- Location
- Maryland
Remake Rufus is a Metal Gear Rising boss.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
So here's one aspect of the whole thing that's worth pointing out when asking why Remake had to end with the big fight against the Whisper Harbinger and Sephiroth.
1) Remake was never going to cover the entirety of FF7 because creating an hour of content in a triple-A PS4 game is probably 4,000 times as labour intensive as creating an hour of content in a PS1 game.
2) Where do you stop Remake if it can't be the whole game? You can at least cover Disc 1, because Midgar is a relatively self-contained arc of the story and stops just before you get into anything alarming like having to create an entire open world or what have you.
3) If you're stopping the game early, you need to give it some kind of satisfying climax, something to make the player feel like they have experienced a story that resolved in some capacity, even just to lay groundwork for the next part and leave you wondering about the future
Does anyone honestly think there's a world in which FF7 Remake was created under these circumstances and fucking Motor Ball was the final boss of the game? Because an early fight with Sephiroth sure feels like literally the only card they could have possibily played without being crushingly lame. Sure in a perfect world maybe they could've done the whole thing in one shot and had no pressing need to bring Sephiroth forward, but also Sephiroth is one of the most famous video game villains of all time and there would be something faintly ridiculous about trying to play coy and hide him for an entire video-game, like some 'ooh maybe the killer isn't michael myers this time~ (it was it always was)', whereas now even though Sephiroth has plenty of face-time his motives are legitimately still a mysery, even to returning fans of the original!
1) Remake was never going to cover the entirety of FF7 because creating an hour of content in a triple-A PS4 game is probably 4,000 times as labour intensive as creating an hour of content in a PS1 game.
2) Where do you stop Remake if it can't be the whole game? You can at least cover Disc 1, because Midgar is a relatively self-contained arc of the story and stops just before you get into anything alarming like having to create an entire open world or what have you.
3) If you're stopping the game early, you need to give it some kind of satisfying climax, something to make the player feel like they have experienced a story that resolved in some capacity, even just to lay groundwork for the next part and leave you wondering about the future
Does anyone honestly think there's a world in which FF7 Remake was created under these circumstances and fucking Motor Ball was the final boss of the game? Because an early fight with Sephiroth sure feels like literally the only card they could have possibily played without being crushingly lame. Sure in a perfect world maybe they could've done the whole thing in one shot and had no pressing need to bring Sephiroth forward, but also Sephiroth is one of the most famous video game villains of all time and there would be something faintly ridiculous about trying to play coy and hide him for an entire video-game, like some 'ooh maybe the killer isn't michael myers this time~ (it was it always was)', whereas now even though Sephiroth has plenty of face-time his motives are legitimately still a mysery, even to returning fans of the original!
GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
Its me. I thought it was going to end on a Motor Ball fight. I was 100% expected it to be piloted by Roche and doing crazy wacky woohoo pizza things as a result. "Roche in a giant robot at the edge of Midgar" would have made for a fine final boss.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
He played FF7R before this whole gala was so much as a twinkle in his eye.
Roche is a cool fight, but to pretend he's final boss worthy is absurd. Dude is the literal definition of 'quirky side boss you fight during some filler who's charismatic enough to make it pop all the same'.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This is a very good point and something I should have brought up in my own post, I think. Like, I remember at the time of playing the Remake thinking "huh, no way this covers the whole game, but it's not like there's a major story boss coming so - what? Are we just getting another random Shinra robot as final boss? Heidegger comes down to fight us in a mech? All of that sounds like kind of a letdown after all that buildup." I had no idea where they were going, but I knew they had to be going somewhere. There was no way they didn't change the conclusion to Midgar in some way.
- Pronouns
- They/Them/She/Her
I played most of FFVII years ago (I think I got to just before the final boss, but never beat the final boss?), though not when it came out; IIRC, VIII was my first Final Fantasy (and I got all the way to the final boss of that and don't recall whether I ever beat that, either), but I may not have gotten to VII until after IX, not sure. I think later on I played remakes or remasters of IV and V, though I don't recall how far I got, played some of X, and I think beat XII?
(IX, by the way, is my favorite of all of the ones I've played, and IIRC I've played through the whole game at least twice.)
...Anyway, that was something of a digression from saying: I did play through FFVII, at least almost the whole main plot, and not as my first Final Fantasy game, and I still as far as I recall got the best idea I ever had of what was actually going on in it from some fanfiction I happened upon years later. Or that's how I remember it, at least. I mean, my impression is that despite how confusing people've said VIII's time kompression is, I had a lot less difficulty with that than with the general plot of VII, and I never really understood why on Earth VII turned into such a big thing.
So as interested as I am to know what Omicron makes of VIII (which I have a soft spot for even if I badly misunderstood one of the core gameplay mechanics and had a much harder time playing it as a result (On the one hand, yeah, turned out, I learned later, there was a reason why level grinding somehow didn't seem to be making combat any easier, and on the other IIRC I didn't use junctioning nearly as much as I ought to have.)) and IX (see above), it's been interesting seeing him go into VII here (and the bits of reading back in the thread I've done, mostly about VI so far (I didn't start at the beginning), have also been interesting.).
...Anyway, I think what spurred this post was something along the lines of feeling like, hm... Well, the FFVIIR I'd already heard did the thing with breaking destiny, but I feel like I've a different relation to that than a lot of people do due to how little I understood or cared about (the latter probably mostly a result of the former) the plot of the original. Which might be... adding an additional dimension of interest to reading the comparison here?
(Also, due to how much larger that fanfic looms in my head than any other FFVII material, my main impression of Sephiroth is basically of a pretty nice, kind of lonely guy who doesn't get out much but still gets on well with his coworkers (when that's returned, at least) and wants to do right by them. It is, ah, probably not a spoiler to say that that's not so much, as I understand it, the main impression most people familiar with FFVII media have of him.
(And thinking about how I just described him, no, it was not a Sephiroth shipping fic.
))
[shrugs]
Okay, so I'm not really clear on what I'm talking about here, I think, but I'll go ahead and post this in case anyone finds it interesting.
And to provide Omicron with another comment saying someone's enjoying the content he's making here.
(IX, by the way, is my favorite of all of the ones I've played, and IIRC I've played through the whole game at least twice.)
...Anyway, that was something of a digression from saying: I did play through FFVII, at least almost the whole main plot, and not as my first Final Fantasy game, and I still as far as I recall got the best idea I ever had of what was actually going on in it from some fanfiction I happened upon years later. Or that's how I remember it, at least. I mean, my impression is that despite how confusing people've said VIII's time kompression is, I had a lot less difficulty with that than with the general plot of VII, and I never really understood why on Earth VII turned into such a big thing.
So as interested as I am to know what Omicron makes of VIII (which I have a soft spot for even if I badly misunderstood one of the core gameplay mechanics and had a much harder time playing it as a result (On the one hand, yeah, turned out, I learned later, there was a reason why level grinding somehow didn't seem to be making combat any easier, and on the other IIRC I didn't use junctioning nearly as much as I ought to have.)) and IX (see above), it's been interesting seeing him go into VII here (and the bits of reading back in the thread I've done, mostly about VI so far (I didn't start at the beginning), have also been interesting.).
...Anyway, I think what spurred this post was something along the lines of feeling like, hm... Well, the FFVIIR I'd already heard did the thing with breaking destiny, but I feel like I've a different relation to that than a lot of people do due to how little I understood or cared about (the latter probably mostly a result of the former) the plot of the original. Which might be... adding an additional dimension of interest to reading the comparison here?
(Also, due to how much larger that fanfic looms in my head than any other FFVII material, my main impression of Sephiroth is basically of a pretty nice, kind of lonely guy who doesn't get out much but still gets on well with his coworkers (when that's returned, at least) and wants to do right by them. It is, ah, probably not a spoiler to say that that's not so much, as I understand it, the main impression most people familiar with FFVII media have of him.
(And thinking about how I just described him, no, it was not a Sephiroth shipping fic.
))[shrugs]
Okay, so I'm not really clear on what I'm talking about here, I think, but I'll go ahead and post this in case anyone finds it interesting.
And to provide Omicron with another comment saying someone's enjoying the content he's making here.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Man, it's weird how this is somehow the one thing I actually osmosed before reading this LP, where like, 80% of the stuff that's happened so far was 'huh, didn't know that was a thing in ff7' but this guy I already know about.
no further commentary, just kinda funny.
Manic Dogma
This, I can't deny.
- Location
- The far side of tired
- Pronouns
- Whatever
Admittedly my only real interaction with FF7R is watching a particular LP of it, but given I rewatch that entire LP for fun every few months, I feel pretty comfortable in saying that I really, really love FF7R's take on things. Even with the bloat. And I've never played the original to be clear, everything I knew about FF7 prior was pure cultural osmosis.
My take on the ending is that the Sephiroth you actually fight has somehow subverted the Whispers, and also that the fight absolutely fucking slaps. Like god damm, that shit is so fucking cool,even when it ends with him being sat on by a fat chicken.
Also I'm shocked noone has paused to ask what the fuck he's wearing, and why anyone trusts him to dress himself when his decisions lead to wearing a second and third coat exclusively for each leg.
My take on the ending is that the Sephiroth you actually fight has somehow subverted the Whispers, and also that the fight absolutely fucking slaps. Like god damm, that shit is so fucking cool,
He's basically a puzzle boss. You either wreck his shit with parries, or you have to carefully time a Braver to hit him when he's reloading, which Staggers him instantly. The game tells you as much when you scan him.
Also I'm shocked noone has paused to ask what the fuck he's wearing, and why anyone trusts him to dress himself when his decisions lead to wearing a second and third coat exclusively for each leg.
If the whispers weren't in the game I think Rufus would have been an appropriate final boss. Maybe introduce him earlier and give people more time to hate him. I would have loved the game if they had just made the changes they wanted to make instead of constantly stopping things dead with the boring whisper fight and story.
- Location
- Phoenix
It's not that Reeve is cowardly, it's more like that if he displays too much humanity he'll have an 'accident' out of one of Shinra HQ's many windows.
Yeah, the pacing of the remake is entirely f'ed up, what they should have done is have the game continue until you got to Kalm and had THAT as the endgame area, it would've given them a lot more space to work with in making FF7's endgame content, and allowed them to close on Cloud's whole explanation of who Sephiroth is and what's going on with him.
That's just Nojima's normal writing style. I swear the man is in some kind of writers junk measuring contest with Kojima for the title of 'Most convoluted plot in the history of writing'.
Considering it's not slated to come out until early next year you should have it fully done by then. I imagine that most of your future updates won't be as jam packed as the Midgar section is.
kairuf
(Verified Kaiger) (Not the Siberian)
- Location
- The land of Potatoes
I've always felt that the Shinra Executives in FF7R need a borderlands style introduction card because of how cartoonish they seem
So it's brave of you to try and tiptoe around the video game equivalent of "No Luke, I am your father." Foolish but brave.
The thing that IMHO makes FF7R work is that it is aware the plot of FF7 was driven by secrets. Everyone in FF7 has secrets and the plot is driven by the heroes need to discover Sephiroth and Shinra's secrets and complicated by the heroes own secrets.
Unfortunately like cats, once secrets are out of the bag they are hard to put back in. And Remake doesn't try. It doesn't rub your nose in them but it also doesn't shy away from revealing Information that otherwise was kept secret until well after leaving Midgar in the original.
Instead it introduces new secrets and questions, like why in addition to inexplicable scenes like this
The room at the top is titled the "&$#% Room." Once we enter, we see…
What the fuck is that.
Oh, it's a ghost. It's Cloud's ghost. Or at least a vision of himself.
Cloud turns to… 'himself'... and asks "You? What are you doing in a place like this?" Then Cloud suffers the Flashback Migraine, holding his head in his hands in pain as the vision replies "That's what I wanted to ask you. Should you be foolin' around here? You think problems go away by just thinking about them?"
Then the vision stands up holding its sword, and Cloud passes out. The Honey Bee rushes into the room in a panic, fade to black, and there's this exchange:
Backseater: "You can't change anything by just sitting back and looking at it."
Cloud: "What are you saying?"
Backseater: "It's started moving."
Cloud: "What has?"
Backseater: "Wake up!"
Why is Cloud now having visions of Sephiroth in addition to REDACTED?
Or the big unanswered question of FF7R, why are the Whispers needed to keep things on the canon route?
Is time travel involved? And if so who time traveled and why?
And so it does a pretty good job of being interesting to players who span from knowing nothing at all about FF7 to have played FF7 and all of the side games.
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Silently Watches
Professional Stalker
- Location
- Right behind you
Very similar for me. I didn't get to the final Sephiroth fight (I have vague recollections of a demon wall boss?), but I do remember that when I dropped it I couldn't care less about the characters or plot, and I had no clue why people were always raving about the game. I preferred THIRTEEN to FF7, for what it's worth.
So yeah. Hearing people complaining about how Remake was "Nothing" like the original was honestly a selling point for me.
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all over again I really wish FF7R hadn't had all the friggin' minigames so I could have played it to the end XD
- Pronouns
- They/Them/She/Her
Wow. From what I vaguely recall hearing about XIII, it was... not great! I mean, different people have different tastes, of course, but I don't recall it being very well received in general.Silently Watches said:
And yeah, after reading things about VII like that fanfic and this thread's section on it, I've gotten an appreciation for it I didn't from playing it, but I still don't get why it turned into what it did instead of just being a good FF game and successfully move of the series to 3D and the PS1 in particular. So far my leading hypothesis is that it started by just happening to come along at the right time and wowing people who played it close to when it came out, that led to the accumulation of more media around the base game, that further raised its prominence, and it kept snowballing from there. But that feels... flimsy? Like, it's an explanation, but it doesn't feel like a very good one? And I still wonder if I'm just missing something.
Out of curiosity, if you don't mind me asking, did you ever try VIII and/or IX, and, if so, do you have any particular thoughts you'd like to share? Though they'd probably need to be spoilered in this thread.
Thozmp
Gets my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
This of course brings up the eternal question of remakes and fanfiction: "How much can you deviate from the source material before you hit the point of 'might as well be making something original?'"
Dybbukpossesed
Falling Somewhere
- Location
- California
I was honestly considering stopping my "you can watch up to here without spoilers" for the abridged series because of how unsubtle they were with foreshadowing. I see that the remake has put most of those concerns to rest for me however! Incidentally If you're following along at home, you can now watch up to episode 10 without spoilers.
FourthWall
Love & Destroy
- Location
- Chiraq
I feel like FFVII is a big enough cultural touchstone (in Japan at least) that the "canon" series of events are known by the layperson.
I also feel that the new version defines its own canon outside of the original, like the Rebuilds did. The game explains to you what parts of the canon you need to pay attention to in order to understand the relevant metatext; the Time Jannies function as a mysterious presence outside of that just fine.
E:
I think the Ship of Theseus argument for fanworks is ultimately irrelevant, as the defining point of a fanwork is the brand name. Like yeah, you should have respect for the original work, but you're playing with toys already laid out for you. It holds even less weight for official remakes because the answer is "We own the IP, so our word is law until the check bounces."
Fandom can care super hard about canonicity and tone and what have you, but if a work is influential enough, it will redefine what is acceptable on those fronts.
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- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Think it might be interesting to compare FFVIIR with, of all things, the Gus van Sant remake of Psycho. Both interrogate the whole idea of remakes, but the Psycho remake goes to the exact opposite extreme by being such a shot-for-shot remake that it becomes a 'Be Careful What You Wish For' deal.
Though that may be my own interpretation of the Psycho remake, AFAIK van Sant just wanted to do the remake 'before anyone else could'
Though that may be my own interpretation of the Psycho remake, AFAIK van Sant just wanted to do the remake 'before anyone else could'
- Location
- Drachyench on Discord
If watching, like, 5 other people play FFVII after having gone into VIIR blind has taught me anything, it's "Do not assume anything about somebody's exposure to the source material for that matter if you haven't played it again yourself within the last 4-5 years don't assume yourself to be intimately familiar". There will be things you think are obvious - "How could you not get that it's been referenced by a dozen other games even Super Smash Bros got in on it!" - that absolutely are not to others. Likewise there will probably be plot points you actively misremember because if the last time you touched the game it was ~20 years ago you're dealing with ~20 years of side material with retcons and what-have-you to alter your perception.
I just bring this up as I've seen a bunch of people decide for those same "Played VIIR then went back to the original" to spoil them on things that were big [and, in one particularly bad case, spoil with the wrong information at that] but "Were obvious if you played VIIR / Payed attention to Gaming since it came out" so. Yeah. VII, VIII [kinda], and X are where FF fans normally need to start getting Channel Mute'd for marathon streams to avoid ruining somebody's experience.
I just bring this up as I've seen a bunch of people decide for those same "Played VIIR then went back to the original" to spoil them on things that were big [and, in one particularly bad case, spoil with the wrong information at that] but "Were obvious if you played VIIR / Payed attention to Gaming since it came out" so. Yeah. VII, VIII [kinda], and X are where FF fans normally need to start getting Channel Mute'd for marathon streams to avoid ruining somebody's experience.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
People do have a funny habit of assuming everybody has played a game that came out 25 years ago.
No matter how revolutionary it was at the time (I was in 7th grade, and it blew my tiny child mind), a lot of people playing video games today were not born then, let alone playing video games.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Ship of Theseus is generally conceived that you're replacing the old parts with ultimately similar parts. IF you stick airplane wings on it and render it unable to float on the water, it's definitely not a Ship of Theseus anymore.I think the Ship of Theseus argument for fanworks is ultimately irrelevant, as the defining point of a fanwork is the brand name. Like yeah, you should have respect for the original work, but you're playing with toys already laid out for you. It holds even less weight for official remakes because the answer is "We own the IP, so our word is law until the check bounces."
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
Tell me, was it "The Fifth Act"? (That's the best FFVII fanfiction ever written, for the unaware - and a relatively quick read, too). Because if so, well, that one is specifically based off the spin-off Crisis Core, where Sephirot's characterization had experienced enough fanon drift already to have been substantially different from what the original game presents. Hence why he comes across as much less unhinged.
That's because we're not done with the original FFVII yet. The impact will have a ton more sense once you've experienced it in full - with proper understanding, I mean; Omicron is doing an amazing job of shedding light on the more obscure aspects of the game and finding interesting analysis points. I've said it before, but as good as it is, the Midgar section is a very poor showing of what FFVII has to offer; I know it's a tired cliche to say that "the REAL (thing X) starts here", but in FFVII's case, that is actually correct. Midgar is what is most remembered, but the rest of the game is what actually shaped the RPG culture going forwards.
I have already expressed why I think the Remake is not as good as people say it is - and Omicron did an excellent job of outlining why - so I won't elaborate on it too much, but I want to say a few things about it still. Even with all the effort they put into it and the fact the FF7R is still not a bad game, the compression of things into Midgar still feels really forced to me, and doesn't hold up fully. Also, since it was brought up in the thread before, I want to remark, now that the Remake's analysis has been completed, that it in fact DOES NOT provides additional characterization to any of the main characters, with the lone exception of Barret. Everybody else goes through the exact same emotional beats they did in FFVII, except more slowly - Tifa starts a bit behind, but that's not really added characterization, that's just backtracking - and due to the horrible pacing, instead of feeling like things are being explored in greater depth, to me the game ends up feeling repetitive, walking on already trod ground again and again.
So, that's my take on the Final Fantasy 7 Remake - it's a decent game, the whole meta-canon confrontation aspect is interesting but ultimately neutered by how it can only deal with the smallest portion of the tragedies FFVII has to dish off (it'd have had more weight and made more sense if the actual big tragedy was the game's ending climax), and overall I'm not sure it justifies its existence, even while being very visually stunning and presenting a couple of interesting upgrades to the original in places. But, again, that's just my opinion of it.
SeaSirocco
Formerly 'Sanae Aran' / Aspiring Artist
- Location
- The Seaside
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Haven't played Remake, but I have watched a commentary on it and one thing I noticed in this sequence is that the Ancients inexplicitly have FF14's Cid's Enterprise.
deadcrystal
Slaaneshi Cultist
- Location
- The Warp
I made a catastrophic error when it came to this part of the remake. I beat the Jenova Dreamweaver boss probably around midnight, then decided to press on to the end, already knowing the remake ended upon leaving Midgar. The Rufus boss fight dunked on me for a bit, but I knew the highway chase was the leaving point, and pressed on. Way, way too late, I reached the wall of whispers and door of light and Aerith's 'are you sure you want to proceed?' and, like an idiot, thought this was a 'do you want to end the game?' choice. After all, whispers blocking the way out of the city, but Aerith finds a way through? Made sense. So I hit yes. I went through that entire whispers boss fight, utterly exhausted, desperate for it to end so I could finally go to sleep.