Part 2: A Tribute to Joss Wheddon

Chapter 2 - A Tribute to Joss Wheddon




And as convenience would have it, our health pool is suddenly restored. Apparently blowing up reactors is a good therapy.



We get a huge close up on this as the camera moves down to the next scene. I think most people don't realize but this is actually product placement. A product placement made by fans on top of that.

Basically Loveless is an album from a British band called My Bloody Valentine (you can see the band name on these posters too). The developers enjoyed that band and decided to pay homage to it.

In the world of FF7, Loveless is actually a famous play, its Romeo & Juliet. It's referenced multiple times during the actual game and even more in the spin-offs.

You can see other alternative rock look-a-like posters in the scene, it's kinda cool.

Anyway as we move out of the reactor we get this music. It's really good.



We're approached by a flower seller. They try to sell you things when you're most vulnerable.



On second thought her 10 polygons kinda resemble the girl we saw on the opening cinematic. She's well-dressed and doing something up here in this, uh, nice neighborhood. Plus, she doesn't know I pretend to be badass all the time, so maybe I can chat her up.




Flower Girl: "Oh, these? Do you like them? They're only a gil... ?"



Flower Girl: "Oh, thank you!"



Seriously though, what is this poster about? Is this a E Rated for Everyone?



I'm getting a Dark City vibe from this place.







Cloud is really wondering what he's got himself involved into.



We move further down but apparently someone followed us.



Instead of fighting we actually run. You can fight them but more will just come.



Here's something I appreciate - take a look at that house's window. There are silhouettes moving in and out. This attention to detail is lost in today's completely sterile environments.



Oh snap, we're surrounded.

Guard: "That's as far as you go."

Cloud: "I don't have time to be messin' around with you guys."



Well, fuck you guys.







That's what she said.

Biggs: "Cloud... wonder if he was killed?"
Barret: "No way!!"
Jessie: "Cloud..."







When I was a kid I thought these guys were the villains.





Oh snap!



"You damn right, you're late!!"
"Come waltzin' in here makin' a big scene!"
"It's no bit deal. Just what I always do."





Seriously, what is there NOT to love about Cloud?



Wedge: "Hey, Cloud!! You were great back there!"



Jessie: "Oh, Cloud!! Your face is pitch-black..."
Jessie: "There you go!"









You may be wondering why I'm showing this, but I think this sequence is hilarious. The two punk lovebirds just run the hell out when they see you.

Somehow I picture this scene as Michael Jackson's Beat It. Biggs is just so '80s.









Jessie: "It's a map of the Midgar Rail System. Let's look at it together. I'll explain it to you."

Cloud: Oh... kay.





So this is how Midgar works: The entire city is floating, supported by huge columns and divided in 8 zones. Each zone has a reactor.



In the center is a building so ridiculously out-of-scale that I think each window in it is the size of a normal building. I kinda get the idea though, the whole city is a big 1984 nightmare come true, and the main building is the Big Brother.

Underneath the city are the slums. These are also numbered after the plates they're directly underneath so you have Sector 3 Slums, Sector 4 Slums, etc.

Because Midgar has such strong and characteristic imagery, the city's been target of multiple remakes and fan models.

At any rate, Jessie explains Cloud that at each checkpoint, the system's sensor check for the IDs. They're using fake IDs.









"It's like this train. It can't run anywhere except where its rails take it."

Living in a city with 900 slums (Rio), I'll not deny that Midgar felt much closer to my reality than other games from that same time period. People move to the main city filled with dreams but have no place to live, so they go to the slums. The difference is that unlike Midgar, you can see them wherever you are.



The central plate.



And we arrive at our destination! Look at how bright the place is. The light bill from the slums must be enormous given that they have no sunlight.



"Cause the next one's gonna be bigger than that!"



Not now, we're gonna explore the place a bit.





That's sad.





This is the same couple that was scared of us in the train. You can see they're still not very comfortable with our presence.



The train graveyard is to the right, but there's really nothing we can do there right now. There are random encounters here with random guards, panthers and sweepers for you to grind, I suppose.



We go to the left. If we try to go south we find these two very nice guards.



To the north we find a Save Point, finally. We save and talk to the guy.



Yeah that would be crazy.



That's what she said.



He invite us to look at his huge thing.



Barret clearly doesn't like that.

And with that we're done for this update.


NEXT TIME

Old-School Friends! NPCs no one cares about! More reactors! More Love Interests!



Chapter 2 - Bugs & Bytes



If you were an artist in 1997 you knew that these things were impressive. Doing 3D back then was a major pain - Not only actually modeling was slow and the real time previews were horrible - you need to remember that although these things are pre-rendered, someone was actually placing the models there in real-time. Compare that to what you could ACTUALLY do in real-time in 96-98 and you start to realize the pain.

So you had a lot of limitations, but there were ways to work around them. One of them was batching an object in memory - for example, that stair needs only to have one-segment done, so that the others don't fill your memory with the same information over and over.

Rendering capabilities were extremely limited. Although Pixar had just came out with a way to do better lighting techniques, they were still not widely known or understood. Radiosity - simulating indirect lighting - was the hot word and everythign was poorly optimized and slow. Slooooooooow. Did I mention slow? Hell yes, slow.

A 640*480 render with 10k polygons could take hours and hours to render. Artists were very limited by render times, maybe more so than by memory or polygon limitations.

Cool Music we listened to in this Chapter:

Anxious Heart - An awesome moody song. One of the best tracks in my opinion.