A couple years ago Square Enix decided to port a lot of the Final Fantasy games to Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. One of these games is the very famous Final Fantasy VII, which before then had never been available on any consoles besides PlayStations. The game is a bit upscaled from its original version and includes a bunch of bonus features for cheating.
What Do You Do in Final Fantasy VII?
In Final Fantasy VII you are either walking around and doing puzzles, doing battles, or doing minigames. Unfortunately, all of these are far below what you will find in other JRPGs.
Walking around is okay. Naturally it will be worse than SNES games where you walk over clearly defined sprites, or even full 3D games where the world is rendered much more clearly, but it isn’t that bad overall. The puzzles aren’t too bad either most of the time, though the issue with the puzzles isn’t really about the puzzles themselves.
Graphics Over, and Even Before, Gameplay
An area this game is lacking in severely is pretty much any sort of game design in the overworld. The reason for this is pretty obvious just looking at the game. The entire overworld, besides the big 3D one that connects all of the other overworlds, is made up of pre-rendered backgrounds.
Square kinda did this before in Super Mario RPG, but in that game they used it for individual sprites, while in Final Fantasy VII the entire background is made up of one big sprite. If you’ve played Super Mario RPG you would know it has a lot of overworld sections where you do jumping around, something that Nintendo surely insisted on happening.
In Final Fantasy VII your eyes are definitely going to be much be pleased more than they were when playing Super Mario RPG, but you will also definitely not be having as much fun. Big dungeons with many floors, rooms, and puzzles, a staple of the JRPG genre, are actually hardly a thing in Final Fantasy VII, which is interesting to see in a game often viewed as the face of JRPGs. Clearly Square realized that it would have taken an obscene amount of time to come up with designs, program them, and have artists make appealing 3D renderings of them, so they went the route of just putting in as little gameplay in the overworlds as they could get away with.
Turn Based Combat?
Something that you will often hear about Final Fantasy games is that they have turn based combat. In reality most of them actually don’t, and Final Fantasy VII is no exception. Instead you get the Active Time Battle system, which is worse, basically. Instead of waiting for you opponent to instantly do their move after yours, you wait for a blue bar to fill up after every move you do. Once this bar fills up, though, it isn’t actually your turn because you can still be getting attacked. The specifics of how this all works depend on the mode you pick, but no matter what you are going to wait for blue bars to fill up all the time. Not just one blue bar by the way, one per party member.
The reason why they did this is to make the combat more action-y. I’m sure somebody out there thinks this was a good idea, and it maybe could be on paper, but in practice it doesn’t really work. The battles still don’t actually go fast enough for this to really matter. More than anything this decision to use ATB just makes the game way more tedious.
The Battles Themselves
They are okay, but nothing special. There is definitely a little bit of doing interesting things with the kinda turn based battle system, but not nearly as much as you will see in some other games. As far as difficulty goes it definitely isn’t insanely easy, but it is far from one of the hardest JRPGs you can play. If you want you can cheat through every battle in this version, and you won’t be missing much. Overall the combat is definitely not why you should play this game.
There is one other type of gameplay in this game, though:
Mini Games
They are not too impressive. These modes play like tech demos or the “set-pieces” you will see in a lot of modern games, which is to say they aren’t very deep. They are a nice diversion from the rest of the game, but not much more than that.
Now, on to the good stuff:
Nobuo Uematsu Made the Soundtrack
If you don’t know, he is arguably the best video game composer, and not with much competition either. This game is actually far from his best work, but still better than the vast majority of other games.
The soundtrack itself isn’t full of hits like this composer and some others have managed, but a reasonably good amount of them are nice to listen to. None of them are noticeably bad, generic, or annoying, either, which can’t be said for a lot of other games. Overall you will definitely notice the soundtrack more in this game than you will in most other games.
Why People Like This Game, and Why You Should Too
This game’s story is very good. It’s based on amnesia, which a lot of people complain about in video games, but this game is easily one of the best handlings of this concept and perhaps the inspiration for a lot of other games using the same concept.
The game is pretty twisty and these twists are all pretty good. Some of them are very famous even, but I still won’t spoil them in this review. Maybe even better than the twists are the characters.
Some of the party members are very famous and for good reason. As you get further into the game they get a bit more lame, but are still often better than many party members in other games.
The writing isn’t half bad either. It is more on the level of games like Earthbound than the older Final Fantasy games (in English at least), for example.
Should You Play It?
Yes you should play it. The story is great, and your ears will thank you too. The gameplay and the visuals have been outdone many times, but they are at least not bad enough to make you not want to play the game. Playing this game has the benefit of making a bunch of stuff online make more sense to you, too, since this game is really popular.
Overall, the game is a 7.5/10.
If you decide to buy the game through one of the links below this blog will receive a commission.
