[Review] Final Fantasy VII… Has It Aged Well?

Just finished FF7, my first completed Final Fantasy game, on the Nintendo Switch.

I can see how it could be amazing for its time (literally 2 decades ago) but man I’m so glad I’m done with it LOL. The only reason I think I finished the whole game was mainly for legacy reasons. I’m not sure if I regret giving FF another chance tbh.

(My first one I attempted was Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles for the GameCube over 15 years ago, but I gave up on that about halfway after never really having gained interest. I don’t think my opinion has changed since then, unfortunately, though I do realize that FFCC was one of the lesser ones especially since it wasn’t part of the main series.)

With that said, I just had to write out all my thoughts about this rather now-controversial game.

Navigating

I didn’t really get stuck often in puzzles, but whenever I did it was because the layering in the fore/background sometimes just didn’t match 😶 I felt cheesed out when I discovered the solution by accident, by looking like I walked through a wall when that was what I was supposed to do. Fortunately this didn’t happen too often, but it was enough to merit a bullet here and enough to say this is a factor in the game’s graphics not aging well.

The number of healing spots / items (and gold) is limited, probably for like 2/3rd of the game, so if you’re spending your MP on offense instead of using Cure outside of battle, you might not just make it to a healing spot in time. Which goes into my next point:

Combat System

Unique time-based battle system was overall enjoyable. Despite fighting under a timer, I never felt rushed in my decision making.

Most optimal play for 99% of fights (including half the bosses) is just spamming A and healing with Cure. MP is precious (and Cure costs so little) and the opportunity cost when using an offensive spell is rarely worth it (especially given the cutscene time of each spell). Even when I rarely use offensive spells, I find myself getting to the next town with over 3/4ths of my MP gone just from using Cure in the field, on top of a few potions.

In the early to mid-game (perhaps 2/3rd of the game), doing a magic spell barely does any more damage than a regular, physical attack, unless if the enemy is weak to that specific type (or has high physical defense) (or you’re Aerith). Determining the opponent’s type via a skill “Sense” isn’t a worthwhile use of a turn either, when enemies generally die in 2-4 hits and bosses rarely have a type disadvantage. You can’t tell whether a spell is super effective as well, unless you compare all the raw damage values to each other (and you’d have to use multiple spells to ensure they don’t just have low magic defense) or if you use Sense. It’s quite cumbersome overall.

Even 20 hours into the game I still caught myself mashing A in battle, multitasking while chatting on Discord or something. For the most part, fighting felt like a chore, even though I wasn’t necessarily grinding.

Not much of a difference between choosing the characters you want in your party, which means less strategy and therefore less of a reason to keep everyone at an even level. Suddenly you’re forced to use a character you haven’t been using, sometimes even solo, and now you’re handicapped for that section

Also, why do summons take legit a full two minutes to play out every single time you wanna use it? It’s cool to watch Cloud summoning Bahamut ZERO the first time, maybe even the second the, but every time after that just makes you want to use summons less and less.

Negatives aside, I really liked the idea behind the Materia system. This system aged like fine wine. I just wished I was able to play with it to its fullest potential (due to what equipment provided) before the last few hours of the game, where the Materia system truly shined. Either you didn’t have enough double-slots to pair them effectively, or you did but using magic wasn’t important at that part of the game (except for Cure on All; see previous paragraphs about saving MP for Cure).

Bosses

SO much artificial difficulty added in with later enemies and bosses just one-shotting you, sometimes even via RNG.

Sometimes, the damage dealt per blow increases literally 10x from the previous fight (e.g. Materia Keeper, Demon’s Gate), with no warning (some before having access to the Barrier spell). That’s not reasonable difficulty at all.

One boss, the Carry Armor, can grab up to 2 members of your team (of 3) with its robot arms, disabling the fighters for the rest of the fight (unless that arm dies), and no character can conquer that boss solo. It took me a few resets of not getting two characters grabbed to win, especially when majority of the time the grabs were back-to-back or too soon, so that there’s be no time for setup or counterplay. Level honestly probably doesn’t even matter in that particular fight.

If they weren’t one-shotting you, they were probably too easy (and I never level grinded). There were a few difficult yet balanced bosses that I wished there were more of.

All that said, the final boss was honestly a breeze, except when when two minutes he’d throw out an attack that’d delete 90% of the whole party’s health (and at the very end, everyone down to 1HP) that just scares you and tells you, okay stop hitting and start healing. There didn’t seem to be a way to prevent those either, not even with an MBarrier or Wall spell.

Mini Games

Mini-games spread throughout the story are mind-numbing and unnecessary. (e.g. press the letters on the screen, with no increase in difficulty). The whole game could’ve gone without any of them (except maybe at the Golden Saucer where that’s imperative to the story and unlocking things).

Story

Overall plot was fine. I could tell how it was great for its time.

Dramatic cutscenes with characters falling off cliffs just remind me of dropping my Lego toys when I was a kid. I couldn’t take it seriously LOL. I understand that this was due to the graphics’ capabilities back then, but this mostly adds to the fact that the game didn’t age too well.

In terms of character development: there was an attempt. Not too much, but when there was, they made it obvious (“the OLD me would’ve … !”), which made the characters feel artificial.

Misc

– Despite the 8-bit music, it often made the playthrough much more enjoyable. 

– Bless x3 speed mode lol

Conclusion

Overall, ahhhh could’ve gone without playing this, but ah well. I REALLY wish I could be a part of the hyped group that praises FF7 to be one of their favorite games of all time, but unfortunately I can’t even feign half of that.

I’ll probably play FF9 soon anyway (the only other one currently available on the Switch) because everyone says it aged better and that the series deserves a second chance. For $20, it’s hard to pass up. We shall see!