FF VII Rebirth demo
Feb. 25th, 2024 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peeeeeeetSo I made the mistake of getting my hopes slightly up about FF VII. I didn't care for Remake - it was slow, meandering, with generic side material and a messy, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink combat system with little coherence or tactical management. It did at least have the massively gay bit in the middle which I loved, but otherwise... well, I tend to replay FF games once every couple of years and I keep trying to talk myself into replaying that one and then I remember that tedious motorbike guy, or how you could remove chapter four entirely and no one would notice anything was missing, or those puzzles with the giant mechanical hands, and I think... naaah.
BUT. I heard that Namura was not in charge of the next one and instead it was the XIII guys - Kitase, that bunch. They made Lightning Returns which, if it had had the budget of a mainline entry, would be my undisputed favourite. Even with it's slightly sketchy aspects it's probably second or third after XII and maybe X depending on how I'm feeling about fixed cameras that day. I'd heard - and it makes sense, given Act Two of the original game - that it would be more open world, which boded well.
So a demo came out, and... nope. It's got the same problems as the last one. The combat is still a chaotic mess - perhaps even more so. There are still lengthy featureless treks through generic environments to stretch the thing out to three games. It still has awkward dialogue and stilted voice acting.
I happened to be replaying Forspoken a few weeks ago and really, the gameplay is night and day. True, the village of Cipal is rather bland and you want to get out of there asap, but once you do, it's a never-ending romp through the weird world of Athia. The combat is pretty deep, but everything lines up - controls make sense, you can, for the most part, do what you want to do when you want to do it and the results are easily parsable visually. So, Squeenix can do it, they'd just rather not. Instead we get stupid ideas - why can't I use a item if ATB isn't charged up? At one point we're told about an essential companion move, but I couldn't find it in the menu. Turns out, for no good reason, they just put that one thing in a different place to all the other similar things. It's kind of like that. Moves just thrown together with no logic, no consistency to button presses. In the end I just kind of spammed whatever worked and got through it, but more than half the time if something worked I didn't know why it did. That plus the camera spasming all over the place made combat a curiously arms-length kind of thing; I seemed to be doing OK at it just jabbing at buttons, so I ended up not really paying that much attention. I had similar complaints about XVI, but by comparison that was reasonably streamlined.
So yeh, I'm not buying it. Maybe at some point in the future after I've replayed Remake and maybe the original just so the story is fresh in my mind. But I'm in no hurry.
Anyway, it's time for Squeenix to announce what's coming next. Enhanced remasters of XIII-series seems the obvious choice, and perhaps they could even announce XVII, since they won't have to actually release it for a few years. Otherwise it seems it's going to be very quiet on the FF front, since I feel like XVI hasn't had the legs they were presumably hoping for.
Oh well, off back to Forspoken.
BUT. I heard that Namura was not in charge of the next one and instead it was the XIII guys - Kitase, that bunch. They made Lightning Returns which, if it had had the budget of a mainline entry, would be my undisputed favourite. Even with it's slightly sketchy aspects it's probably second or third after XII and maybe X depending on how I'm feeling about fixed cameras that day. I'd heard - and it makes sense, given Act Two of the original game - that it would be more open world, which boded well.
So a demo came out, and... nope. It's got the same problems as the last one. The combat is still a chaotic mess - perhaps even more so. There are still lengthy featureless treks through generic environments to stretch the thing out to three games. It still has awkward dialogue and stilted voice acting.
I happened to be replaying Forspoken a few weeks ago and really, the gameplay is night and day. True, the village of Cipal is rather bland and you want to get out of there asap, but once you do, it's a never-ending romp through the weird world of Athia. The combat is pretty deep, but everything lines up - controls make sense, you can, for the most part, do what you want to do when you want to do it and the results are easily parsable visually. So, Squeenix can do it, they'd just rather not. Instead we get stupid ideas - why can't I use a item if ATB isn't charged up? At one point we're told about an essential companion move, but I couldn't find it in the menu. Turns out, for no good reason, they just put that one thing in a different place to all the other similar things. It's kind of like that. Moves just thrown together with no logic, no consistency to button presses. In the end I just kind of spammed whatever worked and got through it, but more than half the time if something worked I didn't know why it did. That plus the camera spasming all over the place made combat a curiously arms-length kind of thing; I seemed to be doing OK at it just jabbing at buttons, so I ended up not really paying that much attention. I had similar complaints about XVI, but by comparison that was reasonably streamlined.
So yeh, I'm not buying it. Maybe at some point in the future after I've replayed Remake and maybe the original just so the story is fresh in my mind. But I'm in no hurry.
Anyway, it's time for Squeenix to announce what's coming next. Enhanced remasters of XIII-series seems the obvious choice, and perhaps they could even announce XVII, since they won't have to actually release it for a few years. Otherwise it seems it's going to be very quiet on the FF front, since I feel like XVI hasn't had the legs they were presumably hoping for.
Oh well, off back to Forspoken.
