Over the past month and a half I've been playing Final Fantasy VII again.
I played it once in 2010, and enjoyed it a lot, maybe [loved it](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/1869-the-hyperbolic-take-chamber-a-discussion/12), but as my brain has undergone much development in the past twelve years, it felt in some ways like playing it for the first time. Beyond images and sounds, I didn't remember very much from after the party leaves Midgar.* I was happy to rediscover that, like my favorite FFs, it feels like an epic, a globe-trotting adventure, but one which is almost more interested in the intimate relationships between its little characters. The sense of scale/globe-trotting-ness I think is helped by the fact that you don't (have to) spend very much time in most story locations. ||Sector 7, Sector 5, Wall Market, the trains and junkyards in between, Shinra HQ||: all these fly by, relatively speaking (cf. Persona 5), but I think it was counterintuitively in each location's brevity, in being able to hold my memory of all of those places together that gave Midgar (and by extension the rest of the game) its sense of titanic breadth. That your characters are alternately taking up 50% to 20% to 2% of the pre-rendered, fixed angle screens does no small work in creating a sense of scale too.
*One thing I do remember from my first playthrough:
>! ||Safer Sephiroth|| was a real headache. My party was on average pretty low-level (in the 40s), I didn't hunt down the strongest weapons and armor, and was poorly equipped for the fight. I must've started playing at a "reasonable hour," like 10:00pm, thinking I would finish the game by midnight (bedtime, I think it was a school night). I couldn't tell you how I fared against ||JENOVA Synthesis nor Rebirth Sephiroth||, but I specifically remember the final fight took upwards of 90 minutes. The clock was ticking, I'd been whaling on the boss nonstop (not literally nonstop, I kept needing to heal/resurrect, I don't know if I had learned Life2, and he kept using Supernova). A war of attrition, and it seemed like I was losing: Cloud and Vincent both dead, no phoenix downs left, no offensive items, Red XIII transformed into a frog. The minute hand approached midnight.
>!
I pressed Attack, did 1 damage to Sephiroth, and… won. Of course I stayed up to watch the ending. (This time, I
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My first time through I missed ||[the scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQLymxjOydA) where Cloud gives Yuffie advice for dealing with air travel sickness, which I thought was very cute||.
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And music! [Cid's theme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL9vVzhQytE)! [The Forgotten City](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kip26t-9ESo)! [That one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvHjypXKEsw&list=OLAK5uy_mvDV7aOFHvvOJRUGGoyxNBDIVb49Mbu1k&index=23)! Displace one note, and there would be diminishment. But give me more than one regular battle theme. Change that woodwind in the Wutai theme. Rufus's theme got a little old. plz n thx, lol
I've also been playing Dragon Quest V DS extremely slowly, at this point for just over a year. To reach for an analogy, my impression of DQV among JRPGs (or video games generally) is like my impression of Baroque or Classical period music among Western academic music: impressive in its precise engineering, and certainly inventive, beautiful at times, but to my taste restrictively mannered (I will finish it, though, because the ||generation jumping|| is extremely cool). How have I still not finished DQV, yet I took all of a month to play Final Fantasy VII? Compared to DQV, FFVII is a mess! Awkward movement around a space, bosses galore, highly flexible character building mechanics, optional dungeons, minigames here, minigames there, chocobo breeding! It felt like a shot of adrenaline. I've made my point already, but to complete my analogy FFVII feels like Romantic period music: shaking its fist at the world, indulgent of some silly diversions, bursting at the seams. Musical scholars wag their fingers at this comparison. What is Suikoden? What is Megami Tensei? I don't know, I didn't think this through.
Then I rewatched Advent Children (technically Advent Children Complete, which I'd never seen). I watched it too after playing the game a decade ago, and didn't really understand it on any emotional level; part of this may be up to the fact that I don't know how much I got out of the game's story in the first place, I read the words but didn't understand. Whatever the reason, this time I was able to see the connective tissue between the ideas in the game and the ideas in the movie (thinly plotted though the movie may be), and had a pretty good time with it. The music is pretty good, some of it incredible. I was surprised at what seemed to me a palpable sense of atmosphere about Midgar, which according to my bad memory the cuts were too quick to appreciate. Maybe it owes to Complete's extra scenes, or else it's down to my different frame of mind this time (more like different mind altogether), but the gray, hazy ruin felt like a really affecting place this time around. If I have any big problem with it, it's ||Sephiroth's return: I feel what makes him an interesting presence in the game is how distant he is, he's always one step ahead of you, any sense of personability gone (except in the flashback when he is actually himself and not a JENOVA sock puppet (or rather using JENOVA as a Sephiroth sock puppet), of course). When you do finally catch up with him, he's either warping around, encased in materia (or something) in a giant crater, or transformed completely, an abomination of what he once was. All pretty alien stuff. In Advent Children they do save him until the end, which is good, but when he shows up it's too corporeal somehow. He's not only person-shaped but also comes across like he's personally, spitefully interested in dueling with Cloud. I don't know how to explain it, something about it didn't feel right. It didn't feel like a battle with what Sephiroth eventaully became (+ JENOVA and everything that represents), more like settling the score with an old rival in a western or something.|| Still, I liked it, and much more than the first time.
Looking forward to Crisis Core.
