I would say it's weird how Yuffie can just tell people in town what to do and they obey immediately without question and they're all deferential to her in conversation and unusally call her 'Miss' and she somehow has the pull to just hang out in random people's houses and build secret underground lairs, but, uh, Runaway Secret Ninja Princess is absolutely one of the cliches the FF devs are gonna have no hesitation in busting out, right? It feels on-brand and fits the evidence. She even complains about her dad!
Yeah, so, it turns out you were completely right, I just missed the dialogue about it on my first go around, but: Yuffie is, in fact, Lord Godo's daughter. She is
literally a Runaway Secret Ninja Princess. More on this next update.
Man, I don't remember when it was, but at some point in my JRPG experiences I went from never ever buying status effect cures and the like because "meh waste of money" to almost always stacking 10-20 of each because they tend to be cheap and every once in a while, come in clutch.
Yeah, I had ended up picking up the same attitude at some point in the rest of this Let's Play, but FF7 is, it turns out, a game where money matters more than in previous games and where I have found myself regularly running out of funds without being able to fully upgrade my party, so status effect consumables ended up being an afterthought or a "nice to have" thing more than regular purchases.
Except for Hypers. Gotta keep my party topped up on meth-
(I'm told the game eventually reaches a point where you have access to Infinite Money Tricks but I'm not there yet.)
Well, I suppose if any nation is going to be able to make an effective terrorist squad when properly equipped with some good materia, it's Wutai.
After all: Ninjas.
Is now a good time to point out you could have uh... just waited until the game brought you around to Gold Saucer again? Like say, when you eventually got whatever kind of airship this game gives you?
Well, it's your hour to spend I suppose.
OKAY BUT LET'S TALK ABOUT THE NINJAS THOUGH
Like - they show up for literally
one shot
They're carrying Yuffie away at Don Corneo's orders and then they just
never appear again
They're not with Corneo at the Da-Chao Mural, we don't fight them as random encounters, we have no idea how Corneo even found those ninjas or recruited them or-
They just show up and disappear with no explanation???
Appropriate for ninjas I suppose
With Yuffie's materia theft to try to help Wutai, and Yuffie featuring heavily in the intergrade, now you know what the main theory for how Rebirth is going to justify starting everybody off at level 1 with no endgame equipment or materia is!
Although that did still suffer from the "limited sprite tilesets make the counterpart cultures all look pretty European" issue FF6 had with Doma, at least outside of the artbook.
Hmmm.
So, my read on Doma is that it
wasn't meant to be non-European in aesthetic; I'd sort of interpreted Cyan as a foreigner to Doma, who had settled there and sworn loyalty to the King, hence his name and odd speech pattern.
Of course, we explore the entirety of FFVI's setting and we never find another place for Cyan to have been
from, so I guess it's not meant to be canon, but I'd almost forgotten that it was something I brought in and not how it's presented in the game as it exists.
You'll be pleased to know that this is something corrected by Remake, as while the Steal materia itself may still exist, Yuffie knows Mug as an ATB move that's accessible on all but one of her weapons in Intermission so presumably she will be able to rob people no matter what in Rebirth.
Based, need to actually play Intergrade
Corneo: "ALRIGHT LADIES IT'S BIBLE ROLEPLAY TIME, WHICH OF YOU WANTS TO BE DISMAS AND WHICH OF YOU WANTS TO BE GESTAS"
Yuffie: "What's the difference!?"
Corneo: "IF YOU DID THE READING YOU'D KNOW"
I-
What the hell, how did you just have Dismas and Gestas's names off the top of your head, I had to google them because I'd never heard those names in my
life, is that what they teach in Straya Schools
And if you want me to make myself look foolish in relation to any of the other signs, I'll need better screenshots of them.
This is a good point, I think, to mention one of the pitfalls of playing an old game - such a screenshot, as far as I'm aware, doesn't exist; these pictures are the highest definition you will ever get from FF7 short of Square finally doing a Remaster, which they don't seem very likely to. Sometimes this makes details of the world frustrating to read, because as lovingly crafted as each background is, you can't zoom in - what you see is what you get. And what you see here, is a lot of barely-readable signs.
It's been several decades from the end of FFVII. After the dismantling of the Mako infrastructure, civilization returned to the natural source of energy: oil.
The Planet is dying. Again.
Yuffie is a grizzled woman who has one of her eyes replaced with the Steal Materia. She leads an eco-terrorist group Avalanche (named such after an organization she's heard about once. She isn't clear on details because she didn't pay attention at the time) in a fight against an evil oil baron.
That is, until the oil baron is killed by a mysterious swordsman with an unnaturally huge sword, a swordsman who seems to have a connection to Yuffie and loves bullying her.
The oil baron is replaced by his eviler daughter, and the hunt for the swordsman is on.
...I'm going to make a once-in-a-lifetime exception to my "no sequels where all the victorious characters of the original have become sad fuckups/antagonists" for this one idea, please fund it immediately
Personally I interpret 亀道楽 by splitting up the three kanji, so it's "Turtle Path Comfort", ie "Paradise of the Way of the Turtle". There is always the possibility that it's an intentional play on words between 道楽 and 道、楽, turning it into both "Paradise of the Way of the Turtle" and "Turtle's Pastime".
As for のみ処, it's more straightforwardly のみ and 処: "nomi" for "drinks" and "tokoro" for "place". As in "place for drinks".
To elaborate, Japan trying to emulate China is historically so accurate that it's difficult to overstate how much Japan tried to be China, in aesthetics and culture. China's government structure (even in the midst of its civil wars) and general societal cultures were seen as the end-solution to "how to government" by Japan, or rather the Imperial Court that claimed sovereignty over Japan. This became especially pronounced during the Tang Dynasty in China, which the Nara period of Japanese history copied down to the architecture. It took until the Heian period (starting at around the 9th century AD) where the Japanese Imperial Court went "okay, we're too much like China".
Incidentally, the Heian period is when the Imperial Capital was moved to the city then known as Heian-kyo, and today known as Kyoto. It also happened to be when samurai became a thing, which is why stories set during the "let's copy China" eras of Japanese history don't have them.
This apparent division between "Japan Imperial Court interchangeable with China Imperial Court" and "Culturally Japan" turns up in a lot of present-day Japanese pop culture and media; it's about as well-explored as the cultural changes during the Meiji Restoration, and I would say more common in media than the cultural changes post-WW2.
So personally, my own interpretation of "Modern Cyberpunk Midgar won a war against Traditional Ancient Wutai" is less about "the Allied Powers taking over Japan after World War 2", and more a generalized "modernity charging ahead vs safe traditions". In other words, Midgar isn't "the West"; it's Tokyo, winning the cultural competition against "traditional" (or "backwards", derogatively) areas like Nara.
EDIT:
On re-reading, I want to point out this screenshot in particular:
This is the Materia store. We can tell, because the sign says "Materia".
It says "Materia" in the most ridiculous way possible. 魔手理亜, which is how the sign reads right-to-left and with more olden writing, literally reads as "Ma Te Li A", and means nothing as a kanji combination. They just use the kanji sounds to say "Materia". (The first kanji is a little blurry, so it could be 麻 or such instead, but it doesn't matter, because the kanji pronunciation is all that matters, not the meaning.)
It's along the lines of a store using "Ye Olde Shoppe", with that spelling, and not even bothering to use the proper thorn symbol for "Ye". The overall impression is extremely kitsch, whether because the owner is trying too hard to be over-pretentious, or it's a tourist trap intentionally designed to be kitsch and tacky and "old-timey".
Perhaps related distantly, Japanese media stereotypes of the "biker gang" small-time gangsters like to use kanji like this too: they want to express a word that's more normally written in katakana loanword, but they want to be Traditional and Japanese and Manly, so they just mash together a bunch of kanji with the right pronunciations. Because they want to show off that they know these kanji, but are not actually well-read enough to come up with proper phrases that mean something in kanji.
Thank you for this post, this was very instructive!
A thought I had: we know there are/were more Nibelheimers in Midgar then Cloud and Tifa. They wrote letters home and everything. So, when Nibelheim burned, did they just suddenly stop receiving letters? A letter saying "To whom it may concern, your loved one has decided to no longer remain in contact with you and does not want you to question why."? Hell, when Tifa got to Midgar, did she track them down and tell them their home got torched?
Questions for later, maybe.
Hmm.
My guess is that the Nibelheim youths who went to the city simply didn't realize anything was wrong for a long time, because they
weren't receiving letters from home anyway. They were sending them, sure, but they had no stable job or stable address, meaning they couldn't easily receive mail. So they may have spent a long time just sending letters home and not minding that they didn't hear anything back...
They must have found out eventually, though. Who knows what happened then?[/QUOTE]
