The game that single-handedly made America care about JRPGs. Lured in by the cool dude with the motorcycle and the big sword and the fancy graphics, players found a genuinely moving story about loss and grief. The gameplay is great thanks to the robust and flexible materia system, though not quite the pinnacle of the series. While this may not actually be true, I consider FFVII to be the easiest mainline Final Fantasy game, and none of those are particularly difficult to begin with. This has led to me wishing across all of my many subsequent playthroughs for something more. Something just a little bit rougher. For a first time player in 1997 however, FFVII was exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, and it is a game that will never stop mattering. It's inescapably memorable and is as close to perfect in its pacing as anything ever gets.