Final Fantasy VII at E3 1997 (June 19-21) video!

[koolaidman]

Ever wondered what was playable at E3 1997 for FFVII? Someone recently posted a huge B-Roll video for pretty much every exhibit at E3 that year, containing off screen video footage for prototype versions of games (some unreleased, even). While FFVII is obviously the English translated version at this point, note that this took place a few months before the English translation was finalized. There are a couple oddities in the video shown (starting at 1:34:03), mainly with the character names being all fudged up. I'm not sure if there are other differences in the dialog or menus. Apparently, a lot of the game was playable at the show.

 

[Shademp]

Thank you for sharing this. It is indeed weird that the character names are non-sensical in places. Although Tifa's name is part of a differential equation. In fact all the names look inspired by actual math.

If I were to speculate, I'd say that these recordings were prepared using game editing tools. The player/recorder/editor teleport to parts of the game before the characters have received proper names and then the game fills in these names instead. In the debug room, debuggers had special names the characters would be given for when debugging events. Maybe the translator did something exactly like that?


EDIT: FFVII footage lasts from 1:34:05 - 1:36:39.

 

[Elessar]

Whoa, this is amazing! How did you stumble upon this thing?

 

[Lex]

The field models and particularly the world map look very odd there, but I don't know if that's just because I can't see it clearly.

EDIT: Yep, Cloud's model looks weird on the WM to me, I've just watched the segment 3 times.

 

[koolaidman]

Thank you for sharing this. It is indeed weird that the character names are non-sensical in places. Although Tifa's name is part of a differential equation. In fact all the names look inspired by actual math.

If I were to speculate, I'd say that these recordings were prepared using game editing tools. The player/recorder/editor teleport to parts of the game before the characters have received proper names and then the game fills in these names instead. In the debug room, debuggers had special names the characters would be given for when debugging events. Maybe the translator did something exactly like that?


EDIT: FFVII footage lasts from 1:34:05 - 1:36:39.

The only thing I can think of is that they had multiple saved games prepared for different parts of the game at different stations. The messed up character names seem to be just as you said. Perhaps they used the debug rooms in preparing the scenarios for the demo and made individually saved game files?

Also, I think the world map in the demo is called "area2" when the player brings up the menu...

EDIT: When the player brings up the menu on the way up to the top of the tower there's no area name listed.

 

[Shademp]

Also, I think the world map in the demo is called "area2" when the player brings up the menu...

Woah I didn't notice that at first! Cool.

I'm not convinced Cloud's WM model is different. I think the wobbly camera and the glitchy screen just creates an illusory effect. When Cloud is standing still his model looks exactly as you'd expect.

 

[Pixel]

I decided to steal that footage and added some more
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0BPWBy-faQ

 

[JBedford]

I didn't check everything, but there are two other differences I noticed from the final version. Cloud says "It's lukewarm" in the temple, in the final version he just says "It's warm". The other difference is spell names. In the 1996 demo, and in this video, they named all the spells "Fire 2" et al -- note the space. In the final game there is no space.