FINAL FANTASY VII

I have spent an embarrassing number of hours over multiple playthroughs watching Cloud Strife slowly stop lying to himself, and the original Final Fantasy VII on PC remains one of the few RPGs where the story's emotional gut-punches genuinely land harder on a second read than a first. That is a rare quality, and it is the main reason this re-release keeps pulling new players in more than two decades after the game's original debut. For those who have never touched it, the setup is this: Cloud is a mercenary hired by the eco-terrorist cell AVALANCHE to blow up reactors owned by the Shinra Corporation, which is literally draining the planet's life-force for electricity. The city of Midgar in the opening hours is one of the most atmospheric settings in the entire RPG genre, hand-painted backgrounds layered with grime and class resentment, and the cast that assembles around Cloud, from Barret's loud grief to Aerith's deliberately eerie warmth to Tifa's complicated loyalty, rewards close reading far more than most games bother to attempt. The villain who eventually eclipses Shinra is, depending on your history with the genre, either someone you already know everything about or one of the finest reveal sequences in RPG history. Either way, the writing around him holds up. The combat is the Active Time Battle system: three-character parties, ATB gauges that fill in real time and pause for menu navigation if you set the mode to Wait, and a Materia socket system that is the actual backbone of build variety. Materia slots on weapons and armor determine your abilities entirely. Green Magic Materia gives you Fire, Ice, Lightning, Cure and the rest. Yellow Command Materia adds things like Steal and Mime. Red Summon Materia calls Ifrit, Shiva, Bahamut and their kin. The deeper play comes from pairing Materia in linked slots, where Support pieces amplify whatever sits beside them. Stack All with a healing spell to hit your whole party, or pair Elemental with a damage type to imbue every physical attack with that element. Characters differentiate through Limit Breaks, their stat spread, and the specific weapon pool available to them, which means a Cloud built as a physical attacker and a Cloud built around Magic Materia genuinely play differently across a 40-hour run. The system is not as deep as a modern CRPG's build toolbox, but it is cleaner and more legible than almost anything else from that generation. The PC version in this form is the 2013 Steam re-release, which added cloud saves, Steam Achievements, a Character Booster for players who want to skip grinding, and an upgraded audio pass that replaced the notoriously degraded MIDI tracks from the original PC port with higher-quality audio. That audio fix matters a lot: Nobuo Uematsu's soundtrack is a core part of the experience, and One Winged Angel with its full orchestral choral arrangement is exactly as operatically deranged as it should be. The presentation otherwise still shows its age, pre-rendered backgrounds run at low resolution, character models outside of cutscenes are chunky polygons, and the 4:3 aspect ratio cannot be changed natively. The community has built extensive mod support around this version, with tools like the 7th Heaven mod manager enabling AI-upscaled backgrounds, 60fps support, and quality-of-life patches, and the Steam guide section has well-maintained instructions for all of it. Vanilla is playable; modded is considerably more comfortable. Where the game sags is in its mid-section, a stretch of the world map that pads the runtime with optional side content ranging from the genuinely brilliant Chocobo breeding and racing system to some tedious Fort Condor tower defense segments that feel like filler from a different game entirely. Repeat random encounters in dungeons also accumulate irritation over time, though the encounter toggle in the Character Booster menu addresses that if patience runs thin. The story recovers with force in the third act and delivers one of the most discussed narrative moments in the medium, which I will not name here. If you have already played the Remake and Rebirth, coming back to this is a fascinating exercise in seeing how much the original does with so little. If this is your first entry point into the FF7 universe before starting the Remake trilogy, it is a genuinely worthwhile 40-50 hours. The 93% positive Steam rating across over 30,000 reviews reflects a game that earns its reputation, not nostalgia coasting.

Monika · Scout Team

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