I don’t know if anybody had spent so much money on a game before 1997 as Squaresoft did on Final Fantasy VII. And some of that money was obviously revenge on Nintendo, you’re probably well aware demos were made using early N64 hardware featuring FF6 characters doing call magic, as a prototype for what FF7’s battles looked like. It’s all the funnier to think of the game being a huge hit in America (unlike Japan where of course it was going to sell well) when you consider that Square’s NES and SNES games sold poorly. Did you know that part of the marketing tactic for the game in Japan to make it sell like hotcakes was to have copies of it available in convenience stores? I remember that…

I will confess that as I play through FFVII, a couple of story bits have worked. It is perverse to think that the Midgar parts of the game, which are just the first six or seven hours of a 40-60 hour game, are the parts I remember most iconically. I did enjoy revisiting that part of the game, even though it’s really easy and you can’t do much in the way of magic and the like (and let’s face it, Aeris is a pretty crappy party member through and through–let’s hope the remake corrects that!) and if FF7 were a movie, the whole plot device of having Shinra collapse that pillar, ugly though it is, is an effective “plot point.”
Then we get to Kalm and have Cloud’s creepy Nibelheim flashback with the iconic scene of Sephiroth burning the town down. That and Aeris’s death were the two scenes that were like memes even in 1997. And the Nibelheim parts of the game–both the flashback and the actual visit to Nibelheim later on–are pretty damn effective. That creepy music that plays in the town and the even creepier visit inside the Shinra Mansion with the spare “heartbeat” music actually really did seem to work on a cinematic level (though that boss inside the safe still wasn’t very hard to beat.) There’s also lots of stuff I forgot, like that Sephiroth is actually in the North Cave the entire game and all the Sephiroths you see like the one that kills Aeris is actually Jenova. You know, the game isn’t very good at explaining who Jenova is, I got confused by that and also by Vincent’s backstory.
I also found it iconic to revisit the Shinra HQ building on top of Midgar, that kind of had me shuddering when I entered it, or that goofy book-title puzzle on that one floor that you have to blow lots of time on just to get some accessory.
But while FFVII’s plot gained acclaim I think it was really Metal Gear Solid, which had pro voice actors (unlike the food court staff that was hired by Capcom to do the first Resident Evil game) and a virtual three hour action movie buried inside it, that solidified that game-movie connection. Not that FFVII didn’t feel special at the time.
Of course, I just watched James Rolfe do FF6 as the Angry Video Game Nerd and he seemed pretty impressed with the plot and he’s 44 years old this year, and I’m 41, so whatever. (He also said it was the greatest game of all time and made the final fight with Kefka to be the end all be all of video game bosses, but I never thought Kefka was hard at all.)