History of Final Fantasy: A New Era Begins (Final Fantasy VII) - News
by Taneli Palola , posted on 02 November 2016 / 9,995 Views
During the mid-90s the entire video game industry went through a period of flux. The old home consoles were starting to show their age and the hype for the next generation was slowly beginning to ramp up. Sega and Nintendo were both about to unveil their new flagship consoles, but it was Sony's PlayStation that was about to completely change the console market forever. Square's flagship franchise was in a similar state of uncertainty. Final Fantasy VI had been a big success for the company, and anticipation for the next instalment that was due to be unveiled for the Nintendo 64 was high.
And so it came as a huge shock to a lot of people, including many within Nintendo, when Final Fantasy VII was announced as a PlayStation exclusive release. For the first time ever a mainline Final Fantasy game wasn't going to release on a Nintendo console. Not only that but it was also going to be the very first 3D Final Fantasy game, which naturally brought with it a whole other set of problems for the development team.
Cinematic Shift: Final Fantasy VII
Initial planning for Final Fantasy VII began in 1994 and at this stage it was intended to be another 2D SNES release. However, around the same time Chrono Trigger was in development at Square. Chrono Trigger would go on to hog development resources within the company and effectively halted any potential work on Final Fantasy VII. Thus it wasn't until the following year that development on the title began in full.
The development team once again grew substantially, consisting of around 120 people over a period of almost three years. With such a huge increase in staff there were naturally a large number of series newcomers, but the core of the development team remained largely the same as it had been in the years up to this point.
Sakaguchi once again worked as the game's producer and wrote parts of the story, and Yoshinori Kitase returned from Final Fantasy VI as the game's director, this time working alone. Kitase also wrote a lot of the story together with Kazushige Nojima. Nobuo Uematsu once again composed the game's soundtrack, while Yoshitaka Amano and Tetsuya Nomura both contributed to the game's artistic and visual style. Finally, the character designs were completed entirely by Nomura for the first time ever in the series; he replaced Amano in the role.
As already mentioned, many people naturally assumed that Final Fantasy VII would be coming to the Nintendo 64, after all, what reason was there to doubt that? Unfortunately for Nintendo, the company's decision to continue using cartridges for the console's games proved to be the difference maker for Square. Compared to the CD-based PlayStation, cartridges at the time simply did not have enough space to hold the kind of game Sakaguchi wanted to create. As a result, Square and its flagship franchise made the jump to Sony's console in January of 1996.
Final Fantasy VII was released in Japan on January 31, 1997, and later that same year in the west. It was an immediate success, both critically and commercially, selling over 2 million copies in Japan within three days of release. To this day, it is the most successful entry into the series, and has spawned numerous additional games and other properties.
The story of Final Fantasy VII follows a mercenary called Cloud Strife and an eco-terrorist group called AVALANCHE that hires him to help them in its fight against the Shinra Corporation. Along the way they meet numerous other characters who join them. Eventually they end up in a fight to save the world against an entirely different enemy in Sephiroth, a former member of SOLDIER who went rogue and was presumed dead five years prior to the game's events.
Final Fantasy VII's characters and story are rightfully considered among the greatest and most memorable in video game history. Cloud, Aerith, Sephiroth, Tifa, Barrett, and many others have been immortalized in the minds of gamers alongside other iconic video game characters. The story has also produced some of the most iconic moments in video game history, from the burning of Nibelheim to Aerith's death at the hands of Sephiroth.
In narrative terms this was perhaps the series' most complex entry yet, as it employed various new narrative devices not seen in past games. One of the more interesting ones is how the game makes use of an unreliable narrator in Cloud as he recounts his past to other characters. It's an unusual device to be found in a video game, especially as the unreliable narrator is also the game's main character. Fortunately, it proved to be highly effective, both for the overarching storyline as well as for Cloud's character development, with the game slowly revealing the truth about his past as the story progresses.
The ATB system once again made its return, with some additional elements and changes implemented. Limit Breaks were hugely expanded upon from FF VI's Desperation Attacks, becoming much more readily available for use and including several different attacks for each playable character. Tetsuya Nomura came up with the idea of using them as a way to differentiate characters during battle, due to how the game otherwise allowed the player to develop the party very freely.
The reason behind this was perhaps the Final Fantasy VII's biggest new innovation, namely the Materia system, which gives the players the option to equip weapons and armor with any Materia they wish. This meant that battles would change depending on the Materia the player had equipped on characters, rather than on their innate skills. Every character could technically serve any role in battle based on the Materia being used, as job classes were largely absent from the game, apart from there being some visual references to them. However, the game also limited the battle party to three, in contrast to the four or five characters in earlier titles.
Also, unlike in FF VI where the game's development began with the focus on creating characters that were as memorable as possible, the jump from 2D to 3D, as well as to an entirely new platform, forced the team to focus on translating the series' gameplay into the new environment as effectively as possible. Simple things like deciding how the camera would work during battles required much more thought and attention than in previous titles. FF VII also saw the inclusion of a much higher number of mini-games than before - a trend that has continued in subsequent instalments.
Another notable difference from the previous game was the change in focus from multiple different characters to one specific main character in Cloud Strife. From the very beginning he was designed as the game's protagonist with numerous supporting characters around him. The first characters Nomura designed were Cloud and Aerith, and the last one was Zack, who didn't exist until very late into the production cycle.
Final Fantasy VII's soundtrack is among the most well known scores ever created for a video game and contains numerous iconic pieces of video game music that have become synonymous with both the game and the series as a whole. These include songs such as One-Winged Angel, Aerith's Theme, and J-E-N-O-V-A. Uematsu created the score over a period of eight months, which was much quicker than his usual pace. The move to new hardware also allowed him to experiment with his music and add new elements to it, such as lyrics in the case of One-Winged Angel.
While the hardware was capable of producing CD quality music, the team still decided to use the console's internal sound chip for the music as they felt it was perfectly capable of doing the job by itself. In essence, this was done to put less strain on the system and make the game's loading times faster as a result. The sound quality was treated as a secondary concern at the time.
Visually Final Fantasy VII represents a huge shift from previous titles, for obvious reasons. The 3D graphics led to a more realistic style and presentation of the game's world and characters. For example, the backgrounds of the various locations in the world were now being pre-rendered, and the characters have a much greater variety of movement. Of course, perhaps the one new element that had the biggest impact on the series as a whole going forward was the inclusion of Full Motion Video cut scenes for the first time.
Although they were certainly impressive and quite possibly one of the key reasons for the game's marketing success (people simply hadn't seen anything like them at the time), the cinematic cut scenes also created a problem as the rest of the game's graphics appeared inferior by comparison, especially as far as the polygonal characters were concerned. The team had to make sure the transition between the two would not be too jarring, and was helped immensely in this respect by the pre-rendered backgrounds.
These pre-rendered backgrounds allowed the developers to seamlessly transition from the FMVs into gameplay without any breaks in the game. This is most evident in the title's opening, where the game goes from the intro cut scene directly to gameplay without any pause in-between. It's a great little trick that was unfortunately not used all that much outside of PS1 Final Fantasy titles.
Curiously, the game's English localization was actually handled in-house in Japan at Sakaguchi's insistence. This lead to quite a lot of strange grammatical structures in the English version, as well as many clear errors in the translation that even managed to unintentionally change some smaller aspects of the storyline. One of the more famous ones is Tseng's presumed death - the translation made it appear as if he died due to wounds inflicted by Sephiroth, when in fact he had simply fainted. Small but frequent mistakes of this nature act as a rather quaint blemish on an otherwise excellent game.
The Best Part
The story, since we're choosing just one aspect of the game. It is brilliantly written, full of memorable scenes and twists that will take you by surprise, and it keeps you guessing at what's going to happen next. In addition, the constant, slow build towards the game's ultimate climax is expertly handled, as the stakes keep getting higher as the story progresses, not reaching their crescendo until the very end during the final encounter with Sephiroth.
However, I must still give credit to Final Fantasy VII's memorable characters; its battle system, which gives the player countless different ways to play the game thanks to the materia system; and to the soundtrack, which contains some of Uematsu's greatest work to date.
The Worst Part
The dated graphics, without a question. While they were certainly impressive at the time, by today's standards they simply do not hold up to scrutiny. Final Fantasy VII was made at a time when 3D graphics were still in their infancy, and that clearly shows. The pre-rendered backgrounds can still look impressive, but the characters look like a bunch of blocks glued together to make a figure that somewhat resemble living creatures.
Even the FMVs, while ground-breaking in 1997, don't look that impressive anymore. Curiously, there are two distinct levels of quality of cinematic scenes found in the game. The higher quality, where the characters look more realistic and lifelike, and the other type where they are much closer to their in-game counterparts.
Does Final Fantasy VII Still Hold Up?
For the most part it definitely does. The music is exceptional, the story and characters are great, and the gameplay still holds up thanks to the highly flexible Materia system. The world is a massive and memorable place filled with unique locations that are going to stay in your mind for a long time.
Even the visuals, which haven't exactly aged particularly well, still have a certain charm to them. The pre-rendered backgrounds especially are well made. Unfortunately, the animated cut scenes and the character models don't hold up as well. The cut scenes are still decent when they focus on environments and other largely static objects and machines, but characters move and generally feel very stiff and this gives them a slightly unnatural edge.
The English translation is also disappointingly flawed, filled as it is with mistakes ranging from the inconsequential to the important. The decision to complete the translation without any native English speakers was a clear mistake, and one that fortunately hasn't been repeated since.
Final Fantasy VII is very easy to get hold of at this point, as it has been released on numerous modern platforms, including PSN, Steam, and iOS. There is also much less difference between the various different versions compared to earlier titles. The main difference between the original PlayStation release and the Steam and PS4 re-releases is the improved graphical resolution. As such, it doesn't make much of a difference which version you play. Until the HD remake is released that is.
Final Fantasy VII is the first of the modern Final Fantasy games. It made several huge changes to the series' established formula, introducing various new elements and making it much more cinematic in style. Later games have largely followed the path laid out by Final Fantasy VII, even when it's been to their detriment at times.
The game's massive success also led to several sequels and spin-offs being created, but we'll be talking about those next time. The influence of Final Fantasy VII simply cannot be understated, both for the series and gaming in general. Its success resulted in a huge increase in the number of JRPGs coming to the west, and made the genre, at least for a brief time, one of the industry's biggest.
Fun Fact
One of the rejected early concepts created for Final Fantasy VII by Tetsuya Takahashi went on to become the basic plot structure for Square's Xenogears. Tetsuya Takahashi later became the founder and head of Monolith Soft, which you may also know as the developer of such games as the Xenosaga trilogy and the two Xenoblade titles. In that respect this is yet another group of games that can trace their origins back to the Final Fantasy series, and in particular Final Fantasy VII.
Additional sources:
- Wikia
- Weekly Famitsu
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Still haven't played it yet, I bought a digital version a couple of years ago and still haven't had a chance (damn you ever growing backlog), my expectations for this game are sky high.
The best ff after ffvi, was really a great game, but for it couldn't top the amazing story of terra;)
From the RPGs Square made in the Playstation, FF7 was perhaps till then the most impressive, but the most fun was by far Saga Frontier: you could have a ton of characters, one of then had robots that you could customize, the sprites were colorfu and fun and the pre-rendered backgrounds were beautiful. Also, super fun combat, amazing freedom of choice and overall the coolest RPG ever.
The only one in the series that I've played several times. Best Final Fantasy in the series in my opinion. Haters gonna hate right? Prove me right if you dare.
Great article. It would have been perfect for January 2017(20th anniversary month) instead of this month. lol
Best game ever created!
Ff7 remake will be huge!
