I was drunk the other night and was perusing the Playstation Store on my PS4 which is always a good idea when I am in that state. I have stated in the past that I am not the kind of person that pays full price for a game and will normally wait until the price has dropped dramatically, or it is offered to me for "free" with my Playstation Plus account.
There is an exception to this rule and that is any Final Fantasy adventure. I have always, and likely always will, be willing to pay full price for them and this is a good thing because Square-Enix doesn't normally discount anything.
That was my way of thinking when I paid $50 for FF7 remake 3 nights ago anyway.
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It seems that almost anyone you talk to that has been a fan of the FF series for any length of time agrees that FF7 on the PS1 was one of the best, if not THE best game that the series has ever had. It's not that the graphics were the best of that the gameplay was the best, but the story was the best and the most iconic characters all emerged from this one title.
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I think it is pretty easy to suggest graphical capabilities have improved slightly over the years
For people like me who normally get upset when a remake of a movie just craps all over the masterpiece original, I was very worried that Squenix was going to do the same with one of my favorite games of all time. The way that they really "screwed the pooch" on FFXV didn't instill me with a great deal of confidence when after a decade of development they released a semi-broken, incomplete game with a nonsensical story.
The good news for the FF7 remake is that the story was already there, so the team could just focus on gameplay and graphics (I guess) rather than trying to figure out what works in Japan and USA because it so often is a tough translation to make.
Anyway, here are my first impressions, most are good, some are bad
Pro: The graphics are incredible
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I'm not just referring to cinematic sequences - because those being amazing are expected, I am referring to combat and also simply wandering around. The world looks real aside from the impossible haircuts that no amount of gel products could achieve, especially when jumping around and swinging a sword. But then again, Cloud's sword, if it was actually made in real life, would be impossible to wield, so let's just let that slide :P
Con: Some voice acting is really bad
This is a tough one to pull off for any game. I suppose it is unreasonable for me to expect Squenix to be able to afford the best actors to do the voice-overs and it also might be difficult for the actors to really capture what the character is meant to sound like - especially if they aren't given enough background story on that character. I don't know the process. This is most notable in one of the characters that does a great deal of talking early on in the game.
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Barret Wallace is a gruff, enormous guy with tattoos, scars (both physical and emotion) who has a Gatling gun for an arm (Suck it Bruce Campbell!) Naturally we would expect him to have a rough and abrasive voice - which he does. What I didn't want is for every line of his to sound like Mr. T was given a script with no idea what is going on around him and told to be as angry as possible at all times.
It seems out of place in most situations and I'm already tired of hearing it and dude talks a LOT - he talks way more than "Cloud", who is the main character of the story. So far all of the women have great voice actors and about half of the men do NOT. It's a shame really.
Pro and Con: New combat system
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I did not make this photo. It is from a Youtube video that is part comedy chastising the crazy amount of things that you have to pay attention to in this game and it is also part very informative about how to play the game. The idea is that you need to learn a ton of information in FF7.
I am a lazy gamer, I will admit this. This is part of the reason why I always appreciated turn-based games such as the way Final Fantasy was back in the 80's up to the early 2000's.
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The remake is "kind of" turn-based in that you can slow the game way the hell down at any point and switch to another player to control them - and you better - because the AI is not doing you any favors in this game.
A really important aspect of combat is gaining ATP up so that the individual characters can perform important actions such as using potions, casting spells, or using abilities - all of which do substantially more damage than just attacking. You can get away with not changing characters in the early stages of the game but later on, you will get whooped even by trash mobs if you are waiting for the AI to use some skills.... because they never will.
The amount of ATP that you collect is crucial to victory and if you allow the AI to rack this up on its own, you are going to have a bad time because the AI is intentionally terrible at this.
This has been a difficult hurdle for me to get past because positioning of characters is also very important in most battles since 50% of the characters are melee based.
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I'm only 3 hours in and this game feels more like a research project than a game but it is a research project that I am gladly taking on. There are very few game titles out there that I am willing to learn this much about in order to play, but Final Fantasy is one of them. I already feel as though this was $50 well spent and I highly recommend it to fans of the franchise.
Thus far it appears as though they fired everyone that was involved with that awful awful FFXV game and started from scratch.
There is a ton more information to cover and I have many more opinions about what is good and what is bad, but this is already 1000 words long so I'm gonna cut it short.
Do you own this game? What do you think? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
There's many parts where you'll think, "jesus, this is just padding out the game to an obscene level", but it is balanced by segments of "this is really good, increased detail of world building"
I stayed away from this game for two reasons, one was the combat being so heavily changed which kinda turned me off. And, the bigger reason being that they're splitting the game up into several different parts that you have to buy each time, which made my peepee very flaccid. However, I've watched a lot of people jam on this since it came out, seems like most people either feel like it's a 6/7 out of 10 or a 10/10 weeb masterpiece worthy of a spot in the anime/hentai section of the museum of natural history. So, I will be curious about your overall view once you're done.
ha! brilliant follow up as always. I will say this but didn't get to it in this installment. Too many cutscenes, too freuqently... but that is kind of what Square does now isn't it?
I mean, they don't always do that these days, but when they do, baby, you better squeeze those ass cheeks into shape. Because you're about to speed run enough cut scenes to watch the LOTR trilogy twice over, pusssssy.
Yeah, that's not why your peepee is flaccid
Unless you're some sort of a connoisseur of flaccid wieners who can just smell a soft cock in hand within a mile, I'm not sure how you'd know that. But, shit. If you are, I'm highly impressed.
On a real note though, seriously, the thought of them charging $150-200 to play a remake of a game over the course of several years (Like, possibly even 3-5 years from rumors) certainly could make any man the epitome of dry and soft.
The thought of paying that amount for a game that is "just for fun" is ridonculous to be fair. There are of course men with more winners with ultimate girth and turbidity that won't mind paying but they're better men than me. That amount of money is four months worth of food for me in Nigeria, to give you perspective.
It's just such a weird approach as well in addition to the absurd amount. Everyone who has played the original FF7 knows the story already, and these games just end abruptly in important areas of the original game basically. So, making people wait 1.5-2 years to pick it back up from where they left off in the same exact game just sounds absolutely fucking abysmal to me, man. If they were just doing updates for free when they were done, that'd be fine. But, instead they're greasing everyone's assholes up and just milking their prostate's for as much money as possible. Just seems kinda shitty.
I enjoy the animations and I played it back in Ps1 when it was turn-based. However, if I had a PS4, I'd pay $50 for this game solely because one of the biggest cheapskates I've ever encountered made a post about paying $50 for it Surely they are doing something right
Haha, yeah we have seen it time and time again.
I have lost count of the FF series, there are so many. I played MMO in the early 2000's for a while, I have XIII sitting on the shelf for the PS3 (it needs to be sold), and played another one in the late 90's on the PC. Maybe it was VII, I can't remember.
I loved this game in the PS1 and I don't remember it being so tricky... but I admit I gave up on it when I got to the racing with chocobos, training chocobos, cross-breeding chocobos. I got so fed up on that grind and repeat task that I gave up on the game from one day to the next. 😶
One of the few games I saw with really Intelligent AI on that matter is Dragon's Dogma. In that game, your team will actually use the skills and potions you set up for them! 🤗
Right now I'm still stuck with the PS3 so I haven't played the newest ones.
Glad to hear you're investment was well spent. I, myself, was waiting for it to drop to $20 so that I wouldn't make the same mistake as when XV came out. I bought that masterpiece brand new and still haven't gotten around to finishing it.
XV was the biggest letdown in years for me. It started out just stupid in that you are a member of the royal family yet you are pushing your car down the road? Come on now! Who does that make sense to? I get that you need to meet that G-string wearing lady at the auto repair shop somehow but surely there was a more practical method of doing this.
Senseless long travel to and from various towns that you were forced to watch even though nothing goes on, the need to purchase gasoline (why? dammit! why?) and then about 1/2 way through the game it looks like they just completely gave up on having a cohesive story altogether. Combine this with massive sections of the map that weren't used at all and the huge amount of fetch quests and XV was just LAME.
Squenix has done a much better job with this one and I think repeating the story is ok for most of us because I have forgotten most of the story since the PS1 release.
If you are waiting for FF7 remake to hit 20 bucks you might be waiting forever, Square Enix doesn't tend to discount their games as XV, which no one is even buying, is still near full price in the PS store.
I like to call XV final reality because of the car and gas stuff. It's $20 now at Walmart
ah, ok. i don't have access to walmart over here in Vietnam. I'm subjected to the whims of the PS store for the most part.
I played the original on PC, but I haven't had a chance to play the remake. At $50 I will probably wait a while anyway. Square/Enix really seems to be proud of their games. They have always been pricey. If you are only 3 hours in, you probably don't know if you can race chocobos yet? I remember spending so much time getting that Golden Chocobo. Does it still have summons? Knight's of the Round animation was awesome. I also liked Anima. I look forward to reading more of your thoughts as you get deeper in to the game.
I haven't played the game yet but I feel like the combat system is way too much!
it takes some getting used to that is for sure. I get frustrated because I keep hitting the wrong buttons on a regular basis and fudging up the rotation. There is almost nothing turn based about this and placement isn't really as important as you might imagine, blocking is important though.
well it is good to hear that they didn't butcher is but without turn-based or at least the hybrid turn based like they did in X, I am unlikely to play this at all, certainly not at full price.
yeah i also enjoyed the combat system in 10. That was a great game for sure and the ability to avoid combat if you were quick enough was a tremendous change for the better. So far most of the battles in FF7 remake seem unavoidable although you can run away pretty easily in most situations since the various battle areas are pre-defined. There is some respawning but not a great deal of it. So far it is a pretty great game but i am still finding the combat to be a bit frustrating. I need to git gud though, this much i know.
git gud.... urgh... that statement on its own is a big part of the reason why I don't like playing most online multiplayer coop.