iguanaActually, Yuffie's my favorite character.
NumbuhInfinityI notice I don't replay games much nowadays (back in the day, I've always replayed RPGs many times, including the aforementioned games) after beating them, not sure why.
Same here. FF6, Chrono, etc... when I first played them I couldn't help replaying them over and over, now I'm lucky to get through RPGs even once.
I think a large part of it has to do with novelty--back then, I was new to RPGs and they just wowwed me, yet I didn't have very many of them so I made as much as I could out of the ones I had. Nowadays, 69% of my game library is RPGs and I've played them so much that I just don't care. Then again, I notice I'm the same way with other types of games as well--I have trouble getting into a game again if I've played it too recently. Maybe its just that the novelty of gaming has worn off.
As for FF7 itself, here's a review I wrote and posted on other forums just a few days ago:
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Okay, I have now finished Disc 1 of Final Fantasy VII. As I was playing, I wrote down my thoughts and feelings at irregular intervals, basically so I would remember how I really felt overall instead of judging the entire disc by its absolute best and worst moments (as I usually do).
Overall ThoughtsSo far, my re-experiencing FF7 was a mixed reunion. At times, I thought "This game isn't so bad." At other times, the game bored me, and at still others it annoyed me to the point where I wanted to unhook my Playstation and go back to playing NES games. For the most part, the bad outweighed the good, but I'm still determined to play this game through to the end.
The StorylineOf course I won't be able to deliver a complete critique until I've beaten the game, but still there are some observations I can make from material covered here.
First of all, Disc 1 suffers much from artificial length extension, where the writers add a bunch of filler just to extend the length of the game so they can advertise that its "a story so epic it takes X hours to complete!" Now, the pacing of the plot was all well and good when you were in Midgar and it picks up again near the end of the disc, but inbetween the good parts you get basically a group of seven (nine if you find Yuffie and Vincent) people who chase a black-caped man from town to town with very little actual plot advancement. It stretches five hours of plot over twenty hours, basically.
Now, generally I don't believe you should judge a story by what general traits you recognize but rather by particulars--you don't judge a portrait by its frame--but as a whole, Final Fantasy VII's story strikes me as simply "standard," there's nothing particularly bad about it, but there's nothing that stands out, either.
Except maybe one thing: Aeris' death. In the years since I first played this, I had forgotten what a good bit this was--especially considering its probably the most acknowledged and discussed part of the entire game, the one part of the story that everyone knows even if they've never played the game before, so its easy to make a retrospective analysis that dismisses this scene as a cheap ploy for emotion. But watching it again, it actually works. And not because of the FMV, and not because of anything involving Aeris' character, and only slightly because of the music. No, what makes it work is the dialogue between Cloud and Sephiroth, and in particular what Cloud actually says. I mean, I have never seen a death of a major character done with this much honesty. I mean usually when a major character dies all that happens is everyone says they were a good friend, Cloud talks about all the things Aeris is never going to do again, says his throat's getting dry... and actually interrupts a Sephiroth monologue. This is just good, right here. GOOD.
Now that I think about it, the beginning segments in Midgar are also really good, probably because they don't suffer from pacing problems--a story is definitely being told here, a compelling one at that. In fact in retrospect, the time spent in Midgar almost seems like a totally different game. Easily Shinra was a better villainous figure than Sephiroth--I mean, these were guys who were so determined to crush all resistance that they flattened an entire Midgar sector just to get at a group of five or six people.
Once you're out of Midgar though, the game's plot takes a sudden shift and so do things like Shinra. Now that Sephiroth is the big baddie, Shinra is relegated to the background and basically jump the shark, being represented by little more than common threads in everyone's backstories and occasional appearances by the Turks, who are a rather questionable group of "professional" covert agents... "professionals" who do everything from develop crushes on the good guys to worrying about stepping on flowers while failing time and again to capture an overall average young woman. Then again, Shinra is the same company which had a top-ranking scientist that thought he could continue the bloodline of the Ancients by making Aeris mate with a dog, so I guess I shouldn't trust too much in Shinra's competency.
Probably the one thing that really hurts the story for me though, is when Sephiroth's plan is finally revealed: To call down a meteor then absorb the life energy of the planet to become a god. Just reading that bit suddenly made me feel like I was watching a cartoon instead of playing an RPG, and
destroyed Sephiroth's character in the process. I mean before that, Seph
was kind of this mysterious character of questionable mentality, but once
you read that he's just another madman.
The MusicNow is it just me, or does some of the music sound like revised versions of music from Final Fantasy
Six? I can't remember all the familiar songs I heard, but I know I heard one that sounded a lot like the FF6 Opera House song, several times. Ironically I found the "recycled" music to generally be the better set of tunes--the songs unique to this game came off, like the plot, as "standard."
Play Control and GraphicsNow, normally I don't comment on play control in RPGs, but I did have some problems here. Simply put, I wish this game had Analog Joystick support (I know this game was invented before the Dual Shock but still, a man can wish), as some parts were a pain to navigate with the digital pad and I had trouble getting Cloud to face some people so I could talk to them.
I also really hate Square's "cinematic" camera angles that channel the spirit of Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil. These have a hand in some of my control problems, but also are just really impractical. I can't always make out features that I need to be able to discern because an object is too far away or shown at an angle where its unclear what it is--an example of this is the bell in Wutai--I had to actually look at a FAQ because I didn't even know what that thing was, much less that I was supposed to ring it (and even after looking at the FAQ, the bell was surrounded by so much visual clutter that I had to go into the gazebo housing it and keep pressing the circle button until something happened). Frankly, I don't see why every area couldn't have been three-dimensional like the overworld.
MateriaI'm gonna say upfront: I am not a fan of systems that allow you to customize your character however you want. I mean, I like the idea of it, I just have yet to see a game that pulls it off right, whether it be PC or Console, new or old.
In FF7's case, there's quite a few reason Materia is not good customization. One reason that I found early on was that there simply is not a very steep penalty for loading a character down with Spellcasting Materia--I actually experimented with Cloud, fighting enemies both with and without Materia, and the only difference was that he did 50 HP more damage without Materia. That's not exactly a compelling reason to avoid allowing him to throw fire, heal wounds, and summon dieties.
Another was a lack of variety in the Materia. Simply put, its too easy to get your hands on Materia that allows you to cast spells, but not easy enough to get your hands on Materia that improves your strength or speed and gives you a special ability.
Let's suppose, for example, that I wanted to make Barret a character who has strong physical attacks but can't use magic. Woops, sorry... there's no store on the first disc where you can buy attribute-enhancing materia, except for HP Plus which can be bought in Cosmo Canyon. Barret would simply not have enough extra power in his punch to provide a compelling reason to deprive him of universally-useful attack and healing spells. Perhaps if there were stores where I could buy attribute-enhancing Materia I'd be more inclined to modify him. I'm imagining that on disc two maybe such a store appears, but by that point... why bother? The bonus wouldn't be sufficient to handle the latest challenges unless I went out of my way to level up the Materia.
What it comes down to is, Materia was actually a good system, just Square flubbed it. All that they would have to do to fix it is make a wider variety of Materia available early on (and don't tell me that this would unbalance the game because, as pointed out, Materia starts out weak and levels up over time just like your characters, so that would balance it out). As it is though, basically all you can really do with the Materia system is make sure everyone has healing spells and equip whatever spells are most useful for the given circumstances.
The GameplayThis is where most of my problems are. Everything that irritated me about the game, major or minor, was specifically related to the gameplay.
And by "Gameplay" I mean "Battles."
Now, I hate complaining about this, because complaining about battles gives fanboys cause to complain that "you just hate it cuz you suck at it," but understand that I have beaten the first disc, including the Wutai subquest and finding Vincent, so don't dare think I'm just ranting about "challenges" I couldn't overcome.
Anyway, deal is the game eventually gets to a point where random encounter monsters have the most totally annoying gimmicks, which they use again and again. Often battles become more tedious and frustrating than challenging and fun. The downhill trend starts in that cave in Cosmo Canyon, where every enemy can start you on an instant-death countdown, forcing you to use spells like Fire2 which are real MP-suckers, just to get the battle over in time. Then Shinra Mansion hits you with little pumpkinhead ghosts who start every battle by casting mute spells on you (so you have to beat them down, which is kinda tedious and slow) and has some strange two-headed thing who is barely hurt at all by physical attacks. Okay, I know I sound like I'm tripping over myself here--on one hand I'm saying I want to be able to preserve my magic, on the other hand I'm saying I like to be able to use it if the battles are getting too tedious. But hey, a guy is allowed to have options, especially regarding a limited resource which may very well become a commodity--you never know when a boss is about to appear unless you read a walkthru.
But probably the worst offender of the "annoying battle tactics" category was these grasshopper-like things you face on Mt. Nibel. They do a move called "Lay Down" which does 200 HP per hit (mind you, this is
with the best armor, though all my characters were front-row so that may have been part of the issue). That wouldn't mean a damn thing, except that these things come in groups of five and all five seem to get to move before your guys can pull off an attack. I mean, in one battle, Barret went in with a full Limit Break gauge and,
first thing, I commanded him to use his hand grenade limit break (damages all enemies). I did this
right at the beginning of the battle, but the grasshopper things got to move first, and whats more all of them got to go
twice before Barret
ever got a chance to launch his attack--and by the time it was finally my guys' turn, Barret was dead. I've beaten a few groups of these grasshopper things, but it seemed like I could never finish one without one or two of my characters being either dead or in the yellow.
This kind of thing is, again, not fun or challenging in the "right" way, its just totally annoying for the player. I mean seriously, you know all those monsters in older RPGs who did nothing but heal each other and call for help causing battles to drag on endlessly? I would
gladly face those guys a hundred times instead of ever putting up with those darn grasshoppers again!
Well, thats all for my thoughts on Disc 1. I think I'll take a short break from playing the game, and then decide when exactly I'll post my thoughts next (should I go with a "end of each disc" pattern or just hold off until I beat the game, since the third disc is so short?)
