FFVII also takes the sword-and-sorcery tropes for which RPGs were famous and replaces them with a futuristic dystopia. (It was hardly the first RPG to do this, but the console audience had yet to encounter games like Fallout). Gone are the wizards, knights and rogues of traditional RPGs. Instead, the player meets an aloof mercenary, an eco-terrorist, a bartender, a research specimen, an aviator, a vampire, a remote-controlled toy, and the world's last ninja.

The player's party doesn't fight against an evil empire either, but rather against a globe-spanning corporation with its own private army. The world is well-rendered, highly detailed, and deeply memorable. Years later, players of all tastes still find the gigantic metropolis of Midgar to be one of the most compelling settings they've encountered in a game.

In another sense, FFVII is not as remarkable as its reputation suggests, but instead is a direct continuation of trends which the series had been developing for years. Starting in Final Fantasy V, the series designers began to deprecate the role of traditional RPG job classes. This trend continues in FFVII, in which the statistical differences between characters were so small as to be imperceptible, except to master-level players. Only one character has a discernible job class – Aeris, who is clearly a white Mage – and her fate in the game can be taken as a kind of embedded critique of the meaningfulness of job classes in story-heavy RPGs.

But why does Final Fantasy VII get rid of character classes? By abandoning the tactical aspect of party composition, it allows the player to use whatever combination of characters he or she liked for storyrelated reasons. If the player thinks Cid is funny, that Red XIII is cute, or that Vincent is cool – well, they can bring those characters to any fight in the game!