Living in a Different World

It must be around ten years ago that whilst over-enthusiastically running down some stairs, I landed in a way that ensured my right ankle swelled up to freakish levels. A sympathetic friend was going home for the weekend and handed me his PlayStation to keep me entertained, given I wasn't going to be doing my usual disco dancing down the student union. He also handed me a copy of Final Fantasy VII, noting that "it's not really my thing".

I had been a gamer since the age of six or so, when we got a Sinclair +2 in the home, enjoying games like Rambo, Chase HQ, Tracksuit Manager and the like. By the time I was 18, however, I'd began actually leaving the house now and again to go the pub or rehearse with my first band. The only games we played were the Championship Manager series, over many bottles of dirt-cheap beer from the local Aldi store. Glamorous days.

FFVII pulled me back to the allure of games, though. Previous favourites of mine had included titles such as Wing Commander or Frontier, games were you felt you were living in the future. FFVII had a similar effect in transporting you into an entire world, full of characters with their own stories and tragedies. Even now, I'm not that much of a RPG buff: I find medieval style settings and elf/orc/goblin type characters tedious at the best of times. What grabbed me from the start back then was the setting: sure, there was monsters and magic, but it was all around human characters in a Blade Runner style city (at least at first).

Throughout the Internet, you'll find countless breakdowns of the meaning and background, as if it were some vital piece of literature. I'm not sure I subscribe to that level of fandom, but I will argue the point that back then, it struck me as a wonderful piece of art. Firstly, there was the story, which appeared at first to be the usual boy/girl, fight-the-bad-guys affair, but develops off into tangents on the ideas of memory, fate, nature vs science and others.

Secondly, there was how huge it was. It took me about 78 hours to complete it and by the end, I didn't actually want to finish. I'd become so involved with the characters that it felt like it would be a pain to have to say 'goodbye', so to speak.

From that, I was hooked back on games and as I graduated and entered the real world, they provided a handy escape. I worked through the Final Fantasy series until XII, which did nothing for me and was the first I'd not bothered to complete. I think the series lost something when you could no longer name the characters as you wished.

I've not played through FFVII since I first completed it: perhaps I'm worried, especially now, that I'd find faults galore and it wouldn't hold up, like when you watch your favourite TV show from childhood and realise it was actually a load of crap. Yet now and again, you meet someone else who fell in love with those characters, that world, and you both laugh at the stuff Cid Hawkwind said and try not to admit how upset you got at the end of the first disc.