oh yeah, final fantasy VII rules
2025/01/22
so i've recently gotten way, way more into RPGs. my history with the genre is not brief but in the past year, i've gained knowledge of what it is exactly about role-playing games that works for people.
i'd spent the year trying to get more into them on purpose, spending some of my summer with the original DRAGON QUEST on gameboy color before also playing a bunch of the phenomenal SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI: VENGEANCE. both games introduced to me the passion of
unfortunately, this port was the first way i ever played their beloved playstation role playing game FINAL FANTASY VII.
ok i make it sound dramatic it's really not a big deal and the port is fine if you literally only have access to a switch, but the very fact it included such cheat codes meant back in 2020 i, as a relative outsider who barely understood the basic mechanics FF7 riffs on but really wanted to play it anyway, fell for the temptation and skipped most of the battles. i barely skimmed over the very body of the gameplay, in favor of just looking at its punchy, cinematic storyline. this led to my first experience with final fantasy VII being cut in half, spiritually. even if i did literally reach the ending, it was not complete. it was not whole.
this is because, as i've found, final fantasy VII was a very fun game once i actually engaged with its gameplay.
five years later my relationship with the game in question has warped and twisted. i realised upon making friends with other final fantasy VII fans that i really did Not play the game the way i feel i should have, and didn't even see every one of its (partially missable) story moments that fully form what "final fantasy VII" means to people. in essence, even though i "played" the game a while ago, i barely experienced it, and i'm blaming the port for its dastardly cheat codes.
there is nothing wrong with making a game, especially one as culturally important as FF7, more accessible to new audiences. but square enix tends to take the wrong path every time they rerelease a game, doing something to alter its graphics or gameplay in a way that makes it, regardless of your opinion, different. it's unavoidable in an age where gamers refuse to play anything in a native screen resolution, to a point where companies like nintendo and sony upscale their old 3D games into HD via official emulators with no way of adjusting such changes. every game that's put on a modern screen has to be Remastered, it needs to be Updated, it has to be Remade, for the sake of looking new and justifying charging full prices.
this is too large of an issue to tackle in one article but i'll make my point extremely clear that i'm offended by the notion of objective "improvements" -- it's a plague of ideology that leads to the watering-down of an original artistic vision or gameplay intention. all things considered, with the version of FINAL FANTASY VII i played, it could be a lot worse, but the changes made to it indirectly contributed to an experience i can only describe as Not Final Fantasy VII.
how i experienced the game is not the fault of the port, its developers or publisher square enix though. there is nothing wrong with playing this version & using cheats the way you wish, and being such a stickler about it feels annoying. i only take issue with what i inflicted upon myself, and my decision not to engage with the game, which is why this month i replayed it. and i had a really, REALLY good time replaying it.
with fresh eyes (and a kingdom hearts poisoned approach), i began playing FINAL FANTASY VII for playstation two weeks ago. i played it daily, obsessed with its mechanics and absorbed by its story and in love with its then-cutting-edge visuals, filling myself up with as much game as i could. i really, really enjoyed it, and i can now firmly say it's the first final fantasy game i've beaten. i don't wanna be TOO proud of this, especially since it's a relatively easy and beginner-friendly RPG, but i'm moreso impressed with myself for my ability to be patient with it, something i couldn't do not too long ago. go me!
i initially wanted to play it for reasons unrelated to this blog or my online work in general, but it naturally got me to realise a ton about my relationship with RPGs and prompted me to write this article. final fantasy VII is famous for a reason, it's a great videogame, made in a constantly-shifting period for the industry and the technologies used in game development. for a while, commercially-released games could do almost anything they wanted, and standards were not nearly as concrete as they are three decades later. this game was DARING, it was challenging existing norms and making up new ones, and in allowing myself to be involved in what this game was going for, i better understood why people love RPGs so much.
my conclusion is generally that there really isn't a Right way to play the game. much like every game under the sun, the fun you have with it is yours and yours alone. FF7 offers a host of variables that means no two playthroughs could possibly be the same, and that's the thing that struck me in particular. i used to spend my time playing games worrying whether i was playing them the Right way, and this raw original-hardware playthrough could be considered the Right way, but in truth that way doesn't exist and never has.
this is something the game itself addresses, even, through cloud's characterization. this guy spends half the game literally assuming the role of somebody else, tricking himself into believing that he is and always was that guy. he refused to own his own life experiences, and in doing so he became Gaming's #1 Poser.
we should all kill off the part of us that does that.
by the end of the game, i realised that my first playthrough really wasn't all that incomplete or invalid. it isn't the way i'd do things now, but the fact remains that i still Did it, and anyone who does similar isn't "doing it wrong". adversely, i firmly believe modified versions such as that switch port meddle with the original game's thorough design. i can think both. you won't stop me.