Welcome!! Even unpopular dweebs like you may meet their destiny here!!
Man outside Honey Bee Inn
Honey Bee Inn is an optional and unrevisitable location within the Midgar Slums in Final Fantasy VII. Honey Bee Inn is located in the Wall Market on Sector 6. Honey Bee Inn returns in Final Fantasy VII Remake, albeit in a modernized form. Director Tetsuya Nomura has explained that the facility identical to the original game in the Remake would cause "physical unease."[1]
Cloud Strife and Aerith Gainsborough come to Wall Market to try and find a way to save Tifa Lockhart from Don Corneo. Honey Bee Inn can be entered after first visiting Don's mansion at the north of Wall Market, and then talking to a man near the entrance to Honey Bee Inn who gives the player the Membership Card key item. The area is famous for having hoards of dummied data left in the game coding.
Honey Bee Inn is a members only brothel where the girls wear bee outfits. Visitors may choose between four rooms, each with a different theme. In the game, two of the rooms are occupied and the player can choose between two rooms. At the back of the brothel there is a dressing room for the girls, where visitors are not normally allowed access, but the player can visit it if they wish.
In Final Fantasy VII Remake, the new Honeybee Inn is a much different establishment, a VIP night club.
Layout[]
The lobby of the Honey Bee Inn is a hexagonal-shaped room, with four doors leading to different rooms that can be used by guests: the Group Room, the Lover's Room, the Queen's Room, and the &$#% Room. Each of these rooms is well-decorated with a different theme.
The Lover's Room and Queen Room cannot be entered, but Cloud can peep through a keyhole and hear a conversation. The Lover's Room contains a miniature Cait Sith in the far-right corner, while the Queen's Room contains girls talking about a Shinra employee who has a meeting with President Shinra, and how his wife has found out about him visiting the Honey Bee Inn. The Group Room and the &$#% Room can be occupied by Cloud when he enters. After entering the room, a scene will occur, depending on the room chosen.
At the back is the Staff Room, where the girls get ready and put on makeup.
Gameplay[]
Cloud's disguise sidequest[]
Cloud in the Honey Bee Inn.
The player can visit the Honey Bee Inn as part of Cloud's crossdressing plan in his attempt to pass as a woman to be given admittance to Don Corneo's mansion, in order to save Tifa. By visiting either of the two rooms in the Honey Bee Inn the player receives a key item, which likely was originally intended to affect Cloud's chances of being picked as the "bride for the night" for Corneo, but the items received this way do nothing. The player can still receive a girl's lingerie by visiting the top left room, or a bikini brief visiting the bottom left one. The other two rooms the player can't enter, but they can peep in through the keyhole.
After visiting a room the player can get make-up put on them by a girl in the dressing rooms. If the player talks enough times to the girl on the far left, they will get an option to ask the girl to apply make-up on Cloud. The success of the make-up work is random and the only clue to how good a make-up work the player got is the sound effect that plays when the girl does it. The sound of wind blowing gives the best result, increasing Cloud's chances of being picked by Don Corneo the most, but this is also the rarest outcome. Other outcomes are a simple bleep sound (the worst result) and a sound like being cured (the second best option). Dummied text unearthed from the game suggests that the player would have originally been able to choose which kind of make-up they want to have.
After the events, the player can never visit the Honey Bee Inn again. After dressing as a girl the player can no longer go in, and after the events in Don Corneo's mansion the Honey Bee Inn owners no longer let the player enter, deeming Cloud "too weird" of having heard of his crossdressing habits. If the player visits the Honey Bee Inn after the Meteor has been summoned, the place has been taken over by Shinra.
Behind the scenes[]
Dummied content[]
Honey Bee Inn is known for having a lot of dummied out content, some of which only exists in the original Japanese release, and has since been removed completely. A scene unearthed using hacking revealed an event with Palmer, showing that the Honey Bee Inn used to have a whole reception area with pictures of girls on the walls.
The music unique to the Palmer scene is not used anywhere else in the game. The tune was previously unearthed from the game's PC version, but by then it was unknown for what scene it was intended. In the scene, much of the dialogue reads as gibberish, as the game displays the wrong kanji, but a translation has been made with corrections, which is available in the attached video.
The Shinra Manager fumbles his words as he refuses to give his name, and subsequently whispers it to the receptionist. An unnamed customer faints in response to a blown kiss from a Honey Bee, who shuts herself back into the dressing room in dismay after the unconscious man is dragged away. Palmer descends a stairwell to leave, which makes it the manager's turn, but Palmer notices the manager and shouts at him, calling him simply "Manager." The manager tries to weasel out of guilt by claiming that he was turning his day off into a business trip for on-site marketing research, but a Honey Bee exclaims that she's so happy that he came. Having been exposed as a regular, the manager cowers and begs Palmer not to transfer him or make him write an apology letter, then squirms/crawls between Palmer and Cloud and runs away. Palmer gives chase, and so does the Honey Bee. This makes it Cloud's turn to go up the stairwell and into a room, but the field is unfinished, thus ending the scene.
Honey Bee waiting room.
Honey Bee Inn has other unused areas found buried in the original Japanese version's game data than just the unused reception room. Originally the inn would have featured two floors, with a lobby and a waiting room, as well as a room for employees. Tons of unused text can also be found related to the location, but the text is displayed incorrectly making it read like gibberish, due to changes to the game's writing system applied later in the game's development.[2] Thanks to the efforts of fans, some of the unused text was able to be restored.
In the original Honey Bee Inn design, the player's Membership Card would have been checked at the reception desk, but because this area was removed from the game's final version, the Membership Card is checked at the entrance to the building in the game's retail release. There is also text found in the game data indicating the player would have been able to talk about their "experiences" in the inn, being asked how they went by Aeris. The player would then be able to choose from multiple different options to answer her with.[2] Johnny may also be found among the people outside the inn. In the removed dialogue he appears jealous of Cloud because he spent the night before at Aeris's house and hung out with her on the playground.
Honey Bee girls.
The original reception room design includes TV screens with different girls displayed on rotation. The text on the image on the left advertises "courses" of either 30 or 150 minutes in length and with slogans like "chat with a beautiful woman", "welcome to my nest" and "how about some honey?" The lobby also has a sign on the wall that forbids entry for other brothel owners, scouts and minors, and warns that poaching hostesses leads to a 100,000 gil fine.[2]
In the reception room the player would have been able to converse with NPCs while waiting for their turn. This is where the player would have had the scene with Palmer and what is presumed to be the same Shinra Manager that is found on the train, as described above.
In the waiting room, the player would have been able to converse with NPCs. The room had a TV screen that displays different locations from Final Fantasy VII: the Sector 5 slums church, Cosmo Canyon, Gold Saucer, Junon Underwater Reactor submarine dock, Rocket Town and the Shinra Manor in Nibelheim. Interestingly, the Cosmo Canyon scene shown on the TV is not the finalized version of the location, but an earlier version which could be found on a page from the game's manual in the first Japanese release.
The "Kwedge" found in the waiting room is implied to be Wedge's younger brother. The guy waiting for Tifa to come back can give Cloud the "Mystery panties" key item, a famously dummied key item of whose origins players could only guess. Disturbingly enough, it is implied these are actually Tifa's underpants the guy has stolen from Seventh Heaven, however, given that the panties' origin is "mysterious" and that they are said to have a "childish design", this leads one to question who they really do belong to. Getting the Mystery panties would have given the player affection points toward Tifa and Cloud saying they may come in handy for his disguise.
Cloud's "ghost" scene.
In the area where Cloud is asked to pick a room, there exists an unused scene in which a "ghost" version of Cloud (called "Zax" in the game code, fitting the fact that it is a manifestation of Cloud's subconscious that tends to experience Zack's memories) holding a Buster Sword would step out of him, and he would have another one of his moments in which the screen momentarily turns red and a high-pitched sound effect is heard, similar to what Cloud has in the mako reactor before setting the bomb near the beginning of the game.
There is also a dummied message to be found in the game that breaks the fourth wall that translates to: We apologize, but the following contains material unsuitable for the general public. This line occurs by peeking into either of the two occupied rooms, meaning the player may have never meant to even be able to see a glimpse of these rooms. Cloud goes "...Wooo... ow!!" when he peeks into a room, which does not fit the context of the final game as well as when it appears together with the fourth-wall-breaking message.
More unused text includes a scene where Cloud asks the girl who is asking him to choose a room for her underwear. He has the option to choose between a number of amusing ways to ask for them, including "Please lend me your panties for a dangerous mission", "I need a present for my girlfriend. Give me your panties...", "I need something to remember you by. Give me your panties...", or "I'm a pervert. I want to smell your panties..." At the end of the scene the girl figures that Cloud is into crossdressing and gives him the panties, promising to keep this a secret between the two of them. In the final game, the Lingerie key item is obtained by visiting the top-left room, and a girl gives them as an "apology" after Cloud has passed out due to another nightmare flashback.
In the retail version of Final Fantasy VII, the player can choose between two rooms to have two different scenes, one where Cloud collapses due to his subconsciousness emerging and asking what is he doing in a place like the Honey Bee Inn, and another where Cloud has to bathe with a number of men in a small bathtub. Unused text from the game indicates that there would have been a third scene that is a combination of the other two scenes. The girl Cloud goes to a room with would want to bathe with him and ask him to undress, leading Cloud to try and remember when he last had a bath, and how he "likes to keep his hair natural." The girl and Cloud would have gone into the bath together, but Cloud would then have passed out and been in danger of drowning, a scene that would have led to voices talking in Cloud's head, as seen in the final game.
Finally, the Honey Bee Inn had a dummied employees' room. There would have been a TV in the room displaying areas from the game, same as in the waiting room, but a screen from the Da Chao Statue in Wutai is added to the roster. If Cloud were to talk to the NPCs in the room, they would have told him the area is off-limits to customers, and then one man would talk about Midgar, how he can no longer see the sky, and how he has been thinking of what stars look like.
Development[]
Honey Bee Inn has more dummied content than most areas in Final Fantasy VII, and it seems the area's layout was changed numerous times.
A translation from page 569 of the Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Omega says this:[2]
- Kazushige Nojima: What I remember is the Honey Bee Inn, Toriyama (Motomu Toriyama) was in charge of the Honey Bee Inn's events, but at first what took place there was more extreme, and everyone was saying "That's going too far".
- Yoshinori Kitase: Was it really that bad?
- Nojima: Yeah... for example, Palmer would emerge from the inn saying "Well, that was refreshing!" *laughing*
- Kitase: Toriyama was always making weird, tricky little events like that that kept getting edited. For instance, there was once a scene on the station platform where Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie from AVALANCHE would face each other and try to combine into one.
- (...)
- Kitase: When an event begins in Final Fantasy VII, the other two party members separate themselves from Cloud's avatar. Once the event finishes, the party recombines and Cloud is alone once more. It's just the way the game's set up, but Toriyama parodied that. The three members of AVALANCHE were like "Let's do that too!" and do their best to combine together, but they just ended up running into each other and muttering "I guess we still don't have enough practice."*laughing*
FMV depicting Sector 7 platefall from inside the employees' room of the Honey Bee Inn.
When the Sector 7 plate is dropped onto Sector 7, an FMV depicts this from inside a room where there is a reporter on TV. This room can be identified as the employees' room of the Honey Bee Inn, a room dummied from the final version of the game. There is only a slight difference to the dummied field, and that is the top-half of the wall behind the TV not having the same texture.
The "play" going on in the Queen's Room draws parallels to the game's storyline and is the first time in the game where the Promised Land is mentioned.
- A legend has been passed on through generations....
- .....the sought after Promised Land....
- ....One with Blue Eyes....
- .....and a Great White Sword on his back.....
- .... Will not lead to the Promised Land.....
The dialogue in the scene where Cloud first enters Honey Bee Inn in the original English PlayStation version has a glitch where the game displays the wrong text box and both Aeris and Cloud just say "so that's how you fool them" before Cloud goes inside. This has been fixed in the PC version, where Cloud explains to Aeris he is only going in to get some help for his disguise, something Aeris doesn't seem to entirely believe.
Origin[]
Honey Bee Inn derives elements from a Japanese "love hotel", a type of short-stay hotel operated primarily to allow couples privacy for sexual activities. The dummied content also alludes to hostess bars and soaplands, the latter being notorious as a way to get around Japanese anti-prostitution laws. In contrast to many other brothels and brothel-like establishments, Japanese love hotels tend to serve multiple functions with the intent of making the customer's stay as pleasant and relaxing as possible.
Love hotels can usually be identified using symbols such as hearts and the offer of a room rate for a "rest." Love hotel architecture is sometimes garish, with buildings shaped as things like castles, boats, or UFOs, and lit with neon lighting. In Final Fantasy VII, the location has a bee theme, together with flashy lights on the outside of the building.
Musical themes[]
"Honeybee Inn" (蜜蜂の館, Mitsubachi no Kan?) plays in Honey Bee Inn as background music. If Cloud chooses the top left room and the voices start talking in his head, the "Who... Are You?" (お前は…誰だ, Omae wa... Dare da?) plays.
In the remake, a new arrangement of the "Honeybee Inn" theme can be obtained as a music disc for jukeboxes, bought from the Wall Market Pharmacy for 50 gil.
Gallery[]
