Here's a really great spoiler-filled discussion about the game. It's a doozy, but worth it.
I feel like his
Jenova theory has to be a massive stretch, no? It doesn't really seem to add up to me, and his evidence for it seemed like it could just as easily apply to any of the other possibilities (
for example, why Aerith at the end only uses dialogue from past moments in the game-- that could really mean anything). But it is pretty neat how the game managed to leave it SO open to interpretation that there are legitimately like
5 different Aeriths that it could possibly be at the end (that are each equally likely, and that COULD change from scene to scene within the same sequence) and we just don't know which one it is. It is nutty.
Maybe it's just me, but honestly, I had a lot of frustrations trying to follow his thoughts in this podcast, though. I thought Max was a little less coherent in this discussion than he was in Remake. Considering how convoluted the ambiguities of the game are and the fact that we didn't know his take going into this talk, I wish he would be more upfront and less mysterious/theatrical about how he presents his theories. He kept doing this thing where he starts out framing things a certain way that made you assume it was his genuine opinion of what was going on, and then possibly but unclearly under-cutting it as a fake-out by suggesting something completely different from that, implying that the former was just the natural but wrong assumption and the latter is what he actually thinks is happening, and when follow-up questions are asked to try to make sense of that actual theory (because oh boy, do they need to be), he may or may not do the same thing again (or even suggest a theory that he DOESN'T necessarily believe but is also a possibility), which kept making me lose track and go "Wait, so which one of the two different things that you said is the thing that you think?! How does it connect with that other ambiguous thing you said earlier? Was the earlier thing I'm thinking of one of the real takes or one of the fake-out takes or one of the 'who-knows?' takes?" several times. I feel like the Easy Allies guys also got lost a few times as well.
Also, man, this guy always bends over backwards to be as hyped/forgiving as possible for this stuff (although admittedly, I have sort of similarly started to 180 on a lot of my initial criticisms as well). He's fun, charismatic, passionate, and knowledgeable, but I always have to take his takeaways with a grain of salt.
It is a fun listen regardless, though.
