I’ve been steadily chipping away at Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth again and was planning to keep my thoughts to myself until I got further in the game (apparently ending the open world sections of chapter 9 just launches you into an open world section in chapter 10, unlike every other open-world section that got to have a break for some fun story time before heading back to the open world stuff again, which made me so frustrated that I turned my PlayStation off and stared at my ceiling in discontent for fifteen minutes). Instead, I’m writing this post because I saw someone writing about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth by saying that there might never be another game like it. This was meant as praise and had me wondering if the writer of that post had played the same game I did. As I chewed on this opinion, I realized I’d never really looked at reviews for the game, as it released or in the months since then, because I’d wanted to avoid being spoiled while I finished up some other games before diving into FF7: Rebirth. Uncertain, now, if my opinion was just me being curmudgeonly and unwilling to allow myself to appreciate the game, I decided to spend some time looking at reviews and discussions of the game. Which pretty much all broke down into people either loving or hating the open-world segments of the game, for good and bad reasons on both sides, and doing nothing but shouting down the people who disagreed with them. So, today, as I complained about the game to a friend, I decided I should actually talk about WHY this game doesn’t work for me, why I continue to push myself to play it, and why I feel so emotionally invested in all of this that I’m writing about it multiple times without even finishing it.
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Back To Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth Posting
One interesting factoid about social media is that far more accounts are created than are active at any given time. Most accounts will never post more than once or twice and most posts on social media are created by a relatively small number of uses. Something similar is true about video games, even if it’s often more difficult to observe or discover (or maybe I’m just following weird people on social media who talk about that stuff a lot and can get the numbers to back their assertion up): lots of people start but don’t finish video games. These days, that information is, if available at all, pretty easy to find since a lot of video games will have achievements of some kind (achievements, trophies, etc.) and a subset of achievements that are unlocked for completing sections of the game. You can go to your Steam profile and look at the global achievement numbers for a game you’ve played and while it absolutely doesn’t count every singe person who has played that game thanks to the proliferation of other sources for games, it still gives some interesting statistics about the people on the platform you’re using. Since useless statistics are one of my favorite things, if I get bored while I’m waiting for a Steam game to update or for a friend to come online so we can play a game together, I’ll spend some time looking into what achievements I’ve got that are rare according to Steam. Recently, as I’ve been playing more and more games on my PS5, I’ve taken to doing the same thing while winding down for the evening, once I’ve shut the game off. Which is how I found out that almost half of players never finished Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth.
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 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.
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