A masterpiece that only came to exist as distinctive and disturbing as it is due to the brutal conditions and specific time of gaming history it was made in. To this day Aonuma feels ashamed of it and doesn't understand the love, and it really shows in the 3DS version. MM remains the best example of efficient asset reuse ever. Despite sharing so much with its predecessor it couldn't feel more different, pushing the hardware much further running every event on a real time schedule, and also challenging the player more. You just have to do all the side content to get the full experience and fully appreciate how detailed, varied and interconnected Termina and its characters are. My appreciation for the game has grown more and more over the years to the point I don't care about its shortcomings anymore. Unquestionably in the upper echelon of the Zelda series and Nintendo games in general.

FF7 is just as good people hype it up to be. It starts off in the iconic Midgar with what is probably the most action packed opening of any JRPG, and after a few hours it's already opening up its world. It gets even better the more mysteries are unconvered, the more materia and limit breaks you acquire. The forced minigames are really the only complaint I have with it. It's not hard to understand why this was such a massive deal in the early 3D era with how cinematic and spectacular it is. Even to this day the seamless transitions between gameplay and FMVs with uninterrupted music are mindblowing, and the pre rendered backgrounds have an untouchable aesthetic.

No matter how hard Square Enix try with countless spinoffs and retellings in the same universe with all the advanced technology of today, they aren't able to replicate the magic that was achieved on a PS1 and only make its story retroactively worse. It's not nostalgia talking - this is coming from a person who first played it 23 years after release. There is a great subtlety to the original and its characters that the remakes miss completely. Sephiroth, one of the coolest villains of all time, is basically an entirely different character in every media released after this and his cryptic terrifying aura is lost for the sake of fanservice. I choose to think of this game as existing in a vacuum and will always recommend it over anything else as the most complete consistent work.