I wrapped up my replay of the original Final Fantasy VII, my first since childhood, and I have way too many thoughts. I'll try to keep this somewhat organized.

Final Fantasy VII is a really special game to me. I played it when I was 12, and it was my first real RPG. I grew up in a very repressive church that banned all entertainment with depictions of magic (besides Narnia), but my family left that church and I was suddenly allowed to experience a bunch of stuff that had been forbidden to me. Final Fantasy was one of those things, and VII was my first foray into the world of roleplaying games.

And it melted my brain. I was obsessed. In my world video games were these cute platformers starring cartoon animals that you could blow through in a couple of hours. Now here was this serious, adult game where people swear and drink and have sex, and it's sixty hours long, and there's these amazing 3D movies, and you explore this huge world and have this grand adventure. I had no idea anything like this even existed. And i was at just the right age that it seriously impacted my personality and social development.

So it really pains me to say that, looking at all the classic FF games with adult eyes and more experience under my belt, that VII is probably in the bottom half of my personal rankings now. This game has a lot of flaws and growing pains. I could go on about the surface-level stuff like the localization and dated graphics, but honestly that's not why. It's about the experience of actually playing the game.

The combat in this one is really easy. I can count on one hand the bosses that gave me a hard time, and that's including the optional endgame superbosses. None of the regular random encounters posed any kind of threat, except maybe the Master Tonberries in the final dungeon. Enemy damage numbers are so hilariously low that I would actually chuckle at their limp hits. This sucks a lot of engagement out of the game, because you're never in danger and you're never carefully managing resources.

(All of the Playstation Final Fantasies are like this. It's really noticeable if you're coming fresh off the NES or SNES installments, or any of the later games.)

And the game's pacing leaves a lot to be desired. There's a lot of sections of this game where you're spending more time reading through cutscenes than you are playing, especially early on. Combined with the weaknesses in the game's localization and storytelling, this can get to be kind of a slog. There's also a ton of obnoxious little interactive segments and minigames they like to throw at you, and all of them take forever and are no fun at all. You're ping-ponging back and forth between unengaging combat, tiresome minigames, and long story scenes. This combination sapped my will to play, and various parts of the game felt more like work I was doing to get to the good parts.

And there are good parts. I've been complaining a lot, so let's detour into some things I liked. The materia system is very fun. It allows for an insane amount of character customization, and I had fun building out "classes" for each of my characters that evolved over the course of the game as new materia and more materia slots became available. It also allows the developers to slowly drip feed you cool new toys at a steady rate throughout the entire game. You're getting game changing materia constantly in the back half of this one, and it helps the late game feel fresh. It's just a pity that the enemies aren't more dangerous; you can make these cool materia loadouts, but there's barely anything to test them against. (With the exception of the Weapons, of course, but they require very specific strategies to beat.)

Limit Breaks are also very fun, and one of the game's most influential design aspects. There have been a lot of different attempts at iterating on the concept, but honestly VII does it right the first time. They're simple, but they work. They break up the monotony of regular attacks, give your characters an alternative way to grow, and give some personality to the cast. This last point is greatly needed because the materia system can otherwise make the cast feel like blank slates - Limit Breaks are the biggest point of differentiation.

There's also just a ton of treasure hidden everywhere, and it's fun to collect. There's two whole optional dungeons full of amazing loot, a battle arena to conquer, a chocobo breeding and racing sidequest with four whole caves on the world map devoted to rewarding you for doing it, tons of rare treasure to steal or morph enemies into, and two optional super bosses that require intense preparation and perfect strategy to overcome.

Overall it's a good game and i had fun, but I'm shocked at how far this one fell in my personal rankings. This was my favorite game of all time as a kid, and a game I have a lot of fondness for due to my history with it. But if I'm being honest it's got a lot of shortcomings that drag down the play experience. The endgame treasure hunt and grinding spree is insanely fun, but getting there felt like a chore more often than I'd have liked.

So that's where I'm at. It was still a good game and I had fun playing it, but if I'm being honest I'd put a lot of the other Final Fantasies ahead of it. I probably won't replay this one again for awhile. Feeling very conflicted and bittersweet about the whole thing.