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JP public, of course. No one cares what the baka gaijin think.
And to be honest, I'm not sure modern western Square fans would answer differently. Old farts aren't good slashfic material compared to troubled teens.
Funny thing, the suits aren't to blame for once. Square polled the public when XII was still on the drawing board, and the majority confirmed that they couldn't relate as much to an older main character.
Did they asked related, or played? You don't need to relate to Basch, you just need to be able to play with him. Considering a lot of pople used, Balthier, Fren, and Ashe, it frankly doesn't matter if people can relate to him or not.
Did they asked related, or played? You don't need to relate to Basch, you just need to be able to play with him. Considering a lot of pople used, Balthier, Fren, and Ashe, it frankly doesn't matter if people can relate to him or not.
Relate, since the majority wouldn't want him as the main character, but most FFs have a bunch of Cool Uncles as companions and no one complains. iirc, Vagrant Story also rustled some fundoshis because the hero is a 30-something married guy.
Also I just realized that if they had polled players from the entire world, Vaan would be a hulking, bald space marine sky pirate clad in armor from head to toe.
^ Apparently he WAS meant to be the main character, but the suits thought because some other game with an older hero sold poorly (And I doubt that game wasn't shit on its own merits) or something he should be ditched for a guy who does nothing.
Funny thing, the suits aren't to blame for once. Square polled the public when XII was still on the drawing board, and the majority confirmed that they couldn't relate as much to an older main character.
Doesn't excuse them from not switching to Balthier or Ashe as the main character. Hell, even Larsa was more mature than Vaan (and certainly more relevant to the story).
I did a LP of the insane difficulty patch but gave up about halfway through chapter 3, and that was with regularly consulting two friends of mine who practically eat, sleep, and breathe FFT. I don't recommend it unless you're a fan of pain and savescumming.
It's on my list. I read up on it some time ago and it sounded like FFXII on steroids.
As for Basch, he was supposed to be the main character. Then they interjected Matsuno and told him that he needs to add Vaan to appeal to their core audience. Basically after forcing him to change too much shit in the game he was supposed to write the story for he got fed up with Square and left the company. So he added Vaan as an afterthought and that's why he feels so tacked on to the story; because he is. Had he completely gotten his way with it all we would've had something even better.
We'll never have another good FF and we'll never get a sequel to Vagrant Story.
I remember hearing something about this. I thought the lead designer got ill or something and it was never completed by him the way he wanted. I remember also hearing that someone went to play it to promote it on the dev team and couldn't get past the title screen or something. They were so disappointed that it wasn't completed right.
So I been lurking the past few weeks wondering how everyone was getting on, and I find this awesome thread. As mentioned earlier in my Kodex life I have only played a few RPGs over only a short time period, but they have given me a lasting idle-time interest. Even though FF7 was not one of those games I just loved I would get an enhanced version on Steam just to see if I could raise a nostalgia playthrough in remembrance of the first and only one I had in winter 2009*.
* (I cheated my ass off with a 99 page walkthrough I foolishly spent a day printing out just because I originally hated the combat and just wanted to see the thing 100%ed. Now I look back on it as a not too bad story that I am indeed not confused by and I loved playing around with the crazy amounts of materia combinations. I just wished the AP growth for them was capped at 100 like six's magicite instead of all the grinding)
Just to be clear on what I meant: In principle, hoboelf is right. If the music was written directly in midi, or they haven't kept the recordings, then they will need to rerecord it, to make it sound better: There is just no way you can reliably and automatically convert from midi to another format in order to improve quality/make the sound richer, you will at the very minimum need a human interpretation. If they have higher quality recording, which they converted to midi however, then that is another matter.
Really? Show me a midi file that can give instructions to reproduce a song like: Let's say, just for the heck of it, 'codex' by radiohead, at the same level as a FLAC or uncompressed WAV file or even an MP3 on a very good sound system, and I'll give you a thousand euros, seriously.
The two biggest mistakes (imo) are that side quests get locked out when you progress the story and you don't complete them at a certain point, and by opening the very first chest you find in the game you'll be locked out of the best weapon in the game (there are more than just 1 chest you must not open to get the best weapon, and there is no way to know what chests they are unless you use a guide. Plus there are more items like this as well that you can be locked out of, this was only one example).
Well think about it. That chest is directly in front of the house of a person who helped you, isn't it his chest? Didn't he stored his equipment inside? Wouldn't be he pissed when you'd take it?
The only trouble could happen with these chests on the coast, they might belong to villagers nearby, they highly likely do, or to some pirate who would return for them, and curse you when he will found them opened. Not to mention, it looks weird, did you seen so many chests on one place like that? It smells like a trap, and if your greed would screw you up... too bad for you. Any chest in dungeon, or in that lab, is a free game. Go for them. These that are owned, or too many on one place and it look strange, shouldn't be opened. There is nothing in them you couldn't get by other means anyway.
1 chest + 1 chest + 9 chests that shouldn't be opened + 1 chest in dungeon which should be opened. That's 12 chests isn't it, exactly the same number as number of certain symbols... Well that weapon is called like it's called.
If you haven't played FF12 IZJS (international zodiac job system) you should do that. Much better than FF12 was, it creates a class system (instead of an everyone does everything system), rebalances a lot of loot and enemies (Zodiac spear for example is now a sidequest reward rather than the not opening chests bullshit), removes damage cap (uber-bosses are a easier to defeat without SAN loss), adds controllable summons/guests, button to speed up gameplay, etc. Basically a Japan-only special edition, but there is a patch to import English text. Voices are already in English because I dunno.
They removed damage limit, which made summons interesting in the remake. They added unique board for everyone, thus everyone was talented in different way. But they also allowed to control NPCs in party which is stupid. NPCs act as they act, deal with it.
From what I heard, Japanese have obsession with English, thus adding English voices, even when Japanese voice acting is superior, would be a bonus for them. Japanese brownnosing to west hurt them a lot, they even lost the competition as a regional power with China. Too little aggressiveness, too little militarization, too much hypocrisy, cost them theirs future.
But from what I remember of MIDI, it's just a standard for musical information. It is not a compression format like mp3 so it has nothing to do with quality of sound.
MIDI files on a computer are sheet music machine code with instructions on notes, aftertouch, effects usage and so on. They contain no sounds or samples, which is why they're so small.
gaudaost: instead of bubbling around let's get the facts right: MIDI is the music sheet in fileform and its quality is defined by the quality of the soundbank. Of course It will never sound as good as a recording of a studio session, but did you even hear MIDI files replayed by professional equipment with kickass soundbanks? And btw, the FF7 soundtrack played by an AWE64 sounded quite good.
Yeah. there is a logic to the chests thing, but no one would ever find out about this on their own, especially with the way the series (and jrpgs in general) encourage robbing houses, to the point where if a character DOES care about you barging into his house and nabbing his things, it's played for comedy. Like that time when you can choose to steal that kid's piggy bank on FF7, and if you don't he later uses the money to buy you a rare MP restoring item (but then you had a "Are you suuuuuuuure you wanna do that?" prompt, so you could see there was something else to it.)
I don't get why people get so hung up about the spear, though. You get it too early so it breaks the game's difficulty in half, and requirements so hilariously obscure that you wouldn't know about it unless you read it on Gamefaqs' Cheat section = Easter Egg for people who buy the official guide
Just to be clear on what I meant: In principle, hoboelf is right. If the music was written directly in midi, or they haven't kept the recordings, then they will need to rerecord it, to make it sound better: There is just no way you can reliably and automatically convert from midi to another format in order to improve quality/make the sound richer, you will at the very minimum need a human interpretation. If they have higher quality recording, which they converted to midi however, then that is another matter.
He is right. I had no idea what I was talking about on the subject matter of the specifics of how a MIDI files works. Let me write the actual difference, to make it a little clearer:
A MIDI file is a set of instructions to a MIDI-synthesizer, that then produces the exact wave forms, which serves as the instructions to be sent to the analog device. Whereas other media files stores the wave forms directly. Thus, a MIDI files is also significantly smaller in size. And in principle, those set of instructions can produce a wide variety of interpretations, and could certainly produce songs that are a lot more richer than the typical midi-synthesizer found in windows for example. Which of course shows that I was absolutely fucking wrong on this.
The question remains though, would that do anything good for the soundtrack? Maybe, but I have a feeling, that they would have to rerecord.
Really? Show me a midi file that can give instructions to reproduce a song like: Let's say, just for the heck of it, 'codex' by radiohead, at the same level as a FLAC or uncompressed WAV file or even an MP3 on a very good sound system, and I'll give you a thousand euros, seriously.
Those could surely be stored on the side. I wonder though, is there exists any synthesizer that could accurately reproduce the sound of a piano or a guitar, or indeed a human voice as well as a FLAC file which stores the wave form directly and very accurately, even if you could store the lyrics in a MIDI file. I'm thinking no, but I could be wrong, also about this
Nah. I just read wikipedia on the subject matter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI . Too late though, though I don't mind being wrong, that's how you learn best.
MIDI file is just a digital note spreadsheet. Sounds and quality of sound entirely depends on the device that produces them, not MIDI file.
Most people just use soundcards with crappy on-board FM synth (or Microsoft's crappy soundfont library) for in-game MIDI playback and then whine that MIDI sounds like shit. MIDI file has no sound of its own.
Here's what happens when you actually use something better.
Understood. Though it seems to me to have the following weakness; and that could be purely because of the current technology. As the sound is produced by a synthesizer, I would think that it can't recreate the sound of actual physical instruments, which are used to a large degree in modern games, that produce sound by creating pressure variations in the air that gets propagated as waves, to be recorded and stored directly, for examples as a WAV or FLAC. Though, as I said, I could be wrong, also on this.
gaudaost most of the music in hollywood movies today is not produced by a real orchestra either
Wyrmlord I dunno Wyrmie. It must be fourth or fifth time that I browse Codex and see you post some wikipedia-like bullshit irrelevant to reality or context of some thread
So was the final boss theme (One -Winged Angel, which rocks more when you have looked up what the Latin chanting is saying) the most impressive use of midi ever or wholly/partially recorded?
Also, FF6's opera scene did an awesome job of imitating voices that I haven't seen even attempted to replicate.
