A proper reveal is “coming soon”, though
Over the past seven days, theFinal Fantasy VIITwitter account has beentweetingsome cryptic developer comments from members of theFinal Fantasy VII Rebirthteam. The tweets are all in a Q&A style format, and most of the questions have been fairly innocuous things like “Will FF7 Rebirth have original music?” and “Has the battle system changed from FF7 Remake?” But the answers, at least on the English FF7 Twitter account, have been downright baffling, and have been promptly memed into oblivion.Things will happen to characters during the story, you say? No kidding!
But thanks to some clever internet sleuthing, eagerFinal Fantasyfans are quickly realising that there’s a lot more to these comments than meets the eye. Well, at least there is in the original Japanese versions of them. The English translation team clearly didn’t get the same memo…
Twitter user and frequent translator of Square Enix’s Japanese social media outputAitaikimochihas been joining the dots between these daily developer comments in an ongoing thread since they first started appearing a week ago. On the face of it, both theJapanese Final Fantasy VII accountand the English account are clearly trying to achieve the same thing. They pose the same questions, and both highlight key words and phrases in green to make them stand out.
Or so it seems. If you start putting together the highlighted words from the Japanese tweets, they start forming another cryptic message, which fans think reveal hints about how Rebirth will mess with the Final Fantasy 7 timeline. According to Aitaikimochi’s translations, they go something like this:
Let’s take a look at Day 1-5 FF7 Rebirth tweet keywords in Japanese, which really does give me reason to believe even more that there’s a hidden message.Day 1: 時期を調整 (fix the time[line])Day 2: 高い自由 (steep freedom)Day 3: 運命の行方 (the whereabouts of destiny)Day 4:…pic.twitter.com/5utuiURWyV
In some sense, there’s nothing we don’t already know here. The end ofFinal Fantasy 7 Remakemade it clear that thisnow trilogyof new FF7 games wasn’t going to be a straightforward rehash of the FF7 storyline, and that timeline shenanigans were definitely going to be afoot in its sequel. It’s also probably safe to assume that Rebirth will introduce new party members, and that we’ll tread new paths (or tracks) that have been remixed due to the nature of its timey-wimey hoohah.
But compare that to the highlighted words on the English FF7 tweets, and err… I don’t think they’ve quite managed to achieve the same effect:
In any case, I think one thing wecaninfer from either language is that we’ll probably be hearing more about FF7 Rebirth very soon, possibly even at tonight’sSummer Game Fest- or at the very least sometime imminent, given the whole ‘It’s NotE3 season’ right now.
