I'm quite sure that if you're reading this you probably already know how awesome Final Fantasy 7 is. Good. Now you also probably don't need me explaining all the troubles people had with it when it came out. First of all there was a falling out between Square and Nintendo because Square wanted to make a big huge game, bigger than anything yet on the SNES, but it had the word DAMN in it somewhere. Nintendo didn't like the swear word, told Square to take it out or they weren't going to publish, and Square said "You're not the only game system around" and went straight to another Nintendo jilted company SONY. This was a good move for Square because the Playstation was built on the SNES platform already, just with some extra nifty 3D technology and a brand spanking new CD technology, oh and 2 extra buttons on the controller. So not much new had to be learned by Square's programmers. When the game finally came out everybody was awed by the fully realized 3D graphics it had in all of the battle sequences, but were really put off by what looked like little lego children running around when you weren't fighting. Well it's 14 years later, and guess what? The lego kiddies are gone, the 640x480 only resolution is a thing of the past (rightly so it seemed small to me when it came out, I kept a 1024x768 resolution on my desktop in 1998), and the only thing that seems out of date now is that there's 4 CDs I have to play through. That's right 4 actual physical discs that I have to manually jam into the drink holder on my tower. No I'm not going to back them up and use them as ISO files, that would be wrong on some level, besides, I'm running out of room on my hard drive.
Anyway down to what mods and patches I'm using:
- FF7 1.02 patch http://ffsf.aaron-kelley.net/patch.html
This is a must have no matter what you are going to do next, every single mod depends on the fact that you have this official patch installed. The only reason this isn't linked to Square's own servers is because I couldn't find it there, and the game is 14 years old, how long do you expect support for it?
- FF7 Custom Graphics driver http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=8306.25
I absolutely love this little download. I can use any size I want, fullscreen or windowed, and change all sorts of options, and fix all sorts of glitches known to happen to ATI cards. AFter downloading this and the patch above I could play what is essentially an unmodified FF7 and it looked almost modern. Sure, there were still Lego chibi characters all over, but at least it looked decent and smooth instead of all pixelated and stretched out (my LCD monitor aut-stretches to 1440x900).
- FF7 Unified Model Installer http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=12522.0
This is a big mod! it takes every model created for FF7 ever (minus the ones from Team Avalanche, they've asked to continue to be a seperate project) such as all the ones from the Phoenix Rejuvenation Project (which is an update to the NPC RP), and all the models from all over the QHIMM forums (which if you have anything to do with FF7 modding, that the place to be, strange for a simple machine forum) and other places. This is one exhaustive mod and it can actually get rid of the blocky field characters.
