The best Final Fantasy games to play before Rebirth

polygon.com:

Can you believe it’s 2024 and Final Fantasy 7is still a massive entry within the larger Final Fantasy series? It all started in 1997, when Square Enix released the original FF7 on PlayStation 1, complete with 3D graphics. Fast-forward roughly 27 years andit’s now one of the most acclaimed video games of all time and has seen numerous adaptations and spinoffs since its initial release.

Here’s a short sampling of the options available to Final Fantasy 7 fans. You can play the original RPG, which has been ported to modern consoles. There’s the gloriously corny CGI movie Advent Children, which is set two years after the events of the original game. Side character Zack Fair even has an entire dang prequel set before the events of Final Fantasy 7 that Square Enix remastered. Other characters like Tifa and Aerith don’t have their own games, but they do have entire novels dedicated to telling their backstories. And none of these examples touch the various rereleases of the original Final Fantasy 7 and its related spinoffs.

The release of so much Final Fantasy 7 mediamight prompt a sort of… crisis… for fans. The creators haven’t clarified what’s canon and what’s not, and it has gotten to overwhelming Marvel levels of intricacy. Still, it doesn’t have to be so complicated. With the release of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, now can be a great time to revisit older games in order to prepare. In this list, we’ll give you a spoiler-free rundown of what related media could help enrich your experience of Rebirth based on characters and plotlines in the game and what the story touches on.

Where to play: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4

Instead of just updating graphics, the development team at Square Enix opted to use the original Final Fantasy 7 as a source of major inspiration and split it into three different games for a full-on remake trilogy. The first two titles are Final Fantasy 7 Remake and now Final Fantasy Rebirth. (Square Enix hasn’t released any details on the third installment