A Contrarian View of FFVII

This week is seeing the commercial release of Advent Children, so it's appropriate to see Jeremy Parish discussing the original game. However, he's got a slightly different take on the game than you might be used to. Seen via GameSetWatch. From Parish's article: "What better way to sell to people than by speaking directly to them? Cloud Strife is the everynerd -- wrapped up in delusions of greatness when allowed to take things on his own carefully-selected terms until he sees the world for what it is and is forced to come to grips with the fact that he's actually completely pathetic. That's your average game-obsessed message board dork in a nutshell: the petty tyrant of a tiny little niche of the Internet but a failure in real life. It's the kind of parable Jesus would have been proud to have shared with the hungry masses between bites of magical fishloaf, the cigarette ad of nerd coming-of-age stories -- a promise to nerdlings that if you face down your demons, accept your failures and struggle to move beyond them, you'll save the world and your childhood crush will fall madly in love with you."

Comments

Mod TFA down

[Rob T Firefly]

(-1 Flamebait)

Er.. WTF

[Turn-X Alphonse]

"The petty tyrant of a tiny little niche of the Internet but a failure in real life"

Maybe it's just me here.. MAYBE.. but isn't life a meaningless exercise of not dying untill you die..? Surely being a failure at life means you're oh.. DEAD!

Maybe we should stop judging people on their job/material goods and go "Hey this guys doing something he enjoys, he's not doing too bad really is he?" Life is not what you own, what you buy or what you want to buy.

Go ahead, be contrarian.. but...

[The Living Fractal]

It's ok to be contrarian. You have every right to form an opinion. But I can't help but say I detect a degree of hypocrisy when I read this:

"That's your average game-obsessed message board dork in a nutshell: the petty tyrant of a tiny little niche of the Internet but a failure in real life."

I mean, is it just me, or does it seem like this is exactly what this guy represents, within the context of the very article he has written about it?

The rest of it.. I tried hard to find anything meaningful. But every time I just can't help but think the author has personal experience pushing each word into the keyboard.

TLF

My Life as a Kettle

[Doomstalk]

That's your average game-obsessed message board dork in a nutshell: the petty tyrant of a tiny little niche of the Internet but a failure in real life.

Says the man who A) reviews 7 year-old games B) uses them to insult people.

Dumb.

[menace3society]

This has to be the dumbest "review" of a game I've read in a long time. To sum up his major "arguments" (and I'm committing an injustice to the civility of marital altercations the world over by using this term):

• "I don't like FF7" (not really arguable), "I'm a rational person" (debatable), "therefore no rational people like FF7" (fallacious).
  
• "It's not really an "RPG" according to the classical definition." But then, 90% of D&D sessions I've played in involved about as much role-playing as a random number generator. For better or worse, the term 'RPG' in video games refers to games like Final Fantasy. Get over it.
  
• "The characters are animated inconsistently--there are several versions of each character, with widely varying degrees of realism for each." This is, I suppose, as valid a complaint as any of the author's, but since he spends two paragraphs talking about how great the graphics are (and eventually goes on to complain about how good the graphics were) he does kind of undermine himself here.
  
• "The story is convoluted and weird." This is also true. Too bad FF7 didn't have a plot as good as the original FF, where the ultimate bad guy trying to take over the world is a souped up version of someone you killed in the very beginning, or Suikoden where the King is being controlled by an evil witch--oh wait, no, he's not, he's just love sick.
  
• "Cloud isn't a one-dimensional character who picks one of two personality types and never changes emotional state throughout the game." While technically a true statement, I'm not sure if it counts as criticism.
  
• "Sephiroth is a bizarre and incomprehensible villain, and hence inferior to Kefka." Or, to put it another way, Kefka is a 1970's destroy-the-world-I'm-evil comic book villain, and Sephiroth is a guy with his own neurosis, and motivations (however bizarre). Kefka just does it for the hell of it, really.
  

Basically, what it boils down to, is that this guy wishes all RPGs were still developed for the SNES because things like graphics, characters with personality, and entertainment are all things which subtract from a good RPG.

Re:More graphics, less gameplay

[Rei]

I know people will hate me for saying this, but Kefka was transparent. He was an Insane Evil Overlord(TM). Kill people with unneeded brutality! Destroy the world for no particular reason! All while dressing like a clown!

I just have trouble seing a character like that as a person. Now, Sephiroth, that was a "villain" I could get behind. Yes, he angsted a fair bit. But he had a plan, a purpose. He had a method to become a God that actually worked well within the framework of the game universe. He wasn't evil for evil's sake - he was purposefully evil.

Of course, here is my greatest heretical notion: that FF8 was a better written game than FF7. No, seriously, I mean it. Compare the dialogue from the earlier FFs (through 7) and later (say, 9; oh dear god, 9 was poorly written) to that in FF8.

Non-8 FFs:
A: "Oh, woe! The world will end!"
B: "WHAT?!?!?!?!!?!!!!?"
C: "Take heart, everyone, we can do it!!!!"
D: "Lets do it... together."
A: "Yes! For the world!!! If we believe in ourselves, we can do it!!!"

VIII did have its fair share of that kind of cliche (it's an FF tradition, after all), just not as much. And certainly not the entire script, as in IX. God, that was awful.

Not that FF8 didn't have its problems. Ultimecia would best be described, to borrow Miss Snark's term, as "aliens that arrive in chapter 14". Squall was deliberately hard to like, and as a video game MC, that's harder to deal with than an unlikable book MC. And lets not even get into the gameplay balance/time issues.

Of course, nothing beats Tactics. I think they were channelling George R. R. Martin on that one ;)