Final Fantasy vII PC

 

Time has been cruel to Final Fantasy 7 - but perhaps not in the ways you expect. Sure, its 330 locations, pre-rendered in the finest CGI that yen could buy in 1997, now appear jagged and antiquated: a steam-punk world viewed through the mist of an 8-bit kettle. Its characters, once seemingly the most expressive actors ever pushed onto a video game stage, are now as strange as balloon animals, all bulges and protractions, their weird deformation all the more grotesque in high resolution.

But it's not these surface aspects of the game that have been most wounded by time's arrow. Rather, Final Fantasy 7 has suffered from 15 years of myth, anecdote and opinion. Primary-coloured headlines, fawning editorials and bar-stool critiques have overlooked much of the nuance of what is a broad, generous game - far more interesting and complex than the love/hate apologising accounts for.

MINIMUM

Windows 98/2000/ME/XP
Pentium III or AMD Athlon 800MHz Processor
256MB RAM
2GB Hard Disk Space
Nvidia TNT2, GeForce 1, 2 or 3, ATI Radeon 7000, 7200, 7500 or 8500, or Matrox G450 Video Card
DirectX Compatible Sound Card
DirectX 9

MAXIMUM

Windows 7/Vista (32 or 64 bit)
Intel i7 Quad Core 2.8Ghz or AMD equivalent
3GB System RAM (High)
30 GB Hard dDisk Space
nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX / ATI Radeon HD4850 Video Card
Direct X 9.0 compatible supporting Dolby Digital Live
DirectX 9.0 - DirectX 11