Topic: ff7 remake and also this is the cranky old nut zone (Read 1512 times)

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ok so they're doing a FF7 remake now. it's the one thing Square Enix fans have been wishing for ages.
 
you can probably guess that I'm not too fond of the idea. but mostly, I never really cared about the remake. I mean, who cares? it's not like they're taking the old one away. and a lot of people want this, so who am I to stand in the way of their happiness?
 
but just now I saw the first footage they showed late last year, and suddenly I realized why I'm not behind this remake.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMWEjWCwjzM
 
it's because the same thing is happening with games now that has already happened with movies. they're turning into mindless assembly line productions based on what's called a "universe." you see, years ago, people came up with original ideas (such as the FF7 story, star wars, superhero characters, etc) and now those things each comprise their own "universe", such as the Marvel Universe or the Star Wars universe, and those are basically canvasses with which you can create endless assembly line productions without any reason to believe you should ever stop.
 
so now it's FF7's turn to be turned into a soulless narrative that people work on not because they had a creative spark, but because it just happens to be this week's canvas they're paid to work on.
 
most likely I'm the last person on salt world to come to this realization because I almost never watch new films or play new games anymore, but now I'm just a little depressed. it's interesting though, how the mainstream and all major studios are going nuts in finding new ways to reuse old material, while at the same time the indie scene is basically full of people who value originality of concept over everything else.
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Ok chiming in before this topic goes on for 3 days without a reply... and fuck THAAAT shit, it's ff7... this is probably bad idea since i'm really sleep deprived but what the hell!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
dada what's your relationship with ff7...? do you genuively like it or is it a childhood crush...? how can you make yourself like ff7 even more, when you feel the urge to be "too cool for school" and too harsh on yourself...?
cos dog... this maddog been literally thinking month or two FF7 full. time. , and here you come TALKING ABOUT IT OUTTA BLUE. Sends chills, good vibes. this is omen, dada-pal.
 
*dada's topic insta-opens, a naked ff7 bonzi buddy screams "WHATYA LOOKIN AT!!!!!!" in blue ff7 message, then topic insta-closes*
 
also surely you... we all agree that barrett a. is too thin in that fucking blasmephy, not huge enough b. he's not prominent and hearty enough, what have they done
 
also the barkley 2 teaser trailer aping ff7 remake trailer is really great
Last Edit: October 07, 2016, 06:13:28 pm by bonzi_buddy
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the only cranky ole nut zone is this old world of ours, mi amigo.
 
HOW COULD YOU GUYS LET THIS TOPIC REMAIN UNREPLIED FOR 3 DAYS!!! F I L T H
Last Edit: October 07, 2016, 06:17:12 pm by bonzi_buddy
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I have never played FF7, so I don't really have any feelings about the remake. In fact, so many years since I last touched a jrpg, let alone a final fantasy.. if one day I have time or interest in playing a jrpg, I might give a try to see how it feels as an adult who didn't have the FF7 experience as a teen. Does it hold up? Did you have to "be there" to appreciate it? Does Sephiroth really kill Aeris?
Last Edit: October 07, 2016, 06:33:46 pm by A1A1inE8
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you might want to play a version where 80% of battles is cut off, if there is even one. also with original graphics, fuck the reskins. did you reskin your the clash - songs of your youth to new autotune-corrected versions??? rrrrrrrrrrright. *plays ragnar's Baby Police like super loud*
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No Aeris ends up getting revived pretty quickly.
 
I really like FF7. It's so disappointing to see a company do something crazy by accident and then desperately return to it for years dragging zombie water out the dead well. And it has been happening INCESSANTLY lately!!! It would be like if Hieronymus Bosch made the Gardens of Earthly Delights by sitting on some wet paint and then on the canvas, and then it got so popular he churned out just regular prints of his ass for the rest of his life, sweating nervously, hoping every patron he handed them to wouldn't be taken aback that it looked nothing like his One Good One.
 
~ stream of conscious complaint~
I don't know at what point we went from "Let's make this game just as colorful and lively as an anime!" to "Let's make this game exactly as retarded as an anime, while looking more boring than real life." Because I'm not crazy in thinking that was a popular goal, right? A shitload of games ape cartoons but especially anime sensibilities. In the 90s things got closer and closer to being an actual anime and then at some point it became... cool I guess to pull away from that? Or rather, games started taking inspiration from 2000s anime, which is a lot more dour and stupid.
Re: cartoon characters, there was a big court case between Nintendo and somebody copying their chips - that came down to a battle over the definition of "linear player images" versus "animated cartoon characters", which Nintendo's chip was powerful enough to display and theirs weren't or uh something like that. Eventually it was just one lawyer scribbling body parts onto a character asking if this hip, this tail was enough to make it "nonlinear". Very funny. Nintendo got creamed.
[i wanted to put a picture of the sketch of the weird little scrawly character here but I can't find one]
You see this in ads, in fans talking about the games - how much they're like cartoons, and how much life and expression that gives them. 
It comes back to a point that gets repeated on this forum again and again: When it was harder to represent things, the representation was so much better! What the fuck's up with that? You could look at it as a matter of "now it's easier to make games so more trash is being made", but that's not core to the issue, because it's the biggest companies with the most resources that turn out the most dire and mark-missing shit. Is there just something about elaborate lighting systems that turns people's brains off and makes them think that's the pinnacle of unreal interactive experience?
We possess all the tech to straight-up make cartoons that behave like games and all those other things that got attempted but failed due to lack of speed and storage space. Now we have both in abundance and we use them to hold megatextures and 80,000 lines of Shakespearean acted dialogue HEY WHATS THAT NOISE. GONA GO CHECK IT OUT. Why don't you watch a movie since that's clearly what you want to do?
It seems like a long-term change of attitudes for the worse and I really don't understand it. I don't even know whether the changes I perceive even exist because I wasn't there to see things firsthand with my own eyes. I grew up in a world where video games were old and big, and they got more and more boring and lame with every year - also more popular. Is growing more boring and losing life what it takes to make a medium grow? Oh well, I guess that is more or less what has happened to every medium! It's obviously a folly to think of it in some hurrrr 90s kid everything was better before *I* was born lame ass way, but I am PRETTY SURE that even the shit then was better than the shit now. Because the act of downgrading the visuals, sound, and concepts made art. Even someone completely bereft of artistic fervor (a games company) created art without meaning to because that's what you have to do to fit stories into old computers. Okay, now I'm pretty sure it's that.
 
Also Barret IS too thin. Cloud is too femme. Weirdly enough they did manage to make Wedge as big and lovably dopey as he's supposed to be, of course he's the legacy joke instead of somebody who gets to go on a cool quest. It's all the "Extended universe" FF7 stuff that kicks the original game in the gut, takes its ball, and runs in the opposite direction with it. I strongly recommend playing the real game for what it is - there is a REASON it captured so many people's imaginations and became such an iconic thing, and it's far stranger and more creative than its iconic status and its iconic reputation would have you think. Nothing really manages to capture the same holy spark that FF7 does in the same way that no FPS since Doom has attained quite the aesthetic ultra-union. Anyway, while I strongly recommend playing the game, if you are strapped for time there's also a surprisingly excellent screenshot LP from a guy called Elentor, and he is unusually good for an LPer - no annoying personality, knows a FUCKLOAD about the game + has been playing it since he was a kid (so he shows you EVERYTHING the game has to offer, including secrets and a few glitches) + thinks nothing of the extended universe (so he's careful to make a distinction between the genuinely good parts of the game and the part everyone just remembers because that's the laminated photocopy version of FF7 that has entered the sphere), and also he's from Brazil and goes off on these non-irritating tangents about all sorts of interesting Brazil shit like how the society there and the one in the game world have parallels that not every player would experience.
 
edit: Actually, I'm gettin' real sick of comparing my views to that of crotchety old fist-waggers! Especially when I've never actually been CALLED crotchety for these views, I'm just deciding to call myself a hipster or an old man because I don't want to confidently say that *I KNOW THE TRUTH* and *EVERYONE ELSE IS WRONG*. But that's a fucking stupid thing to do I'm NOT a CRANK because I DON'T LIKE GARBAGE, none of us are, and I refuse to accept the idea that my seeing more value in work that HAPPENS to be old is crotchetiness. I just hit drinking age! The very core of the matter is that there is a lot of heart in tiny stumpy cartoon people and no heart at all in extremely elaborate people who don't look like cartoons. In a year or two there will be countless videos recorded by people who have uploaded their bodies as models into games using the next popular kinect-style put-our-camera-in-your-room and they're all going to use this technology to run around in VR Minecraft.
Last Edit: October 08, 2016, 02:15:51 am by Ice Baby1
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on kind of a related note i think the most brave/ballsy/genuine thing the james bond creators could do is either goldeneye 64 big head aesthetic in next movie and/or have the entire movie just be james bond opening credits with sexy women made of oil slicks dancing in lava lamps and ridiculous over the top theme music a la the world is not enough etc. I actually really liked the intro to skyfall/like kind of best thing about the movie because they did extensive research into the structure of cheesy james bond theme music and found it was usually in a certain key/tempo/versing or whatever... well more the graphics which are kind of both advanced and completely playstation 2-looking at the same time. Like the shadows in this one part look exactly like whatever bilinear/trilinear filtering the texture maps use on PS2
 

 
 
well i'm kind of on a tangent about it recently because dj saint hubert / apparently classic image of the real saint hubert is of him seeing a cross between the antlers of a deer/stag and the opening credits have almost this exact imagery because the bond coat of arms or whatev is a stag apparently. virtually the same image but cross is made /out/ of deer heads. still thought it was cool and wondering if they google imaged "trippy images of deer forming crosses/headstones" by coincidence or knew of the story of st hubert??
 

 
 
 
 
 
also fuckin lol
 
 

 
Edit: thought it was better here instead of dumbtopic because both franchises have weird continuity/stupid extended universe sort of thing and a bajillion sequels and should really just do weird imagery/not be so serious/boring and occasionally they get it right?? i dunno
 
like all the james bond games made by EA seem atrocious/random 'original' plots frankensteined together from previous bond movies that actually were original/had charm to them, basically extended universe as fuk too?
 
some blogger suggested that PIERCE BROSNAN should've played Silva in Skyfall, like Bond name is just a codename and previous Bond goes crazy from jumping directly into too many airvents or something and goes rogue?? and then sean connery comes back from the dead to assist daniel craig-bond and it becomes ultimate showdown of bonds/weird james bond fanfiction played completely straight in the middle of a big budget hollywood blockbuster in 2012 when all movies have become safe as hell/drained of all fun by think tanks??
 
Edit: same scene where silva takes off the prosthetics on his face but with Brosnan and underneath he is N64 version of james bond with brosnan's face sloppily texture-mapped onto it. LOOK AT WHAT THEY DID TO ME
 
edit: maybe silva-brosnan/brosnan-silva slowly turns into boris/hacker guy from goldeneye, blurts out I AM INVINCIBLE, is master hacker but makes all his passwords KNOCKERS and leads to his downfall? Also uses the same graphics/boris aesthetic when he hacks mi6
 

 

 

Last Edit: October 08, 2016, 04:13:07 am by Ragnar
http://djsaint-hubert.bandcamp.com/
 
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I don't understand most of this thread since I got into ff7 late and never was super interested in it. I recall it having a certain lively future-urbaness to it that was neat, but beyond that it seems like maybe a few good parts entrapped in a whole lot of uninteresting junk. I mean were we, young apes and young ice babies alike, not first primarily drawn to cloud's spiky salvaged shoulder thing, spiky anime hair and huge ass sword? pretty anime face, but more importantly the face of a child, surrogate for the player. new-cloud has flabby, pasty juggalo arms, complete with a pinkish youthful veiny blush to match. the marketing team skipped over us as a target audience, being an unlucrative group of curmudgeons.
 
I'm not sure I've ever been a preexisting big-time fan of anything that has been remade so idk, it's easy to just see it as empty carb junk media for people to compulsively fill themselves with, only with the extra safety of brand recognition. I'm a conscious consumer, I invest in the brand-name consumer report-graded fantasies. final fantasies are good fantasies but the one called 7 is the best
Last Edit: October 08, 2016, 05:28:17 am by Elder Chips
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There was a TON of uninteresting junk! FF7 was so far up its own ass! But it went so far up there that nothing else looks and feels quite like it. I just started understanding the plot after reading that guy's lp twice. It only comes through backwards, told through flashbacks and lies and obscure items hidden in towns you would have no reason to backtrack to. A lot of important shit is unfathomable, while some sappy anime subplots appear very clearly. And what's more, everyone remembers it as a game with the one big plot twist, but there's an even bigger curveball way down the line. Like you said, exactly, Cloud's an awesome anime hero and also spent a lot of the game looking like a child's toy. When you were done kicking ass, your party members did a dumb little dance, and they did it EVERY TIME. Also it had MIDI-based music. And wheelchair cloud. (I hope wheelchair cloud still makes a reference to an external non-ff rpg.) I still haven't finished it, but I think I still want to one day.
 
Also hyperragnarpost
Last Edit: October 08, 2016, 08:06:57 am by Ice Baby1
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dada what's your relationship with ff7...? do you genuively like it or is it a childhood crush...? how can you make yourself like ff7 even more, when you feel the urge to be "too cool for school" and too harsh on yourself...?
cos dog... this maddog been literally thinking month or two FF7 full. time. , and here you come TALKING ABOUT IT OUTTA BLUE. Sends chills, good vibes. this is omen, dada-pal.
 
this is a good question, because it's always a question of whether something is "just" nostalgia and doesn't hold up otherwise, or if it's genuinely good. and it's kind of hard to make that assessment, because whether something is good or not is completely a subjective matter. there's no incontrovertible, non-arbitrary way to make that determination. so in a sense, nostalgia is as good a rationale as anything.
 
in any case, regardless of what I think about it, it is a classic. sort of like how Myst is a classic. even though Myst, in fairness, doesn't really hold up all that well in retrospect.
 
personally I think it was great, even the boring parts were good. I can always play this game. but to me that's not even the point of this topic, really.
 
the fact is that under capitalism, nothing is sacred. and that's always been true, and this is surely not the most shocking example of it. (cut to shot of chinese children manufacturing plastic crucifixes by the million.) but it's a shame that the creative industries are moving towards this model in which everything is either a soft reboot, or basically a fanfic that takes place in a previously established (and thus familiar) universe.
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I heard that Doom 4 was surprisingly good, but the fact that they actually had the balls to just straight up call it "Doom" is one of the ugliest things I've ever seen and I can't explain to other people why it bothers me so much. You can't just ride the coattails of something like that and simultaneously... cuckoo it out of a title and... search results. It could be the best game in the world (it isn't) and I would never want to play it because they did that. Conned out of the Pure Doom Experience. There ought to be laws that force you to put ": The Remake" on the end. And laws that force you to say it every time you're talking or thinking about it.
Last Edit: October 09, 2016, 03:30:18 am by Ice Baby1
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I'm almost definitely gonna play it at some point.
 
I played FF7 when it first came out when I was 8 so of course there is nostalgia, but that isn't really the word for it. It isn't 'ah, better times', Thinking about my feelings playing that game when I was 8 is like retreating to a prior level of cognisance. That in itself is compelling and reason enough for me to play this - the clash of those memories/feelings buried deep inside, my current feelings towards FF7, and the way I'll feel about the new one. It'll be an interesting experience pretty much no matter what unless it really is just utter garbage, which I doubt it will be.
 
It isn't that I was happier or that games were better back then (i don't think they were), but that I understood less and so things which now bore me immediately were interesting to me and revisiting FF7 in a remake will bring some of that up by being new but constantly referring back to the old. 
 
Also - there will be cool moments of visual exploration and sound etc which will probably still burrow their way into my skull like with anything. I can't really muster up enough of an interest in new games of this type because I approach it as a cynical adult thinking too much,but with FF7 I can access those cool moments while simulating, or trying to, that old feeling of curiousity for even something as silly as FF7.
 
I don't think anything is being lost. Sometimes you've just gotta dip back into your own past a bit for relief. That's about as good a reason I can express for the fact I'm almost definitely going to play it.
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I like that you're just gonna go ahead and play it and see where it takes you Jamie. like, I'm not interested so I won't even be giving it a try. but maybe I should because I have no idea how it will turn out to be.
 
also yeah, I don't really think that anything gets "lost" by remakes, but... it is kind of a sign of the times. we live in an era in which nothing is sacred and originality is essentially a bad thing (because it's "uncertain" whereas unoriginality is considered stable.)
 
maybe I'm also a little afraid that people will look at this as an awkward attempt to squeeze a bunch of 20 year old ideas into a new container, and that it will just look plain stupid to a modern audience. essentially, a misrepresentation of a classic game, and for the next 100 years I'll have to tell people that the original was better whenever it comes up. and honestly, the anachronism alone should make the remake "worse." as in, it will not resonate with people the same way that the old did, much like 3 Feet High And Rising was a game changing album when it came out but would be considered awkward if it came out verbatim today. essentially it's a story out of time, and they're gonna put band-aids on it to try and fix it up.
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we all know what the real spiritual successor to final fantasy VII is anyway
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnDvKebPpnw
http://djsaint-hubert.bandcamp.com/
 
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Final Fantasy 7 was a fricken weird game. It was all over the place in terms of tone, you could play it for an hour every day and experience something genuinely unique each time you play it. One day you're snowboarding, one day Tifa is slapfighting the shinra lady, the next you're doing that weird rts minigame for the super materia, then you're finishing red 13's quest and seeing his petrified dad in cosmo canyon, then youre breeding and racing chocobo, then youre having a random encounter with a house or like a naked torso swinging on a pendulum, then japanese dracula joins your party, then cloud becomes an invalid from mako poisoning.
 
FF7 was such a wild, wild game and my biggest fear with the remake is that they'll just drop everything that doesn't fit into their hardcore cool-kid modern vision. Like I'm sure the big iconic moments will be done well, but without all the weird nonsense in between then, well, it just won't be ff7.
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the youtube in my last post was kinda a joke but at the same time when I try to remember FF7 and what it was like it just feels like some kind of fever dream
http://djsaint-hubert.bandcamp.com/
 
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Final Fantasy 7 was a fricken weird game. It was all over the place in terms of tone, you could play it for an hour every day and experience something genuinely unique each time you play it. One day you're snowboarding, one day Tifa is slapfighting the shinra lady, the next you're doing that weird rts minigame for the super materia, then you're finishing red 13's quest and seeing his petrified dad in cosmo canyon, then youre breeding and racing chocobo, then youre having a random encounter with a house or like a naked torso swinging on a pendulum, then japanese dracula joins your party, then cloud becomes an invalid from mako poisoning.
 
FF7 was such a wild, wild game and my biggest fear with the remake is that they'll just drop everything that doesn't fit into their hardcore cool-kid modern vision. Like I'm sure the big iconic moments will be done well, but without all the weird nonsense in between then, well, it just won't be ff7.
 
that's true actually. usually when people list instances of things the way you did in that post, there are several exaggerations, but FF7 is actually pretty much like that. keeps changing all the time and a lot of it is really goofy and sometimes totally on purpose. 
 
yeah, that probably won't come through in the remake. it would be a nice surprise if it did.
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I feel pretty confident in saying that brand of crazy no longer appears in commercial games. I would be happy to hear an example to the contrary but I think that the current industry simply can't support termite-levels of passion and creation. Any attempts to transplant the crazy forward in time will fuck it up. Every good aspect will fail to shine through. This is an FF7 fan's prophecy.
 
The only thing I can imagine them not fucking up is "This guy are sick", and they're definitely going to fuck that one up.
 
Something pretty important about the original game is that Aeris is the cool tomboy, tough and loud and spunky, with agency and even an aggressive sexuality. Tifa is the yang equivalent. She's a total mess, like a Romantic poet. Their class and story archetypes are the opposites of their characters, just one reason why the game's weirder and more interesting than most - Tifa is a bartender/kickboxer or something, and Aeris is a last-of-her-kind flower saleswoman and party restorative. (Isn't that like the lowest way to make something interesting, making it the obvious opposite of what it should be? But even that is "one step up" above what most games bother, and FF7 tries it a lot.) It is very telling of how little the company understands their own product that ever since then, they've portrayed these characters with their personalities switched around. In the extended universe shit you see Aeris acting like Tifa and Tifa acting like Aeris because most people do not notice the healer isn't the lovey-dovey one. It's incredibly fucking obvious to me now as an adult, and *I* didn't notice myself! I had to have it pointed out to me. Most of the main characters have this sort of "one extra layer" of twist that gives them more energy than total one-notes. (The ones that don't have huge personality psyche-outs are made even weirder by their lunatic designs, like cait 'fucker' sith.) The game never throws it in your face SEE WHAT I DID? THE PINK ONE IS LESS GIRLY, unlike a lot of silly manga bullshit that it proudly does; it doesn't mind if you misinterpret it because it spends a lot of the time deliberately misleading and lying to you. Or really, the characters are all lying to one another, each lost and made miserable in their attempts to be more than who they are. ff7 is really quite clever in lots of ways that you only notice if you pay lots of attention, and it makes me wonder why it's often remembered as a generic rpg with a couple of inexplicable moments when it tries so hard to be different. It just goes to show why so many things are boring - because they don't have a competitive squatting minigame.
 
I guess I just don't get why people want to go back in time and scrub off all the parts that make something interesting. It's like how they went back to calling her "Aerith" officially instead of just rolling with the (in my worm opinion) more memorable nonsense name that the screwed-up transliteration gave them. The Cloud/Earth thing is absolutely retarded and I'm pretty sure that's the whole of why she's called that, so it's not like they gained anything by backpedaling over the top of something special.
Last Edit: October 15, 2016, 03:14:02 am by Ice Baby1
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Final Fantasy 7 was a fricken weird game. It was all over the place in terms of tone, you could play it for an hour every day and experience something genuinely unique each time you play it. One day you're snowboarding, one day Tifa is slapfighting the shinra lady, the next you're doing that weird rts minigame for the super materia, then you're finishing red 13's quest and seeing his petrified dad in cosmo canyon, then youre breeding and racing chocobo, then youre having a random encounter with a house or like a naked torso swinging on a pendulum, then japanese dracula joins your party, then cloud becomes an invalid from mako poisoning.
 
FF7 was such a wild, wild game and my biggest fear with the remake is that they'll just drop everything that doesn't fit into their hardcore cool-kid modern vision. Like I'm sure the big iconic moments will be done well, but without all the weird nonsense in between then, well, it just won't be ff7.
Ahhaha this is MY FF7!! When I wrote a giant post about it and destroyed it, I literally used that naked torso pendulum. also I forgot about that ridicilous house fight!! ahhah this game!
 
True story:
- I was around... 9 or 10 years old when I first experienced FF7. My friend had an FF7 on PC (i think with MIDI enabled and not with original OST... I could be wrong).
- It was this mysterious broken/glitched version, where we could only play only one specific part of the game, and some ways from the beginning. it was like the game bugged out, so that only one save and certain parts of beginning game were accesible. so it's effectively like a weird demo/shareware version lol.... but I don't think I either understood this, or my friend didn't explain it very well, or maybe even he didn't get or remember what was going on with the game after so long.
- It worked precisely to the point after the first continent's desert and the dead dragon-snake -thing. The game would freeze when you leave the caves after meeting the Turks. This was the reality I accepted. " Ah, so it's bit like shareware games I always play... I get it. you can min-max even beyond what the game offers, but you still cannot progress story, like in that Submarine game. How EVIL."
- ALAS!!! He had another save in late-game Niebelheim (!?! I did not compute this illogicality - how did he manage to get a save there, but now he cannot...? but I accepted the reality)... which now I think of it is a pretty great coincidence, considering how I got to experience both early and late-game version of it, and somehow that depressing mystery town was always a hard-cap to the FF7 experience pretty much.
- my friend stubbornly tried to solve the timer-puzzle on the safe-deposit box of the mansion with his keyboard... keyboard was too slow for it, but he confidently convinced us all that: "yes, it's impossible to solve it. that's how it's meant to be". OK... a make-or-break error, deeply ingrained to the game, I accepted this explanation, so all is fatal, just one of the unexplainable mysterious things of the game...
- I would shake my head in disbelief subconsciously, as I would try to understand why there are random battles in a otherwise empty mansion (the whatever little fights can be fought in that broken save), and why it was fought against:
* A muscled, tanned, blonde man with a long hair and non-descript face...
* with a lower torso of a anchor...
* holding unto a chain that is tied to a metal chain, swinging wildly on it...
* that would break expectations of a battle, as because when you attack him, he would fall helplessly on the floor, and eventually climb BACK to the said chain... umm, doesn't feel so good fighting against this pitiful guy... did he also sometimes summon a wave?? i can't remember anymore.
- Also, when the green materia is dropped at the basement of that mansion, my friend refused to take it - "Why?!? it's new materia, new colour, take it!!" "NO. it's a trap... If you take it, a horrible things happen to the player eventually... it's like, toxic." Perplexed but eyeing fearful at the said witchy materia, I accepted this confident explanation without questioning... we left without it...
 
Missigno....
 
About characters: Yeah, when I was watching a longplay of the game, I noticed how despite the Wacky Anime outlook and behauviors of the joinable characters, they all pretty much are affected by the major corporation one way or another, in a life-altering destructive way? no party members that are in for a ride (save i guess for Yuffie? I'm not sure. I can't remember.). Dat's some subtle shit...
 
Last Edit: October 15, 2016, 07:24:09 am by bonzi_buddy
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Yuffie is the cocky annoying ninja kid thief, but her backstory is intense when you think about it too: she belongs to an ancient society that was destroyed, gutted by Shinra and basically turned into a tourist trap. She hates them because her whole culture got erased and none of her family is willing to take the fight to the company because they don't want to die. so she feels frustrated and lonely enough to join up with the weirdos she distrusts. She's also a selfish cock and will straight up jack your shit, which is no fun to play, but very hilarious and a good idea.
 
The LP I linked goes into more detail about this but yeah everyone's life has been completely emptied and claimed by this horrible power company. The continent (you can buy Korean BBQ item, so, Korea too?) is 100% under the thumb of rich assholes trying to monetize an alien even though they already own all the money in the world. Or, metaphorically, the most powerful entity in an almost dead world makes a grab for infinity, is struck down and reversed by the resultant dregs of its own victims returning the hoard of life to earth, or, more generally, the ol' HUBRIS/fuck you, richy. Telling that through a story so straightforward as "evil power company sucks electricity out of the afterlife" is pretty ballsy. (And of course the whole point is that what they're draining is really "the Earth" and "all dead people" at the same time.) A standard anime thing I hear but frankly it seems like a standard everything thing, a very essential and universal sorta thematic motif that I don't really get tired of.
 
I can't really remember why Vincent and Cid stick around but I think it has to do with them hating Shinra for wrecking their lives and not having any other group of people to fight alongside. But yeah no one is just there because THOU SEEMST A CURE FOR THIS AWFUL... BOREDOM! MIGHT I JOIN THEE IN THINE QUOST?
 
the game also keeps track of how you've treated everyone and sends you on a date with aeris, tifa, yuffie, or, if you've deliberately been a prick to all of them, barret. So that's a lot of replay value - always good in a video game.
Last Edit: October 15, 2016, 08:06:36 am by Ice Baby1