<<Previously
While resentment over royalties would lead Nintendo to undermine the Super Famicom's CD-ROM adapter, the Play Station, in the early days few developers foresaw this troublesome spite. Indeed, Square's
Secret of Mana seemed poised to usher in a new era of excellence for video games. Its gorgeous animation, CD-quality music, and sprawling story with multiple pathways to varied endings altogether seemed like a miracle. For a time the game was the most talked about in Japan, selling nearly half a million copies in total and helping move previously tepidly-received Play Station hardware units.
Overseas, however,
Secret of Mana didn't have the strength of the Square brand to support it and JRPGs were years away from mass popularity. Few Westerns had even purchased a "SNES-CD". Its high price and lack of First Party content, which was never to arrive after multiple 'delays', soured parents on such a high-priced toy, especially coming on the heels of having to buy a whole new Nintendo system that didn't even play NES games. Thus,
Secret of Mana flopped hard
because the Play Station had flopped — overseas.
In Japan, however, it helped carve out an ecosystem for Third Party developers interested in exploring the possibilities of CD gaming, especially as they lacked the financial incentives Nintendo did about focusing solely on cartridges. It was quite the opposite, in fact. The main limit was the modest install base and lack of export market. The former would gradually increase over the Play Station's lifespan. The latter would never materialize, alas.
To the horror and envy of Western gamers, the Japanese market alone supported a modest but vibrant ecosystem for the Nintendo Play Station, boasting many games that either never made their way overseas or had to be striped to the bones for a "cartridge port". This included many JRPGs. Western role-playing game fans might identify
Secret of Evermore or
Final Fantasy 3 as their favorite role-playing games of the SNES Era. Names familiar to Japanese players would only be known to them thanks to fuzzy screenshots in gaming magazines:
Terranigma, Final Fantasy V, Seiken Densetsu 3, and of course...
Where
Final Fantasy V had seriously suffered from lag in its "CD port" while battle screens loaded, and
Final Fantasy VI had featured limited voice acting only during cut scenes that featured in-game sprite assets,
Final Fantasy VII had been designed from the ground up with the CD format in mind. Indeed, it lacked a "cartridge port" due to its sheer size, and stands as one of a handful of Play Station games that spans two discs. With voice acting for the main characters and a handful of 'anime'-style cut scenes, and a darker more mature plot that presaged many JRPGs of the following console generation,
Final Fantasy VII represents a bridge between the Golden and Silver Ages of JRPGs. This quality is often overlooked by Western players due to the decade-long delay in the game's export.
Final Fantasy VII is set primarily in a steampunk analogue of New York City, Midgar, and follows 'Joe' — a private eye — as he investigates a series of eco-terrorist bombings. The trail leads him across a colorful cast of characters from all social levels of the city, until circumstances force him to side with the very criminals he was hunting. But as Joe trapses across the world, following clues about the missing years of the mysterious Sorceress Eden, he finds himself forced to question not only the effectiveness of his hot-blooded nature but his
human nature as well...