#ffviima ep03

[jacquelinemerritt]

Final Fantasy VII: Machinabridged Episode 3 Review

Originally posted on September 19th, 2015

The show retreads ground in both theme and content.

Final Fantasy VII: Machinabridged has, in its third episode, already come across one of the worst aspects of Final Fantasy VII’s story: it was somewhat repetitive in places. And while FFVII’s story isn’t too repetitive by videogame standards,1 its repetition could be incredibly damaging in most any medium, and the webseries, with its emphasis on short and accessible content, is the medium where such repetition is almost guaranteed to be deadly to the pace and progression of the show.

So it’s a genuine feat that Takahata101 has managed to keep the pacing of the third episode nearly as tight as the first, and at a solid pace for any webseries. It moves quickly from beat to beat, and joke to joke, and (thanks in very large part to the editing of MasakoX) none of the beats feel repetitive, even though we’re treading a lot of the same ground that was covered in Episode 1.

It also doesn’t hurt that the episode is held together with the theme of retreading old ground. Cloud reminisces about his childhood with Tifa, realizing that nothing at all has changed between them as they’ve grown older, and even as he’s grown smarter. Barret’s temper causes the crew to miss their station, and they literally must retread a road they’ve already traveled in order to get to their destination. In the Mako Reactor, Cloud hallucinates Zack’s voice again, has to plant the bomb again, and must see the President of Shinra (his former employer) once more.

Of course, the twist comes as we find that President Shinra, a clearly antagonistic and villainous figure, doesn’t remember Cloud in the slightest, enforcing the idea that our protagonists’ retreading of the past is what separates them from the antagonist, which makes all of the similar beats feel worthwhile. And then, the episode is capped off with a thematically poignant callback, in which Cloud angrily twists Tifa’s catchphrase against her.

Rating: 4.5/5

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Stray Observations

1Final Fantasy VII is a Japanese Role-Playing game with anywhere between thirty and sixty hours of gameplay for an average person, and so repeating areas and having semi-similar missions is forgivable because the wealth of content overall makes up for that repetition significantly.

The “12 hours later” “12 hours earlier” gag was magnificent. It also pretty clearly states the theme of the episode, letting us know exactly what’s going to happen at the end of our story, and making us sit through it anyway.

Cloud: “You guys threw your morality out the window a long time ago, didn’t you?” Tifa: “Cloud stop being a pussy and come blow up private property with us.”

Patron: “Excuse me, aren’t you a little too young to be working at a bar?” *cocks gun* Marlene: “Aren’t you a little too old to be asking stupid questions?”

President Shinra as southern old money? Hell yes!

Cloud: “Tifa, can you do me a solid? And go fuck yourself!”