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Azure_Horizon posted:Except that buying Eidos let them reap the rewards of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the Tomb Raider reboot, and the upcoming Hitman reboot, all of which are or will sell millions of copies. ... except that when they acquired a new company, that meant more mouths to feed, which is why the millions of copies they sold of TR, Sleepy and Deus combined is not enough for them. They shouldn't have expanded like that. But everyone is right in what they were saying up here, they pretty much screwed up ever since The Spirits Within.
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Mar 27, 2013 03:50
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Krad posted:... except that when they acquired a new company, that meant more mouths to feed, which is why the millions of copies they sold of TR, Sleepy and Deus combined is not enough for them. They shouldn't have expanded like that. Except for when that company's profits is deperately trying to prop up your flailing FF mmo division? 
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Mar 27, 2013 03:51
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Winks posted:Except for when that company's profits is deperately trying to prop up your flailing FF mmo division? It's great that they got someone to make games for them because they wouldn't do it themselves, but they created even more expenses that needed to be paid at the same time. And besides, it's not like they were buying Infinity Ward and getting the next Call of Duty, so I don't get what they were thinking when projecting Eidos' sales.
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Mar 27, 2013 04:03
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Well, if 3 million of anything is considered not enough than there is some serious questions to be answered. The first being "did we really have to have a 30fps wavy hair mode?"
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Mar 27, 2013 08:59
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So many mentions of Enix and no mention of Star Ocean? For shame. The first 2 are fantastic and the "voice acting" is nothing short of hilarious (in a good/annoying way SOUTHERN CROSS LUNAR LIGHT SOUTHERN CROSS) And SO3 is still one of the more fun battle systems for a modern 3D JRPG. I know the plot totally jumps the shark on the 2nd or 3rd disc and the crafting mechanism is really nebulous (without a guide), but I poured a ton of hours into that game. I played the 4th on a rental on 360 for like 10 hours and gave up.
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Mar 27, 2013 13:21
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I think SO4 and, to a lesser extent, SO3 soured lots of Star Ocean fans. 
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Mar 27, 2013 13:23
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Winks posted:Except for when that company's profits is deperately trying to prop up your flailing FF mmo division? Don't group the two games together. FFXI has been a unique MMORPG and a stable money maker (its made more profit over the years than many of the main titles combined) ever since it came out. Its 6th full expansion is being released today, 12 years after the original game came out. FFXIV has been a trainwreck and a desperate moneygrab that should have been a full-game expansion to XI but lost focus and direction.
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Mar 27, 2013 13:54
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Kyrosiris posted:I think SO4 and, to a lesser extent, SO3 soured lots of Star Ocean fans. 3 is at least tolerable. 4 was everything wrong with JRPGS before FFXIII took that crown with aplomb.
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Mar 27, 2013 13:57
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maelst posted:(its made more profit over the years than many of the main titles combined) Any, not many, which is funny because I always thought of it as "that weird spinoff". Then again the game is more than 10 years old and there's a monthly fee (which goes up if you get stuff like additional characters) if you've been playing since launch and buying the expansions you've spent more than $1500 on it. I'm sure there's not many people who have been playing FF11 for 11 years straight but for $1500 a person you don't need that many.
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Mar 27, 2013 14:21
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Evil Fluffy posted:I'm probably reading this incorrectly; does that say that squaire lost 13 billion yen? Meaning they are in the hole something like 137 million USD, rather than a projected revenue of a few million? Short answer yes (with the caveat that the company almost met its revenue goals, but not its income goals) long answer which is sort of a derail and will bore the thread You want to look at the operating income line, not the net income line. Net income includes interest, amortization...items that the company doesn't really have any control over during a fiscal year. Operating income still shows a loss; however the trouble is overstated, since it includes a 10 billion yen one time cost of restructuring. The company makes 150B/year so a one-off of 10B will easily be financed over the course of a few years. Now the business reason behind the extraordinary cost is concerning (the notes indicate that 4B of it is disposal, which is oftena euphemism for employee severance), but probably won't hit the company's revenue line for a few quarters since probably a lot of the initial pipeline has already been ironed out
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Mar 27, 2013 14:49
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But Rocks Hurt Head posted:Even now, Xenoblade, widely considered one of the best JRPGs of its generation, was a graphical minor miracle on the Wii. A huge, detailed, mostly seamless world with well-designed and executed monsters, vibrant use of color, and visibly distinct characters is an accomplishment for any game, but to have done so in 480p on an underpowered console with the game still looking great is incredible. Not to mention the emulated, upscaled Xenoblade screenshots in the Dolphin thread. Yeah, I think people dance way too much around being all "Visuals don't matter in my visual media" because they feel it makes them superior, but welp, chrono trigger, FF7, all the zelda games, they all were some of the most beautiful games on their consoles at the time and that is okay, it's okay to admit that a game having good graphics and good music is part of the experiance. I mean it doesn't need to be specifically having the highest poly count or most pixel shaders but it's gotta figure out some way to look good and that sort of goes double for JRPGs since they are always story driven and good presentation is a part of story telling and that isn't some big gamer sin to admit that.
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Mar 27, 2013 14:56
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FF13 is a visually stunning game in many places, Square can still produce high end graphics, that's really not their major problem (FF13-2 manages to poo poo on that engine and has fps drops all over the loving place, but hey, at least they got to reuse some assets cheaply!)
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Mar 27, 2013 14:58
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ConanThe3rd posted:3 is at least tolerable. 4 was everything wrong with JRPGS before FFXIII took that crown with aplomb. Yeah, I agree. I just know there's also a lot of animosity in this forum towards SO3, so I at least put a caveat.
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Mar 27, 2013 15:39
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victrix posted:(FF13-2 manages to poo poo on that engine and has fps drops all over the loving place, but hey, at least they got to reuse some assets cheaply!) Only really on the PS3 surprisingly enough.
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Mar 27, 2013 15:54
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ConanThe3rd posted:3 is at least tolerable. 4 was everything wrong with JRPGS before FFXIII took that crown with aplomb. 4 is what happens when a publisher forces a developer to make a game they did not want to make. 3 was supposed to be the last game in the series.
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Mar 27, 2013 16:01
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Winks posted:Only really on the PS3 surprisingly enough. Yeah, it's been said by myself and many others that 13-2 actually runs way better on the 360 than the PS3. Which is really sad since the original game is reversed on the systems it runs well on.
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Mar 27, 2013 17:46
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victrix posted:FF13 is a visually stunning game in many places, Square can still produce high end graphics, that's really not their major problem Would this even be "making GBS threads on the engine?" I mean, fighting games almost always have the most impressive character models because it's two characters on a mostly flat featureless arena. FF13 was pretty characters in a narrow hallway. If you suddenly have to display large areas instead of one path, of course the framerate is going to suffer.
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Mar 27, 2013 17:52
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We got video footage of iOS FFV gameplay now. The sound is apparently straight out of the original SFC version, which is... massively underwhelming. Diagonal movement is pretty neat though.
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Mar 27, 2013 18:37
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Square-Enix needs to start doing mainline FF games with stylized or even old-school styled graphics. They were at their best when they were squeezing every last drop of visual potency from extremely limited systems and creating massive worlds that way. Now that those limitations, for all intents and purposes, no longer exist, this has become a liability. They still have that drive to make it look beautiful, which is great, but the intense amount of labor that goes into optimizing graphics for current/next-gen systems bloats the budget beyond sensibility, which is why they're doing so poorly financially. I suppose what I'm saying here is that Final Fantasy 15 needs to look like Bastion.
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Mar 27, 2013 19:28
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I've been saying for the longest time that I want to see FFVII, VIII and IX remade to look like a SNES game.
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Mar 27, 2013 19:37
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Shaezerus posted:We got video footage of iOS FFV gameplay now. The sound is apparently straight out of the original SFC version, which is... massively underwhelming. Diagonal movement is pretty neat though. I actually like the FF5 soundtrack as is  Menus look pretty, battles look good although the actual walking and such looks worse to me. Universal though!
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Mar 27, 2013 19:42
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Yeah, I think people dance way too much around being all "Visuals don't matter in my visual media" because they feel it makes them superior, but welp, chrono trigger, FF7, all the zelda games, they all were some of the most beautiful games on their consoles at the time and that is okay, it's okay to admit that a game having good graphics and good music is part of the experiance. I mean it doesn't need to be specifically having the highest poly count or most pixel shaders but it's gotta figure out some way to look good and that sort of goes double for JRPGs since they are always story driven and good presentation is a part of story telling and that isn't some big gamer sin to admit that. Those games were also largely fun to play and you could spend time exploring the world (well, Chrono Trigger maybe not so much). There's a couple things I can think of where things start to go bad for Square: -Parity in graphics. In the PSX days they got by with beautiful prerendered backdrops and cutscenes, but nowadays GPU's are powerful enough to render models in real time and took that edge away. I also think that Square spending gobs of money on developing custom engines for flagship FF titles is really dumb since I don't think anybody ever licenses them. Mass Effect got by just fine on Unreal Engine, as have a lot of other games. -Anime as a design aesthetic is weird and stupid. I don't want to delve too much into this because I'll probably invoke a lot of hate, but designs that I enjoyed looking at as a child now irk me and sometimes make my skin crawl. This probably doesn't apply to Japan, but I imagine a large part of the world (especially the West) thinks this poo poo is dumb. I'll also never forgive Square for ruining Aya Brea in the recent Parasite Eve game. -RPG elements have disseminated into a lot of different genres. I can get upgrades in any racing game, I can explore the open world in GTA, and there's a plethora of non-RPG games out there with elemental magic and cool looking monsters. The last JRPG I played was The Last Remnant, and while the combat mechanics were pretty nifty I was completely bored halfway through. There wasn't very much story, the voice acting was atrocious, and the game felt very linear and grindy. Compare that to something like GTA 4 where the world is fairly open and the missions never feel repetitive even though it's pretty much 100 variants of "drive to X and murder Y."
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Mar 27, 2013 19:50
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I think JRPGs don't compete as well when they aren't blowing your eyes out with the graphics. And that seems like a thing they might not be able to recapture, ever. Gameplay matters but graphics matter too, even in the core audience and for a long time Graphics was one of JRPGs dominating unquestionable strength. Part of the problem is how ridiculous art direction and character design has gotten in Final Fantasy and JRPGs in general. Back in the PSX days and back when FFX was released, audiences were so blown away by the graphics and cinematic quality of Final Fantasy titles that they overlooked a lot of laughable design choices, like Cloud's giant sword and Lulu's belt dress. Now that great graphics don't have as big a draw anymore, bad character design is more likely to turn audiences away. Besides Final Fantasy there aren't many JRPGs to choose from on consoles, and a lot of them have very niche anime artstyles which isn't appealing to western audiences. Additionally, FF13 and FF13-2 were lacking in the graphics department- notably the cutscenes. Not only did the cutscenes have poor direction, the characters didn't emote as well as other games from that time. This is especially true in FF13-2 where the two main characters didn't emote a whole lot- the facial animation was even worse than the first FF13. I've been playing Kingdom Hearts II lately and I've noticed the character animation and the facial animation is better than FF13, a game that came out four years later on a superior console.
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Mar 27, 2013 19:52
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Shaezerus posted:We got video footage of iOS FFV gameplay now. The sound is apparently straight out of the original SFC version, which is... massively underwhelming. Diagonal movement is pretty neat though. The sprites annoyed me less in motion than they did in static images. There's still something off-putting about their proportions though, although I can't quite put my finger on it. Overall, I think I'll find it more irritating to be constantly subjected to a large picture of Amano Bartz in every cutscene. (Same goes to a lesser extent for the other characters, but the Bartz artwork just makes me cringe.) The totally free movement was really cool, though, and the overall UI looked like it worked well. Backgrounds (world, field, and battle) also looked very good: both true to the original design but obviously upscaled. Remastered sound would have been nice, but if that's not an option then I'm glad they're using SFC sound instead of GBA sound. I'm curious as to which version of the game itself it's based on: pure vanilla, GBA, and/or its own new bonus content. The achievements we see here (two of them pop up during the playthrough, and the achievement window indicates 96 total): Customer Appreciation - You played a new game. FINAL FANTASY V Master - Earn all achievements. Say Hello, Syldra! - You obtained the pirate ship. Bronze Hunter - Keep defeating enemies. Silver Hunter - Defeat more enemies. Gold Hunter - Defeat even more enemies. Platinum Hunter - Defeat a massive number of enemies. Bestiary (32 Pages) - Defeat a variety of monsters. Bestiary (64 Pages) - Defeat more new monsters. Bestiary (192 Pages) - Defeat rare monsters. Bestiary (323 Pages) - Defeat all monsters. Low Cash Flow - Earn gil. Gil Cave Time! - Earn more gil. Flush with Gil - Earn even more gil. Gil to Burn - Earn gobs of gil. Piano Master - Play piano. Treasure Hunter - Open all the treasure chests. The Wind Calls - Raise Bartz to level 10. Safe Journey! - Raise Lenna to level 10. Where Am I? - Raise Galuf to level 10. That Long Journey Smell - Raise Faris to level 10. Overall? Not the most exciting and creative batch of achievements I've ever seen, but maybe there are more interesting ones for secret achievements.
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Mar 27, 2013 20:20
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Shaezerus posted:We got video footage of iOS FFV gameplay now. The sound is apparently straight out of the original SFC version, which is... massively underwhelming. Diagonal movement is pretty neat though. Nah. You know what is disappointing? Listening to the butchered music of the gba remakes.
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Mar 27, 2013 20:23
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Krad posted:Nah. You know what is disappointing? Listening to the butchered music of the gba remakes. Ehh... while 4 and 6 did get comparatively butchered, I think the GBA version of 5's soundtrack was pretty much a straight upgrade. The SNES tracks sound... empty by comparison.
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Mar 27, 2013 20:27
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Head Hit Keyboard posted:Ehh... while 4 and 6 did get comparatively butchered, I think the GBA version of 5's soundtrack was pretty much a straight upgrade. The SNES tracks sound... empty by comparison. Yeah, 5's wasn't as bad, but the sound quality still killed it for me.
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Mar 27, 2013 20:36
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At least they're using the GBA Script. Thank god for that. And, hey, maybe by the time they've gotten to FF6 they'll get the emotions right on the current style of sprites. ConanThe3rd fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Mar 27, 2013 |
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Mar 27, 2013 20:52
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ConanThe3rd posted:And, hey, maybe by the time they've gotten to FF6 they'll get the emotions right on the current style of sprites. I drat near lost it at Bartz's arm-flailing at the spring. His original sprites made him look so stoked to find magic healing water, here he's like, trying to wave down a helicopter or something.
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Mar 27, 2013 21:04
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I can't get over how awful these sprites look. If they give FF6 the same "treatment" I might get an aneurysm.
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Mar 27, 2013 21:06
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Renoistic posted:I can't get over how awful these sprites look. It's a shame too, since the high-def enemy sprites look so gosh-darn good. But the main characters are just terrible reskins of the FFD ones.
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Mar 27, 2013 21:22
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Kyrosiris posted:I think SO4 and, to a lesser extent, SO3 soured lots of Star Ocean fans. I could put up with SO4's terrible/creepy story and "we want to be like the Tales games, but single player" combat system up until the phantoms. gently caress those consecutive fights. gently caress the enemies chain stunning people, and gently caress the people that thought they were a good idea. Shaezerus posted:We got video footage of iOS FFV gameplay now. The sound is apparently straight out of the original SFC version, which is... massively underwhelming. Diagonal movement is pretty neat though. The FFD-based sprites aren't really doing it for me. Also the king's portrait in chat and that blast screen of his  Faris's sprite looks like she's been fasting since the GBA release. FFD's character sprites were such garbage, why can't SE just redo the original ones instead of homogenizing their spritework?
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Mar 28, 2013 00:05
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I'm disappointed that FF5's flex/double fist pump is now a lame slow wave.
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Mar 28, 2013 08:40
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Evil Fluffy posted:You do know that FFX and X-2 are getting HD remakes, right? I mean FF7 had a re-release on the PC but it was completely absurd, while X/X-2 are actual 1080p games and look pretty amazing, so we're going to see how well they sell. Pardon the confusion. I meant that if they came out as *new* games in this day and age. No one would care. They're not exactly timeless and they're filled with lots of aging design decisions that were only tolerated during their respective generations.
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Mar 28, 2013 15:30
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I thought that the Dimensions character sprites looked 1000x better actually on my phone than on any screenshot or video of them I saw online. No idea why that might be the case, though.
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Mar 28, 2013 17:19
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But Rocks Hurt Head posted:I thought that the Dimensions character sprites looked 1000x better actually on my phone than on any screenshot or video of them I saw online. Maybe because it's both a) The Target resolution and B) a smaller one?
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Mar 28, 2013 22:06
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Having a badly designed sprite look better on S A than Screen B isn't exactly a great achievement though. At the end of the day the FFD spritework is still pretty awful. e: vvvvv Yeah I should clarify that I mean character/NPC sprites specifically and not the entirety of the spritework. Evil Fluffy fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Mar 29, 2013 |
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Mar 28, 2013 23:37
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Evil Fluffy posted:Having a badly designed sprite look better on S A than Screen B isn't exactly a great achievement though. At the end of the day the FFD spritework is still pretty awful. The monster sprites are good but the character sprites are just too smoothed and bland. I loving love Dimensions but that would be my complaint about the game. Speaking of Dimensions, man do things ramp up in Chapter 4. I don't think it's quite as good as the SNES era games but it's very close in quality. With Square Enix posting losses I doubt we will see anything like it again but I sure can hope.
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Mar 29, 2013 00:25
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Evil Fluffy posted:The FFD-based sprites aren't really doing it for me. And you know if they're redoing the sprites to a totally new style that makes them look like poo poo anyway, and putting in giant portraits, the least they could is make the sprites look remotely like the portraits so people don't get all bewildered by the jarring disconnect. Square please have something awesome at E3. Levantine posted:Speaking of Dimensions, man do things ramp up in Chapter 4. I don't think it's quite as good as the SNES era games but it's very close in quality. With Square Enix posting losses I doubt we will see anything like it again but I sure can hope. They seem to think their mobile and social games were not a big factor in their financial losses, they seem to be primarily pinning that on their western games underperforming their ludicrous expectations. It's more likely Sleeping Dogs or Tomb Raider will pay the price than Dimensions!
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Mar 29, 2013 00:42
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But Rocks Hurt Head posted:I thought that the Dimensions character sprites looked 1000x better actually on my phone than on any screenshot or video of them I saw online. The FF5 port is the same way yeah. Actually looks pretty nice, and holy poo poo auto battle is nice for grinding or getting through weak encounters you'd normally mash through. The walking around is a bit annoying though, can't figure out exactly why. Don't really like the virtual joystick.
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Mar 29, 2013 10:02
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