Something needs to be addressed right off the Buster Sword here: This is not one of those lists that seeks to "prove" that Final Fantasy VII is overrated or doesn't hold up or was never that great to 🐬begin wit💧h.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing with things like this. Revered games can be criticized without being completely torn apart. We can be open to exploring the faults of a game we love without it taking away from our fondness for it and without it meaning that we're suggesting the game doesn't deserve its acclaim. Classic, beloved games don't have to be perfect—and in fact, they rarely are. Well, except for Tetris; that's a kind of perfect video game, honestly.

When Final Fantasy VII hit the PlayStation in 1997, it was a landmark release for a variety of reasons. It marked the first time a core installment in the franchise debuted on a non-Nintendo platform, it was the first time the series flirted with 3D graphics and full-motion cutscenes, and it marked Tetsuya Nomura's debut as main character designer. And it was millions of gamers' introduction to the franchise and to RPGs in general, bringing a🍨 formerly fairly niche genre into the mainstream.

While widely acclaimed at the time for all but a certain subset of jaded pre-existing FF diehards, FFVII has since become a frequent target of bloggers and YouTubers looking to take lauded games down a peg and show how wrong everyone is for loving them. Well, we think we can deconstruct and discuss FFVII's faults while still maintaining that it des♊erves its place in the video game pantheon.

25 ဣ Even The 𒉰Plot Holes Have Plot Holes

For most of your first playthrough of FFVII, you really only have a vague idea of the💛 overall plot, with most of it being an incomprehensible mess. And it only becomes more muddled as the game goes on, culminating with an ending that basically explains none of it.

What's worse are the dozens of tangents that spin off into their own little random st🔥ory threads that add nothing to the main plot and only serve to distract us from trying to actually figure out what in Jenova's name is going on. Fortunately, good stories aren't required to enjoy video games.

24 Can We Just Pick A Look, Please? ♓ 🔜

Final Fantasy VII went through a long💝 development process that stretched all the way back into the SNES days, with the team initially not really being 100% sure what platform the game was going to end up on.

Once the PS1 was decided on, too much work had already been done on certain aspects of the game to change them.

The res🌺ult are in-world characters that resembled how 3D models looked on the SNES, which jarringly transition into better-looking versions of those same characters for battles and half the cutscenes. It's like switching between their child and adult version🔯s.

23 Summoning A Nap 🃏

The first time you perfor▨med a new summon, you watched it with mouth agape, certain that you would never get tired of it. The 100th ൲time you watched it, you wished it was the future and you could check Facebook on your phone while the summon played out.

In Square's defense, skipping c♊utscenes wasn't really a thing back then. And they clearly put a lot of work into them and wanted you to appreciate that. But as the summon animations stretched beyond the one-minute mark, it just got to be too much to watch them again and again and again.

22 🎐 Forgetting To Avoid Cliche

The ironic thing about using amnesia as a pl♋ot device is how writers seem to forget that it's onﷺe of the most overused cliches in all of fiction.

How do we have the main protagonist discover things about his past over the course of the game so that players can discover those things too? Amnesia, of course!

Even in 1997, amnesia was already overdone in video games. It's just a lazy way to make a character a blank slate and be able to surprise him with basic information during a stor๊y.

21 ꦐ FF🅺VII: An M. Night Shyamalan Game

The other thing that an amnesiac main character allows is being blindsided by major twists about himself. One of FFVII's biggest⛄ twists—other than the passing of a certain main character—is that what Cloud thinks are his memories are actually the memories of someone named Zack, who was Cloud's friend.

Or something like that. The whole Cloud/Zack thing seems mind-blowing when it happens, but unsurprisin🍸gly it all very quickly falls apart from a logic standpoint when you apply even the tiniest bit of scrutiny to it. Like time travel stories, it's best not to think about it too much.

20 🍎 Hindsight Is 20/20

Losing Aeris was a gut punch for a lot of FFVII players, many calling it the fi🌺rst time a game made them cry.

All emotional nonsense aside, Aeris' early departure presents some complications for completionists.

Almost everyone lost Aeris the first time through without maxing her out ♏and getting all her stuff. And those that tried to do it on their next playthrough found that the game doesn't really make things that much easier to do that for her, forcing 100% seekers to bring all other forward progress to a screeching halt as they grind Aeris for hours and hours.

19 ꦿ The Sounds Of Nostalgia 🏅

"One-Winged Angel" is one of the most iconic pieces of music in Final Fantasy history. That, along with other standout tracks like "Jenova" and the main/overworld theme, make FFVII's soundtrack very popular.

The thing is, though, there really isn't much else beyond that. When you sit down and actually listen to FFVII's soundtrack, the majo꧑rity of the tracks are actually fairly generic, droning background tracks that barely classify as songs. In addition, while we tend to associate the soundtrack with the orchestral arrangements we've heard since, the musi🎃c in the original game was entirely electronic and has aged pretty poorly.

18 Sephiroth Is A Tedd༒y Bear

Through most of our playthrough of FFVII, the game goes through ဣgreat lengths to inform us how evil and scary Sephiroth is. From offing one of the main characters to that famous scene where he is literally standing in flames, we're made to t⛦hink Sephiroth is one bad dude.

In actuality, Sephiroth is kind of tame as far as Final Fantasy villains go.

Especially following FFVI's Kefka, who was completely deranged and literally destroyed the world basically just to do it, Sephiroth just doesn't feel as menacing as he's made out t💛o be.

17 🅘 Which Way Do I Go!?

Discussions about how well they have or havenꦫ't aged aside, pre-rendered backgrounds were necessary in the 90s as a way to have gorgeous "3D" environments before technology allowed actual polygons to look that good.

Few developers knew how to better-utilized pre-rendered backgrounds during the PS1 era than Square did, and even as early as FFVII they were beautiful and pack𓃲ed with detail. The problem is that actually interacting with them could be a pain, between not knowing what is or isn't a navigable platform and getting in just the right spot to open a door or jump onto a ladder.

16 Imaginꦦe That... Another Battle

Ah, the dreaded random battle, scourge of RPGs since they beginning of (their) time. It might not be fair to take FFVII to task for something that many, many RPGs are guilty of—especially JRPGs—but when it was released it seemed as though some of its peers were beginning to step away fro🍸m random battles  or at least toned them down.

The random battles in FFVII just happen way ๊too often, and are especially annoying because the game has so many interesting locations that you really want to explore every nook and cranny of.