I Hate FF7 Fanboys

It's an angry day for me.

I have a lot of angry days whenever the GameFAQs Character Battle rolls around. For those of you who don"t know, this yearly event focuses on people voting for their favorite videogame characters in numerous rounds, with the contestants eventually being whittled down to one champion. Yesterday Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII was a contestant, and as usual he swept the competition.

Let me make this clear right now: I fucking hate Final Fantasy VII. It is an alright game, but certainly not the alpha and omega of gaming that everyone makes it out to be, and because of this fact I have let my distaste for it blossom into a giant, malevolent flower of pure loathing. The story is fairly trite and has too many plot-holes and clichés to name in one post (Aeris dying, Cait Sith, Cloud’s past, etc.). The characters, including key players Cloud and Sephiroth, tend to be boring, whiny and generally uninteresting (Oh, you have a tragic past? SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE IN THE GODDAMN GAME). Cloud, with his constant stream of whiny existential crises, ends up being like Hamlet only somehow MORE boring (side-note: Ophelia is really the character to watch in that play), and Sephiroth is simply a phallus toting second-rate villain with an Oedipus complex and a penchant for misquoting the Bible. Admittedly, the chocobo raising and racing was pretty fun, but even that was kind of fucked up when you think about it.

Yet despite all this, the game is somehow revered as the greatest thing Square Enix has ever produced. You want a good Final Fantasy game? Go play Final Fantasy IV. You want to play the best game Square ever produced? Go pick up a copy of Chrono Trigger. I defy you to come back to me and say Final Fantasy VII is so great after playing those games.

By the way, Final Fantasy VIII sucks, too.