@Kuja: That seems interesting, but how would people deal with the problem of people stealing electricity from Shinra with illegal powerlines and such? I mean, of course if Shinra itself discovers it that might mean that a troop of faceless mooks with assault rifles led by either a superhuman killer or a suited assassin will come to punish people indiscriminately, but that's never going to stop people who think they're smart enough to avoid getting caught from trying. It seems like it'd be a seriously big issue communities would need to have a solution for.
Oh yeah, I can easily imagine a whole byzantine system of corruption built up around the power system in every which way. Legbreakers grabbing someone dumb enough to get caught. Bosses who skim a little power off the top. People who effectively become billpayers by virtue of steady bribes to make officials look the other way. False accusations of power-siphoning. And every once in awhile Shinra sends in a SWAT team to make an example of someone so people remember who's in charge.
Somewhere in the sector 3 slums there's a welder who's never worked for Shinra a day in his life grabbing a line chef by the front of his shirt and shaking him while screaming what the FUCK is wrong with you don't splice into someone's cable you dumb FUCK if you need direct access then pay the FUCKING premium if I don't finish this job under budget I'm gonna weld your eyeballs SHUT.
We do actually see how Aerith pays the bills by selling flowers.
It's actually coming up in the next part, at least if Omi talks to the right person. Turns out Aerith decides the price of the flower based on how much she likes you. Cloud gets charged a gil, I think one NPC gets charged like 100 gil, and another she doesn't like so she charges a stupid amount of cash for one.
In other words, Aerith uses price discrimination. Maybe that's why Shinra are after her? They want to groom her to be the next CEO! Yes I know that's not the reason, I just thought it was funny.
The Roman columns make me think Midgar was an old, old city (or cluster of cities) with a rich multi-layered history that could be seen in its many ruins and relics, and then Shinra just bulldozed it all to build the sky death pizza.
Yeah, that absolutely tracks. It wasn't so long ago that we were using Roman ruins as free building material sources, and Shinra is a corporate state, likely to have the same respect towards ancient architecture as an oil company that stumbled on a bunch of Roman amphoras alone on a moonless night with the bulldozer engine already running.
Here is a bit of trivia that you would know if you had the manual for the original release:
Tifa is twenty, Cloud is twenty one, and Aerith is twenty two. Not a super important bit of info, but even as a kid that stood out to me as intentional.
... There's a giant robot hand on the ground in the tunnel, and it doesn't look to match the rest of the construction equipment around it. However, it does sort of resemble the Hell House's limbs.
Fun fact: It's not the only one! Here's from a screenshot I had to delete due to image limits:
There's a Shinra-branded robot arm sticking out of the rubble! And here's from earlier in Sector 7:
Looks like a robotic helmet/cockpit to me!
So yeah, I think it's pretty clear that Shinra was using some pretty massive robots a long time ago - whether as construction equipment, or for warfare in some kind of fucked up giant robot war, it's impossible to tell at this stage. But it does lend credence to the idea of the Hell House being some leftover robot house-mimic thing.
And speaking of transcription debates... the retranslation's guides are very keen to assert (it's a footnote everywhere) that he should be "Leno" based on that being Latin for "pimp" and/or "seducer." Again, it's nitpicking, and "Reno" seems pretty reasonable to me just for the mob associations the name conjures up more naturally.
The first thing that comes to my mind when I see a guy named Reno is Johnny Cash singing "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die." Which, for a thuggish black ops guy, is pretty apt. So yeah, I think the translators made a good call on this one.
Would it be possible to get the Remake comparisons in a spoiler? I hope that's not too much extra work, but I am intending on playing the FF7 Remake at some point... eventually (eyes Steam library).
25+ years ago, this map took me for-fucking ever. I had to quit playing the game at that point and go back the next time. Why? Because I couldn't figure out how to get up that cliff beside the yellow crane thing. Walking into it doesn't work, you can't walk along the crane arm like it seems to imply by angle of going "through" it. No. Instead, after hours of fighting random enemies and examining the guide and just screaming, I realized that something I can't even make out on this image, a kind of faint reddish-pinkish area against the cliff wall, was a walkway.
Ugh, I still remember how fucking infuriating that was.
The walkable 'faint-reddish pink area' isn't on this picture at all, because it's not actually part of the pre-rendered background. It looks like this:
I believe it is meant to be a construction beam. Now, in this version of the game, it stands out obnoxiously from the background precisely because of the difference between this incredibly low-poly modeled and the background it's set against, but without the Steam port's upscaled graphics, on a CRT with grain? I could absolutely believe you'd miss it for several hours.
So, just a heads up, you've missed something in Sector V Omi. It's not plot relevant, nor is it something you can miss permanently (that's coming later) but it's also one of those miniquests where you'll never know about it without being told.
And looking it up, apparently it shows up in the Yuffie DLC of the Remake. Of course, I'm talking about the Happy Turtle Ad Campaign. In the original, it's the Turtle's Paradise sidequest. Unlike in the Remake, which had the 6 flyers around Midgar, the Turtle's Paradise flyers are scattered all over the world. The first one is in the room with the kid where you could have stolen 5 gil.
You'll get other chances to pick it up so don't worry about going back for it right now.
Oh, I don't think I missed it? I just didn't bring it up because I didn't realize it was connected to a side quest, but I found that poster. At least unless there's something specific you need to beside just read it?
Oh, I don't think I missed it? I just didn't bring it up because I didn't realize it was connected to a side quest, but I found that poster. At least unless there's something specific you need to beside just read it?
I'm guessing since I don't know the original Japanese script, but this is probably "Nee-san", which does translate directly into a casual "big sister". But in context, it's used to politely yet casually address any young woman, or at least any woman who you want to imply is young enough. Kind of like "Miss".
I think the male equivalent ("Nii-san") would be be more familiar in English, as we're used to "bro" to call anyone from friends to strangers. Reno speaks in a very stereotypical gangster way, like a low-ranking movie Yakuza, so it makes sense that he'd use this kind of slang.
The other possibility is "aneki", which is a much more casual/rougher way of saying "big sister", but that's usually used for people you respect greatly. For a FFXIV example, Runar calls Y'shtola this, and in context would be translated as "boss lady". So probably not what Reno was going for.
Ah, then the context changes again. Reno using "onee-chan" is very over-familiar of him, and Omicron's initial puzzlement of "it sounds like they already know each other" is accurate. It turns him from a slang-y casual speaker into an arrogant jerk who doesn't bother with personal boundaries, or at least someone who tries hard to cultivate the image of being an arrogant jerk.
It's a particular sort of arrogance in that using that term means he believes Aerith should already accept that she has a familiar relationship with him, as he implies he has with her. Interestingly he's not condescending, or he'd be using 嬢ちゃん ("Jou-chan"), ie "little lady". In general, it's the "-chan" suffix which makes him over-familiar.
Tangential, but I'm reminded of how stereotypical Reno is supposed to sound, with his appending "と" after almost every line. A possible way of translating it would be to make him slur and drawl out every line, like he's being deliberately lazy and indifferent. As mentioned, Reno acts like a low-ranking Yakuza as per Japanese pop culture, pretending he's bigger and cooler than he really is.
The primary things I'm looking for are quicksaving, acceleration/autobattling, maybe a way to turn off random encounters. Also a way to run the game in borderless mode, which I did find.
I've downloaded the 7th Heaven mod manager and looked through their catalogue, then on Nexus's FFVII library, but I couldn't find what I was looking for.
An emulator would cover several of these aspects easily, but 1) I haven't used emulators in like a decade and am having trouble getting one to work, 2) even if it did work I'm not sure it will support screenshotting without looking awful.
Ultimately I might just run the game as-is just because finding an answer to my problems is turning into more of a headache than just actually playing the game.
Yeah, going into mods without a guide or a specific recommendation for a singular mod is always sort of an adventure in itself. Not helped by the fact that every modding community has its own conventions and that something like FFVII has likely multiple modding communities that have their own sets of priorities.
I swear I remember playing with a version of the game that allowed free saving. I remember it because it made me go "why the fuck do those save points even exist if I can just do this?"
I swear I remember playing with a version of the game that allowed free saving. I remember it because it made me go "why the fuck do those save points even exist if I can just do this?"
I don't know about free saving, but there is a XBox version of FFVII which has such QoL features as toggleable random encounters and a 3x accelerated mode to make battles go faster. It can be purchased on PC. It is, however, a different and separate version from the Steam version of the game, which lacks these features. So it's entirely possible that there exists a separate version of the game that was made for, idk, the PS3 online store or whatever, that had free saving that was never added to the Steam version.
The way Squeenix handles their PC ports is absolutely unhinged.
I don't know about free saving, but there is a XBox version of FFVII which has such QoL features as toggleable random encounters and a 3x accelerated mode to make battles go faster. It can be purchased on PC. It is, however, a different and separate version from the Steam version of the game, which lacks these features. So it's entirely possible that there exists a separate version of the game that was made for, idk, the PS3 online store or whatever, that had free saving that was never added to the Steam version.
The way Squeenix handles their PC ports is absolutely unhinged.
Oh, it was 100% a mod for the Steam version of the game. Or maybe it was a cheat for the PSP version...regardless, it was either Steam or PSP, since those are the only two I've played since 1997.
Oh, it was 100% a mod for the Steam version of the game. Or maybe it was a cheat for the PSP version...regardless, it was either Steam or PSP, since those are the only two I've played since 1997.
Well, switching and improving textures is an entirely different skillset than the quicksave. A lack of non-graphical mods often also hints that a game's code is a mess that noone wants to dive into.
Yeah, the order of difficulty in modding is usually:
Changing text files (eg engine configs, often ingame text strings for translations etc)
Adding extra stuff the game already supports adding extra stuff of (eg maps in an RTS, sometimes units/costumes/etc for dlc and so on, varies by engine, older games often don't really support this at all but for more 'widely used' game engines like Unreal/Unity/etc it's well documented)
Changing existing assets (textures, sounds, models sometimes, again varies by engine; sometimes this is easier than 2, sometimes it's not, god help you if it's animated somehow. Have fun getting the file formats correct for older game engines)
Inserting new assets the engine is not expecting to look for (harder, because you have to inform the engine about them and tell it where/when to load them. Most 'total conversion' or 'custom campaign' mods sit at or around here)
Anything involving a hex editor
Inserting new code (aka 'vive la dll files', if the engine has no public api or documentation have fucking fun lol). Easier if the engine has mod support like the Source engine / is widely used like Unity, painful otherwise.
Changing existing code, which very very probably involves hex editors, trial and error, sacrificing goats to decompilers and staring at log files wishing the devs had done a Super Mario 64 and published a dev build by mistake. If there are no ingame console commands you can access, you are doomed.
Hi-res texture/model packs are at 3. Adding an autosave is very easily 7. Reaching tier 7 is by no means impossible but for niche engines it does take a modding community pooling together several brands of lunatic, with potentially months to years before solutions pop out.
