There is a correction that has been made in multiple interviews. "Final"wasn't talking about Square itself going down. It was talking that it might have been Sakaguchi's final game with square and that he would have gone back to college.
I love the N64, but I’m so glad that FFVII came to the PSX… It ignited my interest in JRPG’s when I first ventured from Nintendo consoles, and the fact it was a 3 disc game was insanity at the time.
This was the very first game I stood in line for in 1997. Final Fantasy VII was like an epiphany for the gaming industry. What an amazing thing to live through. Thank you Lady Decade for not only taking me down memory lane but showing me things I didn't know. I was always under the impression that Squaresoft cut from Nintendo very early in FFVII's development...like before anything was really done with it. Seeing pictures of FFVII on the Super Famicom blew my freaking mind. This, this right here is why I'm a subscriber. Addendum- I wonder what would have happened had Sega approached Square first? That could have been mighty interesting as well. ;)
@@thomasbeall9069 Your missing the point. It's also funny how history is repeating itself. Sony is now in the same position as Nintendo was during the N64 vs PS1 era. Nintendo is catering to smaller studios while Sony is catering to bigger studios with bigger games. You can see this by looking at the Japanese chart every month and the way Sony is censoring games on its console. "Dont ever come back," well, guess what? Square Enix have games on Switch. Even if the games aren't big titles, the point is...they're back! There is no such thing as loyalty even if Sony owns a small fraction of Square. In the end, its all about money. Even Sora was just announced for Smash.
Final Fantasy VII was basically one of the reasons I wanted a Playstation in the first place. Also one of the commercials is how I knew about the Franchise at the time. My only clue of what Final Fantasy is like was in Super Mario RPG with a Boss called Culex which has the FFIV Boss Theme and the first time ever hearing the trademark Victory Fanfare. Again, at the time I had to choose between the original Playstation and Nintendo 64. If I chose Nintendo 64, I would have played Super Mario 64, but if I chose Playstation, I would have played Final Fantasy VII. In the end, me and my brothers went with Playstation. Because of that, I've been a Fan of Resident Evil, Metal Gear, Tekken, Ehrgeiz, Bushido Blade and Alone In The Dark. Also Symphony Of The Night is how I know about the Castlevania Series.
not only final fantasy, Legend of dragoons was as awesome as final fantasy 7 and many many more games on the ps one was waaaay better then the N64 games and all because Nintendo did not listen as they do today and do not listen to the customers. The new Nintendo switch have nothing new and only a new Oled Display (Rly ?) yes if you want to play 30 fps 720p (yes in 2021) then nintendo doing something very very wrong because 1080p is standard many years ago on the last gem console and they reach 30 to 60 fps always. (Ps4/xbox one) are last gen.
@@allxtend4005 Not to mention that Limited Time Sale for the Super Mario 3D Collection and that NES Fire Emblem game. Plus 4K is the thing now. Also Nintendo should have Metal Gear Titles based on the Legacy Collection, Tekken, Soul Calibur, Dead Or Alive and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on Switch.
@@DaRkLoRd-rc5yu FF6(Super Famicom) was called FF3 on the Super Nintendo, and is considered by most to be the greatest Final Fantasy game of all time. Had such a huge dramatic story with so many characters you could add to your party each having their own backstory (aside from a few optional characters that didn't have much backstory), and arguably the best villain in Final Fantasy history.
@@KingNekroI’ve never fully understood the hype over FF7. It’s a good game but like you said it really doesn’t hold a candle to FF6,5, and 4. Plus going from the beautiful 16 bit graphics to ugly polygonal graphics in hindsight is kinda rough to go back to. I understand the hype back then going from 2D to 3D but nobody in their right mind would say that FF7 looks or plays better than 4,5, and 6.
@@KingNekro I'll back you on it being one of the best of its day, and still standing the test of time even now - leagues ahead of more modern FF and other JRPG titles. The single greatest? Ehh.. Yoshinori Kitase would agree based on his obsession with Celes alone. Me? I would say tied with FF7 and FF9 for that title. My late wife preferred FF10 over all others, with FF8 a close second.
I'm sure Square could have come up with an amazing Final Fantasy 7 game on the N64 if they had to, it just would have been wildly different to the PS1 version in direction and style due to storage limitations.
Considering that the game was spread over 3 discs with a total of 1.3 GB of game data and the maximum capacity of an N64 cartridge was 64mb (in the later years and with updated chipset)----Making a game even remotely similar to FF7 would simply be impossible, no amount of coding witchcraft could compensate for the discrepancy in storage.
@@zxb995511 like the OP said, it would be a different game of course. It would like have compressed/midi audio, use in game cinematic instead of video and less reliance on pre rendered backgrounds. A lot of amazing stuff in gaming and movies as well, was done by being creative when dealing with limitations. When you don't have such limitations? You start getting crazy and things get bloated. One just needs to look at modern gaming, especially with PC where power is practically limitless and so many games are beyond 75GB, poorly optimized or relying on third party game engines that are bloated in themselves. It's why AAA Switch ports are interesting because while some developers are talented and can make a Switch ports look good but others are hot garbage and look no better than PS2. When you read or watch old developer tricks, it's amazing some of the stuff they did to make certain things happen and how much work went into it. Now, also because games are so big now, optimization seems to be looking for typos and redundancy in code rather than creatively reducing resources. Don't get me wrong. N64 was difficult to develop for but a lot of games, especially near the end of its life span, showed what the system was truly capable of. Especially without the expansion pack and tinkering with microcode.
@@metalninjajesus1580 Yeah, I'd honestly love to be able to jump to a parallel universe where Square stuck with Nintendo and scaled back, making measured decisions in development. Just to see what such a game would look like in a Marvel style "What If?". Just what could they have done in such a constrained environment? How much could they accomplish versus how much would they cut out? If you don't choose to die on the hills of things like CD quality audio and prerendered FMV (though virtually everything that FF7 did, the N64 could accomplish albeit on a much smaller scale; Resident Evil 2 had full FMVs, Zelda had areas with prerendered backgrounds, Shadows of the Empire had (highly compressed) full waveform analog soundtrack... still, if you want to make a huge game you need to choose your battles wisely), it cuts out a lot of needed storage. There's a lot of things that could have been around the N64, coincidentally enough. What if Nintendo had gone with optical media instead? What if the 64DD hadn't flopped? And so on.
There wouldn't be any FMV. It would have been done with the character models as it was in the previous titles. Overworld models and combat models would have also been the same. Pre-rendered backgrounds also would have been limited. It probably would have looked a lot more than FFVI than the VII we know...not counting Remake.
But what's funnier is that the 3D ones actually aged better because they are more renown. Compare 7/8/9/10 to the NES ones and see which will sell better lol
@@josevanz7654 I absolutely love the traditional 2d jrpg and have only played less than 10 3D ones. I’m just not into the 3D ones especially the first gen ones
Games with pixel art or pre-rendered graphics, compared with early 3D, are a lot of times more aesthetically pleasing and aged more gracefully, but are more difficult to remaster/enhance, if you don't have access to the "source" artwork. On the other hand, cutting edge 3D gets blunt early, but it's more easy to get it sharp. Just check the mods for a lot of 3D games: Many of them include artwork enhancement.
Nintendo perceiving that developers leaving their system in-droves because Square left is one of those short-sighted excuses I remember hearing at the time. It's easier with hindsight to see the bigger picture, but even at the time the confusion of Nintendo's decision to use cartridges was a baffling choice. This is off the top of my head, but the SNES had over 1,700 releases. The N64 barely had like 390 and then the Playstation had like 4,000 or some ludicrous number. The industry was clearly moving to higher storage format (CDRoms) Just with JRPG's alone, even the more less succesful systems like the SegaCD and Turbografx showed a clear line of where the genre's development was moving. When Wild Arms had it's first screenshots released I remember realizing that Nintendo was in-trouble. This isn't to discredit the monumental impact FFVII had on Japanese game development in-general, the JRPG genre and the tech that was used. But as much as I love the N64, Nintendo really dropped the ball hard when it came to it's hardware and maintaining it's relationships with several developers. The N64 is an incredibly weird system. On one-hand it has some of the best Nintendo game's and titles ever made in gaming, and even ushered entire genres on how to use 3D. On the other-hand... By any other metric it was kinda a disaster.
It wasn’t clear then, Sega CD and Saturn never lived up to Genesis (they did but wasn’t seen that way) CD lasers were sensitive at first. Sony made trash hardware form most of its PSone run. Many of its numbers are rebuys, while N64 was solid.
I always say that Nintendo had the best 3D adventure games, party games and first person shooters, and wrestling games. PlayStation had the best JRPGs, fighting games, 3rd person shooters, and shoot em ups.
But you have to admit the hardware choice for Nintendo was the pinnacle of the industry, MIPS processor with decent floating point capability, Z-Buffer, etc and consider CD-ROM drive price back days, it has to sacrifice to make the console in reasonable price.
Well said! I dont think the 64 was a disaster but i can see why u said that so i must say on a whole scale you are right. Nintendo made huge mistakes starting with the n64. At the end of the day nintendo is still the best company. U know which game bested ff7 though? ZELDA Ocarina of Time🤣🤣🤣 ALSO THE SWITCH IS KILLING IT right now. Not even the series x and ps5 can stop them right now until something change. Kudos to Sony though for turning the video game industry on it its and forcred Nintendo's hand to switch it up
@@thomasbeall9069 don't know if i can agree to that, well mabye a little not of it. It was Sony's first time in the video game industry so faulty consoles is undertandable, but a sale is a sale non the less. Same could be said about the 360, the red ring of death fiasco but people forgave them and kept buying them because of the games and they eventually fixed the problem same go's for the ps1
Before FFVII was released I seriously considered getting a PlayStation, but would have to use the 'just incase' money I put aside for unforseen expenses, but the moment I played it at a friend's house I went out and bought one.
I have a similar story. I was a big gamer back then and followed the news closely. I had some interest in the PlayStation, but when Square announced that they were jumping ship I saved up my summer job money for a PlayStation and got it asap.
Regarding how Nintendo reacted, I'm inclined to believe the harsher of the versions because it'd make sense that Square would steer away from bad mouthing them during the GameCube era (which WOULD get a FF game) to avoid burning [further] bridges.
@@allxtend4005 so the Wii and Switch isn't innovation. On the Switch, you can take the same games you play on your TV on the go. Nintendo is the only gaming company that is innovating all the time. The Wii was the 1st console that main control to play games was using motion control.
The mid-90's was such a chaotic time for the video game industry. In the span of a few years we went from 8-bit graphics to 3D polygons and full motion video. Technology was evolving at a dizzying pace. It's amazing how Square was able to create FFVII in this environment. It really paved the way forward for the entire industry.
And then, nothing much changet since 2003 or at least 2005. First and last GRID comparisons are interesting, together with older wolfensteins looking better than new ones. But you still need faster graphics 🤔
I remember buying the game back when it was released. It had such high review scores, I couldn't ignore it. But I had no experience with JRPGs. I found it difficult to understand the game play. and just couldn't get into it. I wanted to return it and get another game instead, but the store had nothing else interesting instead. So I decided to keep it. This was the best choice I ever made. Now I love the game, and it's one of my favorites of all time.
I still remember getting the first Final Fantasy on NES for Christmas as a kid and how excited I was. Quality series to this day. Great video, what a bit of nostalgia 😁
Not a fan of how it has been turned into an action game. I miss the turn based FF formula. FF6 and 7. Had the absolute best system. It should have never changed.
@@chrisd8458 nah X-2 and XII has the best turn based battle system with better Job systems also Square Enix will never stay on a traditional turn based jrpg in the mainline titles because they want to innovate a battle system in every new entry in the series
That explains why Square left Nintendo, but doesn't quite explain why they didn't release FF7 on the Saturn or even the 3DO, as both had 3D capacilities and had CD-rom storage. Like.. Why not try to even port the game to other systems?
Easy answer. At that time for around 10 years or so Sony owned more then 50% of Squaresofts stock thus having a controlling interest in the company. After that 10 years Sony took some money off the table for other investments and relaxed controlling interest which is why you saw a GameCube FF offshoot game. However for the longest time they had exclusive rights to the mainline FF games even then. It seriously wasn’t until FF13 when Square spoke up and that game got an XBOX release. Point is. Sony wouldn’t let them and at that time with how well the company was doing, Square didn’t seem to care about doing something like that.
i actually really like the title "Final Fantasy". it kind of hints at the idea that this particular fantastical story has reached it's peak; the highest and pinacle of all fantasies....the Final Fantasy.
I haven't seen this covered since Game Fan in 1997/98. My friends and I often joked if the game would come in Milky White Cartriges and how many carts it'll take to complete the game. All reminiscing aside, great video Lady Decade!
3:00 Oh no! Lady Decade! You've cited the oft repeated myth that Square's business was not doing well when Sakaguchi named Final Fantasy. A compelling tale, but one that is the result of misunderstandings and gossip among fans. Sakaguchi himself has refuted this, stating that Square was quite successful, and he chose the title "Final Fantasy" simply because it sounded cool. A completely understandable point of confusion, as I believe we have all at some point or another heard this rumour. I myself only recently learned that it was not true.
I suspect that Sakaguchi may be retconning history here, as it's been confirmed elsewhere that Square was actually having trouble at the time. The 8bit era featured a skeptical market in the west, and was extremely competitive worldwide, many companies were struggling to get started at the time, specifically struggling to strike out a niche. People tend to forget how many one off NES games there were, many of them bad, but many of them also quite good.
How do you not have more subs? Just found you and I'm here thinking the algorithm has failed me for not bringing me to this QUALITY channel sooner. Great job and just subbed 🙌🏼
Mid to Late 90s, Niche Japanese Developers leaving Nintendo to join SONY. Mid to Late 2010's and early 2020's, Niche Japanese Developers leaving SONY to join Nintendo. Lesson of the story, never screw over your niche Japanese Developers.
Very good video as always, Lady Decade! I've had the pleasure to meet Sakaguchi-sama at a video game conference a in Kyoto in 2016. Very nice man. My friend was really excited to meet him.
Man FF7 on the SNES, or N64. I'd be interested in seeing that alternate universe. Even better, seeing an alt universe where FF7 appears on the Saturn. Albeit with mesh transparency textures.
Great content as per usual!.. one fun fact is Uematsu actually used 32 bit midi for the soundtrack as he didn’t feel comfortable enough yet to compose for an orchestra. I can’t recall what interview that’s in (as it’s probably been 10 years or more), but it’s out there from the man himself (also if you’ve ever worked in music you can tell the original ost in game is synth, but the orchestral 4 cd set for the soundtrack was amazing!) just great compositions all around regardless of how they were originally heard.
Well, firstly "32 bit midi means nothing". You'd better say it was composed by sequencing a bunch of sanples together, midi has nothing to do with this. Secondly, Uematsu may have said this, I don't know. But surely, him being "uncomfortable" with orchestral music is probably the less important reason as for why ff7 (and the majority of 8, 9 and even 10 on the ps2) ended using sequenced music. The main reason was that the 3 CDs were overloaded with FMVs and Pre-Rendered backgrounds. 600 MB sure was a lot of space but still not enough to add high quality pre-recorded orchestral music back in the day. So in the end that was more of a technical constraint than Uematsu's will.
I had no idea FF7 was originally planned to be a 2D title. Great video! 👏🏻👏🏻💪🏻💪🏻 Also, I love the energy and passion you have for this line of work. It really shines through. 😊
Well done, Lady Decade. I've always wanted to play this game, and it's on sale in the Nintendo Switch E-Shop. I think I'll download it! How ironic that it can be played on a Nintendo Platform now??!!
You are right my friend. But as we all know, women don't belong anywhere near video games and this THING needs to know her place and stop with the BS lies and misinformation SMDH 🤦
I was 12 years old and I would work in a coat room on tips at the occasional wedding or event. I remember saving up my money, going to KB Toys, and purchasing this game. I remember the first time I found a save spot, and that is when I found out what a memory card was and that I needed one. My grandma got me a memory card the next day and gave it to me when I got out of school. My absolute favorite game of all time.
You have to imagine that Sony went so far above and beyond with the attack against Nintendo at least partly because of the failed "Nintendo Playstation" project. Won't make a console with us? We'll just take one of your top developers. kthxbai
@@texanman7191 The Nintendo PlayStation would have had the same problem the Sega CD had: it was just too expensive. On top of that, Sony would have been the one earning royalties on CD-ROM sales; Nintendo would not have earned a dime for any Nintendo PlayStation games sold, except for the ones published by Nintendo themselves.
Developers left to Playstation mostly because it was a new era for graphics, music and FMVs, all allowed by CD-ROM. Plus, the console was selling like hot cakes, the royalties were lower and actual release was trivial on CD compared to cardriges, due to much easier manufacturing process of sotrage and in turn, boxed copies.
The ultimate goal for Sony was complete domination of the console market with the annihilation of Nintendo who betrayed them and Sega who rejected them. And for a brief period after the Dreamcast was discontinued, they had that. For that brief period of time, it was Sony's PlayStation 2 or bust. Sony was easily buying up the exclusivity of a number of big developers that would sink Sega because they were in big financial trouble at this point and Nintendo because of their arrogance. Ultimately Sega were the biggest loser in Sony's conquest for dominance, coming very close to going out of business completely.
I heard that Square at the time reacted to Yamauchi's non-anger towards their departure from Nintendo by convincing Enix to go with Sony. Considering Dragon Quest 7 was in development for N64 up until that point...
Yes, that is true. Square President Hisashi Suzuki admitted to it in an interview with Nikkei in 2001. Chris Kohler in his book Power-Up talks about it more too. Square basically admitted to having secret meetings with other developers, most notably Enix, to convince them to shift their N64 projects over to the PS1, at Sony’s request. Dragon Quest VII was the big one Square admitted to but there were likely others as well. Reason Square admitted to this? They publicly apologized to Nintendo and took all responsibility for destroying their relationship, and they were also in serious financial trouble from the Final Fantasy movie bombing at the box office. Because of that they desperately needed a GBA development license so they could re-release their older games without going under. They were literally BEGGING Nintendo to give them one too. That’s why there were so many NES and SNES Square ports on the GBA. It’s also where the Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles series began too. Yamauchi told Square that if they wanted a GBA license, they had to make something for the GameCube first.
@@OppressedApe oooo I’ll have to have a look into that, I had mine put onto a cart with a box made for it etc mainly just to have on my shelf but I’ve played it a bit and it does have some weird bugs in places
I've always been fascinated by that N64 demo. From the first screenshots until today, man, I would have loved if they went that direction. I don't care about N64, but just a 3d more traditional game. FF6 was such a high, man. Still my fave.
Thats a myth actually about Square Enix going out of business, another popular myth is it was going to be his final game, but in reality he just wanted something that would be FF when translated to English.
Do you have facts to back this up? It's been long reported that Squaresoft (not Square Enix, which is a much later merger) was on the brink of collapse. If you're going to step up and say that all of that is wrong, you should be ready to put up some evidence to prove it.
@@ScooterinAB he wanted to call it like fighting fantasty or something dumb like that, but it wad already taken by a board game so he just went with FINAL instead
That you for putting this out there. Although the idea that "Final" was chosen because of Square's financial situation continues to circulate, it's good to see people actually refute this coincidence. I think Final Fantasy Union makes the most compelling and researched argument on this front.
Not trying to start a battle here, but to me the PlayStation is the true successor of the SNES if you care about RPGs. Apart from the Nintendo classics, I could never regard the N64 as an upgrade over the SNES.
I'll have to agree quest 64 seems interesting, but has its flaws & no mother 3 in slight after the tech demo. Also Paper Mario & others that's are action adventure rpgs.
Regarding RPGs i agree with you. From SNES to PS1 to PS2, those 3 gens were this amazing age of RPGs. I feel like the bar kinda dropped a bit during the PS3 generation
I agree, N64 to me was far inferior apart from a few selct games like Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 which were for the time groundbreaking takes on well established game series. FFVII really didn't change that much in terms of gameplay from VI. You got Materia instead of Espers and instead of static special abilities you had the Limit Breaks. The BIG change was the 3 char party instead of 4, but they did switch it up with 5 a couple of games back anyway (plus if you played Chrono Trigger you were accustomed to turn based 3 char plays).
I remember the whole 30+ cartridges thing when I was a kid. That could have been the first true deluxe edition.... all for the small price of... well, at least it’s doubtful that it could ever be defeated for the most pricey package in gaming history... bundled with a keychain.
@@cliffc2937 it was possible. Rare toyed with the idea of cartridge swapping in Banjo Tooie but Nintendo advised against it might damage the game or hardware. I guess it could rely on the memory card to save progress through the carts but like multidisc games, stuff like the world map would have to be repeated across multiple carts, so as not to have to swap everything you leave a town :P To make the game a similar style and but reduce the amount of cartridge, they would probably have to omit the traditional world wap and keep it linear, while having side quests along the way, so that the world still has some exploration to it.
It was storage capacity, tech wise the N64 walked all over the ps1, yes I had both when they were new. they did get Resident Evil 2 on it after a while, even with the cutscenes.
@@adayinforever nintendo fault for using 64 MB storage. They could've the disk drive expand up to 750 MB for future disk expansions. They start off with 100 or 120 MB, later in a 250 MB during the end of the late 90s and 750 in the early 00s. I wish floppy tech media expand there storages quickly to compete with CD media in the late 90s.
FF7 could have been ported to the N64 later in its life cycle with a talented developer. A LOT of data on the FF7 discs is redundant and uncompressed. It could have been made to fit on a 64 MB cart like Resident Evil 2. That said, Nintendo should have just partnered with Panasonic from the beginning like they eventually did with the Gamecube.
Angel Studios wanted to do FFVII, that was the original plan. However Square and Nintendo's relationship was so bad they could not get the go ahead. So Resident Evil 2 was actually their second choice.
@@G.L.999 The N64 is called that for a reason. It has to do with the data and address bussing widths. What good does it do to make a cartridge 96 or 128 megabytes if first your bandwidth across the data and address bus are limited? You will end up with bottlenecks as you can only have so much throughput. Okay fine, it might fix the "storage capacity" which is all well and good... but if your registers and bus width are only say 32 bits... where the other 32 bits are for both data and control lines such as interrupts... you can only index into so many address spaces. The 64 was a decent system, but it couldn't compare to that of Disc Technology of that era. Why do you think most consoles to this day are disc format whether they are DVD or BluRay? Now, Internet streaming and downloading is challenging the physical medium... and this part of the industry I don't agree with... If I'm going to purchase a game for say $40-70 US dollars, then I want to be able to play that game for as long as the physical content is still in readable condition and the hardware is still in running condition. I don't want to pay $40-70 for a download and then say 2 or 3 years later, their servers go down and you can either no longer download it or in other cases no longer play it. This is why I prefer many of the "retro" consoles over these modern eye candy sellers.
Business is business, but Square could have spared taking shots at Nintendo in their advertising considering Nintendo game them a home when they needed it most in the 80's.
Thats literally what I don't, Iike about square, they literally treated nintendo, the company that saved them from, bankruptcy and even considered them close to 2nd party. I don't care that final fantasy 7 affected the n64, I just sucks that after they got into financial trouble, They came back to nintendo just to get a gba license, sucks that square really had to much pride in them
Most of these companies were in their literal teenage years. That era was all about how much you could mock your competition to gain market share from the actual teenagers that grew with gaming from the NES era. It was truly an awful time that lasted waaay to long until the Wii era, console wars were and are pretty stupid.
Blame Hisashi Suzuki for that. He used to work for Sega before jumping ship to become SquareSoft's next president in mid 1993! Him taking power over SquareSoft is one of the root causes why Nintendo's relationship with Square deteriorated even before the PlayStation came to the market!
@@G.L.999 even so, i hate that no one takes nintendo seriously and that even though they sell more than freaking xbox, they are considered nothing. I hate squaresoft for that so much, since it made the ps1 popular, nintendo isn't even as good of technical standards as most people want. They basically brainwashed people that up until today, think better graphics is the only thing that matters
The N64 was by no means a terrible console, but there were so many decisions Nintendo made that were just, especially in hindsight, completely insane. A lot likely driven on hubris. But from a pure technical standpoint, it's interesting to see, when you compare the PS with the N64, the technical quirks of both consoles and how they drove specific genres of gaming to become more prevalent. The Playstation could handle more onscreen polygons. However, it had a noticeable quirk with large surfaces that caused them to visibly distort unless the appropriate measures were taken in programming to code around this quirk, or more often, compensate by tesselating textures so they were broken into multiple polygons (which can negate some of the Playstation's higher poly count advantage). The N64, on the other hand, had perfectly steady 3D that didn't have the Playstation's warping and distorting surfaces. But a number of technical issues including the prohibitively small texture cache combined with the limited space of the cartridge medium, made it so that only extremely low resolution textures could be used. (Uncompressed textures could be used to bypass the cache restriction, but then you've got a problem of all those texture assets eating up cartridge space...) This results in extremely low quality surface textures which the N64 at least had a built in texture filter for, but filtering only goes so far and makes everything look all smudged. Though it was a lot less noticeable at the time when played on CRTs of the era. The Playstation's discs allowed high capacity but slow access times necessitated loading screens -- and background loading. Which, surprise surprise, lends it more towards games that already require a measure of patience, such as RPGs. Conversely the N64's cartridge loading times made it good for making it so that you're rarely taken out of the action. Things could be more fast paced and have smooth transitions, and you could even have pretty large, seemingly seamless explorable areas by taking advantage of the N64's ability to load and unload stuff on the fly while breaking up these areas into sections that would only load or unload when you could see them. Such as the dungeons in Zelda (or even the fact that the Deku Tree's grove, the boulder maze, and the main area of Kokiri Forest are such 'sub-areas' of the Kokiri Forest map -- use a gameshark to levitate and you can see this in action), or pretty much the entire overworld in Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage. This kind of loading on console was in hindsight pretty unique for the N64 as it was really the only 3D console using mask ROM cartridge media. And when playing games like the Metroid Prime series, you can see how optical media suffered trying to emulate this, as trying to cross through areas too quickly would cause you to outpace the console's ability to load new areas from disc into memory, so when you shoot a hatch it'll stay shut for several seconds while it frantically loads the area behind the door into memory, in the background. Probably though, the biggest bit of wasted potential for the N64 was that they didn't lean into putting proprietary hardware into game cartridges like was done with the SNES and the Super FX chip. It's one of the unique advantages of cartridges, is that you can actually put physical hardware upgrades into a game cartridge; the Super FX chip was basically the equivalent of a 3D video card packed into every Star Fox game, giving the SNES temporary 3D hardware acceleration. Or even things like the Game Boy Camera or the solar sensor in the Boktai games for GBA. You can't do this with an optical disc, requiring some externally connected peripheral port -- though I suppose in the era of USB-C devices and Bluetooth, this isn't as much of a concern. Also literally every battery backed save feature is something entirely unique to cartridges, as evidenced by the fact that every disc-based console that didn't have an internal storage drive, required an external memory card to save your games, the N64 only needing memory paks when savegame data wasn't feasable to cram SRAM into the game cartridge itself. The N64 barely had any extra devices packed into game cartridges, and leaned a lot into external peripherals. I imagine it would have been entirely possible to make an "FX-64 chip" that would expand upon the N64's existing 3D capabilities, even just doing something as simple as decompressing textures on the fly before feeding them to the 64, thus letting it bypass the texture cache. Hell, third parties were able to add cartridge hardware much later, such as the Everdrive 64 that can be used to put a functioning SD card slot to use for loading ROMs to play on native hardware. Then there's the Gamesharks (pro versions only), which (though notorioiusly self-bricking, I had two of them completely die on me) had an embedded parallel port on the back which could be hooked up to your computer, and is even capable of being used to dump game ROMs. But Nintnedo has always been a company that sold themselves on their first party games. Both a blessing and a curse... because first party alone can't make your console run a marathon, you need third party support. But probably more Nintendo consoles have been sold in the name of Mario, Zelda, Metroid, and the like than we can even fathom. And rarely do these games disappoint.
“Now you’re playing with power, Nintendo lack of power” lol I’m pretty positive that Final Fantasy VII is the reason the Sony PlayStation became popular.
@@ikaros21 I always did the swap trick to play import and bootleg games. No mod chip needed. And to the TC, you cant forget games like Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania SotN, Crash Bandicoot, Gran Turismo, Silent Hill, Tomb Raider, Tekken series and many more games that made the PSone special.
I smell some bullshit on Square's side in this story. In particular, the "half the performance of the Playstation" claim regarding the N64 simply isn't true. Even with its original microcode, the N64 is about as capable as the Playstation in terms of raw 3D performance (while offering trilinear filtering, perspective correction and antialiasing). And no, Zelda OoT is not the epitome of what can be done on an N64 and Mario 64, an early, launch title that fits in a 4MB cartridge, even less so. Many late games were much more impressive even without the expansion pak, such as Jet Force Gemini or Factor 5's games. The N64 also ended up having its own version of Resident Evil 2, complete with cinematics and as much geometry (if not more) as on the PS1, plus the perspective-correctness and antialiasing. Square's claims of N64 hardware lack of raw power is demonstrably false. The whole CD vs cartridge thing + the delay in the release of the N64 however, is certainly a factor. But ultimately, it sounds like it was mostly a business decision: that "Sony made us an offer we could not refuse" is consistent with the claims of many other developers, including European ones, and is further corroborated by Sony asking Square to canvas other devs into switching development to the PS1.
it was significantly harder to develop for, had a higher barrier of entry to dev for at all, and had much, much less storage capacity on it's carts. I freaking love my N64 and 100% believe it to be the superior console, but I can also see why it had so much trouble with market penetration and why devs might just pass on it entirely.
there is no way that you could squeese the entire FF7 of that time on cartridge size media so even if they have wanted to stay we would have not had FF7 then... think a that 2 seconds
Couldn't agree more. FF7 on the PS is basically a small amount of polygons on top of CG video. Of course the N64 couldn't compete with the workstations that were doing a high quality CG, 1 frame a minute (or hour), taking a lot of time to produce mere seconds of CG. Square was doing real time animation on N64, a big difference that the lady in the video should have pointed out, but choose no to.
I wonder if a cutdown FF7 would've been possible on the N64 with Resident Evil 2s compression. That turned a 2 disc game into a massive cartridge N64 game.
It's a shame Nintendo was so dead-set on the cartridge medium, I remember the N64 pretty much being nothing but the Mario 64 and Zelda system. FF7 was the first game I ever played on the PSX and without it, I probably never would've wanted one.
Mario 64 Mario Kart Mario Party Paper Mario Smash Bros Star Fox 64 Resident Evil 2 Zelda OoT Zelda MM Golden Eye Turok Trilogy Perfect Dark Castlevania Castlevania LoD Ogre Batlle 64 Killer Instinct Gold Blast Corps Confers BFD Banjo Kazooie WCW vs the Word WCW/NWO revenge WWF 2000 WWF No mercy Sin and Punishment And more
I wonder how the n64 crashed during the behemoth demo, I mean it could render many polygons in its own right - were they too textured or something? n64's texture capacity was like 50x less than what the ps1 could retrieve from the cds. Once again, nintendo screwed up sticking with cartridges lol. The 3d models themselves would have likely looked better on the 64 though, but it would have lacked detailed textures, pre-rendered visuals, and everything else that made the game feel as dense as it was. Oh and FMV (which doesn't matter at all nowadays but was pretty cool to see back then). And I'm afraid of how short the game would have been as well.
Nintendo was at the top of their game, while I love them, this was a time ( N64 ) they did a lot of mistakes, and became arrogant. On a side Note, the N64 was actually more 'Powerful' than the PS but the way the PlayStation structure worked like a charm, it was more friendly, had less bottleneck ,and could more, had more easy access to some shaders effects and so forth, while the N64 was hard to code for, it was difficult to store stuff, and compress and re-use it again, sound wasn't their priority too, N64 was till on the MIDI times... Nintendo golden era was the Supernes, and they could have continue on top if they didn't close themselves that much. They almost continue the same route with the NGC, and the mini DVD...good that changed . Then was time for Sony to do the same mistakes with the PSP, and fall short with the Vita... I think everyone did learn their lessons.
The N64 hardware was ahead of it's time, and apart from the small texture cache, and overly expensive rambus ram, was WAY ahead of anything else at the time. The real problem was Nintendo was greedy and massively overcharged for development, and also refused to share details of the 'microcode' (which was just MIPS assembly). I agree though that SNES was Nintendo's peak.
@@CrimsonTide001 I agree, and their grip on development caused a lot of mistrust and rage. Nintendo Did hit hard with those development kits, and help and documentation was no where to be found, it was hard to Code, or even access the damn thing,. They wanted to have all the guarantees and zero risks. Sony just blew the thing open wide, and let anyone to almost do as they please, just piling content after content. It was wild, I love Nintendo but their strategy at the time was outdated, and failed to foresee the changes on the developers landscape, and the insane amount of access that everyone had to PCs on the 90's changed everything. They kept an elitist approach , it wasn't the 80's anymore, and they wanted to Bully their way out.
Ocarina of time brought open worlds in 3d, well modeled scenarios, atmospheric effects, high quality sound effects, the Midi quality of the songs didn't bother. The console was able to perform water transparency, heat distortion effects, all in real time. It wasn't Nintendo's arrogance, the n64 is infinitely superior for its time, even if it doesn't use CG. And anyone who played ocarina of time or Mario 64 would not be satisfied with a game made with pre-rendered textures, and a "harder plastered " gameplay like FF7.
@@cizar2000 Hello, while I am with you on all the specs wise superiority, it was the final combination of many factors that brought N64 down, it was an incredible engine, but without the right wheels, and team behind the pit stop. Absolutely loved Mario 64 , Zelda OT / and MM, Mario Kart 64, Starfox64, Goemon Mononoke Sugoroku ( Mystical ninja ) and a few others, but at the end of the day it was just a handful of games that were able to shine on the N64. While the N64 could render big poly worlds, somehow looked less entertaining quality wise possibly due to texture compression ( + ALWAYS blurring the damn thing ), the PlayStation games got away creating the 2.5 D genre, and games looked Crisp , RPGs, J-RPGs, Collections, Strategy, Racing games, Dances games, Horror games, Arcade ports were abundant, they found ways to create more interesting mixes of sprites, environments, 3D, 2D, etc. Developers were numerous and with their increasing numbers information and techniques grew altogether, that made a difference at the end of the day. I take nothing away of the impact the N64 made on games, they brought analog and Rumble to the experience on consoles, but again, the format and management from part of Nintendo trying to Hold tight into something that was becoming part of the past was a step back.
I have the Steam rerelease of FF7. I still haven't finished it yet. I want to like the Final Fantasy games but the random battles have always turned me off big-time.
@@TJDious Chrono Trigger and also Terranigma - the greatest RPGs of all time according to me, take their place alongside the two Zeldas [Link To The Past, and Breath Of The Wild. But I love the FF series, I had every one when it was released all the way back starting from Mystic Quest. But yeah they are second place!
@@DarDarBinks1986 All respectable choices, I had so much fun over such a sustained period of time with FNV; great shout on that one ! Chrono Cross I just downloaded yesterday to stick on my emulation box; not played it yet but was listening to the OST and it's amazing. Hope the game lives up to it 👌 We are probably the last generation to have known good quality single player RPG experiences, which you bought in a contained sealed box and installed from that disk, and never needed a connection to the internet or any further payments. Sad but this generation have been force fed gambling and impulse-driven really shallow brand games (World Of Warships for instance). That's what they consider character progression lol gaining item cards from a lottery machine! Pfffft they couldn't even make it to Primm lol.
For me, it's the self aggrandizing plots and play style that turned me off of Final Fantasy and JRPGs in general. Random battles isn't an issue for me, but drawn out game play and terrible writing is. I just can't be bothered to care.
Too bad for this - as an N64 owner, I was forced to make do with Mario Party, Smash Bros, GoldenEye, Banjo-Kazooie, Ocarina of Time, Rush 2, Turok, Mario Kart, and a few others. Oh how I missed out. 😉
Good games can be made on nearly any hardware, but hardware limitations shape what is possible. Building a 3D Final Fantasy on the N64 just wouldn’t be possible due to storage limitations. 3D performance should have been sufficient for a Final Fantasy on the N64, but the hardware was a pain to develop for and had several pitfalls that kill performance. Perhaps if Square’s devs were working on the N64 later in its life cycle, the 3D performance results they got would have been different, but there is definitely something to be said about how easy hardware is to develop for.
I actually remember seeing screenshots of the early 3D demo in a Nintendo magazine that also reviewed Mario RPG for the SNES which never released in many western markets.
Most of the criticisms of the N64 in this video are invalid, to the point where you should review if you've misquoted Square's optimization developer. It's actually Playstation (90k/s) that was capable of approximately half the polygons/60th of a second as the N64 (~160k/s), so maybe you got it backwards? If he really did say that then he was just wrong (ever wonder why the first 3D Final Fantasy didn't happen until PS2?) - the information is readily available online now - but your personal mocking of the N64 is misinformation I don't usually expect from this channel. That said, the audio, cutscenes, and sheer size of the game were only possible on CD-ROM (it still took 3!) and those all more than made up for the vastly superior graphics and 3D world the game would have enjoyed on N64
I don't want to get into a deep conversation about alternate realities and probabilistic determination but this existed in 1998. I don't know why it doesn't now.
FFVII was never that great, even at launch. I was hyped for it, after playing and loving FFII and FFIII on Super Nintendo. Even the FFVII commercial was awesome. But then I bought it on launch day and....well, besides the flashy CGI cut-scenes.....the game was mediocre at best. The story was a huge step down from previous entries, the characters were lame except for Vincent and the battles while flashy with all that special effects and summons, it wasn't very good. The best things about the game were it's music and it's settings. I really liked the industrial setting, it was a nice change of scenery from the previous games' European medieval fantasy settings. FFVII has always been and always will be a mediocre game. It got the level of praise because it was most people's first JRPG and the flashy cut-scenes helped alot. Oh and it was the first 3D Final Fantasy game. Just my opinions.....
I remember being a kid, and wanting an N64 SO BADLY. My dad decided to loan me the money, with the agreement that I pay him back over time, as a way to teach me about borrowing money. Only a few days before I was about to get the N64, My dad convinced me to get a Sony Playstation. Said that CD's are the future. So for some reason, I listened to him. I remember getting Destruction Derby with the system as my 1st game. But not long after, I found RPG's. Originally, I found Vandal Hearts, which I fell in love with. Then FF7 hit. My local video game rental store had it. But I could only rent Disc 1, as the owners wife was currently on Disc 2. No biggie, didn't think I'd get through it all before it was due anyways. I fucking fell in love with FF7. It became my all time favorite video game, even almost 25 years later. I damn near beat the game from renting it so many times, before I saved up the money to buy it for myself. I had gotten both strategy guides that were released for it, and still have them to this day. From that point on, I was hooked on Final Fantasy. After that, FF8 and FFT came out. I still love FF8 to this day, and FFT was amazing, and was the same genre as Vandal Hearts. If it wasn't for me being convinced to buy the playstation, I have no idea how different I would be today. So much of my young teenage years were based around the Final Fantasy series, due to FF7. The friends I made ( and am still friends with ), became friends because we played many of the game video games. My best friend became my best friend, because in school, he was the gaming guru. He was the guy that had played all the Final Fantasies that had come out in America. He was the one who played Pokemon while waiting in the lunch line. One of my best friends, that I became friends with because at that time, I developed a reputation as a gamer ( Which wasn't popular at the time ), is the guy who introduced me to my now wife. If there is a pivotal point in my life, where my life could have gone in a completely different direction, due to a single decision, would be my decision to buy the Playstation. That simple purchase at the time, just seemed like it was nothing more than a decision that would dictate what games I could play. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined how important that single decision would be to my then future life. Hell, I named my son Vincent, from the character in FF7. As dumb as it sounds, FF7 has had a HUGE impact on my life. A simple video game, A product for consumption. And I'm not afraid to admit it. That's why it's important to not judge people on their favorite things. The smallest thing can make a large difference in someone's life, in ways people can't understand. For some, It's music and picking up a guitar, or joining band in school. For others, It's the friends they made because they have a favorite sports team. Out likes and dislikes influence who we interact with. And those people help shape us. hah, I guess my rambling is over. I just wanted to share my personal experience with FF7, and Playstation, and how they shaped my life. I hope others have similar stories.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I was a big RPG lover during the SNES and so PS1 was the rightful home for it. The N64 had its rightful home for first-person shooter as well. I remember Doom on PC but Goldeneye changed all that. A lot of N64 gamers are now PC gamers too thanks to Goldeneye. I remember creating friends and frien-emies while palying Goldeneye. Counterstrike, Call of Duty, and countless other 1st shooters are still now play on PC. RPGs has evolved to JRPG while Skyrim and The Witcher is now consider as RPG.
@@smilingpsycho I remember eventually getting an N64, and my friends and I played A LOT of Goldeneye multiplayer, along with Perfect Dark Multiplayer. I Had a TON of fun times with the N64. The Star Wars : Rogue Squadron made by Factor 5. The 1st Smash Bros game, and Star Wars: Pod Racer were all games I put a bunch of time into!
I love how you're not even trying to hide your PS1 preference over the N64 in terms of which one was better suited to develop FF VII on. I completely agree to all of your sarcastic bits :D
So many Errors in the opening: 1) Hand Drawn Back grounds This maybe a regional thing. So forgive me. However the backgrounds are not hand drawn. They are prerendered CG backgrounds. Every component of FF7's backgrounds are constructed in 3D using SGI workstations. Then assembled into a scene, then rendered to a collection of textures that are tiled onto the screen. Hand drawn implies someone actually went to the trouble of drawing them with either a digital pen or on paper. Neither is correct. So making the leap from "advance polygonal graphics" to hand drawn kind of makes it seem like you do not understand how the game was built. 2) Orchestral Soundtrack So I can't really let this slide. FF7 used sound samples for sure, which is how they achieved tracks like One Winged Angel. However if you look into how nobuo uematsu constructed each track, they aren't orchestral. There just simply isn't any room. Orchestral Soundtrack implies an orchestra was used to create the track. There is some wiggle room with Dynamic audio and I'm sure a sound engineer could get into this better than I, but ultimately you're still constructing this soundtrack behind a keyboard in a studio piecing each track together for FF7. So later another slight error was the SGI Onyx Workstations being optimized for N64/Ultra 64. This was not the case. The knowledge of those machines did contribute to the N64's design, but they were not built with the intent of being used with N64. If anything they seriously outclassed the N64 in just about every way. The same tech if I recall correctly was used on Donkey Kong Country or an earlier iteration of those workstations. EVerything else is solid though. I kind of wonder where sega was in all of this lol. I imagine the hardware architecture and use of quads factored in if the hardware was ever considered, but it sounds like Square only looked at the two platforms.
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Think we need to talk about some games over dinner 😍
I'm not an RPG fan but, I loved FF7!! Thanks for this vid!⚔️
Sexy vid!
I love FFVIII AND X more than VII but FFVII was my first RPG I've played in 1998 I was 13
There is a correction that has been made in multiple interviews. "Final"wasn't talking about Square itself going down. It was talking that it might have been Sakaguchi's final game with square and that he would have gone back to college.
I love the N64, but I’m so glad that FFVII came to the PSX… It ignited my interest in JRPG’s when I first ventured from Nintendo consoles, and the fact it was a 3 disc game was insanity at the time.
It's PS1 PSX is a failed DVR
@@popetechtips PSX is the most common abrevetion
This was the very first game I stood in line for in 1997. Final Fantasy VII was like an epiphany for the gaming industry. What an amazing thing to live through.
Thank you Lady Decade for not only taking me down memory lane but showing me things I didn't know. I was always under the impression that Squaresoft cut from Nintendo very early in FFVII's development...like before anything was really done with it. Seeing pictures of FFVII on the Super Famicom blew my freaking mind. This, this right here is why I'm a subscriber.
Addendum- I wonder what would have happened had Sega approached Square first? That could have been mighty interesting as well. ;)
It's kind of funny now because you can fit FF7 on a microSD card the size of your pinky finger nail... a thousand times over.
Yup. And I have that game on a microSD card in my Nintendo Switch.
That’s flash memory, a whole different tech
@@thomasbeall9069 Your missing the point.
It's also funny how history is repeating itself. Sony is now in the same position as Nintendo was during the N64 vs PS1 era. Nintendo is catering to smaller studios while Sony is catering to bigger studios with bigger games. You can see this by looking at the Japanese chart every month and the way Sony is censoring games on its console. "Dont ever come back," well, guess what? Square Enix have games on Switch. Even if the games aren't big titles, the point is...they're back! There is no such thing as loyalty even if Sony owns a small fraction of Square. In the end, its all about money. Even Sora was just announced for Smash.
Me with a 1tb micro sd card in a switch.
Huh, everything fits on it
Let’s do the math. Ff7 was 3 discs. Let’s say it was 700MB per disc, so 2.1GB. Times 1000 is 2.1TB. So… it’s possible? Sorta?
Final Fantasy VII was basically one of the reasons I wanted a Playstation in the first place.
Also one of the commercials is how I knew about the Franchise at the time. My only clue of what Final Fantasy is like was in Super Mario RPG with a Boss called Culex which has the FFIV Boss Theme and the first time ever hearing the trademark Victory Fanfare.
Again, at the time I had to choose between the original Playstation and Nintendo 64. If I chose Nintendo 64, I would have played Super Mario 64, but if I chose Playstation, I would have played Final Fantasy VII. In the end, me and my brothers went with Playstation. Because of that, I've been a Fan of Resident Evil, Metal Gear, Tekken, Ehrgeiz, Bushido Blade and Alone In The Dark. Also Symphony Of The Night is how I know about the Castlevania Series.
I had played previously played FF 1 and 2 (1 and 4 in Japan) but FFVII was the entire reason I got a PS1 lol, so I feel ya on that lol
@@kageakuma3009 Thanks.
not only final fantasy, Legend of dragoons was as awesome as final fantasy 7 and many many more games on the ps one was waaaay better then the N64 games and all because Nintendo did not listen as they do today and do not listen to the customers. The new Nintendo switch have nothing new and only a new Oled Display (Rly ?) yes if you want to play 30 fps 720p (yes in 2021) then nintendo doing something very very wrong because 1080p is standard many years ago on the last gem console and they reach 30 to 60 fps always. (Ps4/xbox one) are last gen.
@@allxtend4005 Not to mention that Limited Time Sale for the Super Mario 3D Collection and that NES Fire Emblem game.
Plus 4K is the thing now.
Also Nintendo should have Metal Gear Titles based on the Legacy Collection, Tekken, Soul Calibur, Dead Or Alive and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on Switch.
Me too, I chose who SE went with
"A story driven narrative that emotionally invested players to levels never seen before"
FF6: "Am I a joke to you?"
Really it's all of them. Thats kind of what set the series apart from other RPGS at the time.
What's ff6? We never got any of the ff games in the uk until ff7
@@DaRkLoRd-rc5yu FF6(Super Famicom) was called FF3 on the Super Nintendo, and is considered by most to be the greatest Final Fantasy game of all time. Had such a huge dramatic story with so many characters you could add to your party each having their own backstory (aside from a few optional characters that didn't have much backstory), and arguably the best villain in Final Fantasy history.
@@KingNekroI’ve never fully understood the hype over FF7. It’s a good game but like you said it really doesn’t hold a candle to FF6,5, and 4. Plus going from the beautiful 16 bit graphics to ugly polygonal graphics in hindsight is kinda rough to go back to. I understand the hype back then going from 2D to 3D but nobody in their right mind would say that FF7 looks or plays better than 4,5, and 6.
@@KingNekro I'll back you on it being one of the best of its day, and still standing the test of time even now - leagues ahead of more modern FF and other JRPG titles. The single greatest? Ehh.. Yoshinori Kitase would agree based on his obsession with Celes alone. Me? I would say tied with FF7 and FF9 for that title. My late wife preferred FF10 over all others, with FF8 a close second.
I'm sure Square could have come up with an amazing Final Fantasy 7 game on the N64 if they had to, it just would have been wildly different to the PS1 version in direction and style due to storage limitations.
Considering that the game was spread over 3 discs with a total of 1.3 GB of game data and the maximum capacity of an N64 cartridge was 64mb (in the later years and with updated chipset)----Making a game even remotely similar to FF7 would simply be impossible, no amount of coding witchcraft could compensate for the discrepancy in storage.
@@zxb995511 like the OP said, it would be a different game of course. It would like have compressed/midi audio, use in game cinematic instead of video and less reliance on pre rendered backgrounds.
A lot of amazing stuff in gaming and movies as well, was done by being creative when dealing with limitations. When you don't have such limitations? You start getting crazy and things get bloated. One just needs to look at modern gaming, especially with PC where power is practically limitless and so many games are beyond 75GB, poorly optimized or relying on third party game engines that are bloated in themselves. It's why AAA Switch ports are interesting because while some developers are talented and can make a Switch ports look good but others are hot garbage and look no better than PS2.
When you read or watch old developer tricks, it's amazing some of the stuff they did to make certain things happen and how much work went into it. Now, also because games are so big now, optimization seems to be looking for typos and redundancy in code rather than creatively reducing resources.
Don't get me wrong. N64 was difficult to develop for but a lot of games, especially near the end of its life span, showed what the system was truly capable of. Especially without the expansion pack and tinkering with microcode.
@@metalninjajesus1580 Yeah, I'd honestly love to be able to jump to a parallel universe where Square stuck with Nintendo and scaled back, making measured decisions in development. Just to see what such a game would look like in a Marvel style "What If?". Just what could they have done in such a constrained environment? How much could they accomplish versus how much would they cut out? If you don't choose to die on the hills of things like CD quality audio and prerendered FMV (though virtually everything that FF7 did, the N64 could accomplish albeit on a much smaller scale; Resident Evil 2 had full FMVs, Zelda had areas with prerendered backgrounds, Shadows of the Empire had (highly compressed) full waveform analog soundtrack... still, if you want to make a huge game you need to choose your battles wisely), it cuts out a lot of needed storage. There's a lot of things that could have been around the N64, coincidentally enough. What if Nintendo had gone with optical media instead? What if the 64DD hadn't flopped? And so on.
There wouldn't be any FMV. It would have been done with the character models as it was in the previous titles. Overworld models and combat models would have also been the same. Pre-rendered backgrounds also would have been limited. It probably would have looked a lot more than FFVI than the VII we know...not counting Remake.
Mystic Quest 2
It’s funny that the original 16 bit style graphics of ffvii has aged much better then the 3D graphics of the PlayStation
But what's funnier is that the 3D ones actually aged better because they are more renown. Compare 7/8/9/10 to the NES ones and see which will sell better lol
The playstation was like the atari of 3D games (graphics, gameplay), it was all kind of experimental. But that's where the big 3D franchises started
@@josevanz7654 I absolutely love the traditional 2d jrpg and have only played less than 10 3D ones. I’m just not into the 3D ones especially the first gen ones
Those horrible polygons. That's why a lot of Sega Saturn games look so great. The 2D games are amazing. All the SNK and arcade ports. Love the Saturn.
Games with pixel art or pre-rendered graphics, compared with early 3D, are a lot of times more aesthetically pleasing and aged more gracefully, but are more difficult to remaster/enhance, if you don't have access to the "source" artwork. On the other hand, cutting edge 3D gets blunt early, but it's more easy to get it sharp. Just check the mods for a lot of 3D games: Many of them include artwork enhancement.
Nintendo perceiving that developers leaving their system in-droves because Square left is one of those short-sighted excuses I remember hearing at the time. It's easier with hindsight to see the bigger picture, but even at the time the confusion of Nintendo's decision to use cartridges was a baffling choice.
This is off the top of my head, but the SNES had over 1,700 releases. The N64 barely had like 390 and then the Playstation had like 4,000 or some ludicrous number. The industry was clearly moving to higher storage format (CDRoms) Just with JRPG's alone, even the more less succesful systems like the SegaCD and Turbografx showed a clear line of where the genre's development was moving. When Wild Arms had it's first screenshots released I remember realizing that Nintendo was in-trouble. This isn't to discredit the monumental impact FFVII had on Japanese game development in-general, the JRPG genre and the tech that was used. But as much as I love the N64, Nintendo really dropped the ball hard when it came to it's hardware and maintaining it's relationships with several developers. The N64 is an incredibly weird system. On one-hand it has some of the best Nintendo game's and titles ever made in gaming, and even ushered entire genres on how to use 3D. On the other-hand... By any other metric it was kinda a disaster.
It wasn’t clear then, Sega CD and Saturn never lived up to Genesis (they did but wasn’t seen that way) CD lasers were sensitive at first. Sony made trash hardware form most of its PSone run. Many of its numbers are rebuys, while N64 was solid.
I always say that Nintendo had the best 3D adventure games, party games and first person shooters, and wrestling games. PlayStation had the best JRPGs, fighting games, 3rd person shooters, and shoot em ups.
But you have to admit the hardware choice for Nintendo was the pinnacle of the industry, MIPS processor with decent floating point capability, Z-Buffer, etc and consider CD-ROM drive price back days, it has to sacrifice to make the console in reasonable price.
Well said! I dont think the 64 was a disaster but i can see why u said that so i must say on a whole scale you are right. Nintendo made huge mistakes starting with the n64. At the end of the day nintendo is still the best company. U know which game bested ff7 though? ZELDA Ocarina of Time🤣🤣🤣 ALSO THE SWITCH IS KILLING IT right now. Not even the series x and ps5 can stop them right now until something change. Kudos to Sony though for turning the video game industry on it its and forcred Nintendo's hand to switch it up
@@thomasbeall9069 don't know if i can agree to that, well mabye a little not of it. It was Sony's first time in the video game industry so faulty consoles is undertandable, but a sale is a sale non the less. Same could be said about the 360, the red ring of death fiasco but people forgave them and kept buying them because of the games and they eventually fixed the problem same go's for the ps1
That cartridge would have been even heavier than the Resident Evil 2 cart.
Except if they had used ingame Cutscenes without Prerecorded Audio.
RE2 on the 64 is a marvel of programming i still cant believe capcom crammed the whole game in there
@@cheapspace That's cuz they didn't, Angel Studios did lol Angels Studios ended up becoming Rockstar San Diego in 2003.
@@kwizzeh i stand corrected
Before FFVII was released I seriously considered getting a PlayStation, but would have to use the 'just incase' money I put aside for unforseen expenses, but the moment I played it at a friend's house I went out and bought one.
I have a similar story. I was a big gamer back then and followed the news closely. I had some interest in the PlayStation, but when Square announced that they were jumping ship I saved up my summer job money for a PlayStation and got it asap.
Regarding how Nintendo reacted, I'm inclined to believe the harsher of the versions because it'd make sense that Square would steer away from bad mouthing them during the GameCube era (which WOULD get a FF game) to avoid burning [further] bridges.
because nintendo is dumb untill today. It is a mater of tiem untill they will get forgoten because no Inovations are made from nintendo.
@@allxtend4005 nintendo switch is one of the best selling consoles ever, you're plain wrong
@@allxtend4005 dude, what are you on?
@@allxtend4005 so the Wii and Switch isn't innovation. On the Switch, you can take the same games you play on your TV on the go. Nintendo is the only gaming company that is innovating all the time. The Wii was the 1st console that main control to play games was using motion control.
@@allxtend4005
Look at the wii, switch, ds, etc. Your straight up high.
The mid-90's was such a chaotic time for the video game industry. In the span of a few years we went from 8-bit graphics to 3D polygons and full motion video. Technology was evolving at a dizzying pace. It's amazing how Square was able to create FFVII in this environment. It really paved the way forward for the entire industry.
And then, nothing much changet since 2003 or at least 2005. First and last GRID comparisons are interesting, together with older wolfensteins looking better than new ones. But you still need faster graphics 🤔
Although I like ff7 alot I would have love to see a ff6 remake with the graphics we have today just loved the story and characters so much
Same, I've wanted a FF6 remake that looks like FF15 for so long now.
@Aaron9 What?
I remember buying the game back when it was released. It had such high review scores, I couldn't ignore it. But I had no experience with JRPGs. I found it difficult to understand the game play. and just couldn't get into it. I wanted to return it and get another game instead, but the store had nothing else interesting instead. So I decided to keep it. This was the best choice I ever made. Now I love the game, and it's one of my favorites of all time.
I still remember getting the first Final Fantasy on NES for Christmas as a kid and how excited I was. Quality series to this day.
Great video, what a bit of nostalgia 😁
Not a fan of how it has been turned into an action game.
I miss the turn based FF formula.
FF6 and 7. Had the absolute best system. It should have never changed.
@@chrisd8458 nah X-2 and XII has the best turn based battle system with better Job systems also Square Enix will never stay on a traditional turn based jrpg in the mainline titles because they want to innovate a battle system in every new entry in the series
I love how you play the music from the better final fantasy in the background for most of the beginning
That explains why Square left Nintendo, but doesn't quite explain why they didn't release FF7 on the Saturn or even the 3DO, as both had 3D capacilities and had CD-rom storage. Like.. Why not try to even port the game to other systems?
Easy answer. At that time for around 10 years or so Sony owned more then 50% of Squaresofts stock thus having a controlling interest in the company. After that 10 years Sony took some money off the table for other investments and relaxed controlling interest which is why you saw a GameCube FF offshoot game. However for the longest time they had exclusive rights to the mainline FF games even then. It seriously wasn’t until FF13 when Square spoke up and that game got an XBOX release. Point is. Sony wouldn’t let them and at that time with how well the company was doing, Square didn’t seem to care about doing something like that.
multiplatform releases were not standard back then, first ff to release on multiple consoles was ff13.. in 2009.
Pulling a Scott Hall & Kevin Nash, great line! 👍🏻
i actually really like the title "Final Fantasy". it kind of hints at the idea that this particular fantastical story has reached it's peak; the highest and pinacle of all fantasies....the Final Fantasy.
@Steve Wolcott 😂
I haven't seen this covered since Game Fan in 1997/98. My friends and I often joked if the game would come in Milky White Cartriges and how many carts it'll take to complete the game. All reminiscing aside, great video Lady Decade!
3:00 Oh no! Lady Decade! You've cited the oft repeated myth that Square's business was not doing well when Sakaguchi named Final Fantasy. A compelling tale, but one that is the result of misunderstandings and gossip among fans. Sakaguchi himself has refuted this, stating that Square was quite successful, and he chose the title "Final Fantasy" simply because it sounded cool.
A completely understandable point of confusion, as I believe we have all at some point or another heard this rumour. I myself only recently learned that it was not true.
I just learned now that it's not true.i grew up with that story
I suspect that Sakaguchi may be retconning history here, as it's been confirmed elsewhere that Square was actually having trouble at the time. The 8bit era featured a skeptical market in the west, and was extremely competitive worldwide, many companies were struggling to get started at the time, specifically struggling to strike out a niche. People tend to forget how many one off NES games there were, many of them bad, but many of them also quite good.
How do you not have more subs? Just found you and I'm here thinking the algorithm has failed me for not bringing me to this QUALITY channel sooner. Great job and just subbed 🙌🏼
Mid to Late 90s, Niche Japanese Developers leaving Nintendo to join SONY.
Mid to Late 2010's and early 2020's, Niche Japanese Developers leaving SONY to join Nintendo.
Lesson of the story, never screw over your niche Japanese Developers.
Nah, they are porting everything to pc
Very good video as always, Lady Decade!
I've had the pleasure to meet Sakaguchi-sama at a video game conference a in Kyoto in 2016. Very nice man. My friend was really excited to meet him.
How's his hip hop career going?
Man FF7 on the SNES, or N64. I'd be interested in seeing that alternate universe.
Even better, seeing an alt universe where FF7 appears on the Saturn. Albeit with mesh transparency textures.
Transparencies didn't have the be dithered on the Saturn, there are plenty of examples of true transparencies on the Saturn.
@@TeamGun burning rangers being a very noticeable one.
A FF7 game on the Snes would've been hugh!!!
Great content as per usual!.. one fun fact is Uematsu actually used 32 bit midi for the soundtrack as he didn’t feel comfortable enough yet to compose for an orchestra. I can’t recall what interview that’s in (as it’s probably been 10 years or more), but it’s out there from the man himself (also if you’ve ever worked in music you can tell the original ost in game is synth, but the orchestral 4 cd set for the soundtrack was amazing!)
just great compositions all around regardless of how they were originally heard.
Well, firstly "32 bit midi means nothing". You'd better say it was composed by sequencing a bunch of sanples together, midi has nothing to do with this. Secondly, Uematsu may have said this, I don't know. But surely, him being "uncomfortable" with orchestral music is probably the less important reason as for why ff7 (and the majority of 8, 9 and even 10 on the ps2) ended using sequenced music. The main reason was that the 3 CDs were overloaded with FMVs and Pre-Rendered backgrounds. 600 MB sure was a lot of space but still not enough to add high quality pre-recorded orchestral music back in the day. So in the end that was more of a technical constraint than Uematsu's will.
I had no idea FF7 was originally planned to be a 2D title. Great video! 👏🏻👏🏻💪🏻💪🏻
Also, I love the energy and passion you have for this line of work. It really shines through. 😊
I still don't believe this shit. Doesn't give any sources, nothing. I'm inclined to believe it's bullshit.
@@kekeke8988 she literally said it was from a page from the book of FF 25th Anniversary lol
@@dxtremecaliber
Time stamp it.
One of the first emails I ever sent was to Square expressing my displeasure that they abandoned Nintendo. They still haven't responded...
Well done, Lady Decade. I've always wanted to play this game, and it's on sale in the Nintendo Switch E-Shop. I think I'll download it! How ironic that it can be played on a Nintendo Platform now??!!
I love this game it's absolutely my favorite game ever made. 2nd place is metal gear solid 3rd is all ratchet and clank games.
I don't think that's irony, friend. Just a funny happenstance.
Thank you for the videos that brighten my day and let me nerd out with you all the way across the pond out here in North Carolina USA
Final Fantasy VII was my intro to the series and the chief reason I bought a PlayStation. That PlayStation sat right next to my N64.
FF7 was the main reason I decided on Sony Play Station instead of N64. I am so freaking glad I did!!! best choice I've ever made.
Lady Decade, don't blame you Parasite Eve is an underrated classic.
You are right my friend. But as we all know, women don't belong anywhere near video games and this THING needs to know her place and stop with the BS lies and misinformation SMDH 🤦
@@ugandahater wow a misogynistic troll, how original. Women can enjoy games just as much as men.
I was 12 years old and I would work in a coat room on tips at the occasional wedding or event. I remember saving up my money, going to KB Toys, and purchasing this game. I remember the first time I found a save spot, and that is when I found out what a memory card was and that I needed one. My grandma got me a memory card the next day and gave it to me when I got out of school. My absolute favorite game of all time.
You have to imagine that Sony went so far above and beyond with the attack against Nintendo at least partly because of the failed "Nintendo Playstation" project. Won't make a console with us? We'll just take one of your top developers. kthxbai
They took pretty much all of their top developers.
The developers left because the N64 wasn't able to handle a lot of storage. Plus, I doubt the Nintendo Playstation would succeed.
@@texanman7191 The Nintendo PlayStation would have had the same problem the Sega CD had: it was just too expensive. On top of that, Sony would have been the one earning royalties on CD-ROM sales; Nintendo would not have earned a dime for any Nintendo PlayStation games sold, except for the ones published by Nintendo themselves.
Developers left to Playstation mostly because it was a new era for graphics, music and FMVs, all allowed by CD-ROM. Plus, the console was selling like hot cakes, the royalties were lower and actual release was trivial on CD compared to cardriges, due to much easier manufacturing process of sotrage and in turn, boxed copies.
The ultimate goal for Sony was complete domination of the console market with the annihilation of Nintendo who betrayed them and Sega who rejected them. And for a brief period after the Dreamcast was discontinued, they had that. For that brief period of time, it was Sony's PlayStation 2 or bust. Sony was easily buying up the exclusivity of a number of big developers that would sink Sega because they were in big financial trouble at this point and Nintendo because of their arrogance. Ultimately Sega were the biggest loser in Sony's conquest for dominance, coming very close to going out of business completely.
Your reference to the Outsiders (Hall and Nash) truly made my day! Bravo!
I heard that Square at the time reacted to Yamauchi's non-anger towards their departure from Nintendo by convincing Enix to go with Sony. Considering Dragon Quest 7 was in development for N64 up until that point...
Yes, that is true. Square President Hisashi Suzuki admitted to it in an interview with Nikkei in 2001. Chris Kohler in his book Power-Up talks about it more too.
Square basically admitted to having secret meetings with other developers, most notably Enix, to convince them to shift their N64 projects over to the PS1, at Sony’s request. Dragon Quest VII was the big one Square admitted to but there were likely others as well.
Reason Square admitted to this? They publicly apologized to Nintendo and took all responsibility for destroying their relationship, and they were also in serious financial trouble from the Final Fantasy movie bombing at the box office. Because of that they desperately needed a GBA development license so they could re-release their older games without going under. They were literally BEGGING Nintendo to give them one too.
That’s why there were so many NES and SNES Square ports on the GBA. It’s also where the Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles series began too. Yamauchi told Square that if they wanted a GBA license, they had to make something for the GameCube first.
I've been binging your videos all day, they're fantastic!
I have the bootleg NES version of ff7, its glorious, just for the 8bit music
I have it too on one of those 120 games in 1 carts.
I would love to play that version if there was a way to play that rom hack for it
@@OppressedApe willing to share the rom?
I have it too, it really exists. It's on the "852 in 1" bootleg cartridge alongside Tekken 2, MK3 and Golden Four and Golden Five.
@@OppressedApe oooo I’ll have to have a look into that, I had mine put onto a cart with a box made for it etc mainly just to have on my shelf but I’ve played it a bit and it does have some weird bugs in places
I love final fantasy 7 too from childhood up to now. Downloaded on ps4 as HD 😍.
Have nice day Lady Decade.
Greetings from Germany lower Saxony 🌹
I myself would gladly know now how ff7 would look on the sega saturn ??? and if this gamevwould be able been to save the console ??????
Another fantastic video! 👏 Thank you so much for the in depth looks at rarities
I've always been fascinated by that N64 demo. From the first screenshots until today, man, I would have loved if they went that direction. I don't care about N64, but just a 3d more traditional game. FF6 was such a high, man. Still my fave.
You can always play the DS final fantasy games. They are basically what the N64 would have been
I was about to comment (almost) the same thing. I would love to see FF6, Chrono Trigger, or Terranigma in 3d!
@tophatgamingman Dude! Your Wife is doing a really good job! @LadyDecade Lots of Kudos!!! Great Work!
Thats a myth actually about Square Enix going out of business, another popular myth is it was going to be his final game, but in reality he just wanted something that would be FF when translated to English.
Do you have facts to back this up? It's been long reported that Squaresoft (not Square Enix, which is a much later merger) was on the brink of collapse. If you're going to step up and say that all of that is wrong, you should be ready to put up some evidence to prove it.
@@ScooterinAB he came out and did a whole presentation on it in 2015.
@@ScooterinAB he wanted to call it like fighting fantasty or something dumb like that, but it wad already taken by a board game so he just went with FINAL instead
That you for putting this out there. Although the idea that "Final" was chosen because of Square's financial situation continues to circulate, it's good to see people actually refute this coincidence. I think Final Fantasy Union makes the most compelling and researched argument on this front.
Loving your documentaries, please keep going in a heavily dominant market, good quality will always shine through
Not trying to start a battle here, but to me the PlayStation is the true successor of the SNES if you care about RPGs. Apart from the Nintendo classics, I could never regard the N64 as an upgrade over the SNES.
I'll have to agree quest 64 seems interesting, but has its flaws & no mother 3 in slight after the tech demo. Also Paper Mario & others that's are action adventure rpgs.
Regarding RPGs i agree with you.
From SNES to PS1 to PS2, those 3 gens were this amazing age of RPGs. I feel like the bar kinda dropped a bit during the PS3 generation
@@valmontdraconus me too, suddenly consoles became shooter heavy, which I don't really care for.
I agree, N64 to me was far inferior apart from a few selct games like Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 which were for the time groundbreaking takes on well established game series. FFVII really didn't change that much in terms of gameplay from VI. You got Materia instead of Espers and instead of static special abilities you had the Limit Breaks. The BIG change was the 3 char party instead of 4, but they did switch it up with 5 a couple of games back anyway (plus if you played Chrono Trigger you were accustomed to turn based 3 char plays).
Top Vid Lady Decade. Diligently & no doubt meticulously researched, and of course imppecably presented .
Thank You very much
I remember the whole 30+ cartridges thing when I was a kid.
That could have been the first true deluxe edition.... all for the small price of... well, at least it’s doubtful that it could ever be defeated for the most pricey package in gaming history... bundled with a keychain.
I don't think it was even possible to swap carts midgame. It would have had to be on the 64DD, and we all know how that turned out.
@@cliffc2937 it was possible. Rare toyed with the idea of cartridge swapping in Banjo Tooie but Nintendo advised against it might damage the game or hardware.
I guess it could rely on the memory card to save progress through the carts but like multidisc games, stuff like the world map would have to be repeated across multiple carts, so as not to have to swap everything you leave a town :P
To make the game a similar style and but reduce the amount of cartridge, they would probably have to omit the traditional world wap and keep it linear, while having side quests along the way, so that the world still has some exploration to it.
@@metalninjajesus1580 true. Or they could always have used a password system. Lol
FF7 and PsOne might be synonymous with each other, but I experienced this great Game on *PC Back in 1998!* 🤗
That's not the game I think of with PSX. That award goes to Battle Hunter.
So basically Square had to tell Nintendo that their "hardware" wasn't well endowed enough to satisfy their needs and make a baby (FF7) with them? 🤔
That pretty much sums it up.
It's due to cart rom and low storage floppy media with the 64DD.
@@maroon9273 that doesn't sound nearly as sexy tho
It was storage capacity, tech wise the N64 walked all over the ps1, yes I had both when they were new. they did get Resident Evil 2 on it after a while, even with the cutscenes.
@@adayinforever nintendo fault for using 64 MB storage. They could've the disk drive expand up to 750 MB for future disk expansions. They start off with 100 or 120 MB, later in a 250 MB during the end of the late 90s and 750 in the early 00s. I wish floppy tech media expand there storages quickly to compete with CD media in the late 90s.
That Outsiders reference was just... too.... SWEEEEEEEET!
FF7 could have been ported to the N64 later in its life cycle with a talented developer. A LOT of data on the FF7 discs is redundant and uncompressed. It could have been made to fit on a 64 MB cart like Resident Evil 2. That said, Nintendo should have just partnered with Panasonic from the beginning like they eventually did with the Gamecube.
Angel Studios wanted to do FFVII, that was the original plan. However Square and Nintendo's relationship was so bad they could not get the go ahead. So Resident Evil 2 was actually their second choice.
If not a 64Megabyte Cartridge, then perhaps a 96 or 128Megabyte Cartridge!
@@G.L.999 The N64 is called that for a reason. It has to do with the data and address bussing widths. What good does it do to make a cartridge 96 or 128 megabytes if first your bandwidth across the data and address bus are limited? You will end up with bottlenecks as you can only have so much throughput. Okay fine, it might fix the "storage capacity" which is all well and good... but if your registers and bus width are only say 32 bits... where the other 32 bits are for both data and control lines such as interrupts... you can only index into so many address spaces. The 64 was a decent system, but it couldn't compare to that of Disc Technology of that era. Why do you think most consoles to this day are disc format whether they are DVD or BluRay? Now, Internet streaming and downloading is challenging the physical medium... and this part of the industry I don't agree with... If I'm going to purchase a game for say $40-70 US dollars, then I want to be able to play that game for as long as the physical content is still in readable condition and the hardware is still in running condition. I don't want to pay $40-70 for a download and then say 2 or 3 years later, their servers go down and you can either no longer download it or in other cases no longer play it. This is why I prefer many of the "retro" consoles over these modern eye candy sellers.
That could have gone very badly. Something like a CD-i or 3DO.
22 years later.... ff7 is on the switch together with 8 on.... 1 cardridge
You’ve given me a strong urge to play it! Will start a new game later 👍🏻
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SUCH GREAT CONTENT! You are a hero! Never knew about this and also LOVING the fact you're getting more patreons!
All I can say if it wasn't for Sony, my second favorite FF game will have never existed.
haha I loved the Scott Hall n Kevin Nash jumping ship example u used hahaha
Business is business, but Square could have spared taking shots at Nintendo in their advertising considering Nintendo game them a home when they needed it most in the 80's.
Thats literally what I don't, Iike about square, they literally treated nintendo, the company that saved them from, bankruptcy and even considered them close to 2nd party. I don't care that final fantasy 7 affected the n64, I just sucks that after they got into financial trouble, They came back to nintendo just to get a gba license, sucks that square really had to much pride in them
What kind of pot shots?
Most of these companies were in their literal teenage years. That era was all about how much you could mock your competition to gain market share from the actual teenagers that grew with gaming from the NES era.
It was truly an awful time that lasted waaay to long until the Wii era, console wars were and are pretty stupid.
Blame Hisashi Suzuki for that. He used to work for Sega before jumping ship to become SquareSoft's next president in mid 1993! Him taking power over SquareSoft is one of the root causes why Nintendo's relationship with Square deteriorated even before the PlayStation came to the market!
@@G.L.999 even so, i hate that no one takes nintendo seriously and that even though they sell more than freaking xbox, they are considered nothing. I hate squaresoft for that so much, since it made the ps1 popular, nintendo isn't even as good of technical standards as most people want. They basically brainwashed people that up until today, think better graphics is the only thing that matters
I am catching up on your videos I may have missed!
Lock doing Sabine moves went in noted terra doing Celtic moves, gold golem from dragon warrior went un noted
The N64 was by no means a terrible console, but there were so many decisions Nintendo made that were just, especially in hindsight, completely insane. A lot likely driven on hubris. But from a pure technical standpoint, it's interesting to see, when you compare the PS with the N64, the technical quirks of both consoles and how they drove specific genres of gaming to become more prevalent.
The Playstation could handle more onscreen polygons. However, it had a noticeable quirk with large surfaces that caused them to visibly distort unless the appropriate measures were taken in programming to code around this quirk, or more often, compensate by tesselating textures so they were broken into multiple polygons (which can negate some of the Playstation's higher poly count advantage).
The N64, on the other hand, had perfectly steady 3D that didn't have the Playstation's warping and distorting surfaces. But a number of technical issues including the prohibitively small texture cache combined with the limited space of the cartridge medium, made it so that only extremely low resolution textures could be used. (Uncompressed textures could be used to bypass the cache restriction, but then you've got a problem of all those texture assets eating up cartridge space...) This results in extremely low quality surface textures which the N64 at least had a built in texture filter for, but filtering only goes so far and makes everything look all smudged. Though it was a lot less noticeable at the time when played on CRTs of the era.
The Playstation's discs allowed high capacity but slow access times necessitated loading screens -- and background loading. Which, surprise surprise, lends it more towards games that already require a measure of patience, such as RPGs. Conversely the N64's cartridge loading times made it good for making it so that you're rarely taken out of the action. Things could be more fast paced and have smooth transitions, and you could even have pretty large, seemingly seamless explorable areas by taking advantage of the N64's ability to load and unload stuff on the fly while breaking up these areas into sections that would only load or unload when you could see them. Such as the dungeons in Zelda (or even the fact that the Deku Tree's grove, the boulder maze, and the main area of Kokiri Forest are such 'sub-areas' of the Kokiri Forest map -- use a gameshark to levitate and you can see this in action), or pretty much the entire overworld in Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage. This kind of loading on console was in hindsight pretty unique for the N64 as it was really the only 3D console using mask ROM cartridge media. And when playing games like the Metroid Prime series, you can see how optical media suffered trying to emulate this, as trying to cross through areas too quickly would cause you to outpace the console's ability to load new areas from disc into memory, so when you shoot a hatch it'll stay shut for several seconds while it frantically loads the area behind the door into memory, in the background.
Probably though, the biggest bit of wasted potential for the N64 was that they didn't lean into putting proprietary hardware into game cartridges like was done with the SNES and the Super FX chip. It's one of the unique advantages of cartridges, is that you can actually put physical hardware upgrades into a game cartridge; the Super FX chip was basically the equivalent of a 3D video card packed into every Star Fox game, giving the SNES temporary 3D hardware acceleration. Or even things like the Game Boy Camera or the solar sensor in the Boktai games for GBA. You can't do this with an optical disc, requiring some externally connected peripheral port -- though I suppose in the era of USB-C devices and Bluetooth, this isn't as much of a concern. Also literally every battery backed save feature is something entirely unique to cartridges, as evidenced by the fact that every disc-based console that didn't have an internal storage drive, required an external memory card to save your games, the N64 only needing memory paks when savegame data wasn't feasable to cram SRAM into the game cartridge itself.
The N64 barely had any extra devices packed into game cartridges, and leaned a lot into external peripherals. I imagine it would have been entirely possible to make an "FX-64 chip" that would expand upon the N64's existing 3D capabilities, even just doing something as simple as decompressing textures on the fly before feeding them to the 64, thus letting it bypass the texture cache. Hell, third parties were able to add cartridge hardware much later, such as the Everdrive 64 that can be used to put a functioning SD card slot to use for loading ROMs to play on native hardware. Then there's the Gamesharks (pro versions only), which (though notorioiusly self-bricking, I had two of them completely die on me) had an embedded parallel port on the back which could be hooked up to your computer, and is even capable of being used to dump game ROMs.
But Nintnedo has always been a company that sold themselves on their first party games. Both a blessing and a curse... because first party alone can't make your console run a marathon, you need third party support. But probably more Nintendo consoles have been sold in the name of Mario, Zelda, Metroid, and the like than we can even fathom. And rarely do these games disappoint.
“Now you’re playing with power, Nintendo lack of power” lol
I’m pretty positive that Final Fantasy VII is the reason the Sony PlayStation became popular.
No. The reason why it was more popular was because of the Mod chip and the ability to play cheap pirate copies!
@@ikaros21 😂
It was 1 of the reasons but your both right. I had a modded for PS1 solely for RPGs. Yes, thats what they were called not JRPG now a days.
@@ikaros21 I always did the swap trick to play import and bootleg games. No mod chip needed. And to the TC, you cant forget games like Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania SotN, Crash Bandicoot, Gran Turismo, Silent Hill, Tomb Raider, Tekken series and many more games that made the PSone special.
Awesome watch just got a fresh sub !! Time to start the binge
I smell some bullshit on Square's side in this story. In particular, the "half the performance of the Playstation" claim regarding the N64 simply isn't true. Even with its original microcode, the N64 is about as capable as the Playstation in terms of raw 3D performance (while offering trilinear filtering, perspective correction and antialiasing). And no, Zelda OoT is not the epitome of what can be done on an N64 and Mario 64, an early, launch title that fits in a 4MB cartridge, even less so. Many late games were much more impressive even without the expansion pak, such as Jet Force Gemini or Factor 5's games. The N64 also ended up having its own version of Resident Evil 2, complete with cinematics and as much geometry (if not more) as on the PS1, plus the perspective-correctness and antialiasing.
Square's claims of N64 hardware lack of raw power is demonstrably false. The whole CD vs cartridge thing + the delay in the release of the N64 however, is certainly a factor. But ultimately, it sounds like it was mostly a business decision: that "Sony made us an offer we could not refuse" is consistent with the claims of many other developers, including European ones, and is further corroborated by Sony asking Square to canvas other devs into switching development to the PS1.
it was significantly harder to develop for, had a higher barrier of entry to dev for at all, and had much, much less storage capacity on it's carts. I freaking love my N64 and 100% believe it to be the superior console, but I can also see why it had so much trouble with market penetration and why devs might just pass on it entirely.
there is no way that you could squeese the entire FF7 of that time on cartridge size media so even if they have wanted to stay we would have not had FF7 then... think a that 2 seconds
Couldn't agree more. FF7 on the PS is basically a small amount of polygons on top of CG video. Of course the N64 couldn't compete with the workstations that were doing a high quality CG, 1 frame a minute (or hour), taking a lot of time to produce mere seconds of CG. Square was doing real time animation on N64, a big difference that the lady in the video should have pointed out, but choose no to.
i smell bullshit in your response honestly. you don't know enough to be well informed, but you think you do, so you spread bullshit.
@@michalljubljanac312 exactly!
I wonder if a cutdown FF7 would've been possible on the N64 with Resident Evil 2s compression. That turned a 2 disc game into a massive cartridge N64 game.
How am I just discovering this channel!? It's awsome. Shout out to Nobuo tho!
It's always good to see this revisited in either someone's video or an article online. I've always felt FFVII would have looked better on N64.
15:37 loving the Back to the Future 2 ref!!
It's a shame Nintendo was so dead-set on the cartridge medium, I remember the N64 pretty much being nothing but the Mario 64 and Zelda system. FF7 was the first game I ever played on the PSX and without it, I probably never would've wanted one.
Mario 64
Mario Kart
Mario Party
Paper Mario
Smash Bros
Star Fox 64
Resident Evil 2
Zelda OoT
Zelda MM
Golden Eye
Turok Trilogy
Perfect Dark
Castlevania
Castlevania LoD
Ogre Batlle 64
Killer Instinct Gold
Blast Corps
Confers BFD
Banjo Kazooie
WCW vs the Word
WCW/NWO revenge
WWF 2000
WWF No mercy
Sin and Punishment
And more
@@thomasbeall9069 Thank you for pointing out how wrong and misguided my personal opinions are, you are a credit to UA-cam, good sir!
Fact: the head of Squaresoft & the head of Sega of Japan were childhood friends, but the Saturn was never considered.
I wonder how the n64 crashed during the behemoth demo, I mean it could render many polygons in its own right - were they too textured or something? n64's texture capacity was like 50x less than what the ps1 could retrieve from the cds. Once again, nintendo screwed up sticking with cartridges lol. The 3d models themselves would have likely looked better on the 64 though, but it would have lacked detailed textures, pre-rendered visuals, and everything else that made the game feel as dense as it was. Oh and FMV (which doesn't matter at all nowadays but was pretty cool to see back then). And I'm afraid of how short the game would have been as well.
Capcom managed to fit Resident Evil 2 on an N64 cart with everything on it. That was a 2-disc game.
@@alexjones3511 That's why the N64 version is the worst version out there.
@@23GreyFox This is a incorrect statement. Check out Digital foundry stream of it where they go into detail on RE2 for the 64.
@@alexjones3511 The problem is that these larger compacity carts came much later in the N64 lifecycle.
@@Bsmith21000 I don't care about their opinion, i have Resi 2 3 times. The N64 version is a horrible mess.
Great video I loved it!
Love the wrestling and Back to the Future references. This is one of your best videos to date. 👏🏻
What hurt the most about Nintendo's decisions was losing Rare, Aki, and SquareEnix.
Nintendo was at the top of their game, while I love them, this was a time ( N64 ) they did a lot of mistakes, and became arrogant. On a side Note, the N64 was actually more 'Powerful' than the PS but the way the PlayStation structure worked like a charm, it was more friendly, had less bottleneck ,and could more, had more easy access to some shaders effects and so forth, while the N64 was hard to code for, it was difficult to store stuff, and compress and re-use it again, sound wasn't their priority too, N64 was till on the MIDI times... Nintendo golden era was the Supernes, and they could have continue on top if they didn't close themselves that much. They almost continue the same route with the NGC, and the mini DVD...good that changed . Then was time for Sony to do the same mistakes with the PSP, and fall short with the Vita... I think everyone did learn their lessons.
The N64 hardware was ahead of it's time, and apart from the small texture cache, and overly expensive rambus ram, was WAY ahead of anything else at the time. The real problem was Nintendo was greedy and massively overcharged for development, and also refused to share details of the 'microcode' (which was just MIPS assembly).
I agree though that SNES was Nintendo's peak.
@@CrimsonTide001 I agree, and their grip on development caused a lot of mistrust and rage. Nintendo Did hit hard with those development kits, and help and documentation was no where to be found, it was hard to Code, or even access the damn thing,. They wanted to have all the guarantees and zero risks. Sony just blew the thing open wide, and let anyone to almost do as they please, just piling content after content. It was wild, I love Nintendo but their strategy at the time was outdated, and failed to foresee the changes on the developers landscape, and the insane amount of access that everyone had to PCs on the 90's changed everything. They kept an elitist approach , it wasn't the 80's anymore, and they wanted to Bully their way out.
Ocarina of time brought open worlds in 3d, well modeled scenarios, atmospheric effects, high quality sound effects, the Midi quality of the songs didn't bother. The console was able to perform water transparency, heat distortion effects, all in real time. It wasn't Nintendo's arrogance, the n64 is infinitely superior for its time, even if it doesn't use CG. And anyone who played ocarina of time or Mario 64 would not be satisfied with a game made with pre-rendered textures, and a "harder plastered " gameplay like FF7.
@@cizar2000 Hello, while I am with you on all the specs wise superiority, it was the final combination of many factors that brought N64 down, it was an incredible engine, but without the right wheels, and team behind the pit stop. Absolutely loved Mario 64 , Zelda OT / and MM, Mario Kart 64, Starfox64, Goemon Mononoke Sugoroku ( Mystical ninja ) and a few others, but at the end of the day it was just a handful of games that were able to shine on the N64. While the N64 could render big poly worlds, somehow looked less entertaining quality wise possibly due to texture compression ( + ALWAYS blurring the damn thing ), the PlayStation games got away creating the 2.5 D genre, and games looked Crisp , RPGs, J-RPGs, Collections, Strategy, Racing games, Dances games, Horror games, Arcade ports were abundant, they found ways to create more interesting mixes of sprites, environments, 3D, 2D, etc. Developers were numerous and with their increasing numbers information and techniques grew altogether, that made a difference at the end of the day.
I take nothing away of the impact the N64 made on games, they brought analog and Rumble to the experience on consoles, but again, the format and management from part of Nintendo trying to Hold tight into something that was becoming part of the past was a step back.
Did want a Playstation when I got to play Resident Evil for the first time, FF7 and FF8 definitely pushing me towards it.
As a former hardcore Nintendo fanboy. Nintendo done royally messed up with the 64.
I remember when my brother brought home ff7 for pc in 1998 and he named Cloud "Sgt. BAWLLLLZZ" lol
I watched a stream where someone named Cloud "Blow Me" - that ended up with some HILARIOUS interactions with Barret!
I have the Steam rerelease of FF7. I still haven't finished it yet.
I want to like the Final Fantasy games but the random battles have always turned me off big-time.
And this is why Chrono Trigger is better thsn any FF. Plus it never insists upon itself.
@@TJDious Chrono Trigger and also Terranigma - the greatest RPGs of all time according to me, take their place alongside the two Zeldas [Link To The Past, and Breath Of The Wild.
But I love the FF series, I had every one when it was released all the way back starting from Mystic Quest. But yeah they are second place!
@@DailyCorvid For me, my RPG GOATs are Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, and Fallout: New Vegas.
@@DarDarBinks1986 All respectable choices, I had so much fun over such a sustained period of time with FNV; great shout on that one !
Chrono Cross I just downloaded yesterday to stick on my emulation box; not played it yet but was listening to the OST and it's amazing. Hope the game lives up to it 👌
We are probably the last generation to have known good quality single player RPG experiences, which you bought in a contained sealed box and installed from that disk, and never needed a connection to the internet or any further payments.
Sad but this generation have been force fed gambling and impulse-driven really shallow brand games (World Of Warships for instance). That's what they consider character progression lol gaining item cards from a lottery machine!
Pfffft they couldn't even make it to Primm lol.
For me, it's the self aggrandizing plots and play style that turned me off of Final Fantasy and JRPGs in general. Random battles isn't an issue for me, but drawn out game play and terrible writing is. I just can't be bothered to care.
Lady Bongos knocks it out of the park 😃
Too bad for this - as an N64 owner, I was forced to make do with Mario Party, Smash Bros, GoldenEye, Banjo-Kazooie, Ocarina of Time, Rush 2, Turok, Mario Kart, and a few others. Oh how I missed out. 😉
Great stuff, thanks for the video. Very informative
It always bothered me when people said they couldn't make great games on N64 hardware, yet somehow Nintendo was able to pull it off.
Good games can be made on nearly any hardware, but hardware limitations shape what is possible. Building a 3D Final Fantasy on the N64 just wouldn’t be possible due to storage limitations.
3D performance should have been sufficient for a Final Fantasy on the N64, but the hardware was a pain to develop for and had several pitfalls that kill performance. Perhaps if Square’s devs were working on the N64 later in its life cycle, the 3D performance results they got would have been different, but there is definitely something to be said about how easy hardware is to develop for.
I actually remember seeing screenshots of the early 3D demo in a Nintendo magazine that also reviewed Mario RPG for the SNES which never released in many western markets.
Most of the criticisms of the N64 in this video are invalid, to the point where you should review if you've misquoted Square's optimization developer. It's actually Playstation (90k/s) that was capable of approximately half the polygons/60th of a second as the N64 (~160k/s), so maybe you got it backwards? If he really did say that then he was just wrong (ever wonder why the first 3D Final Fantasy didn't happen until PS2?) - the information is readily available online now - but your personal mocking of the N64 is misinformation I don't usually expect from this channel.
That said, the audio, cutscenes, and sheer size of the game were only possible on CD-ROM (it still took 3!) and those all more than made up for the vastly superior graphics and 3D world the game would have enjoyed on N64
I don't want to get into a deep conversation about alternate realities and probabilistic determination but this existed in 1998. I don't know why it doesn't now.
Nintendo sticking with cartridges killed the N64 from becoming a mainstream hit.
I remember the game rags covering this and getting hype for it. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
FFVII was never that great, even at launch. I was hyped for it, after playing and loving FFII and FFIII on Super Nintendo. Even the FFVII commercial was awesome. But then I bought it on launch day and....well, besides the flashy CGI cut-scenes.....the game was mediocre at best. The story was a huge step down from previous entries, the characters were lame except for Vincent and the battles while flashy with all that special effects and summons, it wasn't very good. The best things about the game were it's music and it's settings. I really liked the industrial setting, it was a nice change of scenery from the previous games' European medieval fantasy settings. FFVII has always been and always will be a mediocre game. It got the level of praise because it was most people's first JRPG and the flashy cut-scenes helped alot. Oh and it was the first 3D Final Fantasy game.
Just my opinions.....
If Final Fantasy VI was remastered like this 5:20 I would be very happy.
Loved the Kevin Nash analogy :D
Enjoyed the editorial thank you
I remember being a kid, and wanting an N64 SO BADLY. My dad decided to loan me the money, with the agreement that I pay him back over time, as a way to teach me about borrowing money. Only a few days before I was about to get the N64, My dad convinced me to get a Sony Playstation. Said that CD's are the future. So for some reason, I listened to him. I remember getting Destruction Derby with the system as my 1st game. But not long after, I found RPG's. Originally, I found Vandal Hearts, which I fell in love with. Then FF7 hit. My local video game rental store had it. But I could only rent Disc 1, as the owners wife was currently on Disc 2. No biggie, didn't think I'd get through it all before it was due anyways. I fucking fell in love with FF7. It became my all time favorite video game, even almost 25 years later. I damn near beat the game from renting it so many times, before I saved up the money to buy it for myself. I had gotten both strategy guides that were released for it, and still have them to this day. From that point on, I was hooked on Final Fantasy. After that, FF8 and FFT came out. I still love FF8 to this day, and FFT was amazing, and was the same genre as Vandal Hearts.
If it wasn't for me being convinced to buy the playstation, I have no idea how different I would be today. So much of my young teenage years were based around the Final Fantasy series, due to FF7. The friends I made ( and am still friends with ), became friends because we played many of the game video games. My best friend became my best friend, because in school, he was the gaming guru. He was the guy that had played all the Final Fantasies that had come out in America. He was the one who played Pokemon while waiting in the lunch line.
One of my best friends, that I became friends with because at that time, I developed a reputation as a gamer ( Which wasn't popular at the time ), is the guy who introduced me to my now wife.
If there is a pivotal point in my life, where my life could have gone in a completely different direction, due to a single decision, would be my decision to buy the Playstation. That simple purchase at the time, just seemed like it was nothing more than a decision that would dictate what games I could play. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined how important that single decision would be to my then future life. Hell, I named my son Vincent, from the character in FF7.
As dumb as it sounds, FF7 has had a HUGE impact on my life. A simple video game, A product for consumption. And I'm not afraid to admit it. That's why it's important to not judge people on their favorite things. The smallest thing can make a large difference in someone's life, in ways people can't understand. For some, It's music and picking up a guitar, or joining band in school. For others, It's the friends they made because they have a favorite sports team. Out likes and dislikes influence who we interact with. And those people help shape us.
hah, I guess my rambling is over. I just wanted to share my personal experience with FF7, and Playstation, and how they shaped my life. I hope others have similar stories.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I was a big RPG lover during the SNES and so PS1 was the rightful home for it. The N64 had its rightful home for first-person shooter as well. I remember Doom on PC but Goldeneye changed all that. A lot of N64 gamers are now PC gamers too thanks to Goldeneye. I remember creating friends and frien-emies while palying Goldeneye. Counterstrike, Call of Duty, and countless other 1st shooters are still now play on PC. RPGs has evolved to JRPG while Skyrim and The Witcher is now consider as RPG.
@@smilingpsycho I remember eventually getting an N64, and my friends and I played A LOT of Goldeneye multiplayer, along with Perfect Dark Multiplayer. I Had a TON of fun times with the N64. The Star Wars : Rogue Squadron made by Factor 5. The 1st Smash Bros game, and Star Wars: Pod Racer were all games I put a bunch of time into!
Well researched and spoken presentation. Earned a sub.
I love how you're not even trying to hide your PS1 preference over the N64 in terms of which one was better suited to develop FF VII on. I completely agree to all of your sarcastic bits :D
I wish I had more likes to give...the Hall and Nash reference made me laugh out loud at work :)
Really good video I love final fantasy 7 it's my favorite of the series definitely subscribing to your channel
So many Errors in the opening:
1) Hand Drawn Back grounds
This maybe a regional thing. So forgive me. However the backgrounds are not hand drawn. They are prerendered CG backgrounds. Every component of FF7's backgrounds are constructed in 3D using SGI workstations. Then assembled into a scene, then rendered to a collection of textures that are tiled onto the screen.
Hand drawn implies someone actually went to the trouble of drawing them with either a digital pen or on paper. Neither is correct. So making the leap from "advance polygonal graphics" to hand drawn kind of makes it seem like you do not understand how the game was built.
2) Orchestral Soundtrack
So I can't really let this slide. FF7 used sound samples for sure, which is how they achieved tracks like One Winged Angel. However if you look into how nobuo uematsu constructed each track, they aren't orchestral. There just simply isn't any room. Orchestral Soundtrack implies an orchestra was used to create the track. There is some wiggle room with Dynamic audio and I'm sure a sound engineer could get into this better than I, but ultimately you're still constructing this soundtrack behind a keyboard in a studio piecing each track together for FF7.
So later another slight error was the SGI Onyx Workstations being optimized for N64/Ultra 64. This was not the case. The knowledge of those machines did contribute to the N64's design, but they were not built with the intent of being used with N64. If anything they seriously outclassed the N64 in just about every way. The same tech if I recall correctly was used on Donkey Kong Country or an earlier iteration of those workstations.
EVerything else is solid though. I kind of wonder where sega was in all of this lol. I imagine the hardware architecture and use of quads factored in if the hardware was ever considered, but it sounds like Square only looked at the two platforms.
🙄
are you german
@@zoyboy1914 Does this Unit have a soul?