Final Fantasy 7 – finally it has its own holiday (pic: Square Enix)
Square Enix has officially registered January 31st as Final Fantasy 7 Day in Japan, as the original creators recall the groundbreaking game.
A lot of companies like to think their games were more impactful than they actually were – EA getting carried away with Dead Space being a recent example – but there’s no question about it, no matter what you think of Final Fantasy 7 personally it was a milestone moment for Square Enix and video games in general.
After a decade of being associated with Nintendo, Final Fantasy 7’s defection to PlayStation was a watershed moment for Sony and Square Enix (although they were just Square then), as the pre-rendered backdrops and cinematic cut scenes of the game were clearly impossible on Nintendo’s cartridge-based technology.
The rest is, literally, history but it all began on January 31, 1997 and to celebrate the fact Square Enix has officially ‘registered’ today as Final Fantasy 7 Day in Japan.
It’s not clear who exactly they’ve registered it with or what that means, but we don’t think anyone’s getting the day off work for it. Although by the sound of it there’s been going to be some major celebrations back at Square Enix HQ.
Producer Yoshinori Kitase wrote in a tweet: ‘The day that Final Fantasy 7 came out, was not just a significant day for the Final Fantasy series, but also marked when so many big things started moving for those of us who worked on the game.
‘I remember being overwhelmed at the breakneck speed with which video game technology was evolving, but also dreaming big things for the future.’
That means that Final Fantasy 7 is now officially 26 years old, although it took several more months for the game to appear in the West, arriving in North America on September 7 and the UK on November 14 – although that was actually quite a quick turnaround for the standards of the time.
Kitase and most of the other developers are still important figures at Square Enix, with most of them working on the three-part Final Fantasy 7 Remake project.
Part 1 turned out extremely well and Part 2, named Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, is due out either late this year or early next.
It’s not clear that there’ll be any other announcements or releases today (it’s already nearly midnight in Japan), but in the future, if Square Enix does have anything big to say about the franchise, they’ll probably end up using this date if they can.
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Square Enix has officially registered January 31st as Final Fantasy 7 Day in Japan, as the original creators recall the groundbreaking game.
