There is so much Nutella being spread in this article, it's hard to take it seriously.

>On the whole, the D&D cartoon is a whole lot better than
>FFVII, because at least the characters were pretty likable and
>spoke coherent English. That's a lot more than you can say for
>the game.

This is an example of such. More on this later...

>Part of what makes FFVII's popularity so enduring is the
>nefarious power of "firsties" syndrome. That is, it was
>pioneering in many respects and thus netted a lot of attention
>for its novelty -- including attention by a lot of people who
>were new to the RPG genre and thus had no metric for
>determining a good one from a sloppy, mediocre one. Back in
>1997, FFVII was pretty jaw-dropping; the graphics were
>detailed even though the game world was huge, the integrated
>cinematics were awe-inspiring, and it basically seemed to
>embody everything the "next generation" promised. It was the
>PlayStation's decisive blow against the up-and-coming Nintendo
>64, the single volley that determined the dynamic of the
>console race.

This right here, is 100% truth; no argument from The Doc on this.


>So impressive was the game in its time that overlooking its
>glaring flaws was entirely too easy to do. Like the
>inconsistent art direction. Characters came in three different
>versions: squatty midgets, lanky puppets and detailed humans,
>and depending on when a given video sequence was rendered (and
>by which studio) the designs jumped around from event to event
>like a crack-addled grasshopper. The music was nothing to
>write home about, either; it was pretty well-written, but
>whoever programmed the sound decided that "out of tune Moog"
>would provide the ideal sonic texture for heartfelt moments.
>The story was a damned mess, patterned largely after Neon
>Genesis Evangelion not only in content -- alien force
>crash-lands in the arctic, spiritual connections with mom,
>dopey religious symbolism, etc. -- but also in terms of plot
>structure and its overreliance on obtuse crypticism. (I don't
>even know if "crypticism" is actually a word, which is fair
>enough, because I'm also not sure if FFVII's plot is actually
>a story.)

First of all, a Moog synth sounds better than the sparsity that is most of FFVII's soundtrack. The Doc thinks the soundtrack to that game is serviceable, and has a lot of classics, but it's not touching FFVI's soundtrack, or even -some- of the music on FFVIII (the use of wah-wah guitar and Rhodes-like sounds was something you don't hear much in games nowadays, much less RPGs).


>In short, FFVII was very much a product of its time and has
>aged more poorly than any other Final Fantasy, except maybe
>Mystic Quest. Alas, people are largely unwilling to question
>the validity of their nostalgic fondnesses, so FFVII has
>remained a much-loved creation despite the fact that it's
>really mostly terrible.

This is true too, EXCEPT putting it on a rung on the latter near Mystic Quest. While it is commendable this jabroni actually recognizes that Mystic CRAP was an aberration that should have stayed in the homebrew dungeon of Square USA's R&D, FFVII is nowhere near the second worst Final Fantasy game.

The Doc would put FFXI or FFIX on that rung before that. The former, because the franchise shouldn't have wasted a sequel "number" on an MMORPG, and the latter because that was a 2-pronged kiss-off pandering which The Doc will probably rant about in another post.

>FFVII was an unfortunate first in a lot of senses, but
>probably none so tragic as the really annoying archetypes and
>clichés it established. Prior to Cloud Strife, RPG heroes were
>either upbeat or, better yet, totally laconic. Now they're all
>a bunch of surly jerks who seem a lot more interested in hair
>care products than in social graces. I'm certainly not the
>most outgoing person you'll ever meet (or at least notice
>sitting standoffishly by myself), but Strife makes me look
>like a social chihuahua with an espresso IV drip.

Did he get Cloud confused with Squall? True, the current hero archtype began with Cloud, but Squall was 10x worse than that roody-poo ever was... not to mention, since Squall, Square has skirted away from that kind of PB&J than fangirls eat up (at least in action, character design is another issue).

>Then again, he's actually a brilliant character in a lot of
>ways -- particularly in proving just how well Square knew its
>target audience. Cloud seems like a carefree badass at the
>adventure's beginning, a self-assured mercenary with a heart
>of ice and an oversized sword that appeared to have lived a
>former life as a jumbo jet tailfin. But he really wasn't. On
>the contrary, he was a neurotic loser wracked with insecurity
>and incompetence; though he aspired to badassery, he was in
>truth a SOLDIER program reject who cravenly patterned his
>personality and mannerisms after his personal hero, Zack.
>Hell, he even went after sloppy seconds with Zack's old
>girlfriend... it doesn't get more pitiful than that.

LOL.


>Which just proves how cannily Square recognized its customers.
>What better way to sell to people than by speaking directly to
>them? Cloud Strife is the everynerd -- wrapped up in delusions
>of greatness when allowed to take things on his own
>carefully-selected terms until he sees the world for what it
>is and is forced to come to grips with the fact that he's
>actually completely pathetic. That's your average
>game-obsessed message board dork in a nutshell: the petty
>tyrant of a tiny little niche of the Internet but a failure in
>real life. It's the kind of parable Jesus would have been
>proud to have shared with the hungry masses between bites of
>magical fishloaf, the cigarette ad of nerd coming-of-age
>stories -- a promise to nerdlings that if you face down your
>demons, accept your failures and struggle to move beyond them,
>you'll save the world and your childhood crush will fall madly
>in love with you. And, P.S., she's totally stacked now and, if
>the CG movies are to be believed, has never heard of this
>thing called a "brassiere."

Ok, this "assessment" is starting to get a little gay. Sardony is fine, but this is wrapped in The Fabric of Hate.


>Worse, the filler-heavy 60-hour clock time quickly became the
>new standard for console RPGs -- who cares that Chrono
>Trigger? was 25 hours of unmitigated awesome? After FFVII,
>anything less than 50 hours suddenly became a rip-off;
>developers responded, tragically, by giving gamers exactly
>what they wanted. Parasite Eve was soundly rejected for its
>shocking!! 10-hour story; its spiritual successor Vagrant
>Story (which would have made a powerful 20-hour game) was
>stretched to 30 via tons of copy-and-paste corridor design.

This must be somewhat of a hidden jab at the side missions, some of which (@#$#%#%#$@ Chocobos!) weren't exactly The Doc's cup of tea. But..never mind. Carrying on....

>Come to think of it, "wretched exercise in visual overkill at
>the expense of story" (and gameplay) makes for a pretty good
>description of FFVII in general. In that sense, Advent
>Children was a chip off the ol' Materia. Square even tried to
>compensate by tossing in a handful of minigames, which were
>simultaneously terrible and inappropriate. Hey gang, Aeris
>just died a tragic, heartbreaking death -- it's time for
>snowboarding!

WTF?


>A quick survey of the console role-playing genre reveals a
>creative landscape pockmarked with the scars left by FFVII's
>world-crushing success. Stiflingly linear narrative-driven
>adventure games bogged down with excessive menu-driven combat.
>Sissy-boy heroes. Incomprehensibly dense plots with at least
>two obligatory twists, usually centered around the
>protagonist's conveniently forgotten connection to the villain
>or crisis at hand. And, oh god, the villains.

This jabroni talks about FFXII being greater than FFVII and then uses the "sissy boy heroes" tag? Did that jabroni see that asswipe Vaan? Jabroni is possibly the gayest Final Fantasy character since KUJA. And it's probably worse once you go through that game itself...

>Thanks to Sephiroth, we'll never be able to take an RPG
>villain seriously again. Tetsuya Nomura's discovery that
>leather-daddy albinos are inherently evil means that Sephiroth
>has become the template (and fashionplate) for the RPG
>villain: effeminate, ridiculous and driven by obscure motives.
>It's pretty sad that FFVI's Kefka literally dressed like a
>clown, yet represented a far more significant threat than his
>successor. Kefka broke the world in his quest for raw power,
>then ruled over the ruined remains with divine fury; Sephiroth
>wanted a hug from mommy and babbled a lot. Advantage: Kefka.

LOL. Not touching this one. Sephiroth is an icon of RPG villains, but again... "effiminate, ridiculous, driven by obscure motives" ... KUJA, jabronis.


>It's taken the Final Fantasy series nine years and five
>chapters to dig itself out of the hole that FFVII dug. FFXII
>does things right: it has a story that's worth a damn.
>Characters -- including villains -- who actually have
>motivation and personalities. Fast, fluid gameplay. A
>brilliant character skill system that offers even more
>flexibility than Materia without turning the party into a
>handful of useless, interchangeable meatbags.

See, all this jabroni needed to say about his criticism of FFVII was "Materia broke the game because it zapped any really inherent individuality from the characters outside of Limit Breaks". That's The Doc's main, and only criticism of the game itself. Everything else about it was something that needed to happen to the genre to hoist it out of that damnable "dungeons and dragons" motif that usually kept cats out of giving the games and genre a chance. All this other stuff, despite The Doc agreeing with some if it, in principle, is extra.

>But don't worry, FFVII fanatics. Nomura and Kitase are rumored
>to be in charge of Final Fantasy XIII, so you can be sure the
>status quo of anime-inspired superficiality will be restored
>in due time. In the meantime, you can wallow in fantasies of
>the alleged FFVII remake for PlayStation 3. Because god knows
>that if you fix the horribly dated graphics the whole thing
>will magically be good again.

^^^^ PB&J alert