’m obsessed with the mouths in Final
Fantasy VII. If you first played
Square’s groundbreaking 3D Final
Fantasy on a PC, sometime after 1998,
you might be thinking: the characters
have mouths. So what? But if you
played Final Fantasy VII on the
PlayStation, you’re more likely
thinking: Wait a minute. Mouths?
What mouths?
On the PlayStation, the lumpy-
limbed character models of Cloud
and Barret and the gang had big
anime eyes, square fists and
absolutely no mouths. The more
detailed battle models did, of course,
but out on the field? Nope. But when
FFVII came to PC a year after the
PlayStation, suddenly there they
were: little mouths, in the form of a
terse line or large, gaping black O.
Why are they there? Who added
them, and who decided they should
be there? I started searching for the
answers to those questions after
looking into the history of the PC
ports of Final Fantasy VII and FinalFantasy VIII, two rare, early
examples of console games being
ported to the PC. Because Eidos’s
name was on each box, I’d always
assumed that the British company
had ported
Square’s games
itself. But after
coming across a
GameFAQs
thread and doing
a little digging
into Final Fantasy
VII’s PC credits, I
realized that all of
the development staff had worked at
Squaresoft USA. So I set out on a
quest to learn more about Final
Fantasy VII’s infamously quirky PC
port. What was it like to port an earlyPlayStation game to PC, why were
new localization errors introduced
while others were fixed and – the
most important question of all – why
the hell does Cloud have a mouth?
It didn’t go
well at first.
“I’m not really
sure,” wrote
programmer Jay
Fong in an email
when I asked
why the
character models
have mouths on
the PC. Fong works at Obsidian now,
and his gig as a software engineer on
Final Fantasy VII was his first real
job in the games industry. “I recall we
worked on the port for just a little
over one year. After the project, I was
promoted to a Senior Software
Engineer position and when it was
decided to go ahead and port FFVIII
to PC, I served as Project Lead. Some
of the programmers had left right
around the time when work on
FFVIII PC began so we didn’t have
as large a programming team as we
did on FFVII. But we also had more
experience porting the FF
PlayStation code base.”
Total strikeout on the question
that mattered most, but Fong still had
plenty to tell me about the process of
porting Final Fantasy games to PC.PARTY OF EIGHT
Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy
VIII for PC were developed at Square
Soft, Inc. in Costa Mesa, California.
The original development was done
by Square Co, Ltd. back in Japan.
According to Fong, on FFVII they
had a team of eight programmers.
There are nine software engineers
listed in the Mobygames credits,
though as Fong explained later, atTHERE THEY WERE:
LITTLE MOUTHS, IN
THE FORM OF A
TERSE LINETOP: Just some buff
lads getting into a
scrap with a bunch of
squirrels.
LEFT: If you’re gonna
save the world from
capitalism, a big
sword is handy.Final Fantasy VII
FEATURE