Both original version and upcoming remake are featured in musical salute to the definitive CD-based RPG video game.

Once upon a time, the Final Fantasy video game franchise was exclusive to Nintendo consoles. But after six installments of the mainline series, publisher Square Soft released Final Fantasy VII as a console exclusive for Sony’s PlayStation, and the reason for jumping ship can be summed up in one word: CDs.

The PlayStation was a CD-based system, but Nintendo’s then-upcoming Nintendo 64 was sticking with old-fashioned cartridges. The Final Fantasy VII team wanted to make use of the vastly superior storage capacity of CDs in order to give them a larger canvas to work with, and they weren’t overestimating the scale of their vision, as in the end Final Fantasy VII needed three PlayStation CDs to fit everything the developers wanted in the game, which would have made it prohibitively expensive to publish in cartridge format.

But despite being the definitive CD RPG of its generation, in an ironic twist the next installment in Final Fantasy VII’s musical legacy is ditching CDs in favor of a more old-fashioned media form: vinyl records.

Square Enix has begun taking preorders for an LP collection of selected music from both the original Final Fantasy VII and the highly anticipated (by almost everybody) Final Fantasy VII Remake, which gamers will finally get to play next March. As with the original game, the remake is scheduled to be a multi-disc release, and the LP music collection is paralleling that by coming on two records, one decorated with a CG render of original-version Final Fantasy VII protagonist Cloud…


…and the other sporting Cloud’s modernized Remake look.

Even the pricing is a nod to the game’s positioning in the Final Fantasy franchise, as it’s being offered for 7,777 yen through Japanese outlets, and US$77.77 in North America (before tax).

The LP sound collection has an official release date of January 31, but considering that it’s a limited printing and pre-orders have already started, interested parties are best off putting in their orders sooner rather than later. Shoppers in Japan have a number of purchase point options collected here, including the Square Enix E-Store and the Japanese arms of Amazon and Rakuten, while North American and European customers’ only options at the moment seem to be their local Square Enix online shops, found here and here.

Source: Square Enix via Game Spark via Otakomu
Top image: Square Enix
Insert images: Square Enix
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