Why do some people consider Sephiroth's change one of the worst written parts of Final Fantasy as a whole?

Why do some people consider Sephiroth's change one of the worst written parts of Final Fantasy as a whole?

They have shit taste

Because it's old enough to hate on, but not old enough to praise for being retro.

"I have to go see my mother." is one of his better lines, and the musical change is pretty great.

People don't understand what actually happened. Most think it was reading the research that drove him totally batty. What actually happened was that Jenova was telepathically mindfucking him the same way she did to Cloud.

I always thought it was the research. The research basically uncovered EVERYTHING about his past, so..that would mindfuck him well enough even without Jenova.


I really liked FFVII. I wonder if they'll.....no, I wonder how hard they'll fuck up the remake.

>You are an in-vitro child and your mother is so ugly even John Carpenters the Thing wouldn't fuck
>Well thanks i'm Insane now and gonna destroy the world.

A little more substance to it would have been nice.

The research helped, but you don't find it suspicious that his goals immediately became the exact same as Jenova's goals thousands of years before? She was mindfucking him to use him as a puppet, but once he fell in the Lifestream, he became too strong. So the two assimilated each other. The lines between Sephiroth and Jenova essentially blurred into a single mind because it was most advantageous for the both of them.

>ugly
You take that back, Jenova a cute

I think the idea is that he found Jenova, and then she mindfucked him completely.

Also, I mean...he was basically made of long-insane space parasite DNA

I always figured that the initial impetus to find her was his, but when he did, she basically connected with him (what with most of him being jenova cells) and took control.

You don't remember how she was telepathically fucking with Cloud the entire game through her implanted cells? She did the same to Sephiroth.

Being so close to her in Nibelheim probably gave her the strength to do it, because he was already crazy when he ran off to the reactor to get her.

This
People always fight over who was controlling who, but they were mostly working together
In VII Sephiroth had his own plan, the he got blow the fuck out, so mommy said, "now try doing it my way"

Guess it's semantics at this point. It's pretty safe to say that whatever comes back from Nibelheim isn't Sephiroth in any real sense. He's likely in there somewhere, but Jenova is pulling the strings. Jenova seems to work like a hivemind, having supreme control over her own cells.

The Remake will retcon all this btw.

Until he gets lifestream'd at least

The real question is "what is jenova?"

Is she literally jehovah? God?

She's Lavos+The Thing. Just an alien virus that eats planets.

Wut, it's pretty clearly explained ingame, it's just some alien lifeform that feeds on planets

It'd be fun if she actually was the same race as Lavos.

>giving a fuck about FF canon after the abortion that was advent children

Pic related. Would not put penis into giant vagina with torso clitoris with belly vagine (+tentacles)

Fair enough, you could assume that, but it would have been good if it was more than only implied since it was a major plot point of the game.
Doesn't help that Sepiroth falls under one of the major generic bad guy archtypes with his motivation... but hey FF was always cheesy on their bad guy motivations.

Well, it's not really explained. They don't know anything about Jenova before it landed, and fucked up the cetra. It just seems like a supremely powerful thing, and the biblical references invite this kind of talk.

I kind of like that era of JRPGs, where things are left up to interpretation, desu.

Same reason I liked FFVIII's ultimecia timewarp shit.

>cheesy on their bad guy motivations
Kefka had a pretty good point, don't you think?

>Because it's old enough to hate on, but not old enough to praise for being retro.

FF7 is about to be two decades old, man.
IT PREDATES MODERN TEENAGERS.
It certainly gets glorified praise for being retro.

Nihilism is for edgy teenagers.

Kefka was legitimately mad though.

But is it considered retro yet? retro for video games still seems to be anything up to PSX era.

The rest of the game added up nicely so for me I see the problem without it being such a big deal for me.
I found the "we all were orphans and grew up together but conveniently forgot it for the plot" thing from 8 much shittier.
Or the "we had an apocalypse and returned to a religious society after a high tech age but kept our magnetic suspended water sphere water polo stadiums" from 10

You can't try to pull off a Kefka every other game and hope it'll just work out.

It's gonna be influenced by modern anime instead of 90s anime
So no more Evangelion inspired incomprehensible plot, no more eldritch space monster, no more existential introspective mumbo-jumbo
Jenova will now appear as a sexy blue alien and taunt you a lot and have an evil laugh, Jenova and Sephiroth will literally fuse together as well turning into a blue skinned Sephiroth with tentacles, much more comedy also expanding on the Wall Market part a ton because trap-fags need pandering, more side stuff that goes sort of nowhere and is just there to further flesh out the characters and for humor, more SoL instances basically, more fanservice, more harem tropes with the girls outright fighting over Cloud who is completely oblivious to it, more gaming terms making it an isekai with the twist that this time it's the real world

I can't say I was all that bothered by the shittier parts of the plots from 8 or 10. I mean, it's artistic license, really. I grew up reading Dickens novels, where everyone ended up being related to everyone else, so I just gloss over it. I'll likely catch shit for saying it, but it's fantasy. It's okay to stretch the limits of the imagination.

But I certainly understand why people would dislike it.

>You can't try to pull off a Kefka every other game

It certainly fell flat enough in 9. There were about 4 different "main villains" in that game, goddamn.

I wonder, are they really changing it that much?

meh. I'll pirate one of them if I can, and if I can't i'll just read reviews.

If it's shit i'll always have the old game, with the perfect party of wife-beating hick genius and self-hating half-vampire weirdo.

You can post about PSX, N64, etc on /vr/.
That's retro enough for me.

Some 14 year old kid is going to pick up FF15 as their first Final Fantasy game next week. Think about that for a minute.

Well, if it's an overall good game, you are more likely to forgive small inconsistencies... who cares if some parts of Sepiroths backstory didnt add up that well - overall he was a gud antagonist and you were pumped to kick his ass at the end of the game.

It's only when the game as whole is shit that those (rather small) details become unbearable bullshit.

>They don't know anything about Jenova before it landed
This is the most disturbing thing about Jenova to me. Where the flying fuck did it come from? How was it created? Did it fuck up other planets beforehand? Are there any other aliens in space just like it? Fuck man, so unsettling.

>You can't try to pull off a Kefka every other game and hope it'll just work out.
Fair cop.

Hopefully FF15 bankrupts them.

Lucky every Final Fantasy is in different worlds outside shitty sequels amirite?

Well that's actually a good thing... look at lovecraftian shit... sometimes the unexplained shit is the most disturbing.
Its like that helloween remake... i think showing Michael as a disturbed teenager was a mistake, giving him justification rather than - everyone could be a monster like this.

XII is the only good FF that's come after the merger, and even that was plagued with dev problems that chased Matsuno away. It's only good because of the influence he had on it. SE can't make Final Fantasy.

Cid and Vincent probably aren't changing much
Cid will just be more self depreciating about being old compared to "the kids" and Vincent will be a bit more brooding, have some sexual tension in comedic moments with Cloud and have the NTR amplified

I always figured there was a race of them, which is pretty old-ones level of terrifying. It's probably better we don't know anything about it.

aren't ffx and vii connected?

>who is Gilgamesh

Probably it destroyed Spira before going to Gaia

>Cid will just be more self depreciating about being old compared to "the kids"

I imagine they will take out or replace his abusive relationship with Shera, and just have him guilt-ridden, to appease SJWs.

>have some sexual tension in comedic moments

Fucking christ, i'd drop that in a second. He's a beta faggot in the game, but at least it's on the DL.

Wut? Never heard about that.

...a gag character?

>XII is the only good FF

Pretty much.

I personally didn't like it very much.
The story felt like it should have been epic, but your characters were often too disjointed from it.
The characters itself were bland and uninteresting for me.
And the combat system felt tedious and boring.

I think out of all main FFs I enjoyed it the least.

Kefka was the only boss in Final Fantasy history that technically won.

Really makes you think.

I don't recall perfectly, but in x-2, the little kid is called Shinra, and has lines about using life energy to power the planet, and how it's a good idea that he'll look into.

a joke, likely, but...yeah.

using the farplane as power source, I mean.

here:

From Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Omega:[1]

Shinra is a boy who supports the Gullwings, the group which the main protagonist, Yuna, belongs to. He carries a name that gives him an association to the Shin-Ra Company, and he is researching a method that could utilize the energy of 'the life force that flows through our planet'. The results of this cannot be seen in FFX-2, but maybe one day his descendants will establish a 'company that supplies the energy of the planet'?
In the Final Fantasy X-2 Ultimania Kazushige Nojima said the following:[1]
After quitting the Gullwings, Shinra received enormous financial support from Rin, and began trying to use Vegnagun to siphon Mako Energy from the Farplane. But, he is unable to complete the system for utilizing this energy in his generation, and in the future, when traveling to distant planets becomes possible, the Shin-Ra Company is founded on another world, or something like that....... That would happen about 1000 years after this story, I think.

Gilgamesh travels between each FF world. They're connected through the Interdimensional Rift, and several characters including Gilgamesh can move through it. Shantotto from XI and Lightning can also do it.
The final battle against Kuja in FFIX even takes place in the Rift at the exact location that you fight Exdeath in FFV.

That's just how Matsuno's stories are. There are always more important things going on in the world than the party's feelings and relationships. I personally think Doctor Cid and Venat are the two greatest "villains" in the series.
>The reins of history, back in the hands of Man!

>SJWs
Nah, FFVII is anime, they don't have this stuff and Tabata is the guy chasing western audiences
It'll be dumb jokes but Vincent and Cloud need to have BL fuel for the fangirls
>who is Caius Ballad

First I've heard of it. What's wrong with it anyway. The guy is the fucked up genetic progeny of a genocidal ancient ayylium. He was bound to lose it eventually.

Well, Ultimecia also won, in a way. She controlled all of time and space for the one moment left in existence. We don't know how long she'd been doing that before squall and co popped in.

Could've been millions of years.

Well i rather have either my epic storyline i can be a part off and be the key player in, or a set of interesting characters trying to cope with the greater machinations on their own but in the end are prone to its whims.
FF12 did neither for me... which would be ok if i would have liked the gameplay - but i didn't.

To be fair, you can't expect most people to know who Siegfried, I mean Caius, is. XIII killed people right in the soul.

Oh, well. No reason they'd make people like me their target audience anyway. I played the original as a kid, so I have fond memories, and am in my 30's now, which isn't a popular demographic for anime.

Or..target demographic, anyway.

is it?!

Time hadn't been fully kompressed yet. If it had, Squall and co couldn't even have been able to do anything. Technically, it is a closed time loop, though. At the end of the game, you're going into the future and you see the end of time. Ultimecia destroys everything, and Squall does nothing to close that time loop. The fight against her is even what drives the future persecution of sorceresses in the first place and creates Ultimecia's anger.

>>who is Caius Ballad

that's a very good question.

so she at least destroys time, with her ineptitude. I can only assume that life doesn't return to normal in her world after she's dead.

Because she..killed everyone.

Wasn't it intentionally designed to be ambiguous about who's the true mastermind? Or was that an accident from shit translations?

The place where her castle exists is the literal end of time, and it's not a place she had to extend her consciousness to using Junction Ellone. That's where she naturally exists. So yeah, she ended everything. Just never got a chance to compress it into herself.

Fucking sorceresses. I still don't believe that Hyne gave them his power willingly.

Accident from shit translations.
Also badly placed info dumps.

Remember how Ultimecia was using Junction Ellone to implant herself in past sorceresses? She did it to Edea and Adel. Maybe she did it to Hyne, too.

Isn't that a paradox user

That would be weird as fuck. But no weirder than Hyne belonging to the same elder-god race as Jenova, Necron and Lavos.

paradox is fine in a closed loop. It would just play itself around and around.

His motivation is never properly explained. Sephiroth is literally wrong about everything he talks about with you, like believing he's an ancient and not knowing who his actual father is and whatnot.

Sephiroth is great, as he's scary and had lots of screen presence

Yeah, that's how time travel stories always end up. It's a time loop. There's already one proven in the game. Ultimecia passes power to Edea > Edea creates SeeD > Edea's actions while possessed lead to Sorceress persecution > Persecution creates an angry, victimized Ultimecia > Ultimecia goes back and possesses Edea for Time Compression, ensuring her persecution > SeeD kills her, and she passes her power to Edea, starting it again.

isn't it paradoxical that she took control of Edea when Edea's power was the same as her own, what with her giving it to her in the first place?

The only way around this would be if time was..semi-sentient, like in the legacy of kain games. Which might mean that new timelines are created, and the ending of final fantasy VIII might be a new timeline?

Laguna not going off to war and being there with Raine's grave and ellone kind of suggests that things MIGHT have changed.

At the end, Squall is at the orphanage in the past. He sees himself and Ellone there, meaning Laguna did go to war. Ultimecia then passes her power there, and Squall tells Edea to make SeeD. Nothing changes and it all repeats. They're stuck in a time loop. Time travel always creates paradoxes.

Seems kind of weird, though. I mean..everyone in that world would know about Ultimecia now. And Edea wouldn't be a tyrant any longer, and the sorceresses after her need not be, either.

Still, would it kill Squall to tell everyone to be a little nicer to future ultimecia, and not bully her so much?

>I mean..everyone in that world would know about Ultimecia now. And Edea wouldn't be a tyrant any longer, and the sorceresses after her need not be, either.
That's exactly it, and why Ultimecia turned into a villain. Everyone assumed she would be and treated her like a monster. It can be assumed that she's born extremely far into the future, since you fight a series of future Sorceresses to get to her through the Time Compression sequence. By then, it wouldn't matter what Squall said. Did he even know what led to her anger in the first place to tell everyone?

Perhaps, but there's also the issue of the dead seed you see outside her castle. Squall would have to be an ultra-prick to bother training them if he knew that they'd all die, and he'd be the one to kill her off in the end.

I like the paradox theory though, on the whole. Most things fit.

and makes ultimecia's words to you a little more comprehensible. She's had some taste of time, and knows how easy it is to fuck it up. Squall doesn't, and probably tries anyway, and..fucks it up, because time was always going to be fucked up.

The ending of FF8 confused me a little. Yes, they killed Ultimecia, but Squall is the one who set everything in motion when he accidentally went back to Edea and told her to make SeeD and shit. So they didn't change the future, Ultimecia still destroys most of the world and shit.

Because the translation was shit. That and graphics are the only things the remake can improve on.

>Ultimecia still destroys most of the world and shit.

All of it, in fact. It's a dead planet by the end.

Considering the time VII was released, would it have been considered cheesy when it was new? I didn't get into, or even hear about, FF until XIII and I've never met another FF fag off of the internet so no idea what shit was like back then.

As a side note I wish I found this series earlier, first ten FFs were pretty fun.

If shit was outright stated they'd most likely no where near the level of discussion about the game so many decades later. The mystery helps keep people talking.

I played it when it first came out. It wasn't cheesy back then. It was revolutionary as fuck, really.

FF7, like Evangelion, is a victim of its own success. It spawned things that everyone else copied, and so going back to experience them now makes them seem cheesy and cliched.

I still enjoy FFVII. I replayed last year with the PC added content and texture mods, and it was as good as I remember.

When FFVII was new it effectively took every good thing from halfway decent Japanese entertainment at the time and wedged it into some nook or cranny within the game.

Then it had a (again, for the time) very nontraditional JRPG plot.

It threw everyone for a loop, and Americans especially devoured it like crazy because of how much more "western" it ended up being.

That's only scraping the top layer of what made the game unforgettable when it released, Bum Tickley would need to B^U for days to explain everything.

tl;dr of the fiasco is it was the perfect storm and wiped the slate clean for RPGs in general.

>aren't ffx and vii connected?

Some guy that works at SE said something about that during an interview, but then immediately afterwards said he was bullshitting. But no one ever quotes the second part.

There is that kid in X-2 named Shinra and he does talk about using energy from the Farplane, the place the dead go in that universe, to power tech. But it's nothing more than just a reference to VII.

Thinking that X and VII are the same universe because of that is like thinking that III and IX are the same universe because you find buy Doga's Artifact at one point in IX.

Both VII and X share the whole Gaia theory thing and having the afterlife being this mass of energy you can actually visit. But so does fucking Spirits Within. Are we going to say Spirits Within is part of the universe now?

>Are we going to say Spirits Within is part of the universe now?

I don't see why not? It's pretty fun stuff to think about.

>Bum Tickley
>B^U

That's a name I haven't heard in a long time, user...

>it was the perfect storm and wiped the slate clean for RPGs in general.

If it helped to make Wild Arms 3 the fucking purest masterpiece of gaming that ever graced the world, then that's fine by me.

I know FF8 is the pre-Enix game that usually gets more hate, but I fucking loved that story.

I feel like it's the only game when the writers went totally nuts and got more experimental with the narrative, stopped playing it safe, with more ambiguous storytelling and even surrealist scenes. Sure there are some bullshit plot-twists, but it's not like FF7 and 9 are any different there.

>pre-Enix

was it?

>muh Jenova manipulation
come on, faggots. Sephiroth just got redpilled.

>Maybe she did it to Hyne, too.

The problem is the game outright tells you that she can't use Junction Machine Ellone to send her mind that far back, the "present" shown in the game is as far back as she can go and Hyne was thousands, maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands, of years before that. This is why part of the game has her, acting through Edea, looking for Ellone so she can send herself further back.

Each FF is connected through the Interdimensional Rift, but you need crazy magic to travel through it. Obviously VII and X aren't actually in the same galaxy/universe/whatever. The Farplane doesn't function in anywhere near the same way as the Lifestream. The Lifestream is a closed, self-repeating system of energy, while the Farplane is where everything is finally deposited and stays there. Even then, pyreflies need to be forcefully sent to the Farplane, instead of naturally joining it like Lifestream energy does.

XIV's planet has a Lifestream that functions the exact way as VII's, and has technology like Shinra's that uses it as fuel, but nobody thinks XIV is connected to VII.

I agree. I remember the shitstorm when it first came out. I don't even know if Sup Forums existed back then, I used to visit gamefaq forums. The waves of "it's supposed to be FANTASY!" butthurt was intense. my first experience of it, I think.

I fucked loved the direction they went. Sort of..subtle fantasy sci-fi. It was great.

I actually forgot about that, but she did at some point succeed in beginning Compression, right? Isn't that what Squall takes advantage of to get to the future where she is? So wouldn't that mean she did manage to get into the distant past?

>Sephiroth just got redpilled

>I wonder who's behind this crater
>fucking Cetra
>muh promised land
>1488 we must secure a homeland for extraterrestrial horrors

I would have figured that most of the butthurt would have been from all the people that were introduced to the franchise with VII, internet was not as wide spread back then so good luck researching a game series, bitching about it not being VII-2.

Well kinda yes and kinda no. It was already a famous villain trope by the time FF7 was released but it was also the "in thing" at the time.

True

strangely enough, not that I can remember. Final Fantasy became sort of retroactively known after VII, so I remember people doing that with tactics, because they didn't expect a stragety game, but with VIII, it was mainly the way it looked.

And Squall. People hated Squall, which...has always confused me.

>What actually happened was that Jenova was telepathically mindfucking him the same way she did to Cloud
What?? Source. You better be able to back this outrageous statement up, you nigger motherfucker.

FFX (or X-2?) was the last Soft Final Fantasy.
So yes, it was.