I was nineteen-years-old opening it for the first time. I was meant to be studying for a calculus mid-term, but Kevin and I were barricaded inside his dorm room clutching textbooks and scribbled notes while simultaneously paging through his collection of GamePro magazines. Procrastination will do that to you: suddenly everything is interesting except for the thing you should be doing.
Hidden away in the back pages of GamePro was a preview for Final Fantasy VII. Rendered images showed off the game’s 3D characters posing in front of a cyber-punk cityscape while the text proclaimed “Final Fantasy VII delivers 40+ hours of gameplay” and “the cinematic storytelling of Final Fantasy VII elevates video game storytelling to new heights.” Kevin snickered at the screen, “Forty hours?! Who has that kind of time?” I nodded in agreement. But please don’t @ me, I was mentally preparing how I would rearrange my life to play that game for 40 hours.
My PlayStation wasn’t old by any stretch, I’d bought it with money I “borrowed” that was supposed to be spent on textbooks. That didn’t stop me from coveting that library copy of the Final Fantasy VII strategy guide in Philosophy 101.. Prior to FFVII I was firmly planted in the Nintendo camp. I cut my teeth on Mario and Zelda; played the shit out of Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI (or Final Fantasy III if you want to piss off my SNES cartridge). Those games were sprites with 16 bit characters. Everything I saw in this magazine felt like it was onto something different; something special. A window into what games could actually be.
When FFVII hit store shelves I was unemployed. And broke. College broke. That’s a special type of broke where $49.99 + tax is the equivalent of handing over a thousand dollars. I nearly begged myself waiting those two weeks, listening to everyone around me who had gotten their copies already rave about this game while I frantically tried not to learn any spoilers. I picked up extra shifts at the campus bookstore; I lived off of stolen cereal from the dining hall in Tupperware containers; and managed to scrape together enough coins to make that mystical black jewel case mine.
The opening cinematic still gives me goosebumps thinking about it. Even now, almost three decades later I get chills. Camera pulls back from a young girl holding a flower to showcase the mega city of Midgar; cut to Cloud sprinting off a train platform to drop a bomb. No hand-holding tutorial, no boring expository dialogue to dump on you. Just “Here’s the world, here’s your guy, you figure it out.” It was paradise after years of games saying “Welcome hero! Let me stop the game and teach you the controls for at least twenty minutes.”
Final Fantasy VII’s Midgar blew me away. Here was this dystopian hellscape of a city layered on top of itself while the rich steal sunlight from the poor literally living beneath them. Environmental storytelling at it’s finest. Just by exploring the world you could see the societal divide. Instead of watching some stoic avatar save princesses in towers I was able to see and explore real problems in a fantasy world. It was impactful and resonated with me more than “evil wizard is threatening our kingdom” ever did.
I would play FFVII all night until 3 or 4 am; then stumble to my 8am classes a zombie. “One more save point and I’ll go to sleep” was my mantra (also the reason I’ve wasted dozens of hours Googling “How to maximize FFVII save points”… it doesn’t exist guys, they are few and far between on purpose). Kevin would sometimes peer over my shoulder, ask a seemingly innocent question, only to unleash a monologue of story details that I’m sure he regretted not living anywhere else but within a few feet of me.
Cloud was not your typical RPG protagonist. He wasn’t your silent blank-slate or your all-American good guy. He was broody, conflicted, and more than we initially learned made him completely unreliable to narrate his own story. Here I was at 19-years-old still trying to figure out what sort of person I was supposed to be in this world (I’m still working on that at 47), and this guy has lost his memory… ya know what? This game knows what’s up.
Oh… Aerith dies. We need to talk about Aerith because she ruined me for weeks. This was back in 1997 when you couldn’t google every plot twist and spoiler, so surprises were still possible when it came to media. There I am sitting in my dorm room playing on the floor with my controller in hand and Sephiroth murders Aerith with his LIGHTNING LANCE that’s way too big for him to wield. I actually yelled “What the actual fuck?” Look, I know it was an animated death and all, but damn it Aerith! All that MATTER bouncing down the stairs, that song… I sat there waiting for the plot twist, for the Phoenix Down revival. Something. But it didn’t happen.
This shattered every rule I thought I knew about JRPGs. Sure characters died, but not major party members. Principal protagonists don’t have their love interest murdered brutally and senselessly halfway through a game. But she died. And it was better because of it. It taught me early on as a gamer that you can’t have meaningful story without meaningful stakes. There has to be consequences for your actions.
Combat was simple and deceptively deep. I love that swirl transition from field to battle screen, the music swelling at the exact same moment your character do. Limit Breaks were amazing game design. Take damage to fill up your limit metre forcing you to decide, how much damage can I allow Cloud to take to unleash Meteorain? I probably spent hours purposefully depleting the health of my characters just so I could kill with Limit Breaks. To Kevin’s dismay.
But where FFVII really showed its brilliance was in the Materia system. I kept a notebook beside my console just jotting down notes on various combinations to maximize your damage. Figuring out the best Linking All / Offensive Spell combos to hit multiple enemies at once, linking Added Effect to Status Materia to make your sword breathe fire…every time I unlocked a new technique for combining Materia it felt like discovering cheat code. It was simple enough for newcomers (just shove that shiny ball into the slot and go ham), but nuanced enough that people like me could obsess over it for hours.
Exiting Midgar for the first time and seeing that world map…. Guys I called Kevin at 2AM just to gush at him about it. Of course he thought I was being annoying because he had already reached that point weeks ago and was busy grinding in the Gold Saucer. Our friendship is still intact, but don’t push it. When I realised that towering city of Midgar was only one zone on this planet I had never seen something so big. I remember actually standing there, controller in hand, dumbfounded at what I was seeing.
Final Fantasy VII’s music is what made everything so impactful. Nobuo Uematsu’s MIDI brilliance tapped into a range of emotions you still struggle to find in fully orchestral video game scores these days. “Aerith’s Theme” still makes me sad. I hear that battle music and I need to drop everything and fight. “One-Winged Angel”? That song is what boss fight music is supposed to sound like. I actually recorded portions of the FFVII soundtrack onto cassette so I could listen to it on my Walkman at lunch. Yep, that was me. Love it.
Lastly I want to talk about just how impressive FFVII was for the time. Pre-rendered backgrounds with 3D models running around in it gave you cities that looked like they couldn’t possibly exist on a PS console. Yeah, your field sprites look like pixilated oven mitts by today’s standards – my children love to point out how terrible they look- but back in 1997 this blew my mind. FFVII’s FMV even required you to swap out discs because your story exceeded the storage limits of a single CD-ROM. Changing discs had this ceremonial feel, like we were closing one act and delving deeper into the next.
By the time I finished Final Fantasy VII there was a crowd around my dorm room waiting to see how it ended. Anyone who had zero interest in my stupid “anime game” suddenly needed to know if Cloud stopped Sephiroth. That ambiguous ending kicked off what felt like months of debate on what actually happened. Was Cloud able to save everyone? Did he really kill himself? What about the planet!? I loved that there was no clear answer. Gave us dumbasses plenty to argue about during late night pizza deliveries.
I’ve played through FFVII multiple times since that first playthrough. What strikes me about the game changes every time I play it. During my undergrad I felt connected to Cloud’s identity struggle and the games environmental themes. In my late twenties while dealing with career issues I felt more impacted by the game’s perseverance. These days in my forties I find myself relating to the theme of memory and legacy. It’s like revisiting that favorite book of yours at different stages of your life – you’re able to pick out things you didn’t notice before because you’re viewing it through a new lens each time.
Sephiroth was never that complicated of a villain to me. Sure, he’s a lunatic that wants to tear everything up, but the more I play FFVII I find more complexity to his character. His whole origin of discovering his “memories”, feeling betrayed, the outright foolish premise of him thinking he’s the rightful king of the planet… it’s sophisticated writing for a game villain that still holds up. That scene in Nibelheim when he’s little still gets me.
I skipped classes to play FFVII. I didn’t sleep because I was playing FFVII. I loudly preached to everyone who would listen (and many who didn’t) about how FFVII changed my life. This game taught me what games could be. How they could tackle real world issues like corporate monopoly, the ramifications of pollution, and your place in the world. Games were no longer just toys I played – FFVII showed me that they could be experiences that would affect me for the rest of my life.
Recently I had convinced my nephew to play the original prior to jumping into the remake. He’s old enough now where the graphics don’t make sense to him. “Uncle Sam, why do their hands look like that?” He quickly fell in love with the story though and got past wanting the game to look like Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Seeing him play through Aerith’s death, witnessing him react the exact same way I did twenty eight years ago was incredible. It was a cultural passing of the torch if there ever was one. Good stories are timeless.
Somewhere towards the middle of FFVII Cloud examines his hand and says, “What is this feeling?” Man I felt that feeling. Screen washed over me during my first playthrough, but I was too enamored with the experience to truly realise what FFVII was doing to me. If I had to answer that question now? It was knowing that video games could be art. Not some elitist use of the word. But art that truly affected your emotions in the most primal way. Final Fantasy VII changed me because it pushed the boundaries of what I thought games could be. And for that I will forever be indebted to that angsty tweener with the god damn horsekick.
Elena is a librarian in Dublin with an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure European computer games that most English-language gaming sites completely ignore. She champions forgotten systems—the Commodore 16, the Spectrum 128K, the Atari ST’s untapped potential—with infectious enthusiasm and genuine expertise. Her writing documents regional exclusives and hidden gems that barely made it to print before the companies folded, preserving gaming history that would otherwise disappear entirely. She approaches retro gaming as cultural preservation, not mere nostalgia.
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