Series of Final Fantasy VII articles at 1up

Retr0gamer

Not read these yet but should be interesting. My morning just got less boring:

http://www.1up.com/features/final-fantasy-vii-timing-everything
http://www.1up.com/features/five-influenced-final-fantasy-vii
http://www.1up.com/features/oral-history-final-fantasy-vii
http://www.1up.com/features/how-ff7-got-everyone-into-rpgs
http://www.1up.com/features/final-fantasy-vii-quinceanera
http://www.1up.com/features/secrets-final-fantasy-vii-success
http://www.1up.com/features/final-fantasy-vii-amazing-opening

Retr0gamer

Pretty good read except for the influences one which was a bit of a bore although the Berserk influence never dawned on me but seems rather plausible.

snausages

How cool, I didn't know that I shared a birthday with FFVII. Not that I mean to attention-whore or anything. :P

FFVI is an obvious influence. Everything from the Returners to the Empire using magicite for seriously evil deeds to amnesiac protagonists to using magic rocks to learn magic all sort of started with VI. Which is why I can never understand why there's such a split between people who like VI and VII, they're basically the same game, one just happens to be 3D. In a way I think VII brought to fruition a lot of ideas and themes that were already in gestation with FFVI. The 'war of the magi' preamble isn't totally dissimilar to VII's opening, minus the crawling text.

Retr0gamer

For me the split is like the split between System Shock 2 and Bioshock. I'd say in both cases the technology lead to the games being too ambitious so they decided to pretty much remake the previous game to save resources. In both cases I don't think the follow ups came anywhere close to the previous games. The materia system was very basic even compared to the esper system of VI, while the story was a mess compared to the tight pace and plot of FFVI. Still both are great games and FFVII is very important in shaping how RPGs developed in the 32-bit era.

I'd love to have seen the FFVII entirely centered in Midgar, it would have been a big, excuse the pun, paradigm shift for RPGs but it played it safe by having a world map. The game does feel like two different parts, Midgar and after Midgar and the there's a big difference in tone and focus between both I feel. It's only after midgar when the plot starts to fall apart and get silly. I guess playing it safe was the only option with such a huge monetary investment. In a way I think Squaresoft did manage to explore that angle in stuff like Parasite Eve.

snausages

I really would not have liked a Midgar-centric game. I hated Parasite Eve. New York just felt stifling. Never really worked out what the hell they were trying to do with that, survival-horror-action-JRPG? JRPGs need to be big imo, otherwise there's no real sense of adventure.

Plot was ok imo. VI had its huge tonal shifts as well, I don't see it as a bad thing. Up until Kefka goes mad it has a pretty light-hearted tone especially with baddies like Ultros. Kefka was practically comedy relief for most of the game (ha.. do I look like a waiter?). Then it goes uber-dark all of a sudden.

Retr0gamer

I think it worked better like that, you weren't expecting Kefka to be the main villian. Also there was always a dark streak to him anyway so it wasn't out of the blue, he was shown going berserk before and also with him poisoning the water. I really don't think there were massive out of place tonal shifts in FFVI, it went from light hearted to dark like most RPGs. FFVII was way more jarring, going from this really interesting dystopian society and exploring it to standard JRPG fare. FFVII has it's bizarre shifts to humourous subject matter as well but sure it's just the way japanese write games. I prefer it this way, you can't be totally bleak all the time, just look at the first 2 Fallout games, they do the same.

Parasite Eve was an interesting experiment, I feel it worked a lot better than you thought. The second one though was a mess. I don't feel JRPGs have to be epic in scope, some of the very best have been limited to small areas, Panzer Dragoon Saga, the Persona games and some of the SMT ones, BoF Dragon Quarter, Vagrant Story etc. You can have a sense of adventure in small places as long as you design it well and make it interesting. In a way I felt that FFVII didn't really need the globe trotting adventure, it was kind of filler in all honesty and felt shoehorned in.

Retr0gamer

Two more articles. One in defense of Advent Children but even it can't seem to not call the movie a heap of ****e and rightfully so:

http://www.1up.com/features/defense-final-fantasy-advent-children

And one about stuff that wouldn't work in a FFVII remake, this one is a great read:

http://www.1up.com/features/five-things-final-fantasy-vii-remake

snausages

I thought Advent Children was fine for what it was: a big dollop of mostly forgettable fanwank. It's probably one of the best video game movies of all time, not that that's saying much. The 'Complete' version improved a lot of the problems with the original, it actually feels like a coherent movie. It benifited a lot from making Desmund or whoever he was the moral focus of the story.

What has been way more harmful to FFVII's image are all the other spin-offs, even Crisis Core. It annoys me now when I play VII because I find it difficult to dissociate it from all these other overwrought plot-lines that will never be concluded. Crisis Core's bad guy is still alive and kicking yet we'll probably never see him again, not that I liked him much or anything.

Retr0gamer

I preferred when FFVII was ambiguous. What was the ultimate fate of humanity at the end of FVII? Spoiled by the unsatisfying retconning of Advent Children with a Cloud that forgot that he had gotten over all his existential dilemmas by the end of the game. Was Jenova ultimately controlling Sephiroth? Nah, Sephiroth was so powerful he was in control the whole time according to the Ultimania released to coincide with the other retconning spin-offs.

The last piece makes a good point about how weird FFVII is. It really is very goofy and strange in parts. Everything Square has done on FFVII takes itself way too seriously when ultimately the source material while dark in places has a whole lot of very strange, goofy and funny moments. I don't think that square realise that the underlying story of FFVII was kind of crap and the real magic was how well FFVII well paced the game was in interspersing the weird and wacky with the serious. It's part of Final Fantasy's charms when you look back at FF4 and onwards it was pretty much the same.

I can't agree with you on advent children, I can honestly say it's one of the worst pieces of film I've ever seen with fight scenes that while pretty manage to out do the Transformers films for how crap they are since there's no dramatic tension. They are ultimately boring. Crisis Core on the other hand I didn't really like. The battle system would have been ok if it wasn't for the bizarre fruit machine system and random level ups that actually weren't all that random. The story on the other hand was woeful again with an embarrassing ending, again Square missing the point on why that scene worked in the original game.

Ultimately sometimes less is more.

snausages

I think it's fairly reasonable to assume that Sephiroth controls Jenova given that he spends a lot of time reconstructing his body while Jenova goes towards him and brings him what he needs in the northern crater, as opposed to the clones grouping around Jenova in the Shinra HQ. Jenova would surely be able to summon Meteor by herself if she wanted. A bigger problem for me is the way they reintroduce Rufus into the plot after his death without explaining how he survived getting his face blown up by Diamond Weapon.

I agree with that about Crisis Core. It's shocking how overrated it is. I guess Dirge of Cerberus lowered people's standards so much that something as passable as CC seemed really good all of a sudden. It had some likeable characters at least, which is something that DoC did not have at all.

Retr0gamer

snausages wrote: »

I think it's fairly reasonable to assume that Sephiroth controls Jenova given that he spends a lot of time reconstructing his body while Jenova goes towards him and brings him what he needs in the northern crater, as opposed to the clones grouping around Jenova in the Shinra HQ. Jenova would surely be able to summon Meteor by herself if she wanted.

Well it's more that Sephiroth was basically aiming for the exact same thing Jenova was. Jenova is a mass of cells and they were in Sephiroth. It's not really a singular being so those cells could have been controlling Sephiroth and making him think he was in charge, considering he couldn't move anyway, while the rest mopped up and did the grunt work. Anyway it's been a long time since I played it so can't remember evidence of this theory other than Seph doing the exact thing Jenova was aiming for and the fact that Sephiroths motivations for what he did are terrible, I'd say he borderline has no motivations for what he did but I've seen evidence to the contrary but my point remains, it's far better to leave this stuff unexplained. I can't trust the ultimania since it was created by a square trying to make sephiroth 'marketable', making him badass whereas during my play time I saw him as pathetic. They wanted him so marketable that they brought him back to life in a sequel which segways to my next point:

snausages wrote: »

A bigger problem for me is the way they reintroduce Rufus into the plot after his death without explaining how he survived getting his face blown up by Diamond Weapon.

Which is pretty much the worst thing a writer can do when making a sequel. The fact that they also did it with Sephiroth is inexcusable. It's just terrible writing and probably the two worst things about the movie.

snausages

Well if that is the case then it must be a plot piece that got lost in translation. It’s something that I’ve seen argued a lot on other sites like gamefaqs and youtube but none of these counter-theories really have me convinced. Being honest, to me most of it just seems like reactionary backlash against the perceived over-exposure of FFVII and Sephiroth in particular. And let’s be honest, he really did start being rubbish once they got an N-Sync reject to voice him in a video game. And the less said about Ergheiz the better.

But a lot of it really just seems based on fluffy conjecture or on the foggy translation. There’s a sense of anything goes about it, because the translation is so bad in some of the most critical bits of the game you can just project your favourite interpretation of the game’s plot onto it. I still don’t know what the hell a ‘Sephiroth-Clone’ is, but if the creators of the game insist that Sephiroth is the bad guy then I guess I should take their word for it. After all, he is the final boss and the most powerful story boss in the entire game.


I like this guy’s video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9RaM7U9kFs. It’s not all that probing and its prey to the same kind of conjecturing that I mentioned particularly with the nature of the Jenova creature itself. It also goes on a little too much about how rad the creator thinks Sephiroth is but if you ignore his voice-over it’s a nice way of watching all the key moments of the game in a single 10 minute clip, especially if you haven't played the game in a long time.

Anyway, other than Rufus's Lazarus act AC seemed mostly consistent with VII's storyline. They messed up the characterisation of Cloud and Geostigma was an odd compromise with VII's bleak and ambiguous ending, but other than that it's a mostly logical extension to VII's storyline. Well, other than that one stupid part where Sephiroth cuts the Shinra HQ into little pieces, that was ****ing retarded. :mad:

Retr0gamer

snausages wrote: »

Well if that is the case then it must be a plot piece that got lost in translation. It’s something that I’ve seen argued a lot on other sites like gamefaqs and youtube but none of these counter-theories really have me convinced. Being honest, to me most of it just seems like reactionary backlash against the perceived over-exposure of FFVII and Sephiroth in particular. And let’s be honest, he really did start being rubbish once they got an N-Sync reject to voice him in a video game. And the less said about Ergheiz the better.

Well I'm more convinced by the theory that Sephiroth was in control more than ever, it was discussed here only recently. Unfortunately since it's more than likely true it just shows that FFVII has a worse story than I thought before. The Jenova's motivations make sense, Sephiroth's motivations to become a god don't at all and all this talk about 'force of will' is just terrible writing in the form of deus ex machina. Maybe I just wanted the game to be something more than it isn't

Also it's not really foggy translation because I heard the original japanese versions is just as convoluted and confusing. Otherwise you'd have people that understand japanese able to tell us exactly what happened

snausages wrote: »

Anyway, other than Rufus's Lazarus act AC seemed mostly consistent with VII's storyline. They messed up the characterisation of Cloud and Geostigma was an odd compromise with VII's bleak and ambiguous ending, but other than that it's a mostly logical extension to VII's storyline. Well, other than that one stupid part where Sephiroth cuts the Shinra HQ into little pieces, that was ****ing retarded. :mad:

I don't know, I didn't even see the point in it. Why did they bring back Sephiroth? Their reasons made no sense. It's more that it really wasn't needed. all character arcs were complete and needed no further exposition and the storyline was finished. They just concocted geostigma to give it another crisis and an excuse to bring fan favourite sephiroth back. It's just fan service to me.

snausages

Retr0gamer wrote: »

'force of will' is just terrible writing in the form of deus ex machina. Maybe I just wanted the game to be something more than it isn't

I think 'force of will' is something that really comes to play in the end when Sephiroth 'summons' Cloud into the Lifestream in the final encounter. It's not really made clear but to me the Sephiroth you see there is his will or spirit made manifest in the lifestream. When Cloud omnislashes the ****e out of him his lifestream energy is obliterated and disperses. After that I've always assumed that Sephiroth's life force gets used up in the effort to save the planet, which struck me as a funny irony. Almost like an act of redemption that completes his arc.

If you take AC as 'canon' though then that clearly doesn't happen. Which isn't as good, I agree. The whole circumstances of his revival are a little wishy-washy. It essentially 'fits' with the story given that he already died twice, but it really reduces him as a villain when he can just re-organise his energy again and again and blast off like Team Rocket again and again, something that he seems to guarantee with the line "I'll never be a memory".

Actually, on that other point about the translation, there's an effort atm on the Qhimm forums to retranslate FFVII. It takes some weird liberties and has Barret saying 'Oi' for some stupid reason, but they're hoping to iron out and fix some of the weird bits that haven't always been very clear. At the very least the script they'll provide should be interesting if they release it. It's 55% done now I think. You can already download a pre-release version for the PC port of the game

Retr0gamer

Well it's more the fact that they use 'the force of his will' in the same way they use nanomachines in MGS4. It's a big deus ex machina used to explain why he didn't die in the lifestream and managed to stay alive despite being mortally wounded and how he was able to control Jenova. It's just silly and bad writing.

When you kill sephiroth you can clearly see red spirity stuff come out of him and turn the same white/green colour of lifestream. I took it that his spirit joined the lifestream just like everybody else's, something he was fighting against the whole time through the 'sheer force of his will'. :rolleyes:

I'm not liking the sound of that translation. I've been following the fan translation community for years and the worse thing they can do is take liberties with the source material. It makes the entire translation worthless.

Retr0gamer

Actually have you any examples of what they are taking liberties with or are you just talking about how it's not a literal translation of the game because literal translations are terrible and the correct way to localise is to change the text so that it's natural to an english speaker, which I'm fine with.

snausages

I don't know if they are liberties really. I don't know what 'Oi!' is in Japanese but it doesn't sound like something Barrett would say. Cloud's dialogue is really weird as well. It was in a video I saw but I can't find it now.

It seems like they're going for faithfulness as opposed to a literal translation. They're leaving some stuff as is. This thread has the details

Retr0gamer

Well one thing about cloud to note is that in the english translation they made him more into a badass type character. In the original he's a big wuss, they modelled him on Shinji from Evangelion and he acts closer to the cloud in Crisis Core.

Look like they are doing it right although they are a bit too hardcore with translating some names correctly instead of localising them. I'd be interested in playing this version.

snausages

How do you know that about Cloud being modelled on NGE? I tried googling it but all I managed to find was some god-awful EvagelionxFFVII fan-fiction that I wont post here for fear of offending someone.

Retr0gamer

I'm not sure which show it was on it might have been retronauts or ATB podcast but I'm pretty sure it was Kat Bailey talking about it. I don't know anyone else that knows RPGs better than her and she is fluent in japanese soI'd trust her. Could have been while she was at roleplayers realm.