Arsenal sucks.
I finished this. It was pretty indulgent and goofy and just a really fun video game. Looking forward to seeing where it goes but I hope they still hew closer to the original than not.
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hm i don’t know, a bunch of that gold saucer stuff isn’t visible during the date sequence either
can you just go on that ride anytime outside the date? maybe that’s where it is?
idk if this is the thread but I’m replaying parasite eve and
- damn this game is more fun that it should be
- combat system feels like a weirdly embryonic version of ff7r
- wow aya and daniel really are just rewritten versions of cloud and barret
- this game is actually surprisingly classy, well put together, and very atmospheric for the time it came out, like it’s put together like a mid budget action thriller and executes that very well
- how is the localization of this game so good when it came out so close to final fantasy 7??
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yeah, and doesn’t daniel even have a young son around marlene’s age?
my favorite thing about parasite eve is they gave aya the surname “brea” most likely after the tar pits (they were on a kick naming characters after areas in southern california c. 1998) probably not realizing “brea” means tar.
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the best way to play parasite eve is in black and white, like i did back then
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Because it was made in america by yet another “Square USA” that Square opened and then shut down after making a single game.
The best way to play Parasite Eve was on the exact brand of TV I did as a child, with an RF connector, because on the screen where you shimmy down a cable to fight the optional crab boss there’s a particular sound that plays that interferes with the video and causes static, and the farther down the cable you go the louder the sound, and more pronounced the static, became. Freaked the hell out of me as a kid; I thought it was intentional.
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I mean, while we’re here, seems like the best way to play any video game is to play it on the TV you had when you were a kid, with the original console you had when you were a kid, and also when you were a kid.
Most of us had a nice feeling with a controller in our hands when we were 10 and we’ve been chasing the idea of recapturing that feeling ever since.
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I smell an underserved market for slightly oversized classic game controllers for adults who want that experience of holding the controller and having it be the same size in proportion to their hands as it was when they were ten.
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this is a very good idea
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i am getting close to the end and stalling a little because when it’s over it’s over
the only real problem here is now the wall market music won’t leave my brain and i hate it
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I’ve had the exact same problem with the wall market music boring into my skull. It’s such an annoying earworm of a melody!
Also yeah I beat this and I really liked the game. I thought the ending was pretty botched but I don’t really have anything interesting to say about it at this time, sorry about my puerile and simpleminded discourse.
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I thought chapter 18 was at least less botched than 17, which was not what the discourse had warned me about
17 was just a lot of boring padding. I didn’t love it, especially when the game at that time felt like it was careening toward its conclusion but still needed you to do another interminable dungeon. Once you finally get out of it, you’re treated to the Jenova reveal, but I really felt like the game totally undermined that reveal by going full Kingdom Hearts with it, which it then continued to do throughout chapter 18.
I really loved this game’s story for how relatively grounded it was, but at the end when they introduced the world’s wider scope with Jenova and Sephiroth, they totally screwed up that transition. The game gives no meaningful context for either villain, and the emotional resonance is just not there at all. You’re suddenly facing two abstract, hallucinatory villains that have no clear connection to the environmental crisis, Shinra’s totalitarian exploitation, or any of the other reasons you’ve been fighting for the entire game. Then suddenly the game drops the Shinra thread entirely and has you basically doing the classic JRPG fighting god trope completely out of the blue. I guess Shinra is just still doing its thing while the main characters talk a bunch of abstract metaphysical nonsense about escaping destiny and hunting down this teleporting goober who hasn’t shown himself to be particularly threatening to the world of Midgar in any real way?
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my impression on all that is that FF7R is intended as continuation and not a literal remake in the like, current hollywood sense. i think it expects the viewer to already have context for who jenova + sephiroth are & what their whole deal is. cuz yeah, that (and the big reveal in the ending) makes literally zero sense without it?
to me the abstract metaphysical stuff felt less like KH Nonsense & more Aerith knowing more than she’s letting on about what’s actually happening but being coy about it. she’s trying to strike a balance between not telling everyone something they aren’t ready for while still pushing the gang to break out of destiny as it’s the first step to actually fixing everything (and not leaving her bubbling around the lifestream watching her friends fail to stop the apocalypse.)
i am possibly being overly generous with my reading? what i took away from the ending is that square is having a go at deconstructing the whole hollywood/AAA remake trend in their usual over the top way. i am an unread yokel but can’t recall another one of these sort of efforts incorporating the original narrative as an actual character (i’m choosing to read the whispers as some kind of Time Cop Ghost Gestalt for the sake of argument) in dialogue with the viewer and the new renditions of its cast? i thought that was pretty cool but again, i am not the postmodernism genius so please don’t throw books at me if i’m talking out my ass lol.
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Yeah if you are a new player who never played the original then the main villain (and other characters like Rufus) in this game is basically never explained to you who they are or why should you care or what motivates them or anything. They’re just there to stand in your way and say cryptic stuff.
And for returning players they go too far with the Whispers and all that to try to make things fresh and unpredictable.
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Yeah, exactly, like, they spent so much time on the whispers over the course of the game, but it’s not an interesting or nuanced enough concept for the amount of space they give it. You could have reduced 75% of their screentime and still got the message across loud and clear, while making more time to build up the underseen characters who actually matter so that newcomers will care at all about them.
I do kind of like the weirdo postmodern thing they’re attempting, but it could have been done in a way that works better for both new and returning players.
I came at this remake with a very cloudy memory of the original game, so I actually would have really preferred more of that contextual info.
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I don’t think I’d have been nearly as critical of this part if they hadn’t shit up the jenova + sephiroth + president shrina bit before the end so badly
and then, like, the rufus fight is terrible, etc etc
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The Rufus fight is fine once you realize the One Weird Trick to defeating him (spoiler: use counterstance/only hit him while he’s reloading) and then after that it’s over in like a minute. I didn’t even mind having to replay it. The sucky part is the fight with arsenal immediately after Rufus. No breather or rest just straight into an uninteresting, tedious fight that takes too long to get through (unless there’s One Weird Trick I missed).
I really didn’t mind Hojo’s lab. I was kind of glad to have One Last Dungeon to go through even if it was a bit padded out. They didn’t really do anything with it story-wise though. I guess they used it to show you have evil Hojo is? Like, yeah, he experiments on people. That’s what evil mad scientists do.
I was annoyed that they have Sephiroth kill Barrett and then bring him back literally a minute or two later. When he died I was like oh cool they’re killing him instead of Aerith this is going to be nuts but then almost as if to say “yeah none of what happens actually has any consequence lol” they have the whispers bring him right back to life because there is a fated destiny etc. I was surprised to see Biggs waking up at the very end. Does that mean Jessie survived too? I would be okay if they just kept Biggs/Wedge/Jessie alive this time around since their characters never got to be explored or developed in the original.