On the fact that this is their first use of blood splatter, bear in mind that this was their first game off of a Nintendo platform.
Today, sure, Playstation is more known for being overly sensitive on pulling the censorship trigger than Nintendo. But back in the days of the NES and SNES, when one of their guiding principles was to be seen as a family friendly toy and distance themselves as much as possible from the Wild West era of pre-1983 video games? Nintendo was famous for how stringent its restrictions on what you could or could not have in games were. Admittedly Nintendo of America was most famous for this (some translations got massacred by it), but NoJ wasn't exactly innocent of it either.
Chances are its less "this is the first time they thought to include blood splatter" and more "this is the first time they thought blood splatter would have been appropriate and were allowed to put it in".
Not coincidentally, Playstation not having that kind of kid-friendly image obsession the way Nintendo and to a lesser extent Sega did is a big part (not as big as the CD thing, but big) of why it ate Nintendo's lunch so easily, which is why by the end of the N64 Nintendo fully embraced getting rid of its kid friendly restrictions.
Much less, yeah. Or at least, you've got much more at-will control over your party, and you accumulate more materia, so there's less need to keep everything focused on your one 'active' party, you know?
Also the game does lean into "Tifa is jealous of Aerith" at times; it's not been obnoxious about it, really, and it's a perfectly believable human reaction, I am just always wary of love triangles. This one strongly benefits from the fact that Tifa and Aerith are genuinely friends, and nearly immediately gets over the fact that Cloud and Aerith are having a discussion through the wall to instead ask Aerith about her mysterious heritage and the voices she's hearing.
I do quite like this, not gonna lie. Maybe I'm just burned out from basically everything modern anime nonsense but the fact that while Tifa and Aerith clearly have a bit of a rivalry going on they're still good friends is nice. I could easily see one or the other being totally accepting of Cloud picking their opposite, if maybe a bit sad that they didn't win out.
Red XIII goes scouting ahead while Barret stays to "clean up back there" (what does he mean, it's not like we care if Shinra pins yet another death on us), and Cloud, Tifa and Aerith head on ahead.
Boy, FF7 really does its best to push whatever it can to keep you to that three man party huh? At least it doesn't have FFIV syndrome, where Red XIII and Barret would suddenly "die" in a dramatic moment only to show back up outside Midgar like "oh yeah we're fine btw".
And a real special touch? The music doesn't change for combat. The same slow, ominous tune continues to play throughout all the encounters. (I don't know what it's called; OST titles typically contain spoilers so I only looked briefly).
…who just suffered a terminal case of katana to the back.
Well! That is certainly a dramatic way of disposing of who's so far been our main antagonist!
Man, the ghost of FFVI is all over this game, isn't it? Like, it's subtle, the parallel isn't direct (we haven't met a Kefka figure yet), but "the old man leader of the evil company/empire whose actions have precipited the protagonists to act as rebels dies surprisingly and shockingly partway through the game" definitely echoes the previous game.
It's certainly earlier than the Emperor got offed, but yeah even if you expect President Shinra to go down at some point this is still pretty unexpected.
For all that I dislike Sephiroth in other media because of how hard he gets pushed as the Cool Bishie Long Katana Edgelord Man, I do have to admit going back to finally replay FFVII he's a very well done villain so far.
As long as you're the one with the guns, the mutant super-soldiers, and the giant robots, what's anyone going to do about it? The monopoly on sufficient violence can certainly substitute for the monopoly on legitimate violence. It's only laying bare the system's core mechanisms, isn't it?
...Final Fantasy VII came out in 1997, about halfway into Japan's first Lost Decade. The desillusionment with the system is patent, and it hasn't exactly grown old here in 2023.
Oh boy funny enough you say that, because I just got around to watching an hour and a half video on "why do you always kill gods in JRPGs" and part of the history lesson it covered was the direct comparison of Shinra to actual Japanese companies and the Lost Decade.
Sadly I can't recommend the video for now, since it heavily spoils FFVII's story (in fact even the thumbnail has some spoilers), but I doubt I'm the only person who will be interested in dropping it in the thread come the end of FFVII.
…something I distinctly remember bugging me when I was much younger and playing Final Fantasy VIII and IX is... Well, I wouldn't have phrased it that way, but I was bothered by the lack of field models for bosses. It's striking how often characters on the field will openly warn each other of a monster attack, sometimes even talking about that monster as if it were standing right there, but the monster just… doesn't exist. They didn't bother spending the resources to make him exist on the screen for all of twenty seconds before combat, which I guess is fair enough, but it leads to these strangely surreal scenes where someone is like "oh no, a dragon" in a completely dragon-less scene and then we transition to the encounter and the dragon is suddenly there. It's not really a major issue but as a kid, it bugged me.
I can kind of get it for FFVII since you've got that difference between the Popeye-looking models in the overworld and the battle models, but FFVIII/FFIX don't have much of an excuse imo considering they use the same overworld and combat models.
Additionally, there's an extra complication - the game actually does take into account that we're meant to be on two separate platforms with nothing between but the void; as a result, neither Aerith nor Red XIII can reach the robot using their normal attacks - only Magic and Limit Breaks. Barret is the only character who can reach the enemy, because he has a gun. That's clever!
However, thanks to the Materia system, everyone has magic, so it's no problem. In fact, the Hundred Gunner is (say it with me now) weak to lightning, and we have at least two characters who can cast Lightning, so we're able to deal enough damage to destroy it before it can unleash its Wave Artillery.
Buying multiple Lightning materia is a godsend for this part of the game, that's for sure. And probably relevant going on considering Shinra still exists.
Okay, so I appreciate that the game is giving me the option, every time the party splits or swaps, to reconfigure my Materia, but also that's going to be incredibly obnoxious incredibly quickly just out of sheer frequency.
The way Materia works is that it gains AP by being equipped in combat, but is character agnostic. My Sense Materia A with 500 AP has 500 AP whether it's equipped on Cloud, or Tifa, or Barret, and I can swap it freely, transferring the same competency from character to character. This makes the game very flexible and also means there is no incentive to not have the playable group be equipped with the best Materia we have (other than grinding low-level Materia, of course), and given that save points can be half an hour apart with huge cutscenes in the middle, there is very little incentive to not constantly optimize Materia whenever we swap characters. Except I probably shouldn't do that because it's busywork that is going to make me end up hating the game.
I wonder if there's a mod for that. "Materia auto-sorter." A man can dream.
Well hey, maybe I can help you with that! So around this point of the game, I also started to get tired of the constant Materia switching, so I looked up some solutions. As it turns out, the game already has one, although it's rather badly communicated.
So if you open up the Materia menu, you've got the Arrange option here if you press to the left:
Yeah I know, not exactly looking like an actual menu option with how the cursor starts on the Materia themselves. Anyways, click that and you have options ranging from "sort all your Materia in the bag by type" so they aren't a disorganized mess, to opening up an Exchange menu that brings up every single party member's Materia sets on the side, letting you freely edit them all whether or not they're in your current group, and even select two character's weapons/armor to exchange all the Materia in those slots directly. Might not be perfect considering characters will have different armor and especially weapons with different slot counts, but does ease things quite a bit.
Our rewards for this fight are better armor and a Guard Source, an item which permanently increases the Vitality stat of a character. I was wondering about those! We've seen "permanently boost a character's stats" in… I think it was FFIV, right? But not since, and I was wondering if the idea had been fully scrapped. Looks like it's back!
Yep, permanent stat boosts in the form of the Source items are a thing in FFVII. Pretty sure you can eventually farm them even, though of course that's in the distant future.
Yeah, Cloud. You kinda fucked up on that whole "take out Shinra's new president before he can institute a new reign of terror," huh? Well, I can't blame Cloud for not being able to chase after a helicopter.
Personally, I've taken it as more... Red XIII is currently only interested in getting out of the Shinra Building to his freedom, rather than wasting time bonding with this squad of bozos that showed up. I'm sure he'll warm up eventually.
Motorcycle Cloud, the following minigame, and the music during this whole part is just forever burned into my mind, one of my favorite parts of the game when I played FFVII back in the day. Pretty sure I even saved a backup file entirely for the purpose of playing it again when I wanted to.
This one is… interesting. We are in a full departure from normal gameplay; a full sequence of high-stakes gameplay that completely changes the way the game is approached. At the same time it's the first one that's actually fun? Like, I don't mind having had to play through it - but at the same time, the fact that it changes a turn-based, strategic game into something movement and reflex-based is, like, rude. I don't like when a game suddenly throws something at you that totally changes the kind of skill you need to use for one you might absolutely suck at.
So first, my one complaint for this minigame: dear god playing with a controller bound to some of those options for what's convenient made it very silly with some controls, like having to find out "swing sword to the left" was apparently my select button.
Other than that, it's fun, it's not too difficult, and even if the damage your party members take in the minigame carry over to the boss fight, that's nothing a quick Cure-All won't fix.
This is a giant six-wheeler car robot which can use its own engine as flamethrowers. It's a sick concept, and a cool battle, although thankfully not too difficult (the last saving point was after the Rufus fight, which isn't too bad, but at that point I haven't fully acclimated to PSX saving rhythms so my last save was prior to finding the dead President. That would be… bad.)
Yeah, in regards to save points... it's a good idea to get used to saving everywhere you go compulsively, and rotating save files. Pretty sure you aren't getting an autosave again for at least three or four games.
This is going to be a whole thing, isn't it. It's not like we're anywhere close to having an airship, either, so I wonder how the game is going to manage to justify the party splits.
This is about where I left off my own playthrough for the moment, but I wouldn't be surprised if they just stop justifying it eventually and it's an arbitrary mechanic like in FFVI.
I said it before, but it really is pretty nuts how much of the game Midgar takes up. Not quite as much as I recall from my childhood, but 5-6 hours is still a lot of gameplay to be confined into one massive city. The Remake even managed to stretch that out to a full game, though... I have my thoughts on that and how much filler was really necessary.
@Omicron, quick note to make your life easier: You should now have ready access to Hyper and Tranquilizer items, which inflict two very useful status effects that persist between battles: Fury and Sadness, respectively. Sadness reduces incoming damage by 30%, but makes your limit break gauge fill half as quickly; Fury, on the other hand, multiplies your hit rate by 0.7, so you miss about 30% more often, but it makes the limit bar fills up twice as fast.
Fury is amazing. Give it to Aerith, put her in the first row, give her the Cover materia. With Fury, Healing Wind means Aerith will outheal the damage necessary to trigger it
Going from how characters (especially Aerith and Sephiroth) are portrayed in the movie, video game crossovers, and other media to how they originally appeared is interesting.
In any case, FF7 Original Flavor Midgar Sequence Conclusion: 9.5/10 total banger let down only by clumsy minigames, the fact that this game's interface and systems are 25 years old and have never received a proper remaster to bring to them modern convenience, and the way the writing kind of cheated Barret of a chance at a big character moment for him, even if he's still cool.
Number one thing I noticed when starting to play along was the lack of the convenient boosts and cheats that I think every (Steam) Final Fantasy from viii onwards has. (Don't think it needs to be spoilered since it's a gameplay not a story thing, but just in case…)
Going from how characters (especially Aerith and Sephiroth) are portrayed in the movie, video game crossovers, and other media to how they originally appeared is interesting.
People have talked quite a bit here about how many FF7 characters went through a real case of Kirk Drift, i.e., when a character's misremembered to the point that even official works go with the mischaracterisation
People have talked quite a bit here about how many FF7 characters went through a real case of Kirk Drift, i.e., when a character's misremembered to the point that even official works go with the mischaracterisation
What's most remarkable is how early in the parade of FF7 sequels, prequels, and spinoffs that that drift took place. I'm not sure there's any that used the original's characterizations.
What's most remarkable is how early in the parade of FF7 sequels, prequels, and spinoffs that that drift took place. I'm not sure there's any that used the original's characterizations.
Having only now progressed far enough to check Tim Rogers' Let's Mosey again without too much fear of spoiler, I can see that something has escaped me previously. We know that the Mayor of Midgar is "Mayor Domino." At the door, we also meet his assistant, Hart - Hart is seemingly helpful but actually extremely corrupt, and will offer to give us hints to find the password for increasingly obscene amounts of gil. I didn't talk about it much.
However, according to Tim Rogers, "Hart" is a mistranslation. The pronunciation of Hart's name in Japanese would be "Hatto" rather than "Harto." Hatto, in English, would be more properly translated as either "Hat" or "Hut" - a pun on an object either way.
That is to say, now that we've both met the Mayor and seen a scale model of Midgar:
Barret refers to the plate as a "pizza."
It is circular and divided in 8 slices.
The Mayor and his assistant are named Domino & Hut.
I will be discontinuing this Let's Play at this time and dedicating the rest of my life to hunting FF7's devs for their crimes.
The weird fleshy ghost thing on the right is really the only one of these horror encounters to comment on on the translation front: they're called "Vargid Police" here, "Vagidopolis" in the retranslation (the translation notes claim a possible connection the Spanish word "vagido" for a newborn's crying) and the Remake "Varghidpolis". It's a nonsense word with no clear answer, to my understanding.
…something I distinctly remember bugging me when I was much younger and playing Final Fantasy VIII and IX is... Well, I wouldn't have phrased it that way, but I was bothered by the lack of field models for bosses. It's striking how often characters on the field will openly warn each other of a monster attack, sometimes even talking about that monster as if it were standing right there, but the monster just… doesn't exist. They didn't bother spending the resources to make him exist on the screen for all of twenty seconds before combat, which I guess is fair enough, but it leads to these strangely surreal scenes where someone is like "oh no, a dragon" in a completely dragon-less scene and then we transition to the encounter and the dragon is suddenly there. It's not really a major issue but as a kid, it bugged me.
So, we're fighting a mechanized weapon platform, evocatively called the "Hundred Gunner." A touch I really like is that the very first thing it does upon combat being initiated is shatter the glass of the other elevator in a hail of bullets. It's just, great use of the medium there.
Although it's kind of amusing that we went from "the elevator is a single, tiny tube with enough shoulder room for about four people" to "two massive tubes large enough for people to stand in formation on" in the transition from field to battle background! Like, it's not a problem, it's just that this is something that is only possible within the specific setting of a game like FF7, where combat and navigation exist in two separate realities that don't need to match 1-to-1. In the Remake, if the devs want an elevator to be large enough to accommodate a battle against a giant robot, they need that elevator to be that size every time it's on screen - and so in that scene, the robot merely causes the elevator to drop, then the fight happens in the lobby.
As a gun platform, the Hundred Gunner mostly uses various gun-themed attacks like Aux Artillery, Hidden Artillery, and Main Artillery. Upon reaching a third of its HP, it announces "Sensor Cannon charging!" and prepares to unleash its most powerful attack.
Additionally, there's an extra complication - the game actually does take into account that we're meant to be on two separate platforms with nothing between but the void; as a result, neither Aerith nor Red XIII can reach the robot using their normal attacks - only Magic and Limit Breaks. Barret is the only character who can reach the enemy, because he has a gun. That's clever!
However, thanks to the Materia system, everyone has magic, so it's no problem. In fact, the Hundred Gunner is (say it with me now) weak to lightning, and we have at least two characters who can cast Lightning, so we're able to deal enough damage to destroy it before it can unleash its Wave Artillery.
It's neat how Shinra has, like, a defining vulnerability? They fight with machines and soldiers in high-tech armor, so lightning is super effective against most of their repertoire - with notable exceptions like those "wall" enemies that are immune to it instead (probably because they're grounded).
Once the artillery robot is done, though, we're not out of the water - another robot immediately drops down to continue the fight.
Hundred Gunner and Heli Gunner aren't changed in the retranslation, but I should note that I found on the wiki that as part of the Remake being super iconoclastic on enemy names they are renamed The Arsenal and The Valkyrie.
I don't know if being that extra with it is strictly necessary, but I kind of like it.
I like Shinra's robot aesthetic. It's like… Conspicuously not "sleek robots", they don't look like Terminators or walking iPods. They're colorful, they're round, with big exaggerated shapes, chopper blades or exhaust ports or really big guns or big glowing buttons. It's almost cartoonish in a way that wouldn't work if the game had more high-fidelity graphics but is the right fit for this… early, mid-PSX era? It gives them charm.
If anything, they remind me of Eggman's Badnicks in Sonic the Hedgehog.
It's fascinating. I'd almost say the strange anachronistic technical design makes FF7 less Cyberpunk and more... something else? Like, sure, there's the big evil corporation putting it thematically in line but in terms of the technology on display, it's more like a schizophrenic version of the present. Like a world where they sort of jumped right from the steam engine to nuclear powered Cold War devices looking obscenely crude because they were literally just invented yesterday. (For further reference, I really don't like stuff like the Shinra helicopters in the Remake cutscenes I've watched online just... looking like modern Blackhawks. The weird industrial look is essential to the character of the world.)
Anyway, it's not particularly difficult, and it's fun? I knew that minigame was coming at some point, and I was fully expecting to hate it, but… no. I enjoyed it. At some point a giant road-riding robot comes in and the group runs out of road, so it's time for a boss fight.
It's the best minigame in the game (at least so far as I've played it) in my opinion. Just a plain fun and badass escape scene with mechanics simple enough to just be a neat power fantasy bridge sequence breaking up what is basically a boss rush of three, arguably four, big fights.
Also, did you catch Cloud's little Akira Slide at the end of the road?
Also, don't worry about mandatory party breakups and the Materia shuffle... I do it by choice to evenly level the materia and have access to all the useful things whenever I switch up my party, but from here on out with the world map structure I think the game expects you to mostly have a set loadout and plan for every character, or to otherwise stick with a preferred party if you're not grinding to even out levels.
This is an archetype that goes back at least 2900 years:
1 Kings 12 said:
6 And king Rehoboam consulted with the old men, that stood before Solomon his father while he yet lived, and said, How do ye advise that I may answer this people?
7 And they spake unto him, saying, If thou wilt be a servant unto this people this day, and wilt serve them, and answer them, and speak good words to them, then they will be thy servants for ever.
8 But he forsook the counsel of the old men, which they had given him, and consulted with the young men that were grown up with him, and which stood before him:
9 And he said unto them, What counsel give ye that we may answer this people, who have spoken to me, saying, Make the yoke which thy father did put upon us lighter?
10 And the young men that were grown up with him spake unto him, saying, Thus shalt thou speak unto this people that spake unto thee, saying, Thy father made our yoke heavy, but make thou it lighter unto us; thus shalt thou say unto them, My little finger shall be thicker than my father's loins.
11 And now whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.
@Omicron, quick note to make your life easier: You should now have ready access to Hyper and Tranquilizer items, which inflict two very useful status effects that persist between battles: Fury and Sadness, respectively. Sadness reduces incoming damage by 30%, but makes your limit break gauge fill half as quickly; Fury, on the other hand, multiplies your hit rate by 0.7, so you miss about 30% more often, but it makes the limit bar fills up twice as fast.
Fury is amazing. Give it to Aerith, put her in the first row, give her the Cover materia. With Fury, Healing Wind means Aerith will outheal the damage necessary to trigger it
Square has done some horror-themed setpieces in previous Final Fantasy games, but this is a level beyond. This game was, what… One year before Parasite Eve? Maybe I should look into that one. You know, I've kind of always wanted to play it - and Super Eyepatch Wolf just made a video in which he mentions playing it recently and calls it "a banger…" Damn. Things to put on The List.
One thing about FF VII that always stuck with me was how despite the simple character models they did body language quite well. They evoke the emotions and attitudes of the characters well, even with the basically faceless character models.
That's one image that stayed with me; not only is it your introduction to the World Map, but it rubs it in how Shinra and Midgar really are a literal blight upon the Planet. It's sitting right on a black, burned looking splotch in the middle of a wasteland.
This is a giant six-wheeler car robot which can use its own engine as flamethrowers. It's a sick concept, and a cool battle, although thankfully not too difficult (the last saving point was after the Rufus fight, which isn't too bad, but at that point I haven't fully acclimated to PSX saving rhythms so my last save was prior to finding the dead President. That would be… bad.)
Thankfully we've got Limit Breaks and Lightning magic, so all in all, it's not much of a problem.
The big thing about this boss is that, well... on the minigame you might have spotted health bars for all the characters? Those actually transfer over to the fight. Essentially, if you suck at the minigame you get to start with a weaker party.
Can't remember if the game gives you a chance to heal though, resulting in it just wasting resources or not.
Anyway, welcome to the next stage of the game. I personally don't consider it as being out of the beginning just yet, more the end stage of the beginning. Still, this is an area where Midgar's length made it much more impactful.
The whole scene with Jenova having gone full The Thing on the whole building, culminating with the president being taken down by that mysterious Sephiroth guy… chef's kiss. What amazing atmosphere.
…And then there's the emergency backup president who just shows up out of nowhere to twirl his moustache.
Cloud: "Get Aerith outta the building!" Barret: "What?" Cloud: "I'll explain later! This is the real crisis for the Planet!" Barret: "The hell's that supposed to mean?" Cloud: "I'll explain later! Just take my word for now! I'll go after and take care of him!" Barret: "Alright, Cloud!"
Yeah, look, this dipshit has plot armour so thick Cloud can see it instantly. Time for another fake fight that doesn't matter where you kill the cartoon villain to death and then the GM is like "no he's fine lol" right?
The big thing about this boss is that, well... on the minigame you might have spotted health bars for all the characters? Those actually transfer over to the fight. Essentially, if you suck at the minigame you get to start with a weaker party.
Can't remember if the game gives you a chance to heal though, resulting in it just wasting resources or not.
Boss gets a free party-wide back attack as it smashes into you, but it does pretty low damage so you get a chance to heal soon enough after that, and if you're this far along without Restore and All Materias linked, well... that's kind of on you not having that emergency button.
I need to find a workaround. I don't know if it's going to be "just commit to giving each character their own Materia set and never changing it ever no matter party comp" or what, but I can't live like this.
Flashback to the time I did exactly that because I didnt want to refight all the enemies. Realized my mistake when I died where I really shouldn't have immediately after.
Flashback to the time I did exactly that because I didnt want to refight all the enemies. Realized my mistake when I died where I really shouldn't have immediately after.
I hate to break it to you, but if it's a new Bonfire, you can light it (meaning you'll respawn there) without resting (meaning you don't heal but enemies don't respawn). But only if it's a new one.
