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Final Fantasy VII reviewGame: Final Fantasy VIIPlatform: PlayStation 3 Genre: Turn-Based RPG (Fantasy) Developer: Square Enix |
Staff review by Jonathan Stark
October 22, 2009 It is the most enduring game of all time. Since its rerelease on the PSN, Final Fantasy VII has received over 100,000 downloads, polygon graphics be damned! Why has this antiquated game endured so strongly through the ages? It’s in the story, I say. Nay-sayers call it “emo” but I don’t think they realize how dark a game it is.Final Fantasy VII broke from JRPG tradition in that it isn’t a game about a bunch of people saving the world. Rather, it is about a man failing to save the world, or anything in it, over and over again. It doesn’t follow the classic epic story arc, in which a weak character finds their own inner strength and overcomes previously insurmountable odds. It follows a reversal of this arc, in which a strong character’s ego is slowly chipped away until he is left a broken shell of his former self.
Cloud’s first words in Final Fantasy VII are to tell Barret to bugger off when the man asks for his name. Cloud doesn’t get chummy with the locals. He is willing to use his gargantuan sword to help the locals in exchange for a bit of extra cash, but that’s about it. At the start of the game, Cloud is a self-sure badass who looks out for number one and doesn’t give a damn about anyone else unless they have tits and might be up for showing them.
Our faith in Cloud’s abilities are quickly shaken. He has strange lapses of memory and odd mood swings. He blows off his childhood love interest for some random woman he meets in the slums. He later beats this woman half to death and stands by as she is idly killed by a sword through the gut. He becomes obsessed with understanding this darker side of himself, bringing to mind the old warning "stare into the abyss..."
It's not an easy path for Cloud. Every scene in Final Fantasy VII exists to point out how much of a failure he is. He fails to save the members of Avalanche or the rest of Sector 7. He fails to kill President Shinra and, shortly afterwards, his son Rufus. He gets wrongly framed at the Gold Saucer and fails to prove his innocence, landing him and his buddies in the Desert Prison. He hands Sephiroth the very object he needs to destroy the world.
Those who write Final Fantasy VII off as "emo" forget that it isn’t a game about a whiny group of teenagers. Cloud starts off as a cocky dick. The gamer is given the rare opportunity to witness the fall of this character. By the end, perhaps Cloud is a little depressing. But it takes him 40 hours of psychological and emotional abuse to get there.
They’ve tried, but Square Enix hasn’t abused a character in such a memorable way since.
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