Finalising the Fantasy

When I was ten years old my friend David came into posession of a magical item. We treasured it, and spent as much time with it as we were allowed to. We stayed up full nights just looking at it, bedazzled by its wonder, it's beauty. I longed to be in posession of it, or one like it but alas I was unable to. Seven years later, with the usage of a bursary and another friends paypal account I came into my very own magical...beautiful...sparkling copy of Final Fantasy VII.

After coming home from college I opened the box and began to install the game to my PC. Upon restarting my machine and asking the game to boot up I was met with a horrible truth; the PC version of Final Fantasy VII hates windows xp. I searched and I searched for ways to run the game. Eventually I came across a couple of patches that would make the game run on my video card and force compatibility with windows xp. Sadly the video card patch had apparently been developed for something inferior to what I had, and made distorting lines come up over the pre-rendered backgrounds. I attempted to play through the game like this, but gave up about 15 hours in due to being robbed of immersion by these graphical errors.

Since I first played Final Fantasy VII on the PC it has given off a sense of being incomplete, of being lacking in some way due to it's dedication to WIndows 95. I know how many people there are like me, who just bloody want to play Final Fantasy VII, so I'm here to let you know one thing; IT CAN BE DONE.

In five steps you can have Final Fantasy VII running perfectly on your PC, along with graphical upgrades like Anti-Aliasing and higher resolutions. Trust me, it's worth it.

Step one: Get Windows 7

The most recent home use Windows platform (Windows 7, or VII) runs Final Fantasy VII far better than any before it. I don't have the technical knowledge to explain why but when I gave FFVII a shot after installing Windows VII I was stunned to find that it felt smooth, and almost complete. If you can't get Windows 7 then you can perform the rest of these steps on both windows XP and Vista. Getting Windows 7 is the first stage a perfectly running Final Fantasy VII experience on your PC. Faced with the possible framerate problems (of the "It's too damn fast" kind) though, you may want to keep on reading for the rest of the equasion.

Step two: The Renderer is outdated, get a new one.

What I found was a project by an internet person called Aali. This wonderful person has crafted an OpenGL patch for Final Fantasy VII and is continuously updating the fixing it even as I now type this out. Since using this patch I have been running FFVII in 1024x768 resolution without any texture distortion. It has other options like Windowed mode (works really well) and a HDR filter (doesn't work so well), these things show how much work has been put in to this fix. I applaud Aali and his/her services to geekdom!

Find Aali's stellar work here: Scroll to the bottom for the latest version.

Step Three: Thanks for the synthesiser, Squaresoft.

That may well fix the graphics, but the sound will still need tweaked. Midi processors are very different now to what they were in 1998, as in they interprate the tracks differently. It was a strange decision even then, the way that Square decided to package the music files for Final Fantasy VII on the PC. They chose to package the midi files but have the sythesiser on the given PC interpret those files independantly, so the music can sound rather off at times. Thankfully there is a way of fixing this to some extent, using a tool apparently made by Square themselves. Here.

There are other, more in depth ways of dealing with the sound in Final Fantasy VII but they demand registry editing and front ends, I want to keep this as simple as possible for the layman.

Step Four: Take it in your hand.

Once you've done all this you'll no doubt want to play and enjoy the game, but who seriously wants to play a game like Final Fantasy using a keyboard? Here's where the beauty of the 360 controller comes in. Assuming you have a wired 360 controller (I use a fightpad) you can simply plug and play, just remember to set the controls on the config menu in-game. If you decide to be a big copy-cat and use a fightpad, you need to switch the D-Pad to "LS" on the back of the pad to use it.

It is possible to use a wireless controller if you Buy an Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows so take a look in to that if the one thing you're lacking is a wired pad.

Step Five: SAVE THE PLANET

The calamity from the sky and its child have designs on your demise, put an end to this madness and bring peace and safety to the planet!