Hi. Made an account and wrote the following for an hour and a half.
I really, really don't like FFVII. After thinking long and hard, it just boils down to: it was no good compared to the FF I played before that, III/VI.
I haven't played either game since they each originally came out, so here's what I remember:
Music:
VI had orchestral tunes. So many different styles and varieties. Beautiful and each character had a recognizable tune.
With VII, we'd jumped to CD technology and the music became very simple MIDI with all-synth. No variety. Not even decent MIDI instruments! It was like Nobuo Uematsu decided he'd already done his best work, so decided to take a nap. (And yet I hear people bother to make SoundFonts to make the PC version sound exactly as crappy as the PSX version.)
Graphics:
VI had beautiful, lush colors everywhere. SD characters were a standard since you could only have so many pixels in a sprite at that resolution.
VII: Washed-out backgrounds. It was confusing where you were sometimes, so they even had a little arrow to show you where you were.
Character models were awful. Since it was 3D, there was no real need for SD.
Characters:
VI had a huge roster of characters, and each was easily recognizable from the other by color, music, and attitude. In combat, everyone had their own special abilities that differentiated them. Sabin had his Street Fighter-style attacks. Relm painted, Edgar had his sword charges, etc.
VII: A handful of characters who play about the same except for summons (whatever they were called). I remember when I got Yuffie, I gave her a try to see what she could steal and she kept failing to steal over and over and over.
Story progression:
VI was epic. You slowly build up your party, gaining in strength, then when you get to the big boss, bang, he goes and destroys the world. I thought that was a pretty mean thing to do.
VII: Well, I don't remember very much about it. Something about Soldiers? Avalanche being a scrappy band of rebels. Jenova, Sephiroth, something something. I actually didn't finish because after putting in I don't know how many hours, my third-party card ate my save. (Hey, I didn't buy 3rd party memory cards after that!) I was already on Disc 2, so I figure I gave it a fair shake.
Other bits:
VI: 4 character party
VII: 3 character party
VI: 2 player mode!
VII: No.
VII made HP virtually meaningless. Back in the day, playing D&D or older FF and having double digit HP was fantastic. Then VII came with its over-the-top "You don't start at level 1" and "Here's a few hundred HP." Then soon there were bosses where you'd blast them with what, 9999 damage and it would kind of yawn at you? Or meters that didn't move when you hit them? What's the point of HP counters or meters?
But one of the most irritating things about FFVII? The loading. Square went on to make quite a lot of PlayStation games that took forever to load, some of which even took ages to simply show the menu?But to sit there and have the screen go fuzzy and swirl about, then queue the music, then slowly load each character?before finally letting you beat up on even the simplest enemy?
Imagine going from instant map to fight transitions to that! Also, since FF has been so random-combat heavy, there were times when you spent longer waiting for combat to load than you did actually fighting. >_<
It was so boring.
Yeah, I was not very fond of it after a dozen or so hours.
So, I played II/IV and it was cool. Then I played III/VI and it blew II/IV away in pretty much every aspect. I was shocked both of those games could have been released on the same system; there was such a jump.
We went from the pinnacle of the genre, finely tuned in all aspects on the Super NES?to a slow, sloppy mess.
I was really excited when FFVII came out. I got home from the shop and started playing immediately, but gradually, I began to realize I'd blown my money and I was most unhappy.
Ah, forgot to mention cut-scenes. Those was neat. But FMV in games never impresses me.
I notice a lot of people who glowingly refer back to FFVII talk a lot about story and er, Tifa. Some people point out how poignant Aerith's death was, but on that point, that didn't hit me nearly as hard as Palom & Porom's sacrifice or Tellah's death in II/IV.
But in the end, games are games and no amount of sparkly FMVs will cover up the fact that coming from III/VI, I was disappointed by production values overall and most importantly, didn't have any fun sitting around waiting to mash a button for samey-playing characters over synth music repeatedly.
On the plus side, it did change Sony's mind about not allowing RPGs stateside but that has nothing to do with FFVII as a game.
