Ngl, I've never played ffvii before but you've literally convinced me to start playing the game lol
PLEASE do, the original is good, the remake is good, it's got a lot to say and perhaps even more so now that a lot of the stuff it's addressing is well within the awareness of the current audience. You play as a bunch of good guy terrorists, because the corporate government sucks so hard you're unambiguously in the right for blowing their shit up. Everyone is mentally ill. Everyone is cool and sexy. Everyone is wrong about everything including their own identities. The cutesy-girl alternate love interest who loves flowers and volunteering with orphans is on a first-name basis with a squad of corporate hitmen. Everything is iconic. You KNOW who Sephiroth is.
When it was made, it was the highest budget video game in existence, and you can absolutely tell. This was the game that made JRPGs a world-wide thing, it was THIS game. This is a game that only gets better the more you think about it. It's the only thing I've ever been into that I truly felt deserved how hard I thought about it, how much I wanted to write about it; excluding maybe NGE. Unlike NGE, though, it's extremely fun and fandomable at the same time.
This is also a game that held massive appeal for LGBT fans due to the androgyny and gender-nonconformity (or even confusion) that went on with a lot of these characters, and the Remake has the hindsight to know this, which makes it some kind of non-stop bisexual feast for those inclined. I started with the Remake, started and finished OG half way through it once I'd got a handle on the characters, finished Remake, and am now replaying it 3 times at once with 4 different friends because I want it to be in their eyes THAT badly.
TL;DR FFVII has the Dante seal of approval and I think you should get into it :)
