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Archives for March, 2021

The Dust Storm Cometh

March 30th, 2021

From the office it doesn’t look so bad…

Say what you like about British weather, but I’ve never seen “sand, hazardous” before

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Final Fantasy VII

March 8th, 2021

The last few months I’ve been playing through the PC version of Final Fantasy VII. I first played this on the original PlayStation way back around year 9 in secondary school and it was the first time I’d played any kind of Japanese RPG.

Emerald Weapon


One of my friends was obsessed with the game and the lore around it. He had the golden Chocobo, all the materia and summons, and defeated both the Emerald and Ruby Weapon “superbosses”. I think I just played the main story through to the end and didn’t bother much with the optional content.

Press [OK] to slap…


I love the pre-rendered backgrounds, reminiscent of PC point-and-click adventure games of the same era. However they look a bit pixelated when scaled up on a large monitor (apparently they lost the original 3D scenes). The character models look great on a modern system though.

A regular battle


The story is great too and has tons of memorable characters (albeit mostly the antagonists). There’s a lot more depth to the story than I realised as a teenager. Perhaps my understanding at that time was hampered by the dodgy English translation, but it has a certain charm. I also much prefer the “science-plus-magic” setting to the common fantasy one, it’s almost a bit cyberpunk.

Finally got to level 99


What’s not great? Well it’s kinda easy: once you’ve figured out some tricks with the materia system the main story doesn’t have much challenge. I wish there was a configurable difficulty level (I heard the PC version has a mod to do this but haven’t tried). And the occasional mini-games, especially the snowboarding one, are annoying and haven’t aged well.

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