Tigranes
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2009
- Messages
- 10,350
Had a quick look, and it seems OK.
It's worth remembering how basic FF7-9 combat was, and how it was very easy to lift the curtain and see that it was mostly pointless posturing. When I was a kid the impressive summon graphics, the pleasure of big magic spells, limit breaks, etc. kept up a sense of a cool battle flow, but mechanically speaking, they were piss easy games where you sat around firing your biggest boom booms and stuff like conditions/debuffs only mattered at specific moments.
Even the turn to action gameplay isn't hugely abhorrent, given that the PS-era FFs were all about integrating 'cinematic' experiences into a linear RPG as much as was possible at the time - it was just in the form of simplistic minigames at the time where you mostly mashed X. (FF8 was a lot worse about this than FF7.) The squatting minigame in FF7, for example, is literally QTEs.
However, FF7-9 still had enough bones of a proper old school RPG left within them to enable some kind of system-janking fun. FF8 was broken as fuck, but it gave you huge flexibility in planning and manipulating your stats to purposefully set up powerful characters. FF7 let you use Mime and other Yellow Materia to set up interesti8ng chains of abilities (the most famous, though a relatively boring, example of course being Knights summon chaining). The question is whether this one will have any of that, or it'll become even more of a linear corridor shooter with 3 times as many FMVs.
It's worth remembering how basic FF7-9 combat was, and how it was very easy to lift the curtain and see that it was mostly pointless posturing. When I was a kid the impressive summon graphics, the pleasure of big magic spells, limit breaks, etc. kept up a sense of a cool battle flow, but mechanically speaking, they were piss easy games where you sat around firing your biggest boom booms and stuff like conditions/debuffs only mattered at specific moments.
Even the turn to action gameplay isn't hugely abhorrent, given that the PS-era FFs were all about integrating 'cinematic' experiences into a linear RPG as much as was possible at the time - it was just in the form of simplistic minigames at the time where you mostly mashed X. (FF8 was a lot worse about this than FF7.) The squatting minigame in FF7, for example, is literally QTEs.
However, FF7-9 still had enough bones of a proper old school RPG left within them to enable some kind of system-janking fun. FF8 was broken as fuck, but it gave you huge flexibility in planning and manipulating your stats to purposefully set up powerful characters. FF7 let you use Mime and other Yellow Materia to set up interesti8ng chains of abilities (the most famous, though a relatively boring, example of course being Knights summon chaining). The question is whether this one will have any of that, or it'll become even more of a linear corridor shooter with 3 times as many FMVs.
