Now Playing: Final Fantasy VII (the 2015 version)

What’s one to do after a decades-long wait for a remake finally starts to pay off? The only sensible thing is to go back to the source material of course! Yes,I’m talking about the recent demo for Final Fantasy VII Remake which was fine and all but it just wasn’t old-school enough.

At this point I’m 39 hours into the 2015 PlayStation 4 update of Final Fantasy VII and I’m knock-knock-knockin’ on Sephiroth’s door, err, crater. It’s been fantastic to play through the game after so long and be reminded of all the characters, events, and plot points I’d completely lost track of. In my search for the fantastically overwrought summon spell — Knights of the Round — I reminded myself of something else I’d forgotten: the chocobo breeding guide and family tree that I created for Videogamers.com back when I was first playing the game.

As I was grinding out battles, trying to capture ‘Great’ and ‘Wonderful’ chocobos on my trek for the fabled Golden Chocobo, I started wondering if I actually cared about any of this in 1997 or if I just used a GameShark to unlock everything. Then the image of the family tree above came to mind and I started looking through the folder of “Old Stuff” on my laptop. After a little HTML cleanup, there it was, my silly little guide for getting a gold bird. It is definitely what I should have been doing in 1997 instead of focusing on college classes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyways, the added “cheats” in the 2015 version have been a great help for expediting this process, allowing you to triple the speed of the game or disable field encounters with the press of a button. I still spent plenty of time with the chocobos, reforging my memories from 1997 and falling for those doofy birds all over again. *WARK*