$20 game of the week: Final Fantasy 7 (PC, PS1)

Who the hell said that I was restricted to just this generation?� Beside, you can play this on your PS2/PS3 if that counts, and seeing as how there is a massive resurgence of intrest in it (Advent Children dvd, release of new sequels and prequel games fot it), now would be a good time to take a look at the original.

I can almost hear the peanut gallery of Nintendo fanboys now up in arms about the franchise’s move to Playstation.� Heck, until I got my Playstation, I was one of them.� I even wrote a letter to squaresoft explaining my anger.� At the time I was dead set on getting the Nintendo 64, and Squaresoft’s decision to develop for Playstation felt like utter betrayal to me.� However, it became apparent that the N64 wasn’t really worth spending dough on (at least until WCW/NWO revenge was released in 98).� encouraged by my friends who had made the jump to Sony, and lured by games such as Disruptor, Legacy of Kain, and Tekken 2, I decided to make the jump to Sony.� Ironic then that this object of my anger would be one of the main reasons� behind my abandoment of Nintendo.

No matter how you may have felt about it at the time, or how you feel about it now, this was a major turning point for the Final Fantasy series, role playing games, or perhaps gaming in general.� RPGs have always been big on storyline and character development, but until FF7 was released, the graphics had been (with a few notable exceptions such as Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 3/6) lacking the eye candy to compete with the Mortal Kombats, Donkey Kong Countries, and the FX chip games, thereby condemning them to a niche audience.� FF7 changed all that, involving beautifully rendered CGI cinema scenes along with animated polygonial graphics so that the storyline could be illustrated better than ever.

The storyline wasn’t bad either.� Involving love and heartbreak, evil corporations, conflict between magic and science, and one of the most sinister video game villians ever (Sepiroth), the storyline is a major example of how to properly break away from the norms of RPG storytelling, and still remains a classic to this day.� It set the basis for the more serious style of art in later entries of the series such as VIII and X.