The Impact of Final Fantasy 7: The Game that Changed Everything

[Music] Final Fantasy sevens pretty good okay one thing I want to get at frontier is I love this game and probably an unreasonable amount I've spent hundreds of hours playing it I read books on it I draw terrible awful banners of it I adore this game and clearly I'm not the only one Final Fantasy 7 is a game that rented an entire console generation one that introduced whole continents of players to a new kind of experience and it's both these things I want to talk about today but also how twenty-two years after its release this is a game people still care so much about why both its fans and the industry have never been able to walk away from Final Fantasy 7 shockingly Final Fantasy seven is the seventh game in the Final Fantasy series developed by a one small Yokohama based game dev called square who before Final Fantasy were known for such classics as deathtrap and deathtrap too but later become inspired by the success of Dragon Quest creating their own fantastical turn-based RPG and that would be the first Final Fantasy beginning a series that would transform title by title into a juggernaut of the Japanese games industry with Japanese role-playing games or JRPGs selling a millions of copies and becoming a cultural phenomenon inside of Japan but outside of Japan across international waters that cultural blaze cooled to a smoldering indifference despite selling to a much larger audience internationally JRPGs sold only a fraction of what they did in Japan even earthbound a first party Nintendo title with a massive a fart based marketing campaign was met with indifference by an American audience Nintendo at one point in a desperate bid to build a JRPG fan base in the West just gave away tens of thousands of copies of dragon quests with subscriptions to its magazine Nintendo power and yet still nothing works however there was a game in developments that was set to change everything one that would release in the twilight of the 90s and transform hey J RPGs were seen forever and that game was Sega bass-fishing - oh [ __ ] I mean Final Fantasy 7 originally Final Fantasy 7 was in development for the 16-bit Super Nintendo and this is a time so early on in videogames the 3d was still an unknown quantity square themselves even questioning if JRPGs had a future in 3d however after the initial development was halted after most of the team was transferred to help completion on Chrono Trigger Final Fantasy sevens development was restarted on the more powerful nintendo64 and what you're seeing here is the final fantasy concept trailer that squared developed for that console trying to visualize how turn-based combat would even work in 3d but it was also that shift 3d that began to put pressure on squares relationship with Nintendo since 1988 Square developed games nearly exclusively for Nintendo with every single Final Fantasy title being released on Nintendo consoles and basically being seen as second party titles but it was decided that Nintendo 64's format would be cartridges as opposed to the more modern CD limiting what developers could do on the machine and frustrating Square greatly who had more cinematic ambitions for Final Fantasy 7 and it was here that the brazen newcomer to the console market Sony smelled blood in the water Sony approached Square pushing the larger storage capacity of the PlayStation CDs as well as offering them an insanely lucrative publishing deal and so in a move that shocked the industry developments of Final Fantasy 7 was ripped away from the Nintendo 64 the game becoming an exclusive on this Sony Playstation Nintendo were so furious that they refused to work with Square again until many years later and that was only after the heads of both companies had stepped down irreparably damaged relationships aside this meant that square could now make use of the PlayStation CDs larger storage capacity meaning that full motion video cutscenes were now possible these were large pre-rendered animations that would play at certain key story moments throughout the game and while they may not look like too much by today's standards in 1997 these things were mind-bending which is why Square made them the sole focus of a massive televised ad campaign beyond the edge of reality lies a story of ultimate conquest a story of war and friendship a story of a lung that can never be airing on primetime TV slots during shows like Late Night with Conan O'Brien The Simpsons and sports ball putting a final fantasy 7 in front of the eyes of millions and this would be the tip of the spear head that would be Final Fantasy 7 impact in the West these commercials also highlighted something else and that was that this was intended to be a story focused experience and in 1997 that was a huge deal especially for a console game and especially in the West the story begins with you taking control of a young mercenary first known only as ex-soldier BOTS who after murdering two security guards we find out is named cloud and from here cloud will become intertwined with a small militia organization one of whom is his childhood friend Tifa who through mild acts of violent terrorism would attempt to take down Shinra a giant mega corporation whose harnessing of Mako energy would allow them to seep their insidious control into every corner of society while also draining the planet of its lifeblood and this was basically the first 10 hours of the game until it's revealed the clouds childhood hero turned raving psychopath Sephiroth who has just returned from the dead and may or may not be being controlled by the malevolent evil space being Genova is attempting to destroy the planet with a giant meteorite and so you and your ragtag crew of furries terrorists and I don't know venture forth into the world and an attempt to stop Shinra Sephiroth and the planet itself which has begun to spawn giant weaponized monsters in order to cleanse its surface of the humans who are destroying it oh there was a lot going on in Final Fantasy 7 story but or what I think is nearly more important is how the game used new technology to tell that story and build our world and to show you what I mean here let's talk about the giant walled city of Midgar Midgar is where you spend the first 10 hours of the game and it's here where you get an intimate view of the capitalist nightmare Shinra has created the city exists on two levels the first being a city built in the sky on a massive steel place a place where society's elite live in lavish luxury but beneath that steel sky exists a second city these slums of Midgar a dystopian densely populated place where no natural sunlight can touch meaning there is no day or nice in Midgar it's desolate railroads and abundant playgrounds existing in an infinite haze of artificial lights both the media and its citizens under the constant monitoring and control of Shinra life in Midgar is grim some areas of the city have fallen into complete desolation and are now inhabited by these strange house monsters it just occurred to me while I was editing this that these monsters try and disguise themselves as houses wait for people to walk in and then eat them and that's really [ __ ] up considering madura socio-economic climate but there is a kind of sad Beauty to Midgard - as amidst the pollution and ruin there sprung up the small vibrant shanty towns where people have salvaged the wreckage that's fallen from the upper place and pulled together a culture of recycled metal and repurposed garbage building their homes in the holidays shells of abandoned vehicles and huddling together in the dim light of its makeshift bars restaurants forging life amidst the desolation and considering life is a major theme of fun Fantasy 7 that's importance there's a culture to Midgar science everywhere that despite everything people are trying to live and it's that sense that's conveyed so beautifully through Final Fantasy sevens pre-rendered backgrounds pre-rendered backgrounds were a technique far more common in the 32-bit era of consoles basically it involved overlaying a 3d character model on top of a 2d background first popularized by the original Resident Evil which is where the developers of Final Fantasy 7 got the idea the advantage of pre-rendered backgrounds over 3d environments is you could fit way more detail in without having to model and texture each individual part which in turn would save on polygons which in turn would save on memory it's a technique that's mostly fallen by the wayside given the power of modern consoles and I think that's kind of a shame I still don't know if I've ever seen a game with environments as immersive or atmospheric as the dark painted world of the Resident Evil remake and to me Final Fantasy sevens backgrounds carry a similar charm each background is packed with detail and life some locations feel like intricately crafted little dioramas filled with all these intimate markings that these are real places where real people actually live while other locations pull the camera right back and let you experience these sprawling environments this was all a huge deal in 1997 machines like these Super Nintendo produced images at 256 pixels by 200 or 4 pixels and could display 32,000 colors meaning it didn't really have the pixel density or color fidelity to portray detailed realistic environments while the PlayStation could display images at 640 pixels by 480 pixels and could display 17 million colors meaning that Final Fantasy 7 was one of the first times that intricately detailed realistic environments could be displayed on a home console and the result was immersive visual world building like Midgar something that never would have been possible in previous generations of consoles maybe a little less impressive however were the 3d models overlaid on top of them 7 was the first time Square had developed a game in 3d and it shows especially in the game's exploration sections and even I'll admit that they look kind of goofy and it's not like I'm about to defend Final Fantasy 7 s character models I'm a big believer in that the time a piece of art is made is just as important as the people who made it and when I look at Final Fantasy 7 I don't see basic-ass 3d visuals I see the late 90s I see a developer struggling to come to terms with a new type of visual technology that would end up defining the future of games in the same way Final Fantasy 7 soundtrack was the result of Nobuo Uematsu being limited to the Playstations internal sound chip rather than using more memory intensive high-quality samples which resulted in a score that is all at once lo-fi joyous and haunting a sound forged in the depths of the PlayStation 1 and therefore distinct to that era and completely unlike anything of the modern day and to me the visuals of Final Fantasy 7 carry a similar charm they're simple and cute but they're also moved and posed with an expressive level of emotion take for example this top-down shot of Tifa and Aris line in two separate cells after being captured by Shinra and look at how effortlessly the differences between the two and how they feel about being captured are conveyed just to the subtlety of their posing its animation like this that makes the characters feel like little matchbox toys come to life BOTS ones that have to deal with concepts like rejection death and impending apocalypse or and existential oblivion and I think there's a really interesting tension to that contrast like the world is a very large very frightening place and we are just small simple creatures of innis creating a visual language of low polygons and paint backgrounds born from limitation but surpassing it regardless and I can't help feel that there's something really beautiful about that which is why when I see updated mods of the games character models I can't help feel like we're losing something in the process whatever your opinion of the game's visuals there was one area that the move to 3d drastically benefited Final Fantasy 7 and helped to overcome one of the biggest barriers between JRPGs and national success and it was in its bottles for ten years final fantasy and many other JRPGs conveyed their turn-based combat through single static screens and unless you understood the mechanics of what was actually happening here they never looked very exciting or interesting and I'd imagine this was a huge barrier between JRPGs and a Western audience and that's a barrier that Final Fantasy 7 overcame by taking these static battle screens and turning them into cinematic spectacles when you enter a battle in Final Fantasy 7 the visual style of the game would completely transform both the characters and the backgrounds were now rendered in full 3d meaning 360 degree camera moves were now possible and 7 was not actually the first day or Fuji to do this but what was important was how it did it as battles would now unfold with a spectacular sense of cinema larger enemies could now be shot from low angles to feel massive and imposing the camera diving swooping and cutting in closer to give emphasis and weight to the actions of both your characters and the enemies they faced and the result was that battles now looked impactful and exciting and especially in the games so monotonous someone's had been a part of Final Fantasy since its third game and while they were basically just super powerful magic spells the idea of drawing in a mythical creature from another world and having it obliterator enemies was a powerful one and it's that idea that was fully realized for the first time in Final Fantasy 7 as the jump to 3d gave these attacks a spectacle and bombast that had never been possible before for example check at Bahamut summoned from Final Fantasy 6 and it's cool and I love how that game looks but look at that same summon from 7 and just feel the impact ways and power the shifty 3d alive it's to create this is the kind of thing I would call my friends or my house just to show them in other words what had been JRPGs biggest barrier to Western success had now become one of its most marketable assets the visual spectacle of Final Fantasy 7 battles was a huge step towards making JRPGs more palatable to a Western audience but if it was going to hold the attention of that audience for the 60 Plus errors it took to beat the game story that spectacle would need to be paired with a game system that was both easy to understand to newcomers but they would also grow and evolve over the course of the game which brings us handily to Final Fantasy sevens materia system when you get into your first fight in Final Fantasy 7 the menu presented is nearly brutally simple you can attack you can cast magic or you can use an item but over the course of the game you would find or buy magical orbs called materia these orbs fitting into slots and your equipment and granting you new abilities so attaching a piece of lightning materia to your weapon that gave you access to lightning magic piece-by-piece your collection of material would grow and as a deed so did your options in combat and you could even pair certain materia together for example if I paired our after mentioned lightning materia with an all materia now that lightning magic would hit all enemies as opposed to just one it was simple to understand but the beauty of the materia system is it also offered a nearly limitless amount of depth rather than characters having character classes like they had in previous Final Fantasies you could now through the materia system design your own custom builds for each character for example there are several times throughout the story when Eris turned god damn pronouncing it and I'm muting Aerith in the comments jesus cloud about being her bodyguard and I think this is pretty cute so when I set up clouds materia I do it like this I give him a cover materia which means he will dive in front of other characters protecting them whenever they're attacked and long range materia meaning I can put in the back Rover have received less damage and finally a piece of counter materia meaning the cloud will often counter his enemies when attacked even when protecting other characters turning cloud into a defensive focused tank diving all over the battlefield and counter attacking any enemy foolish enough to go after his friends in a custom character class I like to call bodyguard and yes it's really sad that I named it but something I really look for in combat systems and I mean any combat systems are ones that allow players to express themselves through their mechanics and approach problems with their own solutions and the fact that the materia system allows me to indulge my own [ __ ] like this shows how malleable and expressive a system it really is and trust me we are just scratching the surface here the first time I parried my final attack materia with my Phoenix someone materia I felt like a goddamn genius as it meant whenever clouds HP hits zero he would Auto summon Phoenix a materia that deals heavy fire damage but also resurrects cloud and the rest of the party turning him into a brand new character class I like to call immortal neon Phoenix bodyguard I will stop now I promise but what's important is how welcoming this system was to someone who had potentially never played JRPGs before but also how much expression and experimentation it allowed on its high end drawing new players in and materia by materia expanding on what was possible showing a generation of new players the depth of JRPGs another parrot of Final Fantasy 7s combat is it was just really fun the active Time battle system meant that there was always this exciting tension to your actions in tougher boss fights rushing through the menus to hit the right commands feels like trying to defuse a bomb but one of my personal favorite things about Final Fantasy 7s encounters was the enemies a lot of the creatures you encounter have these weird little gameplay gimmicks that would subtly change the dynamic of bottles like targeting Hojo's individual limbs to knock him over and thus changing the attacks he'll use on your party while others were just really weird and memorable like take this little pot creature you encounter in the city of the Ancients he spends the entire fight using magic to shrink your party and it's like okay but what is he doing until you are small enough that he just straight-up [ __ ] eats you and you're not even dead you're just gone your HP fire disappears and you don't even show up on the level up screen after the fight and it's such a weird and memorable mechanic for this random little creature to have but it's moments like this that give the game's encounters their personality and or I think this gets really special is when the game starts to tell you things about its characters through these encounters and I want to talk about a very subtle example of this I want to talk about rude rude is a member of the elite Shinra hit squad the Turks with him his partner Renault and their new recruit Elena serving as reoccurring boss characters over the course of the game but while Renault has this confident swagger and Eleanor this innocent passion route just kinda hangs back a lot of the time the silence and stoic muscle of the turk's and that is until you encounter an optional cutscene where you overhear a whispered conversation between Renault and rude Renault pressing Ruud on who he likes and Ruud reluctantly confesses Tifa your Tifa and it's a really cute little character moments but what's awesome is how it's actually expressed through combat if you encounter the Turks with Tifa in your party Ruud will never attack Tifa as long as there's another target available and if there isn't he'll often just straight-up refuse to attack instead letting out this reluctant string of a lip zees and you can actually dig into roots code and see the checks and balances the developers have put into place to stop him attacking Tifa with these conditions only growing more stringent over the course of the game as if his feelings for her are growing this is such a subtle piece of storytelling that a lot of people aren't going to notice it I mean I sure didn't until I saw the sobered dwarf video on it but there's also something so genuine and sincere about it giving this 3d collection of polygons and stats an actual heartbeat with feelings and desires and it's here where we start to touch on something a little deeper with Final Fantasy 7 Final Fantasy 7 is filled with these little instances that let us know who these characters really are renault ordering his troops not to step on Eris's flowers watching as Barrett's gruff demeanor falls away the moment he sees his adoptive daughter Ellen has crush on sang or sang subtle affection for Aris in a lot of ways Final Fantasy 7 is a collection of these little human moments in the face of a larger apocalypse but for me it's when the game starts to convey these moments through its mechanics that it begins to tell a story like no other medium can and granted rude and Tifa is a very subtle example of this so what say we talk about one that's a little more prominence what say we talk about Sephiroth it's hard to argue that there is any villain in any RPG more iconic than Sephiroth but for all the reverence that surrounds the one winged angel he's actually barely in the game and even when he is were told very little about Sephiroth as a character but I think the reason people remember sefirot the way they do is less so what we learn about him and more so how we learn it Sephiroth doesn't appear at all for the entire first 10 hours of the game instead you're fed this trail of breadcrumbs as other characters whisper his name in hushed reverent tones the brilliant Sephiroth the decorated war hero and the best there is and so by the time we've escaped Midgar a tantalizing air of intrigue has built up around this yet unseen character and it's only here where Clio tells the other party members of the story between him and Sephiroth conveyed through a playable flashback sequence in which cloud still employed by soldier is a member of sefirot squad on a mission to his and tifa's home village Nibelheim from early on its appearance that Sephiroth is clouds childhood hero and the entire reason he joined soldier and it's through this flashback scene that the game makes you feel that reverence on the road to nibble hein were attacked by a large dragon and find ourselves side by side next to an AI controlled Sephiroth and it's here that the power of Sephiroth is communicated entirely through the game's mechanics if cloud attacks the dragon he does 14 points of damage butts when Sephiroth attacks he hits for a staggering 3,200 points of damage and I love this moment it's like in one singular instance you see the ocean of power that separates cloud and Sephiroth that separates ooh and Sephiroth during this portion of the game you can even check sephiroth's materia in the menus and see his fully level dope endgame magic with him obliterating entire packs of monsters with one spell and even bringing you back from the dead and so for the rest of the section it feels like standing next to a God but this is also why what follows feels like such a nightmare while sefirot starts off as affable and charming casually conversing with cloud and happy to take a picture with him and Tifa that begins to change when beneath the rotten floors of the Shinra mansion Sephiroth discovers that he's actually the result of a freakish genetic experiments that implanted him with the cells of Genova a horrific creature from outer space and when Sephiroth's finds out about this and is reunited with his mother he goes insane and massacres the entire village burning it to the ground and killing cloud and Tifa x' parents in the process back in the present now aware of the personal vendetta that exists between cloud and Sephiroth you leave the village of calm and are tasked with crossing a great Marsh but it's inhabited by the midgar's on a giant snake that will chase you across the marsh catching you before you can reach the other side and it's kind of terrifying this is the most powerful monster you've faced up to this point in the game and beating it is completely impossible and so you're forced to retrieves find a chocobo and flee to the other side and safety but when you do you see that Sephiroth has already been there and he's taken the same creature that felt so imposing and impossible and eviscerated it impaling its corpse large tree this is how the game builds the players relationship with Sephiroth first vice routing him in a thick layer of intrigue then giving us an intimate view of his abilities through the same mechanics we've spent the first 10 hours learning and finally letting us crash up against this impossible barrier and then show us how Sephiroth shattered that same barrier will get a little more into this in a bit but clouds inferiority the Sephiroth is a huge part of the game's story and the beauty of these moments is that they force you to see Sephiroth as cloud does making you feel that inadequacy and it's that feeling that reverberates throughout the entire rest of the game you know how powerful Sephiroth is you've seen definitive mechanical proof of it and you also know that you will eventually have to face him that he is the impossible God waiting for you at the end of the game and it's that feeling that makes Efrat what he is and such a compelling and terrifying villain the moments we just talked about wouldn't work or at least wouldn't work the same in any other medium and this is why I think so many years later people still remember Final Fantasy 7 the way they do it was the first time a lot of us had experienced this kind of narrative through game design and it's also this kind of storytelling that the game uses to build to its most powerful and devastating moments we need eros early on when after a chance meeting and a botched mission cloud plummets to the roof of her church and immediately there's a kind of playful connection between the two after helping eros escape from the Turks you escort her back to her home and it being late she asks you to stay only for her mother to take you aside and ask you to leave during the night without telling eros not wanting her daughter to get involved with an ex-soldier and what follows is a little minigame where you cloud have to sneak out of Eris's house without making any noise lest you be caught by her seven has a lot of these little minigames that put you in the place of its character is soft which are really cool and work really well some of which are not and some are just really really weird but I think this moment in particular is actually a really great little piece of storytelling it feels bad walking out on Eris she's this supercooled super smart funny girl you just met and now you're abandoning her and do you feel that way until you find her waiting outside her house in the slums of Midgard because she's actually way smarter than you and knew what you were doing the entire time I say you rather than cloud here because that's how it feels if the game it just showed clouds sneaking away through a cutscene the feeling of the entire section would be different it would be watching an interaction between two characters but by giving us that little bit of control it changes the dynamic and now it's not just an interaction between cloud and eros but also Eris and the player and that's a relationship that seven slowly builds on both through its narrative and its gameplay up until this point the story cloud has been honestly kind of a dick he treats the other members of avalanche with a disinterest disdain quick to point out that he's only helping them because they're paying him and has no interest in them as people or their goal to save the planet surrounding himself with this Shield of masculine bravado but Eris is the first character in the game able to break through that barrier not long after were reunited with Eris in the slums we see Tifa being taken to the mansion of a local crime boss but rather than having to fight or sneak her way into that mansion Eris has the idea of disguising cloud as a beautiful woman Final Fantasy 7 up to this point has been a string of tightly scripted set pieces but now the story slows right down and the game just lets us spend time with Eris and we watch as she playfully teases and flirts with cloud gently dismantling his macho tough-guy persona literally disguising cloud to dress finding him makeup and even teaching him how to walk in a feminine clothing it's super cute but it also captures a really important part of their relationship that Eris sees through clouds [ __ ] to the actual person he is underneath something that's going to become a big part of Clare's character later on in the story and it's the first taste of that we get on this weird little date and something becomes really obvious Eris is [ __ ] cool a lot of media post 7 tends to treat her as this angel of purity and I don't think that's her I mean she is this sweet girl who cares deeply about the environments but she's also the girl who drags you on this bizarre day through midgar's seedy underbelly the same girl who picks out the sexiest dress in the store and the same girl who threatens to rip off a Mafia dons dick and the angel of purity she paints but what she is is fun and cool and so just like cloud does it's easy to get attached to her and again this is a relationship subtly conveyed through gameplay when I said earlier that there were no character classes in Final Fantasy 7 that was mostly true except for eros eros has the highest magic and spirit stats of your entire party while simultaneously having the lowest HP and attack meaning she's best suited to being placed in your back row out of the harm's way and using magic whose Limit Breaks which are limited use special attacks distinct to each character are nearly entirely focused on healing and buffing your party and what all this means is that Eris is the only member of your party with a specific function she's a healer in pretty much any RPG a basic tactic is to have one of your characters specifically designated to healing and buffing your other party members so the other characters can focus on offense and this is about as fundamental a party setup as you can have in a North eg meaning healers are one of the most vital roles in combat and in seven eros is the character who is best suited to that role making her arguably next to cloud the most useful member of your party and in particular if you want to take down some of the optional early game bosses in other words both through the story and the gameplay Final Fantasy 7 is doing everything it can to make you invest in eros to rely on her both as a member of your party and as a character in the story and then it's all taken away after Eris discovers she's the last surviving member of an ancient race she leaves your party in order to summon holy and save the planet from Sephiroth and it feels weird being abandoned by her given how the game has shaped your relationship up till this point and so you follow her to the subterranean city of the Ancients where it happens [Music] [Music] eris is killed by Sephiroth the game has spent 20 error is letting you get to know Eris building your relationship with her and suddenly it's all gone and it's cruel and devastating cloud breaking down into confused hateful tears admonishing Sephiroth for taking away the one person in his life that could see him for who he is each character in Final Fantasy 7 reacts to arrises death differently but all with these intimate wordless animations Tifa brushing the hair out of Eris's face yuffie collapsing into clouds arms in a fit of tears or the real heart breaker for me Barret falling into deep heavy sobs putting his hand on clouds shoulder looking him in the eye and letting him know she's gone Eris is dead Eris wasn't the first time a party member died in a Japanese role-playing game she's not even the first time one dies in a Final Fantasy game but while a lot of these moments convey the shock of death that Eris is passing conveys something else that is loss if you've ever lost someone close to you you'll know that the hardest part isn't the shock of the initial passing but the days weeks and months that follow the feeling that where there was once someone so important and vital there is now only emptiness no piece of media could ever recreate the feeling of actually losing someone but the game does captured that emptiness eros dies and there's no way to bring her back and she's never replaced by another character instead you're going to spend the rest of the game feeling the space that she'd left behind both in the story as your characters struggle to cope with her death and in the gameplay no other character can fulfill the role of healer the same way Eris code and so it feels like where there was once something so important and vital there is no nothing that feeling never goes away people were so upset by Eris's death that Square actually received a large fan petition to release an updated version of the game to bring her back but this could never happen the decision to kill eros and not have any way to revive her was heavily influenced by the lead creative on Final Fantasy up to this point here oh no boo Sakaguchi's real-life loss of his mother and his desire to convey that loss in a game saying that it's not enough to make life the theme you need to depict living and dying you need to portray death this is why I think people remember about Sephiroth and Eris the way they do Sephiroth as this intimidating oppressive force throughout the story and Eris as this really cool person you lose both intertwining the game's story with its mechanics creating this really unique experience of narrative through game design and so before we finish here there's one more example of this I want to talk about and this one's gonna get a little weird and personal but if you thought I was going to release a forty nine minute video without getting weird and personal welcome to my channel I hope you like it a big part of the appeal of video games is that while in all other mediums we observe protagonists in video games we embody them making forwards I think is the rawest form of escapism letting us take up the roles of heroes of time warriors of light or any other number of characters that just feel bigger than we are and initially this is the appeal of cloud as a first-class member of soldier cloud is this elite military badass he has the highest attack in your entire party and the most devastating Limit Breaks and it's this badass that we embody but something is not quite right when we return to new behind the village Sephiroth destroyed five years ago we find it perfectly intact as if nothing ever happened and if we enter it clouds childhood home we find living there a strange woman who has no memory of cloud Sephiroth or the fire that destroyed the village five years ago and I can't imagine anything more quietly horrifying than walking into my parents home seeing it inhabited by strangers and having them tell me that I never lived there even more bizarrely there seems to be inconsistencies between clouds memories and tifa's with her even turning to him at one point and asking you really really are you right there's gaps in clouds memory he cannot remember how he was able to survive the fire five years ago or how his encounter with Sephiroth ended and it's this uncanny tension that builds as we begin to wonder who exactly we've been playing us which is something that Sephiroth reveals when later in the game he takes cloud and Tifa back to the memory of Nibelheim of five years ago but this time there is one baffling difference cloud is nowhere to be seen and in his place is a completely different person named Zack this is obviously some attempt by Sephiroth to try and mess with cloud at this point in the game we spent dozens of hours playing as him and we know what happened in Nibelheim five years ago only why is Tifa so afraid and why is Sephiroth so gleeful and suggesting that all they need to do to determine who was and was not in nibble Heim and what and what is not real is just look at the photo they took five years ago and it's here it hits us cloud is not in the photo meaning he is not the person from tifa's memory he was never a first class member of soldier from the very moments we've met this character everything we've come to know about him is alive I think one of the cruelest things you could do to a person is take away the things they believe about themselves and this is what happens cloud later in the game we learned the cloud was in nivel hime five years ago but rather than the elite first class member of soldier we thought he was he's actually this guy the shin or foot troop getting motion sick in the corner no different from the countless other faceless Shinra foot soldiers you've down over the course of the game cloud having flunked out of the soldier entrance exam was never able to keep his childhood promise to Tifa or his dream of becoming the next Sephiroth instead immersing himself in a fantasy where he embodied someone that represented everything he wanted to be meaning this character we've been embodying is nobody you the player are nobody I was pretty young when I first played Final Fantasy 7 maybe 13 or 14 and at the time I had barely any friends a crippling case of acne and little proof that I existed outside these saves on my playstation memory card it was maybe the most miserable time of my entire life and to hide that side of me from other people I just make things up things are done at the weekend people had Mets anything I could tell someone to stop them finding out how pathetic I was in my own mind and the word thing was that sometimes I actually nearly believed it and when I saw this photo I knew I wasn't playing as this awesomely badass I could escape into I was playing as a creature exactly as pathetic as I was and that moment shook me in a way I still think about but this is also what's kind of grazed a bed cloud while Sephiroth also has his identity shattered he rejects himself become a consumed by hatred and lost in the false sense of self that Genova provides but cloud through the help of his friends learns to accept himself and all the pain all the failure and all the loss that comes with her it's all okay and it's what makes him who he is and it's only through realizing this that he and you are able to face Sephiroth one final time this moments being less about defeating him as much as it is cloud freeing himself from the impossible standard Sephiroth has created and it's awesome it's like cloud just as he is is enough you the player are enough and that's a message I really needed and one I think a lot of people still do if you want to know why Final Fantasy 7 was a big deal in 1997 it was because it used a new kind of visual technology to reinvent a genre and introduce that genre to continents of new people but if you want to know what that experience is still so important to people today it's because it let us touch this world and feel these characters in a way that only video games could Final Fantasy 7 went on to sell 11 million copies the PlayStation console itself going on to become the dominant platform of its generation the game even retro actively raising the sales of older JRPGs like Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger which are now beloved classics in the West and even today Japanese role-playing games like Kingdom Hearts final fantasy pokemon persona and Fire Emblem are now some of the biggest releases of the entire year and Final Fantasy 7 was the moments that that started to happen and this is something I really wanted to talk about because the conversation around this game is about to change forever the long-awaited remake of Final Fantasy 7 just months away and while I think the remake looks gorgeous and the changes it's making to 15's combat seem really smart I hope Square Enix of today remembers what made the game from 22 years ago what it was and that was an experience born from limitation but surpassing irregardless telling a story in a way that only video games can and in doing so creating an experience we've never been able to forget and that is a lot to live up to that is the impact of Final Fantasy 7 [Music] guys a little reminder I'm going to be at Magfest from the seconds to the fifth of January I have a bunch of panels and signings on so if you're in Washington come hang out it would be really great to see you guys I want to thank you for sitting through such a long video I also have another 50 minute video on file fantasy if you're interested but particularly I also want to thank my patrons who really make this channel possible so thank you and if you would like to become one of them than kicking in a buck or two please do head over to patreon.com forward slash super eyepatch wolf a special thank you this week to bradley Douglas Matt Valentin embrace just as kaito Joe remember to save early and often Scott Steph love friend or Lauren I really hope one of them is right and believe in openness find me hosting be let's fight a boss video game podcast we're on the 26th of December we will be uploading our world-famous game of the year showdown or just come find me on twitter at hype actual friends and give her everything take care of yourselves and i'll see you next year

Channel: Super Eyepatch Wolf

Views: 1,316,878

Keywords: Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 7 remake, Cloud, Sephiroth, Aeris, Aeris Dies, Tifa

Id: 9V68GCZ61Rc

Length: 49min 33sec (2973 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/EagerSleeper]

I've probably watched a hundred videos about FFVII, but this one probably does the best job of deep-diving into the subtle decisions the developers made when it comes to the character relationships such as what made Aerith such an important character to Cloud, or little gameplay changes that happen between Rude and Tifa if they are in the battle together.

[u/Darkvoidx]

I played the game recently for the first time and was blown away by it for a lot of the same reasons discussed here. Stuff like characters reacting to Aeris' death and the downright beautiful backgrounds that livend up the world made this one of the most charming games I've played. It seems the remake being close to release kind of re-flipped the "FF7 is overrated and hasn't aged well" opinion that was prevalent on the internet, as people are starting to realize that the game still has merit today. Hell, messing around with Materia made the combat more enjoyable than 99% of JRPGs I've played, so really the only thing dated in my opinion is the balloon animal proportions of the overworld sprites

I had the fate of Aeris spoiled to me just like everybody else on the planet, so the twist with Cloud's identity was fantastic, and was a highlight for me. I was shocked at how much I liked him as a character, considering how much he differs from the game in nearly every other depiction. My only wish was certain characters got a bit more character time; namely Yuffie and Vincent, and Cait Sith to an extent, they deserved more than they got, especially with Cait Sith just kinda wandering back into the party without any sort of redemption arc to speak of.

Also, more JRPGs need a final boss where the entire party participates in the fight, like with Sephiroth's first form. It weirded me out in games like Chrono Trigger, DQ11 and Persona 5 when there's so much at stake but the group only brings along 3-4 people for the final battle for no reason.

[u/redditatwork12121]

Not entirely related to the video itself but I'm surprised the original commercial for FFVII had Aeris' death scene in it. That's uhh... a pretty big spoiler I guess you can't quite see what's going on but wow.

Also, good video overall, but to the creator if you see this, using the phrase "sportsball" makes you sound like you're being intentionally obtuse, just sayin'.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/XenoGamer27]

The spoiler about Cloud's identity makes me want to play the game now. Some will argue against spoilers, but they get me interested in pieces of media I wouldn't otherwise consume.

[u/OTGb0805]

Made it about 30 minutes in before I gave up. Nothing he's saying is wrong, though obvious fanboyism influences his stances.

It's just that... he's so fucking verbose when he doesn't need to be. It's such a perfect example of the stereotypical youtube gaming video essayist sniffing their own farts. Why say something in 10 words when you could write two paragraphs?

FF7 definitely changed everything... in the JRPG space. For more traditional or western RPGs, that credit goes to Diablo and Baldur's Gate (which were contemporary to FF7.) It's hard to say which games have the "best" characters, and such a thing is inherently subjective. But I do think that FF7 is, overall, a well-told story, particularly for a JRPG.

I was looking forward to the remake until I learned it's going to be some kind of weird "episodic" format where you're not getting the whole game with one purchase. I can see making Midgar its own segment, especially since they're probably wanting to spend a lot more time fleshing out life in Midgar between the actual plot segments, but I struggle to see needing to do so for the entire world... seems overly ambitious to me, and the strength and style of JRPGs has always been to focus on plot over setting.

[u/ClaytonBigsbe]

Not only my favorite FF, it’s my favorite game of all time. Tagging so I can watch this later when I’m home.