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I beat FF7 again *FF7 Spoilers obviously*





0
 06.05.2017 2:10am
Thread Creator

Thirdtwin
It's you guys' fault



I was on a forum talking about RPGs and somebody said FF7's story was "inconsistent." I didn't remember it being inconsistent so I asked them what they meant by that and of course got no response, probably because they didn't actually care about the meaning of words and just wanted something fancy to signify "this game sux" with. But then I thought, "Thirdtwin, it's been a decade and a half since you played that nonsense. You may or may not remember it accurately, and it may have in fact been inconsistent!" Clearly the answer was to replay it again and figure out whether my initial understanding of the game was correct or not.

...now obviously this wasn't the only reason to replay the game, that somebody on the internet said a bad thing, because if I let stuff like that motivate me I'd never get anything done because I'd be too busy trying to spite random schmucks I don't know personally. But if you haven't noticed I've been replaying old FFs a lot (because I can't afford new ones) and I might as well give FF7 its fair shot this time. So there.

-The translation is almost schizophrenic. Like, on the one hand its use of vernacular is generally on point . NPCs and PCs both sound "modern," and not just because of the profligate (censored) cussing. Conversations usually make sense and the characters have unique voices. And then you get stuff like "this guy are sick" or "so that's how I'll fooled them" or "knowlespole" for North Pole. How the hell do you write this coming out of Barret's mouth but don't know what the damn North Pole is? There's actually a couple times that the bad translation interferes with the narrative; both Sephiroth and some of the Cosmo Canyon guys refer to the Cetra in a way that suggest that their search for the Promised Land is ?interplanetary,? not just on the Planet. I remember coming off my original play of the game thinking that the Ancients were from another world*, and only digging around online did I learn that authorial intent was that the Cetra were just relatively mundane migratory people who traveled the face of one (1) planet and the only space alien was Jenova. Replaying the game with that knowledge in mind, I looked at those lines again and went "nope, it still looks like they're saying the Cetra are from another planet." Now, I still don't say that necessarily makes the story inconsistent, since either way the Cetra still settled down on Planet and evolved into humans after (and perhaps because) Jenova fell from the sky and fucked them all up. But it does add  a fair degree of confusion and doesn't reflect the intended plot point at all. I also think the translation damaged the impact of the mindfuck scene at the Whirlwind Maze, since it was a bit ?too? nonsense there.

-Cloud's character is weird. And not just from the space nonsense he was subjected to. At the beginning of the game he wants to be this "badass loner mercenary who plays antisocial but has a heart of gold" sort of guy. This is actualy sort of effective since he did in fact get the SOLDIER cocktail and ended up competent. AVALANCHE probably runs most efficiently after hiring him. But those types of guys usually disclaim the spotlight. Even though the party all had the goal of beating up Sephiroth after they got out of Midgar, him gladly accepting the "ok fool, go be the leader" mandate so readily was inconsistent with that role. The problem, of course, is that because of the nature of his character arc it's easy to sweep any weird characterization under the "barely recovered from brain poisoning and also being hijacked by the genes of a space squid (itself being hijacked by the Great White Hope Sephiroth) injected into him" rug. Obviously he was intended to be an unreliable narrator during the Nibelheim flashback (the characters themselves comment on this, including Tifa) and his whole identity was supposed to be questionable up until the complete mindjacking, but to me the way in which he was weird was inconsistent with even the constructed identity he borrowed in part from Zack.

Compounding this is that Zack's character is itself a little goofy. Next to Sephiroth the angry yet aloof dude with cat eyes you have this guy from Planet Vegeta who does squats in trucks to compensate for his ADD and talks familiarly to faceless grunts like Cloud. Yet they're both SOLDIERS 1st Class; even though Sephiroth is still greatest among equals, Zack's goofy ass is one of those equals. Cloud's fake-Zack persona is a lot less goofy. How'd that happen?

-Cloud isn't emo either though. Well no, he's actually very emotional but not in a sad edgy teenager way. In some ways his character is almost a rejection of the emotionless badass thing. Trying to be like Sephiroth literally resulted in him being a clone of Sephiroth and thus advancing Sephiroth's goals. 

-Ah, Barret, the original Big Angry Black Man of JRPGdom�. You know what? I love this man. Yes his character is problematic. Yes he's a violent terrorist who curses a lot. Yes, he clothes his desire for vengeance under the guise of wanting to save the Planet (even though Shinra were both specifically mean to him and are activelly killing the Planet and somebody should save the Planet from them). I don't care, I still like him. He's an adoptive father with an arm made out of a gun and he's made of pure beef and he will go upside your spikey white head if you trifle with him. In fact I kind of feel like he's the emotional center of the party. 

-I made it a point to use Aeristhshtshtshths this playthrough since I was kind of ambivalent towards her in previous playthroughs. I think I had somehow osmosed that she was going to die by the time I got to the game and thus kind of disconnected with her mentally, I guess. This time I had her in my party as much as possible. And you know what? Aerith is really cool. Like I had this image of her being demure flower girl white mage chick and I'm pretty sure that's how she's portrayed in side stuff a lot so it becomes self-reinforcing, but in FF7 itself she is spunky and pushy and enthusiastic and adventuresome, not a ?tragic heroine? whose fate is but to die, woe is her. She's Rydia (without the fire magic hangup) more than Yuna. And I'm pretty sure she is in fact older than Cloud, which would have made Mama Strife happy if she got to meet her. (She might have changed her mind if she knew Aerith had him cavorting around in slums crossdressing and going to love hotels though.)

She's also really good as a character. She's got the best magic stat in a game where magic is already really good (spam lightning in midgar all day gg), her limits are silly-busted (oh yeah, free limit fill-up for the other two party members, let's do four attack limits in one fight. oh yeah just full-cure the entire party and make them invincible. #rekt.) and her weapons are like a half-tier better than everybody else's. Yeah FF7 isn't a difficult game by any means so it's not like the effect Cid has on FFT but having her around definitely makes things even easier. 

-By the way, the Wall Market part was always weird to me. I know nowadays that Japan has a different set of cultural tropes around homosexuality from America, but even at 12 or so I was pretty sure that a bunch of buff hairy bodybuilders with thick mustaches wouldn't just randomly have womens' fashion accessories that they hand out in between their massive love hotel orgies. Bears don't moonlight as twinks, generally speaking. (I had no problem with Cloud dressing as a woman, probably in part because of how enthusiastic Aerith was about it. And Cloud himself certainly cottoned to it quickly, despite his protestations. His body language turns girly the second he steps out of that dressing room) Generally I had a clue that this was supposed to be subversive and "weird" subject matter that FF7 was addressing here and that the weirdness was supposed to be funny about it, but my understanding of sex stuff was pretty stunted at the time so a lot of it went over my head, but in a way absurd enough that it still amused me. I dunno.

-I feel bad for Tifa because a) she's got some issues and b) they really really wanted you to hook Cloud up with Aerith. Certainly being more forward with "I saw Cloud half-crazy in a gutter thinking he was Zack and half the shit he said happened in Nibelheim he couldn't have known about because he wasn't even physically there (although it turns out he was, just not the person he said/thought he was) jussayin maybe it wouldn't be the best idea to make this cat our leader" would have changed the direction of the plot. I don't blame her not doing it

The funny thing about Tifa is that her character is a kind of a play on the (to get a little weebish with it) osananajimi* or childhood friend archetype. This sort of thing usually comes up in the romcom/harem anime genre: a dude makes a promise to his friend that he knew "since diapers" or from an otherwise young age that they would always be together (usually romantically or getting married or whatever) despite being dumb kids who don't understand time. Then they drift apart, and then later in high school or whatever they find each other again, but there's also four or five other girls looking for his d and the guy may/may not remember the promise, or who he made the promise to, or some other nonsense. The interesting thing is that the two of them ?did? make that promise, they ?were? friends, Tifa even calls herself his childhood friend at one point... but they weren't friends since childhood. Cloud was the dumb outsider kid that had a crush on her that she had no clue about. If she didn't fall off that bridge and Cloud didn't become even more of a violent misanthropic loner because the town blamed him for it, then they probably would never have meaningfully interacted. In short the "childhood friend" thing is totally a construct built on false pretenses. And, of course, their "romantic" arc is also suspect.

Now look, I know that there's been a lot of words on this topic, and I'm not a big shipper at all. Just saying, I think it's pretty clear that Aerith and Tifa both loved Cloud and Cloud loves both of them but didn't know how to propose a poly relationship and then Aerith died. I mean, Aerith loved Cloud 50 much and Tifa loved him 30 much, that's right there in the code of the game. Just, at the same time, Cloud's image of how his relationship with Tifa worked until the present day was tied up in his conception of himself as Zackphiroth. He had genuine emotions of gratitude and appreciation toward her, otherwise he would have probably still been bobbing his head around and singing that Broken Mirror song from Xenogears in the Midgar gutter. But those emotions were built on false premises, and they didn't have a "real" connection until their souls got stuck together in the green Tang. Then again, his feelings for Aerith were also those of the fake personality, and it's obvious Aerith's type is SOLDIERs with spiky hair. But generally I think that their relationships weren't ever "resolved" to the point where you could pair one of them off with the other. (Certainly at some point Aerith would have had to confront Tifa, or vice versa)

-Red 13's tail is on fire. Is he like a charmander, will he die if the fire goes out? I... really don't care about/for him. Yay you reconciled with your dead dad who cried crystal tears down from his statue while you howled at the moon, congrat

-Hojo's conception of biology is like Freud's conception of psychoanalysis. "Let's have Firewolfcatpuppy here fuck this Cetra and see what comes out!" My dude I know you are lonely but  that is not how you get catgirls, and you should know that by now.

I have more but I'm tired and low on energy. I'll keep writing and post it later.

*this was way back in the day before we had words like "headcanon" and the isolation of each FF world was more explicit, but my original theory for the Cetra was that they were actually the Lunarians from FF4.

**TIL Osana Najimi is the name of the main from Yandere Simulator. I just assumed her name was going to be Yandere.



TT




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0
 06.05.2017 11:24pm


Atma Weapon
I Am Pure Energy

I haven't played the game in several years, partly because I have played it so many times before and partly because it's visually awful now. I'm not sure I can think of a JRPG which was so highly regarded for visuals at the time, but has aged so poorly. Meanwhile I can still play Chrono Trigger or FFVI and legitimately say that they are still beautiful.

My impression of FFVII's story, looking back at it, is that yes, there are some plot holes and the details don't hang together like they do in great stories, but the broad brush-strokes make sense I guess.




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0
 06.06.2017 3:39pm


Colinp42
Registered Member

If you want to play it again, get the updated version on PC or PS4.  I could never play it again now without the triple speed option!








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0
 06.07.2017 4:25am
Thread Creator

Thirdtwin
It's you guys' fault



[size=30]you can change speed on emulators too[/size] 

Also, I'm actually pretty okay with FF7's graphics. They aren't the best in the world, but they haven't depreciated too badly for my purposes. The environments are almost universally pre-renders, which meant they looked okay even on the limited Playstation hardware since they weren't being made in real time (otherwise we'd have big balls of chunky polygons like the characters). I like the more anime style portrayal of the characters, although sometimes they had a kind of plasticene look to them in the cutscenes. I'm even a little okay with the lego-men versions of the characters you had most of the time except in battles. Most of the FFs up until then had a gimmick akin to that, using tiny sprites that fit into a tile evenly on the world map and then using the more detailed two-heads-tall guys for battle scenes. FF6 was the only one that used the same kind of character sprites for battles and travel. FF7 doing a similar thing with less-detailed models for traveling and more-detailed models didn't ruffle my feathers (in comparison to FF9's weird thing where they cut down on the anime stylization but still maintained weird chibi proportions for most characters, which created an uncanny valley effect for me). Of course then sometimes they'd have pre-rendered (and I guess pre-laminated) versions of the lego-man models in cutscenes and everything kind of got silly. If I had my druthers, Square have kept the anime style as they continued to make games and just improved the quality of their models over time, but for FF8 they jumped right into their "realistic" style and shrunk the eyes and shit and (barring FF9 in the mainline games) just clung to that forever and ever, which makes the new and improved models kind of weird to look at sometimes because I like Cloud's hair to just stab into the air defiantly with nothing holding it up, not just sort of flop around like "realistic" hair gelled into a vaguely spike-like cluster.

Anyway, back to more decompressing.

-So, when you're jailed in the Shinra Building and everything goes fucky. You're supposed to think that Sephiroth, missing for 5 years, goes busting into the skyscraper, fucks up everything, springs Jenova, stabs the President and then skedaddles out of there. The "reality" (or at least authorial intent) is that Sephiroth from up in the Crater takes over Jenova, transmutes it to look like him, has it blow out of its cage and do all the stuff mentioned above. The original Sephiroth was always in the Northern Crater, frozen inside what is, in effect, a giant Materia, and every instance of Sephiroth you encounter up until the Whirlwind Maze is a form of Jenova.

However, there's a thing that's kind of weird about the real version of the events. See, you find the Masamune blade stabbed into a table across from the big man's desk, and the implication is that Sephiroth used it to Sephiroth everybody. The Masamune's supposed to be unique and badass and only usable as a sword by the freak of nature that Sephiroth turned out to be. And he used it to beat up a bunch of shit at the top of the skyscraper before leaving, and leaving it behind. But Jenova certainly didn't have the Masamune in her tank full of science juice. So that means that either Shinra had Seph's Masamune squirreled away somewhere in the facility, and he retrieved it on his rampage, or that Jenova can spontaneously generate copies of it from her body.

The former isn't beyond the pale, since it is an awesome magical SOLDIER sword, and when Shinra scrubbed Nibelheim after Cloud knocked Sephiroth into the green goop they could easily have retrieved it. Except, it's clear Sephiroth has left the building by the time you get to the top of it, which would mean he had left his primary weapon at the top of the building... until of course he pops up at the next plot point with another Masamune. It would be kind of weird for him to murder everybody violently, stab his Masamune into the furniture as a warning to the rest of Shinra that he was back and not to fuck with him... and then sneak back in later and yank the thing back out, probably after the company is in high alert because he personally just assassinated its top executive. And while Jenova has a lot of alien capabilities, spontaneous generation of swords isn't one demonstrated in the narrative. Usually she a) falls from the sky like a big meteor, b) zombifies a bunch of Cetra in effort to take over a planet, c) gets stabbed and goes into hibernation for a thousand years or so, d) gets recovered and mistaken for a Cetra and used for a bunch of experimentation, e) turns into her son and floats around and laughs a lot, and f) shoots various elemental-flavored flames and lasers at people in her true form. Instantaneous swordcraft isn't thematically in synch with an alien bioterror. 

Although, I guess she could have duplicated them with the duplicating glitch too. Used them to spam Throw with or something.

-Honestly, I mean... I can see why people miss Midgar when you get out of it, I know that's a common complaint. But I think it also feeds the narrative some. Technology doesn't distribute itself evenly across the world, or even across a single city. This is as true of modern life as it is of the game; the future may be here, but there's more of it in some places than others. You don't get heavy citification around the areas other Mako Reactors are located because they're engines of exploitation, funnelling mako (and therefore money) back toward Midgar and into the the execs' pockets. And besides, people don't actually want to live in cities, they want to live in suburbs (like Kalm) and siphon off that wonderful city tax money while keeping out those not-so-wonderful city immigrants and noise pollution and so on. 

Still, it kind of sucks that you just lose the motorcycle and minivan. Your party could have been the A-Team, basically. Instead you have to run around catching wild horses I mean chocobos.

-One thing I liked about the narrative were the intermittent decompression sessions. The first one in Kalm (including the flashback to Nibelheim) is probably the most important, but it happens a couple other times too. It allows the party to maintain a connection to the plot's main points even when you start getting the more irrelevant weirdos in it. Stuff like skits in Tales of the X games take this sort of idea to the extreme, with inter-party interaction over every little thing, but I sort of like the "everybody have a big meeting" style.

This is also where they elect Cloud as -The Leader- which is still one of their dumber decisions, albeit not for reasons everyone at the time was aware of.

And as another note... I didn't get the "orthopedic underwear" thing as a kid. Like I was picturing some sort of cast-like briefs or something. (it is a joke about Tifa's large breasts giving her back trouble. And also Cloud being a perv and digging around in her undie drawer like Happosai or something.) 

-I realized a thing when I was playing FF7 and suddenly I had found myself grinding for five hours instead of advancing the plot. I like grinding in  FF7. Like, grinding is something that's of variable importance in RPGs and it can be more or less fun, but it's not like my priority in a game. And as mentioned before FF7 isn't even that hard a game so the grinding may almost be superfluous. But I still enjoy it a lot in FF7, and I think I've pinpointed why.  First you've got your character levels, and those go up during fights (obviously). Then, you get AP during fights, and AP applies to every Materia you have slotted (barring weird circumstances like nothing-growth weapons and armor). So already you're getting improvement on like eight individual "things" per character. Then at the same time you have different methods of unlocking further limits for your characters, which include doing lots of limits and killing lots of monsters. So you're engineering your fights (with cover materia and Fury status and so on) to rack up those limit uses and getting into those enemy cluster fights to nuke the monsters. You're probably also digging around looking for Enemy Skills to nail (some of which also require fight engineering, like getting Beta really early). So there's a lot of stuff that you're improving when you grind, you get the sense that you're getting a lot of stuff done. Or at least I do. Humping coastlines to have fights with Sea Worms on the beach is something I did a lot of as a kid and something I did a lot of just now. 

-When I was younger, I used to like Yuffie. She was cute. Yeah she stole your Materia eventually. That's okay, you put on the slotless weapons and just smack around all the enemies with attack and use some of the scads and scads of attack items you can get, and then you get the materia back eventually. Not the biggest of deals. And besides, she was cute. And a ninja! And I felt bad for her when she got motion sickness.
That's changed a bit. Like, I noticed when I used her, almost every reaction she had to a plot event was "Ew" or "Gawd" or just constant discontent. Yeah I guess that's accurate to a flighty foreign teenager with surreptitious motives hanging around a bunch of rich strangers. But it was like, wow could you at least try to interface with the plot a bit more (except when you're physically incapacitated?) and be less "are we there yet?" about everything? At least pretend to like people a little bit? ...I still feel bad for her when she gets motion sickness though. 

-So hey you know what's really annoying? The timing for Fort Condor events. Most playthroughs I more-or-less ignored the thing until Huge Materia time, and that was probably the saner option, but this time I said I was going to be at least somewhat "complete" about doing it. That may have been a mistake. For instance, you have a match when you first get to the part of the continent with Junon. (I'm trying to recap/reflect roughly in order) Then you go to Junon, fight off the giant fish snake, and save the little girl. The second match you can have is right after that event, so you (as Cloud alone) have to hustle back to the Fort, do the thing, then go back to Junon. To advance the plot you talk to the girl you saved once, then go down to the beach to jump on the dolphin. The third match opens up (and the second match closes) when you get to the dolphin part (again, another part where you control Cloud by himself), and if you hop up to the Shinra part of Junon (aka do the plot thing literally right in front of you) you lose access to it. And none of the fights are repeatable. And often all they get you is items most of which you can acquire by yourself (barring Yuffie's superball weapon and I think an armor), but you have to keep doing them to get access to those higher-tier items.
To get to some of these fights, you have to (from the western continent) get get in the buggy, drive back to Costa del Sol, take the boat back to Junon, and go from there to the Fort. This takes a long time, and you have to do it multiple times on the wastern continent if you want to complete all your fights. One of these occurs at Cosmo Canyon. Note that the first time you reach Cosmo Canyon, if you drive your buggy right in front of the town it breaks down until you're done with all the plot at Cosmo Canyon. And you can't get back across the river if you don't have your buggy. So you can just outright miss that fight entirely, and probably will unless you know it's coming and avoid breaking down the buggy (by parking right before the town). It's like, come on guys, that's kind of obnoxious, especially when I can ignore all 20 battles and still save your stupid-ass dragon-sized condor and get my fucking Huge Materia and Phoenix. 

-You know who's the absolute worst? Cait Sith. Reeve, you're a dumbass and a kidnapper and you used your fucking moogle + cat robot to infiltrate our party and sell us out. Way later on you make a fair point about damaging the mostly innocent people of Midgar in surreptitous terrorist actions and that's fair but you also kidnapped a little girl to use as leverage against Avalanche and that is pretty damn not kosher. And what kind of last name is Tuesti? Hate that asshat.

Also at some point halfway through disc 2, Cait Sith develops a country accent. At least I think it's supposed to be country.  Uses a lot more contractions. Weirdest thing. Also despite looking like a tank Cait Sith's key stat is actually Magic for some reason.  I hate slots characters in these games anyway. Tifa's thing annoys me but Cait Sith's drives me crazy. It has an Evil Flag. An EVIL FLAG! wtf

-The "totally intact, totally normal Nibelheim with no memory of Cloud or Tifa living there" is probably supposed to be an X-Files or Twilight Zone type thing, as the first thing that actively casts doubt on Cloud's perception of what happened five years ago. (Tifa hems and haws a few times when things come up but of course she's incapable of saying something decisive about it). The zombie-like Sephiroth clones*** infesting the place add to the surreality of the whole thing, and honestly it's kind of spoopy. Or it would be if you couldn't just hit confirm at Tifa's desk and get a whole rundown of exactly what Shinra was doing here, reconstructing Nibelheim and hiring actors to play out the roles of the townsfolk. Like, it's right there. You could run right through and miss it and maintain that impression that something weird was going on, but it's clear they want you to poke around since the clones vomit up items when you talk to them, and a couple are in Tifa's old house. Between that and leaving all the documentation about what experiments they did to Cloud and Zack in the basement of the mansion, you can stumble into a lot of spoiler shit just by being thorough in town exploration.

-Vincent is just so extra. I mean, yeah, it sucks that you went from a good job being a Turk and killing people for Shinra money to getting NTRed by Hojo, the Literally Worst Person On The Planet(tm), then getting killed by Hojo, then getting molested by Hojo and turned into a science vampire. Nobody's saying that wasn't sad or cruel. But Vince, you came up with the "secrete myself away from humanity for 30-some years and literally sleep in a coffin with a bunch of bats for company" thing, as well as the dressing in a cape and flopping around dramatically every time you say something parts. 

...then again, I've come to notice that Lucrecia herself was kind of extra. "STAY BACK! I MUST SEQUESTER MY IMMORTAL MUTANT BODY  IN THIS INACCESSIBLE CAVERN TO EXPIATE MY SIN OF DEFYING ALL SENSE OF SCIENTIFIC ETHICS AND JUICING MY BABY UP WITH SPACE MONSTER GENES btw come back later hun I have this bloodthirsty gun and a spare copy of the Necronomicon for you to grab after I dissipate from my glowing altar thingie, be sure to think of me when you turn into Satan ���." So maybe they were made for each other after all. Either way, their fixation on sin and expiation puts a weird religious spin on a game that's largely apatheistic. (What the hell was that church in Midgar of, exactly? I don't think they had Jesus or anything on Planet.) 

I always bring Vincent with me to shoot Hojo in the face, because really he deserves it. All of it. 

I'm tired again. More later. I have a lot more to say about FF7 than FF8... :s

***So, here's another thing. I don't know if this is another common scientific usage that I wasn't aware of, or a Japanese thing, or a video game thing, or just ???. My layman's understanding of a clone has always been a (more or less) direct genetic copy made extemporaneously. Like if you could photocopy a person, and get another person instead of a piece of paper, that would be what a clone was. But I've seen used a couple times, mostly in video games, where they refer to somebody who's had their genes spliced with a second individual as a "clone" of that individual. They take an already-alive individual, stick them full of other person juice, and call them a clone of the person.  Besides FF7 I'm thinking of the SNK fighting game series King of Fighters. From 1999 to ~2002 its major storyline involved "clones" of the original main character, Kyo Kusanagi. The main clone, the one the story was mostly about, was a guy called K' who, predictably, looked and played nothing like Kyo. He could project flame power like Kyo could, but played totally different. Another clone in a later game, K9999, was nothing if not a fighting game version of Tetsuo from Akira (?!) but he was also a "Kyo clone." Some later games included literal clones of Kyo, guys that actually looked like Kyo and played like (previous game versions of) Kyo, in with guys like this. As well as, eventually, the actual Kyo. It was confusing, mostly because of the existence of these not-clone clones. Between that and FF7 (which itself brings up the idea of  clones as genetic copies; when discussing Cloud in his invalid state, Barret mentions that he doesn't think Shinra is able to create people from scratch, which is part of the distinction I myself made earlier)  I wondered if this was actually a thing outside of these realms, but it doesn't match anything I've read about clones since then.




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0
 06.10.2017 8:23pm
Thread Creator

Thirdtwin
It's you guys' fault



I'm back.

-Cid is verbally abusive. Like, I feel bad for Shera. It's not even her fault that Shinra was pushing the countdown too quickly in the original launch when that oxygen tank hadn't been fixed yet. (Because it was broken, and she could fix it if they gave her the time.) But Cid's misdirecting his anger at her. I understand being enthusiastic about going into space, but if you blew up and died on your first launch then maybe you should have listened to her.

Also I used to think he was British. Like, not high-falutin Received Pronounciation English, one of the other accents. Cockney? I don't know which English accents there are. Hell, maybe I was thinking Australian, my mental voice for Cid was at least partially Crocodile Dundee. As it turned out it had nothing to do with the tea either, just the cursin. But my friends said that was silly when I said I was disappointed that they made him vaguely Southern American in the movie. Oh well. 

-Did Palmer's craving for lard in tea presage the sudden fad of butter coffee? The world may never know. 

-When I was young I thought the whole "let me, the president of the entire company, go to Rocket Town specifically to mug Cid for the Tiny Bronco" thing was a little ludicrous. Shinra's demonstrated scads of air superiority, with helicopters, airplanes and even the Highwind (which they got to land on the Northern Crater somehow, even). Surely they didn't need a dinky little seaplane to dig up Sephiroth. Then I realized: of course they didn't need the Tiny Bronco. Rufus and them came a) to stop the party from getting it (because Cait Sith told them the plan at some point) and b) to be dicks to Cid specifically. That was just a flimsy cover. The whole space program is kind of a joke, you notice-Palmer is somehow even less competent than Heidegger and he's in charge of the thing, and it took them 25 prototype rockets to get to the one that was going to blow up in everyone's face if they actually flew it. As a weapons company, before the war paradigm of Materia-powered genetic freaks, they were probably using the space program as an excuse to develop missile systems. Cid was basically a useful idiot for their purposes. There's no reason not to rub his nose in the dirt some more.

-I liked how the Ancient remnants were chubby black mages.

-So a few parts of this game freaked me the fuck out as a kid. One of them was the part where Cloud gets kicked out of his own head and has to run around as a dumb kid ghost while Cloud vibrates over to Sephiroth and gives him the Black Materia. I don't think I'd played a game which intentionally hijacked my control like that until FF7, and that had me feeling some type of way. A similar thing happens in the Ancient City where when Cloud approaches Aerith, where you get rooted right in front of Aerith (you can wriggle helplessly with the directional control buttons) and start drawing your sword to try and cleave her in half before the others call you back.

Sorry for dragging this out but I just have had no energy this literal week and I'm not sure what the hell is wrong.




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0
 06.11.2017 9:16am


The Hulk
Good Boy



Rock on.  I, for one, am enjoying reading your thoughts on it.  I bought the PS4 version a few months back and was blissfully reassured that this is still far and away my fave game ever.




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0
 06.22.2017 10:27pm


Spidey
So Sigh Ety



Yeah that was an interesting and we'll thought take on the story. I just replayed it a year ago and I understood the story a lot better than I did when I was in middle school. There are some inconsistencies but I found them pretty minor.




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