Topic: Final fantasy discussion thread

@Thrillho lol yeah, I have them down these days but absolutely they can be annoying as hell.

@kyleforrester87 @Thrillho I played FF7 a bit on PS1 but I properly played it for the first time with the slightly terrible Windows port and trying to do the resuscitation was an absolute shambles using random keys on the keyboard like Page Up and stuff. In terms of irritating points in FF games though, that cave in 4 where you can’t wear metal gear is evil.

@nessisonett @kyleforrester87 in the squall is dead iceberg theory, he dies at the end of disc 1, so it is the end of the game rofl. Well worth a look on YouTube, pretty cool theory as the story goes balls to the wall mental, not necessarily in a good way.... and it's my favourite FF.

@johncalmc @Th3solution I could read you two all day writing about FF. Honestly push is lucky to have you both. John as staff and Sol as should be staff. Great write up John. You and forrester love ff9, I want to like ff9 but the battles are sooooo sloooow. And also 10 is bloody amazing.

@themcnoisy
In FF 9 Remastered, you can speed up the game anytime.
Even there are some options like No encounter, Full Trance gauge, Damage 9999, Instant learning, etc.

@themcnoisy Thanks, Noisy. 😄 Final Fantasy 7 was a fundamental ingredient in the genesis of my love for video gaming. FF7 along with Tomb Raider and Metal Gear Solid are what set me on this road as a wee lad.

And yes, I loved FFX. I’d be ashamed to see how much time I spent playing Blitzball. 😂

@AgentCooper it’s a hot topic 😜

@Anti-Matter sweet, will pick it up again. Thank you.

So I've played Final Fantasy VII Remake on PS5 for seven hours now and I'm absolutely loving the game thus far, except for one aspect: the side quests. They are repetitive and unrewarding. Go kill these monsters, go find some lost cats etc. I mean, there really shouldn't be side quests like these anymore in modern games. Hopefully they were just there as simple beginner's side quests and that later side quests are better.

Other than that, I think it's incredible just how much they've expanded this section of the original FF7. It feels like playing a brand new game that has key elements from the original. Can't imagine what an amazing feeling it must be to play the remake after having grown up with the original.

FF7 is the only video game I know of with an opening act so strong that it can carry a 40+ hour remake on its own terms. It's very self-contained in its own right and has a much more explicitly science-fiction feel to it than the rest of the game.

Yeah I remember as a kid, I had been playing FF7 for a while and was still in Midgar. I got a copy of PlayStation Solutions with a guide, it had a world map with each location numbered - I saw there were upward of 20-30 locations or whatever and it blew my mind. Obviously none ended up being as big as Midgar, but I didn’t know that at the time!

I like that they had side-quests in Final Fantasy VII Remake but they do serve to highlight how padded out the game is. It's fun to spend more time in Midgar and get to see that it's an actual city with people and infrastructure and lives rather than like nine pre-rendered backgrounds in the original. It's nice. But between how banal most of the side-quests are, and some chapters that seem to exist purely to make the game last longer, you can see that they struggled to fill it out.

That's probably my biggest non-story related issue with Final Fantasy VII Remake. Otherwise it's a banger.

I enjoyed seeing the recognisable locations in 3D, looking up at the plate in particular and seeing the blue sky around the edges in the distance was really awesome. Other than that I didn’t really get along with the remake at all, it was padded out with weird side quests and far too long sections of walking and combat. I’ve tried to finish it a couple of times but can’t do it, I will have to watch a let’s play of the final section if I end up getting the next one. Funny because I expect the next ones will fly through things way too fast by comparison.

@kyleforrester87 The end is terrible so quitting when you did is arguably the best way to experience the game.

@johncalmc Yes, I have read it and know what happens. Awful stuff. Still, would like to see it with my own eyes one day.

@LtSarge @Kidfried @kyleforrester87 @johncalmc I quite enjoyed the ff7 remake. The yawn inducing padding and memory ghosts, just woeful.

All we wanted was a fully fledged remake to bring the game up to date. They did a fantastic job with the early story beats and the gameplay is decent, the graphics are sublime - bar some strange low resolution textures. What discourages me are the changes to the fantastic story. Unnecessary and actually makes the experience worse. I genuinely don't care what happens next. Factoring in the memory ghosts was such a rubbish idea, why did the developers feel the need to have them and change anything? The original story is great.

@themcnoisy I'm the same. I can't tell you - even with the padding - Remake was on course to be one of my favourite ever games until the end. It brought me such joy to see the places and people from Final Fantasy VII realised so well. It's one of my favourite ever games, and I was grinning so much playing the remake. My girlfriend loves Final Fantasy VII too and we were playing Remake at the same time and it was such a fantastic experience for us both.

Even broken up into parts I would have been totally okay with it. All it had to do was end with the cast walking off to Kalm after following the original story and I would have watched the credits rolling with a salute and a tear in my eye. But they had to Square Enix it. They couldn't leave it alone. And it really soured the whole experience for me. I still love what they did up until then, and I'll probably play it again one day. But where before I couldn't wait to see Junon and Cosmo Canyon and all the other places, now I don't care very much. They'll probably have Sephiroth turn up and tombstone piledriver Emerald Weapon or the Highwind will be piloted by the chipmunks from Kingdom Hearts or something. It's nonsense.

Once the story lost me I was less forgiving to the egregious padding of the game. I can overlook a lot of rubbish in a game for a good yarn. I frequently do. I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077 again right now because I love the story and the world even though the gameplay is pretty spotty. But without the story I'm more irritated by the other problems. There's entire pointless sections of the game that are only there because a fifteen hour Final Fantasy would have raised eyebrows and people would have cried. That whole bit with Hojo in the tower? Garbage. The bit underground? Nah.

I suppose it's hard when you really like a thing, and it makes you a little more critical when it's not as good as you'd like. Final Fantasy VII is one of my favourite games, so seeing it handled like it was in Remake really aggrieved me and pretty much erased any excitement I had for the games going forward. I'll still play them just to see, but I don't really care what they do with it going forward.

@johncalmc That’s well said. I think your comment encompasses a lot of fans’ feelings about FF7R.

Apparently Crisis Core Reunion is a more faithful remake which strictly polishes the original product and gets it up to modern standards without modification of the basic narrative. But like you say, after the way things went off-rails with FF7R at the end, it sapped a little of my hype for playing the others in the FF7 series.

Beat Final Fantasy’s remaster on Switch. Took like 5 hours, the last hour of which was grinding in the Chaos Shrine. Not bad, better than the other versions I’ve played of the game and really liking the new soundtracks.

Final Fantasy II done. Not much longer than the first and still kinda w***. Made more bearable by the boost function for sure. As AVGN would put it, it’s one of those ‘where the f*ck do I go’ kinda games and I got lost despite having played it before. The soundtrack rules though.

That’s FF3 done now. Not the best game I’ve played, and I suffered through the 3D version too. The addition of auto save makes this the best version of the game by an absolute country mile though, you not longer have the 2 hour slog at the end of the game.