Part 107: Into Light, Part II

Chapter 106 - Into Light, Part II




Cloud is finally free.









This is such a cool image.





It's a very nice sequence overall.



Tifa's hands have gloves, so we have this symbolic rescue from the lifestream through Aeris. It's a nice, dreamy sequence going on in Cloud's head.



Tifa on the other hand stays behind in the real world to save Cloud.












Tifa: "What?"

Cloud: "An answer from the Planet..."

















Now that Sephiroth is dead, the whole place is falling apart. A huge amount of energy is being released from Holy.




Heey



"Safe" is kind of a strong word.



Yup.



Red XIII: "And that means this place will..."











I'm not complaining.



















There's something novel about Cid cursing in a cinematic.



How many Emergency Turbo Boost buttons are there in the Highwind?



Ah, that was the self-destruction button. My mistake.



And thus Highwind Mk III is born.



"Let's make sure the airship can fly even after losing all of its vital parts. It will be our little Transformer."



And away we go.





"I have no father."







As much as I love talking about how nice the background art in this game is, some parts of the ending cinematic haven't aged well. The characters and Marlene in particular look super out of place.



Even though there was a cave collapse after defeating the dungeon boss and we got a Deus Ex Machina to save us, the big bad meteor is still falling.





This cinematic is... weird. Like, the meteor just stays there floating in the air destroying the city with red tornadoes. That seems incredibly inefficient when you could just, you know, not stop, hit the planet and evaporate the city and everything in a huge radius.



Why did it target Midgar, even? Wasn't it supposed to hit Sephiroth so he could drain all the Lifestream to himself? I like to think that Sephiroth miscalculated Meteor and he fucked up, but he's not here anymore to see his mess.



Well, Meteor was made by the Ancients, right? Maybe Meteor actually is a good magic and it targets whatever is hurting the planet. So it decided to target Midgar because of its fuckery with the lifestream. Realized a direct impact would kill a lot of innocent people, stopped (through the power of magic I guess) and decide to blow up Midgar with... red tornadoes.



I mean, we know this is just artistic license to destroy Midgar, it just feels awkward to me. Just saying.



That's some Sim City level disaster right there. You blow that city up, you.



This is a long sequence of things being destroyed. I want to know what Meteor is gonna do after destroying Midgar. Will it go back to space? Will it finally crash at super slow speed doing orders of magnitude less destruction than it would otherwise? Will it move around the planet blowing things up with red tornadoes like the spaceship from Independent Day? Did it watch too much Citizen Kane on its way to the Gaia?









The huge blue glow that shot us out of the Meteor was Holy being released, meaning our plan of defeating Sephiroth to release Holy worked! The blue energy is coming from the North, straight from the Crater towards Midgar.



This is a neat tie up. It means Aeris' plan worked, and Holy was successfully cast before she died.





And they say the Eye of the Storm is the safest place to be.





Not gonna lie though, this is a pretty neat scene.



Gaia, ignoring distance, scale and size references since 1997.



Unfortunately our efforts look like they might have been in vain.



Meteor is slowly but surely breaking through Holy.





We might have been too late.



If only there weren't so many sidequests.



I'm impressed by the fact that thing is still standing. Seriously, can nothing tear that building apart? Kudos to whoever designed it. The thing took a Weapon laser barrage and is still standing after being hit by magic lightning bolts and evil hurricanes.



I mean, the Meteor just blew its front plate away. Whoop-de-doo. It doesn't care. Nothing can tear it down. It's shielded by virtue of being a recognizable landmark in the FFVII Universe.



Extreme makeovers.



Barret: "What's going to happen to Midgar?"



Pick a side, Barret.



Cait Sith: "But the way things are now..."



Red XIII: "Meteor is approaching the Planet."



Red XIII: "Forget Midgar. We've gotta worry about the Planet."





The situation looks grim.













But we have it. We have the Planet's answer.



It's interesting that Holy wasn't enough.



I mean, it's a traditional plot point. Holy was supposed to counter Meteor, it would tie everything up with a nice bow at the end, but I actually like that Holy itself was impotent. Maybe it was too late, maybe it got weakened by Sephiroth. It's not relevant.



It's interesting because we've been hinted the whole time that Aeris was still there, in one way or another. Marlene could sense her, Cloud saw her.







It's all very nebulous and mysterious, but it's heavily implied that she's the one who's controlling the lifestream from within.



In a way, maybe her sacrifice was necessary, so it always brings back the question if she knew this was gonna happen when she left the party. If it was a failsafe of sorts.



I like that these will always remain as mysteries. In a character drama, they're the "mountains far away" that Tolkien liked to talk about.



It's better that they're just mysteries. What we know is that, at much cost, our heroes saved the day. It's a happy ending that didn't come easy.



And this is what I like the most about this story, as well as FFVI. Victory didn't come clean. Our protagonists are not without sin. There's nothing glorious or triumphant. It was messy, it was intense. Tifa is not a hero because she defeat the big bad guy. Tifa is a hero because she was afraid to die, and she was afraid to be alone, and she still took upon herself the task of go forward and defeat the big bad guy. Her (and every other character) internal conflicts took much more screen time than her heroisms. And we can all relate to that.



The fantasy is just a vehicle. When you see Kitase commenting on his mother's death, the role of a maternal figure that was taken by Aeris makes more sense. They're sacrifices that felt real in the context of the fantasy they were written, because they were written by people who wanted to share a real feeling.



I've seen the theory that whichever Final Fantasy you play first ends up being your favorite. And it's funny, because they were all made by (mostly) the same people.

They're not perfect games. They're not perfectly written stories. But you can see clearly in each one of them someone put in their personal touch. They're stories that somebody wanted to tell. So it makes sense that they leave a strong, lasting impression. People will remember their more superficial elements (big swords, battles, awesome music) and this will be the bulk of their nostalgia, but it's easy to forget these personal touches, even Square-Enix did.




This personal touch is why you can connect or empathize with some fictitious characters and not others. Stories can be procedurally written, or they can be vehicles for your to express your feelings, your emotions.



And these can be powerful emotions.



And this, dear readers, is why I wanted to LP this game. I think it's a great game, and it's been a pleasure writing this LP for you.

Thank you very much for following this thread for four years. You've been a most wonderful bunch.


Next Time:

The FFVII LP Epilogue!


In case you missed it.

The ending cinematic in its entirety.


And speaking of epilogues. 500 years later...