Reverse Design: Final Fantasy 7

Reverse Design #5

by The Game Design Forum

Final Fantasy 7 was a hugely popular (and sometimes hotly criticized) title that changed the way we view videogames, forever. This book examines the controversial place of FF7 in RPG history, looking at how it pursued a radical artistic strategy to differentiate itself from its RPG forebears. In doing so, it took a radical approach to RPG storytelling, the construction of difficulty, level-up systems, map design and even music.

This book examines the legacy of FF7's design, looking at how it did artistically bold things in the RPG genre in order to make character, storytelling and a persuasive world its highest priority. This eBook version contains significantly more content than the web version, including an entire bonus section and two special appendices.

ebook

Published October 1, 2016

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Insightful, if long-winded. I have to wonder if an almost entirely quantitative approach was the best idea for this analysis, but it works well enough.