My notes from three years ago suggest pairing "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" with "Return of the Jedi" but I can't really remember why

I would say "Chrono Trigger" and "Final Fantasy 7" as opposite views of "changing fate" but those are games.

Atlas you asked for something to pair with Return of the Jedi..

> The Last Starfighter (1984)

@SPArcheon For someone who played neither, but has some general curiosity about conceptions of destiny, what are the views on such changes of the two?

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica Oh, to be fair it is something that a lot of players share but nothing real "official". There are some "signs" that there may be some truth behind this but... nothing confirmed by "word of God". Considering the nature of the thing, it is something I would also expect them to not want to acknowledge at all.

Anyway....

Chrono is a fairy tale at its core. A group of friends by chance discover that the world will be destroyed 1000 years in the future and decide to do something. They manage to change time itself and remove the menace from history. In doing so, they defy fate to the point that one character actually dies at one point but it is saved afterward by the "Chrono Trigger" the game gets its name from.

The whole game is also permeated by the idea that something is "helping" them to change the fate of history and that is probably the planet itself. The planet is portrayed as a motherly entity that even goes as far as to create the opportunity for one character to "cure" her mother from an illness (or to be more precise to make it so the incident never happened) even if that has no tie altogether to saving the world.

Final Fantasy 7 is instead a story about someone having to save the world because he was caught in the events. A character dies for reasons that the writers themselves amounted to "we wanted the player to fell loss without reward".

The world isn't even saved at the end. It is not that clear but humanity could have been wiped anyway.

World also kinda sees humans as parasites (considering that there is a company that is extracting the lifeforce of the planet to user as an energy source that is not far from truth) and acts against them.

Chrono Cross - the sequel to Chrono Trigger, is considered by many fans of the first game as a "good game but horrible sequel", with many inconsistences and a total change of tone to the point that the characters in the first game are basically "dead" or "lost in action". Their victory is also made incomplete since apparently destroying the foe the way they did in the first game only make it stronger.

As for my personal view of this... it totally fells like the two games were opposing views of two teams talking trash about the other. Some FF7 plot elements seems like they were made out of spite to Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross seems a direct cerberous retcon wanted by some members of the FF7 staff.

Coincidentally, years afterward the FF7 REMAKE changes the plot in a way that - for now - seems like it will make the plot more of a fairy tale like Chrono was.

More wall of texts about this general idea.

@SPArcheon Hmm, that seems to be not at all what I expected. I expected it being different views on fate itself, but what you describe seems to be more about a sliding scale of idealism vs. cynicism (in the new sense of the word), sort of.

also Shonen VS Western at work... but you are basically right.

> FF7 is not Fantasy. Is not what FF was. And it focus was on destroying everything that FF was for me.

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica I guess it would be clearer if you actually played some of those games.

@SPArcheon Well yes, but I'm unlikely to play even one of those through, let alone both. But I think I had some similar experiences with other games. Not sure just how close are they. E.g. the Knights of the Old Republic sequel seems like a great game (if unfinished), but a terrible Star Wars game, apparently very much trying to tear down SW expectations, burn them, and piss on the ashes. And Spec Ops the Line seems to be trying to pull off something similar for military infantry squad stories.

It kinda depends IMHO.

The big point is "are you subverting a genre" or are you "subverting a series".

Madoka Magica is probably the most famous subversion of the "Magical Girl" genre. It is also one of the most acclaimed ones.

It is also a stand alone thing.

School Live is a subversion of the Slice of Life school genre that turns the "normal" settings in a box built by one character around herself

again, stand alone and again you know what you are getting from the cover.

Final Fantasy... up to FF7 had a very distinct style - what I call the "fairy tale" thing.

You know, all the "Hopes & Dreams" stuff you expect to see in anime and jrpg (contrasted to for example the more "western" style tales like Dragon Age for example)

So, the point is that you bought a game in a series knowing to work a certain way and then you get something totally different.

@SPArcheon I suppose for KotOR2 that would be subverting/twisting/tearing down both. The Line was twisting a genre but doing so in a way that made sure to imitate the look&feel thereof.

Chrono Cross... goes beyond that.

Combact mechanic is totally different, level up is different, world should be the same but is so different that if you don't know the two games are connected you wouldn't tell (the fact you basically don't visit any place from the first game helps a lot...), art style is totally different etc....

That alone manages to make the game feel like a separate game that was shoehorned as a sequel to cash in on the fans

there is a game sequel that kinda does something similar at the start, trying to portrait the previous game cast as "bad" and "cause of bigger problems".

Yet that game does not get all the hate Cross gets.

Want to guess why?

clue: those in the party are characters from the second game mixed with characters from the first game.

So... you get to see the original cast, you get to see why the new cast thought they were bad IN GAME, the differences are solved IN GAME and the attempt of the first cast to make the world better is not retro actively retconed as a Pyrrhic victory

@SPArcheon Retcon-invalidation of prior events does seem like something that can be extremely frustrating.

Chrono Cross has 45 playable characters. By comparison Trigger had eight. As a result most of the Cross characters are underdeveloped, have no role in the plot, have generic dialogues since they didn't wrote 45 different versions of each line whenever a party member should talk etc

YET they managed to include a character that is basically an expy of a character from Trigger that would be very relevant to Cross plot since it revolves around that character's sister. It is quite clear that he was meant to be the Chrono Trigger character, both based on pre-release art and official comments. His plot was cut for time (yet they had time to include and animate 45 more characters) and so in the final game he is just a visually similar unrelated person.

BUT... then comes the Nintendo DS port of Trigger that adds a post game event no one asked for. That event again retcons the retcon and claims that Cross Guile was indeed Trigger Magus, causing further mess.

this is just a little sample obviously

Other examples...

Schala in Trigger.

Schala in Cross.