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Cid DLC but it's a business management Sim where you're running his business. Shera can be around too.
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Mar 23, 2024 04:17
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Cloud's puppy dog run to Sephiroth is awful to watch in a good way.
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Mar 23, 2024 04:29
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just realized we’ll probably be getting the Unknown designs those things were freaky even with PSX polygons
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Mar 23, 2024 04:45
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Kosume Shezaki posted:Cloud's puppy dog run to Sephiroth is awful to watch in a good way. still can't get over him dropping the black materia just so he can make Cloud go get it for him He really is an unbelievable rear end in a top hat in this game
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Mar 23, 2024 04:52
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Oxxidation posted:just realized we’ll probably be getting the Unknown designs 
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Mar 23, 2024 05:07
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bobjr posted:Cid DLC but it's a business management Sim where you're running his business. Shera can be around too.
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Mar 23, 2024 11:55
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I love how the Gold Saucer has one of those mall-style under construction murals for the snowboarding minigame serving as a placeholder for where it'll be in the next game lol
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Mar 23, 2024 14:16
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I hope Square stealth makes a new SSX with that minigame. Have each party member be selectable each with their own super stylized signature trick. That chocobo racing minigame is a surprisingly good kart racer.
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Mar 23, 2024 14:27
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The existence of Kid G means we’ll definitely learn Goblin punch from him in part 3 right?
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Mar 23, 2024 15:53
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So why were the black robes after the protorelics in Nibelheim? Was it just Sephiroth wondering why the hell Cloud was spending all his time collecting these things? It was pretty surreal seeing Sephiroth and Gilgamesh standing next to each other. Wish they had interacted a bit more before Sephiroth poofed away
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Mar 23, 2024 19:54
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Rhonne posted:So why were the black robes after the protorelics in Nibelheim? Was it just Sephiroth wondering why the hell Cloud was spending all his time collecting these things? It was pretty surreal seeing Sephiroth and Gilgamesh standing next to each other. Wish they had interacted a bit more before Sephiroth poofed away Sephiroth knows Cloud will do all side quests so he’s like “get it over with already so I can have my reunion”
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Mar 23, 2024 20:21
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This Sephiroth remembers Greg from Dissidia and wanted to catch up
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Mar 23, 2024 20:32
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Sephiroth is very supportive of his murder boyfriend.
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Mar 23, 2024 20:52
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Huh! That's interesting. So the change to Dyne's thing actually was a change back to what was originally planned for FF7. Originally the fight with Dyne was supposed to be a duel that took place in the middle of Shinra and Avalanche having an ongoing battle, but it was scrapped due to being too hard to make work. (This is in the Ultimania) So it's a retcon but it's a retcon back to what they originally wanted to do, which isn't what I expected.
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Mar 23, 2024 23:50
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I hadn't quite picked up on how significant it can be that Cloud alone goes through a glowy whisper portal at the end of Rebirth, whereas the whole party that was present went through the portal together at the end of remake. I think that' at least makes my big swing "Cloud fully timeline swapped" possibility a bit plausible, though a more likely explanation is that going through alone exposed him to being present in a doomed timeline caused by Aerith surviving, and then Sephiroth shifted him back to his native "beagle" timeline at the moment when we started seeing blood on the floor. But the whole situation of going through that portal alone and then being yanked back is messing with his already swiss-cheese brain a ton, causing all the alternating visions and him seeing Aerith after her death and the rip in the sky. I wouldn't even consider "Cloud hopped timelines" a theory if they hadn't made such a point out of how one big choice or change is enough to create a whole new universe or timeline with the three choices we see Zack make each displaying new Stamp timelines. And presumably Zack's timeline/universe was in the same state and had the same people in it before he made each of those choices. Aerith living or dying would clearly be a bigger choice/change/difference than who Zack decides to save in that weird doomed-verse, so I think it's quite possible that when we see Cloud saving Aerith he's creating a fresh new offshoot timeline from "Beagle," and it's right after that when we see the whisper wall drop and let the rest of the party in. I think that with all the imagery we've seen of White vs. Black whispers representing Aerith vs. Sephiroth, and how both colors of whispers are all over the events there, that Cloud gets pulled by Sephiroth from the timeline he created by saving Aerith back into the timeline we're in during the post-fight ending. But the constant switching between visions of Aerith's fate, and seeing her speak to Cloud immediately post death and wake up when he asks her to, could be the "Aerith lives" timeline's Aerith trying to pull Cloud back into her timeline but not being strong enough to, so Sephiroth keeps yanking him back and what he sees and experiences keeps flickering. The Aerith he saves could even be the "meta-Aerith" who is hopping her consciousness between timelines and doing things like pulling Cloud into the doomed timeline date and giving him a working holy materia to give to her past self since she was able to live long enough to gain a much greater mastery of her abilities as a Cetra. So a possible origin and personal timeline of a Meta-Aerith who is able to influence the White Whispers in Rebirth and make lots of moves against Sephiroth could be: -Remake Aerith is able to perceive more than usual due to her possessing a Holy materia with future knowledge, but she hasn't yet figured out how to fully comprehend what's in it or use it. How she might have acquired it to have that knowledge when OG FF7 Aerith didn't have that knowledge is unclear, but I can imagine a white whisper dropping it off for her or swapping out one holy for another. -Sephiroth uses his influence over the Whispers to erase that materia and make it a clear materia, or the Whispers do it on their own since it's a deviation from fate. As a consequence of this, Aerith loses most of her foreknowledge. She still has some lingering enhanced abilities or perceptions though, which is causing her to see a scar in the sky to indicate that the timeline is doomed (and without outside influence, at that point of time it is doomed). However, Meta-Aerith's continued ability to influence the timeline is causing it to technically not be doomed, which is why everyone isn't seeing a scar, Mako hasn't dried up, etc. - Rebirth Aerith is given a working Holy Materia again. Her "draining" the Holy Materia to fill her clear materia helps symbolize how she's reacquiring memories and abilities she had during Remake. -Aerith goes to pray since that's what she knows she has to do based on her still limited ability to tap into the memories/knowledge in the Holy materia. -In one timeline Aerith is saved and goes on to become Meta-Aerith, able to influence and travel between multiple timelines and use the lifestream to influence white whispers to help her work against Sephiroth. It's been a popular theory that Sephiorth is using his merging with the lifestream to go back and influence the past and now other timelines, and Meta-Aerith lives long enough to figure out how to do the same. -A nascent Meta-Aerith tries to keep Cloud in her timeline after he saves her, but isn't strong enough to and Sephiorth successfully drags Cloud out of her timeline. -Despite being alive, Meta-Aerith's timeline is likely still doomed, leading to her taking over the consciousnesses of various timelines' Aeriths as she continues to train her abilities and gain knowledge while hiding from Sephiroth. -She uses those abilities to ensure her own creation in classic time-travel shenanigan fashion (notably by getting Remake Aerith extra knowledge and swapping back in a Holy Materia for Cloud to give to her past self in the beagle timeline). -At some point Meta-Aerith either gains the ability to influence various timelines using the lifestream as a delivery system for White Whispers to interfere, or the knowledge she's able to put into that Holy Materia allows the Aerith we see die gain a much greater ability to influence things with the lifestream after her death. -The reunion converging so many timelines allows Meta-Aerith to join Cloud and fight Sephiroth. When he says he underestimated her, he's acknowledging how she's been waging a constant war against him and doing sneaky stuff like using "bad form" to pop a working Holy materia back into "beagle" Aerith's possession. -I think that either just after Cloud leaves the "dream date" or after she fights against Sephiroth in the ending and fades away in green lifestream light, Meta-Aerith dies (or experiences something as close to death as she can). There's some more big theorycrafting for everybody. All the meta-Aerith stuff aside, I really like the idea that Cloud was able to save Aerith and for a few scant seconds was able to be in that new timeline that he created with his own hands, enabled to do so by passing through that Whisper gate on his own, but was then pulled out of it by Sephiroth into the timeline in which she died that the rest of the party stayed in. That also makes the three scenarios we see at work immediately following Aerith's death make more sense to me: -We see Aerith live but be very tired and talk with Cloud a bit. No matter what kind of Aerith that is, she may be tired because she's trying to hold on to Cloud in her reality or drag him back into it briefly after Sephiroth pulls him out of it. -We see, but don't hear, some of OG FF7 Cloud holding Aerith and giving his big speech about all the things she won't be able to do anymore. -We see Cloud crying over Aerith's body but also seeing her talking to him and alive. His experiences with her dead are from Sephiroth interfering and pulling him into the timeline that suits him (which isn't OG FF7's timeline, though cloud does see flashes of that). Him seeing her alive are the brief periods where Aerith (or just the general forces of timelines converging or how Cloud's in a different state having walked through a Whisper portal) pulls him back into that timeline, or we're seeing him perceiving a different Cloud who's experiencing that. That's way too many words about all this stuff, but it's all the stuff that's popped into my head after thinking about the ending some more.
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Mar 24, 2024 08:48
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I finished the game early this morning and I think I dislike the way it leaves off. Aerith being dead/not dead/multiversal entity makes it an intellectual exercise instead of an emotional one. I can't imagine the ending being the slightest bit coherent to anyone who didn't go in to the game having played the original with a good memory of the events. The third part is going to have to do a lot of lifting to artistically justify why they introduced the Whispers and defying fate instead of doing a straightforward 'modernize and expand' remake.
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Mar 24, 2024 21:29
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Since the ghosts haven't actually changed much seems they were part of their way of doing a modernise and expand remake.
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Mar 24, 2024 21:35
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Shiroc posted:I finished the game early this morning and I think I dislike the way it leaves off. Aerith being dead/not dead/multiversal entity makes it an intellectual exercise instead of an emotional one. I can't imagine the ending being the slightest bit coherent to anyone who didn't go in to the game having played the original with a good memory of the events. It’s a sequel and Aerith Prime playing chess against Sephiroth Prime is still very much in play and I really don’t think they need to do much more to explain things if that’s the case and that plays out.
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Mar 24, 2024 21:54
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Were those two characters in Corel that kidnapped a black robe from a novel or something?
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Mar 24, 2024 22:02
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SyntheticPolygon posted:Since the ghosts haven't actually changed much seems they were part of their way of doing a modernise and expand remake. Yeah but adding them, placing so much emphasis on them and having the final bosses of the Remake involve killing the concept of Fate, having it not really go anywhere is a bit of a waste. It's distracting from the emotional core of the story to spawn pop culture website theory crafting think pieces.
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Mar 24, 2024 22:04
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More genuninely I expect they intended to have more major changes when they first conceived the ghosts but then changed their mind later. And while I respect the artistic process of not following up on a thing that was set up I agree it does feel like a bit of a waste.
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Mar 24, 2024 22:27
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the only obvious retcon i've noticed was zack's scene at the end of intermission. beyond that everything's felt like it's proceeding as originally planned. i could tell after the first time i finished remake that sephiroth had basically engineered that whole final slugfest with the whispers to hijack them for his own ends and that's what's happening in rebirth - it's just that they're also being countered by the white whispers presumably commandeered by aerith we'll see how it all shakes out in the final entry but saying that the new trilogy's metacommentary on the nature of canon somehow detracts from its "emotional core" feels like sour grapes
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Mar 24, 2024 22:30
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For me personally I can’t call Zack fighting Sephiroth with Cloud “not really going anywhere” unless they completely brush off Zack in Part 3.
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Mar 24, 2024 22:35
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I think part of the problem with discussing changes is that there genuinely are changes to the canon but what they are can also just be written off as being part of a remake rather than textual. Like whole Wutai thing is a change, and it's a change seemingly engineered by Sephiroth. We, the players, have no real way to knowing if that is a change because it is a remake or it is a change because something shifted. Same with meeting the Gi Tribe, or the entire set of events at the Gongaga Reactor, or so-on. That is even ignoring the big potential neon glowing WARNING that is the Holy Materia seemingly not having triggered. Canon has changed.The degree to which it has changed does not completely change the plot of the game, but the whole Whisper Civil War could justify that as well, with canon fighting shifts in canon with the overall struggle being relatively small but potentially significant. and Aerith still dying doesn't mean that nothing else has changed. Like, honestly, I really feel like the Holy Materia thing is getting kind of glossed over as a change, because that is as potentially a significant a change as Aerith surviving. Holy not being active means Meteor and everything revolving around it changes significantly without actually changing the basic events of the plot. I think the key here, and I think it's relevant, is that canon is changing in bad ways for the protagonists. Cloud almost kills Tifa, Holy doesn't trigger, Wutai is being aggressively manipulated by Sephiroth, characters who survived in part 1 are dead again in part 2. It's the middle part of a trilogy and it is a downer. Sephiroth appears to be winning. Canon is shifting but it's shifting in ways that benefit Sephiroth, not the heroes. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Mar 24, 2024 |
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Mar 24, 2024 22:44
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Oxxidation posted:the only obvious retcon i've noticed was zack's scene at the end of intermission. beyond that everything's felt like it's proceeding as originally planned. i could tell after the first time i finished remake that sephiroth had basically engineered that whole final slugfest with the whispers to hijack them for his own ends and that's what's happening in rebirth - it's just that they're also being countered by the white whispers presumably commandeered by aerith I'm not going off anything concrete but I feel the angle they're taking on this whole "fate" thing has shifted and its less meta now and more just general ruminations on fate and destiny. Like, in Remake 'Fate' seemed to be clearly about the meta commentary on the expected path of OG FF7 but in Rebirth now the Cetra are also talking about Fate and how they couldn't defy it and its divorced from the angle Remake had. But maybe it was always more general in the first game too, I dunno.
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Mar 24, 2024 22:45
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Oxxidation posted:we'll see how it all shakes out in the final entry but saying that the new trilogy's metacommentary on the nature of canon somehow detracts from its "emotional core" feels like sour grapes I'm not sad Aerith is dead, because she's not I'm not happy Aerith is alive, because she's not Aerith's death hangs over the original game so much and we just passed through that scene and we don't actually know what happened because of multiple timelines maybe having partially merged? Or maybe it's all in Cloud's increasingly fragmented perception? How is that sour grapes?
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Mar 24, 2024 23:01
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Shiroc posted:I'm not sad Aerith is dead, because she's not She's dead. Like straight up, actually for real dead. If she's 'alive' it is in a noncorporeal way, which is exactly the same situation she was in in the original FF7. In the original FF7 the plot ends when Aerith, in the Lifestream, draws the Lifestream up to help push Holy and Meteor away from the planet. The last thing we see of Aerith is that she is going to go and try to find a way to stop Meteor. They're not going to suddenly reveal next game that Aerith was alive and everyone was just really sad because Cait Sith 1 died. She's dead, she is just in a setting where 'dead' doesn't meant you can't have an influence on the plot if you're a magical half-elf.
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Mar 24, 2024 23:06
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Shiroc posted:I'm not sad Aerith is dead, because she's not She's dead. Maybe not to Cloud, but the reaaction from the rest of the cast is she's fuckin dead. Timelines and the rest have gently caress all to do with it. In the Remake timeline she has died and that's why everyone but Cloud is sad about it in the end.
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Mar 24, 2024 23:08
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Yeah she’s dead and I feel like the way they did it made that end scene way more sad then if they just redid her OG death.
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Mar 24, 2024 23:12
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betting the next game's going to have cloud treating that incident way too lightly since she's still "alive" from his perspective, and after the nth time he casually tells the party they'll see her soon or she's probably okay where she is, someone's going to beat the poo poo out of him
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Mar 24, 2024 23:15
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Oxxidation posted:betting the next game's going to have cloud treating that incident way too lightly since she's still "alive" from his perspective, and after the nth time he casually tells the party they'll see her soon or she's probably okay where she is, someone's going to beat the poo poo out of him Not going to lie, seeing Tifa deck Cloud at least once would be really nice. I mean dude is a super hosed up brain dude, I know it isn't his fault, but he puts Tifa through so much poo poo and she rolls with it.
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Mar 24, 2024 23:17
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Barret is going to be the one to punch Cloud in the face and Tifa will act like she's concerned but deep down she knew he had it coming
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Mar 24, 2024 23:17
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goethe.cx posted:Barret is going to be the one to punch Cloud in the face and Tifa will act like she's concerned but deep down she knew he had it coming Honestly this is way more likely, you're right.
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Mar 24, 2024 23:19
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Like, her death is important to the plot, 's why it still happened here. No way to deal with Meteor if Aerith ain't dead. It sucks, yeah, but as you said the whispers haven't changed anything. It's why I think we're ultimately getting into the same ending. The whispers are texture, at the end of the day, they're why we can be excited about the plot changing 20 years after the fact even if it doesn't. For all I know, it's all gonna come down to the same scene with Cloud quoting Barret that there's no stopping this train we're on. Only this time Cloud is gonna realize the full breadth of his agency when we reach that scene. It's the entire point of him being able to see the multiverse and poo poo. It's gonna be the same scenes but a bit richer this time. If it's not, I don't mind eating my words.
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Mar 24, 2024 23:23
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After Remake, the whole "maybe this is a stealth sequel" thing was an interpretation a lot of people had, but it got passed around as cold, hard fact so much that I think people started to think that was just plain was the game definitely was to the point of being outright text, rather than subtext. I think there was also just a passive assumption that this also meant that either Aerith would live, or someone else would die. These interpretations and speculations became so solidified that when Rebirth didn't really align with them, people are just immediately assuming something was retconned or that the devs have changed course. I think it's more likely that this is essentially what was planned and it just doesn't align with common interpretations or speculation. That, and we're also only two-thirds of the way through the trilogy--things that didn't pay off in Rebirth still have another whole game they could pay off in.
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Mar 24, 2024 23:25
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I don't think shed even act that concerned. Tifa seems really done with Cloud in the final scene of the game.
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Mar 24, 2024 23:26
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it's less than she's angry at him and more that he's visibly insane and there's nothing she can do about it (until part 3)
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Mar 24, 2024 23:33
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Right, but, like. There is Fuckery going on. We can only guess at exactly what, metaphysically, is going on wrt what Cloud is seeing. He could have actually kinda sorta entered another timeline in which he actually did deflect the sword and save her before Sephiroth smushed the timelines back together and now he's seeing both in parallel or some poo poo. Or he could have just hallucinated the whole thing with his broken brain. Or a little one and a little the other, like, Red is definitely picking up on Aerith being there in the ending. Even if either or neither or, gently caress it, both of those things are the case, those other timelines are there, around, and there's people in them and they're all real and doing stuff and exactly what the implications of it all are are anyone's guess. The writers have repeatedly come out and said they they're still going to have the OG FFVII Story in there but with new things added that serve this multiverse plot and, we can only assume, somewhat broaden what the whole affair means. They've also said, I think, that they're being somewhat reactive to fan feedback although I think it's quite unlikely that they had a master plan and decided to go back on it, I think they're just happy to let people imagine that, because it turns out you can say whatever you like in interviews. There's a plan here that has been in place since 2014 or whenever this thing kicked off and while I can guarantee you that Part 3 is going to be insufferably cryptic all the way to right before the end I am also fairly sure they aren't winging it. All I know for sure is that there are a whole bunch of very different ways they could take this that can be said to have followed on from what we've actually seen. Personally I think we're to believe the Aerith Lives timeline is new, so to speak, even if it is fleeting, even if we did punch out Fate that one time it was still, to some extent, inevitable that she was going to die, and yet as a somehow-culmination of everything that's happened including things we might not have been shown or might not understand yet there now exists one (1) timeline where Cloud wandered in there alone and deflected that sword, and that's going to matter somehow. But also, like. There's only so much they can change What The Plot Of FFVII Means. That's pretty inevitable too. It's basically the same reason they still have to care about Shinra even while fighting Sephiroth. Sephiroth is still hikacking the Lifestream, and the Lifestream is still resisting him, it's just now the Lifestream contains Timeline Fuckery in addition to souls and memories. Now we've got Aerith in there too, engaging with the time side of things in addition to being conventionally dead and possibly ready to help out Holy if it ever launches properly. This all basically works, as far as I can tell, independently of whether you consider The Plot Of FFVII to be a thing that literally has happened before and Someone Thinks Must Happen Again or just Someone's Idea Of What Should Happen. I mean. If it was really fate, it would just be happening. You can't really have a literal fight against fate without reckoning with the idea that the notion is kind of meaningless without a lot of qualification. There's a lot of talk about True Inevitability in this game, removed from the fate that the Whispers are arbitrating. They could go anywhere with this. They could diverge at the last minute from the retelling of FFVII or weave this all into it seamlessly. All I know is that the scenes where everyone talks about it are all going to be absolute fire even if what's actually happening winds up being kinda nonsense.
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Mar 24, 2024 23:44
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goethe.cx posted:it's less than she's angry at him and more that he's visibly insane and there's nothing she can do about it (until part 3) Yeah, I don't think she's angry exactly but with her taking Aerith's death the worst (alongside Red) I don't think she's got it in her to keep trying to help keep this dude together. Cloud's been visibly insane for a while now and she's being trying to support him with "Hey, you're still you. Tell me if you have any weird thoughts" but then in those final scenes she doesn't say a single word.
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Mar 24, 2024 23:50
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| # ? May 23, 2024 16:41 |
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I'm definitely curious to see where the whole thing goes. There are timelines where characters who were killed in the OG are alive and well - two of which are actively changing events. Cloud is now also one of those characters. But yeah, I do agree with ImpAtom is that this whole game, from the whole metanarrative timeline thing, is a huge drat downer. Most of the timelines in which our characters try to save someone end up failing except for the one where Cloud succeeds in saving Aerith. It's the only light at the end of the tunnel we have going into the third game. It probably won't happen but I think if the 3rd game starts off immediately after the ending of this game and you start off controlling Aerith that'd be baller as heck. Just transition from the Bronco flying away and Aerith watching and seeing the camera whip behind her. I'm not banking on it happening in the slightest but that'd be one bananas way to get the game's narrative hooks in you.
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Mar 24, 2024 23:57
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