Let's All Play: Final Fantasy VII (the original one)

The hype train is full steam ahead on the Final Fantasy VII Remake due out on PS4 in April of this year and everything else April of next year (come on, you know it's happening). Before that hype train pulls up at Inevitable Disappointment Station, let's all play through the original together. It's available on everything that runs Skyrim plus nearly everything that doesn't, so if you'd like to join in, there's an easy way for you to do it.

This isn't a club thing, so you don't need to sign up, there aren't any points, and no one has to vote on anything. It's just a fun community thing. Let's do it!

I started this a few days ago but only really put any time into it last night. Cloud has met Aeris (not Aerith, damn it!) and they're making their way through the junkyard.

I'm playing the vanilla PS One game on the PS3 and PSP. I really wish I had an old CRT TV to hook it up to.

I'm curious which version the rest of you are playing or have played.

Oh, and I should mention that spoilers are fine in this thread. The game is old enough by now.

I played through most of the game on PC back in 1997 or 98. I bought it on Switch a few months ago and have made it to Ft. Condor on the overworld before getting distracted by something else.

Playing with sped up battles and fast movement on a portable (if you so wish) system is the way to go with FF VII.

This thread should give me the incentive to get back to my current playthrough!

Is there a "best" version?

Probably the Switch version. It has all the cheats and extras of the other versions plus the option to be portable. All the re-releases make the game look worse than the original, so that's not really a consideration.

I would but I just played it in September. Maybe I’ll fire up my save and see about beating Ruby and Emerald since the cheats make all the grinding much faster.

Wembley wrote:

Is there a "best" version?

You can mod the Steam version to make it look as good as it does in your memories, while still playing the same.

Failing that, most versions are roughly equivalent, but the Switch version's portability and fast-forward feature make it an especially good way to play it.

So, I was turned on to No One Can Know About This, a podcast where they plan to play all the FF games and edit the play throughs for audio. They just finished up the FFVII season last week; it’s a fun podcast and I’d recommend it.

That said, they explained a certain cutscene that is optional on disc 3 that gets way deeper into the nature of Cloud and Zack. I had never heard of it or seen it, and it addresses my primary complaint about the narrative. Make sure you hit it if you’re playing through and haven’t before.

I started playing this last month but hit a major SNAFU this month in... well, a lot of stuff I've been playing and working on. I'm curious to see what other's thoughts are. I actually found that simply upping the battle speed in the game's config menu (not the added speed-up for the whole game) and setting it to wait makes combat a bit more challenging.

However, it's biggest issue is how long it takes for larger hordes of enemies to perform their attacks. That, combined with an avoidance of grinding, actually has made certain encounters a bit of a pain, but I've had fun working through some of that challenge.

I last completed Cosmo Canyon so needless to say I'm ahead. However, while I'm currently playing Switch, I want to replay Midgar on the PlayStation Classic to see if that ROM had some different content. I feel like more than "This guy are sick" were fixed in recent editions.

Just tagging in to read along — no chance I’ll have time to play it again myself.

Blind_Evil wrote:

That said, they explained a certain cutscene that is optional on disc 3 that gets way deeper into the nature of Cloud and Zack. I had never heard of it or seen it, and it addresses my primary complaint about the narrative. Make sure you hit it if you’re playing through and haven’t before.

I'm half-tempted to find a walkthrough to ensure I hit all the missable story cutscenes. I played the game previously on PC back in '98 or '99, and my memory of the story is not a positive one. I found significant elements of the story completely incomprehensible, but I remember finishing the game and being especially confused about the relationship between Zack, Cloud, and Sephiroth.

There are a lot of things I could chalk that up to, though. I was a teenager then, for instance, and I've read plenty of complaints about the game's original translation over the years. It was also my first-ever JRPG, so I just wasn't well-versed in the genre. I hadn't really seen much anime at that point, either.

So like I said, I'm tempted to ensure that this time around I get all the story content that I can. Maybe this time I'll actually understand what the hell is going on. On the other hand, there's a part of me that wants to just play the game without guidance to see what I make of it twenty years later. Was it really as bad as I remember? Or was my age and lack of genre savvy more of a factor than I thought?

Unrelated thought: after playing a bunch of Dragon Quest, Persona, and Tokyo Mirage Sessions, it's a little weird to play an RPG where I have to decide every character's actions every single turn.

I still need to get the trophy for dating Barret... I could download it again and shoot for it...

I did a rough count. I bought this game three times. I have played it to completion 7 times and abandoned advanced games 3 times. I have invested over 900 hours in it. As for the steam version, I am missing 4 achievements: End of Game, Master of Gil, Great Gospel, and Materia Overlord.

My point is this. Replaying sounds like a great idea and I'm in! Let me find my Brady Games guide!

ccesarano wrote:

I actually found that simply upping the battle speed in the game's config menu (not the added speed-up for the whole game) and setting it to wait makes combat a bit more challenging.

I'm not sure how this makes the game more challenging, but it sure makes the game more playable. Maxing out the battle speed makes it so that you're always picking your next action, and setting it in wait mode means you're not struggling with the cumbersome menus. It almost feels like a regular ol' turn-based game.

I seem to remember that in other Final Fantasy games you could customize the arrangement of the magic menu, but I can't find anything like that here. That could potentially make active mode more interesting to play.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Blind_Evil wrote:

That said, they explained a certain cutscene that is optional on disc 3 that gets way deeper into the nature of Cloud and Zack. I had never heard of it or seen it, and it addresses my primary complaint about the narrative. Make sure you hit it if you’re playing through and haven’t before.

I'm half-tempted to find a walkthrough to ensure I hit all the missable story cutscenes. I played the game previously on PC back in '98 or '99, and my memory of the story is not a positive one. I found significant elements of the story completely incomprehensible, but I remember finishing the game and being especially confused about the relationship between Zack, Cloud, and Sephiroth.

To clarify, the cutscene I’m talking about isn’t “missable” in the sense that you can’t go and see it after a certain point - it’s available at any point in the endgame.

The narrative, with the clarity of people explaining some of the parts that were poorly conveyed in the original translation, is actually pretty interesting. How Cloud came to possess Zack’s characteristics, and the true nature of the Sephiroth you’re dealing with at various points in the game is fascinating.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I'm not sure how this makes the game more challenging, but it sure makes the game more playable. Maxing out the battle speed makes it so that you're always picking your next action, and setting it in wait mode means you're not struggling with the cumbersome menus. It almost feels like a regular ol' turn-based game.

I seem to remember that in other Final Fantasy games you could customize the arrangement of the magic menu, but I can't find anything like that here. That could potentially make active mode more interesting to play.

Yeah I typo'ed there. I meant to say "Active". What's weird is I haven't changed to "Memory" for the cursor, so whatever my last action was is highlighted. That tends to be a major time saver, but somehow the game hasn't become unreasonably difficult yet.

Even when doing the dungeon in Cosmo Canyon where the Death counter ticked down surprisingly fast.

Final Fantasy IV allows you to arrange magic in any order you'd like, if I recall, though White, Black, and Summon magic are all in their own command menus. Final Fantasy VI allows you to choose the order of magic type in the command menu. I was also a bit surprised to find Final Fantasy VII offers nothing of the sort.

I did find use for Toad and Mini against larger, hard hitting regular foes. Really helps save on resources when progressing through a dungeon. Bio seems to poison bosses on a decent basis, but as usual, the other stuff has lower or no success rate on bosses at all.

Oh yeah: you basically want "Steal" on Cloud at all times because FF7 calculates success in weird ways based on your level and the enemy's level, and Cloud is bound to always be your highest level character. I feel like it's the most worthless in FF7 of the games I've played recently, with FF9 being the lone example of its usefulness.

Look, translators, are the enemies called "Shinra" or "the Shinra"? Make up your damn minds!

ccesarano wrote:

Final Fantasy IV allows you to arrange magic in any order you'd like, if I recall, though White, Black, and Summon magic are all in their own command menus. Final Fantasy VI allows you to choose the order of magic type in the command menu. I was also a bit surprised to find Final Fantasy VII offers nothing of the sort.

In your Config menu at the very bottom, there is an option called Magic Order that determines how your magic is listed. They fall into three categories: Attack, Restore, and Indirect. The options determine which category is listed first, middle, and last with all six options available.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Look, translators, are the enemies called "Shinra" or "the Shinra"? Make up your damn minds!

I got an old boss that worked QA on the original translation. Stuff like that would get him to laugh and laugh.

I don't think I can jump back in and stomach the old jankiness, but I do pleasantly recall making it out of the big city for the first time and coming to realize there was big world out there.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I'm half-tempted to find a walkthrough to ensure I hit all the missable story cutscenes...

...On the other hand, there's a part of me that wants to just play the game without guidance to see what I make of it twenty years later. Was it really as bad as I remember? Or was my age and lack of genre savvy more of a factor than I thought?

I always had the impression that you were EXPECTED to play PS1-era Final Fantasy games with a print guide in arm's reach. There is content you can't reasonably hope to find otherwise; I recall it being pretty tricky to get Yuffie (and maybe even Vincent) in your party without a tip.

Last night I left Midgar and am now playing through the flashback in Kalm. As I understand it, I've now played the full scope of the upcoming remake.

... That's it? That's all they're working with?

I had remembered Midgar being a much bigger, much more significant chunk of the game. Somewhere in the vicinity of the first third of the game. It's nowhere near that, and what's there already feels a bit overstuffed. Shinra Tower, especially, felt like a lot of padding and busywork that's not necessarily out of place in a game from '97 but wouldn't fit in at all in 2020.

(Although Shinra Tower does have my favorite absurd detail so far. At one point, you come across a scale model of Midgar. You're required to rebuild from pieces you find in chests around the floor, so it's obviously some kind of physical model. However, someone has taken the time to break Sector 7 in the model, the sector that plummeted into the slums maybe an hour or two before. That's some dedication to accuracy!)

My first save outside of Midgar was about six hours in. I'm sure they'll juice up the cutscenes and throw in some encounters with people you don't actually battle in the original game. But I feel bad for the developers who have been asked to stretch this sliver of the game into a full-scale AAA release. Maybe we'll get to run around the city as Cloud collecting chocobo feathers?

Having now refreshed my memory of all of this, the upcoming remake feels a bit like Nintendo announcing a lavish remake of Ocarina of Time that only encompasses the Deku Tree and the fairy village.

beeporama wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

I'm half-tempted to find a walkthrough to ensure I hit all the missable story cutscenes...

...On the other hand, there's a part of me that wants to just play the game without guidance to see what I make of it twenty years later. Was it really as bad as I remember? Or was my age and lack of genre savvy more of a factor than I thought?

I always had the impression that you were EXPECTED to play PS1-era Final Fantasy games with a print guide in arm's reach. There is content you can't reasonably hope to find otherwise; I recall it being pretty tricky to get Yuffie (and maybe even Vincent) in your party without a tip.

True. Not to mention some of the outright bullsh*t they pulled with Final Fantasy IX and the various collectibles and secrets in that game.

I think I got Yuffie and Vincent the first time I played this, but it was only because the friend who loaned me the game told me how to get them. I think I also got Vincent so late that it didn't matter and I never used him.

Grenn wrote:

In your Config menu at the very bottom, there is an option called Magic Order that determines how your magic is listed. They fall into three categories: Attack, Restore, and Indirect. The options determine which category is listed first, middle, and last with all six options available.

I forgot that's where they tossed that.

A little froggy sent me a ribbit, also making note of an "Order" option in the Materia menu. I might mess around with that when I next play, which might be today since it's been a while since I've recorded some material and might as well do so.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Last night I left Midgar and am now playing through the flashback in Kalm. As I understand it, I've now played the full scope of the upcoming remake.

... That's it? That's all they're working with?

I had remembered Midgar being a much bigger, much more significant chunk of the game. Somewhere in the vicinity of the first third of the game.

Yup. I had a friend that kept insisting to me that the first disc ends after Midgar, that's just how huge it is. I shook my head defiantly every time. The first disc doesn't end until after Aeris dies, and not even immediately so. The first disc is, without a doubt, the largest chunk of the game, and then the second disc kind of starts with the "Break", where everything you thought you knew was happening is disrupted.

I don't believe they'll be padding out the rest of the game outside of Midgar, but turning this 3-5 hour portion of game into 30-50 hours? That's one of the reasons I'm not exactly looking forward to it. I mean, part of me always wanted to explore Midgar more thoroughly given how little of it you ultimately see, but more a spin-off that takes Sakaguchi's original vision of a detective game and applies it to new, original characters.

But I've griped enough about all that.

(Although Shinra Tower does have my favorite absurd detail so far. At one point, you come across a scale model of Midgar. You're required to rebuild from pieces you find in chests around the floor, so it's obviously some kind of physical model. However, someone has taken the time to break Sector 7 in the model, the sector that plummeted into the slums maybe an hour or two before. That's some dedication to accuracy!)

Yup. It's a good touch.

Having now refreshed my memory of all of this, the upcoming remake feels a bit like Nintendo announcing a lavish remake of Ocarina of Time that only encompasses the Deku Tree and the fairy village.

It's funny, because I got into a discussion with a friend of mine that argues the FF7 Remake is better than simply touching the graphics and translation up because "That game exists, why just do the same thing as before?" When I asked him about Nintendo's Ocarina of Time remaster, he effectively views that as a new product simply because of the Master Mode they included. To him, though, all remakes should be like Resident Evil 2, where you do something different.

I feel like it's not an equivalent comparison, myself, but it's a weird fine-line. Plus, one of those is actually released and the other still hasn't, so...

I've played FFVII twice in the past couple of years, and while I can see where some might feel some apprehension at the idea of padding out the Midgar section of the game, I personally feel differently. I am one of those who thinks that it would have been great to be able to fully explore Midgar.

Given the story beats and the point in the narrative where Avalanche is in regard to their overall mission, there's plenty of things that could be added main-game-wise that would not be out of place - a few recon missions, some intel/corporate espionage stuff...

What does worry me a bit, though, is what kind of side content we will get. S-E hasn't been great in that department in the past decade or so.

All in all, I'm fairly optimistic, but not expecting too much. I'm curious for the experience, whatever it may end up being like.

brokenclavicle wrote:

Given the story beats and the point in the narrative where Avalanche is in regard to their overall mission, there's plenty of things that could be added main-game-wise that would not be out of place - a few recon missions, some intel/corporate espionage stuff...

I hope not. The whole point of Barret's arc is that he's not a good leader. He only has one mission he knows to pull off: blow up the reactors. A move that causes collateral damage and leaves an unclear message to the citizens of Midgar, causing many to distrust Avalanche. He's a passionate, driven warrior that wants to do what is right, but he's neither a tactician nor a leader, no matter how hard he tries. That's why his second mission is the same as the first, and as a result President Shinra and co. are able to predict his move so easily, only to find their hideout and bring the whole of Sector 7 on top of 'em.

If Barret suddenly starts thinking of recon, intel and espionage, then he starts becoming a competent enough leader, and thus changes his arc completely.

Not that I expect there to be changes that drastic. I imagine they're going to more "drag out" and "modernize" a lot of what's already there. The sewers/train graveyard aren't even really an hour of gameplay, 30-45 minutes I'd estimate, but with the new combat and other adjustments are probably going to take more than an hour to play through. The same goes for the tower climb, and instead of the squats mini-game in Wall Market it looks like there's a whole work-out regimen. Plus, what was in the last trailer of the Honey Bee Inn is definitely going to eat up more time. "Embellishment" is pretty much the best approach we can look at.

Though who knows where "Hi I'm a SOLDIER come to chase you down on motorcycles" fits in. Given Jesse and Biggs were still alive in some of those sequences I'm assuming it's not the motorcycle chase out of Midgar.

OH!

Enemy Skill guide. Now that you're out of Midgar, Clock, I highly recommend fighting around Kalm a bit until you learn Matra Magic from the Mechs hanging around outside. Sadly it took way longer for me to find 'em than I once hoped, but it is one of the most useful spells early on. More powerful than most of the magic you have and able to one-shot most crowd-type enemies. Flamethrower is also useful, and you can get that in the Mythril Cave after the Midgar Zolom and before Fort Condor.

There's also a method to get the Beta Enemy Skill from Midgar Zolom. It requires that you received the Elemental Materia from the Mayor of Midgar though, so if you missed it, you have to loop back around when you are at a higher level.

I'm nearing the end of my time in Midgar, and I've got to say, I'd forgotten how little Sephiroth has to do with the story until after he kills President Shinra. I think he's only been mentioned twice, both in flashbacks.

ccesarano wrote:

Enemy Skill guide. Now that you're out of Midgar, Clock, I highly recommend fighting around Kalm a bit until you learn Matra Magic from the Mechs hanging around outside. Sadly it took way longer for me to find 'em than I once hoped, but it is one of the most useful spells early on. More powerful than most of the magic you have and able to one-shot most crowd-type enemies. Flamethrower is also useful, and you can get that in the Mythril Cave after the Midgar Zolom and before Fort Condor.

You can also, if you're willing to cheese things a bit, survive the Midgar Zolom long enough to learn Beta from it, which at your level is a tactical nuke that you can deploy on your hapless enemies any time you feel like it.

YMMV if that sort of quasi-sequence-break min-maxing is how you prefer to play the game.

Edit: I wasn't able to find a guide to cheesing the Midgar Zolom fight that doesn't rely on a ridiculous amount of grinding, but I've been able to do it by

Spoiler:

using Tranquilizers to inflict Sadness on the party and putting them in the back row so they won't get one-shotted by the Zolom's physical attacks, and giving the character with Enemy Skill a Fire+Elemental materia combo on their armor to halve the damage from Beta so they can survive it, then using Poison to slowly bring the Zolom's HP to below 1500 HP before hitting it with a (non-fatal) attack to trigger Beta.

No grinding required, just a little save-scumming to make sure the Zolom doesn't eject the Enemy Skill party member from the battle early, then getting the timing right on that last, Beta-triggering hit.

ccesarano wrote:

I hope not. The whole point of Barret's arc is that he's not a good leader. He only has one mission he knows to pull off: blow up the reactors. A move that causes collateral damage and leaves an unclear message to the citizens of Midgar, causing many to distrust Avalanche. He's a passionate, driven warrior that wants to do what is right, but he's neither a tactician nor a leader, no matter how hard he tries. That's why his second mission is the same as the first, and as a result President Shinra and co. are able to predict his move so easily, only to find their hideout and bring the whole of Sector 7 on top of 'em.

If Barret suddenly starts thinking of recon, intel and espionage, then he starts becoming a competent enough leader, and thus changes his arc completely.

I wonder if this is something that got lost in translation in the original transcript or just wasn't given enough emphasis in the game, but other members of Avalanche certainly did recon and intel. They were far from pros, of course, and I'll not say you're wrong when it comes to Barret's inexpert leadership, but there's enough there for S-E to work more missions into it, though not on the scale of setting up the bombs. I still contend that there's room to work with without completely changing what characterizes Barret and Avalanche as well-intentioned yet quite terrible at execution.

brokenclavicle wrote:
ccesarano wrote:

I hope not. The whole point of Barret's arc is that he's not a good leader. He only has one mission he knows to pull off: blow up the reactors. A move that causes collateral damage and leaves an unclear message to the citizens of Midgar, causing many to distrust Avalanche. He's a passionate, driven warrior that wants to do what is right, but he's neither a tactician nor a leader, no matter how hard he tries. That's why his second mission is the same as the first, and as a result President Shinra and co. are able to predict his move so easily, only to find their hideout and bring the whole of Sector 7 on top of 'em.

If Barret suddenly starts thinking of recon, intel and espionage, then he starts becoming a competent enough leader, and thus changes his arc completely.

I wonder if this is something that got lost in translation in the original transcript or just wasn't given enough emphasis in the game, but other members of Avalanche certainly did recon and intel. They were far from pros, of course, and I'll not say you're wrong when it comes to Barret's inexpert leadership, but there's enough there for S-E to work more missions into it, though not on the scale of setting up the bombs. I still contend that there's room to work with without completely changing what characterizes Barret and Avalanche as well-intentioned yet quite terrible at execution.

I thought his lack of leadership had more to do with his insistence on taking huge measures, like blowing up 1/4 of the 8 reactors in the largest city in the world. As I grew older, I started to see Barret's hypocrisy at being so angry at Shinra for dropping the Sector 7 plate when he literally exploded two reactors at the same city. His dialogue at the end of the game shows how he regrets his actions with AVALANCHE and how he realizes he was reacting in anger to what Shinra did to him as opposed to any real concern with the planet.