As you may have already noted in the RPG games section of the website, FF7 is a game I have made numerous attempts at playing over the years. There is a story behind why I never completed it, and I’ll get to that shortly. Last night, in a somewhat rare occurrence for me, I decided to play a solo game. Monday and Tuesday nights, my wife and I usually play something together on my PC with XBox controllers, however she was scheduled to work, and I wasn’t in the mood to jump into any of our typical games. For what is probably the up-tenth hundredth time, I booted the game up, honestly not sure where I’d have to pick back up. It so happens I was saved right out of Aeris’s house. I just hit the ground running, and played through to the nap room of the Shinra Headquarters building, where I saved after getting the Elemental Materia from the Mayor and all the rewards from floor 63. I’m hopeful to pick the game back up at another interval where my usual game play is interrupted by some sort of schedule.
An Epic Tale of Loss
Now FF7 is a game that I was very near completion back on the PS1. Unless my memory fails me (which is certainly possible), I had a save where I was getting ready to encounter the ultimate weapons, but I was taking time to grind out some levels on characters, materia, and testing materia combinations. My original save was cheat free, but understand the internet was fairly young in those days, and you couldn’t always find all the information you wanted as easily as you can today. I decided to take testing into my own hands. I forked my original save, and was going to use a game shark to power level materia on the ‘test save’ to see if leveling certain materia would be worth the effort. Everything appeared to be going fine… until it was not. As fate would have it, the game shark shenanigans corrupted not only my ‘test save’, but EVERY save I had on that PS1 memory card. I lost everything in one fell swoop, including save to all the other games I had on that card. One could say, perhaps it was the memory card, however, I saved quite a few other games on that card for years to come with no further issues. Thus to this day, my blame is still directed to the game shark. It was the last time, I ever made use of it as well. Cheating wasn’t really my ‘thing’ as it tended to make me bore of games rather quickly, but the trial and error tester in me did love some of the other aspects it offered. Prior to that incident I did use it to test things quite often, which has always been fun and interesting to me. I have since started many other attempts to complete FF7, as I really do love the game. I have quite a few fond memories of this masterpiece, after all. My brother and I played it feverously. At some point, I think he even managed to max out the clock (probably more than once). He completed it long ago, but alas, my time has not yet come. Of my many attempts, I usually never get out of Midgard. Quite awhile back, I managed to work my way out of Midgard and made a save outside, as I figured having a save there where I could wander around in the open world, grind up characters and materia, might keep me interested enough to make time to play. As luck would have it, I ‘thought’ the saves were in the Steam cloud, and made a grave mistake when I performed a system reload, thus losing even that save. All that said, I have high hopes that maybe this run, might be the one for me! The one that brings me to a closure for something I loved so much in my youth, but never made it around to the end of the saga. The save I lost so long ago, I had everything I could get my hands on. I dare say it might have even been a 100% completion. I was using a guide to walk through, taking my time, enjoying the story. So far as I can remember, I hadn’t missed anything. I got the stashes of materia, I had the Golden Chocobo, Knights of the Round Materia, etc… On this run, I’ll still do my best to grab all I can, but I no longer have that guide, and at this point I’d really just settle for getting all I can done and completing the game.
