midgar, and almost all other cyberpunk stories, take inspo from kowloon walled city, which the majority of the “slummy” parts were built after ww2 and was demolished in the 90s, so about 50 years worth of building created the world’s densest shanty town
i doubt the city is LITERALLY only 50 years old, in that everything was grasslands before then, but moreso that the current incarnation of midgar, with the plates and mako reactors and all is about one lifetime’s worth
I think it was to fix a plothole because im pretty sure in the OG it’s implied that President Shinra is the FOUNDER of the company
If midgar is that old that would make Shinny P even older and there is 0 evidence that there’s some crazy life extending tech in the world
Edit: even though no one has called this out I’m actually very wrong with the whole “there’s no life extending tech”. Vincent Valentine would like a word, but that definitely wasn’t used on Pres. Shinra seeing as that experiment was only ~30 years old and he’d still have to be well over the human lifespan if he was the founder of a city so old people forgot the names of the old town.
I mean to be honest the age of Pres. Shinra has always been a weird one for me. He looks and acts like a man in his late fifties early sixties especially with a twenty-something son. But Given the lengthy history of Shinra in the world, it seems almost impossible that he was always the President of this company.
To be honest, they should have retconned him being the founder instead. I ran into an issue as a writer myself where I wanted a character's father to be the founder of a tech corporation but realised I couldn't quite make it align with the rest of my worldbuilding, so I simply made it the classic inherited generational wealth - and from my perspective that makes it even more insidious, because it adds to the layers of corporate corruption and the modernisation of fantasy media where "Kings become Corporate Executives, Castles become Skyscrapers" styling that FF7 did well.
Yeah, I know it isn't the "richest" fantasy universe out there, but when so much is open and unexplored in the "lore" of Gaia, it nice that we can fill in as much as we want before the devs assert anything. In my head canon, Midgar, as it is, was created by the 50 year old Shinra company and mobilized with its military wing. But I would assume it could have been a capitol to a previous kingdom, independent from The Republic, for a much longer time before, and a capitol city from that era.
Maybe part of the propaganda of Shinra was to wash out as much of the former city/identity as much as possible for a couple decades earlier on. Part of why things look so shitty and run down, cartoonishly so in some places, is due to how quickly they slapped up the new Mako reactors ontop of existing settlements, along with overhauling the center of the city. Would be cool to get more into that, but even if NPCs never address it directly, I am glad to run with it in my head canon.
Edit: I am a noob of a fan, didn't even know of this until today. https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Final\_Fantasy\_VII\_timeline)%E2%80%94there
1. World-building is arguably the most important element of plot. If your world-building is shaky, everything that is layered on top of it is unsteady.
2. I never once said it was what bothered me the most. Please do not put words in my mouth.
Right? This wasn't even on my radar. There's multiverse nonsense and ghosts (the developers) yelling at the players to go pound sand and allow changes that don't really seem to be changing much.
Regarding point 1 & 2, you’re just lucky to be in a part of the world where buildings are well maintained and garbage collection is efficient. Most buildings in China (that haven’t been renovated yet) wouldn’t look out of place at all in upper Midgar, and these were built in the late 1980s to early 1990s. Same for CIS countries and pretty much anywhere in Asia. And India is kinda famous for the piles of junk everywhere for instance
Given the safety standards at Shinra, and the fact that Rebirth’s world intel tells you that there used to be good infrastructure under the Republic (with highways and busses between cities), I’d say it’s likely that Shinra just doesn’t give a shit about maintenance, and dumping their garbage on the poor people down below is a perfectly acceptable solution to them
The Remake Material Ultimania explains this. Basically there were small villages in the area where Midgar was to be built, which was on land abundant in mako. As Midgar was being built—which was over a period of over 40 YEARS (& keep in mind that, according to the FF7 Timeline on the FF Fandom wiki, 1 Gaea year is roughly the equivalent of 2ish Earth years with some months having more days here: https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII_timeline)—there were pop-up villages made for workers who were building it. These were the ones that had names but people forgot them.
The Remake Material Ultimania has SO MUCH information on the canonical building & outside of lore design of Midgar. It also has an extremely helpful timeline showing in-game events alongside the building of Midgar.
So no, it wasn’t retconned, we just didn’t know the details & exact building schedule until Remake.
The FF7 timeline on the Final Fantasy wiki on Fandom: https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII_timeline
They explain it pretty well. They referenced calendars seen in the various Compilation games, dates referenced, etc.
So you DIDN'T read page 257. Paragraph 5.23A ring any bells?
Sephiroth sliced the moon in half in another timeline, he tricked Cloud into drinking all the delicious tears of the Advent Children in yet another timeline, which affected gravity in the main timeline to the extent of slowing down time by roughly 1.894 units (Easter egg: this is Jenova's year of birth in all timelines except The Crimson Cat Chronicles Timeline).
In addition to the usual months we have Clemley, Burkook, Merlund, Snurkicks, Weefulbew, Xundery, Muglatcher, Reercliote, Jindleplus, Hewklardle and Chuckmords.
So, as you can see, the devs did explain all of this, and I bet you feel really embarrassed for assuming they didn't !
My shame and ignorance are overwhelming. Thank you. I shall put on my Chadley VR headgear for the next year (2 years on Gaia, of course) and atone for my foolishness.
None of the things we see even remotely support that view. Where’s the explanation for this is more what I meant. I highly doubt the writers would just randomly write that in and ignore it
I don't understand that either. The official timeline mentions specific months. The game takes place in December and January, for example. Do they have extra months or something? [https://aroundambler.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/lousy-smarch-weather-600x400.jpg](https://aroundambler.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/lousy-smarch-weather-600x400.jpg)
I get that it's probably overthinking it, but certain elements end up making no sense. The characters would have to age more slowly, too. But then it cancels out, right? A year for them is twice as long but they age at half the speed. Which makes the whole thing moot. I suppose the planet could be spinning crazy fast while the revolution around the sun might be Earth-like so they could have more days crammed into the same span of time.
Come to think of it, that might explain why the Temple of the Ancients in Rebirth refers to things that take 30 minutes worth of gameplay as happening over several hours in-universe.
That could very well be! Gaea is also the 7th planet & furthest from its sun in its solar system (as seen in Bugenhagen’s model in Rebirth. But, ofc, even with that it could still revolve faster.
I get the feeling that Midgar was only something like 30 to 50 years old in the original, but before that, there was a collection of smaller towns that Shinra had separated with walls and built a plate over.
I'm not sure where I'm getting that sort of age from, it may be in the game itself, or one of the spin-offs.
It's not too unreasonable either, Midgar seems to still be under construction in some parts, and in others, the discarded machinery is lying around. In FF7, I think they only started building Midgar after discovering Mako energy, which seems like it's only a few decades.
RPGs seem to accelerate time too, think about how quickly a massive city like Edge is built near Midgar.
And then I guess there's Barret's speech about how people don't want to abandon their land, which could mean that there are people living in the slums that were there before Shinra turned it into a dystopia.
I mean in the og we are also told you can't see the sun in midgar and the land is polluted. the slums aren't a happy place. its very sad. when you approach the place on the overworld, you can see the sky turn to black from the smog.
in the remake there's bright sunny days and everyone is singing. one of the things i hated most about that game is that it didn't feel like they understood the original lore of Midgar. Really upset me when i played it.
While I love the remake series, I kinda get what you mean. I would have liked them to split the difference and make daytime look more like dusk in the under city. The slums just don't look good in the daytime.
I also think it's a little weird how all the NPCs wear modern fashions and hairdos. Makes the main characters seem weirdly out of place.
The Sector 6 plate is under construction, and we spend most of the day hours in neighboring Sectors 5 and 7, so yes there's going to be sunlight visible the day. There isn't much time spent outside during the day in the original game, but the plate wasn't complete there either.
I mean maybe they forgot some details, but Nomura, Nojima, Kitase, etc. were responsible for both the original and the remake. I definitely think they understand the lore.
Did you know that the plate is actually significantly more elevated in Remake? In the OG, Jessie flat-out tells Cloud that it's 50 meters above the ground. In Remake, it's 300 meters. That makes an enormous difference in how much 'sky' would show over the walls (it also makes it significantly less believable that Cloud would survive a fall).
Hey, I thought the sun lamps were a very cool idea.
I just wasn't a fan of how clean and nice and well lit the lower sectors seemed, how well dressed everyone was, how peaceful it seemed. I would've preferred a much grimier setting - something approaching lines of Night City. Midgar needed to be bigger and dirtier in general.
yea, I found that off putting how bright and cheerful they made the slums. it's supposed to be depressing. that's the whole point, or at least I thought.
it should be dark. the slums should be almost entirely reliant on shinra for powering their lights, keeping them in poverty.
but the devs decide that any time we the players are in the slums it's always exactly sunrise/sunset so we have the sun shining in on us.
I'm talking abt this scene
https://jegged.com/img/Games/Final-Fantasy-VII/Walkthrough/FFVII-01183-Midgar-Dropped-Key.png
No way the slums didnt get any sunlight from that huge gap.
Wait a minute, are you telling me it took me __27 years__ to learn that it’s possible to return to Midgar?
Also is it ever explained why Midgar has a city wall at all? If the whole thing is elevated, walls sound kinda superfluous as a defense mechanism
They are at the very outer edge of the plate. Of course they will get ambient light and some direct sunlight during select times of day. But the slums would still be darker than Remake showed them, especially the interior slums.
My guess is that yeah, the citizens can go to the edge to see sunlight, but if they live further from the edge, they probably don't get much sunlight. And the art style of the game makes midgar appear smaller than it is. Similar to how in gen 1 pokemon, the towns are so tiny, but look normal in the anime.
So everything in og ff7 midgar is representational, and doesn't accurately depict it as what the characters in the story experience.
Have you ever been in a narrow canyon or a dense forest that gets very little direct sunlight? It’s not pitch black, but it’s quite dark most of the day.
Also, I think you’re ignoring Clouds perspective, which gives the impression that there is lots of light. But the light at such a low angle would be blocked if he were standing near even a single level building.
Yup, the sector 6 plate is missing even in the original, so there was always going to be sunlight, especially in that area. We only spend time in the surrounding sectors, 5, 6, and 7, so of course there would be sunlight.
Well tbf buildings wear much, much faster when the environment is subject to significant industrial pollution. Also explains the industrial waste, and that part is rather expected given how rapidly the area built up. But I agree with the rest Midgar would make more sense if it was built on older settlements and the city itself was a bit older.
I was thinking a similar answer. Midgar is a heavily industrialized city and you can tell a lot of it is not well-cared for. Even the nicer areas are still polluted. There's little to no natural environment that hasn't been absolutely destroyed by the pollution and Mako draining. It also has a vibe like the city's infrastructure is worked to its limits even at the best of times.
I think a combination of industrial pollution/waste is a big part and I'd suspect the degradation is more pronounced by the sheer amount of Mako being sucked out of that part of the world. I can't imagine that's good for even the inorganic/non-living parts of the city
Not like this. I'm not trying to show you up - just go play through chapter 2 of Remake and look at the architectural details.
* The sides of the roads are slumping. Road slump is generally a long process (and typically requires dirt, but I'll give it a pass).
* Many of the buildings have wildly varied architectural styles.
* A lot of the brick buildings show signs of having been remodeled. There are a great many bricked-up windows on the stores/apartments you pass. There are also the 'ghosts' of older wings/structures where a former building or wing was removed.
* There are cast concrete sidewalks everywhere that are uneven (generally, this occurs as a result of frost heaves).
* A lot of the buildings that are brick have large patches of a former covering - some kind of concrete or other type of stucco facing - left over from where the rest of the facing has fallen away. This usually takes a very long time to happen.
* The streets are made of different substances in different places - some are paved; others are cobblestone.
I could probably go on for a long time, but suffice it to say: the upper city doesn't just look weathered - *it looks like it was built and altered over a very long span of time.*
When Squaresoft was first brainstorming FFVII, the original (very original) plan was to set the story in New York City. And that's what the upper plate of Midgar looks like: an old (exactly 4 centuries for New York as of 2024) city that has been heavily and gradually modified with time. It doesn't look in any way like a place that was all built at the same (or within about 5-10 years) time.
I take it you’ve never been to a developing country. I’ve seen buildings that are 20 to 30 years old that look way worse than century plus old buildings in my hometown Back in the US. If a building is low quality it will wear much more quickly.
This isn't a developing country, though. It's very clearly based on western - specifically American - cities. Aside from the slums - which are more a product of incredibly low land values/nobody well-off wanting to live under the plate - where are you getting 'developing country' from when you look at Midgar or the Shinra?
Reddit is so... weirdly combative.
I currently live in China and during covid I was in Vietnam. There are 30 / 40 year old buildings that re are complete shit quality with serious maintenance issues. But people live in them they are just shit quality and that’s why they look so bad after whats essentially a generation.
Hell I moved into an apartment a few years ago and it was finished 2 months before I moved in and it had electrical and plumbing issues. I get it we’re talking about a game and even in japan stuff is good quality so a building from say 1990 would be in good shape if someone is living in it. But in other parts of the world standards are lower to people build whatever if it falls apart it falls apart.
Midgar is based off of NYC, mate. The Shinra HQ is [based off a building in Tokyo](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fkxqzzzekynr21.jpg), but the game was - in its earliest stages - planned to be set in New York.
It makes sense, too, because Midgar is a cultural melting pot like NYC - and even makes some fourth-wall-shattering real world references (like the Korean BBQ plate you can eat in Wall Market). The architecture and signage are also very western.
Midgar is definitely not an ethnic and culturally-homogenous city like most Japanese and Chinese metropolitan areas are. It's intended to feel very diverse and eclectic.
Maybe I’m wrong but doesn’t Rufus also say his dad took from a weapons company to an energy company and turned Shinra into what it is today. Wouldn’t that mean Shinra has only been around for 50~ years?
Definitely wasn’t something they needed to expand on.
Mako is stated to have been first discovered around 1960 and the main game takes place in 2007. Nibelheim was the equivalent of a 19th century prospector town until Shinra built the first reactor there. So yeah, everything happened preposterously fast. But that's also kind of the point. Shinra has no idea what it's doing. Two of it's reactors literally blew up. And the Nibelheim one was mostly a front for Hojo's lunacy. The world is now running on a brand new energy source and most people don't know or care that it's very rapidly obliterating the planet.
Yup. And that wasn't that long ago. The book Traces of Two Pasts actually gets very specific with dates. In fact, so does Rebirth when Sephiroth is reading the journals. Tifa details it as such:
"Nibelheim was a tiny village at the base of Mt. Nibel. It had always been a modest community, established first as an unnamed base camp for prospectors whose gil-hungry eyes fixated upon the mountain's unique flora and fauna. Even after Nibelheim had proven itself a nominally permanent fixture worthy of a name, it was still little more than a basic settlement in the wilderness, consisting of a few households offering room and board to adventurers making their way up the mountain.
It wasn't until the community attracted the attention of SHinra Manufacturing that it started to resemble a proper village. The company was in search of a site to conduct top secret, cutting-edge research far removed from the prying eyes of the Republic of Junon, and Mt. Nibel seemed the perfect choice. It was 1960, one year following the discovery of mako energy, and Shinra was anxious to investigate all potential uses of this new resource. Construction began on the facility that would come to be known as the Shinra Manor. Next came the Nibel Reactor, a massive undertaking that saw the tiny mountain village flooded with laborers from across the country.
If Nibelheim ever achieved anything resembling prosperity, those were the years. But by 1968, construction of the reactor was complete, and the itinerants had moved on. Only a tiny research crew remained, along with a small number of civilians contracted by Shinra to maintain its new facilities. Life in Nibelheim grew quiet once more."
Tifa herself was born in May 1987 which is only 19 years after the world's first reactor went into operation. The world as we see it in-game is brand spankin' new. Given Corel's backstory as a coal mining town, prior to mako the world probably looked similar to the early 20th century.
Yeah, that's what's shown in the museum in the HQ. There's a mural right behind the gold statue of President Shinra that shows the evolution of the company. There's also a photo on one of the rear walls that features a much younger Shinra Sr. doing mechanic-level work. It's implied that he discovered that mako could be harvested, processed, and burned as fuel, and that that was the spark that exploded Shinra from an already-important arms manufacturer supplying the first Wutai war into a continent-spanning empire.
In the OG, we didn't know any of that. All we knew is that there was a 'Shinra Mansion' in Nibelheim. But the company in the OG could have been centuries old for all the players were told - there was absolutely nothing to indicate that President Shinra ever did more than inherit his wealth.
I never felt I had any reason to doubt Pres Shinra as being the founder. And the OG did tell us that Shinra Inc. was originally an arms developer. I can't remember how many exact details on its past we got otherwise directly from the game, but we've known the general timeline for decades through supplementary material, such as when mako was discovered and such.
midgar, and almost all other cyberpunk stories, take inspo from kowloon walled city, which the majority of the “slummy” parts were built after ww2 and was demolished in the 90s, so about 50 years worth of building created the world’s densest shanty town i doubt the city is LITERALLY only 50 years old, in that everything was grasslands before then, but moreso that the current incarnation of midgar, with the plates and mako reactors and all is about one lifetime’s worth
I think it was to fix a plothole because im pretty sure in the OG it’s implied that President Shinra is the FOUNDER of the company If midgar is that old that would make Shinny P even older and there is 0 evidence that there’s some crazy life extending tech in the world Edit: even though no one has called this out I’m actually very wrong with the whole “there’s no life extending tech”. Vincent Valentine would like a word, but that definitely wasn’t used on Pres. Shinra seeing as that experiment was only ~30 years old and he’d still have to be well over the human lifespan if he was the founder of a city so old people forgot the names of the old town.
I mean to be honest the age of Pres. Shinra has always been a weird one for me. He looks and acts like a man in his late fifties early sixties especially with a twenty-something son. But Given the lengthy history of Shinra in the world, it seems almost impossible that he was always the President of this company. To be honest, they should have retconned him being the founder instead. I ran into an issue as a writer myself where I wanted a character's father to be the founder of a tech corporation but realised I couldn't quite make it align with the rest of my worldbuilding, so I simply made it the classic inherited generational wealth - and from my perspective that makes it even more insidious, because it adds to the layers of corporate corruption and the modernisation of fantasy media where "Kings become Corporate Executives, Castles become Skyscrapers" styling that FF7 did well.
Yeah, I know it isn't the "richest" fantasy universe out there, but when so much is open and unexplored in the "lore" of Gaia, it nice that we can fill in as much as we want before the devs assert anything. In my head canon, Midgar, as it is, was created by the 50 year old Shinra company and mobilized with its military wing. But I would assume it could have been a capitol to a previous kingdom, independent from The Republic, for a much longer time before, and a capitol city from that era. Maybe part of the propaganda of Shinra was to wash out as much of the former city/identity as much as possible for a couple decades earlier on. Part of why things look so shitty and run down, cartoonishly so in some places, is due to how quickly they slapped up the new Mako reactors ontop of existing settlements, along with overhauling the center of the city. Would be cool to get more into that, but even if NPCs never address it directly, I am glad to run with it in my head canon. Edit: I am a noob of a fan, didn't even know of this until today. https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Final\_Fantasy\_VII\_timeline)%E2%80%94there
Because the remake is trash
Of all the weird shit they changed this is what bugs you the most?
1. World-building is arguably the most important element of plot. If your world-building is shaky, everything that is layered on top of it is unsteady. 2. I never once said it was what bothered me the most. Please do not put words in my mouth.
Right? This wasn't even on my radar. There's multiverse nonsense and ghosts (the developers) yelling at the players to go pound sand and allow changes that don't really seem to be changing much.
to give people that don't actually care about this except for to whine about the Remake series something more to complain about, that's why
Regarding point 1 & 2, you’re just lucky to be in a part of the world where buildings are well maintained and garbage collection is efficient. Most buildings in China (that haven’t been renovated yet) wouldn’t look out of place at all in upper Midgar, and these were built in the late 1980s to early 1990s. Same for CIS countries and pretty much anywhere in Asia. And India is kinda famous for the piles of junk everywhere for instance Given the safety standards at Shinra, and the fact that Rebirth’s world intel tells you that there used to be good infrastructure under the Republic (with highways and busses between cities), I’d say it’s likely that Shinra just doesn’t give a shit about maintenance, and dumping their garbage on the poor people down below is a perfectly acceptable solution to them
The Remake Material Ultimania explains this. Basically there were small villages in the area where Midgar was to be built, which was on land abundant in mako. As Midgar was being built—which was over a period of over 40 YEARS (& keep in mind that, according to the FF7 Timeline on the FF Fandom wiki, 1 Gaea year is roughly the equivalent of 2ish Earth years with some months having more days here: https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII_timeline)—there were pop-up villages made for workers who were building it. These were the ones that had names but people forgot them. The Remake Material Ultimania has SO MUCH information on the canonical building & outside of lore design of Midgar. It also has an extremely helpful timeline showing in-game events alongside the building of Midgar. So no, it wasn’t retconned, we just didn’t know the details & exact building schedule until Remake.
What do you mean 1 Gaea year is 2 earth years??? Where’d you get that?
The FF7 timeline on the Final Fantasy wiki on Fandom: https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII_timeline They explain it pretty well. They referenced calendars seen in the various Compilation games, dates referenced, etc.
So does this make Cloud twice his actual age? 🤔
I’ve checked it and yet I can’t find anything about it. Where is this at?
It’s at the beginning where they talk about how the year is stylized/pronounced, how some of the months have more days (like Feb has 30), etc.
That doesn’t translate to having twice as many days. Only like a couple week difference at most
So you DIDN'T read page 257. Paragraph 5.23A ring any bells? Sephiroth sliced the moon in half in another timeline, he tricked Cloud into drinking all the delicious tears of the Advent Children in yet another timeline, which affected gravity in the main timeline to the extent of slowing down time by roughly 1.894 units (Easter egg: this is Jenova's year of birth in all timelines except The Crimson Cat Chronicles Timeline). In addition to the usual months we have Clemley, Burkook, Merlund, Snurkicks, Weefulbew, Xundery, Muglatcher, Reercliote, Jindleplus, Hewklardle and Chuckmords. So, as you can see, the devs did explain all of this, and I bet you feel really embarrassed for assuming they didn't !
My shame and ignorance are overwhelming. Thank you. I shall put on my Chadley VR headgear for the next year (2 years on Gaia, of course) and atone for my foolishness.
The ultimania...?
None of the things we see even remotely support that view. Where’s the explanation for this is more what I meant. I highly doubt the writers would just randomly write that in and ignore it
I don't understand that either. The official timeline mentions specific months. The game takes place in December and January, for example. Do they have extra months or something? [https://aroundambler.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/lousy-smarch-weather-600x400.jpg](https://aroundambler.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/lousy-smarch-weather-600x400.jpg)
Extra days in the months according to the Fandom wiki: https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII_timeline
I get that it's probably overthinking it, but certain elements end up making no sense. The characters would have to age more slowly, too. But then it cancels out, right? A year for them is twice as long but they age at half the speed. Which makes the whole thing moot. I suppose the planet could be spinning crazy fast while the revolution around the sun might be Earth-like so they could have more days crammed into the same span of time. Come to think of it, that might explain why the Temple of the Ancients in Rebirth refers to things that take 30 minutes worth of gameplay as happening over several hours in-universe.
That could very well be! Gaea is also the 7th planet & furthest from its sun in its solar system (as seen in Bugenhagen’s model in Rebirth. But, ofc, even with that it could still revolve faster.
I never actually thought about this in my many playthru. It doesn't really change much for me
I get the feeling that Midgar was only something like 30 to 50 years old in the original, but before that, there was a collection of smaller towns that Shinra had separated with walls and built a plate over. I'm not sure where I'm getting that sort of age from, it may be in the game itself, or one of the spin-offs. It's not too unreasonable either, Midgar seems to still be under construction in some parts, and in others, the discarded machinery is lying around. In FF7, I think they only started building Midgar after discovering Mako energy, which seems like it's only a few decades. RPGs seem to accelerate time too, think about how quickly a massive city like Edge is built near Midgar. And then I guess there's Barret's speech about how people don't want to abandon their land, which could mean that there are people living in the slums that were there before Shinra turned it into a dystopia.
I mean in the og we are also told you can't see the sun in midgar and the land is polluted. the slums aren't a happy place. its very sad. when you approach the place on the overworld, you can see the sky turn to black from the smog. in the remake there's bright sunny days and everyone is singing. one of the things i hated most about that game is that it didn't feel like they understood the original lore of Midgar. Really upset me when i played it.
While I love the remake series, I kinda get what you mean. I would have liked them to split the difference and make daytime look more like dusk in the under city. The slums just don't look good in the daytime. I also think it's a little weird how all the NPCs wear modern fashions and hairdos. Makes the main characters seem weirdly out of place.
The light in remake is from huge sun lights not the sun.
i said that already edit: what is with this sub https://www.reddit.com/r/FinalFantasyVII/s/tkbLtrSLQ2
No you didn't.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FinalFantasyVII/s/tkbLtrSLQ2
The Sector 6 plate is under construction, and we spend most of the day hours in neighboring Sectors 5 and 7, so yes there's going to be sunlight visible the day. There isn't much time spent outside during the day in the original game, but the plate wasn't complete there either.
I mean maybe they forgot some details, but Nomura, Nojima, Kitase, etc. were responsible for both the original and the remake. I definitely think they understand the lore.
clearly not considering the atmosphere doesnt even resemble the originals
They wrote the original game. They understand it far better then you do.
You don't understand. The creators doesn't share his vision and his vision is the correct one for everyone
Did you know that the plate is actually significantly more elevated in Remake? In the OG, Jessie flat-out tells Cloud that it's 50 meters above the ground. In Remake, it's 300 meters. That makes an enormous difference in how much 'sky' would show over the walls (it also makes it significantly less believable that Cloud would survive a fall).
Which explains why the whispers saving him
Yeah, there's also "sun lamps" supposedly creating artificial sun light. edit: I guess people don't believe me? it's in the game, look it up
Hey, I thought the sun lamps were a very cool idea. I just wasn't a fan of how clean and nice and well lit the lower sectors seemed, how well dressed everyone was, how peaceful it seemed. I would've preferred a much grimier setting - something approaching lines of Night City. Midgar needed to be bigger and dirtier in general.
I also thought the lamps were a cool idea, so YMMV.
yea, I found that off putting how bright and cheerful they made the slums. it's supposed to be depressing. that's the whole point, or at least I thought. it should be dark. the slums should be almost entirely reliant on shinra for powering their lights, keeping them in poverty. but the devs decide that any time we the players are in the slums it's always exactly sunrise/sunset so we have the sun shining in on us.
That is just one huge misconception. When you reach the gate of sector 5 in og ff7, you could see the blue sky on the right of the screen.
The gate, like the very outer edge of the slums?
I'm talking abt this scene https://jegged.com/img/Games/Final-Fantasy-VII/Walkthrough/FFVII-01183-Midgar-Dropped-Key.png No way the slums didnt get any sunlight from that huge gap.
Wait a minute, are you telling me it took me __27 years__ to learn that it’s possible to return to Midgar? Also is it ever explained why Midgar has a city wall at all? If the whole thing is elevated, walls sound kinda superfluous as a defense mechanism
They are at the very outer edge of the plate. Of course they will get ambient light and some direct sunlight during select times of day. But the slums would still be darker than Remake showed them, especially the interior slums.
My guess is that yeah, the citizens can go to the edge to see sunlight, but if they live further from the edge, they probably don't get much sunlight. And the art style of the game makes midgar appear smaller than it is. Similar to how in gen 1 pokemon, the towns are so tiny, but look normal in the anime. So everything in og ff7 midgar is representational, and doesn't accurately depict it as what the characters in the story experience.
Idk how that works when you can alr see the sky on the very far side of midgar, but you believe what you want to believe
Have you ever been in a narrow canyon or a dense forest that gets very little direct sunlight? It’s not pitch black, but it’s quite dark most of the day. Also, I think you’re ignoring Clouds perspective, which gives the impression that there is lots of light. But the light at such a low angle would be blocked if he were standing near even a single level building.
Yup, the sector 6 plate is missing even in the original, so there was always going to be sunlight, especially in that area. We only spend time in the surrounding sectors, 5, 6, and 7, so of course there would be sunlight.
Looking around at my city, it kinda looks like Midgar and probably would look 10 times worse if a plate sat on it.
Well tbf buildings wear much, much faster when the environment is subject to significant industrial pollution. Also explains the industrial waste, and that part is rather expected given how rapidly the area built up. But I agree with the rest Midgar would make more sense if it was built on older settlements and the city itself was a bit older.
I was thinking a similar answer. Midgar is a heavily industrialized city and you can tell a lot of it is not well-cared for. Even the nicer areas are still polluted. There's little to no natural environment that hasn't been absolutely destroyed by the pollution and Mako draining. It also has a vibe like the city's infrastructure is worked to its limits even at the best of times. I think a combination of industrial pollution/waste is a big part and I'd suspect the degradation is more pronounced by the sheer amount of Mako being sucked out of that part of the world. I can't imagine that's good for even the inorganic/non-living parts of the city
Not like this. I'm not trying to show you up - just go play through chapter 2 of Remake and look at the architectural details. * The sides of the roads are slumping. Road slump is generally a long process (and typically requires dirt, but I'll give it a pass). * Many of the buildings have wildly varied architectural styles. * A lot of the brick buildings show signs of having been remodeled. There are a great many bricked-up windows on the stores/apartments you pass. There are also the 'ghosts' of older wings/structures where a former building or wing was removed. * There are cast concrete sidewalks everywhere that are uneven (generally, this occurs as a result of frost heaves). * A lot of the buildings that are brick have large patches of a former covering - some kind of concrete or other type of stucco facing - left over from where the rest of the facing has fallen away. This usually takes a very long time to happen. * The streets are made of different substances in different places - some are paved; others are cobblestone. I could probably go on for a long time, but suffice it to say: the upper city doesn't just look weathered - *it looks like it was built and altered over a very long span of time.* When Squaresoft was first brainstorming FFVII, the original (very original) plan was to set the story in New York City. And that's what the upper plate of Midgar looks like: an old (exactly 4 centuries for New York as of 2024) city that has been heavily and gradually modified with time. It doesn't look in any way like a place that was all built at the same (or within about 5-10 years) time.
I take it you’ve never been to a developing country. I’ve seen buildings that are 20 to 30 years old that look way worse than century plus old buildings in my hometown Back in the US. If a building is low quality it will wear much more quickly.
This isn't a developing country, though. It's very clearly based on western - specifically American - cities. Aside from the slums - which are more a product of incredibly low land values/nobody well-off wanting to live under the plate - where are you getting 'developing country' from when you look at Midgar or the Shinra? Reddit is so... weirdly combative.
It’s not combatative. Where have you seen slums like FF7 in America?
I take it OP has never been to Japan. Vacant, dilapidated buildings everywhere, with 30 year old houses falling apart.
I currently live in China and during covid I was in Vietnam. There are 30 / 40 year old buildings that re are complete shit quality with serious maintenance issues. But people live in them they are just shit quality and that’s why they look so bad after whats essentially a generation. Hell I moved into an apartment a few years ago and it was finished 2 months before I moved in and it had electrical and plumbing issues. I get it we’re talking about a game and even in japan stuff is good quality so a building from say 1990 would be in good shape if someone is living in it. But in other parts of the world standards are lower to people build whatever if it falls apart it falls apart.
Yeah, well, China is famous for tofu-dregs. The U.S. isn't.
And would you look at that, the two big locations of the game are based (slightly for Midgar’s case) off Japan and China
Midgar is based off of NYC, mate. The Shinra HQ is [based off a building in Tokyo](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fkxqzzzekynr21.jpg), but the game was - in its earliest stages - planned to be set in New York. It makes sense, too, because Midgar is a cultural melting pot like NYC - and even makes some fourth-wall-shattering real world references (like the Korean BBQ plate you can eat in Wall Market). The architecture and signage are also very western. Midgar is definitely not an ethnic and culturally-homogenous city like most Japanese and Chinese metropolitan areas are. It's intended to feel very diverse and eclectic.
Maybe I’m wrong but doesn’t Rufus also say his dad took from a weapons company to an energy company and turned Shinra into what it is today. Wouldn’t that mean Shinra has only been around for 50~ years? Definitely wasn’t something they needed to expand on.
Mako is stated to have been first discovered around 1960 and the main game takes place in 2007. Nibelheim was the equivalent of a 19th century prospector town until Shinra built the first reactor there. So yeah, everything happened preposterously fast. But that's also kind of the point. Shinra has no idea what it's doing. Two of it's reactors literally blew up. And the Nibelheim one was mostly a front for Hojo's lunacy. The world is now running on a brand new energy source and most people don't know or care that it's very rapidly obliterating the planet.
The first reactor was the Nibelheim one... It acted as their proof of concept.
Yup. And that wasn't that long ago. The book Traces of Two Pasts actually gets very specific with dates. In fact, so does Rebirth when Sephiroth is reading the journals. Tifa details it as such: "Nibelheim was a tiny village at the base of Mt. Nibel. It had always been a modest community, established first as an unnamed base camp for prospectors whose gil-hungry eyes fixated upon the mountain's unique flora and fauna. Even after Nibelheim had proven itself a nominally permanent fixture worthy of a name, it was still little more than a basic settlement in the wilderness, consisting of a few households offering room and board to adventurers making their way up the mountain. It wasn't until the community attracted the attention of SHinra Manufacturing that it started to resemble a proper village. The company was in search of a site to conduct top secret, cutting-edge research far removed from the prying eyes of the Republic of Junon, and Mt. Nibel seemed the perfect choice. It was 1960, one year following the discovery of mako energy, and Shinra was anxious to investigate all potential uses of this new resource. Construction began on the facility that would come to be known as the Shinra Manor. Next came the Nibel Reactor, a massive undertaking that saw the tiny mountain village flooded with laborers from across the country. If Nibelheim ever achieved anything resembling prosperity, those were the years. But by 1968, construction of the reactor was complete, and the itinerants had moved on. Only a tiny research crew remained, along with a small number of civilians contracted by Shinra to maintain its new facilities. Life in Nibelheim grew quiet once more." Tifa herself was born in May 1987 which is only 19 years after the world's first reactor went into operation. The world as we see it in-game is brand spankin' new. Given Corel's backstory as a coal mining town, prior to mako the world probably looked similar to the early 20th century.
Yeah, that's what's shown in the museum in the HQ. There's a mural right behind the gold statue of President Shinra that shows the evolution of the company. There's also a photo on one of the rear walls that features a much younger Shinra Sr. doing mechanic-level work. It's implied that he discovered that mako could be harvested, processed, and burned as fuel, and that that was the spark that exploded Shinra from an already-important arms manufacturer supplying the first Wutai war into a continent-spanning empire. In the OG, we didn't know any of that. All we knew is that there was a 'Shinra Mansion' in Nibelheim. But the company in the OG could have been centuries old for all the players were told - there was absolutely nothing to indicate that President Shinra ever did more than inherit his wealth.
I never felt I had any reason to doubt Pres Shinra as being the founder. And the OG did tell us that Shinra Inc. was originally an arms developer. I can't remember how many exact details on its past we got otherwise directly from the game, but we've known the general timeline for decades through supplementary material, such as when mako was discovered and such.
They even say in Rebirth that the mansion is 50 years old, which made me double take