Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 209: Final Fantasy VII, Pt. 2

Episode Date: March 25, 2019

Jeremy Parish and Bob Mackey finally leave Midgar to explore the remainder of Final Fantasy VII with the help of their fellow party members, Chris Kohler and Kat Bailey.

This week in Retronauts, welcome back to a place where flowers are still only one gild. I am Jeremy King Jackass Parish, and this week, we are going to finish up the Final Fantasy 7 episode that we started a few weeks back and did not finish. Much like Tetsuonomura, we just can't bring it home, but today we're going to try to do the impossible, and we're going to try to wrap this thing. So with me here, once again, in a small and crowded room is... Hey, it's Bob Mackie. My favorite part of this game is the CPR mini game.

So much fun. I can't wait for that in the first. remake. Material Thief, Cat Bailey. And, uh, what? Snowboarder. Undead detective, Chris Kohler. I mean, it's good to snowboard.

Everyone greaves in their own way. Right, right, right. Robot cat riding a muggle suit. Yes. All right. So a few episodes back, we talked about Final Fantasy 7 and we got as far as the end of disc one. That's not very far.

There's three discs. So there's still a lot of the game for us left to discuss. We also didn't talk about things like the characters and the some of the localization changes and the sequels and spinoffs and the end of the legacy. Disquan or the end of

Midgar? End of Midgar. Isn't that the end of disc one? It's not. Oh no. I think what? It was Eric gets killed and then it's the end of time. Oh my guy, you spoiled it. Jesus. Oh my God. I'm so sorry. It's been a long time since I've actually played this all the way through. I'm going off memories here. So I may be totally wrong about everything. Okay, so we got to the end of Midgar, which in our hearts is the end of disc one.

But in terms of the place- It feels like the end of this one, doesn't it? It does. Like, in a future episode of, you know, future Final Fantasy 7 for PlayStation 1, that would have been, like, please insert disc two. But I guess not. So my mistake, I'm already screwing up here. Sorry. That's terrible. But anyway, folks, we need to talk some more about Final Fantasy 7, and we got to make it snappy.

So let's bring this thing home. So it occurs to me that we did not really talk about the characters last time. And they're kind of, I feel like they're one of the big selling points of the game. Like, you know, as much as Square and Sony push this game on the graphical appeal, what people really respond to most of all with Final Fantasy 7 is the characters, at least as much as any other, I think, entry in the series. And, you know, the characters in this game are very different from any characters who had been in Final Fantasy 7 before, like as the main cast. And there are a few reasons for that. one of which is that this was the first game whose characters were not designed or illustrated really by Yoshitaka Amano, who we've talked about before was a, you know, like a very talented artist kind of dabbled in both fine art and also doing character design for things like Gatchaman. And, you know, he brought this sort of ethereal painterly quality to the designs of the previous games.

And then, you know, Sprite artists would come in and be like, okay, we can't do that with like 16 pixel high characters. So let's kind of interpret that however we can. But for PlayStation, things worked differently. And I think Amano had, I think we talked about last time, he had like some sort of commitment, like he was doing a show or something that tied him up and he was not able to do his usual work. And so Tetsuya Nomura stepped in, who had. had been previously with the series and some other capacities. And I feel like his design approach worked out a lot better for the PlayStation 1 because you went from, you know, hand-drawn sprites to 3D polygons, but very, very limited polygons.

I mean, now you have characters like their faces are 150 polygons or 1.5 million or whatever it is, 150,000 I meant. but you know back on PlayStation 1 your characters were basically made out of simple triangles and as it happens Nomura was very I feel heavily influenced by sort of Akira Toriyama's artwork his characters have that sort of like angular sort of spiky sort of kind of common shared faces between them and those translated really well to polygons so I don't know what do you guys think about the character designs and the just the characters in general in Final Fantasy 7. I agree with what you're saying, Jeremy.

I think they were developed with the technology in mind and the limitations, and I think they're all developed around. Each character has, like, certain qualities that can be made very distinct, even if the character is abstracted to, like, a very simple level, as you would see in, you know, the world map and things like that. So I feel like these characters, even though they have a, like, they have crap hanging off of them, like an Image Comics character, they all have very distinct qualities that make them identifiable.

I mean, it's really, like, if you. If you want to talk about them having, you know, excessively Baroque character designs, I really feel like these characters much more simplified compared to Amano's character designs. Oh, you're right, you're right. Yeah. But I feel like, I feel like Nomura would get more – his designs would get like more Baroque over time, for sure. But, like, well, now that we're on PlayStation 2, everyone can have belts. Yeah.

So many belts. But with Cloud, it's just like his hair is so – his hair is ridiculous and it's very anime, but it's also so it's like, okay, I can see him – I can always see Cloud on the map. I can always see where he is. spiky mass there. That's with blue underneath. And he'll usually be the character you're controlling on any, on any screen. So I feel like, yeah, that was like a game designer designing a character instead of an artist.

I liked his hair so much. I thought it was so cool back at the time. And back then, I was still drawing. And so every character from that point, every male character from that point, I basically tried to draw with that hairstyle. It was my first real exposure to anime hair in the 90s. It was amazing. And, of course, the big sword, the big buster sword.

Both of these were iconic qualities, cloud, a sword and a hairstyle. That's all he really needed, right? But it drew the eye. It stood out from the characters that were around at that time. And if you look at the entire cast, they were pretty distinct, especially for that time period. You had characters like Sid, who was cursing and he was kind of embittered, and he wasn't the kind of guy that you would see in a Super Nintendo or a 16-bit RPG necessarily. Yeah, he's kind of actually horrible. Yeah.

He's really awful to his partner. Like he's an abusive, not spouse, I guess, but he's like super horrible to the woman he lives with. And it's a little hard to stomach these days. But I guess that was definitely not something you expected in a protagonist in a video game back then. And it fit with the PlayStation's kind of, with Nintendo, Nintendo was still being Nintendo, especially with the Nintendo 64, and it fit very much with the PlayStation's ethos of, we're grown up, we're the adult console, and look at these characters are our headliners. Look how adult they are.

And I guess for adult, it's adult that would appeal to teenagers. I said it was a haggard old man of 32. I had to look that up. I was like, he had to be at least 34, right? No, no, 32. Life is rough in Rocket Town. I guess so. But, yeah, the...

I mean, you smoke that much. That's true. He should have baked instead. Unless he want to sponsor our podcast. So, yeah, you make a really good point. Like, all the characters follow that sort of, that sort of cardinal rule. that everyone has to look distinct. And, you know, each one has their own color scheme.

I feel like Sid is kind of the least distinct. He doesn't really stand out to me in terms of design. I was smoking. Well, yeah, but a cigarette is like two pixels. Like, you know, heiress is pink with brown hair. And then Tifa is like black and white. And Barrett is very large and very black. Katshi is very large and very white.

So, you know, they definitely stand. There's a lot of contrast with all the characters. And then Red 13, of course, is a bright red cat. He's like Marmaduke as a feline. Ufi is green. Ufi is green, that's right. And I think the sprite artist would change Amano's art pretty drastically just because I think in five, isn't it in five where it's like all the characters have white hair

in his original designs? Yeah. I mean, that's most of, he always gives them white hair or blonde hair. But I think by six they were like, okay, here's the colors we want on the screen. And all the six characters have the correct hair that is, I don't. identifiable in the sprites, but with older games, it seemed like, okay, everybody needs different hair colors, just so you can know what's going on. Yeah, you would get occasionally, occasional characters like Rydia who have green hair,

but otherwise it was like, yeah, blonde, blonde, blonde, blonde. And in the game, like, Final Fantasy 7, where all the characters are basically blobs and you have no fine details at all, it helps to have really broad details that stand out like color schemes or hair. Right. I mean, it would have been, it just would have been a lot more difficult to get get character designs back from a mono and then say, okay, well, how do we convert this into something that works in polygons? It would have been a really heavy lift, and they would

have just, they just wouldn't have looked very similar at all. Yeah, these character designs were actually, I remember pretty controversial when they were among Final Fantasy fans when the game first came out. I mean, this whole game was very controversial. All 12 of them. Among Final Fantasy fans. No, like, I hung out on some RPG-centered forums, and there were definitely people who were like, this isn't, this isn't have the final fantasy feel. These character designs are weird. And some of them, I feel like, I do kind of look at them and I feel like, well, maybe

this is a little too simple. Like, Tifa is just like wearing a white tube top and a miniskirt. And then, like, her details are she has suspenders for some reason, I guess, to keep her miniskirt from falling down, like fighting gloves and combat boots. And that's pretty much, that's Tifa. Well, then she's got like a weird split ponytail, a very long ponytail. But, yeah, there's not a lot of detail to her. But then, on the other hand, Barrett is fairly detailed.

He's got, like, a vest over a shirt, and there's a lot of sort of minor details on the vest. And then he's got a machine gun for an arm, by the way. Why? He's a guy with a machine gun for an arm. Like, that definitely makes him stand out. It can be other things. You can put an, like, an axe on there, too.

That's true. Like, or a mace. I think you can, like, you can, you can do it as a flail occasionally. But it works best as a machine gun. Yeah, so, yeah, some of the characters have maybe a little too much detail, a little too little detail. Kind of even them out a little bit, but I like the original designs better than the everyone is wearing black leather remakes that they got in Advent Children, where everyone is like very solemn, sad, and like, they save the world. They don't have to be gloomy. But no, they're all, they're all wearing mournful funeral black.

I don't know. Yeah, just look at the difference between Cloud in Smash Brothers. You can either play him as original cloud, or you can play him with Long Black Trenchcoat Cloud. So, yeah, the characters themselves have very elaborate backstories. Some of them. I mean, Sid, yeah, he was like a guy who wanted to be an astronaut, and then they pulled out the funding from the space program. So he lived his life. Right?

He lived his life in bitterness and resentment. So that's understandable. Red 13 was like the last surveillance. member of a race of talking cats. I learned something horrible today. Apparently, Hojo wanted to mate Ereth and Red 13. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he was a weirdo.

Yeah, Barrett became a rebel because, like, bad stuff happened in his hometown, and eventually you go back and find the hometown, and you find the guy who started Avalanche, and they've kind of had a falling out. And then Cat She, I feel. is like needlessly Baroque. He is a robot cat writing a stuffed muggle who is actually like

the in-party avatar for an agent of Shinra who is spying on the good guys. It's a very convoluted way to go about that task. Like, I know I'm going to create this very strange stuffed animal

who just like tags along with my enemies and is, they're of course going to just invite him into the party. and fight along. It was kind of a weird gambit, but I guess it worked out. I mean, he's driven by a guy named Reeve who works for Shinra, and Reeve is what, the definition of somebody who thinks that he can change the organization, the evil organization from within?

That's my impression of Reeve. I don't remember him super well, but he's kind of the good guy. Eventually, he comes out that he's the good guy, Shinra executive. And then does anyone want to try to explain Cloud's background? Anyone? He was originally a normal soldier who idolized Sephora. Not a soldier. A regular, like an actual.

Like, yeah, soldier lowercase, all lowercase letters as a army guy. Right, right. And they go on a mission, Sephiroth goes crazy. Cloud manages to run them through. Sephiroth falls into the life stream. And then Cloud gets taken and put into, experimented upon for the next five years or so by Hojo, but eventually broken out by Zach and then Zach dies and Cloud kind of takes on

his identity. Very good. Zach is an actual soldier, all caps who was like best buds with Sephiroth for a while and also Gacked. And we'll talk about that some other time. Zach is Gacked. Oh, no, no, Zach is not Gacked. The Gact is a third guy. I think he's, is he

Genesis or is he Angiel? This is your Crisis Corps. I just knew it was it was Cloud, Zach and other guy. You don't remember your expanded universe No. No. Okay. Yeah, there were like. Well, Disney just absolved that, so it's gone now. All right, good job, Disney. Thank you

for Kingdom Hearts. Yeah, so, yeah, the whole thing with Cloud is a very convoluted backstory, and Tiva turns out to be kind of an important character, because she knew Cloud before he was a soldier, or a soldier, and so when he starts giving his backstory,

she's kind of like, um, is that right? I remember it differently, and that turns out to be really significant once you realize that, oh yeah, Cloud just has a lot of fake memories that have been implanted, in his brain. It's kind of messed up. We talk about that in the first episode where, like, they're having their moment very early on where they're like, we're childhood friends.

Were we? Okay. Well, I think they were childhood friends. It was just like everything that happened kind of between childhood friends and meeting up in Barr, Texas. Oh, go. Do tell. Well, it's more like Cloud kind of had a crush on her from afar, but they didn't really know each other all that well. Yeah.

Well, I mean, she was the hot girl who had the cowboy hat, so kind of out of his league. He was just a dork who wanted to join the army and couldn't even make the elite ranks. So really. And then, of course, there are the optional characters, Yufi Kisaragi and Vincent Valentine. And in terms of backstory complexity, they're kind of at opposite ends of the scale. Yufi's just like a kid in a town full of ninja. And she's like, it'd be cool to steal everyone's materia. And then she joins your party when you realize, oh, we need someone to like use.

the mug material we have. And then Vincent Valentine boy. He's like every universal movie monster. Yeah. And a guy. And also fascist dampede. Almost Sephiroth's dad or something.

No, that's Hojo. But there was some debate over that as well. But it was eventually like established in the like one of the source material guides by Word of God that no, it was actually Hojo who was Sephiroth's father. Okay. Right. But he had a thing for.

Lucretia. Yes. Wasn't that her name? Yeah. Who was the like basically the surrogate mother, like the in vitro mother for Sephiroth? My understanding is that Lucretia was pregnant with Sephiroth and Hojo secretly injected Genova cells into her to make him into a super soldier. Oh, okay.

Yeah. Right. As one does. Yep. I read up on all of this before coming here so that I could like get all of the details, right? Thank you for doing that because it's very confusing. still. Yeah, this game has a really convoluted story and it was not

made any more approachable in the U.S. by the extremely variable quality localization. Some parts of the localization are actually pretty good and then other parts you're like, this isn't actually how any human has ever spoken ever. It's not, this

is not grammar. In 1997, it was a feature rather than a book. It's like, I mean, this is extremely complicated and confusing, but that must mean that it's really good. I don't know. Even at the time, like, I remember, certainly I was part of a cool clique of people online who were like, what's wrong with this? Like, the writing in this is really bad compared to six. Like, I understand what happened in six.

But here, like, it's a complicated plot, but also a lot of the writing just isn't coherent. Like, what's going on? Like, it's badly translated. I think it wouldn't be a year, if I remember correctly, that Square would, like a year from after this game came out, that's when Square would take localization more seriously, have, like, a method, have a deployment. have a department, just the people working on these games are like... The difference between 7 and 8 is just ridiculous. But the people working on these games are like, we need to have more organization here because of what happened. By the time they were translating 8, I think the translators were working in the office in Japan, had access to people.

And also, I mean, it was sort of happening more simultaneously. It's not like 8 came out in Japan and then after they were done with 8. It's like, okay, let's start on the English. That 8, I think, is when they started doing it at the same time because I don't think there was that. much of a delay. There was a pretty decent delay. What's there? Eight, I want to say, came out.

99. Yeah, it was 99. It was like March. Yeah, early in the year, like spring. Yeah. And then it came out in the U.S. on Dreamcast days. It did.

It did. September. It was September 8th, I remember. This is a very tall order. I picked it up the same, like the release was the same day as Dreamcast. No, I went, I went two days in a row to get Final Fantasy. And then I went back to get Dreamcast. Your store line.

I got mine on 9-299. What? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, way early. Wow, that is really early. It would be a tall order, but I really want someone to do like a legend of a localization style thing for Final Fantasy 7. Even with simple games like Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Brothers 1, you see how much you miss and a lot of intentionality you miss.

And I'm wondering just like how much stuff is buried in the original text that we never even talk about. I feel like with 7, it was just like one person on a super tight. It was like Ted Wolsey doing Secret of Mana again where it was like one person on a super ridiculous, makes no sense deadline. You just had to do it. Tim Rogers was, at last, I checked, doing an extremely exhaustive look at the Japanese version of Final Fantasy 7. He's done. Yeah, he compared the two, actually, and went through the whole game. It's like, it's like 20 hours of fascinating video.

And there's a solid 10 minutes of him, like, going back and forth on a text message chain with the guys who, like, yeah, so exactly. So this actually exists the thing I want. Yeah, no, yeah. It's on YouTube. I didn't know that. I should know about this. Yeah. So we've talked about the protagonists, the playable party, and we talked a bit last time about the Materia system and how it kind of takes away the idea of job classes and basically says anyone can be anything you want.

But there is still some element of distinction between the characters just in terms of the weapons they use. Like some characters are always going to be short-range fighters and some characters are going to be long-range fighters. and then there's a few that are, they can switch, I think. Barrett, you mentioned you can put different things, like, replace his gun arm with, like, just other weapons. And I think that determines whether he's a ranged fighter or a short-range fighter. It does, yeah. And I think Red 13 is, like, medium range or something.

He uses, like, his weapons are barrettes on his hair locks that it's kind of a strange idea. But then there's also long-range. There's also long-range material, which you can slap on somebody. Yeah, that's right. Yep, yep. Yep. Yep. So anyone can be an archer, basically, but with a sword. And I love about materia that the, that it's the, that the material levels up. I mean, that's just fun because then you look at that and you're like, oh, I'm going to get, you know, some extra ability once I level up or it's, you know, something good's going to happen. But it doesn't matter who I put it on.

Like, I can just stick this on somebody and level it up and it's good because you don't feel like you're going to make the wrong decision. because they did it where you put the material on somebody and then they learned that skill. You might feel like you would waste it or something. Right. I mean, Final Fantasy 9 did that and I think that system works really well. But I feel like, yeah, they looked at the Magosite from Final Fantasy 6

and we're like, well, yeah, that Magosite piece is leveling up and will eventually like do interesting things. Yeah. But also confer abilities onto the characters and we're like, well, what if we took away the conferring thing? Right. And we didn't really give any character's permanent stat changes except, like, health and defense and that sort of thing.

Yeah. And then you can just mix and match your party and do whatever you want with anyone. And you can also, I mean, it also provides a limitation because it's like, okay, well, you're only going to have one Knights of the Round material. You get one. So, I mean, you can't just, like, you can't just grind it out so that every one of your characters can always use this. Right.

Although, once you have seen Knights of the Round in action, you're like, well, I don't ever want to have to sit through that again. Yeah. So then you fight a Ruby weapon and Emerald Weapon, and you get to see. nights in the round like 10 times in a row. Good times. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so it is interesting. Like, you mentioned that you can't just, you know, grind out and give everyone these abilities. But one of the things about mastering material is that once a material is mastered, it does often spawn, like the lower level ones, the standard ones. Right.

Maybe not the summons, but like spells will spawn a new material so then you can, like, build up another, you know, like fire material or whatever. So it does kind of open up these opportunities for you. And it really does, it really, I think, appeals to the MinMax type character players in a way that Final Fantasy 5 did. But despite the fact that it does not have a job system or anything like it, it still gives you that like, oh, I got to keep grinding for experience because I got to get my AP, got to build up my master material.

So, yes, it's a very addicting system, addictive, addicting, yes, that. I feel like what really makes a lot of the characters stand out is the way that their ultimates work or their limit breaks end up working. I mean, if you look at Cloud, Omni slash, probably one of the most powerful abilities in the entire game, able to do quadruple 9 damage like several times. Or you have a character like Tifa with her slot machine and all of that stuff. And to me, that was ultimately like, which limit break do I want to have on this run? Yeah, and the limit breaks do kind of speak to the concept of classes. Like clouds, you know, his abilities have kind of become like samurai skills in later games. Tva's ability, like her slot machine is like, wait, she said she had slots?

Yeah, yeah, it's like a slot machine. What does cat cheese? It's kind of just random, I think. I mean, you can win the battle instantly, but it's very rare. Right. Okay, yeah. Not a great limit break. It's kind of like a hint of class there, but not necessarily.

So it really does kind of get away from that. And it was fun to level them up and get steadily stronger limit breaks. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And, yeah, like, one thing I really like about the limit break system is that you can hang on to a limit break charge for as long as you want, as opposed to, like, Final Fantasy 9, where as soon as you hit that limit break, you use it. Like, you don't have a choice. You're just character fires it off, so you can be fighting, like, you know, level one goblins.

You just happen to go over the edge And so you use some crazy powerful attack Against enemies that'll die in one hit anyway It's called trance Or an 8 where Oh sorry, trance, okay, my bad Or an 8 where you would go down to one hit point And then basically you would get a limit break every turn

Which was an interesting risk reward kind of thing But yeah So in the PlayStation 4 version Which is the version of Final Fantasy 7 that I'm currently playing You can basically just turn on infinite limit breaks, if you want. And so I was, you know, not really doing this, except for the fact that, like, I'll do it if I'm, like,

you can, like, regenerate your health and magic and get a limit break whenever you want. And I'm just kind of like, okay, well, I have no interest in dying and trying things again, playing through Final Fantasy 7 again. So I'll do that if I'm, like, I'm about to die and just restore myself. But after, pretty soon after Midgar, you have to cross a swamp to get into some caves, and it's like, oh, there's this big serpent in there.

Yeah, Zolum. Yeah. And it's like, well, you can't get past that guy unless you're on a chokobo. And I'm like, I'm going to go try to kill him and cheat. And so I decided to go in there. And I just turn on infinite limit breaks. I'm just limit breaking this guy over and over and over and over and over again. But unfortunately, well, fortunately for the game, unfortunately for me, there is just a point in that battle where he just uses a super killing death move on everybody.

And there's nothing you can do. Okay. That's interesting, because I'm glad that they accounted for that. Yeah, because that is kind of like a key story point. It is. You know, you want to go to the next continent, but you can't because you have to cross that swamp. Yeah. So you can't keep chasing Sephiroth.

Yeah. And so you have to get the chokobo and you move along. And then later you come back and you find the Midgarzolam is like impaled on Sepharoth's sword or something. Or like, not a sword, but it's just like he's killed it and impaled it on a spike or something. You're like, oh, we. We couldn't kill that guy, but he just did it. Sephiroth just did it in like the most badass way possible. He just left its corpse behind for us to look at.

So it really, you know, the way they build up Sephiroth throughout the game, like where you don't encounter him but you see him like in flashbacks and you keep like seeing the carnage he leaves behind really does a lot to build him up as a villain. And, you know, I think the way they kind of handle him in the latter portion of the game deflates that a little bit. And that's just a danger of fiction. If you build up a super badass villain, you kind of have to follow through on it. And it's hard to do that.

It's hard to, you know, to kind of, like, pay off the hint you drop in a satisfying way. But certainly, like, I can understand why he has such a place of reverence among so many people who played this game. And we're like, wow, he is crazy. I can't wait to fight him. He's badass. He's a shark from jaws, right? I mean, the less you see, the more impactful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Cloverfield monster or something. But then there are a bunch of him at one point. Yeah. But, I mean, back in 1997, he had that really long silver hair, which looked super cool and was not cliche at all at the time. At least, I mean, not to me. I mean, and he had that. Well, I had played Castlevania Symphony the Knife First, thanks to my desire to import the game. And therefore, I was like, this is just an aliquard knockoff.

And he had that gigantic sword, that gigantic katana looking sword. and, I mean, in the long black trench coat into a certain set of teenagers. Maybe that was like, I want to look like that. Oh, my God. To another set of teenagers, they were like, that is hot. I'm in love with that.

And, you know, he does, whenever he did show up, he was doing something cool. I mean, in the flashback, he's using the level three spells for the first time and you're like, oh, my God, look at Fire 3. That's ridiculous. Yeah, and the first time you actually encounter him in the flesh, although not actually in the flesh, which, yeah, that's a whole other thing.

But the first time the party meets up with him, it's when he appears out of nowhere and kills ERIS, right? Yeah. Yeah, you don't actually meet him in person or his avatar in person until that point. So, yeah, there's all this buildup, and then all of a sudden you do meet him. And, yeah, one of your party members is permanently dead forever. So he had one of the best themes. It's a good job of getting that across. He had one of the best themes, and he had one of most like.

He walked through the flame. And he has one of the most iconic moments where he, like, glares at you and then walks, like, out of the – in through the flames, you know, I mean, in a game that is partly defined by his CG cut scenes, that is one of the most iconic. And because most people in America didn't play five before, this sort of broke the rules as to, you know, killing characters. Like, everyone died in four, but then, like, Love brought them back. And Shadow kind of almost died in six. You can get him back. But in this game, it's just like, this character is not coming back. Right.

She won't be replaced by anyone immediately. There will not be like a resurrection quest. Oh, but everybody wanted to try to bring her back. Of course, of course. I know all the rumors and the secrets and, you know. It was a shanglong of the 32-bit era. Yeah, I mean, that was one of the things, the sort of slipshod localization on it,

left all these kind of weird openings where people were like, well, maybe I need to make use of this somehow. Because it's a very convoluted story, and there's weird stuff happening, and then some of the localization, to English makes those things even more opaque

and mysterious and so people were like well you know you meet this guy with a number in the wall market and if you go talk to him he's actually like a general

who used to be in the army and he can somehow resurrect heiress and there were all these just bizarre rumors that was a huge part of the culture around Final Fantasy 7

at the time for years until I think finally Square just came out and said like no like the whole point of the story is that she is dead like the story

would not have the impact it does it would not have the meaning that it does if you could just bring her back. Like you have to deal with the fact that, you know, she's gone. And that came from, you know, a place in Hirnobu Sakiguchi's life. He, you know, kind of used the story here a little bit as therapy to work through feelings about his mother having passed away, if I'm not mistaken. I think so. I kind of think so that then they would put her in everything else.

Like, oh, she's in Final Fantasy Tactics and Kingdom Hearts and all these things. Like, she didn't really go away. She was very popular. Yeah. She's there in her. our hearts, but, you know, it's not like her appearance in Final Fantasy Tactics is like, oh, she came back to life. It's just a fun little nod.

And it's not like, I don't know, is she like a spirit or something you can summon in Smash Brothers? Probably. She's got to be. Yeah, I mean, it's not like, yeah, her appearance in Kingdom Hearts where she's a kid, right? She's like a kid version. Oh, yeah. No, actually. No, she's an adult. Yeah, that's right.

Ufi and selfie are the kids. Right. Okay. But I mean, Kingdom Hearts, what the hell even is that? Like, I don't think anyone's like, she came back to life. We'll find out soon. But yeah, the whole point of the game is that Eris died, and that is a big, yeah, a big sore spot with some people. You know, I'm going to be able to be. I'm not going to be. I'm going to be able to be.

Speaking of ERIS, Kat, I think you wanted to talk about the love triangle. Well, I feel like it's one of those defining things about Final Fantasy Seven's culture was, are you team Tifa, or are you team ERIS, or are you team Barrett? Because people... What if you're a team, Ufi? Shipping culture was definitely becoming a thing, circa of 1997. And this is one of the early examples of this in video games. games. And, I mean, it's defined by the fact that Cloud can choose which girl he's going to go out with and the golden saucer. I mean, it's defined by the decisions you ultimately think.

Right. Yeah, it's not an overt choice. Like, you don't realize what's happening necessarily. It's not like they say, hey, do you want to go out with Tifa or ERIS? It's more like the consequences of the actions that you, you know, the dialogue choices you make and the actions you take, that determines it. And then people start to compare notes, I think, and are like, oh, wait a minute. I had a date with Tifa, not ERIS, what's going on? Which characters did you guys go out with, or did you care? I wasn't, I mean, playing the game originally, I wasn't aware that your actions had an effect on the date until I read about it later, but I would usually get Tifa because I liked her a lot more than Ereth. Me too. I, you know, the first time I played, I ended up with ERIS

because I thought, like, that's, you know, how the story was supposed to go. And it didn't occur to me that I should be mean to her. So that's just not my personality. So, yeah, I ended up with Aris, and then I found out you could, you know, have a different date. So then I was like, well, I'm going to figure out how to go out with Yufi because she's like the spunky, weird ninja. That's cool. I'm team Ufi, so, yeah. I forget, probably Aris.

Yeah. I mean, and then, of course, you could go out with Barrett, and I always tried so hard to get that one, but I guess I never followed the instructions perfectly. It's like a chemistry recipe or something. Yeah, this is like Japanese strategy. guide bait, basically. Yeah. Yeah, and it's more of a joke date. I've seen a YouTube video of it, and, like, there's not any chemistry between Cloud

and Barrett. It's like, they're both very awkward and, like, so what's going on? But it is, it is in there in the game if you really, if you really just like, it's like finding the Zodiac sphere in Final Fantasy 12. You just have to know exactly what to do well in advance. Or the Excalibur 2. Something like that, yeah. Oh, yeah, in Final Fantasy 9, where you have to, like, do it.

everything perfectly for nine hours, yes. Ridiculous? Yep. So, yeah, strategy guide bait is a good way to describe it. But, yeah, I mean, you kind of get to the point of, like, there is a lot here that you would see explored further in later Final Fantasy games. Like, this really does feel like, you know, we talked about how Final Fantasy Six is kind of like a blending of old and new, but this is where they really just started throwing all kinds of stuff against the walls.

And so you have the golden saucer, and you have the golden saucer. all the mini games. There's so many mini games in this game. There's so many, yeah, like, not just in the Golden Saucer, but, like, that was one of the things that I came away from the, like, the next five or so hours after Midgar that I played with is that there are so many freaking mini games in this game. And it's like, why are there so many mini games?

Like, you had to go, it's like, oh, this girl washed up on the shore and I got to give her CPR. Okay, immediately after the CPR, it's like, okay, now you've got to, You play the minigame where you get on a dolphin, and the dolphin throws you up onto the top of this tower. And then you have to do, like, the salutes and stuff. Yep, the salutes and stuff, and the marching in the parade formation. And then you've got to do this other thing. And it's just mini game after mini game after a summary.

And it's like, what is this? Well, the interesting thing is almost all the mini games you play appear diagellically within the adventure. Yes. And then somehow they become things you can do at the gold saucer later. So if you're like, I really loved that part where Eris died. I snowboarded immediately after to work through my sorrow. So I'm just going to go do that, and I'm going to go snowboard

at the Golden Saucer, and remember how sad I felt about ERIS, over and over again. I love the snowboarding, actually. That was my favorite video game. Lots of fun. So it's kind of wondering, I was thinking about this, like, why would they fill this? Because it's kind of annoying, because I like the downtime between dungeons,

but I mean, I kind of want to, you know, I don't necessarily want to just be playing mini games constantly during that downtime part. I'm wondering, sorry, Chris. Well, I kind of think that, so with the PlayStation, with polygonal characters, you didn't have to draw a new sprite and save it into memory if you wanted to make the player do something different. You could arbitrarily to sort of rig the characters to do whatever you wanted. And so I think that gave the designers a little bit of freedom so that they could say, like, oh, I made this mini game where Cloud marches in place and salutes and twirls his gun and does. does this and does that, and did a CPR minigame where the character is, you know, on the beach,

you know, restarting somebody's heart, pumping his hands up and down, because it was possible to program that stuff in without having to draw literally like five more frames of animation for cloud in which he gives somebody CPR, you could just go in and just sort of rig the character model to do it and see how it looked. So I'm thinking maybe that's why we see a lot of these things because suddenly he can snowboard, he can do CPR, he can jump on a dolphin, he can do this and that.

I'm also, I think, oh, go ahead, Bob. I'm also wondering, I totally agree with Chris's idea, but I also wonder if the more involved many games, like the snowboarding and the RTS and the submarine, if those were all, like, internal prototypes for game ideas, and they just were like, we can just put this in in this unfinished state.

If you, I just finished collecting all of the square games that they released in Japan on the PlayStation 1, and it's just funny, and I put them all in chronological order, and it's really interesting to look at it because, like, they got on the PS1, And they were just like, okay, fighting game, Mahjong game, baseball game, Bushido Blade, Final Fantasy 7. And there was a couple driving. And yeah, and it's like they, within the first year, basically, they were just, they had done so many different games and so many different genres.

I think they looked at the PlayStation as this opportunity to sort of expand into new genres and things like that. So, yeah, possibly. And I, a few things. One is, I think this is a Sakaguchi thing because Numer kind of hinted that. when I talked to him about Kingdom Hearts 3 a while ago, he said that Final Fantasy should be in everything kind of game. And he kind of learned that from Sakaguchi. And so he kind of applied that to Kingdom Hearts as well.

And that's why you have things like the gummy ship with the shooters. Yeah. Another thing is it really... I'd rather play the CPR game for five hours. Yeah. It was a kitchen sink game. Like, they were throwing everything they possibly could into this because it was new graphics, new experience.

and it's like, it's the most realistic game we've ever made to this point. You should be able to have new ways to interact with it. And the third thing is, if they're thinking in terms of getting new audiences, the best way to get new audience members is to make them forget that they're playing a, quote, unquote, hardcore RPG. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Snowboarding. So, yeah, what I've been trying to interject here is, you know, ever since Final Fantasy 4, Square was really pushing Final Fantasy away from the traditional turn-based RPG.

They introduced the act of time battle system. And then in Final Fantasy 5, you started to have these events like the Battle on the Bridge where you're like fighting across a bridge or you have to escape from like the Library of Karnak before it explodes and so on and so forth. And then Final Fantasy 6 you have the Mughal strategy game at the very beginning and then that becomes like the defense against Kepka. And then you have like the train state, the train track thing and you have the serpent trench. So you start getting all these things that are breaking up. You have the Coliseum. just breaking up the sort of standard rubric of RPG of like town, battle, dungeon. And so this was a, yeah, like, you know, the technology was there for them to really just kind of go wild with this

and really break up some of the paradigms of game design and throw other things into Final Fantasy somewhat seamlessly. And right before you get to June on, I think, you find this little settlement that's like, oh, Shinrock keeps attacking us and we need your help. Fort Condor. And, yeah, Fort Condor. And so then you are like, okay, I'll help you. And then it's like a tower defense game. And it's really bad.

And it's really, really confusing. Like, it's just like, okay, pick units. There's going to be this sort of enemy. So you're going to want to pick these kind of units. And you, like, spend all of your guild doing it. And you lose. And you get like, and it's like, you have to go back. You have to go back regularly and defend Fort Condor or else, like, you lose points or something in the overall strategy, like the, the overall strategy, like the,

the campaign. Yeah. It's kind of a weird thing that's thrown in. It's not any fun, but it is there. And, you know, it definitely descends from the, like, the Mughal and Kefka defense sequences in Final Fantasy Six. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yep.

Except worse. Except much, much worse. Well, yeah, you're not using, like, your characters in that case. You're using just, like, little generic soldiers, soldiers that you buy. So it kind of takes you away from what made the defense sequences in six so interesting and appealing. So, yeah, not everything that they tried here necessarily. worked. What was Moghouse, though? Moghouse was a little

story book. Were they trolling you? No, it was great. It was just like this cute little thing you could watch. And if you listened to a sound cue and pressed a button, then you would get some points or some gill or something. It was just a goofy little silly thing that they threw in there.

And I really like Moghouse. It's the same story every single time and there's no variety to it. You just like press the button at the same time every time, but it's cute that they added that. I remember doing, I remember playing a lot of Moghouse back in the day, probably

because I think you could get something good for doing Moghouse, but I, I've forgotten what that is. It was really easy to farm points for the Golden Saucer. Much easier than like, you know, you had the... That must have been it. Yeah, you had like the roller coaster mini game and stuff, and I found that really hard.

So, you know, Moghouse was like a way to just kind of like chill out, get some easy points, You just wait for the little Mughal sounds and press the buttons and you're good. Well, if you think about the golden saucer as a way to kind of ground things in a weird way, it's like a futuristic game center slash amusement park. And people could totally identify with that and be like, wow, what a cool place to just hang out in, which you could do. When was Tokyo Disney built?

Was it fairly new at the time that this game came out? I don't think so. No, was that the 80s? I think it was the 80s. That would make sense because that was when the economy was bumping. Well, never mind then. It was a fun thought, but no. 83.

Okay. Well, that was a dead end. Well, it was the same year as Nintendo's Mario Brothers in the arcade. Wow. There you go. That's something. There's some connection there. There are no Mario Brothers minigames in Final Fantasy 7.

But it is interesting. I remember reading at the time that Namco was so impressed with the mini games in Final Fantasy 7 that they were like, Square, we should partner up, we should do some stuff. And so that's where Ergeist came from, the sort of arena fighter that had like some bonus characters from Final Fantasy 7 in the arcade. And then when it came to PlayStation, they were like, have all the Final Fantasy characters. Here, you can play as Reeve. Remember Reeve, who did nothing in the game except control Ketchee from a dark room someplace? Yeah, you can be him now.

The Golden Saucer is when Ket Shee shows up. Yep. Well, I mean, Ergaius has nothing to do with the golden saucer. It's just gold saucer. It's just there. But actually, that just reminded me, like, there is a point at which Ketchi dies.

Yeah. And then, like, he can immediately bring Kethe back. Well, you don't have a choice. He just comes right back. He's like, hey, guys. Do you feel like... Heroic sacrifice, I'm back. I'm trying to remember.

Does that happen before after ERIS dies? It's before, right? It's around the time. Yeah, well, it's in the temple of the ancients. It's the temple of the ancients, but it's before ERIS dies. So I kind of feel like they're sort of setting you up again to like think, well, I'm going to bring back ERIS because Ketchi came back. Is that before you know what Ketchi avian is, right? Well, I mean, you know that he's a robot or something.

They're like a stuffed animal. I like how dumb the party is. They don't even question this like cat Mughal thing that's following them around. He shows up at an amusement park. He's like, I'm going to join your party. I'm going to kill monsters with you. I'm going to travel around the world with you as you hunt a homicidal maniac. It's why not?

Oh, I'm so surprised that this turned out to be a Shinra agent. Were you surprised? I was surprised. Yeah, it was so cute. Some of the writing you definitely had just kind of have to go, uh-huh, all right. Sure, yeah. Well, it was a bad sub-arch of basically an anime, which is what Final Fantasy 7 is. Pretty much.

I mean, at this point, after you get out of Midgar, Final Fantasy 7 becomes essentially an anthology of stories. I mean, you have Sid with his little arc about launching the rocket. and you have Barrett going back to his hometown, and you've got figuring out what the heck is going on in Nibbleheim and the flashbacks. Well, it's interesting because, I'm sorry, did you want to say it's like Final Fantasy 6 and that each character has their own, like, quest later in the game you can do optionally. But the interesting thing is that these all happen after you lose Eris and after you lose Cloud. Like you lose both of the main characters of the game in pretty rapid succession.

You don't lose Cloud permanently, but he disappears for a long time. And when you do find him, he's, like, sitting there talking about how Xenogiers is coming. He's like, go by the game next year. Zeno Gaius. Zenogeus. Zenogeus. Yeah, so, like, he's basically out of the party for a while, and Sid runs around, you know, looking very constipated, and becomes kind of the de facto leader. And so it kind of breaks out.

And it's almost like a reverse of Dragon Quest 4, where you have, like, all the sub, you know, the side character stories, and they come together and join the hero. now all of a sudden you lose the hero so you see what the side character stories are and does Red 13 have a character arc to speak of? He has to like fight some weird monsters or something. His character arc is when you go back to his hometown and you learn about the nature of the life stream and all that

and then he has bad feelings about his dad but he finds out that his dad I guess defeated a lot of enemies and then turned to stone and Red 13 Howells. Yeah, that's right. But yeah, definitely Sid has more of an arc. Barrett has an arc where he goes back to Correll and has to deal with...

He goes back to West Virginia. Oh, yeah, the coal mining town. He uses word perfect. I'm making some Corel jokes, everybody. No, that's good. And then the train can almost can either be stopped or it'll just crash through Correll.

That's one of the things that you can influence. Oh, yeah. That's right. That was always one of my favorite and also most stressful mini-games. I mean, is it really a game when there are so many lives on the Lion Cat?

Everything is a game to me. Oh, okay. Yeah. So one of the big kind of bonus features in Final Fantasy 7 are the weapons. And, you know, that's something that kind of started in Final Fantasy 4, again, where you had some of the like these bonus super bosses, Ogo Pogo, and something else in the Final Moon dungeon. Yeah, there was like there were a couple of dragons or dragons in the final dungeon who were guarding super weapons, and you could beat them.

And they were tough, but nothing out of the ordinary. But then Final Fantasy 5, you had Omega and you had Shinru. and both of those were like super hard and you had to have very definite strategies to be able to beat them. You had to really understand the battle system. And Six had, it didn't really have super bosses along those lines.

It had stuff like DoomGaze. Yeah, it had like the, you know, the roaming bosses that you could fight, you know, consistently around the world and his health would eventually be whittled down. And it did have some dragons in the advanced remake that they dummied out in the, like the Kaiser Dragon. that they dummied out in the initial retail release. There were like seven dragons to fight in FF6 and like going around and finding them.

Right, but I mean that was kind of part of the story. And none of those were especially hard, especially the Earth dragon. You just put on float. I loved him. He was my favorite dragon. He was fighting on the opera stage. He was hanging out on the opera stage for no reason. He had some class.

Actually, I think he was Dirt Dragon in the original localization because Earth was one character too long. Dirt dragon. Dirt dragon. Sounds like a vacuum cleaner. Yeah, right? Dirt Devil. Forget that. This is the Dirt Dragon.

But in Final Fantasy 7, you had one, two, three, four, five things called weapons. They were just called weapons, and they were all named after different stones. And I think in the Japanese version, there were only two that you could fight. But then they added three more for the U.S. version. One of them you only saw in an FMV in the Japanese version. And I think fans were like, there's like this weapon out there walking around, and I can't kill it. what's up with that? So they added that in and then added a couple more in. And so they added some new items you could collect. One of them is underwater. And in order to be able to fight it,

you have to get the underwater material that lets you breathe for 20 minutes underwater, which creates a hard limit on how long this battle takes. And you would think, oh, 20 minutes, sure, whatever. But let's not forget that the timer is running during summonses. So anytime you cast a spell or the bad guy casts a spell or you use a summon, that's still counting against your time. So all of a sudden, like this, these fancy spell effects you have, that's working against you. And 20 minutes turns out not to be long enough to easily defeat this, you know, level 99

super weapon that's roaming the undersea areas of the world. The ruby and emerald weapon were cool because they really gave you a true reason to do everything. And there was so much to do in this game. I mean, breeding chocobos, getting the knights of the round material, getting all the material you needed from the Coliseum, and then your reward was. that you got to beat these uber hard bosses who you basically had to have a very special defined strategy to take out, or they would just annihilate you, especially a Ruby weapon.

Yep, and I've never beaten any of them. I don't have the patience for that. I think I beat Emerald Weapon. Oh, nice. Yeah. I mean, ultimate weapon you have to beat because it's part of the story, and that's how you get Cloud's ultimate weapon, kind of like Atmo weapon. I think it's the same thing.

Yeah. Just with different localization. You fight them on the beach, right? Something like that. I always thought he was a bit of a win. Is that the one that goes after Junon and takes out the cannon? Yes. Okay.

And then there's also Sapphire weapon that goes after Midgar, I believe. Mm-hmm. I think that's right. Yeah. And then there's Emerald, Ruby, and Diamond. Yeah, the one under the water. Right. Yeah.

And, yeah, so all of these are, like, out there. You can see them. They're like, they're the only enemies you can see roaming the world map. And they'll just kind of hang out there. But if you get up close to them, then you'll die, unless you're really prepared for it. So it's one of those optional things you can do. Also optional, I mentioned Ufi and Vincent.

You don't have to add them to your party. In fact, the entire premise of dirge of Cerberus, the spinoff game, is that because they were optional characters in Final Fantasy 7, they weren't programmed or they weren't rendered for the ending FMVs. Right. And people were like, hey, Vincent and Uvi were in my party when I beat Sephiroth and Genova. how come they're not in the ending?

It's just like the other characters. So dirge of Cerberus basically exists to explain the fact that, oh, yeah, immediately after you killed Sephiroth, they went off on a secret mission and we're doing some other stuff while you were trying to escape the Northern Crater or whatever. That's interesting. But each of them has their own completely optional area attached to them. Ufi is from the town of Wutai.

And you don't have to go there. You don't have to get her in your party. You can just ignore her when she ambushes you. This is so cool when the fact that the Wutai area was completely separate, its own little arc. When she ambushes you and, like, steals all your material, what can you do to not get her in your party at that point? You can just go. Run away? I don't think she doesn't steal your material until you go to Wutai.

Oh, okay. Like, you fight her in the woods, and eventually you can kind of recruit her sort of like Gao in Final Fantasy 6. Oh, okay, okay. But, yeah, when you go to Wutai, then she steals. all your materia, and it creates this fun little, like, self-contained mini-quest because you really can't leave Wu-tai once all your materia is stolen. Right. So you're kind of stuck there doing, you know, very little combat because you're reduced down

to, you know, the bare bones of what your party can do, which is basically nothing except hit. And I guess use items. So you kind of do this quest chasing her around town, and then the Turks show up, and it's sort of like this little lighthearted comedy. It's like the throwaway filler episode of an anime, you know, like... Are the Turks on vacation in that town? No, I think they're on vacation in...

The beach town. Yeah, Costa del Sol. And I don't know exactly what they're doing in Wutai, but they didn't expect to see the party, even though Ketchi is in your party. Okay, anyway. I mean, Reeve, he's a good executive. Right, right.

Wutai is basically the equivalent of Ruroni Kinchin's circus episode. Like, it doesn't really have a place in the overall narrative. Yeah, but it's there and it's a fun thing you can do extra. And, you know, it lets you have Ufi in your party. And I think you get a better weapon or material for it or something. Plus it fills in the gaps because it tells you more about the kind of the history of the world. And you find out that like Wutai was at war with Shinra? Yeah.

Like this globe crushing super power industry that owns a city that is like the size of New York City. And it was defeated and turned into what? A tourist trap? I guess so. Yeah. Yeah, like you wouldn't think Wutai would really stand up too well to all that. But I guess that's, that's, you know, the Yamato spirit for you. And then Vincent is in, again, sort of a self-contained area that's pretty much optional.

Like, I think you have to go to the haunted house that he's in, but you don't have to do all the quests in there. But if you do, then you find out a lot of backstory about Cloud and Zach and the Soldier Project and Mako and everything like that. And if you can figure out the weird safe cracking combo, you can get Vincent to join your party. And he's just, like, hanging out in a coffin. He's actually much more like al-a-card than Separatus, despite appearances. There's two spooky boys in this game. Yep. Everyone's so spooky.

He did. He has, like, claws, and he turns into a weir-wolf. He can also turn into the devil, but they, I guess, didn't want to have the word Satan in the game. So his superpower is not Satan's slam. It's Stan-Slam. I always wondered, who is Stan? What is happening here? And then later I realized, oh, it's Satan.

Okay. I think I read that somewhere online, and I was like, well, that makes a lot more sense. Stan slammed. You know, what happened to Ollie? Oh, my God, Stan slammed him. It's my understanding that there was actually supposed to be a lot more with Vincent. There was supposed to be an entire series of quests where you unlock his powers. But that never came into fruition, and that is one of the way.

reason why I guess he's a fairly weak character compared to everybody else but he's goth and has a gun so that's cool and dead he's also dead yes he was experimented upon by hojo and I guess he killed him and brought him back to life I don't know

yeah but if you do that mini quest then you see like the flashback where you get the story about what the deal is with cloud and with Zach like that is really important to understanding who cloud is and what's up there and it's totally optional it's kind of like hidden and then that's basically the entire basis of crisis core

is, you know, basically leading up to that escape from what the whole town is that? Nebelheim? Nebelheim? Yeah. All right. Optional.

Speaking of optional, how about those chokebo races? Just racing over and over, over and over, over and over to get that gold chokobo. Did you guys ever do the gold chokobo breeding? I did. Yeah, I had to get nights around because I needed. that super powerful spell. And like I said, once I used it, I was like, this is it. I am never using this spell again. This took like 45 minutes just to cast this spell. And I am now like a year older. Like my life is that much closer to end now. But it looked cool. What year is it? Yeah. Like it kind of looked cool, but it didn't do that much damage. Like considering how long it took, I was like, well, I could have delivered a whole lot more damage just using like normal spell effects in this amount of time. The chukobo breeding wasn't exactly what you would call funds. No, like raising Pokemon.

But the fact that it was in there just contributed to Final Fantasy 7's overall scope. And I remember being so impressed that it even had this kind of side quest. Yeah, like it felt like the gateway to you are truly a master of Final Fantasy 7 if you are actually raising Chocobos. Like you're really, you know what it's all about. It's kind of a confusing mini game. It doesn't really give you a lot of direction. It's another, like, strategy guide fodder kind of thing. Yeah.

Yeah. But to your point that, you know, I think it was you, Kat, who said that these mini games in Final Fantasy 7 seemed like, you know, proof of concept for real releases. That was Bob, but yeah. Okay, Bob. There was a game, Chocobo Racing that came out a couple of years later on PS1. That was Squall's actual first appearance on any game. Yeah. And I really feel like they said, okay, what if we did this but made it more fun?

Not a lot more fun, just a little more fun. And so you got Chocobo Racing as a full release. And they never really did anything as crazy and expansive as Final Fantasy 7 again. Like when they went to 8, it was much more focused. They were like, no, you're just doing the card game this time around. Well, there's like cinematic events, but they are tied into the story. Like the clash of the gardens and that sort of thing. Like that's crazy.

It's like this real-time combat and, you know, you're doing all kinds of stuff there. But it's very sort of cinematic and constrained. and very much in service of the story. I think that was the appeal of a game like Final Fantasy 7 and 8 and 9 was that when you were going around this world and there was so much to do at any given time, it felt like you were living in that world and it felt like a real live kind of world like it was basically an open world game. Yeah, I mean, it was. You kind of get that stuff in open world games now where it's just like, oh, go do some other stuff. Like, you know, Skyrim, I'll never see the, I made it to like the second leg of the main quest of that in 100. 20 hours of playing.

I don't care about the stupid dragons. Like, Sovengarde, whatever. Just, like, you know, let me run around and hang out with the guys who have bees and, like, make meat for them. That's neat. I like that. I'm going to go steal, like, everything in every keep I can find. That's cool. That's fun.

Yeah, the mini games in the Golden Saucer are the equivalent of sitting down and playing poker for two hours in Red Dead Redemption, too. Hmm. I'm going to take your word on that one. I haven't played that yet. Or ever. So we've kind of talked about summons a little bit, but this is sort of the point at which summons became a thing in Final Fantasy. Like you always had evokers and summoners, but it was just like, you know, that was kind of like a higher level spell. It cost more, but it did more damage.

But here, summons became a thing unto their own right. And it's interesting because this is the first Final Fantasy in which the summons aren't really tied to anything narrative. You know, in previous Final Fantasies, it was very much about like, well, let's go befriend Ramu or, you know, let's win Bahamut's favor or something like that. But here's just like, well, I was walking through a cave of ice and I found a rock that lets me summon a robot dragon from space. And, you know, you have like, you have, I'm not exaggerating. No, I mean, it's true, yes. You know, you have quests tied to some of the higher-level ones, like the nights-of-round material that you have to get the gold chocobo to be able to access, but there's no real story explanation for why these rocks allow you to summon a space robot dragon from space or whatever. They refined it a lot more in eight where they tied in the guardian forces much more closely to the story.

A lot of the guardian forces are very specific quests in eight. Yeah, they're creatures that you talk to. can summon. Yeah, so that was something I think that they learned from Final Fantasy 7 was like, okay, the summons are extremely popular, but they weren't extremely well integrated into the actual game. So let's really make a push for that in 8. But, I mean...

Well, also because, again, they were going to be using these amazing polygonal effects on these summons, cool camera angles. They wanted you to see these things. They probably looked in... I mean, a lot of people didn't really do a lot of summoning in Final Fantasy five and six, especially because, like, you know, you didn't really necessarily have a summoner. You know, the first time I played.

No. I didn't even know they were an option the first time I played Final Fantasy Six. I stumbled into it and was like, oh, that's kind of weird. Yeah. Whatever. It's expensive. It is expensive, yeah. Who can use summons in six?

Everyone. If you have a materia equipped, you can summon the, you know, the Esper associated with that material. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I did not know that for a long time. Yeah.

Yep. But the summons were a nice cheat because they could take all the polygons off the screen except for the summon. Yeah. We're forgetting that also the screen is smaller. There's, like, less real estate on the screen. So they can do a lot in that space with the polygons are standing. And also, there's no need for, like, you know, keeping track of AI commands and things like that.

Because for that 30 to 1,000 seconds, you basically have the computer just, you know, playing out a scripted event. And it doesn't have to take any input. So they were really just like, what can we do with the PlayStation hardware? So they are, they are really, wonder to behold. I remember, yeah, coming out of Final Fantasy. probably when I wrote my review of it for my fancy and talking about like the summit animations and just how just how cool it was to watch them. Like that was that was really what made a big impression on me coming out of that game. They were the selling point and I mean you, there's a reason they were front and center on on the demo disc back when it came out was just.

Oh yeah, right? And there were demo desks and you were in like midgar, depending on which demo it was. Yeah, yeah. There's Leviathan, right? And also a Bahamas. And the summons did more to separate the places. station from the N64 than almost anything because you looked at those summons

and you just thought, this can't be done in the N64. But, you know, the ironic thing is that you probably could have done those summons. Probably. Probably. Yeah, way more easily than FMV. Right. Like, these were just polygons.

The N64 could do that, but it didn't have the storage space to effectively do FMV as Resident Evil demonstrated. Yeah. Or Resident Evil, too. But they felt so big and so epic. And they define it's like, this is what CD storage space can give you this. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know. I think that maybe that's the impression you got playing it or, you know, from the magazines or whatever at the time. But I don't think the summons had much of anything to do with the storage space of CD-ROM. I mean, they were built out of polygons that were defined by a few vectors, right? I mean, so it's really about like... Yeah, it's more like, here's the horsepower of the PlayStation. And also just here is this company, Wii Square Inix, or sorry, we SquareSoft are

daring to present this cinematic experience where you least expect it. RPG battles are boring, right? You're just taking turns and choosing menus. But wait, wait. There is Hades cackling over a cauldron turning your bad guys into like damned souls or something. Can you do that on any other game?

No. Only with Square. Well, it's a good magic trick then because the most impressive element of the entire game is actually fairly not less hardware-intensive than it actually appears. Right. Well, I think it's hardware-intention.

intensive. It's just not storage, you know, it doesn't, it's not storage hungry. I think, I think that's the point. But, I mean, it was, it was definitely hardware intensive for sure. Like, it was making use of all the PlayStation effects. Transparencies and like, you know, whatever the hell else it could do, like, motion blur and stuff like that. Yeah, it probably would have been easier to do it on the Nintendo 64. It's just that they, they could have only had like one of them. Well, you wouldn't have had load time on it 64. Right, right, right. It still looked cool. Yeah. It's still look kind of cool today, in fact. Yeah, some of them are really cool.

I mean, some of them are, yeah, like you play it on an emulator or something where it's cleaning up the polygons and making things crisper and nicer textures. And, yeah, they still are quite impressive. There's great cinematography to them. And, you know, even something as simple as Shiva showing up and just like, I guess, you know, throwing icicles at people. Yeah. Like, that's still pretty rad. It's like, wow, there's an ice woman throwing sharp icicles at my enemies. That's cool.

Thanks, Ice Lady. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of really pretty design and cinematical. to a lot of the parts of the game. Like, it was just playing through June on again, right? I mean, so many of the little scenes in June on, you know, they have really great camera angles, you know, that would set cloud really far back. And then the angle would sort of be in a 45 degree to the street or, like, coming up out of the, there's an airship on the top of the whole thing and like the pink clouds in the background and the, you know, again, sort of like running towards the camera. And they really thought about, oh, well, I mean, the camera angle is. arbitrary, so, you know, let's just do every different type of camera angle.

The funny thing was that I actually abused the top-level magic, like Ultima, and the limit breaks a lot more than I did the summons. Well, they would buy a lot faster. They didn't get it nearly as long. And, I mean, the summons did a lot, could do a lot of damage, but so could the spells and the limit breaks. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, in practical terms, the summons weren't that useful, but they

were a way to make Final Fantasy 7 stand apart. And they also were a way to kind of say, like, here's a connection to the past. This is Final Fantasy now taking an element that's been here in the series since, you know, Final Fantasy 2 and or Final Fantasy 3 and basically, like, exploding it into something amazing. Like, you've never seen this before. Yeah, you've summoned Shiva and Efried and Rammu before, but not like this. Yeah, you've had, you know, Choko Mog summons before, but not like this. And you've never seen Kajada, whatever the hell that thing is. You can even summon Chupon from Final Fantasy 6, under the proper name Typhoon here.

Like the guy who would sneeze you out of battle if you were too cocky in the Coliseum. He's here, sneezing your enemies out of battle. It's great. Weirdly, Final Fantasy 15 did kind of the same thing. How so? Just in terms of making the really, really elaborate summon animations, kind of a big defining moments of the game. Yeah, I mean, this ended up kind of being an albatross around the series neck because these were so impressive. They, you know, with each iteration, they had to one up the previous games.

Yeah, because everybody was like, oh, wow, I wonder how the summons are going to be in Final Fantasy 8. They're going to be probably really good. It's like, ah, crap. But at the same time, they were like, well, also, it's kind of boring to just sit there and do this over and over again. So with Final Fantasy 8, they added, you know, the boost ability. Yeah, which made it much worse. Yeah. Yeah, like you'd summon them and, oh, you pressed a button at the wrong time at the very last second, and now your summon does one quarter damage.

Sorry about all the life you just wasted. There's a reason I don't use the, I didn't use the GF, Sin, FF8. And then by 9, square said, well, we're not going to let you skip them, but we're going to shorten them dramatically. Well, no, there is an option, like, something you can pick up, I think, where you can just, like, if you equip it or something, you can just, like, skip Guardian animation. pretty much. Like, they'll appear, and then it'll cut basically to the final animation. That was a nine and they made it really short. I remember, like, the first time you summon them, you'll get the elaborate one, but then after that. That's what it is.

It'll be shorter. Yeah. Yeah. But then you'd occasionally get the elaborate one again, just randomly. But then 10, I think they finally figured it out. They turned summons into, like, party members. They were like, you know, if you, if you, if you know, if youna summoned an enemy, like, for one thing, the summon was sort of the core of the quest.

They were like, summons are the thing. Like, you are on a quest to get more summonses. And so when you know it summoned an Idleon, I think is what they called it. Is that what they called it in 10? Whatever they called them, it would, like, show up in battle and replace other party members. Yeah, they were like your pals who would kill stuff for you and you could, you know, integrate them into combat more. So they weren't just one-off animations, but actually like a tactical consideration for battle who you had to, you know, manage and keep healthy and so forth. Yeah, you could use them to block enemy spells, especially like death spells and that kind of thing.

and they were pretty useful in that regard. So, you know, a lot of things that happened in Final Fantasy 7, it took Square a while to figure out, like, how do we do this perfectly? But it did so much all at once that it's impossible not to look back and be impressed by the audacity of the game. It is just so ambitious. And they put this together in, like, two years, which is something. Like, they can't even make a remake of this game in two years or ten years, for God's sake.

So, yeah, like, they accomplished a lot on brand-new hardware with a brand-new, like presentation and gameplay paradigm, it's a huge feat. Like, this game is amazing, honestly. Well, this is when Square was truly firing on all cylinders. They weren't the bloated kind of publisher that they are today, that they were still fairly lean and mean. Sakaguchi had been kicked upstairs, but the next round of talent was upcoming. And, I mean, and you saw it in the way that they were able to pump out games.

Really good games at that. and FF7 was the, well, it was the turning point, both for better and for worse. Yeah, and I mean, they really had to scale up as well just because they just needed so many more people to create a Final Fantasy 7. It was just so much more work. They were also, they were in Hawaii at this point, too. They had like a branch in Hawaii as well at this point. Yeah, I think the Hawaii branch did some of the CG. Isn't that the...

For seven? Yeah, wasn't that right? No, no, no, no, it was L.A. L.A. They had established swear. in Laii wanted to be in Hawaii He did and he was there by Final Fantasy 8 I mean the huge success of Final Fantasy 7

All the money that came in Like that's when they established Hawaii branch I believe Sakuji you can go Aloha and do whatever you want You made us incredibly wealthy We are on top of the world now

Go do it But that lasted until Spirit should And I told him that Yeah Mm-hmm Yeah So to kind of wind this down, we should have gone to kind of wind this down, we should talk about Sephiroth and Genova and what the hell is going on in the ending?

Like, is Sephiroth, like, so, so, you know, all throughout the game, you're chasing Sepharoth, and every time you catch up to him, you have to fight Genova, and it's kind of weird, and then you find out, oh, Sepharov actually has been frozen in the life stream beneath the planet all this time, and you've just been fighting like, what have you been fighting, and not the clones? I believe his chunks of Genova was in the life stream, and he, through the life stream, sort of like when Volta, when Volus, he was in the life stream, sort of like how, when Volus is. Voldemort died because I have to compare everything to Harry Potter. He was still sort of alive and out there and able to manipulate things. So I think what Sephiroth did, maybe J.K. Rowling played Final Fantasy 7 before she wrote Harry Potter. I mean, this idea didn't come from Lord of the Rings at all. Exactly. Exactly.

So she, so Sephiroth, J.K. Rowling was, I'm getting this all confused now. But it was in the life stream. So J.K. Rowling was in the life stream. J.K. Rowling was in the life stream. Seferoth was a slith. And then manipulating, yeah, Sephiroth was manipulating the Genova body to pretend to be Sephiroth. Like, Sephiroth was using his brain powers to think and get into the corpse of Genova. And then that Genova took on the appearance of Seferoth.

And so whenever you're fighting that thing, it was Genova pretending to be Seferoth, but even further behind that curtain, It was Sephiroth controlling Genova controlling fake Sephiroth While Sephiroth was making a new body for himself In a cocoon In the Northern Crater. Exactly. Which, by the way...

So as you can see, it is all incredibly simple. If you ever went into the store near the Square Innix Headquarters, you can see like a life-sized version of cocooned Sephiroth. In the floor. Yeah, it's amazing. There's like a shopping room where you can buy it. by Advent children figures and stuff. And there, if you look down, you're like, oh, Separat's looking at my skirt.

I mean, not my skirt. I don't wear skirts, but if I were wearing a skirt, I would be very infested. Your kilts. Yeah, you kill a kilt. Jokes on him, I wear kiltz properly. The point is that the Sephiroth you see in the game, that is not Sephiroth. That is a clone or a facsimile of Sephora. Right.

So I guess the first time you fight Sephraoth when he or when you see him and he killed, eras. It's actually Genova. And that's why, like, whenever you come across him, all of a sudden you have a Genova battle and the cool music starts. And there are three different Genova battles leading up to kind of like the big revelation. There's Genova birth, Genova life, and Genova death. So there's like some sort of cycle going on there. There's never really explicitly explained, but that just kind of makes it more intriguing, in my opinion. But yeah. So the, like, the weird, like, woman's corpse. face, body thing you see in the Shinra building is Genova. And then, like, that's dragging itself around. I don't know. Is Genova an alien or something? Yes. Genova was an alien. The calamity from beyond the star. Yeah. So

that's kind of what gets down to the whole thing with Aris, is that she is one of the I guess the last surviving member of the Cetra, which was an ancient race of, like, spiritually connected people who understood the planet and stuff. And Genova was a calamity that came to Earth or came to

Gaia and destroyed the Cetra. And when they discovered Genova, they were like, oh, this must be a lost Cetra. When Shinra's scientist discovered her, which was like Hojo and Gast and some other people, and they thought, oh, cool, we found someone nice from the past, but it was actually someone evil. And so they took

Genova's genetics, like her DNA and cells and stuff, and infused them into people to try to make super soldiers. And it worked out for Sephiroth more or less. But then there were He did it really? Well, I mean, he went insane and killed everyone and tried to blow up the planet. But aside from that. But that was only once he found out, like, what had happened to him and his

evil, his origins and that, like, broke his mind. I feel like he overreacted a little bit. Like, I'd be upset if I found out I was actually, like, a genetic experiment based on aliens. But I don't think I'd try to kill everyone. I'd be like, wow, do I get, like, social security still? But, yeah, like, he kind of went nuts. But, you know, up until that point, he was very successful. But then they had a lot of other experiments that they conducted on people.

And they all tended to go horribly wrong. Like, things didn't work out so well with Cloud. It worked out, I guess, with Zach. But that was kind of the exception. So the soldiers were, like, augmented with Genova cells. And Hojo is the real villain of the entire, like, overarching villain. All of the events of FSF7 are animated by his crazy experiments. He's kind of the Gindo Ikari of the joint, except he dies horribly.

midway through. Well, Gendo dies horribly later, so it's all synergy. He dies almost happily. He almost gets to control third impact. Splat. Oh, well. So, yeah, we just tried to explain the backstory and the core plot of Final Fantasy 7 and failed.

We tried to explain Evangelion yesterday. Yeah, we also failed. But the stories are similar. They're similarly convoluted. Well, the core plot is Sephiroth, like a clone of Sephiroth is running around trying to reunify with Genova and summon meteor to destroy everything. And meanwhile, Aris is animating the life energy to try and stop it. And she's doing that through holy.

And so it's very kind of environmentally friendly, naturalistic, like the good, the spiritual good, fighting the spiritual bad coming from space. Right. And there was definitely Evangelian influence in Final Fantasy 7 in the gold saucer you can find D-type armor It's like a trophy in the background.

It's amazing. It's very small. It's not the right scale, but that's okay. Like they definitely were making some nods, like some open nods saying, yeah, like we really liked Evangelian and that's okay.

And the weapons, I mean, they're basically angels, but kind of good because they're operating on behalf of the Earth, of the planet. But the angels and Evangelian are actually, I mean, also kind of part of the planet as well. They're on their own race.

Right. Yeah, so don't try to think about it too much. But the thing with Meteor and Holy, that's another way that Square was building on the legacy of Final Fantasy because those were spells from previous games. Meteor in particular was a critical spell in Final Fantasy 4. That was what Tella was trying to learn to destroy Golbez. And Holy was a spell that had a kind of rough time in English localizations up until Final Fantasy 7. Because Nintendo was like, holy, no. It's Pearl?

It's pearl. It's white. It's fade. It's not holy. So we kind of lost that, I think, you know, at the time. But it's become more obvious in hindsight. Like, oh, they're taking these elements from sort of the Final Fantasy lexicon, you know, from the spell lexicon. And they're turning them into these huge critical plot points.

We lost nuke, though. We did lose nuke. And this was the time that Lifestream and the whole of the planet, spirituality, became a big thing, especially with Sakaguchi, I feel like. And they started to appear quite a bit in a lot of his works, even Spirits Within, perhaps especially Spirits Within, yeah. Like, that whole thing was an attempt to kind of wrangle a lot of ideas from Final Fantasy 7. It didn't quite work out, but it was like one big, long, boring cut scene. Thank you. So finally, let's wrap by talking about the game's legacy.

Final Fantasy 7 was a big deal. It was a huge selling point. Like, Sony published it in the U.S. Rather than Square, because I think they recognized this is some hot shit, and people are going to want to play this. Especially if we don't let them know that it is a turn-based RPG controlled by menus. If we just show them FMVs of like, you know, one of the main characters being buried in a watery grave, let's give away all the spoilers and the kids are going to love it. And it's true.

People were like, this game looks amazing. It could have been a water birthing class. We wouldn't have known. I mean, I heard about it through word of mouth. I mean, everybody, suddenly, all of a sudden, everybody knew about Final Fantasy 7. And to that point, I had kind of been aware of Final Fantasy through magazines and such. but it broke into the zeitgeist. It was on TV commercials.

You had the train coming at you, and it coming to PlayStation felt like a big deal when it ultimately came out. Yeah, I'd been sort of following the game's rumors and developments since Final Fantasy 6 came out in the U.S. And I was like, I love Final Fantasy now. You know, the next one, I'm going to get a PlayStation eventually

because I got to play Final Fantasy 7. But I didn't really know that much about the game until I was at the, I mentioned this in one of the episodes we recorded yesterday, the weird PC gaming shop where I lived, where everyone was kind of like a little weird, but they did import stuff and, you know, turned me on to Evangelion. And, like, someone there was playing the Japanese version of Final Fantasy 7 and was in Wutai. And so they had made it pretty far into the Japanese version of the game. And I saw it in motion and this was like in, you know, February 1997 or something.

It was really early on. And I was like, that's amazing. I need to own this game. So I went and found a used copy of Tollball number one at a pawn shop because that's how I love to support my developers and played the demo disc and was like, yes, this is it. This is Final Fantasy, but new and fresh for the PlayStation era, hot damn. The last time we talked about Final Fantasy 7,

you were kind of positing that it wasn't exactly a turning, It wasn't exactly as big as I was suggesting. You said, well, Grand Tresmo outsold it, but it also was a hinge in so many ways because it opened up the floodgates for a lot of JRP's to come over. It was so popular that even Sony was making a JRP and Legend of Tregoon.

It changed square itself for better or worse, and it became, it propelled Final Fantasy from favorite of JRP fans, and a big game to one of the most popular, like, game franchises, period. I would say it also helped prime the pump for anime and manga to come to the U.S. I mean, it's not single-handedly responsible. Certainly there were, you know, things being localized before that. But I really feel like that was the point, like an inflection point at which people were, you know,

started to become aware of Japanese media and said, I need more of this in my life because it's extremely cool. And so, you know, a couple of years later, you had Tuneami and things like that. It was explicitly Japanese in a way that had not been the case just a couple years before. And it was probably, you know, you know, and you have that, we mentioned Evangelion, you know, yeah, that was a really huge deal in Japan. And it's perhaps, I mean, yeah, you're right. I mean, it even makes an odds to Evangelion, but perhaps that kind of like super weirdness of that story was what inspired Final Fantasy to become super weird. It's, yeah, it's kind of a mirror of each other.

And then people in the U.S. experience Final Fantasy 7 first, and then they start watching. watching Evangelion, and they start looking for things that have that flavor of, like, weird sci-fi in their stories and find it in anime and manga. I'm not in any way saying that Final Fantasy 7 was single-handedly responsible for bringing a lot stuff over, but it definitely was, like, part of a catamari of awareness that just kind of rolled up in the late 80s or late 90s. And, yeah, like, it had a huge impact over here, just like it did in Japan. And, you know, Super Smash Brothers Ultimate just came out a few days as of this record.

And, you know, a big part of that is being able to play his cloud. He is a character that stands out among 74 other characters. So, sadly, Square only allowed, like, two songs from Final Fantasy 7 in there. I can't believe that. The Midgar stage is really good because you can, you have the detailed, like, vision of the smokestacks in the background and all that, and the summons appear, and you can grab the materia, and then they do things to the stage, like Cleveland in half, which is really cool. but you could tell, for whatever reason, Square seemed very protective of how things were going to go with that characters. Cloud isn't nearly as well realized as all the rest of the characters.

Yeah, I mean, I would argue that Cloud is not very well realized in anything except Final Fantasy 7. I don't think there are even any spirits or assist trophies associated with Clouds and Smash Ultimate. Yeah, like, Cloud really stands alone in a way that other characters simply don't. I mean, that's why he's so sad all the time. Yeah. But, yeah, I wanted to talk about the game's sequels and spinoffs here, but we don't have time, so we'll have to do that some other day. That could be a whole other episode. Yeah, I think it should be.

But, I mean, one thing that really stands out is that in all the spinoffs and sequels that Square officially produced to Final Fantasy 7, it's like they just totally forgot what Cloud's character arc was in 7. The whole point of 7 is that he starts out, you know, trying to be someone he's not, thinking he's someone he's not, goes through a deep existential crisis. Like his crisis, I would say, is way deeper than Sephiroth's because Seferoth is like, oh, my dad and mom are aliens. That's not cool. That's weird. I wish they hadn't done that to me. But Cloud is like, wow, everything in my life is a horrible lie. I've been manipulated and, you know, spent five years being tortured and recreated into someone I'm not.

That sucks. But, you know, he spends a little time in a wheelchair and then wakes up and he's like, you know what, I got to live my life. Let's go save the planet. Yeah, it's a deconstruction of the. the typical anime hero. He starts out as a total badass at the end. And then by the end, it's, let's mozy. Yep.

You're like, oh, he's actually kind of a dork, and he's endearing. And then, like, in Advent children, he's just, like, saddy, and he's like, it's like he never had that revelation, and he's still in the wheelchair listening to his, uh, his voicemails. He was a sullen badass in Advent children. I have a word comparison to make before we go. I think Cloud is like Buzz Lightyear in that he already had his arc. So now whenever he comes back, it's like, uh, make him the, make him what he wants. was before in some way.

Yeah. Yeah. But at no point does he, like, begin to speak Spanish. True. Or it's pretty disappointing. Think he's, like, in a video game or something like that. It's just so hard to convey what a revelation, Final Fantasy 7 was in 1997. Like, we really had not seen a game like this.

And the sheer scope of it, but not only that, it, I mean, it's kind of cheesy now, but the psychological elements of there's an entire sequence devoted to TIFA helping Cloud works through his mental issues and reunite himself and find his true memories. And at the time, I found that really boring, but I was also a teenager. And now I look back on that. I'm like, wow, I'm amazed that they had the courage to do that in that particular era. And it was emblematic of games changing really rapidly from the 16-bit to the 32-bit era. I kind of feel like that's another Evangelian thing because that's really what we were talking about in the Evangelian episode, like the interiority of the characters.

and kind of coming to terms with who they are and their losses and their disappointments. Like, that was the heart of that story. So, you know, I think Evangeline kind of emboldened Final Fantasy VII's creators, especially the writer, Kazushige and Nojima, to just like step back and say, let's try a different approach. And you saw that happening in a lot of RPGs, especially from Square on this time, like Xenogiers and Kronocross and so forth. But I feel like Final Fantasy 7 probably was the most earnest.

attempt at that. And then the ending really quickly. I remember at the time I was controversial, but I look back on it now, and I'm like, I liked that it had the courage to be ambiguous. You don't really know what happened to the characters. There was a climax.

It was an exciting climax. I mean, meteors coming down. Holy is seemingly stopping it. What happened? Did they live? Did they die? Yeah, I mean, the game leaves it ambiguous. You see a post script that's 500 years later and Red 13 has some kids and they go and like march along or not you know they trot along the the wastelands and end up on a promenance looking over promontory looking over midgar and midgar is a ruin that's been grown over by plants you're like wow did did life stream did uh you know the life stream and holy save the planet by just killing all humanity is that what happened and it leaves it totally ambiguous well wait

you hear kids laughing but is that like ghosts of children are they laughing from the life stream you don't know like it's it's it's like it's left really ambiguous, and then Advent Children comes along, and it's like, oh, no, everything's just like it was, and everyone's wearing black now, and also, and everyone's, everyone's got a disease. And here's Saffroth again for some reason, and they're flying through the air, fighting him. Yeah, I feel like that's a whole episode of being angry at bad spinoff, so we should save it for them.

I've never seen Advent Children. Oh, you're going to at some point. I want to see it for the show. Yeah. Oh, man. When did that come out? 2005? Yeah.

Yeah. That old? Holy crap. Well, that is eligible for Retronauts, kids. Maybe I will do that episode. When it came out, I bought it on UMD. Oh, of course. The perfect way to watch any movie.

Absolutely. Because if you don't enjoy it, you just twist your PSP, and it shoots across the room. Admin Children was the breaking point for me. Oh, yeah. I mean, it was for me to, but I think Crisis Core came out and I was like, oh, this is good. Yeah. Well, Crisis Core was the only, like, good spinoff to come out of Final Fantasy 7. Oh, yeah.

All right. Well, our next episode guests are here. So we have to break. We have to end. We have to break up this episode. So, yeah, everyone, thanks for talking about Final Fantasy 7. This is not the final story at any way because we have to talk about the crappy spinoffs and the good one. And maybe by the time we record that episode, the remake will be apt.

Probably not. No. Let's take our wages here. What year do you think the Final Fantasy 7 remake will come out? I'm going to say 2024. Boy, you're more. I was going to say PS5 launch game. I'm going to say 2023 because it took about five years for, so, okay, Kingdom Hearts 3 was announced before work even really started on it, and it actually kind of pissed off Nomura.

And so he decided to basically backburner FF7 remake, from what I'm able to understand, especially after the CyberConnect stuff didn't work out because they were like, well, CyberDenac is going to do a lot of the work. And then it wasn't working out. So now it's been backburnered. He's been focusing on Kingdom Heart Surrey. Kingdom Hearts 3 is finally coming out. And then so if it takes five years for him to get Kingdom Hearts 3 out, focusing solely on that, then perhaps FF7 remake will eventually come out, and it won't be episodic. It will be a full game.

Oh. I'm planning my flag in there on, and it will be a PS5, PS5, Xbox 2, whatever. Or a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive. Oh, okay. There you go. All right, Chris, what do you say? Yeah. No, I still think it's, I still think it'll be PS4.

I think, I think, I think it'll be episode, well, that's late PS4. There will be a PS5 version, right? Yeah. Oh, you're going to say it's going to be both like Persona 5 was? Yeah. Maybe episode one at the end of 2020? You think it's still going to be episodic? Okay.

Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I think so. I think they said it was going to be, right? Yeah, they said a lot of things. Yeah, that's true. That's true if they did. I mean, I think that we're going to. to see a true reveal at some point.

Everything that's been said to this point has just been floating. Yeah, I guess, you know what? You're right. I mean, they've said so much, and they've changed developers, which is a bad thing. Yeah, you're right. Maybe it's not epistotic anymore. But maybe, but if it's not episodic anymore,

that means it's... He's already musing on more spinoffs. Yeah. Well, anyway, the point is... The point is, we don't know. And neither do you, precious listener. And we're sorry about that. But maybe someday we'll be playing a remake of this game.

If not, there are lots of ways to play it now, so, you know, go play it with shoddy translation and all. It's fine. Anyway, thanks everyone for talking about Final Fantasy 7 again. And, God, I can't believe there's still more to say about this game, but so it goes. We're wrapping this episode of Retronauts now,

so let me tell you that I am Jeremy Parrish, who was kind of hosting this episode, and you can find me on Retronauts podcasts, talking about video games at Retronauts.com. And on iTunes and so on and so forth, you can also find me personally as GameSpite on Twitter. Holy cow.

Bob, what about you? Hey, it's Bob Mackey. I'm on Twitter as Bob Servo. I have two other podcasts. Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon. You can find those by looking them up on the internet or in your podcast machine. And I also have a Patreon. It's patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons.

We do a lot of exclusive stuff there at the $5 level. And by the time you hear this, we'll be doing a brand new miniseries exclusive only to patrons. It might be King of the Hill, it might be Mission Hill, it might be Venture Brothers. Who knows what will be doing it at this moment in time, probably. So, yeah, check it out at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. Thank you. I'm Kat Bailey, editor-in-chief of USG, and by the time you'll hear this, there should be a whole lot of Pax East stuff going on, and our top 25 RPG countdown on Acts of the Blood God, which you should subscribe to.

It's on Spotify, iTunes, and all of that. Should be done. Is Final Fantasy 7 number one? No, Final Fantasy 7 is not on that list. Crep, you're angry. Whoa. Yeah. They're extremely angry letters.

There are some square games, and we actually, Final Fantasy 5 is in that top 25. Oh, thank goodness. Chris is breathing aside. I really am. Final Fantasy 5 is so unrecognized. But I'm glad I'll be in your list. Yes, so it's on the list. We've already done that.

Right, right, right. Did you have Jeremy rank all the Final Fantasies? Oh, man, we should do that. No, that was Polygon. Oh, right, right, right, right. Well, we're just going to have to do our counter list at some point because I feel like we've been doing dueling lists with Polygon for a while now. I'll do it. I'll rank this

shit. At the point of this podcast, I will be done doing Polygon stuff because of my new day job. So there you go. Anyway, Chris, tell us about your day job. Oh, my day job is features editor at Kotaku, which is a video game website you may or may not have heard of.

And occasionally, I don't edit features. Occasionally, I write things on Kotaku, and so you can come and read those things. With this episode, we'll be coming out sometime in the middle of the year 2019, so I really can't say much about what I've written recently

but just know that I'm probably still doing that job when you listen to this. Fingers crossed. And finally, Retronauts itself is supported through Patreon, much like Bob's other ventures. You can find that

campaign at patreon.com slash Retronauts and $3 a month get you early access to episodes such as this and also get you episodes in a higher bit rate so they sound better and you can hear our throaty noises and weird lip smacking and stuff in high definition. I know you love that. I have those outcomes. And there are no, there are no advertisements. So that's a good deal. Three bucks a month, patreon.com slash retronauts. Anyway, that's enough pimping. It is time for us to go

ahead and do other things. So we'll be back in like a week or so, actually a few more days with another episode and you can look forward to it. This place we want to hear you, see if you're going to have been herein'i, this class in favor of me in thee, it'll be able to be in thee, sent to-it-and-y, Sending-a-hast, you know. Sending a-a-ha-ha-ha-ha-h-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-a-ha-ha-old-sing-a-huis.