Environmental Message

[Cthulhu]

I never did see Cloud as being particularly caring about what or who he was fighting for, especially at the start of the game. Full "Whatever..." mode. Off course, if I get the timeline correct his bestest friend just died and he had a mental breakdown where he impersonated the guy, so one can argue about his sanity anyway,

 

[Starling]

I like to think Tifa played a large role in getting him to agree to do something so extreme in the first place but there really is no telling what his moral boundaries would've been otherwise. Of course, he probably wouldn't have acted quite the same way if he hadn't run into Tifa either, as she's a large part of why his constructed personality was the way it was, not to mention potentially the reason it occurred in the first place.

 

[Octo]

Which is weird because the compilation depicted Zack as an all round pretty annoying good guy. So I don't know who the hell Cloud was impersonating, but it wasn't Zack.

 

[ForceStealer]

I think Sephiroth and what he thought a SOLDIER should act like probably played a bigger role in his false persona. Maybe Crisis Core dialed it up some, but he was pretty cheerful in the truck scene in the original, too. Considering what they had just been through.

 

[leadmyskeptic]

Yeah, you guys are right on both counts...he's in "false personality" mode when he joins the gang (which, by the way, is supposed to be approximately how long before the opening train scene? A few days??), and that's also kicked into overdrive by him wanting to be strong and badass for Tifa, as seen in that scene when she finds him at the train station. It's still pretty nutty though. And I remember also being confused when I played Crisis Core, expecting initially that Zack was gonna be the cocky but still charming dick type of character (Like Cloud at the start), but he was more the cute cocky harmless type of character. I think maybe they thought they had to soften the blow a little bit if they were gonna stretch that type of character across a whole game.

 

[Starling]

I figured Tifa found Cloud somewhere around 2-5 weeks prior to the game. Some of Tifa's memories were apparently used to piece his mind together the way he is at the start, as evidenced by how neither Cloud nor Zack seem to have been present when Tifa finds her father and tries to attack Sephiroth (they show up shortly after), even though Cloud remembers it happening in the Kalm flashback. It seems the jerkish aspect of Cloud's initial personality is because Tifa mostly remembered him getting into fights. They weren't as close as she remembered them being so some of how she remembered him was a bit scewed by that.

 

[Tetsujin]

Well, Cloud reached Midgar towards the end of September and FFVII begins in December. Tifa found Cloud at some point inbetween.

 

[Starling]

I get the impression Cloud had only just gotten to Midgar when Tifa found him. Considering the state he's in, I can't really imagine where he would've gone before that. I'd give Cloud's travel time to Midgar 3 days at most, counting the one when Zack died. Depending on when in September Zack dies and when in December the OG starts, that's a timeframe of about 8-14 weeks/2-3.5 months.

 

[leadmyskeptic]

Okay, so those are actually pretty big potential timelines...unless this is one of those things we're not supposed to look too closely at lest it fall apart (I.E., did cloud sober up enough from his mako addiction to buy a train ticket??). Somehow I always end up forgetting and them re-remembering the whole he-and Tifa-weren't-actually-close-as-kids bit until I'm playing the game again, even though it's one of the keys to the game's narrative. Tifa is someone he's admired from afar since childhood, and now she suddenly seems to be swooning over him, but based on a persona that ISN'T the real him. That whole "in the bedroom after her mother's death in Nibelheim" bit is great. Its remained moving, maybe because it gets less attention than some of the more overt melancholy moments.

Edit: Where are we getting the September/December etc time frames from?? Is there an event timeline in the Ultimania or some such?

 

[ForceStealer]

Yes, click the text in Tetsujin's post to see our translation of it.

And Cloud might have just stumbled around the slums for awhile. It IS the slums, after all, people might not have thought much of it.

 

[Starling]

I think some of the dates come from BC, while the others come from the ultimania. Then, there's stuff you can figure out by using math on the available reference points to narrow down the time frame.

For example the last time I had a look at the game, I estimated a minimum of 38 days for the entirety of the game, with potentially another 20 days worth of travel time, depending on how long it takes to get from one place to another using various means. After returning to Midgar, they say there's a week until Meteor hits and then you get the Highwind scene, which is the last night. That part seems to imply everyone got a week to go wherever rather than just a day like what Cloud says seems to suggest. Either that or the plot skipped a week between those two moments like it did between Sephiroth summoning Meteor and Tifa waking up in Junon.

Considering how Zack was trying to get to Midgar, I figured Cloud just walked in, ended up at the train station and then collapsed where Tifa found him.

 

[CameoAmalthea]

I've read that the timeline of the game is December 9th - January 21 - so that would make it 43 days (so your estimation was close) Though personally I always felt like that was such a short time for so much to happen.

 

[Starling]

I mostly did my timeline estimate specifically because I rejected the notion that the entirety of the game only happened in a month, as I kept hearing. The timelines they give for stuff don't always line up with the information given in the game or by other sources. For example, they don't give us an exact year of birth for Sephiroth and yet we know he was born around the time Vincent was put in his coffin, which was in 1977. Therefore, it's pretty safe to say that Sephiroth was born in 1977.

 

[Ite]

The timeline of game events has always bothered me. I'm pretty sure I stayed at inns for longer than a month, and I certainly used more than 43 tents over the course of my play.

I wonder what it will be like in a modern RPG, especially if they are planning to use a day/night system.

The Elder Scrolls games handle this kind of thing well, they never mention specific days for their game events, even though their calendar is incredibly detailed. Why can't they just point to a particular year (eya 1997 or whatever) and leave it at that?

Speaking of day/night system, if they were to do something like that, I would be interested in learning which monsters are nocturnal - the variety and vibrancy of the Planet's life ties into the theme of the game, an updated gameworld ecosystem would increase immersion and provide further stake in the story.

 

[leadmyskeptic]

Born in '77? How punk rock of him...

Also, weird to think about? Sephiroth as a child.

 

[Starling]

The timeline of game events has always bothered me. I'm pretty sure I stayed at inns for longer than a month, and I certainly used more than 43 tents over the course of my play.

I wonder what it will be like in a modern RPG, especially if they are planning to use a day/night system.

The Elder Scrolls games handle this kind of thing well, they never mention specific days for their game events, even though their calendar is incredibly detailed. Why can't they just point to a particular year (eya 1997 or whatever) and leave it at that?

Speaking of day/night system, if they were to do something like that, I would be interested in learning which monsters are nocturnal - the variety and vibrancy of the Planet's life ties into the theme of the game, an updated gameworld ecosystem would increase immersion and provide further stake in the story.

I still have my notes about how I divided up the days for the OG, if you want. I generally went with plot related time changes for actually marking days, with spaces to indicate variable time based on how long is spent progressing to the next point.

I really don't like the random use of greek for a dating system that really should've just been the one we normally use. When I note stuff down based on the date, I generally just do stuff like 2007 and be done with it.

I'd enjoy seeing day/night cycles as well. Even pokemon had some fun with what pokemon were out and about based on what time it was.

 

[Cthulhu]

The Elder Scrolls games handle this kind of thing well, they never mention specific days for their game events, even though their calendar is incredibly detailed. Why can't they just point to a particular year (eya 1997 or whatever) and leave it at that?

Oh but they do; they often refer to past events (including in some of the previous games) in books of newer events. Morrowind had a quest diary of sorts where quests and quest progress was recorded with a date and shit.

Now I wonder what happens if someone hacks the game to make time progress thousands of times faster and you go through effectively years of the game, . It would actually be awesome if you got an event in Morrowind or Oblivion saying that a Dragonborn appeared up in Skyrim if your play time is a hundred years or however long the time period between those things was.

 

[Ite]

I still have my notes about how I divided up the days for the OG.

I think an essential part of an RPG is making the journey and timeline your own. Through the course of FF7, depending on how much running-around-in-a-circle we did, the journey of Cloud and Co. could last 43 days (I would say minimum) or years (although... years seems a bit much).

(a note on TES: I liked reading about the Oblivion Crisis in Skyrim, because it doesn't actually assume that the prisoner from the dream and the hero of Kvatch are the same person. It says something like "the next time the Amulet of Kings surfaced was at Weynon Priory some time later..." in my case, it was about six months later, but the in-game canon allows for whatever. That freedom should be applied to FF7's timeline.)

 

[Starling]

Bethesda makes their games with the specific goal of allowing so much player choice they bend over backwards to make it all potentially canon in subsequent games.

FF7 was fairly loose until the ultimanias and compilation decided to slap some dates everywhere without necessarily putting enough thought into it to have it mesh together as well as it could've.

Incidentally, I realized after posting earlier that offering notes on the OG's timeline to someone who spent years novelizing it would be rather pointless, as you would undoubtedly have far more detailed notes on the matter.

 

[Ite]

Still not canon lolol. And yeah, comparing a linear, plot-filled story like FF to a Bethesda game is kind of unfair, apples and oranges and whatnot. Just an example of how integrating an in-game calendar (rather than an out-of-game timer that over clocks) or a day/night system might mess with a "canon" event timeline.

 

[Starling]

In that case, I guess you'd have to measure how long it takes to get from one place to another based on the day/night cycle, giving you another estimate of the shortest time frame that can occur in canon, leaving the actual amount of time open up to a cut-off point based on post-game canon. My day estimate was meant to figure out the shortest amount of time anyway.

 

[Ite]

Didn't a TLS user calculate how big the Planet was based on how fast they could travel based on the cNon timeline events, and determined that it was about as big as Texas.

 

[Starling]

There aren't really any day/night cycles to use to know how many days it takes to travel, hence my timeline estimate only counting indications of time provided by the plot to calculate days, leaving gaps where it's a matter of how long it takes from one point to the other. The world isn't exactly to scale so you need to hammer out some variable before getting something decently accurate.