I've talked on here before about knowing someone who is now in their late 30s, if not early 40s, who still insists that she revived Aeris and unlocked Zack as a playable character in FF7.
In terms of first playing it - FF7 was my first JRPG, never knew anything about the genre. I had just started a new school, got talking games with a kid I befriended; I had been playing Little Big Adventure 2, he had been playing Final Fantasy 7. LBA2 felt huge to me at the time - it was relatively open world, had some RPG dynamics, and had a fun point where you go to another world and have to use a different currency - and I assumed FF7 would be a similar game, but it was just so much bigger and broader and I was completely blown away by it.
I had played RPGs before, but it was stuff like The Bard's Tale, some Ultima knock-offs, or more recently Diablo, never anything like a Final Fantasy. FF7 was a complete obsession for a couple of years - my first online communities were around it, every conversation at school was FF7, Starcraft, or Metal Gear Solid for a year or two there. It was, and really still is, my baseline of what an RPG should be - I started getting into emulation and retro games purely to go back and play previous Final Fantasy games, and found so many other great games because of that.