[SPOILER] Final Fantasy VII Remake - Story discussion and comparison with original

[Scoobes]

JWeinCom said:

Scoobes said:

I can pretty much pick out the sentence that made Hynad think "meltdown" as: "Then there were those changes that are best described as Kingdom Hearts bullshit."

The "Kingdom Hearts bullshit" line tends to be used as a pretty lazy criticism because there are other possibilities that haven't been explored with this assumption that they're going heavy into the weird time travel/alternative timelines direction like Kingdom Hearts (and is usually followed up with blaming Nomura). It seems like some people have made their conclusions on something that is still highly speculative.

The thing is that even with no knowledge of where it's going, the sequence was very Kingdom Heartsy.

You shift suddenly from a relatively grounded sci-fi environment to suddenly going to a very abstract "edge of creation" place.  Cloud is suddenly hopping across bits of land and slashing through large chunks of rock, very much like Sora.  Then, you're facing a massive shadowy entity that is completely unlike anything else in the game, but is very much like the kind of enemies you fight in Kingdom Hearts.  Instead of facing a concrete threat (we have to get away from Shinra!) you're suddenly facing an abstract one (we have to fight against destiny)!  It's all very Kingdom Heartsy.

So, yeah, I think Kingdom Hearts bullshit is a very apt description.  Without any discussion of alternate timelines (which are pretty heavily hinted at but I digress) the ending of the game was a massive and jarring tonal shift from both the original FF7, and even from everything proceeding it in the remake.

You see, I never got this "grounded sci-fi environment". The Cetra can "talk" to the planet, Jenova is an alien that can somehow infect the native species of the planet, Sephiroth's consciousness travels across a circulatory system of the planet and is able to take control of "clones", one of the bosses is a giant house... it's all pure fantasy.

The final fight I felt was in keeping with some of the Jenova fights from the original game. It's actually conceivable that the whole ending segment can be explained as Sephiroth and Jenova screwing with the party. It has elements of Kingdom Hearts but they're mostly superficial and I got a more Advent Children vibe overall, especially given the 3 characters you fight seem to be influenced by the character designs in Advent Children.