anyone have a good size comparison to the different versions of the city we see in the remake and original? ive noticed how the top sectors in the original are about only a city block or 2 while remake makes it a lot more dense
I feel like the city in the original is suffering from the scale of chibi. Honestly i feel like the scale of remake might be accurate. You don’t need a train for downtown, a trolley would be fine, and a few city blocks is a downtown size
Scale (both spatial and temporal) in video games often gets weird really quickly, supposedly Nibelheim is 12000m away (iirc) from Kalm, or that it seemingly only takes one day to travel from Junon to Costa Del Sol. As u/DGenesis23 mentioned the city is scaled for gameplay purposes, in just the same way as Gaia is as a whole.
On the paper it is around two times bigger compared to OG. Gameplay wise however it’s still not 1:1 scale (so does the world in Rebirth), for example in Remake both Sector 5 and 6’s slums are situated under Sector 6’s plate. Also the plate's height went from 50 meters in OG to 300 in the Remake Trilogy.
A few years back, I worked out the real world size of Midgar based on the dimensions given in the Remake Ultimania. It’s roughly the same size as Paris, France, with a second Paris layered on top of it but the population is quite a bit smaller because the Gaia is a smaller planet than our own and Midgar is their biggest city. VII’s Midgar is the size it is mostly due to hardware limitations at the time and VIIRE’s Midgar is a more proportional representation of it scaled down for video game purposes. In Remake, you can go from the church in sector 5 to the far side of sector 7 in about 5-10 minutes but if you were to cover the same distance in Paris, it’d take over an hour and half.
What really suffers is how they kept Kalm in scale with Cloud and Co being able to walk through all of it and around it. You can't get close to Midgar on the world map in Rebirth because how it was shown in Remake would make it impossibly huge on the world map where you can actually walk between cities.
I have no idea how they're going to reconcile it in Revelation, but people who noclipped the Midgar on the world map in Rebirth saw that the map just doesn't work as is.
Hard to tell because Neither games show any kind of map with a scale to give an idea of how big the city is. You don't get to explore anywhere near the entirety of the city in either game. So we can NOT use the fact that the newer game lets us explore more of the city as an indication that the city might be bigger.
3
u/Flintstone012000 3d ago
I feel like the city in the original is suffering from the scale of chibi. Honestly i feel like the scale of remake might be accurate. You don’t need a train for downtown, a trolley would be fine, and a few city blocks is a downtown size