Video Games- Old and New

                                            Final Fantasy XII

Final Fantasy 7 is one of the best selling video games of all time. Final Fantasy is an RPG game in which the player first takes control of a person only known as Ex-soldier. You find out later that his name is Cloud and that he is working for a group named Avalanche. A person who wants the world to stop using Mako, a kind of nuclear energy. At first you team up with a man named Barret, the leader of the group. When you finally blow up the reactor you and the group get on the train and go their hideout which is Barret's bar. Their next mission is to blow up another reactor, but on their way there the train sounds and alarm and the entire group has to get out of the train. The group is about to blow up the next reactor but they get intercepted by the Shinra president and his giant bomb machine. This blows up the bridge and Cloud gets separated from Barret and the newest party member, Tifa. Cloud lands on a flower patch next to another party member, Aerith  and Cloud teams up with her to try and find the rest of the group. Cloud eventually meets up with the rest of the group and they go to the Shinra Headquarters where they try to confront the President. There you find the new party member Red XIII, who seems to be a dog-human  but unfortunately, you get captured. When you wake up however, everybody is dead except for your group so Cloud checks the president, and sure enough he has a sword stuck in his back. But not just any sword, he has Masamune, Sephiroth's sword. Eventually the group's new quest is to help Aerith find the so called Promised Land. Finally, the player can leave town, but he cannot really fully explore. The story will progress but by the end of the first disc, Aerith is killed by Sephiroth, and the party's new quest is to find him and kill him instead. Over the course of the game the player recruits new characters to his party, including 2 optional characters, each with their differences. There are also many different enemies in the game, and 3 optional bosses by the end of the game. There is also the quest to find each person's ultimate weapon and there is also the Battle Arena in the Golden Saucer, a casino the party stumbles across along the way. In the end, the party must fight Sephiroth and win. They manage to defeat him, but Sephiroth magic is still strong enough to destroy Midgar, the city where you started in. But before the meteor can do any more damage, the power of the magic "Holy" destroys the meteor. The final cutscene of the game is where you see Red XIII running with 2 of his cubs. He climbs up a cliff, allowing the player to see a land in which Midgar was before, 500 years in the past. After the ending, the player can load his last save, right before the final boss, and go out into the planet and have fun fighting random enemies and the special bosses. The game also has an excellent soundtrack and it can be over 70 hours long. There is even a possibility for a remake for the PS3. However, the game does have its faults. There are a few grammatical errors when talking and the idea of only having 3 in a party back then was a bit silly, but now it is really a common thing. Final Fantasy 7 gets a 9.5/10 from me.