Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 206: Final Fantasy VII, Pt. 1

Episode Date: March 11, 2019

Jeremy Parish and Bob Mackey once again meet with Chris Kohler and Kat Bailey to deep-dive their way through the history of Final Fantasy. This time they've hit the Big One: Final Fantasy VII, a game SO monumental in impact it's a two-episode discussion.

Hey everyone, it's me, Jeremy Parrish, co-host of Retronauts. You may have noticed that we've moved back to Libson after being on podcast one for a couple of years, which means you can listen to Retronauts on platforms like Google Play again, and you won't hear any more creepy geotargeted ads. Now that we're setting up at our new home, our new hosts would like to get to know our audience a little better. If you're a fan of Retronauts, we'd be truly grateful if you could take a few minutes out of your day and complete a quick survey for us. Please head over to Survey.Libson.com slash Retronauts

and let us get to know a little bit more about you. Yeah, this is about collecting info for future podcast ads, but it's our way of making sure you'll only hear us reading ads that are relevant and useful to you. Again, that's survey.libson.com slash retronauts, L-I-B-S-Y-N. Thanks. We really appreciate your help. Now, on to the show.

This weekend, Retronauts, the planet's dying cloud. Hey, everyone Welcome to the latest episode of Retronauts. I continue to be Jeremy Parrish and still sitting across from me in the same spot he's occupied for the past five years. I've always been here. It's Bob Mackey, and I'm still waiting for the Moghouse D.L.C. That's the most exciting part of Final Fantasy 7. And also joining us, because this is another of our blow-by-blow, in-depth looks at Final Fantasy.

It's the Final Fantasy crew, beginning with. Kat Bailey, the Final Fantasy 7 remake will come out after I die. Does that say bad things about you or about the remake? I guess we'll just have to see. No, it means that we're sacrificing. cat so that the Final Fantasy They will lower it into the hole with your

I will gladly give up my spirit for the life stream That's very noble of you and also over here not offering his life probably No definitely not Chris Kohler features editor at Kotaku and Final Fantasy player

Exciting! So we have been through many Final Fantasy games at this point 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and now here we are at yes, that's right, 7. One, two, three, four, five, six, chrono trigger seven. Actually, one, two, three, four, five, Saken Dinsets, Saga. Yeah.

Six, chrono trigger seven. No, we skipped that one. I know. Live a live, no. I want to point out that this is, we've done this before, by the way. Just for some Retronaut's history. So Retronauts episode 38, which aired on March 13, 2008, over 10 years ago, was the initial Final Fantasy seven episode.

And the description is, the final word on Final Fantasy 7. Jeremy keeps doing that. Chris and Sharky watch and horror as Shane and Jeremy tear one another two bloody shreds. But we pointed that out earlier, Jeremy. You named a podcast the final word on Metal Gear. And then we did another Metal Gear podcast. Well, it's not my fault that we, you know, keep going back to the well. It's okay.

It's a very delicious well. There's so much water. But you said the book was closed on Final Fifty Seven 10 years ago. I did. You're a liar. But then they announced a remake. So I'm justified. I think that podcast was talking about.

tied into crisis score also. It was, yeah. Yeah. God, that's 10 years old. Oh, my God. And you can't play it. Yeah, so we had the 10-year Final Fantasy 7 retrospective when they released the, what was it called? The compilation.

Compilation of Final Fantasy 7. And now we've got the 20-year Final Fantasy retrospective with the remake coming out. I think appropriately Final Fantasy 7 has enjoyed a similar arc to Evangelion where it was exceedingly and crazily popular and everybody loved it. And then there was a massive backlash against it. And everybody was like, nope, it's a total failure. And now everybody kind of, I mean, it's still controversial. It's still divisive. But people kind of came back around to it a little bit.

And like, there's a lot of people who love it. There are a lot of people are like, oh, man, that sure ended up being a thing. But it's remembered. If the seven remake ends up being as much as a screw you as the rebuild of Evangelion, I will be so happy. It'll be so fun to watch. We're well on the way. I mean, just look at the way that they're,

what they're doing with the battle system and everything else. I would not be surprised at all. But like you get out of Midgar and there's a 10-year time skip and now there's this girl with glass. I was going to say, they need to add a character based on whatever the most popular fetish is now. I patch girl? I mean, Glass is like so 10 years ago. Right.

No, I patch girl was Ray. Full body cast? Yes. Okay. You just, you just cart her around on, like, a dolly? I mean, there's already that with cloud, so... That's true. That's true.

So, just put a wig on cloud during that scene. Whatever they... Her limit break involves feet somehow. Whatever that Hannibal Lecter... Whatever that Hannibal Lecter thing was, they wield them into cord on with a face mask and everything. All right. Maybe not. Okay.

Anyway, so Final Fantasy 7 is the big one. And in recognition of the fact that this is a hugely popular, hugely successful, hugely influential game that will not go away. We're turning off the comments for this episode. This episode also will not be going away. It's going to be a two-partner. So this week we're going to talk about Final Fantasy 7's history and the Midgar sequence, which in my opinion, is maybe the most cohesive, single portion of any role-playing game ever. It's like a self-contained perfect adventure. And then there's a much bigger adventure beyond that.

But if Final Fantasy 7 were just Midgar, it would be a very, very good game. It would feel very complete and also would have not, you know, kicked off the whole thing with 32-bit RPGs, way overstaying their welcome, feeling that they need to be super long. Like, Midgar is what, 10 hours or so, 8 hours? I think most people, your initial play-through, would take about 10 hours. Yeah, 10-12 hours. After like the 30th replay, I was down to like three hours. Sure. But, I mean, you know, Final Fantasy 4, Krono-trigger, those were games you could.

complete in like 15 hours or so. Right, right, right. So, like, Final Fantasy 7, you know, that opening sequence is almost like a full 16-bit RPG. I mean, it felt like a big world, like a big self-contained, interesting world with its own arc and its own characters and everything. And we're going to talk about that. And then the next episode we'll talk about the rest of the game, you know, beyond that,

and of course the compilation of Final Fantasy 7 and the Final Fantasy legacy and the remake that still won't be out by the time we get to the second part of this episode. So without further ado, let's jump right in. So where were you when you first discovered Final Fantasy 7? Were you guys already Final Fantasy fans? Chris, I know obviously you were. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I had played, I had played, you know, four and six.

And five by that point, yeah, although, yeah, I guess I played five by that point as well. And so, yeah, I'm not really sure when I, like, heard that Final Fantasy 7 was coming to PlayStation. But, of course, everybody thought that it was coming to the Nintendo 64 because, you know, Square and Nintendo, like Square only made games for Nintendo. Right. We'll get into that. Yeah, okay. But I guess that, yeah, I mean, you know, it just would have been in an issue of electronic gaming monthly or something like that and, you know, found out like. And for me at the time, I mean, I guess I had already, I already had a job, you know, I was 16 years old. So, I mean, I already kind of had money coming in.

So it was like, guess I'll buy one of those Sony PlayStation. I didn't really feel like betrayed or anything like that. It just seemed to make sense. Like I understood like, oh, okay, yeah, they want to use CD-ROMs. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So I knew of Final Fantasy mainly because of Nintendo Power and that kind of thing. Extoling the virtues of Final Fantasy 3 or 6, whatever.

I had a very annoying friend. And this very annoying friend would, like, download trailers for new and upcoming games. And this very annoying friend would not shut up about Final Fantasy. Tennessee 7 would just fill my errors about how it was going to be the greatest game of all time. How it was going to be just incredible. Look at these graphics. Oh, my God. Was your friend me?

They're saying, damn in it. And I was like, okay, calm down, man. And then he spoiled the Ayrth, the Ayrth death, like, before the game even freaking came out in the U.S. He's like, Angie dies because that had already been spoiled. I knew that going in a long time before the game came out. Really? I did it. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

If you guys were reader. of news groups, I believe Rec Arts Games Final Fantasy or maybe Recarts Games Squarespaceoft or whatever. I was reading it and I was getting ready for Final Fantasy 7. By the way, like Big Final Fantasy fan going into Final Fantasy 7 after seeing the Silicon Graphics like

screenshots of the Final Fantasy 6 weird demo. We'll talk about that one too, yeah. I was like, yes, I want whatever the next thing is. But I remember pre-ordering it. I got a PlayStation 4 Final Fantasy 7. And I was reading the message boards, the news groups rather. And a post

named Guy Brish Threepwood posted like a hundred posts that were like Ayrith Dyes in Final Fantasy 7, Ayrth Dyes and Final Fantasy 7, Arirth dies and Final Fantasy 7. I can't believe you were betrayed by Guy Bush 3rd 3rd. I know. I know. I was a monkey. I mean, I was a monkey. I mean, I was a monkey. I think of that I was a monkey at the time. Even the cutscene might have leaked a little early because this was a time where video clips were only 30, you know, 30 seconds and took forever to download, but they were available. And you had to download them for your real player and that would launch a separate app. But, yeah, I got the great cloud t-shirt for pre-ordering the game. I don't know if anyone else had those. Yeah, I went to go, because when they announced, oh, you know, you can pre-order Final Fantasy 7, now you can get this T-shirt. I went to Electronics Boutique, and I did the pre-order, and they were like, oh, you know, since you did the pre-order, you can actually have this. And they had, like, the PlayStation Jampack disc that had the second demo of Final

Fantasy 7, not the Toeball number one demo that came packaged with that. game but like the more polished demo and they were like yeah you can have this and I'm standing there holding a PlayStation disc and I don't have a PlayStation yet but I was just but I had the money so I was just like guess I'll buy a PlayStation and I ended up actually getting a PlayStation and then I'm because I was just time shifting the purchase forward a little bit I was going to get it on Final Fantasy 7 day but then I you know just bought a PlayStation then before I 7 came out I ended up getting the only two games that I wanted, which were Wild Arms and Symphony of the Night.

Good choices. But, yes, by the time that Final Fantasy 7 came out, I was already kind of in the PlayStation group as it were. I was a boss opening cutscene. I did not have a PlayStation. I was a PC kid. My parents wouldn't buy me consoles. I didn't have disposable income yet.

But I was aware of the demo because nobody would shut up about it because, I mean, it had the Bahamette attack and everybody was going bonkers over the cutscenes. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Right. And when it came out, I mean, it was such a gigantic deal among my friends who played video games. And that always kind of rattled around in my mind until a couple of years later I finally had some money. I had finished Final Fantasy 6. I was like, I will now play this game, Final Fantasy 7.

Yeah. And, of course, I was completely blown away by it. It was for a very long time my favorite game. I was like, I have a brook no argument. This is the best game ever made because, you know, I was in that time of my life. and eventually I started to question it, but it was a legitimately mind-blowing experience, sort of in 1997 to 2000. Man, Bahamut. I forgot about the demo with Bahamut.

I played on the Toball number one demo disc so you could summon Leviathan instead. It was totally different. Right, right, right, yeah. People have documented how different that first demo is from the main game. It's pretty fascinating to see all the really, like, thousands of tiny changes. Yeah, because they weren't done with the game yet when that demo came out. I mean, that was a really early thing. So as for myself, I actually don't remember where I was.

I was really deeply into Final Fantasy at that point. After Final Fantasy 3 came to the U.S., I was like, man, okay, this is my kind of jam. I like RPGs. I had already liked RPGs, but now I really liked them, and Square is cool. And so this was right around the time that the World Wide Web came into existence, and I had access to that at school in the computer lab. or the, actually the student newspaper room. I did ads for the college newspaper,

and so I basically had this room to myself with an internet connection on a T-1 line. So I was getting all the info. You got to go into all those like, all those Final Fantasy towns and web rings. Oh, I've been to Lucia. I've been to Avaline and Mowgli's. Any VRML rooms?

No. Playing muds? No, I didn't do that either. It was just a message boards and, you know, fan sites. But they loaded really quickly. They did. They loaded really fast. Anyway, so yeah, like I just was, you know, quickly became aware that Final Fantasy 3 was six and kind of kept abreast of the fact that there was another game coming.

I do remember being in a Walmart, I had to, like, buy a card or something. And I stopped at the magazine rack and was flipping through a games magazine. And it said, Final Fantasy 7 and Dragon Warrior 7 coming to PlayStation, betrayal. I was like, wait a minute. I bought an N64, what's happening? Ah, no, I fell into a deep pit. Bad things. But I ended up trading in my N64 for a PlayStation about six months later anyway.

Right, right. So it didn't matter. But I do remember the first time I saw Final Fantasy 7, which was at the local computer game shop that also did a lot of import stuff. Most of their merchandise was of a very salacious nature. But they did have the console import section, and they imported Final Fantasy 7 when it came. out. And I don't think they read Japanese, but they were, like, powering through it. And they were in Wutai by the time I saw it. And I remember seeing, like, these little characters running around in front of this giant Buddha statue being like, wow, that's final fantasy. That's crazy. And then the battle transition. And that was like, in a good way. Yeah. I was like, go. How is this possible? Yep. So obviously, I was there. 9-797.

Yep. Yep. Yeah. That reminds me. Sorry, Chris. No one. The date. So I have to write down my mom's birthday every year, my planner, to remember. But I do remember when Final Fantasy 7 came out, 9-7-97. But I remember this was the age before street dates were being police. Like, they were not sending secret shoppers in to make sure that you weren't selling it before the street day. But I got mine on 9-2-97. Wow.

Five whole days before the street day. I'm impressed. I got mine 9-597. So you got it at launch. Yeah, yep. This was in the very early days of games even having release dates in the first place. So, I mean, there was, yeah, as you say. As opposed to just kind of trickling out.

Yeah, basically, as opposed to call your local store and keep asking them if they get it. So this is the very earliest days of the modern gaming. I mean, even the way that it was promoted and the way it was discussed. That was the first game that I remember reading about online and looking at screenshots and downloading videos and that kind of thing. Right. And like the Nintendo 64 for all of the fact that it had this really this downhill role throughout the entire generation, like it started.

The hype was real for Mario 64. And I mean... Operating of time, Star Fox 64. Yeah, but there was such... I remember the launch... I mean, you know, the thing with the launch of the N64 was that everybody broke street date on that, too, right? But, like, everybody broke street date on the same day.

So, like, the new launch that showed up, you know, like, that new launch day was very exciting because everybody was, like, you know, calling the stores like, are you selling the N64? Yeah, oh, wow, going in, you know, buying the games. And then I had the N64, and a year later, I was like, well, I've played three games on this thing Because I'm not going to be ridiculous and buy a bunch of garbage for this game console. I'm just going to play the good stuff. So, I mean, I was a big Nintendo fan, but, like, just out of necessity, like, the PlayStation was the gaming console. And the Nintendo 64 was the thing that you returned to every six months to pop in the latest game, play through it, and then just go back to all of the gaming on the PlayStation.

I was a crazy. the Loyalist until I played Final Fantasy 7 and Metal Gear Solid in those two games just made me go, okay, yep, PlayStation right there. That's the winner of this generation. And I guess sort of transitioning into the development of Final Fantasy 7, like, I'm thinking of Wild Arms and Symphony of the Night and you mentioned that intro, I think that when you look at those two games, like, that's a good indication of what a lot of developers thought that the PlayStation era was going to look like.

It was either going to be like beautiful 2D. with an anime intro that's in full resolution video, not grainy Sega CD type video, but full resolution video. And soundtracks that were CD audio took up most of the space on the CD and were, you know, could be incredibly high quality, lushly orchestrated, et cetera. And like Final Fantasy 7 was like almost none of those things. I mean, Wild Arms had that really bad 3D, those really bad 3D battles. Like, you had these beautiful 2D look and then it transitioned into terrible 3D load. They had giant beachball heads. And people were like, people loved a rag on Final Fantasy 7's Cupid dolls, but Final Fantasy 7 looked miles better than that game.

And there was definitely a contingent of people who hated Final Fantasy 7 and would point to things like Wild Arms, like, oh, Wild Arms did that first. It has 2D that then transitions into 3D. So what's the big deal with Final Fantasy 7? Final Fantasy 7 was a big deal. I mean, we already talked about how some of us bought PlayStation's specifically to play Final Fantasy 7. It was a huge coup for Sony. It was a huge jumping off point for Square.

They expected to sell a few hundred thousand copies of the game outside of Japan, and they sold millions, something like 7 million copies of the game. It's one of the best-selling PlayStation games. It made JRPGs as big as your blockbuster mega hit. Like Final Fantasy hate right now. I think it opened up people's minds to the prospect of JRP's becoming huge. Final Fantasy 8 was the PlayStation's counter to the Dreamcast. And then, yeah.

But then, you know, people were like... Name me a bigger game than Final Fantasy 8, 1999. People were like, man. A bigger console. Final Fantasy 7 is so much. amazing. JRP's are really cool. And then the next game, Square, followed up with, was Saga Frontier. And people were like, wow, I hate this genre. Everything is bad. I don't like these after all. Like no other JRP on PlayStation except Final Fantasy 8 was as big as Final Fantasy 7.

It was kind of an exception to a lot of rules. But it did open up a lot of people's minds to, you know, the genre. And it's continued to gain momentum and steam. And, you know, as developers find other ways to appeal to international audiences, like with persona games or whatever, like there is an audience there for sure. But it's not like, it didn't become instantly the dominant genre. I think if every game had been like a Final Fantasy 7 experience, sure. But this was an exceptional creation in a lot of ways. Oh, definitely.

But it opened the floodgates for so many import JRP's to come in because suddenly it was popularized. And a lot of developers, Sony included, scramble to make their own kind of Final Fantasy. Yeah. They were no longer these, like, expensive boutique experiences for gamers to buy. Like, you weren't going to, like, in the S&S era, RPGs were few and very pricey. But in this era, everything was coming over. And some things that should have stayed in Japan, like, Guardians Crusade, things like that.

Well, yeah, I mean, the nice thing about, like, again, like, those games that I was buying prior to Final Fantasy 7 was that I believe the, like, full retail on Wild Arms and Symphony Night was $40. Like, that was, that was half price for video games. Like, I mean, I very much remember, like, going to the stores and thinking, man, like, I'm going to pick up some PlayStation games because even the highest-end games are cheap as hell compared to N64 games, which were, like, you know, sometimes $79.99. Yeah. PS-1 game started out at, like, $60 to $70, and Sony quickly realized that they could leverage the cheap price of CD format, the CD format to counter Nintendo. So they drop their max price to, like, $60,000. usually 50, and then they had the $40 budget line of games like

Parapa and something in the night, you know, like niche stuff. I remember, yeah, for the N64, I think Nintendo's first-party titles were 50 or 60, but then I remember a friend bought Mortal Kombat trilogy in 96 for $80. And I was thinking, this is madness. And it probably required a memory card. Oh, yeah, maybe in that era for sure. StarFox 64 was really expensive too because they had the Rumble Pack. Right, right.

Mm-hmm. Yep. So, yeah, I would say the JRP didn't become huge in America after Final Fantasy 7, but it definitely made it a viable niche. Yeah, it became a thing. Not even a niche, like a segment. And that's more than it had been during the Super NES era for sure. It was no longer like the domain of Usenet users. That's good because Usenet went away.

Anyway, so yeah, you mentioned the development history of Final Fantasy 7. And why don't we talk about that? Let's do that. Because the game actually was in development for a long time, but something got in the way. They started working on Final Fantasy 7 pretty much immediately after Final Fantasy 6, which would have been mid-1996 or 94. Four. And they were kicking around some ideas.

This was originally going to be a super NES game. And then Chrono Trigger became the sort of emergency project, and it was all hands on deck. So there was like a one-year gap where the Final Fantasy 7 stopped working on Final Fantasy 7 and worked on Cronotrigger instead. And by the time they came back, they were like, well, Super Famicom, Super NES doesn't really make sense anymore. So we should look to a next-gen system. So basically, this was Final Fantasy 13 before there was a Final Fantasy 13 because that game was delayed by... Started on PS2.

Yes. And then the long development, protected development, all-hands-on-deck style of Final Fantasy 12 forced them to push it to PS3. And then that caused all kinds of rolling delays. Right. Well, and then, of course. It came out better than 13. Yeah.

And then, I mean, it keeps happening with Square. I mean, it's still happening right now because the Final Fantasy 7 remake is waiting on the finishing of Kingdom Hearts 3. Right? So it just keeps, it just keeps happening. What's the common theme in all of these games? The common person. It's impossible to say. It's impossible to say.

No more I was relatively the one of the totem pole at that time. He was. This Final Fantasy 7 was the game that made him into the monkey wrench that would throw a spanner into all of Squaredes projects. Wait, so he's a monkey wrench and he throws in a wrench? He's the monkey wrench. He's the wrench. He's the wrench. He's the wrench.

He's the monkey wrench. This game made him into a monkey wrench. Oh, okay. Yes. It elevated him to canonical monkey wrench status. Right. He's a young spanner in the works. Yes.

So that Super Nintendo project, the Super Famicom project, We know a little bit, well, we know some of, we knew things that people have said about it. I love that the main character was apparently conceptualized as, I believe it was hot-blooded Detective Joe. Yeah. It was going to be based in New York City, as Final Fantasy games so often are. Right. I wonder how much of that turned into Parasite, or, yeah. Yeah, probably a lot.

Yep. I mean, I think the reason Barrett and Detective Dulles are very similar, Barrett, Daniel Dulles, They're very similar personalities and temperaments. I think there is a lot of carryover there. It's weird to you think of them even conceiving of a Final Fantasy set in New York. It reminds me a little bit of spirits within, which is ostensibly set on Earth. But then later on, you hear that Midgar was sort of conceptualized for that Super Nintendo game, too. So maybe Midgar was what they ended up on rather than probably somebody said, well, maybe not New York, but maybe a city.

I mean, yeah, like this story has come out about New York. I don't think they went really heavy into development for it. It was more like – Just ideas being kicked around ideas. And definitely the New York element stays there, although Midgar is really reminiscent of Tokyo in a lot of ways. It's kind of like Hong Kongish, too. Yeah. And there was a mock-up screenshot that they had kind of put together just, I think, just to, you know, as a visual guide to sort of what it would look like.

And, I mean, it would have been, you know, a very nicely detailed Super Nintendo game. Like, you could see even in that one screenshot that they showed like, they were going to be trying some things. But, you know, the Chrono Trigger ended up being sort of the end-all be-all of Super Nintendo RPGs and this got bumped. And I think that probably worked out for the best because what they did end up coming back with was really impressive.

You know, the delay from mid-94 to late 95 when they resumed work on Final Fantasy 7, you know, I think by that point, things were starting to shift. shape up for the next generation. You know, PlayStation was already out in Japan. Saturn was already out. So they had a good handle on what these systems were about. And by this point, Nintendo had said, yeah, we're going to publish games on cartridges because that's what people want.

Yeah. By people we mean our shareholders. You know, that's going to be the future. So that, I think, really helped them kind of decide, you know, what direction should we take? Where should we go with this system, with this game? What system should it be on? Yeah. And so they went with PlayStation instead of Nintendo 64.

And people... That was interesting. They didn't go with Sega Saturn. Because initially, I mean, probably when they were making their decision too... By late 95, I think Saturn already was trailing. It was pretty clear that they were going to be hurting. Yeah. Yep.

But they didn't even go... I mean, a lot of people went multi-platform, you know? A lot of games ended up coming out on both or publishers ended up going, you know, both. But Square was still this, like, sort of small boutique publisher. And so I guess they probably were just like, like, Let's just learn one platform. Yeah, and you know, this game, one of the big landmarks for it is that it does integrate full motion videos so effectively. Ah, yeah.

And that would have been impossible with Saturn without the add-on cartridge that gave you, like, the enhancement rams. It didn't even seem like they thought about the Sega Saturn when, if you go and read Matt Leon's oral history of Final Fantasy 7, they talk about doing extensive tests with both the N64 and the PlayStation. And those were the two systems that were very much on their mind. Also, I think that Sony aggressively pursued them. I think that Sony was like, this would be a coup. We think that Sony probably ascertained that like the creative team was thinking they needed CD-ROMs. They're like, oh, this could be a great way to, you know, neutralize a big advantage that Nintendo has and get Final Fantasy, you know, exclusive to our platform. So they probably, I bet you they gave Square a sweetheart deal to sign with them.

Probably. I mean, you don't see Final Fantasy 7 remakes or ports on any system besides PlayStation and PC. They said, in fact, that they did get a sweetheart deal and that the royalties that they ended up paying were extremely low. And not only that, and then Square went out and recruited Enix and other companies over to the Sony side. And apparently that, I mean, based on one source that I found back in the day, it was Square going and trying to then get other people to ditch Nintendo also, which was that was sort of what made. Nintendo angry at Square. That explains a lot. Supposedly they weren't even allowed in the door for like 10 years or something like that.

Right, right. Well, the thing is, I mean, if you, people were like, oh, Square moved all their stuff over to PlayStation and that's why Nintendo was mad at them. But it's like, everyone did that. Every publisher moved over. Actually, somebody just posted, there's a guy in Europe who's doing a complete Japanese N64 collection. And he's almost there. He's only missing like one game. And it literally doesn't even take up an Ike.

a bookshelf. It is such, it is less than 200 games total in Japan on the N64. That is a huge hollowing out of that third. I mean, that was Nintendo just destroying itself because it was like, we need all the revenue from third parties because when third parties make a game on a cartridge, they have to pay us 20 bucks per cartridge. They were also afraid of piracy. That's our main source of revenue.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it was all kinds of things. But then, like, they lost all that revenue because nobody made carnage games. like everybody completely abandoned them. 1,200 games on Super Famicom. So that's like a thousand games difference. Yeah. Yeah.

And so that's, and so like when you look at that, it's like, okay, well, clearly it wasn't just that Square left because everybody left. But most other publishers would do like a game. Like Enix did like two games on the N64. And were thus when the Game Boy Advance came along, you know, then Enix was just simply able to just start making Game Boy Advance game. So, like, they maintained the relationship instead of being like, peace out. So getting back to the CD-ROM thing.

Actually, hang on, Bob. Bob's been trying to say something. I'm dying over here, everybody. Please. I believe in research for something I did, and this is not hearsay because it's recorded fact somewhere, that there was more animosity towards Square than the other people who left Nintendo, left Nintendo as if they belonged to Nintendo. Yeah, yeah.

And that the president of Square at the time got other developers to join them at Sony. They were sort of spreading the word, like, come with us, like it's better here. found out about that, so they were extra pissed at Swear. Yeah. And also, I wanted to ask, until they forget, in America, in this era, did Sony publish Squares games at first or was it electronic arts? Yeah, so Sony had a six-game deal. Actually, a lot of this came out because of Matt Leon's wonderful story, which we'll just

keep referring to. Yeah, it turns out Sony had a six-game deal, and it was Tobol, Saga Frontier, Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy 7, Bushido Blade, and then Tobol 2. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, they didn't bring out Tobol 2, but Tobol 2, but Tobol 2 was listed on the document. They didn't bring it out, and then it was, as you say, Einhander.

And then they did the Square Electronic Arts thing. So Square did not publish its own games for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, in the U.S. Yep. Getting back to the whole CD-ROM thing, which is usually the persistent talking point, Nintendo didn't have CDs, therefore they lost. But when they were doing the tests between the N64 and the PlayStation, they were getting like half the frame rate. with their test models on the N64,

which was a huge problem for them. And they told Nintendo supposedly repeatedly, look, your hardware is not up to snuff. It's just not good enough. We're getting way better results on the PlayStation. We can't do an RPG on this. What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do?

And Nintendo was like, uh-huh, yeah. That kind of gets back to why fans felt betrayed by the change from Nintendo to PlayStation because lots of people assumed that that Square was already developing a Final Fantasy 7 for Nintendo 64 because at Sigrath, and I want to say in 95, they released a demo to basically like a proof of concept, you know, how would a Final Fantasy game work with a 3D engine? So they took characters from Final Fantasy 6 and recreated a combat scenario where Locke and Terra and someone of Shadow are fighting a golem.

and it's all rendered in 3D and it's clearly like a rough draft, you know, proof of concept but it does really look in a lot of ways like the 3D battle engine they would settle on for Final Fantasy 7 and people started referring to that as the Final Fantasy 7

demo and talking about how well this is on, you know, CGI or SGI machine which is the same technology, Silicon Graphics as the N64 so clearly Square is building up Final Fantasy 7 and it's going to change Change everything is going to be the most amazing N64 RPG.

So when they said, oh, actually we're going over to PlayStation, that was a huge, like, what the hell? But what about your promises to us? Well, gaming magazines didn't help it because, I mean, they would show a screenshot of this demo and say, here's Final Fantasy 7 for Nintendo 64. Yeah, I was my favorite Final Fantasy 7 character, Locke Kohl. Journalistic standards were not as high, but they would not present that screenshot in the right context. Could this be Final Fantasy 7? You know, they really wanted to wet your appetite. Yeah.

SGI, probably at the end of the day, Nintendo's big partnership with them in the wake of the success of Donkey Kong country probably ultimately was what screwed them as much as the CD-ROM thing because, I mean, at the end of the day, the N64 just, yeah, but. I'd say at the beginning of the day was Mario 64 and everyone was like, the future's here. It was a very short day. The future is very short. It was a fun couple of weeks. I mean, Square said explicitly. recently in Matt Leone's piece, yeah, we're constantly amazed at the kind of graphics they were able to get out of Zelda and Mario because, man, I don't know how they did it. So one of the things I find interesting about Final Fantasy 7 is that it was this huge game, you know, from a technological perspective, from a staffing perspective, it ended up being like 100 people working on the game, which was really uncommon back then.

Despite all that, it's actually this sort of comes from a very personal place. the inspiration behind the big story for it came from Hironobosakuchi, the producer of the series, basically trying to work through his grief over losing his mother. And so the entire premise of the Lifestream and Eris's Death and everything like that, like that is a reflection of him kind of processing a personal loss through his work. And I don't know. Like I find that really interesting that such this massive production, really kind of came out of a place that was so intimate

and something you don't really see, I don't see a lot of Japanese developers talk about that sort of thing. I just imagine him sitting down with Tetsu Numerra and telling him this story. It's like, and I want this to be about my mother's death and the grief that I'm feeling about that. Nomura is just sitting there doodling a spiky-haired guy with a big sword going, yeah, totally.

The sword's a metaphor. Cross-dressing? Okay, sure. Well, I feel like he was only in his early. early 30s when he started thinking of the ideas for this game, and that's still a pretty young age to lose a parent, you know, in most cases. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, that's definitely not what the only thing that the game is about, but it did come from that place. You mentioned Nomura, and one of the things about Nomura is that, something that's interesting about Nomura's role in this game is that he only really had this opportunity to work on character designs because Yoshitakaamano was busy. You know, he was, he was not a square, soft staff member. Amano was a contractor who would come in and, you know, do artwork for them, do character designs on contract. And at the time that this game was in development, he was working on, I believe, an exhibition in Paris.

So he was occupied and was like, sorry, guys, I can't really help. I'll do some, you know, some illustrations for this. But I can't do the heavy lifting for this one. So they looked internally and they really liked Nomura's doodles and the spiky-haired dude. He drew while he was talking to Sakaguchi by his mother's desk. Now, to be fair, I mean... He had already done sets are in Final Fantasy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But they had a lot of artists who, you know, contributed to their games. Right. And it was not a given that Nomura was going to be elevated to the status. We're still doing, like, a few character designs and some monster illustrations. He did, like, the Baroque boss tower at the end of Final Fantasy 6. But, you look at those things and you're like, I'm not really seeing a lot of that in Final Fantasy 7. Right. But, yeah, just something about the characters he drew, the spirit of the...

the characters, the doodles he created really appealed to Sakaguchi and Sakaguchi was like, I think you're the guy. And everybody else too. What he did was, I think it really was a plugged into and be fed a lot of

sort of like the anime zeitgeist that was happening, you know, like that was at that time. Like those character designs were cool in a way that was super hot right then, you know. And really tacked into something.

Guy with long white hair. People are with spiky blonde hair. For sure. I mean, it was, yeah. Like, it was, um, Goku. Yeah, it was, uh, what to face, um, Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball was just starting to air in America at the end of the 90s. You know, that was all, Final Fantasy 7 was of a piece with Japanese, uh, popular culture,

um, really actually getting some purchase worldwide, um, not just being, again, RPGs and anime and manga and Japanese popular culture in general were coming out of that niche status. They weren't quite mainstream yet, but they had started, they were on the road to really actually becoming mainstream. And like the designs of characters like Cloud and Sephiroth especially were just spot on, you know, right in line with that. Yeah, as an animation historian, Dragon Ball's, I mean Dragon Ball, the series, the first 13 episodes of Dragon Ball with Little Goku was syndicated in 1995 and nobody care.

Dragon Ball Z was syndicated in 1996, no one cared. In 1998, that's when it went on Tsunami. And it turns out buying all that anime no one wanted made it huge for Cartoon Network. So this is on the cusp of anime exploding in America, which meant people had an awareness of it, but it was still exotic and just like, ooh, what is this? I know these big-eyed, spiky hair people. They seem pretty cool. Yeah, for some reason, what wasn't catching on in 95, like 97, 98, 99, it was working. That's funny.

I mean, and you think about the fact that anime and j. Japanese kind of designs were broadly suppressed in the 16-bit, 8-bit era, off the box art, they were going for much more Western looks, even though these were Japanese games. And so when Final Fantasy 7 comes around and Cloud is such a distinctly Japanese design, that spiky hair and that big sword, it's fresh, it's great. And he was a character for the zeitgeist in another way, just for, like, technical reasons, spiky hair is something that the PlayStation could do really well with all those triangles. He was made for a low-poly model. He's the Mario of low-poly. He is. He is triangle man.

Yep. Yeah. Like when you get him like, you know, more realistic hair with feathering and everything, it's kind of like, yeah. I love that spiky hair. I sat there trying to draw it in school, like, so many times, you know. It's only two lines. I was a bad artist.

I appreciate replaying the game recently, you know, that we've joking. about the pop-eye arms, you know, the giant forearms that these characters had in their low-poly models. But I realize, like, oh, it's, it is because it allows these characters to emote with their hands, even when they're really small on the screen. Like, the hands are really big, so that when the characters move their hands, if they were realistically proportioned, it would just be pixels, but now it's like big chunky things and you can kind of see them, you know, doing pantomime with those big forms.

Yeah, in Final Fantasy 8, I think a lot of the detail gets lost. because they try to make them realistic, but there's only so much resolution you can deal with. But I think nine was a good medium in which they were not as abstract as seven, but they were still had like stranger proportions. Yeah, like big hands, big head, where you could see them a moat in that lower resolution. This is a lesson that goes back to Final Fantasy 5, sorry, Jeremy, where they had the characters emote in big ways on the screen and then also Final Fantasy 6 as well. So they continued that on to Final Fantasy 7. Yeah, you can't. They're not very detailed, but they moat in.

They need to be able to emote. Yeah, I've just been playing through Final Fantasy 4 and like really taking notes and paying attention. And that's really kind of the first game where I can look back and say, you know, you have characters on screen emoting. And in this case, in Final Fantasy 4, like the emotion is basically they can lower their head and that's it. And they can raise a hand too. Yeah, they can raise a hand and they can like pretend to hit each other. Yeah. But that's it.

But then Final Fantasy 5, you get that and you also get like them laughing. And Final Fantasy 6, you get, like, panicked looks and goofiness. The eyes popping up. And that was a big interaction. With every game, they raised the bar. But Final Fantasy 7 moving into polygons allowed them to really take, you know, their character expressiveness for storytelling purposes and push it beyond, way beyond what they could do with sprites. And they looked at three different approaches to creating the graphical style of Final Fantasy 7. Kitasay interviewed him up, like, man, it was probably like 10 years ago now.

But he told me, you know, like at first we looked at making this a 2D anime game, which would have been like, you know, traditional sort of hand-drawn. And then we looked at doing 3D backgrounds with 2D sprites, like they ended up doing with Zenogears. And then they looked at doing everything in 3D. What they actually did was kind of a reverse of number 2, where you mostly get 2D backgrounds with 3D characters except in combat, where it's all 3D.

But the 3D sprites really allowed them to create little tiny actors who could do all kinds of things. They could, you know, have motion capture. I don't think they did actual motion capture. It's probably just like hand-drawn animation at that point. But they could gesticulate. They could, you know, shake their fists at each other. You had Barrett, like, constantly raising his arms and being like, cloud, you foo!

They can do squats. Over and then, Sephirov is like, I am grandiose. They could do squats. Yeah. That's a good animation. And they could do whatever the scene called for. Like, they could, I mean, you didn't have to have the, you don't have to just select from a list of pre-canned motion.

You didn't have, like, well, I've got six sprites available in the ROM space. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. And, you know, we can still debate whether or not that was the right move. You know what I mean? Like there was, they couldn't do full 3D. I mean, everybody is like, oh, Final Fantasy 7. It's 3D. It's 3D. It's 3D. And it's like, well, usually when I'm playing this game, most of it is 2D because there's a big 2D background. And the 3D part is this little teeny tiny guy running around on there. And that's the only thing that's 3D in that part of the game. It's basically convincing. It's not like 3D. is not the aesthetic. It's like the use of a highly detailed 2D instead of having to build it all out of, you know, chunks they could literally just like make a bitmap and have that just be arbitrary, whatever they wanted to, the use of that plus 3D characters to give an effect that is neither 2D nor 3D, but just its own thing. Well, and going with the detailed 2D backgrounds was a really great choice because it allowed them to create a smooth integration with the movie sequences. Like, that is, to me, the real technical, like, creative standout in Final Fantasy 7 is taking FMV, which, you know, as you mentioned before in previous games was like hand-drawn anime that did not look like the rest of the game.

And they could, you know, create computer models and hand-drawn, you know, touch-ups on it that smoothly transitioned from a static background into a movie or vice versa. Like, the opening of the game is a movie and then it becomes the game. and there's no loading time, there's no breakpoint, the train comes into stop, and if you're paying attention, yeah, you can see when the motion JPEG graphics go away and it becomes the static image, but you really have to be looking. Right. And then Cloud and Bear it jump off the train and start punching guys and you transition into a battle. That is still like, I think it's still so impressive. It's easier to see that transition these days if you're playing on the PlayStation 4 or Steam or whatever. when you were playing it on a standard definition television

and everything just sort of got that blur across it. Yeah, a motion artifact didn't look that different than dithering. You could get away with a lot. And it's like, yeah, and it just seems like that background would just start moving. And especially, like, you know, again, replaying the game, like I'm going through the old abandoned train yard, you know what I mean? And you can tell the trains are polygons. Yeah, yeah.

But originally, you couldn't tell what part of the background was going to start, was going to start moving. And it allowed for little flourishes, like, you would be looking in a security control room in Shinra Headquarters, and they would focus in on one particular TV, and then Cloud and Company would be coming out of the elevator. Yeah. That was cool in 1997. Oh, my God.

I think the word is cinematic. I mean, that's what they were pursuing. Resident Evil had already done this to a degree, but not to this degree. And, you know, Resident Evil, the original game, used that live action cutscene stuff, which was like, what are you guys doing? It was a period of wild experimentation. Yeah, it was. Yeah.

But this took, you know, the static backgrounds of Resident Evil and said, well, you know, we can do all that cinematic stuff, give people crazy camera angles and, you know, do cuts and reveals. But then it can also become like a computer animated movie, like Toy Story. Your point, to your point, Chris, about this being a period of wild experimentation, there's a bit where Sakaguchi is looking back on this. And he said, yeah, I couldn't even conceptualize what it would look like. to transition from a one from the environment to a battle scene. Right.

How that would look. Nobody could. Like the jump from 2D to 3D was so big and different and people didn't know really how to develop games in a 3D space. Yep. So they were drawing from on a whole new canvas. Yeah. And that's what I think makes Final, like Final Fantasy 7 define so much of what we came to expect from 3D games. in that period.

Yeah, because there were moments in Final Fantasy 7, I mean, even just in this Midgar sequence that, I mean, first of all, battles are full 3D, right? And so then, okay. With the camera like spinning and rotating and interesting. Yeah, and that was the experimentation of, okay, now we're going to have this rather than have these stock camera angles because they're experimenting with, okay, now you're running down the hallway, but the camera's at the end of the hallway and you're getting smaller and smaller or you're getting bigger or whatever.

But now it's like, okay, well, what does it mean to, what do we do with the camera? Like, do we just rotate it constantly? Do we set it in a standard, you know, sort of position? And so you start to see, and I think that limit breaks are kind of a part of this. Like, that's probably, that's probably why limit breaks are in this game because you get limit breaks a lot. And so, which is when your character a meter fills up and then you can do a big super move. And that limit break, that's when the game starts doing funny dynamic camera angles because the active time battle pauses at that point. And then the character does their whole thing and there's a whole like, you know, choreographed camera sequence that's meant to blow you away.

But the camera wouldn't just come in, like say, in Final Fantasy 6, you're always from a fixed angle, right? Final Fantasy 7, it comes in on different points of where your characters are standing, which keeps it relatively fresh and interesting every time. Sometimes it's pulled way back. Sometimes it's kind of zoomed in on the characters. Sometimes it's just kind of turning around. And it keeps it fresh and interesting. If there was one thing I didn't like about Final Fantasy 9 is that I think it's because of the engine constraints from having four characters. The camera was a lot more static.

And I noticed that when it first came out. It was probably engine constraints, but also that game was meant to be like, hey, remember Final Fantasy 6 and the old games? This is like that, but with polygons. So I think it was a deliberate choice to be less hyperactive with the camera. Yeah. Also, they'd gotten it out of their systems. Yeah. And it wasn't going to be as impressive anymore. work a lot of their systems with this game, which is why

you get the summons that can take up to 70 seconds, I think, for nights of the round. Final Fantasy 8 was even longer. It was, but you could skip those. You could want to. You could not skip them. You can only power them up. And 9 you can skip them. Yeah, that's right. The Final Fantasy 8 solution was, hey, people say

are summons are too long. Okay, make them press a button. Make them kind of interactive. And I think they weren't sure people could handle this so you can actually turn the dynamic camera off and have a fixed, more fixed or static camera. There's an option for that. There's lots of, like, little strange options because they weren't sure, like, will people want this?

Yeah, I mean, they're still working out the kinks, which is why you get the finger cursor over cloud. And, you know, if you're not sure where you are on the screen, you press select and a little finger pops up and is like, clouds here. You know what? Necessary. They were still figuring it out. Yes, it's the famous Final Fantasy finger. It's not pointing to the right. It's pointing down this time.

Yeah, trying to figure out. I mean, they do a lot with, it's like every door has a glow coming out of it, you know, sometimes. But sometimes it doesn't. but it's really difficult to look at the maps and just be able to tell what an exit is. So that's what I had to mark some of them. When you turn on that finger, the finger button, it actually highlights all the doors like a little green error or a little red arrow too. They would figure out how to use, like, use this technology to communicate better in the future. I don't think eight or nine has that function because they figure out a way to present it elegantly to the player.

And consider the fact that we were playing with the D-pad rather than like the analog stick to move these characters in 3D space. Which maybe isn't that intuitive, actually. Nope. Yeah, so it was a period of wild experimentation. But it worked, and we'll talk about that after this break. We're going to be able to be. Thank you. So we've talked a lot about the origins of Final Fantasy 7.

Let's talk about how the game builds on what has come before. Because this is, you know, this game-by-game look at Final Fantasy is really about how the series has evolved over time. And I talked a little bit about, you know, the emoting of actors and so forth. And you mentioned Act of Time Battle. But we haven't really talked about, you know, kind of how the systems have adapted and how, and how they changed to fit this new game. And I would start by saying that the biggest change, or the biggest creative choice I think the dev team made for the systems in the game

is that they greatly simplified them in a lot of respects. I think Materia seems complicated at first, but it's actually quite a bit simpler than a commitment like the job system. Yeah, especially because the materia itself is what levels up. So, I mean, you take this materia and you put it on a character and they level up that material. And then you're like, oh, wait, I think I want ERIS to have the recover material. And you put it on her and all the leveling up just transfers over.

It's not being done on ERIS's side. It's just the materia. Right. Which means that you can't screw up. Like, you know, whatever you're doing, you're gaining AP for your material. It's somewhat reminiscent of Magisite from Final Fantasy. Very reminiscent. Yeah, except with...

Gaining AP for the different things. I think it's notable that previously Final Fantasy had been kind of odd number games were system-oriented, even number of games were story-oriented, and that went out the window with Final Fantasy 7. I think it's a bit more... I don't know if user-friendly is the word, but I'll use it... It's a bit more user-friendly than six, because in six, you're not leveling up the magicite. You stick it to a character, and then with every level up, they get the...

It's a character-specific. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the Final Fantasy 6 style, and before that, was very much the traditional RPG approach. And I remember when this game came out, there were some people who were like, this game is crap because you don't level up your characters.

You might as well just have your materia be your party members because that's what you're leveling up. Your characters gain experience, but that just makes their, you know, their basic stats rise. It doesn't teach them new skills. They don't have any special abilities. They have their weapon, which is distinct. Like, you know, there's a melee weapon or arranged weapon, basically. And they have their limit breaks, each of which is unique to each character.

And I think they can learn four maximum. And that's it. I think there are four levels and the fourth one has one. Oh, that's right. Yeah. There are several limit breaks within each level. Except for Vincent, which is, he's a freak. So fuck him.

But, yeah, like, really all the skills you're learning are based in the magocyte. And it's a pretty brave idea, honestly, to basically say. like, these characters aren't intrinsically becoming better. Right. They're not gaining experience and wisdom by, I mean, they're gaining experience, but they're not, you know, becoming mages or becoming specialized warriors or learning all these different jobs. Like, your job can be whatever you wanted to be.

I mean, Arith maybe inherently seems like a white wizard type character, but if you want to make her a samurai, you can do that. Sure. You can give her the gill tossed and, you know, other assorted, you know, kudrumang of a samurai. It's really basically like build your own character the way you want it to be. And the only thing that really sets a character in a specific role is I guess they do have specific individual character growth. Like, Arith definitely gets, you know, more wisdom as opposed to strength. But that and their limit break and their weapon is pretty much all that really defines them.

It gives you a lot of flexibility. And you can change those, like you said, you can switch things around whenever you want, pretty much. In terms of the character's equipment, I think they might have been inspired by Mario RPG because in that game as well, you have a weapon, you have a weapon, and you have an accessory. And that's all you equip. And I believe it, you have three things to equip and set up in a weapon as well. I don't think you even have armor in this one. You have like an accessory, basically. You have a weapon and accessory, and each of those has a number of material slots.

Yeah. And there's always a tradeoff that comes with that. there is a different level of growth for some weapons. Some weapons give you double growth. Some weapons have extra slots versus the others. Some weapons have slots that are linked. So you can

apply effects to something so you can have like linked poison and double cut or something. So you get two attacks that have a chance of inflicting a poison status. So there's a lot of flexibility available but you also have to kind of trade off like maybe the weapon that has, you know, four slots with extra growth is actually extremely weak. So your character is going to be a crappy fighter, but they're going to become a really great mage because they have extra growth.

Or maybe you can turn them into someone really strong, but they only have a single materia slot in that weapon. And it has like standard growth and, you know, they can't do much in the way of specialized skills. Yeah. And you could abuse the material in a lot of interesting ways. I mean, infamously, there are some really strong crazy materials like the phoenix. mix material and the material that allows you to repeat previously cast summons. And so people would abuse that to take down Ruby Weapon. W summon and W.8um, all of those Ws.

So basically, you would put down the controller as it cast Knights of the Round over and over and over again. And it required a fairly intricate connection of the different materials and leveling them up and everything. Yeah, so is it abuse or is it solid? solving the puzzle that the game lays out for you. I mean, I don't know if the developers really intended for those combinations to ultimately happen, maybe, but I just, people figured it out, and it's circulated around the Internet, and that was how ultimately people figured out how to beat that particular. I know that there are people who figured out how to beat Ruby Weapon without using those combinations, like using limit breaks, for example.

I think that there is, to some degree, a little bit of, like, yeah, let the character or let the player do what they want, let them abuse this system built into some of these Final Fantasy games. I mean, there was a lot of crazy stuff you could do in five and then six. And I think, like Chris said, there is a little bit of a puzzle to it. I feel like the developers of Final Fantasy are kind of okay with developers, or with players coming up with really inventive workarounds and sort of breaking the system. you know, if you can figure that out, you clearly understand the game. It's not like you're just going to stumble into these things by accident and be like, oops, I broke the game. Like, you have to sit down and really think about it.

In which case it means you're spending time trying to understand the systems and taking the time to get the things to make it happen. So is that bad? I mean, it means you're really devoting yourself to their game. I don't see why that's bad. I think ultimately accessibility is the watchword of Final Fantasy 7, which is why you have so few equipment, why Materia is so powerful and intuitive to use.

I mean, it's a very – it's an easy game to grasp, which I think is one of the huge reasons that it became so popular. It's like I am playing this complicated RPG game, but I mean, you plug – you put – you plug in the material. You're good. Of course, there were also a lot of people because remember, you know, this game, they expected it to sell less than a million copies. It sold many millions of copies in the U.S. alone. And it sold a lot of it off the strength of the graphics. And so you have a lot of first-time RPG players who didn't actually really know what they were getting into. So, I mean, I think everybody has a story or at least a secondhand story or a friend who was playing Final Fantasy 7 who never played an RPG before.

And it's like, you know, how do I beat this boss? And it turns out they weren't using materia at all. Like, they were just picking fight and just trying to get as far as they could with that. I mean, one of the major challenges for advanced players is trying to beat the game without any material, which is mostly just tedious, actually. You just use material. You do it, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So let's see, there were limit breaks, which were an extension of Final Fantasy 6's desperation attacks,

which were extremely hard to pull off. I've only seen a few of them in all the times that I played Final Fantasy 6. Because they only show up when your character is like almost going to die. You've got to get your character down to 1.HP. Yeah, just about. And then instead of using a curative spell on them or something or throwing a potion at them, you're like, what if they just almost stay dead and started to tap? And then they do their desperation attack.

But limit breaks were a much more, they were much more baked in as a feature as opposed to like an Easter egg. And the idea is that in addition to, you know, like experience and the act of time meter, you also have the limit break meter. So each character progressively as they act and as they take damage, they build up this limit break meter. And when it hits max, then you can kind of cash it in and perform a super attack or an amazing curative special. or something like that. And, you know, I actually think the way Final Fantasy 7 integrates it is good. And I wish that Square were not so quick to throw out good ideas just to be different because the way it worked in 8 was not as good.

The way it worked in 9 was so frustrating because your character would automatically use it as soon as they hit their limit break. Here, it's kind of like something you can keep in reserve. So it becomes part of the strategy. Like, do I use it now in a difficult? situation, or do I save it for the boss that I know is just around the corner? Right, but you don't want to save it for too long

because then you're just wasting it. Right. For my money, they were the coolest-looking attacks in the entire game, more so than the actual sound. It's like, Omni Slash is still a dang cool looking attack. And you know what? And I think it did a lot to kind of build out those characters

and to endear people to those characters, like the fact they were doing these really cool ones. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, all of the this builds in builds into the active time battle system, which returns from Final Fantasy 6 and 5 and 4, and this time active time battle is a little slower because everything's moving in 3D and this is just the nature of 3D versus 2D. There's more a more deliberate feel to it. But you even hear this reflected in the battle theme, you know, in the Final Fantasy

4 you have like, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do it's like three seconds and the battle theme kicks in, but here it's, dun, dun, dun, da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. Yeah, it takes like three or four times as long for it even to get past that beginning. Things are loading in. Yeah, loading in all the enemy models.

Yeah, you're like up to the refrain before you can actually take action with your characters. Yep. And that is, you know, that's really a side effect of the PlayStation's very slow load speed. And that was, you know, the trade-off they had to make to get the extra storage capacity of CD-ROM. If they had put this game on in 64, battles would load really quickly, but everything would look like but. Again, the game would be about two hours long.

But it didn't feel like it was loading slowly, even though the battles felt like they were coming in relatively quickly because, I guess because they put in all those tricks with the swishing transition, which looks cool and then followed by the camera panning in. And you're like, whatever. It got obnoxious by nine. I mean, Final Fantasy 7, I think the entire design of it is like, how do we distract you from noticing the things that we're not doing? I mean, a lot of games were kind of trying to distract from the loading times at that time. You can think about the games that had little shoot-em-ups during their loading screens and that kind of thing. Right, right. Somewhat similar, yeah.

Also, I mean, what was going on was so you mentioned the music. And what I thought was interesting about this is that. Um, Uyamatsu already, Noble Uyamatsu, the composer who was still, who did the whole soundtrack for Final Fantasy 7, um,

uh, he definitely, like, felt professional jealousy when he saw other composers doing stuff that was cooler than what he was doing or, or technologically superior. He also felt with Final Fantasy 7 like, oh,

I don't want people waiting on loading screens so my music can be loaded in. Um, and so I'm just going to do everything through the PlayStation's, sound chip. I'm not going to do, you know, CD audio, stuff like that or anything too crazy. With one or two exceptions. Yes, yeah, yeah. But mostly it's going to be through the sound chip.

And so everything kind of sounded like butt on the PlayStation 1. Like people really weren't too happy, especially coming off of, you know, the mastery of the Super Nintendo sound chip. The PS1, it all sounded vaguely mid-ish. It didn't really sound great. Which is kooky and weird because Sony designed both sound chips. Yeah, kind of strange. And so Waymatsu was not actually happy with

the quality of the the OST either in the way that it sounded. I mean, compositionally Yeah, he's really proud of the composition. Like, he considers it his masterwork. Yep. And so probably it dings him a little bit more that it didn't sound as good. And then he kind of realized after like, oh, I didn't actually have to do this.

Like, people don't actually mind waiting a little bit and they like the music being better. But you know what? I feel like this is a really good jumping off point. to talk about the first chapter of the game, the Midgar sequence, because I feel like the cold sort of flat sound of Uwamato's music in this game fits Midgar. Like, it's all very synthesizery and cold and kind of oppressive and uncomfortable. And that's exactly what Midgar is. Like there's like certain sounds in this OST that just perfectly, it's like synthesizers

and it just perfectly fits the sort of cold. inhuman distressing nature of Midgar itself. The word I'm looking for is mournful. I think of like a really mournful soundtrack. It's sad. It's dark. Everything is dark. They talk about at one point in Midgar saying we can't even see the sun.

You can't see the sky. The plates blocking everything. Right. Technodistopia. Yeah. We're living in the future and it sucks. Right. Like once you get into Cosmo Canyon, it would be nice if the music sounded a little warmer.

But when you're in Midgar at least, like just the artificiality. of everything and the dark oppressiveness of it really, really fits the environment and the tone. And I guess, you know, the overall theme of the game is about sort of like nature versus technology. So it's actually, I don't know, I've warmed up to the soundtrack. I really liked it at first. And then over time, I was like, you know, once I heard other PlayStation soundtracks, once I heard Final Fantasy 8, which has a lot of sampling in it and sounds much more, much warmer and more lively, I was like, Final Fantasy 7 soundtrack sucks but now I've kind of come around and I'm like

it actually really works for this game so it's totally by accident it's just kind of a happy coincidence Yeah the texture of it really puts me in this place and time I appreciate it on that level at least and I do like the compositions a lot especially I think it has the best

world map theme period I agree yeah the battle I think the world map theme I think when you started talking about the music I started hearing that song in my head first And I think maybe as much as One Wing and Angel, that's the song that for me defines Final Fantasy 7 as an overworld map theme. And One Wing Angel does make an impression because that is where he breaks away from just the PCM and gets some sampling in there. And not just sampling, but people singing Latin. I'm sure we'll talk about that later.

The battle theme is actually pretty solid, too. I mean, it's a really distinctive. I think the measure of a good battle theme is when it has the opening chords, are they really distinctive? and you, like, you can think of them immediately. You've got to be able to listen to it for hours and hours and hours. I do, like, this has, oh, go ahead. Sorry, I do like the boss theme and it's crazy, like, Prague rock organ noodling. Yeah.

Actually, my favorite battle theme in this is the Genova theme, which is, like, Erie and otherworldly, which is exactly what it should be because she's a freaking alien who wants to take over people's brains. It's a bit EDM-E. Seferos theme is repetitive, but really dark, and I really love to. it back in the day because, I mean, you knew that Sephiroth was bad news

and it kind of presaged the one-winged angel theme as you were listening to it because it was the the... The Sephiroth Seferoth does not show up

takes them a while in Midgard. No, he's only seen a sword. He's only referred to. He's spoken of. Well, in maybe it's getting ahead of things, but you don't even see Sephiroth until like the very end of the game. Well, yeah.

Yeah. But, yeah, like, he is a presence all throughout Midgar, but you don't ever actually see him. You see that he's been there or something like him has been there and he's had an impact, but you don't see him. And the whole game becomes sort of like the pursuit of Sephora. Yeah. Which is a really interesting sort of creative choice.

Like, it really drives the quest. Everyone wants to find Sephiroth and figure out what the hell is going on. Right. If you think about Final Fantasy 7, the context. of, say, a show, then the first acts like main villain is Rufus Shinnra. Right. He is the overwhelming presence with the rest of the Shinra board. Well, even then the main villain seems to be President Shinnra, but he gets kebubed.

Yeah, no, because, yeah, he does show up at one point. He's the one who's making all the nefarious plots, but as you said, he gets kebubed. And Rufus is the one you ultimately fight. Well, President Shinra listens to opera. in his office as a plate of the entire city comes down and crushes millions of people. Yeah. Meanwhile, he's just like,

mm-hmm, mm-hmm, hmm. Yeah, so he seems like a really bad dude. And then he is a bad dude. He gets killed off camera. Off camera. You don't even get to see him die. He's just like, oh, yeah, by the way, he's dead. Here's his son.

Here's Don Jr. You see the sword sticking out of him, though. You see his corpse, right? That's how you figure it out. But people love Rufus. Rufus has, I think it's because it's the suave coat. and the cool weapon and everything. He's a popular cosplay choice, I believe.

He is. And he has his own dog. He has a good boy who is very young. We're going to be able to be. So anyway, all of this is about Midgar. And that's what we're going to talk about now for the next, I don't know, 20, 30 minutes or so before we wrap this episode. and Midgar is basically the first chapter of Final Fantasy 7. It is a self-contained space in the game that spans, again, like somewhere between 8 and 10 hours the first time you play.

That's really, really an interesting creative choice. I can't think of any game before this that does something like that. The closest I can really think of in any game is like Mass Effect's Citadel, where you can spend a lot of time in the Citadel doing quests and stuff. But that's more open-ended, whereas this is very much a... That's a choice. Yeah, like this is a linear journey through a place. And it really, for a long time, it seems like all of Final Fantasy is going to take place just inside of Midgar.

You don't see a world map until you get out of Midgar. Yeah. Like, it's very much breaking the tradition of a Final Fantasy game. You do see, you can see the kind of the outside at a certain point. I think there is an exit, but you can't leave. Right. You can check out any time you want. No, like, there's clearly a world beyond Midgar, but it doesn't really mean.

matter for those first eight hours or so. Yeah, was it sector seven that you're initially starting in? That is the sector 7G. That is your whole world. And it feels like a big world. Well, Midgar itself is a really interesting design. And I love the way the game sort of reveals it to you piece by piece. It's a big city.

It's two tiers. There's the upper tier, like the plates, and then the lower tiers and the darkness. That's the slums where people who don't have money live. It took the metaphor way too far. Yeah, they did. that city. It's fine. I mean, that's like, in terms of sort of themes, like no game had really done this to this level, certainly no JRP, really kind of throwing into relief the disparity of capitalism and what happens when you let a corporation take over everything. So, Jeff Bezos is Rufus Chindra. Pretty much. Yeah. Or Elon Musk.

Elon Musk is a better JRP supervillain. He is, but I feel like Bezos has a lot more power than Musk. Right from the start, Shinra is a huge presence. And, I mean, I think that one of the, the corporation, the corporation. Shira power company. I think one of the first things you even see is a Shinra logo on the power plant. And it makes me think of the megacorbs that kind of dominate over in Japan, like Tokyo and that kind of thing. It's very much a Japanese zibatsu type structure. And then they, like, they own the city.

They built the city, basically. It is a wheel. It's a hub and spoke design. The center of the wheel is Shinra's tower in the middle of the city. It's very much like Gennam headquarters and bubblegum crisis, the big pyramid looming over Neo Tokyo or whatever. It's very much like Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. I mean, I believe that you guys probably know more about this, but a former square guy started a company called Shinra that failed. And when it happened, I was like, don't name your company after a company that sponsored genocide.

It's a bad idea. was cloud saving like cloud will destroy Shenra guys don't do that again the metaphor was but they had a nice logo as opposed to an evil logo so it was okay I say embrace it but but midgar is such an amazing place and you you discover it in medius res so the game begins you know with this view of outer space and erith you're like who's this girl and then it cuts to a camera that's zooming into the city while being, you know, cross-cut with a speeding train, the wheels of a speeding train. It's like easy rider, I swear. They stole that.

Yeah, like you see the whole city, this huge looming, polluted megalopolis, and the camera zooms in and flies in and goes through the buildings and through a tunnel and then matches up with that train and you're on the mission and you are cloud and Barrett and you're fighting through these soldiers and you don't know why you're killing guys, but you are. And again, and it seamlessly, like the train, as the train pulls into the station, stops, cloud jumps off the train, and boom, video game. Yeah, even... There's a reason that the train is featured in the commercials really prominently because, I mean, first of all, trains looked cool. But second of all, I mean, that is a money shot right there, seeing that initial cutscenes. It's a brilliant opening. I mean, considering what this game is trying to do. Yeah.

The Final Fantasy creators always had cinematic ambitions. Like, think Final Fantasy 4 with the Red Wings opening, and you get kind of this cold open where you kind of learn what, like, what's been happening? And then Final Fantasy 6 with, you know, the introduction, the mex walking into Nibble, not Nibbleheim, Narsha, yeah, yeah, and, you know, very cinematic. But there was only so much you could do with a ROM cartridge. But here they had, you know, CD development teams in Hawaii and L.A. and the power of the PlayStation and three whole disks of data.

So go wild. And they finally got to express the ideas, like the things they wanted to do. So this is all of that coming out. And it's such a beautiful, perfect beginning. And like I really feel like the whole opening of Midgard, there's some kind of weird stuff like the darn Corneo. And it gets a little kind of off in the weeds occasionally. But really, it's just such a fascinating, compact, self-contained story

that then leads into a much bigger. adventure. Yeah, in terms of pacing, the way the game starts still feels daring to me because even with modern JRP's, it's very much, okay, the game is starting. Now you wake up in bed and you talk to everyone in the town and, oh, I heard there are monsters in that cave and it never, they're always too afraid to just let you, like, just start in a dungeon or something like that. It's always just like, no, no, we want to teach you what every button does and how to

walk around and how to access the menu. This game is just like the first thing you do is fight a battle. That's like the very first thing you do. But it's a very simple battle. And, really, you have two commands, attack and magic. And if you go into magic, you have fire. And it's not, it's not going to, you're not going to get lost. I think you're going to figure it out pretty easily.

Yeah. The guards aren't going to serve any particular danger to you. And then the game actually does a fairly good job of kind of walking you through things because the boss ultimately is a tutorial boss. They learn those lessons from final fantasy four. There's a little bit of a mistranslation there that gives you some wrong direction. Attack when its tail is raised. Oh, that's right.

I was being sarcastic. It was like that patent-offs' that troll thread where it's like, he says one thing, but oh, wait, it's the other. I mean, that opening dungeon, it's straightforward, it's linear. You're going to learn the mechanics really quickly. You're going to learn the premise. You're getting snippets of the story, like Barrett's telling you who you are and why you're there and who Shinra is and why you're attacking this power plant. You're like, wow, I'm actually an asshole. I will take a simple dungeon to start a game rather than an army of people telling me what all the buttons do and, you know.

Well, and there is a little bit of that. You know, I think Barrett gives you a thunder material, doesn't he? And he's like, be sure to equip this. Right, right. But, you know, it doesn't, like, stop the game and say, here's how you equip material. Compared to Final Fantasy 8, which does, in fact, stop the action constantly with very long and annoying tutorials. Right, right. Well, what did Final Fantasy 5 kind of did the same thing?

Final Fantasy 4, no, Final Fantasy 4 did not. Final Fantasy 4, like, when you got control of Cecil and Kane, you were like, you were in the, inside the castle talking to people and blah, blah, blah. You didn't actually control those battles in the game. Go to bed, Rosa comes and talks to you. You're sad about your life. I think one of the reasons a lot of people were put up by Final Fantasy 8 was because Final Fantasy 8 begins with you in school.

You're waking up in the infirmary. You're going and taking a test. You're kind of wandering around this kind of strange, boring school. Yeah, like the game opens with a battle, but you don't get to play it. It's a CG battle between Cypher and Squall. And you watch and then you wake up after the battle is ended. And Final Fantasy 7 is just right from the start, you're off. And it circumvents the slow start that so many JRPs get out to.

Yeah. And the fact that, like, you know, these battles take a long time to, you know, you're getting into it. You're seeing, I mean, you're also, I mean, they want to get you into battle as soon as possible because that's full 3D. And they want to introduce you to these other character models, you know, these more realistically proportioned, nicer character models that are in battles. they don't want you like, they want to show you that really fast. And talking about the music, it has one of my favorite tracks is the attacking, the bombing. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, right? I mean, it's very energetic.

You're, like, really into it. They don't cut to the actual battle music. It sticks with it the entire time. Oh, that's right. Yeah. It's very seamless. You wait until you actually get into the reactor area and then the music changes and then you start getting the battle theme when you go into battle. But for that initial run-up to the elevator where Barrett kind of gives you the, the breakdown of what you're doing,

it's just that continuous bombing around the track. Yep. Lots of great creative decisions. And then, you know, even once you finish the bombing mission, it doesn't really slow down because you create this huge explosion and it's kind of bad and you get separated from everyone and you meet Ereth right away. And then you go back and kind of get a look at the slums by going to Barr, Texas. That is what it's called, right? everybody buys the flower first, right? Yeah.

Oh, I bought the flower. So I was always, whenever I played FF7, I never liked Eryst very much. I didn't, I liked Ufi actually. And I was forever either trying to date Ufi or I was trying to date Barrett. I wanted the. And so I was like, okay, I can't buy the flower. I got to be mean to her all the time. And this was, Gamebacks existed at this time, but it was a little unclear to me.

It was secrets of the Sega Sages, thank you. The steps required to get Barrett were you could not screw up even once. And so I was constantly sweating it out. And so whenever I buy that flower for the first time, I'm thinking, no, I don't want your flower. Go away. Right, right, right. Spoiler, though, all the ladies in Final Fantasy 7 are great. Eris, Tifa, U.P.

I like Tifa. Marlene. I've come around to Arette over the years. I found her really boring for a long time. Now I'm like, she's all right. I think Erith seems boring on the surface because she seems like such a good girl. But then if you really pay attention, she's actually not. Like, she's the instigator in the wall market scene trying to get Cloud to cross-dress.

Well, she's the one who's just like, yeah, she's just like, Cloud, you have to dress like a good girl. It's the only way. I know a lot about human trafficking. So listen to me. There's probably a lot of solutions to this. No. No, you're going to have to dress like a girl, Cloud. Trust me.

Yeah. Like I said, I've come around to her. It's the only way for me. She's into it. Yes. Oh, she clearly is the whole entire time. Yeah, Tifa's actually the innocent girl next door. She's the one, you know, wearing like a tight t-shirt and a miniskirt, but really she's not very experienced in the world and she's kind of relying on cloud to show her the way.

Whereas Ereth is like, I like you because you're like the first guy I boned. It's, you know, like she's got a mischievous streak to her. Like I said, I was team Ufi because she was like the manic pixie dream girl coming straight out of a forest, like just completely at random, joining her party. like completely insane. Ui makes you work to like her because your first real experience with her is going to Wutai and she steals all your materia

and throws you under this quest where you're just like, I hate you so much. But yeah, I like you. Anyway, so where were we? Oh, yeah, just seeing like the whole city. And like I said, there are some weird digressions. The wallflower or the wall market.

Wallflower. So I get this. I lost my turn at that. out there. I get this Batman. I get this Gotham City kind of feel when you step out of the, sorry, the power plant, just in the way that the cars kind of have this almost 1930s kind of gothic look to them. And the, sorry, the Art Deco kind of signage and everything.

I think of Tim Burton's Batman at that moment. It looks cool. Yeah, it's a really distinctive look. But then there's also a lot of references to, oh, crap, what's the band? My Bloody Valentine just flown around. It's a, sure, why not? Yeah, it does have a very odd look. Like, I'm thinking of the weird truck that shows up alongside the motorcycle.

It's like this really weird kind of like. Toriyama drew it. Yeah, it's like a cross between a model A, I think, and a Toriyama vehicle and then the motorcycle. Yeah, it's an interesting vibe. Also, there's like untranslated Japanese everywhere. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's very blade-ruder-ish. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah.

And then, you know... Yeah, you expect a gigantic Atari logo somewhere. Exactly. There's lots of really memorable sequences. One of my favorite is the infiltration of Shinra Tower, which is kind of like the climax of the Midgar sequence. You can go in and go straight up the elevator, or you can try to sneak in and go up the stairs. Yeah, I always do that. And you're like, it doesn't really make any difference to how you play the game.

But if you go up the stairs, you go up all the stairs. And along the way, everyone is complaining because it's so tedious. And they're like, oh, my God, we're up for 70 now. They were inspired by Ghostbusters. So, actually, you get an elixir if you take the stairs. Oh, yeah, you do. So if you play the game on PlayStation 4, and there's a lot of places in which this comes in handy. So on PS4, you can click the left analog stick to speed up the game by 3X.

And it doesn't speed up the music, so you can still listen the music at the same speed. Oh, nice. while the game goes at 3x speed. So if you want to speed up the battles, you can do that. If you want to run up those stairs really, really fast, you can do that. And you can also click the right stick to just max out everybody's HP and limit break at any point if you feel like it. So it's kind of like if you, hey, hey guys, if you want to revisit Final Fantasy 7 but you don't want to play 50, 60 plotting hours of Final Fantasy 7, you don't have to. If you play the PS4 version, you can speed it up and give yourself infinite health if you want.

And you can experience the story again without actually having to sit through like 10, 15 minute battles every couple of feet. Oh, you can turn off random encounters too. The funny thing is I think we remember Final Fantasy 7 as being a really long game. But actually, I mean, I think a lot of people, their initial run is going to take like 50 hours. But by the end, like, I had gotten to the point where I was like knocking it off in 25 hours. or so without any particular problem. There's a lot of extra stuff to do. I mean, golden saucer, raising black chocobos, all of that stuff.

But ultimately, I could get through it really quickly for the most part. It wasn't actually that long of a game. No, but it's a game that really gives you a lot of freedom to explore, even more so than any other Final Fantasy game before it. Like once you get out of Midgar, there's a lot to do. Midgar itself is very, very linear. and it really does a good job of kind of bringing you into this world and kind of showing you the stakes and getting you getting a sense of how horrible Shinra is. And, you know, like, that's a great start.

But then, yeah, there's a lot to do outside of the world. Like, you can buy a house. Is there a point of buying the house? It's extremely expensive. It takes a long time to earn that much money. Just something to dump all your money into it after you've been playing the games. Is there a point to buying a house in Skyron? Sure.

You can have a kid live there and a pet and stuff. But you can't even do that. in this one. I think it's just like, now you own a house in Costa del Seoul. Congratulations. They did that in earthbound too, right? And there was barely any reason to do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. So after the initial, so after you meet

Eris, everything slows down a lot. It gets a lot quieter. You meet her mom. You are, you're seeing Midgar for the first time. You get that train sequence where it's going around the big core pillar and it's kind of zooming out. You're getting a feel for

the environment. You meet the rest of Avalanche and Barrett's daughter and you're starting to plan your next kind of mission and it's at this point often when I'm trying to replay it that I'm like going I'm checking my watch a little bit because for me it was always the initial bit would always be very exciting and then from that point I'm marking time until President Shinra's scheme to basically do a false plague operation and destroy the pillar because everything up to that point, it's pretty slow and pretty boring to me. I do. Actually, I like that

part because it's sort of like a heist where there are many stages of this plan and you have to go through them all and then you eventually enact them. Plus, this is the part of the game where you get to fight the hellhouse. Yes. How can you not love that? A random enemy that is a possessed house that shoots missiles at you.

There are a lot of weird enemies in this game. Just completely random. Why are they, why is it a house that tries to kill you? Because they didn't have a mono to do character designs for them. So they were just like, Like, throw it at the wall. Yep. And probably trying to come up with stuff that, you know, works well, yeah, in polygons.

Yep, yep, yep. So you would think maybe it would be better to have, say, monsters that are living in the slums. Right. Or like Shinra, whatever, police officers or something. I mean, at this point, we had a menagerie, a fairly large menagerie of Final Fantasy 7 character, or Final Fantasy Monsters. So it's a little weird. A lot of those do show up, but, you know, they're kind of parceled out throughout the game. So you definitely see things like behemoths and quarrels.

and bombs and goblins, but you don't see those in Midgar especially because those things don't make sense in Midgar. Why would you see a goblin in the middle of a huge city or like, you know, some kind of wild beast or a behemoth? Those are things that happen later in the game. But the enemies in Midgar, I think, honestly, like, now that I think about it, the weirdness of these enemies helps kind of set this stage of the game apart from what's come before in Final Fantasy.

It's like, I don't know that that was deliberate. But the upshot is, like, it does feel like this sort of alien experience, even if you've been playing all the Final Fantasy games to this point. It's like, wow, this is really different. Things have changed. Side note, I hated that house because if you let it go crazy and start attacking you, it could really mess you up. It could do a lot of damage to your party. And Final Fantasy 7, by and large, was not that hard of a game, but there were moments that were really hard. And that could be one of them.

Especially early on, you're not that strong. So you can be taken out by regular enemies pretty easily. Yeah, but I mean, this is a game that dares to let the protagonist and the cute girl he just met hang out at a playground and just chat a little bit. And it's a weird-looking playground, too. It's not a normal playground. Garfield-ass thing coming out of the ground. But, I mean, it's these quiet moments of contemplation that you really didn't get in games before this because there just wasn't the space for that much, you know, text. Everything had to be very economical.

on PlayStation or on Super NES. And so, you know, they kind of take advantage of that. And they're like, why don't we have some moments which are just like the characters sitting and looking at the sunset or, you know, sharing moments. This is also where they start messing with you because they have an entire sequence where you have a flashback sequence where Cloud is hanging out with TIFA. That didn't happen. That absolutely did not happen. And so it's setting expectations. And I think that's why a lot of people were very, a lot of, one of the selling points of Final Fantasy 7 was that the story for a lot of people made no dang sense, which made it good because it's like, it's so deep and so interesting that I don't understand what the heck is going on.

That's just a problem with localization. Sorry. Yeah. Well, I mean, that was, you know, so, yes, so tons of text in this game. But I mean, a lot of the answers. Like. Put one person on it and was just like, okay, transatl out all the text. there's a lot of stuff that you have to find

like you have to deliberately seek out certain story moments if you want to have a fuller picture of say what Hojo was doing and that kind of thing. Yeah, I mean you have to go do that whole mansion sequence that's completely optional get an optional character if you want and then that's when you start to make sense

of like why does ERIS seem to think that cloud is so familiar? What's going on there? Like that's all totally optional. So it's kind of a weird choice creatively and it doesn't again, it doesn't help that the localization is pretty rough. So it doesn't really flow smoothly and make a lot of sense at all the time.

You know, of all the jerks who retranslate games with perfectly fine translations, why did no one retranslate this? Because it, I mean, I feel like even with a re-release, can you just give us some better text? Somebody, somebody do it. Another interesting flourish that I always, that I was remembering as I was revisiting this opening sequence was they loved having just text appear on the screen and like you would see a, you would hear a little whoosh of sound and a white screen

and some text as Cloud is remembering a thing and sometimes it would cut to a, it was going for that psychological feel of what's going on with Cloud. And they established that almost right from the start that something is going on, Cloud is remembering stuff, but maybe not very well,

And at the time, it was really cool because it just didn't see that in games very much. Yeah, I mean, this game owes a lot in terms of narrative to Neon Genesis Evangelion. And it definitely – I mean, there's references to Ava in the game. And it definitely seems to be doing that sort of psychological, like, what's happening inside of Cloud's mind. And you would have text – you'd have text appearing on the screen at random in Evangelion as well. So I think that makes sense. Right. And Cloud was like hearing voices. You know, he goes up to the reactor in the very beginning of the game.

And there's a voice that says, this reactor is not what it seems. And he's like, what, huh? Who's talking to me? So, yeah, he's kind of having a freak out. And, you know, later in the game, that kind of comes to a head. But in, you know, in the Midgar section, it's just a mystery. And really, you're kind of like everything is framed to make Shinra look terrible. And then you get to Shinra Tower and you get captured and break out of jail.

and, you know, this whole other entity comes into existence. And you're like, whoa, there's actually this horrible guy who everyone thought was dead and now he's killing everyone else. It's crazy. And so that kind of leads into the rest of the game. And Shinra is still an entity throughout the game and something you have to worry about. And they're, you know, their special agents, the Turks, are constantly in pursuit of you and you keep bumping into them. But clearly, like, once President Shinra is murdered, Shinra is not the worst, you know, the worst entity around the bad guy on the block.

So the first time you meet the Turks. So you're, you've done a mission, you're doing your second mission, but you get ambushed by President Shinraan himself, actually, with his security robot. And then there's that really cool sequence where the floor explodes and you fall through, which a very nice kind of transitionary point. And then you fall into Eris's church seemingly, which one of the most iconic locations in the game and in games period, right?

I mean, you go from this cold, dark, timber-esque, blade-runner-esque city to your first real flash of green because you have almost this little flower patch in the middle of a church with sunbeams coming in and the contrast works really well, I think. It's very effective. And it also kind of gives you a teaser of what ERIS actually is. You don't know why there are flowers growing here,

but it ultimately reaches back to her nature and kind of the role that she'll play in the game. And that, you know, that stuff that all kind of comes later once you get out of Midgar. But in the meantime, we're out of time. So we're going to battle our way on motorcycle to the end of this podcast. and climb over the wall to the next time we talk about Final Fantasy 7, which will be in a few months. So what you're saying is that this should be like a three-part pod because we've got so much to cover. I don't know about three.

Well, three discs. I think we can get through the rest of the game and spinoffs next episode. That's what you say. That'll be the final word. I know. I've got to say, before we get on the motorcycle, put everyone in the back row because that boss fight is a back attack. And you guys need to know that.

That's right. Yep. So any final thoughts on this portion of the game? I mean, it's probably one of the most iconic parts of Final Fantasy 7 because I think a lot of people, it really stands out in your memory of so many scenes where, you know, the initial power plant attack, the destruction of the pillar, the Turks, the, I love the entirety of the Shinra headquarters attack as you're, it's a really lengthy sequence as you're going. up to the very top, working your way up. It's starting to get a feel for kind of the weird things that are happening. You meet Hojo there. You meet Genova there.

The fight on the rooftop against Rufus Shinra is really cool. The motorcycle escape. I think the motorcycle escape was the first time. We didn't really talk about this. The first time you see the cool, realistic version of a cutscene. That was always one of my absolute favorite cutscenes. Right. Yeah.

So there's so many cool things going on in that first. like 10 hours or so and then of course it lets you out into the open world and it's like oh my god wow the world's so much bigger than I ever thought it's really mind-blowing and one of the really great things is that

as you descend that ladder or rope or whatever to the exterior of Midgar the music that plays is a reprise of Final Fantasy fives ahead in our way so isn't it I'm thinking right I don't think it is I don't think so wait where is where does that play

There is a reprise of A Head On Our Way. Is there? Yeah. I don't think I heard it at that point. Damn it. I was positive that it plays there. It's been a while since I was. I would love that because A Head On Our Way is one of my favorite songs.

It is a less energetic version. But there definitely is a version of A Head on Our Way that is called A Head on Our Way. And I was thinking it plays there. And it's like saying, okay, well, now you've been through this crazy self-contained future city. now you're going into the real Final Fantasy experience. Things are going to be more like you expect. You're going into an overworld and you're going to fight through dungeons and there will be random battles against monsters that you're familiar with.

They should put the title screen there. Right. Then I would have just totally freaked everybody out. Oh, my God. But seeing as Sephora, and of course you see Sephora of course you see Sephora of Sora, the Masamuna in going through President Shinra, and that's where things really get serious. I'll say that if I want to have a Final Fantasy 7 experience, but I don't want to play the whole game and I normally don't want to play the whole game. I've only revisited it once in the past decade in full.

I'm content to just play this section of the game, the Midgar section, and it's a full experience that I'm satisfied with, and I can just put it down after that and just be, move on to something else. Like I do, I do enjoy how it's somewhat self-contained, and I feel like it's just so the pacing is great. it's very varied in terms of what you're doing and I love the characters in the section so I do enjoy the Midgar section a lot So I was just praising it and like It does have a lot of really memorable things But I always

I was always out of pains to get out of Midgar Because for me the game did not really start in earnest until I got into the open world Because then I had a lot more freedom to explore The world got bigger Safferoth became a much bigger presence I got a lot of my party members You kind of learn the stakes

the battle system expands quite a bit. And, yeah, I mean, that was my own perspective. I was like, okay, I'm at Shinra Headwaters now. This is where it gets good. Right. That was my recollection. You spent so much time with that going, oh, man, I can't wait until we get to the world map.

And then, like, later on with, like, Final Fantasy 10, it's like, oh, man, I can't wait to we get to the world map. Oops, the Final Fantasy 10 turned out to the entire midcar sequence. Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating to go back and play. I really had not played much Final Fantasy 7 since, you know, my original play-through 20 years ago. And it's just interesting to look at it now as this really unique product of its time where they were not ready yet to go full 3D with role-playing games but were ready to start

leaving 2D behind in whatever capacity that they could. And it really is this, you know, very much a product of its time does a lot of stuff that you're just not going to do anymore with the full 3D games of today. They had so many mini-games. Oh, God, yes. Starting with the motorcycle escape, really. I think I talked about this. So I interviewed Tetsun Numura not too long ago, and he said that one of the reasons he has the gummy shipping Kingdom Hearts is that Hiranovo Sakaguchi taught him that Final Fantasy games and by extension, Kingdom Hearts should be everything games.

And that made Final Fantasy 7 make so much more sense because I was just thinking about, like, when you're in the church, you're above the rafters and the Turks are or the Shinra soldiers are coming after eras. and you're pushing the stupid barrels off to hit the shinross. If you push them off wrong, if you push the wrong barrel, it's going to miss, and you've got to do it again. It's like, eh. I like the CPR minigame. It's great. It's fucking sucks.

And the squat mini game. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that is the first mini game, pretty sure. The squats to get the better swimsuit or whatever. The motorcycle, like, battling mini game. Yeah, this game is a sprawling, messy, contradictory slice of brilliance. And I feel like, you know, this opening portion of Midgar really crystallizes everything

good and bad about the game. And, you know, I understand why it was a huge hit and it absolutely deserves it. And there's a lot I love, like, the way Midgar is slowly revealed to you until you get to that train sequence where you're riding around the perimeter and you finally see the city again after the intro for the first time. And you're like, man, this place is amazing. This is crazy. There's never been a place like this in a video game.

It is the Sonic Adventure of Final Fantasy's. No. Put that on the box. So what you're saying is that entire thing is the killer whale of Final? Maybe. I was just being a smart ass. We're talking about how it's trying to do everything. But in this case, it actually works.

That's right. I said it. It's weird. I mean, yeah, there's you, by the time that you're end up like doing, doing squats in this, in this gym, like, you're kind of thinking back to like, this was not in the TV commercials at all. It was just this dude riding a motorcycle and swinging things with this, you know, with this huge sword. I mean, I guess I just remember when I was playing it, I was 100% invested in the world and in the story. And I had loved Final Fantasy 6, but it felt at that time so much bigger and smarter and more interesting than Final Fantasy 6.

You know, a generation of gamers was becoming teenagers. and this was just a direct shot, you know, on that group of people. All right. So Final Fantasy 7, that was the first of about 12 hours of conversation we're going to have about this game. Thank you for listening. We'll be back again in a few months to talk some more about Final Fantasy 7. We're just going to – this is just Final Fantasy 7, the podcast from now on. Thanks for joining us.

The beginning of the final word on Final Fantasy. Right, exactly. So, yes. Anyway, Chris, Kat, thank you for coming in. You'll be called to the carpet again soon. Don't you worry. We're going to talk about this game some more. Anyway, why don't you guys tell us where we can find you on the Internet?

I, of course, am Jeremy Parrish, who can be found at Twitter on Twitter as Games Fight and at Retronauts.com, which is also where you find this podcast. But what about y'all? You can find my writing when I do it at Kotaku.com. I recently re-reviewed Krono Trigger. That was a lot of fun. And I, you know, would be remiss. not to do this episode and not to mention that I've written a book about Final Fantasy.

It is called Final Fantasy 5. It is from Boss Fight Books. Go to bossfightbooks. Go to bossfightbooks.com. And you should buy it and give me money. Good plan. You can find me on Twitter at the underscore Cap Bot. I have a podcast. It's about RPGs called Acts of the Blood God, which I might have just mentioned. And we're doing a top 25 RPG countdown.

Can't tell you yet whether Final Fantasy 7 is going to be on the list. But Final Fantasy 5 is... I'm going to tell you that this episode is probably coming out long after that countdown is finished. So next year? Maybe. Okay. Who knows? Who knows?

Well, if it's all done, go check it out on the site because we'll have a complete hub and all of the episodes. So you'll be able to find the countdown relatively easily. So go check that out. Bob? Hey, it's Bob Mackie. And you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. And if you like podcasts and if you like retronauts, boy, if I got an offer for you, I have two other podcasts.

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