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Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]

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Omicron said:
YEAH IT'S A BIT LIKE THAT
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Since no one else seems to have brought it up yet, do you remember how the scene of Nanaki running around with his kids is one of the canon-timeline scenes Remake shows the characters in the lead up to the Sephiroth fight?

Remember how he actively cringes and tries to deflect the others from figuring out what's happening when they see that? It's up for debate how much context people get with those visions. Given his maturity and attitude, it's possible he's just responding to being seen with kids at all; and it's also possible that he's just aware that everyone he's talking to is dead at that point, but not that it's from old age because there's a five century gap. But, well, there's also the fact that that little scene is the opening to this ending sequence, with implications that are absolutely worth cringing over if accurate.
 
Let's be fair now: Vincent's writing is pretty good! In the very least you tend to get where they're coming from and nothing is horribly disagreeable about either its quality or themes.

It's just that the good writing is "Vincent got cucked by Hojo with both he and the rest of the world suffering because of such".
 
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Final Fantasy VII, Final Thoughts
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    • Final Fantasy VII.

    What a game.

    Final Fantasy VII took 50+ hours of gameplay, six months of writing, and 173+k words to complete. It is by far the longest game we have played so far, that I have had the most to write about. Two novels' worth of writing and half a year of my life went into this Let's Play. Combine this, and the general pressure of the end of the year, and I won't have the time and focus to carefully curate a well-organized long-form essay. I will merely try to lay out my last thoughts, mostly summing up what we've already gone over.

    Let's proceed in no particular order.

    Steam

    You should not buy Final Fantasy VII.

    I realize this is a harsh statement to make about a game I am about to largely praise, but some things simply are not acceptable.

    I believe in the preservation of media. The concept of 'patching' games is a relatively recent one, and there is value in, for instance, preserving access to FFVII in its original state, with its original translation. But should you pay money for a bad translation made in two weeks that sometimes outright contradicts the text of the game and gives out incorrect information?

    Furthermore, there's a line where you cross from 'selling a game as it was originally made' into 'scamming people,' and that line is drawn at 'the soundtrack is literally broken.' I don't know why my soundtrack was the original unpatched upload of the port, when others have the patched version that works fine, but it was, and Stream doesn't deserve my money for it.

    Beyond this, the game is a buggy, antiquated mess. The fact that it runs in windowed 4:3 with huge black bars doesn't actually bother me, that is better than bad attempts at 'upscaling' graphics; the fact that it's full of the same bugs as in 1997, that a major moment can be missed by triggering dialogues in a particular order fifteen hours prior, that the translation, again, is literally incorrect, all that and the total absence of modern quality of life features in a 2013 port: Steam is pretty much making you pay for a PSX emulator ROM. Except the emulation would probably work better.

    I really wish FF7 received a Remaster, in addition to its Remake, which is an entirely different beast, and would have been regardless of its plot. This is something people really need to grasp: The way modern AAA gaming works means a FF7 Remake in modern gaming sensitivities (full 3D and voice acting, etc) would have covered a small slice of the original game regardless, because of the way building assets and playable characters work. But a Remaster? Yeah, that would be nice. On the other hand, I've seen some of the machine-upscaled mods made by players and, with all due to respect to fans who enjoy them, they look incredibly wrong to me.



    I'm sorry, but both of these look worse than the original, to me.​

    The Pixel Remasters were an incredibly smooth and enjoyable modernized NES/SNES gaming experience, and I wish FF7 receives that someday. We can hope.

    As it stands, Buy a different version than the one from the Steam store page or something. There's an XBox store version you can download on PC, isn't there? Find something.

    Alright.

    The Story

    IV was a theatre play. V was a Saturday morning cartoon. VI was an opera.

    VII is prestige TV.

    I've toyed with the idea of calling it a 'psychological drama' to be cheeky, but that's not really what it is, of course. FF7 is still a fantasy epic concerned with fighting monsters using giant swords and fireballs and big, cool monsters, a sweeping story about love and grief and saving the world.

    But it's not just that.

    FF7 gives a particular attention to the psychological depth of its characters, to the things they know and don't know about each other and themselves, to the secrets they keep. It's a game about people and the things they don't tell each other. In VI, I commented on how the game actually has a lot of missing spaces, of holes in the characters' personalities and history, and the game is at its best when its sweeping, operatic narrative makes you not even question the missing gaps in the first place. VII spends considerable effort doing the opposite of that. That doesn't mean we have a complete biography of each character - how could we - but many times, when you think 'this is a little weird', it turns out yeah! It was weird! There was actually more to this than you thought!

    This culminates in what is probably the strongest moment of writing in the game: The Lifestream, where Tifa and Cloud slowly work through his memory and the haze of delusion to piece together the person he really is, and has been afraid to be all this time. It's a genuinely profound, moving scene, which rests entirely on these two characters' fragility, their openness to one another, their buried trauma and grief. That's the core of what makes FF7 work at its best, that attention to character psychology and drama.

    Back in VI, I noted how the game uses a clever trick to get around the limitations of its dialogue count: It has 'generic,' unmarked dialogue boxes, which are assigned to characters based on party order. So it doesn't need to have parallel series of lines for 'what if Sabin is in this scene' vs 'what if Edgar is in this scene,' in non-critical plot lines it has a generic line and then assigns that line to Edgar or Sabin or whoever else is in Party Slot 3, and that creates a kind of unique experience where different characters will be assigned different lines in any given player's playthrough, and missing characterization is 'filled in' by generic dialog lines.

    But VII… Doesn't need to do that. Because it actually does have lines for every character for every event in the game written for that character. Sometimes to its detriment (Vincent getting stuck with "..." in half of the scenes is hurting his character something fierce), but that's rare - for the most part, this is a massive lead in writing and characterization over VI.

    But characterization is one thing, and we'll get to that later.

    How does the game work as a plot?

    Honestly, pretty good. It's not without its weaknesses, but the other thing FF7 has going for it, and the thing that is most easily lost in the decades since it became one of the most popular and thoroughly-spoiled games of all time, is mystery. FF7 is constantly enticing you onwards with the next unknown, constantly delivering morsels of truths and half-truths, it is frequently outright lying to you, leaving just enough inconsistencies for you to spot that it is lying, before revealing the truth. The game is constantly being propelled forward by this sense of mystery and discovery, of investigating the secrets scattered throughout its plot. How did Barret lose his arm? Who is Sephiroth? What is Jenova? What is Aerith's plan? Why does Tifa act so cagey around her childhood friend? Why is Cait Sith so insistent on following us, and what even is he? Where did this strange talking cat-dog came from? All these questions actually have answers!

    This is what makes the worst moments in the game go down a little better. The entire Huge Materia arc is essentially just filler episodes featuring our least favorite characters, but it moves the player forward with the hanging mystery of Cloud's past and his current illness.

    There are a number of weaknesses - the tone-shifting Turks, Shinra becoming a comedy antagonist, Sephiroth vanishing from the narrative in the third act, party member characterization varying wildly in quality, the Huge Materia arc, all the missable fucking lore, a number of times the game crosses the line from 'ambiguity' into 'you didn't think of an answer to this fucking question now did you,' but overall it's an incredibly solid work. It's not my favorite game story, but it's a genuinely solid one, and it had me going 'ooooh!' more than a few times.

    Presentation

    We're just going to ignore the soundtrack. Suffice to say that, even with the massacred soundtrack from the unpatched PC port of yore, it mostly still works. It's clear it's doing its best to convey powerful emotions, strong ambiences, to be dramatic and melancholy and beautiful in turn. Aerith's Theme is still a banger. But it would all, of course, be all that much better with the actual proper fucking soundtrack.

    Visually though…

    This is so complicated.

    Final Fantasy VII ends the way it begins: with its improbable three-way mix of amazing-for-the-time FMV cutscenes, gorgeous static background, and ridiculous Lego models. The destruction of Midgar by Meteor still holds up! The Northern Cave is boringly designed, but beautifully composed! FF7 is for the most part pretty inspired with shaking up the concept of a 'dungeon' by making its dungeons into office buildings, military bases, abandoned mansions and laboratories, and underwater industrial facilities! The game, it must be said, truggles with the limits of its ambitions graphically. A large part of the game takes huge advantage of both the FMVs and the prerendered backdrops, giving the game an aesthetic that is truly unique, truly cool, dripping with character in a way VI only managed in narrow, specific occasions (Vector, the World of Ruin world map). At the same time, the game often defaults to uninspired top-down views and isometric shots of its world. Once we're outside Midgar, most towns use the same architectural aesthetic with minor twists like 'there's a big rocket in the background' or 'there's a medieval wall' or 'there's snow' (standout exceptions: Wutai, Gongaga).

    In fact, here's a very funny fact for you: In the original FFVII, we only go topside in Midgar once, briefly, while running from the wreck of Mako Reactor 1, which means we only get a very short look at what topside architecture looks like. We're more or less left to assume that, while it obviously doesn't look like the slums, it is nonetheless a similar scifi-ish, noir-esque, technological architecture. But the truth is…



    ​

    …it's the same terracotta tile individual houses with little chimneys! Not even a glass-windowed skyscraper in sight!

    Anyway. These are nitpicks. The game still has a strong sense of aesthetics, and is using its new 3D technology to amazing effect. What it feels like, in many ways, is a transitional stage: Like the Final Fantasy series just needs the experience of having actually done VII before it can hopefully evolve and take full advantage of the technology and artistic medium. What we see here still has the growing pains of something new and untested, of breaching new horizons, where VI was the near-apex of the 2D pixel art form (although I'm told Chrono Trigger is even better or something).

    It's incomplete, unrefined, and there is a core aesthetic conflict/compromise in the low-poly character models vs the environment. But it's still great.

    Gameplay: The Combat

    Okay. So.

    Conceptually, the Materia system is genius.

    I have… issues with it, but first I have to acknowledge that it's a work of art.

    VI had as its great innovation an increased flexibility of character building over even V's Job system. It didn't work - the Job system was plainly a better experience - but it was more flexible, that much can't be denied; the problem is that it was so flexible that everyone could be taught all the healing spells, all the offensive spells, and eventually Ultima. The stat-building aspect of Espers was interestingly thought up, poorly conceived, and led to a combination of feelsbad and massive power creep.

    VII's genius idea that changes everything is that the shiny rock that teaches you Ultima no longer teaches you Ultima; the rock itself learns Ultima. And once that shiny rock has learned it, you have to physically pass around the rock, and only the character who is holding it can cast Ultima. And this works for everything: You have to actually level up a Cure rock and have a character actively hold it in order for them to be able to cast Cure. You can't teach every spell that matters to every character, at least not within the expected time/leveling frame of the game. So you do have to create dedicated roles, but these roles can be flexibly combined and broken up. You can, at any moment, turn one character into a black mage with only offensive spells combined with support Materia to make these spells better like All and Quadra Magic and Turbo MP, then turn that character into a mixed red mage with a combination of healing and damaging spells, then scrap all of that and give that character two HP Plus, Cover and Counter Attack to make them a tank, but you can't permanently teach that character all those things, so you have ultimate flexibility (any character can do anything) but are still making actual character builds (no character can do everything), and unlike in V, those character builds can be freely shuffled at any time instead of requiring learning new skills, because the skills are instead taught to the Skill Rocks that you're passing around.

    One of my main complaints with VI has been the way characters lack mechanical identity, and VII has gone even further into this. No character has a unique skill. Without Materia, all characters are a list of stats, the Attack and Item commands, and a Limit Break. Now, Limit Breaks are great. They are maybe the best innovation the game has brought to the franchise and are going to stay with us forever, if XIV is anything to judge by, and while they are annoying to grind on characters you don't use much, much moreso than most Materia, they are great flavor and mechanically interesting. But they're not unique skills available at all times. VII characters have less mechanical identity than VI characters, because what would have been skills in VI are now also Materia and can be equally passed around and shuffled as you will.

    The game has achieved total flexibility at the cost of character mechanical identity. This is an intentional trade-off. I don't like it, because I like mechanical identity, but it's a deliberate choice and it does what it sets out to achieve excellently, better than VI did. This is in part because while Espers only taught spells and granted stat boosts, VII gives Materia amazing tactical depth. The All Materia is its foot in the door, teaching you "oh, I can transform my spells with metamagic, but I have limited slots so I need to make careful choices between metamagic and just more magic," but as the game opens up, the addition of things like Counter, Added Cut, Added Effect, Elemental, HP Absorb, MP Turbo allow you to enhance and refine your other Materia, to create interesting combos, enhance attacks, obtain immunities, trade off power for longevity, and so on. With the endgame Materia like Final Attack, some truly amazing synergies open up. Meanwhile, the Independent and Command Materia function as important building blocks that let you lean into or balance out character traits and give them new skills, like giving Yuffie a Speed Plus Materia and buff magic so she can open the fight by acting before anyone else by omnicasting Haste, and similar feats.

    We are absolutely miles beyond VI, and while some (including probably me, although that's highly theoretical for reasons I'll explain in a moment) might still prefer the FFV Job system for its very different depth of character building as opposed to tactical building, this is a genuinely amazing system with real potential depth and complexity.

    There's just one problem:

    It doesn't matter. None of it matters.

    This is the core of my frustration with FFVII's character building and combat gameplay: It's literally wasted effort. Any shiny new toy is a brief light in my eyes at the prospects of what I could do with it before I remember that it doesn't matter. It may make my team 'stronger' but I won't see the difference, because I don't need it. I don't need any of it.

    This is what I mean when I'm complaining about the game being too easy. Jokes aside, I'm not looking for it to kick my teeth in over and over. I don't enjoy getting a game over screen. I like styling on my opponents.

    The problem is, Final Fantasy VII doesn't let me style on people. It is so easy, all my strategies are redundant. The only hype I get from combining Quadra Magic with Cometeor (a combo unleashes SIXTEEN METEORS on my hapless opponent!) is that the animation that kills them takes more time, and there are more numbers on the screen. I thought Final Attack + Phoenix was so cool and I never used it.

    The entire tactical system is so much frustration because every time it shows me a shiny new toy and then I just. Don't. Ever need it.

    Which also combines with the way several of FF7's most powerful, and most interesting Materia are endgame content - in order to take advantage of them, you will need to grab them in the North Cave (or wherever) and head back out to grind AP to level them up and work out new strategies but… You don't need to do that? Because the game is already too easy? It's wasted effort.

    The only exception are two superbosses which require specialized tactics and high-end Materia but like… That's not what I'm talking about. I want to fight a boss where joining Flare with MP Turbo to achieve massive single-target damage lets me beat it after its last damage gate before it finishes the countdown on its final attack, or put Odin and Added Cut on Cloud's sword so he has a 20% chance of instantly killing any opponent and this mattering in fights and I can do that, it just… Doesn't matter. I needn't have bothered.

    This is why the system is ultimately so disappointing. All its tactical depth is wasted.

    But hey. On the upside, combat isn't the only type of gameplay in FFVII!

    Gameplay: The Omnigame

    I think I have a theory as to the nature of FF7's minigames: Minigames are part of FF7's attempt at being the ultimate game. The game is trying to be everything: Not only does it have RPG combat, but it has:
    1. (Very light) dating sim elements.
    2. A driving minigame.
    3. A snowboarding minigame.
    4. A submarine minigame.
    5. A variety of rhythm games.
    6. A horse (well, chocobo) breeding and racing sim.
    7. A whole damned RTS.
    8. An FPS shooting gallery.
    9. Several platforming segments.

    Now, most of those minigames suck, because they're crammed into an RPG and made by RPG designers instead of being dedicated version of whatever subgenre they are. But put together, they paint this incredibly ambitious picture of a game that is trying to be all games, to provide the most complete experience in gaming, crossing genres.

    And I think it's important to look at Chocobo Raising in that context. Because the way I engaged with Chocobo Raising isn't the way it's intended to be played. Without a guide to show you the optimal steps to do the whole thing in a solid chunk in a few hours, Chocobo Raising exists, I'm pretty sure, to massively expand the longevity of the game and its feeling of being a world unto itself. Without a perfect route to the golden chocobo, you would engage with chocobo capture, breeding, and raising intermittently throughout the game, talk to the Chocobo Sage frequently for more advice on how to pursue your goal, incrementally make your way through the Chocobo Racing ranks and breed successive generations of chocobos trying to work out how to get to the ultimate golden chocobo. You could spend weeks on this, doing it in pauses between stretches of the main plot, making FF7 a game it would take far more than 'just' 50 hours to finish. If you're actually enjoying the minigames, the combo of Chocobo Raising and the Gold Saucer could easily double or triple the longevity of the game just chasing high scores in the Shooting Gallery and the Bike, Snowboarding and Submarine minigames. You could be racing chocobos forever trying to get those Hero Drinks to beat Emerald Weapon.

    Shenmue came out in 1999, a mere two years after FF7. It was a blockbuster that blew everyone's minds, and one of the most recurring commentaries on it is a variation on the idea that Shenmue represents a world in itself, that it's like living a virtual life, with a day and night cycle, weather, people with schedules, minigames, a job. This is far beyond what FF7 is trying to do, but I think some of the same idea is at the heart of FF7's emphasis on minigames, especially its most ambitious ones like FF7. In fact, I've read that you can buy a house in FF7? I seem to have entirely missed this, and nobody in the thread brought it up, but it's a thing.

    FF7 is trying to be the Omnigame. It's just… Not very good at it.

    Characters

    I've said that the character drama was the core of FF7's plot. So let's talk about these characters, shall we? This is the non-shitpost version of that character tier list I posted earlier.

    Cloud

    Cloud is the best character in Final Fantasy VII, which is good, because he's also the most important character in Final Fantasy VII and if he sucked, the whole game would suck. Unlike II, V and VI, which all had an ensemble cast (though Bartz was the main protagonist, the game was ultimately about the five friends and their adventures) or I and III which didn't have individual characters, VII is the first game since IV to have a clear and unambiguous main character.

    It's easy to not expect much from Cloud. Shounen male leads tend to be the least interesting characters in their own stories, and Cloud has the image of a broody loner who is too cool to care. And the game is fully aware of this: That persona is a trick, set-up for one of the best punchlines in video game history. When looking at the full breadth of the game, Cloud is a complete character, someone who grows, reveals profound anxieties, immense vulnerability and pain, and changes as he addresses these faults within his armor, transforming himself into a confident, emotionally aware person who is actually cool for legitimate reasons. Cloud loves, and loses, and loves again. Like Barret, what started as a quest for revenge becomes about something greater, about salvation and hope.

    Now show this to me in glorious voice acted 3D Squeenix please

    Aerith

    The most shocking thing to me about Aerith's death is that it occurs before the halfway mark of the game. I fully expected it to be a late-game development, but instead, it sets up the entire second and third acts. And as a result, the dominant quality of Aerith's character is the unfulfilled potential. All the things she never gets to see. All the words she never gets to hear. She never learns about her father. She never learns Zack's real fate.

    She never gets to ride in that airship.

    The way Aerith's death hangs over everything that happens afterwards is a tremendous feat of writing in a series whose record with heroic deaths has been spotty at best. But because of that death and the way it affects the plot and every other character, it's so easy to forget who Aerith was. The cheerful, sassy, energetic flower girl who grew up in the slum. The girl who started scamming every man in sight when Cloud turned his back on her for five minutes. The one who was laughing the entire time as she put him in The Dress. The oldest of the main three, who has already experienced love and the pain of losing her boyfriend.

    Those traits - that energy, that savvy, that worldliness - are all written in very deliberate contrast to Tifa, the other Main Girl of the game. And they are all easy to forget when put against the spectre of her death turning her into a martyr. But she truly is one of the best characters in all Final Fantasy. And part of why her death hurts so much, is because it cuts short the time we could have spent with her. All those adventures will have to go unlived, a flower nipped in its bud.

    Tifa

    Tifa is a deliberate paradox: The athletic punch-girl who is nice and sweet to a fault. And I do mean to a fault, because the game's biggest trick is that much of its drama happens because Tifa is scared of confrontation. It is a genuine character flaw on her part; she's afraid of hurting people or pushing them away, and so she lets much of Cloud's psychodrama unfold without pointing out the contradictions in his story. She spends half the game harboring secrets, and you barely suspect it because she looks so unlike someone who'd lie. But in the end, after all this happens, when she realizes the sheer scope of his damage, she's the one who steps in and helps him put it all back together. To paraphrase one of my readers, one of the most important twists in Final Fantasy VII is "Tifa is Cloud's childhood friend," which is wild considering that it's literally how she's introduced.

    Tifa attacks, but she also protects. She's the one who takes care of Cloud when he's sick, who dives into the Lifestream with him, who uses their knowledge of one another to help him find his true self. She was also Aerith's friend… And yet her love story is only possible because Aerith died, because she was too afraid to speak up about her feelings and simply let the romance between Cloud and Aerith bloom while staring sadly from the corner (the scene in the Temple of the Ancients if you have both Tifa and Aerith in the party when Cait Sith arrives pretty much sums it all up). Her version of the Gold Saucer date is literally her being unable to actually make it explicit she has romantic feelings for Cloud and letting the gondola ride end without finding the courage to speak up.

    And in the end, the conclusion to that romance, instead of her finally finding the courage to speak, is her accepting that this is a limitation of both hers and Cloud's, and to tell him that sometimes, feelings don't need to be spoken to be clear to both parties, and then they fucked, and they admit their love without words. It's so… Weird. Such a strange place to take that character arc. It seems so obvious that it should be about Tifa learning to voice her feelings, and yet…

    I love Tifa, but she's complicated. She has genuine character flaws of a type you don't often see emphasized as such, and the conclusion of her character arc frustrates me even as I find her last scene with Cloud genuinely touching.

    Barret

    This is where things get a little dicier.

    Barret is a good character, but his arc bothers me. He is in a subtle way one of the characters most impacted by the translator's choices, both in emphasizing an AAVE-style of speech and emphasizing his temper in a kind of Angry Black Man stereotype, and in introducing more nuance in the question of 'how much is Barret's crusade about saving the Planet and how much is it about revenge' than exists in the original. I want Barret to be the charismatic-if-temperamental leader figure that the game initially introduces him as, leading Avalanche and making speeches about the fate of the Planet, but his character arc is about how he isn't that person. It turns out Avalanche are three dudes hiding in the basement of a place he's probably renting from his barkeeper, his big speeches are a cover for hatred and a desire for revenge, and the game's environmental politics turn out to be, let's say built on shakier ground than initially appears. Nuclear bad! Coal good! Oil… Maybe bad? Ecoterrorism bad when bombing power plants, but good when doing targeted political assassinations?

    Do you think in the world of FF7, Midgardians do the same memes about Barret that we do about the guy who shot Shinzo Abe?

    Ultimately, the conclusion of Barret's arc is him literally turning to the camera and saying "I am not, nor was I ever, cut out to be a leader," and I find that… disappointing. Give my man some food, come on.

    The other aspect of Barret's character is more unique. He is that rarest of things among FF protagonists: a father. Not an old fogie like Galuf, but a guy of normal adult age with a child he cares about and loves very much. Which is part of why it's so disappointing that Marlene exits the plot midway through the Midgar sequence and is never seen again until literally the final cinematic of the game. Barret and her are never together on screen again. Come on! Yes, the Corel Prison arc and the confrontation with Dyne, which is about Marlene, is really compelling, but the game is just… Underusing Barret and his status as father.

    I like Barret, but his writing is full of little details that nag at me.

    Red XIII/Nanaki

    The fact that Red XIII is introduced by the experiment name assigned to him by Hojo, the game later reveals his actual name, and the game never gives you a choice to change his name and stop the other character from constantly calling him a slur basically sums up the entire issue with Nanaki's writing: He needed more time to cook.

    I like Nanaki, but that takes effort. His initial arc, from Midgar to Cosmo Canyon, is genuinely neat: He's introduced as a Very Rational redditor and revealed as a vulnerable teenager desperately trying to project seriousness. The Seto backstory baffles me, but Nanaki's emotional arc throughout it is compelling, it's the factual details of 'how the fuck did he come to believe his father was a coward, why are people keeping these secret things secret, what the fuck was Nanaki's mom on' that hurt it. And at the end of it, Nanaki adopting a more youthful manner of speaking as he opens up to the others and allows them to see him as he truly is, that's the good stuff.

    And then that's it! Arc's over. Nanaki never gets any focus ever again, except for Bugenhagen's death, which is a sad moment but isn't really about Nanaki as much as it is about Bugen. Indeed, Bugenhagen almost gets more focus than Nanaki himself in the endgame! He has a whole thing about journeying with the heroes across the world and going to the Ancient City and during that whole time, Nanaki and him don't really have any interaction?

    I have been given the impression that having Barret and Nanaki be Best Buds is a common fan interpretation (and something the Remake sort of leans into although Red isn't on screen for very long)? And I can see the appeal, but aside from that one scene in the Shinra Building where they both share a cell, there is never any indication that they're particularly close in the game itself.

    And then he gets the very last shot of the game in the epilogue. Now, people have talked about this, but it actually does make sense: We know Nanaki's species is very long-lived, so he is the only character you could plausibly put in a far future flash-forward to reveal that the world is still alive, the planet was save, and someone we care about is there to see it. Unfortunately, since he's not human, that opens the possibility that humanity was wiped out. What a mess. And more to the point, it's giving the final shot of the game, the conclusion of FF7, to a character we just… Don't have reason to care that much about. I don't agree with people saying he's one of the least important characters in the party, you can't compare him to Mog or Umaro, but it is true that his character arc concludes ten hours into the game and then he never gets anything again (at least if you pick Barret to hold the Black Materia at the North Crater).
    Verdict: They did my boy dirty, he needed more time to cook.

    Yuffie

    Yuffie is the best character in the game.
    Look, I know she's battling that top spot with Cloud, Aerith and Tifa, but these are serious characters. They are about that drama. Meanwhile, Yuffie is absolutely unrivaled as a comedy party member in all seven games so far.

    Look at that hook: Yuffie is a ninja thief who wields giant fucking shurikens and is introduced stealing the party's shit, and she is also a secret runaway princess fighting for the prosperity of her downtrodden conquered homeland, and her father is possibly a literal god… And she is a total failure who is constantly bullied. Her interactions with Cloud specifically are a riot, as our hero sees through her acts and constantly denies her the respect she craves, which probably plays a part in her puppy crush for him that's always latent but extremely obvious if you somehow get her as a Gold Saucer date (and boy would that be a lot more uncomfortable if Cloud ever acknowledged or returned those feelings but, thankfully, he never does and it's hilarious).

    But crucially, Yuffie is not completely devoid of her own hype spots. The Teleport While You're In The Menu gag is fantastic, and the Wutai twist where she somehow steals everyone's Materia and has to be chased after across a small continent, effectively becoming a temporary main antagonist, are a highlight of the game. She's actually pushing back, which makes her continued failures all the funnier - as well as her occasional successes more endearing; the Pagoda Challenge is the last time the game made me actually excited to engage with its combat mechanics, and is genuinely a great character moment for Yuffie and an impressive victory.

    And she has some of the most quietly effective emotional beats in the game, as well. Her crying and Cloud hugging her after Aerith dies fucked me up, it's genuinely heartbreaking. Her growing trust and confidence in her friends and her genuine attachment to Cloud is a powerful arc, because it has such an earnestness to it.

    And at the end of it all, her very last action in the game before the ending FMV forgets she exists, when you meet up with the rest of the party at the bottom of the Northern Crater… is to try to steal shit from us one final time.

    Character of all time, 10/10 no notes.

    Cait Sith

    Ah, Cait Sith. What to say about everyone's favorite scrimblo?

    This is not meant to be an indictment of the entire character, but Cait Sith is probably the first character to show us bad writing. I know, I know, controversial statement! But the thing is, I have issues with Barret because of justifiable choices in presenting him that I don't like and in questions of translation and presentation, and I have issues with Nanaki because he's undercooked… But Cait Sith is the main character to make me shout "THIS DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!" at my screen. The never-resolved Marlene hostage crisis? The 'heroic sacrifice' at the Forgotten Temple? Reeve's inexplicable psychic link to a stuffed toy? Cait Sith has the highest quotient of 'no, hold up, explain this to me' and the game going 'OH LOOK OVER THERE A SEPHIROTH' of the main cast.

    And beyond that, there is… Not all that much to him. "Remote-controlled cat toy riding a Moogle toy" is a great character design and a lot of fun to watch in action, but Cait Sith doesn't really have that much to him between that initial hook and the Reeve reveal, and the fact that it's actually a normal dude piloting it makes it less interesting. Cait Sith's big character moment is betraying the group by handing out the Keystone to Shinra and holding Marlene hostage, and that's strong, that is good writing, it's punchy and makes him instantly hateable, and the idea of having an 'evil teammate' that the player knows is evil but can't do anything about is a really interesting wrench to throw into the gears of the usual JRPG party mechanics… But then the game never really does anything with that or resolve it beyond the fake heroic sacrifice that we're somehow supposed to take seriously.

    The Reeve reveal is where the game finally breathes life back into Cait Sith, and there is genuinely interesting stuff there, it actually increases the character's depth and provides new context for old events and present characterization. I like it! But also it happens in the last 10% stretch of the game, literally in the penultimate dungeon, so there's not much left to talk about after it happens.

    Ultimately: One of my least liked character, sorry. Give Cait Sith ten extra hours to do stuff in post-Reeve reveal and explain the stuff that doesn't make sense, then maybe we're talking.

    Cid

    Okay. Fine. I'll talk about Cid.

    Sigh.

    "Chain-smoking Swear-a-minute Grandpa" was a great hook for a game aimed at teenagers in the 90s, but it hasn't aged all that well. We have outgrown the need for le funny abuse man.

    It's… interesting, that the game portrays Cid as a better leader than Barret, who takes charge of the group when Tifa and Cloud are away. It only makes me like him less, because I want that spot to go to Barret, but it's certainly A Choice. Cid being responsible for one of the most filler-y arcs of the game and stealing Tifa's chance to shine as party leader also doesn't endear me to him!

    Cid does have an arc, and that arc literally goes to space, which is something I enjoy, but he's ultimately not that interesting and has several turn-offs that make me just not fond of him.

    Ultimately, the best thing about Cid… Is Shera. Because watching that absolutely insane woman try and achieve a bizarre death wish by getting herself incinerated with rocket fuel or crashing into the sun or burning on impact with Meteor was, if nothing else, entertaining. In a kind of baffling way.

    Although, here's a funny thing about Cid: He has "grandpa energy." He's older than the rest of the cast (except Nanaki who doesn't count), he's been stewing in resentment of his bygone dream for years, he's an experienced airship pilot who acts fatherly towards his crew… And he's 32. WHICH MEANS I ACTUALLY LIED TO YOU, HE'S ACTUALLY YOUNGER THAN BARRET!

    He's like, dad age, at most. He's a normal adult. Which makes the fact that the game clearly thinks he's an ancient geezer extremely funny, and what is even funnier is that, in typical "take the original game's characters as they actually are, rather than how they're remembered" fashion, FF7 Rebirth decided to not age him up and instead just make his canonical age, which means he looks… Like this:

    ​

    That's not an old dude. That's just a fuckboi.

    Anyway, yeah, Cid. He's there, I guess.

    Vincent

    Just picture me writing 'wasted potential' over and over for one paragraph.

    Look, I wanted to like Vincent. Even twenty five years later, I unironically love his Shadow the Hedgehog looking ass. He's a vampire with a gun who transforms into Hammer Horror monsters? His final Limit Break which you didn't get to see in this playthrough has him become Satan. He's all tormented and shit, he sleeps in a coffin. I have moved beyond cringe, this shit is sick as hell.

    Unfortunately the game gives me nothing to work with. The problem with a brooding character with muted emotions is that he reacts to every plot development with "..." and the game simply doesn't have the high fidelity models to make him emote in a way that would sell those silences as full of meaning. You could actually miss one of his few character traits, the fact that his transformation has suppressed his emotions but that he's starting to have them again when hanging around the party, because it's only found in missable conversations on the Highwind. He gets one plot beat, one, and it's the Hojo NTR Arc. An undoubtedly important part of the backstory, but one which makes him even more pathetic, and it does it all through a wordless flashback, and then it resolves the Lucrecia plot by… Not resolving it. Lucrecia is literally just hanging out in a cave, you find her, she delivers the flashback, and then she disappears without any explanation (did Vincent mercy-kill her off-screen???).

    Ultimately, Vincent is the one singular thing I couldn't have expected from his introduction and appearance:

    Boring.

    Sephiroth

    Even if he's not a true party member, flashback notwithstanding, we can't close our talk about the characters of FF7 without talking about Sephiroth.

    So.

    Let's talk about that hot mess.

    It's completely understandable why Sephiroth was instantly iconic on release and has become one of the most famous and popular villains in gaming. He's got a killer design, he's hot, he's intimidating, he has a cool backstory, he is absurdly powerful. He wields a katana as long as he is tall and is introduced obliterating dragons in a single shot. But does he live up to that hype? In a game that has Vincent Valentine in it, that's a fair question to ask!


    I mean, just look at him.​

    And my answer is 'yes and no.'

    The build-up to Sephiroth's introduction, the myth that precedes him, President Shinra's assassination during the Jenova breakout, the Nibelheim Flashback introducing him as a psychologically complex character who was once a friend, his megalomaniacal madness when we meet him again, Aerith's murder, his legendary hater behavior at the Northern Crater - all of it is just fantastic. And the reveal that Cloud killed him, that very deliberate, calculated deflatory move to rob Sephiroth of this aura of untouchable coolness and reveal him as incredibly petty, is genuinely great writing, and fits into the game's overall suspicion towards anyone who tries to project coolness. But it also serves a double purpose in establishing a very strong personal connection between Cloud and Sephiroth - and in fact, the game isn't leaning as hard on that connection as it sometimes could, perhaps even should! There is a reason the last 'battle' in the game is fought inside Cloud's mind against Sephiroth in a 1v1 that no one else can see! They are personally and intimately connected!

    But after that big moment at the Crater, Sephiroth starts weakening. Sephiroth completely vanishing from the narrative post-Crater is one thing, but as we go through the rest of the story, the question of 'how much is Sephiroth in control, how much is Jenova' starts to be less of an interesting ambiguity and more of an actual question that needs answered, because looked across the whole game, Sephiroth's motives aren't fully coherent. He clearly changed over time, but he did so in gaps of time where we don't meet him. Is he being transformed, driven mad or subverted by Jenova's influence, is he changing his mind based on new discoveries, is it just inconsistent writing? Sephiroth upended Cloud and Tifa's entire lives, dealt them lasting trauma, killed Aerith whom the whole party loved, and then we meet him again and he just… doesn't talk at all. I am left unsure of who Sephiroth is. His plan is to become god - then what? Why does he value godhood? What does he seek to accomplish? When we saw him in Nibelheim, he spoke lovingly and reverently to his 'mother.' When we meet him again, he's tossing chunks of her at us like from a chum bucket. Is Jenova even part of his plans anymore? Has he lost his worshipful side after seizing back control over himself? Has he been so subsumed that he's effectively Jenova and his ascent to godhood is for all intents and purposes her own? Who knows!

    I don't need answers to every question. I do need to know when I'm looking at deliberate ambiguity and when I'm looking at inconsistent writing.

    Also, this is a minor pet peeve, but we never actually fight Sephiroth. He has a whole 3D model and attack animations, yet at no point in this whole journey do we get an actual boss battle against katana-and-trenchcoat Sephiroth. He's an unplayable party member in a flashback, he is in a narrative single-shot battle at the end of the game, and we fight him, as a boss, in his Bizarro and Safer forms… But we never cross blades with him. It took until Advent Children to get that!

    That's why Remake was based actually, we actually get a proper boss fight against Bishieroth.
    For these reasons, I'm partially ambivalent towards Sephiroth, but a lot of that ambivalence arises towards the end of the game. For the most part, Sephiroth works incredibly well. And even as he starts getting a little shakier, he still has style and presentation in spades going for him.

    Also, some of the criticisms of Sephiroth that have arisen over time are completely off the mark. He's often been derided as an omnicidal nihilist, but he… isn't? He's a megalomaniacal narcissist, which is an entirely different thing! He isn't out to kill humanity because of nihilism, he is out to kill humanity as casualties in his plan to become God. He selfishly desires power and self-aggrandizement, an entirely different thing! And he is also a massive hater out for petty revenge, the exact opposite of someone who is too cool and detached to care about the heroes opposing him.

    So in the end, does Sephiroth live up to the hype? Mostly yes, but he falls short in some annoying ways.

    Shinra

    Unfortunately, I am finishing this update half an hour before I have to leave with my family for Christmas, and so I do not truly have the time to study Shinra as a character, and the way, as one of my readers pointed out, its nature as an all-consuming parasitic monster that will kill this world then try to move to the stars perfectly mirrors Jenova. "Shinra is an evil god, just like Jenova" is certainly an intriguing chain of interpretation to go down, and I think it's potentially fruitful, but the way Shinra oscillates between terrifying capitalist beast that is going to bleed the world to death and a comically incompetent source of endless cannon fodder and wacky evil CEOs blunts some of its message. We've argued in thread about whether Sephiroth becoming the primary antagonist of the game robs Shinra of its power as a metaphor for real-world evils by replacing them with an Alien Satan that has no counterpart in our reality or whether Sephiroth is actually a continuation and fulfillment of Shinra's metaphor and in the end his evil is on their hands; I suspect we could keep that conversation going for days, and I can see merits in both sides, but we'll leave it at that today.

    So.

    That's our characters wrapped up.

    Now…

    The Ending, And the Promise of Advent Children

    The ending is bad.

    No, look, I'm sorry, guys. I know some of you like it. And I know that it was a very deliberate, very calculated choice to avoid the cliché 'where are they now' epilogue. But you know what? Sometimes clichés are clichés for a reason, because they work. Not that you would need to even do that! VI had a perfectly satisfying epilogue which consisted entirely of vignettes from the characters' escape from the tower, a few shots of life growing back across the world, and the game cut off with them soaring into the sky with the Falcon, no need for a time skip!

    That shot of Aerith's spirit within the Lifestream as the souls of all mankind come together to stop Meteor is beautiful. The hard cut to credit followed by the legendarily ambiguous epilogue showing the ruin of this game's Tower of Babel reclaimed by nature, potentially survived only by catdogs (WHERE WERE THEY HIDING DURING THE GAME)? No! The game would be literally improved by removing it and ending on the Aerith shot.

    And that brings me to Advent Children. Because Advent Children is… bad. We all mostly agree on this, right? It might not be awful (though maybe it is), but it definitely fails to live up to the legacy of FF7. I haven't watched Advent Children in years, but from my dim memories and talking to others, it walks back characters' arcs (Cloud is a silent brooding loner), assassinates others (Barret working on an oil rig), revives others against all good sense (Rufus being alive at all), and other sins, like Tifa getting owned by Some Fucking Dude, like come on. But for all these flaws, Advent Children has one merit that transcends all those flaws:

    It exists.

    By simple virtue of its existence, and by opening the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Advent Children says: "There is no intended ambiguity in the ending to the original game, life goes on without so much as a little apocalypse, people do their best to adapt to a post-Mako world." This is likely pretending to be a clarification where it is actually a retcon, but that doesn't matter: What Advent Children is saying is, "all these characters you've grown to love over the course of the game are fine, their lives go on, they find new paths forward in the wake of the final battle, and make their lives their own again." It does so badly, but you can discard every single piece of Advent Children canon and still retain the general shape: Everyone is fine, and it's okay to tell more stories featuring them.

    Which in turns opens the floodgates to a torrent of potential sequels, prequels, and sidequels. And that's how we get the Compilation.

    It's… Genuinely difficult for me to imagine that span of a few years when FF7 was all we had, and all, by series' standards, we would ever get. One of the most beloved games of all times, and it ends like this, and we may never get any more.

    So that's the promise of Advent Children: That life goes on. That FF7 isn't over.

    Is that a good promise to make? I don't know. It's good to let stories end, to give closure or force the ambiguity of a lack of closure to remain, but now FF7 may never end. The second part of the Remake-that-is-secretly-an-AU-sequel comes out in two months. There will be a third. We may be getting more FF7 content ten years from now. Is that good? You tell me. The only thing I can tell you, though, is this:

    I never played FF7 as a child, in that between-time when there was no sequel. I never experienced that ending absent the context of knowing an entire expanded universe exists, and all these characters go on with their lives. And that context profoundly shaped my reaction to the ending of FF7.

    Specifically, it meant I didn't react to it by throwing my monitor out of my window while shouting "FUCK YOU!"

    …

    Okay, but is it one of the greatest games of all time or not?

    Right. Okay. I guess we can't avoid that question. I mean, it's literally on the game's Wikipedia page:

    ​

    And the answer is… I don't know? I can never know.

    The fact is, I didn't play FF7 as a child. I did not experience the game in the context of its time. I did not have the other games of its era to compare it to, only my childhood memories of those games to compare it to today. I didn't grow up with Aerith's death seared into my memory or identifying with Cloud's desire to be seen as a cool aloof badass. I played FF7 today, as an antiquated clunky masterpiece done dirty by its PC port but still carrying the weight of having been clunky, bug-ridden and badly translated to begin with. Endlessly frustrated at its gameplay, its translation, bits and pieces of its storytelling even. Unable to mentally escape the comparison with the depths of dialogue and storytelling and characterization games have achieved since, howevermuch it stands as a pioneer and still holds up today.

    Is it one of the best games of all time? Well it's no Disco Elysium, but maybe it stands in the same category? It didn't rewrite my entire personality the way the Soulsborne series did. It didn't make me break down in tears the way Undertale did. But how could I ask it to? I played it like dissecting an insect, like sifting through the ashes of nuclear fallout twenty years after the bomb hit, not like exposing myself full blast to an emotional shotgun at a tender age back when it was objectively the apex of video game technology, graphics and storytelling.

    I'll forever wish, somewhat wistfully, that I had experienced Final Fantasy VII that way, the way many of you did. But that universe is sealed to me, and I can only give you the one I live in.

    Article:
    Driving to that sunflower field outside Topeka in the summer of 2021, I again understood every painful nuance of that song, and I remember how they had somehow, protolinguistically, made me feel the first time I had heard them, unable to understand any of it. And I realized... I never ended up feeling the way this song made me believe I'd someday feel. I'd shot right past being able to feel that way, and then, I'd just started feeling the way I feel now.

    How do we colorize a monochrome memory? I don't know. What can we take from another person's nostalgia? What can other people take from our nostalgia?
    Source: Tim Rogers, Action Button Reviews Boku No Natsuyatsumi


    Is Final Fantasy VII one of the greatest games of all time? I don't know, but it's certainly one of the most important, and isn't that the same thing?

    Okay, but is it the best Final Fantasy so far?

    Yes, obviously. What are you, crazy?

    I'm sorry, I understand the power of nostalgia, I get popularity backlash, I know the old adage that 'the best Final Fantasy game is the first Final Fantasy game you played.' I understand the desire to take those older games, who lacked many of FF7's own unique issues yet are overlooked, underrated, and to lift them up and show them to the world, to defend their honor.

    But guys. It's not even close. Sephiroth eats Kefka's lunch any day as a major antagonist. They have the exact same issues (vanishes from the final act, omnicidal maniac with a god complex), but what Kefka has going for him is a clown aesthetic and a pretty good final villain speech against the heroes, while Sephiroth has an aesthetic that would define Japanese villains for a decade afterwards and actual psychological depth and history and mystery.

    Just, as a whole, FF7 blows every past game out of the water. Yes, the Job system is great, but Final Fantasy V is a children's story. Galuf's death is an amazing moment but the calculated violation of expectations of Aerith's death is a masterpiece of writing craft. FF7 has contrivances, unexplained motivations, ambiguous events, the occasional baffling plot holes, but VI was a constant parade of plot holes, inconsistent tone and unexplained nonsense. The Warring Triad? The Esper Genocide? Cyan's entire writing? I mean, how did I describe it at the time, let me find that quote…

    Article:
    Final Fantasy VI is a deeply flawed masterpiece pushing the limits of its hardware and the abilities of its writing staff both to their limit, and it is tearing at the seams, crumbling under its own weight, throwing out history-making bangers as the same time as steam explosions take it off at the knee, and I'm going to be thinking about it long after I've stopped giving a shit about Xande, which happened roughly five minutes after the credits rolled on FFIII.
    Source: Me, six months ago


    VI has a better ending than VII, that's one thing I will give it without a shadow of a doubt (although I am still pissed at the whole 'magic fades away' angle, and Shadow's own ending). It turns out closure is good actually and lightly playing with the form of the well-trod epilogue refined over decades of storytelling beats just hard cutting to credits. The 'credits' sequence in VI with the black-and-white vignettes of the party escaping Kefka's Tower and then the finale with the soaring Falcon and Terra freeing her hair is an absolute banger… And because of ending bias it's easy to let that overshadow how much of the game doesn't work and how much steam the World of Ruin loses as it goes on, and how little meat there actually is to most of its cast. A story is more than its ending! Great stories can have terrible endings, and lesser stories can leave on a positive note by ending well. Which isn't to say that VI's story is "lesser," but rather simply that they both leave with a different taste, but there's more to the whole picture than just that final swiftness or bitter tang.



    Not that being 'merely' equal to VI would be a small achievement, to be clear.​


    Yeah, VI was good. Yeah, VI was a masterpiece. A flawed masterpiece, but they both are. VII is just playing with a whole new deck of cards. Its attention to character psychology, its sense of drama and tragedy, its use of mystery as a driver of the plot, its sheer volume of writing, the way it world feels so lived in, so full of people with their own lives and struggles, its emphasis on recurring antagonists, the ecological themes, the way Shinra feels more relevant today than it's ever been… The unprecedented breakthroughs in graphical quality, the cinematic direction of the FMVs, the artistry of the pre-rendered backgrounds…

    I'm playing the 1998 PC port of FF7 pretty much unadulterated, as opposed to the gorgeous Pixel Remasters of the previous games, with their enhanced graphics and music and art direction and UI, and that's a huge handicap for 7 to be carrying. But it still meets the challenge.

    So yeah. I'm sorry for not breaking new grounds here, for being a boring normie who is just repeating the common opinion shared by the majority of players, but FF7 is the best Final Fantasy so far.

    Which means we are still, mostly, on a 'every Final Fantasy game is better than the last' track. And that makes it interesting, because the next Final Fantasy is the one where that trend seems to take a turn. Where opinions are a lot more mixed. And while some people's favorite Final Fantasy is VIII, that doesn't seem to be the mainstream take. And that makes it really interesting to me.

    In no small part, because Final Fantasy VIII is my first Final Fantasy.

    If we end up skipping Tactics, or more likely delaying it, that'll be why. I haven't decided yet which FF I will play next, but the urge to revisit my first ever FF is extremely strong.

    We'll see. None of that will be decided until after the New Year, anyway.

    In the meantime, happy holidays, everyone.

    And thank you for reading.

    ***​

    Hey. As usual, I'd like to close this out with a reminder that if you like my work, you can support it on Ko-Fi or Patreon. I would appreciate it even more today, as the end of the year looms and we find ourselves dealing with a lot of unfortunate surprises. Among other things, this year, our washing machine, dishwasher, and oven all broke down in some form or another. Cooking is one of my main pleasures in life, and I would very much like to have an oven to do it with. If you can contribute towards Omicron Gets A New Oven - well, please consider a small contribution towards this as a Christmas present. Thank you very much.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Omicron said:
    Cid

    Okay. Fine. I'll talk about Cid.

    Sigh.

    "Chain-smoking Swear-a-minute Grandpa" was a great hook for a game aimed at teenagers in the 90s, but it hasn't aged all that well. We have outgrown the need for le funny abuse man.

    It's… interesting, that the game portrays Cid as a better leader than Barret, who takes charge of the group when Tifa and Cloud are away. It only makes me like him less, because I want that spot to go to Barret, but it's certainly A Choice. Cid being responsible for one of the most filler-y arcs of the game and stealing Tifa's chance to shine as party leader also doesn't endear me to him!
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    I'm not actually sure the game does say Cid's a better leader than Barret.

    Yeah, it puts him in the party leader slot, but Barret tells him precisely what to do and then gets on his ass to make sure he does it. Cid's basically a figurehead during the two Huge Materia heists, is my read on that situation :V
     
    Omicron said:
    VI was the near-apex of the 2D pixel art form (although I'm told Chrono Trigger is even better or something).
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Witnessing this statement get dropped so casually resulted in me experiencing a full PTSD flashback. There were times and places on the Internet where bringing up this debate could get you stabbed. Great way to experience your own sweeping operatic conflict, complete with extremely loud acting and intractable personal vendettas.

    Thanks as always to Omicron for a fantastic and highly entertaining read. FF7 was my first FF, Tifa my first video game crush, and Cloud my first coolguy protagonist who's actually such a loser that he wraps around to being genuinely cool. Sephiroth being insanely hot and evil basically informed my preference for and taste in villains for life. Great to see someone go so deep into what was, to me, such a formative experience. Can't wait for FF8.
     
    I don't remember my first final fantasy, nor if I ever actually played FF7. It's definitely the best of the lot reviewed thus far, although signs of improvement are glaring and obvious in some areas. Like the minigames, or personal use Materia being absent from the plot.
     
    Now, if you want an experience of VII that fixes some of the problems mentioned here, I suggest Team Four Star's FF7 Abridged series.
     
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