The game itself is mix between my favorite genres.
Role playing game and Adventure. Its more a RPG,
though. Every person in your party has several
chatacteristics, which rise by gathering experience
points. You gain experience points in hundreds of
battles youll get into. Very interesting is how much
your characteristics will rise thru the game. At the
end of the game i had 260 times !!! more health
points that in the beginning. Thats what I call an
advance...hehe. The battles are randomly generated.
That means that you are wandering around the world
map and suddenly the games stops and throws you in
the battle mode. Battle mode is the only place ( and
Chocobo racing, of course :-)), where its better if
you have some good 3d accelarotor ( like Voodoo(2) or
RivaTNT(128) chipset cards). The battle system is
pretty revolutionary. Its half real time and half
turn based. Depending to your equipment, you can do
several things during one turn, like attack with your
weapon, cast attack or curative magic, steal things
from your enemies, sense their statistics and many
other things. The graphical design of the battles is
very good. The camera is floating and it always shows
the plan from the most dramatic angle, so you have a
movie-like feeling. The visual effects are state of
the art. Turok and Incoming were the #1 games, when
it comes to visual effects, but some spells from
FFVII top those two games. Especially summon spells
like Neo Bahamut ( ground beneath your enemies gets
ripped off and floats up. The ceiling shreds open,
letting blinding light rays on the battle plan. You
see the enemies float up above the clouds, where they
meet a HUGE and beautyful red dragon Bahamut. After a
while he opnes his mouth and awesome rays of energy
start forming by his head, then the screen fades to
white and you hear a powerfull blast. Then you see a
huge flame frying your enemies. Then the floating
chunk of ground collapses and it sends them falling
back down ). At the end your enemy uses the ultimate
summon spell, which sends a comet to our solar system
destroying !!! all planets even SUN !!! Enemies youll
encounter vary from usual RPG adversaries (like
goblins, dragons, human soliders, electronic guards)
to very extraordinary ones ( walking light bulbs !!
cactuses !!!! live pumpkins ?!!!). Everyone in the
battle is neatly made up from many polygons and is
also nicely animated.
The non-battle part of the game is devided between
two modes. The first one is world map traveling,
where you can freely save your game. You see Cloud
from high above and you lead him through the huge
world. The world is devided into several continents
and you cant get on all of them from the beginning.
When you reach one of many special locations like
various cities, villages, mines and so, the game
switches to another mode. If youve played games like
Alone in the dark or Little big adventure, you know
how this mode looks like. You see your party ( well,
you see only Cloud, who represents the whole party)
from various angles as it moves through BEAUTYFULY
rendered locations. The game takes place in
fantasy-techno enviroment ( swords, magic and middle
age architecture combined with cyberpunk weapons,
buildings and vehicles) Even if those backgrounds are
in lo-res, like in the Playstation version, they are
truly state-of-the-art. Some are even animated and
few of them are even made out of a video clip ( those
backgrounds ruin the computer´s performance, though
:-) ). The characters are made in typical Japanese
anime style (manga).Very often the game swithces to
self controlling mode, like a video, but all made in
the game´s engine, therefore no disc space is
needed, like in case of FMVs. This no need for space
lets the game include hundreds of these
"videos".
Full motion video is another awesome feature of
the game. Even if the files are in AVI format ( MPG
would be much better) and in low resolution, the
videos themselves are truly magnificent. First of
all, the movies are working great together with the
rendered backgrounds. You wont recognise the switch
from the video to the game. The movies are rendered
very good. The rendering doesnt seem unnatural, like
in most of the games. Those were the technical
aspects. The movies themselves are even better and
what more, in my opinion they are the best FMVs ive
seen. Monumental, thrilling, breathtaking. Those are
just few words to describe the videos. When I saw
FMVs like Junon assault, Sister ray VS The Weapon,
Sepiroth´s descent into the flames, Escape from
Shinra HQ and most of all the awesome outro ( the AVI
file of the outro is 146 MB big !!!! thats almost a
fourth of one CD !). The game stretches itself on 4
CD´s. The first CD includes the game itself (sounds,
music, graphics, program) and on the remaining 3 CDs
are FMVs. That means over 60 minutes of video files.
In short, AWESOME.
Sounds are very disappointing feature of the game.
It sends me to old Nintendo times. What a shame. Some
battle commands, like summoning or some monumental
spells could have great sound effects, no doubt. Oh
well. On the other side, THE MUSIC IS EXTATIC.
Unfortunately, Eidos seems to like Midi format. This
format sounds good only on professional soundcards (I
do not have anything like that), so many people wont
appreciate this move. At least, Eidos made a deal
with Yamaha software, which made a new software
emulator of professional Midi soundcards exclusively
for Final Fantasy VII. The program is awesome, thats
true. My midis sound very cool, now. But it also
overloads the system, making it very slow. So, if you
wanna play the game with midis handled by the Yamaha
driver, you better have a really good PC ( like PII
and 64 or 128 megs of RAM). Technically, the music
could have been managed better ( like CD-audio
format). When you look at the music from the artistic
point of view, the situation is completely different.
The composer Nobuo Uematsu made the music for all
Final Fantasy games and I hope he keeps on composing
it for next FF games. When you hear tracks like FF
theme, FF prelude, Tifa´s theme, Aeris´s theme,
Holding memories in our hearts, Chocobo race,
Blooming flowers in the church, One winged angel and
much much more, you must agree, that Nobuo Uematsu is
T-H-E C-O-M-P-O-S-E-R. Soon after the game release
there were released 3 !! soundtracks for the game.
The OST, which is incredibly a 4CD set !!!. The
Reunion soundtrack, which includes best tracks from
OST plus Theme, Aeris´s theme and One winged angel
in orchestral versions. I love those tracks. The
orchestrated theme is the best instrumental song
(together with Twin Peaks theme :-), in my opinion.
As I said for the FMVs. In short, AWESOME.
Thats just about it. I could talk about this game
for hours, but I think Ive said enough. I´ll just
write down some miscellanious facts.
- The game is (if you take only the part you
actively play, not something like Daggerfall,
where you stumble across the land for days
and the story doesnt develop at all) propably
the biggest, as well. It has a real time
counter and my time was 48 hours (I played it
three weeks, i was pretty fast). Yeah, this
sounds like " what ? that is supposed to
be long ?", but take in mind that I was
following the story, i wasnt wandering around
(to train my party members, catch Chocobos,
etc.). So you could just think of it as you
were in a cinema watching a fantastic movie,
with the best story youve ever experienced,
and this movie was 44 hours long !!! (and you
would enjoy every last moment of it) ( Ive
substracted 4 hours, which i spent traveling,
fighting and the time I left the game, when I
needed to do something, but the counter kept
on timing.)
- Lots of prestigeous computer gaming magazines
have praised this game and some of them gave
it " Game of the month/year/ OF ALL
TIMES " awards
- FF
VIII is on the way. I´m gonna buy it as
soon as it gets here, theres no question
about that. Square soft. released a playable
demo for the Playstation already. Ss
president also said, that FFVIII is going to
be much better than FVII ( that means better
storyline and techincal part of the game). I
find it hard to believe, because FFVII is a
game of my dreams. I really cant think of
anything better. But, if it actually IS
better than FFVII, i think im gonna be outta
reach for SOME TIME (its supposed to be much
bigger than FFVII) or maybe Ill die by the PC
(with a smile on my face, of course), who
knows :-)
- You can download all the midis and few MP3s
at this site : Music
files
I cant rate this game, like I couldnt rate The
Best of... by U2. I have the same reason, id have to
go higher than the maximum rating. Oh well. I hope I
make a review of something I dont adore THIS much.