Overthinking Final Fantasy VII
By TGB 30 Comments
Stirring the flames of passion within the Final Fantasy legion has quickly become one of my favorite pastimes. It's just so much fun! Moving on from my disjointed primer on Final Fantasy Fandom, I've decided to do something more focused, direct and something that sometimes is down right spiteful. The time has come to spit in the eye of the cyclops. To face the ecclesiastical faithful and deny their Shepard, their prophet. To go toe for toe against the most beloved Final Fantasy of them all! I hate Final Fantasy VII, and so can you!
My major beef with the game pertains to its pacing and story. The first six hours of the game are perhaps the best RPG ever made. Midgar is an interesting and unique world in miniature. The pacing and direction within the Midgar arc of the story is comprehensible, engrossing and its steam-punk dystopia styling was a revelation for the genre. The story slides downhill from these dizzying heights once the characters escape from Midgar. When the veil that covered the world is lifted and a greater horizon is revealed, the world that emerges from the other side is rather sparse and dull by comparison. The game put a great first step forward, but didn't flesh out the world outside of Midgar very well.
Cloud's motivations and purpose throughout the march to Northern Crater are garbled and confusing as well. The man is clearly going insane and losing control of his psyche as they draw nearer to Sephiroth. Yet, no one in the party seems to notice or care. The story is further hurt by an atrocious localization job done by SCEA. Read the dialog for yourself, it simply does not hold up to the test of time.
Very important parts of the stories are also left unexplained and ill-defined. A fine example is the fact that Sephiroth, yeah is actually kind of a lazy bastard. He spends the entirty of the game hanging out in his strange cocoon in Northern Crater. Every time you see Sephiroth before you reach the center of the Crater was just Jenova pretending to be him because Sephiroth was telepathically controlling pieces of Jenova from afar. Buh? If you want to have a better idea of what actually happened in Final Fantasy VII check out Falsehead's well written plot analysis, reading that piece made think about the story for FFVII and made me realize how bat-shit insane the story was. Though to be kind to the game the localization was so porous that it's possible the actual story is brilliant, but its so swamped down by SCEA's amateurish that I may never know.
Cloud's character is also a causality of his time. Cloud was the first of many RPG characters created in a post Neon Genesis Evangelion world. Final Fantasy VII established the precedent for the main characters in jrpg's to be jerks with major physiological problems. His surliness and psychoses were were interesting and unique for the time, but his example would haunt avid jrpg players for years.
Gameplay wise Final Fantasy is probably the most shallow in the main series. The materia system makes all the characters interchangeable. By the middle point of the game the only difference between the characters other than their materia is there limit breaks and sometimes their weapons (on a side note Cloud's Nail Bat is great, that Bat with a nail in is the most awesome weapon in any game ever). Every Final Fantasy before and since tried very hard to make the characters distinct in their abilities or reward the player for creating a balanced differentiated squad of heroes. Final Fantasy VII lost sight of that goal as soon as the character left Midgar. Strong and powerful materia could be found on the ground or in the shop like candy. The characters quickly become the materia they are wearing and cease to be unique, Yuffie and Tifa are almost exactly by the time you reach Nibelheim if you give them the same materia. Final Fantasy VII materia system just can't hold a candle to the other character development systems that Square has used in other iterations of the series.
The things that I mentioned are what make it such a great game in the first place. It tried a lot of new things in the genre, not every idea was a winner to be sure, but touchstone games often rise above the sum of their parts. I think Final Fantasy VII is one of those games, it's very easy to pick it apart by disassembling the whole, but doing so makes you lose the whole picture, makes one subservient to the wiles of the mind at the expense of the heart. It makes you a troll, something I could only stand doing for about 30 minutes before I felt dirty and felt the need to retract and give an actual genuine appendix to this piece.
Games should be enjoyed and not over thought too much, I think Final Fantasy VII was a game that had a lot of heart, the makers succeeded in finally making the type of game that they wanted to make. Unlike the points I made, Final Fantasy is perhaps the most genuine game in the franchise. Midgar especially was the realization of something that Sakaguchi and company had always wanted to achieve in games like Final Fantasy VI but didn't have the graphical chutzpah to turn into reality (Vector was pretty cool, but it didn't have the same gloomy weight and gravity that Midgar did). I think heart is one of the things that is missing from critical reviews today. Is the subjectively evaluating a game based out its genuineness and heart perhaps a bit bias? Yeah, probably, but it's a whole lot better then just roboticly listing perceived pros and cons.
Was I a disingenuous dick for writing the first few paragraphs dick for writing the first few paragraphs of this blog? No doubt, but I think I have a new found appreciation for Final Fantasy VII and other games as a result. Let me catch my breath and remember that I play video games because their fun and engaging, not so I can prove the length of my critical penis on the Internet. Keep on trucking Final Fantasy VII and FFVII fans, don't lose heart and let trollish snobs berate your game of choice. This blog was a lot of fun to write, but it made me feel all icky inside after I realized how venomous and devoid of taste and humor. Like Doctor Frankenstein I have looked at my creation, found it inadequate and a pox upon my character and am washing my hands of the affair. Boy do I feel cleansed. It was a strange and crazy trip to come to this conclusion, but I think it was worth it