1. Final Fantasy VII
PSX, 1997


I first played Final Fantasy VII - or rather, watched someone play it - for about five minutes at my neighbour's place. One of his friends brought a bunch of games over and he played that to show it off for a short while, but as we were wanting multiplayer games it was quickly turned off in favour of Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit. It would be a couple of years before I would see it again. I was renting games and thought I'd give this one a try as I was looking for a bit of variety.

I hopped in and it took my interest pretty quickly. It was different to other games I'd played. I'd played WRPGs, sure, but the characters and story were always so bland. This one focused much more on the storytelling. In the end, I would be captured by it, immediately looking up all the information I could online about it. Discovering sites, forums, etc. I would quickly be playing the previous FFs and buying FFVIII. I had found a new genre and I loved it.

FFVII, though, still managed to outdo all other games in this genre, and every other game I have played since. It offers me everything. I have multiple things I can do in the game, all of which I got enjoyment from. I liked the materia system, which firstly gave you the conundrum of "Must save up for all this materia", then "Which materia should I put on each character?", followed by "Oh man, which materia should I link?" and eventually "Which materia should I grow!?" Just one small part of the game and it had so much done for it, particularly when compared to some other systems in the FF series which rely on "Learn skill, retain skill forever, done."

The characters were all decent at minimum and some of them remain my favourites of the series. Tifa is probably my favourite character of all time, with enough revealed about her to know her personality and story, while still retaining a lot of mystery given how much she seems to keep in her head. Red XIII is also an excellent character and a brave step into the non-humanoid form by Square Enix. I wish there were more non-humanoid characters. The only gripe I have with Red is that after he learned about Seto, he became a little wusspuss. But such things are forgiven when in battle he is still badass. Barret, Cloud, Cid, I loved these characters too. Aeris I did not like much at all. I'm one of the few who celebrated in their head when she died. Yes! Take that! High five to Sephiroth! I'm a bad person, aren't I?

Chocobos are awesome and no other game did chocobos as well as FFVII did. Chocobo breeding, chocobo racing? Hell to the yes! And then golden chocobos that can take you to the far reaches of the world, too, for amazing reward!? Even better!

The story itself had the right kind of twists, the ones you don't generally anticipate, but also that worked and didn't cheapen the overall plot. I found the story quite confusing when I first played it, mostly because it was the first game that I found myself having to really pay attention to such things. Most dominant games - a la Air Combat, Doom and Gran Turismo - required no focus on the story whatsoever, it was gameplay with some vague plot tacked on. This (and Resident Evil to be fair) was different for a gamer like me.

In the end I've probably said way more than enough boring drivel here - I love FFVII. It's a timeless game and every time I've replayed it I've still found it enjoyable. I haven't even beaten all the Weapons after all these years! It's weird how much I can play the game and just enjoy the start to finish. Endgame is a bonus that I never went out of my way for - but it just goes to show that a game I love more than any other has something I can still go back to and check out should I want to. It also says a lot that you can play this game and do a crapload of stuff and still have more to do.

Overall just fantastic.

Huzzah! #1 over! I'm done! It's only been, what, 15 months?