This is a strong possibility, but it's a hell of a lot of setup to just throw away. They have at least setup conflict with Wutai over the Magnus materia, and the huge materia plotline is a part that actually does need some punching up, so my bet is still 'short intro before they go north, and then later get back into it in place of the Huge materia plot.' All this setup has created something very very difficult to write,
On one hand: Wall Market was also very very difficult to write in Remake, and this writing team nailed it.
On the other: The Whispers were massively built up and then mostly dropped.
The Whispers did make a fairly prominent appearance in Gongaga which is also connected to all of the Weapons conflict inside the planet & Magnus Materia plots as well (and all of the new
Ever Crisis The First SOLDIER Chapter 2 content has been centered around Wutai as well). If anything those are mostly just preliminary setup for more of the Huge Materia coming back to the observatory in Cosmo Canyon, as well as the expanded thematic elements with the Gi and other things involving the Will of the Planet that don't really get as heavily emphasized.
So why is there a cold war if Wutai is so very outgunned? Cold wars happen when the consequences of a hot one are too high, but Shinra is by no means afraid of going to war with Wutai, the leadership is actively trying to bring war about, and it's not made clear why they haven't already given that they very much want it and are not afraid of Wutai. Even public opinion seems on board with the war, so what was holding them back from it?
Glenn's broadcast was the declaration of war, literally. It's already begun.
Because while on the surface it's presented as two warring states, the
reality is that it's a large state against a widely distributed network of aligned terrorist cells. Avalanche is a terrorist cell, and the original game is pretty cut-and-dry about that 5 years before all of the things with the US & 9/11 shifted a lot of perspective on that type of conflict engagement (building on top of how things like America in the Vietnam War informed a lot of
Star Wars with the Rebellion vs. the Empire that were also very closely interconnected to things Japan saw). The Shinra Executives under President Shinra don't want war with Wutai – they want Wutai as a permanently declawed boogyman as a scapegoat that keeps their forces in check on top of quashing the growth of any local insurgencies & creating even stronger loyalty in their own populations.
The hitch in all of this is that Rufus is the one who's secretly catalyzing a lot of those rebel activities in order to undermine his father and take over, and be in a position to command everything more completely. It's not as simple as just obliterating the opposing side, because that only goes so far, and any tiny little shred of the past with sufficient motivation will eventually build up into a rebellion that'll potentially topple an Empire. That's why the goal is to twist control of the narrative and make it impossible for those forces to find purchase. That's why Shinra's more than happy to blow up their own reactors or drop the plate and mass murder their own citizens while framing Wutai, because it's about controlling the narrative, and by extension the emotional judgement of the population.
ACTUAL war is something that they don't control – which they don't truly want.
This is still the same situation as Shinra massacring the Wutai group at the Nibelheim Reactor during a ceasefire, where just because people say they're at peace doesn't mean that they are. There's a difference between what's actually happening vs. what the official positions are of the commanders of those two respective forces.
Glenn's Broadcast didn't actually have any appearance by Viceroy Sarruf who's actually in charge – so while it may have stirred up movement to that end with that message, it isn't actually an official declaration that would change anything from where things are already. The broadcast also happened at the end of
Rebirth, so we don't know whether or not any of the associated groups who align with that have formally stepped in towards doing that or not.
So what's your theory on how Corneo escaped a crowded, enclosed arena riding a giant monster that without squashing half the audience or opening any doors?
...why do you think that they don't exit through the same doors that have opened to let all of the other monstrous contestants though into the arena? The only reason that he & Abzu entered through the center of the arena is because it parallels the extra Hell House fight in Wall Market, not because Abzu literally wouldn't fit in any other way.
To prove my point, 19:37 has Abzu directly by one of those colosseum doors for scale to show that they're clearly able to accommodate his size even with Corneo riding on him, and 21:49 shows Corneo telling Azbu to charge directly forward pointing exactly at the Blue Corner doors... so they obviously just left through those doors exactly like you'd expect.
Hang on, those two things are not the same.
Um, okay, how to tread carefully here.
Macarthur did preserve elements of the militarist right because he thought they would be useful against the Soviets, but the entire nationalist movement did not have to be created and controlled by him. He was not preserving them so he could kill the US President and take his place.
There are considerable differences between the scenarios (no China or Soviet analogue, for a start) making this kind of direct parallel unwise, especially given how sensitive this history is. There was no second war between Japan and the US where Japan's government was being secretly run by the US President in disguise. If the US President tried to do that by stealth via a handful of Secret Service agents and soldiers, it would not work.
Historical parallels are tricky, but the bits that don't match are as important as the bits that do. OG Version, we have Yuffie representing the militant wing of Wutai (a nice subversion of expectations, because the audience expects the teenage girl rebel to be the peace loving person rebelling against tradition, but no, she's the hardcore traditionalist who wants to make Wutai great again by rearming). It's one of the most brilliant pieces of characterisation in the game.
Changing her position to be due to foreign influence/control via the SRC leadership, undermines that arc, because she's now been tricked by foreign forces into holding that position. The issue I have with that is the potential to undermine the agency of Wutai by having the bad position be due to foreign influence, undermining the idea that Wutaians can think for themselves and have bad ideas outside of foreign influence.
Japan had (and has) plenty of militarist people who are not puppeted by foreigners. If the game for some insane reason really tries to glaze the Japanese nationalists by attributing the things they did to foreign influence, well, the end result will be to upset a lot of people. That would be why making the militarist Wutai faction firmly controlled by foreigners is potentially problematic if we do draw the realworld parallel.
Cultural context is important, but it's not so determinative that writers from one place can't write outside of that, so I would be very cautious of assuming, this story is from this culture, therefore they must be doing exactly this parallel. I don't think that level of confidence is justified, because people can and do write from outside their own perspective if they are any good. Godo's pagoda isn't some grand commentary on culture, it's just ripped off from Game of Death.
A realistic setup would be too complex to put in the game, of course, but the shortened mulched together version does a disservice to the complexity of the real situation, and even if it was tried would be very very difficult to do sensitively and would be best avoided in this kind of game because of the potential for causing genuine hurt to real people.
Your core criticism that I was responding to with that was,
"It's a bit whitewashy towards post war Japan to have the militarist faction all be foreign forces or manipulated by foreign forces." to which my counter-point was that post-war Japan has constantly been in a position where they've been entangled with & manipulated by foreign forces when it comes to military engagements literally since day 1 when the American Occupation began and Japan was relegated to solely having a self defense force and no active military. It's not "whitewashy" it's literally just part of Japanese history that's still felt in modern times given Japan's position on the global stage, as well as a lot of the dynamics that specifically occurred during that time.
That's why, when making fictional stories about those types of conflicts in other settings, that's a fairly common topic for Japanese writers to have those elements because of their own experience & events of real-world history, but especially when it comes to paramilitary narratives. One of the most well known for that type of story is Mamoru Oshii who has a lot of those particular themes throughout his works like the
Kerberos Saga which he started in 1987 (set in an alternate history where the Weimar Republic won WWII & then occupied Japan). Those works contain a monumental number of things that were deeply inspirational to the original
FFVII but especially and even moreso in the
Compilation era when
Final Fantasy VII started to create a multimedia expansion of its core setting in much the same way that the
Kerberos Saga exists. This thread of inspiration becomes even more especially prominent all throughout
Dirge of Cerberus – which is where a bulk of the groundwork for the expanded character elements for Yuffie & Vincent were established. Their characters' connections to Deepground and those dynamics being pulled into
Remake,
INTERmission, &
Rebirth and having those themes built upon are also a core part of that in the narrative with the Wutai War with the situation that Yuffie & Sonon faced is why it helps knowing more about how Japanese authors whose works strongly influenced parts of the narratives of
Final Fantasy VII wrote about things like that, as well as what to expect from them.
The geopolitical elements of Mamoru Oshii's works do this frequently for more modern or near-future settings as well, as things like
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex have a number of story elements like that, but especially in
2nd GiG where the American Empire ends up obligating Japan into a number of circumstances via terrorist organizations and other types of paramilitary & political manipulation. It's also true of what Hideaki Anno did in
Shin Godzilla to cover how part of the reality of a core cultural struggle that the people of modern Japan still face is that the post-war period extends forever, and how that pressure of their obligation to adhere to the decisions of other national powers being made for them ends up shaping Japan in ways that it can't stand up against. In that film, the solution to that struggle and helplessness comes from the interconnected back-channel interpersonal relationships outside of that official structure to help pull the strings and achieve a victory – touching on exactly the same reason why a group like Cloud & Co. are the protagonists in
FFVII and also why Yuffie and her connection to them are an instrumental element in relieving Wutai from the no-win circumstances which they currently find themselves in.
Suffice to say that my observation about this isn't coming just from having a single obvious historical example and making a blanket assumption based on just that one thing. I've got a spreadsheet with over 500 entries in it of books, plays, music albums, manga, anime, films, games, & real world events that have elements that were influential to varying degrees to
Final Fantasy VII as well as to the larger prominent works that
FFVII was inspired by, as well as the varying parts of the
Compilation &
Remake Project. I've been gradually making my way through watching / reading / playing every single entry on that list since the release of
Remake back in 2020 as a way to understand the shifts in the various elements of design language & storytelling used between the original game in 1997, the
Compilation elements in the early 2000s, and also the
Remake project in the 2020s – because that type of narrative conveyance through visual design is just interesting to me, and it's really just building up on ensuring I get to check out more things that I know I'll almost certainly enjoy.
I wanted to mention that, because you following that up by claiming that,
"Godo's pagoda isn't some grand commentary on culture, it's just ripped off from Game of Death." is being overly reductive and falling to the same type of myopic assumption that you're attempting to warn against. There's a LOT of cultural commentary all throughout that segment in the original game with the underlying themes connected Zen Buddhism that are also present all throughout
FFVII's narrative, and there are a vast number of other things that it draws reference from aside from that single 1978 Bruce Lee film having a battle pagoda in it. That's like saying, "AVALANCHE isn't some grand commentary on culture, it's just ripped off of the Rebellion from
Star Wars" just because you have two characters named Biggs & Wedge in it. It's just an overly reductive and objectively wrong statement, despite citing a single real inspirational reference.
Lastly, if you're just looking at these all as a post-WWII thing, Japanese writers have been creating these types of narratives for over 80 years now – but really they're an ongoing extension of the same dynamic of tensions that have been present in novels and other works going back to the historical events of the Genpei War and the fallout of the conflict between the Taira & Minamoto clans in how Japan has formed its narratives about the massive Imperial rulers and the fragmented groups who stand in opposition to that new order. Those relationships & dynamics of the ruling Empire & fragmented scrappy Rebellion are interconnected to those things just as much as their military history with China & the US. I'd trust that Japanese writers following the same conventions that they've been using to tell their own stories, and their ability to make them as realistic as whatever plot that they're creating demands without doing a disservice to the reality of the experiences & other works that they're drawing from.
There's no reason that Part 3 couldn't handle this type of conflict in just as much of a realistic way as the previous entries have managed to handle everything else they've done, but especially because it's the exact type of story that Japanese writers in particular have an extensive history with portraying very realistically even in incredibly fantastical settings. That's why I think that this plot line in particular has a
LOT of things in it that have been established to follow towards particular narrative patterns & resolutions that happen in specific ways, and where what we already know about the original
Final Fantasy VII, the
Compilation, as well as the first two parts of the
Remake Project combined with that background of familiarity with those narratives makes me think that there's a lot more to what they've been building up on with Wutai which prioritizes the order of how those elements will end up being handled narratively in Part 3 (which is what this thread is actually about, so that we can hopefully steer things back on topic).
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