Gaming Final Fantasy Saga (FF7 Rebirth Spoilers TAGGED)

I guess they also added some tweaks to jobs but I'm probably the wrong person to ask regardless. The reviews seem to very much indicate this is the same basic game under the hood.

 

So returned to FFXV and… Well, didn’t have a great time. The story mission felt tedious beyond belief, but did open up the Duscae region. Wasn’t getting on particularly well with the combat either. Yes, you can sometimes just rely on level superiority and curb stomp everything but that doesn’t always work. The main difficulty was a combination of the camera being crap, even with Wait mode, so it’s hard to tell whats going on and the game literally dropping in new enemies from airship too often. I get the story concept behind but it makes for a crappy game. It all culminated in a crappy hunt that emphasised all the flaws and lack of control I have on the characters.

Then, remembering that I hadn’t upgraded the gang in quite a while, I went back some time later and grabbed a load and then went hunting. Also remembered there is Libra and worked out how to use it. Combination of those two made for quite a different fight experience, even when the game dropped an airship contingent of enemies on me.

I still think the game makes healing harder than it should do, but those upgrades changed the picture enough for me to stick with it.

 

So FFXV - when’s it’s good, it’s very, very good and when it’s bad it’s horrid. The bigger problem is it can go from one to the other quickly due to two factors - the combat system and the camera.
Those two occasionally combine to wreak a whole lot of unholy hell on the player - the combat system is set up for moves to be made depending on enemy position. Now when the camera stays at a good distance and doesn’t decide to suddenly zoom in, around and up and down in a bid to be ‘dramatic’, it can work OK, assuming the enemy weaknesses are not to a crappy weapon or magic, for they really nerfed that here by deciding its effects extend to your party too! Realism? Screw realism, it’s a pain in the arse and it deters me from using magic unless I absolutely have to.

The game has these various moves but it explains them badly, so much so they remain incomprehensible to me 20 hours in. I’m pretty much instead relying on level superiority, good weaponry and enemy weakness coupled with dodging, but depending on how long it arbitrarily decides to give you on the ‘block’ prompt that can vary quite a bit too. IF you get enemies that are weak to rubbish weapons and you are near trees, it’s nigh-on guaranteed that the camera will place those trees right in your line of sight because button-mashing to kill enemies you can’t see is fun.

It also relies far too much on warping in enemies or even, quite a few cases, literally dropping them on top of you. At a time when other games are making their enemies visible, this marks out FFXV as being quite anachronistic, particularly as, in combat system terms, Xenoblade was doing similar seven years ago without that reliance and was far more dynamic. (Also the frequency of Imperial airships is too damn high, I know they are going for the plot point of the Empire hunting you but the size of the gameworld argues against the frequency with which I end up legging it from Imperials.)

When the combat works, you know what to use, you can tell what’s going on, you even pull off some blocks and parries - it can be absolutely superb, but it can always change to the opposite extreme on a knife-edge. It would be even better if you had greater control over your party like being able to coordinate attacks on one enemy or get Ignis out of battle before using hi Regroup ability. That and there’s times when enemies will be running around with zero health but no one’s killed them. Is it an ambitious system? Yes. Has it realised that fully? I don’t think it has.

So, what’s it’s like when not doing dumb **** like that without warning? It can be very good. Quest/hunt structure is uninspired ‘go here / get this / kill that’ for Quest Giver Captain Cardboard - yes, neither Witcher or HZD will be losing any sleep on this. The characters of the party work well, the world is unique and well designed. There are some quite impressive vistas when you get to Duscae. Town design is very good, save for the slow pace the game inflicts upon you. Manual driving remains rubbish, as does its tendency of giving you a list of controls on either left and right and, with your eyes on that side of the screen, it puts a button prompt dead centre. The car is too slow, it takes you hours to drive 3 mile! The auto-driving, to old FF soundtracks, is far better and allows you to appreciate the world design.

I’m only on Chapter 3 still, so loads still to do and go. I’ll probably stick with this, though it probably isn’t going to survive for my immediate attention once Yakuza: Kiwami arrives.

 

Did anyone here get the Beta code for Dissidia NT? I'm download and try it out sometime this weekend.

 

Oh, forgot to mention that the 'find these 5 things' quests are an unholy abomination that should have been expelled from the game long before release. They are abysmal. FFXV would be so much better without them.

 

So, about that "upgrade" to the boards....

 

Had a far better go today overall. Though there are times when the game just can't help itself, like when I'm whacking the crap out of a Gigantoad and the camera rotates to put a tree in the way of my line of sight! Have to admit that, now there's a good amount of superiority, not even the Imperials numbers help them much - my gang tore through two lots with ease today.

 

Another mixed session on FFXV but generally more good than bad:

Did a quest for the weapon shop, that was quite good except on the way got ambushed by low-level that had a one-hit KO move - which this game seems to give to quite a few low-level enemies, which makes little sense. It all happened amid trees so I didn't even see it, just that Nict's HP meter went instantly to zero. So popped a potion then killed them.

I remain irked by the game's "tutorials" - doubtless they wanted to avoid doing these as set at the start of the game but I'm not convinced the replacement works, especially how they trigger which seems random. It'll do something like bring up an instruction to warp-strike to set up a chain attack, but after I've just done a warp-strike which the game tells you is best done from a distance. So triggering the instruction afterwards where I'm too close to the enemy for it be practically effective is dumb.

Went and did the Deadeye hunt. Now this should have been an epic spectacle, a superb set-piece the likes of which you've never seen. Initially it lived up to that, with an excellently creepy intro and excellent design on the Behemoth bastard. You thought FF13's Behemoth's were bad? Not compared to this monster. Unfortunately that was the high point as it then did a stealth minigame of following Deadeye back to its lair without being detected. It was total arse. It then followed that with a 'walk into middle of beast's lair to be ambushed' instruction. And then, for a hat-trick of awfulness, it did the instruction of 'use fire magic to blow up these explosive that happen to be present'. The problem with that? Deadeye rarely went near them, by the time I targeted him and blasted, the boom was never big enough to set off the barrels, yes, they were the most stable explosive barrels you've ever seen. Even if I did get him, it didn't do that much damage - so instead opted for my Lv 30+ party just beating the hell out of his Lv 15 arse. Woefully unsatisfying and a total fiasco, capped with an unclear exit from his lair

What followed was far better - Chocobos! Got to run around with one of those. Granted the 'take photo of Chocobo' quest was utter crap, for it wasn't actually a photo of it, which you have the ability to do, but instead chasing down the Cocobo to trigger a cutscene. The two 'find Chocobos' missions were far more fun, not least due to the quest indicator actually leading me to them and not a damn search circle. Riding Chocobos in this game is incredibly fun, but it didn't quite make up for the dreadful quest to unlock them. (Deadeye)

 

I've tried and tried with FFXV but just can't tell with it.

I'm a reasonable distance in done first "summon" type acquiring mission but like you I find the combat and camera angles awful and I really hate the characters.

I can normally deal with crappy controls if the story is good but here I just would not care if either Prompto or Ignis burnt in the volcano

Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk

 

I quite like the gang and their interactions, so that levels off a lot of it for me. The Quests are uninspired but do give a ton of XP, so I've started completing them all but the last step, then claim the lot on one day, go to a hotel, 1.5x multiplier on XP and ka-ching, level upgrades.

It's pretty obvious what they were going for on the combat but the camera frequently wrecks it for me, if there's a tree around it's akin to a glass pane in a martial arts film, just as someone'll go through it, so too will that tree block the camera.

What I find on the combat is it varies between brilliant and awful with no middle ground whatsoever. There was a particularly bad miniboss MA-X Maniple that rendered any sort of strategy pointless, so I went for 'nuke his arse with magic', not the best way to win a fight.

It's a shame because, as I've noticed due to driving around and today's Chocobo trips, it's a really well-designed game world, with all kinds of neat little details.

EDIT: Of course, in terms of FF characters, sooner or later I'll be booting up Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age and everyone loses to Balthier - really liked that character.

 

Just an FYI relevant to this particular thread.

http://www.pushsquare.com/news/2017/09/the_masterpiece_that_is_final_fantasy_ix_is_coming_to_ps4

 

I just recently put on 7,8&9 so Jace could watch the magic and summons and airships. He enjoyed them all and agreed with me that 8 is where it's at lmao

 

I played through 8 once and it just didn't click for me. VII put the franchise on the map, and it instantly made me a FF fanboy.

 

Final fantasy is obviously the best saga I played. I love many of these games.

 

Final fantasy is obviously the best saga I played. I love many of these games.

 

This is basically the version to own unless you already have the PC version (of which this is a port), for the record. Well worth the asking price.

Also I now have FFIX on every current device I own and I wish I could travel back in time and tell middle school me of the wonders of future technology.

 

So what have they done to improve FF9 for PC / PS4? It's hard to work out what's been done.

Did FF7 receive the same treatment too?

As I have the PS1 editions on the PS3, but if there's been significant improvements then that'd influence whether or not to purchase.

 

HD models and backgrounds, remastered cinematics, some "this is an old game" QoL/cheat features like smart speed-up, skip combat, etc. Basically it looks great and has substantially reduced load times on every front, I much prefer it to the straight port on my PSTV. That said, if your PS3 is currently hooked up and you've made substantial progress in that version you might want to hold off.

Yes, but FF7 also featured the PC translation which is generally considered less bizarre/error riddled than the PSX version (So, for example, now "This guy is sick" rather than the infamous "This guy are sick.").

Edit: Now that I'm really thinking about this these would be perfect for a Switch release. Someone talk to their uncle who works at Nintendo about this.

 

I'd assume you'll see videos on YouTube soon enough showing the PS4 port of IX sooner rather than later. Just like the other PS games in the franchise, they've probably just touched up CG sequences for HD format and fine tuned the graphics for the actual gameplay.

 

So far I've only gone through the PS3 copy of PS1 FF7 and the you can really tell it wasn't made for a world of HDTVs!

Thanks for the info, helps quite a bit.

 

Oh, also the background on my PS4 is a bunch of Vivis now, which is a great change of pace.

... Sorry Geralt.

 

Are they taking the mick? Oh wait, these are the same bunch who came up with dodge-200-lightning-bolts-perfectly, so nope, probably not:

 

And just think, to get it in a reasonable amount of time you would have to master that crappy rhythm on the 3X speed mode.

 

One Q: For the PC FF7 and presumably FF9 too, was it altered so the movement controls include analogue sticks?

I know why the PS1 versions were the way they were, but it felt very weird only using the D-Pad and it's likely deterred me from trying either 8 or 9. Well that and the pixel effect.

 

I think analog control was always an option for IX? It's been a long time. It's enabled on both anyway, though for 7 because of the old lack of analog support it functions a bit like an 8-way joystick rather than "true" analog movement.