FYI guys there's dating mechanics in this game like how there was a system to select who was your Gold Saucer date in the original. It gives you one of three cutscenes in Chapter 14 and orders how your party members join you in the final battle.

Spoiler: oh god oh fuck

I've been reading others input for the multiverse theory. I now believe there's more than three. In terms of games/compilation it's Before Crisis >> Crisis Core >> 1997 >> Advent Children Complete >> Dirge of Cerberus >> 2020, mostly because Sephiroth has knowledge of the future with no good explanation how (Jenova cell bullshit plus all the Lifestream being collected by Omega Weapon in DC into one point? that's essentially what the 1997 Meteor plan was, to obtain all the power of the Planet as it pooled together) and there's references to BC and CC (main AVALANCHE's assassination attempts in BC, Gongaga Apples, Kunsel, and that Zack scene from CC). After Sephiroth has the team destroy the Whispers to unlock everyone from Fate, it fractured the spacetime continuum and caused not only a split timeline in the past where Zack lived, but also another timeline where Biggs and Jessie also lived. That scene of Biggs waking up at the orphanage and Jessie's gloves were on the table had all these glowing gold particles falling from the sky, which only appear when the Whispers were offed in the Zack scene. You don't see them as the team enters the Wasteland. Therefore, there's the 2020 timeline where they died at the pillar, and another timeline where they were saved.

Before Crisis
Crisis Core
1997
Advent Children Complete
Dirge of Cerberus
└─2020
space├─Zack lives, new Crisis Core ending
space└─Party enters Wasteland
spacing├─Jessie and Biggs are dead at the pillar, Wedge who the hell knows since he was at ShinRa Tower somehow being chased by Whispers
spacing└─Jessie and Biggs live

Spoiler: and yes

Aerith does know some elements of the future as one of the optional cutscenes is her telling Cloud not to fall for her

Anyways, here's an evolution of One Winged Angel

 

Spoiler

Yeah, I saw that cutscene... pretty cool. Those theories are pretty crazy.

 

Spoiler: for those who haven't gotten them all

Also of note, in the new CC timeline there's a piece of litter that has the Stamp dog that's ShinRa's mascot. However, that Stamp is an entirely different breed than the ones that Finn has been painting the town with. Helps solidify the multiverse timelines theory.

 

Spoiler

Aerith is a wildcard here. As a Cetra, she has some manner of foresight, and knows more than she is letting on even now that the whispers are gone (if they are indeed gone). So like, what does she think defeating the whispers accomplishes? It's definitely the biggest question mark right now.

Sephiroth is changing fate so that he wins (though we don't know exactly how or what he's done), the whispers were trying to preserve the original path. Aerith may not know which was which. Which means she may eventually decide that a certain event in her future still needs to happen to get things on the right track...

On that note, I love what they did with Aerith here. The psychic powers really sell how she's descended from these super beings. She shows Marlene the vision to make her feel better, among other weird magic things.

 

You're never playing with a full hand with Nomura, so I have a few theories, but it would be a long post.

 

That feels like an understatement.  

 

Unpopular opinion, but I'm still in disbelief at how much I enjoyed this part.


Is it bad that I want to see the next showdown between Cloud and Sephiroth to become this? Make it happen, Square.

 

Yeah, this part in the game was better than it had any right to be. My wife wants a dancing game similar to what they made for Persona 5 now.  

 

I do hope they actually do joke stuff like with the Silent Hill games and their joke endings. I imagine the devs were also having too much fun recreating this part.

Just imagine...

*One Winged Angel theme intensifies*

"Let's end this, Sephiroth."

"I'm almost a god, Cloud. You can't stop me."

"I've still got some SOLDIER skills to spare."

*Funky music plays and random square button pops up on screen*

 

Definitely worthwhile, been watching some folks play as I don't have the console. Blows me away how much they've packed in while at the same time splitting up the game.

 

Spoiler: Boy, oh boy.

​

also, here's my full writeup of my theory of the ending:

Spoiler: might want to get a chair and stretch

the following is probably bullshit and is me just trying to formulate what happened after reading a bunch of comments left on reviews and after watching an Australian playthrough because I don't have a PS4. I don't fully understand what the ending was but I'm gonna try anyways.

TL;DR: Sepiroth does an Avengers Endgame Steve Rogers and creates a multiverse of parallel timelines.

My probably bullshit summary of The Final Fantasy VII Timeline as a whole:
Before Crisis
Crisis Core
1997
Advent Children Complete
Dirge of Cerberus
2020

"Remake is a sequel to not just Complete, but DIRGE OF CERBERUS? The fuck?" Yeah, and here's my bullshit explanation that makes it sound like Terminator: GenisYs (the one that has John Connor become a Terminator himself). Strap in:

After Sephiroth is defeated at the ruins of the ShinRa tower in Advent Children Complete, he gets Infinity Warred into the Lifestream. However, now seeing that his attempts to win in the present have now failed, he sends himself back in time to try and change his destiny. But since he was weakened with the defeat of his Remnants, Sephiroth doesn't go to the past from after his defeat in ACC, he goes to the past after Dirge of Cerberus. Why wait another year? Because Jenova cell bullshit plus all the Lifestream being collected by Omega Weapon in DC into one place. That's essentially what the 1997 Meteor plan was, to obtain all the power of the Planet as it pooled together. Omega sucked all of the planet's blood, and when it was released at the end of DC, that release was a focusing point for Sephiroth to send himself back in time. However, he finds himself at the Edge of Creation, only managing to slightly interact with those who have been injected with Jenova Cells. That is, however, until the first Mako Reactor bombing. The amount of Mako concentrated there with the presence of Cloud leads to the feather we see in chapter 1. This is where the timeline fractures. The Whispers of Fate take note of his actions and begin to manifest as more and more events change compared to the original game. Their first appearance next to Loveless Avenue is because they took note of Aerith since she is a major player in 1997, and they start to try intervening with Avalanche's activities, going so far as to take Jessie out of the mission since Cloud was about to not be in the Reactor 5 mission, the mission that leads to him falling into the church.

With ACC Sephiroth now finding himself being warded off by Fate itself (or rather, Whispers), he begins experimenting with how much he can fuck around while exploring the past. This leads to him doing mild nudges here and there, with things such as having messed with the Chocobo Theatre's VR simulation to show Meteorfall early as he continues to splinter the timeline. However, the Whispers keeps making some fluid changes to course-correct destiny, and so while things change like a mission sneaking to Jessie's parents for pizza and Hojo wanting to force the creation of more Ancients by using S-enhanced and G-enhanced SOLDIERS (sup Crisis Core reference of RE #2) instead of using Red XIII (ew), the major beats still are there. Then comes the events of the S7 support beam. When Cloud was just about to stop the Turks from destroying the pillar, they defeated Reno before he could finish the job, but then Rude does it instead (an alteration from the original!) because the Whispers prevented Cloud from doing so. However, Wedge DOESN'T DIE because the Whispers were losing their ability to keep fate going. They tried, but Sephiroth's influence in altering time stopped them. Sephiroth is gaining power over time, probably because of Jenova bullshit. Most major beats are still happening, but AVALANCHE's survival is not a part of the original plan.

Then came the raid on ShinRa Tower. Finding the corpse of Jenova, ACC Sephiroth lets his past/RE self control of her body and has it kill the President, however an opportunity in the altered timeline presented itself: Jenova was released early because of Hojo and AVALANCHE never went into the jail cells, so instead of finding bloody halls, Barret gets killed by RE Jenova just so ACC Sephiroth can see what the Whispers would do. Because it was not his time to die, the Whispers save him. That will not do, so ACC Sephiroth begins to manipulate the team into killing the Whispers themselves so he can fuck about in this new timeline, leading to the last two hours of the game. However, this has an unintentional effect: the Whispers are destroyed throughout all of Time/Space in the FFVII universe, so the Whispers that were there to make sure Zack died in that fateful last stand fade away, and he lives on in another splinter timeline.

As for fighting Sephiroth, I'm still not sure *why* we had to fight Sephiroth, but the moment of him getting a wing helps solidify my belief that he's Advent Children Sephiroth just projecting himself from the Edge of Creation and going around to see what else he can do after Fate died. I attribute him losing to the team who aren't at their endgame levels because he's still weak from the ACC fight, the massive amount of Lifestream he absorbed from Omega was used to go back in time, and it's not actually him there, he's still in the EC. When Cloud finds himself in the pocket dimension where ACC Sephiroth is watching over all the new changes, he fails to kill Sephiroth, since when the time is right, ACC Sephiroth will take over RE Sephiroth's body to succeed in this new splinter timeline.



If I wanted to take this a step further, then after Sephiroth has the team destroy the Whispers to unlock everyone from Fate, it fractured the spacetime continuum and caused not only a split timeline in the past where Zack lived, but also TWO MORE timelines where Biggs and Jessie either lived or died. Despite seeing the two draw their last breath, we get that scene of Biggs waking up at the orphanage and Jessie's gloves were on the table, but then we had all these glowing gold particles falling from the sky, which only appear when the Whispers were offed in the Zack scene. You don't see them as the team enters the Wasteland. Therefore, there's the 2020 timeline where they died at the pillar, and another timeline where they were saved.

My probably bullshit timeline summary:

Before Crisis
Crisis Core
1997
Advent Children Complete
Dirge of Cerberus
└─2020
space ├─Zack lives, new Crisis Core ending
space └─Party enters Wasteland
spacing ├─Jessie and Biggs are dead at the pillar, Wedge who the hell knows since he was at ShinRa Tower being chased by Whispers
spacing └─Jessie and Biggs live

I'm going back to playing Crisis Core.

 

Barret's interactions with his daughter are quite possibly the cutest moments in an RPG I've witnessed. It's so adorable how this huge tank of a man with his gatling gun arm becomes a complete doting softie around her  

 

Speaking of gameplay, as much as I enjoy the battle system. I could probably use a little more control over computer AI.

For example, during the Air Buster fight. You have to stay out of its way when it's charging up its laser beam. Say if I control Cloud out of the way, Tifa and Barrett still continue attacking. And I'm like...

"Tifa, stop punching and move out of the way. Barrett, you know you don't have to be this close with a gun towards the enemy."

 

I just want to know why the AI is -so- slow in hitting people to build up ATB. Which gets really annoying late game where the enemies change targets as soon as you change who your controlling.

 

You can throw Haste on them to help them out a bit. There's also the ATB Assist materia towards the middle of the game to give them a nudge.

But the point is you're supposed to be actively switching around. Messing with the enemy aggro also helps your survivability a ton. Charge an ATB, unleash, swap characters, repeat. Keep moving. Don't stick on one character too long. If you burn ATB on an attack with a long wind-up, or duration, like the Tier 3 magics or skills like Barret's Maximum Fury or Tifa's Starshower, then you should be using that time to charge someone else's gauge and have another high-strength attack queued up. Essentially, the idea is that the game should be played like the original, with the party all executing their turns in sequence. Just that building the meter requires a bit more busy-work this time around.

That's by design. It's not like the CPU-controlled characters are particularly passive. They perform their normal attacks frequently and constantly, as well as guard (which would also normally build meter). The game just doesn't grant them meter for it in the same way the player-controlled character does.


Finally pushing towards the end of the story campaign now, and getting to see what all the fuss is about regarding the ending. Stalled out in Chapter 14 for awhile, grinding materia and clearing up some of the side quests, including the last of the Battle Reports. Woof, that fight was a doozy. I know that some people have just said to wait until end-game to do that fight, since it's not like you actually need to claim that summon to beat the game or anything, but I knew the fight is doable around level 40-ish so I decided to challenge myself for a bit. Took a couple of tries to get a good rhythm going, to find a good cadence for my healing and Barrier-casting to prevent premature team-wipes, but I eventually scraped that one out by the skin of my teeth.

 

Never finished the original but I’m beyond the point where the remake ends in the narrative. Had to download the remake. Physical copies are sold out everywhere. I’ll probably play a mix or the remake and the original.

 

So, while I was playing, my dumbass roommate kept asking "when you gonna fight Sephiroth?" Having been under the impression that the remake (at least what we have at the moment) only covers Disc 1 of the original game, I assumed that since Sephiroth wasn't fought until the very end of the original game, he wouldn't show up as an opponent until the very VERY end.

Spoiler

boy was I in for a Surprise

 

Spoiler

Why do I feel like Sephiroth wasn't taking that fight seriously though?

 

Spoiler

The dude smiles way too much even when the odds are stacked against him. 

While Cloud on the other hand is usually carrying the stoic face.

 

It seems like eveybody loves it.


EDIT: Found this video of streamer reacting to it.