Holy shit a FF14 TTRPG? We ballin.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy IX]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I can't believe Squeenix would steal Fabula Ultima's lunch money like that
21stCentury
Let's get down to bismuth
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- They/Them
There was a LL a while back where YoshiP basically turned straight to the camera and said "Y'KNOW, THE DEV TEAM HAS BEEN PLAYING A LOT OF TABLETOP GAMES LATELY...", and I was like, "Hmm, that's not implying anything". Don't worry though, the monkey's paw still has time to curl all four fingers and punch us in the sack; it could be a 5e conversion.
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
On one hand, it'd be taking an already existing ruleset that's getting some attention thanks to BG3. On the other hand by Zenos no please let it be homebrew rules I want to scream as a warrior at bitches and heal with every head I cleave and then switch to dragoon for the next fight so my DM can give me reputation points with the floor just like in critic's alley accclaimed em-em-ooo.
Also, these news made me google and just found out they'll add Stormblood to the free trial next month and I'm hella excited to finally get to stick that shit into my vein, so thanks. :_P
- Pronouns
- They/Them/She/Her
I think the Gold Saucer actively supports that one, too. After all, exactly what's gained in terms of information security by destroying a small out-of-the way village... and replacing it with a giant casino arcology tower with a ropeway (or whatever it was called) with its other station practically right next to the reactor? Oh, and the Corel refugee camp is also right there, and closer to the reactor than Corel itself was; if they goal was to prevent people from getting close to the reactor, why are they alive? It's not like Scarlet was averse to killing innocent people for being in her way. Whereas, if the goal was to clear them out to make way for redevelopment, well, here they are, out, and bullets still cost gil, you know.Omicron said:
In my RPG group's first campaign, at one point we had the party split in a market, and due to some details of session scheduling or something, I forget what it was exactly, having them try to rejoin right then could have been a problem for in-universe causality. So the GM jokingly said that the way was blocked by fruit carts.Connelly said:
That became something of a running joke in the group.
And then, a couple of campaigns later, because we're that sort of group, some of the NPCs figured out that fruit carts had had a connection with causality and the flow of time, which they were concerned about due to some in-universe magic. They set up a network of monitoring stations, with fruit carts hooked up to instrumentation, to better track anomalies, and even developed tools using miniature fruit carts, say, sized for a single blueberry.
- Location
- Texas
You know what? You're right. We haven't been living up to our full potential. Now let me see, I think I have something here… eh, not a perfect fit, but close enough.
Magic is powered by potential energy. The longer something could happen, but doesn't, the more magic is gathered. Balance a boulder precariously on the top of a mountain for a few years, and you'll get an uptick of monster activity. So long as there's no avalanche.
A good chunk of a person's attack is internal, self reinforcing magic. People can only build up so much before hitting a threshold and having to act. This is shown in the Bravely Default spinoff, where waiting longer than normal let's you "bank" actions, while "overdrawing" actions leads to an equal recovery time.
That said, this does nothing to explain why a character's speed stat often effects the ATB gauge, and FF7 Remake is basically the complete opposite, where actively attacking fills the gauge faster.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
Advent Children added visible mako flares to some character's Limit Breaks, and some Limit Breaks are adapted into simple ATB attacks in 7R, therefore the ATB and Limit bars are merely expressions of a character's building Soul Force which they can expend to overcome the limits of human capability in small or not-so-small ways. Your ATB charges faster when landing attacks and actively guarding attacks because the survival instinct is the humanity's oldest and strongest urge, therefore it's obviously intertwined with the soul's ability to generate more internal mako in times of crisis where death is on the line.
dinomannitro6
all your gender is belong to us
- Location
- The Land Where The Sunflowers Bloom
in Remake, there was 20 years of anticipation waiting for the game, so the characters can draw on that massive pool of energy instead. Thats why they have to space out the releases of the games, so the energy can be refreshed and they don't have to go back to the old mechanics.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
Going by this logic, the train flashback almost makes Shinra seem downright decent; they didn't have a body to transport back because Lifestream, but still went so far as to ID and inform Elmyra of her husband's death in battle.
It does suggest that what Aerith and Sephiroth should really do is bury the hatchet on this 'Kill humanity; return Planet to Ancients' thing and go into business together solving cold cases. Aerith could sense her mom's husband returning to the Lifestream from clear across the Planet; there's a world of people needing closure out there, and only the last two (sorta) Ancients and their immortal catdog can do it.
A loose cannon with a animal companion and a by the book partner adventure for the ages
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
I can honestly say I can't tell who's supposed to be Aerith and who Sephirot.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
They take turns.I can honestly say I can't tell who's supposed to be Aerith and who Sephirot.
- Pronouns
- They/Them/She/Her
Hm. From pondering on that, some speculation:ZerbanDaGreat said:
Prior to the development of mako reactors, the amount of mako on Planet had been slowly increasing from... whatever the initial amount was, wherever it came from. The mako cycle is mostly closed, but those organisms which can grow from non-life energy (mostly plants, gaining energy from sunlight) slowly convert some of that "base" energy into more mako, which then makes its way both through the ecosystem directly and back into the lifestream pool for incarnation into new, more complex life. In this way, Planet's biosphere can both grow in size and complexity over time and heal from some degree of mako loss. Possibly there's some level of mako at which a steady state is achieved, or things would have just kept going until Planet became, I don't know, some skyscraper-treed gaia world with active planetary sapience and who knows what, or maybe biospheres actually reproduce by budding and that's where the initial seed mako came from, the "child" of some other planet (though if that's the case, I wonder if some physical life goes along with it, or if the arrival of a Mako Pulse From Space is what jostles some molecules in a puddle of goo into for-now-simple self-replicating patterns)... Actually, maybe it's a combination of those two: mako keeps accumulating and complexity building until a gaia world is achieved, at which point further mako generated is, when enough's accumulated, sent out into space to spread life to new worlds.
However, then the mako reactor was developed, a machine which takes the potential difference between mako and base energy and uses it for power. Mako goes in, waste heat comes out, depleting the mako supply far more quickly than it's regenerated.
Hm. I wonder if mako or the generation thereof is actively antientropic?
Anyway, it may also be that there's some critical mako threshold and/or rate of train which will cause things to collapse (I think something about that was hinted at being a possibility? Low on time at the moment, though.), such that stopping the drain before that point will just mean it'll be a while before Planet recovers and stopping it after that point will be too late. If the physical complexity of life usually grows with the mako supply and the mako supply generally only increases (with even ordinary mass extinction events just temporarily shunting a lot of mako from the incarnate ecosystem to the lifestream -- but it's possible there's some magical equivalent in this world), how would the ecosystem react to having too little mako to support its physical complexity? And/or is there actually some sort of ongoing mako outlay needed to sustain the presence of an ecosystem on Planet at all, that's initially covered by the seed mako and then by the rate of generation being higher, but if the rate of generation dips too low not only without a seed-sized reserve but with the reserve that does exist still being drained by reactors for at least a time...
As for what might be causing that... maybe the life energy equivalent of the planetary magnetic field has to be actively generated, and without it the conditions of vast, lifeless outer space will start eroding Planet's lifestream? And/or possibly it's related to potential antientropic properties and entropy not liking being antied and needing to be actively fended off...
Hm.
Okay, well, this is a lot more speculation than I thought I had on this, and while it's interesting, see above about being low on time; I think I'd better be cutting this here at least for now and moving on.
Well, it might not have been too difficult, the IDing, at least. Sure, if someone maybe dies out of sight, you might never know, but a soldier could still get shot, fall down, and poof into mako all in front of multiple witnesses who'd already had a positive ID on them.Guile said:
MiskWisk
Hoot
- Location
- Somewhere devoid of wit
- Pronouns
- He
"Aerith, put the chair down. It's my turn to be the loose cannon."
I can honestly say I can't tell who's supposed to be Aerith and who Sephirot.
Sephiroth never had an animal companion
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Sephiroth never had an animal companion
View: https://twitter.com/UltimaShadowX/status/1704716145297666125
Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
You know, I am sensing some slight traces of shipper bait in this exchange.
Well I was gonna go with Cloud not being an animal but then I realized under Shinra law every one under Executive probably doubles as a test animal.
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Thozmp
Gets my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
Maybe they have specific ID tags that don't go poof with the body? As every living thing on the planet is mako based, including the animals and plants, there's got to be some amount of remains, otherwise food would be something of an issue.
Final Fantasy VII, Part 17: Return to Nibelheim, Part A
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Welcome back to Final Fantasy VII, the game where when I was a young boy, my father took me into the city to see the marching band. He said son, when you grow up, would you be the savior of the broken, the beaten and the damned?
Okay, before we start on the 'plot' part of the update, we're just going to be doing some house cleaning.
First off:
I reload the Cave of Gi and go through it all over again, only better this time. You can see in this picture that everyone is in critical MP; this is because, with a better handle on the length of the dungeon and the type of threat, I was able to go pace myself so as to go through it all using just the right spells to blow through all the encounters without facing much risk to myself, consuming only two Ethers before hitting the boss at almost no MP left and killing him instantly with an X-Potion ('low MP' being important because it means I got through as many encounters as possible and got the maximum amount of XP and gil I could get without having to use more Ethers; it's all about efficiency). The end result is I came out of this with a lot more Gil and Ethers than in my previous outing.
Forearmed is forewarned: A good RPG combat system is one where advance knowledge of the threat you're facing allows you to significantly reduce its strain on your resources by making more correct choices.
(Also taking on Aerith instead of Barret helped, sorry Barret, Healing Wind is just really good.)
In the process, we grab a couple of Enemy Skills like Death Sentence, a spell with a cool animation where a demonic skull appears over the enemy and they get a 60 second timer until they die. It's basically identical to the old Doom status effect, and seeing as few non-boss battles take more than 60 seconds to resolve, I'm dubious as to its utility.
Also, I made an off-handed comment recently that went unremarked on but which I should clarify, in which I said Cait Sith was riding a "giant Moogle plushie." The exact nature of the weird thing Cait Sith has been riding is ambiguous… Until you hit battle with him in your party, at which point it becomes clear:
That enemy is called 'Golem,' and is straight up a robot, which I love.
Look at that zipper in the back of the Moogle. It could mean it's a suit with a person on it, theoretically, but no - I think the much more reasonable assumption is that it's a stuffed toy. A giant stuffed toy, to be sure, brought to life somehow, but a stuffed toy at its core. Or, more precisely, an animatronic/stuffed toy combo - a kind of real size Furby. Notably, when Cait Sith attack, he's not doing it with the Megaphone; instead, Cait Sith gives it orders with said megaphone, and the Moogle charges forward and hits the opponent with its giant paws. The Megaphone weapons merely increase the effectiveness, the enthusiasm with which the Moogle attacks.
…
So what I'm saying is that Cait Sith is riding Moogle Freddie Fazbear.
Also, FF7 has one of the coolest griffon design of all times, because in addition to "eagle" and "lion" it goes "fuck it, let's give that fucker a peacock tail."
Anyway, we go on a loooong Buggy trip all the way back to the Gold Saucer so I can try and find that Death Claw enemy with the Laser move to learn as an Enemy Skill. This, it turns out, was pointless; the Death Claw is not merely native to the Corel Desert, but to two specific screens of Corel Prison. We do run into this game's version of the Dhorne Chimera and the Sandworm, though, so that's neat (the Chimera knows another Enemy Skill, but I didn't know that when I fought it, so I missed that too). The trip back is so long that I just end up reloading and doing a shorter trip, back to Gongaga. It turns out when Scarlet was rambling about 'junky reactors giving junky Materia,' she wasn't making a general-purpose comment, she was specifically commenting on a Materia she'd picked out of the broken ruins of the Reactor. This wasn't visible on the screen, we were meant to treat the dialogue as hints and investigate ourselves. Actually finding the damned thing takes some pixel-hunting, but eventually, we get it, and…
It's the Titan Materia.
Titan is, as usual, a human-looking very buff dude, but they really went creative with his animation in this game: when you summon him, Titan delivers a table flip. He literally crouches to grasp the ground underneath the opponent, then turns it upside down in a way that both flips the opponent onto their back and crushes them with the weight of the earth.
That's really cool and I dig it. As often, Titan is a tier of power above the Elemental Trio with the caveat that flying enemies are immune to Earth Damage, making him more conditional than a straightforward upgrade in power.
We've gotten a bunch of stuff and a lot of Gil to spend, so I buy our first MP Plus Materia to help out whoever is assigned Beta duty, and off we go to our next destination. It takes a little doing to find; Cosmo Canyon is a maze of mountain corridors… Which are largely irrelevant, it's actually really easy to leave the area if you don't get it in your head that you have to explore the back-alleys for some reason. Cross a river, and…
…
Well I don't like that.
True story: I played a game and reversed the order of the pictures, because what happens is that I first approached this place, saw this screen, and went "a'ight I'm heading back" and left to do other stuff instead.
In case you're not getting what I mean from the weirdly-shaped mountains and the location of the town alone, the Save screen helpfully indicates that this is the "Nibel Region."
So.
Alright.
Let's head in.
…okay what the fuck.
This town is perfectly fine. In fact - and this is one of the first signs that something is even more wrong than the fact that it's fine - it looks better than it did in Cloud's flashback. The streets and plaza have been swept of dirt, the houses are cleaner. It's almost… Brand new.
This, of course, prompts an immediate reaction from the party I gathered. A party which, hm.
Yuffie: "I thought someone said this town burnt down!"
Cloud: "...Yeah."
Cait Sith: "Cloud, did you make up that story to get our support?"
Cloud: "I'm not lying!"
Cloud: "I remember… The intense heat of the flames…"
Holy shit. Holy shit I am dying. I didn't think to change my party members before heading in and Cait Sith literally turned to Cloud and went 'wow I guess your tragic backstory was a bunch of fucking lies huh?'. Of all the people he wandered into town with, he did it with the two people least invested in his personal drama and the Shinra struggle and they immediately just called him out on his backstory. This is so fucking funny. And because Cloud has major memory issues that have only become more prominent over time, for all we know, it could be true, the destruction of Nibelheim could be a fake memory.
Flawless.
Anyway, for the more serious take on this, I reload and walk into town with Tifa and Aerith, which leads to different results.
Tifa: "What!?" [She turns to Cloud with an agitated expression.] "This was all burned down, wasn't it?"
Cloud: "...I thought so."
Tifa: "Then why… My house is still here too…"
Aerith: "...Something's strange?"
Cloud: "I'm not lying!"
Cloud: "I remember… The intense heat of the flames…"
Cloud's dialogue not changing aside, having Tifa on board instantly changes the context because she was also there when Nibelheim burned down - she's just as shocked and confused as Cloud, and in being shocked and confused, she brings corroboration to the fact that Cloud did see the town burn, whatever is going on here is something else. Aerith, as well, doesn't outright go "wow I guess your backstory was a lie huh," she's just worried about whatever might be going on here that causes he town to not match her friends' memories.
Well, only one way to find out what this is about, so we're heading in.
Asking about the innkeeper's story has Cloud ask what the hell is up with this town that was supposed to have burned down, only for the innkeeper to brush him off, say he was born and raised here and none of that happened; Tifa accuses him of lying and the guy tells us that if we're going to insult him like that, we should leave.
Taking Tifa on in this part is really interesting because she's more openly confrontational and emotional than Cloud is. At this point it's a pretty well-worn observation that Cloud does a lot of avoidance regarding his past, but here it's interesting because it's Tifa who takes on the more proactive role of going 'what the hell is happening,' and accusing people of lying. It's a confrontational role that is noteworthy precisely because it's a departure from Tifa's usual character.
Also, huh.
There's this goddamned thing in the inn's kitchen, just hanging in there being completely unremarked upon. It is described as a 'man in a black cape,' and it has a tattoo labeled with the Number '6.'
So.
This is such a wild thing to just throw at us here and now.
For a while now, we've been treating 'the man in the black cape' as synonymous with Sephiroth. There was always the possibility of it being a red herring, of course, but if that was the case I expected one singular character to be said red herring, one dude in a black cape we could catch up to.
But no.
These things are all over Nibelheim.
They are in every house, hanging around all the denizens of the town, and all sport sequential numbered tattoos. Most of them also give highly valuable items when interacted with, like Elixirs or Sources (a consumable which permanently increases character stats). And because of their weird models, it's totally unclear what the person or 'person' underneath looks like - it has to look at least mostly human or Cloud wouldn't describe it as 'a man,' right? But the bigger question is not 'what are they,' it's - Are they the ones we've been chasing after this whole time? Are all the sightings of Sephiroth just sightings of those things? Someone did say they met a 'man in a black cape' with a numbered tattoo in the Gold Saucer, but - was that all of the 'Sephiroth' sightings, or just some, or none?
This is going to leave me with a headache even after we learn more. As we are about to.
If we visit the item store, the saleswoman has no particular dialogue, but another person in the back talks about how they've been in business here for a long time, and when Cloud calls them out on it and says he lived there until he was 14 (which incidentally means there is a 2-year time gap between him leaving and coming back), they call him a liar back. It doesn't lead anywhere.
Of course, the choicest gut punch is in Cloud's own house.
There's an older woman there, working in the kitchen - the game took care to animate her movements to convey the sense that she's tending to normal domestic tasks, most likely cooking, just like Cloud's mom was last time we were here. Only, when he approaches her and says this was his house, he lived there until he was 14, she tells him he's sick, and to get out of her house.
And then, of course, Tifa's house. Which is where we meet the first of the black-robed figures to start talking.
In a halting voice, they speak of bringing 'something' to Sephiroth, and of 'becoming one' with him, and of going to a 'Reunion', whatever that is. There's another one, in Tifa's parents' bedroom, with the number 4, asking aloud where is the 'great Sephiroth', and dropping the Platinum Fists, a weapon for Tifa.
Then, we find Tifa's bedroom, and…
…
So, in Cosmo Canyon, there was something that mildly bothered me that I ended up not mentioning mostly because something always fell through, but one of my readers actually said much the same: The Nanaki/Seto plotline is in too much of a hurry. It introduces a conflict - 'Nanaki is bitter towards his late father because he thinks he was a coward' - then has a single scene of separation that's about the main plot ('here's the deal with Mako and spirit energy'), then immediately has Bugenhagen say 'so you have these feelings towards your father, come with me' and then we do the dungeon and it resolves that emotional conflict. It's way, way too quick; we're not allowed to sit with it, to have the initial conflict inform Nanaki's character and actions except in retrospect, it's introduced and immediately resolved. Less a character arc, and more a character pitch.
So. Nibelheim.
The game had a really cool set-up with 'why is Cloud and Tifa's hometown that was burned down five years ago seemingly intact and populated by people who claim to have lived there all their lives and don't recognize Cloud or Tifa? And who are these mysterious figures in black robes muttering about Sephiroth?' You get to visit three houses that set up this mystery, then you walk into Tifa's house and you find A LETTER, ON HER DESK, IN THE OPEN, which says "btw all the dudes in black are clones, we rebuilt the town to look identical to what it was five years ago and everyone in it is a Shinra employee who took special acting lessons.'
Seriously. This entire thing lasted less than ten minutes, start to end. Granted, the actual answer to the mind-bending 'what the fuck is going on here' being the most predictable answer, 'Shinra rebuilt the town as a decoy and everyone you meet is just lying' would have been a kind of limp resolution if the mystery had been dragged out overlong, but like… You could have kept it up a little.
One of my readers mentioned that back in the day they completely missed the letter from the shop owner's son on Tifa's desk during the flashback, and I'm wondering if missing the letter entirely here might not actually improve this sequence. Sometimes FF7 is in way too much of a hurry to resolve a cool plot thread.
With that said.
…
The phrase, 'Unfortunately, no 'CLONES' have left this town this quarter' is not a mistranslation from any version I can check. They do say unfortunately. The black-robed things, the Clones, are intended to leave town, to go out into the world, to do… something. But for whatever reason, they have to do it of their own will, they can't just be kicked out. They were created for a purpose, and that purpose requires allowing them to just hang around Nibelheim until they feel called by… something, and leave. But instead of doing that, they've taken to just rambling about 'Sephiroth' and 'Reunion.'
Were they designed as a kind of tracker? Made by Hojo to sense something, then left to follow it on their own, with a Shinra team close behind to retrieve whatever it is they're called to once they find it?
…it's Jenova, isn't it? The missing parts of Jenova that weren't in the tank in the Shinra Building. They are clones made out of Sephiroth or Jenova's cells, in hope that they would sense the lost Jenova pieces across the world, and seek to be reunited with them, allowing Shinra to find and reclaimed the piece once they do. But Sephiroth derailed the system by seizing Jenova's corpse and then doing… whatever he's currently doing with it.
I think that's the best theory I can come up with at this time and I think it holds up fairly well to the fact we currently have, even if they end up invalidated later. Let's keep an eye on that 'Reunion' thing, though.
As for the piano in Tifa's room, I do my best to remember what I played during the flashback, and it opens up to reveal Young Tifa's personal savings… of 1 gil. I don't think it was related to the specific sequence of keys I entered, though.
So, now that we've covered the town (there are yet more creepy Clones hanging around, one of them helpfully telling us Sephiroth is inside the Mansion), it's time for our Return To Spencer Mansion.
One of the interesting things about revisiting a place you only saw in a flashback, which by nature of what a flashback is was non-interactible at the time, is all the stuff you spotted that seemed like it would eventually be something we can interact with. Doors that we couldn't pass through, chests we couldn't open, and yes, THE SAFE. I fucking called it.
It's not all a pleasure cruise, though, because the Shinra Mansion has been left in disuse (except by Sephiroth) for so long that various kinds of gribblies are now running around, making the whole place a dungeon full of random encounters, which, herm…
…floating pumpkin heads? Flying hand-mirrors? Scales? Am I fighting the furniture from Beauty and the Beast? And what's with the dude riding a blade chandelier or whatever that is!
Shinra Mansion has the game really going in on enemies with unique mechanics, which… I would appreciate a lot more in a game with curated encounters that are one-and-done where each one is its own problem to solve and then solved for good, instead of random encounter spam. For instance, the mirrors have auto-Reflect on; this causes me to hit myself in the face with a Fira-All, massively hitting my party, at which point I figuratively hit my forehead going "oooh, of course, they're mirrors, that's clever!" and proceeded to crush them with summons and never think about it again.
Those floating scales inexplicably called 'Jerseys' (what the heck?) are way, way more annoying, because their mechanic is that if their hands lean to one side, they are immune to magical damage, and if they lean to the other, they are immune to physical damage. The hands change upon receiving attacks, and each scale changes individually, causing serious problems for group attacks or 'flow over' attacks when a previous Jersey dies with an attack logged in.
If you gave these things four times the HP and twice the attacking power and then made them a miniboss I encountered once, they might actually be a fun puzzle. As it stands, they keep coming up and getting in my way and, past the first time and the moment where what I'm supposed to do clicks, they're a chore.
As for the guy swinging on a giant blade, his name is Ghirofelgo, and he's… Weird. Basically, he's a more resilient and dangerous opponent than the other mobs on paper, only he has a limiting mechanic - when you hit him, it sometimes knocks him down from his pendulum and leaves him sprawled on the ground, and he needs a few turns before climbing back up and being able to attack again. The first time this happens, I end up knocking him on his ass over and over, so he gets up, gets knocked down, gets up, gets knocked down… Which at least has entertainment value.
I appreciate the game making an effort for mechanical complexity and engagement, I just think in the context of the random encounter system it ends up more annoying than anything. Still! Points for trying.
Anyway, let's head to the upper floor.
SEE? KNEW IT.
Okay, so, the safe is going to be a pain. As any good safe would, it requires a code to open. Specifically, it requires entering four separate numbers, with directional input mattering (that is to say, "Right 12" would mean you need to move the dial to the right until you reach 12, if you go over to 14 and backtrack to 12 it doesn't count) within a 20 second window. This makes "brute forcing" the safe essentially impossible, so we'll need to find clues.
It's not a pressing concern though, so first, let's tackle… Drum roll please… The basement!
Same old, same old.
This time, we can actually investigate some of what's in the old laboratory, with… disturbing results.
The place has barely been touched at all in all these years. In fact, as far as I can tell, the same books Sephiroth left in piles are still just there, unsorted. There are scratches left from inside glass containers, written notes by what I think were creatures trapped within planning their escape.
But of course, our main goal is the same book-strewn corridor in which Cloud first confronted Sephiroth all those years ago.
Cloud: "Sephiroth!"
Sephiroth: "Being here brings back memories. Are you going to participate in the Reunion?"
Cloud: "I don't even know what a Reunion is!"
Sephiroth: "Jenova will be at the Reunion. Jenova will join the Reunion, becoming a calamity from the skies."
Cloud: "Jenova, a calamity from the skies? You mean she wasn't an Ancient!?"
Sephiroth: "...I see. I don't think you have the right to participate."
Sephiroth: "I will go North past Mt. Nibel. If you wish to know… then follow…"
Cloud: "...Reunion? Calamity from the skies?"
Then the funniest thing in the world happens: Sephiroth CHUCKS A MATERIA AT CLOUD'S FACE.
There's no 'this makes sense in context,' he literally pulls his arm back to grab something, then throws it, and a Materia sails across the room and hits Cloud straight into his goddamned forehead, knocking him back and bouncing off onto the ground while Sephiroth starts rising into the air and levitating. Then Sephiroth does a fucking backflip in mid-air, then flies head-first above Cloud and out of the room.
Head down. Elbows in. Shoulders out.
It is, genuinely, incredibly funny, in no small part because of how out of left field it is, following the build-up of mystery and spooky ominous pronouncement and new story concepts being thrown at us with Sephiroth suddenly engaging goofball mode.
God.
It helps distract from the fact that we learned basically jack shit from this exchange, our second-ever with present-day Sephiroth.
I'm starting to see how this guy got the vibe of a cryptic asshole who says shit that doesn't make sense to anyone. The dialogue here is mostly utilitarian when you strip away the cryptic layer - he tells us where he's going to be and that Jenova will become something terrible, but, hmm.
Okay, let's look at the Retranslated mod's version of this exchange.
Sephiroth: "Being here brings back memories. Won't you be participating in the Reunion?"
Cloud: "What the hell is this all about?"
Sephiroth: "Jenova is holding a Reunion. With the Reunion, she will become a Calamity from the Sky."
Cloud: "Calamity from the Sky? I thought Jenova was an Ancient?"
Sephiroth: "I see. It would appear that you're unable to join us."
Sephiroth: "I shall proceed North, over Mt. Nibel. If you should awaken, then follow."
Cloud: "Reunion? Calamity from the Sky?"
Setting aside the Metal Gear Solid-style 'repeating the exposition' dialogue which feels unusually stilted here, and the fact that "I don't even know what a Reunion is!" is an objectively superior line to the generic "What the hell is this all about," because you should call out villains for cryptically throwing around Capitalized Nouns that they refuse to explain… This dialogue is still cryptic, but actually contains crumbs that, if they don't sate, at least whet the appetite, instead of being just fluff. The active voice of "Jenova is holding a Reunion," as opposed to the passive voice of "Jenova will be at the Reunion," makes it clear that Jenova is the one with agency here. Sephiroth is either Jenova's agent, fulfilling her will, or believes that he is doing so, deluding himself into acting the will of a dead/dormant monster - either way, for him, this is Jenova who is setting things into motion.
Which ties into the possibility that Sephiroth is being mind-controlled, or possessed, or otherwise under Jenova's eldritch influence; that rather than just a psychological break which had him instantly go off the deep end, his fraying sanity instead opened him up to influence and manipulation by an ancient, alien being which he initially mistook for one of the Ancients, his own race(?). When Cloud throws a question about thinking Jenova was an Ancient, Sephiroth takes it in stride and acts dismissive, as if Cloud just didn't know what he needed to know or didn't see the broader picture - when Sephiroth first snapped five years ago, he believed Jenova to be one of the Ancients, and justified his genocidal intent accordingly; in the meantime, he has come to a new position, where the idea that Jenova (and by extension, him?) might not be one of the Ancients doesn't faze him. Either he's learned the truth and it failed to deter him, or he has come under such influence that it no longer matters, for he is fully in Jenova's thrall.
As for "If you should awaken, then follow," that is way, way more ladden with implications than "If you wish to know more."
Let's put a pin in that and come back to all of this, along with the Clones, towards the end of this post.
For now, Sephiroth has given us new directions, along with a new Materia. By way of chucking it at Cloud's face. Which I genuinely can't get over. I hope they do that in Rebirth in full, glorious AAA 3D.
Incidentally, that Materia is the 'Destruct' Materia; it teaches Breach, which ends Barrier/Shell/Reflect, Dispel, which ends basically all beneficial status effects, and Death, which is Instant Death. A case where the mid-level unlock may actually be more valuable than the final spell on the Materia, then; I haven't actually gotten much use out of Dispel in previous games, so I guess we'll see if this one is worth it.
We can actually read some of the reports in the 'office' section of the library while we're here, and they're… interesting.
These are a series of "Escapee Reports," referring to 'escapees' located near Midgar. It's unclear if these are the same as the Clones being monitored in Nibelheim, though. Escapee "A" was an "Ex-SOLDIER," number redacted, and Escapee "B" was a regular soldier. Both were captured after being located, and subjected to both "Mako Radiation Therapy" and "Jenova;" A showed no reaction, B showed a considerable reaction to Jenova. Both escapees attempted to escape - A was shot while resisting, and B managed to escape during the struggle. B's whereabouts are "currently unknown," but "pursuit is unnecessary due to his diminishing consciousness."
Well.
I'm sure that doesn't have any plot relevance whatsoever. There's one massive thing I feel I can say here but, let's put another pin for the end of the post on that.
For now, with the plot out of the way, let's deal with that pesky safe. Turns out, if we look around a little better, one of the rooms off the side of the Mansion's entrance hall has a letter lying around with valuable information in it!
Letter: I must get rid of all those that stand in the way of my research. Even that one from the Turks. I scientifically altered him and put him to sleep in the basement. If you want to find him, search the area. But… This is merely a game I thought of. It is not necessary for you to participate if you don't want to.
This is followed by instructions on how to open the safe, including a hint for each of the four numbers to input in the dial. The first dial isn't too bad; it says "The lid of the box with the most oxygen." Weird, but you can figure out to just press OK next to everyone of the plants in the greenhouse room above until you find it.
The second, though, says "Behind the Ivory's short of tea and ray." And… Like… What? I've seen two explanations online for this; one is that "short of tea and ray" is meant to allude to a place between a 'tea room' and the 'rays' of the sun coming out of the windows of the mansion, and another one is that we're supposed to treat this phonetically as 'Ti' and 'Re' which are music notes. Maybe. I think that's bullshit and I hate riddles. The only word you actually need is 'ivory', which refers to 'ivory keys,' because we have to look behind the piano.
The third hint mentions a "creek (sic)" in the floor on the second floor near a chair and then a whole series of steps to take. Any hint for a riddle, a genre which commonly uses puns and deliberate misspellings, which includes an accidental, uncorrected after 25 years creak/creek typo does not deserve your respect, and neither does any puzzle which measures step count on a PC port of a game originally meant for a pre-analog stick PSX game played with a d-pad. Just look it up online or press OK on every tile of the second floor until you find it. Then, finally, there is no hint for the 4th dial, which is its own hint, because there is an empty space on our list of hints we can actually move the cursor over to and select, which reveals the final number in invisible ink.
Now we have all the dial numbers, all we need to do is enter them in 20 seconds, which is actually harder than it sounds because the buttons are very sensitive and it is incredibly easy to go over the intended number, which invalidates the whole sequence.
Once we do that, the safe opens, and a Materia rolls out of it - unfortunately we are immediately under attack before we can grab it.
This thing is "Lost Number." A forgotten or forsaken experiment by Hojo, left behind to guard the safe? My assumption at this stage is that this is the Turk that Hojo modified and then sealed and left a letter giving instructions on finding (I forgot that it specified 'in the basement', which will have consequences very soon). It's tougher than previous bosses, with 7k HP and powerful spells and attacks. Specifically, its red half casts spells, and its purple half will perform physical attacks. Once it reaches half HP, it undergoes a phase change based on how it was damaged; if the triggering damage was magic, it turns fully into its red half, if the trigger damage was physical, it turns fully into its purple half. To give you an idea how I approached the first leg of the fight…
…I hit that thing with relentless Summon abuse, for about 500 damage a pop, predictably (not to me, I had no idea how its mechanics work at the time) turning it into its red form, which is magic-resistant. From then on, it takes significantly reduced (like barely over 100 damage out of 3k remaining HP) from spells, and I already burned out all my Summons for this fight, while the Lost Number continues to pressure us with every 2nd tier spell in the book, including Quara (the Quake upgrade!) and Biora (Guess). Unfortunately for him…
This is actually a recast, I've had this up since the start of the fight.
…we still have Big Guard, which buffs everyone with Barrier, Shell and Haste, massively increasing party speed while reducing its spell damage. With Aerith's Healing Wind Limit Break and Big Guard, we're essentially unbreakable, and can tear down the Lost Number's remaining health with physical attacks without much trouble.
The damned thing dies just as I was about to unleash Tifa's new level 3 Limit Break, asshole.
On top of the considerable gil and XP for this fight, we gain an item called 'Cosmo Memory,' which teaches the Limit Skill: Cosmo Memory to Red XIII. Sounds good! He's not in our party though, so we'll leave it in the backpack for now, and go over to pick up our true reward, the red Materia which rolled out of the safe when we opened it.
…Odin!
Damn, that's cool. Although, Odin has generally kind of gradually lowered in power/significance over its appearance in the series, with FFVI even making him the base form of a more valuable 'evolved' summon, Raiden; still, finding it in Disc 1 is a lot more middle-of-the-road than I had anticipated. Let's check out what he's capable of!
…
Dark clouds engulf the battlefield. The rain begins to fall. Odin, in his antlered armor, appears wielding a crimson spear; he faces his opponent briefly, then his horse kicks, Odin hurls the spear into the storm-wracked sky, and the impact of Gungnir clears the cloud in a single blast, casting sunlight down upon the foe moments before Gungnir falls in a devastating impact, hitting the enemy for massive damage.
Yeah, okay, this is just the coolest spell animation in the entire series, nothing has come even close so far. And this isn't even an endgame summon, goddamn. Excited for the true endgame summons.
It looks like Odin has two modes, which he triggers based on whether the opponents are vulnerable to Instant Death, using Zantetsuken if it can trigger death and Gungnir for non-elemental damage if it can't, ensuring Odin is always useful, if MP-expensive? This is so cool.
Alright, with our prize seized from the safe, we're done with the Mansion. Let's head for Mt. Nibel.
[VETERAN DISCLAIMER: Yes. I know. You are getting the Undiluted Omicron Experience, and this is how it played out. Please contain your screaming until end of update.]
And now, we're heading to Mt. Nibel. Cutting the post here for image count!
Okay, before we start on the 'plot' part of the update, we're just going to be doing some house cleaning.
First off:
I reload the Cave of Gi and go through it all over again, only better this time. You can see in this picture that everyone is in critical MP; this is because, with a better handle on the length of the dungeon and the type of threat, I was able to go pace myself so as to go through it all using just the right spells to blow through all the encounters without facing much risk to myself, consuming only two Ethers before hitting the boss at almost no MP left and killing him instantly with an X-Potion ('low MP' being important because it means I got through as many encounters as possible and got the maximum amount of XP and gil I could get without having to use more Ethers; it's all about efficiency). The end result is I came out of this with a lot more Gil and Ethers than in my previous outing.
Forearmed is forewarned: A good RPG combat system is one where advance knowledge of the threat you're facing allows you to significantly reduce its strain on your resources by making more correct choices.
(Also taking on Aerith instead of Barret helped, sorry Barret, Healing Wind is just really good.)
In the process, we grab a couple of Enemy Skills like Death Sentence, a spell with a cool animation where a demonic skull appears over the enemy and they get a 60 second timer until they die. It's basically identical to the old Doom status effect, and seeing as few non-boss battles take more than 60 seconds to resolve, I'm dubious as to its utility.
Also, I made an off-handed comment recently that went unremarked on but which I should clarify, in which I said Cait Sith was riding a "giant Moogle plushie." The exact nature of the weird thing Cait Sith has been riding is ambiguous… Until you hit battle with him in your party, at which point it becomes clear:
That enemy is called 'Golem,' and is straight up a robot, which I love.
Look at that zipper in the back of the Moogle. It could mean it's a suit with a person on it, theoretically, but no - I think the much more reasonable assumption is that it's a stuffed toy. A giant stuffed toy, to be sure, brought to life somehow, but a stuffed toy at its core. Or, more precisely, an animatronic/stuffed toy combo - a kind of real size Furby. Notably, when Cait Sith attack, he's not doing it with the Megaphone; instead, Cait Sith gives it orders with said megaphone, and the Moogle charges forward and hits the opponent with its giant paws. The Megaphone weapons merely increase the effectiveness, the enthusiasm with which the Moogle attacks.
…
So what I'm saying is that Cait Sith is riding Moogle Freddie Fazbear.
Also, FF7 has one of the coolest griffon design of all times, because in addition to "eagle" and "lion" it goes "fuck it, let's give that fucker a peacock tail."
Anyway, we go on a loooong Buggy trip all the way back to the Gold Saucer so I can try and find that Death Claw enemy with the Laser move to learn as an Enemy Skill. This, it turns out, was pointless; the Death Claw is not merely native to the Corel Desert, but to two specific screens of Corel Prison. We do run into this game's version of the Dhorne Chimera and the Sandworm, though, so that's neat (the Chimera knows another Enemy Skill, but I didn't know that when I fought it, so I missed that too). The trip back is so long that I just end up reloading and doing a shorter trip, back to Gongaga. It turns out when Scarlet was rambling about 'junky reactors giving junky Materia,' she wasn't making a general-purpose comment, she was specifically commenting on a Materia she'd picked out of the broken ruins of the Reactor. This wasn't visible on the screen, we were meant to treat the dialogue as hints and investigate ourselves. Actually finding the damned thing takes some pixel-hunting, but eventually, we get it, and…
It's the Titan Materia.
Titan is, as usual, a human-looking very buff dude, but they really went creative with his animation in this game: when you summon him, Titan delivers a table flip. He literally crouches to grasp the ground underneath the opponent, then turns it upside down in a way that both flips the opponent onto their back and crushes them with the weight of the earth.
That's really cool and I dig it. As often, Titan is a tier of power above the Elemental Trio with the caveat that flying enemies are immune to Earth Damage, making him more conditional than a straightforward upgrade in power.
We've gotten a bunch of stuff and a lot of Gil to spend, so I buy our first MP Plus Materia to help out whoever is assigned Beta duty, and off we go to our next destination. It takes a little doing to find; Cosmo Canyon is a maze of mountain corridors… Which are largely irrelevant, it's actually really easy to leave the area if you don't get it in your head that you have to explore the back-alleys for some reason. Cross a river, and…
…
Well I don't like that.
True story: I played a game and reversed the order of the pictures, because what happens is that I first approached this place, saw this screen, and went "a'ight I'm heading back" and left to do other stuff instead.
In case you're not getting what I mean from the weirdly-shaped mountains and the location of the town alone, the Save screen helpfully indicates that this is the "Nibel Region."
So.
Alright.
Let's head in.
…okay what the fuck.
This town is perfectly fine. In fact - and this is one of the first signs that something is even more wrong than the fact that it's fine - it looks better than it did in Cloud's flashback. The streets and plaza have been swept of dirt, the houses are cleaner. It's almost… Brand new.
This, of course, prompts an immediate reaction from the party I gathered. A party which, hm.
Yuffie: "I thought someone said this town burnt down!"
Cloud: "...Yeah."
Cait Sith: "Cloud, did you make up that story to get our support?"
Cloud: "I'm not lying!"
Cloud: "I remember… The intense heat of the flames…"
Holy shit. Holy shit I am dying. I didn't think to change my party members before heading in and Cait Sith literally turned to Cloud and went 'wow I guess your tragic backstory was a bunch of fucking lies huh?'. Of all the people he wandered into town with, he did it with the two people least invested in his personal drama and the Shinra struggle and they immediately just called him out on his backstory. This is so fucking funny. And because Cloud has major memory issues that have only become more prominent over time, for all we know, it could be true, the destruction of Nibelheim could be a fake memory.
Flawless.
Anyway, for the more serious take on this, I reload and walk into town with Tifa and Aerith, which leads to different results.
Tifa: "What!?" [She turns to Cloud with an agitated expression.] "This was all burned down, wasn't it?"
Cloud: "...I thought so."
Tifa: "Then why… My house is still here too…"
Aerith: "...Something's strange?"
Cloud: "I'm not lying!"
Cloud: "I remember… The intense heat of the flames…"
Cloud's dialogue not changing aside, having Tifa on board instantly changes the context because she was also there when Nibelheim burned down - she's just as shocked and confused as Cloud, and in being shocked and confused, she brings corroboration to the fact that Cloud did see the town burn, whatever is going on here is something else. Aerith, as well, doesn't outright go "wow I guess your backstory was a lie huh," she's just worried about whatever might be going on here that causes he town to not match her friends' memories.
Well, only one way to find out what this is about, so we're heading in.
Asking about the innkeeper's story has Cloud ask what the hell is up with this town that was supposed to have burned down, only for the innkeeper to brush him off, say he was born and raised here and none of that happened; Tifa accuses him of lying and the guy tells us that if we're going to insult him like that, we should leave.
Taking Tifa on in this part is really interesting because she's more openly confrontational and emotional than Cloud is. At this point it's a pretty well-worn observation that Cloud does a lot of avoidance regarding his past, but here it's interesting because it's Tifa who takes on the more proactive role of going 'what the hell is happening,' and accusing people of lying. It's a confrontational role that is noteworthy precisely because it's a departure from Tifa's usual character.
Also, huh.
There's this goddamned thing in the inn's kitchen, just hanging in there being completely unremarked upon. It is described as a 'man in a black cape,' and it has a tattoo labeled with the Number '6.'
So.
This is such a wild thing to just throw at us here and now.
For a while now, we've been treating 'the man in the black cape' as synonymous with Sephiroth. There was always the possibility of it being a red herring, of course, but if that was the case I expected one singular character to be said red herring, one dude in a black cape we could catch up to.
But no.
These things are all over Nibelheim.
They are in every house, hanging around all the denizens of the town, and all sport sequential numbered tattoos. Most of them also give highly valuable items when interacted with, like Elixirs or Sources (a consumable which permanently increases character stats). And because of their weird models, it's totally unclear what the person or 'person' underneath looks like - it has to look at least mostly human or Cloud wouldn't describe it as 'a man,' right? But the bigger question is not 'what are they,' it's - Are they the ones we've been chasing after this whole time? Are all the sightings of Sephiroth just sightings of those things? Someone did say they met a 'man in a black cape' with a numbered tattoo in the Gold Saucer, but - was that all of the 'Sephiroth' sightings, or just some, or none?
This is going to leave me with a headache even after we learn more. As we are about to.
If we visit the item store, the saleswoman has no particular dialogue, but another person in the back talks about how they've been in business here for a long time, and when Cloud calls them out on it and says he lived there until he was 14 (which incidentally means there is a 2-year time gap between him leaving and coming back), they call him a liar back. It doesn't lead anywhere.
Of course, the choicest gut punch is in Cloud's own house.
There's an older woman there, working in the kitchen - the game took care to animate her movements to convey the sense that she's tending to normal domestic tasks, most likely cooking, just like Cloud's mom was last time we were here. Only, when he approaches her and says this was his house, he lived there until he was 14, she tells him he's sick, and to get out of her house.
And then, of course, Tifa's house. Which is where we meet the first of the black-robed figures to start talking.
In a halting voice, they speak of bringing 'something' to Sephiroth, and of 'becoming one' with him, and of going to a 'Reunion', whatever that is. There's another one, in Tifa's parents' bedroom, with the number 4, asking aloud where is the 'great Sephiroth', and dropping the Platinum Fists, a weapon for Tifa.
Then, we find Tifa's bedroom, and…
…
So, in Cosmo Canyon, there was something that mildly bothered me that I ended up not mentioning mostly because something always fell through, but one of my readers actually said much the same: The Nanaki/Seto plotline is in too much of a hurry. It introduces a conflict - 'Nanaki is bitter towards his late father because he thinks he was a coward' - then has a single scene of separation that's about the main plot ('here's the deal with Mako and spirit energy'), then immediately has Bugenhagen say 'so you have these feelings towards your father, come with me' and then we do the dungeon and it resolves that emotional conflict. It's way, way too quick; we're not allowed to sit with it, to have the initial conflict inform Nanaki's character and actions except in retrospect, it's introduced and immediately resolved. Less a character arc, and more a character pitch.
So. Nibelheim.
The game had a really cool set-up with 'why is Cloud and Tifa's hometown that was burned down five years ago seemingly intact and populated by people who claim to have lived there all their lives and don't recognize Cloud or Tifa? And who are these mysterious figures in black robes muttering about Sephiroth?' You get to visit three houses that set up this mystery, then you walk into Tifa's house and you find A LETTER, ON HER DESK, IN THE OPEN, which says "btw all the dudes in black are clones, we rebuilt the town to look identical to what it was five years ago and everyone in it is a Shinra employee who took special acting lessons.'
Seriously. This entire thing lasted less than ten minutes, start to end. Granted, the actual answer to the mind-bending 'what the fuck is going on here' being the most predictable answer, 'Shinra rebuilt the town as a decoy and everyone you meet is just lying' would have been a kind of limp resolution if the mystery had been dragged out overlong, but like… You could have kept it up a little.
One of my readers mentioned that back in the day they completely missed the letter from the shop owner's son on Tifa's desk during the flashback, and I'm wondering if missing the letter entirely here might not actually improve this sequence. Sometimes FF7 is in way too much of a hurry to resolve a cool plot thread.
With that said.
…
The phrase, 'Unfortunately, no 'CLONES' have left this town this quarter' is not a mistranslation from any version I can check. They do say unfortunately. The black-robed things, the Clones, are intended to leave town, to go out into the world, to do… something. But for whatever reason, they have to do it of their own will, they can't just be kicked out. They were created for a purpose, and that purpose requires allowing them to just hang around Nibelheim until they feel called by… something, and leave. But instead of doing that, they've taken to just rambling about 'Sephiroth' and 'Reunion.'
Were they designed as a kind of tracker? Made by Hojo to sense something, then left to follow it on their own, with a Shinra team close behind to retrieve whatever it is they're called to once they find it?
…it's Jenova, isn't it? The missing parts of Jenova that weren't in the tank in the Shinra Building. They are clones made out of Sephiroth or Jenova's cells, in hope that they would sense the lost Jenova pieces across the world, and seek to be reunited with them, allowing Shinra to find and reclaimed the piece once they do. But Sephiroth derailed the system by seizing Jenova's corpse and then doing… whatever he's currently doing with it.
I think that's the best theory I can come up with at this time and I think it holds up fairly well to the fact we currently have, even if they end up invalidated later. Let's keep an eye on that 'Reunion' thing, though.
As for the piano in Tifa's room, I do my best to remember what I played during the flashback, and it opens up to reveal Young Tifa's personal savings… of 1 gil. I don't think it was related to the specific sequence of keys I entered, though.
So, now that we've covered the town (there are yet more creepy Clones hanging around, one of them helpfully telling us Sephiroth is inside the Mansion), it's time for our Return To Spencer Mansion.
One of the interesting things about revisiting a place you only saw in a flashback, which by nature of what a flashback is was non-interactible at the time, is all the stuff you spotted that seemed like it would eventually be something we can interact with. Doors that we couldn't pass through, chests we couldn't open, and yes, THE SAFE. I fucking called it.
It's not all a pleasure cruise, though, because the Shinra Mansion has been left in disuse (except by Sephiroth) for so long that various kinds of gribblies are now running around, making the whole place a dungeon full of random encounters, which, herm…
…floating pumpkin heads? Flying hand-mirrors? Scales? Am I fighting the furniture from Beauty and the Beast? And what's with the dude riding a blade chandelier or whatever that is!
Shinra Mansion has the game really going in on enemies with unique mechanics, which… I would appreciate a lot more in a game with curated encounters that are one-and-done where each one is its own problem to solve and then solved for good, instead of random encounter spam. For instance, the mirrors have auto-Reflect on; this causes me to hit myself in the face with a Fira-All, massively hitting my party, at which point I figuratively hit my forehead going "oooh, of course, they're mirrors, that's clever!" and proceeded to crush them with summons and never think about it again.
Those floating scales inexplicably called 'Jerseys' (what the heck?) are way, way more annoying, because their mechanic is that if their hands lean to one side, they are immune to magical damage, and if they lean to the other, they are immune to physical damage. The hands change upon receiving attacks, and each scale changes individually, causing serious problems for group attacks or 'flow over' attacks when a previous Jersey dies with an attack logged in.
If you gave these things four times the HP and twice the attacking power and then made them a miniboss I encountered once, they might actually be a fun puzzle. As it stands, they keep coming up and getting in my way and, past the first time and the moment where what I'm supposed to do clicks, they're a chore.
As for the guy swinging on a giant blade, his name is Ghirofelgo, and he's… Weird. Basically, he's a more resilient and dangerous opponent than the other mobs on paper, only he has a limiting mechanic - when you hit him, it sometimes knocks him down from his pendulum and leaves him sprawled on the ground, and he needs a few turns before climbing back up and being able to attack again. The first time this happens, I end up knocking him on his ass over and over, so he gets up, gets knocked down, gets up, gets knocked down… Which at least has entertainment value.
I appreciate the game making an effort for mechanical complexity and engagement, I just think in the context of the random encounter system it ends up more annoying than anything. Still! Points for trying.
Anyway, let's head to the upper floor.
SEE? KNEW IT.
Okay, so, the safe is going to be a pain. As any good safe would, it requires a code to open. Specifically, it requires entering four separate numbers, with directional input mattering (that is to say, "Right 12" would mean you need to move the dial to the right until you reach 12, if you go over to 14 and backtrack to 12 it doesn't count) within a 20 second window. This makes "brute forcing" the safe essentially impossible, so we'll need to find clues.
It's not a pressing concern though, so first, let's tackle… Drum roll please… The basement!
Same old, same old.
This time, we can actually investigate some of what's in the old laboratory, with… disturbing results.
The place has barely been touched at all in all these years. In fact, as far as I can tell, the same books Sephiroth left in piles are still just there, unsorted. There are scratches left from inside glass containers, written notes by what I think were creatures trapped within planning their escape.
But of course, our main goal is the same book-strewn corridor in which Cloud first confronted Sephiroth all those years ago.
Cloud: "Sephiroth!"
Sephiroth: "Being here brings back memories. Are you going to participate in the Reunion?"
Cloud: "I don't even know what a Reunion is!"
Sephiroth: "Jenova will be at the Reunion. Jenova will join the Reunion, becoming a calamity from the skies."
Cloud: "Jenova, a calamity from the skies? You mean she wasn't an Ancient!?"
Sephiroth: "...I see. I don't think you have the right to participate."
Sephiroth: "I will go North past Mt. Nibel. If you wish to know… then follow…"
Cloud: "...Reunion? Calamity from the skies?"
Then the funniest thing in the world happens: Sephiroth CHUCKS A MATERIA AT CLOUD'S FACE.
There's no 'this makes sense in context,' he literally pulls his arm back to grab something, then throws it, and a Materia sails across the room and hits Cloud straight into his goddamned forehead, knocking him back and bouncing off onto the ground while Sephiroth starts rising into the air and levitating. Then Sephiroth does a fucking backflip in mid-air, then flies head-first above Cloud and out of the room.
Head down. Elbows in. Shoulders out.
It is, genuinely, incredibly funny, in no small part because of how out of left field it is, following the build-up of mystery and spooky ominous pronouncement and new story concepts being thrown at us with Sephiroth suddenly engaging goofball mode.
God.
It helps distract from the fact that we learned basically jack shit from this exchange, our second-ever with present-day Sephiroth.
I'm starting to see how this guy got the vibe of a cryptic asshole who says shit that doesn't make sense to anyone. The dialogue here is mostly utilitarian when you strip away the cryptic layer - he tells us where he's going to be and that Jenova will become something terrible, but, hmm.
Okay, let's look at the Retranslated mod's version of this exchange.
Sephiroth: "Being here brings back memories. Won't you be participating in the Reunion?"
Cloud: "What the hell is this all about?"
Sephiroth: "Jenova is holding a Reunion. With the Reunion, she will become a Calamity from the Sky."
Cloud: "Calamity from the Sky? I thought Jenova was an Ancient?"
Sephiroth: "I see. It would appear that you're unable to join us."
Sephiroth: "I shall proceed North, over Mt. Nibel. If you should awaken, then follow."
Cloud: "Reunion? Calamity from the Sky?"
Setting aside the Metal Gear Solid-style 'repeating the exposition' dialogue which feels unusually stilted here, and the fact that "I don't even know what a Reunion is!" is an objectively superior line to the generic "What the hell is this all about," because you should call out villains for cryptically throwing around Capitalized Nouns that they refuse to explain… This dialogue is still cryptic, but actually contains crumbs that, if they don't sate, at least whet the appetite, instead of being just fluff. The active voice of "Jenova is holding a Reunion," as opposed to the passive voice of "Jenova will be at the Reunion," makes it clear that Jenova is the one with agency here. Sephiroth is either Jenova's agent, fulfilling her will, or believes that he is doing so, deluding himself into acting the will of a dead/dormant monster - either way, for him, this is Jenova who is setting things into motion.
Which ties into the possibility that Sephiroth is being mind-controlled, or possessed, or otherwise under Jenova's eldritch influence; that rather than just a psychological break which had him instantly go off the deep end, his fraying sanity instead opened him up to influence and manipulation by an ancient, alien being which he initially mistook for one of the Ancients, his own race(?). When Cloud throws a question about thinking Jenova was an Ancient, Sephiroth takes it in stride and acts dismissive, as if Cloud just didn't know what he needed to know or didn't see the broader picture - when Sephiroth first snapped five years ago, he believed Jenova to be one of the Ancients, and justified his genocidal intent accordingly; in the meantime, he has come to a new position, where the idea that Jenova (and by extension, him?) might not be one of the Ancients doesn't faze him. Either he's learned the truth and it failed to deter him, or he has come under such influence that it no longer matters, for he is fully in Jenova's thrall.
As for "If you should awaken, then follow," that is way, way more ladden with implications than "If you wish to know more."
Let's put a pin in that and come back to all of this, along with the Clones, towards the end of this post.
For now, Sephiroth has given us new directions, along with a new Materia. By way of chucking it at Cloud's face. Which I genuinely can't get over. I hope they do that in Rebirth in full, glorious AAA 3D.
Incidentally, that Materia is the 'Destruct' Materia; it teaches Breach, which ends Barrier/Shell/Reflect, Dispel, which ends basically all beneficial status effects, and Death, which is Instant Death. A case where the mid-level unlock may actually be more valuable than the final spell on the Materia, then; I haven't actually gotten much use out of Dispel in previous games, so I guess we'll see if this one is worth it.
We can actually read some of the reports in the 'office' section of the library while we're here, and they're… interesting.
These are a series of "Escapee Reports," referring to 'escapees' located near Midgar. It's unclear if these are the same as the Clones being monitored in Nibelheim, though. Escapee "A" was an "Ex-SOLDIER," number redacted, and Escapee "B" was a regular soldier. Both were captured after being located, and subjected to both "Mako Radiation Therapy" and "Jenova;" A showed no reaction, B showed a considerable reaction to Jenova. Both escapees attempted to escape - A was shot while resisting, and B managed to escape during the struggle. B's whereabouts are "currently unknown," but "pursuit is unnecessary due to his diminishing consciousness."
Well.
I'm sure that doesn't have any plot relevance whatsoever. There's one massive thing I feel I can say here but, let's put another pin for the end of the post on that.
For now, with the plot out of the way, let's deal with that pesky safe. Turns out, if we look around a little better, one of the rooms off the side of the Mansion's entrance hall has a letter lying around with valuable information in it!
Letter: I must get rid of all those that stand in the way of my research. Even that one from the Turks. I scientifically altered him and put him to sleep in the basement. If you want to find him, search the area. But… This is merely a game I thought of. It is not necessary for you to participate if you don't want to.
This is followed by instructions on how to open the safe, including a hint for each of the four numbers to input in the dial. The first dial isn't too bad; it says "The lid of the box with the most oxygen." Weird, but you can figure out to just press OK next to everyone of the plants in the greenhouse room above until you find it.
The second, though, says "Behind the Ivory's short of tea and ray." And… Like… What? I've seen two explanations online for this; one is that "short of tea and ray" is meant to allude to a place between a 'tea room' and the 'rays' of the sun coming out of the windows of the mansion, and another one is that we're supposed to treat this phonetically as 'Ti' and 'Re' which are music notes. Maybe. I think that's bullshit and I hate riddles. The only word you actually need is 'ivory', which refers to 'ivory keys,' because we have to look behind the piano.
The third hint mentions a "creek (sic)" in the floor on the second floor near a chair and then a whole series of steps to take. Any hint for a riddle, a genre which commonly uses puns and deliberate misspellings, which includes an accidental, uncorrected after 25 years creak/creek typo does not deserve your respect, and neither does any puzzle which measures step count on a PC port of a game originally meant for a pre-analog stick PSX game played with a d-pad. Just look it up online or press OK on every tile of the second floor until you find it. Then, finally, there is no hint for the 4th dial, which is its own hint, because there is an empty space on our list of hints we can actually move the cursor over to and select, which reveals the final number in invisible ink.
Now we have all the dial numbers, all we need to do is enter them in 20 seconds, which is actually harder than it sounds because the buttons are very sensitive and it is incredibly easy to go over the intended number, which invalidates the whole sequence.
Once we do that, the safe opens, and a Materia rolls out of it - unfortunately we are immediately under attack before we can grab it.
This thing is "Lost Number." A forgotten or forsaken experiment by Hojo, left behind to guard the safe? My assumption at this stage is that this is the Turk that Hojo modified and then sealed and left a letter giving instructions on finding (I forgot that it specified 'in the basement', which will have consequences very soon). It's tougher than previous bosses, with 7k HP and powerful spells and attacks. Specifically, its red half casts spells, and its purple half will perform physical attacks. Once it reaches half HP, it undergoes a phase change based on how it was damaged; if the triggering damage was magic, it turns fully into its red half, if the trigger damage was physical, it turns fully into its purple half. To give you an idea how I approached the first leg of the fight…
…I hit that thing with relentless Summon abuse, for about 500 damage a pop, predictably (not to me, I had no idea how its mechanics work at the time) turning it into its red form, which is magic-resistant. From then on, it takes significantly reduced (like barely over 100 damage out of 3k remaining HP) from spells, and I already burned out all my Summons for this fight, while the Lost Number continues to pressure us with every 2nd tier spell in the book, including Quara (the Quake upgrade!) and Biora (Guess). Unfortunately for him…
This is actually a recast, I've had this up since the start of the fight.
…we still have Big Guard, which buffs everyone with Barrier, Shell and Haste, massively increasing party speed while reducing its spell damage. With Aerith's Healing Wind Limit Break and Big Guard, we're essentially unbreakable, and can tear down the Lost Number's remaining health with physical attacks without much trouble.
The damned thing dies just as I was about to unleash Tifa's new level 3 Limit Break, asshole.
On top of the considerable gil and XP for this fight, we gain an item called 'Cosmo Memory,' which teaches the Limit Skill: Cosmo Memory to Red XIII. Sounds good! He's not in our party though, so we'll leave it in the backpack for now, and go over to pick up our true reward, the red Materia which rolled out of the safe when we opened it.
Damn, that's cool. Although, Odin has generally kind of gradually lowered in power/significance over its appearance in the series, with FFVI even making him the base form of a more valuable 'evolved' summon, Raiden; still, finding it in Disc 1 is a lot more middle-of-the-road than I had anticipated. Let's check out what he's capable of!
…
Dark clouds engulf the battlefield. The rain begins to fall. Odin, in his antlered armor, appears wielding a crimson spear; he faces his opponent briefly, then his horse kicks, Odin hurls the spear into the storm-wracked sky, and the impact of Gungnir clears the cloud in a single blast, casting sunlight down upon the foe moments before Gungnir falls in a devastating impact, hitting the enemy for massive damage.
Yeah, okay, this is just the coolest spell animation in the entire series, nothing has come even close so far. And this isn't even an endgame summon, goddamn. Excited for the true endgame summons.
It looks like Odin has two modes, which he triggers based on whether the opponents are vulnerable to Instant Death, using Zantetsuken if it can trigger death and Gungnir for non-elemental damage if it can't, ensuring Odin is always useful, if MP-expensive? This is so cool.
Alright, with our prize seized from the safe, we're done with the Mansion. Let's head for Mt. Nibel.
[VETERAN DISCLAIMER: Yes. I know. You are getting the Undiluted Omicron Experience, and this is how it played out. Please contain your screaming until end of update.]
And now, we're heading to Mt. Nibel. Cutting the post here for image count!
Final Fantasy VII, Part 17: Return to Nibelheim, Part B
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Mt Nibel! Whooo!
It's the same place we visited before but, this time, we have a lot more control over where we're going, so it's kind of a "last time you got through the main road but this time you get to check the little alleyways" kind of deal, which is cool. There's neat stuff to find, like the Rune Blade, a new sword for Cloud - a recurring item in the series, here it's a Double Materia growth sword with four slots, making it a straight upgrade over the Force Stealer we'd been using thus far, though it doesn't have any other notable properties.
This time, the bridge doesn't collapse as we go through, which means we can check out an area we bypassed entirely five years ago: The Deadly Mako Slide (Do Not Bring Your Children).
Each of these pipes sends us down to a different spot on this screen; some are just wasted time as we have to climb back up, some lead us to items we can't access otherwise. I elect to be cautious and first make my way using the ladders, which proves a good idea, as there's a ladder we need to kick down before we can climb up from where the pipes send us. And at the bottom of the screen…
…on the one hand, there's a Save Point right there. On the other hand, there is a giant fucked up scorpion standing in the way, and I am not taking my chances hoping it won't attack if I reach for the save point. I elect to leave this alone for now and instead explore the pathway directly to the south.
Okay, the place is one of the more labyrinthine dungeons we've had today, but manageable. Most of the random encounters we bump into - bugs, flying reptiles - don't have any of the tricks the Mansion monsters have, it's just a simple matter of trading damage. There is, ah, one exception.
The Dragon we fought in the Nibelheim flashback is back.
It's a brutal opponent, with 3,500 HP and the Flamethrower spell, capable of dealing significant damage and absorbing a lot of punishment - it absorbs Fire damage, which means Beta would be counter-productive if I even wanted to use it and Fira is useless. With that said, I, uh.
May have dosed my entire party with methamphetamines.
Look, the Hyper item causes the Fury status in a party member. Fury causes a character to take more damage than they otherwise would, but also for their Limit gauge to fill up faster than it otherwise would. With Cloud, Yuffie and Cait Sith just dosed to the gills on uppers, their Limit Breaks + Gungnir (which deals about a third of the Dragon's HP), we are able to kill the Dragon not just once, but any time it shows up.
(Yes, this is one of the miniboss-type random encounters.)
Which is a really way of showcasing character progression through story-gameplay interaction! The dragon which was an absolutely overwhelming opponent for Young Cloud and trivially defeated by Sephiroth is now squarely in 'tough, but doable' range for the present-day party. We have advanced far, far past the Cloud of five years ago, but we're still not as powerful as Sephiroth was back then, meaning he is very much still a deadly threat.
The Mako Fountain from five years ago is still here. Against all odds, it survives, vegetation still grows around it, the green-tinged light of spiritual energy still bathes the place. We cannot retrieve the large, naturally-formed Materia in its center, which while frustrating makes in-setting sense; we exclusively use standardized Materia designed to slot into equipment, and that thing would require Cloud to carry it around in a backpack and he still wouldn't have been slottable equipment for it. As a consolation prize, there's an Elemental Materia in the water nearby.
Anyway, all this ends up taking us on a grand tour of the caves which ends up circling around to the Jenova Reactor!
There's nothing in there. Or, I should say, nothing of interest. Same old pipes and perilous walkways, same old pods with glowing windows. The door to Jenova's room is closed; we can't get in, and there is nothing else to do in there. Except… Okay, I forgot to screenshot it here, but the room is identical, so let's pull up an old picture:
Notice how 'Jenova' is written not just on the doorway, but also on that large pipe running above the room, a cable which splits off into smaller pipes feeding into the tubes? Let's add that as another pin to that board we're putting together for the end of the update.
And now we've circled back around to the Super Slide Extraordinaire section. Seeing as none of this got me closer to the Save point, I heal up everyone, and resolutely try to sneak past the giant scorpion beast…
…and it works! It doesn't attack. We just move past it, access the Save Point, and we're fine. That was a waste of worry and effort.
Alright, we've saved and are healed up, so let's just run into that bug's face.
What an ugly thing you are.
The Materia Keeper boasts an impressive 8,400 HP, higher than the Lost Number, and bolsters that considerable health with the ability to cast Cura on itself when it reaches critical damage. In addition, it absorbs Fire damage, meaning Fire is useless and we can't resort to Beta as an emergency button if pushed; we have to win this the long way. Materia Keeper attacks using a variety of physical moves - Slice, Big Horn, and the powerful Hell Combo - as well as the mighty Trine, a lightning-type spell which hits the whole party for, in theory, very high damage. However…
…Big Guard shields us from most of the damage of its attacks. And as it turns out, Trine is an Enemy Skill, so we just learned a new spell!
As you might guess from the fact that Keepsie is glowing green in the screenshot above, it is not immune to Poison, something I found out accidentally after hitting it with Biora, and which makes our job easier. Between this, Big Guard's frankly ridiculous effect on our defenses and attack speed, and our beastly new summons…
Odin is our first non-Beta attack to break 1k damage, incidentally.
A combination of spells and summons quickly break the boss down and allows us to claim victory. And as you might guess from its name, the Materia Keeper is keeping watch over… A Materia!
Counter. That old Monk staple is back as a Materia, only kinda finicky? Basically the level of the Materia affects the chance of Counter triggering when a character is hurt by a physical attack; at lv 1, this is a feeble 20% chance, and I haven't been super impressed with the growth of Independent Materia so far (Magic Materia have been mostly leveling up at an appropriate rate so that I have 2nd-tier spells at about where I need them). That said, if we ever want it to be useful, we're going to have to equip it to someone so it levels up, so on Cloud it goes.
Note to self: Remember to also give Cloud the Cover Materia now that he has Counter, since those synergize.
(Incidentally looking up the Counter Materia was briefly confusing - I think my mod which changes the spell names to their Classic Final Fantasy naming schemes also renamed some non-Magical Materia, because 'Counter' in the base game refers to a completely different Materia, while this Materia is named 'Counter Attack.' I had to double-check which one I got.)
And with this, once we've ridden the powerslides a couple of times to grab the Powersoul (a glove for Tifa) and an extra All Materia, we've about cleared out Mt Nibel, and we're free to continue our way until we leave on the other side of the creepiest mountain range in FF history!
I was honestly expecting a little more sick lore from Mt Nibel itself, but I suppose after the incident five years ago Shinra cleared the place of anything sensitive (although given that they're leaving letters on their desks explaining their nefarious plans, their opsec needs work).
…
And then we're going all the way back across the mountain to Nibelheim.
You see, at some point in this process, I decided to check something about Mt Nibel, to see if I had missed any important items or whatever. While I was doing this, I discovered that I had, indeed, missed something. But not in Mt Nibel. No, earlier than that.
You see, when I opened the safe in the Shinra Mansion, I blithefully assumed that the Odin Materia which rolled out of it was what the safe was meant to protect, as it seemed a pretty fitting reward for the boss fight which followed. And it was. One of the items the safe was meant to protect. And I completely missed the other.
So now we are heading back to Nibelheim, crossing the entire mountain range again. Which, because of its winding paths, is harder than it sounds, because you can just… get lost.
I miss the Pixel Remaster minimaps.
There was a key in the safe. And it was right there on display in the center of it. I just completely missed it because I got my eyes caught on the Materia. See, this is what I mean when I say I alternate between 'let's obsess over two screenshots for two thousand words' and 'no thought head empty' at random times when going through this game.
So let's head back. To the basement. With our new key.
And run into a bunch more horrible shit while we're at it.
Jesus Christ what the fuck is that.
That thing is actually two monsters, in a weird kind of conjoined twins situation, named 'Ying' (sic) and Yang.' One of the two is highly resistant to magic, and the other highly resistant to physical attack. Yang also has a mechanic where it reacts to attacks by increasing its own attack value and magical attacks by increasing its own magic attack value, only the way the game conveys this is by saying "Yang's excited." and "Yang is happy." Which, added to the fact that one of Ying's attacks is called 'Sadistic Attack,' combines to make this one of the creepiest enemies so far. After this fight, I feel like I need to take a shower.
Seriously.
Anyway, nightmares aside, we deal with both halves of the monster and make our way to a door in the basement which previously didn't open, and there, find our… prize?
It's a coffin.
And as soon as we interact with it, it opens to reveal…
A vampire???
Coffin Man: "...I don't know you. You must leave."
Cloud: "You were having a nightmare."
Yuffie: "Man, you really WERE having a bad dream! Even I feel bad!"
Coffin Man: "Hmph… a nightmare? My long sleep has given me time to atone."
Cloud: "What are you saying?"
Coffin Man: "I have nothing to say to strangers. Get out. This mansion is the beginning of your nightmare."
Cloud: "...You can say that again."
Coffin Man: "Do you know something?"
Cloud: [Talk about Sephiroth] // ([Don't say a thing)]
Cloud: "Like you said, this mansion is the beginning of a nightmare. No, it's not a dream, it's for real."
Cloud: "Sephiroth has lost his mind. He found the secrets hidden in this mansion…"
Coffin Man: "Sephiroth!?"
Cloud & Coffin Man, simultaneously: "You know Sephiroth?"
At which point, Coffin Man flies out of his coffin and does a backflip in the air before landing on the edge of the coffin.
I gotta say, Cloud reacting to an ominous pronouncement of how this house is a place of nightmare by going "yeah dude I know, this is where my tragic backstory started" and then him and the fucking coffin vampire doing spidermanpointing.jpg at each other over knowing Sephiroth is pretty good comedy.
We have a fast-forward to Cloud having explained the plot to Coffin Man, and then the Translation strikes again:
Cloud: "...That's how it was."
Coffin Man: "So Sephiroth knows he was created five years ago? And about the Jenova Project?"
'Sephiroth was actually created five years ago' would be an incredible revelation to drop in this conversation, suggesting that he was born shortly before the events of the Nibelheim Incident and all his memories of growing up were fake, implanted artificially. What a twist!
However this is literally just a mistake. This line is supposed to say that Sephiroth learned about his creation five years ago. This is just referring to the Nibelheim Incident which Cloud described, it does not contain new information.
Anyway.
Coffin Man: "...He was missing, but has just recently reappeared. He has taken many lives and is seeking the Promised Land."
Cloud: "Now it's your turn."
Coffin Man: "Sorry… I cannot speak."
Yuffie: "Oh, that's okay. It was probably depressing anyway."
Coffin Man: "Hearing your stories, is yet another sin for me. More nightmares shall come to me now, than I previously had."
[He climbs down into his coffin and lays back down.]
Coffin Man: "Now… Please leave."
[The coffin door flies up and slams down shut on his coffin, moving on its own.]
Yuffie is the funniest character and I need to start taking her everywhere. Also, this dude hearing about all the shit we've been through and going "Well it sure sucked to hear that, I wish I hadn't, now get the fuck out" without reciprocating with any information about himself is hilarious.
Obviously, we knock on this asshole's coffin again, I'm not leaving here without new lore. The door flies away again, and he says "...You're still here."
YEAH DUDE. OBVIOUSLY I AM. NOW OUT WITH THE BACKSTORY.
Cloud: "At least tell us your name."
Coffin Man: "I was with… Shinra Manufacturing in Administrative Research, also known as - the Turks."
…
12-year old me just called, he said this is the coolest guy to ever live.
I can't even disagree.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2kWUJkRvVs
Current status: Blasting My Chemical Romance at full volume.
We have a new party member and he is a vampire who sleeps in a coffin in the Shinra Mansion and he looks like this and his weapon is a gun and he talks about sin and nightmare and how he is so dark and tormented and shit, I love him. He was deliberately designed to hit a specific demographic target and he is hitting it hard.
Anyway, now he's a little more talkative, introducing himself as a former Turk who no longer has any affiliation to Shinra, which prompts Cloud to introduce himself as a former SOLDIER who no longer has any affiliation to Shinra, so, instant connection! Vincent is clearly the Turk mentioned in Hojo's letter about sealing a Turk in the basement after 'scientifically altering him' - clearly whatever Hojo did to him allowed him to enter a permanent sleep, surviving for years inside of a coffin without food or drink, as well as allowing him to… Fly?
Giving your own enemies whose lives you ruined superpowers is such an incredible mad scientist thing to do. This is like The Mummy and Imohtep being cursed to being an immortal lich with superpowers capable of commanding the weather.
Vincent: "You were also with Shinra…? Then do you know Lucrecia?"
Cloud: "Who?"
Vincent: "...Lucrecia. The woman who gave birth to Sephiroth."
Cloud: "...gave birth…? Wasn't Jenova Sephiroth's mother?"
Vincent: "That isn't completely wrong, but just a theory. He was born from a beautiful lady. That lady was Lucrecia."
Vincent: "She was an assistant to Professor Gast of the Jenova Project. Beautiful… Lucrecia."
Cloud: "...A human experiment?"
Vincent: "There was no way to cancel the experiment. I couldn't stop her. That was my sin."
Vincent: "I let the one I loved, the one I respected the most, face the worst."
Yuffie: "OK. Boring story no. 1."
Obliterated by Yuffie's comment, Vincent once again closes the lid to his coffin. Incredible.
…
I've been told that Yuffie suffers from a particularly bad translation, though I haven't really had much opportunity to notice yet because she hasn't had any real plot-relevant dialogue yet. But judging from Vincent, it seems pretty clear that the original translator focused on the main story path first and foremost, and that any optional content, such as optional party members, were given much less of the limited time he already had, because we've known Vincent for one scene and he already has multiple mistranslations. It starts with the baffling 'Sephiroth was created five years ago,' but there are other, more subtle mistakes; "Not completely wrong but just a theory" is a confusing as hell sentence, where what Vincent is saying is that Sephiroth being born of Jenova is a myth that is partially rooted in truth. As for "no way to cancel the experiment," what Vincent is supposed to be saying is that he couldn't change Lucrecia's mind, which is to say that she wanted to take part in… Whatever experiment gave birth to Sephiroth, and Vincent couldn't convince her not to do it, with terrible results.
Also, if you thought it was strange for the Turks to fall under the "Manufacturing" division of Shinra, that's not because of a weird artifact like how the Secret Service that protects the President used to fall under the Department of Treasury, funny as that would be; rather it's just a complete mistake and Vincent is instead saying that he fell under "General Affairs, Investigation Department," which makes significantly more sense for the Turks' public-facing job.
Anyway. Big twist! Sephiroth wasn't born of Jenova, he was born of a human woman! …ish. The picture is still quite blurry, but things are coming into focus, and interestingly the more we learn, the more it seems like Sephiroth's initial discoveries which led to his psychotic break were only partially true and included actual mistakes such as Jenova being an Ancient or her being his mother. Interesting. Let's put those pins on the board as well, we're almost done now.
Vincent won't say more, so we turn to leave and, once we've been some distance into the basement tunnel, he calls out to us.
He arrives flying, of course.
Vincent asks us if he'll meet Hojo if he goes with us and Cloud answers honestly that he doesn't know, but the group is after him as well as Sephiroth, so maybe? (One might suggest that if we actually are after Hojo Costa del Sol would have been a nice play to get him but what do I know.) Vincent decides to join the party (Yuffie immediately complains about this being "just what she needed" / about recruiting "another weirdo," depending on translation). Vincent says he might be able to help because he's a former Turk, but we've been kicking the Turks' asses easily this whole time, so I think he might be more interesting for his mad science vampire mutations.
And now we have a new party member! Vincent has joined us! His weapon of choice is… Guns. Not even arm-mounted machinery guns like Barret, just straight up guns. That Peacemaker we found way back in Kalm? That's for him.
So let's see what he looks like in battle.
Oh my god he's so fucking cool. And so fucking ridiculous. God he has gold armor plating on only one arm? That cloak?? Hello??? That's not even a handgun, he's one-handing a hunting rifle! You can't see it in this shot, but every time he does a normal attack, he first spins the gun in his hand, for no other reason than to look cool!
He is the ultimate 12-year old hero. Hell, despite his vampire-like aesthetic, he doesn't actually need to drink blood, so he's literally just doing it to look cool.
And if we have Yuffie in the party she simply refuses to take him seriously and relentlessly shit-talks him at every opportunity? This is the perfect party dynamic.
Okay, one last thing. What's his Limit Break like? Is it going to be "fire your gun especially hard" like with Barret?
…
I need to go lay down.
…
HE TURNS INTO A FUCKING DEMON WEREWOLF?!?
Wait. No. The blue color. The crest. The horns.
HE TURNS. INTO. A WERE-BEHEMOTH.
Okay so mechanically it's actually really interesting; Gallian Beast is sort of an 'advanced' form of Gau's Rage or the Berserk status - by using it, Vincent transforms into a beast with increased HP, Defense and attacking power and new moves, but becomes impossible to control. That said, in this werewolf form, Vincent can cast Beast Flare, which hits for more damage than even Beta, so it's still insanely good?!
Fuck. I may have to make this guy a permanent team member.
Okay, well, we're almost done. Just one thing left: In the process of exploring Mt Nibel and backtracking multiple times, we've acquired a massive amount of gil, like easily 60k. So the first thing I do is decide to take an early advance on my character upgrading, and head back to Cosmo Canyon to complete a full set of MP Plus and HP Plus Materia (three of each, that is). Yes, this means more backtracking but we're already in Nibelheim anyway, so we just take the buggy and head back, it's not like we have to backtrack all the way through Mt. Nibel seeing as I already did that because I missed the goddamned basement key. So we might as well take advantage of that opportunity.
Bonus point: with MP Plus Materias, we can afford to throw around Beta with even more wild abandon.
Purchasing all these Materia is pretty costly, but at the end of the day, we have everyone equipped with +10% HP and MP, and getting an early start on leveling those up to their maximum rating, where they grant +50%. And then, we have to go through Mt Nibel a third time, and only then, at last, are we free.
Free to head towards whatever the hell that is.
This does mean that we've lost the Buggy; we had to leave it to enter Nibelheim, and then we went through the mountain to access the other side, so the Buggy is back on the other side. We're on foot again.
And I think that'll do for today. Save and quit. We've made solid progress, recruited a new party member, and learned…
…
Well, what did we learn?
Okay, so. Let's go back to all those pins.
We know that 'Mako' is the processed, ready-for-consumption form of 'spiritual energy', or 'the Lifestream,' made up of the souls and life force of everything that has died and returned to the Planet (in much the same way 'oil' in daily use is the processed form of petroleum). When humans (or Ancients such as Aerith's mother) die, their souls return to the Lifestream, where they 'merge' and 'race around the planet'; this process can include the disappearance of said soul, as their spiritual energy becomes new life, but a soul within the Lifestream may still be capable of a certain degree of self-awareness and communication, such as the voice of Aerith's mother reaching her in quiet places like the church.
I think, in this context, the SOLDIER program's internal mechanisms make a lot of sense; we know the soul has power, everyone has spiritual energy of some form, which manifests in Limit Breaks. Thus I can theorize that by exposing SOLDIER candidates to Mako, they are directly exposed to processed souls, pure spiritual energy that isn't 'taken up' by another will; this increases the total quantity of spiritual energy in them, the 'mass' or 'density' of their soul. They are literally denser souls, which directly translates to increased capability.
We now know that Jenova was not an Ancient, which casts into doubt Sephiroth's narrative, where Ancients were space travelers who landed on the Planet as a stopover and meant to go on to another world, which split into 'stay-behinders' and 'movers-on', with the stay-behinders becoming humans and the movers-on including Jenova; that can't be true if Jenova wasn't an Ancient to begin with. Maybe the Ancients and Jenova were two separate space traveler species, maybe the Ancients were native to the Planet and Jenova a space invader? Impossible to tell at this stage. We also know that Sephiroth wasn't 'born of' Jenova, but of Lucrecia, a human woman, as part of an ill-fated experiment which she presumably did not survive (seeing as Sephiroth grew up motherless), but that Jenova was involved in his creation in some capacity.
We know that Nibelheim is full of 'Clones' that sense 'something', ramble about Sephiroth and the Reunion, and occasionally leave town. We know that Clones have been spotted outside of Nibelheim, recognizable by their 'black cape' and numbered tattoos.
Remember this guy?
Incoherent moaning by a sick-looking guy with a numbered tattoo? We can be pretty sure this guy is one of the Clones.
We know that the documents in the Shinra Mansion's basement include references to both Mako Radiation Therapy and a Jenova-related treatment as two separate procedures. We know that Jenova was initially contained within a special chamber inside of a Mako Reactor, and that there were giant tubes labeled 'JENOVA' running out of that chamber and feeding directly into pods where humans/animals were sealed and mutated into monsters.
We know that Jenova is a composite or 'starfish' entity, whose individual limbs/organs are capable of turning into fully-autonomous entities and whose body and head are to some extent capable of individually surviving separation, which Shinra keeps at the center of its research facilities.
…
I think, at this point, it's a pretty safe guess that while Mako Radiation Therapy exists, part of what we've been ascribing to Mako exposure - like transformation into monsters - is instead exposure to Jenova gene therapy. Jenova's body, capable of partial regeneration, is used as a source of cells which are implanted into things and, thanks to Jenova's ability to split and produce new Jenova-forms, mutate the being they're implanted into. Is that the case with all SOLDIERs? Hard to say.
And we know that, when Sephiroth addressed Cloud in the Shinra Mansion this time around, he asked him if he was going to come to the "Reunion", which Jenova is holding, and expressed dismissal when Cloud didn't understand what he was referring to, telling him to come to him if he would "awaken;" in addition, the Clones in Nibelheim speak of going to the Reunion.
So.
I think Sephiroth died.
Okay, let me back up a bit and start earlier.
I think Shinra has been experimenting with Jenova's body for years now, as their new form of enhancement therapy - SOLDIER was once just Shinra Navy SEALs, then they brought in Mako treatment, and then they stumbled upon Jenova and it was the next step in their human enhancement program. But while introducing new cells into animals and humans might create cool monsters or potentially mutant super-soldiers, the real prize on Professor Gast's mind was a full-grown Jenova clone. Only Jenova's state makes her not really… Viable as a mother, so that clone had to be implanted and grown in a human woman, and that was Gast's assistant Lucrecia. Why Sephiroth is a dude I do not know; maybe they flipped some genes during the process, maybe he's actually only a half-clone of Jenova and a human being (probably Lucrecia herself, with Jenova being the 'father') for better chances of delivery, maybe he's hiding top surgery scars under that badass cloak. Whatever it is, Sephiroth is thus the 'child' of both Jenova (genetically) and Lucrecia (as either a surrogate, or contributing half of his DNA).
Because of his genetic similarity to Jenova, which Gast thought dead but which doesn't actually 'die' in any real sense, Sephiroth was highly susceptible to her influence when he came into proximity of her, which influenced the direction his mental state took after his initial psychotic break (which was not related to Jenova's influence, that was on him/the discoveries he made in Shinra Mansion). He grabbed her head, and moved her as part of his plan to exterminate humanity and go to the Promised Land.
Then, at some point, he died. That wasn't a lie by Shinra to cover up his going rogue and escaping, the reason why he went completely unseen for five years is because they did in fact kill him. Whether that's as a result of the confrontation in the Jenova chamber on which the Nibelheim Incident flashback ended, or later after deploying Shinra weapons after him, whatever it was, Sephiroth died.
But the Jenova head was still missing. Hojo wanted it back. However, he still had Jenova's body. And he still had all the research on using Jenova gene therapy to create monsters and clones, and he now knew Jenova exerted an influence on her split-offs. So Hojo started creating the Nibelheim Clones from Jenova cells (or Sephiroth cells? It ends up the same either way) - whether as actual clones grown in vats, or as humans implanted with Jenova cells, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that the clones are all fucked up because they deliberately weren't made for fighting, they're weak and sickly, because their only purpose is to eventually pick up the Jenova 'radio wave' emitted by the missing Jenova head, which she exerts as a means of trying to secure new agents like Sephiroth, and then head towards her. Then Shinra troops would only have to follow the Clone and, once it finds the Jenova head, secure it and bring it back to Hojo (the Clone being non-combat viable means they can't get in the way and you can just shoot them if they do).
Only.
Sephiroth's soul is still around. It joined the Lifestream, only because his power is so high, his soul didn't dissolve or lose its individuality - it remained self-aware, like Aerith's mom might be to some degree. Sephiroth's soul persisted as a cancerous entity within the Lifestream, watching, waiting for an opportunity. And he found that opportunity with the Clones, which are empty vessels designed to have no true individuality or will but merely to be hyper-sensitive to the Jenova 'signal', and Sephiroth's soul is highly similar to that signal.
So he possessed one of the Clones, and then used the inherent mutability of Jenova cells to mold that Clone into a facsimile of his own body.
That's why the Remake has these scenes with the weird hooded guys, and why Sephiroth has traits that are only half-consistent with being physically present in a scene and only half-consistent with him being a hallucination; why he appears into view and then disappears, leaving a haggard dude in robes in his place, and seems to teleport.
He's body-hopping between Clones.
Those guys.
In fact, the 'this guy are sick' dude back in Sector 5, the one with the Number 2 tattoo? He's probably the exact dude who Sephiroth body-jacked to get into Midgar and infiltrate the Shinra Building.
And Cloud himself was exposed to Jenova cell therapy. That's why Sephiroth opened the door to his cell back in the Shinra Building, and that's why Sephiroth asks him if he'll join the Reunion and then tells him to come to him once he has 'awakened.' He expects that, as a Jenova mutate, Cloud will eventually 'receive' the Jenova 'signal' and come under Jenova's influence - effectively being mind-controlled into helping Jenova fulfill its purpose, but Sephiroth perceives this as 'awakening' to one's true nature and glorious purpose as one of Jenova's children who will inherit the earth, because he is still under Jenova's influence.
…
A lot of this has been bubbling in my head for a few updates now but part of it was based on Remake-specific content so it seemed too early to put it into an update, but this sequence brought in a bunch of information that helped me cement it into a proper theory.
Did I just spend a thousand words on a theory that is almost certainly wrong on many points and which the game itself is likely going to invalidate in like, an hour? Yes. But, theorizing is part of the fun of a mystery plot like FF7's. This game really does tickle my brain meats in ways not even VI did, by far. There is an actual mystery there, with clues and buildups and answers, and I love it.
Even if specific sub-mysteries are often handled too quickly or clumsily because the game seems afraid that if the player doesn't get an answer in five minutes he'll leave (Red's father, the Clones), the overall mystery of the main plot is really, really well-done so far, and really makes me think.
Also I love knowing there are veteran players who are currently chomping at their desks desperately wanting to tell me what I got correct and all the points where I'm wrong, but can't. I'm evil like that.
That's it for today, though. I fully gave up on bringing this update down to a sensible length and picture count, given all that's happened, so you get a mammoth-sized double-update. Hope you enjoyed it.
Thanks for reading!
Next Time: Rocket Town!
- Location
- the Republic
- Pronouns
- He/They
Okay, I've officially completely turned around on Cait Sith now, he's my favorite.
Fantastic update. I laughed like a hyena at the Nibelheim re-intro. Also that safe gave me so much anxiety when I was a kid, you have no idea.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Yuffie and Cait Sith are worth it just for their dialogue.
I'm pretty sure I played the game with the Yuffie Vincent combo a lot. I also got decent use out of Trine in my 'completely non-optimized, just whatever random monsters hit me with' use of Enemy Materia for part of the game.
I always assumed that was a cybernetic and the other arm doesn't look like that because it's his original arm, but I just jumped to that conclusion when I first played in the 90's with no evidence, so I could be wrong. But he was a mad scientist experiment, so it's pretty likely I'm right.
I'm pretty sure I played the game with the Yuffie Vincent combo a lot. I also got decent use out of Trine in my 'completely non-optimized, just whatever random monsters hit me with' use of Enemy Materia for part of the game.
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Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The protagonists are terrorists opposing the corporate government who always travel in groups of 3 and are going to Rocket Town? Clearly, Cait Sith is Meowth and Cloud is James, the question is who's Jesse.