I don’t have a PS4 so I haven’t played the Remake demo yet, but I’ve seen the hype and it feels good.
It’s impossible to overstate for me how much FFVII changed things. I was the sort of kid who was super into Japanese role-playing-games in the 16-bit era (SNES), but living in Britain I never got to play very many of them because the top titles were not released in my country. A lot never made it outside of Japan because of the huge amount of work they were to translate (shmups, platformers, beat-em-ups etc. were much easier to translate) but even those that got to the US, like Final Fantasy IV (II) and VI (III), never had a PAL release, because the company responsible for distributing Nintendo titles in the UK had got the idea that UK gamers were all ignorant savages who wanted action games and thought turn-based story-heavy RPGs wouldn’t sell... which was probably true to a certain extent, I mean all the kids I was friends with thought Mortal Kombat was the pinnacle of gaming. But still, there was definitely demand for that type of game, as anyone who read Super Play magazine would tell you.
A few action RPGs did have a PAL release, but if you were into the idea of fantasy games of the sort that Square and Enix were putting out you were really limited in your options. Secret of Mana was fucking amazing and Illusion of Gaia was underrated but there was no Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound... You had to get an NTSC adaptor and mail-order these games from the retailers who advertised in the back of games mags and hope the title worked with your machine.
So when the N64 (then the Ultra 64) was announced and Square was one of the developers enlisted by Nintendo, it looked like it was probably gonna be the same old story - the next Final Fantasy would be on the N64 and Nintendo in the UK would think British gamers would be too scared of all the numbers and text and turn-taking, and would pass on the title.
Then of course Nintento and Square parted ways over the fact that the N64 was going to be a cart-based system at first, which Square felt wasn’t conducive to all the FMV content they wanted to use and went to Sony, with their CDs and their massive, massive marketing power.
Cut to 1997 and I’m watching TV and it’s a commercial break in like Star Trek or Babylon 5 or something, and I see two words I never thought I would see in a TV commercial in my country come up on screen.
You don’t know, unless you were that type of gamer in the UK then, how much that fucking meant. Not just that we were finally getting a Final Fantasy game, but we were getting one that was being treated like the absolute AAA blockbuster we had always said that Square’s games should be seen as.
I bought a PlayStation that autumn.
The rest is history. FFVII went to the top of the charts and stayed there for a not inconsiderable period of time. All the kids who I’d tried to convince that Secret of Mana was at least as good a game as Mortal Kombat were lured in by the Trojan horse of state-of-the-art graphics and memorable characters into playing a goddamn turn-based Japanese RPG. Final Fantasy became a global brand and Squaresoft one of the world’s most respected developers. Publishers no longer underestimated the potential for Japanese RPGs with their strategic combat, number crunching and epic plots to appeal to gamers in the West, and a great many more titles followed on that generation of consoles and after - not just Final Fantasy games but stuff like Suikoden, Xenogears, Disgaea... even all those old Square Enix games from the 90s got reissued on the PS1, the GBA and so on.
Looking back, it’s easy to see that FFVII is far from the perfect game. Its success arguably overshadowed better games in the series and subsequent releases never had the impact FFVII had. Many now resent it for its ubiquity, the plethora of Sephiroth-like villains and big-haired, big-sworded heroes in its imitators, not to mention Square themselves often seeming afraid to move on from milking the FFVII cash-cow with the endless Compilation of spin-offs which arguably add little to the main game.
But what Final Fantasy VII did for the gaming landscape, especially in the UK, can never be understated. If any game deserves a fancy, epic remake, it’s this one.
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