Funny, now that I have a brand new 360 (sorry, Sony) and a huge HD TV, all I can think about are old-school games and what it felt to play back then. So, out of a misplaced sense of … well, something, I decided that I wanted to replay some of my old PS1 games. RPGs, mainly. Old Squaresoft RPGs, to be precise.

I think the main thing was that I hadn’t played Xenogears in over a decade, which is a sad and sobering thought, as I still consider it the greatest RPG I’ve ever played. Seriously, despite the god-awful voice-acting, the game is wonderful in every way — the battle system, the characters, the music the storyline –

Okay, maybe the graphics aren’t the best, but this was what, 1997, 1998? A huge amount of Square’s energy was being poured into Final Fantasy VII, which everyone has heard of. And while it was a great game, Xenogears was absolutely buried beneath all the Final Fantasy press, and lived a quiet life to become a cult classic. I was ridiculously lucky to come across a pristine copy of both game and strategy guide my sophomore year of high school, right around the time VIII was the New Thing. I was absolutely addicted, and ended up in love harder than I’d ever been before.

Unfortunately, despite ripping from clean discs, my emulator just didn’t want to play.

So I thought about old games I’d played and loved, and reconsidered VII — the entire reason why I’m a gamer. I’d gone to a friend’s house my freshman year, and saw her playing, and got hooked on the characters very quickly. Obligingly, she restarted, and with no need to sleep for two days and a nearly inexhaustible supply of Dr. Pepper, we played the whole thing in one go. It took a bit longer to convince my family that I needed a Playstation — we were pretty poor, and I hadn’t been allowed to touch video games as a kid, and my dead-beat step-brother who’d pretty much dropped out of school so he could play more wasn’t exactly a shining example. Still, I persisted, and that Christmas I had my first piece of awesome technology, with VII and Origins included. I was so excited, I played through three discs before I got a memory card; not bad for a brand-new gamer without internet or a strategy guide.

I wondered, twelve years later, if the game still held up. Oh, the graphics are dated, but what about the rest of it? Was it really good, or was it a case of teenage taste (much like Gundam Wing, which I’d tried to watch only a year after I’d fallen out of hard-core love of the fandom, only to find that it was so god-awful that I couldn’t get past the first five episodes)? Well? Why not find out?

Fortunately, the emulator wanted to comply.

Luckily, the verdict points to either it being almost as good game as I remember, my tastes having not developed much further, or that I actually had a little good taste back then. Seriously! Despite the hugely dated graphics, FFVII remains an entirely replayable game. The materia system kept the customizing interesting up until the very end, the world was interesting (though I still hate the first trek to North Corel just as much as I did the first time), and I have had an entirely too fun week, waiting eagerly to get off work so I could go play a game almost old enough to be my kid.

The music was particularly memorable, something I’d forgotten — of course there’s Aeris’ theme, which no player of the game could ever forget, but I’d forgotten how gorgeous some of the other tracks were, Cosmo Canyon’s music especially, as well as the eerie, throbbing music in the City of the Ancients. Not only that, FFVII seems like such an open-minded game in comparison to what came after, from Barret and Cid’s potty-mouths to the cross-dressing bodybuilders, Cloud’s cross-dressing and getting picked to be Don Corneo’s bedwarmer, as well as those horrifying, hilarious scenes in the Honeybee. (Have you ever been to a brothel — or even something brothel-like — in later FFs?)

Despite the great things, there were also things I’d glossed over or not noticed back then. In particular, the shallowness of some of the characters — Aeris, in particular. I’ve heard countless tales of teenage boys weeping like girls over Aeris’ death, and my absolute first introduction to the game was at a guy friend’s house with a bunch of gamer-nerds, who sat me down and played that scene. I remember watching Sephiroth gut her, and then looking around in mute amusement as guys and girls alike broke down like someone had just run over their childhood pet, and then the incredulous looks I got when they saw I was the sole dry-eye in the room. “How could you not care about that?” they asked.

“Because I didn’t know her,” I’d said, and I meant it — and I felt it when that time came again, this time around. I mean, there’s the facts — nice girl, lives in the slum, sells flowers, last cetra, murdered while praying to save the planet, and … and what? What else was there, really, about Aeris, other than crazy Cloud loved her a little? To me, the part that struck me hardest in that scene was the music. Don’t get me wrong, I really did like the girl, but her death wasn’t the end of my world. Weirdly enough, I’ve never made it through the bit where Nanaki ‘meets’ Seto at the end of that bastard Gi cave without tearing up hard. I don’t even know, man, I don’t even know. (Again, the music plays a huge part of that — holy shit, Uematsu can deliver a hell of a blow, even in midi-format.)

Also, Vincent is kind of a melodramatic bitch, but I still love him because he is Vincent Fucking Valentine and holy shit is he pretty in the later stuff. Hell, I even re-read Snow Fields in a fit of super-nostalgia (I used to bring home chapters of it on one of those hard floppy discs, because we only had internet at school). Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t nearly as good as I thought back then, but I blame that mostly on the ESL-ness of it. I’d love to find an edited copy somewhere, minus that last chapter, because really?

So here I am at the end of the game, getting ready to face down Sephiroth the ultra-douche. I think he gets too much credit for a crazy guy with a lot of power, but he’s pretty and he just happened to head the villian train of a very good game. I genuinely liked him in Crisis Core (or as far as I got, which was well into Nibelheim), though, which kind of led the replay of VII into a giant sense of ‘bummer, man’ over his inglorious downfall.

Totally stoked to replay 8, now. It didn’t hold a candle to my favorites, no, but it was still a good game, and it was innovative in its own ways as well. Square was actually trying back then, and the results were generally interesting, to say the very least.

In the wake of the disappointments of XIII and XIV (and XII to some people, though I loved it as much as I loved X), it kinda makes me wish the Squeenix suits would take a month off, go find a comfortable chair, and replay their old classics, if only to remember ‘look, we did this – why not do it again?’. Enough of the cash-cowing and dragging old franchises into the ground, guys — you’re capable of so much more than what you’ve shown for the last couple years.