Final Fantasy VII is a masterpiece in every sense of the word. Few games are as heartwarming, charming, cool, and epic as FFVII. The impressive visuals, amazing soundtrack, exciting gameplay, and incredible story will almost certainly change your life.

• Even ignoring the supplemental works such as Crisis Core and Advent Children, the story of Final Fantasy VII really holds up as a unique and fun experience on its own. There are twists and turns, flawed heroes, despicable villains, and tons of content.
• Despite some lackluster translation at times, the plot moves you forward, the lore is deep, and the narrative keeps you invested in the goings-on. Cloud is one of gaming’s most famous icons, and among the most interesting. His struggles and motivations are a big driving force in the story and keep you hooked until the very end, especially when those struggles are challenged by other characters and outside forces, shedding new light on old information that will always keep you on your toes.
• FFVII tells a grand story spanning multiple cities, towns, and continents– even delving into the celestial. It relishes in its massive scope with Earth-shattering events, yet doesn’t shy away from focusing on the interpersonal relationships of its cast and even lowly NPCs. There are a wide array of themes and concepts floating around all throughout, from love and death, to identity and forgiveness, to security and despair. On some level, one way or another, this game will move you. And as the credits roll you’ll sit back and say to yourself, “Wow… what a game.”

• This is some classic Final Fantasy combat. The Active-Time Battle (ATB) system that began with FFIV has been refined to a razor’s edge here, with tons of variety and a wonderful balance between excitement and tacticality.
• When you talk about Final Fantasy VII, you can’t not discuss Materia. This system, which is FFVII’s spin on the Magicite system from FFVI, is a complete game-changer:
  • Each piece of Materia affects the stats of the character that has them equipped, meaning if you drown someone in Magic Materia, they will not be a very effective melee fighter because most Magic Materia decreases physical damage output, and these effects stack.
  • At the core, Materia serves as a gameplay function to add active and passive abilities to your characters. These abilities range from a simple Fire spell to summoning Shiva or causing your character to automatically counter attack when receiving damage.
  • Where Materia absolutely shines is the combinations you can create between different Materia. You can, for example, take the Counter-Attack Materia and combine it with the Cover Materia, and the character will randomly take damage for other characters in your party and that damage will result in the Counter Attack Materia to activate, making that character then attack the foe(s). This means in a single “turn”, that character could in theory attack for each enemy you’re fighting plus their own turn. This is an extremely basic combination but it served me well from the opening hours to the final battle, and there are plenty more combinations that do absolutely insane things you wouldn’t believe.
• Exploring is such a joy as you traverse the beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds that are as numerous as they are diverse; from the gritty cyberpunk city of Midgar to the foreign and ancient Forgotten Capital. The overworld map of FFVII was used in some very clever and fun ways. It serves as a standard representation of traversing the world on a small scale for most of the game, but there are secrets hidden away in little nooks and crannies that can only be accessed in special ways, and the story will sometimes use the overworld to tell story moments and to add perspective and scale.

• The graphics of Final Fantasy VII are, to me, very charming. No, of course they do not hold up to the standards of today and this is due in part to technical limitations of the time but also the push to be realistic. If you take a step back though, I really don’t think they’ve aged as poorly as some would have you believe. The character models do their jobs perfectly fine, the backgrounds are pixelated, but gorgeous, and the ground-breaking CGI cutscenes really do still hold up.
• The art style of FFVII changed the series forever by being headed for the first time by Tetsuya Nomura, who had previously done some minor work in the series but never anything on this scale. His designs are now iconic, and when you think Final Fantasy what most likely comes to mind are characters designed by this man: Sephiroth, Cloud, Lightning, Noctis, Sora, and Tifa, to name a few. It’s a very distinctly anime-inspired style that contrasts so uniquely with the realistic backgrounds and it just oozes ‘cool’.

• This should be of no surprise, but Final Fantasy VII’s soundtrack is among the greatest in all of gaming, it is truly masterful. Nobuo Uematsu smashes all expectations in his followup to FFVI’s soundtrack, and just kills it. The music is epic, beautiful, depressing, mysterious, vibrant, exciting, and full of character. You will be humming tunes from this game between play sessions and long after you’ve beat it, I can guarantee that.

• This happens to be the first game I ever played! I was 3 years old, barely capable of moving around and certainly barely capable of fighting, but I pushed through it for years and I’ve played this game probably more than any other game in my life. I find that fact funny when you consider I didn’t actually beat it until 2017, for various life reasons.

Believe the hype, it is well deserved. There are few games that can live up to their colossal expectations as much as Final Fantasy VII, but even my distorted and sometimes impossible expectations were defied by this game.

FFVII transcends every game in the series, and many games in general, as one of the greatest of all time, and my personal favorite. I not only recommend it, but implore that everyone plays it.