Happy Birthday Final Fantasy 7 !

[Dennis Fleaman]

Final Fantasy VII is 20 years old !
Can you believe that. What are your memories of ff7 ? Have you beaten the game ?
Do you also hate the remake ? Let's talk FF7

[MaterialHandlerMike]

My memories of FFVII are bittersweet. I was young and had a great GF who was my High school sweet heart. I remember her brother (Clayton) being a harsh jerk, and he was pretty standoffish with me at first. We soon hit it off over our love of Black Sabbath and classic RPG's on the NES and SNES. We soon realized of our mutual love for games and began to discuss with great excitement that Final Fantasy VII had been announced. That Christmas, my GF and Claytons GF bought us both Playstations. We got FFVII the next month and began to dive in. We would constantly discuss our progress, and share tips with each other, while trying to beat the game.

I beat the game, after a couple months, and so did Clayton. It seemed I had made a new friend over the common bond of our love for video games. Unfortunately, Clayton wouldn't be around to game much longer. He died in a bad accident the following year. Final Fantasy VII was an awesome game, and renewed my love for the franchise, but it will always make me remember about the friendship I made, and how it came to a tragic ending.

[FatherJack]

Sorry about your loss Mike

I'm not a RPG fan or many thinking games and had never played one before I came across FFVII on my future brother-in-law's PS1. It had no memory card but I must have played for close to two hours with no idea what I was doing but the start just sucked me in with a character I didn't know going straight into the action and a great story.

When I finally got a PS1 this was the game I got with it. Got to the 2nd disk but had to look up a walkthrough to ge past one boss and realised I had to get an objectfrom a certain situation earlier that I would never have thought of to do myself. I started to use up health too quickly and not enough refills so I stopped playing as iI really didn't know what I was doing.

Sadly I never did get the RPG bug but a great experience was had.

[Disposed Hero]

I was in the 5th grade when FF VII was released.  Most of my friends and I were already into RPGs, particularly the Final Fantasy games on SNES, so a new release coming out for the PlayStation was a big deal.  I remember being confused that the new one was number 7 since the last one we got in North America was 3.  My 10 year old self just figured that the new game in the series must be so good that they decided to skip the numbers 4, 5, and 6 because they couldn't do the game justice. 

So in September of '97 I was invited to a friend's house for a birthday party sleepover kind of thing.  I remember being the first to arrive, so while we waited for more of our friends to show up, my friend showed me Wild Arms on the PlayStation.  I didn't have a PlayStation yet, but I only had a few opportunities to play one myself by this point.  Once everyone showed up, we did the actual birthday party, and my friend's parents gave him Final Fantasy VII.  We almost immediately popped the game into the PlayStation and played it most of the night.

When I went home the next day, one of the first things I did was ask my parents for a PlayStation and FF VII for Christmas that year.  I was so excited about the game that I bought the strategy guide for it shortly after and must have read it from beginning to end multiple times before I even had the game.  Yeah, most of the story was spoiled for me, but being 10 years old, I didn't really care.  A few months went by and Christmas arrived, and, lo and behold, I got what I asked for that year!  At this time in my life, my family and I always packed up and drove to Tennessee on Christmas morning to spend the holiday with my dad's side of the family that lived there.  Fortunately, my parents let me take my new gift with me, so I found a TV there to plug into and must have played the game for about 8 hours straight.

It took some time, but I finally beat the game sometime while I was in high school.  I probably should have beaten it a few years earlier, but I had a bad habit of getting to the second disc and starting the game over.  I revisited this game about a year ago via the PS4 remaster, and I think I enjoyed it just as much as I did when I was a kid.  Some of my favorite memories of the game are the awesome opening section, exploring the Gold Saucer, and chocobo breeding and racing.  A friend of mine and I spent hours raising chocobos until we finally got a gold one.

So yeah, if you couldn't tell, Final Fantasy VII is one of my all time favorites. 

[Haoie]

Haven't heard much about the remake lately!

[Raidou]

Two screenshots were released at a trade show:

https://www.destructoid.c...y-vii-remake-419458.phtml

[RobotWillie]

I will be playing the remaster soon I hope, but the original is one of my favorite memories as a kid. To me RPG's are gaming. And without FF gaming itself as a result would be a shell of itself. We'd still have great games, but just imagine how many FF itself inspired (much like a band like The Beatles and Rolling Stones inspiring the direction of music for decades to come)

I might say Dungeons and Dragons and its ilk are the main inspiration for western RPG's. I think its safe to say at the very least Japanese styled RPG's look to FF as its Jesus or God.

And to top it all off, FF7 is considered the best by many in the series. So the premier title in a premier series.

FF and the RPG genre also opened up other genres to the idea or possibility of open world gameplay. RPG's were the first to have such vast areas to explore and now we have games like that in many genres, and open world games are my favorite kind.