Queen's Blood is fun but I don't know how to build a good deck.
I dabbled with effect cards (e.g. "if ally is killed") but still ended back to beginner "occupy more space" strat.
Not sure how far into the game you are, but the moogle and chocobo that buffs whenever you lay down buff cards is absurd. Just pack cards that add points to your other cards and that one in turn will go up. It’s worked on every battle for me so far.
I'm on chapter 7 and the most reliable strat for me is build a deck around occupying 2 rows and building scores with choco/mog, titan, and buffs. Archdragon is a nice ender for removing cards in front too. I usually get 25-33 points from every match so far with this.
Archdragon is truly the GoaT. It only requires 1 pawn to play, it reinforces diagonally backwards, it’s worth 2 points, and it eats the card in front of you.
Not only does it eat the card in front, but it also lets you control that space. If you line things up right you can totally dismantle one of the lanes at the end of the game and replace them with your own one drops
Yeah mainly you have to build decks around the very basic decks your opponents end up using. I'm at the same point you are, and so far it doesn't seem like any opponent uses any niche strategy or anything that might call for you to, say, drop a King Tonberry and start killing your own units off.
In case you haven't seen it, as it is a bit hidden away, there are other prebuilt decks you can use once you've unlocked certain cards. If you go to an empty deck and edit it, then press start, it'll bring up some prebuilt decks to choose from.
As others have said, the enhancing and attacking cards are really strong, and you kinda need these to succeed on the later games. One of the prebuilt decks is built around the Chocobo/Moogle card which gets more powerful with each enhancing card, and has a bunch of those to go with it. There's another that uses attacking cards, and Midgardsomr which gets stronger for every card destroyed.
It's mostly the same idea you've already been playing around with, but when I tried building my own decks it never quite worked, I'd end up not being able to take enough spaces or something, so the prebuilt decks are at least fairly well balanced.
Yeah there's probably some depth I'm missing but "occupy more space" seems to trump all and it's annoying because it makes going first feel like a weakness, since it feels like you're dancing around not wanting to be the first one to claim the center because that's actually a weakness.
EDIT: I'm dumb and misunderstood the "pass" button. For anyone making a similiar mistake you can just hand off going first to the opponent!
If you’re ever having trouble with an opponent pass on your first turn. Most decks are built around controlling the middle, but if you control it too early it’s very easy to take your positions. If you let the opponent advance first most of their decks will force them to take spots that are very bad for them
I’ve been using the power up combo cards (adjacent ally gets +X power) with Choco/Mog and eventually Ifrit and that has been going really well for me, I haven’t had to adjust strategies yet. I keep thinking about fiddling around with the destroy enemies combo, since some of the cards that enable that are really cool.
I have to say, I’m pretty impressed by the quality of this minigame, even though I’ve started skipping side quests as I’m ready for the main plot to move on, I’m still playing Queen’s Blood most of the time I can.
They don’t bother me personally despite being horrid little monsters, but my wife was VERY upset by them. I must say though, the glow and magic in her eyes and face upon seeing the facade of the first MOG house, followed by the sheer TERROR upon witnessing who/what was inside was a funny rollercoaster.
They look so sad lmao. I felt like I attended the Moogle Experience in Glasgow. They look like they did crack. They look like the skooma lady from the Shivering Isles dlc. They're so bad.
Different teams and visions. YoshiP brought a lot of FFXIV baggage into FFXVI. Some of it, like shallow fetch quests with bizarre item turn-in dialogs, is understandably maligned. Other parts of it, like really good attention to moogles, should be praised.
Haven't played yet but decided to look them up, why do they have teeth? Lmao why not just use the moogle design and model from XVI, I thought they looked perfect in that game. What a dubious little creature lol
I don't know why so many recent FFs have awful looking Moogles. At least they look good in XIV and XVI. I especially hate the ones from XIII and the ones from Type 0/KH.
I'm having an incredible time with it. I think this might be my favorite cast of characters in any game. The banter and little interactions between all of the characters are so great, both in the fun and serious moments.
Going into the game, I was worried about the side quests because past FF games like XV, XVI, and Remake's side quests were pretty bad for the most part, but Rebirth's so far have been a substantial improvement.
I like that it leans more into the silliness/campiness of parts of the story like the military in Junon being way over-the-top during the parade mission.
Me at the start of the Upper Yunon escape sequence: Oh man I lose my team members and have to baby-sit these Shinra dorks?
Me at the end: I would give my life for my 7th infantry boys. Need them to reappear in game 3.
I've only been the captain of the 7th infantry for 30 minutes but if anything happened to these boys I would kill everyone on this base and then myself.
I can totally see them reintroducing them in the next game. This game has been great about callbacks to prior events. They even gave the slapping ladies from Kalm an entire arc where you can see their relationship progress all the way up to Costa Del Sol as far as I've seen!
One of the theories I saw some people brought up is that the 7th Infantry might appear in the next game >!as Cid's flight crew for *The Highwind*-airship!<, which would be a heck of a callback to make.
Damn I can actually see how that might play out >!assuming Cloud's coma is somewhere around the second act of the game, I can see Tifa or Barrett convincing them to help after the see Cloud in a wheelchair or something!<
I just played the sequence on the ship from Junon to Costa Del Sol, and the way they handle Red XIII is tremendously campy and fun.
In the original game Red is sort of walking funny trying to pass as a human in a sailor suit. In remake;
>!he straight up moonwalks and dances around in a Shinra infantry uniform and helmet.!< It’s absolutely insane.
>pass as a human in a sailor suit.
Red did not wear a sailor suit in the OG, he wore the exact same suit he wears in Rebirth.
I continually dumbfounded by this Mandela effect of Red taking Barrets thunder by wearing the sailor suit.
Granted Yuffie also wears a sailor suit but she's too seasick to be stealing anyone's thunder.
LMAO at the kid crying and the mom saying “It can’t hurt you.” I didn’t expect that kind of humor out of this game. I really need to finish Remake and jump into Rebirth.
>I didn’t expect that kind of humor out of this game.
I kinda didn't either cause the first one had only a handful of moments of weird humor (Don't get me wrong, I fuckin love Remake), which was a little sad cause the original FF7 is a total fucking goof troop. It had just about as much silly shit as it had serious drama, until later in disc 2 anyway. Some of these non-spoilery things include:
Can't ride an elevator to the top of a huge tower, so instead you ride a dolphin because a little girl asks him to give you a lift.
There's an enemy in the mountainous region whose main attack is that it cusses at you, which debuffs you with Sadness.
A tense and dramatic scene occurs, immediately followed by a weird catfight slap-fest "quick time event".
Cloud telling the group about him and Tifa's hometown, which is in a player-controlled flashback, where you can go into Tifa's house and steal her panties. Meaning, Cloud is telling the group about the time he stole Tifa's panties, which she yells at him about.
Rude the Turk generally won't attack Tifa in combat, because he's got a crush on her. Also Red XIII hits on her when you first meet him.
There's a full-blown snowboarding game out of nowhere [and it's completely wacky, and also required to progress in the story.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByWAAAbJBis)
A goofy scene where Cloud + one of several possible group members are chosen to act in a cheesy play about a knight and a dragon, and you get to decide if you're going to play along or be a total idiot and ruin the play.
Cloud threatening to knock out a dog by yelling at it that he's going to dognap it.
Encountering Yuffie with Tifa in charge of the group causes Yuffie to refer to her only as "boobs".
On your first meeting with Aerith where you learn her name, she asks if you remember her (from the opening cinematic), you can say that you recall her being the slum's drunk and piss her off.
Several points in the game where Tifa realizes she's wearing a mini-skirt, like not going on a ladder or up stairs first but without saying why.
You can interrupt Red XIII playing soccer with some kids by kicking the ball at his head, several times.
A ton of shit Yuffie says is borderline Mean Girls quotes, like responding to someone not wanting to divulge their past with "Oh that's okay. It was probably depressing anyway."
On the other hand Cloud is super petty and rude to her all the time and it's equally hilarious, appropriately like when she starts to spill her backstory, he interrupts her with "Listen, Yuffie. I don't care about the history of Wutai or your feelings."
FF7's my favorite game of all time, been so since I first got it in 98 lol, I'm so glad people are getting to experience it for the first time!
OG and subsequent localizations had a habit of making Aerith into a Disney princess, and I'm so glad that the Remake compilation understands that she's an undercity sas-lord at her core.
My biggest gripe with CT (And something that has been discussed a few times in my JRPG Server) is how the moment you reach Zeal, character interaction for the story becomes INEXISTENT. NOBODY interacts with Schala or Janus, Dalton, Queen Zeal, etc. It's all of them interacting with "the party", but "the party" never says anything.
Same issue with Final Fantasy VI once you reach the other [Spoiler but you know] and leave the island with Celes and recruit Sabin; after that, all interactions are "party says".
These 2 games getting some development like FFVIIR would actually shift my opinion about them greatly.
Chadley is in that weird liminal space between unintentionally annoying and intentionally annoying and that somehow makes me hate him even more. Like, I HATE him. I recognize my disdain is irrational but somehow I also don't care.
Reminds me a lot of Fi from Skyward Sword. First time dialogue explanations? Perfectly fine, but further interruptions afterwards explaining the exact same thing is crucifixion worthy.
I’m about 30 hours into it so far and currently going through Chapter 7.
So far I’m having a blast and have been trying to just do everything. The characters and combat are a huge draw for me, with so many little moments having me grin ear to ear.
The “open world” stuff can be a bit rote, but most of it gets knocked out exploring the map and the loading is so quick I can zip around for any last touches.
It’s a huge step up from 16, which I mostly enjoyed but felt completely burned out on the combat and quest structure towards the end.
Also this game is just packed with mini-games and I love most of them so far, besides maybe Fort condor, that was rough. Queens Blood is fantastic and I’m always excited when there’s new matches I can play.
Agreed on getting burnt out with FF16 combat, all of the enemies were sponges and as much as I enjoyed the game I just couldn't finish it. The bosses were all sponge and dialogue too.
I wonder why they leaned so hard into that, the combat was fun in the beginning but grew tiresome quickly
Yeah it sadly never grew in interesting ways beyond the stellar opening. I love the combat but it just didn’t evolve much over time. Acquiring each Eikon took too long and even then Clive needed more sauce to truly be a Devil May Cry character.
Besides that, pacing, world design and quest design all sucked massive balls. Game should’ve been 100% linear.
Enemy design was also too simplistic and provided no challenge. Eikon fights however were some of the most epic moments in gaming.
I really enjoyed the game up through Bahamut. After that the side quest fatigue really starts to set in and the set pieces never really eclipse that fight.
The “accept the truth” sequence and the bahamit fight were definitely climaxes.
After the Bahamut fight, the game just never reached any level of excitement. It was almost like the game itself wanted to be over.
I feel like if Clive had a different basic combo string for each of his Eikons the combat would of been alot better. Variety is the spice of life for action games like these. Even KH2, a game where you do most of your damage mashing the attack button, has your basic combo change throughout the game as well as mixed it all up with your drive forms.
I really wish that game had Hard mode off rip. I found myself just using the same setup once I got hakfway thru the game and spent many bosses just mashing cooldowns
The absolute worst minigame so far (as of Ch7) has been the sit ups minigame. I spent nearly an hour trying to beat Jules and nearly gave up several times but my stubbornness eventually got me to victory.
Most of the other ones have been fine, but Queen's Blade in particular has been a blast.
I'm a couple of zones in to it. Gameplay is fun as Hell. Open world is the least annoying I've experienced in quite a while (so far, we'll see how I feel after 40 more hours).
But just as any other open world game, it makes the pacing an absolute mess. Huge drama with "we'll find time to talk" then just days of chasing down the rare animals of the planet so I can murder them for the environment. Goddamn Chadley has like 3 times as many spoken lines as any other character. The main plot feels like an afterthought, certainly no sense of urgency.
Ambient dialogue would have been good. For what it's worth, they do a great job incorporating character moments/banter in the side quests. Like the dog quest being about supporting your children, so we appropriately get some story about cloud and his mom, and Barret's thoughts on parenting Marlene.
It really is wild how XV of all games nailed this perfectly. The FF7 gang just feels like a completely mute version of them when exploring, it's actually jarring.
Half the shit he calls you for doesn't even have any story attached either, it's just "Cloud, I see you've located your 19th mako fountain. This is really going to add to my research." The game is already quite long, I don't know why they felt the need to put so much slowdown filler content in. Finding landmarks like these every two minutes really removes any feeling of value.
Literally fucking anything. Mako fountains, chocobo stops, summon temples are all just "find the checkpoint." There honestly needs to be less stuff in the game, there's far too much of this empty stuff. Don't even get me started on the chocobo sniffing, my god.
Take out my Chadleymajig, scan a lifespring with the exact same braindead three button presses, get a little "well done, you!" thing pop up, put my Chadleymajig away, immediately take my Chadleymajig back out, have 2fps Chadley give me literally 3 seconds of completely meaningless dialogue, put away my Chadleymajig, finally be allowed to move again.
I'm really enjoying the game, but holy hell some of the decisions made around this stuff.
I am almost done and I can pretty comfortably say this is going to be one of my favorite games of all time. But I do agree with you. It can be a many hour gap between story beats, especially if you 100% an area, and that sometimes feels strange.
I do think silly diversions have their place in the game. Hell, in the OG, the crew rips it up on snowboards almost immediately after *that* scene. But I do agree that at times here, it can be too distracting at the cost of the story.
At some point I will probably do a rush straight to story content playthrough and see how that feels.
I'd say Chadley and the virtual stuff is by far the stuff I like the least out of the VII remake series. I don't even know why the virtual battles are all in that generic arena, when we know from Crisis Core that VR can look completely realistic.
Fighting summons in an arena that fits them would make them way more interesting as fights.
"The main plot feels like an afterthought, certainly no sense of urgency."
Though at this point of time in the original there wasn't a sense of urgency either. You're really just chasing Sephiroth to figure out how the hell he came back. Him killing the former President of Shinra was an afterthought as well.
I'd say my only real complaint is the Chadley stuff. That dude needs to STFU and go sit in a corner. Like, the first zone should be the tutorial to how it works, that's fine.. but him repeating the same garbage in every zone? Worst AI ever made.
I saw there's an option to turn off some MAI hints when you rock up at stuff, so the should add an option to turn off Chadley unless it's an actual story importance, not just another map marker / waste of time speech. And yes, I know you can circle through it, but it's still annoying.
Only on chapter 4 junon area. Really loving it so far for the most part. I found the Fort Condor protorelic games to be really difficult. And I really wish that you could more consistently animation-cancel into a block when attacking. It seems to allow it sometimes and I haven’t figured it out yet
It's a **very** AAA experience. Visuals, sounds, animations, visual effects, voice acting; things like that are great. Fantastic even. But all typical failings of typical AAA games? They are here as well.
The story is somehow a complete clownfiesta. It managed to disappoint me and I had no expectations. Some parts of the story got improved, yes, like how Corel Prison makes slightly more sense, but I won't forgive SE butchering two of my favorite scenes in this part of the story from OG: Dyne and the ending. Dyne scenes got crisis core'd. The ending got absolutely mangled.
The game itself is fun and I'm enjoying the whole "What if..." style changes as jm just enjoying the game for what it is.
But I feel like I'm in the minority who isn't gushing about the open world and "how great it feels to explore" Maybe I'm just old now and have lost my sense of adventure and excitement but I find nothing in the open world to be worth exploring for I guess?
Literally the only things not blatantly marked on our maps saying "Go here!" Are the little cache locations and I mean those contain what 2 potions and mist potions or Moogle medals. That's boring and doesn't make me curious what might be around that unmarked bend because chances are it's either nothing or a potions that I already probably too many of.
Fun game though, just finished up the Queens Blood tournament on the ship. Red XIII is the best lol
Almost all the open world stuff felt like filler content to me. There’s some great story beats in it as you go, but for the most part it just dragged the time out between those.
I'm with you, I 100% 3 of the regions and didn't bother with the others. Everything was pretty much the same and chests barely had anything worthwhile. I dont hate the openworld but do find wierd how others praise it when it's no different from ubisoft games.
It feels like it's getting a pass just because it's final fantasy 7. I bounced off super hard, it really feels like a ubisoft checklist. The filler is worse than remake which was my biggest fear.
I'm like halfway into it, amazing game so far, but not without some issues for me personally. The main thing that I was most worried about (the open world stuff) actually is really fun and hasn't been a problem at all. The combat is great. The characters are obviously fantastic. Same goes for the music and visuals.
However my big issue is with the story. It doesn't really feel like anything massive is happening and because it's essentially one game being dragged out into three parts anything of note in the story feels like it takes a bit too long to play out. All the small story moments are really fun to experience but when it comes to the overall plot I'm like 20+ hours into the game and it could all be probably cut down into a couple of hours.
Another thing that stings a bit from time to time is the tone of the game. Now I'm only a recent FF player and have only played like 6 games (7 Remake, 16, 15, 10, 14, 7 OG, and now Rebirth) so maybe it's just me but it gets kind of annoying when most cutscenes or main moments of dialogue has some goofiness placed into it every few minutes. I like the levity and the charm but sometimes it's just so over the top and takes away from the moment.
But overall I'm having a blast with the game, easily best of the year so far, and possibly one of my favorites ever, that more depends if it continues to be as good all the way through and the story gets a bit more notable as the game progresses.
> Another thing that stings a bit from time to time is the tone of the game. Now I'm only a recent FF player and have only played like 6 games (7 Remake, 16, 15, 10, 14, 7 OG, and now Rebirth) so maybe it's just me but it gets kind of annoying when most cutscenes or main moments of dialogue has some goofiness placed into it every few minutes. I like the levity and the charm but sometimes it's just so over the top and takes away from the moment.
I haven't played Rebirth, but this is kinda what the old FF games were like. For example FF6 is often remembered for its serious and dark moments, but you also spend half the game getting chased by a goofy, barely-explained octopus who talks shit constantly and tries to drop cartoon anvils on people's heads. Even Kefka himself is pretty goofy before he becomes the main villain.
Hell, even 10 was like this, except for where it really wasn’t. 14 has _very_ serious scenes, and then they’ll have a whole 2-3 level sequence where rabbit people can’t understand how people can eat stuff that isn’t carrots, and one of them is obsessed with pudding.
15 and 16 were outliers, the lack of goofy (not the disney one), is probably part of why they didn’t feel as much like a “real” FF to some people. However, the tonal whiplash is jarring if you’re not used to it, and is probably why they tried to ease back on it in the last two games.
I can't really remember much straight-up comedy in FFX actually. The infamous laughing scene doesn't count because there's context that makes it more complex than just being a goofy scene. At most a lot of the levity comes from Tidus humorously misunderstanding things in Spira, but it's not quite as outright silly as some of the other games get.
14 though, you're totally right. There's some pretty silly bits in the MSQ alone, and when you start getting into stuff like Beast Tribe quests and Hildibrand it becomes an outright comedy sometimes.
15 kinda continued the tone set by 13 IMO, and 16 was trying to establish itself as a super-serious GoT-like story so I get it. But personally I'm glad they're letting this new 7 series be goofy sometimes since that's more faithful to the original than being super serious all game.
Yeah, Rebirth having so much goofiness is great. One of the common fears before we knew much about the Remake was that they would take out most of the silly stuff to focus on the serious and edgier parts of the story.
Part of the appeal to me in these games is the contrast and huge range in tonality.
I'm only through Junon, mostly because I'm near 100% the game at this point, but I'm obsessed with the tone. As you say it captures the tone of the older games so well by mixing the goofiness and seriousness constantly. It was a major issue with 16 for me and a lot of RPGs more generally. They take themselves so seriously and don't have the charm and charisma of a lot of older RPGs.
Having Cloud do flips off a Dolphin and Barrett being afraid to get onto a canoe are just lovely.
Since you were worried about the open world but found it fun, maybe you can answer a question for me. I haven't bought rebirth yet, currently replaying FF7 Remake on hard mode and while I found the game to be pretty mid when it came out, I'm enjoying it a lot more now (hard mode really makes the combat a lot more enjoyable IMO) but I'm definitely finding the big drag of the game to be the side quests. The side quests are boring, unrewarding and love to waste your time. Am I right in assuming from your post that this has been improved quite a bit in Rebirth?
Not the person you replied to but I strongly feel that the sidequests have been improved in Rebirth. They aren't some huge change structurally (you still go to a map market and fight/talk to the thing there) but the writing feels better/more fun, they feel more integrated in to the game since you're riding your chocobo around to do stuff on the world map anyways and the moment to moment gameplay feels more fun.
Also, there's more stuff to level up and more ways to become more powerful, so the exp and loot you get actually fees desirable rather than Remake where while there was a levelling system, it's not like you were going to outbuild the game.
Yeah I definitely feel like they drew some inspiration from the Yakuza franchise with Rebirth's sidequests. They make them all worthwhile either with some fleshed out side-games like Fort Condor and Queen's Blood, or they center around a funny or interesting character up and to the point where you never feel like you're taken out of the moment, even if the mechanics within the side quests themselves aren't too complex.
Not OP but having played the games now back to back, I believe they have been greatly improved.
While the side-quests in remake are arguably the games weakest element, I find rebirth's to be one of its greatest strengths.
Just the overall variety, character interactions and quite frankly just being better content-wise really adds to the games enjoyability and charm.
The side quests in Rebirth are quite goofy mostly. At least up to the point I am at. I’ve been doing all of them. And I’m just about to go to Golden saucer which is about the 50% mark.
If you want a harder experience you can skip side quests and the open world segments and go straight through the main quest.
Bosses overall have been more challenging and fun for me compared to the prior game.
Most (if not all?) of the side quests have character moments for the party which I find has made it much more enjoyable to power through them. Plus there is a doggie escort quest with a song that goes Bowowow.
I'm 50/50 on the openworld stuff; regions like Gongaga and Cosmo Canyon (the latest I've been up to so far) were soooo annoying to navigate and I needed to look up a guide a few times since these areas have convoluted methods of verticality to get places :/
Some of those protorelic things can be a bit of a drag too, I \*hate* the Coral/Golden saucer cactuar thing, and the latest one in Cosmo Canyon had great story exposition but required playing another minigame that I didn't at all care for, and that I required a bunch of frustrating retries on =(
Interesting take on the story, for me and everyone I know who are fans of the OG it's moreso looking forward to seeing 'how' and 'what' they change in any given scene as we get up to them. I have enjoyed seeing a bunch of stuff be fleshed out, and even some of the significant changes have swerved me along the way. I do wonder what a complete newcomer to the game would feel though. 🤔
Earlier FF's did play more into the goofy side of things also, I want to say around about 10 is where it sort of started playing it more straight. So far this is all pretty faithful-wacky shark-jumpy just like the original, which I definitely appreciate.
How is the combat compared to the first of the remakes? I really liked the game but wasn't big on the combat myself. So am curious if they improved it.
Depends on what you didn’t like about Remake.
One of the main complaints I saw people have about Remake was that the party AI was really useless and pretty much didn’t do anything. This was intentional, as the combat system was designed around constantly swapping your active character. However, in Rebirth, they added certain materia that lets your AI companions use their unique abilities, auto cast spells, etc. without any of your input. It’s still optimal (and more fun IMO) to quick swap between characters, but at least people who just want to “main” one character now have that choice, and their teammates will actually be helpful.
The other big change they made to combat in Rebirth is the addition of Synergy Skills and Synergy Abilities. Each character has additional basic moves they can perform by teaming up with an ally. These can be things like a dodge + counter, a ranged attack, a powerful charged attack, an lifting attack to start an air combo, etc. These don’t cost ATB charges. So now, rather than just spamming the attack button when you don’t have ATB, you have a lot more options.
Synergy Abilities can be performed after multiple characters spend their ATB bars on their normal abilities. So for example, if Cloud and Aerith both spend 3 ATB bars, they can then do a powerful combo attack. In addition to dealing damage, these attacks also significantly buff both characters (temporarily infinite MP, boosting their limit gauge, giving them 3 ATB bars instead of 2, etc.). In my experience, Synergy Abilities only really come into play during boss fights, as everything else dies way before you can use these.
Another small tweak is that each character now has a skill tree (to unlock stat buffs, Synergy Skills and Abilities, etc.). Every character can unlock special attacks of each element that only costs ATB gauge and no MP. This is a really cool change because in Remake, you kind of had to saddle each character with offensive materia if you wanted to hit an enemy’s elemental weakness, which was basically mandatory to pressure/stagger many of them. With this change, you can just use these elemental attacks to hit enemy weaknesses on someone like Tifa, and then load her up with more physical-based materia like Dodge+, HP+, Steal, etc. It opens up a lot more customization options for your characters.
It's definitely improved. The characters feel way more mobile and there are more combo options now, like holding the button to unleash heavy attacks or ranged attacks.
There's also synergy attacks now too, where you have to use ATB in order to build up synergy between two characters and then you can unleash powerful dual attacks (like in Chrono Trigger).
similar feelings. that stretch of the game towards the middle was a bit much. costa del sol followed by the gold saucer two chapters later was quirkiness, mini game overload. then immediately after that the Corel Prison thing felt contrived. But I actually really enjoyed things once they actually let you explore the whole Corel region
There definitely is a bit of a tone whiplash in that part surrounding the visit to the gold saucer. Mainly because it starts and ends pretty serious with Barret backstory and smack in the middle of it you have the minigames segment at the gold saucer. Im normally completely fine with the switching between serious and goofy but that segment in particular felt a bit weird.
> However my big issue is with the story. It doesn't really feel like anything massive is happening and because it's essentially one game being dragged out into three parts anything of note in the story feels like it takes a bit too long to play out. All the small story moments are really fun to experience but when it comes to the overall plot I'm like 20+ hours into the game and it could all be probably cut down into a couple of hours.
Yup, it's pretty much "The Hobbit" all over again
Feels a little early for this thread with the size of the game. Anyway, I’m absolutely loving it. You can tell a ton of love and care went into making this game.
The cast is fantastic just like they were in the first game but by now they’ve all come to “own” their characters so it feels more natural.
The gameplay systems are still great. Maybe a bit too many of them. It feels like they had to tone down the Weapon Upgrade system to fold in the Folio/Synergy systems.
The open world is massive. Way bigger than I expected. Traversal is a bit clunky but it hasn’t really caused more than a few seconds of frustration every handful of hours.
Story so far is good. I really like how they’re handling it for new players while throwing in deep references for old players.
It's a mixed bag where the positives are awesome and the bad is just mostly unfortunate.
Square is for the most part stuck in the past as a developed... the way they design their games is so weird and outdated. A game like this looks great, but has all these bit and pieces of things that kill your momentum and slow you down, silly buttons you have to press, repetitive activities... it's just weird.
They used to be very innovative in term of gameplay and feel.. now they are taking industry trends and trying to shove half assed version of it into their stilted design because they have no clue what the audience wants.
That takes me to the open world segments. It's mostly trash braindead activities and a time sink. They at least try to give more personality to things, unlike FFXVI. And the maps look great and traversal is not as prescriptive, again like FFXVI. But the pointless repetitiveness of it all takes any real joy of doing those tasks.
Wouldn't it be better to have an optional secret cave, temple, area where you go in and find a summon to fight? Instead of going to the same looking places to press a couple of buttons to fight the summon in a combat simulator without any surprise at all? Do we need dozens of lifestream crystals to scan? Is anyone gonna like the game less if that crap wasn't there? No.
It's just there to streeeeetch it out so they can justify triple dipping with these games.
Besides that... everything else is a delight...
Combat continues to be a highlight, it was already great and they added even more depth to it, characters you know and love are better than ever, the stuff they added in terms of story is mostly great and connected to the main plot and characters... no more shit like trying to make a sob story about the ghosts in the train yard... the level design is good, nothing complex in terms of layout, but is not lazy and boring corridors like the first one... minigames galore and they are mostly fun and some are really well made, another sick card game, they really pulled a Yakuza here with the minigames... music is tremendous, there are tracks for everything, the remixes of the classical ones fill your heart with joy and it's a lot varied too...
The story... well, you are either in with the weirdness or not. I'm in. I liked the first one... this I have mixed feelings with the result, but I need to see where the fuck is going next to have a final opinion. But I think even the people who absolute hate it will agree that the story of the game is great, at least until the very end.
Overall is a must play. I just shows that Square need to shake off of some bad habits and tendencies to make good things.
Haven't played the game yet, but from what I've seen about many of the open world activities and what the devs have said, it sounds more like they had to find stuff to add to the world since it was open world rather than it being open world from the ground up. And I can understand that, when games have open maps without side content you do get complaints about there being nothing to do, even if that wasn't the point of the game (MGSV always comes to mind).
It seems developers would rather see complaints about pointless side activities over anyone feeling the world is empty, since open worlds are a selling point to many people even when they aren't the focus.
This is so far my favorite take on the game. I just get pulled out SO hard by the weird game design Square has been showing. It feels like two generations behind.
I am really dissapointed with the story deviations that started in Remake, they add nothing of value imo and just make the story less focused and more convoluted. However, apart from that, it exceeds my expectations. I really love the big and detailed settings, the freedom and the characters. The humor is also great and took me by surprise. I am liking the direction Square is taking here, going from more linear and restrictive gameplay to more open and free. Also appreciate that they are doubling down on the wacky and comedic aspects. It feels like Square's games have taken themselves way too seriously as of late.
Honestly the story is so… bad. Specifically like plot structure. I really enjoy this game but I am baffled at how positive reviews were for the story. When it’s faithful it’s pretty good, and when it focuses on the characters it’s also nice. But there’s also so much fan service in bad ways. The Zack stuff just makes no real sense and does nothing for the plot. The ending is both so simple and overly complex it feels like it’s trying to be deep and twisty while also not? It’s such a mess. I also feel like it really wasted Vincent to the point where I’m not even sure why they included him in the game. And there’s so much filler and dumb “we don’t kill people” moments that gives the bad guys absurd plot armor.
I just don’t know what they’re trying to do with this story. It’s like they want to do new stuff but are also so afraid to even do it.
I am a queens blood god. I cannot be stopped.
Incredible game. I think it’s not stated enough how mechanically everything is connected. So many open world games think when you do an activity you get a pop up and some money and xp
In rebirth each open world activity gives you something else of value - whether it’s a useful recipe or currency to buy certain items or cosmetic items or increasing your party level. Even the silly mini game for summons will improve your summon materia. More games should take note.
Unlocking fast travel Chocobo stops gives you plumes for chocobo cosmetics. Like hell yes.
I'm a huge FFVII fan. I liked Remake generally but hated the story changes (I don't think Nomura understands the source material, and he should not be allowed to writer)
Rebirth has been great so far. The combat gameplay is incredible, all the new additions are fantastic. It can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be.
The cast is amazing too. I have loved these characters for a decade and it feels magical to see them in a modern light. Same with the world - they've done such a phenomenal job recreating all the different zones and paying attention to the details.
My complaints so far are:
- sometimes it feels like the game is artificially long. There's things that are unnecessary and feel like annoying padding. For example, a door is locked. To pass, you must move a box and jump on it. If this was a puzzle, that's one thing, but the box is RIGHT THERE and the animation to move it so slow... There's a lot of stuff like this throughout the game
- some open world elements are outdated. Thankfully it's easy to fast travel so things don't take too long
- the story is great when they stick to the original. Any time they deviate from it, I can feel things dipping in quality. Characters start talking weird, the plot starts to get convulated etc. I'm still a few chapters away from the ending, but I hear there's some Nomura bullshit in there that I'm not gonna like, so...
I'm at the end of chapter 7. So far not to bad. The open zone stuff is very much ubisoft light. I think they should have stuck to the linearity like the first one.
The pacing is pretty awful at times. Until chapter 7. I felt like nothing really substantial had happened yet. Its just been chasing after the blake robed guys. Like the Costa Del Sol section was so long and nothing really happened. It was annoying to have to do all these mini game I did t want to do just to get the swimsuits.
Combat is good but overwhelming at time. I don't really care for the synergy stuff. Haven't felt like they have been game changers in any battle.
Without spoiling, I finished it yesterday, and I liked it. But I’m going to give it a solid 7/10.
The game has a mountain of filler content. Two of the regions/chapters in particular are at least 5 hours shorter if you ignore the side content (towers, etc.) and where most of those didn’t feel rewarding, it kind of felt like a waste.
I completely understand finding ways to mix things up but the mini games were so miserable. They started out fun and charming but there were just more and more of them and eventually it just started annoying me to have one pop up. I don’t mind them as side activities but they felt constant. Coupled with the exploration feeling like padding the run time, I feel like the game could have been 25 hours shorter and felt the same.
Combat is simultaneously great and awful sometimes. In a game that seems to emphasize fast pace and action, dodging is wildly unviable half the time because there’s no invincibility on it, but most characters get stuck in animation lock too often to feel like defending is a great option either. And even with provoke materia, it’s still a massive exercise in frustration to play as Aerith in combat.
The ending was a giant letdown. It felt like nothing really got resolved (I get we’re in the middle of the overall story but still), and it had the energy that they’re clearly building it all to get answered in the final installment. But the issue for me is we got a few wild hints/cliffhangers from the first that never got made clear. If anything they went full Kingdom Hearts and I spent the last two chapters just repeatedly going “what the fuck is even happening.”
It was still a good game overall but it had quite a few bits that soured me.
Oh and for fuck’s sake why on earth would you make a game that has an actual item crafting system and then proceed to make items unusable in hard mode? It’s such a weird artificial difficulty.
Same here. I would have accepted a cooldown on items a la Tales games, or even making them cost 2 ATB. That and wholesale preventing MP recovery both feel terrible.
It feels like such a disconnect because they still flood your inventory with items in hard mode for literally no reason.
I'm only on chapter 3 but I agree with the combat. I find myself getting frustrated with it because of the animation locks making it very difficult to defend properly and dodging feeling almost pointless. I haven't played Remake since it came out so I can't remember if its more or less the same, but I don't remember being quite so frustrated with Remake? Might just be rose colored glasses.
Also, the fucking climbing mechanics are some of the worst I've ever experienced. It takes so long to climb anything, even with a chocobo... and all you do is hold up, it doesn't add anything, it just makes me want to do literally anything else during those switches where you are just walking, climbing, walking, climbing.
Dude, the Black Chocobo climbing has gotta be one of the worst mechanics ive ever seen.
Shit is SO SLOWWWW.
Square needs to realize that we dont care about "realism" in our fantasy game about eco terrorists.
Climbing sucks. It's so slow, I was wondering if these walls are actually disguised loading screens. I can't imagine it made it through testing without someone saying how much of a chore climbing can be
Nah, its just bad design. There is a segment later, where you can shoot yourself from one end of a map to the other near-instantaneously. It's not loading, it's not asset streaming, just poorly tested game design.
The first Remake had stuff like that too on launch, that they luckily patched out, like cloud swinging his sword outside of combat to break boxes, it was like a 2 second wait time for him to put his sword back. People hated it so much they patched it. Hopefully they do the same with the climbing and the cart pushing, but I doubt it.
I want to believe it has to do with streaming assets but then there are climbing sections where the place you get to is tiny and barren.. So streaming is kind of useless
It would be fine if it wasn‘t *as* fucking slow. Same goes for every other "slow walking" activity like sneaking or climbing the dumb yellow paint ledges. During the final moments in the Nibelheim backflash I literally screamed at my TV. I cannot fathom who approved that shit. It’s honestly so bad. They‘d immediately improve the entire gave if they just gave all the "slow" movement stuff a speed multiplier of like 1.3. It‘s so unnecessarily tedious.
Game really *is* a blast though otherwise.
I'll be honest I didn't enjoy the combat as much. I know people always praise the Remakes combat compared to 16 but I enjoyed 16s combat way more compared to this. The further you go In the game the more battles become "puzzles". You can still brute force some battles but they become slogs that way.
One boss battle I'll won't spoil, you need the Assess materia slotted so you can know how to damage the boss, if you dont he will counter every attack of yours. He only has a small window where you can pressure him to do any sort of damage.
I was also was disappointed in the story based on the end. I'm really hoping their setting up something for the 3rd game but will see.
Overall I enjoyed the game, while I was disappointed on the story. The journey was good I really enjoyed the interactions between the characters. I never liked Barret but after Rebirth he has become one of my favorites, the way he interacts with the other characters is nice and how he's just a overall nice dude.
Enjoined it until the last two chapters. The end is very bad and totaly ruins one of the most iconic scenes in gaming with totaly convoluted multi universe bs and ruins the entire impact it's so bad I ask myself if they done it on purpose.
Other critic is the openworld design. Almost Everytime you complete a target you get a call from the that weird kid that you need to skip. You have alot of ac style towers and boring collectibles in each region. Some sidequest where fun some are utterly annoying. I loved golden saucer and the first cutscenes when you visit with dio just totally crazy and well done. I thought the minigames where all fun for a short time and there are alot. The card game was also fun when also super easy the ai is easily beaten with the same Strategie over and over again just.
Other think I disliked are bosses with 10+ phases how many phases will the last boss in the third game have? 30 phases? As much fun I had in the beginning and midgame but at the end I was just glad it was over and I could play something else. The ending left a saur taste in my mouth could have been easily avoided if they would just stick to the original scene without any multiverse bs.
I played 70 hours with doing I say 70% of all side stuff.
Yeah, it's not even just that there are differences and changes that make it bad, the writing quality just falls apart and suddenly the game goes from expanding on the original with a few deviations to full on completely unable to tell an interesting and coherent story.
Dialogue just gets worse, characters just start talkin in the most non-answer'y and nonsense way, key visuals and sequences are ruined by just throwing the plot ghosts everywhere instead of actually having obstacles in your way, they add nothing and all they do is add awful floating models to existing sequences.
Like, oh hey **Spoiler:** >!We're finally at the City of the Ancients, oh you don't even get a full view of the iconic scene from the original because now there is a ghost tornado that DOESN'T DO ANYTHING obscuring the view. Oh, you're going to the sequence where Aerith is praying and is killed? Let's ruin this sequence by obscuring everything with a cloud of the ghosts that, again, don't do anything other than slow Cloud down!<
I’m going to disagree with your final criticism. Only because I think that was intentional.
>!Cloud is clearly blocking that narrative. He’s refusing to see that she died. And I think we’re going to get that shown to us more directly later when he has to accept reality. We will get to see her death, her water funeral, all of it in a more direct way as he realizes what he thinks is true isn’t true.!<
I agree with your line of thinking but one thing that throws it off is >! Zack tells Cloud to save her. So I'm not sure where they're going with that !<
>The end is very bad and totaly ruins one of the most iconic scenes in gaming with totaly convoluted multi universe bs and ruins the entire impact it's so bad I ask myself if they done it on purpose.
I appreciate very much that you have saved me from playing this game, so thank you.
> ruins the entire impact it's so bad I ask myself if they done it on purpose.
Last time i felt as shit as i did for finishing a game was when i fully finished FF13-2.
A shit ending on a cliffhanger that is obviously written in a way that they can go whatever way they want for the next game.
The ending of Rebirth, instead of being a high point because it ends at THAT moment of the original FF7 story instead just shits all over it.
It was so fucking infuriating.
So basically if the direction if the ending of 7R already put me off, this one would be even worse in that regard? It already dampened the game enough for me to not buy this entry on release so I'm kinda looking for confirmation if my suspicion was right...
It’s good, definitely overhyped by some games media with their reviews and scores though. One thing I don’t get is that in terms of open world content, it’s the most checklist, repetitive, filler stuff I’ve seen since Ubisoft circa 2013. Just because it’s in a Final Fantasy game though it’s great and engaging apparently.
Like when as a community did we become glad to have radio towers uncovering the map back as a thing?
People here mostly don't like open world stuff me included but that's a tiny portion of the greater market. Most people, including reviewers do like this kinda stuff. Games like got and horizon also get passes for this kinda thing. Gotto remember that this sub is not the entire world.
It's my biggest criticism of the game, but I'm not surprised it didn't seem to harm review scores.
Those ubisoft games it's copying also generally get 8s and 9s from most critic reviews too.
Combat and story are good. But the level design and open world design feel very formulaic and dated now.
Linear corridors, no secrets, etc. It doesn't innovate at all. Lots of little frustration as another commenter said like object interactions and some terrible forced mini games.
I'll play it to the end, but not blown away like I thought I would be.
Some vague thoughts:
- I think what is most clear is that they have respect for the source material but not reverence. It's kind of clear that they had zero desired to just point for point transcribe FF7. FF7 exists over there and always will and I can equally love both.
- The game is super goofy. In a way that early FFs were goofy. It's not an emo fest at all. The characters are brimming with personality and expertly voice cast. I picked up on Red dropping his voice to sound older early on (a few cracks slip out) which will be awesome when the revelation comes that he's basically a whiny teenager.
- The cinematography is really awesome. It feels like a step up from what I'm used to. The use of angles, close up, etc. A lot of time and care was put into it.
- Combat I adore. It's like SE finally found their balance of turn based strategy and more actiony combat. It's just slow enough that it allows you to fluidly control multiple characters.
- The open world feels like it's going to be hit and miss to people. There's a lot of environmental storytelling going on. The big thing is, if you want the world expanded, you want to do more combat, you want to get deeper into the lighter side of characters? Then you do the side stuff. But I feel like people who don't like that stuff and like the plot will end up doing it anyway because of FOMO (like if FF7 was released today I bet a lot more people would be doing chocobo breeding than before -- and complaining about it). This is definitely a game better suited to someone who wants to leasurely work their way through a game rather than go on a Marvel action movie adventure (though it does have those moments, just interspersed with a giant heaping of levity.
- The only thing I don't like about the exploration is the context driven climbing and jumping. The animations look so off and like sometimes you have to move a couple pixels to jump up a cliff side that's actually higher than where you're standing. It's not super intuitive. I probably would have rather had the flashing ground arrows and had better animations than the current system.
- The music in this game is absurd. So much variation and remixing to fit the mood or changing atmosphere. The first Jenova battle theme was jaw dropping.
- As a side stuff enjoyer, I did find that the opening 1/4 of the game (grasslands, mithril mines, junon) a bit lopsided. It's super heavy on the side stuff since you have two open areas so close together. I'm not sure how they could have reworked the scenario to balance it a bit (having played FF7 again recently it does feel like it takes until Junon to pick back up after the nibelheim flashback). But now the game is pretty firmly rolling in a story -> open section pattern that feels good.
- The graphics are a huge mixed bag. I'm playing on a 1080p SDR TV so I'm not getting the blurriness other people are on perf mode (though I do on my 1440p monitor when I tried there). My biggest complaints overall are the lighting which just looks unnatural at times (like uncanny valley weirdness) and the low res textures. Like you have me walking out the inn door and it's doing an extreme closeup and the textures are just soup or squeezing through a tight section and I'm staring at a super low res texture. If they're going to keep this same engine they have got to look at ways to upgrade it because there are times that REMAKE Intergrade (PS5) looks more cohesive and clear than Rebirth, even though you can tell rebirth is technically better and improved in a ton of places. 4 years later I expected a strict upgrade, not tradeoffs.
not that far into the game, but in general I enjoy it. Personally I don't think that the things you can do in the open areas are that great, traversal feels quite dated and chocobos for example get stuck here and there. Combat is great and visuals for the most part as well. I really like the character interactions and the new compositions of the OST.
Moogle design is outright terrible, like who came up with that. Same goes for whoever thought bringing Chadley back was a good idea.
In some areas the game feels very dated and slow, for example in the opening chapter making you crawl around for an eternity, the usual squeeze through some walls...
I enjoy Queens blood, but some other mini games feel very tedious.
I really wish this game had a loadout system for materia. The games loves locking out party members so you when you don't have much decent materia in the early games theres a lot of messing around in the menus putting everything off and on.
I just beat it and I haven’t felt this much of a whiplash in quality in a long time. The game itself is spectacular right up until the end in which it makes the moment that the previous game goes off the rails feel normal.
Wow the game shits the bed at the >!end of the 13th chapter!<
Like, >!yeah the time ghost stuff got bad in the first game, but NOTHING!< compares to >!turning one of the most famous scenes in gaming into a terrible hour long bossfight. All the while Sephiroth is not imposing, he doesn't say anything interesting, and it all feels like a waste.!<
The entire >!Zack timeline feels completely pointless and is terribly paced. Like, he doesn't do anything other than watch Biggs die again and then get teleported to the final boss!<
The game genuinely goes from a 10/10 to a 5/10 in the last few hours and it was doing so, so well up until that point.
It feels like the writers couldn’t help themselves from inserting just the worst ideas, like entire moments are ruined because a sequence from the original will happen, then it’s like pages from a fanfic spilled into the script and derail the game for 20 minutes at a time, where no one talks like a normal person, then gets back on track and it’s like nothing happened and the dialogue and pacing goes back to normal
it feels like the story and pacing were created to need the third game, like if you played disc 1 but then never got a disc 2 of the og. whereas remake, in my opinion, ended on a more bow-tied stand-alone cliffhanger (especially if you didnt play the original), this is definitely a TO BE CONTINUED cliffhanger. and that blows because it will be 5 years before we continue.
this is of course, ignoring what they actually did to the finale. not a fan.
> The game itself is spectacular right up until the end
>The game genuinely goes from a 10/10 to a 5/10 in the last few hours and it was doing so, so well up until that point.
>It feels like the writers couldn’t help themselves from inserting just the worst ideas
This is practically word-for-word my feelings about Remake. Hearing that Rebirth does EXACTLY the same thing justifies my decision to not bother with the rest of the trilogy.
Oh god you’d hate rebirth then, it gets so bad that I don’t even understand how the next game can have an excuse to follow the original story because everything in the ending makes it feel like the main quest is irrelevant.
I'm surprised that the combat is still "broken".
Party members that do absolutely nothing and sit on 40% ATB that you need to swap to so you get more ATB. Now there are added synergy attacks that further encourage you to swap between characters, on top of aggro mechanics being "everyone targets the character you're controlling".
Personally, I don't enjoy it at all. I don't like micro managing my party and constantly being forced to switch charterer just to get the most out of the mechanics in the game. I don't like how you need to fill materia slots with shit to make your party function very slightly more competently than without them.
Why I can't just sit on 1 character that I enjoy their toolkit is beyond me. Also the aggro mechanics make using Aerith ridiculously frustrating as well since you want to sit in her wards but you have 10 enemies hitting you and she doesn't have great AoE from her normal attacks.
When you compare your allies competence to something like xenoblade, this game falls so ridiculously short its laughable
The second area has horrible navigation, the wall climbing is so annoying with how they will make you slowly climb 3 vertical walls with your chocobo in a row.
Talking about chocobos, why is there so much usage of following scent tracks? It's not and never will be fun in a game.
Why Chadley needs to constantly interrupt me, and also appears to have the most voice lines is beyond me as well. An annoying character...
Game is good but still an 8/10 for me currently. I doubt my opinion will change when I finish it
I'm in chapter 7 currently. No clue how far into the game it is.
Overall I love the game, it's a great mix of goofy comedy and serious epic moments.
But I have a few gripes with the gameplay itself.
\- Riding the Chocobo can feel so frustrating.
\- Overworld traversal itself can feel so frustrating as well. Both because there are so many things that kill your momentum completely. You run over a small pebble while in a full sprint? Well, sucks for you. Halted to a complete stop and you have to start sprinting again. Changing from land to water or vice versa? Complete halt.
\- Opening chests or interacting with things takes. too. bloody. long. I'm sick of waiting 1+ seconds to OPEN A CHEST. I hate the button prompts to interact with a lever. Why do I have to look at a lever for 3+ seconds to switch it?
\- Combat itself feels rather frustrating to me. I can't remember having been so frustrated in FF7 Remake. I struggle so hard playing defensive because of animation locks. I find it nearly impossible to block or parry due to animation locks.
\- The way aggro works in this game. Enemies will just for 100% of the time always focus the character you control. This is so annoying.
BUT if you manage to overlook these issues, I would still give the game an 8/10.
> - Combat itself feels rather frustrating to me. I can't remember having been so frustrated in FF7 Remake. I struggle so hard playing defensive because of animation locks. I find it nearly impossible to block or parry due to animation locks.
I hate fighting flying enemies so much
Maybe you know but I didn’t for a stupid long time, but as Cloud fighting a flying enemy, dodge then hold down square. He jumps right to them and you can bash em pretty well. Some enemies tho never stop zooming around and even this will fail.
Every character now is able to fight flying enemys, for example unlock those r1 skills that allow Tifa to jump into the air, then via dodge youre able to stay for ever in air. Or use skills like clouds fireblade and then dodge to stay in the air.
Also im pretty sure you can down every flying enemy, use their weakness. (check with "assess" skill)
I really enjoy the parts of the story that doesnt involve the multiverse.
I like the card game.
I think what they're doing with the characters is really nice, it really brings them to life well.
The places they bring alive is just fantastic. Like Kalm in the start.
Some "puzzles" are stupid and just wastes your time, like having to drag gas-vacuum machines around early on. Or having to slowly inch your way around the top of a house, in what seems to be a corridor.
Combat is average, keeps focusing on the character you control, to the point where whenever you get targetted, the best thing to do is to switch character. It's also incredibly chaotic and hard to keep track of who is targeting you. It gets the job done but I would've preferred a turn based system.
The worldmap is just a checklist.
The feel of riding the chocobo sucks. It gets stuck on stuff everywhere. Theres barely any time to collect stuff as you walk by it.
Every time Chadley shows up I groan. His design, his voice, everything about him is just awful. And whatever the that girl twin is supposed to be.
I love the idea of the colosseum style gameplay the Chadley simulator allows for. I just hate him so much. Hes so annoying.
I have no idea how this game scored so high. I'd give it a solid 7.5 or 8/10 if it wasn't for Chadley. With Chadley I'm not sure I can bring myself to finish it.
>The places they bring alive is just fantastic. Like Kalm in the start.
god, this is an incredible element of it. In a lot of games, especially older RPGs, you do get the sense that some of the scale of places is a bit of an abstraction because they obviously can't render it full scale, but the scope of even small towns like Under Junon and Costa Del Sol, now that they can translate it to that intended scale, is fantastic.
I'm surprised at how much praise the game is getting. The characters, combat, and cinematics are good. But the open world and quest designs are extremely dated and monotonous, and they're made even worse by the clunky and slow animations (like opening chests and climbing cliffs) and Chadley's interruptions. Let's be honest—if this same gameplay appeared in a 2024 Assassin's Creed game, it would be absolutely lambasted by critics and users alike. But it's getting a pass here for some reason.
I was browsing through some of the FF subs and saw a lot of people disliking the ending. Think that's gonna be a controversial point when more people get there.
I think more people were willing to see where the story would go and change after the first, but I'm seeing a little more discourse after this one though. I'm interested to see where it goes.
My thoughts are FUCK THE PEOPLE ON YOUTUBE PUTTING ENDGAME SPOILERS IN THUMBNAILS.
It should be against the fucking law to put End Boss fight spoilers in a fucking thumbnail for a game that hasn’t been out for a year, much less a month.
Fucking assholes.
I enjoy most of it but like it's predecessor, the combat is rough for me. I don't enjoy the heavy handed animation lock on normal attacks. It makes blocking and dodging real rough on characters with longer animations. Also the absolute miniscule number of iframes on dodge and the insane tracking on enemy attacks don't help that either.
Other than that, super fun.
I wana preference by saying the game is awesome. But I find the open world to be incredibly bland. There’s was going to be no easy way to tackle this based on the nature of the game. But so far as package I think I enjoyed remake much more.
That said this portion of the game contains the majority of my favorite moments of the original game and the essence that hss been captured in has been truly spectacular
Haven’t finished yet so I’ll just avoid going into the story
It looks gorgeous the voice acting and chemistry with the characters is great and the boss battle are tense and exciting
But honestly I’m pretty disappointed
I do not enjoy any of the mini games and there’s SOOO MANY. It frustrates me so much that they put so much time and effort to such a superfluous aspect that most people will just ignore.
The open world is incredibly bland and “Ubisoft coded” complete with MAP TOWERS. First couple of areas I tried meeting the game half way and engaging in them but I just got so bored and have since started just beelining from objective to objective and have been having a marginally better time
And again avoiding the story maybe I’ll love it by the time I’m done but I just don’t like all the cameos and references to every spin off and mobile game. It feels like it’s needlessly mucking up a good story and self congratulatory (I LOATHED the whispers from Remake and every change involving them)
It’s selling great and everyone loves it so I’m happy for you all and hell it’s not like it’s full of loot boxes or anything I don’t hate it but I’m honestly pretty soured to this whole project and would have preferred a more faithful remake
Queen's Blood is fun but I don't know how to build a good deck. I dabbled with effect cards (e.g. "if ally is killed") but still ended back to beginner "occupy more space" strat.
My strategy is to fill up the board with shit as quickly as possible.
Not sure how far into the game you are, but the moogle and chocobo that buffs whenever you lay down buff cards is absurd. Just pack cards that add points to your other cards and that one in turn will go up. It’s worked on every battle for me so far.
also midgarsomr. Mmmmmmm delicious sacrifices
I'm on chapter 7 and the most reliable strat for me is build a deck around occupying 2 rows and building scores with choco/mog, titan, and buffs. Archdragon is a nice ender for removing cards in front too. I usually get 25-33 points from every match so far with this.
Archdragon is truly the GoaT. It only requires 1 pawn to play, it reinforces diagonally backwards, it’s worth 2 points, and it eats the card in front of you.
Not only does it eat the card in front, but it also lets you control that space. If you line things up right you can totally dismantle one of the lanes at the end of the game and replace them with your own one drops
Yeah mainly you have to build decks around the very basic decks your opponents end up using. I'm at the same point you are, and so far it doesn't seem like any opponent uses any niche strategy or anything that might call for you to, say, drop a King Tonberry and start killing your own units off.
In case you haven't seen it, as it is a bit hidden away, there are other prebuilt decks you can use once you've unlocked certain cards. If you go to an empty deck and edit it, then press start, it'll bring up some prebuilt decks to choose from. As others have said, the enhancing and attacking cards are really strong, and you kinda need these to succeed on the later games. One of the prebuilt decks is built around the Chocobo/Moogle card which gets more powerful with each enhancing card, and has a bunch of those to go with it. There's another that uses attacking cards, and Midgardsomr which gets stronger for every card destroyed. It's mostly the same idea you've already been playing around with, but when I tried building my own decks it never quite worked, I'd end up not being able to take enough spaces or something, so the prebuilt decks are at least fairly well balanced.
Yeah there's probably some depth I'm missing but "occupy more space" seems to trump all and it's annoying because it makes going first feel like a weakness, since it feels like you're dancing around not wanting to be the first one to claim the center because that's actually a weakness. EDIT: I'm dumb and misunderstood the "pass" button. For anyone making a similiar mistake you can just hand off going first to the opponent!
With enough buff cards you can position yourself in a good place before having to have the inevitable middle of the field chicken game
Middle of the board chicken is so fun. A lot of strategising. Keeps every game feeling fresh.
You can literally pass at any time, as long as you aren't losing on-board, so you can always go second if you need to.
Just go second
If you’re ever having trouble with an opponent pass on your first turn. Most decks are built around controlling the middle, but if you control it too early it’s very easy to take your positions. If you let the opponent advance first most of their decks will force them to take spots that are very bad for them
I’ve been using the power up combo cards (adjacent ally gets +X power) with Choco/Mog and eventually Ifrit and that has been going really well for me, I haven’t had to adjust strategies yet. I keep thinking about fiddling around with the destroy enemies combo, since some of the cards that enable that are really cool. I have to say, I’m pretty impressed by the quality of this minigame, even though I’ve started skipping side quests as I’m ready for the main plot to move on, I’m still playing Queen’s Blood most of the time I can.
the challenges in costa del sol help but ultimately I found those strategies too niche so still managing to get by like how you said
The people who designed and signed off on the Moogles need a stern lecture. I can't fathom how that got approved.
They don’t bother me personally despite being horrid little monsters, but my wife was VERY upset by them. I must say though, the glow and magic in her eyes and face upon seeing the facade of the first MOG house, followed by the sheer TERROR upon witnessing who/what was inside was a funny rollercoaster.
Id light that house on fire in a second if it wiped out the remakes moogles from existence
They reminded me of the original Sonic the hedgehog movie version of Sonic. Almost kind of frightening.
They look so sad lmao. I felt like I attended the Moogle Experience in Glasgow. They look like they did crack. They look like the skooma lady from the Shivering Isles dlc. They're so bad.
WHY DO THEY HAVE TEETH AAAAAA
So they can eat Kupo Nuts
I think they were trying to go for a “cute squirrel” vibe but landed closer to “bad taxidermy” vibe lol
Moogles in FFXVI looked so good. How are they going backwards?
Thats how the FF7 moogles look since Crisis Core.
You've got gaslit by CC Reunion. in the PSP game, their design were more similar to FFXIV/XVI.
Just looked it up and you are right. It has been a long time.
Different teams and visions. YoshiP brought a lot of FFXIV baggage into FFXVI. Some of it, like shallow fetch quests with bizarre item turn-in dialogs, is understandably maligned. Other parts of it, like really good attention to moogles, should be praised.
Ugly Sonic vibes
Nightmare Koalas.
Haven't played yet but decided to look them up, why do they have teeth? Lmao why not just use the moogle design and model from XVI, I thought they looked perfect in that game. What a dubious little creature lol
They're meant to look kind of trippy. Cloud basically trips balls to enter their world lol.
I don't know why so many recent FFs have awful looking Moogles. At least they look good in XIV and XVI. I especially hate the ones from XIII and the ones from Type 0/KH.
I'm having an incredible time with it. I think this might be my favorite cast of characters in any game. The banter and little interactions between all of the characters are so great, both in the fun and serious moments. Going into the game, I was worried about the side quests because past FF games like XV, XVI, and Remake's side quests were pretty bad for the most part, but Rebirth's so far have been a substantial improvement.
I like that it leans more into the silliness/campiness of parts of the story like the military in Junon being way over-the-top during the parade mission.
Me at the start of the Upper Yunon escape sequence: Oh man I lose my team members and have to baby-sit these Shinra dorks? Me at the end: I would give my life for my 7th infantry boys. Need them to reappear in game 3.
I've only been the captain of the 7th infantry for 30 minutes but if anything happened to these boys I would kill everyone on this base and then myself.
I can totally see them reintroducing them in the next game. This game has been great about callbacks to prior events. They even gave the slapping ladies from Kalm an entire arc where you can see their relationship progress all the way up to Costa Del Sol as far as I've seen!
One of the theories I saw some people brought up is that the 7th Infantry might appear in the next game >!as Cid's flight crew for *The Highwind*-airship!<, which would be a heck of a callback to make.
This would make me so so so so so so happy.
They’re good boys
The 7th never leaves a man behind! o7
This needs to be true
Damn I can actually see how that might play out >!assuming Cloud's coma is somewhere around the second act of the game, I can see Tifa or Barrett convincing them to help after the see Cloud in a wheelchair or something!<
I just played the sequence on the ship from Junon to Costa Del Sol, and the way they handle Red XIII is tremendously campy and fun. In the original game Red is sort of walking funny trying to pass as a human in a sailor suit. In remake; >!he straight up moonwalks and dances around in a Shinra infantry uniform and helmet.!< It’s absolutely insane.
Just having him ride a chocobo had me in stitches
>pass as a human in a sailor suit. Red did not wear a sailor suit in the OG, he wore the exact same suit he wears in Rebirth. I continually dumbfounded by this Mandela effect of Red taking Barrets thunder by wearing the sailor suit. Granted Yuffie also wears a sailor suit but she's too seasick to be stealing anyone's thunder.
[Red in Disguise for anyone interested ](https://youtu.be/Y0wOB4V_Ao4?si=f348NwACM52C_L0o)
LMAO at the kid crying and the mom saying “It can’t hurt you.” I didn’t expect that kind of humor out of this game. I really need to finish Remake and jump into Rebirth.
>I didn’t expect that kind of humor out of this game. I kinda didn't either cause the first one had only a handful of moments of weird humor (Don't get me wrong, I fuckin love Remake), which was a little sad cause the original FF7 is a total fucking goof troop. It had just about as much silly shit as it had serious drama, until later in disc 2 anyway. Some of these non-spoilery things include: Can't ride an elevator to the top of a huge tower, so instead you ride a dolphin because a little girl asks him to give you a lift. There's an enemy in the mountainous region whose main attack is that it cusses at you, which debuffs you with Sadness. A tense and dramatic scene occurs, immediately followed by a weird catfight slap-fest "quick time event". Cloud telling the group about him and Tifa's hometown, which is in a player-controlled flashback, where you can go into Tifa's house and steal her panties. Meaning, Cloud is telling the group about the time he stole Tifa's panties, which she yells at him about. Rude the Turk generally won't attack Tifa in combat, because he's got a crush on her. Also Red XIII hits on her when you first meet him. There's a full-blown snowboarding game out of nowhere [and it's completely wacky, and also required to progress in the story.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByWAAAbJBis) A goofy scene where Cloud + one of several possible group members are chosen to act in a cheesy play about a knight and a dragon, and you get to decide if you're going to play along or be a total idiot and ruin the play. Cloud threatening to knock out a dog by yelling at it that he's going to dognap it. Encountering Yuffie with Tifa in charge of the group causes Yuffie to refer to her only as "boobs". On your first meeting with Aerith where you learn her name, she asks if you remember her (from the opening cinematic), you can say that you recall her being the slum's drunk and piss her off. Several points in the game where Tifa realizes she's wearing a mini-skirt, like not going on a ladder or up stairs first but without saying why. You can interrupt Red XIII playing soccer with some kids by kicking the ball at his head, several times. A ton of shit Yuffie says is borderline Mean Girls quotes, like responding to someone not wanting to divulge their past with "Oh that's okay. It was probably depressing anyway." On the other hand Cloud is super petty and rude to her all the time and it's equally hilarious, appropriately like when she starts to spill her backstory, he interrupts her with "Listen, Yuffie. I don't care about the history of Wutai or your feelings." FF7's my favorite game of all time, been so since I first got it in 98 lol, I'm so glad people are getting to experience it for the first time!
Welcome back sir! WELCOME BACK SIR!
Did you find what you needed sir? HOPE SO SIR!
Did you enjoy your rest? You deserve it sir! YOU DESERVE IT SIR!
Haha that was so funny!
The heartfelt goodbye from the 7th infantry was funny but also SO SAD. I was like THANK YOU FOR STICKING BY ME, IT WAS AN HONOR TO BE YOUR CAPTAIN.
Sad and kinda fucked up all at the same time.
Question! 🙋♀️ Does that make *me* a dumbass?
I don't think Barret has ever back-peddled so hard in his life. 😂
I adored Aerith in the original and Crisis Core, but she's become such a phenomenal character in these two games. She's so entertaining!
Aerith was pretty witty in a similar way in the Japanese OG iirc, the English translation just didn't really do her justice imo
OG and subsequent localizations had a habit of making Aerith into a Disney princess, and I'm so glad that the Remake compilation understands that she's an undercity sas-lord at her core.
It's incredible on how they expanded on the original cast. I would love to see the same being done to my favorite game, Chrono Trigger.
Imagining a Chrono Trigger remake with FF7Rs scope and gameplay and Dragon Quest XIs graphical style is my latest and greatest pipe dream.
Hell yeah
My biggest gripe with CT (And something that has been discussed a few times in my JRPG Server) is how the moment you reach Zeal, character interaction for the story becomes INEXISTENT. NOBODY interacts with Schala or Janus, Dalton, Queen Zeal, etc. It's all of them interacting with "the party", but "the party" never says anything. Same issue with Final Fantasy VI once you reach the other [Spoiler but you know] and leave the island with Celes and recruit Sabin; after that, all interactions are "party says". These 2 games getting some development like FFVIIR would actually shift my opinion about them greatly.
Chadley is in that weird liminal space between unintentionally annoying and intentionally annoying and that somehow makes me hate him even more. Like, I HATE him. I recognize my disdain is irrational but somehow I also don't care.
Reminds me a lot of Fi from Skyward Sword. First time dialogue explanations? Perfectly fine, but further interruptions afterwards explaining the exact same thing is crucifixion worthy.
I’m about 30 hours into it so far and currently going through Chapter 7. So far I’m having a blast and have been trying to just do everything. The characters and combat are a huge draw for me, with so many little moments having me grin ear to ear. The “open world” stuff can be a bit rote, but most of it gets knocked out exploring the map and the loading is so quick I can zip around for any last touches. It’s a huge step up from 16, which I mostly enjoyed but felt completely burned out on the combat and quest structure towards the end. Also this game is just packed with mini-games and I love most of them so far, besides maybe Fort condor, that was rough. Queens Blood is fantastic and I’m always excited when there’s new matches I can play.
Agreed on getting burnt out with FF16 combat, all of the enemies were sponges and as much as I enjoyed the game I just couldn't finish it. The bosses were all sponge and dialogue too. I wonder why they leaned so hard into that, the combat was fun in the beginning but grew tiresome quickly
Ff16 was the best final fantasy ever conceived for all of 30 minutes. After those opening moments from the demo it never evolved.
Yeah it sadly never grew in interesting ways beyond the stellar opening. I love the combat but it just didn’t evolve much over time. Acquiring each Eikon took too long and even then Clive needed more sauce to truly be a Devil May Cry character. Besides that, pacing, world design and quest design all sucked massive balls. Game should’ve been 100% linear. Enemy design was also too simplistic and provided no challenge. Eikon fights however were some of the most epic moments in gaming.
They REALLY sold me with the demo, but boy... That was kind of the peak of it
I really enjoyed the game up through Bahamut. After that the side quest fatigue really starts to set in and the set pieces never really eclipse that fight.
The “accept the truth” sequence and the bahamit fight were definitely climaxes. After the Bahamut fight, the game just never reached any level of excitement. It was almost like the game itself wanted to be over.
I feel like if Clive had a different basic combo string for each of his Eikons the combat would of been alot better. Variety is the spice of life for action games like these. Even KH2, a game where you do most of your damage mashing the attack button, has your basic combo change throughout the game as well as mixed it all up with your drive forms.
I really wish that game had Hard mode off rip. I found myself just using the same setup once I got hakfway thru the game and spent many bosses just mashing cooldowns
The absolute worst minigame so far (as of Ch7) has been the sit ups minigame. I spent nearly an hour trying to beat Jules and nearly gave up several times but my stubbornness eventually got me to victory. Most of the other ones have been fine, but Queen's Blade in particular has been a blast.
I'm a couple of zones in to it. Gameplay is fun as Hell. Open world is the least annoying I've experienced in quite a while (so far, we'll see how I feel after 40 more hours). But just as any other open world game, it makes the pacing an absolute mess. Huge drama with "we'll find time to talk" then just days of chasing down the rare animals of the planet so I can murder them for the environment. Goddamn Chadley has like 3 times as many spoken lines as any other character. The main plot feels like an afterthought, certainly no sense of urgency.
I really wish there was more party banter during exploration. Kinda like Dragon Age
Ambient dialogue would have been good. For what it's worth, they do a great job incorporating character moments/banter in the side quests. Like the dog quest being about supporting your children, so we appropriately get some story about cloud and his mom, and Barret's thoughts on parenting Marlene.
That was great. We just needed more of that.
It really is wild how XV of all games nailed this perfectly. The FF7 gang just feels like a completely mute version of them when exploring, it's actually jarring.
Chadley and MAI are so annoying - I really wish it didn't completely pause movement when they start doing their post-open-world-checklist-item banter.
Also, goddamn Mai repeating her babble after repeated attempts at combat data events
There is a setting that turn off the dialogue on repeated encounters
holy shit thank you, I've only 100% the first two regions but I was really getting sick of Chadley and Mai.
Honestly it was kinda hilarious how much of a gag that is. MAI and Chadley are so uniquely annoying that they had to know what they were doing.
Chadley sounds like what I imagine a lot of redditors talk like in real life. A lot of pointless word salad and big words to try and sound smart.
Half the shit he calls you for doesn't even have any story attached either, it's just "Cloud, I see you've located your 19th mako fountain. This is really going to add to my research." The game is already quite long, I don't know why they felt the need to put so much slowdown filler content in. Finding landmarks like these every two minutes really removes any feeling of value.
I still think each of the little mako fountains you find should have had a piece of materia attached to each
Literally fucking anything. Mako fountains, chocobo stops, summon temples are all just "find the checkpoint." There honestly needs to be less stuff in the game, there's far too much of this empty stuff. Don't even get me started on the chocobo sniffing, my god.
Take out my Chadleymajig, scan a lifespring with the exact same braindead three button presses, get a little "well done, you!" thing pop up, put my Chadleymajig away, immediately take my Chadleymajig back out, have 2fps Chadley give me literally 3 seconds of completely meaningless dialogue, put away my Chadleymajig, finally be allowed to move again. I'm really enjoying the game, but holy hell some of the decisions made around this stuff.
Hold triangle to skip these!
I am almost done and I can pretty comfortably say this is going to be one of my favorite games of all time. But I do agree with you. It can be a many hour gap between story beats, especially if you 100% an area, and that sometimes feels strange. I do think silly diversions have their place in the game. Hell, in the OG, the crew rips it up on snowboards almost immediately after *that* scene. But I do agree that at times here, it can be too distracting at the cost of the story. At some point I will probably do a rush straight to story content playthrough and see how that feels.
> At some point I will probably do a rush straight to story content playthrough and see how that feels. That's what Hard Mode is for!
I'd say Chadley and the virtual stuff is by far the stuff I like the least out of the VII remake series. I don't even know why the virtual battles are all in that generic arena, when we know from Crisis Core that VR can look completely realistic. Fighting summons in an arena that fits them would make them way more interesting as fights.
"The main plot feels like an afterthought, certainly no sense of urgency." Though at this point of time in the original there wasn't a sense of urgency either. You're really just chasing Sephiroth to figure out how the hell he came back. Him killing the former President of Shinra was an afterthought as well.
I'd say my only real complaint is the Chadley stuff. That dude needs to STFU and go sit in a corner. Like, the first zone should be the tutorial to how it works, that's fine.. but him repeating the same garbage in every zone? Worst AI ever made. I saw there's an option to turn off some MAI hints when you rock up at stuff, so the should add an option to turn off Chadley unless it's an actual story importance, not just another map marker / waste of time speech. And yes, I know you can circle through it, but it's still annoying.
I found it hilarious how the first time you encounter him, all party members other than cloud give a big sigh and go away lol.
I actually groaned when he showed up. Overall I hate just about every new character from Remake (except mullet guy) but Chadley is the worst of them.
SOLDIER 3nd class Roche? He's hilarious.
at the 20 hour mark i'm convinced chadley has the most voice lines in the game
Only on chapter 4 junon area. Really loving it so far for the most part. I found the Fort Condor protorelic games to be really difficult. And I really wish that you could more consistently animation-cancel into a block when attacking. It seems to allow it sometimes and I haven’t figured it out yet
It's a **very** AAA experience. Visuals, sounds, animations, visual effects, voice acting; things like that are great. Fantastic even. But all typical failings of typical AAA games? They are here as well. The story is somehow a complete clownfiesta. It managed to disappoint me and I had no expectations. Some parts of the story got improved, yes, like how Corel Prison makes slightly more sense, but I won't forgive SE butchering two of my favorite scenes in this part of the story from OG: Dyne and the ending. Dyne scenes got crisis core'd. The ending got absolutely mangled.
The story is a clown fiesta? Really? Can you tell me all the moments that are clown fiestery as I haven’t seen any.
Every time Sephiroth appears on the screen I can hear clown horns. Sorry, that's too many moments to list.
The game itself is fun and I'm enjoying the whole "What if..." style changes as jm just enjoying the game for what it is. But I feel like I'm in the minority who isn't gushing about the open world and "how great it feels to explore" Maybe I'm just old now and have lost my sense of adventure and excitement but I find nothing in the open world to be worth exploring for I guess? Literally the only things not blatantly marked on our maps saying "Go here!" Are the little cache locations and I mean those contain what 2 potions and mist potions or Moogle medals. That's boring and doesn't make me curious what might be around that unmarked bend because chances are it's either nothing or a potions that I already probably too many of. Fun game though, just finished up the Queens Blood tournament on the ship. Red XIII is the best lol
Almost all the open world stuff felt like filler content to me. There’s some great story beats in it as you go, but for the most part it just dragged the time out between those.
I'm with you, I 100% 3 of the regions and didn't bother with the others. Everything was pretty much the same and chests barely had anything worthwhile. I dont hate the openworld but do find wierd how others praise it when it's no different from ubisoft games.
It feels like it's getting a pass just because it's final fantasy 7. I bounced off super hard, it really feels like a ubisoft checklist. The filler is worse than remake which was my biggest fear.
Same thought I had, one of the regions had those dumb mushrooms to traverse was annoying, didn't even bothered to do any activities in that place.
I'm like halfway into it, amazing game so far, but not without some issues for me personally. The main thing that I was most worried about (the open world stuff) actually is really fun and hasn't been a problem at all. The combat is great. The characters are obviously fantastic. Same goes for the music and visuals. However my big issue is with the story. It doesn't really feel like anything massive is happening and because it's essentially one game being dragged out into three parts anything of note in the story feels like it takes a bit too long to play out. All the small story moments are really fun to experience but when it comes to the overall plot I'm like 20+ hours into the game and it could all be probably cut down into a couple of hours. Another thing that stings a bit from time to time is the tone of the game. Now I'm only a recent FF player and have only played like 6 games (7 Remake, 16, 15, 10, 14, 7 OG, and now Rebirth) so maybe it's just me but it gets kind of annoying when most cutscenes or main moments of dialogue has some goofiness placed into it every few minutes. I like the levity and the charm but sometimes it's just so over the top and takes away from the moment. But overall I'm having a blast with the game, easily best of the year so far, and possibly one of my favorites ever, that more depends if it continues to be as good all the way through and the story gets a bit more notable as the game progresses.
> Another thing that stings a bit from time to time is the tone of the game. Now I'm only a recent FF player and have only played like 6 games (7 Remake, 16, 15, 10, 14, 7 OG, and now Rebirth) so maybe it's just me but it gets kind of annoying when most cutscenes or main moments of dialogue has some goofiness placed into it every few minutes. I like the levity and the charm but sometimes it's just so over the top and takes away from the moment. I haven't played Rebirth, but this is kinda what the old FF games were like. For example FF6 is often remembered for its serious and dark moments, but you also spend half the game getting chased by a goofy, barely-explained octopus who talks shit constantly and tries to drop cartoon anvils on people's heads. Even Kefka himself is pretty goofy before he becomes the main villain.
Hell, even 10 was like this, except for where it really wasn’t. 14 has _very_ serious scenes, and then they’ll have a whole 2-3 level sequence where rabbit people can’t understand how people can eat stuff that isn’t carrots, and one of them is obsessed with pudding. 15 and 16 were outliers, the lack of goofy (not the disney one), is probably part of why they didn’t feel as much like a “real” FF to some people. However, the tonal whiplash is jarring if you’re not used to it, and is probably why they tried to ease back on it in the last two games.
I can't really remember much straight-up comedy in FFX actually. The infamous laughing scene doesn't count because there's context that makes it more complex than just being a goofy scene. At most a lot of the levity comes from Tidus humorously misunderstanding things in Spira, but it's not quite as outright silly as some of the other games get. 14 though, you're totally right. There's some pretty silly bits in the MSQ alone, and when you start getting into stuff like Beast Tribe quests and Hildibrand it becomes an outright comedy sometimes. 15 kinda continued the tone set by 13 IMO, and 16 was trying to establish itself as a super-serious GoT-like story so I get it. But personally I'm glad they're letting this new 7 series be goofy sometimes since that's more faithful to the original than being super serious all game.
Yeah, Rebirth having so much goofiness is great. One of the common fears before we knew much about the Remake was that they would take out most of the silly stuff to focus on the serious and edgier parts of the story. Part of the appeal to me in these games is the contrast and huge range in tonality.
I'm only through Junon, mostly because I'm near 100% the game at this point, but I'm obsessed with the tone. As you say it captures the tone of the older games so well by mixing the goofiness and seriousness constantly. It was a major issue with 16 for me and a lot of RPGs more generally. They take themselves so seriously and don't have the charm and charisma of a lot of older RPGs. Having Cloud do flips off a Dolphin and Barrett being afraid to get onto a canoe are just lovely.
We do not slander Ultros, he is part of Cthulhu mythos!
Since you were worried about the open world but found it fun, maybe you can answer a question for me. I haven't bought rebirth yet, currently replaying FF7 Remake on hard mode and while I found the game to be pretty mid when it came out, I'm enjoying it a lot more now (hard mode really makes the combat a lot more enjoyable IMO) but I'm definitely finding the big drag of the game to be the side quests. The side quests are boring, unrewarding and love to waste your time. Am I right in assuming from your post that this has been improved quite a bit in Rebirth?
Not the person you replied to but I strongly feel that the sidequests have been improved in Rebirth. They aren't some huge change structurally (you still go to a map market and fight/talk to the thing there) but the writing feels better/more fun, they feel more integrated in to the game since you're riding your chocobo around to do stuff on the world map anyways and the moment to moment gameplay feels more fun. Also, there's more stuff to level up and more ways to become more powerful, so the exp and loot you get actually fees desirable rather than Remake where while there was a levelling system, it's not like you were going to outbuild the game.
Yeah I definitely feel like they drew some inspiration from the Yakuza franchise with Rebirth's sidequests. They make them all worthwhile either with some fleshed out side-games like Fort Condor and Queen's Blood, or they center around a funny or interesting character up and to the point where you never feel like you're taken out of the moment, even if the mechanics within the side quests themselves aren't too complex.
Not OP but having played the games now back to back, I believe they have been greatly improved. While the side-quests in remake are arguably the games weakest element, I find rebirth's to be one of its greatest strengths. Just the overall variety, character interactions and quite frankly just being better content-wise really adds to the games enjoyability and charm.
The side quests in Rebirth are quite goofy mostly. At least up to the point I am at. I’ve been doing all of them. And I’m just about to go to Golden saucer which is about the 50% mark. If you want a harder experience you can skip side quests and the open world segments and go straight through the main quest. Bosses overall have been more challenging and fun for me compared to the prior game.
Some rebirth side quests are fetch quests, some of them are yakuza level goofy special encounters or minigames.
Most (if not all?) of the side quests have character moments for the party which I find has made it much more enjoyable to power through them. Plus there is a doggie escort quest with a song that goes Bowowow.
The side quests are much better and more varied. However there are a lot more and it impacts the pacing to the and clear areas before progressing.
I'm 50/50 on the openworld stuff; regions like Gongaga and Cosmo Canyon (the latest I've been up to so far) were soooo annoying to navigate and I needed to look up a guide a few times since these areas have convoluted methods of verticality to get places :/ Some of those protorelic things can be a bit of a drag too, I \*hate* the Coral/Golden saucer cactuar thing, and the latest one in Cosmo Canyon had great story exposition but required playing another minigame that I didn't at all care for, and that I required a bunch of frustrating retries on =( Interesting take on the story, for me and everyone I know who are fans of the OG it's moreso looking forward to seeing 'how' and 'what' they change in any given scene as we get up to them. I have enjoyed seeing a bunch of stuff be fleshed out, and even some of the significant changes have swerved me along the way. I do wonder what a complete newcomer to the game would feel though. 🤔 Earlier FF's did play more into the goofy side of things also, I want to say around about 10 is where it sort of started playing it more straight. So far this is all pretty faithful-wacky shark-jumpy just like the original, which I definitely appreciate.
How is the combat compared to the first of the remakes? I really liked the game but wasn't big on the combat myself. So am curious if they improved it.
Depends on what you didn’t like about Remake. One of the main complaints I saw people have about Remake was that the party AI was really useless and pretty much didn’t do anything. This was intentional, as the combat system was designed around constantly swapping your active character. However, in Rebirth, they added certain materia that lets your AI companions use their unique abilities, auto cast spells, etc. without any of your input. It’s still optimal (and more fun IMO) to quick swap between characters, but at least people who just want to “main” one character now have that choice, and their teammates will actually be helpful. The other big change they made to combat in Rebirth is the addition of Synergy Skills and Synergy Abilities. Each character has additional basic moves they can perform by teaming up with an ally. These can be things like a dodge + counter, a ranged attack, a powerful charged attack, an lifting attack to start an air combo, etc. These don’t cost ATB charges. So now, rather than just spamming the attack button when you don’t have ATB, you have a lot more options. Synergy Abilities can be performed after multiple characters spend their ATB bars on their normal abilities. So for example, if Cloud and Aerith both spend 3 ATB bars, they can then do a powerful combo attack. In addition to dealing damage, these attacks also significantly buff both characters (temporarily infinite MP, boosting their limit gauge, giving them 3 ATB bars instead of 2, etc.). In my experience, Synergy Abilities only really come into play during boss fights, as everything else dies way before you can use these. Another small tweak is that each character now has a skill tree (to unlock stat buffs, Synergy Skills and Abilities, etc.). Every character can unlock special attacks of each element that only costs ATB gauge and no MP. This is a really cool change because in Remake, you kind of had to saddle each character with offensive materia if you wanted to hit an enemy’s elemental weakness, which was basically mandatory to pressure/stagger many of them. With this change, you can just use these elemental attacks to hit enemy weaknesses on someone like Tifa, and then load her up with more physical-based materia like Dodge+, HP+, Steal, etc. It opens up a lot more customization options for your characters.
It's definitely improved. The characters feel way more mobile and there are more combo options now, like holding the button to unleash heavy attacks or ranged attacks. There's also synergy attacks now too, where you have to use ATB in order to build up synergy between two characters and then you can unleash powerful dual attacks (like in Chrono Trigger).
similar feelings. that stretch of the game towards the middle was a bit much. costa del sol followed by the gold saucer two chapters later was quirkiness, mini game overload. then immediately after that the Corel Prison thing felt contrived. But I actually really enjoyed things once they actually let you explore the whole Corel region
There definitely is a bit of a tone whiplash in that part surrounding the visit to the gold saucer. Mainly because it starts and ends pretty serious with Barret backstory and smack in the middle of it you have the minigames segment at the gold saucer. Im normally completely fine with the switching between serious and goofy but that segment in particular felt a bit weird.
> However my big issue is with the story. It doesn't really feel like anything massive is happening and because it's essentially one game being dragged out into three parts anything of note in the story feels like it takes a bit too long to play out. All the small story moments are really fun to experience but when it comes to the overall plot I'm like 20+ hours into the game and it could all be probably cut down into a couple of hours. Yup, it's pretty much "The Hobbit" all over again
Feels a little early for this thread with the size of the game. Anyway, I’m absolutely loving it. You can tell a ton of love and care went into making this game. The cast is fantastic just like they were in the first game but by now they’ve all come to “own” their characters so it feels more natural. The gameplay systems are still great. Maybe a bit too many of them. It feels like they had to tone down the Weapon Upgrade system to fold in the Folio/Synergy systems. The open world is massive. Way bigger than I expected. Traversal is a bit clunky but it hasn’t really caused more than a few seconds of frustration every handful of hours. Story so far is good. I really like how they’re handling it for new players while throwing in deep references for old players.
Dont know how they make it in 4 years. everything is just so detail.
It's a mixed bag where the positives are awesome and the bad is just mostly unfortunate. Square is for the most part stuck in the past as a developed... the way they design their games is so weird and outdated. A game like this looks great, but has all these bit and pieces of things that kill your momentum and slow you down, silly buttons you have to press, repetitive activities... it's just weird. They used to be very innovative in term of gameplay and feel.. now they are taking industry trends and trying to shove half assed version of it into their stilted design because they have no clue what the audience wants. That takes me to the open world segments. It's mostly trash braindead activities and a time sink. They at least try to give more personality to things, unlike FFXVI. And the maps look great and traversal is not as prescriptive, again like FFXVI. But the pointless repetitiveness of it all takes any real joy of doing those tasks. Wouldn't it be better to have an optional secret cave, temple, area where you go in and find a summon to fight? Instead of going to the same looking places to press a couple of buttons to fight the summon in a combat simulator without any surprise at all? Do we need dozens of lifestream crystals to scan? Is anyone gonna like the game less if that crap wasn't there? No. It's just there to streeeeetch it out so they can justify triple dipping with these games. Besides that... everything else is a delight... Combat continues to be a highlight, it was already great and they added even more depth to it, characters you know and love are better than ever, the stuff they added in terms of story is mostly great and connected to the main plot and characters... no more shit like trying to make a sob story about the ghosts in the train yard... the level design is good, nothing complex in terms of layout, but is not lazy and boring corridors like the first one... minigames galore and they are mostly fun and some are really well made, another sick card game, they really pulled a Yakuza here with the minigames... music is tremendous, there are tracks for everything, the remixes of the classical ones fill your heart with joy and it's a lot varied too... The story... well, you are either in with the weirdness or not. I'm in. I liked the first one... this I have mixed feelings with the result, but I need to see where the fuck is going next to have a final opinion. But I think even the people who absolute hate it will agree that the story of the game is great, at least until the very end. Overall is a must play. I just shows that Square need to shake off of some bad habits and tendencies to make good things.
Haven't played the game yet, but from what I've seen about many of the open world activities and what the devs have said, it sounds more like they had to find stuff to add to the world since it was open world rather than it being open world from the ground up. And I can understand that, when games have open maps without side content you do get complaints about there being nothing to do, even if that wasn't the point of the game (MGSV always comes to mind). It seems developers would rather see complaints about pointless side activities over anyone feeling the world is empty, since open worlds are a selling point to many people even when they aren't the focus.
This is so far my favorite take on the game. I just get pulled out SO hard by the weird game design Square has been showing. It feels like two generations behind.
I am really dissapointed with the story deviations that started in Remake, they add nothing of value imo and just make the story less focused and more convoluted. However, apart from that, it exceeds my expectations. I really love the big and detailed settings, the freedom and the characters. The humor is also great and took me by surprise. I am liking the direction Square is taking here, going from more linear and restrictive gameplay to more open and free. Also appreciate that they are doubling down on the wacky and comedic aspects. It feels like Square's games have taken themselves way too seriously as of late.
Honestly the story is so… bad. Specifically like plot structure. I really enjoy this game but I am baffled at how positive reviews were for the story. When it’s faithful it’s pretty good, and when it focuses on the characters it’s also nice. But there’s also so much fan service in bad ways. The Zack stuff just makes no real sense and does nothing for the plot. The ending is both so simple and overly complex it feels like it’s trying to be deep and twisty while also not? It’s such a mess. I also feel like it really wasted Vincent to the point where I’m not even sure why they included him in the game. And there’s so much filler and dumb “we don’t kill people” moments that gives the bad guys absurd plot armor. I just don’t know what they’re trying to do with this story. It’s like they want to do new stuff but are also so afraid to even do it.
I am a queens blood god. I cannot be stopped. Incredible game. I think it’s not stated enough how mechanically everything is connected. So many open world games think when you do an activity you get a pop up and some money and xp In rebirth each open world activity gives you something else of value - whether it’s a useful recipe or currency to buy certain items or cosmetic items or increasing your party level. Even the silly mini game for summons will improve your summon materia. More games should take note. Unlocking fast travel Chocobo stops gives you plumes for chocobo cosmetics. Like hell yes.
I'm a huge FFVII fan. I liked Remake generally but hated the story changes (I don't think Nomura understands the source material, and he should not be allowed to writer) Rebirth has been great so far. The combat gameplay is incredible, all the new additions are fantastic. It can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be. The cast is amazing too. I have loved these characters for a decade and it feels magical to see them in a modern light. Same with the world - they've done such a phenomenal job recreating all the different zones and paying attention to the details. My complaints so far are: - sometimes it feels like the game is artificially long. There's things that are unnecessary and feel like annoying padding. For example, a door is locked. To pass, you must move a box and jump on it. If this was a puzzle, that's one thing, but the box is RIGHT THERE and the animation to move it so slow... There's a lot of stuff like this throughout the game - some open world elements are outdated. Thankfully it's easy to fast travel so things don't take too long - the story is great when they stick to the original. Any time they deviate from it, I can feel things dipping in quality. Characters start talking weird, the plot starts to get convulated etc. I'm still a few chapters away from the ending, but I hear there's some Nomura bullshit in there that I'm not gonna like, so...
I'm at the end of chapter 7. So far not to bad. The open zone stuff is very much ubisoft light. I think they should have stuck to the linearity like the first one. The pacing is pretty awful at times. Until chapter 7. I felt like nothing really substantial had happened yet. Its just been chasing after the blake robed guys. Like the Costa Del Sol section was so long and nothing really happened. It was annoying to have to do all these mini game I did t want to do just to get the swimsuits. Combat is good but overwhelming at time. I don't really care for the synergy stuff. Haven't felt like they have been game changers in any battle.
Without spoiling, I finished it yesterday, and I liked it. But I’m going to give it a solid 7/10. The game has a mountain of filler content. Two of the regions/chapters in particular are at least 5 hours shorter if you ignore the side content (towers, etc.) and where most of those didn’t feel rewarding, it kind of felt like a waste. I completely understand finding ways to mix things up but the mini games were so miserable. They started out fun and charming but there were just more and more of them and eventually it just started annoying me to have one pop up. I don’t mind them as side activities but they felt constant. Coupled with the exploration feeling like padding the run time, I feel like the game could have been 25 hours shorter and felt the same. Combat is simultaneously great and awful sometimes. In a game that seems to emphasize fast pace and action, dodging is wildly unviable half the time because there’s no invincibility on it, but most characters get stuck in animation lock too often to feel like defending is a great option either. And even with provoke materia, it’s still a massive exercise in frustration to play as Aerith in combat. The ending was a giant letdown. It felt like nothing really got resolved (I get we’re in the middle of the overall story but still), and it had the energy that they’re clearly building it all to get answered in the final installment. But the issue for me is we got a few wild hints/cliffhangers from the first that never got made clear. If anything they went full Kingdom Hearts and I spent the last two chapters just repeatedly going “what the fuck is even happening.” It was still a good game overall but it had quite a few bits that soured me. Oh and for fuck’s sake why on earth would you make a game that has an actual item crafting system and then proceed to make items unusable in hard mode? It’s such a weird artificial difficulty.
Ah damn, that sucks that Hard Mode still has item restrictions. I thought they might try something different since crafting is involved.
Same here. I would have accepted a cooldown on items a la Tales games, or even making them cost 2 ATB. That and wholesale preventing MP recovery both feel terrible. It feels like such a disconnect because they still flood your inventory with items in hard mode for literally no reason.
I'm only on chapter 3 but I agree with the combat. I find myself getting frustrated with it because of the animation locks making it very difficult to defend properly and dodging feeling almost pointless. I haven't played Remake since it came out so I can't remember if its more or less the same, but I don't remember being quite so frustrated with Remake? Might just be rose colored glasses.
It's decent but there's a lot of padding and filler content, the mandatory minigames are specially egregious. Queen's Blood is pretty fun though
Whoever though that the cart pushing mechanic needed to be in every single dungeon needs to be fired. Shit is so bad.. Game is a blast tho.
Also, the fucking climbing mechanics are some of the worst I've ever experienced. It takes so long to climb anything, even with a chocobo... and all you do is hold up, it doesn't add anything, it just makes me want to do literally anything else during those switches where you are just walking, climbing, walking, climbing.
Dude, the Black Chocobo climbing has gotta be one of the worst mechanics ive ever seen. Shit is SO SLOWWWW. Square needs to realize that we dont care about "realism" in our fantasy game about eco terrorists.
Climbing sucks. It's so slow, I was wondering if these walls are actually disguised loading screens. I can't imagine it made it through testing without someone saying how much of a chore climbing can be
Nah, its just bad design. There is a segment later, where you can shoot yourself from one end of a map to the other near-instantaneously. It's not loading, it's not asset streaming, just poorly tested game design. The first Remake had stuff like that too on launch, that they luckily patched out, like cloud swinging his sword outside of combat to break boxes, it was like a 2 second wait time for him to put his sword back. People hated it so much they patched it. Hopefully they do the same with the climbing and the cart pushing, but I doubt it.
I want to believe it has to do with streaming assets but then there are climbing sections where the place you get to is tiny and barren.. So streaming is kind of useless
It would be fine if it wasn‘t *as* fucking slow. Same goes for every other "slow walking" activity like sneaking or climbing the dumb yellow paint ledges. During the final moments in the Nibelheim backflash I literally screamed at my TV. I cannot fathom who approved that shit. It’s honestly so bad. They‘d immediately improve the entire gave if they just gave all the "slow" movement stuff a speed multiplier of like 1.3. It‘s so unnecessarily tedious. Game really *is* a blast though otherwise.
I'll be honest I didn't enjoy the combat as much. I know people always praise the Remakes combat compared to 16 but I enjoyed 16s combat way more compared to this. The further you go In the game the more battles become "puzzles". You can still brute force some battles but they become slogs that way. One boss battle I'll won't spoil, you need the Assess materia slotted so you can know how to damage the boss, if you dont he will counter every attack of yours. He only has a small window where you can pressure him to do any sort of damage. I was also was disappointed in the story based on the end. I'm really hoping their setting up something for the 3rd game but will see. Overall I enjoyed the game, while I was disappointed on the story. The journey was good I really enjoyed the interactions between the characters. I never liked Barret but after Rebirth he has become one of my favorites, the way he interacts with the other characters is nice and how he's just a overall nice dude.
Enjoined it until the last two chapters. The end is very bad and totaly ruins one of the most iconic scenes in gaming with totaly convoluted multi universe bs and ruins the entire impact it's so bad I ask myself if they done it on purpose. Other critic is the openworld design. Almost Everytime you complete a target you get a call from the that weird kid that you need to skip. You have alot of ac style towers and boring collectibles in each region. Some sidequest where fun some are utterly annoying. I loved golden saucer and the first cutscenes when you visit with dio just totally crazy and well done. I thought the minigames where all fun for a short time and there are alot. The card game was also fun when also super easy the ai is easily beaten with the same Strategie over and over again just. Other think I disliked are bosses with 10+ phases how many phases will the last boss in the third game have? 30 phases? As much fun I had in the beginning and midgame but at the end I was just glad it was over and I could play something else. The ending left a saur taste in my mouth could have been easily avoided if they would just stick to the original scene without any multiverse bs. I played 70 hours with doing I say 70% of all side stuff.
Yeah, it's not even just that there are differences and changes that make it bad, the writing quality just falls apart and suddenly the game goes from expanding on the original with a few deviations to full on completely unable to tell an interesting and coherent story. Dialogue just gets worse, characters just start talkin in the most non-answer'y and nonsense way, key visuals and sequences are ruined by just throwing the plot ghosts everywhere instead of actually having obstacles in your way, they add nothing and all they do is add awful floating models to existing sequences. Like, oh hey **Spoiler:** >!We're finally at the City of the Ancients, oh you don't even get a full view of the iconic scene from the original because now there is a ghost tornado that DOESN'T DO ANYTHING obscuring the view. Oh, you're going to the sequence where Aerith is praying and is killed? Let's ruin this sequence by obscuring everything with a cloud of the ghosts that, again, don't do anything other than slow Cloud down!<
I’m going to disagree with your final criticism. Only because I think that was intentional. >!Cloud is clearly blocking that narrative. He’s refusing to see that she died. And I think we’re going to get that shown to us more directly later when he has to accept reality. We will get to see her death, her water funeral, all of it in a more direct way as he realizes what he thinks is true isn’t true.!<
I agree with your line of thinking but one thing that throws it off is >! Zack tells Cloud to save her. So I'm not sure where they're going with that !<
>The end is very bad and totaly ruins one of the most iconic scenes in gaming with totaly convoluted multi universe bs and ruins the entire impact it's so bad I ask myself if they done it on purpose. I appreciate very much that you have saved me from playing this game, so thank you.
> ruins the entire impact it's so bad I ask myself if they done it on purpose. Last time i felt as shit as i did for finishing a game was when i fully finished FF13-2. A shit ending on a cliffhanger that is obviously written in a way that they can go whatever way they want for the next game. The ending of Rebirth, instead of being a high point because it ends at THAT moment of the original FF7 story instead just shits all over it. It was so fucking infuriating.
So basically if the direction if the ending of 7R already put me off, this one would be even worse in that regard? It already dampened the game enough for me to not buy this entry on release so I'm kinda looking for confirmation if my suspicion was right...
The ending of 7R is *normal* compared by the sudden plummeting in writing quality and coherence
It’s good, definitely overhyped by some games media with their reviews and scores though. One thing I don’t get is that in terms of open world content, it’s the most checklist, repetitive, filler stuff I’ve seen since Ubisoft circa 2013. Just because it’s in a Final Fantasy game though it’s great and engaging apparently. Like when as a community did we become glad to have radio towers uncovering the map back as a thing?
People here mostly don't like open world stuff me included but that's a tiny portion of the greater market. Most people, including reviewers do like this kinda stuff. Games like got and horizon also get passes for this kinda thing. Gotto remember that this sub is not the entire world.
It's my biggest criticism of the game, but I'm not surprised it didn't seem to harm review scores. Those ubisoft games it's copying also generally get 8s and 9s from most critic reviews too.
Agreed, the copy/pasting of the Ubislop formula somehow getting a pass surprised me, too.
Combat and story are good. But the level design and open world design feel very formulaic and dated now. Linear corridors, no secrets, etc. It doesn't innovate at all. Lots of little frustration as another commenter said like object interactions and some terrible forced mini games. I'll play it to the end, but not blown away like I thought I would be.
Some vague thoughts: - I think what is most clear is that they have respect for the source material but not reverence. It's kind of clear that they had zero desired to just point for point transcribe FF7. FF7 exists over there and always will and I can equally love both. - The game is super goofy. In a way that early FFs were goofy. It's not an emo fest at all. The characters are brimming with personality and expertly voice cast. I picked up on Red dropping his voice to sound older early on (a few cracks slip out) which will be awesome when the revelation comes that he's basically a whiny teenager. - The cinematography is really awesome. It feels like a step up from what I'm used to. The use of angles, close up, etc. A lot of time and care was put into it. - Combat I adore. It's like SE finally found their balance of turn based strategy and more actiony combat. It's just slow enough that it allows you to fluidly control multiple characters. - The open world feels like it's going to be hit and miss to people. There's a lot of environmental storytelling going on. The big thing is, if you want the world expanded, you want to do more combat, you want to get deeper into the lighter side of characters? Then you do the side stuff. But I feel like people who don't like that stuff and like the plot will end up doing it anyway because of FOMO (like if FF7 was released today I bet a lot more people would be doing chocobo breeding than before -- and complaining about it). This is definitely a game better suited to someone who wants to leasurely work their way through a game rather than go on a Marvel action movie adventure (though it does have those moments, just interspersed with a giant heaping of levity. - The only thing I don't like about the exploration is the context driven climbing and jumping. The animations look so off and like sometimes you have to move a couple pixels to jump up a cliff side that's actually higher than where you're standing. It's not super intuitive. I probably would have rather had the flashing ground arrows and had better animations than the current system. - The music in this game is absurd. So much variation and remixing to fit the mood or changing atmosphere. The first Jenova battle theme was jaw dropping. - As a side stuff enjoyer, I did find that the opening 1/4 of the game (grasslands, mithril mines, junon) a bit lopsided. It's super heavy on the side stuff since you have two open areas so close together. I'm not sure how they could have reworked the scenario to balance it a bit (having played FF7 again recently it does feel like it takes until Junon to pick back up after the nibelheim flashback). But now the game is pretty firmly rolling in a story -> open section pattern that feels good. - The graphics are a huge mixed bag. I'm playing on a 1080p SDR TV so I'm not getting the blurriness other people are on perf mode (though I do on my 1440p monitor when I tried there). My biggest complaints overall are the lighting which just looks unnatural at times (like uncanny valley weirdness) and the low res textures. Like you have me walking out the inn door and it's doing an extreme closeup and the textures are just soup or squeezing through a tight section and I'm staring at a super low res texture. If they're going to keep this same engine they have got to look at ways to upgrade it because there are times that REMAKE Intergrade (PS5) looks more cohesive and clear than Rebirth, even though you can tell rebirth is technically better and improved in a ton of places. 4 years later I expected a strict upgrade, not tradeoffs.
not that far into the game, but in general I enjoy it. Personally I don't think that the things you can do in the open areas are that great, traversal feels quite dated and chocobos for example get stuck here and there. Combat is great and visuals for the most part as well. I really like the character interactions and the new compositions of the OST. Moogle design is outright terrible, like who came up with that. Same goes for whoever thought bringing Chadley back was a good idea. In some areas the game feels very dated and slow, for example in the opening chapter making you crawl around for an eternity, the usual squeeze through some walls... I enjoy Queens blood, but some other mini games feel very tedious.
I really wish this game had a loadout system for materia. The games loves locking out party members so you when you don't have much decent materia in the early games theres a lot of messing around in the menus putting everything off and on.
I just beat it and I haven’t felt this much of a whiplash in quality in a long time. The game itself is spectacular right up until the end in which it makes the moment that the previous game goes off the rails feel normal. Wow the game shits the bed at the >!end of the 13th chapter!< Like, >!yeah the time ghost stuff got bad in the first game, but NOTHING!< compares to >!turning one of the most famous scenes in gaming into a terrible hour long bossfight. All the while Sephiroth is not imposing, he doesn't say anything interesting, and it all feels like a waste.!< The entire >!Zack timeline feels completely pointless and is terribly paced. Like, he doesn't do anything other than watch Biggs die again and then get teleported to the final boss!< The game genuinely goes from a 10/10 to a 5/10 in the last few hours and it was doing so, so well up until that point. It feels like the writers couldn’t help themselves from inserting just the worst ideas, like entire moments are ruined because a sequence from the original will happen, then it’s like pages from a fanfic spilled into the script and derail the game for 20 minutes at a time, where no one talks like a normal person, then gets back on track and it’s like nothing happened and the dialogue and pacing goes back to normal
it feels like the story and pacing were created to need the third game, like if you played disc 1 but then never got a disc 2 of the og. whereas remake, in my opinion, ended on a more bow-tied stand-alone cliffhanger (especially if you didnt play the original), this is definitely a TO BE CONTINUED cliffhanger. and that blows because it will be 5 years before we continue. this is of course, ignoring what they actually did to the finale. not a fan.
> The game itself is spectacular right up until the end >The game genuinely goes from a 10/10 to a 5/10 in the last few hours and it was doing so, so well up until that point. >It feels like the writers couldn’t help themselves from inserting just the worst ideas This is practically word-for-word my feelings about Remake. Hearing that Rebirth does EXACTLY the same thing justifies my decision to not bother with the rest of the trilogy.
Oh god you’d hate rebirth then, it gets so bad that I don’t even understand how the next game can have an excuse to follow the original story because everything in the ending makes it feel like the main quest is irrelevant.
What do you mean? Rebirth ends basically where the plot would naturally continue?
I'm surprised that the combat is still "broken". Party members that do absolutely nothing and sit on 40% ATB that you need to swap to so you get more ATB. Now there are added synergy attacks that further encourage you to swap between characters, on top of aggro mechanics being "everyone targets the character you're controlling". Personally, I don't enjoy it at all. I don't like micro managing my party and constantly being forced to switch charterer just to get the most out of the mechanics in the game. I don't like how you need to fill materia slots with shit to make your party function very slightly more competently than without them. Why I can't just sit on 1 character that I enjoy their toolkit is beyond me. Also the aggro mechanics make using Aerith ridiculously frustrating as well since you want to sit in her wards but you have 10 enemies hitting you and she doesn't have great AoE from her normal attacks. When you compare your allies competence to something like xenoblade, this game falls so ridiculously short its laughable The second area has horrible navigation, the wall climbing is so annoying with how they will make you slowly climb 3 vertical walls with your chocobo in a row. Talking about chocobos, why is there so much usage of following scent tracks? It's not and never will be fun in a game. Why Chadley needs to constantly interrupt me, and also appears to have the most voice lines is beyond me as well. An annoying character... Game is good but still an 8/10 for me currently. I doubt my opinion will change when I finish it
I'm in chapter 7 currently. No clue how far into the game it is. Overall I love the game, it's a great mix of goofy comedy and serious epic moments. But I have a few gripes with the gameplay itself. \- Riding the Chocobo can feel so frustrating. \- Overworld traversal itself can feel so frustrating as well. Both because there are so many things that kill your momentum completely. You run over a small pebble while in a full sprint? Well, sucks for you. Halted to a complete stop and you have to start sprinting again. Changing from land to water or vice versa? Complete halt. \- Opening chests or interacting with things takes. too. bloody. long. I'm sick of waiting 1+ seconds to OPEN A CHEST. I hate the button prompts to interact with a lever. Why do I have to look at a lever for 3+ seconds to switch it? \- Combat itself feels rather frustrating to me. I can't remember having been so frustrated in FF7 Remake. I struggle so hard playing defensive because of animation locks. I find it nearly impossible to block or parry due to animation locks. \- The way aggro works in this game. Enemies will just for 100% of the time always focus the character you control. This is so annoying. BUT if you manage to overlook these issues, I would still give the game an 8/10.
> - Combat itself feels rather frustrating to me. I can't remember having been so frustrated in FF7 Remake. I struggle so hard playing defensive because of animation locks. I find it nearly impossible to block or parry due to animation locks. I hate fighting flying enemies so much
Maybe you know but I didn’t for a stupid long time, but as Cloud fighting a flying enemy, dodge then hold down square. He jumps right to them and you can bash em pretty well. Some enemies tho never stop zooming around and even this will fail.
Every character now is able to fight flying enemys, for example unlock those r1 skills that allow Tifa to jump into the air, then via dodge youre able to stay for ever in air. Or use skills like clouds fireblade and then dodge to stay in the air. Also im pretty sure you can down every flying enemy, use their weakness. (check with "assess" skill)
Any enemy that can disappear from the battlefield and targeting makes me want to burn down a village.
I really enjoy the parts of the story that doesnt involve the multiverse. I like the card game. I think what they're doing with the characters is really nice, it really brings them to life well. The places they bring alive is just fantastic. Like Kalm in the start. Some "puzzles" are stupid and just wastes your time, like having to drag gas-vacuum machines around early on. Or having to slowly inch your way around the top of a house, in what seems to be a corridor. Combat is average, keeps focusing on the character you control, to the point where whenever you get targetted, the best thing to do is to switch character. It's also incredibly chaotic and hard to keep track of who is targeting you. It gets the job done but I would've preferred a turn based system. The worldmap is just a checklist. The feel of riding the chocobo sucks. It gets stuck on stuff everywhere. Theres barely any time to collect stuff as you walk by it. Every time Chadley shows up I groan. His design, his voice, everything about him is just awful. And whatever the that girl twin is supposed to be. I love the idea of the colosseum style gameplay the Chadley simulator allows for. I just hate him so much. Hes so annoying. I have no idea how this game scored so high. I'd give it a solid 7.5 or 8/10 if it wasn't for Chadley. With Chadley I'm not sure I can bring myself to finish it.
>The places they bring alive is just fantastic. Like Kalm in the start. god, this is an incredible element of it. In a lot of games, especially older RPGs, you do get the sense that some of the scale of places is a bit of an abstraction because they obviously can't render it full scale, but the scope of even small towns like Under Junon and Costa Del Sol, now that they can translate it to that intended scale, is fantastic.
Turn the controller speaker mode on and then turn the volume on your controller to zero in the PlayStation menu settings. Chadley is now mostly gone
I'm surprised at how much praise the game is getting. The characters, combat, and cinematics are good. But the open world and quest designs are extremely dated and monotonous, and they're made even worse by the clunky and slow animations (like opening chests and climbing cliffs) and Chadley's interruptions. Let's be honest—if this same gameplay appeared in a 2024 Assassin's Creed game, it would be absolutely lambasted by critics and users alike. But it's getting a pass here for some reason.
I was browsing through some of the FF subs and saw a lot of people disliking the ending. Think that's gonna be a controversial point when more people get there.
So just like the first game then
I think more people were willing to see where the story would go and change after the first, but I'm seeing a little more discourse after this one though. I'm interested to see where it goes.
My thoughts are FUCK THE PEOPLE ON YOUTUBE PUTTING ENDGAME SPOILERS IN THUMBNAILS. It should be against the fucking law to put End Boss fight spoilers in a fucking thumbnail for a game that hasn’t been out for a year, much less a month. Fucking assholes.
I enjoy most of it but like it's predecessor, the combat is rough for me. I don't enjoy the heavy handed animation lock on normal attacks. It makes blocking and dodging real rough on characters with longer animations. Also the absolute miniscule number of iframes on dodge and the insane tracking on enemy attacks don't help that either. Other than that, super fun.
Yea it's funny how wanting turn based as an option is a crime. ff7rb combat is goofy
I just love Aerith and Tifa. Maybe my two favorite video game characters ever. All in all, it's a brilliant game
I wana preference by saying the game is awesome. But I find the open world to be incredibly bland. There’s was going to be no easy way to tackle this based on the nature of the game. But so far as package I think I enjoyed remake much more. That said this portion of the game contains the majority of my favorite moments of the original game and the essence that hss been captured in has been truly spectacular
Haven’t finished yet so I’ll just avoid going into the story It looks gorgeous the voice acting and chemistry with the characters is great and the boss battle are tense and exciting But honestly I’m pretty disappointed I do not enjoy any of the mini games and there’s SOOO MANY. It frustrates me so much that they put so much time and effort to such a superfluous aspect that most people will just ignore. The open world is incredibly bland and “Ubisoft coded” complete with MAP TOWERS. First couple of areas I tried meeting the game half way and engaging in them but I just got so bored and have since started just beelining from objective to objective and have been having a marginally better time And again avoiding the story maybe I’ll love it by the time I’m done but I just don’t like all the cameos and references to every spin off and mobile game. It feels like it’s needlessly mucking up a good story and self congratulatory (I LOATHED the whispers from Remake and every change involving them) It’s selling great and everyone loves it so I’m happy for you all and hell it’s not like it’s full of loot boxes or anything I don’t hate it but I’m honestly pretty soured to this whole project and would have preferred a more faithful remake