by Ken Horowitz
About a year ago, Square Soft released Final Fantasy VII on Sony's Playstation console. The game received more hype than the Super Bowl, and was a smashing success (it sold over three million copies in Japan). Now, Square has decided to port it over to the PC, courtesy of Eidos Interactive.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the Final Fantasy mythos, let me clue you in. In 1990, Square released FF1 for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The game was a success and swiftly prompted a sequel on the Super Nes. This game, and its sequel FF3, distinguished themselves for their excellent storylines and awesome music. The series has achieved classic status in the U.S. and enjoys a nearly religious following in Japan. Although parts four through six were never released stateside (why Square, oh why?), part seven was getting press attention more than a year before its intended release.
The story centers around a young mercenary named Cloud (better start getting used to those weird video game names, they're quite common) who joins Avalanche, a group battling the corrupt Shinra Corporation. Shinra rules the world through its monopoly on Mako Energy, the fuel that is used to power everything. The problem is that harvesting this energy is slowly destroying the planet.
Cloud is by no means alone in his righteous quest. During the course of his adventure, he meets a large cast of characters, including Cid (who's been in every FF game since part two). Vincent (a sharpshooter), Red XIII (a talking dog with human-like intelligence, and Aerith and Tifa (Cloud's love interests).
Through a detailed storyline (hey, it IS a Final Fantasy game), classic role-playing elements (I especially like the Materia system, which lets you customize what effects and spells you want to develop), and turned-based battle scenes, the game progresses to the ultimate confrontation between Avalanche and Shinra.
You may or may not be asking how the PC version fairs against the Playstation version. The good news is that Eidos was not constrained by the Playstation's hardware limitations. More RAM and 3D processing power have freed the programmers from the struggle of creating insane management routines that often taxed the hardware to its limits. This mainly shows in the battle scenes and on the world map, where graphics are much cleaner than on the Playstation and animate at a faster frame rate. However, before you expect to be amazed at the Alone in the Dark style pre-rendered backgrounds, be warned. Stretching a 320X480 screen leaves much to be desired. The results are often blocky, and the now cleaner-looking polygonal characters seem out of place against the chunky backdrops. This is also evident during the game's CG sequences. It's a shame too, because they really add to the game's feel.
The 3Dfx card does shine in the level of detail achieved on the actual characters themselves. For example, you can now count the number of strokes of Kanji on the Mog's headband in the summon spell (it looks REALLY neat).
Musically, the game is relatively the same as the Playstation version, which is pretty darn good. It isn't redbook audio (poo!), but I guess Nobuo Uematsu was too busy to score new music for this version (FFVIII maybe?). I was disappointed, however, that the CG sequences are entirely subtitled. A game of this caliber deserves to be heard!
In the final analysis: is it worth the money? In my opinion it is. While I'm not a big fan of pre-rendered backgrounds (real time is where it's at!), the game's atmosphere and story hooks you in for the long haul. Expect to squeeze 25+ hours of play time out of this one my friends. It isn't hard to play, and the magic spells are worth the price of admission alone. They are simply AMAZING.
So, until Red XIII learns to fetch Cloud's slippers, keep those game pads happy!
Ken Horowitz is a HAL-PC member and world class gamer.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.