Question for the music guys in the thread; how many different versions of the soundtracks of 1-6 are there? There's the originals and the pixel remasters, but did any of the playstation or gba or ds rereleases have their own?
And for future reference do any of the other games have multiple versions of their soundtracks?
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.
I'm playing it right now (for the same reason, lol), and holy shit, it's the best iteration of ATB system I've encountered. Like, there is an actual reason for the ATB gauge now since in-between your actions you get to move around and dodge enemy attacks, so it can't be easily collapsed into normal turn-based system.
It can be a bit hard to read enemy patterns in 3D environment, but so far it's not too obnoxious and does add to the feeling of precariousness useful for a horror game.
Question for the music guys in the thread; how many different versions of the soundtracks of 1-6 are there? There's the originals and the pixel remasters, but did any of the playstation or gba or ds rereleases have their own?
And for future reference do any of the other games have multiple versions of their soundtracks?
I don't know if it was a separate version but apparently the music wasn't as good quality for FF6 GBA I've heard? Also I guess it depends on what you mean by "different version" because there were certainly some remakes out there (officially produced by Square), just not of the full soundtrack.
Question for the music guys in the thread; how many different versions of the soundtracks of 1-6 are there? There's the originals and the pixel remasters, but did any of the playstation or gba or ds rereleases have their own?
And for future reference do any of the other games have multiple versions of their soundtracks?
Here's one I found way back comparing the SNES, GBA, mobile, and Pixel Remaster versions for VI. You can just skip to 1:55 and listen to the different battle themes. The GBA version is waaaaay worse. Same sheet music, but bad instruments and performers if that makes sense.
Yeah, GBA ports of SNES games in general tended to have vastly downgraded soundtracks. Apparently GBA just has a worse soundchip overall, not to mention being kind of crunchy coming out of those little speakers.
Which isn't to say the GBA doesn't have some great soundtracks, like Mother 3 or Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, but directly comparing SNES to GBA the former will pretty much always come out on top.
Yeah, GBA ports of SNES games in general tended to have vastly downgraded soundtracks. Apparently GBA just has a worse soundchip overall, not to mention being kind of crunchy coming out of those little speakers.
Which isn't to say the GBA doesn't have some great soundtracks, like Mother 3 or Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, but directly comparing SNES to GBA the former will pretty much always come out on top.
Special shout out to the Tales of Phantasia port (the first official release of that game in the West, in fact), which tried to shove the SFC's already pretty crunchy attempt at voiced dialogue onto an even crunchier audio chip. View: https://youtu.be/WbmCKT3XSAU
If you choose to hang out with Barret and Red XIII, the comment will be: Aeris:
...Unexpected Tifa:
...combination.
Well, have fun with just the guys.
We'll see you at Kalm!
If you choose to hang out with Barret and Red XIII, the comment will be: Aeris:
...Unexpected Tifa:
...combination.
Well, have fun with just the guys.
We'll see you at Kalm!
(Screenshots in this update were clipped from a YouTube playthrough by Kristal109.)
Spoilers for Remake's plot up to the end, obviously.
Remake follows the Midgar sequence to its end, with the characters escaping through the freeway and looking onto the dawn as they go on to the start of their journey.
The way we get there, though, is, huh… Different.
It starts off similar enough, although there have already been nuances; the protagonists and their allies were successful in enacting an early evacuation of Sector 7, massively reducing the death toll of the plate crush to the point that one Shinra character openly complains about it. As usual with the Remake, the "climbing up to the top plate" sequence is its own entire level with monsters and Shinra troops - then we reach the Shinra Building and have the same choice of sneaking in or going through the front door, which plays out similarly (elevator encounters vs stairs), except the stairs take even longer and are even funnier, with the game deliberately playing up fourth wall leaning effects like distorted audio or disabled running from fatigue, and Mako Super Soldier Cloud somehow has worse cardio than Tifa, who is clowning on him and Barret.
The ascent through the building is modified in the details but not in concept. We go through various levels of Shinra stuff while getting blasted with their propaganda (there's an entire museum we have to go through that has full VR reconstructions of the planet's past and Midgar's construction) and talk to a bunch of employees. The game also freely dispenses some information which hasn't been revealed yet at this stage of the original, like the fact that the Ancients' civilization was destroyed by a meteor. But there's a lot of these details. For instance, Cloud actually runs into a Shinra soldier who recognizes him - and not just as some wanted terrorist, but as Cloud, an old buddy. "We went through training together!"
Except that guy isn't SOLDIER. He's just a regular Shinra trooper with their standard gear. And him introducing himself immediately starts to cause Flashback Migraine in Cloud, who looks genuinely kind of distressed by this - and the moment the guy is gone (to fetch another of their old training buddies), Cloud is like "Well, let's never think about this again!" and leaves. Weird, huh?
Also, as a fun twist, Mayor Domino is no longer (or, depending on the truth in the original, we learn earlier that he is more than) just a disgruntled political puppet lashing out in what small ways he can; he is Avalanche's man on the inside, his resentment towards Shinra turned so bitter that he fully turned coat. He's actually been following the group through their entire ascension of the tower, editing and deleting security footage to ensure they couldn't be traced, which does a lot to explain their ability to get that far.
Meanwhile, in terms of antagonist characterization, the Shinra executives are now somehow even more evil, but the normal Shinra employees are less so? Like, the Board - Shinra, Scarlet, Palmer, and Heidegger, are all cackling villains who literally make jokes about how much they love torture. Reeve is more sympathetic, it's clear he really cares about people and isn't just mad about his own department being impacted… But still too cowardly to truly strike back?
But the normal Shinra employees have no idea of the extent of their company's evil. While the Shinra employees are still to a degree sheltered and insulated from the harm happening to the rest of the population, many of them are working overnight shifts coordinating efforts to save Sector 7's inhabitants, while Reeve's Urban Development department is scheduling multiple teams to propose plans to reconstruct Sector 7 - in a twist of dramatic irony, minutes before we learn from the President that he has no intention to rebuild. Tifa even says that seeing Shinra employees earnestly working to try and save people makes her feel better about the disaster.
On the one hand, it captures more of human complexity, the nuance of how massive corporations like this can be filled with well-meaning employees and still, as an organization, be a net negative for the world. On the other hand, it loses some of the sharp edge that makes the original's portrayal of Shinra a cutting portrayal of privilege and corporate malfeasance.
The Turks get a scene emphasizing their moral qualms regarding the Sector 7 attack.
…
More broadly the Shinra Building in Remake isn't a "dungeon." It's literally just the entire late game. That means it's expanded in many ways, but it also means that. Like. It has entire dungeons inside it and sometimes it's tedious. I'm simply not sure the game needed a scene in which Cloud hallucinates Sephiroth (or does he??), falls down a bunch of stairs, and has to climb back up over half an hour pulling switches to move pods to climb up the new, bigger and better Jenova Containment Chamber? Okay, that one might justify itself - the fact that there's a VR room where you can engage in battles against simulated opponents for rewards and you can just say "Aerith will be fine" and play there for about an hour, hanging out in the Shinra lobby in between? I'm not so sure. The pacing is fucked.
In terms of plot structure, there are some pretty radical departures, like the fact that the group is never cornered by the Turks and captured - it was kind of a "fine, I can roll with it" moment in the original, not upsetting but a little convenient. Here, that never happens. The group actually temporarily takes Hojo hostage before he manages to slip from their grasp and spend much of the late game going through Shinra laboratories hunting for him after rescuing Aerith. There is a "Cloud wakes up in a cell" scene, but instead of being captured, it's after he passed out from Flashback Migraine and the others take him to Aerith's old childhood room.
This, in turns, leads to a different take on the Jenova Containment Breach. It's not the group being mysteriously freed from their cells after capture and finding out the building security has been wiped out and the place is overrun by rogue experiments. Instead, after hunting for Hojo for several hours in the bowels of the laboratories, the group discovers that Jenova is no longer in its containment tank; following a trail of glowy purple-blue stuff (there is no ambiguity about it being blood) which leads directly to an elevator, which itself directly leads to President Shinra's office.
And I'm sorry, but that's just not as good. "Waking up in the middle of the night to find the door open, the guard dead, and following a trail of blood while battling horrors unleashed from Shinra's labs is just stronger that being sent for several loops in a bunch of underground laboratory and coming up to find that the plot happened while we were gone.
And this is where things start splitting apart in more than just 'the details.' So let's talk about the Whispers.
The Metatextual Ghosts
The Whispers are a bunch of hooded ghost-things that appear throughout Final Fantasy VII Remake. If you haven't played the original game, or if you played it long enough ago that the exact details of the plot are blurry, their motivations might seem ambiguous, even inscrutable; they alternatively help and hinder the party at seemingly random time with no rhyme or reason.
If you have a clear memory of the plot of the original, though, the motivations of the Whispers are increasingly obvious: They're the Canon Enforcement Force.
I mean that in the most literal sense. The Whispers' goal is to ensure the plot of the Remake doesn't deviate from the original. For instance, their first major intervention comes after Barret decides that they don't need Cloud after all, and that he won't be hired for further missions; the Whispers immediately attack Seventh Heaven in a swarm, injuring Jessie, which forces her to sit out the next mission; because Jessie is now injured, Barret has to go back on his decision and hire Cloud for the Mako Reactor 5 raid.
The first Whisper attack.
Later, when Cloud is fighting Reno, Cloud wins a fight they don't have in the original, and is about to kill Reno when the Whispers intervene and drag Cloud away. The Whispers also intervene when Avalanche prove too successful in attempting to prevent the Sector 7 plate collapse - but the group still manages to force a better outcome than in the original, saving many Sector 7 civilians and Wedge. Wedge actually survives the plate collapse! Well, for now, at least. In the Shinra labs, when Cloud introduces himself as a "SOLDIER, First Class," Hojo takes a look at him and starts saying that no, that's wrong, and before he can even finish his sentence the Whispers show up to drag him away and keep him from revealing critical information ahead of time; Cloud has a brief bout of Flashback Migraine then goes "Well, let's never think about this again!," again.
The ending of the game is where everything starts going wildly off the rails, and it causes the Whispers to go apeshit. For one thing, President Shinra isn't dead when the group finds him after following Jenova; he's hanging by his arms from the edge of the building, about to fall, having somehow escaped Sephiroth but fell nearly to his death. This means that Barret does get his confrontation with Shinra and a chance to fight the leader and founder of the organization he's dedicated his life to fighting while in a position of power. He pulls Shinra up to 'safety,' but that's so he can threaten him at gunpoint. What Barret wants, he says, is for the President to go public with a broadcast in which he confesses his crimes, his company's actions, and Avalanche's innocence in the collapse of the plate.
It's a good beat that felt missing from the original - although it's undermined when Barret somehow lets the President sneak a (gold-plated, because of course) gun out of his desk and hold Barret at gunpoint. Like, c'mon, my guy, you should know better. In turn, the President gets to wax philosophical in turn - he mocks Barret for caring more about Avalanche's name than their cause, which is unfair but not wholly inaccurate - Barret is very much grieving for Jessie, Biggs and Wedge and wanting to clear their name to give their death some kind of meaning is overriding his previous goals regarding Just Killing The Guy; what President Shinra is saying is true, but it's a lot more sympathetic of a motive than the President is making it sound.
He also does some classic supervillain shit, calling truth, justice and honor meaningless vanities and boasting that Shinra and its Mako reactors are the only thing lifting humanity out of stagnancy and asking Barret if he thinks humanity will thank him for bringing them ruin. Which is fair - Avalanche is right that the Mako extraction has to be stopped to save the planet, but "sudden collapse of modern civilization" is unlikely to be well-received by people.
It's a strong scene, even if Barret is kind of an idiot for part of it…
…and then Sephiroth murders them both.
Unlike the original, which has been building up Sephiroth's mystery without ever showing him to us even this far in, Sephiroth constantly appears throughout the Remake - usually as a vision or hallucination that Cloud is experiencing during scenes that bring up his buried trauma, but sometimes it's more ambiguous. For instance, during the interminable Shinra Lab sequence, Cloud sees Sephiroth near Jenova's containment tank and immediately attacks him; but everyone else in the party is standing there without saying anything, so it's unclear if they are seeing Sephiroth; however, it can't be a hallucination either, because Sephiroth parries Cloud's sword and cuts the bridge he's standing on in half. What's going? Maybe I'd known if I'd played the original to the end, but from just comparing the Midgar sequence side by side it's not clear.
This moment here, however, marks a very real and very physical appearance of Sephiroth, who stabs President Shinra through the back, as he was meant to - Barret reacts angrily by rushing him (whatever he was planning to do, he was clearly still intent on getting that public confession and needing Shinra alive for it). The Whispers appear in a panic to try and interpose themselves, but unfortunately Sephiroth is just too strong and simply flash-steps past them to impale Barret through the back.
It's a shocking swerve, for sure. And it's also a huge break in the canon of the game, which is where the Whispers reveal that they actually have healing magic - powerful enough to stop Barrett from dying. Cloud, Tifa, Aerith and Red XIII immediately engage Sephiroth in combat, only for him to transform into Jenova, or some kind of hallucinatory version of it which makes the entire presidential office looks overtaken by some alien fungus; upon defeating it, 'Jenova' is revealed to have actually been some weird dude in a hood, and Sephiroth picks up the headless body of the actual Jenova and proceeds to leave the room; the group doesn't pursue immediately, as they're more concerned about Barret - who wakes up pretty much fine, to everyone's relief and surprise (it doesn't seem like "heal a stab through the chest" is normally within the realm of this setting's healing magic, which is more like a quick pick-me up or applying first aid).
A lot about that scene is extremely confusing… Unless you've played the original game, I assume. Or seen Advent Children! That one also explains what's going on, even if it's kinda obtuse, I think.
While all this is happening - and it's a lot! - an Avalanche helicopter appears looking for the group to rescue them. Again, in the original, by this point it's unclear if Barret's cell is still even in contact with the rest of Avalanche, or for that matter if a 'rest of Avalanche' even exists. Here, Wedge (who didn't die) actually managed to reach out to Avalanche HQ and convince them to help the 'black sheep' cell Barret is leading. As the group pursues Sephiroth on the rooftop (he turns into another hooded guy and jumps off the rooftop and disappears, again I assume I'm missing some information that would explain what's happening from later in the original game), the Avalanche helicopter arrives to extract everyone… Only to be shot down by Rufus Shinra's own chopper.
The whole beat that follows is mostly textbook, except that Rufus Shinra doesn't make an evil monologue about how he'll rule by fear; he is in fact extremely reserved except for a quip about how if Cloud is SOLDIER, then that must mean Rufus owns him. Still sinister and corporate, but less obviously evil. He's also inexplicably really fucking cool. Like, he uses the blast of his own shotgun to propel himself forward in the air and swing the barrel like a sword at Cloud? He has supercharged coins that he tosses in the air and then he shoots them and they fire giant energy beams from the impact? It looks sick.
Once again, Rufus escapes riding the helicopter's undercarriage, but this time Tifa deciding to stay behind actually has a purpose, as the Turks fire a machine gun which breaks the platform and sends Cloud tumbling down, only for Tifa to catch him and tell him he has to do better if he wants to be that hero from their promise. It's a sweet beat. Meanwhile the others are chased by the Hundred Gunner (Arsenal in this version), and while this happens…
…the Whispers find Wedge, who is alone in the Shinra building trying to reach and help the other, and hurl him down an elevator shaft to fall to his death, like he should have in Sector 7.
You can see what I mean about the Whispers' motivations being incredibly bizarre if you haven't played the original and incredibly clear if you have, right? On one hand they save Barret, on the other they mercilessly murder Wedge, and it's all because their only and overriding interest is for "fate to unfold as it should," that is to say, ensure the Remake sticks to canon events. But by their very existence, they introduce the idea that it doesn't have to. That the Remake is a story of its own, with characters who are their own people and who may, if left to their own designs, change the course of fate. The Whispers have to intervene because, if they don't, the protagonists might actually change their own fate and prevent one specific tragedy which happens in the original, and which I won't talk about; the Remake never explicitly references it, but its shadow looms over the entire plot. Basically everything about the Whispers exists to present the audience with the great question of, "if our protagonists have to be corralled by fate's agents to force them to follow canon, does that mean that they might break their hold and avert that tragedy?"
Wedge's dying words are "Please, tell me I at least made a difference." He is literally asking - hoping - if he managed to, in some way, alter the events of the original game for the better even a little. It's incredibly on the nose.
Prokopetz over on tumblr called it "a discursive meditation on the nature of remakes whose subtext frames the expectation of fidelity with one's source material as a form of intellectual tyranny." The entities that are forcing events to adhere to their canon path are literally oppressive, hostile aliens that do not talk, do not explain themselves, and deal life and death in arbitrary ways, constantly opposing our heroes at every turn.
The antagonist of FF7 Remake isn't Sephiroth; it's the expectation that a remake should adhere to the story of the original.
It's special.
The Ending
Our heroes escape the Shinra lobby on bike/car and fight a giant robot (I totally forgot to mention that Motorball is almost definitely a reference to Battle Angel Alita first time around), as they do in the original. While this is happening, the Whispers are forming a giant tornado of themselves around Shinra HQ. The robot is destroyed, the party reaches the end of the road…
…and things go fully off the road. Sephiroth once again appears in person, makes ominous pronouncements (he seems to be to some level aware of the weird metatextual nature of the game, and so too does Aerith), and Cloud prepares to fight him. The Whispers see the possibility that the final boss fight may be happening three discs ahead of schedule, and freak the fuck out, rushing in a tide around Sephiroth and the party and forming a wall of shadow with a single white flame burning forward, like a portal. "What will we find on the other side?" Tifa asks. "Freedom," Aerith answers. "Boundless, terrifying freedom."
Our characters are fighting against the forces of destiny, in order to reclaim the ability to decide their own fate against the script of the game. "We'll be changing more than fate itself. If we succeed, if we win, we'll be changing ourselves."
The final level is a kind of weird, alternate dimension kind of place, a ruined version of Midgar, with floating buildings and such, controlled by a giant made of thousands of fused Whispers. There's a boss gauntlet against multiple variants of Super Whispers, destroying chunks of the giant. Once it's no longer strong enough to hold us back, Sephiroth appears, and he is our final boss. I… think this Sephiroth is a construct of the Whispers? Like, he clearly represents the inevitability of fate, the strongest opponent who embodies the destiny our protagonists are forced to follow. But I'm not clear if it's "Sephiroth broke in once the Whispers were too weak to hold him back," "Sephiroth has been summoned by the Whispers to stop the protagonists in a last-ditch move," or "this Sephiroth is an artificial construct of the Whispers." Again; probably makes more sense if you've played the full original game rather than just the Midgar sequence.
Sephiroth telekinetically lifts and throws the entire Shinra Building, which seems a little OP.
At the end of the battle, Cloud chases after Whispers!Sephiroth, entering some kind of otherworldly realm, and Sephiroth has an ominous speech in which he asks Cloud to side with him against fate, and Cloud refuses; they have a duel, Sephiroth eventually vanishes, and we move to the epilogues/sequel hooks - watching the Sector 7 survivors begin the process of rebuilding their home, Rufus sitting in as new President of Shinra, [REDACTED], Marlene watering flowers while staying with Elmyra... and Biggs waking up in bed in Sector 5, having himself survived Avalanche's fall.
The hurricane of Whispers scattered, our heroes find themselves on a cliff, overlooking the horizon, and have their "we're all in this together/our journey begins here" moment, like in the original, and the game ends.
It's a surreal kind of ending, the kind that feels like the reputation JRPGs have acquired of weird, confusing endings about fate and the universe that involves people making mysterious monologues that barely explain anything. But in actuality, the plot is fairly clear if you've played the original game recently! And most of the unclear parts I'm pretty sure are because of information I don't have from not playing the first game to the end.
Conclusion
[Tim Rogers voice] "You have to play the Final Fantasy VII Remake before you can play the Final Fantasy VII Remake."
You can play most of the FFVII Remake without having played the original. You can play all of it, in fact! I did! But the thing is, as it reaches the end, a bunch of underlying aspects that have been felt this whole time start rising in prominence until they fully derail the plot.
But even if you haven't played the original, it holds together. Red XIII tells us that the Whispers are destiny's enforcers, and we can understand that the characters are fighting for freedom to decide their fate. It still makes sense. It's just that with the original in mind, everything makes specific sense, the details all gel together.
Which is why Final Fantasy VII Remake is often referred to as an "AU" or a "sequel." It's a game that only makes complete sense in discourse with the original. Final Fantasy VII Remake is a game about Final Fantasy VII.
Which makes it a weird recommendation. On one level, the 'layer' on which Final Fantasy VII Remake is "just" a remake is excellent; the new level of depth given to the characters and the setting, the new, expanded Midgar, the way the city feels so much more alive when you have modern technology to depict it and five times the game length to explore it, is genuinely incredible. On another level, the layer of gameplay is more complicated; this is not a Remaster, it's a Remake, it plays absolutely nothing like the original and action RPGs are not everyone's cup of tea, especially ones that have… A bunch of mechanical issues, IMO (the implementation of damage gates to make boss fights more cinematic is a neat idea which also cripples gameplay by making it so you can just completely waste a Limit Break because you fired it 100 HP away from a damage gate you didn't know existed, and the game isn't easy enough for that not to matter, so you basically have to already know how a boss fight works if you want to have fun). It's absolutely nothing like a turn by turn RPG. And on yet another level, the layer on which FF7R is a metatextual discourse about the nature of Remakes is what makes it most interesting, but also potentially alienating to a player with no experience of the original! Like I said, for the most part it held up for me, but for instance there are flashbacks which absolutely do not explain themselves or make sense without further context from outside the game itself (looking at you, black-haired dude I think is called Zack).
FF7R obscures what it truly is, and that may be off-putting to some players. But what it is is frankly kind of incredible. It's a tremendously written and performed game with really interesting ideas to explore. It has a bunch of issues (pacing is fucked in a lot of places, gameplay is sometimes tedious when dungeons intrude at the wrong time, some writing decisions like absolving Avalanche of the blame for the human costs of their actions are extremely questionable), but overall, it's fantastic.
9/10, hopefully I'll have finished FF7 by the time Rebirth drops and gets even weirder with it.
I still feel like the plot ghost stuff should have been a Snowgrave-style secret route. At the very least, then you'd have the "canon" series of events to inform the new version without needing to play through the original.
I do appreciate how FF7R establishes that the main characters have explicit in-universe plot armor and then, one major gameplay segment later, have those same characters go "we have to kill our plot armor".
I would like to preface this post by saying that I love this update and I'm always psyched to read Omicron's stuff. I'm about to go full hater about a specific aspect of FF7R, so I don't want it to seem like any of that negativity is directed at the OP or the LP. I just have Thoughts and I must Post them.
Hideaki Anno and his consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Or whoever's responsible for this "the remake is actually an altered time loop and some of the characters are aware of it" trend, anyway. Usually I'm entirely behind Omicron's takes, and I'm sure I'd feel more positively toward FF7R if I played it, but I just can't get behind the deployment of this particular trope in this specific instance.
Anno used it in Rebuild of Evangelion to settle a beef with his fans and say something about audience expectations, which I found entertaining, and the time-loop elements were sufficiently integrated and non-obtrusive that it didn't interfere with the enjoyment of the actual product. Conversely, FF7R has actual plot ghosts who interrupt every time there's something new and significant with the narrative, which just seems obnoxious to me. I'm down with a remake that wants to faithfully replicate the previous work with new graphics and systems, and I'm down with a remake that wants to do the same story but bigger, better, and/or different, but having a big flashing in-universe sign that a canon deviation is occurring, complete with actual interference in those events, is not my thing at all. I'm not here for a story about plot ghosts, I'm here for FF7.
It's kind of a letdown, honestly, especially since it sounds like a lot of the changes to the narrative might have been pretty good if they'd just happened? Like, a FF7R that just lets Barret have his final confrontation with President Shinra before he gets ganked would be fantastic. More depth and nuance for the Turks is probably good, even though I think their post-facto woobification is excessive given the whole mass-murder thing. Why do plot ghosts have to show up? Why does Sephiroth have to kill Barret, so the plot ghosts can then un-kill him? It's all so egregious.
Combine that with the frankly excessive on-screen use of Sephiroth throughout the first act, which seems to be pure fanservice rather than something being done in pursuit of any narrative goal, and I'm left with a pretty negative impression. I would have much rather seen a Remake that went full-throttle for the changes it wanted without any of this weird meta-narrative nonsense. Especially because a lot of those changes seem really good. I want to see more power throuple antics! I like getting more Jessie screen time! aaaaaaaaaaaa
Anyway, looking forward to the forthcoming parts of FF7 proper. Some great stuff ahead, really.
I would like to preface this post by saying that I love this update and I'm always psyched to read Omicron's stuff. I'm about to go full hater about a specific aspect of FF7R, so I don't want it to seem like any of that negativity is directed at the OP or the LP. I just have Thoughts and I must Post them.
Hideaki Anno and his consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Or whoever's responsible for this "the remake is actually an altered time loop and some of the characters are aware of it" trend, anyway. Usually I'm entirely behind Omicron's takes, and I'm sure I'd feel more positively toward FF7R if I played it, but I just can't get behind the deployment of this particular trope in this specific instance.
Anno used it in Rebuild of Evangelion to settle a beef with his fans and say something about audience expectations, which I found entertaining, and the time-loop elements were sufficiently integrated and non-obtrusive that it didn't interfere with the enjoyment of the actual product. Conversely, FF7R has actual plot ghosts who interrupt every time there's something new and significant with the narrative, which just seems obnoxious to me. I'm down with a remake that wants to faithfully replicate the previous work with new graphics and systems, and I'm down with a remake that wants to do the same story but bigger, better, and/or different, but having a big flashing in-universe sign that a canon deviation is occurring, complete with actual interference in those events, is not my thing at all. I'm not here for a story about plot ghosts, I'm here for FF7.
It's kind of a letdown, honestly, especially since it sounds like a lot of the changes to the narrative might have been pretty good if they'd just happened? Like, a FF7R that just lets Barret have his final confrontation with President Shinra before he gets ganked would be fantastic. More depth and nuance for the Turks is probably good, even though I think their post-facto woobification is excessive given the whole mass-murder thing. Why do plot ghosts have to show up? Why does Sephiroth have to kill Barret, so the plot ghosts can then un-kill him? It's all so egregious.
Combine that with the frankly excessive on-screen use of Sephiroth throughout the first act, which seems to be pure fanservice rather than something being done in pursuit of any narrative goal, and I'm left with a pretty negative impression. I would have much rather seen a Remake that went full-throttle for the changes it wanted without any of this weird meta-narrative nonsense. Especially because a lot of those changes seem really good. I want to see more power throuple antics! I like getting more Jessie screen time! aaaaaaaaaaaa
Anyway, looking forward to the forthcoming parts of FF7 proper. Some great stuff ahead, really.
I do appreciate how FF7R establishes that the main characters have explicit in-universe plot armor and then, one major gameplay segment later, have those same characters go "we have to kill our plot armor".
Which is also why the "Sephiroth shows up in the confusing ending to fight the heroes" is so confusing - he also has a very obvious motive, being the bad guy, to want the heroes' plot armor to be gone so he can have an actual chance at winning. So it might be the canon enforcement police using his image, it might be him trying to egg the heroes on to sabotage their chances, it might be that due to Weird Time Shennanigans there's two of him and one has no idea what's going on and the other does (I've seen speculation that there's at least three separate Sephiroths in that ending sequence, each with their own motives and amount of knowledge of what's happening).
It is, needless to say, more complicated than it needs to be by far, even for the metatextual commentary bit. The entire involvement of Sephiroth inside the weird tornado thing feels superfluous both to retelling the old story and to the metacommentary bit, save to make things more complicated so as to make you want to play the next installment of the didn't-need-to-be-in-multiple-parts-but-we're-stretching-it-out.
My opinion on the metatextual commentary itself is, broadly I agree with Etranger that it's needlessly fanservicy and would have been better if it picked a lane and stuck with it... but I think the metacommentary is best understood as an attempt to square the circle of "how do we tell new stories the way we want to, while also fulfilling the demands from corporate to retell old stories that sold well and give fanservice by actively leaning in to the fact that such a tension exists. Sure, they could just retell the old story, but they don't want to do that. And if they had the authority within the company and sales ability in the market market to tell an entirely new story, they wouldn't be going back to the nostalgia well of FF7 to begin with. So in lieu of finding a way around the corporate suits and fans breathing down their necks they shrug and tell a story that is, fundamentally, about the fact that they have fans and corporate suits breathing down their necks.
See, I don't know, I think if they have enough creative freedom to do the "Our Heroes are being hounded by the canon police" runner, they probably also have enough to just implement the other changes without the runner. Unless, of course, the canon police are a corporate mandate, along with more Sephiroth, which would make a lot of sense.
See, I don't know, I think if they have enough creative freedom to do the "Our Heroes are being hounded by the canon police" runner, they probably also have enough to just implement the other changes without the runner. Unless, of course, the canon police are a corporate mandate, along with more Sephiroth, which would make a lot of sense.
My guess is the corporate mandates are more along the lines of "you have to include things/plot beats a b and c and give Sephiroth x amount of screen time", and the canon police are their way of including things/plot beats a b and c while also telling a new story
aka, "we have an annoying person demanding we include event b in the game, so we'll put a bad guy into the game forcing event b to happen".
I genuinely loved the Whispers and the metatextual commentary on the nature of remakes and how fan expectations relate to remakes of past works, and I think the game would have been both unnecessary and also much worse without those things.
The Whispers and the nature of 7R in general are fantastic tools to tell an interesting story, and I think the only shame with it is that we don't have Rebuild yet to be able to see how the story progresses from the endpoint of Remake.
A take I've heard regarding the Remake, and I think holds weight, is that
There are actually at least two Sephiroths in Remake running around at any given time; the one who is creepily intent on haunting Cloud and railing against fate in the ending is Advent Children Sephiroth that somehow returned from the Lifestream. He died, he's back, and he's not happy about it. The one in the President's office that grabs Jenova and does the 'my people need me' meme is OG Sephiroth, who's probably kind of confused right now. There being multiple Sephiroths with differing levels of 'realness' would go a long way to explaining his sometimes schizophrenic appearances.
For the record, I love Remake very much. I think the metatextual elements are fascinating. The fans have spent over 20 years constantly begging Square to remake Final Fantasy 7. Every time a new Final Fantasy product is announced, you'll have some reporter interviewing some rando live at the opening event or E3 or whatever, and it will come up, 'Sure, this is fine, but please remake Final Fantasy 7." The potential of a Final Fantasy 7 has been literally haunting Square-Enix for twenty years.
And then the Remake writing staff had the Sephiroth in full HD glory we always wanted go 'lol no' and dunk a basketball through a metatextual hoop to hit us in the face. And I kind of love them for the colossal brass balls they're dragging around the Square offices, ruining the executive carpeting.
And I'm sorry, but that's just not as good. "Waking up in the middle of the night to find the door open, the guard dead, and following a trail of blood while battling horrors unleashed from Shinra's labs is just stronger that being sent for several loops in a bunch of underground laboratory and coming up to find that the plot happened while we were gone.
I agree with this. But there are also all the individual moments that are going to live in my head forever, like when the team splits up while tracking down Hojo and Tifa and Aerith watch through the monitors Barret and Cloud fruitlessly attacking a giant super-secure porthole door while they're just like, '.. Hrm.' Regretfully, there were only two brain cells that day, and one of the split teams got both of them.
He's also inexplicably really fucking cool. Like, he uses the blast of his own shotgun to propel himself forward in the air and swing the barrel like a sword at Cloud? He has supercharged coins that he tosses in the air and then he shoots them and they fire giant energy beams from the impact? It looks sick.
