Why Final Fantasy became the face of Sonys first PlayStation

I still remember the very first time I laid eyes on a Final Fantasy game and, by extension, the original PlayStation console. It was the year 2000, and I was spending a weekend afternoon as I usually did: sitting in the carpeted basement of my friend Alex’s house and watching him play a video game I had never seen before.

This time around, it was a borrowed copy of a title with a name we’d only ever seen written on the cover of magazines. Alex had gotten his hands on it from the older neighbor of a fellow classmate who lived up the street and was, by all accounts, ahead of the curve when it came to cool new entertainment out of Japan. The game was kind of like Pokémon, Alex told me, except better and bigger in every way. (We had very...

Continue reading…