Number one on my wish list is letting you change materia mid battle. The first run on a boss is basically a wash as you see “weak to X element” — and don’t have that equipped on anyone.
Number one on my wish list is letting you change materia mid battle. The first run on a boss is basically a wash as you see “weak to X element” — and don’t have that equipped on anyone.
Yup, I had exactly this thought while playing! You get to a point during a fight where you realize you have all the wrong things equipped and basically have to use that iteration as a learning experience. Die and retry.
It's very linear. It's basically like X, where the game is entirely story driven rather than exploration driven.
Hmm I liked 10 it was 13 I believe that turned me off from the franchise such a s### game I waited in line at midnight to buy it and play it and it was just mini areas that you walk a straight line in ever since I can't even support square anymore
The only issue I am finding is, with no, or limited respawning, its nearly impossible to level up some of the better Materia.
Scripted low end fights end in like 1 minute and you barely have any time to use the materia you want to level up.
That for me, has me just a tiny bit annoyed. Especially when you come upon a boss creature and it is weak to something you never really get a chance to use.
So, I'm a bit late to the party on this, but I am playing through it now. Currently in the sewers - forget which chapter it is. My notes so far are...
Definitely linear, but as noted, it's Midgar. The problem is that it's even more linear than Midgar was. As in, if you try to leave an area to go back to a previous one and the story doesn't want you to, it'll just stop you and give a dialogue prompt or something. That's occasionally a little annoying.
Combat is generally pretty fun for this type of thing, which admittedly isn't usually my cup of tea (mash square mash square ok do a spell now mash square). Much better than FFXV. Tifa is definitely the most fun to fight with at this point. Cloud's okay. Barret kind of sucks.
The dialogue and voice acting is extremely cheesy in parts and I don't really blame the voice actors, who all are doing pretty well with what they have. It seems to have been a directorial decision to make it immature. The weird part is that a lot of it isn't even anachronisms from it being a 23 year old game... the whole part where Cloud has to do a dance-off with Andrea Rhodea or whatever the dude's name is is just cringey as ####. The bandits who show up a few times are even dumber. There's a lot of that to varying degrees and I wish they could have tried to make it a bit less kiddy. If this is supposed to be a kids' game, well, they sure do swear a lot.
I recall there being a controversy about Tifa's boobs being made smaller and the characters being faithful to the original. Frankly, I think they could be a bit LESS faithful. Tifa's a bit distracting, they could have made her more like Advent Children and dropped her a cup size or two and ditched the miniskirt, and it would have been fine. Same goes for Barrett, who does not look like any human being I've ever seen. He appears to weigh 340 lbs. If you're going to remake the thing for 2020, you don't need 1997 design choices. Even the ability to change costumes would have been nice for the immersion factor. I will say, Aerith, from character model to voice, is utterly perfect.
It's surprising how well the materia system works in this game. It just translates like it was made for a real time fighting game. I'm not as sure about the weapon upgrade system, but I don't hate it, and it was nice of them to implement the auto-upgrade feature.
The biggest complaint I have is how much time wasting crap there is. Again, it's not 1997, I don't need to re-attempt sneaking out of Aerith's house a bunch of times just to bump into a bucket. The worst offender here so far is the crane arms on the way to wall market. Not even a remotely challenging puzzle. Just a waste of time. I assume this sort of stuff is to pad playtime. At least one some of the quests there's an instant travel option to go back to the person who gave it to you.
The music is amazing, although I don't always love the jukebox versions of things. Tifa's theme is cool, but do we need a sort of jazzy version of it? Can't we just do straight orchestrated versions? Maybe that'll happen more as things go on outside of Midgar. Aerith's theme has gotten a bit of that treatment and those have been the best moments for the soundtrack. The midi versions of these tracks were really simple and straightforward and that's kind of what made them work as leitmotifs.
Overall, aside from the moments where I get annoyed at the game wasting my time (crane arms) and the moments where I want to skip dumb cutscenes (Beck and company), I'm enjoying my nostalgia trip. I have also heard complaints about changing the story and robbing it of some of its emotional impact. I have had no such complaints yet. Obviously there's a bigger focus on Sephiroth and Cloud's visions right off the bat, but I can live with that. Otherwise, the plot has been remarkably faithful - sometimes even too faithful, I think they could have done without the cross-dressing - and I'm the kind of person who is almost always going to want them to stick to the original story wherever possible (with a few polishes here and there to make it hang together more clearly and solidly, but those issues don't come up for a while).
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
My least favorite padding in the game is actually right near the end, which is too bad since it should have been relevant and exciting at that point. Unfortunately it felt just completely tedious and added nothing to the story.
I enjoyed the overall game a lot. I do agree with the unnecessary padding being annoying, but it wasn't too distracting for me. I loved the characters, and the world. I like how they expanded the storyline of the side characters.
I must say, the overall voice acting was well done, especially Aerith and Red XIII. It just further cements Aerith as best waifu in my books.
So I just finished. I could go on at length about what I think about the writing, the combat system, the voice acting, the graphics, and so on. But really, all I can think is this.
Did anyone ask for this? Was anyone who was a likely consumer of this product thinking, "gee, I hope they don't ACTUALLY re-make the game, it'd sure be boring to re-play one of the most beloved games ever made, despite the fact that so many people have re-played it multiple times in its ORIGINAL form"?
It was so easy... just... re-make the game. Voice acting, modern graphics and gameplay, fill out the story in a couple of places to add more depth and smooth out some of the confusing bits. That's all you had to do. Nothing more. I don't want an "unknown journey", as they put it at the end. I don't want an alternate universe where the events all play out differently, as we're apparently about to receive. The whole last chapter of the game I was just... depressed. I don't even know if I want to continue playing this when the next chapter comes out. Realistically I probably will, because it's still set in the same universe, but... for ####'s sake. I'm not looking forward to it the same way I was before. When they announced this, I said I'd buy it even if they made the thing cost more than the system it plays on. But this isn't what I wanted. I can't imagine this is what anyone wanted.
The addition of the "whispers", as the game was going on, I was like, "okay, you didn't need to add more weird #### to this, the story is weird enough", but I thought, eh, I can deal. The added stuff like the mission for Jessie and the stuff with Leslie, all good, expanding the story a bit worked pretty well. The Madam M, Andrea stuff was pretty stupid, but I could forgive it. But one it started becoming clear what they were doing with the Whispers... well, here is a video of my reaction.
In short, on its own merits, it was a pretty enjoyable game with some flaws. In context, finishing it just sucked the joy out of my day.
Fortunately I now have The Last of Us 2 to play through. Surely they can't have screwed that up, right?
... Right?
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
I know the the direction they went in the end was polarizing, but I'm of the opposite view in that I loved what they did with it. I rather have a continuation rather than just a straight up remake. I know Nomura made the Kingdom Hearts story way too convoluted, and I get fans being wary. But I'm excited nonetheless to see what they do with the storyline from here. Lets hope Nomura and Kitase have learned from their past mistakes.
I know the the direction they went in the end was polarizing, but I'm of the opposite view in that I loved what they did with it. I rather have a continuation rather than just a straight up remake. I know Nomura made the Kingdom Hearts story way too convoluted, and I get fans being wary. But I'm excited nonetheless to see what they do with the storyline from here. Lets hope Nomura and Kitase have learned from their past mistakes.
I heard one idea that I think would allow SE to print money...
Spoiler!
offer 2 versions for the next part Ver 1: OG story Ver 2: New timeline story
I would buy both.
The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to I_H8_Crawford For This Useful Post:
Like, as an avid lover of the original am I going to be angry? I am so close to just falling over and caving for this game and only this game, but hearing this is the only thing giving me pause.
Edit - For the record, I will also buy Fallen Order and Spider-Man if I do this, but those games aren't why I want the PS4. I will live if I never play those games.
It's a timed exclusive until next April to my knowledge. But if you're willing to wait it'll probably pop up on PC.
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Like, as an avid lover of the original am I going to be angry? I am so close to just falling over and caving for this game and only this game, but hearing this is the only thing giving me pause.
The ReMake is a love letter to the original game, but it's not a straight remake. It's a 40 hour version of the first 8 hours of the original, with some details added, and other details changed, and other details intentionally kept the same with a somewhat meta story about how badly fans want the remake to stay the exact same, but how restrictive that would be.
I like to think of it as I do Crisis Core... it's a great supplement to the original, it's not a replacement and they didn't seem to intend it to be.
As a fan of the original, I think the changes are welcome, but I wouldn't suggest someone play the remake instead of the original.
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Edit - For the record, I will also buy Fallen Order and Spider-Man if I do this, but those games aren't why I want the PS4. I will live if I never play those games.
If you're going to buy a PS4, you should also check out Nier: Automata assuming you haven't played it on a different platform.
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"May those who accept their fate find happiness. May those who defy it find glory."
Last edited by GranteedEV; 06-25-2020 at 01:46 PM.
Do I.... do I buy a PS4 to play this game?
Like, as an avid lover of the original am I going to be angry? I am so close to just falling over and caving for this game and only this game, but hearing this is the only thing giving me pause.
I don't think it's worth buying a PS4 for regardless of whether you end up being angry with what they did, or not. It's a perfectly competent re-make, leaving aside the stuff that annoyed me. It's actually very faithful to the original, except that Sephiroth was more explicit. As I mentioned in an earlier post, while I didn't really agree with the changes (having most of Midgar be about your insurrection against the corporate overlords, only to be thrown a total curveball at the end when the President is suddenly dead and you have a new, different enemy that was barely hinted at was really effective storytelling) I could accept them all.
The problem is, even if you aren't pissed off by what they did at the end (and I'm still annoyed days later), it's just an okay effort, overall. The writing is very stilted and most NPCs don't seem like actual human beings. There are some additional missions that add some flavour to some of the characters, but there was a real missed opportunity to do more of it with the sidequests, which are mostly just padding. Seriously, looking for lost cats and tracking down orphans who are late for class has no actual substance and really adds nothing to the universe. The parts that are extended - the Hojo's Lab bit is way, way longer - doesn't really give you any new insight into Hojo. It just takes a while and involves fighting some monsters. And while combat is incredibly well conceived (after giving it a bit, I'm more impressed in retrospect at how well they managed to blend old-school FF turn-based combat and the current button-mash style), it is a bit chaotic and frustrating at times - while I understand that this would never happen in the current gaming market, I couldn't help thinking "this game would be absolutely amazing if it was just fully turn-based like the original".
It is, by modern standards, just... not outstanding. A lot of its virtue is the nostalgia. That's part of why I'm so annoyed that they've decided to change the course of the story. As a 1997 game with re-booted graphics you can forgive its flaws and quirks. As a new game with a new storyline, those flaws stand out a lot more, and you end up having to ask, if they were going to change a bunch of #### anyway, why not modernize the dumbest, campiest parts, and make the characters more like real people?
And as a result, even if you do end up enjoying it and subscribing to Yen Man's view of the world, I wouldn't shell out for the system for it.
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Edit - For the record, I will also buy Fallen Order and Spider-Man if I do this, but those games aren't why I want the PS4. I will live if I never play those games.
Spider-Man, yes, Fallen Order, no. Horizon Zero Dawn, heck yes. Nier Automata, yes but prepare for an odd sort of experience. I'm assuming you've already played Witcher 3.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
You can definitely tell when the team had to let Nomura do Nomura things. And it's no coincidence those represent a lot of the weakest parts of the story.
It's still a really good game of course, but not 'buy a console 6 months before next gen hardware makes it obsolete' good.
