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 readingVideo Gaming
Early 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.
Continue readingPatterns In The Clouds: Comparing Final Fantasy 7 Original and Remake Protagonists
Somewhere, between all the articles I’ve read about Final Fantasy 7 (the original game, Remake, and a few non-spoilery ones about Rebirth), I read a bit of commentary from one of the developers of Remake talking about Cloud’s romance/personal connection scene from Remake. He described Cloud as being five years younger than he appeared, and five years younger than every other protagonist in the game on account of his lost memories, which meant that his interactions with the other adults around him often came off as weirdly stifled or uncertain in a way that mapped better to a 16-year-old teen than a fully grown (if still somewhat young) adult. As I’ve been playing through Final Fantasy VII: Remake, I’ve been thinking about that interview and how it changes the way I read Cloud’s dialogue and body language. At the very base of all this is the image Cloud is trying to project to other people, of being a tough but cool SOLDIER (“ex-SOLDIER”) guy who is untouched by what is going on around him. On top of that, you have this imposed emotional distance that, in the original game at least, was part of maintaining that image of himself. That so far seems to be the case here, though I’ll admit I’m curious to see how that might be changed by the events of Rebirth and whatever the third installment in this series is called. Still, I can’t help but feel that the two Clouds, from the original game and from the Remake/Rebirth/Re-something (my money is on “Renewal,” currently) series, are very different characters.
Continue readingI Played Original Final Fantasy 7 So I Can Critically Engage With Remake & Rebirth
Just a quick head’s up: this post contains spoilers for the original Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 7: Remake. Feels a little weird to put a spoiler tag on a game as old as FF7 (it is only six years younger than I am, after all!), but it’s pretty relevant given Remake and, more recently, Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth.
For the fourth time, I started playing Final Fantasy 7. The original, I mean. I’ve only started playing Final Fantasy 7: Remake three times so far. I actually played Remake before I’d played the original. I grew up in a limited console household and none of my friends had a PlayStation around the time that FF7 came out, so I missed my opportunity to enjoy it in my youth. When I had subsequent opportunities, mostly in college and afterwards, I just never felt inclined to spend the time. After all, so much about Sephiroth and the major plot twists of FF7 have seemed into general knowledge of the world. I mean, I knew Sephiroth was a ghost, that Cloud wasn’t really in SOLDIER, and that Aerith dies no matter what you do. Hell, a great example of that is that I’ve never once had to add the word “Sephiroth” to a personal dictionary on any web browser or cell phone I’ve ever owned and that’s not even true for “Aerith” or her incorrectly spelled variant name, “Aeris.” I was under the impression that there wasn’t really much left in the game for me to experience, especially after I watched Final Fantasy 7: Machinabridged and got a lot more of the details. Still, as I picked up my copy of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and realized that my save data for Final Fantasy 7: Remake hadn’t transferred from my PS4 to my PS5, I figured I might as well give the original game another try.
Continue readingGetting Lost In Warframe With My Friends
I started playing Warframe pretty recently. Well, sort of. I started playing Warframe past the introduction recently. I started playing it years and years ago, because one of my friends was really into the game, but I was getting into it as he was falling off it and I didn’t really have it in me to stay focused on the game by myself back then. I still don’t these days, but I’ve got a pair of friends (the same pair who got me into Palia and most other new games I’ve tried over the last year) who have been investing their time in the game recently and, since I’m more interested in doing fun stuff with my friends than the specifics of most games, I decided to launch myself back into it. Plus, this game gets around most of my aversion to guns in games since the enemies in this one are rarely human, melee attacks are my preferred mode of combat, and I can actually not use any guns at all if that’s what I want–for instance, I’m doing a Bow, Shuriken, Hammer thing right now and having a blast. I don’t really understand more than the very basics of whatever plotlines exist in the game since my friends have been powering me through the various advancement-critical missions so they can open up the world for me, reveal something they’ve been trying to keep a secret (which is working really well, aided in part by the fact that I genuinely don’t know enough to spot whatever stuff they might be trying to hide), and get me all of the cool abilities that usually take a long time to unlock. So I’m having fun but I’m also confused to the point of just sort of sliding through the missions without them leaving any kind of lasting impression on me.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 24
When I started this series as an alternative to writing about how I felt and putting myself in a situation where I was just venting all over my blog in a way that wasn’t particularly constructive, I picked this title because I was frequently tired and sad. Most of the time, I was sad because I was tired and not getting enough rest was (and probably still is) the leading cause of periodic depression in my life. I was only occasionally tired because I was sad, though I sometimes descirbed other emotions that were exhausting me as being sad so I could write one of these blog posts to help me get over them, but the two things were always related. I was tired and sad as a result of something specific causing one or the other (or both) and then the missing one would follow immediately behind. These days, though, as I find myself writing these more frequently again for the first time in quite a while (perhaps, as I’ve begun to suspect, that I was too tired and burned out to be anything but physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted), my tiredness and sadness are entirely disconnected and will not be solved by writing about something I enjoy immensely. Which is unfortunate, because there’s a pretty apt metaphor here, somewhere, and I’m way too tired to see it from where I am right now [editing this, I can see it, but I’m going to let you find it yourself rather than call it out]. Instead of continuing to dig for whatever that is, I’m going to write about building weird contraptions in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and the three economies involved in that process. While I’m tempted to make the argument that there are two processes, since things work a bit differently if you’re building something you’ve already made in the past than if you’re putting something together for the first time, it doesn’t really make sense to deal with them separately because you can’t rebuild something if you don’t build it first.
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