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crisiscutie · 2 months

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Dissidia Darling's Disaster Dates! Round 1: Sephiroth

In celebration of Rebirth's upcoming release, my blog's anniversary and the sad demise of Opera Omnia, I might just do a mini-dating series, set at the Gold Saucer. Let's see how it goes. Enjoy this scenario! Features slight Aerith/Darling.

Content Warning: Slightly NSFW. Yandere/toxic relationship. Blood. Some physical abuse. Emotional abuse and manipulation. Skinshipping. Lots of dialogue. Darling's POV is trippy and unreliable.

You looked around with worry, desperately searching for any sign of your allies. Somehow, you had become separated from Kadaj, Aerith and the others while exploring a haunted mansion. You looked all over this damn amusement park searching for them, but with no luck so far. Why the hell is everything so eerily quiet now? Everywhere you went, there didn't seem to be signs of life. But all the bright lights and machinery operated as normal, oddly enough. The round square is one of the last places you haven't checked, so you went there to see if they're around.

But the longer you walked, the hazier your vision became and your kimono felt constricted, causing you to readjust your obi. Maybe it's just your anxiety making you feel that way. But you hated being alone. You just need something, someone, to keep you from going mad. You didn't even notice a black feather landing on top of your head as you approached a gondola ride. Maybe this will lead you to the others? The reason you all came to this world was to hunt for crystals, but Aerith came up with the idea for everyone to take a break and enjoy themselves, which is why you opted to dress up. Kadaj and the others must be worried sick about you. You hoped that no monsters or summons had caused any trouble in your absence.

"...Are you lost?" a deep voice purred from behind you. Coming to a sudden stop, you turned hesitantly to face Sephiroth. His gaze was so intense that it practically rooted you to the earth, and your vision became clouded by a pink-purplish tint, blurring everything but him. The man who rescued when you first arrived in this universe, the one who masqueraded as your jaded, but caring mentor. He had treated you so well. But now, you knew the truth about him - he had used you for his own gain. What could he possibly offer you now that you knew his true nature? Yet, you're alone, with no one else by your side. The void was becoming unbearable. But the simple act of him offering his hand shattered your psychosis, bringing you back to reality. You couldn't resist the impulse to take his hand now, though it was against your judgment. When you took the final step into the gondola, your body stiffened, causing you to stumble and lose your balance, but Sephiroth acted swiftly. He caught you, wrapping his hand around your waist.

He pulled you close to him and your hands gravitated towards his chest as he leaned down to your level. And without warning, his luscious lips inched dangerously close to yours, making you gasped. He smirked, savoring the way you reacted and how you shifted uncomfortably. Then, he moved his lips to your ear, almost brushing against it, and spoke in a soft whisper.

"You know, you could thank me for catching you." He chuckled when you quickly took a step back, too flustered to respond. Though, he still kept his hold on your waist. With a heartfelt sigh, he reached out and took hold of your hand. His lips hovered above it as if he were about to kiss it, but instead, he lovingly nuzzled it against his cheek and closed his eyes. Your touch alone sent shocks of euphoria to his cold heart. Slowly, he guided your hand down his neck, collarbone, and chest, while wearing a euphoric smile that seared itself into your consciousness.

"I've missed you..." He then sat down on the seat, pulling you into his lap soon after. He gave your neck a small kiss before locking his slit eyes onto you. Even with all that transpired, every fiber of your being craved him. You wanted him to keep holding you, touching you, worshipping you. This had to be the reunion instincts Cloud and Vincent warned you about, it's a mix of unsettling rightness and wrongness that erupted goosebumps all over your body.

"Have you been keeping up with your sparring?" he asked, adopting the caring tone of a father checking on their child. You shyly mumbled a "yes," which earned you another sweet neck kiss from him.

"Good girl..."

"Why did you lie to me, Sephiroth?" you huffed out, as you tried to resist the reunion and the euphoria building up within you. Your face grew hot, and beads of sweat trickled down your forehead.

"I never lied to you, my darling. In fact, I played my role well. Guiding you in this realm was my duty. I was always there for you. And let's not forget, it was you who offered to help summon 'Mother' for me." As these words sunk in, your heart dropped.

"I... did.. But-"

"and you had to know that she didn't have a physical form," he interrupted you, still nuzzling into your neck. He had you cornered. What he said was certainly true, but there had to be some lie in there. Like the others told you, he's always lying... Right!?

"I NEVER AGREED TO BE ITS VESSEL!" you shouted, a surge of strength and anger flowed through you in that fleeting moment. In response, he erupted into a series of dark, eerie chuckles like a deranged maniac, almost as if he was emulating someone.

"Foolish girl," he hissed, his voice cutting through the gondola, making you feel like an unruly child being scolded. How else could she come into this realm without a beacon? You're the one who called her, so it's fitting she chose you. It is my duty to see this through, as her chosen son." His lips curled into a sneer as the horror and self-doubt washed over you like a wave. You had gotten yourself into this situation, but now you didn't know how to deal with it or even put an end to it. Your arms instinctively wrapped around his neck, drawing him nearer to you. The expression on his face suddenly shifted from sadistic and smug to... almost comforting and warm?

"I know you're scared, darling," his voice was smooth and reassuring, almost hypnotic. "But I'm here for you, and we're in this together. Remember the good times we had? Do you really want to throw all of that away? We could rule this world, the entire cosmos, if you'd only come back to me." He finished his speech with a relaxed sigh. In one swift movement, he tore your kimono open, exposing your soft skin to the cool air. He then pressed his cheek against your upper chest, causing a sigh of pure bliss to escape your lips. He gave your collarbone a firm nip and left his mark, his slit eyes glowering at your belly with a solemn look when he's done.

"You are carrying our future within you," he whispered. "And soon, it will be born."

Afterwards, a blissful silence enveloped the gondola, as both of you became completely engrossed in each other's presence. You two just wanted to keep holding each other for eternity. Your trance started to end when you heard the familiar voice of Aerith calling out to you. You muttered her name in return and glanced out of the gondola's window to see her and the rest of the group waiting for you two at the final stop, weapons drawn and prepared.

"It seems like our time together has come to a close," he whispered, hissing softly in your ear. Your heart raced, and your vision blurred, focused on his alternating expressions, a sinister smirk, and a euphoric smile. His slit eyes widened, and his pupils dilated, fixated solely on you. As soon as you blinked, his Masamune blade was pressed against your neck, its icy touch leaving you paralyzed with fear. "If I take your head, darling, I can keep better track of you. No one will ever separate us." His velvety voice betrayed a glimmer of giddiness, revealing cracks in his composed demeanor.

"No! Don't do this! Nothing will come out of it!" you exclaimed. His blade barely moved, and already a small trickle of blood ran down your neck. You closed your eyes, hoping this nightmare would end soon.

"Nonsense, it will work just like last time, Mother," he whispered, his thumb gently caressing your left cheek. He slightly moved the blade again, the flow of blood increased. But then, his Masamune vanished, and he pressed his forehead against yours.

"The manifestation is not yet complete. Go on, my darling, continue filling your hollow heart with despair so that we may achieve the reunion we seek." After those words, he carefully and tenderly positioned your weakening body onto the seat, like a precious doll being prepared for exhibition. He kissed your foreheadbefore disappearing, leaving his dark feathers scattered around you. Your vision was clouded by that same pink-purplish tint from before as your body went completely limp, just as the gondola ride came to a hard stop.

The others were geared and ready for a fight when the gondola's doors automatically opened, but they were surprised to see Sephiroth gone already. Aerith was the first to rush inside, making a beeline for you. As she examined your body for injuries, she noticed something peculiar when she looked into your dull eyes - a brief, faint pink glow. Her gasp was followed by her gaze drifting downward, where she spotted a strange dark feather resting on your swollen collarbone, covering Sephiroth's lovebite. With a grimace, she gently removed the feather, watching it disintegrate in her hand. It was undoubtedly his twisted way of asserting ownership over you, a taunt to her and the others about your impending "destiny". Despite her efforts to lift you to your feet, your body remained dead weight, making it impossible to get you up.

"Zack, I need your help!" she yelled. He nodded, quickly rushing over and utilizing his SOLDIER strength to carry you out of the gondola.

Your last thought before fully losing consciousness in Zack's arms was whether there was time to enjoy the fun night with other dates. Got those priorities straight, don't you darling?

Date rating: 2/10.

Sephy tried, but he just couldn't help himself after being separated from darling for far too long. 😔 As I said, I might make a mini-dating series with other FF characters.

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superthatguy62 · 11 months

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The Differences and Influence of the Final Fantasy 1 manga

While Final Fantasy is certainly no stranger to adaptations and alternate media, it’s mostly towards the later entries such as VII or XV depending on how you feel about such media, this may not be a bad thing.

When it comes to the first three entries, their adaptations are the most mysterious: Final Fantasy III got an absolutely insane manga, Final Fantasy II got a somewhat insane novelization and Final Fantasy I has an obscure manga. As these came out long ago in Japan and were rarely, if ever, re-released, knowledge on these media remains scarce.

However, TrafalgarScans on MangaDex has translated the entirety of the Final Fantasy I manga, allowing english readers to experience it for the first time.

And, while a straightforward retelling of the original game, there are a few interesting elements in it. Elements that may seem somewhat familiar if you’ve Dissidia or Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin.

Before we begin, I’m going to be doing something different from my previous discussions: Rather than doing a summary/play-by-play of the manga, I’m mostly going to be talking about things I noticed, whether they be different... or indirectly indicative of where Square would take FF1 in the future. As that implies, I will be discussing spoilers for Dissidia and Strangers of Paradise.

For context: The manga was written Kaimejii Yuu and was released in 1989: 2 years after the first game landed on Famicom, one year before it arrived on NES and the same year as the MSX port. So rejoice Space Station!Flying Fortress fans.

Let’s start with one of the obvious ones:

The Party

The original Final Fantasy centers around four Warriors of Light who mysteriously appear, each with a crystal fragment.

In the manga, we are introduced to the members of the party bit by bit: First, there is Puffy who seems to be a traveling Warrior.

Puffy later meets Flitz/Fritz, a Monk who was kicked out of his monastery for his vices.

A Monk and a Warrior. Seems standard so far. But then there are the other 2 members.

Matoya, a witch who is skilled with black magic.

And the fourth party member... who isn’t introduced until quite a ways in. While Sarah and Bikke both join the party, the true forth member turns out to be none other than

Bahamut, the king of dragons.

Naturally, this is a pretty big deviation: Matoya and Bahamut are NPCs in the game after, but here, they’re main characters. Matoya would go on to be a prominent character in FF1, even being playable in spinoffs for what it’s worth. However, I don’t think there are many FF1 interpretations that put the NPCs in the WoL roles.

They’re not the only ones different, however

The Villains

The Final Fantasy manga follows a somewhat condensed version of the game. It’s actually kinda close to how Memory of Heroes did it, with the focus largely on Garland and the Four Fiends, concluding with a bout against Chaos.

Garland generally keeps his overall role, including his infatuation with Sarah (which makes me wonder what was the first media to touch on that aspect of him) but also has some significant differences: He doesn’t wear armor, he doesn’t seem to die before vanishing and the manga more blatantly sets up the plot twist by showing Garland entering the Dark Crystal. Only Flitz notices though, so he’s the first to realize that Garland’s behind everything once the Warriors learn about the whole she-bang from the Lufenians.

There’s also his name, but we’ll get to that.

The Warriors are promptly attacked by the Four Chaos/Fiends. There’s the Lich, who is looking positively Mobius!Chaos today.

Then we have Marilith, who looks about how you’d expect.

Then we have Kraken... Who is...

And last but not least, we have Tiamat, who has both a monster form and a humanlike form.

And then there’s Chaos, whose design is vaguely reminiscent of how Garland’s armor would evolve from Dissidia onwards mixed with traits from his Chaos form.

Oh yeah, Garland. Did you know that’s not his full name in this adaptation? Yup, long before “Jack Garland” would use the last name Garland, this Garland had the full name of “Red Garland”.

And here’s where we start to get into the influence that this manga may or may not have had on Square-Enix’s future interpretations of Final Fantasy 1.

The Backstory

In the games, the Warriors of Lights’ backstory is left unexplained. This plays into the role-play/”create a party” aspect of the game: It’s up to the player, if they so chose, to fill in the blanks about who their characters are and where they came from.

Memory of Heroes, being a close adaptation of the games, leaves its characters’ backstories ambiguous outside of tying a further connection to Garland as his time shenanigans “unchained” the Warriors of Light and wiped their memories, explaining why they can remember nothing and why nobody recognizes them.

Dissidia Final Fantasy, while not directly touching upon the events of FF1 itself, gives a backstory to its Warrior of Light: He’s a perfect manikin created by Cid of the Lufaine and placed within the cycles of conflict. Over time, he grows into more of an actual person and continuously comes to blows with Garland, who already knows him from the cycle back home. In the end, WoL ends up in the FF1 world and sets off on his journey, determined to not only save the world from Chaos but to free Garland from the endless cycle he unwittingly trapped himself in.

The manga, however, gives a more detailed backstory.

Early in Chapter 2, Puffy explains that she is not actually from that world; In another dimension, she worked at an inn and was just an ordinary girl. However, on her way to visit her friend Matoya, she winds up slipping through a dimensional barrier. When she wakes up, she’s surrounded by the circle of sages who explain the situation to her and send her off to fight Chaos, despite her attempts to argue otherwise. Puffy later meets up with a different version of Matoya, and soon after the manga begins.

This is largely forgotten about until climax, where it becomes much more important:

As one of Lufenia’s Knights of Gaia/Sky Warriors, one of the bats in the Chaos Shrine explains a bit further: It’s not just Puffy, all four of the Warriors apparently hail from other dimensions. The Knights figured that the best way to stop Chaos was to get four people from parallel worlds that Chaos did not exist in, resulting in heroes with fresh perspectives from worlds in which the crystals were not compromised. Thus they set up barriers that would link the five worlds together and the four Warriors of Light seen in the manga wound up being the four that were chosen (the manga mostly focuses on Puffy, but the implication is that Flitz, Bahamut and that version of Matoya all hail from similar parallel worlds). After Chaos is defeated, the four end up being sent back to their own worlds with no memory of their adventure. Puffy in particular goes back to being an innkeeper and serves drinks to various patrons... including Garland who, although rejected by Sarah yet again, has not turned into Chaos and is an overall decent guy.

What makes the dimensional stuff even more surprising is the meta aspect: Either great minds think alike, the parallel world stuff was in the Japanese FF1 or Square Enix took inspiration from this very manga.

Dissidia Final Fantasy is a big fat crossover featuring the protagonists from the first couple games. While the first game was somewhat ambiguous, Dissidia 012 (the prequel) would establish that the game took place on World B: A destroyed parallel counterpart to World A, which is the world of Final Fantasy 1. The reports in 012 would also establish that Onrac stumbled upon a dimensional gate which would be how they acquired the ore that allowed them to produce manikins.

Stranger of Paradise takes the parallels even further. The concept of Lufenians drawing in people from parallel worlds to function as Warriors of Light was embodied in the Stranger Project. However, it turns out that the manga beat them to the punch with Knights of Gaia’s dimensional barriers. Of course, the KoG were benevolent compared to the SoP Lufenians who were malevolent. The concept of summoning warriors from other worlds would naturally be used there too, although in 012′s case, it’s due to Shinryu’s influence creating gateways.

And speaking of...

The Lufenians

The Lufenians are a simple, standard “Ancient Civilization with advanced tech (TM)” that was common in fantasy stories and would become a recurring trend in Final Fantasy, one that still remains even to this day. As far as plot significance go, they remain primarily in the background: They’re one of the civilizations the WoLs encounter their space station is the Semi-final dungeon and their champions were turned into bats that infodump a number of aspects about the overarching plot.

Then there’s Cid. In the original Final Fantasy, while the airship is said to be a Lufenian creation I think, I need to fact that that, there’s no mention of any particular Lufenian who created it. Later versions would name the Lufenian “Cid”, in keeping with series tradition of naming the prominent airship engineer “Cid”. Memory of Heroes gave a Cid a more prominent role, leaving behind video projections to show what happened to the Flying Fortress, entrusting the warp cube to the robots and burying the airship that the Warriors of Light find and use to travel in the later half of the story.

However, Cid’s actions are actually somewhat familiar.

In the manga, a Lufenian (not Cid, though with the benefit of hindsight and how SE would’ve handled it, he may as well be) features prominently in the intro, leaves one of the robots to gather the warp cubes in preparation for the day the Warriors of Light arrive and leaves behind a video projection, with the man himself being long dead by then. Not!Cid’s exposition is different though, tying into how the energies from the four shrines can be seen converging on the Chaos Shrine from the Space Station as well as discussing the Knights of Gaia for a bit.

There’s also the dark crystal. In Final Fantasy, Garland is seen in front of a dark crystal in the Chaos Shrine. When the Warriors travel back to the past, they play the lute in front of the shrine, transforming the crystal into a portal. Stranger of Paradise would explain the crystal as being a “Dimensional Crystal Matrix”, sent to them by their unnamed collaborator.

Again, however, this is not the first time this has happened.

Turns out, the Dark Crystal in the manga is a “Time-Space Transfer Device”. The Knights of Gaia had used the device to set up the barriers to summon warriors from other worlds. However, Chaos took control of the device soon afterwards and used it to set up the time loop that would bring him to power. Coincidence or not, the manga Lufenians’ usage of the device would be echoed in the aforementioned two different aspects (the Dimensional Crystal Matrix and the Stranger Project). SoP would also echo the element of Garland taking control of the device for his own uses.

Conclusion

In the Stranger of Paradise Confidential Files -Secret Chapters- (An official complete guide - Thanks ChrysalisThoughts for the clarification! ), one of the questions posed to the developers is why Jack’s station is known as “Station 19″. While the final game has its own independent time loop, apparently it was named after SoP being the 19th time Final Fantasy 1 was ported/remade at the time, with the idea of different strangers being dispatched from different stations for each of the remakes.

While that plan ultimately didn’t fully pan out, the implication of Final Fantasy 1 having parallel worlds or a connection to other worlds in general is one that has echoed throughout the franchise.

- The Final Fantasy manga utilizing the concept of parallel worlds for its protagonists.

- The Souls of Chaos dungeons featuring prominent bosses from the other 5 Nintendo-era Final fantasy games.

- Dissidia introducing “World B” with 012 establishing it of being a parallel world to the world of the original Final Fantasy

- Memory of Heroes implying that the Warriors of Light of its three adaptations (and perhaps beyond) either inherit the will/souls of the previous ones or are the previous ones reincarnated in another world.

- And Stranger of Paradise’s original intentional of having parallel worlds, along with its hinted connection to World B

It’s looking more and more like a DC multiverse, especially if you flub things to suggest that each interpretation is its own parallel world.

But, in a way, it’s oddly fitting. Final Fantasy is a game that has you make your own party. The game gives no detail as to their character or backstory. You’re encouraged to fill in the blanks yourself, hence why fanfics and such can vary wildly with how everyone ca reinterpret the story. In a way, it’s fitting that SE themselves get in on it. And it’s interesting how, almost every time, multi-dimensional shenanigans manage to get involved.

I dunno.

I just think it’s neat.

#Final Fantasy #Dissidia #dissidia final fantasy #Stranger of Paradise #Final Fantasy Origin #Long Post #Longpost #Memory of Heroes #Puffy Tolte #Flitz Stewart #Fritz Stewart #Garland #Matoya #Bahamut #Chaos #FF1 #FFI

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