A screenshot from Twitter from the "Shinra Archaeology Department" with the handle @ShinraArch, reading as follows: Ever Crisis director Ichikawa also says that in terms of setting, Rhadore is located between Wutai and Mideel. Because of it's geographic proximity to Wutai, it features a similar Eastern aesthetic, regards Shinra with hostility, and uses mecha-type weapons. (Famitsu, 9/7/23)ALT

[source]

I saw someone saying that Rhadore is in Wutai and I’m losing my mind over it so here’s a reminder that it’s a whole different country, which is literally stated in First SOLDIER within the first five minutes of gameplay, and is mentioned several times. Glenn & Co. make a point of comparing and contrasting the differences between Rhadore and Wutai several times in the first couple chapters.

We haven’t heard about Rhadore elsewhere in the Compilation because its existence is a retcon—but the devs are allowed to do this, since it’s their game and the overworld of the OG was hardly detailed, and its lack of reference in the rest of the series is easily explained by the plot of First SOLDIER. Glenn & Co. literally commit genocide on its people, so there’s no cultural footprint left, and then Shinra accidentally sets off a geological disaster that renders the land itself unsafe. All of this takes place 15 years prior to the OG, so it’s very much history by the time we start in on the main story. There was a whole ‘nother war in between.

Saying that Rhadore is part of Wutai because it’s geographically close on a global scale and has clearly had some cultural exchange due to that proximity is like saying that Taiwan is part of the Philippines for the same reasons. Which is equally incorrect.

I wish I were less surprised that people are lumping together fictional Asian-coded nations and people the same way they do in real life, but mostly I’m just disappointed.

I’m thinking about First SOLDIER.

I still think I’m right about the battle royale being a Synaptic Net Dive (particularly since the event in Ever Crisis where we literally faced down the system that was used to train that first round of would-be SOLDIERs in the battle royale), but the iteration of First SOLDIER in Ever Crisis isn’t. Not exactly, anyway. It seems like it’s whatever the energetic equivalent of the SND would be for Sephiroth, whatever you would call the way that he (and Lucrecia) can pull memories out of people’s heads and put them on display, run through them and relive the experience tangibly, beat for beat—only in Ever Crisis, it’s Sephiroth doing it to himself.

Sephiroth gave up his memories in Meteorfall, using his only surviving Clone as an anchor to keep his consciousness from being burned away forever—this is why the Remnants don’t actually know him, because they’re made from what the Lifestream remembered of him, not from his own concept of himself. He doesn’t have a concept of himself anymore, he needs someone or something else to pull him back together.

Jenova “remembers,” such as she can, because they were temporarily fused into one being prior to Meteorfall. This is why Kadaj’s assimilation of the last piece of Jenova at the climax of Advent Children opened the way for Sephiroth to come back up out of the Lifestream, albeit in an obviously incomplete state.

Cloud also remembers, and he’s special: as the only surviving Sephiroth Clone, as the man who struck him down both in Nibelheim and in the Northern Crater, as someone who actually met him prior to everything falling apart, Cloud’s memories contain both the most accessible and the most complete version of Sephiroth that can currently be found.

But it’s still someone else’s memory, because Sephiroth doesn’t remember himself.

The Sephiroth at the Edge of Creation at the end of Remake comes from some point well beyond the end of the series, postcanon by some incomprehensible degree. And he’s…different. That Sephiroth uses his old personal pronoun, that Sephiroth is almost soft with Cloud—and that’s the same Sephiroth as we see at the end of the opening arc of First SOLDIER, because the corresponding cutscene appears to take place just before Cloud arrives at the end of Remake.

That Sephiroth is out there at the Edge of Creation thinking about his childhood, thinking about Rhadore, thinking about Wutai, thinking about who he is and what he’s done.

And he remembers. Somehow, in spite of everything, that Sephiroth remembers. He knows what happened to him, what he went through, what he did. He knows himself. And Sephiroth is not some horrifying amalgam of a extraterrestrial pathogen and the incandescent rage of a man created only to be used, he’s not an incomplete echo of a memory of a hero long dead; and the Sephiroth at the Edge of Creation knows where he came from, how he got here, and everything that happened along the way.

And he’s playing it back to himself.

What’s he looking for? What’s he hoping to see? Why did he start there, on his first field mission, where he learned the only thing he really had to prove was that he’s capable of compassion? Where he learned that it’s not black and white, and that death can also be mercy?

Why did he move forward to the night that he ran himself ragged saving lives in an attempt to never have to show that kind of mercy again?

That Sephiroth remembers, and he’s choosing to remember this.

And I think…that might make him a Sephiroth that can be saved.

One thing that really gets me about Sephiroth’s obsession with his mother is that it had to have been instilled in him by Gast and Hojo. Assuming he was raised by the company and in Gast’s care until the guy ran off, after which he was shuffled off into Hojo’s custody (all of which is either overtly canon or heavily implied enough to be considered canon), it wouldn’t have been particularly difficult to pull him away from the whole concept.

Children are dangerously impressionable for the first several years of their lives, it’s indescribably easy to condition them into seeing things as normal—this is why a lot of abused children don’t talk about anything being wrong, because that’s their normal. It would have been very little work to indicate to Sephiroth starting very young that his mother died when he was born, but it’s fine because that’s not uncommon and he doesn’t need to worry about it.

But Gast (and Hojo) didn’t do that. Gast at the very least ingrained this concept into his head that his mother was special; he’d have been the one who told Sephiroth her name, who told him anything about her, because he had him at his youngest and he was the one who was so obsessed with the Cetra. One of them even gave him a photo of her* so that he’d know what she looked like, even if the woman in that photo wasn’t Jenova.

They nurtured that longing for a loving parent, something that would only have been worth the effort to instill if being used as a form of manipulation. They knew his mother, she was involved with the company, the only way he’d ever know anything would be if he stayed and listened and did as he was told. The longer he stayed, the more he’d understand, and the more likely it would be that he’d find out about her. They made sure that he knew the only way to ever get any information on the one person who might have loved him unconditionally, who wouldn’t have abandoned him or abused him if she’d had a choice, was to be loyal and obedient.

They led him along with the prospect, the hope that someone out there might have loved him for himself instead of for what he could do. Someone out there might have loved him for who he was, not what he could become.

They absolutely must have done this intentionally. Gast started it, Hojo continued it, and Lucrecia never had a chance to intervene. Gast may not have had ulterior motives in the malicious sense, as he believed that Sephiroth was the son of a Cetra—but he never told Sephiroth that, did he? Because Sephiroth was shocked by the discovery in Nibelheim, he didn’t know until then that he was, allegedly, the last of the Ancients. Gast never told him.

But he told him his mother’s name was Jenova, he told him he was special, he was kind and supportive through Sephiroth’s most formative years. We know that because of how he behaves as a young teenager, the values and patterns of behavior that were instilled in him prior to being surrendered to Hojo’s abuse in the name of progress. We know that because of how he talks about Gast, and how he compares to Hojo.

Gast and Hojo gave Sephiroth the concept of “mother” as someone that was good and kind and would love him no matter what, and turned it into a leash that bound him to Shinra for life.

Absolutely evil people.

*The photo was given to Sephiroth by Hojo, as a note. Based on FSBR and DoC, Lucrecia was still with the company until around 1984, when Gast left; she was on Project 0 then, not the Jenova Project, and there didn’t seem to be any overlap since Hojo also didn’t appear to have access to Sephiroth until he got control of the department, but it still would have been a very risky thing for Gast to do. Hojo seemingly got custody of Sephiroth around the same time that Lucrecia ran off into the mountains, which was also around the same time that Gast went AWOL, so Hojo may very well have given the photo to Sephiroth in an attempt to ingratiate himself to the boy during the transition in custody.

It makes more sense that Hojo would have the photo than Gast, anyway—Lucrecia was and is Hojo’s wife. Of course he has a photo of his wife. Of course he held onto it all this time. Of course he gave it to the only part of her he had left, the great work they created together. Sephiroth was her project too.

Not trying to be a bother here, but I was wondering a few things about your post on the FS crew.

  1. Do we know for certain Glenn only started gambling when his grandma went to the hospital? There's a line in the game that to me implied that it was a habit he actually learned from her.
  2. Where was the info that Lucia trained him? Been trying to find that since last night honestly but maybe I'm just blind lmao. I know that they were cadets at the same time but I want to know if its true she trained him somehow.
  3. Where did we learn they weren't actually friends? Glenn mentioned being able to acquire them because of the rumor of interpersonal relationships being prioritized and Matt mentioning that camaraderie is important for the mission implying at they all at least trust and are somewhat friends with each other.
  4. What part was posturing? I didn't pick up on any of that honestly. Nor do I see why a trio that has known each other for roughly 4 years would need to do so (Original FS trailers show them meeting in 1998). But I could have easily missed things honestly.
  5. Did they have something to do with Sephiroth being called in?? I don't remember them sending out the distress signal. I thought that was a call Shinra made all on its own since he had new mission orders.

Sorry I'm not trying to be a pain I just genuinely feel like I might've missed those somewhere or that I was bad at picking up any hints the game might've dropped. I can be pretty rough with missing that info and haven't found anyone else that's talked about them with this much detail yet.

- Asked by screaming-lurks

I mean, my biggest issues with these characters are still the acceptance of genocide, suggested child murder, and excitedly declared intention to kill a dog, but I’ll break the rest of it down because a lot of it is probably pretty easy to miss if you’re not already feeling critical of the cast. (Hopefully those issues get called out somehow eventually, but they haven’t yet, so I’d have a bad taste in my mouth over the characters just from that.)

Putting the explanation under the cut!

Keep reading

What are your thoughts on the First SOLDIER trio(Glenn, Matt, and Lucia)?

- Asked by give-my-son-back

To be completely blunt, I’m not a fan.

I’ve got a long-winded and spoiler-filled explanation that I’m putting under a cut, but to put it simply I hated them to start, but I’m comfortable putting up with them now. The story is going to have to do a fair measure of work if SE wants me to do more than put up with them—but I admit that’s entirely possible, because the narrative and characterization shift in Chapter 5 impressed me so much I actually want to see where things go.

Keep reading

I thought I posted this here ages ago, but I couldn’t find it to link in another post I’m working on, so I’m posting it now!

Regardless of everything else surrounding the First SOLDIER battle royale game, I’m always going to be delighted that the timeline established in its opening cutscene indicates that Hojo and Lucrecia were experimenting on Vincent for around seven years before Lucy ran off and Hojo put him in the box.

See, the thing that’s always bothered me about the known timeline of Vincent’s life as it existed up until this cutscene dropped is that it kind of implied that Hojo did all his scientific body horror work in about two months, and then Lucrecia took over and spent a couple months on her part. This is…utterly ridiculous, for so many reasons, not the least of which is Shalua being aware of Lucrecia’s work with Chaos having subjects, which it didn’t prior to Grimoire’s death—this project wouldn’t have been ongoing long enough for Shalua to refer to “subjects” in Dirge if it was only a couple months of work.

The implication with the timeline shown in the FF7FS opening is that Lucrecia and Hojo both moved to Project 0 after their part of Project S was complete, presumably leaving Gast with Sephiroth while they tried to make superhumans that would be deployable sooner than a literal baby. We know it’s post-Jenova Project, because Hollander is there but Gillian isn’t, so she’s already in Banora with baby Angeal. The team is shown working on Project 0 until around 1984, with Lucrecia present.

Hojo working on Vincent for a year or two while Lucrecia first gives birth to Sephiroth and then recovers from that whole ordeal makes sense. Him going back and forth between Midgar and Nibelheim trying shit on Vincent that he thinks might work on Project 0 also makes sense, given that we know Hojo’s work on Vincent was eventually repurposed for a couple of the Tsviets, who are the current iteration of what Project 0 originally was.

When Vincent’s body finally gives out, Hojo just kinda leaves him there, changing his focus entirely to Project 0, while Gast still has Sephiroth. Lucrecia comes back to Nibelheim at that point, for whatever reason, and picks up where Hojo left off, trying desperately to do something to keep from being responsible for killing both Valentines.

Gast leaves the company in 1984, whereupon Sephiroth is moved into Hojo’s care—not Lucrecia's—and we can assume that Project 0 as a whole is shuffled.

This is the point where Lucrecia reaches the end of her rope. She’s never going to get to meet her son, she’s never going to get anywhere in this damn company, she’s still so sick from the Jenova infection she contracted during her pregnancy. She can’t do this anymore. So she dresses Vincent up like his dad (because his eyes look just like his father’s), puts on a wedding dress she never got to wear, and leaves forever.

Hojo comes back to Nibelheim, possibly looking for Lucrecia—he either finds her “dead,” or he only finds Vincent. Either way, Lucrecia ends up in the Nibel Mountains and Vincent ends up in the basement. With nothing left to lose and nothing holding him back, Hojo proceeds to track across the planet to find Gast and shoot him in the face.

This is a much better story.

This also explains why the official Dirge guide says that Vincent was asleep in the basement for, very specifically, 23 years, and why all Ultimania material cites that he was in the coffin for “over 20 years” even though he was shot to death 30 years ago. It’s not a retcon. It never was. It’s a clarification.

Vincent was killed in 1977, 30 years before Cloud found him during the Crisis. But he was under the knife and in the tubes for seven years after that, until the two equally brilliant psychopaths trying for opposing reasons to make him into Something Else finally gave up and put him in a box.

That’s fantastic.

getvalentined:

Transferring all my screen recordings of the EC beta over to dropbox is going to take 8000 years but at least I can make some nice gifs when it’s done.

Genuinely sad that the beta test ends tonight, once you get out of the absolute slog that is Chapter 1 of the OG section, it’s a fun game! I had to do some level grinding to make it through Chapter 2 (that difficulty spike with regard to recommended power is bonkers) but I expect any FF title to have a fair amount of level grinding in it.

The First SOLDIER section is the worst. It’s not the weakest with regards to gameplay overall, the battles are super repetitive but it has the exact level of free movement that I wanted in the OG section (and have been shown very clearly that I cannot have), but the cast is just. So fucking bad. The dialogue is terrible. The costume design is terrible. The pacing is terrible. The character interactions are terrible. The characters are terrible.

The most interesting person in the entire thing is a nameless ~native~ child in a shawl made of belts who appears to live in a weird fruit orchard with his dog.

OH YEAH I forgot to mention btw that in FS you are playing a team of proto-SOLDIERs who have been sent to do a mako survey so Shinra can install a Reactor in an island nation that they’ve decimated. One character literally says that Shinra has almost wiped out the entire native population. This is not treated like a bad thing, just kind of “how it is.” You’re supposed to root for these people.

ALSO MATT’S WEAPON COMBINATION IS STUPID. IT LOOKS STUPID. IT PLAYS STUPID. WHOEVER CAME UP WITH THIS HAS NEVER USED A SWORD OR A GUN BEFORE IN THEIR FUCKING LIFE.

Load More