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Vandar posted:The difference is that Chrono Cross is good. CC is the best looking and sounding ps1 game, but that doesn't make it good, so much as impressive. The plot is barely conveyed at all, till its all dumped at once, and is pretty garbled even then. There's a huge cast of seemingly interesting playable characters, of which like 4 get any characterization and the other 40 are just a verbal tic attached to some stats. The huge cast makes you think there's a tremendous possibility for dual and triple techs, the most interesting and innovative part of CT's battle system, but theres barely any in the game, two triple techs and nine dual techs. Several of them require you to have very stupid party builds, like 2 different dark element users in your 3 person party, or two thief characters, or using weird joke characters, like the walking turnip. Its a deeply frustrating game because it feels like it really could have been incredible but instead its just very pretty and dumb.
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Jul 11, 2021 18:15
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Inspector Gesicht posted:What other games blatantly tried to be the next FF7? Shadow Madness, Koudelka, Legend of Legaia... the PSone was sort of the renaissance of JRPGs, at least in the US. christmas boots posted:I have fond memories of LoD and I don’t know how I never picked up on that Honestly, I love it when LoD comes up, because I love showing people that and seeing them go 
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Jul 11, 2021 18:37
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Koudelka wasn't trying to be ff7 it was its own bizzare survival lovecraftian jrpg
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Jul 11, 2021 19:37
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Legend of Legaia had a cool freaking battle system and it should have had a few sequels.
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Jul 11, 2021 20:41
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One More Fat Nerd posted:There's a huge cast of seemingly interesting playable characters, of which like 4 get any characterization and the other 40 are just a verbal tic attached to some stats. That was my big problem with Chrono Cross when it originally came out.
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Jul 11, 2021 20:56
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Gaius Marius posted:Koudelka wasn't trying to be ff7 it was its own bizzare survival lovecraftian jrpg Yea, Koudelka was a strange combination of survival horror and esoteric tile-based combat JRPG. It's far closer to Parasite Eve than FF7, and even that is a very different beast.
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Jul 11, 2021 21:21
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Rockman Reserve posted:Legend of Legaia had a cool freaking battle system and it should have had a few sequels. i think it had one on ps2? that's a game i played the demo of a few dozen times but never played the real version, much like tomba
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Jul 11, 2021 21:24
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Len posted:i think it had one on ps2? LJN92 recently wrapped up a LP of Legaia 2 and the game was a budget copy of a Tales game with Legaia's battle system taped on.
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Jul 11, 2021 23:20
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Rockman Reserve posted:I’ve had a copy of Legend of Dragoon on a shelf by my bed for like a decade on loan from a friend that moved away and I’ve never fired it up and what I have a copy of Chrono Cross a friend loaned to me saying "Hopefully you like it, I thought it sucked." Back in high school, they never asked for it back and when I tried to give it back they changed the subject so I just have a copy of Chrono Cross. I wasn't a fan either.
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Jul 11, 2021 23:38
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All I remember about Legend of Dragoon is it had a remarkably bad translation by PS1 RPG standards, which is loving saying something.
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Jul 11, 2021 23:58
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Inspector Gesicht posted:What other games blatantly tried to be the next FF7? FF8 I knew a guy in high school who just loved Legend of Dragoon and was constantly trying to show it to people and he turned out weird enough that I wonder if he was just trying to show off the menstruation spells I liked Chrono Cross but mostly as a mechanical exercise, the story wasn't much
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Jul 12, 2021 00:15
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Rockman Reserve posted:Legend of Legaia had a cool freaking battle system and it should have had a few sequels. Legend of legaia is still my favorite jrpg. The battle system definitely had its issues, but I haven't seen anything quite like it since. Other than its actual "sequel", Legaia 2: duel saga. It has nothing to do with the first game, swapped out the magic system for a lame summoning type mechanic, and had a completely forgettable story.
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Jul 12, 2021 02:58
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Koudelka actually had 3 sequels, the Shadow Hearts series, which weren't terrible.
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Jul 12, 2021 05:58
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I just finished the FFVII Remake and it's fairly good! Technically it's the first Final Fantasy I've played but also not really; I watched my sister play through FFVII, VIII and IX and like half of X when I was little rather than playing them myself so it's still a nostalgic series for me! The combat is a lot of fun, albeit pretty easy. Dialogue is not great and is quite overwrought on the whole, but it's basically an anime so that's to be expected and the voice acting is not bad. And it's nice that Cloud comes across more as reserved and socially stunted since he often read as a callous rear end in a top hat in the original. Main detractions: The aesthetic is annoyingly schizophrenic; the plot characters have crazy hair and outfits, but all the randos in Midgar are just wearing dull t-shirts and jeans with bland real life haircuts. It's like they got imported from an entirely different game. There's also a bunch of purchasable music tracks with a meta presentation (e.g. you use vending machines to purchase "Tifa's Theme") comprised of classic songs and they kinda keep the music from feeling harmonious and coherent in the aggregate. Instead of being introduced at an appropriate and impactful time in the story, many of them just get tossed at you devoid of context and some of the remixes break too much from the general style of the game and/or sound like poo poo. The level design is so basic that it can hardly be called level design. It's basically just a series of interconnected hallways, and if you're doing the half-assed filler side quests, there is a ton of backtracking. There's also a shitload of narrow beams and little passages you gotta duck through and you cross them agonizingly slowly. Some of them must be masking load times, but many of them don't seem like they possibly can be? The weapon upgrade system which replaces traditional stat upgrades is kind of neat since it makes all weapons at least ostensibly usable forever, but you have to spend a looot of time in those upgrade menus and the individual upgrades are pretty much the same across every character's weapons and aren't too exciting to begin with. The motorcycle bits are not much good. They're not hard, but the enemies have like 2 to 3 times the health they really ought to and it kills the adrenaline and it turns it into a slog. The bosses of these sections just take so drat long to put down even when you're playing perfectly and the controls for attacking are clunky and simplistic. There are some changes to the plot here and there, some of which are fine and some of which are poorly considered. Obviously that was gonna happen since they're stretching out the original's first 5 or so hours into like 40. The worst new plot element is obviously the fate whispers, which just strike me as an unbelievably bad idea that essentially can't not cause tons of plot holes. Even if you wanna switch things up and play around with alternate universe stuff, introducing bizarre capital D Destiny with physical arbitrators is such a terrible way to do it and I can't imagine how they could possibly pull off anything not stupid with it. I don't think anyone who played the original FFVII thought "hey this isn't convoluted enough!!" and this new stuff is doubly confusing for newcomers since it relies on knowledge of the original game. Also I don't know how Square Enix can complete the full FFVII story in any reasonable amount of time with this effort as their jump off. The end product here is like 8ish/10 pretty good!! but it still feels like they only barely pulled it off and have dug themselves in a hole that'll be difficult to get out of. FFVII Part 3: We're loving DOne (2031) Whatev has a new favorite as of 10:38 on Jul 12, 2021 |
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Jul 12, 2021 06:13
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Whatev posted:There are some changes to the plot here and there, some of which are fine and some of which are poorly considered. Obviously that was gonna happen since they're stretching out the original's first 5 or so hours into like 40. The worst new plot element is obviously the fate whispers, which just strike me as an unbelievably bad idea that essentially can't not cause tons of plot holes. Even if you wanna switch things up and play around with alternate universe stuff, introducing bizarre capital D Destiny with physical arbitrators is such a terrible way to do it and I can't imagine how they could possibly pull off anything not stupid with it. I don't think anyone who played the original FFVII thought "hey this isn't convoluted enough!!" and this new stuff is doubly confusing for newcomers since it relies on knowledge of the original game. the whispers are gone for good by the game's ending, the combined efforts of the party and sephiroth's sucker-punch essentially banished them from the narrative. since the whispers were fighting against FF7R's divergence from the original game's story, that means the cast is, at this point, working without a net. canon is broken and now we've got aerith and sephiroth both working with foreknowledge of how things were "supposed" to go, as aerith tries to maybe avert her own demise for cloud's sake and sephiroth cracks his knuckles and tries to pull off an ending where he wins instead FF7R's meta is pretty loopy and could have been better-executed but i think it elevated what was otherwise a pretty good remake to something close to brilliance
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Jul 12, 2021 06:24
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I can't really abide by that part of the VII remake, because the message it's trying to convey is so massively separate from the message of the rest of the game, both remake and original, and only ends up confusing what was a really clearly-intentioned story. The central text of FFVII is broadly and grandly environmentalist, and anti-corporate. It's not subtle about these; both Shinra and Jenova are trying to consume the Planet's resources for selfish gain, and there's definitely no denying of how Shinra's tactics harken back to post-industrial revolution robber barons and company towns (the remake throws in a whole bunch of EPCOT and Disney allusions to modernize that a bit, too). It's all very clear, very uncomplicated. ...except when the Whispers rock up in the remake. They're speaking entirely different metaphors that run basically perpendicular to the originals, intersecting at effectively random points that at best muddy that original message, or at worst clash with it. Their metaphor is also pretty obvious, but... not as broad: 'gently caress people who want retellings of a story to be faithful'. You can build and vague that up into being generally anti-determinism or something, but that's very clearly the direction they were coming from, they're an antagonistic force that gets mad when story breaks from 'the true path'. Not in a way that exclusively helps or hinders that environmentalist angle, either, they equally hate turns that would make things better or worse for the planet. Even putting aside that it's a needlessly antagonistic plotline to add--c'mon guys, making 'skeptics about remakes' the villains of your remake is just petty--it's a metaphor that exists on a completely different level to the real story, and only serves to distract from it.
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Jul 12, 2021 06:50
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they represent the creative intimidation of trying to recreate one of the most seminal works in its genre, and the potential loss, or gain, of leaving behind what's expected and comfortable in favor of new solutions. there's nothing antagonistic about it it's equal parts amusing and frustrating that so many people jumped to thinking the whispers are a stand-in for whiny gamers. you do know that not everything needs to be about you, right
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Jul 12, 2021 06:53
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They represent the cast of kingdom hearts, whose intrusion upon final fantasy erodes away at the world
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Jul 12, 2021 06:54
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You're right in every way but it's 2021 and people don't engage with themes in stories anymore, metafiction, references and crossovers are where the money is.
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Jul 12, 2021 06:59
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My Lovely Horse posted:You're right in every way but it's 2021 and people don't engage with themes in stories anymore, metafiction, references and crossovers are where the money is. FF77 is super-meta nonetheless, right down to the title. if any game was going to be a remake about remaking something, the risks and anxieties associated with it, then it might as well be this one
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Jul 12, 2021 07:04
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Oxxidation posted:they represent the creative intimidation of trying to recreate one of the most seminal works in its genre, and the potential loss, or gain, of leaving behind what's expected and comfortable in favor of new solutions. there's nothing antagonistic about it ...they are literally the bad guys, they turn up to be enemies to you at several points in the game. They're the penultimate boss. They are by definition antagonistic. You also very deliberately ignored my actual larger point about them: they hinder the original clarity of purpose of the game, regardless of intent. And they do so to speak to a message that exists worlds apart from that original purpose.
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Jul 12, 2021 07:07
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Cleretic posted:...they are literally the bad guys, they turn up to be enemies to you at several points in the game. They're the penultimate boss. They are by definition antagonistic. you still don't get it. they're antagonists but not antagonistic against the game's potential audience. they don't represent skeptics or gamers, they represent the creators' own anxieties about confronting a work that might well have been the pinnacle of their careers. i guarantee you that nojima and nomura et al were chewing their nails to the quick over how this would turn out and the potential backlash from fans was just one instrument in a rich and exciting mental symphony blaring "i'm going to gently caress this up." the whispers are the actualization of that creative anxiety, the compulsion to retreat to what's safe and comfortable instead of trying something new and they don't exist apart from the original themes, they enhance them. we live now in a world where environmental damage has grown unfathomably worse because of cultural inertia and the social pressure to stick to what's safe, comfortable, and profitable instead of risking that comfort. barret's now a firebrand ecoterrorist who was exiled from his larger organization because they considered him too extreme, when it turns out that the bulk of AVALANCHE are themselves just acting as catspaws for shinra. aerith is openly afraid of leaving the polluted, futureless ruin of midgar because the "steel sky" makes her feel safe, and her last line is wistfully repeating that as the plot strikes out in a new direction. the parallels aren't subtle Oxxidation has a new favorite as of 07:18 on Jul 12, 2021 |
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Jul 12, 2021 07:13
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If the whispers are angry gamers how come none of them have any names? It's not like the internet is low on those, how about someone tell me who they are if they're supposed to be a representation about how Square Enix hates gamers huh?
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Jul 12, 2021 07:32
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Oxxidation posted:the whispers are gone for good by the game's ending, the combined efforts of the party and sephiroth's sucker-punch essentially banished them from the narrative. since the whispers were fighting against FF7R's divergence from the original game's story, that means the cast is, at this point, working without a net. canon is broken and now we've got aerith and sephiroth both working with foreknowledge of how things were "supposed" to go, as aerith tries to maybe avert her own demise for cloud's sake and sephiroth cracks his knuckles and tries to pull off an ending where he wins instead Going with your interpretation, I can see the benefit of having the break from fate stuff in the story, since it adds dramatic tension as to whether the original's events will happen or not. That has value even if they do mostly stick to the original story. At the same time, it can be thoroughly picked at, upsets the clarity of a story that could already be pretty mazelike, and forces a meta narrative that makes the story no longer self-contained. It is indeed very Kingdom Hearts esque. Ultimately, I suppose it comes down to what precisely they do in the sequels. I'm cautiously pessimistic but hey, maybe they'll surprise me (in 5 to 10 years lol)
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Jul 12, 2021 07:34
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Whatev posted:I was not fully clear on whether the whispers are done with. I initially interpreted beating the big whisper boss as getting rid of their influence, but I could've sworn that you still saw some whispers in the background after that battle and I got confused. Might've been mistaken there! if nothing else, the escalation of FF7R's end sequence is pretty good evidence. the whispers go completely ballistic as the party tries to leave midgar, the game's most iconic location, which would effectively lock in all the changes and divergences to the story that cloud and sephiroth have established so far, and the gestalt-whisper's death cries literally consist of it blasting the original storyline's major events into the party's heads. there's not many other places you can take the idea from there. aesthetically i'm not crazy about that boss and it definitely smacks of kingdom hearts, but considering this is the final encounter of a 40-hour game instead of a 10-hour chapter i guess a little visual indulgence is excusable (though ironically nomura wanted to dial it back for that sequence, it was nojima who voted to go hogwild) the story's no longer self-contained because of the meta, but i think the meta does make it so that FF7R can effectively stand up as as its own game instead of just one part in a series (that as you said will take god knows how long to come out). as an overarching plot it's "unfinished," but the themes and ideas it presented all tied up really well Oxxidation has a new favorite as of 07:46 on Jul 12, 2021 |
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Jul 12, 2021 07:43
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Personally I really like the idea of this remake explicitly existing in conversation with the game it’s remaking and not simply being meant to replace it. Whether it ends up working or not I just think that’s an incredibly cool choice
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Jul 12, 2021 07:59
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RareAcumen posted:If the whispers are angry gamers how come none of them have any names? It's not like the internet is low on those, how about someone tell me who they are if they're supposed to be a representation about how Square Enix hates gamers huh? Oh, there actually is a reading for that, it's just a little vaguer than you're joking about and coming from a slightly different direction. Right near the end of the game, though, so it is spoilers. In the actual final fight against the Whispers, you fight three of them wielding three different weapons: Whisper Rubrum wields a sword, Whisper Croceo dual-wields guns, and Whisper Viridi fights hand-to-hand. Their descriptions specifically say that they're from the future and are fighting to protect their timeline. These weapons happen to line up perfectly to the villains of Advent Children--a movie that, sure enough, can't happen chronologically in the remake's timeline. So yeah. Not confirmed, but there you go.
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Jul 12, 2021 08:25
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Cleretic posted:Oh, there actually is a reading for that, it's just a little vaguer than you're joking about and coming from a slightly different direction. Right near the end of the game, though, so it is spoilers. I'm only second-hand familiar with FF7. Up until Remake I never played any of the game and just read Elentor's LP of the game. Were any of them confirmed as gamers?
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Jul 12, 2021 08:48
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I eagerly await to see how it continues and possibly diverges, as FFVII:RE2 rolls out towards the end-of-life of the PS5, and FFVII:RE3.31 Buster Sword of Memories rolls out sometime in the 2030s. But yeah, it looks like a very interesting way of maintaining peoples' interest and speculation for the additional installments, and it does make me wonder how far they'll be going. It's a very novel way of remaking a game, where as mentioned earlier in the thread, it makes a point of standing beside the original instead of existing with the intent to replace it. (As for replacing/updating it, that seems to be the intent of FF7: Ever Crisis? Unless that does a swerve as well.) e: Nevermind I forgot that apparently FF7:EC is supposed to roll all the FF7 universe spinoff things into a single (episodic) title? SubNat has a new favorite as of 08:56 on Jul 12, 2021 |
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Jul 12, 2021 08:51
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Cleretic posted:Oh, there actually is a reading for that, it's just a little vaguer than you're joking about and coming from a slightly different direction. Right near the end of the game, though, so it is spoilers. What are the actual plot changes though? Like someone survives? (No I don't have a PS4  )
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Jul 12, 2021 11:39
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MiddleOne posted:What are the actual plot changes though? Like someone survives? (No I don't have a PS4 Okay, just in terms of actual changes to the plot from the original VII, rather than outright new characters filler-dungeon additions and expansions on what was already there... Biggs is alive; Jessie might be too. Wedge died, but he died in Shinra Tower instead of the plate drop. Sephiroth is much more active, although it's not clear exactly how, why, or to what end. There's a lot more of those weird branded clones; we also don't know why. The Turks actually try a little harder earlier on to kidnap Aerith, but they're stopped because of the Whispers. AVALANCHE as we know them have actually been softened super hard; rather than being unrepentant ecoterrorists, they're outright trying to harm nobody but Shinra themselves, and honestly if they were having their way they'd be basically ineffectual. But Shinra is deliberately sabotaging to make their actions seem worse, so they can paint a public enemy. The AVALANCHE we're familiar with is now a cell of a larger organization; that larger organization is actually much more paramilitary and much more brazen about fighting Shinra, and Barrett's crew are the outcasts because they don't want to be that blatant. Wutai are now somehow relevant to the present-day Midgar plot; so far it just seems like Shinra are scapegoating them and claiming AVALANCHE have ties to them. That might be elaborated on in the Yuffie DLC, I don't know. Zack somehow survived the fight against Shinra soldiers at the end of Crisis Core (which takes place at the same time as the escape from Midgar, I'm not sure how accurate that is to Crisis Core). The party has not yet crossed paths with him, but he exists. Keep in mind, the first remake game stops as they leave Midgar. Cleretic has a new favorite as of 12:05 on Jul 12, 2021 |
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Jul 12, 2021 12:00
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Agents are GO! posted:Koudelka actually had 3 sequels, the Shadow Hearts series, which weren't terrible. Weird way to say the pound for pound second best JRPG series
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Jul 12, 2021 12:16
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Oxenfree is a great game but when I tried to save and quit I got the message that the save was corrupted and my only option was to start a new game. Apparently this is common and yet it hasn't been fixed.
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Jul 12, 2021 16:30
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Man, Yakuza 3's bowling physics are really unsatisfying. The pins barely fall down when they should fly around after a good hit.
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Jul 12, 2021 18:45
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Cleretic posted:Okay, just in terms of actual changes to the plot from the original VII, rather than outright new characters filler-dungeon additions and expansions on what was already there... A lot of that feels less like explicit story changes and more like expansions to plot due to making what used to be a three-hour experience into a full game. Edit: except for the fate of certain Avalanche members and when zack shows up at the end, of course And the change of Avalanche's goals isn't really something new - in the original, Jesse (I think) speculates that the bombs weren't supposed to be as strong as they were.
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Jul 12, 2021 19:05
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Morpheus posted:A lot of that feels less like explicit story changes and more like expansions to plot due to making what used to be a three-hour experience into a full game. the spoilers about AVALANCHE aren't totally accurate, it's more like barret and his cell have been incorporated into how the group were portrayed in Before Crisis. the overall organization is a paramilitary group that mostly acts to disrupt shinra's operations, but barret himself is a "planetologist," who subscribes to the gaia-theory that was probably first published by bugenhagen. AVALANCHE as a whole considers him a loon and way too disruptive and ambitious for their own goals, so he's basically leading a rogue cell comprised of dropouts and mercenaries making do with scraps, and unaware that shinra's just using his ops to give themselves good PR of course, since this is drawing from before crisis, it's really strongly implied that the rest of AVALANCHE is on rufus' payroll and are, unwittingly or not, being used to oust his father and drum up anti-wutai sentiment to keep the public nice and bloodthirsty. they've been captured, or manufactured outright, by the same destructive establishments they purport to resist, which is depressingly apt for a lot of environmentalist movements today
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Jul 12, 2021 19:57
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Tunicate posted:They represent the cast of kingdom hearts, whose intrusion upon final fantasy erodes away at the world I love this fan translation, it’s iconic. I can’t find the official translation, I think it has him say something like “people get confused and upset when they see things they don’t understand so we try to keep it secret”
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Jul 12, 2021 23:32
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I'm enjoying revisiting Deus Ex: Human Revolution after all these years but I just played the Missing Link content for the first time and writing a villain who says "We're not so different, you and I." should be a criminal offense. Fineable at the very least.
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Jul 13, 2021 04:04
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Oxxidation posted:the spoilers about AVALANCHE aren't totally accurate, it's more like barret and his cell have been incorporated into how the group were portrayed in Before Crisis. the overall organization is a paramilitary group that mostly acts to disrupt shinra's operations, but barret himself is a "planetologist," who subscribes to the gaia-theory that was probably first published by bugenhagen. AVALANCHE as a whole considers him a loon and way too disruptive and ambitious for their own goals, so he's basically leading a rogue cell comprised of dropouts and mercenaries making do with scraps, and unaware that shinra's just using his ops to give themselves good PR Yeah, it's admittedly a little hard to split up every instance of 'expanded on because they had to', 'tying in expanded universe content you may not have ever heard of', 'things the remake quietly retconned in for reasons', and 'things the remake actively and openly changed'.
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Jul 13, 2021 05:57
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Crowetron posted:I'm enjoying revisiting Deus Ex: Human Revolution after all these years but I just played the Missing Link content for the first time and writing a villain who says "We're not so different, you and I." should be a criminal offense. Fineable at the very least. Especially when the characters are nothing alike. At least let Jensen fire back with something like "You're kidnapping innocent people and torturing them to try and make some sort of organic supercomputer. I'm trying to rescue people you've kidnapped. We're NOTHING alike." I loving loved that Alpha Protocol let you unlock that as a speech option with Marburg after he'd spent all his time with you going on about how you were the same.
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Jul 13, 2021 09:43
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