On September 5th, 1997, Chris M. and I rented Final Fantasy VII (FF7) that night from the Blockbuster at the marketplace on west Covell in Davis.

Let’s take a second to reflect on the Final Fantasy series to this point. Keith had the original Final Fantasy on the NES. We knew of the game, but it wasn’t until the SNES era that FF4 made its mark on me. It was also FF4 that solidified Chris M.’s time at the L street house going forward. Chris M. even had that great big blowout over the lost experience in the land of summoned monsters during Christmas of 1993. Damn shoulder buttons! Then a little older, a little more into games, we played FF6 through a piano recital and lessons to completion. And now here we were, three years after FF6 came out with our first Final Fantasy game to hit in the fancy new PSX era.

Chris M. and I were actually wary of the switch from 2D to 3D and from Nintendo to Sony at this point. So, we called up Blockbuster Video the weekend it came out, reserved a copy and got my folks to take us over there to pick it up since neither of us were drivers at the time. Renting it was the safe bet. If the switchover was bad, we would have only invested a couple bucks into the game.

Little did we know how silly we were being. The last two games in the series enthralled us. Why didn’t we just go buy this one? Well for one the PSX worked differently than the Nintendos of the past. No more cartridges, they were on CD, so all the game saves didn’t require extra hardware in the cartridges. Instead, an extra memory chip, you already likely bought for the system, was required to save the games on, like a console floppy disk in a way. The memory cards though meant we could safely try out this new generation 3D version of our old 2D friend and if we liked it, we’d still have all our progress safely saved on our own hardware. But still we were being silly, being so cautious, the writing was on the wall that we would like the game, enough to own a copy.

We liked it. Big surprise. Chris M. and we stayed up playing it all night, and into the morning, and then all night again. By the end of day one we had managed to make it to the Golden Saucer and perhaps got sidetracked from a while off the main goal. But there was some fascination with being able to go to the video game arcade inside of a video game. It for sure slowed our progress on the story down as I can remember Chris M. trying the mini games for a while. This sidetrack would keep us from getting to the end of the first disk for a little bit.

It is of course at the end of the first disk where we lose one of our main characters in one of the more famous video games cutscenes ever. However, with fatigue and Nintendo generation logic being our two guiding forces it didn’t carry the hit that you see modern gamers have when they do Let’s plays on YouTube. As I said fatigue played a huge factor since we were well into not sleeping by then and it was the norm in video games that if something like that happened it was a fake out. The story would allow you at some point to bring the character back, which made sense since we still had items for the character, and we just moved onto the snowboarding sequence.

It was an intense weekend of playing and trading off sections of the game. Finally, after Saturdays play through, I still wanted to watch the 49ers game on Sunday. It was a pivotal game early in the season, the week prior Steve Young had been knocked out and Jerry Rice was lost for the season. They were starting a rookie quarterback and where zero for one on the season for wins.

As I watched the Niners eke out a very important win that day and Chris M. started his own save on the game. When it became time to return the game, we knew our own copy was the way to go. So, we returned the game Sunday night and Monday went out and bought a house copy.

We would continue on, playing and beating the game. Now in our very late teens and with the internet we could even investigate what little hidden details we missed and play back through the game without flaws.  It was then that we hit some of the more memorable sequences to us, the rocket ship and the discovery of the “weapon” boss battles that would take a while to defeat. And by a while, not that weekend.

There was one monster swimming around at the bottom of the ocean that had us stumped. When we got online there was some walkthrough help, but seeing as the game was new to the U.S. a lot of the tips in the guides were in Japanese. We found that there was a missing spell that might help us, but we needed to access a remote island that was blocked off from normal travel. The way was through breeding our beasts of burden in the FF world, Chocobos, and that was one of the guides that was strictly in Japanese.

We had an out though. That Fall I was attempting to take a Japanese class at school. So, I got on Mother’s printer, printed the relevant parts of the Japanese guide and that Monday night I stayed after class to get the text explained to me. From that the way to get the fabled Knights of the Round summon spell was unlocked, and it was soon after that we were able to knock out our underwater rival.

The game intense took time away from other things in the beginning. I mentioned there were cutscenes. Games had these before FF7, but for some reason the ones in this game seemed bigger and better than we had before. The gameplay was generally the same as the ones before with a new system to upgrade one’s characters, but it so totally worked.

The ability to dig in with the internet too cannot be overstated. Beyond just looking up hints and getting them translated, one could also download the music. Which in this endeavor seemed so much cooler than it had before with the CD quality sound. FF7 just seemed bigger, better, and more epic than anything we had come across before in a game. The other FF games were big, but this one felt more real, and the fact it was on multiple CDs one had to climb through to get to the end made it seem like this was the way games needed to be going. In the end it didn’t just meet our SNES expectations, it changed what we would expect from games.

Then of course there is the fact that FF7 was the last major release of a game that Chris and I ever got to sit down as kids and play like that. A lot has been said about the game itself. At the time the idea this game would have the lasting impact outside of our little world that it did was unimaginable. The game was always going to be special to the L street house regardless of the outside world. It was the last hurrah of another childhood relationship. Chris never lost contact with us, and we still have a few more months before he leaves but this was still kind of a neat way to go out. Our other Chirses. K and H both sort of went out with a whimper, or I guess with Chris K. getting hated out of all social groups. This on the other hand was a memorable and fun send-off.

So be a JRPG nay sayer all you want. Great game at the time, somewhat immortal. Sits up there with Civ I and SimCity for the SNES, as a decade defining title and unlike FF6 lives up to the nostalgia judgement too. Would I take 7 over 4 in a fight, maybe. But now we have a metric showing I can expect more out of a sequel, shattering what I thought going out of FF6.