Best video on the subject I've seen thus far. 100% agree. Multiverse, parallel timelines, alternate worlds, other realities, blah, blah blah... Whatever we choose to call it, that general concept/possibility simply existing in an FF7 related story dilutes the finality of death. There's a version of reality where Zack died and a version where he doesn't. Same situation with Biggs. Same with Aerith possibly as well, who knows at this point. (Some people are very confident that she is actually dead, but the fact that it's even debatable one way or another is a problem imo.) In general, when there are multiple versions of a character that can live or die depending on branching timelines/worlds/whatever, that cheapens the moment when a character actually dies. Because in the back of my mind I know there is another version of that character still alive and happy in a different version of the event. This is an issue I have with multiple realities as a concept itself, separate from however the FF7R series ultimately chooses to implement it. The FF7R characters could all end up with the same exact fate as the original by the end of part 3 and I would still have huge problems with the story being told in this way.
It just sucks my investment out of the story when I know there are multiple versions of the same character who may be alive or dead, all for the sake of keeping the fanbase guessing for 3-4 years between games. I have similar gripes with the Marvel multiverse stories too. I have always disliked those types of tropes in the comics as well. Why should I care if Peter Parker and Mary Jane eventually get together if there are an infinite number of universes in which they both do and don't get together!? For FF7, it's much harder for me to care about Aerith's death if there are many, many possible realities (or Lifestream memories/realities/whatever) where she doesn't die. If we just happen to be viewing a version of reality where she does in fact die, then yes, I can still feel empathy for the characters in that moment when they lose their friend. But my personal attachment to losing that character is not nearly as strong as it would be if there was only ONE Aerith in existence that we could lose. The multiple worlds/realities trope is simply incompatible with the message of having only one life to live and cherishing the time we have together as temporary but meaningful. That we must all accept we are just a small part of nature's cycle, and that death is just the natural end of our experience. Mr. Sakaguchi's FFVII was trying to show us a way to be at peace with that concept. But that theme was already damaged at the midpoint of Remake, well before the ending sequence at the end of the highway. During the sector 7 plate fall scenario, every named NPC we meet in the earlier chapters just happened to survive. Compared to the original, where it was implied that basically no one (other than Aerith and Marlene) got out in time. The scenario in Remake doesn't make the player feel any sense of loss. And so it felt much less tragic than it did in the original, despite Remake having much more powerful visuals and sound in it's toolbox to convey a sense of loss. Wedge survives the platefall (twice), only to be killed later on (maybe?) because the whispers are inconsistent plot devices. They revive Barret instantly, yet allow Wedge to live for a whole extra day before trying to kill him again. Biggs died at the pillar, but is apparently alive in another reality. Jessie is the only character not shown to survive, but they show us her headband/glove in the ending cutscene to keep people guessing. Teasing a possibility that she might be alive similar to Biggs. Whereas in the original there was no question about her fate. But tropes like these are just 10x worse when used in a story like FF7 which was originally about the finality of death and the preciousness of life. Now if others are not bothered by this and are still hyped for the rest of the FF7R series the story that's great. I am happy for people who are still enjoying Square Enix's wild ride. I'm just personally not on board with this storytelling approach. I hope the trilogy ends in a satisfactory way for all of those who are still invested.
I think you hit on the real, and unfortunate, reason for the changes. Once they chose to chop up FF7 into a trilogy, their highest priority became how to sell each next installment, and less about the integrity of the story. All that mattered was how to keep people talking during the many years of making the next one. If FF7 had been remade as a single game, there is zero chance Midgar ends by going into a portal to another world and prematurely fighting Sephiroth, nor would Aerith's death be butchered of it's impact and finality, in place of trying to create a cliffhanger.
They are writing to make people talk instead of telling the story that’s considered a masterpiece. They clearly have no confidence the story can stand on its own and are actively insulting it as a result.
When I beat remake, it was very clear to me that we as a fandom were dealing with a multiverse. When you understand the basics of multiverse theory and how time travel works and compared it to remake's plot, it began to make more sense. But what's confusing about FF7 Remake, we are told by red 13 that if they failed to beat the Arbiter of fate, then the future we knew from the OG would happen the same. So we beat the Arbiter of fate, and when we saw Zack surviving, it became clear at that moment both aerith and Sephiroth were time travelers. You dont need really need someone to tell you specifical details to figure that out. So Rebirth should have opened a new door way leading to a completely new and original story and if cloud and the gain saw Aerith's death in remake which we know they did, cloud and the others would not let Sephiroth anywhere near her. Its common sense. But with Rebirth, with some slightly different and added story elements, we didn't get a new original story, and that majorly flipped the switch on me. Because I was hoping we'd save Aerith, and when we got that ending, my love for the remake trilogy died, and that's coming from someone who writes books for a living. The only purpose that ending served was shock value and only shock value. It's ok to have a good twist in a story, but it's not really needed. That ending was not only convoluted but longer than it needed to be. Look, I'm fine with Aerith dying in the original, but when I played this ending, it was like I was reading a unedited script that two fanboys wrote, and no one corrected them on it. If I were the editor, I would not have allowed this game to be published to the media until after they picked one ending and gone with it.
Dude you dont know how refreshing it is to find someone who is nailing the same sentiments I have about Final Fantasy. I hate when I try to talk about these frustrations and all my friends get so mad at me.
I can understand your feelings. I was told as well to move on from Rebirth in particular. But I just can't move on that easily, because the points, what bothered me, still lingers in my mind.
In the OG we had: - Cloud's schizophrenia - Cloud's amnesia - Cloud's illusions and warped perception of reality and himself On top of that (as if that wasn't complicated enough), we now got: - Multiverses - Multiple timelines - Aerith's dreams and visions - Multiple timelines and multiverses colliding and merging - Whispers that actively shape fate and kill more people in Midgar by preventing us from saving them than Sephiroth killed in Nibelheim and in total - Whispers reviving characters arbitrarily - Ever Crisis ... - FF7 Remake Project DLC yet to come and unlikely change anything for the better => Congratulations Nomura and Kitase. The story of FF7 now officially makes less than zero sense.
Whisperer's are not a inherent good or evil. They're no different than white blood cells. They just do what they were designed to do. No different than the planet creating Diamond Weapon.
The ironic part was watching people who would vehemently recoil from Kingdom Hearts' convoluted story in the same breath state how logical and profound FF7R storytelling is. I give props to Nomura for having a throwaway line in one of his KH spin-offs in response to a character trying to make sense of the plot being: "you're thinking too hard about this." It goes to show how little care is put into the stories he works on; all that matters is him having fun crushing our dreams and expectations. Death is meaningless, betrayal is a minor setback, and the power of friendship overwrites all problems.
@@hooligan7290 You're on point, man. What drives me insane even more, is the fact, that people gobble up Maximillian Dood's pseudo-intellectual takes on this mess of a story when he clearly makes up stupid crap as he goes. It reminds me of people believing in star signs and the horoscopes. Be as vague and generic as possible to check as many cognitive boxes for as many people as possible. And since Nomura and Kitase enabled it and laid the foundation to make appear any theory viable, even youtube brainlets and npcs like him can cough up something seemingly deep.
@@romzen I love how Dood hates on Genesis' pseudo-intellectual Loveless monologues, and then laps up all of Remake as deep and profound. Literally laugh out loud stuff. :D
A multiverse carries an inherent flaw, if there's infinite realities, then nothing really matters. It makes the viewer not care about what's happening.
Most writers including marvel can't write multiverse stories. In my experience only Michael Moorcock wrote multiverse well. The difference is Moorcocks approach created an ever increasingly complex tapestry of stories. Bad multiverse writing is when nothing really matters.
the sad, empty, actual answer for any of this is, as always, MONEY the crappy mobile games, the infinite spinoffs, the avalanche of merchandise, and the potential of a lucrative avenue in any and every direction possible all die if there's ANY definitive conclusion to anything in the story. Why close that door when it leads to a bank vault?
This was definitely NOT about money. You are mistaken there. If it was a about money they would have just made a 1:1 remake and flood the market with all the things you have mentioned anyway. The story having a definitive conclussion or not has nothing to do with it. And if they wanted alternate versions of these characters, that's what "Kingdom Hearts" is for. No, this was made for a completely different thing entirely, one even more important than money for people once they go above a certain threshold: Clout.
@@XanderVJsquare did it for money , we are talking about a company making games for profit, but they don't know what they are doing and so the kingdom farts guy worked flat out ruined this with his confused brain
@@XanderVJ Correct, the remake itself is for money but the weirdo bullshit story has nothing to do with that. Thy've already added in story expansions before with before crisis, crisis core and the books and movies. Changing the narrative didn't make the game more profitable, in fact I'd go as far as to say it made it less profitable due to how convoluted the game and it's themes became. I think even square noticed it too as the first part of the remake had a lot of weird changes and plot threads that seriously pissed some people off so they made this part a bit more focused on fanservice (not just the booba kind but franchise appeal in general). The only way I see them getting more profit out of this is by wrecking this story and forcing people to go back and play the original, which is well played as that is what I did and it still holds up but all I can say is congrats I guess? I paid 2 bucks for the game on a sale, nice profits for you (also the game is on sale right now go buy it if you want to see it).
I think even the writers working on that project at SquareEnix are not sure what the hell these other realities or multiple universes are or what they want to do with them. Seems to me like the idea was thrown in because of so many successful movie franchises exploring the concept of multiverses in the 2010s and making big bucks. Still, I'm pretty impatient to see how they handle the resolution in Part 3 after Rebirth's ending, it's probably going to be a mess.
The weirdest thing was how a bullet was gonna headshot zack... but thats not how he dies... he talks to cloud before he dies it was so weird and really shit on the OG.
To be fair, that is how he died in the original. He was gunned down by Shinra soldiers. You have to go out of your way to learn this but that's how it originally happened. They reconned that in Crisis Core for a more dramatic ending.
Good multiverse stories actually requires effort, talent and care to make it work. Thinking about every possibility, thinking about the actual concequences and how it will impact the future story of that timeline. What Rebirth did, is not just the lack of focus on making the multiverse working on paper, but it is also infested with inspirations from other franchises. If we want to make a good conclusion on a beloved story, then we have to think of everything. The context, the buildup and the impact. That should be the proper rule for many writers.
An aspect of multiverse which remains unexplored is the impact of its mere existence on the characters. If I knew about millions and trillions versions of myself I would develop an identity crisis. Imagine the type of conflict and drama this could inject in the story.
Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is the only story I can think of which thought to explore this very issue. That's why it's one of the few multiverse stories I like.
Considering multiple things in media nowadays relies on the multiverse The concept loses its value For example if the character dies in the original game they can have a happy ever after inside another universe and Vice versa to that Universe as well In a nutshell it's mainly a lazy plot device in case Backlash to a story decision Gets 2 Out of hand Love your videos dude always look forward on your takes on FF7 and final fantasy in general 😎👊👊
That was everyone that wanted a remake for ff7 until this ridiculous attempt at gaslighting anyone who wanted that into thinking they were the ones who were crazy for expecting a remake to be, you know, a remake.
@@rayweaver8295 No it was more people trying to gaslight everyone into claiming they were lied to, plus people in general using remaster and remake as interchangeable terms.
@@Dayv018 square has had numerous interviews before the first part came out where they flat out lied about what the remake was going to be. From an interview taken on March 23, 2020 Kitase: Ever since FINAL FANTASY VII came out in 1997, fans and the media have repeatedly called for a remake like this. Unfortunately, we haven’t really had a chance to get a team together to work on it during the last 23 years. I’ve always felt that for such a big, important project we had to have our best developers on it. It had to be a team that had a lot of experience of working on FINAL FANTASY games too. But we finally managed to find a point where everybody’s schedules aligned - that’s when we started the FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE project. The biggest reason though, is how much time has passed and how technology and the world has changed since the original was released. *Modern players may have seen the characters Cloud and Sephiroth over the years as they have appeared in other games, but they may not have played the game where the characters originated from.* I felt that if we want to show people where these characters came from then, truthfully, if the original game was the only way to experience it, new players - especially anyone that wasn’t playing games in the original’s era - probably wouldn’t be so impressed with the original game compared to the latest titles they could be playing. Hamaguchi-san: When we started this project, I had to think very, very hard about what form we wanted any new experiences in this remake to take. *From the start, I felt that FINAL FANTASY VII’s characters, world and story are so beloved that we couldn’t start playing with those or changing them in a reckless manner.* But the style and presentation - the way they’re shown - that we can work with. Kitase-san: We made FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE not just for fans of the original, but specifically for new players too. Something that we repeated to ourselves throughout the development was “what are the essential parts of the original” and “why did people respond to the original the way they did?” *Our goal was to capture everything that made the original game so special, but bring it up to date with the latest technology so that new players could be just as excited as players of the original game were when that released. For new players, this is where the story of FINAL FANTASY VII begins.* If you’ve seen characters such as Cloud or Sephiroth in other games, and wondered where their story began, this is the game. And then you have this from another interview. Kitase-san: There was ideas like putting subtitles that relates to the story. Nomura-san: *When we put a subtitle, it seems like spin-off or the second arc. We didn’t want to give that kind of impression.* Kitase-san: When having presentation today, we used the footage that had recorded the reactions of the users. They seemed skeptic at the first, but when the word “REMAKE” was shown on the screen, they believed that “VII itself will be back!” and they got so excited. We appreciate that reactions. If there had been a subtitle, it wouldn’t have been like that. With that being in our mind, we picked the simple title for the official one as well. Enough with the gaslighting.
I heard someone say they love that the remake wasn't a 1:1 remake because they liked not knowijg what was gonna happen, which is fair... but they went on to say they already played the original and don't want to play it again... Kinda sounds like the original wasn't that special to them. My favorite games and movies I go back to over and over again because I love how they make me feel, whether it's the gameplay or story. When someone "remakes" that thing and makes changes, then it's no longer the thing I loved.
Interesting, as the OG is my favorite game of all time...and I go back all the way to FF1 on the NES. I love this Remake project for precisely that reason. I would have played a 1 to 1 for sure, and it would have been a great nostalgia trip. But the Remake project feels like it has some stakes since we don't know exactly how it will all unfold. They could royally screw it all up, but so far I've loved both Remake and Rebirth...especially Rebirth.
@@Dayv018 Perhaps I was too harsh towards the guy, but he did follow up saying if they had made a 1:1 remake of the story he would refuse to play it which kind of hurts my soul, haha. Now, I am in a unique position where I never actually played the original and when I finished playing Remake I didn’t get what all the fuss was about. I didn’t feel like I’d played one of the most influential Final Fantasy games of all time. I had fun for sure but I never felt any motivation to play it again or even play rebirth but you could probably just chalk it up to prefence. I’m a bigger FromSoft fan than anything, haha. I think my main complaint about the story was the ghost things. Since I have no connection with the original story the ghosts felt like an obstruction of plot, getting in the way randomly when all I want to do is reach my goal. That’s not inherently a problem, but their explanation and resolution didn’t make sense to me, and when the game finished I was more confused than anything. Afterwards someone told me what their purpose was for and it made me disappointed that I wasn’t getting the same experience as everyone who played the original. Again, I don’t mean to say it was a bad game or a bad story, nor do I think anyone is wrong for loving it. I think I just fall outside of the target audience.
@@merleetomlin6218 No it's cool to get people's opinions who didn't play the OG at all. Ironically I've found it's more OG players who dislike the ghosts/Whispers from Remake. I can understand the idea of wanting the same experience as OG players, although obviously you can still play the OG...the only major difference will be how it fits into this era of gaming playing it for the first time now versus back then (which is a thing, obviously). I've seen many new players who fell in love with characters in Remake that they either chose to A) go back and play the OG and extended games/compilation, or B) some who specifically did not want to, because they wanted this story to unfold fresh for them. It's very interesting to see their reactions/complaints at parts where fans of the OG are so obviously biased in positive or negative ways versus these fresh players seeing events play out for the first time for them. Ironically despite loving Remake and Rebirth, I didn't really like the ghosts implementation in Remake...although the fact they still have had a role in Rebirth and presumably going forward leaves a little hope I will dislike them less. A lot of things are left up to how Part 3 resolves for me, to be honest, but I can't deny how much fun I've had seeing this fresh take with the Remake Project...even if I absolutely would have played a 1:1 Remaster.
@@Dayv018 OG players had the realisation that the silly ghosts were a metaphor for them: the fans who wanted them to be faithful and respectful to the original game when remaking it, and that they're seen as some "problem" by the creators of the remake games...hence why they didn't like it!
@@mikespearwood3914 it was a little more tongue in cheek I feel, and since I"m one of those fans of the OG, I can still laugh about it. They also clearly were part of the story they did want to tell, loose metaphor or not. I'm not mad at the devs for any of that, especially with how many people were complaining over and over 4-5 years later after they had been telling us from the start what the game wasn't going to be. It's perfectly fine for people to want that, but it's just as fine for the devs to tell the type of story they want to tell, and not be forced into one simply to appease a certain percentage of the fan base who would take their ball and go home if they didn't get what they want. This is why I can both feel for people who really wanted a 1:1 Remaster because they won't get that (Ever Crisis is clearly something different/more)...and be annoyed by those that use that as an excuse to be upset/negative simply to be negative about what we did get.
The tension between Remake and the OG is the tension between grounded storytelling versus melodrama. You know those eighties US soaps and dramas where characters came back from the dead, parts of what happened for whole series were dismissed as dreams, the fourth wall broke down, the characters were having visions of the supernatural etc etc? That's what Remake is. Remake is the _St. Elsewhere_ or _Dallas_ of Final Fantasy. This, combined with the apparently total narrative constipation of Nomura, Noijma and Kitase, is why I would not at all be surprised if at the end of the Remake trilogy, everything that happened is revealed to have been a dream of Vincent while he hibernates in his coffin.
I don't think you know what "melodrama" means, buddy. The OG was also a melodrama through and through. But that's not a dig against the original. "Melodrama" doesn't mean "poorly written drama". It means a story with hightened emotions, making them incredibly intense (often times with the help of music or "melodies", hence the name). It's not so much a genre as much as a tone. And the OG was stellar at it. Although to be fair, you're not alone in this misunderstanding. Melodrama has been historically seen with contempt by the intelligentsia, since it's by its very nature a tone that elevates emotions to their highest degree, and that was considered an afront against reason itself. And since nobody wants to loose social credit, many people took that point of view and ran with it.
I can’t take how they literally ruined Sephiroth, the One Winged Angel, my favorite character since Super Smash Bros. Ultimate/Advent Children/Final Fantasy VII Remake, making him literally work a puppet {AKA Cloud} in a show and making him like an obedient dog returning a ball to its owner and when he keeps talking about merging worlds to make sure Aerith is fully dead. Sephiroth's always been my favorite since Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and the December Sephiroth reveal trailer for Smash. “A confluence of worlds…and emotions. Loss, chief among them. It engulfs fleeting moments of joy, transforming them into rage, sadness, hatred.” ~ Sephiroth, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, 2024~ That got me. I left and immediately stopped watching and started bawling because I feel so bad that they basically destroyed my favorite character of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series. Dimension hopping Sephiroth from the future trying to prevent his own defeat and spawning Whispers that are trying to keep fate in the same direction, so you have to defeat these Arbiters representing fate/destiny/the natural order to open the timeline and be in control of your own destiny and etc., etc., etc. This is a horrible story. I'm not going to see the great finale in the year 2027 either. Just the very last of the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Sephiroth Cutscenes for Part 3.
Same. I absolutely hate how Sephiroth is handled in this trilogy. His dialogue is bursting with some of the most pretentious pseudo-philosophical horseshit I've ever had the displeasure of hearing. And my GOD I cannot STAND his ASMR voice. I already hate ASMR to begin with, but it's even worse when the lines are all cryptic nonsense and the speaker sounds like a Christopher Nolan character on antidepressants. Sephiroth is not the kind of villain that I love to hate anymore. He's not even the kind of villain that I hate and want to see the heroes beat the shit out of. He's literally so annoying that he makes the entire trilogy impossible to stomach.
@@obsessive_hermit He's pretty much a Genesis clone now, he talks as if he was reading some corny dark poem, you can't take him seriously not to mention he's e everywhere, he Even appeared in Gold Saucer telling Cloud to "Have fun" Seph went from being a cool iconic villain to a combination of the Worst anime tropes ever
I SHOULD have skipped rebirth. Hated the ending of pt 1 and wanted to give it another shot w/ rebirth (maybe they could fix it?). But it only got worse T_T
The only PS5 game I own and you didnt miss much, I mean the gameplay was fine but everything else was not. Oh and the platinum was hell. But I already too deep into this crap, I just ignore the story and pretend is the original retelling....I know I am harming myself by doing that but I am big FF 7 fanboy idiot...but I will never defend the direction. BTW sales are pretty low so I am so glad people is voting with their wallets. Also Part 3 is going to the worse one so...yeah is an easy skip and watch it on youtube.
Man what a breath of fresh air to hear some one spitting so much facts.. People need to stop defending this crappy writing.. it's so bad, all I ever hear is people justifying it by saying it's a 3 parter .. thats what they said after part 1 and after part 3 they will say to wait until the dlc and then after the dlc they'll say we gotta watch the anime thats coming out soon, then they'll say wait until the Advent Children video game is released 5 years from now in order to be able to fully critique it. I gave the story a chance for part 1 and now 2 and its only getting worse.. I have no problem with them changing the story if it would have been for the better but square has not done that. They set up that fate can change but nothing actually changes.. the same things happen but in worse ways than the OG.The pacing the tone the stakes everything was done better in the OG..and I never even played the OG back in the day.. i'm not even a die hard fan of the OG but the remakes are objectively worse. They bring back Biggs and Wedge back just to die randomly later in an unceremonious way.. They keep on spoiling the story so that there is no mystery.. They show Cait in Reeves office .. They show Barret chasing after Dyne and Marlene even flat out tells you that Aerith is going to die.. They don''t explain shit in this game either.. I don't think any new ff7 player even realized that Sephiroth was caressing jenovas body part in the boat fight because cloud and the gang never talk about what happens and act like it was nothing. Aerith's death ruined by multiverse crap and an hour long boss rush Don't even get me started on the mini games and the "open world" The one thing I don't get is how on earth can someone say that FF7 was one of their most favorite games of all time and at the same time call this crap a genuine "masterpiece". Are they lying when they say ff7 was that good or what.. Because if they did this to my favorite final fantasy, which is FFX and changed it like this i'd be incredibly disappointed and infuriated. I have no doubt in my mind that in another 15 years when people get over their recency bias, people will look back at these remakes and say " what the hell were they thinking?"
The same people who defend this are the ones who think kh is a god tier saga with master story telling. They won’t know a great written story if it whacked them on the head.
@@coreymartin6486 Don't feed the troll buddy - all that matters is that *you* like the game. For me both Remake and Rebirth are masterpieces for sure.
It sold “poorly” because it was a ps5 exclusive jackass. If it was on ps4 and PC, it would of made close to the numbers remake did, get Your head out of your ass pretentious bug
FYI: the lifestream never had a connection to other timelines or anything like that. That was a retcon from a novel and I don’t care about what other people say is canon, it’s not. It’s a retcon forced into a story with a lore that doesn’t support it.
This is just my opinion, but I feel the weight of business decisions are impacting this game more than anyone is willing to admit. Like a drug dealer, they're chopping up the source material to allow them to sell much, much more. This multiverse pivot is the same thing diluting Marvel IPs. After so long, it gets old...and they're just willing to ride that into the ground so long as people pay for it, but at what cost?
I don't understand why the Remake Project fans don't understand this. "It's not a multiverse!" "Aerith is dead!" It doesn't matter the SEMANTICS and DEFINITIONS of the words at play, even if it's "all a dream" or a "hallucination of the Lifestream", it's still going to be spun out into a FF7 Expanded Universe and milked even more than it already has been. I just wish they'd let it die at this point.
Multiverses are so hard to get right, and in this day in media overused. My original thought when playing Remake was that Sephiroth was in a sense “time travelling” to rewrite the story/destiny bc he knows how the OG story ends. They could have left it at that. It still implies there’s another universe (the OG) and then the Remake universe but doesn’t get to complex and gives weight to the steaks and the Lifestream and overall the environmental change subject matter
Square have been ruining the story of FF7 long before Rebirth. The compilation have been making retcons and additions that have not enhanced the story in any way but only taken away from it. Genesis is a terrible, awful character whose entire personality is quoting some stupid play yet was retconned into the Nibelheim reactor where apparently he was the one to send Sephiroth on the path to losing his mind. We know what really happened in Nibelheim but Crisis Core just says no, this is what REALLY happened. In Advent Children, not only are there clones of Sephiroth but he comes back too despite being beaten by Cloud in the Lifestream at the end of OG. Rufus is still alive even though he shouldn't be. They just pulled some BS excuse that there was a hidden bunker or something under his desk? Yeah except we saw him engulfed in flames during the attack on Midgar and he would not have possibly had time to take cover. Rebirth is just the latest entry that retcons, changes and takes away from the story of OG FF7 because Square knows that they can milk this just because it is FF7.
FF7 was infinitely better when the Lifestream was just a place from which magic and monsters could be summoned, and to which souls/memories returned when people died. And that was it. I could tolerate Sephiroth's resurrection in Advent Children (you could argue that JENOVA kept them both alive because of her interdimensional powers and/or that the Lifestream cannot claim JENOVA's soul), but the 7R trilogy has taken it WAY too far by making the Lifestream omni-dimensional--able to create time-travelling ghosts, control the spacetime continuum and create alternate worlds/universes. It's almost everything I dislike about superhero comic books in a place where I would have never asked for them to be.
@@obsessive_hermit Nah: Sephiroth back from the dead in that horrendous Advent Children was lame: "Cloud & the gang are back to fight Sephiroth again in a new wacky adventure!". Just a lazy cash grab with the famous FF7 IP...pretty much like these current remake games!
God Lord the dialogue is SO Bad Every Zack / Biggs scene was painful to watch, "we have to believe in ourselves biggs, everything is going to be ok" who wrote that garbage!?
What were they thinking? Multiverses are popular right now, via the transitive property if we have a multiverse people will like it. Squaresoft made works of art for a passionate fanbase. Square Enix makes products to generate revenue for shareholders.
They didn't use multiverse here because they are popular. The FF7R project started long before that... and it was used by Square Enix long before that too. They just like the trope and decided to go full in here. The fact that it's popular right now was just a """"happy"""" coincidence.
I’m just glad people are recognizing how much of a hack Nomura, Kitase, And Nojima are and have always been. They absolutely suck at writing and have needed to be booted from writing stories for a while.
And let us not forget the 2.0 version of this trilogy when it’s finished too. It’ll go the route of Kingdom Hearts most likely, adding in additional cutscenes here and there to “Try” to add more context or explain plot threads of the timey whimeyness “better”
@@katherinemerkel3505 And just hardcore FF7 and video reviewers on RUclips. Doesn’t even have to be Nomura fans alone They all contribute with their overly praising and over the top reactions
agreed, they need to hire better writers as well, both noct and cloud loudly groan in womens faces but all women cant pick up on body language apparently (according to square writing team) and love them for some reason, charters just turn all meta n cryptic and no one questions it! or follows up on it this game is ff7 kh edition, got to play the original, the spin offs watch a movie, find some translations for some terrible "novels" (poem more like) and play the mobile gacha game....... we have entered namura territory lmao imagine a world where they did a actual remake instead of this nonsense, (would have sold way better, look at resi 4) i see this and the impending kh4 flop to sink square for good, they nearly did when namura took 13 years on ffxv, but somehow he still gainfully employed and why cant they add combo modifiers? cloud doing the same 6 hit combo for 160 hours now 🤦🏽🤣
The only good remake I can Recommend nowadays is persona 3 reloaded it does everything I a remake should do in my opinion Improve on the Turn bass comeback improve on the social links and Improve on the Activities But the one Important thing they got right was The story its the Exact same story from 2006 with an few Minor changes that doesn't affect it In other words a Faithful remake Unlike FF7
@@paulf631 I don't get the logic in changing one of there best storys! It's like if they changed 9 or xs story!! They litteraly ripped off ff13 we beat fate n changed time.... we even got the bit when anima gave them a vision ( a huge plot point in 13) the bit when you fight the big wisper in the first part Now he doing ff8 he gonna squish time together.... 🤦♂️ nojima and namura both washed up aha The irony is sephiroth in all his master planning don't realise he already won in one time line n could just go there but no can't write above the intelligence of the writers 🤣🤣🤣 I really enjoyed persona 5 so I will have to cheak them out. My m8 tells me 3 is the best one I really liked the remake of xenoblade chronicles, was the first time I even played it but was what I needed after square got offended by the term JRPG even tho they used to make the best in class and probably why the genre so popular It's like sonic they can't help but keep reinventing the wheel even tho the fans clearly like 2d platfoming, we like JRPGs with deep mechanics and lots of good exploration! And a good story!! (tho 8 or 12 my favourites for the mechanics I'm more about that aha and 8 got the best music free) Probably unpopular opinion but Honestly I put ffxv above these ff7 games. At least it had some exploration and the action part of combat felt way more fleshed out if a lil floaty n super easy because of items 🤦♂️ The irony of namura saying ffxv dint feel like final fantasy to him, them him dropping the turd of ff7r with 13 side quests n all corridor simulator was laughable.... he had 13 years to make It wanted to make it a musical!!! He even got a dig in in kh3 ( another flop) how salty you got to be to add a project you failed to make to your already over bloated lore 🤦♂️ he makes cool characters but keep him away from writing and directing lol He also let dissdia just flop instead of adding more modes like 2v2 he added £15 skins 🤦♂️ someone fire this man aha
@1BadAssArchAngelvs14 it could be I guess but after the last game and any game connected to namura in the last 21 years (except xenoblade 2(I'm not gonna hold my breath The last one divided the fan base, by dropping final fantasy characters, even story connected ones, the lazy writting, the super easy "super boss" the end of the game where they all die them come back again then sora disappears like buy the dlc..... I'm talking base game. i would never buy that recycled verses 13 crap! He had 13 years to make that game, nearly sunk square enix, now he forcing this noct clone lore into the game as well..... People already don't like the way the story is just new mystery box plot that ends in the most basic way over and over again, and using every plot devise ever, time travel, dark light, clones. Digital world, dream world, mystery past, now dimensions with this ffv13 bs..... nojima washed up and needs to retire He made a final fantasy gatcha game with lore...... and a final fantasy 7 battle royale....... Smart move would just to add the cast to fortnight.... but he's not had a smart idea in years or made a character that's not cheesy and one note How sora gonna lose all his power again this time n spend 80% of the game messing about being stupid.... sound familiar, lol This style of writing now is killing any reputation final fantasy 7 had for being good. People outside the fan base not interested and like oh still weeb nonsense.... the fan base hated this style of writing since dirge of the cebreus! It's the same old bs..... Square not made a really good game since ff12
@@dbfzato-1327 To be honest the final fantasy characters in Kingdom Hearts are not really important anymore since they have zero ties with any Keyblade wielders of the past "Keyblade orders" so that's why final fantasy characters are being phased out completely. in order for a character to become important now in Kingdom Hearts' new plot line a character needs to have a Keyblade and ties to previous Keyblade wielders of the old eras. none of the final fantasy characters in Kingdom Hearts have ties with the Pre-keyblade war old-Era orders of keyblade wielders, so that's why this is happening. besides the only time final fantasy characters appeared in Kingdom Hearts is either "Hollow Bastion" or "Traverse Town" which the two original worlds are not even important anymore since we are going to a world where only Keyblade wielder organizations only co-exist together to find the source of all conflict with the darkness, so what would "Cloud Strife" do in a world with just "Keyblade wielders" he would not have a say in any conflict on what the "Keyblade wielder organizations" are doing since cloud strife is not a Keyblade wielder himself.
you give both the creators and the fans of the remake fans too much credit and respect by engaging with them on this level love you king thank you for all your work
7:30 Zero Escape confirmed as a justifiable canonical sequel to the Titanic movie, rose SHIFTed to another world with the morphogenetic field to escape death of old age Zero escape is a good example of many worlds working, but as you say, "a story built around that premise" can work.
Rebirth is the worst type of fanservice, the type that ruins a whole story in order to give the fans what they want, Zack shouldn't be alive, but they brought him back just because he's popular, what a Joke
If you want a good multiverse story, I recommend Black Science by Rick Remender. It's a comic that takes the concept to it's absolute limit, has real stakes, and nuanced characters.
everything everywhere all at once is the most easiest access to a good multiverse stories because the multiverse used for expanding the characters more than used as a main plot
@@Skadi.- Couldn't agree more. I adore that movie. It's about the relationships amongst a multigenerational family and the multiverse is basically a tool akin to 007's gadgets.
While I love getting your take on this there's a part of me that thinks it's not even worth humoring this mindset. "Not a multiverse" is becoming the modern "Squall is dead". For those who don't know most corners of the FF fandom openly and rightfully ridicule people who believe in the "Squall is dead" theory as it's become short-hand for needless and insipid theory crafting conceived from a lack of media literacy. And if you take them seriously then they would suggest their respective games' plot are ultimately a Jacob's Ladder scenario which is an even harder concept to pull off without the proper writing chops. I'm not even someone who is completely against parallel realities as a plot device, I think they can be fun but I openly acknowledge the narrative pitfalls it creates. I think you hit the nail on the head pointing out that it's less about there being alternate realities at all and more about how it dilutes the original story. FF'97's story is TOO important to be using this crap. You bring up some interesting film examples but I feel like there is a much more famous example that you can apply the same pedantic arguments 7R fans use and yet it would still qualify as one of the most objective examples of "alternate universe" in the history of film. The 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life. You could make the case that George Bailey is deriving these "what if" scenarios from the flawed memories of his own life and in this case the stand-in for what people call the "lifestream" is a little thing called "heaven". However if what he experienced within his moment of despair was in fact "all in his head" then it becomes less powerful since "heaven" as a concept is meant to be aspirational within the logic of the film. The story makes not only heaven aspirational but living as well. Life and death. The story made its point with only two realities and that's difficult enough to pull off in fiction. What some people don't seem to understand is that a multiverse doesn't HAVE to be infinite, having even a handful is already complicating your narrative immensely so if your writing is bad it becomes very noticeable. I often see people talk about 7R being too "anime" but really I think that mainly applies to the way action is directed. Feels like a lot of principles you would use for sakuga applied to video game cutscenes. The bigger issue to me is that it's very comic book. Classically mainstream comic books have relied on recycling legacy characters that they own throughout the decades almost as a proving ground for up and coming writers. That's why they love using time-travel, multiverse, and universally reboots. Weirdly enough there is some merit to this style as more often than not the best characters stories...aren't written or drawn by the creators of said character and that becomes somewhat perilous to navigate when corporate ownership is involved. Anime/manga tends to be self-contained one and done tales (at least the good ones are) and because of that they have their own kind of complicated publishing hurdles to contend with due to that bespoke nature. Because of that writing style manga sales have been stomping a mud hole in western comics purely because you can often start a series from chapter one and expect an ending point most of the time, as opposed to deciding whether you should jump into Spider-Man on issue #181 or #237 or if the next 7 years of new issues will even be worth it? Should you jump into FF7 on the '97 original or Rebirth or should Crisis Core be the first thing? Should I look up videos of First Soldier just so I know something extra super secret that only our super secret club of fans know about? I've recently had this bad feeling in the pit of my stomach that they're going to call the 3rd game FFVII: Revival. The idea being to hint at those Aerith revival rumors from back in the day. And hey maybe they'll be tasteless enough to make a side mission where you defeat a magical (game) shark so you can recruit her lifestream hologram to fight with you to the end. But of course that will be a bait and switch like everything else they've done and she'll still sacrifice her hologram body to stop Sephiroth from making time stream taffy or whatever he's doing. And the devs will be like "We meant it as a jumping off point for the 'revival' of FF7 as a brand." So get ready for Advent Children: The Movie: The Game, get ready for Before Crisis: Remind, get ready for Rougelite of Cerberus, get ready for Dissidia 7R. Would 7R fans have the right to complain after spending the last 4 years praising the subversive/deceptive use of the title "Remake"?
The way alternate timelines/universes/multiverses are done now is terrible and is more used for "hey lets bring this character everyone likes back." these days. Back in the day alternate universes had a good stake, for example some Stargate stories. These explore scenarios where earth makes very different decisions that have moral implications in their worlds. Or SG1 has to fix something the bad guy changed. Star Trek did the same. The issue with FFFRemake+sequels is the writers are doing what I call the ''Marvel' method of writing. Where they are looking to make moments fans get excited and have theories, then they decide to write based on the popular Theories. It's the Japanese version though. It comes off as too fanfiction-y, and I liked the remakes but also see their problems.
Exactly. Even South Park criticized how the multiverse narrative was being used as a dumb excuse to bring back characters that everyone likes and how corporations use it to continue milking older IPs in the “Into The Panderverse” special.
@@Probably_JENOVA wow, even South Park did a satire on it? I liked the Marvel Cinematic Universe for what it was, but them popularizing the comic book multiverse mechanic has made everyone else want to copy it and it's lazy. I'd have just preferred this be a different timeline on it's own.
I'm gonna paste this conversation I had about the topic of FFVII Remake Project's world: Me: Apparently in regards to FFVII Rebirth, Toriyama thinks the structure of the world will become clear in the third game. Brother: WAIT! Are you heading into the 3rd act of a story not knowing how the world works? Me: Yeah, pretty much. Brother: That is so dumb. Me: I find it funny that the more info we get from the Ultimania. The more I see people upset it contradicts their favorite theories. Brother: Is that what matters more than the baseline rules of the game's world? Me: Remake project lives off of theories. Brother: How long were Remake & Rebirth? Me: 66-80 hours together for the story. Brother: AND YOU DON"T KNOW HOW THE WORLD FUNCTIONS? Me: Thought I did, then Rebirth happened.
This was my biggest criticism of Remake’s ending in a video I made back before Rebirth came out-the world of Gaia doesn’t seem to have any clearly defined rules anymore, and so it’s impossible for the viewer to actually tell what’s at stake and thus ROOT FOR ANYTHING.
@@obsessive_hermit I saw your video on Remake. With Remake ATLEAST I had the idea of things will probably be different since the Whispers were defeated and Zack would be doing something. Only for Rebirth to remove Aerith & Red XIII's future sight and basically just be a worse, but still good version of events from OG FF7. The new scenes like the Gi Tribe also serving to complicate things more while being awkwardly placed. Zack basically doing nothing for most of the game's runtime (why even have Zack on the box?). Until just like Remake, the only parts that matter play out in the game's finale (backloaded stories aren't a bad thing. But it's frustrating when both Remake & Rebirth pad out the campaign with filler content). My brother added that since the party gets their levels & Materia reduced with no explanation in Rebirth and will happen again for the 3rd game. Then that means that characters aren't progressing towards Sephiroth's level or that Sephiroth is losing to people throwing basic Fire spells. I replayed Rebirth with a friend, his first time experiencing it. My friend was excited during Rebirth's finale, UNTIL the final boss was defeated. The fact that Sephiroth still leaves the boss encounter smiling AGAIN, made my friend wonder why bother making three games? My friend said that if fighting Sephiroth TWICE is pointless to the narrative, then why bother making three games instead of the one that matters most? My friend felt like nothing is being accomplished by the party or Sephiroth throughout two games already. And to note, my friend only recently got into Final Fantasy starting with OG FF7 last year and the compilation material this year. So my friend's perspective is of a new fan to this franchise. The perfect summarization of Remake Project's narrative can be summed up in this quote from my playthrough with my friend- Me: That's a different dog ain't it?🤣 Friend: I DON'T SEE A F****** DOG!🤬
@@Gordoniankid I wholeheartedly agree. Disregard for power-scaling is one of my storytelling deadly sins - if the character's strengths and weaknesses are arbitrary; if they can abruptly gain or lose their powers/levels/capabilities at the drop of a hat, then how am I supposed to feel *tension/drama* or believe *that anything is at stake* ? How am I supposed to *care* who does or does not have the upper hand in a fight when the writer can just turn the tables arbitrarily; with no regard for rules or limitations? This is why fictional worlds and conflicts need to have clear rules and limitations - the audience needs to know *how the world works* (e.g., Y will happen if B happens; Y *won't* happen if C happens, etc.) in order to understand what's at stake and become invested. But the makers of the FF7R trilogy are flat-out *refusing to tell us how anything works* because they don't want to risk anyone figuring out the story before Part 3 releases. You know those elementary school playground fights where the kid you’re fighting keeps making up new powers so that he doesn’t lose? Well, the 7R trilogy is the writing equivalent of that-the writers keep making up new Lifestream powers so that it’s impossible for the internet/theory-crafters to understand what is happening to the world/characters and thus extrapolate/predict where the story is headed. The result is that we have no reliable way of telling what - if anything - *matters* in the story, because for all we know, the writer can just make up an entirely new rule/piece of lore at the drop of a hat; with no foreshadowing. And yeah: Remake and Rebirth have reduced Sephiroth to one of the tackiest villains I've ever seen in fiction.
@@obsessive_hermit I made a replay earlier but it's not here. Just in case I'll post again. I remember saying on Twitter that Sephiroth was overly used in Rebirth. Someone was baffled since Sephiroth isn't in the game much. But Sephiroth barely does anything for the most part. Even my friend kept saying Sephiroth "is a worthless clown that should get out of our face". Despite Sephiroth manipulating Cloud at times, it doesn't add anything outside of handing over the Black Materia (which we're not sure this version of Sephiroth needed Cloud to do). I also don't like how the party knows Cloud is not OK, but do nothing to help him. It's crazy they can see Cloud act way more violent & nearly slice a Black Robed person. Yet have the audacity to get mad at Cloud when he tries to desperately get the Black Materia. No Tifa, hugging Cloud over and over isn't gonna fix the problems he's suffering from, HELP HIM. It's also nuts how the party knows Sephiroth is a major threat. Yet actively choose to goof off in places like Costa Del Sol & The Gold Saucer. The player choosing to do side content is one thing. Having your characters actively ignore the situation is ridiculous. Sephiroth taunting Cloud at The Gold Saucer should have been the wake up call to get back on track. Then again the Rebirth party rely entirely on the Black Robed people (How did the Black Robed people get allowed on the cruise ship, but the party needed disguises?) The whole finale being one massive question mark was a baffling decision. It steals attention from what should be important. And places that attention on unrelated characters and question baiting. But I don't wanna ask questions, I'd rather wait for the inevitable answers that can't live up to it. People love to say 'it opens room for discussion ", but if someone gives a radically different interpretation than the others. They get dismissed as "not understanding FF7" even though only the devs know what's going on. And Remake Project being more about Fate & Destiny than the OG's Loss & Identity. I think Rebirth plays great with its combat, it's a very fun game to play. But the story just fails to build on what Remake set up (I didn't like Remake's story. But was willing to give the new direction a chance ). And doesn't live up to the OG FF7 version of events either. With scenes being done worse or new content being slapped awkwardly in the middle major moments. The party choosing to goof off & ignoring Cloud's situation makes me dislike them. I still like Zack, but he has no purpose in the story so far. Side Note: Yuffie's Ninjutsu just really makes Materia pointless. Why use Elemental Rocks when Ninjutsu can do that and create independently thinking clones. Yuffie is my favorite to play as because she's insanely versatile. But Ninjutsu shatters the world building more than it already was. Also Gilgamesh being added to Rebirth is great (although the Proto Relic quest aren't good). I love Final Fantasy V so Gilgamesh finally appearing in an FF7 game is great.
perfect argument, doesnt matter how many times you experience a good story, it will always work. the changes are just a reflection of ego, and born of the idea of "making it fresher, better, unexpected" shame. I'm tired of square, i dont give a F* about rebirth and its sequel.
And this is a demonstration of a perfect example of why i fundementally dont like comic book multiverses, my setting has a multiverse but it's Neither parallel realities or timelines instead its a cluster of a good couple thousands of universes (far from infinite but still beyond the abilities for an average Person to comprehend) and heres the big twist crossing universes isn't just a rare event thst has ome off implications and shows multiple versions of characters its a commonality to the point that its considered in general 2nd Year Magic to learn about its existence and how to Cross to other universes and because of this major element of it being a commonality the multiverses genetic profile are such that duplicates are Rare and even if a Duplicate does occur genetically their experiences will be so radically different that its hard to even call them the same person much less interchangeable should one die because. And then Theirs the influence this commonality has on faction's for example theirs a cult that for a potion of time had complete influence in a good 10% of the multiverse until they're own actions caught up to them and they made their own undoing and then theirs the also the faction of scientists who created their own Universe and called it the nexus. Note that most stories I've concepted in my setting don't even dive into the multiverse angle of my setting unless their fully focused on magic and even then i like to portay perspective so from a perspective of someone in my setting when they're first told about or shown that they exist in a multiverse their first reaction is most frequently a mental breakdown
Hey Orion, I've been watching your videos more lately as i really enjoyed your rebirth video it really opened my perspective on the game i come from a different position than most people who played the og when it came out as i was a freshman when remake was going to drop but i had played the og before the hame came out and i was young and didn't really know why i liked the things i liked i just consumed cause i was looking for something special and FF was that and remake helped me a lot during covid and my growth as a person but i wasnt to experienced with the story. but when i beat the game i was so excited to see locations remade but it was quite a long wait so id just keep replaying the og and played all of squares games like FF just so i could become a fan of the series and i grew such a connection with the original game and games VII-X but i still hadn't knew why i was just feeling emotions but i thought if the og was this great and remake has the potential to be better than the original in terms of the locations and atmosphere and i remember watching a lot of theory videos and a lot of max that got me even more excited and i was like that for 3 years so i had a big attachment with remake and the team behind it as i look up to them and was quite open to the changes and in a way still am. And was super eager leading up to the games launch and even had the opportunity to meet naoki hamaguchi and a lot of voices to the characters and those are experiences ill never forget so i have the emotional attachment to the team and staff behind the game but during the wait last year for rebirth i really began asking why i loved FFVII to begin with and i finally found my answer and it was the story and the themes and the dark atmosphere which was something i could take everywhere in my life so maybe i had made a mistake for realizing i loved when ffvii was about a compelling story and world and possibly getting overhyped by theories of things that realistically couldn't have been true maybe it was both but the only way ti find out was by playing the game and i had so many experiences leading up to this games launch When the game came out and i remember liking it when i played it but something just felt off about the experience and i wasnt sure why and i love knowing why i feel the way i do that resolution in myself gives me so much passion to like sometimes so i kept asking myself about rebirth and letting that thought sit and i found just some choices in game design and story and music that just didn't have weight as to why they were the way they were and there was also somethings that i loved about fleshing out the characters more and game design choices but part of the reason i love the og was the dark and unsettling theme of death and in the og that reflected everything in the music and locations and i wasnt getting that in Rebirth everything was to happy and party like and it felt off for me but i love getting other peoples opinions from both sides as i love discussing FF games and i really saw a lot of perspectives but majority of them from both sides didn't really attack the reasons as to why something was bad or good and there wasn't any form of discussion just hating on each other. for the longest time it was just the normal thing to assume people who wanted a faithful remake where bad people and i never really questioned why but seeing your videos and how much you understand and explain things for why you didn't find the games good really made me rethink why people thought purists are bad and i just feel from both sides everything just comes from hate but i just love discussing opinions about the game and you opened my perspective not to immediately discount a opinion just because its unpopular and i also noticed people are just out for blood if you disliked the remakes and i just never understood why. and i noticed majority of the big names in the fandom didn't really take the story as serious as i thought i did and they were just wanting to feel hype and emotions and not question why and all the power to them but i used to feel that when i first got into FF but i just found a reason why i liked the series so i was at odds seeing people not care not question just consume and call every decisions amazing maybe its just the honeymoon phase as i certainly had one but i kept thinking what made me feel a little dissatisfied and thats something after a lot of thought i think I'm less optimistic about the final game and if it'll deliver which im at a conflict because i love ffvii and the team behind it but i cant help but feel skeptical especially with a lot of the choices they made but also at the same time i want the best for the series and a reason why im so pretentious about FF is cause i love it so much i want the best for it but at the same time i think its best to have lower expectations next time so thayf if the last game manages to work then ill enjoy it there's a lot of small things i could yap about but ive already gone on long enough i just wanted to express my opinion and gratitude for your videos and your analysis on the games and i also am not looking for hate but just stating a opinion and my opinion may change in time thanks for reading this long yap of mine
Hey, thanks for sharing your thoughts and background with FF7. It's greatly appreciated. And very interesting to read about. I hope you get some enjoyment out of the next part. I know for a lot of people, their feelings are complicated. But it's great to hear how you found the channel, and really grateful to you for watching :)
Part 3 is probably just going to reveal that what we've played in 1 and 2 all takes place in Cloud and Tifas lifestream scene, the players choices being written off as Cloud being an unreliable narrator finding the truth. Us the players have been repairing his mind, it'd be the biggest copout of this horrible multiverse shit but its probably the most plausible and Square thing to do. FF7 REmember, Help I'm in the hell timeline
It's a multiverse, because the original concept of death, with this change, there will be no consequences. Zack and Aerith are alive and coming to the last part of the demake project, to make the "happy ending"
I'd have a lot more respect for Remake/Rebirth fans (and the developers) if they would stop engaging in historical revisionism. If they would just be honest and say: "this is a different version of FFVII which has alternate universes and destiny stuff added in." This would make it easier for us detractors to ignore the 7R trilogy and go back to loving the OG. Bending over backwards to try and argue that these things somehow existed in the OG is actually worse and only serves to make Remake fans look deceitful and desperate. The "Lifestream scene" wherein we learn about Cloud's past and false memories was not a real, "alternate world"--it was happening IN CLOUD AND TIFA'S HEADS. Because they had fallen into the Lifestream, their minds were connected, allowing Tifa to see Cloud's memories and reconcile her (correct) ones with his (fake ones). The reason why Cloud's memories were fake is because he didn't fully remember everything and he was filling in the gaps with Zack's memories. More crucially though, the events which take place in the Lifestream scene did not TANGIBLY AFFECT "the real world"--they only affected Cloud and Tifa's PSYCHES; nothing that happened in the Lifestream scene was PHYSICALLY transferred over to the real world when Cloud and Tifa woke up. This is VERY different in Rebirth. The scene where Aerith-B hands Cloud-A the White Materia so that he can take it back to World-A CLEARLY establishes that these alternate worlds are REAL, TANGIBLE PLACES; not mere visions/hallucinations in the Lifestream. This means that there are theoretically infinite versions of the characters which can be transferred from these alternate worlds to the main worlds. Furthermore, these alternate worlds we see in Rebirth still SERVE THE SAME PURPOSE IN THE STORY that alternate universes do in multiverse stories: they exist to show multiple different versions of the characters in a variety of different scenarios (e.g., the "main" scenario and the ""What if?" scenarios)--they are corporeal places which spring into existence whenever someone/something hits a fork in the road of the series' timeline, leading to different outcomes of events. It is FUNCTIONALLY IDENTICAL to how the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (multiverse theory) works in other works of fiction. Saying: "it's not a multiverse because it's in the Lifestream" is like saying: "Star Wars doesn't have magic; it's the Force." The names make no difference; they still serve the exact same FUNCTION IN THE STORY. This is one of the things that aggravates me most about FF7R fans--they aren't actually engaging with the UNDERLYING PREMISES of critics' arguments. Instead, they're just pedantically nitpicking the DEFINITIONS of WORDS; not getting to the meat of the discussion. (e.g., "It's a remake, not a remaster," blah blah blah). In this case, the meat of the discussion is the following question: "Do these new plot devices and mysteries (e.g., Zack's new role, the alternate worlds, Sephiroth's plan to destroy them and fuse together a new world which he can rule over) MAKE THE STORY BETTER?" In my personal opinion, the answer is "no," for two reasons: 1) Adding a literal multiverse to a story based on an extremely liberal and unusual interpretation of one scene is a terrible way to write stories. The interpretation of the OG's Lifestream scene as some kind of alternate world flies right in the face of Occam's razor, and it would make for the most contrived and torturously forced retcon I have ever seen in fiction. And you can tell that it's a retcon because there's no way in hell that the Lifestream in the OG could control the spacetime continuum or create alternate worlds. If it could, then why the hell didn't Sephiroth mention it? Why didn't he find out about them after he was thrown into the Lifestream in the Mako Reactor at Nibelheim? Doesn't that seem like something that would have been important to factor into his plan (or at the very least mention)? 2) Storytelling is about CONFLICT: if you want the audience to care about your story and characters, you need to establish what can or cannot happen in that story's world; you need establish that the odds are stacked against the heroes, and that bad things will happen if they don't succeed in their mission. The OG succeeded in doing this for a simple reason: Holy was the ONLY spell that could stop Sephiroth's meteor; the game went out of its way to establish that no amount of any other kind of magic could possibly work (not even crashing Cid's rocket into it made a difference). However, JENOViroth were blocking Holy at the Northern Cave, and so the heroes had to find a way of defeating them ASAP so that Holy would work. No to mention, there were no alternate worlds to speak of either (there was only ONE version of each character; they were unique, and so we still cared whether they lived or died). FF7R's new story additions/lore changes rob me of any reason to me care about what the characters are fighting over: 1) You can't tell an emotional story about life and death when there is a repository of replacement characters in the Lifestream. 2) You can't depict a riveting, high-stakes conflict about "saving the planet from destruction" when the planet itself is an omnipotent cop-out which can arbitrarily do whatever the writers arbitrarily want it to with no warning. E.g., Making up new Lifestream powers like the Whispers resurrecting Barret (if Lifestream magic can resurrect the dead then where is the "Resurrect" materia?), altering the spacetime continuum, changing how the Black and White Materia work with no explanation, etc.). 3) You can't tell an immersive story when the writers are constantly making their presence known-by changing the rules of how the world operates and forcing the characters to behave in ways which are out-of-character for the sake of the plot (e.g., the heroes fighting the planet-protecting whispers only moments after Sephiroth-who wants to destroy the planet-taunted them to do so). Over the past few years, it has become clear to me that the writers at CBU1 (Nomura, Nojima, Toriyama and Kitase) have absolutely no idea how stakes and conflict work. They seem to think that, if you just throw characters into huge, spectacular and unexpected battle scenes and you don't know what's going to happen or what's going on, then that *somehow* equates to "high stakes and conflict." It doesn't. As I explained in Section 8 of my video, LIMITATIONS are how you create stakes-you have to TRAP the characters in tight circumstances wherein they have limited options and limited time in which to succeed. E.g., in Osmosis Jones: - The hero, Ozzy, is pliable and can bend his body into any shape. His partner, Drix, has an arm cannon. - Thrax, the villain, uses his claw to steal a nucleotide from Frank's hypothalamus, which results in Frank being taken to the hospital with a life-threatening fever. His daughter. Shane, watches over him in the hospital (and she happens to be wearing false eyelashes). - Thrax escapes from Frank with the nucleotide. It seems as though all hope is lost. - But Ozzy does some quick-thinking, remembers that he is pliable, and tells Drix to fire him out of his arm-cannon after Thrax. He does, and both Ozzy and Thrax end up landing in Shane's eye. - Ozzy then uses his pliability to trick Thrax into getting his claw stuck in Shane's false eyelash, which then falls into a beaker of rubbing alcohol where Thrax dissolves. - Ozzy remains on Shane's real eyelashes, and when she cries over her nearly-dead father, he rides one of her tears back to Frank with the nucleotide so that they can save Frank's life, just in the nick of time. Simply put: fictional conflicts are only entertaining if the audience knows what the combatting parties can/cannot do AND--crucially--what they are VULNERABLE to. To quote Predator: "If it bleeds, we can kill it." FF7R utterly fails to do this because we have absolutely no idea what the Planet and/or JENOViroth can/cannot do or what either is vulnerable to. Someone needs to translate Brandon Sanderson's laws for magic systems into Japanese (if they haven't already). The Remake trilogy might have been SO MUCH BETTER if Nojima and co. had read it before they started putting words to paper. Also: the transition at 8:15 was perfect!
One last thing I’ll add to your explanation is also the TONE This game really wants you to like the characters, to the point where we’re getting goofy MCU like banter and the attitude that characters like Aerith act like they know how popular and iconic they are to the gaming world. As they defeat Shinra forces and pose for the audience to look all cool and emotive, showing off and essentially sucking any narrative tension because they’ve got plot armor and popularity on their side. Kills any showing of genuine respect or fair tension when the game plays out dramatic emotional scenes and moral conflictions, only for them to get softened, and then brushed aside with quirky, facetious banter
i have a feeling that ff7r writer are trying to copy attack on titan "paths" or "attack titan" abilities to show memories through space and time this is very apparent when sephiroth said "this landscape, i could've sworn I've seen it before", implying sephiroth from "future/alternate verse" sending that memories to sephiroth in "ff7r verse" using lifestream and also the weird reaction from aerith when she touched the water in "gi" land, and the zack/cloud stuff yada yada so now "lifestream" in ff7r = "paths" from attack on titan if that were the case, I'd hate it even more, why the writer trying to copy a plot points from popular series? they have no confidence the series would sell if they just stick to original?
I avoided playing remake until recently, I heard about the story changes and that was enough, I didn’t want to play it. Since the original is one of my favorite games I figured I’d at least see give it a chance. To my surprise I’m enjoying it more than I expected, I can see the potential of what the project could have been. A large part of my enjoyment comes from recognizing places, music and characters from the original, those things have an impact on me, but what about a newcomer? The locations, music and characters don’t mean anything to them. If I was to recommend ff7 to my brother who has never experienced it before, I couldn’t recommend remake because it’s a different experience entirely. Remake does more things right than I expected it would, I just can’t get past the story changes.
@@rclaws3230 I know, I made it so long too. It looks like rebirth is lacking in sales though. I just felt like if I was going to criticize the game I may as well play it and give it a chance. It’s not like they are going to change their minds and do a faithful remake now.
Yes, me too! But I LOVE the story as it hasn't changed at all. Just added a little bit more to the already existing story. I wouldn't have liked it if it remained a cookie cutter copy, I wanted to be a little surprised at least, and boy was I ever!
@@AShroudOfTruth I don’t think anything about the original ff7 story is cookie cutter. The point of a remake should be to update the game so a new generation who are for some reason, afraid of “old” graphics, can experience the game. To appreciate this remake fully you have to have played the original. There is a lot I like about it but it’s a different game entirely. Not to mention the detrimental effect multiple timelines can have on the stakes of story telling. They undermined a lot of the best parts of the story in my opinion.
They way FF7 Remake uses alternate realities/dream worlds is so vague and sporadic, that it's unclear what role any of it has in the remake storyline. Events in FF7R and FF7R2 play out 90% the same as in FF7, but then there are moments where the new layer of vague fate/multiverse stuff takes over. It overshadows the original story events, because the developers are also using it to justify spectacular climactic scenes that really shouldn't be happening at this point in the story of FF7. That's what alternate realities/dream worlds comes down to: being able to show things that shouldn't exist, to generate a reaction from the audience. The game opens with shocking images of Tifa, Barrett and Red XIII lying dead. It's a cheap gimmick and a manipulative contrivance. There's this doomed world we keep going back to, but never long enough for me to care about anything or anyone in it. I don't want to care about any other worlds, I just want to follow my favorite cast in the Final Fantasy series.
Adding to the Titanic tangent, it would have still sank no matter where it went because of the passengers aboard who opposed the Federal Reserve's creation, this tragedy was inevitable.
Every single multiverse story in existence is garbage and for a clear reason. I will absolutely never understand why they did go down that route. There was nothing to gain or explore that way and they lost everything. Idc, if there is actually people liking this style of storytelling in general, it's just plain heartbreaking one of the greatest videogames and stories had to be ruthlessly disfigured and desecrated this way. By it's own creators nonetheless, how mental is that. And just to trump it all, they literally bait people into playing a malevolent and immoral gacha game by sprinkling it with story bits. It was all for greed they sacrificed this legacy.
Loved this, thanks. I feel like these worlds are within the lifestream and are akin to “Dream Zanarkands” with the souls who could not merge w/ lifestream acting as the “fayth”. I think OG already happened, humans maybe didn’t survive post-DoC, and there’s is still a lot of hatred in the lifestream, which Aerith is trying to continuously clean up. But something happens at the opening of remake. She looks so dazed and confused, almost as if she can’t believe she’s alive. I think something glitched in the lifestream matrix because of you know who, and the dream became real. And now its a countdown to get all these “dreams” to stop becoming Sephy tainted, and also becoming real…because if everything is real, nothing is real, just chaos, and Sephiroth wants to absorb it. How do certain dreams of lifestream get made real? Yeah, I guess Seph went on a dinner date with Yu Yevon, who still doesn’t know wtf happened with that Tidus kid.
I know what you’re trying to say but the comparison isn’t accurate at all because “Dream” Zanarkand is a physical place located near Baaj Temple. Dreams in Final Fanatsy X don’t operate the same way they do in our world or FF7’s. Yu Yevon doesn’t really know anything as he’s become a parasite endlessly summoning. Tidus is, as dream Zanarkand also is, an Aeon.
Exactly the title. That also kinda ruined Bioshock Infinite. Here I'm loving the game, story a bit confusing but who cares, until Elisabeth goes nuclear on me. In all these universes, apparently there were not a single good Comstock, but who cares, Elisabeth kills all the versions and herself. Don't get me started about the DLC, burial at sea.
I really wish I knew how to explain it but the remake/rebirth games just don't 'feel' right. There is just no natural emotion in the environments, no atmosphere. Even the music doesn't produce the same 'atmosphere' as the simple original arrangements did. Every scene just feels generic. I don't feel awe, wonder, discomfort, excitement in any of the environments they jut lack personality. I wish someone more intelligent and poetic could explain this on my behalf better.
I’m with you. There is just a lack of tone in the setting entirely that the OG nailed so well. Every town and location feels like it’s a tourist trap and is so clean and upbeat creating an almost uncanny valley type feeling. There are next to no houses in towns, it’s all shops and inns yet the places are teeming with jolly NPC’s touring the sights. It’s always sunny everywhere even around nibelheim which was famously overcast and unsettling.
@@ItsSVO Yes you've said it so well. What you said really helps remind me of something I remember feeling in almost every town in the original - the people always seemed so tired, like life was really hard. I think that in the OG Shinra promised the people an easy life because of mako energy but they just took everything from the people, made them dependent and robbed them of their happiness. So every town you go to people just seem worn down, but trying to get through it all. In the demakes they are all happy, loving life and on top of the world - Shinra truly did bless them with a wonderful life. Such terrible world building.
@@AShroudOfTruth such a piss-poor attempt at paraphrasing what i said so you can leave a snarky reply. Nobody in the OG were suicidal and I never said anyone was that's you using your vapid imagination to construct a story you want to debunk because what is being said here hurt your feelings. I'll say it again simply for the people in the back, in the OG everyone was struggling because of what it was like to live under Shinra, in the demake everyone was thrilled and loving very minute of it. Bad world building is making a mega-evil coorporation that sucks the life out of the planet and suppresses the population but not having that represented in any of the locations or characters. In the demake we are told that Shinra are the bad guys, in the original we actually see it through environmental storytelling.
@@mitchplaysriffs walking down linear areas, game purposely wasting your time is not good gameplay. the games combat system is all this game has and even then i can cherry pick that
@@mjesus850the combat system is fun but it isn't fun to watch as a spectator and honestly it can get messy quickly. Alot of the charm of having a turn based combat is that we can appreciate the moves since the screen will focus on it. This combat so much shit is happening so fast with hyper realistic graphics so it's hard to make out anything.
Mario better have some sort of 3D power up in this game. And also I hope the Bowser Boss battles are actually good. They need to have Bowser Jr and the Koopalings but make the fights good
I agree. I hope the power ups are really cool and fun. I also want Luigi in the game and would like to have some really cool and creative Bros. Attacks from the Mario and Luigi series.
To answer your question about what was SE was thinking it's....cash grab! No, really the company has been going downhill for a while now and they probably decided to bring FF7 back to cash in on it some more.
Even if its comes from the lifestream and we are seeing multiple outcomes before a final reality manifests/ merges whatever. If all these outcomes have a possible probability of existing.... its still a multiverse/ timeline story even if its from the same source ( lifestream). It doesnt need a full fledged universe and planet for each one. You need to understand Schrodinger cat thing. We're seeing multiple possible outcomes/ possibilities. Would you prefer "timelines" as a descriptor word? perhaps I dont know. If the lifestream is the blueprint machine for physical reality that it will conclude with.... it doesnt mean it's not multiverse. Or would you say its not multiverse but generating possibilities for the final reality? So..... its not multiverse story..... its a blueprint making story for a final physical reality? thats not much of a difference. We're seeing multiple outcomes/ possibilities where it originates from is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if its in the lifestream or not. The final reality when it merges of these events in the third game doesnt matter where its source is. It does not matter if its the lifestream not at all. "Multiverse" doesnt mean an established universe that you have have to go through a wormhole in space to get to. Like taking a vacation that's on another planet lifestream etc. Again the source of the game's events ( lifestream) doesnt matter.
"In [the eyes of many FF fans], it's utterly perplexing why we WOULDN'T want many worlds. 'Why have ONE version of a character when you can MANY? Why let dead characters join the Lifestream, when you can travel there with them; pull up a deck chair and crack open a couple of cold ones?'" I suspect there are two main reasons why these fans are so perplexed by our lack of interest in an FFVII multiverse. 1) They don't understand that, for us, "more" =/= "better." We value quality > quantity. We want BETTER content; not simply MORE. 2) For us, the thing we loved about the original FFVII was its high stakes and conflict--the feeling of being on the edge of our seats as we tried to stop Sephiroth from destroying the world. Many 7R fans don't care about this. They only care about either gameplay, surprises, or forming relationships with the characters, and couldn't care less if the story has little-no conflict worth getting invested in. I've seen a lot of FF7R trilogy fans say that they don't care about Sephiroth's plan to destroy the alternate worlds and fuse the remains together, but they still enjoy the trilogy because of its character interactions, battle system, and/or because "not knowing what will happen is exciting". Well for me, the original game's conflict about Sephiroth trying to destroy the planet while the heroes fought to save it is what I loved most. FF7R has so greatly (and pretentiously) over-convoluted that conflict with alternate worlds and new interdimensional/Lifestream powers that I cannot remain emotionally invested in it. And since that trumps all other concerns I have, the 7R trilogy is of no value to me.
Multiverses are a mere gimmick. Cheap storytelling for the lazy writer. Their only purpose in their introduction is to make fun of the actual story and crap on it. Neither MultiVersus, nor the Spider-Man multiverse, nor The Expandables, nor Marvel's Avengers take themselves too serious. It is not meant to be deep storywise. On the contrary. It is meant to be enjoyed by impressionable simple minds.
“Not knowing what will happen is exciting”. That is a sentiment that I do not understand. I thought that the fear of the unknown was the greatest human fear out there. I thought that when faced with the unknown, people were supposed to be screaming and crying while curled up into a ball in the corner and crying for their mommy and daddy. They’re supposed to cry into the darkness and go like “Mommy! Daddy! Somebody, help!” Not get all super excited and bouncy like a bunch of kids on Christmas Day or like an adult who just won the lottery. Gosh, everything is all topsy-turvy now. I don’t understand how not knowing what will happen is exciting. I thought that it was pure anxiety, especially if you’re an anxious person. It goes to show that I truly do not understand human beings.
@@Probably_JENOVA The unknown is what drives any good story. It is story-telling 101. With Remake we do not have that. We do have everything at once at the same time instead of a hint at something. The former is essentially nothing because everything at once is meaningless and kills all curiosity and excitement. The apologists of Remake's "story" only confuse it because they are easily impressed by the old lazy tropes of time travel, multiverses and unreasonable complexity.
If I may but some nuance here, "gameply, surprises and forming relationships" aren't worthless things to enjoy, even if the multiverse ruins the overall piece. And I say this as someone who hated what they did with the story. But I don't think throwing the baby out with the bath water does us any favors. For me, the worst thing of it all is that these two games have an amazing remake trapped inside of them. The combat system is probably the best middle ground between action and turn base ever created, the characterization of pretty much all the characters is on point, and most of the story beats that keep themselves faithful to the original and those that expand upon it were as good as anyone could have hoped them to be. But whenever the bootleg dementors and the multiverse BS show their ugly face, everything gets ruined. However, there are lot of good things in these two games that are worth praising. And honestly, it be a huge tragedy that they would be abandoned after the trilogy is done, and not iterated and expanded upon in other JRPGs. And I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to expect. The whole trilogy is unarguably doomed now. Rebirth has bombed financially (despite what the damage control BS they spouted in their investors meeting would indicate. There's no way in hell a game like this made its money back with 3-4 million copies) so it's pretty much impossible for the last game in the series to not do it as well. The best that Square Enix could do is to make a massive, and I mean a MASSIVE budget cut for the next entry and cut off their losses. And make no mistake, as time marches on, the reputation of this trilogy will be remembered as one of the biggest artistic blunders in video game history. Once the gaslighting hype machine dies down and the games have to truly stand on their own, the house of cards will inevitably crumble. That could be interpreted as that these games had absolutely nothing going for them, and that's just not the case.
When Sephiroth said that line "join me, let us defy destiny together", I was actually hoping they were trying to go for a redemption arc for Sephiroth and he would team up with Cloud & Co. to defeat Jenova together, assuming Sephiroth was under the control of Jenova and wanted to break free and save the world for real and not become a God/vessel. maybe even meet his REAL mother (Lucrecia) and gain more insight from Vincent Valentine as he was freaking there when he was conceived... What a wasted potential that would have been, at least then there would not be a Marvel Multiverse of Madness thrown onto us from left field and the story would be a bit different but more contained within the same universe! Honestly, I forgot Biggs survived thanks to the Whispers and then I busted out laughing when he was killed AGAIN mid-speech! By the time the ending arrived, I was thuroughly confused and disappointed. I'll probably just watched the cutscenes of the 3rd Finale rather than play it because it's certainly not worth my time or effort when so much as changed :(
jenova was never in control of sephiroth, in fact sephiroth control jenova and that's what i dont like about ff7, if sephiroth was actually got controlled by jenova than his madness is justifiable then there's chance to redeem himself
@@Skadi.- i know that, I was simply saying that it would make for an interesting twist if it had been that scenario where jenova was in control this whole time and not some passive malevolent force.
@@Skadi.- Jenova controls Sephiroth just as it does all the others injected with its' cells, Sephiroth more so than others. It isn't 'just' madness that made him turn, but the influence of the Jenova cells.
I enjoyed these games a lot. I loved the character interactions, the graphics, the enhanced, notalgic music the gameplay itself. Revisiting these places as I imagined them to look in real life is an amazing experience. The characters look glorious and the voice acting is superb, but it's pretty clear Square pretty much stepped into the same trap as all the rest of the reboots/remakes...cheesy commercialism, useless fan service and too much Sephiroth...TOO MUCH SEPHIROTH! Every time they don't know what to do the reintroduce him.
I like multiverses that are inherent to the setting like in Planescape Torment and such. But when games (or stories in general) throw multiverse crap in the mix, it only makes a turd sandwich a forth dimensional quantum turd sandwich, which happens to taste like shit beyond time and space.
I enjoy your videos but have some optimism towards the final chapter of the R trilogy, at least one of the major narrative and thematic possibilities created by its various setups. Narrative FF7 Dude born of an Alien attempts to consume the planets life force, A group of Heroes set out to stop him and lose a dear friend along the way. FF7 R Dude dies, enters the afterlife, sees the finite life span of the planet. He whispers back through time to trick the Heroes into breaking the mechanisms of fate to permanently extend the life of the planet, as it will permanently re-alive him & their deceased friend. That seems to be the setup, looks like Aerith’s presence in the planets Dream Worlds will be to take us through the stages of grief alongside Cloud. Starting the game in denial and moving into Acceptance by rejecting and foilling Sephiroth’s plan. We will permanently be keeping her dead with our own hands. Thematic FF7 Life & Death, you experience the permanence of a void left in your life / party. FF7 R The stated theme is "the acceptance of death" The devs have had 30+ years experience with death to learn that the people you love leave more than just a sad void after they go. The memories, hopes and dreams you have in your imagination, become your most valuable possessions. (this is the dream world we will visit in the next game that will fill the empty materia). This can be summarized with the Cosmo Canyon quote: “Sorrow is not a burden, it is yet another of the planets gifts” This medicine helps us just a little every day to live with that loss.
Aerith's consciousness or spirit at least was always still maintained in some way within the lifestream after her death and that's an absolute fact of the OG game and we are shown multiple times including at the end. The Lifestream in FF7 is functionally similar to The Force in Star Wars. I don't know with certainty what will happen in part 3 but I remain convinced that this isn't a sequel but a remake it is an expansion in breadth and depth of the original in every direction. I am pretty sure that the ending will differ in that as the ending in OG 7 was the Bad ending the ending in Remake 3 will be the true/good ending (or perhaps have multiple endings but I doubt it.) in that all the characters and themes that would have lead to Advent Children and Dirge will be brought up and resolved in Part 3 of remake thus making those entries not Really happen in the true canon of events.
Okay so here's my take on the whole thing. You've already talked about how the nature of loss is a core theme of FFVII, and I agree with this, but as far as people in OG FFVII just being gone after they die, I think the ending of the OG contradicts that claim. I mean, the closing images of the game very heavily imply that Aerith is still around in some compacity. We see her hand reaching out to Cloud in an attempt to save him, after he has defeated Sephiroth. Now, maybe you could say that this was just a hallucination in Cloud's mind. Later though, the scene of Meteor's destruction heavily implies that it is in fact Aerith who is controlling the lifestream from beyond the grave, and using it to save the planet. So if it's true that people who die really are just gone...how did she do this? For that matter, how did the lingering wills of the Cetra remain in the Temple of Ancients, even after thousands of years? How did the soul of Elmyra's husband attempt to come and visit her after his death? (Aerith confirms that his soul came a long way to see her in the OG) There are several examples in the OG which seem to confirm that death is not really the end in FFVII. While we are told that the conciousnesses of the dead will eventually dissolve and join with the lifestream, there does seem to be an unknown period of time where the souls of the dead continue to linger, even after death. Aerith is still around by the end of OG. It's just that her ability to interact with the physical world is more limited than when she was alive. The same seems to be true in Rebirth. She's able to interact with Cloud to some degree because of everything going on with him, but she's unable to directly interact with characters like Red, Yuffie, or Tifa. Her friends are suffering from the pain of her loss, and Aerith is unable to comfort them. So her death does still have consequence. There are things she could do while alive that she is simply incapable of doing now that she is dead. Her spirit may still be around, but things will never be the same for her, or the party, ever again. Personally, the nature of how life and death actually works in this world is something that I've always been very curious about, and I've always wanted to explore how the lifestream works in more depth. I feel this way about a lot of things in the OG actually. In my multiple playthroughs of the OG, I've always found myself thinking things like "I love this idea, but I wish we could explore it more.", or "This character is great! I wish we had more time to really go into what makes them tick." The FFVII Remake Project allows us to re-experience the core narrative of FFVII, while also expanding on that narrative, and exploring the themes, characters, and concepts of the OG in greater detail. For me personally, that is an incredibly exciting prospect. Now of course, I won't truly know how I feel about the results until part 3 finally comes out, but for the moment at least, I find myself very satisfied with how this world and these characters have been expanded. For people who adopt a "less is more" mindset when it comes to FFVII, or simply aren't interested in the same things that I am, then yeah, the prospect of an FFVII deep dive doesn't hold much appeal. It just feels like an overcomplication of something that they saw as at least damn near close to perfect already. I get that, but for me, someone who really did want a better understanding on the mechanics of the lifestream, on the nature of life and death in this world, on the characters, the struggles they face, and how they individually deal with loss, this project really is shaping up to be a dream come true.
Thanks for engaging with the video. I appreciate it. It was good to read through your thoughts. This is where I'm at with it: What I was trying to get at is when Aerith dies, you don't travel to the lifestream with her. You cannot spend time with her. Even if she influences events, you cannot get to her. Which leaves us with that tremendous sense of loss we all feel when we lose someone we love. Yet it's comforting to think or feel that the person may be close to you. But the truth is, they never come back to you. Maybe they have become part of something bigger. The OG story was told from the POV of the living (the people who have to carry that pain). It's the same principle whether this 'multiverse' thing is explained by timelines, memories, etc. In the OG, people watched characters suddenly die (e.g. Zack and Biggs). Now, their story continues (through whatever the mechanics are). Death may have consequences around limitations of what the character can do or interact with, but there's a blurring of lines for us because we are mainly comforted by their return, their screen time. That will always feel at odds with the feelings I described above. And what made the OG so powerful to me. All that said, I get why people enjoy this project. Hopefully the final part delivers for you. Thanks again!
@@katherinemerkel3505 OMG girl, get a fricking life. If you don't like this game, then move on and forget about it! It's healthier to let go of that which makes you so miserable. Put it behind you. Look forward, not back.
@@kellevichy Cloud was in denial that he was a soldier in the original game and he didn't even know about Zack existence till that bridge. It's not as if Rebirth is going to a complete and different direction. Everything will be handle when Tifa enter his memory, etc.
I feel like I'm missing context for this video, I'm not sure I understand why you're asking whether multiple worlds are compatible with the original FFVII or not. I don't see why that question matters. The remake trilogy is its own thing that doesn't have to tell the story the exact same way as the original. I don't think the issue is that multiple worlds isn't compatible with the original. The more meaningful criticism that I think you're getting at is that multiple worlds don't do anything to meaningfully expand on the themes of the original or make them more accessible to a new and broader audience. I think it's better to regard the remake trilogy as being in conversation with the original, not being a megaphone for it. We should criticize it not for being unfaithful but for being a poor conversationalist. The remake trilogy's biggest "sin," if you want to call it that, is that it's obsessed with the original but has nothing interesting or emotional to say about it, treating it instead as a checklist of characters, events, and gameplay.
if you watch The Matrix or Nightmare on elm street you should understand Rebirth and its not changing ff7 more than AC did. bottom line just like the movies i said main character goes asleep he ends up in a dream world when he wakes up, he is back in real/main world. side character has the power to make copies of himself in the dream world just like Agent smith and Zack. its not that hard to understand and anyone who had a dream knows much crazier things goes on then that. og had you going to that dream world in the lifestream sequence. the truth is you found out rebirth didnt go off track but you who caims to be a fan never understood og past cloud seph and their swords. if i said i was a big fan of matrix then said i hate all the timeline multiverse stuff in it you wont say i really wasnt a fan of matrix at all im confused
This video is kind of weird because he’s started out with fans are making their own assertions into the plot of rebirth when he made his own assertions on the plot of the original game stuff that was never confirmed like dyne house and the grave of his wife and daughter, which I need to really say this are never confirmed. These are things that you can only really assume on a context clues basis much like the same with the people making assertions that it’s not timelines or Multiverse
I was just gonna leave it at here, but then I watched the rest of this video and he makes very weird assumptions over other works on how the “death/dream” worlds never mind the fact that there are other movies that actually have this type of concept and actually uses them and builds tension behind them. Then he decides what if these movies had this type of concept despite the fact that they also have to like rework a little bit in order to make it work. But then it makes the weird assumption that these are all safe Havens, even though they’re all going to die in order to fill a villains plan, which is even weird because he didn’t take the idea of what if there’s a villain, threatening these types of worlds so he then has to rework the plot in order to have tension behind them.
If you look at the background you can clearly see the 2 crosses to mark their graves. One is larger (his wife) and the other is smaller (Marlene). It’s not his opinion, it’s obvious. You don’t need a confirmation from SE for everything.
@@za87647 all right then I’m glad that you saw my comment and decides to answer it so let’s get things started. It’s pretty obvious that it Is the grave of his wife and daughter it’s so obvious that no one has ever made the connection to it like I decided to look up on Internet to see if anybody has made that connection and nope even on a video called FF seven remake dyne scene has to be perfect. Makes no mention on whether or not any of this is it. Now, if you just wanna say on a symbolic level, (for the graves not for the house because literally nothing really says that) it is that, that’s why he’s shooting on it. Then OK you got me there, but he didn’t say on a symbolic level he said and you are saying it is the graves which there is really nothing that supports that which is also a fan insertion and he’s making a video complaining on fans making their own assertions while he also made his own assertions, you get where I’m coming from my friend
I completely disagree. You said you want “to sit down, and be told a story”. You were. It’s an incomplete story because its a trilogy and you dont have all the parts yet. And yet, you want to dissect it and say its too convoluted, etc; but the story isn’t complete. Rebirth is probably by far one of the greatest video games experiences i’ve ever felt. Yes, I’ve played OG back in the day, and have been playing video games since the early 90s’ as young kid. I find it interesting people love to dissect and find lore in video games, even when it’s just meant to be fun and not have huge lore. I say the fans are the ones that need to step back, chill out, and go along for the ride like you yourself said you want. The story isn’t done. Once it’s done, THEN you can critique the hell out of it and its story.
Love the remake project and what they are doing here. Brought the characters to life, combat to another level and whole game as it was meant to be. Bravo 🙌
I’m with you as well, but this is not the right place to comment your opinion of Remake project, people here just hate everything and are quite sad. They think they are above people that enjoy the project somehow because it’s the only way they can feel better about themselves
@@rosegiogio9255Yeah. I hate how, they're writing this story off when they still don't get the whole picture, none of us do. Calling a story "bad" because it's incomplete at the moment and because you think you know where will it go is just bad criticism. The one thing I agree with this Remake project in regards to storytelling is that it shows too much in the final act (for both games). Everything else has been great. But no, some fans can't get around the idea of these new story elements and automatically say that it's bad in general. It sucks.
@@martinaguiluz4063 I feel like they don’t understand the esoteric nature of Remake is literally how esoteric the OG was back then. They don’t really want to engage with what the new elements Remake brings to the table because somehow it “butchered” the story. The lifestream and the planet are more of a player this time, how the cycle of life and death is correlated with dreams and hopes and how the worlds inside the lifestream are a commentary of nature. The expansion to character arcs, making Cloud’s mental health even more of an issue this time around, Making Tifa an even more active player in the themes of ff7, etc. there’s so much more and it’s a shame people just throw to the said because is not a faithful one to one remake. It’s all a good if you don’t like ff7 Remake, but if you do plz don’t let it be out of spite and bare-bones analysis.
This guy is on a crusade against ff7 demake lol. Im so glad i never liked ff7 or i would be ultra depressed with this woke clusterfuck of a game. The combat system could work on a new FF though. Not as great as ff12 imo.
I really feel bad for players that write this story off as "just another multiverse mess". It clearly seems that you're not willing to give it a chance, even though you really don't know where this is going. Besides, it's not like the stories in this franchise are always straightforward (the only exception being FF1). The one gripe that I have with this project is that they throw too much at the end and that leaves you with thoughts like the ones on this comment section. I'll gladly wait to see how these same storytellers amaze me the same way they did back in 97.
'not willing to give it a chance' i pre-ordered remake and bought rebirth despite my disappointment in hopes it gets better; have another theory for why we dislike trash writing?
'you're not willing to give it a chance' i preordered remake, first game in my life i ever preordered, and bought rebirth despite my apprheneions b/c i wasn't happy with remake. i gave it a chance it it only got worse. got any more theories to why we don't like trash writing? that you justify spending hundreds of dollars on 3 different games waiting for it to 'get good' is a joke.
@@kellevichy See, this is what I'm talking about. A story that covers the multiverse theory is automatically considered "bad writing" and that's really not true. There are plenty of shows, movies, books, that cover this time travel/multiverse shit and are extremely well done. Has the time travel/multiverse concept been used too much lately? Yes, definitely. But just because this concept is being used too much in different shows and movies doesn't mean outright awful concept. Besides these games are kinda going on a different route when it comes to this multiverse concept. Now, I'm not entirely sure where this is going but I'm willing to follow it because of how interesting it's getting. The characters and the gameplay are already great I just want to know how they continue to reinvent this plot.
players just don't get it. we do not care if it is a multiverse. all we care was to SEE more of these characters. more of the back stories, the lost, and suffering, joy, and happiness. who cares if there are mulitple timelines. we wanted to see more of Zack and Aerith. if they are dead at the end and happy at the end of part 3. and a dlc that brings them back to life, we will love it.
I've seen it all as well coming from what I call the purist fans who refuse to take off their nostalgia goggles. It's okay to have nostalgia for something and even to love it for what it is... My personal opinion is I genuinely appreciate the additions they made and for me and many others this game is a masterpiece. They did not change the core of the story or the characters... and without it I would not have been able to go through this game with the sense of curiosity and wonder that I did back in 1997. A 1:1 remake would've been great don't get me wrong, but extremely predictable and boring... I understand that change can be a little off-putting for those who grew up playing the OG and have a lot of sentimental value attached to its story, and that’s fine, but there’s some people out there who have turned to storming the internet with so much hateful rhetoric towards the remake project and its fans to the point where they are actively dissuading people from playing it or enjoying it in the first place... and that is completely messed up.
I guess you have missed, dodged or ignored all the arguments in all the videos that do go through why "the core of the story is different". If people really think that fate and whispers add things to the story, maybe they need to take off their nostalgia glasses (if this was a new game without FF VII skin there the new themes would be useless) and stop with the fan theorizing and writing the story for the developers. Also if people can judge things now in a positive light, then people can judge them in a negative light.
@ChangingTimes01 This whole video is this persons personal opinion about the game. Therefore his own opinion about it cannot be objectively right or wrong because it is simply his opinion. His opinion is that he feels the original game is much better than the remake and that by definition cannot be wrong unless you’re trying to claim he actually loves remake despite saying conclusively that he doesn’t. Is that what you’re saying?
@ChangingTimes01 How can they be objectively wrong? If I say “I don’t like this song because of these reasons” then how can that statement be objectively wrong? It’s a personal opinion. Please explain and provide the metrics you’re using to determine so. If it's an opinion then it can't be wrong on an objective level because it isnt about objective things. It simply states a personal preference. There are ways to compare opinions using facts, reasoning, etc, but by their nature of being an opinion they can't be inherently wrong as long as they are at their core based on personal viewpoint I.e. someone saying that they have 6 fingers when they have 5 isn't an opinion like that because it is simply a falsehood and isn't based on what people personally prefer or unobjective things. But someone saying that grapes are better than oranges or that one camera angle is better than another cannot be wrong on an objective level because they aren't objective things. Objectively means “not influenced by personal feelings” therefore, as I’ve pointed out multiple times already, you’re wrong. Regardless of what your clear Narcissism is in denial about.
@ChangingTimes01 You are OBJECTIVELY wrong in claiming that the person's personal subjective opinion regarding FF7 remake games can be objectively wrong as that's literally an impossible non-sequitur! And who EXACTLY is this authority on deeming subjective opinions objectively wrong??!! You??!
He bought it to be able to review it fairly for his channel. Thats called having integrity. You don’t have to listen to critiques by the way, you have the power to watch or not watch things, take hold of your emotions and take some responsibility.
You can’t win with FF7R fans. If you haven’t played it = you can’t have an opinion. If you do play it = you can’t criticise the game if you cared enough to buy it 😂 basically the only correct opinion is whatever aligns with YOUR views on the game. Narcissist much?
@@za87647 cult like behaviour and a lack of of critical thinking. A common occurrence in society these days. People are being told what to think but not how to think.
Best video on the subject I've seen thus far. 100% agree.
Multiverse, parallel timelines, alternate worlds, other realities, blah, blah blah... Whatever we choose to call it, that general concept/possibility simply existing in an FF7 related story dilutes the finality of death. There's a version of reality where Zack died and a version where he doesn't. Same situation with Biggs. Same with Aerith possibly as well, who knows at this point. (Some people are very confident that she is actually dead, but the fact that it's even debatable one way or another is a problem imo.)
In general, when there are multiple versions of a character that can live or die depending on branching timelines/worlds/whatever, that cheapens the moment when a character actually dies. Because in the back of my mind I know there is another version of that character still alive and happy in a different version of the event. This is an issue I have with multiple realities as a concept itself, separate from however the FF7R series ultimately chooses to implement it. The FF7R characters could all end up with the same exact fate as the original by the end of part 3 and I would still have huge problems with the story being told in this way.
It just sucks my investment out of the story when I know there are multiple versions of the same character who may be alive or dead, all for the sake of keeping the fanbase guessing for 3-4 years between games. I have similar gripes with the Marvel multiverse stories too. I have always disliked those types of tropes in the comics as well. Why should I care if Peter Parker and Mary Jane eventually get together if there are an infinite number of universes in which they both do and don't get together!?
For FF7, it's much harder for me to care about Aerith's death if there are many, many possible realities (or Lifestream memories/realities/whatever) where she doesn't die.
If we just happen to be viewing a version of reality where she does in fact die, then yes, I can still feel empathy for the characters in that moment when they lose their friend. But my personal attachment to losing that character is not nearly as strong as it would be if there was only ONE Aerith in existence that we could lose.
The multiple worlds/realities trope is simply incompatible with the message of having only one life to live and cherishing the time we have together as temporary but meaningful. That we must all accept we are just a small part of nature's cycle, and that death is just the natural end of our experience. Mr. Sakaguchi's FFVII was trying to show us a way to be at peace with that concept.
But that theme was already damaged at the midpoint of Remake, well before the ending sequence at the end of the highway.
During the sector 7 plate fall scenario, every named NPC we meet in the earlier chapters just happened to survive. Compared to the original, where it was implied that basically no one (other than Aerith and Marlene) got out in time. The scenario in Remake doesn't make the player feel any sense of loss. And so it felt much less tragic than it did in the original, despite Remake having much more powerful visuals and sound in it's toolbox to convey a sense of loss.
Wedge survives the platefall (twice), only to be killed later on (maybe?) because the whispers are inconsistent plot devices. They revive Barret instantly, yet allow Wedge to live for a whole extra day before trying to kill him again.
Biggs died at the pillar, but is apparently alive in another reality. Jessie is the only character not shown to survive, but they show us her headband/glove in the ending cutscene to keep people guessing. Teasing a possibility that she might be alive similar to Biggs. Whereas in the original there was no question about her fate.
But tropes like these are just 10x worse when used in a story like FF7 which was originally about the finality of death and the preciousness of life.
Now if others are not bothered by this and are still hyped for the rest of the FF7R series the story that's great. I am happy for people who are still enjoying Square Enix's wild ride.
I'm just personally not on board with this storytelling approach. I hope the trilogy ends in a satisfactory way for all of those who are still invested.
I think you hit on the real, and unfortunate, reason for the changes. Once they chose to chop up FF7 into a trilogy, their highest priority became how to sell each next installment, and less about the integrity of the story. All that mattered was how to keep people talking during the many years of making the next one. If FF7 had been remade as a single game, there is zero chance Midgar ends by going into a portal to another world and prematurely fighting Sephiroth, nor would Aerith's death be butchered of it's impact and finality, in place of trying to create a cliffhanger.
They are writing to make people talk instead of telling the story that’s considered a masterpiece. They clearly have no confidence the story can stand on its own and are actively insulting it as a result.
When I beat remake, it was very clear to me that we as a fandom were dealing with a multiverse.
When you understand the basics of multiverse theory and how time travel works and compared it to remake's plot, it began to make more sense.
But what's confusing about FF7 Remake, we are told by red 13 that if they failed to beat the Arbiter of fate, then the future we knew from the OG would happen the same.
So we beat the Arbiter of fate, and when we saw Zack surviving, it became clear at that moment both aerith and Sephiroth were time travelers. You dont need really need someone to tell you specifical details to figure that out.
So Rebirth should have opened a new door way leading to a completely new and original story and if cloud and the gain saw Aerith's death in remake which we know they did, cloud and the others would not let Sephiroth anywhere near her. Its common sense.
But with Rebirth, with some slightly different and added story elements, we didn't get a new original story, and that majorly flipped the switch on me. Because I was hoping we'd save Aerith, and when we got that ending, my love for the remake trilogy died, and that's coming from someone who writes books for a living.
The only purpose that ending served was shock value and only shock value. It's ok to have a good twist in a story, but it's not really needed. That ending was not only convoluted but longer than it needed to be.
Look, I'm fine with Aerith dying in the original, but when I played this ending, it was like I was reading a unedited script that two fanboys wrote, and no one corrected them on it.
If I were the editor, I would not have allowed this game to be published to the media until after they picked one ending and gone with it.
Dude you dont know how refreshing it is to find someone who is nailing the same sentiments I have about Final Fantasy.
I hate when I try to talk about these frustrations and all my friends get so mad at me.
I can understand your feelings. I was told as well to move on from Rebirth in particular. But I just can't move on that easily, because the points, what bothered me, still lingers in my mind.
In the OG we had:
- Cloud's schizophrenia
- Cloud's amnesia
- Cloud's illusions and warped perception of reality and himself
On top of that (as if that wasn't complicated enough), we now got:
- Multiverses
- Multiple timelines
- Aerith's dreams and visions
- Multiple timelines and multiverses colliding and merging
- Whispers that actively shape fate and kill more people in Midgar by preventing us from saving them than Sephiroth killed in Nibelheim and in total
- Whispers reviving characters arbitrarily
- Ever Crisis ...
- FF7 Remake Project DLC yet to come and unlikely change anything for the better
=> Congratulations Nomura and Kitase. The story of FF7 now officially makes less than zero sense.
Whisperer's are not a inherent good or evil. They're no different than white blood cells. They just do what they were designed to do. No different than the planet creating Diamond Weapon.
The ironic part was watching people who would vehemently recoil from Kingdom Hearts' convoluted story in the same breath state how logical and profound FF7R storytelling is. I give props to Nomura for having a throwaway line in one of his KH spin-offs in response to a character trying to make sense of the plot being: "you're thinking too hard about this." It goes to show how little care is put into the stories he works on; all that matters is him having fun crushing our dreams and expectations. Death is meaningless, betrayal is a minor setback, and the power of friendship overwrites all problems.
@@hooligan7290 You're on point, man. What drives me insane even more, is the fact, that people gobble up Maximillian Dood's pseudo-intellectual takes on this mess of a story when he clearly makes up stupid crap as he goes. It reminds me of people believing in star signs and the horoscopes. Be as vague and generic as possible to check as many cognitive boxes for as many people as possible. And since Nomura and Kitase enabled it and laid the foundation to make appear any theory viable, even youtube brainlets and npcs like him can cough up something seemingly deep.
@@hooligan7290 I'm honestly shocked that Nomura even still has a position within SE after all these years considering how shit his writing is!
@@romzen I love how Dood hates on Genesis' pseudo-intellectual Loveless monologues, and then laps up all of Remake as deep and profound.
Literally laugh out loud stuff. :D
A multiverse carries an inherent flaw, if there's infinite realities, then nothing really matters. It makes the viewer not care about what's happening.
Exactly.
It's fiction. It really doesn't matter.
@TrueBlueMajikDewd that's what she said! But when do we listen to women, huh? Yes mother ill come now sorry.
@@TrueBlueMajikDewd they why invest your time in it if it doesn’t matter? Good story telling matters for a game you’re investing 120+ hours in.
@@TrueBlueMajikDewd Appeal to triviality much?
I was worried about this. That Nomura would give it the Kingd9m Hearts treatment...making everyting unnecessary complicated and without emotion...
Most writers including marvel can't write multiverse stories. In my experience only Michael Moorcock wrote multiverse well.
The difference is Moorcocks approach created an ever increasingly complex tapestry of stories. Bad multiverse writing is when nothing really matters.
Never seen time travel or multiple timelines work out.
the sad, empty, actual answer for any of this is, as always, MONEY
the crappy mobile games, the infinite spinoffs, the avalanche of merchandise, and the potential of a lucrative avenue in any and every direction possible all die if there's ANY definitive conclusion to anything in the story.
Why close that door when it leads to a bank vault?
This was definitely NOT about money. You are mistaken there.
If it was a about money they would have just made a 1:1 remake and flood the market with all the things you have mentioned anyway. The story having a definitive conclussion or not has nothing to do with it. And if they wanted alternate versions of these characters, that's what "Kingdom Hearts" is for.
No, this was made for a completely different thing entirely, one even more important than money for people once they go above a certain threshold: Clout.
@@XanderVJsquare did it for money , we are talking about a company making games for profit, but they don't know what they are doing and so the kingdom farts guy worked flat out ruined this with his confused brain
@@XanderVJ Correct, the remake itself is for money but the weirdo bullshit story has nothing to do with that. Thy've already added in story expansions before with before crisis, crisis core and the books and movies. Changing the narrative didn't make the game more profitable, in fact I'd go as far as to say it made it less profitable due to how convoluted the game and it's themes became.
I think even square noticed it too as the first part of the remake had a lot of weird changes and plot threads that seriously pissed some people off so they made this part a bit more focused on fanservice (not just the booba kind but franchise appeal in general).
The only way I see them getting more profit out of this is by wrecking this story and forcing people to go back and play the original, which is well played as that is what I did and it still holds up but all I can say is congrats I guess? I paid 2 bucks for the game on a sale, nice profits for you (also the game is on sale right now go buy it if you want to see it).
I just tell the fanboys nothing is canon after FF7. Not entertaining their cringe weeb nonsense
Fantastic take. And fully agree. All I ever wanted was an actual remake 😭 Just throw a couple new materias/side quests in that freshen it up 😔
I think even the writers working on that project at SquareEnix are not sure what the hell these other realities or multiple universes are or what they want to do with them. Seems to me like the idea was thrown in because of so many successful movie franchises exploring the concept of multiverses in the 2010s and making big bucks. Still, I'm pretty impatient to see how they handle the resolution in Part 3 after Rebirth's ending, it's probably going to be a mess.
It’s purely inserted because of the Marvel multiverse.
they shouldn't have done this in the first place ugh
It should have just been one game
The weirdest thing was how a bullet was gonna headshot zack... but thats not how he dies... he talks to cloud before he dies it was so weird and really shit on the OG.
Agreed. It was so inconsistent with Crisis Core
To be fair, that is how he died in the original. He was gunned down by Shinra soldiers. You have to go out of your way to learn this but that's how it originally happened. They reconned that in Crisis Core for a more dramatic ending.
Good multiverse stories actually requires effort, talent and care to make it work. Thinking about every possibility, thinking about the actual concequences and how it will impact the future story of that timeline. What Rebirth did, is not just the lack of focus on making the multiverse working on paper, but it is also infested with inspirations from other franchises. If we want to make a good conclusion on a beloved story, then we have to think of everything. The context, the buildup and the impact. That should be the proper rule for many writers.
An aspect of multiverse which remains unexplored is the impact of its mere existence on the characters. If I knew about millions and trillions versions of myself I would develop an identity crisis. Imagine the type of conflict and drama this could inject in the story.
Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is the only story I can think of which thought to explore this very issue. That's why it's one of the few multiverse stories I like.
@@obsessive_hermit Thank you for the recommendation.
It's a massive problem in the whole story. None of the characters actually react properly to any of the tacked on stuff.
Considering multiple things in media nowadays relies on the multiverse The concept loses its value For example if the character dies in the original game they can have a happy ever after inside another universe and Vice versa to that Universe as well
In a nutshell it's mainly a lazy plot device in case Backlash to a story decision Gets 2 Out of hand
Love your videos dude always look forward on your takes on FF7 and final fantasy in general 😎👊👊
Whats lazy is the game being 70% filler
@@WhySoSeriousSenpai and And necessary paddling to pad the run time
Multiverse is a crutch for bad writing
I feel bad for the og ff7 fans who have been wanting a one to one remake since the reveal of the ps3
I feel for them, and I would have played that nostalgia trip for sure...but the Remake project has somehow been even better for me so far.
That was everyone that wanted a remake for ff7 until this ridiculous attempt at gaslighting anyone who wanted that into thinking they were the ones who were crazy for expecting a remake to be, you know, a remake.
@@rayweaver8295 No it was more people trying to gaslight everyone into claiming they were lied to, plus people in general using remaster and remake as interchangeable terms.
@@Dayv018 square has had numerous interviews before the first part came out where they flat out lied about what the remake was going to be.
From an interview taken on March 23, 2020
Kitase: Ever since FINAL FANTASY VII came out in 1997, fans and the media have repeatedly called for a remake like this. Unfortunately, we haven’t really had a chance to get a team together to work on it during the last 23 years. I’ve always felt that for such a big, important project we had to have our best developers on it. It had to be a team that had a lot of experience of working on FINAL FANTASY games too. But we finally managed to find a point where everybody’s schedules aligned - that’s when we started the FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE project. The biggest reason though, is how much time has passed and how technology and the world has changed since the original was released. *Modern players may have seen the characters Cloud and Sephiroth over the years as they have appeared in other games, but they may not have played the game where the characters originated from.* I felt that if we want to show people where these characters came from then, truthfully, if the original game was the only way to experience it, new players - especially anyone that wasn’t playing games in the original’s era - probably wouldn’t be so impressed with the original game compared to the latest titles they could be playing.
Hamaguchi-san: When we started this project, I had to think very, very hard about what form we wanted any new experiences in this remake to take. *From the start, I felt that FINAL FANTASY VII’s characters, world and story are so beloved that we couldn’t start playing with those or changing them in a reckless manner.* But the style and presentation - the way they’re shown - that we can work with.
Kitase-san: We made FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE not just for fans of the original, but specifically for new players too. Something that we repeated to ourselves throughout the development was “what are the essential parts of the original” and “why did people respond to the original the way they did?” *Our goal was to capture everything that made the original game so special, but bring it up to date with the latest technology so that new players could be just as excited as players of the original game were when that released. For new players, this is where the story of FINAL FANTASY VII begins.* If you’ve seen characters such as Cloud or Sephiroth in other games, and wondered where their story began, this is the game.
And then you have this from another interview.
Kitase-san: There was ideas like putting subtitles that relates to the story. Nomura-san: *When we put a subtitle, it seems like spin-off or the second arc. We didn’t want to give that kind of impression.* Kitase-san: When having presentation today, we used the footage that had recorded the reactions of the users. They seemed skeptic at the first, but when the word “REMAKE” was shown on the screen, they believed that “VII itself will be back!” and they got so excited. We appreciate that reactions. If there had been a subtitle, it wouldn’t have been like that. With that being in our mind, we picked the simple title for the official one as well.
Enough with the gaslighting.
@@Dayv018 people that were trying to justify this *sequel* as a remake were the ones using the term remake incorrectly.
I heard someone say they love that the remake wasn't a 1:1 remake because they liked not knowijg what was gonna happen, which is fair... but they went on to say they already played the original and don't want to play it again...
Kinda sounds like the original wasn't that special to them.
My favorite games and movies I go back to over and over again because I love how they make me feel, whether it's the gameplay or story. When someone "remakes" that thing and makes changes, then it's no longer the thing I loved.
Interesting, as the OG is my favorite game of all time...and I go back all the way to FF1 on the NES. I love this Remake project for precisely that reason. I would have played a 1 to 1 for sure, and it would have been a great nostalgia trip. But the Remake project feels like it has some stakes since we don't know exactly how it will all unfold. They could royally screw it all up, but so far I've loved both Remake and Rebirth...especially Rebirth.
@@Dayv018 Perhaps I was too harsh towards the guy, but he did follow up saying if they had made a 1:1 remake of the story he would refuse to play it which kind of hurts my soul, haha.
Now, I am in a unique position where I never actually played the original and when I finished playing Remake I didn’t get what all the fuss was about. I didn’t feel like I’d played one of the most influential Final Fantasy games of all time. I had fun for sure but I never felt any motivation to play it again or even play rebirth but you could probably just chalk it up to prefence. I’m a bigger FromSoft fan than anything, haha.
I think my main complaint about the story was the ghost things. Since I have no connection with the original story the ghosts felt like an obstruction of plot, getting in the way randomly when all I want to do is reach my goal. That’s not inherently a problem, but their explanation and resolution didn’t make sense to me, and when the game finished I was more confused than anything. Afterwards someone told me what their purpose was for and it made me disappointed that I wasn’t getting the same experience as everyone who played the original.
Again, I don’t mean to say it was a bad game or a bad story, nor do I think anyone is wrong for loving it. I think I just fall outside of the target audience.
@@merleetomlin6218 No it's cool to get people's opinions who didn't play the OG at all. Ironically I've found it's more OG players who dislike the ghosts/Whispers from Remake. I can understand the idea of wanting the same experience as OG players, although obviously you can still play the OG...the only major difference will be how it fits into this era of gaming playing it for the first time now versus back then (which is a thing, obviously).
I've seen many new players who fell in love with characters in Remake that they either chose to A) go back and play the OG and extended games/compilation, or B) some who specifically did not want to, because they wanted this story to unfold fresh for them. It's very interesting to see their reactions/complaints at parts where fans of the OG are so obviously biased in positive or negative ways versus these fresh players seeing events play out for the first time for them.
Ironically despite loving Remake and Rebirth, I didn't really like the ghosts implementation in Remake...although the fact they still have had a role in Rebirth and presumably going forward leaves a little hope I will dislike them less. A lot of things are left up to how Part 3 resolves for me, to be honest, but I can't deny how much fun I've had seeing this fresh take with the Remake Project...even if I absolutely would have played a 1:1 Remaster.
@@Dayv018 OG players had the realisation that the silly ghosts were a metaphor for them: the fans who wanted them to be faithful and respectful to the original game when remaking it, and that they're seen as some "problem" by the creators of the remake games...hence why they didn't like it!
@@mikespearwood3914 it was a little more tongue in cheek I feel, and since I"m one of those fans of the OG, I can still laugh about it. They also clearly were part of the story they did want to tell, loose metaphor or not.
I'm not mad at the devs for any of that, especially with how many people were complaining over and over 4-5 years later after they had been telling us from the start what the game wasn't going to be. It's perfectly fine for people to want that, but it's just as fine for the devs to tell the type of story they want to tell, and not be forced into one simply to appease a certain percentage of the fan base who would take their ball and go home if they didn't get what they want. This is why I can both feel for people who really wanted a 1:1 Remaster because they won't get that (Ever Crisis is clearly something different/more)...and be annoyed by those that use that as an excuse to be upset/negative simply to be negative about what we did get.
The tension between Remake and the OG is the tension between grounded storytelling versus melodrama.
You know those eighties US soaps and dramas where characters came back from the dead, parts of what happened for whole series were dismissed as dreams, the fourth wall broke down, the characters were having visions of the supernatural etc etc? That's what Remake is. Remake is the _St. Elsewhere_ or _Dallas_ of Final Fantasy.
This, combined with the apparently total narrative constipation of Nomura, Noijma and Kitase, is why I would not at all be surprised if at the end of the Remake trilogy, everything that happened is revealed to have been a dream of Vincent while he hibernates in his coffin.
I don't think you know what "melodrama" means, buddy. The OG was also a melodrama through and through.
But that's not a dig against the original. "Melodrama" doesn't mean "poorly written drama". It means a story with hightened emotions, making them incredibly intense (often times with the help of music or "melodies", hence the name). It's not so much a genre as much as a tone. And the OG was stellar at it.
Although to be fair, you're not alone in this misunderstanding. Melodrama has been historically seen with contempt by the intelligentsia, since it's by its very nature a tone that elevates emotions to their highest degree, and that was considered an afront against reason itself. And since nobody wants to loose social credit, many people took that point of view and ran with it.
You deserve more views
I can’t take how they literally ruined Sephiroth, the One Winged Angel, my favorite character since Super Smash Bros. Ultimate/Advent Children/Final Fantasy VII Remake, making him literally work a puppet {AKA Cloud} in a show and making him like an obedient dog returning a ball to its owner and when he keeps talking about merging worlds to make sure Aerith is fully dead. Sephiroth's always been my favorite since Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and the December Sephiroth reveal trailer for Smash.
“A confluence of worlds…and emotions. Loss, chief among them. It engulfs fleeting moments of joy, transforming them into rage, sadness, hatred.” ~ Sephiroth, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, 2024~ That got me. I left and immediately stopped watching and started bawling because I feel so bad that they basically destroyed my favorite character of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series.
Dimension hopping Sephiroth from the future trying to prevent his own defeat and spawning Whispers that are trying to keep fate in the same direction, so you have to defeat these Arbiters representing fate/destiny/the natural order to open the timeline and be in control of your own destiny and etc., etc., etc. This is a horrible story. I'm not going to see the great finale in the year 2027 either. Just the very last of the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Sephiroth Cutscenes for Part 3.
Same. I absolutely hate how Sephiroth is handled in this trilogy. His dialogue is bursting with some of the most pretentious pseudo-philosophical horseshit I've ever had the displeasure of hearing. And my GOD I cannot STAND his ASMR voice. I already hate ASMR to begin with, but it's even worse when the lines are all cryptic nonsense and the speaker sounds like a Christopher Nolan character on antidepressants.
Sephiroth is not the kind of villain that I love to hate anymore. He's not even the kind of villain that I hate and want to see the heroes beat the shit out of. He's literally so annoying that he makes the entire trilogy impossible to stomach.
@@obsessive_hermit Agreed, my friend! :)
@@obsessive_hermit He's pretty much a Genesis clone now, he talks as if he was reading some corny dark poem, you can't take him seriously not to mention he's e everywhere, he Even appeared in Gold Saucer telling Cloud to "Have fun" Seph went from being a cool iconic villain to a combination of the Worst anime tropes ever
I skipped rebirth. I can’t take how they butchered the story.
Same, I'll sail the high seas 🏴☠️when it comes out on PC. They ain't getting my money again.
I SHOULD have skipped rebirth. Hated the ending of pt 1 and wanted to give it another shot w/ rebirth (maybe they could fix it?). But it only got worse T_T
The only PS5 game I own and you didnt miss much, I mean the gameplay was fine but everything else was not. Oh and the platinum was hell. But I already too deep into this crap, I just ignore the story and pretend is the original retelling....I know I am harming myself by doing that but I am big FF 7 fanboy idiot...but I will never defend the direction.
BTW sales are pretty low so I am so glad people is voting with their wallets.
Also Part 3 is going to the worse one so...yeah is an easy skip and watch it on youtube.
butchered what story? This isn't a remaster...
Then I feel bad for you. What's the point of playing the same game with no changes and only improved graphics? FF7Rebirth is the best jrpg since ff10.
Facts. Facts. Facts.
Man what a breath of fresh air to hear some one spitting so much facts..
People need to stop defending this crappy writing.. it's so bad, all I ever hear is people justifying it by saying it's a 3 parter .. thats what they said after part 1 and after part 3 they will say to wait until the dlc and then after the dlc they'll say we gotta watch the anime thats coming out soon, then they'll say wait until the Advent Children video game is released 5 years from now in order to be able to fully critique it.
I gave the story a chance for part 1 and now 2 and its only getting worse.. I have no problem with them changing the story if it would have been for the better but square has not done that.
They set up that fate can change but nothing actually changes.. the same things happen but in worse ways than the OG.The pacing the tone the stakes everything was done better in the OG..and I never even played the OG back in the day.. i'm not even a die hard fan of the OG but the remakes are objectively worse.
They bring back Biggs and Wedge back just to die randomly later in an unceremonious way..
They keep on spoiling the story so that there is no mystery.. They show Cait in Reeves office .. They show Barret chasing after Dyne and Marlene even flat out tells you that Aerith is going to die..
They don''t explain shit in this game either.. I don't think any new ff7 player even realized that Sephiroth was caressing jenovas body part in the boat fight because cloud and the gang never talk about what happens and act like it was nothing.
Aerith's death ruined by multiverse crap and an hour long boss rush
Don't even get me started on the mini games and the "open world"
The one thing I don't get is how on earth can someone say that FF7 was one of their most favorite games of all time and at the same time call this crap a genuine "masterpiece". Are they lying when they say ff7 was that good or what.. Because if they did this to my favorite final fantasy, which is FFX and changed it like this i'd be incredibly disappointed and infuriated.
I have no doubt in my mind that in another 15 years when people get over their recency bias, people will look back at these remakes and say " what the hell were they thinking?"
The same people who defend this are the ones who think kh is a god tier saga with master story telling. They won’t know a great written story if it whacked them on the head.
The only thing I like was the fighting gameplay. Not the story or 24 mini-games
@@mac1bcThen you are the only sane person in the ff 7 trilogy cult.
“The anime that’s coming out soon”????? Huh??
Wish more people would see this video
FF7Rebirth is the best jrpg since fF10. I played the game...I don't need a youtube video to base my judgement on it.
Wrong 😑 this remake is a horrible written fan-fiction.
Final Fantasy 14 is and continues to be the best ff game after 10.
@@katherinemerkel3505 ff14 is not a traditional jrpg.....you do realize the difference between jrpg and mmorpg, right? Lolz
@@coreymartin6486 Don't feed the troll buddy - all that matters is that *you* like the game. For me both Remake and Rebirth are masterpieces for sure.
@SnuSnu91 yeah, I try not to.
It sold poorly so we were right.
It sold “poorly” because it was a ps5 exclusive jackass. If it was on ps4 and PC, it would of made close to the numbers remake did, get
Your head out of your ass pretentious bug
@@fgclash454no it sold poorly because fans aren’t interested.
FYI: the lifestream never had a connection to other timelines or anything like that.
That was a retcon from a novel and I don’t care about what other people say is canon, it’s not. It’s a retcon forced into a story with a lore that doesn’t support it.
@ChangingTimes01No he literally traveled to another planet as space travel exists in the universe of 7.
This is just my opinion, but I feel the weight of business decisions are impacting this game more than anyone is willing to admit. Like a drug dealer, they're chopping up the source material to allow them to sell much, much more. This multiverse pivot is the same thing diluting Marvel IPs.
After so long, it gets old...and they're just willing to ride that into the ground so long as people pay for it, but at what cost?
I don't understand why the Remake Project fans don't understand this. "It's not a multiverse!" "Aerith is dead!" It doesn't matter the SEMANTICS and DEFINITIONS of the words at play, even if it's "all a dream" or a "hallucination of the Lifestream", it's still going to be spun out into a FF7 Expanded Universe and milked even more than it already has been.
I just wish they'd let it die at this point.
It's more about clout than about money. Except that it's backfiring badly.
Multiverses are so hard to get right, and in this day in media overused. My original thought when playing Remake was that Sephiroth was in a sense “time travelling” to rewrite the story/destiny bc he knows how the OG story ends. They could have left it at that. It still implies there’s another universe (the OG) and then the Remake universe but doesn’t get to complex and gives weight to the steaks and the Lifestream and overall the environmental change subject matter
Square have been ruining the story of FF7 long before Rebirth. The compilation have been making retcons and additions that have not enhanced the story in any way but only taken away from it. Genesis is a terrible, awful character whose entire personality is quoting some stupid play yet was retconned into the Nibelheim reactor where apparently he was the one to send Sephiroth on the path to losing his mind. We know what really happened in Nibelheim but Crisis Core just says no, this is what REALLY happened.
In Advent Children, not only are there clones of Sephiroth but he comes back too despite being beaten by Cloud in the Lifestream at the end of OG. Rufus is still alive even though he shouldn't be. They just pulled some BS excuse that there was a hidden bunker or something under his desk? Yeah except we saw him engulfed in flames during the attack on Midgar and he would not have possibly had time to take cover.
Rebirth is just the latest entry that retcons, changes and takes away from the story of OG FF7 because Square knows that they can milk this just because it is FF7.
FF7 was infinitely better when the Lifestream was just a place from which magic and monsters could be summoned, and to which souls/memories returned when people died. And that was it.
I could tolerate Sephiroth's resurrection in Advent Children (you could argue that JENOVA kept them both alive because of her interdimensional powers and/or that the Lifestream cannot claim JENOVA's soul), but the 7R trilogy has taken it WAY too far by making the Lifestream omni-dimensional--able to create time-travelling ghosts, control the spacetime continuum and create alternate worlds/universes. It's almost everything I dislike about superhero comic books in a place where I would have never asked for them to be.
True and now they ruined the main story. Still cant belive it . F... Square enix !
truth
@@obsessive_hermit Nah: Sephiroth back from the dead in that horrendous Advent Children was lame: "Cloud & the gang are back to fight Sephiroth again in a new wacky adventure!". Just a lazy cash grab with the famous FF7 IP...pretty much like these current remake games!
I like how literally everybody has totally wiped _Last Order_ from the collective fan consciousness.
These games take place in an alternate reality where everyone looks and sounds like a cringe-worthy cosplayer version of themselves.
Kh tier dialogue 😂
God Lord the dialogue is SO Bad
Every Zack / Biggs scene was painful to watch, "we have to believe in ourselves biggs, everything is going to be ok" who wrote that garbage!?
What were they thinking? Multiverses are popular right now, via the transitive property if we have a multiverse people will like it. Squaresoft made works of art for a passionate fanbase. Square Enix makes products to generate revenue for shareholders.
From trend setters to trend chasers.
@@dudemcguy1227 Is this the legendary DudeMcGuy from the Resonant Arc Community?
@@themalgadar7339 Yup, it's me :).
Seems you also have good taste in gaming/storytelling content haha
I hate how mainstream and popular multiverses have become these days.
They didn't use multiverse here because they are popular. The FF7R project started long before that... and it was used by Square Enix long before that too.
They just like the trope and decided to go full in here. The fact that it's popular right now was just a """"happy"""" coincidence.
I’m just glad people are recognizing how much of a hack Nomura, Kitase, And Nojima are and have always been. They absolutely suck at writing and have needed to be booted from writing stories for a while.
They are absolutely worthless story tellers.
Sakaguchi seems to be the only decent writer.
Night Sky Prince and his ilk seem to think CBU 1 are masters at storytelling. After all he claims Rebirth is the best ff since 10. 😂
And let us not forget the 2.0 version of this trilogy when it’s finished too.
It’ll go the route of Kingdom Hearts most likely, adding in additional cutscenes here and there to “Try” to add more context or explain plot threads of the timey whimeyness “better”
And like kh it will fail to do so. Instead adding more convoluted plot elements as it goes on. Trash 🗑️
@@katherinemerkel3505
But it will look, play and sound “amazing” so much of it will be acceptable for those reasons
Yeah Nomura fans will blindly eat it up.
@@katherinemerkel3505 And just hardcore FF7 and video reviewers on RUclips. Doesn’t even have to be Nomura fans alone
They all contribute with their overly praising and over the top reactions
agreed, they need to hire better writers as well, both noct and cloud loudly groan in womens faces but all women cant pick up on body language apparently (according to square writing team) and love them for some reason, charters just turn all meta n cryptic and no one questions it! or follows up on it
this game is ff7 kh edition, got to play the original, the spin offs watch a movie, find some translations for some terrible "novels" (poem more like) and play the mobile gacha game....... we have entered namura territory lmao
imagine a world where they did a actual remake instead of this nonsense, (would have sold way better, look at resi 4) i see this and the impending kh4 flop to sink square for good, they nearly did when namura took 13 years on ffxv, but somehow he still gainfully employed
and why cant they add combo modifiers? cloud doing the same 6 hit combo for 160 hours now 🤦🏽🤣
The only good remake I can Recommend nowadays is persona 3 reloaded it does everything I a remake should do in my opinion Improve on the Turn bass comeback improve on the social links and Improve on the Activities
But the one Important thing they got right was The story its the Exact same story from 2006 with an few Minor changes that doesn't affect it
In other words a Faithful remake
Unlike FF7
@@paulf631 I don't get the logic in changing one of there best storys! It's like if they changed 9 or xs story!!
They litteraly ripped off ff13 we beat fate n changed time.... we even got the bit when anima gave them a vision ( a huge plot point in 13) the bit when you fight the big wisper in the first part
Now he doing ff8 he gonna squish time together.... 🤦♂️ nojima and namura both washed up aha
The irony is sephiroth in all his master planning don't realise he already won in one time line n could just go there but no can't write above the intelligence of the writers 🤣🤣🤣
I really enjoyed persona 5 so I will have to cheak them out. My m8 tells me 3 is the best one
I really liked the remake of xenoblade chronicles, was the first time I even played it but was what I needed after square got offended by the term JRPG even tho they used to make the best in class and probably why the genre so popular
It's like sonic they can't help but keep reinventing the wheel even tho the fans clearly like 2d platfoming, we like JRPGs with deep mechanics and lots of good exploration! And a good story!! (tho 8 or 12 my favourites for the mechanics I'm more about that aha and 8 got the best music free)
Probably unpopular opinion but Honestly I put ffxv above these ff7 games. At least it had some exploration and the action part of combat felt way more fleshed out if a lil floaty n super easy because of items 🤦♂️
The irony of namura saying ffxv dint feel like final fantasy to him, them him dropping the turd of ff7r with 13 side quests n all corridor simulator was laughable.... he had 13 years to make It wanted to make it a musical!!!
He even got a dig in in kh3 ( another flop) how salty you got to be to add a project you failed to make to your already over bloated lore 🤦♂️ he makes cool characters but keep him away from writing and directing lol
He also let dissdia just flop instead of adding more modes like 2v2 he added £15 skins 🤦♂️ someone fire this man aha
@@dbfzato-1327 what if kingdom hearts 4 is actually a good game when it comes out.
@1BadAssArchAngelvs14 it could be I guess but after the last game and any game connected to namura in the last 21 years (except xenoblade 2(I'm not gonna hold my breath
The last one divided the fan base, by dropping final fantasy characters, even story connected ones, the lazy writting, the super easy "super boss" the end of the game where they all die them come back again then sora disappears like buy the dlc.....
I'm talking base game. i would never buy that recycled verses 13 crap! He had 13 years to make that game, nearly sunk square enix, now he forcing this noct clone lore into the game as well.....
People already don't like the way the story is just new mystery box plot that ends in the most basic way over and over again, and using every plot devise ever, time travel, dark light, clones. Digital world, dream world, mystery past, now dimensions with this ffv13 bs..... nojima washed up and needs to retire
He made a final fantasy gatcha game with lore...... and a final fantasy 7 battle royale.......
Smart move would just to add the cast to fortnight.... but he's not had a smart idea in years or made a character that's not cheesy and one note
How sora gonna lose all his power again this time n spend 80% of the game messing about being stupid.... sound familiar, lol
This style of writing now is killing any reputation final fantasy 7 had for being good. People outside the fan base not interested and like oh still weeb nonsense.... the fan base hated this style of writing since dirge of the cebreus! It's the same old bs.....
Square not made a really good game since ff12
@@dbfzato-1327 To be honest the final fantasy characters in Kingdom Hearts are not really important anymore since they have zero ties with any Keyblade wielders of the past "Keyblade orders" so that's why final fantasy characters are being phased out completely. in order for a character to become important now in Kingdom Hearts' new plot line a character needs to have a Keyblade and ties to previous Keyblade wielders of the old eras. none of the final fantasy characters in Kingdom Hearts have ties with the Pre-keyblade war old-Era orders of keyblade wielders, so that's why this is happening. besides the only time final fantasy characters appeared in Kingdom Hearts is either "Hollow Bastion" or "Traverse Town" which the two original worlds are not even important anymore since we are going to a world where only Keyblade wielder organizations only co-exist together to find the source of all conflict with the darkness, so what would "Cloud Strife" do in a world with just "Keyblade wielders" he would not have a say in any conflict on what the "Keyblade wielder organizations" are doing since cloud strife is not a Keyblade wielder himself.
you give both the creators and the fans of the remake fans too much credit and respect by engaging with them on this level
love you king thank you for all your work
god i hate multiverse trope
Final Fantasy VII the Multiverse of Madness
Fitting to compare a mediocre story with a mediocre movie
7:30 Zero Escape confirmed as a justifiable canonical sequel to the Titanic movie, rose SHIFTed to another world with the morphogenetic field to escape death of old age
Zero escape is a good example of many worlds working, but as you say, "a story built around that premise" can work.
They did this shit it kingdom hearts too. Characters would "die" and be brought back by bullshit ways.
Well, nobody technically dies in Kingdom Hearts barring a few exceptions. And even some of them were revealed later on to just be somewhere else
Rebirth is the worst type of fanservice, the type that ruins a whole story in order to give the fans what they want, Zack shouldn't be alive, but they brought him back just because he's popular, what a Joke
Yup. They hate hearing that though. They can’t stand that their shit taste caused the game to flop
@Asami_Kagehisa I kinda loved it because it was such a slap in the face to his fanboys. He literally served 0 purpose in rebirth. 😂
THE RISING STAR HAS DROPPED AGAIN!! Hell yeah, man, it's always a pleasure to hear what you have to say on these topics!
If you want a good multiverse story, I recommend Black Science by Rick Remender. It's a comic that takes the concept to it's absolute limit, has real stakes, and nuanced characters.
Many thanks for the suggestion. I'll look it up.
@@orion8550 It has GORGEOUS artwork too
everything everywhere all at once is the most easiest access to a good multiverse stories
because the multiverse used for expanding the characters more than used as a main plot
@@Skadi.- Couldn't agree more. I adore that movie. It's about the relationships amongst a multigenerational family and the multiverse is basically a tool akin to 007's gadgets.
They lost me during Remake, no interest of Rebirth at all 😑
Multiverses where fun in Rick & Morty, not in FF7.
While I love getting your take on this there's a part of me that thinks it's not even worth humoring this mindset. "Not a multiverse" is becoming the modern "Squall is dead". For those who don't know most corners of the FF fandom openly and rightfully ridicule people who believe in the "Squall is dead" theory as it's become short-hand for needless and insipid theory crafting conceived from a lack of media literacy. And if you take them seriously then they would suggest their respective games' plot are ultimately a Jacob's Ladder scenario which is an even harder concept to pull off without the proper writing chops.
I'm not even someone who is completely against parallel realities as a plot device, I think they can be fun but I openly acknowledge the narrative pitfalls it creates. I think you hit the nail on the head pointing out that it's less about there being alternate realities at all and more about how it dilutes the original story. FF'97's story is TOO important to be using this crap.
You bring up some interesting film examples but I feel like there is a much more famous example that you can apply the same pedantic arguments 7R fans use and yet it would still qualify as one of the most objective examples of "alternate universe" in the history of film. The 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life. You could make the case that George Bailey is deriving these "what if" scenarios from the flawed memories of his own life and in this case the stand-in for what people call the "lifestream" is a little thing called "heaven". However if what he experienced within his moment of despair was in fact "all in his head" then it becomes less powerful since "heaven" as a concept is meant to be aspirational within the logic of the film. The story makes not only heaven aspirational but living as well. Life and death. The story made its point with only two realities and that's difficult enough to pull off in fiction. What some people don't seem to understand is that a multiverse doesn't HAVE to be infinite, having even a handful is already complicating your narrative immensely so if your writing is bad it becomes very noticeable.
I often see people talk about 7R being too "anime" but really I think that mainly applies to the way action is directed. Feels like a lot of principles you would use for sakuga applied to video game cutscenes. The bigger issue to me is that it's very comic book. Classically mainstream comic books have relied on recycling legacy characters that they own throughout the decades almost as a proving ground for up and coming writers. That's why they love using time-travel, multiverse, and universally reboots. Weirdly enough there is some merit to this style as more often than not the best characters stories...aren't written or drawn by the creators of said character and that becomes somewhat perilous to navigate when corporate ownership is involved.
Anime/manga tends to be self-contained one and done tales (at least the good ones are) and because of that they have their own kind of complicated publishing hurdles to contend with due to that bespoke nature. Because of that writing style manga sales have been stomping a mud hole in western comics purely because you can often start a series from chapter one and expect an ending point most of the time, as opposed to deciding whether you should jump into Spider-Man on issue #181 or #237 or if the next 7 years of new issues will even be worth it? Should you jump into FF7 on the '97 original or Rebirth or should Crisis Core be the first thing? Should I look up videos of First Soldier just so I know something extra super secret that only our super secret club of fans know about?
I've recently had this bad feeling in the pit of my stomach that they're going to call the 3rd game FFVII: Revival. The idea being to hint at those Aerith revival rumors from back in the day. And hey maybe they'll be tasteless enough to make a side mission where you defeat a magical (game) shark so you can recruit her lifestream hologram to fight with you to the end. But of course that will be a bait and switch like everything else they've done and she'll still sacrifice her hologram body to stop Sephiroth from making time stream taffy or whatever he's doing. And the devs will be like "We meant it as a jumping off point for the 'revival' of FF7 as a brand." So get ready for Advent Children: The Movie: The Game, get ready for Before Crisis: Remind, get ready for Rougelite of Cerberus, get ready for Dissidia 7R. Would 7R fans have the right to complain after spending the last 4 years praising the subversive/deceptive use of the title "Remake"?
The way alternate timelines/universes/multiverses are done now is terrible and is more used for "hey lets bring this character everyone likes back." these days. Back in the day alternate universes had a good stake, for example some Stargate stories. These explore scenarios where earth makes very different decisions that have moral implications in their worlds.
Or SG1 has to fix something the bad guy changed. Star Trek did the same.
The issue with FFFRemake+sequels is the writers are doing what I call the ''Marvel' method of writing. Where they are looking to make moments fans get excited and have theories, then they decide to write based on the popular Theories. It's the Japanese version though.
It comes off as too fanfiction-y, and I liked the remakes but also see their problems.
Exactly. Even South Park criticized how the multiverse narrative was being used as a dumb excuse to bring back characters that everyone likes and how corporations use it to continue milking older IPs in the “Into The Panderverse” special.
@@Probably_JENOVA wow, even South Park did a satire on it?
I liked the Marvel Cinematic Universe for what it was, but them popularizing the comic book multiverse mechanic has made everyone else want to copy it and it's lazy.
I'd have just preferred this be a different timeline on it's own.
I'm gonna paste this conversation I had about the topic of FFVII Remake Project's world:
Me: Apparently in regards to FFVII Rebirth, Toriyama thinks the structure of the world will become clear in the third game.
Brother: WAIT! Are you heading into the 3rd act of a story not knowing how the world works?
Me: Yeah, pretty much.
Brother: That is so dumb.
Me: I find it funny that the more info we get from the Ultimania. The more I see people upset it contradicts their favorite theories.
Brother: Is that what matters more than the baseline rules of the game's world?
Me: Remake project lives off of theories.
Brother: How long were Remake & Rebirth?
Me: 66-80 hours together for the story.
Brother: AND YOU DON"T KNOW HOW THE WORLD FUNCTIONS?
Me: Thought I did, then Rebirth happened.
I think they admitted, that the ending and a lot of things were made like that on purpose.
This was my biggest criticism of Remake’s ending in a video I made back before Rebirth came out-the world of Gaia doesn’t seem to have any clearly defined rules anymore, and so it’s impossible for the viewer to actually tell what’s at stake and thus ROOT FOR ANYTHING.
@@obsessive_hermit I saw your video on Remake. With Remake ATLEAST I had the idea of things will probably be different since the Whispers were defeated and Zack would be doing something. Only for Rebirth to remove Aerith & Red XIII's future sight and basically just be a worse, but still good version of events from OG FF7. The new scenes like the Gi Tribe also serving to complicate things more while being awkwardly placed. Zack basically doing nothing for most of the game's runtime (why even have Zack on the box?). Until just like Remake, the only parts that matter play out in the game's finale (backloaded stories aren't a bad thing. But it's frustrating when both Remake & Rebirth pad out the campaign with filler content). My brother added that since the party gets their levels & Materia reduced with no explanation in Rebirth and will happen again for the 3rd game. Then that means that characters aren't progressing towards Sephiroth's level or that Sephiroth is losing to people throwing basic Fire spells.
I replayed Rebirth with a friend, his first time experiencing it. My friend was excited during Rebirth's finale, UNTIL the final boss was defeated. The fact that Sephiroth still leaves the boss encounter smiling AGAIN, made my friend wonder why bother making three games? My friend said that if fighting Sephiroth TWICE is pointless to the narrative, then why bother making three games instead of the one that matters most? My friend felt like nothing is being accomplished by the party or Sephiroth throughout two games already. And to note, my friend only recently got into Final Fantasy starting with OG FF7 last year and the compilation material this year. So my friend's perspective is of a new fan to this franchise.
The perfect summarization of Remake Project's narrative can be summed up in this quote from my playthrough with my friend-
Me: That's a different dog ain't it?🤣
Friend: I DON'T SEE A F****** DOG!🤬
@@Gordoniankid I wholeheartedly agree. Disregard for power-scaling is one of my storytelling deadly sins - if the character's strengths and weaknesses are arbitrary; if they can abruptly gain or lose their powers/levels/capabilities at the drop of a hat, then how am I supposed to feel *tension/drama* or believe *that anything is at stake* ? How am I supposed to *care* who does or does not have the upper hand in a fight when the writer can just turn the tables arbitrarily; with no regard for rules or limitations?
This is why fictional worlds and conflicts need to have clear rules and limitations - the audience needs to know *how the world works* (e.g., Y will happen if B happens; Y *won't* happen if C happens, etc.) in order to understand what's at stake and become invested. But the makers of the FF7R trilogy are flat-out *refusing to tell us how anything works* because they don't want to risk anyone figuring out the story before Part 3 releases.
You know those elementary school playground fights where the kid you’re fighting keeps making up new powers so that he doesn’t lose? Well, the 7R trilogy is the writing equivalent of that-the writers keep making up new Lifestream powers so that it’s impossible for the internet/theory-crafters to understand what is happening to the world/characters and thus extrapolate/predict where the story is headed.
The result is that we have no reliable way of telling what - if anything - *matters* in the story, because for all we know, the writer can just make up an entirely new rule/piece of lore at the drop of a hat; with no foreshadowing.
And yeah: Remake and Rebirth have reduced Sephiroth to one of the tackiest villains I've ever seen in fiction.
@@obsessive_hermit
I made a replay earlier but it's not here. Just in case I'll post again.
I remember saying on Twitter that Sephiroth was overly used in Rebirth. Someone was baffled since Sephiroth isn't in the game much. But Sephiroth barely does anything for the most part. Even my friend kept saying Sephiroth "is a worthless clown that should get out of our face". Despite Sephiroth manipulating Cloud at times, it doesn't add anything outside of handing over the Black Materia (which we're not sure this version of Sephiroth needed Cloud to do). I also don't like how the party knows Cloud is not OK, but do nothing to help him. It's crazy they can see Cloud act way more violent & nearly slice a Black Robed person. Yet have the audacity to get mad at Cloud when he tries to desperately get the Black Materia. No Tifa, hugging Cloud over and over isn't gonna fix the problems he's suffering from, HELP HIM.
It's also nuts how the party knows Sephiroth is a major threat. Yet actively choose to goof off in places like Costa Del Sol & The Gold Saucer. The player choosing to do side content is one thing. Having your characters actively ignore the situation is ridiculous. Sephiroth taunting Cloud at The Gold Saucer should have been the wake up call to get back on track. Then again the Rebirth party rely entirely on the Black Robed people (How did the Black Robed people get allowed on the cruise ship, but the party needed disguises?)
The whole finale being one massive question mark was a baffling decision. It steals attention from what should be important. And places that attention on unrelated characters and question baiting. But I don't wanna ask questions, I'd rather wait for the inevitable answers that can't live up to it. People love to say 'it opens room for discussion ", but if someone gives a radically different interpretation than the others. They get dismissed as "not understanding FF7" even though only the devs know what's going on. And Remake Project being more about Fate & Destiny than the OG's Loss & Identity.
I think Rebirth plays great with its combat, it's a very fun game to play. But the story just fails to build on what Remake set up (I didn't like Remake's story. But was willing to give the new direction a chance ). And doesn't live up to the OG FF7 version of events either. With scenes being done worse or new content being slapped awkwardly in the middle major moments. The party choosing to goof off & ignoring Cloud's situation makes me dislike them. I still like Zack, but he has no purpose in the story so far.
Side Note: Yuffie's Ninjutsu just really makes Materia pointless. Why use Elemental Rocks when Ninjutsu can do that and create independently thinking clones. Yuffie is my favorite to play as because she's insanely versatile. But Ninjutsu shatters the world building more than it already was. Also Gilgamesh being added to Rebirth is great (although the Proto Relic quest aren't good). I love Final Fantasy V so Gilgamesh finally appearing in an FF7 game is great.
perfect argument, doesnt matter how many times you experience a good story, it will always work.
the changes are just a reflection of ego, and born of the idea of "making it fresher, better, unexpected" shame.
I'm tired of square, i dont give a F* about rebirth and its sequel.
And this is a demonstration of a perfect example of why i fundementally dont like comic book multiverses, my setting has a multiverse but it's Neither parallel realities or timelines instead its a cluster of a good couple thousands of universes (far from infinite but still beyond the abilities for an average Person to comprehend) and heres the big twist crossing universes isn't just a rare event thst has ome off implications and shows multiple versions of characters its a commonality to the point that its considered in general 2nd Year Magic to learn about its existence and how to Cross to other universes and because of this major element of it being a commonality the multiverses genetic profile are such that duplicates are Rare and even if a Duplicate does occur genetically their experiences will be so radically different that its hard to even call them the same person much less interchangeable should one die because.
And then Theirs the influence this commonality has on faction's for example theirs a cult that for a potion of time had complete influence in a good 10% of the multiverse until they're own actions caught up to them and they made their own undoing and then theirs the also the faction of scientists who created their own Universe and called it the nexus.
Note that most stories I've concepted in my setting don't even dive into the multiverse angle of my setting unless their fully focused on magic and even then i like to portay perspective so from a perspective of someone in my setting when they're first told about or shown that they exist in a multiverse their first reaction is most frequently a mental breakdown
Hey Orion, I've been watching your videos more lately as i really enjoyed your rebirth video it really opened my perspective on the game i come from a different position than most people who played the og when it came out as i was a freshman when remake was going to drop but i had played the og before the hame came out and i was young and didn't really know why i liked the things i liked i just consumed cause i was looking for something special and FF was that and remake helped me a lot during covid and my growth as a person but i wasnt to experienced with the story.
but when i beat the game i was so excited to see locations remade but it was quite a long wait so id just keep replaying the og and played all of squares games like FF just so i could become a fan of the series and i grew such a connection with the original game and games VII-X but i still hadn't knew why i was just feeling emotions but i thought if the og was this great and remake has the potential to be better than the original in terms of the locations and atmosphere and i remember watching a lot of theory videos and a lot of max that got me even more excited and i was like that for 3 years so i had a big attachment with remake and the team behind it as i look up to them and was quite open to the changes and in a way still am.
And was super eager leading up to the games launch and even had the opportunity to meet naoki hamaguchi and a lot of voices to the characters and those are experiences ill never forget so i have the emotional attachment to the team and staff behind the game but during the wait last year for rebirth i really began asking why i loved FFVII to begin with and i finally found my answer and it was the story and the themes and the dark atmosphere which was something i could take everywhere in my life so maybe i had made a mistake for realizing i loved when ffvii was about a compelling story and world and possibly getting overhyped by theories of things that realistically couldn't have been true maybe it was both but the only way ti find out was by playing the game and i had so many experiences leading up to this games launch
When the game came out and i remember liking it when i played it but something just felt off about the experience and i wasnt sure why and i love knowing why i feel the way i do that resolution in myself gives me so much passion to like sometimes so i kept asking myself about rebirth and letting that thought sit and i found just some choices in game design and story and music that just didn't have weight as to why they were the way they were and there was also somethings that i loved about fleshing out the characters more and game design choices
but part of the reason i love the og was the dark and unsettling theme of death and in the og that reflected everything in the music and locations and i wasnt getting that in Rebirth everything was to happy and party like and it felt off for me but i love getting other peoples opinions from both sides as i love discussing FF games and i really saw a lot of perspectives but majority of them from both sides didn't really attack the reasons as to why something was bad or good and there wasn't any form of discussion just hating on each other.
for the longest time it was just the normal thing to assume people who wanted a faithful remake where bad people and i never really questioned why but seeing your videos and how much you understand and explain things for why you didn't find the games good really made me rethink why people thought purists are bad and i just feel from both sides everything just comes from hate but i just love discussing opinions about the game and you opened my perspective not to immediately discount a opinion just because its unpopular and i also noticed people are just out for blood if you disliked the remakes and i just never understood why. and i noticed majority of the big names in the fandom didn't really take the story as serious as i thought i did and they were just wanting to feel hype and emotions and not question why and all the power to them but i used to feel that when i first got into FF but i just found a reason why i liked the series so i was at odds seeing people not care not question just consume and call every decisions amazing maybe its just the honeymoon phase as i certainly had one but i kept thinking what made me feel a little dissatisfied and thats something after a lot of thought i think I'm less optimistic about the final game and if it'll deliver which im at a conflict because i love ffvii and the team behind it but i cant help but feel skeptical especially with a lot of the choices they made but also at the same time i want the best for the series and a reason why im so pretentious about FF is cause i love it so much i want the best for it but at the same time i think its best to have lower expectations next time so thayf if the last game manages to work then ill enjoy it there's a lot of small things i could yap about but ive already gone on long enough i just wanted to express my opinion and gratitude for your videos and your analysis on the games and i also am not looking for hate but just stating a opinion and my opinion may change in time thanks for reading this long yap of mine
Put some paragraphs in son!
Hey, thanks for sharing your thoughts and background with FF7. It's greatly appreciated. And very interesting to read about. I hope you get some enjoyment out of the next part. I know for a lot of people, their feelings are complicated. But it's great to hear how you found the channel, and really grateful to you for watching :)
Part 3 is probably just going to reveal that what we've played in 1 and 2 all takes place in Cloud and Tifas lifestream scene, the players choices being written off as Cloud being an unreliable narrator finding the truth. Us the players have been repairing his mind, it'd be the biggest copout of this horrible multiverse shit but its probably the most plausible and Square thing to do. FF7 REmember, Help I'm in the hell timeline
Oh god, that sounds so awful... it's probably true.
@@obsessive_hermityou don't understand. It's just sooo smart, groundbreaking and cool...
🤮
Good lord... Please... If that happens, I'll laugh. 😅😅
It's a multiverse, because the original concept of death, with this change, there will be no consequences. Zack and Aerith are alive and coming to the last part of the demake project, to make the "happy ending"
It’s FF7: Anime Weeb Cringe Edition
I rather play dirge of cerberus and crisis core than the remake/rebirth games.
That's a stretch. The gameplay is at least fun and it's still nice to see everything in 4K detail.
I'd have a lot more respect for Remake/Rebirth fans (and the developers) if they would stop engaging in historical revisionism. If they would just be honest and say: "this is a different version of FFVII which has alternate universes and destiny stuff added in." This would make it easier for us detractors to ignore the 7R trilogy and go back to loving the OG. Bending over backwards to try and argue that these things somehow existed in the OG is actually worse and only serves to make Remake fans look deceitful and desperate.
The "Lifestream scene" wherein we learn about Cloud's past and false memories was not a real, "alternate world"--it was happening IN CLOUD AND TIFA'S HEADS. Because they had fallen into the Lifestream, their minds were connected, allowing Tifa to see Cloud's memories and reconcile her (correct) ones with his (fake ones). The reason why Cloud's memories were fake is because he didn't fully remember everything and he was filling in the gaps with Zack's memories. More crucially though, the events which take place in the Lifestream scene did not TANGIBLY AFFECT "the real world"--they only affected Cloud and Tifa's PSYCHES; nothing that happened in the Lifestream scene was PHYSICALLY transferred over to the real world when Cloud and Tifa woke up.
This is VERY different in Rebirth. The scene where Aerith-B hands Cloud-A the White Materia so that he can take it back to World-A CLEARLY establishes that these alternate worlds are REAL, TANGIBLE PLACES; not mere visions/hallucinations in the Lifestream. This means that there are theoretically infinite versions of the characters which can be transferred from these alternate worlds to the main worlds. Furthermore, these alternate worlds we see in Rebirth still SERVE THE SAME PURPOSE IN THE STORY that alternate universes do in multiverse stories: they exist to show multiple different versions of the characters in a variety of different scenarios (e.g., the "main" scenario and the ""What if?" scenarios)--they are corporeal places which spring into existence whenever someone/something hits a fork in the road of the series' timeline, leading to different outcomes of events.
It is FUNCTIONALLY IDENTICAL to how the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (multiverse theory) works in other works of fiction.
Saying: "it's not a multiverse because it's in the Lifestream" is like saying: "Star Wars doesn't have magic; it's the Force."
The names make no difference; they still serve the exact same FUNCTION IN THE STORY.
This is one of the things that aggravates me most about FF7R fans--they aren't actually engaging with the UNDERLYING PREMISES of critics' arguments. Instead, they're just pedantically nitpicking the DEFINITIONS of WORDS; not getting to the meat of the discussion. (e.g., "It's a remake, not a remaster," blah blah blah).
In this case, the meat of the discussion is the following question: "Do these new plot devices and mysteries (e.g., Zack's new role, the alternate worlds, Sephiroth's plan to destroy them and fuse together a new world which he can rule over) MAKE THE STORY BETTER?"
In my personal opinion, the answer is "no," for two reasons:
1) Adding a literal multiverse to a story based on an extremely liberal and unusual interpretation of one scene is a terrible way to write stories. The interpretation of the OG's Lifestream scene as some kind of alternate world flies right in the face of Occam's razor, and it would make for the most contrived and torturously forced retcon I have ever seen in fiction. And you can tell that it's a retcon because there's no way in hell that the Lifestream in the OG could control the spacetime continuum or create alternate worlds. If it could, then why the hell didn't Sephiroth mention it? Why didn't he find out about them after he was thrown into the Lifestream in the Mako Reactor at Nibelheim? Doesn't that seem like something that would have been important to factor into his plan (or at the very least mention)?
2) Storytelling is about CONFLICT: if you want the audience to care about your story and characters, you need to establish what can or cannot happen in that story's world; you need establish that the odds are stacked against the heroes, and that bad things will happen if they don't succeed in their mission.
The OG succeeded in doing this for a simple reason: Holy was the ONLY spell that could stop Sephiroth's meteor; the game went out of its way to establish that no amount of any other kind of magic could possibly work (not even crashing Cid's rocket into it made a difference). However, JENOViroth were blocking Holy at the Northern Cave, and so the heroes had to find a way of defeating them ASAP so that Holy would work. No to mention, there were no alternate worlds to speak of either (there was only ONE version of each character; they were unique, and so we still cared whether they lived or died).
FF7R's new story additions/lore changes rob me of any reason to me care about what the characters are fighting over:
1) You can't tell an emotional story about life and death when there is a repository of replacement characters in the Lifestream.
2) You can't depict a riveting, high-stakes conflict about "saving the planet from destruction" when the planet itself is an omnipotent cop-out which can arbitrarily do whatever the writers arbitrarily want it to with no warning. E.g., Making up new Lifestream powers like the Whispers resurrecting Barret (if Lifestream magic can resurrect the dead then where is the "Resurrect" materia?), altering the spacetime continuum, changing how the Black and White Materia work with no explanation, etc.).
3) You can't tell an immersive story when the writers are constantly making their presence known-by changing the rules of how the world operates and forcing the characters to behave in ways which are out-of-character for the sake of the plot (e.g., the heroes fighting the planet-protecting whispers only moments after Sephiroth-who wants to destroy the planet-taunted them to do so).
Over the past few years, it has become clear to me that the writers at CBU1 (Nomura, Nojima, Toriyama and Kitase) have absolutely no idea how stakes and conflict work. They seem to think that, if you just throw characters into huge, spectacular and unexpected battle scenes and you don't know what's going to happen or what's going on, then that *somehow* equates to "high stakes and conflict."
It doesn't. As I explained in Section 8 of my video, LIMITATIONS are how you create stakes-you have to TRAP the characters in tight circumstances wherein they have limited options and limited time in which to succeed. E.g., in Osmosis Jones:
- The hero, Ozzy, is pliable and can bend his body into any shape. His partner, Drix, has an arm cannon.
- Thrax, the villain, uses his claw to steal a nucleotide from Frank's hypothalamus, which results in Frank being taken to the hospital with a life-threatening fever. His daughter. Shane, watches over him in the hospital (and she happens to be wearing false eyelashes).
- Thrax escapes from Frank with the nucleotide. It seems as though all hope is lost.
- But Ozzy does some quick-thinking, remembers that he is pliable, and tells Drix to fire him out of his arm-cannon after Thrax. He does, and both Ozzy and Thrax end up landing in Shane's eye.
- Ozzy then uses his pliability to trick Thrax into getting his claw stuck in Shane's false eyelash, which then falls into a beaker of rubbing alcohol where Thrax dissolves.
- Ozzy remains on Shane's real eyelashes, and when she cries over her nearly-dead father, he rides one of her tears back to Frank with the nucleotide so that they can save Frank's life, just in the nick of time.
Simply put: fictional conflicts are only entertaining if the audience knows what the combatting parties can/cannot do AND--crucially--what they are VULNERABLE to. To quote Predator: "If it bleeds, we can kill it."
FF7R utterly fails to do this because we have absolutely no idea what the Planet and/or JENOViroth can/cannot do or what either is vulnerable to.
Someone needs to translate Brandon Sanderson's laws for magic systems into Japanese (if they haven't already). The Remake trilogy might have been SO MUCH BETTER if Nojima and co. had read it before they started putting words to paper.
Also: the transition at 8:15 was perfect!
One last thing I’ll add to your explanation is also the TONE
This game really wants you to like the characters, to the point where we’re getting goofy MCU like banter and the attitude that characters like Aerith act like they know how popular and iconic they are to the gaming world. As they defeat Shinra forces and pose for the audience to look all cool and emotive, showing off and essentially sucking any narrative tension because they’ve got plot armor and popularity on their side. Kills any showing of genuine respect or fair tension when the game plays out dramatic emotional scenes and moral conflictions, only for them to get softened, and then brushed aside with quirky, facetious banter
i have a feeling that ff7r writer are trying to copy attack on titan "paths" or "attack titan" abilities to show memories through space and time
this is very apparent when sephiroth said "this landscape, i could've sworn I've seen it before", implying sephiroth from "future/alternate verse" sending that memories to sephiroth in "ff7r verse" using lifestream
and also the weird reaction from aerith when she touched the water in "gi" land, and the zack/cloud stuff yada yada
so now "lifestream" in ff7r = "paths" from attack on titan
if that were the case, I'd hate it even more, why the writer trying to copy a plot points from popular series? they have no confidence the series would sell if they just stick to original?
I avoided playing remake until recently, I heard about the story changes and that was enough, I didn’t want to play it. Since the original is one of my favorite games I figured I’d at least see give it a chance. To my surprise I’m enjoying it more than I expected, I can see the potential of what the project could have been. A large part of my enjoyment comes from recognizing places, music and characters from the original, those things have an impact on me, but what about a newcomer? The locations, music and characters don’t mean anything to them.
If I was to recommend ff7 to my brother who has never experienced it before, I couldn’t recommend remake because it’s a different experience entirely. Remake does more things right than I expected it would, I just can’t get past the story changes.
You bought it and fed the Squeenix monster. Good work.
@@rclaws3230 I know, I made it so long too. It looks like rebirth is lacking in sales though. I just felt like if I was going to criticize the game I may as well play it and give it a chance. It’s not like they are going to change their minds and do a faithful remake now.
Yes, me too! But I LOVE the story as it hasn't changed at all. Just added a little bit more to the already existing story. I wouldn't have liked it if it remained a cookie cutter copy, I wanted to be a little surprised at least, and boy was I ever!
@@AShroudOfTruth🤦♀️
@@AShroudOfTruth I don’t think anything about the original ff7 story is cookie cutter. The point of a remake should be to update the game so a new generation who are for some reason, afraid of “old” graphics, can experience the game. To appreciate this remake fully you have to have played the original. There is a lot I like about it but it’s a different game entirely. Not to mention the detrimental effect multiple timelines can have on the stakes of story telling. They undermined a lot of the best parts of the story in my opinion.
They way FF7 Remake uses alternate realities/dream worlds is so vague and sporadic, that it's unclear what role any of it has in the remake storyline. Events in FF7R and FF7R2 play out 90% the same as in FF7, but then there are moments where the new layer of vague fate/multiverse stuff takes over. It overshadows the original story events, because the developers are also using it to justify spectacular climactic scenes that really shouldn't be happening at this point in the story of FF7.
That's what alternate realities/dream worlds comes down to: being able to show things that shouldn't exist, to generate a reaction from the audience. The game opens with shocking images of Tifa, Barrett and Red XIII lying dead. It's a cheap gimmick and a manipulative contrivance.
There's this doomed world we keep going back to, but never long enough for me to care about anything or anyone in it. I don't want to care about any other worlds, I just want to follow my favorite cast in the Final Fantasy series.
Adding to the Titanic tangent, it would have still sank no matter where it went because of the passengers aboard who opposed the Federal Reserve's creation, this tragedy was inevitable.
Every single multiverse story in existence is garbage and for a clear reason. I will absolutely never understand why they did go down that route. There was nothing to gain or explore that way and they lost everything. Idc, if there is actually people liking this style of storytelling in general, it's just plain heartbreaking one of the greatest videogames and stories had to be ruthlessly disfigured and desecrated this way. By it's own creators nonetheless, how mental is that.
And just to trump it all, they literally bait people into playing a malevolent and immoral gacha game by sprinkling it with story bits. It was all for greed they sacrificed this legacy.
Nomura truly is a deplorable hack.
Loved this, thanks. I feel like these worlds are within the lifestream and are akin to “Dream Zanarkands” with the souls who could not merge w/ lifestream acting as the “fayth”.
I think OG already happened, humans maybe didn’t survive post-DoC, and there’s is still a lot of hatred in the lifestream, which Aerith is trying to continuously clean up. But something happens at the opening of remake. She looks so dazed and confused, almost as if she can’t believe she’s alive. I think something glitched in the lifestream matrix because of you know who, and the dream became real. And now its a countdown to get all these “dreams” to stop becoming Sephy tainted, and also becoming real…because if everything is real, nothing is real, just chaos, and Sephiroth wants to absorb it.
How do certain dreams of lifestream get made real? Yeah, I guess Seph went on a dinner date with Yu Yevon, who still doesn’t know wtf happened with that Tidus kid.
I know what you’re trying to say but the comparison isn’t accurate at all because “Dream” Zanarkand is a physical place located near Baaj Temple. Dreams in Final Fanatsy X don’t operate the same way they do in our world or FF7’s.
Yu Yevon doesn’t really know anything as he’s become a parasite endlessly summoning. Tidus is, as dream Zanarkand also is, an Aeon.
Exactly the title. That also kinda ruined Bioshock Infinite. Here I'm loving the game, story a bit confusing but who cares, until Elisabeth goes nuclear on me. In all these universes, apparently there were not a single good Comstock, but who cares, Elisabeth kills all the versions and herself. Don't get me started about the DLC, burial at sea.
That series died a death after that game.
I really wish I knew how to explain it but the remake/rebirth games just don't 'feel' right. There is just no natural emotion in the environments, no atmosphere. Even the music doesn't produce the same 'atmosphere' as the simple original arrangements did. Every scene just feels generic. I don't feel awe, wonder, discomfort, excitement in any of the environments they jut lack personality. I wish someone more intelligent and poetic could explain this on my behalf better.
I’m with you. There is just a lack of tone in the setting entirely that the OG nailed so well. Every town and location feels like it’s a tourist trap and is so clean and upbeat creating an almost uncanny valley type feeling. There are next to no houses in towns, it’s all shops and inns yet the places are teeming with jolly NPC’s touring the sights. It’s always sunny everywhere even around nibelheim which was famously overcast and unsettling.
@@ItsSVO Yes you've said it so well. What you said really helps remind me of something I remember feeling in almost every town in the original - the people always seemed so tired, like life was really hard. I think that in the OG Shinra promised the people an easy life because of mako energy but they just took everything from the people, made them dependent and robbed them of their happiness. So every town you go to people just seem worn down, but trying to get through it all. In the demakes they are all happy, loving life and on top of the world - Shinra truly did bless them with a wonderful life. Such terrible world building.
@@benfubbs2432 So...miserable, suicidal people is good world building??
@@AShroudOfTruth such a piss-poor attempt at paraphrasing what i said so you can leave a snarky reply.
Nobody in the OG were suicidal and I never said anyone was that's you using your vapid imagination to construct a story you want to debunk because what is being said here hurt your feelings.
I'll say it again simply for the people in the back, in the OG everyone was struggling because of what it was like to live under Shinra, in the demake everyone was thrilled and loving very minute of it. Bad world building is making a mega-evil coorporation that sucks the life out of the planet and suppresses the population but not having that represented in any of the locations or characters. In the demake we are told that Shinra are the bad guys, in the original we actually see it through environmental storytelling.
This game was doomed from the botched part 1.
I rather play the original for another 50 years then put one hour in this trash
That's a shame, cause the gameplay is great.
@@mitchplaysriffs the fact that the game play is great makes it even worse that the story is so broken
@@RealEvilLordExdeathexactly
@@mitchplaysriffs walking down linear areas, game purposely wasting your time is not good gameplay. the games combat system is all this game has and even then i can cherry pick that
@@mjesus850the combat system is fun but it isn't fun to watch as a spectator and honestly it can get messy quickly. Alot of the charm of having a turn based combat is that we can appreciate the moves since the screen will focus on it. This combat so much shit is happening so fast with hyper realistic graphics so it's hard to make out anything.
Mario better have some sort of 3D power up in this game. And also I hope the Bowser Boss battles are actually good. They need to have Bowser Jr and the Koopalings but make the fights good
I agree. I hope the power ups are really cool and fun. I also want Luigi in the game and would like to have some really cool and creative Bros. Attacks from the Mario and Luigi series.
Lifestream livestream multiversuuuuruuuuu!!
well said
To answer your question about what was SE was thinking it's....cash grab! No, really the company has been going downhill for a while now and they probably decided to bring FF7 back to cash in on it some more.
Even if its comes from the lifestream and we are seeing multiple outcomes before a final reality manifests/ merges whatever. If all these outcomes have a possible probability of existing.... its still a multiverse/ timeline story even if its from the same source ( lifestream). It doesnt need a full fledged universe and planet for each one. You need to understand Schrodinger cat thing. We're seeing multiple possible outcomes/ possibilities. Would you prefer "timelines" as a descriptor word? perhaps I dont know. If the lifestream is the blueprint machine for physical reality that it will conclude with.... it doesnt mean it's not multiverse. Or would you say its not multiverse but generating possibilities for the final reality? So..... its not multiverse story..... its a blueprint making story for a final physical reality? thats not much of a difference. We're seeing multiple outcomes/ possibilities where it originates from is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if its in the lifestream or not. The final reality when it merges of these events in the third game doesnt matter where its source is. It does not matter if its the lifestream not at all. "Multiverse" doesnt mean an established universe that you have have to go through a wormhole in space to get to. Like taking a vacation that's on another planet lifestream etc. Again the source of the game's events ( lifestream) doesnt matter.
Exactly
"In [the eyes of many FF fans], it's utterly perplexing why we WOULDN'T want many worlds. 'Why have ONE version of a character when you can MANY? Why let dead characters join the Lifestream, when you can travel there with them; pull up a deck chair and crack open a couple of cold ones?'"
I suspect there are two main reasons why these fans are so perplexed by our lack of interest in an FFVII multiverse.
1) They don't understand that, for us, "more" =/= "better." We value quality > quantity. We want BETTER content; not simply MORE.
2) For us, the thing we loved about the original FFVII was its high stakes and conflict--the feeling of being on the edge of our seats as we tried to stop Sephiroth from destroying the world. Many 7R fans don't care about this. They only care about either gameplay, surprises, or forming relationships with the characters, and couldn't care less if the story has little-no conflict worth getting invested in. I've seen a lot of FF7R trilogy fans say that they don't care about Sephiroth's plan to destroy the alternate worlds and fuse the remains together, but they still enjoy the trilogy because of its character interactions, battle system, and/or because "not knowing what will happen is exciting".
Well for me, the original game's conflict about Sephiroth trying to destroy the planet while the heroes fought to save it is what I loved most. FF7R has so greatly (and pretentiously) over-convoluted that conflict with alternate worlds and new interdimensional/Lifestream powers that I cannot remain emotionally invested in it. And since that trumps all other concerns I have, the 7R trilogy is of no value to me.
Multiverses are a mere gimmick. Cheap storytelling for the lazy writer. Their only purpose in their introduction is to make fun of the actual story and crap on it. Neither MultiVersus, nor the Spider-Man multiverse, nor The Expandables, nor Marvel's Avengers take themselves too serious. It is not meant to be deep storywise. On the contrary. It is meant to be enjoyed by impressionable simple minds.
“Not knowing what will happen is exciting”. That is a sentiment that I do not understand. I thought that the fear of the unknown was the greatest human fear out there. I thought that when faced with the unknown, people were supposed to be screaming and crying while curled up into a ball in the corner and crying for their mommy and daddy. They’re supposed to cry into the darkness and go like “Mommy! Daddy! Somebody, help!” Not get all super excited and bouncy like a bunch of kids on Christmas Day or like an adult who just won the lottery. Gosh, everything is all topsy-turvy now.
I don’t understand how not knowing what will happen is exciting. I thought that it was pure anxiety, especially if you’re an anxious person. It goes to show that I truly do not understand human beings.
@@Probably_JENOVA The unknown is what drives any good story. It is story-telling 101. With Remake we do not have that. We do have everything at once at the same time instead of a hint at something. The former is essentially nothing because everything at once is meaningless and kills all curiosity and excitement. The apologists of Remake's "story" only confuse it because they are easily impressed by the old lazy tropes of time travel, multiverses and unreasonable complexity.
@@romzen Oh, I see.
If I may but some nuance here, "gameply, surprises and forming relationships" aren't worthless things to enjoy, even if the multiverse ruins the overall piece.
And I say this as someone who hated what they did with the story. But I don't think throwing the baby out with the bath water does us any favors.
For me, the worst thing of it all is that these two games have an amazing remake trapped inside of them. The combat system is probably the best middle ground between action and turn base ever created, the characterization of pretty much all the characters is on point, and most of the story beats that keep themselves faithful to the original and those that expand upon it were as good as anyone could have hoped them to be. But whenever the bootleg dementors and the multiverse BS show their ugly face, everything gets ruined.
However, there are lot of good things in these two games that are worth praising. And honestly, it be a huge tragedy that they would be abandoned after the trilogy is done, and not iterated and expanded upon in other JRPGs. And I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to expect. The whole trilogy is unarguably doomed now. Rebirth has bombed financially (despite what the damage control BS they spouted in their investors meeting would indicate. There's no way in hell a game like this made its money back with 3-4 million copies) so it's pretty much impossible for the last game in the series to not do it as well. The best that Square Enix could do is to make a massive, and I mean a MASSIVE budget cut for the next entry and cut off their losses. And make no mistake, as time marches on, the reputation of this trilogy will be remembered as one of the biggest artistic blunders in video game history. Once the gaslighting hype machine dies down and the games have to truly stand on their own, the house of cards will inevitably crumble. That could be interpreted as that these games had absolutely nothing going for them, and that's just not the case.
When Sephiroth said that line "join me, let us defy destiny together", I was actually hoping they were trying to go for a redemption arc for Sephiroth and he would team up with Cloud & Co. to defeat Jenova together, assuming Sephiroth was under the control of Jenova and wanted to break free and save the world for real and not become a God/vessel. maybe even meet his REAL mother (Lucrecia) and gain more insight from Vincent Valentine as he was freaking there when he was conceived...
What a wasted potential that would have been, at least then there would not be a Marvel Multiverse of Madness thrown onto us from left field and the story would be a bit different but more contained within the same universe! Honestly, I forgot Biggs survived thanks to the Whispers and then I busted out laughing when he was killed AGAIN mid-speech!
By the time the ending arrived, I was thuroughly confused and disappointed. I'll probably just watched the cutscenes of the 3rd Finale rather than play it because it's certainly not worth my time or effort when so much as changed :(
jenova was never in control of sephiroth, in fact sephiroth control jenova
and that's what i dont like about ff7, if sephiroth was actually got controlled by jenova than his madness is justifiable then there's chance to redeem himself
@@Skadi.- i know that, I was simply saying that it would make for an interesting twist if it had been that scenario where jenova was in control this whole time and not some passive malevolent force.
Have you played ever crisis yet?
@@Skadi.- Jenova controls Sephiroth just as it does all the others injected with its' cells, Sephiroth more so than others. It isn't 'just' madness that made him turn, but the influence of the Jenova cells.
@@AShroudOfTruth no, why?
I enjoyed these games a lot. I loved the character interactions, the graphics, the enhanced, notalgic music the gameplay itself. Revisiting these places as I imagined them to look in real life is an amazing experience. The characters look glorious and the voice acting is superb, but it's pretty clear Square pretty much stepped into the same trap as all the rest of the reboots/remakes...cheesy commercialism, useless fan service and too much Sephiroth...TOO MUCH SEPHIROTH! Every time they don't know what to do the reintroduce him.
I like multiverses that are inherent to the setting like in Planescape Torment and such. But when games (or stories in general) throw multiverse crap in the mix, it only makes a turd sandwich a forth dimensional quantum turd sandwich, which happens to taste like shit beyond time and space.
I enjoy your videos but have some optimism towards the final chapter of the R trilogy, at least one of the major narrative and thematic possibilities created by its various setups.
Narrative
FF7
Dude born of an Alien attempts to consume the planets life force,
A group of Heroes set out to stop him and lose a dear friend along the way.
FF7 R
Dude dies, enters the afterlife, sees the finite life span of the planet.
He whispers back through time to trick the Heroes into breaking the mechanisms of fate to permanently extend the life of the planet, as it will permanently re-alive him & their deceased friend.
That seems to be the setup, looks like Aerith’s presence in the planets Dream Worlds will be to take us through the stages of grief alongside Cloud. Starting the game in denial and moving into Acceptance by rejecting and foilling Sephiroth’s plan. We will permanently be keeping her dead with our own hands.
Thematic
FF7
Life & Death, you experience the permanence of a void left in your life / party.
FF7 R
The stated theme is "the acceptance of death"
The devs have had 30+ years experience with death to learn that the people you love leave more than just a sad void after they go.
The memories, hopes and dreams you have in your imagination, become your most valuable possessions. (this is the dream world we will visit in the next game that will fill the empty materia).
This can be summarized with the Cosmo Canyon quote:
“Sorrow is not a burden, it is yet another of the planets gifts”
This medicine helps us just a little every day to live with that loss.
Aerith's consciousness or spirit at least was always still maintained in some way within the lifestream after her death and that's an absolute fact of the OG game and we are shown multiple times including at the end. The Lifestream in FF7 is functionally similar to The Force in Star Wars. I don't know with certainty what will happen in part 3 but I remain convinced that this isn't a sequel but a remake it is an expansion in breadth and depth of the original in every direction. I am pretty sure that the ending will differ in that as the ending in OG 7 was the Bad ending the ending in Remake 3 will be the true/good ending (or perhaps have multiple endings but I doubt it.) in that all the characters and themes that would have lead to Advent Children and Dirge will be brought up and resolved in Part 3 of remake thus making those entries not Really happen in the true canon of events.
Re7 fans are just copeing. Bless their souls.
Okay so here's my take on the whole thing. You've already talked about how the nature of loss is a core theme of FFVII, and I agree with this, but as far as people in OG FFVII just being gone after they die, I think the ending of the OG contradicts that claim. I mean, the closing images of the game very heavily imply that Aerith is still around in some compacity. We see her hand reaching out to Cloud in an attempt to save him, after he has defeated Sephiroth. Now, maybe you could say that this was just a hallucination in Cloud's mind. Later though, the scene of Meteor's destruction heavily implies that it is in fact Aerith who is controlling the lifestream from beyond the grave, and using it to save the planet. So if it's true that people who die really are just gone...how did she do this? For that matter, how did the lingering wills of the Cetra remain in the Temple of Ancients, even after thousands of years? How did the soul of Elmyra's husband attempt to come and visit her after his death? (Aerith confirms that his soul came a long way to see her in the OG) There are several examples in the OG which seem to confirm that death is not really the end in FFVII. While we are told that the conciousnesses of the dead will eventually dissolve and join with the lifestream, there does seem to be an unknown period of time where the souls of the dead continue to linger, even after death. Aerith is still around by the end of OG. It's just that her ability to interact with the physical world is more limited than when she was alive. The same seems to be true in Rebirth. She's able to interact with Cloud to some degree because of everything going on with him, but she's unable to directly interact with characters like Red, Yuffie, or Tifa. Her friends are suffering from the pain of her loss, and Aerith is unable to comfort them. So her death does still have consequence. There are things she could do while alive that she is simply incapable of doing now that she is dead. Her spirit may still be around, but things will never be the same for her, or the party, ever again.
Personally, the nature of how life and death actually works in this world is something that I've always been very curious about, and I've always wanted to explore how the lifestream works in more depth. I feel this way about a lot of things in the OG actually. In my multiple playthroughs of the OG, I've always found myself thinking things like "I love this idea, but I wish we could explore it more.", or "This character is great! I wish we had more time to really go into what makes them tick." The FFVII Remake Project allows us to re-experience the core narrative of FFVII, while also expanding on that narrative, and exploring the themes, characters, and concepts of the OG in greater detail. For me personally, that is an incredibly exciting prospect. Now of course, I won't truly know how I feel about the results until part 3 finally comes out, but for the moment at least, I find myself very satisfied with how this world and these characters have been expanded. For people who adopt a "less is more" mindset when it comes to FFVII, or simply aren't interested in the same things that I am, then yeah, the prospect of an FFVII deep dive doesn't hold much appeal. It just feels like an overcomplication of something that they saw as at least damn near close to perfect already. I get that, but for me, someone who really did want a better understanding on the mechanics of the lifestream, on the nature of life and death in this world, on the characters, the struggles they face, and how they individually deal with loss, this project really is shaping up to be a dream come true.
Thanks for engaging with the video. I appreciate it. It was good to read through your thoughts.
This is where I'm at with it: What I was trying to get at is when Aerith dies, you don't travel to the lifestream with her. You cannot spend time with her. Even if she influences events, you cannot get to her. Which leaves us with that tremendous sense of loss we all feel when we lose someone we love. Yet it's comforting to think or feel that the person may be close to you. But the truth is, they never come back to you. Maybe they have become part of something bigger. The OG story was told from the POV of the living (the people who have to carry that pain).
It's the same principle whether this 'multiverse' thing is explained by timelines, memories, etc. In the OG, people watched characters suddenly die (e.g. Zack and Biggs). Now, their story continues (through whatever the mechanics are). Death may have consequences around limitations of what the character can do or interact with, but there's a blurring of lines for us because we are mainly comforted by their return, their screen time. That will always feel at odds with the feelings I described above. And what made the OG so powerful to me.
All that said, I get why people enjoy this project. Hopefully the final part delivers for you. Thanks again!
I hate (.)7 'remake" and I hate this game. I really hate the people that like this game.
Geez son is just a game
Agreed, these "remakes" spit on the face of the original
They're contemptible, aren't they. Like people eating shit sandwiches and telling other people it's yummy.
@@rclaws3230I remember when people made mud pies. Do they still make mud pies?
Who hurt you?
I definitely hope it lands with a perfect 10x10.
Way to late for that
@@katherinemerkel3505 OMG girl, get a fricking life. If you don't like this game, then move on and forget about it! It's healthier to let go of that which makes you so miserable. Put it behind you. Look forward, not back.
@@AShroudOfTruthNope I can and will raise my voice against the butchery of 7.
Personally I think Aerith is dead but Cloud is in denial. It'll definitely make for some interesting exploration in the third game.
Cloud was never in denial in OG; that direction is beyond stupid and how they presented it is unrelatable to anyone who's ever lost someone.
@@kellevichy Cloud was in denial that he was a soldier in the original game and he didn't even know about Zack existence till that bridge. It's not as if Rebirth is going to a complete and different direction. Everything will be handle when Tifa enter his memory, etc.
I feel like I'm missing context for this video, I'm not sure I understand why you're asking whether multiple worlds are compatible with the original FFVII or not. I don't see why that question matters. The remake trilogy is its own thing that doesn't have to tell the story the exact same way as the original. I don't think the issue is that multiple worlds isn't compatible with the original. The more meaningful criticism that I think you're getting at is that multiple worlds don't do anything to meaningfully expand on the themes of the original or make them more accessible to a new and broader audience.
I think it's better to regard the remake trilogy as being in conversation with the original, not being a megaphone for it. We should criticize it not for being unfaithful but for being a poor conversationalist. The remake trilogy's biggest "sin," if you want to call it that, is that it's obsessed with the original but has nothing interesting or emotional to say about it, treating it instead as a checklist of characters, events, and gameplay.
bro is making essay about nothing, do you have any better arguments? 😂
First :)
if you watch The Matrix or Nightmare on elm street you should understand Rebirth and its not changing ff7 more than AC did. bottom line just like the movies i said main character goes asleep he ends up in a dream world when he wakes up, he is back in real/main world. side character has the power to make copies of himself in the dream world just like Agent smith and Zack. its not that hard to understand and anyone who had a dream knows much crazier things goes on then that. og had you going to that dream world in the lifestream sequence. the truth is you found out rebirth didnt go off track but you who caims to be a fan never understood og past cloud seph and their swords. if i said i was a big fan of matrix then said i hate all the timeline multiverse stuff in it you wont say i really wasnt a fan of matrix at all im confused
Anyone who likes the matrix is confused! Had an ok/passable first film, then just turned into weird/pretentious nonsense in the sequels.
your comment sections bring out the worst this is never a place i want to be lmao
What exactly makes them the worst? Bearing in mind that you are also here.
@@orion8550probably that they largely disagree with his consensus of liking the Remake trilogy. In other words he’s coping
wow wtf why talking about other ffs expecting people to know without a fucking warning
This video is kind of weird because he’s started out with fans are making their own assertions into the plot of rebirth when he made his own assertions on the plot of the original game stuff that was never confirmed like dyne house and the grave of his wife and daughter, which I need to really say this are never confirmed. These are things that you can only really assume on a context clues basis much like the same with the people making assertions that it’s not timelines or Multiverse
I was just gonna leave it at here, but then I watched the rest of this video and he makes very weird assumptions over other works on how the “death/dream” worlds never mind the fact that there are other movies that actually have this type of concept and actually uses them and builds tension behind them. Then he decides what if these movies had this type of concept despite the fact that they also have to like rework a little bit in order to make it work. But then it makes the weird assumption that these are all safe Havens, even though they’re all going to die in order to fill a villains plan, which is even weird because he didn’t take the idea of what if there’s a villain, threatening these types of worlds so he then has to rework the plot in order to have tension behind them.
If you look at the background you can clearly see the 2 crosses to mark their graves. One is larger (his wife) and the other is smaller (Marlene). It’s not his opinion, it’s obvious. You don’t need a confirmation from SE for everything.
@@za87647 all right then I’m glad that you saw my comment and decides to answer it so let’s get things started. It’s pretty obvious that it Is the grave of his wife and daughter it’s so obvious that no one has ever made the connection to it like I decided to look up on Internet to see if anybody has made that connection and nope even on a video called FF seven remake dyne scene has to be perfect. Makes no mention on whether or not any of this is it. Now, if you just wanna say on a symbolic level, (for the graves not for the house because literally nothing really says that) it is that, that’s why he’s shooting on it. Then OK you got me there, but he didn’t say on a symbolic level he said and you are saying it is the graves which there is really nothing that supports that which is also a fan insertion and he’s making a video complaining on fans making their own assertions while he also made his own assertions, you get where I’m coming from my friend
I completely disagree. You said you want “to sit down, and be told a story”. You were. It’s an incomplete story because its a trilogy and you dont have all the parts yet. And yet, you want to dissect it and say its too convoluted, etc; but the story isn’t complete. Rebirth is probably by far one of the greatest video games experiences i’ve ever felt. Yes, I’ve played OG back in the day, and have been playing video games since the early 90s’ as young kid. I find it interesting people love to dissect and find lore in video games, even when it’s just meant to be fun and not have huge lore. I say the fans are the ones that need to step back, chill out, and go along for the ride like you yourself said you want. The story isn’t done. Once it’s done, THEN you can critique the hell out of it and its story.
In other words: don’t think just CONSOOOOOM. That’s a brilliant argument
Love the remake project and what they are doing here. Brought the characters to life, combat to another level and whole game as it was meant to be. Bravo 🙌
Gross.
I’m with you as well, but this is not the right place to comment your opinion of Remake project, people here just hate everything and are quite sad. They think they are above people that enjoy the project somehow because it’s the only way they can feel better about themselves
@@rosegiogio9255Yeah. I hate how, they're writing this story off when they still don't get the whole picture, none of us do. Calling a story "bad" because it's incomplete at the moment and because you think you know where will it go is just bad criticism. The one thing I agree with this Remake project in regards to storytelling is that it shows too much in the final act (for both games). Everything else has been great. But no, some fans can't get around the idea of these new story elements and automatically say that it's bad in general. It sucks.
@@martinaguiluz4063 I feel like they don’t understand the esoteric nature of Remake is literally how esoteric the OG was back then. They don’t really want to engage with what the new elements Remake brings to the table because somehow it “butchered” the story. The lifestream and the planet are more of a player this time, how the cycle of life and death is correlated with dreams and hopes and how the worlds inside the lifestream are a commentary of nature. The expansion to character arcs, making Cloud’s mental health even more of an issue this time around, Making Tifa an even more active player in the themes of ff7, etc. there’s so much more and it’s a shame people just throw to the said because is not a faithful one to one remake. It’s all a good if you don’t like ff7 Remake, but if you do plz don’t let it be out of spite and bare-bones analysis.
@@rosegiogio9255 pretentious dribble.
This guy is on a crusade against ff7 demake lol. Im so glad i never liked ff7 or i would be ultra depressed with this woke clusterfuck of a game. The combat system could work on a new FF though. Not as great as ff12 imo.
This game deserves every bit of disrespect and disdain for how absolutely terrible its story is.
I really feel bad for players that write this story off as "just another multiverse mess". It clearly seems that you're not willing to give it a chance, even though you really don't know where this is going. Besides, it's not like the stories in this franchise are always straightforward (the only exception being FF1). The one gripe that I have with this project is that they throw too much at the end and that leaves you with thoughts like the ones on this comment section. I'll gladly wait to see how these same storytellers amaze me the same way they did back in 97.
I feel really bad for tbis giu who already made it clear he doesn't like the remake series....but will milk it for more views lol
Wow, you people have incredibly low narrative standards and clearly don't understand the arguments others make against this deconstructive turdpile.
'not willing to give it a chance' i pre-ordered remake and bought rebirth despite my disappointment in hopes it gets better; have another theory for why we dislike trash writing?
'you're not willing to give it a chance' i preordered remake, first game in my life i ever preordered, and bought rebirth despite my apprheneions b/c i wasn't happy with remake. i gave it a chance it it only got worse. got any more theories to why we don't like trash writing? that you justify spending hundreds of dollars on 3 different games waiting for it to 'get good' is a joke.
@@kellevichy See, this is what I'm talking about. A story that covers the multiverse theory is automatically considered "bad writing" and that's really not true. There are plenty of shows, movies, books, that cover this time travel/multiverse shit and are extremely well done. Has the time travel/multiverse concept been used too much lately? Yes, definitely. But just because this concept is being used too much in different shows and movies doesn't mean outright awful concept. Besides these games are kinda going on a different route when it comes to this multiverse concept. Now, I'm not entirely sure where this is going but I'm willing to follow it because of how interesting it's getting. The characters and the gameplay are already great I just want to know how they continue to reinvent this plot.
players just don't get it. we do not care if it is a multiverse. all we care was to SEE more of these characters. more of the back stories, the lost, and suffering, joy, and happiness. who cares if there are mulitple timelines. we wanted to see more of Zack and Aerith. if they are dead at the end and happy at the end of part 3. and a dlc that brings them back to life, we will love it.
You and your fellow cult members are the issue with this whole fandom.
Exactly! Tired of these sad someone dies stories.
@@AShroudOfTruth its funny you want a shit story with happy vibes and good feelings like a damn 9 year old.
@@mjesus850 ?? No, I want the exact opposite of shit story, one with happy vibes, not the same ole same ole boo-hoo-hoo storyline.
@@mjesus850 Try not to be such a depressive. It'll do you a world of good. Wish for happy instead of sorrow.
there is no multiverse
Someone didn’t watch the video 😂
I've seen it all as well coming from what I call the purist fans who refuse to take off their nostalgia goggles. It's okay to have nostalgia for something and even to love it for what it is... My personal opinion is I genuinely appreciate the additions they made and for me and many others this game is a masterpiece. They did not change the core of the story or the characters... and without it I would not have been able to go through this game with the sense of curiosity and wonder that I did back in 1997. A 1:1 remake would've been great don't get me wrong, but extremely predictable and boring...
I understand that change can be a little off-putting for those who grew up playing the OG and have a lot of sentimental value attached to its story, and that’s fine, but there’s some people out there who have turned to storming the internet with so much hateful rhetoric towards the remake project and its fans to the point where they are actively dissuading people from playing it or enjoying it in the first place... and that is completely messed up.
No it’s called recognizing horrible storytelling
I guess you have missed, dodged or ignored all the arguments in all the videos that do go through why "the core of the story is different". If people really think that fate and whispers add things to the story, maybe they need to take off their nostalgia glasses (if this was a new game without FF VII skin there the new themes would be useless) and stop with the fan theorizing and writing the story for the developers.
Also if people can judge things now in a positive light, then people can judge them in a negative light.
@@vincentgraymore I don't care buddy. I love Remake and Rebirth and that's that. If you are that butthurt over a video game, well... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@SnuSnu91 Low standards don't excuse poor taste.
@@rclaws3230 We love it - we win. You hate it - you lose. Keep crying all you want :)
MUH WORLDS AND SHIET remake is alr better than og
The sales figures and impact on gaming as a whole would suggest otherwise.
there's no multiverse, it's one planet and one lifestream with many memories. All worlds will be merged by Sephiroth, the stakes are even higher
“It’s not a multiverse….. all worlds will be merged” LOL
yeh bruh ! there's not a million clouds aeriths and sephiroths. Glad you read it and get it @@ItsSVO
Did you not even watch the video?
@@za87647 yeh and he misses the point. Just because he has a video doesn’t mean he’s correct lol
@@salmark9080You’re the one missing the point. 🤦🏻♀️
Rebirth is so good. Grognards need to get over it lol
When it comes to story absolutely not.
@@katherinemerkel3505 it's 90% the same as OG and we don't yet know how the new stuff will impact the end
@@AuramiteEX No it is not
@@katherinemerkel3505 except it is.
@@AuramiteEX really pretty sure multiple timelines and Zack/ plot ghosts weren’t a part of the original story. 🤦♀️
This video and your entire opinion is objectively wrong.
A subjective opinion cannot be objectively wrong.
@ChangingTimes01 This whole video is this persons personal opinion about the game. Therefore his own opinion about it cannot be objectively right or wrong because it is simply his opinion. His opinion is that he feels the original game is much better than the remake and that by definition cannot be wrong unless you’re trying to claim he actually loves remake despite saying conclusively that he doesn’t. Is that what you’re saying?
@ChangingTimes01 How can they be objectively wrong? If I say “I don’t like this song because of these reasons” then how can that statement be objectively wrong? It’s a personal opinion. Please explain and provide the metrics you’re using to determine so.
If it's an opinion then it can't be wrong on an objective level because it isnt about objective things. It simply states a personal preference. There are ways to compare opinions using facts, reasoning, etc, but by their nature of being an opinion they can't be inherently wrong as long as they are at their core based on personal viewpoint I.e. someone saying that they have 6 fingers when they have 5 isn't an opinion like that because it is simply a falsehood and isn't based on what people personally prefer or unobjective things. But someone saying that grapes are better than oranges or that one camera angle is better than another cannot be wrong on an objective level because they aren't objective things.
Objectively means “not influenced by personal feelings” therefore, as I’ve pointed out multiple times already, you’re wrong. Regardless of what your clear Narcissism is in denial about.
@ChangingTimes01 You are OBJECTIVELY wrong in claiming that the person's personal subjective opinion regarding FF7 remake games can be objectively wrong as that's literally an impossible non-sequitur!
And who EXACTLY is this authority on deeming subjective opinions objectively wrong??!! You??!
You talk trash about the remake project but cared enough to buy Rebirth. Your just shitting on the game for views at this moment.
He bought it to be able to review it fairly for his channel. Thats called having integrity. You don’t have to listen to critiques by the way, you have the power to watch or not watch things, take hold of your emotions and take some responsibility.
You can’t win with FF7R fans. If you haven’t played it = you can’t have an opinion. If you do play it = you can’t criticise the game if you cared enough to buy it 😂 basically the only correct opinion is whatever aligns with YOUR views on the game. Narcissist much?
@@za87647 cult like behaviour and a lack of of critical thinking. A common occurrence in society these days. People are being told what to think but not how to think.
ff7r have became a cult
blame maximilian_dood for creating this cult
Final Fantasy ended when Sakaguchi left.