That doesn't make the planet round, the way the north edge of the map wraps around to the south (instead of one side of the map's north edge wrapping around to the other side of the north edge) means that if you go by world maps FF worlds, like most JRPG worlds, are donut-shaped
Final Fantasy VII, in 1997, is much more situated in that earlier era of thinking about pollution first and foremost, and about global warming less, if at all. Mako exploitation drains the life from the land, but there's also a lot of emphasis on Mako pollution, enormous scrapyards, train graveyards, slums built out of the detritus of the city, fishing towns that can no longer find any fish… All of which builds to a great aesthetic but is rooted in this slightly different paradigm, and from that perspective, having coal be the better alternative to the inherently evil exploitation of Mako makes sense, especially as it is tied to the livelihood of miners, but… Looking back from 2023 where we have politicians kneecapping governments because a coal mining town in rural Appalachia could potentially be run out business by the dread spectre of 'green energy' that must be stopped at all cost? This is borderline physical-flinch inducing to read.
Notably, as far as the Mako pollution itself, it's always been treated as ultimately local. It spreads outwards from Mako Reactors- Shinra's ever expanding, never ceasing policies threaten to eventually consume the planet, yes, but they threaten to do so by...
Well, they want to go to the Promised Land to go build a Mako Reactor there. Literally, Shinra just looks at places that are unpolluted and goes 'let's build a new pollution machine there'. The point is, the globality of the threat of Mako is Shinra policy- there's no reason just Midgar using reactors would necessarily threaten far away cities if they just stuck to their own backyard, at least by currently available info at this juncture of the plot.
About how the 'good wholesome coal mining' plot point would've seemed less yikes in a 90s context than it does nowadays, I was reminded how an episode of the Sabrina the Teenage Witch 70s cartoon (yes, she had a show about 25 years before the sitcom) had a pro-SeaWorld message about getting a young whale back into performing at a marine park*. Understandable given how most people knew nothing about what Seaworld was actually like at the time, but incredibly jarring to watch nowadays.
Also, from memory quite a few 90s jRPGs used the name 'Dyne'. On top of FF7 there was Dragonmaster Dyne in the first Lunar, and the MegaTen series uses '-dyne' as a suffix for third-level spells.
*There is the issue of reintroducing animals raised in captivity into the wild, but the episode doesn't really bring this up
And also WHY CAN'T I KILL HIM. HE'S RIGHT HERE. HE'S DEFENSELESS. HE HAS NO SHINRA GUARDS. IN FACT, HE RESIGNED FROM SHINRA. WE CAN LITERALLY JUST STAB HIM.
It's so frustrating because these characters have been fully willing to commit assassinations before. Whether it's Cloud trying to solo Rufus, Barret looking for opportunities to kill President Shinra or Heidegger, we know those characters are willing to get their hands dirty. And here, they just… decide not to.
But… I guess I can see the logic of it, maybe. At this point, Hojo's direct interactions with the group mostly consists of his (absolutely evil) attempted actions against Aerith and Red, which he never ended up carrying through thanks to our own actions. If I squint I can see how someone who is only working from that knowledge alone might go 'he's evil, but he's not 'kill while defenseless' evil.'
…except no. We had the Nibelheim Flashback. We know Hojo is complicit in the creation of monsters from people.
Yeah, no, they should be icing this dude right here and now.
But no. They won't. We just have to… Leave him there. Hanging out. On the beach. With his INEXPLICABLE GROUPIES.
I think this is the devs long game to make you hate Hojo even more than you do know. There can be a certain artistry to hatred and the writers clearly want you to want to kill Hojo with a rusty spoon by the end of all this so clearly, extreme measures needed to be taken so thus, Hojo is temporarily turned into a modern isekai protagonist complete with him somehow getting all the bitches.
Well, either that or he used some kind of pheromones. Take your pick.
Johnny bringing up his heretofore-unknown past connection to Cloud as childhood friends and comrades in SOLDIER is, needless to say, a complete fabrication.
Tifa asks Cloud to please leave them alone for the day; "we haven't seen each other in ages and sometimes it's fun to talk about old times for a change," and she promises to not be back too late.
Strangely, I thought Johnny might actually be a childhood friend from Nibelheim. Like, we know that more then Cloud and Tifa went to Midgar, and that Cloud more or less didn't have any interaction with others until Tifa hired him as a mercenary, and of course there's Cloud's faulty memory, so there might have been a chance that Johnny knew them from before Midgar.
While we're doing a close reading of the flashback scene, it's probably worth noting that the coal mines appear to be the collective property of Corel's people. To Dyne they represent legacy generational wealth, and not merely his, but "ours," the property of the townsfolk's "fathers [and] their fathers' before them." The appropriation of the land by Shinra appears as expropriation and reduction to dependence upon its "guarantee" of the town's livelihood, but one over which it will have no control.
This bears very little resemblance to any of the actual devastation of real coal mining communities, over which the coal company lorded rather than being cooperative property.
The downside to FF7's cavalier approach to genre-shifting is stuff like not being able to bisect Hojo when you come across him just sort of sitting there like an SS guy on an Argentine beach. Sorry, can't off crimes-against-humanity man, he's doing a funny bit. Exasperating.
I'm pretty sure this is fully explainable. It's simple; the man is a high-ranking Shinra exec, and the other examples of those we've seen are Heidegger and Scarlet. Two walking, talking sexual harassment lawsuits. (Hojo is less of a "sexual harassment lawsuit" level and more of a "felony sexual assault" level, as established.) If you can withstand the perpetual grease, you could probably get a lot of cash out of him.
Exactly. He's Kissinger, only instead of being a psychopathic manipulator who's convinced all his power games are signs of what a master of realpolitik he is, he's a deranged vivisectionist who thinks his brutality proves what a great scientist he is.
Before playing FF7, my impression of Hojo was evil creep who lives in the lab, so randomly finding him on the beach, getting a suntan, surrounded by bikini babes was absolutely surreal.
I really hope the remake does this scene. Even if our eyes shrivel in their sockets, we need the HD version.
I found that scene immensely frustrating and weird, too. My best guess as to why you can't just kill him, though, is that they don't want to commit murder in front of a dozen witnesses on a crowded beach. Shinra knows they're in the area but it doesn't really seem like anyone is actively hunting them in Costa Del Sol right now, which would change if they did that. It's not a great explanation, but it would make sense.
NOTHING can explain those three hanging of Hojo, though. Except maybe if he's rich. Did he pocket a lot of money when he went AWOL from Shinra?
Strangely, I thought Johnny might actually be a childhood friend from Nibelheim. Like, we know that more then Cloud and Tifa went to Midgar, and that Cloud more or less didn't have any interaction with others until Tifa hired him as a mercenary, and of course there's Cloud's faulty memory, so there might have been a chance that Johnny knew them from before Midgar.
Oh we know he knew them in Nibelheim, we saw letters from Johnny earlier, where he established he was friends with (and into) Tifa and didn't really care for Cloud, then he went to Midgard and was not able to get a good job with Shinra. Thus the translation here of being friends with Cloud and in SOLDIER together is quite wrong.
The whole reason we know more than Cloud went to Midgar is Johnny's letters.
If Red isn't in the party, he can be found next to the bar, taking some respite from the heat in the shadow. He's waggling his tail and trying to convince Cloud that it's not on purpose and he just doesn't control his tail, which I think is meant to convey that he's happy/comfortable but embarrassed about showing it?
So this quote may not be obvious, but if you watch the kids kicking the soccer ball around you'll notice that Red uses his tail to flick it back to them. He's not embarrassed about being comfortable, but that he's playing around with the kids.
Once we leave the screen, a cutscene plays out in which Rufus and Heidegger come down from the ship while a helicopter sets down to take them away to whatever their next destination is. Rufus says he heard that Sephiroth was on board, as well as Cloud and the others, and berates Heidegger both for his lax security and for his lackluster charisma, the man only sheepishly giving one-word answers and cringing apologies.
It looks like Rufus has finally managed to wear down Heidegger's bombastic self-confidence… and he likes the results even less than the Heidegger from before. Incredible. Rufus takes the helicopter and leaves, and Heidegger once again vents his frustration by punching people, this time knocking sailors into the harbour and prompting Seaplane Guy to run away in fright.
On one hand, I kind of feel sorry for Heidegger being this beat down by Rufus.
On the other, he's kind of a violent murderous piece of garbage who laughed about dropping the plate on Sector 7 so, you know, kills the sympathy just a tad.
…this is, incidentally, the point where I discover that I can't just leave everyone but Cloud. The game mandates having three characters in the party, and will not allow me to leave the PHS screen with only one. Also? Cloud is mandatory. You cannot remove Cloud from the party no matter what. Which I guess is required by the story, so that the writers know that Cloud will be there to act as party face in any scene no matter what, but it has the… interesting result that Cloud, our protagonist, basically can't not be the strongest member in the party. Simply because we phase others in and out and benched characters only get half-XP, while Cloud is always there and always getting a full share, he necessarily rises above everyone else. I could see this having some weird effects on combat balance in the future.
Funnily enough, we're seven games in and this is only the second Final Fantasy game with a singular designated Main Character in Cloud, as your Always Mandatory guy. FFI, and FFIII had generic characters and FFII wasn't much better, FFV stuck you with the same party of 4 all the ay through (one replacement who's mechanically almost the same aside), and while FFVI had sort of... tiers of character importance, you still didn't have a central main character. The only other game to do this... was FFIV, with the story always following Cecil even if others died or left the party for whatever reasons.
There's another stand where a guy sells "Soft," a 'memento of this wonderful trip, made especially in Costa del Sol.' It's really unclear what he's talking about, and at first I assume that it's a 'soft drink,' but you don't buy soda as a souvenir, right? Turns out Soft is an alternate name for the Gold Needle. So we're buying commemorative fancy pins which also happen to cure Petrify. Neat.
Personally, seeing "hey the shops just started selling cures for petrification" just makes me immediately buy twenty, since... that probably means petrification is on the menu in the near future.
…Barret is admiring himself in his sailor outfit in the inn bathroom.
Oh my god.
The girls told him they thought he was cute in that uniform, he deflected it with saying he only feels comfortable in his normal clothes, and his next move was to privately admire himself in the glass once there was no one looking. And not just that - he's planning to keep it specifically to see Marlene again because he thinks she'll like it. That's kind of… Adorable. They really had a brain blast making one of the main characters an actual dad.
And also WHY CAN'T I KILL HIM. HE'S RIGHT HERE. HE'S DEFENSELESS. HE HAS NO SHINRA GUARDS. IN FACT, HE RESIGNED FROM SHINRA. WE CAN LITERALLY JUST STAB HIM.
It's so frustrating because these characters have been fully willing to commit assassinations before. Whether it's Cloud trying to solo Rufus, Barret looking for opportunities to kill President Shinra or Heidegger, we know those characters are willing to get their hands dirty. And here, they just… decide not to.
But… I guess I can see the logic of it, maybe. At this point, Hojo's direct interactions with the group mostly consists of his (absolutely evil) attempted actions against Aerith and Red, which he never ended up carrying through thanks to our own actions. If I squint I can see how someone who is only working from that knowledge alone might go 'he's evil, but he's not 'kill while defenseless' evil.'
…except no. We had the Nibelheim Flashback. We know Hojo is complicit in the creation of monsters from people.
Yeah, no, they should be icing this dude right here and now.
But no. They won't. We just have to… Leave him there. Hanging out. On the beach. With his INEXPLICABLE GROUPIES.
Sadly, I suspect it's as Zerban says: you've entered the "silly beach episode interlude" dimension, which means running into the crazy evil man just suntanning on the beach is just a comedic moment that nobody will bring up again after this episode, instead of an obvious chance to... you know, kill off the crazy evil man.
Johnny and Tifa, who were friends in Sector 7, are catching up and reminiscing about old times. Not only that, but when we approach them, Tifa asks Cloud to please leave them alone for the day; "we haven't seen each other in ages and sometimes it's fun to talk about old times for a change," and she promises to not be back too late.
It's a neat character touch that shows how different characters relate differently to one another - that the same guy who is obnoxiously rude and insecure to Cloud can be a pleasant friend to another party member, and it shows how the other characters have their own lives going on.
…you know, seeing this scene, I'm thinking, hm. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the target audience of FF7 is adjacent to the same demographic who, today, yell fury in Mangadex comments if a non-protagonist male character exists within five miles of a female love interest; here, FF7 is having Tifa ask Cloud to please leave her alone so she can spend time with a guy we know is romantically interested in her. I could easily see an insecure teenage male audience getting mad about that, but I wonder if I'm just projecting much more modern trends into the past; either way it's nice of the game to commit to having Tifa have her own friends that are none of our business.
Well, on one hand there were probably those same types of demographics existing back then who would complain about a scene like this? On the other hand, it's both a potentially hard to find optional scene, and the internet was a different place back in 1997 which might not have nearly so many online communities that would support that kind of nonsense rather than laughing them out of the room for being that obsessive over a polygon girl happening to talk to a guy. Hell, remind them that before Cloud showed up Tifa was *gasp* sleeping in the same building as Biggs, Wedge, and Barret! How scandalous!
Also she ran a bar lmao probably had a good chunk of Sector Seven hit on her at some point or another (and promptly get hit back with a fist, but hey).
I love the positioning of the sun, and the use of its light to create striking beauty out of barren mountain cliffs, and then the reveal of the enormous Mako Reactor as the cause for that barrenness.
You know, I wonder if the group has to keep Barret from trying to blow up every new Mako Reactor they run into on their journey across the world? Though I suppose in the case of this one, he wouldn't want to potentially bring even more heat on Corel and potentially get "Burning Town Two: Electric Boogaloo".
We also find the Transform Materia on top of the rollercoaster; it allows us to cast Mini at first and eventually Toad, which… I'm not going to spend an entire Materia slot on Toad, thanks.
To add some insult to injury for the viewers at home: you can get the Frog Song Enemy Skill eventually anyways, which is AoE Toad and Sleep. Sooooo why would you even bother using Transform when Enemy Skill can do so much more? Doubly so since super crippling status effects like these in FF games have a tendency to only be effective against already trivial enemies.
The characters who aren't in the party are hanging out on this screen, on one side of the same river blocking our way from reaching the weird tree-looking place. The lazy slackers tell us that the commands to the movable bridge is probably in that hut on the other side, and that they'll be taking a break while we go get it. Typical.
Barret turns to his friends, head hanging low, and blames himself for the destruction of the town.
It's… kind of shocking how, like, vulnerable Barret is in this scene. Like… If he didn't want these guys to yell at him and knock him around, he could make it stop. He is stronger than any of them and armed to the teeth. But he's allowing this to happen, allowing people to insult him and trample over him and punch him in the face, because he thinks they're right. He agrees that he is to blame for North Corel's destruction. All he can do in the face of their anger is meekly offer futile apology.
It's a… massive departure from what we've seen of Barret so far, a really effective shift - and one that makes sense for what we know of him. Barret is a man with powerful emotions, and a deep sense of duty and responsibility - to the Planet, to his daughter, to his friends. His grief is rooted in his sense of responsibility. If he blames himself for what happened in North Corel, whatever that is, it's natural that it would leave him completely disarmed when confronted with people's (in his eyes) justified anger.
Eyyy, more Barret time! We're getting a lot of Barret in this update, huh? Do have to give credit to FFVII, for a guy that seemed poised to just slip into the background as comic relief as we moved on from Midgar, he's still getting plenty of screentime and varied characterization.
Second: Barret's guilt. Such complicated feelings about that one. I absolutely do believe, as a character beat, that he would blame himself for what happened; it makes perfect sense. He was a major voice in advocating for the construction of the Mako Reactor, and the resulting death and destruction that came to his people, including his own wife. Of course he blames himself. However, I can't help but feel that because he feels that guilt so strongly, the survivors are scapegoating him.
Like. Sure, he was clearly a leadership figure in the village. But a large number of people agreed with him. The decision to build the reactor was near-unanimous. Their elder, the Village Headman, advocated for it. But of course - the Headman probably died in the burning of the village. And Dyne, wherever he is now, was opposed to the Mako Reactor's construction. Which leaves Barret the only one left alive to be blamed for it all - aside, of course, from everyone else who agreed with him. Well, it's not their fault, right? Barret is the one who convinced them to go along with it, surely. They're not responsible. And Barret isn't in the village anymore. A scapegoat; blamed for everything then exiled from what remained of the village as punishment for his sins, freeing everyone else to have merely been blameless victims. That would explain the sheer vitriol they pour on him. I can't blame Barret for blaming himself. It's not like he didn't have a part in the events that led to the destruction of his hometown. But he was seduced by straight-up lies from power-hungry corporate assholes preying on poverty.
And woof, what a bit of Barret time and a backstory it is. And yeah, I can totally see Barret being so wracked with guilt over the entire situation and the deaths of many of the people he knew and loved (including his wife), so he'll just fully accept everyone's blame whether or not it's misplaced.
Though at the same time, it's kind of interesting to contrast that with his reaction to Sector 7's destruction, where his actions did in fact directly inspire Shinra to effectively, once again murder all his friends, family and new home just to get at Barret. And there, while he mourns Avalanche and the rest of the dead... he also directly tells Tifa this isn't their fault, it's Shinra's fault for doing the killing in the first place. Is that what he's really thinking, or is it what he's telling himself to keep from being even more overwhelmed with guilt? Food for thought.
Wait, how old is Hojo? Its implied he was involved with Ghast and whatever was up with Sephi's birth or creation or whatnot, and Sephi is in his mid 20s at least, and Hojo was doing Hojo Science then, so he was probably at least in his early 20s so... is Hojo in his fifties at the earliest? And what, early to mid sixties, maybe at the high end?
According to some good old wiki diving? Hojo is a Young and Spry Sixty-two years old.
Which... I guess means he wouldn't look half bad for his age if he cleaned up a bit? Problem is, I really can't picture Hojo ever bothering to clean up when there's crimes against science to be committing, which is all the time.
Wouldn't be surprised if he's absolutely rolling in personal cash, even after leaving Shinra. Hojo seems like the kind of guy who sleeps in his lab and lives off of cup of noodles so he just has this fat bank account all his big money checks go to from his decades of high paying science work.
Hum…
I think 'Soft' might be an old translation-good name for the Gold Needle as a general rule? Like this is not the first time I've seen that name used for an item that cures petrify.
Which makes me wonder at the logic of a Gold Needle being the item that cures getting turned to stone.
'Soft' to me makes sense-admittedly even with the bias of having encountered it before I might think to criticize it…
Stone is hard, flesh is soft. 'Soft' then softens the body and makes it flexible so the person can move again versus being a motionless statue, too stiff and brittle to change position without cracking or being damaged in some way.
The Golde Needle as a cure for the condition…Makes me think it's some kind of mythological reference, one I guess I'm unfamiliar with unless it's to the later Midas myths where he turns his daughter to gold but…There he undoes the transformation via basically blessed water or something like that?
I always assumed Soft was fabric softener, which by some cartoon logic could cure petrification. Or now that I think of some of the other status cures having diagetic purpose as things you can buy at a normal pharmacy, another kind of "softener."
He just smells too bad for anyone to come within stabbing distance. His onionlike qualities even cause Barret to tear up from a distance so he can't get a straight shot.
Oh we know he knew them in Nibelheim, we saw letters from Johnny earlier, where he established he was friends with (and into) Tifa and didn't really care for Cloud, then he went to Midgard and was not able to get a good job with Shinra. Thus the translation here of being friends with Cloud and in SOLDIER together is quite wrong.
The whole reason we know more than Cloud went to Midgar is Johnny's letters.
Wouldn't be surprised if he's absolutely rolling in personal cash, even after leaving Shinra. Hojo seems like the kind of guy who sleeps in his lab and lives off of cup of noodles so he just has this fat bank account all his big money checks go to from his decades of high paying science work.
…you know, seeing this scene, I'm thinking, hm. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the target audience of FF7 is adjacent to the same demographic who, today, yell fury in Mangadex comments if a non-protagonist male character exists within five miles of a female love interest; here, FF7 is having Tifa ask Cloud to please leave her alone so she can spend time with a guy we know is romantically interested in her. I could easily see an insecure teenage male audience getting mad about that, but I wonder if I'm just projecting much more modern trends into the past; either way it's nice of the game to commit to having Tifa have her own friends that are none of our business.
