FFVII was the first RPG I ever played. As an immigrant from a poor Balkan country, I never had access to computers and the only console I had ever played until 1997 was Atari 2600, which was a clone with built-in games (although it did have a slot for cartridges as well). I did buy an SNES after much convincing my father, against the advice of my friend. It was basically EOL at that point, but the price was right for our family's budget.
I borrowed the same friend's PS1 and had a blast with Resident Evil 2. Then he lent it again for FFVII.
When I started it,it seemed so stupid. Short, polygonal characters, lots of text and no context. Still, I kept on going. I discovered a whole new world of video games I hadn't encountered before. Began slowly immersing myself into it, and reading up on it at the middle school library's PCs. (486 running win 3.11 and slooow thrashing pagefile due to what was probably 4mb or less of RAM). Once I got started, there was no stopping me. I bought the official strategy guide, learned how much fun the materia system was, got emotionally involved when Aeris (Aerith) died, and spent more than 100 hours in that first game, and with some internet sleuthing, used the mega potions glitch to help me fight the mega bosses. At that point, the final boss was a cakewalk, with the most powerful summon a few times.
Lest one thinks it's nostalgia talking, I ended up playing it again twice more all the way to the end throughout the years.
The remake held my interest for a bit, but didnt like the new combat system, so lost interest . I'll try and pick it back up when the 2nd part, Afterbirth, is released.
Don't bother with FF7R, it sucks. I tried so hard to like it, as FF7R is my favorite game of all time. But it's just a bad game.
1. It's a remake which completely diverges story wise and gameplay wise from the original. So not a great thing off the bat, because it's a "remake" which is really a new game with an FF7R coat of paint on.
2. The game was needlessly padded out to try to justify why they split the game into multiple installments. That might've been fine if the new content was good, but instead there is so, so much boring filler content which exists just to pad the length of the game. It's a 40ish hour game iirc, and at least half of that could have been cut (and the game would've been better for it).
3. The story goes way off the rails and ends up with some fourth wall breaking stuff that is just plain amateurish in its writing quality. And to add insult to injury, the fans of the original who wanted a faithful remake are not so subtly implied to be the villains.
4. The combat is... ok for what it is. I don't like action combat. But it's very poorly tuned. For example, take Air Buster, a boss fight that takes a few minutes in the original. In FF7R, it's a 10 minute fight. It's the same basic strategy - it's weak to thunder, so use that a lot (and your abilities that add stagger, which is obviously not a thing in the original). Then the boss will be staggered, and you can unleash limit breaks to do big damage. The problem is, it's 10 minutes of just doing that. Nothing new or interesting happens, just hit the boss with chip damage until it's staggered, then do real damage for a few seconds, repeat for 10 minutes. It's not horrible as a system but it's really badly tuned.
So yeah, you're not missing anything with FF7R. It's just a really bad game, which isn't worth your time or money.
I enjoyed my time enough with Remake, but it's relied waaaay too much on having prior knowledge of FF7 and its extended universe. Remake threw Sephiroth in your face within the first hour of gameplay, without much explanation of who the guy is. In the original, Sephiroth was just the subject of whispers and rumors until you got an up-close look at him in the flashback after you've left Midgar.
I enjoyed your story, but I do want to make one correction. The upcoming second part to the remake is called "Rebirth", not Afterbirth. I think that would be a very different game indeed.
I played FF7 three times during my pre-pubescent years. Along with Chrono Cross twice, Chrono Trigger, FF9 and FFX. (I could not get into FF8's story or magic system.)
I really wanted to like FF7 Remake but stopped around 2/3 way through Midgar.
I don't know whether it's my lack of patience with with single player RPGs at this age, or whether it was just not a good game. I find I can only really get into the odd competitive multiplayer game these days because of the community & friends factor.
That said I always found I enjoyed FF7 much more after getting out of Midgar and having a semi-open world to run around in, versus the more on-rails experience of Midgar. I suppose I'll give the next installment a go.
Permanently missable secrets and a lot of farming are things that lose a lot of interest. I'm having trouble with ALL square games, there is just too much farm.
>I also think that while the cinematic scope and melodrama would eventually be copied by “Western” rpgs like Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Witcher, there is a degree of vulnerability to Cloud and his Final Fantasy successors that still isn’t quite allowed to exist among most of the gruff dudes and sad dads of ‘western’ games.
JRPGs are just much more open about feelings. It's really hard to describe. I'd actually even say that you can see that across all japanese games really regardless of the genre.
The thing that bothered me about the later Final Fantasys is that as the series went on, the protagonists got younger and more like pop stars than original characters. At some point it seems like they forgot they were making fantasy games and just started aping pop musicians (both in fashion and appearance/age) and Hollywood.
This happens to a lot of game companies though. Turnover leads to teams with no connection to previous games in the series and with that a loss of connection to what made the games so special.
> Turnover leads to teams with no connection to previous games in the series
It's even weirder and more fascinating than that. Turnover eventually leads to teams made of people who were fans of the original series, and the risk there is that their own interpretation of the series can become a navel-gazing love letter to the superficial stuff that floats on top of their memories (e.g. references, callbacks, tie-ins, inside jokes, and memes) while neglecting the underlying qualities that made them fall in love with the series in the first place.
Well, I have good news for you: the most recent Final Fantasy has the oldest protagonist in the series (after the prologue), at a grizzled and careworn 28. Prior to that the oldest protagonists were Cloud and Lightning, both 21. (Zidane is the youngest post-Famicom protagonist at 16.)
I don't consume japanese media too often. But from what I've been sensing, there is a real class tension in japan'a young population now. It's not like in america where we villify the powerful. It's quite the opposite. The lower class gets villified and portrayed with a certain malice that i find quite distasteful. There is a presaure to be in communion with the so called 'elites'. And this partly drives the change of theme and feeling in their media.
I wonder if there's any connection between theater and video games in Japan, since theater is another medium where emotion has to be exaggerated to get across to the audience. And some JRPGs (e.g. Final Fantasy or Octopath Traveler) are not just open with emotion but pull out all the stops to get across the emotion they're going for.
That's Kabuki theatre, but they are that way also thanks to the immense popularity of shōnen manga, aimed at young boys, where the main storytelling device is "tell, don't show".
As someone that wanted to get into anime and Japanese media in their 30s, this characteristic has majorly turned me off from the most anime, manga-derived games and JRPGs. I just cannot stand their lack of subtlety and nuance in writing.
It is a major and understated expression of the Western-Eastern cultural divide. In the Western world adults tend to appreciate sophisticated stories, maybe too much so, while, from what I understand, the traumatic break from happy school life to overly-rigid business Japanese culture is the reason why even grown adults tend to find refuge in late teen/school-age drama. Most Japanese animated media is made of, but not strictly for, 17 year olds in their senior year of high school fighting the universe and God himself.
Interesting thought - I wouldn't say there's a strong connection, but it feels a bit less distant than in the west, e.g. stage show adaptations of videogames are relatively common.
Manga got its style from shitty printing presses. They were not reliable enough to draw small detail faces realistically so they started drawing huge, super emotive faces instead with giant eyes and what not. I would guess it’s the root of it
One of the things that made FF7 special for me, beyond being my first JRPG, was that there wasn’t voice acting and I was ignorant to the fact that it was a Japanese game, so I was completely unaware of all the weird translations. This forced me to resolve my own interpretations of the characters, their mannerisms, speech patterns, etc.
I think this is what made FF8 and FF9 quite approachable, but then 10+ were jarring with the overly vocalized characters, verbalizing every slight emotion.
I think this is what led me to appreciate a less-is-more personal opinion on video game storytelling. Voice acting can sometimes be incredible. But often it’s just in the way.
I think you are in a minority.
Ff10 was huge leap at the time and they never looked back.
Voice acting is something most people enjoy and make the story actually enjoyable.
Sales have generally been trending down substantially since FF7. [1] X and X-2 only sold better by merit of both being two games counted as one, and by being released and released on a zillion platforms.
I think in general though there's this weird paradox in games that things we think we enjoy can make games worse, yet it feels bad to try to 'fix' now. I think the best example would be quest waypoints in various open world games. It's absolutely painful to play without them now, but on the other hand when one actually had to pay attention to your quests and goals, it resulted in vastly more satisfying gameplay compared to what's gradually turned into some weird ritual across a million games of fast-travel to nearest location, bee-line to colored dot, skim text, repeat.
No idea who first said the quote (that's been attributed to Gabe Newell) but it's just so true: give players the opportunity to, and they'll optimize the fun out of your game.
Perhaps OP is in the minority, but I am too then - I couldn’t enjoy the voice-acted versions; they all sounded cheesy.
With text only, I imbued the game with a little imagination - not unlike reading a book - and also found the weird translations let my imagination fill in the gaps
“You spoony bard” is one of the best lines in the whole series. Why would you want it to be changed to something unobtrusive? It has tremendous staying power and it gets people talking about a game they might’ve otherwise overlooked. And that’s tragic because FFIV is a wonderful game that should not be overlooked.
I think SquareEnix agrees with me, as they’ve kept the line in retranslations of the game.
That's a perfectly good and underappreciated translation. The guy is a hundred-or-so year old sage, he's not going to be turning the air blue, in that scene he's finally flown off the handle and is not going to be choosing his words carefully to match the modern ear. If you ignore the meme and read the words as they are, it really helps the emotion of the moment come through.
The pearl-clutching of the author regarding the women of the story, and Cloud's aversion to cross-dressing, is about as eye-rolling to me as those elements were to him.
That aside, it was a decent read, and in the end he said what I was hoping he'd realize: It was a game targeted at a particular demographic, though potentially enjoyable by anyone. The easter eggs which he chose to ignore are a part of the "openness" of the game that makes it feel like a more immersive world - I remember farming chocobos for hours in order to get the golden one, which would let me get the Knights of the Round summon.
As the author realizes but doesn't quite say, it was a product of its time. It is amazing as a video game the same way Zeppelin and Black Sabbath are amazing rock and metal - their sound is more impressive when you realize they were the vanguard of a new way of music. Seinfeld is "just" a nihilistic comedy like dozens of others, but it was first.
Some of these games are considered so great as a bandwagon effect, but I say that in a kind way: It's part of the common culture of gaming, and so experiencing it (and hopefully enjoying it) brings you into a familiarity with the subculture, the same way one has probably watched Star Wars or Star Trek to be a "sci fi" geek.
I'm eagerly waiting for 7 Remake's part 2 this February, having not played the original since it was on Playstation & I only had an N64. Having played a lot of SNES JRPGs via SNES9X or ZSNES, I loved the story and character building in FF6, gameplay of Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean, and overall gameplay of Lufia 2 and Chrono Trigger when I was younger.
I think back and I find that not that many modern games have the same influence on me as those older games from my childhood - I don't think it's necessarily the quality of games has gone down, FF16, Tales of Berseria, YS VIII are all exceptional RPGs, but it might be that we have so many entertainment options these days that truly memorable games get lost when there's always something new around the corner.
I’m in the minority, but I was let down by the game. I have RSI so forcing me into the modern combat in games destroyed it for me. I just wanted my turn based game. It also just didn’t feel like the original at all for as far as I played. Barrett’s voice was embarrassing to listen to I also remember feeling.
Yes you can switch off the fighting but that other system is very broken and it’s nothing like the Orginal.
I loved Lufia 2 as well, especially the Ancient Cave which blew my mind when I was younger since I didn't realize how they could make a full game and a replay-able 100 level dungeon in the same SNES cart.
My favorite game from SNES era is probably Tales of Phantasia though (the DeJap fan translation) - the gameplay mixed with a fun story across 2 different time periods was an amazing experience. I probably have FF5, 6, Chrono Trigger, Fire Emblem 4, or Star Ocean somewhere in the 2-6 range.
Lufia 2 came out in North America in May of 1996, just 4 months before the release of the Nintendo 64, so it may have been overshadowed. A lot of other late releases for the SNES are similarly underrated. Likewise with games like Kirby's Adventure for the NES, which was actually released 2 years after the SNES's debut!
Final Fantasy VII Remake was an exceptionally good game. It managed to make me feel like I was a kid again when I was playing the original game for the first time. The graphics, music and overall mood was just right. I can’t wait to play Rebirth in February.
I personally found the music “overdone”. I get wanting to spin it for today, but found in every reimagining that there was just too much going on with it.
Few games inspired the unexpected wonder and scale that FF7 did. 8 did a little. 9 hit the mark. So did X. Everything after was kinda of numb... I felt nothing for FF12 characters, or for the absolute trainwrecks that were FF15 and FF16. FF15 was an excuse to market real-life products to the player. It was exchausting having immersion broken by nissin noodles ads, and coleman camping gear ads. FF16 is some of the worst fighting I've ever had in a game, with a focus on these garbage cinematics. The brand is dead to me. I'll only replay the classic games, and that's why square has 1-6 pixel remasters at a staggering $80 virtual, and you can't even find the physical version for less than $110 on ebay. That's how bad the new series are.
Now we're awash in a cacophony of copycat indie devs who flood the market with cringeworthy half-finished games that can only copy the wonder of the FF series.
We at-least have hope with stunning remasters like Star Ocean Second Story R, which has that feeling of depth, progress, story, and nuance.
>Few games inspired the unexpected wonder and scale that FF7 did. 8 did a little. 9 hit the mark. So did X. Everything after was kinda of numb
The FF games you loved were created by the two talents at the heart of FF: series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and legendary composer Nobuo Uematsu. They left after X. I think the soul of the franchise left when these two did.
I played FF12 about 12 years ago and I couldn't name you a single character (or remember their personality/story) or hum a single music track. I played FF7 25 years ago and there's a few music tracks I still remember, and I can name most of the characters (though it helps that they're popular in gaming culture).
I replayed 12 a couple of years ago, the new Zodiac Age version. The quality of life changes in that have made it a significantly more enjoyable game, you can see now what they were aiming for and where they were up against the limits of the PS2.
Story is still a bit of a mess, pacing wise, but its voice acting has aged well (unlike X).
It’s a different game to the classic run, but I would rank it up amongst my favourites in the series now.
I don't care for the occasional cinematic quick time event combat in FF16 either but once you get the abilities maxed out the normal combat is actually amazing, particularly in Final Fantasy mode. I feel like the game should have been in Final Fantasy mode from the start.
For me, the highlight was FFVI. Square was firing on all cylinders on the SNES.
FFVII started the tilt into anime and, aside from FFIX, they've continued to lean into that. I don't care for it.
Luckily the indie developers (and even teams within Square Enix) have taken up the mantle. Chained Echoes, Sea of Stars, the Star Ocean Remake, the Tactics Ogre remake, Crosscode, the Seiken Densetu 3 remake, Live A Live, SaGa Frontier 3, the Octopath Traveler games - they're quite good, and that's just in the last few years! Maybe not to everyone's taste, but they are well made games and there's no shortage of good stuff to play.
I'm not sure what "tilt into anime" means here. FF has always been heavily influenced by anime. If anything, the earlier games bore those influences more obviously.
I love that game. I don't know how much of it is the excitement, but having enjoyed "III" and then going to VII I was pretty hyped when the opening sequence switched to player control. Nobuo Uematsu is a genius, you're basically at the peak of console music and graphics for the time, and it came in a thick box with three CDs.
Materia is on of my favorite systems, too, it made getting new weapons, armor, or materia more exciting than other games because you'd usually have a new way to combine the skills you want, or a far stronger attack with worse skill slots.
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I borrowed the same friend's PS1 and had a blast with Resident Evil 2. Then he lent it again for FFVII.
When I started it,it seemed so stupid. Short, polygonal characters, lots of text and no context. Still, I kept on going. I discovered a whole new world of video games I hadn't encountered before. Began slowly immersing myself into it, and reading up on it at the middle school library's PCs. (486 running win 3.11 and slooow thrashing pagefile due to what was probably 4mb or less of RAM). Once I got started, there was no stopping me. I bought the official strategy guide, learned how much fun the materia system was, got emotionally involved when Aeris (Aerith) died, and spent more than 100 hours in that first game, and with some internet sleuthing, used the mega potions glitch to help me fight the mega bosses. At that point, the final boss was a cakewalk, with the most powerful summon a few times.
Lest one thinks it's nostalgia talking, I ended up playing it again twice more all the way to the end throughout the years.
The remake held my interest for a bit, but didnt like the new combat system, so lost interest . I'll try and pick it back up when the 2nd part, Afterbirth, is released.
1. It's a remake which completely diverges story wise and gameplay wise from the original. So not a great thing off the bat, because it's a "remake" which is really a new game with an FF7R coat of paint on.
2. The game was needlessly padded out to try to justify why they split the game into multiple installments. That might've been fine if the new content was good, but instead there is so, so much boring filler content which exists just to pad the length of the game. It's a 40ish hour game iirc, and at least half of that could have been cut (and the game would've been better for it).
3. The story goes way off the rails and ends up with some fourth wall breaking stuff that is just plain amateurish in its writing quality. And to add insult to injury, the fans of the original who wanted a faithful remake are not so subtly implied to be the villains.
4. The combat is... ok for what it is. I don't like action combat. But it's very poorly tuned. For example, take Air Buster, a boss fight that takes a few minutes in the original. In FF7R, it's a 10 minute fight. It's the same basic strategy - it's weak to thunder, so use that a lot (and your abilities that add stagger, which is obviously not a thing in the original). Then the boss will be staggered, and you can unleash limit breaks to do big damage. The problem is, it's 10 minutes of just doing that. Nothing new or interesting happens, just hit the boss with chip damage until it's staggered, then do real damage for a few seconds, repeat for 10 minutes. It's not horrible as a system but it's really badly tuned.
So yeah, you're not missing anything with FF7R. It's just a really bad game, which isn't worth your time or money.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/401920/The_Binding_of_Isa...
I really wanted to like FF7 Remake but stopped around 2/3 way through Midgar.
I don't know whether it's my lack of patience with with single player RPGs at this age, or whether it was just not a good game. I find I can only really get into the odd competitive multiplayer game these days because of the community & friends factor.
That said I always found I enjoyed FF7 much more after getting out of Midgar and having a semi-open world to run around in, versus the more on-rails experience of Midgar. I suppose I'll give the next installment a go.
FF7 story is bland, simplistic, characters are semibaked. It is a product of its era, with meant poorly written characters and stories.
JRPGs are just much more open about feelings. It's really hard to describe. I'd actually even say that you can see that across all japanese games really regardless of the genre.
This happens to a lot of game companies though. Turnover leads to teams with no connection to previous games in the series and with that a loss of connection to what made the games so special.
It's even weirder and more fascinating than that. Turnover eventually leads to teams made of people who were fans of the original series, and the risk there is that their own interpretation of the series can become a navel-gazing love letter to the superficial stuff that floats on top of their memories (e.g. references, callbacks, tie-ins, inside jokes, and memes) while neglecting the underlying qualities that made them fall in love with the series in the first place.
Still love it, but its interesting to notice in retrospect.
As someone that wanted to get into anime and Japanese media in their 30s, this characteristic has majorly turned me off from the most anime, manga-derived games and JRPGs. I just cannot stand their lack of subtlety and nuance in writing.
It is a major and understated expression of the Western-Eastern cultural divide. In the Western world adults tend to appreciate sophisticated stories, maybe too much so, while, from what I understand, the traumatic break from happy school life to overly-rigid business Japanese culture is the reason why even grown adults tend to find refuge in late teen/school-age drama. Most Japanese animated media is made of, but not strictly for, 17 year olds in their senior year of high school fighting the universe and God himself.
I think this is what made FF8 and FF9 quite approachable, but then 10+ were jarring with the overly vocalized characters, verbalizing every slight emotion.
I think this is what led me to appreciate a less-is-more personal opinion on video game storytelling. Voice acting can sometimes be incredible. But often it’s just in the way.
It’s like reading a CYA book rather than a movie, I want to imagine their voices, not listen to some goofy voice actor.
Thank said, I think FFX did a decent job at it.
I think in general though there's this weird paradox in games that things we think we enjoy can make games worse, yet it feels bad to try to 'fix' now. I think the best example would be quest waypoints in various open world games. It's absolutely painful to play without them now, but on the other hand when one actually had to pay attention to your quests and goals, it resulted in vastly more satisfying gameplay compared to what's gradually turned into some weird ritual across a million games of fast-travel to nearest location, bee-line to colored dot, skim text, repeat.
No idea who first said the quote (that's been attributed to Gabe Newell) but it's just so true: give players the opportunity to, and they'll optimize the fun out of your game.
[1] - https://www.vgchartz.com/game/226241/final-fantasy/
With text only, I imbued the game with a little imagination - not unlike reading a book - and also found the weird translations let my imagination fill in the gaps
Given that flatness, I always found the voice acting awkward. I much rather read it.
I think SquareEnix agrees with me, as they’ve kept the line in retranslations of the game.
Thanks, this describes my take perfectly as well.
That aside, it was a decent read, and in the end he said what I was hoping he'd realize: It was a game targeted at a particular demographic, though potentially enjoyable by anyone. The easter eggs which he chose to ignore are a part of the "openness" of the game that makes it feel like a more immersive world - I remember farming chocobos for hours in order to get the golden one, which would let me get the Knights of the Round summon.
As the author realizes but doesn't quite say, it was a product of its time. It is amazing as a video game the same way Zeppelin and Black Sabbath are amazing rock and metal - their sound is more impressive when you realize they were the vanguard of a new way of music. Seinfeld is "just" a nihilistic comedy like dozens of others, but it was first.
Some of these games are considered so great as a bandwagon effect, but I say that in a kind way: It's part of the common culture of gaming, and so experiencing it (and hopefully enjoying it) brings you into a familiarity with the subculture, the same way one has probably watched Star Wars or Star Trek to be a "sci fi" geek.
I think back and I find that not that many modern games have the same influence on me as those older games from my childhood - I don't think it's necessarily the quality of games has gone down, FF16, Tales of Berseria, YS VIII are all exceptional RPGs, but it might be that we have so many entertainment options these days that truly memorable games get lost when there's always something new around the corner.
Yes you can switch off the fighting but that other system is very broken and it’s nothing like the Orginal.
My favorite game from SNES era is probably Tales of Phantasia though (the DeJap fan translation) - the gameplay mixed with a fun story across 2 different time periods was an amazing experience. I probably have FF5, 6, Chrono Trigger, Fire Emblem 4, or Star Ocean somewhere in the 2-6 range.
Now we're awash in a cacophony of copycat indie devs who flood the market with cringeworthy half-finished games that can only copy the wonder of the FF series.
We at-least have hope with stunning remasters like Star Ocean Second Story R, which has that feeling of depth, progress, story, and nuance.
The FF games you loved were created by the two talents at the heart of FF: series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and legendary composer Nobuo Uematsu. They left after X. I think the soul of the franchise left when these two did.
I played FF12 about 12 years ago and I couldn't name you a single character (or remember their personality/story) or hum a single music track. I played FF7 25 years ago and there's a few music tracks I still remember, and I can name most of the characters (though it helps that they're popular in gaming culture).
Yah... sigh. The world also moved on; while my kids did play FF6 recently, there's a lot of treadmill crap that modern gamers are not accustomed to.
I played The Last Story (which was a commercial failure), and it felt a whole lot like FF9 to me.
Story is still a bit of a mess, pacing wise, but its voice acting has aged well (unlike X).
It’s a different game to the classic run, but I would rank it up amongst my favourites in the series now.
Luckily the indie developers (and even teams within Square Enix) have taken up the mantle. Chained Echoes, Sea of Stars, the Star Ocean Remake, the Tactics Ogre remake, Crosscode, the Seiken Densetu 3 remake, Live A Live, SaGa Frontier 3, the Octopath Traveler games - they're quite good, and that's just in the last few years! Maybe not to everyone's taste, but they are well made games and there's no shortage of good stuff to play.
Materia is on of my favorite systems, too, it made getting new weapons, armor, or materia more exciting than other games because you'd usually have a new way to combine the skills you want, or a far stronger attack with worse skill slots.
Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 3: Playing Final Fantasy VII - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38736161 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)
Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38306057 - Nov 2023 (89 comments)