Final Fantasy 7's Beautiful & Baffling Designs | Design Delve

This was a really great video and I enjoyed the longer format. I missed the vote, but Vagrant Story has always been my favorite example of a potential BEST GAME OF ALL TIME obscured by one of the worst menu systems ever created. All you'd need to do for a remake is add swappable loadouts and I'd pay full price

I first tried FF7 in 2013 and while I could see why it was a revelation at the time it was a bit too dated for me to stick with after the Gold Saucer. But hearing about all of this has been fascinating, love hearing about those little differences between good games and classics.

I am all here for JM8's JRPG arc. There are a *lot* of peak JRPGs in the PS1 era, games that influenced gaming as a whole, and FF7 is only the most obvious example of that. Hearing JM8 talk about the creative things SE did to make FF7 fit on four disks makes me nostalgic for old game development. The things that developers had to do in order for the game to work is truly staggering. Nowadays things just work because the code exists or big name publishers can just throw enough money at it to make it work but the amount of things that devs worked out to do on limited disk space with limited graphical capability makes for a college course all on its own. The example that really sells me on this idea is the old FPS game Chasm. It's hard to explain (I'm not even sure of the specifics) but the best way I can put it is that it's a nearly 3D game developed on the Doom engine and it's nearly impossible to tell unless you know what to look for.

Your Twitch live edit was a fun peek behind the curtain. The danger meter was new info for me and explains why it never felt truly random. Glad to see you enjoyed this classic

Liked this. Felt a bit Old Skool Design Delve. ...and such a good game. Some of the more Pixel Hunty gripes and obscure route-mapping never felt like such issues in the late-90s when you'd probably only have a couple of games that you'd replay to death over the course of multiple years. Anyway, good stuff, J.

Oh my God real-life Ludo is adorable! What's her breed? She looks like maybe a poodle-cocker spaniel cross? On the topic of retro games to cover I would like to suggest Parasite Eve, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, and if you are feeling REALLY ambitious, Xenogears.

Since I don't use Twitch and there for can't vote, I hope he will one day play FF9. It is by far the best FF of the time and yet, much like Wind Waker was for Zelda, it was completely over looked because of assumptions made about its art style.