The Pitters' Place

The original, not the remake. We just started playing this last week. I couldn't help but notice that the back story is basically Evangelion. Government research team finds an ancient being during an archeological dig (Jenova/Adam), they use that being to create their own beings (Sephiroth, Rei, Evangelions, Angels). They keep the original stored in a secret place within their headquarters.

Sephiroth isn't created exactly, but that might be something of a translation error still retained in the original game or you just not being far enough in the game.

FF7 definitely took some inspiration from Evangelion though, but there's probably a bit of Carpenter's The Thing in there as well with some of what you mention.

Right; where I am (pretty early; most of what I know is from the long flashback scene where Cloud and Sephiroth are together at Mt. Nibel and Sephiroth discovers the truth about Jenova and the Ancients), I guess it gives the impression that they used Jenova to enhance Soldiers in some way. And then there's the fact that Jenova is also the name of Sephiroth's mother; which I'm assuming means in one way or another; he came from Jenova. It's definitely a bit confusing; and I think it's supposed to be. No spoilers though.

Yeah FF7 is definitely part of that post-Eva trend of anime and Japanese games that let themselves willingly be less than straightforward.

I mean FF8 is one of my all-time favorite games and I think it has a great story, but it's also really out there and has parts that basically can't be followed.

I liked Triple Triad and generally the first disc of FF8, but the rest never did much for me.

Defeated Emerald Weapon and Ruby Weapon!

Fun but also annoying battles, quite difficult. I don't like that there's basically no choice but to use Knights of the Round a lot; practically nothing else hurts them enough to matter.

So for Emerald Weapon, it was a particularly crazy ending. After a long battle, I was down to 1 character left alive (not Cloud), at low health. I had no clue how much damage I had dealt out of his starting 1,000,000 HP. Bringing someone else back to life would have been pointless; Emerald would have just done an attack that killed all party members at once. So I did the strongest attack I could, a quad-cast Ultima which would deal about 12,000 damage. Knowing that if it didn't kill him, I was dead and I would have to start all over. I needed to have already done about 988,000 damage in order to win. And it worked; it killed him.

Ruby took a few tries, but he's a bit more cheesable so it wasn't quite as hard.