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The thing that's "like Kingdom Hearts" is the final boss, which reminds me a lot of the final boss of the first game. Nothing else about the story is like Kingdom Hearts but I got mad KH vibes from the final boss.
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Apr 22, 2020 21:24
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Macaluso posted:The thing that's "like Kingdom Hearts" is the final boss, which reminds me a lot of the final boss of the first game. Nothing else about the story is like Kingdom Hearts but I got mad KH vibes from the final boss. Oh yeah and to be fair, the music during that fight (and during the Edge of Creation scene) is very Kingdom Hearts. That part definitely has similarities.
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Apr 22, 2020 21:26
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There's a double meaning to "like Kingdom Hearts" though, and it isn't just in the aesthetic presentation or overwrought soundtrack. When people say "like Kingdom Hearts" they usually mean "pointlessly, and somehow boring-ly, bugfuck crazy and nonsensical." I'm not... really?... sure that FF7R's ending is that? I mean I didn't feel that way? I understand if people did though.
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Apr 22, 2020 21:29
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I guess part of it is that we don't know where it's going from here. The "like Kingdom Hearts" thing people are most afraid of, I think, is that the story becomes all about plot and lore babble and the characters just fall by the wayside. One of the reasons I really can't stand Kingdom Hearts as a story is that there aren't really any characters--they're plot robots who ask for or spout exposition. FF7R is, emphatically, not that. Not yet, at least. I think some people fear it'll end up that way now that the plot can be substantially different from the original, but at least up until now, FF7R is a game that is all about its characters in a way that makes it a much better, more fulfilling story experience.
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Apr 22, 2020 21:31
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Harrow posted:Well poo poo if we're gonna have the "rank your favorite FFs" discussion I'm not going to not participate.  X VII OG VIIR (As it stands now; could change in later parts of course) X-2 XIV V Tactics Advance/TA2 VI XV XIII (Never played enough 13-2 or LR to place them) III II (only played the remastered version, from what I hear the original would be a lot lower) IV I VIII IX XII Tactics* * Tactics should absolutely be my jam. I love the genre, both eastern and western variants. I've played a huge number of games in the genre and I could talk to you for hours about why Vandal Hearts is an all-time classic that is criminally overlooked. But for some reason I've never been able to pin down I really do not like FFT at all, I've tried maybe six or seven times and I can never stick with it for any length of time. I even love Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark which is pretty much a direct lift of FFT into the modern age!  e; I have grown increasingly smug about Kingdom Hearts over the years because when I first played it at release I was like "This is a big bag of poo poo" and now everyone else finally agrees 
Ms Adequate fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 21:33
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Harrow posted:I guess part of it is that we don't know where it's going from here. The "like Kingdom Hearts" thing people are most afraid of, I think, is that the story becomes all about plot and lore babble and the characters just fall by the wayside. One of the reasons I really can't stand Kingdom Hearts as a story is that there aren't really any characters--they're plot robots who ask for or spout exposition. chapter 18 of 7R was definitely an exposition dump, and Red's main purpose during his brief time in the story was to drop exposition about the Whispers (though he had more fun character moments in those few hours than the entire cast of KH3 combined) now that nomura's going totally off in his own direction there's a serious chance that he'll disappear up his own rear end like what happened with kingdom hearts, but that's a worry for a time that may never even arrive on account of the world ending and all Ms Adequate posted:e; I have grown increasingly smug about Kingdom Hearts over the years because when I first played it at release I was like "This is a big bag of poo poo" and now everyone else finally agrees the first game was pretty great! it still holds up if you excuse the shoddy camera and mostly felt like the fun crossover it was intended to be from the second mainline game onward the story was steadily eaten alive by a cast of characters identical save for their haircuts who existed for no other purpose than to spout po-faced exposition while disney's lawyers pressed for increasingly byzantine rules over the rest of the content Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 21:39
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Harrow posted:I guess part of it is that we don't know where it's going from here. The "like Kingdom Hearts" thing people are most afraid of, I think, is that the story becomes all about plot and lore babble and the characters just fall by the wayside. One of the reasons I really can't stand Kingdom Hearts as a story is that there aren't really any characters--they're plot robots who ask for or spout exposition. Yeah I think the debate about the ending rests on whether you believe it to be punctuation: something that needs to cap off a self-contained story, and which clears the stage to let them properly return to what they had been doing for the other 95% of the game without the weight of historical/fidelity expectations. Or whether it is a reveal: that the ending tells you what this story has secretly been all along and this is what it's going to be like going forward. I understand the fears of those who perceive it as the latter but I hope and expect it to be the former
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Apr 22, 2020 21:40
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14 ShB 8 10 7R 7 13-2 14 HW 14 StB 6 9 14 ARR 5 10-2 2 13 1 only listing the ones I've played to completion, the bottom would be littered with ones I bounced off of otherwise cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 21:41
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I'm old enough to have played the first game when it came out, and I wonder if that colors my ranking. 1. VI 2. XII 3. X (haven't played the sequel) 4. IV 5. V 6. IX 7. XIII (haven't played the sequels) 8. XV 9. VII 10. I
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Apr 22, 2020 21:47
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Oh god, the Switch version has the original jank translation?
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Apr 22, 2020 21:49
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Luceo posted:I'm old enough to have played the first game when it came out, and I wonder if that colors my ranking. FF13 above FF7, Great Scott. Either it'd be super interesting hearing your perspective or we'd have a pistols at dawn situation
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Apr 22, 2020 21:54
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Pollyanna posted:Oh god, the Switch version has the original jank translation? Square has never really fully retranslated the original. The Switch version (same for the PC, PS4, and Xbone versions) does have some fixes to the most obviously-broken lines and typos from the original but for the most part the translation is the same.
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Apr 22, 2020 21:55
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guts and bolts posted:FF13 above FF7, Great Scott. Either it'd be super interesting hearing your perspective or we'd have a pistols at dawn situation I absolutely loved XIII's combat, and its linearity was welcomed by me at the time after being fatigued by open world decision-heavy RPGs. I just sat back and enjoyed the hell out of XIII, where VII was just meh for me. Loved the combat and music, but the poor translation made me wonder WTF was going on most of the time, and really didn't let the characters shine like they do in the remake.
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Apr 22, 2020 21:59
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Harrow posted:The "like Kingdom Hearts" thing people are most afraid of, I think, is that the story becomes all about plot and lore babble and the characters just fall by the wayside. One of the reasons I really can't stand Kingdom Hearts as a story is that there aren't really any characters--they're plot robots who ask for or spout exposition. Kingdom Hearts in its latter entries is like listening to a book report being read aloud by an elementary school student, except the book the report is about is My Immortal and the student is aggressively stupid Luceo posted:I absolutely loved XIII's combat, and its linearity was welcomed by me at the time after being fatigued by open world decision-heavy RPGs. I just sat back and enjoyed the hell out of XIII, where VII was just meh for me. Loved the combat and music, but the poor translation made me wonder WTF was going on most of the time, and really didn't let the characters shine like they do in the remake. I sympathize with open world fatigue. As lauded as The Witcher games are, and as much as I can appreciate that they are almost objectively Good Games, I find myself not wanting to touch The Witcher III: Wild Hunt because I was honestly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff to do in The Witcher II: Assassins of Kings. I'd probably really like Witcher 3. I just... fuckin'... can't, right now. When you give me what appears to be ~limitless freedom to do whatever I want!~ nowadays I usually wind up doing nothing instead, because I look at all the stuff I could do and the completionist in me immediately has a meltdown. I'm curious though as to how you felt about all the non-battle system elements of FF13. Did you like the characters? The story? The soundtrack? When the game did eventually open up into Gran Pulse, did you dig that? guts and bolts fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 22:05
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I prefer to break FF games into tiers because which one I prefer in a given tier might change depending on my mood. Top Tier: X VII High Tier: IX XIII-2 VI XV Mid Tier: III IV X-2 XII Low Tier: XIII II VIII I don't hate any FF game. I find redeeming qualities in all of them, even FFVIII. If anything, FFVIII is so lovely precisely because it didn't need to be. It had all the tools there to be the best FF game and I still like a lot about it. But they just bungled putting together all those good things in a cohesive, sensible way. cheetah7071 posted:14 ShB This person gets XIII-2 is an underrated gem. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 22:07
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CharlieFoxtrot posted:Yeah I think the debate about the ending rests on whether you believe it to be punctuation: something that needs to cap off a self-contained story, and which clears the stage to let them properly return to what they had been doing for the other 95% of the game without the weight of historical/fidelity expectations. Or whether it is a reveal: that the ending tells you what this story has secretly been all along and this is what it's going to be like going forward. The sequels are definitely going to color people's perspective on this game. If they end up going way off the rails in a terrible way, people are going to look back on the ending of this game as where all the trouble started.
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Apr 22, 2020 22:09
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guts and bolts posted:Kingdom Hearts in its latter entries is like listening to a book report being read aloud by an elementary school student, except the book the report is about is My Immortal and the student is aggressively stupid http://endlesslore.polyatomic.org/
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Apr 22, 2020 22:10
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That Spoiler Mode podcast has brought up some interesting details that further supports the idea that the Whisper Trio at the end are Yazoo, Kadaj, and Loz: they use the same moves they do in the movie, and their elements line up with something from an Ultimania about which element each one specializes in. They also use the same weapons (dual guns, large glove, and a smaller sword, unlike Barret, Tifa, and Cloud's weapons) and, as others have pointed out here, they fuse into Whisper Bahamut. Max's theory there is that by the time you're fighting the Whispers at the end, Sephiroth's will is already controlling them, which is why they try to block you from leaving Midgar in the first place. Perhaps that happens because, now that he has Jenova's body, he's a lot more powerful than he was earlier in the story. Which would explain why Aerith wants you to kill the Whispers in the first place there, and perhaps also why Sephiroth explodes into Whispers when Cloud slashes him after the final boss fight: he's already one with the Whispers before the final battle, and he wants Cloud to fight them almost as a taunt, like "I want you to feel like you're in control even if you aren't." I'm not sure I 100% buy it, at least not the "Sephiroth's motivation" part, but it's an interesting take I think. He also pointed out that Bugenhagen talks about time and fate a good amount in the original, along with equating the planet's will to fate just like Red XIII does, so the idea that the planet might try to enforce fate doesn't come completely out of left field.
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Apr 22, 2020 22:10
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Oxxidation posted:now that nomura's going totally off in his own direction there's a serious chance that he'll disappear up his own rear end like what happened with kingdom hearts friendly reminder that Nomura is the director of the game but he is not the writer
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Apr 22, 2020 22:13
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guts and bolts posted:I sympathize with open world fatigue. As lauded as The Witcher games are, and as much as I can appreciate that they are almost objectively Good Games, I find myself not wanting to touch The Witcher III: Wild Hunt because I was honestly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff to do in The Witcher II: Assassins of Kings. I'd probably really like Witcher 3. I just... fuckin'... can't, right now. I'm still the same way about Witcher III. I know it's a great game that I'd probably enjoy, but it's just too. loving. big. As for the non-battle elements of XIII: I liked the characters except for Hope and Snow, though Hope was at least somewhat tolerable. Sazh is best dad and cool as hell, I mean gently caress he has a chocobo in his afro, that's unbeatable. I was  when Lightning punched Snow. Vanille's forgettable on her own, but really sweet when she's with Fang. The story was weak, but I was still having so much fun playing that I didn't pick at it. When the game opened up, I was fine with it since it wasn't an overload of openness, if that makes sense. The soundtrack was weird for me in that I didn't notice it during the game (except for Can't Catch a Break) but started to really appreciate it after the fact.
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Apr 22, 2020 22:14
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NikkolasKing posted:I prefer to break FF games into tiers This is a better method, I'm stealing it. The Really loving Good Ones FF7 FF7R FFT FF5 FF12 The Good Ones, Real Good FF10 FF6 FF14 (since 2.0, never played the original to its end) FF9 FF Adventure The Basically Fine Ones Tactics Advance FF3 (DS remake) FF10-2 Type-0 The Iffy Ones FF4 FF15 FF FF Mystic Quest The Actually Bad Ones FF8 FF2 FF13 FF13-2 FF13-3 Dirge of Cerberus (omitted: FF11, Tactics Advance 2, Revenant Wings, After Years, Before Crisis, Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon and similar spin-offs, the Crystal Chronicles sub-series, both Dissidia games, and all of the gacha games) guts and bolts fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 22:21
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Harrow posted:That Spoiler Mode podcast has brought up some interesting details that further supports the idea that the Whisper Trio at the end are Yazoo, Kadaj, and Loz: they use the same moves they do in the movie, and their elements line up with something from an Ultimania about which element each one specializes in. They also use the same weapons (dual guns, large glove, and a smaller sword, unlike Barret, Tifa, and Cloud's weapons) and, as others have pointed out here, they fuse into Whisper Bahamut. Oh nice I’ve been waiting for that to come out, glad Ben, Kyle and Max are on it too. Maybe this has been asked a bunch but this thread moves incredibly fast, but what does Sephiroth mean by Cloud having 7 seconds??
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Apr 22, 2020 22:22
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More from the Spoiler Mode podcast: god drat there's a lot of Advent Children poo poo in FF7R and it's all put in pretty subtly. Like when Cloud doubles over in pain and grabs his left arm when he sees Sephiroth--that's the arm where he had Geostigma. The Whisper Trio being essentially Loz, Yazoo, and Kadaj, Whisper Bahamut, a track from Advent Children playing when Sephiroth first appears... So I guess what I'm saying is that if you're hoping the new timeline de-canonizes Advent Children, it's more like Advent Children feeds directly into the new timeline 
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Apr 22, 2020 22:22
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Best chocotheme though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDwAN90MKTo
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Apr 22, 2020 22:22
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On my Hard mode replay I was intentionally trying to be as much of a dick to Aerith as I could (refused her flower, told Sam that Tifa was hot, talked to Tifa first in the sewer). Still got Aerith's scene in chapter 14.
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Apr 22, 2020 22:25
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CharlieFoxtrot posted:Best chocotheme though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMwuJ4kxy8A Imhotep posted:Oh nice I’ve been waiting for that to come out, glad Ben, Kyle and Max are on it too. I believe it's supposed to be the time it takes Sephiroth to descend and impale Aerith in the original game. So everyone has said in here anyway.
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Apr 22, 2020 22:26
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DeathChicken posted:On my Hard mode replay I was intentionally trying to be as much of a dick to Aerith as I could (refused her flower, told Sam that Tifa was hot, talked to Tifa first in the sewer). Still got Aerith's scene in chapter 14. That's odd. Did you do all of the sidequests in Chapter 3, or skip them?
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Apr 22, 2020 22:27
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NikkolasKing posted:I believe it's supposed to be the time it takes Sephiroth to descend and impale Aerith in the original game. That's a common theory, but there's in-game text that says it's "seven seconds before Meteor falls" or something like that instead. It's vague enough that I'm not sure we really have anything to go on.
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Apr 22, 2020 22:28
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guts and bolts posted:That's odd. Did you do all of the sidequests in Chapter 3, or skip them? Skipped them all. Also skipped everything possible in Wall Market.
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Apr 22, 2020 22:30
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DeathChicken posted:Skipped them all. Also skipped everything possible in Wall Market. That's probably why. Completing sidequests with the girls in your party is a major influence on their affection rating, and (I'm hazarding a guess here, I don't know enough about how to dig through game's code or whatever to see myself) I think the single biggest boost to Tifa's affection is simply doing her Discovery event. edit: FWIW there's manuscripts hidden behind sidequests in chapters 3, 8, and 14 on Hard as well
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Apr 22, 2020 22:31
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Harrow posted:Like when Cloud doubles over in pain and grabs his left arm when he sees Sephiroth--that's the arm where he had Geostigma. That's reaching quite a bit, imho.
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Apr 22, 2020 22:32
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canepazzo posted:That's reaching quite a bit, imho. Yeah, probably, but on the other hand--why else would he grab his arm? He usually grabs his head. With the other Advent Children things in the game (right down to a music cue from it accompanying Sephiroth's first appearance), it's not impossible. I'm not necessarily saying "oh Cloud has Geostigma or he's feeling his future Geostigma" or whatever, though. More than, well, Geostigma was tied to Jenova cells, right? Maybe they thought, "Cloud's pain is coming from his Jenova cells. Oh, maybe he should feel it in a specific place, and maybe his left arm makes sense because that's how it manifested in Advent Children." Something like that. It's not so much that I think Advent Children is happening as part of this or whatever, more that it's in the creators' minds and informing some things.
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Apr 22, 2020 22:35
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Harrow posted:Max's theory there is that by the time you're fighting the Whispers at the end, Sephiroth's will is already controlling them, which is why they try to block you from leaving Midgar in the first place. Perhaps that happens because, now that he has Jenova's body, he's a lot more powerful than he was earlier in the story. Which would explain why Aerith wants you to kill the Whispers in the first place there, and perhaps also why Sephiroth explodes into Whispers when Cloud slashes him after the final boss fight: he's already one with the Whispers before the final battle, and he wants Cloud to fight them almost as a taunt, like "I want you to feel like you're in control even if you aren't." idk about this. I think this scene is pretty clear that Sephiroth is drinking the Whisper juice after you defeat them  Maybe Aerith wants to kill the Whispers cause she knows that the OG path stops Sephiroth's meteor plan but he keeps on coming back, so she might want to try an alternative to purge him once and for all, and the Whispers don't want to take the risks of things going worse. They block your path in Midgar so you don't chase and fight Sephiroth preemptively. The Kadaj, Yazoo and Loz theory might be true, but not neccesarily mean they are sided with Sephiroth/Jenova any longer. If they are looping back from the end of AC, Aerith is the one to comfort Kadaj when he dies (him mistakingly calling her "Mother"), and prior to that when fighting Cloud Kadaj shows doubts about being just a puppet.
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Apr 22, 2020 22:37
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The one thing I don't really get in the ending, which I found otherwise mostly straightforward, is why the whispers were blocking first Sephiroth and then the rest of the party from leaving Midgar. You had to fight the whispers just to get out of the city, when they ought to have been shoving you out whether you wanted to go or not.
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Apr 22, 2020 22:40
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Harrow posted:More than, well, Geostigma was tied to Jenova cells, right? Everything else aside, Geostigma is due to a side effect form coming into contact with the lifestream, apparently somehow. And Aerith's Final Limit Break is what heals it. Somehow. EDIT: I guess it was Jenova cells inside the lifestream.
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Apr 22, 2020 22:41
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Harrow posted:I guess part of it is that we don't know where it's going from here. The "like Kingdom Hearts" thing people are most afraid of, I think, is that the story becomes all about plot and lore babble and the characters just fall by the wayside. One of the reasons I really can't stand Kingdom Hearts as a story is that there aren't really any characters--they're plot robots who ask for or spout exposition. Kingdom hearts is one of the rare cases of a game literally disappearing up it's own rear end. The minute I saw Ventas and I realized they were to going come up some convoluted plot bullshit as to why there were TWO Roxas' and somehow Sora has all these...nobody clones of himself??? That are both a girl and boy and they're allllll loving living inside him along with an EVIL eversion of himself and loving CHRIST!!!! I'm not even touching the tip of the holy poo poo what is all this nonsense iceberg. Also all FF characters got phased out for these AMAZINGLY deep characters. It's just a load of nope.
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Apr 22, 2020 22:41
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Flopsy posted:Kingdom hearts is one of the rare cases of a game literally disappearing up it's own rear end. The minute I saw Ventas and I realized they were to going come up some convoluted plot bullshit as to why there were TWO Roxas' and somehow Sora has all these...nobody clones of himself??? That are both a girl and boy and they're allllll loving living inside him along with an EVIL eversion of himself and loving CHRIST!!!! I'm not even touching the tip of the holy poo poo what is all this nonsense iceberg. Also all FF characters got phased out for these AMAZINGLY deep characters. It's just a load of nope. I want so badly to get the full story of how this happened to Kingdom Hearts, like how it got this astoundingly convoluted. Like, this is a story that conscious human beings are writing, and other conscious human beings are still huge fans of, and I will just never understand either side of that equation. I really liked the first KH when it first came out, and KH2 was a lot of fun but the story was definitely going off the rails towards the end. Honestly I probably should've seen it coming when the things that are literally made of hearts are called Heartless and the things that are bodies without hearts are Nobodies. I never played another one but every time I check back in on what's going on in Kingdom Hearts land it's just so many layers of characters who are different versions of each other and time loops and DARKNESS and... it's wild that it's still being made, and still going down that road, and it just keeps on piling up. And it's that RPG with Disney characters! That's what really makes my head spin, like... by all rights this should be a fairly simple, fun story because it's a JRPG full of actual Disney stuff. I want to know how it got here and how it continues to go this way and is just never gonna stop. I've read the wiki page on it multiple times and I'm still not entirely sure what the hell "Kingdom Hearts" even is. The first game was all "is it dark or is it light" and yeah okay but beyond that, like... what even is this thing? Is it a place?
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Apr 22, 2020 22:51
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Regarding part 2, I really hope that Manipulator Materia comes back in the form of an ability for Cait Sith where the moogle robot throws the cat robot towards an enemy and proceeds to ride it ala Ratatouille's Remy
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Apr 22, 2020 22:58
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I get really strong parallels to (Stephen King oeuvre spoilers) The ending of the dark tower series and the notion of cycles getting closer to the "real" conclusion. It's a good way of an author getting to have their cake with "the old version is still true" while allowing this one to deviate as much as they feel the need to without having to justify it anymore.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:00
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Boy Square's been making black wispy stuff swirl around Shinra Tower for years now, huh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ws7BeK6DS0&t=134s I wonder if they intentionally borrowed that aesthetic for the Whispers.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:08
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