Final Fantasy VII Review

Final Fantasy VII was a bet of unprecedented scale, a reported hundred-person team burning years and a then-outrageous budget on pre-rendered backgrounds, CG cinematics, and three discs of content, and the bet paid off so completely that it dragged an entire genre into the Western mainstream. Midgar remains one of the great opening acts: a dystopian pizza of a city whose plate slums establish theme through architecture.

The Materia system is quietly brilliant, letting any character wear any magical loadout so party composition becomes a build-crafting hobby of paired and linked orbs. And the story still lands, from eco-terrorism into a hallucinatory study of memory and identity, punctuated by a mid-game death the medium has never stopped discussing. Blocky field models aged fast and the translation creaks, which is why gameplay and visuals sit at A rather than S, but the ambition and emotional reach were genuinely new.