Final Fantasy 7 and other games you haven't got round to finishing

I remember all these years ago when this game had just come out and it was the hottest thing in the gaming press. Now over 20 years ago, I am giving it another go with the intent to finish it this time.

Anyone else pick the original up lately? Anyone play it on a regular basis?

Anyone have any other old retro game they keep going back to, or mean to finish after leaving it for a while?

Personally I finished Deus Ex and Icewind Dale 2 finally over 2020, after a long hiatus.

I had 100+ hours into FF7 back in the day. Gold chocobo, leveling materia and finding all the good stuff. I hadn't officially beat the game because I had not fought Sephiroth in the final battle yet.....

I got dragged along on a family vacation - rented a stupid RV and drove through a bunch of states and so on....not what a 15 year old kid wants to do, be stuck in a RV with his younger brother, mom and step-dad for 2 weeks.

Anyway, while we were gone on vacation, without my knowledge my younger brother lent out the PSX (or PS1 as some might call it) to a friend of his. He let his friend borrow our games, Playstation, controllers and memory cards.

We get back from vacation and a few days later I finally got my brother to get the Plaaystation back....load up FF7 and all my goddamn saves were deleted. WTF! I was pissed. Apparently his friend wanted room to save whatever piddlyass game he was playing and deleted out every save file for every game on both memory cards.

I never officially beat FF7. I restarted it and maybe got about 10-15 hours into and just gave up. I couldn't bring myself to go through everything again. I did get a copy of it gifted to me from my younger brother about 4 years ago on Steam, but I haven't put any time into it. I doubt I'll ever officially beat the game.

I have a bunch of PC games I haven't beat, ones I haven't even unwrapped that I purchased 10-12 years ago or more. I have lots of backlog to work on. I'm sure I'll never get through them all, but you never know.

I did recently go back and beat Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, pretty sure I started that playthrough in 2012. Honestly though, the list of games I haven't finished is probably longer than the list of ones I have. Actually forgot that I hadn't made it to the end of Ocarina of Time, plan to rectify that soon. Got 80 hours into Persona 4 and just had to stop. The dungeons are a slog in that game, and you're supposed to go through each one twice. Liked everything else about the game, but not enough to put up with that to the end. Also only part way through God of War 3, Super Mario World, Blood Omen, Fatal Frame 2, and many more.

I end up playing FF7 once every 2-3 years. Most recently I played the PC version, visually modded out while keeping it close to the original in terms of balance. It was pretty great. Check out 'Tifa's 7th Heaven' if you are interested. It's a mod loader that will download the mods for you when you have it set up properly.

I'm currently playing through the original FF. I modded it with a collection of patches that contain a bunch of bug fixes, localization tweaks, and QoL improvements. All the goodness of the NES sound chip synth, with none of the broken stuff. It's called 'Final Fantasy Restored'. I'm playing it on my MisterFPGA. Gotta be the best way to play it IMO.

@judaspete: I am with you. I finished Persona 4 Golden last week, with about 100 hours put in, without even completely completing it (you know which ending I missed out). Can't wait for some announcement on when Persona 5 will come to PC.

It was on my list of games I started years ago and never finished, as is FF7 now (despite finishing 6 and 8 years ago). This time Im committed to seeing it out to the end before I go on to any other games.

@neatfeatguy: Similar story. Made it to the 3rd disk, on the pursuit of you know who, then stopped. A few weeks later my savefiles all got lost somehow and I didn't bother starting again until now. Luckily however some of the tips I learnt from the first playthrough help this one: i.e: equipping materia to everyone all the time as they grow with use, understanding the finer points of the combat system.

For the record FF8 was my first final fantasy and I loved it. But when I started FF7 3 years ago, I now get why most people reckon FF7 blows 8 out of the water, as well as many other games to this day. One of the greatest games of all time that still holds up today.

@pyro1245: It's encouraging to hear that people will actually have multiple playthroughs of some JRPGs. I can however now imagine doing that with the Persona games, though ideally I would like to have 5 of them released so that you eventually start to forget previous playthroughs.

I tried to keep an updated list of my games I haven't beat and ones I've beat from the list, but I'd venture to guess the list is only about 80% complete. I have more games that I know aren't on the list, but I'm too lazy to confirm everything. I just keep a blog here in gamespot - it's about the only thing I really use gamespot for anymore, just to update the list when I remember. I occasionally post on the forums, but it's maybe a dozen times a year...the site and forums is just a pathetic shadow of it's former self from years ago before new ownership took over, gutted the site and made it worse.

Anyway, here's my backlog list.

Slowly trudging through AC3 and finally getting to play the son of the templar guy. I hate this game but I do have all the other AC games still waiting to be played and I am andamant to finish all in order... someday....

Yeah I've played FFVII a fair number of times at this point..probably boot it up once every 2/3 years, and do the same for my other favourite FF games (VI-IX) on a regular basis, so must have played them each between 3-6 times or more.. But for games I've been getting back to which I never beat... my white whale, my unfinished FF shame is nr. XII.. I almost beat it back in 2006 or whenever, literally made it to the final dungeon section, and got so bored with the endlessly repetitive battles against the same selection of 4 enemies in a non-descript maze of bland corridors that I just couldn't bear the drudgery of it all. Didn't help being slightly under-levelled either I guess..

Well now I've finally gotten back to it in the 'Zodiac Age' version, and almost up to the same area once more...here's hoping I have the patience and sense of direction to make it through this time! I've actually been putting it off for weeks at this point because I'm so sick of the repetitive, constant combat already, heh...kind of ironic since it got rid of random battles, but if anything the encounter rate just went up instead. A good game otherwise though, really want to see the ending and get it over with :p