legend

@best3444 I've only completed the first part of Costa del Sol, but thought I'd let you know that you don't actually have to do all the mini games. On the boat ride over, you don't have to play in the tournament (you can forfeit immediately), to get to the beach you only need to play one mini game as Cloud, and for Tifa/Aerith, you can get the tickets by doing non-mini game activities once for each. I don't think you need to do the Red soccer at all. So you may have put yourself through more pain than you needed.

That said, I did them all  

11 minutes ago, Chris- said:

How does the combat feel in Remake/Rebirth? I only played XVI for like 3 hours because the enemies felt like absurd damage sponges, and the combat really wasn’t fun as a result. Do these games have the same thing going on?

No, I've loved the combat since Remake but was pretty disappointed in the stale 16 combat. In Rebirth, it's much the same as 7R, but expanded a bit more.

* There are many more spells/skills/abilities than 16

* The stagger system is much better implemented. (In 16, it was just a cycle of stagger before you could do damage, here there are specific abilities for pressuring and staggering that vary by enemy, but it isn't the only way to fight.)

* You have a party of 3 to play with and in more challenging scenarios, the design of the combat encourages you to frequently switch between them.

* The "cool down" is so much fucking better than 16. 16 has long as annoying cooldowns. 7R/Rebirth use ATB (inspired by the OG of course) where the ATB is a common resource for any ability. It fills up on its own, but fills up *much* faster when you do active damage, parry, etc. allowing your to get off moves quickly. And some builds allow you to build up at insanely fast speeds. (Tifa builds up ATB crazy fast in general). This system is part of what encourages frequent switching between party members.

* Each character plays differently

* It's real time with pause (well, slow way the fuck down rather than complete pause I suppose), which lends itself better to having more strategy like the OG in addition to the real-time combat

* Lots of different Materia and Materia synergies to customize your build

* Much more varied skill trees to customize your character

* Weapons do not become instantly obsolete with the newest one, because they all keep leveling and have different trade offs

* Rebirth adds "synergy" skills and abilities which are special moves you can do with different teammates. The skills can be done at will in real time. The abilities require using regular abilities of each character to build up a resource on both to use for the synergy abilities.

The 7R/Rebirth combat style is what I was really hoping the indefinitely postponed KOTOR remake would use. 

JC. I didn't even know about this to give it a shot and Netflix already canceled it? They're their own worst fucking enemies I swear.

Does the series end on a possible conclusion or is it obviously incomplete?

56 minutes ago, best3444 said:

I still am not understanding synergies. Is it rare to get that ability to show up in a fight? I think I'm doing everything right. 

There are synergy skills and there are synergy abilities. Synergy skills you can do whenever by pressing a button when you're guarding.

Synergy abilities require each of the teammates to a number of abilities to build up those tick marks and then you can use the synergy abilities from the synergy menu which will show you how may ticks each character has. It's in the manual and I think the combat simulator.

If you're not controlling your other party members a lot, they probably aren't using many abilities and won't give you opportunity to use the synergy abilities.

31 minutes ago, best3444 said:

Man, game as hit a road block with these bullshit minigames and activities they force you to do to get on the beach. This will knock my score down. 

Maybe the game is telling you to slow down and not rush it?  

But honestly, you're just going to be in a minority here. One of the things the OG FF7 was famous (and loved) for was having lots of different mini games, especially in the gold saucer, and this game is bringing it back!

1 hour ago, Biggie said:

What I did was read the enemy analysis and try and do exactly what it said to set off stagger. Switching out party members and materia until I finally got it. So far I’ve only had that issue one time and it took about 5 tries and different combinations before I got the check mark. 

It's not that I didn't know how to stagger it, it's that they died in like 3 hits to me! Using the stagger abilities or the magic weakness (which gives lots of stagger) would nearly1 shot it.

I finally managed it by... changing to "dynamic difficulty" so that it gave them lots more health.

Gah! I cannot get one of the fiend objectives in grasslands because you have to stagger them, but the enemies are way too weak and die well before I can stagger them. I don't know how to nerf myself.

1 hour ago, best3444 said:

I'm on chapter 6 already (only 14 chapters total) 10 hours or so in. I just hit Costa del sol. I'm about to hit the beach with Barret.

 

BUT I hate games that force you to play their mini games and it does it here for you to advance the main plot. The thing that sucked was I didn't play this card game on the cruise ship so when I got to land they forced me to play it and I had absolutely no idea what the rules were lol.

 

So in order for me to beat this card game I had to memorize my card placement to beat 3 challenges. It was ridiculous and time consuming. But I got through it and ready to play tomorrow morning at a good spot. 

 

It says it takes 41 hours to beat this game when only focusing on the main story. So I'm iffy on that the way things are going. 

Battles are probably shorter on easy which will affect your time if you’re just doing the main quest and ignoring everything else. 

I'm not very far (just got to Junon) but I feel like they upped the boss difficulty in this one and required me to get back into the groove of the frequent and well timed character switching that I got really good at in Remake. I actually *like* that the difficulty and structure of the combat does that because it makes you use all your tools. There are a couple advantages to this strategy

1. It let's you accelerate the ATB of the whole party faster -- especially if you switch when you start an ability/spell of one of the other characters so that you can fill up while they're busy.

2. It decreased the boss damage output.

Regarding 2, that's because non-controlled players take less damage. The boss will also focus on them less. So if you switch characters once the boss starts targeting you, you'll soften the damage received and it will give your other character time to do some damage before the boss changes focus to your new controlled character.

You end up changing characters a lot, but that's both fun and really makes it feel like a party game. Anyway, just thought I'd leave that tip for anyone struggling with it.

14 minutes ago, best3444 said:

@legend @crispy4000

 

What did I miss here?

 

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I know who the presidents son is from Remake but what happened to the actual president? The last thing I remembered was he was hanging for dear life in Remake. Barret saved him so what happened next?

 

Just now, Mr.Vic20 said:

For those with OLED TVs, turn on motion smoothing immediately! Its fixed so much of the problem!

Words I'm not sure I ever thought I'd hear  

Hmm. I haven't noticed frame drops in graphics mode. I mean, 30fps is shitty but it seemed like pretty consistent shitty to me?  

1 hour ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

I would suggest that almost all legal frameworks and tax codes for any type of corporate entity are fucked up.

Yeah, but there are levels  

I want to see this soon, but

1. My wife doesn't enjoy going to theaters anymore; and

2. We got Covid this last week (first time!) and are still recovering so we probably shouldn't be in a theater now anyway.

2 hours ago, Ricofoley said:

Just to state the obvious here, if "abandoning your founding mission in pursuit of profit" is grounds for a lawsuit, Tesla should be sued many times over.

It's more complicated than that. OpenAI was originally a non-profit, and they continue to have a "non-profit" base on which a capped "for-profit" entity sits on top. Tesla is just for profit with none of the legal benefits of a non-profit (or at least I wasn't aware of any!)

It's a fucked up world to allow the BS organizational structure that OpenAI gets away with and they ought to be taken to task for it.

2 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

@Spork3245
@legend

 

The timeframe also seems a little screwy.  I thought it was weeks after that Cloud joined up with Barrett and co.

 

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...Unless it took Zach weeks to carry Cloud into Midgar, lol.

 

Yeah either

20 minutes ago, SaysWho? said:

I never did the demo, so I'm doing the flashback right now. Nibelheim looks quite lovely.

8 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

Also, that’s a pretty surprising start plot-wise.  I’m here for it.

Haha yeah, I was like "oh they're going to remind us of that bit at the end.... wait it's even weirder than we thought!?"

The part in particular that was weird is that they mentioned in the news cast

Sucks  It's going to make this final season of Curb weirder. Especially since he was talking about his will in it  

Also thought this was worth sharing

25 minutes ago, Remarkableriots said:

Why do people hate live service games? I enjoy games that continue to get updates so you have new content to play.

They can be great, but they're especially susceptible to having their game design infected by executives who are trying to figure out how to get more money out of people instead of how to make the game more fun.

So it ultimately depends on the development environment.

5 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

 

We have a different perspective, for sure.  I don't mind any references to the original game's happenings, since it's been long enough and a lot of the twists are common knowledge.  And its still a great game.  Although I do feel somewhat bad for people at the end of remake lacking context.

 

It's the stuff like this that bothers me.  Just in the past week, I've learned about all sorts of things I would have never considered to be brought in, or even knew about like the existence of like the novel.  Remake limits itself to one game, maybe two if you count Crisis Core.  Rebirth, the references and inside knowledge keeps coming...

 

PSA: A Final Fantasy VII Spin-Off You Didn't Play Matters In Rebirth

KOTAKU.COM

---

No spoilers, but you should catch up on The First Soldier and Ever Crisis before jumping in

 

I'm not terribly concerned as of yet. I'm not going to bother catching up on what happens there. As long as they give you the background in Rebirth, it can remain background for me!  

13 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

More like fumble it in the way we should expect by now, lol.  But I think they make their point clear enough about the DLC tying directly in.  Even if they're wrong about it being all that "important," a youtube summary would probably be good idea to watch at the least.  Just in case.

 

There's nothing wrong with a series leaning into this stuff.  I loved every second of XB3's Future Redeemed DLC for example, even though it requires 200+ hours of RPG backdrop to set itself up.  And I'd strongly recommend someone who hadn't beaten the three games to hold back, because the lore is entirely responsible for its biggest impact moment.

 

 

Where I honestly get frustrated here is that so much of the secondary FF7 material is middling.  I'm not going to tell anyone to play Dirge of Cerberus for context for example.  Or even Crisis Core.  But the Intermission DLC, as a game, shouldn't be skipped.  It's great fun, and as a bonus, should partially prepare us for the extent they could deviate from og.  Or that it likely will, if the direct tie in comments are believed.

Oh I have no doubt the DLC will have connections. It would be silly not to have any references as if it didn't exist. I just deeply doubt it's critical for someone to play through it before Rebirth. I think you'll still be able to enjoy Rebirth just fine without having played it and you could even go back and play it later if you find yourself interested in expanding on what happened. Certainly I have no objections to people reading synopses of it before hand though. It won't take long to read! 

The bigger worry I would have is how much knowing the OG will be important. The ending of FF7R just doesn't make much sense without knowing it. Arguably, it's "just the end" whereas the rest of the game is perfectly understandable on its own. So maybe Rebirth won't be too bad, but there is a real risk of it getting weird and without the OG knowledge it might be hard for newcomers. Guess we'll find out soon!

5 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

 

I don't think I can spell it out more directly than Giant Bomb said it, so I'll let them say it for themselves.  Timestamp is given:

 

 

I think it reeks of geeks being geeks about everyone having to know all the lore perfect information to appreciate a story (which I say as a geek myself). But hey, I'll leave open the possibility that they'll out do themselves!

5 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Unexplained flashbacks to Sonon’s death. 

Shinra strikes back at Sepheroth with this weird masked purple guy.  Where did he come from?  Why does Yuffie act traumatized by him?

 

Genesis returns at the behest of purple mask guy and white hair dude.  Wait, who the heck are any of these fools?  I don’t remember them in FF7 on PS1.

etc

 

If that's the worst, I still don't think it's worth telling people they need to play it before they play Rebirth and I suspect it will still be better than that  

2 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

It could be.  It could also be messy and taken as prior knowledge, as the end of Remake was for someone who didn’t know og FF7.  They’re not above doing it, I don’t trust them to properly contextualize to catch people up.

If they can find a way to turn the background content of the DLC into required viewing I’ll be impressed  

2 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Legend has just been in an argumentative mood lately.

 

Just let the robot win.

 

Pretty sure I’ve always been argumentative on this board and life in general