A look back at: Final Fantasy VII

Well, here's a special one. I hear way too much about this particular game, the iconic death scene, Sephiroth and Cloud in general, and the multiple spinoffs and important characters. It was only a matter of time before I laid my hands on this game.

And, well, it is a game. A very immersive example of a Final Fantasy game. You look at the bleak Midgar setting, but then release that's less than one-fifth of what you'd be dealing with when you reach the overworld. The focus of Materia being the centerpiece for learning everything makes this a lot more customizable than FF6, from spells, to summons, to enemy skills. Hell, a good focus of my playthrough of this game was learning the best enemy skills like Beta and Aqualung, and using those to break many of the games roughest enemies. The many dungeons in the game, as well as the flashbacks of things which take place in those areas can be memorable (damn you Great Glacier). And then you have the many, many minigames that would make the Breath of Fire games keel over. Yet they thankfully manage to not be too annoying, and an entire chunk of them exist in one area anyways.

So all this talk about the revolutionizing of the RPG genre and I didn't really feel all that magnanimous about this game. It's good but it isn't great. We have generally good characters like Red XIII, Cid, and Tifa, moderately good ones like Barrett and Hojo, and awful ones like Aeris. The whole Midgar thing pretty much paints Cloud and the group as terrorists, well they are at least fighting for a cause. We get to see which characters are definitely villainous, like Hojo and Sephiroth. We get to see these neat flashbacks from time to time, and even control characters during them. There's also the dating scenes as well as a few cool cutscenes, plus the censored and uncensored swearing. Most of it's quite flashy in its own sense, but today, that really doesn't mean a whole lot.

The circumstances for Sephiroth really don't make a whole lot of sense. All this because of his origins and his mother? Okay. Surprised he doesn't end up killing Hojo over all this considering he's the one responsible. And why Aeris and the President of Shinra being the only two to actually die by his katana anyways? Tifa gets slashed across the chest by it, but survives, even keeping her hat on. Tseng gets stabbed through the chest, also surviving, somehow. And Cloud himself? Skewered the same way, and also held aloft, but somehow managing to pull Sephiroth into the reactor below and as you might expect, surviving. This game sure does not know how to kill people sometimes. Then you have Cloud's manipulation of his abilities by the same guy which really just make you wonder how good of a character Cloud really is if he's prone to this a lot. The whole Lifestream concept went over my head, as did the whole deal with Black and Holy materia being the be-all-end-all materia. It's not as nonsensical a plot as Chrono Cross is, thankfully, especially at the beginning of the game and just about everything that actually involved Shinra, so to speak. Those parts were actually fun and felt like fun rivalries and all. The pursuit of Sephiroth also was good, but just made less and less sense and/or got sidetracked as the game went on. I'll recommend at least one playthrough of this, at best.