It makes perfect sense and isn't incompatible.
When I said "90% old Square and 10% new Square", what I mean to say is what you allude to: that it followed a basic structure, a catalyst that had been laid down that they could follow. Sure the new content was created by them, but it was contingent upon a basic narrative flow and characterization previously established they could refer back to at any given moment for reference when needed. There absolutely was a rubric that held them within constraint that we saw the result of in the last 10% when they wholeheartedly decided to abandon it to their own creative predilections, predilections that appear are going to run rampant in Episode 2.
I made a post in the OT thread that I don't think the new content is necessarily all that either, and that it didn't improve anything. Much of it is boring, tedious chore work that adds little to what made the original amazing, only extended its playtime from four hours to forty which helped destroy the pacing. The new content was only tolerable precisely because it existed within a framework that, while minimal from moment to moment, was in its over-arching foundation strong enough to bear the burden of the lesser. And as that framework looks to be going out the window for a story that's looking at this point to very loosely adhere to tenets of the original instead of following them strictly, my hopes are non-existent. Well, they became non-existent the moment the credits rolled. Frankly, I don't believe the new content is nearly strong enough from a narrative and gameplay perspective to justify itself outside of a context of past competence into one of future incompetence.
Meh, i disagree. The added sections/interactions/dialogue in this game hit all the same points for me as they did in the original, and then some.
The structure they followed in FF7R was only ever a loose one....again, they stretched 8 hours of charming but relatively simple content into 40+ hours, with SIGNIFICANTLY more dialogue and detail than the original game had. --
infinite space to mess up before the ending. Not to say it's "better", but in the context of this conversation when we're discussing the competence of the writing team.....it does what it set out to do -- it recaptures the FEELING of the original. We're all afraid of the same thing. The game went FULL anime at the end (complete with teleporting cloud) but the majority of the game didn't include these tropes, despite spending the ENTIRETY of the game alluding and building up to them.
What i'm saying is that it's pretty silly to suggest that the only reason you liked the game before the ending is because it was "following the original" when it was only ever loosely following the original in the first place, and all of the best scenes (imo) were original.
The bar scene after the explosion? 100% different turn of events. The feeling of watching Barrett reject cloud, and the dialogue of everyone else hanging without you was brilliant. The whole scenario was completely original up until the ghosts come and force you to go on the Sector 5 bombing mission.
The Cloud+Tifa flashback? In a completely different section, and followed up with an original scene that was pretty charming.
The rooftop hopping with Aerith was pretty cool, but had nothing on the trip to Sector 7 topside with Jesse, Biggs, and Wedge, and that whole mission + the parachute + aftermath was CLASSIC FF story-through-gameplay goodness.
Shinra HQ? Missing the air duct stuff and a few floors (i think) but what we got instead was awesome, and honestly the whole sequence breaking in and then the gimmicks with Tifa was, again, classic true-to-form FF7-FF9 goodness that we haven't seen in Final Fantasy
since Squaresoft.
So what i'm saying is, yes the ending was a fucking mess, but it can't be indicative of the entire experience because the rest of it was nothing like that.
Unless Square's actual message with the ending was "Yeah, we know this is the kind of writing you like, but THIS is the kind of writing we WANT to do", in which case yeah i think we should all be terrified of how bad the coming chapters will be. But I doubt that's the case.
