It's interesting: Remake never let you pick your party composition - the story dictated who you'd have available, and so you'd always just happen to be missing Tifa or Aerith or Barret (maybe at some point Cloud?) and of course Red XIII was technically there but not controllable.
Rebirth is a far more open game than Remake was, and while it's debatable if it's truly an "open world" game (so many games are that the specificity of that descriptor has kind of faded) it makes perfect sense that the game allows you to swap out your party members (I'd actually have liked if you could sometimes have Cloud hang back - story-wise in most parts the full party is there, and you even hear combat shouts from "back line" characters in the midst of a fight).
With seven characters playable in this game (Cid and Vincent will have to wait for part 3) and three pre-set party groups, the path of least resistance is to simply have each non-Cloud party member have a partner that they share one of your pre-set parties with (you can even build out the characters' manuscripts to focus on getting Synergy abilities with Cloud and their usual partner).
However, sometimes the game will force you to change things up.
The Nibel region is either the last or second-to-last region you unlock in the game, I think (the ocean might be an additional one) and is, of course, the site of Cloud and Tifa's hometown, which we see burned down in a flashback at the start of Rebirth but find mysteriously rebuilt when we enter the area.
The town has now become basically a rehabilitation facility for people with Mako poisoning - or at least that's the official story. But the various cloaked figures who have been shambling all the way from Midgar (apparently booking passage on a cruise ship somehow?) seem to be heading here.
Naturally, anything involving Shinra is suspect, and with a little meta-knowledge, we know there's something sinister going on.
It appears that the robed figures are all SOLDIERs, and I'm assuming that the cause of their affliction is from injected Jenova cells cultured from Sephiroth. We've seen fiends fuse with some of these guys, so I'm expecting that the "Reunion" they are talking about is some kind of horrifying eldritch body-horror.
Anyway, Cloud, Tifa, and Yuffie go up to the abandoned reactor on Mt. Nibel, where we start to see how unreliable the events of that flashback at the start of the game were (Cloud forgot that Zack was even there, and again I'm more or less 100% sure that the acts he performs in the flashback were actually Zack, and the nervous Shinra grunt was actually Cloud - what's odd is that Tifa takes so long to mention that he got the details wrong, but I guess she's worried about triggering him).
Actually, one thing that I wonder about the writing of the game or possibly just the dialogue choices I've made, but the relationship between Tifa and Cloud does actually seem to me to be pretty purely platonic. Aerith clearly likes him, and is trying to bring him out of his shell (and aren't we all in love with Aerith?) but given the ways he's internalized aspects of Zack's personality, it's a little weird (personality-wise, what we see of Zack feels way more of a kind with Aerith - you can see why they'd have been a couple).
Anyway, the journey up into the old reactor sees Yuffie discovering that war between Shinra and Wutai has begun again in earnest, even if it hasn't been announced. Yuffie is... I don't know that I'd call her annoying, but they're really telegraphing that this kid has a big reality check coming for her. She says that the "Interim Government" is actually made up of a bunch of SOLDIER defectors, which sure as hell seems like a Shinra-run black op (and given that we've seen one of the Wutai leaders planning that war with Rufus Shinra, that seems to confirm this idea). Yuffie is clearly younger than the others (Cloud we get a canonical age of 21 for - it's insane that he was a soldier for Shinra at 16, but then, JRPGs really skew their characters younger. I'm assuming Aerith and Tifa are about the same age). Perhaps because I'm now 37 I relate a lot more with Barret.
Actually, as a note, back in the Corel part of the game, I was stunned by the tonal whiplash - between going to a giant amusement park to being kidnapped by a Mad Max-like desert gang to then doing what is essentially Mario Kart on Chocobos to then having Barret's very Spaghetti-Western-style confrontation with his old friend who has become a murderer and, oh yeah, is Marlene's actual father. This is a story that goes from very dark and serious (my roommate is playing through Remake, and in a meeting Hojo straight-up talks about forcibly breeding Aerith to create more specimens of Cetra genetics, which is, like, holy shit - most evil character in the game) to utterly goofy (basically Cait Sith).
Anyway, the other forced-party-selection we get while Cloud, Tifa, and Yuffie go up the mountain is the first segment where we actually control Cait Sith as the party leader, with Barret and Aerith tagging along. We go into Shinra Manor, exploring the facilities below. And this involves what might be the most frustrating puzzles in the game.
Cait Sith can summon his robotic moogle mount to toss various boxes, but the controls to do this require very precise use of the control stick, and even when the little aiming reticle says you're aimed at the right thing, it often doesn't work. I cannot tell you how many boxes I had to throw to get enough Mako into a little power generator. There are also some enemies that Cait Sith has to fight solo that are genuinely very difficult.
Each character, of course, has its own special abilities when you're directly controlling them. Cait Sith might be the one with my least favorite set up. He's a character who can do physical damage in melee or magic damage at range, but unlike Yuffie, who has two very clear modes to do so, it seems like Cait Sith switching kind of arbitrarily. And when he has to solo creatures that will start retaliating with big damage when they take one type of damage or the other, you really want to have that kind of clear, precise control.
I think I'm most comfortable with the four characters who were playable in Remake, who largely play pretty similarly (Aerith's gotten some changes) and of course we got a preview of Yuffie in Intergrade (and as far as I can tell she works similarly - I think they might have changed how the Synergy attacks work). Tifa is a character I spent most of Remake not really getting, but when I figured out how to properly use Unbridled Strength, I actually started really liking her. Red XIII I realized I have more fun with when I hold down his attack button to do his big spinning attack, and I generally like using his Vengeance meter to fuel his various "Watcher" abilities rather than actually going into Vengeance mode (for one thing, any ability that can heal a large amount without consuming MP or Items is great in my book - I've had Aerith keep Pray equipped basically the whole game, and that makes it actually a really massive party-wide heal, the only downside being that it takes two ATB charges).
One of the odd things about the Nibel region is that I've completed all the Chadley Intel stuff but have not yet gotten the Protorelic quests, so I just have those four dots not yet filled in. I suspect I need to finish up stuff in Nibelheim before that becomes available.
Anyway, while not fully in the end-game, I suspect I'm getting there. Things feel like they're building to a climactic moment. Still very unclear on what is going on with the weird alternate timeline in which Tifa and Barret are dead but Biggs and Zack are still alive.
No comments:
Post a Comment