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I've never been entirely up to speed with the EU. How much of the Wutai plot we learn about in Rebirth is either drawn from the EU or original to Rebirth?
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Mar 11, 2024 16:55
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 13:03 |
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My only point of order on all of that is that I do not see how destroying the planet with Meteor will do anything for the Gi. They're still going to be ghosts. In fact, it would be a changed detail if Meteor even did destroy the planet. Sephiroth's whole plan hinged on it inflicting a recoverable wound.
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Mar 11, 2024 20:45
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But Ruby and Emerald Weapons are already in Rebirth! 
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Mar 12, 2024 20:10
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I always think I don't like playing as Aerith but somehow I always forget that under a barrage of pew pew noises followed by a double firaga
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Mar 14, 2024 17:42
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Are we supposed to know or suspect what exactly Cloud did, or was invited to do, while seven seconds from the end?
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Mar 14, 2024 18:23
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I would think Jenova cells should make you an incredible actor given what we know about Jenova.
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Mar 15, 2024 00:06
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throw a dart at the track listing and you'll hit the best song
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Mar 15, 2024 23:34
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[meanwhile in the Lifestream] *doo-do-do-DO* Cloud! Good work tracking down that lifestream mote. I've analysed the data from it and located a fragment of your psyche!
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Mar 20, 2024 21:23
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I replayed chapter 12 a bunch to see all the dates so maybe it's just a coincidence that I have this line stuck in my head (excuse my possibly piecemeal recollection but I'm not replaying it again); "What is the future, if not the product of choices past? Each, a fork in the road. None can divine the conclusion of every path... and yet, each story that begins with a chance encounter shares the same end; a tearful farewell." I don't know. I think it's like the law or something that all diegetic plays must be prophetic, so I guess, like. Even in a world where we punched out Fate, there's still inevitability, and I guess if we're going to read into the play we might as well also think that true love will save the universe? Maybe Cloud can try to kiss Sephiroth and it'll make the final boss battle harder. Whatever. Wherever this is going I'm sure we'll be able to look back at the play and say it should have told us the end we get in Part 3 was inevitable. Until we find out for sure I do like the idea of transient parallel universe bubbles taking shape within the Lifestream based on divergences and sometimes themselves diverging and that people can fall into and get stuck in and are somehow a lynchpin of Sephiroth's master plan, but which themselves are still subject to a progression of events which are, from a certain perspective, inevitable.
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Mar 22, 2024 19:52
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I don't think there's a problem with the Stamps simply being signifiers for reader benefit without a grand in-universe significance. Although I do think it would be funny if there turned out to be such a significance. I always like it when stories have these elements disguised as contrivances or plot holes that turn out to have been foreshadowing. But it would also be fine if it wasn't that and just a little thing there to keep us from losing our minds speculating what timelines are joined.
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Mar 22, 2024 21:57
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Incidental detail from the replay: the message in the temple of the ancients at the black materia altar refers to "those who seek our star's demise" so I'm somewhat inclined to believe that for reasons unknown it has been decided that both the cetra and the gi use "star" to refer to "planet".
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Mar 23, 2024 01:20
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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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I wonder if they'll directly address Cloud's six part techno sword from Advent Children
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Mar 25, 2024 15:04
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Tifa/Scarlet fight in the style of Cloud/Rufus is the kind of thing that could go very wrong or very right
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Mar 25, 2024 16:29
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Feel like they'll just forget about Cid smoking. It was a Thing but the only things that really hinged on it were one comedic limit break animation which could be replaced with literally anything else and one brief gag during the ending when he gawps so hard at Holy that his cigarette falls out of his mouth. In a fight between that stuff and avoiding a rating change I feel like avoiding the rating change would win. Sadly.
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Mar 25, 2024 16:48
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Can I timidly say that it just seems like Cid has a professional existence and a personal one and the fact that he inhabits both of these worlds in contradictory ways is the reason anyone remembers anything about him as a character at all. Like. We're fairly convinced at this point, I think, that maybe some of how we remember Cid's character in general is the product of either mistranslation or misrecollection. Is the same true of Cid's treatment of Shera? Is his resentment of her a translation error? Maybe he doesn't literally shout and swear at her but did they at least not invent the sentiment? I just think these two things are different dimensions of a character.
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Mar 25, 2024 20:04
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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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Really the problem I have with the ending is that I'm not really going to be able to form an opinion about whether or not it's good until Part 3 is out. Generally I've liked a lot of the individual story beats in these games but they really really suffer from existing as portions of an entire story split into three games that need to function as stories on their own, but which between them are trying to Still Be Final Fantasy VII. The pacing is so weird. Sometimes it works, but often it doesn't.
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Mar 28, 2024 13:16
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Or, hell, just have a new region "Skies" like we have the ocean where everything is clearly just off scale. Very true to the original, that.
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Mar 29, 2024 03:05
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What's getting me is a combination of not really being sure exactly what the level at which this thing works on is and not really being convinced that much of this story isn't being driven by its three game format in a way the writers aren't contending with. Second point first: If there's one thing these writers get, fundamentally, primally, absolutely, it is the characters, they understand and comprehend who these people are, what they're about, what they're driven by, and they are at their peak when writing scenes where everyone is hanging out and the dynamic is just, like, brewing, and festering, and even now that they have Tifa laying out her hand far earlier you can still feel the tension escalating, it's loving electrifying. If there is one thing on which these writers - and I make this observation at the directorial level, where the writers also have a hand in scenario design - have not the first semblance of a grasp of, it's pacing. Despite Rebirth's comparatively marathon length I actually think it was still better at beat-to-beat pacing than Remake, but in a way this illustrates the problem. Remake was, of course, an entire feature length game fashioned out of what used to be the first act in its former story. As a result, Remake expands significantly, sometimes by adding lore in places that can accommodate it, and sometimes by turning scenes that were characterised by their brisk and frantic pacing into plodding slogs. Take the run-up to the plate drop. In the OG, there is all of, what, an entire half hour maybe, between Corneo revealing the scheme and the pillar coming down, and most of that is because you have to climb out of the sewers first, but it's max drama the whole way, because, y'know, that is a situation in which urgency is very appropriate. In Remake that same stretch of game is not one but two full length dungeons with gimmick-laden puzzles, stops for cutscenes, involved boss battles, and even new and original characters participating in a self-contained plot with its own lead-in, development, catharsis and conclusion. They have to cut away to a scene with the Turks in a chopper just to remind you that that whole thing is still happening! Rebirth has a lot more source material to work with and consequently has a lot less obvious filler adding space between OG beats than Remake does - it basically only has that stuff when you choose to engage with sidequests, unlike Remake which was constantly dropping it into the critical path. This isn't to say Rebirth didn't have padding on the critical path - and hell, much as Chapter 13 was a slog, it was kinda necessary to put a lot of time after the date scene, in which Cloud is extremely sympathetic, in which he can remind us that he's coming completely unhinged - only to observe that everything seems very constrained and defined by needing to fit into an entire game-length story that comprises an incomplete portion of FFVII's own second act. I harp on this because, now coming to the first point; What is the plot of FFVII Rebirth? Like. We go to some places and engage in some things, and We The Player learn a few things and some of them are metaphysical. But, what has changed? I don't mean relative to the OG, I mean, relative to the beginning of FFVII Rebirth. What is different in the story we actually got in the game compared to a story where the party escapes Midgar and Tetsuya Nomura appears and opens a rift in spacetime and the party steps through and emerges outside the Forgotten Capital but Aerith trips and falls into the void? Because mostly it seems to me like this game is a lot of ruminating on things we already know, with occasional nuggets of information that change the context of what each party member is fighting for somewhat but none of which changes their purpose, their stake. Everyone has their own baggage but fundamentally they're still following Cloud and chasing after Sephiroth, and that's a position that won't change until Meteor happens. Seemingly the only very significant thing is the party's relationship with Cloud, but even there it feels like they moved a couple things forward for the sole purpose of making that the only element in the game that has any kind of payoff in the game and not presumably saved for the third game. Remake, for all its padding and sometimes weird deviations, had a conclusion, it had its own theory of why it was a complete story in and of itself even though it was obviously also an adaptation of a bigger story's first act, the party got caught up in a thing, and fought against it, and secured a triumph that existentially altered both their stake in the story and ours. That's loving something! What does Rebirth have that compares to that? All this conclusion feels like it has is an invitation to spend 70 more currency units in 2028 or whenever to find out if we've all been jerked around or not. Chasing after Sephiroth may as well be searching for the One Piece at this point; this whole plot is just some stuff that happened on the way and they did what they could to fit in some of the stuff from the OG's actual conclusion to Act 2 in the Northern Crater but aside from Cloud's deteriorating mental state and a few progressing episodes that happen independently of the party there just don't seem to be any plot threads here. Rebirth ends in more or less the same place it starts in - timelines aren't working quite right, Cloud is lying, Tifa knows, Sephiroth is scheming. The only change is Aerith is dead, and even that's open to some interpretation. It seems like the whole game is just waiting for the next game, albeit the whole time simmering in all the masterful character vibing. For all the early handling of certain details we still haven't really gone to any of the places that properly conclude that original second act. Aerith's death was a lot of things but it was not a plot twist and it was not a conclusion of anything other than a disc; that good old Act 2 Downer didn't arrive until Meteor was summoned and the party's failure completed, Cloud's delusion revealed and his self shattered. As best I can interpret as someone who cannot not know how the OG progressed, Rebirth sets up a lot of hints for the reveals that its own foreshadowing is hinting at, Zack's role in Nibelheim, Sephiroth's control of Cloud, etc, but it's all about the next game, here's what the next game will reveal! What did this game reveal? All the revelations are to us. We are the ones who see the jumps between timelines, the apparent ripple of the defeat of the Whispers to Zack's errant wandering to the Power of Hope or whatever to the direct invocation of Aerith's fate on a level seemingly more fundamental than the authorship of fate itself to Cloud's determination to fight fate on a level beyond literally fighting fate to a rupture of time that might actually break out of theoretical space and encompass the main timeline or whatever. That's cool and valid, it's fine to have meaning that the characters themselves aren't aware of, that's literature baybee. It's just, this game's plot is really bugging me, and I think it always will even if the third game actually does take everything that's being set up and knock it out of the park. I'm not satisfied that seeing Barret's resolution with Dyne or Nanaki's with Seto or even what we've seen of Tifa's with Cloud, or even Aerith's death, or even Zack's misadventures through the possibility space, is enough. I guess one stake that definitely changed over the course of the game is that now of course Cloud has the Black Materia and even if we haven't seen him literally hand it to Sephiroth yet it is pretty obvious that that is now inevitable, so that element of tension is added relative to the game's opening. Aside from that, and the existence of the Clear Materia, whose purpose is still unknown, there just doesn't seem to be anything other than excellent character beats. I don't think Rebirth stands alone and I think the reason for that is 100% down to the directors' choice to end the game at the Forgotten Capital and not at the Northern Crater. I think despite their best efforts they are unable to write Rebirth out of the bind they placed it in by having it start and end at the points it does while also being a full price retail JRPG. I also, for what it's worth, don't think the game is particularly vague, at least about things it directly addresses rather than their implications. It's pretty clear we're seeing possible worlds breaking off inside the lifestream, and a battle for control over them, and the threat that this will all spill over into the main world. It's just, that hasn't happened yet, and everything that's currently vague is stuff that would determine what happens when that happens. That said, the ending does throw a lot of stuff at you fairly rapidly, and then dumps you straight into an enormous series of boss fights without any time to process what you've seen, so in that sense it's understandable and perhaps not commendable on the game's part that people might end up confused by it.
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Apr 8, 2024 22:21
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I enjoyed Barret's turn as Varvados. I gotta wonder if anyone can play the role of Garm if there happens to not be a dog in the audience.
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Apr 9, 2024 12:06
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Palmer demonstrates quite aptly what happens when someone unqualified tries to pilot a Shinra mech
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Apr 11, 2024 21:16
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 13:03 |
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JBP posted:The way rebirth handled a few of the big scenes was frankly poo poo (I still loved the game don't get me wrong), so I feel like the original made those bits worse because they were done ham handedly for reasons I don't understand. One of the sound bites I keep coming back to is to say this game has a very poor grasp of pacing, and this is also true of the Big Cutscenes. They, like the setpiece dungeons, are a victim of the game's need to be Long. A good early example is the lead-in to Sephiroth walking through the flames, you know, the loving money shot, the most iconic CGI ever to come out of that company. It's a short scene in the original but in Rebirth it's dragged out into this whole Thing where you wander around town at 0.2x speed while nothing really happens and there's this whole dance where you have to go the short way and then get blocked and have to go around the long way and then have to mash buttons to slowly crawl toward Sephiroth while he stands there contemplating some other guys who are standing there contemplating him and it's all so... so... obviously contrived, so transparently there to pad out runtime and the best they could do to fill that time was this. As it happens I think the game broadly improves its handling of this kind of thing over the course of its runtime, and even kinda sorta almost manages to eventually make the slow L2/R2 struggle pay off a little when you're doing it for Aerith at the end, it's just. What I keep coming back to though was that the Fire Scene was what they put in the demo. This was the public showing, the best foot forward. I don't think it's possible to play through this scene for the first time (whether as an OG veteran or new) and not be taken aback at how bad it feels. Of course, this is balanced against how so many of Rebirth's best scenes are the ones that not only are mostly original but during which technically nothing really happens, where everyone just hangs, and the vibe just hangs, and you feel it. There, the languid pacing really works. I guess I think that maybe they just don't know how to do paces that aren't languid.
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Apr 15, 2024 15:27
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