RPG Review: Final Fantasy VII

	There ain’t no gettin’ offa this train!
	All right everyone, let’s mosey!

So after we finished FF7 Rebirth, we decided we wanted to see the rest of the story and not wait another 5 years and FF7 OG just so happened to be on sale so we decided to buy it for $5 on Steam and give it a whirl. First thing I did was install 12 gigs of mods to make the game 1. look less ugly because people spent years completely redrawing all the sprites, cut scenes and backgrounds 2. to make it less of a pain my ass with some upgrades like my HP and items never going down. 😂 I had intended to play it mostly legit (aside the HP buff mod) but then I hit a brick wall of “OLD GAME ANNOYANCE” and installed Black Chocobo to give myself basically the ability to 9999 every enemy. Apparently you can legitimately do that with the Steam version as well, however it would require you to actually play the non-modded game and also apparently connect it to your Square Enix account (WTF?) Sorry but in the year 2024 I just do not have hundreds of hours to grind levels, weapons, and *drumroll* Materia! This allowed us to breeze through the game in about 23 hours, 3 of those hours were us spinning in circles due to the terrible 2D backgrounds that were supposed to be in a 3D plane.

Holy SHIT I did not expect this game to be as bad as it was. I was prepared to simply be a reflexive hater in the sense of “heh, thing that you like and is popular is overrated, ACTUALLY” but I didn’t expect the game to be BAD bad!!!!!! Turns out FFVII Rebirth really did capture the general vibe of FFVII of “so much tedious bullshit that you can’t stand before you can get back to the story.” Anyway we cheated as usual. In this case it was using a save editor to give everyone max levels and every item. This allowed us to breeze through more or less every fight with the exception of the accidental attempt at Emerald Weapon, where we nearly failed the enrage mainly because somehow Cloud’s LB got glitched. When I think about trying to legitimately engage with the game’s systems it made me realize the absurd amount of grinding that would be required. A lot of the character’s gear has tons of materia slots so you’d need to max out dozens of materia. And looooooooooooool I’m trying to imagine doing Emerald or Ruby Weapon legit and spamming Knights of Round having to sit there for like 2 minutes every time you attack. (I don’t have to imagine it at all of course, I went to Youtube and saw the video of it which consisted of 15 minutes of the summon animation lol.)

Since I’ve already talked about my general thoughts on FF7 characters in my remake posts I’ll just mention a few things briefly specifically about the original game. As I mentioned above, the backgrounds in the game are the most irritating shit since FF8. Yea I know FF8 comes after 7, but it’s backwards to me since I played 8 first. In 8 it was hard to tell where the exit was because there was no markers on the map. Fortunately FF7 had markers for entrances and exits but it had NO CLEAR MARKERS where you could ENTER or climb or go up a stairs. So for example, our first brick wall was the train graveyard. We spent an hour trying to figure out how to get on the other side of the trains because we didn’t realize that you could go behind certain parts of the trains and go inside them and come out the other side because the entire background is 2D while your character is 3D. It felt like I was in some kind of hall of mirrors and I just kept smashing myself into walls because I thought that’s where the exit was. (ノ# ﾟдﾟ)ﾉ ┫:･’∵:．┻┻:･’．:∵

Our most frequent rage point came from the incredibly poorly-conceived idea to have 2D environments which are then given the impression of being 3D. The reason this is a problem is that the perspective gets incredibly unclear and we constantly could not tell how elevation, passageways, foreground/backgrounds, etc. worked. This is kind of the opposite of a 90s version of YELLOW PAINT, where now the problem is that the confusion comes about because the graphics are too bad rather than too good. So for example, because the graphics can’t really portray height well, there were times where we didn’t realize that something was or was not a ramp and in turn kept thinking that we could/could not proceed. Early on we thought that maybe one of the upscaling mods was causing a glitch or something and messing up the hitboxes because why can’t we walk along this “obvious” grating? I’d also put incredibly aggravating things like trying to navigate the world map using the Tiny Bronco in this category as well

We actually thought that maybe the mods had glitched our game and we restarted and disabled all of them several times and then after googling I finally found someone who mentioned that you can go “through the other side of the train”. Eventually after prodding and pocking various parts of the screen I found where you ENTER and EXIT the train to go to the next map. W T F. This was only the beginning. We got stuck on these weird pixel areas several times where we had to climb wires in the Shinra building or climb up Ungabunga’s house in Cosmo Canyon. I also got lost at the stupid giant seashell where Aerith was buried and kept running in circles outside trying to figure out where the right side entry was. 🤯 I BASICALLY SPENT MORE TIME TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHERE TO MOVE ON A MAP THAN PLAYING THE GAME LMAO. 😂😂😂

Then there’s well, the minigames. It felt like there were significantly fewer of them than in FFVII Rebirth, but there were still far too many and the worst ones are REALLY bad. I am dreading returning to that snowboard minigame in the final FFVII remake game!!!!!! Or warming up on the glacier. Or the sub battle. Although on second thought, a lot of the minigames that they kept in the remakes were still better than the originals. The bike minigame in the original had the most bizzare controls of all. We would complain about the bad controls in the remakes but you wouldn’t just like, fly all over the screen with the faintest touch of the controller. (I don’t really even know how to rate the original Fort Condor. The Rebirth version of it suuuuuuuuuuuuucks, but the original is not only stupid but the best strategy is simply to wait for everything to slowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwly walk over to you so that you can…just fight them in a normal battle.) Fortunately/unfortunately they also cut out the minigame where you have to give CPR to a drowning loli. (Hopefully when the PC version of Rebirth comes out the modders will add it back in.)

The actual story as expected, progressed much faster. The entirety of FF7 Rebirth took us about 5 hours in the original version. FF7 remake was also another 5 hours. The final parts of the game took us longer because I was trapped in the stupid snowy mountain, full of you guessed it, more mini games. Fortunately the mini games were a lot less annoying in FF7 OG and there was just less of them in general. Some parts of the game felt ridiculous like the snowboarding mini game: Why is there only 1 snowboard in the entire world and how did Cloud not die after I had him smash into snowballs, rocks and walls several times down the mountain. 😂😂 The other thing is we could never figure out WHY we were going to certain places in the first place. Sometimes they game would be like “we should go talk to X at X town” but other times the only way I knew to go somewhere is because this awesome guide would tell me to proceed there for the next part of the story.

The story is…okayish. Here we have the opposite problem of the remakes where the game often didn’t have enough connective tissue at times. Most of disc 2 is spent going to places that nobody ever really mentions or explains to do things that they magically know what to do once they get there. It feels really bizarre where we’ll look at a guide and it’ll say “okay now you go to Bone Town” when nobody has said a single thing about what Bone Town is, how to get there, why we need to go there, and so on. The remakes go wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy too far where we got to the point where the first 18 hours of FFVII Rebirth were about one hour in the original but the game definitely needed a lot of the gaps in the narrative to be filled in, combined with how the extra little character building scenes went a long way. Midgar does not need to be 10 times longer (and feature multiple sewer dungeons), but some of those scenes with the Avalanche B team add a lot to deepen the understanding of the team, or turning Wall Market into a fun explorable hub gives a better sense of place to the setting. And meanwhile many of the character-focused scenes in the original feel a little too phoned in. Why are we going to Rocket Town? idk but otherwise Cid’s character arc won’t resolve itself.

The story did get interesting after flower girl croaked but I guess 20 years of spoilers and memes kinda made her death not all that shocking or interesting to me (especially not after seeing it in Rebirth just a week earlier.) I loved all the parts of the story about Cloud’s degradation and Tifa basically being there for him throughout till the end. Honestly the Cloti wagon is what pretty much kept my motivation for a lot of the end game – along with the Sephiroth memes. Also after watching this video a lot more stuff made sense to me but also puts a funny spin on the entire story 😂

The most important realization here is that coming from the extremely expanded (cough cough padded cough cough) remakes is that well, Aerith doesn’t actually have going for her in the original. She never really gets enough time or emphasis to really feel like a member of the team or that she’s Tifa’s BFF. She’s honestly pretty dull. And then she dies like 8 hours into the game, and since there’s again too many “gaps” in the narrative the game never gets the opportunity to give the characters enough time for her loss to really affect them. Plus she’s not a particularly useful character to use in the party (made worse by how the materia system shaves off any uniqueness for how the characters play), so by not using her it also reduces to the attachment? Oh I lost the character I never use? Okay whatever no skin off my back.

I also honestly thought that the story gets too muddled where it can’t decide between the Shinra storyline or the Sephiroth/Jenova one. Shinra is a more interesting angle where they’ll destroy the planet haphazardly through greed (along with the protagonists wondering what they can even do to stop them), while meanwhile Sephiroth wants to destroy the world simply because he’s a yanhomo slasher movie monster. But meanwhile there probably isn’t an easy way to resolve the former. Killing Rufus or Hojo won’t suddenly turn off all the power plants, but all you gotta do to stop Sephiroth is fire off your LB (or rather, after he does his 2 minute long special attack that destroys an entire solar system but that you can heal off with a megalixir).

Anyway overall I’m not sure if it’s the “old game frustration”, the memes, or the fact that the story just felt overhyped by all the people who were 10 years old in 1997 and thought this was the best game ever but FF7 didn’t really live up to the hype for us. I would rate it as definitely one of the worse FF games we’ve played (and we have played pretty much all of them except when I rage quit 3.) I would rate 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, and 16 well above this series personally. I think at the time since it was the first non-pixel FF game with actual movie cut scenes, it was definitely cutting edge at the time. Playing it over 20 years later though, it definitely shows its age and it just doesn’t hit the same way. That said, since the part I enjoyed more is after the events in Rebirth, I am crossing my fingers in the hope that the final installment of the FF7 Remake will be less mini games and more focused on the actual story. Also, I’m hoping they will retcon the ending and change it to give everyone a happy end instead of Nier Automata.

At least Sephiroth’s theme song is an all-timer.

And now, for yet another great FF7 in a nutshell parody video: