I was kind of indifferent to RPGs, apart from Pokemon, before I started playing this game due to how much I hated random encounters. I had basically dismissed it as a brain-dead trope only good for grinding. Final Fantasy 7 made me change my mind. The Materia system is an ingenious system allowing you to give any character any move or attack you want once you acquire its Materia. The Active Time Battle system is thrilling and makes battles feel more alive forcing you to think under pressure about what moves to use rather than mash A until you win. But where FF7 truly shines, in my opinion, is in its soundtrack. I liked every single track and found them all to be memorable and incredibly fitting to their respective scenes within the game. The one thing that keeps me from giving this game a 4.5 however, is its story. Without going into spoilers, I found it very underwhelming by the end and was shocked by how little character development there is, apart from Cloud, Tifa and Aerith. I’m honestly a bit mystified about why its story has been praised for such a long time, but that’s just me. The gameplay really stuck out for me and I definitely look forward to play more Final Fantasy games!