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.
While my overall memories of FF7 are vague since I haven't replayed it in over a decade (until now, where I'm just... about around where the LP is), but one thing that absolutely stuck in my mind as a talking point for when it came up was exactly this - Midgar is
long. Not "an entire disk of a three disk game" long, but still it's a starter city that you don't leave for multiple hours where in previous games, you'd already be halfway to reaching World 2 (leaving the floating continent, hitting the dwarven underground, Galuf's World, World of Ruin, etc.)
Wait, is Texas canon to the Final Fantasy VII setting?
I do not know what to do with that information.
Look, all I know is there's a
lot of Cowgirl Tifa fanart.
Tifa, our third playable character and the hottest woman in video game history. Who said that? I didn't say anything.
I'm just saying, can any other video game woman claim to have made it into the Italian Senate? No? Then clearly Tifa is the greatest woman in video game history.
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.
This is... probably a bad translation thing, honestly. Came up last update but the PC version of the game on Steam seems to be almost one for one with the original PS1 version I played, for better or for worse. It' absolutely something to keep in mind considering up to this point, you've been entirely playing Remasters that had plenty of room to fully re-translate their games with a presumably dedicated team rather than "we locked three guys in a room overnight and they gave us this script".
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.
Seeing as the first option is the one that gets you positive points with Tifa, I took it as a "how could you say such a hurtful thing, of course I care about you" dialogue, but it is kind of vague yeah.
'the best there is, just like Sephiroth.'
THERE HE IS EVERYBODY
IT'S THE GUY, THE HYPE MAN, KATANA LONG HAIR BOY
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.
Cloud is just living the classic murderhobo lifestyle, drifting from place to place killing anything for small sums of money. Respect, it's the fantasy lifestyle we all want.
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.
From my vague recall, I don't think it really matters much unless you
seriously stack someone with nothing but Materia of a single type. Like just going off of that screenshot and the slot counts, I'd assume you max out at like... 8 slots each on weapons and armor, which magic Materia would give a grand total of +/- 32 to your stats, sure... except this isn't FFV or FFVI anymore with things like class-dependent stats, or only ever getting boosts from Magicite. In FFVII, every character just has their own base stats and growths that vary from person to person and increase with levelups, so it's not nearly as big of a potential modifier as it looks.
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.
Of course, also of note is that you don't have the FFVI problem of needing to grind up magic on every individual character. Materia can be transfered, so if you've got Bolt 3 on Tifa and she gets booted out of the party for someone else, you can just slap the Materia on them instead and they're just as potentially magic capable.
I
think Materia was generally scaled decently well with AP from what I remember, such that unless you go out of your way you don't have "whoops tier 3 magic halfway through Midgar" but it's also not "I've reached the final dungeon and I can finally cast Fire 2". Could be off though, I know kid me eventually found guides on best AP grinds and how to get infinite stat boosters and went to town.
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.
So one thing you didn't mention that's kind of important about the All Materia - since it levels like any other Materia, each of those levels is
how many times you're allowed to use the All effect per battle. Meaning at base level, you can slap this on to multi-target your fire or cure spell... only once. Point being, make it count.
Or you know, buy Recover and All for every member of the party because
obviously.
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.
So, this here? This is one of the reasons the Remake really loses me (beyond... obvious plot reasons later that many a detractor has probably spoken about at length, and anyone who knows much about the Remake knows what I'm talking about). The original FFVII is three disks long, and Midgar while a significant portion of that first disk is hardly all of it.
The Remake, on the other hand, bloats up Midgar's content so much that it's almost the entirety of the game, which makes the fact that they're releasing the Remake as multiple games years apart from each other become "boy can't wait for Final Fantasy Seven Remake Part Seven: Reimagning to release in 2077 and finish the story!" It's still a fine game, but... absolutely a major issue with it imo.
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.
Did I say fine game? I mean
worst game. Remake officially Cancelled, going to my Twitter as we speak, no Mancave no Good Rating.
Oh! There's a couple rewards, actually - two guys just give us an item if we're quick enough to talk to them.
Since Omi didn't bring it up, I assume he didn't even notice the fact that he got pickpocketed in car 3. Whoops, RIP Gil
Once we're inside the reactor, it's literally identical to Reactor 1 but with a different color filter.
On one hand, part of my brain calls this lazy dungeon design. On the other... why
wouldn't mass produced reactors have nearly the exact same layout?
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.
For now I'll just say stick with it, because Tifa has a fairly unique Limit Break system compared to other party members. As for the Hit/Yeah!, it's just a damage modifier iirc, where Yeah! does slightly more damage than Hit.
…is that Tifa?
Is she wearing a cowboy outfit?
Okay so I guess Texas really is canon to the FFVII setting, damn.
Oh, yeah. That would explain the fanart.
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.
Hilariously, this is
also one of my most distinct memories of Midgar from when I originally played FFVII: failing this minigame over and over. I kind of figured coming in as an adult that it couldn't be
that bad.
Nope, it's actually just a shit minigame, why the hell wouldn't one of the party members at least shout "okay press now!" or something??? You just have to somehow internally time it right, because Cloud swings his arms so slow that you can't really do it on reaction. Very silly.
Man, Barret really doesn't get the best repartie in these exchanges.
I'll be honest, the main thought standing out for me in this entire sequence was just "Barry please you have a
machine gun on your arm, just start spray and praying Mr President doesn't even have any guards." But I guess talking is a free action.
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.
Well, the other main gimmick is that each time it turns around it punches someone in the face for daring to hit it in the back... but when you kill it fast enough, that doesn't really matter.
picking the latter results in Barret shit-talking you for "cryin' like a woman," wow. Real sexism in the workplace hours.
You know, this doesn't really strike me as the smartest thing to say when there is, in fact, a woman who is childhood friends with the guy you're making fun of standing right next to you? And who is proficient in "punching people really hard" while you're standing over a death drop gap?
