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

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Omicron said:
Wait. Except not. That can't be the case because Vincent managed to swap from a Turk uniform to his My Chemical Romance costume. So he was active in some capacity, at some point during that time???
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Well. There is also the possibility of Hojo doing the classic Hojo creepiness and playing dress-up dolls with Vincent.

And yeah. It's not as bad as the Huge Materia plotline before, but I've been thinking that late-game is when you can really start seeing that 7's story is kind of split between two philosophies. On one hand, the writers don't really feel the need to make the world consistent—how did Kefka kill the Espers, why did that Snow talk?—so long as it's cool. It's just a fun li'l experience. On the other hand, you can see how both the worldbuilding and the story are gradually growing more elaborate, self-consistent, and important. And that requires consistency and thought like you'd expect in a fantasy novel. We're analyzing it from the second perspective, which is what makes the habits of the first so frustrating.
 
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Note: Missing from that scene is a sound effect [the Bio one], which represents Vincent changing. Presumably Vincent did not have control over his Limit Breaks when first experimented upon. Or the Limit Break is implicitly that loss of control. Or so-on.

But yeah. Hojo. Hojo. So much of FFVII's in-setting issues can be lain on his lap.
 
…Hunh…
Sephiroth is Amy's hammer. Err.
Sonic! Amy that is.
See.
Apparently a long time ago there was a Sonic fighting game, and Amy was the joke character, because she was using a squeaky inflatable hammer, and thus did the least damage.

The catch, is that somewhere down the line someone saw art of her holding that thing and thought it was real.
And ever since Amy has had a seemingly inexplicable ability to wield a giant hammer and it's since become her calling card.

Sephiroth is a nobody who wanted to be special so badly he doubled down on having freaky alien stuff injected into him, and yet.
The secret backstory is another nobody stepped up and owned him mid villain rampage, and he's been chasing after the guy who linked him but.

Like.
Where Sephiroth let his delusions drive him to madness to mastering him entirely…
Cloud ultimately maintained control, except for the bits where Sephiroth used their mutual Jenovah infestation/Cloud's trauma.
The funny thing I didn't think about is how…
Normally the villian that burns down your hometown is too powerful to contest so you gotta go on the big journey to get the strength to beat him…
Cloud just immediately chased down Sephiroth and killed the man, subverting the trope.

IDK man half my head is filled with a Sephiroth screaming about how no this latest post is blasphemy he really is that cool he didn't need to run to daddy in the evil company to get another shot at that nobody Cloud…

…When I wa little I half-convinced Sephiroth was over-hyped. Only half-convinced because I hadn't played the game.
And it's something to see the little kid laughing his head off in vindication.
 
Omicron said:
That was thirty years ago. The Shinra Mansion basement saw use at multiple times since then. The Nibelheim Incident happened there! It's where Hojo kept Cloud and Zack for five years! Hojo did, in fact, come back to Nibelheim.

Vincent slept through all of it. Nobody forced him to. Nobody put him in the coffin. He just saw he was locked in the basement, shrugged, went "ah well," went into the coffin and then slept through the next thirty years including his hated nemesis coming back and just hanging out, five feet from his door.
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And now you know what really happened during those three sleepless days and nights Sephiroth spent in the Nibelheim mansion that drove him irrevocably, omnicidally insane: he woke up Vincent and found out Hojo was his father. Everything else, the whole "Jenova's my mother", "Professor Gast created me", that whole weird Nomad/Pastoralist Cetra thing? Hallucinated whole cloth in sheer denial of the true horror revealed by Vincent "Hojo stole my girlfriend" Valentine.
 
You can even see that Hojo and Sephiroth have similar hairstyles on their field sprites if you know what to look for, though Hojo's hair is way less magnificent.

Also while the Vincent of it all does make Sephiroth a little less cool, I think it's more than made up for by the idea of him as the artificial False Savior/Antichrist (product of evil science, born out of tragedy and ickiness) in contrast to Aerith as a true sacrificial Messiah figure. That's all actually pretty dope imo. We were about due for some overwrought Christian symbolism, and Square's crazy unfinished love letter to Evangelion is only a year away at the time of FF7's publication. It's just a shame that this subplot is, like Xenogears, sort of half-baked.
 
I do appreciate that even in a fantasy game with magic and monsters and super-soldiers and kaiju, the game always comes back to say "the truest evil in the world is a petty man given too much power over other's lives."

Plus as much of an irredeemable monster he is, I've got to give it to Hojo. He's the root cause of nearly half the party's issues in life directly, as well as the main antagonist. I'm half expecting the remake to hit us with "Hojo is actually from the Gi tribe" and "Hojo sabotaged the rocket" because my man just has to have his slimy little hands in everything.
 
Know what? Hat off to you, FF7. I didn't expect the source of a solid half of your problems at the minimum to be a dude who wandered in from, fuck I dunno Taimanin or something and promptly found the Thing.

It really is all just his fetish isn't it?
 
So what you're saying is, this entire game's plot could have been avoided - or, at least, manifested much differently - if Lucrecia just had better taste in men?

Edit: Like, the whole thing of SOLDIER having Jenova Cell implants would probably have come to a head sooner or later, but without Sephiroth it'd probably have manifested rather differently.
 
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Tonight, in this episode of "Things that Caused Completely Common People to Present Themselves at the Author's Home to Demand Compensation"...

Omicron said:
ABSOLUUUUUUTE POWAAAAAAAH!
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I lost the Omipatine shitmeme in a hard drive death and can't be arsed to dig it from the thread. Otherwise I would have added a Red Mage hat, tinted Palpatine's clothes red, and added a wee rapier to his zappy hand, or someone else can do it.
 
And this is, among other things, part why Dirge of Cerberus is so maligned. Not only is it a third person shooter as designed by people who are leaving menu based battles for the first time... its plot centers around Vincent as its protagonist, which means more of the Him, Hojo, and Lucretia love triangle taking center stage for the plot development and characterization.
 
maskedanddanger said:
Remake further foreshadows this twist by modeling Hojo and Sephiroth's faces very similarly.



It's not immediately obvious, because Sephiroth is young and pretty and white haired while you can smell Hojo's hair dye through your screen, but looking at the structure of the cheeks, the lips, and their hairline reveals the hidden relation.

Sephiroth looks a sculpted version of his father, one filled out by a master artisan trying to make an ugly client look good lest they get their head cut off.
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As I've noted elsewhere, it's a brilliant design. Hojo is ugly yes, but it's an acquired ugliness, that of a man with naturally handsome features not giving a shit about presenting himself and aging badly on top of it due to the aforementioned.
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
And this is, among other things, part why Dirge of Cerberus is so maligned. Not only is it a third person shooter as designed by people who are leaving menu based battles for the first time... its plot centers around Vincent as its protagonist, which means more of the Him, Hojo, and Lucretia love triangle taking center stage for the plot development and characterization.
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Not only that. Dirge is based around taking whatever remains of Vincent's dignity and systematically destroying it on every level all the while the writers think they're doing the exact opposite.

The fact that the Dark Id participated didn't help Vincent's cred, either.
 
Omicron said:
The Character Assassination of Vincent Valentine By The Coward Professor Hojo
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Hojo being revealed as Sephiroth's biological father is something that paid/pays narrative dividends both in the base game and in various spinoff media, imo. I really like it as a story beat, since it adds a huge wrinkle to the seeming beatific divinity of a would-be messiah to have his secret origins be something much more base and hubristic.

Vincent's backstory just being the word CUCK stamped across his forehead in red ink (hence the bandanna, it's all coming together now) pays a different sort of dividends, in that I cannot think about it without literally crying with laughter even after all this time. I'm glad you picked up on the weird implication that he possibly could have just left at any time if he had just broken the shitty lock on a wooden door and walked out. Instead, for years, everyone working at Shinra Manor INCLUDING HOJO just walked past Vincent's Tantrum Box sitting alone in a room, presumably vibrating slightly as he listens to "Bela Lugosi's Dead" on repeat with the bass cranked up to max. You're right, the way it's delivered to the player is just utterly deranged instead and is really what cranks the comedy factor to the max and braks the knob. It's so dumb and nuts that it wraps around to become genuinely endearing. It's stupid; I love it. Later media adds plenty more context to everything involved...but still.

Taken by itself though, you have a plot seed that could be the start of a very good bit of action horror media...man gifted monstrous powers...betrayed by the woman he loved...awakened 30 years later to a dystopian world filled with monsters and man-killing machines gone mad and ruled by the corporation he once served...Great premise for an Exalted Vs. World of Darkness game.
 
Cypocryphy said:
Hojo being revealed as Sephiroth's biological father is something that paid/pays narrative dividends both in the base game and in various spinoff media, imo. I really like it as a story beat, since it adds a huge wrinkle to the seeming beatific divinity of a would-be messiah to have his secret origins be something much more base and hubristic.

Vincent's backstory just being the word CUCK stamped across his forehead in red ink (hence the bandanna, it's all coming together now) pays a different sort of dividends, in that I cannot think about it without literally crying with laughter even after all this time. I'm glad you picked up on the weird implication that he possibly could have just left at any time if he had just broken the shitty lock on a wooden door and walked out. Instead, for years, everyone working at Shinra Manor INCLUDING HOJO just walked past Vincent's Tantrum Box sitting alone in a room, presumably vibrating slightly as he listens to "Bela Lugosi's Dead" on repeat with the bass cranked up to max. You're right, the way it's delivered to the player is just utterly deranged instead and is really what cranks the comedy factor to the max and braks the knob. It's so dumb and nuts that it wraps around to become genuinely endearing. It's stupid; I love it. Later media adds plenty more context to everything involved...but still.

Taken by itself though, you have a plot seed that could be the start of a very good bit of action horror media...man gifted monstrous powers...betrayed by the woman he loved...awakened 30 years later to a dystopian world filled with monsters and man-killing machines gone mad and ruled by the corporation he once served...Great premise for an Exalted Vs. World of Darkness game.
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I'd like to remind everyone that this time period of just sitting in that coffin sulking includes the entire fucking Nibelheim incident. Vincent somehow managed to miss Sephiroth spending the better part of a week going insane in literally the next room over, then the shitstorm on the surface, then Hojo dragging more people and doing experinments on them for what must have been at least five years, and finally Zack breaking him and Cloud out of the basement. And that's just the shit we know about!
 
GilliamYaeger said:
I'd like to remind everyone that this time period of just sitting in that coffin sulking includes the entire fucking Nibelheim incident. Vincent somehow managed to miss Sephiroth spending the better part of a week going insane in literally the next room over, then the shitstorm on the surface, then Hojo dragging more people and doing experinments on them for what must have been at least five years, and finally Zack breaking him and Cloud out of the basement. And that's just the shit we know about!
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He heard a bunch of insane cackling and supervillan monologues from down the hall while Sephiroth was there, and just assumed it was Hojo back at it again. Can't blame the guy though, his watch battery died 29 years and 11 months ago, and it's been hard to keep track of time since then.
 
Omicron said:
FUCKING HOJO???

HOW

WHY

HOW DOES THAT GREASY FUCK-

Oh my god the beach scene was set-up. It was meant to establish "Hojo is inexplicably attractive to women in defiance of all sense or reason." Everything. EVERYTHING comes back to Hojo!!

This is the worst twist in the history of the game. I hate it. It's hilarious. It's awful. I don't even know what to say.

*snip*
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You may not like it, Omicron, but this is what peak performance looks like.
 
The Zog said:
Not only that. Dirge is based around taking whatever remains of Vincent's dignity and systematically destroying it on every level all the while the writers think they're doing the exact opposite.

The fact that the Dark Id participated didn't help Vincent's cred, either.
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They did fit in some answers to questions Omi raised this update, at least! In between piling more bullshit on top.
 
So remember when I said Hojo getting worse wasn't a spoiler? That he'd get even worse?

This isn't the end of that.

He can still get worse baby.
 
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