Been playing a lot of this. Just hit the prison. There was a wee bit of open open world stuff around Costa Del Sol but the entire stretch from Upper Junon til now has been much more like Remake - all dungeons and mini hubs with mandatory parties. A nice change of pace from the early game which I’m assuming flips back once you get past the desert.
Can really see the money spent on the dlc from this. As Yuffie has field interactions with the environment she is now a party leader.
The skill tree stuff is still unclear to me. I have no idea how you consistently ear skill points outside of the occasional side quest.
The majority of these are centered around a specific party member. There was one in Coral which even came with a fairly extensive mini dungeon. Going through a cave using a flash light which turned off and on every time you climbed or interacted with something. Every time it’s turned back on the pad both rumbles and makes a sound. Really draining on the ps5 pad battery. Alongside the occasional sound mixing issue with weird sound levels between music and dialogue and the pad speaker being on at the same time it’s some nicely sneaked in low budget weirdness.
Not sure what’s going on with the date stuff. Either Tifa/Aeris are the only options now or you need to be disagreeable with both of them to have any hope of triggering anyone else. As an example, I think there is one event to interact with Yuffie beforehand and even that is a choice between her and Barret whom is barely involved in this system otherwise.
Whatever they’re doing in lieu of the Whispers this times seems a bit more effective/intriguing thus far.
maybe i’m going slow, but i just got to Upper Junon after about 20 hours. i’m doing all the sidequest nonsense. so far, i’m having a real good time with this. i was kind of surprised that (spoilers through ch. 4) playing Triple Tri i mean Queens Blood unlocked some cutscenes that seem to have story implications. like is this the game’s way of telling the player that Sephiroth has been ressurrected because we demanded this remake? that playing the game has unleashed this evil? i also went into the game spoiler free, so the Ft. Condor thing was also a really fun surprise, and again seems to play into this metanarrative around game character identity. is this the MGS2 of Final Fantasies? i guess we’ll see.
I like how much of the world is just strewn with wreckage and they don’t really point it out that much. It’s just self-evidently a trash hellscape with bits of resistance and nature scattered throughout.
Junon parade sidequest is very cute. They just want you to have a fun adventure sometimes, tone be damned
Barrettttt politely disagrees with Cloud about the fiscal monetary levers applied in vertical upstart crypto-markets, Aelice turns orange in envy over Such Filthy Monetary Insider Trading Insight.
‘No No No No’ i hear ye shout, you are in it for the ART?
Fear not, because 7R#2 got you covered there:
you can have some fun in b&w. It’s really just a simple screenshot tool they’ve implemented, but if you are so inclined, you can have some fun trying to get That Shot That Looks Larger Than Life (on Midgar).
This is by far the funniest final fantasy game I’ve played, like it’s almost at Yakuza levels of jrpg comedy. Loved that one special bald bar in upper Junon.
I’m now on the cruise ship to Costa Del Sol and I’m really fixated on how deeply goofy this game is. I love that you’re just drifting along from place to place with very little actual reason and just getting into hi-jinks along the way. It’s all like, “oh, I guess we might as well follow these robed guys onto a cruise ship, not like we have any other leads… Oh, the ship is hosting a card game tournament, let’s have a tournament arc with random NPCs from the first game!”
I barely remember the original FF7, but if this second remake is covering the bit of the original where you’re just let loose in the overworld to go exploring, then I guess it’s trying to recreate that experience of aimless freedom with its open zone gameplay and relaxed plotting. But ultimately you’re still moving linearly from point to point in the story, basically the same way the first remake was structured. It’s just that now, every other one of those points has a pleasantly bloated exploration segment attached to it. Weirdly I keep thinking of Sonic Adventure’s adventure zones. Getting real Mystic Ruins vibes here.
When it comes time for them to make part 3, I wonder whether they’ll try to reign things back in and put you on more of a straightforward trajectory without the open world markers and such. Or maybe they’ll tweak the gameplay again in some totally different way to suit the big climactic finish of the story.
I liked part 1 well enough, but so far for me this game blows that one completely out of the water. I have a feeling part 3 is going to tighten things back down and get all dramatic and self-serious, and part 2 is going to end up being this total beautiful anomaly in the middle of the trilogy. In 10 years am I gonna be the guy who’s like “yeah dude, just play part 2, don’t even bother with 1 or 3”?
Wait now I’m confused by the structure of this thing. I thought it was gonna have like 9 parts or whatever. It can’t just be a trilogy if they haven’t even got to the City of the Ancients by the end of this one, right?
yea bear with me here but i think an expanded first act that ends with the lethe river sequence and ultros as the final boss would be cool, and kind of similar to what they did with ff7r1. i don’t think narshe is compelling enough to have a full game set there, but between that and figaro castle and the returners stuff there is plenty. and i think expanding a bit more on banon and the other returners would raise the stakes of the rest of the story much better.
i am not really a huge ff7 fan but i do think one way that game improved on 6 is making the star wars analog stuff even more explicit, like focusing on characters who end up tangentially connected to a rebel army but who have their own goals and stories that don’t always intersect with the political stuff. it’s interesting and final fantasy games are right to continue ripping star wars off for that basic gimmick. arguably, they should do it more.
i would also have banon not just disappear randomly in the middle of the game, but idk what would be the best arc for him after that. maybe they make more of the factional split after the banquet and have him become a secondary antagonist for awhile before returning at the floating continent and making a noble sacrifice or w/e
anyway i think beginning the second game with the group having to split up into the three scenarios would be kind of interesting and would function kind of like a tutorial version of the more open-world rest of the 2nd game. i think you could probably find some way to make everything that happens after that less linear, with a more open ended search for terra after she disappears.
ending the second game after the floating continent makes the most sense to me, because a lot of what happens after that feels sort of like a reprise anyway and it would be odd to have to repeat yourself so much in the same game if it was divided into a trilogy. but if you wanted it to be kind of jarring, you could also end the 2nd game after the magitek factory. opening the last one in narshe again would be some good symmetry. and the raid on the imperial fort is easily the kind of thing you could expand on, like let’s say there are several of them you have to infiltrate instead of just 1. and a good opportunity to give banon and other returners beyond the main party more to do.
making it seem as though you’re really gaining the upper hand would also make the floating continent stuff much more impactful.
actually the more i think about it the more i like this version better, tbh the world of ruin is great but having a game entirely devoted to that seems like it would be a bit much. i would go the other route and stress even more how much of what goes on in that section is optional–i would keep everything more or less linear up until that point, then make the wor be the main ‘open world’ map for the third game, but make it even more possible to just rush kefka totally underprepared BotW style
man how great of a game is ff6 anyway. still think its weird that there are people out there who don’t think it’s the best one.
I really wish it would get this treatment! as someone who didn’t play 5 and 6 until 1998-1999, after FF7, both 5 and 6 have always seemed like, a half-step behind where they wanted to be technologically in my mind.
I played both 4 and chrono trigger right around when chrono trigger first came out on the SNES, and I’ve always felt like 5 should’ve had the presentation of 6, and 6 should’ve had the presentation of chrono trigger (and the extra megabyte of script space), and neither quite felt like all they could be as a result. I think americans tend to feel similarly about the SNES version of DQ5 which is weirdly primitive in comparison to its reputation.
