So yea it's been a while since I've posted anything on here. I'd have to blame the whole hard drive situation for half of that but the other half was because I was playing Final Fantasy 7 in my spare time instead of doing other random stuff on the internet. Over the last month I've played Final Fantasy 7 for a total of around 65+ hours. To put that into perspective I've only logged about 110 or so hours into Skyrim in about a year and a half. If that tells you anything it should tell you that I get stuff done a lot faster when I'm not recording, and that I have had a fair bit of spare time over the last month or so.
Let me be clear now that I did not play through the game blindly, as I was using a walkthrough just because I felt like going for completion as Final Fantasy games tend to have a lot of well hidden items and optional objectives that only have a short window of opportunity. This one in particular had a lot of optional stuff compared to the previous iterations of the game.
I'd first like to start by saying that Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 6 have a plot that is eerily similar to each other. The technology and setting is completely different, but that seems to be one of the few differences. Both plots seem to revolve around the main character joining some kind of a resistance group against some kind of "evil" empire/corporation within the first few hours of the game, and both have a main villain that is affiliated with said empire/corporation but is working towards their own evil goals that are not in the best interest of their employers. In the case of Kefka from FF6 he was driven insane due to the infusion of espers into his body and thus became obsessed with destruction. In the case of Sephiroth he learns that he was just a test tube baby born from the cells of JENOVA (who was the entity that severely damaged the planet two thousand years ago, initially mistaken as one of the Ancients by Shinra scientists leading to their experiments to revive the ancients in an attempt to reach the promised land), and this revelation drives him insane and he decides to finish what JENOVA started two thousand years ago and destroy the planet using the meteor materia. I could go on with more similarities but I've already proven my point.
Because the plots are so similar I can't really place one above the other. What I can do instead is look at how each plot utilizes its characters (i.e. character development). Final Fantasy 7 has a much smaller cast of characters than Final Fantasy 6, and because of this the game has much more of an opportunity to flesh out the 9 playable characters that are provided. Every character in FF7 has a reason to fight against Sephiroth that goes beyond just saving the planet. Cloud and Tifa fight to avenge their loved ones who died in Nibelheim 5 years ago. Barret fights for the future of his adopted daughter Marlene. RedXIII is fighting to protect his grandfather and the people in Cosmo Canyon. Aeris fought (yes fought, because she dies at the end of disk 1) to save the planet from Sephiroth, which she felt was her duty as the last of the Cetra (often referred to as the ancients). Cait Sith (who is actually Reeve, the Mayor of Midgar) is fighting to protect the people of his city. Vincent fights to avenge the death of his love Lucretia at the hands of Hojo's experimentation (Lucretia gave birth to Sephiroth). Cid and Yuffie are really the only two party members who really haven't been given a good explanation for fighting Sephiroth beyond saving the planet, though we could assume Cid still wishes to fulfill his dream of going to space. Yuffie really only seems to want to stick with the party so that she can take the party's materia afterwards to help the economy of her homeland, which had lost the war against Shinra a few years ago. Beyond that Yuffie is pretty much the most one dimensional character in the game, despite being one of the most iconic.
Final Fantasy 6 has I think 14 playable characters, 15 if you include General Leo (granted you only get to play as him for a couple minutes and fight one unwinable battle against Kefka). Tina/Terra, Edgar, Sabin/Mash, Locke, Celes, Setzer, Relm, Strago, Shadow, Cyan and Mog all have pretty well established stories. Umaro, Gogo, and Gau aren't so well established. Gau does have some backstory to him but it's nowhere near what most of the other characters have. Umaro and Gogo literally have nothing to them, they only exist to fill the role of berserker and mimic.
So to compare characters, you could say that on average the FF7 characters are more developed than the FF6 characters. This is probably why there's been a decent number of spinoffs from FF7 and none from FF6. So yea, as much as I hate to admit it, FF7 does beat out FF6 in the plot and story departments, if only by a narrow margin. However that's just one aspect of the game. We've still got gameplay and the general game experience to compare.
Obviously the gameplay isn't gonna be radically different between these two, because they are indeed Final Fantasy games. However FF7 does change up the combat system from FF6 with the additions of materia and limit breaks. Materia are basically crystallized chunks of magic, which have different properties based on their colours. These properties are then subdivided into skills. The way these work in combat is that you have to equip the materia in either your weapon or armor slots so that you can use them in battle. Once equipped, the materia commands appear in your combat menu while you're fighting. The amount of materia you can equip is based on how many slots your weapons and armor have. Similar to FF6 and its esper learning system, materia levels up with AP, which is gained after winning a battle. Leveling up materia unlocks new abilities. Materia also has an effect on your stats, and this effect can be positive, negative, or both.
Moving on to limit breaks, they are a much improved version of the rarely seen desperation attacks of FF6. As you take damage in battle, your limit bar builds. When you take enough damage to fill the bar, the attack command changes to the limit command and you can use your limit commands. Limit commands are generally stronger versions of the attack command and can sometimes hit multiple targets, attack multiple times in one turn, and even cause status effects including instant death. Once you use the limit command the limit bar resets to 0 and the limit command changes back to the attack command. You can level up limit breaks by using your limit command several times or by killing enough enemies with each character. Doing this you can achieve up to level 3 limit breaks. Level 4 limit breaks can only be unlocked when all other limits are unlocked and only if you have the required limit in item form. These item limits can be well hidden, take a long time to get, and can normally only be obtained once in the game. However each final limit can easily do more than 9999 damage to all onscreen targets.
So yea, the combat has definitely become more complicated than what it was in FF6. While I do agree that complexity doesn't always make it better, the system does work and it's only a matter of getting used to it. The game also allows you to toggle markers above enemies and to toggle an information bar that displays the enemy name when you hover the cursor over it, as well as other useful information. For those who thought that FF6 made it too easy to do obscene amounts of damage to enemies, FF7 has one very powerful and very hard to get summon hidden on a remote island that's not even displayed on the overworld map known as the Knights of the Round. This summon can easily break the 50K damage mark on all onscreen targets in a single casting. So yea, with that kind of firepower there'd be no need to spam Kefka with ultima 6 times to kill him, as you could probably one shot him with one casting of KotR. Hell, even Safer Sephiroth, the game's final boss, only has 80K health so literally two castings of KotR would kill him. I had killed him before he even used his famous two minute long Super Nova, and I only used KotR once, and that was on my party's third turn into the battle after dealing over 30k damage to him with 4x attack materia on RedXIII and having Cid casting shadow flare. So really there's ways to get overpowered in both games but in FF6 it is far easier in my opinion to become overpowered simply by abusing summon status boosts which permanently stay with the character whenever they level up allowing you to beat the game at low levels around 40. Final Fantasy 7 on the other hand has methods to become overpowered, but they require a lot of time and effort to acquire (KotR can only be reached by breeding a gold Chocobo, which takes a solid 5 or so hours of tedious and boring work, as well as a decent chunk of cash for greens). So yea that FF6 design flaw is really the largest issue with the game but it's still solid, FF7 doesn't have this flaw so so far it's looking like the better game, right?
Well there's one problem I do have with FF7, and that's the loading times when transitioning between the overworld and local maps, the framerate issues when getting into a battle, and while the actual framerate was running pretty solid for the majority of the game, right before fighting the final boss as you hop down the rocks leading to the core of the earth where the Holy materia sleeps there is definitely some noticeable lag caused by too much motion in the background for the PS1 to handle, and when you're moving through some local areas of the game quickly (particularly in towns), there is sometimes loading lag after loading in. Where FF6 really pushed the boundaries of what the SNES could do, FF7 feels like it's pushing perhaps a bit too hard on the capabilities of the system at times. So yea, just for overall performance hiccups here and there I'll have to dock it a bit.
I usually try not to get into arguments over graphics but that's the next logical step in reviewing the game in comparison to FF6, and that's to look at graphics. Now I know both systems have completely different capabilities so I'm just gonna look at what they were able to accomplish with what the system could handle. No one is gonna argue that FF6 really pushed the limits of what a 2d game could do, with trying to create its own 3d at times. The cart escape sequence wasn't exactly pretty, but the whole book sequence in the end credits of FF6 was something I honestly didn't think was possible with the SNES's graphics limitations and yet Square surprised me with that one. The sprites in the game also looked quite polished, in particular the whole sprite job for the final bosses were very well done. FF7 graphically to be completely honest doesn't look amazing at first, until you get into some of the cutscenes and animated movies within the game. I know the reason they chose to do the models the way they did was because it wouldn't be as hard on the PS1 to produce and track them. Honestly if they had to do it just to ensure the game ran at a decent framerate then I'm fine with it, but it seems more like the developers were being held back by the system and had far more ambitious plans that they couldn't yet realize.
I just don't get the same feeling looking at FF7 that I do from FF6 when it comes to them really going all out on something. I mean, if they did go all out then the system would have probably had some kind of terrible slowdown issues or something which would have made the game borderline unplayable. I can definitely tell they were still working on a way to try and get the graphic quality up without sacrificing the actual game but they hadn't quite found a way to do it yet. I mean, at the time the game was just moving to the PS1 from the SNES and I'm sure it's a completely different system to code a game for so that's probably part of why it looks the way it does, but it's still pretty good. Honestly more so than FF6 I think FF7 would benefit more from an HD remake if only to show how Square has now mastered the playstation and release the game the way I'm sure the developers had envisioned it to look. With that in mind I'm gonna give the graphics a tie, if only because of the limits of the PS1 holding FF7 back from completely taking this one away.
I guess the final thing now is music. This is gonna be probably the toughest one and it'll decide at least in my mind which was the better game. FF7 has some great themes, in particular the overworld theme in Disk 1, the airship theme, the boss battle theme, Jenova's theme, and of course One Winged Angel. More importantly the music fits the areas. Final Fantasy 6 on the other hand counters with its first overworld theme, and pretty much every other piece of music in that game because they're all pretty damn good. Probably most impressive and this is by far the most ambitious thing I've ever heard of in a video game was the final boss theme of Final Fantasy 6, which featured one very long musical piece that played nonstop through 4 boss battles, with the tempo and tune changing as you defeat one boss and move on (or to be more precise, up) to the next. This all of course comes to a head with the transition into the fight with Kefka himself with the orchestra basically climaxing into your ears as Kefka descends from the heavens to deliver his foul judgement upon both you and humanity. There is just no way anything can top that. You can replicate it sure, but you just can't ever come to that level of programming genius. You can make one really awesome song like One Winged Angel, sure, but you just can't top a song that literally evolves as you fight that still has the same impact of One Winged Angel. Honestly I don't think I need to say anything more, FF6 clearly wins the musical battle because a few good songs alone cannot hope to stand against the glory of that entire final boss setup from FF6.
So where does that leave this? At 2 wins, a draw, and 2 losses. At least mathematically anyways. I guess I'll have to go with my gut on this one, which means that FF6 is still my favorite final fantasy. As much fun as I had with FF7, I'm not sure I'd ever want to replay it anytime soon considering the sheer amount of time and effort I put into it so far. I still have Emerald and Ruby weapon left to beat, the three huge materia to obtain, morphing my way to maxed stats for everyone, and I suppose a bunch of minigames in the gold saucer for BP to buy some elusive materia and prizes. I'm not sure if I'll ever do that stuff but it's definitely there for me to do if I wanted to. I'm likely gonna attempt emerald weapon sometime this week if I can get my stats maxed out. I'm considering trying out the overflow glitch just to see the game buttfuck itself in front of me (seriously, that glitch literally makes the game auto death everything it's used on except for Safer Sephiroth and Ruby Weapon). If not then I might just quadra magic KotR and mimic it twice, take a shower, then come back once the 15+ minutes of KotR animation finishes (because it's basically a short film every time you use that damn summon I swear).
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