Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
In the modern context. And even in the old context, it's still not "X" as "Cross".
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
In this thread, we call it Noël as Reason intended.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Indeed, it means 'Christ'. Abbreviating Christ to X dates back a long, long ways, because the Greek spelling of Christ is χριστός.
The point here is that "X" for "cross" is actually much more legible. There's a reason noughts-and-crosses is called that
Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
Actually, it kinda is. The X in
dinomannitro6
all your gender is belong to us
- Location
- The Land Where The Sunflowers Bloom
Xmas is actually Good Friday, got it
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
Even in these barbaric, savage lands we call it Navidad. As in, short for Natividad. As in, the Pilates dammed Nativity of Jesus. Christmas? What's that? A Jesus with his own gravitational pull that lost an S at the third day? Jesus celebrating only half a mass?
Dare to be correct.
About the update, it's notable about Heidegger and Scarlet that they don't even bother questioning what would make Reeve afraid enough of Hojo to order stopping him in the absence of a higher authority. Instead of even asking what got his panties twisted, it's implied they just go "how dare be sensible, arrest him and hunt the rebels (that we don't even know if they are coming) before they get to Hojo. His badly understood and secretive yet ill fated experiments that brought us to this catastrophic point must continue!"
You can't even blame ties reducing the flow of oxygen and blood to their heads because Scarlet doesn't wear any, the corporate brainrot is real here.
Dare to be correct.
About the update, it's notable about Heidegger and Scarlet that they don't even bother questioning what would make Reeve afraid enough of Hojo to order stopping him in the absence of a higher authority. Instead of even asking what got his panties twisted, it's implied they just go "how dare be sensible, arrest him and hunt the rebels (that we don't even know if they are coming) before they get to Hojo. His badly understood and secretive yet ill fated experiments that brought us to this catastrophic point must continue!"
You can't even blame ties reducing the flow of oxygen and blood to their heads because Scarlet doesn't wear any, the corporate brainrot is real here.
- Location
- Land of the Midday Sun
X-Blade.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
My problem with Caith Sith being Reeve is.... I just didn't who was this guy the first time I have done this game. I think I even have mixed Tseng and Reeve at this time. It's probably because both of them have very few screentime, so, after dozens hours of play, their personnas (and ugly 3D models) have blurred together in somewhat Shinra exec and so, the whole revelation of the pilot of Caith Sith feels totally flat in my case. At least, I didn't have this problem with Elena, Rude and Reno because we met them regularly but well... It was disappointing.
RogueIce
Noctis Æternæ
- Location
- New Lunar Republic, Equestria
This is Cid's Theme, by the way.
While his character may be questionable, there was nothing questionable about his musical theme.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
First thing that sprang to mind:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDPk8cOc-x8
And since Kamen Rider W came up, Kamen Rider X was also a thing. It's the one where he fought Starfish Hitler
I recall that by the time I finished the game back in the day I was almost completely confused by the plot in general since it took me so long that I'd forgotten half of what happened earlier.
That happened to my Final Fantasy VIII playthrough. Got to right around the last disk change and then had to break for a month for finals, and going home for Christmas (I was playing on PC), and by the time I got back I had completely lost the thread. >.<
There's a lot to be said for the Adventure log/Journal that most modern RPGs now have some version of.
There's an RPG flowchart somewhere that I vaguely recall from years and years ago, and one of the potential paths towards the end is totally just "stop playing arbitrarily for a year right near the end, come back to the game with zero memory of the plot or how to play, restart the entire game (again) instead".
Pretty accurate summation, in my experience.
Pretty accurate summation, in my experience.
21stCentury
Let's get down to bismuth
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Big news: I beat Final Fantasy Tactics just now by accident. Ranked it 14/17 best FF. OK good night.
EDIT: overall, it is still ranked 188/506 so it is a certified goodgame. I had issues with it but it had addicting gameplay.
EDIT: overall, it is still ranked 188/506 so it is a certified goodgame. I had issues with it but it had addicting gameplay.
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SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Didn't you just prove those derived from two separate words and so aren't the same thing?
I'd like to thank the thread for goading me into reading about early Christian heresies/apocrypha and the evolution of church iconography when I should be sleeping. A merry Christmas too you too.
daniel_gudman
KING (in land of blind)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You've heard of Elf on the Shelf, now get ready for Spot the Saint
"Catherine was born immediately before the Black Death, the twenty-third child in her family....As a girl she had visions, and conversations with Christ, St Dominic, and the Virgin Mary....At the age of twenty-one, she went through a mystic marriage with Christ, where he gave her his foreskin as a wedding ring — it was invisible to other people. Much like Francis of Assisi, she fasted almost constantly, and performed other extreme mortification of the flesh including drinking pus from the sick in hospitals. She also developed stigmata like Saint Francis, though some reports say they were invisible....Her head was stolen almost immediately, and smuggled back to Siena, where it was encased in a bronze bust, which was honored in a parade which Catherine's (very tired) mother attended...IMPORTANT: DO NOT confuse CATHERINE OF SIENA with CATHERINE OF ALEXANDRIA. They have a lot in common, and are often depicted together, so the names can make it easy to mix them up. Both are virgin saints, and both had a mystic marriage with Christ, but Catherine of Alexandria is depicted having a mystic marriage with the INFANT Christ, while Catherine of Siena is usually depicted as marrying the ADULT Christ."
Martin Luther hates to see a girlboss winning.
Final Fantasy VII, Part 35: The End of Part 2
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Welcome back to Final Fantasy VII, the game which teaches us that sometimes, parental love is bad and should be outlawed.
Last time, we paused before a fork in the road - on one side, the main plot. On the other side, an narratively brief but subjectively time consuming detour by some old décors.
The Shinra Building. Deep pull.
It's a bit awkward because the final confrontation with Shinra we're headed for isn't set in the Shinra Building, so this is just kind of a 'oh, remember when you were there? And how there were all those items you couldn't get the first time around? How about now?' And, indeed, we can bask in the nostalgia and grab a bunch of cool shit:
In the (now deserted) shop, we find the Master Fist, a powerful weapon for Tifa whose deceptively low stats (38 is hilariously outdated) hide the fact that its damage rating is multiplied while under certain status effects - notably, the Curse Ring combo I have her equipped with means she is under 'Death-sentence,' which increases the multiplier of its damage by 2, which if I understand the math at work right, would triple the damage to 114, higher than God's Hand? Unclear if I'm getting right, but if not, it's possible to increase the damage even further by tagging Tifa with a permanent, low-stakes status effect like Sadness from Tranquilizers.
It's not really necessary yet, but we'll keep that possibility in mind for later bosses. Next to it is the 'Pile Banger,' which I am pretty certain is a mistranslation of Pile Bunker, a fantasy weapon mostly featured in mech shows. The Pile Bunker is what I'm going to call a 'Fake Ultimate':
Because it has no Materia Growth.
Earlier in this playthrough, I chanced upon the Supershot ST, a gun for Vincent that is found in an optional late-game area (the jungle), took a look at its statline, and described it as Vincent's ultimate weapon. A couple of people went 'silly Omi, why would you even think that, don't you know that you can recognize ultimate weapons by their lack of Materia growth?' And… Yes, I did. That's why I thought the Supershot ST was an ultimate: it has no Materia growth, and with its 97 Attack rating was, at the time, the second-highest Attack weapon I owned, on par with the Premium Heart. I was told that lack of Materia growth, high damage and unique mechanics were the telltale mark of the ultimates. So I saw a weapon with no Materia growth and crazy high Attack power and drew the natural assumption. And getting talked down to for it has nagged at me ever since now you get this lecture
Anyway the Pile 'Banger' isn't an ultimate weapon, it's just a weapon with high damage that happens to have no Materia growth, we already have the Max Ray, it goes into the trash. Let's move on.
…
Okay. Here's the thing. Let me show you a standard combat encounter in this area:
Grenade Combatant C, Level 10, 130 HP.
They didn't update the encounter table for the Shinra Building. We're fighting the exact same Shinra troops and robots as we were the last time we were here. And the Shinra Building is large; that's a lot of time-wasting random encounters devoid of any stakes or rewards. But that's not all. Let's take a look at the building.
The building is identical, except it's empty. Also, nobody has even cleaned up the Jenova blood trail in all these weeks.
…
FF7 is kinda bad at return trips.
I mean, don't get me wrong. It tries, and it gets points for effort. And there actual rewards that have been snuck in there so that returning through the first locations of the very beginning of the game is rewarding. But in a way, the very ability to retrace our steps back to those places we first visited in the game just highlight how it's all kind of… Hollow. The Slums at least had the unnamed inhabitants with updated dialogue about Meteor, even if it didn't have much else, but the Shinra Building is literally just taking a tour through an empty building to grab some loot. There's nobody. The only characters are outdated guard encounters. There are no employees to lament the state of Shinra or reflect on past events, the upper floors are straight-up locked and inaccessible… (There actually are employees in one of the upper floors, but it's one that we can't access through a locked door, so we can't talk to them.) Mayor Domino is gone, I doubt we'll ever meet him again. I thought we might meet Reeve and get to do a bit with Cait Sith but no, we won't be seeing Reeve here either. We still haven't seen Marlene and Elmyra since our initial escape.
It makes me kinda sad, honestly, I can't really explain why.
Anyway, we grab all the stuff (including going through the 59-floor staircase again for one weapon we won't use), and then take the other way around, and finally land in the streets, above ground. Then the ground quakes, the group turns around, Barret addresses something off-screen with "What the hell is that!!?" and an enormous metal frame lumbers onto the screen.
…Heidegger and Scarlet.
I see this is going to be a comedy battle.
Slight side-note: Palmer just kinda vanished, didn't he? We saw him alive after getting run over by a truck, so he's still alive, but the game seems to have just kind of forgotten what it wanted to do with him, so he vanished off-screen. Which, I mean, he's a bumbling oaf but he's just not quite evil enough compared to Scarlet and Heidegger, so I guess the game just decided to discreetly take him off screen with no explanation. A little annoying, but whatever.
Heidegger and Scarlet greet us from the cockpit of their new and greatest creation, the product of the Weapons and Peace Divisions working together to produce an anti-Weapon weapon: the… "Proud Clod."
Okay. I'll give you that, readers: my confusion at the "Sister Ray" was on me, I totally missed a Velvet Underground reference, shame on me; I'm listening to Heroin as we speak to atone for my sins. So this time, I looked it up. I searched for "Proud Clod," "Proud Clad," "Proudclad" and even "Proud Cloud." And while the best I can get is that the name is meant to be 'Proudclad,' just like its secondary component the 'Jamar Armor' is (obviously, in its case) meant to be the 'Jammer Armor,' I am fairly certain it's not a reference to anything. Rather, I think this is the Japanese writers' attempts at giving this giant mech a badass name as a weapon 'Proud-clad', that is to say 'Proudly Clad,' 'Clad in Pride.' It is armored (clad) in the strongest material and technology Shinra have at their disposal (pride).
That makes sense. 'Proud Clod'... Doesn't.
Anyway, Heidegger and Scarlet have drunk Midgar's entire store of Kool-Aid and fully believe that their new mech can defeat the Weapons and will have an even easier time defeating us (nobody tell them about the Ultima Weapon and the new crater in Cosmo Canyon), and it's time for payback for all their men we killed (Scarlet, who sent them in waves after waves long after it was clear they couldn't stop me?). Cue battle.
Anyway. Proud Clod! It's a four armed robot with a back-mounted railgun, which is incredibly stupid and also incredibly cool.
Proud Clod is mostly a setpiece - it has a ton of HP, which means the fight takes a while, but weak attacks, which means it isn't particularly threatening. It's mostly a chance for it to show off it neat animations, like knee-mounted flamethrower or claw swipes, or its special move where it crouches into a feral stance to point the railgun at us.
However, this super-move charges so slowly that we have ample time to destroy the beast before it launches. The most dangerous thing the Proud Clod does isn't actually done by the Proud Clod but by its Jamar Armor, which exists as an independent entity and has 'Materia Jammer,' an attack which actually casts Reflect on one of our party members - thereby taking advantage of whenever we try to throw up Big Guard or Regen All. Clever! But insufficient. Dragon from space, go.
Proud Clod is defeated.
Scarlet: "No way! This is the Proud Clod?"
The Proud Clod backs away from us and starts to turn towards a white color, which I think is meant to represent it glowing as it is about to explode from excess damage. Then, flash of light…
And it's gone. They leave behind Ragnarok, an old FF staple which here serves as Cloud's sub-ultimate weapon, and the weapon we want to be using instead of Ultima until we have fully leveled up Cloud's Materia.
In case you're wondering, there isn't any explosion VFX, just an increasing light and then the robot vanishing. It's very undercooked, even if the meaning is clear - Heidegger and Scarlet just blew up alongside their over-engineered, over-priced piece of Shinra junk.
A fitting end? They were destroyed by their own arrogance, wielding their own creation, due to their refusal to ever acknowledge defeat or even weakness and their stubborn insistence on fighting us even after we'd proven stronger, even after it was all pointless, even after Rufus was dead, Shinra's army in shambles, their tech base destroyed, Hojo in control of their cannon, and with Sephiroth about to destroy the world.
Instead of being dispatched piecemeal over the course of the game, Scarlet and Heidegger stay the course until the end, where they die for the sole reason that they look at their ultimate anti-Weapon mech, and instead of using it to take down the mad scientist who is right now trying to give Sephiroth one final power boost, they used it to fight us.
They were idiots. Their ending was karmic and appropriate to their character, but ultimately they were never real threats. They lapsed into comedy relief relatively early on, with only the occasional heinous crime like Scarlet personally shooting Barret and Dyne (with an invisible gun, admittedly), and they just… Never posed a serious threat. So when they show up in their Great Value Gundam, it doesn't register as anything more than these two idiots in yet another overhyped junkpile about to meet their end.
Ah, well. Speedbumps on the road to the one man who did earn every ounce of his hatred.
Halfway up the scaffolding leading up to the Cannon, we find a chest. Interacting with it causes Barret to exclaim "Hey! This is…" and then "This is great. Hold on, Hojo!" after it turns out this item is the Missing Score, Barret's ultimate weapon!
I don't know why Barret specifically gets a mini dialogue bit about finding his ultimate weapon, or why he recognizes it, or what 'Missing Score' is supposed to allude to, but, well, there it is. The Missing Score's damage increases based on how much total AP is in all the Materia slotted inside it, with a minimum of 150k being required to outpace the Max Ray he currently has equipped; we clear that easily with just what Barret currently has equipped, and with the extra slots of the Missing Score compared to the Max Ray we could get it three times over… But it would probably take grinding or shenanigans for it to get significantly above that, which is where it would be comparable to the 'strongest' ultimate weapon mechanics like Tifa at full Limit. Eh, I'm not using Barret much anyway, we'll think about it if it comes up for whatever reason.
And then, it's time for the final confrontation with THE WORST CHARACTER IN THIS ENTIRE GAME, THE ONE WHOSE FAULT EVERYTHING IS, THE MAN, THE HORROR, THE CAUTIONARY TALE:
HOOOOOJOOOO.
Hojo: "Oh… the Failure."
Cloud: "At least remember my name! I'm Cloud!"
Hojo: "Every time I see you… It pains me that I had so little scientific sense…"
Hojo: "I saw you as a failed project. But, you're the only one that succeeded as a Sephiroth-clone. Heh, heh, heh… I'm even beginning to hate myself."
Cloud: "None of that matters… just stop this nonsense!"
Hojo: "...Nonsense? Oh, this? Ha, ha, ha… Sephiroth seems to be counting on the energy. So I'm going to lend him a hand."
Cloud: "Why!? Why do that!?"
Hojo: "Quit asking why, you moron. Hmm… Actually, you might make a good scientist."
Okay, Hojo scoffing at Cloud for asking stupid question and then catching himself going 'wait, that's what science is about to be about, kinda forgot that for a second' is pretty funny.
Hojo: "Energy level is at… 83%. It's taking too long. My son needs power and help. …That's the only reason."
Cloud: "...Your son?"
Hojo: "Ha, ha, ha… But he doesn't know it. Ha, ha, ha… HA, HA, HA!!"
Hojo: "What will Sephiroth think when he finds out I'm his father? He always looks down on me. HA, HA, HA!!"
Cloud: "Sephiroth is your son!?"
Vincent: "...!"
Hojo: "Ha, ha, ha… I offered the woman with my child to Professor Gast's Jenova Project. When Sephiroth was still in her womb, we took Jenova's cells… HA, HA, HA!!"
Vincent: "You……!"
Cloud: "I can't believe you're the one who did this… Illusionary crime against Sephiroth…"
Hojo: "Hee, hee, hee! No you're wrong! It's my desire as a scientist! Hee, hee, hee!"
Vincent: "I was… wrong. The one who should have slept was…" [Points dramatically; battle music engages] "You, Hojo!"
…wait, why are we acting like this is all news to us?
Oh, right. Because Vincent's cave is completely optional. We can just miss that whole bit of storytelling, and the game's dialogue trees aren't that modular, so they just talk as if we hadn't seen any of it.
On the one hand, it's… good… That this whole bit of the story isn't as missable as I had believed at first; most of what's found in Lucrecia's Cave is actually conveyed through dialogue after all! On the other hand it's frustrating that everyone is pretending that didn't happen because it's sealed in the Optional Content Dimension.
I do appreciate that we have Hojo actually making the 'Sephiroth despises Hojo not knowing that Hojo is his own father' angle explicit, though, and stating that he's doing this as the closest thing he can imagine to a loving gesture from a father (and then immediately contradicting it by saying 'no it's about science I am totally a rational scientist without attachment I swear). That line about 'This illusionary crime against Sephiroth' is such total nonsense I have no idea how it even got there - the Retranslated mod has it instead as Cloud asking if this is Hojo's way of atoning for what he did to Sephiroth, turning him into a science experiment and denying him a human life, but of course Hojo doesn't care about that.
Still, it means we get Vincent some closure. It's two sentences, because this character is as undercooked as a steak tartare, but it's something; it means he now sees Lucrecia's fate wasn't his fault, but entirely Hojo's, and that Hojo was the one who deserved punishment for his sins. It's not much, but it's something. He had an arc, it's resolved now.
God, imagine if we hadn't taken him on. He wouldn't even get that much.
Anyway, Hojo cackles and declares he's done as any good Lovecraftian scientist gone mad would and injected himself with Jenova cells, cue battle.
…oh, we're doing Dr Lugae again.
Dr Lugae? Remember him? Final Fantasy IV mad scientist who ordered the death of Edge's kingdom and turned his parents into horrible mutant monsters? He takes to the field as a Dr Willy-lookalike fighting alongside his experimental subjects and then turns himself into a horrible robot zombie when we beat him? Yeah, Hojo is doing exactly that, I'm certain it's an intentional reference. And he's starting the fight with an unhealthy green hue.
Hojo summons two 'Sample' monsters from capsules, Pokémon-like.
…wait, Pokémon Red and Green had come out in Japan by 1997. Not in the US and Europe, where they waited (as Red and Blue) until '98 and '99, but in Japan they came out as early as '96, a full year before FF7. So this actually could be a direct homage, Hojo tossing out capsules and monsters popping out of them?
Hojo in his scientist form is literally just a wheezy scientist, so he has no attack and no magic, all he does is toss out more monsters if we kill either of those two, so we just go max damage on his ass until it finally forces his Jenova cells into activations and he takes on his monster form.
Oh yeah baby, that's the stuff.
This form is named 'Helletic Hojo,' which I am 99% sure is a misrendering of what is supposed to be 'Heretic Hojo,' for his crimes against the natural order. And this is a lovingly designed monster - you can see Hojo's features, his hair, the way his body has been stretched out horribly and deformed. It's great. And again, that Resident Evil aesthetic with the exposed ribs and tumorous flesh and exposed, oversized heart - good stuff.
Hojo is a multi-part boss, whose bloated left and right arm are game entities with their own attacks. He uses a number of status effects and Bio magic. Destroying his arms actually results in his model falling over, showing the damage dealt to him.
In a way, Hojo is the true antagonist of the game, the man who not only set everything into motion but kept it into motion at every possible turn, every time, even when he didn't know he was doing it. And that's reflected in the level of care that goes into his boss fight, with multiple forms, a complex articulated model that shows damage, and a custom animation when this monster form falls… And turns into his final form.
Which follows Frieza Rules.
You know what Frieza Rules are. The bad guy starts off with a 'casual', normal form, then turns into a monstrous form that's either huge and buff or monstrous and hideous (Frieza has both in Form 2 and Form 3 respectively), and then just when you think his final form is going to turn even huger it turns out his final form is actually a simple, unassuming, humanoid shape.
That is 'Lifeform-Hojo NA,' Hojo's final form. I am pretty sure this is either referencing, or drawing from the same pool as, the term 'Ultimate Lifeform,' a phrase that I've seen used repeatedly in Japanese media (most notably in Sonic Adventure 2)? This is the apex of Hojo's transformation, a hovering, faceless, cyborg-like being. It uses combo strings, deploying status effects like Silence (which actually does suck, because it disables all my magic and summons and leaves my character to just use raw Attacks until I cure them) and following them up with physical attacks. I like him. Conceptually, this whole string of boss forms is one of my favorite in the game.
Doesn't mean it's any trouble dealing with, of course.
AM I HURTING AM I SAD, SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO, I'VE FORGOTTEN HOW TO TELL, DID I EVER EVEN KNOW-
Even taking it relatively easy and not pulling out the big guns so I can see more of Hojo's moves, he's not much to write home about. Still a really cool fight, though.
And there it is. Final Fantasy VII's ultimate monster, its most hateful antagonist, more loathsome than Sephiroth, Jenova, or Rufus Shinra could ever hope to be, has fallen.
Like any good mad scientist, he is survived by the consequences of his actions. First we kill the father; then, the son. Sephiroth exists as the wound this man dealt upon the world, the tragic aftermath of his evil.
With Shinra's executives fallen and Hojo dead, it's all that remains for us to deal with.
The group gathers again on the deck of the Highwind, and it's time for perhaps the most important speech in the game - basically the story's thesis statement.
Cait Sith: "Shinra's… finished."
Red: "Meteor's gonna fall in about… Seven more days. That's what Grandfather said."
Cloud: "Red XIII… You want to see everyone in Cosmo Canyon again?"
Red: "...Yes."
Cloud: [Turning to Barret] "You want to see Marlene, right?"
Barret: "Don't ask me that."
Cloud: "We'll beat Sephiroth… Then, if we don't release the power of Holy in seven days… There won't be a Planet left to protect."
Cloud: "If we can't beat Sephiroth… It's as good as death for us. We'll just go a few days sooner than the rest who'll die from Meteor."
Barret: "Don't think you're gonna lose before ya even fight!"
Cloud: "No! What I meant was… What are we all fighting for? I want us all to understand that. Save the Planet… for the future of the Planet… Sure, that's all fine. But really, is that how it is?"
Cloud: "For me, this is a personal feud. I want to beat Sephiroth and settle my past. Saving the Planet just happens to be part of that."
Cloud: "I've been thinking. I think we all are fighting for ourselves. For ourselves… And that someone… something… whatever it is, that's important to us. That's what we're fighting for. That's why we keep up this battle for the Planet."
Barret: "You're right… It sounds cool sayin' it's to save the Planet. But I was the one who blew up that Mako reactor… Lookin' back on it now, I can see that wasn't the right way to do things. I made a lot of friends and innocent bystanders suffer…"
Barret: …At first, it was revenge against Shinra. For attackin' my town. But now… Yeah. I'm fightin' for Marlene."
Cloud: "For Marlene… For Marlene's future… Yeah… I guess I want to save the Planet for Marlene's sake…"
Cloud: "Go and see her. Make sure you're right, and come back." [He turns to the others.] "All of you. Get off the ship and find your reasons for yourselves. I want you to make sure. Then I want you to come back."
Cid: "Maybe ain't none of us'll come back. Meteor's gonna kill us all anyway. Let's just forget any of this useless struggling!"
Cloud: "I know why I'm fighting. I'm fighting to save the Planet, and that's that. But besides that, there's something personal, too… A very personal memory that I have. What about you all? I want you all to find that something within yourselves. If you don't find it, then that's okay, too. You can't fight without a reason, right? So, I won't hold it against you if you don't come back."
Fade to black.
Man. There's a lot to unpack there.
First, to get the trivial stuff out of the way: It's very funny that Bugenhagen can randomly give us an exact time table to Meteor killing everyone, it's such an arbitrary number as 'seven days', and this isn't reflected in the gameplay anymore than it was before - we can go breed chocobos all we want, time won't advance. This is such a weird attempt at raising the stakes and drawing a clear timeline in a game that is hurt by it far more than it is helped.
(Everyone takes a moment to remember 'No all of FFXIV expacs included totally took place in less than a year.')
More importantly…
Cloud saying that they're fighting to save the Planet, but also something more, is such an important thing for the themes of the game (and also kinda messy and not totally working). When Barret says that 'saving the Planet' is a nice thing to say, a cool abstract idea, but that in truth people are fighting for things close to them, things they personally care about, that's really important. It's the heart of Final Fantasy VII: Its cast of characters with complex personalities and interpersonal dynamics, who have loved and lost, who each have their own narrative arc, most of whom are defined in some way both by something they lost (Cloud and Tifa everything, Barret his hometown, Yuffie the glory days of a free Wutai, Vincent the woman he loved, Cid his dream of space, Nanaki his parents) and by what they found again.
It's a very human game. Sure, we're fighting to save the living, sentient planet from the threat of Space Satan destroying the world, but none of that means anything if at the end of the day that world doesn't have someone or something we care about in it.
…it's imperfect, of course. While Cloud asks everyone to find the thing they're fighting for, he leaves this an open-ended question that doesn't receive an answer except from Barret, Mister "I Have One Thing In This World I Hold Dear And Have Been Bringing Up Continuously For The Whole Game" Man himself.
Meanwhile, huh. Yuffie is fighting for Wutai, her father, and her own future as the youngest member of the cast, sure. Red is fighting for his grandfather and all of Cosmo Canyon where everyone he cares about lives, no problem. Cait Sith/Reeve is fighting for… 'Midgar'? 'The citizens of Midgar'? Yeah, let's go with that. Cid is fighting for… Shera..? Vincent… Nope, I give up, Vincent's got nothing. He didn't even get any kind of 'You guys are the friends I made along the way who give me hope life is worth living again' arc; he found out what happened to Lucrecia, killed Hojo, avenged her, and hasn't found anything else in that time.
If you do go with the somewhat off-text read that Sephiroth might actually be Vincent's son rather than Hojo, and Hojo is just deluded about it, then this is about Vincent killing the son that he put into the world and who is now threatening to destroy it as part of his atonement… No, I don't think that works.
Yeah, once again, FF7's characters aren't all created equal. It's still doing much better in this department than VI (remember Umaro?), but it's uneven in a way that it has to consciously navigate around in big thematic moments like this.
Third: This is the moment where I truly bought that Cloud is the leader. Not just the guy thrusted into a position of authorship because he is very driven (by revenge), has a clear objective (kill Sephiroth), is stronger in a fight than anyone else, and also is kinda hot and everyone kind of has a crush on him. No, this Cloud here is the one who has finally got his shit together, he's come to terms with his trauma and grief, he's charismatic, he talks well, he understands people's hearts, he's gotten over his social anxiety. This is a leader speech, and he does it well. This, I think, rather than killing Sephiroth, is the climax of his character arc - killing Sephiroth will merely be the denouement. It's really good.
Fourth and final:
Barret what are you doing lmao.
No, like, I get it - early game triumphalism aside, it's been a running undercurrent ever since the Corel Prison arc that maybe blowing up civilian infrastructure in the middle of a crowded city in an act of actual, literal terrorism wasn't something Barret was doing solely for the Planet's sake and was maybe a little fucked up. It turns out FFVII isn't pro-ecoterrorism after all, it just took its time telling its story about why it was wrong. Which is a more conventional conclusion to come to, for sure.
At the same time… Shinra was literally killing the Planet. Mako is literally, not figuratively, the Planet's lifeforce. There's an actual alien invader trying to take over the world and Shinra was helping it along by shoving its cells into people. What was Avalanche supposed to do, defeat Shinra at the ballot box? Midgar is a corporate dictatorship conducting imperialist wars for economic control of the world! What was the correct course of action, then?
I mean, we know what it was: Eschewing terrorism in favor of conducting small-unit tactics raids on Shinra infrastructure to disable it from within and conducting assassinations of corporate leadership until the whole structure collapsed. This fulfilled the operating objective (total destruction of Shinra as an organization) while avoiding civilian casualties (but killing a shitton of Shinra soldiers along the way). I am not sure how applicable that lesson is to the real world, though.
Final Fantasy VII: Does not endorse Sea Shepherd. Does endorse the Rote Armee Fraction.
Anyway. With all this said and done, and everyone having left the ship, there's only two people left aboard: Cloud, and the only other character that the game acknowledges (unlike Vincent) as having nothing to fight for.
Cloud and Tifa, the orphans of Nibelheim. Tifa, who lost everyone she knew and cared about five years ago in the Nibelheim Incident, and then lost almost everyone she'd found since then rebuilding her life in the Sector 7 Plate Collapse. She doesn't have anyone or anything to fight for beyond… Well, all the other characters in the game. And first and foremost of all, Cloud.
They put down the airship in some patch of land outside… Somewhere, wherever that is, so they can talk to each other, alone.
Tifa asks Cloud if he thinks everyone will come back, and he says he isn't sure - everyone else has something precious to them, but their opponent is overwhelming. Then Tifa tells him it's okay even if no one else comes back: as long as Cloud is by her side, she'll never give up.
Could this be? Could Tifa get over her unbearable inability to speak about her feelings and honestly say she's in love with Cloud?
Cloud: "..."
Cloud: "Tifa…"
Tifa: "No matter how close we are now… We were far apart before."
Tifa: "But when we were in the Lifestream surrounded by all those screams of anguish, I thought I heard your voice…"
[She closes her eyes and inclines her head.]
Tifa: "...sniff… You probably don't remember this… But deep in my heart I heard you calling my name… Or at least I thought I did…"
Cloud: "Yeah… I heard you calling me. You were calling me back from the consciousness of the Lifestream."
Cloud: "After all, I promised that if anything ever happened to you, I'd come to help."
Tifa: "Cloud…? Do you think the stars can hear us? Do you think they see how hard we're fighting for them?"
Cloud: "I dunno… But… Whether or not they can, we still have to do what we can. And believe in ourselves… Someday we'll find the answer. That's what I learned from you when I was in the Lifestream."
Cloud: "Yes… That's right…"
Cloud: "Hey Tifa… I… There were so many things I wanted to say to you. But now that we're together like this, I don't know what to say… I guess nothing's changed at all… Funny, isn't it?"
Tifa: "Cloud… Words aren't the only thing that tell people what you're thinking…"
Cloud: "..."
Tifa: "H, huh?"
Cloud: "Sorry. Did I wake you? It's almost dawn, Tifa."
Tifa: "Umm… Just a little longer… A little bit longer…"
Tifa: "This day will never come again… So let me have this moment…"
Cloud: "Sure… This might be the last time we'll ever be together…"
[Fade again.]
…
Did Tifa and Cloud have sex?
No, like - the cinematic language at work here is pretty well trod: Two characters are sharing a moment of romantic realization that they both like each other, one of them says something that kind of trails off, a fade to black to preserve modesty, and then we open on them, later in the night or before the break down, lying in bed next to one another. Now, of course Cloud and Tifa aren't in bed, and they're fully clothed, but this is still some really evocative visual language that's being used here.
"Omi, what are you talking about, they clearly just spent the night talking to each other and Tifa fell asleep against Cloud's shoulder, it's very cute but nobody would think sex happened here!"
Really? Really?
PEOPLE HAVE BEEN ARGUING ABOUT THIS FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS.
And the answers people give seem to tie into Shipping Wars pretty heavily. Like some of these links up there aren't just saying "don't be dumb, they're fully clothed and just cuddling," they're arguing that this scene wasn't even romantic in nature and Cloud and Tifa are just good friends, which is an egregious refusal of the truth laid out before your eyes, presumably because you are a die-hard Cloud/Aerith shipper.
But no. This is probably reading too much into it. Cloud and Tifa didn't, in fact, have sex in the grass on the hill next to the Highwind at the end of Disc 2. Why would I say that? For the same reason that the person in that screenshot can argue it's not actually a romantic scene.
Because what I have just now realized is that Final Fantasy VII is Patient Zero.
All my childhood and teenage years, I've run into this slightly baffling thing where romantic relationships in a number of manga, anime and Japanese games (not all, of course, there's always been an actual romance genre, but that wasn't what I was reading) existed in implication. Where characters who have an implicitly romantic relationship still never say the words 'I love you' or share a kiss. Like, Bleach has a scene in which Orihime confesses her love to Ichigo… while he's unconscious and can't hear her, and then the subject is never broached again for 400+ more chapters until we find out they have kids in the epilogue. Anzu and Yugi go on a single Friend Date in one episode and then never become a couple in the entire show. In the very last episode of Sonic X, Amy asks Sonic if her feelings for him are reciprocated, and he gives her a heartfelt reply… And the sound cuts off so we don't hear what he's saying.
What I'm talking about isn't 'well these are shows for teenage boys who think feelings are icky so they don't do romance.' I'm talking about shows that very much have romance as a subplot (sometimes as a main plot!), but that romance is never more than implied. Characters never confess to one another, never go out together or kiss or sleep together. These shows are written with plausible deniability: romance is happening, but in a way that if the cops ask you, you can swear there's no romance and it won't be a lie.
Like - there's this show, right? Where the original work was very much about a budding friendship/romance between the two main characters, and then the sequel set years later has those two characters living together, pretty much raising children together, behaving lovingly towards one another, but they never actually describe each other as a couple, never say they're in love, never kiss, so that even though they're obviously a couple, the story can get away with never making it explicit or official and the writers are free to never commit and answer that they could totally be in a relationship with another character.
Hm? What is that? "But that's not fair, in Nanoha's case it was because of homophobia meaning they couldn't have a lesbian couple be explicitly gay in a show aimed at teenagers?"
Oh, that's just a random picture I found lying around. I was talking about Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.
…
That's it. I am blaming FFVII for it all. It either started the trend or popularized it. Did someone have brainbugs about how implicit romance is somehow more elegant or sophisticated? Does 'I love you' feel too blunt to the writer so they're allergic to it? Or is it all Tifa's fault because she's physically incapable of speaking about her feelings and then a generation of writers went cargo cult on that specific point of characterization regardless of whether or not it made sense for other works and other characters? Or is it all indeed about 'plausible deniability' in the context of shipping, ie of writers wanting to make sure characters are never canonically nailed to one relationship so no, player, you can totally believe that Aerith was Cloud's One True Love and Tifa is just some hussy and she'll never be Cloud's girlfriend because Cloud will forever be faithful to Aerith's memory?
A mix of all of these, I think.
And I hate it.
…
Anyway absent that cultural context it's a really sweet, really romantic scene and the point it's getting at is 'sometimes it's okay to not find the words because you don't need to say it to both know you love each other' is sweet if a little bit dubious, Tifa and Cloud are my perfect blorbos and I love them and want the best for them.
Anyway, backtracking a few hundreds word back, if the line about Tifa asking Cloud if the stars see how hard they're fighting for them strikes you as weird, that's because it is. Cloud and Tifa aren't fighting for the stars, they're fighting for this planet, against a threat from the stars. The stars are, at best, witnesses. The Retranslated mod doesn't have the 'for them' part, just asks if the stars see how hard they're fighting, so I'm guessing the original translator followed through on what he thought was an implication in the JP script that wasn't actually there.
In the morning, Cloud and Tifa head back to the airship. Tifa says such a big airship feels lonely for the both of us (which I take to mean they sent all the airship crew home along with the rest of Avalanche?). Cloud tells her he'll make a 'big enough ruckus' for…
…
Okay, I wasn't originally going to transcribe all this dialogue, but looking it over it turns out this is the biggest cases in the game of the translation's poor quality making an intended emotional beat completely miss because you don't know it's there. So. Here is the dialogue between Tifa and Cloud as they stand in the light of day looking up at the Highwind, then on board:
Cloud: "We'd better go."
Tifa: "But, still…!?"
Cloud: "It'll be all right, Tifa. You said so yourself yesterday. At least we don't have to go on alone."
Tifa: "Yes… That's right!"
Cloud: "Okay! Let's go!"
[On board the Highwind:]
Tifa: "This airship is too big for just the two of us. Yeah, it's a little lonely without everyone."
Cloud: "Don't worry. It'll be okay. I'll make a big enough ruckus for everyone. Besides, I'm the pilot. No more flying around casually like before. We won't have time to feel lonely."
It seems fairly straightforward. Tifa is saying she wants to stay there, to preserve that moment rather than go back to the Highwind and the great struggle against Sephiroth, Cloud tells her it'll be fine because they won't be alone, and he'll make a big enough ruckus for/to draw everyone, ie we're going to pick up the others before heading for the final fight.
Meanwhile, in the Retranslated mod:
Cloud: "It's time."
Tifa: "But the others, they're not…"
Cloud: "It's cool, Tifa. You said so yourself yesterday, remember? We have each other."
Tifa: "Yeah! That's right."
Cloud: "Okay, let's go!"
[On board the Highwind:]
Tifa: "This airship is way too big for just the two of us. It feels so lonely without the others.."
Cloud: "Don't worry. It'll be okay. I'll make a big enough noise for everyone. Besides, I'm the pilot. No flying around casually like before. We won't have time to feel lonely."
Right? That one line by Tifa changes the context completely, as does "It's time" rather than "We better go" - what they're saying is that the clock has run out and the others haven't come back to the Highwind, so they're going to proceed without them and fight Sephiroth on their own. The line about noise/ruckus is thus about Cloud saying he'll make so much noise by himself it'll feel like the others are there.
It's a pretty important beat! The fact that Cloud and Tifa think their friends haven't found it in them to fight for the Planet and that they'll have to do it with just the two of them, and that they think it'll be enough because they have each other, is kind of a big deal! Especially because it sets up the next plot beat coming immediately, as the Highwind stirs to life and starts moving, and Cloud and Tifa rush to the bridge to see what's going on…
Note the deactivated Cait Sith body. Cloud and Tifa pass right by it with the implication that it's been there the whole time and they pay it no mind. This is pretty important because it means that, contra later canon apparently, when Reeve isn't actively piloting it Cait Sith is completely inert rather than semi-autonomous.
…and, of course, it turns out everyone is already on board. Like they'd leave them to fight their greatest enemy and save the planet on their own, right?
The logistics of it are a bit… These characters are from literally across the entire planet. How did they coordinate meeting up and sneaking onto the airship in the middle of the night, like 'we go and pick them up one by one in the Highwind' was so obviously a more natural read, like - I'm thinking too hard about this, it doesn't matter. The point is, everyone is back on board, they introduce themselves one by one, Cloud and Tifa are overjoyed (and somehow surprised) that all their friends are standing by them, Cid makes a joke that clearly implies he and Barret were watching the two lovebirds cuddle in the grass, Tifa is overcome with embarrassment and dramatically falls to her knee like she's been slain on the spot, it's pretty funny.
Poor Tifa.
I will give the game props for one of the rare few good Vincent interactions: as Vincent dramatically enters the scene, Cloud looks surprised, Vincent asks him why he looks so surprised, doesn't he want Vincent to join them, and Cloud responds that he thought Vincent was too cool to care.
Cloud's character has now progressed to the point where he is able to make fun of people who adopt the same attitude he used to have trying to appear above it all. And Vincent looks embarrassed and says he can't help it, his face is just stuck in permanent Resting Bitch Face mode. It's hilarious.
Man, for a game that has so many characters who are introduced as being the coolest motherfuckers alive who don't give a shit about anything, it's genuinely a running theme that the game is making fun of these guys and knocking them down a peg every chance it gets. The game is very clear-eyed about people who try to use style and posture to make up for lacking genuine character or virtue or feelings and how it's ultimately either an empty affect or reflective of a dangerous personality, whether that's Cloud, Sephiroth, Vincent, or to a lesser extent even Reno and Rude.
Then the ship alarms blare out as the ship once again receives the 'Cait Sith signal' that seems to interfere with its controls somehow, and the furry critter stirs to life and approaches the group.
Cait Sith/Reeve explains that he was planning on joining the group as they escaped after the Cannon Raid, but he couldn't 'get away' and ended up being taken in by nice Midgar people, where he is presumably sitting there enjoying their hospitality while remote-controlling the cat toy. It's a nice bit of character closure for Reeve - all this time he was the only Shinra executive who cared about the people of Midgar, and in the end, it's those same Midgar people who take him in and take care of him when he's in need.
(...although while fitting, that idea seems like a mistranslation; in the Retranslated mod Reeve instead says that he wanted to come but had 'too much to do' and that he had the people of Midgar take refuge as a precaution, rather than Midgardians taking him in. This is another of these rare cases where I prefer the English version, accidental though the change may be.)
Although it remains funny how the game insists on making sure Cait Sith and Reeve are NEVER in the same room even after the reveal of…
…
Motherfucker. WE STILL HAVEN'T SEEN MARLENE OR ELMYRA.
Barret's character arc? His final bit of closure as he visits his daughter when everyone is taking a break before the final assault to remind themselves of the human things they care about? The reunion with the daughter we last saw in the Midgar Sequence, who in the meantime was (maybe??) abducted and held hostage? The reunion with Aerith's mother, who has lost her daughter since we last saw her, the very thing she feared most when she first met Cloud?
ENTIRELY OFF-SCREEN.
What is this? What even is this? Was there a bet among the Square devs as to whether or not they could hang an entire character arc off Marlene without showing us Marlene again? Why would you do this? Do they think Elmyra just isn't an important enough character to meet again and talk to about her own loss and grief? I cared about those characters!
I feel bamboozled.
Barret is a good character, and he gets some really strong beats and a compelling arc overall, but man is the game doing him dirty a lot of the time. You couldn't have had a single cutaway to him entering the Gainsborough household and hugging Marlene? You don't even need to create any new models or write dialogue! Literally just reuse existing models and animations for thirty seconds!
No wonder Advent Children thought he didn't matter enough to give him more than an absolutely dripless outfit and a bit role. My man is being downright mistreated, is what.
Speaking of Barret, someone asks where Yuffie is - she's the last missing member of our little coterie - and Barret scoffs. That selfish teenage ninja thief would never risk her hide for something as lofty as a cause. She's not coming, and they should all just be thankful she didn't steal their Materia this time.
So of course this is when Yuffie drops from the ceiling where she was hanging with ninja stealth to the middle of the group and does a bunch of air-punches.
Best girl.
She takes a moment to berate Barret for talking that way about her when she went this far with them even though she gets really sick on airships, then immediately runs off to be sick over the railing in the hall.
Even in her best moments, reality itself insists on bullying Yuffie.
Cloud thanks everyone for being there, and then everyone takes a moment to remember the one who isn't there. The missing friend. The one who didn't make it. Aerith.
Red: "...Although she's not here, she left us a window of opportunity…"
Cid: "We can't let it go on like this."
Cloud: "...Aerith. She was smiling to the end. We can't just let it end with that smile, we have to do something. Let's all go together."
Cloud: "Memories of Aerith… Although she should have returned to the Planet by now, something happened and now she's stuck… We've got to let go of Aerith's memory."
I… don't think there was any hint of 'Aerith's soul is stuck and can't return to the Planet' before. This seems to be another mistranslation - as I alluded to before, I think the translator had the impression that Holy required someone's soul to reach the Planet, whereas in the original it's a much more abstract 'prayer' that must reach the Planet, and in this dialogue scene, it's the 'prayer' that is stuck. It's a pretty significant divergence!
Anyway, that's (nearly) all the tearful reunions done. Now Cloud declare that it's time to settle this once and for all, and to head for the North Cave. Cid makes a weird mention of two levers he hadn't seen before and decides to pull them at random, and the Highwind decloaks as a jet fighter.
Several elements of the outer casing of the Highwind fall away, revealing enormous engines which burn to life, and the Highwind takes off at unprecedented speed - so unprecedented in fact, that Cid is holding on for dear life trying to wrestle the controls (while everyone else is fine), until the airship crew, who also had inexplicably snuck into the ship and hung around in hiding until a dramatically appropriate moment, reveal themselves and rush to his help.
There's such a thing as overdoing these moments of surprise emotional reveals and this is it. The fuck is this airship, a hide-and-seek parlor? Was everyone in simultaneous separate hiding from one another? No, seriously! Barret and Cid were hiding from Cloud and Tifa, Yuffie was hiding from Barret and Cid, the airship crew was hiding from everyone as they came aboard, this is just getting silly.
Anyway. The ship reveals its new engines, they fire, and with the entire crew coming together, the Highwind soars into the sunset.
End of Part 2.
For the non-players, as should be clear by now, not all discs were created equal - Part 2 was shorter than Part 1, and Part 3 is going to be shorter than Part 2. This 'end of part 2' screen doesn't mean there's another ten updates of story and gameplay content and multiple dungeons. We are heading now for the very final dungeon in the game.
Next Time: The end of the gamepfhahahahaha can you imagine? No, of course not.
The third 'disc' (obviously the Steam version doesn't have discs but they kept the exact same separation of parts) also contains everything else, all the optional content we could be tackling now instead of doing it earlier, because, big dramatic speeches notwithstanding, there is nothing keeping us on the rails now - we can just fuck off and do sidequests, as we've always done.
In fact, that is most likely what we're going to be doing, either right away, or as seems typically advised, after backtracking midway through the final dungeon with a bunch of new OP Materia. The Emerald Weapon is out there. The Ruby Weapon, I assume, is… Somewhere. We never did end up clearing that Ancient Forest with the carnivorous plants.
So, we've got some clean-up to do.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: The clean-up.
Last time, we paused before a fork in the road - on one side, the main plot. On the other side, an narratively brief but subjectively time consuming detour by some old décors.
The Shinra Building. Deep pull.
It's a bit awkward because the final confrontation with Shinra we're headed for isn't set in the Shinra Building, so this is just kind of a 'oh, remember when you were there? And how there were all those items you couldn't get the first time around? How about now?' And, indeed, we can bask in the nostalgia and grab a bunch of cool shit:
In the (now deserted) shop, we find the Master Fist, a powerful weapon for Tifa whose deceptively low stats (38 is hilariously outdated) hide the fact that its damage rating is multiplied while under certain status effects - notably, the Curse Ring combo I have her equipped with means she is under 'Death-sentence,' which increases the multiplier of its damage by 2, which if I understand the math at work right, would triple the damage to 114, higher than God's Hand? Unclear if I'm getting right, but if not, it's possible to increase the damage even further by tagging Tifa with a permanent, low-stakes status effect like Sadness from Tranquilizers.
It's not really necessary yet, but we'll keep that possibility in mind for later bosses. Next to it is the 'Pile Banger,' which I am pretty certain is a mistranslation of Pile Bunker, a fantasy weapon mostly featured in mech shows. The Pile Bunker is what I'm going to call a 'Fake Ultimate':
Because it has no Materia Growth.
Earlier in this playthrough, I chanced upon the Supershot ST, a gun for Vincent that is found in an optional late-game area (the jungle), took a look at its statline, and described it as Vincent's ultimate weapon. A couple of people went 'silly Omi, why would you even think that, don't you know that you can recognize ultimate weapons by their lack of Materia growth?' And… Yes, I did. That's why I thought the Supershot ST was an ultimate: it has no Materia growth, and with its 97 Attack rating was, at the time, the second-highest Attack weapon I owned, on par with the Premium Heart. I was told that lack of Materia growth, high damage and unique mechanics were the telltale mark of the ultimates. So I saw a weapon with no Materia growth and crazy high Attack power and drew the natural assumption. And getting talked down to for it has nagged at me ever since now you get this lecture
Anyway the Pile 'Banger' isn't an ultimate weapon, it's just a weapon with high damage that happens to have no Materia growth, we already have the Max Ray, it goes into the trash. Let's move on.
…
Okay. Here's the thing. Let me show you a standard combat encounter in this area:
Grenade Combatant C, Level 10, 130 HP.
They didn't update the encounter table for the Shinra Building. We're fighting the exact same Shinra troops and robots as we were the last time we were here. And the Shinra Building is large; that's a lot of time-wasting random encounters devoid of any stakes or rewards. But that's not all. Let's take a look at the building.
The building is identical, except it's empty. Also, nobody has even cleaned up the Jenova blood trail in all these weeks.
…
FF7 is kinda bad at return trips.
I mean, don't get me wrong. It tries, and it gets points for effort. And there actual rewards that have been snuck in there so that returning through the first locations of the very beginning of the game is rewarding. But in a way, the very ability to retrace our steps back to those places we first visited in the game just highlight how it's all kind of… Hollow. The Slums at least had the unnamed inhabitants with updated dialogue about Meteor, even if it didn't have much else, but the Shinra Building is literally just taking a tour through an empty building to grab some loot. There's nobody. The only characters are outdated guard encounters. There are no employees to lament the state of Shinra or reflect on past events, the upper floors are straight-up locked and inaccessible… (There actually are employees in one of the upper floors, but it's one that we can't access through a locked door, so we can't talk to them.) Mayor Domino is gone, I doubt we'll ever meet him again. I thought we might meet Reeve and get to do a bit with Cait Sith but no, we won't be seeing Reeve here either. We still haven't seen Marlene and Elmyra since our initial escape.
It makes me kinda sad, honestly, I can't really explain why.
Anyway, we grab all the stuff (including going through the 59-floor staircase again for one weapon we won't use), and then take the other way around, and finally land in the streets, above ground. Then the ground quakes, the group turns around, Barret addresses something off-screen with "What the hell is that!!?" and an enormous metal frame lumbers onto the screen.
…Heidegger and Scarlet.
I see this is going to be a comedy battle.
Slight side-note: Palmer just kinda vanished, didn't he? We saw him alive after getting run over by a truck, so he's still alive, but the game seems to have just kind of forgotten what it wanted to do with him, so he vanished off-screen. Which, I mean, he's a bumbling oaf but he's just not quite evil enough compared to Scarlet and Heidegger, so I guess the game just decided to discreetly take him off screen with no explanation. A little annoying, but whatever.
Heidegger and Scarlet greet us from the cockpit of their new and greatest creation, the product of the Weapons and Peace Divisions working together to produce an anti-Weapon weapon: the… "Proud Clod."
Okay. I'll give you that, readers: my confusion at the "Sister Ray" was on me, I totally missed a Velvet Underground reference, shame on me; I'm listening to Heroin as we speak to atone for my sins. So this time, I looked it up. I searched for "Proud Clod," "Proud Clad," "Proudclad" and even "Proud Cloud." And while the best I can get is that the name is meant to be 'Proudclad,' just like its secondary component the 'Jamar Armor' is (obviously, in its case) meant to be the 'Jammer Armor,' I am fairly certain it's not a reference to anything. Rather, I think this is the Japanese writers' attempts at giving this giant mech a badass name as a weapon 'Proud-clad', that is to say 'Proudly Clad,' 'Clad in Pride.' It is armored (clad) in the strongest material and technology Shinra have at their disposal (pride).
That makes sense. 'Proud Clod'... Doesn't.
Anyway, Heidegger and Scarlet have drunk Midgar's entire store of Kool-Aid and fully believe that their new mech can defeat the Weapons and will have an even easier time defeating us (nobody tell them about the Ultima Weapon and the new crater in Cosmo Canyon), and it's time for payback for all their men we killed (Scarlet, who sent them in waves after waves long after it was clear they couldn't stop me?). Cue battle.
Anyway. Proud Clod! It's a four armed robot with a back-mounted railgun, which is incredibly stupid and also incredibly cool.
Proud Clod is mostly a setpiece - it has a ton of HP, which means the fight takes a while, but weak attacks, which means it isn't particularly threatening. It's mostly a chance for it to show off it neat animations, like knee-mounted flamethrower or claw swipes, or its special move where it crouches into a feral stance to point the railgun at us.
However, this super-move charges so slowly that we have ample time to destroy the beast before it launches. The most dangerous thing the Proud Clod does isn't actually done by the Proud Clod but by its Jamar Armor, which exists as an independent entity and has 'Materia Jammer,' an attack which actually casts Reflect on one of our party members - thereby taking advantage of whenever we try to throw up Big Guard or Regen All. Clever! But insufficient. Dragon from space, go.
Proud Clod is defeated.
Scarlet: "No way! This is the Proud Clod?"
The Proud Clod backs away from us and starts to turn towards a white color, which I think is meant to represent it glowing as it is about to explode from excess damage. Then, flash of light…
And it's gone. They leave behind Ragnarok, an old FF staple which here serves as Cloud's sub-ultimate weapon, and the weapon we want to be using instead of Ultima until we have fully leveled up Cloud's Materia.
In case you're wondering, there isn't any explosion VFX, just an increasing light and then the robot vanishing. It's very undercooked, even if the meaning is clear - Heidegger and Scarlet just blew up alongside their over-engineered, over-priced piece of Shinra junk.
A fitting end? They were destroyed by their own arrogance, wielding their own creation, due to their refusal to ever acknowledge defeat or even weakness and their stubborn insistence on fighting us even after we'd proven stronger, even after it was all pointless, even after Rufus was dead, Shinra's army in shambles, their tech base destroyed, Hojo in control of their cannon, and with Sephiroth about to destroy the world.
Instead of being dispatched piecemeal over the course of the game, Scarlet and Heidegger stay the course until the end, where they die for the sole reason that they look at their ultimate anti-Weapon mech, and instead of using it to take down the mad scientist who is right now trying to give Sephiroth one final power boost, they used it to fight us.
They were idiots. Their ending was karmic and appropriate to their character, but ultimately they were never real threats. They lapsed into comedy relief relatively early on, with only the occasional heinous crime like Scarlet personally shooting Barret and Dyne (with an invisible gun, admittedly), and they just… Never posed a serious threat. So when they show up in their Great Value Gundam, it doesn't register as anything more than these two idiots in yet another overhyped junkpile about to meet their end.
Ah, well. Speedbumps on the road to the one man who did earn every ounce of his hatred.
Halfway up the scaffolding leading up to the Cannon, we find a chest. Interacting with it causes Barret to exclaim "Hey! This is…" and then "This is great. Hold on, Hojo!" after it turns out this item is the Missing Score, Barret's ultimate weapon!
I don't know why Barret specifically gets a mini dialogue bit about finding his ultimate weapon, or why he recognizes it, or what 'Missing Score' is supposed to allude to, but, well, there it is. The Missing Score's damage increases based on how much total AP is in all the Materia slotted inside it, with a minimum of 150k being required to outpace the Max Ray he currently has equipped; we clear that easily with just what Barret currently has equipped, and with the extra slots of the Missing Score compared to the Max Ray we could get it three times over… But it would probably take grinding or shenanigans for it to get significantly above that, which is where it would be comparable to the 'strongest' ultimate weapon mechanics like Tifa at full Limit. Eh, I'm not using Barret much anyway, we'll think about it if it comes up for whatever reason.
And then, it's time for the final confrontation with THE WORST CHARACTER IN THIS ENTIRE GAME, THE ONE WHOSE FAULT EVERYTHING IS, THE MAN, THE HORROR, THE CAUTIONARY TALE:
HOOOOOJOOOO.
Hojo: "Oh… the Failure."
Cloud: "At least remember my name! I'm Cloud!"
Hojo: "Every time I see you… It pains me that I had so little scientific sense…"
Hojo: "I saw you as a failed project. But, you're the only one that succeeded as a Sephiroth-clone. Heh, heh, heh… I'm even beginning to hate myself."
Cloud: "None of that matters… just stop this nonsense!"
Hojo: "...Nonsense? Oh, this? Ha, ha, ha… Sephiroth seems to be counting on the energy. So I'm going to lend him a hand."
Cloud: "Why!? Why do that!?"
Hojo: "Quit asking why, you moron. Hmm… Actually, you might make a good scientist."
Okay, Hojo scoffing at Cloud for asking stupid question and then catching himself going 'wait, that's what science is about to be about, kinda forgot that for a second' is pretty funny.
Hojo: "Energy level is at… 83%. It's taking too long. My son needs power and help. …That's the only reason."
Cloud: "...Your son?"
Hojo: "Ha, ha, ha… But he doesn't know it. Ha, ha, ha… HA, HA, HA!!"
Hojo: "What will Sephiroth think when he finds out I'm his father? He always looks down on me. HA, HA, HA!!"
Cloud: "Sephiroth is your son!?"
Vincent: "...!"
Hojo: "Ha, ha, ha… I offered the woman with my child to Professor Gast's Jenova Project. When Sephiroth was still in her womb, we took Jenova's cells… HA, HA, HA!!"
Vincent: "You……!"
Cloud: "I can't believe you're the one who did this… Illusionary crime against Sephiroth…"
Hojo: "Hee, hee, hee! No you're wrong! It's my desire as a scientist! Hee, hee, hee!"
Vincent: "I was… wrong. The one who should have slept was…" [Points dramatically; battle music engages] "You, Hojo!"
…wait, why are we acting like this is all news to us?
Oh, right. Because Vincent's cave is completely optional. We can just miss that whole bit of storytelling, and the game's dialogue trees aren't that modular, so they just talk as if we hadn't seen any of it.
On the one hand, it's… good… That this whole bit of the story isn't as missable as I had believed at first; most of what's found in Lucrecia's Cave is actually conveyed through dialogue after all! On the other hand it's frustrating that everyone is pretending that didn't happen because it's sealed in the Optional Content Dimension.
I do appreciate that we have Hojo actually making the 'Sephiroth despises Hojo not knowing that Hojo is his own father' angle explicit, though, and stating that he's doing this as the closest thing he can imagine to a loving gesture from a father (and then immediately contradicting it by saying 'no it's about science I am totally a rational scientist without attachment I swear). That line about 'This illusionary crime against Sephiroth' is such total nonsense I have no idea how it even got there - the Retranslated mod has it instead as Cloud asking if this is Hojo's way of atoning for what he did to Sephiroth, turning him into a science experiment and denying him a human life, but of course Hojo doesn't care about that.
Still, it means we get Vincent some closure. It's two sentences, because this character is as undercooked as a steak tartare, but it's something; it means he now sees Lucrecia's fate wasn't his fault, but entirely Hojo's, and that Hojo was the one who deserved punishment for his sins. It's not much, but it's something. He had an arc, it's resolved now.
God, imagine if we hadn't taken him on. He wouldn't even get that much.
Anyway, Hojo cackles and declares he's done as any good Lovecraftian scientist gone mad would and injected himself with Jenova cells, cue battle.
…oh, we're doing Dr Lugae again.
Dr Lugae? Remember him? Final Fantasy IV mad scientist who ordered the death of Edge's kingdom and turned his parents into horrible mutant monsters? He takes to the field as a Dr Willy-lookalike fighting alongside his experimental subjects and then turns himself into a horrible robot zombie when we beat him? Yeah, Hojo is doing exactly that, I'm certain it's an intentional reference. And he's starting the fight with an unhealthy green hue.
Hojo summons two 'Sample' monsters from capsules, Pokémon-like.
…wait, Pokémon Red and Green had come out in Japan by 1997. Not in the US and Europe, where they waited (as Red and Blue) until '98 and '99, but in Japan they came out as early as '96, a full year before FF7. So this actually could be a direct homage, Hojo tossing out capsules and monsters popping out of them?
Hojo in his scientist form is literally just a wheezy scientist, so he has no attack and no magic, all he does is toss out more monsters if we kill either of those two, so we just go max damage on his ass until it finally forces his Jenova cells into activations and he takes on his monster form.
Oh yeah baby, that's the stuff.
This form is named 'Helletic Hojo,' which I am 99% sure is a misrendering of what is supposed to be 'Heretic Hojo,' for his crimes against the natural order. And this is a lovingly designed monster - you can see Hojo's features, his hair, the way his body has been stretched out horribly and deformed. It's great. And again, that Resident Evil aesthetic with the exposed ribs and tumorous flesh and exposed, oversized heart - good stuff.
Hojo is a multi-part boss, whose bloated left and right arm are game entities with their own attacks. He uses a number of status effects and Bio magic. Destroying his arms actually results in his model falling over, showing the damage dealt to him.
In a way, Hojo is the true antagonist of the game, the man who not only set everything into motion but kept it into motion at every possible turn, every time, even when he didn't know he was doing it. And that's reflected in the level of care that goes into his boss fight, with multiple forms, a complex articulated model that shows damage, and a custom animation when this monster form falls… And turns into his final form.
Which follows Frieza Rules.
You know what Frieza Rules are. The bad guy starts off with a 'casual', normal form, then turns into a monstrous form that's either huge and buff or monstrous and hideous (Frieza has both in Form 2 and Form 3 respectively), and then just when you think his final form is going to turn even huger it turns out his final form is actually a simple, unassuming, humanoid shape.
That is 'Lifeform-Hojo NA,' Hojo's final form. I am pretty sure this is either referencing, or drawing from the same pool as, the term 'Ultimate Lifeform,' a phrase that I've seen used repeatedly in Japanese media (most notably in Sonic Adventure 2)? This is the apex of Hojo's transformation, a hovering, faceless, cyborg-like being. It uses combo strings, deploying status effects like Silence (which actually does suck, because it disables all my magic and summons and leaves my character to just use raw Attacks until I cure them) and following them up with physical attacks. I like him. Conceptually, this whole string of boss forms is one of my favorite in the game.
Doesn't mean it's any trouble dealing with, of course.
AM I HURTING AM I SAD, SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO, I'VE FORGOTTEN HOW TO TELL, DID I EVER EVEN KNOW-
Even taking it relatively easy and not pulling out the big guns so I can see more of Hojo's moves, he's not much to write home about. Still a really cool fight, though.
And there it is. Final Fantasy VII's ultimate monster, its most hateful antagonist, more loathsome than Sephiroth, Jenova, or Rufus Shinra could ever hope to be, has fallen.
Like any good mad scientist, he is survived by the consequences of his actions. First we kill the father; then, the son. Sephiroth exists as the wound this man dealt upon the world, the tragic aftermath of his evil.
With Shinra's executives fallen and Hojo dead, it's all that remains for us to deal with.
The group gathers again on the deck of the Highwind, and it's time for perhaps the most important speech in the game - basically the story's thesis statement.
Cait Sith: "Shinra's… finished."
Red: "Meteor's gonna fall in about… Seven more days. That's what Grandfather said."
Cloud: "Red XIII… You want to see everyone in Cosmo Canyon again?"
Red: "...Yes."
Cloud: [Turning to Barret] "You want to see Marlene, right?"
Barret: "Don't ask me that."
Cloud: "We'll beat Sephiroth… Then, if we don't release the power of Holy in seven days… There won't be a Planet left to protect."
Cloud: "If we can't beat Sephiroth… It's as good as death for us. We'll just go a few days sooner than the rest who'll die from Meteor."
Barret: "Don't think you're gonna lose before ya even fight!"
Cloud: "No! What I meant was… What are we all fighting for? I want us all to understand that. Save the Planet… for the future of the Planet… Sure, that's all fine. But really, is that how it is?"
Cloud: "For me, this is a personal feud. I want to beat Sephiroth and settle my past. Saving the Planet just happens to be part of that."
Cloud: "I've been thinking. I think we all are fighting for ourselves. For ourselves… And that someone… something… whatever it is, that's important to us. That's what we're fighting for. That's why we keep up this battle for the Planet."
Barret: "You're right… It sounds cool sayin' it's to save the Planet. But I was the one who blew up that Mako reactor… Lookin' back on it now, I can see that wasn't the right way to do things. I made a lot of friends and innocent bystanders suffer…"
Barret: …At first, it was revenge against Shinra. For attackin' my town. But now… Yeah. I'm fightin' for Marlene."
Cloud: "For Marlene… For Marlene's future… Yeah… I guess I want to save the Planet for Marlene's sake…"
Cloud: "Go and see her. Make sure you're right, and come back." [He turns to the others.] "All of you. Get off the ship and find your reasons for yourselves. I want you to make sure. Then I want you to come back."
Cid: "Maybe ain't none of us'll come back. Meteor's gonna kill us all anyway. Let's just forget any of this useless struggling!"
Cloud: "I know why I'm fighting. I'm fighting to save the Planet, and that's that. But besides that, there's something personal, too… A very personal memory that I have. What about you all? I want you all to find that something within yourselves. If you don't find it, then that's okay, too. You can't fight without a reason, right? So, I won't hold it against you if you don't come back."
Fade to black.
Man. There's a lot to unpack there.
First, to get the trivial stuff out of the way: It's very funny that Bugenhagen can randomly give us an exact time table to Meteor killing everyone, it's such an arbitrary number as 'seven days', and this isn't reflected in the gameplay anymore than it was before - we can go breed chocobos all we want, time won't advance. This is such a weird attempt at raising the stakes and drawing a clear timeline in a game that is hurt by it far more than it is helped.
(Everyone takes a moment to remember 'No all of FFXIV expacs included totally took place in less than a year.')
More importantly…
Cloud saying that they're fighting to save the Planet, but also something more, is such an important thing for the themes of the game (and also kinda messy and not totally working). When Barret says that 'saving the Planet' is a nice thing to say, a cool abstract idea, but that in truth people are fighting for things close to them, things they personally care about, that's really important. It's the heart of Final Fantasy VII: Its cast of characters with complex personalities and interpersonal dynamics, who have loved and lost, who each have their own narrative arc, most of whom are defined in some way both by something they lost (Cloud and Tifa everything, Barret his hometown, Yuffie the glory days of a free Wutai, Vincent the woman he loved, Cid his dream of space, Nanaki his parents) and by what they found again.
It's a very human game. Sure, we're fighting to save the living, sentient planet from the threat of Space Satan destroying the world, but none of that means anything if at the end of the day that world doesn't have someone or something we care about in it.
…it's imperfect, of course. While Cloud asks everyone to find the thing they're fighting for, he leaves this an open-ended question that doesn't receive an answer except from Barret, Mister "I Have One Thing In This World I Hold Dear And Have Been Bringing Up Continuously For The Whole Game" Man himself.
Meanwhile, huh. Yuffie is fighting for Wutai, her father, and her own future as the youngest member of the cast, sure. Red is fighting for his grandfather and all of Cosmo Canyon where everyone he cares about lives, no problem. Cait Sith/Reeve is fighting for… 'Midgar'? 'The citizens of Midgar'? Yeah, let's go with that. Cid is fighting for… Shera..? Vincent… Nope, I give up, Vincent's got nothing. He didn't even get any kind of 'You guys are the friends I made along the way who give me hope life is worth living again' arc; he found out what happened to Lucrecia, killed Hojo, avenged her, and hasn't found anything else in that time.
If you do go with the somewhat off-text read that Sephiroth might actually be Vincent's son rather than Hojo, and Hojo is just deluded about it, then this is about Vincent killing the son that he put into the world and who is now threatening to destroy it as part of his atonement… No, I don't think that works.
Yeah, once again, FF7's characters aren't all created equal. It's still doing much better in this department than VI (remember Umaro?), but it's uneven in a way that it has to consciously navigate around in big thematic moments like this.
Third: This is the moment where I truly bought that Cloud is the leader. Not just the guy thrusted into a position of authorship because he is very driven (by revenge), has a clear objective (kill Sephiroth), is stronger in a fight than anyone else, and also is kinda hot and everyone kind of has a crush on him. No, this Cloud here is the one who has finally got his shit together, he's come to terms with his trauma and grief, he's charismatic, he talks well, he understands people's hearts, he's gotten over his social anxiety. This is a leader speech, and he does it well. This, I think, rather than killing Sephiroth, is the climax of his character arc - killing Sephiroth will merely be the denouement. It's really good.
Fourth and final:
Barret what are you doing lmao.
No, like, I get it - early game triumphalism aside, it's been a running undercurrent ever since the Corel Prison arc that maybe blowing up civilian infrastructure in the middle of a crowded city in an act of actual, literal terrorism wasn't something Barret was doing solely for the Planet's sake and was maybe a little fucked up. It turns out FFVII isn't pro-ecoterrorism after all, it just took its time telling its story about why it was wrong. Which is a more conventional conclusion to come to, for sure.
At the same time… Shinra was literally killing the Planet. Mako is literally, not figuratively, the Planet's lifeforce. There's an actual alien invader trying to take over the world and Shinra was helping it along by shoving its cells into people. What was Avalanche supposed to do, defeat Shinra at the ballot box? Midgar is a corporate dictatorship conducting imperialist wars for economic control of the world! What was the correct course of action, then?
I mean, we know what it was: Eschewing terrorism in favor of conducting small-unit tactics raids on Shinra infrastructure to disable it from within and conducting assassinations of corporate leadership until the whole structure collapsed. This fulfilled the operating objective (total destruction of Shinra as an organization) while avoiding civilian casualties (but killing a shitton of Shinra soldiers along the way). I am not sure how applicable that lesson is to the real world, though.
Final Fantasy VII: Does not endorse Sea Shepherd. Does endorse the Rote Armee Fraction.
Anyway. With all this said and done, and everyone having left the ship, there's only two people left aboard: Cloud, and the only other character that the game acknowledges (unlike Vincent) as having nothing to fight for.
Cloud and Tifa, the orphans of Nibelheim. Tifa, who lost everyone she knew and cared about five years ago in the Nibelheim Incident, and then lost almost everyone she'd found since then rebuilding her life in the Sector 7 Plate Collapse. She doesn't have anyone or anything to fight for beyond… Well, all the other characters in the game. And first and foremost of all, Cloud.
They put down the airship in some patch of land outside… Somewhere, wherever that is, so they can talk to each other, alone.
Tifa asks Cloud if he thinks everyone will come back, and he says he isn't sure - everyone else has something precious to them, but their opponent is overwhelming. Then Tifa tells him it's okay even if no one else comes back: as long as Cloud is by her side, she'll never give up.
Could this be? Could Tifa get over her unbearable inability to speak about her feelings and honestly say she's in love with Cloud?
Cloud: "..."
Cloud: "Tifa…"
Tifa: "No matter how close we are now… We were far apart before."
Tifa: "But when we were in the Lifestream surrounded by all those screams of anguish, I thought I heard your voice…"
[She closes her eyes and inclines her head.]
Tifa: "...sniff… You probably don't remember this… But deep in my heart I heard you calling my name… Or at least I thought I did…"
Cloud: "Yeah… I heard you calling me. You were calling me back from the consciousness of the Lifestream."
Cloud: "After all, I promised that if anything ever happened to you, I'd come to help."
Tifa: "Cloud…? Do you think the stars can hear us? Do you think they see how hard we're fighting for them?"
Cloud: "I dunno… But… Whether or not they can, we still have to do what we can. And believe in ourselves… Someday we'll find the answer. That's what I learned from you when I was in the Lifestream."
Cloud: "Yes… That's right…"
Cloud: "Hey Tifa… I… There were so many things I wanted to say to you. But now that we're together like this, I don't know what to say… I guess nothing's changed at all… Funny, isn't it?"
Tifa: "Cloud… Words aren't the only thing that tell people what you're thinking…"
Cloud: "..."
Tifa: "H, huh?"
Cloud: "Sorry. Did I wake you? It's almost dawn, Tifa."
Tifa: "Umm… Just a little longer… A little bit longer…"
Tifa: "This day will never come again… So let me have this moment…"
Cloud: "Sure… This might be the last time we'll ever be together…"
[Fade again.]
…
Did Tifa and Cloud have sex?
No, like - the cinematic language at work here is pretty well trod: Two characters are sharing a moment of romantic realization that they both like each other, one of them says something that kind of trails off, a fade to black to preserve modesty, and then we open on them, later in the night or before the break down, lying in bed next to one another. Now, of course Cloud and Tifa aren't in bed, and they're fully clothed, but this is still some really evocative visual language that's being used here.
"Omi, what are you talking about, they clearly just spent the night talking to each other and Tifa fell asleep against Cloud's shoulder, it's very cute but nobody would think sex happened here!"
Really? Really?
PEOPLE HAVE BEEN ARGUING ABOUT THIS FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS.
And the answers people give seem to tie into Shipping Wars pretty heavily. Like some of these links up there aren't just saying "don't be dumb, they're fully clothed and just cuddling," they're arguing that this scene wasn't even romantic in nature and Cloud and Tifa are just good friends, which is an egregious refusal of the truth laid out before your eyes, presumably because you are a die-hard Cloud/Aerith shipper.
But no. This is probably reading too much into it. Cloud and Tifa didn't, in fact, have sex in the grass on the hill next to the Highwind at the end of Disc 2. Why would I say that? For the same reason that the person in that screenshot can argue it's not actually a romantic scene.
Because what I have just now realized is that Final Fantasy VII is Patient Zero.
All my childhood and teenage years, I've run into this slightly baffling thing where romantic relationships in a number of manga, anime and Japanese games (not all, of course, there's always been an actual romance genre, but that wasn't what I was reading) existed in implication. Where characters who have an implicitly romantic relationship still never say the words 'I love you' or share a kiss. Like, Bleach has a scene in which Orihime confesses her love to Ichigo… while he's unconscious and can't hear her, and then the subject is never broached again for 400+ more chapters until we find out they have kids in the epilogue. Anzu and Yugi go on a single Friend Date in one episode and then never become a couple in the entire show. In the very last episode of Sonic X, Amy asks Sonic if her feelings for him are reciprocated, and he gives her a heartfelt reply… And the sound cuts off so we don't hear what he's saying.
What I'm talking about isn't 'well these are shows for teenage boys who think feelings are icky so they don't do romance.' I'm talking about shows that very much have romance as a subplot (sometimes as a main plot!), but that romance is never more than implied. Characters never confess to one another, never go out together or kiss or sleep together. These shows are written with plausible deniability: romance is happening, but in a way that if the cops ask you, you can swear there's no romance and it won't be a lie.
Like - there's this show, right? Where the original work was very much about a budding friendship/romance between the two main characters, and then the sequel set years later has those two characters living together, pretty much raising children together, behaving lovingly towards one another, but they never actually describe each other as a couple, never say they're in love, never kiss, so that even though they're obviously a couple, the story can get away with never making it explicit or official and the writers are free to never commit and answer that they could totally be in a relationship with another character.
Hm? What is that? "But that's not fair, in Nanoha's case it was because of homophobia meaning they couldn't have a lesbian couple be explicitly gay in a show aimed at teenagers?"
Oh, that's just a random picture I found lying around. I was talking about Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.
…
That's it. I am blaming FFVII for it all. It either started the trend or popularized it. Did someone have brainbugs about how implicit romance is somehow more elegant or sophisticated? Does 'I love you' feel too blunt to the writer so they're allergic to it? Or is it all Tifa's fault because she's physically incapable of speaking about her feelings and then a generation of writers went cargo cult on that specific point of characterization regardless of whether or not it made sense for other works and other characters? Or is it all indeed about 'plausible deniability' in the context of shipping, ie of writers wanting to make sure characters are never canonically nailed to one relationship so no, player, you can totally believe that Aerith was Cloud's One True Love and Tifa is just some hussy and she'll never be Cloud's girlfriend because Cloud will forever be faithful to Aerith's memory?
A mix of all of these, I think.
And I hate it.
…
Anyway absent that cultural context it's a really sweet, really romantic scene and the point it's getting at is 'sometimes it's okay to not find the words because you don't need to say it to both know you love each other' is sweet if a little bit dubious, Tifa and Cloud are my perfect blorbos and I love them and want the best for them.
Anyway, backtracking a few hundreds word back, if the line about Tifa asking Cloud if the stars see how hard they're fighting for them strikes you as weird, that's because it is. Cloud and Tifa aren't fighting for the stars, they're fighting for this planet, against a threat from the stars. The stars are, at best, witnesses. The Retranslated mod doesn't have the 'for them' part, just asks if the stars see how hard they're fighting, so I'm guessing the original translator followed through on what he thought was an implication in the JP script that wasn't actually there.
In the morning, Cloud and Tifa head back to the airship. Tifa says such a big airship feels lonely for the both of us (which I take to mean they sent all the airship crew home along with the rest of Avalanche?). Cloud tells her he'll make a 'big enough ruckus' for…
…
Okay, I wasn't originally going to transcribe all this dialogue, but looking it over it turns out this is the biggest cases in the game of the translation's poor quality making an intended emotional beat completely miss because you don't know it's there. So. Here is the dialogue between Tifa and Cloud as they stand in the light of day looking up at the Highwind, then on board:
Cloud: "We'd better go."
Tifa: "But, still…!?"
Cloud: "It'll be all right, Tifa. You said so yourself yesterday. At least we don't have to go on alone."
Tifa: "Yes… That's right!"
Cloud: "Okay! Let's go!"
[On board the Highwind:]
Tifa: "This airship is too big for just the two of us. Yeah, it's a little lonely without everyone."
Cloud: "Don't worry. It'll be okay. I'll make a big enough ruckus for everyone. Besides, I'm the pilot. No more flying around casually like before. We won't have time to feel lonely."
It seems fairly straightforward. Tifa is saying she wants to stay there, to preserve that moment rather than go back to the Highwind and the great struggle against Sephiroth, Cloud tells her it'll be fine because they won't be alone, and he'll make a big enough ruckus for/to draw everyone, ie we're going to pick up the others before heading for the final fight.
Meanwhile, in the Retranslated mod:
Cloud: "It's time."
Tifa: "But the others, they're not…"
Cloud: "It's cool, Tifa. You said so yourself yesterday, remember? We have each other."
Tifa: "Yeah! That's right."
Cloud: "Okay, let's go!"
[On board the Highwind:]
Tifa: "This airship is way too big for just the two of us. It feels so lonely without the others.."
Cloud: "Don't worry. It'll be okay. I'll make a big enough noise for everyone. Besides, I'm the pilot. No flying around casually like before. We won't have time to feel lonely."
Right? That one line by Tifa changes the context completely, as does "It's time" rather than "We better go" - what they're saying is that the clock has run out and the others haven't come back to the Highwind, so they're going to proceed without them and fight Sephiroth on their own. The line about noise/ruckus is thus about Cloud saying he'll make so much noise by himself it'll feel like the others are there.
It's a pretty important beat! The fact that Cloud and Tifa think their friends haven't found it in them to fight for the Planet and that they'll have to do it with just the two of them, and that they think it'll be enough because they have each other, is kind of a big deal! Especially because it sets up the next plot beat coming immediately, as the Highwind stirs to life and starts moving, and Cloud and Tifa rush to the bridge to see what's going on…
Note the deactivated Cait Sith body. Cloud and Tifa pass right by it with the implication that it's been there the whole time and they pay it no mind. This is pretty important because it means that, contra later canon apparently, when Reeve isn't actively piloting it Cait Sith is completely inert rather than semi-autonomous.
…and, of course, it turns out everyone is already on board. Like they'd leave them to fight their greatest enemy and save the planet on their own, right?
The logistics of it are a bit… These characters are from literally across the entire planet. How did they coordinate meeting up and sneaking onto the airship in the middle of the night, like 'we go and pick them up one by one in the Highwind' was so obviously a more natural read, like - I'm thinking too hard about this, it doesn't matter. The point is, everyone is back on board, they introduce themselves one by one, Cloud and Tifa are overjoyed (and somehow surprised) that all their friends are standing by them, Cid makes a joke that clearly implies he and Barret were watching the two lovebirds cuddle in the grass, Tifa is overcome with embarrassment and dramatically falls to her knee like she's been slain on the spot, it's pretty funny.
Poor Tifa.
I will give the game props for one of the rare few good Vincent interactions: as Vincent dramatically enters the scene, Cloud looks surprised, Vincent asks him why he looks so surprised, doesn't he want Vincent to join them, and Cloud responds that he thought Vincent was too cool to care.
Cloud's character has now progressed to the point where he is able to make fun of people who adopt the same attitude he used to have trying to appear above it all. And Vincent looks embarrassed and says he can't help it, his face is just stuck in permanent Resting Bitch Face mode. It's hilarious.
Man, for a game that has so many characters who are introduced as being the coolest motherfuckers alive who don't give a shit about anything, it's genuinely a running theme that the game is making fun of these guys and knocking them down a peg every chance it gets. The game is very clear-eyed about people who try to use style and posture to make up for lacking genuine character or virtue or feelings and how it's ultimately either an empty affect or reflective of a dangerous personality, whether that's Cloud, Sephiroth, Vincent, or to a lesser extent even Reno and Rude.
Then the ship alarms blare out as the ship once again receives the 'Cait Sith signal' that seems to interfere with its controls somehow, and the furry critter stirs to life and approaches the group.
Cait Sith/Reeve explains that he was planning on joining the group as they escaped after the Cannon Raid, but he couldn't 'get away' and ended up being taken in by nice Midgar people, where he is presumably sitting there enjoying their hospitality while remote-controlling the cat toy. It's a nice bit of character closure for Reeve - all this time he was the only Shinra executive who cared about the people of Midgar, and in the end, it's those same Midgar people who take him in and take care of him when he's in need.
(...although while fitting, that idea seems like a mistranslation; in the Retranslated mod Reeve instead says that he wanted to come but had 'too much to do' and that he had the people of Midgar take refuge as a precaution, rather than Midgardians taking him in. This is another of these rare cases where I prefer the English version, accidental though the change may be.)
Although it remains funny how the game insists on making sure Cait Sith and Reeve are NEVER in the same room even after the reveal of…
…
Motherfucker. WE STILL HAVEN'T SEEN MARLENE OR ELMYRA.
Barret's character arc? His final bit of closure as he visits his daughter when everyone is taking a break before the final assault to remind themselves of the human things they care about? The reunion with the daughter we last saw in the Midgar Sequence, who in the meantime was (maybe??) abducted and held hostage? The reunion with Aerith's mother, who has lost her daughter since we last saw her, the very thing she feared most when she first met Cloud?
ENTIRELY OFF-SCREEN.
What is this? What even is this? Was there a bet among the Square devs as to whether or not they could hang an entire character arc off Marlene without showing us Marlene again? Why would you do this? Do they think Elmyra just isn't an important enough character to meet again and talk to about her own loss and grief? I cared about those characters!
I feel bamboozled.
Barret is a good character, and he gets some really strong beats and a compelling arc overall, but man is the game doing him dirty a lot of the time. You couldn't have had a single cutaway to him entering the Gainsborough household and hugging Marlene? You don't even need to create any new models or write dialogue! Literally just reuse existing models and animations for thirty seconds!
No wonder Advent Children thought he didn't matter enough to give him more than an absolutely dripless outfit and a bit role. My man is being downright mistreated, is what.
Speaking of Barret, someone asks where Yuffie is - she's the last missing member of our little coterie - and Barret scoffs. That selfish teenage ninja thief would never risk her hide for something as lofty as a cause. She's not coming, and they should all just be thankful she didn't steal their Materia this time.
So of course this is when Yuffie drops from the ceiling where she was hanging with ninja stealth to the middle of the group and does a bunch of air-punches.
Best girl.
She takes a moment to berate Barret for talking that way about her when she went this far with them even though she gets really sick on airships, then immediately runs off to be sick over the railing in the hall.
Even in her best moments, reality itself insists on bullying Yuffie.
Cloud thanks everyone for being there, and then everyone takes a moment to remember the one who isn't there. The missing friend. The one who didn't make it. Aerith.
Red: "...Although she's not here, she left us a window of opportunity…"
Cid: "We can't let it go on like this."
Cloud: "...Aerith. She was smiling to the end. We can't just let it end with that smile, we have to do something. Let's all go together."
Cloud: "Memories of Aerith… Although she should have returned to the Planet by now, something happened and now she's stuck… We've got to let go of Aerith's memory."
I… don't think there was any hint of 'Aerith's soul is stuck and can't return to the Planet' before. This seems to be another mistranslation - as I alluded to before, I think the translator had the impression that Holy required someone's soul to reach the Planet, whereas in the original it's a much more abstract 'prayer' that must reach the Planet, and in this dialogue scene, it's the 'prayer' that is stuck. It's a pretty significant divergence!
Anyway, that's (nearly) all the tearful reunions done. Now Cloud declare that it's time to settle this once and for all, and to head for the North Cave. Cid makes a weird mention of two levers he hadn't seen before and decides to pull them at random, and the Highwind decloaks as a jet fighter.
Several elements of the outer casing of the Highwind fall away, revealing enormous engines which burn to life, and the Highwind takes off at unprecedented speed - so unprecedented in fact, that Cid is holding on for dear life trying to wrestle the controls (while everyone else is fine), until the airship crew, who also had inexplicably snuck into the ship and hung around in hiding until a dramatically appropriate moment, reveal themselves and rush to his help.
There's such a thing as overdoing these moments of surprise emotional reveals and this is it. The fuck is this airship, a hide-and-seek parlor? Was everyone in simultaneous separate hiding from one another? No, seriously! Barret and Cid were hiding from Cloud and Tifa, Yuffie was hiding from Barret and Cid, the airship crew was hiding from everyone as they came aboard, this is just getting silly.
Anyway. The ship reveals its new engines, they fire, and with the entire crew coming together, the Highwind soars into the sunset.
End of Part 2.
For the non-players, as should be clear by now, not all discs were created equal - Part 2 was shorter than Part 1, and Part 3 is going to be shorter than Part 2. This 'end of part 2' screen doesn't mean there's another ten updates of story and gameplay content and multiple dungeons. We are heading now for the very final dungeon in the game.
Next Time: The end of the gamepfhahahahaha can you imagine? No, of course not.
The third 'disc' (obviously the Steam version doesn't have discs but they kept the exact same separation of parts) also contains everything else, all the optional content we could be tackling now instead of doing it earlier, because, big dramatic speeches notwithstanding, there is nothing keeping us on the rails now - we can just fuck off and do sidequests, as we've always done.
In fact, that is most likely what we're going to be doing, either right away, or as seems typically advised, after backtracking midway through the final dungeon with a bunch of new OP Materia. The Emerald Weapon is out there. The Ruby Weapon, I assume, is… Somewhere. We never did end up clearing that Ancient Forest with the carnivorous plants.
So, we've got some clean-up to do.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: The clean-up.
- Location
- the Republic
- Pronouns
- He/They
The Turks did villainy for a paycheck, the Shinra execs did it for power, Don Corneo did it because he's a pervert, and Sephiroth is doing it for his 'mother'... but only one man did it all JUST FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME.
Hats off to the best FF villain so far. Rest in piss, Hojo.
Hats off to the best FF villain so far. Rest in piss, Hojo.
- Location
- Amman, Jordan
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
All I can think of after hearing that name is this:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g25S5X5SOOE
Team
- Pronouns
- He/Him
@Omicron: There was a second ultimate weapon in this sequence, for Cait Sith, that you seem to have missed. You can actually find it twice: the first time you visit Shinra HQ, and here. First time through, Cloud goes 'Why the hell would I want a megaphone?' and puts it back. Second time through you can collect it; it, like Ultima Weapon, scales based on Cait Sith's HP.
It's in the lockers in the exercise room.
Yes, they're interactable. Yes, there's more than just Cait's weapon in them. Yes, you could've gotten all of that stuff back on Disc 1.
I would strongly recommend doing the Ancient Forest before anything else, if for no other reason than getting the single best piece of AP boosting gear in the game, a sword for Cloud with three triple AP materia slots and very solid attack power. I prefer it to either Ultima or Ragnarok in almost all situations bar Battle Square or the final boss.
Barret's Missing Score is one of two weapons that can trigger an overflow glitch in the game allowing you to instantly defeat any enemy in the game bar one, but as that requires an absolutely tremendous amount of grinding to achieve (like, 8 mastered copies of Knights) it's not a concern.
What is relevant:
1. Missing Score is relatively easy to power up by doing something you'd do anyway;
2. It provides a very large synergistic stat boost to Magic atop of the stat boosts that come from the materia so that Barret becomes quite a strong spellcaster;
3. Barret's physical attacks will scale with how strong a caster you make him, so he's now good at both;
4. What governs its attack strength can't be reduced in battle (unlike Ultima or Premium Heart, for example);
5. Because you can boost Missing Score beyond the power of every other weapon in the game bar one, Barret becomes one of the easiest characters to hit for 9s with even if you have a damage reduction in play;
6. Barret has a L3 limit break that hits 18 times, which gives him the highest possible damage output of anyone in the game. There's only one other 18-hit LB and it's a L4 one, Cloud's Omnislash is 15 hits and L4, and Yuffie's Doom of the Living is L3 but also only 15 hits.
It's in the lockers in the exercise room.
Yes, they're interactable. Yes, there's more than just Cait's weapon in them. Yes, you could've gotten all of that stuff back on Disc 1.
I would strongly recommend doing the Ancient Forest before anything else, if for no other reason than getting the single best piece of AP boosting gear in the game, a sword for Cloud with three triple AP materia slots and very solid attack power. I prefer it to either Ultima or Ragnarok in almost all situations bar Battle Square or the final boss.
Barret's Missing Score is one of two weapons that can trigger an overflow glitch in the game allowing you to instantly defeat any enemy in the game bar one, but as that requires an absolutely tremendous amount of grinding to achieve (like, 8 mastered copies of Knights) it's not a concern.
What is relevant:
1. Missing Score is relatively easy to power up by doing something you'd do anyway;
2. It provides a very large synergistic stat boost to Magic atop of the stat boosts that come from the materia so that Barret becomes quite a strong spellcaster;
3. Barret's physical attacks will scale with how strong a caster you make him, so he's now good at both;
4. What governs its attack strength can't be reduced in battle (unlike Ultima or Premium Heart, for example);
5. Because you can boost Missing Score beyond the power of every other weapon in the game bar one, Barret becomes one of the easiest characters to hit for 9s with even if you have a damage reduction in play;
6. Barret has a L3 limit break that hits 18 times, which gives him the highest possible damage output of anyone in the game. There's only one other 18-hit LB and it's a L4 one, Cloud's Omnislash is 15 hits and L4, and Yuffie's Doom of the Living is L3 but also only 15 hits.
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