I cannot believe Square spent $12 million on this game. Don't get me wrong, it is a good RPG, it's just the fact that I enjoyed Final Fantasy VI so much more. Comparison aside (for now), let's get to the detailed stuff.

FFVII follows Cloud Strife, a soldier-turned-mercenary. Cloud has been hired by a resistance group called Avalanche. Avalanche are out to stop the evil corporation (cough� empire� cough) named Shin-Ra. From there, the game follows the usual RPG gauntlet of gaining new characters, finding out more about your/their past(s), and saving the world from an ultimately evil force and/or being.

FFVII features some nice pre-rendered backgrounds. It also features some blocky characters. Did I mention the use of FMV to attract players to the game? The FMV was so cool that Square paid for many commercials to be aired on MTV. That's a first for an RPG.

While most of the music I heard in FVII seemed to be remixed or rehashed, it didn't get to the point where I was annoyed. There are actually some original songs in there.

FFVII's combat system is the same old thing, which I guess is good. Here to replace Espers from FFVI is Materia. While I miss the ability to actually -learn- the spells, Materia is kind of cool. You ggain AP points towards higher level spells. Say Barrett has a mastered Cure Materia. Now I'll give Cloud that same Materia and he'll have access to all the spells that Barrett earned.

Now, here's my main problem with FFVII: I wasn't "glued to the tv" until around Disc 3. That's somewhere around 40-50 hours of nearly forced gameplay at times. The characters, all of them, seem to be @$$*$*$ for the majority of the game. I didn't even care when one of the characters died besides for the fact that I lost some good equipment and Materia.

All gripes aside, FFVII is still a good investment. You'll probably be playing it for a good while breeding chocobos, mastering materia and doing all that good stuff.