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… 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 T-rated game, and from Japan. Murdering the man while he's sunbathing would be rude, and that's a big no-no in Japan.
Yeah, Barret has shown that he's got a strong sense of justice, and when someone like that has some big wrong they've done but have no way to fix, they tend to just shut down. It's like that saying 'if you can't be part of the solution don't be part of the problem' and Barret feels that doing anything other than just taking the blame straight up would make the problem even worse. It's part of why I personally really like him along with Tellah, they both felt human in the way they dealt with their personal issues. Tellah as an old man felt that he had nothing left but vengeance, in the heat of the moment he acted rashly, but once he had a chance to calm himself he approached it with patience and ensured that he was in a situation where he would have the chance to act on it eventually, and ultimately was consumed by it. Barret had Marlene as a stabilizing influence in his life that kept him from going off the deep end so his pursuit was more measured than Tellahs and he wants to make sure that there's a safe world for Marlene to live in.
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?
Also, I wondered if Hojo being named that was a reference to the historical Hojo samurai clans (there were two of them, one pretending to be the other), who people might know for having a family crest that looks a lot like the Triforce. But I checked the kanji and no, they don't match up, save for the character 条.
It's funny Hojo has a Japanese name though, given Shinra fought against Japan stand-in Wutai. Not that he's a guy to care that much about sides other than his own
Midgar is very much a Tokyo stand-in though, and Shinra itself a stand-in for hyper-conglomerates that are more common in Japan than elsewhere. So of course he's also Japanese - the conflict with Wutai wasn't a "colonizer vs colonized" conflict, it was a "new order vs old ways" conflict. But that's something that is best left to explore once Wutai comes up in the plot.
That's true, but on the other hand, they're comparable to 1st level limits in terms of damage. So, you know, not Graviball or Beta, but a better use of a turn than a normal attack, at least until you have some more power available.
The fact that the game insists on referring to command prompts by meaning rather than key (ie it says [MENU] or [SWITCH] instead of "Tab" or "Del" which are the actual keys for these commands)
Hey, it beats having the game show you xbox prompts when you're using a ps4 controller. "Press B? Wait, is B the one on the left or the right? I'm pretty sure it's on the *dies* dammit."
Of course at the time the PC port was made, a game wouldn't have even pretended to know what kind of controller you had.
They put the catdog in a Shinra soldier uniform and told him 'do your best human impression' so he's just… Standing on his hind legs wobbling back and forth because his body was not meant for that kind of balance?
... Well, look at this. I fully believe that most of Shinra's troops just don't give a damn. Don't obviously look like you're gonna try to kill them? Sure, whatever, go on through. Dude with a tail? Everyone's got their own problems, man, no point in getting worked up about it..
Anyway, I guess Barret could try shooting through the window to get at Rufus, but then we'd be cornered by Shinra troops in the middle of the sea with nowhere to go
Speaking of the people running the boat, none of this murdering stowaway and giant monster battle stuff is stopping them. They got some chill ass motherfucker captaining this thing.
all the text in the translated game is actually a kind of fixed-space Rōmaji that word processors don't recognize as English and thus don't run spelling and grammar checks on, and they had to write directly in that because they didn't have quick conversion tools for it
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?
Given how he seemed to be interested in really long term research on Ancients, maybe he's a total conversion cyborg, or used mako to stop his aging, or something.
Also, I refuse to believe he's wearing a lab coat on the beach. My suspension of disbelief can only stretch so far.
I mean look at that fucking thing in the Next Time On bumper, they built a city out of gold and covered it in mako-powered lights. You've already seen two examples of local commerce with Shinra's fingers stuck securely in the pie (Wall Market via Don Corneo and now Costa del Sol), what's one more?
You'd think they'd have destroyed what's left of Corel by now if it was Shinra. Because, would you want guests to your casino having to walk through this to get to it? But where some people might try to improve the place, Shinra seems to prefer fire.
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 know when the name is 'Soft', I think more of a potion of some kind than something like a needle. What's a needle supposed to do anyway? Why can't you use it more than once? Potions are obviously consumed by use...
But wait a minute, I said. How does someone petrified drink a potion. Why, they don't drink it, it's poured on them, I replied.
NPC #2: "That's right!! It totally skipped my mind! There was something I was supposed to tell you. That's right! It's about that! It was yesterday. A man wearing a black cape came up from the ocean. I think he had tickets for the Gold Saucer… No, that wasn't it… I wonder if it was all just an illusion.
I like the implication that Sephiroth, ex-SOLDIER and mysterious mass murderer, who sees all people as being beneath him and usurping the true glory of his race, apparently bothered to obtain a legitimate ticket to the Gold Saucer before heading there.
I remember how when I was a kid in the 90s and early 00s, 'climate change' wasn't something I heard about that much. Pollution was. There was definitely a still great concern around the environment, but it had to do with - the Ozone Layer. Trash in the oceans. Textile chemicals in the rivers. Giant tyre fires. Eternally growing scrapyards. And, yes, nuclear wastes. A whole constellation of individual, local ways the world was getting hurt and sullied by humans.
Climate change (or "global warming" as it was then and now known) was definitely a thing back then, but I agree that it was kind of presented as "and another thing" regarding the overall environmentalist message of anti-pollution. I know it was a thing because I distinctly remember arguing against someone online about whether climate change was real (I said it obviously was, the other person said it was a hoax) during that period of time.
The Captain Planet cartoon touched on it a few times, but placed it on the same level (or even slightly below) as stuff like poaching and GMO, and definitely below the actual polluting supervillains, including the one representing the dangers of nuclear power.
However, even at the time of FFVII's development and release, coal was already known to be Bad and Polluting, so I can't explain the "actually coal mining is good and worthy" implication here.
Honestly that was my headcanon, along with the addendum that Hojo didn't do it because he wanted to pick up women. Instead, it's another experiment to him, and he's not actually interested in the women themselves; the experiment is likely to do with weaponizing suggestibility and mind control.
Given how he seemed to be interested in really long term research on Ancients, maybe he's a total conversion cyborg, or used mako to stop his aging, or something.
Also, I refuse to believe he's wearing a lab coat on the beach. My suspension of disbelief can only stretch so far.
However, even at the time of FFVII's development and release, coal was already known to be Bad and Polluting, so I can't explain the "actually coal mining is good and worthy" implication here.
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?
Omicron, how could you! The man is on holiday. Those are sacred.
How would you like it if you were taking a break from spitting in the eye of god and making abominations that defile the laws of man and nature and a plucky band of anime characters turned up and threatened you while you were trying to get a tan.
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.
So you may or may not have missed two things here. On that first picture I've quoted, you might've heard some birds tweeting. There's actually a hidden spot you can climb along the wall around that point specifically (where you can hear the birds). A small scene will play when you get to the top, and it'll change depending on what characters you've got in your party. It will only play once (to my knowledge), so choose wisely (or save scum).
The second picture has a secret cave near where you are standing. I... think there was a few items in it and a guy to talk to. It's not much or overly important, but it is something you can very easily overlook.
Instead, it was Shinra's reaction; they decided the explosion couldn't have been an accident, had to be the work of rebels or terrorists, blamed the locals, and destroyed the town, along with much of its population. Barret's wife, Myrna, died in the disaster.
Fun fact, this is actually covered in the Before Crisis game. Turns out, it really was terrorists who bombed the reactor.
Specifically Avalanche.
See, the original incarnation of eco-terrorists viewed civilian casualties as somewhere between irrelevant and a stretch goal. They did not care, and would eventually switch to genocide as part of their operating strategy.
So it's interesting that Barret took the name. Presumably, he's not aware that they triggered the Shinra response. He probably writes off anything he hears about the first Avalanche as Shinra propaganda.
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.
Also an interesting perspective from the UK side of things since we have Thatcher shutting down the coal mines and everything that resulted from that. The reasoning was very different, and I'm not going to go into it because it's a very hot button political issue, but North Corel feels very much like the sort of aesthetic people go on about at times regarding the effects of that decision.
Which would be weird, because while I'm not sure what the state of information on Mako energy is at the time of Barret's flashback (evidently not that much, given the majority of North Corel did approve of the Mako reactor plan), coal's downsides are very obvious, very quickly. The downsides are just tolerated historically because people assumed there was no better option, especially considering cost-effectiveness (often by offloading the costs to health and environment on the "lower classes").
Even if Dyne was thinking that the negative effects from the burning of coal for power generation was happening Somewhere Else and thus not his problem, he should still be aware of presumably the higher incidence of Black Lung Disease in North Corel.
...I'm pretty sure the girls are on the job. They may or may not be employed to do this, but this absolutely is their hustle. Fawn over whatever exec, celebrity or rich fool comes to the resort - receive money and gifts, rinse repeat. Bet they cheered and wowed over Rufus' surf skills when he was in town, too.
Maybe it comes from growing up next to a seaside resort town, but this sort of thing is completely common? I knew a guy who made bank of off middle-aged foreign women. I was too introverted to even try, but plenty of my peers basically had a side-hustle as escorts 🤷♂️
Motherfucker's brow is cro-magnon in construction. Motherfucker doesn't have a forehead he has a sixhead. Motherfucker looks like Frankenstein and his Monster.
...I just realized: the Gold Saucer isn't even employing the townspeople as exploited labor, is it? It's not doing anything at all for them, except provide a trickle of travellers (with the really rich presumably using helicopters) they can try to sell to or beg from. So not only do the people or North Corel has their desperate living situation's internal characteristics, the have one of the world's most famous and richest resorts looming right there, and the aerial tram to it having its station right next to their ruined town. And they're apparently not allowed in even to mop floors or serve drinks. Wow.
Omicron said:
Holy shit the game really went "The German federal government turning its coal power plants back on as nuclear plants shut down is based and correct and the way forward."
I think I remember one detail, too, from a FFVII spinoff movie I happened to see at some point. Between it not actually being the game, my own hazy memory, and an omission of details, I'm not sure it actually needs to be spoiled here, but since it is something FFVII-related that hasn't already been covered, I'll do that just in case.
At one point, IIRC, Barret explicitly and happily says that they've found a wonderful alternative to Mako, or something like that: petroleum! No need to drain Mako out of the planet, we can just pump up this black goo and burn it for power, which'll surely have no negative consequences!
(
Peel said:
Barret becomes an oil prospector in Advent Children, it's hilarious.
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.
Eh. Isn't there still the implication that even a single Mako reactor's drained area would eventually grow to cover the whole planet?
But even so, that's a different sort of threat, yeah. It's not everything everywhere changing, no matter how far it is from the source, it's an advancing wall of doom. And while that's much easier to see if you're close enough to it, if you're not, on either side of it, it's something way off somewhere else, someone else's problem (if you're in Costa del Sol or something, sure, you might be aware on some level that the Midgar drain would eventually reach your town, but that's a potential problem for people way in the future, and maybe they'll have thought of something different by then; if, on the other hand, you're a well-off resident of Midgar's upper city, well, hey, it's what you know, and so far as you can see, life still seems to be going on just fine for plenty of people who've already adapted).
wetodet said:
So if they decide to include Beach Hojo how are they gonna justify the party not killing him now?
...I wonder if the way Shinra did it was important there. Like, if they'd sent goons to burn the slum down, maybe that would have triggered memories and the same sort of thing -- but instead, they dropped the plate, destroying the upper city. Their own people, or at least more than the slum-dwellers.
...Might also be a time factor. Maybe the Barret of the day the plate fell would have blamed the destruction of Corel on Shinra too, and the only reason he was still blaming himself for Corel was the years he'd spent telling himself it was his fault.
...Or... the nature of the action? He believes that the actions he took that contributed to Corel's destruction were wrong, but the actions he took that contributed to Sector 7's destruction were right; therefore, he should have known better in the former case, but he was already doing the right thing in the latter and thus it's entirely Shinra at fault? (Of course, when he helped Shinra get the reactor built, he believed at the time that that was the correct course of action...)
...Heh, well, seems to have been food for thought indeed.
I don't actually remember how many problems killing Hojo right now would solve, but I'm sure it would be worth it even if they had to skip town immediately.
Also, yeah, the bit about the wholesome, traditional coal is one of the bits where FF7 is...well, not great. This is one thing I hope that FF7R changes fairly significantly.
I don't actually remember how many problems killing Hojo right now would solve, but I'm sure it would be worth it even if they had to skip town immediately.
Also, yeah, the bit about the wholesome, traditional coal is one of the bits where FF7 is...well, not great. This is one thing I hope that FF7R changes fairly significantly.
Probably not, since coal was tied to a more traditional way of life in Japan and they might be loath to lose that symbolism. They'll probably compromise and say the coal was polluting, but Mako energy was just outright draining all life from the planet.
Sapiosexual ? Look at that mans experimental setup! He is a hasbeen that rides on the achievement on those before .
He is , may square forgive me.
A Techbro
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.
This is a translation inconsistency going all the way back to the first game. In Japanese and the Reunion they're called "Gold Needles", but way back in Final Fantasy I someone decided that it being the cure to petrification should be more obvious so they just called it "soft", the opposite of hard/stone.
First of all, girl. You do not want to be his guinea pig, I assure you. I guess that you're attracted to his massive, throbbing brain, but our boy here entered the plot carrying a battering ram called 'sexual assault.'
Aerith: "There's so many things I don't understand… I feel a little uneasy." Aerith: "Cloud…? What do you think of me?"
At this point, the Translator strikes again; our two options are "I dunno" and "Nothing much," both of which seem incredibly rude in only slightly different ways. Still, you can see what they're going for ahead of clicking if you squint; "Nothing much" is the option to tell Aerith we don't think about her at all, which makes her really upset, whereas "I dunno" is more of Cloud saying a lot's going on and he doesn't really understand much of it, to which Aerith replies:
So, funny thing: Reunion kept this prompt unchanged, which to me indicates both that it was similarly blunt in the original Japanese and also how the issue of writing good branching dialogue prompts in a way that isn't the actual exact line (and tone in which your character will say it!) is a crapshoot.
These things are called Grangalan (and Grangalan Jr., and Grangalan Jr. Jr...) in the original translation. It's direct and simple and tells you the whole "child enemy spawn" angle. The Reunion decides to change the transliteration to "Grangaran" (although they are batting around the idea of making it "Grangran" because the base form is supposed to be the "grandparent" and put (child) and (grandchild) in parentheses where in Japanese it's a prefix word.
Also, the giant chicken-looking enemy you fight? They're called "Cokatolis" in the original translation but it's meant to be Cockatrice, which does strike me as one of the clearer and more direct cases of Baskett being short on time and QA to put 2 and 2 together that what he's supposed to be transliterating isn't some nonsense word but an actual mythical bird put in the game as an enemy.
And finally, you probably ran into some weird exoskeleton-covered dragon things called "Bagnadrana"; the Reunion translates this as "Bugdra" in an attempt to close a logical leap in the naming scheme... if it's both bug and dragon like, why is its name roughly "bug nor dragon"? I don't really agree with it, it's a fun name to say.
One thing though - Barret is the last person I would expect to be called a 'techno-freak.' Is that because of his arm gun? I guess it technically makes him a cyborg? Hmmm.
It is about his arm. Let's Mosey has a good breakdown on the exact etymology and logical leaps I can't quite recall at the moment that led to the choice of "techno-freak." In my opinion some kind of derogatory derivation of "cyborg" might be better... Too bad Reunion seems to excise the mention of it entirely due to the difficulty of translating it.
There's a young miner who asks if it's true that tattoos are the big fad in the city, and if we tell him yes, he says he'll get a '0' tattoo, which is the perfect way to reflect where he's at in life. That bit of gallows humour is the closest we get to positive vibes in this entire sequence (aside from a little girl who just wants to play).
Well, the geography kind of lines up. Mountain range near the east coast of the western continent?
And if we similar decide to squint at the basic geographical description of the map...
Midgar, and thus Shinra, is in the northwest of the eastern continent, north of a big mountain range, covered in reactors providing all the power and a massive central city that consists of beautiful squares and avenue lording over sprawling slums and all centered around a giant tower...
So not only do the people or North Corel has their desperate living situation's internal characteristics, the have one of the world's most famous and richest resorts looming right there, and the aerial tram to it having its station right next to their ruined town. And they're apparently not allowed in even to mop floors or serve drinks. Wow.
Shinra just really, really loves building fancy exclusive rich places right above the slums. We're going 3 for 3 now. This kinda goes beyond "symbolism meant to be incidental in-universe" and straight into "this is an actual official Shinra policy" at this point.
...I just realized: the Gold Saucer isn't even employing the townspeople as exploited labor, is it? It's not doing anything at all for them, except provide a trickle of travellers (with the really rich presumably using helicopters) they can try to sell to or beg from. So not only do the people or North Corel has their desperate living situation's internal characteristics, the have one of the world's most famous and richest resorts looming right there, and the aerial tram to it having its station right next to their ruined town. And they're apparently not allowed in even to mop floors or serve drinks. Wow.
They can't just let people see the poor. That would be disturbing to their lifestyle of pretending that nothing's wrong. And letting the poor work? Geez, next you'll be saying that they deserve to not live in squalor! /s
Shinra just really, really loves building fancy exclusive rich places right above the slums. We're going 3 for 3 now. This kinda goes beyond "symbolism meant to be incidental in-universe" and straight into "this is an actual official Shinra policy" at this point.
I think it was already linked to in a previous post about why Japanese videos have a lot of "kill god" in them. Mostly about how capitalism became the new "religion" of Japan after the failure of Imperial kakoshinto as a result of the brutal defeat Japan received during WW2. And FF7 has a LOT of cyberpunk dystopic imagery, so it's about as subtle about the stratification of society under a corporation-state as a killdozer going through a pottery shop. The rich get prosperity, the middle class suck up to the rich and get the scraps (which are still generous), and the poor get practically nothing.
...I just realized: the Gold Saucer isn't even employing the townspeople as exploited labor, is it? It's not doing anything at all for them, except provide a trickle of travellers (with the really rich presumably using helicopters) they can try to sell to or beg from. So not only do the people or North Corel has their desperate living situation's internal characteristics, the have one of the world's most famous and richest resorts looming right there, and the aerial tram to it having its station right next to their ruined town. And they're apparently not allowed in even to mop floors or serve drinks. Wow.
it would have given Corel a very different sort of air, but I think I would have liked it better.
Not just destroying these people and leaving them to look at what Shinra did to their land, but making them complicit because you can't eat hate.
Destroy their way of life, and then make them serve drinks at your shitty theme bars and casinos. Erase them.
I think that might be the brand of capitalist metaphor that Reeve follows, where he can tell himself he's helping. The Prez prefers the enormous wastefulness side of the metaphor; of leaving people in the wreckage of the lives ShinRa ruined because it's cheaper to let things decay than to either fix it or destroy it completely.
If there was a greyhaired gal with a labcoat and Hojo's credentials she would merely need to open Discord to find a whole bunch of people screaming at mommy to free them of the prison of their mundane flesh in favour of the many-limbed nightmare they know themselves to be.
Motherfucker's brow is cro-magnon in construction. Motherfucker doesn't have a forehead he has a sixhead. Motherfucker looks like Frankenstein and his Monster.
