Absolutely. I feel like they’re trying to open up space for him to grow as a leader – because his bomb is a dud, because he’s so nervous in the elevator, it really sets him up as small-time who’s just happened to find himself in over his head with Cloud.
Maybe they’re planning to pay this off when it gets to his later scenes in his hometown, but also, that won’t happen in this game? And presumably they’re planning for full arcs over the course of this title, so it could end up with: B.A. Barrett chills out a little and becomes competent and less anxious because he realizes he can’t control the situation and is along for the ride, ready to push things in a positive direction at any moment.
Jesse’s lines feel like someone wrote the entire script without her and then added her as ‘color’ in between every scene, it’s terrifyingly overwritten
I can’t get over how they can’t commit to an architectural style, bouncing between:
Steampunk: trains, oil refineries, floodlights
Modern construction sites: chainlink fences, tarpaulins, scaffolding (like in FFXV), flat-panel TVs?
Super-science base: steel paneling with gribble, like the end of a Resident Evil game
and mixing them within 3 rooms? It looks like the environment art team farmed the reactor out to 3 different companies
My review: FF7R feels like a Kingdom Hearts spinoff
Everything in this game looks ridiculous now that all layers of abstractions like the turn based battle system and low fidelity graphics are removed from FF7 (most egregious being Cloud with his big sword mowing down tons of gun wielding soldiers)
It’s like when anime RPGs introduced voice acting, but more
I can sort of see the appeal, but had to stop the demo halfway through and felt better
i was looking at jessies face and screaming ‘GO BACK TO KINGDOM HEARTS’ so i totally feel this. her and biggs and wedge are really high detailed but less detailed than the main characters so they look like ps2 cutscenes in comparison. thats not necessarily a bad thing, but im glad i wasnt just being a weirdo
best case scenario its a horrible first impression, and the purpose is to break down stereotypes as his character progresses
worst case barrett never stops yelling
a lot of the stuff is visually translated well. like you can imagine the pre rendered backgrounds and remember how the enviroments were exactly in the first game when you see them in the remake. they got the look down
OH WAIT
did clouds hair look like, REALLY WEIRD and jagged for some people? like you were seeing it through static? i dunno if like his hair is unfinished or its because i dont have a ps4 pro, but clouds hair texture was different than everything else in the demo and it was very distracting
Hair is a hard technical problem, they want Cloud’s to be blonde with a darker color underneath and that ups the contrast, causing worse aliasing. FFXV had similar problems.
ahh okay. i guess it was just weird because i was screaming about aeris’s loose hair strands and how good they looked, but that was also in a cutscene, i dunno how her hair will work when im running around with her
peoples expectations of this remake are astronomical and i think squeenix is doing all they can not to get their mako reactor blown up by angry cloud fans. i cant imagine the pressure of making this game
i have no stakes in FF7 so im just enjoying a free demo and comparing it to what i remember but there are going to be so many parts that are just a little different that make people angry, fans are so hard to please
It’s breathtaking even today to see the FMV seamlessly transition to gameplay, with streaming video synced up to polygon figures atop it and then a battle launching as soon as the player hops off the train.
so of course they muck it up with a steam cloud as a low-effort cut to realtime and then a minute of cutscenes deflating all in medias res energy the opening is supposed to be broadcasting. The player’s supposed to feel like things are happening without enough context, and too fast, because that’s Cloud’s mindset, but here it’s bloated and slow
I am definitely not going to play this demo so maybe it comes off differently but as you’ve described it this is the exact aesthetic melange of original FF7 and probably one of the only good things about it
It’s probably more noticeable to me without cuts between backdrops and with a modern sound design. There’s a moody wash that overlays everything in original FFVII that I mostly attribute to the music, which is so present as to force a mood onto even incoherent visuals, and of course, all older games had this and I sorely miss it in newer stuff.
the total inconsistency of architecture in Final Fantasy 7 contributes to the feeling that midgar is like a real place. Real cities are a bricolage of disparate styles made at different periods in time with radically different underlying forces at work. Even within the same building, this kind of consistent inconsistency feels right to me
yeah it seems that many of the things complained about, for better or for worse, are a result of the designers being as faithful as possible to the original.
personally I thought it was great and I’m looking forward to seeing more. still a zillion ways they can get things wrong as the game opens up so we’ll see I guess
It makes a lot of sense when they’re contrasting neighborhoods in the city through the explosive growth of metaphorical industrialization, and the militarized corporate districts, but I think it’s distracting when we’re looking at a single refinery building the core materials technologies span more than a century of design. Just trying to understand how the robot made out of a discarded locomotive engine sits next to a techno-lazer helmeted grunt; how the bomb has a red stencil seven-segment LCD screen timer but the HUD display is a '50s-style lightguide display even as it ostensbly is a window into that bomb…it reads as confused
I mean, compare Midgar to literally the entire rest of the game world, remake OR original. Everyone else looks like they’re still figuring out how screwdrivers work, while anything Shinra touches has all lasers and whatnot. The anachronism is fully by design, and is supposed to show just HOW rapid Shinra’s technological superiority has advanced, due to literally sucking up the lifeforce of the planet to power their reactors
It’s not outside the realm of possibility that the rate they’re going for is something like steam-to-lasers in like ten years
Yeah, I absolutely agree that it feels good and correct when it’s illustrating the sedimentary nature of the world and the uneven rate at which industrialization happens, it’s really down to the execution of it in this high-fidelity world when assets are this compressed next to each other. It’s a subtle distinction that I’m having trouble explicating.
i just wanted to stop by and say i played this thing last night and i went BONKERS
the fans that have been screaming the loudest for this remake are exactly the kind of people that will never, ever be satisfied by whatever this thing turns out to be.
fighting stuff is fun, looks SICK, and and controls are RESPONSIVE in a way i wish 15’s were. their two battle systems aren’t fundamentally that different, but i feel like this one gets it so right and it makes a world of difference.
it’s cool and dumb and iove it, see ya in the fun zone