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Oh, I have probably well over 2000 hours in this playthrough and I'd maxed out my level (which hard caps at 713) before the DLC released.

@@hugehuman1 The changes in soundtrack with the final phase carry a huge amount of that emotional weight as well. The only downside is that the Bleed can burst kill you so quickly and its high weakness to fire means that you oftentimes don't get to appreciate the full emotional tonal shift for quite as long, like in bosses like Ludwig in Bloodborne where the shift in soundtrack is such a pivotal part of the overarching storytelling. As an entity, I love how reminiscent it is of Goldmask in its thin, fragile silence and having a face just like his mask. It's in a state like the Elden Ring where it's shattered but not yet fully broken, and its body seems held together by the shadow of the golden Impenetrable Thorns that seal the Erdtree shut. The face gives it a unique identity, unlike the Erdtree Avatars, while it's body is not dissimilar to the Ulcerated Tree Spirits but not too similar either. The only thing I wish it had are a mirror to the massive ethereal petals of the Scadutree draped across the sky when it does its detonation attack where it perfectly mirrors the shape of the massive tree. I'm glad it has such spectacular Remembrance rewards, because there's something especially satisfying about roaming around Shadow Sunflowering things.

@@brotusclips The Smithscript talisman mentions that they gave souls to their creations by looking at the patterns in the molten metal, and the Albinaurics emerged from the ripples in Dew - so there are fingerprint-like patterns all over that are _similar_ but slightly distinct. It generally seems to be used to display the presence of souls in some capacity. The twin trees that intertwine planted around Moorth Ruins and throughout Belurat have similar fingerprint-like marks on them, and are implied to be grown from the Shaman's bodies, (based on the “O, Mother” sprouting branches immediately beside a lone, fully-grown tree outside Bonny Village). This is likely why they mirror the physical form of the Two Fingers that the Shaman eventually come to worship directly with the Erdtree in an alteration of the beliefs of the Tower, which the Spiraltree Seal also reinforces.

​@@PierceArnerA very good observation. The second part you mention is a bit confusing to me. Are you implying the Shaman worshipped the Two Fingers, which is why they morph into those trees? Or Did the people of the Tower make contact with the Two Fingers in some way, so they began to grow the twisted Shaman trees as another expression of their Spiral faith? (This could imply the Two Fingers were already setting up the Hornsent to be overthrown, slowly infiltrating their culture by also manipulating the Shamans, playing both sides)

@@BLK_MN It's not entirely clear. The Spiraltree Seal description shows there's some syncretism between both, _“Sacred seal of soiled amber engraved with a spiral tree design. Enhances spiral incantations. The majesty of the white tower, stretching to reach the gods, even inspired a secret faith in the invaders, the people of the Erdtree.”_ Ymir mentions that the Two Fingers' mother (Metyr) is damaged, which lead to flaws with Marika and everything that followed, but he's rather cryptic about it all. We know very little about what the Divine Gateway was or how it helped to establish details of their respective religions or how exactly they split aside from the crusade against the Hornsent.

@@PierceArner Thanks for the quick response. Yeah, it's pretty unclear. I certainly don't trust Ymir when he talks about Marika being flawed, however. As far as what the Two Fingers and Greater Will want? Sure, totally flawed, but Marika's plans were never their plans, so I'd say it's a good thing that Metyr was damaged. I'd even conjecture that Marika "accidentally" sealed Metyr in the Shadowlands, cutting the Greater Will off directly from the rest of the world. The Greater Will and Two Fingers would normally punish such an act, but they didn't know that Marika knew Metyr existed, so they let it slide. All a part of Marika's secretly crafted, elaborate plan.

@@BLK_MN Especially after seeing the architecture in Enir-Ilim strewn with petrified bodies fused into the columns, the similar parallels with Nokron's large The-Scream-like Silver Tears emerging from the buildings feel eerily similar, especially since we know that the Mimic Tear was their attempt to forge a Lord, and that they were banished underground and relegated to an artificial sky for attempting to defy the Greater Will (Nox Mirrorhelm & Finger-Slaying Blade), not to mention Marika's Mischief being a physical body transformation item that turns you into varying inanimate objects based on your physical location. We see these sorts of overlaps things with the Claymen belonging to the previous dynasty, and the non-biological beings like the Crystallians or even what happens when the Sorcerers who start to stray too close to the Primeval Current and Sellen turning others into artificial stars studded with Glintstone. That seems to also be what somewhat looks like has been occurring at the various Finger Ruins with their massive stone forms, and especially since we know that Metyr predated the arrival of the Elden Beast, and Placidusax was the Elden Lord before the Erdtree, there's a great deal of lore in there tied in with Ancient Dragons as a living wall of Gravelstone. Ymir's High Priest Hat depicting the Greater Will in a lightless abyss makes that a fairly surprising mirror to the Nox, where he's essentially attempting to become a mother to the fingers like Metyr was, rather than focusing on magic directly connected to Glintstone. He's far more focused on Metyr's suffering as the root cause rather than anything explicitly specific to Marika, and everything with Marika just being an extension of that inherent suffering happening further up the "parental" chain of control, hence abandoning following the Moon as it was only the closest not the most powerful of the celestial bodies. What I find most fascinating about that is that his hat, the Lord of Frenzy, and all of Marika's church statues in the Shadow Lands have an empty void where their head should be - as they've been made to relinquish control to be the body for the will of something else, much like Miquella is doing with Radahn. The Two Fingers gesture being near the Shaman Village, along with the internalname value for the orb that Metyr summons between her fingers being "Sun" while her staff holding the whole Microcosm between them & Ymir's remains dark of anything are all set up in a way that's in a stark juxtaposition to the Carians & Ranni, who are far more closely interconnected into dismantling all of those elements. While Radagon swore the Carian sorcerers to secrecy when married to Rennala, and we know that Marika made Hewg swear to craft a weapon capable of killing a god, the Scarseal & Soreseal talismans seem to indicate that it's more out of a trapped desperation of being "Eternal" in that role than anything else, similar to how St. Trina tells the player that divinity would be a prison for Miquella and begs you not to let him be turned into a god. That all being said, the patchwork mix of overlapping contradictions and confusingly syncretized details is basically the quintessential template for how these sorts of things are intentionally set up to be variably interpretable in Japanese fantasy (the manga version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind still being what I'd consider to be the most quintessential example of what laid the foundation for this type of world building, but especially with the religious & historical themes).

@@kixakii436 I missed it initially as well, and totally didn't catch this immediately after the actual fight either. I actually only noticed it on this second playthrough because I beat the Scadutree Avatar at the very end of the day - and when I started again the next morning I was confused by how _dark_ the whole arena was. That's when I went back to rewatch my capture of the boss fight and noticed it all changes here.

@@AlphaSeagull Good to know that Shard Spiral is also consistent for this! Still curious if it's actually hitting the Face, or if it's mostly damaging the inner basket target instead. I'm also curious what the numerical value of those damage & bursts are, since that might give some idea of whether the HP breakpoints and if they're the same as the 17,000 HP pool for the legs in NG+7. Unfortunately I'm ages away from being able to loop back and do more testing, so hopefully you figure out something neat. (I'm particularly curious if Ambush Shard + Arrow's Reach talisman would be consistent for that).

I've been using it a bunch in my current playthrough, as it can hard knock down the Black Knights and with so many boss arenas in water and the constant rain makes the damage insane. However, the damage itself doesn't seem to be what's triggering these huge bursts though, since before this clip I did over 70k damage with Sock Sling & Ancient Death Rancor and never had that happen. It looks like what's happening is specific to something about how the Furnace Golems have unique HP-based breakpoints with their legs that controls when they stagger, and seems to applies to their other damageable areas as well. It's still new, so not a lot about the mechanics are totally clear yet.

Well, the two Armored Furnace Golems actually _DO_ typically require you to use the game's anti-golem tool of throwing Fire/Furnace Pots into their basket from above (which you can learn about from a note by the fallen golems beside Shadow Keep), as those ones seemed to be effectively "unkillable" unless you wanted to just VERY slowly churn through their entire HP pool by shooting at their Face from long-distance.

@@Spookhunter7 Unfortunately, these don't take any direct body damage, because of the armored legs. I'm not sure if the double arc of Pest Thread Spears has the range to hit the face - but it _does do target penetration,_ so it might be able to tag the inner basket vulnerable point in a similar way to how this exploit does… Worth a try at least (though it'll be a while before I get through to NG+4 to be able to test this out again, as I was sitting around on a full-clear of the base game before SotE released, so it was easy to get back quickly, but now I have a lot more to go through to cycle back into it again).

@@PierceArner Oh I see, I don't think I killed the Armored ones just the regular ones. ty for the info

@@Spookhunter7 Sure thing! I believe that the only armored ones are the one in the massive field in Charo's Hidden Grave, and this one in Scadu Altus between Bonny Village & Manus Metyr.

@@chaoton It's still utterly absurd that it got changed to only cost 3FP.

@@tileux Well, all of them drop a unique Crystal Tear - this one being the Cerulean-Sapping Cracked Tear - but this is NG+3, so I already have them all, hence only dropping the Furnace Visage in the clip.

@@kanaria-cu3uv Haha, once you've beat a boss before, it's fun to get creative about seeing what's possible! Also, while you CAN easily cheese this armored Furnace Golem & slowly chip it's health away by shooting it in the face with an entire stockpile of spells, arrows, or anything that'll reach (which is why I was using this one to test misc spells with), I'm just surprised you're able to hit it's the inner weak point that other attacks can't from this position - and the massive damage burst it gives.

​@@PierceArner i couldn't find a video of you cheesing manus with what the commentor replied Is there a link to it or no vid at all?

@@wolfsteintruppel9259 They're not being strictly literal in this case. They're referring to the well-known cheese exploit for the endgame boss of Dark Souls' Artorias of the Abyss DLC as being a sort of similar "kill the big & powerful souls-like DLC boss while they can't attack you back" sort of tactic.

@@PierceArner oh so basically you're not the one who did the exploit

@@wolfsteintruppel9259 Correct.

And you are a prime example of a back seat loser

...Are you sure about that? First: The legs of this Furnace Golem are fully armored & so the body will take zero direct damage from direct attacks... so you _LITERALLY CAN'T win this fight with a colossal hammer_ even if you wanted to, let alone in half the time. I've already full-cleared the DLC, and this is my second time through it (currently on NG+3), hence why I'm just testing possible tactics to see what works & what doesn't. While there is one other Armored variant in Charo's Hidden Grave, I picked this particular Furnace Golem in Scadu Altus, because it's an easy area for testing the effectiveness of various spells since, when he's sufficiently pressed up against the arch entryway, his main fireballs can't hit you and it's the only other armored variant where a large number of attacks _just flat-out do no damage at all._ Secondly: I had already tested Rock Sling, Ancient Death Rancor, Multilayered Ring of Light, & Ancient Dragon's Lightning Strike against this Furnace Golem prior to finding out that this worked (hence why the clip starts with my FP already being low and the Furnace Golem partially damaged). None of those spells are particularly effective against this variant of the Furnace Golem from the ground. The only targetable damage regions are the Face & occasionally the Inner basket - both of which are fairly small targets and also are at a considerable vertical range from the player on the ground. Additionally, the basket can't be hit by anything that deals damages directly unless you're above it and firing down into it, so it has to be a spell with target penetration. The spells with particularly long range tracking like Ancient Death Rancor, Rock Sling + Arrow's Reach talisman are able to hit the Face reliably from below even at a decent distance, with Multilayered Rings of Light able to hit from a bit closer - they're only doing 2.5k-3k damage per cast, and all of them can only hit the Face - so they're a no-go unless you want to just win this as a battle of attrition chugging down FP flasks. Rock Sling costs 18FP, Ancient Death Rancor costs 21FP, and Multilayered Rings of Light costs 23FP. For comparison, Discus of Light does about 1.5k on a normal cast with both hits, and costs _6-8 TIMES LESS FP than all of three of those spells_ - which means that you're getting 9k-12k damage for the same FP cost from the casts only hitting the Face. On top of that, because Multilayered Rings of Light stops as soon as it makes contact with an object, Discus of Light is the only one of those ranged spells that has target penetration into the inner basket like a Comet spell does, which is what allows it to hit the inner basket when it is recalled back to you. This is why it's able to do sudden spikes of damage for the 14k or 51k damage chunks that occur spontaneously. Ancient Dragon's Lightning Strike costs 36FP, which is TWELVE TIMES as much as Discus of Light meaning that _it would have to do a MINIMUM of 18k per cast_ to be more cost effective than just hitting the Face with Discus of Light... and what's worse is that it doesn't seem to be able to reliably hit either the face OR basket when cast from below. While it's usually able to be ludicrously effective against large boss targets like the REGULAR Furnace Golems where it can multi-hit an enormous hitbox - _that doesn't apply here because their legs are fully armored._ Compared to the other spells, you have to be _extremely_ close to cast that... and when I did, I never had a cast hit the face OR inner basket _even a single time._ I don't even know if the hitbox of the Lightning Bolts even extends up high enough to even be capable of registering a hit against the Face OR inner Basket, as I had multiple casts that literally did ZERO damage. (So, it seems like it was exactly as effective as your proposed colossal hammer strategy). Lastly: I honestly wasn't expecting Discus of Light to pop off and do 51k damage out of nowhere and just absolutely demolish it, so I didn't get around to testing some of the other possible strategies with this Furnace Golem variant. But I'll be back to messing around with it again in NG+4 at some point.

@@PierceArner my mistake it's even easier than i thought you literally just throw large fire pots at it's head.

​@@pulverize3the showcased method has zero risk. Why do you spend precious seconds of your life attacking people online for literally no reason?

@@PierceArneryeah get his ass

If you check the description it goes into detail on exactly what I know about it at the moment. The short version is that Cursed Blood Pots apply their status effect to Spirit Summons - but the Death Knight not only seemingly ALSO gets this effect, but he also re-triggers the Mohg sigil multiple times which normally only appears once at the location where the pot first hits.

@@elnovato250 I totally forgot how it gets that extreme turn capability when it's midway through the air before the dive, so the sudden 180° strike into his face to stagger for giving the killing critical was an unexpected surprise & the moment that stood out for me as feeling particularly thematic. This run through I've mostly been trying to bash through in a specific order to get the rest of the DLC stuff from Remembrances & quests (like Dragonbolt of Florissax & Bayle's Flame Lightning which I got from this), so that I can put together a specific fully dragon-themed build on my next run.

@@maidros85 I assume it's using it as an extended jump primarily, but I'll have to check it out once I get back through again.

I'll definitely give that a go on my next run!

It also pulls any other magic in towards it, which is harder to tell in this one, but if you launch it a bit earlier, you can actually see that it draws the rocks and other projectiles away within a certain range.

Having more people increases his health. You gotta beat him 3 times, essentially

It's gotta be a second Radahn Festival to give the man the proper sendoff he deserves!

@@PierceArner Bro I’d be right with you if you set down the summon. FOR RADAHN!!! 🔥

@@kadimawolf7711 More participants for the festival = more good.

Yeah, I wish my victory fight was as cleanly executed but this one by _far_ had the better and more consistent counter with Ranni's Dark Moon, which I thought was the most interesting tactic.

Cloud is probably a component of that, as he's a VERY close reflection of Sephiroth's own trauma. There's a portrayal of them in *_Kingdom Hearts 2_* where Sephiroth is the darkness in Cloud's heart that he can't let go of, while Cloud is the little piece of light left in Sephiroth's that he can't bring himself to fully snuff out. Like yin & yang, perfect opposites like that are just a mirror of one another, which is why Cloud's identity about being a Sephiroth Copy and his behavioural slips in *_Rebirth_* all show him displaying Sephiroth-like characteristics. (There's some critically important context in that relationship that's also very true of people with visual hallucinations from PTSD like Cloud experiences, which is that the inability to recognize someone who traumatized you as a human very much like you reinforces the fear and trauma responses for things like visual hallucinations. They do a really good job in portraying his condition even amidst the scifi & magic elements).

As materia is crystalized wisdom, knowledge, memories, etc. from the Lifestream, I figured that Aerith's White materia became clear when the Whispers took her memories away from her. As Cloud still doesn't really remember himself and thus is frequently subject to Sephiroth's puppeteering, I think that it's more representative of himself at the moment. While it may be his dreams and desires that facilitate some of those interactions, those things have largely been taking place since the end of Remake when it was in Aerith's possession, so it's hard to know exactly what its core purpose is mechanically compared to the White & Black Materia. Thematically, I think it's that Cloud has to be able to make his own choices rather than following the echoes that others have for him to decide what it is he really wants (which he struggles with through ACC), but it is an interesting mystery either way!

Just to clarify… I don't ever record anything _FOR_ TH-cam. Anything on my channel is just something I clipped from a playthrough with the PS5 capture, and then saved by tossing it online here so that I don't have to use the storage space to keep it locally. I have no interest in making something individually curated as content, so don't expect that of anything here. At most it'll have description notes as a reference. This one is from a little ways into my first playthrough of *_Rebirth_* and I was just trying for high scores since it was fun strategy. I _VASTLY_ outclassed this win in other clips after I got further and played the minigame for longer, so I can confidently say - if you're trying to maximize a possible score with a deck in Queen's Blood, _you SHOULD take your time_ because it's about strategy, not speed and that will change slightly every match. If you're not trying to think through chains of different plays and potential score shifts, you're not going to be able to optimize when the opponent happens to set you up properly for one possible success path your deck has. There are a lot of easy ways to lose out on getting a higher score by rushing.

Cloud hasn't been just the "real" Cloud since the Nibelheim incident when he got impaled by Sephiroth. He's been in a mako-poisoned catatonic state, and then sort of patched together with fragments of other people's mannerisms like Zack's thanks to Jenova cells. *_Remake_* addressed this with Jessie's dad being in a mako-poisoned coma from collapsing in the reactor with her theory that his spirit was stuck in the Lifestream disconnected from his body. In that sense, our Cloud is sort of only half alive, thus he slips between those realms when he's sleeping. Sephiroth doesn't arrive until Aerith is actually there, since she's the only one he's pursuing - which he's able to do because Cloud killed him in Nibelheim, but his consciousness has refused to return to the Planet. He's in that same liminal state, most of which is covered in *_On The Way to a Smile Case of Lifestream Black & White_* which came out years ago. Sephiroth doesn't want Cloud dead, because they're reflections of one another and he's always wanted a friend. He's being the antagonist for Cloud because Cloud wants to get stronger to save the people he cares about, and so Sephiroth is guiding him through the pain to make Cloud embrace that power in the same way he did.

As someone whose favourite FF7 character since 1997 has been Zack - I don't feel deceived. Not sure what exactly anyone would even be called out on.

​@@PierceArnerIf feel since I come to the conclusion that Zack has not died this time. If this is some false hope BS then screw Square Enix simple as that.

@@PierceArner They definitely gave people the impression that Zack would have a much greater presence in the game.

Yup. It's what the whole concept of "Returning to the Planet" is.

Yup. FFVII has always been a story about how to cope with significant loss where the terms like "returning to the Planet" and "the Promised Land" have always been metaphors about death and finding peace, so seeing them represented this way in the Remake Project is really just in line with the way it's always been. There is also a lot of spiritual existentialism that comes from Hinduism & Buddhism that Western audiences aren't implicitly familiar with from a cultural perspective, which intersects with multiverse themes in fiction that ARE very familiar, so it's not too surprising that only half of that gets picked up on, which is why I'm glad for things like the overt dialogue from this NPC to clearly lay some of that out.

So the world Zack is alive in isn't an alternate universe? Is it just a dream world?

@@ericstaples7220 Well, yes and no. The concept of the Lifestream is heavily based in a few existential themes about life that originate in Hinduism & Buddhism where reality itself is just as much of an illusion. That's why there are the scenes of Sephiroth and Cloud in a space outside of that looking at the true nature of reality of choices and decisions forking off into various realities that end, and why Sephiroth wants to prevent them from ending and stitch them all together as a form of Reunion. Essentially this would invalidate individual agency as none of the choices you make would matter, and while that would remove the pain from loss or death, it wouldn't prevent suffering from emerging as the Gi Tribe demonstrates. The world where Zack is alive is just that collection of hopes, dreams, and ambitions in a Promised Land that represents when people and experiences that you lost and have a longing for but can never return to, and the desire to see them again some day. (It's a metaphor for Heaven in the Lifestream that Shinra has also conflated with a literal physical place made of Mako, similar to where the real world metaphor originates).

Not really.

Bingo. This is also why, when Zack touches Aerith's hand and talks to her, Aerith literally feels it from a strand of the Lifestream making contact with her hand while she's on Gi Nattak's boat headed towards the Village of the Gi.

This may be how it used to be... until we killed the Arbiters of Fate in Remake. Now it seems like those pre-existing boundaries are gone, and those worlds now do actually exist. Sephiroth is feeding on many many lifestreams trying to protect their worlds from dying instead of one. So what you said is probably the case when the Arbiters were alive. But now that they aren't, those boundaries are gone.

they were playing elden ring when they were figuring out where to put this shi 😂

Lmao yuuup. Had to know what Max was talkin about. I completely missed this shit. The sound of my jaw hitting the floor every 4 seconds must have drowned it out.

Here's my take: Chapter 14 in *_Rebirth_* specifies that the alternate reality we see with Zack surviving in is Aerith's Dream (which is why it's populated specifically with the people of Sector 5). *_Remake_* also always has the visions of Zack's fate coming from her memories in Chapter 18, and she sees the fragmented sky at the end of that game when they leave Midgar the way Cloud sees it now after *_Rebirth._* While Aerith's Dream is where she got to be reunited with Zack, it's ALSO where she's trying to find the "real" Cloud, since his mind is still lost in the Lifestream from the mako poisoning. His memories & dreams are all confused still in a similar way, which is why Sephiroth has such an easy time confusing him and why he sees things others can't (since Sephiroth, Zack, & Aerith have now all passed on and are interacting from a spiritual plane). That's why Aerith & Cloud both wake up there together and specifically she tells him it's her dream - a world where everyone has accepted their fates. Cloud keeps a connection to this even after he recovers, which is the pure white space where Aerith's hand reaches out at the end of the original *_FF7_* and also where he sees her & Zack in *_Advent Children_* because he's still holding on to those memories as he's healing from the loss, while they're helping him to move forward and smile again. The main events in *_Remake_* seem to be following the original and leading naturally into *_Advent Children_* so I don't see it as a different timeline of sorts, and more just a way of conceptualizing the spiritual realization of the dreams of those who have passed on as a way of understanding what the Promised Land is for both the life you're left living without the people who are gone and the idea of all of your dreams becoming intertwined when you eventually return to the Planet with them.

@@PierceArner Late reply but I think you have the correct gist of the situation. The lifestream doesn't follow the rules of time and space as any other living being does, it's a gateway that connects all, and a place where all souls go to when their original body dies. My take is that OG was the correct and original timeline, and it already "happened". The problem is that Sephiroth by the end of it, once reunited with the lifestream, decided to "remake" things through the lifestream itself. FF7 follows a completely different setup compared to Kingdom Hearts, for example, where there is only one timeline and if I go to the past then I can't change the present because the consequence of my actions are already would already there. In FF7 instead through the lifestream it is possible to alter fate and create different branches (note that most of those are just very limited in scope and serve a very specific purpose, there should be only one main timeline which is the one we follow during the game), Sephiroth wants to use this ability to create the perfect timeline where he ends up as the winner. Aerith by the end of OG is also part of the lifestream and probably decided to play the same game as Sephiroth, but her objective is to make things ultimately go as planned (OG)

@@PierceArner So in an essence Square Enix has decieved Zack fans into thinking he survived to get their money and then told them he was dead all along? That's completely BS and I truly hope you're wrong dude.

​@@punkpop101I think the moral of the story is accepting fate and learning to move on. Zack died. He isn't coming back.

​@@ericstaples7220If this is the moral of the story I'm out. I truly hope you're wrong and Square Enix has not lost it. After all those scenes to just make us accept fate would be the biggest BS of all for me.

Yup. Probably one of _the_ most important bits of in-game information for that.

And so easily missable. Wild.​@@PierceArner

I assume it was just stats, but I'm not certain. If you do this a bit more cleanly, you can avoid getting any stacks entirely.