Final Fantasy 7 turns 25 this week, something Square Enix is celebrating via a special broadcast. It's pretty remarkable to think a 25-year-old title in a series of games preparing to become 16 installments long, not to mention all the spinoffs, remains so popular today. FF7 Remake brought the historic game and its story to a whole new generation of players, and thanks to The First Soldier and Ever Crisis, there's an entire FF7 universe.
Remake meant a lot to me when it finally arrived, as a rare title to live up to the hype. I would say the original game meant a lot to me when it launched 25 years ago, but that's not entirely accurate. FF7 wasn't the kind of game that would have caught my eye as an eight-year-old flicking through PlayStation magazines. I was playing Crash, WipeOut, and Rugrats: Search for Reptar – which deserves a remake of its own – but that's not why we're here.
I didn't really know what FF7 was when my dad handed it to me, but that didn't mean I wasn't excited. It was a new PlayStation game. You could have handed me anything in one of those easily broken, perfectly square plastic cases in the late '90s and I'd have excitedly rushed to my PS1 to play it. I even enjoyed Simpsons Wrestling back then, which should demonstrate just how low my new game bar was. What I didn't realize until much later in life was that my dad gifting me FF7 was the start of a successful attempt by him to find something we could bond over.
Like most parents throughout history, my dad didn't really get most of the stuff I was into as a kid. He didn't follow football, didn't share my love of Pokemon, and struggled most with my obsession with pro wrestling. What exactly drew him to FF7 to the point that he bought a copy with the idea to watch me as I played will forever remain a mystery. That's exactly what happened though, and thanks to the game having what might well be the best opening mission in a video game to this day, I was hooked on a game I had never heard of, and that was very much outside of my childhood comfort zone, right off the bat.
I wasn't the only one in the room gripped by Cloud and the gang's successful attempt to blow up a mako reactor. My dad sat alongside me, watching as I attempted to escape before the explosives went off as if he were watching it on a big screen with a bucket of popcorn. He was hooked too. What I can only guess was a fleeting thought that popped into his head as he passed FF7 on a store shelf somewhere had quickly morphed into a successful attempt to find something that would entertain a man in his 30s and his eight-year-old son at the same time.
Even though my dad didn't play games, he was able to help me when I got stuck, explain the story to me when it got too complex for my still-developing brain. The bond didn't extend to other Final Fantasy products, though. A few years later he would show me Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and since it had no connection to FF7 (something I didn't realize until the movie had begun), my interest in it fell off a cliff pretty quickly. The same applied to Final Fantasy 8. For some reason the fact the game was called 7, meaning there had already been six games before it, didn't occur to me at the time. I wonder if it occurred to my dad.
Our bond over FF7 remained though, and even helped us bond over other games I'd have never given a second look at a kid, like Abe's Odyssey. FF7 remained our go-to though, which is why I was so excited when Square Enix revealed it was working on a Remake. My dad passed away ten years before the Remake arrived, so playing through that iconic opening mission all those years later was emotional and nostalgic for me for so many reasons.
Even though Remake was tweaked significantly, there were still moments that hit me a lot harder than I expected. The callbacks to the original game I played with my dad sat right there. The moments we talked about, or he had to explain to me when I was a kid. I didn't need to be talked through the game this time around, but there were moments I wish he'd have been there to do it anyway, to see the game that had brought us closer together completely reimagined. The ability to see Midgar from a whole new perspective. I never actually finished the original game as a kid, nor do I remember where I finally gave up. Not until I played Remake, and the memories came flooding back. I moved on past to a part of Midgar I had never seen before, continuing my journey years later without my dad.
When you ask me what my favourite games are, or I'm prompted to share them by yet another viral tweet on social media, FF7 or its Remake never make the cut. Sonic 2, The Last Of Us, and Pokemon Yellow are the ones that immediately spring to mind. And while those are my favorite games, none of them will ever hold a candle to how much FF7 means to me. I have a connection with it that will never be replicated since I'm no longer a kid and my dad is no longer around. Bring on Part 2, or whatever they're going to call it, so I can reassume the role of Cloud and continue my emotion-fueled nostalgia trip.
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