I missed that, forgive my oversight.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
RogueIce
Noctis Æternæ
- Location
- New Lunar Republic, Equestria
It probably helped that 99% of the signage were symbols anyway: swords for the weapons shops, shields for the armor shops, etc. Only "Cafe" and "Inn" seemed to get actual wording, though near as I can tell they were indeed English characters even in the Japanese versions - at least so far as the "FF6(J)" versions of speedruns has shown me.
Were it not for those I probably would have chalked it up to them simply deciding to "spell it out" for the backgrounds and the effort to change it would have been too great. Except there clearly was a choice to use English characters pre-VII while including kanji post-VII. I suppose the modernity angle is as good an explanation as any?
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Its the modernity, I think, but not directly. Medieval or Industrial Revolution Europe is what they were doing before, and thats its own specific aesthetic - medieval Japan and Medieval England looked very different. But Industrial Modernity? That looks the same the world over, the only difference in the language on the signage, NYC and London's downtown and Tokyo all looking pretty similar once you're in skyscraper or factory neighborhoods rather than tourist attractions or historic districts. Using kanji would have clashed with the aesthetic before, whereas for 7's aesthetic the only change using kanji makes is how easy it is for their target audience to read.
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RogueIce
Noctis Æternæ
- Location
- New Lunar Republic, Equestria
I also wonder if they knew they'd be doing an English port on this, instead of the "maybe" the prior console generations seem to have (as evidenced by skipping games for one reason or another). Which is why there's kanji but with the English translation beneath it. IIRC basically all of the kanji-using signs include a translation on them.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
I mean the skipping games thing is because Nintendo. Like, in the NES and SNES days there was this whole thing of like. I don't remember all the details and don't know where to look to find a clear explanation, but basically thanks to companies like Atari video games were for lack of a better word broadly discredited in the west as bad, and so Nintendo apparently mandated strict standards on translations including, critically, the number of games companies could port to the west per year or whatever. So you had a lot of companies basically go 'okay, only the best, the things sure to sell a lot' in response.
And then obviously you hit the playstation era and suddenly Square started doing translations of everything in terms of the playstation era remakes etc.
(there's a lot of series that have similarly patchwork early release history, presumably for the same basic reasons)
Geckonator
Occult Materialist
Oh yeah, that's the "Nintendo Seal of Quality". The video game crash of 1983 wiped out Atari and it was partly (and importantly: popularly) to blame on Atari's absolute open market which allowed a torrent of shovelware onto the 2600, including primitive porn games like Custer's Revenge. Part of Nintendo's intensively planned entry into the American market (an interesting story in a lot of other ways, from what I've picked up in bits and pieces in various places) was to focus on quality control and internally approve every third party game that would be released on the NES. Now, as anyone who's dug into any of the worst of NES library can tell you, this didn't necessarily mean all the games were all well-designed or fun, just that the software worked all the way through and the content wasn't deemed unseemly to Nintendo's toy-store image. This was marketed with the gold seal that Nintendo still uses a variant of today, although now to my understanding it's no more or less stringent than any other console manufacturer's certification (as the Wii becoming a shovelware machine in its own right should attest). I believe they dropped the "of Quality" from the label in the GameCube era, although just looking up pictures of game boxes maybe they reintroduced it recently?
Interestingly, articles I've found don't give a clear answer to when the really restrictive clauses like limited releases per year were dropped, just that the actual competition with Sega during the SNES era made the policy too detrimental to business. It could have been that FFV was blocked by this policy, or it could have just slipped through due to some other factor.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
As I understand part of the impact was also less anything Nintendo would have said no to, and more what people thought they would say no to. Self policing, caused by the specter of the actual rules, as tends to happen.
But yeah, somewhere after there started being competing consoles worth caring about the thing eased up, both in impact (because people could just release to those other consoles) and in enforcement (because Nintendo did have to compete with those consoles).
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
IIRC 5 was not translated simply due to the difference in average age of gamers between US and Japan; US gamers in the early 90s skewed way younger than Japanese gamers, and so it was assessed that FF5 was simply too difficult and too complicated for the US market.
2 and 3 meanwhile were left untranslated because by the time they bothered releasing a translated 1 it was May of 1990 and FFIV was already on the horizon (and also they ran into the same difficulty and complexity issue, but mostly why translate those when you could do IV on the hot new system).
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Heck, skews younger and babby gamers is why we got the custom-made Final Fantasy Mystic Quest as well, isn't it? What with the whole "a simplified role-playing game... designed for the entry-level player" thing. And it's very much Baby's First RPG since it takes out a lot of the complexity like random battles and choosing your equipment, and adds bits of overworld things you can do for... presumably the sake of non-RPG gameplay to keep your attention.
I don't remember all the details of that game granted, it's been quite a long time since I played it. Might be neat as a quick interlude if Omi played it, though also understandable if he doesn't want to detour even if it's a fairly short game.
I don't remember all the details of that game granted, it's been quite a long time since I played it. Might be neat as a quick interlude if Omi played it, though also understandable if he doesn't want to detour even if it's a fairly short game.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's funny that they saw random encounters as a 'complexity to be removed', given JRPGs in general would since gradually move away from random encounters altogether
Clearly, Mystic Quest was ahead of it's time.
Though yes, I much prefer games with either no random encounters, or some way to track and prepare for them (Etrian Odyssey) or avoid them (Wild Arms 3), not gonna lie.
- Location
- Florida USA
Ah, Mystic Quest. Nostalgia fills me. It also had some banger fight tunes.
The funny thing about the Guard Scorpion meme is II didn't get hit by it for two reasons. One, IIRC my mother also let me buy a third party strategy guide when we got the game, so I knew about the encounter already, and two, I already knew this mechanic because I'd played FFIV and FFVI, so I had pattern recognition.
I have a... interesting history with this game, emotionally. On the one hand, I enjoyed it greatly when it came out, I loved it very much, played it to completion, got that super-summon Materia (you all know the one) by grinding the Chocobo race thing, etc. I featured FFVII as one of many properties in a very Trek-centric crossover I was writing for fun in that ancient era even before I joined SB.com. Some time after I started regularly coming online socially for web morums and such, I even did a Star Wars-FFVII crossover fic (with Chrono Trigger tossed in) purely from inspiration over Phantom Menace on top of my lingering fan enjoyment. It may even be online somewhere on whatever RPG web forum fanfic archive I submitted it to (and no, I'm not reposting it here, oh god no).
But by the early 00s, my rememberance of the game soured. Maybe it was in reaction to just how overpowering the fandom love for the game was, and how it seemed to strangle any love for FFIV or VI (or V, as around then I first completed it on PSX). Or it was jjust getting older and starting to recognize what I felt as faults in the game. Or emotional permission from an early... I think it was IGN article about the game and one reviewer outright calling it overhyped and not that good. Either way, by the mid-00s, my enjoyment of the game had turned to a disdain. The famous PS3 demo with the FFVII intro didn't do anything for me. I watched and enjoyed Advent Children to some degree but it was my brother who completed Dirge of Cerberus and either way, I just didn't care as much.. I was starting to remember the ending that disappointed me and the follow-ups not quite resolving that feeling, plus the general feeling the game was overhyped by fans and the SNES-era titles were better. FFVI was the work of art to my sentiment; FFVII the "popular" thing that wasn't as good.
This continued onward into the 10s. I bought the HD remaster of the PC port in a Steam Sale sometime around 2013 and I don't remember if I even got out of Midgard. I certainly didn't give it the same love I did the Android/iPhone remakes of the GBA ports released about that time.. I even fully played Final Fantasy Dimensions, which was something of a testbed for those pixel ports IIRC with an FFV-style job system and it sown unique story. I had little interest when the remake was announced, nor have I ever played the remake, though maybe at some point I will. Hell, maybe I will just to appreciate Omi's commentary on it in contrast to the original. And I needn't say FFXIV has shot welll past VII in my rankings.
Anyway, that's it for now, looking forward to Omi's next update.
The funny thing about the Guard Scorpion meme is II didn't get hit by it for two reasons. One, IIRC my mother also let me buy a third party strategy guide when we got the game, so I knew about the encounter already, and two, I already knew this mechanic because I'd played FFIV and FFVI, so I had pattern recognition.
I have a... interesting history with this game, emotionally. On the one hand, I enjoyed it greatly when it came out, I loved it very much, played it to completion, got that super-summon Materia (you all know the one) by grinding the Chocobo race thing, etc. I featured FFVII as one of many properties in a very Trek-centric crossover I was writing for fun in that ancient era even before I joined SB.com. Some time after I started regularly coming online socially for web morums and such, I even did a Star Wars-FFVII crossover fic (with Chrono Trigger tossed in) purely from inspiration over Phantom Menace on top of my lingering fan enjoyment. It may even be online somewhere on whatever RPG web forum fanfic archive I submitted it to (and no, I'm not reposting it here, oh god no).
But by the early 00s, my rememberance of the game soured. Maybe it was in reaction to just how overpowering the fandom love for the game was, and how it seemed to strangle any love for FFIV or VI (or V, as around then I first completed it on PSX). Or it was jjust getting older and starting to recognize what I felt as faults in the game. Or emotional permission from an early... I think it was IGN article about the game and one reviewer outright calling it overhyped and not that good. Either way, by the mid-00s, my enjoyment of the game had turned to a disdain. The famous PS3 demo with the FFVII intro didn't do anything for me. I watched and enjoyed Advent Children to some degree but it was my brother who completed Dirge of Cerberus and either way, I just didn't care as much.. I was starting to remember the ending that disappointed me and the follow-ups not quite resolving that feeling, plus the general feeling the game was overhyped by fans and the SNES-era titles were better. FFVI was the work of art to my sentiment; FFVII the "popular" thing that wasn't as good.
This continued onward into the 10s. I bought the HD remaster of the PC port in a Steam Sale sometime around 2013 and I don't remember if I even got out of Midgard. I certainly didn't give it the same love I did the Android/iPhone remakes of the GBA ports released about that time.. I even fully played Final Fantasy Dimensions, which was something of a testbed for those pixel ports IIRC with an FFV-style job system and it sown unique story. I had little interest when the remake was announced, nor have I ever played the remake, though maybe at some point I will. Hell, maybe I will just to appreciate Omi's commentary on it in contrast to the original. And I needn't say FFXIV has shot welll past VII in my rankings.
Anyway, that's it for now, looking forward to Omi's next update.
Please remove this and put it in the spoiler thread there's a whole thread where we put all the spoiler things and that is a spoiler and we don't want Omni to see it
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GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
You should also probably do it with the quote.
Final Fantasy VII, Part 2: The Sector 7 Slums & Mako Reactor #5
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Welcome back to Final Fantasy VII, the project which will consume me and leave nothing but ash.
Last time, we arrived in Sector 7 and saw the giant pillar which holds up the plate above it, which I'm sure will have no relevance to the plot later.
So, fun fact:
In any previous game, by now, we would be exploring the world map. In FFV, the opening hour covered the first meteorite to the pirates' hideout to the wind shrine; in FFVI it was all of Narshe plus our first town visit in Figaro. FFVII isn't doing that. It seems really invested in making Midgar stick.
That town is, in a way, the evolution of Saronia from FFIII (I know, deep pull). That was the first time in the game a town was so large that it had to be split into several overworld entities, and visited as multiple screen. Oddly enough, the game never revisited that concept, even though it works great at conveying a sense of 'this is a major place' - until now; until Midgar, which is so enormous that we haven't left it yet, and which contains several more towns within itself. And the first of them, the first place that functions like a town of previous game, is Sector 7.
Hmmm. Let me see if I can't…
Oh yeah, that's better.
This is Sector 7, our first 'town.' And there's so much aesthetic condensed in this one screen. This weird shantytown is visibly built ramshackle; there's a shack in the south built out of random metal plates and wooden planks stitched together, while the building to the lower right seems like it's been built out of some kind of construction platform turned housing. In the upper left, we have a literal saloon - the sign at the very top reads 'Texas Cowboy'... 'Old'?
Wait, is Texas canon to the Final Fantasy VII setting?
I do not know what to do with that information.
Anyway, yeah. We have this combination industrial slum/Western movie town/Fallout settlement, I love it.
When we arrive, the Avalanche groups heads straight to that saloon, the Seventh Heaven, and Barret promptly kicks out all the patrons - and I mean that literally; people are knocked onto their butts outside. It was hard to capture, but in the second picture you can see a girl in a white shirt who came out just after Barret kicked everyone out and who is bowing to the crowd in what looks like profuse apologies - probably the barkeep. It's a really nice touch of wordless storytelling.
Talking to people around the bar, we learn that news of the explosion has trickled down, and a very news-interested kid tells us that the destruction of the reactor must have knocked out power to the sector's computers, causing a billion of gil in damage - it's a nice look at the consequences of a digitized economy, and shows that Midgar's economy is in fact pretty heavily computerized.
Also, the duality of man:
Anway, we walk into the saloon (I don't care if it's a bar, I'm going to keep calling it a saloon) and are immediately greeted by a little girl who thinks it's her dad coming in, only to realize that it's Cloud and instantly hiding in fear.
To be fair, I think Cloud is probably as afraid of that child as she is afraid of him. The girl in the white shirt gently chides her for not saying hi to Cloud, and then welcomes him in the tone of someone who already knows him personally.
She asks us "Did you fight with Barret?" Because I sometimes have the reading comprehension of a five-year old, my understanding of this line is she's asking if we and Barret fought together (against Shinra troops), so I say yes, whereupon it immediately becomes clear that she was asking if Barret and Cloud got into a fight with each other. Ah, well. I mean, it's true, but I might have been more diplomatic. Still, she's understanding, saying that Barret is "always pushing people around" and that Cloud has "always been in fights ever since he was little."
Okay, childhood friend, got it. And her name is…
Tifa, our third playable character and the hottest woman in video game history. Who said that? I didn't say anything. It's not clear if she's the proprietor of the bar or just currently manning the counter, but either way she doesn't seem to object to the Avalanche group having the run of the bar; everyone has a relaxing after-work drink together, and Biggs even offers us a drink, which we can choose to take.
Yeah, tell that to the undersocialized murder machine who saved all your asses multiple times today.
Wedge tells us that Tifa cooks really well and always lets him taste her cooking, and that this is why he is now "rolly-polly." He doesn't know if he should be happy or sad about that, but it's the food and drinks that make the bar saloon famous.
Once we've talked to everyone, approaching the door causes Barret to enter, and it turns out he was the little girl's dad (she's called Marlene).
Look at the way Cloud is sitting cross-legged on a table, looking away from the public display of affection. It's increasingly apparent that he's just kind of socially awkward on top of everything else.
He picks her up and raises her in a hug. I wonder if I should read anything into the fact that she looks a lot, huh, paler than him - could be it's an adoption situation, could be not.
Either way, this scene is fantastic in terms of humanizing all these characters - Biggs as the guy who's trying to get Cloud to loosen up and team bond over a drink and to act as the Experienced Senior of the group, Wedge as the friendly guy with a bit too much of a taste for material comforts, Barret as being incredibly nice and affectionate to his daughter in comparison to the gruff demeanor he's had this whole time. Jessie is the only one kind of left out, but she's had some spots in previous scenes.
Then Barret, with marlene riding on his shoulder, tells us to get in for 'the meeting,' and reveals the SECRET AVALANCHE HIDEOUT which is hidden… Under that pinball machine in the screenshot above. It's a secret pinball elevator. That's so silly, I love it.
Since we're not part of Avalanche, Cloud is just left sitting around. We can get up and talk to Tifa, though, who offers us a drink:
I agree, and she chats with Cloud while mixing his drink. She's relieved he made it out safely; he shrugs it off like this job wasn't even a big deal, and she muses that he was in SOLDIER, after all.
She asks Cloud if he's feeling alright, he looks tired, which might or might not tie into that weird vision he had earlier; then she tells him he should go ahead and get his money from Barret, so we head down for the secret hideout place.
Love the aesthetic of the Avalanche hideout, by the way. It's half terrorist shelter, half teenager mancave. You cannot convince me that Avalanche don't play Dungeons & Dragons on that table in the middle. There's a computer where Jessie is doing Hackergirl stuff, a TV broadcasting the news, a white chalkboard to make conspiracy notes on, a pirate flag, training weights and a punching bag… is that a fax machine? It's a great aesthetic for a ramshackle group of rebels against authority, but it doesn't exactly scream competency. Or resources. Or 'could conceivably succeed in taking down the government.' More on that later.
Barret: "Yo, Cloud! There's somethin' I wanna ask ya. Was there anyone from SOLDIER fighting us today?"
Cloud: "None. I'm positive."
Barret: "You sound pretty sure."
Cloud: "If there was anyone from SOLDIER you wouldn't be standing here now."
Barret: "Don't go thinkin' you so bad jus' cuz you was in SOLDIER."
Barret: *shakes fist angrily; Biggs tries to hold him back and is comically flown into the rooftop and knocked out*
Cloud: "..."
Barret: "Yeah, you're strong. Probably all of them guys in SOLDIER are. But don't you forget that your skinny ass's workin' for Avalanche now!"
Incidentally, I wonder if Barret's AAVE-influenced dialogue is translating a specific accent from Japanese.
That's a good question, though. Why wasn't there anyone from Shinra's elite forces defending Reactor 1? To some extent, that can be justified as them not being aware that a terrorist attack on the reactor was a real threat, and so they were unprepared, and we hit the site too fast for a task force to reach us, but still.
Well, we'll have ample chances to face SOLDIER in the future, seeing as there's seven reactors left. Not that I expect 'destroy the reactors one by one' to be where the plot is going - even the previous games shifted away from "there are four crystal shrines, do each shrine in order," and that's with each crystal having a very different elemental aesthetic. Something is bound to happen to disrupt that plan.
The following interaction is… weird, I think maybe because of the translation? The gist of it is that Cloud asks Barret for his money, Barret takes offense to that, Cloud reiterates once again that he doesn't care about either Shinra or the planet, and then Barret fumes in a corner while we have to talk to everyone else while he cools down. The gist of it makes sense enough - Barret is continuously frustrated by Cloud's insistence that he's just a mercenary, instead of willingly falling in with Avalanche when the planet is at stake, and has to be talked into giving Cloud his money. But the dialogue is just, like, weird. Check out this exchange with Jessie:
Jessie: "Money… Oh my. It must have been for a lot of it. Sure! Well, what the hell? It's a verbal agreement. Now let me figure this out."
Cloud: "Jessie…"
Jessie: "Oh, stop it, Cloud! Did you hear me?"
I have no idea what Jessie is actually saying here. The sentences are just constructed bizarrely and don't seem to relate to one another. Wedge's dialogue makes more sense - he is convinced that Cloud is secretly lonely and wants friends and Cloud blows him off.
When we take the elevator and leave, Tifa chases after Cloud and tries to convince him to stay with them and help save the planet. "The planet is dying," she says, "slowly but surely, she's dying."
So Tifa does agree with Avalanche's cause - she just wasn't part of the previous mission for whatever reason; busy holding the fort or whatever.
Notably, in the Remake, Tifa agrees with Avalanche's goals, but disagrees with their means, and isn't part of the first mission because she refused to take part in a terrorist attack - although I'll talk about the Remake more later, it's, huh, doing a lot of different things there.
When Cloud blows her off again, she appeals to First Girl Principle:
Tifa, you should know the childhood friend never wins-
Cloud can reply either "How can you say that!" or "...Sorry," which seems like two different flavors of the same thing, like a lot of these.
Tifa adds that Cloud forgot their 'promise,' and Cloud is puzzled, so Tifa takes him outside to reminisce about a time seven years ago:
The framing of that scene confuses me; Tifa is talking as if they were in that place where the flashback happens, but the flashback suggests they're not in Midgar. I think what's happening is that the space above their heads is acting as a kind of 'memory canvas'?
As younger teens, Tifa and Cloud meet up on top of a water tower (which the game confusingly describes as a 'well') - Cloud wanted to meet her there to announce that in Spring, he will leave for Midgar to join SOLDIER and become 'the best there is, just like Sephiroth.'
Well. That's a name I wasn't expecting quite so soon.
Even if I try to approach these games as their own, standalone thing, I have to acknowledge that I obviously know who Sephiroth is. Like. He's one of the most famous villain in all of gaming. He is so famous he has his own backlash and like, backlash to the backlash. He's absolutely iconic.
Which is why it's interesting that here, he's not introduced to us as a villain at all - instead Cloud talks about him like some kind of inspiration or role model, and Tifa calls him 'the Great Sephiroth', so that dude is obviously famous. And related in some way to the SOLDIER program.
Cloud tells Tifa he probably won't be back for a while, and Tifa asks him to make her a promise - that if he becomes famous and she's in a bind, he'll come save her. That "my hero will come and rescue me. I want to experience that at least once."
So it looks like they're childhood friends who were separated - Cloud went to Midgar to join SOLDIER and disappeared for seven years, and at some point returned or met with Tifa again, who in the intervening time had joined with Avalanche. That could easily have been a star-crossed lover scenario in which they were compelled by their opposite allegiance to try and kill each other, but at that point Cloud had left SOLDIER for unknown reasons, and instead it became an opportunity for Tifa to rope her into her cause.
Cloud promises, and we return to the present, where Tifa is trying to use that promise as leverage to convince Cloud to stick around and help them. Cloud argues that he's not a hero and he's not famous, so he can't keep that promise; Tifa retorts that he did get his childhood dream of joining SOLDIER, which is basically the same thing. Not sure I buy that argument. Anyway, then Barret comes in and finally gives Cloud his pay, having finally cooled down somewhat. Said pay amounts to 1,500 gil, which is an okay sum by early FF game standards but isn't exactly breaking the bank.
Cloud laughs off the amount, but it turns out he's using a classic old trick of blasé cool guys who have a compulsion to look like they don't care about anything - he says he'll do 'the next mission' for double that, 3,000 gil, which implicitly is him saying that he will do the next mission for Avalanche, whereas previously he was adamant that he didn't intend to stick around and would be leaving the moment he got his pay; he's basically agreeing to stay on and fight with Avalanche with the face-saving pretense of being an amoral mercenary wanting more money.
It's a good bit! I like that. Barret doesn't see it that way though, and gets angry at Cloud's apparent greed - and the reason why becomes obvious when Tifa whispers to him that they really need the help and he replies that the money to hire Cloud is coming out of the savings he made to put Marlene through school.
Oooof. Yeah, Shinra looks like a capitalist hellscape, I can't imagine there are any decent schooling options that don't involve paying money out of the nose (honestly, depending on how sharp the class divide here, even having the money might not actually be enough; looking at you, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners). So Barret is forced to make a very difficult choice between his cause - the planet's future - and his family - his daughter's future.
Granted, if Avalanche ever succeeds in blowing up Midgar's entire power infrastructure, I'm not sure how much that schooling will be worth. Or that money, to be frank.
But it hints at something else as well - Barret is having to spend his own personal savings to hire Cloud. That suggests he doesn't have an external source of funding to back his cell, even though Biggs implied earlier that Avalanche was connected to a broader group.
Like, if Avalanche is an ecoterrorist group trying to end Mako exploitation, then Barret's cell is shockingly successful at it. It doesn't seem like anyone ever took out a Mako reactor before, and he now has an ex-SOLDIER with intimate knowledge of Shinra's internal workings and security protocol on his side. Yet they're not being contacted, or supported by anyone; they're operating out of the basement of Tifa's bar, with IEDs put together by Jessie with whatever she could scrounge up, and using Barret's personal money to finance their operations.
Something's off, and I'm not sure what it is, or if it's intentional on the game's part.
Barret argues Cloud down to 2,000 gil, and it's settled - Cloud will be part of the next mission.
There's a scene transition with Cloud waking up in the basement hideout - he clearly slept there, which does raise interesting questions: Where does Cloud normally live? Does he have a house? It seems he's not been back to his hometown in years, and I assume Shinra provided barracks as lodging for SOLDIER, so… does he have any place to stay?
He doesn't, does he. Our fearsome super-soldier with the giant sword who can take out a small army on his lonesome and doesn't need friends is a hobo.
Outstanding.
Tifa welcomes Cloud, and we have the opportunity to either shit-talk Barret, or flirt with her:
It's an easy choicebecause I would die for this woman, but it's interesting that this game seems to make it optional how much the player wants to engage with its romance angle, in a way? It's very clear that there is at least romantic subtext between Tifa and Cloud, but we're given several options to give her the cold shoulder.
Then, Barret asks Cloud an unexpected question - we found some Materia during the last mission, and he doesn't know how to use Materia, so he'd like Cloud to explain it to him. This leads into a tutorial which is explained in-character by Cloud, which is a really neat trick; he's supposed to be this experienced super-soldier with all that training, but the player still needs the game's new mechanics explained to him, so instead of him being told them, it's Cloud explaining them to others. I dig that.
So, Materia.
The equipment system has been highly streamlined. There are now only three pieces of equipment - weapon, armor, and accessory. Weapon and accessory can both sport Materia slots, the number depending on the piece of equipment. When a Materia is slotted in, it grants stats modifier; here, for instance, equipping the Restore Materia penalizes Cloud's Strength and HP, but boosts his Magic and MP. I don't know how much impact these modifiers will have, and it's unlikely that I'll ever decide to give a character no magic just for a +02 in Strength. We'll see.
Each Materia has a whole suite of magic which unlocks as a character gains AP in combat. Here, just by equipping the Restore Materia, Cloud can now cast Cure; with further AP gain, he can unlock Cura, Regen, and Curaga. It's notable that this allows the characters to, in theory, unlock high tier magic in a way that wasn't previously possible in game - games from I to V basically locked magic access behind shop access which was itself locked behind plot advancement, while VI locked them behind esper access which was similarly gated. Here, we could in theory have a full team with Tier 3 spells in the early game.
In theory. Everything I've heard about Materia is that the grinding required to unlock their better stuff is intense and tedious. Forget unlocking top tier magic early game, I might not get to see those spells in the normal course of play without grinding.
Anyway, so far this is pretty simple stuff, but here's where it gets interesting - elsewhere in Sector 7, we can find an 'All' Materia. That Materia doesn't have any magic; instead, if we slot it into a slot which is connected to a magic Materia, it turns that Materia's spell into omni-target spells - so for instance, by equipping Barret with the Restore and All Materia, he casts Cure on the whole party at once.
That's interesting! It has the potential for a lot of quirky mechanical expression. We'll see how well it works out in practice, but I'm intrigued.
And now that we have the Materia rules explained and Tifa on board, it's time for our next mission - the destruction of Mako Reactor #5.
…or at least it will be, after we've explored the Sector 7 Slums a little. And I really need to show screenshots there, because it's where the game really puts its all in giving this place a unique charm that the mostly-identical architectural style of the 2D-era effects could never really get:
A father and mother missing their son, who brought them nothing but grief when he was there but whom they miss now that he's gone somewhere; look at these leather jackets!
"Might be unhealthy for ya, if ya know what I mean." Is… is this weapons merchant threatening my life???
There's so much neat stuff in there. My favorite is that this game's version of the Beginner's Hall is, like, this cage fighting ring where a bunch of flexing bodybuilders are cheering on two kids who are sparring/fighting, and they all ask Cloud to give them tips because he's such a badass, which is how the game brings in the many tutorial questions we can answer for them. And these two kids? The girl is being beat up, but Cloud acts as coach, telling her to hang in there because her Limit gauge is building up - and then she turns green and lays the other kid flat.
Which tells us that Limit Breaks are a real thing in-universe and that anyone can have them, even little kids. The implications of this are fascinating and will not be studied at this time.
Also, the weapons shop is built like one of these American gun stores with a walled-off counter to protect the clerk, and may or may not be run by mafia? Neat touch.
Back at the train station, it looks like the couple from yesterday are breaking up. And punching each other out? I don't know, it's unclear. Anyway, it's time to board the train, and head for Sector 5.
Same suit from yesterday is about to get bullied out of his train car again.
…
I think this scene offers us an interesting point of comparison to both a game that came out not too long before it, and a game that came out much, much later.
First, let's look at FFVI.
We can roughly analogize the 7th Heaven meetup with the Returners' hideout; in both scenes, a group of rebels against the main power of the setting are bringing a new recruit to their secret hideout in order to discuss their next plans, they need that newcomer to succeed, but the newcomer doesn't know if they want to or can fight by their side. The newcomer meets an important person who makes an emotional appeal to them, and at the end of it, they decide to join the fight. It's pretty close in concept!
The FFVI scene contains, from arrival at the Returners' Hideout to the escape in the boat; give or take roughly 101 lines of dialogue. This includes a recounting of the War of the Magi and a briefing on the group's specific goals with their next mission. The FFVII scene, from entering 7th Heaven to Barret announced we were heading for Mako Reactor 5, is about 135 lines of dialogue, covering meeting Tifa, having a drink with her, Cloud fighting with Barret, a flashback to the childhood promise and Cloud finally deciding to do the next job with Avalanche. It's longer, but it's also denser; it contains both more dialogue boxes in total but is also saying more with each one. It's a very efficient bit of character and story exposition, even if it's marred by either writing or translation that makes some of the conversation bizarre or hard to follow.
Now, though, what about the Remake?
Well, hm.
The Remake's version of the arrival at the Sector 5 Slums is where my idea of replaying FFVIIR to refresh my memory and compare it 'live' to the original died and I started simply pulling up Youtube videos.
In the Remake, the time between "Cloud arrives by train at Sector 7" and "the group leaves for Sector 5" is, give or take, three to four hours. Instead of one argument and Cloud agreeing to the next job, Tifa tells Cloud she's found an apartment for him to rent, and he spends at least two days there just hanging out, doing sidequests, killing the local wildlife, running into criminals working for a mysterious boss. Avalanche go on another mission but, for whatever reason, they can't or don't want to afford Cloud's services, so he just stays behind in the slums with Tifa for a while.
Notably, this whole extended stretch includes maybe my favorite sequence in the game, Mad Dash, which is a whole chapter in which Jessie asks Cloud to take her to the top plate to visit her parents, who are middle-class Shinra employees; during that scene, Cloud gets into a motorbike chase with Shinra security forces - until the party is crashed by ROCHE, THE SPEED DEMON, SOLDIER THIRD CLASS, my favorite dude.
I love Roche because he offers us a direct demonstration of what people hear when Cloud says he's an 'ex-SOLDIER'; he offers us the template for expectation of Shinra's elite. He's a bombastic, quirky super-soldier who loves theatrics, performs flamboyant and impossible stunts (specifically motorbike tricks), and is completely disruptive to normal Shina security operation to the point that both times he shows up, the standard forces' reaction is to immediately pull back and let him do his thing, while at the same time being kind of bad at his job because he's more interested in the excitement of a duel with a strong opponent than with actually protecting Shinra property and capturing criminals. He's an over-the-top shounen villain, and it's very easy to see why someone would want him on their side while at the same time not trusting him to do the job on his own. Honestly, in contrast Cloud looks downright professional.
Also it's just a great scene for building up on Jessie, Biggs and Wedge's characters. None of them are playable, but they're with Cloud the entire time trying to aid however they can, and they come across as, well, 'competent but human' - they're all skilled operators, they just can't operate in the realm of SOLDIERs and other hypercompetent protagonists. Jessie's whole little family drama in particular is really sweet, and it gives us a look at what life is like on the top plates (also, she is flirting outrageously with Cloud the whole time, and his repeated shooting down of her advances is hilarious).
This is combined with a narrative throughline about Tifa coming to the decision of actively helping Avalanche with the next bombing, even if she finds the idea distasteful, which doesn't exist here because she has no hesitation to begin with. By the time all of this has unfolded (plus a weird attack by metatextual ghosts), Jessie, Biggs and Wedge are all some degree of out of commission and have to sit out of the Reactor raid, leaving only Barret, Tifa and Cloud to tackle it, whereas here the gang's all here.
What's weirdly missing from Remake is that we never end up going down that pinball machine elevator. So we never get to see Barret's Mancave. That's a shame.
Anyway, Jessie, Biggs and Wedge are my blorbos and I love them.
Alright, back to it.
Barret shoos everyone out of the car and, in a shocking display of bravery, the suit actually challenges him over it, though weakly and stammering. He then commits the mistake of trying to fluff himself up by saying that Avalanche warned there would be more bombing, so "only devoted Shinra employees would go to Midgar on a day like today." This immediately causes Barret to become furious, but he is held back by Tifa; the Shinra employee just cowers on his seat while Avalanche discuss their plans.
Barret is… I'm not sure to what extent the game intends him to be funny as opposed to cool. Like, he's a passionate guy who cares about the planet and has a machine gun for an arm, but also he has a very short temper that's regularly used for comedy in contrast to Cloud's Mr I Don't Care demeanor. I like him, but - the thing is, I played Remake before, and Remake Barret is the Most Charismatic Man To Ever Live. His modeling and voice acting came together in an absolutely outstanding way. If he took off his glasses, stared me in the eye and asked me to help him save the planet I'd be in an Avalanche outfit before I could finish saying 'Yes sir!'
Now, as warned by Jessie previously, Shinra has gone into security mode, and their fake IDs won't hold up - so Barret's plan is to jump off the train. Ballsy, that's for sure. Unfortunately, Shinra played us for fools - they moved the ID checks, and they trigger ahead of our expected point of egress. Uh-oh!
What follows is a little weird. Basically, each train car locks in a sequence, so we have 15 seconds to cross each one. That's easy enough; however, there are people in each car, and we can try to talk to them - but we have just 15 seconds to do it. There's no particular benefit to doing that, the game just decided to cram a lot extremely optional, extremely missable dialogue in that sequence. All of it incidental, like, huh, the Underwear Bandits:
A car with three guys who got literally robbed of the clothes off their back. This is such a weird detail.
Oh! There's a couple rewards, actually - two guys just give us an item if we're quick enough to talk to them.
We make it to the end of the train, where the whole group are standing in front of the open door waiting for the right time to jump - Jessie, Biggs and Wedge are all in disguise, amusingly enough:
Cloud: "...You look great, just like a man."
Jessie: "Yay! I'm so happy… I think?"
Cloud, you dolt, that's not the compliment she was looking for.
Jessie, Biggs and Wedge decide to stay behind with their disguises and fake IDs, and Tifa, Cloud and Barret jump out of the train one after the other.
That's a fucking lie, Barret.
Now our next objective is to move through a series of identical screens until we reach our destination. The correct direction in which to go is away from the camera. If you head towards the camera, you will spend five minutes going through the same screen over and over while fighting random encounters until you reach a dead end.
In case you were wondering what Tifa's weapon of choice is, she punches people. And kicks them.
My wife.
Our way is barred by security sensors, so we use that hole to the side to enter the vents.
Shinra… Shinra has an open vent… Large enough for a human being to go through… That goes into their complex… Set up on the wrong side of their security sensor barrier.
Holy shit, they deserve to get blown up.
Our new enemies include fish who can spit water bubbles that put characters asleep. Do not ask me to explain this.
We move through an industrial area where we find the blorbos waiting for us. When we run into Jessie, she apologize for the issue with the ID check - she modified Cloud's ID and it triggered the sensors, and now she blames herself. Then it's more vent crawling.
It definitely feels like there's a division of labour in Avalanche where Jessie, Biggs and Wedge are on some level aware of their non-protagonist status and stay out of fights, leaving the combat and mission-critical stuff to Barret, Cloud and Tifa. Now, Cloud is a super-soldier, and Barret is a mountain of a man who replaced his arm with a machine gun, but what are Tifa's qualification? As far as I can tell she's just A Girl who is good enough at kickboxing that she can take out giant robots. Odd. I wonder if something will be made out of this.
Once we're inside the reactor, it's literally identical to Reactor 1 but with a different color filter.
It's all going pretty alright so far and gives us some chance to experiment with Tifa. Her Limit Break, Beat Rush, is a… slot machine…? It has a single slot which reads either "Hit" or "Yeah!" I've only managed to get the "Hit," and it barely does more damage than her punches. Underwhelming.
As we approach the reactor, though, and just like last time, some kind of vision comes over Cloud. Only this time, he's not just hearing some words, no… This time he grips his head in pain and goes into a full on flashback.
…is that Tifa?
Is she wearing a cowboy outfit?
Okay so I guess Texas really is canon to the FFVII setting, damn.
Tifa is kneeling next to who I can only assume is her dead father, as well as a pretty impressive katana.
Tifa: "Sephiroth… Did Sephiroth do this to you? Sephiroth… SOLDIER… Mako Reactors… Shinra… I hate them all!"
She then picks up the katana, and heads straight into that reactor chamber at the top of the screen.
Okay. So. I guess there is more to Tifa than meets the eye. She has a personal grudge to settle with Shinra and that 'Great Sephiroth' she and Cloud were talking admiringly about in a previous flashback, and with SOLDIER - but she doesn't seem to be holding it against Cloud.
Now, what's weird is that Cloud is there in this flashback, yet it is framed as a painful, surging memory he doesn't have context for. As if he'd suppressed it somehow. Intriguing.
As Cloud emerges from his trance, Barret tells him to get over himself and Tifa asks if he's alright; Cloud almost says something to her, but then says 'never mind,' and the group moves to put the bomb on the reactor. Once again, Barret asks Cloud to do it himself, saying the fact that he's some old friend of Tifa from long ago isn't enough to make him trust him. Once the bomb is set (no timer this time), we go to make our escape.
It's incidentally good that there is no timer, because there is an incredibly frustrating minigame where we have to time the unbearably slow animation of Cloud pushing a button in synch with Barret and Tifa and I fail it like, twenty times. I hate this.
However, as soon as we are on the bridge above the lower city, Shinra pulls its trap.
Shinra's own president has decided to come in person to witness Avalanche's latest misdeeds. He looks… Like you'd expect a guy called 'President Shinra' to look; he's a somewhat portly old man with an expensive suit and a beard.
The President fakes not even remembering who these pesky ants he's dealing with are, and Barret proudly boasts their name, but it's the exchange that follows that I find really interesting.
Cloud: "Long time no see, sir."
President Shinra: "...Long time no see? Oh… You. You're the one who quit SOLDIER and joined Avalanche. I knew you'd been exposed to Mako, from the look in your eyes. Tell me, traitor… What was your name?"
Cloud: "Cloud."
President Shinra: "Forgive me for asking, but I can't be expected to remember everyone's name. Unless you became another Sephiroth. Aah, Sephiroth… He was brilliant. Perhaps too brilliant."
Barret: "Don't give a damn 'bout none of that! This place's goin' up with a big BANG soon! Serves y'all right!"
President Shinra: "And such a waste of good fireworks, just to get rid of vermin like you…"
Barret: "VERMIN!? That's all you can say? VERMIN!? Shinra's the VERMIN for killing the Planet! Guess that'd make you King VERMIN! So shu'up, jackass!"
President Shinra: "...you are beginning to bore me. I'm a very busy man, so if you'll excuse me… I have a dinner I must attend."
Man, Barret really doesn't get the best repartie in these exchanges.
But it's interesting - the 'look in your eyes' President Shinra mentions is more explicit in later, 3D takes on the character, where Cloud's eyes have a particular, vivid blue-green color that you wouldn't necessarily think is unnatural on its own but which becomes obvious once you know to look for it in both Cloud and Roche. I take it this is their super-soldier program's secret - direct exposure to Mako energy providing enhanced capabilities.
And all that stuff about Sephiroth suggests that, in the time between Cloud and Tifa's childhood promise and today, "the Great Sephiroth" (he's referred to as "the great war hero" in the Remake) fell from grace, and is now referred to by President Shinra in the past tense. From the way he's talking, it seems like he's saying he would consider Avalanche and Cloud to be worth remembering the name of if they caused as much problems as Sephiroth once did, but as it stands, they're nothing more than pests. It is interesting that President Shinra has heard of a rogue SOLDIER, even if he didn't care about his name, and that Cloud recognizes him immediately and acts oddly deferential in spite of this.
It seems the destruction of one, possibly two Mako Reactors if this bomb goes off doesn't bother the President all that much, which is kinda wild. Like, if Three Miles Island was a terrorist incident you'd think it'd become a national obsession, you know? The Remake recontextualizes this in a way that at least makes the President's attitude make sense but at the same time takes away a lot of the protagonists' heat, by revealing that Shinra wants the reactor blown up so they can blame it on the foreign nation of Wutai and use it as a casus belli to invade a long-standing rival. It's going for a 'you foolish heroes were pawns in our great political games all along' and I don't think I vibe with it - the destruction of the reactors should be Avalanche's own success or tragedy to face.
Anyway, President Shinra unleashes a giant robot and escapes on a helicopter.
Look, I have no notes here, this is top-tier corporate supervillainy.
President Shinra: "Meet 'Airbuster,' a techno-soldier. Our Weapon Development Department created him. I'm sure the data he'll extract from your dead bodies will be of great use to us in future experiments."
Tifa: "THIS is from SOLDIER?"
Cloud: "No way! That's just a machine."
Barret: "I don't care what it is!! I'm gonna bust him up!"
Engage battle.
Hmmm.
Where is SOLDIER? Like, there was a number of reasons that made sense for them not to be on site the first time we attacked Shinra, but they clearly ramped up their security protocols here, yet their elite task force is nowhere to be seen - instead they are deploying some kind of advance super-robot which Cloud treats with contempt at the very idea it might be related to SOLDIER.
I'm starting to wonder if there isn't some kind of internal power play or purge and if SOLDIER isn't being phased out in favor of more reliable machines.
Airbuster… looks kind of ridiculous, not gonna lie. He's made of a single block and he looks like a toy you'd put on your shelf, you know, one of those with the slightly convex base that you can make go back and forth on its base? His main attack is to bomb us until it runs out of ammo then use energy attacks.
Airbuster is unusual for a boss in that it has a gimmick working against it; the fight is a side attack, and whenever Airbuster is attacked from behind, it takes massively increased damage before turning around to face the person who attacked it. A single Limit Break for Cloud hits it for 600 damage, half of its HP total.
All in all, the battle is quickly folded. Unfortunately, destroying the robot causes it to explode, which…
Oops.
With the bomb about to explode and Cloud hanging on for dear life on the other side of the chasm, there's genuinely nothing Barret and Tifa can do to help him, but it it's still a bit callous to leave him to die like that. Tifa shouts to Cloud to not die, there's "still so much I want to tell you," and Cloud responds "I know, Tifa," which feels like it might be a reference to that one exchange from Empire Strikes Back? Also Barret asks "Hey, you gonna be alright?" and Cloud can answer with either looking tough or saying "I don't know if I can hold on," and picking the latter results in Barret shit-talking you for "cryin' like a woman," wow. Real sexism in the workplace hours.
But then, these tearful exchanges are interrupted by The Bomb.
This is some high drama, I love it.
And on this literal cliffhanger (oooooh!) we're going to stop for today. We're still making our way through the first 'session' of the game I did, I didn't play it again in between updates, there's just a lot to be going through and I may need to adjust my workflow to adjust.
Man though, the game really is cooking with Midgar. There was a real, huge change being made in leaving behind six games' worth of map-based exploration where you're always released onto the worldmap within the first 30 minutes of the game at most, and instead putting the player on a 100% linear journey inside the sprawling megalopolis of Midgar, but it's paying off. That place looked full and lived in in a way no previous Final Fantasy town really did; even comparing it to its closest aesthetic equivalent, Vector, there's so much more vibrancy to Midgar. So far, this is absolutely a success.
Honestly, it makes me a little worried the game can't live up to it after we left the city, but we'll see about that later.
Next Time: The Girl Who Was Named Wrong!
Last time, we arrived in Sector 7 and saw the giant pillar which holds up the plate above it, which I'm sure will have no relevance to the plot later.
So, fun fact:
In any previous game, by now, we would be exploring the world map. In FFV, the opening hour covered the first meteorite to the pirates' hideout to the wind shrine; in FFVI it was all of Narshe plus our first town visit in Figaro. FFVII isn't doing that. It seems really invested in making Midgar stick.
That town is, in a way, the evolution of Saronia from FFIII (I know, deep pull). That was the first time in the game a town was so large that it had to be split into several overworld entities, and visited as multiple screen. Oddly enough, the game never revisited that concept, even though it works great at conveying a sense of 'this is a major place' - until now; until Midgar, which is so enormous that we haven't left it yet, and which contains several more towns within itself. And the first of them, the first place that functions like a town of previous game, is Sector 7.
Hmmm. Let me see if I can't…
Oh yeah, that's better.
This is Sector 7, our first 'town.' And there's so much aesthetic condensed in this one screen. This weird shantytown is visibly built ramshackle; there's a shack in the south built out of random metal plates and wooden planks stitched together, while the building to the lower right seems like it's been built out of some kind of construction platform turned housing. In the upper left, we have a literal saloon - the sign at the very top reads 'Texas Cowboy'... 'Old'?
Wait, is Texas canon to the Final Fantasy VII setting?
I do not know what to do with that information.
Anyway, yeah. We have this combination industrial slum/Western movie town/Fallout settlement, I love it.
When we arrive, the Avalanche groups heads straight to that saloon, the Seventh Heaven, and Barret promptly kicks out all the patrons - and I mean that literally; people are knocked onto their butts outside. It was hard to capture, but in the second picture you can see a girl in a white shirt who came out just after Barret kicked everyone out and who is bowing to the crowd in what looks like profuse apologies - probably the barkeep. It's a really nice touch of wordless storytelling.
Talking to people around the bar, we learn that news of the explosion has trickled down, and a very news-interested kid tells us that the destruction of the reactor must have knocked out power to the sector's computers, causing a billion of gil in damage - it's a nice look at the consequences of a digitized economy, and shows that Midgar's economy is in fact pretty heavily computerized.
Also, the duality of man:
Anway, we walk into the saloon (I don't care if it's a bar, I'm going to keep calling it a saloon) and are immediately greeted by a little girl who thinks it's her dad coming in, only to realize that it's Cloud and instantly hiding in fear.
To be fair, I think Cloud is probably as afraid of that child as she is afraid of him. The girl in the white shirt gently chides her for not saying hi to Cloud, and then welcomes him in the tone of someone who already knows him personally.
She asks us "Did you fight with Barret?" Because I sometimes have the reading comprehension of a five-year old, my understanding of this line is she's asking if we and Barret fought together (against Shinra troops), so I say yes, whereupon it immediately becomes clear that she was asking if Barret and Cloud got into a fight with each other. Ah, well. I mean, it's true, but I might have been more diplomatic. Still, she's understanding, saying that Barret is "always pushing people around" and that Cloud has "always been in fights ever since he was little."
Okay, childhood friend, got it. And her name is…
Yeah, tell that to the undersocialized murder machine who saved all your asses multiple times today.
Wedge tells us that Tifa cooks really well and always lets him taste her cooking, and that this is why he is now "rolly-polly." He doesn't know if he should be happy or sad about that, but it's the food and drinks that make the bar saloon famous.
Once we've talked to everyone, approaching the door causes Barret to enter, and it turns out he was the little girl's dad (she's called Marlene).
Look at the way Cloud is sitting cross-legged on a table, looking away from the public display of affection. It's increasingly apparent that he's just kind of socially awkward on top of everything else.
He picks her up and raises her in a hug. I wonder if I should read anything into the fact that she looks a lot, huh, paler than him - could be it's an adoption situation, could be not.
Either way, this scene is fantastic in terms of humanizing all these characters - Biggs as the guy who's trying to get Cloud to loosen up and team bond over a drink and to act as the Experienced Senior of the group, Wedge as the friendly guy with a bit too much of a taste for material comforts, Barret as being incredibly nice and affectionate to his daughter in comparison to the gruff demeanor he's had this whole time. Jessie is the only one kind of left out, but she's had some spots in previous scenes.
Then Barret, with marlene riding on his shoulder, tells us to get in for 'the meeting,' and reveals the SECRET AVALANCHE HIDEOUT which is hidden… Under that pinball machine in the screenshot above. It's a secret pinball elevator. That's so silly, I love it.
Since we're not part of Avalanche, Cloud is just left sitting around. We can get up and talk to Tifa, though, who offers us a drink:
I agree, and she chats with Cloud while mixing his drink. She's relieved he made it out safely; he shrugs it off like this job wasn't even a big deal, and she muses that he was in SOLDIER, after all.
She asks Cloud if he's feeling alright, he looks tired, which might or might not tie into that weird vision he had earlier; then she tells him he should go ahead and get his money from Barret, so we head down for the secret hideout place.
Love the aesthetic of the Avalanche hideout, by the way. It's half terrorist shelter, half teenager mancave. You cannot convince me that Avalanche don't play Dungeons & Dragons on that table in the middle. There's a computer where Jessie is doing Hackergirl stuff, a TV broadcasting the news, a white chalkboard to make conspiracy notes on, a pirate flag, training weights and a punching bag… is that a fax machine? It's a great aesthetic for a ramshackle group of rebels against authority, but it doesn't exactly scream competency. Or resources. Or 'could conceivably succeed in taking down the government.' More on that later.
Barret: "Yo, Cloud! There's somethin' I wanna ask ya. Was there anyone from SOLDIER fighting us today?"
Cloud: "None. I'm positive."
Barret: "You sound pretty sure."
Cloud: "If there was anyone from SOLDIER you wouldn't be standing here now."
Barret: "Don't go thinkin' you so bad jus' cuz you was in SOLDIER."
Barret: *shakes fist angrily; Biggs tries to hold him back and is comically flown into the rooftop and knocked out*
Cloud: "..."
Barret: "Yeah, you're strong. Probably all of them guys in SOLDIER are. But don't you forget that your skinny ass's workin' for Avalanche now!"
Incidentally, I wonder if Barret's AAVE-influenced dialogue is translating a specific accent from Japanese.
That's a good question, though. Why wasn't there anyone from Shinra's elite forces defending Reactor 1? To some extent, that can be justified as them not being aware that a terrorist attack on the reactor was a real threat, and so they were unprepared, and we hit the site too fast for a task force to reach us, but still.
Well, we'll have ample chances to face SOLDIER in the future, seeing as there's seven reactors left. Not that I expect 'destroy the reactors one by one' to be where the plot is going - even the previous games shifted away from "there are four crystal shrines, do each shrine in order," and that's with each crystal having a very different elemental aesthetic. Something is bound to happen to disrupt that plan.
The following interaction is… weird, I think maybe because of the translation? The gist of it is that Cloud asks Barret for his money, Barret takes offense to that, Cloud reiterates once again that he doesn't care about either Shinra or the planet, and then Barret fumes in a corner while we have to talk to everyone else while he cools down. The gist of it makes sense enough - Barret is continuously frustrated by Cloud's insistence that he's just a mercenary, instead of willingly falling in with Avalanche when the planet is at stake, and has to be talked into giving Cloud his money. But the dialogue is just, like, weird. Check out this exchange with Jessie:
Jessie: "Money… Oh my. It must have been for a lot of it. Sure! Well, what the hell? It's a verbal agreement. Now let me figure this out."
Cloud: "Jessie…"
Jessie: "Oh, stop it, Cloud! Did you hear me?"
I have no idea what Jessie is actually saying here. The sentences are just constructed bizarrely and don't seem to relate to one another. Wedge's dialogue makes more sense - he is convinced that Cloud is secretly lonely and wants friends and Cloud blows him off.
When we take the elevator and leave, Tifa chases after Cloud and tries to convince him to stay with them and help save the planet. "The planet is dying," she says, "slowly but surely, she's dying."
So Tifa does agree with Avalanche's cause - she just wasn't part of the previous mission for whatever reason; busy holding the fort or whatever.
Notably, in the Remake, Tifa agrees with Avalanche's goals, but disagrees with their means, and isn't part of the first mission because she refused to take part in a terrorist attack - although I'll talk about the Remake more later, it's, huh, doing a lot of different things there.
When Cloud blows her off again, she appeals to First Girl Principle:
Tifa, you should know the childhood friend never wins-
Cloud can reply either "How can you say that!" or "...Sorry," which seems like two different flavors of the same thing, like a lot of these.
Tifa adds that Cloud forgot their 'promise,' and Cloud is puzzled, so Tifa takes him outside to reminisce about a time seven years ago:
The framing of that scene confuses me; Tifa is talking as if they were in that place where the flashback happens, but the flashback suggests they're not in Midgar. I think what's happening is that the space above their heads is acting as a kind of 'memory canvas'?
As younger teens, Tifa and Cloud meet up on top of a water tower (which the game confusingly describes as a 'well') - Cloud wanted to meet her there to announce that in Spring, he will leave for Midgar to join SOLDIER and become 'the best there is, just like Sephiroth.'
Well. That's a name I wasn't expecting quite so soon.
Even if I try to approach these games as their own, standalone thing, I have to acknowledge that I obviously know who Sephiroth is. Like. He's one of the most famous villain in all of gaming. He is so famous he has his own backlash and like, backlash to the backlash. He's absolutely iconic.
Which is why it's interesting that here, he's not introduced to us as a villain at all - instead Cloud talks about him like some kind of inspiration or role model, and Tifa calls him 'the Great Sephiroth', so that dude is obviously famous. And related in some way to the SOLDIER program.
Cloud tells Tifa he probably won't be back for a while, and Tifa asks him to make her a promise - that if he becomes famous and she's in a bind, he'll come save her. That "my hero will come and rescue me. I want to experience that at least once."
So it looks like they're childhood friends who were separated - Cloud went to Midgar to join SOLDIER and disappeared for seven years, and at some point returned or met with Tifa again, who in the intervening time had joined with Avalanche. That could easily have been a star-crossed lover scenario in which they were compelled by their opposite allegiance to try and kill each other, but at that point Cloud had left SOLDIER for unknown reasons, and instead it became an opportunity for Tifa to rope her into her cause.
Cloud promises, and we return to the present, where Tifa is trying to use that promise as leverage to convince Cloud to stick around and help them. Cloud argues that he's not a hero and he's not famous, so he can't keep that promise; Tifa retorts that he did get his childhood dream of joining SOLDIER, which is basically the same thing. Not sure I buy that argument. Anyway, then Barret comes in and finally gives Cloud his pay, having finally cooled down somewhat. Said pay amounts to 1,500 gil, which is an okay sum by early FF game standards but isn't exactly breaking the bank.
Cloud laughs off the amount, but it turns out he's using a classic old trick of blasé cool guys who have a compulsion to look like they don't care about anything - he says he'll do 'the next mission' for double that, 3,000 gil, which implicitly is him saying that he will do the next mission for Avalanche, whereas previously he was adamant that he didn't intend to stick around and would be leaving the moment he got his pay; he's basically agreeing to stay on and fight with Avalanche with the face-saving pretense of being an amoral mercenary wanting more money.
It's a good bit! I like that. Barret doesn't see it that way though, and gets angry at Cloud's apparent greed - and the reason why becomes obvious when Tifa whispers to him that they really need the help and he replies that the money to hire Cloud is coming out of the savings he made to put Marlene through school.
Oooof. Yeah, Shinra looks like a capitalist hellscape, I can't imagine there are any decent schooling options that don't involve paying money out of the nose (honestly, depending on how sharp the class divide here, even having the money might not actually be enough; looking at you, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners). So Barret is forced to make a very difficult choice between his cause - the planet's future - and his family - his daughter's future.
Granted, if Avalanche ever succeeds in blowing up Midgar's entire power infrastructure, I'm not sure how much that schooling will be worth. Or that money, to be frank.
But it hints at something else as well - Barret is having to spend his own personal savings to hire Cloud. That suggests he doesn't have an external source of funding to back his cell, even though Biggs implied earlier that Avalanche was connected to a broader group.
Like, if Avalanche is an ecoterrorist group trying to end Mako exploitation, then Barret's cell is shockingly successful at it. It doesn't seem like anyone ever took out a Mako reactor before, and he now has an ex-SOLDIER with intimate knowledge of Shinra's internal workings and security protocol on his side. Yet they're not being contacted, or supported by anyone; they're operating out of the basement of Tifa's bar, with IEDs put together by Jessie with whatever she could scrounge up, and using Barret's personal money to finance their operations.
Something's off, and I'm not sure what it is, or if it's intentional on the game's part.
Barret argues Cloud down to 2,000 gil, and it's settled - Cloud will be part of the next mission.
There's a scene transition with Cloud waking up in the basement hideout - he clearly slept there, which does raise interesting questions: Where does Cloud normally live? Does he have a house? It seems he's not been back to his hometown in years, and I assume Shinra provided barracks as lodging for SOLDIER, so… does he have any place to stay?
He doesn't, does he. Our fearsome super-soldier with the giant sword who can take out a small army on his lonesome and doesn't need friends is a hobo.
Outstanding.
Tifa welcomes Cloud, and we have the opportunity to either shit-talk Barret, or flirt with her:
It's an easy choice
Then, Barret asks Cloud an unexpected question - we found some Materia during the last mission, and he doesn't know how to use Materia, so he'd like Cloud to explain it to him. This leads into a tutorial which is explained in-character by Cloud, which is a really neat trick; he's supposed to be this experienced super-soldier with all that training, but the player still needs the game's new mechanics explained to him, so instead of him being told them, it's Cloud explaining them to others. I dig that.
So, Materia.
The equipment system has been highly streamlined. There are now only three pieces of equipment - weapon, armor, and accessory. Weapon and accessory can both sport Materia slots, the number depending on the piece of equipment. When a Materia is slotted in, it grants stats modifier; here, for instance, equipping the Restore Materia penalizes Cloud's Strength and HP, but boosts his Magic and MP. I don't know how much impact these modifiers will have, and it's unlikely that I'll ever decide to give a character no magic just for a +02 in Strength. We'll see.
Each Materia has a whole suite of magic which unlocks as a character gains AP in combat. Here, just by equipping the Restore Materia, Cloud can now cast Cure; with further AP gain, he can unlock Cura, Regen, and Curaga. It's notable that this allows the characters to, in theory, unlock high tier magic in a way that wasn't previously possible in game - games from I to V basically locked magic access behind shop access which was itself locked behind plot advancement, while VI locked them behind esper access which was similarly gated. Here, we could in theory have a full team with Tier 3 spells in the early game.
In theory. Everything I've heard about Materia is that the grinding required to unlock their better stuff is intense and tedious. Forget unlocking top tier magic early game, I might not get to see those spells in the normal course of play without grinding.
Anyway, so far this is pretty simple stuff, but here's where it gets interesting - elsewhere in Sector 7, we can find an 'All' Materia. That Materia doesn't have any magic; instead, if we slot it into a slot which is connected to a magic Materia, it turns that Materia's spell into omni-target spells - so for instance, by equipping Barret with the Restore and All Materia, he casts Cure on the whole party at once.
That's interesting! It has the potential for a lot of quirky mechanical expression. We'll see how well it works out in practice, but I'm intrigued.
And now that we have the Materia rules explained and Tifa on board, it's time for our next mission - the destruction of Mako Reactor #5.
…or at least it will be, after we've explored the Sector 7 Slums a little. And I really need to show screenshots there, because it's where the game really puts its all in giving this place a unique charm that the mostly-identical architectural style of the 2D-era effects could never really get:
A father and mother missing their son, who brought them nothing but grief when he was there but whom they miss now that he's gone somewhere; look at these leather jackets!
"Might be unhealthy for ya, if ya know what I mean." Is… is this weapons merchant threatening my life???
There's so much neat stuff in there. My favorite is that this game's version of the Beginner's Hall is, like, this cage fighting ring where a bunch of flexing bodybuilders are cheering on two kids who are sparring/fighting, and they all ask Cloud to give them tips because he's such a badass, which is how the game brings in the many tutorial questions we can answer for them. And these two kids? The girl is being beat up, but Cloud acts as coach, telling her to hang in there because her Limit gauge is building up - and then she turns green and lays the other kid flat.
Which tells us that Limit Breaks are a real thing in-universe and that anyone can have them, even little kids. The implications of this are fascinating and will not be studied at this time.
Also, the weapons shop is built like one of these American gun stores with a walled-off counter to protect the clerk, and may or may not be run by mafia? Neat touch.
Back at the train station, it looks like the couple from yesterday are breaking up. And punching each other out? I don't know, it's unclear. Anyway, it's time to board the train, and head for Sector 5.
Same suit from yesterday is about to get bullied out of his train car again.
…
I think this scene offers us an interesting point of comparison to both a game that came out not too long before it, and a game that came out much, much later.
First, let's look at FFVI.
We can roughly analogize the 7th Heaven meetup with the Returners' hideout; in both scenes, a group of rebels against the main power of the setting are bringing a new recruit to their secret hideout in order to discuss their next plans, they need that newcomer to succeed, but the newcomer doesn't know if they want to or can fight by their side. The newcomer meets an important person who makes an emotional appeal to them, and at the end of it, they decide to join the fight. It's pretty close in concept!
The FFVI scene contains, from arrival at the Returners' Hideout to the escape in the boat; give or take roughly 101 lines of dialogue. This includes a recounting of the War of the Magi and a briefing on the group's specific goals with their next mission. The FFVII scene, from entering 7th Heaven to Barret announced we were heading for Mako Reactor 5, is about 135 lines of dialogue, covering meeting Tifa, having a drink with her, Cloud fighting with Barret, a flashback to the childhood promise and Cloud finally deciding to do the next job with Avalanche. It's longer, but it's also denser; it contains both more dialogue boxes in total but is also saying more with each one. It's a very efficient bit of character and story exposition, even if it's marred by either writing or translation that makes some of the conversation bizarre or hard to follow.
Now, though, what about the Remake?
Well, hm.
The Remake's version of the arrival at the Sector 5 Slums is where my idea of replaying FFVIIR to refresh my memory and compare it 'live' to the original died and I started simply pulling up Youtube videos.
In the Remake, the time between "Cloud arrives by train at Sector 7" and "the group leaves for Sector 5" is, give or take, three to four hours. Instead of one argument and Cloud agreeing to the next job, Tifa tells Cloud she's found an apartment for him to rent, and he spends at least two days there just hanging out, doing sidequests, killing the local wildlife, running into criminals working for a mysterious boss. Avalanche go on another mission but, for whatever reason, they can't or don't want to afford Cloud's services, so he just stays behind in the slums with Tifa for a while.
Notably, this whole extended stretch includes maybe my favorite sequence in the game, Mad Dash, which is a whole chapter in which Jessie asks Cloud to take her to the top plate to visit her parents, who are middle-class Shinra employees; during that scene, Cloud gets into a motorbike chase with Shinra security forces - until the party is crashed by ROCHE, THE SPEED DEMON, SOLDIER THIRD CLASS, my favorite dude.
I love Roche because he offers us a direct demonstration of what people hear when Cloud says he's an 'ex-SOLDIER'; he offers us the template for expectation of Shinra's elite. He's a bombastic, quirky super-soldier who loves theatrics, performs flamboyant and impossible stunts (specifically motorbike tricks), and is completely disruptive to normal Shina security operation to the point that both times he shows up, the standard forces' reaction is to immediately pull back and let him do his thing, while at the same time being kind of bad at his job because he's more interested in the excitement of a duel with a strong opponent than with actually protecting Shinra property and capturing criminals. He's an over-the-top shounen villain, and it's very easy to see why someone would want him on their side while at the same time not trusting him to do the job on his own. Honestly, in contrast Cloud looks downright professional.
Also it's just a great scene for building up on Jessie, Biggs and Wedge's characters. None of them are playable, but they're with Cloud the entire time trying to aid however they can, and they come across as, well, 'competent but human' - they're all skilled operators, they just can't operate in the realm of SOLDIERs and other hypercompetent protagonists. Jessie's whole little family drama in particular is really sweet, and it gives us a look at what life is like on the top plates (also, she is flirting outrageously with Cloud the whole time, and his repeated shooting down of her advances is hilarious).
This is combined with a narrative throughline about Tifa coming to the decision of actively helping Avalanche with the next bombing, even if she finds the idea distasteful, which doesn't exist here because she has no hesitation to begin with. By the time all of this has unfolded (plus a weird attack by metatextual ghosts), Jessie, Biggs and Wedge are all some degree of out of commission and have to sit out of the Reactor raid, leaving only Barret, Tifa and Cloud to tackle it, whereas here the gang's all here.
What's weirdly missing from Remake is that we never end up going down that pinball machine elevator. So we never get to see Barret's Mancave. That's a shame.
Anyway, Jessie, Biggs and Wedge are my blorbos and I love them.
Alright, back to it.
Barret shoos everyone out of the car and, in a shocking display of bravery, the suit actually challenges him over it, though weakly and stammering. He then commits the mistake of trying to fluff himself up by saying that Avalanche warned there would be more bombing, so "only devoted Shinra employees would go to Midgar on a day like today." This immediately causes Barret to become furious, but he is held back by Tifa; the Shinra employee just cowers on his seat while Avalanche discuss their plans.
Barret is… I'm not sure to what extent the game intends him to be funny as opposed to cool. Like, he's a passionate guy who cares about the planet and has a machine gun for an arm, but also he has a very short temper that's regularly used for comedy in contrast to Cloud's Mr I Don't Care demeanor. I like him, but - the thing is, I played Remake before, and Remake Barret is the Most Charismatic Man To Ever Live. His modeling and voice acting came together in an absolutely outstanding way. If he took off his glasses, stared me in the eye and asked me to help him save the planet I'd be in an Avalanche outfit before I could finish saying 'Yes sir!'
Now, as warned by Jessie previously, Shinra has gone into security mode, and their fake IDs won't hold up - so Barret's plan is to jump off the train. Ballsy, that's for sure. Unfortunately, Shinra played us for fools - they moved the ID checks, and they trigger ahead of our expected point of egress. Uh-oh!
What follows is a little weird. Basically, each train car locks in a sequence, so we have 15 seconds to cross each one. That's easy enough; however, there are people in each car, and we can try to talk to them - but we have just 15 seconds to do it. There's no particular benefit to doing that, the game just decided to cram a lot extremely optional, extremely missable dialogue in that sequence. All of it incidental, like, huh, the Underwear Bandits:
A car with three guys who got literally robbed of the clothes off their back. This is such a weird detail.
Oh! There's a couple rewards, actually - two guys just give us an item if we're quick enough to talk to them.
We make it to the end of the train, where the whole group are standing in front of the open door waiting for the right time to jump - Jessie, Biggs and Wedge are all in disguise, amusingly enough:
Cloud: "...You look great, just like a man."
Jessie: "Yay! I'm so happy… I think?"
Cloud, you dolt, that's not the compliment she was looking for.
Jessie, Biggs and Wedge decide to stay behind with their disguises and fake IDs, and Tifa, Cloud and Barret jump out of the train one after the other.
That's a fucking lie, Barret.
In case you were wondering what Tifa's weapon of choice is, she punches people. And kicks them.
My wife.
Our way is barred by security sensors, so we use that hole to the side to enter the vents.
Shinra… Shinra has an open vent… Large enough for a human being to go through… That goes into their complex… Set up on the wrong side of their security sensor barrier.
Holy shit, they deserve to get blown up.
Our new enemies include fish who can spit water bubbles that put characters asleep. Do not ask me to explain this.
We move through an industrial area where we find the blorbos waiting for us. When we run into Jessie, she apologize for the issue with the ID check - she modified Cloud's ID and it triggered the sensors, and now she blames herself. Then it's more vent crawling.
It definitely feels like there's a division of labour in Avalanche where Jessie, Biggs and Wedge are on some level aware of their non-protagonist status and stay out of fights, leaving the combat and mission-critical stuff to Barret, Cloud and Tifa. Now, Cloud is a super-soldier, and Barret is a mountain of a man who replaced his arm with a machine gun, but what are Tifa's qualification? As far as I can tell she's just A Girl who is good enough at kickboxing that she can take out giant robots. Odd. I wonder if something will be made out of this.
Once we're inside the reactor, it's literally identical to Reactor 1 but with a different color filter.
It's all going pretty alright so far and gives us some chance to experiment with Tifa. Her Limit Break, Beat Rush, is a… slot machine…? It has a single slot which reads either "Hit" or "Yeah!" I've only managed to get the "Hit," and it barely does more damage than her punches. Underwhelming.
As we approach the reactor, though, and just like last time, some kind of vision comes over Cloud. Only this time, he's not just hearing some words, no… This time he grips his head in pain and goes into a full on flashback.
…is that Tifa?
Is she wearing a cowboy outfit?
Okay so I guess Texas really is canon to the FFVII setting, damn.
Tifa is kneeling next to who I can only assume is her dead father, as well as a pretty impressive katana.
Tifa: "Sephiroth… Did Sephiroth do this to you? Sephiroth… SOLDIER… Mako Reactors… Shinra… I hate them all!"
She then picks up the katana, and heads straight into that reactor chamber at the top of the screen.
Okay. So. I guess there is more to Tifa than meets the eye. She has a personal grudge to settle with Shinra and that 'Great Sephiroth' she and Cloud were talking admiringly about in a previous flashback, and with SOLDIER - but she doesn't seem to be holding it against Cloud.
Now, what's weird is that Cloud is there in this flashback, yet it is framed as a painful, surging memory he doesn't have context for. As if he'd suppressed it somehow. Intriguing.
As Cloud emerges from his trance, Barret tells him to get over himself and Tifa asks if he's alright; Cloud almost says something to her, but then says 'never mind,' and the group moves to put the bomb on the reactor. Once again, Barret asks Cloud to do it himself, saying the fact that he's some old friend of Tifa from long ago isn't enough to make him trust him. Once the bomb is set (no timer this time), we go to make our escape.
It's incidentally good that there is no timer, because there is an incredibly frustrating minigame where we have to time the unbearably slow animation of Cloud pushing a button in synch with Barret and Tifa and I fail it like, twenty times. I hate this.
However, as soon as we are on the bridge above the lower city, Shinra pulls its trap.
Shinra's own president has decided to come in person to witness Avalanche's latest misdeeds. He looks… Like you'd expect a guy called 'President Shinra' to look; he's a somewhat portly old man with an expensive suit and a beard.
The President fakes not even remembering who these pesky ants he's dealing with are, and Barret proudly boasts their name, but it's the exchange that follows that I find really interesting.
Cloud: "Long time no see, sir."
President Shinra: "...Long time no see? Oh… You. You're the one who quit SOLDIER and joined Avalanche. I knew you'd been exposed to Mako, from the look in your eyes. Tell me, traitor… What was your name?"
Cloud: "Cloud."
President Shinra: "Forgive me for asking, but I can't be expected to remember everyone's name. Unless you became another Sephiroth. Aah, Sephiroth… He was brilliant. Perhaps too brilliant."
Barret: "Don't give a damn 'bout none of that! This place's goin' up with a big BANG soon! Serves y'all right!"
President Shinra: "And such a waste of good fireworks, just to get rid of vermin like you…"
Barret: "VERMIN!? That's all you can say? VERMIN!? Shinra's the VERMIN for killing the Planet! Guess that'd make you King VERMIN! So shu'up, jackass!"
President Shinra: "...you are beginning to bore me. I'm a very busy man, so if you'll excuse me… I have a dinner I must attend."
Man, Barret really doesn't get the best repartie in these exchanges.
But it's interesting - the 'look in your eyes' President Shinra mentions is more explicit in later, 3D takes on the character, where Cloud's eyes have a particular, vivid blue-green color that you wouldn't necessarily think is unnatural on its own but which becomes obvious once you know to look for it in both Cloud and Roche. I take it this is their super-soldier program's secret - direct exposure to Mako energy providing enhanced capabilities.
And all that stuff about Sephiroth suggests that, in the time between Cloud and Tifa's childhood promise and today, "the Great Sephiroth" (he's referred to as "the great war hero" in the Remake) fell from grace, and is now referred to by President Shinra in the past tense. From the way he's talking, it seems like he's saying he would consider Avalanche and Cloud to be worth remembering the name of if they caused as much problems as Sephiroth once did, but as it stands, they're nothing more than pests. It is interesting that President Shinra has heard of a rogue SOLDIER, even if he didn't care about his name, and that Cloud recognizes him immediately and acts oddly deferential in spite of this.
It seems the destruction of one, possibly two Mako Reactors if this bomb goes off doesn't bother the President all that much, which is kinda wild. Like, if Three Miles Island was a terrorist incident you'd think it'd become a national obsession, you know? The Remake recontextualizes this in a way that at least makes the President's attitude make sense but at the same time takes away a lot of the protagonists' heat, by revealing that Shinra wants the reactor blown up so they can blame it on the foreign nation of Wutai and use it as a casus belli to invade a long-standing rival. It's going for a 'you foolish heroes were pawns in our great political games all along' and I don't think I vibe with it - the destruction of the reactors should be Avalanche's own success or tragedy to face.
Anyway, President Shinra unleashes a giant robot and escapes on a helicopter.
Look, I have no notes here, this is top-tier corporate supervillainy.
President Shinra: "Meet 'Airbuster,' a techno-soldier. Our Weapon Development Department created him. I'm sure the data he'll extract from your dead bodies will be of great use to us in future experiments."
Tifa: "THIS is from SOLDIER?"
Cloud: "No way! That's just a machine."
Barret: "I don't care what it is!! I'm gonna bust him up!"
Engage battle.
Hmmm.
Where is SOLDIER? Like, there was a number of reasons that made sense for them not to be on site the first time we attacked Shinra, but they clearly ramped up their security protocols here, yet their elite task force is nowhere to be seen - instead they are deploying some kind of advance super-robot which Cloud treats with contempt at the very idea it might be related to SOLDIER.
I'm starting to wonder if there isn't some kind of internal power play or purge and if SOLDIER isn't being phased out in favor of more reliable machines.
Airbuster… looks kind of ridiculous, not gonna lie. He's made of a single block and he looks like a toy you'd put on your shelf, you know, one of those with the slightly convex base that you can make go back and forth on its base? His main attack is to bomb us until it runs out of ammo then use energy attacks.
Airbuster is unusual for a boss in that it has a gimmick working against it; the fight is a side attack, and whenever Airbuster is attacked from behind, it takes massively increased damage before turning around to face the person who attacked it. A single Limit Break for Cloud hits it for 600 damage, half of its HP total.
All in all, the battle is quickly folded. Unfortunately, destroying the robot causes it to explode, which…
Oops.
With the bomb about to explode and Cloud hanging on for dear life on the other side of the chasm, there's genuinely nothing Barret and Tifa can do to help him, but it it's still a bit callous to leave him to die like that. Tifa shouts to Cloud to not die, there's "still so much I want to tell you," and Cloud responds "I know, Tifa," which feels like it might be a reference to that one exchange from Empire Strikes Back? Also Barret asks "Hey, you gonna be alright?" and Cloud can answer with either looking tough or saying "I don't know if I can hold on," and picking the latter results in Barret shit-talking you for "cryin' like a woman," wow. Real sexism in the workplace hours.
But then, these tearful exchanges are interrupted by The Bomb.
This is some high drama, I love it.
And on this literal cliffhanger (oooooh!) we're going to stop for today. We're still making our way through the first 'session' of the game I did, I didn't play it again in between updates, there's just a lot to be going through and I may need to adjust my workflow to adjust.
Man though, the game really is cooking with Midgar. There was a real, huge change being made in leaving behind six games' worth of map-based exploration where you're always released onto the worldmap within the first 30 minutes of the game at most, and instead putting the player on a 100% linear journey inside the sprawling megalopolis of Midgar, but it's paying off. That place looked full and lived in in a way no previous Final Fantasy town really did; even comparing it to its closest aesthetic equivalent, Vector, there's so much more vibrancy to Midgar. So far, this is absolutely a success.
Honestly, it makes me a little worried the game can't live up to it after we left the city, but we'll see about that later.
Next Time: The Girl Who Was Named Wrong!
- Location
- England, unfortunately.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Midgar fucks.
Seriously, even with me being something of a debby downer with this game, Midgar fucks. The pacing, the aesthetic, it's so damn on point. It's such a good opening.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Gotta post Jacob Gellar's video on how much Midgar fucks.
(Slight spoiler visuals)
View: https://youtu.be/hQAQ92dsOw4
(Slight spoiler visuals)
View: https://youtu.be/hQAQ92dsOw4
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's my opinion that FF7's strongest stretch, for the longest time period, is in Midgar. There's plenty of other good bits in the game, but it loses something once you're out of the city.
Somehow it's weird to see someone within our subculture here be openly horny about a woman who has, like, yet to commit any warcrimes.
- Location
- the Republic
- Pronouns
- He/They
Have I mentioned recently that our LPer has impeccable taste? The amount of culture in this thread is just off-the-charts, really.
Omi, did you not make the connection that the Avalanche trio were the ones who stole their clothes? Were you distracted by your Tifa appreciation?
Thozmp
Gets my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
Texas is more then a place. It's a state of mind.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
See, here I'm going to voice a discordant opinion, and say that, while Midgar is objectively great, the rest of the game is actually way better, and the overfocus that Midgar gets into all of the various companion pieces is one of the greatest disservices popular culture ever made to FFVII.
I'll elaborate more once doing so doesn't requires massive spoilers, but I do think the fact that Crisis Core is the best of the spin-offs is not unrelated to the fact that it's the one which has the least amount of Midgar in it.
- Location
- USA
Shinra as a brand is kind of the gold standard for whatever exactly it is going for. Like, they are post/pre apoc corporate/government villains, but also gangsters and mad scientists and patsies and comic relief. It's like 8 baby villains standing on each other's shoulders, but the mashup that results is iconic and, I think, unforgettable.
Perhaps I should say that they are the only shadow that someone like Barrett could possibly cast, or vice versa. Anyway, love love love early FFVII.
Perhaps I should say that they are the only shadow that someone like Barrett could possibly cast, or vice versa. Anyway, love love love early FFVII.
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's been awhile, but I don't remember most materia being that difficult to upgrade. I may have grinded a bit here and there when I ran into bosses I had trouble with, but I easily had the highest level magic going into the final dungeon.
I don't always agree with Omicron but when I do it's about best girl in videogames.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I mean, arguing this one too hard is gonna devolve into spoilerblock warfare, but my view is that the rest of the game is much more uneven, whereas the Midgar sequence (especially if you include the bits directly thereafter, to the first cave or so) is just consistently top-flight.