Yeah, the order of difficulty in modding is usually:
Changing text files (eg engine configs, often ingame text strings for translations etc)
Adding extra stuff the game already supports adding extra stuff of (eg maps in an RTS, sometimes units/costumes/etc for dlc and so on, varies by engine, older games often don't really support this at all but for more 'widely used' game engines like Unreal/Unity/etc it's well documented)
Changing existing assets (textures, sounds, models sometimes, again varies by engine; sometimes this is easier than 2, sometimes it's not, god help you if it's animated somehow. Have fun getting the file formats correct for older game engines)
Inserting new assets the engine is not expecting to look for (harder, because you have to inform the engine about them and tell it where/when to load them. Most 'total conversion' or 'custom campaign' mods sit at or around here)
Anything involving a hex editor
Inserting new code (aka 'vive la dll files', if the engine has no public api or documentation have fucking fun lol). Easier if the engine has mod support like the Source engine / is widely used like Unity, painful otherwise.
Changing existing code, which very very probably involves hex editors, trial and error, sacrificing goats to decompilers and staring at log files wishing the devs had done a Super Mario 64 and published a dev build by mistake. If there are no ingame console commands you can access, you are doomed.
Hi-res texture/model packs are at 3. Adding an autosave is very easily 7. Reaching tier 7 is by no means impossible but for niche engines it does take a modding community pooling together several brands of lunatic, with potentially months to years before solutions pop out.
I'm not sure it's actually that hard, considering you just need to trick the game into thinking you're standing in a save point at all times. It's just changing a 0 to a 1, and as I said before I was surprised when it worked so flawlessly. Speaking of which!
I found a trainer that lets you save anywhere. Apparently you need to be careful where you save since it's easy to break scripts when you save and reload in "unsafe" areas, but otherwise it's flawless.
I'm not sure it's actually that hard, considering you just need to trick the game into thinking you're standing in a save point at all times. It's just changing a 0 to a 1, and as I said before I was surprised when it worked so flawlessly. Speaking of which!
I wouldn't think it'd be as simple as flipping a bit to say you're standing in a save point. I'd assume one of the advantages from a programming perspective of only being able to save at save points is that you can control exactly where the player will be when they load a save. Like, instead of having to properly save and load "player is in [zone] at coordinates [x],[y] with angle [z]," and make sure there's nowhere in the game that breaks, you can just save "player is at save point [x]" and only have to make sure one set of position data loads properly per save point. Thus, I'd assume if you'd want an autosave, you'd have to build those systems from scratch. I'm not a programmer, though.
I wouldn't think it'd be as simple as flipping a bit to say you're standing in a save point. I'd assume one of the advantages from a programming perspective of only being able to save at save points is that you can control exactly where the player will be when they load a save. Like, instead of having to properly save and load "player is in [zone] at coordinates [x],[y] with angle [z]," and make sure there's nowhere in the game that breaks, you can just save "player is at save point [x]" and only have to make sure one set of position data loads properly per save point. Thus, I'd assume if you'd want an autosave, you'd have to build those systems from scratch. I'm not a programmer, though.
No, it actually is as simple as that. It works completely perfectly and you can save and load anywhere without altering the game at all (aside from flipping that 0 to a 1, of course) The issue is that saving during events can break them - one example is that someone saved in the middle of an event where Barret shoots at something, walks around a bit then rejoins the party, but instead because the event triggers were broken by the game being reloaded he instead just runs in one direction forever and the game softlocks.
In this light we can safely say that the save point thing isn't about limited memory, it's about making sure the player doesn't softlock themselves by breaking the game's scripting.
To me it's also surprising that nothing breaks with that saving change. Could actually be evidence that they consider arbitrary saving at some point during development. There are definitely plenty of games of that era and genre out there where things wouldn't go that smooth.
It's literally a cheat code you can enable, no real modding required.
Hell, having it just store your position would be easier than programming in however many save points there are in the game. You just need to remember three values (current screen, x and y) as opposed to needing to give every individual save point its own id number.
It's literally a cheat code you can enable, no real modding required.
Hell, having it just store your position would be easier than programming in however many save points there are in the game. You just need to remember three values (current screen, x and y) as opposed to needing to give every individual save point its own id number.
Kiiiiinda. Implementing it that way it is simple, sure, but it's all the edge-cases that're a pain in the arse. Stuff like what can happen if the player can clip through stuff while loading (classic speedrunning exploit), the problems with event scripts as mentioned, or the eternal classic of a gameplay softlock from saving moments before an unavoidably unwinnable situation. Abusing save/load to reset enemy AI is a classic exploit in the Soulsborne games, for example.
Usually, in practise, for a 'save anywhere, anytime' system, you have to save the entire game-state to get reliable results, and that puts you at great risk of accidentally invalidating a save if you update the game and now some of the old gamestate data no longer makes sense. Yeah, you can write converters to let the new version read old data, but you have to remember to do that and not let anything slip through the cracks.
Believe me, fixed checkpoints/savepoints can save the developer a whole world of pain.
So, as Omicron is busy with choosing the perfect mods for him for FF7, as a little throwback about the past LP he has done until now, I am sharing this new video from few days where Hironobu Sakaguchi, Pixel artist Kazuko Shibuya, who has been creating pixel art from the very beginning, and Brand Manager Yoshinori Kitase, speak about the first games (honestly, it's mostly Sakaguchi who speaks the most and having a lot of fun). There are some interesting bits to learn about the games then and there (like : why no save point in the final donjon of FF3 ????).
So, do you recognize the church where Aerith meets Cloud, or you were too horny for Tifa in Advent Children to pay attention to the place where she fights Loz ? ^^
Kiiiiinda. Implementing it that way it is simple, sure, but it's all the edge-cases that're a pain in the arse. Stuff like what can happen if the player can clip through stuff while loading (classic speedrunning exploit), the problems with event scripts as mentioned, or the eternal classic of a gameplay softlock from saving moments before an unavoidably unwinnable situation. Abusing save/load to reset enemy AI is a classic exploit in the Soulsborne games, for example.
Usually, in practise, for a 'save anywhere, anytime' system, you have to save the entire game-state to get reliable results, and that puts you at great risk of accidentally invalidating a save if you update the game and now some of the old gamestate data no longer makes sense. Yeah, you can write converters to let the new version read old data, but you have to remember to do that and not let anything slip through the cracks.
Believe me, fixed checkpoints/savepoints can save the developer a whole world of pain.
Oh yeah, that's why you can only do it at predetermined locations via the save points. I'm just saying that it's programmed so instead of reading which save point you saved at and placing you there, it's instead a kind of "save anywhere" system that only lets you save in specific locations.
Okay, well, I was hoping to get the next update done by today, but that's not happening - it currently sits at 8k words covering Wall Market alone.
I'm going to need to change my workflow for this game, I'm pretty sure. That intensity per update is going to kill me. But there's so much to say, though.
I'm not sure it's actually that hard, considering you just need to trick the game into thinking you're standing in a save point at all times. It's just changing a 0 to a 1, and as I said before I was surprised when it worked so flawlessly. Speaking of which!
I found a trainer that lets you save anywhere. Apparently you need to be careful where you save since it's easy to break scripts when you save and reload in "unsafe" areas, but otherwise it's flawless.
So, as Omicron is busy with choosing the perfect mods for him for FF7, as a little throwback about the past LP he has done until now, I am sharing this new video from few days where Hironobu Sakaguchi, Pixel artist Kazuko Shibuya, who has been creating pixel art from the very beginning, and Brand Manager Yoshinori Kitase, speak about the first games (honestly, it's mostly Sakaguchi who speaks the most and having a lot of fun). There are some interesting bits to learn about the games then and there (like : why no save point in the final donjon of FF3 ????).
Still, there is something which nags me since some days Omicron. Remember the (not ?) missed connection because Tifa is in the place :
So, do you recognize the church where Aerith meets Cloud, or you were too horny for Tifa in Advent Children to pay attention to the place where she fights Loz ? ^^
If you count the two parts of the first update as one thing, then all three of the FFVII posts you've made so far are around that number - meaning every single FFVII post is longer than any individual post in all of the previous games. Given that, perhaps just take it for granted that the size of each new update will be around that number, and plan accordingly? Or make a lot of mini-updates, perhaps.
Maybe you can console yourself with the knowledge that, as I said in the past, FFVII is going to be the longest of these let's play, and thus the certainty that it's never going to get worse than this might help make it through? Not sure there's many ways to deal with the issue.
It's not like everywhere is going to be as dense as Midgar.
But there will be a lot, and honestly this feels like how it's going to be going forward; future FF games won't exactly be light on worldbuilding, either.
As it turns out, when you go from "game barely stuffed into less than 3 megabytes of memory" for the largest SNES Final Fantasy, to "game spread across three CDs for 1300 megabytes of memory"... they can shove a lot more detail into that space. Don't get me wrong, a good chunk of that is things like moving from sprites to 3D Models (not to mention the fact that plenty of areas are modeled on all three disks since, well, you can visit them on all three), but that still means a shitload of spare room for text and conversations and whatnot.
The density of story and… for lack of a better word texture is definitely something that feels like a seismic shift when the point of reference is the SNES Final Fantasies.
It's… well, honestly the games make a great analogy themselves, I've noticed. There was a lot of talk in the VI LP about it being framed as a theatrical production, with the player's versions of the characters being actors on a script and stage. Well, VII's game over screen meanwhile… I'm not sure I should post it or if Omicron will encounter it and want to go into it, but I don't think it's a spoiler to mention everyone and especially Square themselves called/calls the new design style "cinematic" and that movies seem to be a touch point. There's so much more "mise-en-scène" with deliberate character motions and camera framing… gameplay works in setpieces and scenes… it's so much more dense and audiovisual with more story to bite into so word counts for discussion ballooning is understandable.
It's been fun following Omis let's plays. I just built a new pc, very fancy, and this has inspired me to install the FF7Remake as the first game to play on it.
Hopefully the pc version is alright, I've never really figured out modding beyond steam workshop.
Welcome back to Final Fantasy VII, the game that is making me deal with an American translator's idea of a Japanese gamedev's take on the 90s' presentation of queerness and sexuality, oh boy.
CW: Discussion of sexual assault, though no character is harmed.
Before we get there, though, let me take you on a small journey. I close my last post saying I would be looking for ways to increase some QoL aspects of the game. This… didn't work.
The first thing I did was download the 7th Heaven mod manager. I immediately panicked on realizing all my saves were gone and the game was now running in a very small windowed mode. Thankfully I found answers to this in the FAQ and managed to fix it. Then I started looking for mods and, from their description alone, everything seemed like it wasn't doing what I actually wanted. So then I started looking for an emulator. Then I realized I hadn't used a PSX emulator in a decade and had no idea how they worked. I downloaded three separate emulators and had no idea how to make any of them work. At that point, I got tired and frustrated, went back to 7th Heaven, looked for stuff that I did want.
At the end of that multihour process all that had changed was that I now had a mod that changed the spell names to their standardized appellations of later localizations, that I had disabled the open mouth flaps, and that I now had an overly complicated process to run the game in borderless windowed mode without fucking up my screenshots so I could finally alt-tab safely in and out of the game.
This was a big failure is what it was, but now we're back.
EDIT: UNTIL @GilliamYaeger FOUND A WAY??? Well it'll have to wait until after this update to try and implement it, we'll see.
Easily the largest town we've been to so far (the picture you're seeing above is the largest town screen we've seen and is still only one of multiple Wall Market screens), Wall Market is really more like a no-combat dungeon, a giant puzzle based on character interactions. There's one objective we're trying to fulfill, and depending on how extensively we worked towards it, we'll succeed more or less, though the rewards are just flavor.
The very first man we encounter in Wall Market is doing street advertising for a local hotel. It's sort of implied in his English dialogue, and much more obvious in Japanese, that he's basically advertising a love hotel, assuming that Cloud and Aerith are looking for a place to spend a few hours (not a full night, the language he uses in Japanese apparently implies 'a short rest') together in privacy. We can use that hotel as a normal inn, although of course no scandalous events unfold - but this immediately gives us the vibe of Wall Market as a red light district kind of place, somewhere everything is for sale, even the more carnal pleasures - we'll get to that more in a bit.
Without a clear lead on Tifa's location, I just start exploring places at random. Like huh, this place:
You see that machine gun mounted on the wall? Yeah, the moment you try to interact with that computer screen it whirrs about and starts firing at Cloud, who backs away and says it's broken. Alright, then.
There's a convenience store nearby - and it really does look like a convenience store, with a fridge for drinks, stocked shelves, a counter - I just really look how 'normal' it looks, like a place you might step into in the real world. The cashier isn't paying attention and gets spooked when we approach; he sells the normal array of basic consumables.
There's also a… I don't know what you call that specific kind of restaurant, actually, the kind that has very little space so it's built narrowly with every customer sitting at the counter facing the kitchen? They are actually run a promotional event where if we eat there we get a 'Pharmacy Coupon' for free, so let's check it out-
…Korean BBQ plate?? Korean???
THAT'S ENOUGH, FF7, I WANT YOU TO SHOW ME WHERE KOREA IS ON YOUR FANTASY WORLD MAP RIGHT NOW, WE'RE NOT LEAVING THIS DINER UNTIL YOU DO
this wouldn't be getting to me so much without the Texas Cowboy saloon and the NATO missiles but at this point I feel like I'm being gaslit
One of the customers mentions that it's "thanks to the Don that we can eat like this." Don, in the context of a seedy place like Wall Market, very strongly suggests 'mafia', so I take it this place is ruled by a mafia boss - the darker side to Sector 5 and 7, which seem to operate mostly on… Hmm.. Actually I am not sure how they're organized. There is no explicit social hierarchy and no visible law enforcement, but there are privately-owned stores which sell unregulated weaponry using cash, so it looks like private property exists but not the state, said property being guaranteed mostly by how big your guns are. So… Absolute laissez-faire anarcho-capitalism?
Christ, what a nightmare.
We come by a couple of other places, but for now most of them just have some atmospheric dialogue. There's one place in particular that's of interest though…
The Honey Bee Inn. A bee-themed 'members only' club advertised with garish pinks and a heart, where we are told 'even unpopular dweebs like you may meet their destiny.'
It's a brothel. The game is never going to use that exact term but it's clear from the start and going to grow increasingly clearer.
The red-haired guy to the side is Johnny, a Sector 7 Slum native who decided to leave Midgar some time ago earlier in the game. He's here to… Mäke some 'last memories of Midgar' before leaving… but he's too anxious to actually confront the bouncer. He also lambasts us for 'bringing a new girlfriend to a place like this' even though we're Tifa's childhood friend, which, I'm not sure you have a leg to stand on there, my guy. One of the other guys appears to have a favorite girl, but he's run out of cash and they started fighting. When we address the stocky guy in a suit, he asks us if we're looking for a 'girlfriend' and we have the option to ask if Tifa is here - to which he enthusiastically agrees, Tifa is their newest girl!
However, she's not at the Honey Bee Inn right now. All new girls must first pass an interview with Don Corneo, a 'famous dilettante' who 'wants to settle down and is in the market for a bride.'
Yeah. 'Famous dilettante' is the euphemism of the year. He's a mafia boss. 'Don Corneo'/'Don Vito Corleone,' it's pretty obvious even before people start talking about how Don Corneo ensures Wall Market's prosperity and how he has goons everywhere. The Godfather isn't something I was expecting Final Fantasy to pull from as inspiration, but it makes plenty of sense for VII's modern setting.
Okay, we have our next lead, let's find Don Corneo.
Unfortunately, we won't be just allowed in sight unseen. Specifically, we are informed that the Don 'isn't into men,' so while Aerith is welcome to come in and meet him, Cloud needs to leave. Aerith is all too willing to go in alone, until Cloud pulls her away and asks her if she knows 'what kind of place this is,' (which she does, clearly; the scene isn't framing Aerith as naive, merely reckless, but I can see how other time player memory of one might shift into the other), she goes "well what am I supposed to do then, do you want to go in with me?" which Cloud takes completely seriously, answering he can't since he's a man.
And that's the point where Aerith's eyes figuratively lit up.
I want to emphasize that everything that follows is not just her idea, she is extremely into it.
WHY DON'T YOU DRESS UP AS A GIRL, CLOUD? IT'S THE ONLY WAY. THERE IS NO OTHER POSSIBLE OPTION. IGNORE MY GREMLIN-LIKE LAUGHTER IN THE BACKGROUND AS I AM COMING UP WITH THIS IDEA. WE HAVE NO CHOICE. NOW PUT ON THE MAID OUTFIT I AM NO LONGER ASKING-
Aerith gives him no opportunity to refuse, telling the gatekeeper she'll be back with a 'cute friend' of hers, then when Cloud tries to tell her she can't, emotionally blackmails him with Tifa's safety into just going along with it.
On the one hand I could understand if someone saw that scene and thought Aerith was clearly trying to push Cloud past his boundaries but on the other hand it's, like, really funny because the joke here is mainly "Aerith is an out-of-control goblin who has designs on making Cloud into the cutest girl and our stoic, elite mercenary must bear with it" and it's just, a fun dynamic.
I love all these shops.
The woman left in charge of the shop tells us that she'd love to help, but unfortunately, she only sells the things; her father is the one who makes the dress and he's been in a slump, getting drunk at the bar all day long. If we want a dress, we need to get him back to work somehow.
Our dude is at the… food court?
This whole sequence is testing my knowledge of English food service terminology mightily.
This is something that frequently happens when I'm screenshotting dialogue - text unspools slowly so I keep clicking before it's done and getting half-sentences.
Cloud bluntly requests "Make me some clothes," the old man dismisses him saying he doesn't make men's clothes, and Aerith… asks Cloud to please go have a drink while she chats alone with that gentleman for a while.
Once Cloud is out of earshot, Aerith 'confesses' to the tailor that Cloud always wanted to dress like a girl, just once, and that's why she wanted to get him a cute dress. The old man is shocked that a 'tough-looking guy' would have such a wish, but is immediately interested by the unique challenge of a dress for his specific build (a fit dude, something which will come up repeatedly once Cloud is actually in the dress), and agrees. We're given two options to pick from, twice, asking for something "that feels clean"/"that feels soft" and "shiny"/"that shimmers." I pick soft/shimmers, though it's not clear what the distinctions are, but 'shiny' feels a little too tacky and clean more like it prioritizes comfort over appearance, which is the opposite of what we want here.
The old man then says, mysteriously, that he has a (male) friend with the same tastes as Cloud, and that he'll ask him for help.
So, our first step is complete - we've secured a dress. But it won't be enough.
…
On the one hand the fact that Aerith basically invents a fake backstory about Cloud having a secret cross-dressing wish without his awareness is, again, kind of manipulative and boundary-pushing. On the other hand that's presented as like… completely non-judgmental and non-mocking? Nobody is making fun of Cloud in this exchange, the tailor is totally down with helping that girl get her boyfriend his secret dress wish.
Our next step also takes place in the food court, and is a little weird. Remember when we got that Pharmacy Coupon? We can head to the convenience store (pharmacy, I guess?), give the coupon, and receive one of either Deodorant, Disinfectant, or Digestive. I have no idea what sets them apart so I look it up and it turns out the Digestive is the best pick, so we grab that. Next, in the food court, there's a man who's hopping in place, desperate to use the bathroom, but somebody has been in there 'all day'; when we open the door to the bathroom, we find a woman bent over, vomiting in horrible pain into the bowl. Now, if we have the digestive…
She feels better and gives us the 'Sexy Cologne.'
We find a woman horribly sick in the bathroom, give her a digestive which cures her, and she gives us the sexy perfume we need to seduce Don Corneo. This game's sidequest are on another level. What kind of a level, I'm not sure, but another for certain.
Now, let's head back to the tailor's shop - turns out our dress is already done! Cloud can head into the changing room, try it on, and Aerith immediately peeks through the curtains, to Cloud's loud protests. She's not satisfied - Cloud, unfortunately, still has the short-haired Goku haircut. He needs a wig. The tailor interjects - he guessed that they would be needing a wig, and asked that friend of his about it.
Cloud is immediately suspicious about the phrase 'people like you,' and asks Aerith what the hell she told him, but she waves it off and we head to the gym.
This is the gym. It is full of 'gym bro' characters using special, 'buff men' models, who are all engaged in squats, punching a bag, or sparring in the ring, and one character who uses one of the generic "female townsfolk" models, and who could previously be seen weighing herself on a scale and complaining about needing to lose weight.
They're not a woman, though. Or at least they're not presented as such. Let me copy the dialogue:
NPC: "Are you the one who wants to be cute?" Cloud: "Cute?" Aerith: "Right. And about the wig…" NPC: "Yeah, I heard. But it'll cost ya." Gym Bros: "Urrrrgh!!! Big Bro! The only way you're gonna get cuter is if you can beat Big Bro!" Gym Bros: "That's right!" Gym Bros: "So, you've got to compete with us!" NPC: "You're right. Let's do squats." Gym Bros: "All right! We'll beat you out of this gym!" Cloud: "Are you…" Aerith: "THE beautiful Bro?" NPC: "What? You didn't know? Always running around saying 'Big Bro' this, 'Big Bro' that… Never mind, come over here." Gym Bro: "No, I'll explain the rules."
The dialogue is slightly confusing, but what transpires is that 'Beautiful Bro' is not a woman, or at least isn't presented as such, but a crossdresser who thinks Cloud is a baby crossdresser looking for his first wig, and more than that he is famous. Like, that's the implication in Cloud and Aerith's shocked sentence, they've heard of 'THE Beautiful Bro' from reputation from across the slums, but didn't recognize him in person. The sentence 'Always running around saying Big Bro this, Big Bro that' doesn't really feel like a coherent follow up, but in this context, it's not clear if 'Big Bro' and 'Beautiful Bro' are the same character, or if 'Big Bro' refers to the black Gym Bro doing squats that we have to beat in a squat contest ("the only way you're gonna cuter is if you can beat Big Bro!").
Having checked the retranslated mod's version of this sequence, which I assume to be closer to the original Japanese (I can't find a version of the actual Japanese screen with a direct translation - Tim Rogers does not cover this part of Wall Market in Let's Mosey, unfortunately, more interested in the I imagine more controversial Honey Bee Inn sequence), it has some significant differences. Notably, 'Big Bro' here much more explicitly refers to the cross-dressing character, and instead of saying the wig will 'cost us,' the Gym Bros tell us that we have to 'prove ourselves worthy of Big Bro;' instead of 'Are you… THE beautiful Bro?', after Cloud has heard the character he assumed to be a woman referred to as 'Big Bro,' he starts asking "Are you a ma-" and is cut off by Aerith yelling "Cloud!!" and Big Bro responds "Am I a what? Everyone here just calls me 'Big Bro.'"
Both of these translations are seemingly trying to translate a particularly tricky exchange. If we go from Tim Rogers' live translation of the scene over at Kotaku, the exchange, in a more literal sense, is Cloud going "Wait, does that mean you are-" and Aerith cuts him off saying something roughly like "You're one pretty Big Bro," with his read of the exchange being that Cloud only just now, this way into the conversation, realized that it was this character he thought was a woman is the one these characters keep calling 'Big Bro,' and now he's about to ask if he's Big Bro in a rude way and Aerith cuts him off to compliment him.
So basically both the original translation and the retranslation are different takes on that scene. The original translator parsed the sentence as emphasizing how that character is "Beautiful Big Bro" rather than a beautiful 'Big Bro,' and turned it into a comment on 'oh, wow, you're that famous cross-dresser!' The Retranslation completely changed the text to preserve the idea of 'Aerith cuts Cloud off before he can make a rude remark.' Tim Rogers doesn't commit to a specific translation because he's more commenting on the literal and figurative meaning of each line.
This is… probably a scene I would understand better if I was more familiar with the intricacies of Japan's 90s queer/crossdressing/transvestite culture. From my 2023 Sufficient Velocity dot Com perspective, the fact that Aerith interrupts Cloud before he can say something she assumes is offensive and Big Bro goes "Am I a what?" makes me tempted to read that character as trans (and Aerith as an ally tbh), but I don't think that's the intent, or rather, not necessarily something the writers would have been thinking of writing that scene, though it's notable that Cloud doesn't notice Big Bro 'isn't a woman' until made clear by external, contextual clues - but either way, both Aerith and Big Bro treat Cloud bluntly asking if he's a man as rude.
I have now written more words about this single scene than anyone else I have been able to find on the whole Internet. I googled it. Even a blog article that was literally 'my experience as a trans person playing the Wall Market scene as a child who didn't know she was trans' has spent fewer words on that one exchange.
What's transpiring from this and the earlier exchange is that Wall Market is home to a cross-dressing subculture, which is accepted (people openly point Cloud to where he can find 'people like him' and are willing to help him dress up) and has its own codes ('you don't ask someone in drag if they're 'really' a man'). If we compare this to similar historical places that I'm slightly more familiar with, that's probably the kind of place where the line between 'cross-dressing,' 'drag,' and 'transness' is blurry at best, at least to outsiders; US drag circuits of the 60s, for instance, would have gay men and trans women involved in the same drag culture.
Anyway, the Drag Queen of Wall Market ruling over the pack of gym bros who are at their beck and call is a nice cultural touch. Although, if I'm honest, I think the English localization's suggestion that Aerith and Cloud have both heard about the Beautiful Bro from reputation is a superior addition to the original text; 'The Gang Meets RuPaul' is a great bit.
…
Anyway now that I have spent a few hundred words on this I guess I can no longer delay having to deal with the fucking squats minigame.
The squats minigame is, on its face, extremely simple; you have to press three buttons in a specific order over and over to complete as many squats as possible in 30 seconds. However, this minigame was designed for a PS1 controller. Here, on my keyboard, the Cancel button is tied to Backspace, the Okay button is tied to Enter, and I don't even remember what the Switch button is because I've never used it. (Turns out it was tied to Insert, of all things.) This makes not tripping while trying to enter inputs surprisingly difficult! I manage to complete 8 squats in the allotted time, versus my opponent's 17.
Fortunately (since we couldn't progress the plot otherwise), since Big Bro agreed with the tailor to give us a wig, he is gracious enough to lend us one even though we lost. Unfortunately, when he digs around trying to find it, our squats competitor reveals that he hid it… Inside his speedo.
He immediately gets knocked the fuck out by Big Bro's fist of steel for his awful, awful hygiene.
Big Bro apologizes, and tells us we can still use it if we disinfect it first.*
Well, none of that. Seeing as I'm on a computer, I can just remap the controls to something that doesn't make my brain trip over itself. Specifically, I turn off the game, reload, and map Switch->Cancel->OK to 1->2->3 on the numpad.
Even so, we're not specifically rated on the sheer speed at which we can input sequence of three keys - we also have to abide by Cloud's animation speed, so if we go too fast, we might still trip on a squat. Even now, the best I can manage is 18 squats in 30 seconds - just enough to eke out a win against our opponent's 17, which gets us the best wig. Our opponent then starts whining about how he really wanted Big Bro's whig, and is promptly knocked the fuck out again.
Now that we have the wig and the dress, we have enough items to dress Cloud up as a girl and enter Don Corneo's estate, and that's what I do at first - but this doesn't get us the best outcome, which means I missed some stuff; so I reload to hunt for the rest of the items. I'll get to the difference between the two endings afterwards.
We have a Silk Dress, a Blonde Wig, and Sexy Cologne. What could be missing?
First off, we need headwear - specifically, a tiara. How are we going to find it? Well, in one of the shops, there's this guy:
For some obscure reason, this guy only wants to talk to Cloud - so this time it's Aerith who has to sit out the conversation. His only explanation is that he can't 'ask a girl' for the favor he needs (keep an eye on that): the inn where we stayed has a vending machine, and this guy wants to know what it's selling, presumably so he knows what the competition is up to and can outflank them with his own products. Unfortunately he got into a fight with the owner, so he's persona non grata there. It's a simple enough favor, so I agree; all we need to do is head back to the inn, rest there again for a measly 10 gil, and Cloud will get up during the night, head to the vending machine, and have a choice of a variety of items only listed by their price.
We buy 'the one worth 200 gil' and head back to the store guy, who identifies our mystery item as…
What's this guy selling, anyway? Earthenware?
A 'protein drink set.' The guy triumphantly exclaims he'll do 'so much more business' than the innkeeper, and then hands us a Diamond Tiara, which seems a little overkill. How much does that thing even cost? Well, it's probably not real diamonds. Anyway, a 'protein drink set' makes sense enough, Wall Market is home to a gym. But it doesn't quite adequately explain why it's such a secret weapon for a store to have, or why the shopkeeper is insistent Aerith not listen to the conversation.
Thanks to Tim Rogers over at Kotaku, though, we can tell that in the Japanese, the 'protein drink set' is a 'drink that recharges/reloads the spirit', a 'Spirit Reloader' as Rogers translates it - a type of energy drink sold in vending machines in Japan, but not Red Bull; more intense, sometimes including nicotine, and sometimes advertised as having aphrodisiac property. Now, if you'll recall, the 'inn' is, in the original Japanese, much more clearly a love hotel, or at least advertises that function as well as that of a normal hotel.
It does have a large room with multiple king size bed so it can't just be that, although that might be a limitation of the art style.
If you put this all together, it becomes much clearer why the shopkeeper doesn't want a woman to hear his conversation with Cloud: the inn's vending machine sells boner juice for male clients who may be suffering from performance anxiety or having performance issues during their stay.
Wall Market has by far the most sexually charged content of any FF game so far, and I can kinda see why a US translator might have want to err on the side of 'it sells protein shakes for the local gym bros' when pressed for time in a game whose American target audience seems to have been primarily children?
Not that it's going to save the sequence as a whole, because next up is the Honey Bee Inn. In order to enter it, we need a membership card - which we find by talking to a local who 'can't make up his mind' about whether or not he wants to actually visit a brothel and who gives us the card to spare himself the dilemma.
In case you're wondering why Johnny is crawling on the ground, all these guys are basically on their hands and knees grasping for the hem of Aerith's dress and begging for her to look at them.
I have no idea how Cloud expects entering the Honey Bee Inn to complete his disguise, and Aerith immediately makes fun of him for coming up with the least believable excuse in the world to visit a 'hot girly place,' as Tim Rogers calls it.
The moment we come in, we're accosted by a woman in a bee costume who clearly thinks we're someone she was expecting and who breathlessly asks us to hurry and 'pick a room.'
Soooo.
The Honey Bee Inn.
The HBI contains five rooms, three of which we can enter, and two of which we can peep through the keyhole to watch, like so:
In The Lover's Room, we find an old couple who apparently who had the room rented by their son as a gift, but it's too nice, the bed's too big, the bathtub is too pretty, the grandfather can't get comfortable. The grandmother calls this 'a high-class neighborhood in the big city' which, considering that's the very opposite of what Wall Market is, gives me a strong impression that people from outside Midgar have very little idea what it looks like and what the living standards of the top vs the slums are like.
In the Queen's Room, we have people… roleplaying.
I think what's happening here is that a client hired two of the Honey Bees to do some Sexy Roleplaying and they're chatting about him while he's doing a big monologue before they get into the meat of things, as it were, (they mention that he's a Shinra guy and that President Shinra's wife recently learned about 'this little hobby of his'? It's not clear), although the image of a Shinra nerd being so frustrated with his inability to arrange scheduling with his friends that he went and hired escorts just so he would have a D&D group on a regular schedule and guaranteed to show up is hilarious, and is in fact my headcanon now.
At the top of the room is the makeup room for the Honey Bee:
Most of the Honey Bees' dialogue is musing about losing weight, telling Cloud he can't be there, or muttering under their breath about weird clients and perverts. In general, the Honey Bees don't seem to be extremely fond of their job, is what I'm saying.
The other two rooms are exclusive, we can only pick one; once we do, a scene will play out and after it's done, we'll be locked out of the Honey Bee Inn. Those are the two rooms the Honey Bee is asking us to pick from and enter; when we pick one, she asks us if we're certain, and our options are "I'm still trying to decide" or "Don't make me repeat myself," which prompts the girl to plead Cloud not to be angry with her and to reflect that he is probably "the violent type."
The Honey Bee Inn is funny except when it's not.
The room at the top is titled the "&$#% Room." Once we enter, we see…
What the fuck is that.
Oh, it's a ghost. It's Cloud's ghost. Or at least a vision of himself.
Cloud turns to… 'himself'... and asks "You? What are you doing in a place like this?" Then Cloud suffers the Flashback Migraine, holding his head in his hands in pain as the vision replies "That's what I wanted to ask you. Should you be foolin' around here? You think problems go away by just thinking about them?"
Then the vision stands up holding its sword, and Cloud passes out. The Honey Bee rushes into the room in a panic, fade to black, and there's this exchange:
Backseater: "You can't change anything by just sitting back and looking at it." Cloud: "What are you saying?" Backseater: "It's started moving." Cloud: "What has?" Backseater: "Wake up!"
Then Cloud opens his eyes to find that he is being pounded by a mostly-naked man.
Look, that's not a joke, the game literally uses the onomatopeia 'rub rub rub' and 'pound pound pound.' I think what's happening here is that the guy is alternatively massaging Cloud and slapping him awake? We actually get a full HP/MP refill out of this, by the way. I guess passing out from hidden trauma is recuperative.
This guy is called 'Mukki' and, aside from being a bodybuilder, I assume he's another employee of the inn - perhaps one meant for their male-favoring clientele - who got called in for the emergency?
Either way, Mukki says that "time's up" and gets up from the bed, then talks reassuringly, telling Cloud not to think about it too much, it happens to him all the time, and the Honey Bee has some poorly translated dialogue ("There are a lot of 'adult' things happening here," which in Japanese is closer to "I'm sorry, this kind of thing happens all the time with adults"), apologizes for Cloud's inconvenience and giving him the Lingerie item.
I'm given to understand that it's been speculated in the past that this scene may be meant to imply that Mukki sexually assaulted Cloud in this scene, but, like, that's not it.
It's a sex joke. Cloud entered the room, passed out from his vision, and by the time he woke up his time slot renting the room ran out. The girl and Mukki assume that he suffered from performance anxiety and that's why he passed out from stress and they tell him not to worry about it, it happens to everyone, and give him a consolation item since he never ended up using the room for its intended purpose.
If, instead, we choose to pick the other room, labeled the 'Group Room,' the girl asks Cloud if he picked that room because he's lonely, then says 'everyone is waiting,' which slightly confuses Cloud, and then this happens.
A pack of bodybuilders led by Mukki barge into the room and corner Cloud; Mukki declares they should 'all wash their sweat and dirt together', grab Cloud (it's strongly implied that they undress him first), and then bodily drag him into the bathtub, where the entire group squeezes itself:
I don't… I don't know, man. What do you even want me to say at this point. What am I supposed to make of this scene.
Cloud says he's not feeling so great, Mukki tells him to relax and count to ten, and then starts asking him about his age (this is how we learn in-game that Cloud is 21), and asks him if he wants to join his 'Young bubby's group' who are planning to take a trip to a cabin in the country. Eventually, everyone moves out of the bath, and Mukki offers Cloud 'Bikini Briefs' as a 'memento of our time together', then all the bodybuilders run out of the room, completing our objective.
I…
I don't know what to say. I guess Cloud got cruised by a bunch of gay bodybuilders but they eventually fell back in front of his stone-faced twink rejection? I'm actually not even sure what happened exactly - if Cloud got mistaken for the Honey Bee Inn employee who was meant to entertain a group of guests, or if he was mistaken for a client who'd requested the Inn's male employees. This whole scene is just weirdly surreal and, like, 'problematic'? At one point Cloud explicitly states his discomfort with the scene and Mukki just carries on. I think, Mukki is meant to be the Honey Bee Inn's employee catering to gay clients (hence why he shows up in both cutscenes), and he assumes that Cloud is simply being shy about what he really wants after paying for his room?
I don't know. This is a lot to take in.
…wait, is this Final Fantasy's first gay representation-
Okay let's just carry on. If we visit the dressing room after either of the two rooms exchange, we have the option to ask the Honey Bees to put makeup on Cloud, which they oblige:
And that's the final step of our disguise. With all our objectives accomplished, we head back out, where we find that all the bozos outside are clustered around Aerith probably trying to flirt with her, badly. They scatter once Cloud arrives, Aerith rejoins the group, and if we ask around, we can find that our girl hasn't been idle:
She's been fleecing the locals by selling them flowers at outrageous price. What a girl. It's a good reminder that she's grown in the slums all her life and she's far from helpless when alone, and in fact can have most men wrapped around her finger in little time. Which… Let's put a pin in that.
FOR NOW. AT LAST. WE HAVE ALL THE ELEMENTS OF THE COSTUME. We can finally head back to the tailor's shop and have Cloud dress up as a girl. And the result is… Drum rolls…
…you know what, that's pretty good. I mean, the low-poly models kind of blunt the effect somewhat, especially the way the leg articulations makes every character wearing a dress look like they're actually wearing extremely wide trousers, but it looks pretty okay. Also it's very amusing to me that Cloud is doing a 'hand folded on her lap and head bashfully looking down' maidenly pose, my man's a natural.
The old man declares that he may have just found a new venue of business, and out of gratitude for getting her dad his motivation back, his daughter gives us the dress for free. Then Aerith starts giving Cloud lessons in womanly posture:
Aerith is extremely enthusiastic about 'Miss Cloud,' fawning over him, calling him cute, and then asks for a dress for herself, and soon enough our two characters are both in matching outfits.
Cloud, ice cold, replies by just shaking his head, and Aerith tells him he's 'no fun.' I think he's starting to develop defensive reflexes to Aerith's flirting.
Now that we have control of 'Miss Cloud,' we can go back through the town and find a number of new interactions from the townsfolk! For instance, if we head for the front of the Honey Bee Inn, all the guys will flock to Cloud, compliment his looks and try to badly flirt. As I've mentioned before, one of them will comment on how 'hard' Cloud is, by which they specifically mean that they try to touch him and feel his muscles of steel, and ask him if he works out, but this doesn't result in a 'that's a dude!' reaction, they're explicitly still into 'Miss Cloud.' An older man asks us if we want to eat at his soup cart. A Corneo henchman calls us 'Pretty ladies' and tells us if we want to make some money, we should head to the Don's place. And if we head to the gym, Big Bro will comment on our appearance depending on whether we got all the best items - "Ehhh, so so," if we didn't get the good stuff, "Pretty good" if we did.
All in all, there's one character in all of Wall Market who reacts negatively to Cloud, and it's the rude lady client in the clothing store who saw him get into the changing room and come out in a dress and says "You're weird."
As far as crossdressing comedy goes, here the joke is that Cloud looks extremely fine in a dress and everybody is into him.
And once back to Don Corneo's mansion…
The problem is the hairdo. The pigtails don't work in that visual style. By contrast, Aerith's new style hairdo works a lot better.
…we're let in.
The doorman tells us he'll go warn the don of our arrival and to not move from where we are, so obviously, the very first thing we do next is start exploring the house. It's not complicated - there are three doors, two are closed, and the last one opens into a dark and foreboding stairway to the basement, which, huh.
…hm.
Yeah, so, that's a dungeon. That's a murder basement. That's an occult torture chamber. We already know Don Corneo's a mafia don, so I guess this is where he conducts interrogations? But man, the table at the center with the human figure and the weird lines that's seen so many dead people the blood won't wash out anymore sure is something.
The alternative, even darker possibility is that this isn't even a mafia torture room, it's… where Don Corneo's "brides" end up, Bluebeard-style. Well, let's not think about that! Not that any character in the scene will comment on the setting, we're just… Left with that.
Cloud goes to approach Tifa, but then remembers that he's currently dressed like a girl and gets cold feet, turning around to hide his face from her; it's Aerith who has to step forward and introduce herself, telling her Cloud told Aerith a lot about her.
It turns out Tifa did see Cloud and Aerith talking from the back of the carriage, and she's bummed out that he was having what looked a lot like a date situation. Aerith tells her don't worry, it's nothing, they just met, and Tifa is like "don't worry about what, I never said anything, we're just childhood friends', which is just.
Cloud is literally standing there and these two girls are trying to one-up each other about how they totally don't see him that way, don't misunderstand (which is obviously a lie, but), just totally trash-talking his romantic prospect within earshot.
On Tifa's part it can be forgiven though, she doesn't know that this is Cloud; Aerith has to ask the girl in the corner to come forward for Tifa to finally recognize him under his disguise. She's confused but happy he's alive, Cloud explains why he had to dress up, and then the two of them kind of mumble awkwardly and look at Aerith, who tells them she'll go stand in the corner and plug her ears while they talk.
…right. Because they are WANTED TERRORISTS and Aerith, at this moment, still isn't aware of Cloud's connection to Avalanche. Wow, that had genuinely completely passed me by.
Tifa explains that while getting back from Sector 5, they spotted someone suspicious, caught him and squeezed him for information, and he was working for the Don, so Tifa decided to investigate herself.
It's a weird explanation for the length we had to go to, in that it's incredibly vague, but I guess that's what we have to work with. According to Tifa, every day Corneo picks three girls, and then chooses his 'bride' from one of them, and she's worried she won't be tonight's pick and will miss her chance to interrogate him. Aerith, who was clearly faking and heard their whole conversation, turns around to chime in that it's no problem now, since there are three of them, so whoever Corneo picks will be one of their group and can get Tifa her information. Cloud protests that he can't involve Aerith in this, and Aerith judo-throws him by saying "oh so it's fine for Tifa to be in danger" and he's trapped with no good response. Tifa asks Aerith if she's sure, Aerith asks Tifa if she trusts her, and the two are now friends.
Then Corneo's henchman comes back, complaining that we wandered against his orders, and tells us it's time.
Also, Tifa says Cloud "doesn't look bad, if you don't look closely," which, girl, I can assure you I have all of Wall Market to testify that Cloud is, in fact, the hottest girl in town.
Which it is. Time to confront Corneo.
Don Corneo is a ridiculous old creep who is literally jumping on his desk on all four and all but doing the Tex Avery wolf faces at the sight of the three girls. He then hops off his desk, cigar in his mouth, and examines each girl in turn for a while until making his decision.
Cliffhanger break! (For image count.)
Final Fantasy VII, Part 4: Wall Market Is Burning, Part B
This is a divergence point. If we collected all the high-value items and made a complete costume, then Don Corneo picks Cloud. If we didn't, then he picks Aerith or Tifa, depending on which set of item we picked. If Cloud doesn't get picked, then we face the Sexual Assault Zombies.
By which I mean, Corneo tells his henchmen that 'they can have the rest,' and Cloud is dragged off to a different room, where one of Corneo's henchmen tells the other they've got guests and says "we'll take REAL good care of you," and then all the henchmen start advancing forward with their arms held out and slightly hunched over, advancing towards Cloud.
Resident Evil came out the year before, so this is almost definitely a deliberate visual reference, as well as a joke about how lust is making the henchmen act 'mindless.'
Look, this whole plotline deals with a lecherous mafia boss who draws new girls from the local brothel to allegedly look for a 'bride', it was always going to get uncomfortable, but at this point it's starting to really get uncomfortable, if it wasn't already before. Especially because there's no obvious way out - one henchman blocks the exit, talking to them only brings up dialogue about these guys telling Cloud what's the hurry, fawning over 'her' appearance, and talking about how horny they are, and so all I'm left to do is run around the room increasingly sure how I'm supposed to escape this.
The answer, it turns out, is that we have to talk twice to a specific henchman, at which point Cloud says 'I'm flattered, but no thanks - I'm not interested in a bunch of SCRUBS like you!", somersaults across the room and tears off his dress, at which point we can finally just kill everybody.
At that point the borderless mode broke and I had to play the whole rest of the session like this.
…are those early gunblades they're carrying? I think they're just assault rifles with bayonets fixed under the barrel, but seeing as they both use melee attacks and gunfire, I think this may be where the gunblade from FFVIII is originating.
Once we've cleared the room, if Aerith was chosen, we bump into Tifa in the corridor - we ask if she's alright and she says anyone who takes her lightly will pay for it, then we barge into Corneo's room, where he is, what else, creeping on Aerith.
The most notable thing here is that this is the first time in the game where Aerith is clearly uncomfortable. She has her knees pulled up and her arms around it in a defensive posture, she's stammering, and she can't even get to the part where she's interrogating Corneo - he tramples over her questions, she throws her arms up to try to hold him at bay and he shouts "Aooooh! I can't wait any longer! Here comes Papa!" and throws himself at her, which is when Cloud and Tifa finally barge in.
It's uncomfortable and a jarring shift for Aerith, who so far has been entirely self-possessed and able to deal with anyone, including overbearing creeps trying to hit on her. It's not unbelievable, in a realistic sense, that even a tough, savvy woman who by now has not inconsiderable combat and magical power would find herself with her defenses down in a situation like this, where she's expecting to talk to a reasonable person instead of resorting to violence, but like… It was a choice that was made.
Look, I wasn't exactly looking forward to 'first sexual assault scene featuring one of the female protagonists in a Final Fantasy game, much as I love studying the evolution of the genre.
If we really do badly at the 'collect items' minigame, it's worse; after Cloud's escape, we run into Aerith, who has been being chased in the torture chamber by one of Corneo's henchmen, until she pushes him down a flight of stairs, and then basically the same scene plays out in the bedroom with Tifa instead of Aerith.
I'm not a fan. I'm just not.
The thing is, all of these scenes are basically punishment for failing to navigate Wall Market properly. If you collect the right items, Cloud is picked, and the sequence that then plays out has the potential to be some high tier comedy. Because what happens is Corneo is flustered and stammering and asks Cloud a series of questions like "Do you like me too?" and "What do you want to do?" and we have the option every time of an aloof or a flirty answer, which culminates in Corneo asking Cloud for a kiss, and if we say yes to that…
How the turns table.
Like, what happens there is that after Aerith got her fun by putting Cloud in a dress and teasing him since the moment they met, Cloud turns it around by being picked as Corneo's favorite and then playing along with him until Tifa and Aerith have to barge into the room to stop him from kissing Corneo. He outplayed them.
It's a great beat.
Anyway, whether it comes as comeuppance after rescuing a female teammate or as the payoff to Cloud being good at girling, the scene that follows is great. The three throw off their disguises, returning to their standard field sprites, and corner Corneo on his bed, demanding to know what he learned from his men, and threaten to hit him directly where it would hurt the most:
Corneo hastily says he was looking for 'the man with the gun-arm' on someone's behalf. When asked whose, he says he can't say, he'd get killed…
Panicked, Corneo admits it was Shinra's head of "Peace Preservation," I assume a euphemistic name for their military, a man known as Heidegger. Tifa demands to know why Shinra would want to know such information…
The Rule of Three is an old, old storytelling trope, and having each of the three party members step forward and threaten Corneo with the same horrible fate one by one is, considering how much of a dirtbag he is, a funny beat.
Anyway, now Corneo finally reveals the terrible truth:
Shinra wanted to locate Barret to track him down to Avalanche's headquarters, and now that they know Avalanche is somewhere within Sector 7, they're going to crush them… By breaking the support pillar holding up the plate and crashing it onto the Slums, killing everyone in Sector 7.
Jesus. I guess if you don't mind casualties, it makes sense. But holy shit. Like - the plates are the upper city, they're where the upper class lives. It's not just destroying a shantytown full of the marginalized and the dispossessed, they're going to wipe out a significant chunk of the People Who Matter to a dystopian corporate society. Shinra is really ready to go to any lengths to wipe out Avalanche - I think the President is significantly more peeved by the destruction of two Mako Reactors than he's let on so far.
There's no time to lose. The group hurries to leave the room…
…and then pause when Corneo asks them to wait just one second, he has only one question.
"Why do you think scum like me babbled on about the truth?"
I mean, I think that should be obvious: because they threatened to annihilate his genitals. But we're actually given a choice of answers here:
The answer, it turns out, is "Because I'm sure I'll win."
Then he reveals his Wile E. Coyote trap.
Everyone does actually just hover there for a second.
And everyone falls into the hole.
In a clever move of narrative construction, the game utilizes this cliffhanger moment to move us to a cutscene at Villain HQ, revealing to us some of the internal conflicts within the villainous faction.
Heidegger is the man in green (sporting a massive beard that can't easily be spotted on this picture). Reeve is the slim guy in blue. Heidegger is fully on board with wiping out Sector 7; Reeve is a lot more circumspect, correctly remarking that they're trying to get to six people by killing thousands. President Shinra asks Reeve if he 'wants out', and Reeve says that, as head of the Urban Development Department, he's been involved with the building and running of Midgar. It's his baby that President Shinra is blowing up to wipe out a single terrorist cell.
So even the one guy who is raising concerns about this plan is, himself, a bastard who doesn't give a shit about innocent lives but is mad that they're about to ruin all his work. Either that, or he knows that he has to frame his objections in such callous terms because Shinra would regard humanitarian concerns with utter contempt - and either way, he still ultimately allows it to happen. Stellar villainous characterization, there.
Then Reeve throws in a wrinkle on one of my earlier assessments, stating that the Mayor is also against this plan; Heidegger replies that the Mayor just sits in his office eating all day - so he's not a total puppet, in that he has his own opinions and they include 'please don't destroy 1/8th of my city,' but at the end of the day he's a powerless figurehead. Heidegger storms out of the office and Reeve almost runs after him, but President Shinra catches up to him and tells him that he should consider taking a few days off, maybe leave the city for a bit. Once alone, the President gloats - he's not only going to destroy Sector 7, he's going to pin it on Avalanche, who after all already have two blown up reactors to their account, and then send in a rescue operation, turning public opinion against Avalanche while granting Shinra massive PR.
It's… not a bad plan, all considered, I think. It assumes that the population won't blame Shinra for their total failure to ensure the security of the population, but if Shinra doesn't yet have full control over the city, if there are remainders of a civilian government, this could be just the opportunity they need to say 'regretfully we weren't given the latitude necessary to protect our citizens' and be granted a massive increase in the surveillance state as a result.
I think that scene works better here, where Avalanche is fully to blame for the destruction of the Mako Reactors and Shinra is opportunistically taking advantage of their actions, than in the Remake where, as previously established, Shinra is deliberately making both reactor explosions worse so it's really just Shinra repeatedly blowing up Midgar to increase public fear. Like… It's not that the game has to say "btw ecoterrorism is wrong," it's that the inherent tragedy of resorting to necessary violence against exploitative regimes who will take advantage of it to crack down further is just one of the core dynamics of any violent revolutionary struggle that makes it interesting to explode, as opposed to making Avalanche basically morally blameless.
Meanwhile, down in the sewers…
Everyone is briefly knocked out on impact, and Cloud wakes up first. We manually go to each girl in turn to ask if they're alright (Tifa: "Man! This is terrible." Aerith: "Well, the worst is over… Maybe not…" and then, a monster attacks!
This thing is called 'Aps.' It appears to be some kind of horned pig-lizard-bull chimera? Judging from the chains on its wrists and the bridle on its face, it's definitely a 'pet monster' - I doubt it's anything like tame, but Corneo keeps it chained down there under his trapdoor to eat inconvenient guests. I appreciate the commitment to the supervillain bit.
Aps's main attack is Sewer Tsunami, which uses the 3D field and animations to great effect:
An actual wave of dirty sewer water washes over the screen, hitting everyone, Aps included, for… Honestly fairly low damage (23 on Aerith who is in the back row, 47 on Tifa, 44 to Cloud, but 180+ on Aps itself).
That fight continues the trend of FF7 fights so far in being frankly really not difficult. We've got enough Restore materia that everyone can cast Cure, Aerith's Healing Wind as backup party healing, everyone can use magic to deal reliably high damage, and Aps keeps hurting itself.
Instead, hey, check this out!
Cloud learned a new Limit Break, Cross Slash, which has a complex animation in which he delivers several blows which draw a kanji on the screen that then explodes. It looks sick.
Victory poses.
Of note - Aerith's staff has changed now that I have bought the mithril rod. So it looks like each character changes weapon models when they change weapons, which… Hmm. We'll come back to that another day.
Tifa is desperate, and Aerith tells her to never give up hope, they might still make it on time. It's really notable how, from the moment they met each other, Aerith and Tifa started having interactions with each other, because that was a big missing spot in, say, Celes and Terra in FFVI.
…
Thankfully this is not a true 'sewer level.' It's, at most, two sewer screens. We do find a bunch of sewer gribblies, like, hm -
Those things. Are turtles. Armed with weapons. Who live in the sewers.
They're fucking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
We find the Steal materia in the sewer (which I guess kinda makes sense seeing as this is a secret passage under the Crime Slums of Wall Market used by Don Corneo's mafia), navigate to another screen, and bam!
We're back in the train graveyard!
Aerith: "Don't tell me to go home."
Tifa notes that we are in the train graveyard, and that the way to the slums is not far - we just have to climb between the trains' roofs.
But!
First, we will take advantage of a nearby save point, store our progress, and leave it there for today.
God, that was a lot!
Wall Market is… Wow.
There's been very few, if any, place in Final Fantasy before that have felt so realized. That have felt so much like a single, coherent place, living, with its own internal dynamics, where every inhabitant is a person with their own little life and goals. There's stuff I didn't even think to bring up, like the couple complaining about how a weapons merchant keeps littering the slum with trash, or how said weapons merchant is a weirdo who's currently working on refurbishing a tank - the competing hotel and business, the two restaurants with their clienteles, the whole ecosystem surrounding the Honey Bee Inn, the gym - it's all a level of richness that other places in previous games only approached on a high concept level. "Wandering Castle Figaro," "Narshe the snowy steampunk mining town," "Vector the imperial capital," they're all big, bold ideas but they don't get down into the guts of how people work. Wall Market, for all that it is aesthetically Yet Another Sector Slum, does. (And it is 'yet another sector slum', that's its only real weakness - though personally I could spend the entire game immersed in that aesthetic and not mind so, YMMV.)
On the other hand… yeesh.
Wall Market is so 90s it hurts. It's like the devs went 'okay we're in 3D now it's time to make a game for ADULTS, with SEX and HOOKERS and DRUGS and ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION JOKES.' It's still… a lot more low key than some Western games were going at around the same time, to be fair, but compared to previous FFs it's jarring. And then that tips over into 'sexual harassment as peril/comedy,' and then into the incredibly bizarre scenes at the Honey Bee Inn, which are all some variant of 'bafflingly weird' to 'translation machine broke'.
And yet the entire subplot of getting Cloud in a dress is handled about as gracefully as it could be in a game of that era, and that's not damning with faint praise. Yes, it's in large part a comedy beat, but the comedy is drawn in part from 'Cloud's stoic demeanor is tested by other people's density of shenanigans' and in part for 'Aerith is way more into this than you might expect,' and in part 'that thematic thread about Cloud being in-universe attractive doesn't stop being true and all of Wall Market has heart-shaped eyes for Miss Cloud,' and the culmination is Cloud getting a chance to actually turn it around on the girls for some payback. Like, it's good. The plot about Cloud cross-dressing is good, not merely 'not as offensive as I might have hoped,' it's a great bit and they brought it back in Remake for a good reason.
Wall Market is complex and messy and I get why it's like that. Because the mood of Wall Market is - it's a seedy place, it's a hard place, it is, under the neon lights, a bleak place. Everyone's out for themselves, the closest thing to a ruling government is a criminal organization (that is still buddy-buddy with Shinra), the main business in the area is a brothel in which the girls are at best ambivalent towards their clients and implicitly often threatened with violence or by creeps, and the local ruler may or may not be a modern take on fucking Bluebeard. Wall Market is a vibrant, living place, and it's built on exploitation and fucked up power imbalances and everyone looking out for number one.
In this, it's all the slums writ large - the life that's been forced into the margins, with its beauty and its sharp edges. It's Zozo turned into a real place, fucked up and alive.
But also it's just too weird and skirting the line and extremely of its time. It's not that you couldn't do the scene with a dozen bodybuilders undressing Cloud and dragging him into a bathtub with them, it's that maybe you shouldn't?
As a result, the Remake version of the Wall Market is different in basically all the specifics while retaining the general idea of 'we have to get the group to meet Don Corneo'. So, spoilers ahead.
For one thing, the generic doorkeeper is now a named character who actively tries to dissuade Aerith to enter, all but saying that no one should want to meet Don Corneo and least of all be his bride; this obviously falls on deaf ears given her actual objective isn't being Corneo's bride, but it emphasize this sense of like - Don Corneo is a monster from whom you should stay away and even the people directly enabling him are put off by him.
The Wall Market sidequests are massively expanded with a new cast of characters - now Aerith and Cloud need to meet the approval of three fixtures of Wall Market in order to meet Corneo, the chocobo carriage owner, a massage parlor owner, and Andrea, the owner of the Honey Bee Inn.
'Big Bro' is gone. Instead of a somewhat ambiguously-gendered cross-dresser, the head of the gym is Jules, who's just camp.
The squats game, incidentally, is an absolute nightmare in Remake, and I have never been able to beat even its second tier, let alone the last.
The Honey Bee Inn, meanwhile, is just… completely different. It's not a brothel, it's more like a VIP night club with burlesque shows, helmed by Andrea, a man who is far more camp than even Jules. In order to enter it, we have to beat a colosseum sidequest, fighting a whole series of monsters, until Andrea challenges Cloud to a dance-off which he must win in order for Andrea to dress him up as Wall Market's Most Beautiful Girl, which gives us literally the best scene in all of gaming history:
The Honey Bee Inn, meanwhile, is just… completely different. It's not a brothel, it's more like a VIP night club with burlesque shows, helmed by Andrea, a man who is far more camp than even Jules. In order to enter it, we have to beat a colosseum sidequest, fighting a whole series of monsters, until Andrea challenges Cloud to a dance-off which he must win in order for Andrea to dress him up as Wall Market's Most Beautiful Girl, which gives us literally the best scene in all of gaming history:
I love how Aerith in the remake is literally about two seconds away from rushing the stage to shove a 100 dollar gil bill into Cloud's pants, and she gets even more down bad after the dance. It's incredible how thirsty the lady is.
Maybe Shinra could get better PR if they did some work on the city's water supply holy shit -
The funniest part of that scene was the anticipation. Going into the remake, everybody was absolutely positive that they'd tone down the Wall Market sequence, maybe even remove the cross dressing. Sure, they cut out the explicit prostitution, but instead they leaned into the drag and got us that beauty.
The funniest part of that scene was the anticipation. Going into the remake, everybody was absolutely positive that they'd tone down the Wall Market sequence, maybe even remove the cross dressing. Sure, they cut out the explicit prostitution, but instead they leaned into the drag and got us that beauty.
I like that Cloud seems increasingly okay with it as things progress, probably not hurt by the fact that Aerith seems to find crossdressing men extremely hot
This is a big and informative analysis of what's going on with Wall Market. I enjoyed reading these thoughts, there's a great deal there both cool and dubious. Seeing the nuances in Aerith's character even in the original laid out like this is also very interesting.
The Reunion fixes this by... not fixing this and instead using the very specific Japanese term for the type of meat platter this is. At least the anomalous reality breach is contained!
It then makes a complete stumble by deciding to be more iconoclastic than fucking Leo the Isaurian and translating the Honey Bee Inn to "Honey Bee Manor", which rolls off the tongue way less effectively misses the vibes.
In The Lover's Room, we find an old couple who apparently who had the room rented by their son as a gift, but it's too nice, the bed's too big, the bathtub is too pretty, the grandfather can't get comfortable. The grandmother calls this 'a high-class neighborhood in the big city' which, considering that's the very opposite of what Wall Market is, gives me a strong impression that people from outside Midgar have very little idea what it looks like and what the living standards of the top vs the slums are like.
So... a little something else to note from the Reunion and the original Japanese while dancing around spoilers...
This old couple speaks in very thick Kansai accents ("the designated funny accent" as I believe Tim Rogers calls it later in Let's Mosey) which the Reunion translates... into Scottish accents. This is... strangely questionable. Like, apparently the lead on Reunion/Beacause is from the United Kingdom so my maybe the Scottish are seen as the right combination of funny and uncouth for it to be a proximal cultural reference... but, well, it's a bit annoying to read a phonetically spelled, accent right? There might be another motivation for this...
Did you notice the doll in their bathtub, by the way? You can look around the rooms slowly through the keyholes.
I think what's happening here is that a client hired two of the Honey Bees to do some Sexy Roleplaying and they're chatting about him while he's doing a big monologue before they get into the meat of things, as it were, (they mention that he's a Shinra guy and that President Shinra's wife recently learned about 'this little hobby of his'? It's not clear), although the image of a Shinra nerd being so frustrated with his inability to arrange scheduling with his friends that he went and hired escorts just so he would have a D&D group on a regular schedule and guaranteed to show up is hilarious, and is in fact my headcanon now.
The Reunion clarified this a bit... the people talking, and in fact everyone in the room I think are all just employees with the boss's delegation. The boss guy just keeps going through his same little fantasy monologue, though, and they're never going to get to their meeting now!
Small enemy translation note time! Corneo's goons, in the original Japanese, are named "Kocchi" and "Socchi", which are apparently Japanese proximal words for "this guy/here" and "that guy/there", respectively, and Reunion wants to just write this out literally unless you turn the canon names option on. Translating them to Kotch and Scotch, as the original did, is... basically the best you can do to make them a funny matching pair of goons in English.
These are also kind of a neat combination of reference and FFVII's "modern fantasy" approach to series tradition monsters; they're Sahagins, which I think were in the games you've already played? The Reunion prefers a variant spelling of "Sahuagin", because that's how they're spelled in the D&D monster manual they were originally shamelessly stolen from, but FF series standard naming drops the u.
And for thoroughness an enemy you didn't run into or at least didn't comment on... there's giant crabs which in the original translation are called "Ceasar". Their original Japanese transliterates more directly to "Schezar Scissor", which the Reunion uses and I like the rhyming scheme of... but frankly I think the original was right to read that first word as "Caesar" even if they misspelled it. Neither side wins here.
As for overall content... I find it notable, having played it myself a week or two ago and also seeing your comments and analysis of the whole Wall Market sequence, that the Remake... probably pulled as neat a trick as it'll ever be able to pull by modernizing the sequence to remove the very uncomfortable '90s sexual-assault/harassment as comedy vibes and double down on the fun camp that the original was probably received as. I think the one real loss is probably "Big Bro", where you could have certainly written in just a more tastefully clear drag queen or trans woman character like you suggested through headcanon. Writing them out in favor of just a particularly camp member of the gym bros is... playing it safe to a fault, in my opinion.
The funniest part of that scene was the anticipation. Going into the remake, everybody was absolutely positive that they'd tone down the Wall Market sequence, maybe even remove the cross dressing. Sure, they cut out the explicit prostitution, but instead they leaned into the drag and got us that beauty.
I actually think the most interesting part is how the Remake's characterization of Aerith in the Honey Bee scene is explicitly sexual? Not sexualized, but she is actually extremely horny for Cloud and it shows then and there. And in the original, she's a gremlin who is developing feelings for him but there's not so much of an emphasis on sexual desire outside of what is implied via romantic desire.
It really fits the character, but it's also kind of new.
