X-SOLDIER
Harbinger O Great Justice
- AKA
- X
Just pasting these quotes in here as a point of reference to jump back to.
Very well on my way down the correct road from everything I've found. STILL waiting on my copy of the new Ultimania!
tl;dr – Thanks for waiting around while I take an approach to this type of thing that I can't imagine anyone else ever would.
X
I was in the mood.By the way, what exact page of which book is this that you're showing @Odysseus?
ミッドガルの地下に作られた極秘の施設
七番街プレートの崩落後、クラウドたちは地下実験場を訪
れることになるが、同様の実験場は『ダージュ オブ ケルベ
ロス-FFVII-』にも登場した。ミッドガルの地下深くには、神
羅によって極秘に建造された実験施設があり、人道を外れて
いるような実験が盛んに行なわれていたのだ。
←地下実験場では人体
実験用と思われる施設
が見つかった。改造を
受けたような異形の生
物も多い。
A top secret facility built in the basement of Midgar
After the collapse of the Seventh Avenue Plate, Cloud will visit the underground experimental site, but a similar experimental site also appeared in "Dirge of Cerberus -FFVII-". Deep underground in Midgar, there was an experimental facility built in secret by Shin-Ra, and experiments that seemed to be out of humanity were actively conducted.
← A facility that seems to be used for human experimentation was found at the underground experimental site. There are many unusual creatures that have been remodeled.
ルーツ
1
神羅の闇「ディープグラウンド」
『ダージュ オブ ケルベ
ロス -FFVII-』で描かれる実
験施設はディープグラウン
ドと呼ばれている。「実験
によって人をどれだけ強く
できるのか」を研究するた
めに作られたもので、神羅
の関係者でもその存在を知
るものはごく少数だった。
ダージュ オブ ケルベロス
↑空から飛来したメテオにより、行き来
は不可能となったが、興味本位で訪れた
テレビ局によってふたたび扉が開かれた。
Roots
1
Shin-Ra's Darkness "Deepground"
The experimental facility depicted in "Dirge of Cerberus -FFVII-" is called Deepground. It was created to study "how strong people can be made by experiments", and only a few people involved in Shinra knew about its existence.
Dirge of Cerberus
↑ Meteor flying from the sky made it impossible to come and go, but the door was opened again by the TV station that visited with interest.
ルーツ
2
人体実験
ディープグラウンドに
は、通常のソルジャーより
も過酷な実験を受けたDG
ソルジャーが登場した。
『ダージュ オブ ケルベロ
ス-FFVII-』の物語は、この
DGソルジャーが施設から
抜け出し、人々を殺戮する
ところから幕を開けた。
ダージュ オブ ケルベロス
↑DGソルジャーは、身体を保つために魔
晄を必要とする。そのため、つねに魔晄
が流れる特殊スーツを身に着けていた。
Roots
2
Human experimentation
In Deepground, a DG Soldier that has undergone more rigorous experiments than a normal Soldier has appeared. The story of "Dirge of Cerberus -FFVII-" began when these DG Soldiers escaped from the facility and killed people.
Dirge of Cerberus
↑ DG Soldier needs mako to keep their body. Therefore, he always wore a special suit with flowing mako.
ルーツ
3
強化されたモンスター
ディープグラウンドでは生物の改造も行なわれたようで、強
力な敵が登場した。『FFVII リメイク』のクエスト「さまよう軍犬」
で登場するレイジハウンドも改造を受けたのだろうか?
怪奇虫 A
←地下実験場で出てくる
怪奇虫は、ディープグラ
ウンドにも生息するモン
スターだ。
Roots
3
Enhanced monster
It seems that creatures have been remodeled in Deepground, and powerful enemies have appeared. Did the Rage Hound that appeared in the quest "Wandering War Dog" of "FFVII Remake" also undergo remodeling?
Bizarre Bug A
← The mysterious insects that appear in the underground experimental site are monsters that also live in Deepground.
Very well on my way down the correct road from everything I've found. STILL waiting on my copy of the new Ultimania!
tl;dr – Thanks for waiting around while I take an approach to this type of thing that I can't imagine anyone else ever would.
I've cracked open a really big resource of contextual information, but it requires a ton more reading / watching / information consumption/dissection, and going back through and organizing things a bit differently. (After I got off of work on Thursday, I was writing and researching for 8.5 hours straight). Since it's gonna be a couple more months until I get this done, I wanted to at least give a better sense of exactly what it is that I'm currently working on that I keep nebulously referring to.
In order to really understand what the Whispers & Failed Experiment are, I first went through all of the things I could hunt down from within Final Fantasy VII's story. That was my starting point to get situated in the right direction. The next point was that I broke down the designs of all of the related thematic elements from the original game, the Compilation, and Remake. Then I went through all of the branches of pieces of Indo-European, Norse, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, & Shinto mythology that influenced the concepts in the original game, in order to establish where the basic frameworks of the designs came from, and ensure that those elements hold consistently within the series. Then I found all of the pieces from there where they refer to concept that don't generally exist in Western spiritual mythology, and mapped them to the pop culture sources of films and other things in the West that would have been present at that time, and then followed those elements through.
With that information, I've also been going through all of the Japanese media that's related to when they were released, to see if those elements are used, when they come up, and if they share that same iconography, and design language from within the storytelling. Then digging into all of the design language, and charting how it's shifted, and what the concepts are consistently mapping to for story elements that are using Eastern Religious iconography, and make sure that those don't point me at new things that I've missed that are important (they have frequently).
This is because Japanese pop-culture media has been gradually establishing those concepts in more and more media, the same way that the style of that one actor got adopted for all of the Bishonen protagonists. These things are a lot more deeply linked to specific concepts than just a sexy hair style. What makes them important is that they're being consumed by a global audience. This means that it's important to look at how, and why certain designs are changing when, because those are the ways that they're using an established but evolving "global storytelling language" to communicate ideas that are Japanese in style, but connect more clearly to shared concepts that religious & cultural backgrounds don't provide.
Essentially, after examining the evolution of how Japan adopted any relevant concepts into their religious practices, I also looked at how they adopted western ideas into that structure, and then followed up by how they've been adapting media that they produce for a global audience to communicate those themes, what iconography it uses, why, and how it's evolved and been refined as a specific storytelling element.
The thing that I've gone through and completely broken down the design iteration and evolutions for: The White & Black Materia, The Shinra & Wutai War & post-war era, Deepground, The Tsviets, Project G, every form and appearance of Jenova & named member of SOLDIER. Then in Remake that maps to Roche, Aerith's Mural, Failed Experiments, the Whispers, the Unknown Sephiroth, and everything that happens in Chapters 17 & 18. The Remake Material Ultimania has been hugely helpful in just being able to look at it and confirm that I haven't made any missteps yet, but also it gives context specific names, information, and concept design & development details that with just a couple little words, I can cross-reference an absolutely MASSIVE amount of information.
Essentially, it's really easy to point to something like Sephiroth's name as being connected to the Sefirot, and Jenova to John Carpenter's The Thing, because it's also a long-established reference that's easy to show. It's a lot more difficult to map out influences of a storytelling language that's being written, but when you get all of the pieces together it is ASTOUNDING what's tucked away.
That being said, I am still cross-referencing, double-checking, expanding, revising, and refining things. The biggest part is that there are points where I have to amass and consume just an absurd amount of data, so that I can figure out how to best condense it. Doing that is also making sure that I have a real understanding about exactly which common elements exist, how they're used, and what they represent in general on a broad spectrum usage, so that I can ensure that they match correctly to how Final Fantasy VII specifically uses them, how the Compilation shifts those and why, and how and when Remake maintains or adjusts exactly what it chooses to and why.
So, as a little sort of look at the map of information that I have gone through and or am currently doing (the one I have is a bit more refined), these are the points of media that I've been using. Everything in there that's bold, I have gone through end-to-end in its entirety for those design elements. The ones in Italics I am familiar with, but I need to finish going through end-to-end.
The outcome of all of that is that I can get into really solid detail about what the Whispers & Failed Experiments represent from a storytelling perspective, the conceptual ideas that they represent, what those spiritual connections have to do with the fundamental nature of the understanding of human existence as it comes to the nature of life & death, and the dynamics of how that arises in particular expressions of suffering as a facet of common human experience in struggling with the mind-body duality when trying to understand the meaning of your sadness and pain when someone you love dies, and what your mind is attempting to process when it comes to purpose, destiny, free will, and helplessness. (I had 1 close friend die unexpectedly before I published the previous article, and two more of my friends have died unexpectedly since then. So it's also been an interesting examination of those ideas since I spend a lot of time experiencing the facets of those natural emotions as you go through it, so it's been an interestingly cathartic examination of those ideas and how/why I think about things the way I do related to all the stories about dealing with this that I grew up with).
But yeah. That's why I've been bouncing in periodically with little "You're on the right track, but I have not yet managed to condense why into a form that's consumable, but just trust me on this one." in the Ultimania thread and whatnot, but in general am very quiet overall. This has honestly been just... one of the most extremely energy-filling things that I've done probably in ever. I've been stitching together things about media that I've been consuming most of my life, and finding out a TON along the way.
Like... did you know that there's an entire thematic storyline that's represented in Final Fantasy VII with just how it uses dragons? Designers are really interesting, because they hide things everywhere and adhere to a VERY rigid consistence whose purpose is to be intrinsically felt & understood without ever relying on anyone speaking that language. So, becoming fluent in that design language has been endlessly fascinating.
In order to really understand what the Whispers & Failed Experiment are, I first went through all of the things I could hunt down from within Final Fantasy VII's story. That was my starting point to get situated in the right direction. The next point was that I broke down the designs of all of the related thematic elements from the original game, the Compilation, and Remake. Then I went through all of the branches of pieces of Indo-European, Norse, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, & Shinto mythology that influenced the concepts in the original game, in order to establish where the basic frameworks of the designs came from, and ensure that those elements hold consistently within the series. Then I found all of the pieces from there where they refer to concept that don't generally exist in Western spiritual mythology, and mapped them to the pop culture sources of films and other things in the West that would have been present at that time, and then followed those elements through.
With that information, I've also been going through all of the Japanese media that's related to when they were released, to see if those elements are used, when they come up, and if they share that same iconography, and design language from within the storytelling. Then digging into all of the design language, and charting how it's shifted, and what the concepts are consistently mapping to for story elements that are using Eastern Religious iconography, and make sure that those don't point me at new things that I've missed that are important (they have frequently).
This is because Japanese pop-culture media has been gradually establishing those concepts in more and more media, the same way that the style of that one actor got adopted for all of the Bishonen protagonists. These things are a lot more deeply linked to specific concepts than just a sexy hair style. What makes them important is that they're being consumed by a global audience. This means that it's important to look at how, and why certain designs are changing when, because those are the ways that they're using an established but evolving "global storytelling language" to communicate ideas that are Japanese in style, but connect more clearly to shared concepts that religious & cultural backgrounds don't provide.
Essentially, after examining the evolution of how Japan adopted any relevant concepts into their religious practices, I also looked at how they adopted western ideas into that structure, and then followed up by how they've been adapting media that they produce for a global audience to communicate those themes, what iconography it uses, why, and how it's evolved and been refined as a specific storytelling element.
The thing that I've gone through and completely broken down the design iteration and evolutions for: The White & Black Materia, The Shinra & Wutai War & post-war era, Deepground, The Tsviets, Project G, every form and appearance of Jenova & named member of SOLDIER. Then in Remake that maps to Roche, Aerith's Mural, Failed Experiments, the Whispers, the Unknown Sephiroth, and everything that happens in Chapters 17 & 18. The Remake Material Ultimania has been hugely helpful in just being able to look at it and confirm that I haven't made any missteps yet, but also it gives context specific names, information, and concept design & development details that with just a couple little words, I can cross-reference an absolutely MASSIVE amount of information.
Essentially, it's really easy to point to something like Sephiroth's name as being connected to the Sefirot, and Jenova to John Carpenter's The Thing, because it's also a long-established reference that's easy to show. It's a lot more difficult to map out influences of a storytelling language that's being written, but when you get all of the pieces together it is ASTOUNDING what's tucked away.
That being said, I am still cross-referencing, double-checking, expanding, revising, and refining things. The biggest part is that there are points where I have to amass and consume just an absurd amount of data, so that I can figure out how to best condense it. Doing that is also making sure that I have a real understanding about exactly which common elements exist, how they're used, and what they represent in general on a broad spectrum usage, so that I can ensure that they match correctly to how Final Fantasy VII specifically uses them, how the Compilation shifts those and why, and how and when Remake maintains or adjusts exactly what it chooses to and why.
So, as a little sort of look at the map of information that I have gone through and or am currently doing (the one I have is a bit more refined), these are the points of media that I've been using. Everything in there that's bold, I have gone through end-to-end in its entirety for those design elements. The ones in Italics I am familiar with, but I need to finish going through end-to-end.
Timeline Reference for Final Fantasy VII's Design Language & Iconography – Creation & Evolution
- The Thing [Novel/John Carpenter Film] (1938/1982)
- Waiting for Godot [play] (1949)
- The Man Who Fell to Earth novel/film (1963/1976)
- Berserk The Prototype (1988)
- Berserk (1989 - Present)
- Alita [Gun Dream] (Dec 1990-Apr 1995)
- King’s Field I, II, III (1994, 1995, 1996)
- Chrono Trigger (March 1995)
- Neon Genesis Evangelion (Oct 1995-March 1996)
- Radical Dreamers (Feb 1996)
- Parasite Eve [Novel/film/game] (1995/1997/1998)
- Final Fantasy VII (Jan 1997)
- Death & Rebirth, and End of Evangelion (March 1997, July 1997)
- Naruto Pilot (Aug 1997)
- Berserk anime (Oct 1997-March 1998)
- Chrono Cross (Nov 1999)
- Naruto [Ch1-Ch238] (Sept 1999-Nov 2004)
- Alita: Last Order (2000-2014)
- Waiting for Godot [film] (2001)
- Drakengard I (Sept 2003)
- VII: Before Crisis (Sept 2004-April 2007)
- Naruto Shippuden [Ch245-Ch700] (Feb 2005-Nov 2014)
- Drakengard II (June 2005)
- VII: Advent Children (Sept 2005)
- VII: Last Order (Sept 2005)
- VII: Crisis Core (Sept 2007)
- Evangelion Rebuild I: You Are (Not) Alone (Sept 2007)
- Lost Odyssey (Dec 2007)
- VII: Dirge of Cerberus (Jan 2006)
- Chrono Trigger DS (Nov 2008)
- Demon’s Souls (Feb 2009)
- Evangelion Rebuild II: You Can (Not) Advance (June 2009)
- NieR (April 2010)
- Dark Souls I (Sept 2011)
- Asura’s Wrath (Feb 2012)
- Berserk films (Feb 2012, June 2012, Feb 2013)
- Prometheus (April 2012)
- Evangelion Rebuild III: You Can (Not) Redo (Nov 2012)
- Drakengard III (Dec 2013)
- Dark Souls II (March 2014)
- Alita: Mars Chronicle (2014- present)
- Bloodborne (March 2015)
- Dark Souls III (March 2016)
- Shin Godzilla (July 2016)
- Berserk anime (July 2016-June 2017)
- NieR Automata (Feb 2017)
- Alien Covenant (May 2017)
- Alita Battle Angel [film] (Feb 2019)
- Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (March 2019)
- VII Remake (April 2020)
- Evangelion Rebuild III+I: Thrice Upon a Time (Jan 2021)
The outcome of all of that is that I can get into really solid detail about what the Whispers & Failed Experiments represent from a storytelling perspective, the conceptual ideas that they represent, what those spiritual connections have to do with the fundamental nature of the understanding of human existence as it comes to the nature of life & death, and the dynamics of how that arises in particular expressions of suffering as a facet of common human experience in struggling with the mind-body duality when trying to understand the meaning of your sadness and pain when someone you love dies, and what your mind is attempting to process when it comes to purpose, destiny, free will, and helplessness. (I had 1 close friend die unexpectedly before I published the previous article, and two more of my friends have died unexpectedly since then. So it's also been an interesting examination of those ideas since I spend a lot of time experiencing the facets of those natural emotions as you go through it, so it's been an interestingly cathartic examination of those ideas and how/why I think about things the way I do related to all the stories about dealing with this that I grew up with).
But yeah. That's why I've been bouncing in periodically with little "You're on the right track, but I have not yet managed to condense why into a form that's consumable, but just trust me on this one." in the Ultimania thread and whatnot, but in general am very quiet overall. This has honestly been just... one of the most extremely energy-filling things that I've done probably in ever. I've been stitching together things about media that I've been consuming most of my life, and finding out a TON along the way.
Like... did you know that there's an entire thematic storyline that's represented in Final Fantasy VII with just how it uses dragons? Designers are really interesting, because they hide things everywhere and adhere to a VERY rigid consistence whose purpose is to be intrinsically felt & understood without ever relying on anyone speaking that language. So, becoming fluent in that design language has been endlessly fascinating.
X
This isn't even remotely related to any of those things insofar as I'm aware.