20 years later, Final Fantasy VII’s greatest achievements are still unmatched

I loved FF7 as much as I hated it. I would finish it with a sense of huge accomplishment, then get annoyed by the huge amount of praise on the internet that I would just push back and say that actually, it was in fact not that good and Final Fantasy VI was the better game. This game was the mirror of my coming-of-age, it was the pulse that I would periodically check when it came to the maturing of my taste as a young adult. It speaks to the towering accomplishment of the game that any attempt at belittling his achievements are often derided and seen as childish, because they rightfully are. The qualities of Final Fantasy VII are on another plane as its failings, and trying to lump them together is a futile exercise.

Yes, It was very much a game of its time. FF7 was at that specific period of the video game industry where you could have the money and the talent to try your hands at everything  without corporate meddling on your back. The strength of Hironobu Sakaguchi as a leader allowed for the creative drive permeating Final Fantasy VII. In that sense, it is a title that will never be replicated, because its core has always been about freedom, something that has left the AAA space. It exists in a time capsule that the industry will never be able to go back to. This game will always be there as a reminder of that : the sheer amount of content, the themes that were previously unexplored, the characterization that would aim for Jungian aspirations…it was all there, to never be seen again together in any other high-budget JRPG.

If we’re to talk about achievements, Final Fantasy VII’s musical score has to come first. It drifted away from the classic formula of town, battle and field music to offer a score that is far more ambient in nature. It had movie aspirations in mind, in which the score would closely accompany the situation. Its most iconic pieces weren’t the battle theme or the boss theme, it was atmospheric tracks like Anxious Heart that could easily be considered as the main theme of the game. The influence of that single piece of music in putting every element of the game together to make them pop out as a representation of a city afflicted by corporate truancy is astounding. By bringing meaning and emotion about the environment, it places a level of subtlety that was rarely seen before. Misery wasn’t told, it was shown. The biggest city a JRPG has ever seen is riddled with bouts of melancholia and hopelessness, it was definitely something new.

The other achievement is the staging. As hard as it is to believe, FF13’s director was the person in charge of staging Midgar and its events back in 1997. He did so with a talent that must have spent his creative drive for a lifetime. His influence focused on maximizing interactions between the player and the city, going from the sewers to an eerie train graveyard, while also putting a cross-dressing sequence where you have to maximize Cloud’s sex appeal by finding cosmetics around the market. All of this while you have the chance to peep through the keyhole of rooms in a brothel to find people rehearsing a theatre play that was disturbingly foreshadowing the events of the game. The key-word was interactivity. Midgar was its own character, and it was created not to showcase the power of the Playstation, but to enhance the incredible talent that Square nurtured over the years in terms of mise-en-scène.

Remember the Shinra building? Who could have thought one of its best part was making you walk up the stairs for five minutes? They made what should be an excruciating trek into something entertaining as you listen the characters talk and complain in an intimate space while rhythmically moving the characters around to make them climb up.  It shows the sheer talent and ingenuity of this game to break the norm that until today I have never considered that the Shinra building was a dungeon. Everything was there : the challenge, the journey, the puzzles…but it was so good that I could not compare it to a dungeon, it was a different experience. To start with a long set of stairs and then end it with you following trails of blood in an oppressive atmosphere that left a huge impression to many young players shows that convention didn’t matter in this game. They made the Shinra building a crucial point of the game regardless of what the genre is about and have been doing before.

Yet, the real crowning achievement of Final Fantasy VII had nothing to do with the new possibilities offered by the power of the new system. The groundbreaking accomplishment was the main character, Cloud Strife. It was unique to the game that the flagship character was utterly robbed of his function as a hero. The very best moment of the game finds you diving into his subconscious, witnessing his extreme PTSD from the chemical experiments and the loss of his best friend, but also his worries, his extreme embarrassment at his failure as a farm boy unable to make it big at the city to impress his childhood love, Tifa, where he went to great lengths to hide his feelings. This one single sequence, witnessed by the person he cared the most unraveled the many layers of the character as someone more than a pragmatic, snarky character that has influenced countless other character in other games. He is a mentally ill man, but managed to alleviate his condition by allowing himself to be surrounded by supporting friends and accepting who he really was. To make Cloud an impostor with personality disorder puts into question the whole proximity that the player has with him as he becomes an unreliable narrator, but he regains that trust. The new chance he’s been given allows him to finally be himself. He becomes a more thoughtful and compassionate man, it makes him a better leader. Doubting oneself has been a staple of the franchise, but exposing Cloud as a failure, going as far as making him the most pitiful, miserable man in the eyes of the player and subsequently make him bounce back, was new. It remains as new as it was 20 years ago, as Square is still utterly unable to replicate what made the character so great even now. Cloud as a character is a lost art for Square-Enix, a puzzling relic of another era they will never be able to decipher.

Yet, the answer is simple, Cloud managed to be so great because it was a game that managed to bring physical contact into its narrative. They were not just interacting each other, they were fighting each other, arguing, flirting, dating, even having sex. It was an organic group that shared as many good moments as they shared disturbing one. It was a game that put his 3D engine to use by putting Barret and his daughter together in a heartwarming hug while also showing Cloud physically abusing Aerith in a horrifying way while under mind-control. They were not perfect, they were sometimes horrible, but they were human.

Cosmo Canyon’s campfire scene after learning of the impending doom of the planet

I remember this scene in the Cosmo Canyon, when they were sitting around a campfire. All of the characters were talking about their worries : Barret about the loss of his friends and the renewed motivation of his quest against the Shinra, Tifa foreshadowing that she knows about Cloud’s true identity and how conflicted she is about it, Aerith slowly coming to grip that she is the last of her kind or Red XIII approaching the subject of his  anger against his father…Final Fantasy VII was valuing its characters and was not afraid of setting up intimate spaces to make them open up to you. I could understand them, I could see something in me in their stories, I could see myself as if I was a party member, a friend they could open up to. They were not simply a motivation to press on, it was an earnest way of displaying characters that the team behind the game believed in, because they knew that none of them were one-dimensional and they had the means to prove it.

The game is as modern now as it was back then. It was a display of an environmental struggle in a modern setting, and the wealth-based discrimination that ensues as the planet is slowly being robbed of its resources. What it shows is that the real fantasy based on reality is not the title we’ve come to know this tagline from. Final Fantasy XV was a relic of an ancient legacy of kings and prophets, Final Fantasy VII was a current tale of the people, in which they rose up to arms to find a better future in a world trampled by corporate authoritarianism. It was a journey that was both physical and spiritual to find the strength to fight against the odds for an ideological ideal that was worth fighting for. It was today.

I could talk about the brilliance of Aerith’ iconic scene and the position to never renege on her death, I could talk about how class discrimination was a huge centerpiece of FF7, showing extreme poverty and wealth often in the very same space, but does it matter ? The game escaped our grasp as a piece of art. It has set itself as a work in which our world will always reinforce its relevance and strength. There is nothing to do but revel at its ascension as the formative game of our generation.