Final Fantasy 7 on iPhone: What's the Fucking Point?

So recently I was killing some time and decided to browse around the app store on my shitty iPhone.  Before downloading some anime game about girls running races with each other I noticed that Final Fantasy 7 had been made available for download.  As I was swiping through the screen shots I found this.

Since I live in Japan the information came up in Japanese but I'll tell you what it says.  It says that on this version of the game you can turn off the encounters and raise your stats to maximum in order to make it easy to "play".  Now I'm also pretty sure this feature is available on the Steam PC version too and I may have ranted about it then but I don't remember so I'm going to go off on one again just to make sure.

Why is this even a feature?  What the fuck is even the point of playing a game if you are going to strive to take out all the "game" aspect of it.  Part of the reason FF7 is so good was because combat was fun and levelling up your characters and materia was a satisfying experience.  Sure, the story was cool as well but it wasn't JUST the story that made it a PS1 classic, it was the whole damn package.  If you're just going to cut a huge part of the games content just because you're lazy/shit then what's the fucking point?

See, we are playing fucking video GAMES here.  That means that there is some element of skill involved weather its platforming, solving puzzles, precise movements or accuracy or in this case, managing a team of adventurers so that they are able to cope with the challenges that the story presents them. 

Imagine if I was playing Mario and I could opt to turn off all the pits and enemies and just run to the end of the game for the "experience" of playing it?  It would be the most boring, retarded bullshit and anyone who actually cares about games would laugh you out of the fucking room.  If you are so stubbornly unwilling to get good at the GAME aspect of the video GAME then maybe you should just fuck off.

But wait, I hear an idiot somewhere on the internet cry "what if I just want to experience the story! I should be allowed to!"  To which I say go and fuck yourself up the ass with a spiky baseball bat.  These are games and if you aren't willing to put in the time or effort to gather enough skill in order to play it through then you shouldn't be playing at all.  If you want to experience a story go and read a book or watch a fucking movie, you aren't entitled to see the ending to FF7 just because it's a popular game that you haven't beaten due to being shit.

If a game wants to include an easy mode so that the less skilled members of the gaming community can play through their game and feel good about it, that's cool.  Even on an easy setting there is still the fact that you have to play the fucking game and get at least somewhat good in order to make progress but this is just retarded.  Doing shit like this just dumbs down the medium but that is another post for another time.

If you want to play Final Fantasy 7, play fucking Final Fantasy 7 and spend the 10 minutes required to learn how materia works in order to beat the game.  It's a fucking easy game, even someone COMPLETELY new to gaming could see the ending.  If you want to experience a story in a game, go and google some good visual novels I'm sure picking from a list of A, B or C choices won't be too taxing for you.  Then again, if you're the kind of person who needs to max stats and turn off combat then I'm not even sure that you could find the button to progress the text.

Glitching is Not Cheating

As someone who enjoys watching and doing lots of speed runs, there is nothing that irks me more than some idiot in a comment on a video going "durr, you just used glitches to get through the game, this is cheating".  Using glitches within the game isn't cheating and I thought I'd take a moment to explain why.

First of all, let's define the term "cheating".  Cheating, as far as I and most others are concerned, is where people use some kind of code or some kind of external device (Game Genie for example) to change the way the game is played.  For example, codes used to skip or select levels are great examples of cheats.  Another good example of a cheat are the codes found in things such as GTA in order to just make guns and vehicles materialize right out of no where.  You are changing the rules of the game in order to win and that's why it is called cheating.

Glitching is something completely different and it involves exploiting things that the developers either didn't notice during testing or thought that no one would find.  The absolute best example of something like this is the glitch in Ocarina of Time that warps you from the first dungeon to the final showdown with Gannon.  Even though you are achieving a cheat-like effect (skipping most of the game), the method to achieve this is completely different from cheating.  You aren't tapping in a code and selecting the final battle, in the case of Ocarina of Time you are manipulating something in the games code by using a specific set of actions.  The game essentially "fucks up" and drops you off at the wrong spot and what speed runners do is trigger these fuck ups on purpose in order to make a game faster.

This is very simplistic but think of it this way, a cheat requires no skill in order to pull of while a glitch usually requires the player to do a lot of backwards ass shit that you'd never be expected to do in normal play in order to make work.  Another example could be found in Sonic 3 where there is a level select code that has to be input during the appearance of the SEGA logo.  If you put the code in correctly you can select any level you like and skip anything you came before it.  In a speed run they skip levels but in a very different way.  Using a technique that I think is called screen wrapping, they manipulate the sprite and or the camera in order to enter walls and zip through the stage to the end.  This isn't as easy as just tapping a few directions when starting up the game and requires a great deal of good timing and positioning and fucking it up will usually lose you time.

Maybe I've not done a particularly good job of explaining it but I've tried.  Recreating glitches at will actually takes a fair amount of skill and it's kind of insulting to see a speed run that someone put a lot of time and effort into get shit on by some idiot in a comment section who doesn't understand what he or she is watching.