Hey Escapists,
I thought that while we are still in the early year release lull for gaming, a lull that who knows when it will lift considering the circumstances of the past year, I thought it might be fun to look back at our collective gaming histories and put forth a review for our favorite games of all time. Whatever that game might be, i'd like you to post about it here and review it so that we all might see what specific games tickle our fellow forum members fancy and why those games have reached their peak of gaming.
However there are special rules to this. This has to be your favorite game all of time as of now, today, no cheating and being like "Sonic '06 was my favorite growing up but now it's Hello Kitty Island Adventure" No. None of that. I want your favorite game as of this very moment, I don't care about what games it knocked off the mountain top before, just what is the top TODAY.
Sound good? Ok let's do this. Mine is no surprise......
Final Fantasy 7 was the first game I had ever played that became more than just a game for me. For a lot of reasons, this game became a pivotal part of developing my growing tastes in all sorts of media not just gaming. I was in 8th grade in 1997 when FF7 came out, and back then I had no interest in the game at all. I had seen the ads on TV (which spoiled the who fucking plot if you had context) and in magazines, but I just wasn't interested. I would rather play Tekken, or Crash Bandicoot, or something along those lines. I never really played anything with a story until FF7.
I was bullied, like most nerds in school, by one guy named Caesar who used to give me shit in P.E. all the time. But one day he came to me and asked, "Hey you like video games right?" To which I nodded suspiciously. Then he took his backpack out and gave me a copy of FF7, not to borrow, but to keep. Apparently his uncle and parents had gotten him the same game so he had two copied and rather than return one of them he brought it to school and for whatever reason gave it to me.
I remember taking the game home, and being impressed by the intro cinematic (my grandfather also was blown away by the polygons) but when the game actually starts and you get into that first battle I frowned. The menu at the bottom of the screen with commands to select and you just watch the character do the thing you pick, I distinctly remember saying, "Oh this is one of those menu games." And i was disinterested. But I decided that I should at least beat the first level because I was kind of curious to see why the game needed three discs. After the bombing run and escaping from the explosion, I found myself going "Okay I'll get to a save point and stop." So I got to the part on the train where Jesse explains the city and thought, "Okay so you go on missions to bomb all these reactors then probably fight the Shinra at the end." It made sense.
As we all probably know now, that's not how the game continues at all. But that first time I played the game I kept telling myself, "okay next save point, actually one more, one more, one mo..." And so on. That first night I played the game for hours. The story and the characters were sinking their hooks into me, Sephiroth, who the hell is that? What's a Jenova? Where did they take Aeris? I wanted to find out more.
On top of the story getting it's hooks into me, I found myself becoming more and more into the battles as well. As I got more Materia to expand abilities I began tweaking the way i equipped the party and really got into how deep the game actually was instead of just being menus the way I had dismissed it at the beginning.
Caesar also became...not a friend...but we would casually take about the game and trade tips and secrets we found in the few minutes between gym that we had. And he stopped picking on me so that was a plus.
Today Final Fantasy 7 has some pretty obvious flaws, the materia system is easy to break and it also doesn't really do you any favors in making the characters feel different from each other. But this being my first RPG, I had no concept that characters SHOULD play differently, I like the Materia system because it let's me use the characters I wanted and just equip them for whatever situation I needed covered. Nothing is worse to me these days than being forced to use a character that's really good because they balanced that character to be amazing in combat while at the same time hating the shit out of the character. Rikku from FFX, and Vanille from FF13 come to mind as characters I'd rather kick off a cliff than use, but they are too good in combat to not use.
The story gripped me the most, and it changed the way I played games. I started playing more and more RPG's because i wanted to experience more stories. While no game has ever hit me the same way FF7 has, the game did lead me to seak out more story-driven games. Xenogears, Legend of Dragoon, and so on. Still to this day, nothing scratches my gaming itch like an amazing story.
While the story, combat and music are incredible in FF7, there are some aspects of the game that just didn't work. Mini games often control like shit and are not only pointless but often ruin the emotions of a story. When your flower girl is killed at the end of the first disc, ten minutes later you are playing a wild and wacky snowboarding game just ruins the mood. Some characters are inconsistent, supposed to be a threat they then end up doing something silly, like the Turk who tries to punch you only to miss and go tumbling hilariously down a hill. Or Don Coreno being a bumbling rapist. Those sorts of moments don't really land in the modern day, but back then I guess it was easier to disconnect the story from the gameplay because you still where playing a video game, which is something that can being challenging these days.
Still FF7 means a great deal to me, and while some games have gotten close to being the incredible experience this game was, nothing has yet toppled it. Not even the Remake.....yet.
I thought that while we are still in the early year release lull for gaming, a lull that who knows when it will lift considering the circumstances of the past year, I thought it might be fun to look back at our collective gaming histories and put forth a review for our favorite games of all time. Whatever that game might be, i'd like you to post about it here and review it so that we all might see what specific games tickle our fellow forum members fancy and why those games have reached their peak of gaming.
However there are special rules to this. This has to be your favorite game all of time as of now, today, no cheating and being like "Sonic '06 was my favorite growing up but now it's Hello Kitty Island Adventure" No. None of that. I want your favorite game as of this very moment, I don't care about what games it knocked off the mountain top before, just what is the top TODAY.
Sound good? Ok let's do this. Mine is no surprise......
Final Fantasy 7 was the first game I had ever played that became more than just a game for me. For a lot of reasons, this game became a pivotal part of developing my growing tastes in all sorts of media not just gaming. I was in 8th grade in 1997 when FF7 came out, and back then I had no interest in the game at all. I had seen the ads on TV (which spoiled the who fucking plot if you had context) and in magazines, but I just wasn't interested. I would rather play Tekken, or Crash Bandicoot, or something along those lines. I never really played anything with a story until FF7.
I was bullied, like most nerds in school, by one guy named Caesar who used to give me shit in P.E. all the time. But one day he came to me and asked, "Hey you like video games right?" To which I nodded suspiciously. Then he took his backpack out and gave me a copy of FF7, not to borrow, but to keep. Apparently his uncle and parents had gotten him the same game so he had two copied and rather than return one of them he brought it to school and for whatever reason gave it to me.
I remember taking the game home, and being impressed by the intro cinematic (my grandfather also was blown away by the polygons) but when the game actually starts and you get into that first battle I frowned. The menu at the bottom of the screen with commands to select and you just watch the character do the thing you pick, I distinctly remember saying, "Oh this is one of those menu games." And i was disinterested. But I decided that I should at least beat the first level because I was kind of curious to see why the game needed three discs. After the bombing run and escaping from the explosion, I found myself going "Okay I'll get to a save point and stop." So I got to the part on the train where Jesse explains the city and thought, "Okay so you go on missions to bomb all these reactors then probably fight the Shinra at the end." It made sense.
As we all probably know now, that's not how the game continues at all. But that first time I played the game I kept telling myself, "okay next save point, actually one more, one more, one mo..." And so on. That first night I played the game for hours. The story and the characters were sinking their hooks into me, Sephiroth, who the hell is that? What's a Jenova? Where did they take Aeris? I wanted to find out more.
On top of the story getting it's hooks into me, I found myself becoming more and more into the battles as well. As I got more Materia to expand abilities I began tweaking the way i equipped the party and really got into how deep the game actually was instead of just being menus the way I had dismissed it at the beginning.
Caesar also became...not a friend...but we would casually take about the game and trade tips and secrets we found in the few minutes between gym that we had. And he stopped picking on me so that was a plus.
Today Final Fantasy 7 has some pretty obvious flaws, the materia system is easy to break and it also doesn't really do you any favors in making the characters feel different from each other. But this being my first RPG, I had no concept that characters SHOULD play differently, I like the Materia system because it let's me use the characters I wanted and just equip them for whatever situation I needed covered. Nothing is worse to me these days than being forced to use a character that's really good because they balanced that character to be amazing in combat while at the same time hating the shit out of the character. Rikku from FFX, and Vanille from FF13 come to mind as characters I'd rather kick off a cliff than use, but they are too good in combat to not use.
The story gripped me the most, and it changed the way I played games. I started playing more and more RPG's because i wanted to experience more stories. While no game has ever hit me the same way FF7 has, the game did lead me to seak out more story-driven games. Xenogears, Legend of Dragoon, and so on. Still to this day, nothing scratches my gaming itch like an amazing story.
While the story, combat and music are incredible in FF7, there are some aspects of the game that just didn't work. Mini games often control like shit and are not only pointless but often ruin the emotions of a story. When your flower girl is killed at the end of the first disc, ten minutes later you are playing a wild and wacky snowboarding game just ruins the mood. Some characters are inconsistent, supposed to be a threat they then end up doing something silly, like the Turk who tries to punch you only to miss and go tumbling hilariously down a hill. Or Don Coreno being a bumbling rapist. Those sorts of moments don't really land in the modern day, but back then I guess it was easier to disconnect the story from the gameplay because you still where playing a video game, which is something that can being challenging these days.
Still FF7 means a great deal to me, and while some games have gotten close to being the incredible experience this game was, nothing has yet toppled it. Not even the Remake.....yet.
