dancingstar93

Played through the whole thing & then pre-ordered the full game. This, in contrast to FF XV, is action combat done well (as expected given who worked on it). Also a decent EN voice track, evidently the voice director made it quite clear to the cast they weren't dubbing a shounen anime.

@jollyjoe0 AFAIK the devs have been pretty much open about that, one straight up said they made the team watch the whole of the GoT TV show.

@Andy22385 The localised version of 7 didn't have the number either, & AFAIK that sold well enough.

@Clemerek yeah that's what I thought initially, but the RGG Studio twitter just confirmed this is the game previously announced as Ryu ga Gotoku: Like a Dragon 8 (or however you want to read the title logo) & the Japanese RGG Youtube channel posted the same trailer with the RgG8 title logo.

@Athrum Given that the localised version of Ryu ga Gotoku 7 didn't have the number in its title, and 0-6 were localised under a different name, releasing it as Like a Dragon 8 would be liable to confuse people.

Kinda weird that this is the first one since 3 that won't have a subtitle in the Japanese release (Yokoyama confirmed in an interview last year that it would be simply "Ryu ga Gotoku 8" with no subtitle, because reasons) whereas out of 4-7 and Zero, only 6 had the subtitle in the localised release.

<nitpick>That header pic isn't from the PS1 original, the field models only got mouths with the PC port.

@Uromastryx In the JP version of the trailer he explicitly mentions her name at that point. Also in the announcement trailer from last year, we hear Tifa asking Cloud, apparently in connection with the Nibelheim flashback "What are you implying? That I died? That I'm some kind of imposter?"

Played it up to the second boss (guy with horse mask wielding a totally-not Saw Cleaver on a bridge); it's competent enough, but not in "pre-order the steelbook" territory for me.

I was getting strong Blooodborne vibes from the whole thing, but then again Bloodborne is the only Soulslike I've played (not counting Nioh or Stranger of Paradise) so I'm prolly not the best person to judge.

@Darude84 Remake project has a third game planned. Crisis Core is a prequel to the OG FF VII but spoilers a fairly major third-act reveal so shouldn't be played first. Ditto Before Crisis (tho' the only way to play that at the moment is a bad RPGmaker "remake").

@Fizza where did you get "Yuffie dies" from that trailer? Sephiroth appears to be insinuating that the real Tifa died at Nibelheim and that the "Tifa" travelling with the others is a puppet formed from Cloud's memories & Jenova cells (<spoiler for something on disc 2 of OG FF VII redacted>)

@knowles2 Didn't SE try that once? IIRC it didn't go well.

@Uromastryx the former of those was pretty much what I went, I just didn't give details because I don't know how to tag spoilers on this site.

And now dev comment #4 is up, confirming there'll be a recap movie or somesuch for "players who did not get a chance to play the first game."

@Uromastryx Obvious breakpoint would be after Whirlwind Maze, which would also give a story excuse to reset everyone's gear. Of course this is assuming that the rest of the remake project retains the general story structure of the original which is by no means certain.

And now an even vaguer "Developer comment number 3" is up, this time about the story.

@Cloud39472 Hey, Dissidia Opera Omnia is turn-based & still being updated, and there's a chance Ever Crisis (apparently ATB-style despite the flashy Remake-style graphics for battles) will actually launch and have its service last longer than First Soldier did . . .

@Rgeneb1 It's vague, sure, but wouldn't, for instance, apply to FF X or XIII & remember how much flack the latter game got on that count.

@KidRyan . . . except the person you're replying to was referring to a particular character / boss in FF XIV and his theme
song & the official roman-script name of that character is "Good King Moggle Mog"

EDIT: nvm, I see they replied already.

FF XVI, probably (not pre-ordering it 'til after I've played the demo). No interest in fighting games and only ever played the first Diablo.

@Skeletor85 Legacy Collection basically had HD Collection as Disc 1, Guns of the Patriots as Disc 2 and a download code for MGS + VR Missions.

Depending on how badly Konami decide to cheap out on this project they may pad out one or another of the volumes with things like the NES port of Metal Gear, Snakes Revenge, Ghost Babel &c. running under emulation layers. The current advert already mentions "regional versions of the titles" being "available as additional downloads."

@Arisen The Tolkien estate doesn't own the film / TV / videogame / merchandising rights to The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit ever since Ron Tolkien sold them off to United Artists in the late '60s to pay off his back taxes. What they do own is all rights to everything in the Tolkien legendarium that isn't in those two books (e.g. pretty much everything First Age and earlier) & unlike the various corps that have been trading the LoTR / Hobbit rights among themselves, have been extremely reluctant to license them to, well, anyone.

@Heavy_Artilery I seriously hope that was sarcasm. Not sure I'm in the mood for another Nier Replicant / FF Type-0 deal on that score.

@KaijuKaiser heh I've not seen fighting games called "beat 'em ups" since the 1980s.

@Michael2008ish Some of the IX characters are voiced (well, barks / battle shouts rather than full dialogue) in Dissidia Omnia Opera, tho' this being a gacha-based mobage with a paper-thin story I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to play it. Vivi & Eiko appear & are voiced in World of Final Fantasy (the "guests" in WoFF are alternate-universe versions with different tho' analogous backstories but the same general personality).

@Kanji-Tatsumi FF XII is one of the very few JRPGs that I don't reflexively set to JP voice at the first opportunity. Not super-fond of Vaan & Penelo's voicework on either track, tho'. X, I eventually grew to tolerate the EN dub (since my Japanese sucks, the alternative was using a mod which leaves subtitle & animation timings out of sync with the voice track). I initially though Yuna's part sounded phoned-in but it later becomes clear why she's talking that way.

@themightyant Clive is hardly the first FF playable character, or even main character, who had a fairly common English given name: we've had Maria, Guy, Leon, Richard, Cecil, Rosa, Edward, Tina, Edgar, Vincent, Claire* & probably some more I don't remember.

• (some of those may have been victims of localisation changes for one reason or another; e.g. Claire was originally Éclair which to English speakers suggests a variety of sweet pastry)

This had better be good. Sony getting complacent does none of us any favours.

LOTRO is still a thing tho' not under its original publisher / dev, I've not really been following it for many years (quit shortly after Isengard launch). I have various memories of that game, including one side quest in Eregion that literally had you picking up the Fellowship of the Ring's litter. Also trying to level up a Hobbit character as far as possible without leaving the Shire (mainly through farming and cooking). I also use it as a good example of video-game scaling syndrome: compare the distance from the Buckleberry Ferry to Brandywine Bridge in the game (less than a minute at normal run speed IIRC) with how far it's described as being in the book.

@CutchuSlow A good guideline would be, if it's not specifically stated to be PS exclusive, assume it isn't.

@trev666 Pretty much, yeah. In-universe order is MGS 3, Peace Walker, MGS 5 (Ground Zeroes / Phantom Pain), Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2, Metal Gear Solid 4. AFAIK Portable Ops (between 3 and Peace Walker) & Revengeance (after 4) are considered non-canon.

@CutchuSlow No. PC & XBox Series too AFAIK.

That kind of action combat might work in an online game if you're in a relatively small country with decent internet infrastructure, like, well, South Korea . . . not so much if you've got people from all over Europe or the Americas playing on a single datacentre for their continent. Never mind the question of how the hell will the "time manipulation" gameplay element play out in a multiplayer game.

@Judal27 I kinda miss the simple box designs from the PS2 era that were just the title logo on a white background (e.g. the PAL releases of X, X-2 & XII). The steelbook of Zodiac Age had some nice cover & interior art tho'.

The version of the story I generally read was that changes were not a result of direct fan feedback but executive meddling, as regards imposing a shounen MC, and in respect of the dissonant nature of the story, due to the lead writer being replaced partway through development.

I also suspect the game ran into delays and the ending was rushed in order to get it released while the PS2 was still relevant; I found the final dungeon (whose basic concept btw appears to have been recycled from one in Final Fantasy II) struck me as brief and disappointing compared to the two main story dungeons immediately preceding (Giruvegan / Great Crystal and Pharos).

@Browny Possibly III 3D had a balance pass between DS and the mobile / Steam version, I don't remember the latter being crazy-difficult outside of the hidden post-game dungeon.

This game is also a retort to anyone who mocks "Clive" as a name for a FF prontagonist.

I don't remember this one as particularly difficult, but then the first version of FF IV I played was the Steam port of the 3D remake which even on "normal" difficulty (i.e., easier than the DS version) is somewhat mechanically tougher, & also changed a bunch of boss fight mechanics (e.g. a making certain boss attack pierce Reflect).

FF II, by the way, is where a large number of the franchise's iconic critters first put in an appearance — Bombs, Behemoths, Coeurls, Malboros, the familiar form of the flan / pudding amorphs, Chocobos, airship engineers called Cid (Cid of Lufenia was retconned into the backstory of the first game in a later release). Much of the bestiary in the original game was cribbed from the Monster Manual.

"Use skills to level them up" works in tabletop RPG (e.g. old-school Cthulhu / RuneQuest) where you have a human GM; in computer RPGs like this and Elder Scrolls it just gets horribly abuseable.

Also, did this game's writers consciously lift things from Star Wars, or were they just mining the same set of tropes Lucas used?

@CutchuSlow Apologies. With it being a ~25 year old game and so successful & influential, somehow avoiding the plot spoiler in question while having an interest in the series is something of an achievement. I will also add that while Remake is nominally an alternate-timeline retelling of the first four or 5 hours of the 1997 game, there are things in there that only make sense if you've completed the OG FFVII up to the post-credits scene.

@ItsBritneyB_tch depending on why you didn't like FF XIII you might like some of the others. There's a vocal contingent of people on the Internet who claim to be fans of this series that loudly loathe XIII.

@Jayslow this is nothing new, I believe the Western launch trailer for the original FF VII included a fairly major character death spoiler.

@LifeGirl Just mashing Square in XV (which I'll freely admit had action combat done badly) or VII-R, or for that matter spamming Auto-Battle and never changing paradigms in XIII, won't get you further than just spamming Attack in the turn-based and ATB games does.

I got the error message, but that's possibly because I had the avatar set already. These were first released a while ago.

Keeping mine (500GB super slim) mainly for Metal Gear & Ryu ga Gotoku.

@Hundred_Hand_Slap & maybe also to actually play it, I read the PS4/5 version of that was pretty broken.

@Shstrick There are 3 collections on the PS store. The "Anniversary Collection" has 8 of the older games (3rd & 4th gen) emulated from the NES / SNES / Gameboy / Mega Drive versions & is a good starting place for the classic games; the "Advance collection" has the three GBA games plus Dracula X (a remake / alternate retelling of Rondo of Blood for the SNES), and "Requiem" (exclusive to Playstation 'cos Sony paid for the minimal dev work actually involved in the release) contains emulated versions of the PSP ports of Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night that were embedded in "Dracula X Chronicles" (itself a remake of Rondo).

They come up in sales quite a lot, but if you only want to get one, get Requiem; Rondo is pretty much the culmination of the "classic" games & Symphony established the "Metroidvania" format.

Symphony is also available as an emulated version of the OG Playstation version on PS3 and that version includes the memetic Dracula-Richter dialogue in the English version which was changed in the PSP version, as well as the IMO superior ending theme "I am the Wind."

Lords of Shadow was a competent enough action game, albeit not all that original; its main problem was that (like the Haunted Castle arcade long before) it had the Castlevania branding slapped on it relatively late in development for marketing purposes (Mercury Steam's original pitch was for a retelling of Simon Belmont's story but that quickly fell by the wayside).

Konami in any case haven't been completely sitting on the Castlevania IP quite the way they have with Metal Gear, their bean-counters have likely been looking at how well things like the recent port collections, the Netflix animation and the current collab with Dead Cells do & trying to work out if it's worth actually doing anything with it that would involve them spending money up front.

Playing it (on ch. 5 so far), but alternating with a few other things including God of War 2018, replaying Nioh 2 (random aside: the first Nioh included a whole bunch of historical figures who also appeared in the other RgG samurai game as characters, wonder how many the same studio's Rise of the Ronin will share with this), & grinding through the DLC chapters of Stranger of Paradise.

@johnny30 well yeah, the "quite dated" part follows from it being a 9 year old game. It plays a lot like Yakuza Zero & compared to the PS3 / PS4 version (tho' this is from memory, it's been a year or two since I started that and never got past ch. 3 since my Japanese sucks so was constantly flicking between the game and the KHH guide) got nothing like the upgrade / working-over that the "Kiwami" versions of 1 & 2 did (& it is being sold as "Ishin Kiwami" in Japan).

@tselliot currently a vague "2024."

@thetraditional TBH while Kenzan! certainly is an early PS3 game and shows it, I found it less clunky than 3 (and a lot less clunky than Dead Souls / Of The End). It's so early in that gen that it doesn't have PSN trophies, although it has the usual in-game completion list.

But yeah, from a marketing point of view it is so old that a simple "remaster" like the mainline PS3 games got (& it would also need to be localised from scratch which would be a lot of work) probably wouldn't sell well enough at any given price point to justify the expense involved, and that's even if you disregard the persistent meme that the game's treatment of early Edo-era prostitution would cause it to run into trouble with Western ratings boards.

To be clear, this is a very limited demo which pretty much throws you in the deep end in a couple of battle scenarios with a whole bunch of trooper cards and no real explanation of anything: it's not like the demos we got for 6, Kiwami 2 or FotNS: Lost Paradise.

Yeah I got the plats on Bloodborne, Nioh & its sequel, but life's too short & my game backlog too long to attempt those for most of the Yakuza / RgG series: closest I got are on 6 (which doesn't require 100% completion list, I'm only missing "complete on Legend difficulty") & 7 / Y:LaD (only missing Super Final Millennium Tower).

I suspect the Ishin! trophy list is mostly copied from the original PS3/4 version, which apparently has a 1.6% plat rate.

Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise (a.k.a. Hokuto ga Gotoku) which was pretty much Yakuza characters cosplaying as Hokuto no Ken characters, had a similar free DLC at launch which let you swap out Kenshiro's character model for Kiryu.

@Athrum hmm Maiden is currently in the PS store sale, might check it out.

I suppose anyone who's into this series knows this already, but might be worth mentioning that on the UK / EU store this is called Project Zero which AFAIK is a closer translation of the original name. (EDIT: checked and not quite, JP name is just the kanji for "zero" with "zero" in katakana or roman script).

@Shadcai So Final Fantasy, the 1987 Famicom game, isn't Final Fantasy?

Most of the series' now-iconic critters were introduced over the course of II-VI. The first game's bestiary was largely cribbed from the Monster Manual.