RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

Final Fantasy VII, the legend, the phenomenon. Classic? Overrated? Whatever you may think of the game now, nearly a dozen years later, its impact on the RPG world is undeniable. More than any other game in the history of the genre, it brought RPGs into the spotlight and gave them a mainstream appeal never before seen (and only occasionally duplicated since).

A lot of us were blown away the first time we saw this screen.

Fanfic, fanart, spin-offs and spoofs, Final Fantasy VII has done it all. It is the behemoth of RPGs. It put RPGs on the map, especially in North America. Now perhaps some readers may find this hard to believe what with the proliferation of the RPG genre in the decade or so since FFVII‘s release, or perhaps, like me, you were playing RPGs years before FFVII‘s release, maybe back in the NES days with the first four Dragon Quest games (Dragon Warrior back then, of course) or maybe the grand days of the SNES era with games like Breath of Fire I and II, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, Lufia 1 and 2, and Final Fantasy IV and VI (II and III for us poor North Americans who’d been cheated out of three Final Fantasy titles, which should tell you something right there about the North American RPG market).

The numbers don’t lie, though. Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger were wildly successful RPGs, selling 3.48 and 2.36 million copies, respectively. Not bad, eh? Want to take a guess on how many of those copies were sold outside of Japan? Final Fantasy VI sold a whopping 860,000 copies internationally, dwarfing Chrono Trigger‘s respectable 290,000 units. 1.5 million between them. You see where I’m going with this, don’t you? In its first week on sale in North America, Final Fantasy VII sold 300,000 copies, more than Chrono Trigger sold in North America — ever. It had sold half a million in under three weeks. By Christmas, a mere three months after its North American release, FFVII had surpassed the one million mark. Worldwide, the game went on to sell 9.8 million copies. So, just to be clear, that’s nearly twice the sales of Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger put together. There were clearly some new fans drawn in by the game.

Okay so it looks like cubism now, but in 1997 this was cutting edge.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Square (Remember that? The days before the merge with Enix?) knew what they were doing when they developed FFVII.  Final Fantasy was already a titan in the RPG world and FFVII was the first game in the franchise to make the jump to 3D, and pretty well the first RPG to do so as well. Before that, RPGs consisted of sprites on 2D backgrounds. FFVII‘s graphics may look blocky now, but they were a huge step up and the CG sequences blew your mind the first time you saw them. The company also launched an aggressive ad campaign. The first I heard of FFVII was when I saw a commercial for it on TV. A commercial for an RPG. This was revolutionary. Not to mention it was an amazing commercial, sampling scenes from the CG sequences. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one foaming at the mouth after seeing that.

Strong plot and solid gameplay had been hallmarks of the Final Fantasy series since the Super Nintendo days, but Square decided that the missing ingredient to appeal to a wider audience was graphics. And it worked. Since then, there have been many great games, but none that have had as much impact or that were so universally acclaimed. Certainly no other RPG has maintained enough of a following to have a movie and several spin-off titles the way Final Fantasy VII has. The leap from 2D to 3D was perhaps the biggest leap any RPG has made. The trend lately is to make games shinier — more pixels, better resolution, etc. etc. — but all this is only a refinement of what FFVII did first. Is that the only reason it was a great game? No. Certainly not. But it’s one of the reasons it was able to draw in such a huge new audience, and some of that audience stuck around and helped make the genre more mainstream. Best game ever? Maybe, maybe not. That’s up to each gamer to decide. Game Changer? Definitely.