When I played this it was magic. Journey back to the mid-life of the PlayStation. No, not the PlayStation 2, the original PlayStation. Yes, to the kids who were born just before the release of the PlayStation 2 and are now reviewing FFVII against games on the PS2 and Xbox, there really was a previous version of the PS2. It was a greyish top loading CD based (yes! CD!) system with no USB or iLink (FireWire/1394 for the PC crowd). After the end of Final Fantasy games on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System by Nintendo (yes, there really was a system called SNES that came before the Game Cube and for you old foagies among us, the N64 (Nintendo 64)) Final Fantasy finally got the 3D treatment for the first time. Or at least the characters did. The backgrounds were pre-rendered textures. That is the backgrounds weren't true 3D, they were rendered on a computer in 3D and then a snapshot of them at a certain angle was taken and slapped behind characters who were complete 3D rendered internally by the original PlayStation (remember, the system that came from Sony before the PS2). Only because the PlayStation couldn't render fully 3D extremely detailed environments by itself. Up until FFVII, which, by the way, was not the first Final Fantasy to be developed (there were other 2D (two-dimensional) offerings that only people who are long dead or are old and senile will remember, ask your great, great, great grandfather if he remembers playing Final Fantasy on his Nintin'do Entur-Tain'Mant Sih'stim back in the trenches during WWII), there was a real worry that Squaresoft (as Square-Enix was called back then) really had abandoned Final Fantasy games in favor of simple graphic demos on completely unknown systems like the N64. Not so. Those demos were actually distractions from the truth. That Square-Enix... errr... I mean, Squaresoft was readying its Final Fantasy XII demo called Final Fantasy VII on the equally unknown PlayStation (or as some Amish like to call it, the PSX). But at that time the network feature wasn't fully implemented which made for a lonely playing experience for some already lonely and pathetic super-nerds out there. But for us old timers it was a blast seeing Final Fantasy in 3D finally. However, we didn't get the demo but unfortunately we got the fully playable game. Which was great in and of itself. Because it showed what was possible with the Final Fantasy franchise which wouldn't be fully realized until late 2004 when all gamers finally proclaim in one voice "What? Another Final Fantasy game? I thought they discontinued it back when Roman caesars ruled the known reality/universe and mammoths roamed computer generated alien landscapes". Oh well, anything before Doom 3 is going to vanish from the collective memory of computer-gamedom anyway so don't play this because you won't be able to. It's just too alien an experience for today's DDR generation (oh, for those fetuses unfamiliar with DDR it's "Dance Dance Revolution" and it's what today's elderly play when their hips aren't healing fast enough).