I'm thrown by the clear intentions of Nomura from a meta perspective are, and what the actual text of the game is suggesting. Knowing him, there's no point in trying to bridge the gap, it'll just be nonsense.
There was seven people credited with the writing for FF7R. None of them were Nomura. Nomura was one of three directors on the project. And if you trust the word of the other directors, Nomura was the one vetoing most of the ideas the other directors had of changing things too radically from the original FF7, insisting on things remaining as faithful to the original game as possible. But if the guy so much as designed a single belt buckle in a game, fans point fingers in his direction for whatever story being "nonsense." Regardless of if it's actually nonsense or not. This has gotta end.
Just as long as they don't situate it as a grand sacrifice on her part. She didn't have to and wasn't trying to die in the original.
You sure about that? Like, she left the party for no reason to go do a very dangerous thing by herself. The whole scenario always seemed very blatantly coded as an allegorical discussion of suicide. And that's before you consider the context of her very intense relationship with death - where she grew up watching her family get murdered and has to talk to their force ghosts.
My biggest worry right now is that the period between Midgar and Aerith's death is the dullest part of the original. They'll probably look to spice that up with nonsense. I assume the third game will be Reunion up through the end, where the plot really cooks.
I don't think you're wrong here, because opinions are opinions. But this is a wild perspective to me, at least. Disk 2 and 3 definitely build up momentum fast, and has a lot of famous set pieces and wild events. But to me, Disk 1 is where the game shines brightest, and after that it kind of goes off the rails. I really enjoyed the slow build up of Disk 1, where the party is just kind of on an adventure and getting to see all the weird and whacky sights in this world before everything goes topsy turvy. And it's just low key really fun. It's also where most of the interesting character work happens as well, where we dig into the pasts of most of the cast. Disk 2 and 3 by contrast are all business. Just forward plot movement to save the world versus the slower hunt for Sephiroth/peeling back the onion layers of the world as they explore it.
I've been having a lot of fun watching people lose their minds over some of the lines in that trailer. I've seen one person suggest Tifa is a clone after wildly misinterpreting the exchange about the Nibelheim incident.
TBF in FF7R there were a TON of lines/moments in the game where a character would be talking about whatever immediate thing is happening, but there were heavy insinuations they were also talking about something else at the same time. I definitely assume some of the lines here are going to have that kind of hidden double meaning thing going on, but jumping to conclusions with such little information is a fool's errand.
I'm hoping Rebirth will be on semi-rails like Remake was, and then the third game goes open world with all the areas they made in one place. I assume we'll be in PS6 days by then.
I really have to assume it'll be on rails. For starters, Disk 1 of FF7 is extremely linear in nature. Yes, you traverse a world map. But the map is structured in such a way that you can really only go forward to your destination, with maybe one or two points of interest on the side to provide side-quests. FF7R: Intergrade also includes a post-credits sequence showing Cloud & Co hitchiking the entire way to Kalm as well, so if they're going to fast forward to Kalm and bypass the first meaningful moment you hit the world map in FF7R, I take that as a sign of where things are headed with these games.
