I have played many of the Final Fantasy games before and after VII, but admittedly the early 3D graphics always warded me off of this one. After dipping into the extensive mod base of Seventh Heaven that gave an HD shine to most of the game, I was pretty pleased to find that this game definitely holds up. The foundation of the Active Time Battle system is maybe a bit of a wobbly step sideways into figuring out how to handle turn based and real time battles, but otherwise it does keep the flow of battle moving, although navigating enormous list of items is a bit more of a cost sink than it should be. Generally there's not a lot of active strategy involved in all but the toughest battles, and more piecing together what equipment/materia synergizes the best--although, admittedly, I used guides for figuring this out.
This game is pretty guilty of most of the genre annoyances of this era: endless random encounters, convoluted, strategy-guide-heavy sidequests that feel too masochistic for me to take a whack at--anything that involves hours of grinding is, in my opinion, almost smugly wasting your time--constant backtracking.
Even still, you can definitely feel the scope of this game from the very beginning. I found the core cast and story beats to be affecting all these years later. The major emotional moments still felt moving, even with the plastic, stiff polygonal models. While later Final Fantasy games (including games within the Compilation of FFVII) would get more and more elaborate and perhaps even bloated, FF7 is just on this edge of having interesting layers to peel back while never getting too far up its own intestines. In some ways it reminds me a bit of how Souls games really hook you in with leaving a lot of juicier details in the background for you to put together, giving you a sense of greater investment.
This game is pretty guilty of most of the genre annoyances of this era: endless random encounters, convoluted, strategy-guide-heavy sidequests that feel too masochistic for me to take a whack at--anything that involves hours of grinding is, in my opinion, almost smugly wasting your time--constant backtracking.
Even still, you can definitely feel the scope of this game from the very beginning. I found the core cast and story beats to be affecting all these years later. The major emotional moments still felt moving, even with the plastic, stiff polygonal models. While later Final Fantasy games (including games within the Compilation of FFVII) would get more and more elaborate and perhaps even bloated, FF7 is just on this edge of having interesting layers to peel back while never getting too far up its own intestines. In some ways it reminds me a bit of how Souls games really hook you in with leaving a lot of juicier details in the background for you to put together, giving you a sense of greater investment.