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On January 31st, 1997, Final Fantasy VII was released to the Japanese public. This single game both revolutionized and raised the bar of Japanese style console role playing games. It success was so staggering, it placed Squaresoft firmly on top the the the genre, displacing the Dragon Quest series created by the rival Enix company.

The story of how this game came to be has a story more expansive than the game itself. It starts, as most stories do, with its prequel.

Sadly, as Nintendo had exclusive distribution rights to all games in the United States, the decision was made to alter the game. The traditional Final Fantasy logo was changed to one American audiences were more used to. The sequel number was also dropped from VI to III. Nintendo had only released two Final Fantasy games in the states. Part I for the NES, and Part IV for the SNES (Part IV was actually going to be a NES game, but was ported up in the middle of it's development. That, however is another story). The game was also edited for content. Several silly things like a programmers room and a porno book were removed. All in all the sales were modest, but it was nowhere near the success that the game enjoyed in Japan.

Nintendo went behind Sony and asked Phillips for assistance, as they also could license CD-ROM technology. When Sony found out that Nintendo was going to someone else, (and a foreign one at that!), it was the last straw and pulled their technology. They also convinced Phillips, Matsushita, NEC, and Pioneer not to license any optical drive technology to Nintendo either.

Nintendo, without a drive system, quietly disclosed to their third parties that the Ultra 64 was going to be cartridge based. The maximum limit that any game could be was 32 megabytes. Squaresoft was now in a bind, they had invested millions of yen into creating a movie-like RPG experience and now had to cut it down to fit on a cartridge. When it was revealed that the PSX would also be using a MIPS CPU, Square abandoned Nintendo and gained an exclusive distribution contract with Sony. The groundwork for Final Fantasy VII was now laid and could continue unobstructed.

Halfway through the production of Final Fantasy VII, two very important things happened. First a second team was spun off to start production of [[FF8|Final Fantasy VIII]]. This allowed a staggered development cycle were when one game one done, another would be half done, cutting production time in half. Also half way through production, Hironobu Sakaguchi, the producer, learned that his mother Aki had died. Sakaguchi drew on this death and altered the story in a radical way. It now revolved around life and death and the earth.

The game was shipped to stores in Japan January 31, 1997, but not without a few problems. First, the game was incomplete. A few scenes were not able to run correctly before release. Also the extra bosses were not added in time. These were minor issues that no one missed, and were later fixed in the U.S. version.

Later, Japan got a re-release of the expanded U.S. version, along with a scene viewer and other bonus content. This was called "Final Fantasy VII International"

With the wild success of FF7, Square's shareholders were beginning to pressure the company to start diversifying their products. At the time, Square was only making games exclusively for Sony, and limiting their market. It also became apparent that their older games were not suitable for more modern systems. Even Final Fantasy VI, the game previous, was fixed to a single platform and could not be adapted easily to other computer systems. Square made the choice to update their old games to modern programming languages and platforms. They also decided to port Final Fantasy VII to the PC.

Eidos was dropped when Final Fantasy VIII for the PC was released.

The PC port is now out of print and does not run on the Windows NT type kernels due to some farflung misallocated pointers. Many now play FF7 via PSX emulation. With this way of playing the game, graphic modes higher than 1024x768 resolution, 32-bit color, and texture filtering, can all be used. The PSX version is also stable and for the most part, bug free. The engine has continued to be built upon. It has also been used in other non-Final Fantasy games such as "Parasite Eve", which was the first to support full body textures before FF8. The PC port is still supported by a small band of users. Unofficial patches have also been released with varying degrees of success. Not bad for a little engine that could.