Inside FINAL FANTASY VII

[Shademp]

Official Square Enix video about the making of FFVII.

 

[Lex]

Hermagheeeeeerrrrrd watching now

 

[pxp]

I’m about to watch this, but can this be construed in any way as a gee up to anything 7R related do you think?

Edit: Just saw they did one for IX a few weeks back, so likely no indication.

 

[Claymore]

Never usually watch these, but that was really interesting. I'm surprised at, even to this day, how they still treat the 'spoiler' moment. If anything, it lends weight to the opinions that they are going to change it up in some way in order to provide that impact to everyone all over again.

 

[jazzflower92]

Nice how they knew that Sephiroth would be popular with the ladies.

 

[Gary Caelum]

Crazy to think they considered sticking with 2D. I don't think it would've had the same impact if they had.

At least in my friends group at the time, it was the CGI trailers that really sold the game. None of us knew what RPGs really were at that point. We were attracted to FF7 because it was presented as being the next big technological leap forward in gaming.

I guess they could've still had CGI trailers with a 2D game (like they did for the PS1 version of FF6), but it would've been much less effective. And probably seen as false advertising at the time!

 

[jazzflower92]

Crazy to think they considered sticking with 2D. I don't think it would've had the same impact if they had.

At least in my friends group at the time, it was the CGI trailers that really sold the game. None of us knew what RPGs really were at that point. We were attracted to FF7 because it was presented as being the next big technological leap forward in gaming.

I guess they could've still had CGI trailers with a 2D game (like they did for the PS1 version of FF6), but it would've been much less effective. And probably seen as false advertising at the time!

Yeah, FF7 really helped make RPG's mainstream in the Western world.

 

[Gary Caelum]

Yeah, FF7 really helped make RPG's mainstream in the Western world.

It did especially in Europe. Because we hadn't got many big JRPGs before that. We didn't get FF4 or FF6. We didn't get Chrono Trigger.

FF7 sold itself by not really explaining what type of genre it was. We just knew that it was cinematic and a big deal. We had no idea about things like turn-based battles until we'd bought it.

 

[Ite]

“Different from high fantasy where you have a bad guy up in a castle, I wanted the bad guy to be in a normal building - just an office building.” - Naora-san

I totally understand his meaning here in terms of theme, but does this guy think Shinra HQ is a “normal building”??? It has a HEAD. XD

I’d never seen that warship building before. Aside from that barrel thing near the top I don’t really see the resemblance, but a cool bit of trivia nevertheless.

And probably seen as false advertising at the time!

Nahhh the norm for video game ads back then was “false advertisement”. Maybe there was gameplay in the StarFox and Mario World commercials but I mostly remember cartoon or live-action commercials, heavily narrated, like toy commercials. Maybe a gameplay glimpse here and there, but mostly teens going “whoaaa!” For early PS commercials, Crash was a snide mascot bothering people on the street, Spyro commercials were like sheep and snowmen protesting him. Commercials in the 90s were weird. FFVII's ads were oddly straightforward iirc.

 

[Gary Caelum]

Nahhh the norm for video game ads back then was “false advertisement”. Maybe there was gameplay in the StarFox and Mario World commercials but I mostly remember cartoon or live-action commercials, heavily narrated, like toy commercials. Maybe a gameplay glimpse here and there, but mostly teens going “whoaaa!” For early PS commercials, Crash was a snide mascot bothering people on the street, Spyro commercials were like sheep and snowmen protesting him. Commercials in the 90s were weird. FFVII's ads were oddly straightforward iirc.

Yeah but most of those are obviously not the game they're representing. Whereas you couldn't say the same with FF7, as we now know by the fact that those CGI animations are integrated into the games in several places. It was only in a few places in FF7, but they did it quite a lot in FF8.

I think the fact that it was 3 discs kinda hinted toward the fact it was a technological leap foward as well. I remember we were impressed by that, even though we didn't understand why.

 

[jazzflower92]

“Different from high fantasy where you have a bad guy up in a castle, I wanted the bad guy to be in a normal building - just an office building.” - Naora-san

I totally understand his meaning here in terms of theme, but does this guy think Shinra HQ is a “normal building”??? It has a HEAD. XD

I’d never seen that warship building before. Aside from that barrel thing near the top I don’t really see the resemblance, but a cool bit of trivia nevertheless.



Nahhh the norm for video game ads back then was “false advertisement”. Maybe there was gameplay in the StarFox and Mario World commercials but I mostly remember cartoon or live-action commercials, heavily narrated, like toy commercials. Maybe a gameplay glimpse here and there, but mostly teens going “whoaaa!” For early PS commercials, Crash was a snide mascot bothering people on the street, Spyro commercials were like sheep and snowmen protesting him. Commercials in the 90s were weird. FFVII's ads were oddly straightforward iirc.

Well, given that this was a genre that no one really had played before they wanted to give a good first impression.