The map-reading of the glacier area was my favourite map-reading segment since playing Nocturne. Having an iconographic map based on the relative position of landmarks rather than a blueprint of the game environment is something games should play with more. I’ve heard this is one of the more frustrating sections of the game but this is been the absolute highlight in terms of gameplay for me. VII does a lot of playing around with different scenarios but this felt the most engaging from a player standpoint compared to the usual ‘minigame time! quickly! learn a whole bunch of shit which you will never do again’
Climbing the mountain gave me Cursed Mountain vibes. The preceding glacier area and the plot stuff afterwards make section stand out as the premium gameplay scenario. The descent into and the reveal of a gigantic crater was the good stuff.
Finally the reveals keep on coming when Cloud is revealed to be a goo monster memory vampire… or is he!?
Cloud and Tifa’s connection turns out to be one of the best aspects of the game and the big flashback scene in the lifestream is the game’s ambition writ proud. You have a studio doing things with limited 3D environments and cameras, trying to tell a story where flashbacks and false memories distort how time and perception will be read by the audience. It’s pretty bold they didn’t go with something more linear and straight ahead (I guess an example would be the relatively flat staging and scene direction of OoT). These kinds of parallel narratives are regularly messed up by contemporary devs with the benefit of decades of conventional knowledge of how 3D game stuff functions and means.
Not a fan of the side tangents with Cid. Cid is characterised as a catankerous womaniser who really really really wants to go to space. His arc of being deemed the team leader in Cloud’s absence comes out of nowhere. Feels like the writers were struggling for meaningful character moments to happen while Tifa oils Cloud’s wheelchair. Why not have Barrett take up the role? Oh I forgot, it’s because Cid is a nothing otherwise.
Around this time the game becomes Cid Icarus: Uprising, we learn the rocket ship is part of Shinra’s plans to defeat the weapons and Sephiroth. The plan presents a lot of muddled motivations and ropey calls to action when otherwise, aside from memory fuckery, it’s been fairly straight-ahead. Shinra is bad, let’s stop the rocket that is going to destroy meteor! Oh no we couldn’t stop the rocket but it didn’t destroy meteor anyway because we meddled with it? Goal achieved? At least Cid got to go to space, his arc is done.
I get that Shinra is staffed by pantomime villains but thwarting the plans to destroy meteor and defend population centers from weapons is fairly reasonable. The party even justify the use of materia themselves for the sake of long-term ends since no other means will help them. I’m not sure if some of this was meant to be partially satirical regarding the fact that climate disasters would seriously need the buy-in of the disgusting corporate actors that put the world in this position in first place. It just felt weird that the eco fighter goals get really muddy when humanity’s goals should align to try and stop literal doom.
Is Reeve constantly piloting Cait Sith? What happens when he needs to use a toilet or eat? Assuming the planet has time zones how does he make sure that Cait Sith is active when the party is working to a different schedule? Does it autopilot? Also Reeve is too far up the corporate ladder for me to find his laments about corporate ethics to ring true. I was assuming one of the turks was the actual pilot for a while since it’d make more sense honestly.
Tifa and Cloud’s final moments before the party rejoin to fight Sephiroth was surprisingly sweet in that the characters seem to be making peace with the inevitable but in a self-determined way. Cloud ordering the entire crew of the Highwind to go and find themselves. Tifa making peace with finally actually knowing one another too close to the world’s end. Impressive that despite my osmotic knowledge of FFVII’s extended universe, fan paraphernalia and hentai, some of the more crystallised moments remain untarnished.
Really liked the ending and how it leaves things fairly open with regards to the extent of the destruction and timeline of nature’s recovery. Humanity dead? Were the actions they took actually worth anything? We know the Earth will live on without us in all likelihood, refreshing to see anthro-arrogance played with. In reverse retrospect it makes all the sequels and extended VII-verse stuff seem quite against the spirit of that final cut-to-black as the planet spreads its tendrils.
Materia optimisation only really comes up in the endgame which was great for about two hours when I infinitely guaranteed multi-deathblow with healing on hit. The game is simply too easy once you have boss-routine materia and it’s not hard to accidentally become overlevelled since there’s no reason to specialise with anything other than your two favourites and Cloud.
Overall, extremely breezy game that gets very spiky in the final dungeon which reminded me of IV (and pretty much all the end dungeons’ sudden collapsing buttocks time).
I’ll never unsee the scene below and, like many parts, I wonder, will Remake selectively recreate only those moments 90% of the player base actually remember and trim the rest to avoid the berserk task of remaking all that shit?
re: Cid’s narrative prominence, I agree it makes no sense from a modern perspective, but if you were a kid in 1997 I’m pretty sure it came down to, like, he had the second highest attack stat, spears are usually second most prominent after swords, he was the only other human white male party member (!) – FF7’s cast was really good and interesting so this stands out – and swearing was funny.
the idea of him being basically washed up when you meet him is very good and sympathetic and I hope they choose to focus on that aspect in the remake because the rest aren’t very meaningful anymore
Yakuza LAD’d battle system is so shallow, I’m not sure I’ve seen JRPG battles this brainless since the NES area?
It still works because of pure aesthetic bombast. At least for now. I just put on autobattle and watch the wonderful animations. I’m VERY tempted to turn everybody into breakdancers. I don’t know how long the spell will last, but it’s a good companion piece to Elden Ring
It reminds me of a dead subcategory of JRPG during the JRPG peak ( ~SNES to PS2 era) A lot of games used turn based battles almost by default: the numbers weren’t finely tuned, there weren’t a lot of mechanically meaningful systems, and instead the games were made more exciting by the addition of QTEs, cool animations, flashy overly complicated systems that amounted to nothing, etc. They felt like RPGs by inertia, clearly influenced by Final Fantasy 6-8 (which IMO had both Good Numbers AND some fancy stuff)
They could still be extremely good. There’s like… Legend of Legaia, Suikoden 2, Shadow Hearts 1/2, Valkyrie Profile 1, Xenogears, Breath of fire 2, Chrono Cross, Skies of Arcadia, Legend of Dragoon…
Nowadays chosing to make a turn based RPG is a deliberate choice, so there’s a good chance the devs might make The Numbers at least Pretty O.K. and might not feel the need to add something to keep players awake
I haven’t played any earlier Yakuza game but 0, but as I understand it combat has become less and less central as the games went on. So the switch to a RPG where you just push the autobattle button, watch mayhem, press some QTEs if you want and win 20 seconds later regardless makes a lot of sense. And that’s why it’s the only modern game in this « bad numbers but fancy nonsense » RPG subcategory that I know of, besides of course fucking Yiik lol
yeah, I remember this weird discourse around them deciding to make yakuza turn based along the lines of “it’s practically a jRPG anyway, what does it matter” which I always heard to some degree as defensiveness on the part of people who like to engage with jRPGs on the level of a dopamine security blanket by having to engage as minimally as possible with a videogame and advance it gradually by pressing two buttons – maybe me being uncharitable but there you go – and then it came out and it was mechanically really poor, just barely not actively bad, but still worth playing on the basis of the presentation alone. not sure what the lesson is there
This is the thing. I’m trying to see it from a kid in the late 90s perspective but it’s hard to turn off grumpy adult brain lathered with the new when a narrative shortcoming arises regarding the arcs.
I have some faith they can develop the full cast well given what they had to work with with Aerith in 7R.
So I went back and played a bunch of Satisfactory and my new verdict was “actually this game is pretty good but it feels like garbage to navigate the terrain, which is really important in the midgame”
But then I did a bunch of research (i mean like, wiki research not in-game research) and it turns out I missed a whole tech tree that has a vehicle that would have been super nice to have before.
So my new verdict is “Still not as good as Factorio, but much prettier, and now I’m interested in giving it a third shot. Also what the hell with all these tech trees, jesus”
i don’t think i like Tunic. i would probably have liked Tunic 10-15 years ago.
the virtual manual aping its visual style from the FDS Zelda 1 manual feels both inspired and trite. it’s very pretty and not unpleasant to play, but it kind of just has this feeling that so many indie games have (in the same way many AAA titles feel tonally or texturally similar). a vibe/something that is both at once completely beholden to its inspirations while also having a vague sense of ironic detachment. a tone we’ve seen many times previously.
i only played like 15 minutes of it which is probably both enough time and not enough time to make a real judgment, so maybe there is something in there worth seeing.
i think it got significantly better after the first hour/90 minutes. basically when it gets past the focus on the overworld map and you’ve rung both bells.
i’m very sick of retro style indie games, or not sure i ever really cared bout them, but this one really ended up hitting for me.
Love VP but the battles are insipid beyond the good first impression TBH
Once you get the basics down very early on, there’s nothing to learn anymore for the rest of the game and no reason to not do the same combo over and over (watching the same fancy/trite 10 seconds PWS animations), there aren’t any other options anyway
There are no fights that require any real change of strategy in battle aside from Bloodbane and the superhidden superboss hamsters
Went to an anime con a while ago and saw a friend demoing the Bloodborne board game. I’ve never played a dungeon crawling board game before and it looked cool, so I went down to the dealer’s room and they had already sold out of Bloodborne. But since I was at an anime con, I thought “why not see what Japanese board games like?”. I ended up buying one that wasn’t actually Japanese, just anime themed (Bullet), and one actually was from Japan (Testament). They’re cooperative games so I figured they would be easy for me to play by myself, playing all the characters.
I have come to the conclusion that boardgames require too much thought and too much time. I didn’t notice this at the time but 500 minutes is a lot of time to be thinking hard.
I wasn’t all that interested in Tunic but I hear it really ramps up the Fez/Witness type metapuzzles after a while so now I’m really intrigued and have got to try it out once I’m done with Elden Ring.
But really the past couple days I’ve gone back to Receiver 2, specifically the Compound part that was added in an update last year. It’s a fixed, enemy-free location used for training challenges and easter egg hunts that’s a less compelling to me than the main game, although it’s still pretty entertaining, although maybe only in small doses once you realize you’re gonna have to do all the shooting range and training stuff with all guns, also the collectibles you’re after are partly random spawns.
Love that they include Receiver 1 in it though, with the funny joke that the tape that was empty in the original now contains a garbled message, indicating that you’re further down the path of true awakening.
i have testament! it definitely gets a lot easier to understand after your first attempt at playing. also, it’s a co-op game themed like a videogame, where you go through 6 stages with boss fights, and the 500 minutes time given is assuming you’re going to play through the whole thing in one go, which is insane.
it’s still probably not a game for someone new to board games, though.
most japanese board games that have english translations seem to be a lot simpler, with much shorter play time. i really like ars alchimia, which is fairly simple, and plays in about 30-40 minutes. i think it’s out of print now, though.
That’s exceptionally long FWIW. Back when I played boardgames (the circa 2010-2015 boomlet when everybody I knew was into board games, at least here in the Bay Area), I mostly played 5-30 minute games. I’d usually have more fun iterating the same 30-minute game four times than playing one 2-hour game.
The thought level varies a lot too, and the most mentally demanding phase of any game is in my experience when you’re first learning the rules and basic tactics. And it’s much higher-effort to learn the rules from the book than to have someone explain it to you, so typically only one player would volunteer to pre-read a new rulebook and then teach the other players during a test run.
the best japanese board game I’ve played is tragedy looper, which despite its awful art direction and questionable legibility produces some of the most unique board game fun I’ve ever had.
You might also enjoy just about any game put out by oink games, all of which are extremely short and simple games
