Is FF7 Overrated?

[Joe]

This is one of the oldest gaming debates around. Hell, I was arguing whether or not FFVII was overrated a full year before the damn thing came out.

Taken in its proper historical context, certainly not. EW was right to rate it so high in their hundred best games of all time list. Can't understate the importance of this game; it arguably killed the Saturn, allowed Sony to control the 32-bit era, and brought RPGs into the mainstream in a way that no game had done before.

And as a game, no, not really (not anymore, anyway). And I think the game has stood the test of time quite well; the backlash against the game in the year or so after it came out was nothing short of absolutely merciless, and I think it survived fairly well. There are indeed people around who still consider the best RPG of all time, but probably not nearly as many who hold the same opinion about FF6 (or even Chrono Trigger). But on the other hand, there aren't a whole lot of people around who still consider it their purpose in life to relentlessly shit on the game (my bias is showing, I'm aware). I feel that the biggest problem with the game was the awful translation, which certainly may have ruined the story for some people.

There are certainly RPGs of higher quality available; FFX, FFIX, Xenosaga, Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy Tactics, Suikoden III, and Suikoden II (train-wreck of a translation aside) are all better, in my opinion. While I've never played Skies of Arcadia, I've also heard that it's better than FFVII. But, with the exception of Suikoden II, without FFVII in the picture, it's questionable whether many of these games would have even been made. That's why I think so much acclaim is heaped upon FFVII; not because of its value as a game (which, while nothing to scoff at, is not extraordinarily high, either), but because of just how important it has been.

[RogueIce]

There's an orchastral FF soundtrack called "The Black Mages."

"Those Who Fight Further (FF VII)"

??

Is the Boss Theme (Labeled on OST as "Still More Fighting"), the regular Battle theme (OST: "Fighting") or the "Hurry Faster!" one, or something else altogether?

[Vendetta]

without FFVII in the picture, it's questionable whether many of these games would have even been made.

To be fair, whilst it was certainly an influential game, especially in regards to the cinematics, it certainly wasn't the kind of driving market force you're making out.

Even without FFVII, Capcom, Enix, and the rest of them would still have been making games like Breath of Fire, Dragon Warrior, and Wild Arms (which actually beat FFVII to market with a polygon rendered battle engine, albeit a crude one showing off extremely early PS1 programming). It's not like FFVII opened up the floodgates for other RPGs to exist, FF and Dragon Warrior had done that, and everyone and his dog had been churning them out since.

As for bringing RPGs into the mainstream? that's true of the western markets, but remember why this game sewed up the 32 bit era for Sony? Because RPGs, and Final Fantasy, already had legions of gibbering fans in Japan, and announcing that FF was jumping the good ship Nintendo was enough to royally shaft the Saturn's home sales (which had been roughly even with the PS1 up until that point).

It's a good game, and it's an influential leap in Square's repertoire into dynamic cameras and battles, and an increase in cinematic presntation, but there are other companies that are producing RPGs in different ways, utterly unaffected by the influence of Final Fantasy, look at the Breath of Fire series, which went exactly the opposite way, into interactive modelled areas, and eventually into Dragon Quarter, a complete departure from RPG norms, but keeping the same spirit, or Star Ocean, which takes a step away from the fixed character mould , and lets you see the relationships evolve between the people you choose to take with you.. (I note that apart from Suikoden, all your other choices were Square games, or as near as dammit, it's not really a valid support for an argument about the entire industry, only highlighting the one company that made the 'so called' influential product)

[Joe]

To be fair, whilst it was certainly an influential game, especially in regards to the cinematics, it certainly wasn't the kind of driving market force you're making out.

It allowed Sony to dominate the 32-bit market on both sides of the Pacific and inflated the size of the domestic market for console RPGs exponentially. What else are you looking for? Would it have had to put Nintendo out of business to qualify as a significant market force?

Even without FFVII, Capcom, Enix, and the rest of them would still have been making games like Breath of Fire, Dragon Warrior, and Wild Arms (which actually beat FFVII to market with a polygon rendered battle engine, albeit a crude one showing off extremely early PS1 programming). It's not like FFVII opened up the floodgates for other RPGs to exist, FF and Dragon Warrior had done that, and everyone and his dog had been churning them out since.

But there would have been no RPGs produced borrowing cinematic elements from FFVII. Wild Arms and BoF3 both had 3D polygonal visuals, but the storytelling was completely traditional, as opposed to cinematic. In any case, it's not just RPGs; FFVII (and MGS, to be fair, however FFVII was the first on the scene) drove the entire videogaming medium into more cinematic storytelling. There had been attempts before, but none quite as successful as FFVII.

As for those three series - make no mistake, they were both different from FFVII and successful on both sides of the Pacific, but without the large market for RPGs created by FFVII in the U.S, Star Ocean 2 wouldn't have seen a domestic release and Wild Arms and Breath of Fire would have seen lower sales.

As for bringing RPGs into the mainstream? that's true of the western markets, but remember why this game sewed up the 32 bit era for Sony? Because RPGs, and Final Fantasy, already had legions of gibbering fans in Japan, and announcing that FF was jumping the good ship Nintendo was enough to royally shaft the Saturn's home sales (which had been roughly even with the PS1 up until that point).

In other words, Sony was able to control the 32-bit era because of FFVII. Thanks.

(I note that apart from Suikoden, all your other choices were Square games, or as near as dammit, it's not really a valid support for an argument about the entire industry, only highlighting the one company that made the 'so called' influential product)

Fine. Skies of Arcadia, Xenosaga (it is not a Square game, regardless of the fact that some ex-Square employees worked on it), Suikoden III, Legend of Dragoon, Legaia, the .dot hack series, Star Ocean 3...

[SirNitram]

Here we go again. We take a game that's certainly excellent, even if clearly not the best of it's series, hype it to hell and back so that RPG's hit more 'mainstream', then claim it's wonderful for bringing RPG's mainstream. Hello? FF6, if hyped to that level, would have done the same.

I'm kinda blinking at the 'It improved Breath Of Fires sales!'. Breath Of Fire was out before the system that FF7 was released on was out.. Fuck, it's sequel was out before that..

[Joe]

Here we go again. We take a game that's certainly excellent, even if clearly not the best of it's series, hype it to hell and back so that RPG's hit more 'mainstream', then claim it's wonderful for bringing RPG's mainstream.

Is that not a good thing, or something?

And hype only takes a game so far; see Daikatana. It has to be worthwhile to succeed.

Hello? FF6, if hyped to that level, would have done the same.

FFVI was a great game in its own right and probably superior to FFVII. But it couldn't have pierced the mainstream the way FFVII did; visuals were a major selling point for FFVII, as the commercials prove (they consisted almost entirely of FMV footage).

Before FFVII, RPGs were considered "Dungeons and Dragons crap" (one of the less flattering labels for RPGs I've heard) by a great number of casual American gamers. Using top-quality graphics and beautiful FMV cinemas to attract casual gamers, FFVII just proved what longtime fans of the RPG genre had known all along; that RPGs would be popular if only people would give them a try.

I'm kinda blinking at the 'It improved Breath Of Fires sales!'. Breath Of Fire was out before the system that FF7 was released on was out.. Fuck, it's sequel was out before that..

Please. BoF did have a small following before FFVII, but you can't deny that the series didn't benefit from having more people interested in its genre.

[SirNitram]

Here we go again. We take a game that's certainly excellent, even if clearly not the best of it's series, hype it to hell and back so that RPG's hit more 'mainstream', then claim it's wonderful for bringing RPG's mainstream.

Is that not a good thing, or something?

And hype only takes a game so far; see Daikatana. It has to be worthwhile to succeed.

Well gee, I only just said it was a good game. It's not as good as many of the other FF's is my point.

Hello? FF6, if hyped to that level, would have done the same.

FFVI was a great game in its own right and probably superior to FFVII. But it couldn't have pierced the mainstream the way FFVII did; visuals were a major selling point for FFVII, as the commercials prove (they consisted almost entirely of FMV footage).

Before FFVII, RPGs were considered "Dungeons and Dragons crap" (one of the less flattering labels for RPGs I've heard) by a great number of casual American gamers. Using top-quality graphics and beautiful FMV cinemas to attract casual gamers, FFVII just proved what longtime fans of the RPG genre had known all along; that RPGs would be popular if only people would give them a try.

Ooo, ahh, pretty pictures. Doesn't mean the game was good. The game was hyped ridiculously, that doesn't make it good. It's mainstream appeal is solely from being overhyped. So continue to yell that it brought it mainstream if you want; it doesn't improve the game.

I'm kinda blinking at the 'It improved Breath Of Fires sales!'. Breath Of Fire was out before the system that FF7 was released on was out.. Fuck, it's sequel was out before that..

Please. BoF did have a small following before FFVII, but you can't deny that the series didn't benefit from having more people interested in its genre.

Given that the games were several years old, and almost never showing up on any shelves at that point.. Yes, I can. I suppose this is going to degenerate into jumping up and down and pointing at sales figures, as opposed to whether the game deserves it's reputation as a wonderful game.

[Joe]

Well gee, I only just said it was a good game. It's not as good as many of the other FF's is my point.

I never said it was; you have no point.

Ooo, ahh, pretty pictures. Doesn't mean the game was good. The game was hyped ridiculously, that doesn't make it good. It's mainstream appeal is solely from being overhyped. So continue to yell that it brought it mainstream if you want; it doesn't improve the game.

Of course it was overhyped (but overhyped isn't the same thing as overrated). No game could have possibly lived up to the massive amount of hype FFVII got.

And I never said that the game was good solely on the basis of its visuals, although visuals aren't as irrelevant as some RPG fans tend to make them out to be. I said that the visuals were what made the game a huge mainstream success, and ultimately what induced casual gamers to buy FFVII and become RPG fans. FFVI didn't have these visuals, and couldn't have attracted disinterested audiences the way FFVII did.

Given that the games were several years old, and almost never showing up on any shelves at that point.. Yes, I can.

Actually, I was referring to the post-FFVII Breath of Fire games, not the first two. While sales of the first two games obviously weren't affected by FFVII, it seems to be a stretch to suggest that subsequent games haven't had any benefit from the larger pool RPG fans created by FFVII.

I suppose this is going to degenerate into jumping up and down and pointing at sales figures, as opposed to whether the game deserves it's reputation as a wonderful game.

You just said it was an excellent game, Nitram. That is not the point we are disagreeing on, so why discuss it further?

[SirNitram]

Given that the games were several years old, and almost never showing up on any shelves at that point.. Yes, I can.

Actually, I was referring to the post-FFVII Breath of Fire games, not the first two. While sales of the first two games obviously weren't affected by FFVII, it seems to be a stretch to suggest that subsequent games haven't had any benefit from the larger pool RPG fans created by FFVII.

And this contributes jack or shit to FFVII's qualifications as a game, how? Oh right. Not a damn thing, like most of your ridiculous wafflings that have no place here other than to serve as a distraction.

I suppose this is going to degenerate into jumping up and down and pointing at sales figures, as opposed to whether the game deserves it's reputation as a wonderful game.

You just said it was an excellent game, Nitram. That is not the point we are disagreeing on, so why discuss it further?

Yet still inferior to most of the FF series, something most of it's fanboys refuse to listen to. So yes, it's badly overrated by most. If you have to resort to saying 'Oh, but it did wonderful things to the industry', that's sort of conceding the game itself isn't as good as people claim.

[Joe]

And this contributes jack or shit to FFVII's qualifications as a game, how? Oh right. Not a damn thing, like most of your ridiculous wafflings that have no place here other than to serve as a distraction.

You're right, it doesn't, and I'm sure you would have a point if I had ever claimed it did; I was simply responding to Vendetta's entry of Breath of Fire into the discussion.

Yet still inferior to most of the FF series, something most of it's fanboys refuse to listen to.

And this is not unique to FFVII; Chrono Trigger, FFVI, and FFVIII all have rabid fanbases who are just as unwilling to listen to unfavorable criticisms of their favorite games. Do you have a point with this, or are you just going to keep asking me over and over again to acknowledge over and over again that FFVII is not the best of the series?

So yes, it's badly overrated by most. If you have to resort to saying 'Oh, but it did wonderful things to the industry', that's sort of conceding the game itself isn't as good as people claim.

Tell me, do we have to consider a game as being completely divorced from any significance it may have had to the history of the medium? I'm trying to evaluate the game on both its subjective value as a game and on the not-as-subjective value of the game to the development of the medium.

As for the game being overrated, true, many people were eager to overrate it when it first came out, and true, there is still a rabid contingent who still consider it the pinnacle of RPGs, but as for most people? I can't take a psychic journey into the head of every gamer, everywhere and find out their opinions on FFVII, but I will say that within the gaming news media this is not the case; retrospectives of FFVII that you can often find on gaming websites and magazines typically contain at least some mention of the game's many flaws, while acknowledging and praising its importance to the history of the genre at the same time.

[Steve]

When I first got it, FFVII blew me away.

And though I abhored the ending, the music, gameplay, and characters were such that I have it ranked third (a three-way tie actually, with FFIV and FFX) in my favorite RPGs list.

#1 is Final Fantasy VI and #2 is Chrono Trigger, BTW. And even they're neck-and-neck.

[Drooling Iguana]

1st time playing FFVII (when it was still fairly new):

1st thought: "Wow. These graphics suck." (I mean, they had cubes for hands, for chrissakes!)

2nd thought: "Wow. The gameplay is pretty much the same as the first one. Didn't like it then, don't like it now.

I put it away for a few months after that.


2nd time playing FFVII:

1st thought: "Wow. Cloud's an asshole."

2nd thought: "Why, exactly, are we chasing after this Sephiroth guy? This game sucks."


3rd time playing FFVII (a couple of years after that):

1st thought: "Cool, they finally killed off that whiny bitch. Things are looking up."

2nd thought: "What? Snowboarding?"

And I haven't played since.

[Vendetta]

It allowed Sony to dominate the 32-bit market on both sides of the Pacific and inflated the size of the domestic market for console RPGs exponentially. What else are you looking for? Would it have had to put Nintendo out of business to qualify as a significant market force?

It allowed Sony to take the Japanese market, and it did so because RPGs were already the dominant genre there.

The Playstation won each market in a different way, the US never took an interest in the Saturn, and the N64 never had enough titles due to Nintendo's outrageous lisencing fees and cartridge format, and Europe was sewn up by marketing the Playstation to clubbers, and grabbing the disposable income of the 18-30 market, who hadn';t been much interested in a gaming device until that point.

If you ask most people with a Playstation in the UK about FFVII, they'll go "Huh, is that the new FIFA or summat?"

FFVII opened the market for translating RPGs, not for maiking them in the first place, as you originally claimed, and it certainly wasn't the sole reason why seventy five million Playstations were sold.

But there would have been no RPGs produced borrowing cinematic elements from FFVII. Wild Arms and BoF3 both had 3D polygonal visuals, but the storytelling was completely traditional, as opposed to cinematic. In any case, it's not just RPGs; FFVII (and MGS, to be fair, however FFVII was the first on the scene) drove the entire videogaming medium into more cinematic storytelling. There had been attempts before, but none quite as successful as FFVII.

Yeah, cause I guess games like Command and Conquer, which used cinematics to elaborate the whole story between missions, never existed before FFVII? No game ever borrowed anything from a film before FFVII? Right? I mean Resident Evil didn't have all those camera angles and cinematics borrowed from Romero a year before FFVII, did it?

As for Wild Arms' traditional storytelling, yes, it tells the story in the normal way of game engine cutscenes, but the polygo battle engine is there, and that's the other thig that comes from a cinematic influence, dynamic camera angles in order to highlight the action and make it more interesting. Of course, which came to market first?

It didn't drive the whole medium towards cinematic storytelling, because the medium knew all about that anyway.

Xenosaga (it is not a Square game, regardless of the fact that some ex-Square employees worked on it)

You mean led the project, and developed it directly from a game and style of game they made whilst at Square, the overblown, needlessly non-interactive Xenogears... As I said, it's as near as dammit.

[Joe]

It allowed Sony to take the Japanese market, and it did so because RPGs were already the dominant genre there.

And for the last time, how does that not make it a driving market force?

The Playstation won each market in a different way, the US never took an interest in the Saturn, and the N64 never had enough titles due to Nintendo's outrageous lisencing fees and cartridge format, and Europe was sewn up by marketing the Playstation to clubbers, and grabbing the disposable income of the 18-30 market, who hadn';t been much interested in a gaming device until that point.

And FFVII was one of those titles that helped Sony win the U.S. market; it was Sony's killer app during spring and september of 1997.

FFVII opened the market for translating RPGs, not for maiking them in the first place, as you originally claimed, and it certainly wasn't the sole reason why seventy five million Playstations were sold.

I should have made it clear from the beginning that FFVII only made RPGs big domestically, because obviously they were already that way in Japan.

Yeah, cause I guess games like Command and Conquer, which used cinematics to elaborate the whole story between missions, never existed before FFVII? No game ever borrowed anything from a film before FFVII? Right? I mean Resident Evil didn't have all those camera angles and cinematics borrowed from Romero a year before FFVII, did it?

Live action cinematics. FFVII was the first only to really effectively use CG cutscenes, ultimately which came to be the preferred medium for cutscenes in video games.

As for Wild Arms' traditional storytelling, yes, it tells the story in the normal way of game engine cutscenes, but the polygo battle engine is there, and that's the other thig that comes from a cinematic influence, dynamic camera angles in order to highlight the action and make it more interesting. Of course, which came to market first?

Wild Arms' use of camera angles was rather slow and simplistic compared to FFVII's. And true, WA did beat FFVII to the market with a polygonal battle engine, but only because Square delayed FFVII to January 1997 because they weren't satisfied with the game at that time.

It didn't drive the whole medium towards cinematic storytelling, because the medium knew all about that anyway.

By using live action cutscenes, not CG cutscenes and in-game cutscenes. A completely different way of storytelling, and ultimately not the direction the medium went in.

You mean led the project, and developed it directly from a game and style of game they made whilst at Square, the overblown, needlessly non-interactive Xenogears... As I said, it's as near as dammit.

Quit nitpicking. The fact that a Namco was even willing to pay for the game is evidence of FFVII's influence.