If anything, him not immediately recognizing it was Cloud who stabbed him in the Jenova freezer room is a red flag that something's deeply wrong with him.
All the buildup Sephiroth gets in other media just makes Cloud beating the crap out of him at level 1 that much funnier. Even Crisis Core trying to be like "Actually he had an epic showdown with Zack first!!!" is just... c'mon, guys. There's no retconning your way out of this; Sephiroth got taken down by half of the first enemy encounter in the game. Cloud wasn't even Faceless Goon #1.
Sephiroth himself establishes that it's totally possible to take down a high level character in one strike so long as you do it from behind. He has no right to complain, especially since he's got two.
Sephiroth himself establishes that it's totally possible to take down a high level character in one strike so long as you do it from behind. He has no right to complain, especially since he's got two.
There is a genuine form of arrogance that arises from it, and which makes it even harder to form connections because the other children correctly identify that you're looking down on them and they reject you even more as a result. Even if this attitude manifests as a response to rejection first, it's maladaptive. It will only isolate you further, while also leaving you potentially open to manipulation by adults who play into that sense that you're different, smarter and more mature than everyone else, and therefore it's natural for them to give you their attention.
The weird part is this passage could also describe Cloud as he was back in the beginning of the game, when he was all aloof and "I'm only in this for the money, not the Planet" and everyone in Wall Market called him "Mr Gloomy".
Back then there was speculation that the outgoing and dorky Cloud in the flashback at Kalm was how he originally was, and it was after Sephiroth's madness that Cloud became gloomy, but now we know the dorky personality was Zack as Cloud imagined himself as. So this gives me the impression Cloud never really grew out of his childish behaviours.
Which can be understandable, given the traumas that Cloud had gone through since he first left Nibelheim, including failing to live up to his own unrealistic goals. Still, Cloud going from "that weird loner kid" to "that weird loner merc" makes it seem like he's been stuck in stasis, and only this healing of his mind can let him move past that.
I did a replay in uni where I was like "let's have Cloud pick Yuffie for the Gold Saucer Date" and accidently turned myself into a genuine partisan Cloud/Yuffie shipper
The Yuffie/Cloud Gold Saucer Date is a really interesting scene in terms of characterization. It's a rare moment of early emotional earnestness from Yuffie, where it becomes clear that she has something of a crush on Cloud, and Cloud absolutely stonewalls her, which is a very funny follow-up on the general 'Yuffie gets no respect' vibe, but also can probably be read as the fact that, huh, Yuffie is 16 and Cloud is deliberately not playing along with a teenage crush, which is probably for the best but also extremely embarrassing for her.
So what I'm getting from this is, as an apology for not giving us the Team Leader Tifa Arc, FFVII is instead going to give us Super Psychic Lifestream SOLDIER Tifa. A fair tradeoff, I suppose.
Tifa probably qualifies as a SOLDIER now doesn't she? Presumably 2nd Class since 1st likely involved Jenova Cells. Sadly doubt we see anything brought up about that angle though.
Listen, if the story doesn't give us Lifestream Antifa Super-SOLDIER Tifa, then it falls to us to make it a reality through the gameplay. As a result, I have equipped Tifa with a very silly build since last update, and she is currently my strongest party member.
Yeah, I didn't get into it in the update but, with the full context we have now, rewatching the original flashback to try and parse out what is Cloud, what is Zack, and which of the Shinra troopers is actually Cloud is a pretty interesting exercise.
What're you talking about? Cloud used a Limit Break.
... no, seriously. In Last Order and Crisis Core you can see mako flares in Cloud's eyes as he grabs the Masamune and plays his Uno reverse card. He's so fucking pissed at Sephiroth and so past the end of his rope that he's able to summon up literal, magical superpowers in order to toss him into the wall and send him GMOD ragdolling down into the depths of Tartarus.
Yeah, that makes sense. We did get that whole tutorial with the tiny child punching another kid in Limit Break at the start of the game, after all
Limit Breaks are such a fascinating gameplay/story concept that the game has so far left purely on the gameplay layer but I'm really curious about future games in the series actually maybe exploring them as a tangible narrative device.
@Omicron: as others have said, going back to Nibelheim now that Cloud has his true memories back to explore it as thoroughly as you did when you collected Vincent will provide a new block of completely optional, highly important lore. I think some people might argue this is more crucial than the Icicle Inn, although I personally don't think so. Still, of the optional lore in the game, it's certainly in the top two spots. (There's more than two optional lore-dumps in the game; Gongaga was also one, and there's at least one more you'll need to do a lot of exploring to actually find).
Now, I will preface this by saying this is my personal theory, and so nobody is forced to agree with it. It's just opinion and nothing more.
That said, I think that the writers of the compilation just fell for the very same "invincible Sephiroth" propaganda that Cloud fell for in-game, for Sephiroth's "mystique". Thus, they felt that him being taken down by Cloud was not properly fitting such a great individual, and tried to rewrite it so he came across less humiliatingly stupid in the scene. Whereas in the game itself, this is the point where Sephiroth's image of being this invincible badass is shattered, and he's revealed to be arrogant and, in hindsight, incredibly petty.
The whole point of this sequence having Cloud kill Sephiroth, instead of something else happening (such as Zack doing the job, for example) is that Sephiroth thinks himself the chosen one, above the common man. As a direct result of this arrogance, he left himself open to be taken down by somebody who he'd not merely dismissed, but also made as angry and determined to hurt him as somebody can be, by killing his hometown, his only family, as well as wounding (possibly lethally, for all Cloud knew!) the girl he loved and his best friend. Sephiroth didn't have to do any of that; he could have made his way to Jenova in secret, used his connection to the clones to build himself an army over time, and if he had to kill the mortals, do it in a way that left no survivors. He didn't do that, because he arrogantly thought they didn't matter. He was wrong.
And then, after he was stabbed, and could have slunk away to lick his wounds and recover, instead he came out to confront the one who had insulted him so, secure in his arrogance that he'd only been hurt because it was a backstab that took him by surprise. Instead, his strength fails him because he wasted time gloating (that's how I chose to read the "Cloud leveraged himself to the ground", as Cloud's grip on the Masamune and wiggling on top of it changing the balance point enough that Sephiroth's wounded strength wasn't enough to keep him suspended), and gave the person who had all that anger motivating him the time for the one burst of strength needed for him to be thrown in the Lifestream.
Plus, in addition to completely removing all the coolness Sephiroth has been cloaked with the whole story, this also makes the point that it didn't take a super-soldier enhanced with Mako or Jenova or whatever to defeat Sephiroth; it just took somebody who had been wronged enough to not hesitate to strike when the opportunity for payback presented itself, and who had been wronged enough to push himself to perform past human limits just one time. This is important, too, because it makes it clear that it's not Hojo's experiments that made Cloud Sephiroth's match, it was just that he cared enough about the people Sephiroth was hurting to do the impossible for them. That matters to the themes of the story a whole lot.
Obviously, I deeply dislike that the writers have been trying to retcon this away in the following adaptations of the story, both because it completely misses the point of the scene, and because it takes away what is one of Cloud's most important and unambiguous moments of awesome. It's Sephiroth's hype managing to overwhelm the story, because writers got caught up in how cool he was that they weren't able to stomach leaving intact the scene where it's proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he's really not. So they rage about it by rewriting it.
Just like Sephiroth himself does when he speaks to Cloud. I think there's a lesson to take in that, but this is pretentious enough as it is, so I'll stop here. I'll just reiterate that I think the writer are rewriting the story on purpose, because they either don't get it, or don't want to get it. Everybody can make their own judgment over that.
It's an interesting analysis! I haven't played/watched any of these other, later takes on Sephiroth's death, so I have no particular opinion on the matter, but it's certainly a potential read I'll have in mind if I ever do play them (someone threatened to buy me Crisis Core after I'm done with VII already, although for personal play purposes, not LP).
Tangentially, this is why the description of the Black Chocobo mount in FFXIV says it "looks more muscular" than the regular yellow version, and that "when left alone, it has a tendency to start squatting".
EDIT:
Screenshot of the FFXIV mount description just for the record:
This is wild to read, for me. Partly because the truth of who Cloud is, is honestly yeah just put together pretty damn well, but also because it's one of the few things I thought I knew about FF7 as a story, and which turned out to be completely wrong. I'd picked up a vague understanding (mostly from yaoi fanfics when I was a kid - anybody who tells you that all the porn about Cloud started with the remake's dress scene is laughably offbase, the only difference is back when I was a youngin', more of the Cloud/Sephiroth shippers figured Cloud could dom) that Cloud's hidden backstory is that he really was a tabula rasa who pieced his personality together from Tifa's stories, not because he was an escaped clone made by Hojo, but because he was one of the planet's WEAPONs, just cast from a different mould due to the reduced urgency of the disaster at the time.
To be fair, if there's one genre that lends itself to these distorted word-of-mouth-through-fanfic takes on characters, it's JRPGs. Why, even now, I feel a nagging voice in my head saying "wait, isn't what Imrix describes here the actual origin of that other character from a different Final Fantasy," and I have no idea if that is the case or similar distortion!
For another potential insight, I get the impression the "true" Sephiroth, when they first arrived at Nibelheim and before he went No Sleep Kill Everyone, was actually somewhere between Tifa's "cold and foreboding" and Cloud's "great hero".
Considering the following:
We can be fairly sure that Sephiroth did know about Cloud the random Shinra trooper, and that Cloud's hometown is Nibelheim. And since Cloud (during the flashback) is shown to have visited his mother and spent time at his house, that is consistent with what I mentioned way back then, viz Sephiroth the commander of this expedition is flexible enough to grant one of the troops under his command the freedom to bunk at his old home.
With these new revelations, Sephiroth was willing to allow this for a low-ranking Shinra trooper, rather than a fellow Soldier (however low-levelled to be one-shot by dragons). So clearly he wasn't that cold.
Yeah, the translator seems to be having trouble with one of those "multiple terms for the same idea, with differing shades of meaning" cases. The "memories" that Tifa refers to as potentially false is "記憶", "kioku", and when she says "consciously recalled" she uses "無理矢理", "muriyari", which translates to "forced". In other words, Tifa is saying that if Cloud tries to force himself to remember, those memories could be false; not even due to Jenova manipulation, but just human psychology of misremembering things.
Meanwhile, the latter "true" memories Tifa refers to are "思い出", "omoide". She even emphasizes it by saying "the memories deep within your heart", meaning memories that are not simply "data stored", but rather the deep-down "I know this to be true" memories. Some articles about the differences try to explain it as "kioku" being like "records" memories, and "omoide" being like "nostalgia" memories.
To use a FFXIV example, Emet-Selch recreating Amaurot is largely "kioku" memories. But his stray thought of "Hythlodaeus will figure it out" is "omoide" memories.
And later, "Remember that we once lived" is also intended to be "omoide" memories, where Emet-Selch wants us to remember the Ancients in a more visceral way than "there was once the Ancients".
(For a change, the above spoiler is safe for Omicron, as well as anyone else who is current on FFXIV's story. I'm putting it into spoilers in case someone doesn't want to be spoiled on FFXIV, particularly Shadowbringers.)
"Now that you mention it" is the more literal translation of "そういえば", "sou ieba", but yeah, the translator had to be working without context here. A more natural phrase keeping the same meaning is "By the way".
Yeah, Sephiroth's line there is "おまえごときに..." trailing off, which is unhelpfully just "The likes of you...". So the Retranslated mod is how I'd translate it too.
The translation is more bloodthirsty than the original, where Zack tells Cloud to stop Sephiroth. Admittedly at this point Sephiroth does not seem likely to be stopped by any means less than lethal, so I don't know if this is a case where the Japanese script is too implicit for me to catch the meaning of.
The Japanese text is "ずにのるな", "zu ni noru na", albeit with more ellipses for dramatic effect. It translates roughly to "don't get carried away" or "don't push your luck", which is probably what the translator is going for. Sephiroth is indeed warning Cloud not to mess with him; depending on how one interprets the tone, it could be Sephiroth's last vestiges of caring for the troops under his command that makes him warn them, or it could be Sephiroth puffing himself up arrogantly with "you cannot hurt me, so don't even try".
I'd like to note that I really appreciate all these posts. It's really cool having someone in the thread who can actually look at the Japanese script and give us literal reads of the intended meaning of some of these trickier parts.
The greatest guide in Nibelheim everybody! Accept no substitutes, for mazes physical and mental!
Honestly the association of Mt. Nibel with death and the afterlife (and thereby mako as well) is especially interesting considering Tifa's motivations for learning to navigate it; while she was never able to find her mother... she still in the end rescued someone from the jaws of death. A reverse psychopomp in a way.
That's been this entirely playthrough for me, absolutely. Like, I never fell into "FFVII is bad awful stinky game actually" territory, but I did end up in that good ol' FF fanboyism of "FFVI actual peak, FFVII kinda overrated", not to mention just having a general dislike of Sephiroth with how often he shows up in other media (with the crowning king of that being everyone hyping him in Smash Ultimate while I'm sitting here going "oh fuck off he's literally Another Anime Swordsman he's just one you all happen to like").
But Sephiroth is pretty dope, actually? FFVII has a pretty good story a lot of the time, actually? It holds up far better than I expected, especially considering it's in that awkward 2D to 3D jump territory. And also, as shown in the FFVI playthrough... despite all the praise, it's still a game with some low points like "and then Kefka genocided all the espers in one scene with never before seen supermagic powers", and how... somewhat meandering the World of Ruin becomes.
Or in other words, Childhood is idolizing Sephiroth as the Coolest Awesomest Villain Ever. Teenagerhood is when you realize actually Kefka is the Coolest Awesomest Villain Ever. Then later as an adult you realize "no wait actually it was Sephiroth all along, my B"
That's actually really nice to hear! Seeing people who've already played the games before react to my playthrough is always nice, but "actually this made me recontextualize/change my mind about the game" is really, it makes me feel like all those thousands of words spent trying to dive deep into the game as someone who only had second-hand impressions were for a purpose.
The amazing thing about this revelation is the fact it justifies a few gameplay quirks - quirks that would only otherwise make sense with the reasoning of "it's an RPG, don't think about it."
Why is Cloud, who is not only an ex-SOILDER but a First Class Elite, such a low level at the start of the game? Because he never made it into SOLDIER and is just a normal dude who has been pumped with Mako and Jenova bullshit. He's stronger than a regular human but lacks both the training and experience of a SOLDIER.
LIkewise, why is Flashback!Cloud an utter wimp who gets oneshot by every single monster encounter, whilst his fellow elite Sephiroth can effortlessly carve through everything? Even considering the gulf between the legendary Sephiroth and other First Classes, it seems odd that a SOLDIER can't even protect himself against local wildlife, even if they are dangerous monsters spewing from an old Reactor. Except Flashback!Cloud is Shinra Grunt #2. He's just a guy with a rifle and a baton, the lowest class of trooper, the same type we've been cutting down easily since the first Reactor. Of course he's going to get bodied by monsters on Mt Nibel. Thinking about it, it's possible that Grunt!Cloud actually did get smashed by a dragon and other monsters during the mission (much like Flashback!Cloud did) and every time, Sephiroth used his Full Life Materia to revive and save him. If so, this does suggest Sephiroth did have some fondness for Cloud even when the latter was just a fanboying trooper - or maybe Sephiroth really did care about the common mooks under him?
Funnily enough this works to both the advantage and the detriment of the Remake. To its detriment: While Cloud does start at lv 1 despite allegedly being this badass augmented super-soldier, he is also... Actually very obviously a badass augmented super-soldier, with a fully-formed fighting style, who can parry bullets and blow up giant robots and change between combat modes and moves in dramatic anime fashion. "Why is he just lv 1" doesn't really exist because level is obviously completely divorced from the narrative.
On the other hand, ROCHE, THE SPEED DEMON is a fantastic addition to the game, because the moment this Third Class SOLDIER comes in and is a better driver than Cloud, more flamboyant, more obviously superhuman, and who ends up being a peer opponent to him in a 1v1 duel "out of the saddle," something should be clicking that says, "it's weird that First Class SOLDIER Cloud kind of feels like the underdog here."
This actually brings up something interesting in regards to FF series as a whole, and that is the role of monsters in it.
Like, random monsters are everywhere in the games, they're a major part of the core gameplay loop, the game literally doesn't work without them, but they're also kinda... non-diegetic? They're everywhere in the world, but the world doesn't take their presence into account. There are no mentions of the refugees from the mining town being picked one by one by monsters in the night or anything like that, most towns don't have fortifications that could protect them against dreadful stray cats and leaf bunnies, everything functions exactly the same as if monsters didn't exist (or at least weren't more dangerous or more likely to attack humans than regular wild animals).
It's not entirely true, though. The giant snake is acknowledged in the narrative, that's why you need a ride to begin with, and the corpse of its brethren serves to demonstrate Sephiroth's power. Such things existed in previous games as well, including that one hunting quest from FFVI. But they remain exceptions and typically concern powerful unique or semi-unique monsters, or else characters talk about a particular area infested with monsters for some defined reason, like the boat graveyard full of undead.
I think this becomes more and more prominent as the series become more plot-heavy. In FFI, with its minimal lore and dialogue, random encounters were as real as everything else in the game because everything received minimal narrative attention on account of there not being much narrative. As the series progressed, the plots became more complicated and complex, the characters grew in definition, the themes became a thing that exists, but random encounters remained unchanged and, notably, were rarely incorporated into the plot unless there was a specific reason for it. In FFVI, everyone feared the empire, and some random encounters represented its forces, so they were "real" as far as a the game is concerned, but leaf bunnies existed for our heroes only and not for anyone else.
So, I guess, what I'm saying is that in the "true" version of most FF games, the one that could have been an anime or a novel, most monsters don't exist. So they may as well be sealed under Mt Nibel. There is no place for them above, after all.
And it ties into that post I made a little while ago about 'abstraction' in the world - FF7R, with its highly realistic environments, ends up dealing with the issue of 'monsters' by making them largely pests who exist in abandoned areas. So you run into small drakes in a fenced-off scrapyard, or you fight ghosts in an abandoned train graveyard, and so on. And it mostly works... But in large part because 7R is limited to the Midgar Sequence, so most of its environmental monsters are drawn from the early game in the original and just scan as pests; wererats are no bigger than a dog and can easily be thought of as a minor vermin infestation that normal people could fight off, for instance, and a lot of its enemy roster is directly Shinra-related, being either humans or robots who fulfill an obvious security function.
I'm not sure how they're going to square the circle of 'realistically' integrating monster in the overworld when it comes to Rebirth and beyond where you commonly run into Actual Fucking Dragons in random caves and mountain peaks, or Marlboro are just hanging out on a snowy peak, or the fucking Flying Dutchman is just a random encounter. In Remake they navigated that in interesting ways - the Hell House, for instance, is a singular boss encountered in unique circumstances that everyone reacts to as a baffling occurrence; maybe the same will be true of the inexplicable zombie ships (not a ship full of zombies, a ship that is itself a zombie)? We'll see, I guess.
Yeah, I didn't get into it in the update but, with the full context we have now, rewatching the original flashback to try and parse out what is Cloud, what is Zack, and which of the Shinra troopers is actually Cloud is a pretty interesting exercise.
There's something that sticks out like a sore thumb once you know the truth:
Cloud doesn't look all that much different than he did when he'd left town only two years earlier, but absolutely nobody from Nibelheim, up to and including his mother, recognizes him at first glance -- there's always a beat in the dialogue before they go "Cloud?!" or something similar.
Because, of course, Cloud is wearing his helmet, and so either has to take it off or otherwise specifically introduce himself.
On a side note, because getting this information is a pain in the ass, I have transcribed the game's tutorial on Chocobo breeding below.
Getting this information requires something like a dozen visits to the Chocobo Sage, with random battles in between, and then talking to Chloe (the girl in the barn) at the Chocobo Ranch, first to tell her what the Sage said and then a second time to have her translate that into more useful instructions for you.
Code:
Other than regular Chocobo, there are
'Mountain Chocobo' and 'River Chocobo'.
In order for the 'Mountain Chocobo' and
'River Chocobo' to be born,
Feed the 'Carob Nut' to
a 'Great Chocobo'
or a 'Good Chocobo' and
have it produce an egg.
But we don't sell any 'Carob Nuts'.
A 'Great Chocobo' and
a 'Good Chocobo' are found...
on an island southeast
of the Chocobo Sage's dwelling at Corel
and in the area west of Corel.
The 'Carob Nut' can be
found south of the Chocobo Sage's dwelling.
Monsters carry them.
Let's see, is Bone Village just south of there?
One surprise:
If you get the "Mountain Chocobo" and
the "River Chocobo" to produce an egg,
You'll get a Chocobo that
can cross mountains and rivers.
I bet that the right nut for
that is the "Carob Nut."
Bigger surprise:
There seems to be a Chocobo
that can cross the ocean.
If you could cross the ocean,
mountains, and rivers,
there'd be no place you couldn't go.
In order to get an Ocean Chocobo
you need to get a Mountain-and-River Chocobo
to mate with something else.
If you mate the Mountain-and-River Chocobo
with a 'Wonderful Chocobo',
you'll get an Ocean Chocobo.
But to do that you can't
use an ordinary Nut.
The 'Nut' that produces
Ocean Chocobos is the 'Zeio Nut'.
This is the first I've ever heard of it.
I wonder where you get them?
Zeio Nuts are found on a little island
east of the Chocobo Sage.
'Goblins' have them.
With this, you can produce
an 'Ocean Chocobo'.
According to my research,
Mountain, River, and Ocean Choocobos
are hard to produce.
But, if you take the right care
of the Chocobo and increase their
Class ranking by winnning at the races,
it'll increase your chances of getting one.
To get started make sure you have at least three rented stables at the Chocobo Ranch. This will set you back 30,000gil, but it's the minimum needed: One for each parent and one for their offspring. If you have the gil, to make your life easier, you might as well rent all six.
Mountain Chocobos are green. River chocobos are blue. The combined mountain & river chocobo is black. The ocean chocobo is gold.
The blue Chocobo allows you to go anywhere the Tiny Bronco could, and because it can cross over land, some places the Tiny Bronco couldn't.
Both Black and Gold Chocobos get inherent stat bonuses in the races.
"on an island southeast
of the Chocobo Sage's dwelling at Corel
and in the area west of Corel."
This is poorly described. It is referring to the Chocobo tracks by the Gold Saucer and by Mideel. Chocobo Billy will tell you what grade of Chocobo you've caught, and since encounters in FF7 are always a set combination of enemies, once you know what you got from one encounter, you know you will always get that grade of Chocobo from that encounter.
Carob Nuts can be stolen from those dinosaur guys by the Bone Village. You don't need many.
"If you mate the Mountain-and-River Chocobo
with a 'Wonderful Chocobo',"
The Sage mentions you can catch 'Wonderful chocobos right around here', but that information drops out in Chloe's version. It's referring to the Chocobo tracks by the Icicle Inn -- there's a small patch of grass nearby you can land the Highwind on, or you can ride a green or black Chocobo there.
"Zeio Nuts are found on a little island
east of the Chocobo Sage.
'Goblins' have them."
This is the island marked on the north-east corner of the world map, with the forest on it. Goblins encounters occur in the forest (and are the only encounter there), and will drop Zeio Nuts on defeat or steal.
"But, if you take the right care
of the Chocobo and increase their
Class ranking by winnning at the races,
it'll increase your chances of getting one."
This can be a huge money sink if you overinvest, but it doesn't have to be. Great, Wonderful, and coloured Chocobos will all demolish the first couple of ranks of the races without any problems or in fact any feeding at all (quite honestly the biggest annoyance is having the victory fanfare playing for like thirty seconds while you wait for #2 to cross the finish), and even a handful of greens will make them win A reliably against anyone except Joe & Tieoh, since Tieoh's stats are based on your chocobos and are always better. You don't even need to race your way to S class for every Choco, to get your first coloured ones you only need a handful of wins between the parents. But it's so easy you may as well, since the potential rewards are good.
Black and Gold chocobos are worth a bit more greens investment and are the ones that can reliably win the S-class races since they aren't slowed down by any course obstacles and get inherent boosts to their speed.
Each green has, in theory, slightly different effects, but in practice it doesn't matter, the Sylkis Greens the Sage sells are the strongest and you only need five-to-ten for your basic Chocobos and maybe ten-to-fifteen for your black or golds.
There's no difference in rewards between the short and long courses. Always pick the short, it's much faster.
In races green and blue chocobos have their abilities reversed: green will handle the space and water sections without penalty and blue will handle hills without penalty. This doesn't make a lot of practical difference since both kinds of obstacles are found on the short track, but the space section is at the end so it can feel better for a final sprint with a green.
You can savescum to ensure correct genders/abilities of chocobo; for wild-caught it is determined when they're moved from the holding pen into a stable, and for new-borns their type and gender are determined on birth, so save beforehand, try it, and if you get the wrong one, reload and shift the RNG by walking around a bit, then try again.
Chocobo breeding has a cooldown period. It's governed by battle count, so you need to fight something like eight or ten battles before the same chocobo (or a newly born one) will be able to mate. I personally flew down to the Mideel forests, as they're convenient easy fights with solid AP output.
Despite retconning FFVII to hell and back multiple times, Crisis Core is by far the best of the FFVII spinoffs, so you'd likely enjoy it a lot. Furthermore, it's very obvious upon playing through them all that the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which is the second best of the FFVII spinoffs, is based at least as much off of Crisis Core as it is off the original FFVII. Seeing as you liked FF7R, there's little doubt in my mind you'll like Crisis Core.
or the Flying Dutchman is just a random encounter. In Remake they navigated that in interesting ways - the Hell House, for instance, is a singular boss encountered in unique circumstances that everyone reacts to as a baffling occurrence; maybe the same will be true of the inexplicable zombie ships (not a ship full of zombies, a ship that is itself a zombie)? We'll see, I guess.
This is only the second time I have to say it so I'm not going to take drastic action but allow me to reiterate:
If you quote me in another thread, I get an alert for it.
That alert reads "X quoted you in the something something Final Fantasy thread." So depending on whether I'm paying close attention, there are even odds I'm going to click it before I realize it's not the right thread.
Then I get a faceful of spoilers.
Then I'm angry.
Please take it upon yourselves to make sure that doesn't happen.
I did a replay in uni where I was like "let's have Cloud pick Yuffie for the Gold Saucer Date" and accidently turned myself into a genuine partisan Cloud/Yuffie shipper
The Yuffie/Cloud Gold Saucer Date is a really interesting scene in terms of characterization. It's a rare moment of early emotional earnestness from Yuffie, where it becomes clear that she has something of a crush on Cloud, and Cloud absolutely stonewalls her, which is a very funny follow-up on the general 'Yuffie gets no respect' vibe, but also can probably be read as the fact that, huh, Yuffie is 16 and Cloud is deliberately not playing along with a teenage crush, which is probably for the best but also extremely embarrassing for her.
I did the same thing, and while not going full-bore shipper (not my style) it did make Yuffie one of my favorite characters. I know it was probably some coincidence, but way back in that Cosmo Canyon scene where Bugenhagen does his Solar System display, she was in my party and the camera happened to pan around and her face just looked so...fill with awe and wonder and just pure, innocent amazement. Which is really saying something since it's her LEGO-polygon model that doesn't even have a mouth (this was PSX version so no mouth bug) but something about her eyes and the camera angle just made it come across that way and I instantly fell in love with her as a character.
Couple that with her date sequence and then her showing some of the stronger emotional beats at Aeris' death (crying into Cloud) and...yeah.
Yuffie didn't get a lot of respect but she deserved it. I hope the Remake series does her justice and remembers that she's a kid with a good heart at her core, not just the sneaky Materia thief with a loud mouth.
Finally read the newest update... and wow. Final Fantasy VII really was cooking with this. It's wild albeit understandable why this whole sequence is less well known in the popular consciousness for the game.
It's a great culmination to the steadily increasing tension and misery in the arc of Cloud's identity that also showcases Tifa's feelings, leading to Cloud's self-actualization and Tifa finally finding that space of openness and mutuality with Cloud that she had been afraid of but seeking. I've enjoyed the thoughts on all the psychological details and deliberate plays with perception that the story did. That bit about the rationalization of a child for feeling really excluded, in particular, feels very deep-cutting. Good thoughts!
The actual breeding portion is really straightforward, it's getting all the bits together from the relatively vague/poor instructions the game gives that's frustrating. And certain portions are just time sinks for the sake of being time sinks, but at least you get rewards out of that too.
So for me, the moment that made me An Genuine Shipper was in Gongaga.
When Tifa leaves the party in the hospital, the other two party members turn and walk out the door. But one of them does a stop-turn-look beat, a lingering glance.
In that playthrough, for me, that was Yuffie.
So Yuffie giving a longing look, and then kinda ceding to Tifa... the might-have-been hit me pretty hard. Even if it was basically a coincidence that Yuffie was Party Member #2 for that.
To be fair, if there's one genre that lends itself to these distorted word-of-mouth-through-fanfic takes on characters, it's JRPGs. Why, even now, I feel a nagging voice in my head saying "wait, isn't what Imrix describes here the actual origin of that other character from a different Final Fantasy," and I have no idea if that is the case or similar distortion!
The Yuffie/Cloud Gold Saucer Date is a really interesting scene in terms of characterization. It's a rare moment of early emotional earnestness from Yuffie, where it becomes clear that she has something of a crush on Cloud, and Cloud absolutely stonewalls her, which is a very funny follow-up on the general 'Yuffie gets no respect' vibe, but also can probably be read as the fact that, huh, Yuffie is 16 and Cloud is deliberately not playing along with a teenage crush, which is probably for the best but also extremely embarrassing for her.
Which is hilariously ironic because Cloud is, on all levels except physical, himself stunted at the age of 15-16 given the time in the Science Tube and all the brain damage. Maybe he was unrelentingly mean to Yuffie all this time because he was looking in a mirror and didn't like what he saw...
Funnily enough this works to both the advantage and the detriment of the Remake. To its detriment: While Cloud does start at lv 1 despite allegedly being this badass augmented super-soldier, he is also... Actually very obviously a badass augmented super-soldier, with a fully-formed fighting style, who can parry bullets and blow up giant robots and change between combat modes and moves in dramatic anime fashion. "Why is he just lv 1" doesn't really exist because level is obviously completely divorced from the narrative.
On the other hand, ROCHE, THE SPEED DEMON is a fantastic addition to the game, because the moment this Third Class SOLDIER comes in and is a better driver than Cloud, more flamboyant, more obviously superhuman, and who ends up being a peer opponent to him in a 1v1 duel "out of the saddle," something should be clicking that says, "it's weird that First Class SOLDIER Cloud kind of feels like the underdog here."
Well that's because SPEED DEMON ROCHE THE GIGACHAD THUNDERCOCK is a different breed, staying in Third Class because they keep it real, man, not like those posers in First who go all rockstar sellout.
Also, amusingly,
once Zack starts using the Buster Sword, he can switch between Operator and Punisher stances just like Cloud in FF7 Remake - so that 'fully-formed fighting style' is yet another thing Cloud stole from him.
Looking forward to the day 1,000 years from now when you've caught up to FF CCCXXVII, (the last FF released before the Square Enix Corporate Hegemon mass uploaded their minds into Award-Winning MMO FInal Fantasy XIV: NounVerber) and can finally read the Spoiler Thread in it's entirety before crumbling to dust with a wistful smile.
FF327? I'm amazed you think that they'll make 311 mainline final fantasy games in 1000 years. Between the DLCs, Spinoffs, and ever-growing FF14 budget I think they'll manage 200 mainline games at most
The Yuffie/Cloud Gold Saucer Date is a really interesting scene in terms of characterization. It's a rare moment of early emotional earnestness from Yuffie, where it becomes clear that she has something of a crush on Cloud, and Cloud absolutely stonewalls her, which is a very funny follow-up on the general 'Yuffie gets no respect' vibe, but also can probably be read as the fact that, huh, Yuffie is 16 and Cloud is deliberately not playing along with a teenage crush, which is probably for the best but also extremely embarrassing for her.
So for me, the moment that made me An Genuine Shipper was in Gongaga.
When Tifa leaves the party in the hospital, the other two party members turn and walk out the door. But one of them does a stop-turn-look beat, a lingering glance.
In that playthrough, for me, that was Yuffie.
So Yuffie giving a longing look, and then kinda ceding to Tifa... the might-have-been hit me pretty hard. Even if it was basically a coincidence that Yuffie was Party Member #2 for that.
Which is hilariously ironic because Cloud is, on all levels except physical, himself stunted at the age of 15-16 given the time in the Science Tube and all the brain damage. Maybe he was unrelentingly mean to Yuffie all this time because he was looking in a mirror and didn't like what he saw...
