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…)

No Game New Year: Kingdom Hearts

Kingdom Hearts

Ah, Kindom Hearts. It is a beautiful, beautiful game that took the epicentre of imagination and made it into something truly special. It never quite achieved the mainstream success of the triple-A titles of the time, nor did it manage to compete with the leading games that came after. However, after twelve years it retains a relatively small but immensely loyal fan base. And rightly so.

I played through the game up until more or less the end back in 2003, and had a few false starts later on, but I’ve never beaten it. And with No Game New Year still in full swing, and my sister’s PS2 still plugged in, I felt compelled to give it one more shot.

Anybody who knows about Kingdom Hearts knows the score: It is an amalgamation of the Disney and Squaresoft intellectual property in a somewhat linear but very enjoyable role playing game. That, to me, sealed the deal while I was still reading magazines running the preview versions of the game in Japanese – I’m a big Disney fan, and I loved the Final Fantasy games. What was not to love about this?

As with all games that take more than a day to finish, I’ll probably be some time with this one, so I’m going to give you the highlights here:

 

There was a certain amount of innocence to Squaresoft before it became Square Enix. Final Fantasy VII was a huge success, had some incredibly memorable characters and had a great storyline. Final Fantasy VIII was a good game but fell short of the mark in terms of character, and Final Fantasy X was very good indeed.[1] So taking some of the characters from their games and putting them into Kingdom Hearts was a fantastic idea. With a completely new hero, Sora, you actually got to interact with some of the characters who appeared in the aforementioned Final Fantasy games – Cloud, Tidus and Squall (Leon) were all very good as player characters but talking to them from an outsider’s point of view is a special experience even to this very day. It’s an odd thing to pick up on but I loved it.

Similarly, teaming up with Goofy and Donald Duck, characters I have been watching on TV and film my ENTIRE LIFE, was magic. They both have video games of their own but having their characters interact with yours – Sora – was an incredible experience that made me somehow feel that they were talking to you – with their quirks and personalities intact. Takes me right back to ‘pretend’ games you played as a kid, which I won’t go in to but don’t tell me you didn’t do the same at some point.

Of course, kicking their asses was fun too...

I equally enjoyed teaming up with the Disney characters you find on the various worlds you visit, though I have done less of it this time due to team balancing (I’ll tell you later.) At the time of writing I’ve only got to Tarzan in this playthrough, but later on you get to team up with Aladdin, Ariel from the Little Mermaid, and The Beast to name but a few. Plus the characters you can get through Summons (Simba, Bambi, the Genie) are a pleasure to have alongside you.

I set the difficulty on this one to Expert. As far as I know, it only affects the combat, and I found myself breezing through most of the combat on Normal difficulty. I wanted a challenge, so I set it to expert. However, I found a different challenge in one of the few negative aspects of this game: The controls.

Sadly, both the controls and the interface don’t work quite as well as they should. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the character action games I’ve been playing on the Xbox360, but it took me a while to get my head around the idea that you can’t change the direction of your attack during a combo. Usually you can do this in games by pointing the analogue stick in the direction you want to go, but it doesn’t work like that in Kingdom Hearts. Some of the moves take a surprisingly long time to do, and more than once I’ve been injured or killed simply because I’ve been interrupted during the first attack of the combo. Similarly the jumping is a little off, in that once you land, there is a delay of about a third of a second before you can move again. I imagine I will appreciate it a lot more during some of the platforming sections I know are coming up, but I’ve been caught out by it a few times in combat.

Well I'm very pleased to hear it...

The other major is that as far as I can see, there is no quick way to access your items. You have to ‘equip’ items to each character in order for them to be able to use it in combat, which is fine, because otherwise Goofy and Donald would use all your potions in five minutes. But once you get in to combat, you have to use the directional buttons – which takes your thumb off the left analogue stick and stops you moving – and cycle down two menus to do something as simple as using a potion. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve died because I was faffing about trying to use my potions, and while I’m getting a little more used to it now, it’s still a design flaw in my opinion.

But as I said in my coverage of Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, which was from about the same time, this game was developed before a lot of these things were standardised. There wasn’t a precedent for a ‘good’ system, so the developers just did whatever came to their heads, though I still find it hard to believe that anyone thought a menu in a real-time combat system was a good idea. My sister actually told me that it gets a lot better in Kingdom Hearts 2, which I haven’t played yet due to wanting to complete the first game, er, first.

To end on a high point, I would like to shake the hand of the genius who came up with the soundtrack. I don’t know who it is, I have looked in the manual to the game but the composer of the music either isn’t mentioned or is given a different title. I was almost in tears with nostalgia when I heard the background music to Traverse Town. I find it incredible that a loop of 16 bars of music and a melody from what I think is a clarinet can simultaneously make you feel welcome, comfortable and lonely, and it never, NEVER gets old.

I probably will shed a tear or two when I get to Agrabah – Aladdin’s stage – and the Genie makes his appearance. As I write this, Robin Williams, who voice-acted the Genie in the film Aladdin, died earlier in the week. I found myself as moved by the terrible circumstances of his death as I am by the huge legacy of work he leaves behind, and will be reminded of it only too well when his character appears in the game.[2]

I’ll most likely be away next week but hopefully I’ll have a little more to say about it when I come back. See you all then!

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[1] Can’t pass judgement on FFIX because I never played it.

[2] Yes, I know the voice actor for The Genie in Kingdom Hearts was Dan Castellaneta, but it will still nonetheless remind me of Robin. What a loss.