16 KEEP KALM AND CARRION
The extended post-credits at the end of Intermission see Cloud, Barret, Aerith, and Tifa hitching a ride with Chocobo Bill to Kalm. The devs have confirmed the sequel is currently planned to pick up immediately after this point.
The sleepy small town is the closest settlement to the industrial Midgar, and the first place the gang head in the original game. There, Cloud recounts what took place when he visited his hometown of Nibelheim with Sephiroth and the silver-haired SOLDIER went off the rails. It’s an extended, playable sequence where we get a sense of how incredibly strong Sephiroth is through having him as a party member (where he easily outclasses ‘glass cannon’ Cloud).
It’d be an incredibly cold opening to the sequel to begin with this sequence outright and have us controlling a different character like Sephiroth. Joining him as he realises he was lied to about his past (being created from the cells of an ancient alien) would gain so much impact if done with the increased detail Remake has treated us to so far.
That said, the original game later reveals that some of
Cloud’s memories of this have been mixed up – in particular the part that Zack Fair played. With Zack now apparently revived (a huge departure from the original) he could be more important to how this flashback plays out from the off. Perhaps we could play as both Sephiroth and Zack together, in a similar way to how the sequence is revisited in PSP prequel Crisis Core (which was hugely important to Remake). The spin-off again pulled the rug out from under us by revealing Genesis also played a big part in Nibelheim’s destruction. Either way, the sequence has to be there, and there are several exciting options for how it could play out this time around.
“WE GET A SENSE OF HOW INCREDIBLY STRONG SEPHIROTH IS.”