Took me awhile to get some time to work on this.
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Originally Posted by
Flying Arrow
Sheeeit, Wolf. You caught me in a few blanket statements, so I'll try to respond as best I can.
It wouldn't be a fun discussion if we only allowed blanket statements. This isn't meant to be an attack on your views but rather a method to determine value we can agree upon. ;)
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VII's progression just felt right to me, and maybe that's because it's basically an M-themed graphical-up SNES game. It goes bonkers at points, but so do all JRPGs. This isn't an excuse for weak storytelling, of course. What I like about VII is that it seems to hit all the story points properly, even if a little stilted. I've never felt entirely comfortable with Square's games post-FFVIII. There are plenty that I love, but I also think that the scripts to a lot of them keep them anchored down by too much wordiness and location-fatigue. I love FFVII because, despite its plot-holes and vomit dialog, it's brisk and playable, just like my other favourite Square games that came out around the same time (FFVI, CT, MarioRPG).
I actually feel VII is a game too trapped in throwing out terminology and very wordy dialogue scenes (at least in the second disc beyond) that are so badily hampered by the games poor translation it feels overly complicated despite many of the plot elements being fairly straight forward. IX on the other hand I enjoyed cause I never found its dialogue terribly convulated and peppered with heavy terms until about the time you get to Terra but that is pretty far into the game seeing how its at the very tale end of Disc 3. VII to me, in terms of dialogue was really trying to use all that extra memory to tell a story but I feel every time I play the game its hampered because of it. As though the skill of the writers was not on par with the technology and often I find when reading the dialogue naturally the plot can be confusing. The game borrowed a writing principle made very popular around the time of VII's development which was Neon Genesis Evangelion and that principle was using symbolic terminology as short hand for plot elements. At its best its very avant-garde, at worst its overly pretentious and I feel VII goes back and forth with it depending where you are in the story. I felt it was a great tool for making the player move forward but the answers themselves were not as rich and complex as the symbolic terms used would suggest.
IX just dropped this whole nonsense and I appreciate the game for having a more straight forward plot that doesn't try to garnish itself with too many fancy phrases. If anything it gets extra points by instead using terminology from FF's own mythos.
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I can't really get behind IX's storytelling because it's just filled with so much stuff big and bombastic that it's bursting out of itself. For me, its twists just don't jive, and while it's filled with wonderful set-pieces and a boatload of charm, nothing really has much impact. Despite that I do enjoy the game, my interest plot-wise just plummets once each play-through takes me past the Mist Continent.Once Terra and Oeilvert come around, I'm done.
I'm sorry to hear that, personally there is only two plot elements that don't work for me in IX but they don't ruin the experience completely for me. Of anything, I feel one of IX's problems is that it doesn't tie up its loose ends very well and this was something I felt was a problem in VII as well because beyond Cloud, Cid, and Tifa, there was no real character growth for the rest of the cast beyond the first Disc.
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The thing I enjoy in hindsight about FFVII is that it introduces all its themes and players well, and everything progresses from there despite a few JRPG-ish plot-holes and contrivances. There's very little left-field for me to feel like the game has ever gone off the deep end. It get ridiculous and questionable at times, but it all more or less fits (for me, at least) within its own fiction. Things like Time Kompression or Necron or Terra... they almost feel like they're there because huge twists are expected for every game, despite how well those twists actually work with the story being told.
I would say Cloud's double plot twist identity issues were not only a bit left field but poorly stretched out in the plot out for the sake of having another big plot twist. Hell, VII is one of the few games in the series that has a plot twist for another plot twist. First revealing Cloud not to be who he is and then another that says he is who he says he is just with a few important oversights. To me, this felt a bit tacky and definetly left field. I would have actually been happier had Cloud actually been an attempt to make a real clone of Sephiroth.
For me, VII's plot goes completely downhill after Cloud's mental breakdown at the Northern Crater and the game never redeems itself for me after that. I spend the rest of the game hoping it will pick up and it never does. Cloud's past is just badly executed for my taste and once again I would like to point out the logical issue of your party trying to stop Shin-Ra from saving the world, which is one of the main conflicts in Disc 2. It makes no sense and is never offered a satisfactory answer, instead its used as filler so they can stretch out the time before the game throws you the plot twist of a plot twist. The believability of Cloud's past working also depends on so many factors concerning Tifa that it begins to feel far fetched it would have worked out so neatly for the big reveals. Her very presence in the first Disc only being sustained on the writer's hope that the player will keep Tifa in your party so you can see all the extra scenes concerning his fishy past, is a poor way of going about telling a story. It doesn't help that the game requires several MacGuffins to explain most of its plot, which is a bit too many for any story.
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Even as far as party dynamics, none of the later games hold up to 7's, either. The relationships involving Tifa, Aeris and Cloud (or whatever it is they think they see in Cloud) really is well done, I think, despite a few hiccups. Squall and Rinoa don't come close, and neither do Zidane and Dagger or Tidus and Yuna. Those characters' relationships are kind of just there, adding a bit of romantic-comedic flavour to events, but never being genuinely interesting past the will-they-or-won't-they stage. Me, I always thought it was very sad that Aeris liked Cloud because she was subconsciously being reminded of Zack - a character point that does, in the end, become the central point regarding Cloud's neurosis, which, in itself, is nurtured by the otherwise warm-hearted Tifa. I won't say there aren't holes and contrivances in all this at certain points, but this is one of those points where I think Square haven't managed to top FFVII.
I will agree with you on the love triangle, its very complicated and I liked the fact its a bit more low key than other romances in the series that feel like they need a huge romance subplot. VII's is actually not in your face about the romance like the other games. Aerith teases Cloud about dating him and having feelings and Tifa has her fawning moments but really the game doesn't make it go past a few conversational pieces here and there. Even the date scenes are more of a personal conversation as opposed to a romantic getaway.
As for the rest of the cast, I can't agree about party dynamics. I never liked VII's cast except for Vincent. I don't hate them but I never found any of them interesting. Still, they are better done than some modern games.
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For all the holes, VII is still more interesting to me than all the newer, more refined FF games that have come out since. To tie this into my first post, I think it's a shame that for all the technological and gameplay advances, Square never tightened up the writing, and never really produced anything as flat-out imaginative as VII with improved technique and pacing.
I agree to a point, as I said, I feel IX did a great job and as I was playing through it recently I kept finding myself blown away by all these great game mechanics and ideas that the game used that should have become mainstays in the RPG genre and yet no one, not even SE has bothered to pick up where IX left off. Whereas I also feel IX took the best concepts from VII and utilized them well as opposed to the middle child in the PS1 set.
Yet I agree that modern RPGs are too busy trying to cast off all the elements that make them who they are so they can still remain relevant in an age of ADHD gaming. The problem here, is that I don't see why the genre feels it needs to completely reinvent itself, what it really needs to do is reinvent how they make them. Instead of trying to push the system to new limits, they should be learning how to make high grade graphics and massive worlds quickly and more cost efficiently. If SE could cut down costs and development time, we could probably go back to having old school (8-bit threw 32-bit) RPGs, that or they need to stop wasting money on making games visually impressive and let them take a slight notch down in favor of more development and money going towards content. I strongly feel this is part of the reason SE doesn't make games like they use to.
That and they are still trying to make another VII. Not a remake, but a game that did what VII did for the company back in the day and sadly lightning doesn't strike twice I'm afraid. I usually feel they learn their lesson but then something like XIII comes along and shows me they are still trying.
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My first playthrough of every subsequent FF game never captured me as well as my first playthrough of VII, despite the fact that in hindsight we can poke dozens of holes through it.
But this is all subjective, I guess. FF7's silliness and occasional ill-conceived vagueness aside, I still think it hits all the most important notes to be a good, involving story (maybe even the best in the series), especially for when it came out. The setting still grips me, too, and the music is fantastic. For me there's nothing like Midgar, the Great Glacier, or Mt. Nibel in any other game in the series. It's a lot of nostalgia, of course, but the reason I'm getting these nostalgics is because I was so moved by it all in the first place.
I feel this way about a few other games in the series but I do recognize that part of this is also just nostalgia, still it had to blow your mind the first time to leave that kind of impression. :D
To me, VII didn't do all that, it did press some buttons but I felt that VII promised more than it could provide and this is not simply just the hype surrounding the game, I mean this within the story itself. The resolution was not as neat or rewarding for me as the game was trying to lead me to believe. Its why VII will always be one of the more disappointing entries for me. There was a time during the first disc I was on the wagon with the rest of the crowd about how good the game was but as I've stated, the second disc and beyond was rather disappointing for me and I felt the games quality fell apart.
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Buuuut, I'm going to go out on another limb here and say that there are really only two solid stories in the entire series: VI's and VII's. VI and VII were great SNES and early-PS1 narratives that created fantastic worlds with plots that followed through without any left-field shenanigans. A game like IX, I think, doesn't have a story that matches up with the advancement of its technology. Shinra were pretty moustache-twirling on the villain scale, but Kuja, in a game so much more refined and comfortable with itself as IX, is no better, and kind of a little worse considering at this point the FF series had become much more than derivative anime Crystal-finding quest part 5. For me, the destruction sequences of IX don't even come close to the World of Ruin in VI or the death of Aeris and impending doom of Meteor in VII. It's beautifully rendered, but feels kind of pedestrian if you had been playing and mastering all the FFs on release, waiting with excitement to see how Square would turn everything on its head with the next entry.
I feel Kuja is a better villain for many reasons, simply because he combines the best elements of all the best villains in the series and I felt he did it well. Sure he's still a selfish evil jerk but he's a well thought out evil jerk, and this is where I stand on the idea of "I R EVIL" villains, I don't mind them at all, sometimes the story needs an inconceivable evil, other times the story requires a more complex villain that falls into moral ambiguity. IX with its throwbacks needed a traditional evil villain but he was well written and not just some generic evil monster like say... Necron was. That is what I want, a villain to fit the role. Don't pull a XIII and present a philosophical drama and then introduce Mr. "I R EVIL" halfway through and if you do, he should be more than just a two dimensional being like XIII's villains were. I love complex villains but they need to fit the heroes and for me, Kuja was fitting for the cast, an over the top narcissus, struggling to be free from his master and eventually coming to grips with his own mortality and what life is. He's not as sympathetic as Xande but his story was interesting and his character was fun to watch.
Still, I feel IX has its wonderful moments, Vivi's battle with Black Waltz 3, his encounter with the Black Mages and the scene about "stopping", the parties battle with Beatrix in Burmecia, Kuja attacking Alexander (which leads into my favorite FMV in the series of Bahamut vs. Alexander) and Kuja releasing Trance and leveling Terra. The game is filled with memorable moments and I sorta feel like IX pretty much did what VII was suppose to.
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Yep. Totally with you on this one. The game (bizarrely) glosses over a lot of stuff like this. FFVII is not a gushing well of social-commentary the way some people think it is - not even smurfing close. In fact, as you say, it's probably detrimental to the whole plot that the game introduces scenarios like this and doesn't really follow through with them. Lots of interpretations have been made that I've read (including the depravity that has been induced on Barret, Tifa, and Cloud that all are too despondent to recognize), but most of them only exist because the game never bothered to put its foot down on certain things. Me, I don't love fiction because of its political or social commentary, whether its games (ha), literature, film, whatever. I like things because they are well-made as narratives or (in the case of games) as playable universes. FF7 certainly would have been enriched had there been some attempt to tie up some of the heavy :bou::bou::bou::bou: that went down at the beginning of the story (smurfing terrorism committed by the PC, for Christ's sake.) JRPGs are nothing if they aren't expert hand-wringers at the mass murder of innocents. It doesn't happen and that's stupid, but I don't necessarily hold it against the game. To be frank, I kind of hold it against Square that they never really tried to mature the series in this way. FF7 was an interesting step but smurf if any of the other games after it took FF7's potential seriousness and tried to make something, you know, actually serious with it. X actually had an intriguing setting for me at first... but we all know how that turned out.
This is a problem I have with the series as a whole. VIII pulls a similar thing by introducing some very morally questionable elements in the beginning and never goes with them besides using them as set pieces. Yet, once again, I feel IX goes a little bit farther in terms of Vivi who is literally an artificial being trying to find meaning in a world that he is not suppose to exist in. As usual, I feel Square drops it the story and it doesn't ever get the satisfying end it deserved but I'm just beginning to think SE will never do a truly sophisticated game aimed at adults. I read in an interview once, Kitase said that FF is usually made for a younger audience in mind and that has worked for the series, so it is very unlikely the series will ever grow past the maturity level of Teens and actually explore more sophisticated and philosophical themes I'm afraid. That's why I love Xenogears and FFTactics.
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I spoke too soon here. You caught me. I even had written down exceptions in my original post, but took them out before posting. FF7 was not the be-all and end-all of RPGs, for sure. Xenogears, as an example, is another very well made game. I'm mostly just jealous because my favourite and most nostalgic era of gaming is the 2D and very early 3D JRPGs (SNES and early disc-based consoles like PSOne, Saturn, Sega CD for the Lunars) and the 3D-ifying of the PS2-and-on eras have never
really sat that well with me.
I actually agree, though there have been some great RPGs released in the last decade, I've been finding that I buy fewer and fewer original RPGs with each passing year. I feel the genre has sorta stagnated in the PS2 era. There have been notable exceptions but nothing has had the real impact on me like some of those games in the 16-bit and 32 bit era did. Maybe its because I'm old now and more difficult to impress. :eep:
