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Start date: 1/19/2024

End date: 2/28/2024

Platform: ps4

Hours played: 75

Rating: 4/5

Officially the year of Final Fantasy for me! And what a great game to revisit! Easily the Final Fantasy that I think best mixes humor and seriousness in equal parts.

It's been a while since I played the original, but the remake does an amazing job at adding depth to these beloved characters; even getting me to love characters I previously didn't care for much. Aerith was a character who I admit, on my first playthrough as a kid, I overlooked. But the remake made her so charming and endearing I couldn't overlook her.

Events that previously seemed small on the ps1 (like the first mako reactor bombing) now show just how devastating the aftermath truly was. In the original, I never thought twice about Avalanche being correct when taking their extremist methods. It's hard to visualize just how bad an explosion of that scale would have been, and harder to convey the devastation through that medium.

"A good man who serves a great evil is not without sin"

The voice acting also adds to some of the characters a lot. Cloud, for example, absolutely thrives as a voice acted character. There's a noticeable change in voice an mannerisms as he goes from an uncaring merc who is only in it for the cash, to a person who genuinely cares about the people around him.

I do have a gripe about the ending, though. Nit the fact that it diverges from the original, I just feel like they could have gone about it in a more subtle way. Like okay, yes, square-enix. I got that the whispers represented fate without you stabbing Barret and having the magical dementors save him so we could get a scene that verbally spells out that plotline for us. I already got it before that. You're good!

That aside, at the time for writing this, I have just barely started rebirth. I am excited to see where the story goes, how it diverges from the original, and what this means for these characters, who I am reminded of why I love so much. I hope the spirit of the original stays in tact while still telling a wonderful and unique story.

Funny story about the end boss; Sephiroth pulled a move that dropped my entire teams hp down to 1, and then started the meteor countdown. Cloud started a limit break when the countdown reached one second. Screen flashed white, and I thought I died, so I put the controller down. When the screen faded back in, cloud was in the middle of his limit break and it had canceled meteor. I had won.

The entire team won with 1hp.