Final Fantasy VII

"It's a fun game, but the story's just go downhill."

FF7 is a first dark atmosphere Final Fantasy game which made it very popular among people, it's one of the cheese cake Square-Enix noticed and made so many seasonings out of it, the problem is, does it even worth it in the first place? Don't get me wrong, I like this game, but the story's too stupid to make anything out of it.

Graphic- 7/10
Background are detailed, blood looks real, sprite are blocky, ugh... Block character sprites are bad for many players but at least they're small and cute enough. They don't keep the SD sprites in the battle scene, though.

Story- 3/10
THIS is what dragging this game down. And I see no reason why it's interesting.

Final Fantasy VII tells the story of Cloud Strife, a quiet hero who was an Ex-SOLDIER for a nothing but evil company called Shinra, he joins the rebel group called AVALANCE in the beginning of the game and meet its boss, Barret, an old childhood friend, Tifa. As the main objective is to fight against the evil Shinra to save a young innocent flower girl named Aeris and the world from getting all energy sucked. The mess of the story starts when a guy called Sephiroth steps in and kill Shinra President. The hero's objective changes to "Chase That Sephiroth Pretty Boy", even though they know that the Shinra isn't defeated yet, and chasing someone as dangerous as Seph will only cause more pains for themselves.

Cloud and Sephiroth's story is very detailed and complex, the only problem is that Square put too much thoughts into it, and these two characters are unlikeable themselves. Cloud, even not being the worst emo I've ever seen, he's still too cold, no development going on with his personality and his friends, neither does Seph, who only want to be a god and kill everything he see, so much for the most important characters.

Meanwhile, those who traveled with Cloud don't get enough attention, They don't have enough dialogues to make them lovable characters. Still, each heroes have their quest and evil they have to fight with, but after his/her quests, however, that character's personality will not be developed, nor his/her teamwork ability with their friends. The main reason is because there can be only 3 characters in the party including Cloud. Squaresoft simple being too lazy to script the fitting dialogues for all of them. Although there's few points of the game that are done very well in term of story-related, after those parts, they return to the boring story till the very end.

We'll go into detail for the support characters, Tifa involves in some very important scenes and can be recognized as another heroine beside Aeris, still, she don't get any relationship developed with Cloud due to his nature and don't get much spotlight as she should. Barret is an angry black guy who will shoot his gun at anything when he's mad. Cid is even worse because he swears a lot more than Barret. The Cait Siths are nothing but toy robots who are controlled by Shinra operator, but switch to your side when he finds his chance. Red 13 and Yuffie (a secret character) are another stories, they have a few quests that develop them a bit but in the end, they are still not good enough to drive the main story.

Other major characters are Vincent Valentine, who's another cold guy can fill you plot holes if you manage to get him, because he's a secret character. Another detailed character is Aeris, she's lovable character at the personality, but still can't escape from being an annoying character when she start talking about something the team mate can not understand. Also, being a great character both in story and battles, Square put her out of your squad after awhile because of the *not good at all* reason, sad but true.

And this is it, this game has a very few humors, which is very needed in every RPG especially as it's to cool down the story's tension, but since you won't having Aeris in your team to inspire your happy days later in the game, it's resulting of nothing but crappy and serious yet not interesting story in almost all turns. Tifa is not happy enough to cheer you up either.

System- 8/10
The thing that saves FF7 from oblivion, ATB is very great. Limit Break and weapons are things that make characters different, for example, Barret and Yuffie and use long range weapons, Aeris has strong supporting limit breaks, Cloud can use powerful attacking limit, and Tifa can create combo attacks with her limit breaks. Making it fun trying to create your favorite team sometime.

Materia system is good enough, but it can make every characters the same since they can a character use every same skills that everyone else can as long as you have the Materia equipped, you can level up the Materia's level and put a combination set of Materias to make them more useful, but we have to say that we can obtain almighty summons like Shiva, Ifrit or even Bahamut too easy, there's no secret to get them. It's as if they're Pokemons in the ball that are lying around the world, waiting for the heroes to catch' em all.

There are a lot of minigames you can play during a game, many of them are interesting and fun, such as Chocobo Race, you can raise a good chocobo to race and win good rewards.

Music- 7/10
Music are good to hear, battle BGM is great, normal boss music is even greater. But some boss battle BGM don't suit the battle, even if it's a fight after an emotional scenes.

Final Conclusion - 6/10
Gameplay and graphics are nice, but the story ruins it all. There is just not enough things to make the heroes interesting, and if the heroes themselves are not interesting, the game won't., no matter how deep the story can be.

If you're playing this game, don't bother to think about the story too much. Just experience its systems and relax.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 06/01/09, Updated 11/13/09

Game Release: Final Fantasy VII (US, 05/31/98)