Ideas and Thoughts: Final Fantasy VII: The Fittage: The Legend Continues

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9-Jan-98

Today at lunch Chad, Chet, and I were further discussing the FF VII thing.  Here are 2 rather interesting answers to questions posed to Chad...

Which do you like better, FF VII or FF III?  Answer: FF VII

If FF VII had FF III's graphics, which would you like better.  Answer: FF III

So the graphics are what put FF VII at the top for Chad.  I'd been wondering what he meant when he said that putting it on 64DD would make it a crappy game, nothing special, wouldn't pass Nintendo's quality control, etc.  Evidently he's saying that without those stupendous graphics, FF VII wouldn't be that great.  :)  I can't remember exactly how he put it today, but FF VII the game is good, but with the prerendered FMV and backgrounds, it's superb... oh, and something else interesting.  I asked him "If they made a version of FF III with 300 MB of textures, would you then say it would be impossible to fit FF III on a cart?" to which he answered "Yes.".  I'll leave you to make your own conclusions.  Now I pose this question to Chad:

OK, we've been assuming downsizing FF VII.  What if we upsized FF III?  Let's make it's graphics similar to FF VII.  By that, I mean that characters are polygons, but the backgrounds are sprites, and that battle is 3D.  The other day I used the high number of 2 MB of FF III is graphics.  I checked out the ROM, and found it to be closer to a little over 1.  But much of that is characters and such, which would be polygons, so let's say that without characters/enemies, the rest of FF IIIs textures/sprites would take up 3/4 MB.  I'm going to use about the same numbers as I ended up with my FF VII choppings down, and I left 20 MB for this.  That's over 26 times what FF III has.  Now, remember my 2nd FF VII thing, where I talked about how you could use extra graphics space in 2D games (and face it, FF VII plays about the same as it's more 2D predecessors).  But the things we have left are things which usually wouldn't have much animation to it.  But I'll still count doubling the animation for all the things.  Including that, we can still have 13x the textures/sprites of FF III.  But we're not going to leave them as they are.  Oh, no.  They're going to be rendered, so the end effect is (and haven't I brought this up before?) a Super SMRPG.  I don't really recall any minigames in FF III, so we needn't worry about using space for that.  The program data in the FF VII figurings is 14.  I'll cut that down to... 5 here.  I mean, the engine for FF III was already something below 3 MB, and I don't see how that much more would be needed for this... I'm also going to put the world data down to 8 MB.  Well, I had FF VII chopped down to 74 MB, and for this I've chopped down 16 more!  Down to 58 MB.  Under the size of a single 64DD disk.  From there I'm not sure what'd happen.  I mean, 6 more MB could be added on (perhaps onto that magic which seemed so complained about), but then you'd have to save on a memory pak.  4 games should be able to be saved on 1, though.  Why not just save it on the 64DD?  Well, remember that there's only so many preset readable/writeable combinations.  Perhaps the lowest writeable is 5 MB or something?  Is it really worth taking all that if the only thing it would be used for was saving games?  I don't know.

Anyways, if this was done, which would you like better: The above FF III or FF VII?

Now, again, I'm going to take Chad's latest (though not the full thing like before), and take it bit by bit.

a game that large could not possibly have the same graphics as the Playstation version

Not exactly the same.  But you wouldn't consider it bad unless you were comparing it to the PlayStation version and got ticked at the reuse of potted plants.

Do I hear graphic that you are slashing graphic quality?

Abadyabadyab that's all folks!  And the answer is no.  Not quality.  Quantity.

FFVII just would not be the same if put in an FFIII form.  I'm not saying it couldn't be done.  I am saying that they would have to remake the game to do it.

And again I don't see the difference between making a new 2D or 3D version.  Either way they'd have to remake it.  That's my point.  I think I see you're thinking that for a 3D version, it would be easy enough to take the 3D models and what-not, and port them over to the N64.  I'd hope they'd redo them, since the N64 could have them look better and all.

Maybe it would sell.  Definitely not to 1,000,000 people like the Playstation version did, but it would sell.

Remember that that's 1 million in all of North America, not the US, where it's sold something like 600,000.  Also remember Cruis'n USA has sold well over a million copies.  Also realize many N64 owners are dying for an RPG.  Yeah, I'm sure it'd sell well.

But, if they are going to remake the game to put it into an FFIII engine they might as well just make another game so it would sell to people with both a playstation and an N64.  Would this not be the logical approach?

This is the approach I'm suggesting... sorta.  Remember that my point is just to say that FF VII on 64DD wouldn't be impossible, and that making a game especially designed with the 64DD in mind would be even better.

In conclusion,  today I will admit that FFVII DD is possible.  However, it is not logical to do this by using the change that Josh has suggested.  I would suggest to Square to make a new game with the 64DD in mind that uses full advantage of the features of the 64 and the DD.  That would probably be a better game than FFVII anyway.

OK, I can for the most part agree with that statement.

Note from the author:  I am not in any way biased against the Nintendo 64.  Actually, I am probably biased against the Playstation if any.  The Playstation doesn't have many good games on its system.  I would not recommend a Playstation to anyone except those die-hard Squaresoft fans like myself.

Or for those Square fans like me who can't wait for the PC FF VII, of course.  And about the subject of not many good games on PlayStation, let me tell you that I also had the chance to play Tomb Raider and Resident Evil for a bit.  The most enjoyment I got out of those games was drowning Lara in her pool and watching RE's cheesy FMV.

Joshua Slone quotes Dali... "The only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad!"