In the beginning of 1997, Square released the seventh part of the Final Fantasy series, in Japan that is. About a half year later, Sony did the same thing in Usa and later (of course) in Europe. Actually, this was the first FF-game to reach Europe, and it sold well here also of course. It wasn't impossible to get the games in the series here before, since there is something called import, but the price was high; 120 dollars... However, the game is the most sold for Playstation, more than 6 millions copies and also the best selling FF game yet. With stunning graphics and wonderful music that isn't that strange either.

Story

FF7's story is much darker than its sequels. When you in old times got, well, happy when playing FF, now everything is more depressing. The plot is also much more realistic than before, with big companies, or at least one (Shinra), which control the people's life. Instead of taking place sometimes in the medieval as most rpgs do, FF7 is more present-day. The electricity has been discovered here and much of the game actually is about that. Power plants that use a special energy called Mako is in the centre of the plot all the time. The problem with those Mako reactors is that this Mako is something like the planet's life. With other words those reactors suck out the planet's life force, which isn't that good. Most of the reactors are placed in one big city, Midgar. This is also the place where Shinra have their head quarter. Shinra owns all the reactors in the world, including the ones in Midgar, so that's why Barret wants to take them down. Barret by the way is the very first playable characters you meet when walking around with the main character, Cloud. Barret is the leader of a terrorist group called Avalanche. As you probably understand he doesn't like Shinra and their reactors too much, so now he plans too destroy the reactor in Sector 6: Slums (Midgar is divided in 8 sectors, most of them slums). But he needs some help, and Cloud is the best one he can find, so he hires him into Avalanche. Cloud has been in Soldier, Shinra's number one military force, so that's why Barret decides too let him into the group. Now it's up to you to demolish the reactor in Sector 6: Slums and try to save the entire planet's life. FF7's story is much deeper and cryptic than before, making it more enjoying in some ways. The cryptic part is because Square didn't have time to fit in everything from the original manuscript as i heard. This game is long; it should take at least 35 hours to complete it the first time.

Music

Good music, but not a good as in other FF games. Still, the music is better than in most other Ps games. One reason may be that its quality isn't that superior other games as it was with the Snes FFs. At that time no game could even come near the quality of the instruments and songs in the FFs, as now with Ps. Cid, however, is truly one of Nobuo Uematsu's masterpieces of all time. Oh, seems like i forgot to mention that Nobuo composed all the music for this FF too.

Graphics

There is a huge difference between the graphics in FF7 and all the other FFs. Of course that isn't that strange since FF7 is fore Ps, which can handle much more complicated graphics than the Snes. However, that isn't exactly what i mean when i talk the about the differences. What i mean is that the whole style has changed, from being cute and colourful, to dark and more realistic. All nature scenes and the whole environment could actually have been taken straight from the reality. All the backgrounds where you can move are rendered except the map that is built of polygons. The many movies shown between every single commission you complete are also beautifully made, especially when it comes to the one in ending.

Battles, menus, & gameplay

The menu-system is mainly the same as always, but of course, Square has developed it a bit. The news is mostly that it's more of everything this time, more information, more stats, more numbers... The battles have changed a quite lot, with monsters that now move and many cool magic effects. A new command that has been introduced in this FF is the Limit break. When a character's special bar gets filled, he or she will able to do an extra powerful attack. How fast the bar fills depends on how much the character in question gets hit. When fighting bosses this can be very usable as these attacks can be much more powerful than the ordinary blows. Magic is also used in another way this time, with Materia that is. You can equip these nice orbs at each character's weapon or armour and then he/she can get a lot of interesting powers like steal (!), summon or a simple cure spell. The Materia itself gets levels much the same way as the Espers in FF6, but instead of having to level it up separately for each character, it stores the levels gained. This means that you can take off a certain Materia from one person and give another person the powers collected. However, the powers then disappear from the first person. Moving around at the field is easy in FF7 and in the same as in most of their later games you can run by pushing a special button.