This is all from memory of FF7 alone without all the terrible cartoons they made afterwards but (spoilers for original plot) Cloud is a shitty failed clone, and everything he thinks about his past is actually something he watched Zack, a real person, do while he stood by as an anonymous footsoldier. After Zack dies Cloud basically steals his accomplishments to be his own memories and then gets so invested in this identity he forgets he faked it. His character’s whole arc is learning to accept that he has his own accomplishments, he can let his constructed Zack-based identity go and be legitimate and worthwhile as his own person
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I liked FFXIII a lot more when I realized the purpose in battle is almost never winning (you can win battle of attritions easily by switching to a defensive paradigm) but finishing as fast as possible for additional battle rewards… This involves taking a lot more risks and is a lot more fun. It’s sort of a speedrun game.
A funny thing about FFXIII is how it was understandably criticized for its linearity, but at one point there’s a big open ended field you can explore with superbosses etc, BUT navigating it is extremely annoying because the minimap auto-rotates like in a racing game and there’s no way to turn the spinning off. I was begging for the game to bring back linearity
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i thought it wasn’t that cloud was a clone, but that he’d been genetically fucked with while he was in soldier. otherwise, tifa wouldn’t have childhood memories of him.
but he does delude/misremember zack’s actions as being his actions during the long nibelheim flashback you see just after leaving midgar.
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Uh, that might be true. Pretty sure Sephiroth laughs at him for being a failed clone, but that could’ve been 1. Seph just fucking with him 2. a metaphorical way of referring to Cloud’s fake constructed identity 3. bad writing 4. bad translation
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yeah the clone thing is IX, Cloud doesn’t get jenova’d until after the Zack episode. he was actually a regular mediocrity before that. VII uses the “clone” language to refer to the other test subjects who got jenova’d and who lose their form, Cloud retains his so he’s supposed to be unique in that regard.
I didn’t remember that either and looked it up last week
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The assumption is he would have become a clone if Zack hadn’t broken the two of them out.
It’s easy to miss Zack in the original because you have to return to the basement lab in Nibleheim after regaining Cloud’s memories, without any prompt to do so.
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playing the first hour or so of Fallen Order directly after this is interesting
really like drives home the star war imprint on midgar
and also, like, as technically competent as ff7r remake is that star war game is wow those are some extremely big and cool environment graphics wooshing around
two distinct flavors of high-input-lag real time sword swinging
the little cans and radios and shit strewn about on tables in FF7r, RE2/3make and Fallen Order have a similar cute vibe
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also I think my favorite new character in FF7R is that sweet blue Citroen 2CV baby pickup truck thing Tifa’s drivin’ at the end
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really? the most recent time i played ff7 (2016 or 207 i think), i was struck by how obviously influenced by battle angel alita midgar was
both can be true, of course
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ur probably right
i mean it is clearly its own thing too a big delicious soup of many refined mother broths
i had a few days away from this game but i’m at shinra hq now. i adore the music in the archives. i’m on my way to the end and then i can read all the blurry stuff in this thread and maybe join in on the disappointment!!!
is Sephiroth’s only major crime in FF7R getting all that purple drank on Hojo’s floor?
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Now I see it clearly. My whole life has pointed in one direction. There never has been any choice for me.
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Places like Wall Market, which are definite highlights of this new game, have been completely rewritten from the original, with only the don corneo scenes left relatively intact. The game, at its best, was able to overwrite our nostalgia for the original, to rewrite the original version in a way that we don’t even notice how much has changed. The characters have become too lively to be confined by a faithful narrative.
This is one example I can give of how they desacralized the original game. They avoided the two cowardly routes (cutting the section entire because of how poorly the original has aged or remaking it exactingly, ignoring all the cracks in that foundation) and instead designed what they feel wall market should have been
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tbh i think the game is beautiful and captures that special jrpg magic, but it also comes with a very clunky ui and gaudy armor designs which might make the remaster worth the wait (even if you have to emulate it, if, like me, you don’t have a switch)
Thing is, that falls under “following the course of original” to me, as roughly put maybe 80-90% of the game does. Most people seem very pleased with how Wall Market turned out, regardless of any small bullet points they could miss from the original’s setup. I’m sure someone’s upset about it! But I don’t know how that chapter relays some kind of crucial disruption to the more integral aspects of FF7 og narratively or thematically long run - which is where the most valid concerns about coherency and storytelling come from. I get that it’s an appealing talk point but really don’t see what you’re extrapolating, given there’s similar shifting just in different places (and degrees to different effect) all throughout the remake.
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he made palmer spill his tea
btw it has been established, and is now canon, that the shinra building is bereft of not only butter for palmer’s tea, but mayo as well. absolutely baffling.
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That’s pretty much what I’m saying when I say the remake desacralized the original. It felt comfortable reworking all the specifics, up to the point that sometimes the specifics clash with the original narrative. This is when the spectres show up to push the narrative ‘back on track’. Wedge was supposed to have died during Shinra’s attack on Sector 7. His eventual death in Chapter 18, at the behest of the spectres, is a character in the narrative being killed by an extranarrative force. The spectres only want the story being told to be a nostalgic reification of the past, and they would rather undermine the narrative than let it get too far off track.
Wall Market is a completely different place from the original! It’s different in a way where we don’t care that it’s different because it’s so much better. Remakes have a difficult time because they have to justify their own existence in context of the source material. Wall Market is interesting because it feels like the developers are saying “we can do better this time. The past is the past, we don’t have to follow that course.”
To be more explicit, the original wall market, as fascinating as it was, was also extremely homophobic and traded in casual misogyny. The authors of the remake decided neither to whitewash that chapter of the original nor act like how it was handled in the original was inviolable.
It’s not so much that they expanded the quest here as they completely rewrote it because the original was just not worth preserving. When I say the game desacralizes the original, I mean exactly that the remake didn’t treat the original with nostalgic reverence nor with contempt.
R stills fits into the broad strokes of FF7, but often only at the behest of the spectres. Their dissipation, in the end, feels like an emphatic statement “the future is unwritten”. The developers don’t have to follow the roadmap of the original any more. AVALANCHE finally outside of Midgar have an open world of possibilities before them, and so do the developers.
Hopefully, they realize that their best work was in the subtle additions and easily overlooked rewrites of the original, not in the crass inclusion of Advent Children-isms and nostalgic nods to things the players remember. Sephiroth was of special interest to the fan-spectres but plainly felt like an unpleasant reminder of how childish the original work (and its sequels) often was. Sephiroth feels more like a relic weighing the protagonists down than an active threat.
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I really like this read and it’s reminding me of the overwhelming conflict I got from Blade Runner 2049, which is less interested in whether people can be fake and more in whether experiences can be real if they’re imitations of earlier ones. The movie is as conflicted over its own existence as Joe, and it’s structured around a series of faked experiences to keep checking it from different angles – the virtual girlfriend, the memory crafter, the return to Las Vegas, a city that exists to parody and compress American culture, and the stuttering, broken recordings of lounge singers inside.
The reworked Voight-Kampff test that runs on the audience, so that by the time the audience can unpack its meaning it’s become clear to Joe as well the box we’re both trapped in, but we don’t know how to escape our spiraling nostalgia.
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