The Successful Experiment

[Wolf Kanno]

I'm not sure what we're defining as "success" but FFVII was the one that put the series on the map, so it's kind of hard to argue with that. The complete abandonment of the rigid four-way directional movement far and away eclipses any previous attempts to "shake things up." And if you want to talk about experimenting with interactivity, FFVII had entire games incorporated into its story sequences. The way cutscenes seamlessly lead into gameplay is a technique the rest of the industry only began incorporating some ten years later once they had the power of High Definition consoles to leverage; even today, it's something of a White Whale only the Naughty Dogs and Kojima Productions of the world have success in pulling off.

I know we're discussing where to attribute innovations among the RPG pantheon but VII overshadows all of them for pioneering features the rest of the industry had to keep up with.

This isn't about sales Mr B. this is about impacting future FFs and while VII is a success as well the issue here is that everything you just attributed to VII can be traced back to VI and other 16-bit titles. The fact VI pioneered more interactive design that later games like Live A Live, CT, and the PS1 era FFs continued to build upon shows that evolutionary speaking VII owes some of it's successful design to VI. VI utilizing universal sprites for combat and story scenes (something VII doesn't even do) already showed that Square were moving towards making seamless transitions and frankly Secret of Mana and CT both beat VII to the punch on a technical level though VII's contribution is certainly the more impressive version but CT already had beaten VII to the seamless game-story-minigame transition before VII pulled it off. So yeah... VII owes VI.

Eh, I would argue that the Esper system was conceptually quite different from the Materia system. How many people actually equip espers to characters because they want to use the actual esper vs how many people equip espers solely as a means of character building (learning spells/boosting stats)? Heck, I bet half the people who played the game didn't even know you could summon espers in battle.

Conversely the materia system had you equipping your materia based on who you wanted to use it. Materia was about how you want to use your characters, espers were about how you wanted to build them.

You forget that I said the Esper/Relic system with Relic's providing changes in characters skills as long as the item was equipped combined with having your magic leveled up by equipping various espers that taught different skills as you gained AP. On paper the system have some similarities in execution, it's just that VII basically combined both concepts with materia being items that must be equipped to gain their ability but multiple abilities can be learned by leveling them up with AP. They are not the same system but I feel one can see a link in how they both grew from FFV's Job System (which is frankly vastly superior to both). VI's system was simply trying to reinvent the wheel and Square/Squenix has being pursuing that ever since.

I think I misunderstood your opening argument. I wasn't trying to say VI's system was boring, or ignoring their other advancements. But those were evolutionary. When you say experimental, I was trying to think of its more revolutionary aspects. And the story may have been an evolution, but it was so far beyond what anyone else was doing at the time, I think it's fair to call it revolutionary in both story and character portrayal and development

But yes, they definitely refined the styles they used to a new degree as well. Art, animation, battle mechanics, and above probably anything else, music. I just didn't see them as an experiment

I do feel the story is revolutionary for its time but so were many of its gameplay elements, I mean incorporating slot machine mechanics, SF move sets, and enhancing story sections with game mechanics were not very common in the early 90s and Square pursued the trend well into the PS2 era. I guess it would depend on what you felt the story did that was truly novel as all I can think of is the ensemble cast which is rare for the genre, even today.