THE UNIVERSE OF FINAL FANTASY VII

How the spirit of the series’ most important entry lived across different media

ADVENT CHILDREN

Bad movie or great extended cutscene? This is the difficult call faced by a Final Fantasy fan who knows they like watching Cloud and Sephiroth have a swordfight in gorgeous CGI, but still feels the need to act like they think Advent Children is a totally rubbish film in front of their friends. Which it sort of is, but the Complete cut is better. Bonus points if you got it on UMD.

FINAL FANTASY TACTICS

Cloud is a supporting character in the massively deep combat-focused FF spin-off that originally came out on PS1, released a year after VII. It’s not for everyone, but for fans of Disgaea and the like, FF Tactics: War Of The Lions on PSP is the version to get.

KINGDOM HEARTS

Cloud, Aerith, Cid, Yuffie, and Sephiroth made the cut for the first Kingdom Hearts, voiced for the first time, while Tifa was added into the second. Most of them feature in battles throughout both games. Zack, meanwhile, appears in all three stories in spinoff Birth By Sleep, with a remixed version of the Crisis Core theme to boot.

BEFORE CRISIS

This mobile game focuses on the suit-wearing Turks from Final Fantasy VII. That’s about all we know, though, since it never made its way to Europe, trapped as it was between the time period of phones being slightly too rubbish to play good games and the iOS/ Android era we live in now. It’s probably lost forever.

FINAL FANTASY VII ON PS4

It’s a real shame you can’t freely download the PS4 port (released in December 2015) if you’d already bought FFVII on PS3 or PS Vita. But nonetheless, the PC version on console is the best you can get the game looking, and currently pretty cheap.

It also comes with trophies, giving you yet another reason to go through this marvellous adventure, and there’s no need to swap the discs around. Revisiting FFVII is never a chore. While the character models are dated (and were by the time FFVIII came out a couple of years later, really) it’s a fantastically paced game with an extraordinarily diverse world.

CRISIS CORE

The king of Final Fantasy spin-offs, this heartfelt PSP prequel explores the background of the ‘real’ Cloud that he sees in his memories – Zack. Its dramatic and extended interpretation of the Nibelheim Incident, and the events that follow, shed some light on how remaking scenes from the original could be ppretty effective.

Indeed, the fact you go from being a member of a resistance faction in a sci-fi city to snowboarding down a mountain, driving a submarine, and even going into space shows that Squaresoft was truly on fire when it put all the scenarios in VII together.

With the reboot set to add extra texture to the story and the lush environments, then, now’s a good time to go back to the original so you have it fresh in your memory before the first part of Remake finally gets here. Even just comparing the intro to the footage of Remake shows a lot of differences in dialogue – so who knows what other changes will creep in? You’d better get revising, in case you miss something.

DISSIDIA

Final Fantasy heroes and villains fight in this beat’em-up/action hybrid that was among a surprising number of brilliant handheld games that Square Enix made for PSP (shame PS Vita never gets anywhere near the same love). Its sequel, Duodecim, with added Tifa, is the one to buy for your PS Vita.

EHRGEIZ

This obscure and slightly rubbish PS1 beat-’em-up featured Cloud, Tifa, Sephiroth, Zack, Vincent, and Yuffie from FFVII. The rest of the game’s character designs came from artist Tetsuya Nomura, while the game itself was published by Square after its release in arcades by Namco.

FFXIV’S GOLD SAUCER

The popular, multi-region amusement park from FFVII found its way into Square Enix’s excellent MMO. If you’re really starved for good Final Fantasy nostalgia in the run-up to the remake, there are far worse ways to indulge yourself than spending time in this old place.

DIRGE OF CERBERUS

This shooter starring Vincent Valentine is the most disappointing of the VII spin-offs, especially as it’s set furthest in the future of that universe. Familiar locations turn into dull corridors, the shooting is pretty bad, and the best bits can all be found on YouTube.