Uematsu was a big part of my childhood and it was a bummer when he stepped back from composing so much, but Masayoshi Soken has done amazing work on FFXIV, he's a worthy successor. I really like this piano arrangement of the Endwalker soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRmXuN53ggw

I think the Zelda franchise has similar if not greater cultural impact in some of the ways you're talking about.

Good luck from a fellow player who's already walked the path you're walking.

Final Fantasy 6, which is an equally awesome game, although for very different reasons, had a complete makeover and one can download it with new quests, gears, translation, balance, etc.

It's crazy what people will do by passion.

I've never played the Secret of Mana type games, or Mario RPG, or any of a host of other ones.

I think the PSX was an interesting high point for 3D creativity vs graphics. The PS2 started pushing polygon counts such that the creative/artist teams started to blow out and budgets shot up, but then the PS3 and "modern AAA" budgets took over. Large budgets, low risk, more priority on splash graphics than depth.

Is there a good place to follow these discoveries? The site you linked seems to mainly just be mods, and when I search for glitch discussion I mostly just find generic wiki's listing the same old glitches known for decades.

I recommend this whole channel as it's a great resource for FF7 in general and covers the newest developments: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyotyCGt7oYAKM1mCwsHT...