Sunday, October 25, 2015

Final Fantasy VII remake Chapter 4 – Materia


Welcome back folks. Since we talked a lot about how some materia might become problematic I decided to devote a short chapter to materia. Now I could have named it progression system but the thing is, Final Fantasy doesn't have a real progression system beside leveling materia.
I also revealed that materia weren't always so important at an early part of development. All of this might leave you wondering wether materia will stay at all or be outright removed from the game..
That is something that will never happen. At this point materia are an integral part of the lore. The Sister Ray is powered by materia, Meteor is launched by the Black Materia and Holy by the White Materia. And that is just this game. Before Crisis has the Zirconiade materia and the support materia needed to summon it, Crisis Core has the Goddess Materia, and Dirge of Verberus has the Proto Materia. Materia are also frequently depicted on screen and mentioned in Advent Children.
Taking Materia away from Final Fantasy VII would be like taking away lightsabers or the Force from Star Wars. It's completely out of the question.
What I do believe is that materia will loose some of their significance. If there is some sort of meaningful progress beside materia the whole Wutai sequence will be a lot less painful. In XIV materia are only their to provide passive bonuses to equipment. This also wouldn't work as the plot relevant materia are used for summoning or very strong magic spells so the right use of materia is probably in the middle ground between VII and XIV.
As for the alternative progression system: That depends on wether jobs will return or not. And wether we will be able to change jobs or not. We probably shouldn't expect any major surprise. Progression systems in Final Fantasy are usually not overly complicated and give a lot of freedom. Whatever we get here will be the same.
And now I must bid you all farewell. Next chapter will be the most controversial of them all as we will tackle changes to the story. Oh dear.


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