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

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Xero Key said:
…Well, that's another mark on my Kingdom Hearts headcanon, especially once I read what Tiferet's domains were.

However, I can see one reason why the Remnants aren't named for the sephirot: it never occurred to anyone to make such a reference. Remember that Sephiroth was only given his name because The Fiend of VI was not named Sephirot, something that would eventually be fixed in XIV. I would bet money no one at Square was even aware of the sephirot heirarchy.
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Also Neon Genesis Evangelion was now much further back in the rearview mirror (and Rebuild two years ahead) so "random sprinkling of Jewish and Christian namedumps on random people and things" was no longer in vogue, even if it still popped up on occasion in the Xeno metafranchise and Tales of the Abyss
 
Thozmp said:
Also, those things are huge. Like baseball sized, how did they fit into arm bands? Or Tifa's glove type weapons? Like, maybe one or two, four if you really push it, but trying to fit eight on one piece of equipment?
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Because they merge into the weapons when combined. Like, materia are still softball-sized in Remake when they had every opportunity to make them smaller if complete adherence to logistics were a requirement, but materia slots are still just as small - in fact Sephiroth's updated design has a sort of amulet hanging from his belt with seven full materia slots, but they're such small coloured dots in slotted form that nobody actually noticed until his model got ripped. Also materia are quite literally magic, formed of condensed and crystallised Magic Juice, so I find that an entirely reasonable assumption.
 
I once again have to bring up the maybe true internet anecdote that Sakaguchi, affected heavily by his mother's death during the production of FF3, had a mandate with FF7's script: No Last Words, No Heroic Last Stands. Sakaguchi said "Ever since my mother passed away, which was when we were creating Final Fantasy III, I have been thinking about the theme of "life". "Life" dwells in many things, and I was curious what will happen if I attempt to analyze "life" in a mathematical and logical way."

Sakaguchi was long gone by the time Advent Children rolled around. I can't help but feel that FF7's follow ups have the same sort of "No One's Ever Really Gone" nonsense as the Star Wars sequels, something even Remake, otherwise a massive character check for the original FF7 in how it's written, cannot help but play into.

Remake gives Jesse a dramatic last speech, gives President Shinra one last chance to monologue, lets Wedge survive his original death and literally push back against fate itself as he is vanishes into an uncertain doom by the canon police, and ends with Zack Fair, a man whose story ended with an ignoble end dead in a ditch and then had it retold as a heroic last stand, having survived his canon death with the line "Was that all of them?".

Remake is better written then Advent Children. But it was made by the same people as Advent Children, and thematically it seems like Remake is an attempt to make a few of Advent Children's ideas more respectable.
 
Omicron said:
Cloud arrives at the Turks' location, where he finds out that Rufus Shinra is, incredibly, alive.
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Don't worry, he's not the worst character they chose to survive.
Don Corneo survived too! He's an arms dealer and has (well, had) pictures of Cloud.

It's also the story that introduced Leslie and his fiancee that pops up in the remake
Omicron said:
Anyway, Cloud has set up the Remnants' base in the very same pool where Cloud gave Aerith's body to the waters.
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How nice of Cloud to help his little brothers set up a secret base.

(I assume this is meant to be Kadaj)
Omicron said:
This is bullshit. Again, remember: Writers lie. At no point do any characters speak about 'Jenova's head' in a way that would suggest they're being metaphorical or using scare quotes. Vincent casually refers to "Jenova's head" and Cloud immediately gets it, because with his retrieved memories, he knows that Sephiroth disappeared with the head and no one ever saw that head again.
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You could make an excuse that Jenova, as a Thing-type alien doesn't actually have organs as we understand them and is merely mimicking the human form. Hence, calling it a head is inaccurate and the mass of cells is more technically correct, but that feels the same level of pedantic as insisting on using the taxonomically correct name for a dog.
 
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ZerbanDaGreat said:
Because they merge into the weapons when combined. Like, materia are still softball-sized in Remake when they had every opportunity to make them smaller if complete adherence to logistics were a requirement, but materia slots are still just as small - in fact Sephiroth's updated design has a sort of amulet hanging from his belt with seven full materia slots, but they're such small coloured dots in slotted form that nobody actually noticed until his model got ripped. Also materia are quite literally magic, formed of condensed and crystallised Magic Juice, so I find that an entirely reasonable assumption.
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Why am I now thinking of materia as nerf balls that can be squeezed and compacted to hit the small materia slots in equipment? Like, I now want some little scene of someone replacing materia, but isn't ready for the expansion and doing some sort of awkward juggle type motion.
 
pedanterrific said:
Okay, I realize this isn't something the movie would ever do, but like, what reason does Cloud have to not kill these people? "Hey Reno, Rude. Long time no see. Hey, weird question- remember that time you murdered everyone in Sector 7?"
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Really, it comes back to that same issue that was had in the original FFVII playthrough of how the Turks feel like during Midgar and post-Midgar, they're written by two entirely different teams. Midgar Turks? Shinra's murderous black-ops team that will kill a full eighth of the city and not even bat an eye just to swat a handful of mosquitoes.

Post-Midgar Turks? Very blatantly just... the Quirky Miniboss squad. Look at Reno, he's so silly, what a cad! Look at Rude, he's all big and silent but he's secretly got a crush on Tifa~! Look at Elena, she's the plucky newcomer who's oh so dedicated, doesn't get it's a punchclock job and she should just relax. Oh hey, it's Tseng, he's the leader of the bunch, so serious!

And that second version is pretty clearly the ones they went with in Advent Children, considering the comedy that comes up in their fights during the film. So suddenly, it's not "Wow Cloud really not going to kill these guys responsible for thousands if not tens of thousands of deaths, including your Avalanche buddies" to "oh hey guys, whadup, still working for Shinra you silly fellows?"
 
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Omicron said:
This is emblematic of Advent Children's approach to everything: Sure, the plot of FF7 happened, but, y'know… If we actually followed up on the logical conclusion of events shown in the game, we would have a lot fewer of these iconic elements that you, the viewer, are here for, right? What are we going to do, not set the movie in Midgar? We'll pay lip service to that idea, but c'mon.
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Which just goes to show how dumb they are, since around 80% of the game took place outside of Midgar. And they could have set things in Midgar while it was in the process of being evacuated to someplace(s) farther way, if they really wanted to. Moving everyone out of a metropolis isn't a quick process.

The phone is ringing off the wall, but not hers - Cloud's, from his own office, which is in the same building. He apparently operates a delivery service, which is a funny job but actually makes sense for a dude established as: 1) good at riding a bike, 2) good at fighting, 3) living in a world where travel between cities means frequent monster encounters.
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No lie, I think this is the smartest thing in the entire movie, for exactly the reasons you listed. It's all down hill from here.

After pausing and briefly deciding whether or not to continue watching this version of the movie, I decided that I was in no way going to watch Advent Children twice so I needed to pick one and, ultimately, Complete is generally agreed to be the better version of the movie, the one that makes it make sense.
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Oh, you're going to have a different experience than the one I did. Well, let's see how much more sense it makes and if I can spot the additions.

As a fight scene, this services. It's high octane motorcycle action, but it takes place in the middle of a desert and ends utterly inconclusively when Kadaj calls his brothers back and decides to fuck off for no obvious reason.
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Considering the random shadow monster summoning, among other things, "For no obvious reason" could have been this movie's tagline.
In many ways Denzel seems to be intended to be the emotional core of the Complete version of the movie. He is one of its most prominent characters by screentime, he is a vulnerable orphan, his misadventures serve to both showcase the grief that followed the events of the game, the threat of Geostigma, and eventually the true evil of the Remnants. "Will Denzel make it" is one of the major concerns of the story and the characters throughout. It doesn't really… work? In part because Denzel is kind of a nothing character.
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Huh, that's weird, but not unexpected. He had basically no screentime in the original version but the movie still expected us to care about him, which by the way, no one did. I guess they decided to doubledown instead of doing the rational thing and cutting him out.

The fact the materia were apparently just sitting in a box in the church and neither Tifa nor even the children though of, you know, using them as anything other than throwing weapons drives me mad.

I'm glad at least some of the comedy works for you.
 
somewhatLazy said:
Immersion ruined, -99/10 rating, this movie burned my crops and salted my fields. Where is the chocobo harem of a chocobo-headed man so charismatic his mere glance could get an entire fieldful of chocobos to do a silly dance and cough up a summon materia.
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That's because incest is the one thing that is not allowed in media intended for mainstream.
 
Part of why I was so gung-ho about the remake diving into plot ghost territory was that every element of the original canon following Final Fantasy 7 made any possible effort to dilute and dumb-down whatever message or impact its story might have had. I can forgive a lot if it means crossing this mess out.

I hope that in Rebirth, Tifa lifts Rufus over her head and tears him in half like the Hulk to the non-diagetic sound of children cheering. Following this, Barrett should look directly at the camera and give an uninterrupted, ten-minute monologue about how he loves spending time with his daughter so much more than resource exploitation.
 
Pretty much everything I would have said has been said, so I'll just stick to saying Bahumut-Sin is well named because it's ugly as sin. Looks more like a gargoyle than a dragon.
 
Omicron said:
Actually, thinking about it, here's something that would be interesting to do more often: polling people ahead of an update now that I have most of my own thoughts on the topic typed up.

Here's a question to my readers who've seen Advent Children:

What, if anything, do you think about the main antagonist(?) Kadaj?

"I don't think about Kadaj at all" is of course a valid answer.
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I was wondering how best to put it, since my first thought was "teenagers attempting to look bigger than they are and rebelling with only the barest excuse for a cause", but that didn't seem to fit Kadaj's sheer obsession with Jenova and Sephiroth.

But the comments about how Sephiroth keeps stalking Cloud reminded me of the Majima Everywhere System, and thus I found a better analogy: the trio are small-time Yakuza whose gang has been effectively dismantled, but still cling onto the hopes that it will rise again, preferably with them in charge. They're the "young punks" ("chinpira", which I think has also been translated as "two-bit thug") archetype of Yakuza, who strut around pretending to be big-time, except now they can't because their gang is gone.

Omicron said:
Then, in what took me a moment to realize was a gag and is actually pretty funny, Marlene turns around to look at Vincent, and points to the keychain hanging from Vincent's hip, asking 'May I?' at which point Vincent dramatically opens his coat to reveal that this keychain is, in fact, hanging from a gun, and Marlene asks outraged "You don't have a phone!?"
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Which does create a bit of a ludonarrative plot hole: Vincent should have a cellphone, as should all of the FFVII party members, because of the PHS mechanic that allows players to swap party members.

A possible answer is Vincent, for whatever reasons (I'm trying not to make a "old man has no idea how cellphones work" joke here), does not have a cellphone, so he just quietly hangs around other party members who do, following them around like a hopeful lost puppy. So whenever player-Cloud wants to swap Vincent into the party, he just calls the others at random and tells them to pass the phone.
 
Adloquium said:
A possible answer is Vincent, for whatever reasons (I'm trying not to make a "old man has no idea how cellphones work" joke here), does not have a cellphone, so he just quietly hangs around other party members who do, following them around like a hopeful lost puppy. So whenever player-Cloud wants to swap Vincent into the party, he just calls the others at random and tells them to pass the phone.
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He was literally living under some rocks for decades (it was stone basement, that he never left.
 
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'Shinra' still being in charge makes a lot of sense. They were effectively the government and life goes on, this sort of thing happens all the time. What's unfortunate is that Reeve wasn't able to seize control and rebrand (or that the heroes didn't go depose Rufus when he resurfaced).
 
I mean, Shinra is still around, but haven't they been replaced as a government by the World Regenesis Organization under Reeve?

(Spoiled because I don't remember if relevant info appears in the film)
 
I can accept the Rufus thing as the ass pull makes a tiny bit of sense.
tl;dr Kid Rufus asks his dad something like "What do you do if an emergency happens?" His Dad clearly brushes it off, but at some point puts enough stock into it to make the Loser Zone escape room. During the incident Rufus accidentally discovers / uses in, breaks his leg or arm or something falling down the chute, and basically is stuck until IIRC post-Meteor malding in an actively belittling black box

It's an ass pull, but not as bad as some others either in AC, the rest of the EU, or even a couple in the OG.

I actively memory holed the oil stuff by contrast, for one example.
 
I can actually see why a Japanese company would go 'well this horrible fascistic mass-murdering power-hungry organisation that was directly responsible for all the awful things that happened got off nearly scott free and basically remained in power' because, uh, that's pretty much what happened with Japan post-WWII?

(And if I have my broad-strokes understanding of the modern Japanese government correct, a lot of the people still in power are direct descendents or at least proteges of the people who were left in place after WWII despite all the atrocities. See also: all the state visits to that one war criminal shrine and so on)
 
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