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Sprite

(He/Him/His)

Obviously the title is to put tension on Aerith's death or... maybe not death?!?! Though of course it has a lot of other possible meanings.

I think the biggest surprise of Remake is that I'm kind of hoping they don't kill her. Aerith is the best character in Remake by a mile and I'll be disappointed if an Aerith who knows she's going to die goes through with it. Cloud better turn her whole "terrifying freedom" talk back on her. The obvious move is to prevent her death but destroy the white materia, taking away Holy for added *drama*.

Anyway Remake is the hardest about-face I've ever done on a game, from absolutely hating the idea to slotting it just under XII in my favorite FFs. They'd have to do a lot to scuttle my goodwill at this point. As long as the character work is solid I could care less about the plot nonsense.

I am also SO relieved they confirmed the project as a trilogy. The scope creep of this sub-franchise is pretty out of control.
 

fanboymaster

(He/Him)
I'm impressed at the speed they're turning these around in, the assurance that part 3 has also entered development showcases a commitment to getting these out in a timely fashion which is always nice.
 

Solitayre

Circumstance penalty for being the bard
(He/Him)
I cannot overstate how much I would respect it if they spend the whole game building up to you being able to change fate and save her, and then kill her anyway.
 
You guys touched upon it, but with this news also comes the idea that this will be a trilogy. We'll see if they hold true to that, but it makes sense enough. I'm very looking forward to it. Also PS5 exclusive for now. Almost assuredly will come to PC like a year or so after that. But the fact that they didn't announce an XSX port today of FF7R:I but announced a release of it for Steam has me wondering if it'll just never come to Xbox.

Also announced today was a remaster/update to Crisis Core:
Which looks pretty good. They're redoing the voice acting because they're going to do a full voicing this time. (And I assume they'll launder Gackt out of it while they're at it.)

They also did the first meaningful show-off of Ever Crisis and man, this just looks really good:

As long as the gacha nonsense isn't too obtrusive to beating the story this looks awesome. I wish more 32bit Era games could get remakes of this kind.
 

Sprite

(He/Him/His)
I cannot overstate how much I would respect it if they spend the whole game building up to you being able to change fate and save her, and then kill her anyway.
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.

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'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.
 

Solitayre

Circumstance penalty for being the bard
(He/Him)
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.

Aerith says a couple times in Remake that this game is a 'do-over,' a chance to do things right. But the heroes won in the original FF7. What are they trying to do over? The obvious thing we're meant to think is that it'll be happy ending where Aeirth, Zack, and the Avalanche crew all survive. But I think it'd be much cooler if that were a red herring. What if this is a do-over for Sephiroth?
 
What if this is a do-over for Sephiroth?
The words and actions of the Sephiroth that taunts Cloud throughout the game almost make this explicit, especially at the end of the game. We meet the normal Sephiroth (or rather, him controlling the "clone") in the Shinra building and he's still doing the stuff he's supposed to be doing as per the original.

I expect they're also expanding the Lifestream weirdness, given that they made an entirely new WEAPON for the purpose of time/fate shenanigans.

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.
 

RT-55J

space hero for hire
(He/Him + RT/artee)
We meet the normal Sephiroth (or rather, him controlling the "clone") in the Shinra building and he's still doing the stuff he's supposed to be doing as per the original.
Okay, reading this, now I want Sephiroth to kill Sephiroth (whichever one, I don't care), instead of Aeris dying.
 
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.
 

Regulus

Sir Knightbot
Just because Nomura doesn't have a scenario writing credit doesn't mean he isn't involved in the story. It's clear based on interviews that he is.

He has a reputation for nonsense because most of the games he's involved in as director or creative producer lead people to that conclusion. He might not be directly writing them but he at the very least props up the people who do.
 
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Nomura's VERY WEIRDLY negative reputation comes from Kingdom Hearts where he is on record as having intentionally made the story needlessly complex. And even then those games are beloved for their stories despite the nonsensical complexity (every time I see KH fans talk smack it's ironic quipping because they love it). I really don't get why his involvement is something to worry about, especially being the person who's keeping the train on its tracks.
 

Sprite

(He/Him/His)
I’m honestly not too worried about nonsense, mainly because they’ve stated the goal is to stick fairly close to the original game (with some tweests), but also because the original plot is already pretty wild.

The real issue with Nomura is how long some of his games take to make, but they seem to have sorted that out these days. 3.5-4 years is a good turnaround for this project l, imo.
 

Bongo

excused from moderation duty
(he/him)
Staff member
Tetsuya Nomura gets games out on time and under budget. How many Kingdom Heartses has he helmed? For a hot minute there he was the only reliable producer Square Enix had on staff.
 

Bongo

excused from moderation duty
(he/him)
Staff member
I think that, in terms of sheer economics, Rebirth is where the plot is likely to start diverging significantly. The reason is: if they tracked the original plot closely through a second game, then the most logical dramatic stopping points would all require them to build nearly every location from FF7. That would incur two problems: in order to have a similar pace and structure, Rebirth would end up being a much larger game than Remake (while it's likely to be bigger, it would be impractical to make it that much bigger), and it would leave them with few locations and features from the original to hold back to help hype up part 3. I further think they would have reckoned that from the earliest planning phases, which is why Remake ends the way it does.
 

fanboymaster

(He/Him)
I could give a spiel about how most of the time Nomura's games are actually made on pretty typical timelines but KH3 and FFXV both grappled with either never being put into production or having the team assigned to them reassigned to other much more troubled projects (respectively) for years, but it'd be kinda tedious to go much more detailed than that.
 
Just because Nomura doesn't have a scenario writing credit doesn't mean he isn't involved in the story. It's clear based on interviews that he is.
I mean, yes, he is involved with the story. But my point was, he is not uniquely and solely responsible here like Nomura-bashers would have you believe. And when you read the substance of those interviews, the things he's contributed to the game by the accounts of others are about keeping the project on track and the narrative focused on being faithful to the original, and curbing the impulses of the other creative leads on the project to change things more dramatically. All the real evidence here leads to one conclusion and it's diametrically opposed to the common 'nomura bad' notion.
 

ThornGhost

lofi posts to relax/study to
(he/him)
I've often thought that Remake does a fairly good job of obscuring the fact that it features a relatively narrow scope for environments and I expect any future game in the series to do the same. It's just the cost of this quality of asset creation I'm sure, but FF7's wild story is going to have to be compressed into some narrower visual scopes than the original had to worry about.

It wasn't as noticeable in Remake because the beat of the original story it showed was tightly focused anyway. I expect we'll see some strange decisions to address this problem in future installments.
 

Solitayre

Circumstance penalty for being the bard
(He/Him)
Tetsuya Nomura gets games out on time and under budget. How many Kingdom Heartses has he helmed? For a hot minute there he was the only reliable producer Square Enix had on staff.
Famously on-time game Final Fantasy Versus XIII
 
I've often thought that Remake does a fairly good job of obscuring the fact that it features a relatively narrow scope for environments and I expect any future game in the series to do the same. It's just the cost of this quality of asset creation I'm sure, but FF7's wild story is going to have to be compressed into some narrower visual scopes than the original had to worry about.
I both agree and disagree here. FF7R did a lot of concealing the scale of its set pieces with carefully disguised loading zones, going through narrow hallways and slowly through doors. Most of that was due to the PS4 system limitations. Now that the sequels won't be restricted by 9 year old hardware, I anticipate the set pieces to open up significantly. The Intergrade/Yuffie DLC gives a small preview of it, by removing some of the loading areas while traversing Midgar, and having the set pieces designed for that game feel much more massive in scale. The snippet of gameplay we saw in the new trailer, shows rolling hills and a very much more open environment - presumably near Nibelheim. I don't think we'll get a full open world or anything, for reasons I stated before, but the set pieces will probably look and feel more open.

The game also has the benefit of most of its design elements already being complete as well. They don't have to do much to the battle system, just add new abilities for the characters we already played with in part 1, and iron out how the new party members will play - which has mostly already been done. The story, the setting, the framework is all there, they just have to pump out next gen renditions of it all.

I do think however, that a lot of superfluous content and locations from FF7 will probably get cut or creatively reduced down. Intergrade for example, took the Fort Condor minigame, and made it a game you could play in Midgar vs NPCs a la Triple Triad. So that whole side quest at Mt Condor is probably gone from the game, or at least won't be included in a conventional way. I could see the Cargo Ship being cut from the game, and the same with the first visit to Rocket Town. (They could figure out a different way to get Cid into the party, and leave Rocket Town for the third game.)
 

Alixsar

The Shogun of Harlem
(He/him)
Hello we have very little information about this game. VII is anime as hell, and VIIR is double anime, and all signs are pointing to VIIR-2 being triple anime, and that's a good system that they've got worked out. They've got Tetsuya "Belts" Nomura helming the triple anime sequel to Anime 2, itself a remake/pseudo-sequel of Anime: The Game™. It'll probably be stupid and crazy, as FF is often wont to be. If the writing and combat hold up, then that's cool and good and neat. It will look pretty, I'm sure. Zack and Cloud will probably fight someone with a sword. Sephiroth will say "hello I'm the bad guy" and then also fight with a sword. Or maybe there'll be a new guy and he's like grrr I'm the bad guy and Sephiroth is like oh no I'm an anti-hero now and everyone will hate it. Aerith dies twice, but Tifa only dies once (Yuffie doesn't die, but she does say "fuck" over 1000 times). I liked VIIR a ton; I will play it.

That's all, thank you.
 
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.

With as much detail as they are putting in the levels and movies, I can't see Square making an open world FFVII remake game.

I would love to be wrong and have Square nail it, but I would bet parts 2 and 3 are similar to part 1, mostly on the rails with some optional side quests.

I think FFXVI is where the more open world FF game gets made (I could be totally wrong on that! EDIT: I am wrong. Silicon Era article states FFXVI is not an open world game.)
 
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With as much detail as they are putting in the levels and movies, I can't see Square making an open world FFVII remake game.

I would love to be wrong and have Square nail it, but I would bet parts 2 and 3 are similar to part 1, mostly on the rails with some optional side quests.

I think FFXVI is where the more open world FF game gets made (I could be totally wrong on that! EDIT: I am wrong. Silicon Era article states FFXVI is not an open world game.)
FFXVI would probably be better described as "wide-linear". The devs have already described big, open zones not unlike what was seen in FFXV. That's actually what I anticipate to a certain extent in FFVIIR-2. If you rewatch the trailer, where we see Cloud and Sephiroth walk through the wilderness outside of Nibelheim (presumably going to go check out the Mako Reactor) the objective marker is over a kilometer out. That's pretty huge/far away compared to how things were in Part 1. I doubt if you kept running forever, you'd eventually reach Juno or something, but it's probably going to be big areas that are a lot more open with a lot more freedom to explore versus Part 1's very narrow paths with some arenas spliced in between.

It'll be interesting to how much of FF7 Part 2 is going to take up. I think the assumption most people would be that they end the journey at the City of the Ancients. But I'm not sure. One of the things the devs talked about repeatedly in this most recent information dump was the idea of trilogies and the trilogy structure. And something we should all remember is how those kinds of trilogies work. The Empire Strikes Back and every such trilogy always shows heroes at their lowest. And while Aerith's death might seem like that might fit the bill, I actually think the Northern Crater might be where they end things. Think about it. Cloud is presumed dead, the party is split up, Tifa and Barrett are captured, everything seems way more hopeless than in the City of the Ancients. And if they prevent Aerith's death like I suspect, that wouldn't really qualify as a low point either. But who knows? That's just my speculation. I doubt we'll know for sure when the game ends until it's actually out.
 
I need a PS5 so dang badly. I can't wait to see the entirety of Cosmo Canyon. It's one of my favorite locations in the franchise and that scene explaining the cycle of life in the original has stuck with me ever since.
 

Bongo

excused from moderation duty
(he/him)
Staff member
Junon in the background of those overworld battles.

Interesting that they're adding a new angle to the Nibelheim flashback, with Sephiroth insinuating that Tifa is a John Carpenter's The Thing (JENOVA).

However, one thing I especially noticed is that they stopped short of revealing what's at the end of Bugenhagen's legs, thereby preserving the mystique of the greatest mystery of Final Fantasy VII (the mystery of what the fuck is up with Bugenhagen's legs).
 
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