[SPOILERS] Am I The Only One Pissed About This?

[OWA-2]

Adding the Watchers of Fate to this remake, is like adding aliens to a remake of God of War. It's so friggin stupid and nonsensical! And the worst part, is that they seem to be very important to the overall story(of this, and future games).

FFVII's world is already complex enough, with it's cycle of souls that keep the planet alive and sentient, it's ancient inhabitants who could speak with the planet itself, an alien parasite/virus that tried to infect/destroy everything a long time ago, and an evil corporation rulling the world and doing unethical genetic experimentation. Isn't that enough?? Why add "changing destiny" to all of this?? Wasn't the original story convoluted enough??

Not to mention the two concepts of "a predetermined future that can be changed" and "a river of souls that keeps the planet alive" are nothing alike! How are they going to do a non-convoluted and coherent story, by foccusing in such different(and complex) concepts, in the same story?

Rant over.

 

[oty]

I really dont know. I suspect that there is a high chance their addition might not bring anything of fruition to the Remake, but may well also not bring down the overall quality of the game as much as it seems. We can only determine that upon the game's release and we analyze them with such context. I feel like many things were added to the continuity of the Original with the release of the many Compilation titles, that a lot of times are minor nuisances. Hell, if these Watchers bring up some cool cutscenes and gameplay variations, the fun could certainly outweigh their bogging of the story. I would be down for that.

 

[Makoeyes987]

It's convoluted, but not really in the grand scheme of things.

The fact is, with the Remake being broken into pieces, it necessitates something to fill in the resulting plot chasm, which fleshes out the beginning portion as a full game that lays out stakes but also leaves the totality of the overarching plot to be uncovered in later portions. The game needs some sort of "padding" which hints at the global stake of the plot but also leaves the main notable plot thread to be extrapolated further later on.

Remember, this is the beginning portion of Midgar. The lay out of what the Lifestream is, Meteor, Holy, the Cetra, etc doesn't even get mentioned until Cosmo Canyon and then Temple of the Ancients. Sephiroth does not fully appear at all until the Cargo Ship to Junon.

This means something had to change and S-E weren't going to simply omit Sephiroth, his scheme, and leave it as Shinra to carry the antagonist role.

So, it's been tweaked. Sephiroth's role and nature as a villain is shown up front and they are leaning in heavily on him working towards godhood. He's usurping the planet's system to control its fate, and making the planet choose the fate he lays out for it. Because he's corrupting the Planet. His will now becomes the planet's will.

It's convoluted in the sense that we have another layer to the entire premise of the living planet. But it's not out of step with its lore at all. Between Weapon, Holy, Omega and Minerva, there's no surprise or doubt that the planet has a will and means of protecting itself and furthering its own existence. These Whispers are another system working towards that end.

It just so happens it now belongs to Sephiroth.

And now there's zero confusion as to who is puppeting whom. Sephiroth is being shown 100% at the jump as being in control. Theorizing if Jenova is in control is now not even necessary. If anything, that makes understanding the plot clearer. New players who have not played the OG will not go in confused about whether Jenova broke itself out by its own cognizance or if Sephiroth is puppeting the alien monster from the Northern Crater. It's simply showing that Sephiroth is the mastermind. That is easier to grasp and understand.

 

[Cannon_Fodder]

Short answer: it's too early to tell for me. They might be awful, they might not be so bad.

Long answer: If I think of them as the cost of having the remake in the first place, I don't really mind them at all. I can't speak for Nomura, Kitase, or Nojima, but the idea of listening to fan demands for a remake for 23 years (and then actually making said remake) sounds like a nightmare to me. I get the desire from a fan's perspective--FFVII is special in a lot of ways--but when I think of it from a creator's perspective I don't blame them for never wanting to touch the main story again. That said, they seem really engaged with the Remake now, and part of that is the Watcher's of Fate. If the rest of the game looked bad, some stupid ghosts might bug me more. But since almost everything else looks great, I can't get worked up about them--especially when I haven't seen their role in the story for myself yet.

 

[Suzaku]

Seems to me that people are blowing them way out of proportion. They're just another of the planet's antibodies to be used as recurring enemies for the sake of some extra tension and fights. I don't really see the Whispers as being fundamentally different from the Weapons (hell, they're even named after colors), and I certainly don't see how they detract from the story, especially at this early point in the saga where the game's overarching themes and main narrative thrust haven't really been introduced yet.

If anything, I suspect they'll be used as a sort of springboard to introduce and contextualize the more macro scale cosmological concepts that are presented later in the game. In that sense, I feel like it's a way they can make this Midgar episode a bit more representative of FFVII's narrative as a whole. And I see the earlier emphasis on Sephiroth and Cloud and the Wutai propaganda from Shinra as fulfilling a similar purpose, by showing that this isn't all as simple as eco-terrorsts fighting a corrupt electric power company, which is really what the original game was about before you left Midgar and the exposition dumps in Kalm and Cosmo Canyon fleshed things out.

 

[Odysseus]

Alright, while I don't know as much as some of you do since I haven't looked at the leaked materials at all (being in this thread may not be wise on my part,) from what I've gathered, the watchers of fate basically serve as a way to keep ol' Sephman more heavily integrated into the story now that its been broken up into parts. I don't really think that's ideal, and I'm not fond of introducing the concept of "fate" into things, at the end of the day something like this was pretty much inevitable. Sephiroth's "felt more than seen" implementation in the original was very effective then, but having the primary antagonist be barely involved until as late as potentially the third part of the Remake would be stupid. If the fix for that is to have some spooky ghosts controlled by Sephiroth occasionally harass or otherwise manipulate the party, then so be it. As long as the story is still well told, an added layer of convolution shouldn't matter all that much, and I doubt Square changed something so drastically without due consideration on a project as major as this one.

 

[Eerie]

Someone mentioned this interview in the FFVIIRemake reddit, and I think it's spot on for a lot of things we're going to see:

Kazushige Nojima: “In Final Fantasy VII Remake, there will be much less room for player imagination. This fact will probably change the feel of the story considerably. People who know the original might not know quite how to take it. Such is the fear that I have. But I also have conviction. It should be possible to feel a much deeper connection to Cloud as you join alongside him. It would be amazing if you could feel that fiery flame together with him.”​

I have seen people complaining that Nojima's writing lately was very blunt, but I feel that more than blunt, it's that the game takes you to somewhere (Midgard in this case) that is fully showned, and the dialogs and plot reflect that. There is little left to the player's imagination anymore, because the game is much more realistic now.

So the whispers to me are the embodiment of that; they serve narratively to make you understand that the planet has its own will, which is important to see in the first game, but we can't really touch what's going to be shown in later games, so they're a "fitting addition" (maybe not fitting enough for some, maybe enough for others, we have to see how it's done). Same for Sephiroth, they had to show him in the first game because he's that important to the game and lore.

 

[Lex]

There's no way to know until we play the game tbh. I do already feel a kind of "why did they have to add this" but I feel like we need to reserve judgement until we've had a chance to see how they actually impact the plot.

Though right now I am kind of holding them to an unfulfillable catch-22 with the following:

1. Do not change the plot in a major way
2. If these things don't change or impact the plot, they should never have been added

I will logically have to change my mind on one of those points, and I can only do that after playing the game. My end result will either be "they changed the plot too much" or "the guardians of fate shouldn't have been added", I think.

EDIT: I will just say aswell that we don't know anything more from the spoilers than how these things have already been described in press interviews, because they gave the same description a long time ago.

 

[oty]

Honestly, as long as they are not over-used and the scenes with/about them arent filled with corny dialogue, I wont really mind their addition. I would say even our beloved Genesis wouldnt have crashed it's landing if we didnt feel like he was just "nagging" in a lot of moments with his cringey dialogue. On another note, as a visual concept, I think they are pretty okay. It can even become an interesting change of dynamic. I could even say the same thing about Roche.