FFVII REMAKE CONFIRMED

[Addy Carver]

I don't have an issue with Cloud beating Aeris because it's not symptomatic of an abusive relationship, he's literally not himself and then he spends a long time lamenting about how he couldn't have prevented her subsequent death anyway. Depictions of violence against women and whether they're gratuitous depend entirely on context. Tifa brawling with Loz in the church in AC was pretty violent but also beautifully portrayed, her bitchslap fight with Scarlet was genius - she's a combative character so you expect to see her fighting and OFC that's not going to be limited to sex. The same can be said for Aeris, she's armed and prepared to fight and that to me is why the scene carries so much impact - she doesn't fight back. Interesting topic for discussion though.

[ChipNoir]

Addy Carver wrote:

I don't have an issue with Cloud beating Aeris because it's not symptomatic of an abusive relationship, he's literally not himself and then he spends a long time lamenting about how he couldn't have prevented her subsequent death anyway. Depictions of violence against women and whether they're gratuitous depend entirely on context. Tifa brawling with Loz in the church in AC was pretty violent but also beautifully portrayed, her bitchslap fight with Scarlet was genius - she's a combative character so you expect to see her fighting and OFC that's not going to be limited to sex. The same can be said for Aeris, she's armed and prepared to fight and that to me is why the scene carries so much impact - she doesn't fight back. Interesting topic for discussion though.

It also sells home why Aerith leaves: Cloud is a liability. Aerith cares deeply for him, but she has a mission, and it's clear that Sephiroth can snap his fingers and Cloud could easily kill Aerith if nobody is there to stop him.



Also this IS the first demonstration that Sephiroth has the power over him. If not demonstrated, Cloud almost killer her again would have come out of nowhere and been confusing, rather than a tense Will He Or Won't He moment.



We should never cringe away from violent imagery when it has a purpose.

[Lex]

cold_spirit wrote:

Lex wrote:

Your interpretation of what I've said is fine and valid - aside from the part about it being out of line. My comment reads like it's built up because that's what it is, I'm calling out a pattern of behaviour rather than this specific post.

Is here the best place to do that? Not over PM? When all they said was two observations in a reasonable tone? I’m not buying it.

Listen, I get that we’re proud of this community. I think it’s pretty cool too. However, let’s keep it humble and not foster an “us vs. them” mentality. I’m not okay with bringing down other members for communities they may or may not be a part of.

cold_spirit wrote:

Because if Lex is going to publicly call out Lulcielid then I’m going to put up a public defense. Though I see how this is going beyond the topic and am happy to drop it or continue the conversation over PM.

I've PM'd you so we don't stray too far off topic but to close publicly - yes I think I was justified posting what I said publicly because I consider it pretty innocuous. My point about other communities was that the fandom in general elsewhere tends to be more casual and less well informed, which was in no way directed at Lul for posting in those places (and this is clear in the way I've written the post). Merely saying that if you're used to dealing with that mentality it'd be easy to see it everywhere, hence one might assume the general posters on TLS are equally misinformed, which is not the case. It's got nothing to do with an "us vs. them" mentality. It's just a factual thing that the people who chat on the regular on the dedicated FFVII fansite are going to know a bit more about it than other more general gaming websites *shrug*. Plenty humble here

Hope that clears everything up in case anyone else misinterpreted what I wrote?

[Theozilla]

https://youtu.be/6HrxOS__Ccc

YouTube Video

Interesting editorial video I thought would be appropriate for this thread (it’s not as combative/nagging as it’s title may sound, it’s more a rumination on nostalgia and why visual mediums get remakes vs books/written mediums).


Some personal thoughts on the video is that while I largely agree with his conclusion I think it’s more specific to fans of FFVII (or other visual media) who experienced it during its original release (or near to it). For me, Advent Children and later pop cultural/fandom osmosis was my first exposure to FFVII so my first proper playthrough of FFVII was arguably more similar to the editorial author’s second and subsequent playthroughs than his first. But I personally still desire/am really excited for the Remake, however it’s almost as if I have nostalgia for a nostalgia I never had/experienced in the first place. I wonder if that’s true for any other latecomer fans of the game?

[LicoriceAllsorts]

It's definitely true for me. I played FFVII for the first time as an adult with young children, which is a completely difference experience from playing it for the first time as a child. I was introduced to it by my son via Advent Children.

[Lex]

I love all the different ways people have come to the VII fandom, like people being introduced to that universe via AC boggles my mind because I played VII when I was a kid and came to it independently. The PAL copy I still own to this day belonged to my uncle and he couldn't really wrap his head around the RPG concept (he told me "that game is crap, don't play that one, here's Tekken instead!"). I didn't exactly know what an RPG was either, but somehow it managed to suck me in anyway.

I wonder if our perceptions of the franchise are different? I know I've had a couple of conversations with people where they've gone "as someone who came to VII through AC" when expressing a point, but I can't think of anything specific people on the other side of that might disagree on. Maybe we have different views on the Turks?

[Lucis Caelum]

Like @Theozilla my first contact with anything VII related was with Advent Children (jpn dub) sometime in early 2006 (I think it was after the announcement of FFXIII) followed by years of internet/fandom osmosis until mid 2013 (I was 18) when I finally got the chance to play the original game via emulation. By that time I've only played FFX, X-2 & XII and was a big fan(boy) of 10 & 12.

So for me FFVII was , and still is, a very recent experience and as such I hold no nostalgia to it and never desired an updated version of it like the remake most long time fans dreamed pre 2015. In spite of that I'm pretty excited for it getting a remake! Though that's mostly for what many would consider to be the wrong reasons to want a remake (different gameplay, different release model, some story changes, etc) .

[Sprites]

@Lex: funnily enough it was my uncle who introduced me to the series and well. Also when I was a kid the more violent aspects of the game didn't bother me so much and I Just thought Cloud dressing up was a really good way to not be caught out.

Also I genuinely thought Don Corneo wanted to marry someone and that the Honey Bee inn was a cute place to play dress up as a bee(I was 9) weirdly enough the whole Cloud beating Aerith scene I remember being so concerned for how Cloud reacted and how awful he felt after handing the black materia over that I didn't really register that he was beating the shit fully out of her, I thought he just pushed her and was getting really upset

Looking back on it I can laugh at how innocent my brain was but I also remember finding some of the moments like Aerith's death or Nanaki finding out about his dad very emotional and touching.

I feel that if I'd discovered the game as an adult rather than as a child I don't know if I'd feel the same way about it, I love that nostalgia I have of being so innocent to some of the more mature aspects of the game and I certainly wouldn't have cried over Aerith's death now compared to having seeing my then favourite character die then.

[Turlast]

Nomura speaks on FFVII:

It’s been three years since we’ve seen anything from Square Enix regarding its episodic remake of Final Fantasy VII. The game was a no-show again at E3 this year, but it remains in development, according to Tetsuya Nomura, who has a hand in the title along with directing Kingdom Hearts III. “We are developing [Final Fantasy VII] in parallel, and it’s not just in the early concept stages,” he tells The Verge. “We are actually in development.”

The longtime Square Enix developer says he’s been giving equal effort to both highly anticipated games. “So right now, it’s like I’ve been putting in 100 percent into Kingdom Hearts, 100 percent into Final Fantasy VII, 100 percent into Kingdom Hearts... just going back and forth,” he says. “It’s just like [working on] two titles is just going to be one [after Kingdom Hearts III’s launch]. That’s pretty much how I see it.”

https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/14/1...hearts-3-delay

[Highwind]

It's something, I guess.

[Claymore]

And yet, completely disregarding everything that fans have been saying, and still nothing about why we've not seen anything.

[Shademp]

Tetsuya Nomura wrote:

Despite the long hours needed to complete such high-profile projects as Kingdom Hearts III and Final Fantasy VII Remake, Nomura says his love of creation keeps him going. I don’t get fatigued by that at all. It’s really fun for me to do,” he says. “I actually don’t like human relationships more than just work, so I just want to focus on work and creating things, if I don’t have to deal with human relationships. It’s actually a little bit easier for me to do than not working.” Still, he says, he owes a lot to his fans. “I do need fans to play my games, to be able to create it,” he says, “and so fans are definitely a factor to motivate me to keep on going.”

Well that explains for me why Nomura tends to stay outside of the public view. In Polygon's FF7 article, the embedded video with Tetsuya Nomura quite notably didn't show his face. Nobuo Uematsu, Kazuyuki Hashimoto and Yoshitaka Amano showed their faces in video for the article.

Although I'm unable to find the quote right now (I believe it was a staff commentary video for Lightning Returns), I recall staff describing Nomura as this elusive, mythical figure who was almost never seen by anyone.

Ergo, Nomura's self-description in that The Verge article makes a whole lot of sense and finally settles one of my long-thought speculations about Nomura's personality.

[ChipNoir]

Final Fantasy VII came to me on Christmas of 97 when I was 10, and DOMINATED my thinking process for years. Everything I wanted to write had some basis in it. That same year I got K'nex building sets, and I made almost nothing but weapons based on those in the game, even with slots to stick marbles in to pretend they were materia. Every time a character casted a spell, I'd wave my little clunky sword or staff or shuriken around like I was the one casting it.



My later perception was filtered through the Frank Verderosa novels. Just when I'd outgrown all that, and really got hardcore in X, Advent Children trailers emerged. It took a bit to reconcile it with the canon of those novels, but it was also the first time I ever became a gaming news hound. I lurked among you guys probably for years without saying much. Did spend a hell of a lot of time on Go-Gaia though exclucively on The FF board.

[Turlast]

It just seems odd to have so many questions about a game that was announced....literally 3 yrs ago. All I really want is some solid information. Whether that's about how the episodic stuff will be handled, Materia, the Gold Saucer, whatever. I just want to know more about the game. If a trailer seems like (and it isn't) a bit too much, the least they could do is communicate to the fans.

This whole silent approach is pretty wack in general.

[Random Nobody]

ForceStealer wrote:

That's a good point about the distinction. I'm still not sure I agree that every FF since X, or XII or whatever are entirely shallow and lacking in complex themes. Hell, I think Sazh's story is one of the 'realest' in the franchise. Which was certainly helped by the performance of his English voice actor, but that's still part of it.

I think it's fair to say that the core of a lot of Square's thematic ideas are interesting. But I also think that if you took a sip of Henny every time someone said "hero" or "honour" in Crisis Core, you'd be dead in, like, thirty minutes.

I think it's easiest to see when contrasting the OG and the Compilation in general -- you've got returning characters (.....all of them) who are reduced to one or two traits, and then increasing conceptual and moral simplicity. Much of the time, the story forgoes the labour of creating any kind of complexity at all by abstracting ideas to the point that it becomes nonsensical symbols and visual motifs: SOLDIERS are Heroes, Wings are for Monsters, Apples are Tragic. Meanwhile, the thematic and tonal content is inconsistent with or outright contradictory to the source material. Death is supposed to leave "no dramatic feeling, but great emptiness," yet Zack is lifted into heaven (....on an animist planet) to a rousing backtrack of earblistering screech pop. He's supposed to be likeable and objectively "good" (or supposedly a person who tries to be), but also we get to play through his participation in a genocidal campaign of invasion without his giving a second or third thought, and without sufficient world-building to explain how and why "good" people would associate this with "heroism," or better, giving Zack a more complex motivation to begin with. Imperialism, subjugation, corporatism, and all of Shinra's attendant demonry are bad, but also let's undermine this by giving child(er) Yuffie a quirky cameo in the middle of a slaughter and then have her skip off amongst the corpses of her people.

I mean, I don't feel like I'm extrapolating too much here. The destruction of the commons, privatisation, corporate imperialism, and so forth are all things that were intentionally included and reiterated. But it just seems like beyond the arcs in the original title, the narrative is unwilling to engage the elements it introduces on anything but a superficial level (so why have them?). Theme™ is delivered in service to the events of the story rather than the other way round.

We know that this is an organisation that runs Chiquita-style death squads, that probably pulled some shit like Pepsi pulled on Allende in the not-so-distant past, and has the environmental and moral integrity of Shell n dem all rolled together, but instead of tying that to the story's more fantastic elements, it comes across as garnish for character studies. Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing...if it weren't for the fact that the characters less and less resemble humans than they do a collection of ten tropes in a trench coat trying to be a facsimile of human.

I'm not asking some kind of revolutionary manifesto of a game or something, but I just find it weird that the actors in Square's stories tend to exist so far outside of the contexts they're placed in. Most of them could be transplanted into other worlds altogether and have little or nothing about them changed because the world they live in has little development of its own and barely informs their characterisation. It just makes the whole universe feel two-dimensional, like nothing that happens in the narrative has any consequence or purpose beyond its potential for flashy sequences.

...That's by no means a shortcoming unique to Square, but definitely in addition to that, they lean so heavily on derivation that they have entire archetypes and character arcs distinct to their oeuvre. It's like queuing up one thousand copies of an image and watching the lines of its face slowly fade with each iteration as the ink disappears from the printer's well.