The building is identical, except it's empty. Also, nobody has even cleaned up the Jenova blood trail in all these weeks.
…
FF7 is kinda bad at return trips.
I mean, don't get me wrong. It tries, and it gets points for effort. And there actual rewards that have been snuck in there so that returning through the first locations of the very beginning of the game is rewarding. But in a way, the very ability to retrace our steps back to those places we first visited in the game just highlight how it's all kind of… Hollow. The Slums at least had the unnamed inhabitants with updated dialogue about Meteor, even if it didn't have much else, but the Shinra Building is literally just taking a tour through an empty building to grab some loot. There's nobody. The only characters are outdated guard encounters. There are no employees to lament the state of Shinra or reflect on past events, the upper floors are straight-up locked and inaccessible… (There actually are employees in one of the upper floors, but it's one that we can't access through a locked door, so we can't talk to them.) Mayor Domino is gone, I doubt we'll ever meet him again. I thought we might meet Reeve and get to do a bit with Cait Sith but no, we won't be seeing Reeve here either. We still haven't seen Marlene and Elmyra since our initial escape.
It makes me kinda sad, honestly, I can't really explain why.
Yeah, it's always a bit of a disappointment in RPGs when you go back and revisit areas after major events... and nothing changes. Some Final Fantasy games have been better about this than others, granted.
…Heidegger and Scarlet.
I see this is going to be a comedy battle.
Slight side-note: Palmer just kinda vanished, didn't he? We saw him alive after getting run over by a truck, so he's still alive, but the game seems to have just kind of forgotten what it wanted to do with him, so he vanished off-screen. Which, I mean, he's a bumbling oaf but he's just not quite evil enough compared to Scarlet and Heidegger, so I guess the game just decided to discreetly take him off screen with no explanation. A little annoying, but whatever.
Not much more to do with him, I guess. He would feel even more out of place as a boss at this point considering he was already a ridiculous comedy fight, and he's so uninvolved in anything else in Shinra beyond shouting "SPAAAAAACE" which is old now that the rocket actually launched, might as well quietly lock him in his office to play with model spaceships and make vrooming noises while everyone else fails to deal with Cloud and Friends.
Anyway, Heidegger and Scarlet have drunk Midgar's entire store of Kool-Aid and fully believe that their new mech can defeat the Weapons and will have an even easier time defeating us (nobody tell them about the Ultima Weapon and the new crater in Cosmo Canyon), and it's time for payback for all their men we killed (Scarlet, who sent them in waves after waves long after it was clear they couldn't stop me?). Cue battle.
Ah yes, I'm sure the giant mecha can take on Cloud and company... you know, unlike the
last twenty giant Shinra bots they've beaten the crap out of.
A fitting end? They were destroyed by their own arrogance, wielding their own creation, due to their refusal to ever acknowledge defeat or even weakness and their stubborn insistence on fighting us even after we'd proven stronger, even after it was all pointless, even after Rufus was dead, Shinra's army in shambles, their tech base destroyed, Hojo in control of their cannon, and with Sephiroth about to destroy the world.
Instead of being dispatched piecemeal over the course of the game, Scarlet and Heidegger stay the course until the end, where they die for the sole reason that they look at their ultimate anti-Weapon mech, and instead of using it to take down the mad scientist who is right now trying to give Sephiroth one final power boost, they used it to fight us.
They were idiots. Their ending was karmic and appropriate to their character, but ultimately they were never real threats. They lapsed into comedy relief relatively early on, with only the occasional heinous crime like Scarlet personally shooting Barret and Dyne (with an invisible gun, admittedly), and they just… Never posed a serious threat. So when they show up in their Great Value Gundam, it doesn't register as anything more than these two idiots in yet another overhyped junkpile about to meet their end.
In summary: exactly the same as the rest of Shinra, regulated to the comedy enemy pile that was only occasional resembling a threat past Midgar, and unceremoneously offed to make room for more important Sephiroth and JENOVA content. RIP In Piss I guess.
Hojo: "Oh… the Failure."
Cloud: "At least remember my name! I'm Cloud!"
Hojo: "Every time I see you… It pains me that I had so little scientific sense…"
Hojo: "I saw you as a failed project. But, you're the only one that succeeded as a Sephiroth-clone. Heh, heh, heh… I'm even beginning to hate myself."
Oh wow, Hojo actually acknoweldging that he was even remotely wrong about something? World really
is ending!
…wait, why are we acting like this is all news to us?
Oh, right. Because Vincent's cave is completely optional. We can just miss that whole bit of storytelling, and the game's dialogue trees aren't that modular, so they just talk as if we hadn't seen any of it.
On the one hand, it's… good… That this whole bit of the story isn't as missable as I had believed at first; most of what's found in Lucrecia's Cave is actually conveyed through dialogue after all! On the other hand it's frustrating that everyone is pretending that didn't happen because it's sealed in the Optional Content Dimension.
Stuff like this does make me wonder if its a victim of time crunch/disk space, or like... the devs just genuinely didn't think about the idea. Maybe it's because I've spent well over a decade fiddling with RPG Maker off and on where you can just flip a single internal switch or variable to say "already got this backstory" and have some slightly different dialogue, but I have to lean towards crunch/space because it's genuinely not too hard of a thing to factor in.
Still, it means we get Vincent some closure. It's two sentences, because this character is as undercooked as a steak tartare, but it's something; it means he now sees Lucrecia's fate wasn't his fault, but entirely Hojo's, and that Hojo was the one who deserved punishment for his sins. It's not much, but it's something. He had an arc, it's resolved now.
God, imagine if we hadn't taken him on. He wouldn't even get that much.
It's kind of nuts thinking about it the gap between Yuffie and Vincent as optional characters. Yuffie has a
ton of personality in every scene she's in, even when it's just "insert optional party member dialogue here", has an entire runaround sidequest in Wutai and boss pagoda, the works... and then Vincent has "I sure am brooding" and a one-off hidden cutscene area that gives us a quick bit of backstory before he goes back to sitting in the corner for the rest of the game.
…oh, we're doing Dr Lugae again.
Dr Lugae? Remember him? Final Fantasy IV mad scientist who ordered the death of Edge's kingdom and turned his parents into horrible mutant monsters? He takes to the field as a Dr Willy-lookalike fighting alongside his experimental subjects and then turns himself into a horrible robot zombie when we beat him? Yeah, Hojo is doing exactly that, I'm certain it's an intentional reference. And he's starting the fight with an unhealthy green hue.
Hojo seems like a bit less of a comedy boss, but yeah he's understandably absolutely worthless as an actual fighter until he stuffs his face with JENOVA cells.
In a way, Hojo is the true antagonist of the game, the man who not only set everything into motion but kept it into motion at every possible turn, every time, even when he didn't know he was doing it. And that's reflected in the level of care that goes into his boss fight, with multiple forms, a complex articulated model that shows damage, and a custom animation when this monster form falls… And turns into his final form.
Surprising that Hojo of all places is where the dev team gets to really flex their boss modeling muscles, but hey it
is presumably near the end of the game and development, where they've had some time to get used to this whole 3D thing.
You know what Frieza Rules are. The bad guy starts off with a 'casual', normal form, then turns into a monstrous form that's either huge and buff or monstrous and hideous (Frieza has both in Form 2 and Form 3 respectively), and then just when you think his final form is going to turn even huger it turns out his final form is actually a simple, unassuming, humanoid shape.
That is 'Lifeform-Hojo NA,' Hojo's final form. I am pretty sure this is either referencing, or drawing from the same pool as, the term 'Ultimate Lifeform,' a phrase that I've seen used repeatedly in Japanese media (most notably in Sonic Adventure 2)? This is the apex of Hojo's transformation, a hovering, faceless, cyborg-like being. It uses combo strings, deploying status effects like Silence (which actually does suck, because it disables all my magic and summons and leaves my character to just use raw Attacks until I cure them) and following them up with physical attacks. I like him. Conceptually, this whole string of boss forms is one of my favorite in the game.
Doesn't mean it's any trouble dealing with, of course.
Boooo, gimmie more Truly Monsterous final forms for bosses, the "and then they were pretty" trend is a bother.
I mean, probably easier to draw/model/animate for complicated stuff, but come ooooon.
It's a very human game. Sure, we're fighting to save the living, sentient planet from the threat of Space Satan destroying the world, but none of that means anything if at the end of the day that world doesn't have someone or something we care about in it.
…it's imperfect, of course. While Cloud asks everyone to find the thing they're fighting for, he leaves this an open-ended question that doesn't receive an answer except from Barret, Mister "I Have One Thing In This World I Hold Dear And Have Been Bringing Up Continuously For The Whole Game" Man himself.
Yeah, while it still beats out FFVI there's certainly room for more party member declarations of "This is what I'm fighting foooooooor". Just an explicit line or two per character, that's all I ask!
Tifa asks Cloud if he thinks everyone will come back, and he says he isn't sure - everyone else has something precious to them, but their opponent is overwhelming. Then Tifa tells him it's okay even if no one else comes back: as long as Cloud is by her side, she'll never give up.
Could this be? Could Tifa get over her unbearable inability to speak about her feelings and honestly say she's in love with Cloud?
Tifa: "This day will never come again… So let me have this moment…"
Cloud: "Sure… This might be the last time we'll ever be together…"
[Fade again.]
AND THEN THEY FUCKED
And the answers people give seem to tie into Shipping Wars pretty heavily. Like some of these links up there aren't just saying "don't be dumb, they're fully clothed and just cuddling," they're arguing that this scene wasn't even romantic in nature and Cloud and Tifa are just good friends, which is an egregious refusal of the truth laid out before your eyes, presumably because you are a die-hard Cloud/Aerith shipper.
I, too, am such a diehard shipper of Cloud/A Literal Corpse that I will deny any possibility that the other still living love interest won by at bare minimum, default.
Right? That one line by Tifa changes the context completely, as does "It's time" rather than "We better go" - what they're saying is that the clock has run out and the others haven't come back to the Highwind, so they're going to proceed without them and fight Sephiroth on their own. The line about noise/ruckus is thus about Cloud saying he'll make so much noise by himself it'll feel like the others are there.
It's a pretty important beat! The fact that Cloud and Tifa think their friends haven't found it in them to fight for the Planet and that they'll have to do it with just the two of them, and that they think it'll be enough because they have each other, is kind of a big deal! Especially because it sets up the next plot beat coming immediately, as the Highwind stirs to life and starts moving, and Cloud and Tifa rush to the bridge to see what's going on…
I mean realtalk, they
do have KotR Materia, Cloud and Tifa could
totally go solo Sephiroth, who needs the rest of the crew?
…and, of course, it turns out everyone is already on board. Like they'd leave them to fight their greatest enemy and save the planet on their own, right?
The logistics of it are a bit… These characters are from literally across the entire planet. How did they coordinate meeting up and sneaking onto the airship in the middle of the night, like 'we go and pick them up one by one in the Highwind' was so obviously a more natural read, like - I'm thinking too hard about this, it doesn't matter.
Smh Omi forgetting you had a Gold Chocobo.
Obviously they just took turns picking each other up on it, can cross the entire planet in like six minutes anyways wouldn't take long.
Man, for a game that has so many characters who are introduced as being the coolest motherfuckers alive who don't give a shit about anything, it's genuinely a running theme that the game is making fun of these guys and knocking them down a peg every chance it gets. The game is very clear-eyed about people who try to use style and posture to make up for lacking genuine character or virtue or feelings and how it's ultimately either an empty affect or reflective of a dangerous personality, whether that's Cloud, Sephiroth, Vincent, or to a lesser extent even Reno and Rude.
Makes it all the more of a shame that it feels as if every bit of FFVII spinoff material took all the cool brooding awesome dude characteristics at face value, honestly. Sephiroth again springs to mind, look at how the game dunks on him when the true Nibelheim backstory comes out, and how his entire plot later on is "I'm gaslighting Cloud out of sheer 'YOU DIDN'T WIN' spite". Meanwhile, everything else FFVII related goes "OOOOH IT'S DA SEPHIROTHS, QUICK PLAY THE THEME".
One more reason I wish we got an actual FFVII remake instead of a sequel.
She takes a moment to berate Barret for talking that way about her when she went this far with them even though she gets really sick on airships, then immediately runs off to be sick over the railing in the hall.
Even in her best moments, reality itself insists on bullying Yuffie.
Best girl? Best girl. I now agree with everyone who says Cloud and Tifa didn't bang, shipping Cloud/Yuffie
Wait that feels a shitload weirder now that I'm no longer a teenager like she is whoops, curse aging it makes all our childhood vidyagame crushes awkward.
For the non-players, as should be clear by now, not all discs were created equal - Part 2 was shorter than Part 1, and Part 3 is going to be shorter than Part 2. This 'end of part 2' screen doesn't mean there's another ten updates of story and gameplay content and multiple dungeons. We are heading now for the very final dungeon in the game.
Yeah, this is surprisingly common for those good old multi-disk RPGs on the PS1 - you've got two or three disks chock full of plot and story content, then the last disk is basically the "alright final dungeon unlocked go do sidequests and finish up" where everything's open to do, rather than like... say if FFV or FFVI were divided into three/two disks, one per world.
Of course it's also come up in thread that all the disks actually have all the game content, hasn't it? As in, the only
actual difference (and what's taking up 90% of the memory per disk) is the FMVs. Disk 1 of FFVII contains the full, playable game if you do some PS1 cover popping tricks, the only thing you'll miss out is stuff like "you beat Sephiroth, now playing FMV-12.EXE which is totally the ending cinematic" and call "Cloud Rides A Motorcycle" instead.
