Story: You are Cloud Strife, an ex-SOLDIER who is now a mercenary for hire. The story mainly revolves around Cloud, but sometimes gets the pasts of the other characters into the story, which is a good thing. Overall, the story is pretty interesting and deep, but if you miss certain optional story parts, you may end up confused. And nobody wants to be confused. Naturally. 15/20
Graphics: This game was the transition from the SNES FF's to the PlayStation FF's. The graphics were what made this game so appealing to gamers that had never touched RPG's in the past (stupid graphics hawks). This is why FF7 was so important; it bridged the gap between hardcore RPG people and foolish regular gamers who thought RPG's were dumb but were willing to play any game that looked good. The summons are always raved about and at the time, they had reason to be. The game even looks ok today, but it was great then. The characters do have funny shapes though, and the camera can get really annoying when you're walking far away from the center of a particular map thing. But that's it. 18/20
Sound: The sound is pretty damn good. There are plenty of songs, and most of them are enjoyable enough. The battle theme is cool, but the problem is that it is repetitive since it never changes throughout the game. The world map theme also isn't that great. Other than that, though, it is excellent. 18/20
Gameplay: FF7 presented plenty of new things to RPG's. The biggest change was the Materia system, which let a player basically customize their characters however they liked. On the downside, good players can make their characters way too strong, making the game even easier than it already is. That leads to the other downside of the game: the fact that it is too easy. It was necessary for it to be like that, though, or the stupid graphics hawk people who never played RPG's before would quit. The encounter rate was decent, though, and everything else important in an RPG was present and fine. Overall, not too bad. 15/20
Fun: FF7 was a pretty enjoyable game. A good story with good characters and an awesome boss in Sephiroth creates a good game. Obviously, there were some annoying parts, such as the ease and the camera (at times), but overall it was pretty good. It also had one of the most memorable deaths in a game ever. It must have been pretty fun if I spent 40 hours on it. I don't think it lives up to the hype it got, but you should still check it out. It's worth playing. 16/20
FINAL SCORE: 82/100
