If there's one Final Fantasy that most people know about, it's Final Fantasy 7. I grew up watching my parents play Final Fantasy 1 and Final Fantasy 4(which was called 2 at the time) I started playing 4 and 6(2 and 3 at the time) as a kid. I loved those games. In 1997, I heard whole new Final Fantasy was out and it's only on the Playstation. I was upset since I didn't have a Playstation at the time.(I did got it a few years later) I did wonder how I miss out on Final Fantasies 4, 5, and 6. Well the truth is that 2, 3, and 5 never came to America and 4 and 6 were the second and third games here in USA. Once 7 came out, all the FF games went by their actual numbers. All the unreleased FF games did came to states later on systems like Playstation, GBA, DS, PSP, etc.
I did got the PC version of FF7 on Christmas and I was happy. Plus seeing Final Fantasy in 3D was a huge deal at the time.
Wow! look at the characters, they look so real!!!
Ok, I admit they don't look real and they look really blocky. 3D was the cool new thing back in the mid to late 90s. Alot games back then really look dated by today standards. FF7 does has this extended universe called "Compilation of Final Fantasy 7" in the mid to late 2000s with the game having prequels, and sequels games and movies with non of the characters looking blocky. Also the characters appear in spinoffs like Kingdom Hearts and Dissidia.
Here's the hero and villain looking real and not blocky
This character I played, Cloud who has ridiculously spiky hair and ridiculously oversized sword. One of the first things I notice about the game is that Cloud is having an attitude and he is talking back to his teammates. Most of the previous main characters were more of a nice guy(or girl) type than some guy with an attitude. Oh and black guy that's paying him for the mission was cursing like a sailor. This was a shock to me at the time.
No one talked like this in the earlier games
As I was going through the 1st level, the game all of sudden crashed. A pop up appear and said, "This program perform an illegal operation" Soon I was back on the computer's main screen. This wouldn't be the 1st time this would happen. This pop up happen occasionally as I play the game. I had to make sure I save my game before this happen. I check out others who played the 1998 PC version of FF7 and they admit they suffer the same problem as I did. It wasn't my computer.
Turns out the PC version of FF7 was full of errors. A small team in Honolulu was in charge to port the game to the PC. There were several problems, the small team didn't have support from the crew that made FF7 because most of the staff that worked on the game were transfer to other projects like FF9 and other games. The small Honolulu team who were porting the game has never made a PC port before. I will tell you guys about the many problems.
One of the worse moments was game freezing at 37 seconds in the video
I had to replay the game and it froze at the same moment. I got so tired of the freezing moment in the video, I just took a break playing from the game for a few months. I thought it had to do with the computer not having enough memory for the game but that was not the case, the problem was the game itself.
I did always wonder back then if the Godzilla-sized monster known as WEAPON got destroyed in that blast in that video. When I did got back to playing FF7 and got to the point where I suspected the game will freeze, the cannon fired and the blast crashed into the water and.....it sent out waves towards the camera. You don't know how happy I was when I saw that.
Another problem was the music. Here's the Playstation version of the famous final boss song, One Winged Angel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7wJ8pE2qKU skip to 1:10 if you want to jump to the singing part of the song.
Now here's the PC version of the song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZfkt0GR8hkYes, listen to the butchered music and listen to the lack of vocals.
For several years, I didn't know the final boss had singing in the background. The computer I had at the time was dial-up and the only way to hear the music on the internet is clicking on a .wav file or direct download.
Another problem that came up was the Full Motion Videos played upside down. I didn't encounter this problem till I was late in the game.
There was one scene where the heroes jump off their airship and land in the enemy city with their parachutes.
Imagine that scene being upside down. The laws of gravity has been destroyed. The game's plot at the end is the villain plans to destroy the world by summoning a giant meteor to destroy all life on the planet. Well with these upside-down videos, might of well change Chicken Little's famous saying to "The ground is raising."
I encounter the same problem when I beat the game and saw the ending. Final Fantasy didn't have voice acting till it's 10th installment, so I had to read dialogue backwards and upside-down. I had to grab a hand mirror to read what their saying.
There are a few positives to the PC port. One of them is the graphics were touched up a little and all the field models were added with mouths.
The other one is the improved translation. The Playstation version had some errors here and there. Here's a sample of the Playstation version
The translation Playstation version did made one big error, misleading us that a certain someone died when he wasn't dead at all.
*Warning the next part will discuss some spoilers and no, I not talking about that one scene from the end of disk 1 that everyone knows about even you never played the game.*
At one point in the game, a man named Tseng was stabbed by the villain, Sephiroth. The wounded man encounter the heroes and he gave them info about the villain's whereabouts. He told them not worry about him and he's still alright.
Way later on, the good guys encounter one of Tseng's employees called Elena and she hates Cloud for getting her boss killed.
Let's fast forward 7 years in the future when FF7 got a sequel movie called Advent Children.
OMG!!! Your suppose to be dead. How did you came back from the dead!?
Well in the PC version, Elena made sound like he was more injured then killed. People didn't came aware of this translation error for many years till they saw Tseng miraculous alive in Advent Children. Next thing you tell me is there was a hidden sidequest in FF9 that no one knew about for 13 years.
*End Spoilers*
The PC version has been re-released in recent years. Sadly, it came with the same problems. There were a few added features like achievements and a cheat menu. The game did came with some patches like restoring the music to how it's suppose to sound. There are modding communities to improve the PC version out there.
From what it sounds, the PC version may be better to play nowdays with patches and mods Nowdays, most Final Fantasies are playable on PC. I'm sure they won't suffer the same problems as 7 did. From what I heard, Chocobo World is playable on the PC version of FF8, so you don't need a Pocketstation(which never arrived in USA.)
