semi-annual Final Fantasy binge/purge

Mastery of the way goal is, Young Mogry.
#Stiltskin

… not them,

that guy…

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I finished it and never figured out how it works

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it’s somehow at a level of “sloppy and oblique and you can fudge your way through” that isn’t particularly bad in practice. I don’t know exactly how I’d feel about it at another time, but taking into account how like virtually every big budget title that square put out from the PS2 until recently was supposed to be like a deconstruction of final fantasy and the vast majority of those made no sense and were no fun, I think this one is pretty successful.

it’s also like, objectively better than those later (mistwalker?) Wii jRPGs that tried to introduce cover mechanics and shit and wound up feeling badly contrived, so I do think there’s something there and it’s not succeeding on the basis of final fantasy psychosis. I would include it with the ~7 actually classic instalments in the series, at least.

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The way it scrupulously avoids being a character action game while wanting to look exactly like a character action game is I think very offputting for those of us with videogame experience. I wonder if it would work better for a neophyte, but probably not because it still demands timing and a lot of controller buttons. A combat system for no one really. But I’m really enjoying it because it’s poorly tutorialized and therefore mysterious and I have no interest in the typical combo based DMC thing. It flips all my switches.

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What game are you thinking of here?

Last Story probably

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nah, I’ve seen lots of other stuff that tries to split the difference about as badly, it’s a discrete category all its own, I loved DMC5, and FFXV still gets out of its own way enough to actually work and not just muddle through. I don’t think it’s meaningfully worse than witcher 3 combat for example. that’s why I keep comparing it to MGS5 – the salvage-development is actually credible (unlike with the last guardian, this only works as a vague maximalism), though I don’t think we’ll see it again.

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FF15 is operating like one entire level of abstraction above Witcher 3, but I take your point that there is a diversity of precedent for “3rd person combat in a lite rpg that isn’t trying to be god of war or whatever”. My point is that the way each of those games tries uniquely to square that circle is more interesting to me than Platinum, and FF15’s is the weirdest I’ve seen.

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yeah, I mean, bizarre abstraction has been ~the brand~ for quite a while, in practice it’s about whether it becomes a crutch

Having never messed with MMORPGs I feel like there’s a major chunk of the family tree leading to these modern action-y Square JRPG combat systems that I missed. Is that where this stuff got traction, or is it a reaction to Skyrim and New Vegas? Are Parasite Eve and Vagrant Story finally getting their due?

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honestly a lot of it is evident in worse squaresoft games from the preceding 15 years, they were iterating on their own garbage for a long time

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I think FF15/7R combat was just a reaction to Assassin’s creed / Arkham Asylum / Witcher
I really don’t see any of like Vagrant Story’s or even FF Type 0’s DNA in FF15

FF loves spectacle (since FF6), and has always been willing to reinvent itself. Turn based combat was kind of getting in the way and FF waited for this new paradigm to fully shift to showy action combat

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Turns out my blind spot is a lot bigger than MMOs. That wall cling thing in FF15 made no sense to me until your post.

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i also think of recent ffs as single player mmorpgs but honestly that’s probably not fair to online games

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idk i think ff7r/ffxv combat is like completely birthed from kingdom hearts combat. for some fucking reason

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It’s tough to say what influenced what but yeah there are also a lot of MMOs that have this kind of gormy 3rd person slippery combat, though there it’s usually much more based on cooldown management which is something FF15 doesn’t really do. There’s a definite throughline from like early WoW’s very discrete, clicky cooldown combat to something like a modern Nexon game or Elder Scrolls Online or whatever. How that’s been crossing over with singleplayer games is an open question but there’s definitely some kind of relationship there.

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Yup, this is the case. It is an iteration on the action combat from Kingdom Hearts and the Nomura combat line, which has always been an attempt to get menu based combat to work in something vaguely action based.

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Who remembers CRISIS CORE: FINAL FANTASY VII

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Pretty cool how dodge was on the button that tended to break on 1000-series models

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i have been playing remake lately and it has a weird power about it that makes me want to go outside and learn punch arts and look at flowers and be a girl. idk! it’s like, something about the way they render those flowerfields tells me that whoever put them together knows exactly why flowers are so beautiful. the way cloud is a goofy, pouty little shit just makes me want to kiss him and pat his dumb little head. the way these small flashes of feeling happen in characters’ eyes in between cutscene beats tells me they must have had one very special dramaturge on staff. when tifa says ‘i feel trapped’ and the weight of those words feels earned even before they get contextualized… the care is just spilling out of this like it’s on special. or maybe i’m just gay and a target audience. idk

ff7 was, to my mind, a product of joyful ambition. remake seems a product of boundless love for the source material. of all the things nomura brings to the work he does on this series, pretension is not one of them. guy might be too clever for his own good, but he loves his babies and it shows. i’ll concede that the weird time ghosts really don’t work for me, especially since i already know where its going, but the character work here is so rich and so surprisingly subtle that i can forget about that part of the whole thing pretty easily.

the combat is really weird, but i really don’t care, it’s there and then it’s gone, the real meat of the game is definitely elsewhere

please fix the undelete function or move the delete post button away from the edit button x_x

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