Quote Originally Posted by Kenshin IV View Post
No, I think people are too caught up now with how successful it has become, and have taken that to mean Square knew it was going to be that big of a hit over on our shore. They tried that with Mystic Quest and failed miserably -- the reason Seven got the attention it did was because of Sony's marketing.
If you look at developer interviews, especially at the time, those guys knew how special what they were working on was and how there wasn't anything else like it at the time. This wasn't Mystic Quest. RPGs may not have been popular in America at the time (they were) but I think they had an idea that once people saw the visuals and heard the music, it wasn't going to matter where they were from anymore. Plus anime was creating a huge demographic ready for this at the time.

But I agree with your point, and I think even Mirage will concede that (discounting EoFFers), the average American video game player who had not played RPGs, having item, armor, weapon, limit breaks, and a materia system (especially in 1997) were probably not easy to grasp at once. I know a lot of people who reminisce on playing VII at the time and say it was a hard game. I had played RPGs before, so it wasn't too difficult but at the age of 10 I still didn't have the advanced grasp on it I do today.

Quote Originally Posted by Mirage
Not to brag, but the first time I played FF7 was at a friends house, and at the time, I had only played one single RPG in my life and that was FF5
How old were you/when was this? Because I don't think the FFV fanslation was even completed when VII was released and even if it was, what the hell were you doing playing FFV???

Anyway, I don't think VII is the easiest, at least undisputably. Most here will agree that FFVIII is far easier to break to an almost embarassing level. And FFVI becomes broken the moment you get Edgar, about an hour and a half into the game. There are some areas and bosses where you're challenged on your knowledge of the system, but FFVII has a few of those moments as well. FFX similarly has a few bosses that are a pain, but the ability to swap members in and out made the battles a Xenogears-esque series of one-hit kills. FFVII's problem is that the enemies don't scale well with the party's progression and abilities. If you just play through the story, you've probably already far outgrown them by the end of Disc 1. On my last playthrough, I ran from every random encounter in Mako Reactor 1, except maybe that machine, in order to get the better weapon for Barrett early on. It may not sound like much, but I found the difficulty far better balanced for the rest of the game.

Anyway, I think the real challenge from RPGs comes from how quickly you can beat the game. You can take the easy route by grinding or teleporting out of dungeons to find inns, but the real test is how do you conserve your resources to make it through everything straight through on your first time. The objective for developers is if they can make the game just challenging enough to make you think you can do it, but it's a risk. I think that's why Dragon Quest V is my favorite 2D RPG of all time.