PC re-release announcement vid.It's not the remake the fans have been asking for damn near since the month after the original release, but it's got a few new features. It's optimized for current gen PCs and the resolutions that were frankly science fiction back when it was new. It's got a character booster feature which is basically just a cheat feature for those who get stuck and just wants to play instead of grinding to win. There's also Cloud Saves (... seriously? Cloud saves? Palming Face procedure initiated.). Oh, and achievements for the pavlovian dogs who start drooling when there's a ding after a fight.
So is this something to be excited about? I mean, the game has been on PSN since 2009 and the game is fifteen years old by now. To me... yes, it's actually kind of exciting. I wasn't sure why so I decided to sit down and think back to the days when I first played it. Why is a re-release of this so great to me?
A camera moves through the dark streets of a city, occasional traffic breaking up the hum and glare of the neon lights. A girl contrasting so hard against the drab and dirty streets with her impossibly pink and red outfit and roses in her basket. The camera moving ever outwards and upwards, showing more and more of a dark and yet wondrous city, evoking imagery from Blade Runner and other great dystopias. The music reaches a climax and the logo appears before the camera zooms down and the music gets an electronic hectic pace to it. It's combat time and we're in a hurry.
Already then I think the youngster me realized this was something new. Something very special. All the controls the game had was the freakin' numpad and that was it. The combat was turnbased menu navigation and yet somehow visceral. The artstyle and design was outlandish. The mixing and matching of everything from vaguely steampunk to fantasy to sci-fi hit you somewhere in the primal core of "these things are all awesome... and they're all in the same game!". Exploration. Combat. Story. Character depth. These things weren't all supposed to be in the same game. Not when combined with the setting and the gameplay.
The main protagonist was even an emo bitch long before the emos got mainstream. Cloud is a hipster!
And of course, this was the game that introduced the violent, brutal, sudden and oh so senseless death of a close companion. Hell, for many it was the death of the love interest. Sure, there'd been death and loss of companions in other games, but for some reason this particular one was the one that really hit home for a lot of players. Like it or not FFVII was the first game where a lot of gamers came together around this one event and shared their experiences. Did you cry when Aeris (yes, I know, it's Aerith but all the translations I played had Aeris so fuck you all.) died? Well, I didn't but a lot of people did. For me it did make me very sad. It struck my young teenager self quite hard and for the very first time in gaming history it managed to make me hate an enemy.
That wasn't the end of it, though. It kept going. It got me to empathize with an enemy. It had me putting myself in his position and seeing things his way. His actions were understandable. They were almost justified. As he saw it he did -right- and yet it was okay to hate him. He was evil, no doubt about it... and yet you knew you were fighting a man/god that did what he thought was the right thing to do.
There'll always be some hipsters that claim that everything after FFVI is horribad and will never count as good. I really couldn't give two shits about that as there's just no denying that FFVII was the game that brought JRPGs to the masses and frankly revolutionized the genre. It reached out to PS and PC players alike, all across the world, and struck them harder than any game before it. For an astounding amount of people it was a pivotal and defining moment in gaming history and it is an integral part of their childhood or teen years.
For me, FFVII is an example of what gaming can truly accomplish. It's worldbuilding and storytelling out of this world. It's truly epic in scope (yes, the word actually applies here) and it puts todays games to shame. For the last couple of years I haven't seen one single game that can rival FFVII when taking the fifteen years of progress into account.
Is this re-release exciting? Yes, I think it is. And it's very telling that I am waiting with my wallet open for this to hit the market instead of anything else that's on the horizon. I don't need Dx11 graphics. I don't need enormous spectacles and endless first-person QTEs instead of bossfights. I certainly don't need Call of Battlefield: Modern Black Ops 4 to give me a couple of hours of generic singleplayer. I don't need indie devs giving me shitty pale copies of old games that fall apart after a few hours of playing.
I need this. A nice long game with a large world, characters, story, and more than five hours of gameplay.
I don't know who to blame for the age of gaming taking such a pratfall after the late nineties, but it's sad but true. The old days actually were the best. When this comes out, I think I'll install it and just yank out the ethernet cable for a month. The news get pushed to my phone anyway and I think it's time to shut out the endless noise from EA and the gaming press that impressively enough manage to sing their praises while having the publisher's dick lodged in their throats and quite simply focus on gaming.
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Topic: Ye Olde FFVII... again... (Read 1151 times)