I can't even remember why Sephiroth cut the head off to start with?
I can't even remember why Sephiroth cut the head off to start with?
Is that how he controls where the Reunion occurs? That could make sense but did Sephiroth even know about the Reunion when he cut off Jenova's head? He thought Jenova was an Ancient. I think maybe he was just losing it.
Yeah VII’s original scenario was... in need of a couple more rounds of editing, if you ask me.
IIRC he only took her head because Cloud stabbed him while he was breaking the container so only had the strength to recover the head rather than the whole body.
Does that make any sense? I thought the point of the reunion was that all Jenova cells would naturally find their way back to the body. How does separating her body help that? Unless he was just testing the theory or something?Originally Posted by Fynn
This dovetails with my statement that he was losing it, because "I can't carry my mother's body, so I'll sever her head and take that" is not a normal line of thought. It's more of a Norman Bates line of thinking.
Editing?
I think the original story was just so complicated, as video game stories go, that there are some parts they didn't think through.
Another thing that was never really explained was how Cloud managed to suddenly develop super strength and kill Sephiroth in the Nibel reactor.
There are many games with stories much more complicated than FFVII that are much better thought out. Beyond the very tightly plotted Midgar FFVII does tend to just... be a bit contrived at several points.
I wouldn't say FF7 is terribly complicated, but I would say that's mostly a good thing. Most games with more complicated plots are more concerned with inane worldbuilding details that don't really make for a good narrative. Most of the "complicated" aspects of FF7's plot only appear that way because of bad translation.
I really don't think there were in 97. Not that I'd ever seen anyway. This was the most complicated at the time.
Especially when you take the size into account. Most complicated stories tend to be much smaller.
Xenogears. FFVII actually outright copies some of its ideas. It was actually pitched as FFVII. Is much more complicated and yet less contrived than FFVII. Incidentally, it also has a much more competent translation, despite also being done by one dude.
I don't want to disparage Xenogears too much, because it's one of my favorite games, but Xenogears is largely a cobbled together mash of everything from 2001 A Space Odyssey to Evangelion. Xenogears is undoubtedly more complicated than FF7, but whether it tells the story more effectively is highly debatable. And there's plenty of contrivance in Xenogears. Including probably a record setting use of unclear pronoun references to obscure plot details, which is pretty close to the same kind of contrivance you complained about with Tifa in FF7. I won't argue the better translation part. Off course, that's true. Although I would say a more competent translater might get rid of the excess of "howevers" which might be a literal translation but comes off pretty awkward in English.
I never really got into Xenogears, so I didn't finish it. I'll probably retry it at some point.
Although that was 1998, so still technically after FF7, even if just barely (it also didn't release in Europe so I had no chance to play it at the time).
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