For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to FlyingArmor's Final Fantasy VII (PSX) maps.
The Shinra Electric Power Company is draining the planet of its Lifestream to produce Mako energy, but AVALANCHE, the eco-terrorist group, seeks to disrupt Shinra's operations. Also a danger is Sephiroth, who seeks the Black Materia to cast the spell "Meteor" to damage the planet, which would allow him to absorb the Lifestream to become a god. Can the mercenary Cloud, with AVALANCHE members Tifa and Barrett, and other allies and friends (inluding a robot cat and a vampire), save the world?
Final Fantasy VII is considered one of the greatest video games of all time, and it helped popularize JRPGs worldwide while boosting the sales of the original PlayStation, of which it is considered an iconic title (though it would also appear on the PC a year later). This 1997 game is the first Final Fantasy game featuring polygonal graphics and full-motion cutscenes, making use of the optical media on which it originally appeared. It has seen a number of rereleases in the last decade alone, including PC (again), iOS, Android, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and the mini-console, PlayStation Classic, to be followed by an episodic remake appearing this month for PlayStation 4.
(Its iconic status has put protoganist Cloud Strife into a number of other games, from Chocobo Racing, Ehrgeiz, and the Kingdom Hearts series - though those were all by Square (later Square-Enix), as well, but Cloud also managed to be a surprise guest character in Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. series starting with Super Smash Bros. For 3DS/Wii U.)
FlyingArmor is definitely a JRPG fan, judging from the many epics he has mapped for VGMaps.com. Having put together over 800 maps for the Super NES atlas alone, mostly for RPGs, he now adds almost a hundred PlayStation maps by mapping out Final Fantasy VII. Though fully labelling RPG maps to show where items and points of interest are should be the norm by now, FlyingArmor went so far as to recreate icons, such as the icon for the save point, which was originally seen (though distorted) on the fourth disc of the International version. Now that's attention to detail!
So to recognize the effort put into finally fully mapping this fan-favourite Final Fantasy, FlyingArmor's Final Fantasy VII (PSX) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for April 2020.
