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Maximilian Dood finished the story so you can probably expect people on the internet to start parroting his takes as canon again soon  (I kid, he's a chill guy and has some fun ideas)I'm surprised to find he seems to be on team "Cloud's brain's loving broken and he can see dead people" instead of team "Cloud's seeing alternate Aerith," especially when he was such a champion of the multiverse theory after Remake. Harrow fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Mar 25, 2024 |
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Mar 25, 2024 20:47
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max went back and forth said it was fairly confusing, so there weren't necessarily any fixed takes he offered. on top of the fact that his opinion kept changing or developing as he was thinking about it, so it's not something straightforward idiots can use as ammunition but there's probably going to be a three-hour video quoting him a few weeks from now
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Mar 25, 2024 21:02
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After two entire games of multiverse poo poo and timeline meta awareness, hours of cutscenes dedicated to looking at other worlds, multiple gameplay segments in other worlds, and Sephiroth's end game boss fight monologing about them the entire time, the mental gymnastics needed to ignore all that and go "ah clouds crazy  " is absurd to the point I assumed only the compulsive contrarians you usually meet on 4chan could think that.
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Mar 25, 2024 21:29
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even in the original game, cloud’s madness was seldom outright delusional. his hallucinations are things that actually happened, he just can’t place who they happened to
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Mar 25, 2024 21:35
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Like, I think it’s more than “Cloud’s cuckoo” - he’s drenched in Mako and god knows what else, possibly giving him a special connection to the Lifestream. These multiple worlds are definitely more than just delusions, I just think the nature of them is up for debate. Are they literally MCU-style alternate universes, or Lost-style dream worlds conjured up by the Lifestream collective imagination? Personally I subscribe to the latter.
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Mar 25, 2024 21:41
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Whitenoise Poster posted:After two entire games of multiverse poo poo and timeline meta awareness, hours of cutscenes dedicated to looking at other worlds, multiple gameplay segments in other worlds, and Sephiroth's end game boss fight monologing about them the entire time, the mental gymnastics needed to ignore all that and go "ah clouds crazy There is a difference between "Cloud is nuts and thinks Aerith is alive when she is dead" (something that has proof inside the game) and "Cloud's just crazy nothing happened" Like nobody said "Aerith is gone forever" because she isn't. She's in the Lifestream. This is canonical. There's no indication that Aerith is alive anymore but she saved the world while dead in the original.
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Mar 25, 2024 21:46
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On the one hand, Aerith is definitely dead. On the other hand, Cloud explicitly has a physical empty materia that he got from Aerith in another universe and you can't "lifestream dream" that away.
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Mar 25, 2024 21:55
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Just Andi Now posted:On the one hand, Aerith is definitely dead. Pretty sure nobody is deny that considering you fight Sephiroth in multiple dimensions simultaneously.
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Mar 25, 2024 21:57
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I can be proven wrong in three years, but I really think people are just overthinking it and it really is just the lifestream holding all various timelines and possibilities, and Sephiroth is just trying to make it as complex as possible to absorb even more power when the meteor hits. If you do really want to overthink it, the part that fundamentally makes zero sense is that the Stamps should all just be the same one unless 1) each timeline/world goes back to when the Stamp mascot was designed, and 2) every single butterfly effect action in every single timeline was exactly the same leading up to that point, except whoever designed the Stamp was someone else or they just came up with something different at the time. You can use the tunnel scene where Zack is deciding to go after either Cloud or Biggs as an example. You either have to assume there's two exact timelines leading to that point where everything that happens in Cloud's is the terrier and everything in Biggs's is the pug, or that the Stamp mascot magically changes for reasons(?) the second he makes that decision. That's why it's all stupid as gently caress and I love it, don't get me wrong, but I'm not gonna really try and assume the developers are gigabrained and gonna do anything substantially new rather than write out an obscenely convoluted scenario to justify playing as Zack and Aerith in part three because this all just leads to Advent Children at the end of the day. I'm also someone who explicitly predicted the lifestream shenanigans and being able to play as Zack well before Rebirth was released, and the only thing I was wildly wrong about was that his screen time over the course of the game ended up being less than an hour rather than much longer.
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Mar 25, 2024 22:03
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Aerith didn't save the world from beyond the grave in the original game because she was actually dead and Holy already got summoned before the party stops Sephiroth to free it. In this game we have her in an epic boss fight with Sephiroth, carrying on conversations with Cloud and having Nanaki being able to tell she's present in some form. That's a whole hell of a lot less dead than the original game even if you have to start hedging on 'teeeeeechnically she's in the Lifestream.'
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Mar 25, 2024 22:06
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Yeah I definitely don't think the Stamp thing bears thinking about too deeply. It's shorthand for showing us different timelines, even if it's kind of hard to make it make logical sense (really, the one consistent difference between every timeline is that someone designed Stamp differently every time?). I don't think it's supposed to be that literal, just that whenever you see a different Stamp, it's a sign you're looking at a different reality.
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Mar 25, 2024 22:06
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He’s literally a stamp.
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Mar 25, 2024 22:08
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Cloud is seeing Aerith's lifestream force ghost but his brain is too broken to process that it means she's dead. Aerith gave a whole speech in the temple of ancients about how death isn't the end and people live on in the lifestream but that doesn't make it any less of a loss, and she was explicitly trying to make Cloud in particular understand this but since Sephiroth was in full control of him at the time he completely ignored her. Shiroc posted:Aerith didn't save the world from beyond the grave in the original game
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Mar 25, 2024 22:08
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Obviously this is all just one big easter egg reference to the ghost Aerith glitch(?) from visiting the Church in the original game on later discs.
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Mar 25, 2024 22:09
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Augus posted:Cloud is seeing Aerith's lifestream force ghost but his brain is too broken to process that it means she's dead. The "are you finished?" was the most shocking line in the entire game in terms of how gone he was at the moment.
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Mar 25, 2024 22:10
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Just Andi Now posted:On the one hand, Aerith is definitely dead. On the weird mutant third hand, materia are just made out of lifestream stuff. "<Thing> is within the lifestream" doesn't mean it's wholly immaterial. Hell, the lifestream itself is a tangible, material thing. Augus posted:Cloud is seeing Aerith's lifestream force ghost but his brain is too broken to process that it means she's dead. That's what I think, yeah. I will say that I think whatever happened to Zack and Biggs is similar to what happened to Aerith. Their mysterious salvation also came with rainbow light, and seemed to coincide with being pulled into another universe at the exact moment that they died in the prime reality.
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Mar 25, 2024 22:10
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Shiroc posted:Aerith didn't save the world from beyond the grave in the original game because she was actually dead and Holy already got summoned before the party stops Sephiroth to free it. In this game we have her in an epic boss fight with Sephiroth, carrying on conversations with Cloud and having Nanaki being able to tell she's present in some form. That's a whole hell of a lot less dead than the original game even if you have to start hedging on 'teeeeeechnically she's in the Lifestream.' She literally summons the Lifestream. Marlene even senses her just before it happens. Also in Advent Children she saves Cloud and cures Geostigma. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Mar 25, 2024 |
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Mar 25, 2024 22:13
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Maybe Stamp isn't entirely fictional, but is a deceased inspire who is also helping from inside the life stream. Changing their presentation is the only way they have to communicate, as they are far less powerful than Aerith or Sephiroth.
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Mar 25, 2024 22:13
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triple sulk posted:The "are you finished?" was the most shocking line in the entire game in terms of how gone he was at the moment. what made that line so hard hitting was that i thought that whole sequence was garbage and the speech really obviously Forced By Writers and i hated it and wished it would end already and even then it was jarring when he actually came out and said it and i thought he was an rear end in a top hat even when i was basically agreeing
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Mar 25, 2024 22:14
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Harrow posted:On the weird mutant third hand, materia are just made out of lifestream stuff. "<Thing> is within the lifestream" doesn't mean it's wholly immaterial. Hell, the lifestream itself is a tangible, material thing. Makes me wonder if they'll bring up Tifa's question about whether mako reactors actually consume/destroy lifestream again in part 3. Perhaps when they talk to Bugenhagen again later on we'll get an updated model of planetology.
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Mar 25, 2024 22:18
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Shiroc posted:Aerith didn't save the world from beyond the grave in the original game because she was actually dead and Holy already got summoned before the party stops Sephiroth to free it. In this game we have her in an epic boss fight with Sephiroth, carrying on conversations with Cloud and having Nanaki being able to tell she's present in some form. That's a whole hell of a lot less dead than the original game even if you have to start hedging on 'teeeeeechnically she's in the Lifestream.' Go back and rewatch the ending cinematic for OG ff7 again. The last thing we see after meteor and holy and the combined lifestream collide is a smash cut of Aerith. The implication is that she extremely explicitly saved the world from beyond the grave. Edit: Going back and rewatching the og finale, the fire tornados ravaging Midgard in advance of meteor actually really does remind me of how things start in the Zack Dimension. I have to assume that is also very intentional. DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Mar 25, 2024 |
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Mar 25, 2024 22:21
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Also like... "the people who die are still there in the Lifestream" isn't a 'teeeeechnical' thing. it's an explicit stated fact of the setting. Aerith is able to tell Elmyra her husband died before she even found out, she still is able to talk to her mother, the basic premise of why Shinra is so evil is that they are literally using your grandma's soul for electricity.
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Mar 25, 2024 22:27
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You're completely missing the point of what I'm trying to say and I give up.
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Mar 25, 2024 22:34
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I get what you're saying. The point is that "Aerith is alive" is not the same as "Aerith is talking/moving around" because we already have multiple cases of canonical evidence that Aerith can interact from beyond the grave. Even if Aerith shows up more in the next game she's still very dead, and pretty much everyone assumes that if she does show up it's going to be limited/flashbacks/saved for the big superclimax. Nobody seems to think she's coming back from the dead in any meaningful sense. Like the happiest theory I've seen is that she'll wake up in another universe with Zack, but (as the game drills home), that doesn't change the fact she's for-real dead to the cast.
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Mar 25, 2024 22:36
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ImpAtom posted:I get what you're saying. The point is that "Aerith is alive" is not the same as "Aerith is talking/moving around" because we already have multiple cases of canonical evidence that Aerith can interact from beyond the grave. Even if Aerith shows up more in the next game she's still very dead, and pretty much everyone assumes that if she does show up it's going to be limited/flashbacks/saved for the big superclimax. Nobody seems to think she's coming back from the dead in any meaningful sense. Like the happiest theory I've seen is that she'll wake up in another universe with Zack, but (as the game drills home), that doesn't change the fact she's for-real dead to the cast. I'm almost certainly counting on Remake Aerith waking up in Zack Dimension in the next game and there being plot beats involving them there. My guess is that after the northern crater Cloud also winds up there and the plot in Zack Dimension involves getting Cloud to the correct world using the knowledge Aerith regained from having intact Holy materia again. I'm guessing there's some sort of big "end of second act" climax when Tifa goes to save Cloud's mind in the lifestream where you get the four of them working together to bring Cloud back. Truly the most damned curse is a character that has the superpower of "knowing the plot of Final Fantasy 7".
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Mar 25, 2024 22:46
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The first time she died she got stabbed with a sword. No bullshit, no room for loop holes. Cloud saved her this time and Sephy did bullshit to basically go "no you didn't :)" there's basically zero reason after kicking him in the dick enough Cloud and Zack can't just wretch the timeline and bullshit it back to "yes he did :)" My boy is fighting his way tooth and nail into narrative relevance and I'm not ashamed to say, I Belive In Zack.
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Mar 25, 2024 22:48
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Stamp will be the final boss
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Mar 25, 2024 22:48
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Whitenoise Poster posted:The first time she died she got stabbed with a sword. No bullshit, no room for loop holes. The problem is that "Cloud saved her" looks an awful lot like "Cloud hallucinated saving her." There's no indication of it being multiple timelines. We're shown that the Whispers vanish instantly after Cloud moves, before the visuals even go back to where they were before. The implication there is that the timeline was back on track. The idea that there's a "Cloud saved Aerith" timeline isn't really backed up since even when Cloud sees Aerith afterwards, she's lying on the ground being cradled by him as if she'd been gravely wounded, but the original 'save' moment is 100% save, Cloud knocks the sword away, Aerith is untouched. Zack says "save her" but like... Zack has no idea what is going on or what happened. Him asking Cloud to save Aerith is just as easily tragic irony that Zack isn't aware that it's too late. (Again, I do 100% believe Zack and Aerith are going to show up to help in part 3, but I just doubt it'll be "oh yeah we 'fixed' the timeline so Zack and Aerith are alive in the main timeline somehow") ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Mar 25, 2024 |
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Mar 25, 2024 22:52
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ImpAtom posted:The problem is that "Cloud saved her" looks an awful lot like "Cloud hallucinated saving her." There's no indication of it being multiple timelines. Well. No indication except the liberal use of the rainbow glow effect that indicates timelines being created/split/destroyed. It's not concrete, but it's there throughout the scene, including the part where he's deflecting Sephiroth's sword. On that note, we also don't know where the hell Zack ended up after the end fights. We do know he's in a place where the flowers at the church are still blooming at least, but I don't recall if that was the case in his offshoot universe, too. I just remember the flowers being dead around Aerith's house.
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Mar 25, 2024 23:08
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Just Andi Now posted:Well. No indication except the liberal use of the rainbow glow effect that indicates timelines being created/split/destroyed. It's not concrete, but it's there throughout the scene, including the part where he's deflecting Sephiroth's sword. The flowers were alive in the church during the Intergrade ending stinger with him, but we don't know how much time passed after that and him meeting Elymra etc. I assume him rescuing coma-Aerith happened fairly soon after that scene.
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Mar 25, 2024 23:38
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cait sith/moogle fanfic edit: poo poo this isn't AO3
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Mar 25, 2024 23:38
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When the second demon gate appeared and started making the room smaller even faster, oh my god I panicked pretty bad That was one of my favorite moments of my Rebirth playthrough
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Mar 25, 2024 23:44
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Just Andi Now posted:Well. No indication except the liberal use of the rainbow glow effect that indicates timelines being created/split/destroyed. It's not concrete, but it's there throughout the scene, including the part where he's deflecting Sephiroth's sword. Yeah, the rainbow glow effect is an extremely strong case for Aerith is alive in one timeline and gone in the one you're playing in. You have to actively ignore those signifiers to come to the conclusion that she's just a hallucination or a lifestream spectre. That rainbow mist junk showed up when Cloud deflected the blade, it showed up when Zack made his choice in the subway. They aren't exactly subtle with this stuff. Any more they'd just blast "In another timeline" in the same over-the-top manner as the "seven hours early" silliness from the temple.
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Mar 26, 2024 00:17
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also, as i said, cloud seldom "hallucinates" in the sense that he just conjures scenarios from nothing. he's disconnected from his own perspective and keeps snapping back and forth between the present and his fractured past, and the remakes take that fracturing further with the alternate timelines the closest he gets to an outright delusion is when he replaces the drowning shinra trooper with zack
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Mar 26, 2024 00:19
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Oxxidation posted:also, as i said, cloud seldom "hallucinates" in the sense that he just conjures scenarios from nothing. he's disconnected from his own perspective and keeps snapping back and forth between the present and his fractured past, and the remakes take that fracturing further with the alternate timelines Even that isn't quite an outright delusion He just is aware "There were four Shinra soldiers there. I know a Shinra trooper survived the mountain trek. I now remember Zack was there. Zack was not there when the city was on fire" and his brain just comes to the most logical conclusion "Zack must have been the soldier who drowned."
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Mar 26, 2024 00:24
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In the alternate universes where FF7 Rebirth definitively confirmed whether Aerith is alive/dead, what do you think is the main focus of discussion is in that alternate version of this thread?
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Mar 26, 2024 00:49
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Whether Zack is alive/dead
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Mar 26, 2024 01:09
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Why Tifa/Aerith and Zack/Cloud would have been the superior set of pairings.
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Mar 26, 2024 01:38
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DeathSandwich posted:Truly the most damned curse is a character that has the superpower of "knowing the plot of Final Fantasy 7". It’s been long enough that I don’t actually remember the details of how true this was in Remake. What exactly did she say and/or do again? Rosalind posted:In the alternate universes where FF7 Rebirth definitively confirmed whether Aerith is alive/dead, what do you think is the main focus of discussion is in that alternate version of this thread? Whether one would have preferred one option or another. As it is now, the ending is too ambiguous to even have that debate in the first place. Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Mar 26, 2024 |
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Mar 26, 2024 02:08
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Namnesor posted:I could also see it going in the extreme other direction, where Scarlet goes for a slap and Tifa just Tiger Drops her and walks away. If they have Tifa throwing Komaki moves in R3, I will give them all of my money. All.
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