(Tagged Remake Spoilers) OG Frustration Thread/Double Standards

[Rydeen]

Feel free to move this thread if you feel I've put it in an inappropriate location.

I wanted to post this thread as a companion to the Remake Frustration Thread. Many of us have been fans of this franchise for so long that we've immortalized the OG and ignore its faults and the ways in which it aged poorly, holding the remake to a double standard (myself included, at times). Not to mention, the graphical limitations and the lack of development of certain characters/arcs have resulted in staunch but disparate headcanons in much of the fanbase. The only people who really know how things were "supposed" to be, if anyone, are the original developers. I wanted to compile a list of things that annoy me about the OG (I still don't love it any less), and what I perceive to be improvements the remake made upon these blind spots.

• Biggest complaint: the combat aged very poorly. Although the materia system is still interesting, very little strategizing is required, and classing your characters is unnecessary. Random encounters and high rates thereof are intolerable to me now, to the point where I actually can't play these kinds of games anymore. The gameplay is simultaneously annoying and too easy. From this era, gameplay like that of Chrono Trigger and even FFVI have stood the test of time better. FFVII was not groundbreaking in this arena. FFVIIR's battle system is very unique, strategic, and quite challenging at times, and I expect it to stand tall as the years go by.

• Although the poor translation was very endearing/hilarious at times, it also resulted in OOC moments (eg. "Will you stop being a retard and climb!?") and instances where the dialog was more cryptic than it needed to be in an already cryptic game. The English "localization" team was one poor fellow.

• Regardless of what one thinks about the remake Shinra building,
  Spoiler

  it was handled in a much more believable (and I would argue funner) way in the remake.
  OG Shinra building and the dialog therein was very charming at times, but actually playing it was a bit of a slog to me, and the suspense of disbelief required was a bit of a stretch.

• The pacing/sidequests of the remake got under my skin tremendously, and while it was worse than the OG simply by virtue of being so expanded, it's not like the OG didn't have you taking detours to tediously breed chocobos while a meteor was raging in the skin. Worst sidequest in history.

• Sure, the ending was very jarring, but isn't also the fact that an ultimania was required to explain the convoluted (but still lovable) plot of the OG? When I think about it, this really isn't a "compilation" thing.

• It always irked me how there was never a flashback of Cloud and Zack interacting as normal.

• Spoiler: Plate Drop

  As someone who prefers the OG's plate drop, the remake spent way more time establishing a connection with the NPCs than the OG did. The characters were very much expendable to most people, unlike, say Remake Wedge, who seems to have died. This is me trying to play devil's advocate for the sake of the remake.

• OG President Shinra is a cartoonish villain. It's fine and perfectly realistic to have some of those, but almost everyone in Shinra is rather one dimensional. President Shinra, The Turks, and even Hojo are all way more nuanced in the compilation/remake, which makes them more compelling to me.

 

[Ite]

So wait, is this thread a free-for-all on stuff we don't like about FF7 OG, or is it specifically about things the Remake does *better*? I have two different lists

 

[Rydeen]

So wait, is this thread a free-for-all on stuff we don't like about FF7 OG, or is it specifically about things the Remake does *better*? I have two different lists

Whatever you want, I guess. I was leaning a little closer toward things that I didn't like about the OG specifically, but it's not like our threads aren't a low key free for all to begin with.

 

[Keveh Kins]

I have a love/hate relationship with the Great Glacier dungeon the OG, and the whole climb up Gaea's Cliff.

I love the idea of the party trekking across this wholly inhospitable environment, and I love Barret's little moment of reflection on how compared to it, Midgar doesn't seem so bad, but I also find it too long, a bit boring and annoying to play through with random encounters and dungeon layout.

I always go into total mindless apathy playing until I hit the Whirlwind Maze.

 

[Glaurung]

As I play the OG I also realize many of those things but, 23 years have gone by, and these last two decades have been a whole epoch in terms of narrative in videogames. The OG, despite the serious themes of death, murder and reincarnation, was at many points funny nonsense, and maybe cartoonish nonsense.

I could do without Fort Condor, though. The wireless gamepad I'm using to play on the tablet is not very... accurate when trying to point at things (bluetooth connection havig a bit of delay, I guess). Also, I'm dreading the Shinra Mansion safe. I'll never get Vinnie in this playthrough ;3;

Got no complains about the combat system, though.

 

[ForceStealer]

I have a love/hate relationship with the Great Glacier dungeon the OG, and the whole climb up Gaea's Cliff.

I love the idea of the party trekking across this wholly inhospitable environment, and I love Barret's little moment of reflection on how compared to it, Midgar doesn't seem so bad, but I also find it too long, a bit boring and annoying to play through with random encounters and dungeon layout.

I always go into total mindless apathy playing until I hit the Whirlwind Maze.

When I was younger it always required effort for me to continue a replay once I got to Great Glacier. Now I have my route pretty much set so it's not so bad anymore, but yeah, was never a fan. The Gaea Cliffs are a perfectly cromulent dungeon, but the glacier's a drag. (Which is part of my negative reaction when people complain about the "dissonance" of snowboarding after Aerith's death. You mean you want to get rid of the fun part, and make the worst dungeon in the game even longer?)

But this is a good summation of it's drag-iness in addition to the positive elements of it.

 

[Odysseus]

I'm not a fan of the original shinra building. The one room gimmick puzzles were fun exactly one time, and are just tedious every time after, especially the mini-midgar model you need to fix. I was not sad to see those go.

The original game had a problem with utilizing the characters post Midgar. It got very formulaic. Every party member would get their 15 minutes of spotlight at various points in the plot, and would otherwise mostly fade into the background. This is because you can conceivably have any combination of characters at any time (barring a few exceptions) so the character's unique quirks couldn't shine much due to the scenes always needing to happen the same way. I hope the remake addresses this going forward.

I also just generally think most of disk 1 past midgar is a little directionless, not enough emphasis given to the "hunting for Sephiroth" framing device. It ends up feeling very episodic and like not much is actually accomplished until the party inadvertently bumbles their way into hearing about the temple of the ancients and the keystone.

 

[ForceStealer]

I'm not a fan of the original shinra building. The one room gimmick puzzles were fun exactly one time, and are just tedious every time after, especially the mini-midgar model you need to fix. I was not sad to see those go.

I've always enjoyed the library puzzle, but yeah that Midgar model floor was quite dumb, lol.

 

[Odysseus]

I've always enjoyed the library puzzle, but yeah that Midgar model floor was incredibly dumb, lol.

Library puzzle actually changes each time, so it's at least a little more interesting than the others

 

[Theozilla]

It's ironic, even though I love the pokemon games (and random encounters are like an inherent element of its gameplay), if the mobile version (and later ports) of OG FFVII didn't have the added feature of toggling on/off random encounters, I might not have been able to get through it (though I was able to with DS FFIV and FFX HD and those don't have a random encounter toggle option, maybe those battles just loaded better/faster). Also I really didn't like not having a permanently visible enemy enemy health bar, definitely glad later FFs added those in as a staple element.

 

[looneymoon]

One aspect of the story I have difficulty reconciling as an adult: Cid. Specifically, his treatment of Shera.

He's a downright abusive prick, and I don't think the story does a good job of redeeming that later on. My values have changed from when I was a kid, where I just took him as a quirky old pilot who swears. I don't think every character has to be a beacon of morality, but I hate how a lot of it is played for laughs. I don't find it funny or charming at all anymore. I know this is pretty standard anime tropey stuff where the Yamato Nadeshiko character is all like "uwu I will gladly die to help my boss/husbando achieve his dream." But God... I hate that shit. So much.

I am sure this will be something that will be reworked once he's introduced, but it's definitely something that leaves a bad taste in my mouth in the OG.

 

[Theozilla]

One aspect of the story I have difficulty reconciling as an adult: Cid. Specifically, his treatment of Shera.

He's a downright abusive prick, and I don't think the story does a good job of redeeming that later on. My values have changed from when I was a kid, where I just took him as a quirky old pilot who swears. I don't think every character has to be a beacon of morality, but I hate how a lot of it is played for laughs. I don't find it funny or charming at all anymore. I know this is pretty standard anime tropey stuff where the Yamato Nadeshiko character is all like "uwu I will gladly die to help my boss/husbando achieve his dream." But God... I hate that shit. So much.

I am sure this will be something that will be reworked once he's introduced, but it's definitely something that leaves a bad taste in my mouth in the OG.

Oh definitely this so much, it's especially jarring when one is introduced to Cid in other media entries first and the "quirky grouchy old man" is your main impression. Actually learning about his subplot with Shera and then experiencing playing the OG, it's such subpar writing and just weird/nonsensical. I am definitely hoping and looking forward to that subplot being heavily rewritten in the Remake.

Also less of weird/bad taste writing, and more of a plothole the audience is supposed to ignore, is why Bugenhagen didn't just tell Nanaki about Seto before? Like as much as I love Nanaki's subplot and his revelation, the suspension of disbelief required to believe that Bugenhagen wasn't aware/didn't notice Nanaki's resentment of Seto before (at least how it's presented in the OG) and/or believed Nanaki wouldn't believe him without physical proof (since there's nothing to indicate Nanaki wouldn't trust his grandpa), really brings the engagement of enjoying the emotions of the subplot. Hope that gets improved in the Remake too.

 

[Rydeen]

Ah yes, Cid, forgot about him. His character arc did not age well at all. I used to like him a lot because he was entertaining, but then I realized that he was not a very likeable character (especially in the context of the highly sympathetic portrayal) beyond his one liners.

OG Nanaki never resonated with me. I felt like he was just background noise, got 15 minutes of fame, and was subsequently forgotten again. It felt a bit contrived to me. Based on the remake, I expect to enjoy his presence more this time.

 

[Lord Noctis]

I just went through the OG recently, and I think my biggest issue is that after you're first trip to the northern crater, the plot loses its sense of focus until almost the very end. Up to that point you were actively pursuing Sephiroth for most of the game. Then after the crater he throws up a big barrier and the party just kinda goes around and does stuff while they wait for said barrier to come down.

 

[Theozilla]

I just went through the OG recently, and I think my biggest issue is that after you're first trip to the northern crater, the plot loses its sense of focus until almost the very end. Up to that point you were actively pursuing Sephiroth for most of the game. Then after the crater he throws up a big barrier and the party just kinda goes around and does stuff while they wait for said barrier to come down.

Yeah everything that isn’t The Escape from Junon, Mideel/restoring Cloud’s identity, and the return to Midgar to defeat Hojo (and then subsequent Northern Crater climax), is all very unfocused. The Huge Materia questline is definitely the weaker parts of the narrative, and the in-game justification to try to sabotage Shinra’s sincere attempts to destroy Meteor is pretty weak. That is prime material for rewrites.

 

[Ite]

So, coming hot off the Super Nintendo, with the other video game pioneers being an anthropomorphic bandicoot who collects flying tomatoes, a 3d version of the mushroom-killing plumber who collects flying coins, and a child dragon with 90's 'tude who collects flying crystals, the bar was pretty low for "sense-making" in video games, and there was a general attitude of "I don't need to suspend my disbelief, because a video game wouldn't ask me to believe anything." Each FF title was a major brick in the road to modern video game story-cohesion, but with the exception of FFXII, I haven't seen the series completely shake off abstract nonsense.

So, a lot of the more unintentionally ridiculous stuff in the story only seems ridiculous in hindsight, like, the platedrop is a pretty stupid plan, it isn't well motivated, and is more about the impact it has on the characters and setting than being a natural act from a villain. But this game came out between Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, between Star Wars: The Special Edition and The Phantom Menace, and most importantly, before The Matrix raised the bar on sci-fi storytelling.

Out of context, though, holy shit does this story need an update, and not by adding time ghosts.

Spoiler: Stuff the Remake Fixed

- Poor Music Samples > Better Music Samples. The composition of the original score is lovely, but the PS1 soundboard sometimes sounds worse than SNES, especially when it comes to wind instruments (or maybe it's because I'm a wind instrument player, and so it stands out more?). Unlike the Distant Worlds arrangments, the Remake's soundtrack uses synths and rock elements in keeping with Uematsu's vision, while giving the real instruments a much needed sample update (an occasionally a live performance with a real instrument!) beautiful.

- Barret as a horrible charicature > Barret as a nuanced character. The Tim Roger's translation videos reveal that the blame for this lands squarely on the Sony translator. It wasn't really until I watched those videos that I found really anything too wrong with Barret -- after all, I know people who talk like him, and he's a popular character among black fans. I always found him to be more of a hick than a gangsta, with his coal miner background and family-man motivation. But the translation videos revealed to me what was lost from his original characterization, and I'm really glad to see that come through in the Remake. To westerners, Barret became nuanced during Act II, but in Midgar he's a cartoon. Very glad that's no longer the case.

- Carnival of Freaks > Andrea and life-affirmation. "True beauty is an expression of the heart, a thing without shame, to which notions of gender don't apply. Don't ever be afraid." Stand up and cheer. This scene will save lives.

- Aeris and Tifa as rivals > Aeris and Tifa as bffs. I think Remake lays it on a bit thick, but I can't say my inner poly person (and AerTi shipper) wasn't squeeing like a child whenever they interacted. Even if you never let those two out of your party in the OG, their interactions are so minimal you have to squint to see their friendship, relying mostly on the story you tell yourself by role-playing ("...and then Rapps cast Wind3 on Tifa, knocking her out, but then Aeris threw her a phoenix down followed up by Healing Wind! Tifa's so grateful, and ready to get back in there!"). I'm glad the Remake makes this more than just wishful thinking.

- Wedge as a fat joke > Wedge as a fat guy. Of course we still has a long way to go in terms of fat rep, but this is a step in the right direction. Instead of "everyone jumps through the fire and Wedge scorches his fat butt!" it becomes "Wedge jumps in the fray to distract the hounds and while he's leading them away, one of them bites his fat butt!" The latter makes him a hero character instead of just a punchline. With more Wedge content comes more fat jokes, sadly, but it also dilutes them with more character building, and until Ch. 12 Wedge was my dark horse favorite character of Remake. When his grappling hook breaks in Ch. 12 , I cried out in agony -- I was so with him. That was probably my last second of pure enjoyment of the Remake.

- 2 glimpses of the Plate from beneath > the Plate is an oppressive ceiling. Aside from the gorgeous, cinematic reveal of the slums (mysteriously absent from Remake) and the one screen where Cloud and Aeris are leaving the church, you never see the underside of the Plate in the OG. What a missed opportunity. I knew this would be remedied, and (aside from the wrong skybox in Chapter 8) I was not disappointed. One of the best gaming moments I've ever had was learning how to navigate Sector 7 using the Main Pillar as a visual landmark, and its omission from the OG is now irreversibly glaring.

- Tifa moves like a bimbo > Tifa moves like a prizefighter. Controlling Tifa on the field and in combat is incredibly fun in Remake. I could never take her OG field model seriously, her poses and walking/running animations were cringe af, I basically just ignored what the sprite was doing and used the dialogue to have an imaginary actor perform those lines in my head. The FMV tit-waggling from the international release of FF7 is also done away with. Jiggle physics are instead tastefully applied to her blue dress only.

 

[Keveh Kins]

Ooooh, the password for getting the huge materia in the rocket was such bullshit You have no opportunity to retrieve the password yourself in game, so it comes down to sheer dumb luck or else using a guide.

I sincerely hope, if it's included in the remake, there's some additional side quest to find the password. I wouldn't be at all opposed to it even just being on a random computer in Junon when you're escaping the execution. Just as simple as someone not locking their screen, it shows schematics for the rocker and Barret walks up, doesn't know what the hell it's for, and heads on.

Then later on, attentive players put it together and bang the password in.

Or something better than just trying to guess while Cid chats shite next to you

 

[youffie]

- Character interactions that don't include Cloud are very limited in the OG (I'm mostly talking about the main gang here). The range of this cast is huge though, and there's plenty of room for meaningful expansion. I also feel like the Compilation failed to deliver on this ("didn’t even try" would be a better way to put it), which is a waste of FFVII stellar cast; I mostly enjoyed what little that we got, though. I think the remake's chances of succeeding at this are pretty good, seeing as I loved what they did with it in this first part.

- The Huge Materia quests are always a big meh for me every time I replay. It just feels like the game is killing time since no one has got a clue on what to do and messing with Shinra is always a good idea (is it though? What Reeve's take on this even is??); some good ideas are sprinkled here and there, but they still do not live up to their potential (Barret possibly saving North Corel is optional and it's not even as rewarding as one would imagine when you do bring him along, for example).

I like that we can dog-nap the Shinra dog if we fail the submarine quest though, that whole optional segment is crazy stupid and doesn’t even try to make sense and I love it for that

- Not nearly enough Reeve in the OG; we get back to Midgar and we don’t even meet the guy??? Insane

- I think they could and should have done more with Gast. That fucked up mess that was the Jenova project started on his watch, and while we're told he felt bad for it, I'd like the characters and the game to acknowledge it more instead of repeating how awesome he was.

... I guess the Compilation soured my judgment on this though, since it does a far worse job than the OG by virtually erasing his existence

- I would have loved to see all the characters' final resolutions at the end of CD 2, like seeing a final scene with Barret and Marlene, Cid going back to Shera after he finally acknowledged being a dick to her for years for no good reason and so on (yeah, Cid and Shera are definitely getting a rewrite). Even a tiny wordless little scene for these would have been nice!

- You don’t get to main Tifa for nearly as long as you should!!! Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t even get ONE lame scripted battle with her as the leader. Aerith gets one, Barret briefly gets one (though his is kind of lame), Cid gets to do two Huge Materia quests…

It's just so unfair, I always try to prolong my time with her but there's so little that you can do in that tiny empty segment that she gets. Remake is doing way better at this already, I can only hope that we get even more. Make this beautiful cast shine, SE!

- I love that there are lots of different materia and wacky combinations, but since the most interesting materias are actually found late in the game, you only get to try them out at the very the end, when most of them are obsolete anyway. I guess a New Game Plus mode of some kind would help. Remake handles this better.

- I think the thing with the clones and how the Reunion works is going to be much clearer and better explained this time, even if only because we'll have all the visual cues to help us now. It might even be too clear by the time we get to Northern Crater, but I'll take clarity over convolutedness any day.

- The Wutai war is an incredibly important piece of worldbuilding that is mentioned time and time again in the OG, but it does feel like there could have been more to it. Even if you don’t care about the lore, it is the war that made Sephiroth the Great Sephiroth. I don’t like what the Compilation did with it either, but I’m game for whatever the remake is going to do with Wutai.

Spoiler: Remake-specific points

- I liked how Tifa's arc was done in Remake and how it established the kind of relationship that Cloud and Tifa have at this point in their story. I think they gave her character more space to breathe and be independent from Cloud compared to the same segment of the OG. You also really get a feeling that this was her home for five years, a place that welcomed her in the most difficult moment of her life and then was taken from her, again. I also think, by some of the seeds that were already planted here, that the remake might do a better job at explaining Tifa's point of view regarding the whole "Cloud knows way too much stuff and I have no idea what that means or how to approach that" situation.

- I've talked a lot about Tifa and Aerith's relationship but I will still give it a honorable mention here. I've seen people saying that it happens too fast, but I didn’t mind it, it still felt natural to me as that's how I always viewed them anyway, even if that was not what was strictly shown in the OG. I think the story and the characters are better for it, especially considering that this is part of an extended series.

- I generally liked what they did with the Turks in Remake, and I think they made a more consistent job with them than in the respective portion of the OG. The slap from Tseng never made complete sense to me, and I think the game HAD to address the fact that they're responsible for dropping the Plate in some way. It's also important that while they fully understand the gravity of it, they still go along with it.

I think that in this part of the OG, the Turks feel like they were written more as it suited the story rather than in a way that made sense for them as characters. I'm not sure I'm explaining this very well, but still, I had many reservations about the Turks going in, and I was pleasantly surprised.

- We all know that Barret is a loving, caring father. We also know that he is not the best of fathers. It’s those kinds of duality that really make Barret the amazing, well-rounded character that we know and love. In the OG, however, we only get one comment from Elmyra questioning his behavior as a father, then it’s never brought up again; we don’t even see Marlene interacting with Barret ever again.

While I mourn the loss of that line from Elmyra in Remake, because there are so many interesting parallels between Elmyra and Barret, I loved what they did with Marlene and Barret in Remake, as it paints a complex picture with subtlety.

On one hand, you can feel that Marlene means the world to Barret and that she’s the only reason he didn’t become a complete psycho like Dyne did. He loves her, every scene he’s with her she’s his whole world and she’s always on his mind when he’s not. On the other hand, we got that beautiful scene in the train graveyard with Tifa and Marlene, where Marlene has that little freakout when she realizes that Barret is not there; you can definitely tell that is not the first time that has happened, and how much it hurts her even if she’s too young to understand. And what is the scene when we next see Marlene? Oh right, it’s the one when she’s been left alone in a bar when all hell broke loose and she’s terrified out of her mind. I don’t need Elmyra to tell me that not even all the love in the world can excuse any of it, though it’s clearly more complicated than that.

I hope Remake doesn’t completely abandon this thread and someone who has known Barret and Marlene for more than five minutes actually confronts him on this and his hypocrisy as a whole in the future – I’m thinking Reeve? (I really want that Reeve content)

- I think they did a phenomenal job with Elmyra’s character design, specifically her face. There’s just a… harsh sadness to her, to her eyes. You can tell that she’s been through a lot, that she probably feels she’s on borrowed time with Aerith, and that one slip is all that is going to take and then she will lose her forever. And she’s right.

 

[crazyrabbits23]

It's been a toss-up between VI and VII for my favourite game of the series (IX is a secret pick), and I've almost always gone back to VII because it's more easily accessible - I just can't get into the "mobile port" version of VI on Steam because I'm an OG/SNES purist.

That said, in spite of loving VII so much, I've always had a few complaints about it:

- The OG has some of the best sidequests in gaming history. The way I explain it is that it has about half-a-dozen such sidequests that could qualify as full games of their own, and many of them are woven incredibly well into the plot (Wutai, notably). That said, there are sidequests I'm not sure I would ever complete again. Fort Condor required you to backtrack long distances at several critical moments of the game just to get the most of it (which the game doesn't tell you). Chocobo breeding, presuming you don't bypass it by defeating Ruby Weapon, requires a good three-to-four hours, either spread across the game or all done in one shot, with plenty of RNG and confusion that will trip up players.

- I've always loved Midgar, but they just don't do enough with it after you leave for the first time. The Midgar Raid is just a handful of locations (mostly tunnels and streets, along with an empty Shinra Building with a couple new items). The Return in Disc 2 also doesn't do enough - I wanted to see more about how NPCs were reacting to the platedrop / more to do than a couple of NPCs with different lines and a couple extra items.

- Compared to its characterization in the Remake and the Compilation, the rest of Barret's cell comes across as an unfinished story idea. Wedge is the fat guy. Jessie is the tech girl who has a couple of regrets about her actions and might have a crush on Cloud. Biggs is... just kind of there as the everyman. Avalanche appears to be comprised of a handful of terrorists with no outside support. The Compilation and the remake did a lot of good work fleshing out these characters.

- I just never felt a need to use half the characters. Barret's main arc more-or-less ends after Corel, and his "angry black man" characterization wasn't the best even at the time the game was released. I ended up leaving him out of my party completely after the midway point of the game, and never even bothered to get his Ultimate Weapon (seriously, why is it on a random staircase?) during the Raid. Cait Sith was cool, but his main drive ends after Disc 1, and he gets relegated to a more-or-less ineffectual comic relief character.

- It's been said before, but there are several moments in the OG that still make me cringe. Tifa calling Barret a "retard" in the Midgar Building stairs scene. Cid's treatment of Shera came off as shameful, even when I originally played it, and his attempts at making amends came off as shallow to me. Tifa's slap fight with Scarlet, as amusing as it originally was, just comes across more as pointless and shallow.

- I always felt that both Reeve and Rufus were underutilized characters. Rufus comes across as fairly ineffectual after Midgar, showing up in a location to try to seize something only to get shut down by the party/the plot, before getting critically injured and leaving the story completely. Reeve/Cait is just an extra party member for long stretches of time, and the reveal of his double-identity just gets handwaved away after he's arrested (he's somehow still able to control the robot in confinement?).

- Never liked the Huge Materia quest. Yes, I get that Shinra's plan to launch the rocket into Meteor is most-likely a lose-lose proposition. No, I don't know why my party is hellbent on actively sabotaging this plan, to the point of jumping on the rocket themselves and stealing the Materia, when even they don't know it will succeed. Yes, I want to save North Corel. No, I don't like that Barret just kind of shrugs afterwards, regardless of whether the train is stopped or not.

- I said it in another topic, but I was never satisfied with the way almost everyone forgot the plate drop in Sector 7 after it occurred (a mistake the Compilation/novellas tried to fix it). I much prefer the way the remake handled it, even if there are problems I had with that version of the event too.

 

[Glaurung]

One aspect of the story I have difficulty reconciling as an adult: Cid. Specifically, his treatment of Shera.

He's a downright abusive prick, and I don't think the story does a good job of redeeming that later on. My values have changed from when I was a kid, where I just took him as a quirky old pilot who swears. I don't think every character has to be a beacon of morality, but I hate how a lot of it is played for laughs. I don't find it funny or charming at all anymore. I know this is pretty standard anime tropey stuff where the Yamato Nadeshiko character is all like "uwu I will gladly die to help my boss/husbando achieve his dream." But God... I hate that shit. So much.

I am sure this will be something that will be reworked once he's introduced, but it's definitely something that leaves a bad taste in my mouth in the OG.

I never liked Cid's treatment towards Shera, even as a teen, and the very first impression I had was that there was nothing between them except a professional relationship, hence his abuse was that of an assholey boss to an employee. Color me suprised when later in the Compilation I get told that they married. I always painted him as being a very rough around the edges man instead of a grumpy old man.

By the way, I kinda remember that Cid apologized to her once he learned that the oxigen tanks in the rocket DID malfunction, and that she really saved his life.

 

[Odysseus]

I don't know if I'd rather they tone down Cid's abusiveness or otherwise have the party react more strongly to it. Barret and Tifa especially should be pretty disgusted by his behavior I think.

 

[Keveh Kins]

^This. I'd rather they face up to the very real abuse Cid hurls at Shera. I came from a home where the man in the house perpetrated emotional, psychological and physical abuse on his wife and his kids. I'd never encourage it being portrayed lightly in any medium.

But the reality is this kind of shit goes on all the time.

And I'd rather they show that reality, that real nasty side to Cid that makes him a total prick, but still a useful ally.

And really have the party fucking call that shit out, have him slowly redeem himself and reflect on his anger and his deeds over the course of his journey with Cloud and co, give Shera that catharsis that she was fucking right and fuck him for that abuse. And have this motivate Cid even more to better himself and repent.

I know in life there are people who are beyond redemption, I reckon my father is probably one because he just can't find it in himself to ever make that first step.

At the same time, I refuse to believe that every person who's ever done a terrible thing is defined entirely by that thing, or that they can't redeem themselves for it and earn forgiveness.

I'd like them to have Cid be one of those people, because all his flaws notwithstanding, I believe he is a compassionate person who knows deep down what he's done is wrong and he's let blind anger make him horrible.

 

[Odysseus]

I wonder if seeing the planet from space, seeing how small he and his problems are in the face of all that, might be enough to really shake up his attitude. That comes at more or less the end of his arc, after realizing that he was the idiot and that Shera was right all along too, so it could work. Cid's a bitter old asshole, but deep down he's got a heart of gold. I just don't think he should have been let off so easy for his treatment of Shera, especially at first.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Don't you know, Keveh, people aren't allowed to redeem themselves nowadays? They can only be cancelled.

I'd love to see Cid realise the truth about what a prick he's been, and redeem himself, too.

 

[youffie]

Yes, I guess what I’d like is a more nuanced depiction of Cid and Shera's relationship in general, since they're implied to get married eventually, and they live together (I think?)… Are they even together in the OG? I'd also like it if we could see Cid acknowledging Shera for her intelligence more, because I think it's implied that he doesn't really think she's stupid, he's just very angry and bitter. Shera in general could be expanded to become an actual character, which she kinda isn't. I'd like it if she could board the Highwind eventually.

Recently, I read an interview about FFVIII that made me think about this:

There’s this scene where Squall and Rinoa are talking at Fisherman’s Horizon, and I don’t remember what the conversation was about exactly, but Rinoa says something kind of sassy to Squall, and he throws his hand at her. She dodges, but even at the time, [Kazushige] Nojima-san was like, “He shouldn’t be hitting her. It’s really not good to have a guy hitting a girl.” Looking back, I wish I could change that.

Now, it's not like Cid beats Shera so it's clearly not the same, but I think they're generally more aware of certain issues and hopefully they will handle it with the proper care it requires instead of just pretending it never happened.