final fantasy vii
a game by squaresoft
produced by hironobu sakaguchi
directed by yoshinori kitase
with character designs by tetsuya nomura
and music by nobuo uematsu
a review by tim rogers
images by persona, who will get his name in bigger font when he emails me the rest



Final Fantasy VII is the most important game Squaresoft ever made. It is also the most important Final Fantasy game they ever made. They made some better ones (IV and VI), they made some more cohesive ones (V), they made a weirder one (X), they certainly made some worse ones (IX, XI, I, II, III), and they most definitely made one with more perfect hairstyles (VIII). Yet Final Fantasy VII trumps them all; it is Squaresoft's most important game ever, and it is a wonderful videogame, in that, unlike nearly every game Square has made following it, Final Fantasy VII aspires to be little more than a videogame. Final Fantasy VI had aspired to be like a modern opera, because its fans were the kinds of people who would shed tears to midi music; Final Fantasy VIII would take the Final Fantasy series's penchant for constant reinvention of situation, world, system, and character and run it into the ground spectacularly; between these two noteworthiest of videogames, Square attained pop nirvana in a game that instantly became both a cult smash and a worldwide craze. In its setting and its story, it tears handfuls of superfluous pages out of everything else that was popular at the time of its creation, and it weaves a tale not unlike a Japanese samurai fiction bled into a spaghetti western sitting on top of a pile of dystopian science-fiction. Looked at from the top down, it is a big, unwieldy, burlap sack of hot genius parts. Booted up from the beginning, it's a game with a hell of a beginning.

It starts on a train. No -- it starts in outer space. No, outer space is just a metaphor -- it really starts in an alleyway, where a young girl is stooping to pick up something. Maybe the young girl is just a metaphor, too. Let's pretend she isn't. Her face is stained green by the glow of some ethereal light. If you happen to be playing this in 1997, your bottom jaw might be trembling. In five seconds, as the girl takes several clicking footsteps toward the end of an alley, you might find yourself unconsciously breathing through your nose. The camera pans out slowly. All is in darkness behind her. Suddenly, she stops, and the camera pulls back with great force. Cars zoom down a busy city street in front of a theater. The camera pulls up and moves through a web of gritty city blocks and pipes. It stops soon, providing us with a logo splash, a piece of music that recalls Vangelis' work in "Blade Runner," and a bird's eye view of the city of Midgar, which is shaped like a wagon wheel, with walls where spokes should be. Each section of the wheel is crowned by a numbered tower. In the middle is a giant skyscraper. We later learn that the numbered towers are power plants that are sucking the life force out of the planet and using it to provide the people with electricity. What they use the electricity for, I don't know. The city sure is dark. Maybe they use it to watch television? There are a lot of flickering televisions in the Midgar phase of Final Fantasy VII. That's probably the best way to describe it. The first ten hours of Final Fantasy VII, the first time you play it, proceed with the rhythm of a muted, snow-crashed television sitting on the front desk of a dark general store in a small American town shortly after the nuclear apocalypse. Only the snow is green. Yes, definitely green.

That's not to say it's boring, oh, not at all. Green television static has the potential to be a wonderful, eclectic night-light of sorts. I encourage you to fasten a green piece of cellophane to your television screen, and then turn it on to a channel that gets no signal. Let your mind wander. Do this when you're very tired, maybe after working three overtime shifts at a job that requires you to sweat outdoors, and it might be more exciting than playing videogames.

If Final Fantasy VII was a color, it'd be green. The first ten hours are a whirlwind of revolutionary-in-1997 computer-animated cutscenes that climaxes in a motorcycle-racing combat minigame programmed by Namco and resolves in a two-hour segment wherein you don't, actually, really play. The protagonists, as the beginning of the game shows them, are either the sort who will brush off a friendly introduction with "I don't care about your names -- I'm just here to do my job" (oh, how original it was, back then) or are seven feet tall, black, and managing to raise a daughter as a single dad with a Gatling gun for a right hand. There's a girl with ditzy hair, a pink dress, and a fairy cane -- the girl from the intro, Aeris, who is of course being hunted down by People With Intentions To Abuse Her Magic Powers -- and a girl with giant, giant, morbidly huge, triangular boobs, named Tifa. All of these people live, more or less together, in a sunless slum beneath a thick metal plate fifty meters above the earth, on which the city of Midgar sits. To a teenager or an American witness of pop-culture in the 1990s, Midgar was an amazing invention, something that could have existed in the real world. Looking back on the game today (and playing it again) makes me scratch my head. First of all, the train in the cut scene looks like it couldn't possibly be the train our heroes are riding (the polygons are too smooth), and for another thing, why does the plate have to be fifty meters above the slum? I mean, none of the buildings in the slum are more than two stories tall.



Early in the game, after our protagonists -- who are, as the game requires them to be edgy, environmentalist terrorists who blow up the power plants for the sake of the planet's life energy -- do their bad business, they're riding a train from the upper level of Midgar to the lower level. There's a computer-animated scene, set to bleak, dreary, loud, powerful music, in which the train ramps down and begins to spiral and descend the central strut of the city. It's rather magnificent. Just before that scene, one of the terrorists is explaining to Cloud (our hero, the new recruit, and the first of many Final Fantasy characters to be named after something related to weather) how the train works. She calls him over to a panel in a car alive with flickering red light, and says, hey, look at this. She shows him an electronic panel mounted on the wall near the door. She says, "I've always liked this sort of stuff." Cloud is new to Midgar, for reasons crucial to the story (which the story won't explain until much, much later, and even then, only if you ask it to), so he's taking in this information cold, as we are. Jesse -- the girl's name -- boots up the panel, and our viewpoint goes from over Cloud and Jesse's shoulders to a full-screen view of the panel. A green-and-black wireframe model of Midgar spins to life. Markers denote all of the stops. At one point, Jesse explains that they're passing through a security checkpoint, which scans everyone's ID to make sure they're not a fugitive from the law. We then see a top-down view of the train car as it passes through the checkpoint. Everything glows red for an instant. Jesse explains that Cloud has been outfitted with a fake ID so he can get through these checkpoints. Of course, a few hours later, after you've met the rest of the crew, defended Aeris from the Men With Intentions, you'll plant powerful bombs in another power plant, this time with not so much luck, and a harder boss battle. That the boss battle is harder is justified by the story -- the Men With Intentions are onto your little fly-by-night terrorism scheme, and are increasing security. When you get on the train back home again, of course the alarm is going to get tripped, because your fake ID doesn't work anymore. Soldiers flood the train and start chasing you down. So what do you do then? Well, at Jesse's advising, you start running down the train. You're in the last car, so you proceed to the next car, and then the next, until you get to the front. There are no obstacles. Guards are behind you. Any attempt to engage them in friendly conversation results in a battle. Keep moving down the train, and you'll have more guards behind you. Just remember not to get near them, and you're okay. The battles are no big deal, either way. Get to the front of the train and the story proceeds.

What is the significance of this train business? Well, aside from being the one event that, from the outset, defines Final Fantasy VII's aspirations as a piece of entertainment, it's quite immersive. The simple act of moving from one car of the train to next, storming through the car, feeling the passengers' eyes on your back as you stride to the next car -- it feels oddly more human than the things most videogames ask us to do. It's such a human thing that when it's summer or winter in Tokyo, and I accidentally get into the "low-air-conditioning car" (for people who like being either hot or cold) of a subway, when I stride to the sliding door to the next car, I always recall Final Fantasy VII for a brief moment. As a piece of a videogame, it has a hard impact on the player; we know we're in danger, and we don't know what to do. If the game offered us all the freedoms of the real world, we could perhaps get on our hands and knees and beg for mercy, or perhaps bash our fist against the window in an attempt to break it and escape. However, if we actually found ourselves in this situation -- that being the situation of a man with stick-uppy blond hair and a six-foot-long fat sword strapped to his back -- we'd probably be as confused as we are as the chubby guy with a bag of Doritos and a PlayStation controller. We'd just follow the girl, because her little text window ("This way! Hurry!") just seems so authoritative. Final Fantasy VII, in its opening stages, plays out like a ten-hour fantasy action movie where the parts that aren't necessarily a "game" are the most fascinating.

It's when we actually fight someone that Final Fantasy VII becomes a videogame. It uses, essentially, the same battle system from Final Fantasy VI, only now, instead of equipping characters with the souls of summon beasts, which, through power-leveling, allows them to learn magic spells, you now use magic crystals called "Materia," which gain experience points, learn magic spells, and can be handed off to other characters at any time. It is "essentially" the same as Final Fantasy VI's system, only now you don't have to go through the trouble to teach all of your characters the Cure spell. You just power up three "Cure" Materia to the appropriate level, and though your characters may change, you can just share the Materia. Special attacks like "steal" are also contained within Materia. Power a "Steal" Materia up to a high level, and Cloud might seem like a master stealer. Then take that Materia and give it to Tifa, if you want, and though she might not have stolen a potion in her life, she'll now be able to instantly steal as quickly as Cloud had been able to. Some Materia give you bonus abilities like automatic counterattacking. The higher leveled the counter Materia, the more often the counter attack hits. Some Materia boost innate statistics such as hit point totals. To remove a hit-point bonus Materia from one character and give it to another character of equal level is to, roughly, make that second character as powerful as the first once was.

The Materia interface system is color-coded for simple use. You enter the Materia menu, and you see the number of slots available to you, and you arrange the Materia as you see fit. The slots are, you learn through the story, holes in your weapon or armor. You start the game with two-slot or one-slot weapons, though in the end, you'll have some eight-slot weapons and armor. If the slots are linked, then two Materia can support one another. If they're not linked, the Materia act independently. Some weapons have only three slots for Materia, yet multiply AP (points awarded from battling, which level up the Materias' abilities) by three. Some weapons are quite powerful as weapons, yet feature eight unlinked slots with no Materia growth. It's a gamble; it's a videogame. It's fun.

This color-coding makes the game simpler -- and simple is what the game is going for. Why, you can beat this entire game without ever using a Materia. Well -- at least, you can get to the final boss. I remember some guy on my dorm floor was stuck at the final boss, and asked me to come in and help him. The guy didn't have a single Materia equipped, and Cloud was only on level 29. He'd gotten all the way to the end, in sixty-some hours, just choosing "Fight" and "item" at every battle. Amazing! I take it he hadn't even taken the time to watch the long monster summon spells, which had been the selling-pojnt of the game for some role-playing game fans.

"The story's really great. I just wanna see how it ends."

Is the story great, though, really? To analyze that, we must first talk about the characters. And to talk about the characters, we must first talk about what the characters do. And to talk about what the characters do we must first, well, talk about the battle system some more.

The important thing to note here is that the characters are all, essentially, equal. Final Fantasy VI had foreshadowed that its successors would feature characters of equal strength; yet in Final Fantasy VI (in the Japanese version, at least), the characters all had job classes (which never changed) written next to their names on the status menu. Each character in Final Fantasy VI had a special ability that only they could use (well, the Mimic, Gogo, could use any special abilities, though his strength was only half everyone else's). The Karateka Mash could do little fighting-game-y diagonal inputs, resulting in a power move; the Machiner Edgar could use tools like drills (armor piercing) chainsaws (sometimes-instant killing) flash bulbs (blinding) or the dreaded Bioblaster (poison) to inflict status ailments on enemies; Locke could steal; Celes could catch magic spells with her sword; Tina could transform into a pink-haired psychobeast, with double her attack and magic power, though only for a limited time. In Final Fantasy VI, the character abilities all tell us things about the characters that the story, otherwise, doesn't have the wind to say. The story in Final Fantasy VI is, as has been said elsewhere, operatic, and with the faintest whiff of literary aspirations. Though a character is called a "Machiner" in the instruction manual and on the status screen, the story, which allows us to pick which characters we're using at all times, has no time to stop and show us that this man does, indeed, sometimes make machines and use them to accomplish purposes. Edgar is introduced at a point in the story when the world-weary master of love is slated to step onto the opera stage, and so he fills that role. That Kitase wanted him to also tool around with chainsaws and power drills is the game's own business; when it decides to show us Edgar's hobby, it does it on the battlefield. Edgar, who is just as strong as every other character, and who can be powered up to be a better magic-user than the sorceress Tina, is the only character who can use tools in battle. It is the battles, in Final Fantasy VI, that define te details of the characters.

Final Fantasy VII, as a game, talks quite a lot. We know everything we need to know about Cloud based on the way people talk about him. The game, in spite of its rather crude visual style and presentation (more on that later), is taking a hyper-real approach. It wants us to know its characters down to their favorite foods. For the greater half of the game, the characters we can play as during given segments are strictly chosen for us by the writers. Though in their designs Tifa (white T-shirt, shorts, huge breasts) and Cloud (some kind of navy-blue jumpsuit, spiky blond hair) are rather vanilla, it's through their interactions with other people (like the jive-talkin' no-nonsense tough brother Barret or the grizzled old pilot Cid) that they come alive. When, at a later point in the game, we're free to choose which three characters from a list of seven we want to have in our adventuring party, we normally pick the two that appeal to us in terms of how the story has presented them.



It's crucial to note that Cloud must always be in the party, save for a few small incidents where he's incapacitated and Tifa or Cid step into the main character shoes.

In Final Fantasy VI, the characters lead triple lives -- they are men and women engaged in a dire struggle against evil in a world that has been destroyed, trying to pick up the pieces of their former lives and triumph against adversity; every fifteen steps or so, when the proper music plays, they are the wielders of fantastic battling techniques unique to their professions and stations in life, or sometimes histories (like the ninja Shadow's ability to throw ninja stars and command an attack dog); when the fighting stops and we summon the status screen, they are blank slates onto which we scribble experience points, magic techniques, and performance-enhancing accessories and weapons.

In Final Fantasy VII, the characters are who they are. The story involves a giant evil corporation, a huge metallic city, a couple of murder mysteries, and a handful of characters that would feel comfortable at a bar in a black-and-white comic book about colorful gangsters. They wear their weapons on their sleeves (or, in Barret's case, their weapons are their sleeves), and they strut as they speak their silent lines. When they fight battles, they are who they are. The cast of Final Fantasy VII, most of all Vincent, the red-cloaked, long-haired, dark man with a shady past and the ability to sometimes turn into one of several crude beasts, have endeared themselves to fans of videogames more than any characters Square had made or probably ever will make. This is because they look impressive standing still; it was said that Tetsuya Nomura was chosen as the artist for Final Fantasy VII because his straight-edged, pencil-shaded style was more suited to polygonal graphics than Yoshitaka Amano's busy, busy, busy, flower-haired, impossibly-posed, flame-handed fantasy fruitcakes, which PlayStation technology could have hardly done justice. While I have always been of the mind that the old Famicom and Super Famicoms couldn't quite represent Amano's art either (we must have stared at Chaos in Final Fantasy for a half an hour during our first time through, wondering about his snake tail -- "Like, is that his schlong?"), and while I like Amano's art better (it feels more . . . otherworldly), I think I understand why Nomura was the better choice: his characters are easier to look at, and you can understand from a human perspective (big boobs; giant sword; smoking a cigarette and wearing goggles; gun for right hand; big ninja star) without moving any more than two gears in your brain. You don't have to use your imagination, is what I'm trying to say. This is both wonderful and nothing special; this model of character-making has been done elsewhere since Final Fantasy VII, though usually the makers of games like Shadow Hearts or -- hey! -- Final Fantasy VIII seem to forget that when the burden of imagination is lifted off the player's shoulders, it should be placed on the writers', not put in a chair in the Hawaii office with a view of the ocean and forgotten about.

In Final Fantasy VII, there is imagination around every corner. The best imagination is also the simplest: the "Limit Break." The characters' personalities and schticks as human beings shine forth when, every couple of battles, they've been hit enough times and a "limit" meter builds up. When it hits the top, it's time for a "Limit Break." This means the character can use a special ability, though only once -- until the next Limit Break, of course. Cloud's specials all deal with leaping giant-sword techniques. Cid jumps and comes crashing down with his spear. Aeris can heal the whole party. Tifa can do powerful martial arts triggered by quick button sequences. In Final Fantasy VI, Edgar came to look kind of silly if all we ever did was make him use the chainsaw. If he'd been a character in Final Fantasy VII, he'd only have been able to use that chainsaw when he got really angry. The Limit Break has the common decency to serve as punctuation to long string of random battles, rather than a long string of exclamation points in the middle of a sheet of an opera score. The Limit Break's imagination makes the battle system simpler, yet, at the same time, more amusing (if not more entertaining) than that of Final Fantasy VI.

Though a great deal of how the game plays as a game is carried out in the battle mode, the planners and writers saw fit to toss so many little mini-games into the mix that to define Final Fantasy VII as an RPG where you hack dungeons, fight battles, and advance the story is to tell half a lie. Surely, you fight battles; and surely, there are dungeons; though the dungeons themselves feel important and alive. It's not all about caves and towers anymore. RPGs were in a crisis around the time of Final Fantasy VII's release; Sony Computer Entertainment and Media Vision's Wild Arms, the first significant work in the genre on PlayStation, had featured somewhat bland dungeons where it should have taken a page from Taito's Estopolis (Lufia) II, and thrown in ingenious puzzles that relied on the player's imagination and not the use of some little tool you'd just acquired. This branch of game design would go on to get panned by certain critics who knew too well what was good for them; it would lead us down the path to The Legend of Zelda: The Wind-Waker, a game with too many capitalized "The"s in its title, and also a game wherein you get a grappling hook, and then use it over and over and over again.

Final Fantasy VII spiced up its dungeons with little button-mashing minigames. Actually, I suppose, to call them minigames is to speak too highly; the are minichallenges. They are hand/eye taffy. While climbing a mountain, we might have to hide behind rocks when the wind blows. We might need to alternatingly slam on buttons to climb, as text windows cheer us on.

The famed "Opera House" sequence in Final Fantasy VI had given Yoshinori Kitase a new lease on life, as regarded event planning; it was a sequence, relatively free of the game's core battle system, in which players took a hands-on approach to the progression of the story. It was not difficult to complete, nor very complicated, yet it was so multi-layered in its genius that to have witnessed it as a fan of videogames in 1994 was to believe in love; for two hours of the game, our heroes follow the trail of a gambler, find he's in love with an opera star who looks just like one of our heroines, and then set about training that heroine to sing opera for the big performance the gambler is planning to crash. Yet a vengeant octopus is also on our trail, and he is determined to ruin the opera at all costs. So we cut back and forth between Celes, in her dressing room, and Locke, in the audience; Celes reads over the opera score while Locke finds the letter from the octopus and rushes to warn his traveling companions. When the opera starts, we control Celes' singing; we cut between this and Locke and friends, trying to reach the upper end of a maze of rafters and stop the octopus from dropping a two-ton weight on the stage. A boss battle ensues.

Final Fantasy VII takes this action from a different angle. In VI, Locke and Celes will eventually end up quite blushingly in love because the story is simple, like an opera; in VII, Cloud is torn between two women, one of whom loves him, and one of whom he won't be able to get in the end, no matter what. One of those girls is the pyramid-breasted Tifa, who, following our heroes' fall into the slums after their second terrorist attempt in Midgar, is swiped up by a man named Don Corneo and spirted away to his brothel in Wall Market, the slummiest part of the slums. Cloud and Aeris, united at a church, of all places, follow the auspicious Chocobo-drawn carriage in which Tifa is screaming at the top of her lungs, and end up embroiled in adventure. They hatch a plot to infiltrate the brothel by dressing themselves up as hookers. This means Cloud has to dress up as a hooker, himself. Wall Market is a big place with dozens of shops and restaurants. Cloud can sit at a restaurant and eat Korean barbecue to restore his hit points. The chef then asks if it was good or not. You can tell him it sucked, if you like. It doesn't affect the story. Though I suppose you're lying no matter what you say, because damned if you could actually taste that imaginary food.

The Wall Market segment, which one might call "The Most Gorgeous Situation in Midgar," if so inclined, requires a teaspoon of actor's suspension of disbelief. We don't have to plunge in and genuinely believe we are Cloud, though we do have to at least care enough about the size of his virtual shoes to imagine what we'd tell the cook at a little diner about an imaginary Korean barbecue. In this case, our imagination is not nearly doing as much work as the event planners', who had to imagine what we would imagine.

The quest in Wall Market, which takes us from restaurants to hotels to sex clubs to a gym populated by flagrantly homosexual bodybuilders, is to gather up a gorgeous outfit, one pretty enough to get Cloud recognized as a woman and allowed into Don Corneo's mansion. It's quite easy to get all the components -- dress, wig, makeup, panties -- though quite tricky to get all the best ones. When it comes down to the moment of truth, the face-to-face meeting with Don Corneo, he's going to pick either Cloud or Aeris. If he picks Aeris, Cloud is just going to burst in and solve the problem anyway, though if we're industrious enough -- if we were able to beat the gay bodybuilder in his button-stomping squat contest -- Corneo will find Cloud prettier than Aeris, and instead invite him into the bedroom, which is rather amusing.

Once we get Tifa back, the story darkens again; the evil Shinra Corporation extracts vengeance on the resistance by dropping a chunk of concrete over a section of the slums. They want Aeris. They get her. We then go to get her back, in the Shinra Building dungeon, perhaps one of the finest examples of RPG dungeons to this day.

We have two options for getting in. One is to walk in the front door and enter the elevator, which means we have to kill a couple of guards in a couple of random battles. The other is to take a dark, winding stairwell up to the sixty-somethingth floor. The stairwell takes forever. We walk it manually. The three characters -- Cloud, Barret, and Tifa -- complain all the way up. Tifa has a sense of humor about it. Barret, a big man, is tired and angry. Cloud is hip and cool.

Either way we choose, we get to the top. There are some guards we can avoid by standing behind shields. If the guards see us, we fight a random battle; a victory removes the guard from the playing field. Kill all the guards, and get all the experience points, as well as clearing the room. It also takes a little more time, and feels a little out of character.

The rest of the dungeon involves climbing staircases that don't connect to the next floor's staircase up, hiding in shadows, entering air ducts in the bathroom and eavesdropping on a meeting that explains the evil Shinra's Sinister Plot Against Humanity, meeting new party member Red XIII, a red panther creature who speaks eloquent words we imagine Sean Connery as reading, and eventually getting caught, and then getting busted out of prison by Sephiroth.

Ahh yes. Sephiroth.

We then experience many thrilling boss battles, some in an elevator, some on a roof, as all the characters rush to make sense of the hyperventilating bloodshed and profound seriousness that has just succeeded in wracking the story. Who is "Sephiroth"? What is "Jenova"? Cloud promises to tell the gang later; for the meantime, the goal is to escape Midgar, which is done thanks to same people at Namco who made that snowboard game that used to cost a buck fifty at the arcade near the mall multiplex -- oh yes, you're riding a motorcycle, and swinging a sword while doing it, in the name of defending a van from crazed soldiers on motorcycles. You reach the end of a highway -- a big, awe-inspiring, lonely sight of a road, still under construction, that trails up and off into nowhere, simultaneously looking like a skateboard ramp and reminding one of a pirate's hooked hand, cold and cruel and maybe kind of bitching to fly off of. When the battle is done, the group meets up outside the city gate, unable to get back in, determined to run from their corporate oppressors. They split up and head for the city of Kalm, wherein the high point of Final Fantasy VII as a piece of entertainment occurs.

Holed up in a country town inn, Cloud, a little shaken loose by the events in the Shinra Tower, tells a story to Tifa, Red XIII, Barret, and Aeris. The story is of how he became one of Shinra's SOLDIERs, and how he met a legendary swordsman named Sephiroth one day on a truck to the village of Nibelheim, where Cloud and Tifa grew up way back when. The trip was to investigate a malfunctioning Mako Reactor (Mako is the planet's lifeblood, which Shinra sucks out both to be cruel and to power their televisions, as we've covered). It's an old Mako reactor, and in need of repair, and located atop a hideous, craggy mountain that computer animation reveals to be made of spray-painted Styrofoam. For around two hours, we control Cloud, back home for the first time in several years, as he talks to his mother and wanders town. There's a scary old Silent-Hill-like mansion on the edge of town, and there's a mountain path, and a town square with a well that looks one drought away from dry. You can take all the time you want. Eventually, Tifa and her dad are going to take you up into the mountains, where Something Terrible happens. Back in town, Sephiroth, to the fear of the people, holes himself up in the mansion, and something like an Alfred Hitchcock movie with samurai swords commences. Later than sooner, the town is on fire and More Terrible Things are happening. People are murdered. The future is altered. Cloud, new recruit, young, noble, bland, inexperienced, wielding a sword too fat for him to hold properly, and Sephiroth, flowing-silver-haired, eight-foot-katana-wielding master of the sword, slayer of dragons, wearer of leather, wielder of Magick, devourer of worlds, face off on a staircase and . . .

"And that's the end of the story," Cloud says.

"What happened then?" asks Tifa.

"I . . . killed him," Cloud replies.

"What the hell?" Barret interjects. We agree with him. What the hell! This is totally unbelievable! There's no way Cloud could have killed Sephiroth. How do we know this?

Because there was a battle with a dragon on the road, on the way to the town. Cloud and Sephiroth jump out to take on the dragon. We control Cloud. He attacks the dragon, scoring maybe a hundred damage. Sephiroth attacks, scoring many thousand. Cloud gets hit by the dragon, for 9,999 damage; Sephiroth barely takes a scratch. With a flick of his wrist, he revives Cloud and finishes the dragon off.

And then a couple of hours after the vast divide in their skills has been so spelled out, we're being told Cloud killed Sephiroth in a fair swordfight. This provokes many questions regarding the details. It's too late in the story's day to hear the details, and so our party calls it a night and sets out in the morning for the next stop on the fugitive trail.

Here, the game has used its foundation in number-based amusement to entertain us on a semi-profound level. Where a game like Mother 2 might have planted the seeds at the very beginning and shown us the flower at the very end, making the effect near-soul-shattering, nearly literary, Final Fantasy VII has a smirk about the whole process. It is no less aware of what it is doing than Mother 2 is; it simply chooses to make itself a page-turning sci-fi thriller rather than aspire to be remembered through the ages. It sets up little conflicts, crises, and resolutions, dividing the game, roughly, into three-hour episodes that are numbered and divided by disc-switchings, or else the comings and goings of characters and acquaintances, as opposed to title cards. The story moves at a breathless pace for the duration of the first disc, racing from town to town around a world that doesn't look anything like the sci-fi town of Midgar (and with good enough reason), eventually climaxing with an event that shocked, scared, saddened, and made cry many a confident male gamer. The event was, at the time of this game's initial release, considered unholy to spoil. Everyone should know the deails of it now. Still, I will refrain from spoiling it. The event happens, it is sad, and that's where Disc One ends.

For the rest of the game, Sephiroth is missing, after having found the legendary Black Materia and cast the spell "Meteor," which has summoned a ball of rock from far across the cosmos. That rock is speeding on its way toward the earth, and for the rest of the game it can be seen in the sky. It is inevitable that it will collide with the earth and kill millions, if not billions. It makes the previous resistance activities of the heroes look like kid stuff. With the close of disc one, it is made apparent that the Meteor will not be stopped. The heroes will perhaps resolve to do as much as they can with their time on earth, neither ignoring the Meteor nor truly believing their efforts to stop it will bear fruit. At the opening of Disc Two, in something of a paralell throwback to Final Fantasy VI, Tifa is the protagonist, and she is prisoner in the city of Junon, and Barret throws open the window blinds to show her the giant flaming ball gleaming like a second sun, perched above the earth and waiting for the story's climax.

WHERE IT GOES FROM THERE

The game, from this point on, makes a habit of playing with the player. It moves forward, through battles it is not difficult to win, relying on the player to satisfy himself by winning the battles exactly as he wants, through dungeons no more complicatedly laid out than a shopping mall where all the stores are closed, relying on little button-mashing interjections to keep the player amused. It's curious in the methods it chooses to progress. The "Opera House" events, to a point, outnumber the straight dungeon-hackings. The prison break at Junon, complete with a televised execution escape, an angry, attacking Weapon (these Godzilla-like monsters of Diamond, Emerald, and Ruby varieties, in existence to avenge the use of Meteor Magic), gunboats on the purple sea at sundown, soldiers with rifles, a giant cannon being fired, and a button-mashing girl-on-girl slapfight that takes place on that cannon (our hero Tifa being the one with her back to the ocean, and therefore the one in the most trouble), is without a doubt the best orchestrated of them, much like the tank chase in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" was probably the best-orchestrated movie action scene of all-time, though we may still remember the car chase from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in more detail.

Once Disc Two has settled into the groove, the story does an amazing thing: it calms down and tries to teach a message. Without diving into postmodernism, without infringing on any Hayao Miyazaki copyrights, and with only the slightest hint of metaphysibabble, it teaches us that we should cherish life, and our planet. When Cloud is rescued from his disappearance from the face of the earth -- his trip to the other realm, as it were -- the story does a few complete 180s, until we're not sure which way we were facing in the first place. The two-hour Final Fantasy equivalent of an Alfred Hitchcock film that we waded through, unexpectedly fascinated, all those hours before, is shown to us again and again, its smallest details critically torn apart and reanalyzed until we realize that the parts we figured were true were a lie, and the parts we thought were lies (with a few exceptions) were all true. To watch the mystery unfold in its later stages is to feel quite like a magician's helpless assistant. The trick is amazing and confounding and revolting all at the same time, and while we're playing the game, we're in love. It is, even in best-seller terms, a well-written and highly intriguing mystery that involves less psychological melodrama and fantasy mumbo-jumbo than you'd originally guess it did.

On the basis of the core of its story alone, I award Final Fantasy VII a final score of four stars.



With Final Fantasy VI, series producer Hironobu Sakaguchi and director Yoshinori Kitase looked to opera, and to literature, and it's said they did such things because the recent Dragon Quest V had been a humble, small-subject role-playing game rife with heavy, affecting moments. Kitase's Final Fantasy VI was smartly written and aspired to literature because it had to be; Dragon Quest V had stunned and humbled them, and Kitase has said he felt like repaying a debt of gratitude. Final Fantasy VII came after both Enix's Dragon Quest VI and Square and Enix's first (though certainly not last) joint effort, a fantastic RPG called Chrono Trigger. When the opportunity arose and the rumor soared that Enix was making Dragon Quest VII for the Sony PlayStation, Square quickly seized the chance.

It was never certain that the PlayStation would succeed. It was a CD-based game system, and CD-based systems, though historically better and more capable than cartridge-based systems, had always had trouble finding people willing to pay more for better value. Sony put a lot on the line with the PlayStation, and their risks eventually paid off. They dethroned Nintendo from their seat atop the industry, and the Nintendo 64, though it had Super Mario 64 and that game was mighty impressive when you played it the first time, just didn't have enough support. CDs were the new rage. Cartridges were too expensive, and on the way out.

And besides, cartridges didn't have full-motion video.

Full-motion video had been a toy of certain people in the era of the ultimately failed Sega CD; back then, some individuals thought it a good idea to make interactive movies. Their efforts produced the bland press-a-button-to-proceed-the-video-er Sewer Shark, and the campy mystery Night Trap, which became a sensationalist piece of shock-jockery quite accidentally. Videogames have not yet, to this day, been able to portray people exactly as they might look in real life; though the videos in Night Trap, starring sorority girls being hunted by a killer (I think) were grainy, the violence, as cheesy as it was, looked all too real, and people got concerned. The full-motion-video game ended soon after, and maybe we were better off for it.

Videogames have always desired to show people cool and interesting things. It is, in fact, one of their duties. If they are not constantly interesting to look at, then they are merely "fingergames." RPGs that challenge neither the fingers nor the brain are merely "books with buttons." Games that move and change shape as we look at them, yet don't offer any connection to our world, I call "eye taffy" (though one might also merely call them "toys"). Many games are forms of escape, like the first-person shooters Koreans play in internet cafes, conversing loudly about head shots, every night after work. Not all games are escapes, just as not all hobbies are escapes. A man reads literature for a different reason than he reads popular fiction. A man plays a videogame for a different reason than he plays a fingergame or an eye taffy.

Yoshinori Kitase was all too familiar with these things. Final Fantasy VI's popularity among a million crazed otaku had inspired many imitators, most of them coming ironicaly from Square themselves. 1995's Rudra's Treasure and Treasure Hunter G, along with Bahamut Lagoon, together the last three games Square would make for Nintendo until Final Fantasy Tactics Advance in 2002, were all cardboard-thin brain taffies with polished artistic veneers. When Kitase was placed in charge of the first game Square would make for the incredibly powerful Sony PlayStation, and when he was told that game would be Final Fantasy VII, he knew the game would have to be a huge chunk of virtuoso, an undeniable piece of entertainment at the top of its form, or else the company was ruined.

Square has a knack for getting themselves in these kinds of situations.

Kitase knew he had to push what Square knew to the limit, filling the game with amazing sights and sounds, and playing smoothly. He knew he had to forget about making a game that would be hailed as literature -- even fantasy literature -- and instead make something that would appeal to a wide audience. His success -- which was never guaranteed, yet which would come -- would beget a long and prosperous relationship with Sony that, well, hasn't ever had to do anything interesting since.

Well, there was that incident where Hironobu Sakaguchi made that awful computer-animated "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" movie, lost about two hundred million dollars, and then got Japanese-Style Fired.

That's for another installment, however.

What Kitase needed, in the meantime, was lots of sweet graphics. What he also needed was a killer attitude. And what he needed above all that was a bitchin' story. Everything else rode in the back. When the first renders surfaced and the protagonist was a blond-haired leather-wearing dude with a fat black sword, posing next to a motorcycle, and the game was said to be on Sony's yet-unproven game console, many a chubby teenager threw up all over his new issue of Die-Hard Game Fan. It seemed blasphemous, to a point.

Yet, after a while, when the villain was introduced, and his name was Sephiroth, and he carried a samurai sword longer than his body, and we learned the story was about revenge, we started to calm down, and realize, "Hey! I've loved every other Final Fantasy. I guess I have to get this one, too." We saved up a little money and got PlayStations, and waited.

And when the game was released, there were commercials on television. The commercials showed only the shiny full-motion video, where the characters were tall like adults and shined like plastic. It looked absolutely delicious. Videogame magazines had for years shown those of us without personal computers that some PC games had really hip full-motion video those days. Playing some of them taught me that I liked console games better, that there was something that felt better about having a controller designed for a console in your hands. Final Fantasy VII had full-motion video like one of those PC adventure games, and the commercials, alive with balletic action, were silent, and seemed to crackle with the energy of television static in a dark room. It was intriguing.

Meanwhile, others were being intrigued as well. The commercial had enticed big males sometimes called "jocks," who in 1997, the year I started college at Indiana University, were wearing maroon "INDIANA" sweaters and hemp necklaces, crowned with "Abercrombie and Fitch" caps; they walked into the Gamestop and asked, and I quote:

"What's with that Final Fantasy VII coming out? Are there really six games before it?"

"Nah, dude, that's just what they say. A buddy of mine knows though and he says if you play the game you'll totally understand why."

"Dude!"

The game sold unbearably well. I felt like a guy whose favorite indie rock band had just gotten on Top Forty radio. It was a silly thing to be upset about. Coca-Cola had a promotion. Cloud appeared on cans of Coke. My brother's friend's little brother, captain of his Jesuit high school's wrestling team, scrawny, manly, and homosexual, had at first dismissed the game as "Fruity as hell." Then he won a free copy thanks to a fateful can of Coke ingested one night when he needed to gain four pounds, and ended up loving it straght through to the end.

"I love summoning Shiva -- she's god damned gorgeous."

Hardcore Dragon Quest fans will tell you that Final Fantasy VII is where Square turned to the Dark Side. Their collaboration with Enix's Yuji Horii on Chrono Trigger had blest Sakaguchi and Kitase with unquantifiable cosmic powers. It also began the twice-practiced, twice-misfired tradition of Square and Enix agreeing like gentlemen not to compete with the releases of their games. As Dragon Quest VII ended up delayed by two years, Square was given full permission to jump the gun on the Japanese release of Final Fantasy VII, which they did. (A later "International Edition" would see the system rounded out a bit, the bonus bosses and sidequests fully in place, and some odd goodies thrown in as well.) It was, to my knowledge, the first time a Japanese game company released a demo disk of a console RPG. They included that disc in Tobal #1, a fighter with characters designed by Akira Toriyama, and otherwise nothing else going for it. It sold to Toriyama fans because of the characters, and Final Fantasy fans because of the demo disc. Everyone ended up enjoying the demo disc more than the game. (Though some people loved the game's dungeon-hacking "Quest Mode." I wasn't one of them.) The trap was set. The game was released on a Saturday, as per the law Dragon Quest III brought about. It sold out in a heartbeat; those who had loved Final Fantasy since 1987 bought it because it was an important event; those who had never played a Final Fantasy bought it for the hype. Two days later, many young men called in sick to their company jobs. On Tuesday, they might have said to a coworker in the cafeteria, "I got to Disc Two. My lord, this game is a masterpiece."

And, bless them all, they were all right, every last one of them. They were right because they were saying what they thought they knew.



Is Final Fantasy VII a masterpiece of videogame-making? Hell yes, and hell no. It is a masterpiece because it riled people up, because it delivered with virtuoso and satisfied all the desires of those who eagerly would eat it up; it is a masterpiece because its story has moments of beauty and sadness, and action scenes of masterful pacing and weight. It is, however, also not a masterpiece at all, because to play it now raises curious questions. The most curious of them all is:

"Why does Cloud look all tall and buff in the cut scenes and then in the game, he's all short and has these Popeye arms?"

The game is ugly. To play it now is to play something ugly. The polygonal character models that move around the prerendered maps are almost indiscernable from smeary blobs of nonsense. In battle, the characters have more personality and size; it's a shame at least those models couldn't be used on the map screens, I tell you.

Its biggest sin is inconsistency. The inconsistency is such that it snaps the gamer out of a trance. It reminds us of one world while showing us another, in ways it intends, ideally, not to do.

There is talk, lately, of this game being remade. I would appreciate that. It could do with some polished-up graphics, some redbook sound (the original was midi, to save disc space) and some voices. To say no to voices for this game would be silly; it obviously is quite fond of and informed by movies like "Blade Runner" and literature like "Lord of the Rings." One could argue that "The Lord of the Rings," as a book, encourages imagination, and that Final Fantasy VII's graphics are purposely vague so as to encourage imagination on the part of the player. If you argued that, I'd kindly ask you to sit down and read another book. If you told me that about Dragon Quest, I'd give you an exemplary mark for today's class participation; that game was all about testing, knowing, and then embracing the limitations of the hardware. The battles flowed in one-on-one fashion, the hero invisible, the enemy standing stock still, and the creativity of the moment flowing only in a text box at the bottom of the screen. Final Fantasy VII, with its elaborate summon spells that sometimes portray the dragon Bahamut cutting the earth with a laser and then levitating it and the enemies standing on it up into the stratosphere, where he breathes fire, melting the earth and sending the enemies crashing to the ground, is just past the point of trusting its audience's imagination. It hardly trusts its own imagination, which is part of what makes its flow so fascinating. Take the Materia system for example -- integral to playing the game for players who want to satisfy their statistic-managing urges, it is embedded into the menu, a little color-coded brain-teasing exercise that's neither difficult nor simple -- kind of like a Rubik's Cube with thirty-five red squares and one yellow one. There are parts where Final Fantasy VII shows us its creativity, and is imaginative about it, and these are usually full-motion video, or else virtuoso sequences involving skyscrapers, snowboarding, or submarine-duelling. All the rest of the time, it's just being lazy.

I repeat that: a remake would be nice. With the PlayStation3's power and a team of top-notch CG artists (all of whom, according to Square-Enix's contract, were inspired to study their field by Final Fantasy VII), coupled with voice actors of a high enough caliber, the game could be remade, and it could be gorgeous.

However, the true test of Final Fantasy VII's worth is this: I would love to see this game downported to Final Fantasy VI's graphics, and put on Gameboy Advance. I believe it would work all the same, if not better: the inconsistencies removed, it would be allowed to play out straight to the end without being forced to break out into song and dance (I mean, . . . FMV) every two hours.

The FMV, in Final Fantasy VII, perhaps the most important element of any videogame ever (or perhaps not?) was a ruse. It was a shiny golden coin meant to catch our eyes and open our starstruck wallets. What makes us still remember Final Fantasy VII, what makes us still eager to write fanfiction about it, or, say, hound a third-rate internet celebrity via email about reviewing it for two years is our emotional connection to the story and characters, a connection that is reinforced every time we see them perform a Limit Break in the midst of a heated battle. Even so, the battles are not the heart of the game, and the game knows this. It has a story to tell, and it wants us to hear it. Expecting constant eye-candy, we, like the guy who got to the end without using a single Materia, were told a great story, and we were grateful for it.

There are, of course, some who don't like the story. It could, I admit, use a little editing. There are certain things that make me cringe to think of them, like the part on the boat where stealth is of the utmost, and Red XIII is standing there in a sailor suit with his tail sticking out, and everyone thinks he's a human. There's the character Cait Sith, a little cat riding a giant stuffed Moogle, who looks so stupid. When he's revealed as being remote-controlled by someone else, it's a befuddling shock. When a big deal is made about the death of one Cait Sith, and he gives a speech warning us not to cry, and then his successor is waiting just outside, it's a little stupid and jarring. The joke falls flat.

Furthermore, the game's ending needs work. Yoshinori Kitase has openly admitted that he drew on the stories of master vagabond swordsman Miyamoto Musashi (Cloud) and his rival, Sasaki Kojiro, who was hailed as the greatest swordsman in Japan, yet who had a deep dark secret (Sephiroth). However, the highly romanticized account of Musashi's life, Musashi, by Eiji Yoshikawa (available readily in English translation -- read it now!) ends when Musashi defeats Kojiro in a much-hyped duel -- the most famous duel in Japanese swordsmanship history -- that lasts only three seconds. Musashi and Kojiro had never fought; Kojiro employed his silver tongue to earn a postition as a loved retainer to the Hosokawa Lords of Kumamoto. Musashi wandered, seeking a master with pure motives, and polished his sword skill. Their paths crossed many times. When they finally fought, Musashi was of such higher skill than Kojiro that he killed him in one stunning blow with a boat oar, hopped back in his rowboat, and left the island, leaving behind dumbfounded spectators. Musashi ends with a ponderance; Musashi gazes into the trembling water and wonders how few men know what lies beneath the surface, how few men know its depth.

(Side note: consider that one of the next two games Tetsuya Nomura designed characters for was, indeed, Square's own version of the Musashi legend, which, while an alright game, was a terrible interpretation of a legend.)

Final Fantasy VII, though it involves ironically less characters and situations than Musashi (ironically, in that Final Fantasy VII is a videogame, and one that lasts some eighty hours, and Musashi is only a book, with only words and pages), dips its fingers in too many pies. It sets up too many inter-character conflicts where the fate of the world ends up at stake. By the beginning of Disc Two, the beginning of the game's second half, there is an unstoppable meteorite headed toward the earth, one that renders all interpersonal relationships moot. That the story continues despite this is Kitase's fondest nod to Musashi, in which Miyamoto Musashi is pleased beyond compare when the Shogun finally decides not to hire him for his teacher. To Musashi, the mountains are more appealing; to Final Fantasy VII, Cloud's personal issues, which, if understood right, indicate that Sephiroth, the one behind all this madness, might not even be real, are more important than the death of the world. We must see Cloud's past resolved. A peaceful death can occur off-stage.

After all, no one challenged Musashi after he defeated Kojiro. They were terrified by his virtuosity. That is why his story ends at that exact moment.

Final Fantasy VII has promised us a lot, by the time the end of Disc Two draws near. And Disc Two ends, with a final Weapon attack that lays waste to the great city of Midgar, where the game began all those hours ago. Cloud destroys the man who made him and Sephiroth. On the way out of the city, the Turks, an elite task force to which Vincent had once belonged and the game's most tenacious recurring bosses (there are three of them, just as there are three of us) meet us in the tunnels beneath the city. The shit, as they say, has hit the fan, and now it's all over the walls. The end of the world is nigh. Reno, leader of the Turks, says to Cloud, leader of the heroes of the earth, that he doesn't care how he dies anymore. He says, if you want to fight, let's fight. If not, let's part ways forever. You are then offered a choice. If you fight them, you encounter the greatest boss battle of the game. If you don't fight them, they walk away.

Disc Two ends shortly thereafter.

This is where, I believed, the game should have ended. Disc Three is a chance for us to explore the world on the eve of destruction, to toy with our Materia and to gain levels, or raise racing Chocobos and win tournaments in the battle coliseum. If we breed a Gold Chocobo, we can go to a sealed island and receive the "Knights of the Round" Materia, which will summon Arthur's famous knights (now dressed up like flaming kendo practce dummies) to do moronically impossibly high damage on a single enemy. They can kill the final boss in one hit!

When we are ready, we descend into the final dungeon, which is long, and bland, and thrown-together. We fight Sephiroth, who is a slow and boring fight, unless you use "Knights of the Round" one time on each phase, effectively ending him. Then, on the way out, there's a psuedo-battle between Cloud and Sephiroth. They square off in the crater, facing one another. The battle flashes back and forth between their eyes. In something that feels subtly like a nod to Mother 2 (of which post-Final Fantasy VI Kitase was quite outspokenly enamored), Cloud's Limit Break meter is building for untold reasons. It reaches full. The two warriors still stand staring one another down. The music is a heartbeat. The final command is "Omnislash," Cloud's strongest Limit Break, which deals 9,999 damage thirteen times. It is brutal, fast, and overkillicious.

Musashi's deathblow on Kojiro had been a single stroke to the top of the head with a wooden oar. It seemed cruel of him to jump back in the boat and head back to whence he came. However -- had he whipped out a six-foot-sword and Omnislashed Kojiro, I'm certain history would remember him as a braggart. Maybe Yoshikawa wouldn't have ever even written a book about him, if he'd done that.

To be certain, Cloud's Omnislash of Sephiroth is symbolic; it shows us, using the amusing game interface, how determined Cloud is to be rid of the shadow Sephiroth cast over his short, twenty-two year life, though I can't help feeling the therapy is too aggressive, and Cloud is a bit of a jerkoff for overdoing it.

The game then ends with a crash of brassy FMV with very, very bad music. It is subtitled because no one thought voices were appropriate, and it has no idea what it's talking about or representing when it shows the Meteor hit the earth and the little girl looking out a window in Kalm; it's making shit up, as we say in the industry, and though we thought it was cool when the "FIVE HUNDRED YEARS LATER" title card splashed up and we saw Red XIII running across the wilderness to Indian tribal music, after playing Final Fantasy VIII years later, I felt educated by its plaintive, quiet ending, full of loud symbols that actually symbolized things, and Final Fantasy VII's ending just seemed like a whole lot of bullshit. The reason the game ends with such bullshit is that Kitase didn't have the luxury to think of anything else. Kitase is a good writer, though I wouldn't call him an artist. He admitted in a Famitsu interview in 1997 to being rather fond of Kentarou Miura's manga Berserk, which chronicles the relationship between Guts, a six-foot-sword-wielding mercenary, and Griffith, a white-haired katana-wielder with ambitions to rule the land. Final Fantasy VII's story, I spoil for you now, is Berserk's story, with some ingenious Sherlock Holmes mystery thrown in. In Berserk, Guts and Griffith become good friends and allies; they eventually fight, and (to put it into the simplest, most abstract) terms, Griffith loses (without being hit), which only scars him emotionally and pushes him to do a Drastic Deed which will bring about something roughly as nasty as the Meteor hanging over the sky of Final Fantasy VII. The characters are similar, the girls are similar, and the Major Plot Events are all parallel. The only catch is, well -- Berserk is still going on today. It was in volume 14 when Final Fantasy VII came out. It's in 26 now, and on hiatus for a little bit.

I stopped reading it around the point Kitase did -- the point where everything comes full circle. The rest of the manga is rather aimless, kind of like the second half of Final Fantasy VI, which I loved. Though I do believe a man only has room in his life to love only one story of that desolate, aimless sort. All of the others seem like mockery.

Though ending Final Fantasy VII after the decision to fight the Turks or part with them in relative peace would have rid us of the battle with Sephiroth (boring) and the amazing "One-Winged Angel" music (actually rather corny for its synthesizer use, yet amazing in the remixed, orchestral version), I believe it would have been for the best. It would have never flown in 1997, alas. The world was not ready. Now, with the advent of Metal Gear Solid 2 and Zone of the Enders, which ends with a statistically impossible boss fight, your only option being to run away, it would probably be embraced with open arms. Final Fantasy VII, with its widespread mainstream success, inspired at least ten times as many admiring imitators as Final Fantasy VI did. If it had ended on a more prudent note -- I mean, had Kitase followed his heart (it is impossible for the thought to have not occurred to him, lover of Mother 2 that he was) and if it had ended when it should have ended, and not in the same way all preceding installments had ended (long descent into the core of the earth/moon and/or top of a tower, fight with something that looks like an angel or a demon with a penis, or a giant scrotum), and if it would have succeeded that way, maybe we wouldn't be making so many threads on insertcredit.com forums asking why the hell modern RPGs suck so much.

Videogames are a transitory entertainment, and The RPG is a transitory genre, just as this life is a transitory life. We, a transitory species destined to one day become the next dinosaurs, entertain ourselves with transitory forms of entertainment, and are amused by transitory amusements, sometimes even while in transit. Final Fantasy VII is a good story, put together well enough to be called magnificent or great. It has some weird music and rough, ugly, primitive graphics and spotty presentation, and would be well off to be remade with some brush-ups, some voice work, and a little bit of editing. It raises ethical discussion between best friends, one of whom says "If you want the game to end there, just don't play it past that point!" and the other of whom replies "I don't work that way!" I am confident that, if remade, it will be revealed that the game is still excellent, unlike the constant remakes of Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II we see these days. Square knows this game is important; it knows that this game, not Final Fantasy I, is the game that made them, and so it is taking its time with the spilling of related games. Games like Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus, a third-person action-adventure shooting game starring Vincent in Midgar three years after the Meteor destroyed everything prove that Square knows the RPG was transitory from the beginning, that choosing "fight" on a menu was not so much an art form as it was a means to represent things they could not, otherwise, efficiently represent. In Dirge of Cerebus, Vincent shoots while running because the game and the programmers are experienced in making games (though it still feels too floaty for my tastes). Meanwhile, with Final Fantasy VII Snowboarding and the accursed bore-fest multiplayer-online RPG Before Crisis on cell-phones, and with that "Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children" direct-to-DVD movie, Square is proving that they don't know when to let go. The team that created the original Final Fantasy games is now scattered to the winds. That Tetsuya Nomura, now somehow in charge of most of Square's output (. . . Kingdom Hearts . . .) found it necessary to point out to the press that "Advent Children" is "not a movie so much as non-interactive software" spells something unhealthy for the company. I said in my review of the remake of the first Final Fantasy that Square needs to learn that its games are not the Bible, and not in the slightest infallible. Remaking Final Fantasy VII would be nice, because I'd love to play it as it should have always been, though please, let's stop thinking its success was a one-time thing. There were three wonderful Final Fantasies before VII, and there would be two mostly-wonderful Final Fantasies (VIII and X) after it. Rather than cling on to these transitory characters, this transitory population of a transitory dream -- and certainly without analyzing market trends -- without thinking too hard, why not allow someone with capable, reckless hands to craft another masterpiece? It's a choice that must be made -- the choice to trust someone to make something great. Thinking about the changes that would wrack the now-internationally-acclaimed Final Fantasy series from Final Fantasy VIII on, years later, as Final Fantasy XII looms, I feel a little stretched, like lying in bed while green television static fizzes silently on, and I ponder the past.


--tim rogers' dad was a SOLDIER

don't forget to wath the videos over at insertcredit.com!

discuss this on the largeprimenumbers.com forum, if you like