See The New Final Fantasy VII That Brings In Voice Acting
A mod for the original Final Fantasy VII adds impressive voice acting to the beloved game.
A team of modders has created a mod for the original Final Fantasy VII that adds full voice acting to Square Enix’s super-successful 1997 role-playing game. The original Final Fantasy VII launched on the original PlayStation console to universal acclaim and massive financial success, fueling the sales of PlayStation. However, unlike the recently released Final Fantasy VII Remake version, which launched for PlayStation 4 in 2020, and PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Windows in 2021, the original version didn’t contain any voice acting.
Well, all of that changed now that the modding crew Tsunamods has made a custom voice-acting mod for the classic Final Fantasy VII, with a full voice cast lending their talents to the game. The mod, called Echo-S 7, was released a few days ago on Tsuanmods’ website, and the modders credit the voice actors from the YouTube channel Still Thinking Game Dubs, who performed the voice lines and character barks for the mod.
A word of advice, though; make sure you use headphones around the elderly and little children because there’s quite a bit of swearing in the game.
The Echo-S 7 showcase video above admittedly has too much swearing, but Final Fantasy VII wasn’t an E for Everyone game in the first place—just ask the Italian government. The modders used the original Japanese script for the game, which was re-translated correctly for the Echo-S 7 project, rather than the English script—which was an “adapted” translation of the original lines. This was a very sound decision by the modders, considering that the English version of the script attracted some controversy when the original game launched.
Some other tweaks have been made to the Final Fantasy VII game, though all of them relate to the newly-introduced voice acting to make the lines sound more human. According to the modders, the text boxes read differently when spoken out loud. A good example of this is Tifa’s “Shake it off” line, which was very repetitive in the original game. However, in the mod, the subsequent lines reflect Tifa’s frustration over previous failures. So, the results of Tsunamods’ (unpaid) efforts really paid off, and the voice acting is pretty fantastic.
We already saw the characters of Final Fantasy VII get their voices in the aforementioned remake, but Echo-S 7 is actually a pretty interesting—and much-needed—way to have voice acting in the original game. It’s important to note that Final Fantasy VII was originally conceptualized as a Nintendo game, but the development team faced issues with Nintendo 64’s 64DD floppy drive—cartridges were out of the question due to their limited storage capacity, and the game would require approximately 30 64DD floppies to run the game properly.
Square Enix was impressed by the increased storage capacity of the original PlayStation’s CD-ROM compared to the Nintendo 64 cartridge. So, the company shifted Final Fantasy VII’s development, along with all other planned projects, onto the PlayStation. However, even with the advancements in hardware, voice acting was omitted from the original Final Fantasy VII to prevent long loading times. Now that smartphones have greater computing power than fifth-generation consoles, it was about time for Final Fantasy VII to finally receive what it had been missing for so long.
