Thanks for the welcome, all!
@JT77fp It really does feel like the good old days again! (And your wife sounds lovely/has the patient of a saint, haha)
It's kinda funny how the AC/the anticipation for it was what brought me and so many other people into the fandom, but now looking back at without those rose-colored lenses, it really is such a disappointing piece of work.
@Yumelinh great article! Does a particularly good job of setting out what made the OG so special and why AC felt so shallow in comparison. (I actually remember quite liking CC and its characterizations, but it's been....over a decade since I've played that as well, hah!). This is a rant for another time, but I find AC more frustrating than anything because its squandered potential. 'After The End' sequels are always so great on paper, but AC's execution left so much to be desired. To be fair, there is only so much you can do in a feature-length film, but you could have easily cut out 10-15 minutes of mindless action scenes and spent that time to establish the Seventh Heaven family dynamic to actually understand what Cloud has lost and what he recovers by the end of the film. Shoving all the emotional development into a bunch of supplemental novellas and a DVD extra epilogue was certainly a choice.
Since the Compilation felt like it was the last word on these characters, I almost forgot about how good the characterizations were in the latter half of the OG. I feel like I drifted away from the fandom because I was in it more to be proven right than actually caring about the relationship. But again, the Remake has changed all that, and now I am deep in my Cloti feelings all the time.
@Shadowfox I very vaguely remember Pink Moses. I am just forever grateful we now live in a world where we no longer have to rely on the same 5 Japanese speakers on the entire Internet and Babelfish for translations
As to what happened to ACF, I think I had stopped being active in the fandom when it went kaput for good. I'm sure the reasons were actually financial in nature, but wasn't there also something about Summoner_Yuna "meeting" Sephiroth on the astral plane or am I totally making that up?