There are a select few games in the medium's upper echelon that have transcended the medium that birthed them and entered the cultural stream proper. Games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time have timeless characters and songs that just about anyone even tangentially aware of popular culture could recognize. There are a few games, however, that have entered this upper echelon without taking with it almost any of the components that made it up. For Final Fantasy VII, only two or three things really ever entered the cultural zeitgeist: the image of Cloud Strife, and his massive, unwieldy sword (one could argue villain Sephiroth has as well, but I'd put that in the iffy camp, and one particular spoiler that has come to define this game to the initiated). To anyone interested in game culture at all, this may seem like a severe under representation of the impact this game had, but ask anyone on the street about any and all things they know about this game, and you may be likely to get even less than I listed. The reason I bring this up at all is because despite Final Fantasy VII's cultural status, it was an extremely unlikely hit.
Final Fantasy games are, by design, a little less inclusive than the Zeldas and Marios that usually take up the mantel of video game ambassadors to culture at large. They are dense, novel styled stories with sprawling worlds, an ensemble cast of main or important characters, complex battle systems, and (particularly the PS1 generation and beyond) a substantial time sink. Final Fantasy VII had a couple of things going for it that made it stand out so singularly in 1997. For one, the graphics were cutting edge at the time, blending polygons with prerendered backgrounds and with full motion video, with loading screens masked by CGI cutscenes that included the live rendered polygonal figures you played with or outright replacing them with full-bodied, movie-like (for the time) avatars. This aspect of the game has dated poorly, to be sure, but placing it side-by-side with its contemporaries is rather impressive. The setting to the game, a cyber punk type dystopia where an eco-terrorist group is trying to fight the government (which is run by an energy corporation), was incredibly unique to gaming and also matched a relatively popular style at the time (The Matrix would be released two years later). None of this is to say that Final Fantasy VII is bad - it is actually very good - but that it's image as one of THE games in that exclusive club that defines the medium is largely coincidental, and to discuss Final Fantasy VII's legacy at all is to digress away from what actually makes it so good in the first place.
The basic plot is this: you play primarily as Cloud Strife, an ex-super soldier (part of a branch simply called SOLDIER) gone AWOL and joined an eco-terrorist group called Avalanche. Cloud is the platonic form of the cold, broody anime protagonist (and has largely been said to have made it popular - unfair, given his character has far more depth than that), and thus doesn't care about the idealism of Avalanche, only lending a hand for money and at the request of his childhood friend, Tifa, who has joined the group. The game opens with Avalanche bombing one of the Shinra corporation's eight mako reactors. Dissecting that last sentence: Shinra is an energy corporation that now owns the planetary government, and mako is an energy source made up of the planet's energy. Avalanche greatly oppose the company's killing the planet for energy and magic powers called materia (which is made up of condensed mako), and their bombing results in mixed reception among the populace. Some like that they are fighting against their dystopian oppression, while others wonder if the large loss of innocent lives was worth it. Avalanche's charismatic leader, Barret, distrusts you for having worked for Shinra previously in SOLDIER, but realizes he needs you and offers you more money for another bombing. During the bombing attempt, you are caught by the Shinra president and his forces, and separated from the group as you flee, falling into the slums. There, you find Aerith, a young woman who Shinra is trying to kidnap. You make your way with Aerith back to the sector Avalanche's headquarters are, only to find Shinra destroying it, faking a terrorist attack by Avalanche. Barret, Tifa, and Barret's adopted daughter survive, but Aerith is captured by Shinra. Your group goes to rescue her only to find that the Shinra president has been killed, and it is thought to be by the strongest SOLDIER operative, a man named Sephiroth, who has been presumed dead for five years. Cloud, in particular, has reason to be concerned, as he saw Sephiroth die and had worked with him, and what happened that fateful day lead to his going AWOL. You rescue Aerith and your rag tag team decide to leave the city and follow the rumors of Sephiroth's sightings in hopes of finding and stopping him from doing whatever he is doing, while Shinra sends their own team to do the same.
This largely makes up the setup for the game's plot, and for the first half of the game you hop from town to town, meeting colorful characters and learning little bits of plot, following Sephiroth's trail. One of the disappointing aspects to the plot is how it is given to you through most of the game. The game starts explosively, giving you a lot to take in while at the same time jumping you right into the action, but as you begin to follow Sephiroth, the game takes an episodic structure. Each of the towns and characters are fun, and the little bits you learn along the way about the town you grew up in and the various interactions with Shinra are all entertaining, but the story can feel a bit like it isn't moving. Add to this copious amounts of misdirection, and it would be surprising if you weren't at least a little confused by the end of it all as to what happened, and who was who. When the threads are untangled and the dust is cleared, however, you have a rather good story about ecological damage, corporate destruction, identity, loss and its affect on the people who cared about them. While Sephiroth never becomes more than the villainous icon, his relationship with cloud and himself is an interesting attempt at something different, but the real standout here is Cloud himself. Literally the mold to most brooding anime characters that "work alone", Cloud surprised me as he became far more than just a scowl. Learning his true backstory and who he used to be, and how that now feeds into his current self was one of the best character surprises in the whole game, and gave me far more reason to cheer him on than just as this badass icon he was sold as in the beginning.
As with any Final Fantasy game, the battle system has been tweaked, and this time it's easy to pick up, relatively tough to master. Here, we have the materia system, which uses slots in weapons or armor as a way of adding abilities, from spells to summons to buffs and autocasts. Some of these can be combined together in chained slots, where two slots are paired and allow for interplay. You can use a Restore materia, which allows for healing spells like Cure, with a paired All materia, which allows casting spells or attacks on groups rather than a single target, and you can heal your entire party at once. Sometimes materia only works in pairs, such as materia that allows elemental materia to be infused with weapons or armor for elemental physical attacks or defense. The materia itself is leveled up on its own, allowing you to switch materia between party members at will without worrying about starting over learning spells. The system is fun to play with and grind AP (the experience points for materia) into, but there isn't a whole lot of depth past the basic level. Learning how various materia interact doesn't take long after attaining it, and you'll have greater difficulty attaining it than you will building loadouts (sidebar: I really wish I could have saved materia loadouts). The game tries to toy with your choices in materia vs armor/weapons by giving you far more slots in exchange for worse stat buffs, but it never feels worth it. Likewise, it never feels worth having massive stat boosts if your materia slots are tiny. Compare this to Final Fantasy IX's system of learning abilities from armor and weapons, where I was more than willing to grind a character with sub-par equipment so I could learn abilities I wanted, because I knew it was a temporary sacrifice that would benefit me in the long run, and it was a lot of fun. With materia, there is just no reason not to go balanced materia unless you are going for extremely high physical attacks and defense only, with only buffing materia and no spells. You could use high materia equipment to try and level up materia quicker (many of these had double or triple AP gain), but I found my materia leveling up at a pretty solid rate.
The battle system also adds the new limit breaks, which allow for powerful attacks after taking enough damage for the limit bar to have been filled. These can be unlocked by leveling up or, as with the final limit breaks, can be found by doing obscure RPG stuff. If a limit break is attained in battle, you can choose to use it in place of a physical attack, or otherwise save it by casting magic, allowing for far more tactical usage than some of the other games' trance-type systems. Attacks were done through the ATB system, one found in many of the modern Final Fantasy games. There is an ATB bar that fills up depending on the speed of the character, and when it fills up the character is able to attack. Taking too long to choose an attack can lead to enemies catching up on their ATB meter and even able to attack twice if you were so careless. You're limited to three party members, rather than four like in some Final Fantasy games (I'm partial to four for more versatile party composition), and Cloud is locked in for most of the game. Final Fantasy VII has several interesting characters you can put in your party, and while the materia system allows you to pick and choose who you want to be where (although certain characters, like Aerith, have limit breaks that feel very class specific), you are more than likely going to stick with the same two for most of the game. This is a real shame, since it would require either going out of your way to rotate characters (and respec their materia, which is a chore) to spend time with them all, making it more of an incentive on subsequent playthroughs. Compare this to Final Fantasy IX which uses the story to separate your party and force you to spend time with everyone for considerable amounts of time (full disclosure: Final Fantasy IX is probably my favorite of the series). The biggest sin, however, may be the summons, which can take upwards of an unskippable minute to play out, lengthening your time (unless you place one of the rereleases with a fast forward button, which I highly recommend you do) to insane numbers. To sidebar this just a bit, this is true of many parts of the game, with odd sections of the game where you are required to run along short looking prerendered paths, but taking twice as long as you'd think. The game seems rather content wasting little pieces of your time, and these little pieces add up.
The pieces of Final Fantasy VII are hit and miss when looked at through a microscope, and while I won't say the game totally makes up for the sum of its parts, Final Fantasy VII is certainly more significant than that. The world is very well realized, and making your party partially made up of terrorists with a large body count adds a flavor of moral ambiguity that many other games lack. Materia, likewise, isn't just a tool useful to you, but has a real world place, and that place is as a weapon created by the evil corporation you are fighting, and made through a process you are trying to stop. And it will be hard to mention without spoilers, but that one part about 2/3rds through the game is seriously impactful, and the fact you still have so much of the game left to deal with the consequences and to see how the party deal with it is a stroke of genius for a game of this generation. In a lot of ways, Final Fantasy VII is a flawed masterpiece, one I can't in my right mind give a masterpiece's rating, but in a lot of ways lives up to the title nonetheless. It's an emotional journey, one that rewards most of its side quests with actually significant plot points and world building, some of which will change the way you think of characters, or clear up some of the those confusing threads toward the end of the game. I beat Final Fantasy VII in a rather short amount of time, having played it back-to-back with IX, but already I'm considering things I want to do again, or old saves I might replay to find some of that side content. There is a wealth of world to explore, and the game has dated horribly, but if you can get past that you won't regret visiting a classic that casts one of the longest shadows in gaming.
9.0
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