Other games (won't say which due to spoilers) have you using a specific Command when an enemy's at 1/8th of the HP to get their Blue Magic, or a draining move that also nets you Blue Magic.
I've also always liked the idea of combining the Monk and Blue Mage classes. Not sure if this'd have any tactical advantage (guess that'd depend on the game), but lore-wise I feel it fits nicely due to a lot of Chinese martial arts taking inspiration from how animals move. In fact I once had a Monk+Blue Mage character as a party member in a short-lived FF Quest of mine
The core issue of the Blue Mage is that it doesn't... really have a mechanical identity? The lore concept is cool, 'learn sick monster spells' is an awesome idea, but when you've already got Black Mage (spells detrimental to the enemy), White Mage (spells beneficial to your party), and Red Mage (White Mage plus Black Mage, but with a more limited list), there isn't really... space? For Blue Mage to be worthwhile.
Especially when it's almost always just 'Black Mage except legitimately worse and also it's a pain in the arse to get the spells for'.
And sure, you could get around this by having Black Mage restricted to the traditional elemental triad (Fire/Ice/Lightning) and let the Blue Mage have access to more esoteric stuff, but then you run into the issue of having to do the Blue Mage monster hunt to get access to those elements and that's also not great from a fun perspective.
I dunno. I just think it's one of those things that's far more exciting and interesting as a lore thing than as any kind of gameplay mechanic.
The way FFXIV does it is by making Blue Mage its own separate, individual gaming experience that does its own dungeons and stuff with other BLU never interacting with the normal jobs, and which I am given to understand consists mostly of shooting trouts at people and committing near-suicide in a way that causes your enemies' insides to spontaneously invert and explode.
One way could be to have learning work like how XIV does it, where you just need to see the enemy cast a given attack during a fight to learn it after beating them, rather than needing to actually get hit by it. Would also alleviate the issue of learning spells like Lv 5 Death where you suddenly need to keep the party at staggered levels to acquire it.
This is actually how Strago's Lores work, at least in the console versions of the Pixel Remasters, and according to various wiki guides in the Pixel Remasters in general. For Strago to learn a Lore, someone involved in the battle must use it while Strago is alive and awake. The actual target of these spells does not matter.
This means you could learn Lores in consecutive battles if you've kept up with Gau, because Gau using the spell counts as Strago seeing the Lore.
I think if the Blue Mage does have a mechanical identity, it's as the 'miscellaneous' Mage class, a junk drawer for all the spells that don't really fit elsewhere (though even then, there a few Blue spells that could probably be given to other classes, e.g., Big Guard as high-end White Magic)
The core issue of the Blue Mage is that it doesn't... really have a mechanical identity? The lore concept is cool, 'learn sick monster spells' is an awesome idea, but when you've already got Black Mage (spells detrimental to the enemy), White Mage (spells beneficial to your party), and Red Mage (White Mage plus Black Mage, but with a more limited list), there isn't really... space? For Blue Mage to be worthwhile.
Especially when it's almost always just 'Black Mage except legitimately worse and also it's a pain in the arse to get the spells for'.
And sure, you could get around this by having Black Mage restricted to the traditional elemental triad (Fire/Ice/Lightning) and let the Blue Mage have access to more esoteric stuff, but then you run into the issue of having to do the Blue Mage monster hunt to get access to those elements and that's also not great from a fun perspective.
I dunno. I just think it's one of those things that's far more exciting and interesting as a lore thing than as any kind of gameplay mechanic.
I think it requires the Blue Magic to do something that White/Black Magic alone won't. Take White Wind for example: in some titles it not only cures but also cleanses debuffs. A White Mage needs two separate casts for that, but the Blue Mage can do it in one shot. You could balance this by making the heal less capable than a similar-level Cure spell (for the MP cost) but the combined heal/cleanse is what makes it worthwhile. Bad Breath also shoots off all the possible debuffs rather than a Black Mage doing it one at a time, so even if you don't know what an enemy is weak to (or not immune to) it almost doesn't matter as whichever one it is will get through; for a Black Mage it's either trial and error or needing the extra Libra cast from a White Mage.
Things like that would make it more valuable, while finding ways to make finding the various spells easier/less cumbersome also increases the utility.
Thats how the lvl x spells work - they either give you access to late game spells early (but only for certain enemies) or guaranteed hit versions of low accuracy spells (but only for certain enemies).
After the third game (Nothing against the first three, but the storytelling in DQ 1,2, and to a lesser extent 3 is somewhat primitive) all those tragic backstories tend to happen as you play. For all that the games are generally more lighthearted in presentation, they can get surprisingly dark. The thing about Dragon Quest is that all those fantasy jrpg tropes that everyone takes the piss out of or riffs on these days, Dragon Quest plays them straight because it functionally invented them. I STRONGLY recommend anyone looking to play any DQ game start with 5 and or 8, then move to 11 once you've played those two. The hard part is actually getting playable copies these days. For most of these games the most recent release was on the DS (Bar 11) and 10 is a Japan only MMO.
Other recommendations for old school JRPG's to look into if you (are not Omi, he's busy, and) want more of the genre are the Phantasy Star series (I, II, III, and IV, not any of the Online spinoffs), Wild Arms and Xenogears for some of FFVII's period rivals, and anything SMT for what the disruptive rebels in the space were up to. The Legend of Heros (The Trails in/to/of... series) and the Tales of... series also started getting relevant about the SNES/PS1 era and are mostly quality products behind the big names in the space.
Yeah, DQ is one of those things where it uses its cartoony artstyle and tendency for lightheartedness to be able to get away with a lot of genocide, racism, and onscreen major character death. Its a series that both names every monster with puns and has a running gag where you encounter dead bodies as part of the basic dungeon experience (with the response "there is no reply, it is only a corpse" as the running-gag response).
DQ4 is also worth noting here, as it did the "human-looking central villain with comprehensible, sympathetic motives behind his start of darkness that led to him becoming a genocidal monster" thing in 1990 at the tail end of the NES, four years and a system before Final Fantasy tried its first bad guy with both recognizable human looks and something approaching human emotions - the villain in question, Psaro, being so popular to this day that he's going to be the protagonist of the upcoming Dragon Quest Monsters spin-off twenty-three years after his debut.
The way FFXIV does it is by making Blue Mage its own separate, individual gaming experience that does its own dungeons and stuff with other BLU never interacting with the normal jobs, and which I am given to understand consists mostly of shooting trouts at people and committing near-suicide in a way that causes your enemies' insides to spontaneously invert and explode.
Sardines only need 5 Fishing to catch, where Trout need 20 fishing, so sardines would be easier to access, but trouts heal for 7 HP where sardines only heal for 4 despite them both needing the same amount of ticks between eating, so trouts are the superior form of food. Both are completely outclassed by simple potatoes and pizzas, though
DQ9 is just a genuine hole in my memory in a way that is genuinely scary. I could tell you more about the books I didn't read in my classes back then than about this game.
How do you just forget about the game with the accidental fallen angel plot? That is scary. Then again, I couldn't buy the guide nor had reliable internet access, so I ended up writing out every shop's inventory in the entire game. And then using school internet to write out alchemy recipes.
The hard part is actually getting playable copies these days. For most of these games the most recent release was on the DS (Bar 11) and 10 is a Japan only MMO.
While it's not exactly the most optimal way to play them because controller is generally preferable, DQ1-DQ6 + DQ8 are all available on mobile devices. In fact, some people apparently prefer the mobile version of DQ4 because the DS english version removed party chats for no explicable reason, and they were re-implemented in the mobile port.
After the third game (Nothing against the first three, but the storytelling in DQ 1,2, and to a lesser extent 3 is somewhat primitive) all those tragic backstories tend to happen as you play. For all that the games are generally more lighthearted in presentation, they can get surprisingly dark. The thing about Dragon Quest is that all those fantasy jrpg tropes that everyone takes the piss out of or riffs on these days, Dragon Quest plays them straight because it functionally invented them. I STRONGLY recommend anyone looking to play any DQ game start with 5 and or 8, then move to 11 once you've played those two. The hard part is actually getting playable copies these days. For most of these games the most recent release was on the DS (Bar 11) and 10 is a Japan only MMO.
Other recommendations for old school JRPG's to look into if you (are not Omi, he's busy, and) want more of the genre are the Phantasy Star series (I, II, III, and IV, not any of the Online spinoffs), Wild Arms and Xenogears for some of FFVII's period rivals, and anything SMT for what the disruptive rebels in the space were up to. The Legend of Heros (The Trails in/to/of... series) and the Tales of... series also started getting relevant about the SNES/PS1 era and are mostly quality products behind the big names in the space.
5 and 8 have phone versions currently availible. For 5 that might be a legitimately good option. No idea how it plays but from the screenshots it doesn't have the bad art style of the mobile versions of the NES games and the modern console releases based on them, seems to have some content that was added in the DS version, and the reviews are good. Reviews for 8 seem more negative, looks like a pretty compromised port.
8 was on the 3DS digitally, so it was easy to get a couple months ago if you had a 3DS. Not so much now. PS2 copies are still ~$20 and if you don't think you have a PS2, fair odds there's one hiding in your couch and if there isn't you can probably find one pretty cheap, game+system for less than a new AAA. Or use your legitimate copy with an emulator, of course. The 3DS version added content but the PS2 has an orchestrated soundtrack. For 5 you're probably not going to want a physical DS English copy, they're well over $100, but it's the only other official English release. The SNES and PS2 versions have English translation patches. A Japanese PS2 copy is around ~$25 so you can dump your own ISO to patch like a good upstanding citizen.
I was hoping I could dig out my old FF7 walkthrough guide so I could go through that with the thread. Sadly I've got no clue where it's gone since it's not in the places I'd have left it.
Ah well, guess we'll be seeing how well my memory holds up for certain things. Did dig up the FFX guide though, so if you need any help with the Al Bhed primer locations I'm good to go.
Just finished reading the FF5 LP, so I'm all caught up now.
Omega conjured up yet another Doctor Who parallel for me, as there's a DW villain of the same name who's also first encountered in an interdimensional void rift (a cognitive antimatter dimension inside a black hole in his case). He first appeared in 1973, so would predate the FF Omega by nearly ten years.
His line "A Hero? I should've been a God!" also sounds exactly like something a FF villain would say.
Doubt any reference was intentional though (DW being only moderately popular in Japan), given DW's been around so long that you can draw parallels with it to almost anything
Man, this thread brings back memories of wanting a FF7 remake in the vein of FF3 and FF4 on the DS.
We are kind of getting something like that with Ever Crisis, but FF7 is too important to SE to ever allow it to look as crude as it's original form in spin offs or remakes.
Edit:
Regarding the graphics trade off, the reason it's not unambiguously in the favor of the SNES era games is that the PSX brought something to the table that the SNES never could: control of the Camera. Like Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, and a handful of other industry pushing titles, Final Fantasy 7 got to use pre rendered backgrounds and FMVs to mimic Hollywood camera angles.
Of course, the trade off is that the early Final Fantasy attrition dungeons pretty much disappear. It was already on it's way out in FF6, but it is really gone in 7.
Regarding the graphics trade off, the reason it's not unambiguously in the favor of the SNES era games is that the PSX brought something to the table that the SNES never could: control of the Camera. Like Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, and a handful of other industry pushing titles, Final Fantasy 7 got to use pre rendered backgrounds and FMVs to mimic Hollywood camera angles.
At the start of my FFVI Let's Play, I made a big intro about the exalted status FFVI has among the 2D generation of Final Fantasy. You can pretty much take everything about it and extrapolate it to Final Fantasy VII, except tenfold. It's a legendary game. It reshaped video game culture. It single-handedly brought JRPGs into the forelight in the West. It is one of the most beloved and successful games of all time. And so on.
I'm going to be real with you: I have been dreading this moment since I pretty much started this Let's Play. Final Fantasy VII is a quarter of a century old, and kingdoms of ink have been spilled on its behalf. There are hour-long video essays about its importance. Its Wikipedia page is the same size as some major countries.
What the hell do I say about it that hasn't been said a hundred times, even as a new-ish player?
I don't know. I'm going to try not to think about it. I'll simply try to approach the game as it is, as part of the continuity of this Let's Play, of every game being played in turn and informing one another in turn, and say what comes to my mind, even if it's been said a hundred times before; and maybe, in all this, there will be novel insights that you've never read before.
If you, my dear reader, are someone who's never played Final Fantasy VII, someone who doesn't know what this game is about or why it has such hype - well, this Let's Play is for you and I. We're venturing in this together.
In my beginning
In the beginning there was the PlayStation.
Note the absence of analog sticks, a technology which would become ubiquitous later for a good fucking reason.
Except it wasn't the beginning, of course. But it was mine. All the games I played as a kid were either on Nintendo's handheld consoles (from the old GameBoy through the GameBoy Pocket through the GameBoy Color through the GameBoy Advance through the Nintendo DS, and then my interest tapered of), or on the PlayStation. And though Final Fantasy VII is not a game I played as kid, only one I vaguely heard about from friends, the fact that it is the first FF game on PlayStation means something. Specifically, for me? It means that we're entering the realm of nostalgia in a way that wasn't true of any of the Pixel Remasters. Though handheld consoles had aesthetic similarities to 16-bit era consoles, their catalog was different enough that I basically never look at a SNES game and feel nostalgic for my childhood experience playing it.
The same, I have now found out, is not true of Final Fantasy VII. Even though I never played this game as a child and did not finish it as an adult, after having only started it, my experience of playing it is steeped in nostalgia. I am likely to be a less objective reviewer as a result. I ask that you forgive me.
I have much to say about PSX-era gaming.
On Time
We're taking a leap in time simultaneously forwards and backwards.
The Pixel Remasters were remasters of very old games on very old consoles, and while they retained some of the old sensibilities of said games, doing very little to overhaul the moment-to-moment gameplay beyond not being buggy as hell, they also made the games much smoother, much more convenient, much more beautiful. As we grew closer and closer to the end of the SNES cycle, the Pixel Remasters grew closer to the original style - but still higher definition, still with greater resolution, revisited color palettes, and so on.
Just look at this one picture:
It's not as vast a chasm as FFI vs FFI PR, but the frame's been expanded to 16:9 (which incidentally is something that could very easily backfire and it is very remarkable that it doesn't; entire shows have been visually ruined by hackish 16:9 ports to streaming), the background has been made more complex with a more visible Narshe, the sprites are a little more detailed.
FFVI might have been the peak of Final Fantasy on the SNES, but FFVI Pixel Remaster is itself a masterpiece of retro pixel art taking full advantage of modern game technology.
FFVII is not that. FFVII, at the time of its release, represented an incredible leap in technology, allowing true 3D in video games and the Full-Motion Videos that would come to be iconic of the series. However, the version I am playing is a 2012 update of the PC port of the original 1997 game; while it boasts things like cloud save storage and 'high-resolution support,' but it is not a remaster.
That means multiple things, among which that on my computer, it looks like this:
It's framed in 4:3, with black bars on each side of the screen, I assume so as to preserve the backgrounds from being rendered hopelessly pixelated. Furthermore, it has very few of the quality improvements of the Pixel Remasters. There is no quicksaving, for one. There's no autosave, a feature which I had initially overlooked as redundant in the PRs before it proceeded to save me from long repeat runs multiple times. Additionally, there's a little charging time on every screen transition - not much, but in a game with random encounters, it compounds. The translation also predates the streamlined translation conventions of the later eras of the series, so for instance, Cure/Cura/Curaga are instead Cure/Cure2/Cure3. There are a number of these little details, some which I am likely to bring up as relevant, some which I will probably forget.
All of this combines to make Final Fantasy VII, a game that massively innovated on all its predecessors, oddly antiquated compared to the Pixel Remasters of said predecessors.
Some may call this the 3D curse. Early polygon-based games are doomed to age faster and worse than the 'timeless' aesthetic of 2D sprites.
I don't agree with this, for reasons that I will be going into shortly.
So.
Now that we have established the context of this odd gaming artifact unstuck in time…
Let's dive in, and play Final Fantasy VII.
As we open the game, we are greeted by several 3D-animated logos, including a "Square" logo which has a bunch of fully animated chocobos racing in front of it, then a flat background with the Final Fantasy logo, the credits, and this game's reprise on the classic opening menu theme - and then this.
A background of total shadow, a sword resting at an angle as if planted in the ground, abandoned or marking a grave, a sliver of light, and nothing else. Not even the name of the game. This is novel for a series which has so far followed a very formulaic style for their intro menu - the game is clearly shooting for a particular kind of mood there, somber, perhaps brooding even, and definitely mysterious.
So, we start a new game.
I'm going to run us through the first five minutes of the game and then promptly go insane trying to encompass everything it's doing.
The very first thing that greets us is probably one of the most famous introductions in gaming. First, the sight of stars - which can't be stars, it soon becomes apparent, as the camera pans across them and the lights move; then, a face appears, backlit by a green glow and surrounded by embers.
…a young woman, standing in front of some kind of light or engine, seeming to… warm herself, maybe? Then something draws her attention; she turns around and walks towards the camera, which pulls back at her approach until it reveals the woman is walking out of an alleyway and into a main street of a fully modern-looking city:
In fact, one of the first things we see other than this woman is a moving car. We've never seen cars in Final Fantasy before; even when the games leaned into modernity or industrialism, like with Vector or the sci-fi aspects of Ronka and the Moon Aliens, it never showed something like cars. I think because cars are so individual. Trains are infrastructure; dreadnoughts are state power; factories are mass production on a gigantic scale. But a car says "you, individual, possess the tools of modernity, the ability to navigate this world," in a way that negates the… hostility you get from something like the Gestahlian Empire. It changes the individual's relationship to industry and modernity.
So it looks like we are going for a fully modern, industrial setting. I dig it. And then…
Those black bars are going to be with us the whole time. Better get used to it.
Splash screen, game title and logo.
It's dawning on me that I have never analyzed the logos of the series before - each one has a different figure behind it. Unfortunately just as I say this, we're seeing a logo that I have no idea what it represents. The planet? A meteor?
Oh, and of course, behind that logo - a gigantic kind of factory, glowing with light, an entire city sitting within the spokes of its wheel-like shape, rimmed with gigantic iron walls. The camera takes it all in from a distance, intercut with brief, rapid shots of a train moving at high speed, then dives in on one specific spot…
A train is pulling into a station.
The camera draws closer, and we see figures standing oddly, very obviously modeled different from their environment.
Guards, a baton at their hip, are standing watch as the train pulls in… only for a group of characters to jump off the train and immediately beat the surprised guards into unconsciousness.
First, a bandana-wearing man, then a girl wearing what looks like a breastplate and pauldrons, then a portly-looking guy with a covered head, then a massive bearded Black man with something weird on his right arm, and then, finally, back turned to the camera, our hero:
'Newcomer' is a weird choice of word there (I might have gone with 'new guy') but it's clearly stating that this guy is a new addition to this group. The rest of the group proceeds to run ahead deeper into the station, and the game hands us control of the new guy - for only a second, before two soldiers come barging out from the other end of the screen and force us into a battle - which brings with it a huge visual change; like pre-VI games, VII is using different models in and out of battle, with much more compressed models in the overworld, and in battle, well…
I've commented previous about how the difference between 'static' enemy sprites and 'moving' player sprites requiring the player sprites to be much smaller and simpler (because they need to have dozens of variants on their one template for each action), leading to that weird issue with characters being minuscule chibis and bosses who are ostensibly also human being three times their size? That's gone now. Our protagonist is, if anything, slightly taller than these Shinra soldiers. He is fully modeled to an even greater extent than he is out combat, and when he swings his sword, he swings it.
Look at this animation play out. The soldier even reels back under the blow.
Our character is revealed as 'Ex-SOLDIER,' with the capitalization strongly suggesting that SOLDIER is an organization, rather than an occupation; this will be confirmed shortly. The screen is familiar - we have HP, MP, our ATB gauge (here labeled, confusingly, WAIT), but with two additions - two 'Barrier' gauges, which I can only guess will be there to indicate if our character is protected by Shell/Protect, though that seems like an odd addition; and the 'LIMIT' gauge. This is one of the game's biggest innovations and a new mainstay of the franchise; Final Fantasy VI had a rare mechanic where the normal Attack command would, rarely while at critical health, produce a Desperation Attack, a special, stronger attack unique to the character firing it. The mechanic is incredibly niche, to the point that I have never encountered it a single time in my entire Let's Play, though I was aware of its existence (it's explained to you at the start in the Beginners' Hall). Here, the Desperation Attack has been standardized as a normal feature of gameplay - every time a character takes damage, the Limit gauge increases slightly. When it's full, our next attack will be upgraded to a unique, character-based special move. We'll get more into that later, but first…
Another aesthetic change to note?
These guys have guns. Like the car, this is the first time a Final Fantasy game has guns - Magitek machines in previous game had rockets, lasers, gas, but as far as I can recall, there's never been anything like an actual gun that shoots bullets, let alone one just wielded by a dude (with the odd exception of Siegfried's sprite in FFVI, which looks like it's holding a gun, but isn't using one in the fight). This is kind of a huge aesthetic shift; plenty of fantasy settings struggle with the addition of guns even when they have every other kind of machine - it's often felt, wrongly or rightly, that guns "should" dominate a setting's of warfare if introduced and will break the basic fantasy of slinging spells and dueling with huge swords if people can just wave around the People Deleter.
Final Fantasy VII makes the bold decision of introducing guns, and solves the conundrum in the best and most correct way: by making its protagonists fucking bulletproof. What happens when those two security guards in their fancy gear shoot at "Ex-SOLDIER" is that they deal single-digit damage out of his 302 HP pool, and then he immediately swings around his enormous sword and erases their entire existence in a single blow.
Seriously though, that thing is massive. I don't know how common ginormous swords were in anime at that time, but it's definitely a departure from the previous games' mostly sensibly-sized weapons (at least in the concept art and sprites, though you never saw them much). Here, though, the weapon is part of the character's model, and so it's always on display, and the game makes the very wise decision to make it impossibly large and therefore instantly iconic. That thing's our starting screen for a reason.
Both guards are quickly defeated, the protagonist does a victory dance, and we move on out of the train station and onto the next screen.
So…
Okay, let's talk visual design.
What should a 3D world look like?
2D animation is flexible, but only to a certain extent. For the most part, control of the camera is never something 2D games have to be concerned with. A side-scrolling platformer, a top-down isometric RPG and a racing game all look the way they look and can't really break from it. But 3D opens up all dimensions, and in theory your entire world could be modeled from any angle - so you have to decide how it will be seen. This is a matter of convenience, possibility, and art all at once; your early 3D hardware can only handle so much, you need your world to read cleanly to the player, you need it to look good…
This is Armored Core:
The textures are blocky. The environment is simple. In the first picture, there is a gigantic office building in the background, built like a cardboard box, a few sparse trees giving this city the illusion of life, and the night sky provides a convenient boundary beyond which the game doesn't have to render anything. In the latter, the environment is more complex, but still built almost entirely out of boxes and rectangles, heavily pixelated. As a tradeoff for these primitive 3D graphics, Armored Core is able to give the player control over the camera - it's stuck behind the mech's back, but that mech can turn around, look up and down, and the camera will follow and look at whatever you're looking at.
(Side Note: The actual control of that camera, though, is kind of a nightmare, because AC is a pre-analog stick game and so you have to move the camera with the directional pad and the trigger button. Basically all games released pre-1997 had to work with those controls in some form of another, making free camera controls an absolute agony, even beyond all the 'bad camera controls' we'd see in later era. Anything 3D pre-analog stick giving you camera controls feels like it actively hates you.)
Of course, Armored Core's environments look extremely basic. AC is a game that is fought in extremely simple environments: it might be an open plain, the sea, or the cramped corridors of a military base, but either way you're unlikely to find any obstacle more complex than "cube" and "rectangular box." That can't work for every game.
Here's Silent Hill:
This is a game about looking for your vanished daughter in a spooky town. It needs a closer, 'on the ground' look than Armored Core, higher fidelity environment, it needs things to look like you can touch them. So we have a much greater degree of detail, while having the player controlling the camera (in some sections, and not in others), which leads to the use of the mysterious mist surrounding the town which blurs the graphics and sharply limits how far the game has to render anything - in the above you can see both an open section of road where the mist kills the view dead basically inches from your face, and a closed room where it doesn't need to do that because the walls cut off how much rendering is needed. In a perfect example of 'limitation breeds creativity,' that incredibly narrow draw distance contributes heavily to the game's claustrophobic feeling, where even out in the street, you're hemmed in on all sides by the fog and whatever horrors are hiding in it. This means Silent Hill enjoys much higher fidelity in what it does show you than Armored Core's vast distances and immense architecture being extremely limited in its polygon count. This is pretty much as good as the PSX can make a game look.
…or is it?
Faced with the difficult task of deciding what the new visual identity of Final Fantasy should become, Square had multiple options, from 'stick to top-down isometric graphics, just with more power and higher fidelity', in which case it might have looked like, say, Grandia, another PSX RPG:
Here we can see that Grandia still opted for 3D, but a very different angle and aesthetic. The 'zoomed out' view emulates older RPGs and allows for environments with lower resolution, still it feels natural for there to be less detailing on something that is 'farther away'; meanwhile, the characters themselves are represented by 2D sprites, giving them a lot more detailing and color. In some ways this is pretty much the opposite of the choice FFVII is making. And it looks really good! It might actually look better than FFVII, although FFVII is itself at the 'foot' of its series' graphical evolutionary tree, so to speak, and has rooms to grow in later games in ways Grandia might not.
(Of course, I'm playing timeline tricks here; while all these choices were theoretically available to the FFVII devs, these games post-date FFVII and had more time to master the capabilities of the hardware.
One might consider this the 'safer' choice, the one which most directly fit into the continuity of the series. But Final Fantasy has never done 'safe': it's a series characterized by its wild ambition and constant innovation. On the other hand, the low-poly blocky environments of Armored Core are hardly a good fit for the lush detailing and gorgeous design that characterized FFVI, while the low rendering distance of Silent Hill or Medal of Honor might fit a survival horror game or a shooter mostly set at night, but for a world-spanning adventure like an FF game? No way.
But there is another way of doing it. This is Resident Evil:
Look at the grain on that furniture. The detailing on those rugs. The paintings on the walls. It's all so smooth and rich. This is because Resident Evil is using pre-rendered backdrops; the backdrops were generated in a more powerful piece of hardware than the PlayStation, which is 'playing it back.' The advantage of this is that the console can thus present much more detailed and rich environments than if it were rendering them in real time; however, this puts some sharp limitations on what you can do with these backdrops - mainly, you can't move them in any way. So the camera angle is fixed.
This is where that 'limitations breed creativity' thing comes back. Because that, in turns, means that every screen in the game has to be shot on purpose. Because the player has zero ability to control the camera, the developers must be the ones to frame every shot in the game. When used well, this results in things like that screenshot above, where the use of perspective is bringing these crows incredibly close to the camera, closer than the protagonist Jill, who is seen from a top-down perspective, from the perspective of the birds, who are currently not doing anything but which you know, you just know are going to swoop down to kill you the moment you grab the item in the next screen. In anothother shot, the first zombie you encounter in the game is framed dead center, the protagonist of this scene, revealed standing up when the player pulls away, giving Jill just enough space and time to pull out her gun and shoot if the player is quick. In the last one, the view along the table emphasizes the size of the room, reveals its two stories, and captures the richness of the manor as well as its degradation from the dirt and mold on the walls. In another scene, the game has you walk in front of two windows before one breaks, behind you, as a zombie dog jumps in to attack your character who has their back turned on it, making sure you will never, ever trust a window ever again.
This is where Final Fantasy VII is going. Not for horror, no - but the effect is the same, in using pre-rendered backgrounds and static shots to perfectly control the staging of every screen in the game. Look at that first shot again:
It's the game flexing that it has now gained the ability to display perspective. Every character is arranged on a continuum of depth, their respective sizes affected by the corresponding shift in distance 'away from the camera,' immediately telling the viewer what it can do - what could never have been done before. It's a Renaissance painting. And everything's like this:
On the ground, a potion awaits picking up.
In both these shots, the game is using its fixed camera angles to convey the sheer scale of the industrial setting we're in, the verticality of it, standing over voids you could fit entire houses in or walking through complex, labyrinthine catwalks and pipes. One of them is characterized by its void, the gigantic chasm open on three sides leading to nothing but what seems like a plunging view of the city hundreds of meters below, while the other is cramped with machinery, steam hissing on one side, ladders and pipes, a but they both each use top-down angles to convey the smallness of the characters in that setting.
Now, of course, that screenshot also reveals what is the crucial weakness of this style of presentation: it makes it incredibly obvious that the low-poly character models exist in a separate world from the highly detailed pre-rendered backgrounds around them. You've got a train with minute detailing brought to every piece of its engine and next to it is Barret who looks like a fucking LEGO figurine. He doesn't even have enough definition for you to tell what's up with his arm, which the game also kind of utilizes to its own benefit, but right there you would be forgiven for just not realizing anything is supposed to be up with his right hand that's blocky and grey.
This is going to be the defining contradiction of FFVII's aesthetic design: gorgeous pre-rendered backgrounds inhabited by fucking muppets.
And it's fascinatingly just FFVII that has this issue. Later games will have much better character models, but this was a new game on a new console; the hardware would remain the same, but the experience the devs could rely upon changed over time, just as FFVI differs so massively from FFIV.
That said, the game has different models to call upon when it needs them most - in battles, everyone is upgraded to a bigger, better-proportioned model that looks almost like a person, which we'll be seeing more of later.
Notably, because battles aren't using pre-rendered backdrops, their backgrounds are much simpler and more sparse than the rest of the game - but that in turns means the game can move the camera around, which it does with glee; every battle has a cinematic affect as the camera swoops around the battlefield, zooms in on opponent, changes the perspective, and so on. Here's casting Bolt:
The camera moved away from my character, cutting out 90% of the fight to focus on the enemy who's being electrocuted for heavy weakness-hitting damage. We're playing with a whole new set of cards when it comes to cinematic dynamism. Similarly, though we've seen traces of it before, characters and enemies are now fully capable of moving the screen and hitting each other.
Speaking of cinematic dynamism - pre-rendering is also what the game uses for its cutscenes, its FMVs or cinematics. That's why they can be so much more elaborate than the game itself, but it also means they can't account for the game; cinematics cannot be edited for us having a different weapon equipped, or having different characters in our party, the way FFVI, a game with no difference between its cutscenes and its gameplay, could. They are, effectively, little movies that were made during game production and are just shown to us at key points. But because they're both pre-rendered, the game can pull off that incredible seamless transition between the overview of the train approaching the station as an FMV and the actual game in which the characters come bursting in.
It's just. It's so much.
Let's get back to the game
Let's.
The character art this time around is done by Tetsuya Nomura and, as much as I have praised Amano's artwork, I kinda like his better.
The conversation that follows establishes a few things: "Ex-SOLDIER" is called "Cloud," the big guy is Wedge, the bandana guy is Biggs (hey, the return! This time they may even make it farther than the intro sequence!), the armored girl is Jessie, and the leader is Barret. Everyone except Cloud is part of a group called AVALANCHE, and Cloud used to be in SOLDIER, a group antagonistic to Avalanche - SOLDIER are, according to Jessie, "the enemy," which explains why Cloud is viewed so suspiciously, even though as Biggs insists (I guess he's 'the nice/trusting one'), Cloud is no longer in SOLDIER and is their ally now.
For some measure of ally. The moment Biggs tries to introduce himself, Cloud brushes him off saying "I don't care what your names are. Once this job's over… I'm outta here." Okay, so he's a cold merc who is deliberately keeping people at bay, who took this one job for reasons but is impatient to be done and leave, and the others are willing to trust him despite ostensibly coming from an enemy group because, one assumes, SOLDIER troops are just That Good. Solid intro.
Barret arrives, berates the group for bundling up as a group where they stick out like a sore thumb; Jessie, who appears to be the group's tech, finishes picking or hacking the door, opens the way, and everyone hurries to the next area - but Barret pauses to turn, glare at Cloud, and warn him that as a merc formerly from a hostile group, he doesn't trust him:
I like what the game is doing here - it has Barret basically deliver exposition about his conflict with Cloud and why they don't trust each other, immediately before telling us, the player, that he will be a playable character in the future. That's clever!
RIP those FFVI character intros that gave you a little quasi-poem about what their deal is, though. I guess because FFVII is keeping its cards close to its chest regarding what its characters are about, instead of having a Greek Chorus literally sing what their deal is as they enter the stage because FFVI was a fucking opera.
Barret also gives us our objective - the "North Mako Reactor." As Cloud enters the facility, he looks up, showing us the tower containing the reactor in question.
On the way, we fight a number of random encounters, for the most part more security guards occasionally accompanied by coeurls:
One thing that's going to bug the hell out of me; with this expanded interface, the names of the enemies are no longer on the screen. Targeting is done purely through arrow selection. I hate that. I need to know what my opponents are called so I can read too deeply into their names, I'm not looking them up online with every fight.
Having crossed the giant bridge above, the group reconvenes inside the facility's walls.
Barret: "Yo! This your first time in a reactor?" Cloud: "No. After all, I did work for Shinra, you know." Barret: "The planet's full of Mako energy. People here use it every day. It's the life blood of this planet. But Shinra keeps suckin' the blood out with these weird machines." Cloud: "I'm not here for a lecture. Let's just do it." Barret: "Alright! You come with me from now on."
The menu, now that Barret has joined us. As you can see, Limit is persistent between fights, and there are missing spots for two commands we can't access yet.
So.
There it is.
It took only about five minutes to get to it, but the initial exposition was delivered in a nice, in-character fashion, leading us to just the wildest hook in any Final Fantasy game so far.
We're literal terrorists.
Avalanche is an ecoterrorist group, and Shinra are a company sucking up Mako from the earth with immense power plants to provide energy to the city, and we are here to blow up one of their reactors, with our main character so far as an ex-Shinra mercenary who is willingly working with them to sabotage said reactor.
That's… that's a lot. Because like, spoiler alert, Cloud isn't going to turn around at the end of the intro and say 'you criminal fools, I was never on your side.' The game is, at least for now, fully on board with us blowing up a power plant to save the planet. It's like FFV's crystal-amplifying machine plot, only ramped up to eleven, with the gigantic city and machinery we saw in the intro as the very opponent we're here to destroy.
Damn.
We proceed further into the facility, the other members of Avalanche deciphering the codes to each door in turn. On the way, Biggs has the very interesting comment "Think how many of our people risked their lives, just for this code…" Which, on the one hand, sure, Star Wars reference, many Bothans blah blah blah, but also this means Avalanche isn't just these four guys and their pet merc; there has to be a broader organization they're attached to. Good to know.
Then we get into an elevator, where Barret takes advantage of the cramped confines to further evangelize to Cloud.
Cloud: "It's not my problem." Barret: "The planet's dyin', Cloud!" Cloud: "The only thing I care about is finishing this job before security and the Roboguards come."
At this point Barret turns to the camera and silently shakes his fist in anger.
It's a good dynamic; it makes sense for Barret to be pushy, from his perspective, Shinra is literally killing the planet, the idea that someone could just not care is baffling. It's Cloud's planet to live on, as well. He's understandably passionate about it. But Cloud is aggressively keeping up boundaries, in a way where it's impossible to tell if he's genuinely an aloof mercenary who doesn't give a shit if the planet dies, or if he's deliberately trying to keep these people and their ideas at a distance because he doesn't want to get attached when the murderbots kill half of them.
Okay…
Okay, this is the point where I should probably start talking about FFVII: Remake.
The Destruction of Mako Reactor 1 is the first chapter of FFVII Remake, and for the most part, it's basically identical to the original version we're seeing here - at least in terms of plot, which makes the comparison of the presentation all the more interesting. For one thing, the Remake has access to modern 3D rendering, which means it has basically photorealistic characters who can emote and are voice acted.
This is stuff FFVII can't do, as it has unvoiced models with flat faces. Which leaves anything that can't be conveyed by either text or the basic body language of their model ambiguous - sometimes to the story's detriment, sometimes to its benefit. For instance, Remake!Cloud comes across as someone who's a lot more socially awkward than he is callous or brooding, sometimes to the point of comedy; Barret asks him his age and Cloud responds assuming he's asking about his position in SOLDIER. His repeated insistence that he doesn't care about the planet and is just here for his paycheck comes across as avoidance more than anything.
In contrast, his role in this mission has a different emphasis. Instead of 'we'll be spotted too easily if we stick together,' the justification for Cloud fighting alone is that he's basically here as a distraction; he slow-walks through the power plant, drawing all the guards to him, while the rest of the group sneaks in behind them while they're distracted, and Cloud can do that because he's very obviously a killing machine. Without old-school random encounters, what we have is a series of guards rushing to intercept Avalanche in groups of two or three at a time and getting obliterated by this twink just walking through them. It's very, very obvious why having an ex-SOLDIER on the team is desirable - he's pretty much superhuman. Which in turn helps with the extra dialogue which adds more emphasis on Barret's distrust of Cloud and his anger that he doesn't care about their cause; Barret doesn't like, trust, or respect Cloud, but his muscle power is what is making this entire operation possible in the first place.
All of this is in the original, but it's more in implications and subtext where the Remake makes it a lot more overt.
So, continuing on…
Now that Barret has joined our party, we can finally see exactly what's going on with that arm of his:
It's a machine gun. Dude's got a fucking machine gun for an arm. This is such a killer aesthetic, tbh, while also raising a bunch of questions. Like, is this a replacement for his fleshy arm, or is he just wearing it over it? Did he lose a limb somehow, and if so, how? How does that interact with civilian life? Does he take it off when he's just hanging out in his daily life, or is he effectively carrying a minigun everywhere he goes? I could see both takes - it might too high profile, but he might also like the 'don't fuck with me' sign this hangs over his head. Also? It looks fucking sick.
Well, some, but not all, of these questions may be answered in time.Also, we're fighting robots now, so that's cool.
On this screen, Jessie instructs us on how to climb ladders, which technically count as a new mechanic.
New enemies include this funky looking walking mech and these weird gimp soldiers with bodysuit, masks, and beam guns strapped to their hands that shoot large blue pixels at us. It seems like Shinra's aesthetic is only 'modern corpo' on the surface and, as soon as we get into the deeper levels of the reactor where the public is not supposed to tread, it's throwing the weird shit at us - I don't think these guys are just normal dudes who happen to have a weird uniform, I think Shinra is being more experimental with its soldiers here.
Also…
This is what Save Points look like in this game - question mark-shaped things hanging out in dungeons. Like I said before, there's no quicksave feature in this game, so I'm going to be significantly more interested in their placing than I was in previous games, lmao. Here, this is the first save point encountered after the beginning of the game; it's one screen away from our objective, just before (spoiler) a boss fight. Which is nice.
Also…
…I'm guessing this is Mako?
We're at the bridge leading to the Reactor, so it would make sense if that green-tinged water below was Mako, the 'life blood of the planet,' which these massive pipes are draining directly. On the other hand, nuclear reactors involve water pools that glow blue from Cherenkov radiation, which this could be a reference to - it might be water around the actual Mako drainage/engine. Unclear at this time. But, notably, this green glow is similar to the embers around the Flower Girl's face in the intro.
Alright. Obvious boss fight incoming... Cut for image count.
Final Fantasy VII, Part 1: The Destruction of Mako Reactor #1, Part B
This right here is frustrating me: There is an item on the bridge that you can't not run into heading for your objective, and it's a Materia… But it's impossible to use for now, because the game hasn't explained to us what Materias are or how they work, so I just have to leave that healing magic in my backpack for now.
Barret orders Cloud to set up the bomb; Cloud asks if Barret shouldn't be the one doing it, but he says he has to watch so that Cloud isn't pulling anything shady - and, I suspect, also as a way of making him directly contribute to the explosion to try and pull him deeper. It doesn't really work, in the sense that Cloud is shockingly chill about this; he has zero issue setting up a bomb that will destroy one reactor of the power plant powering this entire city who were also his previous employers. Whatever reason he has for leaving Shinra, it's clearly left him with no love lost for the company.
As Cloud approaches, though, the screen flashes red and the words "Watch out! It's not just a reactor!!" appear; moments later, Barret asks Cloud what's wrong, and Cloud seems confused and distracted. Whatever that was, he was the only one who experienced it, Barret didn't notice anything unusual.
Just as we are about to be done with it, though, Barret shouts "Heads up, here it comes!" and a boss fight is initiated.
This Scorpion Robot (or whatever it's called, again, I can't seem to check the enemy names I hate this) is your basic Final Fantasy ATB Tutorial Boss, but is also where the game starts really flexing what its 3D models allow it to do now that it's not limited to just swapping between static sprites; the robot can turn around, can actually attack with its tail instead of the attack being divorced from the sprite, that tail moves to signal its status…
This is also where our characters take enough damage to finally start pulling Limit Breaks. The functionality is very simple, when the Limit gauge is full, the character's Attack command changes to Limit:
"Limit Level 1" suggests we're going to be learning new ones as we go, which is good, because the Limit Breaks we have right now are extremely simple - Cloud's Braver is him jumping in the air, doing a pirouette and bringing his sword down, while Barret's Big Shot is him charging up a, well, big shot.
Simple, but effective enough, although both only really deal as much damage as we can already do thanks to the fact that Cloud starts the game knowing two spells, Ice and Bolt (which should be Thunder and Blizzard, but, old translation), and Bolt hits machines' lightning weakness.
After a while, the Scorpion reveals its gimmick: it raises its tail in a threatening posture. Cloud shouts "Barret, be careful!"
…
I'm told that this line is kind of a meme and that it's stayed that way in later translations or references, but, like.
Okay, setting aside the giant typo sitting right there in the text of "it's tail" making the translation look straight up amateurish, THE GAME IS LYING TO ME.
This line should read either "If you attack while its tail's up, it's gonna counterattack with its laser" or "Don't attack while its tail's up! It's gonna counterattack with its laser!" Because that is in fact what happens. If you don't spot the mistake and go ahead with what the game is saying, you will in fact get murdered by a tail laser.
Which is probably why I remember that fight behind harder than it actually is way back when I played the game a decade ago.
Well, anyway. With Bolt, Limit Breaks, and knowing the game is lying to us about what to do, the Scorpion Sentinel is pretty easily folded, and our reward is…
…a new weapon for Barret!
Incidentally, hmmm.
In previous games (except II), different characters/jobs had different weapon permissions. Terra can equip most weapons, including the strongest swords, Edgar has a narrower selection but can use spears, Cyan can only use katanas but is the only character who can do so, and so on. These categories have overlap and reflect a character's training and focus.
Not here, though. It looks like every character is going to have a single weapon selection: Cloud uses giant swords and is the only one using giant swords, Barret uses arm-mounted machine guns and is the only one using arm-mounted machine guns, and so on for whoever comes next. That's… interesting, in that it's going to mean that for instance, any weapon for a party member I don't plan on using is basically useless to me, and I wonder what it's going to do to character upgrade balance.
Now that we've defeated the Scorpobot, it's time to finish setting up the bomb, setting its timer to 10 minutes, and then running as fast as we can to escape the reactor before it blows up!
Using the ugliest countdown lettering known to man.
On the way, it turns out Jessie got her leg stuck the railing while climbing - we help her get out and she's thankful, then we run backwards through the entire level to get to the escape just in time…
We did it, Patrick! We saved the city!
Man we really did just commit an act of ecoterrorism. That's wild. Like, I'm not going to say you 'couldn't do it these days' because we live in an era full of incredibly rich political video games, but very specifically the idea of "you're terrorists blowing up infrastructure to save the planet" I don't think could have survived 9/11 if it hadn't been grandfathered in by the game coming out in 1997?
We're all on the other side of a bunch of rubble. The group congratulates themselves on their victory, though Barret is somberly silent. For reasons that I'm not clear on, Jessie here is setting up an additional bomb on that rubble; I'm not sure what the intended effect is meant to be (covering their tracks?) but the group runs again to escape that new explosion.
Those piles of rubble weren't caused by the explosion. Life on the edges of the city seems pretty rough.
I think the gamedevs just wanted to make sure the players would see how cool their CGI flames look like. And to be fair, they're pretty cool.
Wedge, who by virtue of being fat has been selected as 'the funny one,' runs around the screen clutching his butt, which is, presumably, on fire. Then Barret tells the group to disperse and rendezvous at the Sector 8 train station, and the group scatters - though Cloud calls to Barret on his way out and Barret tells him that if it's about the money, he'll get paid when they get back. This leaves Cloud alone; we head up those stairs in the background, and next up we get a brief sight of the shock and confusion caused by the explosion - and another look at Flower Girl from the intro. She's been knocked on her butt by the explosion, and people are running around in a panic.
Oh hey, dialogue options. FFVI's most powerful trick from the banquet table is back as a normal part of the game. Neat! I wonder if they have any real influence on the plot. I tell the girl she'd better leave, it's not safe here, and she says she "doesn't know what's going on, but alright."
Well, it's simple, lady, there is a car encased in the shop window behind you because we just blew up a power plant.
We only get a brief look at the damage to the rest of the city in the next screen - along with some Avalanche posters.
Then, just as it seemed like we might make it out safely, we are cornered by Shinra soldiers!
We're given a choice whether to fight them or try to escape, but honestly, we can take them. More soldiers come after and I pick "Fight them!" every time to test out Cloud's WMD status, and he doesn't disappoint, cutting through all soldiers with ease. Still, more come, until Cloud is fully cornered…
…and escapes with a classic "jump from a bridge onto a running train" move.
Which coincidentally happens to be the very train Avalanche are riding home!
They did wait for Cloud, for a while, but he never came, and now they're wondering if he's even alive. Barret just says "No way!!" - he might not like the merc, but he does recognize his fighting ability. Biggs pivots onto asking if Barret thinks Cloud will stay and continue the fight with them; Barret gruffly answers that he's not a mind reader. Then Wedge asks about their money - it's a weird sentence, because at this point it's clear Biggs, Wedge, Jessie and Barret are all a close-knit group bound by ideology and part of the same broader organization; in Japanese they're more specifically asking about their wages, which makes it clearer that Avalanche is paying everyone, as an organization, but that there may have been delays or problems in receiving said wages - Barret tells them that unfortunately he's unable to pay them at the moment. Hmmm.
The Remake has a line earlier from Jessie which makes it clear that Barret's cell are cut off from the rest of the Avalanche organization, black sheep who can't count on the rest of the group for support, but here I think Barret might be hiding this from the others?
Just as things might get awkward, Cloud comes jumping in with a somersault that makes Barret jump in surprise, literally.
Cloud plays it cool by saying it "Looks like I'm a little late." Barret berates him for both being late and "waltzing in, making a big scene." Then Barret has a very interesting comment - "Havin' everyone worried like that. You don't give a damn 'bout no one but yourself!"
So he does have a big heart under all that gruff. Cloud picks up on it and makes a comment, which upsets Barret again, who orders everyone to start moving.
Also Cloud gets his dirty face cleaned up by Jessie. We're only seeing hints of the Thirst Machine she is in Remake, but they're there.
The moment Avalanche enters the train compartment, everyone recognizes them as some kind of hardened criminals and most vacate the car, which is genuinely funny. We then take control of Cloud and can talk to people, in what's the first scene of quiet and 'settling down' since the start of the game - the come down after the spike of action of the intro, I guess.
Hmmm.
There's not a lot of time spent on the human cost of the explosion. We see two screens of damaged buildings and people running, and then we're in the train, where everyone is chill and happy with their success. As far as I can tell, nobody died except maybe a bunch of Shinra security forces caught in the explosion; the power plant has no apparent custodian staff or on-site engineers and appears largely automated. There was obvious damage to the surroundings, but loss of life appears limited; this was purely infrastructural damage. This is… optimistic; an explosion of that size would kill people in its proximity from debris, and the damage to the surrounding city would be significant.
The Remake is… different. We spend a significant amount of time following Cloud in the wake of the devastation; there's in fact a deliberate deflationary effect from the hype and excitement of "we did it!" to the group splitting up and Cloud walking amidst the burning wreckage and horrified people in the district surrounding the reactor. It's obvious we did more than briefly scare people a little. By the time we meet with Jessie on the train, she's second-guessing herself - this wasn't her plan; the bomb was meant to destroy the reactor, not turn the whole thing into a chain reaction. She's wondering what she did wrong, how she messed it up, before ultimately deciding that she can't look for excuses and simply has to accept her responsibility for fucking up. We're still firmly on the side of blowing up the Mako Reactor being a good thing, but it's also very clear that in the process, something went wrong, what was meant to be a surgical strike to disable machinery and take out the extraction operation of a Sector became a humanitarian disaster.
There's more attention paid to human suffering and the costs of operating a terrorism cell, although in context, it's also, well…
The game makes zero pretense that this is actually Jessie's fault; she thinks it is, but we see a full cutscene of President Shinra watching her bomb explode, finding the damage insufficient, and then having all his machines fire on the reactor to trigger the massive cataclysm he wants to blame on Avalanche for his own nefarious purposes. In contrast, the original game doesn't have any moral qualms from the Avalanche members, so revealing that actually Shinra made the explosion worse on purpose would be… weird? Because they're not bothered by its scale in the first place. I wonder what's up there.
Back to the present (by which I mean the past of 1997)...
That poor suit.
That guy sleeping on one of the couches, who says this is his home, so I'm guessing he's homeless. The bald dude in the trenchcoat on the left mentions he's read in the Shinra Times that the terrorists that blew up the reactor are based somewhere in the slums, and comments that they must have a real calculating leader.
Biggs tells us that by tomorrow, the train will likely have shifted into "security mode." Wedge is less job-focused, instead musing about his life - he's always felt like a "sidekick," but now that he's joined Avalanche and is fighting to save the planet, he feels like he has a bright future ahead of him. Meanwhile, Jessie shows us a digital map of the city, while commenting that she "likes this kinda stuff - bombs and monitors, you know, flashy stuff." Bombs and monitors. Lmao. Two wild things to put on the same footing, but she did look like the techie and bomb-maker of the group, so it makes sense.
She explains the anatomy of Midgar - there's a "top plate" 50 meters above ground, supported by a main pillar. There are additional pillars built to support each section, one pillar per sector, each sector built around a Mako Reactor which provides it with electricity. The Sectors used to be independent towns with their own names, but as they were swallowed into the Midgar sprawl, those names were lost, as each sector became referred to only by its number, from 1 to 8.
As the 3D map displays the path the train takes through Midgar, Jessie explains that there are multiple automated ID checkpoints along the way, checking the "identity and backgrounds" of each passenger, linked to a central data bank in Shinra headquarters.
Hmmm. I wonder which came first: Avalanche's rebellion against Shinra's exploitation of Mako, or the surveillance state used to crack down on their operations? My guess is they feed into each other; the threat of terrorist action is used to justify the surveillance technology which further marginalizes and alienates its victims.
At this point it seems obvious that, despite being a "mere" power company, Shinra is for all intents and purposes the government of Midgar. There may or may not be a vestigial state in the form of an 'official' civilian government, but Shinra rule the city and are calling all the shots. This isn't 'just' attacking an oil company, Avalanche are in open rebellion against the state.
It also raises the question of other states. If Mako is the life blood of the planet, then surely other polities would take issue with Shinra exploiting it all for their own benefit, wouldn't they? But of course, Shinra would have first-mover advantage - any foreign polity trying to protest their use of Mako on commons grounds is going up against someone who is already using Mako to fuel their security apparatus, and liable to be put down with extreme prejudice.
We'll see when we get to the world map, I suppose.
Lights turn red as we go through an ID Security Check, but the fake IDs Jessie made for us seem to hold up to scrutiny.
Cloud approaches Barret, who's looking out the window and musing - thanks to the plate over it, "this city don't have no day or night. If that plate weren't there… We could see the sky." Hmm. Yeah. A world under perpetual occlusion from an iron sky, that's grim.
It's growing more and more obvious that this Final Fantasy is drawing inspiration from dystopian science-fiction in a way no previous game did. I wouldn't feel confident calling any specific novel or movie, and I'm going to try and avoid using 'cyberpunk' because that term's been used to death, but there's a very strong retrofuturistic, neo-noir aesthetic at play here.
Barret is surprised to see Cloud express a thoughtful or aesthetic preference - then starts ranting about the 'upper world, a city on a plate,' blaming them for the suffering of those below and calling it-
A pizza. This is such an outlandish comparison. I mean, the shape is there, but -
One thing I'll note is the game is using grawlix, those old comic-book style swears, where characters ostensibly use swear words when it would feel natural for them to, but it's rendered as a jumble of symbols like @#$%&! to avoid having any actual swears that might hurt the sensitive eyes of children while leaving it to the imagination what is actually said. Sometimes it's for the better; Donald Duck is a character that it's natural to depict as swearing like the sailor he's dressed as, but a string of Fucks and Shits would be kind of out of tone for one of his comics. Sometimes it feels like an awkward way to keep things PG-13, like bleeping out swears in an audio-visual media.
Notably, the Remake dispenses with it, using swears pretty effectively and without seeming like they're just trying too hard or being edgy for no reason (mostly in the form of well-placed 'Shit!').
But yeah, makes sense. We have a literal two-tier city, with the upper tier elevated in the sky away from the dying earth, and the lower tier cast in perpetual shadow from the plates - no sun, no rain, no day-and-night cycle, plus polluted air from all the machinery and the reactors draining energy from the ground, it's a pretty terrible place to live. Cloud asks why people don't move up onto the plater, and Barret says probably because they have no money, making it clear this is a class issue, Jidoor and Zozo writ large - or else because they love their land, 'no matter how polluted it gets.'
Cloud: "I know… No one lives in the slums because they want to. It's like this train. It can't run anywhere except where its rails take it."
Hmm. Our merc is getting surprisingly philosophical here. And definitely has some personal history with the slums.
And with this, we've arrived in the slums.
Barret calls over everyone for a combination pep-speech/warning, telling them the mission was a success but not get lazy or be scared by their actions - the next action will be even bigger than that, then tells everyone to meet back at the hideout.
Those random NPCs sure are philosophical.
Which leaves Cloud alone and free to explore a bit. That couple near the streetlight has some funny dialogue - they're looking for some alone time but the only place they can think of to be alone is the train graveyard, which is haunted by ghoooosts! If we go there, we mostly find a bunch of angry robot random encounters. Best stay out for now.
Incidentally in terms of life breathed into the setting these NPCs are doing so much. The small slice of Midgar we've seen so far just dwarfs any other town we've seen before in terms of just, the feeling of living-in-ness of the world, that this is a real, breathing city with people going about all their lives together.
Now we're just looking for a save point, since if the game died now, we'd be losing all our progress since roughly 'just before the Scorpion boss fight.' I know I keep harping on this point but, like, here's the thing: I can't safely alt-tab out of this game. It's 10 years old and, for whatever reason, on this computer, if I alt-tab to a different window there's a small but real chance of the game not just crashing, but giving me a black screen that can't be tabbed out of to anything, so I have to reboot the computer. So basically when I'm playing FFVII I can't do anything but play FFVII until I can save and quit, just like old times.
Thankfully our next save point is right there, near a fence protecting the access stairs to the pillar holding up the plate over this Sector:
Impressive piece of tech alright. But also… janky?
So much of Midgar has a janky aspect to it. It's all very obviously recent technology, but it's technology that has outpaced itself. The slums are straight out of Fallout in terms of rubble heaped everywhere and heaps of rusty iron and metal plates propped into buildings; the Mako Reactor is so immense and so understaffed it's full of broken parapets, rusty machinery, and signs of weathering. Everything is so high tech, yet at the same time already worn down.
It very effectively conveys the feeling of Shinra as an organization that doesn't really believe in doing things properly or cleanly, but is just building up in a frenzy without stopping to look back at the rickety ladder on which they're standing. I mean, a group of five dudes managed to punch clean through their guards and blow up one of their reactors! It's sloppy, and I think it's pretty clear that's intended to come across as such.
Anyway, there's a save point right there, which makes this a perfect point to stop this update - we saw the Destruction of Mako Reactor 1 in its entirety and took a glance at the staggering developments in animation and worldbuilding and graphics and -
Wait a minute I didn't even talk about the muuusiiiiii-
Oh hey, dialogue options. FFVI's most powerful trick from the banquet table is back as a normal part of the game. Neat! I wonder if they have any real influence on the plot. I tell the girl she'd better leave, it's not safe here, and she says she "doesn't know what's going on, but alright."
Well, it's simple, lady, there is a car encased in the shop window behind you because we just blew up a power plant.
So I'm a little hesitant to point this out but given it's apparently okay to tell you if you missed something after a section and this is something permanently missable, I'll say you might want to go back and pick the other option depending on if you want to have fun with a dating sim mechanic scene way in the future.
The results range from:
serious romance scene (????? and ?????)
less serious romance scene with comedic shenanigans (????)
and totally platonic comedic trashfire where everything that can go wrong does go wrong scene (Barret)
It won't lock you out if you don't go back, but this will be passing up the first potential opportunity to influence the result if you have a preference for what scene you want.
Now we're just looking for a save point, since if the game died now, we'd be losing all our progress since roughly 'just before the Scorpion boss fight.' I know I keep harping on this point but, like, here's the thing: I can't safely alt-tab out of this game. It's 10 years old and, for whatever reason, on this computer, if I alt-tab to a different window there's a small but real chance of the game not just crashing, but giving me a black screen that can't be tabbed out of to anything, so I have to reboot the computer. So basically when I'm playing FFVII I can't do anything but play FFVII until I can save and quit, just like old times.
I've been talking about this on Discord and it's sort of wild, so here are some fun historical facts about this FF7 PC port.
The reason it's so rough is that it came out at about the same time as the actual PSX game - 1998 as opposed to 1997. A bunch of Square America guys had to rewrite most of the game's code to make it run on PC because the entire thing was a kludge running on brand-new hardware. They ended up contracting out the publishing to Eidos because they'd recently done so well with Tomb Raider.
The biggest thing that gets me is that this port existed decades ahead of the current craze for PC remakes and remasters because there was a loophole in the contract. The PC market was considered so incidental by Sony that their deal with Square didn't even mention a PC port. Square only made one because they wanted FF7 to be a big hit in the US and thought Americans didn't own enough Playstations.
And they were right to do it. It sold gangbusters. Blew their lifetime sales expectations out of the water in the first month. It was such an important lesson that afterwards every Japanese developer started putting their games on PC and haha no I'm just kidding it took decades to only kind of sink in.
The version Omicron is playing now has been updated and patched pretty extensively, but the base code is still the flower of 1998 technology. That's why it seems so janky; because it was enormously ahead of its time.
The initial PC port in the 90s was my first experience with FFVII, and it kind of coloured a lot of my impressions. For example, the default control scheme on keyboard used the arrow keys and the numpad almost entirely, with the rest of the keyboard going unused.
The music was done in what I later heard claimed was MIDI soundfonts, so a lot of the songs just sounded weirdly lacking, especially compared to what FFVI managed to achieve with its much more limited capabilities. I don't know if the "MIDI sounds" thing was accurate, but the music was definitely not up to the quality I associated with FFVI, accounting for hardware differences.
