Happy birthday, FF7NA

Final Fantasy Online Forums > Video Gaming Discussion > Final Fantasy Series

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09.07.2011 5:20pm

Thread Creator

Monetary Dragon
Just keep swimming

FF7's North American release was September 7, 1997, making today it's 14th birthday.

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09.07.2011 5:34pm

Crono
Crono can cross dimensions too!

I remember getting the call that my copy arrived. I got to the EB immediately and was second in line waiting for the unboxing. By the time (ten minutes later) I got my copy the line was 40 long out the door to the mall. How appropriate is it that I just got to disc 3 on my fourth replay last night. :)

Currently Playing: Dark Cloud 2: 3 hours.
Also Playing: CT, FF VI, Solatorobo, Secret of Mana, Halo 4.
Just Finished: Fable II: 7 hours.

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09.07.2011 6:58pm

Seldomseen
Old Guard

Oh man, I remember the first time I saw a demo of the game playing at a local video games store, and I was just floored by its presentation. And then the title card popped up and I totally did a double take; Up until that point, I hadn't realized it was Final Fantasy, much less its seventh iteration.

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09.07.2011 7:59pm

Rinoa
Night Star
Administrator

The first way I played this was an illegal copy of the JP version, we played the hell out of those scratched CDs till enough real copies were imported over. Then replayed the english game because of the added content (which wasn't even noticable IMHO) then later replayed FF7J-international for the purpose of halping friend's site at https://tifa.nu/tifa before Advent Children came out.

Rinoa.Nu

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09.07.2011 8:40pm

Zubis
Registered Member

14 years? Good grief...I was well, 14. So old :/ Guess this is how the Star Wars fans felt in the 70s.

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09.07.2011 8:41pm

Nelfichu
I've been there, hombre.

Around Christmas time 14 years ago, I was in the 5th grade, and this one friend of mine kept going off on how excited he was for some game called Final Fantasy. Knowing nothing about it, I asked for a Playstation, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and FF7 and got all three. I put in FF7, was wowed by the graphics, but didn't understand the whole RPG/active time battle system. I got as far as the scorpion boss in the reactor, furiously attacking when its tail was raised (as Cloud told me to do!). I kept dying and dying, and--at this point very frustrated--I quit. To this day I still don't understand why Square had Cloud tell the player to attack when the tail was up. What a way to alienate new players.

So I tossed FF7 aside and spent the next month playing nothing but Mortal Kombat. Needless to say, that got old fast, and since I only had one other game for my brand new PS1, I went back to FF7 and struggled through it. Once I got passed that damned first boss, I became utterly hooked. FF7 totally changed video games for me. I never knew a video game could actually tell such a gripping story or play with your emotions.

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09.07.2011 8:45pm

GregT
Registered Member

I rented VII three times before coming to the realization that the plan I was going through with was incredibly stupid. Other than Mario RPG, I had no real experience with the genre.

My fondest memory was when I decided to take on Emerald during a strong thunder storm. I was planning on turning it off once he killed my party, but I was fairing well against and eventually defeated it. This made me anxious because I couldn't shake the feeling that the power was going to go out. I quickly made my way to Kalm to claim the Master Materia before finally saving. Quite a rush for me, as silly as it sounds.

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09.07.2011 9:30pm

Testament
Shamshot

My friend had rented the game and I stayed at his house for a couple days playing it. He was kind enough to let me do most of the playing. On the way home I stopped at Blockbuster but didn't have enough money to purchase the game (nevermind that I didn't even have the console) so I purchased the Brady guide to tide me over until I could get the game. A couple weeks later my mom bought the console, game and a memory card for me after plenty of begging.

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09.07.2011 9:49pm

Seldomseen
Old Guard

Oh man, the Brady guide. Such fond memories...

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09.07.2011 10:04pm

Testament
Shamshot

At one point I had the original guide, the revised bestiary version and the PC guide. I liked the PC version because they showed pictures of the weapons and armaments...even if they were in B&W.

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09.08.2011 1:49am

Arckanghel
Pirate.

I didn't have a playstation, but my friend had his and had borrowed another. We sat in his room with two TVs and played the game constantly. I hadn't played an FF since IV at that point, and it brought me back to the series.

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09.08.2011 2:18am

FenixDown
The King's orders are absolute

I never got a Playstation until after the PS2 came out, but I was at a friend's house the very same day FFVII came out and I got to watch him play it for the first time. I was floored, listening to the Prelude at the start, and going through the reactor bombing. I wish I could get that kind of feeling from games again.

Let's Play Chrono Trigger
Let's Play The Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past
Let's Play Final Fantasy VI

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09.08.2011 4:41am

kjonez
with a Z

I remember seeing ads for the game when I was about 13 and thinking, 'What happend to 4-6?'. My friend and I had played the SNES series thinking that they were 2 and 3 in the series, soI was pretty shocked to see 7 already. Then I read a magazine article that slapped me in the face with the fact that I had actually played 4 and 6. After collecting myself from the absue laid forth by Gamepro(lol days before everyone had internet) I began marking the days on my calender until the release.

When it came out my friend and I had enough money pooled together to buy one copy. After a serious game of rock,paper,scissors she ended up getting to go first. We had a deal that after she finished the first disc she would pass it on to me, and I made sure she wouldn't spoil anything for me. That first week sucked. I would call her and talk to her at school trying to convince her to hurry up. She fancied it upon herself to do as much as she could on that first disc. When my turn came,oh, it was like CRACK. The commercials had built up my anticipation for the game and holy hell did it deliver. After we both finished we started a new 100% playthrough together, taking turns after every couple of hours.

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09.08.2011 5:16am

Arckanghel
Pirate.

Commercials

Japanese Commercial

Trailer

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09.08.2011 6:21am

Thread Creator (Edited on 09.08.2011 at 6:44am)

Monetary Dragon
Just keep swimming

I didn’t actually play FF7 until a number of years after it was released. I was in middle school, I think 7th or 8th grade when it came out. I played RPGs, but didn’t have a Playstation and I have a natural distrust of anything popular or mainstream. I am a stereotypical closed-minded oldschool purist, and was even back in middle school. I played Dragon Warrior, Ultima, and obscure RPGs that not even the other kids at school who played RPGs knew about.

So what was weird about FF7 was that everyone was playing it, and enjoying it, even people who never played RPGs. I also knew that the graphics were godlike, which is actually a negative- do people like the game just because it’s pretty? I distinctly remember a conversation with someone who had never played an RPG, and I was probing him about the difficulty, leveling up, whether that was necessary, and so on. The impression that I got was that you just worked your way through the story, and that no actual effort was required to get further. That conversation kept me from trying FF7 for years. Remember, in Dragon Warrior, if you didn’t level your ass off, you were toast. There were actual obstacles that required work to overcome. FF7 seemed to barely even be an RPG.

Then at some point in high school, two or three years later, over one summer (I think between sophomore and junior year, and I didn’t have a job then) my best friend was telling me that it’s actually a pretty good game, and that he’d let me borrow his copy, and that I should play it that summer. So I did. By the time that I returned it to him, I had finished much of what I’m known for, the basic no controller and no materia Weapon kills (those were done with my first FF7 file, which was done with the aid of a Game Informer mini-strategy guide). I was like ‘well, I guess you can have this back now, since I guess I’m done’. Of course, it was really only the beginning.

Happy birthday FF7NA.

EDIT:

Thank you, Arckangel, for the memories.

The point at which I really got hooked (and got over my bias against the new, popular, mainstream, and pretty) was very early on in Midgar, on the train when Jesse was explaining that there are Sector 5, 6, 7, etc., and they used to be cities with names, but no one remembers the old names anymore. That’s when I ‘got it’ that this really wasn’t any different from any other Dragon Warrior-like fantasy world, just set in the future of one of them. All barriers to enjoying the game were then gone. And the game was so fun, and the materia and combat system so beautiful and flowing that I didn’t even notice how easy it was.

I’m also pretty happy about the reaction that this thread has gotten. We are all home here. We should also kind of be celebrating FFO a bit here, as it was originally (according to recollection) FF7 Online.

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