After really digging into the devilish details of Final Fantasy VII Remake’s excellent battle system on my second playthrough, I was really happy to see how much Intermission doubles down on the quirky complexities of those combat encounters at their best. Despite making up a whole new guy to hang out with Yuffie, she’s the only controllable character, with Sonon taking a weird support/ambient role that is unique from the way party members behave in the main game, so the challenge here became twofold: first, we’re fitting an entire party’s worth of abilities into one guy. Making Yuffie and Yuffie alone a close up and ranged attacker, a tank, a magician, a speedy guy, and an aggro manager all at once without overcomplicating her moveset or making her feel overpowered. The second is designing combat encounters that are interesting and challenging for this uniquely skilled duo, a prompt admirably filled by a significantly ramped up average combat difficulty level and several of the best bosses in the game. It’s been a question for me since this episode came out, how all of this would be handled, but it was only recently that I got my hands on a PS5 so I’m happy to find out how good it all is even if I’m a little late to the party.

Much more heartening though, is Yuffie herself, and the way her narrative is handled in such a way as to assure me that everything I liked about Remake was in fact not the fluke that I was worried it might be. I liked Remake quite a bit when it came out, but hot off the heels of my first time playing the original VII I think I was judging it too harshly for not embodying my idea of What Final Fantasy VII Is, which ironically distracted me from some of Remake’s loudest themes and best ideas. Today the entire body of Remake hits me super hard, and I’ve come around to full champion status, ready to sing the game’s praises all the way.

But if the stuff about Fate and Feeling and making A Choice to live all hit better - and I think, more uniquely to this game than the normal version of that you often see in RPGs and anime that it is often compared to but that is for another bit of writing – the stuff that I liked to begin with rang just as strongly today. The sorely needed expansion of Barrett’s character into both the game’s political core and its beating heart; the elaboration of AVALANCHE into a splintered group of infighting leftists; the bracing and genuine depiction of poverty and community in the slums, a life given no empathy in Final Fantasy VII but afforded a familiar realism in Remake; even Tifa’s naysaying – because even if she is wrong and I think it sucks that it has to be her being That Guy so hard and I do hope they calm down about it in the next couple of games, those are good conversations to make Barrett and Tifa and even Cloud have with each other.

But you know how it is, it’s fuckin Square! You want to believe!!! You do!!! But you truly never know with these guys, ESPECIALLY when it’s not like Final Fantasy VII itself was exactly on top of the revolutionary messaging to begin with specifically wrt AVALANCHE. But This game was so good dude. It was easier to write it all off before it came out and was mostly just really good. Now the fear of god is in me. Now I care whether they fuck it up. Now I want Rebirth to be good. It’s a fucking curse. So I take no small amount of comfort in the confident and graceful direction of Episode interMISSION, which in only a small handful of hours reassures me that yes, they knew what they were doing, and yes, it was all on purpose, and yes, they’re interested in the same parts of it that I’m interested in, and they might even revisit them down the road.

Remake packs a truly wild amount of character into the little conversations you overhear as you walk around its hub areas. Every npc’s dialogue updates with every major story event and it’s all voiced, sometimes playing only randomly, but many of those nameless little characters have fleshed out story arcs, whether they end up intersecting with our heroes or not. Lots of them don’t though, and are there only to further color a world in a game that is in no small part dedicated to fleshing its world out in fine detail. A lot of the dialogue you overhear as cloud, a lot of the ambient conversation, has to do with Shinra’s totally effective propaganda campaign against Wutai, the country they’ve recently won a bloody war against. We never get many details about the conflict itself, but we do get the picture of Wutai’s national character that’s been painted by Shinra and that the people of Midgar by and large believe, even people who don’t like Shinra, even people our heroes work with, and even, tacitly, our heroes themselves. The boogeyman version of Wutai is a lawless nation of honorless, bloodthirsty criminals who, having lost the war, will stop at nothing to seek revenge for their decimated nation now that their hope is lost. There’s a real bone-deep paranoia towards a culture that clearly very few people in Midgar understand and even fewer have a care to learn anything about, even from the handful of refugees and immigrants who have made their ways into their communities. These are the tidbits you pick up when you walk by people as Cloud throughout the game, a mosaic of public thought you can piece together from dozens of scraps of overheard conversation in between equally weighted comments about the neighborhood watch, or the train graveyard, or weapons shop guy’s broken water filter.

As Yuffie, this is all you hear. As a teenager from Wutai who is in fact on an anti-Shinra espionage mission representing the new government, every inch of Midgar feels hostile and alien to begin with; Yuffie doesn’t like it here, doesn’t want to be here, and wants to spend as little time in the city as possible on the way to the job she actually came here to do. It’s hard to blame her, given her history. So it’s no surprise that when you’re walking around town in Yuffie’s shoes, the snippets of conversation that she overhears don’t include the neighborhood watch, or the train graveyard, or weapons shop guy’s broken water filter. She only hears people talking about Wutai. About their spies, their plans, their awful character, how they’re behind the recent bombings, the bastards. How our neighbor down the street is from there, I heard, so suspicious. It’s such a small detail. Of course these aren’t suddenly the only things anybody in Sector 7 are talking about, but Yuffie, the actual target of this discrimination, is more tuned into it than Cloud, who is entirely unaffected by this kind of talk and at worst has to brush it off when he’s being false flagged using another victim’s identity. He’s got other stuff on his mind. Yuffie is never thinking about anything else. How could she be?

It isn’t just the small details, though. The absolute best choice interMISSION makes is to introduce us to a small slice of the AVALANCHE that Barrett’s group split off from, and they are truly the most rancid batch of little shithead assholes you could possibly imagine. When I say “the 7 Remake DLC made me feel better about liking the game’s politics the instant I realized it was about petty leftist infighting” and tell you that for the first half of it you’re hanging out with the AVALANCHE group that wants to do a peaceful protest in the street but only if they’re not blocking traffic, it conjures certain images of a Kind Of Guy and that’s exactly who shows up.

“But Ina,” I know you’re saying to me, “Yuffie and her partner Sonon are working for a government that explicitly wants to commit violent military action against Shinra, isn’t it weird that they would team up with these guys over Barrett’s group?” Well yeah, for sure it is, but we learn here that the schism in AVALANCHE was recent enough that the Wutaians don’t know Barrett’s group exist, and the second he finds out about them Sonon is like shit shit shit we teamed up with the wrong guys. As it stands their primary contact for the team they work with is pretty overtly racist to them the whole time they hang out with them and even tells Yuffie at one point that the only reason they’re teaming up at all is because they didn’t want Barrett’s group to make contact and establish a relationship with the Wutaians. Despite all this, Yuffie is like wow she’s so nice and cool. Sonon is more actively bloodthirsty than Yuffie but he’s not wrong that this AVALANCHE cell isn’t their friend, that this is a union of convenience, and likely a short-lived one.

These aren’t conflicts that will be resolved, maybe not conflicts that CAN be resolved. At first glance this feels like it’s because this is a tiny slice of a small chunk of Final Fantasy VII’s narrative tableau, one that we know will end with the Sector 7 plate dropping, one that we know results in Sonon being somehow removed from the narrative and Yuffie separated from her purpose and unsuccessful in the mission she’s been assigned. But like Remake before it, interMISSION is a complete thematic work, even if it’s a small chapter withing a larger story. Yuffie is traumatized by the war in her country and she’s old enough to be radicalized politically and to be able to act against Shinra, but she’s young enough that people being superficially nice to her or professionally cordial can throw her off the subtext of their relationships. That doesn’t make her stupid, or wrong, though. Sonon cares a lot less about casualties in Midgar than Yuffie quickly comes to, but like Barrett’s AVALANCHE before them they never truly disagree and they never try to do anything but the mission they came here for.

There’s a moment where Yuffie tells Sonon something along the lines of “Y’know before we got here I was kind of expecting everyone in Midgar to be just like the soldiers who ruined Wutai during the war. So most people just being normal and chill is kind of a relief. I feel kind of stupid for thinking that way.” And Sonon clearly doesn’t hold this opinion of the people of Midgar and especially not of the AVALANCHE members they’re working with but he does validate her feelings and he can empathize with her, even if he thinks the only good thing to do with Midgar is burn it down.

These moments, and Yuffie’s thoughts and feelings here, coexist with the racist whispers in Sector 7, with the open paranoia in the streets and the propaganda on the news, with the way Midgar natives are actively disgusted by the snack beans Yuffie offers to everyone she meets. And Yuffie and Sonon don’t get a chance to hash out their political differences, if that was something they ever might have done anyway. No one confronts their AVALANCHE cohort, because they die in the Sector 7 plate drop. Just like a lot of these moments in Remake, and in life, interMISSION asks us to sit with the discomfort of the knowledge that all of us are entangled in these kinds of thorns, these dissonance of how we think and feel in a world that we can’t ever entirely fit comfortably into, whose ills we are to some degree complicit in and others that we might have to commit further to if we’re to change anything.

So, even if they completely fuck it up, even if Rebirth whiffs huge and Remake 3 is awful and all of this praise I’ve heaped on the writing in this first installment backfires on me, it won’t really matter, because these are two complete stories. They’ll never be able to take Barrett lifting his arm and praying to Marlene in front of that portal from me. And they’ll never take Yuffie and Sonon trying to negotiate their twisted up feelings about what the future might even be allowed to look like if they dare to imagine it as they pick their way through that junk yard either.

Capcom Classics Collection Revisits #9

When Capcom Classics Collection hit the scene on PS2 a lot of us saw the three versions of Street Fighter II on there, and asked "why isn't Street Fighter 1 here?" None of us played it, but we were always curious about this piece of history to this world famous video game franchise that just suddenly started at "II". It's gotta be great right?

How naive.

Fighting Street's entire feel is shit, the characters don't move around in any smooth capacity, and just shimmy all over the place like crabs. Hits have zero impact with garbage sound effects vaguely sounding like someone dropping their rubber ducky in the bathtub. Next to no hitstun means constant button mashing, and hoping that Gen doesn't divekick you four times in a row for your whole lifebar, unless you know the special moves, which you probably do since you weren't born yesterday. Best of luck getting a hadoken or shoryuken out consistently, because it's really strict and is based on button release rather than button press. They were originally intended as hidden secret moves of sorts, which explains why one dp or tatsu can potentially kill a man in one hit.

Capcom decided to try voices with this one, but unfortunately the one guy they got to do the voices just couldn't stop munching on toffee that morning apparently.

"WHAT STWENGTH BUTDONTFOWGETDEWAFBFBFBF ALL OVAH DA WOWLD"

Probably the same one they got to play Dr. Light in MM8.

The characters for the most part are horrifically stock and stereotypical. How many people can you find who are clamoring for the return of fucking Joe the homeless guy from SF1? How about the amazing English representation in the form of the mohawked punk and the stuffy aristocrat? What about bushy eyebrows man from Japan or THE NINJA GUY? Unfortunately, I've actually seen people online who want Retsu back without any memes attached. Dorks.

It took me a while, but I beat this piece of shit after spamming DP against Sagat and managed to oneshot him two rounds in a row, lucky me. Goddamned great music here by the way, sounds like an infant Sega Genesis with whooping cough. It's kind of sad that my only reasoning for not giving this a lower score is because of reasons like "I've played worse", or that it's at least hilarious for how much of a low point it is for the series. If I played the version with the stupid pressure-sensitive buttons I'd probably rate it lower after breaking my wrist and splitting my knuckles on the cabinet controls.

I think my favorite trivia is that Capcom still tries to pull the wool over our eyes by declaring that Mike (SF1) and Balrog are different characters, because they're still afraid of Mike Tyson swimming across the pacific and beating the shit out of them for parodying him like everyone else during the late 80s/90s.

I’ve been playing this game nonstop for two weeks, constantly thinking about how I want to get my thoughts out on this one. Radiant Dawn gets a fair amount of distaste these days because of what it does wrong, and it’s totally fair, but I can’t get myself to dislike this game even with the myriad of problems.
For every stupid thing RD does, it does three other things that are pure genius. The sheer scale of everything makes this the largest and most ambitious FE game to date, even outdoing Genealogy of the Holy War. There’s a huge amount of map variety, with objectives and units constantly changing to help tell the story. It’s far from being a boring FE game because the game never stops mixing things up every chapter or so. While it can be very hectic both in gameplay and story, I can’t help but admire what was done here. Every single map, even the ones I disliked, made me go “wow, that was a neat concept for a map and it feels unique compared to everything else so far!” The gameplay-story integration is also up there with the Jugdral titles, especially the finale of part 3 which is one of my favorite maps in the whole series. When in tandem with the fantastic Tellius mechanics such as shove/rescue and BEXP it also creates an immensely fun gameplay experience.
The story is mixed overall and i think PoR had a more solidly constructed narrative, but RD has a lot of interesting concepts and plot threads that are thrown around, and when combined with the ludonarrative aspects of the gameplay, makes it super engaging. There’s definitely a lot of “huh” moments closer to the end, though, and the final part is a really odd curveball after the very dense political drama the rest of the game was, but the themes it uses are probably the best use of said themes in the entire series.
I dunno man, I adore Radiant Dawn. There’s like 800 problems you could pick at with this game and I still wouldn’t give a shit. It’s the quintessential Fire Emblem game in my eyes, it has something for really any fan of the series. Maybe not the whole package will jive with someone, but I think you’ll get at least one section of the game that appeals to your tastes. Radiant Dawn is messy, ambitious, and maybe tries to bite off more than it can chew. But at the same time, I almost wouldn’t have it any other way.