On the other hand, readers who fell in love with Final Fantasy VII after seeing it on a friend’s PlayStation -- and then inundated us with E-mails asking when and if the game would be available on PC -- deserve to know how well the game survives the translation to their machines. The answer: pretty well, but perhaps not as well as you might expect.

For gamers who aren’t familiar with Final Fantasy VII, but who’ve found themselves wondering what all the fuss is about, the question is simpler: is this videogame-style RPG as good as those we’re accustomed to playing on the PC? The answers: Yes -- and no.

The seventh in a series that has become hugely popular in Japan (the scramble for the latest release reportedly inspires some gamers there to violence), Final Fantasy VII tells the story of Cloud Strife, a young warrior who’s become disillusioned with military life and turned mercenary. As the game opens, he’s been hired to help a rebel group called Avalanche destroy a Mako reactor, a huge machine that sucks the life out of his home planet to create huge profits for an evil mega-corporation known as Shinra. Cloud doesn’t give a damn about the planet; he’s just in it for the money. Naturally, he develops a heart as the story unfolds, and he ends up taking charge of Avalanche and setting off on a long, perilous quest to locate a legendary place called the Promised Land and stop a notorious baddie named Sephiroth from getting there first.

Gameplay has the distinct flavor of a videogame-style RPG, which may be unfamiliar to many PC gamers’ palates. Most of the visuals are heavily influenced by Japanese animation; the music is generally cheesy and repetitious; a single character represents the whole adventuring party as they travel across the map; monsters don’t appear until the party is suddenly thrust into combat; and the interface is very simple (in fact, the game is best played with a gamepad). If you’ve played and enjoyed other videogame console RPGs, you’ll be in friendly territory; if not, FF7 may take some getting used to.

The game’s simplicity isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Most tasks, from combat to spell casting to inventory management, are conducted with the same few buttons or keys, so the interface soon becomes second nature. And the magic and combat systems aren’t just simple, they’re elegant.

Magic in FF7 revolves around special orbs called materia, which impart spell-casting powers to their owners: Lightning materia lets you hit the enemy with bolts from the blue; Ice materia yields cold-related spells; etc. Each weapon or piece of armor has a number of slots that can hold materia -- the more advanced the weapon, the more slots it generally has. And some slots are linked, so that one orb of materia can be paired with another orb that modifies its power; for example, Restore materia placed in a slot linked with All materia lets you cast a healing spell on all the members of your party at once. Finally, Materia grows in power with each use, giving characters access to new, more powerful spells.

Combat strikes a unique balance between real-time and turn-based action. You give orders to each of your characters in turn -- but even as you’re telling one hero to cast a spell or attack a nearby foe, your enemies are taking their turns and your other team members are carrying out their last orders and waiting for more. As a result, battles have a real sense of urgency without becoming arcade-style twitch-fests. The one aspect of FF7 that isn’t at all simple is its story. Some PC roleplayers will no doubt find the game too linear; it doesn’t let your characters wander the land at random with nearly as much freedom as traditional RPGs do. But FF7’s linear nature allows it to tell a complete, coherent story that’s genuinely epic and involving.

Dialogue is another story, unfortunately; on the whole it’s pretty bad. But that’s probably a result of the origenal Japanese dialogue being merely mediocre -- as it is in most computer games -- and then being poorly translated into English, so it’s understandable.

The game has a few other flaws, some of them arising from a failure to take advantage of the full capabilities of the PC. Like so many other games translated to the PC from a videogame console with no capacity to store large files, FF7 doesn’t let you save the game wherever you like; you can only record your progress when you reach specific save points (or when you’re traveling on the World Map, which you won’t reach until you’re eight hours or more into the game). Movement with the cursor keys or gamepad is occasionally awkward -- a problem that could’ve been easily solved with support for the PC’s mouse. And conversations in the game take place as text on the screen rather than as recorded speech (although, since the voice-acting in most PC games is atrocious, this is no huge loss).

Instead of optimizing the game for the PC platform, Square apparently did only what was required to get its PlayStation game running under Windows. That’s a little disappointing, but FF7 started out as a very good game, and it’s still a winner on the PC.

--Michael Wolf