GameSpot presents CGW's Final Fantasy VII review (original) (raw)

A guy wielding swords with a serious case of repressed memories. Cat puppets riding on gigantic stuffed animals. A martial-arts expert whose measurements put Lara Croft's to shame. These are just some of the wild characters you will portray in the PC port of SquareSoft's successful PlayStation role-playing game Final Fantasy VII. Now it's been polished up a bit and has entered the PC arena, but how does it fare? It's a prime example of console-style gameplay, which is both good and bad.

Attempting to summarize the plot is simply futile, since it is truly immense--which is one of the highlights of this game. There are many complex layers, subplots, and bouts of symbolism scattered throughout. It starts off with the protagonist, a mercenary named Cloud Strife, taking part in an act of eco-terrorism against the evil Shinra Inc., which is drawing power straight from the planet's natural energy stores. Through an incredible series of twists and turns, involving things such as an ancient prophecy, a so-called Holy Land, and a gigantic meteor, the plot becomes significantly more complex. Secrets are revealed, betrayals are committed, and revelations are made. While it all boils down to "Kill Foozle," it's one of the best implementations of that style of story I've seen.

Character development is equally strong. You control a total of nine characters (seven main characters plus two optional ones that you must recruit on your own), and each has his or her own back-story, motivations, and habits. As you play the game, these characters intrigue you, and you get so attached to them that you might jump as a reaction to a shocking event on the first disc. Final Fantasy VII evokes that kind of emotional response.

Standard Fantasy Fare
Gameplay is vintage console-RPG, in that you progress linearly through a storyline while engaging in combat that is both random and predetermined. That is to say, it's almost like a graphic adventure game with loads of combat thrown in.

A leader (usually Cloud) represents your entire party as you journey in either 2D-prerendered locations or the 3D-rendered exterior gameworld in an isometric perspective. These locations range from the dark and gritty city streets of Midgar to the beautiful Temple of the Ancients to the vast plains outside the Chocobo farm. The gameworld is quite large, featuring several cities and dungeons.

The game is entirely story/dialogue-driven, in that you progress by going to certain locations, talking to certain people, and winning certain battles. The amount of dialogue is staggering, so using voice acting would have required many more discs. Gamers will have to settle back into actually reading the text, as in the old days. The dialogue itself is uneven, and sometimes downright silly. Yet, at other times it works at tugging at your emotions as well. I'm not sure whether to blame the translators or the writers for the mixed bag of content quality.

Console Combat
Combat consists of mostly random encounters, with a few preordained matches thrown here and there. You get into battle without warning, and most of these fights are for level pumping, so if you don't feel like it, you can just flee.

The combat system is one of the game's distinguishing characteristics. It's a workable mix of phased-turn and realtime. You give your characters their commands, they carry them out, and then you wait for their time-gauges to fill up. It feels turn-based, because you tell them what to do and wait for the result and another chance to give commands, but the enemies are able to attack you while you're waiting or making a decision.

The magic system is even harder to explain. Magic is tied to the substance "materia," and different materia casts different spells. Anyone can cast any spell, as long as he or she possesses the proper materia. Materia also gains experience, so that you can cast higher-level spells contained within the materia; a lot of the strategy is figuring out which materia to develop.

The enemies are wonderfully imaginative and are pulled from many fantasy and sci-fi sources. You will fight traditional dragons, futuristic soldiers, and even giant houses sprouting arms and legs. The enemies are portrayed with shaded polygons rather than textures, but are, on the whole, more varied and imaginative than the enemies in traditional role-playing games.

Final Rites
Unfortunately, this port is kind of a technical letdown. Yes, it uses 3D acceleration, but this is dubious at best. The initial release didn't support certain 3D-accelerator cards, such as those using the RIVA chipset, so it was mostly restricted to gamers with 3Dfx cards. On top of that, the port didn't work with Cyrix processors, and it generally behaved very badly during installation. While I personally had no trouble running and installing it, one CGW editor gave up after hours of installation mayhem, and Usenet forums have been filled with horror stories about FFVII installation problems.

The 3D acceleration affects only the character models, the battle engine, and the overworld map. The prerendered backgrounds are a bit washed out, probably due to monitor-versus-TV resolution problems. And unfortunately the stunning cinematics of the PlayStation version are diluted and blurrier in the PC conversion. They still convey most of the epic feeling and cinematic technique; it's just not as powerful as it is on the TV screen.

The game's sound is also a letdown. The sounds range from average to downright abysmal (an important event is accompanied by sounds that seem to be from the Atari 2600 era). The music, while beautifully composed, is butchered by being dependent on your sound card. The software synthesizer is barely adequate, and unless you have a SoundFont-capable sound card (such as the AWE32/64), then One-Winged Angel, perhaps the best battle music ever composed for a game, is a pale imitation of its PlayStation counterpart.

The save system is uneven. When you explore the outdoor world, you are able to save anywhere, anytime. But in specific areas, such as Midgar or in other cities and dungeons, you can save only in predetermined spots. Since you start in Midgar and don't get out for a while, this could be disconcerting to gamers. And while saving anytime in the overworld was fine, the save-point in the last dungeon was annoying. A couple of spell mishaps meant I had to go through several battles all over again. One final annoyance in the save system is that you can reload only after you die; otherwise you have to exit and restart the game to reload a saved game.

Recommended, with Caution
Despite the technical problems and other troubling legacies inherent in console ports, I can't help but recommend this game. It is so radically different from other RPGs, and it presents such an intriguing story, that I was compelled to play more. However, if you're a die-hard "traditional" CRPG fanatic who cut your teeth on games like Wizardry VII and Ultima IV, and you don't have a high-end Pentium with a 3Dfx card, you might want to pass. If you're fairly confident in your hardware, are open to new experiences and perspectives in role-playing, and can put up with idiosyncrasies from console game design, then take the chance and experience some of the best storytelling ever found in an RPG.