Originally beginning development for the Super Famicom in 1994 before switching to the PlayStation for the higher storage capacity of the CD-ROM, Final Fantasy VII was released in Japan on January 31, 1997 and worldwide 7-10 months later, and has sold more than 13.3 million copies since release. The EU version of the game - the region I play in - was released just three days before my 1st birthday.

i've loved a LOT of games over my lifetime so far, but ff7 has stuck with me the longest. i bought a copy for $70 on ebay in 2007 at 11 years old, after being introduced to the characters in kingdom hearts, and played it for the first time sitting on the floor in front of the downstairs crt television. i've revisited it roughly once a year ever since!

my copy of the game was a little busted - disc 1 was scratched in a way that prevented the fmv cutscenes from properly loading, but i figured out that if i popped the top of the ps2 slim and swapped it with disc 3 it would play the fmv registered on the same spot on that disc instead, letting me get through to the next part of the game while only missing a little bit of context. it took YEARS before i actually saw the disc 1 cutscenes in full; for some reason i never searched them on youtube, so the first time i got the full experience as intended was when i finally had good enough internet to download a pirated version.

the way the ost utilised the psx's soundchip still makes it one of the best sounding games i've ever played. i saved up for an ipod nano the same year, and when i figured out how to download mp3s off the internet it was one of the first things i put on there, alongside advent childrens soundtrack.

as an emo preteen, i also thought advent children was the coolest. shit. ever.

i lurked the ff7 section of fanfiction.net religiously. i was obsessed with peoples self insert x established character fiction, mostly because my pairing of choice at the time was yuffie x vincent and very few people shared my tastes. this was, of course, in the brief window of time before i discovered the existence of "yaoi boyxboy dont like dont read", something that tilted my world on its axis in a fun new way as a tween girl who didnt know he was actually a gay boy in three huge trenchcoats.

my favourite ff7 fic was an xD rAnDoM humor one called Ongaku Niji, which... wow! i cant believe its still up. a precious unburned book in the library of alexandria that is the web.

my love for "fixing the past" time travel/grounhog day/peggy sue/rebirth plots also started with ff7, of which ive read too many to count - the fifth act being my longstanding favourite in its little microgenre, so - SPOILERS - when part one of the final fantasy 7 remake dropped that bomb it was like a gift delivered personally to my doorstep by kitase.

if part two introduces a fishing minigame, my delusions of being the sole targeted audience for the remake will calcify in my brain and ill become even more of a medical novelty to doctors everywhere.

i'll expand on this, sometime, with fun facts and more graphics and some of my favourite bugs and glitches !