Interman's Final Fantasy extravaganza

[interman]

Continued



Shinra is collecting a bunch of "huge materia", and we have to get it before they do, so here we are, hopping between railway tracks.

















Oh no


With Cloud being practically zombie-fied Tifa has to sort out his memories, and help him figure out who he really is.





But it turned out Sephiroth was lying about your identity after all.








AHA!





Well that's nice

[interman]

Continued



Eventually Tifa got him back


and somehow they were just able to swim back up


But then Weapon starts moving towards Midgar (the big main city)


and he's pissed


But Shinra's moved the huge canon there, and is charging it with materia charges or something.











Blammo!


Not the best screenshot, but this is Weapon getting shot,


and the big energy barrier around Sephiroth's place getting wasted





But before we go there we have to stop Hojo, the nasty scientist guy who wants to use the canon again to charge up Sephiroth - that's right, not kill, but make stronger.

[interman]

Continued



Soon enough we're greeted by the president and his buddy.


In this big thing.


Sorry





Chatting some more with Hojo








He turns into this thing, which for the most part stands upright, but in this pic is close to death.


With those guys gone we head off to the crater up north to pay Sephiroth a final visit.








Getting closer





Around here we ran into a lot of enemies that alone could qualify as bosses. By now we have quite a few powerful spells, so we could blast them away fairly quickly - since we could just replace the mana points with turbo ethers.

[interman]

Continued











He doesn't look too nasty, or hit that hard - clearly just the first form!


And this is the more pissed off one. In phase two he'll use a spell called Supernova that's ridiculously over the top, which leaves all three characters with maybe 100 hp, when it used to be full. He also does a few other annoying attacks that can make a character mini, frog, confused, slow, and more. It really, really helps to have x-potions (get full health), turbo ethers (get full mana), elixirs (full health and mana), remedies (removes status ailments), and maybe even stuff to throw.


But eventually he blew up








And as per tradition, gets disintegrated. Next we climb back up, and the whole gang chat for a bit, when Cloud senses that Sephiroth is still around, laughing at them.


So he somehow just takes off





And beats the everliving shit out of him!





It was pretty satisfying, to tell you the truth!




Thoughts about the game:
It always feels really good finishing up a Final Fantasy game. They do take a significant amount of time, and by the end you usually dislike the main villain a whole lot. The storyline in FF7 is reasonably interesting, given its age. It is after all a game that a huge number of RPGs after it have tried to emulate. The plot twists are somewhat expected, but delivered pretty well, I think. What detracts a bit for me is that it felt as though you were constantly being pulled in different directions, or that there wasn't enough consistency in the areas you visited. It was as though they had a number of artist groups that just made whatever they wanted, and then they just added it all together afterwards. Variety is fine and all, but still.

Technically the areas look pretty good though. It's obvious a lot of care went into this, and for the most part it holds up well - except the characters. There aren't really any facial animations at all here, something we'd even gotten used to back in like FF5. Still, it was their first 3D installment, and came out eleven years ago, so I'll give them some slack.

The audio on the other hand holds up really well, or at least the music. As I mentioned earlier in the thread a lot of it is just new versions of the classic old tunes, but that's fine. They used real instruments this time around, so there isn't that much of a difference between the music here, and the music in FFXII. I guess I should also mention that in the process of learning the classical guitar I've learned parts of the main theme. So yeah, I guess now I'm not just the guy who plays through old games, but also the guy who plays music from old games!

The gameplay is decent, if somewhat basic. What's essentially new is how you have to juggle the materia for each character. It lets you customize your guys quite a bit, and it's less of a hassle than having to just guess what jobs are good and what jobs suck, like you had to in some of the previous games. FFVII is also less focused on armor and weapons. Sure you pick up several of the legendary items from the previous games, but for the most part you don't have to work as hard for them here. Masamune for instance can be bought at a vendor. There might also be stuff like Genji armor etc, for all I know. Since I played without a walkthrough (or anything at all!) I know I missed at least two characters, even though I think I visited every location and talked to everyone. It is a game you can definitely play multiple times. I won't, but I can see why some people do.

So the big Final Fantasy question is, what's best? FFVI, or FFVII? The best of the SNES era vs the first of the PS1 era. It really is a tough question. FFVII has more, and deeper story. The quality of that story material isn't always as good as that in 6, and I'd say the gameplay is slightly simpler. You don't have to grind in 7 though, and the summon attacks are a lot more fun.

By the end of 7 I had about 350 pictures, versus 204 in 6, and I think that says something. It's not that I just went print screen happy, there's just more interesting stuff happening.

In the end I prefer 7 to 6, but I can see why people would choose otherwise. It's a bit sad that now I've finished what's considered the best games, and in a while I'm starting on the ones considered the worst. FF7 took me somewhere around 30 hours, and looking back I'd say it was time reasonably well spent.

[KamisoriX]

I had more fun finishing WoW

[interman]

I think I'm just going to start deleting your posts

[KamisoriX]

How childish of you

[Nxs]

Originally Posted by interman

I think I'm just going to start deleting your posts

Sweeeet! I think I am gonna help

[KamisoriX]

Originally Posted by NXS

i got a small penis

awesome info

I thought so too

[Magus]

There's still alot to do, like beating those weapons, which is really really hard! Oh and one of the characters can be gotten at some forest near the beginning.

Great job doing it without a walkthrough, the game can be pretty hard at times!

Oh and don't worry about the next games, alot of people really love final fantasy 8, and I myself really really love Final Fantasy 9!