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they want shady posted:Eh, the direct funeral was skipped but the party's reactions were not. I think it's all in service of telling us where Cloud is at going into part 3 (and why he's going to shred the poo poo out of those downhills as the rest of the party cries in the background). The multiple timelines might feel confusing, but I think them and the hollow materia are ultimately about showing Cloud's agency in the plot. I have to imagine they open up the third game with the party in Shinra Prison. They set up some establishing shots and do the tutorials there, and say "What the actual gently caress was happening with Cloud?" before cutting to the Snowfield and North Crater as a narrative flashback. It just feels too off for me to open the game with functionally a smash cut into snowboarding. Given the whole Zach and Aerith thing this game has going on with it. I have to imagine they are coming back in the next one. I wonder if it doesn't become the story of how Aerith actually fires off the Holy Materia from the other side - Not that I really think that part really needs it's own whole narrative arc. Maybe tie it back to the dimension thing by having Rebirth Cloud awaken in Zack Timeline Cloud's body when cloud takes the Lifestream dive in the Northern Crater. Use the knowledge Cloud gets from Zack and Aerith on that side to make some fundamental change for the last act of the third game.
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Mar 25, 2024 07:20
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 22:49 |
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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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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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Pollyanna posted: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? Pretty explicitly she knew in the first game that she has to die to connect to the lifestream. And she passed that info on to Marlene, hence Marlene spilling the beans to Zack in ZackSpace. She knew because she learned it from Aerith. Granted - a lot of this is conjecture or having to read between the lines based on her behavior, but she knew people's names and who they were before they were introduced. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7f5BcnUdGY
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Mar 26, 2024 02:31
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Harrow posted:Notably, the Intergrade stinger can’t have happened in any of the worlds we see. Zack arrives at Midgar with Cloud in tow, all beat up from his fight with the Shinra troopers, and immediately goes to see the news report where he sees Aerith unconscious. In the Intergrade stinger, he shows up at her church all cleaned up, with the expectation that she’d be there. That can’t have happened in any of the realities we see—there’s just no point at which Zack would think Aerith would be at her church because she’s in a coma the whole time he’s in Midgar. The interesting thing I thought was in the ZackVerse, Cloud explicitly vanished from the defeated protagonist group (I'm pretty sure you hear them calling it on the radio during the Zack intro) functionally at the same time Zack was dragging his rear end into the city. So there could also be some goofy dimension thing happening from that direction, or potentially stupider, a whole-rear end second protagonist Cloud in hiding in the ZackVerse.
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Mar 26, 2024 05:50
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The Dave posted:I don't disagree with this? I just don't expect her to be a full time party member or be more than Zack/Seph were gameplay wise. I kind of expect Zack gets a lot more screen time next game and Aerith will be full playable there. Would bet they have a lot more screen time on their end of things, probably having their own form of global journey through the ZackVerse's damned mako-dry planet. It'd give an excuse to reuse some of the open world assets from part 2 at least. Crisis Core 2: Zack and Aerith's Bogus Journey. (and probably Cloud too, post-northern-crater)
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Mar 26, 2024 21:28
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Rhonne posted:And Aerith told her all about her friends, so they can just skip that awkward getting to know each other phase. Nobody even says anything about the Groucho Marx fake-nose-and-mustache she wears the entire time or anything either.
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Mar 26, 2024 22:56
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Oxxidation posted: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 My read in FF7Classic was always that whenever you seen Sephiroth pre-Northern Crater, It was Jenova as it slowly assembled itself and found its sense of agency. You run into Sephiroth on the boat? Fight Jenova. Confront Sephiroth in City of the Ancients? Fight Jenova. Confrontation with Sephiroth in the Northern Crater? You bet your rear end you're fighting Jenova. It could be that was just a convenient form for her to take because it was the thing in her purview she can wear as a puppet (seeing as how it largely didn't recognize Cloud / Tifa early on, it largely behaves rudamentary early on and gets more sophisticated as it coalesces). It could be that it was Sephiroth pulling the strings the whole time and there are pages and pages of arguments to be had either direction made by people far nerdier than me. What I will say for Remake however, is that it's pretty clear *this* Sephiroth does have agency above and beyond Jenova, and that could potentially lead to some interesting places in the third game.
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Mar 27, 2024 02:12
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