You look like a bear wearing a marshmallow.
See, there’s this game. You either love it or you hate it. It’s a shame it had to come to that, because it used to not be that way. Final Fantasy VII is probably the most socially divisive (compared to Final Fantasy VIII which is mechanically divisive). It used to be a game you could play and enjoy, but now the game is the living embodiment of the divisiveness within the RPG community. The sad thing is, the middle ground on this game has been slipping for almost 15 years now.
When I moved back to Montgomery, I met this guy named Sean in my last year of junior high. We had first period PE and lunch together. In much the same way Chris and I spent the nights with each other, I went to Sean’s house after school because he lived close by. We played video games and watched Pokemon and Dragonball Z in the afternoons until my mom picked me up when she got off work.
We spent the night with each other on the weekends. Well, he spent the night with me once, and I spent the night with him most of the time. One weekend that I didn’t spend the night with him, he rented the first disc of FF7. That’s how the local rental place did multi-disc games.
The Monday after he returned the game, he came to school enraptured by this amazing game he’d spent the weekend playing and couldn’t wait to tell me all about it. Throughout the day, he recounted the tale of how he participated in eco-terrorism, corporate espionage, prostitution and breaking and entering. Well, more specifically, it was along the lines of recounting everything up to the fight with Rufus Shinra on the helicopter pad of the Shinra building.
I knew I had to have this game. I knew it was a Final Fantasy game, but after I’d had such a (limited) positive experience with Final Fantasy VI, my opinion on the series had changed a lot since the encounters in the Marsh Cave level checked me so hard I gave up on the series for seven years.
Like I said, it took a couple of months to get the game. I finally got this game in February 1998. I wanted the game for a few months before that, but still being new, it was expensive. My mother bought it for me with her income tax refund. I remember the day. I didn’t feel well. I had a colossal headache, so I went to the office to see if I could call home. While on the phone, I remember my mother told me that she’d gotten her refund and wanted to take me to Babbages to buy FF7. I was thrilled, even though my head was killing me.
So she took the afternoon off and we went to the mall to get the game. After buying it and the strategy guide, we ate Chick Fil A in the food court, she gave me ibuprofen for my head and we went home. I felt better by the time I got there.
Like so many people, I had problems with the whole “attack while the tail is up” thing. I’d even made it a decent ways into the game when I decided to start over. I’m not exactly sure why, maybe because I missed something, but I did. By that evening, I’d made it to the church in the slums. When my grandmother came home from work, she knew I’d left school early. On the occasions I didn't feel well at school, she usually bought me a Frosty from Wendy’s. This day was no different. I remember Cloud and Aerith standing on the junk pile after escaping the church while I ate my frozen treat.
I remembered Chris made an off-hand line about when he played through Final Fantasy IV. He told me that major characters in Final Fantasy games routinely die. Of course, I’d never exactly experienced this before, but I believed him. My goal was to figure out who it was. I pretty much keyed in on Aerith, because she talked about it so much.
We had a weather day at school. There was a front moving in that had been spawning tornadoes and strong thunderstorms across the Southeast. Lots of hail, lots of rain. Early that morning, my mother turned on the TV to watch the morning news. By this time I was already dressed and ready to go, the superintendent of the school system cancelled school for the day. Normally, I’d have just gone back to bed, but on this day, I decided to play the game. My mother and grandmother went to work and my youngest brother went to day care.
I was at home by myself on the darkest, dreariest day possible. Thunder rumbled in the distance every few minutes. The mood was incredibly somber. I loved days like this (and still do). That was the morning I reached the end of the first disc. I can’t forget that moment. I’d figured out it was coming (though I wasn’t using the strategy guide), and I’d been blown away by the cutscenes prior to this point. This was the moment I realized we were clearly dealing with a different animal than I’d experienced in earlier Final Fantasy games. Square had successfully made the leap to the PlayStation generation.
The rest of the game went on uneventfully. I beat it, enjoyed it, but that time around I didn't do everything possible. My first file was such a mishmash of materia and levels I’m not sure how I even completed it.
Sean didn’t get a copy of the game until the summer before our 11th grade year in high school. And he did do everything the first time around. By this time, we weren’t as close because we didn’t have any classes together in 9th or 10th grade. In fact, that one year in junior high was the only year we ever had a class together, even though I continued to spend the night with him on into high school. Just less often because of high school extracurriculars.
Like I said, the game is good. It has a good flow. The story is fairly convoluted and I dislike a lot of the characters, but there’s real fun to be had with this game. I guess you could say there’s a lot of replay value (which is just about the only good thing I can say about using materia) to be found in the battle system, but that’s about it.
That’s where the biggest mechanical problem I find with the game lies. Outside of limit breaks, no one is unique. The materia system augments player abilities. While you have certain types of materia equipped, it nerfs your physical attack, defense and health, while boosting your magic attack, magic defense and mana pool. Every time you level up, what you would get in latent stat bonuses are either supplemented or declinated by the magic you have equipped to each character. For instance, if you were going to innately gain three points in strength at level up, with an equipped magic materia that has a -1 to its strength, you’d only get two points of strength at level instead of three.
This essentially makes certain types of materia worthless for characters with high latent physical attributes. Theoretically, you could make your latently strongest fighters your magic users, but the attrition rate of status points would make them equally impotent with both magic and physical damage.
Compound this by the fact that the story purposely makes no sense. Bad translations are a large part of the issue. I mean, once you play through it a handful of times, you get the gist of what’s going on, but there’s still debate about a lot of it. In fact, I had a discussion about an early plot point just last night.
My problem with the game, chiefly, is the characterization is clearly comprised of Jungian archetypes and not necessarily how the fandom purposely tries to ruin it for everyone (that's a discussion for another time). These characters don't desire to have any shades of gray. This makes for characters completely devoid of personality. What makes me especially sad is even the villain, Sephiroth, isn’t in control of his own actions by the end of the game and is as much of an unwilling participant in the fate of their world than those fighting against him.
I think it’s the same problem I have with the philosophy inherent in Star Wars. There’s good and bad, light and dark. “Only a Sith deal in absolutes,” or so Obi Wan Kenobi tells us. Which, in and of itself, is an absolute. This is the biggest difference FF7 has to its predecessor, FF6.
In FF6, every character had a past they were trying to escape. Several of them had done a lot of bad and wanted to atone for it. Because of the sheer depths of his depravity, Kefka, on the other hand, was clearly black and white. Which is what made him stand out in a world filled with wonderfully rounded gray area characters. These characters even admit that in a lot of ways they’re just as bad as Kefka, and embrace their faults.
In FF7, the characters all go with the idea that “Sephiroth is so bad that we’re all good because of it,” and their faults ultimately become ignorable. You don’t have to be neutral good to be a well rounded, chaotic evil fighting character. You can also be chaotic good and embrace the mistakes you’ve made without ignoring them. Not only that, but the writing treats Sephiroth as a chaotic evil character, when he's clearly lawful evil.
And to be honest, Sephiroth is just a defenseless puppet to Jenova. It’s the alien’s will that brings everyone together. Sure, Sephiroth surrendered himself over to the will of Jenova, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s clearly not in control of his own actions by the end of the game. In fact, you don’t even encounter the real Sephiroth until the middle of the game, and don’t see him again until the very end.
Yeah, well, regardless, I just don’t see the level of deification this game gets. I do like the game, but I guess I’m able to keep it in perspective. The garbled mess of a story and some aspects of the combat bother me. Yet I find myself continuing to go back to it. I also think Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core does a much better job with its characterization and story than the original title (and an even worse job with its combat), but that’s another review for another time.
The only picture I have of Sean is a scan from my high school yearbook.
Breakdown:
- Order played: 3 of 12
- Order completed: 1 of 12
- Place among my favorites: 8 of 12
- Number of times completed: 10+
- Versions completed: PS1, PC re-release
- Versions attempted: PS1, PC re-release
- Definitive version: PC re-release
- Favorite track: Interrupted by Fireworks
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