So...Sephiroth's rampage, Avalanche's infiltration, and the battle against the Jenova creature just...occured right under their noses? The higher-ups just stayed in their cabins drinking champagne and playing poker while all this was happening? I can't disagree with Rufus here. Security on that boat really, really sucked.
This is something I wasn't sure I wanted to comment on in the update itself, because it's something on which my own feelings aren't clear.
All video games operate at a degree of abstraction from the 'reality' they are meant to represent. This is normal and inevitable. The
nature and
degree of that abstraction, however, has a wide range of way it can, or not, impact the
story the game is telling.
Here is an obvious example: All NES- and SNES-era Final Fantasy towns are smaller than they 'actually' are. This is the only way the world's internal logic makes sense; there are only a few dozens to a couple hundred of living people on the entire planet if you go by the reality presented in the game. This is because those towns are abstracted. Baron probably has thousands of inhabitants, but they and their houses and so on are not represented within the game due to engine limitations and artistic choices. A town of twenty people stands in for the 'in-universe reality' of an actual medieval city.
This is extremely easy to simply accept in pre-PSX games. It becomes
harder the closer we move towards
photorealism, the harder this particular abstraction is to buy. Because the people within the game look so real, it's hard to accept that a cluster of ten houses, which also individually look real, and are inhabited by real-looking people, are abstractions standing in for a larger reality. The way FF7 handles this is by
implying the rest of the town existing off-screen; we see whole city blocs in cinematics, we travel through large expanses of Midgar by train, there are always obstacles which leave the possibility that more of what we see lies just beyond the boundary of the screen. Even so, towns like Kalm or Nibelheim are unrealistically small; the game still uses camera tricks to suggest more houses than are on the screen, and place multiple buildings that can't be visited, but objectively each of these towns is much, much smaller than the tiny rural village my grandparents live in. They get away with it because they still exist on a relatively high layer of abstraction.
Remake, which goes for photorealistic full 3D characters and environments, can't even get away with that much. Significant amount of efforts are spent on creating a Midgar which feels big enough, because there's so much less abstraction it can get away with. You
can't model the world of 7R the way you could the original, with its low-poly Playmobil characters.
So, the Cargo Ship.
The Cargo Ship exists at the dangerous intersection where the abstraction layer intersects with the plot layer.
If we take what we see at face value, it doesn't make any sense. There are all of three (plus one) floors in the ship - the deck, the cargo room, and the engine room, plus the bridge which we can't enter. If we treat the events as they are presented to us visually, everyone in the cargo room and engine room (which includes all Shinra soldiers on board) got killed by Sephiroth/Jenova, the people on the bridge didn't notice until after the ship (with most of its crew dead) came into harbour, the normal docking and disembarkment process occurred, Cloud & Co just walked out in plain view of everyone, and then someone spotted all the dead bodies and went "Mister Rufus Shinra sir, it appeared we have a case of the Demeter, we've been Dracula'd."
This isn't really believable as a sequence of events. It just doesn't make internal sense except Shinra being a weird combination of absolutely incompetent and 'able to carry on basic operations totally unfazed with most of the crew dead,
without even noticing they're dead.'
The more likely answer is that we are still in the domain of abstraction. The ship is bigger than it looks. There is more than one cargo deck. There are crew quarters. There is a significant amount of space on the ship we never get to see, and that space mattered to the plot: Shinra soldiers were busy looking in the wrong places while Sephiroth/Jenova headed for the engine room and Cloud & Co pursued them, the party successfully hid in that unseen space while the ship was completing its docking maneuvers, there was significantly more crew than we ever get to see so Sephiroth's body count was relatively small and didn't impair operations even when people noticed the dead, and so on.
All of that makes the scene work better. But for all of it, you have to extend the game a degree of... Charity. Be willing to
assume abstraction when it is not obvious or explicitly signaled. Be willing to just roll with what the game is doing when it makes sense in terms of
character or
narrative even if there is no obvious way of connecting the physical facts as they are shown on-screen. If you're not doing that, the whole sequence is weird and kind of stupid.
And the more 'real' the games get, the more high-fidelity its universe, the narrower the band of acceptable abstraction becomes. If this scene appears in Rebirth, it will need to
look different. In the most literal sense of the physical objects and actions portrayed on screen, it will need to change. Either that bit of the plot is altered, or the ship is bigger, or Cloud & Co take different actions (jumping out of the ship to swim to shore after beating Sephiroth?), they'll need to depict what happens here differently.
...
The matter of abstraction that I think hangs over the series the most, the one that can't really be interrogated because the games don't really have answers, is the size of their world.
Put simply, even if we assume, which is very easy, that Corneria and Baron and Fynn and Bal and South Figaro are all larger than they are depicted on screen, there are still
so few of them. Every Final Fantasy game has a world-spanning plot that, by its end, has taken us to every corner of the earth and, more or less, met every major polity. Even if we say, not merely 'Baron is larger than it looks,' but 'Baron is a whole kingdom with multiple extra cities that are simply not shown on the map,' even that's not enough, because we know all the world's players. There is Baron and Fabul and Mysidia and Troia, and we've done all the world's major players, and crossed every continent. There
can't be more. There is not an entire extra empire on one continent and two extra nations on another that are never explored, people explain geopolitics to us and they are pretty clear about their big players and their limitations.
This is the part where 'abstraction' breaks down. You either have to not think about it, or simply accept that the worlds of Final Fantasy are, even within their own narrative, even within their own universe,
incredibly small. Entire planets the size of Western Europe, with about as many power players and major urban centers (fewer, frankly).
It's the Avatar: The Lost Airbender issue, where you kind of have to just accept that their entire planet, pole-to-pole, is the size of a corner of Asia.
And you can just ignore that. You can just, as every AtLA viewer does, simply accept the Small Final Fantasy Setting Hypothesis and let it go through you unbothered. And that's fine. There is no real
benefit to interrogating the SFFSH too deeply. Like, what's going to be your takeaway, 'those world sure are small'? It's just the way it is. It's only really interesting to raise as a point when talking about abstraction and worldbuilding as I am doing now.
I'm... curious how this will evolve as we go through the series and the settings become more realistic in visuals and more complex in plot and politics. Because FF7 is pretty good at making its world feel big and lived-in, and Midgar is a beautiful massive giant of a place, but I can count the number of dots on the map, and there isn't that many of them. But what FF7 is, unlike previous settings, is
modern. Which raises the question: Is the world of Final Fantasy VII the size and population density of France, or is it the size of a planet but with the
population of France scattered across it with vast empty immensities between each individual settlement, enabled by the speed of modern technology connecting them?
That, I think, may be an interesting question to explore, once we have seen more of this universe in this Let's Play.
...
This is, incidentally, something FFXIV has done wonders with. Its expansion structure allows it to thoroughly explore a single chunk of a continent, and then to expand it, and expand it again, painting the world bit by bit so that it does end up thinking like it just might be a real planet, if one on the small size. It does so by making heavy used of Bethesda-style abstraction - 'here are five tents, please consider this to be a village of a few hundred people within the narrative,' but it's fine. It works.
Just some thoughts. I wrapped up the Gold Saucer (the first visit, anyway) but I didn't have it in me to start working on the update tonight, so have some musings instead.
