Squeenix Final Fantasy VII Remake Integrade - now on Steam

[Starwars]

I can't really judge the combat system based on these videos, I barely remember how the original felt to play. But one thing I do know from watching the video above is that I'm getting old because I really think there's too much audio/visual shit going on. Feels like it's going to give me a headache.

Also, the greatest crime of all... did they really remove the rockin, electric guitar feel from that boss battle music? What the fuck?

 

[Machocruz]

I can't really judge the combat system based on these videos, I barely remember how the original felt to play. But one thing I do know from watching the video above is that I'm getting old because I really think there's too much audio/visual shit going on. Feels like it's going to give me a headache.

It's not your age. Maybe the headache part. There is an indulgence in effects here. Not as much as a lot of Jap action games as sullynathan said, but still reveling in excess. This is what a lot of the fans of this kind of entertainment want and think is great action. Conditioned by manic films, anime, and games, they need sensory overload for it to register at all.

 

[Ysaye]

Rather than this, they should have just kept it simple and done a new Visual Novel with Aerith, a model manager sim maker thing with Sephiroth and Cloud and a Wii-fit style aerobics+boxing game with Tifa.

 

[Hyperion]

I don't recall seeing the party get interrupted while doing shit so it's not like you need to time your commands to get them off, you could still play just fine with gimped hands and reflexes.

Right here he gets whacked as he's using an ability. You see some damage go off (55?), but I'm not sure if that's the full hit, or some sort of follow up was cancelled.

Overall I'd still prefer FF10's system where everything had it's own delay and speed and animation times didn't matter, but I'm sure people would lose their shit over the remake not having some form of ATB.

Hard to say, but FF fans are the type to lap up anything SE throws at them with this game since they just wanted FF7 with modern graphics. FF10's combat was good, but fell apart at the end with it granting XP on an actions taken / kills gotten system when they gave so many ways to completely break the game with the endgame setups that XP was generally hoarded on the guy that had Auto-Haste on.

I'll still stand by the notion that FF12 had the series' best form of ATB since positioning finally mattered, multiple actions could take place at once (limited by initial ps2 hardware, but fixed in TZA), but you weren't mindlessly pressing attack buttons just to fill the void between ATB fills. Plus, Gambits still allowed you to customize party AI, which I assume (but have a feeling isn't) to be the case in this. Moving away from active vs wait as a form of difficulty and just giving us a super slo-mo form of ATB is kind of weak too. Like the company itself has forgotten what ATB is.

Being episodic, and charging people $150 - $180 just to experience the most popular game in the series with great graphics just leaves such a bad taste in my mouth I don't think there's any design decision that will convince me to buy it.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I think that 55 is the whole attack, he does the same move ~15 seconds later when he staggers the enemy and there's no follow up.

The episodic thing is weird. I can see it being justified this way: the game has been anticipated for so long and has so much hype around it, there's no way to do a remake of the whole game (which had a huge budget to begin with) and make it live up to expectations with a normal budget. Or release schedule for that matter. You can't just throw 10x more money at it and make a 10x bigger game in the same amount of time, and if the development takes too long it'll be outdated before it's even released. They've certainly got a better excuse than blizzard did with SC2.

OTOH doing a fairly basic remake where they just replace the shit 3D and leave all the nice backgrounds and don't change any mechanics wouldn't be such a huge undertaking and is something people have been begging for forever. I think they've always been afraid such a remake won't hold up to the nostalgia people have for it, and I think they're right. If they released such a game nowadays under a different name it'd flop hard.

So they've remade it as an action rpg with a kludged together turn based mode for people who want a nostalgia trip.

Honestly the only game ATB ever really made sense in was Chrono Trigger, since it let you give up some speed in exchange for doing double or triple techs. There's pretty much no reason to ever wait in a FF game, it introduces a ton of jank regarding turn orders and speeds, and animations have always taken so long that the time it takes to select a spell and a target is trivial even on the highest speed.

I am worried about the overworld/backtracking/exploration aspects of the game though. I don't see how they can make that work across episodes on consoles, unless they do something weird where the different episodes are functionally like swapping discs in the original.

 

[Steamboat Willie]

So this "episode" supposedly only covers the Midgar portion of the game, but in the trailers multiple summons are shown. In the original you didn't get any summons until you left Midgar, so that must be fucked up now.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well, one would hope it's going to take quite a bit longer to leave Midgar than in the original. It's not like the summons were plot devices or anything to begin with. They might add a character as well. I'm curious what they're planning on doing regarding balance/power creep by the time the later episodes roll around.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Yeah unlike 8 and 9 the summon has nearly 0 story relevance in 7. They are just there as tools to bomb the enemies.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Well, one would hope it's going to take quite a bit longer to leave Midgar than in the original. It's not like the summons were plot devices or anything to begin with. They might add a character as well. I'm curious what they're planning on doing regarding balance/power creep by the time the later episodes roll around.

This was from E3:

During a behind-closed-doors appointment with Square Enix for the Final Fantasy VII remake, producer and original Final Fantasy VII director Yoshinori Kitase gave a presentation about various aspects of the new game. As if to head off the inevitable questions about the remake's content split at the pass, Kitase remarked that the first game focuses just on the dystopian metropolis of Midgar and that, while limited to that city, it has as much content as any mainline Final Fantasy title.
​

Sounds like the Midgar section is normal FF length. Given what they've shown, I'm a little surprised some of those AVALANCHE members like Jessie aren't playable now.

 

[Shaewaroz]

Given what they've shown, I'm a little surprised some of those AVALANCHE members like Jessie aren't playable now.

It's cause they'll die before the party leaves Midgar. Snowflake gamers wouldn't accept losing playable party members permanently.

 

[Lyrique]

Given what they've shown, I'm a little surprised some of those AVALANCHE members like Jessie aren't playable now.

It's cause they'll die before the party leaves Midgar. Snowflake gamers wouldn't accept losing playable party members permanently.

True ,and we all know no playable party members permanently die in FF7 ...

 

[Damned Registrations]

Or FF6, or FF5, or FF4, or FF3...

Weird how they stopped doing that after FF7 when it was such an iconic thing.

 

[Shaewaroz]

Given what they've shown, I'm a little surprised some of those AVALANCHE members like Jessie aren't playable now.

It's cause they'll die before the party leaves Midgar. Snowflake gamers wouldn't accept losing playable party members permanently.

True ,and we all know no playable party members permanently die in FF7 ...

Yea, but there's a big difference between Aerith being killed by the main villain and Pigs, Wedge and Jessie all getting slaughtered by Shinra troops. Letting them all be playable characters would turn FF7 into a Tarantino film.

+ I'm sure there's going to be a Resurrect Aerith DLC available this time around.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Looking good. I hope Midgar offers a lot of content to explore. I hope you can visit the various sectors and pick up new side quests in the city. Open world Midgar would be sweet.

 

[Hyperion]

Given what they've shown, I'm a little surprised some of those AVALANCHE members like Jessie aren't playable now.

It's cause they'll die before the party leaves Midgar. Snowflake gamers wouldn't accept losing playable party members permanently.

True ,and we all know no playable party members permanently die in FF7 ...

Yea, but there's a big difference between Aerith being killed by the main villain and Pigs, Wedge and Jessie all getting slaughtered by Shinra troops. Letting them all be playable characters would turn FF7 into a Tarantino film.

+ I'm sure there's going to be a Resurrect Aerith DLC available this time around.

And that might just put it about on par with Final Fantasy 2 for party deaths. Mindwu, Josef, Scott, Ricard...I might even be missing one.

 

[Duraframe300]

Well, one would hope it's going to take quite a bit longer to leave Midgar than in the original. It's not like the summons were plot devices or anything to begin with. They might add a character as well. I'm curious what they're planning on doing regarding balance/power creep by the time the later episodes roll around.

This was from E3:

During a behind-closed-doors appointment with Square Enix for the Final Fantasy VII remake, producer and original Final Fantasy VII director Yoshinori Kitase gave a presentation about various aspects of the new game. As if to head off the inevitable questions about the remake's content split at the pass, Kitase remarked that the first game focuses just on the dystopian metropolis of Midgar and that, while limited to that city, it has as much content as any mainline Final Fantasy title.
​

Sounds like the Midgar section is normal FF length. Given what they've shown, I'm a little surprised some of those AVALANCHE members like Jessie aren't playable now.

Which is a fucking terrible idea when it comes to narrative pacing.

So, either its going to be a completly different story to begin with or we're left with the following two scenarios

- Midgar will feel like a drag

or

- The second part/rest of the game will be a rushed, disappointing mess.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I'm going to guess, completely different story. It'd be pretty fucking weird if the climax of the game was some random ass roller robot boss fight after a bike chase.

 

[Grimlorn]

Midgar was only about 10 hours in length IIRC in about a 60-70 hr game. I'm not sure how they could expand it and still make it good. Even 20 hours seems like it would be pushing it. I think they're full of shit about the length. No way is it going to be 40 hrs or whatever the typical FF game is these days.

 

[Hyperion]

Have fun watching 20 hours of unskippable cutscenes.

 

[Steamboat Willie]

Which is a fucking terrible idea when it comes to narrative pacing.

So, either its going to be a completly different story to begin with or we're left with the following two scenarios

- Midgar will feel like a drag

or

- The second part/rest of the game will be a rushed, disappointing mess.

I can see this happening. Production drags out and interest starts to wane in future chapters and resources are pulled from it. We end up with a situation like Jericho, where they're forced to wrap everything up quickly and we get an entire season's story arc crammed into a single episode.

Assuming all goes well though, did they state how many episodes are planned? If ep 1 ends after Midgar, what would others cover? Predicitons:

Episode 2 - Ends after either: Aeris dies (this is where Disc 1 of the original ended) or after the Northern Crater Scene.
Episode 3 - Rest of the game.

Unless they really pad shit out I don't picture them dividing it up any more than that.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Might be holding out to see how well it gets recieved before deciding whether to give it one or two more episodes. I agree more than that would be pushing it, Midgar has a lot of potential (especially if they pad it out with flashbacks and a bunch of side content) but it's not like the other towns in the game had a whole lot of detail to them for the most part, especially if they move a bunch of the story into Midgar as I'm guessing they'll do.

Have fun watching 20 hours of unskippable cutscenes.

Well at least that'll be faithful to the original then.

 

[sullynathan]

 

[mogwaimon]

If nothing else, the remake got the box art right.

 

[Modron]

Codex won't play this because it has Cloud's Sword in it.

 

[Deflowerer]

If nothing else, the remake got the box art right.

Nah, PAL and JP box art was superior.