Final Fantasy 7: An oral history (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Final Fantasy 7: An oral history (2017)

polygon.com

122 pointsrcarmo69 comments

I remember I was watching my friend playing it on his Playstation and I nearly bought Playstation because of it. ( I was still on my Saga MegaDrive ). But I waited for the PC version, turns out my ATI Graphics card just wasn't good enough. The game if I remember correctly was heavily optimised for Glide ( The API from 3Dfx ), so bought a Voodoo 2 instead which was crazy expensive just to play a game but I couldn't resist. The PC version was insanely great. Voodoo 2 Graphics had 30fps making everything silky smooth LOL. ( I dont think we were 60fps era yet ) The software synthesiser from Yamaha was miles ahead of anything else on the market. The music was just brilliant ( Nobuo Uematsu is an absolute genius ), 25 years later when I see FF7 I could still hear the intro music in my head. Those MIDI sound when selecting commands. Spending days just to get a Golden Chocobo ( And typing that now the Chocobo music is playing in my head ). It is somehow all burned into my DNA.

I just wish I have time to play the Remake. Still waiting for PS5 to become widely available.

The good old days, they dont make games like that any more.

I also played it on PC, but remember even at the time the low resolution backgrounds looking horrendous and taking a lot away from the experience. You had insanely low polygon, untextured characters rendered at full monitor resolution, composited on backgrounds pre-rendered at 320x240 for TVs. So the graphics were made up of two drastically different elements each with distinct, critical issues.

The first 3D console that I thought was actually worthy of the name was the Dreamcast. Everything before that was just atrocious looking, even at the time, in my opinion. I'd had some exposure to computer gaming but I was in college and always bottom-feeding on hardware, so it's not like I was always cutting edge on computer gaming graphics.

I remember watching an ad for some Playstation game that was clearly trying to have awesome graphics at all costs, even if it meant that their TV ad was playing at something like 5 fps. Awful. Honestly looked unplayable.

Yeah, man, I was a kid in high school at the time, and saved a lot of money to get this game. It was running at 4 FPS, but even worse was that the characters went from beautifully-drawn sprites in FF6 to hideous sets of cubes and pyramids in FF7. I'd heard so many good things about the game that I assumed it must just be completely broken on my computer, and returned it to the store for a refund

I gave the game another try on the PSX later, and I have to admit that it was a lot of fun once I got past the terrible graphics

That's interesting! Watching a friend play Final Fantasy 7 was the reason I never cared to get a Playstation. The graphics were horrible. I mean, sure it was 3D, but everything was so ugly. I went back to playing games on my SNES and Genesis, and didn't buy any Playstation games until much later.

In retrospect, I missed out, but the way that game looked really soured my view of Playstation for years. I should play one of the remasters some time to see what the story is all about.

Yeah, I like FF7 a lot, but my view in the 90's was that 3d was ugly and the older games had better graphics. The ff7 backgrounds look a lot better than the characters, and even the FMV sequences still pretty meh if you ask me. I'd take the art style of Lunar or Phantasy Star or something over it any day..... in fact I still prefer that style to the newer 3d games anyway.

Thankfully there's more to the game than the appearance. The music <3

The backdrops and environment were gorgeous. The in-battle 3d models were realistic for their time.

The controllable characters in the overworld were strangely blocky and angular. https://www.google.com/search?q=cloud+ff7+original

When I first saw the game as a kid, I was baffled by how thin the character's elbows were. It's almost doll-like, and you get the feeling you're a puppet master witnessing an epic and sometimes tragic performance.

FWIW I remember seeing it at stores when I was a kid and thinking the graphics were best I'd ever seen. Like my mind was blown and I was sad I didn't have a PS1. The pre-rendered backdrops helped a lot here. It was a different time.

I was getting into the remake but stopped playing when I learned it was only half the game plus a bunch of bullshit filler. Instantly killed any interest or goodwill for me. Playing the original again on emulator ATM. Was perfect, just needed to up the polycount...

It really isn’t. You should play it and see for yourself.

As I said, I am literally playing it right now. It really is!

It's a really strong game if you judge it on its own merits. I had played through most of disc 1 of the original just before it came out, and I liked all the extra detail that the remake added to the gameworld. It's a shame it's not all of FF7 but if they eventually remake the whole game with this level of detail then its future is very exciting!

I loved FF7. They definitely make games like that today! It's just that we've since grown and don't have as much time to sink into a game and you're more influential when younger. I played Breath of the Wild 2 years ago and I'd 100% put that game up against any of the wonderful RPG/Action games I played as a child (going as far back as Ys Book I & II on a Turbo Duo and Fate of Atlantis on PC).

The remake is more fun, but they took real liberties with the story. Some would say they butchered it. Pacing also has that modern sluggishness.

the remake is great i highly recommend you play it !

Final Fantasy VII was/is such an influential game. It was this game that sparkled my interest in programming because of its big, very helpful modding community that I stumbled upon. It started over 20 years ago and is still very active to this day: https://forums.qhimm.com . Inspired by this back then I wrote a couple of tools that were used for FF7 translation projects and created my first website, learning the craft along the way, and that's how I became a web developer.

What's more, new things are discovered almost every month - new game glitches, mechanics, new tools are being created to either lower the speedrun times or create mods to the game. I recommend anyone even remotely interested in this game to check it out.

I have been learning Japanese to play this game in its original language and am planning to learn the piano to be able to play its soundtrack. I know I am not the only one doing this. I can't think of any video game / movie that has been so inspiring to so many people.

Nobuo Uematsu's music sounds great when arranged for piano! The Piano Collections are fantastic, if you can play them.

Uematsu was a big part of my childhood and it was a bummer when he stepped back from composing so much, but Masayoshi Soken has done amazing work on FFXIV, he's a worthy successor. I really like this piano arrangement of the Endwalker soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRmXuN53ggw

Yes. Uematsu's music is part of my soul forever

>I know I am not the only one doing this. I can't think of any video game / movie that has been so inspiring to so many people.

I think the Zelda franchise has similar if not greater cultural impact in some of the ways you're talking about.

Back in 2000 when I was originally learning Japanese, I played through Final Fantasy 7 and stopped every time I didn't recognize something and looked it up in my Denshi Jisho. It was tough but I made it through the whole game!

Good luck from a fellow player who's already walked the path you're walking.

There's a lot of FF7 that made my childhood. Reading the article seems like a blast from the past.

my favorite music was red 13's village one

Aye cosmo canyon is a classic - the game is full of just so many bangers. I really haven't resonated with game music since that era in the same way. Last game music that really caught my attention was Hollow Knight

I find "A Secret Sleeping in the Deep Sea" really takes me back to my childhood.

I was surprised to learn that even earlier titles had an active modding community!

Final Fantasy 6, which is an equally awesome game, although for very different reasons, had a complete makeover and one can download it with new quests, gears, translation, balance, etc.

It's crazy what people will do by passion.

FFT 1.3 is absolutely incredible too

I still have my original PlayStation discs. Is there some way to get this?

Damn, how many gems exist out there?

Square's library is loaded with gems. Xenogears and Vagrant Story are my favorites from the PSX.

I've never played the Secret of Mana type games, or Mario RPG, or any of a host of other ones.

I think the PSX was an interesting high point for 3D creativity vs graphics. The PS2 started pushing polygon counts such that the creative/artist teams started to blow out and budgets shot up, but then the PS3 and "modern AAA" budgets took over. Large budgets, low risk, more priority on splash graphics than depth.

There's a FF7 'demake' in the style of FF1 for NES that's really kinda cool and amazing they made it run on NES hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII_(NES_video_g...

>new things are discovered almost every month - new game glitches, mechanics

Is there a good place to follow these discoveries? The site you linked seems to mainly just be mods, and when I search for glitch discussion I mostly just find generic wiki's listing the same old glitches known for decades.

Just recently a Chocobo glitch was found that allows speedrunners to skip Kalm flashback sequence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiO9ixPicHU . There's also the materia smuggle glitch found not too long ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hosDrlVF6e4

I recommend this whole channel as it's a great resource for FF7 in general and covers the newest developments: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyotyCGt7oYAKM1mCwsHT...

Thanks, that's amazing! I wish there was more of a central forum for this stuff. Do you know of any similar channels for FF6, Chrono Trigger, and other golden-age JRPGs?

There is always speedrun.com (https://www.speedrun.com/ff7)

FF7 was also massively influential for environmentalist causes. An entire generation of kids were introduced to tough political problems via this game.

Not just FF7. Mystic Quest (Final Fantasy Adventure) [1] was my first Final Fantasy game (I only played a little bit FFXIV ~30 years after) back around 1991/1992 on the orig. Gameboy, and it also had the tree of life paradigm. Though you can regard it as a spinoff, the Mana series, it featured things like moogles, chocobo's, tree of life, Excalibur, ...

One of my first RPG games, along with Hero Quest (a simplified clone of Warhammer Quest).

One thing it couldn't do though was walk diagonally, which you could with Zelda/Link (forgot the exact name) on Gameboy. I got stuck on that game (IIRC clueless what to do, where to go). In Mystic Quest I only got stuck once, with the palm trees where you had to make the 8 to find the dungeon. I didn't get the clue to it, but then again my native language wasn't English.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Adventure

That's probably more true outside Japan than inside it. By then, just to mention one factor, Miyazaki and Takahata had already smashed the Japanese box office multiple times with "militant" environmentalist films like Nausicaa and PomPoko. In fact, I remember the whole environmental theme being a bit of a clichè in my part of the world (Western Europe) by the late '90s - for us, those themes had really exploded in the '80s as part of the debate over nuclear energy.

Honestly, when I was a kid, I didn't get the scenario. What the hell was genova ? Is sephiroth the good guy ? Then why is he trying to meteor us to hell ? And who is really cloud ?

But it didn't matter, because it was so incredible to play.

I had to replay the PC version later as a teenager to get it. Unfortunately this version was incredibly buggy.

The Cloud identity mystery was wonderful for me as a kid. It really had a lot of intrigue and mystique. Even when they explicitly explain it, something didn't seem to fit right. Something about imposter syndrome. Crisis Core helped establish a lot more context but the characters and settings really did feel like Kingdom Hearts 1.5.

As much as I love this game some of the story really starts to fall apart around those points. I used to think I was just overlooking something or some details were lost in translation but after playing more of the series it seems like convoluted plots are just kind of part of the Final Fantasy style.

note: I've only played the original game and the remake on PS4 and seen Advent Children.

Great article surprise I’ve never seen it before.

Tim Rodgers has dedicated hundreds of hours talking about this game. It’s so iconic and moved the genre forward in many ways. But I think in opening the series up to the mainstream it took steps backwards too. So very linear, very simple bosses, and little in the way of customizing your party like you could in VI.

I recently replayed it though and it has aged well. I think about the limits they had with CD-ROM and I think this is why the game was so linear. It also has tons of side quests if you want to spend more time.

The remake is fantastic too.

What a weird time in the mid 1990’s and late 90’s when JRPG’s were extremely popular.

>What a weird time in the mid 1990’s and late 90’s when JRPG’s were extremely popular.

They still are, though it has become much more blended with western audiences and taste.

Back then things moved way slower, even though it was released in 1997, it was still popular because of the PS2 and it's low price cost $20 via Greatest hits.

the last few years have been a mini golden age for JRPGs

Persona 5: Royal, Dragon Quest 11, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, FFVII:R

It has been. Even others too like Bravely Default 2, Last Remnant, and Octopath Traveller have done interesting things with mechanics.

The Switch is incredible for these new games + all the old ones.

Sort of but FF7 was the top selling game when it came out. That will never be the case for a JRPG again. In fact I’m convinced that it was all just a perfect storm of gaming going mainstream and much of the audience had no idea what it was.

I think the western RPG genre killed it for good here in terms of mainstream success. Oblivion did a number on it.

Final Fantasy VII is still awe-inspiring for me. The original is arguably the greatest game of all time, and the remake is probably the best video game remake of all time, too.

If anyone wants to relive FFVII on YouTube, I'd highly recommend this[1] speedrun from GDQ. The runner beats it in ~8 hours and the commentary takes you through the story as it happens, sharing a lot of really cool insights and and highlighting details that I never knew from my playthroughs.

[1] https://youtu.be/EWgb-Jrk5tQ?t=677

FFVII is so close to my childhood it’s almost difficult to play it without tearing up.

The soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu is probably the best video game OST ever made.

And it's all MIDI, running on a 24-voice synthesiser with a 470-kilobyte sample bank.

Whenever I'm composing, and I'm tempted to be perfectionist about instrument fidelity or mixing quality, I listen to some Uematsu tracks then go back to my piano roll.

The OST is a masterpiece, and has only gotten better with time.

The Orchestra world tour (https://ffvii-remakeconcerts.com/) is incredible. Definitely recommend seeing it live if you get a chance.

Thanks I’ve gone twice and it was amazing

Ah, yes... I remember the first time I ran my submarine into Emerald Weapon without knowing what the creature was. Needless to say, I was ill-prepared for such a battle.

And who can forget Ruby Weapon? Which some would say is an even harder battle than Emerald Weapon... until you discover the optimal attack for the battle.... Hades.

*sigh.... So good.

What made these battles so special is that the internet in its current form didn't quite exist yet, so you couldn't easily look up guides or YouTube videos. You had to buy the big expensive FF7 strategy guide book and struggle yourself!

The easy access to information these days has made games a very different experience. Struggling for 2 minutes? Look up the answer.

I remember AOL message boards/forums were pretty critical to me getting through FF7 and other role playing games of the time.

I bought a PS1 for this game. It's still my all-time #1. It has a great story, lots of content, lots of extras and minigames. Heck, in 1997 it was my favourite snowboarding game...

Hmm, no mention of how they lopped off a huge chunk of the story to get the game out the door... that is the oral history that would be interesting. Actually, there are some recollections included that don't seem to make a lot of sense - specifically related to how Aerith's death was supposed to be some kind of teachable moment for players, a demonstration of how precious life is... through permadeath. Well Aerith's death wasn't supposed to be permanent, her resurrection was going to be part of the later story - you can even see where they cut out a scene where she appears at the church, following her death, in a shaft of light. Presumably there would have been some back and forth - and then a lead to the beginning of the fetch quest that would end with her back to life. All that is left is a very brief pop-in of her character model, and a useless item that was probably part of the cut quest - but developers forgot to remove.

Wow, your comment reads like many of the later 90's blogs I saw about this very thing. I saw SOOO many comments about Aeris should have been ressurected, or do these stupidly long things made up that can do it (it didnt).

Unless you have attestation from the devs or designers, I'll have to consign this comment as 1990's level rumormill.

Aeris revival rumors were my favorite thing to read about. There were so many ridiculous, complicated methods to supposedly revive aeris. In fact there were a lot of different mytha like that.. things like getting the supernova materia, killing tifa instead of Aerosmith, fighting secret weapons, getting sephiroth to join your team, etc. Even though I knew 95% of it was fake, I loved reading about it for some reason. They were strangely imaginative, mixing real mysteries like aeris' ghost with plausible ideas like that there's a way to revive her through that. And let's be honest-- everyone wanted to revive aeris. Her death was one of the craziest moments in a video game I've ever experienced

https://youtu.be/VQEAFxjqr-E

It's really common to find unfinished, cut content in game data. Even if that possibility was explored, a design decision was made in the game that actually shipped, so I don't think it makes any sense to talk about different intentions.

> ... a design decision was made in the game that actually shipped, so I don't think it makes any sense to talk about different intentions.

>>> Final Fantasy 7: An oral history (2017)

>> An oral history

> history

wut?

Do you have a source for that huge lobbed of chunks? I have only found rumors and speculation.

I highly recommend the book 500 Years Later: An Oral History of Final Fantasy VII. It's Matt Leone's article, but expanded to book length (240 pages). I received it as a Christmas present when it came out from my parents. Read the entire book in a day. Reading the book was a super nostalgic experience for me since my parents purchased the original PSX game for me back in 1998 around Christmas that year. It was awesome reading all that went into one of my favorite games of all time.

https://readonlymemory.vg/shop/book/500-years-later/

If anyone is interested, Read Only Memory did a book on FF7.

https://readonlymemory.vg/shop/book/500-years-later/

I have 2 of their books.

Sega Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works

Sega Dreamcast: Collected Works

And waiting for delivery of

Like a Hurricane: An Unofficial Oral History of Street Fighter II

Their books are amazing.

One of the few games I can play over every few years. I haven't played the remakes. I'm afraid it will spoil it for me.

The remake is so different that I don't think it could spoil it. The character / art design, voice acting, format of missions, etc. are so different that it's basically just an homage.

Hi, please add (2017) to the title

Funny because I’m replaying it now on my Mister with the alpha PSX core. Still looks, plays, and sounds amazing!

Reading this I'm surprised at the parallels of Sakaguchi and Job's first stint at Apple.

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