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Tuesday 4 March, 2008
GAMEPLAY
Moving around the game-world is better in ff7 than in nearly any game I’ve ever played…and that includes new ones on more advanced systems. FF7 takes place in a large world with three main continents and many islands. Landscapes include grassy plains, deserts, mountains, rivers, oceans, swamps, and snow covered tundra. At first, you can only travel on the plains, but as the game progresses you are given different modes of transportation in order to traverse the landscape. These include an airship, a shallow water boat, a buggy, and a submarine. Also available to players are animals called Chocobos (giant chickens than you can ride on). Chocobos can be bred to have different characteristics, such as the ability to walk over mountains, rivers, or even oceans).
Before you go to fight the final boss at the end of the game, ff7 opens the entire world for you. All of the transportation is available, and the world still has much exploring to offer. There are so many side-quests to be completed at this point, you could spend days finishing up. Some of the more fun (and profitable) ones include raising Chocobos, fighting in the Battle Arena (a minigame that has you fight through 8 rounds of enemies, randomly hampering you in some way after each fight), exploring a sunken plane, and fighting giant monsters called ‘weapons’.
DESIGN
The difficulty of ff7 depends on how long you are planning on spending on the game. The more you train with enemies and level up in each area, and the more you explore and find all of the items/materia the easier the game will be. The most recent time I played, I made sure to level up completely in each area, and my characters were extremely powerful at each stage of the game, making usually difficult boss fights a breeze. For me, that was a fun way to play, but if you want a different challenge, you can try playing the game (and can do this for most of the story) with only the main character, Cloud, in your party, or without spending extra time in areas to level up.
The magic system, materia, is one of the most interesting design aspects of ff7. The system gives players a lot of control over their own abilities, instead of just having the basic fire, ice, lightning magic. You can attach a counter command with a 4x cut, and counter attack enemies with four physical attacks. Couple that with a lightning-elemental, and you can counter with four lightning based physical attacks. The possibilities are nearly endless, and figuring out all of the ins and outs of the system was a major part of my good experience with the game. I’ve played through three times now, and I’m still figuring out new combinations to help me on the journey.
The reward structure of ff7 is another fun design aspect. Killing enemies gives you four things: EXP, AP, items, and Gil. EXP is a character’s experience gained from battle. This goes toward their ability to level up. AP is used to level up the materia currently being used by the characters. While Gil is the money system of ff7. Some enemies will give more EXP or more AP, and seeing which enemies are good to kill for what can be an important part of making strong characters.
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