I’ve once again reached a branch in the saga that is listening to the podcast A More Civilized Age. This time, I’ve begun playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on my PC, for the first time in years. KotOR, as I’ve mentioned years ago, was the game that made me fall in love with RPGs. It is also one of the few games I didn’t replay post-high school since it went “missing” at one point after my brother came home from college for a vacation and then, when I got it on Steam as part of a Star Wars bundle, I just couldn’t get into it again. I played it so much in high school that I’d basically memorized the entire game and I was pretty much the only person I knew who was really into Star Wars stuff so I had no one to talk to about it. There was nothing to keep me there. Which has all changed this year. Now, one of my closest friends is more into Star Wars than I am and my current podcast listening focus is a podcast all about Star Wars media that played through the game themselves! How could I not replay it? I mean, I could have tried to wait for whatever remake is going to happen (which, as of an interview in April of 2024, is still being worked on), but it has been several years since it was supposed to be done the first time and it spent most of the time since then looking like a dead project, so I’m not expecting that to ever bear fruit. Instead, I’m playing the old, kinda janky version of the game (with no mods so I can get the unadulterated experience) and having a blast most of the time.
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Turns Out I Wasn’t Burned Out On Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth
After two weeks of struggling to even force myself to play Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth (much less WANT to play it) amidst a burst of burnout, depression, and other pastimes that needed my attention more immediately, I’ve finally figured out why I’ve been avoiding it. In retrospect, I think the main reason it took me this long was because I was up to my waist in denial, and the rest of it is made up of my general patience, my habit of having a podcast to listen to when there’s not much going on in terms of audio, and my genuine love of Final Fantasy 7: Remake. It is difficult to see clearly past all of those blinding or rose-colored filters. But now I have and I can firmly say that the reason I’ve been struggling to play Rebirth is because the open world is boring and empty. Sure, there’s lots of little collectibles, but having junk to pick up doesn’t make the world feel any less empty. It actually makes it feel even more empty most of the time, especially when I have to wander further and further afield to get all of the random junk I need to craft my own items since the people who made the game decided it would be better to fill your inventory with junk than to just give you chests with items in them. And it’s not like you can just keep collecting this stuff so that you never run out. No. You can have ninety-nine of something and then you can’t pick up any more, which sucks because this is your main avenue for collecting potions and items. You have to craft all this crap, mix up weird combo items, and make sure you’re leveling up your item crafter device so you can make level-appropriate items. It’s a whole-ass crafting system created for the sole purpose of filling this empty world and all it has accomplished is to draw attention to the fact that the world is pointlessly massive.
Continue readingI Don’t Know If Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth Can Get Any Better Than This
Now, in my third week of playing, I’ve finally make it into chapter seven of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Chapters five and six were exactly the sort of weirdly enjoyable stuff I’ve been looking forward to since I first saw the Segway–excuse me, “Wheelie”–bits in the game’s trailer. Each one has its own little moments of interesting characterization, some whacky fun (that, in Chapter 5, bordered on being a little over the top for my tastes, but was still incredibly hilarious in the moment) unique to each chapter, and then each included a moment that swept the rug out from underneath me–even during what I was hoping would be a classic beach episode filled with emotional development and inter-character discussion in Chapter 6. This is, in my opinion, the modern versions of Final Fantasy 7 at their best. As long as we can include the bit from chapter four that I wrote about last Tuesday. It would feel wrong to describe the modern FF7s as being at their best without including that moment of intensely emotional characterization for Cloud that is incredibly rare in these games. After all, we get to see a bit of Cloud’s softer side in Final Fantasy 7: Remake, but only in drips and drabs as he plays the part of the invulnerable hero and we never really get it at all in the original game, aside from a few moments during the end of the game where Cloud admits he has no idea what he’s doing but he’s going to keep doing it anyway (which isn’t really that much vulnerability since everyone already knew that by then).
Continue readingFinal Fantasy 7: Rebirth Is Making Me Care About Cloud
I just wrote about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and my experiences with the game leading up to a point near the end of Chapter 4 the other day, but I’m back again, earlier than usual, because I played just a little bit more and was absolutely struck by what happened less than an hour of game time after I stopped playing. When I wrote the post linked above, I’d finished my previous gaming time with an enjoyable hour collecting squads of Shinra soldiers for a parade. Having them waiting for me–coming to attention and shouting greetings as I (well, Cloud), their parade captain, exited whatever building I’d been in–was an absolute delight. Since it was already far too late to still be awake and playing video games at that point, I saved my game and shut everything down for the evening. Then, last night, I fired it back up again, worked my way through the parade, the awards ceremony immediately after it, and then the escape from Junon aboard a cruise ship. What struck me most wasn’t the parade (I could barely pay attention to what was happening in the parade since I had to focus on the quick time event) or even the fun tournament of Queen’s Blood (since every major game needs to have a built-in card game, I guess, which I say somewhat resignedly despite actually enjoying this one), but the way Cloud reacted to being a captain in in charge of this group of soldiers.
Continue readingFinding The Fun Amidst The Familiar In Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth
A few weeks ago, as a part of my on-going quest to document my time spent in the various worlds of Final Fantasy 7, I wrote about Cloud Strife and the way his character is portrayed differently between games. As I’ve gotten further into Rebirth, I’ve thought a lot about the depiction of Cloud in the original game, the way it was different in Remake, and the way it’s different again in Rebirth. The Rebirth version of Cloud is a melding of the two. The terse, non-committal version of Cloud has returned (which brought back the Classic Cloud Shrug, baybee!), but there are still moments of awkward earnestness that break through this shell. Despite that merge of the two different Clouds I saw, between the original Final Fantasy 7 Cloud and the Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth Cloud, there’s still a missing element here. Original Cloud felt like he was playing at being a cool guy. He felt like he was living out his dream and trying to fulfill the image he had in his head of what it meant to be a SOLDIER. This Cloud, the Cloud of Rebirth, feels more like he’s just a million miles away. He tunes in and out, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes seemingly involuntarily. He has moments where is is alive, his personality is a brilliant spark, and he’s driving the group forward with lateral and creative thinking. Other times, he can barely pay attention to a conversation or someone sharing a memory from what should be their shared past in an effort to connect with him. It’s disconcerting to see it play out on the screen but, crucially, the game also makes it clear that the other characters are noticing it as well.
Continue readingEarly Thoughts On Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth
After a week of cramming what gaming I can into my work nights, I’m about six hours into Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Which might sound like a lot, but much of that time has been spend exploring the largely open world available to me about an hour into Chapter 2 of the game. After all, I can’t NOT explore every nook and cranny of the wipe world open world suddenly thrust upon me with its incredibly limited potential since there doesn’t seem to be much in it other than crafting resources. What if I missed something actually interesting [turns out that following the plot unlocks exploration activities so the interesting stuff isn’t even there or available to you until you’ve gone through the requisite steps]? What if there was a quest that I missed because I didn’t run along the top AND the bottom of each cliff? And, like, after spending some sixty or so hours (probably more, to be honest) playing two Final Fantasy 7 games–Remake and Intermission–that didn’t let me move freely around the world, I might have gone a little bit overboard. Also, you can jump now. Sort of. You have to be next to a cliff that the game judges is short enough for you to jump up, jump down, or somehow clamber over, but you can do it. Only vertical jumps, though, which lends some credence to one of my idle theories from a post that went up just over a week ago. If you want to hop across a small gap, you better hope you can jump down and then back up the other side. After all, you’re not jumping. You’re executing environment maneuvers. Heaven forbid you actually jump. Still, all that aside, it’s been an interesting look at what I might be able to expect from this game as I continue playing.
Continue readingTaking A Break Between Final Fantasy 7s Remake And Rebirth with Intermission
Over the weekend, taking much longer than I expected, I played through both chapters of the Final Fantasy 7: Remake Intermission. I’m pretty sure I’m missing part of the name, but even after looking it up, it seems confusingly similar to what they’re calling the remake of Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core, so I’m just gonna call it “FF7: Remake Intermission” or just “Intermission” for short. Despite my confusion and unwillingness to engage with it deeply enough to deal with the overly complex naming scheme used for parts the remake of Final Fantasy 7 that aren’t a part of the “core” game, I enjoyed it quite a bit. The Fort Condor minigame was a lot of fun, if a bit frustrating at times (I beat the grandmaster, but only be restart spamming so I could get an advantageous start and then getting a bit lucky as the match continued), and seeing the other side of Avalanche was an interesting addition to the world. I got a bit tired of how many references were crammed into the game, partly because it made it very clear that Rebirth was going to have less going on in the periphery than the original game did. Which, you know, makes sense given how much they’ve expanded the part of the original game that they turned into Remake. Games aren’t infinite, even if this one comes on two discs unlike literally any other massive PS5 game I’ve played (though not needing the internet to play this game is a pretty big plus that none of those other games can claim), so it makes sense to trim down some parts of the old game to make room for additions like riding Segways.
Continue readingChanging The Past By Destroying The Future In Final Fantasy 7: Remake
I finished Final Fantasy 7: Remake. I’ve still got to do the Intermission thing with Yuffie and I’ll probably go back at some point to finish collecting the achievements by playing through the game on Hard Mode (I’ve been enjoying the extra challenge of a more difficult game mode lately and I enjoy the combat in FF7: Remake enough to figure overcoming the challenge could be a fun way to spend my time), but I think I should finally be getting to Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth sometime this weekend [this turned out to barely be true, as I only had about an hour to play it before I went to bed Sunday night]. In the meantime, though, I’m surprised by my lack of ideas to write about. Sure, I’ve got plenty to say now that I’ve fully played through both Remake and the original Final Fantasy 7, but most of that is kind of boring since it amounts to “oh, I know who that character is, now” instead of “who the hell is this Sonic The Hedgehog-looking bipedal Cat?”. Which, honestly, is still my main impression of Cait Sith since I played FF7: Remake the first time not long after I watched the Sonic The Hedgehog movie in theaters (and all that separated the two experiences was the everlasting month of March, 2020). He sure looked like a character right out of that movie. Other than that, most of my impressions of Remake have nothing to do with the original. After all, the whole point of the end of Remake is that you’re ultimately rejecting the pre-ordained future of the original game. Quite literally, given that you fight three strange figures in the lead-up to the Sephiroth fight that are, according to the Assess skill (which shows you a bit of background information about the enemies you’ve targeted, some battle strategy information in yellow text, and then a bunch of game statistics such as weaknesses, resistances, and immunities), the embodiments of people who fought for the future you’re rejecting.
Continue readingFinding Logic Where There Is None In Final Fantasy 7: Remake
One of the things that always sticks in my mind about a lot of video games is the often huge difference between the abilities of a character when they’re in a cutscene and when they’re under player control. Compounding this problem is that there’s also sometimes a huge difference in a character’s abilities from one cutscene to another. Take Final Fantasy 7: Remake as an example: Cloud makes some truly impressive leaps, runs up falling debris, easily carries people while moving quickly or jumping, and then, in other cutscenes, he can’t make the small jump from one side of a channel to another (which was maybe ten feet–fifteen, tops). Hell, the dude can’t even pull himself up by his arms half the time while, the other half, he can easily support his own weight, Tifa’s weight, and Barrett’s weight without straining. Then, throw him under player control and suddenly the dude has to move slowly and carefully lest he fall into the “abyss” which is less deep than some jumps I’ve seen him make. Yes, I know the interplay between these moments is to create drama or make Cloud seem particularly heroic or cool or to maintain reasonable pathing in a video game with a lot of environmental detail that was clearly not supposed to be interacted with. But what if it wasn’t? What if there was some indiscernible but otherwise still present and consistent logic beneath it all that governed whether or not Cloud was capable of incredible physical feats from one moment to the next? There isn’t any that I know of, but sometimes I like to approach games that pull these kinds of shenanigans in a completely serious manner, as if every instance of this makes sense, to see if I can find some wild (or mild) explanation that fits what I’ve seen.
Continue readingAerith Keeps Taking The Thoughts Right Out Of My Head In Final Fantasy 7: Remake
There’s spoilers for the early parts of Final Fantasy 7 and pretty much all of Final Fantasy 7: Remake in this post. Just all over the place. The thing is lousy with ’em. Read at your own peril. Or because you’ve already played those games. Or because you don’t care and just want to read. I’m not your boss.
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