Final Fantasy VII

Final Fantasy VII is a 1997 role-playing video game developed by Square? for the PlayStation?, the seventh main installment in the Final Fantasy? series and the franchise’s first to move from cartridge to CD-ROM and from two dimensions into three.⁶¹¹ The game blends 3D polygonal characters, pre-rendered backgrounds, and animated full-motion cut-scenes across three discs, following the mercenary Cloud Strife? as he joins a resistance movement against a world-controlling power corporation.¹¹ It sold more than 11 million copies, pioneered 3D graphics techniques, helped Sony’s PlayStation outperform its competitors, and established Japanese RPGs in the Western market.¹⁰

Development

Production began in late 1995.⁹ Square, the company Hironobu Sakaguchi? had co-founded, had by the mid-1990s branched out from a near-bankrupt Famicom developer into one of Nintendo’s top third-party studios, with hits including Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger.⁹¹⁰ Where the sixth game had been built around more than ten characters, any of whom could be called the protagonist, the team resolved from the outset that Final Fantasy VII would tell the single story of Cloud.⁸ Director Yoshinori Kitase?, who had worked as a scenario writer on the fifth and sixth games and directed Chrono Trigger, handled almost all of the story, working with co-writer Kazushige Nojima?; Sakaguchi, whose original ambition Kitase noted was to be a film director, stepped back into a producer role and led the battle team.⁸⁹

The decision to develop a true 3D game was made from the earliest planning stage, with detailed designs and storyboards drawn up in advance and the script locked in before work began.⁸ The very first design decisions concerned how camera angles would change during battle and the materia system, in which any weapon and armor could be equipped with any materia, so that combat depended on how materia was used rather than on innate character skills.⁸ Sakaguchi, working with SG1 workstations and rendering software after the sixth game was finished, wanted visuals rendered in real time rather than the slow frame-by-frame rendering that took hours.⁸

The choice of hardware pivoted on memory and price.⁸ A CG demo Square made for the SIGGRAPH exhibition, based on Final Fantasy VI, took 20 megabytes by itself, and Sakaguchi concluded that only the CD-ROM format could deliver what the demo promised.⁸ Cartridge ROM had forced later Super Famicom games such as Bahamut Lagoon and Front Mission: Gun Hazard—the latter priced around 11,400 yen—well above 10,000 yen, whereas CD-ROM would let a two-disc Final Fantasy VII sell for 5,800 yen.⁸ Kitase later recalled that although the N64 was attractive, only high-capacity mass storage could facilitate the next-generation RPG the team wanted, which meant CD and therefore the PlayStation, marking Square’s headline-making move from Nintendo to Sony.⁶ Sakaguchi set the team a ground rule that if the player became aware of the loading access times, they had failed, prompting tricks such as animating the screen while data loaded.⁶

The move from the 16-bit generation demanded a much larger team working with unfamiliar tools such as Power Animator and SoftImage, and Square hired a large CG staff who nonetheless integrated with the existing developers.²⁶ Programmer Ken Narita, the main programmer, described the sudden shift from the Super Famicom to the PlayStation and from 2D to 3D as the hardest part of the work.⁸ Music was composed by Nobuo Uematsu?, a longtime Square composer.⁸¹⁰

Original plans centered on a mystery plot set in Midgar with themes of rebels fighting a corrupt system, but when Kitase came aboard the mystery angle was dropped and the opposing forces—the resistance group Avalanche and the Shinra corporation, Cloud and Sephiroth?—came into sharper focus.⁹ Active Time Battle, a series staple since the fourth game, returned to add urgency to the turn-based combat, and Kitase replaced the earlier Desperation Attacks with Limit Breaks, adrenaline-fueled counterattacks that built up as a character took damage.⁹ Art director Yusuke Naora? fleshed out the tiered industrial city of Midgar and its Mako reactors.⁹ With series designer Yoshitaka Amano? largely unavailable, the team turned to minor character and monster designer Tetsuya Nomura?, whose first turn as design lead produced the spiky blonde Cloud, the gun-armed Barret Wallace, Tifa Lockhart, and the rest of the cast; Nomura also contributed a late-night story suggestion that became one of gaming’s most shocking twists.⁹

Gameplay and story

Gameplay divides into three phases: travel across a world map, close-up exploration of areas, and a 3D battle screen.¹¹ Enemy encounters use a turn-based, active time-battle system in which players choose to attack, use items, or cast magic within a short window as a Time meter fills, with no two combatants acting simultaneously.⁴¹¹ Materia, a crystal-like energy source found in the world, attaches to equipment to grant new skills or the ability to summon powerful creatures.¹¹ The party consists of three heroes selected from a pool of nine, and the game includes mini-games ranging from motorcycle racing and snowboarding to arcade fighting, boxing, creature breeding, and arm wrestling.⁴¹¹

The nine playable characters are Cloud, Barret Wallace?, Tifa Lockhart?, Aeris Gainsborough?, the talking beast Red XIII (Nanaki), Cait Sith?, Cid Highwind?, and the two optional recruits, ninja Yuffie Kisaragi? and Vincent Valentine?.¹⁷ Sephiroth, playable only in a flashback at Kalm, is a key enigmatic figure pursued through much of the adventure.¹⁷ Cloud is a 21-year-old former member of SOLDIER, Shinra’s elite army, hired by Avalanche, an eco-terrorist group working for the good of the Planet, while Barret is the group’s leader, driven by Shinra’s past destruction of his home village of Corel.¹⁷ Partway through the game Aeris is killed by Sephiroth, in one of the most famous spoilers in video-game history; she lives on in the lifestream and later brings it up to help push back Sephiroth’s meteor.¹⁶

Reception and legacy

Reviewers judged the game epic in scope, with a story spanning three discs and a completion time Square estimated at around 40 hours; contemporary praise centered on its stunning pre-rendered backgrounds, seamless transitions between cinematic sequences and gameplay, and awe-inspiring summon animations.⁴ Some critics also faulted a surprisingly linear story that funneled players down a set path until vehicles became available roughly 15 hours in, and a translation that was at times muddy.⁴ Square’s masterpiece was credited with bringing the Japanese role-playing genre to the mainstream market at a time when many companies had feared it was too niche for Western audiences.¹¹

The game established Square as a company in the eyes of many fans and marked the point at which the studio’s mentality shifted from a small operation to a large one pouring its resources into an ambitious project.¹⁰ Kitase called it “undoubtedly the game that changed everything,” describing a sense among the team of making history.⁶ Its influence extended beyond its own series: Black Isle Studios cited Final Fantasy VII as an inspiration for Planescape: Torment (1999).²² The game drew on real-world mythology, taking influences from Norse mythology—the town Nibelheim derives its name from Niflheim.²¹

The original game has been re-released widely, including a PlayStation “Greatest Hits” edition, an IBM PC compatible version published by Eidos Interactive in 1998, and a version on Steam in 2013 and on the Nintendo Switch.¹¹¹⁴¹⁸ Beginning in 2020, Square Enix launched a remake project reimagining the original as three standalone titles by its original creators: Final Fantasy VII Remake, released March 3, 2020, followed by Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, released February 29, 2024, and the concluding Final Fantasy VII Revelation.¹²¹³¹⁵ A prequel, Crisis Core -Final Fantasy VII- Reunion, focuses on the character Zack Fair.¹⁹