 2007 at 848
YAAAAAGH!
*Spits fanboy rabies at you.*
I like the game mostly for nostalgia, and the fact it was the first non-”suitable or all audiences” game I played (my mother was very, very picky about what I got my hands on, or a long time). Hell, the story surprised me and excited me, especially when I found out there was life after Midgar.
But honestly, more people shouldn’t like this game. It could have been done better by another company, which probably would have opted out of that stupid (with bad instructions) bit in Wall Market where you have to jump at the right time to grab a pipe.
I hated that part. It was enough to make me stop playing for like, a week.
April 12th, 2007 at 957
That’s another of FF7′s sins: it began MINIGAME MANIA, and pretty much every game since then has been worse for it.
April 12th, 2007 at 1021
attack, attack, heal, summon – boooooring
April 12th, 2007 at 1343
“This is the plot, and if you want to experience it in all of it’s horrifically ray-traced glory you will be required to spunk away scores of hours the Reaper will never return.”
haha, I was just looking at this review again and that’s a pretty excellent line. spunk, I don’t know if that’s British slang or what, but it gets the job done.
April 12th, 2007 at 1421
e-jrw: I have no problem with the whores.
But I do have a problem with Johns. The simple experience is not enough. They assert that they deserve a total ownership of that experience and ownership of everyone involved in the experience. They pony up their cash to people who need the money and mmake otherwise unreasonable demands that the whores are not allowed to deny.
They will hide behind the notions of free commerce, and their supposed right to get it however they can, but they are predators who only derive pleasure from the exploitation inherent in exchanges where inequality is strictly enforced.
April 12th, 2007 at 1625
[...] I came across an interesting review of Final Fantasy VII. I totally disagree with it, but it’s pretty funny, very well written and absolutely worth [...]
April 12th, 2007 at 1705
I think your review is pretty good james, but i think you can’t say criticise the FF7 characters and say FF6 “had a daringly large cast of likable characters” since the main character was a women from another dimension where strange creatures with strangers powers lived peacefully until an evil man with a strange face paint took them these so powerfull creatures to his dimension where he stole they energy and started an era of destruction and fear. It looks a lot like FF7′s plot.
Anyway, I like both FF6 and FF7, because i think they made their characters pretty human, with human decisions and human feelings.
OFF:
Sorry for my english, im brazilian, so don’t ask much from me =P
April 13th, 2007 at 1423
I am also a fan of FFVIII- the plot made no sense, but it told it with style.
VII I feel was let down primarily with a godawful translation. At least, I hope that’s why the dialogue is so dreadful.
April 13th, 2007 at 1532
I think the plot of FFVIII made perfect sense, so long as you don’t take it literally. I’d say more, only I don’t want to be laughed out of the place. Maybe if somebody writes a review of VIII.
In my previous comment I questioned if such an acidic review fit the mission of the website. After reading the other reviews, however, I find that the harshest ones are my favorites, particularly those by James and brenden. So spew away. Good work.
April 13th, 2007 at 2329
The plot of FFVIII makes sense if you don’t think about it.
April 14th, 2007 at 846
I played through the whole of FF7 without noticing Tifa’s tits. Perhaps it’s because I was living in a post-Tomb Raider age, perhaps it’s because they were only small polygons on a small polygonal character, or maybe I just wasn’t sexual enough to notice at the time. But I wouldn’t have picked out her tits as her one defining feature. Or even her two defining features. So I’m really fascinated that, years later, now I’m spending too much time on the internet, it turns out that they’re the central pillars of a massive FF7-hating subculture. It’s amazing much these things can arouse people.
April 15th, 2007 at 127
Tim’s review says:
“We then experience many thrilling boss battles, some in an elevator, some on a roof, as all the characters rush to make sense of the hyperventilating bloodshed and profound seriousness that has just succeeded in wracking the story. Who is “Sephiroth”? What is “Jenova”? Cloud promises to tell the gang later [...]”
when i read this summary, see those questions, i get this feeling in my gut that i imagine i’d receive if i suddenly found this hole in my room that i could crawl through. for all its failings after a certain point, and even before, the game had a buzzing, dark punch at the (relative) outset. it spoke of mysterious things, so that when it was trodden on by all the ensuing directionless horseshit, it was really too much.
sephiroth was a real person – before you actually met the guy. protip: show and tell, but don’t do too much of either. when he appears in an awkwardly staged sequence of the boat to costa del sol, it’s just stupid and jarring, partially because you realize, yes, he is also rendered as a multi-colored combination of blocks. i wanted him to remain as strangely alluring as he was in the guide – a photo on a folder. and if i ever did see sephiroth, i wanted it to be visceral and exclusive.
(how was he always carrying jenova around?)
yeah, final fantasy 7 is catastrophically overblown. but, to me, there was something surrounding, something hard-hitting in midgar and a little bit after. i was constantly moving, getting entangled, wondering when i’d be able to get the next piece of the plot. i’ve longed for a game since that renders me incapable of moving like 7 did in the kalm flashback.
maybe i’m just a fool!
April 18th, 2007 at 1713
Thank you James, and all the reviewers at Action Button, for filling the sadly missing oldmanmurray niche of game journalism. It’s refreshing and inspiring to see reviewers who actually demand quality and thoughtfulness in this medium. I especially appreciate your review of FF VII, and am glad a person with a soapbox could finally voice his frustration with such a trite and irrelevant storyline and the equally trite gameplay. I’m glad this site exists and hope it will serve as a forum for criticizing the tired, frankly-stupid, and overused gaming conventions that are accepted and taken for granted by so many other voices in the gaming world. Thank you, and good luck. -ArtyFishal
July 20th, 2007 at 1455
I agree with some of what you say here, but I don’t think this game is without merit. Now, I’m not a fanboy, let me say that up front. However, I think the game is fun, and while I’m not an RPG fan in the traditional sense, I do enjoy the occasional RPG. FF7 was the first game I felt emotionally involved in (despite the confusing, convoluted storyline). That emotional involvement was taken to the next level w/ Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete a year later.
I think the game’s biggest problem is that the scope of the story is so huge that it’s hard to take it all in. I mean, I’ve played the first disc & a half of the game at least 4 times, but I’ve never progressed beyond that for a number of reasons, chief among them being that I start to get overwhelmed by how overwrought the whole thing is. The quirky, SD characters don’t bother me (I think they have a certain charm), and I really like the music in the game. I also think the visual style (while steeped in anime cliche) is appealing.
Anyway, I think your review points out some of the flaws of the game, bursting the collective FF7-fanboy bubble that the game isn’t perfect, so I salute you for that.
August 12th, 2007 at 1605
this review
is poorly written.
June 8th, 2008 at 1239
[...] Found the text version of the review, so now the actual author has been given credit. « [...]