I was nineteen and supposed to be cramming for a calculus midterm when I first saw it. Kevin and I were holed up in his dorm room, textbooks spread everywhere, but somehow we’d ended up flipping through his stack of GamePro magazines instead. You know how it is when you’re procrastinating – suddenly everything becomes fascinating except the thing you’re supposed to be doing.
There it was, buried in the back pages: a preview spread for something called Final Fantasy VII. The screenshots showed these detailed 3D characters standing around what looked like a cyberpunk city, and the text promised “40+ hours of gameplay” and “cinematic storytelling never before seen in video games.” Kevin took one look and said, “Forty hours? Who the hell has that kind of time?” I nodded along, but honestly? I was already doing mental math, figuring out how I could rearrange my entire life to find those forty hours.
My PlayStation was still pretty new then – I’d bought it with money that was technically supposed to go toward textbooks. Sorry, Philosophy 101, but the library had a copy, right? Up until that point, I was mostly a Nintendo guy. I’d grown up on Mario and Zelda, played the hell out of Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI (which my SNES cartridge stubbornly insisted on calling Final Fantasy III, because the 90s were confusing like that). But those were sprite-based games with charming 16-bit characters. What I was looking at in that magazine seemed like something completely different. Like a glimpse into the future of what games could actually become.
When FFVII finally hit stores, I was broke. College freshman broke, which is its own special category of poverty. Forty-nine ninety-nine plus tax might as well have been a thousand dollars. I survived two weeks of torture, listening to friends who’d managed to snag copies talk about this incredible game while I desperately tried to avoid spoilers. I picked up extra shifts at the campus bookstore, ate nothing but dining hall cereal I’d smuggled out in Tupperware containers, and finally scraped together enough cash for that iconic black jewel case.
That opening sequence, man. Even now, almost thirty years later, I get chills thinking about it. The camera pulls back from this flower girl – Aerith, though I didn’t know her name yet – to reveal the massive city of Midgar, then cuts to Cloud jumping off a train for a bombing mission. No tutorial, no exposition dump, just “Here’s the world, here’s the character, figure it out.” After years of games that started with “Welcome, hero! Let me explain the controls for the next twenty minutes,” it was refreshing as hell.
Midgar itself blew my mind. This wasn’t your typical RPG setting with castles and forests and generic medieval towns. This was a proper dystopian nightmare – a city built in layers, where the rich literally lived above the poor and stole their sunlight. The environmental storytelling was incredible. You could see the inequality just by looking around. The people in the slums were struggling while the folks topside lived in luxury, and it all felt so much more real and relevant than “evil wizard threatens generic kingdom.”
I played in these obsessive marathon sessions, staying up until 3 or 4 AM, then stumbling to morning classes like a zombie. “Just one more save point” became my constant lie to myself, even though the game’s save points were spaced out like some kind of sadistic test of willpower. One more save point usually meant another hour and a half of gameplay, minimum. My poor roommate would occasionally watch over my shoulder, asking innocent questions that would trigger these long-winded explanations about the plot that probably made him question his housing choices.
Cloud was unlike any RPG protagonist I’d encountered before. Most heroes in these games were either silent blank slates or cheerful do-gooders. Cloud was moody, complicated, and as I’d discover later, completely unreliable as a narrator of his own story. As someone who was trying to figure out who I was supposed to be as an adult – which, let’s be honest, I’m still working on at forty-seven – his identity crisis hit home in ways I couldn’t fully understand at the time.
And then… Aerith’s death. Jesus. I need to talk about this because it messed me up for weeks. This was 1997, before the internet spoiled everything, when you could still experience genuine surprises in popular media. I’m sitting there in my dorm room, controller in hand, watching Sephiroth come down and run her through with that ridiculously long sword. I literally said “What the hell?” out loud. The materia bouncing down those stone steps, that music playing… I kept waiting for the reversal, the phoenix down, the magical revival. Something. But it never came.
That death violated every rule I thought I knew about JRPGs. Main party members don’t just die halfway through the story, especially not the love interest, especially not in such a brutal, senseless way. But she did die, and the game was better for it. It taught me that meaningful stories need real stakes, real consequences. You can’t have emotional payoff without genuine risk.
The battle system was brilliant in its simplicity and depth. That swirling transition from the field to battle screen, the sudden blast of battle music – it still gives me goosebumps. The Limit Break system was genius game design: taking damage filled your limit gauge, so there was this constant risk/reward calculation. Do I heal Cloud now, or let him take another hit so he can unleash Meteorain? I spent way too many hours intentionally keeping my characters injured just to build up their limit breaks, much to my roommate’s complete bewilderment.
But the materia system… that’s where the game really showed its genius. I filled actual notebooks with combination theories and optimal setups. Linking All materia with offensive spells to hit multiple enemies, combining Added Effect with status materia to give weapons special properties – every discovery felt like I was breaking the game in the best possible way. It was accessible enough for newcomers (just slot the glowing orbs and you’ll be fine) but deep enough for obsessives like me to spend hours optimizing builds.
The moment when you leave Midgar and see the world map for the first time… I actually called Kevin at 2 AM to tell him about it, only to learn he’d hit that part days earlier and was already screwing around at the Gold Saucer. Our friendship survived, but barely. After spending 8-10 hours thinking this massive city was the entire game, suddenly discovering it was just one location on a whole planet? That sense of scale was unprecedented. I remember just standing there, controller in hand, trying to process what I was looking at.
Nobuo Uematsu’s soundtrack was the emotional backbone of the whole experience. Those MIDI arrangements somehow conveyed more feeling than most fully orchestrated scores today. “Aerith’s Theme” still makes me melancholy. The regular battle music got my blood pumping every single time. And “One-Winged Angel”? That completely redefined what boss battle music could be. I actually recorded tracks onto cassette tapes so I could listen on my Walkman between classes. Yeah, I was that guy. No regrets.
The technical achievement here can’t be understated. Those pre-rendered backgrounds with 3D character models moving through them created environments that seemed impossible on PlayStation hardware. Sure, the blocky field models look primitive now – my kids call them “oven mitt people” – but in 1997, this was mind-blowing stuff. The FMV cutscenes required multiple discs because CD-ROMs couldn’t hold all that data. Swapping discs felt ceremonial, like transitioning between acts of an epic play.
By the time I reached the ending, my dorm room had become a viewing party. People who’d previously shown zero interest in my “weird Japanese game” suddenly wanted to see how it all concluded. That ambiguous finale sparked immediate debates about what actually happened. Was humanity saved? Destroyed? Transformed into something new? The uncertainty was both frustrating and perfect – it gave us something to argue about over late-night pizza runs for weeks.
I’ve replayed FFVII multiple times over the years, and what resonates changes with each playthrough. In college, I connected with Cloud’s identity issues and the environmental themes. In my late twenties, dealing with some career setbacks, the perseverance angle hit differently. Now in my forties, I’m more affected by the themes about memory and legacy. It’s like revisiting a favorite book at different life stages – you’re always discovering new layers because you’re bringing different experiences to it.
Sephiroth seemed like a straightforward villain at first – he’s gone insane and wants to destroy everything. But with each replay, I’ve found more complexity in his character. His discovery of his origins, the sense of betrayal, his twisted logic that leads him to believe he’s the planet’s rightful heir… it’s sophisticated villain writing that holds up decades later. That scene in the Nibelheim reactor where he learns the truth about himself remains genuinely disturbing storytelling.
I skipped classes to play this game. I dreamed about it when I finally slept. I talked about it constantly to anyone who’d listen and plenty who wouldn’t. FFVII fundamentally changed what I thought games could accomplish. It proved they could tackle complex themes like corporate exploitation, environmentalism, and identity with real sophistication. It showed me that the hundred-plus hours I invested weren’t just entertainment – they were experiences that would stick with me for life.
A couple years back, I convinced my nephew to play the original before trying the remake. He struggled with the graphics initially – “Uncle Sam, why do their hands look so weird?” – but got completely absorbed once the story kicked in. Watching him experience Aerith’s death, seeing that same shock and denial I’d felt, was like witnessing some kind of cultural torch-passing moment. The technology might be dated, but great storytelling remains timeless.
There’s this scene midway through where Cloud, realizing his memories might be false, says “What is this feeling?” I asked myself the same question constantly during that first playthrough, unable to articulate how profoundly this game was affecting me. Now, with the benefit of years and perspective, I can answer: it was the realization that this medium I loved could be genuine art. Not in some pretentious academic sense, but in the most direct, emotionally impactful way possible. FFVII changed me because it showed me what games could become when developers aimed higher than simple entertainment. For that alone, I’ll always be grateful to that spiky-haired mercenary with the oversized sword and surprisingly human struggles.
Samuel’s been gaming since the Atari 2600 and still thinks 16-bit was the golden age. Between accounting gigs and parenting teens, he keeps the CRTs humming in his Minneapolis basement, writing about cartridge quirks, console wars, and why pixel art never stopped being beautiful.
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