| Words Of Wisdom said: Most of the people who dislike FF7 don't have solid factual reasons beyond "X was crappy!" and "OMG TEH BAAAD GRAPHX!!!" Naznatips' post is a good example of this. Naznatips said: Personally I thought FFVII was a piece of unmitigated crap filled with ridiculously awful design decisions, a horribly translated (and bad in the first place) plot, and some of the worst characters in video game history. I think it's the day FF died, and the only time I ever enjoyed FF much after FVII was IX, which imo is one of the best JRPGs ever made. After that brief glimmer of hope though the FF series is officially dead to me, and I blame FFVII. I have blamed it and hated it ever since I was a 12 year old kid with little sparkles in my eyes paying all the money I had saved up for a year for that PSX and FFVII. I have blamed it ever since I brought it home, popped in that disc, and a part of my soul died with the awfulness. With the horrible lego character models and ridiculous dialog. With the annoying characters, and the pathetic villain (Who wasn't even the main villain of the game BTW). FFVII is one of the most traumatically awful experiences of my 20 years of gaming. ^^Just my opinion. There are valid reasons to dislike Final Fantasy VII but most people have boarded the hater-train which is running full speed these days and it's most definitely not powered by valid reasons. |
And this folks is how to add a worthless reply to a topic that you have no experience with because it makes you feel smart to contribute even if you know nothing about it.
Since apparently WoW thinks I just hate this for no reason, let me go through my issues with this game:
Design: Yes, you may say graphics are a superficial reason to dislike a game, but this borders on downright unplayable. Why am I playing a game where the only time my characters can display anything even remotely resembling emotion is in a cutscene? Why am I walking through gothic/steampunk backgrounds as legos? Why is there so little freaking variety in the environments? You don't have technical limitations as an excuse for that. Backgrounds were hand-drawn.
Just because you have the technology to use 3D, doesn't mean you should use it. This is the perfect example of that, and don't say graphics don't matter at all. They absolutely do, and really bad ones have a damaging effect on the gameplay experience. If you don't believe that, then go play your Atari. On the other hand, a game like FFIX holds up even today, despite it's graphics being bad for modern standards. Graphics do matter to a point.
Plot: Okay, now this is going to get lengthy. First of all, stuffing 5 billion lines of dialogue and explanation into a plot does not by default make it good. In fact, it just makes it worse because it kills the pacing. You would figure the upside to this would be that the plot would be complex and deep, and that the characters would be well developed. To the contrary, the plot was simplistic and derrivative. Even in the late 90s the super-soldier gone bad thing was ridiculously over-used. To make it even worse, despite the game being crammed with wordiness and supposed "twists," none of the plot was actually revealed till the last 30 minutes of the freaking game!
Then let's get into the development of the plot itself. First of all, Sephiroth was not the main villain of this game, nor did he have a major part in this game. Of course, given how poorly translated it is, this just created confusion. Jenova was the main villain of this game. Jenova's clone in the form of Sephiroth killed Aeris. Jenova is the one who you hunted for 80% of the game. Jenova is the one who killed President Sinra and burned down the village. She was the one who controlled Sephiroth's actions using the cells in his body. Jenova was the main villain of this game. Didn't anyone wonder why everytime you caught a Sephiroth clone you fought Jenova???
Characters: Jeeze, so much awful stuff here. I already started on Sephiroth before, but I'll continue on him now. Sephiroth was an awful character. He goes from being completey normal to completely insane just because he found out his genes were screwed with some? So were Cloud's, and although he was a jackass until Aeris died then an emo after that, he didn't randomly decide to go insane. Sephiroth completely lacked motivation and emotion.
Of course, he didn't matter that much anyway, because he was worthless! Sephiroth spent the entire game frozen in the Northern Crater, then came out in the last hour in time to try and drop a meteor on the planet, which he even failed at (unlike Kefka who practically destroyed the world). Sephiroth did nothing. Nothing but whine and complain about his poor unfortunate past. He is one of the absolute worst characters in video game history.
That's not even going into the other characters... Aeris was just a slut, Tifa was a bimbo, Barret was the most ridiculous example of a stereotypical black man I've ever seen in a video game (Well, until Unreal Tournament 3 anyway, but that's another story), Yuffie was only there to steal your materia and add an extra few hours to the gameplay, Vincent was just another emo, Cait Sith served no purpose and had no character development, and Cid was decent.
I HATE Final Fantasy VII, and I have since I first played it. I don't care if other people hate it because they jumped on some band-wagon, or because it's on the PSX, or whatever other stupid reason. My reason for hating Final Fantasy VII is that I got hyped to play it. I saved for a year to play it. I was ready to fall down and worship it if it met the standards of FFVI and Chrono Trigger before it, and it completely crushed me. I hate it because I played it.
