Let's face it--Final Fantasy VII got the whole thing started again.  Back in the old days of 8-bit consoles and Commodore 64s, when Apple computers wasn't nerd-speak for "I don't know how to run my machine," RPGs were a very narrowly targeted genre with little flavor or flash in them, and as the consoles outpaced the appeal of the text based, graphics poor style, they started to fall out of favor.  It was this game that opened the door for the whole next generation of RPGs and brought the genre into the mainstream, and this game did all those things for very good reasons.