RPG Cast – Episode 538: “Flat Milk”

1. At the risk of being mocked, I’ll be honest. I have played FF7 to completion multiple times and enjoyed it. Bought it at release in 1997 at the tender age of 14 and it was several firsts for me; the first FF I ever bought, first multi-disc game, and first game I ever pre-ordered (and got the strategy guide (my first strategy guide) free and a Cloud T-Shirt that I didn’t know came with it… So my first preorder bonuses, too 😅).
   Played and beat it at least once a year for a few years. It became a yearly tradition before I got a decent paying part time job and I could buy more games regularly as opposed to one ever few months. The game still sits comfortably in my personal Top 5 Favorite FFs behind 9 and 6, and really looking forward to Remake; whose demo I thoroughly enjoyed.

2. Never played it. I really am adverse to all PS1 games with those polygons and with a backlog of 50-100 more modern games I know I’ll enjoy, I’d rather not. Maybe the remake one day in the far future, but it’s not turn-based, so likely not.

3. A friend loaned me his PlayStation and what was possibly a bootleg copy of FF7 sometime in the late Nineties – perhaps 1998. I mainlined the game over the course of a couple of weeks, beat the main campaign, reached max level on Cloud, and bashed my head against the Ruby Weapon and Emerald Weapon. Think I beat one of them in the end, but definitely called it quits without getting both. Didn’t know about the plot twist (if you can imagine such a time), and spent 60 hours or so waiting for one particular character to reappear.

4. I tried to play FF7 at least three times in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, but something always frustrated me and caused me to stop playing less than an hour in. Controlling Cloud to navigate the “impressionist painting” backgrounds felt counterintuitive; the materia system seemed clunky; the heavily polygonal character graphics did not age well at all.

   I enjoyed watching my roommates play through FF7, but since I now know FF7’s story, I have even less incentive to play it.

5. I had a save file for FF7 PC on my brother’s computer where I beat the game including Emerald and Ruby Weapon in the early 2000s. I could never quite get over the hump on Playstation, but for some reason it just clicked as a computer game for me.

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