FF7 Bugs & Glitches FAQ

When playing Final Fantasy 7 PC, you are bound to encounter a number of different problems related to the playing the game and, and consequently such issues will not let you play Final Fantasy 7 PC.

Here, I will try to address all the problems and provide sound solutions to each issue regarding such issues.

Since Final Fantasy 7 PC was released at the time when Windows 95/98 were out, it seems that later versions of Windows (including when using a 64 bit Operating System) occasionally have difficulties in running this game, not to mention that the game itself does have a ton of bugs because the port from the PSX version to the PC was somewhat lousy. If there is a problem you are having that is not in the list below, please leave a comment.

Issue: I am encountering a black screen when I load the game.

Solution: There have been a number of solutions and it seems like a number of different reasons cause this problem. Please try the following and hopefully it should work:

1. Right click on the ff7.exe file and go to the compatibility tab, select “Run in Windows 98 compatibility mode”.
2. Create ISO’s of your Final Fantasy 7 PC CD’s (check the ISO Help section in the Game Info sub-menu for information on how to do this) and run the game using a virtual drive (as sometimes, there is a problem with loading the fmv sequences which in turn causes a black screen)
3. Uninstall the game and re-install making sure that you do install the codecs (though this may cause other problems).
4. Go to your Graphics Card control panel and be sure to check the “use application settings” as opposed to custom graphics settings (this can be a real issue for people using Windows 7 or 64-bit Operating systems).
5. Right click on ff7.exe and run as Administrator (sometimes this seems to solve the problem)

If none of the above work for you please leave a comment with your computer specs and OS and we’ll try to solve it.

Issue: My game crashes when I encounter the first two enemies.

1. Download and install Microsoft’s WA Compatibility Toolkit. http://msdn.microsoft.com/compatibility/act.exe.
2. Try the above solutions for the previous issue.
3. Make sure you have the latest service packs installed for your Operating System.

Issue: None of the FMV’s (3d scenes) are working properly (or are being displayed upside down)

1. I have managed to fix this by running the game off of my hard drive (i.e. create an ISO and run on virtual drive).
2. Download the upside-down movie patch, but be sure to disable the ffdshow True Motion support through its settings.

Issue: My game crashes at the Chocobo Racing scene

1. Initially, there was a chocobo patch which was released by Eidos itself. However, there is a mod that exists which was written by a Modder named Aali called Aali’s custom driver. Please refer to the Mods section for a link to this file.

Issue: Whenever I encounter Mysterious Ninja (a.k.a Yuffie), it freezes at the battle scene

1. Firstly, I would advise that you try turning on the compatibility mode on to Windows 98.
2. If this doesn’t work, set the resolution to 640 x 480 (quarter screen) in the Final Fantasy 7 Config and then right click on ff7.exe and check the Run in 640 x 480 resolution box. Hopefully this should work.