One of the stranger zombie memes still circulating in this year of Our Lord 2023 – a time rife with zombie memes – lazily holds that video games are just toys and gaming a mere hobby. A quick look around the cultural landscape soon reveals that notion as reductive. Vdya has been around for half a century now. Not only is it an industry bigger than Hollywood, it’s become an institution and has long since emerged as a major subculture.
Like all cultures, gaming has developed its own body of lore. Consider the infamous BEN Drowned, an urban legend centered around Majora’s Mask that made the rounds on creepypasta boards in the early 2010s.
Exploring this digital legendarium is good for some idle moments of time-wasting fun. True, a lot of vidya creepypastas suffer from common Zillennial aesthetic destitution. But a far larger menace stalks the gaming scene – and this one is all too real.
We’re talking, of course, about AAA games that ship unfinished.
And there is one game in the annals of vidya lore wherein urban legends intersect with an undercooked blockbuster title.
And most ominous of all, it may well be the first unfinished AAA game.
Related: “Defusing the Pop Bomb”
What else could fit both of those contentious bills but 1997’s paradigm-shifting release, Final Fantasy VII?
Rumors have swirled since the publication of FF7’s unofficial Versus Books strategy guide that gaming’s first blockbuster shipped in incomplete form. Since this game is already a prominent marker of Cultural Ground Zero, that would be par for the course.
But are the legends true? Or are jaded gamers projecting Current Year standards onto a game that was perfectly fine back in the day, yet whose then-pioneering tech has simply aged like milk?
Clues to the answer surfaced in – what else? – an ancient Angelfire page that’s somehow still online.
Who really is the guy in the pipe in Midgar Slums? Can you complete
any sidequest related to Aeris AFTER her death? Who did Cloud really
love, Aeris or Tifa? We’ll never know the answers to those questions,
but at least we can learn a couple of interesting things about our
favourite game by… Editing it.
Loyal readers know that I 100% endorse editing.
In the beggining there was Ficedula and his ‘Cosmo’. ‘Cosmo’ is a free
editor in which you can view backgrounds and all of the game dialogs on
the PC version of FFVII. But that wasn’t the end. Ficedula, along with
his friends, tried to decompile as much of the game they could and write
a sequel. The project is still alive, but sadly, the progress is very,
VERY slow. You think it was the end of hacking FFVII? Somewhere in
France, one man, snailrush, made ‘7mimic’. It _looked_ like it would be
the same as ‘Cosmo’, only for the PSX version. But to our surprise,
‘7mimic’ was way more advanced and you could view every background
perfectly, along with all the dialogs from the original version of FFVII
(remember, the PC version has changed dialogs from the PSX version).
Thanks to it, we got more unviewed dialogs, locations and… More
guesses.
Because what proper hunt for answers doesn’t unearth more mysteries?
Let’s start with the ‘easy’ stuff. The pipe in the Sector 5 Midgar
Slums. The guy who’s living in it is a first normal human who was
infected with Jenova cells, that’s why he has a number 2 tattoo. By
editing this screen we can’t see anything unusual. But at the very end
of the dialogs in this location there is a text showing, that we can
find an Elixir here. Well, from known sources, we can’t find anything
here. Even the fourth disc of FFVII: International, a special Japanese
edition which knows the locations of every item in the game, stays quiet
about that item. Okay, so they scrapped that item. Let’s think how could
we get that Elixir in the first place. Our first hypothesis brings us to
the Nibelheim clones. Every guy in a black cloak gave us some item after
we talked to him, right? So why not this guy in the pipe? Okay, okay,
you might say “Hey, maybe you could find an Elixir on the second/third
CD?”. Good guess my boy, but I find it stupid that Square would remove
such a simple item only because they wanted to.Let’s move on! Our second location, Aerith’s church. Heck, everyone
knows that this location wasn’t totally finished. We all know about the
“famous” Aerith’s ghost which appears only for a split of second in the
south area of the church, then it dissapears and appears again, tending
the flowers. If it wouldn’t be for that split of second, everyone would
think: “Cloud only saw her ghost, because she’s related to that place,
what’s so strange about it?” But when we’re viewing the script with
‘7mimic’, there’s an interesting text written between two dialogs – the
Reno & Cloud one, and the Cloud & kids one:
Sounds intriguing, but like the OP said, also like guesswork.
Where’s the proof that Square released Final Fantasy VII unfinished?
Time to get to the Corel Prison. I think most of you know about the
Test0 enemy who was located in a well in the prison. In the European
version you can find an empty treasure chest there. Many prisoners are
in Corel, so that shouldn’t be strange. But… There’s someone in the
well… Someone who’s very well hidden… Someone in a red polyester
suit who’s high on Mako or something and thinks he’s a Power Ranger with
an eye patch. …Well, I thought he looked just like that. You may think
something different.
Not sure about the red Power Range, but the Test 0 enemies had been a longstanding rumor since the old Versus Books days. And that rumor has indeed been confirmed.
The unofficial strategy guide of Final Fantasy VII by Versus Books mentions, on page 37, a strange enemy encounter that was supposedly removed in all but the game’s original Japanese version. Climbing down the well at the beginning of the Corel Prison level would give players a very small chance of fighting these strange dog-like enemies. Supposedly, the enemies have 25,000 HP each, and they strangely don’t attack you. Defeating these enemies supposedly nets the player 4,000 XP, 400 AP, and 40,000 gil. The encounter does indeed exist, but only in first-run prints of the Japanese version of the game. The chances of encountering the Test 0 enemies is incredibly small, so persistence and patience are necessary.
See the Test 0 fight for yourself here:
“OK,” you might be saying, “so they cut a test enemy from other regions’ versions of the game? Big deal.”
But what if I told you they cut a lot more?
Like, entire dialogue trees and side quests?
Ladies and gentleman, it’s time for one of the biggest proofs stating,
that FFVII isn’t a finished game. Many years ago, someone was playing
with his GameShark and he discovered a code for every Key Item in the
game. Some time later, some FFVII fan checked this code and found two
items that never existed in the game. They were called “Letter to Wife
in Kalm” and “Letter to Daughter in Kalm”. His first guess? “I can find
something new in this game!” Nice thinking ol’ chap, but did you really
think that such an item would still be hidden? I mean, FFVII was
released in 1997, people would find a thing like that. No one found the
hidden items. No one found the people to whom these letters were
addressed. Some people said that the letters were addressed to Elmyra
and Marlene. Wrong. Thanks to ‘Cosmo’ and the FFVII Polish Translation
Project, an interesting dialog was found in the city of… Gongaga.———————————————————————
“I am a traveling salesman,
going around the world.”“I came because I heard that near
this village was materia strong
enough to shake the earth.’……”“Even I get homesick and want
to see my family.”“I have a favor to ask of you.
Can you get this letter to my lovely wife?”“Will you do it for me?”
Take the letter
Not interested“My wife lives in the town of Kalm.
I really appreciate this.”
———————————————————————If you wouldn’t accept his proposition, he’d answer:
———————————————————————
“What’s going on…
In a world about to end,
is people’s kindness the first to vanish…?”
———————————————————————…Thanks to this we know, that this dialog takes place after the Meteor
was summoned. Unfortunetly, there isn’t a text “Received Key Item
“Letter to Wife in Kalm”!”. You win Square, no one knew about this item.
But thanks to us, we’re one hundred per cent sure that FFVII is an
unfinished game.
Bonus: Speaking of letters, here’s Zack’s letter to his parents, which you can only find on their desk using an editor.
The Angelfire article concludes with a sentiment shared by many gamers back in the day – including yours truly:
But now, knowing all those errors and negligences from Squaresoft, you
can say one thing – Final Fantasy VII isn’t and never was a finished
game. Translation errors, the restricted version of the game in Japan
and the things we wrote about in this article. If FFVII would be
released again, those errors would probably be fixed. Maybe Square would
add some sidequests and items they scrapped from the final version, who
knows. But it’s all because of… Fans. They wanted FFVII to be released
on schedule both in Japan and in the USA. Square had to delete all the
quests and locations they were still working on and release the game.
Even though I don’t like the idea of a re-release of FFVII, I still
support every fan petition to Square Enix regarding remaking of FFVII.
Why? Because I want to receive the best game in the world. I want to
know the real story behind the game. I want Square to release the game
which they wanted to release. I want them to release Final Fantasy VII.
Some people think I hate Final Fantasy VII. That’s never been true. I’ve owned the game since Christmas of 97, and I had a blast playing it from start to finish.
But seeing that landmark game’s potential and knowing that it was never fully realized somewhat tarnished the fun for me. Like the anonymous gamer quoted above, for decades I hoped and waited on Square, now Square Enix, to complete their flawed masterpiece. Their announcement of the FF7 remake got me excited about a new game for the first time in years. Imagine my disappointment to see that instead of just fixing the legendary original, they’d made a whole new game based on it.
You may love the Final Fantasy VII remake. But millions of other FF fans, me included, are still waiting for the full version of our first blockbuster game.
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