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.
To see the latest entry in another epic fantasy saga from conception to realization, become a Neopatron insider. You’ll get access to the patrons only Discord, and elite members receive first looks at my exciting works in progress. And the chance to influence their development!
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If not FFVII, then definitely Xenogears.
Disk 2 is a tragedy. My problem with Xenogears is that the lore is fascinating but the game itself is so front ended in a glacial moving plot. The prison sequence and sewer levels are unforgivably long. By the time you get to Disk 2, it’s just people sitting in chairs and a very empty world.
Even the OST seemed incomplete.
Everyone in my college gaming circle swore by Xenogears. To date, I’ve started it 3 times. Never made it past the sand ship.
One of those games I watched friends in college play, but never played myself. (I was a late adopter on the PS1, and Xenogears’ religious overtones put me off.)
Same here, re: the game’s subversive religious themes. It always comes up in any discussion of the God is Evil meme in JRPGs.
And its spiritual successor Xenosaga flirts with blasphemy against Mary Magdalene.
It was late 90s fare where Japan was in love with gnosticism: NGE, Xenogears, and Aeon Flux.
The church of “Ethos” (totally not the Catholic Church) is portrayed to be corrupt and in league with a space Illuminati that controls Deus (the demiurge).
And the ultimate good in the game, the Wave Existence (horrible name btw) is, I guess, the Gnostic interpretation of Jesus who comes from another dimension and was trapped by the demiurge.
Can I tell you how much I can’t stand Gnosticism?
“Can I tell you how much I can’t stand Gnosticism?”
Yes, always.
I haven’t been exposed to enough Japanese media to pick up on that, but what I have encountered is a strong interest in a confused, highly kenotic parallel to the Incarnation, with the divinity taking on human existence. It shows up in both Zelda and Lunar: Silver Star Story, for example.
And Dragon Quest IX has the daughter of “the Almighty” interpose herself to save humanity from her father’s wrath … and wind up transforming into the World Tree and creating a race of quasi-angelic beings, including the PC, who has to eventually forfeit his angelic status and become mortal in order to be able to defy his fallen superior, who fell from grace in part because of involvement with a human woman ….
I could write a journal article on DQIX’s approach to theology and its mixture of motifs, especially when you add in the ‘forbidden fruit’ angle that drives much of the midgame …
I’m not a theologian but I’d say the games are likely fully blasphemous if you look close. I played both Xenosaga and Xenosaga III to completion (couldn’t play II as its gameplay and graphics were, well, there’s a reason their original plans got trashed by that monumental ball drop).
I’d look up the character of “chaos” to understand what I’m getting at here. I liked him, thought he was cool and all, but yeah. Final Boss in III calls him a name even mostly ignorant young me got and went “Yeah, this just went full NGE but hey game’s painting me beating up edgelord one man Illuminati Nietzsche and thwarting his plans as an unalloyed good to me so I’m still in!” (Yes that’s a spoiler but game’s over 10 years old so statute of limitations applies).
Still liked the games as games (Xenogears included), but I wouldn’t exactly recommend them to my children until I was sure I’d done a darn good job in their intellectual formation. Gameplay was cool, but the story will rub those who know the wrong way if they can’t take the “MST3K Mantra” to heart.
If we’re having this discussion, then at least some of the Shin Megami Tensei games need to come up. An enemy that is clearly supposed to be God Himself (even using the Tetragrammaton as its name most of the time) is frequently depicted as being at least as evil as the actual devil. Usually, it’s your typical yawn-inducing “God as evil fascist who wants everyone to be mindless robots” nonsense or somesuch. I’ve heard them described as “what your Evangelical parents thought Pokémon was”.
I always enjoyed the battle system of Xenogears but boy did the plot try too hard. I always gave up on disc 2 because it was so boring and horribly unbalanced. But much like Grandia II, “Church and God Bad” is not a compelling narrative hook to hang your tired clichés on.
It always fascinates me how Gen X and Y fedoras still think this same plot recycled without any nuance for over a quarter century constitutes interesting quality writing. Look at anyone who praises the Netflix turd Midnight Mass, for instance.
The best part about Lunar is how the main villain of the first game is proven completely correct by the second. You don’t just “evolve past” objective meaning.
For those in the know (spoilers incoming for an old game), the main story of Lunar is the goddess Althena deciding to reincarnate as a human on Lunar, the main character Alex’s love interest Luna. A long time ago the Dragonmaster and his three companions fought an evil and the goddess believed that she could entrust the world to humans from now on, despite the protests of one of the four heroes himself, Ghaleon. The story is about Alex becoming the new, and last, Dragonmaster to stop Ghaleon, now the Magic Emperor, from taking the world for himself.
So why is one of the legendary heroes on quest to take over the world? Because he vehemently disagrees with the goddess’s assertion that humanity no longer needs a god to rule or look to, that without one they are destined to be ruled by the strongest fist and can be led to do anything.
Given his actions in the game, and the fact that without the magic provided by the goddess or the statues of her that heal the party the heroes would not have succeeded, he is proven 100% correct by the end. Humanity cannot survive without a god.
This leads to the second game where a demon is able to wear the face of Althena and fool the people because of course that can happen now. Ghaleon atones for his past actions by restoring the dragons and all that was lost when Althena became human, and helping the new hero destroy the otherwise unopposed demon from controlling the unguarded world using, again, Althena’s magic that she left for her people to use.
I’m not quite sure I can call Lunar anti-God, because I don’t know if the point is that said position simply doesn’t work. The “anti-God” position in the first game is what actually causes every issue in both games, more or less proving that such a thing doesn’t work.
Regardless, the series has a lot of fans that are fedoras, even though I don’t quite get why. I think many simply didn’t play the second game where it was basically shown that Ghaleon’s original assertion turned out to be correct.
I don’t know if I’d call Lunar ‘anti-god’ so much as ‘confused humanist’–believing in the power and goodness of humanity to the point that humanity supersedes the divine or makes it irrelevant, without the divine being actively malevolent. I’m given to understand that this high view of humanity is common in Japanese media, and I can see it in Lunar (both games–Lucia’s power in Lunar: Eternal Blue seems to be framed as the easy and insufficient way out) and Dragon Quest VII (“God” dies sealing the Demonlord away, appears to be revived and acting malevolent for a while, only to reveal it’s the Demonlord in disguise, and the heroes have to eventually do what “God” couldn’t and destroy the Demonlord permanently), as well as other media.
Compared to FF6 which I believe only had the Czar dragon as the noteworthy cut (who was put back in the GBA version.)
I can’t think of any scrapped quests either. There’s so much in the World of Ruin to keep you busy.
Did they ever figure out what was going on with Siegfried? He seemed to be a dropped thread back in the day.
Apparently there was a scrapped fight with him on the Veldt where Gau uses a rage. You can fight him in the Coliseum and he mentions that there was an imposter of him stealing treasure (likely the guy you fight on the Phantom train and the guy who runs with the band of thieves during the Figaro mission.)
That’s it though. I agree that it seems like there was a lot more to the character given his random appearances. I guess they thought that Ultros was one comedy villain too many.
FFVII might be the first AAA game to launch unfinished, but it’s no secret that FFVI launched as a software mess. It had the Windows problem of being built on layer upon layer of previous games’ code. One programmer described it as “Held together with bubblegum and bailing wire.”
And yet, it worked.
Just be careful with your artistic efforts … 😁
Western versions of FFVI do have the infamous omission of General Leo not being added to your party. But unlike the Reviving Aeris tall tale, you can get Leo back in the standard North American FFVI cart. I’ve done it.
You are pulling our legs, right?
Nope. The tl; dr version is you exploit a glitch involving the number of player character slots (notice that even if you get all the official party members, 1 space remains empty – that’s Leo’s). You save the game on the overworld as soon as you take control of Edgar. Then play the game without saving again till you reach the Floating Continent. When you get the option to return to the airship select yes, fly around a bit, return to the Floating Continent, and die in the next encounter you get into. Load your save from outside Figaro Castle. Doing so will trigger the Airship Glitch, giving you the airship early in the game. That in turn enables a whole slew of other exploits – one of which lets you get General Leo in your party.
Here are all of the instructions:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FinalFantasyVI/comments/lfod2x/how_to_semi_legitimately_get_general_leo_back/
Legacy of Kain is another interesting example from a similar time period. Blood Omen (1996) has a large amount of cut content, but none of it is really essential. Mainly it is a few missing spells and corresponding dungeons to pick them up, some shorter dungeons, and a cut chess game against Vorador that ended up being too glitchy. This is more stuff that was edited out since it didn’t fit than results from an unfinished game.
Soul Reaver (1999) is another story. It infamously ends on a cliffhanger for Soul Reaver 2. This is because the battle against Kain at that point was intended to be the halfway point of the game. Before that battle you see various visions of periods of time; about half already occurred and the remaining ones were meant to be hints of what would happen in the second half of the game (they were later repurposed to foreshadow other events in later games.) The game would have ended with a sequel hook, but only after Raziel had a climatic battle with every major vampire (including Turel and Kain himself). The end result is only half a game, with the remaining half being scattered between Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance (along with many new ideas.)
But if we’re being fair, the same thing happened with Sonic the Hedgehog 3 being split into Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles.
Sonic 3’s manual literally had a page telling you that one of “Robotnik’s traps” might sometimes freeze the game or get you stuck, needing you to reset. There is a reason it feels like half a game, and that’s because it is. The full Sonic 3 is called Sonic 3 & Knuckles because the locked on version with both carts connected is what the original game was intended to be.