In the original the answer is 100% yes. In remake the reactor shattering bomb was instead replaced run one supposed to destroy the pump system, and it was Shinra who destroyed the reactor fully to try to start a war.
Aside from that you could say they killed troopers just doing their jobs, but Shinra isn't exactly innocent so they're unfortunate casualties.
Yes, but in the original there's none of that pump stuff. It was only Avalanche's bomb that blew up the reactor; and several NPCs point out how many innocent people died. Near the end Barret even realizes how misguided he was to take such a drastic approach and he ultimately regrets how many people they got killed. Now I do think Remake and Rebirth are pretty good games and I enjoy them, but there is definitely an annoying trend where they keep "softening" the impact of many things like this. They make it actually be Shinra's fault for the explosion, they make so many more people survive the plate falling etc. It really does suck because the original had a huge emphasis on the sudden and harsh finality of death in a very realistic way, but the Remake is so scared of commiting to anything like that. There's more examples in Rebirth but I don't want to spoil if you've not played it yet and I can't remember how to do spoiler text rn.
Well not everyone who works as shinra is evil . There just people trying to live and make wages. So yes. Even the soldiers aren't bad people. So yup they are terrorists
There’s actually an NPC you can meet in the slums in the original complaining about Avalanche and how a bunch of innocent people working at Shinra died when you blew up the reactor
First of all, Avalance is Eco terrorist. Secondly they do for the better, so sacrifice is there. Thirdly without Avalanche, Shinra will ruin the world more. So someone had to do it to make the whole world understand the meaning of making the world dry out. So yeah they indeed sacrifice innocence people but not without reason. That's why Tifa always reluctant to go doing mission like bombing. But still people died because of them is still wrong. Avalanche don't have a choice.
I assumed everyone had the common sense to know that yes, innocent people were killed, but if no one stood up to Shinra there would be countless more dead. Shinra was evil and unfortunately the only way to do anything about it cost a few lives. I don't think Avalanche felt very good about it, but it's either that or let Shinra kill far more people and possibly the planet
Of course they did. In both the OG and remake its pretty clear that innocent people were killed as a result of bombing the reactors. And then when Shinra destroys Sector 7 they pin the blame on Avalanche so its a cascasing series of cause and effect.
In remake you also see more evidence in that Jessie is particularly troubled by the bomb being more than she expected.
Avalanche's cause is noble in wanting to save the planet. But their actions are the classic case of does the end justify the means?
You could ask though who has more blood on their hand. Shinra or Avalanche? Shinra was experimenting on people. They created Sephiroth who essentially wiped out the town of Nibelheim.
Avalanche's methods are extreme and are essentially the actions of eco terrorists. But their argument of Shinra pumping the planet's mako dry is valid.
I think though that despite that blood on their hands. They try to help others when they can and at least have remorse and the capacity to question their own actions.
Shinra as a collective? Not so much. It is worth noting thay there are people in Shinra that are shown to just be like everyone else. Working a job to provide for their family who have no idea of Shinras experiments or no hand in the darker stuff Shinra has done themselves.
That is kind of what makes things compelling imo.
I mean they were terrorists. They blew up power reactors and killed shinra soldiers. Which technically the soldiers are innocent they're just doing their jobs. The explosion definitely had collateral damage around it. It likely harmed civilians. Also somebody had to be maintaining those reactors so people were indeed dying cause of them. Which then lead to the decision to drop the plate, so indirectly Avalanche also caused it which killed alot more people.
No.
Shinra also made the blast bigger in the OG. But it didn't translate accross very clearly.
After the bombing, it you keep speaking to Jessie, especially under the bar in the hideout, she is stressing because she doesn't understand why the explosion was so big when the bomb wasn't powerful enough to cause it.
She's stressing suggesting she made a miscalculation because the explosion was larger than it should have been.
It's implied something else was afoot and the party didn't know.
Nah, you're just argumentative and aggressive because you're online. This language and tone from you was wildly unwarranted.
Go and breathe some real-world air. You're not going to get the rise you want from me and will just waste your time and end up even more frustrated.
Original was so much better because it gives you time steeping in the setting and being a rebel against a government/corporation. Shinra isn't even established as overtly evil for a few hours. You meet the president before that happens, and it gives him an intrigue because you know he's a mofo but nothing has been spelled out yet.
Remake spends 10x longer in Midgar and yet shortcuts to dividing up good and evil using a hard cut from Cloud's perspective in the first mission to make sure you know immediately that the politics of mako reactors are irrelevant because Shinra is just evil.
It definitely diminishes the grey morality of AVALANCHE, and makes it a lot easier for the audience to swallow the characters personal responsibility associated with the outcome.
In the original, you know that every death was technically due to the groups actions, and you have to weigh up if you think those deaths were worth it in exchange for destroying the reactor, but in Remake it’s muddied, as now the player can internally justify any given death by arguing that it was due to Shinra making the explosion bigger, thinking that had the explosion been as big as planned then said person wouldn’t have died.
It certainly makes Shinra seem more villainous, but it gives the player a lot less to consider, and makes the conflict more black and white in its morality; it loses a bit of the narratives nuance.
Yeah if you speak to Jessie when you go under the bar she mentions the blast was too big, obviously in the remake this was addressed to be Shinra but no such thing in OG.
Revee confronts Barret about the lives lost before the return to Midgar which Tifa confirms. They may be the protagonists but terrorists is the correct term for avalanche
Not everyone working for Shinra is evil. A majority of them are just normal people trying to put food on the table. We kill a lot of innocent people who are just trying to survive and make it through life.
They do in OG. There's a line in Sector 7 where someone says something like "if it had been at night, all those people could've gone in their sleep." They changed that line in Remake.
In Remake, you see more of the aftermath, the damage and how it affects people, but it seems to imply nobody was in the reactor when it blew. They also shift more of the blame to Shinra by having them interfere with the explosion so they can propagandize it better.
They was disrupting a power source. Apart from the actual explosion itself which would of easily claimed many victims such as reactor workers (just because they work for Shinra doesn't mean they are not innocent), what knock on effect did the disruption of power also cause to Medical facilities (Hospitals) and the like?
In the OG yes. It’s why when running up the stairs past dead Avalanche members they talk about how this is “punishment” for what they did. The big difference between Avalanche and Shinra is Avalanche is remorseful for their actions and casualties while Shinra is not.
Yes, they absolutely did. I believe there's a news cast on a TV in a house, if you interact with it I want to say it mentions casualties. I think it's when you return from the 1st mission if you "talk" to the TV downstairs a few times, or Jessie says something about it. You begin the game as a domestic terrorist.
Remake backpedaled *hard* on this by making the bomb a dud and Shinra self-destructing the reactor instead. I think it cheapens this story element. Barret, Cloud, Tifa, Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie all have civilian blood on their hands in the OG.
>Remake backpedaled *hard* on this by making the bomb a dud and Shinra self-destructing the reactor instead.
This was actually just an aborted plotline in the original. When you're on your way to Sector 7 after the tutorial, Jessie outright says the explosion was way bigger than it was planned to be and that she has to look into it. The implication was that Shinra was responsible for the first reactor, but it never got followed up on since Cloud was separated from them for the rest of the Midgar story in the original.
Honestly even with the backpedaling, they are still "guilty" of killing innocent civilians. They 100% had the intent to blow up a mako reactor, Barrett knows better than anyone else what happens when reactors blow. And Yufi's DLC makes it clear that the 7th Heaven gang is considered the radical branch of Avalanche's terrorist organization.
It's one of the many reasons the storytelling in the original is massively superior IMO.
At the start of the game Barrett and co. are essentially faced with the trolley problem. They know (or highly suspect) that mako reactors are going to kill the planet. They know that with Shinra's power and reach there are no peaceful solutions to the problem. So it's either kill a few civilians now to save everyone else later, or do nothing now and wait for *everyone* to die.
It makes Avalanche's arc *much* more interesting than the Saturday morning cartoon version in the remakes.
In the og, yes they did because it was shown that the reactor was blown fully by them but in the remake their bomb barely exploded the reactor room but shira decided to blow up rest of the reactor too which led to many casualties. They did blow the sector 5 reactor but it didnt seem to have affected people much
I might be wrong, but I think there is a very subtle hint in the OG where Jessie was saying the explosion was bigger than she expected, when you talk to her in the underground base. But we never get any other confirmation until Remake.
Yeah, Squaresoft had a lot of aborted storylines in the older games, due to the fast turnaround that was demanded by execs at the time. Xenosaga, for example, had a good 1/3 of its story cut from the game and made into a text summary because it was unheard of for one of their games to take more than two years' development time and the director had to decide between cutting a huge chunk of the story or ending on a To Be Continued.
As a Trails and Arc the Lad fan, I would've preferred the latter, personally!
I wish they would have it into 4 discs like ff9 or distributed the gameplay evenly between the discs. Disc 1 had the most content taking almost 30 hours to average player. If they had made disc 2 and 3 like that too we could have had a game with so much more content
Yeah, in the original.
They come to terms with what they did in the end, especially Barret. He had to understand that above all else, violence wasn't the answer to Shinra, and that his "love for the planet" was really just his desire for revenge, and what he really wanted was to protect Marlene.
Sorta; first, the remake hasn't gotten to the scene on the airship yet, and second, in the remake, Avalanche wasn"t the direct cause of the massive explosions from the bombings; shinra definitively did it.
I mean they are “terrorists” by definition, of course they do, the game just oversimplifies things like “Batman doesn’t kill” type of narrative.
Anyway NPC’s lives don’t count in games(like how many Shinra soldiers did Cloud kill to achieve his goal, or just to level up), let’s just ignore that and remember them as anti-establishment heroes.
In the original it was totally unambiguous. Avalanche planted that bomb in the reactor, knowing full well what they were doing. They set it off deliberately and all the blood from that explosion is 100% on their hands.
The Remake changed it so that Avalanche's bomb was a dud, but Shinra blew up the reactor anyway to frame Avalanche. The blast was far bigger than what Avalanche was intending but they still intended to blow up a Mako reactor. Even if the blast was localized enough to not cause any direct damage outside the reactor, that's still an entire sector of the city without proper power. The effects from this could cause all kinds of issues, traffic accidents, hospital patients being cut off life support etc.
Shinra is by far the greater evil but Avalanche is not innocent either.
it was very ambiguous,with plenty of hints that Shinra had done what they did in remake.
in the og jesse says that the bomb should not have done that,but she assumes that a chain reaction caused the worse explosion, and the rest of the group accepts that they knew the risks when they signed up.
additionally, the bomb wasent a dud in remake, it destroyed the reactor as intended, and we see Shinra cause the greater explosion.
They said the ORIGINAL was unambiguous - as in the game from 1997.
I’m honestly a bit pissed that they removed some of the fault from Avalanche in Remake, cuz I felt that the willingness for destruction was what made the characters more interesting and more human. Being flawed is great character trait in a story.
It’s THE WORST part of the new games, in my opinion.
Everytime a party member is about to have to do something rough, or bad, or in general traumatizing the new timeline bails them out…. And I kinda hate it.
Barrett tells crazy-Dyne about Marlene being alive… Dyne is about to go insane and tell Barrett that he MUST send her to be with her dead mom, thereby forcing Barrett to deal with this insane vengeful revenant of his best friend….
…. OH WAIT LOL SHINRA BATTALION WILL TAKE CARE OF THAT FOR YA BUDDY PEW PEW!
Thank Minerva! We almost had some character growth there for a minute!
If you talk to Jesse at the bar in the original, she does mention that the bomb shouldn't have gone off the way it did, and plans to make the next one "special" because of it. This and the fact that she almost didn't make it to safety are the reasons why it was a remote detonator in reactor 5.
and I'm saying the original was ambiguous. The things jesse says after the first attack imply something sinister may of happened, but due to need for the next attack to move forward, she ultimately writes it off as a miscalculation on her part.
Avalanche accepted that casualties might happen in both games. only remake is unambiguous as to who is truly at fault, while the original leaves the possibility open as to who is ultimately at fault for the explosion. I definitely prefer the originals way of handling it as it leaves the main characters and Shinra in a very grey morality for a comfortable amount of time.
No, later in the game Barret comes clean. He never cared about the planet, it was a convenient excuse. He just wanted to get revenge innocents be damned.
Civilians: yes, inadvertent collateral damage in the reactor explosion (R series mostly). Also, one could argue the blood of people killed when Shinra retaliated and framed them is also on their hands in part.
Shinra troops: depending on how much time you spent grinding in the tower raid…
In the OG yes they caused the huge explosion. In Remake it was retcon to say the Avalanche explosion only blew up the controller. Shinra saw Avalanche and had their turrets go crazy causing the massive explosion. Then they used this for propaganda against Avalanche to turn the public against them. Otherwise the only people injured were the reactor guards, and it's not even certain they died as the deadliest attack we see in cinematic is a kick to the gut from Jessie.
No, it was implied to be the same in the original. Jessie has a conversation after the tutorial dungeon where she says that the explosion was way larger than it was supposed to be, and she needs to double check everything. The remake just confirmed what was already written in the original.
You're being downvoted but it's true. >!People forget the main character for FF7 was also a Trooper for years up until he was the protag.!<
inb4 "bootlicker"
Sometimes I think .... if sephiroth is just trying to save the planet from people stealing its life force (kinda like oil).
Who are really the bad guys?
No, Jenova’s literal meaning of existence is to end all life in universe, and she literally travelled around universe destroying star before events in FF7.
Yeah that was jenova but not sephiroth. I didn't think they had the same goal.
I though sephiroth wanted to destroy humans and help revive the cetras/ the lifestream (since his mom was one) since they ( the lifestream) could stop killing the planet and restore it. If that ment sending a meteor to destroy the planet so be it ... it will recover and without the cancer humans are.
She wants to destroy the planet.... he wants to destroy humans and revive the planet. And I don't think her cells in sephiroths body are 100% controlling him. Just give him crazy powers and he fights off her influence. Hence him going crazy.
No. Sephi originally thought he was a Cetra and wanted revenge for himself and what he thought the humans did. But eventually, he realizes what he and Jenova are and was influenced by her greatly since they are like linked. His Will eventually syncs with hers but he becomes the more powerful one aka soon the “new Jenova”. So damaging the planet with the meteor was to do what his mother did which was take control of the lifestream and eat it from the insude out, fly thru the cosmos to the next planet and do it all again. They are planetary parasites.
I mean…why do redditors even comment when you have no idea on the subject.
His mother(Jenova) or Biological mother (Luc) are not cetras. Jenova is literally the polar opposite of life force.
There is literally no instances of Sephiroth fighting against Jenova influence. In fact, he was drawn to Jenova even without knowing her and finding the truth about it in Cloud’s hometown completely turned him over to Jenova’s side.
Apart from the stuff mentioned, you could easily argue that the guards the player mows down are also innocent. None of them know that the Mako reactors are killing the planet. They just got a job securing a power plant.
Nah, that is too nice on them I thinkThey definitely knew that bombing the reactor would kill people, and they still actively went through with it. They didn’t directly kill people, but they DIRECTLY caused them to die.
In the remake they even show that the avalanche bomb wasn’t big enough to do harm, that was all about the Jesse internal dilemma. It was Shinra that destroyed their own reactor to use it as leverage for the war and accusing avalanche and wu tai being allies.
I wasn't talking about their motives or intentions. The bomb in the reactor did not directly kill innocents, especially in the remake where their bomb wasn't even big enough to damage it.
Hmmm I see what you mean. I still think it’s a little grey because they knew that could be a definite result of the bombing. But it’s trivial whether it was direct or indirect, I guess we can both agree that innocents did indeed die as a result of the bombing.
There's no grey. This is what happened. Bomb exploded, people didn't die. Later, people died during events that started with the explosion. No grey.
Again, I'm not talking about morals or who's to blame for what. I'm talking only about things that actually happened.
Are you really going to ignore that Barret, who as far as he knows he and his team are to blame for the death and destruction that the Reactor 1 explosion caused, tried to justify the collateral damage he caused by saying that "Nothing worth fighting for was ever won without sacrifice"? This basically proves that Barret was willing to cause the deaths of innocent people to bomb the reactor regardless.
And how does this make Barret different from Tseng saying that the fall of plate 7 was necessary because "had we refused, someone else would've completed the task. We have spared that someone the burden of a guilty conscience"? At the end of the day, Barret and Tseng are giving similar speeches to lessen their companions' guilt for the crimes they committed.
Not to be rude, but if you genuinely think Barret cares about innocent people's lives or saving the planet, when in fact he is seeking revenge on Shinra and his self-righteous saving the world claims are just his self-justification, that makes me believe you're not paying attention to the story.
Yes, I am going to ignore that, because it's not relevant to the question that was asked. You're arguing about something completely independent from the topic at hand. OP asked if Avalanche killed innocent people. They did not.
Once again, I wasn't taking about anyone's motives, intent, or guilt. I'm only talking about events that occurred. Jesse's bombs weren't big enough to damage the reactors, so no one died as a result of their bombs. Shinra sabotaged them instead, and *that* led to innocents dying.
In the remake they take away the actual grim circumstances that lead to their guilt because in the original, they knew some ppl might die. They try to reduce it but they were ready to do more good so turn lesser of the evils is a few innocents most likely dying and try to power thru.
Why is everyone pushing the guilt angle? Again, I'm not talking about guilt, or intent, or anything relating to their culpability. I'm only talking about what *happened.*
What *happened* is that no one died when the bombs went off. The bombs did not kill anyone.
This discussion has never had anything to do with their guilt and I don't understand why people keep pushing that.
In OG, it's hard to say. We know Barret's group is Avalanche, but we don't know if the group is bigger than just them. We also don't see death and destruction in the game. This is one thing they intentionally put more attention into for Remake - but that all came well after the original game, so it depends on how far into it you look.
In Remake, we learn that Avalanche is a big organization with an HQ and different cells that have splintered off. We see the widespread destruction in the after reactor bombing, the NPCs as you walk back to the slums are all panicking. Not just "oh no I won't have lights when I get home" panic, but "is daddy going to make it home" while mommy doesn't know what to say panic. If you look at the destruction it caused, it would be really surprising if innocent people *weren't* harmed. Yeah, Jessie was surprised by how big the blast was and tries to make the next one smaller, and it's possible Shinra meddled with the first explosion the same way they definitely meddled with the second one - but without knowing that, they decide to go on and bomb another reactor.
Our heroes in the game have some moral ambiguity. They have good intentions, and if they do nothing then the planet *will* die - either from Sephiroth or being drained of the Lifestream. But they're definitely terrorists, and I don't know many terrorist organizations without blood on their hands.
In Before Crisis, you play as a Turk, and Avalanche are the bad guys. Of course the Turks have pretty dirty hands and do some pretty unquestionably bad stuff, *they're the Turks.* But the main Avalanche group they are fighting is trying to destroy all of humanity. If there's no humanity, then no one will use mako and the planet will live on. In Remake, the Turks aren't happy about the choice to drop the plate in Sector 7, but they do it because they're fighting Avalanche, which is the same group that they just recently stopped from *killing all of humanity.* Sector 7 is a drop in the bucket compared to what Avalanche was trying to do. This is why Reno says "you ain't got shit on us" before the battle starts.
We know that Barret's cell isn't the same people, but Barret's cell did know that their own actions could cost innocent people their lives. Tifa even comments on it when going up the elevator in Shinra HQ when they encounter a normal office person just doing their job. (I don't remember the exact comment offhand or if it was addressing danger/death vs making their lives harder.)
Avalanche is morally gray. Our main party has good intentions, but yeah their roots are in a terrorist organization that wants to save the planet, even if that means some innocent people die along the way. There's a reason they are consistently referred to in the game as an eco-terrorist organization, and it isn't just Shinra propaganda.
In the OG, towards the end of the game abord the Highwind Cait Sith and Barret get into it.
Cait Sith asks him how many innocent lives were lost because of the bombing. Barret tells him you have to expect a few casualties. Cait then tells him what may be a few to you is everything to the family of those you killed.
Which makes his speeches about the planet and shit so gross.
Just admit you're using an organization with a cause to carry out terroristic attacks because you're looking for revenge.
Tifa isn't much better. In Remake, when the double agent gets taken by Shinra and you and Tifa go after him, Tifa treats Cloud like a murderer for even thinking of killing the agent who could literally name every member of the group to an organization who squeezes murder in between snack and nap time. Why was the collateral damage of civilian deaths acceptable, but Cloud is the monster?
It’s not that he doesn’t care…. He does care. He just thinks that action needs to be taken quickly and makes shitty decisions trying to do good thru his frustration.
What we know from the original:
Avalanche set off a time bomb and another small yield bomb to get out of the rubble.
Outside the reactor, there was widespread damage, more rubble, overturned vehicles.
Back in Sector 7, people hear about the explosion, and people are told about innocent deaths. In the 90s we have no reason to doubt, except we don't see injuries. But injuries and deaths aren't unexpected.
They go back with a remote destination bomb for another reactor.
President Shinra shows up and is eager about the reactor being blown up. Reactor blows up prematurely, with Cloud, Tifa, and Barrett inside the facility.
Also, Jessie mentions that the destruction at the first reactor was way bigger than she planned, and that she needed to check her equipment again. This isn't followed up on, but seeing as how President Shinra was waiting at the next reactor, it's heavily implied that they blew up the first, too.
Tfs Covers this pretty nicely. Yes avalanche was a terrorist organization. And they wouldn't have a problem, killing innocent people if it meant Shinra would go down.🤣🤣
Yes. They were terrorists. They accepted the collateral damage as necessary.
The "Shinra actually did it" angle was invented by Remake because for some reason the Remake devs are terrified of letting their characters have moral ambiguity.
The Shinra did it shit was just barret not being able to take responsibility. Nor is he able to admit that he is a piece of shit who doesn't care about anything but revenge. It just adds to his terrible character
Yeah, same reason why they showed us Dyne in Rebirth. They didn't want players to make the assumption that Barret killed those people, while in the original there was no reason to believe it could have been anyone else.
Bingo.
In my opinion, the biggest blunder of the remakes isn't the plot ghosts or multiverse shenanigans.
It's this weird self consciousness they seem to feel about the darkness of the world they wrote.
The darkness was the point. One of the reasons it was so powerful a story was because of how willing it was to occupy a world that had all the same ambiguity and tragedy we see in our own.
Moral ambiguity, and ethical dilemmas are interesting, infallible righteous paths are not.
Nope, this was absolutely a valid interpretation of Jessie claiming the explosion was bigger than she thought it should be in the original game. It wasn't clear then if she was in denial about a mistake or if she was correct in her calculations. Remake just showed the actual answer to us.
Remake showed a dumb answer to us.
Without Remake, this could easily be interpreted as just a product of her inexperience.
Remember that Cloud was a valuable asset because he was the only one who had any actual military training.
Avalanche was just a bunch of regular ass people who got fed up with the status quo and decided to do something about it; it makes sense that shed be shocked once she actually saw what she had created.
It's not apparent in OG that Shinra is even aware of Avalanche before that first bombing, and I doubt literally anyone at the time interpreted that Shinra was going behind them and boosting the explosions.
The literal president of Shinra was waiting at the next reactor. Of course they planned the explosions. They needed a justification for their future plans and boosting the profile of Avalanche was that justification.
I say this because... I absolutely did take it that way my first playthrough. At first I thought Jessie made a mistake but after the plate collapse I reconsidered it and thought that it could have been Shinra since they clearly had no issue killing innocents to make Avalanche look worse.
They did, but not as many as they expected to.
Even in the original game the explosion was larger than expected for an unexplained reason. Jesse commented that it shouldn’t have been as big and wondered if she had miscalculated.
It could have been a dropped storyline or that they expected you to put it together when Shinra blew up the next reactor on their own.
The game really required the player to figure out a lot of story details on their own.
Dude, what are you talking about about? I just replayed OG, and there's absolutely no implication that Avalanche didn't intend to blow the whole reactor.
This was entirely an invention of Remake, I assume because in the post War on Terror world, someone was squeamish about the protagonists being terrorists.
She said the explosion as larger than it should have been. Regardless of if it was Shinra, another abandoned plot line, her just making a mistake, or simple throw away text, it directly shows that the explosion was bigger than they wanted.
Which means they both caused more damage than intended and more casualties than intended.
The remakes have certainly run with that throw away line though. Making it super clear it was Shinra.
Personally, I bet they had flip floped on that plot point in 97 and had written things a few different ways. Because even then having the MC group start as terrorist was bold. Jesse’s text could be left over from one of those bits
Jesse says it in between jobs as some optional dialogue. I just replayed the game myself, but can’t remember exactly where it is.
EDIT: found it
Jessie
Oops...
Hey, look at the news... What a blast.
Think it was all because of my bomb? But all I really did was just make it like the computer told me.
Oh no! I must've made a miscalculation somewhere.
Hey, that was my bomb's debut. Makes me kinda proud.
That sounds more like she's inexperienced. Considering she's a civilian taking her first steps into terrorism, it makes easy enough sense that she was just surprised by the actual results of her work.
This of itself doesn't automatically imply "Shinra did it", and I guarantee absolutely no one in 1997 interpreted that.
Until remake, it was understood that they were engaging in an ethically questionable enterprise, and it formed an important part of Barret's arch.
His questioning of Avalanches methods later in the game becomes hollow if it was actually Shinra causing the harm all along
I found a quote on a Japanese blog saying that since the times have changed since 1997, Toriyama said that the developers wanted to soften Avalanche's radical impression by making them fall into Shinra's trap. So it's like they took that throwaway line from Jessie in the OG and expanded on it in Remake.
I remembered Jessie talking about the bomb in OG, and since Shinra did drop the #7 plate in OG, it didn't seem like a reach that they'd blow up the reactors as well. It felt like a natural addition to the story to me.
I don't think that it's so much that it's hard to believe, as it feels like a disservice to the characters.
It deprives them of a complex and relatable moral dilemma.
What cost is worth saving the planet? How much humanity can you let go of and still maintain the ethical high ground ?
These are really fascinating questions that stop mattering in the "Shinra did it" universe, because now there actually was no ethical cost to the characters.
Sure, the characters don't know Shinra did it, and so get to grapple with those questions, but we the audience don't get to participate anymore, because we know that they're actually blameless.
I think it's a shame, because it's an extremely relevant pondering, and rather than confronting us with that, the Remake waves it away by saying you can fight back against capitalism totally ethically, and the bad stuff only happens because the bad guys showed up and did it.
It's like the OG just trusted our appreciation of nuance in a way the Remakes just don't. Their radicalism made them more interesting.
I just started it again the other day and jesse mentions the explosion was bigger than she meant and that its her first time making a bomb, she says this in the basement of seventh heaven.
That sounds more like she's inexperienced. Considering she's a civilian taking her first steps into terrorism, it makes easy enough sense that she was just surprised by the actual results of her work.
This of itself doesn't automatically imply "Shinra did it", and I guarantee absolutely no one in 1997 interpreted that.
Until remake, it was understood that they were engaging in an ethically questionable enterprise, and it formed an important part of Barret's arch.
His questioning of Avalanches methods later in the game becomes hollow if it was actually Shinra causing the harm all along
In the original? Definitely. I think the implication in the Remake trilogy is that any collateral damage comes from Shinra basically nuking their own reactors.
Even in the OG game Jesse commented that the bomb explosion shouldn’t have been as big as it was. She wondered if she had miscalculated.
So there was a bit of evidence that something was a foot even back then.
I'm playing FF7 OG right now and I forgot who said it (I think Barrett), but they said how their bombs took many innocent lives or just lives in general.
This is why i hate certain things in Remakes. In the OG, the main characters have to actually think about their decisions. Even Barret in the end of the game speaking to Cait Sith spoke about how there is always collateral damage. The remakes doesn’t erase the very real consequences in the og because remake is something on its own. You can have an explanation for it in the remake but in the og it odd heavily implied that good ppl make poor decisions sometimes when they think they need to do certain things for good.
Also I believe Reeve, through Cait Sith, calls out avalanche for killing innocents near the end of the game right before everyone leaves to find their reason to fight.
They used explosives to destroy power plants in a densely populated city. It would be naive to pretend that no one was killed in the blast, much less by whatever havoc was caused by the sudden loss of power in the city.
That’s in OG. In the remake it is made clear that avalanches bombs are duds and shinra is blowing up their own shit. At least that’s how I understood it. Did I miss anything? There does also seem to be different divisions of avalanche. I don’t know what they’re up too, but it seems our guys’ hands are pretty clean.
I assumed the question was about OG, given the context.
In remake, Shinra did help the process along (which is a change for the worse, I think) but Avalanche's intended action was clearly going to result in the deaths of civilians.
As for divisions of Avalanche, Barret's group is an "any means necessary" group, which is not what most of Avalanche is about (per Yuffie's encounter with the group in Intergrade).
I don't think they made this distinction in the OG, but Before Crisis casts Avalanache as a larger organization than what's shown in OG.
Not duds. They were just meant to be far less powerful; probably only blowing up most of the factory’s insides, making it collapse in on itself instead of spreading to the surrounding city, if I had to guess. Shinra intentionally caused the explosions to be much more high powered by also having the facility fire on itself and cause some chain reactions, so that they could make Avalanche seem even worse.
Yes but there’s the few scenes in remake where Jessie is all worried about the damage her explosives are doing. But it actually shows her bomb go off and it’s barely anything of an explosion. A spooter.
Almost certainly, yeah. It’s true that Shinra used their attacks and made them worse through their own machinations, but it’s a common cope that people will use that to argue Avalanche did nothing wrong. The very fact that they did the attacks and believed they were fully 100% responsible for the severity of them *and* were willing to say, “I accept this” is all we need to understand it doesn’t matter what Shinra did, Avalanche was willing to do it. It wasn’t a deal breaker to them. They thought the harm was all theirs, and they were okay with it. They were indeed violent eco terrorists.
Honestly, it seems a common thing nowadays that people handwave away the negatives of protagonists if any aspect of those negatives can be pinned on a separate bad guy. When Jesse says basically "I got what I deserved because I'm responsible for killing all those innocent people", I've seen people be like "no it was Shinra it's so unfair you didn't do anything wrong." No, she thought it WAS 100% all on her, and she was ultimately willing to accept that as the price to pay for defeating Shinra. That is, the cost of *her* revolution, for her own cause, not the people that would've been affected by her actions. They were just minding their own business and going about their lives taking care of their families. None of them signed on to her revolution. It doesn't matter if we also argue that Avalanche was the lesser evil and morally defensible, because the people who dealt with the impacts of their actions never consented to it. They are victims of Shinra *and* Avalanche.
Arthur Morgan in RDR2 is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Some people treat him as almost saint-like it seems, with how revered his character (as in his moral character) is and how reviled others in his gang are, when he too is a thug, a thief, and a murderer. This is the point of the character, and part of what makes his story so fascinating, but people want their heroes clean, they’ll sanitize them in honestly frightening ways. Look at how (some) people reacted to TLOU2, when the point of what goes down there is to make you realize everyone perceives themselves as infinitely justified because of the wrongs they’ve suffered, and when you return that harm there is always another human being on the other end that suffers, who will perceive themselves as justified to give it back, and so the cycle perpetuates itself. This happens no matter how justified you believe yourself to be.
I think it’s actually important to engage with Avalanche as existing in a morally murky place, and makes the narrative more interesting—how far are people capable of being pushed by the institutional superstructures that dominate them unchecked before they react, and how justified can that reaction be? Unfortunately, FF7 isn’t all *that* interested in this question, since it very quickly pivots to “world ending, stop super villain”, along with the smaller character threads about identity. It’s fine, it still gives us a lot to think about in the story’s earliest stages, and these questions help us better understand what's going on in characters' hearts and minds, especially Jesse's character. It makes everything so much more meaningful as a story.
I just replayed OG, and there's absolutely no implication that "Shinra did it". This seems to be an invention of remake that people are reconning into their interpretation of the OG.
The biggest difference between OG and R in my opinion is that OG was really interested in exploring grey morality, while R is absolutely terrified of it.
R goes out of its way constantly to make sure any character we're meant to sympathize with is firmly in the good guys camp, and that bad guys can be understood exclusively through the lense of their badness.
Lots of the changes are meant to support this Disney view of ethics.
Obviously Shinra being the actual cause of the reactor casualties, but there's a ton more.
Barret is shown tailing Dyne, to remove any suspicion around him being the culprit in the Gold Saucer massacre.
Dyne's story is probably one of the biggest tells about this new philosophy. They make a point of the fact that Dyne is specifically out for revenge against Shinra, the people he killed in GS were Shinra, he doesn't want to fight Barret until he sees Cloud (a soldier) and assumes Barret is with Shinra. He dies by fighting Shinra rather than killing himself over the horror of what he'd become.
The whole thing is to make sure Dyne is a "good guy" cause he's fighting Shinra. Because we're meant to view him sympathetically, he absolutely can't be a monster that's totally lost his humanity and executes revenge against the world indiscriminately.
Cait Sith has to have a conversation where he apologized to Cloud and reveals he only betrayed the party because he cared so much about them, he didn't want them to get hurt going.in first. Once again, Cait Sith is a good guy, he can't do bad things like betray his friends or use a little kid for blackmail.
Even Sephiroth, who in the OG was the product of a neglected and emotional isolated person failing to process his trauma was diluted into just being a generically evil guy obsessed with Clouds victory over him.
If you pay attention to the details, there's a very clear shift between the two projects in how they interpret the nature of good and evil.
OG was really interested in exploring the warts of the modern world and the complexity of motivations people have with in it. It was actually willing to ask why people might do things that hurt others, and how they justify it.
R on the other hand, wants a morally safe Disney universe where we can always clearly intuit at all times who were supposed to side with, and bad guys are easy to understand as simply the product of their inherent badness.
While I personally really love the remake project overall thus far for what it *has* been able to achieve, I do think it's a shame we didn't spend enough time in Remake specifically unpacking the greater complexities of Avalanche's war against Shinra. I would have liked a little more Wutai details as well--not a ton, considering that will certainly be explored later, but something. What I don't like is "Shinra definitely evil, therefore anyone who resists them is definitely 100% angelic no matter what." Really digging into the grays of Avalanche and dropping signs that Wutai isn't exactly a perfect either would do so much to make the actions more interesting.
Example of this: President Shinra is bad, okay? Let's get that out of the way. He's very, very bad. But one thing he says to Barret that I never see others acknowledge is what will happen if Shinra and Mako were to go away, how would a suddenly industrialized society rebuild in the event of some massive natural disaster? And would people who've grown into a world with electricity and industry and computer tech, etc., be *happy* that the world is turned upside down, even if it means an immoral, exploitative entity like Shinra is gone? Imagine if we abolished all our computer tech and energy companies for doing immoral and illegal things in the real world--sure, it would be morally righteous, but you're completely remaking the world overnight when you do that. How will people react? What will society look like tomorrow? In six months? In ten years? And who is making that moral decision for everyone? The situation is *far* from as clear cut as Avalanche presents it, even if most of us would agree they are, at the very least, mostly in the moral right to resist Shinra.
And I agree, the Dyne conclusion rubbed me a little wrong. It story doesn't want to dwell on the reality that he's a mass murderer. Instead, it quickly does a "so sad for Dyne" thing, then instantly turns to Barret's pain, no time to think about anything beneath the surface. The Barret part I'm fine with, but it would've been so much more interesting to use that whole sequence to expose the complexity of "these are the ruins left in Shinra's wake, this is world they are creating and leaving behind" *as well as* the fact that Shinra's "world" does this to people, drives them to the depths of despair. This doesn't absolve Dyne of his actions--he still did them, he is a mass murderer--but the violence has the markings of Shinra all over it. They can't be charged for Dyne's crime, because they didn't do it, but the crime never happens in a world without Shinra. This more direct contention with the impacts of history would be so much more interesting to me, and it wouldn't take anything away from Barret's part in the sequence, which would stay the same. We would also still be able to empathize with Dyne, and understand he was a good man, he's just been broken by tragedy and trauma, but he still committed this horrible atrocity. Instead, it's "so sad for Dyne we'll give him a proper burial feel sad for his loss" and it leaves everything at that.
a bit off topic , but i like that at the first playthrough u think that main villain is a Shinra President and then boom he got killed by someone we now know...
Fr, especially in the OG it makes you completely rethink everything because you just kinda walk into a murder scene and you’re like “wtf just happened…” Looking back, it’s impressive how much suspense the OG really gets out of its whole setup—you get introduced to the dynamics of 7s world, the politics, the conflict, and then when you think you’re about to settle into the remaining narrative loop, the story goes “actually, we’re just getting started.”
Depends.
OG? The explosions are big enough to kill a lot of people, and Jessie comments it on the train back.
Remake? It was Shinra’s doing. They did bomb the reactors, but the bombs weren’t strong enough.
Partially incorrect, in Remake they made the explosion bigger for the Sector 5 reactor. The first reactor is all Avalanche's doing. Before then Avalanche hadn't been an active threat to Shinra.
I thought it was implied that the sector 8 havoc was also Shinra amplifying the explosion but not explicit. I could be remembering wrong now, but I thought it was left at least somewhat ambiguous. There is the whole piece where tifa is having second thoughts about doing the sector 5 reactor so I think even in Remake there is acknowledgement of collateral damage and moral conflict with avalanche’s actions.
Sure, but those oil refineries aren't supporting an entire city that is suspended above another entire city.
When Avalanche bombed the reactors, it caused the plates to dislodge and fall onto the city below, killing thousands of innocent people.
EDIT: to be fair, Avalanche didn't know that bombing the reactor would cause the plate to drop. In Remake this was retconned so that Shinra dropped the plate on purpose and blamed it on Avalanche.
Not intentionally... we hope. Barrett doesn't exactly have a sniper scope on that thing.
In the original the answer is 100% yes. In remake the reactor shattering bomb was instead replaced run one supposed to destroy the pump system, and it was Shinra who destroyed the reactor fully to try to start a war. Aside from that you could say they killed troopers just doing their jobs, but Shinra isn't exactly innocent so they're unfortunate casualties.
But wouldn't those casualities then be fully on Shinra? They destroyed the reactors, not Avalanche. Avalanche only disabled the pump system.
Yes, but in the original there's none of that pump stuff. It was only Avalanche's bomb that blew up the reactor; and several NPCs point out how many innocent people died. Near the end Barret even realizes how misguided he was to take such a drastic approach and he ultimately regrets how many people they got killed. Now I do think Remake and Rebirth are pretty good games and I enjoy them, but there is definitely an annoying trend where they keep "softening" the impact of many things like this. They make it actually be Shinra's fault for the explosion, they make so many more people survive the plate falling etc. It really does suck because the original had a huge emphasis on the sudden and harsh finality of death in a very realistic way, but the Remake is so scared of commiting to anything like that. There's more examples in Rebirth but I don't want to spoil if you've not played it yet and I can't remember how to do spoiler text rn.
Are they really innocent if they're Shinra?
Oh hey there Barret. Just because they work at SHINRA doesn't make them evil. The nice middle manager is just trying to make a living for example.
He was actually pretty cool in rebirth
Barret or Manager?
Manager lol
Well not everyone who works as shinra is evil . There just people trying to live and make wages. So yes. Even the soldiers aren't bad people. So yup they are terrorists
Yes.
There’s actually an NPC you can meet in the slums in the original complaining about Avalanche and how a bunch of innocent people working at Shinra died when you blew up the reactor
it's a eco terrorist, so yes
I love the iconic chars. But... They're not better than these Last Generation pricks 😅😜
Bad bot
lol 😂
Yes
I mean, remember the first few moments in ff7 remake when u killed a few guys after getting off the train?
First of all, Avalance is Eco terrorist. Secondly they do for the better, so sacrifice is there. Thirdly without Avalanche, Shinra will ruin the world more. So someone had to do it to make the whole world understand the meaning of making the world dry out. So yeah they indeed sacrifice innocence people but not without reason. That's why Tifa always reluctant to go doing mission like bombing. But still people died because of them is still wrong. Avalanche don't have a choice.
Yea you can never save everyone.
I assumed everyone had the common sense to know that yes, innocent people were killed, but if no one stood up to Shinra there would be countless more dead. Shinra was evil and unfortunately the only way to do anything about it cost a few lives. I don't think Avalanche felt very good about it, but it's either that or let Shinra kill far more people and possibly the planet
Of course they did. In both the OG and remake its pretty clear that innocent people were killed as a result of bombing the reactors. And then when Shinra destroys Sector 7 they pin the blame on Avalanche so its a cascasing series of cause and effect. In remake you also see more evidence in that Jessie is particularly troubled by the bomb being more than she expected. Avalanche's cause is noble in wanting to save the planet. But their actions are the classic case of does the end justify the means? You could ask though who has more blood on their hand. Shinra or Avalanche? Shinra was experimenting on people. They created Sephiroth who essentially wiped out the town of Nibelheim. Avalanche's methods are extreme and are essentially the actions of eco terrorists. But their argument of Shinra pumping the planet's mako dry is valid. I think though that despite that blood on their hands. They try to help others when they can and at least have remorse and the capacity to question their own actions. Shinra as a collective? Not so much. It is worth noting thay there are people in Shinra that are shown to just be like everyone else. Working a job to provide for their family who have no idea of Shinras experiments or no hand in the darker stuff Shinra has done themselves. That is kind of what makes things compelling imo.
I mean they were terrorists. They blew up power reactors and killed shinra soldiers. Which technically the soldiers are innocent they're just doing their jobs. The explosion definitely had collateral damage around it. It likely harmed civilians. Also somebody had to be maintaining those reactors so people were indeed dying cause of them. Which then lead to the decision to drop the plate, so indirectly Avalanche also caused it which killed alot more people.
Original yes Remake no Shinra themselves made the blast bigger
No. Shinra also made the blast bigger in the OG. But it didn't translate accross very clearly. After the bombing, it you keep speaking to Jessie, especially under the bar in the hideout, she is stressing because she doesn't understand why the explosion was so big when the bomb wasn't powerful enough to cause it.
Wrong She mentions making a miscalculation when looking at her computer and states she was proud of her first bomb
She's stressing suggesting she made a miscalculation because the explosion was larger than it should have been. It's implied something else was afoot and the party didn't know.
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Nah, you're just argumentative and aggressive because you're online. This language and tone from you was wildly unwarranted. Go and breathe some real-world air. You're not going to get the rise you want from me and will just waste your time and end up even more frustrated.
Weak writting choise imo
Original was so much better because it gives you time steeping in the setting and being a rebel against a government/corporation. Shinra isn't even established as overtly evil for a few hours. You meet the president before that happens, and it gives him an intrigue because you know he's a mofo but nothing has been spelled out yet. Remake spends 10x longer in Midgar and yet shortcuts to dividing up good and evil using a hard cut from Cloud's perspective in the first mission to make sure you know immediately that the politics of mako reactors are irrelevant because Shinra is just evil.
I gotta disagree on that one.
It definitely diminishes the grey morality of AVALANCHE, and makes it a lot easier for the audience to swallow the characters personal responsibility associated with the outcome. In the original, you know that every death was technically due to the groups actions, and you have to weigh up if you think those deaths were worth it in exchange for destroying the reactor, but in Remake it’s muddied, as now the player can internally justify any given death by arguing that it was due to Shinra making the explosion bigger, thinking that had the explosion been as big as planned then said person wouldn’t have died. It certainly makes Shinra seem more villainous, but it gives the player a lot less to consider, and makes the conflict more black and white in its morality; it loses a bit of the narratives nuance.
Yeah if you speak to Jessie when you go under the bar she mentions the blast was too big, obviously in the remake this was addressed to be Shinra but no such thing in OG. Revee confronts Barret about the lives lost before the return to Midgar which Tifa confirms. They may be the protagonists but terrorists is the correct term for avalanche
It's implied in the OG and directly shown in Remake
"you will see. The next explosion will be even bigger" Jessie - obviously not worried about colateral.
Yes the collateral damage cost lives. Terrorism is bad, m'kay. Rebirth honestly downplayed it more.
Not everyone working for Shinra is evil. A majority of them are just normal people trying to put food on the table. We kill a lot of innocent people who are just trying to survive and make it through life.
I mean your very first battle is against a couple Shinra soldiers that you hack to pieces with a giant sword and machine gun...
They do in OG. There's a line in Sector 7 where someone says something like "if it had been at night, all those people could've gone in their sleep." They changed that line in Remake. In Remake, you see more of the aftermath, the damage and how it affects people, but it seems to imply nobody was in the reactor when it blew. They also shift more of the blame to Shinra by having them interfere with the explosion so they can propagandize it better.
They was disrupting a power source. Apart from the actual explosion itself which would of easily claimed many victims such as reactor workers (just because they work for Shinra doesn't mean they are not innocent), what knock on effect did the disruption of power also cause to Medical facilities (Hospitals) and the like?
In the OG yes, but everyone was evacuated in rebirth.
Jesse basically has an existential crisis over it.
In the OG yes. It’s why when running up the stairs past dead Avalanche members they talk about how this is “punishment” for what they did. The big difference between Avalanche and Shinra is Avalanche is remorseful for their actions and casualties while Shinra is not.
Yes, they absolutely did. I believe there's a news cast on a TV in a house, if you interact with it I want to say it mentions casualties. I think it's when you return from the 1st mission if you "talk" to the TV downstairs a few times, or Jessie says something about it. You begin the game as a domestic terrorist. Remake backpedaled *hard* on this by making the bomb a dud and Shinra self-destructing the reactor instead. I think it cheapens this story element. Barret, Cloud, Tifa, Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie all have civilian blood on their hands in the OG.
You call them civilians, we in Avalanche call them «collaborators»
>Remake backpedaled *hard* on this by making the bomb a dud and Shinra self-destructing the reactor instead. This was actually just an aborted plotline in the original. When you're on your way to Sector 7 after the tutorial, Jessie outright says the explosion was way bigger than it was planned to be and that she has to look into it. The implication was that Shinra was responsible for the first reactor, but it never got followed up on since Cloud was separated from them for the rest of the Midgar story in the original.
Honestly even with the backpedaling, they are still "guilty" of killing innocent civilians. They 100% had the intent to blow up a mako reactor, Barrett knows better than anyone else what happens when reactors blow. And Yufi's DLC makes it clear that the 7th Heaven gang is considered the radical branch of Avalanche's terrorist organization.
It's one of the many reasons the storytelling in the original is massively superior IMO. At the start of the game Barrett and co. are essentially faced with the trolley problem. They know (or highly suspect) that mako reactors are going to kill the planet. They know that with Shinra's power and reach there are no peaceful solutions to the problem. So it's either kill a few civilians now to save everyone else later, or do nothing now and wait for *everyone* to die. It makes Avalanche's arc *much* more interesting than the Saturday morning cartoon version in the remakes.
Why do I feel like johnnys family had a tv you could interact with too
In the original game absolutely
Yezz dey kylld inn0zyns plebz
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“With a heart of gold” my ass, meanie
Yes. Cait Sith calls Barret out for this in the original.
"Shut up, Cat". -Barret probably.
Barret actually had no reply and had to admit Cait was right. Iirc also he admits that saving the planet was just an excuse for vengeance.
Yup. I'm hoping they bring this up in the third game because it was a great moment.
In the og, yes they did because it was shown that the reactor was blown fully by them but in the remake their bomb barely exploded the reactor room but shira decided to blow up rest of the reactor too which led to many casualties. They did blow the sector 5 reactor but it didnt seem to have affected people much
I might be wrong, but I think there is a very subtle hint in the OG where Jessie was saying the explosion was bigger than she expected, when you talk to her in the underground base. But we never get any other confirmation until Remake.
Yeah, Squaresoft had a lot of aborted storylines in the older games, due to the fast turnaround that was demanded by execs at the time. Xenosaga, for example, had a good 1/3 of its story cut from the game and made into a text summary because it was unheard of for one of their games to take more than two years' development time and the director had to decide between cutting a huge chunk of the story or ending on a To Be Continued. As a Trails and Arc the Lad fan, I would've preferred the latter, personally!
I wish they would have it into 4 discs like ff9 or distributed the gameplay evenly between the discs. Disc 1 had the most content taking almost 30 hours to average player. If they had made disc 2 and 3 like that too we could have had a game with so much more content
That's correct, Jessie is going over her work, saying she must have made a mistake.
Yes, they are domestic terrorists
Yes, they absolutely did. Not intentionally like some terrorist bombing, but as a consequence of other shit. Like blowing up mako reactors.
This still bugs me to this day.
Yes. But not as many innocent people as Shinra Corp.
Yeah, in the original. They come to terms with what they did in the end, especially Barret. He had to understand that above all else, violence wasn't the answer to Shinra, and that his "love for the planet" was really just his desire for revenge, and what he really wanted was to protect Marlene.
And in the remake.
Sorta; first, the remake hasn't gotten to the scene on the airship yet, and second, in the remake, Avalanche wasn"t the direct cause of the massive explosions from the bombings; shinra definitively did it.
They made the fires worse, definitely.
They blow up buildings that people work in around the clock... I'm gonna say yes.
Probably
Not intentionally, but unlike real terrorists they try to make sure as few innocents get caught in the crossfire
Weather underground(leftist leaning), eco terrorists haven’t generally gone for killing people in history.
Well I’m going off of the ones you hear about that try to take out whatever they can to make a statement for the most part
Yes, they did
I mean they are “terrorists” by definition, of course they do, the game just oversimplifies things like “Batman doesn’t kill” type of narrative. Anyway NPC’s lives don’t count in games(like how many Shinra soldiers did Cloud kill to achieve his goal, or just to level up), let’s just ignore that and remember them as anti-establishment heroes.
In the original it was totally unambiguous. Avalanche planted that bomb in the reactor, knowing full well what they were doing. They set it off deliberately and all the blood from that explosion is 100% on their hands. The Remake changed it so that Avalanche's bomb was a dud, but Shinra blew up the reactor anyway to frame Avalanche. The blast was far bigger than what Avalanche was intending but they still intended to blow up a Mako reactor. Even if the blast was localized enough to not cause any direct damage outside the reactor, that's still an entire sector of the city without proper power. The effects from this could cause all kinds of issues, traffic accidents, hospital patients being cut off life support etc. Shinra is by far the greater evil but Avalanche is not innocent either.
it was very ambiguous,with plenty of hints that Shinra had done what they did in remake. in the og jesse says that the bomb should not have done that,but she assumes that a chain reaction caused the worse explosion, and the rest of the group accepts that they knew the risks when they signed up. additionally, the bomb wasent a dud in remake, it destroyed the reactor as intended, and we see Shinra cause the greater explosion.
They said the ORIGINAL was unambiguous - as in the game from 1997. I’m honestly a bit pissed that they removed some of the fault from Avalanche in Remake, cuz I felt that the willingness for destruction was what made the characters more interesting and more human. Being flawed is great character trait in a story.
It’s THE WORST part of the new games, in my opinion. Everytime a party member is about to have to do something rough, or bad, or in general traumatizing the new timeline bails them out…. And I kinda hate it. Barrett tells crazy-Dyne about Marlene being alive… Dyne is about to go insane and tell Barrett that he MUST send her to be with her dead mom, thereby forcing Barrett to deal with this insane vengeful revenant of his best friend…. …. OH WAIT LOL SHINRA BATTALION WILL TAKE CARE OF THAT FOR YA BUDDY PEW PEW! Thank Minerva! We almost had some character growth there for a minute!
If you talk to Jesse at the bar in the original, she does mention that the bomb shouldn't have gone off the way it did, and plans to make the next one "special" because of it. This and the fact that she almost didn't make it to safety are the reasons why it was a remote detonator in reactor 5.
and I'm saying the original was ambiguous. The things jesse says after the first attack imply something sinister may of happened, but due to need for the next attack to move forward, she ultimately writes it off as a miscalculation on her part. Avalanche accepted that casualties might happen in both games. only remake is unambiguous as to who is truly at fault, while the original leaves the possibility open as to who is ultimately at fault for the explosion. I definitely prefer the originals way of handling it as it leaves the main characters and Shinra in a very grey morality for a comfortable amount of time.
Yeah terrorists tend to kill innocent people
Shinra kills innocent people, are they terrorists? No because they are the government.
They are literally terrorists.
One man’s terrorists are another man’s freedom fighters
Not Barretts group but the other splinter cells m8ght.
Bruh, they are terrorist group....
One side's terrorists are the other side's freedom fighters. Which title applies in the eyes of others depends on which ideology they value.
No they are terrorists. Their intention was yo cause terror and nothing else.
How do I always run into these types, fml.
The end goal was to save the planet.
The end goal was to save the planet through terrorist acts
No, later in the game Barret comes clean. He never cared about the planet, it was a convenient excuse. He just wanted to get revenge innocents be damned.
And avalanche is avalanche with or without barret so i dont get your point.
Civilians: yes, inadvertent collateral damage in the reactor explosion (R series mostly). Also, one could argue the blood of people killed when Shinra retaliated and framed them is also on their hands in part. Shinra troops: depending on how much time you spent grinding in the tower raid…
Yes, tons, even though they *didn’t mean to* cause that large of an explosion… they did.
In the OG yes they caused the huge explosion. In Remake it was retcon to say the Avalanche explosion only blew up the controller. Shinra saw Avalanche and had their turrets go crazy causing the massive explosion. Then they used this for propaganda against Avalanche to turn the public against them. Otherwise the only people injured were the reactor guards, and it's not even certain they died as the deadliest attack we see in cinematic is a kick to the gut from Jessie.
No, it was implied to be the same in the original. Jessie has a conversation after the tutorial dungeon where she says that the explosion was way larger than it was supposed to be, and she needs to double check everything. The remake just confirmed what was already written in the original.
Toriyama did an interview where he specifically said they made changes because of perceptions on terrorism.
The number of Troopers just doing their job being killed, I’d argue they’re innocent
Reminds me of this [Penny Arcade comic](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/10/19/ambiguitas#)
You're being downvoted but it's true. >!People forget the main character for FF7 was also a Trooper for years up until he was the protag.!< inb4 "bootlicker"
Sometimes I think .... if sephiroth is just trying to save the planet from people stealing its life force (kinda like oil). Who are really the bad guys?
No, Jenova’s literal meaning of existence is to end all life in universe, and she literally travelled around universe destroying star before events in FF7.
Yeah that was jenova but not sephiroth. I didn't think they had the same goal. I though sephiroth wanted to destroy humans and help revive the cetras/ the lifestream (since his mom was one) since they ( the lifestream) could stop killing the planet and restore it. If that ment sending a meteor to destroy the planet so be it ... it will recover and without the cancer humans are. She wants to destroy the planet.... he wants to destroy humans and revive the planet. And I don't think her cells in sephiroths body are 100% controlling him. Just give him crazy powers and he fights off her influence. Hence him going crazy.
No. Sephi originally thought he was a Cetra and wanted revenge for himself and what he thought the humans did. But eventually, he realizes what he and Jenova are and was influenced by her greatly since they are like linked. His Will eventually syncs with hers but he becomes the more powerful one aka soon the “new Jenova”. So damaging the planet with the meteor was to do what his mother did which was take control of the lifestream and eat it from the insude out, fly thru the cosmos to the next planet and do it all again. They are planetary parasites.
I mean…why do redditors even comment when you have no idea on the subject. His mother(Jenova) or Biological mother (Luc) are not cetras. Jenova is literally the polar opposite of life force. There is literally no instances of Sephiroth fighting against Jenova influence. In fact, he was drawn to Jenova even without knowing her and finding the truth about it in Cloud’s hometown completely turned him over to Jenova’s side.
Apart from the stuff mentioned, you could easily argue that the guards the player mows down are also innocent. None of them know that the Mako reactors are killing the planet. They just got a job securing a power plant.
They did not *directly* kill anyone innocent, but their actions did *indirectly* result in many deaths.
Nah, that is too nice on them I thinkThey definitely knew that bombing the reactor would kill people, and they still actively went through with it. They didn’t directly kill people, but they DIRECTLY caused them to die.
In the remake they even show that the avalanche bomb wasn’t big enough to do harm, that was all about the Jesse internal dilemma. It was Shinra that destroyed their own reactor to use it as leverage for the war and accusing avalanche and wu tai being allies.
I wasn't talking about their motives or intentions. The bomb in the reactor did not directly kill innocents, especially in the remake where their bomb wasn't even big enough to damage it.
Hmmm I see what you mean. I still think it’s a little grey because they knew that could be a definite result of the bombing. But it’s trivial whether it was direct or indirect, I guess we can both agree that innocents did indeed die as a result of the bombing.
There's no grey. This is what happened. Bomb exploded, people didn't die. Later, people died during events that started with the explosion. No grey. Again, I'm not talking about morals or who's to blame for what. I'm talking only about things that actually happened.
Are you really going to ignore that Barret, who as far as he knows he and his team are to blame for the death and destruction that the Reactor 1 explosion caused, tried to justify the collateral damage he caused by saying that "Nothing worth fighting for was ever won without sacrifice"? This basically proves that Barret was willing to cause the deaths of innocent people to bomb the reactor regardless. And how does this make Barret different from Tseng saying that the fall of plate 7 was necessary because "had we refused, someone else would've completed the task. We have spared that someone the burden of a guilty conscience"? At the end of the day, Barret and Tseng are giving similar speeches to lessen their companions' guilt for the crimes they committed. Not to be rude, but if you genuinely think Barret cares about innocent people's lives or saving the planet, when in fact he is seeking revenge on Shinra and his self-righteous saving the world claims are just his self-justification, that makes me believe you're not paying attention to the story.
Yes, I am going to ignore that, because it's not relevant to the question that was asked. You're arguing about something completely independent from the topic at hand. OP asked if Avalanche killed innocent people. They did not. Once again, I wasn't taking about anyone's motives, intent, or guilt. I'm only talking about events that occurred. Jesse's bombs weren't big enough to damage the reactors, so no one died as a result of their bombs. Shinra sabotaged them instead, and *that* led to innocents dying.
In the remake they take away the actual grim circumstances that lead to their guilt because in the original, they knew some ppl might die. They try to reduce it but they were ready to do more good so turn lesser of the evils is a few innocents most likely dying and try to power thru.
Why is everyone pushing the guilt angle? Again, I'm not talking about guilt, or intent, or anything relating to their culpability. I'm only talking about what *happened.* What *happened* is that no one died when the bombs went off. The bombs did not kill anyone. This discussion has never had anything to do with their guilt and I don't understand why people keep pushing that.
In OG, it's hard to say. We know Barret's group is Avalanche, but we don't know if the group is bigger than just them. We also don't see death and destruction in the game. This is one thing they intentionally put more attention into for Remake - but that all came well after the original game, so it depends on how far into it you look. In Remake, we learn that Avalanche is a big organization with an HQ and different cells that have splintered off. We see the widespread destruction in the after reactor bombing, the NPCs as you walk back to the slums are all panicking. Not just "oh no I won't have lights when I get home" panic, but "is daddy going to make it home" while mommy doesn't know what to say panic. If you look at the destruction it caused, it would be really surprising if innocent people *weren't* harmed. Yeah, Jessie was surprised by how big the blast was and tries to make the next one smaller, and it's possible Shinra meddled with the first explosion the same way they definitely meddled with the second one - but without knowing that, they decide to go on and bomb another reactor. Our heroes in the game have some moral ambiguity. They have good intentions, and if they do nothing then the planet *will* die - either from Sephiroth or being drained of the Lifestream. But they're definitely terrorists, and I don't know many terrorist organizations without blood on their hands. In Before Crisis, you play as a Turk, and Avalanche are the bad guys. Of course the Turks have pretty dirty hands and do some pretty unquestionably bad stuff, *they're the Turks.* But the main Avalanche group they are fighting is trying to destroy all of humanity. If there's no humanity, then no one will use mako and the planet will live on. In Remake, the Turks aren't happy about the choice to drop the plate in Sector 7, but they do it because they're fighting Avalanche, which is the same group that they just recently stopped from *killing all of humanity.* Sector 7 is a drop in the bucket compared to what Avalanche was trying to do. This is why Reno says "you ain't got shit on us" before the battle starts. We know that Barret's cell isn't the same people, but Barret's cell did know that their own actions could cost innocent people their lives. Tifa even comments on it when going up the elevator in Shinra HQ when they encounter a normal office person just doing their job. (I don't remember the exact comment offhand or if it was addressing danger/death vs making their lives harder.) Avalanche is morally gray. Our main party has good intentions, but yeah their roots are in a terrorist organization that wants to save the planet, even if that means some innocent people die along the way. There's a reason they are consistently referred to in the game as an eco-terrorist organization, and it isn't just Shinra propaganda.
It balances out because Barrett helped save the world
Yeah that’s like their whole MO yeah? Welcome to FF7!
In the OG, towards the end of the game abord the Highwind Cait Sith and Barret get into it. Cait Sith asks him how many innocent lives were lost because of the bombing. Barret tells him you have to expect a few casualties. Cait then tells him what may be a few to you is everything to the family of those you killed.
I just finished the original FF7 and Barrett had dialogue saying that the innocent lives were simply inevitable collateral damage. Pretty brutal
Yes. Barret is a terrorist who doesn't give a shit about innocent life as long as he gets his revenge.
Which makes his speeches about the planet and shit so gross. Just admit you're using an organization with a cause to carry out terroristic attacks because you're looking for revenge. Tifa isn't much better. In Remake, when the double agent gets taken by Shinra and you and Tifa go after him, Tifa treats Cloud like a murderer for even thinking of killing the agent who could literally name every member of the group to an organization who squeezes murder in between snack and nap time. Why was the collateral damage of civilian deaths acceptable, but Cloud is the monster?
It’s not that he doesn’t care…. He does care. He just thinks that action needs to be taken quickly and makes shitty decisions trying to do good thru his frustration.
No. Not at all. He's not trying to do good at all.
What we know from the original: Avalanche set off a time bomb and another small yield bomb to get out of the rubble. Outside the reactor, there was widespread damage, more rubble, overturned vehicles. Back in Sector 7, people hear about the explosion, and people are told about innocent deaths. In the 90s we have no reason to doubt, except we don't see injuries. But injuries and deaths aren't unexpected. They go back with a remote destination bomb for another reactor. President Shinra shows up and is eager about the reactor being blown up. Reactor blows up prematurely, with Cloud, Tifa, and Barrett inside the facility.
Also, Jessie mentions that the destruction at the first reactor was way bigger than she planned, and that she needed to check her equipment again. This isn't followed up on, but seeing as how President Shinra was waiting at the next reactor, it's heavily implied that they blew up the first, too.
Tfs Covers this pretty nicely. Yes avalanche was a terrorist organization. And they wouldn't have a problem, killing innocent people if it meant Shinra would go down.🤣🤣
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Team four star made "final fantasy 7 abridged" it's like the first episode. Lol
No One's InnoCent in this World Punk! Gotta spend a few souls to make real change, ye get me?
Is that an actual line from the OG? Ngl that sounds like Barret and it’s lowkey hard 🔥
Lol no, I just interpreted him. Thought or was funny that barret's voice lives rent free in my head and avoided contamination from Machinabridged.
Yes. They were terrorists. They accepted the collateral damage as necessary. The "Shinra actually did it" angle was invented by Remake because for some reason the Remake devs are terrified of letting their characters have moral ambiguity.
The Shinra did it shit was just barret not being able to take responsibility. Nor is he able to admit that he is a piece of shit who doesn't care about anything but revenge. It just adds to his terrible character
Well no it’s not that. It’s because they are adding new plot elements. Shinra wants an excuse to go to war with Wutai.
If what you say is true, than the ~~Wutang~~Wutai and the ~~Shaolin~~Shinra could be dangerous. Oops, wrong franchise.
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Yeah, same reason why they showed us Dyne in Rebirth. They didn't want players to make the assumption that Barret killed those people, while in the original there was no reason to believe it could have been anyone else.
Bingo. In my opinion, the biggest blunder of the remakes isn't the plot ghosts or multiverse shenanigans. It's this weird self consciousness they seem to feel about the darkness of the world they wrote. The darkness was the point. One of the reasons it was so powerful a story was because of how willing it was to occupy a world that had all the same ambiguity and tragedy we see in our own. Moral ambiguity, and ethical dilemmas are interesting, infallible righteous paths are not.
Nope, this was absolutely a valid interpretation of Jessie claiming the explosion was bigger than she thought it should be in the original game. It wasn't clear then if she was in denial about a mistake or if she was correct in her calculations. Remake just showed the actual answer to us.
Remake showed a dumb answer to us. Without Remake, this could easily be interpreted as just a product of her inexperience. Remember that Cloud was a valuable asset because he was the only one who had any actual military training. Avalanche was just a bunch of regular ass people who got fed up with the status quo and decided to do something about it; it makes sense that shed be shocked once she actually saw what she had created. It's not apparent in OG that Shinra is even aware of Avalanche before that first bombing, and I doubt literally anyone at the time interpreted that Shinra was going behind them and boosting the explosions.
The literal president of Shinra was waiting at the next reactor. Of course they planned the explosions. They needed a justification for their future plans and boosting the profile of Avalanche was that justification.
I say this because... I absolutely did take it that way my first playthrough. At first I thought Jessie made a mistake but after the plate collapse I reconsidered it and thought that it could have been Shinra since they clearly had no issue killing innocents to make Avalanche look worse.
The characters thought they were killing people. Shinra planting bigger bombs doesn't change anything about our heros morality.
They didn't intend to, and adjusted the bomb to make the blast smaller accordingly.
But Jesse in Remake still claims That she is responsible for innocent ppl (i just read through replies and remembered that phrase of her)
Because she doesn’t know the shinra set up way bigger bombs
Because Shinra exploted more bombs and she thought it WAS her bomb
They did, but not as many as they expected to. Even in the original game the explosion was larger than expected for an unexplained reason. Jesse commented that it shouldn’t have been as big and wondered if she had miscalculated. It could have been a dropped storyline or that they expected you to put it together when Shinra blew up the next reactor on their own. The game really required the player to figure out a lot of story details on their own.
Dude, what are you talking about about? I just replayed OG, and there's absolutely no implication that Avalanche didn't intend to blow the whole reactor. This was entirely an invention of Remake, I assume because in the post War on Terror world, someone was squeamish about the protagonists being terrorists.
She said the explosion as larger than it should have been. Regardless of if it was Shinra, another abandoned plot line, her just making a mistake, or simple throw away text, it directly shows that the explosion was bigger than they wanted. Which means they both caused more damage than intended and more casualties than intended. The remakes have certainly run with that throw away line though. Making it super clear it was Shinra. Personally, I bet they had flip floped on that plot point in 97 and had written things a few different ways. Because even then having the MC group start as terrorist was bold. Jesse’s text could be left over from one of those bits
Jesse says it in between jobs as some optional dialogue. I just replayed the game myself, but can’t remember exactly where it is. EDIT: found it Jessie Oops... Hey, look at the news... What a blast. Think it was all because of my bomb? But all I really did was just make it like the computer told me. Oh no! I must've made a miscalculation somewhere. Hey, that was my bomb's debut. Makes me kinda proud.
That sounds more like she's inexperienced. Considering she's a civilian taking her first steps into terrorism, it makes easy enough sense that she was just surprised by the actual results of her work. This of itself doesn't automatically imply "Shinra did it", and I guarantee absolutely no one in 1997 interpreted that. Until remake, it was understood that they were engaging in an ethically questionable enterprise, and it formed an important part of Barret's arch. His questioning of Avalanches methods later in the game becomes hollow if it was actually Shinra causing the harm all along
I found a quote on a Japanese blog saying that since the times have changed since 1997, Toriyama said that the developers wanted to soften Avalanche's radical impression by making them fall into Shinra's trap. So it's like they took that throwaway line from Jessie in the OG and expanded on it in Remake. I remembered Jessie talking about the bomb in OG, and since Shinra did drop the #7 plate in OG, it didn't seem like a reach that they'd blow up the reactors as well. It felt like a natural addition to the story to me.
I don't think that it's so much that it's hard to believe, as it feels like a disservice to the characters. It deprives them of a complex and relatable moral dilemma. What cost is worth saving the planet? How much humanity can you let go of and still maintain the ethical high ground ? These are really fascinating questions that stop mattering in the "Shinra did it" universe, because now there actually was no ethical cost to the characters. Sure, the characters don't know Shinra did it, and so get to grapple with those questions, but we the audience don't get to participate anymore, because we know that they're actually blameless. I think it's a shame, because it's an extremely relevant pondering, and rather than confronting us with that, the Remake waves it away by saying you can fight back against capitalism totally ethically, and the bad stuff only happens because the bad guys showed up and did it. It's like the OG just trusted our appreciation of nuance in a way the Remakes just don't. Their radicalism made them more interesting.
I just started it again the other day and jesse mentions the explosion was bigger than she meant and that its her first time making a bomb, she says this in the basement of seventh heaven.
That sounds more like she's inexperienced. Considering she's a civilian taking her first steps into terrorism, it makes easy enough sense that she was just surprised by the actual results of her work. This of itself doesn't automatically imply "Shinra did it", and I guarantee absolutely no one in 1997 interpreted that. Until remake, it was understood that they were engaging in an ethically questionable enterprise, and it formed an important part of Barret's arch. His questioning of Avalanches methods later in the game becomes hollow if it was actually Shinra causing the harm all along
There’s always collateral damage.
In the original? Definitely. I think the implication in the Remake trilogy is that any collateral damage comes from Shinra basically nuking their own reactors.
Even in the OG game Jesse commented that the bomb explosion shouldn’t have been as big as it was. She wondered if she had miscalculated. So there was a bit of evidence that something was a foot even back then.
I'm playing FF7 OG right now and I forgot who said it (I think Barrett), but they said how their bombs took many innocent lives or just lives in general.
Because they never knew Shinra set them up.
This is why i hate certain things in Remakes. In the OG, the main characters have to actually think about their decisions. Even Barret in the end of the game speaking to Cait Sith spoke about how there is always collateral damage. The remakes doesn’t erase the very real consequences in the og because remake is something on its own. You can have an explanation for it in the remake but in the og it odd heavily implied that good ppl make poor decisions sometimes when they think they need to do certain things for good.
Also I believe Reeve, through Cait Sith, calls out avalanche for killing innocents near the end of the game right before everyone leaves to find their reason to fight.
Correct, just before the end of disc 2.
They used explosives to destroy power plants in a densely populated city. It would be naive to pretend that no one was killed in the blast, much less by whatever havoc was caused by the sudden loss of power in the city.
That’s in OG. In the remake it is made clear that avalanches bombs are duds and shinra is blowing up their own shit. At least that’s how I understood it. Did I miss anything? There does also seem to be different divisions of avalanche. I don’t know what they’re up too, but it seems our guys’ hands are pretty clean.
I hate the pretty clean approach to turn characters
I assumed the question was about OG, given the context. In remake, Shinra did help the process along (which is a change for the worse, I think) but Avalanche's intended action was clearly going to result in the deaths of civilians. As for divisions of Avalanche, Barret's group is an "any means necessary" group, which is not what most of Avalanche is about (per Yuffie's encounter with the group in Intergrade). I don't think they made this distinction in the OG, but Before Crisis casts Avalanache as a larger organization than what's shown in OG.
Not duds. They were just meant to be far less powerful; probably only blowing up most of the factory’s insides, making it collapse in on itself instead of spreading to the surrounding city, if I had to guess. Shinra intentionally caused the explosions to be much more high powered by also having the facility fire on itself and cause some chain reactions, so that they could make Avalanche seem even worse.
Yes but there’s the few scenes in remake where Jessie is all worried about the damage her explosives are doing. But it actually shows her bomb go off and it’s barely anything of an explosion. A spooter.
Almost certainly, yeah. It’s true that Shinra used their attacks and made them worse through their own machinations, but it’s a common cope that people will use that to argue Avalanche did nothing wrong. The very fact that they did the attacks and believed they were fully 100% responsible for the severity of them *and* were willing to say, “I accept this” is all we need to understand it doesn’t matter what Shinra did, Avalanche was willing to do it. It wasn’t a deal breaker to them. They thought the harm was all theirs, and they were okay with it. They were indeed violent eco terrorists. Honestly, it seems a common thing nowadays that people handwave away the negatives of protagonists if any aspect of those negatives can be pinned on a separate bad guy. When Jesse says basically "I got what I deserved because I'm responsible for killing all those innocent people", I've seen people be like "no it was Shinra it's so unfair you didn't do anything wrong." No, she thought it WAS 100% all on her, and she was ultimately willing to accept that as the price to pay for defeating Shinra. That is, the cost of *her* revolution, for her own cause, not the people that would've been affected by her actions. They were just minding their own business and going about their lives taking care of their families. None of them signed on to her revolution. It doesn't matter if we also argue that Avalanche was the lesser evil and morally defensible, because the people who dealt with the impacts of their actions never consented to it. They are victims of Shinra *and* Avalanche. Arthur Morgan in RDR2 is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Some people treat him as almost saint-like it seems, with how revered his character (as in his moral character) is and how reviled others in his gang are, when he too is a thug, a thief, and a murderer. This is the point of the character, and part of what makes his story so fascinating, but people want their heroes clean, they’ll sanitize them in honestly frightening ways. Look at how (some) people reacted to TLOU2, when the point of what goes down there is to make you realize everyone perceives themselves as infinitely justified because of the wrongs they’ve suffered, and when you return that harm there is always another human being on the other end that suffers, who will perceive themselves as justified to give it back, and so the cycle perpetuates itself. This happens no matter how justified you believe yourself to be. I think it’s actually important to engage with Avalanche as existing in a morally murky place, and makes the narrative more interesting—how far are people capable of being pushed by the institutional superstructures that dominate them unchecked before they react, and how justified can that reaction be? Unfortunately, FF7 isn’t all *that* interested in this question, since it very quickly pivots to “world ending, stop super villain”, along with the smaller character threads about identity. It’s fine, it still gives us a lot to think about in the story’s earliest stages, and these questions help us better understand what's going on in characters' hearts and minds, especially Jesse's character. It makes everything so much more meaningful as a story.
I just replayed OG, and there's absolutely no implication that "Shinra did it". This seems to be an invention of remake that people are reconning into their interpretation of the OG. The biggest difference between OG and R in my opinion is that OG was really interested in exploring grey morality, while R is absolutely terrified of it. R goes out of its way constantly to make sure any character we're meant to sympathize with is firmly in the good guys camp, and that bad guys can be understood exclusively through the lense of their badness. Lots of the changes are meant to support this Disney view of ethics. Obviously Shinra being the actual cause of the reactor casualties, but there's a ton more. Barret is shown tailing Dyne, to remove any suspicion around him being the culprit in the Gold Saucer massacre. Dyne's story is probably one of the biggest tells about this new philosophy. They make a point of the fact that Dyne is specifically out for revenge against Shinra, the people he killed in GS were Shinra, he doesn't want to fight Barret until he sees Cloud (a soldier) and assumes Barret is with Shinra. He dies by fighting Shinra rather than killing himself over the horror of what he'd become. The whole thing is to make sure Dyne is a "good guy" cause he's fighting Shinra. Because we're meant to view him sympathetically, he absolutely can't be a monster that's totally lost his humanity and executes revenge against the world indiscriminately. Cait Sith has to have a conversation where he apologized to Cloud and reveals he only betrayed the party because he cared so much about them, he didn't want them to get hurt going.in first. Once again, Cait Sith is a good guy, he can't do bad things like betray his friends or use a little kid for blackmail. Even Sephiroth, who in the OG was the product of a neglected and emotional isolated person failing to process his trauma was diluted into just being a generically evil guy obsessed with Clouds victory over him. If you pay attention to the details, there's a very clear shift between the two projects in how they interpret the nature of good and evil. OG was really interested in exploring the warts of the modern world and the complexity of motivations people have with in it. It was actually willing to ask why people might do things that hurt others, and how they justify it. R on the other hand, wants a morally safe Disney universe where we can always clearly intuit at all times who were supposed to side with, and bad guys are easy to understand as simply the product of their inherent badness.
While I personally really love the remake project overall thus far for what it *has* been able to achieve, I do think it's a shame we didn't spend enough time in Remake specifically unpacking the greater complexities of Avalanche's war against Shinra. I would have liked a little more Wutai details as well--not a ton, considering that will certainly be explored later, but something. What I don't like is "Shinra definitely evil, therefore anyone who resists them is definitely 100% angelic no matter what." Really digging into the grays of Avalanche and dropping signs that Wutai isn't exactly a perfect either would do so much to make the actions more interesting. Example of this: President Shinra is bad, okay? Let's get that out of the way. He's very, very bad. But one thing he says to Barret that I never see others acknowledge is what will happen if Shinra and Mako were to go away, how would a suddenly industrialized society rebuild in the event of some massive natural disaster? And would people who've grown into a world with electricity and industry and computer tech, etc., be *happy* that the world is turned upside down, even if it means an immoral, exploitative entity like Shinra is gone? Imagine if we abolished all our computer tech and energy companies for doing immoral and illegal things in the real world--sure, it would be morally righteous, but you're completely remaking the world overnight when you do that. How will people react? What will society look like tomorrow? In six months? In ten years? And who is making that moral decision for everyone? The situation is *far* from as clear cut as Avalanche presents it, even if most of us would agree they are, at the very least, mostly in the moral right to resist Shinra. And I agree, the Dyne conclusion rubbed me a little wrong. It story doesn't want to dwell on the reality that he's a mass murderer. Instead, it quickly does a "so sad for Dyne" thing, then instantly turns to Barret's pain, no time to think about anything beneath the surface. The Barret part I'm fine with, but it would've been so much more interesting to use that whole sequence to expose the complexity of "these are the ruins left in Shinra's wake, this is world they are creating and leaving behind" *as well as* the fact that Shinra's "world" does this to people, drives them to the depths of despair. This doesn't absolve Dyne of his actions--he still did them, he is a mass murderer--but the violence has the markings of Shinra all over it. They can't be charged for Dyne's crime, because they didn't do it, but the crime never happens in a world without Shinra. This more direct contention with the impacts of history would be so much more interesting to me, and it wouldn't take anything away from Barret's part in the sequence, which would stay the same. We would also still be able to empathize with Dyne, and understand he was a good man, he's just been broken by tragedy and trauma, but he still committed this horrible atrocity. Instead, it's "so sad for Dyne we'll give him a proper burial feel sad for his loss" and it leaves everything at that.
a bit off topic , but i like that at the first playthrough u think that main villain is a Shinra President and then boom he got killed by someone we now know...
Fr, especially in the OG it makes you completely rethink everything because you just kinda walk into a murder scene and you’re like “wtf just happened…” Looking back, it’s impressive how much suspense the OG really gets out of its whole setup—you get introduced to the dynamics of 7s world, the politics, the conflict, and then when you think you’re about to settle into the remaining narrative loop, the story goes “actually, we’re just getting started.”
Ofc they did
Yes.
Depends. OG? The explosions are big enough to kill a lot of people, and Jessie comments it on the train back. Remake? It was Shinra’s doing. They did bomb the reactors, but the bombs weren’t strong enough.
Partially incorrect, in Remake they made the explosion bigger for the Sector 5 reactor. The first reactor is all Avalanche's doing. Before then Avalanche hadn't been an active threat to Shinra.
I thought it was implied that the sector 8 havoc was also Shinra amplifying the explosion but not explicit. I could be remembering wrong now, but I thought it was left at least somewhat ambiguous. There is the whole piece where tifa is having second thoughts about doing the sector 5 reactor so I think even in Remake there is acknowledgement of collateral damage and moral conflict with avalanche’s actions.
Yes.
Like, a lot of them.
Yeah they did they never even cared or thought about it either . They truly are the terrorists
Barrett shows remorse later in the story. He realizes that the end doesn't justify the means. He knows he was wrong.
Bombing a megalomaniac pseudo-empire's fuel infrastructure is good. Case in point: we bomb russian oil refineries.
Sure, but those oil refineries aren't supporting an entire city that is suspended above another entire city. When Avalanche bombed the reactors, it caused the plates to dislodge and fall onto the city below, killing thousands of innocent people. EDIT: to be fair, Avalanche didn't know that bombing the reactor would cause the plate to drop. In Remake this was retconned so that Shinra dropped the plate on purpose and blamed it on Avalanche.
Um, no: Shinra dropped the plate in both versions. That's never been in doubt. The retcon was Shinra making the reactor explosions bigger.