The story, specifically the way it's presented, is an absolute cheese platter full of Nomura-isms and things that really only (some) Japanese RPGs can get away with. In many ways, this is 'worse' than Kingdom Hearts, a franchise notorious for just how campy it is and for how hard it is for some people to really understand why these games affect fans so much emotionally.
But, well, they do. Kingdom Hearts does, so does this one, despite how often I had to roll my eyes or flat-out had to laugh even in moments that were meant to be dramatic and intense.
The script, the voice acting, the voice direction, the cutscene direction as a whole, some of the designs... they all really suck, objectively. Yet, I find them irresistible engaging.
I have nostalgia for this kind of game, and also Final Fantasy VII as a whole, but never actually got around to playing more than maybe 10 minutes or so of the original PSP version of this game; and to be honest, I couldn't really get behind the way the battle system felt, had some eye issues that made playing on a PSP screen a bit difficult at the time, I didn't like the portable-ized structure of this game and similar ones Square released at the time, and didn't quite care as much about FF7 back then to push myself past these problems, so I kinda just always had this game on my 'man, I should probably play this' list but never did until now. Like, I really really liked FF7 but just not quite enough for that, you know. Unlike the Kingdom Hearts franchise, which caused me to binge its PSP installment to great detriment to my health because I was just so hyped to find out where the story was going with that.
But I digress.
My point is that I'm not super nostalgic for this game in particular. But playing it kind of made me feel like I was. Because it rekindled a lot of the love and passion I used to have for certain games, including FF7, especially once I replayed the game a few years after the release of Crisis Core.
And most importantly, this made me incredibly hyped for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which is a pretty rare feeling for me as well these days, since I've grown a bit more jaded and cynical about especially the bigger, more important-to-me, franchises out there.
The dumbest, campiest moments really got me. Gave me chills, gave me energy, made me emotional.
It honestly made me a little embarrassed, even though nobody was even in the room to witness it.
But it's just all these feelings that I thought I had outgrown and that I probably wouldn't feel in this way anymore while playing a game.
That said, there still are a few issues I'd like to address.
Like I mentioned above, the (English) voice delivery isn't always the best. I don't entirely attribute this to the voice actors themselves (and luckily I'm not so used to the original cast that these new voices sound like nails of a chalkboard to me) but rather a lack of quality direction.
It often kind of felt like lines were recorded entirely without context and maybe even out of order, causing inflections to completely change from one sentence to another or sometimes even mid-sentence if there happened to be a gap in there somewhere.
Now I do realize that some of this stems from matching the English script and voices to the rhythm of the Japanese lip movements and body language, but still. There was lots of room for improvement and sometimes that can take you out of the moment a bit, and not exactly in an amusing ways like it happens in some of the campier scenes.
I do like the voice actors -- some more, some less -- and I think with a proper script and direction, and maybe the option to match the lip movements to their line deliveries instead of the other way around, they could have done a great job. But the way it is, is a bit lacking.
I also don't really like that characters like Cloud, Tifa and Aerith don't sound any younger than they do many years later, despite being at an age where such a time gap would definitely change their voices quite a bit.
In terms of gameplay and also visual presentation, the game has been improved quite a bit.
It doesn't look quite as good as Final Fantasy VII Remake does even on Playstation 4, but it looks a lot better and more detailed, and especially closer to said Remake, than the PSP original. Though some people will definitely prefer the stylized character models in that one. I'm honestly a little conflicted on which I prefer myself.
A great example are the Midgar slums, for instance. They look really close to how they do in Remake, down to even the skybox with the JPEG of the plates up above (was a JPEG in Remake as well, though probably a little higher resolution).
On PSP it just all looks really blocky and not very detailed, though you could argue that it's more oppressive in atmosphere there.
The battle-system is the same as the original in essence, but polished to a mirror finish.
Attacks and movement flow well better (though there can be some hiccups and bugs still that can get a bit annoying in harder battles) and instead of having to pick special moves from a menu with the shoulder buttons, these are instead used via a hotkey menu somewhat akin to Kingdom Hearts.
These battles are mostly done in random encounters where enemies just kinda show up around you and the play field is artificially restricted by a ring around Zack and his enemies.
This can sometimes get a little frustrating, especially when the camera doesn't wanna play along, when you evade into a nigh-invisible wall and get stuck there, almost entirely unable to prevent getting hit.
But it's smooth sailing for the most part.
Another aspect that I'm not too fond of is the mission structure.
At any save point, Zack can embark on a number of optional missions that unlock more missions, some nice item rewards, a few more important unlocks and also sometimes some character- and world-building optional story bits.
These were definitely made to accommodate for the Original's portable nature. Square wanted to give players the opportunity to pull their PSP out of their pocket at a bus stop or wherever else someone might wanna kill a couple of minutes, knock out a mission or two, and then just put it away again without being too concerned with getting lost in the story or not knowing where to go.
They do also kind of fit the nature of who Zack is and what he does. He is a SOLDIER, going on assignments for Shinra.
Now these missions never really feel that much like those assignments, especially since Zack never brings reinforcements on those, unlike what we see in mandatory story missions, but the shoe still kind of fits.
The biggest downside though is how repetitive, tedious and mostly meaningless these are though. Grinding out some missions will have you go to the same disconnected environments over and over again, fighting mostly the same few creatures and the difficulty, eventually, is either you one- or two-shot pretty much everyone in every fight, or you're the one getting unfairly killed with little to no recourse, at least until you completely rebuild your Materia and item loadout to work with that one specific encounter.
It's a bit of an exercise in both boredom and frustration, and then you will quickly find yourself overpowered for any main quest, so those become a completely meaningless cakewalk with almost no exceptions as well.
This does make me wish they had overhauled the whole leveling and mission system as well.
And also the DMW system, which is basically a slot machine that constantly runs during every fight and causes different in-battle effects like buffs, healing, summons, attacks and even level-ups for both Zack himself and his equipped materia, determined (almost) completely by RNG.
A ground-up overhaul of all of it would have probably been really good, though I can also see that annoying a lot of fans of the original, so I don't know what Square should have done here.
THAT SAID, I still had mostly a really good time with the game. While it can maybe somewhat negatively affect how one looks at certain aspects of Final Fantasy VII's story, I love how much it expands on things we already knew, makes certain aspects of the story a bit more clear, while building up way more of a connection with certain characters.
It's a work that can stand on its own, while also adding a lot to another standalone work.
Its design is great as a kind of grindy on-the-side type of game. Doing random missions while watching YouTube, for instance, is some pretty easy mindless fun. But if you don't like to do that, it's still a pretty good, though in that case somewhat short, companion piece for the overall FF7 project.
And most importantly, it's a great reminder of why FF7 is so great and an amazing appetizer for Rebirth.
But, well, they do. Kingdom Hearts does, so does this one, despite how often I had to roll my eyes or flat-out had to laugh even in moments that were meant to be dramatic and intense.
The script, the voice acting, the voice direction, the cutscene direction as a whole, some of the designs... they all really suck, objectively. Yet, I find them irresistible engaging.
I have nostalgia for this kind of game, and also Final Fantasy VII as a whole, but never actually got around to playing more than maybe 10 minutes or so of the original PSP version of this game; and to be honest, I couldn't really get behind the way the battle system felt, had some eye issues that made playing on a PSP screen a bit difficult at the time, I didn't like the portable-ized structure of this game and similar ones Square released at the time, and didn't quite care as much about FF7 back then to push myself past these problems, so I kinda just always had this game on my 'man, I should probably play this' list but never did until now. Like, I really really liked FF7 but just not quite enough for that, you know. Unlike the Kingdom Hearts franchise, which caused me to binge its PSP installment to great detriment to my health because I was just so hyped to find out where the story was going with that.
But I digress.
My point is that I'm not super nostalgic for this game in particular. But playing it kind of made me feel like I was. Because it rekindled a lot of the love and passion I used to have for certain games, including FF7, especially once I replayed the game a few years after the release of Crisis Core.
And most importantly, this made me incredibly hyped for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which is a pretty rare feeling for me as well these days, since I've grown a bit more jaded and cynical about especially the bigger, more important-to-me, franchises out there.
The dumbest, campiest moments really got me. Gave me chills, gave me energy, made me emotional.
It honestly made me a little embarrassed, even though nobody was even in the room to witness it.
But it's just all these feelings that I thought I had outgrown and that I probably wouldn't feel in this way anymore while playing a game.
That said, there still are a few issues I'd like to address.
Like I mentioned above, the (English) voice delivery isn't always the best. I don't entirely attribute this to the voice actors themselves (and luckily I'm not so used to the original cast that these new voices sound like nails of a chalkboard to me) but rather a lack of quality direction.
It often kind of felt like lines were recorded entirely without context and maybe even out of order, causing inflections to completely change from one sentence to another or sometimes even mid-sentence if there happened to be a gap in there somewhere.
Now I do realize that some of this stems from matching the English script and voices to the rhythm of the Japanese lip movements and body language, but still. There was lots of room for improvement and sometimes that can take you out of the moment a bit, and not exactly in an amusing ways like it happens in some of the campier scenes.
I do like the voice actors -- some more, some less -- and I think with a proper script and direction, and maybe the option to match the lip movements to their line deliveries instead of the other way around, they could have done a great job. But the way it is, is a bit lacking.
I also don't really like that characters like Cloud, Tifa and Aerith don't sound any younger than they do many years later, despite being at an age where such a time gap would definitely change their voices quite a bit.
In terms of gameplay and also visual presentation, the game has been improved quite a bit.
It doesn't look quite as good as Final Fantasy VII Remake does even on Playstation 4, but it looks a lot better and more detailed, and especially closer to said Remake, than the PSP original. Though some people will definitely prefer the stylized character models in that one. I'm honestly a little conflicted on which I prefer myself.
A great example are the Midgar slums, for instance. They look really close to how they do in Remake, down to even the skybox with the JPEG of the plates up above (was a JPEG in Remake as well, though probably a little higher resolution).
On PSP it just all looks really blocky and not very detailed, though you could argue that it's more oppressive in atmosphere there.
The battle-system is the same as the original in essence, but polished to a mirror finish.
Attacks and movement flow well better (though there can be some hiccups and bugs still that can get a bit annoying in harder battles) and instead of having to pick special moves from a menu with the shoulder buttons, these are instead used via a hotkey menu somewhat akin to Kingdom Hearts.
These battles are mostly done in random encounters where enemies just kinda show up around you and the play field is artificially restricted by a ring around Zack and his enemies.
This can sometimes get a little frustrating, especially when the camera doesn't wanna play along, when you evade into a nigh-invisible wall and get stuck there, almost entirely unable to prevent getting hit.
But it's smooth sailing for the most part.
Another aspect that I'm not too fond of is the mission structure.
At any save point, Zack can embark on a number of optional missions that unlock more missions, some nice item rewards, a few more important unlocks and also sometimes some character- and world-building optional story bits.
These were definitely made to accommodate for the Original's portable nature. Square wanted to give players the opportunity to pull their PSP out of their pocket at a bus stop or wherever else someone might wanna kill a couple of minutes, knock out a mission or two, and then just put it away again without being too concerned with getting lost in the story or not knowing where to go.
They do also kind of fit the nature of who Zack is and what he does. He is a SOLDIER, going on assignments for Shinra.
Now these missions never really feel that much like those assignments, especially since Zack never brings reinforcements on those, unlike what we see in mandatory story missions, but the shoe still kind of fits.
The biggest downside though is how repetitive, tedious and mostly meaningless these are though. Grinding out some missions will have you go to the same disconnected environments over and over again, fighting mostly the same few creatures and the difficulty, eventually, is either you one- or two-shot pretty much everyone in every fight, or you're the one getting unfairly killed with little to no recourse, at least until you completely rebuild your Materia and item loadout to work with that one specific encounter.
It's a bit of an exercise in both boredom and frustration, and then you will quickly find yourself overpowered for any main quest, so those become a completely meaningless cakewalk with almost no exceptions as well.
This does make me wish they had overhauled the whole leveling and mission system as well.
And also the DMW system, which is basically a slot machine that constantly runs during every fight and causes different in-battle effects like buffs, healing, summons, attacks and even level-ups for both Zack himself and his equipped materia, determined (almost) completely by RNG.
A ground-up overhaul of all of it would have probably been really good, though I can also see that annoying a lot of fans of the original, so I don't know what Square should have done here.
THAT SAID, I still had mostly a really good time with the game. While it can maybe somewhat negatively affect how one looks at certain aspects of Final Fantasy VII's story, I love how much it expands on things we already knew, makes certain aspects of the story a bit more clear, while building up way more of a connection with certain characters.
It's a work that can stand on its own, while also adding a lot to another standalone work.
Its design is great as a kind of grindy on-the-side type of game. Doing random missions while watching YouTube, for instance, is some pretty easy mindless fun. But if you don't like to do that, it's still a pretty good, though in that case somewhat short, companion piece for the overall FF7 project.
And most importantly, it's a great reminder of why FF7 is so great and an amazing appetizer for Rebirth.