FF7 remake most important ever, and that's not a compliment

[CritialGaming]

It's cut from the same cloth as the constant droning of how sequels and franchises are the devil; it's a way for people to feel like they're more daring and curious than they actually are, as well as to make up for the MASSIVE insecurity of how a game nearly twenty years old still hasn't been beaten. A remake of it pretty much means that the guys at Square have given up on ever surpassing it as they frequently said they would not remake it until they released an FF that surpassed it in sales and acclaim, which still hasn't happened. Seriously, stuff that's twenty years old isn't remembered fondly solely due to nostalgia (because if nostalgia was the sole or main factor then the FMV phase of gaming wouldn't be relentlessly mocked as it is).

I agree, sure nostalgia colors views on older games in a very favorable light. But you only look back fondly on things you remember being good, because they generally were. You don't look back fondly on a turd you took because it reminded you of your dead dog right?

While every game has faults and every piece of artwork can be criticized, nostalgia let's you overlook the nitpicks that other would genuinely toss at something.

That's kind of where the flame war starts isn't it. You have one group of players who got the game back in 1997 and had their minds blown. It is this group who is going bat shit crazy from this remake news. Then there are the players who maybe didn't play the game until very recently when it once against became available on PC or the playstation network. These players are more of a modern crowd and they look at this game with the eyes of 2010+ gamer. The wonky grammar, abundant in old Japanese games, the slow battle system, the choppy story. So when they see the game is getting a remake they shake their heads and go "why?".

What the haters don't realize is that Final Fantasy 7 is a fucking fantastic, yet wonky and flawed, masterpiece. It is because of those flaws that it not only needs this remake but DESERVES it.

 

[Scars Unseen]

But it was babby's first RPG, and so a lot of people cut their teeth on it.

That's a fairly silly complaint about a game that ignores the fact that many JRPG veterans also enjoyed it. If you want a game that really was a JRPG Lite, you have to go back a bit and check out Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.

As for the dialogue... I honestly couldn't tell you how much of a role it plays, but the English translation is famously awful in FF7. I doubt re-translating the script would result in something that's going to show up Planescape: Torment, but it might elevate it from "serviceable and occasionally hilarious in all the wrong ways" to "yep, that's a JRPG all right."

 

[Odbarc]

I have a significant problem with FF7. It's a classic but if the remake doesn't fix it, I'm definitely not going to get it.

The magic system had a lot of classic options but cure+all was the only effective use of mana in the entire game. No enemy was weak enough to any element that curing your entire party with the same amount of mana and spamming fight wasn't a more cost effective option. In effect, the combat system suffers and only offers eye candy.
When you can cast a spell for 500 damage for 10 mana OR fight 10 times for 1000 damage and then cure+all the team back to full health for the same amount of mana, it's a waste to cast any other spell than cure+all.
If Ultima costs 100 mana, it needs to do at least 9999 damage to be in par with cure+all and it mostly doesn't.

Worse flawed is you can just get like 3~4 HP materia per person and you're too tanky for a lot of enemies to kill for a large portion of the rest of the game.

I would absolutely LOVE IT if they could manage some kind of quicker transition between fights, in and out. CD based games were pretty bad and slowed down the process of playing the game compared to their sprite based counterparts.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

I played through FF7 in 1998, and never touched anything related to it since then except for watching "Advent Children" (and I basically just fast-forwarded to the fight sequences in that). If you gave me a sheet of paper and about 5 minutes, I could write you the names of every major character in the game and probably give you a little of their backstory as well. That's how much that game stuck with me, and this is coming from someone who hates anime style, and didn't like any of the other Final Fantasy games.

I can't do that with any other RPG that I played through that long ago except for Planescape: Torment.

So yes, the game could certainly use some improvements to some of its mechanics, but overall I consider it one of the most memorable games I ever played through.

 

[MysticSlayer]

Seriously, stuff that's twenty years old isn't remembered fondly solely due to nostalgia (because if nostalgia was the sole or main factor then the FMV phase of gaming wouldn't be relentlessly mocked as it is).

I agree, sure nostalgia colors views on older games in a very favorable light. But you only look back fondly on things you remember being good, because they generally were.

I very much agree. Nostalgia requires there to have been something there in the first place that could both capture the imagination in the moment and stick with the player long afterwards. Sure, it can cause us to not bring up flaws when talking about the game (which probably frustrates those who jump into it for the first time years later), but in the end, those flaws just don't matter in the grand scheme of things because those games did at least one thing so well that it made up for flaws. And unfortunately for people who can't look past those flaws, they end up getting blinded to whatever caused so many people to remember the game so fondly for so long.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

I mean I played FF7 for the first time like 5 years ago. It wasn't awful, but it want good either. It was meh. Decent. C+. Neither terribly good like Bioshock or terribly bad like Bioshock 2. Absolutely nothing remarkable.
I've had this conversation often on this site and the consensus seems to be FF7 was good when it came out. Leave it alone. Don't replay, don't remake. Leave it alone so you don't ruin thousands of nostalgic memories.

 

[CritialGaming]

I mean I played FF7 for the first time like 5 years ago. It wasn't awful, but it want good either. It was meh. Decent. C+. Neither terribly good like Bioshock or terribly bad like Bioshock 2. Absolutely nothing remarkable.
I've had this conversation often on this site and the consensus seems to be FF7 was good when it came out. Leave it alone. Don't replay, don't remake. Leave it alone so you don't ruin thousands of nostalgic memories.

You comparing FF7 to Bioshock makes me want to hurt very tiny animals. It's like saying oranges are not nearly as good as skittles. Oranges are okay, but I mean skittles bro....awesome.

If you compared FF7 to another RPG then okay, but you are putting an RPG against an FPS in your mind which doesn't make any sense to me. Regardless of what your opinion of either title actually is. You may like Bioshock better, and that's fine, but those games are so radically different and come from such radically different eras in gaming that one cannot possibly hold up against each other.

 

[Auron225]

So what, everyone who ever played it is suffering from a mass delusion that it was a good game? And the author of this article is the one person who saw it for what it was really was?

If you want this article in 9 words; "I'm not crazy! Everyone else is the crazy ones!!1!1!"

 

[Something Amyss]

If it was babby's first RPG what were the other 6?

Ah. Diction probems.

"Babby's first" is not a statement that it is the original. It does not have to be the first in a series or the first game, period. It needs to serve as entry to the genre or be intended to. The concept comes from those "baby's first" products, none of which are first.

You go on to prove my point, in that it was your first RPG. Like, immediately after trying to dismiss my case, you make it for me.

As for what about the other 6, not all of them even made it out of Japan initially. FFVI was retroactively dubbed a masterpiece, but that was well after FFVII came out.

I mean it was my first RPG, but that was because my nintendo days were filled with Mario and Donkey Kong country.

Exactiment.

That's a fairly silly complaint about a game that ignores the fact that many JRPG veterans also enjoyed it.

Except A. it wasn't a complaint, but a statement of fact, and B. it doesn't ignore veteran players, it's just a statement where veteran players are irrelevant. Whether veteran players played VII or not doesn't change the statement.

If you look at lists of "baby's first," most RPGs/anime/whatever listed will be ones that veterans played. A lot of times, they won't even be basic, just popular. I mean, some are. Pokémon is often on those lists, because the single player game is pretty easy and light, but this isn't a defining feature.

Point remains, this was the game that got the mainstream audience, as in the one the kiddies cut their teeth on. This was the first RPG many experienced. You can tell by the way its sales figures manage to dwarf most of the games in the FF series and prior console RPGs. Also by its popularity in the West.

If you want a game that really was a JRPG Lite, you have to go back a bit and check out Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.

Yes, and when it finally sells 10 million copies, we'll talk. But you'll notice I didn't say JRPG lite. You did.

I doubt re-translating the script would result in something that's going to show up Planescape: Torment, but it might elevate it from "serviceable and occasionally hilarious in all the wrong ways" to "yep, that's a JRPG all right."

I'm not sure that helps anything. While things like "I'll be stand here" are potentially amusing/cringe worthy, the script would need fundamental work to make it particularly any better. As you say, translation can only do so much.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

Well I'm excited. I'm sorry the game doesn't meet that person's standards, but to me, any time I hear someone talk like this, the feeling I get is more along the lines of, "Waaaah, I don't like that this thing is so popular, so why do you stupid people like it so much? Stop being stupid and liking what I don't like."

 

[mad825]

Well yes. But really. Once you get into the Shrina building 5 or so hours into a 70 hours game, the tone shifts from corporate bad too, oh god god-like evil dude is back and we have to chase him down and stop him.

....Did we play the same game? The tone never changed, with AVALANCHE being a front for Greenpeace and Hatred Sephiroth whining like a ***** because he doesn't have any parents...I mean ffs, most people in that situation wouldn't give a fuck. Even if he is symbolism for the Antichrist I would expected more cynicism than anything else.

You are free to have your qualms and have parts about the story that you don't like. You're taste of storytelling here is valid. However every story is going to have some kind of message, it is just a matter of whether you can ignore the subtext of the plot in order to sit and enjoy the story as it is told.

If you want corporate bad messages play a couple Resident evil games. Or wait, you didn't like that.....don't play resident evil.

RE is a whole different minefield, it's camp and it isn't so blunt with it's message (as in I know and you don't need to tell me) and the premise is unique. It's out stayed it's welcome after 4.

Still, I find it funny that you proclaim to be good, almost perfect in fact and yet you want a remake? You realise that REFF7 won't be the same as the original, no? The story will be cut, edited and resampled. You want a FF7 without ATB? GTFO IMO, after FFX it's been a incoherent mess to a point where they've almost removed any user interactivity.

So you really think that SE will release a game without thinking about a homogenised audience?

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

SNIP

You comparing FF7 to Bioshock makes me want to hurt very tiny animals. It's like saying oranges are not nearly as good as skittles. Oranges are okay, but I mean skittles bro....awesome.

If you compared FF7 to another RPG then okay, but you are putting an RPG against an FPS in your mind which doesn't make any sense to me. Regardless of what your opinion of either title actually is. You may like Bioshock better, and that's fine, but those games are so radically different and come from such radically different eras in gaming that one cannot possibly hold up against each other.

Would it help if I compared FF7 to the Mass Effect trilogy, Kotor, Dragon Age or hell even Pokemon and said compared to them FF7 looks like a pile of used cheeseburgers over a half broke Speak-&-Spell that someone glued googly eyes to?
'Cause I can do that if it saves tiny animals.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

And then there are those who say it's a bad game are prob gamers who didn't grew up in the PS1 era, and are so used to modern game, they might say it's bad in their view. That's how generations work, maybe the remake will help with that.

I grew up with Atari and NES. I tried to play FF6 on SNES but I just couldn't take the horrible turn-based combat and random battles. There's not enough strategy in the combat of FF to merit it being turn-based. Maybe that was the only way to do things back then at least with the combat system, there was no need for random battles though. Just because that may have been the best way to do something then doesn't mean it was good. And, PS1 era definitely had the hardware to do away with the bad turn-based combat and random battles. I'd call FF6 a bad game because trudging through all that combat was what you spent most of the game doing and if what I spend most of the game doing isn't fun or entertaining, then the game simply isn't good. I never played FF7 because I knew I wouldn't like it. I'm not going to just call a game I didn't play bad, but I tried to play a few JRPGs like it and I just couldn't stand the battle systems. Hell, I knew when I played Syphon Filter that 3rd-person shooters would be way better in the future (just control-wise), I didn't need to have played a modern TPS to know that.

 

[LordLundar]

If it was babby's first RPG what were the other 6?

Unheard of. The bulk of the mass appeal for FF7 was that it was the first Mass Marketed game in the series and was heavily so. It had a budget that the devs would have KILLED for with the previous games and most of it was in marketing. The PS1 and PS2 era was when games were being heavily marketed to the general public whereas before they were niche markets and the JRPG corner was essentially a niche of a niche. THAT's why for most of the people overrating the game it's because of nostalgia. For them, FF7 was their first one in the series. Not helped that for a large percentage of them the previous titles that first caught their attention were the piss-poor Playstation ports.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Note I never said that those who call it bad, didn't play it. If they did and didn't grew up in the PS1 era, some are likely to call it a bad game. And there are people who will call it bad before playing it.

To me, you were implying that people that play FF7 now say it's bad because of how genre has evolved. You could've played it on released and called it a bad game too is what I'm saying. I played FF6 and it's a bad game to me. I tried the series again and actually beat FF10 mainly due to the random battles (the series was still using random battles on fucking PS2) being not so frequent and it was a bad game all around, the combat was so simplistic and the characters were awful. I played FF12 and actually liked it to a degree and FF12 is basically a proof of all prior FF games having combat that doesn't require them being turn-based. Anyways, I'm actually sorta looking forward to a FF7 remake with an entertaining combat system so I can experience the story without having to trudge through combat that I hate.