POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD.



Graphics: Alot of people like to make the claim that the graphics are as they are because it was an early PSX title. What with its squares connected to other squares for body parts, lack of mouths on any character, deformed overworld characters who look like badly made "chibi" versions of their battle models, and enemies that suffer from the same "square connected to square" syndrome. But this is folly. In fact, this is one of the single worst looking games on the PSX.  the FMV sequences were well done, except that they used the overworld character models, but overall the graphics are sub par for what the PSX was capable of handling, how much data the CD's could hold, and compared to almost any other PSX title from the same time period.


Sound: the sound in this game is nothing but bad midis. YES, the music is -generally- composed well. Catchy tunes, an interesting voice synth on the semi-final boss, but that doesn't detract from the fact that the system could handle real music perfectly fine, and there was more then enough space on each CD to fit real music in. If you have the PC version, which you almost certainly don't, you can replace the terrible quality super Nintendo music with real music. But on the console, you're stuck with super Nintendo instruments. I don't believe many PSX titles took advantage of the real music capabilities, but that doesn't matter, the fact is that they COULD have put it in, but they opted to lowball it and make this thing for the cheapest possible cost, and use terrible sounding midis. The sound effects themselves are annoying, you just here "swish" and "tatatatata" all the time. There are a good amount of sound effects, but once again, they used midi when they didn't have to, and ended up making a bunch of terrible sounding nonsense. The only sound effect in the entire game that I enjoy, is the chocobo "wark" which ironically sounds like a high pitched "boo-bee-boo"


Addictiveness: well, its an rpg. If you like rpgs, then it will be semi addictive as you figure out the materia system, but that will soon lose any novelty once you realize it takes half the game just to master ANYTHING. The battles are boring, you can literally go through the entire first disk doing nothing but holding down X and attacking everything. No magic needed, no special attacks, just attack and limit break. 2nd disk requires SOME strategy, and 3rd a little more, but its a dull and lifeless battle system that is only given high praise for being, in most peoples minds, the first 3D rpg.


Story: the story is terrible. In a sad attempt to make it seem "deep" they throw a bunch of nonsense that's never quite explained fully, and makes no damn sense at all. The majority of the story revolves around your main characters secret love for the main villain, who he killed several years back, but somehow survived because of a bunch of nonsense. You just run around as your guy screams "sephiroth were art thou my love?". That's not LITTERALY what he says, but it is essentially what the main story revolves around. The characters are extremely 1 dimensional, and are generally devoid of any personality besides that which they exhibit when you first meet them. 


Depth: its actually a decently long game. It should take about 30-40 hours to beat if you just plow through it, don't bother to care about "secret" items and spells, bosses, and take on the final boss in his weakest form. There is a fair amount of stuff to do, with a few completely pointless minigames, a battle arena, and a seemingly useless feature of breeding giant chickens that actually gets you the best spells in the entire game. As previously mentioned, the battle system is minimal. While there ARE many combinations of materia you can use for different effects, they are all worthless. You'll basically end up doing nothing but spamming your highest level elemental spell, attacking, and highest level healing spell for the entire game. The summons can do a nice bit of damage, but are mostly a waste of time since the time it took to use most of them, you could have done 2x the damage in other ways.


Difficulty: there is none. First disk, hold x for every fight and you win. Second disk, same rule, but add in a few healing spells. 3rd disk, the exact same but with stronger healing spells, and the occasional elemental spell. A lot of people have a hard time fighting the "secret" bosses, this is generally because they want to rush  through the game as fast as possible to say "OMG I DUN BEETED FF7", and try to score some nostalgia points with those of us who moved past this travesty long ago.the secret bosses require either a very specific strategy(ruby) or final attack materia(emerald). The final boss is a joke. If you're level 98 or lower, his health is pathetic. If you didn't use Knights Of The Round on his first form (jenova synthesis is in fact sephiroth), AND are lower then level 99 with all characters, you can actually 1-hit the final boss with either Knights Of The Round, or Omnislash, or one of the several other specials that hit for around 15 times.


Overall: I enjoyed it as a youngling. It looked terrible back then, but we were willing to overlook that seeing as the last systems looked terrible to the Nth degree(snes,genesis). We were even able to overlook the bad sounds that were obviously the same soundfonts used on the snes/genesis albeit slightly better. But the terrible, generic story? The generic battle system that can be summed up to "hold down confirm and attack"? The complete lack of anything to do OTHER then fight, do worthless minigames that aren't even fun, and breed giant chickens n a way that REQUIRES a strategy guide to understand due to a complete lack of explanation? No. The only people who were willing to overlook these things, were people who had been playing every iteration of Madden, or almost any of the generic copy/pasted titles across the SNES. Those of us who had previous history and enjoyment of RPGs, were terribly disappointed. It is important to note that they KNEW they could have had better graphics and sound. How can I state this? Final fantasy 8. Made about 2 years after, on the same system, it showed what ff7 COULD have been. Alas, this was what we had. A low quality piece of trash rushed out in the hopes that people would buy it simply because it said "final fantasy" on the cover. 

Huh, this review is interesting, and this is not just a pointless "I didn't read this but I am posting anyway because I love spam! Yay!" I mean I am interested in your review, like actually interested by it and here's why. While this review was mostly negative (Not blaming or even disagreeing with you, nor I am I agreeing with you, merely stating.) you actually backed up your claims for the most part which is something that is sadly lacking in your average Vizzed review these days. While I personally have yet to finish this game (Disk broke.) I'm not going to say I agree nor disagree with any of your points because I personally decide not to review something until I've played it through. However I do actually see your points that you have made here and I see why you feel the way you do about the game and I will respect you and your opinion of the game. I would love to see more reviews from you in the future.

You know what, a lot of the Psone and N64 games haven't aged that well either because of bad 3D/blocky polygon graphics horrible cameras or something of the like.

I'm not sure about the argument that this was so much different than other 3D games for it's time. Heck, a lot of the reason why I feel like this age of games has aged the worst is because of games with blocky polygon style graphics similar to the ones you are complaining about in this review. Sure you might feel that this game is worse than others, but it's not that much worse taking in consideration other games released for it's time.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but I feel that if you play a lot of the popular titles from this time period, you will find this is a common problem.

what exactly is final fantasy about?

not really. most early psx games had at least some form of smoothness to the polygons. this game is literally just squares and triangles connected to other shapes as such.  while badly done polygons were common for most space shooters, and low budget cast off games that companies just put out in small quantities, youll find that with most 3D PSX games, regardless of the time they came out, had far more smoothing applied to them then whats done here. thats mostly because in OTHER games they actually used textures. in this game they just colored body parts a solid color, and applied low quality texture wrapping to certain parts of the body.  the battle graphics arent as bad, but they stil suffer from the exact same thing. if you ever beat this game, youll notice in the REAL final fight, that clouds battle model is NOT blocky. its actually very smooth for the hardware being used, and in some ways looks even better then those used in FF8. 

oh and for the record, i have played almost every PSX title that has ever come out in the USA. i love the PSX, and always have.

as for what final fantasy is about, its the same story every time. you have to save the world. you know, pretty much the same thing as almost every other rpg. its not so much "what its about" as much as its "what leads up to the conclusion". many find the ending (what its about) to be the main point, but thats how terrible storylines like FF7's get praised as great, when in actuality they are generic, uninteresting, and badly written.

TetraDigm : You are saying that you disagree that N64 and Psone have a lot of titles with blocky polygons?? What games are you playing?? Sure, some might be worse than others, but it's a common theme for games early in the 3D era. To say otherwise would be disingenuous

As far as this title is concerned, I have played through it and beaten it several times. Including back when the game first game out. I've been playing games for about 30 years now ;-)

Also I always get irked when people refer to the PS1 as a PSX because the PSX was in fact a console that was released on the PS2 platform with a DVR unit built in. So I would like to point that out for any younger users that might read this thread.

It's refreshing to see someone sharing my opinion about Final Fantasy VII being overrated. I largely think it became so popular because of the characters. Cloud, Sephiroth, Aeris, etc. I just didn't like Final Fantasy VII much. I still personally disagree with your review though. You seemed to focus most about the game's graphics, and how horrible they looked. Even though they're not quite up to par with certain games here and there from 1997, the game was huge, it had multiple discs just to be able to play the game well. I think Squaresoft had to sacrifice something, and let's face it, nice visuals is the least important ingredient for making a good game. 

You hit the needle on the head about the music, though. Never really thought about it, but you're right about that.

brb gtg play final fantasy 9264892

not at all Jordan. im saying that even though every game that used true 3D rendering for these systems DID use blocky polygons, the majority of titles which had some actual effort put into them, early or not, used a higher polygon count for their meshes, which resulted in a smoother look to the polygons. FF7, used a very low polygon count, and instead opted to use HUGE polygons, with essentially only 6-12 faces. this resulted in the game looking like one of the space rail shooters like starfox, where everything looks terrible and jagged.  this i common with titles that were rushed for the simple reason of throwing them at the market, and can be observed in almost every part of FF7. the inclusion of "minigames" that were completely useless just to fill some space, CD's using up barely half of their maximum capacity, overlooking overflow glitches, terrible quality music when real instrumental music would have been hardly any expense, or increase in data size. things like that.

 i refer to the playstation as the PSX because of the simple fact that it is the generally accepted abbreviation, and PS1 is actually referring to the PSOne, a smaller version later made to try and sucker people into buying a system that was already being pushed to its very limits.

Ordannons: i wouldnt say i focused on the games graphics, seeing as i only mentioned them in the graphics section, a nod to them being why people consider it a classic, and in the overall section. the game was of modest size, but it was split up into multiple disks for the PSX to make it SEEM bigger then it actually was. the total size for this game is around 900MB i believe, where as these CDs could hold around 700 on each. but even with that size, it was mostly only "big" because you ran slower the molasses, the battle gauge took forever to move, and the game was padded with extremely long sequences of nothing but talking. remember your first trip to Calm? that hour long trip of watching clouds past, only to find out later that it was all made up? thats the kind of stuff that makes this game long. they go into great detail to explain how things happened, and then 3 hours later hit you with a "trolol we were just messin with you". and then they never bother to explain what REALLY happens. as for sacrifices, the entire game was a sacrifice. they had an easy job, or designing a game on a system that had MASSIVE support for developers, a well made SDK, and compared to what they were used to programming for, extremely advanced hardware. they took what was sometimes a great series, and decided to make Final Fantasy 2 Part 2.

TetraDigm : Sorry Playstaton or PS1 is the correct term. Not PSX. That's all I'm saying. TO say otherwise is not true. Sure some people have adopted that term because of the emulator and some magazines, but that is in no way the correct term. So just an FYI. Feel free to Google it if for some reason you feel like I'm wrong. PSX is it's own console that has nothing to do with this platform.

Look you seem to keep changing what was said originally. Sure you might find that this game is more blocky than most, but what I am saying is that blocky textures are VERY common from that era. That's all I said. I also admitted that some games are worse than others but if you are playing a game made early in the 3D video game era, you know what you are getting into. Thats why most people feel that NES/SNES/Genesis era of games have aged better than Playstation games.

im done responding to you. if you want to act like a condescending know-it-all because you got the wrong answer to your attempted argument off google, then you just go ahead. im not on this site to troll, so there is no reason for me to continue any form of communication with you.

good day sir.

Jordanv78 : What? PSX is a incorrect term? sorry but i have to facepalm on that

GlazedKitten : It IS the incorrect Term to describe PS1. The PSX was a separate combo DVR PS2 system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSX_(video_game_console)

Jordanv78 : Thanks for clearing that up