well, 20 years ago today I wasn’t actually much of a kid who enjoyed videogames. I really liked Zelda but more for re-enacting it in my yard with swords and shields my parents would make me.
I never actually ended up playing Final Fantasy VII until I was in highschool and I borrowed the discs separately from several different friends copies of the game.
BUT: When I saw it as a kid it blew my mind. I wasn’t a kid who read a lot beyond weird old fantasy books my parents head and Final Fantasy VII had everything I was familiar with in spades. I can still listen to the soundtrack and get pretty emotional: I watched and played it so much it’s practically permanently stuck in my head.
I once shed actual tears on a bus over the fact that Square was no longer making Final Fantasy games for Nintendo consoles. Coupled with the fact that the promotional pictures of Cloud wielding the Buster Sword just seemed absurdly out-of-balance, I bad-mouthed the game for basically no reason whenever it came up. Eventually it came out on PC, but our machine could only run it at 1/4 screen resolution, which meant it was a tiny little box in the middle of the screen. (The funny thing is that the PC version actually cuts out all battle music in the Shinra Manor when that eerie, lilting background track is playing, which I think improves the experience of that area.)
I found out about Final Fantasy VII in 1999(?) when I was randomly browsing anime webpages while hanging out in an anime chat room on TalkCity and saw art of Red XIII on one of the pages. I asked the chat room what this was from, and then convinced my mother to buy it for me from Suncoast Video (the same place I would get my obscenely overpriced Tenchi Muyo! In Love and 90s Gatchaman reboot VHS tapes from).
Then my third-party “mega” memory card decided to format itself while I was on the third disc. I’ve never been able to motivate myself enough to play through it again, though, I’ve attempted to, but only made it maybe four or five hours in. I’ll probably try again with the remake.
I used to sit on the world map in the Highwind just to listen to the music – I had tried to get a friend to listen to it, but it didn’t have enough bros shouting “CH’YEEEAAH! STINK FINGER!” over it, so they declared it as preferring the company of its own gender. Oh well.
I really like the Mako Reactor theme a lot more now than I did as a kid.
Jessie is still one of my favorite FF characters. She builds bombs for eco terrorists and makes fake IDs. How cool is that?
I didn’t end up playing FF7 until I was 16 which was only 5 years ago, but I have a lot of respect for it. At that point I had already experienced SMT/Persona, Dragon Quest, and other RPG series, so I went into FF7 expecting it to fall flat based on the hype, but it really didn’t disappoint. It’s got amazing game feel for an ATB game (a battle system which I find pretty un-fun) and there’s a ton of extraneous shit to do which helps flesh out the world and make it feel a bit more explorable. The enemy types are really varied and wacky and interesting, and I don’t think there’s a single character that I didn’t enjoy using and leveling.
Games like Revelations: Persona and Persona 2: Eternal Punishment are what killed a lot of my interest in more traditional fantasy games, including Final Fantasy. It was easier to relate to the world and characters because it was set in an analog to our reality, so I could become more engrossed in it. In hindsight, it definitely “plays” better than Revelations, despite both games being a bit of mess. And the Materia system was fun to dick around with.
This pretty much mirrors my experience. I ended up playing the Persona remake on PSP which launched me into other SMT games like Nocturne and Strange Journey
FF7 is still cool and weird, imo, and deserving of all the praise it gets – just, for things a lot of people ignore or downplay. EDIT: forgot to link this
Thinking about the world of videogames from twenty years ago made me remember a curious contemporary internet phenomenon, of which few examples remain today…
EDIT: I don’t know why I thought that would work; most of those links are probably broken. Probably the only way to find them is through web.archive.org searching, but the only one I really wanted to find, Illucia, seems to be broken at every URL I can find.
Our family didn’t have a Playstation back then, so instead we rented one to play the game. The only problem with this is that we also didn’t have a memory card, so we had to leave the console on lest we lose our progress. Needless to say, we did not finish the game during the rental period. The only specific memory I have of the game itself from that experience is of Cloud crawling around some vent with a savepoint in Midgar.
(Note: As with all JRPGs of that era, I never got to play it myself. I just watched one of my older brothers play it while the rest of us watched. These games were very much shared experiences for us.)
Later we got the PC port. I remember spending the better part of an evening installing it on our old Packard Bell PC, only to find that it didn’t actually work. Like, the problem wasn’t performance – it refused to run at all. Somehow, we convinced our parents to get us a new PC to run it.
As for the game itself, I couldn’t make any coherent sense of it – but then again I was only 7 or 8, so it didn’t have to make sense. “ooo they made that thing explode now they’re on a train ooh there’s a helicopter oh hey dead trains uhoh cloud fell hey why are they swinging on vines oh boy that’s a lot of stairs what kind of dog’s name is red xiii wow cool motorcycle music woah they’re outside of the city nice amusement park who’s this cat guy wait why are they in jail now” etc.
so, wait, wasn’t FF7:AC released in 2007ish, or is my mem deceiving me… BR says 2004-2009 as copyright, so… wikipdia states 2005 as release, and lists 2009 as ‘complete’ (?)
in short, its a mess, and i look forwardto watch it again.
it’s a fundamentally very weird game, one that could only be made at the dawn of a new era of technology, when everyone involved was super ecstatic to just make stuff that they couldn’t before, but they didn’t actually know what the heck to make, and it never really added up coherently in any meaningful way.
you could tell the scenario writer had to try really hard to figure out how to put the pieces together that random developers made because they thought it’d be cool to make all kinds of silly pointless things like a CPR minigame
it’s a game where you can feel the energy of the developers in it, something that has a difficult spark to have in most other games, where it’s either polished to a shine or you can just feel how tired they had gotten of it
