Final Fantasy VII

The Good
The play engine is much improved over Final Fantasy III on the SNES, and I had a great time getting into it quickly. The graphics in DirectX hardware rendering mode are something to awe at, especially in the beginning and at the end of the game. The music is terrific, but not in the same vein as Final Fantasy III on the SNES. What's really nice is how I can slam this copy into a laptop, using Virtual Drive 8 to not carry the discs around, and play it anywhere.

The Bad
Since 70 million Windows 98 users are supposed to be ignored, I'm going to give my experience on Windows XP in installation. Note, though, that my XP is SP2. Now, thank you Square for using Sega CD looking .AVI video for the cinema scenes. Would it have been too much to ask for using a different codec (.AVI can do Cinepak, MPEG-4's early version, and some other really swell codecs) or use the STANDARD called MPEG!! (I always found it weird that both Apple and Microsoft ran away from the royality-free MPEG formats till they both got into consumer hardware like the iPod and Xbox). That would've cleaned up the terrible video that is intercut throughout the entire game! The music is good, so no complaints. Now, this is all after installation, which I had to find an XP patch for the game and sit through a long installation. Anyways, sorry for the bad writing structure, but I did configure the game to use a GravisPad Pro USB, so that's a real lifesaver, since I played this game to death and back on PlayStation.

But as far game goes, and I did notice this with its first release on PlayStation, but this is so typical for adventure games from Japan:

Teenage boy meets teenage girl and they save the world with an airship and a team, with a few cute characters, from a megalomaniac.

If I want story, I'll read a book, watch a movie. I want action, and after seeing the same graphics and moves again and again, that swell rendering gets real old, real quick.

And I can go on again about the Sega CD looking video clips.

What I don't like is the cyberpunk look. Final Fantasy is supposed to just thank, and I also don't care for the homosexual chic is clothesing fashion (not a rude term, it's what the fashion mags use as the actual term for what Cloud is wearing, I'm sorry that it's called that). I also found Tifa (which is actually a boy's name in all of Oceania, Asia and Africa) too butch for me (I like my women to look like Terra from the prequel). Also, that whole Negative Utopia thing brings me down. It's like Orwell's 1984, except a corporation would never become like it has in the game (name one corporation that's even close to these cyberpunk corporations in power and not in a RoboCop movie). Also, I hate subplots, flashbacks and stuff like that. I want to in the "moment" when I'm playing the game.

Lastly, I hate "anime". I used to like Japanimation (it's real term before a bunch of . . . never mind, anyways . . .) and I don't find the characters at all designed well because of it. The movie really does the characters well, but not here, being more Matrix than Japanimated so, nope, no "anime" for me.

Lastly, no dragons, demons, moggles, chocobos or anything. What's up with that? And the Marxo-Environmentalist message? Sorry, that's not my belief or religion, and I feel that a game would do best to just be a game and not "enlighten" me, because I want to get away from the world and battle, not take on the problems of another world and their beliefs.

I guess you can tell I don't use myspace.com or Second Life, either.

The Bottom Line
You want to play this game on a computer? I suggest finding either bleem! with it's update patch and a nice Windows 98 SE computer with LOTS of power or an IBM clone or Macintosh with System 8.x using the Virtual Game Station. These are the best ways to play this game. However, somebody, today, would look at this game and wonder what's the big deal.

My suggestion?

Watch the movie.