FINAL FANTASY 7 REMAKE

[Jonexe]

Btw, Sephiroth is a Kefka with depth. Feel free to impale me now.

 

You can like and dislike whatever you want; this is just flat not true.

 

Kefka is a psychopath through and through. He's deranged from the very first meeting with him. Additionally, when he wants to obtain the power of the Goddess he, well, does so. And then destroys the known world and pulls it down into a ruinous cycle that would have eventually killed all life on the planet unless he was stopped.

 

Sephiroth is much more collected, even at his worst moments. He succeed at summon Meteor...... and that's about it. Oh, he killed the President and Aeris. But we see his decent into madness, we know why he is the way he is. He's a hero that falls once the truth of his existence is finally understood.

 

They're entirely different characters in every way save the "Kill all humans" aspect of their ultimate plans.

[Griffith!]

Btw, Sephiroth is a Kefka with depth. Feel free to impale me now.

 

You can like and dislike whatever you want; this is just flat not true.

 

Kefka is a psychopath through and through. He's deranged from the very first meeting with him. Additionally, when he wants to obtain the power of the Goddess he, well, does so. And then destroys the known world and pulls it down into a ruinous cycle that would have eventually killed all life on the planet unless he was stopped.

 

Sephiroth is much more collected, even at his worst moments. He succeed at summon Meteor...... and that's about it. Oh, he killed the President and Aeris. But we see his decent into madness, we know why he is the way he is. He's a hero that falls once the truth of his existence is finally understood.

 

They're entirely different characters in every way save the "Kill all humans" aspect of their ultimate plans.

 

Really, the only similarity between the two is the whole experimental super soldier thing.

[Zyrusticae]

Man, everyone's talking about other games in the series while I'm just sitting here pondering how in the world they're going to remake Supernova:

 

[Asher]

One thing I learned at the end of 7 is that Sephiroth really hated the solar system. Enough to destroy it about 5 times over. 

 

I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that they'll be changing the combat system. I wouldn't mind something similar to 13 as long as they got rid of the auto-play stuff, since if you remove that it's essentially a turn based system but with your characters *actually* moving around the battlefield.

[Gegenji]

Man, everyone's talking about other games in the series while I'm just sitting here pondering how in the world they're going to remake Supernova:

 

 

Probably won't show Pluto, since it's not a planet anymore.

[Blue]

As a big FFVII fan (there is a lot of sentimental value to the game for me. It's the game that made me learn English (see whole story of how it did here) ), I am very nervous to know that it will be SE and not Squaresoft to handle this. They will likely change the battle system to something closer to the recent chapters (remove turns, make action-game based battle system with AI handling the "other party members), and remove things that they either consider unappealing to the new generation (grinding) or too heavy to handle for the new engines (take a look at World Maps for example. It's not a mystery that SE hates world maps, they haven't been making one since FFXII unless you want to count that pathetic thing that Dissidia's world map was).

 

It'd be really a dream if they simply took FFVII and just gave it big graphics, but the realistic me knows that won't be true. I just pray that the remake will be built keeping the old-days fan in mind and not just the new generation.

[Caspar]

Btw, Sephiroth is a Kefka with depth. Feel free to impale me now.

 

You can like and dislike whatever you want; this is just flat not true.

 

Kefka is a psychopath through and through. He's deranged from the very first meeting with him. Additionally, when he wants to obtain the power of the Goddess he, well, does so. And then destroys the known world and pulls it down into a ruinous cycle that would have eventually killed all life on the planet unless he was stopped.

 

Sephiroth is much more collected, even at his worst moments. He succeed at summon Meteor...... and that's about it. Oh, he killed the President and Aeris. But we see his decent into madness, we know why he is the way he is. He's a hero that falls once the truth of his existence is finally understood.

 

They're entirely different characters in every way save the "Kill all humans" aspect of their ultimate plans.

Both are mad supersoldiers who have different origins for their insanity; Kefka just reacts to it by behaving like a cartoon villain. Sephiroth is more subtle about it, but he's just as insane and lacking in human compassion as Kefka. They simply took the time to develop his character. Their approach was different, but at their core the characters are really similar. Mad super soldiers with god complexes and a psychotic lack of understanding of other human beings. Whether one was successful or not says nothing about the character save the plot mandated whether their plan worked or didn't. Had FF7 been written as such, Sephiroth's meteor would have had similar results to Kefka's destruction of the world. Even his final boss forms look similar.

 

If not for it being en-vogue to hate Sephiroth and FF7 for years due to the game's unwholesome popularity, I think a lot of people would actually prefer Sephiroth to Kefka, as he has tangible reasons for going mad, and that is one of the few things outside of external elements like design and behavior that really separates them. Kefka was really popular for years, too, and this is one of the reasons I never understood why. It felt like I was getting the same, only less, with him. (It doesn't help that the laughing mad psychopath archetype was done better in Suikoden II anyway, which I played before 6 despite it being a later game.)

 

Though I'm sort of venting, since it's something I always found weirdly off-putting. Like how people called Cloud emo, when if anything his lack of emotion and slow reclaiming of them was more defining. Hell he spent a good chunk of the game catatonic; if anything they should take issue with that! Even years later, people just didn't *get* FF7, both the fans, and the haters, and the unneeded proliferation of spin off titles only worsened this. Not that it was a particularly deep game or anything, but the wonky translation really made it more obtuse than it really was. I wonder if this remake will contribute to the problem or make things better.

 

But yeah, I hope the new translation does more to give character to the portrayal of the original story. They've been really dry and boring in a lot of the crossovers they've done featuring FF7 characters, particularly in groaners like KHII. I think to a certain degree, the bad translation has influenced people's impressions of the characters too. So many of Sephiroth's scenes are just him talking at Cloud until he loses his shit, and I felt that totally didn't work in the original game.

 

I think the thing about Sephiroth from the first game that I liked so much was how personally it seemed like he took getting owned by some no-name MP who back stabbed him. Even after falling into the Lifestream, the impression I always got from the Nibelheim sequence was "that faceless asshole who stabbed me with Zack's sword. I'm *really* going to fuck with him when I come back." It was probably the last real human emotion he had left. He had all these crazy plans and you never were quite sure how much of it was him and how much was Jenova, but when it all came down to it, that grudge was all him. Maybe he would have been more successful if he just left Cloud alone, lol.

 

[Griffith!]

You know what just occurred to me? Minigames. How much different is the Golden Saucer going to be? Are we going to have the same handful of minigames or are they going to give us a whole new batch? I hope snowboarding returns. I wasted way too much time playing that crap.

[TheLastCandle]

Luca Blight was a good villain, but "better" is subjective. Neither of them are shining examples of well-realized character development -- and neither is Sephiroth -- but in Suikoden II, Blight was a flat out murderous psychopath from beginning to end. In FF6, Kefka goes from nearly a comic relief side villain to god of destruction.

 

And honestly, I never heard anyone call Cloud "emo" until Advent Children, in which he actually fits the description. In fact, most of the complaints I heard about FF8 when it released was that Squall was way too moody/"emo" compared to the previous game's main character.

[Griffith!]

Luca Blight was a good villain, but "better" is subjective. Neither of them are shining examples of well-realized character development -- and neither is Sephiroth -- but in Suikoden II, Blight was a flat out murderous psychopath from beginning to end. In FF6, Kefka goes from nearly a comic relief side villain to god of destruction.

 

And honestly, I never heard anyone call Cloud "emo" until Advent Children, in which he actually fits the description. In fact, most of the complaints I heard about FF8 when it released was that Squall was way too moody/"emo" compared to the previous game's main character.

 

Y'know, I never really got the whole "Cloud is emo" thing either. I mean, he was a dork. Seriously, re-read that dialogue, and tell me Cloud wasn't just a bad Soldier cosplayer. He's kind of cartoonish early on, with his whole "I'm a cool mercenary, I don't care about anything" attitude.

 

And Luca was the subject of an awesome boss-fight, but he wasn't that great a character. He was basically just one of those blandly evil-for-evil's-sake bad guys. The real villain in that game was so much better it's not even funny.

[AquiziTC]

I'm throwing my hat in with the "Cloud wasn't emo" crowd.

 

Pre-reveal, Cloud was a dork. He was trying to be the anti-hero. Part of it was his childhood dream, part of it was Zack's influence, and part of it was just trying to look cool. The thing was he wasn't really anti-hero material, so he just came off as looking kinda dorky, which made it kinda humorous. I think most of us players remember that.

 

Now of course later we see how fucked up that kid really is, and why that weird kinda mishmash of personality is IN that head of his. He has his pre-crisis, which culminates in him just trying to do SOMETHING so he doesn't lose his f'ing mind. Which he does anyway, poor guy.

 

Post-recovery, he's a man who has had a new identity, and a new TRUTH about existence thrust onto him. He also has all the memories about what he's done, and what is happening now to the world basically because of him. He's understandably timid and nervous and cautious! He doesn't like making the big decisions anymore, and when the party asks him to lead, what does he come up with?

 

"Let's mosey."

 

I think Cloud is just a victim of Flanderization, primarily due to Advent Children. And even that can make sense. The despair from "I thought we saved the world, but looks like the Planet is telling us to go fuck ourselves anyway." It's like.. all that work and death and ruin for NOTHING. I'd be a little emo, too.

[Kellach Woods]

The problem is that the translation didn't get that across - It tried way too hard to be serious, when if he was a dork, it should have shown that more.

 

Just a better translation (and script kinda) will fix the game tremendously in my eyes.

[Caspar]

I've heard a lot of people say Cloud was a socially-isolated dork who wanted to be special, and got over it, and Sephiroth had the same problem (due to being raised like a weapon) who felt he was special and never got over it, and I think that's a pretty apt comparison.

 

It's supposed to be amusing because the fictionalized Zack was nothing near as perfect as Cloud imagines him to be, just a really normal, friendly guy, so he gradually seems to realize he's imitating someone who never existed in the first place, and it's okay for him to be himself. The spinoffs, to me, were like a self-fulfilling prophesy, where Cloud became the angstlord his detractors said he was, sort of ruining the development he went through.

 

I always felt Luca made an impression because unlike Kefka, he did not have godlike power to make him scary. He was a very real, personal madman who was just an obsessed human who trained to the point of physical human limits. Admittedly, what hurts Luca most is the nature of his backstory is only alluded to indirectly in the game, but I was able to infer it from his talks with Agares and Jilia. The weird way he tried to establish a kind of "friendship" with your traitorous friend and got indirectly refused really amused me because it suggested a lot about how far he'd fallen. I think the way he went out said a lot about his character. He definitely was straightforward, but in no way as one-dimensional as Kefka. The only thing that was a bit unbelievable was how many people willingly followed him despite him being obviously insane, but then again, people followed Hitler and Pol Pot... (And eventually it did catch up with him, just later than what would realistically have happened I think.)

[Michikyou]

I've heard a lot of people say Cloud was a socially-isolated dork who wanted to be special, and got over it, and Sephiroth had the same problem (due to being raised like a weapon) who felt he was special and never got over it, and I think that's a pretty apt comparison.

 

Well no, Cloud throughout the whole game is having an identity crisis. He thinks he is someone else, he thinks he is a man named Zack (but with his own name). He is a little confused on the whole thing due to the maco poisoning.

 

Crisis Core explains a lot of his

[Griffith!]

The problem is that the translation didn't get that across - It tried way too hard to be serious, when if he was a dork, it should have shown that more.

 

Just a better translation (and script kinda) will fix the game tremendously in my eyes.

 

Naw, it's far more likely we'll get more of compilation Cloud, rather than the original direction of the character. There will be brooding and expressionlessness. All of his dorkiness will be lost in time.

 

I've heard a lot of people say Cloud was a socially-isolated dork who wanted to be special, and got over it, and Sephiroth had the same problem (due to being raised like a weapon) who felt he was special and never got over it, and I think that's a pretty apt comparison.

 

Well no, Cloud throughout the whole game is having an identity crisis. He thinks he is someone else, he thinks he is a man named Zack (but with his own name). He is a little confused on the whole thing due to the maco poisoning.

 

Crisis Core explains a lot of his

 

Sort of but not? I mean, yeah, it was an identity crisis, and he did totally take most of his image of a Soldier from Zack and fill himself into Zack's role in the events of the story, but he didn't actually think he was Zack. He'd forgotten all about Zack. His memories of childhood were pretty complete, it was just everything about his return to Nibelheim he'd skewed in his head.

 

His personality was a mix of his own and Zack's and his own (mostly incorrect) idea of how an elite Soldier would act. But he didn't actually think he was Zack. he just thought he did the things Zack did in Nibelheim.