Remake changes are spoilered in my own posts as a consideration for readers who haven't experienced the Remake and might wish to be surprised by its changes, including one who specifically asked so. I don't particularly mind whether or not people also spoiler it in the replies.
I've heard that the Turks are victims of being rushed through development, and I'd believe it. The Remake's version where they're morally grey and conflicted about it at least makes all their component parts feels reasonably coherent.
Remake Barret gets some great bits in the aftermath – everyone does, really – and the ending of the Three Stooges was devastating. But I think during the drop itself, FF7 is actually stronger than it's counterpart. This shot here is nightmarish, getting to see the sky falling outside the window somebody's home, from the perspective of some poor bastard sitting on the sofa watching the news:
The Remake has more of an adventure-y type music as the team grapples down to safety which feels weird to me.
It's a very, very good shot, and the use of silence and diegetic music in the clip of the fall is genuinely gripping.
As for the Turks, them being rushed through development would explain a lot about their Advent Children/Remake characterization - they seem to have been meant to be more complex, nuanced characters than what we've seen of Reno and Tseng so far, and I could totally buy that this was just left on the cutting room floor.
Oh hey, it's one of those places kid me game overed on. I don't know if it was a lack of healing, or just not dealing with the pyramids, but I distinctly recall getting my ass kicked here. On the other hand, this playthrough it was a lot easier because I already had three restore materia because obviously if you have the option to give every party member easy healing access, you do it even if only one has All to go with it.
As a side note, four hours in now I haven't had a single wipe or character KO, which I think may be a record in any FF game so far? VII is easy in comparison, at least early game.
It also has an incredibly low density of encounters. Like... There just aren't that many fights. To the point that it feels weird.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Is it because it should be "handful of his friends" with an s?
Generally speaking I find pointing out typos to me irritating at the best of time, telling me there's an issue without pointing out what it actually is or why it severely impairs comprehension of the sentence is worse.
I…dunno if I count because I DID watch Advent Children at least.
But my read is basically something something akin to how when one dies their body will be consumed by scavengers in what may be poetically called the great circle of life, the whole 'returned to the planet' thing might be a mystical equivalent of that.
Though I would argue anything where your soul is like, reabsorbed then begs the question of is that process 'zero sum'? Because zero sim negative 'energy is gradually being lost, means eventually death comes for the planet itself and uhh.
I don't like the concept of Entropic heat-death.
'Zero-sum positive' of souls feeding back more power than it takes to make a new one? That feels like something that would justify 'ghosts' fairly easily….
Something to consider next time I world-build.
Or you guys if you swipe this idea for your own use. Go ahead! You might take this places I might never dream of.
Edit:Soo Reno's baton is electric? I thought it was just some kind of fold-up stick Reno kept smacking his fellow Shinra dude with 'dunno if that bald guy was Tseng or not'…
I have only background familiarity with the plot of FF7, osmosed over the years indirectly, and I admit I don't have any guesses as to what kind of conclusions you think could be drawn from that and all. Like obviously there's things one could guess, but those facts aren't at this juncture suggesting a specific direction to me.
Well, if _I_ said it, I'd be implying that maybe only the Ancients actually have souls, but perhaps _you_ mean something different?
Although, I suppose I'm not an FF virgin, it's just been literal decades since I played VII and I've both forgotten most of it and am trying to take your line solely in context of what you've played so far.
Okay, never mind, normal people have spirits. P-zombie crisis averted.
Maybe I shouldn't have been as scrupulous about limiting myself to information that had already come up at the time you wrote that sentence.
Hm. Not quite sure what you're getting at. Obviously the Ancient religion is literally true, because there are only two kinds of religion in RPGs: objective truth, and vast conspiracy. And Aerith proves it's the former, not the latter.
Mako is presumably undifferentiated soul-stuff, and Materia is obviously related to Magicite, but this time it's more ancestor-worship-y than being the corpse of a magical individual.
It also makes me wonder, especially given that Aerith can sense death, if the Ancients are psychopomps. Shinra massacred them so they could steal the soul-juice for their own purposes, and the Ancients were in the way. Then something went a little awry in the ecosystem and they realized that the needed Ancients for… something. Sephiroth was their big play for fixing that problem (not enough Ancients? Make a super-Ancient with Mako!) but he went rogue so they need a replacement to try the next plan.
…Oh, ew. They better not be trying to breed more Ancients using Aerith…
Mako is "the life blood of the Planet." The souls of the dead "return to the Planet." The conclusion that Mako is literally the souls of the dead, and that Shinra is burning through the actual souls of everyone who's ever lived, is pretty horrifying, and one the game hasn't drawn directly so far, but it's my current theory.
Yes, absolutely. I meant to add that in my post, but it's a trivial issue to fix if you feel it's an issue at all (which I do), you just need Don Corneo to have a radio in his office and like two lines from Tifa, bam, done, it was all a vital mission in the end.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Is it because it should be "handful of his friends" with an s?
Generally speaking I find pointing out typos to me irritating at the best of time, telling me there's an issue without pointing out what it actually is or why it severely impairs comprehension of the sentence is worse.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Is it because it should be "handful of his friends" with an s?
Generally speaking I find pointing out typos to me irritating at the best of time, telling me there's an issue without pointing out what it actually is or why it severely impairs comprehension of the sentence is worse.
As a side note, four hours in now I haven't had a single wipe or character KO, which I think may be a record in any FF game so far? VII is easy in comparison, at least early game.
It also has an incredibly low density of encounters. Like... There just aren't that many fights. To the point that it feels weird.
Yeah playing with an actual developed brain and basic strategy, the closest I've come to dying so far in FFVII is... when I was spamming the steal command against a random encounter to see what they had, and even then it was immediately solved with the power of "Aeris casts cure all, entire party is healed for more HP than they have".
Maybe it picks up later as we get into more complicated enemy encounters and bosses, but maybe it's also just a game broken wide open by the incredible amount of free customization that is Materia.
The funniest part about Kai Leng is how there's actually One Easy Fix which while it hardly fixes him entirely, at least makes him almost feel threatening.
And that's modding out all his voice lines so he's a completely silent ninja man, instead of a cyber-weeb constantly trying to act cool while failing left and right even with being an author's pet. Man managed to get bodied by Thane on his literal deathbed, what a loser.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Is it because it should be "handful of his friends" with an s?
Generally speaking I find pointing out typos to me irritating at the best of time, telling me there's an issue without pointing out what it actually is or why it severely impairs comprehension of the sentence is worse.
My apologies. I don't really care about typos either, but this one has some innuendo/implications of groping that I was pretty sure you didn't intend. In the unlikely case that something similar happens again, I will be more direct.
Welcome back to Final Fantasy VII, the game that is forcing me to reconsider my conception of what a "dungeon" even is!
Last time, Shinra crashed the Sector 7 into the slums, killing most of everyone Barret and Tifa knew in a horrible man-made disaster. Now we're heading to Wall Market to find a way onto the top plate and the Shinra building.
On our way, we find the Sense Materia - it grants the effects of the old Libra spell (identifies the opponent's level, HP, MP and elemental weakness), only in this game it's no longer a spell - instead it's its own mechanic, a return to a very old implementation back in FF3. Interesting!
There's some new dialogue in Wall Market; people here are less horrified than people in Sector 7 were, seeming to mostly see it as an opportunity - a lot of the rubble from the collapse is is potentially valuable as salvage, so the weapon shop owner (the guy who keeps a tank in his backyard) has been raiding it ruthlessly. People also make oblique reference to climbing up to the top of the plate and to a "pipe" that might allow it. So let's visit the shop!
Our man here scavenged some usable batteries, and while he refuses to explain why, he's adamant that we'll need them if we want to successfully climb the plate. It's only a couple hundred gil, so sure.
While we're in Wall Market, we might as well check out Don Corneo's house. I don't expect to be let in again, but…
…hm.
The house is completely open, and completely empty. There are none of Don Corneo or his goons, except for…
Well!
Corneo's henchman Kotch is tied to the torture table. When we agree to free him, he explains what happened - not long after we left, Shinra troops broke into the estate to punish the Don for leaking information, grabbed him, and left; most other henchmen are probably either dead in the shoot-out, or scattered after their boss was gone.
I guess this clarifies the balance of power in Midgar. The Don's criminal operation existed at the sufferance of Shinra, rather than in spite of them. I'm honestly even tempted to read this as Shinra using the Corneo crime syndicate as a convenient way to keep the slums quiet - they allowed his operations to run because he was the effective proxy government of the Sector 6 Slums (and probably beyond) and meant Shinra themselves didn't have to bother with doing it themselves - kinda like how the American occupation government of Japan post-WW2 was lenient to outright cooperating with the yakuza at times, or how it cooperated with the Italian Mafia in Sicily - in a way organized crime behaves kind of like a state, which makes delegating state needs to them relatively practical! But once Corneo had fucked up, his usefulness was past. And I'm guessing it was the Turks that did the did - it seems like their kind of op. Once we have our explanation, Kotch is quick to run away before Shinra can come back.
Outside, we spot a group of children shouting about "something awesome" and heading out of a corner of the screen that wasn't obvious as an exit before. Once we're there…
Love the massive graffiti.
That little girl tells us that all her friends climbed up that wire, but she's scared to try it, and she tells us that it leads to the "upper world." Looks like we got our new destination. Cloud tells Barret there's no way they can manage to climb that high, and Barret points to the wire, referring to it as a "golden shiny wire of hope." Pffft. Barret, you're terrible at metaphors.
Let's head up.
This is aesthetic.
Although…
Is that graffiti at the bottom meant to be "Avalanche"? Or rather, AVERLANCHE? That is a pretty random misspelling. Jessie, Wedge, Biggs, which of you skipped school?
…oh, right. Well.
Once we crest the wall of the titular Wall Market, though, we get a glimpse of the ruins of Sector 7, and it's… Awesome in its terror, is how I would put it?
There's only a small sliver of it visible at this stage, but look at the enormity of it. That gigantic plate, collapsed, looks like a cracked mountain or an active volcano. One of the kids mentions that his dad told him Shinra did it - yeah, I think their effort to propagandize and bolster their image using the Sector collapse are going to run into some trouble. No wonder they're made Corneo babbled.
We don't climb all the way to the top of the plate using just that one cable, though. Rather, we are using the very destruction of Sector 7 to strike at the heart of Shinra - that is to say, our path up is made of the dangling debris at the cross-section where Sector 7 fell.
More cables, reinforced concrete blocks dangling from their rebar, chunks of road and piping, and more to come. At various points, we need to use the batteries we bought from Tank Guy to power up some kind of contraption to free the way - here, for instance, a fan or propeller whose blade we must alight to cross. In a later screen, a movable road barrier needs to be lifted to use as a ladder.
Look at this. An entire subway car, dangling into the void, framed by the twisted remains of its railway. And behind - the gap in the sky, the collapsed plate, and in the distance the rest of Midgar. This is so gorgeously composed.
There are no random encounters during the ascent, notably. The entire sequence is spent just slowly, laboriously climbing the path of ruin, until we finally reach the end. And when we do…
I like that they included the Buster Sword even though this scene uses Cloud's muppet model. The three protagonists bracing themselves as they take on the immensity of the Shinra building, the very heart of their enemy's power, is really cool.
We're only 5 hours into what's historically been a series of 20-30 hours games, but I'm sure that's fine, right?
Moving on to the next screen, Barret tells Cloud he must be familiar with this building, but Cloud is quick to disappoint him - it's the first time he's been there, in fact. Which, hey; SOLDIER is an elite combat organization, and this is a corporate HQ, an administrative area, so it kind of makes sense, yeah?
Yeah…
Apparently, we don't have to concern ourselves much with floor 1-60 of the building - they have low security. The real problem is above, where security gets tighter.
And here we come to another Iconic Moment in Gaming, one that I was vaguely aware of even before playing the Remake: the choice of how to approach Shinra HQ.
Barret says security's looking pretty light, so we should just head straight in, guns blazing. Tifa thinks that's a terrible idea, and everyone will just get swarmed in Shinra guards. Instead, she suggests sneaking in through a back entrance.
It's up to us which choice we pick, and they play out vastly differently - but in a way that's… really interesting to me?
If we follow Tifa's advice and look for a backdoor to sneak in, what we find is the escape stairs.
Which happen to run through the entirety of the building up to the 60th floor and have zero security. Because they're escape stairs, you can't just lock them.
They look like this:
It's the exact same stairwell, for 60 floors.
We just have to walk up.
The entire way.
There are no combat encounters. There's nothing.
There's just stairs.
59 flights of them.
This scene is apparently infamous. When I commented on Discord about having just wrapped it up, one of the first comments I received was "I see you chose to climb. I did that once. Never again." It seems to be seared into the memory of a generation of gamers as a seen that is, basically, comedic in the way it punishes you for 'playing it safe' with one of the most grueling, boring moments in video game.
And here's the thing:
It's… actually… fine?
The entire sequence takes, at most, 5 minutes. And Tifa, Barret and Cloud are talking the entire time. They're arguing about saving Aerith, Barret makes a comment about how "even Cloud" will fight altruistically, for someone else - it's the first real moment of Barret seeing Cloud as anything other than an annoying, amoral mercenary; in seeing Cloud chose to fight for someone else, his attitude towards the merc softens. Cloud rebuffs him, saying he doesn't care what Barret thinks, and then it's Tifa who laughs at that obvious cope - it's a scene in which the two truly see past Cloud's persona and into the vulnerable man beneath.
Then the conversation shifts to the characters wondering if this isn't some trap and this isn't actually some kind of endless stairway, then having an argument about Barret acting like a child asking "are we there yet" over and over…. Barret protests that only his gun-arm is machine, the rest of him is flesh and blood, as vulnerable as anyone, which is funny because Tifa, who is the only unmodified, baseline human in the party, is ahead of him in the stairs. Then there's some kind of joke about Tifa deliberately falling back behind the group when she realizes that anyone behind her could see up her microskirt, very anime of the game.
It's just a funny scene! It's five minutes of uninterrupted, characterful dialogue. This is objectively fine and everyone who's ever complained about this scene is a baby .
Or, hm, no, Tifa, no, I wasn't, you don't need to ramp it up, NO-
…
I have no idea what the translator was thinking.
I mean, I know it was the 90s, but this is such a weird choice of language for Tifa to use. It's so offensive but also so… childish? It makes her sound like a schoolyard bully, which is the opposite of her entire displayed personality so far. And this is completely made up by the English translator! In Japanese she says something like "Don't say stuff like that," because he had a (genuinely funny for how over the top it is for the circumstances) line about how he wanted to see Marlene again but he's going to die here, on these stairs. It's such a wildly inappropriate line.
I mean, it's not the worst slur she could have decided to call Barret. That's it. Tifa is a gamer now. She is using Gamer Words.
Anyway.
The group finally reaches the top of the stairs, and we're free.
This is a fun scene, it takes only a little time, and it provides good characterization (except for Tifa). Why is everyone acting like it ate their dog.
So what happens if we instead decide to go in guns blazing?
Well…
We enter through the front gate, to a lobby full of Shinra employees and guards just idling about. The receptionist tells Barret he needs an appointment, and his reply is that this is an emergency, and anyone who stands in our way will get their face bashed in. The civilians, horrified, cry that this must be the dreaded Avalanche, and the guards rush in. I do appreciate being acknowledged, though.
This is your standard Shinra security troops, and they get dealt with accordingly within a few rounds (though those seem to have new, more damaging moves such as throwing a hand grenade). Once they're gone, we can just advance onto the rest of the lobby.
Another Turtle Paradise poster.
I dig the showroom aesthetic here, with Shinra's hottest car models on display. A neat reminder that this is a company, making products, and that cars are a real thing in this world - a weird thing to say but, if you'll note, we haven't seen a car since… about the moments after the Reactor 1 bombings, I think? Midgar is very obviously a car city, with paved roads and highways, but, most likely due to limitations of the game's engine (as well as because we spent the majority of our time in the slums, which don't have roads), the only cars that exist in the world are part of cinematics or pre-rendered backgrounds.
The civilians actually stay in the room; they move away from Cloud when we approach them, so we can just take them on an endless chase around the lobby if we feel like it for some reason. Our goal, though, is the elevator. Once we're in, the conversation about Barret being impressed that Cloud can find it in him to fight for other people plays out like it did in the stairway scene, but a little different:
I genuinely wasn't expecting an apology from Barret. Everyone's getting character growth today!
Then the alarms turn on, the screen goes red, and the elevator starts going crazy - the number showing which floor we're at is rolling randomly. Barret asks Cloud to stop the elevator, he doesn't care which floor we're at, and as soon as it opens, a fight starts.
Our opponents this time are "Mighty Grunts." As was pointed out after my first update, "Grunt" is the name of those weird cyber-gimps with claws that look to be in some ways modified or augmented, rather than just weird uniforms; appropriately, the Mighty Grunts themselves appear to be a similar kind of modified combattant, wearing heavy armor and fighting with arm-mounted machine guns; I say "modified" because they have a really neat mechanic where, once you drop them below HP, their armor breaks and releases the soldier inside, who looks like this:
Sleek, helmeted, wearing claws and roller blades, this looks closer to the Grunts guarding the reactors; that transformation is accompanied by a lowering of the opponent's defense values but an increase in speed and evasion, and its moves shift from gunfire to skating across the arena delivering slashing attacks.
It's a really neat gimmick - I'm a sucker for 'character drops his armor to increase speed and offense' in anime - though mechanically it doesn't amount to all that much; like 90% of Shinra's repertoire of enemies, the Mighty Grunts are weak to lightning, so combats are quickly folded.
Once we've dealt with that random encounter, the elevator rollercoaster starts again, we stop at a random floor again, and so on a few times. Each time, we get one of a list of encounters based on which floor we land on. They include these fucking things:
Hovering saw-bots that fold themselves into a spinning disk of death to cut people. I can fault Shinra for many things, but not their sense of aesthetics.
We can also just bump into that random employee who sees three Avalanche guys armed to the teeth and facing the entrance ready for a fight and who decides he feels like taking the stairs today instead, which is a great comedy beat after a series of fights.
Either way, we end up on Floor 59, same as before, and fight a bunch of guards to get access to the special elevator required to reach Floor 60.
The irony is that it actually takes more time to go through a series of fights in an elevator than it does to climb the stairs. But of course, instead of just repetitively walking in a circle upwards, it has you engage with the game, so it feels less boring. It's also objectively the better choice because more fights means more XP and gil; you don't really gain anything by taking the stairs. Which is a shame, because I like the dialogue better.
The least attentive security guard in the world totally misses our entrance.
Pause for image count.
Final Fantasy VII, Part 6: The Shinra Building Raid, Part B
Floor 60 is probably the worst part of the entire Shinra building, because it's the game trying to introduce a stealth sequence in a game that lacks any systems for it. The way it works is this:
Those two guards are walking in the space with these golden statues (tacky, btw; I assume they're statues of President Shinra, which would be somehow even tackier). We have to time Cloud running between each statue so that the guard is facing away from the gap we're about to cross. That means we have to move in several moments, taking cover behind the statues and waiting for the guards to pass. When Cloud is on the other side, we then have to order Tifa and Barret to follow us - not by controlling them in the same way, but by pressing the [OK] button at the right time for them to move without being spotted by the guards.
If we fail, we first fight the guards, and then we're sent back to the start, so it's impossible to power through with violence. Once we've gone halfway, the group gathers up again, and we have to do it a second time with guards that are moving faster.
It's a fiddly, irritating bit of gameplay that doesn't feel good to win. At this point, it's growing apparent that FF7 has a thing for minigames - I can kind of see where it's coming from; they're trying to take advantage of the PSX's newfound power and their 3D abilities and models to flex a million new possible ways to engage with gameplay.
The problem is that it's irritating every time. The game is good when it sticks to its core mechanics, not when it's doing… Shit like this.
Thankfully, once we're done with this floor, things become much better.
Floor 61 is a resting area, with a tree at its center - and remember, vegetation in Midgar is extremely rare, so this is corporate luxury at its finest, using the most basic item representative of nature, a tree, as decoration while they drain the world of life. Perfect environmental storytelling.
So, in order to access each individual floor above 60, we need a keycard for that specific floor. That means each floor is its own individual puzzle we have to solve in order to progress. Each floor serves a particular function, and has its own aesthetic. The whole thing is basically a puzzle dungeon in the same way Wall Market was, all while contextually providing worldbuilding about Shinra. It's simple yet clever.
On Floor 60, a female employee who finds Cloud cute decides to explain to us how it all works, noting that it's a security system "worthy of Shinra; after all, they control everything in Midgar and in the world for that matter." It's been implied before, but I think this may be the first time someone explicitly refers to Shinra as the dominant world power. There's another character to whom we can ask 'where is Aerith,' and he freaks out… Because he thinks we're talking about a receptionist he's into. That guy is actually our way up; if we don't pick the option to ask about Aerith, he mistakes us for a repairman and hands us the Keycard to floor 62. That was easy!
Floor 62 is the library - and the Mayor's office.
If it wasn't already obvious, the fact that the Mayor lives inside the Shinra building, and has to share his floor space with the library makes it obvious how much of a puppet he is. And he knows it very well - and resents it. The very first thing he tells us is that he is "Mayor in name only. The city and everything in it is really run by Shinra, Inc. My only real job is watching over Shinra's documents…" Yeah, he's been reduced to the status of librarian. That must be humiliating. The fact that he offers to just give us the keycard to the next floor if we guess a password suggests he's looking for any small rebellion he can take in these conditions.
So our job here is to guess the password out of a list of four-letter words - BEST, KING, ORBS, BOMB, MAKO, and HOJO. The password changes in each playthrough, so we can't just look it up; we have to look for hints. As you might guess, those hints can be found in the library.
Basically, every section of the library has six books, and there are four sections: Urban Development, Peace/Weapon Development, Space Development, and Scientific Research. Each book's title is preceded by a number with no apparent meaning. The Scientific Research Library contains the following books:
3 File on Dr Gast, Biologist
2 Mako energy and the rise of life forms
4 Ranks and extended use of Mako weaponry
14 The Ancients in history
4 Report on high Mako levels in living beings
8 Final evolutionary stages in land dwelling life
Interesting stuff! But you might notice one of the books is out of place - "Ranks and extended use of Mako weaponry" should be in the Peace/Weapon Development library, shouldn't it?
Mayor Domino misplaced one book in each section of the library. By finding the books, we should find the password. The out of place books seem to be "6 Data on experimental animals living near Midgar" in the Urban Development Library, "17 Modern history of Midgar space program vol. 2" in the Weapon Development library, and "4 Midgar city map: Sectors 0-4" in the Space Development library. Putting it all together, we get the numbers 4, 6, 17, and 4. Now all we have to do is look up each number's corresponding letter in the alphabet and we get… DFQD!
…I'm sorry, what?
Okay so this stumped me an unreasonable length of time until I looked it up and it turns out the answer is the numbers are meant to refer to numbers within the book title, so the 4 letter in "Midgar city map," for instance. That gives us KING, which turns out to be the password.
As a side note, though we sadly can't make Cloud stop to read the books, even the titles are tantalizing. There's multiple references to Shinra's space program, including "Results of failed mission YA-79," another book about the diminution of Mako energy and the planet's movements which suggests Shinra is all too aware of the impact they have on the world, and Mako's impact on life forms. Intriguing stuff!
Once we bring the password to Mayor Domino, he says that he loves the word King, President Shinra sucks and he should get to be King of Midgar. We're very much looking at someone who's been sidelined, his power taken away, and who is lashing out in small, petty ways where he can. He gives us the Keycard 65, unlocking the next three floors and, for guessing the password right, the "Elemental" Materia - joining it to another Materia and equipping it on a piece of gear will turn our damage elemental (if a weapon) or grant elemental resistance (if an armor item ). That's neat! I slap it on Cloud so he has lightning attacks now.
The 63rd Floor is a straightforward puzzle. There are three rooms that have a coupon in it. If we find the coupons, we can exchange them for items. We can only open three doors in total, and there is a vent we can pass through to avoid some of the doors. It's simply a matter of finding the optimal path to collect all three coupons. It's pretty much impossible to figure out that path at first glance because you don't see enough of the screen at once, but thankfully we can just try again (we have to give back our coupons if we do; we only get what we can collect through a single run of the puzzle, we can't just double back) as many times as we want, and the puzzle is not very difficult. Once done, we trade in the coupons for our rewards: a Star Pendant, a Four Slots, and another All Materia. The "Four Slot" is an accessory which has, as its name indicates, four materia slots. Its stats are dogshit and none of the materia slots are joined, so its use is pretty much "I want to stack as much magic as possible on one character and I don't care about anything else." It goes on Tifa for now but it'll probably be Aerith once we get her back.
Floor 64 is the company gym. There's a vending machine we can try to order a drink from only for it to get stuck and Cloud to get scolded when he tries banging on it. One of the guys doing bench presses says that stamina is really important to him because he's "head of building security…" While literally talking to Avalanche as they waltz through the building. He's not even aware that we've been fighting guards for 60 straight floors.
No wonder we can get away with so much if this is the caliber of people meant to stop us.
Also it's just… Fascinating how disconnected from the world these people are? Here, or in the lounge below, they're all just… Chilling. Talking about needing to get rid of their love handles, flirting with the receptionist, just having normal lives while thousands are dead in the collapse of Sector 7. Completely insulated from the world and any level of care at the top of the world's tallest building. Not even evil, just… Oblivious to the horror going on outside their walls.
So of course we rob their locker room of every valuable item we can find.
Floor 65 is home to a giant model of Midgar. Initially incomplete, we have to collect 'Midgar parts' from various chests around the floor to complete it; it's one of the few floors to have random encounters.
Notably, once the model is complete, that chunk in the bottom left is still missing - this is how we learn that Midgar isn't complete yet; Sector 6 is still under construction. When it's finished, "Shinra's plan will be complete," whatever that means. Well, no time to lose, then. Once we complete the model, a chest opens containing the Keycard for Floor 66.
The NPC dialogue here is just incredible.
Floor 66 seems to be one of the more job-oriented floor - a couple of supply closets, an electrical room with unknown purpose, and a conference room in which President Shinra and his high-ranking executives are currently meeting. Our goal here is to sneak into the vents through the bathroom so we can spy on that conference.
When I tell you about this game's incredible choice of camera angles.
President Shinra we already know, as we do Reeve and Heidegger; the big guy is one "Palmer," and the woman is "Scarlet." It's not clear yet, but considering that Reeve is head of Urban Development and Heidegger of Peacekeeping, these are two people out of four that match with the library division, I think Palmer is head of Space Development and Scarlet head of Research.
Reeve is providing the damage estimates for Sector 7 - several factories were destroyed, resulting in an estimated 10 Billion gil in damage. He's about to bring up the additional cost to rebuild the Sector when President Shinra interrupts him - they're not going to rebuild.
President Shinra: "We're not rebuilding." Reeve: "What?" President Shinra: "We're leaving Sector 7 as it is and restarting the Neo-Midgar plan." Reeve: "...then the Ancients?" President Shinra: "The Promised Land will soon be ours. I want you to raise the Mako rates 15% in all areas." Palmer: "Rate hike! Rate hike! Tra, la, la! And please include our Space Program in the budget!" President Shinra: "Reeve and Scarlet will divide the extra income from the rate increase." Palmer: "Oh man!" Reeve: "Sir, if you raise the rates, the people will lose confidence…" President Shinra: "It'll be all right. The ignorant citizens won't lose confidence, they'll trust Shinra, Inc. even more." Heidegger: "Ha ha ha! After all, we're the ones who saved Sector 7 from Avalanche!"
…okay, so they've fully lost touch with reality. Like, they didn't save Sector 7, they allowed it to be fully destroyed and simply sent in rescue workers afterwards while trying to pin it on Avalanche. And now they're deciding not to even bother rebuilding it and increase energy costs?
If this was a situation where President Shinra is jettisoning Midgar because having the Ancients and access to whatever the "Promised Land" and "Neo-Midgar" are means they can afford to squeeze the population for a quick resource boost before flying off in a golden parachute-clad helicopter, that would make sense, and it's partly implied to be what's going on? But more than that they just don't care. The Shinra executives are fully confident in their own invincibility, absolutely certain that nothing can happen to them and that they can afford to let a chunk of their city be destroyed and then squeeze everyone for more profit on their basic life necessities and it will all be fine because Avalanche will take all the blame.
I don't think that's how these things work.
Then, Hojo, Shinra's head scientist, walks into the room, and he's, well… He's a greasy hunched-over creep in a lab coat and a ponytail and glasses who just exudes "hasn't showered in two weeks" energy. This is confirmed the moment he opens his mouth; President Shinra asks him how the girl is, and Hojo declares that Aerith is an inferior specimen to her mother, Ifalna, by "about 18%," whatever that value means; the research he's conducting will take an estimated 120 years, beyond any of their lifetime or that of Aerith - but he, uh, has a solution.
whatthefuckmydude
Okay okay let's - let's put a pin in that and get back to it shortly.
President Shinra asks if this will hinder their plans for the Promised Land, and Hojo answers cryptically.
Shinra doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who cares about what happens after he dies (see: destroying the planet), so I'm guessing the search for the Promised Land and Hojo's hundred-year plan are two different.
President Shinra calls an end to the meeting, and the executives scatter - seeing as Aerith is in Hojo's custody, our next step is obvious: follow him to his lab.
Barret notes that he's heard of Hojo, the man in charge of Shinra's science department, and asks if Cloud has ever seen before - Cloud says it's the first time he's actually seen him in person. Hmmm.
We don't have a keycard to the next floor, but that doesn't matter, because Hojo opens the way for us, and we sneak into the Floor 67 labs.
Weird amount of suits for a lab. Maybe Hojo's just a stickler for formal attire.
There's a number of empty cells to the north of the map that aren't relevant to us (yet), but what we're looking for is the area around that huge, suspicious looking dome with the glowing window. When we approach, the camera drops down as the group hides behind a crate to observe Hojo mutter to a weird, cat-looking kind of creature sealed in a glass tube, calling it "my precious specimen" and ordering it to be raised to the "upper level."
Oh, Tifa, poor darling, you have no idea.
I love how totally inconspicuous and unimportant that glowing reinforced purple door is. Oh, what's this? Cloud is approaching the window? Cloud is muttering a name we have never heard before in the game?
WELL.
I WASN'T EXPECTING A HEADLESS BODY WITH EYE-NIPPLES
It's only on screen for a few seconds, but it definitely strikes a powerful image. And the sight of it immediately causes Cloud to undergo Flashback Migraine again, clutching his head and falling to his knees, then collapsing entirely. Tifa rushes to help him up, and Cloud mutters "Jenova… Sephiroth's… So they brought it here."
So he knows what that thing is, but he's not telling us, the audience. Tricksy. At this point the number of references to Sephiroth, whom we haven't seen at all, is growing to the point that it's clear there's a deliberate effort to cultivate mystery around him - he's someone who matters, that several characters have some degree of familiarity with, but that people will talk around rather than about. As for that Jenova… We'll see.
We pick up the Poison Materia (it lets us cast Bio - very funny to put the 'horrible biological warfare' spell materia in the Shinra science labs), take a special elevator, and head to Floor 68.
Aerith is lying inside a glass cell, connected to some kind of observatory cockpit thing - the group is no longer bothering to try and hide their presence, but Hojo is unfazed.
Hojo: "Aerith? Oh, is that her name? What do you want?" Cloud: "We're taking Aerith back." Hojo: "Outsiders…" Barret: "Shoulda noticed it earlier, you…" Hojo: "There's so many frivolous things in this world." Hojo: "Are you going to kill me? I don't think you should. The equipment here is extremely delicate. Without me, who could operate it? Hmm?" Cloud: "Ugh." Hojo: "That's right. I recommend you think things out logically before you make any rash moves. Now, bring the Specimen!"
Oh my god. He's a fucking rationalist. "Nice argument, unfortunately I have already calculated you to be the soyjak and me to be the chad with facts and logic." Yet somehow he doesn't even know Aerith's name? He didn't even bother talking to her once? I find that hard to believe - I think he's affecting not knowing it because it feeds into his Facts And Logic persona. The exchange about 'who would operate the equipment' seems to suggest he's threatening that without him nobody can free Aerith, but, like, she's just in a transparent cage? Smash the walls, guys.
God, that guy is a real piece of shit. It's like the writers took Cid from FFVI and went "okay so we accidentally made Loving Doofus Grandpa Cid into Mengele implicitly and people have issues with that, let's just strip away all the humanizing elements and get right down to the core of the fucked up evil scientist."
Actually… Aerith grew up in a lab with her mom, right? And Hojo talked about comparing her abilities to her mother's? So he must have known her as a child - she was raised as a scientific experiment under Hojo's supervision, just like Celes was under Cid's. He's literally "what if FFVI!Cid was a sociopath," damn. Sneaky move to pull.
Hojo orders "the specimen" to be brought up, and the weird orange cat-thing rises into Aerith's cell; Aerith wakes up at the commotion and runs to the wall, banging her fists against the soundproof glass while, in the back, the cat raises its tail and its back and growls angrily, seemingly able to pounce on her. The group hurries to the cell and Cloud asks Hojo what the hell he thinks he's doing, and he…
"If I don't help, all these animals will disappear."
He…
…
[Omicron slowly takes off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose]
I…
It's a kink thing, right?
Hojo didn't ACCIDENTALLY or SCIENTIFICALLY end up producing a #feral #anthro #impregnation doujin scenario. Dude here was looking for an excuse. My guy had a weird orange magical cat-dog from an extinct species just waiting for the opportunity to put it into an insane contrived scenario as to why we have, we HAVE to have the cat fuck a person President Shinra, it is IMPERATIVE to locating the Promised Land.
What is he even expecting to happen? Is there any reason to believe that's even possible? They're separate species! Is he trying to create catgirls?
Oh my god, that's it. Hojo is literally trying to breed magical catgirls.
This is the worst plot twist in all of Final Fantasy. Why am I being subjected to this!! Why can't I kill this man for forcing me to think about these things!!!
Barret has the only possible sane reaction to this, and immediately starts shooting the cell. This seems to trigger some kind of security mechanism - Aerith falls to the ground, light fills the cell until we can't see inside it, and Hojo rushes to open the door and check on his 'precious specimen'...
And gets predictably jumped by the cat, who starts mauling him while Cloud gets in to help Aerith out.
Deeply satisfying picture.
Then the elevator starts moving. The cat pulls back from Hojo, who gloats that an especially ferocious specimen is on its way - and to everyone's surprise the cat talks. Not just talks, but has a rather calm, formal manner of speaking, saying that the monster is "rather strong" and he'll help us out, and calling Tifa "Miss."
Cloud says they'll take care of that monster, and that somebody should take Aerith somewhere safe - and we have to choose whether Barret or Tifa does it. Once that's decided, the rest form a party; Cloud asks the cat's name, and it says that Hojo named it "Red XIII", but that this name has no meaning to it and that they can call it whatever they like.
…see, this is kind of awkward because, well. I don't want to refer to Red XIII by his experiment number? I'd like to give him something more meaningful, a new name for a new life. But I don't know him enough to actually make any kind of call, and "Red XIII" is his name as referenced in all extra material about the game or in the Remake where characters are voice acted and so names can't be changed, so it would be weird if I went this whole playthrough calling him, I don't know, Mittens. So Red XIII it is, but it feels like a missed opportunity.
And now that's done, the fight with the unseen monster begins.
So…
We had five characters there, and the game found a justification to have two of them leave, so that we would be fighting this boss with a party of three.
I now realize what should have been obvious to me all along from the size of the interface. FFVII's maximum party size isn't four like in every other game except FFIV (which had five). It's three.
This… kinda sucks?
I imagine there are many important technical reasons why it wasn't possible to make it a full party of four, but wow, that feels like a downgrade. I mean I guess the Materia system makes it so "party composition" isn't really a thing, since anyone can equip anything, but like… In terms of who gets to hang around as part of the group… How many of your blorbos you can take on a trip together… I feel disappointed.
Props to the game, though: it's been pretty good so far about writing the plot in such a way that you might not notice that it contrives for Cloud, Barret, Tifa and Aerith to never be together at exactly the same time, so it never registered as a contrivance until now.
Okay, well.
We have a new party member - Red XIII, the cat… dog… thing… person. He comes by default equipped with magic materia and Sense, and, this being FF7, does not otherwise have any particular character mechanics until we see whatever his Limit Break is.
As for the boss, Sample:H0512, it's a Tyrant. Like. That's a Resident Evil Tyrant right there, I don't care what you say. I mean, it's a tyrant with a beard, which is unique enough…
But like, heavily mutated limbs, shoulder that contains a body part normally found on the face… That's some Resident Evil shit.
Sample:H0512 uses his claw for physical attack, and "Shady Breath" to breath out a toxic cloud that damages and poisons the party. Because it sits in the back row behind these eye monsters, it takes half damage from attacks by melee users, but Barret deals full damage. Destroying the tiny pests to get full damage would be a good idea, but unfortunately the main monster instantly reanimates them if we do so, so the way to go is to just sink as much damage as we can into it while ignoring the tiny beasties. It has 1,000 HP and a Fire spell deals around a hundred damage, so it takes a while, but ultimately it's not too hard to deal with, and we win.
Victory fanfare. From his field model, Red XIII looks more like a cat, but here he kinda looks like a dog? Hard to tell.
Tifa answers that Aerith "Seems all right… In many ways." I checked the Retranslated mod, and no, this seems accurate, Tifa there says "She seems to be [okay]. In more ways than one." I think Tifa is just straight up saying "girl lookin' fine?" That is the only way I can make sense of this. Incredible.
Red XIII then interjects that he "Has a right to choose too. I don't like two-legged things." Is… is he doing a delayed response to Hojo's plan by saying "actually I'm not into human girls"? He is, isn't he?
This is the weirdest plot beat and even having played through that sequence before and vaguely remembering it it doesn't stop being weird. It never will. What the hell.
Barret: "What are you?" Red XIII: "An informed question. But difficult to answer. I am what you see. …You must have many questions, but first, let's get out of here. I'll lead the way." Aerith: "Cloud… So you did come for me…" Red XIII: "I apologize for what happened back there. I was merely acting to throw Hojo off guard…"
Okay, yeah, the game is very deliberately going for a highly formal manner of speaking for Red XIII, in deliberate contrast to his animal appearance. Interesting! I wonder if he's a member of a species of talking cat-dogs, or if his sentience is the result of Hojo's experiments. We'll find out later, I suppose.
Confirming my suspicions, the game then asks us to split the party into two groups, 3 and 2. The non-playable group goes ahead on their own to the 66th floor elevator, while we control the main party while heading in the same direction - I pick Cloud, Barret and Red because Barret is still a bit underleveled and Red is new.
The main thing of interest I want to talk about before ending this update is, of all things, a random encounter. Most of the walk back to Floor 66 is unremarkable, but we have to explore around Floor 68 to get the Keycard from a scared Shinra suit, and the floor has random encounters, so at some point we run into…
…these guys.
We've seen a lot of Shinra units at this point, and they fall into broadly three categories: "Soldiers" with equipment ranging from normal to fancy and usually have guns, "Grunts" who may or may not have been augmented/modified and who have distinctly weird gear, and robots which come in a variety of forms.
These guys are closer to the "Soldier" troops, but also they're, very noticeably, swordsmen. They are knight-looking types with giant swords. Their attacks include "Flying Sickle," a move in which they throw their sword in a spinning arc to attack people at range. Who does that resemble that we know?
Their name, it turns out, is "SOLDIER: 3rd." SOLDIER Third Class. After raiding two Mako reactors, this is where we finally find Shinra's elite super-soldiers, modified with Mako infusion - in their innermost sanctum, the laboratory where they keep Jenova and where Hojo conducts his most unethical experiments.
And you can see it - they're mini-Clouds. They wield oversized swords and focus on melee combat without high-tech gimmick. They have the same trousers.
It's… interesting, though, that they're third class. Implicitly the weakest or lowest-ranking ones. There's implicitly more, higher-sensitivity shadow lab stuff Shinra must be working on elsewhere, away from their HQ.
But if this is where the SOLDIER units are deployed as security, it's weird that Cloud never entered Shinra HQ and has never seen Hojo before, right? You'd expect it to be the opposite. Unless he was assigned to a different place or project? But he would have started out as Third Class, surely.
Well. We'll see about that later.
Once we're out of the dangerous area, all we gotta do is head back through the executive level, and get to the Elevator… Where, suspiciously, Tifa and Aerith aren't waiting for us… So we just get in, and…
…it was a trap.
Honestly, it's a wonder we managed to get so far without the Turks dropping on us, considering how the entire building has to be wired up with security and we've made only the most token efforts at stealth.
Now this is where I'd ask "okay but why are we just letting ourselves be captured instead of fighting them" but we're cornered in an elevator and they've already abducted two of our team members they can use as hostages - the fact that this ended up in a recursive Damsel in Distress scenario with both Tifa and Aerith captured is just down to me picking Barret and Red XIII for my group, I could have simply not.
(Also, this is the first appearance in this game of Rude, who has a significantly larger role in the Remake.)
The group are put in handcuffs and dragged in front of President Shinra so the man can gloat about his victory.
Cloud: "Where is Aerith?" President Shinra: "In a safe place. She's the last surviving Ancient…" President Shinra: "Don't you know? They called themselves the Cetra and lived thousands of years ago. Now they are just a forgotten page in history." Red XIII: "Cetra… That girl is a survivor of the Cetra?" President Shinra: "Cetra, or the Ancients, will show us the way to the 'Promised Land.' I'm expecting a lot out of her." Red XIII: "The Promised Land? Isn't that just a legend?" President Shinra: "Even so, it's far too appealing not to pursue. It's been said that the Promised Land is very fertile. If the land is fertile…" Barret: "Then there's gotta be Mako!" President Shinra: "Exactly. This is why our money-making Mako Reactor is necessary. The abundant Mako will flow out on its own. That is where Neo-Midgar will be built. Shinra's new glory…" Barret: "[Censored]! Quit dreamin'!" President Shinra: "Oh, really, don't you know? These days all it takes for your dreams to come true is money and power." President Shinra: "Well, that's all for our meeting." Rude: "Come on! Outta his way!"
[The group are taken away; Barret resists as Rude pulls him away.] Barret: "Hold it! I got a lot to say to you!" President Shinra: "If there's anything else… Talk to my secretary."
Oh, my God.
This is so hilariously on the nose it wraps around to being genius.
These guys have stumbled on the possibility that fucking Atlantis may be real and they're planning to strip-mine it for more oil. Their big world-changing era-defining plan is build a bigger power plant. They've been exhausting the Mako supply of the planet, and their plan is to find a new place with more Mako and just move their industry there and do it all over again.
Absolutely zero self-reflection. No sense of irony whatsoever. Just Make Money. Absolutely perfect capitalist bad guys.
Also President Shinra seeing off the terrorists being dragged off with "Talk to my secretary" is some classic Evil CEO stuff, I love that for him.
The Turks drag the group away, and everyone is thrown into a cell on the experiment storage floor.
Given that Shinra's in-house jail is on the same floor as where they stored Red XIII and Jenova, I think it's pretty clear why the Avalanche group are still alive - their fate is to be used in Hojo's next experiments. A grim prospect, but surely our heroes will find a way to make it!
This is not the end of the Shinra Building sequence by far, but it's where we're going to close today - this was a chunky segment of gaming (the entire sequence takes about two hours, and this was one hour), and it works well enough as having a defined starting and ending point; when we resume next time things will be taking a sharp turn.
All in all I think this worked really well, but, hmm, I have some more thoughts on this.
It's interesting to me that for six games in a row Final Fantasy has played the concept of 'dungeon' as a core part of the gameplay loop completely straight, and with VII it shakes up the formula heavily? There are dungeons in Midgar, mainly Mako Reactors 1 and 5 and the Shinra building, but they're heavily integrated within a linear plot progression instead of being overworld cave that you leave a town to enter, with character dialogue and plot progression interwoven so they don't feel like the old dungeons, which for the most part felt very "this is a dungeon because a dungeon is a dungeon is a dungeon," so to speak? Like, the Shinra building is the longest "dungeon" we've had in the game so far, but over half of it is just walking around office buildings, talking to people, peering through library shelves…
More generally speaking it's weird how low the density of random encounters is in FFVII compared to previous games. Like, sometimes I will go through an entire screen and trigger a single fight before moving on to the next plot point. This game is really, really heavy on the storytelling and atmospheric dialogue and worldbuilding, and it just works… Incredibly well? This feels like Final Fantasy is mutating into a whole new form, or perhaps into its own true form.
I don't even mind that the entire Shinra raid ended up on a failure and everyone getting captured because it's like - very obviously setup. "We're launching a raid on the corporate headquarters of the company that rules the world, yes all three of us" was a suicidal plan from the start and it's impressive that the group even got this far, and how it informs their character and how much we learn about Shinra is just… Great.
Except for whatever the fuck is up with Hojo, the greasiest man alive.
And also the mini-games. Please stop trying to do mini-games (I know they won't).
Ah, yes. Hojo is certifiably The Worst (TM). Even within the context of Shinra, the man is like a total aberration, an autonomous war crime device that crawled out of some creepy Doujin.
So our job here is to guess the password out of a list of four-letter words - BEST, KING, ORBS, BOMB, MAKO, and HOJO. The password changes in each playthrough, so we can't just look it up; we have to look for hints. As you might guess, those hints can be found in the library.
Not that I want you to replay the first 5 fours of the game ad nauseum until you get all the passwords, but does anyone know what changes for each? For KING the Mayor had the little line about him and President Shinra, what about the others?
Notably, once the model is complete, that chunk in the bottom left is still missing - this is how we learn that Midgar isn't complete yet; Sector 6 is still under construction. When it's finished, "Shinra's plan will be complete," whatever that means. Well, no time to lose, then. Once we complete the model, a chest opens containing the Keycard for Floor 66.
Not that I want you to replay the first 5 fours of the game ad nauseum until you get all the passwords, but does anyone know what changes for each? For KING the Mayor had the little line about him and President Shinra, what about the others?
(Upon selecting "BEST" if it is the correct password.) Domino: BEST!! God, I love the sound of that! BEST!! I AM the best...ME!! No matter what anyone else says, you'd better believe it.
(Upon selecting "KING" if it is the correct password.) Domino: KING!! God, I love the sound of that! KING!! President Shinra sucks! I should be King of Midgar!
(Upon selecting "BOMB" if it is the correct password.) Domino: BOMB!! God, I love the sound of that! BOMB!! I'm so angry, I'm like a walking time bomb waiting to explode!
(Upon selecting "MAKO" if it is the correct password.) Domino: MAKO!! God, I love the sound of that! MAKO! If I had a lot more of it, I would be a real Mayor!
[*]
Thanks to the Final Fantasy Wiki for the detailed script.
The discussion about the transformation of the dungeon got me thinking on how the pre-rendered era affected dungeons on both sides of the ocean. In a handful of years, the Infinity Engine CRPGs would be doing the same thing in games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment.
Eventually, the 3D era would settle in on reusing assets to make unique play areas with only a handful of truly unique pieces, but for a brief moment, gaming revolved around traversing through beautiful paintings of the world, and I think that's beautiful.
Hojo really is just amazingly gross. In the remake the other executives, who'e all been made even worse people, are creeped out by Hojo, who feels exactly the same as he always was. Can't improve on that kind of awful perfection I guess.
[Omicron slowly takes off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose]
I…
It's a kink thing, right?
Hojo didn't ACCIDENTALLY or SCIENTIFICALLY end up producing a #feral #anthro #impregnation doujin scenario. Dude here was looking for an excuse. My guy had a weird orange magical cat-dog from an extinct species just waiting for the opportunity to put it into an insane contrived scenario as to why we have, we HAVE to have the cat fuck a person President Shinra, it is IMPERATIVE to locating the Promised Land.
In the parody he goes completely mask off and just screams "Because... IT'S MY FFFFFFFFFETISH!" and breaks out into crazed laughter while everyone else looks on in horror.
Incidendentally can now watch the machinabridged up to episode 9 without plot spoilers now!
The entire sequence takes, at most, 5 minutes. And Tifa, Barret and Cloud are talking the entire time. They're arguing about saving Aerith, Barret makes a comment about how "even Cloud" will fight altruistically, for someone else - it's the first real moment of Barret seeing Cloud as anything other than an annoying, amoral mercenary; in seeing Cloud chose to fight for someone else, his attitude towards the merc softens. Cloud rebuffs him, saying he doesn't care what Barret thinks, and then it's Tifa who laughs at that obvious cope - it's a scene in which the two truly see past Cloud's persona and into the vulnerable man beneath.
Then the conversation shifts to the characters wondering if this isn't some trap and this isn't actually some kind of endless stairway, then having an argument about Barret acting like a child asking "are we there yet" over and over…. Barret protests that only his gun-arm is machine, the rest of him is flesh and blood, as vulnerable as anyone, which is funny because Tifa, who is the only unmodified, baseline human in the party, is ahead of him in the stairs. Then there's some kind of joke about Tifa deliberately falling back behind the group when she realizes that anyone behind her could see up her microskirt, very anime of the game.
It's just a funny scene! It's five minutes of uninterrupted, characterful dialogue. This is objectively fine and everyone who's ever complained about this scene is a baby .
Or, hm, no, Tifa, no, I wasn't, you don't need to ramp it up, NO-
At least it's not the hardest R she could've used...
But seriously, love how it's done in Remake, complete with the screen distorting and the music getting out of key as even local supersoldier Cloud realises his cardio game is weak compared to his kickboxer friend.
Once we've dealt with that random encounter, the elevator rollercoaster starts again, we stop at a random floor again, and so on a few times. Each time, we get one of a list of encounters based on which floor we land on. They include these fucking things:
Hovering saw-bots that fold themselves into a spinning disk of death to cut people. I can fault Shinra for many things, but not their sense of aesthetics.
Then, Hojo, Shinra's head scientist, walks into the room, and he's, well… He's a greasy hunched-over creep in a lab coat and a ponytail and glasses who just exudes "hasn't showered in two weeks" energy. This is confirmed the moment he opens his mouth; President Shinra asks him how the girl is, and Hojo declares that Aerith is an inferior specimen to her mother, Ifalna, by "about 18%," whatever that value means; the research he's conducting will take an estimated 120 years, beyond any of their lifetime or that of Aerith - but he, uh, has a solution.
But more than that they just don't care. The Shinra executives are fully confident in their own invincibility, absolutely certain that nothing can happen to them and that they can afford to let a chunk of their city be destroyed and then squeeze everyone for more profit on their basic life necessities and it will all be fine because Avalanche will take all the blame.
Hojo orders "the specimen" to be brought up, and the weird orange cat-thing rises into Aerith's cell; Aerith wakes up at the commotion and runs to the wall, banging her fists against the soundproof glass while, in the back, the cat raises its tail and its back and growls angrily, seemingly able to pounce on her. The group hurries to the cell and Cloud asks Hojo what the hell he thinks he's doing, and he…
"If I don't help, all these animals will disappear."
He…
…
[Omicron slowly takes off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose]
I…
It's a kink thing, right?
Hojo didn't ACCIDENTALLY or SCIENTIFICALLY end up producing a #feral #anthro #impregnation doujin scenario. Dude here was looking for an excuse. My guy had a weird orange magical cat-dog from an extinct species just waiting for the opportunity to put it into an insane contrived scenario as to why we have, we HAVE to have the cat fuck a person President Shinra, it is IMPERATIVE to locating the Promised Land.
What is he even expecting to happen? Is there any reason to believe that's even possible? They're separate species! Is he trying to create catgirls?
Oh my god, that's it. Hojo is literally trying to breed magical catgirls.
Hojo, dabbing an entire pizza's worth of grease from his perspiring brow as he speaks: "PRESIDENT SHINRA I ASSURE YOU IN MY SCIENTIFIC OPINION IT IS ESSENTIAL FOR THE FUTURE OF THIS COMPANY THAT AERITH GETS FUCKED BY A DOG"
his scene is apparently infamous. When I commented on Discord about having just wrapped it up, one of the first comments I received was "I see you chose to climb. I did that once. Never again." It seems to be seared into the memory of a generation of gamers as a seen that is, basically, comedic in the way it punishes you for 'playing it safe' with one of the most grueling, boring moments in video game.
Huh, I'm learning a lot today. I played this back in the day when I didn't even really conceptualize internet fandom as a thing and I took the stairs because 'of course you take the stealthy option' and took the fact there was all this dialogue to mean I made the right choice and the other one was a dead end. I never even heard other people complaining about it.
The whole 'let's shove a bunch of minigames in' approach reminds me how a lot of platformers in this era did the same thing, mostly vehicle segments in their cases. This kinda forgets that the whole idea of minigames is they're supposed to be an occasional break (minigame compilations like Mario Party excepted obviously), put in too many minigames and they stop being the break
I know, it's like the guy is just throwing crimes against humanity at the wall and recording what happens to see what sticks. As for the mini-games, it was square enix trying to put things into the game other than combat and running around and talking to npcs. They really went in to explore the new hardware of the PSX.
Omicron slowly takes off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose]
I…
It's a kink thing, right?
Hojo didn't ACCIDENTALLY or SCIENTIFICALLY end up producing a #feral #anthro #impregnation doujin scenario. Dude here was looking for an excuse. My guy had a weird orange magical cat-dog from an extinct species just waiting for the opportunity to put it into an insane contrived scenario as to why we have, we HAVE to have the cat fuck a person President Shinra, it is IMPERATIVE to locating the Promised Land.
What is he even expecting to happen? Is there any reason to believe that's even possible? They're separate species! Is he trying to create catgirls?
Oh my god, that's it. Hojo is literally trying to breed magical catgirls.
On our way, we find the Sense Materia - it grants the effects of the old Libra spell (identifies the opponent's level, HP, MP and elemental weakness), only in this game it's no longer a spell - instead it's its own mechanic, a return to a very old implementation back in FF3. Interesting!
Oh dang, I totally missed that materia down there. Granted Red XIII shows up with one soon enough and it's not like you really need multiple copies of Sense, so no big loss, but still.
There's only a small sliver of it visible at this stage, but look at the enormity of it. That gigantic plate, collapsed, looks like a cracked mountain or an active volcano. One of the kids mentions that his dad told him Shinra did it - yeah, I think their effort to propagandize and bolster their image using the Sector collapse are going to run into some trouble. No wonder they're made Corneo babbled.
You can actually see Shinra actively propagandizing if you check out some of the houses back in Sector 5. There's the guy in his house watching the news who previously was all "you can't trust the news or Avalanche", but now seems fairly absorbed in Shinra's propaganda of how Avalanche has done this terrible, platesmashing deed.
This scene is apparently infamous. When I commented on Discord about having just wrapped it up, one of the first comments I received was "I see you chose to climb. I did that once. Never again." It seems to be seared into the memory of a generation of gamers as a seen that is, basically, comedic in the way it punishes you for 'playing it safe' with one of the most grueling, boring moments in video game.
I had zero idea until this post that some people apparently hated the stairs so much. What's to hate, it's not like it makes you climb in boring silence, you've got some fun character banter and a free Elixir?
I mean, I know it was the 90s, but this is such a weird choice of language for Tifa to use. It's so offensive but also so… childish? It makes her sound like a schoolyard bully, which is the opposite of her entire displayed personality so far. And this is completely made up by the English translator! In Japanese she says something like "Don't say stuff like that," because he had a (genuinely funny for how over the top it is for the circumstances) line about how he wanted to see Marlene again but he's going to die here, on these stairs. It's such a wildly inappropriate line.
I mean, it's not the worst slur she could have decided to call Barret. That's it. Tifa is a gamer now. She is using Gamer Words.
So same word used way earlier if you talk to some of the guards near the Sector 7 pillar right after the opening bombing mission, but that was actually what made me realize "oh the PC version is the original game translation", because apparently only said original translation uses said word. So that means for better or for worse, we've got the original FFVII script, warts and all.
I actually had an argument with someone the other day where they said Barret was a terrible character good for little more than comic relief because he doesn't actually care about Sector 7 except Marlene, said he was technically responsible for the collapse of the sector, and never apologizes to anyone, and man it just... doesn't ring true in the least? Not just small bits like this obviously, but even back when it collapsed yeah no shit the first person he screams for is his daughter, but he still also calls out the rest of Avalanche, and bangs his fist wondering what it was all for if Shinra was going to escalate to this level so quickly.
Really though, Barret is a surprisingly deep character even this early into the game.
I mean, there's an Elixir sitting on the stairs. Heck, I've heard some players go up the stairs halfway just to get said Elixir, then head back downstairs to bust in for the EXP (which must be hilarious trying to convince Tifa and Barret of this ingame).
At this point, it's growing apparent that FF7 has a thing for minigames - I can kind of see where it's coming from; they're trying to take advantage of the PSX's newfound power and their 3D abilities and models to flex a million new possible ways to engage with gameplay.
The problem is that it's irritating every time. The game is good when it sticks to its core mechanics, not when it's doing… Shit like this.
Easily the worst minigame so far, though we'll see if anything outstrips it as the game goes on. At least the "haha press the buttons in sync" one was over relatively quickly.
Also iirc you can actually fail at the stealth minigame something like 3 or 4 times in a row, and you'll have eventually just killed all the guards so the party shrugs and moves on.
He gives us the Keycard 65, unlocking the next three floors and, for guessing the password right, the "Elemental" Materia - joining it to another Materia and equipping it on a piece of gear will turn our damage elemental (if a weapon) or grant elemental resistance (if an armor item ). That's neat! I slap it on Cloud so he has lightning attacks now.
Suffice to say, Elemental gets a lot of good work in for the rest of Shinra Tower by just slapping it on whoever's main weapon along with lightning. And of course, as you level it up it'll only grow better for armor attachments as well.
Also it's just… Fascinating how disconnected from the world these people are? Here, or in the lounge below, they're all just… Chilling. Talking about needing to get rid of their love handles, flirting with the receptionist, just having normal lives while thousands are dead in the collapse of Sector 7. Completely insulated from the world and any level of care at the top of the world's tallest building. Not even evil, just… Oblivious to the horror going on outside their walls.
Look, when you've got a busy work week like some of these dudes, you just don't have time to focus on the fact that tens of thousands of people just died out in a partial city collapse, you know? Like sure it's tragic but I've got half an hour to finish this report or my boss is going to cut my pay!
Then, Hojo, Shinra's head scientist, walks into the room, and he's, well… He's a greasy hunched-over creep in a lab coat and a ponytail and glasses who just exudes "hasn't showered in two weeks" energy. This is confirmed the moment he opens his mouth; President Shinra asks him how the girl is, and Hojo declares that Aerith is an inferior specimen to her mother, Ifalna, by "about 18%," whatever that value means; the research he's conducting will take an estimated 120 years, beyond any of their lifetime or that of Aerith - but he, uh, has a solution. whatthefuckmydude
What, you don't keep one in your living room Omi? Makes a nice conversation piece with guests! And if they don't like it, you can always just feed them to it.
God, that guy is a real piece of shit. It's like the writers took Cid from FFVI and went "okay so we accidentally made Loving Doofus Grandpa Cid into Mengele implicitly and people have issues with that, let's just strip away all the humanizing elements and get right down to the core of the fucked up evil scientist."
Actually… Aerith grew up in a lab with her mom, right? And Hojo talked about comparing her abilities to her mother's? So he must have known her as a child - she was raised as a scientific experiment under Hojo's supervision, just like Celes was under Cid's. He's literally "what if FFVI!Cid was a sociopath," damn. Sneaky move to pull.
It's amazing just how quickly Hojo establishes himself as being a slimy, greasy piece of shit in every way possible. You can maybe see some nuance to characters like the Turks (just doin' mah job!) or the rest of the Executives (Money!), and then in comes Hojo adjusting his glasses in that traditional anime dipshit way and going "ahem I am le' smartest, that is why we must breed cat dogs with ancient humans."
What is he even expecting to happen? Is there any reason to believe that's even possible? They're separate species! Is he trying to create catgirls?
Oh my god, that's it. Hojo is literally trying to breed magical catgirls.
This is the worst plot twist in all of Final Fantasy. Why am I being subjected to this!! Why can't I kill this man for forcing me to think about these things!!!
We had five characters there, and the game found a justification to have two of them leave, so that we would be fighting this boss with a party of three.
I now realize what should have been obvious to me all along from the size of the interface. FFVII's maximum party size isn't four like in every other game except FFIV (which had five). It's three.
This… kinda sucks?
I imagine there are many important technical reasons why it wasn't possible to make it a full party of four, but wow, that feels like a downgrade. I mean I guess the Materia system makes it so "party composition" isn't really a thing, since anyone can equip anything, but like… In terms of who gets to hang around as part of the group… How many of your blorbos you can take on a trip together… I feel disappointed.
Props to the game, though: it's been pretty good so far about writing the plot in such a way that you might not notice that it contrives for Cloud, Barret, Tifa and Aerith to never be together at exactly the same time, so it never registered as a contrivance until now.
Sadly, the downside of large or customizable parties starts to rear its head, as the more characters you get and the farther you progress in a game the more it becomes "okay but why don't they just all jump the boss at once".
Funny enough as I'm back to marathoning the Dragon Quest games on the side, Dragon Quest IV handles this by giving you a wagon the other party members are in as long as you aren't in certain dungeons and you can freely swap them in and out of your four man battle party, including having them toss someone dead back in the wagon to worry about later while they take their place. Not the perfect solution, but one I've seen replicated in other JRPGs over the years.
I actually spent the entire Reno fight back in Sector 7 waiting for Rude to show up, because I could have sworn he does to make the fight ore complicated... but nope, he doesn't make an appearance until now.
This is so hilariously on the nose it wraps around to being genius.
These guys have stumbled on the possibility that fucking Atlantis may be real and they're planning to strip-mine it for more oil. Their big world-changing era-defining plan is build a bigger power plant. They've been exhausting the Mako supply of the planet, and their plan is to find a new place with more Mako and just move their industry there and do it all over again.
Absolutely zero self-reflection. No sense of irony whatsoever. Just Make Money. Absolutely perfect capitalist bad guys.
Also President Shinra seeing off the terrorists being dragged off with "Talk to my secretary" is some classic Evil CEO stuff, I love that for him.
Gotta give it to him, for what little screentime he's had President Shinra is classy as a villain and it can be wonderful to watch (in a rich, slimy businessman kind of way).
It's interesting to me that for six games in a row Final Fantasy has played the concept of 'dungeon' as a core part of the gameplay loop completely straight, and with VII it shakes up the formula heavily? There are dungeons in Midgar, mainly Mako Reactors 1 and 5 and the Shinra building, but they're heavily integrated within a linear plot progression instead of being overworld cave that you leave a town to enter, with character dialogue and plot progression interwoven so they don't feel like the old dungeons, which for the most part felt very "this is a dungeon because a dungeon is a dungeon is a dungeon," so to speak? Like, the Shinra building is the longest "dungeon" we've had in the game so far, but over half of it is just walking around office buildings, talking to people, peering through library shelves…
More generally speaking it's weird how low the density of random encounters is in FFVII compared to previous games. Like, sometimes I will go through an entire screen and trigger a single fight before moving on to the next plot point. This game is really, really heavy on the storytelling and atmospheric dialogue and worldbuilding, and it just works… Incredibly well? This feels like Final Fantasy is mutating into a whole new form, or perhaps into its own true form.
I think to some degree, much like FFIV was a breakout moment in the series of taking advantage of new technology to advance from a more generic "go hit dungeons also I guess there might be a plot somewhere" to "sweeping epic fantasy story with actual characters and development", FFVII is taking advantage of the massively improved processing power of the PS1 over the SNES to go even further than FFVI could dream of. Like, as you've mentioned several times now we're barely five hours into the game and Tifa/Aerith have had more interactions and characterization with each other than Terra/Celes got over an entire game.
We'll see if that sticks (I'm only just now getting to the open party selection part of FFVII and again, that's where FFVI started to fall off on inter-party characterization), but for now it's great.
Or maybe you do, but hey, spoiler thread, vagueness, goes hand in hand.
And on a barely related note, as I continue to play Dragon Quest on the side god does the Party Chat feature in DQIV feel like something that FFVI could have desperately used. To be fair, party chat wasn't in the original game it was added in the remakes around the early 2000s, but still just having an on demand button to go "hey party members what do you think of the current situation" and get all kinds of small talk, that dynamically reacts to whatever area you're in or random NPCs you talk to... adds so much character to the game that FFVI (or really, any FF game) could have used.
Hojo really is just amazingly gross. In the remake the other executives, who'e all been made even worse people, are creeped out by Hojo, who feels exactly the same as he always was. Can't improve on that kind of awful perfection I guess.
Hojo orders "the specimen" to be brought up, and the weird orange cat-thing rises into Aerith's cell; Aerith wakes up at the commotion and runs to the wall, banging her fists against the soundproof glass while, in the back, the cat raises its tail and its back and growls angrily, seemingly able to pounce on her. The group hurries to the cell and Cloud asks Hojo what the hell he thinks he's doing, and he…
"If I don't help, all these animals will disappear."
He…
…
[Omicron slowly takes off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose]
I…
It's a kink thing, right?
Hojo didn't ACCIDENTALLY or SCIENTIFICALLY end up producing a #feral #anthro #impregnation doujin scenario. Dude here was looking for an excuse. My guy had a weird orange magical cat-dog from an extinct species just waiting for the opportunity to put it into an insane contrived scenario as to why we have, we HAVE to have the cat fuck a person President Shinra, it is IMPERATIVE to locating the Promised Land.
What is he even expecting to happen? Is there any reason to believe that's even possible? They're separate species! Is he trying to create catgirls?
Oh my god, that's it. Hojo is literally trying to breed magical catgirls.
Ah, this scene. This scene. Forget Team Four Star's abridged series. The Dark Id's summation of this scene in his Dirge of Cerberus LP still lives in my head rent free from when I read it years ago to this very day.
