Game Changers: Final Fantasy VII

Final Fantasy VII's recent breakthrough success on PSN brings to mind what a truly monumental achievement this game was for Squaresoft back in the '90s.  It's somewhat fashionable nowadays to deride the game for things that are easy to nitpick roughly 12 years later: the graphics, wonky (albeit heavily celebrated) storyline, and Cloud Strife himself.

But would as many Americans even KNOW about Squaresoft and their other RPGs if not for Final Fantasy VII?  Sure, Final Fantasy IV and VI (II and III in the U.S.) were considered moderate successes on the Super Famicom/SNES, and Chrono Trigger still has a raving group of fanatics behind it.

Final Fantasy VII was something else entirely... a phenomenom.  It sold millions within days after its release in Japan, and the hype spread like a virus until the game's success exploded into North America, making it the first Japanese RPG to reach cultural icon status on a global level.  How else can one account for the game's continued success?  10 million sales as of 2005 easily place it as the highest-grossing Final Fantasy game... and the story was selected among the many other Final Fantasy tales to be continued in spinoff games and a film.

I remember Final Fantasy VII in the way many American teenagers do:  It was the first real epic game we sat through.  It took me around fifty-two hours to complete (obviously, I wasted a great deal of time playing in the cutesy casino and looking for the legendary Knights of Round summon), but the payoff was a spectacular, bittersweet finale in which our heroes experienced both enormous loss and salvation.

No matter what you think about Final Fantasy VII as a game, it's hard to deny that for many gamers, and particularly many Western gamers who were previously only minimally familiar with JRPGs, it was a momentous experience.  One we're still trying to find in the other Final Fantasies, I think.

Even if the stories have improved in subsequent Final Fantasy titles (and they have!), there will never be the perfect storm of factors that played into Final Fantasy VII's success.

You had Aeris, a truly wonderful and sympathetic characterization that took the best of Squaresoft's other "innocent girlteen" creations and made her into a martyr for the ages.

The score by famed composer Nobuo Uematsu was equal turns haunting, poetic, and catchy... a feat I'm not sure he has ever repeated.

Most importantly, it was one of the first games that really combined epic fantasy cinema with gameplay successfully.  The Playstation itself was a remarkable product in that way:  It took a kid's medium--the video game--and for the first time truly legitimized it as a platform capable of satisfying mature intellects in a way that Mortal Kombat and Night Trap couldn't.  And if that is the legacy of the PSOne, then Final Fantasy VII still stands as its crowning achievement (even more so than the arguably superior Castlevania: Symphony of the Night).

Surely, we've all heard friends and other gamers recount the tears shed during Aeris' death cinema.  It wasn't a particularly good LOOKING full-motion cinematic, even for the mid-'90s.  But the spectacle of it all... the shimmering lighting of the caverns, the ninja-like stillness with which Sephiroth pierces Aeris with his blade, the heartbreaking Uematsu score that followed.  Even today, the cinematics and in-game cutscenes stand out as something of an anomoly:  They move poorly, but they move us. 

For a generation of gamers who were fresh off of the cheap, detached gameplay of supposedly cinematic titles like Battle Arena Toshinden, Loaded, Ace Combat, and Warhawk, I'm not sure any of us were prepared to be moved.  We all knew Squaresoft could pull off an epic, but an emotionally-involving and cinematic fantasy that actually made good on the Playstation's promise to usher in a new era of advanced gameplay?

It was damn good timing.  And it changed the way we look at RPGs forever.

Comments

[JiltedCitizen]

Off topic but you should get facebook connect on here...

Speaking of Final Fantasy VII I am so tempted to get it from PSN so I can play it on PS3 and PSP. I still never beat it. On my PS1, yes I still have it somewhere, also still have the original Atari 2600. I tried again a few years ago with an emulator...could even cheat but just could not bring myself to sit through 50 hours of fluff. Even though I never beat it I still like to play it.

Doom was definitely a game changer. Wolf3d brought the pseudo 3d to light, Doom scared teh crap out of it. Plus made multiplayer awesome. I remember hooking up everyone's computers to be able to dial each other on things called modems. Not that I played many or any of them but Lucas Arts SCRUMM based games may have broke molds too. Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, etc.

[Matthew G Kaplan]

Thanks for the suggestion, and for replying. I use Facebook Connect with Kotaku sometimes when replying over there and it just doesn't work very well (at least not better than simply entering info here or starting a TypePad account). I think I might hold off until it becomes a better developed tool or TypePad decides to integrate it on the most basic level for their sites.

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=535397537]

No Legend of Zelda? I don't think there was another game like it before. That kind of depth.. I'm not sure what other RPGs were there, before or during Legend of Zelda but that was my introduction to that world.

Also, when you do SFII, make sure you mention the epic soundtrack which I still listen to often. Pretty much every single track is solid.

I cried a lot in that game when I Couldn't beat M. Bison :/