Final Fantasy 20th Anniversary

I was kind of late to the Final Fantasy party by the time that seven was announced. It was a huge upheaval for Square to leave Nintendo for greener pastures at Sony. But that impact was lost on me since I never really played a Final Fantasy game at that point. I did rent Final Fantasy II (IV) at one point but the random encounters frustrated me and I shortly gave up on it. I did, however, see some advertisements for Final Fantasy VII on TV and that blew me away. Video games just did not look like that in 1997. Final Fantasy VII would not be the game that made me want to get a Playstation (that would be Metal Gear Solid) but it would definitely be a game that I would want to have in my library. I picked up Final Fantasy VII at a local used game store, Games Plus, about a year after it was already released. By that point I was more familiar with RPGs after playing through Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, and Super Mario RPG. I got into the game so late that I already knew that Aeris died at some point in the game but that didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the sprawling RPG. Most RPGs are set in a medieval type fantasy world and Final Fantasy hasn’t been much different until VI and VII came along. Their take of a mythical world in dieselpunk, blending dystopian metropolises with fantasy, and heavy handed environmentalism, was something new to me and a lot of other players. Nobuo Uematsu’s soundtrack has stuck with me ever since I heard the first notes of Bombing Mission. Final Fantasy VII also helped foster a love of video game music. The country twang of Farm Boy to the heavy metal of Still More Fighting to the operatic bombast of One Winged Angel made sure that the soundtrack would be cemented in my brain for years to come. While I was learning guitar, several songs from the soundtrack became a staple including Cosmo Canyon and J-E-N-O-V-A, which I learned by ear. We are still several years away from the remake which will change a lot of things about the original game. Some of it for the better and others for the worse because nostalgia will not allow us to really appreciate it and because Square Enix is trying to capture lightning in a bottle twice. It’s certainly dated by today’s standards and it has a lot of annoying conventions (random encounters) but it is an important title to video games and to this gamer.