The original story really dropped the ball on that aspect, I think. Shinra went from a (stinky) boardroom filled with figures all vying for power to Diamond Weapon blasting Rufus and then... idk that's about it but Proud Clod sorta pops up near the end of the story to wind things up, I guess?

Maybe it's not so relatable to a westoid like me because I don't have connection to fairly recent cultural history of ruling dynasties being handed down to successors before tragedy strikes, where that unifying force is dissolved, leading to quarreling factions and widespread political disunity. I feel like if I came from a Japanese cultural background it would be more within my frame of reference to be like "Oh, I know this story - the Daimyo has fallen and now the political structure is crumbling" on reflex whereas my cultural context is much more steeped in corporations and political parties being like a hydra rather than leviathan and I have to step outside my own cultural bubble to try and understand how the story progressing this way might have been a lot more commonsensical to a Japanese game dev team than it is to me.

That, or FF7's story is a rolling disaster that was only ever barely strung together and it really starts falling apart at the seams in the third act.

I love the original FF7 but all I've seen of the remakes just sort of makes me cringe. I've probably aged out of the target audience, but then again, I've always found every single piece of FF7-related media since the original game pure garbage

I didn't like Rebirth as much as Remake for multiple reasons, this included, but also it's a tedious game full of mindless bullshit that it forces you to engage with regularly. The implementation of tedious bullshit is nowhere near as fun as something like Yakuza and it ultimately drags the game down instead of spicing it up with variety.

Cloud, I've discovered a new assassin's creed tower for you to spend 3 minutes climbing for a 45s cut-scene that fills in 1/6th of this zone's map. Be sure to do them all and then also do all the dumbass eikon crystals so Odin doesn't immediately use Gjallarhorn's Warning to buff himself after hitting you twice and then subsequently spam Gjallarhorn as fast as he can.

Cloud if you want to have decent armor (and by armor I mean materia slots) you're gonna want to get on your chocobo and spend 2 minutes in the designated zone holding down Up on the d-pad until your chocobo goes through the 25 second animation of lowering its beak to the ground and sniffing so you can get the blue line that will point you to the item, but oh wait it went through a pile of gravel so you'll have to do it again even though we both know it's gonna be in that corner 10 feet away.

Cloud if you want to change your materia before doing this simulator battle, you're going to have to close completely out of the simulator and my main dialogue options, open the main menu, set your materia, and then go through the 15 second long "hello cloud, you'd like to try the simulator ok let me just boot it up for you"

As someone who basically 100%ed Rebirth and had a blast doing so, if Reunion (or whatever the 3rd winds up being named) has even 15% less Chadley and 'omg 2015 era open world' exploration padding, I'll be so fucking happy

They really seem to just have had no idea what to do with Wutai, like they made a whole prequel and the Wutai war is literally one single sequence and then they move to a totally invented scenario instead.

I hope this is the case

Shinra Mayor is a traitor that helps Avalanche get up the tower too in the first Shinra section of the game.

Advent Children shows us that Rufus no sells that somehow