An abridged timeline of Final Fantasy 7, ahead of Rebirth

destructoid.com:

Many of us grew to know most parts of the original Final Fantasy VII by heart, and that’s both awesome and heartbreaking. But how many of us are aware of the full extent of the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII extended universe that Square Enix kickstarted in the mid-aughts, in celebration of its seventh anniversary?

I sure wasn’t for a long while, but now I feel like I’m ready to talk about this wackily ambitious attempt at multiplatform, multi-genre, multi-generational storytelling.

Even though The First Soldier takes place long before everything else in the series, it only came out in 2021, seemingly in an attempt to make bank on the battle royale craze.

Yeah, you got that right. First Soldier is a battle royale title where 75 wannabe members of SOLDIER fought it out for the big job. Boy, if Cloud feels like a fraud sometimes, imagine how the SOLDIERs must feel if this is how they ended up getting the job. Though The First Soldier featured some cool ideas such as getting to ride Chocobos and, well, not much else, it failed to gain traction and Square Enix canned the thing a little over a year after release.

This is a gacha-style game that mostly retells the events of the OG FFVII and other related media, but it also has a prequel segment dedicated to Sephiroth who, at 14, was already a total murder machine.

Crisis Core is the crown jewel of the Final Fantasy VII compilation, as it’s both the game that began experimenting around with the kind of gameplay we’d later see in more actiony FF titles, and also because it’s a prequel that tells a story fans actually want to see.

Crisis Core shows us the life and times of Zack, Cloud’s mentor and protector. If you prefer other media, Last Order is an anime that takes place during the same time, but also focuses on some other events and tells the events of Crisis Core differently.

Ok, it’s strange that the game called Before Crisis takes place after the one whose name suggests it takes place at the very core of the