By James Casey
Arizona Daily Wildcat
October 23, 1997

The 'final' word in video games

Image courtesy of Squar Co., Ltd. Arizona Daily Wildcat Cait Sith and his stuffed Mog (it's a video game, don't ask) head for ChoCoBo Racing in Final Fantasy VIII.

Attention video-game fanatics: in case you haven't realized, Final Fantasy VII has been released for the Sony PlayStation and, judging by the recent press, it is expected to be one of the most successful games ever.

PlayStation owners usually fit into two categories. There are the serious gamers, and then there are those who, like me, only use the machine when intoxicated or procrastinating. Final Fantasy would appear to appeal only to the former audience, although it is in fact the ultimate tool of procrastination, and even the slackest of the slack will be hooked in a matter of minutes.

The game is similar to Zelda, in that you control a little guy with a big sword and roam through mystical worlds. This, though, is where the similarity stops. The graphics, story line and length of the game are far superior to the adventure games of old.

You control a bloke called Cloud, who like many Japanese heroes, has spiky hair and wields a sword much larger than his body. Cloud is an ex-secret-agent man who joins his old buddies to fight the tyranny and evil of corporate development. Along the way he utilizes his special powers to beat the living shit out of the baddies, who appear as a vast array of aliens, monsters, ghosts, machines and dragons.

The game itself takes up three compact discs, so obviously the scope of it is huge. The background graphics are spectacular, as is the amount of detail rendered. The featured cinematic sequences are epic, and the same can be said for the actual scene graphics, as it is sometimes very hard to distinguish between the two. If this is the future of computer games, be scared - very scared.

As one progresses through the game, which takes over 70 hours to finish, new characters are picked up and battles made easier, as you can pool the characters' powers together against certain enemies. The characters are detailed in depth and all have different characteristics and skills that can be improved by gaining more 'experience points' and increasing the characters' power levels. An example of such an ability is Clouds' use of his magic to create an electrical 'bolt' storm that severely damages smaller enemies.

The bosses in the game are huge, and the final one is rumored to take over an hour to defeat. The final cinematic sequence lasts for over 45 minutes and is the main source of the game's huge production costs. The quality of the sequence is supposedly the same as a computer animated movie and is guaranteed to leave you dumbfounded.

Final Fantasy VII is one of those things, like drugs, that is guaranteed to negate your education, although computer games, unlike narcotics, have not yet been linked to premature death. Therefore, what does not kill you will only make you stronger.