/vr/ - Retro Games

I thought it was a nice development. It made Cloud into more of a character and made his relationship with Tifa more interesting.

I didn't give a shit about Zack and was surprised when subsequent material put so much focus on him.

>>9426237
legitimately one of the best plot twists in any game ever. Cloud's backstory firmly cemented FF7 as one of the best games of all time.

>>9426304
>legitimately one of the best plot twists in any game ever. Cloud's backstory firmly cemented FF7 as one of the best games of all time.

and they'd never do something like that again - because specifically it's about making the main character self-insert not special.

>>9426237
I was suprised, considering the most talked spoiler was Aeris dying.

>>9426381
Aeris is like at the 40% mark, whereas this is closer to the ending. So people don't talk about the enidng.

>>9426237
Actually was shocked on my first playthrough.

I was 12 when ff7 came out and found the entire zach/cloud thing kinda confusing

>>9426237
Dropped it when I realized it had random encounters on top of generic turn based combat.
This game was 20 years outdated when it came out and only liked for its edgy cutscenes...which don't hold up...which is why they remake it

Shocked throughout the entire sequence. The part where Cloud was demoralized enough to even apologize to Rufus Shinra, Scarlet and the other scumbags sealed the scene.

>>9426436
Me too, and I still don't understand it.

1 word: amazing

>>9426237
i didnt get to play it back when it was relevant. my copy from a pawn shop had two disc 3's and one disc 2, i couldn't start without the first disc.

>>9426479
ESL detected

>>9426237
It came as a huge surprise for sure. I remember I was a little dissapointed that Cloud wasn't the bad-ass SOLDIER he thought he was, it took sometime to realize it's actually kind of brilliant that he wasn't. He's just a regular guy who got swept up into events far beyond him and somehow managed to kill the most powerful warrior on the planet.

>>9426609
This was me. Granted I was nine the first time I played Final Fantasy 7 and I'm in my thirties now. At that time though all of my heroes were basically gigachads that beat up bad guys and doesn't afraid of anything. So when I saw that Cloud was just a regular guy I was sort of confused by it. But as time has progressed and I continually played this game Cloud became one of my most beloved characters ever. Not in the "this character could beat up your character" way or the bishie way. More in the I get it sort of way. Just a guy kind of just learning to drop the unrealistic expectations of himself and just be who he is, which ended up being good enough.

>>9426237
I didn't play until like 2003 but it still blew my fucking mind because I only went on parts of the internet that talked about DBZ back then so I wasn't spoiled on it.

It's funny because FF7 takes so much from Star Wars, openly
but the idea of a regular storm trooper ultimately being the hero is something Star Wars took another 20 years to get to and then utterly fucked up beyond belief

But like imagine if Star Wars wasn't complete putrid liquid shit right now, and imagine there was a character that was a Storm Trooper on the Death Star when Luke escaped with Leia, and then he went around telling people that he was Luke - that'd be great! And that's FF7!

Why did Tifa cuck Cloud?

>>9426580
I gotta go back and replay it soon since I haven't beaten ff7 since launch but I have a lot of confusion about 7s plot. Like, I completely forgot about Zach as a plot point till crisis core, and crisis core didn't really clear anything up.

>>9426580
>>9426710
Cloud was one of those chuuni teens that that l thought he was SO MATURE and left home to join SOLDIER. Mostly to get Tifa's attention. Except he never made it. Cloud washed out and was made a Shinra grunt. And the only thing that made it more embarrassing is that Cloud was assigned to be an escort for Sephiroth and another 1st Class Soldier, Zack Fair.

Nibelheim used to be a Shinra research center where they experimented on Jenova and using Mako to infuse Jenova cells into a living person. Shinra left but the reactor remained up until it stopped working. So Zack and Sephiroth where there to investigate. Cloud was so ashamed at returning home a failure that he kept his helmet on the entire time. The only thing he did was visit his mother. From there the memory happens similar to the actual game except every instance of "Cloud" being the 1st Class Soldier was actually Zack. Cloud was just the grunt that was hanging with them the entire time. Fast forward: Sephiroth has his breakdown. Zack chases Sephiroth into the reactor, Sephiroth beats him and throws him out the front door. Cloud follows behind and notices Zack collapsed on the floor. He takes the Buster Sword off Zack, runs up, and stabs Sephiroth in the back. After returning to tend to Tifa Sephiroth tries to escape. Cloud stands against him, Sephiroth stabs him through the gut, Cloud in his anger takes control of the sword and uses it to throw Sephiroth to the bottom of the reactor. Let's be clear: Cloud killed Sephiroth.

With Shinra clean up arriving, Hojo takes the opportunity to experiment on Zack and Cloud. And while Zack is mentally strong enough to keep it together, the blood loss and Mako Poisoning causes Cloud to mentally fall apart. Zack breaks out, takes Cloud, and they try to run to Midgar to find his ex, Aeris, to crash with. Along the way Zack tells Cloud stories about Soldier and his life to keep his mind busy. And right at the finish line they're ambushed by a Shinra patrol

>>9426801
Zack is killed immediately, gunned down like a dog. The patrol decide to spare Cloud since he's so mentally broken that he wasn't worth the ammo. Cloud took Zack's Buster Sword from his dead body and crawled to the Sector 7 train station. Taking a mixture of his own self loathing and the stories Zack told him on the way there, Cloud inserted himself into Zack's stories. Cloud was the 1st Class Soldier that investigated Nibelheim. Cloud was the one who traveled with Sephiroth. Why does Cloud know so many details about Shinra despite never being more than cannon fodder? Because Zack told him. Right in time for him to reunite with Tifa who, coincidentally was also staying in Midgar.

Cloud maintained this delusion which confused Tifa because he knew details about events she knew he wasn't there for. Which led to Tifa deciding to follow Cloud and learn what the fuck was going on and then for her to realize that something was severely wrong with him. But the reality is that Cloud was pretending to the Zack. Zack was the real Soldier 1st Class the whole time.

>>9426479
>only liked for its edgy cutscenes
u 100% weren't there, zoom zoom

>>9426237
idk wasn't born yet

In the end, Cloud still comes out as heroic, he saves Tifa and even kills Sephiroth, something Zack couldn’t do.

>>9426681
she didn't. also Johnny has a GF at that point of the game, you can see him creeping around the bathroom whilst she's showering when you come back to his home after that scene.

>>9426805
I mean the mako was also messing with his head and he couldn't really understand where his memories ended and where Zack's began. You make it sound like he was just faking it, which if he was then he wouldn't have freaked out and gone schizo when the truth was revealed.

>>9426237
I had no idea what was going on and I still kind of don't. The fact that it was badly translated didn't help matters.

>>9427206
>t. esl

>>9427197
That wasn't my intent. That was why I used the word delusions. Cloud wasn't just making up a story, he genuinely believed he was the soldier first class that was with Sephiroth that day.

>>9426609
but Cloud IS a badass, he just didn't have the mental fortitude to get into soldier. But he was fast, wickedly strong and incredibly skilled even as a kid. and in the end he surpasses everyone else. The whole soldier thing doesn't even really matter; at the end of the day Cloud was the one left standing.

>>9427187
Tifa remarks on this exact thing

Tifa.

>Tifa
...You came. ...You kept your promise.
So you really did come when I was in trouble!

>Cloud
Sorry... I didn't get there... fast enough...

>Tifa
It's all right... Cloud.

>>9427217
no, I'm American
It really was badly and confusingly translated in a lot of places.

>>9427227
uh, no? I was 14 in 1997 and understood the game perfectly, and the plot blew me away. the translation errors are mostly typos and have no impact on the content or delivery of the plot.
if you didn't understand it, you were either 7 years old, or have a poor understanding of english.

ESL here, english script is mostly fine, in my language version the game barely made any sense. No one in my school properly understood the whole plot.

>>9426607
Cool, now if you can detect your own ass you'll closely match the achievement of never having learned a second language.

>>9426237
My very first reaction was actually laughing because Zack's model looks kind of goofy. But the usual states of befuddlement followed eventually.

>>9427243
I was 12 and it was still badly translated. Huge chunks of the plot didn't make sense because of it.
What the fuck was Sephiroth? Jenova? Human who was freaking out because he was genetically modified? So what? It doesn't help that that whole sequence of him freaking out had to do with Japanese social expectations of not being outside the group.

>>9426237

Everyone is always debating about Aeris vs. Aerith. What about Zach vs. Zax?

>>9427359
You mean normal people vs dyslexics?

>>9426251
This. Zack is boring BECAUSE he's a dumb shonen protagonist, whereas Cloud is interesting because he's a poser and kind of a nothing loser.

>>9427341
>What the fuck was Sephiroth?
A clone baby made out of hojo and jenova cells implanted into lucrecia.

>Jenova?
A creature kind of like the alien in The Thing. It can subvert and absorb living things, it moves from planet to planet, eating them until tehy're dead then launching itself into space.

There is a level of Japanese culture to it, since Japan puts a lot of emphasis on perfecting yourself and your craft. But for the most part Sephiroth freaks out because he realizes he's NO different than Cloud or any other Shinra grunt or experiment. He thought he was some super human that had got to his position through hard work, and really it was just magic alien juice. He realized he wasn't real or even human after seeing the monsters in the pod at nebelheim. Everything about him was a facade so Shinra could use him as a poster boy/tool to kill monsters. He dies at neibelheim, and his corpse falls into the mako/spirit energy. Because he has a lot of willpower/mako energy/jenova cells inside of him instead of diluting like most living things do in the lifestream, he instead manages to recollect himself into the Northern crater(the corpse in the ice). All the sephiroths you see in the game are Jenova-aliens imprinted with his will.

The final fight in Cloud's head is Cloud literally killing the last of Sephiroth's 'will' in the jenova cells inside of cloud.

>>9426237
I recall it made me think Cloud was even more pathetic than he originally seemed. Up until then he had seemed like a high ranking ex-special forces type mercenary but this blew all that away.

>>9427396
Also to add on to this in the japanese aspects - Japan puts a LOT of emphasis on to physical purity = spiritual purity. It's why a lot of places won't serve people with tattoos(and why the Yakuza tattoo themselves - it's a brand that removes you from normal society), and why in so many JRPGs the main characters are pretty young people. It's also why there's never, EVER a villain in any of these stories that doesn't go from calm, collected super-genius to giant screeching murde-rmonster(Your classic RE-turned into eyeballs goop monster). In Japanese culture, an evil person CAN'T remain calm or physically pure, because the Hero must win through Clarity of purpose and their own will power.

>>9427405
Yes. That's what you're supposed to take from it. Then later you learn that despite not being important he BECOMES important by wanting to protect those he loves and cares about. It always makes me furious that people treat Cloud like he was some silent protagonist. One of the things I liked best about FFVII was that Cloud wasn't some generic insert, he was kind of a douchebag for a disc and slowly grows into an adult and good person over the course of the game.

>>9427406
>It's why a lot of places won't serve people with tattoos(and why the Yakuza tattoo themselves - it's a brand that removes you from normal society)
That's actually a relatively recent phenomenon from the last 2 and a half centuries or so. Prior to that point tattoos didn't have that connotation in Japan and religious tattoos wouldn't have been seen as strange.

>>9427292
I speak Pashto, a little Punjabi and (unlike you) fluent English.

Honestly I was pretty shocked when I got to this part. It was sad to see Cloud, a character I loved, just be a cripple and realize his memories were a straight up lie.
Out of all the twists in FF7, it was the one that caught me off guard the most (I already knew Aerith died because everyone knew that when I played the game in 2003)

>>9427225
This. It's a other element of Cloud's character that I found fascinating. The man IS strong enough to call himself a First Class SOLDIER and almost no one bats a eye. Even the Turks and Rufus don't even seem to question his strength all that much, and they would be the first ones to know what that'd even look like.

Honestly when I saw Zack for the first time, I always imagined him to have Raditz tier hair due to how long it is. Always kind of bugged me that they've toned down his hair length since the original.

>>9428071
Yes? I didn't say it was ancient Japanese culture I said it had roots in Japan's cultural purity fetish. Yakima tattoo are literally based from a type of criminal tattoo from the 1600s-1800s, and getting them as a yakuza(who came to prominence shortly afterward) was a way of being branded as not part of normal society

>>9428096
he looks like retard the hedgehog with that hair

>>9426436
I wasn't 12, but trying to understand it at the time was kinda weird.
>Zack is cloud, but not but is
Ive just glossed it all over and moved along

>>9426237
To Zack? He looked like a DeviantArt donut steel, just a Cloud palette swap with black hair. Completely original and stupid looking. I still think this.

>>9428083
My dad speaks Pashto. I only found out when we went to a Pakistani restaurant together and he started talking to the people there. I remarked "I didn't know you spoke Urdu" and he said "that was Pashto, and there"s a lot you don't know about me."
It's true. I don't know a lot about him. To this day, I still have no idea wtf he actually did for a living when I was growing up beyond that it was a gubmint job.

>>9426237
Don't remember. I do remember giggling at Cloud's wheelchair tremors, which is fucked up cuz I had a brother with MD who was wheelchair-bound.

>>9428154
>I still have no idea wtf he actually did for a living when I was growing up beyond that it was a gubmint job.
If he told you, he'd have to kill you.

>>9428158
Yeah, that's the joke.
It's kinda fucked up, though. I don't even know what building he worked in, just the general area in the city (or DC when we lived in Maryland).
Wanna know the weirdest thing? Before we got a car phone in the early 90s, he used to get phonecalls at the house most evenings he was home and not off on some business trip. The weird part is that they seemingly amounted to him just saying "Okay. Okay. Okay." about thirty-seven times in a row and nothing else while writing numbers down in a marble notebook. No "Hi, how are ya?" or anything similar. Just "Okay" and the occasional "Uhuh" and "Again?" all as he scribbled numbers on paper.
No idea what those numbers were and I never asked since he never gave me straight answers to literally any questions I asked him, anyway, including "hey dad, wtf do you do for work?."
Just "government job."

>>9428209
I saw on TV those guys who worked at Area 51 would have a backpack ready to go at all times because they never knew what time of day or night they'd get a call and would have to immediately leave home and report to work. Sounds like a shit job, even if you did work with aliens. You'd be right in the middle of a boss battle and have to quit and who knows if you could get back to that boss again even.

>>9428231
Where even IS Area 51? NM? In the US, we've only lived in MD, NY and PA.

>>9427410
Well said. I don't even really like FFVII that much, but Cloud is the rare FF character who actually grew beyond "hey, I conquered my demons so now I know all the Blitzes/know all the Swordtechs/know fire magic to pass this ice mountain/became a paladin/etc.

>>9428259
Nevada, north of Las Vegas. You can even see it on Google maps satellite view. They don't even try to keep it a secret anymore since everyone already knows. But all the UFO stuff is probably done like 30 floors underground.

Thought it was pretty crazy in a good way. Though all the "Sephiroth clone" stuff confused me a bit as a kid on my first playthrough, the revelation about Cloud and the flashback was still awesome.

PSX RPGs has a bunch of mindblowing twists in RPGs compared to the 16-bit ones I had played. FFVII, Xenogears, Chrono Cross, etc. It was fun reading all the theorizing going on back in the day on GameFAQs.

>>9426237
>oldfag who actually played the game in 1997.
Yes, I was 10-years-old when I received this game in 1997. And I played it thoroughly, to conclusion.

>How did you react?
To the game? It lived up to the hype, which was mountainous.
Unlike the other "JRPG" games I had played, before Super Mario RPG (SNES), FF III (SNES), Earthbound (SNES), Pokemon Red (GB), this game was realistic to look at. The story was easy to understand, I identified with the protagonist (being a Germanic blond-haired, blue-eyed man, myself) and I thought the action was thrilling. Nobuo Uematsu's soundtrack was something I was happy to buy every single version of for decades to come, it was that good.

I loved it. All of my friends loved it. Girls didn't know about it, I guess, but who cares what girls think? I re-played it at least 3 more times before the turn of the millennium just a few years after. It was the theme for easily more than half the reason I visited the internet for the entire year. I downloaded everything I could find of it.

>>9427396
None of this shit was in the game you nerd. You're like one of those dorks that read the whole kabbalah to understand Evangelion then gets mad at people who don't get the show, insisting all the lore is "right there" when really it's not

>>9426237
Mind blown. Clouds past segment was so kino it hurt

>>9428323
Pretty much everything he said is straight from the game though. Like the stuff about Sephiroth's background is a bit hidden since you have to find Lucretia, but it's all there.

>>9428380
maybe I just need to play it again. I don't remember any of that shit, just thinking how stupid it all was and how little sense Sephiroth's whole deal made.
and the shit with Zack was totally fucking stupid, made Cloud seem like a crazy loser, what a lame fucking game turns out the only good things about it were Aerith and Tifa's big ass titties

>>9428273
All of the UFO stuff has probably been gone for decades after it became public knowledge

>>9428396
Can't argue with Tifa's big ass titties being the best part

>>9428323
>made cloud seem like a crazy loser
Because for the first two discs he is. That's why he gets dunked on by all the other characters, because he's acting like a kid playing pretend.

>>9426805
>But the reality is that Cloud was pretending to the Zack
Nah, he really thought those events were his.

>>9426237
I wanted to be able to play as him.

>>9426237
I didn’t get it.

>>9426805
Well that was pathetic.

FF7's major character twists are great and play off each other well.

>the protagonist is a nobody grunt who wound up fucked into thinking he was someone much greater. eventually, the shadow becomes better than the real thing.
>the antagonist was the best of the best, who was already dead before the game even began. in his death he winds up fucked into becoming a puppet of jenova and acts out its will while thinking he's furthering his own goals. the real thing becomes a shadow of himself.

the compilation shit unfortunately fucked with the sephiroth twist pretty hard and tried to play it off as him having more control than is apparent in the actual game. he wouldn't be doing exactly what jenova wanted in using meteor (resulting in its seed being spread further across the stars) if he wasn't being heavily manipulated in the same way jenova winds up getting to everyone. he kept his will, but it was used against him.

>>9426801
I still don't understand how Cloud is as strong as he is even though he's just a jobber goon

I still don’t get it, was Tifa dating Zack? Is cloud a cuck? I never understood what exactly was going on

>>9429912
Sephiroth broke from Jenova control, he wanted to become a god and rule the universe alone, he viewed Cloud and co. as nuisances
Then, his character went to be obsessed about Cloud due to his defeat by him

>>9429917
>as strong as he is
But he isn't. He BECOMES strong.
At the beginning of the game he's not a pushover but he's merely on par with the other playable characters; it's only the plot telling you he's supposed to be an awesome elite warrior. As a player you usually just dismiss that since you understand the game is not going to hand you an overpowered character, but ultimately it actually makes sense in-universe as well.

If your question is about how he's comparatively stronger than other regular military guys like the ones you find as enemies, that's because he got experimented on (and was considered a "failed" result, even though he got some enhancement)

>>9426237
Kinda didn't like it. I was 10 at the time and learning that he was a weird schizophrenic guy was not super appealing. I appreciate it more now, but cloud is a failed science experiment. Not super deep.

>>9429952
I get why you wouldn't like it as a kid. Claiming FF7 is a story for "adults" is silly, but it unironically is closer in elements and characterization to Young Adult fiction than the regular "here's your hero, he's great" kind of stories you got in JRPGs until then on average.

>>9429932
Yeah, this. You fight actual random SOLDIER First Class enemies late in the game and they're way stronger than Cloud starts. He did get enhanced like the rest of SOLDIER though, along with whatever other enhancements he might have gotten from Hojo's Sephiroth clone experiment (if the process wasn't identical). He actually has the mako eyes and stuff, which is one reason people believe him.

>>9429981

>>9426237
I was a young kid and i was just like this is dumb get back to the game. Not sure why i played jrpgs in hindsight.

>>9428083
Which is your native language?

>>9428095
That's because Cloud WAS adept enough to be a First Class SOLDIER and the game even points this out. The problem was the distress that the Mako infusion process caused in his psyche and rejected him from the program - it had nothing to do with his physical abilities.

>>9430089
>the game even points this out
When*? Cloud explicitly explains (eventually) that he didn't qualify for SOLDIER and became an infantryman instead. The Mako infusion happened AFTER the Nibelheim incident under Hojo's own secret experimentation initiatives

>>9428396
>maybe I just need to play it again. I don't remember any of that shit, just thinking how stupid it all was and how little sense Sephiroth's whole deal made
You can find most of this stuff in the Icicle Inn where Gast recorded some data with Ifalna. Or just watch it on youtube.

>>9430096
Cloud: I'm physically built like someone in SOLDIER. Hojo's plan to clone Sephiroth wasn't that difficult. It was just the same procedure they use when creating members of SOLDIER. You see, someone in SOLDIER isn't simply exposed to Mako energy. Their bodies are actually injected with Jenova cells...... For better or worse, only the strong can enter SOLDIER. It has nothing to do with Jenova Reunion. But weak people...... like me, get lost in the whole thing.

I recall either the Ultimania or Before Crisis dwelling further on this issue and confirming that Cloud was indeed qualified for SOLDIER but was rejected because his psyche was not strong enough to withstand the process (as evidenced by the later experiments he was subjected to in the Nibelheim basement)

Her name is Aerith stop calling her Aeris dammit

>>9430157
She's Aeris in my game. Why should I call her something that she's not called in the version I played? Would you complain about people calling Chaz Chaz in Phantasy Star IV when his original name is Rudy?

>>9430157
Hark! I shall aerith out mine balls upon thine chin as thou sucketh mine cock, foul faggot. Yon lass' name be-est Aeris and naught else.

>>9427341
>NOOOOOOOOO YOU CAN'T JUST GO ON AN INSANE ANGER-FILLED MASSACRE AFTER FINDING OUT YOUR WHOLE LIFE IS A LIE IT'S NO REALISTIC!!!
Did you forget what game you were playing?
Also
>Tripfag is retarded
Many, MANY such cases.

>>9429928
Sephiroth THINKS he's doing something like that for himself. But Jenova's end goal is identical to what he will accomplish, destroying life, absorbing it, and then making way for the next target. It's manipulating him the entire time to achieve what it wants in whatever way is most convenient. Jenova subverts those it affects and leads them to act in ways that benefit its goals. Sephiroth simply believes he's above that when he's the biggest pawn of them all.

>>9430501
What an amazingly and all-bases-covered fully worthless post. I can't bring myself to look away.

>>9426237
Confused, because I am a retarded

>>9430097
But do I need to go out of my way to find this? That's kinda important in terms of "it wasn't even in the game", if I need to go out of my way to understand basic lore to then your game kinda sucks

>>9430880
>But do I need to go out of my way to find this?
what do you mean out of the way.
It's there in the game, just explore Icicle village before doing the snowboard.

Either way you are a retard you probably didn't even read the Jenova Project entries at the Shinra Mansion in Nibelheim

>>9430770
i don't know where you get this fanfic stuff from. go play the game.

The fact not a single two anons in this thread can even come to a consensus about the basics of the plot lead me to believe it’s all contrived meaningless bullshit.
When I finished the game I did not understand anything about Zack or sephiroth

>>9430868
That's the warranted reaction to it, but you're not retarded. It threw me for a loop the first time I played it too. Sephi was gas lighting the hell out of Cloud -- Tifa too -- during that entire scene. Cloud's freak out afterwards is in-part what Tifa didn't want to happen if she were to pry him enough.

>>9426304
9 inches futa bulge

>>9426237
Man, I really don't remember. I think I just took it and kept on moving. I would have been 9 when I played it, and I think I was more into how cool I though Cid and Red XIII were.

Good game.

>>9429331
Cloud is the only truly successful Sephiroth Clone. The term Sephiroth Clone not being a literal clone but rather a successful human/Jenova hybrid. The reason why Cloud can so perfectly insert himself into Zack's life is he is exercising the most basic Jenova abillity, the abillity to mimic and copy other life forms. It's just a survival mechanism.

>>9429918
Aerith was dating Zack. Tifa was always waiting for Cloud.

the question is did Hojo actually fuck Lucretia or he just inserted his sperm with a giant syringe?

I played the game as a kid and don't remember what happened in that scene. Can anyone give me a refresher?

>>9432565
After Sephiroth mind controls Cloud to give him the black materia, Cloud becomes a vegetable at the realization he was always just Sephiroth's puppet. Eventually he and Tifa fall into the life stream and she helps him piece together his memories of what really happened at Nibelheim, that he was really there as a Shinra grunt, that even after Zack dies, in order to protect Tifa Cloud in all his level 1 grunt glory stands up to Sephiroth and tosses him into the lifestream.

>>9430880
>if I need to go out of my way to understand basic lore to then your game kinda sucks
it's not out of your way if its in the town that the story forces you to go to. if you're interested in information then talk to people. if you're too stupid to talk to people but you also want the story spoonfed to you, the remake is more your speed.

>>9431518
>how cool I though Cid and Red XIII were

Hell yeah

>>9426392
>So people don't talk about the ending.

People don't talk about the ending because most people never got there. The game is a samey slog after the temple of the ancients. I would bet that 90% of players lose interest by time they find themselves fighting Jenova for a fourth fucking time.

>>9426623
I always felt like FF7 was hugely inspired by Blade Runner.

>>9428323
It is. You just have to pay attention and explore/replay the game to get all the info. I was 8 when I first played it, didn't get most of it replayed it at 13 and was blown away by the character development that I missed or couldn't quite grasp as an 8 year old. Fucking play the game and pay attention, shit for brains.

>>9432926
>>9428323
For Eva, much of the backstory doesn't matter. Eva takes a very post-modern approach to story telling and has this big alien invasion but the details don't matter at all. All you need to know that Angels are weird aliens who if they reach their goal will trigger the apocalypse. Shinji isn't even clued into the story for the vast majority of the story.

Tonally Eva is probably the best for capturing the tone and feeling of Revelations even if it's not a direct adaption. Being regular people and part of this weird and confusing event cements it as truly alien feeling.

>>9431385
You're a fucking retard, everybody in this thread that understands the plot agrees. Please point out where it becomes hugely argued over and not just one or two posts .

>>9432942
Thank you ... I guess. Anyways, we have arrived at the golden saucer, enjoy your stay sir or madam!

Fucking annoyed, I was looking for itens not shitty cutscenes.

>>9432554
Yeah, idk, either. I've a sex question of my own: am I misremembering, or was it implied that he wanted Red to fuck Aeris?

>>9432517
When does aeris dating Zack ever come up? I completely missed that when I played

>>9430770
>>9431356
Does it really matter who's controlling who? Either of them benefit from the other's plan, after all.

>>9433218

>>9426237
Mom & dad got it for me for Christmas. I prolly put maybe 3 to 4 hours into it before never playing it again. It just has so many shitty parts before you get to anything good. FF3 (aka 6) on snes is better. Saga Frontier 1 is better. I’m not being a contrarian asshole, it’s just not as good as other rpgs. Too much hype and not enough substance.

>>9433325
>SF1 is better
Meh, only Asellus' part, IMO. Everything else felt like a slog to me. If you preferred it, tho, good on ya, m8.

>>9433218
Didn't she mention when in Gongaga that she used to date a SOLDIER from there? Not explicitly stated to be Zack (until later games), but heavily implied.

>>9433218
>>9433526
It's mentioned a couple times. She says at the playground that her first bf was a SOLDIER First Class. Then at Gongaga you meet Zack parents and they ask if you've seen him and then Aerith mentions that her bf she talked about before was Zack. Also if Tifa is with you she freaks out upon hearing that name and if you ask her if she knows him, she denies it.

>>9433534
She denies it because she fucked him

>>9426237
I didn't really understand the plot twist fully until like my third play through. I understood that Cloud lied about him being in soldier, but that was as far as I understood. Once I played through the game enough times and things started to click more, I finally got that "oh shit" moment. But I was too stupid as a kid to understand the plot of FF7 when it came out. So many things went over my head that I didn't get until I was older.

>>9433325
Very different types of RPGs, I can see why you like one but not the other. They're both favorites of mine though.

>>9427328
I'm upset that so few people are going right by without saying Howdy.

>>9433803
They already got told “Let’s mosey”

>>9426237
The part where a grunt like Cloud got the upper hand on Sephiroth was amazing.

>>9433240
Nobody is controlling anyone in the sense that you are talking about. Jenova has no plans, it is like a virus it doesn't think it doesn't have a personality if just consumes. Sephiroth is Jenova's mind, its personality. They are one being, Sephiroth's body extends to all the Jenova cells in the world. Sephiroth controls Jenova like "you" would tell your arm to move or grab something and Jenova controls Sephiroth like your body being hungry and driving "you" to go eat.

>>9432515
That's actually pretty smart. Never thought about it that way.

>>9428323
Lol, lmao even. “This wasn’t explicitly explained to me and I can’t discern subtlety!” Fucks sake, man, did you think Sephiroth had a clone in the northern cave ice? Did you think Cloud’s soul tumbled into the void to fight Sephiroths soul or something? Grow up, Peter Pan

>>9433173
I somehow remember something along that line, too, but probably just me having read a lot of doujins.

>>9426237
>in 1997.
I was two years old.
But this twist did indeed own my bones when I played this game in 2007. I found it pretty surprising.
I bet if I had waited any longer to play this game that I would have spoiled myself beforehand by skimming a wiki or something.

>>9434524
No one asked, 18+

>>9426304
>manga style twist that feels like a retcon in a self contained game
The fuck it was. Cloud having LITERAL imposter syndrome was stupid. It was an interesting concept that they ruined by doing it too on the nose. Tifa just going with it was dumb. Cloud not being aware of it was also dumb.

>>9433842
>amazing
try "unrealistic" if you want to be more accurate

>>9426237
Dont remember
I was too young to understand the story or care
I just played

>>9430501
>this fucking loser threw a tantrum at his parents when he learned Santa Claus didn't actually exist

You can just tell.

>>9436110
Sephiroth was in the middle of a mental breakdown and probably heavily exposed to radiation. He was hobbling like he'd just been in the desert for two weeks. He literally just had to let go of his sword, but he kind of just let it happen.

>>9436418
https://www.chick.com/products/tract?stk=1033

>>9426237
I was 14 and like many, it was my first FF game. I’ve always loved the "mini-fig" or whatever you want to call it character models.

>>9436442
By that logic Zack could've easily defeated him then because he had superior skills than Cloud at the time, yet Sephiroth manhandled him. Not being able to manhandle Cloud afterwards was dumb in on itself. The story has many holes and it's silly to try and defend it

>>9436598
>guy whose reality is being torn apart
>recognizes and properly responds to threat from close associate
>fails to recognize and bsod's on random faggot with a large sword
FF7 is absolutely not high literature, but it's still wasted on you faggots.

>>9436606
>wasted on you
It's not a waste to point out its flaws, nothing is perfect man don't take it too seriously

>>9436513
They're rad.

>>9433904
>Sephiroth's stomach grumbles loudly
>"Not now, mother"

>>9426237
It was so poorly translated and executed i had no idea that they were doing the whole "unreliable narrator" thing.

So who the fuck was warning Cloud here? His inner Cloud?

>>9436598
but Cloud is stronger than Zack.

>>9436750
oh look, another esl.

>>9436810
the whole point of the story was that cloud was a jobber and only got stronger after getting infused with mako

>>9436491
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

>>9436617
>Disliking cheesy anime camp is "pointing out flaws"
>Why doesn't Mario just KILL Bowser?!
No, you just hate theatrics and drama because you're autistic. Can't imagine what media you even consume that doesn't at least have some cliche troupes. Stop keeping this thread alive with shitty bait for people to reply to.

>>9426304
Shame that pretty much every other piece of FF7 content completely spoil it.

>>9436598
Zack walked into the room and loudly announced his presence, questioned Sephiroth's actions, and challenged him directly. Cloud snuck up behind him and silently backstabbed him with the fucking buster sword, and it was only after that that Cloud was able to overpower him. If you're gonna criticize the story at least follow along with what's happening on screen

>>9426237
I never liked FF7 at all because that was a game for kids and not my Final Fantasy, from my perspective. Sorry for being older and wiser.

>>9436794
The planet.

>>9426237
Literally screaming. Rn.

I was 12 and I thought video game stories were stupid

>>9426365
>and they'd never do something like that again
If I remember correct, they reused amnesia twins in the very next game, but this time for the entire cast.

>>9437585
>twins
twist

>>9436794
It was Sephiroth

>>9426237
I was in middle school and told it to a friend the next day who had no idea wtf I was talking about.

>>9434054
It would make as much sense as anything else in the story

>>9426237
Got spoiled early by my older brother but it was kind of weird controlling a fantasy schizo. Games back then didn't do these kinds of twists.

the moment when he takes off his helmet and the main theme of FF7 plays is pretty great

>>9437585
Bro, almost every FF game, at least up to 32bit era, has some "I don't remember shit" plot point.
FF1: doesn't have one.
FF2: Guy can't remember shit.
FF3: in the remake, the orphans you play as can't remember shit.
FF4: Tellah can't remember spells and Cecil doesn't remember his family.
FF5: Galuf can't remember shit.
FF6: Terra can't remember shit.
FF7: Cloud doesn't remember correctly.
FF8: Everyone but Irvine can't remember shit.
FF9: Zidane can't remember shit.
idk about FF games games from 10 onward cuz I haven't played any, but I bet in each of them, there's some motherfucker who can't remember shit.

>>9426237
it was a really cool and memorable part of the game

>>9441752
>it was memorable
but cloud can't memor any of it : (

>>9436047
>feels like a retcon
Yeah if you're retarded

>>9426237
The novelty wore off about the time I moved onto the second CD and thought the whole deal was fuckin dull.

>>9426365
You skipped FF9, huh?

>>9441903
>You skipped FF9, huh?

wut.

ff9 is Zidane is THE CHOSEN ONE who is actually Goku. It's completely shamelessly ripped off DBZ's Goku backstory. Tailed space alien comes to earth but instead of following his mission to conquor he is chill.

>>9426479
Why even waste your time making a post like this?

>>9427217
>this guy are sick

>>9426237
The guy with the black hair is just a huge faggot and Cloud is still better.

The whole zack thing started with crisis core

>>9427396
>Clone Hojo
Nah, he was Vincent and Lucrecia's love child that Hojo infused with Jenova coom. Sephiroth looks exactly like a silver haired Vincent, whereas Hojo is dyel manlet

>>9426237
So Cloud did kill Sephiroth in that reactor right?

>>9441734
>FFX: everyone is fine
>FFXII: everyone is fine
>FFXIII: Fang can't remember shit
idk about the MMOs or XV since I haven't played those

>>9442224
Go back to your edgy goth coffin, Vincent. You'll never drown in bitches like gigachad Hojo here.

I was 21 in 1997 and the story of FFVII was shit. Everyone was just soaking up the visuals
>huge chunks of game told with flashback exposition dumps. These were so long sometimes that they broke the flashback back to the present and offered you the chance to save
>Tifa knew Cloud was a fucking psycho and just played along just because
>game starts off being about eco terrorists vs corporation
>then becomes of the energy of the planet
>then these fucking talking lions start going on about aliens
The opening at Midgar is the only good part of the game. After that it goes way off the rails with not only a poor story but poor storytelling. And the plotting was
>arrive at town
>npc: "A guy in black with a big sword? Yeah you just missed him, I think he went to X"
>repeat 40 times

>>9443069
lmao @ this guy bragging about being too retarded for a JRPG storyline @ 21

>>9443101
Explain in detail how I'm a retard. I await your silence.

>>9443103
He thinks you should've realized it was shit at the age of 13, because anyone older than that can see what a dumb game it is

>>9430157
Aelis, actually, if you want to get nitpicky. The nips who named her revealed in an interview that it was just a variant spelling of Alice, just as Tifa was short for Tiffany, long before Squeenix started squeezing free money out of IPs they've no stake in.

>>9443103
You're acting as if the anti-corporate/pro-environmental themes are somehow derailed by the Jenova plot point when it's literally hammered into you all game long that Shinra are responsible for every bad happening in FFVII's world. Now go be old and miserable elsewhere, retard.

>>9443160
>You're acting as if the anti-corporate/pro-environmental themes are somehow derailed by the Jenova plot point when it's literally hammered into you all game long that Shinra are responsible for every bad happening in FFVII's world
Wrong retard. The concept of Avalanche is pretty much forgotten after Midgar. Adding in aliens was just fucking retarded. The game should have just been Shinra vs Avalanche over mako harvesting hurting the planet, with Sephiroth and Cloud handling the more personal scifi angle. Instead it's a fucking jumbled mess. Tifa knows that Cloud is either bullshitting or crazy but she says nothing lol. And as I said the game is poorly told with lots of flashback exposition dumps. You just focused on one aspect of my post and splerged like a retard. kys

Got a lotta' old, low hanging shitposts in this thread.

>>9426237
I was BTFO
the meta part where YOU are a dork pretending to be a cool guy, and the cool guy you are pretending to be is also pretending to be a cool guy, magnificent

>>9443186
>the story is shit because it's not how I would have done it
>geeze, why didn't this girl who found a childhood friend that she thought was dead drooling on the side of the road not immediately confront him about his fractured sense of reality? I mean lolz, I would have just slapped his stupid face and told him he was never in SOLDIER lol.
You will never be a writer.

>>9443217
>>the story is shit because it's not how I would have done it
Wrong. It's shit because it's shit. Based on this logic every book, screenplay and story is above any criticism.
>>geeze, why didn't this girl who found a childhood friend that she thought was dead drooling on the side of the road not immediately confront him about his fractured sense of reality? I mean lolz, I would have just slapped his stupid face and told him he was never in SOLDIER lol.
Yeah, better just to keep quiet the entire time and not even tell one of the other party members involved in this life or death quest that they are on.
Kys faggot. Stop being such a mindless fanboy. The game has lots of problems.

I always thought this scene was utterly ridiculous.

>>9443228
Different faggot, but I agree with you about the story veering off from eco-terrorism to a wild goose chase since that was always in the back of my mind as a kid and even now, but the themes of industrialism and nature are still present throughout the story, just in the sense of "What are we really after/fighting for?" and that culminates in the characters and struggling with their denial to accept the truth. I feel you're just lifting old shitposts or you're pebble-sized brain's good at glossing over themes.

>>9443291
>. I feel you're just lifting old shitposts or you're pebble-sized brain's good at glossing over themes.
The themes are still there, but there is just so much jumbled nonsense thrown in. By the time I get to the canyon with Red XIIIs tribe the story is completely off the rails. Tifa playing dumb the entire time is really, really bad from a storytelling point of view. The game's plotting is awful as I said (new town, npc says "you just missed that guy with the big sword and the went that way" repeat). It was really a 1 or 2 disc game padded to 3. Much of it could have been cut.
I maintain that Midgar was the best part of the game and I would have been happy if they told the story just from there.

>>9443291
>you're pebble-sized brain's
So you'RE insulting my brain size when you don't know how to properly use "you're". Kys retard.

>>9426237
It was the most mindblowing story I'd ever experienced in any media (I was 11). Still holds up too.

>>9442990
Those are hookers. Vincent doesn't have to pay for pussy

>>9443632
Vincent literally got cucked by Hojo and ended up a freak. Ain't no bitch getting near his vampire-looking ass.

>>9443359
>Tifa playing dumb the entire time is really, really bad from a storytelling point of view.
How would you rather the writers have handled it?

>>9443638
Nah, Hojo just experimented on Lucrecia and Vincent's fetus because it was convenient

>>9427225
>But he was fast, wickedly strong and incredibly skilled even as a kid.
Compshit doesn't count. None of that was implied in the original material, no one cares about Nomura and Kitase's gay fanfics they made afterwards

Cloud was just some nobody hick kid who was nothing special and regarded as a loser in childhood. He had a normal upbringing, failed at his dream of getting into SOLDIER and ended up drafting as a normal infantryman

>>9444776
NTA, but there should have been some indication that she knew Cloud's story was partially wrong. Or made it clear that she was suffering in silence to appease him.

>>9443359
>Tifa playing dumb the entire time is really, really bad from a storytelling point of view.
consider it from her point of view: aside from that short moment right after she took a 5k crit from sephiroth, she never saw cloud there at all, and yet he somehow knew key details that meant he HAD to be there, so what if it was her that didn't remember properly?

>>9426237
I was bored with it after the first disc so did not bother to play it through

im

He’s not Errol Flynn, but he’s more manly than Tidus.

>>9445448
>there should have been some indication that she knew Cloud's story was partially wrong.
>Or made it clear that she was suffering in silence to appease him.
Try going back and watching Tifa's reactions during the Nibelhiem story and when Cloud talks to her after saving the girl in Junon. It's subtle for a first time playthrough, but there's clearly SOMETHING wrong that she's not telling us as well as Cloud's subconscious even questioning him about what happened.

Until this thread I never knew this pllot twist so it's impressive that I never picked it up online after all these years. I started VII a few years ago but hated the combat and the graphics so I never got very far.

>>9426237
i would play pretend with my only friend, Lauren, where i would be cloud or zack and she would be tifa or aerith.

>>9426436
I played FF7 when I was 10 so it's all kinda hazy

>>9445606
Yeah it's basically Tifa being gaslit into thinking "wait, are MY memories the ones that are wrong?" because Cloud knows shit she thinks he shouldn't know which makes her question everything, even though she knows for sure Zack was there.

>>9445627
You must be 18 to post here. The graphics will never be appreciated by you zoom zoomz because you will never know what it's was like going from SNES to FFVII

>>9436794
Reeve

>>9445627
FF7 is one of those games that look like complete dogshit when upscaled to HD because the backgrounds are all still in 240p so the models dont mesh with it at all. Im assuming you did play an HD upscaled version by this comment because it still looks great when its played as intended.

If you want it to look nice its best to play it at original resolution, preferably on a CRT or at least with a filter. The Remako mod is nice too if you must play in HD

>>9441734
>idk about FF games games from 10 onward cuz I haven't played any, but I bet in each of them, there's some motherfucker who can't remember shit.
Nobody in the main cast has Amnesia but Son's toxin can cause it

>>9441921
Yeah well Goku ripped off Superman so who cares?

>>9426237
How many clues did people need to know that Cloud was fucked up and his story was full of holes? Tifa is walking on eggshells around the guy the entire time and Aeris flat out says during the date that she wants to meet the real cloud after talking about how she's sees Zack in Cloud. If you take them both to Congaga to meet Zacks parents it pretty much gives the entire game away right there

>>9426237
you think I had vincent in 1997
I only accidentalled into yuffie

>>9426237
all those lies in this thread, makes me smile. I played it EU release year, and I can't remember shit how I reacted to this. How could I remember, its over 20 years ago and I played hundreds of other games in the meantime.

>>9426609
>Cloud wasn't the bad-ass SOLDIER he thought he was

The only aspect of the SOLDIER process he's missing is whatever training they're put through, and because he was a Hojo experiment rather than a proper SOLDIER he might have been even more juiced up on Mako and Jenova bullshit than your typical first class.

It's been a good while since I've played FFVII and even longer since I've partook in any of the Comp bullshit. Is there any point outside of the original game where they use the term "Sephiroth clone"? I get the gist of what they mean but it's still such an odd term. For decades now I've always heard the game is poorly translated with this term, and "This guy are sick" but that's just a meme, being the main evidence given for why. But I don't know Japanese, I can't exactly go to that version of the game and see what term they use there, I have to trust what other people say on the matter.

>>9429912
That's an interesting way to interpret it, I like it. I like how in the original game it's left ambiguous if it's truly Sephiroth in control or just Jenova using his form and memories. Because of that you still get people debating that aspect of the game even now, or at least you did before Square came out and said

>NOPE IT'S ALL SEPHIROTH, HE HAS TOTAL CONTROL, MENTALLY THERE IS ZERO JENOVA IN THERE, THE FACT HE'S DOING JENOVA'S GOALS ANYWAY IS JUST A COINCIDENCE AND NOTHING MORE

Like I get it, you wanna push your product and not have your big villain seem weak or whatever. But Jesus Christ.

>>9436794
That reactor actually is just a reactor. That's not a warning, it's Cloud having flashbacks of what actually happened in his home town, which contradict what he believes to be true at this point in the game, so he has the little freak out before he pushes the real memories back down and forgets them.

I think that "This isn't just a reactor!!" line is what Sephiroth says before he opens one of those containers with the experiment in it, or at the very least before he tells Zack/Cloud to look through the porthole.

>>9427243
Quit being disingenuous. He is 100% right that the PS1 translation is hard to follow, especially on a non spoiled first playthrough.

>FF7
>Guaranteed replies
I should filter anything related to FF7. I'm tired of talking about it.

>>9426805
Why are you implying the Jenova had nothing to do with it. The Jenova cells in his body was taking advantage of his weakness and broke him down to a catatonic state.

>>9431356
Hojo is hack. He was wrong about a lot of shit.

>>9447842
That's how science works, tho.

Where did Jenova come from?

>>9448264
The far reaches of outer space. It’s basically John Carpenter’s The Thing

>>9448264
The one place uncorrupted by Capitalism.

>>9447261
no it's not, and i'm being 100% legitimately truthful. if you found the plot hard to follow, that's on your end. yes, there are some typos and iffy word choice at times, but anyone with a highschool level or better reading comprehension should have no problems figuring it out.

>>9446007
What mod is this?
Looks really neat.

>>9443228
>Wrong. It's shit because it's shit.

You will never be a writer.

>>9426237
I identified with Cloud desu, being so unremarkable that you are invisible until you download a le badass persona and even then it only lasts for a short time until people realize how boring or average you are

>>9448341
https://forum.tsunamods.com/viewtopic.php?t=39

>>9448894
heh. Even with this it hasn't fixed the broken shading on the PC port. It's never been fixed and has been broken for like 20 years - and was even the basis for the PS4 version. And they still didn't fix it!

Bascially the original playstation version was a lot darker, with the battle scenes looking like a singular spotlight shining on the cast. The backgrounds were meant to be darker.

>>9426479
>20 years outdated
>released in 1997
Why is this board infested with dumbass larping zoomer faggots?

>>9426237
>tfw 4yo me was too scared to play FFVII when it was released
>tfw the train in the opening scene scared 4yo me so much to turn off the PSX immediately
I did beat it in two or so days a few days after my 5th birthday and I remember being very proud of it.
It was the first time I have felt those feelings and probably the last time too.

>>9426237
I played it in 2001. Does that count?
I didn't really care. I probably thought something along the lines of, "Oh, neat." I've never been excited by plot twists, and I mostly find them annoying. I am focused on the complete narrative arc, and always have been. When a twist happens, my only interest in it is trying to figure out what aspect of the story the twist was hiding, and what story I'm looking forward to, now. If it takes the story too far away from the previous setup, it can ruin it for me.
This is pretty much why I don't care about mystery/hoodunit stories in the first place, but am the bigger sucker for suspense.

>>9436047
>Tifa just going with it was dumb
This was something I wondered a lot about, but even as a kid I understood it was better to not think too hard about stories in JRPG's.

>>9426237
I eventually got confused in the plot after cloud has his memories mixed up. Eventually I had no idea what the fuck was even going on, but 20 years later I looked up an explanation on YouTube and thought it was aight

>>9426801
Then cloud winds up in sector 7, delusional as fuck as he stumbles off the train. Then somehow joins avalanche even though it's a clandestine operation... hating shinra for no reason

>>9427396
I don't think sephiroth was a clone. There were clones of him but he was original

>>9429917
He fell into vats if materia and was genetically modified by hojo

>>9426237
I thought it was fucking confusing. Playing it again as an adult, this is mostly because of the shoddy translation.

Did Pokémon’s Team Rocket inspire the Turks?

>>9427396
>A clone baby
Never once was that stated anywhere.

>>9448264
The same place as Lavos and Deus.

>>9426801
>>9426805
And what makes it even better is that when Cloud becomes sane again we realize he's a goofy awkward dude and the emo stuff is bullshit.

At least it was, before the sequels.

>>9426381
Aeris dies!?

>>9449923
That was such a based website.
Really unfortunate that a big part of my childhood died.

>>9426801
>>9426805
Thank you. I never got into Final Fantasy back in the day. Only just recently played FF7 and gotta admit a lot of the plot kinda just went over my head once the whole twist come up.

>>9432907
More like us Chads just casually became a Chocobo racing master.