Sunday, December 14, 2008
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Final Fantasy VII is a console role-playing game developed by Square (now Square Enix) and published by Sony Computer Entertainment as the seventh installment in the Final Fantasy series. It was released in 1997 for Sony's PlayStation and in 1998 for Microsoft's Windows-based personal computers. The game is the first in the series to use 3D computer graphics, featuring fully rendered characters on pre-rendered backgrounds.
Set in a dystopian world, Final Fantasy VII's story centers on the powerful megacorporation Shinra, which is draining the life of the planet to use as an energy source. Players follow a young mercenary named Cloud Strife, who joins with several others to stop Shinra. Later in the story, the main antagonist, Sephiroth, develops a plan to summon a meteor with the intention of injuring the planet to a point where it would gather massive amounts of its life force in one spot. This would allow Sephiroth to collect all the life force and gain control of all living beings.
Development of Final Fantasy VII began in 1994 and the game was originally only intended for the SNES, but it was later moved to the Nintendo 64. As the system's cartridges lacked space, Square decided to release the game for Sony's PlayStation instead. The music was scored by Final Fantasy veteran Nobuo Uematsu, while the series' long-time character designer, Yoshitaka Amano, was replaced by Tetsuya Nomura.
The game was a major critical and commercial success, and remains arguably the most popular title in the series. The ongoing popularity of the title led Square Enix to produce a series of sequels and prequels under the collective title Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. As of December 2005, Final Fantasy VII has sold more than 9.8 million copies worldwide, earning it the position of the best-selling Final Fantasy title and the second-best-selling PlayStation game of all-time.
Gundam is one of the longest running metaseries of Japanese anime, featuring giant robots, or "mecha", created by Sunrise studios. The series started in April 1979 as a TV series called Mobile Suit Gundam, and later became a franchise name with more sequels, prequels, side stories and alternative time-lines, published and aired in various media including TV anime, OVA, manga, novels, and video games. Gundam became a collective term for 7 different time lines, all featuring their own story-lines, with a few common denominators and war machines called Gundam.
The first time-line is the Universal Century (UC) series. Mobile Suit Gundam and Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, and series set in alternative time-lines, such as Future Century, After Colony, After War, Correct Century, Cosmic Era and Anno Domini were also produced and developed.
In the 2008 ranking of average sales figures for anime copies sold in Japan (1970-2008 total sales figures averaged by episode), Gundam series were in 4 of the top 5 places: Mobile Suit Gundam ranked second, with Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny third, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED fourth, and Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam fifth. Also, New Mobile Report Gundam Wing ranked 18th and Mobile Suit ZZ Gundam ranked 20th.[1]
As of 21 January 2008, the Gundam franchise is a 50 billion yen trademark