The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

The Short


Pros
- Pioneered 3D action games with a control scheme still used to this day
- Massive sprawling adventure across unique dungeons and locations
- Good music (see below)
- Transition between child and adult Link adds an awesome twist on an old formula
- Lots of secrets, sidequests, and more to explore
- Ocarina makes lots of things (travel, day/night cycle, etc.) streamlined
- The crazy windmill guy is the coolest ever

Cons
- Game looks downright awful, and didn't even look particularly great when it came out
- Music is good, but at least half of it is stolen from Link to the Past
- Story is nonsensical silliness that tries too hard to take itself seriously
- Unskippable cutscenes and slow text crawl
- Any attempt at stealth sections is tedious and poorly implemented
- Focus on jumping platforming where you can't manually jump
- While the idea behind the controls was excellent in 1998, trying to play this on an N64 in the modern day is difficult, obnoxious, and tedious
- When you respawn after dying in a dungeon, you aren't penalized severely but whatever items you used are gone forever, meaning item harvesting yay. 
- Lots of little contrived gameplay experiences
- Set a standard, making it so no console Zelda game after this one even tried to innovate (except maybe Wind Waker)

I can hear the hatemail writing itself already. 

The Long

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is a classic and an important game in gaming history. When Mario 64 came along and showed everybody the right way to do 3D platforming, Zelda: OoT showed us all how to do modern 3D combat. While it was a bit clunky even then, the concepts of Z-targeting to focus on an enemy to kill it was a staple that persists to this day. Even modern, more refined (in terms of the combat) games like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry 4 use a targeting system based on single-enemy focus just like Zelda: OoT did back in 1998. It also created a sprawling, massive adventure that few have attempted to emulate (aside from Darksiders, but that was rather recently) since the game's initial release.

So yeah, Zelda: OoT did a lot of good and pioneered a ton of stuff, blah blah blah. But I'm reviewing games in 2012, not 1998. And as is it just so happens, I own an N64, a retro television, and even a rumble pak to get the full Zelda: OoT experience. So after burning through the game for the fifth or sixth time in my gaming career, how do I feel about Zelda: OoT after all these years? 

Well, sit back and take a deep breath, because there's some good and some bad upcoming.

And I thought my Final Fantasy VII review was going to be the hardest.

The story of Zelda: OoT is a simple one that isn't particularly engrossing. Like the Mario games they boil down to one main thing: save the princess, kill the baddie. Unlike Mario, however, Zelda sells itself as a mix between a JRPG and an adventure game, but without the character depth or clever wit of either. Sure, there are plenty of entertaining characters in Zelda: OoT, but there just aren't a lot of them. There's only a few towns (and that's with me stretching what the definition of a "town" is), and each only has a handful of inhabitants, and most of them either won't talk to you or don't have anything to say. Feels sparse. 

Anyway, the point is that little kid Link is chosen by Zelda in what seems more like a fake childhood cardboard fort club than an actual important scheme to save Hyrule, and he has to go collect some gems to open the temple of time because Zelda saw Ganondorf once, through a window, and decided he was evil. I guess because he was the only dark-skinned person to set foot in Hyrule she "knew" he was bad. Whatever. 

So off you go into this sparsely populated kingdom in an attempt to save it. After getting the three gems (which involves a convoluted puzzle to get eaten by a big fish. Brilliant scheme, that) you unlock the Temple of Time and warp to the future where, surprise! Ganondorf won and everything sucks now. 

I WIN

It was actually kind of a cool twist the first time, to show up in town and have it burned to the ground and full of ReDeads. From there it does what it did the first have only as an adult: find more crap at the end of dungeons, bring it back to Zelda for whatever reason (who gets captured. Obviously), team up with Sheik who is very obviously Zelda in disguise (though I don't know why), save Hyrule, yada yada. Though technically you defeat Ganondorf as an adult, which is after he got all powerful. Wouldn't it have been a better idea to have kicked his butt as a kid before he got all crazy? And then all the castle guards would still be alive, so you wouldn't have to fight him alone. There's an idea.

Well, whatever, you win. The story attempts to pad out its history with long, really really boring expository cutscenes about goddesses and the triforce and some bullcrap, but all of it is tedious and generally unimportant to the overall plot. The quirky characters are fun but don't add any particular depth other than a few funny lines, and as a whole the story is just straight up lacking. It isn't bad, and it's enough to make you want to keep playing, but it doesn't aspire to anything beyond that. It's either an annoyance (cutscenes) or just there (rest of the time), which is unfortunate because I can tell they were trying to do something big here.

Oh hey! Now I know why the game is called "Ocarina of Time!" Nintendo, you so clever. 

So who cares about that crap; it's not like Nintendo has every written a particularly compelling narrative in their lives (this is me ignoring the Mother/Earthbound games, but I guess Hal made them so my point still stands). What matters is the gameplay. How has that held up on my oddly three-pronged N64 controller? Does it still work after all these years? Well...yes and no. Mostly no. Yeah, cue fanboy rage right about now, but hear me out.

As stated in the intro, Zelda: OoT pioneered the Z-targeting system and the ability to be highly maneuverable in battle. Before this 3D games either had you fighting one-on-one (fighting games) or just sort of swinging in in arc and hoping you hit stuff. Zelda: OoT helped refine the "swing around and hit stuff" bit by allowing you to focus on a single enemy, and easily switch between enemies ("easily switch" is in theory based on that awful N64 controller, but more on that in a second). This was straight up revolutionary back in the day.

The game also had a heavy focus on having a large arsenal of items at your disposal that you then used for puzzles or to defeat enemies (mostly puzzles, though). While it didn't have an item count to rival the massive Link to the Past, Zelda: OoT in theory should have used its smaller number of side items to a greater extent, refining the game to be built around them. Which it did. Sort of. Hey, it did it better than Twilight Princess at least, which just gave you tons of crap you used once or twice and then never touched again. 

Shootin stuff. 

So back in 1998 I was willing to forgive that stupid-ass N64 controller because I didn't know any better. Hey, it was the first console controller to really use an analog stick right, only to have the idea stolen by Sony with the DuelShock (and fixed, because adding a second analog stick was exactly what it needed) but whatever, still pioneered it. But now, after we've evolved our controllers forward, going back to that horrid three pronged monstrosity is a huge annoyance.

A picture, in case you forgot. 

So my hands are bigger now too, meaning that middle trident prong I'm supposed to grab doesn't exactly fit well, and the whole thing somehow feels both encumbering and too small. But hey, this isn't a controller review, it's a Zelda: OoT review. And I'm going to tell you right now that paired with the N64 controller, Zelda: OoT really hasn't aged well in terms of controls.

The first problem is the analog stick is too sensitive. Yes, it can differentiate between walking and running which is great, but whenever you try to aim the damn thing flies everywhere. It can be hard to precisely move exactly the needed direction to hit a jump, and considering some later levels require pinpoint precision, this can be extremely frustrating.

Let's hit the jumping thing right now as an aside: why are the Zelda creators so averse to letting you jump on your own? The whole "auto-jump" thing is a massive pain in the ass. First off, you have to be running towards a ledge (or just walking fast) for Link to do his little bunny hop off it. Second, he'll "hop" off anything higher than his waist, rather than just stepping down, which can lead to some stupid platforming mistakes. Third, when you actually do want him to just climb down, you have to inch ever so carefully, because one slight tap on that oversensitive analog stick and he'll go leaping off to his death rather than carefully hanging down. All of this could be fixed with manual jumping controls. Come on, you have two shoulder buttons you could have used here, or moved the A button (aka the "roll 90% of the time, talk 10% of the time") button to a shoulder since it isn't used that much and had A be jump. Novel concept. Mario jumped just fine, why can't Link do it on his own?

These are all emulator up-rezed shots, FYI, in case you thought your memory deceived you. 

That's just a small gameplay niggle amongst many. Camera work is horrid throughout (just like Mario 64), which makes getting those precision-required imprecise jumps a lesson in tedious repetition. It seems to work ok in a wide open space (like Hyrule Field or during most bosses), but when you are in a cramped room the camera can't seem to figure out how to function, unable to look through walls and forcing a pan as you step away from the door (which also requires you to adjust where you are pointing the stick, as the movement is based on camera's viewing direction). It's really, really obnoxious.

The bad camera, poor jumping, and mediocre analog controls make the whole game feel very loose, which (based on dungeon design) isn't what the creators were shooting for. Yeah, you can still beat the game, but you can't say it wasn't filled with cheap deaths or hits because of the horrible controls. It's an "added bonus" of difficulty stemmed from poor design, and while I was willing to give this game a cut because it was the first of its kind in 1998, need I remind you it is 2012 now, fourteen years later. The fundamental controls are bad, people. That's just the sad truth about the N64.

The Biggoron sword is awesome, though

There are also lots of parts of the game that just feel sloppy, which may or may not have to do with the awful controls but now I'm not entirely certain. Dungeons are decent in their execution (though that water temple is still infamous) and tend to work well overall, but they don't seem to use all the tons of items you have as much as I'd like. While some (hookshot, boomerang, arrows, etc.) are used frequently, the rest of the assortment seems neglected. Stuff like the Eye of Truth are only used in single dungeons and maybe one area in the overworld later, which makes it seem like a wasted slot. Deku nuts are almost pointless save a few very rare instances, and the same goes for breakable Deku sticks. The hammer can be fun to smash guys with but you have to use the stupid C buttons to do it, which isn't convenient at all.

There's also a lot of running from place to place without anything inbetween, especially across Hyrule field. This is sort of fixed with Epona, who is a bit faster and can sometimes jump fences if you point her exactly at them with the analog stick and at just the right speed (good luck), but since you only get her as an adult that's a lot of wandering around as a kid. A lot of wandering around. 

Does it still hold up? Barely. While the fundamental control issues and weird ideas (Unskippable text? Bad jumps?  Dungeons that rely too heavily on being able to see what you are doing? Fetch quests? LOTS of fetch quests?) bring it down, the core design still seems solid. Dungeons are well paced and strike a good balance between easy and hard, increasing with difficulty at a pretty good clip relative to game progression. A lot of the puzzles can be clever (though for most, if you've solved one you've solved them all: shoot the open eye stone), and there are tons of minigames to infuriate you because you can't control the game well enough to do as well as you'd hope. So the basic infrastructure is there, it's just in the fundamental control scheme that we hit an issue. 

Again: I'm not saying you can't overcome these awful controls. You can. It just is way more worth than should be necessary. I shouldn't have to fight a game every step of the way until reaching some middle ground where neither of us are happy. 

Gee, who would have thought. 

This game looks bad. Like Final Fantasy VII bad, except that game at least had nice battle graphics and CD power cutscenes. I thought this game looked crappy in 1998, with it's super blocky polygons and barren, boring fields, but now it just looks all the worse. Playing at the original resolution (which most of these screenshots aren't) with the super texture fuzz going on makes it hard to know what stuff is. Characters animate stiffly and this translates into clunky battle controls (exacerbated by that freaking controller) which can lead to frustrations. Everything has jagged edges to it that look unnatural, most of the ground just being one massive texture. Yeah, it's an old game and I should cut it some slack, but whatever: still looks bad. I do like that the characters emote, though, something Square couldn't figure out until the PS2. It's too bad they don't talk...which still hasn't happened. Alrighty then.

Music is decent but not fantastic. Yes, I just dissed Zelda: OoT's music, now I'm really gonna get it. It just all sounds...midi. And not particularly original. Yeah, you have your traditional Zelda tunes, but most are stolen exactly from the SNES's Link to the Past. They all seem to be missing like three or four instruments that should be backing up the rest of the notes, like they were only allowed to have three unique instruments playing at once. Come on, the SNES had more options than this. Maybe it was due to the lack of CD technology, but the songs really weren't that exceptional minus a few standouts. 

This song is awesome, though, even if it seems to be missing some key background instruments

So where do we stand? Zelda: OoT is a long game, though it does get a bit tiresome near the end of repeating the same style of dungeon for 20 odd hours, but hey...at least I'm not sailing around looking for freaking Triforce shards rather than killing stuff for the last 1/4 of the game. There's a bunch of other stuff I didn't touch on (the stupid "wallet" not holding enough coins, getting your shield burned mid-dungeon, some other stuff) but I don't feel like I need to. If you love this game, odd are you are blinded to its faults, which means you've either already sent me hatemail or are in the process of writing it right now (or just clicked off this review after seeing my long list of "Cons"). Let me be absolutely clear: I loved this game as a kid, flat out loved it. But that was a different time; it was fourteen years ago. Not to mention every Zelda game since this one has done nothing to change this formula, so if you really wanted to play this game again in all its refine glory, pick up any version not released on the N64. Seriously. They're the same game. 

Anyway, the point is that I've actually played through this again, on an actual N64, with an actual N64 controller, and while it hurts me to say this the game has not aged well at all. I'm surprised the 3DS re-release has gotten such critical acclaim (probably rose-tinted, to be honest, or they fear fanboy ire) considering they say it was relatively untouched, which means it is still a wonky mess. Zelda: OoT is a gem from the past, like a golden idol to a god nobody worships anymore. Yeah, it's still awesome to look back and remember the good times, but we don't worship that guy anymore; his time has passed. 

It's still solid enough underneath the jank to enjoy, though expect massive amounts of frustration (my wife played this after the modern Zelda games, and while she enjoyed it she was certainly annoyed by a lot of its problems). The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is still a landmark game for what it did for the industry, but as it stands it's time to send it to the old-folks home and let its younger, fresher grandkids take the glory. 

Three out of five stars. 

Ah, memories. How you betray me. 

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

The Short


Pros
- Strong single-player campaign is totally bananas
- Game runs at 60 FPS and looks incredible for it
- Spec Ops mode is more fleshed out and has a "horde" style gamemode now, too
- Minor changes to multiplayer are welcome ones, especially the ability to earn killstreaks through death
- Voice acting is excellent, as usual, as is the rest of the sound design
- No stupid zombies

Cons
- Single player campaign is insanely short. On easy I'd give it 3-4 hours.
- Graphics look ok but it's clear this is still the Call of Duty 4 engine
- The breakneck pace of the campaign is fine but it does drain you of any emotional resonance during the "heartwrenching" scenes
- The core fundamentals of this game are virtually unchanged from Call of Duty 4, a game with three Call of Duty games from it to this one
- Multiplayer maps are easily the worst in the series
- Bar of entry to multiplayer is insanely high. Expect to die. A lot.
- This series is finally starting to stale for me.

Time to kill more dudes while aiming down the red dot sight

The Long

I've never been big on multiplayer competitive shooters, mostly because I'm not very good at them. I'll be honest: I suck at the Halo games (though I'm ok at Reach), I was never any good at Counterstrike, and my Battlefield skills are pretty much nonexistant. The only multiplayer shooter I was good at was Alien vs Predator 2, and that's just because I could sneak on the walls as Aliens and instakill marines. 

So when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 clicked with me for some reason, I rode that train for all it was worth. These games (I'm sure everybody already knows) are arcadey, fast-based modern shooters where respawn time is nonexistent (in most modes), deaths are frequent, and getting more than three kills in a row without dying is a "bonus." The gameplay is insanely quick and matches fly by fast, making it a good game to play for an hour or so (or more) without getting too frustrated at it. 

Getting a care package. 

How they hook you is the XP system. Every kill, every bomb plant, every flag capture, and just about everything else you do gives you XP. Earn enough and you'll Rank Up (Level Up?) earning you a new collection of guns, perks, or other such abilities. Perks are three unique abilities you can pick for each of your classes (such as an ability to run longer, reload faster, etc.) allowing you to customize your classes with guns, gun attachments, perks, and more. It's a robust system, one that was revolutionary when it was introduced in Call of Duty 4, and it did an excellent job mixing the RPG drive of XP gain with the fact paced, always rewarding you shooting experience. Hence why it sold twenty trillion copies. 

Why am I bringing this up? Two reasons. First, most people buy these games for the multiplayer, so I figured I'd cover it first. Second, the Call of Duty formula has remained essentially completely unchanged since first iterated in Call of Duty 4, and it's finally starting to get old.

Ding! XP.

The shooting in these games is completely unchanged from the original game. There are maybe two new guns, a few new items of equipment you can use, and some more killstreak bonuses, but as it stands everything else is completely identical. Which, while this was robust when Call of Duty 4 came out, the lack of new additions is very noticeable, especially for a vet. On one side this is nice, because if you played a bunch of Modern Warfare 2 you are going to feel right at home. On the other hand, this lack of innovation makes this feel like a glorified expansion pack rather than a full release game.

What is different? A few things that will only change the game for those invested. Guns now level up with XP when you use them, because everybody knows more XP bars mean MORE FUN! Leveling up guns unlocks the attachments. You can still "pro" Perks by fulfilling their list of requirements, and the money system from Black Ops is gone. Lastly, you can now assign different killstreak packages to individual customized classes rather than having a set overall, and adding one that still goes up even if you die is great for the prone-towards-death players such as myself.

Killstreaks are still very impressive. 

That's basically all that's changed. Everything else is the same, which frankly is kind of appalling. Halo realized it had to innovate four games later, with Reach being a vast improvement over the others. Even Call of Duty itself rebooted with Modern Warfare. This game is easily just a stale cash-in on the phenomenon, with the changes so minor it hardly seems worth a full release and not just a patch.

The bigger offense, however, is this game might actually be worse than Modern Warfare 2. The maps certainly are. The maps in previous Call of Duty games were crafted with care, offering a good mix of wide open areas, sniper nests, secret spots that the clever could use to get lots of kills, and enough stuff to hid be hind but not be annoyingly obstructive. Modern Warfare 3 seems to think that "more stuff = more fun!" with crap littered all over every map, the wide open spaces from maps such as Mansion from Modern Warfare 2 gone for a bunch that really just feel like the same crappy map with a different skin. 

The other factor that is making me withhold from saying "At least new players will love this game," is that this game has the worst damn community of any game I've ever played. The problem is they have had seven games to hone their skills (four if you only start counting on Call of Duty 4), meaning 75% of the people playing this game (or more) are already masters. They are also rude, pompous, and other words less dignified (that they frequently use). New players will find a difficulty curve rivaling that of DOTA, and old players who took a brief hiatus (such as myself) will feel that sting as well. Combined with the bad maps, the same gameplay as before, and all the other issues, it makes it impossible for me to recommend the multiplayer unless you are really good already or have a lot of patience for this thing. 

The single player has some crazy setpieces...wait, not yet? Ok...

So before I get to the campaign let's talk the other multiplayer mode, the two-player co-op missions Special Ops.

These are pretty similar to the last batch (from Modern Warfare 2). They are designed around two players working together to accomplish goals in pre-set mission scenarios. Like the previous game, these are solid all around, though they do all come off as very similar. There's only so much "shooting dudes together" or "stealthing dudes together" you can take before it all starts to blur. They do have unique ones (like the mission where your partner is on security cameras with a rail gun and you have to fight through guys on the ground to give him more camera access to assist), but as a whole this entire thing gives a really weird sense of deja vu. Only without snowmobile sequences. Which is too bad; I liked those.

You can also play together in a horde-esque mode, and Spec Ops has its own leveling system across both that gives you more unlocks for that horde mode. It's an ok addition and fun with a friend, but hardly earth shattering.

Soap is back, as are all the other guys you only sort of care about. 

Lastly we have the single player. It's a short roller coaster at about 4-5 hours on easy, but to my surprise I actually really enjoyed it. I thought Modern Warfare 2's single player was ok, Black Ops didn't interest me at all, but Modern Warfare 3 just turns it on and never turns it off. I think they accept the fact they are the Michael Bay of video games and totally rolled with it. One mission has you sabotaging a submarine underwater, forcing it to rise, then fighting your way inside, launching its missiles at the rest of the fleet, and then driving a small boat around (and through) these battleships as the missiles rain down on them before driving the boat into the back of a helicopter. It's all completely absurd but still a lot of fun, even if the set-pieces are obviously scripted.

Where it falls apart are the large-scale battles where you and your team are on foot against a lot of guys. The Call of Duty games have always been really bad at this; killing you with bullets or grenades from nowhere, only allowing you the briefest of time to pop out and shoot, killing you behind cover, etc. It isn't hard, once you figure out the systems, it's just tedious. The group battles have been dramatically thinned from the previous games (making way for a lot more setpiece moments), but when they come they drag the action down.

Stuff can get kind of crazy

Graphically the game looks good, running at 60 FPS always and doing well masking the limitations of the old Call of Duty 4 engine with lots of explosions and clever texture work. It's fine, though it is starting to look old despite their best efforts. Sound design is top notch as usual, though the abundance of military jargon gets annoying very quick. Guns sound good and voice actors do their jobs well, so I can't complain. 

My biggest problem with Modern Warfare 3 is despite all these nice things I have to say about it, I didn't really enjoy the game past the single player (which was atrociously short). Spec Ops was fun, but it was identical to what I did two years ago with Modern Warfare 2, and only really gets good if you are playing with friends and just screw around the whole time trying to mess each other up (adds a whole new layer of difficulty). The multiplayer is by far the largest disappointment for me. Even with one or two new modes and a handful of improvements, the core game hasn't changed at all. I don't see any reason why this game exists when what is very nearly the exact same game has been coming out since Call of Duty 4. Yes, I know there have been differences (I've played them all quite a bit), but as it stands I'm very heavily getting sequel fatigue. And I do know why they keep making these: they print money better than the yearly Madden installments, and I'm assuming require the most minimal of effort to create since they just take the previous game and make it again.

Surprise! This is a Modern Warfare 2 screenshot. Couldn't tell the difference, huh?

Added bonus that the multiplayer is much worse this time around (worse maps, worse balance, and personally I feel it's a step down from Black Ops) and again: no reason to own this game if you own any other Call of Duty game. I'm really hoping the next installment does something drastic and original like Call of Duty 4 did all those years ago, but for now I'm hanging up my hat for the Call of Duty series until that moment of ingenuity comes. It still is a solid shooter series, it just really needs to evolve. Now. 

I was torn between two or three stars, but after thinking over how the reason why I got this game was the multiplayer and I have no incentive to play it whatsoever, I think two out of five is a fair score. Again, if you've never played a Call of Duty game this one is pretty good, but fans of the series (like myself) really need to stop letting Activision pander this crap to them in a $60 package every year. 

Final Fantasy VII

The Short


Pros
- Solid JRPG gameplay elements with the materia system
- Limit Breaks drastically change battle strategies
- Long adventure that spans three discs
- In-battle graphics look quite good
- Music is excellent, as usual
- Has some genuinely memorable story moments (leaving Midgar, Golden Chocobo, etc.)
- Lots of side-stuff to do before the end of the game
- Barret is a massive stereotype but is still awesome

Cons
- Everything aside from the battle graphics looks hideous
- Dialogue between characters is stilted and very poor
- Story starts off strong and quickly devolves into a convoluted, meaningless mess
- Materia system is clever, but there isn't much differentiating the characters save Limit Breaks
- Sephiroth is a lame villain. There, I said it.
- Square-Enix used this as an excuse to make a bajillion crappy spin-off games

Still love the simple title screen

The Long


There is no doubt in anyone's mind the impact Final Fantasy VII had on the industry, in multiple facets. First off, it came out on the Sony Playstation, a new contender to the console market that opted to use CD-ROMs over the usual cartridges, and people were seriously wondering if it could contend with the highly advertised Nintendo 64. Second, the JRPG market hadn't exactly been nonexistent in the US, but it certainly wasn't pushing copies as much as it does now. Lastly, it ushered in a new era of something we now are trying to ween out of our games: the cutscene.

Final Fantasy VII's achievements cannot be understated. For many, this was their first introduction to a JRPG (or an RPG altogether), their first time seeing a full-3D video game on a console, and their first exposure to a game with a long, epic storyline. I'm certain it is for this reason that people look back on this game with extreme fondness, and why Square-Enix is more than willing to capitalize on that fondness by releasing a billion spin-off games to rake in the cash, as well as a movie and who knows what else they currently have in store.

In a world fresh off pixel art, this certainly turned heads

But this isn't a review of the game in 1997. It's 2012, and the Final Fantasy series has doubled in its entries (more so if you count X-2 and XIII-2). After all these years, has this game really stood the test of time? Does the Soldier from Midgar still have the same emotional resonance as he did nearly fifteen years ago?

Well....yes and no. Let's take a look. 

And kill the first scorpion boss...guy. 

The story starts off with a bang. Cloud and Barret are part of a rebel group called AVALANCHE (yes, all caps, Barret must have had Caps Lock on when he typed up the name) who are convinced the Shinra corporation are using Mako reactors to suck up energy from the planet, essentially killing it. And when I say this I actually mean only Barret cares, because Cloud seems just along for the ride. An Ex-Soldier, an elite military force of Shinra, Cloud essentially has defected but for unknown reasons. He just sort of showed up at the mixer, I guess, and got roped into blowing up a reactor. It's a long while before you really understand what's going on, but whatever; mystery or something.

Anyway, probably because their attempt at environmentalism involves essentially being douchebag terrorists, eventually AVALANCHE gets worked up good and they find out their real enemy is Sephiroth, a trench-coat wearing crazy with a sword almost as absurdly large as Cloud's. It seems Shinra, along with killing the planet, also did a bunch of wild experiments with Jenova (which looks oddly like "Jehovah," which I'm certain isn't a coincidence), some alien thing that has magic, essentially. Sephiroth was made from Jenovah's cells...or something? Anyway he's pissed and now he wants to blow up the planet (ironic, considering you were blowing stuff up to save the planet at the beginning. Or at least I think that's ironic. I don't know.), so naturally you have to stop him. Cloud also has some sort of relationship with Sephiroth (no, not like that) that he can't remember fully, which he also has to come to terms with over the course of the game.

This is how the game actually looks. The sharper screenshots are up-rezed emulator versions. 

While the story certainly has quite a few twists and turns, it seems to play fast and loose with nearly every aspect involved. Cloud's backstory is intentionally long and convoluted, but the game doesn't really know how to present information in the correct order for you to completely understand it. The same goes for Sephiroth and Jenova; there seems to be a lot here, but the story seems to like to drip with ambiguity so much that when it finally starts making reveals, it feels too little, too late. Yes, I know fans could easily chew me out because they know every aspect of this story in detail, and it's worth noting I've played this game no less than four times, watched the movie, played awful Dirge of Cerberous, and read wikis trying to better explain it. I get it now, but my first run there was no way I fully understood it. The story is a convoluted mess, one that revels in its confusion all the way up to the weird, goofy-looking final boss fight.

Compared to the tight stories of Final Fantasy VI, and even Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy VII's "convoluted by design" approach just comes off as bad storytelling. It keeps you in the dark about the important things for so long, often I'd watch entire cutscenes thinking "Wait, I'm supposed to be understanding this, right? Yes? How is Sephiroth in that orb thing when I'm pretty sure he just killed Aeris? Wait, is that a clone? So Cloud is a clone? How does that make sense? How will Sephiroth destroying the earth bring Jenova back? And isn't she already back; I fought her like five times and she has her own battle theme!"

Barret actually sums up Final Fantasy VII's story pretty well during a cutscene late in the game. "I've been here since the beginning, and I still don't know what the hell's going on!"

Cloud needed a lobotomy to piece the finer details of this story together. 

This isn't helped by the fact the translation is piss-poor overall. While I appreciate the characterization of certain people (Barret, despite being a stereotype, certainly has a unique flavor of dialect, as does Cid), most of it just muddles about for text box after text box. Again, the story is playing fast and loose, getting right of tight, cognitive narrative for a more melodramatic and wordy approach. People often point to this as the radical shift in the Final Fantasy formula, and I'd have to agree. There's less "Fantasy" here, and the lightheartedness of the previous games is completely abandoned. Instead we have moping characters, long bouts of expository and melodramatic dialogue (including a whole flashback after you leave Midgar that's something like a 30-45 minute infodump flashback that later turns out to be an inaccurate memory. Gee, thanks for wasting my time), and a plodding, plodding plot. I'm not saying these games didn't have melodrama before; Final Fantasy IV was full of it, and even Final Fantasy VI had its share, but this was when Square started loving it's melodrama more than it loved creating concise, realistic characters. And again, paired with that translation, the whole thing reads like a bloated mess written by children.

And before I get hatemail, seriously consider this game's story, all its "finer points" and all. You probably are glazing over massive chunks of text you just skip through now to get to the "good parts." Having recently replayed this game, I can tell you it's really wordy, and not in a good way. And somehow, despite all these words, they still don't nail anything down solid until the third disc at least. It's poor writing, people. I'm sorry to ruin your memories.

Pictured: Fifteen year old spoiler. 

While I'm killing sacred cows and burning all my bridges, I'd like to address one thing that's bugged me for years: the reaction people had to Aeris' (or "Aerith," if you are a Japanese purist) death. Whenever anybody makes a list of the most "shocking twists" or "scenes that would make you cry," this always seems to cap out as #1 for some inexplicable reason. People have said hundreds of times before this isn't the first JRPG where a prominent character dies (Final Fantasy VI and IV off 'em like no tomorrow), but since this was a lot of people's first JRPG (and first story-driven gaming experience), I guess it had an impact.

I do not get it.

I played Final Fantasy VII after IX, so maybe I'm jut tainted, but I had literally no reaction when Aeris was killed. This is probably because as a charater she's stupidly bland. The love triangle in this game is something recent young adult novels are doing in spades (just swap the genders around), and anime has been doing forever. Both Tifa and Aeris are massive character archetypes, with Tifa being the "childhood friend" you obviously inevitably go for, and Aeris is the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" with a touch of that "Virgin Innocence" everybody seems to get off on. Both these characters have no depth to their characters, but Aeris is especially annoying. She never takes anything seriously, is constantly flirty but never deliberate enough to know if she actually is taking this relationship seriously, and because of that she comes off as annoying. When she died I was actually glad, because now at last Cloud would finally realize that Tifa was the girl for him (even though her personality was just as wooden, at least she wasn't an naive idiot about it all). 

So yes, it was shocking because it came out of nowhere, but I had no emotional character resonance. If you want a death to be impactful, there has to be some like for a character's personality rather than having her cater to the lowest common denominator (which Aeris does perfectly, being that anime dream girl fitting the Manic Pixie Dream Girl stereotype so popular amongst us lonely nerdy folk). Aeris was playing you, guys. Playing your lonely selves back in 1997. Most of you are now married or at least have experienced a serious relationship, and if you go back and play this game, really paying attention, you'll realize Aeris is nothing more than fluffy pandering. She isn't the type of girl you'd want a serious relationship with. I was being pandered to, and so her death was never impactful for me. 

That was a long tangent. Let's talk about something else. 

So the story isn't fantastic but it works enough to progress the game forward, so what about the game itself? It's your standard JRPG fare at it's core: you wait for your active time meter to fill up, pick an option from a menu, and watch as your character executes it. We are down to three party members at a time now (down from four in FFVI and five in FFIV), meaning it's simpler, but they do throw a few key changes into the mix.

The first is Limit Breaks. Technically Final Fantasy VI had these, but they only happened when you were at critical health and popped out randomly, and since that game wasn't particularly difficult you probably didn't see any of them. In Final Fantasy VII, every time you are hit your "Limit" gauge rises, eventually filling up. When it does Attack is replaced with LIMIT (in rainbow colors!) and you can execute a special power move. The more you use Limits the more you unlock, getting to higher tiers (which means the gauge takes longer to fill but the attacks are much better) until you finally get an ultimate one that just murders everything dead instantly. Awesome.

The Limit Breaks change things up because technically you can save them. While you can't "Attack," you can use magic or any other abilities (and as you can see from the screenshot above, you can have a lot equipped), so if you get one just before a boss you can save it rather than waste it on weaklings. It's a minor tactical change, but a cool one. They also look really awesome when you execute them, so that's a bonus. 

Battles are fast paced like Final Fantasy VI, which is appreciated considering how much the series slowed down in games that followed. 

But the big pull is obviously the Materia system, which is now pretty much famous in its application. Rather than learn magic spells or abilities (or having them inherent to certain characters or classes like all previous Final Fantasy games), Final Fantasy VII says "Screw it, make your own character classes" and gives you all the parts to do so. Want to make a battle-mage? You can. Want all your characters to double as healers (a good tactic, FYI)? You can do that too. 

Essentially every weapon and accessory you equip (and that's all you equip; gone are the long lists of armor, relics, and accessories from Final Fantasy VI) has a set number of "slots." In these you can equip Materia like "Fire" or "Heal" or "Steal," giving your character these abilities. A neat trick is that some Materia slots are linked, meaning if you put a Heal and All together you can cast healing spells on your whole party (rather then just having the option normally with a Cure spell). It's too bad they didn't go nuts with this (and make it so if you mixed "Fire" and "Ice" you could cast a duel spell or something), but like the streamlined item system they were clearly trying to keep it simpler for a wider audience, which is fine. 

AP: It's like XP, but for your magic rocks. 

It's a cool system in one respect, but in others it is lacking. Materia levels up when its equipped, which is how you learn new spells, but it does it very slowly. If you don't realize this is going on and swap out a materia for an "identical" one, you'll be basically starting over with your leveling, which means you should be buying all the materia up at the beginning and then never buying any ever again or else you'll have to start the leveling process over with each new piece. It would have been nice if all materia's XP/Level was shared across all types (ex: if you had a Lv 2 Heal, all Heal materia you bought from then on out would be level 2), but that might have made the game easier than it already is so...whatever. 

The other problem is it removes all character uniqueness. In the other Final Fantasy games (especially IV and VI), each character felt unique and personalized because they had their own unique move (or set of moves in IV's case) that only they could use. This helped build characterization in the battles, because you knew Edgar was the machine guy because he had a move called "Machines" that nobody else did, and Locke was the thief because he had "Steal." In Final Fantasy VII, there is no character uniqueness. You can swap your heavy attacker to a mage with just a few materia swaps. You can give somebody all your Command materia so they have the biggest battle menu in the history of the world (again, that one screenshot). Your options are increased, but at the cost of that subtle characterization. And while there are a few stat differences between characters early on, they are so small there's no reason to just pick whomever you want to do whatever regardless of what the game wants. Characters are no longer unique in battle (except Limit Breaks), which I feel is a weakness of this system.

I think that's an appropriately named Limit Break based on the character. 

The game also has a dodgy difficulty curve, and by that I mean it's really easy until it isn't. The game requires a rather hearty amount of grinding, which it will gladly give you due to its insane random encounter rate. Bosses can be difficult but rarely require any strategy, with the whole "Don't attack when they are in counter mode!" usually being the only level of "depth" to them. It's just mash away until you win, which feels tedious (or turns into you waiting for a Limit Break). I breezed through most of the game, but I'd get weirdly stuck in some places. I wish I could remember them off the top of my head, but just know the difficulty spikes up and down, and during the rest of the time this game is a cakewalk. Again, it's really easy until it isn't. 

Battles are fast, thank goodness, with minimal loading (I really have to give Square props for that. They did well optimizing the load times on their first disc-based release) and nothing too flashy except the stupidly-long summons (another thing Final Fantasy VII "pioneered" for the series). The 3D allows for dramatic camera pans, which is fantastic, and adds a lot to the battle presentation. Again, nothing too awful, but it does fall into the "oh boy, another battle where I mash X" curse of JRPGS. 

Not going to lie: this game looks pretty awful. 

Graphically this game looks pretty damn hideous. Character's proportions are way wonky when you are running around,with massive hands and the weird skinny joints (I'm guessing because it made them easier to animate that way?), and their faces and legs look also wonky (I like Cloud's purple clown pants, though). They animate decently, but the lack of any facial expressions (something that did so very well in Final Fantasy VI) makes them seem stiff and unemotive, especially with the new free camera angle able to zoom in for close shots. Backgrounds are all pre-rendered and looked ok back in the day, but now their insanely low resolution really shows, with pixelation and blurryness the name of the game.

Battle graphics do much better, though they are still very blocky. However, after thirty hours of watching puppet Cloud with his clown pants prancing about the world with his skinny arms and noseless and mouthless face, I'll take those battle graphics anyday. Pity they couldn't put those in the main game. It's hard to take your story seriously when all the melodrama is being delivered by what looks like Chinese bootlegged action figures. 

The cutscenes were a big deal in 1997, and one of the big pushing points of the game. They look ok now, which is a testament to Square's graphic designers, but when they start moving things look bad. The animations are stiff and janky, with only select parts of bodies moving, and again: put in contrast with both the battle graphics and the much worse world sprites, there's a massive disconnect. I think this disconnect really hurts the narrative, but that might just be me. 

Uematsu does well this time around, though not as good as previous iterations. 

The music is reasonably solid throughout, with a few standout tracks (like the one above) using piano and music box to have emotional resonance. The game certainly has a "feel" to it that makes it so you can recognize any song from the game after only having heard a few, which does good in unifying things. The main melody also tends to pop up in other tracks (it does in Anxious Heart above; can you catch it?) which is a clever unifying touch as well. 

It isn't orchestrated, which considering the CD capabilities of the Playstation is a bit of a shame. I also think whatever midi mixer Uematsu used for this game isn't as good as the one on the SNES, but that's personal preference. I liked a lot of the songs in Final Fantasy VII, I just don't like the majority of them. That's contrasted to Final Fantasy IV, where I loved most of the songs, and Final Fantasy VI, where I challenge you to find a single bad one. So it does well and is still a memorable sound, but it isn't the best. 

You knew I'd talk about this. Time to burn more bridges. 

I'd also like to point out that I am so damn sick of One-Winged Angel I want to claw at my ears every time I hear it. Look, I get it. The fact it had vocals totally blew you away. You didn't see that coming because you were used to the SNES's chipset that didn't allow for that kind of thing. I understand. It surprised me too. But come on; the music aside from the vocals isn't particularly enthralling (I like the previous song, Birth of a God much better in terms of a battle song, and even Jenova Absolute is more tension building) and we've used it to death by this point. Dancing Mad blows this thing completely out of the water in terms of sheer epicness anyway. 

I'm not saying it's a bad song. It freaked me out when I was fighting Sephiroth for the last time too. It's just...old. But Sephiroth does have that totally bonkers summon at the end that destroys the solar system, so I guess all my complaints are moot. 

Skip to 3:00 for some insane fun. 

As it stands, Final Fantasy VII is a fine game, it just isn't a particularly great one. Yes, I know it has a legacy and yes, I know it was many people's first JRPG experience and it totally blew your minds. But I was a rather entrenched fan for a while (and I still really enjoy the game), but after re-playing it recently I came to realize that this game is seriously flawed, and these issues are even more noticeable fifteen years later. It will still hold a special place in my heart and I will still recommend fans of JRPGs play it, if only to know their roots, but as for being the "best game ever" (or even the best Final Fantasy game), I'd say it's a long shot away from it. 

Still, it's only $10 on the Playstation Store now, which is a pretty sweet deal. It also doesn't have anything that makes it unplayable or overly frustrating (like most old games tend to do), so it still plays fine from a modern standpoint. Just don't expect an earth-shattering revelation if this is your first time digging in, because it's an old game, and it shows. 

A relic from history, which now earns itself three out of five stars. 

Assassin's Creed

The Short


Pros
- Interesting mix of lots of genres, but particularly parkour, open world, and stealth
- Graphics look great, and locals of the middle east are architecturally gorgeous
- Animations for climbing and fighting look extremely fluid. Very well done.
- Voice acting is good throughout
- Music is good
- Playing as Altiar just feels cool, with the hand blade and the assassinations and all that jazz

Cons
- Excruciatingly repetitive
- Stealth elements are poorly executed and the open world feels stilted
- When you mess up a sneaky assassination, you might as well start over. Almost impossible to get a "redo" by hiding out for a while
- Ways you can hide are contrived and make guards look like morons
- On the flip side, if you knock one beggar over near the end, expect 100 overpowered guards to hunt you until you die
- Swordplay/combat is weak; you'll essentially just counter everything to death
- Graphics for faces/animations for faces are awful
- Again, repetition with the mundane tasks kills this game

It's time to be a badass. 

The Long

Assassin's Creed and I have a jaded relationship. It's more one-sided, actually. I really, really want to love it. It's made by the crew that did Prince of Persia, after all, and it looks fantastic and the idea of playing in a middle-ages middle east during the Crusades (an untapped era of time for games) is just awesome. But for everything I give, Assassin's Creed won't give back. It lead to me playing the first sequence and then putting the game down for nine months (pissing off my friend I was borrowing it from) until finally giving in and finishing it. Unfortunately, beating the game didn't make me feel any better about it; if anything it made it worse.

Assassin's Creed is a game that has lots of great ideas but ruins them with some of the worst design choices I've ever seen. Remember my Saints Row: The Third review, where I said that game does everything in its power to streamline its elements so that the game is just a pure, fun experience? Take that, do the opposite, and you have Assassin's Creed. 

One of the many engrossing side missions: sitting and pointing the camera at someone as they talk. 

Assassin's Creed threw everybody off because it wasn't what it initially sells itself as. You actually aren't Altiar, you are his whatever generation later grandson Desmond. Desmond has been captured by some future super-scientist group and forced to sit in a big tanning bed called the Animus which lets him relive his memories because they are like coded into his DNA or something...I dunno, it's total bullcrap but I'm willing to believe it for a few neck-stabs. 

So you are Altiar, an assassin during the crusades, and those douchbag Knights Templar are getting all up in your business. After a lengthy opening sequence you are sent off to a city to find dudes and then kill said dudes, and the story gets...weird at the end with like the Apple of Eden being a mind controlling device or something? I dunno, everything that isn't stabbing dudes in the neck or related to the immediate story is kind of contrived and extremely underdeveloped, so you'd be best to just ignore it. Because it gets super pretentious in Assassin's Creed 2, so save it for that! 

Climbing is really fun and the graphics on the buildings looks fantastic

Assassin's Creed wants to be a lot of things. It wants to be a parkour game like Prince of Persia. It wants to be a stealth assassination game like Thief or a weird variation of Metal Gear Solid. It wants to be a sandbox game like Grand Theft Auto, and it wants to be a swordfighting game like...a game with swords in it. It also wants to have side missions where you spy on people or bribe people or pickpocket people (I enjoyed pickpocketing for whatever weird reason) and have you climb up really high things and then swan dive off into hay and come out undamaged.

All these things are good things, and set to a middle eastern backdrop this game has potential to be just awesome. Unfortunately, it doesn't do any of these things well, and that's only the start of Assassin's Creed's problems.

They can't find me now!

The core element of Assassin's Creed is simple: kill dudes. Specifically, kill one particular dude who is a massive jerk and you need to put down for...plot reasons. So you are briefed back at Assassin HQ (which is what it should have been called), then grab a horse and ride the long distance to whatever city you need to be to. See, that's the open world part. Different cities and stuff. 

Once you get to the city you are given another open world...thingy. You have to climb to the top of tall towers to reveal the map, which is actually a pretty cool mechanic because the climbing is really fun. It can be a pain to figure out what you can and can't climb up, but unlike Crackdown where you'll mash A to try and find out of one window ledge is a handhold while another is not, Altiar just figures it out himself and shimmies up just about everything. It's fast and looks awesome, and it a natural extension of the Prince of Persia formula, though it simplifies things a bit. 

I can see my house from up here!

Now that you have your map updated, your new job is to research your target before killing him. Researching is required, and this is where the game starts to show it's running out of ideas already. The activities you have are limited and not particularly enthralling. You can pickpocket, sit down and listen, interrogate a guy by beating him up, and a few others. Once you've gotten your information you can go assassinate your guy (which is the best part in the game), flee from the guards after killing him, and call it good.

Repeat this, over and over, seven times. There's Assassin's Creed. 

You did so much right, Assassin's Creed. Why do you fail on the fundamentals?

There's a few other bits, like setting up strongholds or safehouses in cities (which is just doing more side missions that I mentioned above) and earning new weapon upgrades, but as a whole this is the game. It ups the number of crappy side jobs (from the incredibly small pool) you have to do for each assassination, and the guards become more and more aggressive further along. No joke: I was stuck on the second to last assassination for an extremely long time because so much as breathing loudly sent twenty guards in my direction. It was frustrating and annoying and was just straight up not fun.

This might have been remedied if the combat was better, but unfortunately it falls flat here as well. 

Good thing the chase music is good, because you're gonna hear it a lot. 

Swordfighting isn't fun. There's just no rhyme or reason to it until you learn the counter move, then you murder everything with one quick tap. Stealth kills are great (sneak up on person and press a single button and you'll kill them silently) but you don't really feel as an agile, empowered warrior like you did in the later Prince of Persia games. It's like he forgets all his agility when he fights, which is too bad because you should be able to do some totally crazy stuff with his acrobatics. 

You'll do a lot of swordfighting on your way to doing another pointless side task you've done a dozen time. The initial rush of a kill, thrill of a climb, and gasp at the beauty of the cities is quickly whisked away to repetition, frustration, and boredom. I didn't think a game about being a badass assassin would get boring, but congrats Ubisoft: you pulled it off. The last several hours of this game were some of the worst I've ever played, and the only reason I finished it was because I felt it was a waste of my time investment if I didn't seal the deal. I was also hoping the ending would make the game worth it. It didn't. 

It's too bad the game is tedious, because the climbing is just so cool. 

I could try and blame it on aging, but it isn't that. Despite being an old game, Assassin's Creed LOOKS really good and the climbing has been basically unchanged through its multiple sequels. It's that its fundamental core is boring and poorly designed. And no matter how good a game looks, if it is a massive, tedious bore to play it's a bad game. Sorry, Assassin's Creed. It isn't me, it's you.

Plus the horses are pretty much useless since they attract guards like ants to a picnic. 

If you really are intent about this game, I will say that the first several assassinations are really fun. The game is still somewhat fresh, the ideas not grinded down yet, and you feel like a totally cool assassin guy. But after that the tedium sets in really fast, to the point where you'll be like me and not want to endure it any more, even to finish the game. 

The sequels did it a bit better (though I don't think the series hit its stride until Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood), but as it stands this game is pretty much a failed experiment. If you are looking to get into this series, you can start up the second game without missing much in terms of plot. Hey, that's what wikipedia is for anyway.

Two out of five stars. 

No matter how many dudes you let me stab, Altiar, your game will still suck.