Final Fantasy VII: Kind Of REDACTED In Retrospect

It was lame that they only used cutscenes in tv adverts, tho

a) a human
b) a machine
c) an animal
d) a cat riding a winged shmoo with fangs

Also, WHERE DA GAMEPLAY AT?

On the other hand...

--easiest last boss ever

--no hands

--"..."

--chocobo racing

I think people have a tendency to penalize games often very harshly (and the "otaku bullshit" certainly makes FF an easier target) not because the characters are really any more ridiculous or the gameplay is really less satisfying, but because it doesn't make them feel the same way it did when they were younger. I say it is a very rare and classic game that can accomplish such a feat. I could much more easily get behind the thread title "Final Fantasy VII: Not Quite as Classic In Retrospect."

When the game came out, I completely fell in love with it and played it endlessly until I realized about 2/3rds of the way through that it was really making me hate roleplaying games due to the insanely long cutscenes. Add into that a couple of really annoying characters (Cait Sith, Yuffie) and minigames that just suddenly stopped being fun and, well... the game is kind of retarded.

Conversely, I still love the PC RPGs that rocked my world (Baldur's Gate I & II + expansions, Planescape: Torment, Neverwinter Nights, Icewind Dale I & II + expansions). They really, really did it right with those games and I'll defend them until I die.

At least we can all agree that Cait Sith is retarded.

I will not deny that the storyline to FFVII is great. It's some seriously excellent narrative. I found the actual game mechanics irritating, though; even when it came out for the PC, I had absolutely no desire to pick it up (I'd played it on my roommate's PS and I was moving out due to getting married.)

xpost I don't think they are!

http://www.icybrian.com/freezer/tavisramzapower.php

MORE BOLD CLAMS

BOLD CLAM: Tactical games have more replay value than conventional RPGs.

I don't know if your clam holds up to inspection when considering their entire line of stuff since FF7 (b/c the only Square game I've played to completion since that came out is Parasite Eve), but the lack of quality control sure pissed me off during my initial playthrough of the game after it came out. It seemed to me obvious that I was playing an unfinished game once I got past being totally enthralled by the early city stuff. All of a sudden, little touches started disappearing, like the branching dialogue boxes for the relationship subplots. I suppose that that Earthbound review duder would claim that that was just a brilliant bit of misdirection on Square's part, but the way it was handled was really sloppy. Moving on from the first part of the game, the overworld seemed nowhere near as interesting or well-formed an environment as the city was. Is that comparing apples and oranges a bit? Maybe, but why did the characters have to leave that environment at all? All the characters in the party that weren't part of the terrorist group just felt superfluous (especially Cait Sith-- WTF Japanese kawaii bullshit). And why did the third CD basically just contain the final boss?

I can't remember what I changed cait sith's name to, but I'm sure it was better than cait sith.

yeh, and after all that it causes only 200 damage or something.
i have very fond memories of ff vii, as i was very ill at the time i played it & the only thing i could cope with was switching on my console & then lying in bed pressing x and o repeatedly.

hell, even Planescape and Anachronax had them, and both games made explicit where they cribbed it from

this is sort of adorable

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKq9iJMXs8Y

this thread makes me so sad because its mostly kind of right. i used to have a poster of cloud--this whole game was my life for like 6 months.

What is wrong w/ you people Yuffie is so obviously the best followed closely by Cait Sith.

Ugh, that video has horrible sound quality. I will go FULLBORE NOSTALGIA and say those pop-midi soundtracks of IV-VI were vastly superior the more film-like scores to VIII and later.

i stand by my comments upthread.

I think the quality is fine in the Youtube video, it's just the actual performance itself that has problems. I demand perfection in my RPG battle themes, and the younger the performers are, the more perfection I demand! 110%.

"Still More Fighting" is the best song in the game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTqX9IKmZtQ

A+ performance. Drum machine set to 'pummel', where it's been the past 4 months. I hate the fact that this 13-year-old kid has more facial hair than I do

This guy sucks at life, but he does include hot clips of FF7 action to keep the action-o-meter maxed out. Poignant conclusion + fade

The FF7 battle theme is once again pounded out, this time on a computer keyboard, as some kids decide that DDR clone games are much more fun without the floor pad, or moving of the body. Performer mutters 'look at my fingers sometimes' to the cameraman - spot on advice.

This is actually pretty awesome

The chocobo theme performed on dual guitars by Zack Kim, the goto hangout buddy in 6th grade, who also performs the Simpsons theme and Super Mario Bros. song upon request.

ha, that last kid is sick!

An early ILG classick

I've softened on FFVII quite a lot but overlong cut-scenes can still fuck right off.

probably my favourite gaming memory, but yeah i wouldn't go back to it.

I realise there might be something wrong with me but i still go back to it. recently to finish of the emerald weapon, and i certainly will give ruby a try sometime in the future

ugh I hate that I titled this thread this

find it kind of retarded, in retrospect?

i still love this game, and also hate it

i had the orchestral score

SEPHIROTH! dun dun dun dun dun dundun SEPHIROTH!!

sephiroth will never lose his awesomeness though.

ya that one-winged angel track is tha hotness

i wish i could find CD1 so i could sell this

See, I've played other PC RPGs that people have madly repped for (particularly Arcanum and the Fallout series) and been seriously "eh" about them. The thing that made the Black Isle/Bioware games so outstanding was that they managed to get the seamless actionesque interface properly on top of the turn-based combat system; that revolution in and of itself completely flipped expectations from RPGs to another level, whereas FFVII basically made console RPGs focus on cutscenes and stat-fiddling.

I will not deny that the storyline to FFVII is great. It's some seriously excellent narrative. I found the actual game mechanics irritating, though; even when it came out for the PC, I had absolutely no desire to pick it up (I'd played it on my roommate's PS and I was moving out due to getting married.)

― Dan (But Yeah, Cait Sith Is Retardo) Perry (Dan Perry), Thursday, January 12, 2006 12:18 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hah, i'm playin BG1 right now and those 2 games (fallout[awesome], arcanum[sux]) are my main points of comparison. i have a lot of problems with it, mostly gameplay related - just a lot of dumb design decisions. like, if you're implementing a regimented, RTS-style group formation movement system that makes it impossible to maneuver in tight spaces, make sure that half the game's environments (ie. all the interiors) aren't comprised of ventilation duct-sized corridors and matchbox houses. and the fact that enemies respawn WHILE YOU'RE IN an area drives me nuts, it's basically the same as random battles and possibly is worse. it's got some things going for it tho, like great strategic depth to the fighting and it's pretty immersive. i think it's just that everything lives in the shadow of fallout for me now.

Honestly, BG2 kicks all kinds of shit out of BG1. It's seriously amazing.

(there are still some pathing issues but MAN the story is about a bazillion times better)

yeah, i actually started off w/BG2, but when it threw me in the middle of this story i didnt know wtf about, i just said fuckit and DLed (420 pirate pc games every day peace) BG1.

i hated arcanum and bg1 but i dont have a clear recollection of why - arcanum i remember being just ugly not as part of any aesthetic but just ugly and cheap-looking. bg1 was frustrating but idk why

FFVII basically made console RPGs focus on cutscenes and stat-fiddling.

i think theres a really good thread in this - i think this is still partially true and it might be interesting to talk about "games that have had changed the other games in their genre are made" but less wordy and awful

BG1 is HARDER THAN HELL. It's kind of insane how impossible some of the fights are until you get into the rhythm of combat management; anyone who can do well at that game playing real-time gets serious kudos from me.

arcanum WAS very ugly and cheaply made - it's like a 9 year old game and it was still considered dated looking when it came out.

i feel like i put together a great lil party in BG - one tank (-7 AC) and 5 archers. they just mow motherfuckers down. only thing I'm lacking is great magic, Dynaheir is my only mage and she's limited in her spell selection

Oh dude, keep levelling her; IIRC she is an unstoppable monster by the end of the game.

I mean, yes, her 4 hp means she gets cut down a LOT initially but some of the spells she gets to by the end are fantastic.

yeah, she is def getting better over time, it just takes a while to build up some useful spells. saves u money on identifying shit too

minsc is a philosopher-king imo

BG1 is HARDER THAN HELL.

i really missed out on this era of pc gaming (say like 97-00) i was @ lol boarding school and didnt have access to a computer that would play them. i did however play jap imports including FFV and it was crazy to me how much harder the combat in bg was.

FFVII has one of the worst combat systems in any well-regarded rpg imo

Minsc is far and away the best character to ever appear in a roleplaying game ever (2nd fave: HK-47 from Knights of the Old Republic)

the great thing about the 1-tank system is that i basically have one unhittable dude who i lead in front by a ways, so he soaks up basically all the attackers while the untouched ranged fighters just fire away. i think traps have probably killed them more than bad guys.

I think the party I ended up rolling with the last time I played was:

Me (fighter)
Branwen
Imoen
Garrick
Minsc
Dynaheir

I did tend to send Minsc or myself in swinging and have everyone else range the monsters to death.

ya, I grew up a JRPG dude and i avoided western PC RPGs for years partly because of the steep curve when u first get into them. now i'm at the point where I can't play JRPGs because they're too easy. *casts KOTR over and over*

Mine, right now, is

Me (Fighter, 4 points in Bows)
Imoen
Minsc
Dynaheir
Kivan (great sniper)
Khalid (the tank, which is kinda funny cuz he is always like 'b-b-blublub i am such a pussy ;_;' when i send him to merc some fools)

haha im gonna have to track down of copy of goddam bg now

i think the success of stuff like disgaea (another game for my genre-changers thread) means that their are a good # of challenging JRPGs its just that they tend to be hard in a much different way. also superhomo

i still think the jap version of FFV is one the hardest games of all time

ff6 seemed impossibly difficult to me when i was a lil kid... it still has some sections that are tough 4 me

If/when you get to BGII, make sure you get Aerie, Jaheira and Viconia all in your party at the same time, fun-time lolz.

also massive lolz here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldur's_Gate_NPCs:

Khalid

* Jim Meskimen
* Half-Elf, Fighter, Neutral Good.
* Jaheira's bumbling husband, and almost her polar opposite. Khalid is a nervous, easily panicked warrior with a pronounced stutter. Like Jaheira, he is a member of the Harpers. Jaheira and Khalid were Gorion's good friends, and Gorion leaves instructions for the protagonist to meet with them at the Friendly Arms Inn after he is killed in an ambush at the beginning of the game. Canonically, the events of Baldur's Gate I are completed with Khalid in the party, however, he is killed at the outset of Baldur's Gate II.

Khalid was described in a 1998 PC Gamer review as the character most likely to be taken out into the woods, stripped of his gear, and shot, a reference to both his personality and his position as an inferior party member who cannot be removed without losing Jaheira, causing many players to kill him themselves.[citation needed]

lollollollolo @ "citation needed"

Jaheira's the useless one! I actually sent her into a house by herself, then switched to the rest of the party and booted her out, that way she couldn't walk up to me and take Khalid with her.

also i love that Minsc is the only one with his own wiki article

I spent most of BGII running around with a posse of ladeez so I didn't think Jaheira was useless.

(there are still some pathing issues but MAN the story is about a bazillion times better)

!!!! This is so incomprehensible to me, I remember being really bored & disengaged by BG2's story after loving BG1's?

I totally don't understand JPRGs, I get that people whose opinions I respect get pleasure from them, I just can't understand how.

i think the success of stuff like disgaea (another game for my genre-changers thread) means that their are a good # of challenging JRPGs its just that they tend to be hard in a much different way. also superhomo

Can you elaborate on this?

!!!! This is so incomprehensible to me, I remember being really bored & disengaged by BG2's story after loving BG1's?

I really liked the "romance" stuff, plus the side stories for all of the companions seemed much more fleshed out to me in BG2. Also, the cutscenes with Irenicus torturing Imoen were super creepy and some of the plot twists genuinely took me by surprise.

the superhomo part?

what made bg2 so good is making your part in the story really important and world-historickal right from the beginning, something they nicked from jrpgs i think! rather than earlier d&d-based games where the important stuff starts to happen at like level 45 and you have to grind up from level 1

also the voiceover in bg2 was uniformly excellent

speaking of superhomo i was always pissed that as a male character u had many fine bytches to mack on but as a chick the romance scripts were with the lamest dude in the game. </3

haha yeah! There was a planned romance with Haer'Dalis but they pulled it due to time constraints and turned it into him mackin' on Aerie.

One of the most fun parties I put together was playing a male character with Jaheira, Viconia, Aerie and Haer'Dalis and trying to get everyone to hook up.

my biggest narrative-related beef with BG1 is that your party members feel fairly faceless - aside from some canned, 'spontaneous' dialogue, they don't really react to events or environments.

They fixed that in BG2, largely by drastically reducing the number of possible party members (in general, the only ones with personalities in BG1 are the ones in pairs and the ones with serious full-on beefs).

i think the success of stuff like disgaea (another game for my genre-changers thread) means that their are a good # of challenging JRPGs its just that they tend to be hard in a much different way. also superhomo

Can you elaborate on this?

― Gravel Puzzleworth, Tuesday, March 10, 2009 10:55 AM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

okay off the top of my head jap games tend to create challenges by emphasizing randomness (where is the grail? search an empty square behind a house in a town two islands away!) and leveling enemies (lol those knights have 1000 hp and u r level 2!). they also - much more than western games - assume the player is a completist so a # of games are structured to punish that. want the only golem's bell in the game? well replay this battle until u get the 1/32 drop!!! and of course all that bell does is unlock a crappy class that you will never use

at its worst these games are just an excersize in mindless grinding but at their best they both require and punish repetition. think of ffv or march of the black queen's reputation/moral system. which is often where the strategy is - the tension between leveling/grinding/replaying enough so that u dont get slaughtered but still can get the "best ending" or the actually unhelpful "myrddian helm"

whereas the stuff the makes western games difficult is a lot closer the game's mechanic rather than structure. they also tend to place a lot less emphasis on filling item slots or unlocking things. i can go on more abt this but thats the gist of my thinking

my biggest narrative-related beef with BG1 is that your party members feel fairly faceless - aside from some canned, 'spontaneous' dialogue, they don't really react to events or environments.

This is pretty exactly what I preferred about BG1 - it presented you with all these interesting characters and then left to you think up what they were doing and feeling, whereas BG2 felt like reading a fantasy novel? Possibly I am alone in this?

I mean, to clarify - I don't want to be left, Eye of the Beholder style, to do all the work myself - I want to be given a setup, and for the game's own ideas of who the characters are to come to the surface in discrete chunks and chafe and align and make friction with my own, to give me the pleasure of reshading my ideas to incorporate new evidence as often as I can cope with it. Anyway that is why I loved that game?

Lamp's post is good and interesting!

I love Minsc a lot too but I'm not reading the rest of this thread for fear of BGII spoilers, still haven't got around to playing it cos I haven't OCD'd on BGI quite enough.

GP, I think that is kind of exactly what BG2 did...?

BG2 & David Warner's Irenicus is what finally made realize the importance of great voice acting in anglophone games, and the how great it was when you had a classically trained actor in the role.

Actually, David Warner and Paul Darrow both highlighted how greatly improved genre entertainment can be with classically trained actor types, as opposed to whatever cheap stringer a casting director or voice-over studio found living around Vancouver/L.A.

Of course, I encountered both actors at an age when I could finally appreciate what they brought to the game, as it were.

Yeah I mean people def def have hugely different thresholds for this, it's a totally personal thing! Some people are happy to make stories around stairscumming in roguelikes, some people want animated cutscenes to feel involved, whatever - I was just positioning the games on a spectrum?

all game voices should be by billy west

and ron perlman

BuuuuuuUUUuuuut SEEEEEpiroooooooooth.....

One thing I do want to mention, which may or may not be obvious, is that I find my personal enjoyment of a game to jump by several levels when there are actual characters & dialogue. I offer up the contrast of BG2 and the Icewind Dale games; ID1 & 2 had better technology and an equivalent story, but it was due to the characterization, dialogue, and attendant voice-acting that puts BG2(and its predecessor of Planescape) as some of the greatest rpg/computer/video games ever made.

One of the criticisms of this I've read goes along the lines of "oh you can just make a story for your characters, why should you actually need somebody to talk it out," which always seemed like bullshit to me; if I wanted to do that, I'd write up dialogue for when the lego men on my desk got sick and tired and decided to declare war on a toy dalek. It's a 6-parter, but I could have edited it down into a real 'crackling' 4-parter.

Final Fantasy VII: Kind of Retarded in Retrospect: A Baldur's Gate II Thread

I'm just butthurt because when I played BGII about 8 years ago, it was the first non-JRPG I had ever played, and it confused the hell out of me. I quit after a few hours.

This FFVII thread is making me want to reinstall it!

I actually first entered the world of rpgs thru the game that helped spark jprgs: Ultima III(a.k.a. the NES 'Ultima'). I played mainly pc rpgs for years(w/ the exception of some nes games) and it wasn't really until i played ffvii in 1999 that i got to get the feel for how jrpgs worked. I was used to stuff like Ultimas IV - VII and a Half.

And now it's interesting to see what happens when americans deliberately make jrpgs, see 'Anachronax' and all the summons in 'Planescape'. (they even tip their hand to the FF series in the game thank-yous)

Do the BG games hold up today if I've never played them? I think i'm in the mood for a good rpg

No, they don't, unless you're really into generic D&D environments and rulesets.

the writing is still great

The graphics are sketchy nowadays but I still like the storyline a lot.

I'm just butthurt because when I played BGII about 8 years ago, it was the first non-JRPG I had ever played, and it confused the hell out of me. I quit after a few hours.

yah i had a pretty similar history w/the game so i d/l (ðôíòõ peace) bg1+2+expansions and started playing bg1 last nite. its... okay so far but tbh im not feeling the interface that much and the layout seems really clunky compared to say nwn. makes u pine for blue menus

i guess basically it seems okay but i shoudve just d/l nwn2 or morrowind i think?

nwn2 isn't as good as nwn1 and I can't imagine playing Morrowind

this reminds me that i used to play might & magic iv: clouds of XEEN on the pc, and all i remember is that there were these teleportation portals where you had to type codes to get where you wanted to go, and if you typed XEEN it would take you instantly to the last boss, who would kill you. i always wondered if you could just grind for hours and hours and then kill XEEN without going anywhere in the actual game.

were already so far o/t i guess it doesnt matter but ime nwn1 is the pinnacle of these games. y/n??

on the first computer i ever put together myself i played one of the ad&d games with a desert setting that was pretty dope i cant remember the name tho woulda been like 95/6. i also sorta played bg and planescape: incalculable, so morrowind is no good?

was clouds of xeen the one with the darkside of xeen expansion? i played that for like ~20 hours of random quests, went looking for the main quest, got immediately killed, forgot about it entirely

I rank Planescape: Torment, NWN1, BG2 and KOTOR1 all about the same; I would replay any of these games in a heartbeat (and have done so with all of them).

never played Planescape, I'd love to give it a (console) go sometime.
Did anyone do Jade Empire? Is it worth it?

Planescape never came out for console.

Jade Empire was fun but nowhere near the league of these other games, IMO.

i have KOTOR on xbawks but whenever i have tried to play it, it crashes when i try to exit the opening area

Yeh, i know there was no planescape console game, it's just that i have no interest in returning to pc gaming these days.

i think that's the one, tom.

i remember getting pretty far in the ad&d game that came out for sega genesis, until it lost my save file, forcing me to go back to playing eternal champions or whatever.

so im pretty sure the game i was thinking of upthread was a ravensloft game for pc. it was fun but comparing that and eye of the beholder (so awful) to the saturn/snes jap ish from that era western games feel so sweaty and stupid and cruel

nwn is the only pc rpg ive really "got" i think. still im going to give bg a chance

the ad&d megadrive/genesis game - WARRIORS OF THE ETERNAL SUN? i finished that. you had to go to one hidden square behind a hidden door in a more or less random dungeon and a guy was behind it and said "oh hey! i want to trade with you guys! guess that means you win the game!" it was dreadful.

it was the only videogame rpg my ex-RL rpg player brother ever played, i think. then i saved over his save file in a sort of involuntarily spasm of brattiness when i was ten or whatever and he never went back to it. otoh in retrospect it certainly seems like a favour

yeah, that must have been the one.

Forks, if you liked Fallout, you gotta go for Planescape someday. The writing is really leagues above what passes for it in most video games, even today.

Man this thread has gotten off-topic! I do wonder if FF VII had gotten a remake on DS or whatever I'd give it more slack, but I still don't think it's as replayable or as worth going back to as the SNES-era games. I can't see all the endless re-trekking, loading, cutscenes and summons being tolerable today, but then it was the last Final Fantasy I've really played.

A remake with an option for skipping through summons would convince me to play through it again.

Honestly, i've played FF VII so many times by now that when i now start to replay it... it's not that it doesn't hold up, it's just that I've done it all like 50 times.
and I don't care about graphics so am going to check out games that for some reason passed by me - BG, NWN, and Fallout

Chris Avellone once wrote about how Planescape was to take your standard Fallout/Bioware isometric engine, and create an entire game around the express purpose of delivering narrative. Not combat, not graphic, not customizability, the main point of the whole enterprise was constructed entirely around the story. And it showed.

Oh yeah, and Sheena Easton voices the hot lead chick.

Really.

meanwhile, we live in such times that all these guys(game creators and whatnot) can be your myspace friends.

don't those nerds know that Facebook is the new cool
fucking gamers

LOL I am going to try to friend Sheena Easton and tell her I loved her work on Planescape.

"Not combat, not graphic, not customizability, the main point of the whole enterprise was constructed entirely around the story. "

see, this is kind of a retarded design strategy

planescape totally earns points for effort, but, eh, still —

see, this is kind of a retarded design strategy

haha i just finished a game that had this goal! i dont think its retarded altho it can be... problematic? idk the best way to describe it but the games i make are way more about ways 2 approach narrative than abt mechanics

weird, i thought planescape was terrific and i thought nwn1 looked and played like shit and had a lame story, never finished it

I thought they were both great examples of different game design philosophy.

I remember, in I think nwn2, it took forever to destroy boxes
my friend and i stopped playing after a couple of hours because of how much that annoyed us

I just finished downloading Fallout 1 and 2
am excited to get home from class so i can play them for the first time

Sheena Easton's myspace doesn't seem to be all that functional, but here's Chris's:

www.myspace.com/SicilianChris

and here's Feargus's

www.myspace.com/the_fudd

Be sure to get the fan patches for FO1 & 2. They help correct a lot of problem.

As great a creative force as Black Isle was, place had some QA issues.

So, if I wanted a next-gen console for rpgs, which one should i get?

DS err, nothin'

haha

kingfish theres a new star ocean coming out for xbox thats supposed to be pretty good. still its pretty much an open qn right now :(

love the FFVII story line

i have yet to see advent children. is it any good?

― kingfish kuribo's shoe (kingfish 2.0), Sunday, January 22, 2006 6:38 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

NO

― adam (adam), Sunday, January 22, 2006 8:21 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yes

― VIDEO STRESS (blastocyst), Sunday, January 22, 2006 11:08 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

FIGHT IT OUT WITH DICKS

― kingfish kuribo's shoe (kingfish 2.0), Monday, January 23, 2006 12:33 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol @ this

FF7 still the best post-nintendo final fantasy game by far, in terms of story, form, and overall aesthetic. I preferred the blocky 3D characters to the inscrutable rendered ones of the later games.

advent children is ok until a ridiculous bossfight out of nowhere that's just to show off all the lame characters from the game

I got this when it came out for PC but never made it very far. I don't think I got to the cross-dressing part, cos this was in the day before the internet (for me) and I had no idea how wacky this game was going to get.

Well I started playing this again, with the intention of going through the whole game, and holy hell is this game amazing! Easily my favorite FF! I genuinely love the graphics and music and all the completely insane Summons and the minigames (basketball is a DAMN fine one-button distraction!) and the dolphin whistles and the chocobo racing and etc. etc. etc. The character design is wonderful and frequently just completely crazy, and I love it. Caith Sith? I love it!

Every time I get a new Summon it's like a Christmas present that takes longer and longer to open, and comes in a larger and larger box. Last one I got had lightning strike the earth, a mountain rising up from nowhere, Zeus appearing on the top of the mountain, shooting lightning at everything ever. The second Summon I got had none less than THE DEVIL appearing and throwing fire at my enemies.

The dated graphics and CGI cutscenes are quite charming in a retro way. They are very minimalist - maybe you will just see a camera pan over some wild post-industrial tower and that's it. The sparse city populations go w the post-apocalyptic feel. The early 3D is weightless and has a kind of puppet/doll look to it, which also makes plenty of sense from an aesthetic point of view. Here is a 20th Century Bestiary, with beings and creatures from myths and legends the world over, rendered as a New Romantic Anime Steampunk Fantasy puppet show.

Also as far as role playing and telling a story, this game does wonders. That bit where you perform CPR, saving the life of that girl, and she teaches you how to whistle to her dolphin friend in order to get the dolphin to jump you to the top of a tower, was pretty great. You actually do feel for these characters. I think the slower pace of these RPGs vs something like GTAV really helps in connecting the player to the story. When you do that CPR minigame, it actually requires a great deal of patience (waiting for the lungs to fill, breathing out, doing this half a dozen times) that a modern QTE would bypass. You've put in your time with this character -- which is the most valuable thing you can offer as a player -- and thus feel good when the next day your character wakes up and hears the news that she is now up and feeling better again.

The planetarium bit, where the guy is explaining souls and life energy or Planet Life or whatever it is, was amazing. Mystical, sort of cyberpunk zen fairy tale. Made me think a little of the Genesis bomb animation from Star Trek II.

I feel like there needs to be a list of all the amazing (and otherwise) things you do in this game besides fight/talk/cutscene. All the little minigames and stuff. There is probably more to do here than in most GTAs. Whistling dolphin jumps. Cross-dressing. Sword fighting while racing motorcycles. Sneaking into an air vent in the toilet. Cracking a safe. Shooting basketball. Racing chocobos. Etc.

i love this game and would play it again if they added cutscene skipping.

Right now I'm fighting in the Gold Saucer battle arena, and they have turned me into a frog and casted "Stone Stare". The makers of Final Fantasy VII probably listened to a lot of T-Rex when they made this.

Have + and - memories about this game, thought about playing it again, re-read the script online, remembered hell

enjoyed this game a lot except for the part where aerith gets resurrected. what the hell kind of bullshit was that, square?

nothing but great memories of playing this

^

played through this a couple of months ago for only the second time, first time in late 90s
played the PSN version which is pretty janky, had to restart several times due to backgrounds or menus glitching out
the disparity between the three sets of character models is pretty jarring nowadays, didn't remember that being a problem 1st time round
also: so many terrible minigames! lots of QTEs too. i hate QTEs.
still had lots of fun with it though. the quantity of different enemies was surprising, so used to recolored models/sprites in modern jrpgs
really loved the Materia leveling system too, weighing up which armor with how many slots and which gems etc
might revisit FF8 soon, all i can remember about that was loving the card game

the terribleness of FF7's minigames is my favorite thing about it

I really prefer the totally frustrating trainwreck minigames to the more polished failures like that water rugby game.

yeh that was rubbish. bet you're all excited at being able to play that in HD soon eh.

The different characters models not really a problem for me. There was always a discrepancy between your character being overhead square and in-battle sideview anyways.

I can't believe how many people knock on the graphics in this. Maybe 3d is just still too new for older stuff to be charming. Maybe this is too early in 3D to look good. Like the graphics in Super Mario Bros. are great pixel art but some old Atari game is just too crude to be appreciated. Still, i love it! I was on a rollercoaster shooting gallery with ghosts and stars and planes and it was like something out of Yellow Submarine.

Yeah, i don't think there are any QTE's. Maybe there was an event or two where you have to push certain buttons to do something you don't normally do, but it's much more involved than 'Quick push A before this message disappears from the screen'!.

nah there's definitely QTEs, i remember one specifically where you have to press X to punch some dude. the PS1 era is hardest to love i think, blocky 3D characters with low res textures smeared over them need a strong art style to be charming these days. the Popeye arms in FF7 did make me lol though.

Oh yeah, and the arm wrestling thing too.

Ok i just went snowboarding. Oh hell yes!

I think my only problem w this game is that it's a bit easy. I lost a few fights early on but every now and then I grind some levels and I'm at the point where I've just beaten Disc 01 and I'm at Level 49 and I can beat big bosses SO EASILY. Maybe i did too much power levelling? I don't know. Seems like I did far less than most (older, 16-bit) RPGs.

49's pretty high lvl for end of disc 1 iirc

also its an insanely easy game and its super mega easy to break the materia system

Yeah turns out the internet says that is way too high and also that FF7 is one of the easiest games in terms of difficulty. At any rate, once I got to the ice caves I quickly found myself back in some challenging battles again. I'll just treat the Summons like cheat codes and only break them out for the big guns.

Looks like this game has GTAV-loads of non-storyline stuff to do. I was looking at a faq and the section on catching/breeding/racing Chocobo's was the size of a Ray Bradbury short story.

Non-storyline stuff is the blessing and the curse of this series IMO. As in the best Ultimas, it's just great having lots of little things to wander into and tinker with. But I threw down FF9 in disgust when I got stuck, checked an FAQ, and in the process discovered dozens of great-sounding side quests that were now inaccessible because the towns they were in had since been blown up or whatever. ''Replay value'' my ass, takes too long to play these things ONCE and I just want to have this rich experience full of memories from the months I spent in Crystanatopia.

FF6 was pretty good on this front IIRC; most of the optional sidequests come AFTER the irreversible story break, and most (not all) of those are fairly well-telegraphed. At the least, you could build up a list of weird shit to double back and investigate before the final dungeon.

I just recently got Cloud back from schizo mental land. Wow going through some dark stuff with Tifa. Kinda wishing I had played through this as a 16-year-old (when it came out) cos it really deals w a lot of big and serious issues and teen angsty stuff in a very intelligent way. There are abandonment issues, characters dealing w feelings of self worthlessness, unrequited crushes, not being able to trust the government, multiple references to being other people's puppets vs. having faith in yourself, etc. I definitely plan on playing this through again after I beat this (maybe not immediately after but still...) and it will be interesting to see if the story holds up. Occasionally I think the game is purposefully breaking the fourth wall, or toying with it. At one point Cait Sith says "There's plenty of stuffed toys like my body around, but there's only one me!" Some mind-bending, Zen stuff coursing through this game.

Reading the plot summary, it looks and is completely ridiculous, but it's not about the plot. It's about HOW the story is told.

It's weird to read people surprised that newcomers enjoy this game, with it's 'dated' graphics, yet you never read anyone say that Super Mario Bros. 3 has dated graphics. Maybe we are still too close to the birth of 3D to be able to see the early stuff as charming. For me, I think it's not only charming but in many cases far superior than it would have been with a million polygons. All these vast, huge landscapes that you run through have a majesty to them that would be lost if they were just a big empty field you see over your character's shoulder. Plus many of the Summons animations are just JAW-DROPPINGLY-OMG-F%$K-YES beautiful. The Neo Bahamut animation is quite possibly the coolest videogame moment ever. The way the enemies look so pitifully small on that piece of land, the way it rises up into the sky and THEN THE SKY PARTS OPEN and it keeps going up and you can see dust and rocks falling off, tumbling back down to earth. Cooler than anything in Super Mario 64, that's for sure.

Pretty much all the criticism I see about this game, I can't take seriously. The shitty walking controls? Yeah I see it as like one of those maps you get at family restaurant where you have to draw your way through a rudimentary map. It's like a little puzzle. Too many cutscenes? Yeah, how much time do you spend in FFII or FFIII just clicking through text boxes? Does that really add a significant amount of gameplay that watching a 30-second FMV has taken away?

Plus this great article, on how pathfinding works as a narrative device:

http://thiscageisworms.com/2012/09/20/in-praise-of-the-worst-design-moment-in-final-fantasy-7/

I would play a remake of this instantly, but I think it's a bit crazy that anyone would want to remake this, it seems like such a perfect combo of time & place re: 3D graphics being a new technology and the pre-rendered backgrounds etc. Feel like Cloud's giant sword was maybe a response to the low resolution, and that this stands for most of the elements of this game that are so beloved.

Also, the Snowboarding and Submarine minigames are pretty damn amazing. Probably better than most actual full-fledged 3d games of the era.

Also, the music is great (I'm playing the 2012 re-release). Maybe it's cos I grew up w the PC version, but having listened to the PSX music on some youtube, I really don't see the big difference.

It's right after I got the sub and I was looking around for the Huge Materia and could not find it anywhere on the map or the screen. So i tried hitting all the buttons to see if i could come up to a menu screen or something and OMG PILOTING A SUB IN 3D UNDER THE OCEAN. Really, this game is so much more influential than just on RPG's, it's kind of ground zero for modern sandbox gaming. Only you get the feeling in most games (eg. Skyrim) that the npcs and accompanying missions are all procedurally generation, whereas here, it feels like every single thing in this giant game was hand-made, hand-painted, and written a haiku about.

love the submarine mini-game. and this revive. :)

Pretty cool that Cloud had a cell phone back in 1997!

A big theme of this game is selective memories too. This game probably influenced Inception just as much as The Matrix.

http://i.imgur.com/lIi949H.gif

How many character models are there? 3? I think the CGI ones are the same as the battle ones but there are definitely some CGI scenes that use the super-deformed lego style models.

At any rate, it's funny that the battle models are the most 'realistic' and yet the battle is the most absurd, biology/physic/religion-breaking batshit part of the game!

have you gotten KOTR yet

It's weird to read people surprised that newcomers enjoy this game, with it's 'dated' graphics, yet you never read anyone say that Super Mario Bros. 3 has dated graphics.

well the appeal of (and advertising campaign for) ff7 when it came out was mostly about a polished level of presentation which hadnt been seen before. smb3 wasnt coming on that 'just give the guys who make cartridges a cigarette and a blindfold' tip

it's kind of ground zero for modern sandbox gaming

lol

^ hah i was gonna make a similar argument - FF7 was what everybody thought killed the n64 at the time (though looking back, i think everybody fondly remembers goldeneye), and it was largely because the ad campaigns only featured FULL MOTION VIDEO which the n64 COULD NOT DO because it was CARTRIDGE BASED

Hah Goldeneye. I remember playing that (and having a lot of fun in multiplayer) but just thinking "Man, Doom is WAYYYY better than this, and it was years ago."

FFVII is VERY ahead of it's time. For good and for bad. I always thought QTE's were some modern variation on Interactive Movies, that craze that was supposed to hit before The Internet came out and destroyed every VCR with a loud eeeee-rrrrrrrr modem death shriek. Constructing an interactive movie was one of the end goals of the optical media revolution.

I haven't gotten KOTR yet. I plan on it! Maybe a Gold Chocobo as well! I'm probably near the end of Disc 2 and wondering if I haven't effed myself over by not doing certain things in time. There were only 3 Huge Materia in Cosmo Canyon when I was there recently, I think I may have missed the one on the train. Was that when Cid had to alternate the brakes or something? I'm pretty sure I never caught up with the other train, or really had a clue what was going on.

I have to say it is nice to not have heroes that steal every single thing that is not nailed down to the floor! Ultima I am looking at you!

Also, they do give some story time to the female characters here, even though Aeris is somewhat of a Woman in a Fridge. I think Tifa saved Cloud twice and spent time as the captain of the airship (?). Also when she got tied up she freed herself with a cool minigame puzzle.

Ok wait I need a Gold Chocobo for the KOTR. Ok. Thing is I think I sold my Steal Materia. Well I can buy one at the Gold Saucer, and I love playing that Sub minigame (seriously, this is probably the best sub game that ever came out for 32-bit systems).

I mean, I can buy the Carob Nut at the Gold Saucer? Do I need that to get the Gold Chocobo?

Hah Goldeneye. I remember playing that (and having a lot of fun in multiplayer) but just thinking "Man, Doom is WAYYYY better than this, and it was years ago."

Watch yourself - I made basically this statement on the ILX video game ballot poll thread and was nearly run out of town on a rail.

Goldeneye is ALL ABOUT multiplayer tho

relevant

http://ryanhemsworth.bandcamp.com/track/battle

sorry to be that guy but can we change the title of this thread? it's not really cool to use a word when intellectually disabled people are offended by it (no matter the context) and are asking people not to use it

http://www.r-word.org/

you're right about Doom vs. Goldeneye, but it was much harder to set up a LAN party and networking over DOS vs. some drinks and a bunch of your idiot friends over to GODDAMNIT ODDJOB

I also would endorse changing the thread title.

kind of treeship in retrospect

otm. Maybe "Kind of Silly in Retrospect"?

I just finished Disc 02 (Hojo was pretty easy for me!) so i think Disc 3 is just the last dungeon + Sephiroth battle + long FMV ending? I will probably goof around, get my limit breaks maxed, collect missing materia, play tons of sub game missions, raise/race Chocobo, etc. before attempting the end.

Is that last cave the best place to level up? I did go in there for a minute and some weird gargoyle guys kicked my ass promptly.

there are 41 ILX thread titles containing the word "retarded", although the practice does seem to have tapered off somewhat in recent years

Barenaked Ladies thread probably the worst outstanding example, in terms of things that remain an active part of the hivemind.

enjoyed this revive. tho the series is generally execrable, the "final fantasy & philosophy" book had one interesting article about the environmental themes of the game & shinto. a good bit on the sector 7 cutscene w/ president shinra looking down listening to... haydn? that was a great scene

Haydn's The Creation!

yeah! that was a pretty nifty deployment. all the eden/fall stuff was interesting iirc, tho I was 11 when I played this

I'm in the final dungeon. I actually made it to Jenova (WTF giant naked woman/vaginal space-brain from Wayne Coyne's infinite nightmare) and Sephiroth before OMG what is going on, why is the planet Pluto on the screen? After that, 5 minutes of destroying the solar system, only to have it not completely kill me! Hahahah soooooo awesome. I intend on grinding a bit in that last dungeon and then traveling around, beating the weapons, getting a Gold Chocobo, etc. 55+ hours of play so far. What a game!

It's funny to read reviews of the FF series and have them compared to each other in any way. I mean it is basically a formula, a huge world with sprawling characters, lots of side quests, etc. Airships. Chocobos. Summons. Etc. I played IV and VI (on the SNES) but can't remember any of the stories at all. I think VII has a big hand up in that department because the story is actually about a small group of people that all know each other and all have a past together. When I think back to IV it's "Oh, here's King _______ of the kingdom of _______ and he needs your help". Maybe my memory is screwed.

The 16-bit RPGs are my main source of comparison, so I think VII is a HUGE step up. Graphics were always horribly dull in those games, just made out of tiles, and it's a huge breath of fresh air to have ornate picture-book ruined forests and snowy wastelands to trace your path through. That and the floating camera that gets all cinematic during the battles. At the very least it makes grinding a hell of a lot more fun.

Oh, and I'm convinced that the basketball minigame is the single greatest basketball videogame simulator ever. It really is all about knowing the precise microsecond at which is let go of the ball.

I probably spent at least 5 hours playing that damn b-ball game.

No regrets!

Adam, you should replay VI! Maybe not as batshit as VII but there's tons to love.

VI is the consensus pick for best FF, I thought

Yeah that's what I heard. Any reasons why that is? I know the opera scene is amazing and all but that's like one scene out of a long game.

I'll probably replay it, but my new roommate has FFVIII and I haven't played many post-16-bit RPGs so that might be fun. Not sure I'll replay VII for a bit, I now have a Gold Chocobo but still have to kill the Weapons and Sephiroth, and by the time that is done, I'll probably have spent as much time on this game as I did playing through Skyrim 2.5 times.

man I hate that I wrote this thread title

lol

ugh I hate that I titled this thread this

― Wes HI DEREson (HI DERE), Monday, March 9, 2009 8:53 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha, opera scene probably my least favorite part of FF6!

It's just big, so much world, so many side quests, so many characters. Actually, probably too many on the last, but there's a strong core of 6-10 leads who are totally interesting IMO. Within the 16-bit palette you also get a real sense of a variety of environments and so on. I mean, I haven't seriously played it all the way through since I got it on emulator in the late 90s, so I don't know how completely this holds up. But I remember finding it broad and chewy. More to find and do than Chrono Trigger, though muddier-looking, and with some seriously flawed sections and certainly a less unique story.

Yeah that's what I heard. Any reasons why that is? I know the opera scene is amazing and all but that's like one scene out of a long game.
― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Friday, November 1, 2013 8:50 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

best villain, arguably the best music, arguably the best easter eggs/hidden items.

man I hate that I wrote this thread title

then ask a mod to change it! i'd do it myself but my influence is not nearly so leveled up as yours

i've been playing ff6 lately actually. my first final fantasy. (i did almost beat super mario rpg: LEGEND OF THE SEVEN STARS as a kid tho.) some of the sprite art is really great; the characters are really emotive for how tiny and cramped they are. peanuts-esque use of space. i partic loved the part where you pick up the guy who just saw his entire city poisoned, and you flee through the forest and wind up on the train full of ghosts going to the underworld, and it feels cartoony and random and dumb until finally after you disembark the refugee sees all the people from his town, including his wife and kids, climbing numbly aboard the train, and chases after it as it pulls away, and ends up standing on the edge of the empty platform staring offscreen with his lil sprite head hung. i thought that was terrific. the opera scene i knew was coming so some of its impact was diluted but the wordless synthesized 16-bit singing kind of blew my mind.

idk if i can finish it tho. it just goes on and on.

yeah i was not a kid when i played that scene and got pretty emo about it

Didn't they re-release it recently?

Mario RPG. Man, I've NEVER played that. Always heard it was real good too!

SMRPG is fantastic & fun

But too easy. Still enjoyable.

My terrible shame is that I have NEVER beat FFVI!

^ i share in your shame! i was playing on an emu but w/o a controller and i couldn't do sabin's blitzes on the keyboard and i didnt want to kick him out of my party because i felt terrible abt it so i just quit altogether

pro-tip: you can do the blitzes very very slowly

press & hold left key
press & hold down key
release left key
press & hold right key
release down key
etc. etc.

fools, get a gamepad for your PC

on the emulated PSX version on VITA you can substitute either adjacent direction for diagonals and it still works, not sure if this was ever true of the other versions

Like, with the one where you have to do a hadouken d,df,f motion you can actually just press d, f, f OR d, d, f and it still comes out

I have also not finished FF6 despite starting it twice

the deathtrain bit is definitely weirdly powerful, poor little guy all jumping up and down with an exclamation mark over his head because his family got sent to the underworld

Any particular version of VI I should look for? I played the SNES III back in the day, but if there is a recent re-release with a better translation that would be ideal.

Yeah, I got an Afterglow Xbox 360 controller and it is USB and plugs right in and works with pretty much any game except some of the early GTA's where it WILL NOT map the analog sticks to the camera so it is pretty much impossible to play. Plus there is a button that turns your room into a gamma radiation isolation chamber (via lighting up insanely strong green LEDs).

the original VI translation is great! loaded for bear, even! (because the translator took strange liberties)

sad 4 all of you who never got to the heavy melodramas of the second half

Any particular version of VI I should look for?

GBA version has a better translation (although less quirky) but slightly worse music than the SNES. PS1 version crippled by load times iirc. There's iOS and Android versions coming "this winter".

then ask a mod to change it! i'd do it myself but my influence is not nearly so leveled up as yours

It's a stronger ask if someone else does it IMO

xp GBA will be slightly downgraded visually too because of the resolution. the music is so great, just go with emulated SNES. the speed up function will help you grind through battles too

Ok I'm going with the original SNES. Cos I bought it already anyways.

I beat VII. Kind of amazed at the ending. I guess the high-end CGI was pretty rad but really it was mostly end credits. I tried watching Advent Children and it was kinda cool (really amazing battle scenes animation) but too colorless and serious, really. I know VII was set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland (or, hell, I guess it was actually pre-apocalyptic?) but it still had lots of interesting places, colorful characters, etc. I guess magic levitating jesters and battle dolphins are just too goofy for SERIOUS CGI MOVIE.

I tried beating Emerald Weapon a few times. Had Knights of the Round, and two copies of Mime, and went and did that for a bit. Died multiple times. At this point yeah is this even fun anymore? Maybe this game's steely grip on my brain is over. 70 hours of play!

Gonna play VI now. I tried playing it yesterday but reorienting myself to 16-bit graphics is going to take some getting used to. The battle scenes are somewhat brutal without the spinning camera and character animations but whatevs.

i feel like someone must have a written a doctorate thesis on the themes of death, shintoism/environmentalism, identity, etc. in FFVII by this point. it really blew my mind back then, how trippy and dark it got by the end

ok, i'm playing FFVI right now. i am going to beat it. this time - IT'S PERSONAL

I will too! Maybe we should do a club

reopen ILGPC

"LOCKE: Thank you moogles! We're in your debt!"

truer words have never been spoken. forgot how much i loved this world

hahaha, we should!

Final Fantasy VII: Kind of Playable in Retrospect

whoa i didn't know that there was a ILGPC

can a mod move my new thread to ILGPC

nooo the replay was for FF VI (unless i'm being stupid)

Anybody try this? Not sure if I want to go through the bother of getting it to run.

http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/1657/

http://kotaku.com/the-steam-achievement-that-nobody-unlocked-1610073943

Wow - fascinating window into a subculture I'm glad I don't hang around. The comments section on this article alone reveals all kinds of really distorted priorities and concerns.

I'll read that.. when I eventually play through Hate Plus in 2017

wtf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyKnc7PlcQc

blowing my mind rn. kinda looks like CC HD

I don't care what anyone says I'm going to buy this and play the shit out of it at the expense of everything else in my life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH3nZ1-D4_4

can't wait to see this in HD

man this looks actively bad and dumb

"actively bad and dumb" is the new ATB system

rank the ffvii minigames best to worst:

--golden saucer shooting
--snowboarding
--motorbike with no control over speed but you have a sword
--tower defense egg thing

hm, i feel like there's a couple i've missed

xp oh have they released details about how thats gonna work?

submarines. i kinda like the feel of the submarines.

snowboarding
gold saucer
fort condor tower defense
excavation
chocobo racing -- without the L+R cheat it's ridiculous
submarine -- interesting system but there's no challenge

excavation??

oh, wait, the where-to-dig thing in that one town. that ain't even a game.

Mog game ftw

Submarine game was incredible too. Way better than it needed to be

i'm sort of excluding anything that takes place with the standard set of interaction5s in the game's normal engine. lol that i forgot about chocobo racing though. I GUESS i would rank them worst-to-best

6. chocobo racing (one boring track, having to do it over and over, breeding just not v fun)
5. tower defense (fiddly and anti-fun, and one of the places the game's standard look really works against it. and the difficulty level didn't scale very interestingly.)
4. motorbike and swords (defending your convoy doesn't actually matter, impossible to lose really, wish you could accelerate. sort of feels nice though, you could start from here and end up with a sort of ok endless runner)
3. snowboarding (physics feel janky but man it's so 1997 it's amazing)
2. golden saucer light gun without light gun game (it's a nicely put together course, if only you actually had a gun)
1. submarine (no challenge but weirdly atmospheric (i just like submarines a lot), i like how it feels kind of like a fighter place sim underwater)

Boxing was trash

let's be real all the minigames were bad

well, yes.

Remember all of those awesome spell cutscenes that lasted for five minutes that were amazing the first time you used them but quickly became so outrageously annoying that you never used the high-end spells more than three times?
Also, Cait Sith! WTF?

― Dan (And So On) Perry (Dan Perry), Wednesday, January 11, 2006 6:02 PM (9 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

when i was a kid i would go nuts for those summon cutscenes every single time, so screw you 2006 dan perry

Summon cutscenes were the best. I will be very surprised if they can top them. Bahamas in particular.

So I guess it will now be multiple games, and people are freaking out, playing the outraged consumer, etc personaly I think its fine and cant wait to see what they do. There is a lot of concern the world map will be cut. Thing is for a good half of the original game you could really only go one or two places at a time. People upset they wont be able to walk to Kalm when in reality isn't it just a big field from Midgar?

Then again that sense of scale once you left Midgar was a HUGE moment in the original so hopefully they can still nail that.

Remake is going to be episodic supposedly so they can release it quicker

maybe it's just best to wait for the inevitable Final Fantasy VII HD complete on-disc edition in 2017

remake is giving me The Spirits Within flashbacks

Man fuck this episodic bullshit. If it means that open-world exploration is severely curtailed at best then... I don't know.

Stupid of me to get excited about a video game dammit.

You know I didn't realize till I saw the remake trailers that Aeris doesn't have (and never had!) pointed ears.

just saw a spoiler for the remake that made my interest in it go from 0 to 100

Finally, the chocobo-fucking minigame we've all been clamoring for.

maybe it's just best to wait for the inevitable Final Fantasy VII HD complete on-disc edition in 2017

― Nhex, Monday, 7 December 2015 15:08 (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Sad lol

mini games are dangerous. I remember just losing all interest in the story in FFVIII and just playing triple triad constantly, only playing the story to provide new games of triple triad

i'd be cool with them expanding the FF7 maybe HALF as much as they seem to have done, and then cranking out the games twice as fast.

that's how it works, right?

but seriously, i have no interest in playing a 250 hour full re-make of FF7, anyway, especially if that takes 8 years to put out. if it was around 125 hours, maybe, and over 4 years? that's way more in my range

especially if that takes 8 years to put out

8 years starting now, i mean

mini games are dangerous. I remember just losing all interest in the story in FFVIII and just playing triple triad constantly, only playing the story to provide new games of triple triad

― COVID and the Gang (jim in vancouver), Friday, April 3, 2020 1:55 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'm doing a playthrough of 4 through 13 and triple triad is the thing i'm most excited about, hope it's as good as i remember it being when i was 12

there’s at least one implementation of that game mechanic outside of having to play final fantasy eight, you know

just saw a spoiler for the remake that made my interest in it go from 0 to 100

― ciderpress, Friday, 3 April 2020 17:02 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

can you put it in rot13 or something

big but vague spoilers: gurl ner tbvat erohvyq bs rinatryvba jvgu gung fuvg

nrevf qvrf

im heading in tonite

The early hours of this are more like Yakuza than I expected, i.e you walk around a vivid urban sandbox having chats and doing sidequests and uh also there is an awful deranged Goro Majima expy who loves fighting you

jesus now i am even more hyped

I'm seven hours in and approximately 40 minutes into the plot of the original game

Looks great, spend a lot of time just looking at stuff and soaking up the vibe, it's kind of bittersweet idk

The combat mechanics work for me, clattering people with Tifa doesn't seem like it'll get old and there's plenty of stuff for you to do in combat with each character right from the start

A lot of the hardcore fans seem excited that Biggs, Wedge and Jessie have (extremely) expanded roles, but a lot of the interactions with Jessie are just kind of distractingly uncanny gibberish. Britt Baron is a bit more natural as Tifa

There are at least two Skyrim guys in this game whose voices I'm extremely sick of

I'm seven hours in and approximately 40 minutes into the plot of the original game

kill me

there’s at least one implementation of that game mechanic outside of having to play final fantasy eight, you know

― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Friday, April 3, 2020 8:32 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

The only one I know of is through that square app but they no longer have online play

it took me a few minutes to place the voice actor who plays Wedge: it’s Matt Jones, who played Badger on Breaking Bad. And the character is kind of like an optimistic, less-stoned Badger

as far as I can tell, Cloud is now dating every female character. And also probably Sephiroth.

jim i swear every year someone does it on iOS with the serial numbers filed off -- e.g. here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/elementimals/id452197048 -- but i don't know if there's any recent versions still working on modern iOS iterations

i am not sure if this game is "good" but it's fun and very strange and very much interested in its own remake-ness.

the latter being what i was referring to upthread that made me interested in it

Game is very horny
Aerith is very annoying
Chadley is a little fucking weirdo and I wish I could smack him

Music is great

In the middle of a strangely sequenced bit where Cloud just sort of chills out for hours after a major catastrophe

no PS4/didn't play but watched the entire game online m/l start to finish on a cpl twitch streams. pretty amazing! def a surplus of drawn out parts and a little melodramatic but overall beautiful, they did really great things with all of the characters and the soundtrack is about as good as you could hope for. And after a cpl days thinking about the ending and how they remixed + restructured the game... pretttty fuckin smart!

have they nailed the psychedelia of the origibal game? sooo trippy in places

It's less trippy, I think. You lose a bit by having expensive orchestras playing everything instead of cheap but extremely evocative ps1 electronic noises. Like the mako reactor music does not chill me to my core any more for example

Also lots of gaps that your imagination filled in the original game are now filled by realistic character models and voice acting

Every time I think I'm going to finish this game I get north of midnight and get attacked by 300 robots in a labyrinthine facility that didn't look like it could be that big from the outside

Reserving judgment on the ending til I see it but I am fairly up for them pruning/abridging the less iconic bits from the middle bit of the original game. I won't be disappointed if I don't get to fight for my life for eight hours while traversing the network of sewers beneath the Costa del fuckin Sol

ILG: the gaming board where no one has time for Final Fantasy VII Remake, really

It's really good! But when are we going to get to the fuckin fireworks factory!!

I was going to download this but I'd have to delete some games off my PS4 to make space for it and I don't actually care enough to do that

I'm to the point where I've almost finished fighting my way up the stairs as the Turks are hovering in a helicopter getting ready to drop the plate. Taking my time, I guess

I won't be disappointed if I don't get to fight for my life for eight hours while traversing the network of sewers beneath the Costa del fuckin Sol

i haven't played the game, only read about it, but correct me if i'm wrong in thinking that it is more likely that you will instead have to fight for 16-24 hours in the sewers beneath the Costa del fucking Sol, with a bunch of expanded scenes and mini-bosses

man I have played a lot of ff7 and yet I'd completely erased that whole section from my memory. almost tempted to invest in a ps4 on lockdown but not sure it's really what i need in my life

At this point, Costa del Sol is probably going to be in like... part 3 or something

Not a spoiler at this point, but the released remake thus far only covers Midgar, from what I've read

the name 'costa del sol' is a sleeper hit for one of the wackiest real-world-appropriated name choices in all japanese video game development

and man i hope there's someone out there who's really really hyped for this and somehow hadn't learned it only covers midgar, and after their 60-hour midgar experience they're furious that the game ends there

Woulda been me eventually

I’m glad the kind-of-spoiler I read is actually something that becomes clear as you’re playing, regarding the weird spectres

Big fan of Cloud's mom being called Claudia

The late game bit where some toughs sic a monster on you in a junkyard with great fanfare is also good clean mischief

This game is very very pretty on ps5 and I have having a great time playing it. I think after 15 years of trying final fantasy games, it’s finally starting to click why they are so well loved

Initial (~8-12 hours, rmde) impressions:

This game is long! I'm still pnly bombing Shinra buildings?
After reading some guides, I think I'm finally understanding the combat, but man, it's complicated and the game doesn't do much to ease you into it. (It does make me long for simple nice turn-based action.)
I really don't like Barrett's voice actor. :(
I guess it's been a while since I played an FF (lol I think 9 was the last one) but I've forgotten how campy it could be.

Pretty much everyone who played the first part of the remake said the only thing it was really missing was having constant interruptions from that weird little cunt in the sailor outfit