Eternal RPG dilemmas: Final Fantasy Seven

So last year - or at least a year ago, it might have been two now -  I bought the full endless amount of games D&D pack, which had Baldur's Gate 1-2 and then some other stuff, including Planescape Torment which I've never finished. I managed to finish BG1, but BG2 just drags on forever and I ended up getting tired of it in the Underdark. I don't really have a lot of nostalgia for it, so maybe I never really liked it all that much, although I did really enjoy BG1 in sort of a weird mix of 'dear lord did game design ever have its head up its ass back then' and 'this plot is rather cool and punchy!'

a world of radiation poisoning metaphors

I don't really have a ton of nostalgia for FF7, either, but they feel like fair games to contrast off each other. I feel like I'll go back to BG2 eventually, since I never played the expansions but I had finished the original core game, but maybe not. Nothing about BG2 really blows me away, the game is good and nice looking but it doesn't rock my socks or something. FF7 though, that one I've finished but far enough back I don't remember much other than the story being pretty damn weird. I mean I fired the game up and realized it was almost 20 years old and felt kinda strange. Except that while BG2 looks like a modern indie title (which is to say, it looks fine if not good) FF7 just has some of the weirdest decisions. You are basically playing with 13 polygon characters on artifact riddled JPG backgrounds and ... Yeah it just looks weird. The FMVs fire up and you're just thinking good lord, how did this not look awful back then too!?!

But then I remember why I don't really have nostalgia - I hated that area of console gaming, where everything went '3D' and wasn't really ready for it. But whatever, let's see if we can beat some fun out of this ancient, bizarre RPG.



Oh boy notes

A Note about Modding: A friend pointed out that FF7 can be modded, and has been modded on PCs for eternity. A quick google search, on the other hand, turns up absolutely nightmarish text walls written by people who ... Look, I understand people get into doing this sort of thing, and that's awesome. But on the other hand I think people get caught up in the idea they need to address everything and refuse to evaluate what they're doing at all. Which of these mods do I install at a glance?

Seriously, I have no clue, and there's nothing in the steam support forums really highlighting what to pick to just enjoy the game as it was. I modded Doom3 because you could seriously look up the mod, people would comment on what was good and what wasn't, then you just installed it. This on the other hand ... Blech. I want to make a point about weeaboos here but long story short I'm pretty much not surprised.

A Note about Controllers; A friend mailed me an Xbox One controller which I wanted for fighting games and I've been tooling around with my lovely since then. Anyway, FF7 will accept the Xbox1 controller just fine, except you have to press X at the "keyboard menu screen" then you're good a moment or two in. I have no idea why - no button on the controller itself seems to work, but it is fine once it is in game which is a little weird...

It is kinda funny playing FF7 unmodded, though I really have no idea how far forward the modding can bring the game. More so than almost any other game I've played in years FF7 just feels so damn old. It feels old compared to games older than it. The menus, engine, FMVs ... It all just gives off this dated, ancient feeling. Maybe playing Mario64 would be this bad, but I've played all the 2d Sonics and Super Mario World recently, and just piles of other related era games and they all look 'new' to me. I still have this 'moved up from the Nintendo omg squeal' feeling in the back of my head, but that does not extend to PSX titles.

This game is old enough that TVs were squares when it was made. Square CRTs even! Such refresh rate. So crisp. Wow. The weirdest moments are the FMVs where they mix the lego man characters with carefully illustrated backgrounds, which clashes like you would not believe.

I can shit talk the graphics all I want though, because while it is sort of ridiculously out of scale and a little silly when you think about it, those first few scenes of Midgar - the big city, for those who forget - are really cool. It has a really neat "steampunk of my own" feel to it, made of slick black gears and insidious steel. You get a lot of Neuromancer / Fallout / cyberpunk into steampunk and back again feelings from it, but it does sort of have its own style. It is hard to say where the aping begins and ends, I suppose. I love the usage of curves in the aesthetics, everything has this glossy curved metallic feel early on.

On the other hand - and this is an issue systemic to the design of this era of RPGs, using jpgs as they did and how they did - you end up with a lot of weird moments where you can't visually distinguish 'the path' from 'the junk'. If you were to superimpose the actual pathways around the screen, well, the game is just very strange in this way. It is also really odd sometimes about giving you a push toward things in the narrative...

There are also a lot of weird, pacing break moments. There's this little dramatic speech midway through the early game where you ascend a wire toward the upper reaches of Shinra. You get up top and ... You can't progress until you go back down and buy some random item you need for, from a narrative perspective, absolutely no reason and would not possibly think of. You don't even know the one guy is a vendor before you ascend! It is strange. After a tense flashback to ol' Sephiroth brutally murdering a whole bunch of people, you spend ... an hour trying to figure out how to get a Chocobo.

what am i doing with my life

The game has some odd tonal issues, which really messes with how the game feels at points. You get a lot of really broken up moments, or weird points where the tension in the game drains out because you're either stuck in some long speech or you're stuck behind some fellow who is blocking your progression and you need to run in circles to get the game to move forward. Characters do talk a fair bit, what dialogue there is, is pretty sparse in terms of actual volume. The game isn't all that wordy and doesn't belabor the text with heavy duty vocabulary. I guess that's a weird thing to point out, but it feels like maybe this is part of why people like FF7 so much. It feels like character emote more with their terrible awful looking models and talk a bit like normal people? I mean I love me some ridiculous highbrow dialogue about the economies of truth and 'predicated upon the delusion of the people insofar as survival in a modern era' but I'm imagining 98% of gamers just start falling asleep. And why not? It's a game not a pretentious french art novel. The funny thing to compare this to is BG2, and honestly, I sort of like FF7's way of doing things better. BG1/2 just feels so static, and while the writing and narrative were good, it really does thing at a glacial conversational pace with really choppy dialogue. FF7 just blazes along, even if it is pretty nonsensical at times, with characters waving their arms around or shooting their arm cannon into the sky.

Started the same year, actually

I think there's a shot where it is implied other people were witness to a sex scene, and you watch one of the lego men on screen models just crumble under the weight of her comrade's implicit voyeurism. Or maybe not, but it is weird how much expression they jammed into the horrific, stumpy models.

Also, totally weird thing to point out: No one in BG2 blinks. Ever. Characters in FF7 don't really have eyes, but rather decals, but there is an open eye decal and a blinking decal. So they do actually blink. It looks horrific, but eventually those soulless portraits in BG2 just stare a hole through you...

Combat in the game is ... Fine? It is very simple, and lots of your options aren't balanced or meaningful, but much like the dialogue it doesn't drag it out and there aren't huge volumes of prep time blown. Honestly, as easy as it is - and it is easy - it is a decent paste to mingle in between the rest of the game. I like the materia system; it isn't necessarily well designed, but it is simple and easy to understand. I do feel like there was a great deal of room for improvement with the game's systems. For one, materia should carry long term change with it. You should be shaping characters over the course of the game, but I guess the game is pretty linear and easy so it doesn't matter. The actual top end of the game is almost all optional, which I didn't really bother to do, so there you go. I think I did it when I played the game as a kid, which was cool, but I sure am not grinding for chocobos in the year of our lord two thousand fourteen.

The game's story, and the proceeding narrative, can be divided into three parts, one of which is pretty amazing, one of which is pretty dull, and one of which is more a mechanical element.

Mechanically, the game really does have serious pacing problems, and suffers in this, as well as in its world building. The pace of the core path is syncopated, almost tortured at times, with long meandering strolls or nonsensical advice. This afflicts the game both on the world map and in 'places', of any kind. It is more than just an issue of pathing on a non-descript backdrop, it is also a matter of problematic design. The world is too big, has too little in it, and forces you to wander around like an idiot to get anywhere or do anything. Even looking up a walkthrough, which is in and of itself a kiss of death for immersion, doesn't really change the long boring minutes of dragging yourself from place to place while pointless random battles crop up. There's more than a few points in the game where it is supposed to be tense but the oblique, mediocre map design and random battles just make it feel the opposite. You can really get a sense of why people started to loathe random battles from this game, as you're struggling to figure out where to go and it just keeps jamming random morons in your face.

You end up with a lot of sleepy feeling dullness, as you plod from place to place or alt-tab to google things. That isn't good for enjoyment of the game, and much of my stated playtime above is from alt-tabbing then just doing something else. The world, as well, is really conflicted with itself. When you get into towns, they pop with personality, but there are so few of them the world just feels like the disasters have already happened and everyone is dead anyway. The game has this first, huge city and then everything else makes you wonder where anyone else came from. Cloud's home town has like, eight people in it?

There is also sort of the issue that it is really hard to figure out where systemic issues are springing up from. This is, after all, a 17 year old game - control schemes and control design were much worse then - but it is also a port and I'm using a controller that I'm not sure the game 100% likes, so who knows. All I know is that the game can feel really clunky and dodgy at the oddest of times. Chocobo racing felt miserable, and the snowboarding which I remember being difficult felt pretty insanely hard to control. Also some puzzles based around inputs that when you look up are in playstation key prompts? Yeah, those you're gonna have to keyboard to do that.

Also! Burly men gunning down little girls!

Anyway, the game's other two parts, without overly spoiling an ancient game, are divided between the story and the weird, garish and garbled eco-message which sort of squirts itself over the "present day" elements of the story. The main story is interesting and layered amidst the different eras the main events occur in. I mean, yeah, it is an older jrpg and some of the stuff is super wonky to the max but that mostly falls into the eco-message. Jenova is actually a really neat concept for an antagonist, even if the idea of something that 'becomes like you to destroy you without knowing itself' is both a trope and rather silly. The element I really enjoyed was, ironic given I just finished Remember Me which didn't manage it at all, Jenova's ability to manipulate memories and its impact on the big character arcs. The game is slick about it, representing perspective and confusion far more meaningfully than a game entirely about the topic, and playing it as an adult who thought they remembered the plot it was actually rather cool.

I admit, part of it is likely to not be intentional, and that the broken message throughout the game and all the weird subtext could very well be mistranslation or just cut parts not clearing things up. However, the idea that Jenova's influence creates that very same sort of miscommunication and is messing with the in-game cast's perception without leaning too heavily on it as some sort of excuse creates an interesting feeling that, authorial intent or not, makes for an interesting game to think about. In fact it is hard to say who really is the antagonist of the game, for all Cloud's ravings.

which means what exactly? oh, they smoke pot

On the other hand, the eco-message that sort of farts its way through the whole game is just awful: It is generic Japanese anime/rpg power of friendship/love/courage/the planet nonsense to the absolute maximum. There is no consistency or overarching meaning, Shinra is "bad" and terrorism against them is ... also bad? Technology is bad, except when it isn't, and then the entire plot sort of farts off stage and we shift to some manmade disaster of another flavor. A disaster I'm not even certain makes sense within the game's own context - its like you go to Switzerland and extract secret hidden ultranukes of the ancient switzerpeople. Zuh? The entire second part of the game is confusing. Shinra is trying to fix the disaster, and you oppose them because...? It is weird, but the weirdest thing is the mad scientist Hojo who basically seems like he meandered from place to place spending his research budget for years on absolutely nothing of any value and then they just let him because he is needed for the plot. The game actually repeatedly derides him as an incompetent dolt of a person while on the other hand the cast gives him the freedom to screw things up.

the gas chamber minigame stinks

I mean seriously, his introduction into the game is his brilliant plan to mate Aeris with a dog. Why is this guy being given million of dollars in research funding? It is never implied he accomplished much of anything - most of the Jenova stuff feels credited to another character.

Basically, as with many games, when the game mechanically interacts with its writing, shit goes downhill fast. When the game is just telling its story, it works pretty well. When it needs a villain, it pulls one out of its toybox, even if that villain doesn't make any sense in the narrative. Most of the Shinra characters come off as jokes, and while Rufus is kinda scary at first he is just shuffled away into the background to not make decisions. "Do you want to shoot the gun at the thing?" and then Rufus is like "well i..." and then the gun goes off

Tough life, Rufus. Being named Rufus and all, I mean.

So, in conclusion, FF7 on STEAM-PC felt like a pretty reasonable port that only crashed once - when some idiot started sending me messages on Steam, which obviously doesn't work very well given ancient games can't use the overlay- of a very old feeling game. FF7 is still an interesting experience given it just tries so many things. There are QTEs and minigames galore, weird story hooks and a lot of strangely modern scenes. I mean the starting cast is two women, a single father black guy and a white kid with brain problems. I think the next character is a one-eyed talking dog.

The game is grindy and rather strange at points, and while the interface is generally pretty smooth those odd QTEs and minigames can come off feel like playing with legos while wearing mittens made of burgers - oddly, that is how the characters hands look - but most of that stuff is pretty easy to just scoot through and forget about. I really can't get into the idea of grinding levels or doing the horrific golden saucer grind, but those elements are mostly optional and I never found the game difficult. Right at the end of the game I didn't bother looking up walkthroughs on how or when the last couple fights go, and just ended up with a screwed up party with my materia all messed up still finishing the job just fine. Heck, I didn't even bother to equip the proper weapons or try to fix gear across the board or anything. The last dungeon crawl is pretty silly in general.

Basically, I think FF7 is still worth playing at the price it is offered on Steam (depending on how you assess sales, of course, I got it for $4 and I'm pretty alright with that), if you have any interest in playing a classic albeit dated JRPG. The game doesn't get quite as hung up on gushing spectacle as later iterations of the formula, and while the world building is often atrocious the core story is pretty interesting. A lot of the graphical work is just so funny you seldom mind it overmuch. Most of the audiowork stands up to this day, although I think some of the midis slipped into the port and hoboy they do indeed sound the most awful. The lack of voice acting in the FMVs has to be the strangest thing, but I think audio was difficult to compress back then? Maybe not? When did MP3s show up? 1995, but FF7 was in development then, so maybe they didn't adapt quickly enough. I can forgive it.

I mean I youtubed 'end of FF7' to discuss something with a friend, and the english dub of advent children came up and oh god the pain.

PLEASE

All in all, while the game hardly feels like a classic due to feeling just so dated and not timeless, the work that went into it is still good, adding up to a fun if silly looking old title.

 Except the Condor War. What the hell is this....?

Next up: FF8, Dead Space 2, FE3R. F3AR? where does the number go? Fthrreeeeeeeeeerrrrruurrrhuur.