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Square's role-playing game for the Famicom borrowed party structure from American computer games, added a story with a twist and side-view battles, and its success stabilized a company in serious trouble.
The console role-playing game found its shape here: a fixed cast, story-led progression, menu-driven battles and music treated as a central element rather than accompaniment. Alongside its main rival it turned a computer genre into the dominant form of Japanese home software for the following decade.
Square released Final Fantasy VII in Japan on January 31, 1997. Spread across three discs, with pre-rendered backgrounds and long cinematic sequences, it became the game that sold the genre to Western audiences.
A genre that had been commercially marginal outside Japan became a mass-market category in North America and Europe on the strength of one release. It also demonstrated what optical storage was actually for, and turned cinematic presentation into an expectation rather than a novelty.
