I am writing about Final Fantasy VII out of order in my history because I only recently discovered that it was, for two weeks in November 1997, the UK’s #1 bestselling game. There are many gaps in the available chart records, and the weeks after Final Fantasy VII’s release fell into one of them. On the way from 1984 to 1997, there is much I still might have missed. However, I know with absolute certainty that it was the first game in the series to have been UK #1, and that Final Fantasys I to VI had not previously achieved the same feat. This is because they had not yet been released in the UK at all. That void extended to some other famous RPGs Squaresoft had worked on: Super Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger had not been released in Europe either, a state of things which continued until 2008 and 2009 respectively.
Over in the US, they had got both of those but only three of the first six Final Fantasy games. Converting lots of text from Japanese to the much less space-efficient English meant additional memory requirements even after translation compromises, meaning such games cost more to produce and had to be sold at a higher price. To that Square could add in the additional language requirements of Europe, and the fact they released all of them on consoles made by Nintendo, who shared a mutual disinterest with the continent. With all of that, it just wasn’t worth making the effort to release Final Fantasy games here. That was one more thing changed by the worldwide success of Sony’s PlayStation, and one more way that Square’s decisions to move Final Fantasy VII to the PlayStation and its CD format paid off.
As far as Japanese RPGs went, some relatively minor releases on Sega’s consoles were pretty much the only ones the vast majority of British players would have previously seen. (A release date aside: the other defining RPG release of this era as far as Brits were concerned, that of the initial entries of Game Freak and Nintendo’s Pokémon series, actually preceded Final Fantasy VII in Japan, but was still a couple of years away here in the UK.) Even other types of more narrative-focused Japanese games, like the Legend of Zelda series, hadn’t had any great success here. All of that meant that Final Fantasy VII came with a different context in the UK than it did in Japan and America.
In Japan, it set new records but was the latest entry in a blockbuster series. In the US, it reached massive new audiences, but the majority of early players would likely have at least heard of the Final Fantasy series, and many played it. When Final Fantasy VII finally came here, it was pretty much a success out of nowhere. The UK’s Official PlayStation Magazine was uncertain whether it would work out: “The only remaining worry rests with the reaction of British gamers. It’s not a problem for the Japanese, and even the Americans have now acquired the taste, but attaching any kind of kudos to strategic menu-driven combat is still a fried egg/Teflon scenario over here.”
In fact, the reception elsewhere played a part in selling it. Computer & Video Games magazine gave the cover of their October 1997 issue and a seven page feature over to introducing it as “the ultimate PlayStation game”, and included a box asking “Best game on PlayStation?” which opens with “Over three million players worldwide can’t be wrong: Final Fantasy VII is already a classic.” Squaresoft told Britain that the game’s success and importance to us was a fait accompli, and it worked. There’s something of a parallel with the game’s own story, in which the main character Cloud trades on his reputation of military prowess, handily built up elsewhere.
The intro to that C&VG piece says “Squaresoft have rewritten the rules not just for RPGs but for the future of games”. Playing Final Fantasy VII indeed must have been a particularly startling new experience to a lot of its British players, and not just those who saw adverts and thought they were getting an action game. Bits would have been familiar, though. The RPG concept, the idea of playing out an adventure through turn-based choices and actions, wasn’t new at all. Tabletop games were popular here too and I’d played a few, as well as more distant descendents like Magic the Gathering. Some western RPG computer games did moderately well here — Eye of the Beholder, for instance. Failing familiarity with those, when it came to the idea of a game where you stare at pages of stats and try to optimise your squad lineup, buy and sell further enhancements, and make tactical decisions on the fly as you face opponents, Britain’s many Championship Manager players can’t have found the concept too mind boggling. Plus, of course, there are the precedents outside of gaming, and I don’t just mean all the Star Wars references. Some players would have been familiar with Akira and grasped much of the aesthetic and tone, or have watched Laputa: Castle in the Sky and found it easy to get Aeris’s whole deal.
When it comes to narrative within games, though, Final Fantasy VII really was something of a revolution to the British mainstream in its scale and complexity. With the most popular Western RPGs leaning more into process and player-generation, point and click adventures are probably the heaviest mainstream games previously got here in terms of scripted narrative. Beneath a Steel Sky has obvious thematic similarities to Final Fantasy VII, but its cast and world are tiny by comparison. I will stan forever for the superb and sophisticated writing of Monkey Island 2, but in its list of priorities telling a story came somewhere below 1) being funny and 2) interrogating the whole idea of telling a story.
Final Fantasy VII isn’t humourless and certainly isn’t devoid of meta-narrative tricks, but it also tells a vast and detailed story at great length, with an ensemble cast who you spend a lot of time getting to know. Everyone gets their own moment, and several different characters even take over as lead. The planet-destroying corporation Shinra is presented through a huge cast of baddies and sub-baddies and not-actually-baddies that could carry many a narrative themselves, and they turn out to not even be the ultimate enemy. The way that the game starts out with a couple of hours of non-stop action and then has main character Cloud literally fall out of the narrative and into a completely different, slower, intro is brilliantly done and sets out the twistiness and scale of what is to come.
Alongside the narrative ambition, Squaresoft max out spectacle in any way possible, from the luxe FMV sequences to ridiculously overblown magic animations to some jaw-dropping angles and ideas when you’re just walking around. There is a striking visual flair to even simple scenes, like the way the characters get in a lift early on and it’s depicted as a box lit up against a black background, and its move between floors shown by it moving off the bottom of the screen and back in at the top. The game’s way of showing flashbacks made up by different snippets by keeping the background still and having characters pop around it in jumpcuts makes even some simple conversations within them feel ominous and dramatic. Sections where two different versions of the same character are overlaid unevenly are impressively creepy. And it’s all ultimately in service of telling a story in a confident and sincere way that sits very at odds with the instincts of the narrative games that were previously most popular here. It’s no wonder that the game made such an emotional impact on so many.
This is the point where I have to come clean and say that I was not one of those people blown away by Final Fantasy VII. I played it at possibly the worst possible time — a couple of years later and having already played a borrowed copy of the first disc of Final Fantasy VIII. More on that when I get to the end of 1999. FF7 was an alternative Christmas present to the one we wanted, mostly because by then it was on the platinum range and £15 cheaper than its successor. My brother and I soon bought FF8 too and, focusing on that, bounced off FF7 before the end of the first disc of its three. There was no big wow moment for us on reaching the world map for the first time. Plus we already knew some of FF7’s most famous twists, which were pretty much unavoidable by that point. When I eventually came back to it, I did get through the whole game and enjoy it, but it could never have been the revelation it might have been if we’d been there at the beginning.
Final Fantasy VII also suffers from a whole lot of functional annoyances which didn’t get any less irritating on replaying. The random battles are the most common complaint, but actually come some way down my list. The pre-rendered backgrounds that allow the game to look so lush also turn much of it into a battle of trying to work out what is interactive, what is a path you can walk on, and what is indistinguishable wall. Walking around pressing a button in random spots to try to prompt something to happen is frustrating. Triggering the exact same conversation with someone several times over as you try to do something else is nails-on-chalkboard. The game’s determination to provide new things to do and new mini-games at every turn is hit-or-miss, sometimes charming but frequently tedious (looking at you, Mr. Dolphin, and the entire parade drill mess right after).
When I played Final Fantasy VII back in 2000, though, there were a handful of superb moments which made enough of an impression for me to still remember them, and which say a lot about what made the game so special. They align pretty well with what stood out when I played it again in 2020, at just the time everyone was playing its remake.
The first was a battle towards the end of the game, I think against Diamond Weapon. It knocked out two of my characters and left just Vincent Valentine (yes, we were consulting internet walkthroughs by that point). I had already set off Vincent’s limit break move, in which he turns into a monster and you no longer have control over him. So he just kept on attacking and couldn’t heal himself or do anything else. However, thanks to his elemental alignment, every few moves, the enemy carried out a move which healed rather than hurt him. I left them to it, went off to have lunch, and came back an hour later to the battle victory screen.
You could point to this as a negative, an example of completely broken gameplay. It did rather stomp on narrative suspension of disbelief that the enemy didn’t realise what was happening and stop healing Vincent. I loved it, though, as the most batshit example of the sheer range of things that can happen thanks to Final Fantasy VII’s teetering tower of systems on systems on systems.
Its combat is superficially straightforward, but has so many opaque rabbit holes to go down that add depth in delightfully weird ways. Just the Enemy Skill mechanic, where when enemies use certain moves you learn them and can use them from then on, has enough to it that it could power much of a game in itself, particularly when coupled with Manipulate and the power to dictate enemies’ actions. But those are just one tiny part of an immense set of systems in which you can pretty much focus on your favourite bits and not worry too much about the rest. And that’s just the combat, before you even get on to all the other extras in the game like the possibility of giving your life over to breeding racing chickens.
The second memorable section also came later in the game. It’s the section in which you journey into Cloud’s subconscious as Tifa, who knew him as a child, and work with him to unpick his screwed-up memories. I’ve seen and loved similar bits in a lot of games since, the dream sequence, or madness sequence, or mad dream sequence, in which the place you are in makes no literal sense (Life is Strange had a strong recent example). It’s something that games are particularly well suited to. In Final Fantasy VII’s, there are a whole bunch of chilling revelations and twists as so much of what Cloud based his identity on gets stripped away, but as much as the narrative, it’s the place that stuck with me.
Being able to walk around and interact with the various Clouds present lends exactly the same concrete sense of reality to this abstract place as interaction does to every location which is physically real within the world of the game. Indeed, the sequence plays on previous parts of the game which were presented as flashbacks of things which had actually happened. The way I felt grounded in those places by the action of interacting with them, being in them, gives the later revelations of the fluidity of their reality a force which would be difficult to replicate in other media.
Final Fantasy VII uses a sense of place as one of its most potent dramatic tools throughout. The much-loved opening section of the game covered by Final Fantasy VII: Remake is based in the grim futuristic city of Midgar, and it wastes no time in introducing you to its geography. The city’s division into numbered sectors and literal vertical split into two levels are used to make its oppression and inequality tangible. You talk to lots of people in the lower areas and they talk about both their lack of choice and their attachment to where they’re from. Lines like someone saying proudly saying “We can get anything here in the slums” help it to feel more like a place people live.
The themes of decay, displacement and inequality are picked up again and again as you travel through the world. One of the most striking parts is an even bigger juxtaposition than Midgar, as you travel from the run-down town of North Corel to the shiny Gold Saucer in the desert. After arriving at this tacky Vegas playground, possibly stuck in the entrance if you can’t afford the entrance fee, there is a spot to save your game. Go to use it and it tells you that it will cost you 5 GP, a special Gold Saucer currency. Which you don’t have any of yet. Being excluded from the basic functionality of the game you’ve taken for granted, because you can’t afford it, is a great way of making the gauche capitalist brutality of the place really sting.
Loss also powers the final, most memorable part of all, alongside Final Fantasy VII’s most famous event. What sticks with me wasn’t quite the death of one of the playable characters itself. Having already seen someone else play the game with that character named ‘Soontodie’ rendered that less than stunning. It was the moment soon afterwards when you are thrust into a boss battle and instead of the usual hyped up fight music, the same peaceful and now mournful theme continues playing right through the battle. Playing again this time round, I found myself wanting to cry every time that music came up earlier in the game, which says something of its impact, not to mention Nobuo Uematsu’s musical brilliance.
I doubt that Final Fantasy VII wasn’t the first game to use this trick. It isn’t even the first time in the game it’s used, I realised this time, which is unsurprising given how brilliantly Final Fantasy VII uses music throughout. It even brings it within the world itself, like the charming moment in one of the flashbacks when Cloud slowly picks out the notes of the main theme on a piano. The earlier mismatched battle music is a sequence in which you fight random battles in Shinra headquarters to the same eerie soundtrack that plays in between them, as you try to find out why the fuck everyone is suddenly dead and there are smeared trails of blood everywhere.
The sad music boss battle is next level, though, and one of the most powerful portrayals of grief I can think of. The music is a constant, aching reminder that something is very wrong, blocking you from mentally just getting straight back into the familiar. But still, that is exactly what you have to do. You have to carry on doing what you have been doing, making the choices and taking the actions that keep you alive and moving forwards. It’s jarring and even nauseating, and that’s exactly the point.
Final Fantasy VII wasn’t the future of gaming in the UK, any more than it was anywhere else, or any more than, say, Tomb Raider was the future of gaming here. It was, though, a game which both broke new ground and built wisely on a whole genre and tradition which we had previously been shut out of. The touching sequence I talked about can only work in the way it does as part of a long-form game. If fighting battles wasn’t second nature by that point, if I hadn’t got used to seeing and controlling all of the characters over such a long stretch, it wouldn’t have felt like an overturning of regular life to anything like the same extent. Final Fantasy VII is a great story, and a great argument for telling a story over the course of tens of hours of interaction with regular sections of repetitive menu-based combat.
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