@mattwoahyeah: Thanks!

@olddadgamer: Lemme know if you've got any dream sequel requests, I'll see what I can do.

@olddadgamer: Thanks!

I can't believe they hit me with the sequel announcement like immediately after I published this.

@mooglestar: It's just me, actually, I just spend a lot of time thinking about Alien stories.

@willhouse4: I don't disagree with this necessarily but I will offer Alien: Isolation as a counterpoint re: scary xenos

@BLKCrystilMage:That's kind of the point though, right? Shinra eventually got so powerful that the rules didn't matter. I mean, they fought a war and won it.

But yeah, FF7 is a world with, like, two governments, and that simplification exists because it helps the story work thematically. It's meant to be a metaphor.

You can also imagine Shinra maybe they also getting some help, like politicians pushing for massive deregulation, or courts that decided corporations could pump endless amounts of money into political campaigns. Just spitballing. :)

@felipe1: Indeed. Indeed.

@jenovaschilld: What you're talking about with Cloud and Barret and the fact that there are Shinra folks who aren't straight garbage is actually why I think a game set in this period would be interesting. When I said Shinra were a bunch of cackling villains, I mean the executives --President Shinra, Heidegger, Scarlet, Palmer, and Hojo (and to some degree, Rufus, although he does get more characterization eventually) all read like Captain Planet villains. But clearly there are upsides to mako and modernization and you gotta think that if Shinra managed to wage a war against the republic and win it, they couldn't have done it all with conscripted forces. They had to have people who bought in.

I think you get a really interesting situation where you have a government that sucks and a corporation that sucks, and they're going to war, and you've got people stuck choosing sides based on that. Plus we know Shinra's pretty good about propaganda, which adds a whole other element to the whole thing. A story about being caught up in that war could have a lot of nuance, I think, not to mention the idea of seeing the effects of that war on various people, to go with your point about war orphans. I'd like to see FF7 go harder on that element, because you're right, it's a pretty pervasive theme.