Original Final Fantasy: Cid was not in this, actually - the name being mentioned was a retcon. He first appeared in FFII. Also, you might want to add "the four elemental crystals" to the thing of significance that appeared first in this game. Maybe also mention that Bahamut first appeared here?
FFII - I would mention that Leviathan first appeared here, also.
FFV - Given the approach you've taken to the rest, this should definitely mention the first appearance of the Tomberri; there's also the first time secret/bonus boss are present in the game that seems relevant.
Original Final Fantasy: Cid was not in this, actually - the name being mentioned was a retcon. He first appeared in FFII. Also, you might want to add "the four elemental crystals" to the thing of significance that appeared first in this game. Maybe also mention that Bahamut first appeared here?
FFII - I would mention that Leviathan first appeared here, also.
FFV - Given the approach you've taken to the rest, this should definitely mention the first appearance of the Tomberri; there's also the first time secret/bonus boss are present in the game that seems relevant.
There is a difference between an optional fight that is meant to give you a leg up against the final boss (such as the Eureka dungeons with the Ninja and Sage jobs in FFIII or Bahamut on the moon in FFIV) and a superboss meant to be harder than the final boss - the latter doesn't really provides any benefit, because if you can beat it you can also beat the final boss, and exists instead mostly for bragging rights. Which the "omega badge" from FFV is a perfect indication of. FFV is the first game in the series where that is what you can face.
I mean, I finished FF7 two years ago, except for the epilogue because it crashed as I beat the final boss and I was too put off to want to redo the whole fight. FF7R's Wall Market meanwhile stone-cold killed the game for me, and I was having very little fun for most of the experience.
Final Fantasy 7 is a pretty solid JRPG. FF7R is a bad action game, but could have been a fantastic VN.
EDIT: this is to say, I think LITERALLY it's a worse game, but a better story. Except the game constantly interferes with the story.
Action system in FF7R is actually pretty good, but it is explained badly. If you really engage with it, you can do miracles with it. Like, most people don't try to sleep bosses, though it works on a lot of bosses, inlcluding the Hell House.
Another thing people forget is to switch between characters often to build up ATB, or used "focused" move on vulnerable enemies to build up stagger quickly.
Original Final Fantasy: Cid was not in this, actually - the name being mentioned was a retcon. He first appeared in FFII. Also, you might want to add "the four elemental crystals" to the thing of significance that appeared first in this game. Maybe also mention that Bahamut first appeared here?
FFII - I would mention that Leviathan first appeared here, also.
FFV - Given the approach you've taken to the rest, this should definitely mention the first appearance of the Tomberri; there's also the first time secret/bonus boss are present in the game that seems relevant.
I'm counting that cid for FFI Advance cause that's the one i played. (I started before the FF Pixel Remasters were announced IIRC.) good catch on the Tonberry and superbosses though. adding those.
For the 4 elemental crystals/Bahamut i think i omitted them because i took them for granted. Might as well add them in.
I mean, it's your list, you can do what you feel best. I'm just confused because I thought the list was recording in which titles from the series various elements of Final Fantasy arose, and that seems like it'd require using the real events, instead of retconned re-releases. Unless I misunderstood the list's purpose? That's perfectly possible, I'm just puzzled is all.
I mean, it's your list, you can do what you feel best. I'm just confused because I thought the list was recording in which titles from the series various elements of Final Fantasy arose, and that seems like it'd require using the real events, instead of retconned re-releases. Unless I misunderstood the list's purpose? That's perfectly possible, I'm just puzzled is all.
Alright, I'm back to working on the next update, and any of you who made comments to the general effect of "well, now that you're out of Midgar things should let up" knowing I was about to hit Kalm can award themselves a Smartass Prize and know that I am plotting revenge.
Alright, I'm back to working on the next update, and any of you who made comments to the general effect of "well, now that you're out of Midgar things should let up" knowing I was about to hit Kalm can award themselves a Smartass Prize and know that I am plotting revenge.
But yes, the game going straight into Kalm is certainly something in terms of plot, and I'm very on the edge of my seat waiting to see what you get out of it.
Alright, I'm back to working on the next update, and any of you who made comments to the general effect of "well, now that you're out of Midgar things should let up" knowing I was about to hit Kalm can award themselves a Smartass Prize and know that I am plotting revenge.
But also I want to crack open Cloud's skull to rain his brains. Like, he has flashback migraines and locked memories, for sure, but there's also stuff that he knows that he knows, stuff about his past with Sephiroth that he is fully aware of but won't talk about, and that includes stuff about Sephiroth I would really like to know right now.
Alright, I'm back to working on the next update, and any of you who made comments to the general effect of "well, now that you're out of Midgar things should let up" knowing I was about to hit Kalm can award themselves a Smartass Prize and know that I am plotting revenge.
Welcome back to Final Fantasy VII, the game that dares to ask 'who needs gameplay if your story goes hard enough?'
Last time, we completed the Midgar sequence. President Shinra was murdered by Sephiroth, his son Rufus took over, and the group escaped through the highway battling a bunch of Shinra troops and robots, before finally escaping to the 'freedom' of the outside world.
We do a brief reload to grab the 'Enemy Skill' command from Hojo's lab; we won't be going all the way back to get a sword from the SOLDIER troops, it's just too much retread.
And what an outside world it is.
I stopped us on the doorstep of Midgar last time, but moving just a little to the side more clearly reveals the grim reality of its surroundings - the land directly around Midgar is a dark circle of pollution; everything around that is barren, cracked earth. For miles and miles beyond the city, there's nothing, no vegetation, no trees, no rivers, just… A wasteland.
It's not the whole of the world, of course. As you can see here, there is grass beyond the jagged boundaries of the Mako-drained wastes. There's life left in the world, but it's clear that Midgar is like a cancer, or a contagion, its drained area radiating outwards like a tentacular beast, encroaching upon more and more of the land.
As for combats in this area…
The backgrounds are just as desolate, and most of our opponents are Shinra machines, either gone rogue or actively hunting for us. We run into new Sweeper-type palette swaps, this time with a special attack in which they unload a barrage of missiles that hits the entire party. It looks pretty cool as an attack - I'd like to have a move like that myself.
What's that, game?
This is an Enemy Skill?
Are these ghost bikers, robot bikers, or robot ghost bikers?
…okay, Tifa is now a fully armed and operational weapons platform capable of conjuring missile swarms. Backtracking for that Enemy Skill Materia was absolutely worth it and has already paid off.
There's just one thing, though - the name bugs me. 'Matra Magic' seems like a nonsense name. For one thing, it's obviously not 'magic' - it might be magitek, I guess, but the original move is just a robot firing missiles at us, and then Tifa somehow managing to replicate that with her materia. And 'matra' doesn't really seem like anything. My immediate thought is that this is meant to be Mantra Magic, and a letter got dropped in the localization, but it still doesn't make sense with the missile swarm - no mantra, no magic. So did something get lost in the translation?
I am onto you, game. I am onto you. There is a limit to the coincidences I am willing to escape. FF7 real world far future is canon, I just know it.
Alright. Our immediate objective here is the town of Kalm, northwest of Midgar. Kalm is actually located in one of the grass areas outside of the Midgar wastes, but, well…
For one thing, the encroaching wastes are converging on Kalm, and are about to engulf it in a pincer motion. Kalm remains as its own town outside of Midgar, independent to a degree - but it will soon become part of the Mako-drained wastes regardless.
For another, look at this. After hours in Midgar's unique weird pseudo-cyberdieselpunk aesthetic, through slum and reactor to the wealth of the Shinra building, here we are for the first time in an older, 'traditional' town, and it looks…
It looks like Final Fantasy VI.
It looks like the whole series prior to that point, more generally. The half-timbered look with whitewashed walls and apparent beams, the slate tiles…
It's Narshe, it's the older architecture inside Vector, it's the Standard Final Fantasy Town Look.
Beyond the similarities in exterior look, the interiors also have that same FFVI vibe of ochre-dominated 'traditional' architecture and furniture existing right alongside imposing, impossible-to-ignore machinery, in VI meant to evoke steampunk and here reminiscent of that but leaning more towards an entre-guerre aesthetic.
It's a pretty clever trick the game is pulling here - after all this time wowing us with the new aesthetic that its 3D style has been enabling and playing with a whole new deck of cards, the game goes 'oh, by the way, here is what a Normal Final Fantasy Town does look like with our new tech,' and it's really surprising and impressive. Kalm is not, like, blow-your-mind gorgeous, but especially for such a minor stopping point (by itself; really important events are about to unfold but they aren't really related to the town), it looks really neat and cute with its use of perspective and such.
As you can see, there's an industrial looking tower/boiler/contraption thing in the center of the town plaza. Kalm, too is a recipient of Shinra's technological miracles, and are using Mako engines of their own.
Aerith and Tifa tell us they'll go on ahead to meet the other inside the inn, but before heading in we're free to explore the town on our own.
It's really standing out to me how 'we', in this game, is first and foremost Cloud. This level of identification between the player and a clear main character has only been seen in FFIV so far; Bartz is the POV character for the intro of V and is played solo like once afterwards and is clearly the 'main character,' but V is very strongly a party game where 'we' is the entire party of Bartz, Farris, Lenna, Galuf and Krile and their constant shenanigans, with the game very rarely splitting us apart for any length of time, and when a party member talks shit to Bartz it very rarely comes across as talking shit to the player. Meanwhile VI has no clearly defined main character and merrily tosses us around from one lead to another across story segments before sorta kinda settling on Celes as the lead character of the late game.
But in VII, even if the game sometimes shifts to Aerith as playable party lead, it's extremely obvious Cloud is the true 'player character.' It's obvious to the point of the game getting meta with it - we share his point of view, the camera goes crazy when he's having flashback and trauma responses, we hear what he can hear and see what he can see, people turn to him to say 'see you in a bit' before the game reverts controls to us… We're going back to the way Cecil was handled, but with even more of an emphasis.
It's an interesting change precisely because it is a change and I wouldn't have noticed it without the contrast of the previous games; this was just my idea of how a JRPG works, for the most part.
Anyway, Kalm!
The vibe we get from the locals is that, as direct recipient of Shinra's Mako technology, they're very much glad for its benefits, but as they exist outside of Midgar's direct sphere of propaganda and closer to the real-life consequences on the natural world, they're also aware of its devastating consequences, leaving them just… Ambivalent. One says, "Thanks to the Mako Energy Shinra, Inc. developed for us, everything's more convenient now… Maybe a little too convenient." Another says that 'natural resources near the reactor are being sucked dry; we're better off with the Mako energy,' which suggests that he either doesn't see the causal link between Mako use and other natural resources dwindling, or that he does see it and sees the (he assumes infinite) Mako as a replacement for perishable natural resources. Another complains about monsters having overrun the mythril mines, the source's previous source of prosperity.
A few people actually ask us for our opinion on the matter, and in response either voice their own approval of Mako's convenience or their own nostalgia for the older ways that didn't imperil nature. Another woman asks us if it's true that Shinra is making monsters, and if we tell her that they do, she bitterly remarks that they can't very well stand up to Shinra while using their own reactors.
All in all, it's an intriguing portrait of a town on the edge of humanity's devastating progress and which chose (or did not have much choice in the first place) to ride its wave, leaving them ambivalent, half-satisfied and half-regretful, compared to the full-throated embrace of the industrial core - the kind of uncomfortable compromises societies have to make all the time in the real world.
There's also someone who says a 'suspicious-looking man in a black cloak, carrying a mean-looking sword' came through town recently, but no one believes them - which is our first visual description of Sephiroth, I'm pretty sure. He went through here recently, then, likely escaping after killing President Shinra.
We also find a gun. Like, not a gun-arm for Barret, an actual gun, labeled 'Peacemaker.' Let's hold onto this in expectation of a future party member, then.
Also, I dig the look of the Materia and Weapon Store:
That place rinses me entirely. I thought I was sitting pretty on my heap of 5,500 gil, but they have new weapons for everyone and buying them + some new materia drains my funds entirely. Plus side, Cloud has a Mithril Sword now! And we have the Earth Materia as well as the 'Heal' Materia - separate from Restore, it teaches status heals like Esuna.
Alright. Enough forcing the FF7 vets to chomp on their keyboard waiting for me to get to one of the juiciest bits of the early game. Time to head to the inn and join up with the others.
We're not here to rest, though. We're here so that we can have a safe, comfortable place, that isn't in the middle of a barren monster-haunted wilderness or within Shinra's reach, for Cloud… To finally sit down and explain the deal between him and Sephiroth.
Oh thank God. I thought we'd be waiting even longer. But no, Barret immediately addresses Cloud and asks about 'his story, about Sephiroth and the crisis of the planet,' and Cloud is finally ready to explain.
Cloud: "...I used to want to be like Sephiroth, so I joined SOLDIER. After working with Sephiroth on several missions, we became friends." Barret: "You call that a friend?" Cloud: "Yeah, well… He was older than me, and hardly ever talked about himself." Tifa: "..." Cloud: "So I guess you'd call us war buddies… We trusted each other. Until one day…" Aerith: "...One day?" Cloud: "After the war it was SOLDIER's duty to put down any resistance against the Shinra." Cloud: "...that was five years ago. I was 16…"
And there it is.
Our first shot of the man himself. The myth, the legend. The defining villain in Final Fantasy history. The great Sephiroth.
Sitting on a crate riding in the back of a rusty military transport with two regular soldiers and Cloud, windshields driving away the rain as they advance on a bumpy road in a storm.
…
Let's put a pin in that. I need to come back to this later.
'Comrades' would get at what Cloud is trying to express better than 'war buddies' here, I think. Fellow soldiers, but with a clear hierarchy of seniority, and with Cloud's admiration towards Sephiroth making friendship aspirational more than anything. Still… That's really interesting.
We know that Aerith was found by Elmyra 15 years ago (she would have been 7) during the war with Wutai; this 'cleaning up' after the war happened 5 years ago, when Cloud was 16. Meaning the war itself lasted something like ten years - no small amount of time to spend conquering and annexing territory.
This very long flashback is, for the most part, fully playable, ish, in that we can move around and talk to people. One of the soldiers is miserable, and Cloud casually boasts that he's never had motion sickness, so running around the back of the truck doesn't bother him - after a moment Sephiroth finally tells the overactive teenager to settle down.
Cloud: "They gave me some new Materia." [He does a 'hyped up' animation.] I can't wait to use it." Sephiroth: "...Just like a kid." Cloud: "You going to brief us about this mission?" Sephiroth: "This isn't a typical mission." Cloud: "Good!" Sephiroth: "Why do you say that?" Cloud: "I joined SOLDIER to be like you. But by the time I made First Class, the war was already over. My big hopes of becoming a hero like you ended with the war. That's why I always sign up whenever there's a big mission. Kind of a way to prove myself…" Cloud: "Say, how do you feel, MISTER Sephiroth?" Sephiroth: "...I thought you wanted a briefing? Our mission is to investigate an old Mako reactor. There have been reports of it malfunctioning, and producing brutal creatures. First, we will dispose of these creatures. Then, we'll locate the problem and neutralize it." Cloud: "Brutal creatures? Where?" Sephiroth: "The Mako reactor at Nibelheim." Cloud: "Nibelheim… That's where I'm from." Sephiroth: "Hmmm… Hometown."
Oh boy!
Etymology Corner
"Nibelheim" seems to be a deformation of "Niflheim," one of the Nine-ish Realms of Norse Mythology. It's… not as clear as you might think what Niflheim is, but broadly speaking (and certainly in a pop culture sense), we might consider it the 'Mist World' of ice and frozen rivers where dwell the goddess of the dead and all her subjects, those mortals who did not die a heroic or notable death.
So basically the game is saying Cloud was born in Hell/Limbo/the Underworld. I'm sure this isn't ominous at all and presages nothing wrong whatsoever.
Sephiroth in this exchange is… Cool, professional, not overly chummy but displaying a certain degree of actual interest in Cloud. The picture of a veteran calming down an excited rookie. Also, Shinra in internal clearly knows to some extent that Mako reactors are related to the rise in monsters, so that's fun corporate malfeasance!
Without further ado, a monster attack the truck, and we initiate battle!
Check these stats out.
Our opponent is a giant fucking dragon. Flashback!Cloud is lv 1, has 140 HP, and dies instantly the moment that beast so much as breathes on him. Meanwhile, Sephiroth is lv 50, his equipped weapon is freaking Masamune, and he deals 3k damage with every hit. The 'combat' is mostly just Cloud dying instantly and Sephiroth cutting the opponent in two before striking a victory pose.
Poor camera angles for the fight, but at least we have the most comical victory fanfare.
That is one enormous katana Sephiroth is wielding. Or, well, it's not altogether that big, it's just very long. (This ties into something I've remarked in the past in that it's difficult to make oversized anime katanas the way you can with any other type of sword or weapon; hammers that would be impossible to wield effectively in the real world parse as natural in fiction, but if you make a katana large it loses its aesthetic appeal, so making it very long like FromSoft's Washing Pole is your closest bet).
Also we're really getting into some classic JRPG villain design here. We saw it in the truck, but with the combat model it's even more obvious how Sephiroth is a handsome, tall, white-haired guy wearing a trenchcoat with armored pauldrons. Iconic design. A generation of anime watchers wouldn't recover in their lifetime.
The fight itself is a pretty shocking swerve, gameplay wise, and Cloud does take a moment to break from the flashback and tell the others: "Sephiroth's strength is incredible. He is far stronger in reality than any stories you may have heard about him."
Then they reach Nibelheim.
What an unassuming little town. I'm sure nothing bad is going to happen here.
Sephiroth: "How does it feel? It's your first time back to your hometown in a long time, right? So how does it feel? I wouldn't know because I don't have a hometown…" Cloud: "Ummm… What 'bout your parents?" Sephiroth: "My mother is Jenova. She died right after she gave birth to me. My father…"
[He has a burst of laughter, then shakes his head.] Sephiroth: "What does it matter? All right, let's go."
…this is where I think that the original translation kind of foreshadows things wrong; "My mother was Jenova" sounds like everyone present already knows about Jenova-the-monster-in-the-tank and Sephiroth is open about being related to her and just thinks she died, whereas the Retranslated mod's "My mother was called Jenova" makes it more clear that he just knows he's an orphan with a mother named 'Jenova,' which is really important for upcoming plot developments. In a similar way, the dialogue saying "the reactor is producing monster" is, in that other version, "Along with the malfunction, there has been an outbreak of brutal creatures," which doesn't make a direct connection implying Sephiroth knows the reactor is causing monsters, which is... also going to be a big deal. Or maybe I'm the only one this bothers, I don't know.
Also, once again, Sephiroth is surprisingly open. Like, his big ominous laugh when he's about to talk about his father has a sinister edge to it, and he immediately cuts off the fraternizing, but he's clearly a kinda wistful guy who has no problem chatting with the rookie about their familial history and how it feels like to have a hometown to come back to for at least a little bit.
That pin I put at the beginning of the scene is starting to make the whole pinboard rumble apart but let's press on.
There's this really neat touch where while Cloud's relationship to Sephiroth may be ambiguous, he's pretty buddy-buddy with the normal grunts - one of them is scolding him for always wandering off and running about while on the job (making fun of RPG character behavior, never gets old), while with the other we can actually rehearse cool-looking poses, which is a really fun humanizing moment; the guy even asks if SOLDIER members always care about what other people think, which I think is a pretty good jab at class of super soldier who clearly think they are the coolest dudes alive and have some of the power to back it up.
It's no JoJo, but I'll allow it.
…man this really is the secret sauce though isn't it. When you show us a character who is a renegade from an evil organization (by which I mean Cloud here, though to some extent Sephiroth as well), it really matters to show them just… As a member of that organization, what that life is like, how they were just pals with some of the other faceless henchmen… It's not new to the series by any means; it was a big part of what made Cecil's Dark Knight arc in IV so strong! But for all its qualities, it's something VI only really dabbled in, at the most, in the encounters with General Leo. To borrow from other media, it's what made the core of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power's early episodes so strong and what I really, really wish we had gotten for Finn in a hypothetical world in which the Star Wars sequel trilogy was good.
For whatever reason, though, the trooper guy's closing remark is "I really don't wanna be in SOLDIER." I guess people don't see the appeal of being a superpowered mutant who is always on the front lines getting chewed up by dragons.
As we approach Sephiroth, he comments that "the Mako smells pretty bad here." Does he mean the smell of Mako is strong enough to be offputting, or that the Mako itself is tainted, I wonder?
Here, Barret tells Cloud to hold the fuck up - Jenova? Like the headless monster in the Shinra building? Tifa tells Barret to wait and listen to the rest of Cloud's story before asking questions - it's a good way of just reminding the possibly inattentive (or just young) player that they're supposed to have heard the name Jenova later and of its significance. This kind of thing can be pretty important in long-form storytelling.
It's also a cute scene; Barret is flustered at being told off and Aerith laughs and comments "The childhood friends reunite!" at Tifa for coming to Cloud's "help."
Cloud: "Everyone must be in their houses, afraid to come out because of the monsters. No, maybe they're afraid of us…"
Heh. Monsters. Shinra supersoldiers. A difference of kind, or of degree?
You could already see it in the previous shot, but it's much clearer here - the water tower. The same place Cloud and Tifa swore that childhood promise.
Sephiroth says we leave for the reactor at dawn, appoints one of the grunts as lookout, and tells everyone else to rest - but notes to Cloud that he's free to visit his family and friends. Again, professional, but not cold.
Soldier: "Look, you never know when a monster's gonna show up, right?" Cloud: "...That's right. Don't blow your chance to become a hero…"
There really is a massive gap in how the soldiers are just normal dudes looking to keep their heads down and stay safe while Cloud is fiending for a chance at heroics, especially after getting absolutely flattened by that dragon.
One of the townsfolk is bold enough to come out hoping for some great picture of Sephiroth with a dead monster, hunter-style. If we ask him to take our picture, he scoffs that he doesn't take picture of nobodies; if instead we act professional and tell him to get back in his house for his own safety, he gets annoyed at us for bossing him around, then recognizes us as Cloud. If we enter that house directly behind him, which I think is an inn or a shop, we bump into this woman…
…then there is a flash of white and the sound of static and she's gone, and Cloud is shaking his head, asking aloud, "Did I go there? I don't remember…"
Our boy's doing fine, guys. No problems here. No psychological issues whatsoever.
And then, there's Cloud's house.
Cloud tries to dodge. Says it has nothing to do with the story of Sephiroth and what happened at the Mako reactor. But it's clear he's deflecting, trying to avoid something sensitive. Barret and Aerith both push him, wanting to hear about him and his family, and there we actually do get a dialogue choice - I don't know if insisting that "I don't want to talk about it" will actually skip the cutscene, but I don't want to skip the cutscene, so…
…oh my god. I, the player, am the one pushing Cloud's boundaries and forcing it to talk about sensitive stuff he would rather not. This is so devious.
Cloud: "I don't know if you'd call it a 'family'... My father… died when I was still young. That's why my mom… Lived alone in this house." Cloud: "Yeah, I saw my mom. My mom… She was a vibrant woman. Hadn't changed at all. But a few days later, she died… But when I saw her, she looked fine."
Imagine asking your friend for some story from his past and he's kinda dodgy about visiting his mom and you know he's a guy with a too-cool-to-care affect so it's probably gonna be cute/embarrassing, so you tease him to make him talk about it, and he just opens with "so this was only a few days before my mother fucking died."
You gotta feel like a real piece of shit.
And there the game loops back around to a much earlier flashback, now placing it in its context - Cloud's mother commenting on how he's grown, how handsome he is, how he should get an older girlfriend who can take care of him… Only know we know the context; Shinra is in town, Sephiroth is in the next building over, monsters are everywhere, tragedy is about to strike.
It goes on a little further than the original from there. Cloud's mother asks him if he's eating right, says he doesn't know how to cook - and then there are more 'white screen, static noise' flashes cutting the rest of the dialogue between brief frames of interrupted dialogue, as if it was hard to remember, or too painful, and finally Cloud asks to stop with this, and moves on.
However.
The next place we can visit is Tifa's house.
Well!
Time to break into a teenaged girl's home and read through her mail!
Honestly my immediate reaction to asking Cloud if he went to her house was to reply "No" and then leave. But, like, this is a video game. There's no really any benefits to saying 'no' aside from I guess roleplaying Cloud as someone who's mindful of the privacy of his friends, but even though this is an RPG it's not really about roleplaying, you know? It's literally just leaving valuable character information and lore on the table. So we go in.
It's not even that weird at first; Cloud just thinks she might be home and is a 16-year old child soldier who doesn't remember to knock. Tifa's house is… cozy. Cute. There's nothing downstairs, but upstairs, well…
If we go further than this, Tifa asks Cloud if he went into her room. The game is really making me increasingly uncomfortable with this, but it's worse when we do go into the room, where…
The phrasing of the replies makes it clear that Cloud realizes that this is a total breach of trust; if we say "I'd never do that!" Tifa replies "Of course!" Because she trusts her childhood friend not to read her mail. But of course, I need the juicy character lore, so we read it anyway, and now I feel bad.
Cloud: "It was a letter addressed to Tifa from the son of the guy that runs the General Store…" Letter: Tifa, how are you? I just arrived in Midgar eight days ago. Yesterday, all of Nibelheim got together to welcome me. The only person that we couldn't get a hold of was Cloud. But everyone said he wasn't really that close to us. So even if we asked, he probably wouldn't have come anyway. Letter: Well, enough about him. Midgar is really something. But to tell the truth, I feel so behind on everything… so out of it. Even the rooms of people in the slums are clean. Right now I'm living in the slums, but I plan to move to a really nice room, like the ones I've seen in magazines, once I make some money. But, to do that, I guess I have to find a job first. That's right, I still haven't found a job yet. I lied to my parents and told them I found a great job at Shinra, Inc. I wonder if it's too late to go back. Sometimes I think I should've taken over my parents' store. Tifa: "Cloud… do you remember all of it?" Cloud: "No, that's it." / "Yes, I remember." Cloud: "Because there was some stuff about me…" Letter: I just made it here to Midgar but all I think about is Nibelheim. Hey, Tifa… Is that stupid old water tower still working? Is the old man at the Inn doing well? Are my parents still at the shop every day? Have any monsters attacked? And most of all, how are you, Tifa? It feels like I haven't seen you for years. We were all talking about you last night. Everyone likes you. But because everyone idolizes you, I couldn't very well stab them in the back. I always acted cool but, actually, I was just afraid of being jilted. Wow, if I keep writing like this, this'll become a love letter! So, I think I'll stop there. Take care. I'll write again. Letter: P.S.: Write me back, okay?
Hmmm.
There's a strong narrative there, of a country kid immigrating for the big city, the land of opportunity, and thinking he might find fortune there, only to struggle to find a job at all - it's an old, classic story, even if it's one that sometimes shares in… problematic ideas about the corruptive influence of the metropolitan city and the wholesome, healthy homogeneity of the rural 'heartland.' But also it's just something that actually happens to people!
It's not exactly a surprise that all the boys in Nibelheim had a collective crush on Tifa, it's kind of the vibe she seems to have had. It's interesting that Cloud was already a loner, even before SOLDIER and the trauma he seems to have suffered, although…
Okay, here's the thing, I don't like the first half of the letter, I think the sentences fit weirdly, it's constructed in a slightly offputting way, and as a result I want to check out the Retranslated mod version of that letter.
Letter: Tifa, how are you? I arrived in Midgar eight days ago. Me and the boys from Niblheim got together yesterday. Oh, except Cloud, that is. I didn't have his contact, so I couldn't ask him. Then again, he was never really close to any of us, was he? And if I'd invited him he wouldn't have been any fun. We all thought it was for the best.
Okay, so, here's the thing. If you compare the two letters, in the first one, the writer is describing Cloud as someone who might have been distant/unfriendly, while also implying that he doesn't really know either way - he and the others made a token attempt at reaching out but 'couldn't get a hold of him.'
In the second version of that letter, which I am assuming, but can't be certain is closer to the original Japanese, the guy comes across as kind of a douchebag. Sure, Cloud didn't leave contact info, but he didn't even bother making an effort to reach out because nobody likes Cloud and he's no fun anyway. It's written callously for someone we know was the childhood friend of the girl he's addressing and making a clumsy flirting attempt with, and it makes Cloud more sympathetic as someone, who, like… Yeah, maybe he wasn't 'fun', but man, it hurts to not have friends as a teenager.
Also, the "even the slums are clean" line is instead "I'm short on money now, so I'm living in the slums, but at least the rooms are clean." It's not 'the city is so wealthy even its poorest places are clean,' it's 'this guy arrived in Midgar and immediately landed in the slums, and he might never have made it out in the present day'
I kind of feel for that guy, but I also kinda think he's a dick.
Well. That's the letter to Tifa that I absolutely, definitely shouldn't have read. Let's just head out.
Oh, wait, no, first-
We can play Tifa's bedroom piano, which is fun. There are no obvious rules but different buttons seem to make different notes, but I have no musical ear, so.
There's an extra house we can visit, with a mother who recognizes us and very young children who don't, and then it's time to head out.
We bump into a character I think might have been able to announce himself as the town's mayor, but before he can do that he recognizes us, identifies himself as Tifa's dad instead, and then darkly tells Cloud to "stay away from his daughter."
I mean… Tifa's dad, Aerith's mom, same deal. I absolutely understand why a parent would want their child to stay away from SOLDIER types, especially if Cloud's personality is any indicative of the group as a whole, even if also I think parents don't get to decide these things.
Also, that mansion in the background is not mysterious at all.
This is Zangan, a martial arts teacher who travels the world and claims to have 128 students (an oddly specific number!) among whom, in this town, is Tifa. Oh! Tifa backstory! So that's why she punches so hard, she's literally this game's Sabin, complete with an old wandering kung fu teacher. Explains why she's punching (get it) in everybody's league with just her fists. Zangan is kind of a showoff, doing backflips over Cloud as he talks, and wears a cape. He says Tifa has 'good sense,' and will become a powerful fighter.
Innkeep: "A lot of the monsters have been appearing in the last 12 months. Other than that, there's not much change. Nothing much exciting happens in a little town like this." Innkeep: "It was all right when they were building the reactor… while they were still building it. But once it was completed, it was bad. Within a few years, all the trees on the mountain withered away." Innkeep: "I don't know if the reactor was good or bad… I mean it's easy to say it was a bad idea now. But what can you do about it?" Innkeep: "Anyhow, we've got to get rid of the monsters. Then, we'll be able to relax a little bit."
Don't you hate to be living in a quiet ordinary rural town and also there are monsters everywhere attacking people. Hashtag just small town life.
No, but, it's fascinating how this game captures the kind of… Learned helplessness of people who thought they were getting the promise of progress and comfort and technology for free, only to watch it poison the land and make everything around them worse, and yet are left unable to do anything. In part because Mako-brought comfort is the only thing left in a land so poisoned it probably wouldn't even allow for subsistence farming (which, don't get me wrong, is a miserable way to live/die of starvation), and in part because the Mako Reactor seems as unassailable as Shinra itself, a representative of a power far beyond what a small town citizen could hope to challenge (and for what?).
It definitely doesn't ring true today, absolutely not.
It kinda feels like Avalanche were, like… The first to actually manage to pull themselves out of that mindset of helplessness and take actions. The first to learn how to blow up a pipeline.
If we ask for a room, the innkeep is a little confused; sure, Shinra booked the whole inn, but wouldn't Cloud prefer to stay at his mom's?
…You know, I have no idea what the protocol would be here in a real military. I feel like you wouldn't let one of your soldiers go off on his own just because he has local relatives? Then again, you also wouldn't book your soldiers into a hotel.
Okay it's kinda funny that Sephiroth opened this scene by saying he doesn't have any hometown and then immediately starts having flashbacks as soon as he walks in.
Sephiroth announces that he hired a guide from town to guide us to the Mako reactor, and that she's "still young," so no points for guessing who it is, and then it's time to tuck in.
In the morning, everyone meets up at the edge of town.
Yeah, I think Tifa's dad is the mayor, seeing as he's now saying he wishes he would have banned mountain climbing, presumably so no one could stumble upon the reactor? Or not run into monsters outside town? It doesn't seem like very responsible leadership, the monsters would still be there and growing in numbers.
Sephiroth declares that we'll set out once the guide is here; Tifa's dad starts saying "In case something happens…" but Sephiroth just tells him 'trust me.'
And then Tifa shows up.
WHY IS SHE A COWGIRL.
I know we saw her in that outfit in an earlier flashback but I just can't get over the fact that-
Wait.
She dug up an inexplicable 'TEXAS COWBOY' sign and modeled her 7th Heaven pub for her saloon. She dressed up as a cowboy when she was a teenager.
She's an Ameriboo.
She's a weeb but for Wild West imagery. Fuck. That's what's going on here. She's the mirror opposite of an American going around in a kimono wearing a katana.
I need to know her opinion on 3:10 to Yuma and Unforgiven-
Okay, let's stay focused. Tifa says it'll be fine, she's got two men from SOLDIER with her, and Cloud is shocked to find out his childhood friend is the town's 'number one guide.' Cloud immediately goes 'oh no this is too dangerous I can't involve you in this' and Sephiroth tells him, in what feels like… Part sarcasm, part sincere, part 'time to step up, big guy,' that there's no problem as long as Cloud does his job protecting her. It's a neat beat. And now it's time to leave again-
Hm?
What's that?
The guy with the camera we bumped into yesterday wants to take a picture? And Sephiroth is willing to go along with it?
Cloud, Tifa, and Sephiroth are all lined up for the picture. The guy takes it, and then we leave.
Well.
There's no way that pictures doesn't show up later either as a poignant moment of… Well there are two ways that kind of callback is used. One is 'look us at back then, so innocent, before [THE INCIDENT] happened," only neither Cloud nor Tifa are dead and Sephiroth isn't particularly close to either of them enough for 'remember when he was cool' to be that strong an emotional beat…
The other way this kind of callback tends to be used is 'huh, that's weird, what this picture shows is inconsistent with how we saw it being taken during the flashback.'
I doubt Mt Nibel was ever a pretty place, but the death of all the vegetation revealed it to be most metal album cover-ass looking place, all twisted peaks and jagged, teeth-like crags, rocky outcroppings growing out like gnarled, branchless trees. Just, an absolutely hostile, miserable, alien landscape where even the sky is a dark shade of brown, choked by clouds or dust.
We engage in further battles on this rope bridge, attacked by flying monsters, but Sephiroth's overwhelming strength easily dispatches every enemy group in a single cast of a Tier 3 spell over and over. This isn't really 'gameplay' in the sense of there being anything for us to do; we're going through a very long segment of pure narrative which is using the combat system to make a point. Sephiroth is entirely automated and wipes out every encounter the moment it starts. It's… interesting, definitely in line with the way the series has been using gameplay-as-narrative before, but this time for a much longer duration. You're not in the Kalm flashback for the combat, is what I'm saying.
We can actually check out Sephiroth in the party menu. As you can see, his stats are absurd, his equipment is overpowered, and his portrait is… oddly sad-looking.
But just as we're about to make it past the bridge, it collapses! Probably due to the stress of all the high-tier magic being thrown around…
Ooooh. Right because you see, in Mako Reactor 5 Tifa tries to reach out to Cloud to keep him from failing but doesn't catch him, but in the past Cloud reaches out to Tifa and does catch her! It's a call-forward! Not only that but in the present, Tifa failing to catch Cloud means he falls next to Aerith and they have to go through the Slums together, but in the past Cloud catching Tifa means they fall together and then go through the Mt Nibel tunnels together! It's symbolic!!
This is storytelling.
Sephiroth and one of the Shinra soldiers quickly find Tifa and Cloud, and Sephiroth checks if everyone is alright then asks if they'll be able to make it back; Tifa describes the caves as an 'ant farm' of interconnected tunnels, so they'll find their way. She notices, however, that one of the guards is missing; Sephiroth says that "It may sound cruel, but we've no time to search for him. We can't go back, so we must go on."
I hope it wasn't Jojo Pose Guy. He was so close to getting it right.
It's the first time Sephiroth has acted in a way that could be described as 'callous,' but even so, he's making a reasonable argument and he knows that what he's saying sounds cold - they're lost in the middle of the mountain after a bridge collapse, there are monsters everywhere, they don't have the means to conduct a search and pursue their objective.
Once we enter the caves, the characters remark on their strange coloration - a green glow pervades them, quite similar to the basins in the Mako Reactors, or Cloud's eyes (notably, in the few close-up shots he gets, Sephiroth's eyes are even more striking and vivid in color). Sephiroth explains that this mountain is rich in Mako, which is why the reactor was built there.
…you know, how common are Mako Reactors outside of Midgar? Like… We know them mainly as a technology used in the city, to power the city. I didn't realize they had more reactors elsewhere, although of course it would make some sense - I guess that's what is powering Kalm?
But… well, this reactor, in such a remote place, with so little active infrastructure around it?
Yeah, that's an illegal research facility.
Look at the few leaves on those trees - and the way these roots go directly into the pool at its center. This, Sephiroth explains, is a Mako fountain, a 'miracle of nature.' Some vegetation can still continue to cling on despite the devastation of the surroundings, but only here, in the very heart of the Mako, closest to the fountain. It's life, but it's grim in its implications.
Tifa, heedless of the fact that she is talking to Shinra soldiers, including their most famous war hero, laments that if the Mako reactor continues to drain the energy of the land, this fountain will dry up too.
Yeah, I can see how that girl became a fully committed ecoterrorist. She is fearless to speak up for the planet in front of the same people killing it.
Fortunately for her Sephiroth doesn't seem to mind. In fact, he's even in the mood for some expository dialogue:
The glowing crystal-looking thing at the center of the fountain is materia - though it is a very rare case of naturally produced materia, instead of needing to be artificially condensed; which probably explains its ungainly shape (they're very large crystalline growths) instead of convenient standardized orbs that can be slotted into gear made for it.
Cloud asks why it is that Materia allows people to use magic, and Sephiroth chastises him for somehow graduating as SOLDIER without that basic knowledge, and drops an understated bomb: Materia contains the knowledge and wisdom of the Ancients. Magic is 'the power of the land and the Planet', and Materia contains the instructions on how to interface with and call up that power.
Right. I thought that Materia was like - condensed elemental energy, and the gear slot served as interface, and you learned to actively manipulate that energy progressively. That's not it at all. The Materia isn't energy, it's user instructions. It substitutes for whatever thousands of years of learning went into learning to initially manipulate the Planet's magic with one's own mind. When Tifa is gaining AP for the Fire Materia, she's not learning how to use Fire magic; she's learning how to better understand and read a… magical computer-gem which handles the magic for her, which is why when removing the Materia from her, she loses the ability to use Fire magic entirely.
That certainly explains why characters no longer permanently learn magic from Materia the way they did from espers in VI. The implications are…
Well, why would Mako which happens to pool together and condense in a natural place somehow contain a full set of instructions on how to cast Curaga? Now, it could be that this is simply because this Mako fountain is a mystical place pervaded by the knowledge of the Ancients, and Mako happens to take on the 'form' of that knowledge. But then why would that ability be replicable artificially in a lab or factory? The only explanation is that the information is contained within the Mako itself, which means that Mako carries that information, which means that Mako, the 'life blood of the planet,' is the repository of the Ancients' knowledge and wisdom.
A sea of souls. And young Aerith spoke of people dying as 'returning to the planet.'
Yeah, I think at this point it's very likely that Shinra is literally just mining the souls of the dead.
Cloud muses about the 'mysterious power' of magic, and this causes Sephiroth to laugh out loud.
Cloud: "Did I say somethin' funny?" Sephiroth: "A man once told me to never use unscientific terms like 'mysterious power'! It shouldn't even be called 'magic'! I still remember how angry he was." Cloud: "Who was that?" Sephiroth: "Hojo of Shinra, Inc… An inexperienced man assigned to take over the work of a great scientist. He was a walking mass of complexes."
…yeah, that sounds like Hojo. He's exactly the kind of man who would arbitrarily rant about how calling it 'magic' is leaning on irrational old superstition and it should be called something stupid like 'aetheric manipulation' or whatever. And Sephiroth clearly doesn't think much of him. I'm assuming that other, better scientist would be that Dr Gast briefly mentioned in the archives.
We walk along a narrow, winding mountain path, and finally, we arrive at the Mako Reactor.
…look at that thing.
This must have been early in Shinra's development history. The Reactor is, for one thing, much, much smaller than any of the ones powering Midgar. It's also more primitive looking; the 'articulated' pipes feeding into the ground look clunky and awkward. Most of all, though, the central shaft of that tower is made of… cobblestone? Some kind of masonry, anyway. Which is jarring for a building that would normally use concrete and metal.
This is a remote, early, small-scale prototype of later Shinra reactors, it's not just small because it's a secret research facility. We're looking at the buried history of the company here.
As we approach the stairs to the reactor, Cloud asks Tifa to wait for them outside. Tifa insists that she wants to go inside and see what the big deal is about this place, and Sephiroth interjects…
"Only authorized people are allowed in. This place is full of Shinra's industrial secrets."
…
Okay, let's pull out that pin we put into Sephiroth's characterization earlier, because this is the point where I want to talk about it.
I know Sephiroth mostly from a mixture of pop-culture osmosis, the Advent Children movie, and Final Fantasy VII Remake, and like, idk, Dissidia clips or whatever. I've seen a bunch of this guy. Not enough that I have a clear idea what his motivations are meant to be, but enough that this feels…
Off.
Obviously we're heading for some kind of dramatic betrayal or, like, insert your "fallen angel" motif there. But the performances of Sephiroth I've seen, their writing, they all lend towards a certain characterization; a distant, ominous, cryptic figure, who's basically always smirking, and seems to express himself only in ambiguous statements of vague ominous import that puts our fates at stake.
Like, I don't want it to sound like a criticism; 7R Sephiroth's performance, for instance, is wonderful, and as a mysterious villain with unknown designs he has real charisma, but also everything he does and says is imbued with gravitas, with weight and import. He's a dude who seems to know everything, and even when you don't know what he's doing, fates or the world is at stake in his actions.
I cannot, for the life of me, imagine Advent Children or 7R's Sephiroth's voice acting and mocap performance saying something like "Tifa has to stay out of the building because there are Shinra industrial secrets inside." Or giving a lecture about Materia functionality and laughing at Cloud for having missed Materia 101 classes. Or shit-talking Hojo behind his back. Or making small talk with a colleague about their respective family lives.
He's just… A dude. He's definitely got a very striking style and personality, he's not necessarily someone you might have a drink with, he keeps things relatively at arm's length and professional, but he's just… A guy. Hanging out.
Obviously there was a transition between "Sephiroth the top-ranking SOLDIER" and "Sephiroth the ultimate JRPG villain," just like there was from "Kefka the court mage" to "Kefka the Laughing Angel," but the laughing angel was still recognizably the same character with the same personality, just handed godlike power and a minor nihilistic breakdown after people kept screwing with his plans. Whereas the Sephiroth I know from spinoff material is unrecognizable here.
It's fascinating.
Cloud and Sephiroth leave the last Shinra soldier to keep watch over Tifa (in both senses; making sure she stays safe and making sure she doesn't sneak in after them), then head on in.
We've seen this place before.
It's the Mako Reactor that appeared in Cloud's flashback where he saw Tifa pick up Sephiroth's sword and declare her hatred of him and the Shinra after her father's death.
This is the place where tragedy happens.
Sephiroth is walking ahead; we just follow in after him, into that red-lit room, and there…
Those are pods.
Like, you don't have egg-shaped containers connected to mysterious tubing with a viewing port at face height unless there is a person or monster inside it. That's just how it works, I don't make the rules.
'Jenova' is written both over the door at the top of the stairs and the cables running through the reactor, in case we could possibly miss it.
Sephiroth identifies the malfunction within the reactor as caused by a broken part, and asks Cloud to close the valve, which we do. Then Sephiroth starts examining the pods, wondering how they broke, and…
Like, you see what I mean, right? The pop culture image I have of Sephiroth is not that of a dude grabbing onto a pod and hoisting him up with his feet dangling in the air so he can try looking through the viewing port. It's so normal and casual.
Anyway, he gets down.
Sephiroth: "...Now I see, Hojo. But doing this will never put you on the same level as Professor Gast." Sephiroth: "This is a system that condenses and freezes the Mako energy… That is, when it's working correctly. Now… what does Mako energy become when it's further condensed?" Cloud: "Uh, umm… Oh, yeah! It becomes Materia." Sephiroth: "Right, normally. But Hojo put something else in there. …Take a look."
He's really talking like a mentor to his teenage pupil, in this exchange. Cloud hoists himself up to see through the port, and…
MONSTER JUMPSCARE.
The way the game is using these screenshots to bypass the limitations of its normal visual style and show us some fully-rendered visual scares with Jenova and now this monster is just, really neat. A really cool way to get the best use out of their available tools.
This design really tickles me though, for reasons that… Well, we'll see in a moment.
Sephiroth explains to Cloud that 'normal SOLDIER members' are humans showered in Mako, different from others but still human. But these things in the tanks were exposed to far higher degrees of Mako - so what are they?
Cloud finally gets it - these are the monsters that have been terrorizing Nibelheim. Living organisms exposed to massive quantities of Mako and turned into mutated, grotesque monsters.
Then Cloud cluelessly delivers the line that throws off everything.
Cloud: "Normal members of SOLDIER? You mean you're different?"
I don't think Sephiroth even realized that he'd said that. That he'd set himself apart as constitutionally different from Cloud and the others. I think so, because the moment Cloud says that…
…Sephiroth himself undergoes Flashback Migraine.
Like, I can't be sure that's what's happening here, but holding his head in his hand, shaking, and saying things like 'No…' or '...was I?' Yeah, our boy is suffering the same cognitive dissonance-induced trauma response Cloud has been going through the whole game.
Fuck that's good.
Then Sephiroth goes absolutely apeshit.
He draws his blade and starts banging against the pods, asking aloud if that's the way he was created, if he's the same as them, telling Cloud that he saw the things in these pods - they're not just 'living organisms,' these were once humans. Is he the same?
Cloud tells him there's no way, and Sephiroth briefly calms down - slightly. "Ever since I was small," he says, "I've felt that I was different from the others. Special, in some way. But… Not like this."
Oooh yeah. 'I always thought I was secretly gifted, nature's special boy, just blessed to stand apart' running into 'you're actually a lab experiment' would be, like, painful.
Then, whether as a result of Sephiroth's sword blows, or because of the noise, or because the facility is just kinda old and breaking down and shit at security, one of the monsters in the tanks roars to life, and manages to break its pod.
Man, look at that thing.
The… painted? I think it was painted? Screenshot of the monster in the tank made it look incredibly fearsome, a beast overgrown with bony spurs with a fearsome snarl, and this… Look at that thing. Its proportions. It's so… small. So deformed. So awkward.
It's not scary. It's pathetic. And I think the game agrees, because there's no fight against that thing; the last thing we see is the camera pulling up, into the wiring and piping above, and the screen fades to black on Cloud's musing.
Then we're back in the room at the inn.
Barret: "Damn Shinra! The more I hear, the more I ate 'em!" Tifa: "...who would have ever thought the Mako Reactor held such a secret." Red XIII: "That would explain the intensity in the number of monsters recently." Tifa: "I think we should listen to Cloud carefully. Don't you think so Barret?" Barret: "(Why you talkin' to me!?)"
Right. I got kinda lost in all the Sephiroth stuff, but 'hey btw Shinra is responsible for the monsters' is kind of a big deal.
The way it's presented, it feels like monsters have always been a part of this world, something people have had to deal with all their lives, but Shinra is directly responsible for a paradigm shift, a recrudescence in the number and aggressivity of monsters. Those horrors that escaped from Hojo's lab in Jenova's wake weren't one-off freaks at a single site - no, Hojo must have labs producing monsters all over the world. For development as weapons of war, perhaps? Maybe; if so I would surmise that's just the justification he gives to the suits so they keep pumping his budget. I think his goals are more high-concept, likely to do with the Promised Land.
And this out of… what, envy? An inferiority complex? Did Professor Gast create Sephiroth and the SOLDIER program, only for Hojo to chase that same peak in vain with his own monsters?
Well. Here, we are given an opportunity to save the game and take a break. We're more than halfway through the flashback by now, but…
…we're also going to take a break.
This is already a 10k word update as it stands, and is going to need to be a two-parter - I've been rather indulgent with the screenshots but, even trying to cut them down to what I felt was needed to illustrate the sequence, I couldn't get it below 50, so might as well just have the full 76 I initially inserted.
Man, though. What a sequence.
We've never had a Final Fantasy antagonist who's revealed in flashback to just be a chill dude we can hang out with? Garland had already turned evil by the time FFI started, we're told Xande was once cool in a single line of dialogue, the King of Baron was already an evil shapeshifter and Golbez under mind control since childhood, Exdeath and Kefka were always evil - Sephiroth starts the game as an antagonist of sorts (though we never see him), but the game's smartest trick is that after all these hours, when it does finally show us the goods, it's in the past, when Sephiroth is just… Hanging out. Doing Shinra's dirty work, sure, but importantly, he doesn't know about the bad shit. He doesn't know about Shinra creating monsters or the true nature of Jenova, and the fact that he knows her as his 'mother' clearly signals there's something with our boy that's beyond 'he was bathed in Mako a little harder than normal.' He is much more than meets the eye, and he doesn't know it yet; he's still just an elite soldier with high-tier magic, personable, slightly aloof but charismatic, a decent mentor to his protégés.
And the presentation, Cloud as this tiny fucking, puppy just whacking monsters with a foam bat and collapsing if they breathe on him too hard while Sephiroth is just cutting dragons in half… Fantastic ludonarrative integration.
It's such a good buildup and reveal and continued mystery. At this stage, we still don't really know what happened - the flashback isn't over, we're just taking a break (and we need it; that whole sequence is at least half an hour long and we haven't been able to save at any point throughout), Sephiroth had a freakout, and after that was sullen and mysterious, but it's not like he went evil at that point. So what next?
The big twist - or 'twist,' really - is that Shinra's reckless experiments are responsible for the rise in monster activity. At an OOC level that's the opposite of surprising, but for our hero it compounds with their escape from Shinra labs to show how Shinra's evil expands beyond just 'draining natural resources for profit.' And that Hojo has an inferiority complex and is trying to compensate by new works of horror after taking over from a greater man - but a man whose name sounds like 'Ghast.' As in ghost; as in ghastly.
I'm really glad Omicron touched on how different Sephiroth is in the flashback sequence than he is in, say, Advent Children or any of the follow-up material. To me at 13, Sephiroth (and Cloud, who I think this makes apparent is clearly mimicking Sephiroth's mannerisms) was the ultimate cool guy, not because he's some smirky diabolical bastard, but because he's a stoic ultra-badass veteran who looks after his junior and has occasional glimpses of humanity. So, basically, this flashback sequence totally ruined me as a kid.
Actually, the entire Kalm flashback sequence is an amazing banger, and I can't wait for the next part. Top-tier coverage as always.
We do a brief reload to grab the 'Enemy Skill' command from Hojo's lab; we won't be going all the way back to get a sword from the SOLDIER troops, it's just too much retread.
Oh hey, you went back for it. As you might have already guessed, you're going to want to keep it on someone. Never know when an ability will come up you can learn.
We can actually check out Sephiroth in the party menu. As you can see, his stats are absurd, his equipment is overpowered, and his portrait is… oddly sad-looking.
He's just… A dude. He's definitely got a very striking style and personality, he's not necessarily someone you might have a drink with, he keeps things relatively at arm's length and professional, but he's just… A guy. Hanging out.
Obviously there was a transition between "Sephiroth the top-ranking SOLDIER" and "Sephiroth the ultimate JRPG villain," just like there was from "Kefka the court mage" to "Kefka the Laughing Angel," but the laughing angel was still recognizably the same character with the same personality, just handed godlike power and a minor nihilistic breakdown after people kept screwing with his plans. Whereas the Sephiroth I know from spinoff material is unrecognizable here.
So! It's definitely something that'd be a surprise to see if your only experience is Sephiroth as the quintessential pretty boy katana anime villain but he wasn't always that.
Once upon a time he wasn't a bad guy. Worked for them, sure, but not bad in and of himself. Hell, something you probably missed, but Seph is actually programmed to revive Cloud if he gets knocked out, it just rarely happens because of how the battles are set to play out. It's a neat little detail.
His portrayal in Final Fantasy: Crisis Core explores this further. To avoid spoilers I'll keep it to a minimum, but he's, again just a guy. Intimidating, powerful, aloof sure. But he's still just a person.
It's not scary. It's pathetic. And I think the game agrees, because there's no fight against that thing; the last thing we see is the camera pulling up, into the wiring and piping above, and the screen fades to black on Cloud's musing.
Yeah, if the game wanted the monster to be threatening, it'd have come out of the pod swinging. As it is, it just sort of lays there moaning. It's sad really. Maybe if it was given time it'd become a threat, but I can't imagine it's a creature who's existence is anything but agony.
Anyway, you noticed a lot of details that flew straight over my 6 year old head and only became noticed as I got older, so at this point I am mostly just having to restrain myself from going on possibly spoilery tangents.
Well, it can't be denied that much as FFIV was Final Fantasy's first big step into "what if we had a plot with actual characters and depth?" once they hit a new system, FFVII is that multiplied tenfold. Probably partially because the Playstation means you can stuff so much more writing into one game; the average SNES cart might hold up to 4 Megabytes of data. Meanwhile, PS1 games? Apparently it's 680 Megabytes per disk, and FFVII is a Three Disk Game.
Sure, some of that might just be recycled because you'll have the same models, world locations and whatnot taking up space on every disk, but even so that's over five hundredtimes the amount of room to work with.
IIRC Enemy Skill doesn't quite reach the heights of FFV Blue Magic, but it's probably more useful than FFVI Blue Magic. In particular, you can get a few classics like Mighty Guard a lot earlier.
It's really standing out to me how 'we', in this game, is first and foremost Cloud. This level of identification between the player and a clear main character has only been seen in FFIV so far; Bartz is the POV character for the intro of V and is played solo like once afterwards and is clearly the 'main character,' but V is very strongly a party game where 'we' is the entire party of Bartz, Farris, Lenna, Galuf and Krile and their constant shenanigans, with the game very rarely splitting us apart for any length of time, and when a party member talks shit to Bartz it very rarely comes across as talking shit to the player. Meanwhile VI has no clearly defined main character and merrily tosses us around from one lead to another across story segments before sorta kinda settling on Celes as the lead character of the late game.
But in VII, even if the game sometimes shifts to Aerith as playable party lead, it's extremely obvious Cloud is the true 'player character.' It's obvious to the point of the game getting meta with it - we share his point of view, the camera goes crazy when he's having flashback and trauma responses, we hear what he can hear and see what he can see, people turn to him to say 'see you in a bit' before the game reverts controls to us… We're going back to the way Cecil was handled, but with even more of an emphasis.
It's an interesting change precisely because it is a change and I wouldn't have noticed it without the contrast of the previous games; this was just my idea of how a JRPG works, for the most part.
You know I hadn't really noticed it until you pointed it out, but yeah, it's kind of a storytelling shift from here on out, isn't it? The first FF game since FFIV to go "what if we focused the vast majority of our screen time on one specific character, even if others around them still have their own arcs and stories?"
Earth Materia really sent me for a loop on my replay when I found out about it. After all, earth magic has pretty much always been single big spells like Quake or summoning Titan in previous games... but now it's just an element you can grab like any other? I guess it scales from "Earth 1 itty bitty spike" to "Earth 3 BIG BOI QUAKE"?
…this is where I think that the original translation kind of foreshadows things wrong; "My mother was Jenova" sounds like everyone present already knows about Jenova-the-monster-in-the-tank and Sephiroth is open about being related to her and just thinks she died, whereas the Retranslated mod's "My mother was called Jenova" makes it more clear that he just knows he's an orphan with a mother named 'Jenova,' which is really important for upcoming plot developments. In a similar way, the dialogue saying "the reactor is producing monster" is, in that other version, "Along with the malfunction, there has been an outbreak of brutal creatures," which doesn't make a direct connection implying Sephiroth knows the reactor is causing monsters, which is... also going to be a big deal. Or maybe I'm the only one this bothers, I don't know.
Oh, I'm in agreement, the original FFVII translation has some serious stumbling points on occasion. Like it's not outright bad or anything, I've seen much worse, but FFVII could really go for a proper, full game retranslation... some kind of "Remaster" or Remake", shall we say.
There's this really neat touch where while Cloud's relationship to Sephiroth may be ambiguous, he's pretty buddy-buddy with the normal grunts - one of them is scolding him for always wandering off and running about while on the job (making fun of RPG character behavior, never gets old), while with the other we can actually rehearse cool-looking poses, which is a really fun humanizing moment; the guy even asks if SOLDIER members always care about what other people think, which I think is a pretty good jab at class of super soldier who clearly think they are the coolest dudes alive and have some of the power to back it up.
I think what I love most about this little conversation is the fact that I'm fairly certain we've already seen Cloud take that exact pose once or twice in the game... and he'll continue to do so in the future. Little SOLDIER boy's been practicing his look for years.
Imagine asking your friend for some story from his past and he's kinda dodgy about visiting his mom and you know he's a guy with a too-cool-to-care affect so it's probably gonna be cute/embarrassing, so you tease him to make him talk about it, and he just opens with "so this was only a few days before my mother fucking died."
The phrasing of the replies makes it clear that Cloud realizes that this is a total breach of trust; if we say "I'd never do that!" Tifa replies "Of course!" Because she trusts her childhood friend not to read her mail. But of course, I need the juicy character lore, so we read it anyway, and now I feel bad.
Yeah, I think Tifa's dad is the mayor, seeing as he's now saying he wishes he would have banned mountain climbing, presumably so no one could stumble upon the reactor? Or not run into monsters outside town? It doesn't seem like very responsible leadership, the monsters would still be there and growing in numbers.
Honestly, I just took it as him grumbling about the fact that Tifa was the most appropriate person in town to lead them to the reactor because he never stopped her from doing mountain climbing and exploration. It's just the fact that Tifa, specifically, is walking off with some Shinra goons that has him upset.
Okay, let's pull out that pin we put into Sephiroth's characterization earlier, because this is the point where I want to talk about it.
I know Sephiroth mostly from a mixture of pop-culture osmosis, the Advent Children movie, and Final Fantasy VII Remake, and like, idk, Dissidia clips or whatever. I've seen a bunch of this guy. Not enough that I have a clear idea what his motivations are meant to be, but enough that this feels…
This kinda came up in the spoiler thread, but non-spoiler wise? As someone who's just kind of done with Sephiroth in all the expanded materials and how much he gets shilled left and right, it was a bit of a breath of fresh air to play through Kalm and go "oh wait, there's an actual character of interest deep down in here in the original game that I forgot about." Like you say, he really is just... a pretty normal dude. A supersoldier, sure, but still just a dude.
It's really fascinating getting this look at Sephiroth and trying to separate it from the depiction in years and years of spin-offs that so solidly entrenched itself in pop culture. The foundational humanity (and tragedy?) behind his descent into villainy. I feel like even if Remake hadn't been a metatextually loaded retelling of Final Fantasy VII and had, as some people might have wanted, not included the Whispers at all... that the game simply couldn't do Sephiroth the same way as the original because he's become too well known. It'd be like trying to keep it a secret who Luke's dad is with a new spin-off or retelling of the original Star Wars trilogy.
It's also fun seeing the shift here to scenery that is more common to Final Fantasy that again shows off the game's capabilities at portraying an environment compared to previous entries. The clashing of different aesthetics reflecting the direct influence of Mako-based technology and Shira developments on the lives of the residents of cities outside Midgar is looking very consistent.
Overall, it's almost shocking how much detail there is to take in for the capabilities of the game. Maybe this is a biased outlook because I'm getting it through what the LP draws attention and focus too, but I think the effort in maximizing the information and narrative given by the world is very insightful to consider about these older games.
I think another particularly strong point about that scene is it establishes two things:
1) ShinRA makes monsters out of men. Like, it's very up front about this. People who presumably did not consent [or if they did presumably under false pretensions] were just... locked into what amounts to boilers of Planetary Soul Juice for ??? reasons.
2) ShinRA makes monsters out of men. Look at what young, bright-eyed 16 y/o Cloud was like arriving back in his Hometown. Look at the Great War Hero Sephiroth. Compare them to what we hear / see (well, 'see': It was all off-screen) of Sephiroth in ShinRA HQ or what Cloud's doing from the very beginning of the game.
This isn't an organization that scums for terrible people. It gives terrible people a place to do terrible things, and when all the gilded glimmer of Midgar and the Power Company fades breaks those who Know Too Much however well they might have originally meant.
Fun fact: if you look in her dresser, you find her "orthopedic underwear", which is a nonsensical pair of random words presumably put together to imply even at age 17 she's already suffering lower back pain from gigantomastia. Also, that joke was a translator original; in the Japanese it was basically just "fancy underwear". No, I wasn't looking for it, I was doing the "click everywhere" thing and the internet wasn't as easy to find rumors on at the time. And yes, it is very skeevy that they put underwear thievery into the game even as an easter egg.
Also, yes, Cowgirl Tifa is an alt-costume in Dissidia. I will not post it, because they changed a perfectly servicable ordinary cowgirl costume into a vaguely cowgirl themed bustier and microskirt (with the hat hanging on her back because lol changing a fighting game character's head model). There's a reason the perverts were so up in arms when she was given a sports bra and an outfit that had been in the same general room as a female designer for a few brief moments in the remake - they'd been pandered to in the past.
There's no way that pictures doesn't show up later either as a poignant moment of… Well there are two ways that kind of callback is used. One is 'look us at back then, so innocent, before [THE INCIDENT] happened," only neither Cloud nor Tifa are dead and Sephiroth isn't particularly close to either of them enough for 'remember when he was cool' to be that strong an emotional beat…
The other way this kind of callback tends to be used is 'huh, that's weird, what this picture shows is inconsistent with how we saw it being taken during the flashback.'
We can actually check out Sephiroth in the party menu. As you can see, his stats are absurd, his equipment is overpowered, and his portrait is… oddly sad-looking.
One recurring theme I've seen in Japanese media is how excess power can leave you isolated from the people around you. People start looking up to you as an Idol, and that prevents them from connecting to you as a person. Considering Sephiroths career at this point Cloud is probably one of the few people in all of Shinra who will talk to him as anything resembling an equal.
So, on the one hand, you using the word Idol made me think of Idol Culture in general and how it isolates the individual it is centred on, to the point they can't live their own lives because the Idol image is so important. I then thought how that applied to Sephiroth and it honestly tracks pretty well.
My mind also went to Sephiroth dressed up as a cutesy Idol prancing around on stage singing musical numbers. I can't get that image out of my head. So uh, in the politest possible way, screw you for that.
Also I now feel like it would be absolutely on brand for Shinra to have an exploitative Idol industry, and the only reason they don't is they never thought about it.
So, on the one hand, you using the word Idol made me think of Idol Culture in general and how it isolates the individual it is centred on, to the point they can't live their own lives because the Idol image is so important. I then though how that applied to Sephiroth and it honestly tracks pretty well.
My mind also went to Sephiroth dressed up as a cutesy Idol prancing around on stage singing musical numbers. I can't get that image out of my head. So uh, in the politest possible way, screw you for that.
Also I now feel like it would be absolutely on brand for Shinra to have an exploitative Idol industry, and the only reason they don't is they never thought about it.
