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#i know playability is totally different from the canon versions of the characters but still

300iqprower · 2 years

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Wait no ppl actually genuinely full heartedly from the bottom the soul believe Parvati in Sakura Matou's body (the girl who had been violently assaulted since the day her father abandoned her) is a good character???? Who is literally forced to be perfect wife because of Parvati (which is upsetting because Myth Parvati is more than that as well) and they think she's a good character???

Parvati bullies Kama and they play it off like she didn't get him killed by her husband and continues to do so in her interludes and nothing else because she has no other character traits other than be "Perfect Wife" omfggg nooooooo plssss free the fate fans.

Like out of all servants to defend as pseudo servants why choose the servant with the least personality—Jinako is better by fucking leagues because she was chosen by Ganesha to live her best life (even if she ends up getting played off for fat phobic jokes)

KAMA'S A BETTER FUCKING PSUEDO SERVANT you forget she's even one because she's so fucking good

Parvati has dry turkey personality compared to the full buffet of any other pseudo servant.

Sorry I'm just really heated about this bc seeing you get hate for being absolutely fucking right boils my piss.

Don't worry i'm used to it, the sentiment is appreciated tho and I'm also stealing that last line.

I also fully agree about Kama! I didn't do the first run of Ooku (burnout) so I didn't even know they were a pseudo servant for a LOOOOOONG time, I thought at most they had a slightly similar design to evil Sakura. She's certainly by far the best Pseudo servant. Parvati is tied with Sitonai for the worst and regardless definitely has the least personality. I can think of something redeemable for every other one despite most pseudo servants being bad. The good ones I'd say are Ishtar, Taiga, Esh (Babylonia), Muramasa, Jinako, and Kama. The bad ones are Astraea, Rasputin, Parvati, Sitonai, Esh (playable version), and the tacticians.

Taiga is a fun character full of personality who has a canon reason to be the way she is, Muramasa doesn't rely on Shirou's brand appeal and acts as something of a philosophical inversion of Shirou himself (maybe Olympus will fuck that up before I'm done tho), Ishtar believably acts like Ishtar herself having her personality mercifully held back by human will and we get things like Super Ishtar with the tattoos in Enkidu's interlude and the like being truly menacing, Jinako when not being wasted on body shaming is genuinely funny and they at least TRIED to give her a proper arc that continues off from Extra (even if they were too cowardly to make it meaningful) and Kama is just...her own character who happens to use Sakura as a vessel simple as that.

Even with the bad ones there are positives. Playable Esh still has personality and if I cant put the butchering of her myth out of my head for 5 seconds I can appreciate they way they implemented her powers in gameplay. Astraea is a much needed f2p ruler and isnt offensively bad if only because she's so bare minimum as a character. The two tacticians are at least fully flushed out characters by proxy of Waver's own spinoff. Rasputin is.....moving on. Sitonai is.............Ainu representation, I guess...........? ......Look my point is that Parvati is the only one I can look at and take downright offense to how bad a character they are purely on the grounds of how they're implemented. Sitonai is bad because she's blatant Prilya creep baiting but she at least has Oniland giving her origin a modicum of respect. Parvati GLEEFULLY ignores any and all of her origin while also not actually doing a single thing with Sakura because it views her pseudo-servant status as nothing more than a free space on the "waifu quota" checklist.

This is also evident in how similarly the two are designed. Parvati is literally just Sakura in a different outfit, while Kama feels like a totally different entity in how she's presented. I assumed she was a terrible character at first but I've been more than proven wrong after learning about her to the point I'm kind looking forward to the Ooku rerun despite what the other less good things i've heard about it. I think if you gave Ishtar a redesign she'd be on Kama's level. My issue with Ishtar is her design. Final Asc Kama, now THAT is how you do it. Something that just screams "beyond anything human" which makes the sexual nature of her design inherently work because it doesn't feel like it's supposed to just be eye candy, on something so monstrously powerful is properly conveys that this is Mara the demon of lust. Ishtar doesn't work on that level because she doesn't look like Ishtar, she looks like a barely not-naked Rin. If they wanted her to be a rin servant that badly they should have gone all in like Kama's final. This is supposed to be Ishtar, the living Dawn, the Morning Star, the god of love and war who strikes terror into people. Don't make her "beautiful" by just putting her in a gold bikini. Make her awe inspiring. Make her draped in ornate robes and/or jewelry, draw her differently, make it so she has a aura of light that makes it hard to look at her. Make her carry herself body language wise like someone who is stuck up enough to believe everyone owes them something. You can keep your useless goddess jokes and all that, heck you barely need to even tone down the Rin attitude, but make her design something I actually believe is a goddess seen as a sign of devastation, not what feels like pure fanservice from the word go.

Oh also don't forget how Parvati also completely undermines any Ash scene in every event. His valentine illustrates EVERYTHING wrong with how they use the "Parvati" label.

So yeah. Parvati's a pretty objectively shit character and it's very telling when a sakura fan tries to defend her because it tells me that they care for Sakura's character about as much as I do, the guy who's made very clear he doesn't like HF.

#fgo #sakura matou #fgo parvati #fgo kama #never thought i'd get an ask #writing analysis #fgo ishtar

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insanehobbit · 3 years

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a twenty-five thousand word post about a twenty-three year old “debate”

As time goes on, I’m baffled that it remains a commonly held opinion that:

The LTD remains unresolved

SE is deliberately playing coy, and are (or have been) afraid to resolve it.

To me, the answer is as clear as day, and yet seeing so many people acting as if it’s a question that remains unanswered makes me wonder if I’m the crazy one.

So I am going to try to articulate my thought process here, not because I expect to change any hearts and minds, but more to get these thoughts out of my head and onto a page so I can finally read a book and/or watch reruns of Shark Tank in peace.

To start off, there are two categories of argument (that are among, if not the most widely used lines of argument) that I will try NOT to engage with:

1) Quotes from Ultimania or developer interviews - while they’re great for easter eggs and behind-the-scenes info, if a guidebook is required to understand key plot points, you have fundamentally failed as a storyteller. Now the question of which character wants to bone whom is often something that can be relegated to a guidebook, but in the case of FF7, you would be watching two very different stories play out depending on who Cloud ends up with.

Of course, the Ultimanias do spell this out clearly, but luckily for us, SE are competent enough storytellers that we can find the answer by looking at the text alone.

2) Arguments about character actions/motivations — specifically, I’m talking about stuff like “Cloud made this face in this scene, which means be must be [insert whatever here].”

Especially when it comes to the LTD, these tend to focus on individual actions, decontextualizing them from their role in the narrative as a whole. LTDers often try to put themselves in the character’s shoes to suss out what they may be thinking and feeling in those moments. These arguments will be colored by personal experiences, which will inevitably vary.

Let’s take for example Cloud’s behavior in Advent Children. One may argue that it makes total sense given that he’s dying and fears failing the ones he loves. Another may argue that there’s no way that he would run unless he was deeply unhappy and pining after a lost love. Well, you’ll probably just be talking over each other until the cows come home. Such is the problem with trying to play armchair therapist with a fictional character. It’s not like we can ask Cloud himself why he did what he did (and even if we could, he’s not the exactly the most reliable narrator in the world). Instead, in trying to understand his motivations, we are left with no choice but to draw comparisons with our own personal experiences, those of our friends, or other works of media we’ve consumed. Any interpretation would be inherently subjective and honestly, a futile subject for debate.

There’s nothing wrong with drawing personal connections with fictional characters of course. That is the purpose of art after all. They are vessels of empathy. But when we’re talking about what is canon, it doesn’t matter what we take away. What matters is the creators’ intent.

Cloud, Tifa and Aerith are not your friends Bob, Alice and Maude. They are characters created by Square Enix. Real people can behave in a variety of different ways if they found themselves in the situations faced by our dear trio; however, FF7 characters are not sentient creatures. Everything they do or say is dictated by the developers to serve the story they are trying to tell.

So what do we have left then? Am I asking you, dear reader, to just trust me, anonymous stranger on the Internet, when I tell you #clotiiscanon. Well, in a sense, yes, but more seriously, I’m going to try to suss out what the creator’s intent is based on what is, and more importantly, what isn’t, on screen.

Instead of putting ourselves in the shoes of the characters, let’s try putting ourselves in the shoes of the creators. So the question would then be, if the intent is X, then what purpose does character Y or scene Z serve?

The story of FF7 isn’t the immutable word of God etched in a stone tablet. For every scene that made it into the final game, there are dozens of alternatives that were tossed aside. Let us also not forget the crude economics of popular storytelling. Spending resources on one particular aspect of the game may mean something entirely unrelated will have to be cut for time. Thus, the absence of a particular character/scenario is an alternative in itself. So with all these options at their disposal, why is the scene we see before us the one that made it into the final cut? — Before we dive in, I also want to define two broad categories of narrative: messy and clean.

Messy narratives are ones I would define as stories that try to illuminate something about the human condition, but may not leave the audience feeling very good by the end of it. The protagonists, while not always anti-heroes, don’t always exhibit the kind of growth we’d like, don’t always learn their lessons, probably aren’t the best role models. The endings are often ambivalent, ambiguous, and leaves room for the audience to take away from it what they will. This is the category I would put art films and prestige cable dramas.

Clean narratives are where I would categorize most popular forms of entertainment. Not that these characters necessarily lack nuance, but whatever flaws are portrayed are something to be overcome by the end of story. The protagonists are characters you’re supposed to want to root for

Final Fantasy as a series would fall under the ‘clean’ category. Sure, many of the protagonists start out as jerks, but they grow through these flaws and become true heroes by the end of their journey. Hell, a lot of the time even the villains are redeemed. They want you to like the characters you’re spending a 40+ hr journey with. Their depictions can still be realistic, but they will become the most idealized versions of themselves by the end of their journeys.

This is important to establish, because we can then assume that it is not SE’s intent to make any of their main characters come off pathetic losers or unrepentant assholes. Now whether or not they succeed in that endeavor is another question entirely.

FF7 OG or The dumbest thought experiment in the world

With that one thousand word preamble out of the way, let’s finally take a look at the text. In lieu of going through the OG’s story beat by beat, let’s try this thought experiment:

Imagine it’s 1996, and you’re a development executive at what was then Squaresoft. The plucky, young development team has the first draft of what will become the game we know as Final Fantasy VII. Like the preceding entries in the series, it’s a world-spanning action adventure RPG, with a key subplot being the epic tragic romance between its hero and heroine, Cloud and Aerith.

They ask you for your notes.

(For the sake of your sanity and mine, let’s limit our hypothetical notes to the romantic subplot)

Disc 1 - everything seems to be on the right track. Nice meet-cute, lots of moments developing the relationship between our pair. Creating a love triangle with this Tifa character is an interesting choice, but she’s a comparatively minor character so she probably won’t be a real threat and will find her happiness elsewhere by the end of the game. You may note that they’re leaning a bit too much into Tifa and Cloud’s past. Especially the childhood promise flashback early in the game — cute scene, but a distraction from main story and main pairing — fodder for the chopping block. You may also bump on the fact that Aerith is initially attracted to Cloud because he reminds her of an ex, but this is supposed to be a more mature FF. That can be an obstacle they overcome as Aerith gets to know the real Cloud.

Aerith dies, but it is supposed to be a tragic romance after all. Death doesn’t have to be the end for this relationship, especially since Aerith is an Ancient after all.

It’s when Disc 2 starts that things go off the rails. First off, it feels like an awfully short time for Cloud to be grieving the love of his life, though it’s somewhat understandable. This story is not just a romance. There are other concerns after all, Cloud’s identity crisis for one. Though said identity crisis involves spending a lot of time developing his relationship with another woman. It’s one thing for Cloud and Tifa to be from the same hometown, but does she really need to play such an outsized role in his internal conflict? This might give the player the wrong impression.

You get to the Northern Crater, and it just feels all wrong. Cloud is more or less fine after the love of his life is murdered in front of his eyes but has a complete mental breakdown to the point that he’s temporarily removed as a playable character because Tifa loses faith in him??? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Oh, but it only gets worse from here. With Cloud gone, the POV switches to Tifa and her feelings for him and her desire to find him. The opening of the game is also recontextualized when you learn the only reason that Cloud was part of the first Reactor mission that starts the game is because Tifa found him and wanted to keep an eye on him.

Then you get to Mideel and the alarm bells are going off. Tifa drops everything, removing her from the party as well, to take care of Cloud while he’s a catatonic vegetable? Not good. Very not good. This level of selfless devotion is going to make Cloud look like a total asshole when he rejects her in favor of Aerith. Speaking of Aerith, she uh…hasn’t been mentioned for some time. In fact, her relationship with Cloud has remained completely static after Disc 1, practically nonexistent, while his with Tifa has been building and building. Developing a rival relationship that then needs to be dismantled rather than developing the endgame relationship doesn’t feel like a particularly valuable use of time and resources.

By the time you get to the Lifestream scene, you’re about ready to toss the script out of the window. Here’s the emotional climax of the entire game, where Cloud’s internal conflict is finally resolved, and it almost entirely revolves around Tifa? Rather than revisiting the many moments of mental anguish we experienced during the game itself — featuring other characters, including let’s say, Aerith — it’s about a hereto unknown past that only Tifa has access to? Not only that, but we learn that the reason Cloud wanted to join SOLDIER was to impress Tifa, and the reason he adopted his false persona was because he was so ashamed that he couldn’t live up to the person he thought Tifa wanted him to be? Here, we finally get a look into the inner life of one half of our epic couple and…it entirely revolves around another woman??

Cloud is finally his real self, and hey, it looks like he finally remembers Aerith, that’s at least a step in the right direction. Though still not great. With his emotional arc already resolved, any further romantic developments is going to feel extraneous and anticlimactic. It just doesn’t feel like there’s enough time to establish that:

Cloud’s romantic feelings for Tifa (which were strong enough to launch his hero’s journey) have transformed into something entirely platonic in the past few days/weeks

Cloud’s feelings for Aerith that he developed while he was pretending to be someone else (and not just any someone, but Aerith’s ex of all people) are real.

This isn’t a romantic melodrama after all. There’s still a villain to kill and a world to save.

Cloud does speak of Aerith wistfully, and even quite personally at times, yet every time he talks about her, he’s surrounded by the other party members. A scene or two where he can grapple with his feelings for her on his own would help. Her ghost appearing in the Sector 5 Church feels like a great opportunity for this to happen, but he doesn’t interact with it at all. What gives? Missed opportunity after missed opportunity.

The night before the final battle, Cloud asks the entire party to find what they’re fighting for. This feels like a great (and perhaps the last) opportunity to establish that for Cloud, it’s in Aerith’s memory and out of his love for her. He could spend those hours alone in any number of locations associated with her — the Church, the Temple of the Ancients, the Forgotten City.

Instead — none of those happens. Instead, once again, it’s Cloud and Tifa in another scene where they’re the only two characters in the scene. You’re really going to have Cloud spend what could very well be the last night of his life with another woman? With a fade to black that strongly implies they slept together? In one fell swoop, you’re portraying Cloud as a guy who not only betrays the memory of his lost love, but is also incredibly callous towards the feelings of another woman by taking advantage of her vulnerability. Why are we rooting for him to succeed again?

Cloud and the gang finally defeat Sephiroth, and Aerith guides him back into the real world. Is he finally explicitly stating that he’s searching for her (though they’ve really waited until the last minute to do so), but again, why is Tifa in this scene? Shouldn’t it just be Cloud and Aerith alone? Why have Tifa be there at all? Why have her and her alone of all the party members be the one waiting for Cloud? Do you need to have Tifa there to be rejected while Cloud professes his unending love for Aerith? It just feels needlessly cruel and distracts from what should be the sole focus of the scene, the love between Cloud and Aerith.

What a mess.

You finish reading, and since it is probably too late in the development process to just fire everyone, you offer a few suggestions that will clarify the intended romance while the retaining the other plot points/general themes of the game.

Here they are, ordered by scale of change, from minor to drastic:

Option 1 would be to keep most of the story in tact, but rearrange the sequence of events so that the Lifestream sequence happens before Aerith’s death. That way, Cloud is his true self and fully aware of his feelings for both women before Aerith’s death. That way, his past with Tifa isn’t some ticking bomb waiting to go off in the second half of the game. That development will cease at the Lifestream scene. Cloud will realize the affection he held for her as a child is no longer the case. He is grateful for the past they shared, but his future is with Aerith. He makes a clear choice before that future is taken away from him with her death. The rest of the game will go on more or less the same (with the Highwind scene being eliminated, of course) making it clear, that avenging the death of his beloved is one of, if not the, primary motivation for him wanting to defeat Sephiroth.

The problem with this “fix” is that a big part of the reason that Aerith gets killed is because of Cloud’s identity crisis. If said crisis is resolved, the impact of her death will be diminished, because it would feel arbitrary rather than something that stems from the consequences of Cloud’s actions. More of the story will need to be reconceived so that this moment holds the same emotional weight.

Another problem is why the Lifestream scene needs to exist at all. Why spend all that time developing the backstory for a relationship that will be moot by the end of the game? It makes Tifa feel like less of a character and more of a plot device, who becomes irrelevant after she services the protagonist’s character development and then has none of her own. That’s no way to treat one of the main characters of your game.

Option 2 would be to re-imagine Tifa’s character entirely. You can keep some of her history with Cloud in tact, but expand her backstory so she is able to have a satisfactory character arc outside of her relationship with Cloud. You could explore the five years in her life since the Nibelheim incident. Maybe she wasn’t in Midgar the whole time. Maybe, like Barret, she has her own Corel, and maybe reconciling with her past there is the climax of her emotional arc as opposed to her past with Cloud. For Cloud too, her importance needs to be diminished. She can be one of the people who help him find his true self in the Lifestream, but not the only person. There’s no reason the other people he’s met on his journey can’t be there. Thus their relationship remains somewhat important, but their journeys are not so entwined that it distracts from Cloud and Aerith’s romance.

Option 3 would be to really lean into the doomed romance element of Cloud and Aerith’s relationship. Have her death be the cause of his mental breakdown, and have Aerith be the one in the Lifestream who is able to put his mind back together and bring him back to the realm of consciousness. After he emerges, he has the dual goal of defeating Sephiroth and trying to reunite with Aerith. In the end, in order to do the former, he has to relinquish the latter. He makes selfless choice. He makes the choice that resonates the overall theme of the game. It’s a bittersweet but satisfying ending. Cloud chooses to honor her memory and her purpose over the chance to physically bring her back. In this version of the game, the love triangle serves no purpose. There’s no role for Tifa at all.

Okay, we can be done with this strained counterfactual. What I’ve hopefully illustrated is that while developers had countless opportunities to solidify Cloud/Aerith as the canon couple in Discs 2 and 3 of the game, they instead chose a different route each and every time. What should also be clear is that the biggest obstacle standing in their way is not Aerith’s death, but the fact that Tifa exists.

At least in the form she takes in the final game, as a playable character and at the very least, the 3rd most important character in game’s story. She is not just another recurring NPC or an antagonist. Her love for Cloud is not going to be treated like a mere trifle or obstacle. If Cloud/Aerith was supposed to be the endgame ship, there would be no need for a love triangle and no need to include Tifa in the game at all. Death is a big enough obstacle, developing Cloud’s relationship with Tifa would only distract from and diminish his romance with Aerith.

I think this is something the dead enders understand intuitively, even more so than many Cloti shippers. Which is why some of them try to dismiss Tifa’s importance in the story so that she becomes a minor supporting character at best, or denigrate her character to the point that she becomes an actual villain. The Seifer to a Squall, the Seymour to a Tidus, hell even a Quistis to a Rinoa, they know how to deal with, but a Tifa Lockhart? As she is actually depicted in Final Fantasy VII? They have no playbook for that, and thus they desperately try to squeeze her into one of these other roles.

Let’s try another thought experiment, and see what would to other FF romances if we inserted a Tifa Lockhart-esque character in the middle of them.

FFXV is a perfect example because it features the sort of tragic love beyond death romance that certain shippers want Cloud and Aerith to be. Now, did I think FFXV was a good game? No. Did I think Noctis/Luna was a particularly well-developed romance? Also no. Did I have any question in my mind whatsoever that they were the canon relationship? Absolutely not.

Is this because they kiss at the end? Well sure, that helps, but also it’s because the game doesn’t spend the chapters after Luna’s death developing Noctis’ relationship with another woman. If Noctis/Luna had the same sort of development as Cloud/Aerith, then after Luna dies, Iris would suddenly pop in and play a much more prominent role. The game would flashback to her past and her relationship with Noctis. And it would be through his relationship with Iris that Noctis understands his duty to become king or a crystal or whatever the fuck that game was about. Iris is by Noctis’ side through the final battle, and when he ascends the throne in that dreamworld or whatever. There, Luna finally shows up again. Iris is still in the frame when Noctis tells her something like ‘Oh sorry, girl, I’ve been in love with Luna all along,” before he kisses Luna and the game ends.

(a very real scene from a very good game)

Come on. It would be utterly ludicrous and an utter disservice to every character involved, yet that is essentially the argument Cloud/Aerith shippers are making. SE may have made some pretty questionable storytelling decisions in the past, but they aren’t that bad at this.

Or in FFVIII, it would be like reordering the sequence of events so that Squall remembers that he grew up in an orphanage with all the other kids after Rinoa falls into a coma. And while Rinoa is out of commission, instead of Quistis gracefully bowing out after realizing she had mistaken her feelings of sisterly affection for love, it becomes Quistis’ childhood relationship with Squall that allows him to remember his past and re-contextualizes the game we’ve played thus far, so that the player realizes that it was actually Quistis who was his motivation all along. Then after this brief emotional detour, his romance with Rinoa would continue as usual. Absolutely absurd.

The Final Fantasy games certainly have their fair share of plot holes, but they’ve never whiffed on a romance this badly.

A somewhat more serious character analysis of the OG

What then is Tifa’s actual role in the story of FFVII? Her character is intricately connected to Cloud’s. In fact, they practically have the same arc, though Tifa’s is rather understated compared to his. She doesn’t adopt a false persona after all. For both of them, the flaw that they must learn to overcome over the course of the game is their fear of confronting the truth of their past. Or to put it more crudely, if they’re not lying, they’re at the very least omitting the truth. Cloud does so to protect himself from his fear of being exposed as a failure. Tifa does so at the expense of herself, because she fears the truth will do more harm than good. They’re two sides of the same coin. Nonetheless, their lying has serious ramifications.

The past they’re both afraid to confront is of course the Nibelheim Incident from five years ago. Thus, the key points in their emotional journeys coincide with the three conflicting Nibelheim flashbacks depicted in the game: Cloud’s false memory in Kalm, Sephiroth’s false vision in the Northern Crater, and the truth in the Lifestream.

Before they enter the Lifestream, both Cloud and Tifa are at the lowest of their lows. Cloud has had a complete mental breakdown and is functionally a vegetable. Tifa has given up everything to take care of Cloud as she feels responsible for his condition. If he doesn’t recover, she may never find peace.

With nothing left to lose, they both try to face the past head on. For Cloud, it’s a bit harder. At the heart of all this confusion, is of course, the Nibelheim Incident. How does Cloud know all these things he shouldn’t if Tifa doesn’t remember seeing him there? The emotional climax for both Cloud and Tifa, and arguably the game as a whole, is the moment the Shinra grunt removes his helmet to reveal that Cloud was there all along.

Tifa is the only character who can play this role for Cloud. It’s not like she a found a videotape in the Lifestream labeled ‘Nibelheim Incident - REAL’ and voila, Cloud is fixed. No, she is the only one who can help him because she is the only person who lived through that moment. No one else could make Cloud believe it. You could have Aerith or anyone else trying to tell him what actually happened, but why would he believe it anymore than the story Sephiroth told him at the Northern Crater?

With Tifa, it’s different. Not only was she physically there, but she’s putting as much at risk in what the truth may reveal. She’s not just a plot device to facilitate Cloud’s character development. The Lifestream sequence is as much the culmination of her own character arc. If it goes the wrong way, “Cloud” may find out that he’s just a fake after all, and Tifa may learn that boy she thought she’d been on this journey with had died years ago. That there’s no one left from her past, that it was all in her head, that she’s all alone. Avoiding this truth is a comfort, but in this moment, they’re both putting themselves on the line. Being completely vulnerable in front of the person they’re most terrified of being vulnerable with.

The developers have structured Cloud and Tifa’s character arcs so that the crux is a moment where the other is literally the only person who could provide the answer they need. Without each other, as far as the story is concerned, Cloud and Tifa would remain incomplete.

Aerith’s character arc is a different beast entirely. She is the closest we have to the traditional Campbellian Hero. She is the Chosen One, the literal last of her kind, who has been resisting the call to adventure until she can no longer. The touchstones of her character arc are the moments she learns more about her Cetra past and comes to terms with her role in protecting the planet - namely Cosmo Canyon, the Temple of the Ancients and the Forgotten City.

How do hers and Cloud’s arcs intersect? When it comes to the Nibelheim incident, she is a merely a spectator (at least during the Kalm flashback, as for the other two, she is uh…deceased). Cloud attacking her at the Temple of the Ancients, which results in her running to the Forgotten City alone and getting killed by Sephiroth, certainly exacerbates his mental deterioration, but it is by no means a turning point in his arc the way the Northern Crater is.

As for Cloud’s role in Aerith’s arc, their meeting is quite important in that it sets forth the series of events that leads her to getting captured by Shinra and thus meeting “Sephiroth” and wanting to learn more about the Cetra. It’s the inciting incident if we’re going to be really pedantic about it, yet Aerith’s actual character development is not dependent on her relationship with Cloud. It is about her communion with her Cetra Ancestry and the planet.

To put it in other terms, all else being the same, Aerith could still have a satisfying character arc had Cloud not crashed down into her Church. Sure, the game would look pretty different, but there are other ways for her to transform from a flirty, at times frivolous girl to an almost Christ-like figure who accepts the burden of protecting the planet.

Such is not the case for Cloud and Tifa. Their character arcs are built around their shared past and their relationship with one another. Without Tifa, you would have to rewrite Cloud’s character entirely. What was his motivation for joining SOLDIER? How did he get on that AVALANCHE mission in the first place? Who can possibly know him well enough to put his mind back together after it falls apart? If the answer to all these questions is the same person, then congratulations, you’ve just reverse engineered Tifa Lockhart.

Tifa fares a little better. Without Cloud, she would be a sad, sweet character who never gets the opportunity to reconcile with the trauma of her past. Superficially, a lot would be the same, but she would ultimately be quite static and all the less interesting for it.

Let’s also take a brief gander at Tifa’s role after the Lifestream sequence. At this point in the game, both Tifa and Cloud’s emotional arcs are essentially complete. They are now the most idealized versions of themselves, characters the players are meant to admire and aspire to. However they are depicted going forward, it would not be the creator’s intent for their actions to be perceived in a negative light.

A few key moments standout, ones that would not be included if the game was intended to end with any other romantic pairing or with Cloud’s romantic interest left ambiguous:

The Highwind scene, which I’ve gone over above. It doesn’t matter if you get the Low Affection or High Affection version. It would not reflect well on either Cloud or Tifa if he chose to spend what could be his last night alive with a woman whose feelings he did not reciprocate.

Before the final battle with Sephiroth, the party members scream out the reasons they’re fighting. Barret specifically calls out AVALANCHE, Marlene and Dyne, Red XIII specifically calls out his Grandpa, and Tifa specifically calls out Cloud. You are not going to make one of Tifa’s last moments in the game be her pining after a guy who has no interest in her. Not when you could easily have her mention something like her past, her hometown or hell even AVALANCHE and Marlene like Barret. If Tifa’s feelings for Cloud are meant to be unrequited, then it would be a character flaw that would be dealt with long before the final battle (see: Quistis in FF8 or Eowyn in the Lord of the Rings). They would not still be on display at moment like this.

Tifa being the only one there when Cloud jumps into the Lifestream to fight Sephiroth for the last time, and Tifa being the only one there when he emerges. She is very much playing the traditional partner/spouse role here, when you could easily have the entire party present or no one there at all. There is clearly something special about her relationship with Cloud that sets her apart from the other party members.

Once again, let’s look at the “I think I can meet her there moment.” And let’s put side the translation (the Japanese is certainly more ambiguous, and it’s not like the game had any trouble having Cloud call Aerith by her name before this). If Cloud was really expressing his desire to reunite with Aerith, and thus his rejection of Tifa, then the penultimate scene of this game is one that involves the complete utter and humiliation of one of its main characters since Tifa’s reply would indicate she’s inviting herself to a romantic reunion she has no part in. Not only that, but to anyone who is not Cl*rith shipper, the protagonist of the game is going to come off as a callous asshole. That cannot possibly be the creator’s intention. They are competent enough to depict an act of love without drawing attention to the party hurt by that love.

What then could possibly be the meaning? Could it possibly be Cloud trying to comfort Tifa by trying to find a silver lining in what appears to be their impending death? That this means they may get to see their departed loved ones again, including their mutual friend, Aerith? (I will note that Tifa talks about Aerith as much, if not even more than Cloud, after her death). Seems pretty reasonable to me, this being an interpretation of the scene that aligns with the overall themes of the game, and casts every character in positive light during this bittersweet moment.

Luckily enough, we have an entire fucking Compilation to find out which is right.

But before we get there, I’m sure some of you (lol @ me thinking anyone is still reading this) are asking, if Cloti is canon, then why is there a love triangle at all? Why even hint at the possibility of a romance between Cloud and Aerith? Wouldn’t that also be a waste of time and resources if they weren’t meant to be canon?

Well, there are two very important reasons that have nothing to do with romance and everything to do with two of the game’s biggest twists:

Aerith initially being attracted to Cloud’s similarities to Zack/commenting on the uncanniness of said similarities is an organic way to introduce the man Cloud’s pretending to be. Without it, the reveal in the Lifestream would fall a bit flat. The man he’s been emulating all along would just be some sort of generic hero rather than a person whose history and deeds already encountered during the course of the game. Notably for this to work, the game only has to establish Aerith’s attraction to Cloud.

To build the player’s attachment to Aerith before her death/obscure the fact that she’s going to die. With the technological limitations of the day, the only way to get the player to interact with Aerith is through the player character (AKA Cloud), and adding an element of choice (AKA the Gold Saucer Date mechanic) makes the player even more invested. This then elevates Aerith’s relationship with Cloud over hers with any other character. At the same time, because her time in the game is limited, Cloud ends up interacting with Aerith more than any of the other characters, at least in Disc 1. The choice to make many of these interactions flirty/romantic also toys with player expectations. One does not expect the hero’s love interest to die halfway through the game. The game itself also spends a bit of time teasing the romance, albeit, largely in superficial ways like other characters commenting on their relationship or Cait Sith reading their love fortune at the Temple of the Ancients. Yet, despite the quantity of their personal interactions, Cloud and Aerith never display any moments of deep love or devotion that one associates with a Final Fantasy romance. They never have the time. What the game establishes then is the potential of a romance rather than the romance itself. Aerith’s death hurts because of all that lost potential. There so many things she wanted to do, so many places she wanted to see that will never happen because her life is cut short. Part of what is lost, of course, is the potential of her romance with Cloud.

This creative choice is a lot more controversial since it elevates subverting audience expectations over character, and understandably leads to some player confusion. What’s the point of all this set up if there’s not going to be a pay off? Well, that is kind of the point. Death is frustrating because of all the unknowns and what-ifs. But, I suppose some people just can’t accept that fact in a game like this.

One last note on the OG before we move on: Even though this from an Ultimania, since we’re talking about story development and creator intent, I thought it was relevant to include: the fact that Aerith was the sole heroine in early drafts of the game is not the LTD trump card so people think it is. Stories undergo radical changes through the development process. More often than not, there are too many characters, and characters are often combined or removed if their presence feels redundant or confusing.

In this case, the opposite happened. Tifa was added later in the development process as a second heroine. Let’s say that Aerith was the Last Ancient and the protagonist’s sole love interest in this early draft of Final Fantasy VII. In the game that was actually released, that role was split between two characters (and last I checked, Tifa is not the last of a dying race), and Aerith dies halfway through the game, so what does that suggest about how Aerith’s role may have changed in the final product? Again, if Aerith was intended to be Cloud’s love interest, Tifa simply would not exist.

A begrudging analysis of our favorite straight-to-DVD sequel

Let’s move onto the Compilation. And in doing so, completely forget about the word vomit that’s been written above. While it’s quite clear to me now that there’s no way in hell the developers would have intended the last scene in the game to be both a confirmation of Cloud’s love for Aerith and his rejection of Tifa, in my younger and more vulnerable years, I wasn’t so sure. In fact, this was the prevailing interpretation back in the pre-Compilation Dark Ages. Probably because of a dubious English translation of the game and a couple of ambiguous cameos in Final Fantasy Tactics and Kingdom Hearts were all we had to go on.

How then did the official sequel to Final Fantasy VII change those priors?

Two years after the events of the game, Cloud is living as a family with Tifa and two kids rather than scouring the planet for a way to be reunited with Aerith. Shouldn’t the debate be well and over with that? Obviously not, and it’s not just because people were being obstinate. Part of the confusion stems from Advent Children itself, but I would argue that did not come from an intent to play coy/keep Cloud’s romantic desires ambiguous, but rather a failure of execution of his character arc.

Now I wasn’t the biggest fan of the film when I first watched a bootlegged copy I downloaded off LimeWire in 2005, and I like it even less now, but I better understand its failures, given its unique position as a sequel to a beloved game and the cornerstone of launching the Compilation.

The original game didn’t have such constraints on its storytelling. Outside of including a few elements that make it recognizable as a Final Fantasy (Moogles, Chocobos, Summons, etc.) and being a good enough game to be a financial success, the developers pretty much had free rein in terms of what story they wanted to tell, what characters they would use to tell it, and how long it took for them to tell said story.

With Advent Children, telling a good story was not the sole or even primary goal. Instead, it had to:

Do some fanservice: The core audience is going to be the OG fanbase, who would be expecting to see modern, high-def depictions of all the memorable and beloved characters from the game, no matter if the natural end point of their stories is long over.

Set up the rest of the Compilation - Advent Children is the draw with the big stars, but also a way to showcase the lesser known characters from from the Compilation who are going to be leading their own spinoffs. It’s part feature film/part advertisement for the rest of the Compilation. Thus, the Turks, Vincent and Zack get larger roles in the film than one might expect to attract interest to the spinoffs they lead.

Show off its technical prowess: SE probably has enough self awareness to realize that what’s going to set it apart from other animated feature films is not its novel storytelling, but its graphical capabilities. Thus, to really show off those graphics, the film is going to be packed to the brim with big, complicated action scenes with lots of moving parts, as opposed to quieter character driven moments.

These considerations are not unique to Advent Children, but important to note nonetheless:

As a sequel, the stakes have to be just as high if not higher than those in the original work. Since the threat in the OG was the literal end of the world, in Advent Children, the world’s gotta end again

The OG was around 30-40 hours long. An average feature-length film is roughly two hours. Video games and films are two very different mediums. As many TV writers who have tried to make the transition to film (and vice-versa) can tell you, success in one medium does not translate to success in another.

With so much to do in so little time, is it any wonder then that it is again Sephiroth who is the villain trying to destroy the world and Aerith in the Lifestream the deus ex machina who saves the day?

All of this is just a long-winded way to say, certain choices in the Advent Children that may seem to exist only to perpetuate the LTD were made with many other storytelling considerations in mind.

When trying to understand the intended character arcs and relationship dynamics, you cannot treat the film as a collection of scenes devoid of context. You can’t just say - “well here’s a scene where Cloud seems to miss Aerith, and here’s another scene where Cloud and Tifa fight. Obviously, Cloud loves Aerith.” You have to look at what purpose these scenes serve in the grander narrative.

And what is this grander narrative? To put it in simplistic terms, Aerith is the obstacle, and Tifa is goal. Cloud must get over his guilt over Aerith’s death so that he can return to living with Tifa and the children in peace.

The scenes following the prologue are setting up the emotional stakes of film - the problem that will be resolved by the film’s end. The problem being depicted here is not Aerith’s absence from Cloud’s life, but Cloud’s absence from his family. We see Tifa walking through Seventh Heaven saying “he’s not here anymore,” we see Denzel in his sickbed asking for Cloud, we see a framed photo of the four of them on Cloud’s desk. We see Cloud letting Tifa’s call go to voicemail.

What we do not see is Aerith, who does not appear until almost halfway through the film.

Cloud spends the first of the film avoiding confrontation with the Remnants/dealing with the return of Sephiroth. It’s only when Tifa is injured, and Denzel and Marlene get kidnapped that he goes to face his problems head on.

Before the final battle, when Cloud has exorcised his emotional demons and is about to face his physical demons, what do we see? We see Cloud telling Marlene that it’s his turn to take care of her, Denzel and Tifa the way they’ve taken care of him. We see Cloud telling Tifa that he ‘feels lighter’ and tacitly confirming that she was correct when she called him out earlier in the film. We see Cloud confirming to Denzel that he’s going home after this is all over.

What we do not see is Cloud telepathically communicating with Aerith to say, “Hey boo, can’t wait to beat Sephiroth so I can finally reunite with you in the Promised Land. Xoxoxo.” Aerith doesn’t factor in at all. Returning to his family is his goal, and his fight with Bahamut/the Remnants/Sephiroth/whatever the fuck is the final obstacle he has to face before reaching this goal.

This is reiterated again when Cloud is shot by Yazoo and seemingly perishes in an explosion. What is at stake with his “death”? We see Tifa calling his name while looking out the airship. We see Denzel and Marlene waiting for him at Seventh Heaven. We do not see Aerith watching over him in the Lifestream.

Now, Aerith does play an important role in Cloud’s arc when she shows up at about the midpoint of the film. You could fairly argue that it’s the turning point in Cloud’s emotional journey, the moment when he finally decides to confront his problems. But even if it’s only Cloud and Aerith in the scene, it’s not really about their relationship at all.

Let’s consider the context before this scene happens. Denzel and Marlene have been kidnapped by the Remnants; Tifa was nearly killed in a fight with another. This is Cloud at his lowest point. It’s his worst fears come to pass. His guilt over Aerith’s death is directly addressed at this moment in the film because it is not so much about his feelings for Aerith as it is about how Cloud fears the failures of his past (one of the biggest being her death) would continue into the present. If it was just about Aerith, we could have seen Cloud asking for her forgiveness at any other time in the film. It occurs when it does because this when his guilt over Aerith’s death intersects with his actual conflict, his fear that he’ll fail the the ones he loves. She appears when he’s at the Forgotten City where he goes to save the children. The same location where he had failed two year before.

This connection is made explicit when Cloud has flashes of Zack and Aerith’s deaths before he saves Denzel and Tifa from Bahamut. Again, Cloud’s dwelling on the past is directly related to his fears of being unable to protect his present.

Aerith is a feminine figure who is associated with flowers. That combined with the players’ memory of her and her relationship with Cloud in the OG, I can see how their scenes can be construed as romantic, but I really do not think that it is the creators’ intent to portray any romantic longing on Cloud’s part.

If they wanted to suggest that Cloud was still in love with Aerith or even leave his romantic interest ambiguous, there is no way in hell they would have had Cloud living with Tifa and two kids prior to the film’s events. To say nothing of opening the film by showing the pain his absence brings.

A romantic reading of Cloud’s guilt over Aerith’s death would suggest that he entered into a relationship with Tifa and started raising two children with her while still holding a torch for Aerith and hoping for a way to be reunited with her. The implication would be that Tifa is his second choice, and he is settling. Now, is this a dynamic that occurs in real life? Absolutely. Is this something that is often depicted in some films and television? Sure - in fact this very premise is at the core of one my favorite films of the last decade - 45 Years — and spoiler alert — the guy does not come off well in this situation. But once again, Cloud is not a real person, and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is not a John Cassavettes film or an Ingmar Bergman chamber drama. It is a 2-hour long straight to DVD sequel for a video game made for teens. This kind of messy, if realistic, relationship dynamic is not what this particular work is trying to explore.

(one of these is a good film!)

By the end of Advent Children, Cloud is once again the idealized version of himself. A hero that the audience is supposed to like and admire. We are supposed to think that his actions in the first half of the movie (wallowing in his guilt and abandoning his family) were bad. These are the flaws that he must overcome through the course of the film, and by the end he does. If he really had been settling and treating his Seventh Heaven family as a second choice prior to the events of the film, that too would obviously be a character flaw that needs to be addressed before the end of the film. It isn’t because this is a dynamic that only exists in certain people’s imaginations.

If the creators wanted to leave the Cloud & Aerith relationship open to a romantic interpretation, they didn’t have to write themselves into such a corner. They wouldn’t have to change the final film much at all, merely adjust the chronology a bit. Instead of Cloud already living as a family with Tifa, Marlene and Denzel prior to the beginning of the film, you would show them on the precipice of becoming a family, but with Cloud being unable to take the final step without getting over his feelings for Aerith first. This would leave space for him to love both women without coming off as an opportunistic jerk.

This is essentially the dynamic with Locke/Rachel/Celes in FFVI. Locke is unable to move on with Celes or anyone else until he finally finds closure with Rachel. It’s a lovely scene that does not diminish his relationships with either woman. He loved Rachel. He will love Celes. What the game does not have him do is enter into a relationship into Celes first and then when the party arrives at the Phoenix Cave, have him suddenly remember ‘Oh shit, I’ve gotta deal with my baggage with Rachel before I can really move on.’ That would not paint him in a particularly positive light.

Speaking of other Final Fantasies, let’s take a look another sequel in the series set two years after the events of the original work, one that is clearly the story of its protagonist searching for their lost love. And guess what? Final Fantasy X-2 does not begin with Yuna shacked up and raising two kids with another dude. And it certainly doesn’t begin with his perspective of the whole situation when Yuna decides to search for Tidus.

Square Enix knows how to write these kind of stories when they want to, and it’s clearly not their intent for Cloud and Aerith. Again, the biggest obstacle in the way of a Cloud/Aerith endgame isn’t space and time or death, it’s the existence of Tifa Lockhart.

A reasonable question to ask would be, if SE is not trying to ignite debate over the love triangle, why make Cloud’s relationship with Aerith a part of Advent Children at all? Why invite that sort of confusion? Well, the answer here, like the answer in the OG, is that Aerith’s role in the sequel is much more than her relationship with Cloud.

In the OG, it wasn’t Cloud and the gang who managed to stop Sephiroth and Meteor in the end, it was Aerith from the Lifestream. In a two-hour long film, you do not have the time to set up a completely new villain who can believably end the world, and since you pretty much have to include Sephiroth, the main antagonist can really only be him. No one else in the party has been established to have any magical Cetra powers, and again, since that’s not something that can be effectively established in a two-hour long film, and since Aerith needs to appear somehow, it again needs to be her who will save the day.

Given the time constraints, this external conflict has to be connected with Cloud’s internal conflict. In the OG, Cloud’s emotional arc is in resolved in the Lifestream, and then we spend a few more hours hunting down the Huge Materia/remembering what Holy is before resolving the external conflict of stopping Meteor. In Advent Children, we do not have that luxury of time. These turning points have to be one and same. It is only after Aerith is “introduced” in the film when Cloud asks her for forgiveness that she is able to help in the fight against the Remnants. Thus the turning point for Cloud’s character arc and the external conflict are the same. It’s understandably economical storytelling, though I wouldn’t call it particularly good storytelling.

As much as Cloud feels guilt over both Zack and Aerith’s deaths, it’s only Aerith who can play this dual role in the film. Zack can appear to help resolve Cloud’s emotional arc, but since he has no special Cetra powers or anything, there’s little he can do to help in Cloud’s fight against the Remnants. More time would need to be spent contriving a reason why Cloud is able to defeat the Remnants now when he wasn’t before or explaining why Aerith can suddenly help from the Lifestream when she had been absent before. (I still don’t think the film does a particularly good job of explaining this part, but that is a conversation for another time).

Another reason why Zack could not play this role is because at the time of AC’s original release, all we knew of Cloud and Zack’s relationship was contained in an optional flashback at the Shinra mansion after Cloud returns from the Lifestream. If it was Zack who suddenly showed up at Cloud’s lowest point, most viewers, even many who played the original game, would probably have been confused, and the moment would have fallen flat. On the other hand, even the most casual fan would have been aware of Aerith and her connection to Cloud, with her death scene being among the most well-known gaming moments of all time. Moreover, Aerith’s death is directly connected to Sephiroth, who is once again the threat in AC, whereas Zack was killed by Shinra goons. Aerith serves multiple purposes in a way that Zack just cannot.

Despite all this, though Aerith is more important to the film as a whole, many efforts are made to suggest that Zack and Aerith are equally important to Cloud. One of the first scenes in the film is Cloud moping around Zack’s grave (And unlike the scene with Aerith in the Forgotten City, it isn’t directly connected with Cloud’s present storyline in any way). We have the aforementioned scene where Cloud has flashes of both Aerith’s and Zack’s deaths when he saves Tifa and Denzel. Cloud has a scene where he’s standing back to back with Zack, mirroring his scene with in the Forgotten City with Aerith, before the climax of his fight with Sephiroth. In the Lifestream, after Cloud “dies,” it’s both Aerith and Zack who are there to send him back. Before the film ends, Cloud sees both Aerith and Zack leaving the church.

Now, were all these Zack appearances a way to promote the upcoming spin-off game that he’s going to lead? Of course. But the creators surely would have known that having Zack play such a similar role in Cloud’s arc would make Cloud’s relationship with Aerith feel less special and thus complicating a romantic interpretation of said relationship. If they wanted to encourage a romantic reading of Cloud’s lingering feelings for Aerith, they would have given Zack his own distinct role in the film. Or rather, they wouldn’t have put Zack in the film at all, and they certainly wouldn’t have him lead his own game, but we’ll get to the Zack of it all later.

The funny thing is, in a way, Zack is portrayed as being more special to Cloud. Zack only exists in the film to interact with Cloud and encourage him. Meanwhile. Aerith also has brief interactions with Kadaj, the Geostigma children and even Tifa before the film’s end. Aerith is there to save the whole world. Zack is there just for Cloud. If it’s Cloud’s relationship with Aerith that’s meant to be romantic, shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Let’s take a look at Tifa Lockhart. What role did she have to play in the FF7 sequel film? If, like some, you believed FF7 to be the Cloud/Aerith/Sephiroth show, then Tifa could have easily had a Barret-sized cameo in Advent Children. And honestly, she’s just a great martial artist. She has no special powers that would make her indispensable in a fight against Sephiroth. You certainly would not expect her to be the 2nd billed character in the film. Though of course, if you actually played through the Original Game with your eyes open, you would realize that Tifa Lockhart is instrumental to any story about Cloud Strife.

Unlike Aerith’s appearances, almost none of the suggestive scenes and dynamics between Cloud and Tifa had to be included in the film. As in, they serve no other plot related purpose and could have easily been cut from the final film if the creators weren’t trying to encourage a romantic interpretation of their relationship.

It feels inevitable now, but no one was expecting Cloud and Tifa to be living together and raising two kids. In the general consciousness, FF7 is Cloud and Sephiroth and their big swords and Aerith’s death. At the time, in the eyes of most fans and casual observers, Cloud and Tifa being together wasn’t a necessary part of the FF7 equation the way say, an epic fight between Cloud and Sephiroth would be. In fact, I don’t think even the biggest Cloti fans at the time would have imagined Cloud and Tifa living together would be their canon outcome in the sequel film.

Now can two platonic friends live together and raise two children together? Absolutely, but again Cloud and Tifa are not real people. They are fictional characters. A reasonable person (let’s use the legal definition of the term) who does not have brainworms from arguing over one of the dumbest debates on the Internet for 23 years would probably assume that two characters who were shown to be attracted to each other in the OG and who are now living together and raising two kids are in a romantic relationship. This is a reasonable assumption to make, and if SE wanted to leave Cloud’s romantic inclinations ambiguous, they simply would not be depicting Cloud and Tifa’s relationship in this manner. Cloud’s disrupted peace could have been a number of different things. He could have been a wandering mercenary, he could have been searching for a way to be reunited with Aerith. It didn’t have to be the family he formed with Tifa, but, then again, if you were actually paying attention to the story the OG was trying to tell, of course he would be living with Tifa.

Let’s also look at the scene where Cloud finds Tifa in the church after her fight with Loz. All the plot related information (who attacked her, Marlene being taken) is conveyed in the brief conversation they have before Cloud falls unconscious from Geostigma. What purpose do all the lingering shots of Cloud and Tifa in the flower bed in a Yin-Yang/non-sexual 69ing position serve if not to be suggestive of the type of relationship they have? It’s beautifully rendered but ultimately irrelevant to both the external and internal conflicts of the film.

Likewise, there is no reason why Cloud and Tifa needed to wake up in their children’s bedroom. No reason to show Cloud waking up with Tifa next to him in a way that almost makes you think they were in the same bed. And there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for a close-up of Tifa’s hand with the Wolf Ring on her ring finger while she is admonishing Cloud during what sounds like a domestic argument (This ring again comes into focus when Tifa leads Denzel to Cloud at the church at the end - there are dozens of ways this scene could have been rendered, but this is the one that was chosen.) If it wasn’t SE’s intent to emphasize the family dynamic and the intimate nature of Cloud and Tifa’s relationship, these scenes would not exist.

Let’s also take a look at Denzel, the only new character in the AC (give or take the Remnants). Again, given the film’s brief runtime, the fact that they’re not only adding a new character but giving him more screen time than almost every other AVALANCHE member must mean that he’s pretty important. While Denzel does have an arc of his own, especially in ACC, he is intricately connected to Cloud and Tifa and solidifies the family unit that they’ve been forming in Edge. Marlene still has Barret, but with the addition of Denzel, the family becomes something more real albeit even more tenuous given his Geostigma diagnosis. Without Denzel in the picture, it’s a bit easier to interpret Cloud’s distance from Tifa as romantic pining for another woman, but now it just seems absurd. The stakes are so much higher. Cloud and Tifa are at a completely different stage in their lives from the versions of these characters we met early on in the OG who were entangled in a frivolous love triangle. And yet some people are still stuck trying to fit these characters into a childish dynamic that died at the end of disc one along with a certain someone.

All this is there in the film, at least the director’s cut, if you really squint. But since SE preferred to spend its time on countless action sequences that have aged as well as whole milk in lieu of spending a few minutes showing Cloud’s family life before he got Geostigma to establish the emotional stakes, or a beat or two more on his reconciliation with Tifa and the kids, people may be understandably confused about Cloud’s arc. Has Cloud just been a moping around in misery for the two years post-OG? The answer is no, though that can only really be found in the accompanying novellas, specifically Case of Tifa.

Concerning the novellas, which we apparently must read to understand said DVD sequel

I really don’t know how you can read through CoT and still think there is anything ambiguous about the nature of Cloud and Tifa’s relationship. The “Because I have you this time,” Cloud telling Tifa he’ll remind her how to be strong when they’re alone, Cloud confidently agreeing when Marlene adds him to their family. Not to mention Barret and Cid’s brief conversation about Cloud and Tifa’s relationship in Case of Barret, after which Cid comments that “women wear the pants,” which Barret then follows by asking Cid about Shera. Again, a reasonable person would assume the couple in question are in a romantic relationship, and if this wasn’t the intent, these lines would not be present. Especially not in a novella about someone else.

Some try to argue that CoT just shows how incompatible Cloud and Tifa are because it features a few low points in their relationship. I don’t think that’s Nojima’s intent. Even if it was, it certainly wouldn’t be to prove that Cloud loves Aerith. This isn’t how you tell that story. Why waste all that time disproving a negative rather than proving a positive? We didn’t spend hours in FF8 watching Rinoa’s relationship with Seifer fall apart to understand how much better off she is with Squall. If Cloud and Aerith is meant to be a love story, then tell their love story. Why tell the story of how Cloud is incompatible with someone else?

Part of the confusion may be because CoT doesn’t tell a complete story in and of itself. The first half of the story (before Cloud has to deliver flowers to the Forgotten City) acts as a sort of epilogue to the OG, while the second half of the story is something of a prologue to Advent Children (or honestly its missing Act One). And to state the obvious, conflict is inherent to any story worth telling. It can’t just be all fluff, that’s what the fanfiction is for.

Tifa’s conflict is her fear that the fragile little family they’ve built in Edge is going to fall apart. Thus we see her fret about Cloud’s distance, the way this affects Marlene, and Denzel’s sickness. There are certainly some low moments here --- Tifa telling Cloud to drink in his room, asking if he loves her -- all ways for the threat to seem more real, the outcome more uncertain, yet there’s only one way this conflict can be resolved. One direction to which their relationship can move.

Again, by the end of this story, both characters are supposed to be the best versions of themselves, to find their “happy” endings so to speak. Tifa could certainly find happiness outside of a relationship with Cloud. She could decide that they’ve given it a shot, but they’re better off as friends. She’s grateful for this experience and she’s learned from this, but now she’s ready to make a life for herself on her own. It would be a fine character arc, though not something the Final Fantasy series has been wont to do. However, that’s obviously not the case here as there’s no indication whatsoever that Tifa considers this as an option for herself. Nojima hasn’t written this off ramp into her journey. For Tifa, they’ll either become a real family or they won’t. Since this is a story that is going to have a happy ending, so of course they will, even if there are a lot of bumps along the way.

Unfortunately, with the Compilation being the unwieldy beast that this is, this whole arc has to be pieced together across a number of different works:

Tifa asking herself if they’re a real family in CoT

Her greatest fear seemingly come to life when Cloud leaves at the end of CoT/beginning of AC

Tifa explicitly asking Cloud if the reason they can’t help each other is because they’re not a real family during their argument in AC. Notably, even though Cloud is at his lowest point, he doesn’t confirm her fear. Instead he says he that he can’t help anyone, not even his family. Instead, he indirectly confirms that yes he does think they’re a family, even if is a frustrating moment still in that he’s too scared to try to save it.

The ending of AC where we see a new photo of Cloud smiling surrounded by Tifa and the kids and the rest of the AVALANCHE, next to the earlier photo we had seen of the four of them where he was wearing a more dour expression.

The ending of The Kids Are All Right, where Cloud, Tifa, Denzel and Marlene meet with Evan, Kyrie and Vits - and Cloud offers, unsolicited, that even if they’re not related by blood, they’re a family.

The ending of DVD extra ‘Reminiscence of FFVII’ where Cloud takes the day off and asks Tifa to close the bar so they can spend time together as a family as Tifa had wanted to do early in CoT

Cloud fears he’ll fail his family. Tifa fears it’ll fall apart. Cloud retreats into himself, pushing others away. Tifa neglects herself, not being able to say what she needs to say. In Advent Children, Tifa finally voices her frustrations. It’s then that Cloud finally confronts his fears. Like in the OG, Cloud and Tifa’s conflicts and character arcs are two sides of the same coin, and it’s only by communicating with each other are they able to resolve it. Though with the Compilation being an inferior work, it’s much less satisfying this time around. Such is the problem when you’re writing towards a preordained outcome (Cloud and Sephiroth duking it once again) rather than letting the story develop organically.

Some may ask, why mention Aerith so much (Cloud growing distant after delivering flowers to the Forgotten City, Cloud finding Denzel at Aerith’s church) if they weren’t trying to perpetuate the LTD? Well, as explained above, Aerith had to be in Advent Children, and since CoT is the only place where we get any insight into Cloud’s psyche, it’s here where Nojima expands on that guilt.

Again, this is a story that requires conflict, and what better conflict than the specter of a love rival? Notably, despite us having access to Tifa’s thoughts and fears, she never explicitly associates Cloud’s behavior with him pining after Aerith. Though it’s fair to say this fear is implied, if unwarranted.

If Cloud had actually been pining after Aerith this whole time, we would not be seeing it all unfold through Tifa’s perspective. You can depict a romance without drawing attention to the injured third party. We’re seeing all of this from Tifa’s POV, because it’s about Tifa’s insecurities, not the great tragic romance between Cloud and Aerith. Honestly, another reason we see this from Tifa’s perspective is because it’s dramatically more interesting. Because she’s insecure, she (and we the reader) wonder if there’s something else going on. Meanwhile, from Cloud’s perspective it would be straightforward and redundant, given what we see in AC. He’s guilty over Aerith’s death and thinks he doesn’t deserve to be happy.

Not to mention, the first time we encounter Aerith in CoT, Tifa is the one breaking down at her grave while Cloud is the one comforting her. Are we supposed to believe that he just forgot he was in love with Aerith until he had to deliver flowers to the Forgotten City?

And Aerith doesn’t just serve as a romantic obstacle. She’s also a symbol of guilt and redemption for both Cloud and Tifa. Neither think they have the right to be happy after all that’s happened (Aerith’s death being a big part of this), and through Denzel, who Cloud finds at Aerith’s church, they both see a chance to atone.

I do want to address Case of Lifestream: White because it’s only time in the entire Compilation where I’ve asked myself — what are they trying to achieve here? Now, I’d rather drink bleach than start debating the translation of ‘koibito’ again, but I did think it was a strange choice to specify the romantic nature of Aerith’s love for Cloud. I suppose it could be a reference her obvious attraction to Cloud in the OG, though calling it love feels like a stretch.

But nothing else in CoLW really gives me pause. It might be a bit jarring to see how much of it is Aerith’s thoughts of Cloud, but it makes sense when you consider the context in which it’s meant to be consumed. Unlike Case of Tifa or Case of Denzel, CoLW isn’t meant to be read on its own. It’s a few scant paragraphs in direct conversation with Case of Lifestream: Black. In CoLB, Sephiroth talks about his plan to return and end the world or whatever, and how Cloud is instrumental to his plan. Each segment of CoLW mirrors the corresponding segment of CoLB. Thus, CoLW has to be about Aerith’s plan to stop Sephiroth and the role Cloud must play in that. In both of these stories, Cloud is the only named character. It doesn’t mean that thoughts of Cloud consume all of Aerith’s afterlife. Case of Lifestream is only a tiny sliver of the story, a halfassed way to explain why in Advent Children the world is ending again and why Cloud has to be at the center of it all.

Notably, there is absolutely nothing in CoLW about Cloud’s feelings for Aerith. Even if it’s just speculation on her part as we see Sephiroth speculate about Cloud’s reactions in CoLB. Aerith can see what’s going on in the real world, but she says nothing about Cloud’s actions. If Cloud is really pining after her, trying to find a way to be reunited with her, wouldn’t this be the ideal story to show such devotion?

But it’s not there, because not only does it not happen, but because this story is not about Aerith’s relationship with Cloud. It is about how Aerith needs to see and warn Cloud in order to stop Sephiroth. By the end of Advent Children, that goal is fulfilled. Cloud gets his forgiveness. Aerith gets to see him again and helps him stop Sephiroth. There’s no suggestion that either party wants more. We finally have the closure that the OG lacked, and at no point does it confirm that Cloud reciprocated Aerith’s romantic feelings, even though there were plenty of opportunities to do so.

I don’t really know what else people were expecting. Advent Children isn’t a romantic drama. There’s not going to be a moment where Cloud explicitly tells Tifa, ‘I’ve never loved Aerith. It’s only been you all along.” This is just simply not the kind of story it is.

Though one late scene practically serves this function. When Cloud “dies” and Aerith finds him in the Lifestream, if there were any lingering romantic feelings between the two of them, this would be a beautiful bittersweet reunion. Maybe something about how as much as they want to be together, it’s not his time yet. Instead, it’s almost played off as a joke. Cloud calls her ‘Mother’, and Zack is at Aerith’s side, joking about how Cloud has no place there. This would be the perfect opportunity to address the romantic connection between Cloud and Aerith, but instead, the film elides this completely. Instead, it’s a cute afterlife moment between Aerith and Zack, and functionally allows Cloud to go back to where he belongs, to Tifa and the kids. Whatever Cloud’s feelings for Aerith were before, it’s transformed into something else.

Crisis Core -- or how Aerith finally gets her love story

The other relevant part of the Compilation is Crisis Core, which I will now touch on briefly (or at least brief for me). In the OG, Zack Fair was more plot device than character. We knew he was important to Cloud — enough that Cloud would mistake Zack’s memories for his own -- we knew he was important to Aerith — enough that she is initially drawn to Cloud due to his similarities to Zack — yet the nature of these relationships is more ambiguous. Especially his relationship with Aerith. From the little we learn of their relationship, it could have been completely one-sided on her part, and Zack a total cad. At least that’s the implication she leaves us with in Gongaga. We get the sense that she might not be the most reliable narrator on this point (why bring up an ex so often, unsolicited, if it wasn’t anything serious?) but the OG never confirms this either way.

Crisis Core clears this up completely. Not only is Zack portrayed as the Capital H Hero of his own game, but his relationships with Cloud and Aerith are two of the most important in the game. In fact, they are the basis for his heroic sacrifice at the game’s end: he dies trying to save Cloud’s life; he dies trying to return to Aerith.

Zack’s relationship with Aerith is a major subplot of the game. Not only that, but the details of said relationship completely recontextualizes what we know about the Aerith we see in the OG. Many of Aerith’s most iconic traits (wearing pink, selling flowers) are a direct product of this relationship, and more importantly, so many of the hallmarks of her early relationship with Cloud (him falling through her church, one date as a reward, a conversation in the playground) are a direct echo of her relationship with Zack.

A casual fling this was not. Aerith’s relationship with Zack made a deep impact on the character we see in the OG and clearly colored her interactions with Cloud throughout.

Crisis Core is telling Zack’s story, and Tifa is a fairly minor supporting character, yet it still finds the time to expand upon Cloud and Tifa’s relationship. Through their interactions with Zack, we learn just how much they were on each others’ minds during this time, and how they were both too shy to own up to these feelings. We also get a brief expansion on the moment Cloud finds Tifa injured in the reactor.

Meanwhile, given the point we are in the story’s chronology, Cloud and Aerith are completely oblivious of each other’s existence.

One may try to argue that none of this matters since all of this is in the past. While this argument might hold water if we arguing about real lives in the real world, FF7 is a work of fiction. Its creators decided that these would be events we would see, and that Zack would be the lens through which we’d see them. Crisis Core is not the totality of these characters’ lives prior to the event of the OG. Rather, it consists of moments that enhance and expand upon our understanding of the original work. We learn the full extent of Hojo’s experimentation and the Jenova project; we learn that Sephiroth was actually a fairly normal guy before he was driven insane when he uncovers the circumstances of his birth. We learn that Aerith was a completely different person before she met Zack, and their relationship had a profound impact on her character.

A prequel is not made to contradict the original work, but what it can do is recontexualize the story we already know and add a layer of nuance that may have not been obvious before. Thus, Sephiroth is transformed from a scary villain into a tragic figure who could have been a hero were it not for Hojo’s experiments. Aerith’s behavior too invites reinterpretation. What once seemed flirty and perhaps overtly forward now looks like the tragic attempts of a woman trying to recapture a lost love.

If Cloud and Aerith were meant to be the official couple of the Compilation of FF7, you absolutely would not be spending so much time depicting two relationships that will be moot by the time we get to the original work. You especially would not depict Zack and Aerith’s relationship in a way that makes Aerith’s relationship with Cloud look like a copy of the moments she had with her ex.

Additionally, with Zack’s relationship with Angeal, we can see, that within the universe of FF7, a protagonist being devastated over the death of a beloved comrade isn’t something that’s inherently romantic. Neither is it romantic for said dead comrade to lend a helping hand from the beyond.

SE would also expect some people to play Crisis Core before the OG. If Cloud and Aerith are the intended endgame couple, then SE would be asking the player to root for a guy to pursue the girlfriend of the man who gave his life for him. The same man who died trying to reunite with her. This is to say nothing of Cloud’s treatment of Tifa in this scenario. How could this possibly be the intent for their most popular protagonist in the most popular entry of their most popular franchise?

What Crisis Core instead offers is something for fans of Aerith who may be disappointed that she was robbed of a great romance by her death. Well, she now gets that epic, tragic romance. Only it’s with Zack, not Cloud.

If SE intended for Cloud and Aerith to be the official couple of FF7, neither Zack nor Tifa would exist. They would not spend so much time developing Zack and Tifa into the multi-dimensional characters they are, only to be treated as nothing more than collateral damage in the wake of Cloud and Aerith’s great love. No, this is a Final Fantasy. SE want their main characters to have something of a happy ending after all of the tribulations they face. Cloud and Tifa find theirs in life. Zack and Aerith, as the ending of AC suggests, find theirs in death.

Cloud and Aerith’s relationship isn’t a threat to the Zack/Aerith and Cloud/Tifa endgame, nor is it a mere obstacle. Rather, it’s a relationship that actually deepens and strengthens the other two. Aerith is explicitly searching for her first love in Cloud, revealing just how deep her feelings for Zack ran. Cloud gets to live out his heroic SOLDIER fantasy with Aerith, a fantasy he created just to impress Tifa.

There are moments between Cloud and Aerith that may seem romantic when taken on its own, but viewed within the context of the whole narrative, ultimately reveal that they aren’t quite right for each other, and in each other, they’re actually searching for someone else.

This quadrangular dynamic reminds me a bit of one of my favorite classic films, The Philadelphia Story. (Spoilers for a film that came out in 1940 ahead) — The single most romantic scene in the film is between Jimmy Stewart’s and Katherine Hepburn’s characters, yet they’re not the ones who end up together. Even as their passions run, as the music swells, and we want them to end up together, we realize that they’re not quite right for each other. We know that it won’t work out.

More relevantly, we know this is true due to the existence of Cary Grant’s and Ruth Hussey’s characters, who are shown to carry a torch for Hepburn and Stewart, respectively. Grant and Hussey are well-developed and sympathetic characters. With the film being the top grossing film of the year, and made during the Code era, it’s about as “clean” of a narrative as you can get. There’s no way Grant and Hussey would be given such prominent roles just to be left heartbroken and in the cold by the film’s end.

Hepburn’s character (Tracy) pretty much sums it herself after some hijinks lead to a last minute proposal from Stewart’s character (Mike):

Mike: Will you marry me, Tracy?

Tracy: No, Mike. Thanks, but hmm-mm. Nope.

Mike: l've never asked a girl to marry me. l've avoided it. But you've got me all confused now. Why not?

Tracy: Because l don't think Liz [Hussey’s character] would like it...and l'm not sure you would...and l'm even a little doubtful about myself. But l am beholden to you, Mike. l'm most beholden.

Despite the fact that the film spends more time developing Hepburn and Stewart’s relationship than theirs with their endgame partners, it’s still such a satisfying ending. That’s because, even at the peak of their romance, we can see how Stewart needs someone like Hussey to ground his passionate impulses, and how Hepburn needs Grant, someone who won’t put her on a pedestal like everyone else. Hepburn and Stewart’s is a relationship that might feel right in the moment, but doesn’t quite work in the light of day.

I don’t think Cloud and Aerith share a moment that is nearly as romantic in FF7, but the same principle applies. What may seem romantic in the moment actually reveals how they’re right for someone else.

Even if Aerith lives and Cloud decides to pursue a relationship with her, it’s not going to be all puppies and roses ahead for them. Aerith would need to disentangle her feelings for Zack from her attraction to Cloud, and Cloud would still need to confront his feelings for Tifa, which were his main motivator for nearly half his life, before they can even start to build something real. This is messy work, good fodder for a prestige cable drama or an Oscar-baity indie film, but it has no place in a Final Fantasy. There simply isn’t the time. Not when the question on most players’ minds isn’t ‘Cloud does love?’ but ‘How the hell are they going to stop that madman and his Meteor that’s about to destroy the world?’

With Zerith’s depiction in Crisis Core, there’s a sort of bittersweet poetry in how the two relationships rhyme but can’t actually coexist. It is only because Zack is trying to return to Midgar to see Aerith that Cloud is able to reunite with Tifa, and the OG begins in earnest. In another world, Zack and Aerith would be the hero and heroine who saved the world and lived to tell the tale. They are much more the traditional archetypes - Zack the super-powered warrior who wants to be a Capital-H Hero, and Aerith, the last of her kind who reluctantly accepts her fate. Compared to these two, Cloud and Tifa aren’t nearly so special, nor their goals so lofty and noble. Cloud, after all, was too weak to even get into SOLDIER, and only wanted to be one, not for some greater good, but to impress the girl he liked. Tifa has no special abilities, merely learning martial arts when she grew wise enough to not wait around for a hero. On the surface, Cloud and Tifa are made of frailer stuff, and yet by luck or by fate, they’re the ones who cheat death time and time again, and manage to save the world, whereas the ones who should have the role, are prematurely struck down before they can finish the job. Cloud and Tifa fulfill the roles that they never asked for, that they may not be particularly suited for, in Zack and Aerith’s stead. There’s a burden and a beauty to it. Cloud and Tifa can live because Zack and Aerith did not.

All of this nuance is lost if you think Cloud and Aerith are meant to be the endgame couple. Instead, you have a pair succumbing to their basest desires, regardless of the selfless sacrifices their other potential paramours made for their sake. Zack and Tifa, and their respective relationships with Aerith and Cloud, are flattened into mere romantic obstacles. The heart wants what it wants, some may argue. While that may be true in real life, that is not necessarily the case in a work of fiction, especially not a Final Fantasy. The other canon Final Fantasy couples could certainly have had previous romantic relationships, but unless they have direct relevance to the their character arcs (e.g., Rachel to Locke), the games do not draw attention to them because they would be a distraction from the romance they are trying to tell. They’ve certainly never spent the amount of real estate FF7 spends in depicting Cloud/Tifa and Zack/Aerith’s relationships.

At last…the Remake, and somehow this essay isn’t even close to being over

Finally, we come to the Remake. With the technological advancements made in the last 23 years and the sheer amount of hours they’re devoting to just the Midgar section this time around, you can almost look at the OG as an outline and the Remake as the final draft. With the OG being overly reliant on text to do its storytelling, and the Remake having subtle facial expressions and a slew of cinematic techniques at its disposal, you might almost consider it an adaptation from a literary medium to a visual one. Our discussions are no longer limited to just what the characters are saying, but what they are doing, and even more importantly, how the game presents those actions. When does the game want us to pay attention? And what does it want us to pay attention to?

Unlike most outlines, which are read by a small handful of execs, SE has 23 years worth of reactions from the general public to gauge what works and what doesn’t work, what caused confusion, and what could be clarified. While FF7 is not a romance, the LTD remains a hot topic among a small but vocal part of the fanbase. It certainly is an area that could do with some clarifying in the Remake.

Since the Remake is not telling a new story, but rather retelling an existing story that has been in the public consciousness for over two decades, certain aspects that were treated as “twists” in the OG no longer have that same element of surprise, and would need to approached differently. For example, in the Midgar section of the OG, Shinra is treated as the main antagonist throughout. It’s only when we get to the top of the Shinra tower that Sephiroth is revealed as the real villain. Anyone with even a passing of knowledge of FF7 would be aware of Sephiroth so trying to play it off like a surprise in the Remake would be terribly anticlimactic. Thus, Sephiroth appears as early as Ch. 2 to haunt Cloud and the player throughout.

Likewise, many players who’ve never even touched the OG are probably aware that Aerith dies, thus her death can no longer be played for shock. While SE would still want the player to grow attached to Aerith so that her death has an emotional impact, there are diminishing returns to misdirecting the player about her fate, at least not in the same way it was done in the OG.

How do these considerations affect the how the LTD is depicted in the Remake? For the two of the biggest twists in the OG to land in the Remake — Aerith’s death and Cloud’s true identity in the Lifestream — the game needs to establish:

Aerith’s attraction to Cloud, specifically due to his similarities to Zack. This never needs to go past an initial attraction for the player to understand that the man whose memory Cloud was “borrowing” is Zack. Aerith’s feelings for Cloud can evolve into something platonic or even maternal by her end without the reveal in the Lifestream losing any impact.

Cloud’s love for Tifa. For the Lifestream sequence to land with an “Ooooh!” rather than a “Huh!?!?”, the Remake will need to establish that Cloud’s feelings for Tifa were strong enough to 1) motivate him to try to join SOLDIER in the first place 2) incentivize him to adopt a false persona because he fears that he isn’t the man she wants him to be 3) call him back to consciousness from Make poisoning twice 4) help him put his mind back together and find his true self. That’s a lot of story riding on one guy’s feelings!

The player’s love for Aerith so that her death will hurt. This can be done by making them invested in Aerith as a character by her own right, but also extends to the relationships she has with the other characters (not only Cloud).

What is not necessary is establishing Cloud’s romantic feelings for Aerith. Now, would their doomed romance make her death hurt even more? Sure, but it could work just as well if Cloud if is losing a dear friend and ally, not a lover. Not to mention, her death also cuts short her relationships with Tifa, Barret, Red XII, etc. Bulking those relationships up prior to her death, would also make her loss more palpable. If anything, establishing Cloud’s romantic feelings for Aerith would actually undermine the game’s other big twist. The game needs you to believe that Cloud’s feelings for Tifa were strong enough to drive his entire hero’s journey. If Cloud is shown falling in love with another woman in the span of weeks if not mere days, then the Lifestream scene would be much harder to swallow.

Cloud wavering between the two women made sense in the OG because the main way for the player to get to know Aerith was through her interactions with Cloud. That is no longer the case in the Remake. Cloud is still the protagonist, and the player character for the vast majority of the game, but there are natural ways for the player to get to know Aerith outside of her dialogue exchanges with Cloud. Unless SE considers the LTD an integral part of FF7’s DNA, then for the sake of story clarity, the LTD doesn’t need to exist.

How then does the Remake clarify things?

I’m not going go through every single change in the Remake — there are far too many of them, and they’ve been documented elsewhere. Most of the changes are expansions or adaptations (what might make sense for super-deformed chibis would look silly for realistic characters, e.g., Cloud rolling barrels in the Church has now become him climbing across the roof support). What is expanded and how it’s adapted can be telling, but what is more interesting are the additions and removals. Not just for what takes place in the scenes themselves, but how their addition or removal changes our understanding of the narrative as a whole vis-a-vis the story we know from the OG.

Notably, one of the features that is not expanded upon, but rather diminished, is player choice. In the OG, the player had a slew of dialogue options to choose from, especially during the Midgar portion of the game. Not only did it determine which character would go on a date with Cloud at the Gold Saucer, but it also made the player identify with Cloud since they’re largely determining his personality during this stage. Despite the technological advances that have made this level of optionality the norm in AAA games, the Remake gives the player far fewer non-gameplay related choices, and only really the illusion of choice as a nod to the OG, but they don’t affect the story of the game in any meaningful way. You get a slightly different conversation depending on the choice, but you have to buy the Flower, Tifa has to make you a drink.

So much of what fueled the LTD in the OG came from this mechanic, which is now largely absent in the Remake. Almost every instance where there was a dialogue branch in the OG has become a single, canon scenario in the Remake that favors Tifa (e.g., having the choice of giving the flower to Tifa or Marlene in the OG, to Cloud giving the flower to Tifa in the Remake). Similarly, for the only meaningful choice you make in the Remake — picking Tifa or Aerith in the sewers — Cloud is now equidistant to both girls, whereas in the OG, his starting point was much closer to Aerith. In the OG, player choice allowed you to largely determine Cloud’s personality, and the girl he favored — and seemingly encouraged you to choose Aerith in many instances. In the Remake, Cloud is now his own character, not who the player wants him to be. And this Cloud, well, he sure seems to have a thing for Tifa.

In fact, one of the first changes in the Remake is the addition of Jessie asking Cloud about his relationship with Tifa, and Cloud’s brief flashback to their childhood together. In the OG, Tifa isn’t mentioned at all during the first reactor mission, and we don’t see her until we get to Sector 7.

Not only does this scene reveal Tifa’s importance to Cloud much earlier on than in the OG, but it sets up a sort of frame of reference that colors Cloud’s subsequent interactions. Even as Jessie kind of flirts with him throughout the reactor mission, even with his chance meeting Aerith in Sector 8, in the back of your mind, you might be thinking — wait what about his relationship with this Tifa character? What if he’s already spoken for?

Think about how this plays out in the OG. Jessie is pretty much a non-entity, and Cloud has his meet-cute with the flower girl before we’re even aware that Tifa exists. It’s hard to get too invested in his interactions with Tifa, when you know he has to meet the flower girl again, and you’re waiting for that moment, because that’s when the game will start in earnest.

After chapter 1 of the Remake, a new player may be asking — who is this Tifa person, and, echoing Jessie’s question, what kind of relationship does she have with Cloud? It’s a question that’s repeated when Barret mentions her before they set the bomb, and again when Barret specifies Seventh Heaven is where Tifa works — and the game zooms in on Cloud’s face — when they arrive in Sector 7.

It’s when we finally meet her at Seventh Heaven in Ch. 3 that we feel, ah now, this game has finally begun.

It’s also interesting how inorganically this question is introduced in the Remake. Up until that moment, the dialogue and Cloud are all business. Then, as they’re waiting for the gate to open, Jessie asks about Tifa completely out of the blue, and Cloud, all of a sudden, is at a lost for words, and has the first of many flashbacks. That this moment is a bit incongruous shows the effort SE made to establish Tifa’s importance to the game and to Cloud early on.

One of the biggest changes in the Remake is the addition of the events in Ch. 3 and 4. Unlike what happens in Ch. 18, Ch. 3 and 4 feel like such a natural extension of the OG’s story that many players may not even realize that SE has added an whole day’s and night’s worth of events to the OG’s story. While not a drastic change, it does reshape our understanding of subsequent events in the story, namely Cloud’s time spent alone with Aerith.

In the OG, we rush from one reactor mission to the next, with no real time to explore Cloud’s character or his relationships with any of the other characters in between. When he crashes through the church, he gets a bit of a breather. We see a different side of him with Aerith. Since we have nothing else to compare it to, many might assume that his relationship with Aerith is special. That she brings something out of him that no one else can.

That is no longer the case in the Remake. While Cloud’s time in Sector 5 with Aerith remains largely unchanged though greatly expanded, it no longer feels “special.” So many of the beats that seemed exclusive to his relationship with Aerith in the OG, we’ve now already seen play out with both Tifa and the other members of AVALANCHE long before he meets Aerith.

Cloud tells the flowers to listen to Aerith; he’s told Tifa he’s listening if she wants to talk; told Bigg’s he wants to hear the story of Jessie’s dad. Cloud offers to walk Aerith back home; he offered the same to Wedge. Cloud smiles at Aerith; he’s already smiled at Tifa and AVALANCHE a number of times.

Now, I’m under no illusion that SE added these chapters solely to diminish Aerith’s importance to Cloud (other than the obvious goal of making the game longer, I imagine they wanted the player to spend more time in Sector 7 and more time with the other AVALANCHE members so that the collapse of the Pillar and their deaths have more weight), but they certainly must have realized that this would be one effect. If pushing Cloud/Aerith’s romance had been a goal with the Remake, this would be a scenario they would try to avoid. Notably, the other place where time has been added - the night in the Underground Shinra Lab, and the day helping other people out around the slums — are also periods of time when Aerith is absent.

Home Sweet Slums vs. Budding Bodyguard

Since most of the events in Ch. 3 were invented for the Remake, and thus we have nothing in the OG to compare it to (except to say that something is probably better than nothing), I thought it would be more interesting to compare it to Ch. 8. Structurally, they are nearly identical — Cloud doing sidequests around the Sectors with one of the girls as his guide. Extra bits of dialogue the more sidequests you complete, with an optional story event if you do them all. Do Cloud’s relationships with each girl progress the same way in both chapters? Is the Remake just Final Waifu Simulator 2020 or are they distinct, reflecting their respective roles in the story as a whole?

A lot of what the player takes away from these chapters is going to be pretty subjective (Is he annoyed with her or is he playing hard to get), yet the vibes of the two chapters are quite different. This is because in Ch. 3, the player is getting to know Tifa through her relationship with Cloud; in Ch. 8; the player is getting to know Aerith as a character on her own.

What do I mean by this? Let’s take Cloud’s initial introduction into each Sector. In Ch. 3, it’s a straight shot from Seventh Heaven to Stargazer Heights punctuated by a brief conversation where Tifa asks Cloud about the mission he was just on. We don’t learn anything new about Tifa’s character here. Instead we hear Cloud recount the mission we already saw play out in detail in Ch. 1 But it’s through this conversation that we get a glimpse of Cloud and Tifa’s relationship — unlike the reticent jerk he was with Avalanche, this Cloud is much more responsive and even tries to reassure her in his own stilted way. We also know that they have enough of a past together that Tifa can categorize him as “not a people person” — an assessment to which Cloud agrees. Slowly, we’re getting an answer to the question Jessie posed in Ch. 1 — just what kind of relationship does Cloud have with Tifa?

In Ch. 8, Aerith leads Cloud on a roundabout way through Sector 5, and stops, unprompted, to talk about her experiences helping at the restaurant, helping out the doctor, and helping with the orphans at the Leaf House. It’s not so much a conversation as a monologue. Cloud isn’t the one who inquires about these relationships, and more jarringly, he doesn’t respond until Aerith directly asks him a question (interestingly enough, it’s about the flower she gave him…which he then gave to Tifa). Here, the game is allowing the player to learn more about the kind of person Aerith is. Cloud is also learning about Aerith at the same time, but with his non-reaction, either the game itself is indifferent to Cloud’s feelings towards Aerith or it is deliberately trying to portray Cloud’s indifference to Aerith.

The optional story event you can see in each chapter after completing all the side quests is also telling. In Ch. 3, “Alone at Last” is almost explicitly about Cloud and Tifa’s relationship. It’s bookended by two brief scenes between Marle and Cloud — the first in which she lectures him about how he should treat Tifa almost like an overprotective in-law, the second after they return downstairs and Marle awards Cloud with an accessory “imbued with the fervent desire to be by one’s side for eternity” after he makes Tifa smile. In between, Cloud and Tifa chat alone in her room. Tifa finally gets a chance to ask Cloud about his past and they plan a little date to celebrate their reunion. There is also at least the suggestion that Cloud was expecting something else when Tifa asked him to her room.

In Ch. 8’s “The Language of Flowers,” Cloud and Aerith’s relationship is certainly part of the story — unlike earlier in the chapter, Cloud actually asks Aerith about what she’s doing and even supports her by talking to the flowers too, but the other main objective of this much briefer scene is to show Aerith’s relationship with the flowers and of her mysterious Cetra powers (though we don’t know about her ancestry just yet). Like a lot of Aerith’s dialogue, there’s a lot of foreshadowing and foreboding in her words. If anything, it’s almost as if Cloud is playing the Marle role to the flowers, as an audience surrogate to ask Aerith about her relationship with the flowers so that she can explain. Also, there’s no in-game reward that suggests what the scene was really about.

If there’s any confusion about what’s going on here, just compare their titles “Alone At Last” vs. “The Language of Flowers.”

I’ll try not to bring my personal feelings into this, but there’s just something so much more satisfying about the construction of Ch. 3. This is some real storytelling 101 shit, but I think a lot of it due to just how much set up and payoff there is, and how almost all of said payoff deepens our understanding of Cloud and Tifa’s relationship:

Marle: Cloud meets Tifa’s overprotective landlady towards the beginning of the chapter. She is dubious of his character and his relationship with TIfa. This impression does not change the second time they meet even though Tifa herself is there to mediate. It’s only towards the end of the chapter, after all the sidequests are complete, that this tension is resolved. Marle gives Cloud a lecture about how he should be treating Tifa, which he seems to take to heart. And Cloud finally earns Marle’s begrudging approval after he emerges from their rooms with a chipper-looking Tifa in tow.

Their past: For their first in-game interaction, Cloud casually brings up that fact that it’s been “Five years” since they’ve last, which seem to throw Tifa off a bit. As they’re replacing filters, Cloud asks Tifa what she’s been up to in the time since they’ve been apart, and Tifa quickly changes the subject. Tifa tries to ask Cloud about his life “after he left the village,” at the Neighborhood Watch HQ, and this time he’s the one who seems to be avoiding the subject. It’s only after all the Ch. 3 sidequests are complete, and they're alone in her room that Tifa finally gets the chance to ask her question. A question which Cloud still doesn’t entirely answer. This question remains unresolved, and anyone’s played the OG will know that it will remain unresolved for some time yet, as it is THE question of Cloud’s story as a whole.

The lessons: Tifa starts spouting off some lessons for life in the slums as she brings Cloud around the town, though it’s unclear if Cloud is paying attention or taking them to heart. After completing the first sidequest, Cloud repeats one of these sayings back to her, confirming that he’s been listening all along. By the end of the chapter, Cloud is repeating these lessons to himself, even when Tifa isn’t around. These lessons extend beyond this chapter, with Cloud being a real teacher’s pet, asking Tifa “Is this a lesson” in Ch. 10 once they reunite.

The drink: When Cloud first arrives at Seventh Heaven, Tifa plays hostess and asks him if he wants anything, but it seems he’s only interested in his money. After exploring the sector a bit, Tifa again tries to play the role of cheery bartender, offering to make him a cocktail at the bar, but Cloud sees through this facade, and they carry on. Finally, after the day’s work is done, to tide Cloud over while she’s meeting with AVALANCHE, Tifa finally gets the chance to make him a drink. No matter, which dialogue option the player chooses, Tifa and Cloud fall into the roles of flirty bartender and patron quite easily. Who would have thought this was possible from the guy we met in Ch. 1?

This dynamic is largely absent in Ch. 8, except perhaps exploring Aerith’s relationship with the flowers, which “pays off” in the “Language of Flowers” event, but again, that scene is primarily about Aerith’s character rather than her relationship with Cloud. The orphans and the Leaf House are a throughline of the chapter, but they are merely present. There’s no clear progression here as was the case with in Ch. 3. Sure, the kids admire Cloud quite a bit after he saves them, but it’s not like they were dubious of his presence before. They barely paid attention to him. In terms of the impact the kids have on Cloud’s relationship with Aerith, there isn’t much at all. Certainly nothing like the role Marle plays in developing his relationship with Tifa.

The thing is, there are plenty of moments that could have been set ups, only there’s no real follow through. Aerith introduces Cloud around town as her bodyguard, and some people like the Doctor express dubiousness of his ability to do the job, but even after we spend a whole day fighting off monsters, and defeating Rude, there’s no payoff. Not even a throwaway “Wow, great job bodyguarding” comment. Same with the whole “one date” reward. Other than a quick reference on the way to Sector 5, and Aerith threatening to reveal the deal to cajole Cloud into helping her gather flowers, it’s never brought up again, in this chapter, or the rest of the game.

Aerith also makes a big stink about Cloud taking the time to enjoy Elmyra’s cooking. This is after Cloud is excluded from AVALANCHE’s celebration in Seventh Heaven and after he misses out on Jessie’s mom’s “Midgar Special” with Biggs and Wedge. So this could have been have been the set up to Cloud finally getting to experience a nice, domestic moment where he feels like he’s part of a family. And this dinner does happen! Only…the Remake skips over it entirely. Which is quite a strange choice considering that almost every other waking moment of Cloud’s time in Midgar has been depicted in excruciating detail. SE has decided that either whatever happened in this dinner between these three characters is irrelevant to the story they’re trying to tell, or they’ve deliberately excluded this scene from the game so that the player wouldn’t get any wrong ideas from it (e.g., that Cloud is starting to feel at home with Aerith).

Speaking of home, the Odd Jobs in Ch. 3 feel a bit more meaningful outside of just the gameplay-related rewards because they’re a way for Cloud to improve his reputation as he considers building a life for himself in Sector 7. This intent is implicit as Tifa imparts upon him the life lessons for surviving the slums, and then explicit, when Tifa asks him if he’s going to “stick around a little longer” outside of Seventh Heaven and he answers maybe. (It is later confirmed when Cloud and Tifa converse in his room in Ch. 4 after he remembers their promise).

Despite Aerith’s endeavors to extend their time together, there’s no indication that Cloud is planning to put down roots in Sector 5, or even return. Not even after doing all the Odd Jobs. If anything, it’s just the opposite — after 3 Odd Jobs, Aerith, kind of jokingly tells Cloud “don’t think you can rely on me forever.” This is a line that has a deeper meaning for anyone who knows Aerith’s fate in the OG, but Cloud seems totally fine with the outcome. Similarly, at the end of the Chapter 8, Elmyra asks Cloud to leave and never speak to Aerith again — a request to which he readily agrees.

Adding to the different vibes of the Chapters are the musical themes that play in the background. In Ch. 3, it’s the “Main Theme of VII”, followed by “On Our Way” — two tracks that instantly recall the OG. While the Main Theme is a bit melancholy, it's also familiar. It feels like home. In Ch. 8, we have an instrumental version of ‘Hollow’ - the new theme written for the Remake. While, it’s a lovely piece, it’s unfamiliar and honestly as a bit anxiety inducing (as is the intent).

(A quick aside to address the argument that this proves ‘Hollow’ is about Cloud’s feelings for Aerith:

Which of course doesn’t make any damn sense because he hasn’t even lost Aerith at this point the story. Even if you want to argue that there is so timey-wimey stuff going on and the whole purpose of the Remake is to rewrite the timeline so that Cloud doesn’t lose Aerith around — shouldn’t there be evidence of this desire outside of just the background music? Perhaps, in Cloud’s actions during the Chapter which the song plays — shouldn’t he dread being parted from her, shouldn’t he be the one trying to extend their time together? Instead, he’s willing to let her go quite easily.

The more likely explanation as to why “Hollow” plays in Ch. 8 is that since the “Main Theme of FFVII” already plays in Ch. 3, the other “main theme” written for the Remake is going to play in the other chapter with a pseudo-open world vibe. If you’re going to say “Hollow” is about Cloud’s feelings for Aerith then you’d have to accept that the Main Theme of the entire series is about Cloud’s feelings for Tifa, which would actually make a bit more sense given that is practically Cloud’s entire character arc.)

Both chapters contain a scripted battle that must be completed before the chapter can end. They both contain a shot where Cloud fights side by side with each of the girls.

Here, Cloud and Tifa are both in focus during the entirety of this shot.

Here, the focus pulls away from Cloud the moment Aerith enters the frame.

I doubt the developers expected most players to notice this particular technique, but it reflects the subtle differences in the way these two relationships are portrayed. By the end of Ch. 3, Cloud and Tifa are acting as one unit. By the end of Ch. 8, even when they’re together, Cloud and Aerith are still apart.

A brief (lol) overview of some meaningful changes from the OG

One of the most significant changes in the Sector 7 chapters is how The Promise flashback is depicted. In the OG, Tifa is the one who has to remind Cloud of the Promise, in a rather pushy way, and whether Cloud chooses to join the next mission to fulfill his promise to her or because Barret is giving him a raise feels a bit more ambiguous.

In the Remake, the Promise has it’s own little mini-arc. It’s first brought up at the end of Ch. 3 when Cloud talks to Tifa about her anxieties about the upcoming mission. Tifa subtly references the Promise by mentioning that she’s “in a pitch” — a reference that goes over Cloud’s head. It’s only in Ch. 4, in the middle of a mission with Biggs and Wedge, where Tifa is no where in sight, that a random building fan reminds him of the Nibelheim water tower and the Promise he made to Tifa there. There’s also another brief flashback to that earlier moment in the bar when Tifa mentions she’s in a “pinch.” Again, the placement of this particular flashback at this particular moment feels almost jarring. And the flashback to the scene in the bar — a flashback to a scene we’ve already seen play out in-game — is the only one of its kind in the Remake. SE went out of the way to show that this particular moment is very important to Cloud and the game as whole. It’s when Cloud returns to his room, and Tifa asks him if he’s planning to stay in Midgar, that this mini-arc is finally complete. He brings up the Promise on his own, and makes it explicit that the reason he’s staying is for her. It’s to fulfill his Promise to her, not for money or for AVALANCHE — at this point, he’s not even supposed to be going on the next mission.

The Reactor 5 chapters are greatly expanded, but there aren’t really any substantive changes other than the addition of the rather intimate train roll scene between and Cloud and Tifa, which adds nothing to the story except to establish how horny they are for each other. We know this is the case, of course, because if you go out of your way to make Cloud look like an incompetent idiot and let the timer run out, you can avoid this scene altogether. But even in that alternate scene, Cloud’s concern for Tifa is crystal clear.

Ch. 8 also plays out quite similarly to the OG for the most part, though Cloud’s banter with Aerith on the rooftops doesn’t feel all that special since we’ve already seen him do the same with Tifa, Barret and the rest of AVALANCHE. The rooftops is the first place Cloud laughs in the OG. In the Remake, while Cloud might not have straight out laughed before, he’s certainly smiled quite a bit in the preceding chapters. Also, with the addition of voice acting and realistic facial expressions, that “laughter” in the Remake comes off much more sarcastic than genuine.

It’s also notable that in the Remake, Cloud vocally protests almost every time Aerith tries to extend their time together. In the OG, Cloud says nothing in these moments, which the player could reasonably interpret as assent.

One major change in the Remake is how Aerith learns of Tifa’s existence. In the OG, Cloud mentions that he wants to go back to Tifa’s bar, prompting Aerith to ask him about his relationship with her. In the Remake, Cloud calls Tifa’s name after having a random flashback of Child Tifa as he’s walking along with some kids. Again the insertion of said flashback is a bit jarring, prompting Aerith to understandably ask Cloud about just who this Tifa is. In the OG, this exchange served to show Aerith’s jealousy and her interest in Cloud. In the Remake, it’s all about Cloud’s feelings for Tifa and his inability to articulate them. As for Aerith, I suppose you can still read her reaction as jealous, though simple curiosity is a perfectly reasonable way to read it too. It plays out quite similarly to Aerith asking Cloud about who he gave the flower to. Her follow ups seem indicate that she’s merely curious about who this recipient might be rather than showing that she’s upset/jealous of the fact that said person exists.

For the collapsed tunnel segment, the Remake adds the recurring bit of Aerith and Cloud trying to successfully complete a high-five. While this is certainly a way to show them getting closer, it’s about least intimate way that SE could have done so. Just think about the alternatives — you could have Cloud and Aerith sharing brief tidbits of their lives after each mechanical arm, you could have them trying to reach for each other’s hand. Instead, SE chose an action that is we’ve seen performed between a number of different platonic buddies, and an action that Aerith immediately performs with Tifa upon meeting her. Not to mention, even while they are technically getting closer, Cloud still rejects (or at least tries to) Aerith’s invitations to extend their time together twice — at the fire and at the playground.

One aspect from these two Chapters that does has plenty of set up and a satisfying payoff is Aerith’s interest in Cloud’s SOLDIER background. You have the weirdness of Aerith already knowing that Cloud was in SOLDIER without him mentioning it first, followed by Elmyra’s antipathy towards SOLDIERs in general, not to mention Aerith actively fishing for information about Cloud’s time in SOLDIER. (For players who’ve played Crisis Core, the reason for her behavior is even more obvious, with her “one date” gesture mirroring Zack’s, and her line to Cloud in front of the tunnel a near duplicate of what she says to Zack — at least in the original Japanese).

Finally, at the playground, it’s revealed that the reason for all this weirdness is because Aerith’s first love was also a SOLDIER who was the same rank as Cloud. Unlike in the OG, Cloud does not exhibit any potential jealousy by asking about the nature of her relationship, and Aerith doesn’t try to play it off by dismissing the seriousness. In fact, with the emotional nuance we can now see on her face, we can understand the depth of her feelings even if she cannot articulate them.

This is the first scene in the Remake where Cloud and Aerith have a genuine conversation. Thus, finally, Cloud expresses some hesitation before he leaves her — and as far as he knows, this could be the last time they see each other. You can interpret this hesitation as romantic longing or it could just as easily be Cloud being a bit sad to part from a new friend. Regardless, it’s notable that scene is preceded by one where Aerith is talking about her first love who she clearly isn’t over, and followed by a scene where Cloud sprints across the screen, without a backwards glance at Aerith, after seeing a glimpse of Tifa through a tiny window in a Chocobo cart that’s about a hundred yards away.

The Wall Market segment in the Remake is quite explicitly about Cloud’s desire to save Tifa. In the OG, Aerith has no trouble getting into Corneo’s mansion on her own, so I can see how someone could misinterpret Cloud going through all the effort to dress as a woman to protect Aerith from the Don’s wiles (though of course, you would need to ask, why they trying to infiltrate the mansion in the first place?). In the Remake, Cloud has to go through herculean efforts to even get Aerith in front of the Don. Everyone who is aware of Cloud’s cause, from Sam to Leslie to Johnny to Andrea to Aerith herself, comments on how hard he’s working to save Tifa and how important she must be to him for him to do so. In case there’s any confusion, the Remake also includes a scene where Cloud is prepared to bust into the mansion on his own, leaving Aerith to fend for herself, after Johnny comes with news that Tifa is in trouble.

Both Cloud and Aerith get big dress reveals in the Remake. If you get Aerith’s best dress, Cloud’s reaction can certainly be read as one of attraction, but since the game continues on the same regardless of which dress you get, it’s not meant to mark a shift in Cloud and Aerith’s relationship. Rather, it’s a reward for the player for completing however many side quests in Ch. 8, especially since the Remake incentives the player to get every dress and thus see all of Cloud’s reactions by making it a Trophy and including it in the play log.

A significant and very welcome change from the OG to the Remake is Tifa and Aerith’s relationship dynamic. In the OG, the girls’ first meeting in Corneo’s mansion starts with them fighting over Cloud (by pretending not to fight over Cloud). In the Remake, the sequence of events is reversed so that it starts off with Cloud’s reunion with Tifa (again emphasizing that the whole purpose of the infiltration is because Cloud wants to save Tifa). Then when Aerith wakes, she’s absolutely thrilled to make Tifa’s acquaintance, hardly acknowledging Cloud at all. Tifa is understandably more wary at first, but once they start working together, they become fast friends.

Also interesting is that from the moment Aerith and Tifa meet, almost every instance where Cloud could be shown worrying about Aerith or trying to comfort Aerith is given to Tifa instead. In the OG, it’s Cloud who frets about Aerith getting involved in the plot to question the Don, and regrets getting her mixed up in everything once they land in the sewers. In the Remake, those very same reservations are expressed by Tifa instead. Tifa is the one who saves Aerith when the platform collapses in the sewer. Tifa is the one who emotionally comforts Aerith after they’re separated in the train graveyard. (Cloud might be the one who physically saves her, but he doesn’t even so much give her a second glance to check on her well-being before he runs off to face Eligor. He leaves that job for Tifa). It almost feels like the Remake is going out of its way to avoid any moments between Cloud and Aerith that could be interpreted as romantic. In fact, after Corneo’s mansion, unless you get Aerith’s resolution, there are almost no one-on-one interactions at all between Cloud and Aerith. Such is not the case with Cloud and Tifa. In fact, right after defeating Abzu in the sewers, Cloud runs after Tifa, and asks her if what she’s saying is one of those slum lessons — continuing right where they left off.

Ch. 11 feels like a wink-wink nudge-nudge way to acknowledge the LTD. You have the infamous shot of the two girls on each of Cloud’s arms, and two scenes where Cloud appears as if he’s unable to choose between them when he asks them if they’re okay. Of course, in this same Chapter, you have a scene during the boss fight with the Phantom where Cloud actually pulls Tifa away from Aerith, leaving Aerith to defend herself, for an extended sequence where he tries to keep Tifa safe. This is not something SE would include if their intention is to keep Cloud’s romantic interest ambiguous or if Aerith is meant to be the one he loves. Of course, Ch. 11 is not the first we see of this trio’s dynamic. We start with Ch. 10, which is all about Aerith and Tifa’s friendship. Ch. 11 is a nod to the LTD dynamic in the OG, but it’s just that, a nod, not an indication the Remake is following the same path. Halfway through Ch. 11, the dynamic completely disappears.

Ch. 12 changes things up a bit from the OG. Instead of Cloud and Tifa ascending the pillar together, Cloud goes up first. Seemingly just so that we can have the dramatic slow-mo handgrab scene between the two of them when Tifa decides to run after Cloud — right after Aerith tells her to follow her heart.

The Remake also shows us what happens when Aerith goes to find Marlene at Seventh Heaven — including the moment when Aerith sees the flower she gave Cloud by the bar register, and Aerith is finally able to connect the dots. After seeing Cloud be so cagey about who he gave the flower to, and weird about his relationship with Tifa, and after seeing how Cloud and Tifa act around each other. It finally makes sense. She’s figured it out before they have. It’s a beautiful payoff to all that set up. Any other interpretation of Aerith’s reaction doesn’t make a lick of sense, because if it’s to indict she’s jealous of Tifa, where is all the set up for that? Why did the Remake eliminate all the moments from the OG where she had been noticeably jealous before? Without this, that interpretation makes about as much sense as someone arguing Aerith is smiling because she’s thinking about a great sandwich she had the night before. In case anyone is confused, the scene is preceded by a moment where Aerith tells Tifa to follow her heart before she goes after Cloud, and followed by the moment where Cloud catches Tifa via slow-motion handgrab.

On the pillar itself, there are so many added moments of Cloud showing his concern for Tifa’s physical and emotional well-being. Even when they find Jessie, as sad as Cloud is over Jessie’s death, the game actually spends more time showing us Cloud’s reaction to Tifa crying over Jessie’s death, and Cloud’s inability to comfort her. Since so much of this is physical rather than verbal, this couldn’t have effectively been shown in the OG with its technological limitations.

After the pillar collapses, we start off with a couple of other moments showing Cloud’s concern over Tifa — watching over her as she wakes, his dramatic fist clench while he watches Barret comfort Tifa in a way he cannot. There is also a subtle but important change in the dialogue. In the OG, Tifa is the one who tells Barret that Marlene is safe because she was with Aerith. Cloud is also on his way to Sector 5, but it’s for the explicit purpose of trying to save Aerith, which we know because Tifa asks. In the Remake, Tifa is too emotionally devastated to comfort Barret about Marlene. Cloud, trying to help in the only way he can, is now the one to tell Barret about Marlene. Leading them to Sector 5 is no longer about him trying to help Aerith, but about him reuniting Barret with his daughter. Again, another moment where Cloud shows concern about Aerith in the OG is eliminated from the Remake.

Rather than going straight from Aerith’s house to trying to figure out a way into the Shinra building to find Aerith, the group takes a detour to check out the ruins of Sector 7 and rescue Wedge from Shinra’s underground lab. It’s only upon seeing the evidence of Shinra’s inhumane experimentation firsthand that Cloud articulates to Elmyra the need to rescue Aerith. In the OG, they never sought out Elmyra’s permission, and Tifa explicitly asks to join Cloud on his quest. Rescuing Aerith is framed as primarily Cloud’s goal, Tifa and Barret are just along for the ride.

In the Remake, all three wait until Elymra gives them her blessing, and it’s framed (quite literally) as the group’s collective goal as opposed to just Cloud’s.

In the aptly named Ch. 14 resolutions, each marks the culmination of the character’s arc for the Part 1 of Remake. While their arcs are by no means complete, they do offer a nice preview of what their ultimate resolutions will be.

With the exception of Tifa’s, these resolutions are primarily about the character themselves. Their relationships with Cloud are secondary. Each resolution marks a change in the character themselves, but not necessarily a change in Cloud’s relationship with said character. Barret recommits to AVALANCHE’s mission and his role as a leader despite the deep personal costs. Aerith’s is full of foreshadowing as she accept her fate and impending death and decides to make the most of the time she has left. After trying to put aside her own feelings for the sake of others the whole time, Tifa finally allows herself to feel the full devastation of losing her home for the second time. Like her ultimate resolution in the Lifestream that we’ll see in about 25 years, Cloud is the only person she can share this sentiment with because he was the only person who was there.

Barret does not grow closer to Cloud through his resolution. Cloud has already proved himself to him by helping out on the pillar and reuniting him with Marlene. Barret resolution merely reveals that Barret is now comfortable enough with Cloud to share his past.

Similarly, Cloud starts off Aerith’s resolution with an intent to go rescue her, and ends with that intent still intact. Aerith is more open about her feelings here than before, it being a dream and all, but these feelings aren’t something that developed during this scene.

The only difference is during Tifa’s resolution. Cloud has been unable to emotionally comfort Tifa up until this point. It’s only when Tifa starts crying and rests her head upon his shoulder that he is able to make a change, to make a choice and hug her. Halfway through Tifa’s resolution, the scene shifts its focus to Cloud, his inaction and eventual action. Notably, the only time we have a close-up of any character during all three resolutions (I’ll define close-up here as a shot where a character’s face takes up half or more of the shot), are three shots of Cloud when he’s hugging/trying to hug Tifa. Tifa’s resolution is the only one where Cloud arcs.

What of the whole “You can’t fall in love with me” line in Aerith’s resolution? Why would SE include that if not to foreshadow Cloud falling in love with Aerith? Or indicate that he has already? Well, you can’t just take the dialogue on its own, you how to look at how these lines are framed. Notably, when she says “you can’t fall in love with me,” Aerith is framed at the center of the shot, and almost looks like she’s directly addressing the player. It’s as much a warning for the player as it is for Cloud, which makes sense if you know her fate in the OG.

This is followed directly by her saying “Even if you think you have…it’s not real.” In this shot, it’s back to a standard shot/reverse shot where she is the left third of the frame. She is addressing Cloud here, which, again if you’ve played the OG, is another bit of heavy foreshadowing. The reason Clould would think he might be in love with Aerith is because he’s falsely assuming of the memories of a man who did love Aerith — Zack.

For Cloud’s response (”Do I get a say in all this?”/ “That’s very one-sided” depending on the translation), rather than showing a shot of his face, the Remake shows him with his back turned.

Whatever Cloud’s feelings may be for Aerith, the game seems rather indifferent to them.

What is more telling is the choice to include a bit with Cloud getting jealous over a guy trying to give Tifa flowers in Barret’s resolution. Barret also mentions both Jessie and Aerith in their conversation, but nothing else gets such a reaction from Cloud.

It also should go without saying that if Aerith’s resolution is meant to establish Cloud and Aerith’s romance, there should have been plenty of set-up beforehand and plenty of follow-through afterward. That obviously is not the case, because again, the Remake has gone out of its way to avoid moments where Cloud’s actions towards Aerith could be interpreted romantically.

Case in point, at around this time in the OG, Marlene tells Cloud that she thinks Aerith likes him and the player has the option to have Cloud express his hope that she does. This scene is completely eliminated from the Remake and replaced with a much more appropriate scene of father-daughter affection between Marlene and Barret while Tifa and Cloud are standing together outside.

The method by which they get up the plate is completely different in the Remake. Leslie is the one who helps them this time around, and though his quest to reunite with his fiance directly parallels with the trio’s desire to save Aerith, Leslie himself draws a comparison to earlier when Cloud was trying to rescue Tifa. Finally, when Abzu is defeated again, it is Barret who draws the parallel of their search for Aerith to Leslie’s search for his fiance, making it crystal clear that saving Aerith is a group effort rather than only Cloud’s.

Speaking of Barret, in the OG, he seems to reassess his opinion of Cloud in the Shinra HQ stairs when he sees Cloud working so hard to save Aerith and realizes he might actually care about other people. In the Remake, that reevaluation occurs after you complete all the Ch. 14 sidequests and help a bunch of NPCs. Arguably, this moment occurs even earlier in the Remake for Barret, after the Airbuster, when he realizes that Cloud is more concerned for his and Tifa’s safety than his own.

Overall, the entire Aerith rescue feels so anticlimactic in the Remake. In the OG, Cloud gets his big hero moment in the Shinra Building. He’s the one who runs up to Aerith when the glass shatters and they finally reunite. In the Remake, it’s unclear what the emotional stakes are for Cloud here. At their big reunion, all we get from him is a “Yep.” In fact, when you look at how this scene plays out, Aerith is positioned equally between Cloud and Tifa at the moment of her rescue. Cloud’s answer is again with his back turned to the camera. It’s Tifa who gets her own shot with her response.

Another instance of the Remake being completely indifferent to Cloud’s feelings for Aerith, and actually priotizing Tifa’s relationship with Aerith instead.

It is also Tifa who runs to reunite with Aerith after the group of enemies is defeated. Another moment that could have easily been Cloud’s that the Remake gives to Tifa.

Also completely eliminated in the Remake, is the “I’m your bodyguard. / The deal was for one date” exchange in the jail cells. In the Remake, after Ch. 8, the date isn’t brought up again at all; “the bodyguard” reference only comes up briefly in Ch. 11 and then never again.

In the Remake, the jail scene is replaced by the scene in Aerith’s childhood room. Despite the fact that this is Aerith’s room, it is Tifa’s face that Cloud first sees when he wakes. What purpose does this moment serve other than to showcase Cloud and Tifa’s intimacy and the other characters’ tacit acknowledgment of said intimacy?

(This is the second time where Cloud wakes up and Tifa is the first thing he sees. The other was at Corneo’s mansion. He comes to three times in the Remake, but in Ch. 8, even though Aerith is right in front of him, we start off with a few seconds of Cloud gazing around the church before settling on the person in front of him. Again, while not something that most players would notice, this feels like a deliberate choice.)

Especially since this scene itself is all about Aerith. She begins a sad story about her past, and Cloud, rather than trying to comfort her in any way, asks her to give us some exposition about the Ancients. When the Whispers surround her, even though Cloud is literally right there, it's Tifa who pulls her out of it and comforts her. Another moment that could have been Cloud that was given to Tifa, and honestly, this one feels almost bizarre.

Throughout the entire Shinra HQ episode, Cloud and Aerith haven’t had a single moment alone to themselves. The Drums scenario is completely invented for the Remake. The devs could have contrived a way for Cloud and Aerith to have some one-on-one time here and work through the feelings they expressed during Aerith’s resolution if they wanted. Instead, with the mandatory party configurations during this stage - Cloud & Barret on one side; Tifa & Aerith on the others, with Cloud & Tifa being the respective team leaders communicating over PHS, the Remake minimizes the amount of interaction Cloud and Aerith have with each other in this chapter.

On the rooftop, before Cloud’s solo fight with Rufus, even though Cloud is ostensibly doing all this so that they can bring Aerith to safety, the Remake doesn’t include a single shot that focuses on Aerith’s face and her reaction to his actions. The game has decided, whatever Aerith’s feelings are in this moment, they’re irrelevant to the story they’re trying to tell. Instead we get shots focusing solely on Barret and Tifa. While the Remake couldn’t find any time to develop Cloud and Aerith’s relationship at the Shinra Tower (even though the OG certainly did), it did find time to add a new scene where Tifa saves Cloud from certain death, while referencing their Promise.

A lot of weird shit happens after this, but it’s pretty much all plot and no character. We do get one more moment where Cloud saves Tifa (and Tifa alone) from the Red Whisper even though Aerith is literally right next to her. The Remake isn’t playing coy at all about where Cloud’s preferences lie.

The party order for the Sephiroth battle varies depending on how you fought the Whispers. All the other character entrances (whoever the 3rd party member is, then the 4th and Red) are essentially the exact same shots, with the characters replaced. It’s the first character entrance (which can only be Aerith or Tifa) that you have two distinct options.

If Aerith is first, the camera pans from Cloud over to Aerith. It then cuts back to Cloud’s reaction, in a separate shot, as Aerith walks to join him (offscreen). It’s only when the player regains control of the characters that Cloud and Aerith ever share the frame.

On the other hand, if Tifa is first, we see Tifa land from Cloud’s POV. Cloud then walks over to join Tifa and they immediately share a frame, facing Sephiroth together.

Again, this is not something SE would expect the player to notice the first or even second time around. Honestly, I doubt anyone would notice at all unless they watched all these variations back to back. That is telling in itself, that SE would go through all this effort (making these scenes unique rather than copy and pasting certainly takes more time and effort) to ensure that the depictions of Cloud’s relationships with these two women are distinct despite the fact that hardly anyone would notice. Even in the very last chapter of the game, they want us to see Cloud and Tifa as a pair and Cloud and Aerith as individuals.

Which isn’t to say that Aerith is being neglected in the Remake. Quite the opposite, in fact, when she has essentially become the main protagonist and the group’s spirtual leader in Ch. 18. Rather, her relationship with Cloud is no longer an essential part of her character. Not to mention, one of the very last shots of the Remake is about Aerith sensing Zack’s presence. Again, not the kind of thing you want to bring up if the game is supposed to show her being in love with Cloud.

What does it all mean????

Phew — now let’s step back and look and how the totality of these changes have reshaped our understanding of the story as a whole. Looking solely at the Midgar section of the OG, and ignoring everything that comes after it, it seems to tell a pretty straightforward story: Cloud is a cold-hearted jerk who doesn’t care about anyone else until he meets Aerith. It is through his relationship with Aerith that he begins to soften up and starts giving a damn about something other than himself. This culminates when he risks it all to rescue Aerith from the clutches of the game’s Big Bad itself, The Shinra Electric Company.

This was honestly the reason why I was dreading the Remake when I learned that it would only cover the Midgar segment. A game that’s merely an expansion of the Midgar section of the OG is probably going to leave a lot of people believing that Cloud & Aerith were the intended couple, and I didn’t want to wait years and perhaps decades for vindication after the Remake’s Lifestream Scene.

I imagine this very scenario is what motivated SE to make so many of these changes. In the OG, they could get away with misdirecting the audience for the first few hours of the game since the rest of the story and the reveals were already completed. The player merely had to pop in the next disc to get the real story. Such is not the case with the Remake. Had the the Remake followed the OG’s beats more closely, many players, including some who’ve never played the OG, would finish the Remake thinking that Cloud and Aerith were the intended couple. It would be years until they got the rest of the story, and at that point, the truth would feel much more like a betrayal. Like they’ve been cruelly strung along.

While they’ve gone out of their way to adapt most elements from the OG into the Remake, they’ve straight up eliminated many scenes that could be interpreted as Cloud’s romantic interest in Aerith. Instead, he seems much more interested in her knowledge as an Ancient than in her romantic affections. This is the path the Remake could be taking. Instead of Cloud being under the illusion of falling in love with Aerith, he’s under the illusion that the answer to his identity dilemma lies in Aerith’s Cetra heritage, when, of course, the answer was with Tifa all along.

Hiding Sephiroth’s existence during the Midgar arc isn’t necessary to telling the story of FF7, thus it’s been eliminated in the Remake. Similarly, pretending that Cloud and Aerith are going to end up together also isn’t necessary and would only confuse the player. Thus the LTD is no longer a part of the Remake.

If Aerith’s impact on Cloud has been diminished, what then is his arc in the Remake? Is it essentially just the same without the catalyst of Aerith? A cold guy at the start who eventually learns to care about others through the course of the game? Kind of, though arguably, this is who Remake!Cloud is all along, not just Cloud at the end of the Remake. Cloud is a guy who pretends to be a selfish jerk, but he deep down he really does care. He just doesn’t show this side of himself around people he’s unfamiliar with. So part of his arc in the Remake is opening up to the others, Barret, AVALANCHE and Aerith included, but these all span a chapter or two at most. They don’t straddle the entire game.

What is the throughline then? What is an area in which he exhibits continuous growth?

It’s Tifa. It’s his desire to fulfill his Promise to Tifa. Not just to protect her physically, but to be there for her emotionally, something that’s much harder to do. There’s the big moments like when he remembers the Promise in Ch. 4., his dramatic fist clench when he can’t stop Tifa from crying in Ch. 12, and in Ch. 13 when he watches Barret comfort Tifa. It’s all the flashbacks he has of her and the times he’s felt like he failed her. It’s the smaller moments where he can sense her nervousness and unease but the only thing he knows how to do is call her name. It’s all those times during battle, where Tifa can probably take care of herself, but Cloud has to save her because he can’t fail her again. All of this culminates in Tifa’s Resolution, where Tifa is in desperate need of comfort, and is specifically seeking Cloud’s comfort, and Cloud has no idea what to do. He hesitates because he’s clueless, because he doesn’t want to fuck it up, but finally, he makes the choice, he takes the risk, and he hugs her….and he kind of fucks it up. He hugs her too hard. Which is a great thing, because this arc isn’t anywhere close to being over. There’s still so much more to come. So many places this relationship will go.

We get a little preview of this when Tifa saves Cloud on the roof. Everything we thought we knew about their relationship has been flipped on its head. Tifa is the one saving Cloud here, near the end of this part of the Remake. Just as she will save Cloud in the Lifestream just before the end of the FF7 story as a whole. What does Tifa mean to Cloud? It’s one of the first questions posed in the Remake, and by the end, it remains unanswered.

Cloud’s character arc throughout the entire FF7 story is about his reconciling with his identity issues. This continues to develop through the Shinra Tower Chapters, but it certainly isn’t going to be resolved in Part 1 of the Remake. His character arc in the Remake — caring more about others/finding a way to finally comfort Tifa — is resolved in Ch. 14, well before rescuing Aerith, which is what makes her rescue feel so anticlimactic. The resolution of this external conflict isn’t tied to the protagonist’s emotional arc. This was not the case in the OG. I’m certainly not complaining about the change, but the Remake probably would have felt more satisfying as a whole if they hewed to the structure of the OG. Instead, it seems that SE has prioritized the clarity of the Remake series as a whole (leaving no doubt about where Cloud’s affections lie) over the effectiveness of the “climax” in the first entry of the Remake.

This is all clear if you only focus on the “story” of the Remake -- i.e., what the characters are saying and doing. If you extend your lens to the presentation of said story, and here I’m talking about who the game chooses to focus on during the scenes, how long they hold on these shots, which characters share the frame, which do not, etc --- it really could not be more obvious.

Does the camera need to linger for over 5 seconds on Cloud staring at the door after wishing Tifa goodnight? Does it need to find Cloud almost every time Tifa says or does anything so that we’re always aware of his watchfulness and the nature of his care? The answer is no until you realize this dynamic is integral to telling the story of Final Fantasy VII.

I don’t see how anyone who compares the Remake to the OG could come away from it thinking that the Remake series is going to reverse all of the work done in the OG and Compilation by having Cloud end up with Aerith.

Just because the ending seems to indicate that the events of the OG might not be set in stone, it doesn’t mean that the Remake will end with Aerith surviving and living happily ever after with Cloud. Even if Aerith does live (which again seems unlikely given the heavy foreshadowing of her death in the Remake), how do you come away from the Remake thinking that Cloud is going to choose Aerith over Tifa when SE has gone out of its way to remove scenes between Cloud and Aerith that could be interpreted as romantic? And gone out of its way to shove Cloud’s feelings for Tifa in the player’s face? The sequels would have to spend an obscene amount of time not only building Cloud and Aerith’s relationship from scratch, but also dismantling Cloud’s relationship with Tifa. It would be an absolute waste of time and resources, and there’s really no way to do so without making the characters look like assholes in the process.

Now could this happen? Sure, in the sense that literally anything could happen in the future. But in terms of outcomes that would make sense based on what’s come before, this particular scenario is about as plausible as Cloud deciding to relinquish his quest to find Sephiroth so that he can pursue his real dream of becoming at sandwich artist at Panera Bread.

It’s over! I promise!

Like you, I too cannot believe the number of words I’ve wasted on this subject. What is there left to say? The LTD doesn’t exist outside of the first disc of the OG. You'll only find evidence of SE perpetuating the LTD if you go into these stories with the assumption that 1) The LTD exists 2) it remains unanswered. But it’s not. We know that Cloud ends up with Tifa.

What the LTD has become is dissecting individual scenes and lines of dialogue, without considering the context of said things, and pretending as if the outcome is unknown and unknowable. If you took this tact to other aspects of FF7’s story, then it would be someone arguing that because there a number of scenes in the OG that seem to suggest that Meteor will successfully destroy the planet, this means that the question of whether or not our heroes save the world in the end is left ambiguous. No one does that because that would be utterly absurd. Individual moments in a story may suggest alternate outcomes to build tension, to keep us on our toes, but that doesn’t change the ending from being the ending. Our heroes stop Meteor. Cloud loves Tifa. Arguments against either should be treated with the same level of credulity (i.e., none).

It’s frustrating that the LTD, and insecurities about whether or not Cloud really loves Tifa, takes up so much oxygen in any discussion about these characters. And it’s a damn shame, because Cloud and Tifa’s relationship is so rich and expansive, and the so-called “LTD” is such a tiny sliver of that relationship, and one of the least interesting aspects. They’re wonderful because they’re just so damn normal. Unlike other Final Fantasy couples, what keeps them apart is not space and time and death, but the most human and painfully relatable emotion of all, fear. Fear that they can’t live up to the other’s expectations; fear that they might say the wrong thing. The fear that keeps them from admitting their feelings at the Water Tower, they’re finally able to overcome 7 years later in the Lifestream. They’re childhood friends but in a way they’re also strangers. Like other FF couples, we’re able to watch their entire relationship grow and unfold before our eyes. But they have such a history too, a history that we unravel with them at the same time. Every moment of their lives that SE has found worth depicting, they’ve been there for each other, even if they didn’t know it at the time. Theirs is a story that begins and ends with each other. Their is the story that makes Final Fantasy VII what it is.

If you’ve made it this far, many thanks for reading. I truly have no idea how to use this platform, so please direct any and all hatemail to my DMs at TLS, which I will then direct to the trash. (In all seriousness, I’d be happy to answer any specific questions you may have, but I feel like I’ve more than said my piece here.)

If there’s one thing you take away from this, I hope it’s to learn to ignore all the ridiculous arguments out there, and just enjoy the story that’s actually being told. It’s a good one.

#cloti

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stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale · 3 years

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Top 5 Reasons Javier Garcia’s Pretty Great

Of all the games in TWDG, A New Frontier seems to get the most shit. Stick around this fandom long enough and that’ll become apparently pretty quick, especially on other platforms such as reddit and instagram... and y’know, I get it. ANF is far from perfect, parts of the storyline go no where and characters don’t get the development they should have, a lot of people were upset that Clementine wasn’t the main playable protagonist, and certain character models look like... well, they look like potatoes.

Hell, I’ve talked to some people who flat out say they don’t even consider ANF as part of the canon and skip it when they replay the series, which.... harsh, but you do you. However, if you do skip over ANF for whatever personal reasons you have, you are missing out on what I would consider the best part of that game: Javier Garcia.

I love Javi, and I will stand by the fact that he’s a pretty damn good playable protagonist. I just wish more love and time was put into developing ANF to give him an even better story but y’know... Telltale was goin’ through shit, so we got this...

But, I still wanna talk about how great I think Javi is so c’mon, let’s take a walk.

5. Javi’s relationship with David

Now this might come off as a weird one, especially if your Javi has a more hostile relationship with David. Even so, I find the dynamic between Javi and David to be one of the more compelling aspects of ANF and I wish it was more front and center than it is but y’know.

So we got Javi, who is the younger, more irresponsible brother who became this hotshot baseball star only to lose it all by gambling. Then you got older brother David who is a military man with a couple kids and a second wife, and he’s always felt a little overshadowed by Javi. This creates this dynamic of brothers who do love each other, but don’t always know how to communicate and confide in one another and it can lead to a lot of tension or hostility.

The route I usually take with a Javier who tries his best with David, who wants this connection despite everything, who made the promise to their father to look out for David and be there for him, to stand with him when he needs it, y’know?

Some stand out moments for me is during the baseball flashback when David’s trying to open up about something, but struggles because Javi isn’t taking a hint about the serious nature, when they stand together on the roof, and the last conversation we see between them if David survives.

Oh, and ya can’t forget the “I love you”’s when David is two seconds away from murdering Javi... that’s the good shit.

And y’know, on the flip side where Javi is against David every step of the way, you can still argue that acts as a more tragic yet compelling story of two brothers who never saw eye to eye, never tried to, and it ended in tragedy... I personally don’t prefer this route, but to each their own.

Again, this is at #5 because it’s not handled the greatest and it’s a bit of an unpopular choice.... but I don’t care, Javi and his relationship with David is one of my favorites.

4. He’s pretty charming, isn’t he?

I’m sorry, I can’t help it.... if a charming character can make me laugh, then I almost always end up loving them. Javier Garcia is so damn funny and I love him for it.

Yeah, ANF is a mess but this dude makes it so much better with his dialogue, a great performance by Jeff Schine, great facial expressions, and just an overall charismatic air around him.

He’s just super likable, okay? Even when you play him as a total bastard, I have a hard time not enjoying his presence. I’ll be honest, if Javi wasn’t the playable protagonist or if he was this bland, watered down version of himself... I might be one of those people who skip over ANF.

He’s easily one of my favorite parts of this game and one of the few redeeming things about it.

3. His growth as a character

Like I mentioned in #5, when we first meet Javi he’s this irresponsible ex-professional baseball player who wasn’t around, even though his father was dying from cancer. After his father dies and he runs to try and make it home in time... he’s too late and David and their mother are pretty upset with him.

And then his father turns into a walker, and the apocalypse happens. Javi is now trying to survive with Kate, Gabe, and Mariana while everything goes to hell around them. But for someone known to not be around or to skip out when things get a little tough, Javi doesn’t abandon them. Nope, he stays with them for years, traveling around and surviving, making sure they have what they need.

By the end of the game? Javi’s proved to be a leader, proved that he’s better than he once was. Again, this is ANF so this growth isn’t super smooth or the greatest, but damn it, Javi makes it work.

He and his family, no matter the combo you got, are staying in Richmond and they’re going to try to start over and rebuild it, make it better than it was.... which I can only assume they succeeded because after that they were never heard from again.

Also, Javi is constantly having shit thrown his way and somehow he manages to pull through.

So good job, Javi, you did it.

2. Javi’s got a lot of force

Listen... Javi is so fun to play as. Like okay, I know that Telltale games don’t have the most complex combat system... you literally just push the buttons as they appear on screen. But I don’t care because Javi makes that fun.

Javi really puts all of his weight into each hit and you feel it. I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s something satisfying about the way Javi fights with a melee weapon, and it’s not something you feel when you play as Lee or Clementine. You do get it a few times when you place as Michonne in the mini-series, but even then, I would argue that Javi did it better.

It’s especially prominent towards the end of ep5 if you go after David and Gabe, and Javi’s on this motorcycle with his damn bat knocking over walker after walker until he finds them... then you get all this intense force when Javi is just gunning and beating down walker after walker to get to the vehicle Gabe and David are trapped in. I love it so much, it’s easily one of my favorite moments in ANF.

Don’t get me wrong, I have fun playing as Lee and Clementine, but Javier Garcia hits different, y’know?

1. He’s really trying his best to care for everyone, okay?

When we think of Lee as a playable protagonist, we tend to think about how wise he was, how he always seemed to know what he was doing and how much he was willing to sacrifice for Clementine... and when we think of Clem as a playable protagonist in S2, we’ve got this sad little girl who gets punished no matter what she does, she’s smart and often underestimated, but she makes plenty of mistakes which she learns from.

And then we have Javi who has a bit of both in him. He’s older and can have his moments of wisdom [like with Gabe and Clem] but he also has plenty of mistakes he’s gotta learn from and sometimes no matter what he does, everything goes to hell... but Javi does manage to stand out on his own among these two.

Javi does what he can, he tries his hardest to look after these kids even though he never planned to be a father figure, he works with Kate to make sure they’re safe. When he fucks up, he tries to make things right... even though it doesn’t always work out. He loves Gabe and Mariana, and you can see and feel his heartbreak when he’s the one to bury Mari after she’s killed.... and now he has Gabe, who’s hurting, and he does what he can to make sure he doesn’t meet the same fate which.... sometimes doesn’t work out depending on your ending.

I just-- he’s trying, okay? Javi is trying his best and I love him for it.

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Honorable Mentions

-Javi has some of the best deaths/fails moments... seriously, I could watch him confidently run right into those metal stairs and fall to his doom a hundred times. -He’s a literal disaster bi. -He fucking loves pudding and I mean, who doesn’t? Y’know? -His bromance with Tripp is pretty good until Tripp dies for death quota reasons.

---

So what are your thoughts on Javier Garcia? Do you agree with these reasons, or do you have any to add? Lemme know, it’s always fun to have character discussions.

Have any suggestions for future T5F’s? Feel free to send ‘em in! :D

Next week’s T5F

#twdg t5f #twdg javi #twdg david #twdg gabe #twdg mariana #twdg kate #twdg clementine

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Mortal Kombat: 15 Most Powerful Characters

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At the end of the day, Mortal Kombat is about a bunch of characters beating the crap out of each other for supremacy. Sure, they toss in stories about tournaments to protect Earth and wars against invading realms, but it all boils down to martial artists brutally punching the hell out of each other until one explodes into a pile of viscera and five ribcages.

Being a fighting game, you expect all the fighters to be on the same level. Even forgettable losers like Hsu Hao and Kai should stand a chance against gods and otherworldly overlords. A nigh-invincible megalomaniac villain can lose to one of their bumbling underlings just as easily as they can lose to the game’s main hero. At least, that’s ideally how fighting games should be balanced.

Storywise, it’s different. Certain characters are straight-up in their own leagues compared to others. Does Jarek really stand a chance against Shinnok? Would Li Mei last five seconds against Blaze? Does Kobra have what it takes to take down Raiden? Not on paper, no.

So here’s a list of the top 15 most powerful characters in the Mortal Kombat series. With this list, there are two main rules:

1) I’m going with the characters at their most powerful, not how powerful they are most of the time.

2) I’m going with the canon storyline. Otherwise, the list would just be made up of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon endings. No DC Universe crossover stuff and no guest characters in general. Sorry, Spawn.

Now let’s see who has the most juice in all the realms.

15. GERAS

This guy is so frightening that his power is more of a curse than a blessing. Geras has near endless experience, having lived through countless timelines over and over again, and is skilled enough to fight off Liu Kang and Kung Lao at the same time. He is also be completely unkillable, as his mastery over time reversal will undo whatever wounds befall him. Granted, Shao Kahn beat him into a blob of red pulp and Geras hasn’t been heard from since, but I’m sure he’ll be back to his old self soon enough.

The rough truth regarding Geras is that being unkillable doesn’t mean he’s unstoppable. In the initial Mortal Kombat 11 timeline, Raiden knocked Geras into an endless ocean of blood in which where Geras was doomed to sink for eternity. Yeah, I’ll be fine over here with my mortality.

14. SINDEL

In the early days, Sindel didn’t seem so tough. She was just a plot device in desperate need of pants. Then Mortal Kombat 9 happened and we got that scene where Shao Kahn empowered her with Shang Tsung’s soul and set her loose. Suddenly, Sindel turned into an Edenian John Cena and cut through most of the heroes like a hot knife through butter. Sub-Zero, Jax, Smoke, Kabal, Stryker, Jade, and Kitana all died by her hand in mere moments while Nightwolf had to sacrifice himself to take her off the board.

This is why Shang Tsung aimed to resurrect her in Mortal Kombat 11: Aftermath. Who else was going to help him get past Cetrion? And while Sindel did win one-on-one against Cetrion, the scene itself looked more like she stunned Cetrion enough for Fujin and Shang Tsung to capitalize and put her on the shelf. Had they not been there, I feel like Sindel would have eventually been overwhelmed. At least, that’s my interpretation.

13. CETRION

Cetrion is Mother Nature. That alone tells you what you need to know. Shinnok’s virtuous (yet still kind of evil) sister would be considered his equal if only she had a final form like him. Regardless, Cetrion is such a threat that Jax and Jacqui Briggs can only stand up to her for a limited time by wearing Kronika’s crown at a detriment to their own health. She also wiped out the rest of the Elder Gods, although that happened completely off-screen.

12. SHINNOK

Here we have Mortal Kombat’s version of Satan. Shao Kahn would later talk shit about Shinnok’s fighting skills, but he’s an Elder God and rules this reality’s version of Hell. He’s an absolute heavy hitter.

He also looks like a total dork when he’s in his base form, but thankfully his Corrupted Shinnok form makes up for that. Corrupted Shinnok is no joke, especially in Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero, where you’re better off cheesing it back to Earthrealm than fighting him head-on.

11. RAIDEN

Raiden was the guy so jacked up that they had to make up a reason for why he couldn’t take part in the first couple games’ tournaments. He was just there to give advice and moral support. What else would you expect from a god among men? He also thwarted Shinnok back in the day to save Earthrealm, meaning he was already a major piece of work by the start of the first game.

Raiden’s apex form is triggered whenever he wields Shinnok’s amulet. It doesn’t make him unbeatable, but it does put an extra pep in his step. The drawback is that it turns his eyes red and he becomes a total dick. Still a step up from him constantly tripping over his own feet on his way to consult the Elder Gods.

10. CASSIE CAGE

Cassie’s is one of the most powerful Mortal Kombat characters but there’s an asterisk. Seemingly more competent and driven than her father, Cassie is so skilled at using her green glow to the point that she was able to defeat Corrupted Shinnok. That’s because the Cage bloodline was bred and trained for the sole purpose of creating mortals who could slay gods. Her DNA is like kryptonite to the likes of Shinnok.

She does have some other impressive wins, like taking down revenant versions of Sindel and Liu Kang. Her Mortal Kombat X ending (which isn’t explicitly canon, but I have no reason to think it isn’t) has her kill Shujinko. Many fans consider that to be a bit on the bullshit side, but this Shujinko would have been 20 years older than the one from the previous continuity and wouldn’t have been powered up by the events of Mortal Kombat: Deception, so it’s not a big stretch (or a big enough deal) that Cassie could take out a martial artist Mr. Burns.

9. QUAN CHI

This sorcerer doesn’t have the raw power of the other main villains, and he gets completely clowned in Mortal Kombat X, but he is smart and sneaky enough to get what he wants most of the time. While overshadowed by Onaga, you also can’t forget that in the conclusion of Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, Quan Chi and Shang Tsung took down a handful of Earthrealm’s strongest warriors, defeated Raiden, then turned on each other with Quan claiming ultimate victory.

Various endings show that while he is working under Shinnok, he has the means to overthrow him if need be. This is especially apparent in Mortal Kombat 9, where Quan Chi has the rights to use necromancy on all of those slain during Shao Kahn’s invasion. He has a whole army of revenants at his disposal, and there are some serious heavy hitters mixed in there.

8. ONAGA

The Dragon King’s introduction came with so much hype that you could almost hear the other characters soil themselves in unison when he stomped onto the scene. On his own, Onaga was a wrecking machine, but in Mortal Kombat: Deception, he had the Kamidogu pieces, which made him completely unstoppable. Unstoppable enough that he shrugged off attacks from the united forces of Raiden, Shang Tsung, and Quan Chi. Add to that his ability to resurrect the dead and mind-control them and you had the ultimate threat.

EXCEPT…those Kamidogu pieces weren’t exactly unbreakable. I don’t know how hard those things are supposed to be, but in-game they would shatter just by walking into them. Either way, Shujinko was able to shatter them all himself and that depleted Onaga’s power enough to to end him. Being a reptilian juggernaut means only so much when you have such an overt off switch.

7. SHUJINKO

The most gullible hero of the Mortal Kombat franchise spent his entire life questing and fighting for what ended up being Onaga’s resurrection. In return, Onaga blessed him with Taskmaster powers. Shujinko can copy fighting styles from other warriors and has been doing so for decades.

That ended up being Onaga’s undoing, as Shujinko absorbed the abilities and fighting skills of just about every playable character in Mortal Kombat: Deception. After shattering the Kamidogu artifacts and removing Onaga’s invulnerability, Shujinko had no problem thrashing him. While experience was his ultimate weapon, the only thing really weighing him down was his aging and human mortality.

6. BLAZE

Blaze, by design, is a top tier beast. He’s the final boss in Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, a game that brings back every Mortal Kombat character in one massive roster. When guys like Onaga and Goro are playable and they’re working their way up to take on Blaze, it really says something about what this guy’s about. Not to mention he’s the catalyst for ultimate power, turning whoever can slay him into an enhanced, godly version of his or herself.

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While it seemed at first that new hero character Taven would be the one to end Blaze, Taven was instead slayed and the real winner was Shao Kahn. Unfortunately, this is where things get a little hairy because we don’t know if Kahn would have truly been able to defeat Blaze one-on-one or if, say, Taven wounded Blaze and Kahn took advantage. Either way, it looks like Blaze straight-up took the L and wasn’t the be-all/end-all after all.

5. SHAO KAHN

Shao Kahn has always been the go-to villain of Mortal Kombat, and as the recurring villain, he’s taken his lumps. He’s suffered defeats at the hands of Liu Kang, Raiden, and Kitana. When he took over Outworld, he killed Onaga by poisoning him because battle was too risky. So yes, Base Shao Kahn may be tougher than most, but he’s not invincible.

But then you have Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, which was Kahn’s real showcase. After dominating the free-for-all, Kahn was grabbed and taken away by Onaga. As foreboding as that would seem for Kahn, he not only bounded back from that, but he also ended up being the last man standing after slaying Blaze. That enhanced Shao Kahn’s strength even more and turned him into a multiversal threat, thwarted only because of Raiden’s desperate use of time travel.

4. KRONIKA

After years of telling us that Elder Gods were the ultimate beings, NetherRealm decided to reveal another tier of beings called Titans who rank even higher. So far we only know Kronika, the Keeper of Time, who is so overpowered that nearly everyone on the roster should have absolutely zero shot against her. She controls time like it’s nothing. Overcoming that isn’t like dodging a fireball.

Thankfully, Kronika has one major weakness: while she can rewrite history, she can’t omit the gods. She can’t create a world without Raiden. Raiden still can’t beat her one-on-one, but it’s through that loophole that Kronika ultimately meets her downfall.

2. LIU KANG (TIE)

The series’ initial protagonist was always fighting above his weight class. He spent the first four games taking down Goro, Shang Tsung, Shao Kahn, and Shinnok. His canon deaths came in the form of an ambush perpetrated by Shang Tsung and Quan Chi, and later an accidental frying from Raiden’s hand. In fact, he spent multiple continuities clashing with Raiden.

That was nothing compared to what he became at the end of Mortal Kombat 11. Two Liu Kangs from different parts of history merged together into one being, with Raiden handing over his godly power, giving us an incarnation of Liu Kang that was not only a god but had control over both electricity and fire. This was the upgrade needed to destroy Kronika and put Liu Kang in control of time itself.

2. SHANG TSUNG (TIE)

As it turned out, Fire God Liu Kang wasn’t equipped to wield Kronika’s magical hourglass for long without her crown, or else time would eventually collapse. Shang Tsung popped in to explain all this, making it clear that he was reality’s only choice. Liu Kang and Fujin realized that they had to give into Shang’s obvious trickery to save everyone.

By the end of his adventure, Shang Tsung had re-killed Kronika and wore her crown while empowered by the souls of Kronika, Raiden, Fujin, Shao Kahn, and Sindel.

Then Fire God Liu Kang popped in to take over. The two rivals faced off and the player was given the choice of which character they wanted to play as. As it is right now, we don’t know who won the epic battle in official canon, so consider Liu Kang and Shang Tsung to be tied until further notice.

1. THE ONE BEING

The most powerful being in Mortal Kombat is not playable in any of the games, nor has it appeared as a boss. In fact, the One Being is presumably too powerful to be portrayed in humanoid form at all. It’s the Galactus of the Mortal Kombat universe, though honestly even more threatening.

The One Being existed at the beginning of time, along with the Elder Gods, and initially fed off of them. The Elder Gods struck back and were able to break the One Being apart into the various realms. If the realms were to be merged back together, it would awaken the One Being once more and destroy all of existence. Despite their desire to be top dog, guys like Shao Kahn, Onaga, Shinnok, and Shang Tsung are unknowingly being influenced by this ominous force.

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The post Mortal Kombat: 15 Most Powerful Characters appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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cyberramblings · 4 years

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Kingdom Hearts BBS, DDD Blind Thoughts

Spoilers for Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep and earlier titles in the series. Also warning that I have insomnia and these are utter ramblings on the last 24 hours of blindly binging the Kingdom Hearts series as a total newcomer to the series. Haven’t played three yet and just started Dream Drop Distance. With that warning.....

Birth by Sleep was a ton of fun. We ended up needing to grind a little to make Aqua playable, but that ended up forcing me to learn the game mechanics much deeper, and even my friends leveled up their playing of the game! It was really cool to unlock some of the high tier spells like Triple Firaga and Thundaga Shot, although I do wish we had gotten to chance to unlock even more. I should remember how much more fun the game was after some internet research.

It was very satisfying to unlock the true ending so easily. We had only missed 2 of the 12 required Xehanort Reports. The 2 we needed involved grinding the arena for maybe an hour total and then 5 minutes of finding a treasure chest. We were then able to roll smoothly from Aqua’s finish into the final episode.

Aqua’s fight against Braig was laughable easy, but the final fight against Vanitas/Ventus was slightly tougher. The real challenge was fighting Terra/Xehanort but then the REAL challenge was phase 2 of that fight. I got them all on the first try! It was a really enjoyable flex of my gaming skills in front of the friends.

From a story standpoint, Birth By Sleep had my favorite story of any KH game so far, by a huge margin. I liked certain elements of the KH2 ending (Riku and Sora teaming up, Kairi’s keyblade) but BBS has been the only game where I had any sense of purpose or desire to see how it ends. They did a great job of having each of the 3 routes reveal new information even if played out of order (Xehanort taking over Terra, Vanitas having Sora’s face, Aqua taking care of comatose Ventus).

Obviously it helps to have Leonard Nimoy and Mark Hamill join the cast, plus Aqua’s VA absolutely dominates every scene she’s in. Terra’s VA reminds me a lot of Leon’s monotone edgy boy voice acting (David Boreanaz or otherwise). Of course Ventus shares a VA with Roxas, but the twist of Vanitas being Haley Joel Osmont is really great because he sounds so much older. I think it would have been easier to predict that twist if I had recently heard more of HJO’s Sora voice in Dream Drop Distance or KH3.

Aqua is, of course, the great standout character from BBS. From the start, we got attached to her because of her known prevalence in KH3 on top of her cool design, Arrow voice actress, and the fact that we could finally play a girl (plus one with more human proportions than Kairi). It worked out really well how we saved her for last and had to kind of unlock the secrets of her play style by finally mastering the various gameplay systems.

I much prefer the command deck system compared to the gameplay of KH2. To be fair, these are the only two KH games I’ve beaten. I’ve only barely touched KH1 and Chain of Memories. I felt like BBS did a good job of fusing the action gameplay of KH2 with the (potentially) satisfying deck building of CoM.

Re: Coded is a fucking mess. I might actually go back and play it on a DS emulator just to see the gameplay, but god damn the story is a flimsy excuse for a retread. I almost wish we had skipped it entirely, but just watching the opening and ending worked out pretty well. In the end, it’s literally just “Mickey is gonna give Sora the memories of all the other protagonists” which is badass but probably going to be mentioned again before being relevant. I will say that the ending with Riku and Sora being summoned by Yen Sid for the mark of mastery test is fucking badass and elicited quite the reaction from all three of us. The series is finally starting to have that feeling of “the stakes are high and I want to see what happens with these characters”.

This was expressed most fully in the intro to Dream Drop Distance. Step 1: invoke Disney Magic with a silhouette of magician Mickey. Step 2: Orchestral Simple and Clean. Step 3: use entirely new cinematic footage instead of splicing together an AMB. Step 4: show every keyblade wielder standing side by side. Apparently that’s enough to make me actually cry. We all got very excited by this intro, so it was a bit of a let down to start the game and be seemingly replaying KH1 again.

Of course that’s not the whole game, but I’m still not sure what the whole game is. Riku and Sora have to...wake the seven sleeping worlds to earn their mark of mastery? Are they dreaming all of this, or what? Seeing The World Ends With You was cute for like a second before realizing that I know almost nothing about it. Flowmotion is similarly kinda neat at first but quickly becomes annoying, but maybe it will grow on me with time.

Speaking of fun at first but quickly annoying: Dream Eaters. The Pokémon-esque system seems like a time waster that’s perfect for 3DS but maybe not so much for our tourist play through. The Dream Eater designs are cute when they’re on your team, but strike me as a bit annoying when fighting the same ones over and over. Heartless and Nobodies felt more generic, but that made them feel a little less repetitive to fight over and over. I see the same god damn rainbow colored Panda every god damn fight. To be fair, I think each world randomly contains certain types of Dream Eaters every time you visit it.

Speaking of Worlds, I’m not really looking forward to Hunchback of Notre Dame or Pinocchio world, but at least they’re new worlds instead of retreading Halloween Town, Agrabah, Olympus, Neverland for the millionth time. What I am looking forward to is The Grid from Tron Legacy! I don’t think we’ve seen any Disney world that specifically spotlight a sequel to a Disney world we’ve already seen. We revisit Halloween Town, Agrabah, Beast’s Castle, Olympus, Atlantica but only for some minor follow-up fluff. The Tron world in KH2 meant a lot to me having just seen the film. The Lightcycle combat could’ve been a little more true to the original, but the visuals were so faithful plus having Tron’s actual actor was so fucking cool. Sora and gang getting Tron outfits was so cool too. Also would’ve liked to have a disc fight, but the Sark/MCP fight was spot on. Hopefully we can get both of more in DDD!

It’s a perfect excuse to revisit The Grid since Legacy looks so different from the original. Now, The Grid is not a true world in KH2 but instead part of Hollow Bastion’s computer system. I’m curious if The Grid in DDD is a sleeping world or something that exists within another world, or if it is somehow connected to the KH2 Tron world (which would get real weird real quick if that version of the Grid is a copy of the original, but Legacy is supposed to be set in The Grid 30 years later).

Oh, I like that DDD has the command deck system but I don’t like the pets, I don’t like the link system, I don’t like reality shift, and I don’t like flowmotion. It just seems like BBS with all the RPG features crammed into the pet system with a bunch of gimmick infused into the combat system. Admittedly, gimmick is one of the biggest strengths of the KH franchise, but flowmotion just seems silly. Perhaps I’ll like it more when I get used to it and potentially get to customize the moves.

I’m not sure yet how I feel about the drop system, but I do like getting to play as Riku. I think multiple protagonists is a smart way to stretch the assets and tell 2 stories per world. I rather enjoyed the way Aqua, Terra, and Ventus interacted with some of the Disney worlds. Hopefully we get something similar in some of these worlds.

The dive mini game is definitely gimmicky nonsense clearly designed for the 3DS. In general though, all the games in these collections look great and feel great. I suppose that is why Days, Coded, and Back Cover are cutscenes: to keep the average quality of gameplay roughly somewhere in between KH1 and 2 between all the titles. In fact, I think KH1 is easily the worst feeling out of all the ones thus far. I’ve always complained about KH hopping between systems, but now I can’t really complain about that anymore. My complaint still stands about the games being overly complicated. Plus, the games are clearly taking themselves way too seriously, but that’s very clearly part of the charm.

Really, I suppose the games aren’t that complicated if you heavily condense Chain of Memories, cut out Coded, and try not to think too hard about the phone games. Then it just becomes: Sora defeats the heartless, Sora defeats the nobodies, Roxas backstory, Aqua/Terra/Ventus, training/prep montage, then KH3. Oh, and try to forget that somehow the upcoming rhythm game is canon.

#kingdom hearts #kh #kingdom hearts birth by sleep #birth by sleep #dream drop distance #kingdom hearts dream drop distance #kh ddd #kd: ddd #kh bbs #kh2

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indulgentia · 4 years

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Ogay I know this basically interests no one but I’ve been really wanting to elaborate on this one subject. As a small disclaimer to newbies or as a memo to myself. It mostly concerns my ( sorta overpowered ) vampire muse Gwi.

In this blog, we have three different vampire muses ( I may add more in the future ). All of which are somewhat made according to the standards of White Wolf’s storyteller tabletop game Vampire: The Masquerade. The game is pretty popular, having an intricate ( and sometimes confusing ) universe, with tight rules that really forces players and writers to think about every aspect of their characters, their actions and such. Why am I saying that? Mostly aimed at those who are not in the fandom and may get confused about these very same rules and standards.

YES, Gwi is a canonical character from a media that has nothing to do with the V:TM setting, but I really stretched his concept, character and timeline to accommodate him on the setting since I’m familiar with it since my teens. Because, I admit it, I didn’t really like his original source material, neither the drama entirely. I didn’t even like his face on the manhwa. He was the sole reason why I kept up with it to the end for I’m a sucker for a beautiful vampire. I haven’t been this bewitched for one ever since that homoerotic tension™ between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in Interview With The Vampire ( Vampire Chronicles were also an inspo for this setting btw ).

When you create a vampire OC to play in an adventure in this setting, usually there’s a lot of things you have to consider. Generally, an average vampire that wanders around in our contemporary age is somewhat “weak” and recently embraced. Vampires numbers tend to be controlled to avoid getting the attention of humans and other creatures, like werewolves, mages and, of course, hunters. Since I don’t want this to get more confusing than it already is, let’s just leave them aside and focus only on vampires. Vampires still may succumb to their thirst, which would make them easy targets, controlling their numbers also. Not to mention all the complicated politics and backstabbing that their history has had ever since the first city of vampires was created millennia before Christ. Falling asleep for long periods of times ( known as torpor ), would require either a lot of strength, reliable allies ( which needless to say are hard to find ), secretiveness, and luck to not be found out and be awaken at some point. And IF you get to wake up, you’d have very little humanity left on you and basically would not know A THING about where you are.

Long story short, for a vampire to last for so long in this particular setting, it takes a WHOLE LOT of power ( political, physical etc. ), cunning, strategy, self-control and SHEER LUCK. Characters that are 200/300+ years old in this setting are already pretty powerful. Some with high ranks in vampire hierarchy. A smidgen of them has reached 1.000+ years of age. Most of the vampires you see around have “weaker blood” ( also refered as “high generation”, that is, their distance from the original vampire, which, according to this mythology, is Caine yeah, that one from the Bible ).

One thing I want people that are not from this fandom to understand is that my take on Gwi wouldn’t be a playable character according to the standards of the game. He wouldn’t go in an adventure with a coterie and such. He’s an Elder. One that has used the system to his favour. He would be either an NPC or a Final Boss. Not unkillable, but you would have to make an unmeasurable effort to take him down, let alone kill him ( again ). My main struggle is that I frequently come across vampire ( and other species in general ) muses that are “old as balls” and can’t really grasp the understanding of how Gwi’s age plays a huge part not only on his characterization, but also on his powers ( supernatural, political, etc. ) and his views on society ( vampiric or otherwise ). Some people use the age just for shock value, which is totally okay and I encourage you to do that, but in this particular setting, the passage of the years is really important, especially when major events happen every once in a while. He saw with his very own eyes the world changing year after year, people’s lifestyle changing. and, more than anything, he saw, one after the other, his clan and sect mates fall. That affects someone’s mind for sure.

Gwi is and has always been a villainous character. He won’t be essentially nice to you unless he can take something from you ( be it a good laugh and entertainment or some important connection and exchange of favours ). I’ve attributed to him a rank that allows me to easily move him around and place him anywhere ( again, using the standards of the game ). I also encourage you to take a look at this post to have a notion of how his clan is usually played. Sure, I doubt he believes in half of the Catholic beliefs the sect he’s part of uses, he just used the premade structure of the sect ( Sabbat ) and applied on a territory without a great organisation of vampires ( since the other sect, Camarilla, was focused mostly on Europe ). I am considering the presence of another kind of supernaturals that exist in the setting ( Kuei-Jin Wan Kuei ) in his scenario, but since their numbers are smaller, it would be easier for vampires ( who can effectively increase their numbers by bitting and embracing new childers ) to set and take over the territory. I had an entire chain of command for Gwi, but that would be a topic for later.

I have two totally playable characters according to the rules. Junior and Allen are made to be your standard average vampires that go out in an adventure to save the world and such ( in spite of being AU versions of canonic characters too ). Their clans are actually playable even on the video-game versions ( here & here ) of this setting.

But since I seem to still be drawn back to this villain, I’m writing this to every one of my potential rp partners to not be mad or confused about him, and to be honest you can sincerely bring any doubt or concern you may have to me. I’m not an EXPERT on Vampire setting nor even on character conception, but I doubt there’s anything that can’t be solved with dialogue ♡

#﹙⠀♔⠀⋮⠀ꜱᴜʙᴊᴇᴄᴛ：GWI⠀»⠀ᴅᴇᴠᴇʟᴏᴩᴍᴇɴᴛ：HEADCANONS ！ ﹚#﹙⠀♔⠀⋮⠀ꜱᴜʙᴊᴇᴄᴛ：GWI⠀»⠀ᴅᴇᴠᴇʟᴏᴩᴍᴇɴ��：METAS ！ ﹚#﹙⠀long post ！ ﹚#( the post is long as fudge and I don't wanna clog anyone's dash )#( but it's about how Gwi's age plays an important part on his characterization following the standards of Vamp.ire: The Mas.querade setting #( this post is mostly a disclaimer for anyone who is not in the fandom and/or is used to see ''old as balls'' characters around. )#( he ISN'T this old and powerful for nothing I promise. )

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defeatedbyamerechild · 4 years

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I knew a was missing a few! XD

• Oceanflowershipping (Moon x Lillie) • Gothgfshipping (Yuri x Marnie) • Soulsilvershipping (Lyra x Silver)

Also, I had a weird idea of Concordia and Dawn being girlfriends?? Opinions?

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Hey, thanks for the ships!

Moon (Selene) x Lillie I give this one an A! I really like it! :D I said this before, but I ship my character in Sun (that is, my version of Moon, called Miranda) with Lillie. I just loved them together, they were both really cute girls. So yeah, I guess when I ship Miranda with Lillie I’m basically shipping Selene (Moon) with her (just with a custom name instead haha). So yeah, I love this ship! ^^

Yūri (Gloria) x Marnie This one? A as well! Love it! Very cute! Actually, all characters in Swsh are lovely, so I kinda support nearly all ships in the game (”Kids x kids” or “adults x adults” only, of course). But yeah, I totally support Gloria getting together with Marnie, and I think Marnie’s behavior could be interpreted as some sort of crush on the playable character. ^^

Lyra x Silver Oh my Arceus yes, oh my Arceus!!! A+ OTP!!! I love this ship so much! I ship them a lot, I was writing a fic with this ship, I mean, dude... I love this. I totally love this!!! AAAAgh!!!! I love Silver becoming a civilized person! I love Silver becoming friends with Ethan and Lyra! I love Silver falling in love for Lyra! I just love this ship!!!! XD

That’s it! This was a really good one! Hahahaha! ^^

Oh, almost forgot, about Concordia + Dawn... Well, you did say Concordia was 16 in your headcanon right? This is very important to take into consideration... I suppose it depends on what age you headcanon Dawn to be. If you headcanon her as 15 or 14 (minimum age imo), I suppose that would be OK. Still, I don’t like the ship idea much, because to me Dawn is much younger than that, she’s 12 at most in my hc... And to me Concordia is also above 20 years of age, I’ve talked about that before.

The biggest issue with the ship is the probable gap between their canonical ages. Since N is canonically between 18 and 20 in Black and White and it’s stated that his sisters raised him, we should presume that, in canon, they are supposed to be adults already, while Dawn is still a kid in Platinum. This is why, in my opinion, this ship would be problematic. Like, I get the idea: in an AU like yours in which Concordia is much younger, and considering we don’t know how much time has passed exactly between DPPt and BW, they might be more or less the same age at the time BW takes place, so they might get together without a problem... But making this ship OK relies entirely on giving them very different ages from what’s implied in canon material.

Basically, I wouldn’t ship them, because it’s way to easy for someone else to interpret that as p*do content in case they are not aware of your hc ages (since the official ages are most likely problematic to begin with) and that would suck.

#ship #collab #thanks #submission

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murasaki-murasame · 4 years

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A whole buncha shit went down in Chapter 12 today and we got a new Chimera fight to begin shaking up the shadow meta in preparation for the new mana spiral batch and the new Agito fight, but like 90% of my brainpower is currently being spent thinking about how the new influx of wyrmite rewards let me do another tenfold on the Valentine’s banner, which finally got me Epimetheus.

But I still have some thoughts on the new chapter so I’m gonna put them under a cut because of spoilers

I’m feeling extremely vindicated in my choice to dream summon Laranoa, since chapter 12 ended up having flame enemies, and she even showed up in the story, which is like the last thing I saw coming.

Even though my water team is probably my weakest one overall, I didn’t actually have too much difficulty with anything up until the last couple of Very Hard battles, which I wasn’t able to do, and probably won’t be able to for a while.

I still think that the higher difficulty main campaign maps are really fun and well-balanced, though. It’s pretty rare to get challenging content based around dealing with waves of mob enemies. It really forces you to play differently, especially in Very Hard where every enemy hits super hard.

And on the note of the main bosses in the chapter, I’m still wondering if the whole deal with the cube bosses is actually gonna lead somewhere. Thus far they’re just this giant question-mark with no real in-universe explanation or acknowledgement, and their whole sci-fi vibe and the cryptic references to space probes just feels like the exact opposite of how the rest of the game is. It’s possible that they’re just there to be challenging boss fights with no real context behind them, but I kinda hope something happens with them. Maybe once we’ve gotten one for each element.

Story-wise this chapter was shorter and a bit less eventful than I expected, but it was still really fun. It really feels like things are heating up now. Especially with how it ended, it really feels like the first half of a two-chapter story arc, so that’s probably why it felt kinda brief. It definitely raised a lot of interesting questions that’ll probably get addressed in the next chapter.

First of all, the big elephant in the room is the reveal that apparently we’re going to see the fifth heir in the next chapter, which just kinda came out of nowhere, lol. I really thought they’d be a mystery for longer than this.

It’s not like there’s anything to go on one way or another, but I kinda hope that the fifth heir is that wyrmclan leader we saw that looks a whole lot like Euden. But who knows.

They’re still a huge mystery, but the stuff with Phares in this chapter makes me think that the fifth heir is somehow involved in the whole concept of black mana and how it corrupts dragons, if we’re meant to assume that Phares showing up with the void dragons at the end of the chapter was related to him getting help from the fifth heir. Which might explain why Chelle and Leonidas seemed genuinely freaked out at the idea of Phares working with their mystery sibling. I don’t think the idea of black mana has been introduced or explored at all outside of the descriptions of the void bosses, so it’ll be cool if it gets properly explored soon.

And on that note, I really wasn’t expecting this chapter to provide an actual in-universe explanation for stuff like the void dragons and the IO bosses. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s nice that the void dragons aren’t just in their own little weird pocket of ambiguous canon.

It’s kinda weird to see the main story basically introduce the concept of void battles when those have been in the game forever, but it’s nice to see them finally addressing it, lol.

The whole deal with Leonidas talking about ‘dracoshifting’ is also totally a hint at a future game mechanic, isn’t it? People have been wondering for a while now if there’s going to be some sort of revamp to dragons as a mechanic to basically rebalance them according to the current needs of the endgame meta, and I could totally see some variation of what Leonidas did to Mars being used to explain a new mechanic about buffing existing dragons. I imagine that if we get to do it, we’d do it in a more humane way than Leonidas, but still.

I’ve been thinking ever since they introduced mana spirals for adventurers that dragons should probably get something like that to make them better, and I could see this basically being how they do it. I dunno exactly how they’d do it, but maybe it’ll be like promoting dragons to make them stronger and giving them a new sci-fi design like Mars has. There’s definitely a lot of old dragons that need some sort of buff to make them more relevant. I’d want it to be slowly rolled out for specific dragons that need it, though, like with mana spirals.

Mainly I think that the 60% strength dragons probably need a buff since we’re starting to get conditional 80% strength dragons, but there’s also other relatively weak 5-star dragons like Prometheus, Takemikazuchi, Nidhogg, etc, that could use a buff.

This also might be a good way for them to make it worthwhile to actually be shapeshifted for a while, instead of just using the dragon to use a single skill or to tank a hit. At the moment they’re basically all weaker than if you weren’t shapeshifted, but maybe this sort of buff would also lead to their shapeshifted forms being way better. Which would at least be great for characters like Xainfried, Mym, Lathna, etc.

I’m also kinda wondering now if this chapter might be setting up for Leonidas joining us and being playable eventually. It kinda feels like that’s what they’re setting up, but honestly I kinda hate all of Euden’s siblings and I don’t really want to see any of them become our allies, lol. Also Leonidas would probably just be a flame sword, and we really don’t need more of them.

On a similar note I think it’s pretty safe to say that we’re probably getting Gala Alex next month. I dunno if I’ll go out of my way to save for her, but we’ll see. I’m curious to see what her gala alt would play like, though, especially if she’s still a shadow unit. There’s just a whole lot of competition in shadow at the moment. Either way, I think she’ll probably end up being a sword. Shadow doesn’t really have any noteworthy sword units at the moment, so that’d be nice.

Once we get into March I might start saving for her, but for now I’m probably gonna put some resources into the new dragon banner, since all of the featured ones really interest me [especially Apollo since I don’t have him yet], and I just got Epimetheus so now I’m done with the Valentine’s banner.

That also reminds me that at this point it’s basically confirmed that both Epimetheus and the three old Valentine’s adventurers are permanent now, which is really interesting. I guess this means that later this year they’ll make the old Halloween and Christmas units permanent, too. That’d be a nice way to keep introducing new holiday units without it getting bloated and hard to manage. And honestly most of the older holiday units aren’t particularly good anymore, so there’s no real harm in making them permanent. RIP in pieces to all the people who whaled for V-Hilde, though, lol. Maybe now that she’s permanent she has a chance of getting a mana spiral to make her better.

Anyway, I’ve felt a little let down by some of the recent story chapters, but I ended up really liking this one. Now I’m excited to see what reveals and developments the next chapter brings.

I’m also still extremely hyped about the upcoming shadow mana spiral batch, and the new Agito fight. I’m still clinging onto my pipe dream wish of them improving Norwin by making him more like V-Addis or Natalie. I’ve actually been thinking some more about the different ways that could go [even after I made a whole post about it lmao], and I think it’d be interesting if in addition to adding an enmity effect to his S1, they added an effect to his S2 where he takes non-lethal damage relative to the amount of damage he does to the enemy with the skill, as a way to manually get him down to low health. So I guess in that case he’d be more like a shadow version of Chelsea, which could be fun. I also think there’s a lot of interesting things they could do with him by, say, adding a team health regen effect to his Blind = Team Strength ability. But who knows. I just want him to get some special attention and become genuinely good because I really love him, lol. Though in general I like the idea of them using mana spiral upgrades to basically give certain characters a whole different play-style. Sorta like how Karl can now be used more or less as a buffer, but that has more to do with D-Rathalos than Karl’s mana spiral. It’s still an interesting way to give older units a niche in the meta.

#murasaki rambles #dragalia lost #I immediately gave Epimetheus most of my Valentine's card items because he has all my uwus

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hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger · 5 years

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Spider-Man: Velocity #2 Thoughts

It continues to not be BAD...but it also continues to be a disappointment.

I think I and maybe other people need to start accepting that, as great as the game’s story was, the tie-in material is simply always going to be a step down. Looking back even the DLCs and prequel novel were not up to the same level.

But they were still good and to be honest better than City at War or Velocity have been thus far.

I don’t know why that is, maybe they had more time and people to help develop the stories, maybe there was more oversight from the head’s of the projects like Feige has with the MCU?

Either way the comic book forays of Gamerverse Spider-Man, whether it’s this comic, City at War or Spider-Geddon just haven’t been as good. They’ve not been godawful, and to be honest after the last 10 odd years that’s a miracle unto itself.

It rather reminds me of the MCU’s TV efforts. It is clear that the films are regarded as the core of the MCU and the ‘main events’ of them, whereas stuff like Agents of SHIELD were not and so the quality of those shows tended to not be as good as the movies. Almost like they were made to keep the train moving but the movies were the interesting destinations.

Perhaps that’s the thinking with these comics. Make sure the Gamerverse Spidey has a near constant presence month to month until the next DLC or sequel game comes out.

But let’s dive more into specifics of this issue.

As I said it isn’t bad, in some ways an improvement over the last issue. We get more Peter/MJ interactions, again not much romance going on but like I said last time that’s not a fault of the issue that’s just something I’d prefer to see.

Spidey isn’t as much of a buffoon but he does make one big dumb move I need to call out. So he is testing the Velocity suit and as part of the tests he decides to allow himself to be hit by a rocket launcher. He even refers to it as the moment of truth.

Not only is there still a question mark over where he is getting the technology and resources to make this suit, but you have to imagine if he has access to that stuff surely he has the means of testing it’s durability in a safer way. Couldn’t he just put the suit over a dummy and then use a rocket launcher on it himself, or use something else designed to test its durability?

Even if he doesn’t have anything like that where he works remember he has contacts with the police and Silver Sable who surely have weapons of their own. If he asks Yuri or Sable to borrow a rocket launcher or something and tells them why he wants it, I’m sure they’d trust him with one. He could even borrow one from a criminal he knocks out and return the ordinance to police custody.

Why does he need to take practically a 50/50 chance that he will be killed or critically injured to see if his latest gadget works? In fact thinking about it, why did he need to find crimes in progress to test the suit at all, even last issue? The problem last time was that the suit seized up. Combat wasn’t necessary to test that, he could’ve just swung around, done some flips, etc.

At least it matches the cover and in-game design now. And the idea of the suit boosting his speed has finally been raised and playing into the main story. I confess last issue I was confused as to what a ghost and the idea of speed have to do with one another, but apparently I totally missed out on the clues that the ‘ghost’ was really a speedster even though they seem obvious looking back, it was clever though I’ll give Hopeless that. I think that’s a great way to tie everything together although I’m at a loss as to who exactly the speedster is. It could be a reimagined version of Speed Demon I suppose but if not I’m at a loss right now.

Her look is a little underwhelming to be honest and I do wuestion somewhat how she can be so fast as to be invisible to the naked eye but can’t move through walls like the Flash. Maybe I’m missing something though as I presumed that was a standard feat amongst speedsters.

Ironically I wish the story would speed up and get to the part where Spider-Man himself exhibits faster abilities. It’s 2 out of a presumed 6 issues in and that still hasn’t happened yet.

Sticking with the tacky speed jokes I can make, another problem with the issue was how it abruptly stopped. It feels very much like the story was written start to finish and then shifted slightly to break up into parts. I’m not saying that’s what happened but i am saying that’s what it felt like.

In fact last issue had a problem with the ending too. it’s not so much the ending was bad it’s just seemed like it was setting up a cliff-hanger but when this issue begins…nothing. it is just a weird storytelling choice is all.

Let’s talk about the art as there are two points of criticism I have.

The first is that the architecture/layout of the building Spidey fights the speedster in is not clearly conveyed. I was under the impression the door leading into the file room they trap her in was located inside the greater Bugle building. And yet when Spidey gets tackled through that door they are suddenly outside. If the idea is that the speedster tackled him through that door and through the building to get him outside it wasn’t that clear to me.

That’s ultimately something of a nitpick, more significantly though is that the art, whilst it isn’t bad, is not great at times. Mary Jane in particular looks weird and off model at times. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it last issue but now I think I’ve figured it out. A lot of the time she looks like a Bratz doll.

Going back to the story, perhaps I’ve missing something, but how precisely is Norman Osborn not in major trouble if there is video footage of his painful experiments on human test subjects, conducted by himself of all people!

That was a negative for me but something that was more of a mixed bag was Mysterio

On the one hand as a general AU twist on Mysterio it is a neat idea…but it is also one very far away from the core concept of Mysterio as a showman, a film lover and so on. It wouldn’t be out of place in like Spider-Man: Noir or something but the Gamerverse tends to cut closer to canon, just updating it, grounding it and making it fit more for a playable experience. But like Vulture, Electro and Scorpion aren’t that different. Mysterio I feel is and to be blunt I’d rather he be reserved for a the full on AAA video game experience than be wasted on a tie-in comic.

Finally I’ll end with something more positive. I like that Peter is sceptical of the supernatural because it’s something that would appear dumb in the 616 universe where he’s met Ghost Rider and Thor. But in the Gamerverse, currently populated JUST by him and his villains and being more grounded, is more conductive for stuff like that

So yeah, right now it’s not baaaaaad but it’s also not much beyond the mere novelty of seeing the Velocity suit, Mysterio or just checking in on these versions of the characters. If you are THAT into the Gamerverse or new to comics and liked the game then go ahead and pick it up but if you are looking for are looking for a above average Spidey/comic story this is kind of skippable.

#Spider-Man #peter parker #mjwatsonedit #Mary Jane Watson #Mary Jane Watson Parker #mj watson #Marvel's Spider-Man #Marvel Gamerverse #Mysterio #quinten beck #Spider-Man PS4 #Spider-Man Playstation 4 #Insomniac Spider-Man #insomniac games

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ladala99 · 5 years

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Spyro Reignited Countdown - A Hero’s Tail

And finally we get... I guess it’s not really a return to form but it is a return to greatness.

A Hero’s Tail uses the Spyro characters and basic mechanics and makes it a modern (for the time) platformer. This does eliminate one of the franchise’s core features (finite gems), but ultimately, it did a good job and did the franchise justice.

And it also officially introduces Ember, who Spyro fanficcers liked to ship with Spyro, especially as a rival ship versus Cynder of later titles. Yes, that was a part of the fanbase I frequented. I am not sorry.

Gameplay

Spyro’s controls are brought to the modern (again, for the time) age, with a much more responsive camera and really that’s the only major difference. Spyro feels like Spyro. He flames, he charges, and he glides.

...Well, aside from the fact that they swapped the Flame and Charge buttons, and now you have to hold X to glide rather than just press it. I first played this game as a demo and legitimately thought the change was a mistake, but nope. Not entirely sure why it was made, but it was. Perhaps it aligns with other PS2 platformers better?

Mini rant, courtesy of how 3-year-old me remembered the controls: Circle is flame because it’s red and the mouth makes an O. Square is Charge because the sides are pointy. X is jump because the X is blue like air and you are in the air while jumping. Triangle is zoom in because the bottom represents a really wide view and the top represents a really narrow view. Why would you change this?

But anyway, it works for the game. Aside from not matching previous games, it’s easy to adapt to and the controls are very responsive. They’re not quite as tight as in the originals, but they’re very close.

Additional Playable Characters

We’ve got a few this time. There’s Hunter, Sparx, Sgt. Byrd and the new character Blink. Totally new. What are you talking about with the “but he appeared in a GBA game”?

While Hunter was technically playable before, this is the first time you can platform with him. His moveset’s pretty similar to Spyro’s, aside from one of his main attacks being very ranged. Aside from his arrows, he’s basically Spyro, but not as maneuverable. Yeah, he can scale walls and Spyro doesn’t in this game, but that ability originally belonged to Spyro, so it doesn’t feel unique.

What is unique is that one section that you’re forced to play as him as part of the story. That was neat. And frustrating because he does not platform as well as Spyro does, since his movements are floaty and you can’t correct them with gliding like you can Spyro’s, and this area has a lot of small platforms.

Sparx has a completely different gameplay style this time: rail-shooter. It’s honestly not that bad, especially in comparison to Season of Ice’s Speedways. I just prefer the other Sparx gameplay.

Sgt. Byrd, speaking of Speedways, takes over for Spyro during them. And his levels are definitely not designed in the same way the old Speedways were designed. It used to be that there was a clear linear path to take from one object to the next, but that is not the case here. I like these Speedways better than Season of Ice’s, but I don’t like them much.

As far as actual controls go, Sgt. Byrd does just fine. Sometimes his turning is a little difficult, but it works for how wide open the areas are.

Blink controls very similarly to Hunter, with the main difference being how the level is designed. Blink’s levels are all underground, having a specific set of enemies and such, and they’re all considered minigames with the goal of destroying Dark Gems. He suffers from the same floatiness as Hunter, and there’s certainly a lot of platforms. Somehow, though, his levels never got me stuck like Hunter’s did in that one section.

Sometimes I feel that Eurocom wanted to make a Blink game, not a Spyro game. While Blink’s levels are minigames, they’re really fleshed out and well-designed. They have plenty of variety, if not in appearance.

Collectables

Gems are not just currency to be used at Moneybags’ shop. They’re found everywhere, and can be collected from enemies multiple times. At the beginning you’ll be hurting for them, but by the end of the game you’ll have much more than you know what to do with. At least, that’s my experience.

Dragon Eggs return, with a twist. They’re pretty much optional, and much less valuable than the other main collectable. This time, dragon eggs come in different patterns and if you collect a set, you unlock a thing. A lot of those things are just the ability to play minigames from the main menu.

The things that I care about are the concept art gallery (as that’s always cool) and the Ember and Flame skins. Mostly Ember since I like playing as female characters. It’s just a skin, though, and it changes back to Spyro in cutscenes plus uses his sound effects. Still: first time skins are in the game, unless you count the color cheats!

Finally we get Light Gems. They’re used to power up gadgets and open doors. They’re required for progress in certain places, but not always. They’re always rewarded on the second round of minigames, which means everybody talks about how worthless Dragon Eggs are in comparison. We don’t want these unborn children, give us the shiny thing!

Oh, and Dark Gems. They aren’t collected, but destroyed. You need to smash all of them to continue. They’re just scattered around the levels. You’ll come across them.

Powerups

Supercharge returns! Sort of! It’s one of the powerups that the Professor unlocks for you when you collect enough Light Gems. It really doesn’t feel the same, and it’s used for a few doors, some of which you can’t just charge to from the pad.

There’s also invincibility which works like it did in Lost Fleet, allowing you to travel through acid. Just with a stricter time limit and now it makes Spyro metal rather than red.

Finally I’ll mention the orb-thingys that let you use a ranged version of your breath abilities. I literally have never used them, but they’re there. I can’t say one way or the other how useful they are, but they definitely are not necessary.

Other Modes

The other minigames, as all minigames repeat, are turrets and ball gadgets.

Turrets aren’t hard, but they are stressful. You need to protect the thing while other things try to steal/eat/whatever it. Or you need to protect yourself and hit a huge number of enemies. I don’t like this minigame. Especially the baby turtle one.

Ball Gadgets are much more fun to watch than they are to play. The controls work, but it takes a bit to stop. There’s also a couple of on-rails ones that are really trial-and-error. Even knowing what to do, you’re going to fast to react so you need to memorize every action.

Breath Abilities

This game continues the trend of having them! And acts like it’s the first time at the same time. Enter the Dragonfly is apparently not canon.

Fire acts like it always has. They didn’t do the particle effect thing like Enter the Dragonfly did so it moves forward with you as it should.

Electricity starts out as a weaker Fire and then ends up being much more useful. It takes longer to defeat enemies, but there are certain enemies that are immune to Fire but not Electricity. After a point, it’s not worth it to switch back, since Fire just isn’t universally useful like Electricity is.

Water is just used for puzzles. Nothing else. This is also the only time Water is an element in the series.

Ice freezes certain things (like steam vents so you can use them to pole spin), and enemies of course. There are certain enemies in the final area that are only weak to Ice. (Maybe Water too, but I haven’t tried) Otherwise it freezes enemies so you can charge them like in other games.

Bosses

Finally, we get some new ones!

Gnasty Gnorc returns as the first boss. He’s actually far stronger than he was in Spyro 1, ironically enough. The fight itself is a pretty fun platformer boss fight, but his personality... it’s so childish. It’s like they didn’t know who he really was before.

Ineptune is a new character. The fight itself is, again, great for this style of game. Her character is kind of forgettable, though.

And then we get Red, who we fight twice. The first time is actually harder if only for the fact that you’re in an icy arena and thus the controls are more slippery. He’s not a very complex villain, but his fights are pretty fun, but very similar to the other two.

Special mention to the mammoth, who wins via being in a cutscene. You never see him again, having no chance to best him. He is truly Spyro’s greatest foe.

Levels

Continuing from Attack of the Rhynocs, the levels are much more seamless. They’re still very distinct, but in a lot of cases (moreso early-on than later) they feel like the same level as you begin in.

And again like Attack of the Rhynocs, the levels don’t have concrete ends. You can check your map and see how many Dark Gems are left, but it doesn’t really feel like you’ve finished even after you smash them all.

There’s no main conflict to defeat or anything, it’s just exploring and smashing Dark Gems, and occasionally finding a Dragon Elder to give you new skills. You get a checklist, but it’s not the same.

The theming is fine, if generic. Older Spyro games tended to have an irony to them, but not this one. Everything is played straight. Which, of course, makes it so this game doesn’t stand out very much.

Story

I don’t even know if I fully understand it. So Red’s an evil dragon who mined some Dark Gems to spread evil throughout the lands. And the Elders are very hesitant to tell you more.

Eventually it comes out that Red used to be an Elder, but he betrayed them. I really don’t understand why they couldn’t just tell Spyro that. Do the Elders just have a reputation that they don’t want to sully or something?

We get no motivation on Red’s part, and normally I’d be fine with that, but with all the secrets I expect a bit more. Also: who’s Ineptune in all this?

There’s parts where I feel I missed a game. Ember knows Spyro, and Spyro appears to know Ember. I feel like I should know who Ineptune is just because of how little introduction she gets.

I read that there was going to be a TV show that got cancelled but the games didn’t, but it was literally one forum post and it may have just been someone making things up. It would certainly explain things, though.

Unique in the Series?

Yes and no. It definitely has a unique feel as far as the series goes, but it’s very generic at the same time.

A lot of what it introduces is used again in later games, even though that part of the series is very different.

But yeah, Water Breath, Pole Spinning, and Wall Kicking are unique to this game in the series. They aren’t unique in general (See: Mario. Yes, even Water Breath. See: Sunshine), but for the series, definitely.

It’s at that weird awkward part in which it’s not anything groundbreaking, but it’s still really good.

Conclusion

Best post-Insomniac Classic Spyro, if only by default. It’s generic for its time, bringing Spyro fully into said time. It works, it’s fun, and I wish there were more to this part of the series that weren’t... well, Orange.

#spyro #a hero's tail #video game review #spyro reignited

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kleeboy · 5 years

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okay im deleting and reposting this because i put a swear word in the tags and it wasnt even showing up in searches for my personal, and i don’t trust the mobile editor to fix my problems but its time 4 me to make a post

Here's what I’ve got for a Thunderbirds D&D AU! I'm not gonna get into numbers and stats and levels because I do that enough when I play normal d&d and I'm gay and tired. Also, there’s probably gonna be a touch of rule bending not only to reconcile d&d with the Thunderbirds canon but just to boost the fun factor a bit. It’s not like we’re setting up a playable campaign so it doesn’t really matter as long as we’re not making it unrecognisable as part of the d&dverse. At that point, you might as well just call it a fantasy AU (still lit tho lmao). This is mostly TOS based but I’ll add some notes on TAG stuff now and then in italics because I’m here to provide. It’s hefty, so everything's under the cut. Hopefully comprehensible.

IR (presumably going by some other name but we’ll just stick with that for sake of ease) is still a rescue organisation - it operates on a somewhat smaller scale but access to magic means it’s got a pretty big reach for typical d&d technology. It’s centred around an ancient deity that few people have heard of and even fewer worship. There’s only one known temple dedicated to said deity and it had been abandoned for a long time before they found it, so it’s currently being restored - if rather agonizingly slowly. Anyway, IR is deity-based because nothing screams “fight for a cause” like paladins! They’re paladins, mostly, is what I’m saying.

Jeff is likely an ex-adventurer, probably a paladin but I’m seriously considering cleric just for interest’s sake so sue me, I love clerics. His party did some pretty cool stuff back in the day, and adventuring pays well as long as you don’t die, so he’s pretty well off. He left the party and settled down in one place when Scott was born, and the rest of them presumably disbanded and went about their own lives eventually. Or maybe they’re still out there causing a ruckus. Who knows. Pretty easy to just say “and he’s not there anymore” for TAG, rationalise his disappearance as you please. Either way, at some point he decided to start an organisation that would make saving lives a bit more structured than the usual “Let's hope a squad of adventurers stumbles on our predicament” that people have been relying on.

Scott is a Battle Master archetype fighter who multiclassed into paladin. Battle Master provides the most appropriate mechanics for a field leader, and also seems like the sort of thing Scott would have been doing previous to IR. He’s the least proficient spellcaster of the group if only by virtue of his class, but access to paladin magic gives his fighting an extra kick which, along with the Battle Master maneuvers, makes him pretty damn dangerous with a sword. It also means he can cast Find Steed, and because said steed’s form can go beyond normal when permitted by the DM and we’re making the rules here I’m giving him a pegasus, which is about the fastest flying mount you could get as far as the monster manual goes. A roc would just be too much. Very VERY cool. But too much.

Virgil is a College of Lore bard into paladin. When it comes to support classes, nothing beats a College of Lore bard for versatility. He’s got the range, darling. Slap an arsenal of magic items on that and you’re well on your way to the d&d equivalent of Thunderbird 2. He has some good offensive spells and weapon training but mostly works to keep others from getting hurt. With a high constitution, the Tough feat, good armour and a shield he pretty much becomes a mobile wall to be put between danger and anyone who can’t take too many hits. Find Steed again lets me give him something interesting to ride, and what better than an owlbear. A big one. Not quite as appropriate stat-wise as the pegasus for Scott but when it comes to aesthetics I’m yet to find something as good as a bear-shaped and -sized owl.

John is predominantly a Divination wizard, with a low paladin level - two maximum - giving him access to a lot of powerful magic but leaving him, how do you say, squishy. Divination is gameplay-wise pretty underwhelming, with not many spells to its name, but for someone whose job is centred around keeping an eye on things, the ability to see very far away and receive premonitions is gonna be useful. The system by which distress calls are sent is giving me some concept trouble but when it comes to receiving it’s as easy as a focus with some capability to project images and sound, gear already necessary to cast Scrying. So, as in canon, rather than going out on missions (at least for the most part), it’s John’s job to keep tabs on incoming signals and active operations. This is all based in the previously mentioned temple - out of the way enough to let me call it a T5 equivalent. He also has the secondary job of making sure nothing else tries to take up residence in the decrepit building. They had to clear it of goblins the first time. As far as Eos goes I don’t have room for all my thoughts (so many) but let’s call her a sentient magic item. Additionally, TAG John probs gets a level or two in cleric.

Gordon is a paladin into druid, Circle of the Land (Coast). He and Alan didn't have any previous class levels before becoming paladins. Neither of his classes give any bonuses for it beyond proficiency for paladins but nobody can stop me from making his primary weapon a longbow, plus the Sharpshooter feat is helpful. Coast druid is the only subclass of any d&d class that has a specific focus on water and what could go wrong if we let him turn into animals? It also has some good circle spells, when he gets to that point. He’d probably have a lot of fun with Mirror Image. There was probably an incident that catalysed his becoming a druid, I'd like to think it's the equivalent of the boat crash just placed on a different point in the timeline. Might get into it at a later date.

Alan is just pure paladin, it's all he's really had time to do with his life so far beyond being a kid and growing up, y'know? I’ll get a little into the subclass here, all of IR’s 3rd level or higher paladins take Oath of Devotion. From the PHB: “These paladins meet the ideal of the knight in shining armor, acting with honor in pursuit of justice and the greater good.” Devotion’s core tenets are honesty, courage, compassion, honor, and duty. Also their Channel Divinity: Sacred Weapon is just really cool. Who doesn’t like glowing stuff, man. Alan's got some more powerful paladin abilities than any of his brothers but probably has the lowest total level regardless. Giving him the Athlete feat, which lets him jump and climb a lot easier, feels appropriate. He snuck a griffon home when it was a baby, and is trying to train it. It's not very well behaved and causes a ruckus when it gets bored but he adores it. One day it’ll make a phenomenal companion. For now, it will continue to attempt to eat his fingers.

Brains is an artificer! Love that class. Artificers, rather than casting spells (though they can do that), make magic items. The artificer class is from Unearthed Arcana and a lot of the mechanics can be hit or miss, it’s been revised many times by lots of different people. But when it comes to the basic idea, it’s the obvious choice for Brains. The less common a magic item, the longer it takes and harder it is to make. The higher level an artificer the more, and more powerful, their creations are. Pretty simple. Also pretty much every version of artificer you come across has some sort of option for a mechanical companion so there’s MAX for you.

Tin-Tin is also an artificer, with a few levels in paladin for good measure. Her time is split between making and repairing gear and going out on missions, and when on call is incredibly useful for lightning fixes and is incredibly creative when it comes to the ways magic items (and nonmagic items) can be used to get out of predicaments. This is the character who constantly has Inspiration. Kayo is an Assassin archetype rogue into paladin. Assassins do… a lot of damage. If you know much about d&d rules (I don’t expect you to), the only thing scarier than a bard, stat wise, is a rogue. +10 to stealth is pretty easy to get by 5th level, combine that with Sneak Attack and Assassinate and you can deal up to 26 damage in one hit with a dagger alone. I said I wouldn’t do any maths but I lied.

Penny doesn’t necessarily have any class levels, though rogue would be appropriate. She falls more under the NPC umbrella, somewhere between Noble and Spy, perhaps? NPCs have a lot less restrictions when it comes to what they can and can’t do laterally, but it’s harder to make them powerful without assigning a class. I also think it’d be really neat to use the fantasy setting to make her nonhuman. High elf would be fitting and cool, but she’d also make a fantastic tiefling. Though, like, call me biased, everyone would make a fantastic tiefling.

I think that’s all I’ve got to say on the matter right now. I have a lot more specific details that I’ll get to eventually but this post is more of a jumping off point listing some options for anyone else who might want to mess around with a d&d AU but doesn’t know where to start. Pick out things you like, ditch things you don’t, add whatever sounds cool, and honestly? Congratulations on getting through this whole thing. This post is kind of in shambles. And thanks! I love taking any excuse to pore over these books.

Shoot me an ask or something if anything’s too incomprehensible or there’s something up with the formatting. Later, skaters.

#thunderbirds #thunderbirds are go #dungeons and dragons #long post #kleeboy talk #no commentary in here because last time i said the f word and got put in the naughty corner

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spdtactics-a · 5 years

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keeping up with my hc that alts of a character, more often than not, are the same character but in a different costume, here’s a list of everyone with alts and deviations from that hc!

generally, there will be more than one version of a hero if

the two are from two different points in time ( ie; ike vs legendary ike-- leg. ike is older. )

the two are from different enough circumstances in their worlds ( ie; eirika vs mage eirika; mage eirika took a different path in life and studied magic. )

their entire concept is that they’re otherworldly in nature to begin with ( ie; the adrift alts )

they’re explicitedly stated to be from another world ( ie; veronica. i may disregard this one if i find it stupid, however. )

i know brave versions are supposed to be born in vaskrheim but they just don’t act differently enough from their canon selves for me to care. so yeah. in coralin’s order, they simply receive the brave outfits in vaskrheim... with the exception of brave veronica, who again was called from a different world’s embla.

if we ever get normal versions of alt-only heroes ( normal charlotte vs bride charlotte ), they will likely be the same person-- one exception right now would be normal hardin vs fallen hardin.

alts with improved weapons ( ie; sieglinde vs storm sieglinde ) bring the original weapon to vaskrheim to be granted new power-- which can then be replicated at the weapon refinery, if need be.

alts with different weapons/a new mount/etc ( ie; gronnblade vs giga excalibur and a pegasus ) are given the mount and weapon by the order-- after witnessing the alternate weapon, it can be replicated and given to the hero.

“but chii, heroes itself states--” shhh. i don’t care. since when have i ever cared about what intsys has to say?

so without further ado, here we go!

alm and brave alm will likely be the same person. we’ll see when he comes out.

alfonse and spring alfonse are the same person.

regular azura, new year’s azura, and legendary azura are the same person. performing arts azura is from conquest specifically, and adrift azura... well, is a child. ( there are three azuras total. )

caeda and bride caeda are the same person.

camilla and new year’s camilla, hot spring camilla, summer camilla, and spring camilla are all the same person. brave camilla, when she comes out, will likely be the same individual as regular camilla. adrift camilla is her own individual. ( there are two camillas total. )

catria and spring catria are the same person.

cecilia and winter cecilia are the same person.

celica and brave celica are the same person. fallen celica is her own individual ( there are two celicas total. )

chrom, spring chrom, and winter chrom are the same person. ... i’m actually undecided about horse chrom, but am leaning towards him being his own individual. ( there may be two chroms. )

cordelia, bride cordelia, and summer cordelia are all the same person.

corrin ( m ) and new year’s corrin are the same person. adrift corrin ( m ) is his own individual

corrin ( f ), and summer corrin are the same person. adrift corrin ( f ) is her own individual. ( between both genders, there are four corrins. )

dorcas and halloween dorcas are the same person.

eirika, legendary eirika, and winter eirika are the same person. mage eirika is her own separate individual, but may wear the winter alt if she really wants to. ( there are two eirikas. )

elincia and festival elincia are the same person. ( i know they list festival elincia as being from radiant dawn but she’s still called ‘princess’ instead of ‘queen’ so fight me. )

elise, summer elise, and hot spring elise are all the same person.

eliwood and valentine’s eliwood are the same person. brave eliwood will likely be the same person as well, but we’ll see when he comes out.

ephraim, legendary ephraim, brave ephraim, and winter ephraim are all the same person.

fae and winter fae are the same person.

fjorm and new year’s fjorm are the same person.

gunnthra and new year’s gunnthra are the same person-- but she is from an explicitly different nifl, as the gunnthra from this world is dead.

hector, valentine’s hector, brave hector, and legendary hector are all the same person. i debated on making legendary hector separate, but... nah. i might change my mind on this, making there be two hectors.

henry and halloween henry are the same person.

hinoka, kinshi hinoka, and hot spring hinoka are the same person.

hrid and new year’s hrid are the same person.

ike, brave ike, and valentine’s ike are the same person. legendary ike is his own individual. ( there are two ikes in total. )

inigo and laslow are from two different points in time, therefore are separate characters.

innes and summer innes are the same person.

jakob and halloween jakob are the same person.

kagero, spring kagero, and halloween kagero are the same person.

laegjarn and new year’s laegjarn are the same person-- but she is from an explicitly different muspell, as the laegjarn from this world is dead.

laevatein and new year’s laevatein are the same person.

leo and summer leo are the same person.

lilina and valentine’s lilina are the same person.

linde and summer linde are the same person.

lissa and winter lissa are the same person.

lucina, spring lucina, brave lucina, and legendary lucina are the same person. masked lucina is her own individual. ( there are two lucinas, one is going by “marth”. )

lyn, bride lyn, brave lyn, valentine’s lyn, and legendary lyn are all the same person.

marth, groom marth, and legendary marth are all the same person. masked marth is, once again, lucina.

micaiah and festival micaiah are the same person. brave micaiah will also likely be the same person, unless intsys goes the “possessed by yune” route for her or does somethng radically different.

mist and valentine’s mist are the same person.

myrrh and halloween myrrh are the same person.

niles and halloween niles are the same person-- but i use the name zero.

ninian and bride ninian are the same person.

nino and pegasus nino... i think are the same person. they don’t act differently enough to warrant being separate, they’re even both green tomes.

nowi and halloween nowi are the same person.

odin and owain are from two different points in time, therefore are separate characters.

olivia, performing arts olivia, and flying olivia are the same person.

olwen and thunderhead olwen are the same person.

reinhardt and sword reinhardt are the same person.

robin ( m ) and winter robin are the same person. fell robin -- grima -- is a separate individual.

robin ( f ) and summer robin are the same person. legendary robin -- grima -- is a separate individual. ( there are two robins and two grimas. )

roy, brave roy, and valentine’s roy are all the same person. legendary roy, if we’re actually getting him, will also likely be the same individual.

ryouma, legendary ryouma, festival ryouma, and hot spring ryouma are all the same person.

sakura, halloween sakura, and hot spring sakura are all the same person.

sanaki and bride sanaki are... different people, i think. it might just be the art but bride sanaki looks younger than normal sanaki. i may change my mind on this, but for now there are two sanakis.

sharena and spring sharena are the same person.

shigure and performing arts shigure are two separate people. performing arts shigure is from conquest specifically. ( there are two shigures. )

soren and valentine’s soren are the same person.

takumi, summer takumi, and new year’s takumi are all the same person. fallen takumi is his own individual, from conquest specfically.

tana and summer tana are the same person.

tharja, winter tharja, and bride tharja are the same person.

young tiki, summer young tiki, and legendary tiki are the same person.

adult tiki and summer adult tiki are the same person. ( there are two tikis from two different points in time. )

titania and valentine’s titania are the same person.

if we ever get a playable normal veronica, she will be separate from brave veronica.

xander, summer xander, and festival xander are the same person. veronica has her own xander as well... though i’m tempted to make embla xander the only xander and not give the order of heroes a xander at all.

zelgius and the black knight are the same person. literally all he does is take off his helmet. i don’t care. if we got zelgius in his marshall’s armour, then i’d make them separate and from different points in time. but he... just took off his helmet...

#♥┇it’s chii time. ( ooc )#♥┇summoner of askr. ( coralin / headcanon )#long post //#i don't think i missed anyone?

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pixelgrotto · 5 years

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The horrific Resident Evil playthrough, interlude three

Resident Evil’s a franchise that has almost as many spin-offs as it does main games, and when I told a friend several months ago that I was going to attempt a series playthrough, he was like, “Dude, aren’t there thirty of those?”

Thirty’s an exaggeration, but there are about eleven spin-off games, give or take a bunch of mobile quickies that only came out in Japan. I’m not counting the “big” spin-offs like Code: Veronica or the Revelations titles, because those are essentially mainline releases with pivotal, canon story elements. I’m talking about games like Resident Evil: Survivor, an early PS1 effort that tried to fulfill the series’ first person perspective fetish with clunky results, Resident Evil: Dead Aim, a light gun shooter, and Resident Evil: Outbreak, an online game that let you tag team with buddies to escape Racoon City.

I decided to pick and choose which of these spin-offs I’d sit down to play, since quite a few of ‘em are mediocre, others have components that are now difficult to get running (Outbreak’s online multiplayer) and I just didn’t have the necessary hardware, like a PS2 light gun, to fully enjoy stuff like Dead Aim. (If you want a more comprehensive study of all of these games, then check out Avalanche Reviews’ Resident Evil Retrospective, which he began at around the same time that I started this playthrough.) I finally settled on Resident Evil 1.5, Resident Evil Gaiden, Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles and Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles as the ones I was most interesting in experiencing...and honestly, it was a mixed bag.

Resident Evil 1.5 - This isn’t so much a game as it’s a leaked beta release of what would eventually become Resident Evil 2, and the reason I chose to play this is because it’s famously different from the final product. Thanks to lots of behind-the-scenes development drama, Resident Evil 1.5 (still shown as 2 in my screenshot up there) is an unfinished build that was scrapped and heavily reworked before it became the RE2 that we know today. The differences between this and the final version are stark - the famous Raccoon City Police Station is a modern office building rather than a gothic hall of weird puzzles and art, the enemies include strange foes like zombie gorillas, there was no partner zapping system, and there’s a whole different character available from the get-go named Elza Walker. Elza, initially just a random motorcycle-riding civilian who crashed into the police station during the zombie outbreak, later became Claire Redfield in order to create a connection with Chris Redfield of RE1. I’m kind of fascinated with her, since it’s rare to get a glimpse of a character that was totally revamped during a game’s development, and I mostly ignored Leon to dabble through portions of the playable build with her. I say “dabble” rather than “play” because you can’t exactly finish RE1.5 - all you can do is wander around rooms and use a debug menu to teleport to different spots before giving up and watching a playthrough of someone more experienced do this on YouTube. At the end of the day, RE1.5 is more of a fascinating look behind the curtain than it is an actual game, and the final version of RE2 is definitely superior. It’s no wonder why the devs decided that a drastic revamp was needed, since RE1.5, even in its unfinished state, feels kind of samey to RE1. That said, I remain enamored with Elza Walker and her slick motorcycle suit, and I ain’t the only one, since it’s available as a skin for Claire in the upcoming Resident Evil 2 remake.

Resident Evil Gaiden - RE Gaiden is a game that got infamously bad reviews upon release, with reviewers crapping on it for not being like the PS1 games. This is kind of unfair in hindsight, because it was released for the darn Game Boy Color, of all systems, and there was no way we were going to get an accurate copy of an experience which originated on hardware that was much more powerful. If anything, it shows how bad gaming journalism was in the early 2000s (you could make the argument that it still is bad, but that’s another story altogether), because honestly...I kinda enjoyed Gaiden? It’s flawed to be sure, but it comes darn close to taking the experience of “survival,” always at the heart of this series, and distilling it down to an 8-bit formula. The setting is a huge ship, just like Resident Evil Revelations (which oddly seems like it borrowed a lot of concepts from this game), and you’ve got to do the usual schtick of running around, collecting ammo and items and dodging zombies. Combat takes place from an RPG-esque first-person perspective that I liked because it struck me as an elegant reminder of Sweet Home, and you’ve got a constantly moving slider bar for each weapon with a key point in the middle that you need to hit in order to accurately fire off a shot. It’s novel but frustrating at times, since advanced weapons have the slider moving so damn fast, and it’s totally possible to end up in a fail state by running out of ammo. You can do this in any Resident Evil game, technically, but it feels more plausible here. Case in point - I got all the way to the final boss and was unable to beat him because I had no bullets. Dang! Still, despite its rough edges, Gaiden feels like a sleeper that didn’t quite deserve the bashing that it got upon release, and for a spin-off designed by a small British studio who had previously only made Mary Kate & Ashley and Tazmanian Devil games, it’s worth a look for people who always wondered what RE would be like in 2D.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles/Darkside Chronicles - I’m grouping these Wii rail shooters together because I expected to enjoy ‘em the most, since they contain remixes of the plots of RE1 to Code: Veronica and also new bits of lore, like the actual story of Umbrella’s downfall. (Why Capcom never stuck this in a mainline game and relegated it to a chapter in a Wii spin-off remains one of the company’s more bizarre franchise decisions.) Unfortunately, I couldn’t finish them, because I realized while playing both that...I don’t really like rail shooters very much. I mean, I think stuff like Time Crisis is okay in the arcade, when you’ve got a partner by your side and a physical zapper in your hand. But playing these after the fact and solo via the Dolphin emulator just isn’t as fun, though they are technically well made, for what it’s worth. I think my issue is that rail shooters take nearly all movement away from the player, and to me a vital facet of this series since day one has been exploration, so to be ushered from location to location with not much to do but blast zombies in the head just isn’t very appealing to me. The camera work in both games was also too much for me to handle, particularly in Darkside Chronicles, which has near constant shaky cam and gave me a headache after ten minutes. Overall, I think the new lore is worth checking out, at least via a YouTube collection of all the cutscenes, but I couldn’t bring myself to play these to completion. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, since I found the Time Crisis-style shoot ‘em up sections of RE5 and 6 to be kinda aggravating, but I was hoping to be surprised. This wasn’t the case, and part of me also finds both of these games to be something of a depressing reminder of the Wii era, where just about every major franchise got a gimmicky spin-off designed around the motion controls of Nintendo’s white box. It happened with Soulcalibur, it happened with Dragon Quest, and it happened with Resident Evil. The Umbrella Chronicles and Darkside Chronicles are certainly on a higher tier when it comes to Wii spin-offs, but...I still think they aren’t for me.

And with that, I wrap up this so-so experience of Resident Evil side stories just in time for the big B.O.W. in the room... Resident Evil RE2make releases in two days, and you bet that I’ve got it pre-ordered and ready to load.

All screenshots taken by me.

#pixel grotto #video games #now playing #resident evil #biohazard #resident evil 1.5 #biohazard 1.5 #resident evil gaiden #biohazard gaiden #umbrella chronicles #darkside chronicles

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hopoo · 6 years

Text

DEADBOLT Q&A

I tried to answer every question as honestly as I could, so I hope this is a good read. If your question isn’t there, it’s either identical to another one asked or joined together with another question. Cheers!

Q: In total, how much time does the campaign of Deadbolt span? It’s hard to tell, what with it being infinite nighttime and all.

A: I would imagine a month-ish. It is implied that the Candles are doing some sort of investigative work between missions, which would surely take some time. Q: Did you have any major inspirations for the visual design of DEADBOLT? A: John Wick is obviously the biggest one! Q: What would hopoo do if someone made a game completely based and inspired from Deadbolt and its… Concept? (with permission and not) A: There’s no way DEADBOLT is that unique in settings or thematics – ultimately, you know what’s right and what’s wrong when you’re inspired by a work, and so will everyone else! If you feel obligated to ask for permission, maybe you’re not exploring enough original ideas? Q: When will we get modding? if so could we get a simplified modding kit? Any plans for updating dedbort, even just the map editor? Feature for adding custom sprites, rotation tool, copypasta tool, just to name a few… A: So the thing with that is that the map editor is only half the equation – while the map editor may be writing stuff to files, it also has to be interpreted on the end by the DEADBOLT game itself. Therefore, adding features that aren’t supported in engine simply won’t work – it won’t know what youre talking about. While rotation is supported in the engine, it doesn’t know how to read that from the files, etc. I also am trying to avoid any legacy issues where old maps are required for old versions of DEADBOLT, or vice versa. Q: When is deadbolt 2 coming with werewolves and mummies A: Werewolves aren’t undead you dingus. But mummies could be cool.

Q: Will the stuff that came with the release of Deadbolt on Play Station, will be added on PC? A: Nope, that was sorta our deal-sweetener for getting on the Sony consoles. Q: Will we ever see expansion levels for Deadbolt or would we get Deadbolt 2 instead? A: DEADBOLT 2 maybe sometime

Q: Does Ibzan is gay? A: I haven’t really thought of the sexual orientation of any of the characters, and I definitely don’t want to pull a JK Rowling and retroactively assign them. So in terms of canon, that just hasn’t been explored.

Q: Would you prefer deadbolt 2 to be in 3d and 2d? Would you do a sequel? A: DEADBOLT is probably the narrowest design space I’ve worked with – there’s no dodging, insta death, insta travel attacks. By the end I felt very stretched out in terms of enemy design, and for that alone I’d think 3D. But hey, I may also just hate 3D by the end of RoR2 so who knows :^). I’d love to do a sequel one day, most likely from the perspective of Ibzan. But who knows! Q: Did Ibzan want to kill the Fire, or just try to reconcile with it? A: He just wanted to talk – but who knows what would’ve happened after the Fireplace rejected him? Q: Would you be interested in going back to the world of deadbolt sometime in the future? I remember hearing somewhere a 3D concept would be interesting to work on. A: I wish I was talented or driven enough to write comics for it – I think DEADBOLT is more about the stories of individuals, compared to RoR who is a story of the universe. I wrote the Cassette Tapes to reflect that. Q: Looking back, is there anything you’d change about Deadbolt? A: Hmmm… I just wish I somehow could expand more on the lore and gangs, and what their goals were. Gameplay-wise, it was a tad too short. I liked doing a few standard stages, and then a mix-up stage (sniper, trap, boss, etc) – maybe we could’ve fit in a few more rotations. Q: What’s your favourite loadout? A: Death/Taxes and Flashbang, like a scrub. Q: Would you ever be interested in restarting the asset suggestion thread A: I consider DEADBOLT to be done – as a 2 (now 3!) man team, we financially can’t do the games-as-a-service thing like most big companies can for smaller games like DEADBOLT. I also intended DEADBOLT to be a one-and-done thing as a contrast for Risk of Rain, which we updated for years after release.

=CONTROVERSIAL OPINION ALERT= I personally also think that EVERY game getting a bunch of DLCS and updates and patches for a long time is, in a way, exhausting as a player. I think it makes it hard to feel satisfied when you finished a game and it’s over and you feel completed in the journey, knowing it’s not ~technically~ over until the devs stop patching. I think it’s great for some games (mostly multiplayer-based ones), but some games you just gotta let… finish, on a good note. Semi-open ended endings are always unsatisfying, in my opinion, and so recently it just feels like you don’t ever complete a game. …On the flip side, we are planning on doing lots of post-launch support for RoR2 because it’s actually inline with our design goals, so don’t fret! Q: Will bugs like Scythe not having a cover sprite or some enemies not having a falling sprite (which causes the game to crash) be fixed? A: Which enemies have been missing a falling sprite? They should be resorting to idle, not crashing. Bosses? Q: Just wanted to say, you guys are my favorite games studio, hands down. Now for the question: Now that the Reaper has completed his task and is allowed to rest, what’s next? Is the Fireplace going to keep him resting for a while? Does our MC have another task to accomplish? A: The Fireplace has never let a reaper “rest” before - the reason he is allowed to rest is because Ibzan never got to, and the Fireplace is trying something different with you. This is unexplored territory for the both of them – presumably he just pets his cat and gets bored before getting back to work. Q: What happens to everyone else in the afterlife? A: People who aren’t in the Place? Who knows, and who cares about boring happy afterlife 😊 Q: I had a question about the lore. There’s mentions of places outside the city, across the river Styx. What are they and what are they like? A: The Styx connects the other realms together, including (presumably) wherever the demons came from. This is explored lightly in one of the demon cassette tapes. Q: Will you ever expand more on the world of deadbolt or are you 100% done with it at this point? A: Nope definitely not done, really wanna explore more one day Q: What’s your office address? For post and stuff, maybe I want to send you a box full of A4 sheets of paper with a thousand hoopters on each. A: Maybe this is the paranoia in me but I’m not comfortable posting my address online – you can just tweet it at me a thousand times instead Q: Did Ibzan think the flames would give warmth to the Dredged or was he just lying to them and using them for his own gain? A: He was lying to himself, but he did truly believe that this was going to work, because this (at the time, anyways) seemed like the only way out. Metaphor woawoawo Q: Could you add some sorta DEADBOLT reference into RoR2? Will the Reaper be playable in Risk of Rain 2 as a bonus? A: Definitely references happening in some form, but playable might be stretchin’ it a bit, especially since it’d be taking up the slot of some more in-universe secret character. Q: How excited are for RoR2? A: Honestly very nervous for the reception, with very big shoes to fill as a sequel for RoR. I just hope people like it, and that we don’t get burnt on 3D because there’s so many possibilities in the future for our games in 3D. Q: How are the Demons born? We know they’re made in birthing chambers, but then is it just like humans or is there anything specific needed for a demon to be born f.e. skeletons>suicide, zombies>overdose, etc. A: Demons aren’t undead and don’t naturally exist in the Place, which is why they have to be smuggled over – they exist in whatever version of hell is in the DEADBOLT universe, and are natural denizens of the underworld. Q: was izban hot before he died? A: The hottest Q: do all the nightclubs canonically have chris c. as the dj A: Yes Q: I love Deadbolt very dearly and i’ve listened to its soundtrack (particularly “Now I Am Become Death”) more times than i can remember. What’s your favourite tune from Deadbolt ? A: Defunktorum or The Proverbial Dust Biters Q: In the Hardmode Cassette Tape it talked about a Reaper that wasn`t the current Reaper that we play as in the Game. Was this Reaper Izban? Since in the tape, he talked about the fireplace as his friend and that could be why he wanted to go back to the fireplace through the portal at the end of the game, to revisit his friend. A: Yes yes and yes. This was most heavily implied in Ibzan’s “home”, which parallel yours. Q: Will RoR2 still have opportunities to create silly messy builds like covering the screen in missiles or releasing an endless stream of Thqwibs? If so, how are you working to mitigate the performance impact of those crazy builds? A: Yep! Currently we have a system that detects the average particle count in a scene and slowly adds a chance non-important effects (like hitsparks or impacts) don’t ever spawn. This will at some point also involve turning off expensive effects and reducing particle LODs. Q: I really love the attention to detail to the characters, environment, aesthetics and gameplay mechanics. Its themes on the criminal underworld and the supernatural give a unique identity in a high-octane/stealth pixel action game I have not seen before. Additionally what prompted or inspired you to make DEADBOLT in the first place? A: DEADBOLT in its entirety was supposed to be not-Risk of Rain. It’s a gorey, violent, moody singleplayer puzzle-stealth game. We were just burnt out from the Risk of Rain experience, and we also wanted to flex our design muscles a bit and show that hey, we’re not just a one-trick pony of gamedevelopment :^) Q: I just played through this game on PS4/Vita over the weekend. Huge fan of Risk of Rain. Even bought it through Limited Run Games. So I had to pick up Deadbolt (Didn’t previously know you had made it either.) and I love it. Its a super solid experience. I’m not sure I have any questions about it. I guess I was curious if co-op multiplayer was ever considered in development? Keep up the great work. Can’t wait to see what you guys make next. A: Nope, because of the reasons above – we wanted a single player game, since RoR was a multiplayer one. Q: First of all, congratulations!! I really loved the game since came out, I bought it for my birthday, since risk of rain made me fell in love with all the pixel art in it, deadbolt didn’t disappointed me!! Everything in it I love it! Thanks for the game!! Now the question You already answered about how the skeletons or vampires came to be in that Place, how the vampires are killed by their lovers, but, how a reaper, becomes to be a reaper? I mean a candle said “I’ve never been so close to one” A: Originally, the reapers were actually supposed to be from suicides – if I remember right, the reaper when going down the stairs to the docks still has the hole in the back of his head in his sprite. Currently, it’s not explored how a reaper is made – I think a bit of mystery is always needed in making a believable universe J Q: Lorewise how many reapers are there total? Why are they incredibly fragile compared to the undead? What makes the reapers not undead? A: IIRC there were 4 fireplaces in the final stage, which was supposed to represent the way the fireplace was communicating to all reapers in the field. Q: Do you like turtles? How about corgis? A: Yes, and yes (although there’s way too many in Seattle now). Q: Did you have any idea Chris would break out a whole band’s worth of musicians for the soundtrack? His work was superb and the OST remains my absolute favorite to this day. A: DEADBOLT OST was actually done with many people – it must be in the credits somewhere! If I remember right, there is at least a drummer and a musician.

Thanks for all the questions, and happy hunting :)

hopoo

#deadbolt

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cerastes · 6 years

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HEY DRIMO it's been a while since you did a big myth post so how about you tell me a cool story about my boi karna

Oh dear me, Hindu mythos, damn, ok, so, first rule of Hindu mythos is that you all have to wear your seat belts while reading this. If you don’t, you are susceptible to immense physical and spiritual damage, enough that it might kick you right out of the cycle of reincarnation, and then the Mythos Retelling Collective (MRC) will revoke my license due to Irresponsible Sharing of Intense Tales (art. 23847). Are you all strapped in? Y’all got your helmets? Alright alright, let’s get this show on the road.

SO, KARNA. I assume most of you are familiar with Karna having Big Strength and being god damn unkillable. Ok, so, it goes beyond that. It goes at least three Milky Ways in width beyond that. Originally known by his other name, Vasusena (and this dude has like 14 different names), Karna is the main protagonist of the Hindu epic, Mahabharata, and–

Oh, right, before I can tell you anything about the Mahabharata, or about Hindu mythos in general, I need to explain power levels. So you know how in Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Vegeta and Nappa use “Raditz” as a unit of measure for power levels and ki? “My power level is 500 Raditz.” “My power level is 23000 Raditz”, the joke being that Raditz was such a weak grunt that his meager total power can be used as a unit as you would with centimeters? Ok, this is actually canon in Hindu mythos. They have a scale of power levels, referred to as “Levels of Warrior Excellence”. The levels are:

Ardha-rathi: The lowest level, meaning literally “Half of a Rathi”. Read the next section for a more elaborate explanation, but this is Yamcha-tier, basically, the weakest of the badasses.

Rathi: It almost sounds like Raditz, doesn’t it? Well, Rathi is the unit by which all the other levels of Warrior Excellence are measured, as well as a rank by itself. A Rathi is an individual so powerful and skilled, that they can do battle with 1000 regular warriors simultaneously. This is the “Dynasty Warriors Playable Character” tier: Strong, but still susceptible to frames per seconds drops and getting stunlocked by arrows.

Atirathi: HERE is where things get spicy. An Atirathi is a warrior that can fight with six Rathi simultaneously. This is the level of strength possessed by Kevin by the time of Home Alone 2.

Ekarathi: You thought six was impressive? TRY EIGHT RATHI SIMULTANEOUSLY. We are entering Popeye-with-spinach levels of world-ending strength now.

Maharathi: The top level, the cream of the crop, the true definition of “Fuckhouse”. Those who reach this level are immensely powerful, and can do battle with 12 or more Rathi simultaneously. That is 12000 asses worth of whoopings. This is where you favorite Touhou is, obviously, and fuck what everyone else says.

Their measure of unit is basically “How many thousands of dudes can this person fight, or how many people that can fight a thousand people at once can this person fight?”, which, in other words, means that India has not fucked around a single day in it history.

So you might be wondering, “where’s Karna in all of this?”. Well, Chili Con Karna is SO MINDBOGGLINGLY STRONG AND SPICY that he is, literally, a Double Maharathi. Karna is stated to be “in terms of strength and skill, equal to two Maharathi warriors”. These peak jokers made this elaborate power level chart just so they could say “AND KARNA IS DOUBLE AS STRONG AS THE STRONGEST”. He is Two Gokus. Karna could literally look at you, without the laser, and you would just be atomized, restructured, and atomized again in the span of minus three seconds, and you would thank him for it. And damn RIGHT you would thank him for it, because he probably didn’t mean to do that to you. That’s because Karna, despite having more powers than Superman and God combined, is the Ultimate Good Boy. This dude is Puppy Kiss Central, this dude chips in on Pizza Thursday every week, and makes up for those who didn’t chip in. Karna lets you take the last chicken nugget. Karna lets you use Player 1 when you hang out at his place. Karna tells you to text him or call him once you get home after hanging out and he gets worried if you don’t. That dashing guy you saw doing volunteer work at the homeless shelter the other day? Probably Karna. The owner of Old Friends Dog Sanctuary? Definitely Karna.

He’s GOOD.

And that’s why the Mahabharata is so painful: I don’t speak Hindi, but I am pretty sure “mahabharata” translates directly to “Karna Has Bad Day :(”. Today, we’ll be talking about Karna’s Three Curses, with a little bit of his childhood for context on the first one, and because I just want to talk about his dumbass mom. Also that one time he clowned Arjuna and Planet Fucking Earth got mad at him.

SO, there was this lady named Kunti, princess of the Kunti Kingdom (yeah), and this one time she was the host to a sage named Durvasa, who was visiting. She is a most Excellent Host, and provided Durvasa with the best of services, the most delicious food, the most luxurious of drinks, and every volume of Detective Conan, and Durvasa was so stoked at this 10/10 Would Come Again service, that he gave Kunti a special boon: With a mantra he taught her, she now had the amazing power to get knocked up by any deity of her selection. Kunti was really happy with her new pregnancy powers, and couldn’t wait to try them out, so she did to call upon the Sun God Surya, and guess what fucking happened: That’s right, fucking happened. It was a violent and intense cyclone of sex so kinky that the baby was born with armor and earrings (in some versions, Surya “handed” the child to Kunti, but in others, which I opt to believe, Kunti bore his child, and his fat solar load was so powerful that the fetus was armored). And then Kunti was like “oh fuck it worked lol but I am not wed” and since she didn’t want to be an unmarried mother (refer to Hindu tradition for this one), so she did like many other Mothers In Mythology and she put Armor Baby on a basket and set him afloat on the rivER LIKE A REAL KUNT, IT WAS IN HER NAME ALL ALONG, WHY DO YOU ASSHOLES KEEP DOING THIS.

THE REST IS UNDER THE CUT BECAUSE THIS IS TURNING LONG.

Like many other Babies In Mythology, Armor Baby was found by someone, this someone being a charioteer named Adhiratha, but not just ANY charioteer, this was the chief charioteer of King Dhritarashtra, who I hope will forgive me if I wrote his name wrong, and was adopted by the charioteer and his wife, Radha. Armor Baby was given a name, Vasusena, and his pet name was Radheya among the locals. Being born an armored baby, it should come as no surprise Vasusena was interested in the military arts, and so he approached this really cool dude named Dronacharya who taught princes about warfare, BUT Drone told the armor kid to fuck the off because he only taught Kshatriyas (the military social caste in Hindu culture), but he was very impressed by Vasusena’s guts because this shit ass kid more or less just strolled into his house and said “HEY TEACH ME HOW TO BE A BADASS”, so he suggested to his father to change his name to Karna, which means “one who peels his own skin”, as a reference to his guts and totally not any sort of foreshadowing to anything NO SIR WHY WOULD YOU THINK THAT.

So ok he got a cool name and whatever, bUT SEE, he still got told to fuck off, which he DIDN’T LIKE, so Cartman, not one to be daunted, sought out Dron’s own teacher instead, because fuck you, that’s why. So Kane finds him, name of Parashurama, and asks him BUT FIRST he disguises himself as a Brahmin, because Futurama only teaches Brahmins, and Karlos was not gonna make THE SAME MISTAKE TWICE. Panasonic agrees, seeing potential in this Double Goku kid and so begins the training arc. Result: Parashurama proudly announces that Karna is his equal in the art of warfare and archery. All this heaving and hoing gets my man Parmesan tired, though, so Karna, ever the good boy, offers his sensei his lap so he can sleep, sensei says fuck yeah and he uses his lap pillow. While he is sleeping, however, a very angry bee goes and stings the hell out of Karna’s thigh, but he’s got his sensei on his lap, which is like when you have a cat or a puppy on your lap and it falls asleep and you do not DARE move. So he didn’t, and this leads to a very important lesson to be learned in the Mahabharata: NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED. When he woke up, Parashurama saw the wound and the blood that flowed from it (and from this, I take bees in India are Cazadores from Fallout New Vegas) and immediately realized that Kane was NOT a Brahmin. This lie meant he had ILLEGALLY STOLEN INFORMATION, and so he cast a curse on Karna that made him forget everything about how to wield the divine weapon Brahmandra-astra, an immensely powerful divine weapon he learned to use, but Karna pleaded to please be reasonable, at which point Par realized, hey, maybe this is kinda excessive and impulsive, so he reduced the curse to make it so Karna would only forget it when he needed it the most against an equally powerful warrior, which IS NOT ANY FUCKING BETTER, and then he felt EVEN WORSE because Karna had basically been his best student ever and is a Good Person, so he gave him his own divine weapon, the Bhagavastra, as well as his bow, Vijaya. I mean, you could’ve just. Undone the curse. But hey. New weapons!

So Karna, a dedicated and excellent archer, was VERY HYPED to try out this new legendary bow he had come to own! There’s a thing in Hindu martial arts called “Shabdavedi Vidhya”, the art of hitting a target by detecting the source of the sound. What Karna didn’t consider is that shooting things by just detecting their sound, you know, means you are not REALLY LOOKING AT WHAT YOU ARE SHOOTING, but hey, like eager-to-try-new-toys mother, like eager-to-try-new-toys son. Three guesses as to what happened. You are RIGHT, HE SHOT A FUCKING COW. And it’s not with a little arrow or a harmless stick, this was with the Vijaya, which means that cow was obliterated off the face of this god damn planet. My dude was practicing “shooting at sounds” with a tactical nuke launcher. What the tits did he expect to happen. SEE, I’m sure you know, but shooting cows in India is not exactly something you just apologize about. But Karna, albeit not the brightest crayon in the box, was still Ultimate Good Boy, so he went to apologize to the owner of the cow, who happened to be an actual Brahmin who had performed the Agnihotra rite daily, which made him extra holy. Brahmin, of course, was pissed, and since apparently people in India just have a full moveset of curses ready to sling at a moment’s noticed, cursed Karna AGAIN, with this curse being “fated to die a helpless and callous death”. Not the best series of days for Karna. He could’ve just walked away, but he’s a Good Boy, so he had to take responsibility. NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED.

So I want to call attention to this bitch of a life for a second: Baby is born because some cunt used her super pregnancy powers to see if they worked without considering the consequences of, you know, getting super pregnant, Baby is chucked into a basket and sent to fuck off on the rapids, is picked up, immediately tries to enroll with a fighting master, instead enrolls with a SUPER fighting master that taught the previous fighting master, and gets double cursed for being a good boy and having bad trigger discipline.

Now, let’s skip a couple of chapters, and we arrive at the moment where the Pandava princes, all demi-gods, hosted a “tournament” of sorts to show off their skills to the people and to their guru, Drona. They were all having a good time, being badass and superpowered WHEN SUDDENLY Karna shows up and arrogantly challenges them because he knows he can do better, from what he has seen. One of the princes, Arjuna (kept you waiting, huh?), who was regarded by Drona to be the most powerful and skilled on the Pandava, told him to maybe fuck off, and that they couldn’t compete because they were above him, as his caste was no doubt lower than theirs. A certain pair of ears DID NOT LIKE THIS and jumped to Karna’s defense: Duryodhana is the name of the owner of said ears, and he’s got Authority. How much of it? Well, he just up and named Karna King of Anga then and there, just so he could compete. Holy SHIT. Now, see, Duryo hates the Pandava. Duryo REALLY, REALLY HATES the Pandava, and he was 100% behind supporting this random stranger if it meant he could possibly maybe humiliate these ugly sumbitches. Maybe. Ok, see, here’s where it gets a bit weird, but depending on who tells the tale, Duryo and Karna actually already knew each other and were childhood friends, but most tellings make this their first meeting, and I am absolutely on board with that, because it only goes on to show how much Duryo hated the Pandava, and divine people in general. He just fucking HATED gods, man. Can relate. So Karna goes and UTTERLY OUTDOES AND UPSTAGES the Pandava princes. Outright beats all their highscores and writes “ASS” in the 1st Place billboard on each entry as his name. They are all FURIOUS at him, especially Arjuna, who had aced every single event, and now had to wear a nice 2nd place on all of them because this absolutely nobody (no one knew Karna was the sun’s son yet) showed up and utterly pulverized them. This also starts his relationship with Duryo, with whom he’d become fast, and eventually, best friends.

BUT, SEE, HE KINDA GOT MADE A KING, SO HEY, HE HAD TO GO, UH, TEND TO THAT. He was checking his brand new sudden kingdom, when he came across a WEEPING CHILD. If there is one thing Ultimate Good Boy can’t stand, that’s the tears of children, so he approached the girl and asked what’s wrong. See, the girl had accidentally dropped her ghee (kinda like butter but less dense) and she was going to get her ass whooped by her step mother. Karna kindly offered to buy her new ghee, but she said it had to be THAT SPECIFIC ghee with the dirt on it, and that she didn’t want any other. Karna, in his infinite kindness, said “oh, sure, lol”, so he grabbed the dirt and squeezed it with all of his extremely godly might, extracting the ghee back into the jar as if squeezing water out of a sponge, because that’s just the kind of solution you come up with when you are the strongest person in Ever.

hey

you guys remember what I said a while ago?

WHY YES

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED.

Guess what happened. Guess whose anger he incurred. He got Bhumi Devi/Mother Earth herself pissed at him. And what was her beef, you ask? Well, see, Karna squeezed that soil SO DAMN HARD that she took offense. Yes. Really. And guess whSHE FUCKING CURSED HIM TOO, OH MY GOD, CEASE THIS, YOU CAN’T JUST HEX A DUDE FOR SQUEEZING DIRTY, COME ON. The curse this time was that she would one day trap his chariot’s wheel during a crucial moment in his life. All because that little girl wouldn’t make do with a new jar of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

WORST. WORLD. EVER.

And guess how Karna dies.

Yes.

His chariot’s wheel gets trapped on the earth (third curse) during a crucial confrontation with Arjuna, he attempts to defend himself with his astral weapon, but forgets how to conjure it (first curse), and is decapitated by a shot of Arjuna’s Gandiva as he helplessly leans against the chariot’s wheel, unable to free it (second curse).

The moral of the story is don’t fucking help anyone, ever, and don’t own up to your mistakes, because if you do, you’ll be triple cursed.

Karna deserved better.

#tainbocuailnge #chili con karna

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