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SPOILERS Remake's Shinra Experiments, Whispers, & Compilation Thematic Analysis

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Just pasting these quotes in here as a point of reference to jump back to.

I was in the mood. :monster: 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.
Seriously... this channel couldn't exist without the help of all the JP translators that do better than a machine translation because they know stuff about different languages.

Fun tidbits about DG and Tsivet design from here: https://thelifestream.net/lifestrea...irge-of-cerberus-interview-with-the-creators/

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. :awesomonster:

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.

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 :neo:
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Well hello there. It's now 2021. :mon:

I've been almost entirely absent on the forums, but I'm still writing and researching. Over the winter break period I'd been writing almost every day since I didn't have work, and was managing ~4k-5k words a day. I've been taking my friend through the original game as a part of it, and re-checking and referencing other things as I do, which has been hugely helpful. I've got a few other design/art books and Ultimania that have showed up over the last few days, so that's been keeping me actively assessing things. Also gotten into a lot more historical research for some of the current writing.

So, while my writeup is still primarily focusing on the things in this topic, the way that I've been able to have a better contextual approach at covering them has involved a lot more focus on other works and the philosophical and moral mythology of the storytelling, and use of particular symbolism in other Japanese media to help provide supporting context for the how and the why of their appearance as new elements in the game, while also showing that they're an extension of the same metaphors that the original game created, but with some updates to them that are a result of the last 30 years of storytelling on those subjects as well as the changes and stagnation of certain things in Japan that reflect on those ideas.

There're some big points of interest about the thematic storytelling purposes of things coming up (one of which is the final Evangelion film). A lot of my writing just in pure wordcount is just unloading detailed technical information out of my brain, so that I can get the cognitive bandwidth to pour over more things. The last several days, I've still been doing a lot of overview and research, but the writing focus has been on expanding some parts earlier when I can introduce multiple referential points of context at once, and then remove the individual tl;dr sections that I needed to make when piecing them together. (There are some sections about mythology references that also exist in a lot of anime/manga, and I have to get all of those out and written before I know how best to sort and summarize what references where and in which order).

But yeah. This is still my favourite thing I've worked on, and it's definitely getting better and more well-rounded by spending more time to dig at all the component pieces.

Additionally, once I've started to get to a point where it's finished, I've been contemplating how to break it down, and if I wanted to release it bit by bit, if I wanted to release the whole thing, and then sort of do little spotlights on different areas, etc. Dunno yet, but that's where my head is currently at.

:awesomonster:



X:neo:
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
I've been gawking at all the images you've uploaded while working on my own article, assuming those are yours. Looks intense lol.

Hahaha, oh yeah. They're definitely all mine. :awesomonster:

A not insignificant period of my time is also making all of the visual references not only to make it easier to reference the important bits (since I also hyperlink to everything imaginable in the text). I also do it to break things up, and I try to never go three paragraphs without some type of image to keep things centered. There're a lot of them I've needed to go back and refine, update, or split elements around from lately, so I was wondering if anybody'd been checking those out while writing the more recent articles. xDDD



X :neo:
 

waw

Pro Adventurer
Re: All Sefirot Design Stuff
X
:neo:

X, this is a bit of a dumb question but do we know for sure that Nomura, Kitase, etc are this aware of mysticism and including it? Is it something we're mapping on in post and just getting it to fit? In other words, is there any ultimania or interview stuff that clearly points to it? Has the Sefirot Cloak design been expounded on?

Lastly, is it possible to rip that design to get a very clear/flat view of it?
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
X, this is a bit of a dumb question but do we know for sure that Nomura, Kitase, etc are this aware of mysticism and including it? Is it something we're mapping on in post and just getting it to fit? In other words, is there any ultimania or interview stuff that clearly points to it? Has the Sefirot Cloak design been expounded on?

Lastly, is it possible to rip that design to get a very clear/flat view of it?

Firstly, while I do have a lot of detail and context input around the overall themes, that article is VERY speculative about the potential designs of Remake's symbol itself and how it might connect to those themes.

To my knowledge it's never mentioned in any interviews, as it's a bit of an odd question to bring up as there's really nothing too contextually specific to've brought up about it before this. That being said, it's definitely something that they're aware of because it's the source of Sephiroth's name, so it makes sense to be on the Sephiroth copies in Remake. The other parts of the article get into a lot more FFVII-specific terms that are derived from borrowed Judeo-Christian mysticism and mythology, so it'd be almost impossible to use all of those themes without an awareness of that. In addition to being an extremely prominent thing in the 80s, both the Kabbalist version as well as the one that's a bit more loosely connected to Christian Gnosticism is an extremely prominent staple in Japanese pop culture media during the mid-90s when FFVII was under development.

Suffice to say my current writing covers a much more extensive amount of surrounding context about other themes that helps to get a better sense of the perspectives that Japanese developers have towards the adopted concepts of a number of different western mythologies vis-a-vis how they're included and coded as a part of modern storytelling.

Also, the Remake Material Ultimania has a small flat image of it without interruption, but I haven't had the time to focus on revisiting any of that since.



X :neo:
 

Sephiroth Crescent

Way Ahead of the Plot
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)
Wild Arms (1996) missing. Doubtful they'd be influenced by that for FFVII due release timings, yet surprisingly has some stuff similar to FFVII.
Did you consider adding that game?
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Wild Arms (1996) missing. Doubtful they'd be influenced by that for FFVII due release timings, yet surprisingly has some stuff similar to FFVII.
Did you consider adding that game?

Aw, I love the hell out of Wild Arms. I drew a lot of inspiration from that game for an old D&D campaign of mine that I was running back when I was a kid. It doesn't have the same points of connections that I'm hitting and it's hard to really focus in on what things I've been selecting and why, since there's a certain amount of the pop-culture ecosystem that is just going to have natural cross-over with tropes just because that's part of the storytelling ecosystem, whereas there are others where certain details are direct references or they carry some particular usage of themes or elements that later titles and entries build upon.

I have added several other things since this list was made, though Wild Arms hasn't been among them thus far.

Also – I managed to get the entire original article to stop loading, so I now have a secondary backup and an offline backup, and I'm going back and checking out my outline structure again to see if there might be a way to start sub-dividing it up a bit, so that it's not just a massive chunk of content all in one piece. I've also hit some more classic important references which have just helped in streamlining and reinforcing a lot of points earlier than I thought I'd be able to. It's still a hell of a WIP though, and this is also why I'm glad that I just keep these as working drafts for months on end, because I've been able to make SO many pieces of it better just by spending a lot more time on research and detail.




X :neo:
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Well, god damn. I am glad that I already wrote thousands of words about both Deepground & Wutai, so that it'll be easy to just slide these new bits in to everything without being disrupted, and I can have more direct points of confirmation that are directly applicable to Remake. All of this is just absolutely spectacular.



X :neo:
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
So, it's really odd writing and then going back to research things that I've seen before with enough context to pick up new details about them. The most blissfully satisfying thing is that as I do more of that, it's making all of my points and observations more well-rounded and supported. There are points I was making originally that have become infinitely better than when I first approached them, because I've gotten to refine them from so many angles. Even if it feels like something that's been growing constantly, it's never really felt like scope creep once I got a handle of the context of what I wanted to really dig in on and what parts I really wanted to be able to emphasize.

Still not sure ultimately how I'll be presenting everything, but there are starting to be some better chronological breaks for getting it into better chunks of content. Overall, I'll have some time to work on getting that sorted and finding other moments to split things up once I eventually get it into a state that's publishable – which has a ways to go. While it's currently an unwieldly large living document, so that I can keep my head wrapped around all of it, I'm going to split up publishing it into indexed sections as individual pages – especially because it helps the document in being more searchable (something I learned from my last article).

Also, for context on the sort of scope and density of all this... as of last week, I've written over 200k words.

Still going well, and absorbing copious amounts of time, but just ever-so-satisfying.

So, to prevent this from being another totally cryptic rambling & since I'm not sure where to focus on talking about this thing, since I jump through content a lot as I link bits and pieces together – I'm curious if anyone has any questions they want to toss out on the topic that I can throw some ideas around at to get a sense of what's going on or maybe let me ramble a bit in a forum format.

:awesomonster:



X :neo:
 

ultima786

Pro Adventurer
AKA
ultima
So, it's really odd writing and then going back to research things that I've seen before with enough context to pick up new details about them. The most blissfully satisfying thing is that as I do more of that, it's making all of my points and observations more well-rounded and supported. There are points I was making originally that have become infinitely better than when I first approached them, because I've gotten to refine them from so many angles. Even if it feels like something that's been growing constantly, it's never really felt like scope creep once I got a handle of the context of what I wanted to really dig in on and what parts I really wanted to be able to emphasize.

Still not sure ultimately how I'll be presenting everything, but there are starting to be some better chronological breaks for getting it into better chunks of content. Overall, I'll have some time to work on getting that sorted and finding other moments to split things up once I eventually get it into a state that's publishable – which has a ways to go. While it's currently an unwieldly large living document, so that I can keep my head wrapped around all of it, I'm going to split up publishing it into indexed sections as individual pages – especially because it helps the document in being more searchable (something I learned from my last article).

Also, for context on the sort of scope and density of all this... as of last week, I've written over 200k words.

Still going well, and absorbing copious amounts of time, but just ever-so-satisfying.

So, to prevent this from being another totally cryptic rambling & since I'm not sure where to focus on talking about this thing, since I jump through content a lot as I link bits and pieces together – I'm curious if anyone has any questions they want to toss out on the topic that I can throw some ideas around at to get a sense of what's going on or maybe let me ramble a bit in a forum format.

:awesomonster:



X:neo:
Can you share what you've done so far?
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
As the Remake project has only released its first part, is a thematic analysis really possible? Or is some of this a sort of predictive analysis?

Totally! The thematic analysis is most heavily focused on the presentation of everything from the original Final Fantasy VII through the Compilation and into Remake. It's looking at which elements change, how those things relate to the concepts presented in the original, which nuances get emphasized differently and why, and how the visual presentation of those elements along with the story expansions serve to reinforce particular themes that have a synergistic relationship with other pop culture media in Japan that helps to shift perspectives and necessity around addressing particular nuances.

Essentially, it's the background around "WHY" we're getting new elements like the Whispers in Remake outside of just what they mean to the story, but in what makes their presence a meaningful element to the narrative now vs. the original, as well as how they're interconnected to the themes that the previous games have covered without changing things about them.

Can you share what you've done so far?

At its core, I started by looking at the new Experiments, & the Whispers.

That meant that I needed to spend some time breaking down the concepts that existed that float between the spiritual & physical in the original game, which is looking at the relationship between Holy & Meteor, because at its core, those are handling one of the most unbelievably complicated tasks in making the original game's story work for a Western audience. Yin=Yang but God>Satan.

So, this meant a REALLY heavy dive into Proto-Indo-European mythology to be able to track those themes, and help follow through when and how Final Fantasy VII matches which mythological themes, and how they connect those to elements of the game's story in ways that match to pieces of mythology in Buddhism & Hinduism, as well as a number of other traditions and concepts around things like Elements and other metaphysical concepts that would create a fantasy structure that would make sense universally. That gets into the Indra-Asura dynamic of the opposing forces where the roles of the divine & demonic but where you'd expect to see good & evil are instead flipped around. This is why we see things like Sephiroth as an antagonist not fitting into the "Luciferian fallen angel" role, since his angelic themes aren't taken away from him to make him wrathful, but rather they're something that he continually gains upon becoming a greater threat.

So when you're looking at themes that try to convey existential spiritual concepts about life & death as well as making people think about the fundamental concepts of life itself at a spiritual level, the Yin=Yang but God>Satan is a pretty big hurdle to try and get past. Luckily, they're not the first ones to the punch in that regard, as there are some big pieces of Japanese pop-culture media that manage to take Western spiritual themes and do a LOT to twist things around that forces you to think really hard about who's in the right AND who also share a number of design references with elements of Final Fantasy VII that makes it clear that they're well-known. Luckily, there are some of those who continue storytelling over the next ~30 years along with Final Fantasy VII going into the Compilation & Remake, so then it gets a little easier to have a wider set of references to look at and help focus around which existential concepts arise when, and what the current perspectives are on those things.

That all gets into how the scientific and spiritual stuff is interconnected to one another, where some of those gaps in spiritual concept get filled with close references from Western film & other media to bridge those connections. That helps in getting deeper back into the game's presentation of certain elements like what is the representative relationship of Genesis & Sephiroth, what are the themes that Nomura follows vis-a-vis Cloud & Sephiroth's relationship in things like Kingdom Hearts, where it's not canon, but it helps to emphasize what ideas are being explored with which characters and portrayed in what way.

Then that's enough to follow through the Compilation and help to set up cross-references to things like what stories were being told in NieR, and why Nomura would reference Mamono Particles when talking about the Whispers in Remake. That lead in to a more detailed dive on historical context for elements like Wutai in helping to look at it as a foil to Shinra and give more context to the new Experiments' visual design and elements specific to how they're portrayed in the Remake Material Ultimania. That then came to a REALLY deep dive into themes in storytelling that followed a set of certain ideas that are intrinsically interconnected to Japanese history (on the same level as the original Godzilla & the Lucky Dragon 5 incident), so then there's a lot of research and breaking down of which of those elements are well known to just reference and which things need more specific context to break down, and when and how to address those influences.

That let me get a bit deeper into the whole party of characters and break down more about how each of the characters in Final Fantasy VII represents not only a particular foil to Shinra, but they're also representing different types of struggles that come along with a number of different historical perspectives and cultural backgrounds to try and help to make the game one that's more international in its cast and is experiencing the issues in the game from a more global perspective, and what the different parts of the story reflects about them. That helps to reinforce ideas around when and how particular themes are being explored with what characters, which themes they tie into, and what all of those things represent in the ways that are understandable at this point in telling the story in Remake.



Essentially, there is a LOT of physical design and historical context around the new Experiments, and there's a ton of existential and historical context around why the concept of the Whispers are an important one to call out explicitly. Both of those are a really deep part of Cloud & Sephiroth's relationship to one another as the protagonist & antagonist, and how the game builds up those things to communicate particular feelings and ideas on an individual emotional, global environmental, and cosmic spiritual / existential level.

So... I kind of just started writing about literally all of it, and the more I do, the more Remake feels like it is exactly the same story as the original game, but being told to an audience who has had 30 years of examining deeper themes along those lines where certain elements need to be reinforced, or provided additional contextual weight to ensure that the ideas don't shift with how some of the themes and iconography have.



X :neo:
 

cold_spirit

he/him
AKA
Alex T
Also, for context on the sort of scope and density of all this... as of last week, I've written over 200k words.

So that's more words than in Dune or any single Lord of the Rings book. Not joking when I ask this, have you ever considered a Masters/PhD in literature? Because you're essentially writing a thesis paper. Graduate students do this same kind of cross-cultural research and their work ends up in academic journals.
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
So that's more words than in Dune or any single Lord of the Rings book. Not joking when I ask this, have you ever considered a Masters/PhD in literature? Because you're essentially writing a thesis paper. Graduate students do this same kind of cross-cultural research and their work ends up in academic journals.

Yeah, when I hit that word count, I actually looked up what books were that long to try and get a sense of what the scale of it all actually is, and Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows is like 198k, which sort of surprised me, because it still FEELS very small in my head when I'm going through it. I'd actually stopped calling it an article and started referring to it as my thesis a while back for that reason. :mon: I have considered other ways of compiling the information at some point, like eventually tossing it into a PDF format, but I'll see as I kept making my way on through it. Especially given the length and ways that I dissect various parts of things there are things outside of the scope of just this being what it is that I've had in mind. I'm actually going to commission an editor to assist me once I get closer to a final draft, since checking that sort of stuff isn't stuff that I'm any good at, and this is something where getting those bits done is worth my contribution to get it done properly.

I haven't ever really considered anything about literature study before now, as my interests are a bit difficult to pin down into a particular field of study, and they're more centered around passions and interests that are a bit field-agnostic. Like some of the stuff that I was really into studying and attending events for when I was very briefly in college were centered on chemical engineering with an emphasis on bio-mimetic design around how you make synthetic nano-scale material structures that mimic features found in nature, so that we can make improvements to technology by shortcutting the designs by looking at very small evolutionary efficiency features, like how certain black pigments on butterfly wings help them to absorb more light to produce heat because they can't consume enough sugars to maintain body heat efficiently that could be used for efficiency improvement on oxygen filters and solar panels. Generally, I really like topics that involve design elements where I can discuss and analyze content in the middle range by looking at things from a REALLY deep-down detail view, and then compare it against a really sky-high overview perspective to get a better sense of what they're about.

That's the sort of brain process that gets me into most of what I write about, and this one just happens to have a veritable treasure trove of stuff that comes along with it that's been amplified by the fact that I work with software designers, and also the particular media is stuff that I'm either intimately familiar with individually, or is stuff that I have a direct interest in consuming. There's... a part of working on this where I'd been thinking about using it as a way to demonstrate, "This is what I do and what I like doing – what can I do that's like this?" in thinking about a possible iteration along my current career path.


Would be fun to have it translated into japanese and sent over to Nojima and see his face when he looked at it.

I do think it'd be interesting if it ever did manage to get translated to see what some of the folk on the team think of it, even any of the English staff who might be inclined to check it out. Personally, I think that the most interesting thing is that I've been seeing a lot of things that I'm familiar with and picking up new details and contextual references that I've always known about but that hold a lot more information than they ever have before, and I look at a lot of narrative game design from Japanese titles from a very different perspective than I have before.




X :neo:
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Did we ever find out what the "Anomaly" was that Heidegger was talking about?

Insofar as I'm aware, this was just an issue in them testing with Airbuster working properly, because it's another of the Shinra prototypes. The way that they're using the word "anomaly" in quotes is because they're talking about something that was a failure in the testing, but they're trying to sell it more softly so that Heideggar doesn't just straight-up murder them.

Example A: "We ran the test and <specific thing> failed, so we're having to restart."
– Heideggar murders whoever was responsible for <specific thing> that went wrong.

Example B: "We ran the test and there as an anomaly, which didn't go according to the results, so we're restarting."
– Heideggar's mad but is saving his anger until there's a specific person to direct it at (unless the messenger is unlucky).

Essentially it's the same thing that happens in the Empire in Star Wars when one of the people screws up something that Darth Vader orders. There is specific control through fear when it comes to physical violence as a punishment for incompetence or ownership over shortcomings, and it's a central quality to Heideggar's character and also the psychological profile that he represents of multiple types of authoritarian abuse in the Shinra leadership. This is so that he stands out as compared to someone like Scarlett who's more focused on subjugation and humiliation, as while both make examples out of those below them, they use very different forms of fear-based psychological control as a motivator to those under their command.

Maybe the Japanese speakers can clarify! Is Cloud a jenova monster or were the whispers helping in the background or was the Crab Warden really Caith Sith?

....what? :huh: This isn't even remotely related to any of those things insofar as I'm aware.

I can go check the Japanese dialogue if needed, but this isn't even something that's ever been on my radar of a moment to look into before. Can you maybe give some more context behind why it would potentially be related to... any of those things?



X :neo:
 

ultima786

Pro Adventurer
AKA
ultima
Insofar as I'm aware, this was just an issue in them testing with Airbuster working properly, because it's another of the Shinra prototypes. The way that they're using the word "anomaly" in quotes is because they're talking about something that was a failure in the testing, but they're trying to sell it more softly so that Heideggar doesn't just straight-up murder them.

Example A: "We ran the test and <specific thing> failed, so we're having to restart."
– Heideggar murders whoever was responsible for <specific thing> that went wrong.

Example B: "We ran the test and there as an anomaly, which didn't go according to the results, so we're restarting."
– Heideggar's mad but is saving his anger until there's a specific person to direct it at (unless the messenger is unlucky).

Essentially it's the same thing that happens in the Empire in Star Wars when one of the people screws up something that Darth Vader orders. There is specific control through fear when it comes to physical violence as a punishment for incompetence or ownership over shortcomings, and it's a central quality to Heideggar's character and also the psychological profile that he represents of multiple types of authoritarian abuse in the Shinra leadership. This is so that he stands out as compared to someone like Scarlett who's more focused on subjugation and humiliation, as while both make examples out of those below them, they use very different forms of fear-based psychological control as a motivator to those under their command.



....what? :huh: This isn't even remotely related to any of those things insofar as I'm aware.

I can go check the Japanese dialogue if needed, but this isn't even something that's ever been on my radar of a moment to look into before. Can you maybe give some more context behind why it would potentially be related to... any of those things?



X:neo:
thanks for the reply in the anomaly stuff. Still a little vague, honestly. And I was joking about the last stuff; I’m aware that Cait Sith isn’t crab warden haha.
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
I've been busier than expected this week, so I haven't gotten quite as much as I've wanted done but I just need to say that I already love Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, literally just based on what you can tell from the trailer alone. It's difficult to overstate just how perfect the idea of bringing in Yuffie in to this point in the story and connecting them to Deepground is. Absolutely just love this even more the more time I get to dive into writing, and digging around at these themes.

It's all just a big exercise in really appreciating something and then gaining a totally new perspective to appreciate this and a mountain of other things that I've always loved, and hopefully that will come through but yes. Going well, and still lots to do!



X :neo:
 
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