-I started replaying a year ago, made it to the Temple of the Ancients (about 80 percent into the first disc), then stopped for a little while, then the little while for some reason turned into about seven months before I did the rest of the game, finally finishing in a way I consider complete enough this morning. For some reason I felt sort of intimidated by the Temple, which is pathetic because it’s actually not very hard (more on this problem in a moment.) The last playthrough prior to this was part of a 2003 purchase and re-play of all the PS1 games I loved and played in high school a few years earlier, on systems borrowed from other kids at school. The other PS1 games played around this time were Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2, Twisted Metal 2: World Tour, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy Tactics and Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night. With the exception of SOTN, I did all of those for a sort of 20th anniversary retrospective last year, you may recall, and I really enjoyed all of them. This is the one that I least enjoyed replaying.

-For years, if I were asked to list my favorite games, this would have placed around, oh, 12th or 13th or so. Something like that. After finishing this play through, it’d have to drop down the list a few places in ranking. Final Fantasy VI and Tactics have always, always placed higher, and likely always will. If this game still rates “five stars” with me, it’s “five stars” in the sense of the game being a sort of admirable craft, the absolute most love and effort anyone ever put into crafting an utterly beautiful, epic, heart-rendingly amazing video game. And it’s “five stars” as a nostalgic, 90s place in the mind–I was there in 1997, 15 years old, and can remember being just in awe of the thing from reading about it in magazines alone, and the burning jealousy I felt as a Nintendo loyalist, because Nintendo losing Squaresoft was a huge touchy point back then–the rumor was not only that Nintendo had mistreated Squaresoft, but that Nintendo were a bunch of morons who went with a cartridge-based system, shooting themselves in the foot and losing The Greatest Game That Is Or Ever Shall Be.

-So what’s the problem? The problem is, quite bluntly, the annoying lack of challenge in the game. It’s not that it’s a cakewalk, mind you (even Super Mario RPG isn’t really a cakewalk)…but…barring some flubbed fights with Emerald and Ruby Weapon, I honestly never once felt like I was in danger of getting killed. And it’s a problem I’m just now seriously noticing, as an adult–if anyone back in 1997 would have said “FF7 sucks, it’s way too easy” I would have stuck my fingers in my ears, la la la la I cannot hear you. It gets worse–there were a few people back then who DID say exactly that; I found an old, glowing, fawning spread in a 1997 issue of Diehard GameFan magazine, where the reviewer, after going on and on for three or four pages about the utter artistry and glorious craft of FF7, admits that (I’m paraphrasing) “I never once bothered to slaughter for experience,” “this may be the first Final Fantasy game that one can play all the way through without dying,” “Although the final boss and final boss music are very impressive, the final dungeon completely sucks, and if one completes all the side quests they’ll have the means (in the form of a very nasty call spell) to kill the final boss in a single shot,” before concluding that the game, for all its glories, was rushed in production and was “a twenty out of ten that could have been a thirty out of ten.” What a thing to say!! But that’s kind of how I feel now.

-How this affects gameplay for me as a 42 year old is as such: as a youth, I would have been hell bent on collecting every single materia, learning every single magic spell and summon spell and limit break, getting most or all of the weapons, all the Limit Breaks, taking every single character as far as they could go, that sort of OCD-autistic completism shit that I really ought to be more ashamed of. Well, I did still do most of that stuff…but I only ended up watching most of those summon spells or level 4 limit breaks once or twice, there was an annoying sense this time around that I was just doing it because of the OCD, since it seriously felt like you could just get through every battle in the whole damn game by hitting “Attack” over and over, that you barely need any of those crazy magic spells or nuclear-strength Limit Breaks pr epic call-monsters. And the game gives you a zillion options to completely obliterate your enemies–did we really need spells like FullCure, Freeze, Comet2, etc.? Getting stuff like that in other Final Fantasy games always seemed like a lot of fun. But here? Kind of ornamental. Hell, the epic call magic spells slow the game down. I’m afraid the stories of the game being rushed, and as a result, not very challenging, are true.

-One other thing pertaining to this whole problem concerns party members. I used Cloud, Cid and Vincent to finish the game, because that’s what I did in 1998 and 2003, but it felt really arbitrary this time. It’s less that the characters are interchangeable (Cait Sith and Aeris pretty much suck) than that you can sort of forget about them–I could have never used Yuffie or Red XIII, or had finished with Barrett and Tifa instead, and it wouldn’t have made one bit of difference. I guess this isn’t a BIG strike against the game, but it’s something that other Final Fantasy titles don’t have a problem with. Also, most characters’ stories seem to amusingly end after you visit their hometowns (Barrett - Corel, Red XIII - Cosmo Canyon, Cid - Rocket Town.)

-The story, then? Obviously an epic fantasy plot about a ragtag gang of adventurers who save the planet from a meteor summoned by an anime samurai villain isn’t going to move me to tears at my old age. I will confess that some of the more cinematic aspects of the plot do still sort of “work” though, as does the general flow from place to place of the game in general (so I can at least understand why FF7’s storyline is still one of the most beloved in game history and inspired its own animated movie spinoff.) There’s the bombing mission at the beginning, and the drift through the slums of the memorable post-cyberpunk city of Midgar afterwards. There’s the Nibelheim flashback, which threatens to go on too long but does muster real cinematic qualities, and which works well when you have to visit the town and find it mysteriously recreated, and enter the spooky Shinra Mansion. There’s Junon and the Whirlwind Maze and the Great Glacier and the trip to Wutai. There’s the Midgar cannon firing and blowing out the glass windows of the Shinra Corporation and when Sephiroth first appears and kills all those people in the Shinra Building and leaves a huge trail of blood (Jenova’s?) up to the top floor. All worth revisiting. Of course, there’s the game’s most iconic scene....

-…while I can’t really shed many tears for poor Aeris at this age, I will state that the part of the story directly leading up to hear death is now probably my favorite part of the whole game, just for the atmosphere alone. I mean when you get to the “Forgotten Capital” (“Forbidden City,” whatever) and there’s all those eerie ancient-looking seashell buildings and there’s no enemies whatsoever and that fucking ominous music is playing…it’s glorious. I’d forgotten that music entirely. As for the actual Aeris death…well, it’s sort of ridiculous that Sephiroth left blood all over the Shinra Building, but there’s none when he rams a girl through the back with a katana blade?…oh well, to say something nice: I like that Cloud tells Sephiroth to “shut up” (I almost laughed) in the middle of him talking about why he did it, and it was touching on a human level when Aeris’ sad piano theme continued playing through the immediate subsequent fight with Jenova. (The shot of her dead body being lowered into the water eerily mirrors Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic the same year, which had a similar success in film the way FF7 had in the gaming world. Coincidence?)
-Speaking of Nobuo Uematsu’s score, to say something less critical for a change: it’s still one of the three or four best in gaming history, bested in my book only by Super Castlevania IV and possibly Symphony Of The Night. It’s no slouch to lose to Castlevania either (Resident Evil, the original, has a hugely underrated soundtrack.) Here’s my ranking for the best FF7 tracks, some of which I know the actual titles of and some I’ll just refer to generically:
1)World map theme (right after you first get out of Midgar…still beautiful)
2)Feeling Held Close To The Heart (Mt. Corel/Midgar re-entry gate theme)
3)Anxious Heart (Nibelheim theme)
4)Bombing Mission
5)You Can Hear The Cry Of The Planet (the aforementioned Forgotten City theme)
6)Birth Of A God (first part of final boss theme)
7)J-E-N-O-V-A
8)Under The Rotting Pizza (Midgar slums theme)
9)Flowers Blooming In The Church (first version of Aeris’ theme you hear)
10)Oppressed People (Wall Market theme)
11)Mako Reactor theme
12)Shinra Building theme (hilarious viewer comment: “Meanwhile at Facebook HQ”)
13)Shinra Mansion theme
14)Aerith’s Theme (the really sad one)
15)Tifa’s Theme (chintzy, but so cozy!)
Looking over the tracklisting on Youtube, I feel like I could still easily name 10 or 15 more, and all of these tracks came back to me something fierce every time I heard one of them. Especially the creepy ones, even ones I haven’t mentioned, like the Shinra Mansion basement where Vincent lives, or the eerie stuff you hear when you’re following Sephiroth’s trail of blood up the Shinra Bldg. Cripes. One I am not mentioning is “One-Winged Angel,” the overblown epic music that plays when you fight “Safer Sephiroth” (hilarious mistranslation of “Savior” there…isn’t that the kind of censorship Nintendo would do?) I like the “veni veni venias” chanting but not the rest of it. The worst track in the game is Cosmo Canyon, God does that ever get annoying (even though the view of the city is pretty cool.)

-As for that final boss fight: I think it’s a very funny joke on Square’s part to have Sephiroth summon a Super Nova that destroys entire planets but cannot kill three people standing right there, a very weak joke of them to deliberately cannibalize so many aspects of the fight with Kefka that ended Final Fantasy VI (turning into a God, creepy orchestral music, has an attack that reduces all party members to 1 HP, and he disintegrates slowly off the screen when he dies), and a flat-out stupidity to have a “fight” with Sephiroth vs. Cloud that isn’t actually a fight, just Cloud killing him right away. I remember people complaining that that last bit should have been a real fight back in 1997, too.

-Graphics? Still pretty cool mostly–the little Popeye-armed figures walking around the 3D fields always did suck, but the battle graphics, backdrops and CGI sequences, even if they have aged a lot, are all still impressive, and who knows how much of the $80 million budget (which would be what in 2024?) was spent on the CGI sequences alone, of which there aren’t many. A lot of graphic artists would have been necessary just to draw the great overhead shot of Midgar, but venture into any house in any small town in FF7 and be stunned at how many visual details people crammed into these weird quasi-isometric homes. I mean, that pan out of Midgar away from Aeris and then back into the city is still mind-blowing.

-The mini games all suck and I hate them. The motorcycle chase is kind of fun the first time, but the snowboard bit is just irritating and stupid, the submarine battle is worthless and I don’t know who even ever bothered with the Fort Condor thing. I’d forgotten entirely what the Speed Square at the Golden Saucer was.

-Parts of the game that I had forgotten one hundred percent: the Sunken Gelnika, the Corel Prison desert thing where you don’t know if that chariot is coming for you, the Great Glacier, the Mythril Cave, the Bone Village and Sleeping Forest, and the final Northern Cave–I hadn’t forgotten the Cave itself, so much as the fact that the part before Jenova comprises a mere nine screens, with enemies that are more annoying than difficult. It’s kind of underwhelming, just like that old magazine article said, and Nintendo didn’t learn any lesson from it (assuming they were watching in 1997-98, and I bet they were) when they marred a similar beloved, acclaimed, epic, era-defining classic with the visually stunning but pathetically un-challenging Ganon’s Castle at the end of Ocarina Of Time a year later. I can’t decide which of these final dungeons I think is weaker.

-The whole Chocobo breeding/racing side quest that you need to complete in order to get Knights of the Round, Mime and the other materia virtually necessary for any sane person to beat Emerald and Ruby Weapon, is tiresome repetitive crap and can go fuck itself, as can the necessary Materia/EXP-grinding you’ll need to do in order to prepare those materia for those battles. On the off hand chance that I play this game a fourth time 20 years from now (on the off hand chance that I make it to age 62) I promise myself I won’t do this sidequest at all. Good lord do I get sick of the Chocobo races. And you know what you get for beating Ruby Weapon? I’d forgotten this–A GOLD CHOCOBO, WHICH YOU’D ALREADY HAVE, AND ONLY NEED ONE OF. FUCK YOU, HIRONOBU SAKAGUCHI. THIS IS WHY NOBODY WENT TO SEE THE BIG COSTLY FINAL FANTASY MOVIE IN 2001. BECAUSE YOU FUCKING DIRECTED IT. AAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH.

-Although I will probably never play the three-part remake Square Enix is currently two-thirds-finished with, I know three things about it just from osmosis and looking around:
1)It’s apparently not selling anywhere near as well as they thought (the original game, in Japan, was sold in convenience stores, a marketing gimmick that worked wonders at the time…guess that’s a no-no nowadays?)
2)The voice actress who plays Aerith (not “Aeris” anymore–Zebes? Zebeth?) is the bubbliest blonde on planet Earth, has the looks of a Pepsodent model, somebody you’d never guess was a gamer from looking at her.
3)I looked up the Aerith death scene in the new game just to see what it was like, and....HER GHOST IMMEDIATELY HELPS YOU FIGHT THE NEXT BOSS. I am not making this up. Fans apparently were royally pissed.
Note: I swear to God I was hearing talk of remaking the game before the year 2000. Anyone remember? Mandela effect?

-Fare thee well, Final Fantasy VII. I put more hours into a single playthrough of you (84 the first time, 75 on the new one…and I immediately deleted my new save files off my lone memory card upon rolling the end credits, out of redundancy with the old ones, where I had people levelled up to 99…here, I stopped with Cloud at about level 87, I think) than any other game I’ve ever played, and I guess that counts for something. And thanks for the memories. But there’s a good possibility that we’ll not meet again.