Final Fantasy VII: Kind Of REDACTED In Retrospect

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.