Quote Originally Posted by Pheesh View Post
They're bad graphics. Some of the worst in any 3D game I've ever played. Sure you can be not bothered by them, and it helps if you know what to expect before you start, but you can't in seriousness tell me that there is only one part of the game's graphics that 'aren't great' (implying everything else graphically related is great, are you kidding me!?).
I actually can say that the character graphics on the field are the worst part and the only truly awful part. The backgrounds were great, especially for the time, the battle graphics are literally no worse than any of the games you mention, and the art direction is actually pretty great despite Toriyama's later bulltrout. There are very few parts of the game where you can't tell what's going on, and this is a game basically from the dawn of 3D graphics. They may be the worst of any game you've played, but they're far from the worst of the era, or even the years after it's release. And I can easily forgive any poor comparisons you want to make to things like MGS that came out a year later, Mario 64 which had the advantage of a significantly more powerful system and a vastly different style of game and graphical needs, or even Crash Bandicoot which I can guarantee never had to worry about hardware limitations in the PSX (and frankly, despite being slightly better looking in respects technically thanks to a simpler graphic style and fewer system requirements to pull off, actually looks awful in some places because the art direction is a god awful mess at times. Yes, I will go on record as saying there are parts of Crash Bandicoot that look worse than FFVII).

Also, I never said they affect the story directly, I said they were so bad that I never even made it up to the meat of the story on two seperate occasions because the graphics made me want to stop playing.

Look, you have to see it from my perspective. The first time I ever played the game was in 2009, I had never watched a let's play of it and had no idea what to expect. I went to play it and the graphics were what they were. I can happily go back and play Crash Bandicoot, MGS, Super Mario 64, Tekken 2, and a slew of other games that were released at that time. I'm not some graphics elitist, but bad graphics are bad graphics, and FF7 has, objectively, some of the worst I've ever seen in a game.
Honestly, this sounds less to me that the graphics are objectively bad as you're saying they're bad compared to 2009 and your expectations of games from the era. The graphics did the job, which was tell the story and be readable onscreen. Which they were. Even the character models which are by far the worst part of the game. If you really want to compare it to something more contemporary you should go with Resident Evil. Same pre-rendered backgrounds. Same use of 3D sprites on top of said backgrounds. I'd still say RE probably looks worse because those backgrounds are terrible but it's not so great all around. I could probably sit here all day listing more games of the day that look as bad, or worse, than FFVII but I won't because I'd be here forever.

I'll just name Tobal No. 1 instead and walk away.

Quote Originally Posted by sinuosity View Post
The lego people definitely aren't fantastic, but they're simple and clean and surprisingly expressive. They animate well, which gives them a lot more expressive capability than the sprites in VI, for example.
I kind of disagree with this but only because so much of human expression comes from the face and the eyes in particular and despite those tiny sprites I thought FFVI did facial expressions better than FFVII. VII didn't really do a lot with them but the expressions in FFVI were gold. I'm still impressed they managed to cram as much expression as they did in there, but I guess that's what happens when you make the head take up half the sprite and the eyes most of that space all on their own.