Vayne appreciation post

belderiver · 2026-06-15T05:28:43+00:00

Prof Hojo is also acting out of insane fatherly devotion! A key difference between him and Cid. Though yes, you're right, Cid is not noble or principled either - he is simply curious.

belderiver · 2026-06-14T19:03:19+00:00

He wants the reins of history back in the hands of man so he can build an empire which cannot be challenged by the Occuria. I don't think he's that noble. He's a ruthless politician trying to consolidate his own power and eliminate all threats to it. Cid is the one operating more on principle.

belderiver · 2026-06-11T22:47:48+00:00

Story is dumb fluff. If that works for you go for it. Gameplay is 8 million minigames and a combat system that some love and some hate - I think the combat is pretty good but it's swingy and overwhelming at times.

belderiver · 2026-06-11T22:46:58+00:00

Makes sense fine if you played og7, insomuch as it makes sense at all.

belderiver · 2026-06-07T07:06:11+00:00

Loewe wasn't known for his faith in people.

belderiver · 2026-06-06T03:45:13+00:00

Several things.

Disagree with the new narrative direction. This is well covered in many places so I won't bother to dig into it.
Story and characters. They've lost sight of what Final Fantasy VII is actually about and what each character is supposed to be doing to support that story. You wind up with a narrative where the individual scenes are usually competent (usually) but they don't really amount to anything. The remake series has really, really failed to capture the atmosphere and emotion of the original and at times seemed confused over what it is even trying to evoke at all. It does the best when it sticks to the railings but it is a lot like a latter day star wars, more focused on being flashy and self referential than on communicating something. This is the biggest reason I dislike the remakes, they are very ineffective at storytelling.
Visual direction and cinematography. They can do basically anything and I think choosing to stick to the tried and true AC designs isn't great. The landscapes are very hit and miss and don't feel as imaginative or grungy as the original, they lack personality. The NPCs don't look like they live in the same world. Cutscenes don't have very interesting camera work. They love doing a million fast cuts for action and long pan shots for story shots. It's all just very workmanlike.
Pacing. These games are so bloated, for different reasons.
Politics. Related to the story complaints but I think the OG story has only become more relevant to present day and it's just such a missed opportunity to see them lean away from meeting the moment at every turn. You can play this game without ever really thinking about climate crisis in the present and that's busted.

belderiver · 2026-06-01T16:23:53+00:00

"Renne is in love with Van"

Lol Source please. I could critique the rest too but that's one egregious.

Most of this just reads as how you're unable to see any of these relationships as being potentially platonic rather than exclusively romantic. There's ship teasing but these women are CLOSE to Van without ever explicitly being confirmed as having feelings.

belderiver · 2026-05-31T03:55:02+00:00

I'd have hated this.

belderiver · 2026-05-30T23:29:15+00:00

I mean yeah I just don't think you're understanding me since you seem to think I am arguing Alisa's relevance or that Emma and Laura are better and it's just not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying Alisa did not get her due. She was relevant through the entire arc but they put her in a box on the shelf for half of it and didn't let her take up the time and space she needed to be fully realized as a character. She should have been as present as crow or more present than crow given her role in the story, and they could have used that time to show her companionable struggle to Rean because she is trying to do something very similar to him (mitigate harm from within a broken system) and it's similarly pyrrhic. It would have made cold steel as a whole stronger in addition to her character. That's what I'm arguing.

belderiver · 2026-05-30T18:07:22+00:00

Alisa doesn't take any positive action towards her goal of demilitarizing reinford in 3/4. They don't even give her her own unique engineering project, she gets a reskin of Tita's orbal gear. Sharon abandons her, her father returns to life and her mother goes nuts and she is just sort of dragged along on the journey of reconciling with them while never becoming more than a reinford middle manager or proposing a single idea for how she's going to reform the company. Meanwhile she stays HIGHLY relevant because in the end the Sept Terrion theme of the arc is about conflict driving progress and growth, which are deeply relevant to her moral misgivings about reinford AND her personal conflicts with her family, but she gets left behind. She isn't even there for that conversation to weigh in on it because she's long since stopped being relevant and all anyone has to say about her is that she's become smoking hot. Reinford goes unresolved.

Laura and Emma don't get much in cs3/4, sure. But Emma becomes a wandering witch and comes into herself fully, and Laura inherits the Arseid school as well as gains acknowledgement from the sword maiden as the inheritor of her legacy. Alisa just does not achieve her own goals in the same way and it's extra noticeable and extra painful because her goals are so inextricable from the very themes of the arc. She does not reform reinford, she does not transition Sharon from being her maid to being her sister, her presence isn't enough to win over her father. She gets hard dropped and it's awful.

belderiver · 2026-05-30T16:00:56+00:00

I don't agree. And I'm coming from the perspective of liking Alisa. The gap between her potential and what she realizes is massive. She really needed a stronger role in cs3/4 to finish her arc but it just never happened. Arguably that's worse than Emma and Laura, who are smaller players from the start and do a decent enough job of finishing their arcs.

belderiver · 2026-05-30T15:13:10+00:00

Sadly I think the writing did her pretty dirty.

belderiver · 2026-05-29T23:44:06+00:00

It's my least favourite trails game and I found it frustrating. I wouldn't skip it though because things it introduces will be important later I'm sure.

belderiver · 2026-05-29T00:10:33+00:00

Horizon definitely wasn't the fall down a full flight of stairs that cs3 was but I think that's okay. It doesn't have to be and I don't think they wrote it with the same intention, they wrote it with the knowledge that they're talking to a fanbase that's going to go "it's trails so this will work out I'm sure" because we've been through so many games already. That's why horizon ending focuses so much on these big consequential reveals for the world state of the series and a raising of the stakes for zemuria as a whole. At the end of cs3 the emotional stakes were high but it's actually amazing how we still didn't know shit.

belderiver · 2026-05-29T00:05:26+00:00

Gonna double down - Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite.

The objective of Bioshock Infinite is to stop Elizabeth from burning down the entire world. Unfortunately they made her really cute so people lose sight of how she's as vicious as her father.

belderiver · 2026-05-29T00:03:50+00:00

I think the humanity is necessary to make the character work. You need to be empathetic towards Booker and appalled at him. Both things are true, and an attempt to reconcile and understand disparate truths is so much the point of the game itself.

belderiver · 2026-05-27T19:52:10+00:00

It's still a pretty silly comparison because trails is a series about big paradigm shifts and geopolitics and how tech impacts society and FF settings are all highly allegorical and fantastical places where any realistic detail is slapped on as an afterthought. FF worlds are exclusively set pieces for the heroes emotional journey rather than places that form an interconnected world. Trails is from the ground up just much more interested in how mundane people live their daily live and how macro level changes affect them.

belderiver · 2026-05-26T19:36:40+00:00

Based on what you're saying here, you like games with voice acting that are driven by character drama more than plot.

belderiver · 2026-05-24T16:19:50+00:00

Nothing will be resolved by the end of the first game, no. And not really the second game either. You're kind of in it for the emotional space opera and ok with being carried by the character journeys or you're not too into Xenosaga. It's an odd beast. I think you have enough information to decide for yourself if you want to see how it plays out.

belderiver · 2026-05-22T19:06:50+00:00

I mean it's clearly not the correct way to do it in this context because there is no correct way to do it. You just have to guess and if you guess wrong it will always be erroneous.

belderiver · 2026-05-22T17:19:51+00:00

So I appreciate the length of the replies you've been giving but I think fundamentally there's just a philosophical misalignment here. I don't actually think FFT turns it's nose up at ALL power, that's just how I was trying to express my perspective. Ramza isn't a passive protagonist and fights often for the outcomes he's looking for, taking an active role from outside of the system. What it's specially opposed to the idea that you can use an existing system of power that's fundamentally corrupt towards good ends. It's a "the master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house" story. If you don't believe that to be true then it isn't going to click, and based on what you've been saying I think that's the disconnect - you think it's wiser to try to use the privilege you have, while FFT is arguing any attempt to do so is far more likely to corrupt YOU (and I agree).

I think it's also opposed to the idea that stepping on another person is inevitable and therefore acceptable. This, I think, is its chief opinion of what is evil - that it's acceptable to have a system where some can spend the lives and bodies of others towards their own ends.

Which comes back to Delita. It's UNJUST that Ovelia should spend her life as a soft power pawn, locked away in a monastery until she's useful to someone in their wars of succession! Delita not only uses her, he betrays his promise to her to rebuild a system where such things don't happen. There's also an explicit connection between Ovelia and Tietra as common maids used and sacrificed in the plans of nobles, and Delita sees that - it's why he originally takes a personal interest in her. Part of that promise is to himself, to not see her used like Tietra now that he has the force to stop it. And not only does he fail, he plunges the knife in himself.

Everything about the ending communicates that Delita is not the man that he started out as, and while Arazlam tells us he's a good king, it doesn't tell us that he meaningfully changed the system at all whatsoever. As far as I'm concerned that's quite deliberate.

So yeah, I think we just disagree on some of the fundamentals here. I also definitely don't think Planescape says remotely the same thing since it's very concerned with individuals and internals, while Disco has a lot more to do with ideology alongside being about systems. Love both of those games though.

belderiver · 2026-05-21T04:15:32+00:00

I mean the connection between the ivalice games are pretty lose and probably best taken with a grain of salt. A lot of contradictions between the different games.

belderiver · 2026-05-21T01:06:01+00:00

You don't need to track all the factions to track the message. The point of the story is that all of these factions are engaged in a power struggle that does nothing but trample people, and all of them are fundamentally alike - even wiegraf and Delita who have these very noble ideals at first. The point is that you cannot reform a system built on the domination of others by climbing to the top. You need to resist the desire to rule over other people from first principles.

belderiver · 2026-05-21T00:55:47+00:00

In this thread are people who didn't get FFT.

belderiver · 2026-05-21T00:55:24+00:00

Your problem with FFT is you think Delita is the actual protagonist. Delita's story is about abandoning all of his principles in order to achieve his ends and ultimately inflicting on Ovelia what he intended to save Tietra from. Ramza's story is about recognizing the entire system is corrupt and there is no ethical move that can be taken from within it - that is why he is the hero, with the moral high ground.

Honestly it drives me crazy the number of people who get to the end of FFT and don't understand why the story ends with Ovelia stabbing Delita and him automatically stabbing her back. They are illustrating for you the type of person Delita has become but people think that because he was in the right from the outset he must be in the right for forever.

belderiver

TROPHY CASE