Backtracking

If you know anything about video games, and particularly about games with stories, chances are you've probably heard of Final Fantasy 7 at one point or another. A massive game, both in terms of the game itself and the impact it had on the gaming market at the time. Praised at the time for its revolutionary graphics, musical score, gameplay, and especially its storytelling, it is still considered today to be on of the greatest games of all times by many people.

And yet, the further we get away from when that game was released, the more people seem to argue that it really wasn't all that good. In fact, just about the only thing that is still universally praised from everything that Final Fantasy 7 had to offer is the music. Its graphics have aged poorly to the point where it is difficult to look at the game in the modern market of HD, life like visuals. The gameplay feels flat and forced, and gives little to no incentive for using the entirety of the party that is given to you. And the story... Oh boy the story. Not only are most characters frequently considered to be one note, but the actual events that transpire are often more confusing than they are suspenseful, leading up to an ending that quite literally takes place outside of the world in which the rest of the game takes place for barely understandable reasons.

Other games like Chrono Trigger manage to hold onto the praise that they received when they first released, not necessarily changing the world with their innovations, but simply by doing it right with what they had. While Final Fantasy 7 was a departure from what had come before it, Chrono Trigger took what had come before and refined and sharpened it into a work of art.

That then raises the question. If we can look back on Final Fantasy 7 with such contempt when we once looked on it with amazement and wonder, what changed? Did anything? Why did we think it was so good in the first place, if nothing about it has changed?

The thing that especially confuses me is that the things we once praised the game for, and now critique it for, seem no different to me than what we praise other games and stories for today. The main character, Cloud, is heavily critiqued for being little more than a dark, whiny git with women crawling all over him for no explicit reason other than he is the protagonist. The villain, on the other hand, is evil because he's evil. He seemingly has nothing to gain from the actions that he takes, and the more you learn about his motivations, the less he and the rest of the story make sense. The story is dark for the sake of creating depth, and the motivation at every turn is twisted and sinister. Death abounds, and rather than fighting to prevent further deaths, it seems more that the characters are fighting to avenge previous ones.

You'd be hard pressed to find someone who would call that good storytelling. And that's not even half of it. How about the fact that, rather than getting stronger, from a storytelling perspective, Cloud becomes weaker the further in you get?

And I say all of these things as one of the people who still thoroughly enjoys this game, and recognizes it as being considered one of the greatest games of all time. I love this game for the things it did. Not because it has an amazing story, or fantastic characters, but because it just had some wild and crazy ideas and threw them together regardless of how strange they seemed and managed to make it all work. When was the last time you heard of a story where one of the major plot points was doing squats to get a wig to help you crossdress to invade a playboy's mansion?

It's weird. It's not good storytelling. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or insane.

But something did change, and that's why people started looking at it differently. We started looking at the game critically, rather than experiencing it for what it is. We heard that it was great so many times that we started to try and look at why it was great. And in doing so, by trying to analyze greatness rather than experience it, we saw that for all accounts and purposes, it was anything but.

That's what happens when you backtrack. That's why some things are better left in the past. At least if you don't want to challenge your opinion of them.