SPOILERS Split-off FFVII/FFX Connection Discussion

[The Twilight Mexican]

....Just as long as Cloud doesn't get his head blown off kicking whacking ...

I mean, the whole point of getting his head blown is so he doesn't have to do any whacking.

 

[Obsidian Fire]

I think why this feels so... bad... is that there are other FF games that do have aliens hopping around between planets and causing problems for those planets. However, most of those games also have natives of the planet the villains are from chasing those villains down or having plans to deal with them on the new planet. FFV and FFIX come to mind (and FFXIV). So there's at least a representation that not all aliens are bad or are trying to take advantage of coming to a new world, but are also trying to help it in some way.

Here, it's very much one sided. It's very easy to argue that a lot of grief would have been saved if FFX Shinra simply hadn't landed on the FFVII world. Or Jenova for that matter. And no one from either of those planets has ever shown up to actually help the FFVII world.

All that said... I think the Cetra were... a lot more "normal" then most people think they were. We have a "City" of the Ancients after all and Ifana talks about there being more then one Cetra tribe Jenova went after. In the City of the Anchients we see mystical things that function like video cameras and projectors. At one point, it's like we step into a security booth to re-watch previously recorded footage of an event. Getting into the City of Ancients itself requires manipulating the forest surrounding it to let people through. The Temple of the Ancients is similar. Getting into it requires a pretty sophisticated key and once people are in there, the place is filled with traps and things. And then there's the bonkers crazy thing going on with shrinking the Temple down into a Materia of all things. (The Banora Underground also has similar things going on in it...) I'd say we have enough evidence for the Ancients having technology of their own that is... very different from how the rest of the world would develop technology in 2,000 years. And none of that tech seems like it's a result of the Cetra "settling down" or anything.

Thing is... that's all Cetra tech. We don't really see any "old" Al Bhed-esque tech unless you want to argue that "modern" tech is Al Bhed tech. And pretty much all that tech is linked to Shin-Ra. The only thing is... Shin-Ra as a company hasn't been around very long. Nor has Mako energy as a concept. As bad as the implications are, it causes a lot less lore issues if the Shinra (or his decedents) from FFX got to the FFVII world very recently rather then a very long time ago. Because the Shinra company itself is a rather recent new-comer to the FFVII world. At least if you want to have the Shinra family actually be descended from FFX Shinra...

I have a pretty hard time seeing info from the FFX world surviving for a long period of time in the FFVII world. We don't see a lot of old stuff the feels like it's that much older then Shin-Ra is. Even if Shinra and the Al Bhed had arrived to the FFVII world a long time ago and their stuff had survived, I don't see it actually being "Shinra's decedents" that would have to find it. It could just as easily be some random kid who finds a bunch of old files and decides that they sound like a good idea. I have an easier time believing the Al Bhed were swallowed up genetically in the existing population only for their stuff to be found later.

And where's the undermining? It's simply a utilization of ancient technology with newly found resources. A marriage of the two. How does that undermine Cid's abilities? If anything, that's a testament to Cid's engineering prowess to get lost technology up and running. This is a trait Cids have been doing since FFV, after all.

It depends on the Cid in question. FFVII Cid never struck me as being a crazy good engineer. He maintains the Tiny Bronco, an out of date airplane and... not much else (at least in the OG). He's a pilot and an astronaut, not the one designing the rockets and planes. Heck, Shera is a better engineer then he is! She was the one working on the actual rocket engine up until it launched!

The thing with the new airship in DoC makes me think he figured out what all the buttons in the cockpit did and doesn't understand how the actual airship works. And like... the important part isn't even how the airship works, it's figuring out how the power generator of the airship works that would be the real prize, and he doesn't know that because it's literally a "black box" machine...

 

[Odysseus]

I've been thinking, it would work better if ffx shinra actually arrived on 7's world relatively recently, not in the past. One thing that's always stuck out to me is how primitive the world outside midgar is. It's like this big cyberpunk city just plopped itself into the middle of a relatively low tech world. What if that aberration was because this lone Spiran scientist found this world and set up shop, bringing all of this out of time technology along with. He could be Shinra sr.'s father, and Rufus' grandfather. That'd explain why the shinra family is still all blonde, the genetics haven't diluted at all, they just lost they eyes. It'd also explain the lack of any technology from the past (dirge airship aside.)

I dunno. That probably isn't true. But it makes the most sense to me if I have to accept this.

 

[oty]

I mean, giving that they have been going through some change of mind multiple times, which they have, then it's literally the definition of inconsistent. Aonuma and Myamoto literally put out a book where one of it's main points was finally confirming and detailing the timeline of it's games. And there are no interviews after it where they backtrack that. Not that I'm aware of. The only one I saw was that BotW had "no place in the timeline".

It's clear that this connection is in a weird place right now. We are quite literally in the pre-"Hyrule Historia" period of FFVII-FFX connection, and just as it was for the Zelda community back in the day, I think it still remains as a theory. A Game The-

 

[ForceStealer]

I used to love watching and reading theories about the Zelda timeline. The Hyrule Historia made it all so boring.

 

[oty]

Funny enough, that was their approach to BotW. The reason that they didnt confirm it's place in the timeline is so that the theories can still run around.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Thing is... that's all Cetra tech. We don't really see any "old" Al Bhed-esque tech unless you want to argue that "modern" tech is Al Bhed tech. And pretty much all that tech is linked to Shin-Ra. The only thing is... Shin-Ra as a company hasn't been around very long. Nor has Mako energy as a concept.

This raises a worthwhile question. We don't actually know when Shin-Ra Works was established, only when they developed the mako refinement process and when they renamed/moved the company.

I got to pondering this just now: Now that we know President Shinra is 67, we also know that he was only 19 when mako refinement was properly developed 48 years earlier. It seems ... unlikely ... that he would have founded a weapons company himself, established it to any significant degree, and then built all of this up himself from an age much younger than 19. It seems more likely that Shin-Ra Works was a family-owned company he revolutionized.

 

[Odysseus]

Do you think I actually had something with my "Shinra came to FF7's world more recently" theory. Maybe not the president's dad, but still relatively sooner than over 2000 years ago.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Do you think I actually had something with my "Shinra came to FF7's world more recently" theory. Maybe not the president's dad, but still relatively sooner than over 2000 years ago.

It's possible, of course. To me, though, it seems like it would add some unnecessary complications.

We would still need to explain the (clearly non-Cetra) ancient airship technology, as well as the loss of the Al Bhed's means of interstellar travel. Assigning the latter to Jenova and the former to the Al Bhed just strikes me as elegant explanations: they're simple and practically write themselves.

 

[Odysseus]

The problem an inflated timescale creates for me is that, why would it take so long for mako technology to come about then? It seems like, despite FFX's shinra having the idea, the technological ambitions of the Al Behd had been completely forgotten. Mako is something the president came up with all on his own millennia later, rendering the connection moot. My idea does leave the holes you mentioned open though. I don't think there's a perfect answer here.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Well, why did it take so long for humans to get airplanes right? The idea was there a really long time ago, along with the research. It just wasn't the only thing on most inventors'/engineers' minds, and it wasn't quite perfected until ... well, until it was.

After the fact, of course, it seems positively mundane.

 

[Theozilla]

Well, why did it take so long for humans to get airplanes right? The idea was there a really long time ago, along with the research. It just wasn't the only thing on most inventors'/engineers' minds, and it wasn't quite perfected until ... unitl it was.

After the fact, of course, it seems positively mundane.

Yeah, multiple inventions have been lost and “reinvented” across multiple cultures throughout time even in the real world. Various forms of agricultural and plumbing techniques being such examples.
Especially if Jenova devastated society in general not just the Cetra (albeit they had the worst of it), same with Sin was to Machina in Spira.

Or to take FFXIV for example, it’s in-universe history had an ancient Empire (Allag) that had magitek that could bend time and space. FF using the “lost advanced technology” trope to its extreme is a staple of the franchise.

 

[Odysseus]

Yeah that is true. It would be interesting to get a story of president shinra in his youth discovering some ancient (as in really old) documents from his long dead Al Behd ancestors that spark the idea for mako energy, among other things. Maybe he found it near whatever place Cid dug up that ship.

 

[ForceStealer]

FF using the “lost advanced technology” trope to its extreme is a staple of the franchise.

But it was never really in VII, I don't think it really benefits from having it stapled in.

 

[Obsidian Fire]

Yeah, multiple inventions have been lost and “reinvented” across multiple cultures throughout time even in the real world. Various forms of agricultural and plumbing techniques being such examples.
Especially if Jenova devastated society in general not just the Cetra (albeit they had the worst of it), same with Sin was to Machina in Spira.

Or to take FFXIV for example, it’s in-universe history had an ancient Empire (Allag) that had magitek that could bend time and space. FF using the “lost advanced technology” trope to its extreme is a staple of the franchise.

The FFXIV world honestly has it worse then the FF7 world does when it comes to "lost technology". Every few thousand years or so, a Calamity happens that more or less hard resets society and culture. So every few thousand years or so, everything has to be reinvented from scratch. The end of the Allagan empire coincides with one such event (Calamity of Earth. And there was still another two Calamities in the five thousand years between the end of the Allagan Empire and when FFXIV starts (Calamity of Ice and Calamity of Water). So... that's like... one Calamity every 1,500 years or so since the fall of Allag...

As for Allag itself... It was so old, it was thought to be a legend and not something that actually existed (granted, the people who came after Allag purposely destoryed most of it as they thought it was what caused the Calamity of Earth). It took someone devoting their entire life to proving Allag existed for the technology to be found in the first place and for people to realize Allag had ever existed. And the... impact of Allagan technology being found... has largely been rather negative overall, as the Allagans put Shin-Ra in the dust when it comes to dangerous technology and ideas that really shouldn't be messed with.

The other issue is that Allagan tech was heavily... accelerated by the discovery of Omega. Which in the FFXIV world is an alien robot that more or less crashed onto the world of FFXIV by accident... Nothing in the FFXIV world ever managed to get back to the level of Allag either. Anything that is on the level of Allag... is based on rediscovered Allagn technology. There's a reason "it's Allag's fault" is often joked to be an explanation whenever any super powerful peice of destructive magic or technology is found. The majority of the time, it turns out that is really the case!

Spoiler: Shadowbringers Spoilers

Of course, the biggest difference when it comes to FFXIV's "lost technology" is that all the Calamities are the work of the Ascians who are the "orriginal" Ancients of the FFXIV world. And who are Tempered by Zodiark. They can do things with Creation Magic that blow anything Allag did out of the water! And they've been manipulating... pretty much all the major civilizations of the FFXIV world for the last 20,000 years. Including Allag. So most of Allaga "high tech" is probably based on Ancient tech and was nudged along in the hope that a Calamity would eventually happen.

It would be as if Jenova brainwashed several Cetra when she first came to the Northern Crater and while Jenova was sealed, those Cetra went around spreading Jenova's influence and making sure technology never got very far before it was all destroyed and had to be reinvented again... all while working towards undoing the seal on Jenova.

 

[Theozilla]

But it was never really in VII, I don't think it really benefits from having it stapled in.

Eh, I feel like the Cetra in the OG, particularly the magitek in the Forgotten Capital, still counts as that trope though, even if it’s not as extreme, as the Spira connection and other FF examples.

Anyways, my overall point though is that said trope is common in FF in general, so it shouldn’t be that surprising that it would be added (more) to the FFVII lore.

As for whether or not it’s a “benefit”, that’s largely a subjective individual opinion I think. Personally I like the FFX-2/FFVII connection, regardless of how significant or insignificant it may be.

 

[ForceStealer]

Everything in the Forgotten Capitol looked a lot more like straight up magic than magitek.