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Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]

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Ah Yuffie, once the odd one out, now given a tragic playable backstory to rival the others. I can't wait to see how the Rebirth melds her classic and new characterization.

Maybe new Yuffie lost her shit after she saw the plate collapse, total shaggy dog story for her, and went bandit in the woods.
 
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Omicron said:
This makes sense and accounts for the events of the game, but Dyne talks as if there was more to it, as if this was but the latest in a long trail of death dealt by his hand - and sure, a prison gang leader isn't going to be a nice person, but in a different way from, like, a serial killer or a terrorist.
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Well, we don't know how he ended up in prison in the first place. My personal guess? Murder. Lots of murder.
 
Omicron said:
Man.

This has layers.

Okay so first off.

Barret's turn from "coal miner fooled by Shinra" to "victim of Shinra's evil" is embodied in the loss of his right arm, ie his working arm, ie his ability to perform physical labour, ie his ability to provide for those he cares about. Setting aside the dubious coal mining politics, he is being invalidated, ie, made invalid. Disability is used here as a literalization of Shinra taking away his livelihood, but not just that - the loss of his family in the destruction of Corel his translated into his very flesh as the loss of the arm which should have been able to protect/provide for his family. Then he goes through a phase of "depression" - it's glossed over in one line of dialogue, but it is a very unusual admission of vulnerability by Barret, openly admitting that he was worn down, powerless, emotionally wounded. In this phase, he is implied to have had an ordinary prosthetic arm, implicitly a weaker, diminished form of his old arm. Then, his turn from "victim of Shinra's evil" to "avenger of the Planet" is manifested in him throwing away that prosthetic and bolting a gun to his arm. By making the choice to implant the gun-arm, Barret is reclaiming his bodily autonomy, but not just that; he is engraving in his very flesh the promise of revenge for Corel, punishment for Shinra, and salvation for the Planet. He fully abandons "ability to perform physical labour," "the ability to provide," and instead adopts "the ability to fight," making himself a more perfect avenger and defender.

This is why he keeps angsting over his relationship to his daughter, over being absent for long periods of time, having to draw into her school fund to hire a mercenary; because he has traded the role of provider for the role of fighter. But is it a path of revenge that is doomed to end in self-destruction, or is it the path of one who is fighting to save the Planet? This is where Barret is right now, at the literal bottom of the world (well, the Gold Saucer), in the middle of a waste of Shinra's making (WHICH INCIDENTALLY WOULD BE EVEN COOLER IF WE KNEW FOR SURE IT WAS THE RUINS OF THE OLD COREL HINT HINT), chasing after a ghost (his old friend once thought dead), having to confront the question: Revenge set him on this path, but is it still what truly drives him, or has he come to care for something greater, the fight for the Planet itself? Will he die when he meets Dyne again because neither of them could truly move on from the hatred and anger that consumed them and set them on a path of destruction, or will he survive, because he is fighting for something greater? That is literally what the other characters are saying/asking in this scene!

Also, fuck, it's so stupid but so good. Barret was holding Dyne by his hand, Dyne dangling over a bottomless chasm, Barret the only one keeping him alive, their friendship embodied in these two holding hands against death, and Shinra literally tore through it with gunfire, which (physically) wrecked their hands and (consequently) caused Dyne to fall and (figuratively) cut through their friendship. And then THEY BOTH GRAFTED GUNS TO THEIR ARMS, ONLY ON REVERSE ARMS, LIKE MIRRORS OF EACH OTHER, BECAUSE THESE WERE THE ARMS BY WHICH THEY WERE HOLDING ON TO ONE ANOTHER IN THEIR LAST MOMENTS BEFORE THEIR FATEFUL SEPARATION.

It's so dumb. It's so cool. I love it.

Except except except ALL THAT IS DIFFERENT IF YOU ARE USING A TRANSLATION CLOSER TO THE ORIGINAL JAPANESE.

Because it turns out in the original Japanese Barret didn't lose his arm entirely and replace it with a prosthetic; rather he lost the use of his arm, as in he suffered a loss of fine motor control/dexterity/couldn't work with it anymore; he wasn't "depressed," rather he "thought things through", and then HE HAD HIS OWN ARM AMPUTATED TO REPLACE IT WITH THE GUN. This is way more psychotic than the prosthetic thing, in that instead of the injury/disability already being there and Barret turning it into a weapon, it's him making a deliberate choice to take what's left of his original arm and remove it to replace it with a weapon, mutilating himself for the sake of revenge. Which then feeds into something else: rather than there being an ambiguity about how much Barret is acting for revenge as opposed to the Planet, there is a line which is entirely missing in the English (not a poor translation, literally the dialogue box is missing), after everyone tells him "you can't throw your life away, what about your fight for the planet?" in which Barret says (paraphrasing, specific details will differ according to translation) "Tifa, you know me better than that, it might have looked like I was doing it for the Planet, but really all I cared about was revenge against Shinra." At which point Tifa says "It's okay, I'm not so different myself," and Aerith says "It's who you are, Barret."

Which is wild because instead of a conflict between "will you fight Shinra for revenge, or for the planet," it's Barret saying "Revenge, 100%, the rest was a front," and Tifa and Aerith nod and say "yeah, that's valid, rock on." And while I think we could do with more stories about how revenge is cool and based actually and sometimes assholes have it coming, in this case here it's…

…I prefer the English script of this scene? For all that the text itself is kind of muddied and a lot of the different details are rooted in straight-up mistakes rather than deliberate changes in adaptation, this is the one time where I think actually, the translation has the better version of this character beat?

Wild.
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This is an interesting thing to think about, because based on Remake they could still really go either way with it in Rebirth. Because Remake has already called out and discussed Barret's more selfish side, with him getting President Shinra at gunpoint and demanding a PR message absolving Avalanche rather than the complete shutdown of Midgar's mako reactors, not to mention the no doubt harrowing experience of being straight-up killed by Sephiroth only to be resurrected by arbiters of the planet's fate. The question is whether they subsequently revisit that in Corel Prison and stick with the original script, or consider it more or less resolved by the changes in Midgar.

Omicron said:
At this point, Cloud and the third party member come back into focus (they were off-screen during this entire exchange, though we knew they were there; it's a really neat way to use the camera to frame an exchange that's being watched by others as a solitary face-to-face between two people alone), call out to Barret, and Barret tells them to stay out of it - this is his fight.

Cue battle music.

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Not to be a broken record about 'in Rebirth' but it's moments like these that are the most exciting to consider in a high-fidelity remake, especially with the re-series' action combat. A one-on-one is one of the mainstay moments of catharsis in any story, but most JRPGs are just mechanically constructed in such a way that those will feel kind of hollow and perfunctory compared to standard party combat. Especially in a game like this, where the characters are ultimately interchangeable in a mechanical sense, so it's not like they can really design Dyne to be an encounter that specifically Barret can uniquely engage with. It's hard to stay invested in the moment for too long if on a gameplay level it's effectively rock-em-sock-em robots smacking into each other until one loses.

Conversely in Remake we already saw how amped up Cloud's similarly extremely simple duel with Rufus was, designed to specifically interact with aspects of Cloud's expanded moveset (Punisher countering Darkstar's Psycho Crusher, instantly staggering Rufus with Braver during a narrow window of vulnerability, etc), so odds are good that Barret will have a lot more to actually do while having a final shootout with his long-lost best friend and dark mirror.

Omicron said:
But, well, it's done! We have won the Chocobo Race, escaped Corel Prison, made it out of the Gold Saucer, and now we have… Something we've never had in any Final Fantasy game to date… A true innovation that marks Final Fantasy VII's evolution into a unique modern setting…


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A car.
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I mean, this is just the FF4 hovercraft. Right down to the terrain types it can traverse. Cloud and co getting powerscaled by Cecil for taking like 14 hours just to get the first vehicle of what, 4 or 5 that Cecil was dragging around b y the end?
 
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Omicron said:
That or the distances on the map are just completely fucked, either/or.

I'm not convinced this is excellent design, you guys. But I guess it beats failing five times in a row and ragequitting.
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It took you 7 games to figure out that the scale of the world map in every JRPG is completely messed up?

If you hold down R1 and R2 + square it allows the chocobo to sprint infinitely without losing stamina.
 
ZerbanDaGreat said:
Especially in a game like this, where the characters are ultimately interchangeable in a mechanical sense, so it's not like they can really design Dyne to be an encounter that specifically Barret can uniquely engage with.
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Whoa, hey now, Barret is actually one of the few party members that does have a unique mechanical thing going for him compared to most! If you stick a chest-high wall between him and Dyne, then he's one of the only long-ranged party members who can use the attack command over it without needing a Long Range materia!

...That's about it though, FFVII isn't too big on mechanical depth making a big difference between characters beyond a few having long range weapons, differing limit breaks (which generally still just amount to "what is the damage modifier" and "is it multi-target"), and some fairly unnoticeable stat differences.
 
McFluffles said:
...That's about it though, FFVII isn't too big on mechanical depth making a big difference between characters beyond a few having long range weapons, differing limit breaks (which generally still just amount to "what is the damage modifier" and "is it multi-target"), and some fairly unnoticeable stat differences.
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Well, except for Aerith. Her limit breaks are pretty unique.

EDIT: Oh, and Cait Sith's, of course.
 
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It's honestly really weird that the game decided to make Dyne the prison boss. Like, the natural story for his character is that he was killing Shinra employees wherever he could find them and get away with it* until he went to Gold Saucer, killed a bunch of people and got thrown down the chute for his trouble (in this version, you go down for some other reason, possibly just following Barret who's learned about Dyne's presence). Then he kills a bunch of people down there because at this point he can't see the difference between Shinra soldiers and honest criminals.

You then tie it up to your need to escape the prison by saying that normal operations, including Chocobo Racing, are postponed until the killer on the loose could be dealt with.

This is a pretty clean, pretty straightforward narrative in contrast to canon Dyne doing [REDACTED] for four years, somehow becoming the gang boss in the process and the official contact for the corporate overlord whom he really should hate, only for him to kill a bunch of people he was working with seemingly out of nowhere.

It's possible to make sense of it, like you did, but it's messy, and I'm not sure why it was done this way.

*There is an opportunity here to compare and contrast his methods with that of the Avalanche since he's not exactly the kind of guy to worry about strategic goals, human cost or validity of guilt by association... but then, the Avalanche was pretty nonchalanche about it too, so...

Omicron said:
Man, it's kinda fucked up that Chocobo Racing is apparently this things where a bunch of professional jockeys compete for the normal things athletes normally compete for (fame, money) and then you've got this one guy for whom this is his only way out of life in prison after he was thrown into jail without a trial on an indefinite sentence. Gold Saucer really is a dystopian place.
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See, that just makes me imagine a bunch of classic jockeys in fancy jackets and pants, and then one guy in full Mad Max getup on a chocobo covered in random spikes.
 
Omi's comparison of Dyne to Sephiroth also reminds me how it's kinda weird that Dyne is killed off that quickly, given how big his role his in Barret's backstory. Though you could make the argument that the game's also got plenty of other backstories to get around to
 
Dyne is another one of those dudes who's super-cool when you're 12 years old. Barret's hard-bitten convict rival who's also got a gun-arm and monologues on a cliff with two graves on it? Immaculate. Actually, I sort of think the Needle Gun looks better than Barret's gun-arm.

Also, FF7 definitely misled me on what a Molotov cocktail was for a substantial period of time. Think about the kids when you overwork your translators, Square!
 
Omicron said:
Probably heading for Gongaga
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So, this might be considered a spoiler, but I think you'll want to know it in advance instead of being told after the fact, so: in Gongaga there's actually dialogue that can be missed unless you bring along the correct two party members with Cloud. Said party members being Aerith and Tifa, predictably. It's nothing extremely important, but considering how much you can get out of even a couple of lines, I'd like to see what you'd make of it, and I thought you might want to have the awareness that this is the case, so you could make an informed choice on the matter.
 
Omicron said:
Also there's a well/underground silo with an empty chest, a dead monster old enough to have become a skeleton, and a sword planted in its jaw. Did an adventurer come and slay this beast to get its treasure? Neat environmental storytelling even if useless to us.
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Fun fact: this room, in the original Japanese (not the updated version), actually let you encounter a debug enemy.
finalfantasy.fandom.com

Êúô0(äñ)

êúô0(äñ) is an enemy from Final Fantasy VII. They are a test enemy hidden within the game data. In the Japanese version of the game, the model they used was the Guard Hound enemy's model. Despite the only access to this enemy in the game being mainly through hacking devices, they could be fought...
finalfantasy.fandom.com finalfantasy.fandom.com

Also, in case you wanted to be confused:

Omicron said:
No, dammit. It just doesn't fit.
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If those mountains looked a bit different, I might suggest that it was a badlands-type area that collapsed, but they look too mountainous to be like that. And I'm not sure if the integrity of badlands is that weak anyway.
Terrabrand said:
birb too pure, can defeat teen angst and SOLDIER angst alike. :thonk:
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the real outcome for Cloud after ff7 is becoming a Chocobo racer and you cannot convince me otherwise :V
 
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Mizu said:
That's gotta be a bug, I can't see why devs would allow that intentionally. Nifty if the minigame is troublesome to play ordinarily, though.
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My guess is rather than an actual bug, it's a developer cheese left in the game accidently that meant to be used for testing. After all, it was already mentioned in thread that they have similar for the rail shooter minigame.
 
Luigi Cloud wins by doing absolutely nothing, and only nothing.

I'm really seeing the weakness of the Materia approach to Blue Magic, as while you don't have to be affected by the skill to learn it any more, there doesn't seem to be any indication an enemy has a skill until you gain it, and you can only gain it if you have it equipped, the early Enemy materias are missable, and while there are multiple Enemy materias, they don't share skills. All of this is on top of gaining skills being something that is dependant on waiting for enemies to use the right skills.

It will be interesting to see how later games deal with this.
 
Indivisible said:
Luigi Cloud wins by doing absolutely nothing, and only nothing.

I'm really seeing the weakness of the Materia approach to Blue Magic, as while you don't have to be affected by the skill to learn it any more, there doesn't seem to be any indication an enemy has a skill until you gain it, and you can only gain it if you have it equipped, the early Enemy materias are missable, and while there are multiple Enemy materias, they don't share skills. All of this is on top of gaining skills being something that is dependant on waiting for enemies to use the right skills.

It will be interesting to see how later games deal with this.
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Blue Magic has a pretty consistent problem in the series (at least, so far) of being some level of "Guide, Dang It" or requiring you to invest in specific classes/characters/materia that are otherwise a wasted slot. Just to go down the line:

FFV - you want Blue Magic, you need to either bring a Blue Mage to fights (a class that until they get their investment of learning good Blue Magic spells is generally kind of mediocre) or use someone's only open ability slot on Learning instead of something like an entire second skillset. Also, you have to get hit by the Blue Magic spell which can be anything from requiring you to be a specific level (Level X spells), to manipulating the enemy to cast it on the party (White Wind or Big Guard) to straight up RNG or death (Roulette and Level 5 Death). With full game knowledge, Blue Magic is absolutely fantastic, but for a casual mostly blind playthrough like this thread, it's generally more hassle than it's worth.

FFVI - On one hand, Blue Magic can now be learned just by seeing it instead of needing to get hit, which makes a number of spells easier. On the other, it's tied to a single specific character who otherwise has fairly mediocre stats, and also Blue Magic in general was somewhat nerfed from FFV. Still has viable spells, but not as many gamebreakers, which makes it doubly not as worthwhile because you're in the game where instead of investing in Blue Magic you can just teach every single character Ultima.

FFVII - Enemy Skill Materia is kind of in-between FFV and FFVI, I feel? We're back to "if you want to cast Bullet, you must first get shot in the face with Bullet", but it's a lot simpler to pass around a materia that takes up a single slot out of up to 16 on a character's loadout than it is to force the Blue Mage class/Learning, or specifically drag Strago to fights. As for power level, I think it's also somewhere inbetween - there's some better spells than FFVI, but not nearly as broken as FFV. Also, the fact that Enemy Skill materias are both limited in number and entirely missable can be a bit of a pain.

We'll stop there for now since the thread is only up to FFVII, but suffice to say they do continue to experiment with Blue Magic as the series goes on, for better and for worse.
 
McFluffles said:
Blue Magic has a pretty consistent problem in the series (at least, so far) of being some level of "Guide, Dang It" or requiring you to invest in specific classes/characters/materia that are otherwise a wasted slot. Just to go down the line:
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I'm pretty sure I just made sure all my Enemy Skill materia were constantly equipped on whoever I had in my party and got useful skills without doing any research at all (including Matra Magic and Beta). I'd just experiment with whatever looked cool or was effective when they used it on me.

Did I get Laser? Probably not. Or if I did, I didn't realize it halved the target's life and just thought it did half my current life total in damage and didn't use it. Because my memories are vague but I don't remember cutting enemy bosses in half. Did I turn out to need it? No.
 
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SolipsistSerpent said:
I'm pretty sure I just made sure all my Enemy Skill materia were constantly equipped on whoever I had in my party and got useful skills without doing any research at all (including Matra Magic and Beta).

Did I get Laser? Probably not. Or if I did, I didn't realize it halved the target's life and just thought it did half my current life total in damage and didn't use it. Because my memories are vague but I don't remember cutting enemy bosses in half. Did I turn out to need it? No.
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Sure, but if you didn't collect weird obscure and mostly useless without a particular setup or luck spells that require a very specific set of counterintuitive actions to get for the sake of completion, can you even say you've played a Blue Mage?

No.
 
Omicron said:
Ester went to Dio and explained the situation to him and how we were blamed for murders committed by Dyne. Dio believed this. And his response was to…

…do nothing until we were actually able to win the race, letting us rot in jail forever if we couldn't pull it off, and then only pardoning us once Cloud actually won.

So that's an absolute scumbag move. No wonder he did it all by sending a letter, if he tried to show his face he would get a terminal case of Buster Sword to the face. This 'buggy' gift is clearly him trying to bribe us into not storming into his office and wrecking his face.
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The thing about Dio is that he's rich, oblivious and stupid.

So yeah, he's a total scumbag too.
 
Mizu said:
That's gotta be a bug, I can't see why devs would allow that intentionally. Nifty if the minigame is troublesome to play ordinarily, though.
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Yeah, the wikis think it was a dev tool that didn't get removed, FF7 is actually pretty buggy, especially at the high end. I'm sure I don't need to tell everyone about the ultimate weapon that once used enough will have an overflow glitch allowing it to do infinite damage and one shot everything in the game.
 
This update really exemplifies the FF7 experience. "That's enough of a somber reflection on the effects of violence on both victims and perpetrators taking place in the bleakest setting imaginable. It's time to race giant chickens on Rainbow Road!"

It's easy to imagine the remake Doing Something with that. Having the characters emerge with hollow eyes and empty voices into a world of color, making clear that all the glitz of the Gold Saucer doesn't just exist despite the horrors beneath it, but that the glamour can only survive because of them.

That wasn't what SE was doing back in the day, though. They were just doing what they felt like and stringing things together afterwards. "Wasn't that emotional confrontation fun? Now, let's play a racing minigame! That'll be fun too!"
 
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