To both lovers and haters of FF7

[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.