n.b. plus again, one for the Freud fanzine:
gosh, what i’d give for freuds geist to return and analyze a dumb FF anime plot.
That’s basically a dumb anime plot in itself, don’t @ me, i know!
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i have not yet played the remake but i have been playing a little bit of the original w/ that relocalized script made for the pc version (and then for the psx version) and honestly i still feel like aerith has a sort of deliberately understated personality. she’s the girl being watched by shinra under the guard of a protective surrogate mother, likely a little bit repressed but clearly a hippie flower punk who willingly seeks out danger and friendship with others who live dangerous lives. cloud sneaks out at night like her mom asks, but she’s already a step ahead of him. she delightedly claps her hands on front of her face when it dawns on her that she’s going to get to put cloud in a dress. she threatens to rip off a man’s dick. aerith’s having the time of her life imo
i can’t believe i canceled my preorder for this game. gotta get it soon.
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Great Glacier has some tricky and patience trying bullshit, so many random encounters but I also love Snow/Winter environments and the tense air of isolation in play, so it ends up among “dungeons” that made an impression in 7.
Gaea’s Cliff less, having to keep Cloud’s/party temperature up (not as fun as it sounds)…thankfully shorter.
This notion alone just sent me down a well of feelings, but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow
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i saw the ending the other day and i really
REALLY
REALLY
hate it
i’m gonna replay the original +
play through crisis core and prob cry for hours
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Beat this. I would very much like JRPGs more if they played more like character action games, as it turns out.
Honestly the overall mood outside of combat is like walking through a vertical slice or tech demo on your way to hit script flags. It gets away with it mainly thanks to personality and sheer scale. It certainly feels like the most expensive one of these.
I have no stake in the ending having never played the original, so all I can do is wait and see where they decide to take things.
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I’m in chapter 9 about to part with Aerith on my way back to sector 7 and I’m pretty sure the battle system needs to just be the standard Final Fantasy battle system going forward (at least for the single player games). It’s really good!
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SE is really going to have to build the rest of the world for part two huh. There’s no way they’ll fit an entire game on just the one continent. When wrapping up the sidequests for this game I realized it’s a pretty small explorable area with just three “towns” which is fine since Midgar is just linear setpiece after the other in the original, but they’ll need to build a whole world even if in part two you’re only on foot/buggy and many areas can be locked off.
I wonder if they’ll go open world, linear airship menus (like in X) or a traditional abstracted FF overworld.
i don’t think they can do the latter, anymore; general audiences wouldn’t tolerate it, i don’t think.
i think the approach will be how it is here (or kind of like Death Stranding) wherein you’ll have segments of “the world” that are open, but you’re confined to a small part of it at a time?
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oh, yeah, it’s definitely gonna be like an ffxiii or ffx in structure. they don’t make that other kind of game anymore
anyway i don’t think i had what i’d call emotional attachments to the characters or anything (red is so cool), but i would be lying if i said it didn’t have a huge impact on me otherwise-- i remember very clearly how it felt when a buddy first showed it to me and i played through the first few hours-- my whole brain lit the hell up, it’s still a significant touchstone for me when it comes to engaging media in general, etc
this is a really good articulation of how i feel and one of the main reasons i don’t really love this! i think so much of ffvii’s charm and impact are due to its technical form and structure, and while i do think viir looks nice i don’t really think a 4K AAA physics engine megagame is ever gonna be a hair on the ass of those psx games, which are genuinely/bizarrely beautiful
i am conflicted about remake’s soundtrack-- it’s generally pretty fun, but so often a theme from a psx track would pop up and i’d just be thinking, oh, yeah, i’d like to be listening to that right now
also, for all this talk about how well remake does by ffvii’s characters, which i generally agree with, i also think sephiroth is just enormously more crucial to vii’s impact than any of the party members, and remake just spectacularly and completely fumbles him straight into the garbage???
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yeah I certainly agree I just think in terms of her dialog that’s lost in the original translation to the extent that these actions you’re listing are kind of dissonant with the rest of her portrayal.
in the retranslation her character makes much more sense but I think in the remake they substantially overhauled her personality to be more explicitly like this and that’s a good thing.
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honestly if they build it like this game but at a grand scale I’m fine with that, that’s more or less how the dark souls worlds are and they feel huge as a result. I do feel like this game had just enough incidental exploration to not just feel like the series of railroads that it really is, like the town/dungeon/area design is way more “lived-in” feeling than I’m used to seeing from squeenix and that gives me hope that they can implement an overworld that is cool and fun to explore.
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The thing that has surprised me the most about this game is that it seems to actually respect my time. Some of the long dungeons are an exception, but even those are peppered with fun little character bits.
The first time the game offered to warp me back after completing a side quest, I was so relieved.
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not arsed about tifa and aerith, all about jenova
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Even by Chapter 16 when everyone else has gone through a bit of an arc, Cloud is edgy and boring, with a lot less dorky one-liners than the original. He was fun for a while and especially during the motorcycle minigame but now he kinda stands in the back of every cutscene.
I think I’m almost at the end of the game, but I really don’t know what it still has up its sleeve. I read that there’s only one magnify materia in this game and honestly that’s kind of an amazing choice.
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I got through Chapter 16 last night and this doesn’t feel like my experience with Cloud at all! His development is subtle but he’s thawed out a bunch. I feel like dorky one-liners arenet what he need at this point in the game? I’m genuinely kind of in awe at how much acting they’re getting out of the animation of Cloud’s eyes.
I don’t think I could play through this game with anything other than the English VAs. They really land the “this is ridiculous” quotient. So far I’ve just been watching my friend play through it, and I gotta say if nothing else, it’s amusing to watch, even if it looks pretty boring to play.
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Wow I got it last night too. I have been very thorough as I go through this grabbing every materia I can find. Was wondering when I’d find an “All” materia and I guess I found it.
a flagged diplo post shitting on the entire thread
I don’t know what to make of this thread. Almost all of the responses fall into three categories: 1) “lol anime”, 2) “stop thinking and just enjoy it”, and 3) “it made me cry so it’s good.” None of these are critically revealing. They are, at best, dispositional sound bites. Maybe the lack of concerted thinking here is another result of collective levels of mental exhaustion (because, you know, modernity; and work and family) and the culture of inattention social media has promoted. Which is to say, I don’t think anyone is being stupid, but there sure is a lot of nothing here, and it is actually frustrating to see the forum having devolved into something indistinguishable from any other medium-dedicated internet space.
The accusation of “anime” is particularly incoherent, and seems to be finding currency only because of conceptual convenience and relaxed prejudices: the FF7 remake is a Japanese game => anime is “bullshit” => anime is Japanese => anything bad about the FF7 remake is “anime.” This is functionally identical to the meme of people attributing anything they dislike in a game which Tetsuya Nomura was involved in to Nomura, simply because he is one of the few names they recognize (Sakaguchi, Nomura, Matsuno, and Uematsu are, I’d guess, the extent of most people’s awareness of Squaresoft staff) and because grudges are often mistaken for critical insights. Even more improbably, there is the illusion that one has perceived the developmental process, right down to each person’s exact contributions (hi tim). And there is the added flavor of casual racism. The idea of “lmao only in anime” is the idea of “lmao only in Japan” – the idea that there is a “normal” or “reasonable” mode of theater circumscribed by nationality, and that, while one is content to enjoy, even fetishize, contemporary Japanese products, one is also content to determine that Japan is uniquely culturally inept.
The aforementioned incoherence is patent in someone describing characters’ theatrical gestures as “anime”, even though anime is in fact noted for its relatively static animation compared to western cartoons (the modern standard for theatrical gestures should really be the musical portions of Disney cartoons), and even though the very term “theatrical” derives from the exaggerated drama of theater (even “jidaigeki” would be a better term of derision here, although it still does not escape the implicit racism). Having said all of this, I think it would still be easy for some people to conclude that the argument here amounts to blanket defenses of media or a denial of artwork being informed by culture. Such conclusions would be wrong. What I am asking people to do is to be more thoughtful about their words. If you are going to keep calling the FF7 remake “anime”, you are going to need to explain what you mean besides depending on shared casual racism to make the point.
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i just want to clarify my position and say that i love anime but still think the english VA is bullshit. i am valid. please allow me to dislike this thing without turning it into an ethical quandary.
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