finalark
SNORLAX
Link to original post: [drupal=1636]Review: Final Fantasy VII[/drupal]
If you know me, then you know that I wasn't very impressed with Final Fantasy VII. Yes, I am one of the few people who didn't find an amazing godsend from the divine planes of heaven. I found a run-of-the-mill RPG that could use some vast improvement. But one day (a few weeks ago), I was bored and was thinking of an RPG I could play to keep me occupied. I looked over all of my PS1 RPGs and I saw Final Fantasy VII, I knew I probably still wouldn't like it. But that annoying little voice that keeps me from blowing two bucks on a bagel every time I pass a Bruegger's told me to give it a second chance.
The game opens with a spiky-haired mercenary named Cloud (who is a completely emotionless prick), who has been hired by a terrorist group (which is lead by a black guy named Barret, who's trying to hard to be like Mr. T) called AVALANCHE. Said terrorist group is trying to take down an evil cooperation (there seems to be a law that says: "all companies that have ten thousand or more employees must be evil" in video games) called Shinra. And they're starting by blowing up their power plants called Mako Reactors, thus putting thousands of people out of business and causing city-wide panic. So after they blow up a Reactor, the heroes go back to a part of the slums where we meet Tifa. A bartender who is one of the two characters with any personality. Soon after that they decide it's time for another bombing mission, but this time they get caught on the way out but escape. Well, except Cloud, he gets to fall about two thousand feet onto concrete. But wait, he gets his fall broken by a building which somehow falls through the first layer of the city and onto some chick in the slums or... something like that. Anyway, here we meet Aries, now she's an interesting character. Not that she's a good character, she's interesting because of how little effort was put into her personality. It's almost as if the writers just kind of opening the big book of stereotypes, looked up "innocent and nice girl" then copy-pasted it into the game. And the very second Cloud meets her he goes from "emotionless prick" to "typical RPG hero with a one-track mind." From there a bunch of completely random and unrelated sub-plots happen until the Heroes go for a direct attack on Shirna's HQ in an attempt to save Aries from becoming a genetic experiment. It is here that we meet Red XII, the other character with a personality, and also Sephiroth, the real main villain of the game. The heroes all get tossed into cells which shields them from Sephiroth when he comes into Shinra HQ to slaughter everyone as if they were a bunch of red-uniforms and to take his "mother," Jenova, away. The poor girl must have been made out of solid gold or something because it gives to heroes enough reason to stop fighting Shinra and to go hunt down Sephiroth. The rest of the game is more or less a bunch of tangled sub plots with a vague main plot, so it's the third Pirates movie.
There are so many things wrong with this game's story that I don't know where to start... oh, wait, I do. I'll start with the very intrusive sub plots. Okay, now in a good story the sub plots merge with the main plot and flow seamlessly with it, but here the entire main plot comes to a screeching halt whenever a sub plot does so much as walks by it so that the heroes can go and resolve it. Even if it has little or nothing to do with hunting down Sephiroth. And the main cast is down-right terrible! Cloud is your typical RPG hero with a one-track mind, and he goes through his personality shift way to fast. Barret and Cid are basically the same character, yeah, one's black, one's white. One has a gun for a hand, the other uses a spear. One's a stereotypical "tough" black guy, the other is a stereotypical angry white guy. But in the end they're both guys who use swear words the same way a normal person uses a comma, hate Shinra for silly reasons, and they both dwell in the past. Only once was Cait Sith at all useful, he seems like a character they just threw in because they felt like the main cast needed to be bigger. Aries was a stereotype, Yuffie had a down-right bizarre materia fetish (more on that later, that is, what materia is, not the fetish) and was annoying as hell. Vincent really didn't do much but brood. The only good characters were Tifa, because she was, you know, characterized (somewhat), Red XII, for the same reason, and Sephiroth. Okay, question: why is it that I feel more sympathetic for Sphiroth over anyone else? Isn't the antagonist supposed to be hated or disliked by the audience? Yes, you can have a cool antagonist but the audience isn't supposed to care more about them then they do the rest of the heroes. And speaking of antagonists, I don't see why everyone insists that the Shinra cooperation is evil. Yeah, they aren't the most eco-friendly company but wait about ten years for the ecofreaks to initiate the whole "green movement" and that problem will be solved. And yes they've done a few questionable things in the past but who hasn't? Really, if you judge a company based off of that then almost every company is "evil." And yes, they're doing that whole "sucking the planet's mako energy" thing but come on, it's a resource! That's what resources are for, so you can utilize it for various means. It's really no different than oil or coal mining, it's just another one of this game's little holes in the plot. Which this game has a lot of, such as how Sephiroth likes to leave his sword stuck inside of people after he kills them but somehow always gets it back. Or how Red XII has kids at the end of the game but is the last of his kind.
Okay, I've spent enough time on the plot, now onto game play. Now I liked some of the game play, such as the materia system. Materia are basically these magic stones that you can stick into your weapons and armor to give your character's special abilities (magic, commands, ect) and you can get some pretty good customization with this. And the battle system is pretty fun to, although the summon animations are unskippable and get old after about the fourth time that you've seen them. They also have this thing called limit breaks, which are fairly powerful attacks that you can use when your limit bar fills up as you take damage. But the problem is that it's too exploitable because the **** thing is at max when a puppy does so much as urinate on your leg. I'd also like to point out that this game has a terrible habit of forcing you to play annoying mini games that you play once and you never seen again. It's almost as if the game's director was thinking up mini games for a Mario Party-like game but tripped and hit his head on something, causing him to think that it would be a good idea to shove them all into Final Fantasy VII. Every other step is another bloody mini game that your are forced to play otherwise the game folds it arms and closes off the rest of it. And this game also has some parts that are about as well translated as Zero Wing, such as how Cloud "still misses the Shinra" or how "this guy are sick."
Saying that Final Fantasy VII is better than any of the later installments is like saying that the 1700s Flintlock is better than the modern .9 Mil. Pistol. Yes, the Flintlock was amazing and revolutionary, when it was first invented but face it, it sucked! You only got one shot, then it's completely useless and has zero resale value, you couldn't hit the broad side of barn with it, so it was basically ****. Now don't get me wrong, Final Fantasy VII wasn't a bad game, it just wasn't a very good one. It was run of the mill, with run of the mill characters and run of the mill mistakes. Honestly, I really don't seen why anyone would still be obsessing over this game when there are many much better RPGs out today.
If you know me, then you know that I wasn't very impressed with Final Fantasy VII. Yes, I am one of the few people who didn't find an amazing godsend from the divine planes of heaven. I found a run-of-the-mill RPG that could use some vast improvement. But one day (a few weeks ago), I was bored and was thinking of an RPG I could play to keep me occupied. I looked over all of my PS1 RPGs and I saw Final Fantasy VII, I knew I probably still wouldn't like it. But that annoying little voice that keeps me from blowing two bucks on a bagel every time I pass a Bruegger's told me to give it a second chance.
The game opens with a spiky-haired mercenary named Cloud (who is a completely emotionless prick), who has been hired by a terrorist group (which is lead by a black guy named Barret, who's trying to hard to be like Mr. T) called AVALANCHE. Said terrorist group is trying to take down an evil cooperation (there seems to be a law that says: "all companies that have ten thousand or more employees must be evil" in video games) called Shinra. And they're starting by blowing up their power plants called Mako Reactors, thus putting thousands of people out of business and causing city-wide panic. So after they blow up a Reactor, the heroes go back to a part of the slums where we meet Tifa. A bartender who is one of the two characters with any personality. Soon after that they decide it's time for another bombing mission, but this time they get caught on the way out but escape. Well, except Cloud, he gets to fall about two thousand feet onto concrete. But wait, he gets his fall broken by a building which somehow falls through the first layer of the city and onto some chick in the slums or... something like that. Anyway, here we meet Aries, now she's an interesting character. Not that she's a good character, she's interesting because of how little effort was put into her personality. It's almost as if the writers just kind of opening the big book of stereotypes, looked up "innocent and nice girl" then copy-pasted it into the game. And the very second Cloud meets her he goes from "emotionless prick" to "typical RPG hero with a one-track mind." From there a bunch of completely random and unrelated sub-plots happen until the Heroes go for a direct attack on Shirna's HQ in an attempt to save Aries from becoming a genetic experiment. It is here that we meet Red XII, the other character with a personality, and also Sephiroth, the real main villain of the game. The heroes all get tossed into cells which shields them from Sephiroth when he comes into Shinra HQ to slaughter everyone as if they were a bunch of red-uniforms and to take his "mother," Jenova, away. The poor girl must have been made out of solid gold or something because it gives to heroes enough reason to stop fighting Shinra and to go hunt down Sephiroth. The rest of the game is more or less a bunch of tangled sub plots with a vague main plot, so it's the third Pirates movie.
There are so many things wrong with this game's story that I don't know where to start... oh, wait, I do. I'll start with the very intrusive sub plots. Okay, now in a good story the sub plots merge with the main plot and flow seamlessly with it, but here the entire main plot comes to a screeching halt whenever a sub plot does so much as walks by it so that the heroes can go and resolve it. Even if it has little or nothing to do with hunting down Sephiroth. And the main cast is down-right terrible! Cloud is your typical RPG hero with a one-track mind, and he goes through his personality shift way to fast. Barret and Cid are basically the same character, yeah, one's black, one's white. One has a gun for a hand, the other uses a spear. One's a stereotypical "tough" black guy, the other is a stereotypical angry white guy. But in the end they're both guys who use swear words the same way a normal person uses a comma, hate Shinra for silly reasons, and they both dwell in the past. Only once was Cait Sith at all useful, he seems like a character they just threw in because they felt like the main cast needed to be bigger. Aries was a stereotype, Yuffie had a down-right bizarre materia fetish (more on that later, that is, what materia is, not the fetish) and was annoying as hell. Vincent really didn't do much but brood. The only good characters were Tifa, because she was, you know, characterized (somewhat), Red XII, for the same reason, and Sephiroth. Okay, question: why is it that I feel more sympathetic for Sphiroth over anyone else? Isn't the antagonist supposed to be hated or disliked by the audience? Yes, you can have a cool antagonist but the audience isn't supposed to care more about them then they do the rest of the heroes. And speaking of antagonists, I don't see why everyone insists that the Shinra cooperation is evil. Yeah, they aren't the most eco-friendly company but wait about ten years for the ecofreaks to initiate the whole "green movement" and that problem will be solved. And yes they've done a few questionable things in the past but who hasn't? Really, if you judge a company based off of that then almost every company is "evil." And yes, they're doing that whole "sucking the planet's mako energy" thing but come on, it's a resource! That's what resources are for, so you can utilize it for various means. It's really no different than oil or coal mining, it's just another one of this game's little holes in the plot. Which this game has a lot of, such as how Sephiroth likes to leave his sword stuck inside of people after he kills them but somehow always gets it back. Or how Red XII has kids at the end of the game but is the last of his kind.
Okay, I've spent enough time on the plot, now onto game play. Now I liked some of the game play, such as the materia system. Materia are basically these magic stones that you can stick into your weapons and armor to give your character's special abilities (magic, commands, ect) and you can get some pretty good customization with this. And the battle system is pretty fun to, although the summon animations are unskippable and get old after about the fourth time that you've seen them. They also have this thing called limit breaks, which are fairly powerful attacks that you can use when your limit bar fills up as you take damage. But the problem is that it's too exploitable because the **** thing is at max when a puppy does so much as urinate on your leg. I'd also like to point out that this game has a terrible habit of forcing you to play annoying mini games that you play once and you never seen again. It's almost as if the game's director was thinking up mini games for a Mario Party-like game but tripped and hit his head on something, causing him to think that it would be a good idea to shove them all into Final Fantasy VII. Every other step is another bloody mini game that your are forced to play otherwise the game folds it arms and closes off the rest of it. And this game also has some parts that are about as well translated as Zero Wing, such as how Cloud "still misses the Shinra" or how "this guy are sick."
Saying that Final Fantasy VII is better than any of the later installments is like saying that the 1700s Flintlock is better than the modern .9 Mil. Pistol. Yes, the Flintlock was amazing and revolutionary, when it was first invented but face it, it sucked! You only got one shot, then it's completely useless and has zero resale value, you couldn't hit the broad side of barn with it, so it was basically ****. Now don't get me wrong, Final Fantasy VII wasn't a bad game, it just wasn't a very good one. It was run of the mill, with run of the mill characters and run of the mill mistakes. Honestly, I really don't seen why anyone would still be obsessing over this game when there are many much better RPGs out today.
.
So Everyone has their own reason for being addicted to the game. I know I do, I've been addicted to it since I've played it for so long. It even introduced me to the FF Series so yeah. It is excellent to me because of those reasons. Even with the shady story line and **** it was still great.
