- Location
- Drachyench on Discord
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Terra Allias
World's only Magical Girl Spec Ops Asuka fan
- Location
- Cheverly
- Pronouns
- She/Her
You know, it's not in anyway related but this probably explains why the Brotherhood of Nod hasn't already been destroyed by the GDI's Ion canons. They're always on the move, to avoid the eagle's prying eyes.
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Terra Allias
World's only Magical Girl Spec Ops Asuka fan
- Location
- Cheverly
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I've never actually played the games, so I wouldn't know
- Location
- Canada, probably
I'm super late for this one, because I saw the title was "Sephiroth." And I was just… not interested. Oh boy, time for the emo-in-chief. Eyeroll.
I am flabbergasted to learn that Sephiroth has, like… a personality. A cool one! He's an actual character! He isn't just a strutting edgelord, all style and no substance.
The internet has lied to me.
I am flabbergasted to learn that Sephiroth has, like… a personality. A cool one! He's an actual character! He isn't just a strutting edgelord, all style and no substance.
The internet has lied to me.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
Tifa and Aerith might be the biggest receivers of characterization drift through pop cultural osmosis, but they're not the only ones. In fact, it'll be a common thing in the upcoming Final Fantasy titles starting from this one - FFVII is just more noticeable because it's the most famous of the lot.
- Location
- Ireland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The expanded media, fandom, and cameos in other stuff has absolutely obliterated the actual personalities and writing involved in FF7. Part of why I loved the Remake so much was because it seemed to take a genuinely enormous amount of time and effort and put it towards ensuring that the characters were written as intended originally back in 1997, rather than following along the exaggerated, distorted, and just plain wrong conceptions of the characters that had evolved over the years.
The funniest one is how Aerith got warped into being Actually Really Pure And Sweet And Innocent, when she's...not that.
- Location
- Spain
Don't bring that outside the spoiler thread please!
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Final Fantasy VII, Part 9: The End of Nibelheim
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Welcome back to Final Fantasy VII, the game where hot white-haired bishie evil.
Last time, we paused during the flashback to Nibelheim, in a move which I specifically calculated to cause as much pain as possible to the FFVII vets who know what's coming next (and also because it was already 10k words).
Aerith asks Tifa if she was waiting outside while all this was happening, and Tifa answers in the affirmative.
Cloud: "We returned to Nibelheim. Sephiroth confined himself to the Inn. He didn't even try to talk to me."
Tifa: "Then all of a sudden he disappeared, right?"
Cloud: "We found him inside the biggest building in Nibelheim."
Tifa: "The villagers used to call it the Shinra mansion."
Cloud: "Long ago, people from Shinra used to live in that mansion…"
I really like the vibe where Cloud is telling a story from his past and Tifa's, so she has knowledge of much, but not all that happened back then, and they bounce off each other in that way.
Also, the fact that this is the 'Shinra mansion' and that people from Shinra lived in that mansion 'long ago' suggests that this was, what… The origin point of Shinra? Does the Shinra family originate from Nibelheim? It would explain why this also happens to be the location of an early Mako Reactor, their research might have started at the nearby Mako fountain; but this is a lot of 'everyone who matters to the plot grew up in the same town,' hmm. We'll see, I suppose.
The town's inhabitants wait warily at the gates to the mansion as Cloud decides to head in and find out what's going on with Sephiroth.
Very strong 'horror movie fancy mansion' vibes here. It's giving Resident Evil, it's giving Haunting of Hill House.
It's not really horror, though, it just has a familiar aesthetic. The house doesn't really have much to do in it, but it's just a really cool place to visit. I'm not sure how those plants are still growing after the house has been abandoned for years, given that they presumably don't receive rain, but it's a neat aesthetic; there's a very conspicuous safe in that study up north which we can't interact with, which, hmm.
The safe is probably the one element that most cemented in my mind 'we're going to go back to Nibelheim and explore the Shinra Mansion again in the present time,' just because it's so conspicuous as something you'd normally have some kind of puzzle to try and open, but we can't (because we can't retrieve items from a flashback).
One of the two surviving Shinra troopers is in the house with us, looking for Sephiroth as well without much success, though he indicates he saw him go into one of the rooms and disappear. We head in, and all we have to do is interact with a wall and…
Presto! Hidden stairway to a secret basement!
Also, hm. Those sure are human bones in there. There are skulls lined up against the walls. There's a door we can't go through (further strengthening my 'we're going to be coming back here' theory). At the end of this underground corridor, we find another door, and behind it…
An old, secret laboratory, and Sephiroth reading its research.
This, it soon transpires, is Professor Gast's old lab, containing his research on Jenova. Jenova, he says, was an Ancient, discovered in an 2000 year old geological stratum; after its discovery, Gast got approval for Shinra to start secret research using Mako Reactor 1 (by which I am pretty sure they mean the reactor in Nibelheim, not the one we blew up in the game's introduction).
Hmm. I can't say I see many similarities between the monstrous eyeless body in the containment tank, and Aerith's mother who seemed physically human, if otherwise magical. Are both really part of the same species?
Sephiroth, reading this, wonders aloud - his mother's name was Jenova, this is the Jenova Project, could that truly be a coincidence?
Quoth Wikipedia: "In filmmaking and photography, the Dutch angle, also known as Dutch tilt, canted angle, or oblique angle, is a type of camera shot which involves setting the camera at an angle so that the shot is composed with vertical lines at an angle to the side of the frame, or so that the horizon line of the shot is not parallel with the bottom of the frame.[1] This produces a viewpoint akin to tilting one's head to the side.[1] In cinematography, the Dutch angle is one of many cinematic techniques often used to portray psychological uneasiness or tension in the subject being filmed."
Cloud can try to approach Sephiroth, but Sephiroth just requests to be left alone. Over the following days, Sephiroth remains locked inside Shinra Mansion, refusing to come out and making his way through Professor Gast's entire library, something which the game shows with great effect by showing a succession of takes on the same Dutch Angle background showing more and more books piling up:
Cloud himself has taken residence within the mansion, likely as a way of keeping watch on Sephiroth; with the Reactor back online and the monster problem presumably solved by locking it up tight, the Shinra group has nothing to do without their leader but sit around and wait.
Eventually, Cloud heads back again, and this time, he finds Sephiroth different - sitting at Gast's desk, in the study at the back of his hidden lab, laughing to himself while surrounded by Gast's research.
Sephiroth greets Cloud very strangely, calling him a traitor; this only confuses Cloud, who has no idea what this could even be referring to - but his confusion is the perfect opportunity for Sephiroth to launch into a rant about his discoveries.
Sephiroth: "This planet originally belonged to the Cetra. Cetra was an itinerant race. They would migrate in, settle the Planet, then move on… At the end of their long, hard journey, it was said they would find the Promised Land and supreme happiness."
Sephiroth: "But, those who disliked journeying appeared. They stopped their migrations, built shelters and elected to lead an easier life. They took that which the Cetra and the planet had made without giving back one whit in return!"
Sephiroth: "Those are your ancestors."
Cloud: "Sephiroth…"
Sephiroth: "Long ago, disaster struck the Planet. Your ancestors escaped… They survived because they hid. The Planet was saved by sacrificing the Cetra. After that, your ancestors continued to multiply. Now all that's left of the Cetra is in these reports."
Cloud: "What does that have to do with you?"
Sephiroth: "Don't you see?"
Sephiroth: "An Ancient named Jenova was found in a 2000 years old geological stratum. The Jenova Project."
Sephiroth: "The Jenova Project wanted to produce people with the power of the Ancients… Or, the Cetra. …I am what they produced."
Cloud: "Pr… Produced?!"
Sephiroth: "Yes. Professor Gast, leader of the Jenova Project and genius scientist, produced me."
Cloud: "How… how did he? Se… Sephiroth?"
Sephiroth: "Out of my way. I'm going to see my mother."
Oooookay!
So there's a lot to unpack here.
First of all: That's a wild backstory for the setting's Ancients. By now, they're a very familiar trope, showing up in most if not all FFs to date, and VII here is (once again!) echoing IV, with its 'Ancients' as aliens who've come to the planet in order to settle it. However, the big twist this time is that it looks like humanity themselves are aliens. The Ancients were space travelers migrating from planet to planet, and humans are a splinter group that decided to stay behind rather than move on with the others - though from what Sephiroth is saying, the Ancients hadn't moved yet when a disaster wiped out most of their species.
That does a lot to explain why Aerith and her mother look just like ordinary humans - they're the same species, they're just descendents of a… Class? Ethnic group? Political faction? They have unique, 'magical' features as a result of… Bioengineering? Special knowledge passed down along the generations? Rather than being intrinsically different from humans, which in turn explains why Materia works the way it does - what humans lack in order to practice magic is knowledge, and some kind of 'unlocking' mechanism, to manipulate the world's energy the way the Cetra did.
Like… Maybe the Ancients modified the planet so that its energy would be available for someone with the right genetic passcode, and Materia fakes that passcode?
And that mention of the 'Promised Land' being a place not on this Planet, but instead another Planet - President Shinra's dream of a hidden region full of Mako is both futile and vastly underestimating the scope of what he was looking for, isn't it?
What it doesn't explain is why the existence of a faction of stay-behinders was so detrimental to the overall project as to have Sephiroth label them as 'traitors' and describe them as effectively parasites and thieves; did they somehow keep the rest of the Cetra from moving on in their space quest? I get the impression that Sephiroth is less than rational in his reaction here, but it's still curious. Also, why did humanity's ancestors survive and not the Cetra? They both faced the same disaster while on the Planet, didn't they? Nor did the Cetra completely disappear, seeing as some survived long enough for Aerith to be born as the last Ancient in this modern day.
"Humans are actually aliens who forgot their extraterrestrial origin" is absolutely the wildest part of this backstory, I love it.
It's a great reveal that also introduces many more questions and further intrigue, and now I want to find out more.
…
But more importantly, IT'S ALL COMING TOGETHER. I HAVE THE PICTURE NOW.
All those inexplicable references to real-world countries and concepts?
The Ancients were a join NATO space colonization effort fleeing a ruined Earth.
Two thousand years isn't that much. Like, two thousand years ago the Roman Empire ruled most of Europe, Confucius was active in China, and the historical Jesus was most likely a few years old; we retain significant amount of information from that era, though concentrated to a few regions of the world. Even as memories of the Ancients faded, certain names, cultural concepts, and physical relics remained. The concept of 'Texas.' The idea of 'Korean barbecue.' Rusted metal wrecks labeled 'NATO,' or perhaps 'Atomic,' for the nuclear engines that powered their spaceships.
Cetra?
More like CETRA.
WE HAVE CRACKED THE CODE, PEOPLE.
Ahem.
Sorry about that.
Although now that I think about, I wouldn't be surprised if in a reverse twists, it was the Promised Land that was the Earth, with the Cetra as humans who colonized space so long ago that they barely remember the Earth, and are now searching for that mythical paradise home after their new colonies… were… destroyed…
…
FUCK
Final Fantasy VII Battlestar Galactica spinoff confirmed.
Okay, let's get back on track.
After Sephiroth leaves the secret lab, we're left alone to control Cloud - though frustratingly, despite pressing the interact button on every square inch of Gast's laboratory, I didn't find any hidden item or additional lore. Instead, this all serves to slowly build up tension as we make the long trek back through the basement and the Mansion back to Nibelheim, not knowing what we're about to find.
Now, our boy Sephiroth here is clearly on a bad track psychologically. He's managed to resolve the existential trauma of finding out he's some kind of lab experiment by deeming all of humanity 'traitors' and an inferior species to himself, and he's headed for Jenova. But surely Cloud can still make him see reason, right?
Okay so the whole town is on fire.
That's something of an escalation, Seph, old bud!
Zangan, the martial artist, is dragging people out of their burning houses, and asks Cloud if he's "still sane" (I assume he think that whatever happened to Sephiroth could happen to any SOLDIER and is wondering if Cloud has also gone full psycho) then asks him for help and tells him to check out one of the houses - a house which happens to be his mom's.
He cut down his own man.
In a moment of dramatic restraint that knows the haunting power of the unseen, we don't see what happens next; we just see Cloud enter the burning house, then walk out, shaking his hand and saying, "Terrible… Sephiroth… This is too terrible…"
Then there's a commotion above, close to the Shinra Mansion, and as Cloud looks up, we see Sephiroth slaughtering the town's inhabitants, followed by a historic iconic shot.
A full face shot of Sephiroth, first looking down, then raising his eyes to stare at the camera, then a full body shot of him turning around and walking into the flames. Notably, there are strange, black flames around him inside the more mundane fire - and this is the first time we can see that Sephiroth's eyes don't have just the Mako glow, but have vertical pupils like a snake, or a cat.
It's a simple shot, but the game is really putting its pre-rendered movie capabilities to work here. It's still straining against the limitations of FFVII's early 3D rendering, but it's giving all it can, and it's working; Sephiroth here appears as he looms in pop culture, a sinister, cryptic, terrifying figure who also looks really fucking cool, staring wordlessly at Cloud and disappearing within the fire as if it had no power to harm him (which it probably doesn't).
And it happens seconds after Cloud most likely found out that Sephiroth killed his mom.
It's a sudden, dramatic escalation. A few days ago, Sephiroth and Cloud shared a mentor-student or officer-rookie relationship, perhaps not a close friendship but at least a kind of bond and affection. Now Sephiroth is just committing mass murder.
Is it… believable?
In the moment yes, unquestionably it worked for me. As I sit here writing this a few days after, though, I do wonder. It's such a sharp, violent turn for the character, turning him from likeable to 'irredeemably evil' within minutes.
But I think it makes sense? Sephiroth has spent his entire life alienated from other human beings, thinking of himself as special, as 'more than'; previously, he'd channeled that innate sense of superiority in a constructive-ish fashion - he probably did some shady stuff as Shinra's strongest fighter in the Wutai War, but he's also protecting civilians from monsters. But now, he's been given a traumatic revelation ('you're not a human being, you were produced in a lab'), and just enough information to resolve the horror and self-doubt induced by that revelation by going 'this justifies my innate sense of my own superiority, I actually am a better and more worthy being than humans,' then constructed an entire worldview which paints humans as traitors and thieves who despoiled his rightful heritage, which reduced every one of the nice, innocent people in Nibelheim as unworthy beings who slighted him personally, and that (ironically) 'dehumanized' them and allowed him to mentally justify turning them into an outlet for the anger and betrayal born of the initial realization that he was a vat baby.
It makes psychological sense. It's abrupt, but it's believable, IMO.
We transition directly to the reactor (I guess Sephiroth successfully cleared the area of monsters and that's why Cloud isn't getting instantly eaten alive by lv 30 encounters), where we connect back to another past flashback we previously didn't have context for.
Tifa and her dad.
Sephiroth killed Tifa's father, and left his sword behind. As we saw before, Tifa declares "Sephiroth… SOLDIER… Mako Reactors… Shinra… I hate them all!," picks up the sword, and heads into the chamber - only now, we know what she's up against; a superpowered monster of a man capable of casually slaying dragons and wiping out whole groups of monsters, and she's just a teenager with kung fu. It's a hopeless endeavor that is very likely to get her killed - but also damn, she's got guts.
That anger is interesting. Perfectly to be expected under the circumstances, but the Tifa we know in the modern day is a very calm, even-keeled woman. It's… disturbing watching her younger self shouting her hatred and picking up her sword to try and kill a man.
But it's no wonder she joined Avalanche, after what happened there.
Sephiroth is banging on the door, begging Jenova to somehow let him in, and Tifa races up the stairs to take a swing at him. Unfortunately, this is Sephiroth, and he is more than a match for her even unarmed; he turns around as she approaches and grabs her hand, wrests the sword out of her hand - and cuts her down.
It's a full slash to the torso, hard enough to knock her down the whole flight of stairs. I have no idea how she survived this. Like, all concept art and 3D model of Tifa should at the very least sport a massive scar, which given her propensity towards crop top should be pretty prominent!
The effect of this scene in my playthrough is diminished by the fact that the Steam version had another of its several random sound-out where the soundtrack inexplicably turns off, but it's a pretty shocking shot. Tifa bounces down the stairs, landing just as Cloud arrives; he picks her up and lays her against one of the pods, and…
Oh, that's rough. A broken childhood promise, escaping the lips of your dying friend as you watch helplessly as the guy who already killed your mother and everyone you knew growing up cuts her down…
…is what this would be, if we didn't already know that Tifa survived this, even though all that Cloud does is sit her up against the pod and then leave.
Strange. I think Cloud believes that Tifa is dead or dying and it's too late for her? It's not clear.
Sephiroth, caring not at all about the tragedy unfolding behind him, ignores them and proceeds into the Jenova chamber, and Cloud follows immediately after him.
Sephiroth: "I've thought of a great idea. Let's go to the Promised Land."
Is there any reason for this weird containment structure to be constructed as a baroque angel with spread wings and an ornate feminine mask? Shinra. Shinra is the reason.
Cloud bursts into the room, asking how Sephiroth could do this to his family and his hometown - which, in a way, I suppose is also Sephiroth's hometown. Sephiroth laughs, and declares that with her power, knowledge and magic, Mother was 'destined to be the ruler of this Planet.'
Hmm. Does she have any of these things, really? Like, Sephiroth might have identified Jenova as one of the Ancients, but what does he know about her as a… person? Entity?
Then, we get something new - our first use of subtitles during a cinematic, as the camera pans down on Sephiroth claiming that 'those worthless creatures are stealing the planet from Mother'.
He reaches up towards the mechanical face, and it seems for a moment as if he's about to cradle it, but it's a fake out - Sephiroth instead grabs her 'torso' and rips the entire mount off the wall to reveal the true Jenova behind her.
I'm not sure what the purpose of this whole setup was, but it definitely looks cool - and we now get a look at Jenova pre-beheading, and she's not looking much better. Her face looks human enough, she has a humanoid body plan, but between her organs just floating around, the eyes growing in places they shouldn't, that thing was a disturbing sight before Shinra threw in all the tubing and, huh, it looks like they exposed her brain? I dig what the design is doing with these cables running from her head-locking device that looks like 'hair'.
Also, Jenova was described as dead when Shinra found her, and she might have been - but I don't think she is anymore. Not with that red glow in her eyes. …if it is her eye; it looks off-center for an actual human eye. It could just be a LED on the cybernetics integrated into her body that's just being made to evoke an eye.
…so where the fuck did her head go?
Well, questions for later. For now, Cloud is drawing his sword, and challenging Sephiroth - he's doing all this because of some emotional breakdown he couldn't deal with, but what about the suffering of all the others he's now hurt?
Cloud: "It's the same as your sadness!"
Sephiroth: "I am the Chosen One. I have been chosen to be the leader of this Planet. I have orders to take the Planet back from you stupid people for the Cetra. What do I have to be sad about?"
That initial shot before Sephiroth registers that Cloud is talking to him, with his arms wide open and his head tilted to the sky, really conveys how he's lost in a kind of… Religious ecstasy. He's found a tortured chain of reasoning which makes him the most special boy in the world, resolves his existential anxieties regarding his non-human nature along with his abandonment issues from growing up without a mother and with mad scientists as father figures, rationalizes away the alienation from ordinary people brought about by his great power, and gives him an exalted, glorious, messianic purpose to set right the world that went wrong.
It's all paradoxically very human. Sephiroth, at this stage, is not some entity of pure evil or cosmic destiny or absolute nihilism. He's a man with a bunch of issues that have suddenly exploded due to a number of revelations he didn't have the mental stability and support network to deal with healthily. He's consumed by solipsism. It's great characterization work, IMO.
Also the staging here is immaculate. Sephiroth's pose here is strongly reminiscent of Jesus on the Cross, all while declaring himself the Chosen One and his great reclaiming mission - Japanese writers tend to use Christianity more as an aesthetic to sprinkle on top of stuff than making deep cut references to its actual theology but, like, this is very much giving off the opposite negative energy to Zack Snyder's Jesus Superman in Man of Steel decades later, and I think it's on purpose (that it gives that energy, not that it somehow prophesied MoS).
I want to highlight this shot from earlier in the scene for how the stark lighting shows Sephiroth as a lot more… Human, wide-eyed, marveling at the sight of Jenova, than the shadowy and sinister expressions he's otherwise had in the FMVs. There's something almost childish to him.
Cloud: "Sephiroth… I trusted you…"
Cloud: "No, you're not the Sephiroth I used to know!"
Bereaved, betrayed by his role model, desperate and with little to live for, Cloud takes his combat stance, the screen flashes white, and… It's over.
That's all that Cloud remembers.
He has the humility to recognize that there was no way he could have possibly killed Sephiroth. Tifa notes that "official records state Sephiroth is dead," and that she read it in the newspaper, to which Aerith notes that the newspapers are owned by Shinra (lmao, of course they are) so you can't trust them; but even if Sephiroth merely escaped and his death was a cover-up, that still doesn't explain why Cloud is still alive - or Tifa, for that matter!
Cloud: "I want to know the truth. I want to know what happened. I challenged Sephiroth and lived. Why didn't he kill me?"
Tifa: "...I'm alive, too."
Aerith: "A lot of this doesn't make sense. What about Jenova? It was in the Shinra Building, right?"
Cloud: "Shinra shipped it from Nibelheim to Midgar."
Aerith: "Did someone carry it out later? It was missing from the Shinra Building."
Tifa: "Sephiroth?"
Barret: "Damn! None of that makes sense! I'm going, going, going, gone! And I'm leaving the thinkin' to you!"
Barret is about to leave the room when he asks Cloud if he's going to get a move on; telling him to wait a minute has him ask if Cloud is going to stand there while Sephiroth heads for the Promised Land, and that he doesn't intend to let Shinra or Sephiroth get there, or they're all screwed.
Right. Barret establishes himself as the pragmatic one; without a backstory connection to the Ancient and Nibelheim stuff (so far), he's relatively uninterested in the mystery of it all - not when it's getting in the way of getting the job done; whatever their secret origins or whatever, Sephiroth and Shinra must be stopped, and that's it.
The others are more thoughtful. After a moment of silent reflection, Tifa asks Cloud how badly she was injured after Sephiroth stabbed her - and Cloud bluntly tells her that he thought she was a goner, which played a part in how distraught and desperate he was when confronting Sephiroth.
Hmm. It's not that surprising for Tifa to have no clear memories of the events immediately surrounding her traumatic injury, but it feels like there's more to it than that - that her picture of that day is as incomplete as Cloud's own. How did she survive? How did Cloud?
Yeah, the game is very deliberately ratcheting up its mystery, and having the characters themselves call attention to those elements that don't fit together.
Like, for just one thing - Sephiroth broke into the reactor so he could reunite with Jenova in some way or another, but then Shinra recovered Jenova and moved it to Shinra HQ, so what did Sephiroth even want with her? Only, the Jenova at the Building was missing her head, so…
Did Sephiroth tear off Jenova's head in Nibelheim so he could more easily transport it and leave the rest of her body behind?
Aerith muses to herself, though it's not clear what she's saying beyond just repeating names - which, fair enough, there's a dizzying number of concepts floating around that now seem connected to her. If Sephiroth and Jenova are Ancients, and she's an Ancient, then is she the same as them? Meanwhile, Red XIII is the last to follow the group outside, merely saying "What a fascinating story…" He's been almost entirely quiet this whole time, but then again, he's the one who has the least direct connection to this story; time will tell if he takes a more forward position in the plot later on.
I am really looking forward to getting more answers, because at this point the game has raised a bunch of points that Remake and my overall knowledge haven't prepared me for, and I'm pretty excited to find out what happens next.
Well, what happens soon, anyway. What happens next, properly speaking, is that Barret gives us a cellphone.
'PHS' is apparently a made up acronym for 'Personal Handy-phone System', which is a weird one, but what it is is, well, a phone. Any time we could save the game (so on the world map or at a Save Point), we can call the party members we left wherever we last split, and change our party comp.
We get that menu, which has a little phone ring sound that plays every time we use it, and we can swap our party members freely. It's a nice beat of gameplay convenience compared to VI's pre-airship group configuration which often needed you to backtrack to a previous city, but the in-game justification for it is hilarious. It's literally just… "Hey Barret I need you to come over from Kalm and swap with Aerith, she just hit lv 16 so it's your time to grind now." And the justification for why we're limited to three party members are just, the game has now given up entirely. It's a gameplay conceit and you just have to roll with it.
We head out of the inn, and updated dialogue from townsfolk gives us our next lead:
"He's got this killer sword, and looks REAL scary..."
Dude with a black coat and a killer sword is a dead ringer for Sephiroth, but it could just as easily be a red herring the game is pulling on us. Another townsfolk teaches us how to use the world map, including |drum rolls], being able to ROTATE THE CAMERA. INCREDIBLE NEW TECHNOLOGY THAT MARKS ENTRY INTO A BRAND NEW AGE. There's also foreshadowing that we will (of course) meet chocobos, and the rules for how to ride them in this game, and then… We're off!
Alright, before leaving for today, let's check out those camera examples.
This is the default view we've had on the world map so far:
Just your classic, top-down isometric view, same as ever but revamped in 3D for the modern age.
Now let's try playing with camera angles…
…oh.
Okay yeah I can see how that might have been a genuine game-changer at the time. The possibility of playing with perspective and, like, sighting Midgar in the distance from 'ground level' as this dark sore within the landscape, with its wastes crawling from the horizon towards us - and in contrast, the ability to look out to the other side, and see the sea stretch across the horizon… It's simple but damn it's effective at selling the world.
Although, let's leave on a bit of, well 'comedy' might be exaggerated, but I just find it funny. Remember when I talked about 'draw distances' in the past and how there's only so far the PSX could render an environment?
Well, let's look at Kalm from this angle…
Peaceful village standing near a river, with a wide skybox horizon of blue skies and fluffy clouds.
Now let's take a couple of steps closer…
A whole-ass mountain range just materialized out of nowhere to block that horizon once we were close enough for the game to render it.
Old-timey games, man.
Alright.
It took two full updates and 15k words combined for me to cover the Nibelheim flashback in a way I felt was satisfactory. That covered around an hour of gameplay or so, and I use the term 'gameplay' loosely; we bought new weapons when we entered Kalm and we haven't used them yet because this entire sequence was just pure narrative with 'fake' random encounters.
But damn, what a story.
I don't know if there's much more psychological depth we can expect from Sephiroth at this point, now that he has completed his fall from grace and turned into a solipsistic mass murderer, but there's still a fair stretch from this to Advent Children, I think, and the game has fully bought my good will in waiting to see what happens next with him. He's… kind of pathetic, really, but in a way where that feels clearly intended? He's a terrifyingly powerful figure but also at the same time his motives are rooted in alienation and abandonment issues. He literally just wants his mommy.
Fascinating stuff.
Thanks for reading, everybody.
Next Time: I think we're coming up on a new recruitable member soon.
Last time, we paused during the flashback to Nibelheim, in a move which I specifically calculated to cause as much pain as possible to the FFVII vets who know what's coming next (and also because it was already 10k words).
Aerith asks Tifa if she was waiting outside while all this was happening, and Tifa answers in the affirmative.
Cloud: "We returned to Nibelheim. Sephiroth confined himself to the Inn. He didn't even try to talk to me."
Tifa: "Then all of a sudden he disappeared, right?"
Cloud: "We found him inside the biggest building in Nibelheim."
Tifa: "The villagers used to call it the Shinra mansion."
Cloud: "Long ago, people from Shinra used to live in that mansion…"
I really like the vibe where Cloud is telling a story from his past and Tifa's, so she has knowledge of much, but not all that happened back then, and they bounce off each other in that way.
Also, the fact that this is the 'Shinra mansion' and that people from Shinra lived in that mansion 'long ago' suggests that this was, what… The origin point of Shinra? Does the Shinra family originate from Nibelheim? It would explain why this also happens to be the location of an early Mako Reactor, their research might have started at the nearby Mako fountain; but this is a lot of 'everyone who matters to the plot grew up in the same town,' hmm. We'll see, I suppose.
The town's inhabitants wait warily at the gates to the mansion as Cloud decides to head in and find out what's going on with Sephiroth.
Very strong 'horror movie fancy mansion' vibes here. It's giving Resident Evil, it's giving Haunting of Hill House.
It's not really horror, though, it just has a familiar aesthetic. The house doesn't really have much to do in it, but it's just a really cool place to visit. I'm not sure how those plants are still growing after the house has been abandoned for years, given that they presumably don't receive rain, but it's a neat aesthetic; there's a very conspicuous safe in that study up north which we can't interact with, which, hmm.
The safe is probably the one element that most cemented in my mind 'we're going to go back to Nibelheim and explore the Shinra Mansion again in the present time,' just because it's so conspicuous as something you'd normally have some kind of puzzle to try and open, but we can't (because we can't retrieve items from a flashback).
One of the two surviving Shinra troopers is in the house with us, looking for Sephiroth as well without much success, though he indicates he saw him go into one of the rooms and disappear. We head in, and all we have to do is interact with a wall and…
Presto! Hidden stairway to a secret basement!
Also, hm. Those sure are human bones in there. There are skulls lined up against the walls. There's a door we can't go through (further strengthening my 'we're going to be coming back here' theory). At the end of this underground corridor, we find another door, and behind it…
An old, secret laboratory, and Sephiroth reading its research.
This, it soon transpires, is Professor Gast's old lab, containing his research on Jenova. Jenova, he says, was an Ancient, discovered in an 2000 year old geological stratum; after its discovery, Gast got approval for Shinra to start secret research using Mako Reactor 1 (by which I am pretty sure they mean the reactor in Nibelheim, not the one we blew up in the game's introduction).
Hmm. I can't say I see many similarities between the monstrous eyeless body in the containment tank, and Aerith's mother who seemed physically human, if otherwise magical. Are both really part of the same species?
Sephiroth, reading this, wonders aloud - his mother's name was Jenova, this is the Jenova Project, could that truly be a coincidence?
Quoth Wikipedia: "In filmmaking and photography, the Dutch angle, also known as Dutch tilt, canted angle, or oblique angle, is a type of camera shot which involves setting the camera at an angle so that the shot is composed with vertical lines at an angle to the side of the frame, or so that the horizon line of the shot is not parallel with the bottom of the frame.[1] This produces a viewpoint akin to tilting one's head to the side.[1] In cinematography, the Dutch angle is one of many cinematic techniques often used to portray psychological uneasiness or tension in the subject being filmed."
Cloud can try to approach Sephiroth, but Sephiroth just requests to be left alone. Over the following days, Sephiroth remains locked inside Shinra Mansion, refusing to come out and making his way through Professor Gast's entire library, something which the game shows with great effect by showing a succession of takes on the same Dutch Angle background showing more and more books piling up:
Cloud himself has taken residence within the mansion, likely as a way of keeping watch on Sephiroth; with the Reactor back online and the monster problem presumably solved by locking it up tight, the Shinra group has nothing to do without their leader but sit around and wait.
Eventually, Cloud heads back again, and this time, he finds Sephiroth different - sitting at Gast's desk, in the study at the back of his hidden lab, laughing to himself while surrounded by Gast's research.
Sephiroth greets Cloud very strangely, calling him a traitor; this only confuses Cloud, who has no idea what this could even be referring to - but his confusion is the perfect opportunity for Sephiroth to launch into a rant about his discoveries.
Sephiroth: "This planet originally belonged to the Cetra. Cetra was an itinerant race. They would migrate in, settle the Planet, then move on… At the end of their long, hard journey, it was said they would find the Promised Land and supreme happiness."
Sephiroth: "But, those who disliked journeying appeared. They stopped their migrations, built shelters and elected to lead an easier life. They took that which the Cetra and the planet had made without giving back one whit in return!"
Sephiroth: "Those are your ancestors."
Cloud: "Sephiroth…"
Sephiroth: "Long ago, disaster struck the Planet. Your ancestors escaped… They survived because they hid. The Planet was saved by sacrificing the Cetra. After that, your ancestors continued to multiply. Now all that's left of the Cetra is in these reports."
Cloud: "What does that have to do with you?"
Sephiroth: "Don't you see?"
Sephiroth: "An Ancient named Jenova was found in a 2000 years old geological stratum. The Jenova Project."
Sephiroth: "The Jenova Project wanted to produce people with the power of the Ancients… Or, the Cetra. …I am what they produced."
Cloud: "Pr… Produced?!"
Sephiroth: "Yes. Professor Gast, leader of the Jenova Project and genius scientist, produced me."
Cloud: "How… how did he? Se… Sephiroth?"
Sephiroth: "Out of my way. I'm going to see my mother."
Oooookay!
So there's a lot to unpack here.
First of all: That's a wild backstory for the setting's Ancients. By now, they're a very familiar trope, showing up in most if not all FFs to date, and VII here is (once again!) echoing IV, with its 'Ancients' as aliens who've come to the planet in order to settle it. However, the big twist this time is that it looks like humanity themselves are aliens. The Ancients were space travelers migrating from planet to planet, and humans are a splinter group that decided to stay behind rather than move on with the others - though from what Sephiroth is saying, the Ancients hadn't moved yet when a disaster wiped out most of their species.
That does a lot to explain why Aerith and her mother look just like ordinary humans - they're the same species, they're just descendents of a… Class? Ethnic group? Political faction? They have unique, 'magical' features as a result of… Bioengineering? Special knowledge passed down along the generations? Rather than being intrinsically different from humans, which in turn explains why Materia works the way it does - what humans lack in order to practice magic is knowledge, and some kind of 'unlocking' mechanism, to manipulate the world's energy the way the Cetra did.
Like… Maybe the Ancients modified the planet so that its energy would be available for someone with the right genetic passcode, and Materia fakes that passcode?
And that mention of the 'Promised Land' being a place not on this Planet, but instead another Planet - President Shinra's dream of a hidden region full of Mako is both futile and vastly underestimating the scope of what he was looking for, isn't it?
What it doesn't explain is why the existence of a faction of stay-behinders was so detrimental to the overall project as to have Sephiroth label them as 'traitors' and describe them as effectively parasites and thieves; did they somehow keep the rest of the Cetra from moving on in their space quest? I get the impression that Sephiroth is less than rational in his reaction here, but it's still curious. Also, why did humanity's ancestors survive and not the Cetra? They both faced the same disaster while on the Planet, didn't they? Nor did the Cetra completely disappear, seeing as some survived long enough for Aerith to be born as the last Ancient in this modern day.
"Humans are actually aliens who forgot their extraterrestrial origin" is absolutely the wildest part of this backstory, I love it.
It's a great reveal that also introduces many more questions and further intrigue, and now I want to find out more.
…
But more importantly, IT'S ALL COMING TOGETHER. I HAVE THE PICTURE NOW.
All those inexplicable references to real-world countries and concepts?
The Ancients were a join NATO space colonization effort fleeing a ruined Earth.
Two thousand years isn't that much. Like, two thousand years ago the Roman Empire ruled most of Europe, Confucius was active in China, and the historical Jesus was most likely a few years old; we retain significant amount of information from that era, though concentrated to a few regions of the world. Even as memories of the Ancients faded, certain names, cultural concepts, and physical relics remained. The concept of 'Texas.' The idea of 'Korean barbecue.' Rusted metal wrecks labeled 'NATO,' or perhaps 'Atomic,' for the nuclear engines that powered their spaceships.
Cetra?
More like CETRA.
WE HAVE CRACKED THE CODE, PEOPLE.
Ahem.
Sorry about that.
Although now that I think about, I wouldn't be surprised if in a reverse twists, it was the Promised Land that was the Earth, with the Cetra as humans who colonized space so long ago that they barely remember the Earth, and are now searching for that mythical paradise home after their new colonies… were… destroyed…
…
FUCK
Final Fantasy VII Battlestar Galactica spinoff confirmed.
Okay, let's get back on track.
After Sephiroth leaves the secret lab, we're left alone to control Cloud - though frustratingly, despite pressing the interact button on every square inch of Gast's laboratory, I didn't find any hidden item or additional lore. Instead, this all serves to slowly build up tension as we make the long trek back through the basement and the Mansion back to Nibelheim, not knowing what we're about to find.
Now, our boy Sephiroth here is clearly on a bad track psychologically. He's managed to resolve the existential trauma of finding out he's some kind of lab experiment by deeming all of humanity 'traitors' and an inferior species to himself, and he's headed for Jenova. But surely Cloud can still make him see reason, right?
Okay so the whole town is on fire.
That's something of an escalation, Seph, old bud!
Zangan, the martial artist, is dragging people out of their burning houses, and asks Cloud if he's "still sane" (I assume he think that whatever happened to Sephiroth could happen to any SOLDIER and is wondering if Cloud has also gone full psycho) then asks him for help and tells him to check out one of the houses - a house which happens to be his mom's.
He cut down his own man.
In a moment of dramatic restraint that knows the haunting power of the unseen, we don't see what happens next; we just see Cloud enter the burning house, then walk out, shaking his hand and saying, "Terrible… Sephiroth… This is too terrible…"
Then there's a commotion above, close to the Shinra Mansion, and as Cloud looks up, we see Sephiroth slaughtering the town's inhabitants, followed by a historic iconic shot.
A full face shot of Sephiroth, first looking down, then raising his eyes to stare at the camera, then a full body shot of him turning around and walking into the flames. Notably, there are strange, black flames around him inside the more mundane fire - and this is the first time we can see that Sephiroth's eyes don't have just the Mako glow, but have vertical pupils like a snake, or a cat.
It's a simple shot, but the game is really putting its pre-rendered movie capabilities to work here. It's still straining against the limitations of FFVII's early 3D rendering, but it's giving all it can, and it's working; Sephiroth here appears as he looms in pop culture, a sinister, cryptic, terrifying figure who also looks really fucking cool, staring wordlessly at Cloud and disappearing within the fire as if it had no power to harm him (which it probably doesn't).
And it happens seconds after Cloud most likely found out that Sephiroth killed his mom.
It's a sudden, dramatic escalation. A few days ago, Sephiroth and Cloud shared a mentor-student or officer-rookie relationship, perhaps not a close friendship but at least a kind of bond and affection. Now Sephiroth is just committing mass murder.
Is it… believable?
In the moment yes, unquestionably it worked for me. As I sit here writing this a few days after, though, I do wonder. It's such a sharp, violent turn for the character, turning him from likeable to 'irredeemably evil' within minutes.
But I think it makes sense? Sephiroth has spent his entire life alienated from other human beings, thinking of himself as special, as 'more than'; previously, he'd channeled that innate sense of superiority in a constructive-ish fashion - he probably did some shady stuff as Shinra's strongest fighter in the Wutai War, but he's also protecting civilians from monsters. But now, he's been given a traumatic revelation ('you're not a human being, you were produced in a lab'), and just enough information to resolve the horror and self-doubt induced by that revelation by going 'this justifies my innate sense of my own superiority, I actually am a better and more worthy being than humans,' then constructed an entire worldview which paints humans as traitors and thieves who despoiled his rightful heritage, which reduced every one of the nice, innocent people in Nibelheim as unworthy beings who slighted him personally, and that (ironically) 'dehumanized' them and allowed him to mentally justify turning them into an outlet for the anger and betrayal born of the initial realization that he was a vat baby.
It makes psychological sense. It's abrupt, but it's believable, IMO.
We transition directly to the reactor (I guess Sephiroth successfully cleared the area of monsters and that's why Cloud isn't getting instantly eaten alive by lv 30 encounters), where we connect back to another past flashback we previously didn't have context for.
Tifa and her dad.
Sephiroth killed Tifa's father, and left his sword behind. As we saw before, Tifa declares "Sephiroth… SOLDIER… Mako Reactors… Shinra… I hate them all!," picks up the sword, and heads into the chamber - only now, we know what she's up against; a superpowered monster of a man capable of casually slaying dragons and wiping out whole groups of monsters, and she's just a teenager with kung fu. It's a hopeless endeavor that is very likely to get her killed - but also damn, she's got guts.
That anger is interesting. Perfectly to be expected under the circumstances, but the Tifa we know in the modern day is a very calm, even-keeled woman. It's… disturbing watching her younger self shouting her hatred and picking up her sword to try and kill a man.
But it's no wonder she joined Avalanche, after what happened there.
Sephiroth is banging on the door, begging Jenova to somehow let him in, and Tifa races up the stairs to take a swing at him. Unfortunately, this is Sephiroth, and he is more than a match for her even unarmed; he turns around as she approaches and grabs her hand, wrests the sword out of her hand - and cuts her down.
It's a full slash to the torso, hard enough to knock her down the whole flight of stairs. I have no idea how she survived this. Like, all concept art and 3D model of Tifa should at the very least sport a massive scar, which given her propensity towards crop top should be pretty prominent!
The effect of this scene in my playthrough is diminished by the fact that the Steam version had another of its several random sound-out where the soundtrack inexplicably turns off, but it's a pretty shocking shot. Tifa bounces down the stairs, landing just as Cloud arrives; he picks her up and lays her against one of the pods, and…
Oh, that's rough. A broken childhood promise, escaping the lips of your dying friend as you watch helplessly as the guy who already killed your mother and everyone you knew growing up cuts her down…
…is what this would be, if we didn't already know that Tifa survived this, even though all that Cloud does is sit her up against the pod and then leave.
Strange. I think Cloud believes that Tifa is dead or dying and it's too late for her? It's not clear.
Sephiroth, caring not at all about the tragedy unfolding behind him, ignores them and proceeds into the Jenova chamber, and Cloud follows immediately after him.
Sephiroth: "I've thought of a great idea. Let's go to the Promised Land."
Is there any reason for this weird containment structure to be constructed as a baroque angel with spread wings and an ornate feminine mask? Shinra. Shinra is the reason.
Cloud bursts into the room, asking how Sephiroth could do this to his family and his hometown - which, in a way, I suppose is also Sephiroth's hometown. Sephiroth laughs, and declares that with her power, knowledge and magic, Mother was 'destined to be the ruler of this Planet.'
Hmm. Does she have any of these things, really? Like, Sephiroth might have identified Jenova as one of the Ancients, but what does he know about her as a… person? Entity?
Then, we get something new - our first use of subtitles during a cinematic, as the camera pans down on Sephiroth claiming that 'those worthless creatures are stealing the planet from Mother'.
He reaches up towards the mechanical face, and it seems for a moment as if he's about to cradle it, but it's a fake out - Sephiroth instead grabs her 'torso' and rips the entire mount off the wall to reveal the true Jenova behind her.
I'm not sure what the purpose of this whole setup was, but it definitely looks cool - and we now get a look at Jenova pre-beheading, and she's not looking much better. Her face looks human enough, she has a humanoid body plan, but between her organs just floating around, the eyes growing in places they shouldn't, that thing was a disturbing sight before Shinra threw in all the tubing and, huh, it looks like they exposed her brain? I dig what the design is doing with these cables running from her head-locking device that looks like 'hair'.
Also, Jenova was described as dead when Shinra found her, and she might have been - but I don't think she is anymore. Not with that red glow in her eyes. …if it is her eye; it looks off-center for an actual human eye. It could just be a LED on the cybernetics integrated into her body that's just being made to evoke an eye.
…so where the fuck did her head go?
Well, questions for later. For now, Cloud is drawing his sword, and challenging Sephiroth - he's doing all this because of some emotional breakdown he couldn't deal with, but what about the suffering of all the others he's now hurt?
Cloud: "It's the same as your sadness!"
Sephiroth: "I am the Chosen One. I have been chosen to be the leader of this Planet. I have orders to take the Planet back from you stupid people for the Cetra. What do I have to be sad about?"
That initial shot before Sephiroth registers that Cloud is talking to him, with his arms wide open and his head tilted to the sky, really conveys how he's lost in a kind of… Religious ecstasy. He's found a tortured chain of reasoning which makes him the most special boy in the world, resolves his existential anxieties regarding his non-human nature along with his abandonment issues from growing up without a mother and with mad scientists as father figures, rationalizes away the alienation from ordinary people brought about by his great power, and gives him an exalted, glorious, messianic purpose to set right the world that went wrong.
It's all paradoxically very human. Sephiroth, at this stage, is not some entity of pure evil or cosmic destiny or absolute nihilism. He's a man with a bunch of issues that have suddenly exploded due to a number of revelations he didn't have the mental stability and support network to deal with healthily. He's consumed by solipsism. It's great characterization work, IMO.
Also the staging here is immaculate. Sephiroth's pose here is strongly reminiscent of Jesus on the Cross, all while declaring himself the Chosen One and his great reclaiming mission - Japanese writers tend to use Christianity more as an aesthetic to sprinkle on top of stuff than making deep cut references to its actual theology but, like, this is very much giving off the opposite negative energy to Zack Snyder's Jesus Superman in Man of Steel decades later, and I think it's on purpose (that it gives that energy, not that it somehow prophesied MoS).
I want to highlight this shot from earlier in the scene for how the stark lighting shows Sephiroth as a lot more… Human, wide-eyed, marveling at the sight of Jenova, than the shadowy and sinister expressions he's otherwise had in the FMVs. There's something almost childish to him.
Cloud: "Sephiroth… I trusted you…"
Cloud: "No, you're not the Sephiroth I used to know!"
Bereaved, betrayed by his role model, desperate and with little to live for, Cloud takes his combat stance, the screen flashes white, and… It's over.
That's all that Cloud remembers.
He has the humility to recognize that there was no way he could have possibly killed Sephiroth. Tifa notes that "official records state Sephiroth is dead," and that she read it in the newspaper, to which Aerith notes that the newspapers are owned by Shinra (lmao, of course they are) so you can't trust them; but even if Sephiroth merely escaped and his death was a cover-up, that still doesn't explain why Cloud is still alive - or Tifa, for that matter!
Cloud: "I want to know the truth. I want to know what happened. I challenged Sephiroth and lived. Why didn't he kill me?"
Tifa: "...I'm alive, too."
Aerith: "A lot of this doesn't make sense. What about Jenova? It was in the Shinra Building, right?"
Cloud: "Shinra shipped it from Nibelheim to Midgar."
Aerith: "Did someone carry it out later? It was missing from the Shinra Building."
Tifa: "Sephiroth?"
Barret: "Damn! None of that makes sense! I'm going, going, going, gone! And I'm leaving the thinkin' to you!"
Barret is about to leave the room when he asks Cloud if he's going to get a move on; telling him to wait a minute has him ask if Cloud is going to stand there while Sephiroth heads for the Promised Land, and that he doesn't intend to let Shinra or Sephiroth get there, or they're all screwed.
Right. Barret establishes himself as the pragmatic one; without a backstory connection to the Ancient and Nibelheim stuff (so far), he's relatively uninterested in the mystery of it all - not when it's getting in the way of getting the job done; whatever their secret origins or whatever, Sephiroth and Shinra must be stopped, and that's it.
The others are more thoughtful. After a moment of silent reflection, Tifa asks Cloud how badly she was injured after Sephiroth stabbed her - and Cloud bluntly tells her that he thought she was a goner, which played a part in how distraught and desperate he was when confronting Sephiroth.
Hmm. It's not that surprising for Tifa to have no clear memories of the events immediately surrounding her traumatic injury, but it feels like there's more to it than that - that her picture of that day is as incomplete as Cloud's own. How did she survive? How did Cloud?
Yeah, the game is very deliberately ratcheting up its mystery, and having the characters themselves call attention to those elements that don't fit together.
Like, for just one thing - Sephiroth broke into the reactor so he could reunite with Jenova in some way or another, but then Shinra recovered Jenova and moved it to Shinra HQ, so what did Sephiroth even want with her? Only, the Jenova at the Building was missing her head, so…
Did Sephiroth tear off Jenova's head in Nibelheim so he could more easily transport it and leave the rest of her body behind?
Aerith muses to herself, though it's not clear what she's saying beyond just repeating names - which, fair enough, there's a dizzying number of concepts floating around that now seem connected to her. If Sephiroth and Jenova are Ancients, and she's an Ancient, then is she the same as them? Meanwhile, Red XIII is the last to follow the group outside, merely saying "What a fascinating story…" He's been almost entirely quiet this whole time, but then again, he's the one who has the least direct connection to this story; time will tell if he takes a more forward position in the plot later on.
I am really looking forward to getting more answers, because at this point the game has raised a bunch of points that Remake and my overall knowledge haven't prepared me for, and I'm pretty excited to find out what happens next.
Well, what happens soon, anyway. What happens next, properly speaking, is that Barret gives us a cellphone.
'PHS' is apparently a made up acronym for 'Personal Handy-phone System', which is a weird one, but what it is is, well, a phone. Any time we could save the game (so on the world map or at a Save Point), we can call the party members we left wherever we last split, and change our party comp.
We get that menu, which has a little phone ring sound that plays every time we use it, and we can swap our party members freely. It's a nice beat of gameplay convenience compared to VI's pre-airship group configuration which often needed you to backtrack to a previous city, but the in-game justification for it is hilarious. It's literally just… "Hey Barret I need you to come over from Kalm and swap with Aerith, she just hit lv 16 so it's your time to grind now." And the justification for why we're limited to three party members are just, the game has now given up entirely. It's a gameplay conceit and you just have to roll with it.
We head out of the inn, and updated dialogue from townsfolk gives us our next lead:
"He's got this killer sword, and looks REAL scary..."
Dude with a black coat and a killer sword is a dead ringer for Sephiroth, but it could just as easily be a red herring the game is pulling on us. Another townsfolk teaches us how to use the world map, including |drum rolls], being able to ROTATE THE CAMERA. INCREDIBLE NEW TECHNOLOGY THAT MARKS ENTRY INTO A BRAND NEW AGE. There's also foreshadowing that we will (of course) meet chocobos, and the rules for how to ride them in this game, and then… We're off!
Alright, before leaving for today, let's check out those camera examples.
This is the default view we've had on the world map so far:
Just your classic, top-down isometric view, same as ever but revamped in 3D for the modern age.
Now let's try playing with camera angles…
…oh.
Okay yeah I can see how that might have been a genuine game-changer at the time. The possibility of playing with perspective and, like, sighting Midgar in the distance from 'ground level' as this dark sore within the landscape, with its wastes crawling from the horizon towards us - and in contrast, the ability to look out to the other side, and see the sea stretch across the horizon… It's simple but damn it's effective at selling the world.
Although, let's leave on a bit of, well 'comedy' might be exaggerated, but I just find it funny. Remember when I talked about 'draw distances' in the past and how there's only so far the PSX could render an environment?
Well, let's look at Kalm from this angle…
Peaceful village standing near a river, with a wide skybox horizon of blue skies and fluffy clouds.
Now let's take a couple of steps closer…
A whole-ass mountain range just materialized out of nowhere to block that horizon once we were close enough for the game to render it.
Old-timey games, man.
Alright.
It took two full updates and 15k words combined for me to cover the Nibelheim flashback in a way I felt was satisfactory. That covered around an hour of gameplay or so, and I use the term 'gameplay' loosely; we bought new weapons when we entered Kalm and we haven't used them yet because this entire sequence was just pure narrative with 'fake' random encounters.
But damn, what a story.
I don't know if there's much more psychological depth we can expect from Sephiroth at this point, now that he has completed his fall from grace and turned into a solipsistic mass murderer, but there's still a fair stretch from this to Advent Children, I think, and the game has fully bought my good will in waiting to see what happens next with him. He's… kind of pathetic, really, but in a way where that feels clearly intended? He's a terrifyingly powerful figure but also at the same time his motives are rooted in alienation and abandonment issues. He literally just wants his mommy.
Fascinating stuff.
Thanks for reading, everybody.
Next Time: I think we're coming up on a new recruitable member soon.
- Location
- the Republic
- Pronouns
- He/They
I can't get over how much I love the quasi-modern-horror elements and sequences in FF7. This game scared the shit out of me when I was eleven years old. Either you're confronting an enormously powerful world-spanning corporation with zero ethical boundaries (and the many problems it causes) or you're staring down a stone-cold messianic psychopath. Just these huge monsters with no remorse. And the atmosphere is perfect! Shinra's aesthetic is so sterile and isolating, the post-Sephiroth HQ sequence is quiet and ominous, the mansion is creepy as hell... I really love it. FF7 really brought so much to the table in terms of the entire genre.
Also, I could fix him.
Also, I could fix him.
GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
That's just the Spencer Mansion, complete with the nightmare lab hidden underneath. Does that mean that Shinra is Umbrella?
- Location
- the Republic
- Pronouns
- He/They
Someone on the PSX FF dev team was a Resident Evil fan, because there's also a (not plot-relevant, I promise) reference in FF9. Also they released Parasite Eve the year after FF7, which, I mean, come on.
- Location
- The Z-Cave
I'd say that they're at the very least more competent, not that that's a particularly high bar to clear, and their bio-weapons actually fucking work instead of being easily killed by randos with guns.
Basically, they're what Umbrella wants to be when they grow up. Only that their even more of a net negative to the world.
- Location
- Phoenix
Purely seeing FF7, yeah Sephiroths mental breakdown does seem sudden, but if you play crisis core you get a bunch of knowledge that shows that it's really been a long time coming. The events there give Sephiroth a lot of mental trauma and plant serious doubts about his humanity in his mind, so with that what he found out at the Shinra manor really was just the last bit to push him over the edge.
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- Location
- Ireland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I feel like this is spoilers, considering Omi hasn't approached Crisis Core at all yet.
- Pronouns
- He
One of the few bits of Earth culture to make the transition was NGE.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
No wonder Sephiroth started going downhill, he's probably running on 3 days of no sleep at this point. Cloud's lucky Sephiroth greeted him with 'traitor' and not 'kids here to steal my favorite cereal.'
It is a bit much. But Seph spent a decade as ShinRa's great war hero. Probably all of his adult life. His compartmentalization skills and ability to dehumanize 'the other' must be top notch. And now that power and training is turned on humanity, in service to a 2,000-years-dead race and Mom-in-a-vat.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Guile
Having a really great time right now
It's kinda funny, what the game is doing with parents. Sephiroth meets his mom, who has clear shades of Aerith's mom as ShinRa experimental subject. And immediately kills Cloud's mom and Tifa's parent. Barrett doesn't get one, but he's his own single dad to Marlene, so he's in.
I wish I knew if divorce is rampant in FF7, or if the extra parents are dead from the monsters, or if this is just what happens when ShinRa goes to war with somebody for 10 years, or what. Elmyra's husband was killed in the war, but we don't know what happened to everybody else.
I wish I knew if divorce is rampant in FF7, or if the extra parents are dead from the monsters, or if this is just what happens when ShinRa goes to war with somebody for 10 years, or what. Elmyra's husband was killed in the war, but we don't know what happened to everybody else.
Dybbukpossesed
Falling Somewhere
- Location
- California
And we're now up to episode 11 of the abridged series! Tune in to see how many references Barret can make while accidentally ignoring Cloud and Tifa's tragic backstory!
The vibe of the entire flashback is great, not just with things like Tifa and Cloud bouncing off of each other to confirm or expand on facts, but also things like Barret's interjections and attempts to understand what's going on, or even the mid-flashback save opportunity being couched as "yo we've covered a lot of material, anyone want to take a short break?"
I suppose it could be some kind of divergence thing? After all, 2000 year difference and I assume Aerith's mom wasn't actually 2000 years old. Who knows though, maybe we'll get more info eventually.
It's a good use of the static environments of FFVII's backgrounds, swapping through multiple looks where the books are progressively all pulled off the shelves and piled up.
Goddamn, now I have to keep up with playing FFVII and actually watch Battlestar Galactica? You're killing me, Omi.
Since Omi didn't mention it, I wanna note that the way the music builds throughout this scene is pretty great, starting with just the sort of "heartbeat" version as Cloud goes down to talk before the rest of the music kicks in as Sephiroth leaves the underground lab and heads up to butcher the town.
It's a strong, classic scene for Sephiroth, even if much like everything else about him they've gone and milked the hell out of it over the years. Going from "that kind of aloof mentor figure who's still Just A Guy" to... well, the Sephiroth we all know and maybe love.
I guess they've just got some really good healthcare in FFVII-landia. Just pump mako in the wound until there's no scar, EZ, that'll be 37 million Gil.
The secret extra reason Tifa actually joined Avalanche: because she couldn't pay off her medical debt.
Gotta give some credit, at least they made it through all of Midgar mostly able to justify the party size stuff. But yeah, from here on out it's pretty much just the usual party game conceit of "Yeah you can only use three for some reason I guess".
I think this is one of the longest Full Story, No Real Gameplay segments for a while, so the pace should pick up slightly more from here?
But on the other hand, FFVII is still plenty plot-dense even outside of hour long flashback sequences, considering it took seven or so updates just to get through Midgar, so hey, we'll see. We should all probably get used to the games taking a lot longer from this point forward with how much more they can pack on a disc instead of a cartridge.
MiskWisk
Hoot
- Location
- Somewhere devoid of wit
- Pronouns
- He
Hmm... I'm not sure if that's a case of mistranslation actually. Is someone able to check it? Because the vibe I always got was that Cetra are native to the world.
Of course, X-2 does set up the idea that the inhabitants of Spira would eventually discover Mako so this would fit with the theory that a Spiran space program did get off the ground, but with their greater understanding of souls and the lifestream they weren't in any danger of wiping out the planet. But iirc even the developers just said it was a fun little reference, not a hard statement that VII and X were connected.
Bite my tongue.
So here's a thing: Sephiroth is also running on three days no sleep.
I want to highlight this shot from earlier in the scene for how the stark lighting shows Sephiroth as a lot more… Human, wide-eyed, marveling at the sight of Jenova, than the shadowy and sinister expressions he's otherwise had in the FMVs. There's something almost childish to him.
I'm not kidding, he canonically did not sleep for those days he was locked in the basement. I think those darker patches under his eyes in this pic are actual bags.
Essentially, this is a stark reminder of the importance of sleep. After all, who hasn't spent a long time without sleep and wished to burn everything to the ground while going on a quasi-religious trip?
A note, the game will level your characters in the background, so you won't have to worry about characters you don't use being disastrously under-levelled. They are a few levels behind... I think it's Cloud's level that gets used? But they don't unlock any new limit breaks, so you'll still need to do some grinding if you want to unlock them all.