Leaving Midgar

[Jiro]

This thread is about the ending of Final Fantasy VII Remake, which sees our esteemed party leaving Midgar for further adventures in the wider world. I apparently need to put even more text here to make sure that the thread preview doesn't show what I've put under my spoiler tag. I didn't expect it to show so much. I hope edits work as I think they do.

(SPOILER)yoooo what the smurf. did they just throw out the script and decide to legitimately remake this game? It's really interesting that they featured Zack so much, which leaves me a bit confused. Like, I can understand them killing the chains of destiny and changing the future, but... surely Zack is already dead in the FF7R timeline? Or are we legitimately just in a whole new parallel universe and Zack is just mysteriously absent for otherwise unknown reasons thus far? About half-way through playing FF7R I was thinking "oh, I won't be shocked if they never do a follow up to this because this style of game wouldn't translate at all to the kind of content post-Midgar" and, well, I guess Square Enix thought the same thing and decided to say smurf it. I'm actually quite interested to see what 20+ years of design (and world events, tbh) will do to change the way FF7R develops.

[Example]

(SPOILER)Yeah the time travel/alternate dimension/arbiter of fate nonsense really ruined the game for me, as did the game shoving Sephiroth in my face since almost immediately after the first bombing mission. I was expecting more focus on Zack but I didn't expect him to actually survive. It's a shame because I otherwise loved the parts of the remake that were faithful to the original.

[tony123]

ok I'm trying to put spoiler tags down for what I want to say and it doesn't seem to work right. I'm trying to wrap the text in php and then typing spoiler. Is that how you do it?

[Jiro]

ok I'm trying to put spoiler tags down for what I want to say and it doesn't seem to work right. I'm trying to wrap the text in php and then typing spoiler. Is that how you do it?

you need to use ['spoiler] insert text here [/'spoiler] but remove the two apostrophes to make 'em work right.

(SPOILER)Yeah the time travel/alternate dimension/arbiter of fate nonsense really ruined the game for me, as did the game shoving Sephiroth in my face since almost immediately after the first bombing mission. I was expecting more focus on Zack but I didn't expect him to actually survive. It's a shame because I otherwise loved the parts of the remake that were faithful to the original.

I can definitely see where you're coming from! (SPOILER)The Whispers really grated on me the whole time, particularly when they were giving Cloud visions of the future—that felt like a huge departure from the kind of headaches Cloud got during the original game. I'm a sucker for the whole Kill Destiny™ thing, so I don't have issues overall as much as I have some concerns about the execution of certain parts. The thought that Original Cloud, Tifa, and Barret could be the spirits you fight at the end has me kind of curious but I can easily see how someone can turned off by what amounts to elaborate revisionism.

[tony123]

(SPOILER)Yeah the time travel/alternate dimension/arbiter of fate nonsense really ruined the game for me, as did the game shoving Sephiroth in my face since almost immediately after the first bombing mission. I was expecting more focus on Zack but I didn't expect him to actually survive. It's a shame because I otherwise loved the parts of the remake that were faithful to the original.

(SPOILER) Yeah and I also feel like the pacing was poor in the game. For instance Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie received a lot of development in the first five or so hours of the game (specially Jessie). However after that point the three of them were just dropped and you didn't really see them again for about eleven or twelve hours of game time until they showed up for their death sequences which officially took them out of the game. Biggs and Wedge survived but their final scenes essentially did the same thing in taking them out of the game. That is just poor narrative flow to do that with characters that for the first few hours of the story received a lot of development (other than Cloud Jessie was probably the most developed character in the beginning parts of the game). The original game never did much with the three so it wasn't any big deal to kill them off right away and they also didn't disappear for 10+ hours before they finally died. Doing things like that makes you feel like you are watching a story unfold that isn't that fluid.

[Aulayna]

(SPOILER)Calling it now, Part 2 will be called Final Fantasy XVI

I mean I'm mostly kidding but I have always wondered why they didn't include "Part One" in the official game title. And then there's the ending statement before the credits "The Unknown Journey Will Continue," makes me think this isn't outside the realm of possibility...

[ham]

I'm still absorbing the overall story of FF7R after beating it recently.

I've commented quite a bit before but I don't mind digging into it again.

(SPOILER)
I'm actually very excited to see where the story will go because it was almost Kojima-like for me. The game itself felt like a huge metaphor about the relationship between the fans and their expectations to the creator's visions. It's almost like we WERE the whispers and trying to lock in the game to a set path that FF7 followed. All the visions seemed to be clues to fans who played FF7, and Crisis Core. What I mean is we the players were controlling what happens up until a point and then when we beat fate, we destroyed the inevitable fates our cast of crew would face.

I definitely could see how a lot of this can be interpreted differently or negatively though. It makes me wonder what type of decisions the staff faced when creating FF7R and I wonder how they perceived their audience would take their changes.

[maybee]

Square Enix : This game is for old and new players !

Square Enix : (SPOILER) Makes it too confusing for both parties.

[Madame Adequate]

(SPOILER)The options seem to be that either we shunted into a different timeline, or alternatively Cloud was able to retroactively change some events that occurred but their memories and thus our own experiences in the game did not change

[Mercen-X]

One of the best aspects of the overworld in in the original game was being able to change your party members at any time. This is what I'm looking forward to in the sequel.