(SPOILERS) Which character would win your "Most Improved" award?

[Fox]

If anything, I feel the campiness of FFVII is sonething modern mainstream gaming is seriously lacking and I hope it’ll usher in a new era of zaniness. Cultural shifts happen and games being super serious all the time is already stale

With narrative storytelling in games being taken more seriously than ever now and with movies and tv shows looking towards video games for ideas of what to make more than they ever have before I think they are a long ways away from a shift back to the era where games were simply meant to be games and the seriousness of the story didn't matter all that much. And a game where they have to use almost quarter century old characters isn't going to be the game to start the shift back to video game zaniness. If anything it is only going to remind people how much gaming has progressed since 1997.

On the contrary, FFVIIR shows that you can take a 'zany' game telling a 20 old year story and shows that it can still work. The characters in FFVII are, in part, caricatures. They have very clearly defining personality traits that are exaggerated to fit the tone. I don't think a girl who flirts while running away from a reactor explosion is particularly out of place in a city built 300 metres in the sky by an electric power company who has their own army of enhanced super soldiers.

And it works. Plenty of people are finding that this is just... better... than a lot of what is coming out these days.

I'm glad to have FFVII demonstrate that even in the year 2020 it's possible to have a really well done, well polished, non-sad dad story in a mainstream video game.