The White Dragon posted:

If you wipe to an attack that does a piddly 3k in FF7, you are, by definition, not actually "overpowered as gently caress."

ImpAtom posted:

Have you seriously never seen a Final Fantasy trailer before or something? This is almost all they've done. Hell, it's what most RPGs do because RPG combat doesn't make for very exciting trailers. Even stuff like Dragon Age has CGI trailers because watching a guy dramatically slaughter a dragon sells more copies than watching a guy micromanaging his positioning so you're not catching your tank in an AoE.

They even do this for games that actually do have more dynamically interesting gameplay. Shiny cutscene bullshit sells more copies than gameplay footage.

Sex_Ferguson posted:

Yesssss.

Also my video is up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAoEk6hHTqQ

Also, I realized I was completely wrong about the guard. No matter when you use it it just reduces damage. The negation of damage only happened during the boss when I was in the Chaps Lightning mode.

Brumaldo posted:

Well.

This looks rather horrible.

BioMe posted:

For me the only immediately off-putting thing is that it's an action game with battle transitions. I mean how the hell do you still need to rely on loading up a small arena to run the game in this console generation?

That loving Sned posted:

I played a bit of Lightning Returns at Eurogamer Expo, and it was alright. I liked how outside of combat, the attack button has been moved to R1, so you can still move the camera. The attacking isn't nearly as stiff as in XIII-2, where you're character would completely stop responding to input for about two seconds. Now you can turn Lightning while she's doing the attack, and the hitboxes are a lot better too. They even incorporated the sneaking up on enemies from the first game, so attacking an unaware enemy starts them off with 25% less health, rather than 10%.

Combat was OK, although you don't really have direct control over lightning's movement, since she runs up to an enemy when you select an attack, and then move back to where she was when she's finished the attack chain. It doesn't really matter in the demo, since you're usually fighting one enemy at a time, and you can block whenever you need to.

I'm glad they finally replaced that horrible checkerboard transparency they used in the previous two games, which made hair and eyelashes look terrible, but there's still aliasing and framerate issues. Actually, the first game was well optimised when it came to the frame rate, but since it was just corridors it's not hard to see why. In fact, next to Final Fantasy X HD, running at a full 1080p with a solid 30 fps, Lightning Returns doesn't really look that much better, besides the skin texture on character's faces, or the crazy particle effects everywhere for no reason. It certainly doesn't look as good as Dark Souls II, which doesn't need to go to a battle screen every minute, and has top notch lighting and motion blur. Lightning didn't seem to cast any sort of shadow indoors, there was no SSAA, and some of the environment textures were very low resolution and repetitive.

Still, it's a JRPG that's not on a handheld, and those are pretty rare nowadays. I got suckered in with XIII-2's demo, which portrayed a much better game than it turned out to be when the difficulty curve falls off a cliff and you need to search the timeline for poo poo just to progress the plot. They must have known that I was wanting to wait a few weeks for it to drop in price by half, so they had to go and make the Cloud costume a pre-order bonus.

ManOfTheYear posted:

A bit curious what Nomura is up to now.

Pesky Splinter posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ1q5UFKimI

quote:

Comparison of launch week sales for the FFXIII series:

2009: Final Fantasy XIII (PS3) - 1,501,964
2011: Final Fantasy XIII-2 (PS3) - 524,217
2013: Lightning Returns Final Fantasy XIII (PS3) - 277,082

Tonfa posted:

Orphan's Cradle may have been uninspired but nothing will (hopefully) ever top the sheer terrible of FF3DS Crystal Tower/Dark World.

floor is lava posted:

At this point we are slowly seeing that Phil Fish was right all along...

Fister Roboto posted:

The only thing that made that terrible was the lack of save points. The original NES version was understandable, but whoever said "yeah lets make an RPG in The Year of Our Lord 2006 without save points in dungeons" should have been fired.

Brumaldo posted:

3)Combat feels very shallow. A perfect guard knockdowns common enemies instantly, other than that my strategy was as follows: I'M PRESSING BUTTONS! Now I'm guarding...BUT NOW I'M PRESSING BUTTONS IN A DIFFERENT OUTFIT!
I finished the whole thing without using items and with a 3 star rating thanks to my pro strats.

To be fair, demos are demos and the flow of combat was kind of enjoyable, but eh. It all feels kind of mediocre.
Maybe I don't like it simply because I don't see the appeal of dressing up anime girls.

MinionOfCthulhu posted:

That loving Sned posted:

The story to XV's already been leaked.

Crabtree posted:

You joke, but I get this ominous feeling that Toriyama will try to corrupt XV in some petty act of revenge over whatever 13-3's reputation will turn out to be. That or somehow try to stall its development yet again to make 13-4 and as many lightning games as it takes "until the sales match the original 13".

Crabtree posted:

You joke, but I get this ominous feeling that Toriyama will try to corrupt XV in some petty act of revenge over whatever 13-3's reputation will turn out to be.

bobservo posted:

Yeah, this was the impression I got when I played the demo at E3 -- instead of being more of an action RPG, LR just pays lip service to the idea. What disappointed me most is that moving Lightning around didn't seem to affect much of anything during the battle.

Sex_Ferguson posted:

XV is Nomura's game, if anyone is going to make any decisions about XV it's going to be Nomura and his team. The story is going to be stupid, but it will be a stupid of a fun kind much like the KH games stupid and it will also have a super fun combat system like every other game he's been a big part of has had.

ImpAtom posted:

That is not going to happen. Toriyama is not a magical genie, nor is he the dread cthulhu. If FFXV sucks it will suck on its own merits.

Crabtree posted:

Oh well, whatever Nomura's zipper fetish has mutated into over the 7-8 years of development of 15 couldn't be any worse than what Toriyama did to 13-3. Right?

Amppelix posted:

I still think it's bullshit that this unremarkable dragon does more damage than an optional boss, though. Even if ultimate weapon isn't the hardest of hard.

Amppelix posted:

Well, my strategy is to pump Cloud full of HP and defense, and give him cover and counter. Then the others are just blobs of MP and magic atk. So cloud has almost 9000 HP and the rest have somewhat below 3000. I'm very overpowered as in I kill everything very easily, but everything apparently also kills me very easily.

I still think it's bullshit that this unremarkable dragon does more damage than an optional boss, though. Even if ultimate weapon isn't the hardest of hard.

Iron Beagle posted:

I didn't know that Ultimate Weapon was optional until I read this, I guess it makes sense though. I always look forward to that fight because I remember during my first playthrough how much of my Materia leveled up upon beating him.

ImpAtom posted:

FFXV's clothing was designed by professional Japanese clothing designers IIRC.

Nomura has chilled out a bit though but still favors flare on his clothing over practicality 10 times out of 10.

Paracelsus posted:

Even if he still draws zipper-belts in his trapper keeper, if he's willing to hand off design work in his signature area for the sake of making a better game he's at least recognized how to be more professional than deliberately designing a costume that would give CG animators problems.

Squallege posted:

I don't know, I can see Noctis and his group stopping about mid game to don their ceremonial moogle dresses and worship the Goddess Claire Farron.

Mustach posted:

Uh-oh, don't say Toriyama's name three times, guys, or you might suddenly find yourself wearing a weird dress!

ImpAtom posted:

Nomura has chilled out a bit though but still favors flare on his clothing over practicality 10 times out of 10.

TheKingofSprings posted:

This is like a series tradition at this point though?

You've got WarMECH in 1, the Iron Giant in 2, Brachioraidos in 6, all of which are deadlier than a good deal of bosses in the game. And probably a ton more that I can't remember.