#so essentially it's like. if zack gets to live the others die instead?? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

wlwfav · 10 months

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I'd love to hear about your AU!! It sounds really interesting:)

omg ok ok i hope you are ready for unhinged and messy rambling..... anyways more about angels of death role reversal au below

first off i want to say this au is 100% inspired by this amazing art, like when i tell you seeing that work FLIPPED something in my brain. go show that artist some love!!!

so basically in this au all of the floor masters have essentially "swapped" roles, but they are still their canon ages because that is just. infinitely funnier to me

anyways the swapped roles are as follows:

ray and zack

danny and cathy

gray and eddie

and now here's the rough background and whatnot for each character:

zack

following the role of ray in this au, zack wishes to die and wants ray to kill him. his personality is much more apathetic and a bit of a 'blank slate', similar to canon!ray. unlike canon!ray, however, zack is still not smart sdfgsdfgsgfs. he never learned how to read in this au. he very much still relies on his strength and survival instincts to get by, he is just much more... chill about it.

he was set on fire by his father when he was young, but he never developed a fear of fire like his canon counterpart. instead, he has a more apathetic view on it. he does not wear bandages in this au. he does, however, wear the same hoodie, but the arrow resembles a cross (like shown in the art i linked above). he also has a cross necklace that was given to him by his therapist, cathy (we will get to that later...)

zack was never sent to the orphanage after being burned, but instead he remained at home with his biological parents, and of course it was not a good home life :/ his parents saw he was strong enough to survive being burnt alive and basically said "hey, this kid's resilience might be useful to us" and so they kept him around so he could do the chores/housework and other odd jobs to get money, usually so his parents could buy drugs and/or booze. he never went to school or got any education. zack had to do what he could to feed himself and get by. due to doing just about any sort of physical labor to get payment, he developed strength and street smarts.

his parents viewed him as "a monster" due to his appearance, and constantly reminded him they only kept him around because he was useful. in zack's mind, he thought maybe his parents would love them if they were monsters too.

when zack got the chance, he would try watching movies, and that became one of his favorite past times. he particularly liked thriller/slasher films.

zack continued to live with his parents until he was around 19. he never thought to leave because he didn't know anything else, and there was a part of him that did care for his parents (similar to canon!ray's feelings towards her own parents). one day, zack's mom was caught with another man, causing his dad to flip out and stab both of them to death. zack, being home, heard and saw everything. his dad tries to kill him too, but zack remembered one film he saw with this similar scenario, and ends up successfully - and fatally - stabbing his father. as a means to "fix" things, zack sets their bodies on fire, thinking this made his family "more equal" now that they've all been severely burned (or, in other words, he is making everyone look like the monsters they truly are)

when the police came to take zack away, they weren't arresting him on murder charges, but instead they (correctly) saw he was a victim acting out of self defense, so they send him off to therapy where he meets....... cathy.

and that's where the main story unfolds in a similar way to canon. cathy ends up becoming obsessed with zack, and begs eddie to let him have his own floor - B1. cathy gifts him a cross necklace, hoping it would help zack "fit in" as a floor master, but eddie places a bible on zack's floor and well.... we all know how it goes from there :')

small side note: zack never actually went by 'zack' before meeting ray, he was only ever referred to as isaac, and even called himself by that name. ray gives him the nickname 'zack'!!!

ray

ray is an infamous serial killer in this au, and is dubbed by the media as "the patchwork killer", due to her sewing up her victims after she murders them, as well as the patchwork all across her own body (again, like in the art i linked earlier)

like canon!zack, she is more deranged and outspoken, but she is still just as smart as her canon counterpart. despite (obviously) not attending school, she still loves to read and tries to self-educate herself in between killings. she really is just some weird 13 y/o girl doing her own thing in this au lmfao

despite her intelligence, she is still small and physically weak, making it difficult for her to kill people unless she has her handgun. she still keeps a knife in her bag as a back-up. even though she is small and rather weak, she is nothing to scoff at. she has killed many, many people, and sewn up their corpses afterwards to make them "perfect" in her eyes.

ray ends up teaming up with zack to take advantage of his strength and height, knowing it will help her escape the building.

ray grew up with her parents who owned an illegal orphanage, and her parents treated the kids pretty badly. they would often force ray to stitch up the wounds of the orphans.

ray got her appearance due to the abuse she endured from her parents, and her mother would forcibly sew her up after. ray ends up keeping the patchwork look on both herself and her victims as a means to "reclaim" what happened to her.

similar to canon!zack's fear of fire, ray has a fear of water. her father tried to drown her when she was younger, but her mother managed to save her. not out of love, but because she saw ray as someone she could use. ray has been terrified of the water ever since.

one day, ray is trying to stitch an orphan's wounds, but the kid ends up dying. ray, out of curiosity, decides to continue sewing the kid back together, in order to make them "perfect". when she's done and she looks at her work, a switch sort of just. flips in her brain. and she realizes she wants to kill more people and "fix" them in her own way. and so, she snaps and kills her parents, along with the other orphans, and "fixes" them to her liking.

after that, the story picks up and she lives her life on the run. i'm not sure if i would want to include ray's own "blind old man" in this au yet, nor how that would work, but yeah.

cathy

cathy's story is pretty similar to her canon counterpart's, but instead of becoming a jailer, she became a therapist.

she's a counselor of sorts for "troubled adults", and she uses her job to find the most "sinful criminals" (in her eyes), and study/punish them in her own way. her goal is to find the most "ideal criminal", and punish them for all of eternity. she wants to "fix them" by making them worse.

and, of course, when she meets zack... she believes he's exactly what she's been looking for. she wants to keep him by her side forever so she can understand him, and encourage his "sinful" behavior

danny

like cathy, au!danny is similar to his canon counterpart, but he's just a jailer now. he keeps people locked up so he can admire their dead, hopeless eyes until the end of time.

ray is someone he becomes obsessed with, because despite everything that happened to her, her eyes still sparkle with manic life. and he wants to be the one to snuff that light out.

gray

like canon!gray, au!gray also grew up in a cult, but instead of being the like. next chosen pastor or whatever, he instead was in charge of the graveyard. he views himself as a grim reaper of sorts; being in charge of guiding people to the next life by making their graves. he believes he is the only one capable of putting people to rest in the way god intended.

in the building, he becomes the grave keeper for all the sacrifices that pass through.

he takes an interest in zack, as he is the only floor master who really feels pity for him. he sees zack has suffered, and wants to give him the most "peaceful rest" as possible as a means to alleviate zack's pain.

eddie

yeah this 12 year old runs this whole murder building. and what about it!

anyways instead of being born into a grave-keeping family, eddie was born into a family of. pastors i guess gfdsgdfgsdfg he basically grew up only knowing church and. that's it

eddie's personality is an odd mixture of both canon!gray and canon!eddie's personalities. au!eddie is still childish and often lets his feelings get the better of him, yet he still gives off a more mature and regal aura.

like canon!gray, eddie became interested in testing if people were angels or sacrifices. if they were truly devoted to god.

eddie believes only he truly understands god, and therefore, only eddie can truly judge one's sins in place of god. he decides to start his little "experiment" when it's revealed albert will take over the family church instead of eddie, and eddie believed albert was the furthest from god one could get.

basically, he is trying to weed out "false gods" and those who follow said false gods

like his canon counterpart, eddie has a bit of a crush on ray. he views her as the perfect angel. he also views zack as the perfect sacrifice.

and yeah i guess that's about it! this is a really rough outline and there are definitely some parts to this au that could use some fine-tuning but overall, this is an au i'm really attached to sfdgsfdgsdfgsdfg

#long post /#shout out to that artist who made that role swap art #bc of you i created this whole thing #ur impact.... ur power.....#aod-enthusiast #✉️

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makoxmind · 2 years

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35, 46, 50

35; are they possessive over their things? or over other people? Both?

Extremely so! He has little want nor need for material things but he despises anyone who touches or moves his clothes, his pauldron, or his sword, because if he has put them somewhere hes put them there for a reason (easy access, always in view, quick to equip). He isn’t one to ‘leave things laying around’ at all and if someone picks up something of his he immediately stops whatever hes doing and aggros on them like a low level mmo enemy trying to get it back this is all the other person hears the moment they touch them https://youtu.be/YVTR8lTnnx8

When it comes to people, he acts like he isn’t possessive over them, because that goes against his outward persona of being cool and unruffled by the little things… however. Even though outwardly he is merely side-eyeing those who vy for the attention of his close friends, when it comes to them being touched in any way, he instantly decides for them that any contact is too much. Cloud doesn’t really understand body language that much and perceives threats way too easily, so a stranger giving a friend a friendly pat on the shoulder really rubs him the wrong way! The only time its acceptable (to him) is when its friends interacting with friends… otherwise, those who would even dare to flirt with Tifa, Zack or Aerith is gonna end up with a very short man either silently blocking their next move or just just full on yapping at them to ‘step back’ like hes a little body guard WEPTOGGWEWGPGWPEGPGREWP

(Because hes pathetic the idea of those three paying any kind of endearing attention to others when hes right there………………….. hmm.)

46; if they could control one thing in the world, what would it be?

Time. There are so many things he wants to go back and redo and so many moments where he feels like he did ‘wrong’, either via overreacting, underreacting, saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing. In the moment he felt like he was right, but he reflects often on his past. What if his mother could have been saved? What if he had actually killed Sephiroth instead of faltering so easily? What if he had tried to be closer to Tifa as a child? What if he had tried to open up to people when he joined Shinra in the first place? Why did he lose those specific members of Avalanche (spoiler safe here) and what would have happened if he had tried harder? Been faster? Cloud feels like hes constantly letting people down, but maybe if he could redo things again, he could show others that he is capable of being someone that truly saves others.

50; where do they see themselves in 2 / 5 / 10 years? (Warning for death mentions )

He believes he will most likely be dead. There were plenty of moments in Remake where he seemed to be entirely accepting of death, and now more than ever if he has something to protect… well, then he doesnt really matter to himself. If he has to die to save someone or to kill Sephiroth then so be it, he sees himself as just another cog in an ever turning universe and his life isn’t essential for it to keep turning. Though he refuses to die until hes done some semblance of good, there is no doubt in his mind that the coming journey out into the world will be his actual undoing. Thats ok. The world is more important… and he feels he is so, so insignificant.

If he doesnt die, hes always thought being an actual mercenary would be his calling, no longer for the profit of it but because of his desire to save. He’s seen suffering on a terrible scale done by those who have too much power. Easing that suffering selflessly would be what a real hero would do, whether it meant continuing to destroy the lives of those who think they tower above others or by killing monsters ravaging town. It’s only downside is that he knows he’d be incredibly lonely doing that… so he imagines frequently returning to wherever ‘home’ is, where Aerith and Tifa will hopefully be safe and waiting. (ZOINKS)

#memes #answers #ooc;; (music intensifies when he gets closer)#ooc;; ty for askin!!!! ;U; <33333

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iaintyourbro · 3 years

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The Unknown Journey Continues

Part 1

I know it's been a while... but I've been going down a rabbit hole with @starlight-samurai regarding time loops, Jenova, Minerva, and more fun. So I figured I'd try to put it into one post to get the insanity out of my head. Everything in here is based on things we've found by either going through more obscure Ultimanias, learning more about Dirge of Cerberus and trying to decipher what the hell Jenova is by putting together various sources - including other Square Enix games - and how they handled freakishly similar scenarios.

Did you know there is a companion mobile game for it that was out on the good old flip phones? Did you know there was an online mode in Dirge of Cerberus only available in Japan, but had story elements that were not in the main game?

The sad part is, there's still so much to go through...

(I've also had various discussions with @ourfinalheaven, Manu, who doesn't have Tumblr, so here is her Twitter. and Somebody's Nightmare (here is her Twitter). So I wanted to tag them here, as it's much more fun to discuss these ideas as a group, since it'll only help you build on and strengthen your own ideas.)

Please be aware, there will be Spoilers for FFVII - Almost all Compilation titles, Xenogears, and NieR Automata throughout this.

So let's go on a journey where we explore what actually already exists in the compilation - including the idea of the whispers and timeloops - how Minerva may play into everything, and what exactly Jenova is capable of doing.

I asked Sesi if he'd ever played any of the NieR games, because he'd said something that made me wonder if they were going to take a similar approach. As a very, very quick high level summary: NieR Automata deals with a time loop type of idea. The androids will be rebooted and repeat the same things over and over again. This is broken when 2B is killed by A2 because she becomes infected with a virus. That being said, you have the option after Ending E to either erase all of your data and end the cycle OR you can try again. The Pods have a discussion, and one asks, "But won't they just do the same thing again?" and the other replies with "Maybe. But it could also be different this time."

Here's Sesi's message back to me when I asked him about this (cleaned up a bit since we were having a casual conversation over Discord):

Maybe I could just guess based comparatively on the Dirge storyline, because that was sort of SE's first flirtation with “robots and androids” since they’re all programmed and locked behind like task managers and shit that can shut them down. The story of the online mode for DoC that came out in Japan, we never got to see it, you’re basically an Android OC and you have to get to “the end of the level” and then essentially die, and a new one takes its place. This keeps happening until Weiss is essentially freed from being able to be task managed by the guys who are suppose to be able to control them and I know from tons of years with Square games that they’re verrrrry bad at differentiating their narratives they tend to just keep “ripping themselves off” so is it anything close to that?

Cuz if so I think I kinda know what you’re saying and yeah, I agree, I think with CC bringing in its poetic symbolism and LOVELESS, and DoC bringing back the cyclic nature of the lore, whispers, premonitions and future visions, proto-Materia and the perversion of this next cycle since the planet can no longer cleanse and protect itself and its will is weakening lesser and lesser to the point where it’s fate is “in a true sense of jeopardy This time essentially it’s all tied in together and sort of played as though it's a fated track; a cycle of events and something has hitched it, thus the whispers manifesting and Sephiroth's higher implied control over his destiny. Of course, even all that is just their new red herring game, but it’s definitely a part of the lore they want to play with, in order to go back and reMAKE the OG with the comp inserted from inception. Also gut punch a lot.

Time Loops

I was somewhat surprised to find out that this concept is NOT new to FFVII's universe. It's discussed in Dirge of Cerberus... probably one of the least played and least understood of the compilation. (Trying to sell a third person shooter with terrible controls to a market of mostly people used to turn-based combat wasn't going to go well.)

On top of it, we didn't even get all of it, since online mode was never released outside of Japan, and the Dirge of Cerberus Lost Episode was on Amp'd Mobile and Verizon flip phones back in 2006. Were you around for the cell phones in 2006? I had the ones on the list, and how somebody could play a game on those blows my mind.

Square has a tendency to reuse themes from their other titles. Probably one of the most blatant is the similarities between Xenogears and Final Fantasy VII. They were both being developed at the same time and a lot of ideas that didn't make it into FFVII ended up in Xenogears.

NieR

So how does this work? In NieR (both Replicant and Automata), you play the same path multiple times. Each time, it's slightly different depending on what side quests you did your first and second playthrough, but there's also other subtle differences throughout the story. In Automata, you get to play as 2B your first playthrough and 9S for your second. They follow the same path, but you get it from his perspective the second time and it reveals a bit more of what is going on. However, even with some slight differences, the main plot points stay the same and the ending result it also the same.

Then on your third playthrough, you wake up in the Bunker, and you're getting ready to go on a new mission. This time, though, 2B is killed and shit hits the fan. Things get crazy, you play as a new character: A2. In the end, pretty much everyone "dies", but you can choose to "reboot" and try again. You also can say you are done and let them all rest and delete your save data (the game gives you the option for both Automata and Replicant, and with Replicant, it actually leads to a new ending).

The striking thing for me is... There are certain events that will always happen, no matter what.

Fixed Points in Time

It's been years since I've watched Doctor Who, but there was something that stuck with me, and that was the fixed points in time. You can read about all of them here, but here's the basics:

Now, of course Doctor Who goes into this with much more detail and it's a recurring theme. However, as you read through that page, you'll probably find many aspects that have been used in various JRPGs that you've played. And Doctor Who most likely pulled some of the idea from classic Science Fiction novels. Each story puts its own spin on it.

How does this relate to FFVII Remake? Well, when they say that the major plot points will stay the same, it reminds me of this. No matter what, Cloud must fall into the Sector 5 Church, the Sector 7 Plate must be dropped, Aerith and Zack both must die, and Meteor has to be summoned, to name a few. So, with a time loop, those things would still have to take place in order to prevent a complete collapse of reality (at least in how Doctor Who uses it).

Therefore, the Whispers are ensuring that the Will of the Planet is followed.

One of the major themes in FFVII is that of loss. People die and they do not come back. Yes, other FF games do allow this to happen (FFX, FFXIII, FFXV), but VII is not those games. It was written with that idea in mind, that once a person dies, they, just like in real life, are dead and cannot be brought back.

I've previously written that I think they'll make us believe we are able to change fate, but we will eventually be slammed with the reality that we can't. That is because the planet has determined that certain events are fixed points.

Xenogears

Xenogears takes a bit of a different approach to the loop idea. Instead of repeating the same time period over and over, it has the characters reincarnated, and the same outcome happens each time: Elly dies. However, each time it's different. After all, they're in various time periods, in some cases thousands of years apart.

In all of the lives of Fei (who will have a different name in each time period) and Elly (who is always Elly/Elhaym), Elly will end up dying trying to protect Fei and the others. In one life, she is a religious figure at a totally not Catholic church, in another she's the wife of a scientist who was working to create children from nanomachines due to mass infertility issues. But she is ALWAYS with Fei, even if his name changes.

In her Mother Elhaym time, this is when Lacan (Fei) finally snaps. Though he's not fully aware of his past lives, he becomes aware, the anger consumes him, and he becomes Grahf. Fei is then reborn into the time period you play the game in.

There's a lot to unpack with this, so I won't go into it. Grahf wants to destroy God (Deus) because he thinks if he does, then it'll stop the suffering (his suffering).

If you do want to read more about Grahf, you can do so here, but it probably won't make much sense unless you've played Xenogears up to that point... Since it's much later in the game that this is all explained.

Lacan's desire was to stop the cycle of Elly always sacrificing herself for his sake. Though Grahf is not a perfect existence - he's not fully "The Contact", he sacrifices himself in order to let Fei move forward, and hopefully stop the cycle, by destroying the Deus system. (Elly also tries to sacrifice herself here, but Fei goes after her and stops her.)

Now, some people may think I'm saying that Cloud or somebody is going to do this in order to save Aerith or Zack (or his village or mom), but in FFVII if they do the loop method, I don't think Cloud, Tifa, Barret, and the others are aware of it. Most likely, it's only 'Sephiroth' and Aerith who are aware of it.

How this Could Be used for Final Fantasy VII

I'm stressing could because there's so many different possibilities on how they use this (if they are using this), so please, don't take this as fact. This is based on speculation based on what we know.

A time loop is a great way to explain away the differences in the story that we've seen: Biggs being alive, Wedge living for longer than he should have, etc. Since these are not major plot changes, they can simply say that this time it'll be slightly different... but your fixed points (major plot points) will remain the same.

It's a way to pull in some of the more obscure themes from Dirge of Cerberus and also play with the LOVELESS lore.

It could all simply be a big red herring and it's really just a remake of OG, but with the compilation tied together nicely... since it works much better when it's combined and not in 50 different games, books, movies, etc.

I don't think it's a "sequel" per say, not in the way I generally perceive a sequel. It's more of a loop of the same thing. The question is, when is the loop started and what will cause it to end? When will the planet (if it even is the planet) determine that it's good enough to begin moving forward?

JENOVA, Sephiroth, Genesis, and Minerva - Oh My!

Let's be real... Genesis isn't exactly the most popular character in the FFVII Compilation... but what if they make him one of the most important to the story? //Ducks as various fruits and vegetable are thrown in my direction//

I think what Genesis is probably most known for is his love of LOVELESS. He has the entire thing memorized and randomly says lines from it throughout Crisis Core. LOVELESS lore is still something I'm trying to grasp, so I am not going to comment much on it. Once I understand it more, I'll update this.

...And then this happens. The secret ending for Dirge of Cerberus, where Genesis picks up Weiss. Weiss, who has now been introduced along with Nero in FFVII INTERmission and is an optional ridiculously hard boss in the Shinra battle simulator in chapter 17 of the main story. There is some lore associated with the battle sim - so if you don't plan on beating it or you just can't, you can look up the pre-battle and post-battle cut scenes on YouTube. They're very short, but interesting. (I beat this asshole last night - it's a hell of a fight.)

....To Be Continued because apparently Tumblr won't allow more than 10 images per post now.... Next will be more on JENOVA and Sephiroth along with Minerva.

#ffvii #ffvii genesis #ff7 genesis #ff7 intergrade #ff7 intermission spoilers #FFVII intermission spoilers #FFVII Intermission #Final Fantasy VII #Dirge of Cerberus #FFVII Weiss #Xenogears #nier automata #final fantasy vii #ff7r #final fantasy 7 #timey wimey

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im-totally-not-an-alien · 4 years

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Final Fantasy prompts no 53

1. Cloud is immortal and has lived for tens of thousands of years. He has watched his friends and enemies get reincarnated over and over again. He would always interfere and save the day when things got bad, prompting legends and myths of a golden haired hero with glowing blue eyes who swore to return whenever the world was in peril.

But thats not the end.

He took great care to find his friends and keep an eye on them, watching over them as a guardian angel of sorts. When he came across Sephiroth again, he expected a battle, but seeing the dull eyes of a broken teenager staring up at him as he layed battered and bruised by his own parents? It made him realize that Sephiroth wasn't born evil.

The blond added Sephiroth to his list of people to protect.

Cloud often removed Sephiroth from the abusive households he was born into by exposing the parents for their crimes and harassing them as an anonymous individual.

Once the silverette was out of the home he would manipulate circumstances so that he would come to live with Zack or one of his other former friends.

Once he hit a certain age, he would find people Sephiroth was romantically compatible with and play puppeteer until one of them married the silverette. Cloud had done this so many times that he practically became an expert. Strangely, in the recent past lives the marriages ended in amicable divorce. He didn't know what he did wrong, so the blond began expiramenting with Sephiroths "types" again, trying to find a perfect match.

This life however, Sephiroth refused to so much as hold hands with someone romantically and Cloud is about ready to rip his hair out in frustration.

The man walked down a busy street, thinking about what to do next when Sephiroth himselfed grabbed his arm.

Startled, Cloud stared up at him.

"It's you." Sephiroth muttered reverently, as though he couldn't believe his eyes.

Cloud never made contact with these people, he had learned his lesson after the fifth time he lost Zack. He let them live out their lives, only interfering to stop something negative from happening. The blond never showed Sephiroth his face since his ninth life.

So how did Sephiroth know who he was?

2. Cloud nearly giving Denzel "The Talk"

3. Denzel accidentally calling Cloud "Dad", calling Tifa "Mom", and Marlene "my sister" until he was eventually like, screw it, and called them that without hesitation

4. Denzel got in trouble at school for beating up a group of boys that were bullying another kid.

He gets suspended and Cloud takes him out for an awesome ride on Fenrir as a reward, followed by fighting lessons from both him and Tifa, then ice cream.

5. Au where Hollander was murdered by Hojo long ago. Degradation is running rampant through Shinras SOLDIER program, killing several and weakening many more.

Genesis is determined to find a cure, after all, his life is on the line. He's eventually cornered by Angeal and Sephiroth, who pull the truth out of him, and begin aiding him in his search.

They discover AC Cloud, who is from a different dimension/timeline whose very body contains the cure.

Cloud was no longer human, and had developed new organs of unknown purpose, his body having disposed of the unnecessary organs such as lungs, gallbladder, and pancreas, and modifying the ones it kept, such as the digestive track. The catch? Now he needed to feed on large amounts of natural Mako every month to survive.

Genesis sees no problem with this and asks for the blond to save them. Cloud, however, refused, not knowing what was happening to him and knew spreading it would be the bad idea of the century.

Genesis doesn't take "No" for an answer.

Hojo finds out the blond was essentially a second Jenova and had a mini lifestream inside him and becomes desperate to get his claws on him.

6. Jenova haunts Clouds dreams, filling him with dread. Not because she was tormenting him, no. It was the opposite.

In the dreams, she held him like a loving mother. Her gentle embrace warmed him, her soft words brought him comfort, made him confide in her. That's why he was afraid.

Cloud was beginning to love her, and it terrified him.

7. Zack Fair is hereby prohibited from using any form of glitter or glue.

Why? It's Classified.

8. Au where Lazard freed Zack from under the nebilheim mansion, but also dragged him outside, leaving Cloud behind.

He lied to Zack when he woke up, telling him the infantryman was dead. He believed that Zacks chances of survival would be infinitely higher if he left the boy behind, which he would never do if given a choice. So Lazard made that choice for him.

So Zack made it to Midgar on his own.

Cloud was found by Sephiroth months later. The blond had no fight left in him and tried to merge with the other Sephiroth clone, unfortunately since his cells were mutated, Cloud could not merge with Sephiroth.

The silverette had planned to abandon this failed clone until Cloud nuzzle his face against Sephiroths gloved palm. From then on out, Cloud followed Sephiroth everywhere, doing the cooking and the laundry or whatever he could to make himself useful. He would beg the former General not to abandon him, as everyone else had done in the past.

That, admittedly pulled on his heartstings a bit. Sephiroth had also been abandoned and betrayed by his two closest friends. By the company and people he foolishly devoted his entire life to.

So Cloud stayed. His master taught him how to fight, how to care for his gear, and they bonded over shared experiences and silent companionship.

It was during that final battle, where Zack and AVALANCHE slew Sephiroth, that Cloud, hidden somewhere out of sight, swore vengeance against the man who pretended to be his friend, who he believed abandoned him and left him to rot in that hellhole after he had sworn for years that they'd get them both out, that he would save Cloud, (Cause that's what heros do!) only for him to murder the first person other than his mom to ever care about him.

Clouds body held both S and J-cells, and though they may be mutated, he could still call for Reunion. Something Zack couldn't sense due to him being an A-type SOLDIER instead of an S-type like himself.

The blond could cultivate the summoned J-cells and make them multiply under his care. He knew the best revenge was patience, after all, so long as Cloud lived, Sephiroth would never truly die.

All he had to do was stay hidden. Know one could know of him, not that they were looking for a supposedly dead man, even if they were, they would never find him in his hidden underground bunker since no one with more then three brain cells would go near the Northern Crater.

9. Sephiroth drops blatant innuendos and pickup lines all throughout his fight with Cloud, but the blond thinks he's just imagining it.

Seph actually manages to escape that time, but after the fight, his friends point out all the questionable things the silverette said.

Cloud wasn't sure if he should be relieved that he wasn't hallucinating it.

10. Tifa caught Denzel and Marlene "interrogating" a doll that was tied to a tree.

They were hitting it with sticks and yelling, "Who's your source?!" At it.

Needless to say, Reno is no longer allowed to around the children without adult supervision.

11. Kunsel began fiddling with a laser pointer, absent-mindedly tracing large slow circles on an opposing wall. He kept thinking back to all the laser pointer related incidents from the past few weeks until he noticed, much to his horror, that a few of his fellow SOLDIERS in the mess hall were tracking the little red dot with laser focus.

Pun intended.

12. Aerith had long since faded into the lifestream where she belonged, but that's not what this story is about.

Thousands of years have passed since the events of MeteorFall, and Gaia is nearly overflowing with mako energy.

Cloud felt as Gaia began remaking her WEAPONS, and couldn't help but wonder as to why. After about a year of searching he found Vincent again and asked him.

The truth was disturbing. Gaia's lifestream had outgrown the planet, and was preparing a new Omega WEAPON to suck the life out of this one and travel back to the "Mother planet"

Cloud eventually found out about Gaias plans for him by eavesdropping on conversation between Gaia herself and the Cetra from the "Mother planet". You see, Cloud has a unique relationship with the planet. He was modified using Jenovas Eldrich powers, and over time, developed his own. The blond allowed Gaia to use his body/very being as a sort of ward against all things Eldrich, and has worked spectacularly well.

Gaia planned to keep him alive as she traveled through the cosmos. That wouldn't be a problem, no the problem was that she planned to encase him in crystal and keep him there for the rest of eternity. When the Cetra mentioned breeding him so that other planets would have a ward, he nearly gagged.

He told Vincent about everything and admitted he was afraid. The only reason he remained sane all these years was because he could travel and have new experiences. He couldn't do that if he was trapped.

Vincent suggested a rocket, to which the blond revealed that Gaia herself always sabotaged the rockets and space programs. For obvious reasons. They were stuck and didn't know what to do now that it was literally them against the world. So when Vincent suggested reviving Mako energy and the SOLDIER program until they could find a way off of Gaia, Cloud didn't dismiss it.

13. Another summoning gone wrong Au where Sephiroth, Zack, and Cloud who are in the normal modern universe and are lovers in a poly relationship, decide to mess around with a spellbook Zack picked up in a shop. They were saying spells out loud and making fun of them, they also did the wierd little ceremonies and made "potions" and had a good time.

Nothing happened, until they woke up the next morning to the chocobo frantically patting them awake with his hands, stunned silent.

There, in their king sized bed, were their trans-dimensional alter-egos, done up with swords and pauldrons and...is Sephiroth wearing a fetish outfit? Said silverette poked his alter-ego with a ruler a few times to confirm he was out cold.

What were they supposed to do now?

14. Final Fantasy 7 and LoZ: Breath of the Wild crossover

Cloud lands in a new reality, but he's too focused on trying to fight the new breeds of monsters and surviving the desert heat to ponder the situation for long

And then there's all those things that keep trying to electrocute him...Clouds not having a good day.

On the other hand he has plenty of things to take his anger out on.

Also, Cloud meeting a horse! Which are critically endangered on Gaia!

15. Genesis finds Cloud post DoC and begins taunting him, but gasps dramatically when he learns the blond has never tasted Banoran apples/apple products. He drags Cloud along to get a taste. Weirdly, they get along.

#cloud strife #sephiroth #sefikura #ff7 #zack fair #sephiroth+x+cloud #genesis rhapsodos #ff7 story prompts #ff7 prompts #final fantasy 7 story prompts #final fantasy 7 #final fantasy story prompts

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rosaguard · 4 years

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i’ll probably make a more official post about all this at a later date but i was talking to verumking about some stuff and since it was already something i wanted to talk about on my blog, i figured i would just post about it here as well. for starters, i don't really like the idea of minerva in crisis core - mostly b/c her existence raises questions the writers didn't seem to consider. for instance, if this being exists to protect the planet, why didn't the planet 'summon' her when sephiroth was running around and shanked aeris? i've been thinking of how i can make minerva not suck ( at least in my eyes ) and one idea is to just continue ignoring her completely while playing with the idea of aeris becoming something more™️ when she dies / enters the lifestream which has been floating in my head for awhile now.

i've seen people say they've made her overly special / powerful in the remake which is weird to me since 1). she was always special - being the last cetra was her big 'special' thing:tm: and 2). she was probably always meant to powerful but they couldn't fully explore it back in 1997. aeris' powers have been unclear in canon as far back as the OG - she can canonically enter cloud's subconscious and they take that ability even further in the remake - but we have no idea if that's a thing all cetra can just do or if she's even more powerful then the average cetra. for the sake of this discussion, i'm going to go with the latter. we already know she helped save the planet even in death; we just didn't know how until maiden that travels the planet ( which i'm constantly confused on whether is canon or not b/c cl.otis and clerit.hs are always arguing about it. apparently the ultmania it was in is getting reprinted so??? ).

anyway, MTTTP basically turns her saving the planet into this 'my friends are my power' thing and all the souls she meets in the novel such as jessie, biggs, wedge, zack, etc. + the other souls within the lifestream itself help push meteor back but i'm also like....what if she just willed it by herself completely? this is essentially a long lead up to me proposing the idea of her and the planet's subconsciousness basically merging together once she dies. i always felt like aeris ( and other characters ) were super active post-death in a way that doesn't really make sense. aeris can be explained as her being a cetra™️ ( but even then i feel like it’s kind of a reach since the cetra are so unexplored ) but zack should've merged with the lifestream by the time advent children happens and it doesn't make sense for him to appear to cloud - at least based on how the lifestream is described in the OG - unless aeris herself willed it so.

i’ve touched on how a lot of the themes regarding the lifestream and the cetra are very similar to many concepts in indian religions before on my blog. one thing i didn’t touch on, however, was how the philosophical concept of brahman reminds me of aeris’ character beyond death:

brahma (ब्रह्म), brahman (stem) means the concept of the transcendent and immanent ultimate reality, supreme cosmic spirit in hinduism.

brahman on the other hand cannot be seen with the naked eye. It can only be experienced. brahman is said to be all-pervasive. It pervades all parts of existence. it is present everywhere. sages of the past have experienced the Brahman and have become realized souls. according to advaita of sankara, all individual souls are parts of the supreme brahman. after getting liberation from the human bodies, the individual souls become one with the brahman. death is meant only for the body and not for the soul.

all of the souls in the lifestream make up one, large collective ( or 'soul' ) which is the planet's consciousness similar to brahman. the way brahman is described, or at least my understanding of it at least, is that it's not a 'physical' thing but something that is felt because it exists within everyone / everything and is present everywhere. this reminds me of not only of how bugenhagen describes the lifestream but also how aeris' presence post-death is handled as well.

bugenhagen: eventually... all humans die. what happens to them after they die? the body decomposes, and returns to the planet. that much everyone knows. what about their consciousness, their hearts and their souls? the soul too returns to the planet. and not only those of humans, but everything on this planet. in fact, all living things in the universe, are the same. the spirits that return to the planet, merge with one another and roam the planet. they roam, converge, and divide, becoming a swell, called the 'lifestream'. lifestream... in other words, a path of energy of the souls roaming the planet. 'spirit energy' is a word that you should never forget. a new life... children are blessed with spirit energy and are brought into the world. then, the time comes when they die and once again return to the planet... of course there are exceptions, but this is the way of the world.

aeris within the lifestream is the last shot you see in the original game ( not counting the post credits ) and instead of hints of her theme playing, the chimes for the lifestream theme plays instead as she smiles. she also helps saves cloud after his fight with sephiroth in the lifestream so aeris not merging with the lifestream and still looking out for the others was a thing even in the original game. in advent children, her presence is constantly 'felt' even though she is not there directly whether it’s tifa being able to feel her presence when it's raining, cloud being able to indirectly talk to her, or even marlene sensing her when sephiroth summons the infected lifestream.

tifa: aeris is here... everyone is here... cloud is here with us!

a lot of these moments are also specifically tied to nature ( or places she was tied to such as the church or her death site ): her leaving a voicemail on cloud’s phone when it’s dropped in water, her appearing in the flower fields in the credits as cloud is traveling the countryside, her showing up while the party is fighting bahamut in the sky, etc. sephiroth’s presence in the lifestream post-game would also work better as them being contrasting rivals because through geostigma, he would be hurting 'her' as she is the planet’s consciousness now. ( it could also explain why she was never like 'hey cloud, i have healing water under my church. go grab a shovel and get to digging fam!!!' because maybe she couldn't reach out to him or something. the real answer is bad writing and fan service but!!! )

overall, aeris becoming the ffivii equivalent of the supreme cosmic spirit is interesting™️ to me. her dying like in the OG isn’t a part of my main canon but the entire concept of this could still be a thing once she dies of old age in my main canon or used for another verse ( most likely the latter ). especially since she seems to just be able to...do things because she simply wills it after death - at least to an extent. for instance, cloud literally dies at the end of Advent Children and she simply went 'no, i don’t think you will' before sending him back to her church alive. she also talks to kadaj as he’s dying and joining the lifestream which again, doesn’t seem to be a general cetra thing but it’s hard to say. it always read to me as if ifalna had already fully merged with the lifestream when aeris was still a child and she couldn’t ‘talk’ to her mother anymore. yet aeris is able to physically manifest herself ( and zack ) outside of the lifestream to talk to cloud ( it was for fanservice:tm: but stuff like that raises questions SE!!!!! ).

tl;dr: she's basically a goddess after dying and keeps zack around because it gets kind of boring monitoring the flow of life sometimes.

#❀ . ━ ❛ blood of the ancients ❪ headcanon ❫ .#they play solitaire and stuff. it's fun:tm:

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kyouminaine · 4 years

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Frankly, this doesn’t even really belong on this blog, but it coincides with my decision to exclude any new plot from that reality into my portrayal. Yes, I’m talking about the Remake. Yes, I’m calling it a “reality.” Now before anyone starts hissing about me being a purist, I’m going to break down why I cannot and will not use material from the Remake (abbr. 7R) in my writing.

(Spoilers under the cut. Beware long post.)

And let me make this clear: 7R was a good game. It was not a good story.

What 7R did well was create a new system that combined SE’s past experiences from the KH series and previous FF games (I see a lot of influence from XIII). It provided a challenge --- whether good or bad is partly dependent on RNGesus favoring you or not --- and created an environment and interrelationship between characters that gave the gamer a chance to connect with the world and understand the repercussions of certain actions. It gave gamers a chance to develop feelings for certain characters that previously had no strong standing in the original. This was good. (I first played on Normal and got a decent challenge out of it during certain boss fights, particularly during endgame. Currently I’m running through Hard mode and utterly regretting my life choices, so the challenge is certainly there.)

As someone who played the original and delved into the rest of the Compilation over the years, it was enjoyable to see nods and easter eggs to those plotlines. A story I didn’t think would have any part in 7R somehow made its way in. People I thought would be skipped over were brought up. It was nice.

But here’s where it fell apart: all these nods and the expansion of the world (yes, we’re only experiencing Midgar, but I’ll still label it as a “world” since that is the extent that the gamers are exposed to) were haphazardly applied to the main plot, and not only that, when it came down to the endgame all those little nuggets ultimately didn’t mean anything.

Why? Because of the new plotline that was introduced. It’s been speculated and the general consensus is that 7R is a different reality. You can call it a sequel, AU, whatever. It’s a different plot altogether, particularly with how the ending unfolded. The Whispers / Watchers of Fate / Arbiters of Fate are what everyone has summed as being a physical manifestation of what fans expected to happen, or what the creators tried to preserve over the years through the many works that elaborated on the original VII storyline. Because the characters in 7R have destroyed the Whispers, this essentially has ripped apart the expectations that old (and new) fans had for the Remake series. We don’t know how many installments there are for 7R, but it’s pretty clear from the ending line that there’s going to be another part. (Hell, you still have to fight Sephiroth again... or something. Or maybe he becomes your ally. Who knows...)

Which makes a lot of mental gears grind, heads tilt, and plenty of frustrated fans raise their voices. The Deus Ex Machina concept is nothing new. A “do-over” plotline is not unique either. (Doubt me? Go look at all the fanfics that have been circling the internet since the day the original game came out.) Taking the original VII plotline and conjoining it with a “do-over” plotline is... well, it’s bad.

There are ways to make something like that work. Ways to rewrite history and attempt to make it right. There are people who speculate that 7R considers the original VII as the “bad ending” --- as if this is a dating sim and you picked the option where Lover C decides to murder you instead of marry you, so now you wipe your save file and change all of your choices so you get the happy ending with Lover C. The major plot events are the same, but now you’re alive and Lover C never goes apeshit on you.

I can understand the desire to get a “good ending.” This just isn’t the smartest way to go about it.

So with that in mind, we are now on that separate save file trying to make all the “right” choices. No one knows what will come of it, no one knows if it even is a “good” ending that awaits us. So what does that mean?

Quite plainly, it means everything we knew, every relationship that was built upon in the original, even all the work that was put into the other games and that particular reality, are all dumped in the trash. 7R is an AU scum save game file that tosses out the original values and lore that were taught to us and the characters too. In an ugly way of explaining it, 7R is spitting in the face of all the other pieces of the Compilation and what lessons came out of them.

These are lessons of the value of life, the value of relationships, the gravity of truth and the price of lies, struggling with flaws and shortcomings, change, love, and personal growth. These aren’t new or unfamiliar tropes, but their weight of worth still remains. (I won’t call VII to be the greatest game in existence, but it did create a strong connection with its audience through the story it told.)

What 7R does in face of these lessons is push them all aside for what is basically fanservice. Wish fulfillment. People who are dead in the original may/may not be alive in 7R. People who are alive in 7R are supposed to be dead in the original. 7R’s reality robs the audience of a chance to experience those values and struggles in a new yet familiar way. Fans who have no idea what happened in the original or only have a vague grasp of the plot will not have the same connection that old fans do. Yes, new fans can still understand that Aerith’s death was supposed to be a sad event. Yes, Sephiroth is a meteor summoning cockroach. (He has a bad habit of resurrecting.) However, they don’t have the firsthand experience. They did not personally go through the journey.

There are heavy hints of it in 7R, but the experience isn’t the same. And now considering that the Whispers are defeated, there probably isn’t even a reason to go through the original content anymore. Just open up a wikia and get the most basic summary, because what lays before us in the 7R series is uncharted territory.

The story of Cloud’s past and who Zack is will most likely still be introduced and explained, but how? Will it still hold the same meaning? Will fans be able to experience the same joy and pain, not knowing how big of an impact Zack had on the story particularly on Cloud’s, Aerith’s, and even Tifa’s lives? They made a whole game with him as the main protagonist; that was how big of an impact he made on those around him, and how much fans thought he deserved more screen time than what was given in the original VII.

Though the ending cutscenes of 7R implied that Zack may still be dead and his survival is probably in a completely different reality outside of both VII and 7R, the idea that it is possible for him to live takes away the meaning behind his death. It takes away how he made such an impact on those he met. Is it sad to always have him die? Certainly. But that’s the point. You, the gamer, and those in the game itself feel the weight of his presence and his loss. Him living diminishes it. Perhaps not completely, but it does stick a knife in the tapestry that wove together this important and surprisingly strong bond between even the most minor of characters.

The same can be said about Aerith’s death. I do enjoy that in 7R Cloud and Aerith got to interact and you could see more of how their personalities played off each other; I enjoyed Aerith’s portrayal in 7R. Yet, with the speculation of her possibly surviving and maybe being omnipotent (or dimension hopping, take your pick), we don’t see how strong of an impact she made on those around her. We don’t see how her death changed the cast, became a driving point of their mission. Particularly for Cloud, she became a pivotal part of his growth. Regardless if you consider their relationship to be friendship or love, it’s undeniable that she made a strong impression and her death hit Cloud like a sack of bricks to the face. The value of her life was so great in his heart, she became one of the major reasons he was so hell bent on fighting Sephiroth. She wasn’t the only reason, but she certainly was fighting to be at the top of the list. Even in the sequels that followed, she was always on their minds. She taught a priceless lesson that still sticks with gamers today. People still weep over her death.

So let me bring it up again: 7R spits at VII. Not just in the lessons it brought, but the lore as well. The introduction of Whispers, Aerith’s unexplained new powers, Sephiroth’s early appearance and his ability to cut through the veil of reality... It all brings about the question of Gaia and how she works as both a habitable place and sentient entity. Gaia had WEAPON --- colossal creatures that were meant to safeguard the planet. When Gaia perceives herself to be in danger, she brings out the giant no-no stick. (This is mainly in response to the threat of Jenova, but it is plausible that WEAPON will tear apart every major threat and hit the big reset button on everything. Otherwise, why did Ultimate attack Mideel? There’s no Jenova there, unless you count Cloud. But that’s a different topic for a different day.)

There is speculation that the Whispers that meld into the Harbinger of Fate / Whisper Harbinger is another WEAPON. This is a theory to take with a fat grain of salt, but the point is this: what did the Whispers uphold, and how does that alter the rest of the lore of the game? Do we consider the Whispers to be beings completely exempt from the rest of the lore? Are they some kind of god? Are they related or unrelated to WEAPON, and do they have their own agenda or do they also work to safeguard Gaia? No one knows, and there are a bunch of videos that try to tackle these questions.

I don’t have the answer. What I do have is a major side-eye at the whole concept of the Whispers existing and how they interact across the different realities, and how in turn they alter the overall lore of VII. Vague telling of the main plot points from the original are present, yet there is a giant question mark as to how much of said plot points will remain present in future game(s). Is there even a need for WEAPON anymore? Is Aerith not the last living Ancient/Cetra? Is Sephiroth blood kin to her? (Anyone remember that old concept?)

What about Holy? The lifestream? Hell, you can create summon materia now, not find godly creatures slumbering inside giant marbles scattered throughout the planet. Can Meteor be created too, or is it still hidden in the Temple of the Ancients and deemed too dangerous and the magic too great for anyone to handle? Do I even want to touch the subjects of Project G and Deepground??

That’s too many questions that don’t need to exist in the first place. What 7R created was a large stew of wtfery. I don’t just say this out of saltiness, it really is a giant “wtf” where almost every fan doesn’t even know where to start when they try to deeply analyze what happened in the game.

Personally, I believe the “do-over” plot that was introduced in 7R was a mistake. Not only did it mess with the lore of the world and open up a rotten can of worms that no one knows how to decipher, it took away from the value of certain actions from different characters, whether main cast or secondary. (I feel cheated. Tifa’s tears were practically wasted because Biggs is apparently alive, Jessie is probably just comatose somewhere, and Wedge probably survived too despite being tossed out a skyscraper.)

What I expected, and I believe what many frustrated fans expected, was not a “do-over” plotline/reality but a retelling of the same familiar story we have come to love over the last few decades. Whether some fans picked it up as soon as it was first published on 3 discs, or played it later down the line on PC, or even waited until it got ported to PS4, we came to enjoy that original plot. The original reality that has been told and retold, and adored even across different games with cameo appearances from the main cast. Flesh out the world, make it bigger, make it grander, show me Cloud in a fugly purple dress and Tifa in a miniskirt, show me Sephiroth’s Vidal Sassoon flowing silver locks, show me Jenova’s eye nipple... but keep the rest the same. By all means incorporate plotline from the other installments of the Compilation --- tell me more about the Turks, the original/main faction of AVALANCHE, Rufus and his relationship with his dad, other perverted projects Shinra had hiding under its mako skirt, the full story behind the failed rocket launch, the Wutai war, Nanaki’s youth, Zack’s early years in Shinra/SOLDIER, all that --- but don’t suddenly throw all that work, all those relationships and stories, all those valuable lessons out the window.

7R had plenty of potential and even if I take away the “purist” expectations I wanted from it, the game still managed to be disappointing.

Coming back to the topic of why I won’t use 7R in my portrayal, it is because of all this. Because it takes away too much from VII and warps it into something it shouldn’t be. My idea of Cloud sits strongly with the Compilation (namely the original game with some minor inspiration from the other materials). His hardships, his pain, his personal growth... I will hold onto those because they make Cloud who he is at the end of the game. They are why Cloud leaves such an impression on people. Yes, recent adjustments to his features have really ramped up how handsome he is (especially in 7R, though I’m salty about his hair being wrong) and that sticks with people. Everyone swoons over how he looks in that crisp HD. It’s his journey that is more worthy of noting though.

I expect that there will be people who are not/less bothered by these details. There are plenty of people who embrace 7R and what it introduces --- I’ve heard people say they’re tired of the same old formula and a “do-over” plot is fresh and exciting for them --- but I’ll stick to what I’ve come to learn to love throughout my life. Because there are plenty of people who favor 7R, the door is open for people to head that way. This isn’t me kicking anyone out. This is me firmly establishing where I stand and why.

TL;DR --- 7R is a high dollar AU fanfic and I don’t appreciate that. (But I’ll still snag icons and reblog gifsets of the cutscenes because I’m opportunistic that way.)

#{ 1 phoenix down } | ooc #salty rambling

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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How Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead Expands on Dawn of the Dead

https://ift.tt/3f7FCKZ

This Army of the Dead article contains spoilers.

The premise of Army of the Dead was originally intended for a Dawn of the Dead sequel. No, really. Director Zack Snyder is not shy about this point, mentioning to the press, including us, that he’s virtually had this concept in the back of his mind since time immemorial.

“Just exploring Dawn, in doing that movie and taking it apart [was exciting],” Snyder recently told Den of Geek. And while the idea of doing a direct sequel to his 2004 remake of the George A. Romero classic fizzled in the years after Snyder’s debut picture, the premise of a heist movie where the heroes have to break into an abandoned Las Vegas hotel to steal the proverbial jackpot has been a Snyder pitch “for forever.”

Now that Army of the Dead is finally here, thanks to Snyder partnering with Netflix, it is very much its own movie. Nonetheless, it is also happy to reference other cinema touchstones more than any other film in Snyder’s filmography. This includes winks to An American Werewolf in London, nods to Aliens, and most intriguingly overt expansions on what Snyder did in the Dawn of the Dead remake. Thematically, it even arguably feels like Zack is coming home.

This is obvious during the opening credits of the film, which may very well be the movie’s highlight. With Las Vegas under siege by the undead, we get a wonderful sequence of everything going to hell. Some might mistakenly feel it’s apiece with another 2000s zombie movie classic, Zombieland, which showed via slow motion vignette how zombies took over the world. However, Army of the Dead more overtly homages Snyder’s own Dawn of the Dead and then builds from that foundation.

The first major wink and nudge comes from the song choice. While Snyder elects to use an old standby for any movie set in Sin City, “Viva Las Vegas,” it is not Elvis Presley’s iconic rendition. Instead, we’re listening to Richard Cheese and Allison Crowe offer their own modern vocal stylings on the classic.

Cheese, the face of an intentionally comedic lounge act, has spent decades offering swinging covers to traditionally un-swinging tunes. That memorably includes his jazzy rendition of Disturbed’s “Get Down with the Sickness,” a heavy metal song with nihilistic implications. Cheese’s cover came to mainstream prominence, too, thanks to Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead.

In that 2004 film, we hear Cheese singing, “Get ready to die!” with maximum joyfulness as the last survivors of a zombie apocalypse find a bizarre definition for their “new normal” inside of a shopping mall with hordes of the undead outside.

For Army of the Dead, Snyder asked Cheese and Crowe to specifically cover Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas,” a song that was always meant to be a lounge act. However, the new version has added menace in 2021 since it’s now recorded with a self-aware detachment about the horrible images we are witnessing: zombie strippers murdering their customer in the bathtub; a paratrooper descending into a flesh-hungry mob ready to devour him whole; Vegas’ mini-Eiffel Tower crushing a poor old Zombie Elvis impersonator—killing him all over again.

The Army of the Dead opener also tells a grim story about how society both descends and stays the same. Unlike Zombieland, we follow a wordless narrative in the opening credits as a mercenary we later learn is Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) goes on a mission to save the Secretary of Defense. In the end, he gets the prized asset out, but the little girl his team also stumbles upon ends up crushed by the makeshift wall the U.S. government is forming around the city: a literal body in the foundation of this new world (which, by the by, alludes to a line of dialogue in Watchmen).

The opening credits of Dawn of the Dead (2004) actually use a sparing amount of original footage shot for that movie. Much of the imagery we see is from recordings of real moments of social unrest and war, which feeds into the frequent original Romero subtext that the living are already zombies. The more things change—be that by zombie virus or otherwise—the more they stay the same. Army of the Dead takes this further. Snyder has the budget this time to film an entire sequence of a world upended and carrying on. Hence showing how the U.S. government is able to prevent a global zombie apocalypse (for now) by walling up Vegas.

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Afterward, the government now has a refugee crisis with detainment camps located all around the ruins of an American city, and in the movie’s universe a simpleton is still president, ordering a nuclear strike on the town on the Fourth of July because it’d be “really cool.” Years after zombies destroyed the town, guys like Scott Ward are also still flipping burger—or getting him and his friends killed while doing the bidding of shady wealthy elites like Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada).

The opening sequence and whole first act of Army of the Dead builds on the idea of Dawn of the Dead, which suggests we were doomed to this disastrous fate even without zombie bites. But Army of the Dead uses world-building to expand on this concept in visceral and sometimes unique ways. Consider that in 2004, the Dawn remake was only the second zombie movie to have “fast zombies” after Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later from two years earlier. Dawn then went a step further by introducing a… zombie baby.

In Dawn of the Dead ’04, Andre (Mekhi Phifer) and Luda (Inna Korobkina) are about to be parents when the very pregnant Luda is scratched by a zombie. Andre hides this fact from the rest of the survivors in the mall until his eventually zombified wife gives birth to an undead babe. The concept is never carried further than the crib since the other characters wind up killing the zombie baby as soon as it opens its dead eyes.

Army of the Dead winds up building off of that idea in alternately interesting and disappointing ways. Once again a zombie baby figures heavily into the plot, with a zombified woman pregnant with another zombie male’s child. Eventually, the zombie mother-to-be is beheaded and her child, still barely in utero, dies in her severed corpse.

Once again we are denied a full exploration of what a zombie baby would mean in this world, and if it could grow or develop, which is a bit disappointing. But by implication of being conceived by two zombie parents, Snyder is clearly attempting to build on the idea of what a zombie can be.

“I think the conversation I was starting to have with myself is: What will people allow in this genre of film?” Snyder told us.

So, what will people allow zombies to be? More than any non-comedy film before it, Army of the Dead leans into the idea that zombies can grow, learn, and essentially evolve into a new society. As another character in Snyder’s movie says, Las Vegas isn’t their prison; it’s their kingdom. One in which living humans barter for safe passage by offering literal sacrifices to the “alpha” zombies who’ve built a society.

It is the original zombie alpha who’s become a king (or “god” with his nickname of Zeus) in this world. And unlike the human characters in Army of the Dead, Zeus and his fellow alphas are immune from deceiving, backstabbing, or betraying each other. Snyder riffs on the Aliens line that they aren’t “fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage,” which is more or less said about his zombies here. But he’s also expanding on how far you can push zombies on screen.

In his first zombie movie, Snyder remade a Romero classic from 1978. But Romero’s later zombie movies, including Day of the Dead (1985) and Land of the Dead (2005), toyed with the idea of zombies growing more sentient and going their own way. Bub the Zombie in Day learned loyalty to human protectors and how to use a gun. “Big Daddy” in Land learned how to lead an exodus of pissed off shamblers against humans. But that was still working on allegorical terms about income inequality, and inequality between nations.

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With Army of the Dead, Snyder goes much farther than the genre has before by imagining zombies building their own society and hierarchy. For arguably the first time since a baby zombie opened its eyes in Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, these walkers are growing up.

The post How Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead Expands on Dawn of the Dead appeared first on Den of Geek.

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annieandjakemovies · 3 years

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Gangster Squad

Great production design, props, and locations can only get you so far in a period piece, and even with a stellar group of talent in front of the camera, Ruben Fleischer's Gangster Squad is a empty and tonally inconsistent film that may be the most dumbed-down gangster movie ever made. The film loves its R-rating, showcasing ridiculous violence every chance it gets, but it's a shame that the only audience that would likely fall for the movie's gags - 15-year-old boys - are too young to legally see this in theaters.

Gangster Squad Director: Ruben Fleischer Starring: Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn, Emma Stone, Anthony Mackie

It's the late 1940s, and transplanted gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) is slowly taking over Los Angeles. World War II may be over, but the war against organized crime in L.A. is just getting started, and the city's crusty police chief (Nick Nolte) essentially gives bruiser cop John O'Mara (Josh Brolin) carte blanche to get Cohen and his drug-running thugs out of town. Despite initial protestations from his wife, O'Mara rounds up a motley crew of cops who speak his language, including the slick-talking charmer Wooters (Ryan Gosling), technical guru Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi), gruff sharpshooter Kennard (Robert Patrick) and his sidekick Ramirez (Michael Pena), and the rough and tumble Washington (Anthony Mackie), to bring Cohen to justice using their very particular set of skills. It's a solid premise, and one that's been mined in dozens of gangster movies before this one. (Most recently, though, this territory has been covered in the video game L.A. Noire, which hits on all the story beats that appear in this film in a much more satisfying way. Since directly comparing a video game to a film isn't quite fair, I'll leave it at that.) Just because the topic has been covered before doesn't automatically mean this film couldn't stand among the classics in the genre, but from the opening moments, it became clear that Will Beall's infantile screenplay wasn't going to allow that to happen. This is Beall's first produced feature screenplay, and as a former LAPD cop, you'd think there would be a hint of intelligence under the surface of his swagger-filled, guns-blazing detective story. Sadly, that's not the case. The dialogue tries so hard to be smooth and cool, especially from Gosling's womanizer character ("Who's the tomato?" he asks in regard to his redheaded co-star Emma Stone), but even though the leads look dashing in their tailored suits and fedoras, they can't make this nonsense sound good. There is no subtlety here. Penn's evil gangster delivers insanely cheesy one-liners with all the personality of a brick wall, and savage violence flies in and out of the movie like a haphazard tornado lost in the multiplex, occasionally wandering into your theater every few minutes before abruptly leaving. (Don't you hate those?) "You know the drill," Penn says to his henchman, immediately before said henchman drills a man to death. It's that kind of surface level stuff that I would have absolutely loved when I was 15, and if I hadn't seen The Untouchables, L.A. Confidential, or any other respectable gangster noir film, my fifteen-year-old self might have proclaimed it one of my favorites of the year. (Although to be fair I must give props to the best line of the movie: "The whole town's underwater, and you're grabbing a bucket instead of a bathing suit.")

As with many stories set in this time period, the shadow of the war looms large over the male psyches here. But though the end of the war is directly addressed multiple times - the chief asks O'Mara to fight in "occupied territory" yet again, O'Mara's wife continually has to remind him that the war is over, and O'Mara even uses it as an inspirational point in a speech to his men - the movie never actually takes the time to dig in and explore what that means in the context of these different characters. All of them essentially act the same, busting into every situation ill-prepared and with guns at the ready, but when Gosling asks Brolin if he "wants to win or die trying," it isn't a meaningful character moment. It's just another thing that sort of sounds cool. There's no emotion behind the delivery or the response; despite the surface differences between characters (the smart guy, the sharpshooter, etc.), these men are all soldiers that are constantly pulling triggers even when they don't have guns in their hands.

Along with a lack of satisfying character development, grown men often behave like children here, refusing to learn from their mistakes even after they admit to making them. The gangster squad bursts into place after place, roughing up Cohen's thugs and getting into close calls without ever having a solid plan, and at one point I started hoping that one of them would die quickly just so it would give the rest of them their cliched newfound resolve to finish the case and avenge their fallen brother. There's a simplified wire tapping story shoehorned in, but after watching HBO's "The Wire," it makes these supposedly professional characters look like total morons. At times the movie is a live action cartoon (complete with a comical jailbreak straight out of a Looney Tunes episode), but then it becomes gravely serious, and then switches again to a sort of pop-infused fun, soaking up the glitz and glamour of the era. It never finds its footing, and as a result the whole film feels like it's treading water for the whole of its runtime.

Ruben Fleischer, who earned some geek cred with his work on Zombieland, makes some pretty baffling choices when it comes to the action sequences. A night car chase midway through the film was especially disappointing, with poorly established spacial relationships rendering it almost completely unintelligible. Speed ramping (ala Zack Snyder) is employed often, and whether it's Mickey Cohen's bulging vein swinging at a punching bag or a series of Christmas decorations systematically destroyed in a hotel shootout, there is nothing interesting about the effect on display here. Whatever novelty it once had has long worn off, and it's going to take some sort of monumental shift in usage to convince me that it should ever be used again by anyone.

As for the cast, Brolin is stoic and hard-jawed enough to pull off the one-dimensional lead character. Gosling is good (even with a strange affectation), but his schtick gets old by the halfway point. Emma Stone is fine as a piece of eye candy, but third act attempts to turn her into something more than that are laughable. Ribisi is the movie's moral center, a nice change of pace from weasels and weirdos he's been portraying over the past few years, and Mackie's talents are totally wasted here. (He randomly throws knives at people. That's about it.) Penn clearly put some effort into his portrayal of Cohen (complete with what appeared to be flesh-colored Play-Doh attached to his face, his visage channeling the villains of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy), but again, he can only do so much with comically bad dialogue.

So I'll leave you with this awesome joke I just came up with: Gangster Squad? More like Gangster Squandering A Great Premise, am I right? But seriously folks...for a film with so much talent on the screen, it's a shame that this script was so abysmal. And with writer Will Beall having already taken a crack at the screenplay for Warner Bros. upcoming superhero teamup Justice League, something tells me that Marvel is going to continue its cinematic dominance for years to come. Until next time...

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comic-movieheroesranked · 6 years

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Cinematic Comic Characters Ranked! (Year 2009) Final Part

It’s rough coming right after a fantastic year of movies (2008) but 2009 did pretty well for itself. Terminator Salvation is our only sequel and we also get an X-Men spinoff with X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Kids favorite shows come out with Astro Boy, Dragonball: Evolution, and G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra, and we got a couple of thrillers with Whiteout and Surrogates. We also get the debut of the controversial Watchmen! Here’s your TOP 20!

*SPOILERS AHEAD FOR ALL HIGHLIGHTED MOVIES ABOVE*

20. Tom Greer (Surrogates)

"You don't change what's been done. You and I know that better than most people."

Tom Greer is a cop living in a world where surrogates are used for everything and humans don't even leave their bedrooms. He gets thrown into a murder case where people are dying through their hosts and gets his whole world turned upside down when his surrogate is destroyed. Now Greer is forced to live as a human again and deal with the emotions and risks that comes with it. After stopping Canter from killing every human attached to the surrogate, he ultimately decides to let the virus destroy the surrogates and returns to home to fix his relationship with his wife.

19. Kyle Reese (Terminator Salvation)

"Come with me if you want to live!"

Introducing a young Kyle Reese, the man who goes back in time and ends up being John Connor's father, was such an interesting dynamic. Kyle looked up to John, completely unaware that he was the one who created him, along with Sarah Connor. Star being his traveling buddy proves that he's good with kids and his character really shows when he calms down all the prisoners and continues to inspire them despite their dreadful looking futures. Skynet recognizes him as the biggest threat so he ends up becoming the number one target and has to get rescued by John and Marcus, another man he ends up looking up to.

18. Snake Eyes (G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra)

*silently fights with ninja sword*

Another mute on our list, Snake Eyes has taken a vow of silence after it appeared his arch enemy, Storm Shadow, killed their master. Now on the G.I. Joe team, Snake Eyes is called in when the team desperately needs a win. He pulls through for the most part, until Storm Shadow comes back in the picture. Personally, there's not much emotional investment I can give to a mute that literally covers his entire body to the point that I never see facial journeys or expressions. Like yes, he's a bad ass, but I really wanted to know how he felt knowing that Storm Shadow wasn't the one who killed his master after all.

17. Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias (Watchmen)

"I don't mind being the smartest man in the world, I just wish it wasn't this one."

Our villain, not villain of the movie. Adrian is one of the only superheroes to reveal his identity, now using his incredible brain to help out the world...as well as start a toy line. Turns out he's the one that killed The Comedian and managed to block out Dr. Manhattan from his plan to 'save the world'. How does he do this? By blowing up cities full of millions of innocent people. Unlike most villains, he doesn't give the heroes a chance to stop him, he pulls the trigger and gets away with it. The worst part? His plan sort of works. All the world leaders decide to band together in peace to heal their major losses and will look to him and his resources for guidance. He also had this really cool looking purple tiger that he killed for no reason and knowing Zack Snyder as a director, I think Adrian is supposed to be bisexual with his high interest in Alexander the Great.

16. Kayla Silverfox (X-Men Origins: Wolverine)

"Walk until you bleed... then keep walking!"

Kayla Silverfox is a mutant with the ability to control others through touch. After her sister is taken by Stryker, she agrees to start a relationship with Logan and fake her death so that he would seek revenge and agree to go through the Weapon X program. I guess she really did care for him, but it's hard to believe it when she only brings it up as a way to convince him to help her rescue her sister. I think it does show she cares though when she tries to convince him not to kill Victor, not wanting him to give in to his animal side. In the end she does actually die, getting shot by Stryker, but not before she gets Stryker under her control and makes him disappear.

15. Wallace A. Weems/Ripcord (G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra)

"Don't start being all nice now."

Everyone needs a comic relief, and on the G.I. Joe's team it's Ripcord. Literally every seen he was in he ends up being the butt of a joke, which obviously got old really quick. It was nice to see him bring out the emotional side of Scarlett and he did truly care about Duke when he was in trouble, so he was more bearable after that. He does come through in the end, flying one of the fastest jets known to man to take out the three missiles launched at three huge city populations all by himself.

14. Shana M. O'hara/Scarlett (G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra)

"Kill all the bad guys."

With Cover Girl dying early on in the movie, Scarlett ends up being the only girl representing the Joe's. Being just as smart as Breaker and one of the best fighters on the team, Scarlett proves she's not t be taken lightly. Her knowledge of different languages helps Ripcord take down the warheads at the end of the movie and we see her start to embrace her emotional side instead of just being the perfect robot soldier.

13. Daniel Dreiberg/Nite Owl II (Watchmen)

"God I'm tired of being afraid, afraid of war, afraid of the mask-killer and afraid of this goddamn suit, and how much I need it."

Daniel is the nicest guy in this whole movie! He doesn't even do much that's super nice, he just doesn't do anything that makes him an asshole like every other guy in the movie. Even though he's the second Nite Owl, he's considered the best, even by the original. He takes not being a hero anymore pretty well and starts living a normal life, but he starts craving the suit more and more as each day passes by. Laurie coming back in his life is the match to light the fire and he officially comes out of retirement to help save the world again, as well as have some steamy sex with Laurie on his owl-shaped jet/ship. There's really nothing he can do to stop Adrian's plan or to stop Rorschach's death but he is able to call Adrian out on his hypocrisy before continuing his life fighting crime with Laurie.

12. Victor Creed/Sabretooth (X-Men Origins: Wolverine)

"Nobody gets to kill you but me!"

So in a bizarre twist, Victor Creed is actually Logan's older brother. As they grow up, its blatantly obvious that Logan is the superior brother though, and that creates some jealous tension coming from Victor. When Logan 'abandons' him and quits Stryker's team, he works with Stryker to bring him down. He also hunts down any mutant that can help with Weapon XI. Being Stryker's glorified lap dog ends up benefiting him in no way, shape, or form as Stryker reveals he lied and that the adamantium wouldn't work on Victor like it did Logan. Of course this doesn't go well and the two brother duke it out, with Logan coming out as the winner, even more so when he decides to spare Victor's life. Victor returns the favor, helping Wolverine defeat Weapon XI before running off, making it clear their rivalry is still very much a thing.

11. Conrad S. Hauser/Duke (G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra)

"My army."

The main G.I. Joe, the All-American hero that will never give up on a mission and do whatever he can to complete it. I liked Duke his heart was always in the right place, but I just got to drag him for the situation with Ana for a bit. He really thought the best thing to do after her brother's death was to abandon her? Like, he can't really be that dumb, can he? And then to not even try to contact in her in FOUR YEARS?? The only reason he runs into her is because her not-dead brother brainwashes her to be this ass-kicking villain he ends up having to go against. Anyways, Duke was an essential member when it came to stopping Cobra. When everyone else was down it was him that stopped the nanobites from destroying all of Paris. And in the end it was him that snapped Ana out of her mind control and then pursued The Doctor to get him arrested. His dedication to the cause is extremely valiant, but maybe he should take some therapy lessons on how to open up to his fiance when there's a little drama in their lives.

10. Carrie Stetko (Whiteout)

"I gotta go out and do the rounds."

Carrie is one hardcore woman who has been fighting for her life from the get go. Even before the investigation in the Antarctic she had to tango with death as she fought off a man her partner released on her, making her trust in others lessen obviously. Then she moves to Antarctica where she now has to deal with the continents first murder, days before she was going to retire permanently. During the investigation, she nearly gets killed like five times and ends up having to get get TWO of her fingers amputated. With all that she still manages to stop the killer as well as confront one of her closest friends. Afterwards though, she decides not to retire, but does ask if she could be stationed someplace warmer.

9. Astro (Astro Boy)

"This is my destiny."

I loved Astro! He was just so nice and kind and helped everyone he could but because he was a robot everyone had to treat him like shit! Even with his father abandoning him, Hamegg wanting to profit off him, and President Stone wanting to destroy him for his blue core energy, he still did all he could to do the right thing and did everything he could to help anyone who was in danger. His level of awareness was also incredible! Like his willingness to sacrifice himself even though he still had the mind of a thirteen year old was incredible and I'm so glad he survived and became Metro City's new protector.

8. Walter Kovacs/Rorschach (Watchmen)

"Men get arrested. Dogs get put down."

I was conflicted with Rorschach because yes, he killed not one, but two dogs, but I totally understand why. They were owned by a man who brutally murdered a little girl and then fed her to them. The birth of Rorschach happens on the night he kills the man instead of turning him into authorities. He starts serves his own brand of justice even after the Watchmen are disbanded. He's the only one that starts investigating The Comedian's murder, which leads him to getting framed for Moloch's murder. In prison, Rorschach takes down a lot of enemies he's put in there before he breaks out with Nite Owl and Silk Spectre II. When Adrian succeeds in killing millions of people to save billions, Rorschach is the only one who refuses to keep quiet and his stubbornness leads to his death by Dr. Manhattan. However, the truth is still in Rorschach's personal journal so who knows how long Adrian's forced peace lasts.

7. Thomas Arashikage/Storm Shadow (G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra)

"Now you will die without a word."

I don't know why but I loved Storm Shadow, but I did have one slight problem. Why on Earth would he wait until he literally dies by Snake Eye's hand to reveal to the other ninja that he wasn't the one that killed their master? That was the only reason Snake Eyes considered him an enemy! And the only reason he took that vow of silence in the first place! Even if he didn't kill his master, he definitely felt some type of way about him favoring this random white kid who showed up so maybe he was still bitter about that and wanted Snake Eyes to think he was the killer. Either way, he was a dangerous foe, probably killing the most people out of everyone in the film. Oh, and did anyone else notice he had the world's first fidget spinner? Because I sure did.

6. John Connor (Terminator Salvation)

"I'll be back."

John Connor has finally shaped into the man Skynet feared he'd be, a leader of the Resistance. He has become a beacon of hope and is always looked upon during times of great stress by his peers, no doubt because of his calm and collected personality he's developed over the years at war. With his mother's tapes to guide him, John ends up doing his best to find his future father, Kyle Reese. He ends up doing so with the help of Marcus Wright, a hybrid human-machine. At first, since he hasn't been told about him by anyone from his future, John doesn't trust him, but when it appears the man is in control of the machine, John teams up with him to rescue Kyle and the other humans from Skynet. In the rescue mission, John comes face to face with The Terminator, who nearly kills him by wounding him to close to the heart. It's Marcus's sacrifice that ends up saving him and allowing him to continue on and lead the resistance against the machines.

5. Logan/Wolverine (X-Men Origins: Wolverine)

"You wanted the animal, Colonel. You got it."

Wolverine is back and this time we get all, or at least most, of the questions to his passed answered. When did he discover his powers? When he killed his father for killing the man he THOUGHT was his actual father. How did he get involved with Stryker? He joined his team of mutants along with his brother, Victor. When Logan didn't want to kill innocent people, he ditched. How did he get his metal claws? Victor shows up and 'kills' Kayla, Logan's girlfriend at the time, so Logan goes to Stryker to put him in the Weapon X program so he can have the adamantium in his skeleton. His biggest struggle is staying on the line between man and animal. It's hard when he ends up fighting almost every character (like the Blob, Agent Zero, and Gambit) and literally fights in every American War since the Civil War. Of course it's discovered Kayla didn't actually die and was working for Stryker but his feelings are still there for her so he keeps his grudge on Victor, defeating him without giving in to his animal side. The biggest threat in the end is Weapon XI, an uber-powered Deadpool. Once he's defeated, the last remaining question is answered. How does Logan lose his memory? Stryker shoots him in the head twice with adamantium bullets and it's only because he's young and his shape that his healing powers saved him. All in all not the greatest origin story but it's the first of a great trilogy with Logan centered on the front lines.

4. Laurie Jupiter/Silk Spectre II (Watchmen)

"I am not afraid."

Laurie had the biggest arc, for me, in this movie. She still puts up with her bitter mother despite disapproving the women's fondness to the Comedian, a man that tried to rape her. She also struggles with her relationship with Dr. Manhattan, who's omniscient persona really puts a strain on them both. She leaves him after reuniting with Daniel, the second Nite Owl. I think in the end she wanted someone who would give their full attention to her when it counted, which is something Daniel was able to do. Back in the crime fighting life, she teams up with Daniel and Rorschach to stop Adrian from destroying the world. In order to do so, she has to confront Dr. Manhattan to get him to help, which ends up with her finding out The Comedian is her real father. Even though she's distressed about it, it gets Jon to help, but they end up being too late. When everything is said and done, Laurie forgives her mother and continues fighting crime with Daniel.

3. Blair Williams (Terminator Salvation)

"I saw a man, not a machine."

Blair Williams is one of the best pilots working for John and the resistance who teams up with Marcus after the pair try to rescue Kyle and Star from the machine gatherers. After taking care of a group of bandits, the pair end up getting close with each other as Blair leads him back to headquarters. During their travels Blair assures Marcus that he's a good guy and that all humans deserve a second chance as long as they want one. When it's discovered Marcus is part machine, Blair sees the human in him and decides to betray the resistance and rescue him. After John forgives her, she ends up flying the plan that rescues them from Skynet Headquarters before it explodes. She grows feelings for Marcus so she's a little upset when he offers to give his heart to John so the other could live, but understands that this is his second chance.

2. Jon Osterman/Dr. Manhattan (Watchmen)

"The world's smartest man poses no more threat to me than it's smartest termite."

The most powerful man on Earth, Jon got his powers as Dr. Manhattan from a freak accident in his lab. With the body of Adonis and powers such as teleporting, flight, multiplying, and growing the size of a titan, there's rare limitations to Jon, which makes him the biggest asset to the United States military. He ends the war with Vietnam by himself and helps Adrian create a world ran by clean energy, but he does have his faults. For one, he treated his ex-girlfriend like shit before he left her for Laurie, who he also failed to care for like she needed him to. However, it's her breakup that makes him give up on humanity and run off to a distant planet. He refuses to help save the world until he discovers the miracle in Laurie's birth, but he ends up too late to save the world from Adrian. When Adrian's plan to bring world peace actually does work, Dr. Manhattan agrees to take the blame so that the peace can remain. He ends up having to kill Rorschach to keep him quiet before saying his goodbyes to Laurie and leaving for another universe.

1. Marcus Wright (Terminator Salvation)

"I am human."

From the beginning I couldn't help but want to to root for this guy. As soon as he wakes up from the future he befriends Kyle and Star and looks after them. He shows Kyle a lot of tricks for survival that the other eventually takes with him when he goes back in time. When the pair get snatched, Marcus tries his best to rescue them, making it his mission to save two people he barely knows. He doesn't think he's a good person, because of what he did in his past, but as Blair points out, he's doing good things now, which is what matters. Even when he discovers he's a machine and that Skynet created him to accomplish John Connor's death, he doesn't give in and proves his human side is in control by helping John rescue everyone. In his final act of redemption, Marcus sacrifices himself by giving his heart to John so that the other could live. With a goodbye kiss from Blair, he dies knowning that he got his second chance at being a good person.

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powerbottomranmaru · 7 years

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so the long zangetsu shin au inspired by long agito by @blood-ritual. here are some rough as fuck notes about that. none of it will make sense. i just gotta info dump it all somewhere before i go insane.

ryoma is somewhat of an inventor but mostly serves as a healer who conducts his experiments on people who need to be healed. because people are willing to let him test new herbs and medicines on them, he’s become the healer with the best success rate. he doesn’t live in any certain kingdom because he doesn’t want to submit to any one leader, he thinks he’s too good for that. he ends up taking in the generals of the opposing armies one night because they’re dying not far from his doorstep and he figures he might as well. they’re staying with him and they talk to each other and when they can actually walk out of his house they have a peace treaty drafted to take back to their kings.

takatora is zangetsu shin aka the god of war and the scariest motherfucker to piss off. he’s very intrigued in this human who managed to end a war by doing nothing more than refusing to let two people argue with each other while they were under his care. he takes his human form and goes to visit ryoma, injuring himself and claiming he’s a traveling merchant who got injured on his trip and wants nothing more than to be healed. while he’s there, he listens to ryoma talk about his aspirations and his dreams and he’s moved by this mortal who reaches for the stars. so he goes back to where the gods live in their enchanted forest-- the equivalent of helheim-- and calls to ryoma in his dreams.

ryoma is like “yeah okay” and packs his things and goes into the forest. essentially you can’t survive the forest unless one of the gods has called you to their side because their magical protection enables you to find the pathway to the castle. otherwise you’ll die of starvation or dehydration before long because the flora isn’t edible and there’s no drinking water. smarter humans have brought food and water with them but no one ever finds the castle through sheer will of force. humans that kaito kumon deems worthy of his service can live, but their only real option is to live in service to him.

kaito is overlord baron, the god of chaos and strength and power who protects the weak and oppressed. he watches over children abused by their families and uses his powers to punish parents who endanger their children. as a child he ran away from his abusive home and found himself lost in the forest. he would have died except mai takatsukasa, the goddess of the forest, took pity on him and cared for him. when he was older, she gave him a golden apple from her tree that gave him his godlike form and powers, and kaito uses that power to protect those who were in a bad place like he was.

mai has always been and always will be. her very spirit and being is tied to her shrine, which is the massive tree at the heart of the forest that spawns the golden apples when someone worthy of claiming them comes along. there used to be other gods and goddesses, but when most of them went bad in a mad grab for power, mai took up fighting and slayed them because she couldn’t have them wreaking havoc on the human world. her love of humans and her belief in them is what lead her to decide that she would preserve the powers of the former gods and goddesses and when humans who were worthy came along, she would grant them the power necessary.

she doesn’t live alone, either. rica and chucky are essentially forest nymphs who came from the tree and they live with mai and take care of her and help care for the tree. they serve as her messengers to the other gods and goddesses-- of whom she is the most powerful-- and they fiercely protect her because her powers are way stronger than anyone else’s are. she shows up in visions only to the humans deserving of godhood.

takatora was a warrior who fought endlessly for the king he followed and he was far more successful in war than anyone else was. he was in the midst of battle to protect a small village and when an enemy warrior went to kill a woman and her children, takatora intervened and nearly died in the process. as he laid dying, mai came to him in a vision and willed him to survive only if he would come to the forest and claim the power that was rightfully his. he was able to make his way to her tree, where she plucked a golden apple for him and gave him the powers of the god of war and the form of zangetsu shin.

yoko minato is marika, the goddess of nature, and she preserves the forest, cultivates the actual vegetables and fruit safe enough to eat, and her being is tied to the nature that humans encounter, as well. she and ryoma become fast friends because he realizes her herbs and plants have a lot of interesting properties and he offers to help care for them in exchange for having access to them. she has a human lover named touka akatsuki.

touka was an archer for the army who flew marika’s banner quite firmly even though most kings who care about that fly banners for zangetsu shin or baron (warlord and strength/power). she and her squadron of warriors were especially well-known for their strength as a unit, stronger than pretty much any group possible, and she made a name for herself because she’d viciously defend farmers who otherwise couldn’t fight for themselves. doing that caught yoko’s eye because it was clear to her that touka not only understood just how hard it was to take care of the land like that but she also had great respect for it and saw it worthy of being defended, so she drew her to her side.

sid is also here. sid is sigurd, the god of lies and trickery and deceipt and basically how to be shady. he was one of the best conmen living and by and large had no great attachment to anyone or anything, he just lived day to day and did what he had to do to get by. takatora and yoko were visiting the human world and talked to him a bit, and sid felt something off about them so he didn’t try to con them and instead warned them about some of the other conmen that live in the area. he also totally noticed a few shady people following them and decided he was going to intervene. sid pretty much believes solely in stealing from bad people since like, they deserve it. takatora and yoko didn’t.

long story short he ended up mortally wounded and mai reached out to him and told takatora and yoko to bring him into the forest. sigurd is on every charm and token that thieves and conmen keep on their persons almost religiously, though sid is in the human world far more often than people would think. he likes to see how modern day humanity is working out.

oren is bravo, obviously, and though he was also a famed warrior who could have become the god of war, he ended up becoming the god of family relationships when he put his life on the line to protect jonouchi, whom he’d always seen like a surrogate son since jonouchi’s father treated him like shit for not being the man he wanted him to be. mai was touched and invited them both to come live at the castle, jonouchi gaining immortality in the process, but oren is the only two of them to be a god. he and baron get along quite a bit when it comes to punishing fathers who don’t deserve to have children.

lastly micchi is the god of death, ryugen yomi. he was always too weak and sick to fight so he stayed behind and did his best to tend to the bodies of the dead, giving them proper burials and leaving flowers over their graves. he and his father had a very terrible relationship because micchi was never who he was supposed to be and his father punished him for it liberally. micchi just snaps one day and fights back and he accidentally kills him in the process, and of course the soldiers try to chase him down because that’s a crime no matter what was happening to him. he ran into the forest to try to get away and mai felt his presence and felt the heavy aura of death around him, so she offered him a golden apple. he resides over death and the peaceful passage between this life and the next, the peace that comes from long illness and painful wounds.

oren’s human lover is bando because bando spent most of his life tending a fruit stand and a pub and he was like a shoulder for every kid who had a bad home life and he caused some pretty heavy strife in his village because he got between ryoji hase and his parents because hase wanted something different for himself and his parents didn’t agree. oren ended up inviting both bando and hase to come stay with him, and he and bando fell for each other very quickly. it was doubly good because hase and jonouochi adore each other.

kaito has several humans who live at his castle, which is separate from the bigger one. shura was his first, a person kaito called to because he stood up for his friends and fought someone who tried to hurt them. shura no longer lives there because the two of them are both too different and too similar to get along, so shura decided he was going to travel. kaito was worried for his safety and he went to mai, and she created a lock for shura to wear on a chain around his neck born from her tree. when he steps into battle, kaito’s protection gives him armor that nothing can break through. he uses this to fight various monsters. sometimes he sends kaito presents.

zack came into the forest looking for someone, anyone, who would help peko when no healers could save him from a deadly infection. he stubbornly survived for a week and kaito, impressed at his strength and skill, came to him and offered him a place in his service. zack agreed on the condition that peko could be saved, so kaito took one of marika’s fruits and healed him and brought him to his castle too. zack likes to explore the forest, which is how he found the other castle that stands away from the rest-- ryugen yomi’s.

micchi isn’t exactly a talkative person, he doesn’t really spend time with the others, so zack finding him is a surprise to him. zack comes to visit him and they talk a lot. sometimes he brings peko with him, it just depends. peko used to be a dancer who taught zack how to dance and decided to stay with him instead of travel anymore, and they teach kaito how to dance.

shapool also lives there. he was the son of a noble who adopted him to have an heir and then who tried to have him killed when he had a biological son. shapool was dying but not dead yet and kaito came out of the forest and saved him and then brought him into it to keep him safe and keep him nearby. shapool adores kaito far more than any of his other humans and the two of them are like brothers. shapool also explores the forest a lot because he loves meeting the animals, and mai loves having him come to visit her.

yuya stumbled into the forest with rat by accident, the two of them on the run from thieves, and they both nearly died. yuya’s survival skills kept them alive long enough to impress kaito, who came to collect them to come tend his home and serve him. they both actually really like him despite the fact he scared them at first and both of them would defend him viciously if given the chance.

kouta comes into the forest looking for ryoma when his sister gets sick and no one else can help her. he heard that ryoma walked in and never came out and even though he knows he has no hope of finding him, he has to try. kaito plans on letting him die as most humans do, but kouta’s dumb perseverance intrigues him so he comes to him and asks him what he’s doing in the forest. kouta tells him his sister is dying and kaito offers to save her assuming both of them would be willing to come into the forest. akira gets to stay with marika when ryoma is finished taking care of her, and kouta comes to baron’s castle.

kouta likes it there, actually. he loves spending time with shapool, who is boundless energy and excitement and joy. he likes hanging out with yuya and rat, who are both easy to get along with kinda guys who are more than willing to show him around and help him figure out how to do his work. he likes peko and zack, who are levels above him and yuya and rat but who never act like it. he begs them to teach him how to dance because he was learning how before he came here and he wants to finish those lessons up.

he’s also the one who starts asking about shura when zack mentions him once or twice in conversation, but kaito is quiet on the subject. kouta finally ends up going to mai about it, which is kinda hard because rica and chucky don’t just let anyone near their goddess girlfriend. kouta swears on his life that he only wants to know what happened and mai tells him about how kaito and shura argued so much that shura decided to leave and how mai gave him special armor that would arise from kaito’s love and protective feelings over him to keep him safe no matter where he was. and he starts pushing for kaito to bring shura home.

kugai kudo is the healer who takes over for ryoma, but unlike ryoma he’s also a warrior who basically turned his back on his kingdom in order to take up ryoma’s work and help people. sid becomes interested in him when he sees someone has taken up residence in ryoma’s old house and he drops by to visit him, saying he isn’t sick or anything, just he’s heard some rumors and is curious. kugai humors him and tells him what he wants to know and sid drops by every now and then to say hi. but of course that betrayal isn’t going to stand for long and kugai eventually has people come after him for betraying his kingdom. sid ends up saving him and bringing him into the forest.

there are also some evil gods from another faraway kingdom who try to invade and kill and takeover but they aren’t important yet.

#zangetsu shin tag

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jameshateseverything-blog · 7 years

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Your Childhood (Actually) Sucks

I’m always worried when I say this; but Final Fantasy 7 is the most overrated game of all time. That, however, isn’t the point. How good it is is less important than how good people remember it being. Because the way people remember things is more important than the way things actually are.

I spend a great deal of time thinking about being thirteen. Probably more than I should, to the point it borders on an addiction. My best friend and his newfound girlfriend decided Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” would be “their song.” I had placed second at the district chess tournament being held at my school. And I had been playing Final Fantasy 10 for the first time. It was not the first game in the series I had played, that goes to 7. What it was, however, was the first game in the series I have ever experienced.

When I initially set out to write this essay I wanted to merely make an argument as to why Final Fantasy 7 isn’t good (or at least not as good as everyone seems to tell me it is). I had planned out several points as to why other entries in the series trumped it. Namely in the storytelling and gameplay departments. I decided to give 7 another playthrough, however. After spending some time with the game, which I concede holds up better than most Playstation 1 titles, I have come to realize something; maybe Final Fantasy 7 is not just the most overrated game of all time. Maybe, just maybe, the entire series is one of the most overrated gaming franchises ever. For those of you (which I assume is most) that have never played 7, 10, or any Final Fantasy, I am going to do my best to cover the story of those two specific games. I chose 7 and 10 because (a) the original argument was based on 7 and (b) though I wouldn’t say 10 is the best, I would say it is my personal favorite.

Our story opens up with edgy ex-corporate mercenary Cloud Strife working alongside terrorist movement AVALANCHE to take down a Mako reactor. Mako being the life force of the planet and what is used to run all machinery. It is essentially crude oil that has the latent ability to grant certain people magical powers, like shooting fireballs or summoning ancient gods. But Shinra faces the problem that Mako energy is beginning to run low and their only hope is to find an ancient promised land. A promised land that is rumored to have Mako flowing endlessly beneath it. The dilemma, only an extinct race of people, the Cetra, know how to find this fossil fuel Mecca.

As the game progresses you assemble a team of unlikely heroes including emo boy Cloud. A revenge-fuelled Barrett who has a gun for a hand and a deep-seated hatred for Shinra’s use of technology. The last remaining Cetra, Aeirith. There’s also a pseudo-vampire, a talking lion wolf, and a marshmallow plush controlled by a cat. Shinra has their eyes set on Aerith, they manage to capture her, and so begins the quest for renewable energy. Cloud and crew go to rescue her and this is when the true villain is introduced. Pretty boy and fan favorite Sephiroth is a one-winged semi-clone of a deity that fell from the sky as a meteor thousands of years prior. Sephiroth is one blatant metaphor for a Christian guilt complex. Sephiroth (who is also the god Jenova) wants to summon another meteor to destroy the planet so he can absorb all the Mako and become one with it. When Cloud and friends try to stop him, he manages to mind control Cloud. Then Convinces Cloud that he’s a clone of Sephiroth with the memories of some guy named Zack planted in him. Cloud has a mental breakdown, becomes catatonic, falls into the planet’s lifestream with his childhood friend, and sorts out his existential crisis like some bad acid trip. After he spends 10 minutes getting his shit together, the gang flies into the crater where Jenova initially crash landed Lord Xenu style. They do battle with Sephiroth, who is also Jenova, who is also the ancient entity known as Meteor. They kill him with the help of a deceased Aerith, and the world returns to its beautiful dystopian self. Minus the evil conglomerate monopoly of Mako Shinra once had. Convoluted enough for you? I didn’t even touch on the movie, four spin-off games (two on cell phone), or the racing of giant chickens to learn to summon King Arthur’s henchmen.

Let us compare 7’s convoluted mess of a story to 10’s. Final Fantasy 10 follows Tidus, a young man with an Oedipus complex. One night, during a game of underwater space soccer [read: Blitzball], Tidus is interrupted by a colossal parasitic winged slug destroying the city of Zannarkand. Tidus and a friend of his father try to fight the creature but are ultimately defeated and Tidus wakes up in a completely different world. In this new world, a few things overlap. Space Soccer is larger than the super bowl, the city Zannarkand still exists though it is in ruins, and the giant slug unironically named Sin. Sin is the driving force for the game’s narrative. The creature is an evil that reincarnates itself and is allegedly a manifestation of what happens when man uses technology rather than prayer. So I guess Sin is just another Christian guilt complex villain.

Throughout the story Tidus befriends an unlikely group of heroes including a subpar Blitzball player who has a deep-seated hatred (bordering on racist) for the machine using Al-Bhed. There is a summoner on a pilgrimage to sacrifice herself to stop Sin for another couple dozen years. A biped lion wolf, and a few other JRPG tropes.

As the story progress you find out that Tidus’ father helped on the previous summoner’s pilgrimage and became Sin. Tidus finds out he isn’t real, and that if they defeat Sin he will fade into a literal dream. Tidus spends 10 minutes sorting out this existential crisis. There is some whistling. The party goes inside of Sin. Father, son, and not-so-holy ghost all die. The world falls back into its primitive state now liberated and free to use their technology as they please.

The games are pretty damn similar when reduced to the lowest common denominator. I have time and time again praised 10 while putting down 7. And if you have played both of them you would be quick to see how they are inherently different. But this is how I remember those games. And how I imagine many others remember them to some degree, minus a few scenes left out for brevity.

I was 13 and sitting in the back of my step-father’s Lincoln Navigator. There was a PS2 set up to the small screen and I was playing Final Fantasy 10; nearing the end. My step-dad just bought a “new car” scented car freshener. To this day I associate that smell with my favorite game of all time. This phenomenon, my addiction, to me is one of the most fascinating tricks the mind plays on us. Nostalgia, coming from the greek words nostos and algos translating to “homecoming pain.” There was a time it was used by the Swiss military where they thought the only treatment for the condition was to send the mercenaries home. Now we see there is something universal about “the better days.”

After discussing the concept of nostalgia with a handful of people I have noticed people tend to fall into two different camps. Some, myself included, look at nostalgia with joyous sorrow. As though there are memories, emotions, and sensations that can never be duplicated. Think back to a favorite Christmas or birthday present, remember how you felt? Even though I believe that feeling itself can be replicated, the way you remember that feeling is encapsulated in that moment and forever gone. In this first camp, there is a fear that if we don’t cling to those memories we may lose a piece of our identity with them. The second camp tends to view nostalgia pejoratively. Longing being some type of weakness. Even if there were “good ol’ days” you can’t ever get them back so why waste time trying? Now whether either of these mentalities is objectively more correct than the other, impossible to say. I’m more just fascinated that everybody feels homecoming pain. I did notice, however, that people more invested into games (video or sport) tend to sit in the former camp with myself. I think that is where Final Fantasy, especially 7, begins to fall apart. Am I using Nostalgia to say that Final Fantasy 7 is bad, even subjectively? No, not really. Instead I’m calling into question why it is important. Not important for gaming, but important to the gamers who believe it is the high bar for the series, or even games in general.

A few hundred words ago I drew attention to the similarities between 10 and 7. And I would like to narrow that down to just the two protagonists; Cloud and Tidus. At face value these characters are different. Tidus is a young, naive, hot-headed sports star trying to live up to a father he resents. Cloud is a battle-hardened soldier whose idol turned out to be a monster. We are supposed to identify as these two. Our perspective is limited to theirs. Both are detached from a larger picture that they inevitably find themselves the center of. So even if Cloud and Tidus are different from one another, their general arcs manage to remain the same. This is why people (myself included) find these games to be important in their lives. Both of their lives are lies. One is a fleeting dream of the gods and the other a blonde husk with a brunette’s memories. Neither character has any reason to exist.

Usually, if you listen, when people talk about their favorite music, movies, games it often is something from their childhood. You favorite Final Fantasy is most likely the first one you played. If it isn’t, your favorite was probably played around the ages of 13-16. Even if you have never played these games I want you to take a moment to just stop. Take a nice long hit of that homecoming pain. Go back, try to remember being 9, or 13, or 16. Try to remember who you were as a person. Sorry if you were awkward, but that awkwardness is kind of the point. These transitional points in our lives, they are moments when we are developing responsibilities and learning who we are. Whether it is your first day home without the babysitter, or a first day of high school, those periods are when we can exist outside of our parents and act as yourself. I remember once breaking down in front of my parents proclaiming I did not know who I was. I didn’t belong. I had no reason to exist. I was the same as Cloud or Tidus.

I suppose when I hate on Cloud as a character, or when others shun Tidus, what we are really doing is collectively hating how annoying and whiny younger versions of ourselves were. But it wasn’t always that way. Sure, we didn’t have to come to terms with being a clone. But maybe, like Tidus, we discover some aspect of our life is a lie. Santa isn’t real. We can’t all be astronauts. These tiresome characters are just us as tiresome teenagers. And it is hard not to look back and cling to that notion, a moment where we didn’t have to feel so alone. At that age it is nice to be understood.

So do I hate Final Fantasy 7? No, of course not, I’m mostly enjoying my third playthrough. But the story doesn’t speak to me like it did when I was a kid. I’m not sure it is supposed to either. This idea that no Final Fantasy will ever capture the same magic as the old ones is toxic. It is only going to hurt the growth of the series in the future. Nothing revolutionary can come of trying to capture the old while moving on to the new. 7, 10, 13, these games aren’t terrible by any means. But they are the Donald Trump of gaming. Maybe we can’t make Final Fantasy great again. Maybe it never was that great.

#Final fantasy x #final fantasy vii #writing #personal #ffvii #ffx #final fantasy #nostalgia

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placebonut · 4 years

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So I finished FFVII: Remake and I have thoughts! Need to record my first impression before I read what everyone else thinks and potentially have my opinion warped beyond recognition!

Overall, I enjoyed it. But maybe a “re-imagining” is a better description, as it looks like it’s shaping up to be a new story. I’ll need to play it again to fully understand all that wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff, though. FF games tend to get a bit abstract and confusing for me toward the end, so that’s not a criticism, just my reality lol.

Highlights:

+ Wedge lives! Apparently Biggs, too, but I have different thoughts about that… Even though they’re essentially the same, Wedge happened before knowing what the Whispers are, and that capital ‘D’ Destiny is fighting to stay on track by smothering all potential divergents, so it was a nice little surprise for me that Wedge survives. I’m even satisfied with how it happened. Like, he’s in the middle of sector 7 when the plate falls, but just through sheer luck gets knocked into a secret underground lab, which I now get to explore? Cool!

+ Johnny lol. No longer “childhood friend”, but still very entertaining. Though that scene where Cloud straight-up intends to execute him while he’s bound and blindfolded is a bit… Uh? I feel like it was supposed to be telling me something about Cloud’s character, but doesn’t really seem consistent. He’s got an attitude, and is very often moody and rude to people’s faces, but that moment is next level cold. That scene also implies that Avalanche aren’t killing all of the Shinra troopers they fight. I’ll just accept “fantasy” as the explanation for how they manage that!

+ Cloud being recognised in Shinra tower. Though does the Kunsel name-drop mean that some of Crisis Core canon will be included? I mean, they basically did a frame-by-frame reanimation of Zack’s last stand, but he doesn’t have the CC scar so I assume no Angeal. Lots to unpack, but I just enjoyed the moment. It makes sense that someone would remember him!

+ I think Madame M’s main role is to replace the .. violation? that Cloud experiences in the OG Honey Bee Inn. She’s still pretty much forcing him to have that hand massage, but at least he just hates that he likes it, rather than being actually super uncomfortable in a hot tub full of strange men. I feel like they steered away from the old homophobic humour and instead embraced some fun, gender non-conforming characters. I’m very straight and cis though, so maybe there’s nuance I missed. No named Shinra employees in the private HB rooms though?

+ Tifa!! I don’t think they’ve actually made changes to her character, but you just get so much more time with her, and I’m able to love her in a way I never really did in OG. My OG first impression was that she was needy, and annoyingly timid at the worse times. Obviously she gets a lot of character growth, but I could never shake that initial impatience I had with her, and the rivalry with Aeris (who the game clearly pushes you to like) just left me with a criminal under-appreciation for her. Remake Tifa is a goddess! Her voice actor is great, which definitely helps. Her empathy, compassion, and generosity are showcased really well in lots of scenes, but she’s still such a badass! I love how she’s always the one to catch Cloud when he’s falling off of something, but my absolute favourite moment is when she steps out of the mist to offer Aerith her hand, “we found you”/”I guess you did..” Had me clutching my chest.

+ The immediate friendship between the girls is sooooo nice compared to the competition they pose for each other in the OG. Even as early as the sewers, when they’ve only just met. Maybe it’ll come later, but I kinda don’t even feel like Tifa expresses all that much romantic interest in Cloud. She’s not jealous of Aerith, and while it’s clear she worries about him and cares what he thinks, she’s certainly not hopelessly in love with him… At least not yet.

+ Voice actors did a better job than I expected tbh. Some awkward attempts to mimic Japanese vocalisations, but that’s always a problem with anime dubs. Hojo’s last scream of laughter really solidified the ‘crazy scientist’ bit. Barret was way funnier and less cringey than I thought he’d be. Marlene is cute as a button! Aerith is a bit high and breathy, but the pitch actually makes her probably the easiest to understand since the background music always seems a bit too loud when they’re talking. Cloud, Barret, but especially Sephiroth, I really struggled in parts to understand. I think Sephiroth was even murmuring things in that final battle, probably just related to his special attacks since all important dialogue had subtitles, but I’m sure I could hear his voice but could understand literally nothing!

+ Music and graphics, obvs. Man, everyone and everything is just so dang pretty!

Didn’t like, or maybe just didn’t understand?

- Sephiroth. I employed some real mental gymnastics to explain to myself what I was seeing, and I mostly succeeded until the very end. Okay, so like, his first appearances I rationalised as being PTSD hallucinations or something. Also, in a real-world sense, I read somewhere that the OG director used the movie Jaws as inspiration for how they introduce him slowly, showing only the destruction he leaves behind to create tension, but it’s 20 years later and he’s an icon in video game and anime culture, they can’t play the same tricks and expect the same result. This game only features the initial Midgar part of the story which he wasn’t originally featured in, so gotta find a way to give the fans some service. Alright, that makes sense, I can accept that.

But then it became clear he’s using the clones to actually communicate with Cloud…. huh. Well, okay, I guess there’s no reason why he couldn’t have always been able to do that. He’s much more interested in Cloud than I think he should be at this point, but if he’s trying to organise Reunion, and I suppose Cloud is the only one resisting, I can make it work: if he’s aware of the clones, then he’s aware of Cloud. It makes no less sense that he’s always been able to connect with them, than him suddenly being able to out of nowhere or only deciding to start at a plot-convenient moment. I always assumed it was Cloud’s proximity to Jenova that triggered the whole series of events in Shinra Tower. That she, and by extension Sephiroth, “wake up” while he’s there. But if Sephiroth has actually been conscious the entire time, maybe Cloud just showed him exactly where to find her, so he’s coming to get her. It’s complicated, but I think I follow.

I don’t know why he’s on the other side of the Destiny storm, though. Really, why was he even there? Is he working with or against the Whispers? And I can’t make sense of his invitation for Cloud to join him. Join him in what? Reunion, still? Sephiroth’s OG plan can benefit only Sephiroth, so what is he even offering? I’m going to have to play it again and pay closer attention to what he says. I did like Aerith standing up to him. One of my favourite OG lines, “the future isn’t just yours!” is reflected nicely. Also, “screw him!”

- Roche. Whyyy? Track record for inventing new SOLDIERs isn’t good, just leave it alone!

- Biggs lives. So, we only witness him waking up after everything has gone down, which is why I reacted differently to his survival than Wedge’s. Basically, it doesn’t make sense. First of all, physically, for him to have survived all that fire and falling. Secondly, it seems to contradict what we know about the Whispers: they interfere when the characters are at risk of taking a path they don’t want, ie. different from OG storyline. Why wouldn’t they have done something? If they’re powerful enough to revive Barret because “it wasn’t his time”, and injure Jessie so Cloud has to join the Reactor 5 bombing mission, surely they could quietly kill off somebody who is “supposed” to die, especially if he’s already most of the way there. So then it’s really Wedge they should have killed off! He’s where the chain begins: I assume he’s the one who finds Biggs and brings him back to Elmyra, since Biggs never would have known who she was, and Wedge only knows after surviving the plate fall. Does having defeated the Harbinger Whisper mean that not only future changes are possible, but past? Anyway, it’s all a bit convoluted, and tbh feels a bit cheap, too. Why not bring back Jessie, while we’re at it? Their OG deaths had a motivational impact on Barret and co., and also drives home the evil of Shinra for the player, who might not have cared that much about unnamed deaths, however plentiful. It makes the plate fall a more personal tragedy, since we’ve spent time with these characters.

- Low-key disappointed I didn’t get to see Avalanche’s secret hideout underneath Seventh Heaven.. But at least I got to play some darts.

#ffviir #ffvii remake #spoilers #ramble ramble

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