Final Fantasy VII comes from a weird little era of game history where every game is very visibly aged, in at least one way or another. The fifth generation of console’s most remembered games often have visually aged more than their fourth generation counterparts. Final Fantasy VII looks weird, it plays weird, and it’s more influential than almost every game in the series since. Square’s intense marketing of spinoffs definitely plays into that, but looking back on the game, its modern game design sensibilities really shine through. First and foremost, Final Fantasy VII is super smooth. Its storyline has just the right pace, through the lens of a remarkably likeable cast of characters, while playing like nothing else that had existed yet.

Final Fantasy VII’s story is used wonderfully to fuel its electric-fast pacing. The first half of the game has you constantly jumping from set piece to set piece. Every single one of those locations counts, they’re all beautifully shown to you through hyper-detailed backdrops. The game doesn’t need to tell you much about Midgar at all, the slums wordlessly show you a people who live together from whatever scraps of metal they can get their hands on. Then you get to explore the whole world, and see how that world has dealt with the dominance of Shinra. In the second half of the game, you begin to revisit many of the previous locations in the game, yet the game’s pacing doesn’t sway. These revisits are glamorous and placed perfectly to get even more worldbuilding richness out of these places than it had the opportunity to on your first visits. The game’s optional content is equally as natural to its setting, often discovered simply by revisiting previous locations as the world has changed by your own volition. All of these components come together to form a world that is richly detailed, refined, and an absolute joy to run through as you go through the game’s golden standard steampunk-fantasy plotline.

Alongside FFVII’s story comes its character cast, which is what a lot of people would consider most iconic about the game. We have our mainstage hero, Cloud Strife, introduced with complete disinterest to that position as a hero. In a genre heavily defined by power fantasy and self insert protagonists, Cloud’s story of failing his dreams is fantastic and unique. Every single mandatory party member gets their own story arc where we learn more about their problems, and it’s hard not to love every single one of them. Even Cait Sith, even if he’s a narc! By the end, my favourites were absolutely Cloud, Aerith, and Barret. Aerith is whimsical and has a good sense of humour, but she’s also strong, and you can feel that she’s lived a burdening life. Barret is intense, and emotional, but shows introspection and maturity in just the right places to make his passionate personality totally believable.

Final Fantasy VII’s biggest gameplay difference from its previous entries is its new central mechanic, Materia. Materia’s game design is immediately intuitive compared to previous FF game’s Job systems, as it enforces the player to create their own characters from scratch, built from individual moves synergizing together. By the end of the game, Final Fantasy VII will have taught the player how to make their own job classes out of their collection of materia, teaching them how to use the stat changes Materia gives to their fullest. It does all of this without any tricks, or forcing the player to commit to anything they don’t fully understand, unlike Class selections at the start of games. This is fantastic, and results in Final Fantasy VII being an incredible beginner’s RPG.
On the other hand, this results in the differences between characters in your party being even vaguer than a class name. Those differences mostly come down to minor stat distinctions and Limit Breaks, most of which you won’t see in a single playthrough. This results in the game’s party feeling expendable, as any character can have a set of materia tossed onto them and function mostly the same as someone else on the team. The game developer’s also seemed to realize this, and fully take advantage of it, filling the game with many moments of temporary party member loss. Those wouldn’t have worked without the expendability that materia allows for, but that just makes me question the value those moments bring in general.
Final Fantasy VII may have the most iconic video game character death of all time, but I can’t say I felt that loss through the gameplay. I traded around my materia and quickly moved on. This isn’t a huge flaw of the game, but it’s easy to see that modern games can convey both temporary and permanent loss much better. Materia has pure game design behind it, and is potent for easing people into the gameplay, but it muddies the water of how distinct each party member is from each other.

Looking back, the combat definitely isn’t the only reason that Final Fantasy VII’s gameplay was so memorable. Final Fantasy VII is packed with minigames and micro-mechanics to go through that’s unlike any other game I’ve ever played. Some of these suck, or have just aged pathetically, but the pretense it sends is so strong. Final Fantasy VII is a game so confident in itself that it tries to give every new plot point its own game engine. If there’s anything about the game that has sent ripples of influence to the medium as a whole, it’s that. Cloud snowboarded down that mountain so that Nathan Drake could run up one.

Final Fantasy VII isn’t just an influential RPG, it’s the rosetta stone of the modern action adventure game. It’s filled to the brim with densely detailed backdrops, and cinematic cutscenes of huge machinery and giant monsters. With its remarkable ability to transform any action movie moment that’d fit into something playable: from motorcycle chases to submarine duels, the promise it gave to people in 1997 for what a video game could be is astounding. Then combine that with an explosive 3 disk long storyline of fighting dictators, aliens, and evil overlords, you can tell why this was the game that made JRPGs a thing people cared about everywhere. But is any of this impressive in the current year, watching those dinky action figure looking character models yell at each other? Well, yeah, a lot about the game still hits the modern golden standard– RPGs to this day still struggle with having immediately gripping intros, or as effortless of worldbuilding as this game's. Its replayability is as potent as any modern action adventure game, with every room holding a secret. And despite being shown through those dinky 3D models, all those character designs have been worshipped for 25 years. Has Final Fantasy VII aged poorly? Well, there’s certainly things modern games have gotten better at, that’s for sure. But that’s exactly why this game is so memorable, it predicts a future of what modern video games could be like, and inspires that future into reality.



Side note, this playthrough of the game was through the Switch port. It’s pretty good, but I have an issue with it. It has a great 3x speed-up button, which doesn’t speed up music or sound effects, preserving the immersion that speeding up in emulators usually loses. It also has a random encounter disable button, which is convenient sometimes, and a ‘battle enhancement’ button that gives you cheats, which is pretty useful for grinding. My one issue is that I don’t like playing the game in 1080p. When the models and the backgrounds don’t blend together through resolution, they clash real bad compared to the PS1 version. I think that all the ports that run FFVII in 1080p have retroactively tricked people into thinking the game looked worse on the PS1 than it actually did, it even tricked me for a while. There should be an option to play the game with enlarged PS1 resolution, like how the PS3 or PS vita versions naturally would. It also crashes sometimes. Good port overall, could be better.