I've said many times that no matter what you think of the FFVII remake games, you could never accuse Square Enix of half-assing these games. Taking a beloved classic and making an entire, long game out of essentially each disc of the original, creating a brand-new combat system that blends the fast-paced action of more recent Final Fantasy games with the strategic menu-navigating choices of the original, creating vastly detailed environments and tons of fully voiced characters - it's a whole lot.
Remake came out in 2020 - not long after the Covid 19 lockdowns started, which made it something of a lifeline for those of us suddenly shoved into isolation. It was another four years until Rebirth was released. But this is not the last part of the series. Rebirth ends with a highly significant moment in the plot of the game, but still leaves a good portion of it to go.
So, what can we expect from the next installment? And when can we expect it?
To talk about this, we're going to go into spoiler territory, so here's a cut for the spoiler-averse.
Rebirth's ending is a puzzling one - we successfully deflect Sephiroth's deadly thrust that killed Aerith in the original game, but somehow she still winds up stabbed - a moment of timelines shifting and diverging, it seems. We're left in this very strange and ambiguous space: it appears that for Tifa, Barret, Yuffie, Cait Sith, Cid, and Vincent, that Aerith is dead and gone. Indeed, in a piece of clever use of mechanics as storytelling device, our fight against Jenova's latest incarnation following this moment, their Limit Gauges start the fight fully charged up, the rage of losing their dear friend empowering them to unleash their fury upon this eldritch monstrosity. Cloud's, however, is not. Because from his perspective, Aerith is still alive, still talking to him, and promising to stop the Meteor and fulfill her destiny to protect the spell with the Holy spell.
Just what this Aerith is remains a mystery: she could be the one that Cloud saved, shunted between different timelines, or she could be a manifestation of Jenova, whom we just learned in a big dungeon is capable of deceiving people by appearing as lost loved ones.
The mystery of what this Aerith is will surely not be answered at least until the latter chapters of the next game (while we're only at the end of "Disc Two" of four, I think the next game will probably wrap this up). These games, after all, have introduced to us the idea of multiple worlds (the multiverse trope that seems to be quite in vogue these days - I'll confess that I've always been more interested in the idea of a multiverse being truly different worlds, more like if there were crossovers between the Final Fantasy games. Actually, as a side note, my best friend's favorite game of all time is Final Fantasy VI, and while I think it's not terribly likely, we'd both be really excited to see VI get the same treatment that VII is getting with this trilogy) and so there are plenty of new mysteries that even those deeply familiar with the original have not yet seen resolved.
Mechanically, though, I wonder how thing will work.
In Rebirth, we start the game with five playable characters - Cloud, Barret, Tifa, Aerith, and Red XIII. These all appeared in Remake, but Red entered so late in the game that they had him act as an uncontrolled friendly NPC who fought alongside you. Here, Red gets tossed into the mix right from the jump (well, not precisely - we do have the Nibelheim flashback as a kind of tutorial/refresher). Then, later, we get Yuffie and Cait Sith perhaps a little before the game's halfway point.
Of course, we also meet Cid and Vincent, and by the game's last chapters, the two are actually traveling with us, but just sitting out the combat.
So, will Re-whatever start with us having full access to eight characters? Or will they space it out a little? There's not really a story reason to do so - and of course, in the original it was all one game, so there was no reason to need to hold back and let a player get "re-acquainted" with the mechanics.
Then there's the question of Aerith.
In Rebirth, the final phase of our final boss fight has Cloud and Aerith face down Sephiroth together. This is, of course, after Aerith has "died," but she steps in through some planar portal (this actually happens earlier when Zack Fair shows up to tag-team Sephiroth with Cloud, and also to face Sephiroth alone in one stage of this huge multi-stage fight).
Personally, I have a dreadful feeling that the Aerith that Cloud is seeing is actually Jenova, but at the same time, i want the fact that we defeated the Arbiters of Fate and that Cloud did actually deflect Sephiroth's sword to count for something.
I think there are two critiques that would typically be mutually exclusive but manage to hit Rebirth at the same time, and I have sympathy for both.
The first is that Square Enix should have had the guts to just kill Aerith like they had in the original game, and to make that moment of grief and loss hit and resonate as hard as it had in 1997 - that by messing with that moment, the stakes of the game are muddled at best and reduced at worse.
The other (and one that I might find myself agreeing with a little more) is that they should have had the guts to fully save Aerith - for the timeline to shift and change in a real and meaningful way, where Sephiroth is put on a back heel and confused for a change, and where Aerith's survival becomes its own challenge - after all, the original game implies that her being dead but also returned to the Lifestream is what allows for her to actually stop the meteor, and that we might discover in the next game that her individual survival has doomed the world (or at least doomed it until the heroes can find a new solution).
We've got an extremely thorny mystery now that seems to involve not just two but three alternate universes (the Beagle, Bulldog, and Terrier universes, given that the cartoon dog Stamp is a different breed in each one).
While I know a bit about some plot ground that needs to be covered - like Cloud finding out that most of his memories are actually things that Zack did, and that he wasn't even a SOLDIER in the first place (my friend remembers him finding out he's actually an artificial person, like a robot, though synopses I've read imply it's more like he was a regular guy who got experimented on by Hojo and probably injected with Jenova cells, but I guess we'll see). But I don't know precisely where we might visit - and I know that already Rebirth shuffled a few things, like skipping Icicle Town and Rocket Town, and that you originally recruit Yuffie in Wutai, which we have yet to see.
Mechanically I don't think they need to do anything too crazy - I've got mixed feelings about the Synergy abilities, but at the very least it was nice to give Cloud ranged options when you had Aerith or Barret (or Yuffie, I think, and maybe Red?) in the party. I also felt like the Stagger-extending ones never felt like they extended it by a significant amount of time - almost like it was just long enough to let the animation play, and sometimes by the time it actually went off the stagger would be over.
I might also let weapons get more materia slots over time - in Remake, I found myself picking weapons to specialize in different strengths, but in Rebirth you basically always wanted the last weapons you could get because they were the only ones with lots of materia slots that were linked.
And then there's timing.
I'd love to think that, given how many assets already exist (and have since 2020) that making the third game would hopefully not take too long, but I'm really not going to bet on getting this game until 2028.
No comments:
Post a Comment