Orphaned FF7r thoughts:

At the start I was like “oh, why am I reminded of the Yakuza games”

And at first I thought it was just I had previously been playing them so much, and then thought the aesthetic of Japanese construction sites and weird-shaped undeveloped plots was reminding me of the real estate-focused 0 and 2.

Then Wall Market was conceptualized as a Kamurocho-type separated “entertainment district”, with karaoke bars and ramen shops and masseuses and brothels and criminal powers and giant stone underground fighting coliseums…

The construction zones, though, I think that was on to something… the ugliness, the brute-force landscaping, the lack of coherence – in the zoning-free utopia, “incompatible uses” put next to each other and then walled off by blank concrete slabs, Cloud and Tifa’s apartments the shittiest seen-a-million “1R"s, institutional bath toilet and sink straight off a bare room.

The point that when they’re dramatizing Shinra’s environmental rapacity, or the degradation of the Midgar slums relative to the richer plate, they’re recognizably invoking and critiquing ”the formless, brutal, utilitarian jumble“ of the Japanese postwar boom

Thing the second: you know how for decades we tee-heed about the Bumblebee Inn scene "helping players realize something about their sexuality”?

Well, you know how I said that part of my personality change since choking last summer was I went up like a Kinsey point? Before even getting to the scene, just in contemplating it, I realized that femboys were now… flagged as eligible targets?

Like, it was with anticipation and eventual relief I proceeded on to the scene and realized that drag!Cloud did not trip the same “yeah, I would” flag as Tifa or Aerith, that was an experience.