Also with Zack's power level or whatever you all want to call it, he doesn't get one-shotted by Sephiroth, he has an entire battle with him in the depths of the Mako reactor before failing to take him down.
As I said - that does not happen in CC. That is entirely a ret-con of the CC that is a part of the power-level inflation I am objecting to begin with.
Don't really understand why that and the horde of MPs Zack faces is a bad thing, more so in the OG Zack was just a side character and they didn't need to show an entire army after him. But now with the release of CC, that scene in Part 2 or 3 of the Remake will for sure be changed.
It's a bad thing the same way the final fight between Sephiroth and Cloud in AC is a bad thing, and the fight on top of Junon between Sephiroth, Genesis and Angeal is a bad thing.
It's retrograde all-flash-no-substance DBZ battle choreography that's made entirely for the purpose of impressing people who're literally just looking for that and not much else with no concern for how that sort of power impacts the consistency of the lore.
As I said - how does scenes like Cloud and Co getting cornered in an elevator by the Turks make sense if Cloud can literally cut the elevator to ribbons and run up the entire building if he wanted to?
How does raging Sephiroth bashing his sword against the tanks in the reactor make sense if he can casually cut to pieces the Junon canon?
It's thoughtless and dumb to write super-human characters if you're writing a plot with specifics that demand that your characters specifically are
not super-human to be troubled by the conflicts you pit them against.
Sure, Cloud doing triple back-flips, zero-gravity acrobatic fighting etc. looks visually pleasing.
It is however completely dumb from a plot-writing perspective.
AC and CC introduces this into the narrative of the FFVII, more so that it already was (in the original it was largely limited to the actual battles, which are abstractions to begin with, and Cloud surviving a couple of falls), and that to my mind, is minus to the franchise.
i disagree. the brief combat in zack's scenes could easily be taken to indicate a fight, and was only as brief as it was because it would completely ruin the scenes in the OG if the player had to wait for fifteen minutes of offscreen combat to finish. Either interpretation works, i think. Either option is valid, and it's a matter of taste which you personally. i actually do think the combat is over the top, for what it's worth, i just don't think that is inherently inconsistent with the og. cloud makes death defying leaps all over the place.
This ignoring the fact that for Cloud to have the memory of Sephiroth revealing Jenova, and Zack squaring off against him he either had to have seen it, or have gotten that memory from Zack through the Jenova Cells which means that the fight would not have had to been off-screen to begin with.
Indeed that there is no reason why it wasn't there except that it didn't happen.
The fact of the matter though is that in the actual memory fix scene Zack is shown to be thrown back out of the chamber merely seconds after he went in, which does not give him time to have a prolonged fight with Sephiroth.
Occam's Razor here. If we have to choose one scenario, why would you pick the one that forces you to imagine that there was a sudden time-skip in in that scene rather than it being exactly what it is - Zack running into the chamber, and getting his ass kicked back out pretty much the moment Sephiroth takes notice of him?
Twilight does make a good case though, that it would have to have lasted at least slightly longer, and this would indeed probably be because it would not be any point showing the player that scene one more time when they've already seen it.
However, that would also indicated that there was nothing new to that scene to show, since there are clearly other scenes that the game bothers to repeat.
Moving on though - Cloud is shown to do some impressive jumps at times, but they hardly come close to the jumps he does in the compilation - not even by a long shot.
Moreover the jumping ability of Cloud is closely mirrored by non-Soldier NPCs, like Aerith - so while it certainly reasonable to assume that Cloud would be agile and strong beyond normal people, I don't think it's anywhere implied that Cloud and Co in the original fought like what they where later portrayed to fight like in the compilation.
I think this is a ret-con formed after the release of the movie trilogy The Matrix and the world-wide super-effect that movie had on action cinematography after that point.
It's pretty obvious when you consider the kind of fighting seen later in FFVIII's intro sequence between Squall and Seifer (which was directed and designed by the exact same people as VII) was pretty down to earth despite the fact that the technology at that time in terms of FMV production could easily have allowed for more over-the-top action if they had been so inclined.
FFVIII provides almost the exact same over-the-top dramatic in-game battles as VII, and also like VII, it provides more down to earth less over the top action in the field scenes.
I think it's more reasonable by far to think that the level of action envisioned here is what they creatively worked with at the time - the limit of their imagination of you will, or simply stylistic preference - and that if they had made a movie around that time the combat would look more like that of FFVIII's cut-scenes, than that of Advent Children.
did you see my links to the 1st class soldier enemy in the game? That was what i was referring to as the average template for a soldier first, an enemy which has 5,000 HP..
Which is a moot point. I ignored it because if you remember, that HP count is higher than Sephiroth's in the flash-back (which is in the mid 3000s), which means that if you were to read the stats literally at this point, ordinary 1st Class SOLDIERs would be stronger than Sephiroth - which makes no sense.
That's why I specifically said, and said again, that my point was not that you should read the stats literally.
I'm saying that they were picked in that specific way to play together with the theme of the narrative - which would be Sephiroth's strength relative to Young Cloud's (who would be Zack at that point) strength. Adding that to everything else you get a Zack who is not a super-human capable of fighting a small horde of MPs.
i'm not sure why you'd use the stats in the flashback to indicate the average standard for a soldier first, as it's established that those memories are very confused and unreliable.
I've already explained why I used them.
Secondly, the memories are confused only in regards to what role Cloud played in them.
When Cloud fixes his memories, with the exception of which role he played, and the missing part, everything else is the same.
I don't know how that can be considered unreliable.
even the soldier 3rds you fight in the shinra building are far more powerful than cloud is in that flashback,
And if Sephiroth's stats where what they were in the flash-back he'd be way to weak too.
This is because the stats don't actually correspond to strength in the lore.
However, they do serve as an indicator as is apparent when they specifically made the choice to include battle scenes with Sephiroth in them to begin with.
This is done specifically to tell the player how strong he is, and the stats he is given is given specifically because they're likely to be far beyond those of the player's current stats outside of the flash-back.
This shows that although stats in plot-significant battles are still scaled to fit the flow of the natural stat-progression of the game, the stats are still used in part to convey plot-specific information.
In this case, it would be the strength gap between Sephiroth and Zack, which is later reinforced by how easily he is downed by Sephiroth, and him being killed by a small troop of Shinra MPs.
if they were all that weak, soldier couldn't be effective as an elite unit.
This is ridiculous, and I know some people here will consider this a rude sentiment - but here goes -
that's a typical perspective of someone who's grown up watching too much action media, and doesn't have enough experience with real violence.
A person being able to down 2 other people in hand-to-hand combat is an amazing feat in and of itself - 3 or 4 even more so.
A person armed with a sword killing 3 people armed with machine-guns is in and of itself a super-unrealistic scenario unless we're talking about 3 people trapped in a cramped pitch-black room, with a guy wielding a sword while wearing night-vision.
If SOLDIER is a group of people wielding swords that can take out even 3 guys with machine-guns under
ordinary circumstances (good lighting, favorable weather conditions, straight terrain etc. which would be in favor of the gunman more than the swordsman), that would make them an extremely lethal fighting force.
And when you consider Zack being weakened by what happened to him in that lab,
having him even put up a fight using only a sword against 6 people armed with machine-guns would make him a beast in comparison to every single human being on planet earth.
So no, I can't grant that point and I have to say that I have no idea what it's like to look at an equation where a person with a sword kills three people with machine-guns and then dies getting shot in the back by two more and then conclude that this is undramatic or that he is under-powered in any conceivable way.
This is where, as a person who's grown up with, and worked with violence I think I'm entitled to be a bit crass and say that people really need to consider their perspectives a bit more on this issue.
The fact that some people here find the original death of Zack to be somehow lacking just goes to show how much damage over-dramatic Matrix-esque combat does to people's perspective on drama in violence.
Even Zack's "lackluster performance" in his original death is an inhuman feat that only a person in a fantasy story could ever pull off - and as such it is not inconsistent with the concept of SOLDIERs being enhanced far beyond the performance of ordinary humans.
being oneshot in itself doesn't make you significantly weaker, it just means that the other character got in the attack first. realistic swordfights are often over in seconds even between very skilled individuals.
1.) Sword-fights usually last very shorty regardless of whether you have skilled opponents fighting or not. This is because sword-fights, when people actually start swinging at each other, take place within the secondary tier of reactionary gap, which means that more often than not, a committed strike at your body will come for you at a distance where your brain cannot actually respond and tell you to react before the blow hits you - which makes most fights with blades - swords or knives not withstanding - something that devolves into seconds-worth of fighting once the two or more combatants actually close the gap to strike at each-other.
The thing that takes time in exchanges with blades is the constant shuffling back and forth adjusting the spacing so that, hopefully, you can put yourself in reach to attack, the moment the other guy is in mid-movement and not yet committed to cut or thrust at you in return.
2.) This is clearly not how sword-fighting works in the compilation of FFVII.
If you're trying to make the argument that FFVII's Zack/Sephiroth encounter doesn't demonstrate that Zack is weaker than Sephiroth because it's keeping to realistic sword-fighting standards, then you're defeating your own argument, because the compilation clearly isn't keeping to realistic sword-fighting
so that would be another place where the compilation and the OG differs.
It's a lose/lose argument - either sword-fighting in FFVII is unrealistic to the point that wins and loses are determined by base-strength and Zack is nowhere near Sephiroth's tier, or FFVII's fighting is supposed to be realistic, and therefore completely inconsistent with the compilation fighting.
sure. but if it's just the materia, what's the point of having mako enhanced soldiers?
I did not say it's just the Materia. I said that Materia is a large part of it.
A person with a sword killing
just one person with a gun, without magic, under ordinary circumstances (not from up close, while having the jump on the gunman) would still require some serious human enhancement.
I see nothing unreasonable about imagining a SOLDIER needing both Mako enhancement and materia to be able to fight multiple opponents with guns.
That's perfectly reasonable.
you could argue that the only reason the og was lower key was that they didn't have the graphics to portray it.?
No you couldn't, because they already had the graphics to portray it, as is apparent by the animations used battle scenes and the models used in the FMVs.
If they wanted to make a scene with Zack or Cloud doing triple back-flips with spinning cuts they could have.
By the time of FFVIII, they certainly could have upped battle-choreography in FMVs if that's what they wanted, or what they imagined Final Fantasy battles to look like.
No, the answer here is pretty simple - the kind of battle choreography you find in AC and CC was not common in most fiction prior to the release of The Matrix.
Sure, over the top anime existed, but it's choreography still tended to be crude and simplistic.
Even the movie Ghost in the Shell, which was a very big influence on the look of The Matrix, only has relatively simple, well-paced action scenes, with the occasional over-the-top moment to add spice to the over-all feel of the film.
This is what pre-Matrix choreography did right (and of course some still do). It recognized that the crazy stuff works best when it's paced, and laid out only on occasions as a treat after more straight-forward, low-key segments.
FFVII does this too, with its magic and limit break progression among other things.
FFVII doesn't need more glaringly obvious plot-holes, and believe me, it's going to be glaring if and when the Cloud that we see in the trailer for the remake, is held up in the elevator by Rude, or locked up in the prison cell after having cut to pieces countless of robots with bodies the size of three prison-cell doors.
That sort of stuff didn't bother me when I was a kid/young teen playing that acid-trip in lego-land version of FFVII with enemy models shaped like giant revolvers firing rockets, or dressing up as a woman wearing a bra I won from a squat contest.
I'm pretty sure it's going to bother me this time around, like it bothered me with every single compilation product.
But that's just me. If it doesn't bother you, it doesn't. I reserve the right to be bothered by it, and to identify what about it bothers me though.
Seriously though, that is actually enough time to have a bit of a backstory, as opposed to all the 14 year-old protagonists. FF probably trends a bit older than most anime JRPGs in general. And Cloud and Lightning (maybe Cecil?) are still the only protagonists with ages that are north of 20. Most of them are 17.
