What's so special about FF 7 for you?

[Dalisclock]

For me, it like the Previous FF games but even more so.

Epic, world spanning Journey? Yep.
Different enough to be interesting yet Familiar enough for comfort? Totally.
Cast of diverse characters, more or less likable(Cait Sith doesn't count)? yep.
Looked really good at the time? Sure.

It's not the best of the series nor is it perfect, but I enjoyed it.

Someday I will go back through and replay it and see how it's aged. The last time I played it was back in the late 1990's, so that will be interesting. Especially since FFVII is the first FF game I actually completed and since then have beaten all of the pre-FFX main games other then FFVIII(maybe, someday, if I decide I hate myself, or I really, really feel the need to have 100% of the first 10 games beaten. So probably not).

 

[stroopwafel]

Excellent post really enjoyed you guys memories of the game. Another thing I really enjoyed about FF7 at the time was that it dealt with really serious subject matter but never in an overly dark or moody way. Even the 'evil' characters had a lot of weird or funny quirks with a lot of comic relief and despite a lot of bad stuff happening to the cast they never took themselves too seriously or forgot to have fun. The story while serious was told with an almost child like innocence accentuated by the excellent music that really set the tone and was always appropriate to the scene.

Ofcourse FF7 being created in the '90s you see that reflected in the game. Nowadays a story of its kind would be told in an overly sentimental and obsessively 'grimdark' way while desperately side-stepping any content that might be considered politically incorrect. Then again it's Japan so maybe not.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

It was relatively the first game I sunk so many hours into the clock stopped working... had to get all them E. Skills which was a huge *****... 100% completion before there was any way of recording it besides a polaroid or VCR. Just for the sake of doing it.
I never had the gameshark thing for PS1 so I had to do everything the hard way, and getting a damn Golden Chocobo was annoying as fuck. Hope they do something to fix that, or actually don't. Make it just as much a ***** as it was in the original, just so others can experience the thrill of breeding chicken-turkeys.

 

[Elementary - Dear Watson]

It was the first time I played a large game like that and was rewarded with so much freedom.

I was born in the late 80s, so I missed FFI-VI and VII was my first FF game I played. I also hadn't played any RPGs before that, instead only playing cutesy platformers befitting my pre-teen mind. I then borrowed FFVII from a friend and I LOVED it! I loved it's turn based combat, the magic, the skills, materia and the like.

Obviously, as a child new to the genre, it took me a long time to get through Midgar, but I loved that, then, for the first time in my gaming history, I was put out into a game world that allowed me to choose what to do. Not just choose a level in a level select world (a la Gex and Spyro) but the actual sense of freedom (even though you were kinda pushed to go to particular places at first.) Being rewarded with the tower defence minigame after going off the beaten track was a dream... it felt so big, so real.

Eventually I came across info from friends and magazines that allowed me to, when available, get 2 characters that were not vital to the story. This added to the sense of such a big game... that there were 2 hidden characters that you could easily overlook, that were actually pretty cool.

The setting was something I had never seen before as well. The mix of fantasy (akin to the novels I was reading as a child) and sci-fi. So damn cool.

Even though I only had it borrowed a week it opened my eyes to a new genre of games (that I still play... I had Tales of Zestiria on pre-order) and setting that then took up the rest of my childhood.


You never forget your first.

 

[Elementary - Dear Watson]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq6K1rIR8MQ

You'll thank me later.

No... No, I will not thank you later. I will thank you now!!!! THAT WAS THE SHIT!

 

[sageoftruth]

The fact that I never played it though I'm told I should totally have to.

Yeah, this pretty much. Everyone keeps telling me that I'm missing out, but at this point, the game, like just about everything else in gaming's early 3D phase, looks like crap. A re-skin might make it easier for me to get into it.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

The fact that I never played it though I'm told I should totally have to.

Yeah, this pretty much. Everyone keeps telling me that I'm missing out, but at this point, the game, like just about everything else in gaming's early 3D phase, looks like crap. A re-skin might make it easier for me to get into it.

Was hoping the remake would be this but it seems like it's going to be a new game for all intents and purposes.

 

[happyninja42]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq6K1rIR8MQ

You'll thank me later.

No... No, I will not thank you later. I will thank you now!!!! THAT WAS THE SHIT!

If you guys like that, you will probably love this


Assuming you don't know about it already. xD

 

[Souplex]

Absolutely nothing except nostalgia for the people who grew up with it. The best Final Fantasy game is either Chrono Trigger on the SNES or The Four Heroes of Light on the DS.

 

[Fox12]

6. Factions don't immediately get on the ground and worship you, indeed you seem rather insignificant to the rest of the world.

I really, really like this point. It's something that has rather bothered me in recent years. I don't like the design choice that states that the whole world needs to revolve around me. It reeks of pandering, but worse, it breaks my immersion in the game. That's why I loved Dark Souls so much, and that's something I really love about FF7. Sephiroth considers you little more then a puppet, and Shinra assumes that it can deal with you whenever it needs to. But no one in the world knows who you are, or cares. You're part of a much larger struggle between multiple factions, none of which have the best interest of the people at heart. Hell, you could even argue that Avalanche doesn't have the peoples best interest at heart.

The WEAPONS, Sephiroth, Meteor, Shinra... the world feels like its in the grasp of all these massive forces, and in comparison your ability to swing a stick of metal doesn't really mean much. It's important that Cloud doesn't save the world. HOLY saves the world, with the help of the lifestream. Cloud just played one part of a much larger story.

 

[Frankster]

Things that came up to mind in order:
-The music. Them classic ff7 tunes
-The lore and characters (I think the lore part is my nostalgia goggles speaking but Ill stand by the cast of characters being quite awesome and the world was interesting)
-Actually kinda related to the above, the whole exploring a world map in 3d was something new at the time.
-Also at the time it was the biggest and most epic rpg around, I'll never forget just how goddamned mind blown a lot of people including me were at release. Like OMG 3d graphics, CGI cutscenes, fancy music and it comes in THREE (!!!!!) ps1 discs!
When remembering the furore around ff7 it's worth remembering the context in which it came out in after all.
-The combat+ materia system was fun

I suspect my story is similar to many others.

Actually nvm, nothing I say will sum it up as good as this post. Ultimately it's the core truth of it, for many people like myself or Saltyk, ff7 was a one of a kind game that introduced us to rpgs and a different type of gaming then what we were previously used to in the 2d era. Fact of the matter is rpgs weren't that popular yet, most people going into ff7 never played a final fantasy and the common myth of the time (which might actually have been true) was people went out and bought ff7 just because of what they saw and without even knowing what an rpg was.

It was a gateway game for a lot of people, through ff7 I moved on to fancy 3d graphic games and opened my tastes to future rpgs like Breath of Fire series or Wild Arms.

 

[ecoho]

honestly the only thing I liked from FF7 was the soundtrack, but then again I finished FF6 for the first time about 3 months before I started playing FF7 so that may have something to do with it.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

For me specifically? Well...

FFVII introduced me to a lot of things new to gaming at the time that revolutionized it. FMVs for one, probably the best quality in existence at the time, and incorporating several of them into the scenery instead of having them viewed as a separate cutscene. Yes, Cloud's lego-tastic body doesn't really mesh with the beautiful backdrops, but just the fact that you could run around in the middle of an FMV in progress (better displayed later in the next game where there was a war scene where there were both polygon soldiers and FMV ones fighting with each other that you could also run into and fight, or choose not to). Also the first PS1 game I ever saw, making a HUGE first impression visually with summons, spells and the like.

But enough about dem gray-fics, which is something I cared about much more fifteen years ago. Having played FFVI before this it was a massive shift not only in setting but tone from fantasy to cyberpunk. Like a common compliment I see paid by fans of Sonic SatAM, Shinra Inc. isn't seeking to take over the world- they already have. Shinra runs almost everything, and the only group opposing them gets massacred less than 2 hours in. Only after leaving Midgar do we get any indication that every town isn't like that (or that massive, and being younger I could actually imagine a game that vast happening). Last game, we had 'Son of a Submariner!', and this time people are swearing like sailors. To me it was like someone going from Adam West Batman to Frank Miller Batman.

But Shinra's not even the worst enemy, oh no. There's also a spree killer with the world's longest katana on the loose trying to outdo Jason Voorhees. When I first saw this game I witnessed a friend play it up to the Kalm flashback sequence. Another first- never before had I seen a game go into this much detail for a villain's backstory before, nor make you a direct participant, with the highlight probably being the moment when Sephiroth's theme begins for the first time, signifying his sanity officially snapping and punctuated by one of the game's best FMVs. It would later be used to signify that you're about to travel through another Shinra facility where he's painted the walls and left behind monsters for you to deal with instead of soldiers.

Later on I would play the game myself and appreciate other things, like the Materia system (which I still believe to be the best progression system in the series), or the deconstruction of Cloud's character. In short, it came out at the absolute perfect time for my age and made the perfect first impression, as I figure it did a lot of people. Things have changed a LOT since then and I probably won't get the remake, but when it came out there was simply no other RPG that did the things that it did, and I'm speaking here as a lifetime fan of Chrono Trigger and FFVI.

 

[cdemares]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq6K1rIR8MQ

You'll thank me later.

No... No, I will not thank you later. I will thank you now!!!! THAT WAS THE SHIT!

I agree. Thank you so much. That was awesome.

 

[Saltyk]

It was the first game I got emotionally invested in. Before FFVII, games were just 'fun' or 'exciting'. You moved a dude and shit exploded and such. FFVII made me care. It made me cry. I fucking weeped. There was snot, not gonna lie.

You posted long before my other post, but I really just wanted to quote you and agree largely with this sentiment. I never cried, maybe that's because someone spoiled THE SCENE before I even started playing the game. But I certainly grew to care for the characters, the world, and the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq6K1rIR8MQ

You'll thank me later.

As a true FFVII fan, that was hilarious. And largely true.

SNIP

Just wanted to say I agree wholeheartedly with you.

3. The story is quite good, not the GREATEST THING EVAR! But it's still good, with a legitimately shocking twist.
Aerith dying was legitimately shocking back then, what's most notable however is that the writers actually took steps to make it look like it wouldn't happen, with things like Cait Sith's "sacrifice", deliberately misleading the audience into thinking death wouldn't have any real meaning or permanence in the game. Contrast Fallout 4, which seems to think I'll be surprised by something I guessed the moment the institute kidnapped the PC's animatronic plywood baby before refreezing the PC. And Mass Effect which simply stole it's "ending" from Deus Ex, trying and failing to make it have context by opening new plot threads when it should be closing them.

There is a lot of truth in this statement. It's nice to get older and appreciate the artistic decisions that some of your favorite media made. Also, it was always nice to go back through FFVII and catch all the little hints that Cloud isn't who he says he is. Things that you may have ignored, like the quick flash before Cloud tells Aerith he was a SOLDIER First Class.

I really, really like this point. It's something that has rather bothered me in recent years. I don't like the design choice that states that the whole world needs to revolve around me. It reeks of pandering, but worse, it breaks my immersion in the game. That's why I loved Dark Souls so much, and that's something I really love about FF7. Sephiroth considers you little more then a puppet, and Shinra assumes that it can deal with you whenever it needs to. But no one in the world knows who you are, or cares. You're part of a much larger struggle between multiple factions, none of which have the best interest of the people at heart. Hell, you could even argue that Avalanche doesn't have the peoples best interest at heart.

The WEAPONS, Sephiroth, Meteor, Shinra... the world feels like its in the grasp of all these massive forces, and in comparison your ability to swing a stick of metal doesn't really mean much. It's important that Cloud doesn't save the world. HOLY saves the world, with the help of the lifestream. Cloud just played one part of a much larger story.

I was trying to rack my brain to think of other games, even RPGs, where you're not the "Chosen One" and most important person in the world. It's actually pretty hard. Even among the Final Fantasy franchise. If the main character isn't the most important person in the world, a party member is, like Princess Garnet and Yuna.