7. It Was The First Final Fantasy To Feature Voice Acting
Nowadays, we take voice acting in games for granted; back in the good old days, reading comprehension was a pretty vital skill if you wanted to enjoy a video game. Final Fantasy finally received full voice acting in 2001 with Final Fantasy X but remarkably, it wasn't actually the first Final Fantasy game to feature voice acting. Nope, Final Fantasy VII beat it by three years. When Diamond Weapon is attacking Midgar, the game shows a scene of the Sister Ray cannon being readied to retaliate. Here, a voice can be heard running through checks before launching the cannon, in a similar fashion to a rocket ship's launch. This is clearer in some versions of the game (notably the PC version); in some versions, the voice is still there, it's just obscured by the music. The voice actor is never actually credited and to our knowledge, their identity is unknown. Some argue that Final Fantasy VI is actually the first game to feature voice acting (Kefka's laugh and Terra's scream were real sound effects given a chip-tune rework) but regardless, this is the first use of a fully voiced line within the series. Still, it's pretty interesting that Square were experimenting with voice acting at this point; considering it took another three releases to fully implement, they obviously didn't learn much from the experiment.