This is a blast from the past
TL;DR: If you like JRPGs, you need to play this game at lest once.
⚠ WARNING: nostalgic babbling ahead ⚠
What is this wizardry?! It even takes my +20 years old save files. 🥲🥲🥲
Back then, many years before Square and Enix merger, Square ruled the world of 16bit's JRPGs. In a movement that surprise many, Square directives had the vision of ditching Nintendo by Sony and backed the soon to be released "PlayStation".
They developed this game in a time when many franchises were making the switch from 2D to 3D, from sprites to 3d-models. It was a time of trial and error, of annoying controls schemes and weird camera angles ... and of many f*** ups. Square needed to prove itself and everyone else they can make it in this new time.
And then they released FF7, and blow everyone's minds. This transitional game of low polygons character models and pre-drawn backgrounds marvel us, make us obsessed, it broke our hearts and marvel us once more.
It was hugely popular in gaming circles and in some countries leaked to the mainstream media. It pushed hard the sales of the original PlayStation, admittedly it wasn't the only game to do it. It became the model to follow for many JRPGs to come. It proved games with turn based combat could outsell 3d shooters and and 3d platformers. Only Grand Turismo 1 (racing cars) sold more copies for the playstation.
And I write all this 'cos this game marked an era. New players may not get what all the fuss is about, 'cos they don't know where we were before its release.
Now days, many of the choices the design team took back then would be called outdated, sub-optimal or plainly bad choices. But at the time those decisions were taken, those which weren't a common place of the genre, were setting foot in uncharted territory (i.e. 3d tech).
Setting a part that, the story of this game is interesting and timeless, its characters are very memorable, the music is superb and its mechanics are deeper than what they looks at first sight. For JRPG players, I can't recommend it enough.
This is clearly not the 1998 pc version. The folder structure is different, the models look a little smother IMO and brings new options, like avoiding random battles, 3x speed up, always full bars at combat and auto-saves. Still, as I said earlier, it takes my old saves and it also and generates 64kb savesfiles just like the original game did.
Other difference are the minimum requirements. I remember playing the original game in a windows 98 PC, with 64 Mb of ram (at most) and a S3 Savage 4 videocard. This version requires windows 10, 8GB of ram and a 10 years old videocard. No clue why.
Something that puzzles me is the store pages says it requieres Directx 11, but GOG's game installer automatically installs Directx 9.c
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