If you’re familiar with me, you know that I grew up with a Mega Drive II. I have many memories of visiting a local market and going through a selection of pre-owned games. Unfortunately, RPGs never made up any part of that, so I wasn’t able to get a taste of that genre until the PlayStation arrived in my household. I remember going to a very out of the way store, alone in the middle of nowhere. It’s a dreamlike memory, now that I think about it. I recall that we grabbed a demo disc to go along with it.
Final Fantasy VII was on that demo disc. Not as a playable game, but as a trailer. I found myself watching this footage over and over. I had no idea what any of the text said, and I had no idea what was going on in it. I didn’t care; it just looked cool. I have no idea how this came to pass, but eventually, a copy of the game ended up in my house, and it went straight into my PlayStation. I was finally playing that weird game with all the cool shots in it. I saw the beginning of the intro movie, showing off what appeared to be a starry night sky. Sounds normal so far, right? But it was not meant to be. Listen to my story.
Calling my first playthrough of FFVII complicated may not be sufficient. You see, I never actually experienced the normal progression of the game that other players did. The start of the journey was nothing to write home about. I played it with a parent. It’s not a memory I want to share publicly, because it’s quite personal to me. I’ll just skip to the boring, deflating part: at some point in the following months, my discs became damaged, and as young as I was, I was never able to beat the first boss of the game.
“Was it the Guard Scorpion? Did you attack while the tail was up?”
Ha. Yes, I did. Nowadays, I always do, because those limit breaks are tasty. I wouldn’t blame Cloud’s misleading battle advice; I’m not sure I had the reading skills necessary at the time to understand Cloud was telling me anything. I could definitely read, but my brain wasn’t used to text heavy games, and so I parsed all the dialogue boxes as sort of a blur. My perception of the game’s opening sequence was also incredibly warped; I had a hyperactive imagination which processed the visuals rather strangely, so I had it in my head that I was exploring a castle with medieval music. I also sometimes made Cloud attack himself in the first battle until he knocked himself out. I’d never played an RPG, so I didn’t understand what the cursor meant. I thought I was selecting him to command him, but I was instead sending him to the afterlife.
Eventually, a day came where I took notice of Final Fantasy VIII in a store, with FFVII nowhere in sight. I resigned myself to never being able to experience the rest of the game, and decided I wanted to see what the other Final Fantasy game was like. For this reason, I technically consider the eighth entry in the series to be my first Final Fantasy. I very vividly remember the morning on which I beat FFVIII, but that’s a story for another time. More importantly, I would start thinking about FFVII again a year or so later.
Like any video game enjoyer on the internet, I would eventually discover a little known thing called emulation. See, this thing called emulation would allow me to play games I owned on my PC, and I would be able to customise my play experience in various ways. The key points of interest here are the ability to load virtual memory cards, and use cheat codes without actually owning a cheat device. My first disc of FFVII was beyond repair, and my third had gone missing. Keep in mind, I had a data cap on my internet, so no acquiring a working game through other means. I couldn’t spend much time on YouTube, and the site itself was still fairly new. As time went on, I found used copies of FFVII to be outside the price range of my younger self, and nobody was willing to lend me their discs, specifically because it was FFVII. It was like a treasure to them. All I had to work with was the second disc.
Clearly, the play here was to grab someone’s heavily modified Disc 2 saves from GameFAQs.
Yes, that’s right. Technically, my FFVII journey didn’t actually start with Cloud heading into Mako Reactor 1. My journey truly began at the start of the second disc. Shock, horror. You must all be screaming at this point. “How could you allow this to happen? Why would you tolerate this? Was there truly no other way? How does anything make sense if you start there? Wouldn’t all sorts of things be spoiled? How do you even get attached to anything!? How do you have fun!?”
Very easily. All I needed to know was that something big had just happened to everyone. I didn’t need to know what it was, because the game would steadily unravel it for me as Disc 2 proceeded. I also wasn’t in any trouble with getting a handle on the Materia system, because I was playing on save files that featured characters with max stats, an entire inventory of materia, and Cloud’s ultimate weapon. Outrageous? Yeah. Fun? Oh yeah.
It wouldn’t be long before I gained access to the game’s airship, the Highwind, allowing me to fly around the entire planet. I was excited to be able to explore entire towns and cities I had never seen before. It was a bit strange, but I was finally playing FFVII. I would watch the cutscenes and slowly begin to piece together who these people were and what they meant to each other. I had to infer the events leading up to Disc 2 through pure media literacy skills. Failing that, I’d pick up on information by speaking to NPCs across the world.
I didn’t mind any of this. I was finally exploring and learning about the planet at my leisure. I was finding juicy text and lore drops all over the place. It was doubly important to me to find all that I could; having never played the game normally, I had no context for anything whatsoever! Every dialogue box was a delicious treat, and I was eating well. The gloomy tone of Disc 2 also helped to keep me invested; it felt so far apart from the calm, almost relaxed feel of FFVIII’s world.
The save files also had certain side events left undone, and so I wasn’t locked out of any interesting sequences. I had the pleasure of being dropped into FFVII during its most foreboding hours, with the most freeing amount of gameplay possible. It was just me, the planet, an airship, and a whole assortment of gear to experiment with. I even sleuthed out how to beat Ruby and Emerald Weapon. There were still challenges in store for me even with my obscene stats!
Of course, the show almost ended when the game told me to swap to the third disc. I wasn’t willing to accept that. My journey would not end here. I would find a way to make it right. I would see everything through to the end, one way or another, even if it meant further defying what was considered the normal path of progression for a game that many considered, either affectionately or with scorn, ‘the game of all time’. I looked online and found something that would provide me the tools I needed to do what I needed to do.
I got into the game’s debug room using a Gameshark code and proceeded to start over at Mako Reactor 1. I was using the maxed out Disc 2 files for this, so I was essentially picking New Game+ in a game that didn’t have New Game+. FFVII actually contains, more or less, the entire game in each disc. The key difference is that each disc contains the FMV (full motion video) files for the cutscenes that were intended to play in their sections of the game, which is why you’re not normally allowed to just play any point of the story on any disc. Discs 1 and 2 were also missing important data for the final boss, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
And so I embarked on my FFVII journey once more. I was finally able to control these characters before the events that would befall them in Disc 2. The wrong video files would play since the game was reading off the wrong disc, but I was able to see the bits of story that I hadn’t played, and make decisions in Cloud’s relationships that I hadn’t been able to before. Eventually, I reached a point of the story where I received a lore dump on the planet and its lifestream, but because of the way the scene was structured, it was impossible to proceed without the correct video file. I had to return to the debug room and skip past that one specific scene. I would later learn that the ‘MOVIE LOCK’ option would have helped bypass this issue by disabling FMV playback. Putting Cosmo Canyon aside, Disc 1 was a smooth-sailing experience.
Eventually, I reached the end of Disc 1, and while I didn’t get to see the video of that scene, I did see the aftermath. The game prompted me to switch to Disc 2. I played through Disc 2 a second time, and it prompted me to switch to Disc 3. I went back to the debug room to bypass the wrong disc error, locating the option that would allow me to start where Disc 3 began. I made it all the way to the end of the final dungeon and fought with the final boss. I had completed every sidequest and gotten every character to Level 99, which had the unfortunate consequence of boosting the boss’ stats. Normally, I would welcome that; however, the data for the enemy’s most infamous attack only existed on Disc 3, leading to a complicated situation.
In Final Fantasy XIV, there’s this term people like to use called ‘enrage’. It’s when the boss you are fighting decides it’s had enough of you and oneshots your party with a special attack. This is due to certain types of fights having a timer on them. Let’s say we’re fighting Leviathan, and we’re doing a really, really poor job of it. We’re not fighting optimally, we’re not equipped properly, and we have no idea how to deal with the boss mechanics. Our poor performance leads us to hit the 10 minute mark, at which point Leviathan will enter ‘enrage’ and just kill us and get it over with. Long story short, you weren’t playing to the standard required of the battle.
Well, Super Nova was my enrage in FFVII. Normally, the Super Nova attack can’t kill you in any version of the game that isn’t the original Japanese one. The attack looks extremely dramatic, and the big numbers that pop up make it seem as though your death is all but assured; however, the damage is percentage-based in the International releases and can never wipe your party. That being said, absolutely none of this mattered for my playthrough, because the game would crash if the final boss cast Super Nova. If the data for the attack isn’t there, the game can’t handle it and simply dies. Having no Disc 3 in my possession, I had no choice but to beat the boss before it was time for it to cast Super Nova.
After some amount of effort, I did it. I had beaten FFVII! Except I couldn’t watch the ending, because the entire thing was a video file! But don’t worry. I did, eventually, get my hands on the PC version of the game. I was able to play a relatively normal playthrough where I watched all the FMV sequences. I now own both the PAL and NTSC-U PlayStation releases. I have it on PS4, and I have it on Switch. I even have the mobile port and know all about the minor differences it has. I learnt to casually speedrun the game in under 12 hours just so I could stream the story to my friend without boring her with random battles. Don’t worry. I more than got there in the end.
The funny thing about all this is that I won’t be able to play the FFVII Remake trilogy and relive my original playthrough until Part 3 comes out. I’d need to play most of Part 3 on New Game+, then go back and play Remake on New Game+, then play Rebirth on New Game+, and then go back and play the rest of Part 3. Extremely convoluted, right? But that’s how it was. I’m not sure I’ll ever actually play the Remake trilogy in that manner, even just for the humour value, but it’s a thought that crosses my mind every now and again. Who knows? Never say never.
