I skipped over a lot of Grasslands content to keep the story moving, but am going to slow my roll and work through some of the Junon quests and points of interest, maybe backtrack and do some cleanup. It hurts the pacing of the story, but I'm starting to get a sense that the story is itself about breaking FF7 open and how the desire to fill in the gaps of the story only creates more gaps.

- The Fort Condor quest line is what got me thinking about this. Like, maybe it is just a time-sink diversion to give the player additional XP and items. But you're also engaging with a part of the game world that has done the reverse: instead of filling in details on a story, it's taking a historical event (the Republic-Midgar War) and abstracting and gamifying it. It also implies, especially with the party turning into the SD versions of themselves, that the Fort Condor section of the original FF7 was part of this history, while also being a previous or separate iteration of this world and story. Similar thing as with Sephiroth spearing the Midgar Zolom.

- It still feels like it's distracting the characters from the pursuit of Sephiroth, which is nominally the direction the story is going. It's the Rockstar Games conundrum.

- Aerith would have been a much better driver of the quests than stupid Chadley, since she is both curious about the outside world and able to communicate with the Planet. That second part doesn't really become relevant until shortly before her death in the original, but since they're mixing things around here it wouldn't have hurt to give her some sort 'geopathy' early on.

- Although there's a lot of aged open world design going on, I wouldn't mind seeing this applied to a future FF game that could be more open-ended with its narrative. The freedom of discovery of Elden Ring married to the narrative depth of classic Final Fantasy would be a hell of a thing. Square would need to back off the high-end production values to make that feasible, though.

Mostly done with Chapter 4.

- Chadley sucks, and his entrance into the game makes the overworld actively less fun to explore. There's no discovery when this dip child is marking everything on your map, it's a list-making. And he interrupts constantly. Take the Sheikah slate from the past two Zelda games and give it Navi's patronizing attitude, and you've got Chadley.

- I'd forgotten what showstoppers the boss fights in these games are.

- It may be they're just condensing or remixing iconic moments from the original to keep it fresh, but the whole 'Sephiroth saves Cloud by spearing the Midgar Zolom,' in combination with how callous Coud is immediately after--not caring about the robed guy who falls--has some big time-space paradox vibes, like the Sephiroth we're following and the one from the original are the same entity acting across multiple timelines. Or else Cloud's got a bigger heel turn in the wing.

- The detour with Barrett and Red in the mines is so much padding. They couldn't have at least included some character-building dialogue to make it worthwhile? At least the boss rocks.

Sure, why not start my account with this?

- The Zack prologue is an absolutely wild narrative gauntlet to throw down, fracturing the timeline much more than the last game's 'we don't have to be beholden to the original' ending implied.

- That would seem to undercut the drama of the original story beats being re-enacted, but so far (I'm about to get a chocobo) it's managed to continually surprise by accelerating certain elements of the original. Tifa confronts Cloud about their mutually exclusive memories the same night he tells his story, and Cloud goes on a date (with Aerith) in the first town outside Midgar.

- The flashback, and it being used as the game's demo, is very similar to the opening of FFXVI. That game was able to sell a lot of it thanks to Ben Starr's committed performance. I've not been as big a fan of how Cloud and Sephiroth have been directed in these games, as an extension of Advent Children, but hearing Cloud fully losing it with Sephiroth really justifies his aloof deliveries elsewhere.

- The 10:1 scale model of remake:original in both story and geography basically means there's no way they could remake the full original with only one more game to go, so I wonder if there will be more composite storytelling.

- Kalm's Renaissance European design feels like an FFIX remake we'll never get outside of dedicated fan projects.

- Ditto the innkeeper distracting the guards while you climb over and past them, an identical echo of a moment in FFVI.

- Love the context-sensitive overworld music, switching between exploration and battle on the fly.

- This might be the balance in map size that the series, at least in its single-player entries, has struggled with ever since they went more or less fully 3D with representative graphics. Big enough to feel like a world to explore (FFXVI felt like it took place on an island rather than a continent), but not so big that there isn't a ton of empty space and dead time spent traversing it (I bounced off XII twice on PS2 because its huge spaces are only tolerable at 4x speed).