No Game New Year: Final Fantasy VII. Great game, shame about the disc.

Final Fantasy VII is about as close as I’ve come to breaking No Game New Year. I found a copy of it at MCM Comic Con in London, and without thinking, bought it. I only realised a few minutes later that I probably shouldn’t have done it! Thankfully, Brian and the others were kind enough to accept that I’d bought the game to replace a game I’d lost years ago, I suspect to a thief. That being said, if I’m going to tread on this thin ice, I’d better make this a damn good play-through…

And what a pleasure it was to play the game again! As I said in the Kingdom Hearts write-up, there was certain innocence to Squaresoft before they became Square Enix. FFVII was the biggest game ever made for a console up to that point (1997) but somehow they got away with blowing it all out of proportion. It had great characters, a contrived but compelling plot and the game was a joy to play through if you had enough time for Japanese role-playing games.

The graphics are blockier than I remember them, but there are three things conducive to this:

1.  I originally played the game on the PC; while the game functioned more or less identically to the PlayStation version there was a difference in the graphics originally designed for TV, not PC monitors,
2. I’m playing the game on the PS2; PS1 games never look as good on the PS2,
3. Graphics originally designed for old-style tube TVs look horrible on the flat screen I’m playing them on now.

I remember back when I used to play this years ago being hugely invested in the plot of the game and the characters that made it. Contrast it with the games we have now and you would be forgiven for wondering why; there was very little voice acting and the characters barely had facial expressions. The answer is, of course, that the developers worked around the limitations of the hardware they had available. For a start, the characters for the most part are in ‘Hero Scale,’ with their heads, arms and weapons exaggerated in size. Expression was mostly done with the character movements, which were over-done for the context but you always knew exactly what the character was thinking. For the same reason, if the character was speaking, you always knew how they were saying it. Or you could make up your own mind about their expression and intentions. It’s much easier to play your own game when it is left to your imagination.

The other contributing factor to this is the incredible soundtrack. This isn’t quite CD-quality audio – the technology was there but the space on the CDs certainly wasn’t. In fact, the music only sounded slightly better than the previous generation’s Super Nintendo. But again, the composer used what was available to his advantage, which in this case was an enormous talent for creating compelling music. Few things inspire a sense of wonder like the opening sequence of the game. The track playing when they attack the Mako Reactor sounds urgent and aggressive, the Wall Market theme is dirty and sleazy but oddly welcoming, and I still tear up at Aeris’ theme when Elmyra is explaining her past – especially when you know what’s coming later. An incredible effort, and it pays off.

You don't bloody work either...

Sadly the game has something horribly wrong with it, which I would imagine is to do with the condition of the disk I’m playing it on: some of it won’t load. The area around Mt Corel takes absolutely forever to load, something like 3-4 minutes just to load an area. The only reason I know it’s doing it is because the music usually kicks in first, but this happens not only after every time you load it but after every random battle as well. And, this being Final Fantasy, there is absolutely no way to avoid random battles. I’ll try and sit it out as long as I can but if it carries on too long after that, I may have to admit defeat. (As I write this, the game is trying and failing to load a battle screen…)