What we’re dealing with in this case, and every ‘story’ event in FF6, is that the story and the gameplay are interwoven so that the player was an active participant at all times. FF6 doesn’t actually have a very good story at all, it just has one which is very involving for the player, so it seems like the best thing ever if you happen to be playing it. If you ever try to described the storyline of FF6 to someone, as I did quite often when I was 10, it would sound something like this:
“First you storm this city in these big robot things, then you have to play as these cat things, then you meet a thief and there’s this guy with a kickass crossbow that you can use to kill a bunch of guys at once, and then you ride a raft…”Assuming I was old enough to know about importing US games at age five and had played FF1, my synopsis would probably have sounded like this:
“You choose from four classes and then you have to go into this temple and you beat up a guy and then the king builds you a bridge and you go across the bridge and you talk to a witch…”When I was 13 and trying to convince my friends how awesome FF7 was, however, it sounded like this:
“There’s this guy called Cloud, and he’s not sure whether he’s really Cloud, or a clone of Cloud, or some guy called Zack. Anyway, it turns out that this other guy called Sephiroth knows why, so Cloud tracks him down and then Cloud gets stuck in the lifestream, so everyone else has to rescue Cloud…”See what I did with the bold text there? If there’s any ‘point’ at which the series tipped the scales in favour of story rather than gameplay, then that point was some time during the development of FF7. It’s not a game with a story added to give it make it more interesting, it’s a story with a game crudely riveted on to the side with no thought given to how the two halves fit together. The most obvious problem is the way in which the game handles the story’s characters. Up until FF7, there had never been characters who were technically useless. Sure, Relm and Edward were shit, but they were still the only characters in their respective games who could utilise certain skills and equipment, however dubious the merits of those skills and equipment might have been. The games which allowed us to choose classes never gave us more characters than would presently fit in the party. Neither approach resulted in dead weight. FF7 is halfway between both approaches, and two thirds of its cast are dead weight. The only three characters who matter are the three with the highest levels, because, thanks to Materia, anyone can do anything and have any stat boosts you want at any time. The Materia system, while fine in and of itself, is entirely the wrong shape for a story that has more protagonists than party slots… but the characters are there anyway, simply because they’re part of the story. Sod the Opera House. The character / Materia issue isn’t that much of a problem – yeah, there’s a bit more screwing around in the menus, but not enough to become annoying. What does cause problems is the story’s presentation: FF7 doesn’t want to be a game, it wants to be a 26 episode Anime series with a theatrical film tacked on the end that will Explain It All. The premise of eco-terrorists fighting an evil corporation that’s sucking the life from the planet is fine and dandy (it is, after all, just the light warriors fighting an evil empire that’s sucking the life from the planet put through the Akira-o-matic), but the presentation of the story, the way it’s told, is completely wrong for a video game. Let’s go back to FF6 again. Cyan’s kingdom, family and reason for living are all taken away from him shortly after we first meet him. This is, obviously, going to do horrible things to his emotions, but he doesn’t really talk about it because… well, because it’s not FF7, basically. So, how does the story resolve this? If FF6 had been all about the story, we’d have hours and hours of (probably unskippable) scenes of him grieving until he learns to love again or some shit. FF6, though, was not about its story, because it was a video game. In order to overcome Cyan’s personal demons, the party travels inside his dreams while he sleeps, explores his subconscious (which, of course, has random encounters) and overcomes his demons by beating them to death. It’s a variation of the Opera House idea: Anything, anytime, anywhere can be a dungeon, even if it’s totally illogical, because otherwise the player’s got nothing to do. Along the way, we learn all about Cyan’s past by observing his memories first hand, and, should we succeed in banishing his demons, his SwordTech ability will become Godlike and we’ll get a new Esper. It combines a dungeon scenario with the game’s story as well as developing Cyan’s character both personally and statistically. It’s just about perfect. Now let’s jump ahead three years. Cloud is sitting in a hotel room in Kalm, and is going to tell us the story of the time he was in SOLDIER (Random capitalisation was the late-90s successor to the mid-90s inappropriate use of the letter ‘K’) and met Sephiroth. He starts the story, and we flash back to Nibelheim. And stay there. And stay there. And they talk. And talk. And talk. And then Barrett tells we should save the game, not because there’s a difficult bit coming up, but because there’s so much more talking to come that the player might need a break from not playing. Yes, there’s a dungeon, but it’s just a few screens of totally linear path designed to show how powerful Sephiroth is by having him kill every monster in one hit, and we can’t keep any items or experience because this is a flashback. It ends. We have no new items. Our characters are not any more powerful. There was no challenge. It was completely linear. The only thing the game let us do was occasionally wander around some houses and watch while Sephiroth killed monsters for us. Was that really a productive use of forty minutes? Kalm is my Opera House, because what happens here is the first time something in the series was all story and no game. The closest the series had gotten to this beforehand was the Esper world flashback in FF6, but, despite the lack of combat and reward, it was still a fully interactive sequence and only lasted a few minutes. The Kalm flashback is almost entirely on rails, and over half an hour long. Instead of the game stopping briefly to explain who is fighting who and why, it’s completely derailed itself in order to focus on a story that the player must observe passively rather than take part in. That story is bollocks.
FF7 is to complex storytelling what slasher movies are to genuine horror. It gets cheap shocks by throwing in twist after twist after twist, but there’s nothing under the surface to hold it together. Cloud was in SOLDIER. Then, shock horror, he wasn’t in SOLDIER! Then, shock horror, he was but lost his memory! Then, shock horror, he wasn’t but he knew a guy who was! Then, shock horror, he wasn’t but he still lost his memory and then his remaining memory mingled with the memory of a guy who was… or something. Or maybe he was a clone. Or it was all a dream. Look how easy it is: Hojo was Cloud’s father!!! Did I just blow your mind or what? If this revelation had appeared during the game, would it have been any less plausible than the rest of the story? Ultimately, there’s no point in paying any attention at all to FF7’s story, because anything you “learn” is going to be invalidated by What Really Happened in about half an hour’s time, and then in another half hour we’re going find out What Really Really Happened etc. etc., until, in what I consider the definitive FF7 moment, we finally beat the game and material is introduced in the end sequence which causes the story to make even less sense. If it’s not going anywhere, what’s the point in following it? If I can pull some random crap out of thin air at 5am while I’m downloading Goemon 3, and said crap is indistinguishable from the storyline of Final Fantasy 7, then it logically follows that the story isn’t very good. There’s a bloody big difference between a story which is complicated and unpredictable, and a story which is simply incoherent and illogical.
Nothing else about the game has any kind of longevity – it’s entirely of its time, like Donkey Kong Country or Mortal Kombat, and doesn’t hold up without ultra-strength rose-coloured goggles. It was a shock when it arrived: An RPG with monsters made of polygons that moved! The final boss music had words! It was dark and steampunky (which is very mature) instead of high fantasy (which is for kids)! There were lots of things that could be described as ‘anime-influenced’! If anything, FF7 is the Playstation’s mission statement: Gritty ‘adult’ sensibility, (implied) sex, (bloodless) violence, (mostly) uncensored swearing, a truly ‘dark’ villain, and the invocation of religious icons that would never have made it past Ted Woolsey without being re-branded something less offensive to people who don’t actually buy games. It was everything that Nintendo, now the lamest company ever, had withheld from us throughout our childhoods. But we weren’t kids any more. We were thirteen, man, and 1997 was our time to shine! Except that it isn’t 1997 any more. All those things which seemed edgy and exciting at the time are now passé in the extreme. It’s now accepted that RPGs will have expensive-looking FMV sequences, animated monsters, violence and labyrinthine plots, so FF7 is going to have to survive on its own merits now, rather than simple newness-factor. It shows up fairly badly, here: The graphics, while a technical step up from what came before, look like lifeless plastic next to the amount of detail present in what came both before and after. One Winged Angel, despite having words and a choir, just sounds like generic ‘villain’ music next to the warped cacophony of FF6’s Dancing Mad, and, if you want an example of musical shock factor in Final Fantasy, they opened FF10 with goddamn Nu-Metal. Dystopic Anime-influenced cyberpunk was… well, it was never that new, and it’s certainly even less so now that Anime has a much wider penetration. Everything that made FF7 special and new in 1997 is now mundane – it lacks the inspiration of what came before, and its technical achievements have been long-since made redundant. Which leaves us with the actual game.
It’s easy, too, but that’s never been a problem. What it does lack is a sense of discovery: If you want to find the secrets in FF7, you will need a playguide. Look at the ridiculous amount of stuff required in order to breed a gold chocobo – you need to catch each parent in a different part of the world, then feed them the right green, then breed them using the right kind of nut (ooo-err), then mate their offspring with chocobos you’ve caught in totally different parts of the world with a different kind of green… it’s not exactly intuitive, is it? This isn’t so bad, really, until you look at where this led the series: FF8, FF9 and especially FF10 featured huge chunks – optional, yes – that were utterly and completely impenetrable unless you knew what you were doing beforehand. FF7 is where this took root, although, aside from the chocobo breeding, most of it is fairly intuitive, such as the frog forest and… actually, I don’t remember any other optional bits that weren’t minigames. Oh, wait, Aeris’ limit break. Ah yes, the minigames. There are a lot of them, and they’re all pretty fun. More fun than cards, anyway. These are the only times the game really requires any skill: Breeding a gold chocobo or getting to the end of the frog forest revolve entirely around knowing what to do rather than being good at the game, but a playguide isn’t going to make you better at racing or snowboarding. Not that they were especially hard in the first place, but whatever. The only problem is that they represent a step backward from the way FF6 was set up: FF7 has minigames in it to break up the monotony of the core gameplay, which basically involved pressing circle over and over. FF6 didn’t have minigames, it just kept twisting the core gameplay into new and interesting shapes, so it never got monotonous. However, the most important thing is that none of FF7’s minigames revolve around fucking card battles. Lest we forget. FF1 to FF6 were games about the player assuming the role of the characters and tackling the outside world through their actions. FF7 is a game in which the player observes characters coming to terms with the inside world through reading lots of text. What came before was fun and a bit stupid, and what came after was better thought-out and more restrained. FF7 is Final Fantasy as a mopey, self-absorbed adolescent who desperately wants to prove he isn’t just a kid any more, but winds up talking about vampires a lot and generally embarrassing himself… which is what most of us were doing when we first played it and proclaimed it the greatest thing ever. It has good bits and bad bits, but most of it is simply mediocre and only worth discussing because it was pretty cool at the time. More than any game in the series, it’s aged terribly, because it was an experiment, a mission statement and a re-formatting of the series rather than a game.
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KID'S STUFF!
This game is very deep and meaningful because that sort of looks like "Jehova". Fact.
"The only reason the cast continue to be popular is that their designs are memorable"
"Is this a stereotype of blacks? If so, it's not one I know about."|
 
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It is a sad indictment on our backwards society that women believe a man cannot be both intellectual and sensitive. Earlier this year my English Literature class was subjected to a screening of a cinematic adaptation of Romeo & Juliet. Upon witnessing the death of both shallow, undeveloped characters, I chuckled derisively, finally glad to be rid of them and their patently unrealistic love story. "Would you mind telling us what you think is so funny, Anthony?", inquired Mrs Groute. Before I could answer, I was rudely interrupted by my classmate, Jessica Hillhouse. "God, you're so totally insensitive!", she cruelly and ignorantly sniped in her nasal, valley-girl twang. "How dare you call me insensitive, you insipid harpy?", I retorted with impeccable timing "Why, only last night I found myself unable to cease crying after reliving the tragic demise of Aeris in Final Fantasy VII". The class burst into laughter, clearly unable to lower their noses and realise that videogames can and do say more about human relationships than their precious 'literature'. I was asked to stay behind after class, most likely to advise Mrs Groute on which RPG to replace Pride & Prejudice with on next semester's syllabus, but she gave me some extra homework by mistake. I never did it.