5 Hours In

[Wolf Kanno]

Now I'm going to have to play it again, because I can see everyone online calling it the sector 5 slums but I could have sworn it was identified in game as the sector 6 slums.

What if they let us play as Reeve in the upper city? I doubt it, but it's just a thought on how they might incorporate more of the city.

One thing they could definitely add is the ability to go see Loveless instead of just having Cid talk about it near the end of the game.

To be honest, I actually thought you were right until I checked again and saw that. I think the confusion may come from Aerith mentioning her house is on the way to the Sector 6 slums.

The Reeve idea might be interesting though. As for Loveless... I feel Genesis pretty much killed my interest in exploring that bit of lore, especially since the title was simply the staff referencing an album by My Bloody Valentine. I actually prefer it just being an easter egg that acknowledging the lore cancer Crisis Core turned it into.

If it's "add-in" missions for Avalanche that offer lore and/or character development then I am all for it. I love learning more about the world of my favourite game of all time! I still think we haven't seen "seen almost half of Midgar proper anyway in the original" though, for the reasons presented in my earlier post. It's like saying you've seen half of the UK because you visited Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London. When I saw Advent Children and played Crisis Core I felt like the city was so much bigger and still had loads of potential for a much larger area to explore.

My issue is really more about relevance. I mean if Top Side Sector 5 turns into a place where I have dozens of NPCs with exclamations over their heads to ask me to go retrieve trout for them from the slums, then I feel we're better off not seeing that. It really depends on how they try to expand the story and setting because we have a clashing issue of Midgar being filled with interesting lore implications, but we're also trying to expand one of the most tightly designed narrative points in the whole game that really never left much room for expansion. I keep worrying that every time something new comes up in the plot, I'm going to feel like it's just the developers padding out the game instead of feeling like something that needed to be said. I already got that vibe from the Jessie motorcycle chase sequence which I keep trying to think of where such a moment would actually take place, and whether it was a good idea to take one of the most iconic moments from Midgar and just have you do it a few more times instead of just making that one moment better.