Description
An Epic Adventure across 3 cd-roms.

What begins a s a rebellion against an evil corporation becomes much more. And what erupts goes beyond imagination.

With vivid landscapes, lush 3D animation and environments, Square Soft's multi-million dollar masterpiece is like nothing ever seen before. And it is only on PlayStation.

Review
I have always dreaded this review.

Having played the import version through 3 times before ever touching the US version, I finally sat down and played it to give it the fair treatment it deserved. And wow…just wow.

If you haven’t played Final Fantasy VII by now, here’s the sum of its parts. First and foremost, it tells the tale of a ex-SOLIDER named Cloud who hires himself out to a rogue group called Avalanche. They form a team to try and sabotage the workings of an evil corporate entity known as ShinRa. Along the way, they’ll be thrown to all kinds of dangers, meet one of the most interesting set of characters in RPG history, and save the planet along the way.

That said, hindsight has granted FFVII the distinction of being one of the most talked about, argued about, and most importantly, most critically acclaimed PlayStation game ever, if second only to Metal Gear Solid and Gran Turismo. It presented a few shocks to hardcore fans at the time. For the first time ever, the FF world was going fully automated. Skyscrapers, cars, tanks, cell phones (or in this case, PHS), elevators, and even basic cable were now part of the lore. Even more astonishing; the game would finally be going full 3D, and have both classical ‘chibi’ characters along with more realistic versions, depending on the cinema you were in. The material system would allow characters to be whatever they wanted, whenever, since no job class was truly assigned to them. Let’s also not forget that just having Squaresoft on the PlayStation was enough to blow peoples minds. After all, Final Fantasy had always been a Nintendo system staple up until now.

So with all the hype, all the talk, and all the controversy, had Final Fantasy been given a hero’s welcome on its new system? I can safely say that answer is yes, but with a huge asterisk attached to it. The game, when dissected into individual pieces, presents a unique challenge. The graphics, sound, cinemas, and control are all flawless. However, especially in the US version, there are some tragic flaws that begin to crack the armor.

First and foremost are the treatment of two characters; Cid and Barrett. I can not speak for the Japanese version, since I don’t speak it, but I can not fathom that they would have been as crude, vile, and in Barrett’s case, ghetto-fied as they are in this one. Barrett’s ebonic-sprinkled comments are thankfully dwarfed by the game’s horrific translation. Many sentences have the wrong verb tense, the wrong words entirely, or have swear words dropped in just to make characters seem more manly. It really takes away from the game at times, and should have never made it to the final product.

The second issue with the game is that it began to show how Square was changing to try and appeal to a much broader audience. There’s now a lot of mini-game type areas tossed in to the mix, often where you would least likely expect, nor want to have one. While some like Chocobo Racing could be fun, Chocobo Breeding, as well as Enemy Skill learning suddenly took on a chore-like status. This only became more problematic in sequels VIII and the PS2’s FFX.

That said, you can’t deny the core storyline of the game; it is about finding one’s self and your purpose in life, regardless of what you must suffer through to get there. Each character has their own demon to face, and some will travel the great divide to fulfill their destiny.

Having finally been able to go through the English language version, I can safely say FFVII still holds true, if but in a slightly dented fashion. If you own any Sony home console, you owe it to yourself to play Final Fantasy VII.

• The game has an ESRB change. Originally just Teen with a nod to 'Realistic Violence', the later prints have it at Teen 13 + with a listing of Comical mischief, Mild Animated Violence, and Mild Language. Thankfully someone realized that a giant yellow bird is not 'realistic.' See below for illustrations.
  
  
• Besides being the PlayStation's first legacy dominating title, it was also the 300th released game for the system.
  
  
• The CDs, when inserted into a PC CD-Rom, do not show any files.
  
  
• Biggs, Wedge, and Cid are all re-occuring characters in FF Games.
  
  
• Was the middle tradition of naming lead characters after watery elements; Cloud, Locke (FFVI), and Squall (FFVIII).
  
  
• Would be the first time Yoshitaka Amano would not be used for the main game's artwork.
  
  
• There's a neat glitch in one of the towns. As Cloud walks up to one of the buildings, the clipping is off, and he'll actually walk 'up' the building.
  
  
• The US version featured two 'weapons' not found in the original Japanese version, Ruby and Emerald.
  
  
• After...um...a certain character's untimely exit, you can actually still acquire their final attack.
  
  
• One of the few US Games to take advantage of the seperate manual. Once the 1st Disc is removed from the tray, the insert and manual form one huge picture (see above).
  
  
• With the help of a game enhancer, like Game Shark or Action Replay, you can unlock a Debug Room built into the game.
  
  
• If you have a blank memory card, save the game in all 15 slots. When you view the data in the PSX Memory screen, you'll see 15 different icons, all based on their portraits.
  
  
• The game actually started out as a N64 playable demo of FFVI, which was scrapped for the PSX version.
  
  
• The first Final Fantasy game to have sequels on three fronts. While FFX had a sister sequel with FFX2, FFVII was given the movie sequel Advent Children, the cell phone game based on the Turks, and the PS2 sequel Dirge of Cerebus.
  

Greatest Hits
     This title was released as a Greatest Hit, with some interesting issues. Here's what the regular Greatest Hits version looks like:

And here's the Misprint version, where the airship picture is replaced by Sephiroth, who should only be on the right side.

Variations / Misprints
     Besides the Greatest Hits variant to my left (er, is that your left?), there was a reprinting that fixed the rather odd ESRB rating. The original version had a Teen rating and listed 'Realistic Violence' as the cause. Eventually it was changed to the more minor descriptions shown in the picture.

With this new look however, there was a rather odd typographical issue. The leter 'i' in the word 'masterpiece' was now way the heck out there, separated from its source word.

We are currently researching to see if there was a third variant that accompanied these two.

No change, or barely noticable difference in load times. Game loaded fine with both options turned on. However, it has been reported that several PS2 hardware versions will lock up in the controller config screen if the L3 / R3 buttons are pushed.

PlayStation 2 Compatibility - Smooth
     With the smoothing option on, there's not much to talk about. Square did some odd choices in how the game displayed the graphics, so outside of a small few changes on characters, not much else happens there. The backgrounds get a nice touch however.