Final Fantasy VII: Discovering the Magic of the JRPG

Kelvin checked out the original before the remake.

- Kelvin Yaghoubi

As gamers, we all share a common, shameful secret. A miserable pile of secret games that taunt us with their mere existence, snigger at our lack of free-time and pile up like it’s nobody’s business. Even though we have new games coming out left right and center, as someone born in 1997, there are many games from before our time that we haven’t experienced as well, with even the ultimate excuse of not actually existing yet barely being acceptable in the round-table senate of the nerds.

The list is too long to admit openly, but one genre of game, indeed one, in particular, is the topic of conversation this week: SquareSoft’s (now Square Enix) classic 1997 JRPG Final Fantasy VII. The sprawling, cyberpunk epic JRPG is the perfect example of a ‘backlog’ game; a game that you know is great, a game that you’ve known about since you were capable of turning on the PlayStation, a ‘classic’, a ‘what the hell is wrong with you, you freak’, sort of JRPG.

So, it’s safe to say that I’ve been meaning to play the title for a long time now, having been sitting on my Steam pile for the past four or five years, barely played, barely delved into, neglected, scared and starving. It and countless other JRPGs for some reason are the only kinds of games where I’ll play for about three or four hours, love it, get engrossed in the complex storylines, and wrongfully-maligned turn-based combat, but never come back, never see to the end of the 50+ hour-mark. Perhaps it’s the subconsciously spooky run-time of the games, perhaps it’s the rude nature of a random encounter, I don’t know what it is, but too many JRPGs have been neglected by me, so I decided it was time.