In the first gaming era, I was a lot less selective than I am now; if it even remotely resembled an RPG, I had to play it- and more so if was created by the then Squaresoft. Back in those days, I was a hopeless Final Fantasy fangirl, and so everything they produced had to be great- didn’t it?

Sadly, there was a rude awakening ahead of me, and it was to begin with this game- SaGa Frontier 2. Due to their lack of availability in the UK, I had remained blissfully ignorant of the SaGa franchise up until this point, but even though this is said to be one of the better games in the series, it was to be the one that put me off investigating any of the others.

SaGa Frontier 2 takes place in the fantasy land of Sandail, a world where practically everyone can use a form of magic known as Anima. For your gaming ‘pleasure’, there are two separate storylines- one following the life of Prince Gustave after he is exiled for not being able to use Anima, and the other chronicling the adventures of the Knights family, a clan of treasure hunters. Both storylines are played as separate chapters selected from the world map, and so you can switch from one to the other and even unlock and play vaguely related side stories along the way.

As the easier of the two storylines, Gustave’s tale can be completed fairly quickly and easily, but sadly, the reason for this is that it turns out to be 90% cut scene. Much as you may want to get down to actually playing, you will instead have to sit through endless dialogue so underwhelming and forgettable that you will ultimately wonder why you even bothered.

Surely, then, this exposition heavy tale is a mere starter, a prelude to the far more satisfying Knights family storyline? Well, yes, there is a lot more game play to be found in this section, but ultimately this means there are only more opportunities for the game to demonstrate just how painful it is. Perhaps in an attempt to be varied and challenging, every aspect of the game is laced with unwanted difficulties; even walking around the field is a pain due to the tortuously mazelike nature of each and every map (it is even possible to get lost in towns). Worse yet, monsters also appear on the field map, and as soon as you enter, even those on the farthest side of the screen make a beeline straight for you, ensuring that battle is inevitable. And heaven forbid you should get lost and have to retrace your steps, for any time you re-enter a particular screen, all the monsters on that map regenerate. Only the patient and the crazy will make it through without recourse to a strategy guide to show the quickest route through these hellish torture chambers.

At this point, you may start to think that I am overreacting a little- after all, just how bad could battle be? Think again, for of all the battle systems both boring and addictive that I have experienced, even now, that of SaGa Frontier stands out as one of the more tortuous ones. Like Suikoden, the game has three battle modes- one on one duel, normal ally party vs. enemy party skirmishes and all-out multi-unit tactical conflict. Sadly, where Suikoden made all of these worthy, SaGa Frontier 2 does the exact opposite.

Although they aren’t particularly inspiring, regular battles are probably the least painful of the three types- for the most part they play out like most RPG battle systems, with characters taking turns to perform attacks and spells- which, if performed in a certain order, unleash more powerful combo moves. Unfortunately, because the battles are harder than average and occur so frequently, you soon begin to dread each encounter.

One-on-one encounters are even worse, however- despite being available at the start of battle as an alternative to regular party battle, they are an option you will rarely want to exercise. In these single battles, your commands are reduced to simple component moves such as “Slash” and “Blow” which you must chain together in order to (hopefully) perform the moves you would have available automatically in normal battle. This is just one example of the pedantic and number crunching nature of the game, which elevates the idea of menus and stats to a whole new level; in fact, every single aspect that could be overcomplicated has been. Take one look at the menu and you will soon be overwhelmed- characters have individual elemental and weapons based affinities, combo information, and both HP and Life Points (reach zero HP and you can revive by spending a life point, but getting to zero LP results in a more permanent death), whilst even weapons have stats relating not only to their attack and defence, but to how long it takes for them to break. All in all, it is as if every possible stat system has been squeezed into a single game, with predictably bad results.

Getting back to battle, and the tactical system has its own unpleasantness to offer. As with Suikoden, you move units across the field as they take their turn, but whenever they encounter the enemy, they have to fight a one round battle with them. Not too bad, you might think, until you realise that the vast majority of your units are composed of four weak and useless generics, who are predictably far more pathetic than the well trained enemy generics. In the end, there’s no real strategy for these tactical battles except to brute force them by throwing all your forces at the enemy and hoping for a favourable outcome.

Even if you do manage to endure all this and level up your characters into a crack fighting force, there is further disappointment to come. Since the Knights storyline covers three generations of the family, just as you get one Knights and his companions up to a decent level, their part in the story ends, and the baton is passed to a new group of newcomers who are often far too weak and under-levelled to take on the latest batch of enemies. This is truly the final blow- the knowledge that even if you work hard and put up with the game’s system, all your efforts are only going to be taken away from you anyway.

Final Thoughts
These days, SaGa Frontier 2 seems to have long fallen into obscurity, and given the many flaws the game had, perhaps that is just as well. In between finding your way across hideous area maps, keeping track of what combos to use, and hoping that your best weapons won’t break too soon, there’s precious little fun to be had from this game, which is surely best kept confined to the shelves of the dedicated RPG collector.

Any gamers who frequent this blog will more than likely be familiar with the Shadow Hearts series of games, but not so many will be aware that those games also have a prequel- a PSOne RPG named Koudelka. Ironically intended to be a breakout game that would revitalise the apparently stagnant RPG genre, the finished product was a game so poor that the lucky ones were those who had indeed never played or even heard of it.

The Dark Side of RPGs
Set in the late 19^th century in a suspicious abbey in Aberystwyth, Koudelka follows the adventures of Koudelka Iasant, a young girl with supernatural powers who is drawn there after a series of visions. Joining her at the abbey are Edward Plunkett, a rich adventurer, and Father James O’Flaherty, a priest, making up the party of three playable characters that you will control throughout the entire game.

Regardless of your thoughts on only having three characters to use, Koudelka will surely turn you off the moment you hear about its battle system. A rather half-hearted attempt to combine regular and tactical RPGs, the game fails on every front, making battle little more than a chore- and not even one you can get over with quickly.

Battle takes place on a bland and limited grid, in which you and the enemy slowly shuffle towards each other as your turns allow. Oddly enough, despite aspiring to be tactical in nature, the game will not let your characters move behind the foremost enemy, putting paid to any of the usual strategies of surrounding and crushing the enemy. Do not direct your anger at whoever came up with this idea, though- save it for the person who decided that it would be a good idea to not let you attack or move for two turns in a row. Yes, if that somehow passed you by the first time, you cannot attack twice in a row, even if you happen to be standing in front of the enemy- instead you must move again or waste a whole turn defending. And this doesn’t just apply to physical attacks- magic and items are equally unavailable.

Even when you do get to attack, however, the whole process is underwhelming. Guns have to be reloaded every six shots, bows have to be reloaded every shot (reloading naturally takes up a turn), whilst short-ranged weapons like swords are prone to break, leaving you to face a powerful boss with a rusty dagger or your bare hands. And don’t even think about relying on magic- it takes forever to cast in terms of loading time, and manages about 0-10 damage. It is also worth noting that you cannot even rely on a shop to replenish your stock of weapons and items- no such facilities exist.

Enemies are equally uninspired; since you spend your entire time in the one abbey, your opponents consist mainly of the various corpses and disembodied body parts, which appear over and over in various shades of grey, green and brown. With each battle taking ages to complete, and a generally high random encounter rate, you will soon get bored of taking on yet another group of identical shambling corpses.

Outside of battle, wandering the mansion is almost as painful as fighting- in order to progress there is no shortage of backtracking, solving puzzles and pressing X randomly in the hopes of picking up a barely visible key that might provide access to another room.

Audiovisual
Visually, Koudelka is roughly at FF8 level in terms of quality, but since the colour palette is so restricted, it ends up looking a lot worse- especially with regards to the repetitive enemies. Music is equally bland, wasting the opportunity to create something tense and atmospheric in favour of simplistic and dull tracks. Voice acting at least isn’t too bad, and whilst the plot doesn’t go anywhere fast, the exchanges between the characters are reasonably entertaining.

Final Thoughts
The poor RPG’s poor RPG, Koudelka may have spawned the enjoyable Shadow Hearts series, but it is hardly worthy of being associated with that name. Doubtless there will those who are inclined to play just because of its prequel status, but anyone who tries this game should be prepared to undergo extremes of pain and tedium.

Arcade Mode
To be fair, even though I don’t particularly crave it when I’m not playing, despite its flaws, the arcade beat-‘em-up aspect of the game is the best part, and I do occasionally have bouts of trying my luck at it. Even so, this isn’t to say that it is particularly good- because if it was, why would I even be ranting about it?

Like most beat-‘em-ups, Ehrgeiz can be played in one of two ways; if you happen to be a multi-limbed creature with incredible reflexes and a photographic, you can pull off a number of advanced button combinations designed to generate special attacks, or, if you are merely human, you can just button bash and chain basic combos- an approach which admits serves well about 90% of the time anyway. In this way, you can battle your way through around eight consecutive battles in back alleys and other fascinating locales, before facing Red Scorpion during the credits in the hopes of winning and getting the game’s good ending. Then, when you’re done, you can battle through identical story modes for all the other characters, each of them uglier and less appealing than the last. What fun, eh?

Dungeon Quest
Had enough of one-on-one battle? Fancy something a little more ambitious? Well, if you’re feeling particularly masochistic, you can always indulge in Ehrgeiz’s dungeon crawler section, a quest which sees generic looking characters Koji and Claire attempt to penetrate to the lowest level of a poorly designed dungeon. Armed with swords and axes, you must hack and slash through hordes of ugly enemies, in a game that is as tedious as it is uninspiring. Even saving is a hassle- in principle, you can save any time, but each time you do so, it costs an increasing amount of money to do so, forcing to play long after you want to quit just so that you have the funds to save.

As if to add insult to injury, not only does the game treat the player badly, it shows so little regard for the characters that one of the healing items is a bowl of dog food. There is something rather soul destroying about having to feed your character dog food, even if it is to replenish their HP.

Mini-Games: why, God, why?
Thought it couldn’t get any worse? Sadly, some bright spark over at the then Squaresoft thought it would be a great idea to include a mini-game section for people to while away their hours on. I’ve yet to meet anyone who thinks running endless laps around a track whilst trying to beat a computer controlled character is fun, but if you happen to be that person, you may have just found the game for you. You’ll be even more ecstatic to learn that your reward for getting an impossible record on these games is nothing less than…an extra outfit for some of the characters! Knock yourself out.

Final Thoughts
Whilst it has value as a collector’s item, Ehrgeiz is the sort of game that tries to do everything, and ends up not doing any of it very well. If you want beat-’em-up, try Soul Calibur; if you fancy some dungeon crawling, go for Diablo- just don’t expect this game to deliver in any way.

In the wake of Final Fantasy 7, everyone wanted to grab a piece of the action, and so it was that RPG creators sought to capitalise on whatever it was that was making the public buy the game by copying and pasting them into their own role-playing epics. One such game thus created is the infamous Legend of Dragoon, an RPG that proves oddly addictive when playing it and entirely frustrating in both past and present memory. Replete with problems as nearly every aspect of its gaming system is, it is truly one of the most deserving candidates ever to be given a Dark Side Gaming Rant.

Enter the Dark Side
At the beginning of Legend of Dragoon, you find yourself controlling Dart, a spiky haired hero who is out to avenge an attack on his village and rescue his childhood friend from the nearby Hellena Prison (spiky hair? Childhood friend? Attacked village? Why do I have this feeling of déjà vu?). Thus begins an adventure that sees Dart and his allies discover their destined Dragoon powers and set off on a world-spanning question to defeat a silver, sorry, platinum haired bishie named Lloyd. Just stop me if you’ve heard this before, which you surely will have if you’ve picked up an RPG within the last ten years.

Battle System
Legend of Dragoon has a rather unique battle system, which is to say that we should all be thankful that its innovations were never featured elsewhere. This is perhaps the only game in existence where a small yellow bird is just as likely to cause game over as a boss, and it is certainly not a game where you should, as I did, think “oh, I don’t need to save” at any point, because if you ever do, you will suffer a crushing game over mere moments later.

In an attempt to spice up the tedium of menu based combat, Legend of Dragoon ‘enhances’ the simple attack command with an Additions system, in which you can perform a combo strike by pressing X or Circle when a square flashes on screen. Yes, it’s a nice idea, but when you have to have perfect timing just to do an attack that does more than negligible damage, it takes the fun out of it somewhat. Worse yet, there is one character (Shana/Miranda), who cannot use Additions at all- why make a system and then create a character who is unable to use it?

Additions or not, battle is always a tedious and protracted affair, even against the most inoffensive looking of enemies. In normal form (I’ll get onto Dragoon transformations in a moment), magic cannot be used, and with space for only 32 items in your inventory, the ability to carry attack and healing items is severely restricted. Instead, the cheapest way to restore HP in battle is with the Guard ability, which replenishes a small amount of HP whist defending. Unfortunately, much of this HP will immediately be removed again on the enemy’s next turn, resulting in a “ten steps forward, nine steps back” situation that ensures most of your time in battle is spent desperately trying to recover some small amount of health.

If you finally manage to do enough damage on an enemy, your SP gauge will fill, enabling your character to transform into a Dragoon and perform powerful attacks and magic. Sounds good, right? Then let me burst your bubble- this aspect of the game is as riddled with problems as the rest of it. In order to get access to Dragoon form in the first place, your character has to have respectable enough attack and defence stats to do the required amount of damage before getting slaughtered- something which is a near impossible for the weaker characters. This basically renders magic-orientated characters useless, and forces your party to be only made up of the strong but not-too-slow attackers.

These aren’t the only issues with Dragoon form, however- the other being that you cannot use items whilst in this state. Typically, the characters with healing spells are the ones who are too weak to ever reach Dragoon form, and so if your health gets low in this state, your only choice is to revert to normal and begin the whole process of attacking and guarding all over again.

The worst part of all this is that, having struggled through such tedious battles, there is barely any reward for having done so. Regular battle gives a pittance in EXP, so much so that it is impossible to use them for levelling up- instead, you have to rely on boss battles for experience, totally negating the idea of levelling up in order to be able to handle a boss you are having difficult with.

Even when you aren’t in battle, getting around in the world of Legend of Dragoon can be a chore. Although most maps aren’t too difficult to navigate in themselves, there are often times when you have to backtrack all the way through a dungeon because the game won’t just let you skip an area you have already completed- for example, the Valley of Corrupted Gravity has to be traversed about four times.

Characters: Generic Hero Set
The heroes of Legend of Dragoon are all, conveniently enough, destined Dragoons drawn from a hero set so standard you could probably recreate it in RPG Maker with little difficulty (certainly it was recreated almost perfectly in Legaia 2).

• Dart: The hero of the tale, Dart is a Cloud wannabe with unknown parents (set up for a major plot point, of course) who sets out to protect his childhood friend. Unlike most heroes, who just undergo one village burning, Dart has his first home burned down as a child, whilst his second one is attacked at the beginning of the game. From there on, he becomes a sword wielder of decent all-round strength, making him one of the better playable characters.
• Shana: Dart’s childhood friend, Shana has unique, destined and mysterious powers that are important to the plot, but largely useless otherwise. As mentioned above, she cannot use Additions in battle, and so her attack is pathetically weak. I recommend never using her in battle.
• Lavitz: As a knight, Lavitz is a strong spear user with a solid attack, despite having an in-battle voice that sounds like Tom Hanks. Sadly, he gets killed partway through the game, but he is soon replaced by Albert. The timing on some of his Additions is quite hard to master.
• Albert: The King of Serdio, Albert inherits Lavtiz’ stats and Dragoon spirit, and soon becomes one of the members of the “party of necessity”.
• Haschel: An old fist-fighter and mentor type, Haschel is actually Dart’s grandfather, although neither of them knows this at first. He is the weakest of the “party of necessity”, but he makes up for this by being a faster attacker.
• Rose: A swordswoman with a mysterious past, Rose is a swift attacker, but she is sadly too weak to withstand the force of boss battles. She’s the character you want to use, but cannot really find an excuse to.
• Meru: A chirpy and cheerful girl who wields a hammer, Meru’s default costume puts her in serious need of a visit from the Fashion Police, and sadly, like Shana, she is far too weak to survive for more than turn or two in battle.
• Kongol: As an axe-wielding giant, Kongol has the high strength you would expect of him, but he is so slow that he barely ever gets a chance to show it off. For this reason, it is best not to rely on him.
• Miranda: Shana’s replacement later in the game, she is just as useless as the female lead in battle, and seems like something of an afterthought in terms of personality and individuality.
• Lloyd: Although he isn’t the final boss, Lloyd and his minions are recurring antagonists throughout the game. A platinum haired bishie with a Sephiroth-complex, Lloyd wishes to destroy the world and create a new one, something every villain has to try at least once.

Audiovisual
In visuals, Legend of Dragoon retains its “FF7a” status, with graphics that fall between those of 7 and 8; concept artwork for the Dragoons is well done, but character models are polygon-deficient, and settings are simplistic and uninspiring (a greenish-brown grassy field sticks in my mind to this day for some reason). Whilst they aren’t particularly lengthy, loading times for battle screens are long enough to induce a sort of cumulative irritation at the continual waiting.

As far as audio goes, the background music is solid enough and even rather catchy in places, whilst in-battle voices are at least unintentionally amusing. What really drags the game down even further, however, is the awful, awful translation, which does not seem to have gone anywhere near a native English speaker. Lines such as “the people of Serdio would all fall down if they heard of this” only attest to the power of a proper localisation.

Final Thoughts
Although I have to admit that I was addicted to it when I was playing it, even then, Legend of Dragoon was a flawed and frustrating experience that showed only glimmers of potential amidst a sea of problems. They may not be perfect themselves, but even the Final Fantasy games it tries to emulate are superior to this.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember why you bought a game in the first place. Alundra 2 is one such game, and whilst I don’t even own it anymore, it felt as if the time had come to explain to everyone just how bad this game was.

Despite nominally being a sequel to the original Adventures of Alundra, Alundra 2 has basically nothing to do with the first game other than being an action RPG with some shared healing items. You take on the role of pirate hunter Flint, a silent young man who finds himself battling sorcerer Mephisto and his army of clockwork monsters. Aside from the quite sinister practice of inserting wind-up keys into people and thus turning them to clockwork, the tone of the game is generally light and comedic, a far cry from the depressing “one character dies every arc” style of the original.

Anyway, suffice to say that the story is generally superficial and not at all worth mentioning- what we are here to rant about today is the awful, awful game play. In the true fashion of the action RPG pseudo genre, game play consists of two halves- battle and puzzles- both of which are excruciatingly painful in a way that few games can ever hope to match.

Battle
When it comes to combat, Flint takes the standard hero’s route of equipping a sword and shield, with no inclination to ever try out any other sort of weapon. His initial attack is a single oversized slash which not only leaves him open for a counterattack as soon as he has performed it, but causes the enemy to flash and turn temporarily invincible, preventing you from delivering a swift follow-up. You can eventually earn a combo attack (up to five slashes), but in order to do so, you must collect hidden puzzle pieces that are scattered about the world. Yes, that’s right, you must complete a tedious and lengthy side quest just to gain the basic combo attack functionality that most games see fit to give you at the beginning.

In order to add some kind of variety to this tedium, you can also equip four different elemental rings to give yourself elemental shots and eventually summoning powers that are so weak for their cost that it is hardly worth touching them. The water ring at least offers something in the way of healing- essential since your inventory is so limited that you never have enough barely useful healing herbs and tonics to get by.

Puzzles
As bad as the battle system may sound, it is nothing compared to the ‘delights’ the puzzle aspect of the game has to offer. Having got it into their heads that harder means better, the developers sacrifice originality for the sake of providing increasingly difficult combinations of switches, blocks, spikes and fireballs- usually to be solved within a time limit that forces you to start over if you make even the slightest mistake. This all culminates late in the game, when after battling through a dungeon for about half an hour, you are presented with a puzzle so difficult and tedious that it remains seared in my memory even now, many years after the fact.

The puzzle in question involves taking a moving platform across a sea of lava- not too difficult, one might think, until the finer details are revealed. Since the opposite side of the sea contains a jump that you cannot make on your own, whilst the moving platform is proceeding forwards, you must first jump to another platform on the right, pick up a box, get both box and yourself onto the moving platform, then onto a platform on the left hand side, where you must use the box to jump up to a barrel, then throw both box and barrel back onto the moving platform before it gets to the other side. Since throwing is not terribly accurate, and the middle platform is moving all the time, mistakes are easy to make, and the slightest error forces you to start again. Even knowing there was a save point in the next room could not stop me from giving up after 45 minutes of attempting this one puzzle (and swearing quite vehemently at the screen by the end). This marked the end of my relationship with the game, one that had somehow endured over twenty hours of substandard play.

Mini-games
Mini-games have ever been the bane of my life, and Alundra 2 goes out of its way to make them particularly poor. From driving a small remote-controlled car around an arena to outrunning a rolling minotaur-ball, each mini-game is as dire as it is lacking in originality- when throwing darts at a rotating board is the most fun the game has to offer, something is seriously wrong.

Audiovisual
Older 3D games are always subject to criticism as their low polygon counts and simplistic designs get shown up by the latest visual masterpieces, but whilst Alundra is certainly worse looking than most, the biggest issue with the 3D setting is the awful, awful camera. Unresponsive and uncooperative, the camera has to be adjusted practically every five seconds as the player desperately tries to find an angle at which you can actually have some vague idea of where you are going. Meanwhile, the background music and sound effects are both forgettable, but the English voice acting is cringe-worthy enough to make anyone want to turn off the sound completely.

Final Thoughts
Fortunately, Alundra 2 is a rare enough game that most people have escaped ever playing it, but those who have must surely have only negative memories of it. In the unlikely event that anyone was at all thinking of playing it, take my advice and leave well alone.

Welcome to a new section of the blog, one in which ranting takes a new direction as I temporarily move away from attacking anime in order to turn my attention onto games. These ‘Dark Side’ rants aren’t like the normal moans, however, for in them I shall abandon my usual writing persona to adopt a more informal ‘Dark Side’ personality, who finds even more faults than I do in my default state. And so, let the ravaging begin with that one RPG that brought many of us into the gaming fold- Final Fantasy 7.

The first FF game for Playstation, Final Fantasy 7 seems to be the game that everyone has played, and back in the day it spawned much debate and discussion, not to mention numerous threads about how Aeris could be revived using some convoluted method, or how Sephiroth was the hottest bishie ever to grace the world of gaming. Ah yes, in those early times we loved FF7 and thought it was the best, and it was only upon going back to it after years of better games that I came to realise that while I will always have a degree of fond nostalgia for it, on a scale of 1 to Phantom Brave, it isn’t really all that good.

Enter the Dark Side…
So come on, who didn’t love FF7 way back when? I know I did- it was my first RPG and I spent many a late night hacking away at it. Back then, the game seemed huge- I spent ages just getting through Midgar, and that was only the first town. I’d never seen an RPG, and this was just great- catching chocobos, equipping weapons, meeting playable characters, I loved it all.

In more recent times, however, I ended up helping my siblings with their play-through of the game, and all the lustre seemed long gone. With each passing town, I found myself thinking “I hate this part”, especially when those accursed torture devices the FF series called mini-games were involved. More often than not, characters looked like deformed Lego rejects, whilst the battle system was so slow and excruciatingly dull that all I needed to do was select attack over and over again. I still had the memories of the good times, but beyond that, it was clear the game needed to be left in the rose-tinted corridors of the past.

Characters

How cute…in a “couldn’t be bothered to find a better resolution” sort of way.

When Final Fantasy 7 begins, you find yourself in control of Cloud, a man who is desperately trying to be cool and MANLY, but who only succeeds in coming off as a complete jerk with poor fashion sense, an obsession with hair gel, and a sword so big that it surely must be compensating for a deficiency elsewhere. Worse yet, as we discover later in the game, he isn’t even the badass top-class mercenary he claims to be- instead, he was rejected and given a career as one of the blue-clad generic guys you can defeat in two hits right at the beginning of the game! It was only after some unfortunate experimentation and the death of his best friend Zack that he stole Zack’s clothes and sword (that’s right, he takes the clothes of a dead guy to wear) and convinced himself that Zack’s successful career was his own! He even gets it on with Zack’s ex-girlfriend Aeris- talk about pathetic.

Next to join the team is Barret, a hot-headed man with a gun on his arm and leader of a terrorist group trying to make a statement by blowing up reactors. Thanks to his weapon, Barret can at least inflict long range damage from the back row, but you have to wonder how he can cope with a gun in place of his arm. Doesn’t it ever overheat? How does he do up his zipper? These questions must be answered.

Third in line is Tifa, a well-endowed woman billed as Cloud’s childhood friend- at least until we find out a few more details from their past. Apparently, Cloud was so moody and antisocial even in his early years that he didn’t actually make any friends, and in fact he barely knew Tifa. Even so, in order to give hope to all the losers out there, Tifa falls in love with Cloud anyway, which proves that you can be a complete jerk and still get the girl as long as the two of you grew up in the same town.

You’d think a guy like Cloud would be lucky to score even one girl, but as it turns out, he’s quick to set his sights on another party member- the aforementioned Aeris. The last survivor of an ancient race (creatively called The Ancients), Aeris is gifted with mysterious plot powers, and also just happens to have been dating Zack at an unspecified point before the story began. Having absorbed Zack’s personality into himself, Cloud is able to make an impression on her too, but as it turns out she’s fated to get stabbed by main villain Sephiroth anyway. Unlike those who laughed at it, I actually felt a pang of emotion at seeing Aeris get stabbed the first time around, but it soon became replaced with annoyance- either I spent ages levelling her up to get her best Limit Break only to have the game throw all my work down the toilet, or I left her pathetically weak only for the game to once again screw me over by forcing me to use her in the Temple of the Ancients. This infuriating situation must be why so many people wanted to resurrect Aeris (it should also be noted that when she dies, she takes away the equipment she was wearing forever, and means that the three parties sometimes needed in the penultimate battle are one member short), but short of starting a new game, it can’t be done.

The fifth member of the team is actually the best character of them all, so utterly awesome that I even used his name as my internet identity for years. Yep, it’s Red XIII, the wolf/lion beast with fire-red fur, whose cool and calm exterior belies his fierce intellect. His name may be taken from Star Wars (with even his real name, Nanaki, said to be an anagram of Anakin), but we can forgive him this transgression due to his sheer worth in every other department. He may have been made ugly and reticent in Advent Children, but the True Red XIII has the looks and personality to go far.

Sixth to join up is Caith Sith, a remote-controlled toy cat who rides atop a giant plush moogle (as you do). In all fairness, aside from the fact that he’s controlled by a generic bad guy who initially betrays the team before deciding to wholeheartedly join the side of good, Cait Sith isn’t all that bad- his character design is quite appeal, and there’s nothing really wrong with him, it’s just that there’s no real reason to use him in battle either. He’s just one of those characters who inspires indifference when the time comes to decide just who should be on the front lines.

The final compulsory character is crabby old pilot Cid, a spear user who will ever be renowned for the line “Drink your goddamn tea!”. At home, he mistreats the woman who stopped his rocket launch to check a problem with an oxygen tank, only to find out that she was right all along, and didn’t deserve all those years of being sworn at. He also has a cigarette permanently lodged between his teeth, which somehow made it through to the US release without being changed into a lollipop.

For the truly committed, another two optional characters are available to recruit- the irritating ninja Materia Hunter Yuffie, and the dark yet cool Vincent, a tortured man who lost his one true love and got turned into a monster. Whilst Yuffie is annoying enough to steal all your material and force you to struggle through a tedious sidequest should you go anywhere near her hometown (she’ll also steal money from you if you don’t recruit her properly), Vincent at least shows promise, but his status as a side character means it isn’t properly fulfilled.

Naturally, no game would be complete without its NPCs, from those boring one-liner characters to a whole host of generically evil enemies with evil laughs and a fondness for lard in their tea (seriously). Standing at the head of the bunch is, of course, main villain Sephiroth, the silver-haired bishie who brought the leather-clad, pale-complexioned look out of the music sphere and into the world of gaming. Want to be a badass? All you need is the right look, and the tendency to turn from a reasonable if cold type into a complete psycho after finding out your father experimented on you. From then on, you must trawl across the world, dragging the head of your alien ‘mother’ with you as you massacre villages or leave them untouched on your way to a date with destroying the world. Naturally, you must always be one step ahead of the heroes, but be sure to leave them alone until they’ve levelled up enough to face you, instead strewing weaker underlings along their path to help them gain experience.

Story
From the generic to the convoluted, RPG stories have come and gone, but only FF7 offers a story so twisted that it is hard to tell how much is due to its base lack of coherence, and how much can be attributed to a translation so half-hearted that some sections simply make the barest of sense (the most memorable translation blunders include “This guy are sick” and “Off course!”).

In the world of FF7, the race known as the Ancients have all but died out, whilst the evil Shinra Company effectively controls the world, sucking life energy out of the planet with its Mako reactors whilst financing various scientific experiments. One such experiment is Sephiroth, who is injected with cells from an alien being found in a geological stratum, resulting in his eventually turning into a psychotic murderer.

After an encounter with Cloud and Zack five years prior to the start of the game, Sephiroth ‘dies’ and is either resurrected by the life energy of the planet or cloned, depending on which theory you give credence to. At this point, Sephiroth goes on a whole new killing rampage whilst his clones and Cloud (also connected to Sephiroth via experimentation) trail after him. Finally, Sephiroth obtains the Black Materia and uses it to summon a meteor to threaten the earth, in the hopes that the planet will respond and he can suck in its power to become a god for some reason. Fortunately, this meteor conveniently waits for you to complete all side quests such as chocobo breeding before reaching a critical point, and thanks to Aeris, her White Materia and a final boss battle, the Planet finds the energy to defend itself and the world is saved (although some thought humanity was destroyed until Advent Children proved otherwise).

That isn’t all there is to it, however, for other Sephiroth ‘clones’ exist, men injected with Jenova cells in order to see if it draws them to the reunion. Cloud is among these people, although with no number tattoo he is considered a failure, despite being the only person to actually reach the Reunion. Red XIII also sports a tattoo, although after this is mentioned once it is never referred to again, and seems to have no bearing on the plot from then on. Still, at least poor Red XIII turns out not to be the last of his kind when he finds an off screen mate, although where exactly she was hiding when you can go anywhere in the world by the end of the game remains a mystery.

Battle System
As with all the pre-X FF games, FF7 uses the ATB system, where both enemies and allies must stand around glaring at each other until their time bars fill up and they can move. At this point, the familiar menu comes up, enabling the player to attack, use magic or invoke any other commands at their disposal. It’s a fairly standard battle system, but in these modern times we have become so used to better and more involved ways of battling that it cannot feel anything other than slow and dull- especially as one can proceed by just selecting attack without really bothering with more advanced commands.

For those who like things a bit more complex, however, the game offers the chance to equip unique skills by way of special items known as materia. Each materia has its own set of skills, commands and stat modifications, and by placing them into a character’s weapon or armour, that character has access to the materia’s abilities and attributes. There are good points about this system, such as advanced commands like 2x and 4x-cut (attack two or four times in one attack) or interesting combinations like Added Effect+Transform (each attack now has a chance of turning your enemy into a small frog), but the materia system also comes with one big flaw- it removes pretty much all the differentiation between different characters.

Thanks to the materia system, every character is almost the same character- their only differences are the limit break attacks they can use after they take a certain amount of damage (most of which are high-powered attacks with negligibly different results anyway) and their base stats. Sadly, although a look at the menu will indeed show that Yuffie has a much higher dexterity than her peers, and that Aeris has a high magic stat at the cost of her strength, the truth remains that these stats are buried pretty deep- compared to the obvious individuality glimpsed in games where a given character has their own strengths, weaknesses and special skills, the act of equipping weapons, armour, materia and accessories effectively makes everyone much the same. All in all, I’d rather have a system where each character has their own merits, even if it means there must be utterly useless ones to balance the ‘party of 1337’ candidates.

Mini-games and sidequests: oh god, no more
I hate mini-games. Okay, so there’s a handful I like, but they’re so few and far between that for the purposes of this rant they don’t exist at all- hell, they certainly can’t be found in FF7.

• Chocobo Breeding and Racing: Alongside prinnies, grunties and the rest, I love chocobos, but when it comes to breeding and racing them, I enjoy the idea of it more than the actual facts. Yes, of course I want my own chocobo stable, but when it takes ages to catch the right sort of chocobo for breeding, and then to find the nut it needs to get in the mood, it can all get a bit tedious. Even catching a chocobo involves distracting it with greens before slaying the accompany monsters- one wrong move and the damned thing runs away.

And then there’s the process of racing them around the same two accursed courses, paying attention to speed and stamina all the while. It isn’t too hard once you get used to it, but by that time it has become so tedious and repetitive that you long for some variety in your racetracks. Worse yet, the constant shuttling between the race course and the chocobo farm, the feeding of greens in the hopes that they are actually improving the bird’s invisible stats and of course the waiting for the “you can’t breed a chocobo that just mated or was just born” message to finally go away is a formula designed to break even the most steadfast and dedicated of breeders.

If you don’t want to get your hands dirty with actual chocobo breeding, you can choose to just bet on the races, something which seems hard to get right at first, but eventually becomes easier. Even so, expect your investments to be large in terms of both time and money, and your returns to be small.

• Crazy Motorcycle: Protect your friends’ van from Shinra motorcycles by riding on your bike and beating them over the head with your sword- quite possible one of the less painful mini-games, but still drenched in a kind of endless futility.
• Wall Market: Early on in the game, Cloud must dress as a woman in order to gain entry into Don Corneo’s Wall Market mansion, a task which involves persuading a dressmaker to make you dress, not to mention some button bashing in order to win a wig in a squats competition. If you want to go even further, you must complete other mundane yet tedious fetch quest style missions in order to pick up cologne, a tiara and even some sexy lingerie. By the time you’ve accomplished all that, you’ll be happy never to look at the accursed Wall Market with its HARD GAY body builders and terrifying group bathing in the Honey Bee Inn again.
• Snowboarding: Aeris has just died and the world is in danger- what better time to go snowboarding? To be fair, this game could be quite fun if not for Cloud’s tendency to slam into everything from a tree to a snow-moogle the instant you dare to pick up some speed.
• Submarine: I loathe and despise the submarine game more than anything else in this game, because whilst it isn’t too hard after you’ve done it a few times, the stress of the first attempt always stays with you. A timed event with awful wire-frame graphics and a depressingly slow submarine trawling through a minefield in search of the enemy, the submarine game set the standard for awful mini-games for many generations to come (or at least until FFX).
• Stop that train!: In order to pick up a Huge Materia and save the town of Corel, you must fight several groups of monsters, and then button bash in order to slow a speeding train. I’ve actually never failed at this quest no matter how ineffectual my attempts to slow the train are, so it at least can’t be said to be too difficult.
• Gold Saucer: The nexus of mini-games in the FF7 universe, Gold Saucer not only hosts the chocobo racing, it also lets you replay the snowboarding, submarine and motorcycle games (why?), as well as adding some other games that can be played- all for a price, of course. Some of these, like a rock-paper-scissors style virtual battler or super dunk basketball, defy purpose, but the most notable area is the Battle Arena, in which a character must go it alone in eight increasingly harder monster battles, gaining an additional handicap in each battle. To be fair, the Battle Arena does not offer much pain beyond that of the basic battle system, but the amount of times you need to play it in order to amass the many thousands of points needed for the best prizes is just another example of how something can become when tackled repeatedly.
• Time those button bashes: At various points in the game, you must time your button presses exactly, whether to dodge rolling rocks, match your timing with an NPC, or jump onto a swinging rod. Somehow, all these instances prove to be memorable in their frustration, with specific examples of pain including a time when you must whistle for a dolphin in exactly the right place, and another instance in the same location where you have to fill your lungs to just the right amount in order to administer CPR to an NPC.
• Weapons: If all that isn’t enthralling enough, the first US release and all subsequent versions of the game include two incredibly powerful optional monsters, the Emerald and Ruby Weapons. You can either ‘cheat’ by chaining ridiculously powerful multi-hit attacks against these monsters, or if you feel like a better test of your gaming pride, you must hack away with standard attacks for hours- take your pick.
• Fort Condor: A pseudo-strategy situation in which you must spend your hard-earned cash defending a fort from endlesswaves of incredibly slow moving enemies. I managed to beat it once, but now I minimise the pain by letting my party just go in and fight the boss.

There are other side quests and secret areas to explore, but other than figuring out how to manipulate the carnivorous plants in the Ancient Forest, they lack the unique pain of the above examples.

Graphics

Behold the visuals of yesterday- and this is his more detailed form.

3D games are never destined to stand up well to the test of time, and whilst FF7 can still boast a few worthy FMVs (for some reason, the sight of chocobos racing past on the Gold Saucer date provokes an emotional reaction from me), sadly the passage of years has revealed much else to be disappointing. There are times when the characters look passable, but in other scenes they are hideously deformed polygon-deficient mutants, with huge heads and stubs instead of hands. I’d hardly expect a ten year old game to be perfect or even near realistic, but some sequences really are too hideous to behold, such as the collapse of Mideel, or Cloud falling off the bridge after fighing Air Buster.

Damn those spin-offs, will they ever end?

“…one day get some dialogue, Red XIII.”

With the world’s continuing obsession with Cloud, Sephiroth and the gang obviously providing fertile ground for additional marketing, Square-Enix realised they didn’t need to come up with new ideas when they could just keep milking old ones. Enter Advent Children, a film sequel so awful that the angry rant it inspired was too intense to even post on this blog, followed by spin-off games such as Before Crisis, Crisis Core and Dirge of Cerberus (note that the spin-offs begin with the letters A-D, leaving E-Z open for further exploitation). As we well know, there can always be too much of a good thing, and so too much of a frankly quite mediocre thing is hardly to be welcomed.

Final Thoughts
Thanks to my history with the game, I’ll never hate FF7, but whilst enough has been written about it already, the time seemed right to expound upon its many flaws. For all that this game and the FF franchise in general has done for us, the time has come to acknowledge that in terms of actual gameplay and enjoyment, they still lag behind the likes of Grandia, Suikoden, Chrono and the rest.