I’ve not played it even more
I’ll never forget walking into my older cousin’s kitchen when I was about 8 years old (it was possibly 1998) and seeing FF7 running on a television. It was the scene outside of Aeris’s house, and combination of the music, and the greenery, and just even seeing little text boxes on the screen… I had come from playing, like, Ridge Racer and Micky’s Wild Adventure, and so it kind of crashed into my life as a pretty big revelation. FF7 was definitely the first thing I’d consider a “text” that I ever ingested, and even though its themes and story definitely went over my head, its bizarre atmospheric places blew my little mind.
I must have got it a little bit later (due to it being a “platinum” release by the time I owned it), but I remember really distinctly one afternoon where my mother pleaded that I stop playing the game and leave the house to play outside. I ended up taking my memory card and the game to a nearby neighbour’s house and enthusiastically played it while he played outside. I’ll always associate Nibelheim with my friend Ben’s stuffy front room… what his parents must have thought of me…
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literally FACEpalm… only SQEX. only SQEX…
other than soliel and link to the past, final fantasy vii was the first rpg i ever played, and like most kids, it started an rpg phase that lasted a few years. during that phase, i played wild arms, alundra, breath of fire 3, grandia, skies of arcadia, final fantasy v, and probably a few more i’ve forgotten. that allended shortly after the dreamcast got me obsessed with arcade games, and i totally rejected all rpgs for a while, especially final fantasy, and double especially final fantasy vii.
eventually, i realised that i found rpgs a lot more palatable on handhelds, and when i goy my ps vita a couple of years ago, i bought a bunch of playstation rpgs, and final fantasy vii was one of them. playing it again after more than 15 years, i saw it in a new light!
the aesthetics of the game were amazing, full of life and colour, and so unlike the grey movies and spin-offs that came later. the game itself was a ton of fun to play as well, and full of inspiration. the battles and the whole “build your own character class” materia system have a lot of potential that’s unfortunately only really realised in the gold saucer’s battle square. but that could easily be expanded into a whole game on its own, and it’s not the only part of the game you can say that about, either. the motorbike escape from midgar and the mt condor battles are two other parts that could be built upon too. (i know there are a million games about riding on a motorbike and hitting dudes, but none of them have the mystical/cyberpunk/gouraud shaded aesthetic of ffvii)
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that’s actually something I don’t see brought up enough about Final Fantasy VII compared to its later spinoffs.
when you look at any background from FFVIII they really tell their own story on the strength of pre-rendered graphics. they have so much color and life to them that even modern games with all the rendering power of the xbox 360 and a horde of kenji eno’s can’t compare to
even in the dreariest of places, FF7 is uniquely popping with charm and character in a way that later installments of the series can’t even come close to
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Where is the perfectly accurate realMYST of this video game?
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This is all anyone actually wants from the mythical FFVII remake, right?
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I can’t speak for everyone, but being able to explore fully realized three dimensional versions of the locations is what interests me about the remake, sure.
But I mean, apart from that, I envision something that maintains the crude ray traced mid-90s look in real time.
that’s how they got me in Dirge of Cerebus and Crisis Core. I was underwhelmed by just about every realization of those locations in both games though, except the chunk of worldmap that dirge of cerebus gives you for the horde mode
Tim’s videos remain excellent.
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Yeah all his recent clips are enormous fun
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The last unsolved mystery of FFVII: “So how come Tobal No.1 outsold Tekken 2 in its first week?”
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yfw you can’t even enter houses :3
Totally agree with the notion that they should just render all the backgrounds in real-time with lighting and shaders. Also, maybe apply the shaders to the character models, but otherwise keep the polygon counts the same. The weird, jagged characters are a lot of the charm of FFVII and why I fundamentally can’t accept Advent Children or any of the weird gaidens that exist for this series within a loosely federated series.
To amplify my point, just play something like Tenebrae Engine (wiki link) for Quake 1.
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If Tennebrae is that hard to find, I’ll have to dig through all my old CD-Rs of Quake 1 mods, maps, and engines.
I don’t think I was actually able to run it when it first came out.
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Yeah, it was a Doom 3 era engine that used similar stencil-shading algorithms, which were intensely expensive back then. It also somehow provided the textures with displacement mapping of some sort, so they really popped a lot more than they do in the Darkplaces engine (though that engine likely has more versatile real-time shadows).
Remake FFVII in a dark, dank, Quake engine port, ya’ll.
Reminds me of an unrelated but still excellent (alas, only one episode) Quake 2 mod called Dawn of Darkness (ModDb) (Let’s Play (YouTube)). The protagonist is named Roarke the Merciless, and he’s some kind of swords and sorcery type of hero (as opposed to a Swords & Sworcery EP type hero, a fine distinction). It had a sort of Crusades-esque juxtaposition of Medieval European influences and Arabic/Islamic antagonists battling it out with a bunch of swords, spells, and blunderbusses in an excellent total conversion. I wonder if I could find it and get it to run and operate within the framework of a Quake 2 engine remake with more contemporary real-time lighting, shadows, and graphics in general. There’d certainly be no normal-mapping or more sophisticated 3D texturing techniques. It also had some adventure-gamey puzzle elements. I really gotta find that whole .pak file again.
The makers of Tenebrae, I think, actually generated their own normal maps (somehow, don’t ask me) for use in their Quake 1 engine port. It looked really nice but it did give some things a weird sheen in memory serves. Not everything though. Maybe they had a materials system, or maybe not. Did Q1 in general do materials? I seem to recall Valve adding that to GoldSrc, which was, of course, more Q1 than Q2 base code.
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we’re living in a world where every celebrity over 30 probably has an ff7 opinion
Let’s continue using this thread for talking about everything related to FFVII.
The Honey Bee Inn cross-dressing event is still in. We’ve made it more modern. If we made the facility like we did in the original game, the physical unease would be staggering, so that was no good…
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