Wednesday 4 July 2012

FINAL FANTASY VII due for PC re-release

Square Enix have confirmed that they are re-releasing Final Fantasy VII on the PC 'soon'.


Before anyone gets too excited, this is a simple re-issuing of the 1998 PC port of Final Fantasy VII, updated to work with modern PCs. There have been no graphical updates (beyond the fact that the original PC version had higher-resolution 3D models than the PlayStation version anyway). There is also no word on if the original game's two biggest problems - a subpar English translation and unskippable, lengthy cut scenes - have been addressed. According to the website, the character many Europeans and Americans know as 'Aeris' has had her original Japanese name of 'Aerith' reinstated, however (this change did make it into some Western reissues of the original game as well).

There's been rumours for a while that Square was looking at reissuing Final Fantasy VII and VIII (the only two to be ported to the PC, aside from the multiplayer XI and XIV), initially through Steam. The current press release confirms that the re-release of VII will be through Square's own online distribution platform.

Interesting news. If the cut scene problem has been fixed - I have no wish to sit through Sephiroth's Supernova spell (the animation for which lasts for 2 minutes and 20 seconds) twenty times in rapid succession ever again - than this will be worthwhile.

2 comments:

John said...

Suuuuuch a good idea. The "Ultima" edition is barely playable in Windows 7.

Lagomorph Rex said...

For me, a bigger deal would be the sound track. Having played both the Playstation and PC ports of this game.. the crap MIDI track that came with the PC game really dragged it down.

In my opinion though the PC game already fixed quite a few of the games problems.. but not having to install a bunch of 3rd party patches to get past the Chocobo Racing and Submarine fights would be a great thing..

That said, there are still a lot of serious problems with the game, mostly stemming from the poor translation job.. the cut scenes don't bother me at all..

Now, I'll sit back and wait for all the people moaning about how it should be FF6 with Kefka getting a re-release instead..