FFVII Remake... It's Official! (Discussion)

So you're basically saying he's The Joker.

While VI introduced a great many things to the series and I would never dream of calling it the worst of the series (that belongs to XIII by a hefty margin over VIII, sticking with the main-chronology only), it is easily my least favorite of the series to play and I've never actually played it the entire way through myself because I've never been able to not just get bored with it.

Cute.

But yeah, I've always felt there's a bit of correlation there.

No different from Metroid borrowing from Alien, MGS borrowing from Escape from New York, Contra borrowing from Rambo etc etc.

Oh, clearly. I'm not saying otherwise.

Just saying there's definitely a consideration there for how you view the villain and their "quality" as such.

No, Rambo borrowed from Contra. I don't care if he came before it, there is overwhelming proof that he used the Konami code to survive those movies.

If they do remake 12 I hope they include the Zodiac version as well so you can play both in glorious HD

*shakes head*

-10 points for Ramy.

The worst are 13 and 2.

Wait a second...

13+2=15

FFXV will be worst FF confirmed.

I really don't mind shallow villain motivations. How many of the truly evil villains in real life have complex motivations? Caligula - Lust and vengeance, Vlad Dracula - brutality to quell opposition, Elizabeth Bathory - Peter Pan complex, Hitler - love of power, disgusted by his lineage, Stalin - love of power, Ed Geen - Mental illness from trauma, Dahmer - Insecurity, mental illness, etc.

The motivations they assign to characters like Kefka aren't any less deep than a person like that would have in real life. Some people just want to watch the world burn.

Thanks everyone on your input of the FFVI mobile port. I just checked and looks like traded away my copy of the game in my local game trade group. I'll probably go see if I can trade back for it while I trade for other games I haven't played yet.

If we're going with the weakest link in the FF franchise, I'd have to go with Mystic Quest. Come on, Squaresoft literally made a game just for Americans because they thought we couldn't handle the difficulty so they tweaked it for kids.

I don't even like Kefka, but occasionally it is nice to just have simpler villains. For example, I liked Maleficent back in the old days when she was just plain evil. Yeah, sure, that can get boring if overused, but I also don't need to know that every villain was a good, happy lad until somebody shot his puppy and caused him to turn evil.

Most of those people you listed weren't very successful. Obviously men like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc., have managed it, but remember that they were the psycho in charge of a group of psychos.

Gestahl's empire may have been conquest happy, but it wasn't crazy. Kefka would have realistically been kept in a Slave Crown (he was a Magitek Knight, after all, still a useful weapon) or executed by General Leo long before he had a chance to poison Doma Castle or betray the Emperor. His rise to power may have been arbitrary and largely unintended, but that doesn't help justify that he shouldn't have been in any position to do what he did. People who "want to watch the world burn" get locked up or killed long before they can attempt it, as your own list demonstrates.

And then when he has world-conquering power and the magic of the creator gods, he sits twiddling his thumbs while the heroes, whom he has been thwarted by before, race around the world getting stronger and undermining his absolute rule. Can anyone imagine the Joker taking over Gotham, installing a city-wide CCTV network, and then ignoring that Batgirl, Robin, and this curious Bruce Wayne fellow are killing off his Killer Clowns and building an arsenal? And, yes, this does mean that I take issue with that exact thing happening with Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. Kefka may be an abject coward, a sociopath, and rather arbitrary, but he was also quite intelligent.

What's weird about FFVI is that the main villain suffers the problem that every one of the protagonists has: his story is told like a side-story to a protagonist that never appears in the game. All of them, the cast of dozens, get a 10 minute spotlight, but no one is really the main character. Terra gets shoved into that role, but if you actually go back and look at the story, she's almost a plot device rather than a person and certainly doesn't take center stage. FFX was not the story of Tidus, but he took center stage. FFXII had no real place for Vaan (and Penelo), but he kept himself in every major event enough to annoy the piss out of people who were more concerned about Ashe's journey. FFVI, though... hell, Kefka is arguably the protagonist since his story is the one that sees the most development, except that it comes to a crashing halt the second he accidentally wrecks the world and becomes God.

I do get Dabackpack's claim that he was probably the only villain that makes sense for the message being conveyed, but that doesn't make him a particularly good villain because the message got stretched too thin.

Returning to FFVII, we can make a case for Sephiroth having an actual motivation, instead of simply being allowed to run amok and stumbling into things. But it's not believable on any level. If we take the "Look at it through a YA lens" that Sparthos suggested, when I was about 10 years old, if I'd been told that I was a vat-grown super-soldier, my first response would've been "Awesome!" It surely wouldn't have been, "Welp... time to kill everyone and surf the universe on a dead hunk of rock." What the *** kind of sense does that make?

If Sephiroth had been a general in Gestahl's empire, he'd have bided his time and betrayed the Emperor at the last second to become god, then he'd have done something with that power. FFVII's story is a really weak attempt to have an environmentalist message, though, so they have to put the planet itself in danger by a rather contrived means. The whole metaphor is "Man's creations will destroy him," but you'd be forgiven if you missed that in between the mommy issues and the multiple personality issues and the slapstick humor that contradicts the tone of the piece. Romeo and Juliet opens with a slapstick scene, but imagine if there was a *** pie-eating contest in between the two of them killing themselves? Because that's how badly the tone shifts when, 10 minutes after Aerith gets bloodily murdered, you're snowboarding down a mountain.

And, incidentally, part of the problem with Sephiroth is that we've had to literally ask the writer to explain what the hell is going on with this absurd bit of motivation. That's a problem: it's annoying if I have to go to the next game/movie in the series, it's measurably bad writing when you have to ask the author to explain himself. If we're claiming that villains can be shallow and caricatured, Sephiroth still doesn't fit that mold.

Maleficent was a primal force of evil, though, not a human being. And she only really became a problem because she got snubbed. That's classic fairy tales (and religion): honor the good spirits, appease the bad. She's an archetype.

That's pretty subjective. Vlad managed to retake his childhood seat as well as much of the surrounding territory and ruled for decades. He was personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths by gruesome means like impalement. Bathory killed enough young girls that the Hungarian crown imprisoned her for the rest of her life, which was borderline unheard of. Ed Geen killed dozens of people and carried out some of the most horrific procedures on their corpses, enough to spawn multiple horror movie franchises.

I think this explains it quite well but having to play several games to know his story isn't the best. They should have fleshed it all out and told us in the first game.

Aside from the part Genesis played, wasn't most of this explained in the original game, including alot of that last paragraph? I'd have to play through both games again (which I don't mind doing) but I thought Crisis Core only added more to that backstory through the involvement of Genesis and Angeal.

Bleah.

Yay for flashbacks in the remake involving them? =D

And some people are willing to sell the flamethrower that burns the world.....

...while selling the fire extinguisher that prevents the flamethrower that burns the world....

...investment opportunities!

BRB

I've only played FFVII and I knew most of this.

It's still not a believable motivation. Even in the realms of outcast middle school students, when you're the baddest warrior on the planet and you find out that you're a test tube baby, you don't decide to wipe out all life. You might decide to conquer the world and make the people you feel are responsible suffer for it, but if Sephiroth did that, he'd have wound up joining Cloud and company to defeat Shinra. Which would have been the far better way to tell the story that FFVII was trying to tell.

Explain to me again how Nojima isn't a hack writer.

Hell, if they wanted to make Sephiroth the big bad while still having Shinra be the actual villain instead of this HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE plot, all they would need to do is pull a Kain Highwind and brainwash him. Surely a vat-grown, Mako-infused SOLDIER would not be difficult to manipulate like that. They could have even done like in FFX-2 and added bonus content for getting full completion, but instead of a stupid cutscene with Tidus, it'd be that the party saves Sephiroth at the last minute from his madness and they team up to topple Shinra's superboss once and for all.

But, no, gotta have some weird self-obsessed emo ***. Has anyone noticed the way that Cloud Strife went from having more than one emotion in FFVII (he's capable of being funny, aloof, depressed, etc. etc.) to being a one-note emo kid in literally everything else? You can hear the Linkin Park in the background whenever he's on-screen in a Kingdom Hearts game.

This is literally why I think I'm going to hate the remake of FF7. They're drawing from Advent Children and that is bad bad bad bad bad. FF7 and Advent Children are not the same. If you coerce Advent Children into FF7, you're going to ruin the game.

(You could argue that Cloud "changed" so much because of the realizations about himself he made in the later parts of the game, but I don't think that really justifies the pure emo that Cloud becomes in Advent Children, KH, etc.)

If it's not obvious, I'm not a big fan of the FF7 franchise, despite liking the original game.

Why not? Sephiroth was praised as being the best from youth. His skills were unmatched even among the other experiments. Shinra raised his success' to cult status. Everyone who enlisted in Shinra wanted to be Sephiroth. After finding out you're not from this world, it's not exactly a stretch to label yourself a god worthy of doling out planetary destruction as you see fit.

Who's going to stop you?


Sephiroth returns from his presumed death to strike back at Shinra, killing the President and making it very clear hes still around. He then spends segments of the game harassing and generally antagonizing Shinra.


The plot's convoluted for sure, especially with crap like Dirge of Cerberus around but Sephiroths main goal is clear. Use Meteor to trigger a calamity that allows him to drain the planet and move on to other worlds. And so Jenova's will continues on, now in a human form.


JRPG writing suffers from many of the same tropes. Much of it involves trying to stick too many ideas into what could be a simplified plot. When it isn't obscene amounts of technobabble (Tales of the Abyss) it's using frowned upon tropes like mindwipes, time travel or *insert something at childhood*

Final Fantasy is far from alone here.


Cloud spent most of the game brainwashed, emotionally pliable to the will of Sephiroth/Jenova. It's only when Cloud stops covering for failing to live up to his promise to Tifa that he's finally able to be himself. And something about Omnislashing Sephiroth out of his mind.

Shinra's always the villain. They created Sephiroth. They triggered his psychotic break. They're the ones behind most of the major problems in the VII-verse. Like a silver haired superman running around causing havoc.


Sephiroth is your superboss. He is Shinra's greatest creation afterall. Originally the character was written more as a villain with a sympathetic backstory but thanks to the expanding VII-verse we could at least consider that perhaps Sephiroth is at least a victim of his own fate.

Still doesn't make sense. Especially because, for all that he had a cult of personality around him that would make the average US political pundit wet with raging jealousy, he was actually still a pretty decent guy. When he's interacting with Cloud Zack, he's encouraging and nice and answers personal questions. A face-heel turn into "*** it, everyone dies now," would be laughed out of a WWE arena, much less a story that the entire world apparently lauds as being the best in video game history.

If he'd been an arrogant jerk-wad with half of Cloud's mopey whininess, I might buy your theory. I'd have to be really drunk, but it's possible I'd buy that.

So what? Pretty much every single Final Fantasy has a "Wait, what the hell?" moment of complete plot failure, and that's not even accounting for things like Chains of Promathia style incompetent storytelling that leave you so confused that it doesn't matter if it makes sense. FFIV does reasonably well except for the silly plot twist about moon people, which actually puts it near the top of the list of "This is a good story." And, reminder, I hated FFIV, so this isn't a fanboy speaking.

Actually, the other game I've played (note: I haven't played 2, 3, 5, or the 13 franchise) with a storyline that makes sense is FFIX, at least up until Necron. And it shows pretty much exactly how badly they botched Sephiroth. Zidane Tribal and Sephiroth are essentially the same character: generally nice guys with super-human powers and no clear understanding of their origins, but clearly aware that they're not quite the same as everyone else. When Zidane finally gets the truth revealed to him, that he was literally manufactured to destroy the world, he goes catatonic and gets depressed, but eventually opts to fight against the plan laid out for him, albeit thanks to friendship sparkles*** out by his teammates.

And if you want to see the villainous result of basically the same start, look at Kuja: he doesn't feel any connection to Terra (or is it Gaia? I can't remember which planet is which), so he doesn't mind contributing to its demise for the sake of his own world, but he does eventually go into a murder frenzy when he realizes he's mortal, especially because that existential crisis opened up his Trance state and doubled-down on proving he's mortal. And just to put a cherry on it, when he does get his butt whupped, Kuja apologizes and asks forgiveness. Advent Children shows us that Sephiroth doesn't change at all from his contrived genocidal plan.

But, yeah, plot failure is commonplace in video games. I don't know if it's because they're written by committee or the writers just aren't very good or what. Hell, J.R.R. Tolkein has some pretty major plot holes in his Middle Earth myth that clearly existed because he just wanted the characters to do what he had planned rather than what was sensible (there are more problems than just the Giant Eagles thing -- that one can actually be credibly explained away). So I'm willing to accept plot holes if the story is compelling or the message is interesting.

Sadly, neither apply to FFVII. It's a really clumsy environmentalist message, about as ham-handed as "Fern Gully" (yes, really), and they've spent several games trying to polish that turd to no real avail. As I've said before, every character except Cloud (and maybe Sephiroth if we accept the unbelievable nonsense above) is completely static, going through no arc or change whatsoever. They're all stereotypes, too. The good-and-pure girl who dies to save the world from evil, the childhood unrequited love (who is also a tomboy for bonus points), the grizzled freedom fighter with a soft spot for kids, the loli, the vampire... Cait Sith is almost the most interesting character besides Cloud and that sentence leaves me ready to vomit.

It's not a bad story, but it's also not very good. I wouldn't bother picking it apart except that everyone who had their cherry popped by it can't face up to its mediocrity. I lost my anime cherry to Neon Genesis Evangelion and, much as I like the series, over time I've had to accept that it was a pedantic, meandering, convoluted mess with no clear message and a resolution only slightly less disappointing than the end of FFVII.

I think I'm the minority that caught on to Cloud's act early on in the game with how Tifa and Aerith interacted with him.

Probably because I was in high school at the time surrounded people pulling the same act, reading manga with those types of characters in them and had older adult friends that confirmed my observations and saw it coming as well. So it didn't surprise me how he carried on after the façade was lifted nor did the events of Advent Children having him do the same.

For years after the original game, I'd see people passionate rail on about how the game changed the badass, confident Cloud into an "emo" sissy. I used to argue the point that Cloud was always that way and playing the game for some would allow them to see the signs. Maybe its just me and my experiences assisting people most of my life, but I'm never bothered by such behaviour and I don't find that it takes away from Cloud as a character but adds to it.

Squaresoft may not have had a great track record for excellently crafted stories or characters but with the popular narratives from back then (and even now for that matter), its perfectly in line with the media that inspired it.

I'm not sure why you can accept Kuja being driven to madness, but not Sephiroth being driven to madness. It's almost the same result, just backwards. One was not of this world and instead discovers his mortality thus making him like humans; the other thought he was a human but discovers he's not from this world.

FFIX is my favourite too, and VII to me is only somewhere in the middle of my personal ranking, but not sure why you accept one but not the other.

I think it has to do with rising standards when you specialize in or are used to something in life. Be it food, sports, sex, movies, video games... most people have yard sticks they use to measure all other things.

Onorgul already mentioned earlier in his posts with me that he has a degree in literary analysis so it stands to reason that he's probably broken down at least a few narratives in his time. Reading all these narratives would probably raise his standards on what's supposedly good and bad based on the important literary concepts.

It's like someone saying the McRib is the best thing ever to a chef or even an experienced food blogger. Or a cop watching a police procedural and seeing all the errors. I see plenty of people take issue like this all the time in my field to varying degrees.

Despite the often, shall we say... passionate approach to his posts in the last couple pages alone, I can see where he is coming from and can respect some of his points without having to agree with them. He could possibly be seeing something in the case of Kuja that he doesn't see in Sephiroth that we don't see due to his proficiencies.

Or it could just some subjective personal preference for him =D

His degree has little to do with this. He injects his bias into this as much as everyone else would, there's no escape to that.

Possessing a degree does not necessarily mean that someone can't fail to make connections of a character's psyche, especially when not enjoying the work altogether.

Agreed, of course. I have found myself questioning his ability to make these connections in my discussions with him, especially when it comes to Kingdom Hearts. I think I made a simlilar conclusion to what you posted above when it came to that series and his understanding of its themes, nuances and plot points.

And while having that degree doesn't guarantee certain things, I like to preceive on a positive slant. I've often been told its one of my own failings.