While FFVII wasn’t the sequel I had been expecting, eventually even SNES JRPG diehards like me came to appreciate the change in style, as well as the sheer scale and ambition of what it was trying to accomplish. It was a time before the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies, a time when sci-fi and cyberpunk were ascendant and the stodgy old wizards and sword-wielding heroes of fantasy worlds reeked of the distant past (say, 1992). The watershed game swapped the series’ swords-and-sorcery and sun-dappled-forests motif for bombs and machine guns in a dark, rainy futuristic urban metropolis. In September of 1997, Final Fantasy VII was released for the original Playstation in North America. I mean, all the packaging required for a game spanning three CDs might help inspire some environmental mindfulness on its own.
