Many people have talked about why this game is so great,so I don't really need to say much.But I will say this,before I played Final Fantasy VII I was primarily a PC gamer,because of games like StarCraft,Dark Reign,Total Annihilation,Quake and the PC versions of Red Alert and Need for Speed III were much better than the Playstation version.
It had come to the point I rarely wanted to play games on my Playstation.Then oneday in 1999 I decided to purchase Final Fantasy VII as a budget priced game(there was many brand new copies of FFVII sitting on the shelf for around 50$ Australian,and keep in mind a budget priced game in Australia is 50$ or under).
The reasons I choose Final Fantasy VII that day were,it looked interesting on the commericals and I was curious to see what a Final Fantasy game was really like.See when I was in highschool(from grades 7-12 because we don't do the Jnr highschool thing here)not very many people talked about RPGs,and most people prefered PC gaming,or if they played games on consoles they liked shooting games,or simplistic games like Spyro the dragon.And keep in mind,Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG were never released for PAL,so Australian SNES owners never got the chance to experience how great JRPGs could be until much later.In fact I don't even remember seeing Final Fantasy 1-6 on any store shelves for the NES/SNES even though I went to video game stores ALOT.
When I played Final Fantasy VII,it was unlike any other game I had ever played.It was the first game that the story alone was deep enough to keep me playing,and in fact the story was better than many movies I've watched.And the use of FMV for presentation made the world feel more lifelike than anything I had ever experienced,and using FMV to show story segments made it so exciting and created so much anticipation on what would happen next eg Would Cloud fall to his death on that collapsing bridge? Another thing that stood out to be about the game was the diversity of the world,having a dark metropolis,city slums,countryside and valleys,tropical locations,desert,caves,ancient cities,forest,terrain with snow and many villages.
I loved the interaction with NPCs,about being able to tell the cook at the diner his food was good,it was OK,or it tasted like dogfood and seeing his reaction.I remember having to give CPR to a child who had drowned,or disguising Cloud as a woman so he could sneak into a brothel,and at the amusement park you can influence the game to choose which person you want to go on a date with(and it was nice seeing Cloud and Aeris on that ride together talking),and you could even play the arcade machines/mini games!
For a while you think Shinra are the main enemy,then Sephiroth shows up later on,and there's the love triangle between Cloud,Aeris,Tifa.And I remember when Shinra made the higher level of Midgar collapse on the lower level killing most of the lower level residents because they were hoping to kill the AVALANCHE(rebel)members,so Shinra were prepared to sacrifise many innocent residents on the lower levels just to kill a few rebels! I was so outraged when this happened!
I would finally like to say FFVII got me into JRPGs,and now JRPGS are my favorite genre,and I think FFVII showed the true potential of how great a JRPG can be.And to be honest JRPGs are the reason I stick to console gaming because they are better to play on consoles and there is more of them available for consoles.
