also it never dawned on me that people were using “anime” as euphemism for “bad” lol like anime is good and it IS relevant to explain a lot of the tropes used in the is remake which align with existing anime tropes. like it isn’t saying they are bad because they are anime to me it’s saying it’s actually good and it just seems hokey because it’s an anime thing and you’re expecting this to be like, serious cinema or something?
idk anyone who means “anime” as shorthand for “bad” is wrong lol but that just seems like a really weird thing to assume about the discussion here??
endgame xiii combat is very good (especially if you have a thing for status effects and stacking buffs/debuffs) but it takes a pretty big time investment to get there
lightning returns is great and i’m extremely tempted to replay it
even when broken over your knee the combat has this great rhythm to it - you have one setup that’s immune to physical attacks, another immune to magic and you swap between the two to null whatever comes in while you build stagger, then you get the BREAK and swap to the big damage setup and watch obscenely large numbers cover the screen
also if you played through all of ffxiii it is painfully obvious that the same people are behind this there are so many similarities, it’s just better executed in every way. so many things about this “feel” just similar to how that game felt.
also ffxiii rules and everyone should play it. yes, it takes like 10 hours for it to “get good” but the first ten hours aren’t terrible or anything. it has imo very coherent storytelling and character development on top of an incredibly great combat system. the part where it opens up is really good too! and there are many environments which are interestingly built and not just long corridors. there is a lot to love. I honestly like it better than XII.
my only real issue with it is the fucking weapon upgrade system which is beyond obtuse and annoying. (another clue that the same team worked on this, the weapon upgrade system is still obtuse and also looks just like the crystarium)
I think people are tired of talking about VA stuff but I just wanna drop my take as someone who grew up watching anime dubbed… not in English, and then only more recently getting a fuller understanding that the way anime was brought over, localized and treated in the United States is very different than in Europe and Latin America (maybe Canada too?)
I 100% understand what Felix and others complain about with English voice-acting -specifically- in anime. I’m also very irked and weirded out by it. A lot of US dubs of anime take a very unique tone that’s very grating to me, too. Women often do weird exaggerated moe intonations and men do their weird Vic Mignogna thing. It feels very unnatural and weird to me.
That being said I don’t think the dub here is bad like that? I think the VA is pretty great considering the VA challenges B_coma alluded to, and that apparently the voice actors for this game didn’t get the full script and only knew their lines when they were in the recording booth. Which is apparently not uncommon practice? But it sucks (for a variety of reasons) and you can tell in a few line deliveries that the actors didn’t really know the full context of their lines and gave deliveries that didn’t match the tone. But the quality I’d say is pretty good and the voices are great. I’d say that my biggest problem with the voices is that you get a tinge of that anime women english VA quality with some female characters, but it might be that I’m before the point that some people in the thread say the actors really settled in their roles.
But yeah the decision that made me play this in English was that there’s just too much incidental dialogue that’s incredibly missable if you’re playing in a language you aren’t fluent in, and the subtitles don’t change whether you’re playing with English VA or original VA so it feels pointless
(oh, that being said, while there’s a lot of English dubs that irk me, there’s a few that I super enjoy, Laputa Castle in the Sky’s English dub is fantastic and the writers did a fantastic job in punching up the script lightly when it needed to)
not that it matters in the context where I feel compelled to say this, but I like japanese cartoons a lot and my comparisons to anime have been reserved to complaining about the english VA sounding like an anime dub (which isn’t surprising given that some of the cast members are anime voice actors and others are just c list actors), and one time I compared the game to dumb shonen anime and called it ridiculously camp, but, I dunno, that point of comparison is self evident.
I don’t remember many disney musicals or jidaigeki films that feature a 20 year old supersoldier pirouetting 30 feet off of a motorcycle to slice a robot tank in half, but that’s practically a cliche image of what shonen battle anime are like.
Diplo you don’t have permission to screencap any part of my posts to mock on your tumblr
I liked what I played of XIII and I do want to play more. The story bits with Snow (visually mid thirties) romancing the tiny little waif girl were making me pretty uncomfortable though.
Again, I’ve only played maybe 5 - 10 hours of the first game so I don’t know what happens yet.
I fell into the XIII hate camp and I don’t think it was a good call for that game to be mainline FF’s “comeback” after several years of silence and much longer for the average gamer since many people didn’t play/appreciate XII at the time. And XIII is a very traditional FF in an era where there was a lot of innovation happening in the Western market especially when it came to commercializing more complex games. So Mass Effect and Fallout 3 got people playing WRPGs and there was a push for cinematic, “mature” games and then the new FF comes out and it feels like a PS2 game in a fresh coat of paint. But now that I look back that’s maybe not a bad thing.
I know XIV is an MMO and Nomura is critical to XV and VIIR and real-time is his preference but it feels like SE was so burned by XIII that they’ve vowed off a mainline turn-based FF forever.
Anyway I did play the Lightning Returns demo when that came out and I thought the combat system was cool. SE has a lot of “unique” combat systems these days and I respect that.
i was going to write a long essay about XIII for TGQ (before talks of doing it withered and died), and i still might write that essay and hold on to it. but yeah, i think a lot of it had to do with timing and expectations. i think the game is more relevant and vibrant as a gameplay experience now than it was when it was released.
I’m okay with them being committed to action rpgs. action rpgs are generally better than turn based lol.
nier automata is like easily one of the best jrpgs of recent memory, it feels uncompromisingly like a jrpg despite also being an action game. I just feel like squeenix has accepted that they are Good.
i usually only like arpgs if they have some functional equivalent to wait mode and actually earn being real time (unlike, say, .hack where you spend all your time in combat in menus anyway) unless you’re terranigma or a yoko taro game, but in general they’re growing on me and it’s mainly cuz of ff7r/ffxv
the problem with “ARPG” combat when it’s set apart from “JRPG” combat is that it is usually terrible because it’s always in this mode of being way less demanding than an action game and so numbers-dependent that it’s ultimately more about grinding than learning &c. &c. &c.
these are very well-hewn arguments from the 360 era and it’s funny that we’re talking about them again because square has once again come back determined to make a bafflingly literal translation of an ATB to an action game, which is some shit they’ve been on since I guess the first seiken densetsu though everyone tends to think of kingdom hearts and FFXV more recently. the good part is that even their tilting at windmills is basically alright nowadays! but this conversation does have a funny way of automatically making it sound like we’re talking about final fantasy in ~2004 when it was newly adrift rather than in 2020 when its various successes and failures have been well-charted.
anyway I have another complaint about this game: if you, for some reason, don’t have access to every elemental materia going into a given bossfight, and you therefore happen not to be able to target a boss’ weakness, the fight is almost always winnable, just … much slower
I hate when the penalty for not playing a game well is that it isn’t fun, instead of the penalty being you losing
I remember enjoying the combat of The Third Birthday and then playing the Prompto DLC for XV and thinking that they improved it a LOT. I think SE could make a sweet shooter/ATB hybrid.
for my money the single worst thing about nier automata was the eventual sludginess of the shmup sections, they shouldn’t have been nearly the drag that they were