2) Final Fantasy VII (1997)
What is there to say about Final Fantasy VII that hasn’t already been said thousands of times before? This is the game that brought Final Fantasy into a more modern world, both in-game and in real life. In the real world, this was the first game in the franchise to forgo pixels and sprites in favor of the much more impressive polygons and 3D models. In-game there’s still the magic, comically big swords, and talking animals, but there are also cell phones, televisions, and motorcycles. Gone are the kingdoms and castles in favor of greedy corporations and mad scientists.
FFVII also marked the introduction to JRPGs for a great many gamers, catapulting the genre from a small, niche market in the west, to one of the most successful and most wanted. This wasn’t just a video game, it was a revolution that defined many childhoods.
It’s not just the legacy of the game that makes it great. There would be no legacy without a quality game at its core, and a lot went into making Final Fantasy VII great. There’s the intuitive materia system; the meaningful optional characters who actually brought more to the story; the massive variety of legitimately fun side quests; the love triangle that ended in tragedy; the demented, disturbed, iconic antagonist in Sephiroth; this list could go on and on.
If nothing else, the fact that FFVII is getting remade from the ground up with a modern game engine and high definition graphics nearly 20 years after its original release is enough of a testament to the game’s past, present, and future achievements.
