So with the acquisition of a Playstayion 5, I decided to put a good effort into ff7r for once.
First a few random notes. If you got ff7r on ps4, maybe keep it around if you wanna do it on ps5 because it's a free upgrade if you have the digital OR physical version, assuming you have a disc ps5 for said version. You do have to pay $20 for the ps5 expansion thing that is included in the standard ps5 version. This is fine, because that is an expansion priced as such, and ps5 ff7r is like $70, so if you snagged the physical ps4 version for like $20, you're still saving $30.
FAR AS I KNOW the Yuffie expansion is totally separate, you gotta select it on the title screen and they recommend you beat the game first.
AND some thing with how the synergy materia works, costs no mp or atb...so if i am cloud and I do a skill like braver or assess or a magic spell, an ally with synergy linked with any elemental materia will cast it FOR FREE on ps5 version. Otherwise I think it's unused on ps4 because your characters not in control by you have no atb to use spells anyway. Kinda dumb how that specific thing is ps5 only when there's no technical limitations behind it...but it was a factor to me not wanting to get too deep in the ps4 version.
I have about ~20 hours played, I am on Chapter 9, and I just beat Hell House.
A few positives with my experience thus far.
Everything besides the combat is really really good.
The music is excellent, the graphics even though I'm not a graphics whore are fantastic. Looking at the sky to see midgar, to Aris house, to the broken highway area before wall market are all executed very well and do the original justice in my opinion. Big attention to detail in every area, like the load icon and the graphics from the benches being the old save point graphic.
The writing and character dialogue is great. They sound more like real people and less like JRPG characbters. In the original game I really never gave a shit about Aris at all, but you really can't hate her in this game. She's adorable and has tons of personality. I really enjoyed the scenes where she tried giving Cloud a high 5 and it failing..again...and again, they made it feel natural. I pretty much like everyone except Cloud, but I don't think they could make Cloud very likable without retconning him.
Over a year later and I can give this old post a somewhat educated reply on certain points.
As far as the story changes I enjoyed, I'll say that I love how the game actually gives you more of a reason to give a shit. In the original FF7 it felt like some important characters really weren't given enough of a build-up. Like, you're told that Tifa is your childhood friend, but the game doesn't really show them prior to the scene with them in the bar ("give me something hard"). The remake changes that significantly and does a far better job building her up (among others). There's also a few things in the original that were very subtle (so subtle that you'd be forgiven for forgetting about them even being plot points) that they ended up bringing out into the forefront.
This might be the best part about the game so far for me. There's a lot of games with character development, and I don't care about them. This game with the obvious nostalgia and love for the original, and knowing that game, it makes me want to play them in tandem to see the differences as I get through the game. For a company that made ff10 and 12 and 13...I don't think anything they've made comes close...except maybe dragon quest 11...but that's apples and oranges.
The game generally looks good and runs smoothly (seems to run at a stable 30fps on a PS4 Pro), though there is noticeable texture pop-in. I chalk that up more to me not being used to playing games with streaming assets from a hard drive on a console. Something something PC Master Race, yadda yadda. This is the first HDR-enabled game I've played (I can't for the life of me get HDR working on my PC) and the added dynamic range definitely makes a difference throughout the game.
Spoiled baby on ps5, load times are neeeeeearrrrrrrrrrrly nonexistant, and looks flawless to me. To be fair to the ps4 though, the load times always sucked on that console from the first time I got mine.
The combat system wore out its welcome at around the 12 hour mark for a lot of reasons. Prior to that I generally enjoyed it and just dealt with the little cracks that were starting to fester, but it eventually got to the point where it became a frustrating slog, so I just switched the game to easy mode in order to preserve my sanity. Let me just detail a handful of situations that I've encountered numerous times during my playthrough.
Playing the beginning of the game a third time now, that shield guy at the beginning almost wiped me because I did not understand the awkward un-intuitive combat. The materia system was great in the original, but in this game it feels more frustrating somehow. There's battles I enter, go "don't have the materia that covers this guys weakness" and I just want to reload my game. That...shouldn't be a thing, but it happens a lot.
I'm not at all opposed to a hard game, and generally welcome them (I enjoy Soulsborne games and have clocked a decent number of hours in various Monster Hunter titles), but the problem with FF7:R's battle system is that it seems to have an identity crisis. The way it's built makes it seem apparent that it doesn't know if it wants to be a straight up action game or an RPG and ends up sending moxed messages. On one hand, sure, you can dodge in real-time, but on the other hand it still feels like if the game wants to hit you with an attack, it'll hit you.
I am still on normal, but I wouldn't call this an easy game at all. Due to it being one of those games with a party, and you can only direct control 1 at a time, when someone dies, you can end up in shit creek real quick. I am beginning to understand the combat more however. Setting shortcuts is MANDATORY for making combat feel anywhere near fluid. Doing some of the combat arena stuff right now I can blast some people with Aris, snap to Cloud and plonk an ability, to snap back to Aris to move or build atb or whatever. It is a weird middle ground where it very much IS an action game, but you have to master a different skillset than the standard.
The game also seems to break previously established rules. Remember how limit breaks were intended to be a character's iconic last-ditch attack? Imagine my surprise when I found out that they can miss. I've triggered cross-slash in front of an enemy, only to have them wander off camera during the wind-up animation, leaving Cloud to aggressively attack the air. Did I mention that you're vulnerable during this wind-up animation? I've had enemies come from off-camera and start wailing on Cloud during the animation, shaving off hundreds of health points during an unskippable animation that locks him firmly in place.
Having done a crosslash limit break to an enemy, to have it casually take 3 steps back...I don't use those style limit breaks unless I have em rooted. I will not defend the system, however with the stagger system, and whatever the state before stagger is called that the enemy doesn't move, and ice magic, there's options to set up a limit break hitting.
Healing spells follow three distinct steps: playing the animation, removing MP, and restoring HP. The problem is that there's a surprisingly long gap between when the game removes MP and restores HP (feels like around half a second). If you die between those two events, the game will take your MP without restoring your health. Really nice given how much smaller the MP pools are now.
You don't even need to die, they can just bitch slap you and knock you over and you lose the mp, take the damage, and don't cast the spell. Pretty annoying, makes you think more before you act.
The game gets really stun-happy around the 12-16 hour mark. Stuns are pretty much what you'd expect: temporary debuffs that completely prevent you from moving. The problem with them is two-fold. First of all, the stun debuff is never shown on your character panel ("am I stunned for a quarter of a second or five seconds?"). Second, too many enemies can do it, and too often. It reminds me all too much of when my friends and I would attempt to clear World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade raids with three overleveled people before Blizzard patched the challenge out of old raids.
I do agree with you, but also somewhat disagree? It's annoying yes, but that to me just forces me to dodge/block/pick my spot better. The one part where having other party members feels "good" to me. Barret is stunned, auto swap to someone else to build some atb to toss him a heal or recovery or something. Being stunned doesn't mean "sit there and do nothing" in this game because you can switch to another party member, and that feels pretty fluid to me.
On top of that, there's no rhyme or reason regarding which attacks can be blocked or dodged, and the only way of knowing is to get hit. I've seen plenty of cases where Cloud was able to block a massive attack from a giant monster, yet a normal-looking attack from a human-sized enemy would break his block (and lock him into a combo, naturally). Similarly, there are more cases than I can count of Cloud getting hit despite being noticeably outside of the range of an AoE attack. Again, if the game wants you to take damage, you're going to take damage. Period.
This part is one of the bigger problems with the games combat as I play more. I was fighting Shiva, and I would try to dodge certain attacks and it wouldn't work and I'd get hit, so I'd start blocking which works great, except that other attack you can't block. Or that one attack you can block, but then it explodes and you have to evade it. This is fine the third time you fight her and understand "block this, dodge this, don't get hit by that, block then evade that" but the game doesn't properly communicate a blockable spell from one you need to dodge. They could easily make clever use of spell graphics or sound effects to communicate this to the player as a lot of games do. Tekken 7 is a 3d fighting game, you have attacks you can sidestep, and there's attacks which can hit lateral movement. Said attacks that hit stepping, you see it with a white swoosh communicating that this attack is hitting those lateral movements. So when you get hit by it, you can see as the person getting hit, what they did, and can use that information to counter it later.
Just to give you an idea, on normal I went from having to struggle to survive due to all of the above issues piling up, to being able to mash square to win. That's not offering multiple difficulty levels, that's giving the player the option to neuter the game. Still, when faced with the choice between frustration mechanics and actually being able to enjoy the story, I chose the latter. Sue me. If I want a challenge (and a decent combat system) I'll play Soulsborne Hunter instead.
I can't make my final judgement until I finish the game, but where I am so far, the combat is
beginning to click. The square button not being the death dealing mechanism you would expect, combined with the pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time feeling of juggling 3 characters at once, feels REALLY REALLY awkward. But right now I to tend to enter combat with the feeling that I sorta know what I'm doing...sorta. I think it mostly boils down to what enemies I'm fighting. I have noticed that you "pick a main and rip" through most fights. Some fights need Cloud as the point guy, and in chapter 9, Aris is point and Cloud is support. Hitting weakness to cause a stagger with Aris, to swap to Cloud rapidly get 1-2 atb and let em rip before stagger ends, is starting to feel more natural, and with that, starting to be more fun.
One more nitpick. I know Cloud is the main character, but if I have a party, just...let me walk around outside of combat with them please? If I'm using barret, I enter combat as Cloud, and switch to Barret...combat ends, and I am back to cloud...to enter a combat and have to swap back to Barret. Wouldn't it be
nice if you wanted to play Tifa, and the game just let you retain control of Tifa? Sure Cloud is the MAIN character but he isn't the ONLY character...
I take back nothing I said about this game from earlier posts, as that is how I felt about the game at that time. I also felt the same way a few weeks ago when I tried playing it on ps4 again.
If I have to say what the biggest flaw to this game is right now, the combat isn't "bad" as it is EXTREMELY UNINTUITIVE. It is OFFENSIVELY unintuitive. With that, it's very hard to even grasp the "correct" way to play the game, and the game not exactly being easy, and having quite a few hard bosses (HELL HOUSEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE), it's very easy to be frustrated. That combined with the fact that I am an old man who likes turn based games and final fantasy hasn't been like that since the early ps2 era. I understand why it is real time, because the kids don't like turn based, and I know more than a few people that wouldn't touch a game if it was taking turns, if that game isn't called pokemon...
TL;DR
Warming up on the game...starting to get used to it's quirks.
*edit*
I should also mention that if this were any other game I wouldn't give it another chance. The only reason I am even able to make this post is because I have wanted to play this game since
this ps3 tech demo in 2005 when I was in high school. Having played the original back in the day, and having wanted a modern remake since I was literally a kid...it's nothing short of amazing that I didn't get the game on release, or even have any care to attempt to get past the combat until now.
And the funny thing is that old tech demo that looked too good to be any game I'd be playing in my lifetime doesn't even hold a candle to what they actually released...on a last generation console, let alone a modern one.
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