Final Fantasy VII (PC, 1997)

Two reasons I dusted off this golden oldie:

1) I wanted to play, and am currently playing, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII on the PSP. Crisis Core is a prequel to the big one and I knew there would be all kinds of references to the original that would be lost on me unless I refreshed my memory by playing it again.
2) At the Distant Worlds concert last month, the audience went nuts when the FF7 intro song started at the beginning of the second half, after politely clapping through several songs from FF8, 9, and 10 through the first half. Something about this game, that I did not understand when I first played it around 2001, compels all manner of devotion to this story and these characters, and I wanted to see if I could suss out what that was.

The graphics have not aged well. When it came out on the PS1 it was enough of a leap from sprites to polygons that people were all like "omg," but subsequent advances have led to the character models being denigrated as "Popeye-like," and they are. But it's a sign of the continuing love of FF7 that fan-made mods to the main .exe file on the PC version allow an intrepid and patient player to update the display resolution for high-definition monitors, as well as swap out the junky character models and profile pictures for more realistic shapes and updated pics from the Advent Children movie. Similarly, the even more computer-savvy PC player can replace the MIDI files with the original PS1 sound files - after all, what is "One Winged Angel" without an ominous Latin choir proclaiming "SE-PHI-ROTH!!" All this work, plus various patches and hacks to make playable on current versions of Windows a buggy, decade-old game.

I'm sort of savvy, but not that savvy. And really I just wanted the short blast of nostalgia, not the "ultimate" FF7 experience. So I did the minimum necessary to get FF7 working on my XP former studio computer, now enjoying a bittersweet and occasionally spyware-beset senescence, fired up a hacked god save file (all characters maxed out, all super items in inventory, etc. etc.), and got to blitzing through the thing.

I may have put the kibosh on my own goals for this reliving by giving myself the god save. It's probable that, my aversion to challenge and game-overs in RPG gaming notwithstanding, the psychological process of effort and time investment is part of what lends impact and meaning to a longform game story experience. Their struggle did not become my struggle, and the severe disconnect between the story segments where I would watch my guys flail around running from enemies and the battles where they would annihilate everyone in one turn was too comical to ignore and took me very much out of the experience.