8 JRPGs Better Than Final Fantasy 7

[elvor0]

Oh boy a backlash to the backlash.

Look, I don't begrudge anyone enjoying or even loving FF7. But from where I'm standing the story, characters, character models and midi quality (though not the song compositions themselves) are all pretty objectively terrible.

Yes it was an important work, but most of its popularity I lay at the "wow" factor of the graphics and cool novelty of anime style outside Japan when it came out. A work being important or a benchmark doesn't mean it's necessarily good. And it certainly doesn't mean it will always appeal to modern tastes.

As for the "backlash" against it that's a natural result of more people actually playing the thing now sans-nostalgia goggles. Since it's more widely available via PSN and Steam. After years of hearing it hyped up a lot of new players are understandably underwhelmed to put it mildly. I played through it 13 years after it came out and found it to be terribly convoluted tripe with exactly 3 characters who were at all likeable. The game was so bad it put me off jRPGs entirely for a long time.

I'll echo the first dude who quoted you, it's a classic case of Seinfeld is Unfunny. Now I'm all for opinions, but the game isn't bad. A game doesn't reach this level of hype, legendary status or consistant best of lists for being bad. I'm not saying it's teh best game EVAR either, it's not even near the top of my top Final Fantasies. But it is a good and influential game. Overhyped? Sure it is, but just you didn't like it, that doesn't make it objectively terrible. If it was, it wouldn't be as popular as it is.

There's also nothing wrong with it not appealing to modern tastes(though I don't buy that, it hasn't aged that badly), but you can't begrudge a game that came out in 1997 for looking bad, having poor sound quality, or the more rabid fans for overhyping it to unatainable expectations. Should we not know by now to not believe the hype?

Even when it came out, people didn't marvel at the character models, they were awful, there was better looking stuff out there. People marveled at it because /nothing/ had even been done like that, yeah sure if you play it 13 years after it came out, or these days, its hype is so legendary, giving you the expectations so high that it can never possibly live up to them. It's just become retroactively ungood because you've played it so long after it came out to have played stuff that immitates or downright copies elements of it.

What about the people who played it for the first time when it came out? They didn't have nostalgia goggles going for them, they stayed for the new gameplay, story, characters and writing.(The Midi music is on the PC version only btw, the PSX version has proper music which is perfectly good). There is a /reason/ the game has legendary hype and it's not because it's tripe. Of course if you believe all of the hype you're going to be dissapointed.

Thanks for being civil. I'll just say though I still can't agree that it's always case of "Seinfeld is Unfunny" when people dislike it. Because at the time I played it I was a jRPG novice. The only games in the genre I had played beforehand were FF6 and FF9. The latter of which did come out later but purposefully eschewed almost all elements of FF7.

Like I said I just found and find the characters to be really unlikeable, the story to be needlessly convoluted and the gameplay to be incredibly mediocre. It's exactly the kind of mopey thing that appeals to teenage angst. I still think a lot of the love the game gets can be put to people who had never played an RPG before being blown away by how big the world was (the pre-rendered backgrounds are nice) and the seeming newness of the in-retrospect very derivative anime style and setting of the game to non-Japanese gamers.

I do agree that you can't blame a game for looking its age, I play and love lots of games as old or older than FF7, including a lot of PS1 games. But unlike other titles in the genre which transcend their technical limitations by virtue of telling a great story or having memorable characters or simply being fun, FF7's lack of visual punch just highlights its failing in the aforementioned areas. Which are what really count.

PS- And it is entirely possible for popular and influential things from the past to be objectively terrible. Just look at Twilight, or The Birth of a Nation. Ok the last one might be a little low, but you know what I mean.

I can be abusive if you like, I mean I am defending FF7 and having an argument on the internet, it just doesn't feel right if I don't personally attack you.

Oh well call me too presumptuous in my initial post. It's usually people that have played a good amount (or are predisposed to dislike it) of JRPGS who come back to rag on it on the basis that "I've seen it all before". And differing opinions aside, I'm sure we can agree that's unfair.

I didn't find the story overcomplicated, it was more complex than is normal, but it wasn't that difficult to follow, I did miss a couple of points, but that was because I was 8 when I played it for the first time, and yeah I'll admit it did blow me away, before that the only two games I'd played were Tomb Raider and Crash Bandicoot. I'd never seen or imagined anything like it before and I'd be lying if that didn't colour my impression at the time. It certainly has pacing and structural problems, but I wouldn't say it was too complex.

The story and characters are certainly not angsty though. I don't understand why that gets bought up, any chance of explaining where your views on that one? It's always puzzled me. It's very true of the extended universe,(especially in Advent Children and Kingdom Hearts) which makes no sense, there's no reason for Cloud to be grumpy before or after FF7. Clouds not exactly the happiest bloke in the world, but he's not mopy or angsty, he's a bit grumpy, but then he is suffering from PTSD, delusions and repressed memories. Calling him emo and angsty just isn't fair. We don't call massacre survivors "emo and mopey" do we? Squall, he was angsty and mopey; but even then he was basically a teenager trained to be a soldier from about the age of 10.

On popularity, there's a difference though, the things that stay popular after their boom tend to be the ones that are good. FF7 is 17 years old at this point. Does anyone still talk about S-Club 7, or the Spice Girls other than mocking them? Twilight hasn't been around too long, reached it's peak 4 years ago and now you barely hear about it, other than people mocking it.

 

[Arkley]

While I can understand why, I don't like that Final Fantasy VII has been retrospectively considered "overrated." I grew up with the SNES era of Final Fantasy, and I still consider FF7 second only to Final Fantasy V.

In fact, the only title on that list I can agree with being better than FF7 is Persona 4.

FF V is my favourite FF game too. It's one of the very few FF games I liked, and I never met anyone who considered it their favourite, too.

You and I are friends now. This is not optional.

 

[G96 Saber]

Dragon Quest VIII: Journey Of The Cursed King.

I played it for hundreds and hundreds of hours on PS2, as did all my friends. I loved the story, and the turn based combat was incredibly well done.

 

[G96 Saber]

Dragon Quest VIII: Journey Of The Cursed King.

I played it for hundreds and hundreds of hours on PS2, as did all my friends. I loved the story, and the turn based combat was incredibly well done.

 

[Nieroshai]

I'm one of those who gets why FFVII is considered great but does not understand why people proclaim it to be "the gold standard of JRPGs" or give it some similar amount of over-the-top praise. The game was great, no question, and to me it has held up very, very well from the standpoint of fun. FFVII is neither a terrible piece of overrated junk, nor is it the Holy Messiah of JRPGS.

I think what it is, is a stand-up classic and a true original that pushed the boundaries of its genre. To me, "FFVII" is to "FFVI" what "Super Mario World" is to "Super Mario 3", or what "Ocarina of Time" is to "A Link to the Past", or what "Symphony of the Night" is to "Castlevania 4" . That is to say, a legitimately great game that, depending on preference, may or may not be better than its equally great predecessor. None of those games are perfect, but all of them are truly great, and whether one surpasses another, I think, boils down to subjective criteria.

Here's the problem, and I'd really like to put this on the record: for the most part, "FFFVII is teh best gaem evar111" gamers are much, MUCH more often strawmen erected by the game's detractors than they ever are people who liked the game. I've honestly never met a single person who thinks that FFVII set an unreachable bar beyond which RPGs have not ascended, and anyone who did think that at the time were likely <14 years old. What is real, however, and painfully prevalent, is the crowd that seeks to shoot down things other people enjoy that they themselves do not. They live here, on the Escapist. They steal tires and deface the mailboxes, metaphorically of course. They are the reason I often spend a good month without ever looking at the Gaming section. I think it helps them feel smarter and more diverse of taste?

 

[Gorrath]

Here's the problem, and I'd really like to put this on the record: for the most part, "FFFVII is teh best gaem evar111" gamers are much, MUCH more often strawmen erected by the game's detractors than they ever are people who liked the game. I've honestly never met a single person who thinks that FFVII set an unreachable bar beyond which RPGs have not ascended, and anyone who did think that at the time were likely <14 years old. What is real, however, and painfully prevalent, is the crowd that seeks to shoot down things other people enjoy that they themselves do not. They live here, on the Escapist. They steal tires and deface the mailboxes, metaphorically of course. They are the reason I often spend a good month without ever looking at the Gaming section. I think it helps them feel smarter and more diverse of taste?

I actually took the "gold standard" quote from someone in this thread, so I don't know that people propping it up a bit too high is necessarily unheard of, but my point is much more aligned with yours than with that bit of criticism anyway. Those that are overly critical of it can easily pick on its flaws, especially the English localization of it. Its proponents can easily point to the areas where it pushed the genre forward and created unique experiences that became mainstays in both FF and JRPGs as a whole. It's basically the same argument people have about "Citizen Kane" or "The Great Gatsby". I think the very fact that we bother having the argument at all demonstrates the game's staying power. As a work of art, it wouldn't have touched so many people in a way to generate these arguments decades after its creation if it wasn't great.

I don't know that the detractors are just trying to make themselves feel smarter though. I fall into the camp that likes to eviscerate Gatsby because I find the whole thing to be a monumental bore who's positive qualities are way over hyped. I don't do this to be edgy or because I want others to stop liking the book, I do it because that's how I feel about it. Detractors should no more be accused of having ulterior motives for disliking something than should those who like it. That's not to say that there aren't those who bash things simply for the sake of going against the crowd, but honestly the motives are meaningless; it's the arguments and their merits that matter.

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

Wow. Whats with the FFVII hate?

Half those games owe their success to FFVII's success in making JRPGs mainstream. One of them is not a JRPG (Front Mission 3). There are those that I think are probably better than FFVII but I don't see a need to create a topic to bash the poor thing yet again. Also, important to note is that your list is almost completely comprised of Square games. You need to look at some titles from other companies to see what other great games lie around.

It's not so much as "stop bashing the poor thing" as it is "your choices will never be the most iconic RPG of all time, so get the heck over it." The choices made in the list aren't very interesting. This is a case not of someone trying to let lesser known titles get some attention, but just that THEIR favorites are always going to be #2, but never #1. Similar to someone going "bah, Citizen Kane is SOOOO overrated, let's talk about THE GODFATHER" as it that's a dramatic example for people to follow. Like I said, bring up some titles that legitimately haven't gotten attention for one reason or another Examples:

Valkyrie Profile: A tale of Ragnarok literally being around the corner and you are tasked with collecting the souls of the dead in order to prepare. You watch each of their fates, most of them painfully tragic, and then task them with being your personal army.

Star Ocean: Dating all the way back to the SNES era, this is a series with one of the most comprehensive and deep item customization systems I've ever seen where you can literally waste DOZENS of hours crafting potions, armor, weapons, accessories, food (oddly one of the most rewarding of them), or changing simple iron into all sorts of rare and valuable ores. Heck, you can even write books and make art either to boost your skills or sells for cash or play instruments for combat benefits

Brave Fencer Musashi: A very funky action RPG, one where the player can assimilate sub-weapons from nearly every enemy in the game.

Parasite Eve: Combining elements of survival horror as well as being set in a decently faithful depiction of New York. Also has my favorite female character ever.

Saga Frontier: The first one was a funky game where you could play the stories of six different characters in any order, each of them having a very different sort of tale. II was a multi-generational epic. One side was about Gustave XIII, the exiled prince of a powerful nation while the other was about the Knights family, the connecting thread being about a strange artifact known as "the Egg." Had very funky battle system, the player fighting as a group or one on one and learning weapon skills.

Secret of Mana: A SNES classic with a load of weapons and a funky magic systems revolving around different familiars.

I could on ALL DAY with this. There are TONS of RPGs we could be analyzing and discussing, probably even wondering if a lot of them deserve more attention due to doing some really funky stuff with the genre. It should never be a pissing match over what is "better" as the zeitgeist has already decided that. Go to RPGFan or RPGamer and you can find all sorts of hidden gems to track down whether they be the Western gunslinger inspire Wild Arms, Tactics Ogre's politically charged plots (like Game of Thrones before it even started), Secret of Evermore's romp through a world comprised of caveman times, ancient Egypt, medieval England, and the distant future, Sakura Wars with its fusion of turn-based strategy and visual novel, Soulblazer rebuilding a ruined world, or Illusion of Gaia with a weirdly somber tale where character after character dies the further you go in your journey. These are all titles that should be given serious analysis but instead people are arguing that what is generally considered to be #2 should be be #1 because apparently being in the top 2% just isn't good enough.

 

[JediMB]

Ah, Final Fantasy VI, the game with a main villain so bland that he needed entirely rewritten when the game was localized (and Woolsey's version became canon). The game whose heroes' only real motive throughout the game is that they're the protagonists.

I adore Final Fantasy VI's mechanics. I think the gameplay is easily the most solid the franchise ever saw. But the story and characters just never did it for me. Even at his best, Kefka was little more than a poor Joker knock-off, and I could never find any reason to care about the heroes.

Yeah, I can definitely relate to this. I played Final Fantasy VI for the first time on the PlayStation, and I just didn't get at all why people who'd played it on the SNES found it so amazing. I mean, the character sprites were gorgeous and the battle mechanics had some neat twists, but the story was very plain and the much-praised Kefka was little more than the occasional humorously sadistic one-liner.

Chrono Trigger, on the other hand, which is from the same era but is a game I didn't play properly until the DS version was released, is absolutely brilliant in comparison. I'd definitely consider that superior to Final Fantasy VII, but FFVI... not so much.

I think a lot of the flack Final Fantasy VII gets is because of an awful English translation. It's pretty evident, comparing Michael Baskett's official localization to the original, that he didn't really understand the plot. Not that I blame him; the game's data files are a complete mess, and you'd pretty much need to be intimately familiar with the game before even starting a localization to compensate for awkward technical design and translate it correctly.

It's a shame, if you ask me. Final Fantasy VII has a lot of depth to the characters that most non-Japanese players will never know. And all that clone/memory loss stuff actually makes sense when translated correctly!

Even without much knowledge of the Japanese script, it was pretty clear after a couple of playthroughs (and much debating with friends) that the translation was pretty terrible. So much stuff about Sephiroth, Jenova, Shin-Ra's soldiers and Mako that wasn't obvious at all during the early playthroughs.

Not to mention the Guard Scorpion, when Barret tells you to attack while its tail is up so it can counter-attack with its laser. Because apparently that's a good thing.

 

[Covarr]

Secondly the clone/memory loss stuff works well in the English version, it's a classic case of delusions and repressed memories. It's just we were young at the time and that stuff was a bit whacked out and new, because it doesn't even fit into the "amnesiac hero" trope.

It sort of works, but it is actively explained wrong. Among other things, there are no clones in the whole game, nor is anybody meant to be thought of as a clone.

What these "clones" were is actually just regular people who went through Mako/Jenova cell treatment in an attempt to duplicate the PROCESS that was used to create Sephiroth, but without having it injected while still in the womb. Sephiroth doesn't even try to imply that Cloud is a clone, just that the fake memories were also part of this process. What the American version of the game got makes sense, but it's totally not what actually happened here.

P.S. Thanks

 

[Snotnarok]

This is one of those titles to provoke people to read I'm aware but some of these you can't directly compare to FFVII.

Persona 4 is more of a dungeon crawler with conversation picker vs a direct RPG. You're not on and adventure, you're not able to explore optional areas on a world map. You go into a dungeon and explore there, conversing with some people at school and around town to how the allows you to. The game is really really good, but it's hard to compare to other titles since it's how it is. Maybe others have an easier time comparing it.

Front Mission 3 is a turn based strategy game, you have no world map it's just combat combat combat. Again fun game but can you really compare it? May as well compare chess to DnD.

Xenogears is not better than FFVII, how can I say that? At least FFVII is a finished game, Xenogears starts off fun then teeters off around the 40% mark and goes from okay to walls of text explaining what the player would have done had the budget been there. Had potential, but it flopped miserably for a large chunk of the game. I don't get how this game ends up on any kind of best RPG list, it's not even freaking complete.

The rest, no reason is given, I'm not saying someone can't like any of these games more than FFVII (except Xenogears) it's all opinion but without any kind of comparison to why it's better and decent reasons? This is just click-bait

 

[Snotnarok]

This is one of those titles to provoke people to read I'm aware but some of these you can't directly compare to FFVII.

Persona 4 is more of a dungeon crawler with conversation picker vs a direct RPG. You're not on and adventure, you're not able to explore optional areas on a world map. You go into a dungeon and explore there, conversing with some people at school and around town to how the allows you to. The game is really really good, but it's hard to compare to other titles since it's how it is. Maybe others have an easier time comparing it.

Front Mission 3 is a turn based strategy game, you have no world map it's just combat combat combat. Again fun game but can you really compare it? May as well compare chess to DnD.

Xenogears is not better than FFVII, how can I say that? At least FFVII is a finished game, Xenogears starts off fun then teeters off around the 40% mark and goes from okay to walls of text explaining what the player would have done had the budget been there. Had potential, but it flopped miserably for a large chunk of the game. I don't get how this game ends up on any kind of best RPG list, it's not even freaking complete.

The rest, no reason is given, I'm not saying someone can't like any of these games more than FFVII (except Xenogears) it's all opinion but without any kind of comparison to why it's better and decent reasons? This is just click-bait

I got about half way through Persona 3 PEZ (I think the special edition was called) and it seemed like the dungeons had optional areas you could explore. Is that not the case with Persona 4?

Yes you can do that, but you're not doing a world map, you are going where the game tells you to for the most part. It's similar to Persona 3: FES but I don't think it's directly comparable....personally. Some can probably do so and go, yes, this this and this make it better and fair enough.

 

[elvor0]

Secondly the clone/memory loss stuff works well in the English version, it's a classic case of delusions and repressed memories. It's just we were young at the time and that stuff was a bit whacked out and new, because it doesn't even fit into the "amnesiac hero" trope.

It sort of works, but it is actively explained wrong. Among other things, there are no clones in the whole game, nor is anybody meant to be thought of as a clone.

What these "clones" were is actually just regular people who went through Mako/Jenova cell treatment in an attempt to duplicate the PROCESS that was used to create Sephiroth, but without having it injected while still in the womb. Sephiroth doesn't even try to imply that Cloud is a clone, just that the fake memories were also part of this process. What the American version of the game got makes sense, but it's totally not what actually happened here.

P.S. Thanks

I do get that now, but yeah when I was 8, clone was clone in the traditional sense. You're right that it is worded badly, though not....entirely without merit, they were attempting to recreate Sephiroth like beings, so the word clone can technically be correctly used, but it did obviously and understandably lead people astray. I was more saying "clone" because that's what they're referred to as in game.

There is that bit where Hojo convinces Cloud that he was created though, which counfounds the issue further, as it enforces the notion that they're traditional clones, not just a symantic error. Without that bit, the symantic error could be brushed off, but otherwise it complicates the issue further.

It doesn't seem like very many JRPGs actually have any roleplaying in them. A list of the ones that do would be very interesting to me.

Also, I didn't know the Mario RPG games were really considered JRPGs, but that does seem kind of obvious now, huh. It actually serves my point above nicely, though; just what roleplaying is there to be had in a Mario game? I've not played any of the RPG ones, but I have watched let's plays of all of the Paper Marios and they are the same, right?

No, but it utilizes RPG systems in order to function. So as has been the case for many a year, it's called an RPG.

 

[bjj hero]

The Seiken Densetsu series I'd place more in the action-adventure genre along with Legend of Zelda than in the RPG genre. And Shining Force is Strategy RPG, so if you're going to count that then Final Fantasy Tactics becomes Best RPG of the Always.

I preferred Tactics Ogre over FF tactics.

 

[Grimh]

While I largely agree with you, I'm afraid that including Chrono Cross completely invalidates the whole list, I'm sorry.

Also FF 9 is better than both 7 and 6. You know it's true.

Also also as the captcha is showing the logo for Pizza Hut I've gotta say I prefer pizza without cheese on it because it's clearly superior.

 

[Ratty]

It doesn't seem like very many JRPGs actually have any roleplaying in them. A list of the ones that do would be very interesting to me.

Also, I didn't know the Mario RPG games were really considered JRPGs, but that does seem kind of obvious now, huh. It actually serves my point above nicely, though; just what roleplaying is there to be had in a Mario game? I've not played any of the RPG ones, but I have watched let's plays of all of the Paper Marios and they are the same, right?

That's because of the lineage that the jRPG genre has. It goes like this- D&D and other tabletop games in the 1970s soon inspired nerdy players to make primitive computer games that utilized the mechanics of those tabletop RPGs. Things like having different ability scores for Strength, Dexterity etc. of course these "Dungeon Crawlers" lacked any real roleplaying (aside from the M.U.D.S or "Multi User Dungeons", which were primitive MMOs) but they did utilize tabletop mechanics.

These computer games, particularly the Wizardry series, migrated to Japan where they were wildly popular with Japanese computer geeks. As were tabletop roleplaying games to some degree in the late 1980s/early 1990s.[footnote]Leading to the western Fantasy boom in Japan at the time. Which not only gave birth to Dragon Quest, but also franchises like Berserk and Record of Lodoss War, the latter of which was literally based on a D&D campaign. And Slayers which was a parody of western fantasy.[/footnote]

Building on the foundation laid by the western "Ultima" series and simpler Japanese games like "Hydlide" the first "Dragon Quest" game was released in 1986 and was arguably also the first true jRPG. It streamlined the mechanics and presentation of dungeon crawlers of old for more casual console play, with an emphasis on pre-defined characters and linear (though at first barebones) stories with an overhead rather than first person view. The "Dragon Quest" series remains incredibly popular in Japan and it wasn't long until other jRPG series, most notably Final Fantasy, started popping up and playing with the formula.

 

[Ratty]

Oh boy a backlash to the backlash.

Look, I don't begrudge anyone enjoying or even loving FF7. But from where I'm standing the story, characters, character models and midi quality (though not the song compositions themselves) are all pretty objectively terrible.

Yes it was an important work, but most of its popularity I lay at the "wow" factor of the graphics and cool novelty of anime style outside Japan when it came out. A work being important or a benchmark doesn't mean it's necessarily good. And it certainly doesn't mean it will always appeal to modern tastes.

As for the "backlash" against it that's a natural result of more people actually playing the thing now sans-nostalgia goggles. Since it's more widely available via PSN and Steam. After years of hearing it hyped up a lot of new players are understandably underwhelmed to put it mildly. I played through it 13 years after it came out and found it to be terribly convoluted tripe with exactly 3 characters who were at all likeable. The game was so bad it put me off jRPGs entirely for a long time.

I'll echo the first dude who quoted you, it's a classic case of Seinfeld is Unfunny. Now I'm all for opinions, but the game isn't bad. A game doesn't reach this level of hype, legendary status or consistant best of lists for being bad. I'm not saying it's teh best game EVAR either, it's not even near the top of my top Final Fantasies. But it is a good and influential game. Overhyped? Sure it is, but just you didn't like it, that doesn't make it objectively terrible. If it was, it wouldn't be as popular as it is.

There's also nothing wrong with it not appealing to modern tastes(though I don't buy that, it hasn't aged that badly), but you can't begrudge a game that came out in 1997 for looking bad, having poor sound quality, or the more rabid fans for overhyping it to unatainable expectations. Should we not know by now to not believe the hype?

Even when it came out, people didn't marvel at the character models, they were awful, there was better looking stuff out there. People marveled at it because /nothing/ had even been done like that, yeah sure if you play it 13 years after it came out, or these days, its hype is so legendary, giving you the expectations so high that it can never possibly live up to them. It's just become retroactively ungood because you've played it so long after it came out to have played stuff that immitates or downright copies elements of it.

What about the people who played it for the first time when it came out? They didn't have nostalgia goggles going for them, they stayed for the new gameplay, story, characters and writing.(The Midi music is on the PC version only btw, the PSX version has proper music which is perfectly good). There is a /reason/ the game has legendary hype and it's not because it's tripe. Of course if you believe all of the hype you're going to be dissapointed.

Thanks for being civil. I'll just say though I still can't agree that it's always case of "Seinfeld is Unfunny" when people dislike it. Because at the time I played it I was a jRPG novice. The only games in the genre I had played beforehand were FF6 and FF9. The latter of which did come out later but purposefully eschewed almost all elements of FF7.

Like I said I just found and find the characters to be really unlikeable, the story to be needlessly convoluted and the gameplay to be incredibly mediocre. It's exactly the kind of mopey thing that appeals to teenage angst. I still think a lot of the love the game gets can be put to people who had never played an RPG before being blown away by how big the world was (the pre-rendered backgrounds are nice) and the seeming newness of the in-retrospect very derivative anime style and setting of the game to non-Japanese gamers.

I do agree that you can't blame a game for looking its age, I play and love lots of games as old or older than FF7, including a lot of PS1 games. But unlike other titles in the genre which transcend their technical limitations by virtue of telling a great story or having memorable characters or simply being fun, FF7's lack of visual punch just highlights its failing in the aforementioned areas. Which are what really count.

PS- And it is entirely possible for popular and influential things from the past to be objectively terrible. Just look at Twilight, or The Birth of a Nation. Ok the last one might be a little low, but you know what I mean.

I can be abusive if you like, I mean I am defending FF7 and having an argument on the internet, it just doesn't feel right if I don't personally attack you.

Oh well call me too presumptuous in my initial post. It's usually people that have played a good amount (or are predisposed to dislike it) of JRPGS who come back to rag on it on the basis that "I've seen it all before". And differing opinions aside, I'm sure we can agree that's unfair.

I didn't find the story overcomplicated, it was more complex than is normal, but it wasn't that difficult to follow, I did miss a couple of points, but that was because I was 8 when I played it for the first time, and yeah I'll admit it did blow me away, before that the only two games I'd played were Tomb Raider and Crash Bandicoot. I'd never seen or imagined anything like it before and I'd be lying if that didn't colour my impression at the time. It certainly has pacing and structural problems, but I wouldn't say it was too complex.

The story and characters are certainly not angsty though. I don't understand why that gets bought up, any chance of explaining where your views on that one? It's always puzzled me. It's very true of the extended universe,(especially in Advent Children and Kingdom Hearts) which makes no sense, there's no reason for Cloud to be grumpy before or after FF7. Clouds not exactly the happiest bloke in the world, but he's not mopy or angsty, he's a bit grumpy, but then he is suffering from PTSD, delusions and repressed memories. Calling him emo and angsty just isn't fair. We don't call massacre survivors "emo and mopey" do we? Squall, he was angsty and mopey; but even then he was basically a teenager trained to be a soldier from about the age of 10.

On popularity, there's a difference though, the things that stay popular after their boom tend to be the ones that are good. FF7 is 17 years old at this point. Does anyone still talk about S-Club 7, or the Spice Girls other than mocking them? Twilight hasn't been around too long, reached it's peak 4 years ago and now you barely hear about it, other than people mocking it.

It has been 4 years so I am getting a little rusty on the specifics, but I just found Cloud to be very mopey. And most of the other characters to be unlikeable for other reasons, I remember Cid came off as a huge jerkass in particular. Maybe part of the problem is the poor translation not properly conveying character motivations, but the only characters I empathized with at all were Red XIII, Tifa and Vincent. Barrett was ok as well but he was incredibly bland. I thought Sephiroth felt like a generic anime villain, which is a matter of taste. I might have been more attached to Aeris if her death wasn't one of the first things I ever learned about the game probably 6 or 7 years before I actually played it.

Wow. Whats with the FFVII hate?

Half those games owe their success to FFVII's success in making JRPGs mainstream. One of them is not a JRPG (Front Mission 3). There are those that I think are probably better than FFVII but I don't see a need to create a topic to bash the poor thing yet again. Also, important to note is that your list is almost completely comprised of Square games. You need to look at some titles from other companies to see what other great games lie around.

It's not so much as "stop bashing the poor thing" as it is "your choices will never be the most iconic RPG of all time, so get the heck over it." The choices made in the list aren't very interesting. This is a case not of someone trying to let lesser known titles get some attention, but just that THEIR favorites are always going to be #2, but never #1. Similar to someone going "bah, Citizen Kane is SOOOO overrated, let's talk about THE GODFATHER" as it that's a dramatic example for people to follow. Like I said, bring up some titles that legitimately haven't gotten attention for one reason or another Examples:

Valkyrie Profile: A tale of Ragnarok literally being around the corner and you are tasked with collecting the souls of the dead in order to prepare. You watch each of their fates, most of them painfully tragic, and then task them with being your personal army.

Star Ocean: Dating all the way back to the SNES era, this is a series with one of the most comprehensive and deep item customization systems I've ever seen where you can literally waste DOZENS of hours crafting potions, armor, weapons, accessories, food (oddly one of the most rewarding of them), or changing simple iron into all sorts of rare and valuable ores. Heck, you can even write books and make art either to boost your skills or sells for cash or play instruments for combat benefits

Brave Fencer Musashi: A very funky action RPG, one where the player can assimilate sub-weapons from nearly every enemy in the game.

Parasite Eve: Combining elements of survival horror as well as being set in a decently faithful depiction of New York. Also has my favorite female character ever.

Saga Frontier: The first one was a funky game where you could play the stories of six different characters in any order, each of them having a very different sort of tale. II was a multi-generational epic. One side was about Gustave XIII, the exiled prince of a powerful nation while the other was about the Knights family, the connecting thread being about a strange artifact known as "the Egg." Had very funky battle system, the player fighting as a group or one on one and learning weapon skills.

Secret of Mana: A SNES classic with a load of weapons and a funky magic systems revolving around different familiars.

I could on ALL DAY with this. There are TONS of RPGs we could be analyzing and discussing, probably even wondering if a lot of them deserve more attention due to doing some really funky stuff with the genre. It should never be a pissing match over what is "better" as the zeitgeist has already decided that. Go to RPGFan or RPGamer and you can find all sorts of hidden gems to track down whether they be the Western gunslinger inspire Wild Arms, Tactics Ogre's politically charged plots (like Game of Thrones before it even started), Secret of Evermore's romp through a world comprised of caveman times, ancient Egypt, medieval England, and the distant future, Sakura Wars with its fusion of turn-based strategy and visual novel, Soulblazer rebuilding a ruined world, or Illusion of Gaia with a weirdly somber tale where character after character dies the further you go in your journey. These are all titles that should be given serious analysis but instead people are arguing that what is generally considered to be #2 should be be #1 because apparently being in the top 2% just isn't good enough.

Yeah life is too short to worry about what other people are liking. I really want to play Valkyrie Profile now but don't have time atm. I've played the first 2 Mana games (Final Fantasy Adventure and Secret of Mana) and they're both great. Too bad at least half the script was cut out of the western release of "Secret of Mana" for space and timing reasons. That extra bit of script really adds a lot to the game. I notice you left Terrinigma off your list of mentions though, the final part of the SoulBlazer trilogy. Yeah I haven't played it yet either XD.

 

[vagabondwillsmile]

Ah. Become the king, and count down the days til people go "Yeah, but this is better, this is better." You got one thing right though - FF6 is the best RPG ever made, so...

Yah, it definitely seems a popular thing to do now - to call FFVII out. BUT... This was the very first game that showed me the medium could provide emotions other than what I would group together as general fun. It was the first game that made me cry (and not in an emo, mopy, shoe-gaze way - I just liked the characters and when bad stuff happened to them I felt sad too). That was kind of an eye opener; and I'm willing to bet others had this experience as well.

I get it. The fact that it was the first polygonal character model FF, means it hasn't aged well gtaphically -- at all. But the environments (non-battle) I still think are gorgeous. Criticize the music quality however you want but it's PS1 (early PS1 at that) and that hasn't aged well either. Though I can still hum most of the melodies off the top of my head - and most jrpg fans will instantly recognize many songs within three or four notes. It may not be stellar quality. But it's EFFECTIVE.

Gold standard or no, the game set a lot of bench-marks.

As for the list, I love Chrono Trigger (best of all time for me personally), and FFVI (I just started playing it for the first time ever a few weeks ago and got Sabin to suplex a f@#%ing train!), FF Tactics holds the record for the most time I've spent on a game; and there are many other JRPGs that I absolutely adore. But even I can't say they are objectively better (or worse). I can say they objectively look, sound, or hold-up better; but that's as far as I can go. I guess I just don't care for subjective assertions mistakenly made as being objective (I understand it's a sensationalization tactic). One thing I think is good though, is that a lot of games have been mentioned that people may not have heard of let alone played, that they definitely should.

Here's a question worth asking. If Square Enix ever re-released FFVII at current standards, would you guys and gals buy it? I certainly would.