Final Fantasy VII: Kind Of REDACTED In Retrospect

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