To both lovers and haters of FF7

[Wolfen]

Why is this game so divided amongst FF fans? You either really love it or you really, really hate it. The people who love it played it in 1997 and also like FFX and Kingdom Hearts. The people who hate VII played the NES and SNES games first and think that VII's anime style ruined the series, aside from IX, which they coincidentally love because it reminds them of the NES and SNES games.

I, however, played through the first six games as well as FF9 before playing FF7. I still enjoyed it as much as IV and VI. I also did this within the last year, so I had to deal with 3D graphics that were dated. The story-telling was very well done though and the ending felt like it tied up things very nicely. The sound track was also outstanding.

I still feel like this game is overrated, but I also recognize its standing in the series.

[oddler]

The people who love it played it in 1997 and also like FFX and Kingdom Hearts. The people who hate VII played the NES and SNES games first and think that VII's anime style ruined the series, aside from IX, which they coincidentally love because it reminds them of the NES and SNES games.

Untrue. I've never even played X or Kingdom Hearts and this is my favorite game. Not to mention I played the NES and SNES games first. Of the games I've played, II and VIII were the worst in my opinion.

[Raistlin]

I don't "love" FF7, but I do enjoy it. Maybe I'm one of the few moderates on this game. Also I hate both FFX and Kingdom Hearts with a fiery passion.

[Flying Arrow]

There are people who have always legitimately disliked the game, even on release. As far as gameplay goes, it's quite a bit easier than the previous games (although VI isn't necessarily a shining beacon of challenge either) and kind of simplifies the combat and strategy aspect of the series. Some people also disliked the Materia system and how most of the characters were very similar in terms of stats... but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, and I really enjoy experimenting with different weapon/armor/accessory/Materia set-ups. The translation and dialogue is also pretty dog, and makes most of the characters come across as having Tourette's or something. Other than that, I think Square were at the top of their act with the FF series at VII. As far as plot goes, they haven't told a story as well in any game since.

But also, and more obviously, there are people who backlash against it because of internet hype - a stupid reason to dislike something, but the overbearing relentlessness of the game's fans can't be overstated. The FF7 fan community is a hideous collection of Lennie Smalls who have probably turned away a lot of people who would have otherwise enjoyed the game.

I don't think FF7 is overrated, actually. Playing it at release was wonderful, but I don't necessarily think other games haven't taken elements from FF7 and done them better - they just haven't been able to match the whole package or replicate the effect with today's technology that FF7 had in its own day. What I'm trying to say is FF7 was a really incredible step in a new direction for JRPG fans at the time, and very few games in the genre have been able to take it all that much farther. For a while after release, it felt like a ton of games were deriving elements from FF7 to varying degrees of success. But lately, I feel like a great deal of the genre has become pretty apathetic when it comes to making a fresh, intriguing and engaging product.

Bottom line: I think FF7 has endured because of the impact it had on gamers for the 4 or 5 years after its release. It's still a very good game, but while I don't think it's totally dated, I'm unsure why a young gamer in 2010 (even one with experience in the genre) would pick up FF7 for the first time and proclaim it the greatest game ever the way most VII fans think they should. These days I kind of see FF7 the way I've grown to look at the original Legend of Zelda: to really appreciate it, one had to be there when it was first new and fresh and before what it tried to do had been done already, basically.

[Wolf Kanno]

Yeah, I am quoting you since I can counter you and give my opinion all at once.

Other than that, I think Square were at the top of their act with the FF series at VII. As far as plot goes, they haven't told a story as well in any game since.

I strongly disagree with this as I felt IX was rather well written and at worst suffered only the same way VII had in terms of its iffy writing. To me, VII was written well. Its still a good story but I often felt it required far too often for the player to outright ignore some logic (the whole scenario involving Cid's recruitment, Vincent's back-story, and Cloud's true encounter with Sephiroth in Nibelheim), to suffer through some poor pacing in terms of the hints on Cloud's past (to get the good pacing, you have to have keep Tifa or Aerith in your party for most story sequences), the fact that the biggest contributing factor to Cloud's plot twist was the games poor translation where Sephy Clones creates one idea of Cloud's identity whereas the truth of what a Sephy Clone in shows that Clone is a poor word to describe what they really are (Shades would have been more accurate or even the actual translation of Copy is more ambiguous than Clone which is far more definitive), nor the fact the the whole scenario in the second disc about Shin-Ra is completely bonkers (wait, we're trying to stop the bad guys from saving the world and my party has no real justification for why they are in the right? Not to mention that no matter whether I succeed or not, this whole scenario doesn't change the story at all, WTF?). The game has plenty of problematic writing, plot holes, and accidentally takes advantage of its poor translation to be better than it is. This is not to say other entries are golden beacons of writing on par with great literature, the rest of the series suffers from the same problems.

My point here is that for me, I feel VII's greatest flaw as a game is its writing, its more complex than previous games but it also has more problems because of it not to mention it still continues on with FF's unwillingness to just "go there". Most VII fans are willing to either accept or just ignore these issues but frankly I couldn't get past them and it diminished my experience. Cloud's plot twist, while original and clever, never set well with me, neither its execution or it realization. I never cared for the idea that Cloud was a nobody who just happened to have a series of bad misfortunes make him into a total badass that is actually his alternate personality. It never set well with and I never cared for his story of identity. This also diminishes the game for me, while I can recognize its originality and the guts it took to tell that story, it doesn't change the fact I don't think it was good.

But also, and more obviously, there are people who backlash against it because of internet hype - a stupid reason to dislike something, but the overbearing relentlessness of the game's fans can't be overstated. The FF7 fan community is a hideous collection of Lennie Smalls who have probably turned away a lot of people who would have otherwise enjoyed the game.

This I agree is the main problem and lately its no longer just VII's problem, years of squabbling have made VI fans just as despicable and self righteous and I feel IX and X fans are not too far away from sharing the same fate. I think the problem comes from all the sides trying to defend their titles. VII is a very popular game and while I feel it deserves its popularity, I felt even back when it first came out that some of its fans had been a bit too fanatical about it. I do consider it overrated cause that fanaticism is still alive among some of its fans but consequently I feel this fanaticism also made other fanbases do the same to their own titles to make them compete with other groups.

I love VI, is it perfect? No, does it have poor writing and shallow characters? Yes, but not as much as some would say and as a fanboy I would defend the game and try my best to point out that its not as bad as some people make it out to be. To convince others of the depth I've always see in it. Of anything, I have simply just taken solace in the fact that the game still survives in memory and is loved by fans and gaming enthusiast despite the title existing before VII. The fact its memory has survived in the shadow of VII is a testament to its quality and its impact on gaming. I've come to terms with that which is why I'm not as quick to jump into the usual VI vs. VII e-penis debates that go on in FF forums.

On the flip side, I've come to appreciate VII more as I get older and while I still feel the game is overrated thanks to the praises lavished on it by fanboys and the media including stuff it never actually did, I still like the game and I still throw the disc in and play it from time to time cause I actually do like the game, its just not in my top five for the series. I'm looking forward to getting a new memory stick so I can play the game on my PSP (with VIII and IX as well).

I don't think FF7 is overrated, actually. Playing it at release was wonderful, but I don't necessarily think other games haven't taken elements from FF7 and done them better - they just haven't been able to match the whole package or replicate the effect with today's technology that FF7 had in its own day. What I'm trying to say is FF7 was a really incredible step in a new direction for JRPG fans at the time, and very few games in the genre have been able to take it all that much farther. For a while after release, it felt like a ton of games were deriving elements from FF7 to varying degrees of success. But lately, I feel like a great deal of the genre has become pretty apathetic when it comes to making a fresh, intriguing and engaging product.

I disagree, to me, VII was a game that still relies heavily on the old RPG conventions of the time and in many ways, borrows and expands the elements that were featured in earlier Square titles of the time. It updated the formula of rebels vs. empire to terrorist vs. corporation, which is basically the modern parallel to the classic formula but where I feel VII falters is that it doesn't really try to break from the old formula.

AVALANCHE is indeed a terrorist organization and its obvious that the reactors they destroyed killed many innocent lives but the game downplays it and does its best to make them out to be the righteous freedom fighters, partly cause Shin-Ra is presented as an irredeemable evil organization that is basically the world government. Barret's story touches upon his group's sins but only does it once or twice and never goes into depth about it. Barret is always quick to say he was in the wrong which also diminishes the possibilities of exploring this mature theme by the fact that Tifa and Cloud never once in the game address the issue despite both their hands being just as dirty.

Shin-Ra is basically the world government and the story you constantly hear when you travel outside Midgard is the companies military policy of expanding its control of the world, there are no rival government bodies in VII's world that bother to show the issue of Shin-Ra being a business taking over political duties beyond the brief moment with the mayor of Midgard. Shin-Ra is for all intents and purposes is an evil empire whose only goal is power and wealth which is not a far stretch from any previous traditional empires from the genres before it. This is the problem I have when people say that VII broke boundaries, its shallow, the names are different but its till the same scenario we've seen before once you look past the terminology. I feel that VII pushed the genre into more mature territory by doing this but I can't say VII succeeded in actually addressing real mature topics, it simply did what its predecessors did and touched upon it and quickly never spoke of it. VII has a definite preachy element of environmentalism and mankind should be having unity with the world instead of dominating it, but its other elements about terrorism, corporate interest, Economical social commentary, and ethics on genetic engineering are simply mentioned in the first ten hours and quickly dropped and downplayed for the rest of the game in favor of a more traditional sword and sorcery adventure after a megalomaniac villain, the mature themes only very briefly returning at the end of the game when the party gives a clever "moral of the story" friendship speech before the big final battles.

Why I feel this is detrimental is the fact that there is a game that does touch upon many of these elements and actually goes somewhere with it and actually does a better job on commentary. Xenogears and Final Fantasy Tactics are the games that prevented me from being impressed by whatever "depth" fanboys spoke about that VII brought to the genre. Tactics was a game that was all about social classes and the way they screw over everyone involved, it had a deep political story and touched upon the dangers of religion as a political tool and letting it have influence upon people. The game dealt heavily on the ideology or morality, social class, family bonds, and politics and religion. VII is like a comic book compared to Tactics which is more like Shakespeare when compared to the former.

Xenogears is to me, the greatest game to come out of Square and has never been topped by anyone in the 12 years since it came out. Despite being released a year after VII, the game was developed at the same time and despite being rushed and unfinished, the game has more depth than most of the medium of gaming. It deals with religion as a political tool, social classes, genetic engineering, war, morality, ethics, justice, faith and spirituality. It touches upon exploitation of minorities for political gain, drugs, and religious conflict. The plot is convulated as hell but oddly enough makes complete sense once all the cards are on the table and makes heavy use of Christian, Buddhist, and Gnostic philosophy in its characters and stories. It "goes there", its T rating is only proof about how ineffective and flawed the ESRB was back in the day (and still is but I actually feel this is a good thing) cause the game deals with so many mature elements. They are not simply just garnishes to make the villains seem more evil, or the heroes to be more human, these are elements that are part of the story that get large parts of the story addressed to them. The revelation of the Ethos organization and exploring the inner workings of Solaris will change your mind on how to view religion and social engineering. Hell, Solaris makes Shin-Ra look like a nice alternative for a world government.

Bottom line: I feel that Xenogears and Final Fantasy Tactics both greatly surpass VII and both were able to go farther than VII did. Toss in the fact they were released not long after VII itself and I feel they are not titles that simply tried to build on VII's merits but instead established their own. VII to me is not some beacon of greatness that ushered in a new era of game design and story telling. These two titles were and the fact that neither really gets the credit they deserve is still one of the great injustices of gaming. VII took baby steps into breaking new ground and imo, a quick run through of the plots of pre-VII RPGs around 94-97 era shows the genre was going there anyway, it just didn't have the technology to convey it as well as VII and quite frankly, even VII falls short of this.

The game is often praised for re-inventing the genre but I feel VII simply makes a few name changes and takes advantage of its new technology to tell a bigger story but in the end, sticks to normal conventions that dominated its predecessors. The genre grew because of the new medium of technology to create the games but VII itself didn't magically pull the genre out of the dark ages, there was depth before it and there was depth after it. Fanboys and the media sometimes act like RPGs were all like DQI, FFI, and the original Legend of Zelda and that VII was the first game to introduce plot and characters and make the genre story focused when looking back at the games of the time, it was already moving that way and most of these elements already existed before it.

[Levian]

When something is loved by a lot of people, another group of people tend to exaggerate their opinion to polarize the first group. See other pop culture phenomenons.

[Winter Nights]

I don't dislike FF7, per se. I do think it is highly overrated, but I don't dislike it. It's a fun game and I still replay it, on occasion. That said, it's far too easy, for an FF. The first time I beat it, I clocked in at something like 60 hours. I was about 16, at the time. Since, then it's gradually taking less and less time, every time I played it. Last time I played, which was something like a year and a half ago, I clocked in somewhere just under 20 hours. While that speaks toward it's replay value, it also speaks volumes on how easy it is to get through it. Plus, as noted above, the characters are interchangeable. Limit breaks and weapons are the only thing that separate the characters in battle, limit breaks being the only difference that actually matters.

As pointed out, the writing can be atrocious at times and the reveal about Cloud was beyond sloppy. This is the mark that hurts it most for me. While the writing tends to be flawed in many FFs, it seems to occur more often in FF7. That said, most of those issues come from a rushed translation. If they had taken more time to translate it better, it might hold up more for me. As it stands, the story doesn't come off as complex at all, to me, just complicated.

Like I said, I like the game and replay in every few years. But, while it's definitely not one of the worst, it's hardly one of the best.

[Clo]

For me, I recognize that my love for FF7 (considering how much I play it, it has to be love) is largely based on nostalgia.

[Flying Arrow]

Sheeeit, Wolf. You caught me in a few blanket statements, so I'll try to respond as best I can.

I strongly disagree with this as I felt IX was rather well written and at worst suffered only the same way VII had in terms of its iffy writing...

Ehh. Line-by-line, IX is by far the better written script, technically. I'm playing through VII now, and its dialog on the whole is so criminally bad that I wonder how I was able to get through the story so many times in my life. As someone who corrects student writing for a living, I have nothing but absolute contempt for whoever wrote the "english" script. But then again, I was 13-years-old when I played VII for the first time and just coming off the SNES generation (which had a slew of my favourite games - many RPGs). VII's progression just felt right to me, and maybe that's because it's basically an M-themed graphicked-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 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. 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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

AVALANCHE is indeed a terrorist organization and its obvious that the reactors they destroyed killed many innocent lives but the game downplays it and does its best to make them out to be the righteous freedom fighters, partly cause Shin-Ra is presented as an irredeemable evil organization that is basically the world government. Barret's story touches upon his group's sins but only does it once or twice and never goes into depth about it. Barret is always quick to say he was in the wrong which also diminishes the possibilities of exploring this mature theme by the fact that Tifa and Cloud never once in the game address the issue despite both their hands being just as dirty.

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 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.

Xenogears

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.

To provide my definitive answer to the original poster. FF7 was my favourite game back then, but I was always eagerly anticipating the next Square game to blow my mind and make me forget about it. Nothing like that ever really came for me. XII actually came close, but enthralled me in a different way (pure gameplay) than VII did, so, by default, FFVII is still my favourite not because it's the Greatest. Game. Ever. (it ain't), but because it's just so damned memorable.

[LowCaloriePie]

You either really love it or you really, really hate it.

I really, really think it's okay. Don't hate it, don't love it. It's just kind of there.

[Jiro]

I love it but I'm not a rabid fanboy. I think it was quality and the nostalgia value is great.

[The Man]

I couldn't be arsed reading all the walls of text right now. Maybe later.

FFVII is a decent game. Not as good as the fanboys claim, but not as bad as some of its detractors claim either. The relentlessness of the fanboys has undoubtedly contributed to many people's dislike of the game, and I have to confess that they've slightly reduced my enjoyment of it as well. Though the compilation has been more responsible for reducing my enjoyment of it, I think.

[escobert]

I love 7, it's the only FF I really enjoy. also I hate X and I hate kingdom hearts. so noty all of us 7 fanboys like those crappy games

[black orb]

The people who love it played it in 1997 and also like FFX and Kingdom Hearts.

>>> I love FF7 and FF10 but I hate Kingdom Hearts..

The people who hate VII played the NES and SNES games first and think that VII's anime style ruined the series, aside from IX, which they coincidentally love because it reminds them of the NES and SNES games.

>>> I dont hate FF7, I played the NES SNES games first and I loved Nomura`s FF7 anime style. You are right about FF9 I love that game because it reminds them of the NES and SNES games...

I still feel like this game is overrated, but I also recognize its standing in the series.

>>> By today standards is probably overrated, but back in 1997 FF7 was the most awesome thing ever. Square has never been able to re-create such an amazing FF game that has shocked the gaming world like FF7 did in 1997..

[Wolf Kanno]

Took me awhile to get some time to work on this.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Xenogears

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.