Final Fantasy VII takes the Japanese role-playing game worldwide

What happened

The move to Sony's console was a break with Nintendo, made for a practical reason: the game Square wanted to build would not fit on a cartridge. Discs gave the team room for painted backdrops, a large orchestral-style score and animated sequences running for minutes at a stretch. Characters were simple polygonal figures moving across detailed scenes, a compromise that looked striking in 1997 and dates visibly now, though the direction and pacing of its set pieces hold up considerably better than the models do.

Its story ran longer and darker than the genre's Western reputation suggested, built around a mercenary with an unreliable memory, an energy company draining the planet, and a death partway through that a great many players still remember precisely. Sony's marketing in North America was unusually aggressive for a role-playing game, with television advertising and print campaigns aimed well outside the existing audience. The gamble worked. Sales in the West ran into the millions, which no game of this kind had previously managed.

What followed was a decade in which Japanese role-playing games were a mainstream Western category rather than an import curiosity. Publishers localized titles they would previously have left at home, and the conventions of the form, turn-based parties, long stories and elaborate cutscenes, became familiar to players who had never touched one. The game has been reissued repeatedly and rebuilt as a multi-part remake, which is its own evidence of how much cultural weight it still carries nearly thirty years on.

The world at the time

Role-playing games from Japan had reached Western markets before and sold modestly, hampered by translation costs and a reputation for being slow and text-heavy. The console market was mid-transition to discs, Sony was two years into an unexpectedly successful hardware launch, and Nintendo's insistence on cartridges had already cost it several major Japanese publishers.

What it changed

Square became one of the most valuable studios in the business and pushed further into film-style production, with mixed results. Western publishers began taking the audience for long story-driven games seriously. The relationship between Square and Sony, formed when a storage decision made this game impossible on Nintendo's hardware, tilted the outcome of the entire generation.