Assuming that I actually stick with this, can someone tell me which of the optional stuff is generally worth engaging with? So far I’m trying to hit the moogle and the summon shrines but that’s it
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Quite a lot of it is necessary to fill out the skill tree by the endgame but you could get around this with optimisation. Some sidequests I remember being very good but a lot of the lawnmower stuff might be optional depending on how hard you find battles.
Yeah the sidequests are all built around the party members so are worth doing.
I did pretty much all the side stuff needed to unlock the summons but can’t for the life of me remember what is worth doing, sorry
You can turn the difficulty of all the mini games like fort condor down
thoughts (most of which people have already shared):
- as in remake, the French voices are so much better than the English ones… not even close imo
- the main strength of this is still how much they’ve successfully extrapolated out of the original and made more fun/substantial without overdrawing it, eg how Barret and Yuffie are so much better-rounded now and how every scene with Cloud, Tifa, and Aeris reinforces that he is literally too stupid to choose between two women and they enjoy torturing him over it
- it’s weird how closely they’ve managed to match the pace of PS1 jRPG boss fights because those have never exactly been good in the first place… the cadence of “it’s not exactly challenging but you’re constantly being worn down and have to keep momentum for your party” is unmistakeable and this was clearly a huge achievement for them to approximate with this action combat system, but it also makes almost all the challenge feel artificial so it’s hard to say whether it’s actually good
- weirdly, it also now has the PS1 jRPG production design of “this game isn’t graphically impressive so much as its assets are triumphantly expensive” — now that they’re stuck on UE4 and not doing any fancy raytracing, the postprocessing is notably lacking in comparison to contemporary PC games, but the character models and the animations and the towns all look great which makes up for it
- I am basically beelining through this as linearly as possible because the side content all seems unnecessary. this has the effect of me constantly saying “I can’t believe I’m 3/6/9 hours in, it feels like nothing has happened” but also (barely) motivating me to keep going.
- I don’t know if it’s a nod to how much they learned how to make quasi-open world games from Yakuza or what, but I like how recognizably Japanese they’ve chosen to make their cities… the ubiquitous vending machines and the particular scale of all the industrial equipment are a nice touch.
- the meta stuff in the storytelling is still annoying but increasingly I feel like they were kind of right to conclude that they couldn’t possibly tell this story straight, it’s way too self-consciously a remake of an almost 30 year old PS1 game
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oh, and it’s funny how much the new character designs make it more apparent that you have one dog and one cat in your party. like, it makes me wonder if that was closer to the original concept and the PS1 effectively obfuscated it by making the dog and the cat less resemble a dog and a cat
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I really hope they figure out what they want to do as far as bringing Aeris back in the last one because getting to roleplay a mako poisoned bigamist is most of the appeal at this point
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like it rules that they punish you for compulsively trying to romance two different women every single time you have a solo conversation with either of them by making you go on a date with your dog
I hope it ends the same way Palestinian Chicken does with Larry paralyzed by choosing between two equally punishing options and then getting killed by Sephiroth
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i still don’t get the combat at all
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you control characters directly to spam weak attacks whenever those specific characters need to build ATB (or if you can’t hit a flying enemy without a ranged attack). you can parry and dodge a little bit when controlling them directly but most boss battles aren’t won on this basis… it helps you need to heal a little less, basically, and it makes the weaker enemies be more fun to fight.
you change characters as needed to build all their respective ATBs, which adds variety to it. eventually you get your summons and limits as well which you can use later in boss fights when you want them to end.
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if the Bechdel test includes Sephiroth this game would not pass
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also it’s funny how this game has like no plot and half of the locations you visit are supposed to be weird company town vacation resorts? like they really lean into that aspect, the whole thing feels like an overlong vacation. I guess that’s a reasonable approximation of what the second half of FF7 disc 1 was like in the first place but it’s one of those things (not unlike the appeal of FFXV) that is totally singular and bizarre as modern big budget games go
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I love to hear Barret yell his iconic line, “on y va,” while spamming bullets at Jenova tentacles
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in the previous game i would just burst everything down with tifa who seemed legit broken or sometimes hit a boss with poison and kite it around cos that kind of thing is what i’m into so hoping to find something similar that makes the combat marginally enjoyable
did have a giggle at the junon parade
got to the gold saucer around the 15 hour mark playing at what is a normal pace for me, but which has the effect of making the whole thing feel super insubstantial. apparently this is about halfway?
honestly can’t remember the pacing at this point, but i would assume that if you are skipping the majority of subquests and whatnot, then this might be the case.
i seem to recall spending about 10 to 20 hours at each new location, doing all of the shit
like I did do the card tournament on the boat and played the Costa del Sol minigames once each because they make that stuff mandatory and that felt like plenty to me
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I honestly feel like someone at square wrote something like “side content = total garbage???” on a whiteboard and they’re just spending days and weeks contemplating this, unable to discern its meaning
like even as their fundamentals of storytelling and combat mechanics have gotten slightly better enough to make their games mostly interesting again (if nothing else this game is much more successful than 16 in this respect), they seem to be totally unable to conceive of what parts of their games should constitute “the main path” and what to do about the parts that don’t
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p accurate to my experience of OGFF7
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it’s kind of weird how the game doesn’t really tell you how good the synergy skills are… they’re like 75% of your non-ATB combat options and the only thing it’s worth spending SP on
they’re implemented well enough once that clicks but until then?
yeah think i’m done with this one, feels like a chore