I have a confession to make: I never really played FFVII. Help, please?

Cafe Society
1

I don’t remember why, exactly, but it involved a friend who was supposed to let me borrow his copy when he was done, my getting thoroughly addicted to Final Fantasy: Tactics, and, I think, all of us getting addicted to GoldenEye before I got to play FFVII.

So, basically, all I know about FFVII is that Cloud cross-dresses at one point, that Sephiroth is the bad guy, and that Aeris dies.

This is obviously an unacceptable background to watch Advent Children from. I figure I have the following options:
A) Buy and play the game through
B) Download and watch all the cut-scenes from the game (an initial Googling seems to indicate that this isn’t much of an option after all)
C) Read one of the 30 walkthroughs on GameFAQs
D) Ask you all for the Cliffs Note version of pertinent events

While A would obviously be the most fulfilling, I’m not sure I have the time or temperment for it. What’s the barebones just-enough-materia-and-leveling-to-not-die-repeatedly playtime for this game? About 40 hours? And is it any fun to try and just blow through the game as fast as possible? It’s typically not my style.

Suggestions, spoilers, etc. are welcome. :slight_smile:

(Oh, btw, I’ve never seen all of Goonies either. I know, I’m a bad, bad person.)

2

I would just like to chime in that, although I am a “gamer geek” and a “child of the eighties”, I have never

  • played any of the Final Fantasy games for any platform
  • seen the Goonies.

I am, however, aware that Wolf Man’s got nards. Not sure why or what it means, but there ya go.

3

I’ve never finished it either. Tried on three separate occasions, but always some kind of technical failure kept me from getting past Mideel.

Blasting through the game probably wouldn’t be much fun, and IMO wouldn’t help you anyway; according to my brother (who has beaten the game, gotten the golden chocobos, and just generally done everything that it’s possible to do), the plot of FFVII is convoluted even by Square’s standards. I sure wouldn’t dare to summarize it for you, even though I’ve had it explained to me three times.

There is hope, though. I watched Advent Children from my ignorant perspective and liked it fine. It didn’t make huge quantities of sense, but my FFVII-player friends tell me that that’s intrinsic.

4

I love the game! This is one of my favorite FF…I would never dream of blasting through it. There’s so much to be done!

I don’t think I want to try to explain it, it is really complicated! But I may try later.

5

FF7 is one of the shallowest of all FF games. It barely beats out FF1 for story depth. Push come to shove, y9u’re just randomly wandering around and fighitng Sephiroth. It wasn’t bad, but the story and characters were, at best, simplistic.

Short version.

The game opens with Cloud Strife and a team of rebels under command of Barret (the big black guy) leading a strike on one of the reactors that powers Midgard, a giant two-layer city. They suceed and escape. After returning to base (a sleazy bar), you meet Tifa, another rebel. Cloud is a mercenary, with no real allegiance to the rebels.

There are some intermediate adventuring. Cloud and Tifa go off and meet Aeris, a young girl selling flowers. They go on a minor adventure, meet the Turks, Shinra’s own mercenaries, and meet back up with Barret, who’s planning a major strike on Shinra HQ. Shinra owns Midguard and forces most everyone who isn’t rich to live down below. Apparently no one invented suburbs in FF7.

You go through Shinra HQ and rescue Red XIII, a big red cat. You’ll see “Jenova,” although it isn’t clear what Jenova is. You go up to the top floor and find the leader of Shinra dead, hacked to peices by a giant sword. Cloud thinks of Sephiroth. You battle with The inheritor of Shinra, then escape to the countryside. The party travels around for a while.

Cloud tells a story. He was once a friend of Sephiroth, but Sephy went crazy after learning that he was a biologicaly-developed organism built by SHinra. His “mother” is Jenova, perhaps some kind of demon of the ancient world or something. Sephy is out to destroy everything because of Jenova’s psychic influence. Or something.

They go a small village and gain the help of Cidolphus Orlandu, a great pilot who gave up his chance to go into space for his girl (she wasn’t his girl at the time, exactly). He’s a big softie, but he acts like a jerk to her sometimes because of the lost opportunity. They all go into space and come back. Soon after, it is revealed that Cloud lied about being a partner with Sephiroth. We learn that Cloud is really a Sephiroth clone (his DNA was refortmatted to match Sephiroth’s) to be a better soldier. Shinra work again. Also, SHinra has been “developing” monsters out of people. Or something. This part didn’t make much sense.

Eventually, they discover that Sephiroth plans to unleash a super-deadly spell and blow up the planet. Aeris runs off for no good reason alone to stop it. Apprently she has some mysterious power. The party goes after her. Sephiroth kills her. Why they don’t bring her back with a Pheonix Down is totally unexplained.

The planet itself unleashes “Weapons” (giant mecha) to defend itself. Why they don’t go after Sephirorth rather than run around like idiots, we never know. There’s a big fight between Shinra and one fo the weapons, and the new owner of Shinra sort of redeems himself by stansding and fighting and dying (admittedly, with and by giant laser guns) one of the Weapons.

More adventuring. Cloud awakens after a big disaster finally healed in mind. Or something. He can now face the truth (it’s not a particularly hard truth). He wasn’t a Sephiroth clone. He was just some poor kid from the FF7 equivelant of Podunk, USA. He watched Sephiroth go nuts, and saved people he could. Sephiroth’s real partner didn’t make it.

The party gears up and heads out to take Sephy down. After a titanic fight, they do so. Sephy takes his “giant squid form” and “one-winged angel form” for the long fight. After the fight, he duels CLoud inside Cloud’s own mind. Cloud unleashes his super-omnislash attack, and wins. Or something. I’m really confused by that part.

Wel, that’s the basics.

6

FVII doesn’t hold a candle to FFT or Chrono Cross.

7

I think FF 8 is *way * more confusing and takes a sharp left turn halfway through. I love FFVII

8

Isn’t there a scene where Cloud rifles through one of the girls’ panty drawer? I’m thinking Aeris, but it might have been Tifa.

9

FF8 more confusing? Were you not paying attention? I mean, yeah, it’s a dumb plot, and the sharp left turn you mention is kinda odious, but still. In a series of games whose plots are kinda silly at best, FF7 is the low point.

10

FFT I didn’t think was that bad. Clarity’s biggest enemy in that game isn’t the plot, it’s the translation.

With that said, I wouldn’t have bitched about FFVII if I’d remembered about Chrono Cross. Holy balls.

Miss Purl McKnittington: There sure was. And I’m pretty sure it was Tifa.

11

If I were you, I would buy the game and play it. You can find it online for cheap and get a guide book for cheaper if you really want to. IMHO, it’s definitely worth playing. One of my favorite games of all time. The story, while simplistic, works. The controls and materia system work perfectly. It’s an all around good rpg.

12

You can wait until the guy doing a speedrun of it sends it to the SDA, if you don’t really want to play it.

13

Yeah, Chrono Cross is pretty convoluted. Good game, though, with a battle system I’d love to see used more often, as well as that right analog stick control and R3=X setup, allowing you to play battles with one hand.

I’ll tell you what I hated about FFVIII. Other than the fact that I never got involved or cared about the characters–causing me to quit somewhere around disc 3–is those ungodly long summons that you couldn’t speed up. That for some reason had this stupid X button press thing during the middle of the summon, so you couldn’t wander off to the fridge to get another soda while Quezatocal took five minutes to deal a small amount of damage.

What FFVII has really got going for it, I think, is the general lack of minigames. Look, Square, I want to play the game. Not some stupid card game, not the most retarded version of hockey I’ve ever seen, I want to play the game. You know, advance the plot. When advancing the plot requires me to play a damn minigame for six hours, I tend to get pissed. That’s what makes the older games so nice and why I play them more often. No 2-minute CGIs just to summon, no minigames, a party of four, and an easier to follow plot.

14

Well, FFVII does have a slew of minigames - all of the ones at Golden Saucer, including Chocobo Racing - but the difference is that they’re entirely for fun rather than involved in advancing the game in any way. If I ever meet the guy who made Triple Triad, I’m going to sock him!

The thing that I think makes FFVII so great is the settings and ideas and environments, rather than a particular dense story of well-developed characters. Midgar is just magnificent - my absolute favorite fictive setting or environment ever. It’s just such a gorgeous megalopolis, equal parts Blade Runner’s Los Angeles and Akira’s Neo Tokyo. From the sleek corporate skyscraper headquarters of Shinra to the sooty slums where Cloud meets Aeris, the city just oozes style. I love the big reactors, the trains circling the city, the whole concept of the slums beneath - I wish that Square had made 10 games set in Midgar. What about the abandoned playground between the two sectors? Wall Market, that wonderfully ethnic barrio, home to the Honeybee Manor and a strange space-reggae soundtrack? Gorgeous.

The other environments and settings are just as amazing - Golden Saucer, that Vegas-esque amusement park, divided into themed sectors like the Haunted House and Chocobo Racetrack. The wonderfully gothic victorian Shinra mansion. That amazing underwater laboratory. The rocky, wild Cosmo Canyon. And so on.

I think that’s why most people, like me, are still so in love with FFVII - none of the other games has come remotely close in terms of pure, engrossing style.

15

Well, during the middle chapters of FFT, it gets kind of hard to keep all the politics and dealings and background and characters straight. Plus there’s a lot of backstory about the 50 years war that leads into the lion war.

And I loved it. I was actually somewhat disapointed that during chapter 4, the plot goes from incredibly twisty and complex to straight an arrow.

16

I don’t know… I liked getting to watch various badasses spit fire from above. :slight_smile: That said, I liked FF3 infinitely more than 7.

17

It’s definitely Tifa ( I’m playing it right now ). He finds “Orthopedic Underwear”.

18

I played FFVII on my computer (the legitimate, official Windows version, mind you). I got up to the part halfway through disc 1, where you have to race a chocobo. The game crashed. I didn’t feel motivated enough to download the patch to fix it. I guess that sums up how much I enjoyed it. Lots of people seem to love it, though, and I guess the concept is fairly interesting. You can probably buy an old copy for cheap if you want to try and don’t mind looooooooong conversations.

(They’re really freaking long.)

19

:eek: Missed that part. Is that a fancy name for Tifa’s bra? What do the orthopedic underwear do? +5 speed for Tifa?

20

Absolutely nothing, as far I can tell; you find it but don’t keep it.