Videogames you love, videogames you hate thread

[PrettyNier]

honestly, the anti-ff7 camp is just as bad as the fanbase. can't we just let ffvii exist as it is without all of these cultural connotations? who cares if sephiroths fanbase is obnoxious - who cares if it purportedly gets more attention than it deserves - who cares if it is or isn't the best rpg ever - at what point did we decide to let a game be defined by the community surrounding it, rather to define the game for ourselves?

yes, the game has a number of flaws; but honestly, most of these flaws could easily be fixed by an upgrade. the games two biggest offenders are things that serve to obfuscate the game and its intended goal: primarily, they are the god awful translation, and the fact that you can't always tell what can and cannot be traversed on the maps. as far as the mechanics are concerned: the mechanics in final fantasy VII are not bad; they're certainly no worse than FFVI or FFIX, anyway. to say that they're bad is to challenge the entire turn-based rpg genre (not that i'm saying this is some kind of sin, or something; go for it, if you want.)

despite the clumsiness of the fact that the map doesn't always convey what it ought to convey as well as it should, that is hardly the games worst offense (it certainly doesn't have the punch that lords of shadow does when it makes the same mistake (considering that lords of shadow is an ACTION game contingent upon platforming and jumping)). the games worst offense is its translation.

the poor translation is what allows for things like the following:

flower girl because she was some goddess descendant

to happen. i'll make fun of the translation later, however.

what i mean by this is, it serves only to obfuscate the storyline; and in doing so, not only are the details lost, but the themes become blurred and confused and hard to extract. the issue with ffvii's story is partly that it is hard to actually understand what happened.

ffvii is, simply put, one of the few (possibly only) final fantasy games to actually be about something on a thematic level. the short version of this would be "Learning to deal with the hand you've been given"; the long version would be "learning to accept the terms of your existence, and the things outside of your control, and learning to move on as a human being". we are created by the people that create us, and we are created by the things that have resulted in those events, and we cant change that.

hironobu sakaguchi's mother died a little bit before final fantasy 7 began production, and it was stated that he wanted to incorporate what he went through into his next project. in this, he conferred into the world, and the characters, something innate to be overcome, something that most of them have not overcome, or most of them are running from.

ultimately, the relationship is then embodied by cloud and sepiroth, both of whom try to go against that point. cloud, initially, denies it; he denies his failure to get into SOLDIER first class, he denies his own past, his own weakness and his own failures and even makes up something different. he tries to change it, initially, but then realizes his own mistake and comes to term with it. sephiroth goes insane, he goes mad, and tries to change it by force, never flinching. he cannot come to accept the terms of his existence, and this inability breeds rage and contempt.

jenova is the primary antagonistic force in so much as it is an enabler, but the thematic antagonist is absolutely sephiroth.

the game cements this feeling, and brings full circle hironobu sakaguchi's experience by killing a playable character, aeris, partway through the game with no means of bringing her back. those are the terms of the game and they also must be accepted.

---

making fun of the translation, and some of the general absurdness in The Game Actual:


















all courtesy of Swimmy's FFVII Mega thread