I didn't even know I had this many FFVII feels IN me

[not_cynical]

I impulse bought the FFVII remake five minutes after it was released because I refused to accept it was real until I was playing it. And now I've played the first chapter and I'm still not sure I trust that it's real?!

Spoilers through chapter one of the remake.

• Literally all I want from this game is for it to not make the female characters saintly, and for it not to make Cloud cool and edgy. Tifa and Aeris are badasses who live in a grungy hellhole, and Cloud is a massive dork. This is all I ask.
• (I was really concerned from Aeris' intro that they hadn't given characters the ability to emote, but maybe the designers just want her to look faintly sad until we meet her and she starts laughing at Cloud all the time.)
• I AM SO HYPE FOR THE ~*DISCOURSE*~ THAT'S GOING TO ARISE FROM THIS REMAKE. EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN, WHOLE NEW BABY FANS ARE GOING TO BE SEEING THE GAME FOR THE FIRST TIME, PEOPLE WHO HAVE GOT THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF THE CHARACTERS FROM FOURTH-HAND FANON INTERPRETATIONS ARE GOING TO FLIP THEIR SHIT! Seriously, so many arguments and old fan-dramas are going to rise up again, and I think everyone I know has hit the age where we're just going to be on our fandom porches gazing into the sunset and reminiscing about the old wars.
• I do not understand the fashion choices in Midgar. Like, there's a kid in that intro sequence who's dressed like a victorian urchin, when everyone else is wearing modern clothes, and I'm assuming that's a character decision? Maybe?
• But also those scenes of daily life with the reactors firing up in the background: yes, love it, beautiful.
• I'm not sure if this feeling I'm having is nostalgia, but I'm happy and I wanted to cry a little, and my convoluted fannish feelings are spinning up to gear. Is that nostalgia? Is that what nostalgia feels like?
• The interesting thing about FFVII on a gameplay level is that this is the game with the most spin-offs, so Squeenix have had the most opportunities to go "Cool, we have a set of basic mechanics that we baked into the world-building, how can we switch up what you do with them to keep up with current trends in gaming and/or use what we've learned from our other games?"
  
  • I can DEFINITELY see more recent Final Fantasies in its DNA! It's got the stagger system from FFXIII, it's got a variant of the Gambit system from FFXII, it's got an ATB gauge from pretty much every Final Fantasy from I-IX, some of the more free-form battle structure from XV...
  • I was 97% certain that they wouldn't keep any part of the ATB system, but here we are! I like that attacking isn't bound to it, but anything more complicated (potions, spells, things that are more complicated than "just swing a sword at it") does use up charges. It makes sense! It makes sense as a character thing, because this was always how I interpreted Junctions in FFVIII - it's not that you can't drink a potion without having a GF, it's that the GF makes it easier for you to drink it while giant monsters are trying to eat you.
  • I'm a bit leery of the "You can only control one character at a time, but can freely switch between them" thing, but that's because I am so bad at paying attention to multiple things at once.
  • Seriously, so far the gameplay feels surprisingly coherent, I'm just bad at it. I used about twenty potions in that first boss fight because I just couldn't quite figure out what I was doing. It's probably something that I'll eventually get better at, it's just going to take a lot of potions between now and then.
• Fuck but this soundtrack gets me where I live. Ominous chanting in latin? YES. Those battle themes? YES.
• ... Do the fandom babies know that Avalanche are ecoterrorists, or is this going to be a thing that they discover when the bomb gets pulled out?!
• I kinda love everyone's voice acting, and the way that they still have a lot of personality and body language from the original game, like when Barret goes off about Shinra destroying the planet! And it feels like they've given more personality to characters like Jesse, who gets to be competent and mildly embarrassed by her boss doing the big speech for an audience of two.
• (I LOVE JESSE AND BIGGS and I guess Wedge too, but he's had fewer opportunities to do cool things. Jesse and Biggs' intro is them tag-teaming a guard, okay, I love Jesse and I'm apparently a sucker for any character voiced by Gideon Emery.)
• The reactor layouts varying by how old they are is a nice detail!
• THEY KEPT THE BIT WHERE YOU WOULD HAVE CHOSEN CLOUD'S NAME, awwww!
• My brain was so stuck on "Wait, did they make Heidegger a hot bear?!" that I honestly couldn't tell you what he actually looked like. Damn son, that was a glow up and a half.
• "So what are you? Twenty-something?"
  "First."
  "What?"
  "Soldier First Class. It doesn't go up to twenty."
  HE IS THE MOST AWKWARD AND I LOVE HIM.
• The little fritzes Cloud gets, yessssssssssssssss. I like it. And I'm interested that the clearest one is of Tifa yelling at him, because yesssss, give me all these cute childhood details.
• (I don't... Particularly have any FFVII ships, as a fair warning. I have no OTPs, I have no NOTPs, but I am interested in seeing if the remake changes that.)
• HOW ARE THEY GOING TO DEAL WITH CID, I MUST KNOW. Everyone is allowed to say "shit" now, so what are they going to do to capture Cid having a mouth like a sailor?!
• GO AWAY ROBOTS, I AM BAD AT FIGHTING YOU.
• I find it interesting that Barret hired a mercenary - literally someone who is there SPECIFICALLY for the pay cheque - and still wants to demand that he believe in Avalanche's cause. It's an interesting character choice! He demands people care, which I'm assuming is because most people don't care that wherever they are in Midgar they're within spitting distance of a reactor.
• ... See, because I know so many people who do political organising, I really want the 100k fic that's just Barret and the future members of Avalanche trying to gather local support and pressure Shinra to produce energy in a less damaging fashion, and their progression to "What if we just blow up a goddamn reactor?" It probably exists already! I just need to find it!
• "Should have asked for more money."
• Wait, the bomb barely did anything, so Shinra and Heidegger turned their own robots on the power plant to exascerbate the damage? I don't remember if that was a thing from the original game, but it makes so much sense with what's going to happen later, oh my god.
• Cloud's sheepish little smile when Jesse tells him that he's cool! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I love them? I love him? I love Cloud being the most awkward little turtle to ever swing a sword?
• Speaking of, I kinda love that while they were changing people's designs, they kept Cloud's "twink who hasn't slept in a month" look. Like, it's a good look! It works for showing how weird it is that he can swing a slab of metal around like it's nothing! I'm just amused that every sequel has gone "No, the purple jumpsuit is no longer canon, we do not talk about that." ... Not impressed that they appear to have gone "Nah, Jesse can wear boob plate, that's fine," but I'm somehow unsurprised.
• (Stupid thing to be happy about: the way Cloud's Buster Sword catches the light. It looks like it's actually got an edge to it now, which none of the other games and movies managed to do.)
• Barret pacing around the lift until he notices that Cloud is just standing there not bothered is also interesting to me! ... Also I was very stuck on why we were taking the lift, not the stairs, but I can absolutely believe that Shinra saved all of the stairs for their corporate building.
• THEY DON'T KNOW. THEY DON'T KNOW THAT SHINRA IS DELIBERATELY SABOTAGING THINGS, OH THEY ARE NOT PREPARED FOR HOW BADLY THIS IS GOING TO GO, oh noooooooo.
• And because of the Times We Live In, I'm just looking at that blackout like "I really hope they did their research and they picked an area with no hospitals in."
• I feel like I must have accidentally skipped a boss fight on my way out of the base, but I can't say if that's because I expected the countdown to start while I was fighting the robot of doom or not. ~Oh well!~
• 
  sithe made a crack about not wanting to play it in case it doesn't live up to him being six and playing his first game with FMVs, which makes sense to me! But also I try very hard to not be using his PS4 when he's awake anyway in case he wants it, so I'm a little worried that this is going to look like me going "NO YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE ANYTHING OF THIS 100+GB GAME THAT YOU HAVE LET ME INSTALL ON YOUR PRIMARY SOURCE OF ENTERTAINMENT IN CASE SIX YEAR OLD YOU IS DISAPPOINTED." ... I am a terrible person to share space with, okay.
• I am so excited to get to Tifa and Aeris, and I MUST KNOW if the awful horrible "Press the button at the right time" sequence that I failed 9000000 times made it through to the remake.
• ... Also I do kinda see why they're releasing it episodically, because each individual section of FFVII has SO MUCH in it. Like, even if you stop it at like... The Midgar Zolom, for lack of a better boundary, that's still covering a huge swathe of the story and so many of the... Sidequests? Mini-games? Sub-games? Like the tower defence sections, or the motorbikes, or the chocobos, or... I don't know how they're gonna fit all of that in, okay. Even if they're only releasing the game in tiny £70 chunks, I don't know that they could keep everything that was in the original game. Which is fine! Most of that stuff I didn't bother with anyway, because I was like ten. (Dark secret: I don't remember doing the chocobo raising thing at all. I'm pretty sure that I just pegged it across the Zolom area and died a lot until I got the timing right.) I just try to imagine the amount of work it would be to bring all of that into the remake with modern graphics, and... Nope. Can't picture it.
• ... Just to be clear, I'm not meaning "New games aren't as chock full of random bullshit as old ones!" because they are, that's why I'm so bad at finishing things. It's just strange to try to imagine FFVII as a modern game, even though it exists and I've played some of it.
• I love everyone, Cloud is as much of a disaster dork as I hoped, I am so ready for Tifa. That's it, that's the tl;dr.