This review contains spoilers
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.
- 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.