Final Fantasy VII is now available on Steam for the price of an overly large meal from your choice of any fine corporate food establishment. The bad news is that it’s an awful port of an abysmal PC port from sometime around the summer of 1998 depending on what side of the Atlantic you live on. The good news is you can play it on a computer. In addition to being a gaming platform a desktop computer is also the actualization of Memex, a system for cataloging the entirety of human knowledge and making that knowledge easily accessible from your desk, or even the toilet if you have a smart phone or a tablet. If you are reading this you have access to everything humans currently know or think they know, and for some reason more pictures of cats then you can possibly view in a lifetime. More importantly, you can fix any bad port of any video game ever.
In case this is your first time reading about video games on the internet, people have an irrational love of Final Fantasy VII. For many people this game was their very first role playing game – your first time is always special. This is a game that was beloved by millions of children and adolescents who grew up into jaded, overeducated adults who long for a simpler time; a time when they could play a video game about a rag tag group of plucky eco-terrorists with impossible hair. Final Fantasy VII has its own special little modding tool. It’s called Tifa’s Boot Leg.
I’m not going to lie to you and tell you the easiest thing you will ever do is install these mods, but it’s not particularly difficult either. There are tutorials, and in case you somehow forget how to read in the variable interim between now and later, as the last memories of your elementary education are somehow being inexplicably wiped from your mind – please try to remember that there are also video tutorials!
Honestly, once you get the Tifa’s Bootleg and the massive 17 gigs of mod files installed then the biggest challenge becomes figuring out what mods to install because you can change pretty much everything by clicking a button. You can make it look and sound exactly like the original Playstation version from your wasted youth, or you can create your own Super HD Remix that Square Enix refuses to make in spite of all your well organized internet petitions and strongly worded E-mails.
I cannot stress enough how many man-hours, of their all too brief existence on this planet, strangers have invested in allowing you to mix and match your way to the Final Fantasy VII of your dreams. Want HD textures and menus? Done. Want bug fixes? Done. Want everyone in the game to look like they do in the Panisonic P900iV commercial Advent Children? Done. Want remastered FMVs, remixed sound track, remixed difficulty, or a new translation? Done. Want to replace Aerith with Sailor Jupiter or put Cloud in a pair of shorts with metal chains wrapped around his body? I have no idea what the fuck is wrong with you, but while Square Enix prepares the next sequel to Final Fantasy XIII no one ever asked for, the Final Fantasy VII modding community has your back.
Seriously, the game is less than 12 dollars. I have no idea how legal this is, but I also know that you’re not supposed to mix the Slushie flavors at the convenience store, and that’s always awesome. Modding Final Fantasy VII is like a slushie that transports you back to your childhood. It’s a time machine that you modded with polygons and textures from the future like the Delorean from Back to the Future 2. Final Fantasy VII for Steam is a slushie time machine made of HD Ploygons and pre-rendered textures made by the internet specifically for you. Go get it.
