yeah i think the remaster is pretty good?
really dig the remastered soundtrack and this time around the job system actually works - you aren’t building three identical characters like vanilla and you aren’t nearly as restricted as izjs plus 4x fast forward, true widescreen and some nicer ui
trial mode is also cool! and you can get loto’s sword without the fishing minigame now
edit: scratch the widescreen comment, i just figured out widescreen patches in pcsx2
Man I haven’t even looked at trial mode yet. Your rewards from it can carry over into the main game? That sounds good. I don’t think IZJS let you do that either.
yeah it’s new
gamebreaking if you want it to be - you can steal an endgame 1h sword on the second stage, really handy for getting some of the stuff that’s otherwise on % spawn chests
I really like that they made the main game breezier and smoothed over the difficulty curve and put the challenge in an optional side mode for when you want to dick around with the mechanics.
That’s a good template for RPGs of this nature
who do you all think the zodiark killer was
non-elemental magic iirc
still really irked at them feeling the need to stamp every screenshot with their bloody copyright information.
can you imagine? The sheer butt-clenching power of Japanese corporate lawyers. Power of There Is No Try at levels beyond human comprehension
I don’t entirely agree with this but replaying it now I do think it is applicable to a lot of the urban interiors’ textures. It doesn’t seem to particularly matter most of the time because the colors and lighting cohere into very livable atmospheres, but if you stop and start to inspect stuff you realize that every wall is like the most impossible bricolage of inscrutable details which seem to have little in common. Places like the Barheim passage or Garamsythe waterway, though, look as good as ever and seem more purposeful in their appearance.
The art direction in this game holds up really well, at least until you get to the more abstract/weird locations, like that huge crystal. But that looked bad in the original as well.
I’m sorry, I was referring to how they look on PS2. You’re right that the environment art can be nonsensical but you can’t even tell what it’s trying to represent at PS2 resolution – for example, Vaan’s shirt is almost never readable in play:
At higher resolutions the intent is clear.
I’m a big fan of the repetition in structure and texture of the oil derricks in the sandsea; it conveys the vast monotony while giving the player a moving path instead of blankness.
Here are my replies to some random things I noted while skimming through here:
I liked all of the characters. Even Vaan and Penelo. There are moments where you are reminded of the youth of some of these friends and its a pretty interesting wall breaking for a videogame.
I liked the original job board or whatever it was called. I enjoyed having to commit to one profession for each character. It forces you to make use of them all and therefore, gain some attachment to them. And gameplay wise, it stretches you out a bit. At least, until the mid point, after which everyone starts over lapping skills. But for awhile there!
I also enjoyed how the summons work. In previous Final Fantasy games, summons were basically just a near guaranteed big damage hit. unblockable. etc. Even at 12 years old or whatever, I got tired of leaning on summons in FF8. As much as I enjoyed that game and as rad as the summons are. Here, they are fragile beasts. You really have to work, to keep them out. and its a small triumph, if you can keep them out long enough to do 2 rotations of their moves. I found that Hi-potions were the ticket. A. They execute faster than spells and B. everyone can use them. So you don’t end up dumping all of your summons on one character and then get screwed when they die or are unavailable for parts of the game.
Poaching is cool because combined with stealing, you can get double and triple loot.
The chaining system where killing the same monsters in sequence increases rewards----is explained in the game. I’m pretty sure its somewhere out in the first desert area where that T-Rex is running around. In fact, the game explains pretty much everything in great detail. Its a matter of talking to all of the NPCs. there are even times when they are lined up, waiting for you to talk to them and learn about the game. But that’s boring so a lot of people probably don’t.
I think that restricting access to gambits was probably how they tried to manage player power/game difficulty. I mean, with all the gambits at your tips, you can manage anything, if you just think about it and connect the dots (gambits). So its either restrict access or turn the enemy encounters into absurdly complex gambit loops. While that would be kinda cool, it could easily devolve into sorry, you didn’t chain exactly the right gambits.
Sounds like the remaster is probably broken to me. I mean, total freedom on the job board and freedom with gambits removes much of what kept the game semi-challenging until about halfway anyway.
I liked guns and always had Penelo as my gunner
The story is about as good as a season of Game of Thrones. Sometimes is pretty great and sometimes is pretty misdirected.
I’m always surprised how people complain about Star Wars connections but never mention that Fran’s rabbit people are LoTR Elves and their home is a direct visual design lift from the movies. But I liked Fran a lot and thought her story was interesting. So it didn’t matter to me that so much borrowing was done.
This game is gorgeous. It is so colorful. And yes, I LOVE the detailed pixel mosaic textures. (Similarly, FF11’s texture work is also timeless.) This game completely sidestepped trends where the PS2 was being forced to somehow do pixel shaders to stay relevant with Xbox. Instead, they went all-in on color and texture and geometry. And it spits it all out a smooth and consistently speedy framerate. Indeed, there is a hard cut off for geometry culling in the not too far distance. But its pretty nuts how many areas will have buildings and statues and several characters on screen and its no big deal. (and its kinda fun to watch the geometry “draw” in front of you, rather than pop or fade in) and during cutscenes, models have transparent doubles to fake a sort of motion blur, along with extra bloom and other effects and there is zero hitching. And everywhere you turn, its all colorful, blue skies, and lovely to look at. Every inch.
While the remaster is definitely ok and akin to mods or shader injectors a lot of people use nowadays------when I was emulating FF12 a few years ago, I was all about massaging the colors and warming up the bloom to compensate for the HD resolution bump. (I might still have those SweetFX settings on a hard drive). The game looks great.
My favorite thing about FF12 was the gambit system.
come at me
More than a decade later and it’s still so impressive how much emotive power the artists managed to convey through the high-detail ingame models’ eyes / brows / mouths, and it only makes the CG movies seems all the more throwaway, as if they were included out of some sense of obligation. Nobody looks like anyone in the CG movies and it’s actually a huge step down from the texture and expressiveness of FFX’s CG movies.
You got that backwards. The original license board was the golden-age-of-FF-style one, where you had complete freedom and any character could learn any skill.
The International version is the one that restricted skills to more or less arbitrarily grouped jobs.
At least, the Zodiac Age allows you to pick two jobs per character, so you actually have a chance to build a party covering a fair amount of skills in a single playthrough this time.
I think limiting the rate gambits were made available in shops was so that players didn’t feel overwhelmed with a vast amount of options from the start, which may be a legitimate design concern.
As a returning player, I definitely appreciate that you have them all available from the start, and I think that new players who grasp the gambit system won’t really have much problem browsing through the different triggers. It’s not that gambits give you any significant tactical advantage, given the amount of options you have to control battle parameters (speed, manual overrides, and so on).
Now, there are some players who find the gambit system is a bit hard to comprehend in detail. Earlier this year I was watching a let’s play of a first timer playing through the remaster, and after 50+ hours of playtime he still hadn’t fully understood how triggers and priorities worked, so one must not underestimate the players who just have a hard time grasping the concept.
i wouldn’t mind playing without the second job board, maybe. when you get two each it gets close enough to feeling as if everyone can do everything
You have to explicitly spend some LP to unlock a certain square on the board to access the second license board so if you don’t want to, you can just never go there.
This works per character too, so you can even have a mix of characters with 0, 1 and 2 jobs if you want.
