Final Fantasy VII - The Awful Scrapped Nintendo 64 Version

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Final Fantasy VII literally sold systems. Not only do I believe that it single-handedly pushed the Playstation into the dominating position it held for so long, it personally sold me on a Playstation back when I was a teenager working at McDonalds. In fact, I actually purchased Final Fantasy VII first, before I actually owned a Playstation. I remember going to high school, working at McDonalds and just itching for my next paycheck so I could finally buy a Playstation and play my game. For a solid week, I read FF7's instruction manual several times a day, twitching with anticipation. I did finally get my Playstation and when I booted the game up for the first time, it was absolutely everything I had hoped for. Funnily enough, I had my Playstation and I had my FF7 but I did not have a memory card. I didn't realize I needed one. I had previously owned a Sega CD and while it has 'memory cards' in the form of full sized Sega Genesis cartridges, it had some small amount of built in storage to play and save your Sega CD games. The memory card cartridge(s) were completely optional in order to expand your storage capacity. However, everyone that ever owned a PS1 knows that a memory card was NOT optional in order to save your games. They were mandatory. This did not work well with a game like Final Fantasy VII. So, when I played my game and realized I couldn't save my game, my poor system was on for about 3 days straight before I convinced my brother's girlfriend (I didn't have a car at the time and walked back and forth to work) to run me up to Gamestop to buy a memory card. To this day, it's one of my favorite memories and I can honestly say, it's all due to Final Fantasy VII. Had it come out on the N64, I would have bought that instead. But I was so impressed with the Playstation that I never owned an N64 and have actually never owned a Nintendo console since (excluding handhelds like the 3DS). That game sold me on Playstation and I've never regretted it. Oh, and before people respond saying I missed out on some great Nintendo classics, I've played them. Between family and friends having them, I've probably played all the games worth mentioning. But, I personally haven't owned a Nintendo console since the SNES.

Isn’t it ironic how decades later FFVII would eventually come to a Nintendo system, that uses cartridges no less?

The Sega Saturn sitting there like 😐

It's not lost, it was never made.

Hmm. The "N64 version" was an FFVI tech demo, and it doesn't even look bad. The models look similar to what they eventually ended up using for VII. I don't think that demo looked "awful," and if they had ended up making a shorter, less-impressive FFVII for N64, it most likely would have ended up being a good game, albeit a different game that was compromised from their lofty vision. We'd probably still be talking about how groundbreaking the game was, much like people are still talking about Ocarina of Time today.

Considering that version of the game never got out of the early alpha stage. Squaresoft, never made more than a tech demo. It's kind of unfair to label a project that never came close to being finished awful. It's hard to say what the game would of been like on the N64.

I remember well all the excitement and expectation over FFVII on the N64!! I was so excited. We used to discuss it in the echoes on fidonet, just before I got the internet. We would speculate wildly about how it might come out on the "Bulky Drive" (as the 64DD was referred to at the time) and how it could be a vast open world with data being written and read from the drive. I miss those days. I did end up buying a Japanese N64 in the summer of 1996 for about 600 quid (a huge amount for me). That summer was so good....

I’m betting the third part will be released on the 30th anniversary of the original game.

Eerie to see the Japanese cover art for dragon quest right after finding out that Toriyama Akira passed away a few days ago.

Do you get withdrawal symptoms when you don’t use Akuma’s 3do theme in a video?

It really is interesting to consider what an N64 FF7 would have looked like. I've heard it said that it would have taken a crazy amount of cartridges (12? 24? 100?) to port the game to N64 exactly as it was on PS1, and I don't doubt that. However, "Resident Evil 2" gives us a road map of how an ambitious multi-disk game might have been translated to cartridge. More than anything, it would involve nerfing the audio down to midi levels and substantially reducing the number of animated cutscenes, if not getting rid of them altogether in favor of subtitled screen caps. Even then, it might have been necessary to push it to at least two cartridges requiring some sort of elaborate password or save data recognition system to make it work, and two cartridges might have made it unacceptably pricey to produce. Part of me still wishes Square-Enix had attempted it, though, because it would have been a cool point of comparison, a godsend for the awful N64 RPG scene, and Nintendo could have marketed the absence of load times as a perk of their version.

I remember watching the previews back in the 90s lol It took me a few hours to download the video. I do not miss the dial-up days at all, but I did miss my childhood.

Not going CD was the N64s biggest downfall. As for the game running better on N64 or PS1 - Randomly comparing unoptimised code isn't a performance measure by any means. Take for instance we see many console to PC ports struggle today despite running on PCs at over 2x the power. The N64 was a complex system like the Saturn and had piss poor development kits that were completely unoptimised for making games. The N64 also required an insane level of advanced technical knowledge (most of which is now only available and being learnt today - basic optimisations in DKR led to an 2x performance increase on real hardware) The PS1 was simply basic and straightforward, combined with CD and an easy to use GDK sum up why it was the best system to develop on in that era.

Imagin having several Final Fantasy ideas before the actuall version came out for it, 1 of those being Xenogears which than became a game franchise on its own.

Toriyama just passed rest in piece

If Nintendo had the CD rom format for the N64, boy oh boy the N64 and PS1 would’ve had an intense heated rivalry. Nintendo would’ve potentially dominated and won. Imagine having OOT and FFVII on the same system.

If I recall at the time the reason Nintendo went with a cartridge system is because CDs for gaming were kind of new but have been around for music for a while by then - and I think they were scared that piracy would be a lot easier with a CD system. The ironic thing is that years later it was a lot easier to emulate the N64 than the Playstation. As a kid I was kind of mad that there were no good turned based RPGs on the N64.

Would've been sick on the n64 - they would have to remove the cutscenes but it would've had next to no loading times

This stuff about the PS1 being more powerful than the N64 is counter to literally every other source I've seen talking about the differences between the two.