[Minor spoilers included]
When I was younger, I never had the experience of playing through FF7. The only memory I had was never escaping the power plant explosion in the very beginning because I was very young and couldn't read English. But I remember playing that section over and over trying to beat it, although I never got to experience anything beyond that part I had a fond memory playing through that beginning over and over. As I got older, I went back to play all the classic Final Fantasy on the GameBoy Advanced and loved it. My favourite being 4 since I love character driven game and seeing Cecil develop was one of the best part of the game.
Recently, FF7 is now on steam and I finally get to play through that game and get past the beginning. I usually don't like older games because of the awful textures and the weird unexplained game play system. But playing through this game made me realize why people loved this game and continue to love it till even now. The way the environment is designed before the game play is one of the coolest thing that I haven't seen the new final fantasy do. The part where you have to climb the tall pole to get over to Shinra corp, you don't know what is decoration and what is an actual platform. The different perspective you have in every room is also amazing. When it zooms out all the way to show you the sense of scale, when it goes top-down view in Nibelheim mansion on the spiral stairway, or when you jump from building to building with Aeris show that FF7 can also use the camera to tell the story.
The story and the narrative of FF7 is also very well developed. Although I haven't finish the story yet, I love how much I play of it. It never goes into detail of what is Midgar nor what the upper-class regions of Midgar looks like but you feel like you are in Midgar as you play. The slum, the trains, the church it feel very human. Unlike FF13 where it looks all pretty and cool but very cold and alien, FF7 slightly tweaked the real world and added in some fantasy elements where it looks dirty and ugly but very human and inviting. The character Cloud is something that we can also relate to since Cloud has never been to a lot of these places we are dragged into so we feel like we are exploring Midgar with Cloud. The fact that Cloud is also someone who was dragged into this whole mess in the first place is something else we can relate with to him. Everyone has a objective and everyone has personality, unlike Lightning in FF13 who is an edgelord9000 every time she comes on screen, Cloud shows us he can be a goofy guy at times. Tifa, Barret, Aeris has different personality to him. Even Wedge, Biggs, and Jessie is characters you'll come to miss. Especially when Barrett breaks down after he survives the pillar destruction. Barrett is probably one of the driving force of the story and his two serious and goofy personality really made you want to follow him on his struggle to bring Shinra down. When I was playing this game, I cared more about Barrett and the struggles of the resistance than the survival of the planet. Although where I am at the Shinra seem to be a very weak villian storywise but I hope that changes with Sephiroth.
The gameplay feels very good since it is just the old Final Fantasy system but with a time meter. At first I thought Limit was a rare thing that only happens every blue moon, because it can be used often made the game play interesting. Since everyone has mana, it doesn't feel punishing to always use magic. In previous Final Fantasy there are character that has such a small mana bar that they could only cast 1-2 spell made casting magic punishing. This game made casting magic fun and with the Materia system I love how you can level them up too and customize who has which spells.
Overall, I can't believe how much I enjoyed playing this game since I never liked older games. It has really stood the test of time and have mechanics that trumps over even the newer games. I hope FF7 remake can offer as much as the original game did and I hope Final Fantasy as a whole franchise would learn more from this game. I enjoyed playing it and I will be playing more of it later.
Do you agree with my opinions and what did you like about FF7, leave me a comment so we can talk about this game more and I thank you guys for reading this.
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