Why all the hate on FFVII?

[Angryman101]

I didn't like it because it was a sucky game.
I got to the final boss and didn't even bother beating him because I stopped caring what was happening.
Cloud was a shitty character, sephiroth was a shitty villain, yuffie was annoying as shit, and Aeris was just...ugh. I would have cheered when she died if I cared about the game at all.
Who uses that many fucking ellipses when they're talking?!

 

[whtkid6969]

For some reason its popular to hate popular things, ike music, movies, or even games. Anything popular just has ALOT of trolls waiting to try and take it down to their level

 

[Defense]

As for the whole Cloud being "emo" thing. I don't particularly agree with it. It's only natural to be depressed when

Spoiler

your hometown becomes burned to the ground, your friend/love interest gets impaled by your worst enemy, and then realize that you may not be who you think you are and may in fact be just a lab creation with fake memories.

It's kind of unrealistic to have a character to brush all that off so easily.

You know, even with that Cloud is less of a brooding whiny emo than Squall. He seems to fit the role of "serious/uncaring" more than anything since he only attacks Shin-Ra reactors for money. Even then, he goes out of his way to help Tifa from Don Corneo.

because cloud does not have a beard. he could be so much more awesome with one

Done.

 

[thatman]

I love FFVII and that puts me in an awkward position as everybody i know despises the game (with only two people having actually played it). Any time i mention it i get 'OMG you've got mass effect, why the HELL aren't you playing that' and to be honest i can't answer. Arguably games have moved on too much for it to have any relevance today and it simply can't compare with modern rpgs (which i beg to differ as it is definitely superior to FFX through to XIII). The fact that a lot of modern gamers simply cannot get past the blocky textures and story-telling cliches may be at the core of why there's so much hate for FFVII.

 

[Treblaine]

It's cool to hate things that are popular.

Well... yeah, that's it basically.

Err, what are we going to talk about now? Oh, well FF7 may be derided a lot but at least it is no where near as bad as Final Fantasy 8! oh, my god, check out Spoony's review/let's-play

http://spoonyexperiment.com/category/final-fantasy-viii/page/2/

it's quite cathartic, you don't think it could be any worse.

then you see his FFX review!

 

[BrainWalker]

...I don't exactly think it's the best game under the Final Fantasy Label. The winner of that award goes to eiterh FFVI or Crystal Chronicles.

I'm actually kind of shocked to find another soul who gave a damn about Crystal Chronicles. That game was freaking awesome. It's too bad the barrier to entry was so damn high. If you could have just played the game with some buddies without everyone needing GBAs AND link cables, I think that game could have been a major success. The magic-combining mechanic was amazing. I don't think I've ever seen another game that had such fluid cooperative spellcasting.

As far as FF7, I'm not going to deny it was huge back in the day. I remember seeing commercials for it on MTV and thinking "Holy shit, did I seriously just see a commercial for a videogame on TV?" I was a die-hard Nintendo fan, and that was the game I bought a Playstation for. I enjoyed the Hell out of it. I was blown away by the graphics and the cutscenes, and the music was great as always, although the story was kind of a giant confusing mess. But I didn't care. it was FF7, dammit!

For old-school fans of the series, I don't think most of us hate FF7 on its own merits. We hate what it represents in the timeline of the series. It represents the point where style started being more important to Square than substance. At least, that's many people's perception. Mine included. As far as I'm concerned, Final Fantasy hasn't had really interesting characters or a story worth telling since FF6. They've all had some pretty sweet cutscenes, though.

Actually, I guess Auron was pretty sweet.

 

[Sejs Cube]

Short version?

Fans. Fans are why there's some much hate for FF7.

Unrelenting, mouth-agape fanboyism has lead to people being well and truly fed up with FF7 as a title. Yeah. It's a game. Yeah, for a lot of people it was your first introduction to console RPGs. No, frankly, it wasn't anything groundbreaking or fantastic.

But fans. Fans won't. Shut. Up. About it even though it hasn't been relevant for over a decade.

Quit attaching your ego to the perception of a game and move on.

It has nothing to do with hating on something that's popular, it has everything to do with hating on something that long since grown tiresome but annoying fans won't let go. See also: Sonic.

 

[Katana314]

The one thing I WOULD say about FFVII is that Sephiroth never seemed like a believable villain. There was just this one point at which he went through a bizarre internal thread of logic that churned out "The world needs to be destroyed for Jenova, my mother" and none of it was identifiable or even sympathetic.

He believed he was a descendant of the Ancients and that the human race had betrayed them. In such, he was passing judgment on humanity in the form of a giant, world killing meteor. Not too hard to decipher really. When you pair that with his power (and ego to match) then you have the fixings for a megalomaniac.

OP: It's cool to hate what is popular. And JRPGs are currently cool to hate - especially the poster boy - Final Fantasy - even more so the series' most popular entry - FFVII.

But that's a comic book villain excuse. Have that many successful, intelligent people in the world ever just decided they want to "pass judgment on humanity"? It doesn't feel believable, or even well-covered; it's the long black coat version of Dr. Take Over The World. It was really pretty shameful when the rest of the game was well-written.

 

[Archemetis]

In fairness, Cloud really isn't emo...

I mean, can anyone here say without a shred of dickheadedness that if they were hypothetically faced with an identity/existential crisis wherein you've been led to believe that your entire childhood and everything you think you know was part of an experiment to create a perfect clone of a mentally unstable superman hell-bent on destroying the world. All because he thinks that's what his surrogate space-mother set out to do, only it's not his space mother, he's just been infused with cells that have sent him over the edge...

Is any of that sinking in?

There is a seriously deep story with incredibly thought out characters underneath all the brooding and 'wahwahing' that DEVIANTART will have you believe (Y'know in between drawing Cloud and Vincent fucking Cait Sith).

If Cloud has any 'emo' moments between questioning his own identity and generally sucking it up and getting the fucking job done. Then I think it's entirely justified.


This all coming from someone who actually liked Final Fantasy IX better...

 

[Skoosh]

I don't get the "Sephiroth is a momma's boy" line of thinking. He got his strength from Jenova, so he was rejecting his actual mother and saying he was a child of power. He was worshiping the monstrous side of himself. He rejected humanity and went for nothing but raw power, which was why he was destroying the world: kill humans, gain power of lifestream. If he was a momma's boy, there wouldn't be a chick in a waterfall. I think people just heard a couple lines and didn't think about the actual meaning behind his words. People don't listen past the surface, especially if it's a madman.

Anyway, I think a lot of people hate it because it was hyped a lot and it didn't live up to the hype for them. Also because people hate popular things. If it isn't popular, there's no reason to hate it, you'll just forget it. The game isn't for everyone. You also have people inflating the game's image due to nostalgia and people that didn't play it originally (games of yesterday don't hold up as well by today's standards, look at Goldeneye).

 

[TheSquashedOrange]

I think that it's just cool to hate popular things, same thing happened with halo and mdern warfare. I will say however that ff7's graphics certainly haven't aged well, they just look...ugh.

 

[Danceofmasks]

FF7 was good.
If I had to pick out a Square game that's a masterpiece, I wouldn't say FF7 though.
I'd probably say Seiken Densetsu 3.

That's probably why the "hate" ... it's overrated.

 

[DevilWolf47]

If Cloud isn't angsty, then i'm not fat.
...i'm 20 pounds overweight? Well fuck. I guess Cloud's ANGSTY.

No shortage of evidence with that between the fucking movies and that scene where Aeris dies that i swear was the inspiration for the Star Wars prequel series where Cloud just sits there trying to remember how to emote. Bad acting in a text based segment... that's never a good sign.

That being said, my big problem with Final Fantasy VII is that the writers have absolutely no sense of discipline. There isn't a real central plot, just a massive amalgam of stupid subplots that even by that point in the Final Fantasy series were beginning to age. Just how many times have they used the former soldier rebelling against a corrupt government plot? Final Fantasy VII is a generic turned based JRPG that only gained popularity because Neon Genesis Evangelion hadn't gained as much popularity in America at that time so a lot of gamers were unfamiliar with "Emo." They thought it was hot shit.
Understanding why is an exercise in futility. Enix was making better turn based strategies before it combined with Square Soft, and Square Soft hadn't lost it's edge before VII.


And i think there may also be some old Square Enix fanboys who rail against FFVII because it really was the mark where the series began to rapidly stagnate.

I also have one more beef with it. Square Soft's Bushido Blade? Square Enix's The World Ends with You? To a lesser extent (Much lesser) Nier? The company isn't completely without talent, but they keep releasing Final Fantasy title that more and more are beginning to have less interactivity than Heavy Rain. And Star Ocean... goddamn am i glad BioWare exists. If Star Ocean had a monopoly on the sci-fi RPG genre, then i'd probably begin cutting.

 

[Tehlanna TPX]

I hate the fact that 'emo' is such an overused, and poorly placed, word in the english language these days. As bad as 'gay' (although without the sensitivities that comes with misusing the term).

I love FF7. Why? It was the first FF that I was allowed to play. The others were only viewable in shotgun mode while my Uncle played. It was no-touchy-touchy on his beloved nintendo systems. But by the time 7 came out, I was old enough, and apparently trusted enough, to give it a shot with my own hands on the controller. That brings a sense of nostalgia that nothing else really can. It was fun to watch my Uncle play the other titles, but ...yeah.

I can understand a little bit of annoyance towards fan boys. The same that non fps'ers (and even some fps'ers...) feel towards CoD idiots, and the like. But there seems to be so many misconceptions towards the game that maybe some of the 'haters' should take a step back and just calm down. And then move on and hate something more important. Although if it must be game related, then choose something much more worthy of your ire, mmkay.

OT: Haters gonna hate. Just like in anything, in this world.

 

[Ladette]

Hype backlash? I don't hate FF7, I think it's a mediocre game that's been massivley overrated.

 

[DanteVX]

I never really understood the hate that has rose against 7, I will say that I didn't enjoy it that much and I don't really know why. In my personal experience most of my friends really like the game and the reason they give is because of nostalgia, they played it when it was released, we were 7-8, but I didn't.

I played it for the first time last year with a friend and they were reminiscing telling me stories of this boss and that plot point, and I just couldn't get into it. For me X was my favourite, maybe because it was newer, I do find that age of graphics unappealing, which is weird because I play mostly retro games these days. I know why I like X so much and I know that it was not the game, but for a disgustingly subjective reason so doesn't have any place in an actual debate. I didn't particularly like any past X because I hate the real time battle systems, for me, they have lost all strategy that the earlier games had, where for some fights you had to sit and figure out how to win, with 13 in particular I didn't even know what I was doing, I just spammed 'X' and beat the game.

OT: For those of my friends who like it, it is nostalgia and they admit that. Maybe the hate comes from over zealous people who don't understand why so many like it. Conversely maybe the 'fanboys' who so adamantly bestow and defend its God like status and agitate so many, realised that it wasn't as good as they remember and get tetchy about it, one of my friends in particular is like this. When drunk, she admits she has actually had a growing hatred for it on her recent play through. For me, if you enjoy a game good, if you don't, you don't. There is no need to attack others for a different opinion. Most forget the difference between opinion and fact.

 

[Fledge]

To be fair, Sephiroth isn't actually on the front lines all the time. I mean, you don't even see him (not including memories) in the whole of the first disk - it's just Jenova all the damn time.