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and we're done. i idiotically chose to repeat the entire final boss fight instead of just the final phase after getting KO'd in the last ten seconds, which took the wind out of my sails a little, but i'm broadly satisfied. no idea how i could possibly clear some of that on hard mode though my only thought right now is this - zack's final line suggests the trilogy is applying the concept of "reunion" not just to jenova's fragments but also to convergent realities. that's the breadcrumb square's tossing us for rebirth - cloud really did divert sephiroth's blade but our reality snapped back to the one where she died anyway (which might partly be why he's cackling like a maniac), and there's a possibility that the reality corkscrew everyone's undertaking might be able to lead her back home either way, i figured that she'd either die or live, or as a distant runner-up that they'd do some vague metaphysical cliffhanger. didn't predict all three happening at once e: further, the reason sephiroth - the "true" sephiroth encountered at the end of remake - is so invested in cloud is that his perspective lies at the nexus of different worlds just as seph's and aerith's do. cloud's basically suffering a slaughterhouse-five experience but through alternate timelines instead of his own personal history, now haunted by both a malignant specter and a benevolent one just as the party's beleaguered by the black and white whispers Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Mar 16, 2024 |
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Mar 16, 2024 03:55
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the scenes with aerith in the alternate world also did a good job of highlighting just how corpse-like his delivery had been for the last six hours
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Mar 16, 2024 23:35
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Augus posted:I don't know if I buy that theory tbqh i do, and it's good the aerith cloud interacts with in the ending is the dead one for one track, but in another, cloud successfully diverted the blade and she wakes up. zack's final line about "why can't worlds unite again" (reunion, in other words) leaves open the possibility that we might be able to bring one over to the other
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Mar 17, 2024 00:31
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Augus posted:Wakes up from what? If she didn’t get stabbed what is she waking up from her consciousness is jetting around timelines and locales for the whole final chapter, it could be any number of things. she even thanks cloud for blocking the blade when she joins him for the last bout against sephiroth
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Mar 17, 2024 00:41
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ImpAtom posted:Oh, yeah, no, Cloud is absolutely seeing something weird, but I think it's the result of all the brain/soul fuckery. I just don't think it's that Aerth got stabbed and her soul teleported to another dimension where she also survived. she's not wounded in the scene where she wakes up - there's no blood, while the spreading bloodstain is the first image used to denote the timeline where she dies. she's unconscious and then she awakens more broadly i'm sticking with this theory because the question of whether aerith lives or dies and more broadly the intractability/malleability of canon have been the driving questions behind the remakes and this lets that conversation continue instead of falling into "ff7, but with more wutaian politics" for the third entry. i'm also strongly against writing off cloud's visions as "brain fuckery" because the remake's ending makes it clear that there's something extraordinary about him that's attracting edge-of-creation sephiroth's attention. if there are multiple sephiroths as SE stated, then one of them is doing the usual routine where he's trying to reduce cloud to just another thrall, but another is approaching him on more egalitarian terms, and that's because he's able to see and interact with other iterations of the Planet just as sephiroth can
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Mar 17, 2024 00:51
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ImpAtom posted:Why is she unconscious though? We see what happens in Cloud's mind/the other timeline/whatever: He blocks the sword and actually sends the Masamune flying, where it lands on the ground well away from the still-praying Aerith. she's also unconscious for the whole of zack's timeline before somehow shunting herself and cloud from the temple of the ancients into their comatose bodies. if aerith is somehow astrally projecting herself between iterations of reality (and her manifestation in the final phase of the endboss suggests that's the case) then she'd be returning to the version of herself in the world where cloud parried the blade and woke up in his arms cloud's in a similar situation, except instead of being able to freely view and interact with those planes as aerith and sephiroth can he's started to wildly billy pilgrim his way through all of them at once, which fits his own fractured and incomplete identity
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Mar 17, 2024 00:56
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oh christ, that author's tweets pop up on my feeds every so often and he's unbearable
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Mar 17, 2024 04:15
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there's not much of the original canon left that the last two games' tweaks haven't severely impacted in some way. rebirth gave me all the original material callbacks i could have wanted so i hereby give the final entry permission to get weird with it
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Mar 17, 2024 05:44
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i also think "advent children will be part of canon" is a pretty slippery statement now that it's been confirmed multiple planets/timelines are a thing
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Mar 17, 2024 05:56
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shinra uses wutai as a paper tiger to justify its oppressive behavior across the planet, not hard to see why rufus would be interested in maintaining that but glenn pushed the conflict into going hot and it's probably going to be more than rufus wants to deal with right now
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Mar 18, 2024 02:51
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the cracked timeline being completely out of mako also seems relevant. mako is the lifestream, which is the memory of the planet. it didn’t all get converted to fuel, so where did those memories go? feel like that’s going to tie into the foreshadowed reunion of planets, which, I’m going to be honest, felt very kingdom hearts. disparate worlds all united by an abstract oversoul that the big bad wants for nefarious reasons
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Mar 19, 2024 21:44
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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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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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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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honestly there's not really much from here on out that i want to see, so much as i'm interested in how it'll be portrayed. scarlet's attempted intervention on the sister ray, the revamped WEAPONs, they've got to do something to justify mideel because it's just an arbitrary wackyland in the original probably the only scene i'm really champing at the bit to redo in high-definition is the hojo battle
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Mar 25, 2024 00:27
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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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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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yes it does
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Mar 26, 2024 15:24
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considering they're apparently able to walk across the sea floor unhindered i think they're more resilient than they look, as long as they're not being shot or mauled
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Mar 27, 2024 00:52
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it depends on how much of an ego/motivation you think jenova actually has. if she's just a philosophical zombie whose mimicry is all a front for her need to consume and reproduce, then it's a moot point how much of sephiroth is "the main guy" because he's the only intelligent one of the pair
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Mar 27, 2024 01:46
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they certainly knew how to build suspense for the big moment if nothing else. like a straight hour of “here it comes! here it comes, rear end in a top hat! uh-oh! uh-ohhhhhh!”
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Mar 28, 2024 14:32
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it owns
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Apr 5, 2024 14:47
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"oh, laddies, i'm so glad you've welcomed me back to-" me, brandishing double armful of materia: shut up and hold still
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Apr 8, 2024 01:43
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Mordiceius posted:imo - Mysteries are good. Confusion is not. attitudes like this are why we’re plagued with poo poo like “EXPLAINED” videos and the cinemasins ding allow uncertainty and discomfort into your life
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Apr 8, 2024 20:26
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sephiroth wanted the big whisper defeated so he could usurp it, not dismiss it. this was obvious in remake when he sucks its remains into himself and then tries to kill off the party with the vision of meteor’s crash, and he keeps using that power to his advantage throughout rebirth
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Apr 8, 2024 20:48
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sephiroth doesn’t call meteor until cloud gives him the materia at the north crater, that’s all still on track
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Apr 8, 2024 21:09
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nomura didn't write this
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Apr 9, 2024 02:46
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yeah I overlooked that part, calling the original’s gameplay “strategic” is insane outside of tinkering with auto-win setups for the WEAPONs
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Apr 16, 2024 19:46
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