/vr/ - Retro Games

Honestly reading this thread I really do think FF7 was so successful compared to past games almost solely due to its graphics and its sort of a shame that ended up being the case. Lots of talking points of what people love about FF7 happened in other games in the series. Even the whole leaving Midgar to find it was a tiny part of a larger world thing was done in FF3 with the floating continent, and that was on the NES. It kind of makes sense why there was such a bitter FF6 vs FF7 debate back in the day, the people who grew up with the SNES titles were probably annoyed the series exploded in popularity because of 3D graphics despite the fundamental gameplay and storytelling being unchanged.

That being said I think this game's cultural impact mandating 3D graphics in JRPGs held the genre back for a while since the PS1 was being pushed hard to make 3D graphics as is so things like party member sizes and enemy counts had to be scaled down, and it was much more dangerous to stray from random encounters like Chrono Trigger did due to model limits.

I can't blame them because its what sold at the time, its just kind of ironic to think these days the low-poly look isn't nearly as popular as the pixel look for indie games, when the low-poly 3D graphics were enough for devs back then to make gameplay sacrifices to implement.