5. Piano

Here’s the very simple thing: if you give millennials a piano, they will play the opening of My Chemical Romance’s “Welcome To The Black Parade.” It’s a fact of modern life that I will never get over. So when FF7 Rebirth’s demo went live and I saw a video of Cloud Strife banging out that iconic opening G chord, I grinned like a dumbass. That feeling extended to much of my time with Rebirth’s in-game piano, where the game asks you to play many legendary tracks from Nobuo Uematsu’s timeless score. One of my favorite moments in Rebirth is the culmination of a side quest where Cloud’s eventually asked to play Tifa’s Theme—one of the most moving compositions I’ve ever heard—as he’s accompanied by a couple of violinists. Reader, I wept like a baby. And though the rhythm game becomes a bit unwieldy (asking players to keep track of two radial tracks fixed to the thumbsticks) on higher difficulties, getting to become a part of these songs was more than worth the frustration. — Moises Taveras