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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

I'm astonished by the amount of money Squaresoft was investing in game development at the time. Obviously, it paid off big time for them, but I can't imagine they realized the game would be as successful as it was. If I'm honest, their follow-ups make it seem like they never understood why the game was a success.

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Would you say you know why it was a success? This game has had a massive impact on me and I am spending a lot of time trying to understand why (along with FF6 and Chrono Trigger). I have identified 3 things : the music plays a massive role, the way emotion are conveyed using by the posture of the characters as well and finally the story telling that mixes stories and battles and that can hardly be recreated using an other medium.

Typing this I realise that does not explain why the follow-ups were not as good.

> Would you say you know why it was a success?

Oh, no. But I can say that the game is still objectively incredible. I recently did a full play through of the Steam version with the 7th Heaven upgrades, and enjoyed every minute of it. And I don't think it's all nostalgia either.

And yes, the music is incredible, as evidence by the fact that the Shin-Ra Orchestra still tours.

Chrono Trigger!

A lot of us had never really played an RPG before, especially if we never had an SNES. Most games had a generic poorly-written story that might be a page in the manual instead of even being in the game itself.

Then suddenly a game comes along on the popular console, and everyone's playing it and talking about it, and it puts you in this 3D living world, and a real story is happening with real characters, with real conversations - there's even swear words in it! It's treating me like an adult! - and yes the music is beautiful too, and the whole thing seems impossibly huge, the world seems to go on forever and now I can fly? And now I can go under the ocean? There was nothing else like it, not on a mainstream console anyway.

>A lot of us had never really played an RPG before, especially if we never had an SNES.

Bear in mind from 1998 to ~2003 most people had launched ZSNES with Chrono Trigger/FFVI for sure.

> huge, the world seems to go on forever and now I can fly?

That was on SNES RPG's too.

On the mid-late PSX/N64 era, people played SNES roms even when FFVII-VIII-IX rocked.

Those of us who had been playing RPGs for years (since the 1980s in my case), including the first Final Fantasy games, also found FF7 to be special.

In a lot of ways I think the big reason the subsequent games were not as good was because square took the wrong message from the success. They didn’t go “we should release more emotionally impactful video games with extremely well-told stories” (although they did this well into the ps2 era), they went “we need to be the most technically innovative company in the world” and this mindset brought them into the the failures of crystal tools and the luminus engine, where they were pulling scenario writers off of games to work on their engine (the saga of Final Fantasy VS XIII is because of this).

They got the music part down though. That stuck around.

I feel like FF7 benefits a lot from its first act being pretty cyberpunk-y. The pre-rendered graphics make it also a game where you see it and are like "wow", as an observer.

Things changed a lot since then but I think that so much of the Playstation's success comes from having these games that are quite high fidelity. You no longer need your brain to fill in too many of the blanks, making it way more mainstream and interesting for a broader spectrum of people.

> If I'm honest, their follow-ups make it seem like they never understood why the game was a success.

This sounds like a pretty simplistic reasoning to me. Do you really believe this?

The fact that your follow up game (or movie/book/album/painting) wasn't as successful as the previous one, doesn't mean you don't understand why the latter was a success. Understanding success and replicating it are two different things.

Btw, I like FFVIII more than FFVII.

Surely they had some idea given that every game did better than the last until 7. You can only be the first immersive 3D game on a new platform once. Personally I still find FF6 to be one of the few 10/10 games that never gets old. After the 3D and tonal jump to more sci-fi I just wasnt as interested - and western PC RPGs started to get really good.

One tricky aspect of sequels of very successful art, be it books, plays, movies, or games, is that a successful work transforms the audience.

Doing more of the same isn’t enough - you need to find the right path to go from where they are now and just getting a bigger boat won’t do it.

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