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Forums - Gaming - Why Final Fantasy VII is Still the Best RPG Ever Made

Dr.Henry_Killinger on 02 July 2014

This article sucks, I explained turn based battle systems better than this asshole.



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exdeath on 02 July 2014
Brii said:
Gotta say, the Final Fantasy series never really grabbed me. Though the argument in the OP seemed to be a little .. weak.

My personal favorites (not necessarily games I'd call the BEST in the genre) would have to be Shadow Hearts, Xenoblade, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, Persona 2, and Tales of the Abyss. Unfortunately, I missed out on a lot of classics from the PS1 as a kid since we never owned the console, and playing them now just doesn't have the same impact.


Sure it does. Xenogears took the top spot in my favorite 5 games of all time only recently taking it from FF IV.  I didn't play it for the first time until my 30s well into 7th gen.

 

It was clunky and ugly as hell of course but my jaw dropped and the hairs on my neck stood up so many times.  The story revelations....wow.

Good JRPGs are timeless, though the early 3D doesn't stand up.



sales2099 on 02 July 2014

I'm going to be that guy: That is the nostalgia talking.

It was a major event at the time with being 3D and all. And I can't stress this enough, nostalgia makes your fond childhood memories better with time compared to what you actually experienced. There are better FF's out there now, hell id even venture to say that some of the FF 1-6 remakes on IOS or 3DS are also equally great in story and gameplay mechanics.

Side note: Do NOT watch your favorite childhood movies. Your opinion of them now will change for the worse. Just let it stay in the past :)



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phaedruss on 02 July 2014
Intrinsic said:
phaedruss said:
Intrinsic said:
Nope. disagree. Thats just his nostalgia talking. I feel FF8, FF9 and FF12 were all better. In every imaginable way that made FF7 good. Well, with exception to the story in FF12 which started off the best but somewhere along the line just stopped being a story and a straight line to the credits.

And even FF13 still uses a turn based system, though very different from the traditional turn based system. And I feel FF12 was the best as far as managing your parties actions are concerned while still using a turn based system.


FF XII was horrible when it came to managing your party unless you mean putting them on auto-pilot.

Wow... then you must have never used the gambit system properly. It may sound like auto-pilot, but its depth of customizations allowed for near infinite possibilties.

You could set a character to use a certain type of heal spell on the party when HP dropped below a certain percentage, or to use a focused more powerful heal spell when when one character recieved instant and extreme damage. You could have one particluar character set to constsantly evive your fallen party members and then have another party member set to only revive the healer if he dies. You could set you party to use certain types of attack spells after a certain prompt..eg, cast or use an item that makes chracters weaker to fire magic, and that will trigger all your chracters to use fire magic on that character for the duration of that status effect. Or casting slow on an enemy can prompt a party member to cast haste on all of your party..etc

I could go on forever, the gambit system was honestly the most ingenious and deepest party management system I have ever seen and allowed you really do so much more in combat rather than micro manage everything. If you have a perfect gambit setup for any combination of party members... its really a beauty to watch everything fall into place.


Yea, I understand perfectly what the gambit system was and how it worked, like I said auto-pilot, I prefer to control my whole party in a single player RPG rather than pretending it's an MMO.



Wright on 02 July 2014

It's certainly a game I would replay, but it's nowhere near to be the best RPG ever made.



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Wagram on 02 July 2014

It wasn't even the best JRPG when it came out. Fantastic, but best? Not in my eyes.



exdeath on 02 July 2014

Oh but Aeris dies its so awesome and tear jerking.

No.

Let me introduce you to Palom and Porom, Yang, Cid, Rydia, Locke, Celes, Cyan..

If you'd experienced those tragedies first, you too would be let down by FF VIIs mediocrity.

VII has all the tragedy and emotion of a paper bag compared to the Shakespeare deep tragedy behind the characters I listed. Aeris was about as interesting as a paper doll.



famousringo on 02 July 2014
phaedruss said:
Intrinsic said:

Wow... then you must have never used the gambit system properly. It may sound like auto-pilot, but its depth of customizations allowed for near infinite possibilties.

You could set a character to use a certain type of heal spell on the party when HP dropped below a certain percentage, or to use a focused more powerful heal spell when when one character recieved instant and extreme damage. You could have one particluar character set to constsantly evive your fallen party members and then have another party member set to only revive the healer if he dies. You could set you party to use certain types of attack spells after a certain prompt..eg, cast or use an item that makes chracters weaker to fire magic, and that will trigger all your chracters to use fire magic on that character for the duration of that status effect. Or casting slow on an enemy can prompt a party member to cast haste on all of your party..etc

I could go on forever, the gambit system was honestly the most ingenious and deepest party management system I have ever seen and allowed you really do so much more in combat rather than micro manage everything. If you have a perfect gambit setup for any combination of party members... its really a beauty to watch everything fall into place.


Yea, I understand perfectly what the gambit system was and how it worked, like I said auto-pilot, I prefer to control my whole party in a single player RPG rather than pretending it's an MMO.


Yeah, a scriptable party was a novel idea, but it positively slaughtered player agency.

Rather than a being a frontline squad commander whose orders make the difference between life and death, the player becomes a middle manager who writes a book of policies that delegates all decisions, then leans back in a big chair while smoking a cigar. I'm sure they could have made it more boring if they had the player worry about staff scheduling and limiting legal liability.



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theprof00 on 02 July 2014
Egann said:

What a surprise. I disagree with someone from N4G.

Final Fantasy VII is actually one of my least favorite of the old Squaresoft games. Every FF game has it's faults, but I found VII particularly irritating. The lifestream business irritated me almost as much as Cloud giving an abrupt character 180 when Sephiroth shows up. And then Tifa knew the whole time that Cloud had Zach's memories and said NOTHING?!

Yeah, good gameplay doesn't make up for stuff like that in my book. Crisis Core is the only FF VII game which doesn't suck.

If you are looking for a traditional party-based RPG, I would say Chrono Cross is the better game, both with gameplay and story. If you are willing to consider non-traditional RPG's, I have to mention Parasite Eve, which was short and really didn't give you a ton of options, but one of Square's best constructed stories. And then there's Xenogears.

Take your pick. I prefer all three of those over VII. Heck, I would prefer VIII, as faulted as it is over VII. Square had a ton of really good RPG games back in the day, and a lot of what you will find enjoyable in each is personal taste. But I do think some of them deserve mentioning in the same breath as  nostalgia-goggled VII.

Lifestream business? What's the problem?
Cloud character 180? You mean when he realizes who he is?
Tifa knew what and said nothing? Cloud only believed he was the person with Sephiroth and some other minor things. He only shows up in the middle of the Avalanche story. Tifa hasn't seen him for years. When he talks about going to Nibel, that's exactly when she DOES say something, because she knows that's not correct. Also, Cloud didn't have Zach's memories, he was just confused about the events in Nibelheim because he underwent mako poisoning, was traumatized by Seph, and then injected with Jenova, meanwhile Zach was talking to him in his coma. There's nothing about actually possessing his memories through lifestream or whatever. As a 10 year old I understood this.

And no, as far as stories go, it's hard to find one as well constructed as ff7. You'll call nostalgia goggles, I'm sure, but my two other favorite storylines in old rpgs are ff:tactics, and suikoden 2. I'm not saying it's amazing...I'm saying it's better than most. You could write a list of all the ones better, but I'll quadruple your list with ones that are worse.



brendude13 on 02 July 2014

Agreed. I first played it in 2009, and it still managed to blow me away.