Return to Midgar

Sometimes there's a game that comes along that just steals everyone's hearts away. It compels you to keep playing it, despite it not having a lot of replay value, just because it's so much fun. While it may not have aged well as graphics, gameplay and ideas evolved, this one single game holds a special, nostalgic place in your soul, and without it, you are nothing but an empty shell of a gamer with unrefined tastes and no direction.

For me, this game is Final Fantasy VII.

I played the absolute balls out of this game through grade school. While I may have been too naive to use the internet for guidance or clever enough to acquire and defeat everything, I put countless hours of my childhood into this game. Honestly, even if you don't know what the Final Fantasy series is all about, if you haven't heard or seen anything from Final Fantasy VII and have no idea what I'm talking about, you really, honestly need to fix that. I'm not just being a smart-ass this time around. At the very least, you can watch someone play it on Youtube, but if you want to be even more awesome, you'll just buy it for your PC from Square Enix's online store, like I'm going to do, because it was recently just re-released.

Granted, this is a Playstation 1 game we're talking about here, so back in the days when Sega was meeting it's unfortunate fate and Nintendo was still putting games on cartridges, graphics weren't all that impressive and stories weren't all that compelling either. Yet, as I played through this game, every character was so compelling and the gameplay was just so ridiculously fun that I couldn't care less about how well the game has aged. I'm a sucker for the fantasy-esque, magic-infused games with monsters and swords, and while this game isn't necessarily "medieval", the setting and world it creates is just amazing enough to want you to find out more about what lies beyond the horizon (that is, after you get out of the city of Midgar, which sort of takes a while).

I deeply encourage anyone who passes over this text to at least watch or try out this game. Try your best to ignore the stereotypical fanboy cry-outs of "being overrated" or "it's just another fantasy game" or "OMFG HD RE-RELEASE ON PS3 ZOMG" (Granted that would make Square Enix a literal dump truck of money, but I digress). I'm fairly certain that you won't be disappointed.

Finally, as a personal confession, I have never beaten Sephiroth. Nope. Not once. My younger self was petrified of the damn crater and going deeper and deeper into it.