Thread by @MOOMANiBE, As is probably obvious , I've been playing ff7 og on my [...]

As is probably obvious , I've been playing ff7 og on my switch during phys therapy today, and I feel like more than anything else this is confirming to me that if I had any nostalgia for this game it died a long time ago

I'm curious if I'll start to feel different once I begin to move into sections of the story I'm less familiar with. I guess we'll see.

* The sections leading up to shinra tower are still very strong and thematic

* Even with 3x fast forward it's hard to ignore how tediously simple the combat system is compared to literally any modern rpg. I feel like I'm gaining a new respect for a lot of more recent games.

I've always argued that ff13's early gameplay takes way too long to get any interest and depth but honestly in comparison to this it's got a LOT going on haha

I am sad to say that ff7 og's weird, low world map camera that clips through mountains is still as nauseating to me now as it was when I was a kid

#ff7og It's surreal how instantly apparent it is, looking for it now, that "cloud" in the neibelheim flashback is not acting like cloud at all.

#ff7og I forgot how INCREDIBLY GOOD the chocobo battle music in this game is

#ff7og It's funny to me just how quickly the narrative vanishes for a bit post-midgar.

Ostensibly you're chasing sephiroth to Junon but your actual tasks involve catching a chocobo, walking thru a cave and getting yelled at by the turks, and then doing a tower defense minigame

I love how red13's reaction to cloud not wanting to do CPR is "well -I- can't do it" lmao

Them dog lips

It's extremely funny that they spend a huge amount of time prepping you for the Junon marching minigame and then it lasts all of five seconds

#ff7og I really do appreciate the CONSTANT implication via background art that shinra's rise to technomodernity is within very living memory, to the extent that you have towns that look like quaint JRPG fantasy villages with newly minted power reactors plopped into them.

#ff7og It's funny how much the section post-midgar feels like a road trip, you chasing sephiroth across various continents and towns, getting filled in on the backstories of your party members and seeing yet more DEEPLY economically stratified towns under shinra's control

Gold Saucer, Junon, Midgar, every single one of these places features a very stark theme of "wealth above, poverty below" that I don't think 11-year-old me quite picked up on

I will say one thing I'm missing here that I think 7R does VERY well is the sense of class identity, the reminder that regulars in money-centric places are all upper-tier shinra employees, b/c that's who has the money, and anyone else is essentially spending their life savings

I suspect it would give "fun" places like costa del sol and gold saucer a very, very different feel and flavor if it was clear that pretty much everyone there was shinra-built upper class, and that isn't necessarily coming across to me in the original so far.

#ff7og I have to say it's interesting, going thru some of the "optional" disc 1 content in goganga and nibelhiem mansion, how happy the developers are to let you stumble onto fairly important narrative or, not

They're dropping all kinds of hints but you can miss it all no prob

#ff7og This is a thing that would be aggressively signposted these days, but the 90s standard for "signposted" is basically "you can see a thing in the forest roughly ~60 degrees off your destination". Modern AAA would flip at the idea of a player accidentally passing all this up

#ff7og (And I'm pretty sure, to be honest, that 11-year-old me DID completely fail to notice goganga, haha. I was not a very patient child.

Then again, 11 year old me was also convinced time magic and protect were useless spells and only ever equipped damage magic.

#ff7og (Back in the day this ended up with me getting a functional soft-lock, stuck in the final dungeon of disc 1 massively underleveled and with no tents or healing items, completely unable to progress. I ended up using my mom's save to continue. <.<)

#ff7og So I'm just about to Temple of the Ancients and what I'm beginning to realize is that I do not remember a single thing that happens in this game after disc 1.

disc 1 -> caves??? -> coma? -> ice place -> sephiroth

that's all I got

#ff7og a thing that happens in temple of the ancients that I totally forgot is that sephiroth reveals he has zero interest in protecting the planet and is in fact much more excited about the idea of injuring it and then protruding from the injury like a nihilist-shaped parasite

#ff7og his motivation of "that'll make me into a cool planet god somehow" cements him as having one of the most traditional final fantasy villain motivations, "I hate life and that's why I wanna be god, no I haven't thought this through any further than that"

If the breath of fire series is about killing god, the final fantasy series is about killing people who want to be god

#ff7og While I'm only just into disc 2, I feel like I could sum up the events of everything since midgar as "a slow putting-on-the-brakes of the entire narrative". Nonstop plot slows to Junon-style setpeices slows to one cutscene for every 5 snowboarding minigames or random caves

#ff7og Yesterday I did some reading up on this game's unbelievable less-than-a-year dev cycle and its pretty easy, I think, to read these increasing departures and pseudo-filler as the product of a dev team pumping out Content as fast as possible and using absolutely all of it

#ff7og Given the structure of the world outside midgar as isolated dots with very little in the way of interaction, it's easy to imagine all these areas being developed in parallel by separate people. Makes sense, given how quickly square had been scaling up to make the game.

#ff7og I'll be honest, the farther I get into the game the more I read Barret as a man who is extremely depressed about the deaths of so many of his friends and is getting zero emotional support over it

#ff7og late on in disc 2 Barret says something tp the effect of "I'm not cut out to be a leader, I see that now". And it comes out of nowhere, but if you consider how much of the game til this point he's spent dwelling on biggs/jesse/wedge's deaths, and probably dyne's as well

#ff7og Barret never really gets resolution on any of those deaths, and from the moment he suggests "going out in a blaze of glory" by walking thru the shinra entrance it's easy to see a lot of his dialogue as that of a man who feels he needs to punish himself

#ff7og (it's notable that Barret is the only person to ever bring up what happened to sector seven again, as cloud pretty patently only cares about sephiroth and tifa has a switch that flips from 'avalanche' to 'cloud' the instant they leave midgar and never flips back)

#ff7og in what I can only assume is an intentional joke, the button combo to play the piano for tifa's limit break appaears to be totally different for every single console port the game has had. I had to do it by ear for the switch version.

#ff7og I'm very near the end of disc 2 and I feel like my forgetting most of this is increasingly justified

Good bits: Cloud in the lifestream, junon escape, the last like 5 minutes of northern crater

# #ff7og Bad bits of disc 2: The entire lengthy quest where you strive to sabotage shinra's plan to destroy meteor because cloud likes big materias (and then just carry out their plan anyway)

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