This Game is Overrated

[Carl the Llama]

>implying that the votes of GameFAQs users have anything to do with "best"
that's just another form of popularity contest

I could just as easily say that the Metacritic scores of FFVI, FFIX, FFXII and CT being higher than the Metacritic score of FFVII shows that they're better games, but I'm not that kind of petty individual.

You could, but then you would be mistaken, FFVI, FFVII, FFXII and CT all get a Metacritic score of 92%, I just checked. Aside from that the term "best" is subjective, for you it means quality, to me it means game that has the highest rating by the fans of said games. I would also point out that metacritic is based upon the scores of the 20 critic reviews out there published by companies, companies that have a limited number of peoples opinions, where as the poll I provided had many voices, and in the opinion of those people (the gamers) FFVII is the best, simple as. Sure its a matter of opinion on how you define the word best but you could say that about anything, to me the majority wins out, that is how I define the word, so by default to me FFVII IS the best.

The pre-rendered backgrounds and FMVs are not "90%" of the graphics. You spend easily half the game staring at the character renders. They look atrocious. The comparison with sprites isn't applicable at all: FFVI's graphics remain some of the best sprite graphics in history. Dismissing an entire graphic style because some people find it "dated" is not the same as dismissing graphics that have been easily eclipsed by better examples of the same graphic style. FFVII looks like trout compared to FFIX. FFVI does not look like trout compared to Chrono Trigger or Suikoden II. Comparing FFVI's graphics to FFVII's is an apples to oranges comparison. Comparing FFVII's to FFIX's, or FFVI's to those of any modern sprite game, is not.

Ok so you really want to stress this fact, I just googled a random review of FFVII from 1997 and can you guess what it said? This:

What is necessary during the game's normal progression is the capacity for awe. FF7's graphics are light years beyond anything ever seen on the PlayStation, making Wild Arms look like a Yarouze demo (we have nothing against Wild Arms, but FF7 is that good). The game begins in an enormous industrial complex housed in a futuristic city, and remains there for the first seven or eight hours of play. Just when it appears that the entire game will take place in the city, the venue changes to a fully 3D, fully rotatable engine, and players will find that the city is a mere dot on the enormous world map.

Nothing about how horrendous the polygons look, "awe inspiring" pretty much say it all. Arguing about a games graphics is like arguing how a steak looks, when you should be arguing about the taste. Taking into the fact that the game started development in 1994 when the PSone was brand new speaks pretty much for itself.

Then lets consider the graphics of FFIV V and VI:





And now CT:



I don't know about you, but I consider CTs graphics far superior to graphics from VI. And when considering FF snes games alone, I would actually say V trumps VI in terms of graphics. But hey, that's just my opinion.

There are people who want FFVII remade so they can fix glaring flaws with the game other than its graphics. Even people who like the game, for example, generally admit that the translation we got was an atrocious clustersmurf that created unnecessary ambiguities in the story and renders parts of the game almost incomprehensible. The fact that Square felt they had to clarify so much of the game with five dozen (note: this is hyperbole) Ultimanias and similar indicates that they themselves realised they screwed up. If the game stood on its own, they probably wouldn't feel it needed so much clarification. Granted, arguments could be made (and in fact I have made them in some cases) that the clarifications often actually made the original game worse, but regardless, the storytelling in some cases is sloppy and the translation is much worse.

Would you give me some examples of these so called "glaring flaws" and "almost incomprehensible" because I never encountered such while I was playing.