Nibelheim Flashback

[Sephex]

The reason I like it to this day for the simple fact that it uses one of my favorite methods of getting a point across in video games: Using the actual gameplay to showcase a story point. The game builds up Sephiroth to be a bad ass super solider, and watching the amount of damage he dished out and capabilities the character had drove that point home. If he was capable of such feats five years ago as a "good" guy, imagine what he can do now!

I like that part too. Shame it's over in the first five minutes or so, and everything after it is nothing but linear exposition for an hour or two.

Yeah, I do agree. They tried some really smurfing cool things, which made Final Fantasy VII an even riskier project, but I just feel like it failed to hit the mark. The promise of open world exploration is immediately snatched away from you and you're immediately put into a linear flashback with a bunch of the options you've come to experience -- materia, etc -- locked off from you. It's a limiting approach. An excellent experiment, but placed and paced wrong, I think.

I don't think it is more or less linear than the rest of the game, or any Final Fantasy for the most part. Every "section" the player goes to can be defined as somewhat linear, in a way. For example, once you get to Cosmo Canyon, you can't go anywhere else once your buggy breaks down. Sure, you can not drive it to the point where it breaks down and go "backwards", but chances are, the player has done everything he/she can up to that point.

So, using the same logic, I can say the Cosmo Canyon part sucks because the freedom of the world map is taken away, and you can't go anywhere or do anything until you mash the X button through exposition by walking from point to point.

Of course, I don't have that dim of a view concerning any part of the game, but I just can't accept the "it's too linear" argument without thinking, "Then why does the rest of the game get a pass?" Every time the player advances the game, the player is essentially "trapped" in a certain area. Sounds pretty linear to me. The difference between the flashback and the "present time" is that you can go meander and lever grind or something, which doesn't offer much more freedom.

Plus, in the flashback you can go participate in minor events like rummaging though Tifa's house, or see Cloud's awkward reunion with his mother. You can also have the option to talk down to certain people, or be the friendly homecoming SOLDIER. Not too many options you say? Sounds like the rest of the game to me, minus side quests.

As far as the pacing side of this topic goes, yeah, I agree it's pretty funky to have the flashback happen right after the world map is offered to the player, but as I said earlier in this thread, there are plenty of long sequences where the player is reading a lot of dialogue and simply more of a viewer than a player. I think this sequence would have been way more out of place if it was later in the game. Maybe it could have been done earlier in the game, but such minor lengthy flashback (it seriously not that long once you have played the game once already) would have felt even more weird then.

You know what? Scrap the whole game. It sucks.