Ignoring the Great Timeline Debate for the moment because it really deserves it's own thread. Onto more interesting Integrade Specific Stuff...
Yuffie and Sonon talk about a time AVALANCHE fought against Wutai. Pretty sure this is a reference to BC's AVALANCHE... Godo is locked up somewhere in jail. So that's different this time around in general. Wonder who decided to do that to him given his OG personality and reasons he spearheaded stopping fighting against Shinra. Not that a lot of other Wutains in CC decided to go along with that idea...
We also now have at least four different groups of AVALANCHE in the Compilation. Barret's, the one Yuffie works with, Elfe's and the one at Cosmo Canyon. Kinda wonder if we'll meet any more...
Sonon's "death" is... really suspicious. And by suspicious I mean... Nero kinda just flat-out kills everyone else ASAP. And then he drags Sonon's death out and lets Yuffie get away. And Sonon gets the mother of all death flashbacks. And Nero is *very* insistent on bringing Sonon's body into his darkness with him and he doesn't bother doing that for anyone else...
This has me side-eyeing the DoC Multiplayer story and thinking Sonon would make a *really* good candidate for taking the Restrictors out from the Tsivet's point of view. They know he's good enough to at least make problems for Nero. And they know he already hates Shinra enough to get into a fight with Scarlet. And actually win for the most part. And then you have him fighting against Shinra before they even *get* there. So they know they don't need to motivate him a ton to want to take the Restrictors out. Although I do think that part of why Sonon has such a long death flashback is because Shelke is rooting around in his head and seeing what's there (and making him see one "vision" that doesn't look like the others).
And... that last bit's important. It's too much SND that makes the Tsivets use a different person to take each Restrictor down in DoC Multiplayer. And I don't think Shelke would need to use *much* SND on Sonon to get him to want to kill off the Restrictors. If the Tsivets didn't have to keep starting from scratch... that could move up their timeline to kill off all the Restrictors by quite a bit. Enough that DG might break out much earlier than last time around.
Half of me likes this idea because it opens the door for Sonon and Yuffie to get into a situation where they fight each other. The other part of me likes this because this doesn't exactly make Sonon living instantly *fix* anything given how bad DG is. I could totally see Sonon not being alive at all. The other part of me thinks this would be a *really* good way to bring in DoC Multiplayer's story with a character everyone actually cares about and is not a random nobody.
Was really happy to see someone else make this connection. I had to check when I made a similar Reddit post and you beat me to it by 3 days! Honestly the second I saw Nero pulling Sonon into the darkness and Sonon having the Melfi flashback I was like, "Yep, they're gonna convince him Melfi was killed by the Restrictors and turn him into the DoC online PC." They make a big deal of establishing Sonon's connection to Melfi, and on top of that use the same sepia filter that is used when presenting Weiss's memories of Deepground's cruelty.
By the way, and quite unrelated—I haven't had the time to read every post in this thread yet but has anyone remarked on the empty sliver of sky visible over Zack's shoulder as he opens the door to the church? Ordinarily this would be where the Sector 6 plate would be, but if you take the skybox error into account it could represent that the Sector 7 plate has fallen. I know this is a CG scene and not subject to the same skybox limitations of the in-game environments; but the in-engine references used by the CG team could have thrown them off.
Edit: Okay yes it was mentioned.
