I'm going to give my view. I adore both Final Fantasy VII and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. During the late 90's and early 2000's, they were my two favorite games of all time. But to be perfectly honest, I feel like both games, while excellent games on their own right that I still re-play to this day, have both been improved upon by subsequent entries in their own series and arguably by other games. We hold them to a pedestal because of nostalgia and how new they seemed at the time, and ignore a lot of the obvious faults they have.
Final Fantasy VII is a wonderful, beautiful game, and for it's time was a perfect 10 out of 10. I just started a new playthrough, actually (this will be about the fifth time I've played it start-to-finish since I first got it along with FFVIII back in 1999).
To me, Final Fantasy VII, while a phenomena, is just like any great film, book, game or other work of art- it has flaws. However, the flaws in this game are a lot deeper than most will admit. It has a lot of bizarre tonal and stylistic inconsistencies that at times drag me out of the game jarringly. Where the tone will radically go from serious to slapstick, from dire to downright-silly, etc. And vice versa. There's also the fact that even for its time, the presentational qualities of the graphics and sound were pretty lukewarm and underwhelming. Character models looking like lego characters on field maps, cartoony sound-effects, etc. Which is really odd because the graphics and sound were fine during the battle sequences, so again, it's jarring. And then there are issues like some really oversimplified gameplay and battle/menu systems, needlessly silly mini-games, etc. (I remember the first time I played, and I was so excited and nervous for mini-games like the bike chase or the submarine battle... and they were silly games that only took about 30 seconds and weren't difficult at all.) And the storytelling itself through the writing, pacing, etc. is pretty much all-over-the-map in terms of quality. Some scenes are perfect, others are poorly written, poorly paced and/or feel like obvious padding.
I just can't call this game "the best ever made." It's up there. Top 25, definitely! Top 10... maybe. But to be perfectly honest, I'd probably rank Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy IX slightly above it on the list. (In that, while their plots are just as flawed as this game, they do improve on other aspects of this game in a lot of ways, so objectively, I consider them to be somewhat better.) Just as I'd rank some of the other Zelda games as higher than Ocarina of Time.
And FURTHERMORE, this is my signature! SERIOUSLY! Did you think I was still talking about my point?
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Jibbler66
8 years ago
final fantasy 8 above it are you kidding me??? yes graphics are slightly better but none of those characters had backstory at all it was lazy writing, all they 'happened to be ' in the same orphanage growing up and all happened to have forgotten it. NONE of those characters you gave a damm about, Zel and Sephie were annoying and Squal was a as'hole
and don't even get me started at all on the juncion system summoning cutscenes you couldn't skip and were long, drawing magic for hours just to get strength rather then grinding killing enemies, the boring weak music (does anyone remember the best track on 8 other then the opening theme)? in FF7 I know each piece of music and can tell you were about in the game that is. 8 could have been so much more
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