You know that sick dude..... SPOILERS!

I've played FF7 like a million times but every time i play something always makes me think. when ur in the slums near Aeris' house and she shows u the sick dude, i remember in the dialogue she said he had a numbered tattoo, which lead me to believe he was a Sephiroth clone, sure enough after the reunion he was gone, but did he serve a purpose in the game? i've read somewhere that if u use a gameshark and get a few items he tells u he is a Seph clone and joins ur party, and he actually becomes Sephiroth for ur party. I find this to be major bs. how bout u?

hmm....just realized this is a pretty dumb topic, but hey, something to talk about, hehe.

Rumours abound about the man in the pipe, the 'guy who are sick'.

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i've read somewhere that if u use a gameshark and get a few items he tells u he is a Seph clone and joins ur party, and he actually becomes Sephiroth for ur party. I find this to be major bs. how bout u?

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I'd call it Major-General BS, or even Field-Marshal BS. It simply isn't true, as far as any reliable source knows.

The guy sure seems to be a Sephiroth clone, what with his diminishing consciousness but evidently great power - notice the trophies in his home? He probably just shuffled off to the Reunion (like one of the slum residents says) and got killed by Sephiroth/Jenova.

Some conspiracy theorists say that he was actually Zack, but then the men in white coats come along and give them their injections.

Oh, this thread already contains some heavy-duty spoilers, so I'm going to rename it slightly.

lol, np

I read somewere that square was oing to let you revive Aeris but decided not to because it would mess up the plot but what you had to do was go there before the reunion and stop the man from leaving when he snaps out if it he says he is an Ancient! and knew a way to restor Aeris or something that's just a rumor tough!

That's not that huge BS. It's a handful of true stuff given a false story.

The man in the pipe is almost certainly a clone (refuses to give Sephiroth credit).
Using a Gameshark you CAN get Sephiroth in your party.
The two are in no way connected to my knowledge. Though I don't own a Gameshark.

stupid question but...

when using a GameShark to get Sephiroth in your party, well, what i heard is that he takes the place of one of your other characters, but, what kind of limit breaks does he have, then? and what are his stats like? will they be the same as the character he replaces, or.....

*scratches head*

Gameshark can't do every thing. In fact it can do less then the debug room in FF7. Here's all the possible characters you could have in your party:

00 - Cloud Strife
01 - Barett Wallace
02 - Tifa Rockheart
03 - Aerith Gainsborough
04 - Red 13
05 - Yuffie Kisaragi
06 - Cait Sith (Sometimes, Young Cloud)
07 - Vincent Valentine (Sometimes, Sephiroth)
08 - Cid Hiwind
09 - (Young Cloud)
0A - (Sephiroth)
0B - (Chocobo)
0C - ('Nau Purintingu'-Now Printing)
0D - ('Nau Purintingu'-Now Printing)
FF - Nobody

That's it. That is all the people you could ever have in your party unless you have an edited version of FF7. Gameshark can't create characters.

Last I checked getting Sephi was a confusing affair. When you do get him, he is exactly as he was in the flashback.

And that Aeris thing sounds like BS to me, though for some reason she does have lines programmed into the game after her death. I believe the response I got when asking why at the FFOnline forums is that Square started programming the game from the middle, and hadn't worked in where Aeris would die yet or summat like that.

I'm sure if I'm wrong someone more enlightened will tell me.

It sounds pretty unlikely to me that they got as far as scripting scenes and hadn't actually decided where she dies. I can't even think of a way that would let you do that with the exception of maybe a handful of very unimportant scenes.

I know nothing about programming though so I don't know.

Well, whatever the case, it IS true. Seen it with me own two peepers, I did. The only line I saw, though, was after the crash into the snow. She has something trivial to say, I don't remember exactly what, but she's got animations there and errthang.

Sephiroth from the gameshark is the same Sephiroth from Clouds story.

Apparenty, Square HAD intended for Aeris/rith to be ressurected. But they had to rush parts for release dates etc.

ZeZipster, where is the debug room? please.

Actually, word is that one of the people working on FF7 decided, very near its completion, to change the plot around: instead of Aeris being the main love interest, she would die relatively early on, and Tifa would become the main chicka. They Scripted stuff for Aeris after her death because, through most of the production, people figured she'd be alive. i don't know if that's true, but at least it's not the kind of story that goes something like:

'If you beat the game in under ten hours with Sephiroth in your party and 200 supergolden chocobos, Aeris comes down from the heavens and unloads ten barrels of whoop-ass on the poor ...!!!"

Anyway, it's the only 'extra script' explanation that i've heard, and it makes enough sense to me.

Yeah, he seems to be a Sephiroth clone.

if they were very near the end of production when they made that decision. Wouldn't that mean that they would have had to scrap half the story that they already had done and start from scratch.

I don't know, maybe it is just me, but I don't think they would have done that.

I figure the way they make video games is they have all the meetings and everything about plot and all before they actually start making the game. And when the story is all written down and set in stone it is sent off to another department never to be rewritten again.

I think that would call for utter confusion and ruination of the game if they had to send the product back to the story department to rewrite half the game and throw in the trash what has been done already.

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I think that would call for utter confusion and ruination of the game if they had to send the product back to the story department to rewrite half the game and throw in the trash what has been done already.

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Right. So, have you played a different FF7 than me, or did the fact that you're better than everyone allow you not to see the utter ruin (no, ruination isn't a word) that is the translation, semblance of plot, sensical character development and overall logistics of the game?

I dont see why it couldnt be sent back and forth, or why things couldnt be changed. If they suddenly took Aeris out of the end when they were deep into making the game, it wouldnt do too much, depending on where they were in the story. I'm sure every script/plot is tweaked around almost constantly. If it's set in stone, then how could corrections and such be made?

There's only one thing we know for sure... VII was under serious time constraints. It had to effect something.

The plot was very well worked out. Given that so many character backgrounds interwove, and the overall complexity of the plot (which spanned 2000 years and required several flashbacks, and doing things outside the main route to get the whole story) rewriting such a major event would have been VERY nasty.

True. But it all depends on the extent of the changes. I doubt they suddenly, for example, yanked Aeris out. But changes can be made, so long as they dont effect the way the story weaves together too terribly. For example, suddenly giving Tifa a bigger role wouldnt effect the over all game much. But I'm sure the script isnt a set thing until it's been inputted into the game. They have a lot of time to work on changes in the script while character models and scenes are being built and such.

Tifa having a large role was vital, espescially her being close to Cloud. The scene in Mideel is one of the biggest and most important twists in the plot.

Then to a lesser extent there's the scenes with Bugenhagen and the Ancient Key.

Then there's the multiple FMVs that would require massive changes. Given they wouldn't even put a short scene with Yuffie and Vincent in.

Oh I'm not arguing with you on the fact that it would change a lot.

I'm saying making Tifa's role bigger... for example, they could have had those scenes in Mideel and with the Key and all that and added more, ya see what I'm saying? And I'm just using Tifa as an example. Most characters had major plot points, but they could have added more... that make sense? All I'm saying is that the script is flexable.

That does make sense. I'm not sure how Mideel would have worked if Tifa hadn't been the only one for Cloud though. A very deep and emotional scene with a childhood friend and potential love sort of loses impact if one of them is still picking and choosing whether he likes her over the flower girl he just met.

just going back a bit

I dont think there anough evedence to really connect the sick dude in the pipe with any event since theres such a large timespan form when hes there and the next time you get to midgar and hes gone. e.g. you could argue it was when jenova escaped or sumthin'.

I heard a rumor about the guy in the pipe, and while I haven't tried it, it could be true. I heard that what he says is a gameshark code, and that's how you get to the developers room. Now, I could be wrong, but I haven't gotten the chance to try it. I don't have a gameshark, so I could very well be wrong.

From a developers standpoint, I think it would be possible to remove Aeris from the story late in the game, but it would've been very difficult. Concidering that they were under major time restraints, I 'll assume that that would've only happened earlier on. My assumption would be that she wasn't removed from production later on, but that she was part of the game after her death. When they decided to change everything, presumably earlier on, they left in a few things on accident that they had already done, even though they didn't have too much programmed. I believe that that portion of the game was made earlier on, and that the rest was smoothed out later on and finished, with that one part left in on accident. So... yeah.

I think that when the original story was writen the developers could have come up with "Well we are agoing to kill this character off." They didn't know exactaly when or how they were going to do it, just that they were. This would explain why they needed extra dialog. When they started actually creating he game thay had a better idea about when they would kill off Aeris so that's why the rest of the game is not FILLED with lines for her but just has a smattering.

They could have also changed the layout of the storyline so that those extra parts (I thought I read somewhere that one extra set of lines was after the snowboard segment) were really in the game before she died. When they moved the story around it was just easier to (basically) copy/paste the code to a new place. Who cares if the extra Aries lines are there noone would Normally see them anyway.

Also I suppose some Square coder could have just put them in for fun. No one would be looking for Aries text becuse she was dead by then. Whick of course would have made them stand out once/if found.

Sick pipe dude a clone? That could make sense...

But to be honest, the last time I played (I got as far as Nibelheim for real before giving up, I think...) I just assumed he was a random ShinRa experiment. Remember Red XIII has his number from the ShinRa labs? I thought it might be something like that, and could still explain the illness... But if he murmers something about going to the reunion later, then I guess that proves me wrong.

My flatmate told me that if you give him the digestive from the market in the slums, he gets well and gives you something. I tried this and it didn't work. So why WAS he there? I thought you could get something from him or his room at some point...

More importantly, what is this debug room people are talking about?!

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So why WAS he there?

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He had the tattoo number one, he was the first 'Sephiroth clone' the party encountered. His poor physical and mental state foreshadows the subsequent horrors of ShinRa's black-caped, tattooed experiments, whose individuality completely disappears when Sephiroth and Jenova fully re-awaken.

Actually I think he was number two. I'm not certain about that, but he definitely didn't have the number one tattoo (Sephiroth had that).

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Right. So, have you played a different FF7 than me, or did the fact that you're better than everyone allow you not to see the utter ruin (no, ruination isn't a word) that is the translation, semblance of plot, sensical character development and overall logistics of the game?

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I have, it's called the PC version, and all translation errors are fixed. As for the other stuff, well that was never broken to begin with. Oh yeah, and ruination is indeed a word.

Quite right... number two it was. The rest of the 'numbers' belong mainly to the clones in and around Nibelheim, and one of the North Corel residents says he saw a black-cloaked man with a #1 tattoo going to the Gold Saucer.

(Spoilers)

I read in a magazine that He is an ancient and was originally able to revive Aeris. After she died you were to find the Midgar key and return to the man in the pipe and he would be able to revive aeris, this had to be done before you fought Jenova Death, but this idea was scrapped by squaresoft, although this is only a rumour that i read in a magazine it may not be true.