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Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]

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SolipsistSerpent said:
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.
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If you replace the robot drama of Evangelion with shonen anime bullshit and the kaiju with fancy humans, you've made Campus Apocalypse, which is still recognizably Eva.

If you take a side character from Triangle Heart, remove everything relevant to that series' eroge origins, then make her a magical girl cosplaying as the RX-78-2 Gundam, you get Lyrical Nanoha. It's still a Triangle Heart spin-off, but it outstripped the original so totally we think of Nanoha as the only thing.

You can remove a whole lot from a story before it stops being related to the original, is what I'm saying here. Fanworks can be planes, trains, or automobiles of Theseus, but still recognizable as the ship it used to be. :V
 
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Im in the weird camp of not liking the metatextual stuff because I feel that they should have gone in even harder and just made blatant changes and dared people to have an issue with it.

A big part of the problem to me is that time, nostalgia, Pop culture and Square themselves have elevated FF7 into being something it isn't - The Perfect JRPG. And thus, that any change to it that isn't graphical is ultimately a mistake that detracts from the greatness of the original.

So a part of me feels like having the game be about FF7, in spite of how the meta commentary is trying to remove that pedestal and show that it's a game that a remake should try to change and address, or even entirely reimagine, ultimately reinforces the idea that the original FF7 is something untouchable. The most you can do is talk around it, you can't just... go, and reimagine how it would be if you had to make the game in the modern day instead of the 90's.

I dunno. I know that's not possible for a number of reasons, but I kinda wish that it had just been an increasing number of differences that added up until people realised "Wait a minute, this isn't how the plot goes!". It's not like there weren't reasons why that didn't happen, but... Eh, feelings on this are still very complicated and hard for me to sort out.
 
Omicron said:
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.
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On one hand, this is a special and very unusual discourse that is frankly neccesary in this world of sequels and remakes.

On the other hand, we've had how many retellings of fairytales and Shakespeare that involve the characters actively rebelling against how the story is supposed to go?

The true 'abnormality' of FF7R might be that it's one of the few times we've treated a piece of modern media like we do the ones in Public Domain.
 
Omegahugger said:
On one hand, this is a special and very unusual discourse that is frankly neccesary in this world of sequels and remakes.

On the other hand, we've had how many retellings of fairytales and Shakespeare that involve the characters actively rebelling against how the story is supposed to go?

The true 'abnormality' of FF7R might be that it's one of the few times we've treated a piece of modern media like we do the ones in Public Domain.
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So when are we getting "Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie are Dead"?
 
Egleris said:
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.
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Depends on what you mean by 'added characterization.' I would call giving us more time to see the characters in more situations 'added characterization' whereas Tifa's new fear of ghosts and Aerith's new love of pro wrestling is just, like, a thing that happens.

Tifa and to a lesser extent the rest of Avalanche are more closely tied to their community (the water filters, Martel, the Neighborhood Watch, etc). They're community leaders, not just boogeymen on wanted posters. People come to them with their problems.
Cloud connects with the Three Stooges much more strongly, and him having a place to stay and running the sidequest treadmill makes him feel more grounded in Sector 7, too.
Aerith is more closely tied to her community (the orphanage, delivering flowers), and the Turks as well, and even Midgar to an extent. Missing an objectively horrible place because it's all you've ever known ("I'll miss it... the steel sky.") was a really poignant moment for me.
Tifa, Cloud and Aerith all have a lot more time to spend in each other's company, and while there's nothing really new there, the bloat giving their dynamic more time to breathe. It makes them feel more settled as a group than hitting the plate segment and ShinRa tower at a dead sprint like in FF7.

The advanced animations and voice acting are also something I'd call 'added characterization.' It's easier to tell that Cloud is awkward, not just cold. Aerith's horniness for Miss Cloud is more apparent. Red's genteel voice and animal mannerisms reinforce the duality of his own character.

And of course, Remake Barrett is the most charismatic man to ever live.
 
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Drachyench said:
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.
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Why not even kinda IX?

Egleris said:
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.
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Oh, no, it was Terrorism & Anarchy.

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.
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Well. Maybe? I'm interested to see if it actually does, at least. This thread would have to add a lot, though, to get close to that far.

Guile said:
"I'll miss it... the steel sky."
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...Reading that just now, something occurred to me: there's light under the Midgar plate. There are a few shafts of sunlight here and there, and, sure, there could be enough openings in the plate for that, but mostly the sky is covered over. There'd be light coming in from the side at dawn and dusk... but at least from what I recall seeing, that's also nowhere near enough for what we see. And the only explanation coming to mind is that the plate's underside has light fixtures on it, for the express purpose of lighting the areas underneath. And since, even neglecting installation and maintenance costs, those lights have to be powered and it'd be rather difficult to conduct billing for them, that means Shinra's been making an active effort to keep the slums around; they're not just settlements Shinra didn't care to remove. Possibly for the purpose of being a cheap labor pool, source of military recruits... or experimental subjects...
Anyway, that seems an interesting detail that I don't recall seeing mentioned anywhere before. Or I could be missing something.
 
Reese said:
...Reading that just now, something occurred to me: there's light under the Midgar plate. There are a few shafts of sunlight here and there, and, sure, there could be enough openings in the plate for that, but mostly the sky is covered over. There'd be light coming in from the side at dawn and dusk... but at least from what I recall seeing, that's also nowhere near enough for what we see. And the only explanation coming to mind is that the plate's underside has light fixtures on it, for the express purpose of lighting the areas underneath. And since, even neglecting installation and maintenance costs, those lights have to be powered and it'd be rather difficult to conduct billing for them, that means Shinra's been making an active effort to keep the slums around; they're not just settlements Shinra didn't care to remove. Possibly for the purpose of being a cheap labor pool, source of military recruits... or experimental subjects...
Anyway, that seems an interesting detail that I don't recall seeing mentioned anywhere before. Or I could be missing something.
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The Remake has a section (a couple sections? it blends together) where you navigate gantries hanging below the Plate and there are indeed incredibly massive lights that shine down on the slums in the daytime and turn off at night.
 
The comparison to Pathologic 2 might have been a bit premature, but now that the Remake's been fully discussed it still holds strong; both works having something that's a vaguely nebulous sequel/retelling which splits the original game into several parts, in which it's implied that this is not the first time going through these events for some, and yet it's still the same sequence of time. Both are in dialogue with the original work itself.

The difference being that Pathologic 2 doesn't have 'canon enforcers' like the whispers; there are metatextual characters with metatextual motives and points to make in it, but the difference here is the sheer weight of expectation. The writers of FFVIIR knew it was going to face a lot of it; from fans, from critics, from shareholders. FFVIIR, as a work, had to put it's foot down hard about what it was about, with no ambiguity.

It's just a guess, but I suspect that Rebirth will be a bit more relaxed on this front; now that the Whispers have been slain in universe, and everyone having made their minds up on how they feel about the idea of diverging from the original outside of it, the game has a lot more breathing room to play around and experiment; I'm hoping that it keeps examining the nature of a remake but lets itself be playful with it. And now that there IS that room to maneuver, I'm excited to see what they do with it. Some of the mystery has returned.

(Honestly though, it is a shame that the old, original game itself doesn't have a QoL version of itself like the pixel remasters. It somewhat undercuts FFVIIR's own point when that niche remains relatively unfulfilled. FFVII's sheer fame and thereby cultural osmosis is both the cause of the remake's whisper move and the major reason it actually works as such.)
 
FallsSideways said:
both works having something that's a vaguely nebulous sequel/retelling which splits the original game into several parts, in which it's implied that this is not the first time going through these events for some, and yet it's still the same sequence of time. Both are in dialogue with the original work itself.
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One difference that springs to mind between FF7 and Pathologic though (other than being way more niche) was that the original Pathologic was already a very metatextual work itself (especially in later routes), so players would've gone into P2 expecting that sort of thing, whereas with FF7R not so much. Though not that being complicated is entirely out of FF's wheelhouse of course.

Edit: Guess I'm really on the fence about FF7R. I can sympathise with the devs being uncomfortable with trying to recapture the glory days when they're long gone and they've changed since, but on the other I can also sympathise with FF7 fans who just wanted a straight QoL update
 
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I'm uncomplicated. I just had a great time with FF7R. I liked what they did with the characters, I liked what they did with Midgard, I liked what they did with the story, and I especially liked the English voice acting. I had nothing but a good time. The meta stuff was neat, as was pulling in stuff from the side content, and the games set before and after. It made the world feel big, drowning in events and history, everything that had happened, would happen, and was happening.

Above all else, I say that FF7R was really about just how much the people making it loved that universe. A love letter to the original game, the world it spawned, and how they wanted it to put that world in one place for all to see.
 
Thozmp said:
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?'"
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In this case it doesn't really, not by fanfiction standards.

The potential changes undone by metatextual ghosts Omicron noted are as follows:

- Barret cuts ties to Cloud, who presumably leaves to do his own thing (which could still potentially result in him stumbling upon Aerith, spotting Tifa, etc.);
- Wedge and Biggs survive;
- The confrontation with the Shinra president goes differently, potentially resulting in AVALANCHE's name being cleared and the public learning the Truth, potentially resulting in the president surviving;
- Cloud's past is revealed early;
- Barret dies.

Such changes are outside the scope of what's commonly expected of remakes, but well within the common boundaries of fanficition. If you were to write a fic incorporating some or all of those changes, you wouldn't even necessary label it as an AU, it's very much "same premise, different outcome", which is dirt-common in fanfiction.

We're not dealing with Smart!Powerful!Dark!Cloud hooking up with genderbent Sepiroth while working at a coffee shop in Texas here.

Commercial remakes, of course, have different expectations and boundaries, but even if the devs were to remove metatextual ghosts and go truly wild with divergencies, it would still be far too early to invoke the Ship of Theseus. We're still dealing with the same characters with broadly the same motivations living in broadly the same world. It's recognizably FFVII and could not be divorced from FFVII without more drastic departure.

The3rdCorinthian said:
So when are we getting "Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie are Dead"?
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The main resolution system in the game is a coin toss, but the coin only ever lands on tails.
 
Reese said:
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.
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I maybe played some of VIII? "Junctioning" sounds familiar, but beyond that? 🤷‍♂️ Never touched IX.

My FF history was X which I loved the hell out of, VII, X-2, then XII and XIII. Then many years later I played Bravely Default/Second, which got me into V except I stop playing video games in general for months at a time and repeatedly forget where I am and what I'm doing. :mad: And hopefully at some point I'll get around to finishing Octopath Traveler so I can justify playing XVI and the free trial of XIV.
 
crankers said:
Ah, Remake Rufus. I think a YouTube comment from a let's player I love sums him up;

"Rufus Shinra is just Seto Kaiba in a world without card games."
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That is slander against Seto Kaiba!

Kaiba, for all he was a huge egomaniac and general asshole who went down a dark path resulting in how he was in episode 1, fucking despises the use of lethal force and War-mongering. It's why he turned a Weapons Manufacturer into something that produced technology for a Trading Card Game. And if it wasn't a card game, it would have been something else, like chess, the game he played in order to beat Gozaburo in order to get him and Mokuba out of the orphanage.

You wouldn't catch him dead running a company like Shinra. The man has at least some principles and morals.
 
Omicron said:
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;
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Honestly? This sounds like a 10/10 gag and I adore it. Of course Hojo would feel the urge to Um, Actually Cloud and Canon Ghosts would try to stop him from being too much of a weird, creepy, but above all nerdy old man.
 
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It's been a minute since I commented on the LP, but there's a lot to the Shinra building and all the creepy atmospheric shit that caps it and also the bare-faced mundane evil of the company (that ultimately gets ousted by more plot arriving and quickly leaving). It's hard to come up with thoughts for all of it, but I've enjoyed this overview a lot.

But especially, the comparisons you make with Remake and the analysis of the whys, are very acute. It's funny but when I first watched a full let's play of Remake I was not very thrilled about the Whispers despite being on board with the plot changes (or more accurately, the space frequently left open for plot changes) and some of the huge shifts in presentation. It took a bit for my perspective to flip around, and now I really appreciate this LP bringing into stark relief what the Whispers are there for and the metatextual conflict they bring to life in service of the new games.
 
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Shinji117 said:
The Remake has a section (a couple sections? it blends together) where you navigate gantries hanging below the Plate and there are indeed incredibly massive lights that shine down on the slums in the daytime and turn off at night.
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Oh, neat; thanks.

@Silently Watches:
Ah, thanks. Oh well, re thoughts on VIII and IX, but then I've not played X-2, XIII, XVI, or XIV at all. And I think I've barely even heard of Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler. Well, to each their own. :)

And yeah, sorry about the months-long gaps between gaming sessions leading to forgetting where you were and what you were doing; I've had that happen too.
 
Square has told some whoppers before, but the biggest imo has to be: "You don't need to have played FFVII to get the most out of FFVII Remake." Though, It's funny how some of the stuff I would HATE that they changed in Remake ends up being okay-to-cool specifically because it's all part of weird alt-timeline bullshit.

I still mantain that OG 7 is the better game in a sort of total holistic sense, whereas Remake is a cool deep dive into 7 as a media sensation. Kind of like a playable Ultimania guidebook. The plate drop sequence in OG is still a million times better and you cannot change my mind on this.
 
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