The remake of Final Fantasy 7 is coming up soon, and I'm still excited for it. The original game remains one of the greatest I have ever played, and one of a small handful of games that I have replayed more than ten times. In fact, I think it no exaggeration to say I have replayed the game hundreds of times! That said, I do not believe the game to be perfect; in fact, FF7 has quite a few flaws. I have amassed a list of 11 of the game's biggest flaws, which I will share with you today.
11. Unequal Elements. In Final Fantasy 7, there are quite a few different forms of Elemental damage. You have the standards: Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, no Heart, though. But many of these Elementals are unevenly distributed: You have a Materia for Earth magic, Fire magic, but none of either Wind or Water magic. This gets further ridiculous when you consider that there are only 2 Spells the player can access that can do Water damage, with one being an easily missed Summon Materia and the other an Enemy Skill, and the ONLY Wind spell the player can learn is gained rather late into the game! This is a flaw that can rather easily be remedied in the Remake with the addition of two new Materia.
10. WHY is the Keystone at some weapon seller's house? Seriously, think about it: You need to get a Keystone to enter the Temple of the Ancients. This is a very old, very valuable object that is key to obtaining the most terrifying power the Planet has ever seen. Where is it? If you guessed it was locked away in some ancient, impossible to reach place surrounded by death traps galore, then SILLY YOU! It was actually at the hands of some no name, WAY outta the way weapon seller (who doesn't REALLY sell weapons at first). And what did he do with it? Sell it to the guy from the Gold Saucer. How much Gil did he get from it? Why did he have it in the first place? WE WILL NEVER KNOW!
9. Hey, WAIT A MINUTE! WHAT WAS UP WITH HUGE MATERIA? Seriously. The Huge Materia is a huge part of the story from between the time Cloud falls into his coma to JUST a bit before the end of Disc 2. Before that, any and EVERY allusion to their existence was hidden away in dialogues in easy to miss, optional places to explore (Fort Condor and Gongaga, respectively). Further, the allusions were SUPER vague. Further, it's never really explained just HOW Huge Materia was objectively more powerful than regular Materia. Plus, after the party gather all four Huge Materia, they are never used again. So...what was up with that? And that leads me to...
8. Wait, WHY was Shinra's plan to stop Meteor bad? The heroes just up and up decided to stop Shinra's plan to crash a rocket ship loaded with Huge Materia onto Meteor, blowing it the fuck up. Our heroes had no plan against Meteor, didn't know how to get to Sephiroth, had NO WAY to stop the WEAPONS, and to top it all off, Cloud was out of commission. So...why was it a good idea to stop Shinra again?
7. Midgar is HUGE! I'd love to explore more! We only got to see 3 of eight slums, and one of them got destroyed. The player is also severely limited in how much of the plate of Midgar they can explore, leaving the player hungry to explore more of Midgar. The remake NEEDS to fix this!
6. Chocobo racing AFTER Dyne? The confrontation between Barret and Dyne was a cathartic, heart breaking duel between two former friends, two fathers, and two men so utterly broken by the Shinra Company that they have crafted guns into their bodies as a way of getting revenge. Two minutes after that SPECTACULAR boss battle, you're made to race chocobos. This was absolutely RIDICULOUS! Some of us would STILL be in tears over Dyne and Barret! And now we have to race giant yellow chickens??? Dude!
5. Was this game proof read at all? There are a ton of grammatical errors in the game's text. Perhaps the most infamous is "this guy are sick," spoken by Aerith in Sector 5 when referring to a man who lived in a drainage pipe.
4. There sure is a lot of foreshadowing here! Does it lead to anything? A lot of elements in the game seem to foreshadow plot twists or elements that, down the line, were either downplayed severely or simply abandoned. For example, during the bombing of Mako Reactor #1, Cloud starts blacking out and hears a voice telling him "watch out! This isn't just a Mako Reactor!" This was fascinating! What did it mean? Well...nothing. Nothing ever came of it. And then there's the Reunion, which was hyped up for the later half of Disc 1, but was promptly forgotten once Meteor showed up. It was like the game was making up the story as it went along.
3. Yuffie and Vincent are such great characters! Why were they secret characters, again? Yuffie, and arguably more so Vincent, have gone on to become fan favorite characters for not just the game, but the franchise as well. So it comes as a total shock to not only notice that they have ZERO impact on the plot, but that they're not even part of it! They're secret characters! This is especially egregious when watching the final CGI cutscene, where the two aren't even anywhere to be found! This wouldn't be so bad, if the developers hadn't given Vincent and Yuffie such great side quests to do; side quests that shine a light on Shinra and Sephiroth. But there's one character that really got the shaft...
2. Nanaki, you're barely in the game! Nanaki, better known as Red XIII, was the very first non-humanoid main character in the entire Final Fantasy franchise. That means bupkus when you realize the dog barely did anything in the game. His one subquest was done halfway through Disc 1, and great as it was, it must be admitted that it had zero impact on the plot. Nothing earth shattering was revealed, nothing was foreshadowed, and nothing of importance was really done. It was all just an obligatory side quest that made you shed a tear, but otherwise did nothing of value. After that, Red XIII did NOTHING of value for the team. Oh well, at least you got some Materia and battle experience out of it.
1. Uh, Sephy? Your plan makes no sense. Sephiroth's plan has more holes in it than swiss cheese. Look, let me break it down:
- Summon Meteor: OK, so far so good.
- Have Meteor crash on the Planet: Alright, simple global genocide. A bit extreme, but-
- The Planet will heal itself using the Lifestream: We're getting into the mystical mumbo jumbo the franchise is infamous for, but I'm willing to suspend my disbelief. Though I feel like this plan is getting overly complex, I'm still following.
- Absorb the energy from the Lifestream: OK, OK, WHAT? HOW DO YOU PLAN TO DO THAT, SEPHY? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT'S EVEN POSSIBLE, SEPHIROTH!?
- Become a God: Are you shitting me? I'm still trying to wrap my head around step 4!
Sephiroth's villainous plan suffers from too much complexity: there are so many jumps in logic that you swear to yourself that parts of it that could explain it MUST have been cut from the game! This is solid proof that, when it comes to writing villains, there is no greater Principle to follow than KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. If you cut out the part about becoming a God and the Lifestream and whatever, you STILL have a pretty damn solid, pretty damn villainous plot to destroy the world! There is still urgency to stop Sephiroth, still tension in the game, and Sephiroth himself is STILL a fascinating character because it takes a seriously twisted mind to come up with a plan to not just destroy the world that could actually work, but to then actually put it to motion AND do everything in your power to keep others from stopping the Apocalypse you're causing! All in all, the complexity of Sephiroth's plan is the BIGGEST flaw in Final Fantasy 7!
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