At midnight on Friday, excited fans in China turned on their PlayStation 4 consoles to return to the city of Midgar. Owing to the time zone difference, Asian players are among the first in the world to get a taste of the Final Fantasy VII Remake, a game that fans have been anticipating for years.
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“Hey, old friend... Long time no see! Can you sit down with me and tell me your story again?” one player wrote on Weibo early this morning, along with a picture of a TV screen showing the new game and what looks like a glass of red wine.
“Went to bed at 21:00 last night and set my alarm for 00:00 to get ready to play!” another wrote on Baidu’s Tieba forum. “Got into the game at 00:00 sharp… Finished the demo and went to bed even though I wasn’t ready, had to go to work tomorrow, sigh…”
Final Fantasy VII Remake comes 23 years after the original game. (Picture: Sony/Square Enix)
It’s a homecoming for China’s Final Fantasy fans, many of them middle-aged gamers who first encountered the long-running franchise in the late 1990s. Even though foreign-branded consoles were still considered a luxury by the average Chinese family at the time, Final Fantasy VII still found a way to make an impact, in various forms, to some young gamers.
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“When I was in junior high, I didn’t have money to buy a game console,” one blogger wrote on WeChat. “I saved up most of the 10 yuan that my parents gave me each week to buy gaming magazines. Back in the days when the internet wasn’t so developed, looking at those flashy game screenshots was the only way I could get in touch with new things… When I first saw Final Fantasy VII, the magazine translated the name as Space Warrior 7.”
