10 Blatantly Unfinished Video Games (That Were Released Anyway)

2. Final Fantasy 7

The Final Fantasy series has been going for more years than I care to count, and has been a barnstorming success on every platform it has been released on. The game makes no excuse for being somewhat linear; it's a feature which players have come to accept, and to be honest, it allows me to focus on the magnificent storyline and detail generally put into them. The various mini-games which have featured in most of Square's offerings have been a delight to play and master, with many players sinking countless hours into these alone. There is, however, one Final Fantasy game which seems to skip the mold of being polished at launch, and that is Final Fantasy 7. It is generally accepted that Square forced its early release back in 1997, and despite this, the game was a huge commercial success, selling over 2.3 million copies within 3 days of its release in Japan alone. It deserves high scoring reviews and plaudits across the gaming world, and was even billed by GameFan at the time as "quite possibly the greatest game ever made". Why, then, have I included it within the ranks of "unfinished" games? Well...the developers, in their rush to get the title out, decided to alter the story offered to gamers and remove the usefulness and point of various characters in-game. Square decided to take out the plot of the character Aerith being resurrected due to time constraints and programming issues. There is a guy in the sewers/slums who has no use whatsoever and was initially intended to be used as a tool to revive her when she died. Much backstory about him can be found online, and it points to the blatant fact that he was left in-game after the sudden change of storyline. If you revisit the area later in the game, an NPC tells you that he has been kidnapped by hooded figures, which point to another story arc relating back to Cloud and Sephiroth. Why go to all this trouble of filling in so much extra background info if it serves no purpose other than to support the now removed resurrection? It's a great shame that Square felt at the time under such pressures to cheapen the experience offered to gamers by making such drastic cuts to the story, especially when that is something they usually pride themselves on. Much of the characters' content/limit breaks are extremely hard to fulfill prior to her death, and various elements later in-game all point to her planned return and these abilities (and other side stories) being completed. Sadly, in this case, we the gamer are left to wonder "what if?".