It’s VERY camp. In a very good way. It’s genuine and serious but silly and fun throughout. The serious tone is something that Advent Children and it’s hardcore very serious fans go for but the game itself is nothing like that imo and I enjoy that more
in the original cloud is stealing someones personality or copied or traumatized it as his own and it's mixed in with his serious cold stoic personality. so that is why he is serious one moment and a goofball the next and all his companions are also excetric in there own way as well. but as thing get more and more crazy near the end of the game they all become serious so it's like the developers knew there needed to be this lightheartedness mixed with the seriose tone because the main theme of the game is life and life is fun sometimes and serious other times.
Well I didn't grow up on the series at all, but I played the original for the first time recently. It had some goofs and gaffs, it has a little wackiness to it. The story itself is serious, what with cloud vs sephiroth, and the destruction of the planet. But in-between those moments are some less serious moments to get you endeared to the characters and to lighten the tension. Eccentric characters, etc. But it gets more serious as the game goes on. At least that is what I remember, I played it a year ago so I could be misremembering things .
Advent children is depressing because of 2 reasons 1. theres an on going plauge and 2 cloud is still in mourning over Aerith and Zack as he feels he failed them. Zack he mistakenly belived himself to be due to the Jenova cells in his system when he promised to be his living legacy and instead impersonated him and Aerith he failed to stop sephiroth from killing her. Advent children is so gloomy comapred to the rest of the ff7 as its a story about cloud geting over his survivor's guilt.
the "remake" isn't a good measuring stick for the tone of the original. I mean 7 had the trail of blood and a theme of inevitable loss. Remake has time travel/alternate timelines/universes.
Not sure when it came to manga like Desert Punk its a mix like life it is. You get funny stuff and not so funny stuff. If it tries to be one or more things then its forced and can't hit.
Honestly the remake is trying to embrace the yakuza mentality of it. A lot of the game is very much a middle ground and not serious. Disc 3 was always the point was when the tone completely changed to a far more depressing tone up until the very end. In remake/rebirth's case, the main story tries to be serious while the sidequest/sidestories take up the comedy, akin to how a yakuza game did it before like a dragon fully embraced it's goofy tone.
I think they just try to get balance, to make things a little bit less edgy and show that not everything is chaos, destruction and pain, there are relaxed moments, made for build the characters bounds.
The tone is mostly serious with hilarious moments here and there. That's how I remember it. Oh and the shock factor in some parts. Oh boy. that's a gem. (Even though I'm still stuck at the Hojo fight. Lol)
Think of a Manga/Anime. Anime plots like Naruto/Dragonball Z can be serious but theres plenty of cartoony aspects that fans like. Advent children gave it a mature tone for the sake of taking itself seriously, gives the whole thing more depth when needed. But, If it was always serious, it wouldnt be as charming and become a bit stale and or depressing.
I mean I’m in the same boat as you, Chris. I play on Nintendo Switch and OG FF7 is available there for what, $16? I don’t know why I put off buying it.
Final Fantasy 7 has an appreciation of using humor to descalate situations when it needs to or to flesh out a character. I'm not gonna get into a lot of spoilers, but a lot of the characters and NPCs are very human and most NPCs aren't really aware right away the danger they're in or what's the come. Others just trying to live their life. Advent Children was very serious because at the time, the world of FF7 was in a serious state trying to move on after the fall of Midgar due to the event called Meteorfall. A lot of characters were in mourning for what had transpired, especially Cloud. That's why you see the pink ribbons, honoring Aerith by remembering her. That's also Cloud's curse is Cloud's coming to terms with the sheer survivor's guilt he's no longer able to block out.
Yeah, the edginess is definitely a post-market thing. Compare modern Final Fantasy titles to older ones. Original Final Fantasy 7 has a tone similar to Final Fantasy 6. Slightly edgy but still plenty of goofy moments.
Final Fantasy 7 feels like the perfect middle ground of the super goofy but still serious story for video games for the time older final fantasies and the more modern final fantasies and video games in general that take themselves more seriously. Final Fantasy 7 may have been the first video game with a Hollywood budget or at least that level of marketing as a serious story, but it was also the last video game that Square produced in a way where the programmers or artists or level designer would just through fun things/interactions into a scene for the heck of it. Development took a lot more organized approach as the scope and teams of video games grew and that puts the original ff7 at a very fun place in history that you can feel in the game and I feel like the remake really captured that goofy feeling so so well.
Final fantasy always has that element of goofiness, whilst the main story is usually focused on telling a serious story, the rest of the game usually will keep the tone light between story beats Even with final fantasy 4, at one point you could be the catalyst for burning an entire village to the ground The next, you could visit a village filled with mini people as well as sentient toads and pigs
The best way I could probably compare it to is to think of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy. Those movies have a very versatile tone where it can jump from goofy to serious with the snap of a finger, and it's the kind of thing that comes off as too much for others and good for others (me personally, I have always found the tone of those movies to be perfect). The early Final Fantasy games are a lot like that, FFVII included. They take themselves seriously, but they also like to have fun. Advent Children and other post-FFVII content seeming particularly gritty and dark is definitely just those other entries doing their own thing, and it's one of the more controversial aspects of Final Fantasy VII as a whole. In fact, one of the biggest worries from fans of the original FFVII is that Remake would try to be more dark and gritty like Advent Children, but thankfully it took a more balanced approach.
The best of Final Fantasy is a blending of campy and dark. And FF7 specifically was so very anime that jrpg's have been accused of being anime in game form ever since (despite all of the snes era FF games being at least as campy as ff7, something about the ps1 brought it to the limelight). Honestly? FF16 needed more camp, it was too dark to truly hold up as one of the greats for me
As i experianced Final Fantasy, my opinion is that FF1 was made to be grandious because it wasn't supposed to be a series... 2 added the cartoonyness because "It is a fantasy, and we need a moment of whimsy because we are too dark" 4-10 all had great moments of sillyness [Examples: Ultros, Gilgamesh, & Tidus laugh]
I think the important thing to remember is that the creators of Final Fantasy 7 had no idea what they were doing. Wait. Hear me out. I don't mean that in a negative way. FF7 was something new. Final Fantasy's first foray not only into the freedoms of 3D but also into the heavy storage space of the disc versus the cartridge. For the first time, characters could have nuance, personal ticks. In short characters could be MORE than they could when they were limited by a sprite sheet. You could have expressively explosive characters like Barret, and bizarre moving characters like Cait Sith. With their photo based backgrounds settings could be bigger (and smaller) than the rigid blocks of sprite RPGs. But with all this new freedom came the responsibility of using it all. Bigger zones needed more NPC's and a bigger plot needed more breaking it up. In other words, they needed padding. So we have bizarre characters like Johnny. We have extrenuous side quests, like Don Corneo, and plot twists like the appearance of Sephiroth! (Can you believe you never even heard his name until 5 dungeons into the game?! Crazy, right?) And the mini games. So many mini games! Much like Don Bluth and Dragon Lair, they had no idea where the line was. And the only way to find out was to go up to eleven. The end result is what we see: a serious story wrapped in several layers of weird and whimsy. A dark secret being explained by bizarre characters and tortured souls taking a break on discovering the truth to go chocobo racing. But just like the creators, we had never had a game like this either. So we ate it up. And thus brought in a new twist. Continuity. Square had never had a singular game this popular, so now they had to make sequels. And they did. Some good, others not good. What the audience took away from the games shaped the furure, so the tough, hardboiled core became grittier, darker, and more prevalent. But the campy zaniness was too memetic to go away completely so it stayed too, albeit subdued. Jump forward to the FF7r games, the inevitable conclusion to everything that makes FF7 FF7. So they did the only thing they could do. They made everything MORE. The darks are darker, the colors are brighter, the mini-games are still everywhere, and Cloud never looked so good in a dress. Tl:dr FF7 is the end result of being the first game out of the gates when everything was changing. It was never meant to be taken so seriously because it was never meant to be taken anywhere.
FF7 had a great balance of seriousness and levity, Crisis Core managed to stick with that for the most part but Advent Children and Dirge of Cerberus went heavy on the more "mature" attitude which kind of worked for DoC considering the main character but AC always felt kind of off because of it. Thankfully Remake definitely managed to recapture a lot of that goofy, light-hearted tone that made OG FF7 so beloved in the first place. I can't speak about Rebirth at all because I'm actively avoiding everything related to that game like the plague until I'm able to play it for myself.
In the PS1 tutorial an Item box bounces on screen and says something like "I'm an item box! Keep an eye out for me I got goodies inside me!" Similarly, there's a point where a robot dies and then minutes later you see them again and they're like, "Oh hey, I'm here to replace that guy. I may look exactly the same, but I'm technically a new one." Like the main plot and Sephiroth are pretty serious but the general idea is if you got 40-60 hours of game, you can get super silly for a couple minutes every once in a while
There's a lot of kooky moments with the characters and NPC's throughout both games. There's a lot of times where the characters get to a new place and they act like goofy tourists and get wild and crazy. And there's other segments where it's all action. Most of the time when it's brooding and dark it's when one of the characters is going down memory lane to a back story, or Sephiroth is doing something scary. Advent children took inspiration more from the tone of Cloud's flashbacks and forgot the moments where they gave the audience a break with some levity and whimsy. I'd say the remake portrays the tone of the original perfectly
I'm going through rebirth and it's one of the funniest games I've played but I'm so stressed about where the story is going every time the story progresses. The thing about 7, remake, rebirth is that it hits almost every kind of situation, tragedy, joy and pain you can run into in real life but with a fantasy setting. You have your bad days, your good days and sometimes you have goofy weird days you just weren't ready for
No Final Fantasy game has EVER been entirely serious. There are times when things are serious, there are times when things are silly, there is light heartedness and over the top just as much as crushing despair or moments that make you think. It shifts around, giving you and the characters a little bit of everything, depending on what is happening. You're meant to go on a journey and experience various stages of emotions throughout and grow with it. The struggles are real and complicated and characters might have to face the unimaginable - but that doesn't mean that there aren't moments that are weird or silly or funny in between; moments that make you laugh and recover and regain some perspective to remember that it's never all bad; that you can still find joy and hope even when everything looks doomed; like in life.
Final Fantasy has always been about striking a tone on a slider somewhere between serious and kooky. The dial is at different spots depending on which installment you look at. VII definitely has the slider set closer to serious more than other FFs but it still has plenty of the kooky and whimsy that permeates all of Final Fantasy, and striking that balance in a fun way has always been one of FF's finer points as a franchise.
The story has some whacky moments, something that gets expanded upon in the Remake for better and for worse in my opinion, the worse coming mainly from Aerith
The tone is meant to be both serious and goofy. A piece of media is not required to stay to one consistant tone. Serious movies can make a joke or two. Comedy shows can tackle mature episodes. It's only recently, because of bad film critics, has there been complaints about a piece of media not sticking to a tone.
