Look guys, the LTD is doing something useful. Truly the end is nigh.
The threads have always been useful as drama lightning rods.
Ever has it been my experience that when faced with two options, the correct answer is most often "bit of both"
Though as the topic of this thread will show, the bits may not be equal.
Yeah, it's rarely exactly in the middle between the two options.
That'd find an audience but quick.
At the very least it'd be amazing as an Ever Crisis event.
Oh, if I were in the writing room I'd make this a funny background detail, with an unusually silent Yuffie just staring at her bunk looking suspicious and disgruntled.
With muttered, panicked noises and have formed sentences like "Did they?" "Not my bed" "I mean you go girl, but..." while an actual conversation is happening in the foreground.
I'd like to say sanity prevails and I back away before it's too late... but sometimes the urge to prod is simply too great.
Morbid curiosity kills the devilish cat and all that.
Doing absurdly batshit things is your only hope of prolonging the existence of your race/life in general. Are you crazy, it is reality? The answer of course is yes
At least da Boyz iz haffin' fun widdit.
It's hard to say if da Boyz are technically the most of the least sane, given they literally change local reality around them based on what they believe, but also, They LITERALLY change reality around themselves so....
Pretty sure it wasn't Apocalypse related, although that is another good example of the visual motif. I'm second guessing myself now that I'm thinking of something more recent but throwback-ish. Art style and animation somewhere between Heavy Metal and Primal. No one irl remembers it so it was probably something I saw during a lonely insomnia... night? Week? Who knows at this point?
Well don't stress yourself trying to recall it.
The accusatory tone she always took seemed to be an attempt to paint you as the villain of the piece to me. Of course when she got precisely 0 sympathy from us all, you'd think she'd give up. How long did it take for her to take her ball and go home anyway? I believe I was away at the time.
To her I was the villain of the piece. I was "brainwashing" people to Cloti. As for taking her ball and going home, it happened several times. She got very mad that people were calling her out on her usual behaviors and bad logic.
In one of those times she exploded at me for trying to "stealth respond" to her because I didn't @ her or quote her from something like 30 pages prior as though it was a personal attack.
It's even better at live performances
You need the extra fancy one for those.
There's a Wild Magic Sorcerer joke here with a buff attempt becoming Taunt by mistake. Hmmm... This could be an enjoyable NPC, possibly a low level quest giver. Things to ponder, though my players are far from low level. Maybe roomie could use it for her high seas pirate campaign.
Doesn't have to be low level. A Archmage whose magic has become random and unpredictable is even more a danger than a novice, and so too must be the cause of that randomness.
I sorta hate how well that fits, but it fits. Give Cannonball fangs and claws and his fight scenes might almost resemble Nanaki.
For Cait, wasn't there a reasonably important character in Iron Man's stable that fits his quirky espionage with a side of mechanical utility but? Or am I just thinking of Kid!Tony?
Cait might be more like one of Tony's AIs in the suit to Reeve's Tony than a different character, but that's just me.
Trying to come up with someone for Aerith and coming up blank as beats though.
Aerith is Jean Grey to Zack's Scott Summers. At least the Jeans that are allowed to be the sassy fiery redhead.
Too few, too far. And I honestly find most streams grating very quickly, even by creators I otherwise like. I'll never not love TFS, but watching them play games is only fun for me in small doses. Thank fuck for MKIceandFire and other no commentary long players.
That's entirely fair, yeah.
The funny thing is he seemed savvy and aware enough mocking various "what the christ?" video game moments it's hard to believe he'd actually think anyone would buy any of it. Let alone a bunch of goons.
I wonder if it's a later onset of something like schizophrenia that changed it from kayfabe to "No this REAL Y'all!"
We're so happy that you got that
Seriously Futurama references go over more and more heads every year.
Maybe if we stopped putting those heads in jars. You ever think of that?
Start with burning evidence, becomes a reference to them getting burned which is itself a sick burn. It works on so many levels, well played sir.
-Bows-
Never doubt the power of spite and negative feelings to shape anything humanity does.
For good and for ill.
Make sure you grab Bloody Mess while you're at it, but watch out for the Bethesda Bloat from all the giblets. ...I miss New Vegas.
Vegas is good fun, though I'm fairly curious about some of the new DLC sized mods for FO4 like London and Miami.
Conditional Curse Caused by Karma! Which is also my new band name, I called dibs
By all means.
I fell for those "kid drawings" at first. I'm a sap.
I believed he had a kid because why not? I did not believe the kid did the drawings. I believed he might have been a PMC because why not? The more that the stories left his LPs and also got more elaborate and details was when I started going "Wait... is he saying this is actually happening to him? Oh....."
Sorta concerned what one might find if we did. I'm my experience, bad trips often hide down such rabbit holes.
No disagreement there.
At least some of this is still LTD related. We haven't quite hit peak flow of consciousness derail just yet.
So anyways, about the new Fallout TV series....
Actually, I'd love to see a new season of that where Kyle returns as the mayor but not quite out of the Fallout mindset. It'd be very in character.
It was the list they made up of Cloud's in-game behaviour towards the women with points assigned to each so that once all the scores were tallied up, there'd be quantitative proof of who he likes/loves more. Like, when Cloud greets the woman it's worth 1 point each time; when he mentions her name it's worth another point; and when he expresses concern for her that's another point, etc. Except that when it came time to actually using the scoresheet, they kept coming up with flimsy and logic breaking excuses to avoid awarding points equally towards the two women. For example, Cloud said "Hello/Good morning" to Aerith, so that's 1 point in her favour; but him saying the same thing to Tifa isn't worth any points because he's only doing it to be polite, not that he actually likes her.
I vaguely recall this, and and that I laughed at it with merry disdain.
My version of this is " because DUH"
In my case I was trying to explain why such a thing would be common sense, why it would be an expected narrative or social norm.
Wouldn't be any better from a thematic standpoint. "oh no, don't worry guys, we didn't bring her back, she actually just never died in the first place". It runs afoul of the same message, which is that the dead are dead. The same problems with kids thinking the dead would come back because that's what they always see in movies would still apply, grandma isn't really dead, because people are never really dead, they always come back. This is why I vehemently oppose the "you'll always have the OG" narrative. The game is more than a set of 1s and 0s, they're a set of themes and ideas. If Aerith is brought back in remake in any shape or form then the OG id dead because its' message is dead. And yes, Gandalf is actually pretty relevant there because I cannot watch fellowship as I did before I knew that gandalf survived. The two towers effectively destroyed THAT version of the movie specifically. Now that doesn't matter as much since fellowship doesn't rely on the permanence of Gandalfs death for its impact, but it did change it.
If the sequel to a movie reveals that movie 1 was a dream then I can never go back to not knowing that while watching movie 1, the experience changes, so the original experience is lost. A living Aerith means no more FFVII OG.
For the record I am talking about "circumventing her death" precisely through the existence of a bifurcation in the timeline that created a different Aerith that didn't die, and who does not replace our Aerith who is ded ded ded.
The narrative use of this Aerith would, I think, be for reuniting with and maybe lore dumping at Zack later on and neither of them would join Beagleverse.
Sometimes it still baffles me how bad these people are at basic logic. You can't use the thing you're trying to determine in the dataset for the thing you're trying to determine.....because DUH.
It's called begging the question and is also sometimes affirming the consequent.
Totally agree. And more than thematic standpoint, I can't stand games that make too much of a character's death and then don't dare go through with it. I just feel like I've been made fun of and from that moment on I don't give a damn about what happens to them. I can't imagine re-playing Remake and Rebirth with all the forshadowing of what's gonna happen to her, her song, her final goodbye to Cloud in the Church if I know that a "GOTCHA she's not dead !" is coming right after.
In this case, at least in the way my mind is treating things you understand, she would be alive in a way that Zack is still alive, or how Howard Stark was still alive during the visit to the military base in Avengers Endgame. She is still dead for all practical purposes even if there's technically a version of her still alive.
Just thought I'd write a little bit on the topic of moving on. This is something that seems to be hotly debated within the LTD because of the nature of the franchise and I saw it recently discussed again on social media, which, to my chagrin, I still find myself caring about.
So anyway, we've got our protagonist, Cloud, who falls in love with Tifa at an early age and sets off to join SOLDIER to win her heart (unbeknownst to Cloud, suffering from an intense lack of self-esteem, her heart belonged to him all along.) As a result of Hojo's experiments, and the devastating affects of both Mako poising and Jenova cells messing with his mind, Cloud effectively loses a large portion of his actual memories.
This creates a situation where our protagonist is incredibly deep, but can be related to as fresh as the viewer is. What it also does is create the window of opportunity for him to potentially leave behind the feelings he once had but no longer fully understands. Obviously Remake and Rebirth have proven conclusively that this is not the case here and, even if the exposition behind it all is missing, that Cloud's love for Tifa is still deeply ingrained and impossible to avoid.
That's all well and good, but what of in the case of Zack and Aerith? Far more are ready to believe Aerith has "moved on" and I confess there's probably good reason for it. Zack exits her life in the most sudden way and 5 years later there remains not a trace of him to be seen or found. Surely in that time her faith must waver?
We see that in 4 of those 5 years Aerith writes some 89 letters to Zack. It's implied by the 89th that she is unaware if he's even receiving them, so has taken the decision to make that one the last - but even Zack, on finally reading it, is clearly panicked by the implication.
A blink of an eye may have passed for Zack but, by then, it was years of devotion from Aerith and the hopes, disappointments, tears and pain that come with it. This was not a couple who broke up. In the Japanese translation, their last words to each other were Zack saying "I'll come see you, I promise" to which Aerith replied "I'll be waiting" - and wait she did, but one can't expect such a thing to last forever.
Throw in the complication that Aerith maybe, kinda, possibly knows Zack is dead and you've got a scenario ripe for Aerith finally leaving behind the memory of, and feelings for, the man she loved so dearly. All sounds pretty reasonable, right?
Let's take a step back. What is "moving on" and what would it entail here? If we assume that our Aerith is uncertain about Zack's fate - she asks after him even in Remake where she clearly has foresight that is lacking in Rebirth - moving on would, you might expect, be similar to how one moves on in real life, vis, leaving the previous life and connections behind and seeking to build new ones in their place.
The issue is that nowhere do we see this with Aerith. She still continues to ask after Zack wherever she goes. In Gongaga, she wastes no time heading to his house and meeting his parents. She takes little pause then in admitting she has feelings still for Zack when asked by Cloud. She persists in wearing pink, the devs have gone to pains to point out that this is done in expectation of being reunited with Zack, and takes the time to tie the bow he bought her in her hair every day. Lest you think it's "just a bow", she actually has more than the one he bought, even another pink one, but continues to wear specifically his.
One might say that different people move on in different ways. Maybe seemingly continuing to search for Zack is her way of moving on, or maybe she's just inwardly moved on but externally goes through the motions. This argument, on the surface, seems valid enough.
In fact, I somewhat agree that it's entirely possible that grief and moving on is different and people relate to it different. But here's the rub: that applies to people in real life. Aerith is a video game character with a defined personality, back story, arc and development. We know her history and her future and we know who she is because her character has been written in a way that can be related to and understood.
What I'm saying here is that if the devs wanted to show that Aerith was "moving on" from Zack, they wouldn't spend such an incredibly long time showing that she's not moving on from Zack. There's no narrative requirement to have her admit her feelings for him to Cloud, if the intent is to show that she wants only Cloud now. Nor was the sector 5 date recreation a necessity as a backdrop to her intentions of delivering the White Materia to Cloud. Why keep Zack in her thoughts, words and deeds if the intent is to show he's been replaced?
Further, one could suggest there would be no need to spend so much time building their relationship at all. An entire game was made in which the protagonists love for one girl drove him to eschew a peaceful existence and head to Midgar (an overt parallel with the actions of Cloud) in Crisis Core, now suitably subtitled Reunion. With Rebirth largely completing Aerith's role in the main story, there would nary be a worse time to pump out a Crisis Core remake if one wanted to suggest Zack is Aerith's past and Cloud alone her future, yet this is precisely what SE did.
For me, it's clear Aerith spends time struggling with Cloud's similarities to Zack and how she should relate to him. Once understanding the two are so fundamentally different, she continues to struggle with how she should relate to Cloud as a friend - one must remember that this is a new experience for her, given she and Zack were in a relationship almost from the beginning and she was, by virtue of her status, a loner.
Nevertheless, if you want to say she does attempt to move on with Cloud, it can somewhat fit. In the two short weeks they are together, one could argue that she makes a decision to try to move on and focus her affections solely on him, but ultimately her efforts are cut short by virtue of the Masamune. This doesn't even necessarily contradict what we know of their fate in Advent Children Complete as just as she had the agency to move on before, so too she can again and just as much give Zack - now actually there and in the present - another try.
That's all well and good, but narratively it falls short. First of all, for insomuch as Aerith may move on from Zack, Cloud himself is only beginning to return to him. Zack will always remain an elephant in the room by virtue of sacrificing his life, and chance to return to Aerith, that Cloud could be alive to this day. Surely in the first instance nobody genuinely believes Nojima et al would reward Zack's heroism with the two people he cares for most spitting on his grave? Such an action, a character assassination on multiple levels, is unthinkable.
On that note, I'm reminded that one (Clerith) argument I see often put out there these days is that Cloud "loves both Tifa and Aerith" and he can "choose between either" and it's totally valid. Ignoring that this is not actually the case - Cloud is not a self-insert and the second he remembers who he is the same second affection mechanics largely stop mattering - the same courtesy should thus be afforded to Aerith.
Even if Aerith is ready to try something with Cloud, which ultimately never happens due to lack of time and Cloud's own feelings getting in the way, by the above logic it's entirely possible that she does so while still deeply in love with Zack, cherishing their moments and waiting for him to return as he promised.
It's not for nothing that one minute he's there then the next he's gone and all that she's left with is the promise unfulfilled. "He's never given me a reason not to (still love him)" she tells Cloud in Gongaga, because he simply vanishes one day without a trace. There's no moving on here because there's no ability to, no closure has been brought and, as such, she continues to wear pink and wait for him to fulfil the promise.
And this is precisely why no reunion, in person at least, was forthcoming between the two in Rebirth. It would be impossible on all levels for Cloud and Aerith to keep the same story beats as in the original (Cloud stuck in his SOLDIER persona fed by the promise of being her bodyguard, Aerith treating Cloud as a stand-in for Zack) if Zack is literally there. It simply could not happen in part 2 or it's over, done, finito when we still have a full game of emotional payoff ahead.
Adding onto this, Aerith is a great example of logically knowing she has to move one but emotionally not being ready to do it, for many of the reasons you outlined above.
The thing mentioned earlier about some CAs saying Aerith deserves the main character or something, it doesn't matter to them that Zack was the main character in CC, since Aerith wasn't a main character, wasn't playable, and her not getting enough screentime to some.
I mean, what were they expecting? Stealth action sequences where she escaped the Turks?
Going back again a bit, OmniAerith, if there is indeed such a thing, I believe we only see her once in the game and that's when she shows up for the final fight with Sephiroth. Or it's possible there were also traces of her on the hill specifically with Tifa and Red but I don't know.
I think we also see her in the dream date because that's confirmed not to be Beagleverse Aerith.
Yeah. That's something a lot of early Clerith arguments essentially went: To determine whether Cloud loves Aerith we must first assume that he loves Aerith, so everything Cloud does is because he loves Aerith, and this is irrefutable proof that he loves Aerith.
Both begging the question and affirming the consequent for sure.
Well, if you’re gonna be impartial and use this system (which makes no sense btw) then shouldn’t you assume Cloud loves both and then start tallying points from there?
Also, using “good morning” and similar greetings as a point is… odd. Cloud says these kinds of things to the other party members too…
And that's where the special pleading comes in.
that’s what they are talking about!
. Jokes aside, I played both but overall i think Duodecim did have more content in general for being the sequel iirc. Could be just bias talking too, it's been a long time now since i played either.