I’m playing Final Fantasy VII on my Xbox. Why? Because I can.

Final Fantasy VII is a classic. It hails from the early days of the original Playstation, from a time when we were blown away by pre-rendered backgrounds and full-motion cutscenes. It also hails from a time when real-time textures were still just a tiny, low resolution collections of mostly pixel art. I guess what I’m trying to say is that, despite how much we adore our beloved classic Playstation games, they are downright hideous by todays standards.

That’s not to say all of them look horrid. Some games lend themselves to upscaling better than others, just look at how great Banjo-Kazooie looked in the Rare Replay collection. Sure, the textures were blurrier than ever, but those polygons were sharp and the framerate was smoother than it ever was on N64. Some games will look great no matter what.

Final Fantasy VII was never one of those games. Sure, the polygonal characters look just fine, even upscaled to 4k, but I seriously had my doubts as to what those pre-rendered backgrounds and video sequences would hold up. Because let’s face it, these were originally (approximately) 320×240 images, which looked just fine on an old CRT television back in 1997. But even with upscaling, a 4k tv is stretching an image with around 76,000 pixels to a screen of almost 8.3 million. I’m not exactly Digital Foundry over here, but from a graphic artist’s perspective, let’s just say I was worried the game would look like absolutely hideous.

And it does… but it works. Those pre-rendered backgrounds are blurry as hell and the ratio is stuck in the old-school 4:3 aspect ratio. To any younger gamers that were possibly curious as to what the hoopla is over this game, it’s probably nigh-unplayable. But for us older folk, who remember the wonky controls and the “not-quite-lined-up” environments, it works.

At least in Midgar, it does. I’ve put about an hour into the game, and at least Midgar still looks decent. But you spent a pretty good chunk of the early game in Midgar, and there were other towns that didn’t get the same attention to detail, namely Yuffie’s home town of Wutai and that awful statue. I just know that thing is gonna look like shit, mainly because it looked like shit back in 1997. Luckily the game should get prettier on the world map, since everything is rendered in real-time.

I can’t wait to put more time into it and give my final thoughts on it before FFX/X-2 and FFXII release for the system.