New age fan who just finished OG, AMA.

I'm a new age FF7 fan in that I never got to play the original (never had a PS1) and somehow never really heard about the game until the remake was then announced back at E3 (rip) in 2015 and realized all of my friends were diehard FF7 fans.

Cut to COVID and I played FF7Remake in the fall of quarantine, loved it, and then played Rebirth back in April after I was done playing FF16.

Some off the cuff thoughts:

  • I'm so glad video games have come a long way. The late 90s video game design and UI concepts are preserved perfectly it felt almost like a gaming time capsule. I know the CD case booklet came with more instructions as most games back then did. I'm glad we've done away with the paradigm of random encounters.
  • Now I understand hardware limitations of the time, but it was amusing just how a lot of transitional screens there were that just felt like empty platforming. Because I just finished it, the entire last level of the Northern crater was the most glaring example of this. Understandable for the late 90s, and also crazy to see how they made a single screen be entire levels in Remake, like the sewers/Abzu fight.
  • It was crazy seeing the OG game line up with Remake and Rebirth. I did the Midgar section in like... two, three hours I think? Crazy to think they made just that section a whole game.
  • The first half of the game is pretty streamlined? I felt like I was blitzing through the story up until around Rocket Town. The planet was big but also very condensed on each continental half.
  • Because all the story events progress so quickly, I was unsure what level I felt I had to be at. I kept using Sense and I remember at one point when I noticed in between two main points (I want to say around when Dragons started showing up, in the Temple of the Ancients) that I noticed suddenly there was a 10 level jump out of nowhere. I hadn't had to really grind up until that point, and if I did do any grinding it was really to have enough money. Weapons were EXPENSIVE.

All in all, I get it. I was keeping in mind that to be one of the first games to go full 3D and to have a time gauge on turn based combat, that must have been crazy to experience in '97. Combine that with the soundtrack, I remember the boss fights very vividly. I definitely saw the fantasy!