It's interesting to see the various environments in Final Fantasy VII. What little of the original game I had seen as a kid was all in Midgar, the massive modern/futuristic metropolis. Remake, the first entry in what I believe is intended to be a trilogy of FFVII re-visits, extends the Midgar portion of the game into an entire game in and of itself, so 2020's release more or less helped contribute to my sense of the game as being very Midgar-focused.
Of course, Rebirth starts off with the party having left Midgar, moving on to the town of Kalm, and makes a full game out of what I'm given to understand is the middle act of the story.
This has its plus sides and its minuses. The plusses include that you get to see a lot of the world. At this stage, I've gone from the Grasslands region to Junon's more coastal area, then over to the expansive Corel region, which includes a tropical coastal region and a big desert (there's also a giant mountain, but this is treated to an extent as a kind of transitional area without any of the big "world exploration" stuff). Then, there's Gongaga, a tangled jungle filled with lots of cliffs and caves (which so far has proven to be the most difficult to navigate).
Some spoilers crop up here and there:
I actually discovered only after I started some lengthy main story quests that I had left two of Cait Sith's weapons back in Gongaga, and so while I don't want to rush the narrative, I've been champing at the bit to get back to that side-quest in-between mode so I can hop on back to Gongaga and grab them.
Anyway, what I find interesting is that, so far, the environments are varied, but still skew toward sort of hotter regions. There are some kind of standard Final Fantasy (or fantasy RPG) regions you expect to see, but I've noticed we haven't gotten a snowy mountain peak or a temperate forest. Many of the regions are pretty arid, which I think ties into the idea that the use of Mako for energy has been causing this desertification - certainly the area around Midgar is pretty parched, as is the bulk of Corel, likely due to the Golden Saucer.
I'm also curious what these areas are like in the original game. I could imagine that some are sort of vague "passing through" regions without a lot of story on their own - indeed, even in this game, the bulk of the "plot" that happens in Kalm and the Grasslands is Cloud telling the story of witnessing Sephiroth going nuts (a memory that seems very likely to actually having been Zack's, wherein the unnamed soldier is almost certainly the actual Cloud). Some of these areas I'd assume get expanded upon thanks to the longer time we have to spend in them - in Gongaga, for example, we visit a ruined reactor and Cloud has a rather disturbing moment where the influence of Sephiroth turns him into a remorseless killing machine.
Violence in these games is always a little vague - our main character goes around hitting people with a massive sword, but this moment, exposed to the giant pool of Mako, is the only time I can think of where Cloud gets a Shinra soldier's blood on his face (you could almost imagine that whenever the party usually takes out human enemies, they're knocking them out rather than killing them... which would be a pretty neat trick with Barret's arm-gun).
Anyway, Cosmo Canyon is, like much of Corel, desert-like, but in this case clearly taking some inspiration from the Grand Canyon. In the main town of the same name, we discover first that Red XIII is from here, and then, in a moment that truly shocked me, that he's been doing a voice all this time, and is his species' equivalent of a teenager (he's still probably the oldest member of the party, at 48, but this is meant to be like 16 for his weird breed of fire-cat/dog).
I... have to confess that I like his lower, "old dog" voice more than his bright youngster voice, which he starts using after this reveal, but oh well.
The other weird thing is that the town is not a town of creatures like Red (whose real name is revealed to be Nanaki) but is still almost all human. But the people there know him. There's an extended section in which Barret comes to assist Nanaki in a trial to become a Warden of the Vale, and while that trial has ended, it leads directly into meeting with the Gi people - a people who are considered outside of the planet's lifestream and thus live as kind of undead spirits (as is traditional, you can harm them with healing spells). At the point I'm in, I've arrived at the Gi village, where the spokesperson for their people points out that the Cetra - the ancient people of whom Aerith is the last survivor - were not exactly the perfect enlightened pacifists that we'd be led to believe they were.
I'm actually curious if some of the pop culture osmosis I have for the story is a bit wrong - I was always under the impression that Jenova was purely an alien being that landed on the planet from outer space, but there's stuff earlier in the game that suggests Hojo at least believes she's an Ancient - which I think would mean she was a Cetra.
Of course, more curious is the stuff involving Zack Fair.
And here, I really don't know exactly what's going on: Zack experiences this strange moment where, at the point where he died in the original continuity, he somehow survives the onslaught of Shinra troops. He enters Midgar dragging an unconscious Cloud with him, but arrives following the disastrous falling of the Sector Seven plate, and seems to see Barret, Tifa, and Red XIII all dead, or at least unconscious and captured. Aerith has been wounded as well, and he finds her but can't heal her before she falls into a coma.
We periodically return to Zack's story, and it starts to look more and more like it's some kind of tangent timeline - there's a giant scar in the sky and it looks like Shinra's losing control of the city even while our heroes are dead or comatose. Zack goes out to find Biggs, and when he finds him, Biggs remembers dying, or being about to die, on the pillar that gets blown up to drop the Sector Seven Plate on the slums, only to wake up somehow safe and alive.
I still have no clue what's going on with this, but it seems like it has to be some kind of other timeline rather than a change to our own.
However, there's another wrinkle:
At the destroyed reactor in Gongaga, after Cloud has his mental break, Tifa falls into the pool of Mako and gets swallowed by a Weapon. But rather than dying, she winds up safely floating in the Weapon's giant materia orb and then experiences this strange dream-like vision in the Lifestream, both seeing parts of her past (including getting a better sense of what actually happened to her and Cloud when she was a kid) but also witnessing that the Whispers seem to be in conflict with one another. There are black Whispers that seem to be working with or at least supporting Sephiroth, but a group of white Whispers that flank the Weapon like they're guarding it, and perhaps by extension, the planet.
I don't yet know how this game ends, but I think it will involve the legendary scene in the original game where Aerith is killed by Sephiroth. However, it seems to me that if we're introducing all this stuff about being able to change the timeline, that seems like the one point most likely to diverge.
But, then, I'm also given to understand that Aerith's being dead and thus in the Lifestream is part of what allows Sephiroth to be defeated in the original game. So, then: might a change to the timeline actually be a bad thing? Is Aerith's death required for the planet to survive? And if it is, what might happen if we do save her?
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