Final Fantasy 7 comes to PC once again.

The list of new features is a little unimpressive:

-Achievements – a means to push you to see all the content in a game? Or utterly useless gimmick?
-a built-in cheat mode – okay, that could be useful for casual players who don’t want to level grind for a week to beat a boss.
-Cloud saves – haha.

What we don’t get is what we’d most wish for: some sort of graphical facelift. I guess a brand new shiny engine would be too much to ask for, but couldn’t we at least have a high-resolution version ,in these days of 1920×1080 being commonplace?

Still! This is worth it just for the sake of the FF7 being easily available on PC once again. I believe this is the first time it’s been on digital distribution. Meanwhile ebay copies frequently cleared £20. I guess they were relatively rare since I never actually saw the game in shops much, or any sort of Sold-Out style budget treatment. Now you can get it for a tenner. (or £8 until september 12th).

I’m tempted just cos my own copy was, ahem, pirated. And I cheated on the endgame. I always felt I wanted to give it another shot.

Anyway to any RPG fans who have so far missed out, i’d recommend it. Sure it’s been somewhat heavily over-hyped over the years. Also I was never a big fan of the combat. But it does have decent characters, and a genuinely compelling and moving storyline that kept me guessing to the end. Here are my thoughts, from when the game was half as old as it is now but they still mostly hold.

[edit]My orignal comments on graphics were a little misleading. Character models have been sharpened up, as have the battle scenes. The pre-rendered backgrounds are however untouched and thus look rather muddy.