i was a little skeptical of the yellow names, curly apostrophes, and LENO but i am enjoying this
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Yeah this was great.
I can’t believe they made Palmer the final boss!?
The bit when he steals all of your Phoenix down and then repeatedly runs over Red XIII in his truck was a bit much though imho
Oh sorry spoilers
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okay but I swear tifa’s boobs change in size from scene to scene like sometimes in gameplay they are distractingly large but never seem that way in cutscenes?? maybe it’s just careful camera angles or whatever, I appreciate how like there has been zero “sexy” fan service beyond the scene with aerith in wall market which is fairly classy and diegetic at least
did anyone else get lowkey god hand vibes from many things in wall market? and I swear cloud’s “punisher” animation with the nail bat is taken straight from god hand…
anyway I think the english VA is fine, even great. as annoying as aerith was at first her performance has grown on me and I absolutely love how she exclaims “shit!” within the first half hour of meeting her, like I feel like it was always kind of lost in translation that aerith is kind of a punk who just has a “cottagecore” aesthetic or whatever lol and it’s nice to see that being represented here.
like so many things make sense here in the way that they never did before. it’s maybe the most cohesive, coherent thing the square side of squeenix has made in like… like, ever lmao
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I will never be able to read “Aerith” as anything other than “Aeris-with-a-lisp”.
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Tim’s localization videos called her Aeriス to avoid taking a stance
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US FF3’s “Terra” followed by an (syllabic) anagram of Earth seems of a piece even if it wasn’t actually intended.
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look I’ll admit the original English etymology seems wrong I just can’t stand it being corrected
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this felt to me like they’d programmed the engine to scale up as available and then the PS4 somehow had 20% less memory than they’d counted on for the baseline quality level so some of the asset LOD just doesn’t work and they shipped it anyway
wrt all the women batting their enormous eyes at cloud… to the extent that it’s a deliberate motif it is also feels pretty self aware and not gross (it could so easily have been gross). it is maybe a bit revanchist that this sort of aggressively good natured heterosexuality keeps turning up in places like this lately, like yeah we get it that’s a fun one, but on its own I think this game acquits itself well in that respect.
yeah i was gonna make a longer post about that but decided to put it off-- i do think it comes off extremely poorly early on, but it does start to feel more self-aware after the first few hours
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the first three ish hours of the game with the English voices I felt like there was basically as much bad as good, for sure
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midgar in the orignal seemed longer than it actually was to me cause I had to replay it 3 or 4 times until I got a memory card a couple days later
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I actually love that the slums sometimes have really shitty N64 textures because it makes me more conscious that a lot of these cutscenes aren’t actually pre-rendered and makes me appreciate everything else about the visuals of the game way more
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the texture issues are annoying but I swear to god someone spent a long time making a custom shader that makes everything look just like psx-era prerendered backdrops, like in the mako reactors, the sewers, and the collapsed highway, it all looks like it was pulled directly from the original asset files. it’s kind of amazing. really hits you hard in the nostalgia too. you can tell so much love and devotion was put into nearly every square inch of this game (pun not intended but lol)
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Ohyeah
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Definitely, or in at least a decade for mainline FF. IV’s remake is a much simpler creature but I think that’s pretty high up too. Still imagining that treatment to resemble the cg opening 
Seems they were able to temper some long running indulgences here during up close reexamination, in a very controlled space.
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fwiw, the french dub does help a lot in making this feel a bit more grounded, if that makes sense?
what helps maybe is me being heavy flirted at by two french women in the past, and to not make it sound as braggy as it may seem like, I shall add that i was such a wuss w/ a stick in my ass back then that i realized after a while that they were probably just trolling an all-too-easy prey to get warmed up, and not understanding what they were saying in french did probably help keep my self esteem afloat until i got a bit more relaxed a few years later.
tl;dr version:
Jessie’s VA is ace, looking forward now to hear more of Aëris’es VA, because atm she’d rank a distant third.
And yes, the french dub is imho half the fun of this remake, correct.
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Since I can’t stop myself from trying to kick boxes and other physics objects along with me when I find them, I made this pic to represent my playthrough of this game
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More "stirring inference than exact spoilers" condensed
I remain enchanted by the whole experience yet still chasing this…tinged aftertaste from some (as of now expected) huge departures, that it eventually underlines.
As more people finish no doubt many will roll with it or get hype, because they did such a bang up job immersing people in these characters and Midgar ANEW…and flirting with change to subvert expectations, often attractive.
So ultimately there’s this arguably clever meta commentary/response to the legacy of FF7, and the position this team has been in. Trying to please both their audience(s) and themselves (creative impulse) as they wrestle with THE REST - howtheshit you contort dozens and dozens of whole new areas, plot beats, and so on - into a handful or more installments. Of this sort.
Deviating from the course of the original game is inevitable, and hell yeah, with this level of work on display they’d eventually win over many a choir of petulant purists. Whether that’s making Cid less of a dick…compressing/omitting areas, invigorating others, further gameplay overhauls, etc. etc. etc! perhaps even all the way up to saving Aerith and a different ending, given they’d still pack a fresh new narrative spin, thematic punch.
I just really wish it hadn’t come in the form of such contrived and familiar devices, imagery. So much Sephiroth, full tilt Advent Children/KH finale, resorts to way too much, way too early for me to respect and admire it quite the same as I had hours earlier.
I’m hopeful, even confident now if they’ve gotten it out of their system: this next title will generate insane interest because of that literal, bright new future potential. But any handwaving can be equally met with justified confusion and distaste for how they went about it.
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Yes, I really can’t believe SE nailed it in this day and age, and it makes me somewhat optimistic that they’re using Unreal and no longer burdened by the mishaps of XIV 1.0 and the entirety of the XIII Crystalis universe.
I haven’t finished it yet but for future parts I hope they take things further down a sequel/Rebuild direction. They’ve already spoiled many of the most interesting story bits, they’ve spoiled that it’s different, instead of a pseudo remake it might as well be all new content (although you know they can hit some of the high marks from the original like Gold Saucer, Nibelheim, Cloud riding a dolphin).
Given that I felt the base game of XV was mediocre but the DLCs were quite good and game out in record time for SE, I’m cool with them pursuing this business model. I’m curious to see how they’ll iterate on the combat in future entries, and given how many FFs use ATB it provides a window into other possible remakes and sequels that SE has been saying they’ll get around to someday, like VI and X-3.
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i love when you find a good box. you can take that box with you
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