It forever changed: The idea of being immersed in an entire other world of characters. Feel free to swap out the Final Fantasys listed above, the reason the first and seventh were chosen is purely down to their dominance of early 2D and 3D RPGs respectfully. Plenty fans still point to Final Fantasy VI as being far superior to VII, and therein lies the reason they're on this list at all - the characters and world are so immersive and powerfully memorable that you feel an immense connection to those within, defending whichever title you first spent a considerable amount of time in to the grave. To be honest you can't go far wrong with any of the first ten games in the series, but especially VII (despite what any hindsight-wielding 'Oh actually don't you realise X iteration did X thing better'-type people would have you believe) is still one of the most lovingly-crafted 3D RPGs available today. Video games can do many things far better than books or film when it comes to truly visualising an entire world of content, and by letting you poke and prod around for essentially days of game time, you'll be hard-pressed to find any titles who do it better than these.
