![]() ![]() He dresses up as a woman to rescue his shy childhood friend Tifa. He falls from a great height, crashing through the church of a flirty flower girl called Aerith. The first instalment in the remake trilogy, released in 2020, covered events in Midgar, where Cloud, having taken on another job for Avalanche, finds himself caught up in the fight against Shinra. ![]() In the age of climate change, where the ethics of direct action are a hot topic of debate, Final Fantasy VII's portrayal of a planet being destroyed in the pursuit of profit, and those fighting against that, has only grown more resonant. It is surely not a coincidence that the thematically similar animation Princess Mononoke, Studio Ghibli's dark, pensive eco-parable, premiered in the same year. But they were born out of challenging times for Japan, which during the mid-90s was reeling from a series of economic and environmental disasters.Īn inspired Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy series, wanted to use its seventh instalment to explore the big metaphysical questions: humanity's relationship with nature, the cycle of life and death. For Avalanche's leader, Barret, a burly zealot with a gun for an arm, ridding society of Shinra's reactors – a mission not without collateral damage – is the only way to save the planet from environmental collapse.īack in 1997, such morally complex computer game protagonists were a challenging prospect: Final Fantasy VII invited the player to be complicit in the actions of characters who could easily be described as eco-terrorists. The discovery has given rise to marvels like Midgar, a vast circular metropolis, built upon a base of polluted slums, which provides the setting for the first act of the game. In this world a fascistic megacorporation called Shinra has pioneered a way to suck the lifeforce out of the planet and convert it into an energy called Mako. You play Cloud Strife, a cynical spiky-haired mercenary who has been hired by an insurgent group called Avalanche to infiltrate and bomb a reactor. Yet undoubtedly the reason why Final Fantasy VII endures is its story: a compellingly plotted, thematically bold tale of a broken mind and a dying planet, immortalised by the most famous twist in video game history. ![]() You could also cite its elegant game mechanics: its intuitive magic system, its dynamic turn-based combat its atmospheric score, its evocative setting, its rich, textured aesthetic and colourful character designs. By today's standards, of course, its blocky graphics and text-based dialogue could be considered crude, but for its time the use of 3D polygonal character models – deftly spliced against painterly pre-rendered backgrounds, interspersed with cinematic cut-scenes – served as an impressive showcase for the cutting-edge power of the PlayStation 1. You could attribute this enduring reverence to the original Final Fantasy VII's technical achievements. – The Japanese animation that flummoxed the US – The blockbuster game that dared to be truly political The second of that trilogy, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, is released today. It has inspired a CGI-animated feature film sequel a range of middling spin-off games and most recently, a long-anticipated project to remake the original title as a trilogy, using the full high-fidelity might of modern video game technology. Predecessor Final Fantasy VI, for instance, has sold 3.8 million copies worldwide to date, Final Fantasy VII has sold 14.4 million. As sombre as it is silly, as futuristic as it is fantastical, its international release in 1997 established the Final Fantasy brand – a long-running anthology series of Role Playing Games (RPGs), developed by a studio called Square – as a force to be reckoned with in the West. The Japanese video game Final Fantasy VII, a sweeping cyberpunk epic generally considered one of the greatest role-playing games ever made, is a miraculous feat of alchemy. ![]()
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