Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby IGNORE ME » Tue Feb 08, 2022 4:27 pm

Thad wrote:(Not like there were major decisions that changed the direction of the game or anything -- it is a JRPG and you're going to go right when they tell you to go right, god dammit -- but there were definitely a few dialogue options that felt like you were putting points toward who you were going to date at the Gold Saucer.)


There were. The "date" is the conversation you have in Aerith's flower garden before storming the HQ, and the options are Tifa, Barret, or Aerith's Ghost.

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Tue Feb 08, 2022 5:53 pm

I kinda figured, but I'd be a little surprised if that's all there is.

Even in the original game, it's not over after the date; your affection score affects later events in the game. At least Cloud and Tifa's scene at the crater, which comes in a they-just-talked version and a they-definitely-fucked version.

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Spram » Sun Feb 20, 2022 3:05 am

Remkae sequels guessesAerith is not going to die and they'll also do to Sephiroth what they did to Cloud in the lifestream and remove the Jenova mind control from him and he's going to become a good guy and you can play as Sephiroth now.

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Sun Feb 20, 2022 3:31 pm

That'd be interesting. We've already seen something of an Everybody Lives! ending in the first remake, so it'd be interesting if they really pushed that to its logical conclusion, and all this "Join me Cloud, and we will overturn our fates together" talk was pushing toward redeeming Sephiroth.

Another thought I had: how much do the Whispers care about details, versus outcomes? Like, a whole lot of stuff happens in Remake that didn't happen in the original game but which mostly doesn't explicitly contradict it; of the bits that do contradict it, it looks like the Whispers don't notice them at first but eventually do and then work to correct them -- like, say, Wedge survives but the Whispers appear to realize that later and then take him away, but then on the other hand Biggs pops up in the ending.

(Which incidentally I thought was a neat little subversion of the "character tells you to go do something but you can't actually do it" trope -- I'm thinking specifically of Robo telling Lucca in Chrono Trigger that they can take his legs and give them to her mother and put him on treads, but you can't actually do that. I thought Biggs's final request that you go to the orphanage and look after the kids for him, but then there are no dialogue options there, was another one of those things, but then at the end it turns out when Cloud responded "You can do it yourself" he wasn't just comforting a dying man, the reason you can't execute Biggs's final request is that he really can do it himself.)

Like, okay, for example, if a character gets swapped out but the story keeps heading in more or less the same direction, does that flag the Whispers or not? F'rinstance I'm thinking of a Dragonlance book -- War of the Twins, I think -- where Raistlin travels back in time to change history but then finds he's not changing anything, history's developing exactly the same, just with him and Caramon replacing Fistandantilus and...I don't remember the name of the other guy but he was somebody Caramon met in the arena in the previous book.

Anyhow, you can probably see where I'm going with this: what if this has already happened? Say, the spiky-headed hero gets gunned down right outside Midgar before everything goes down, but then his spiky-headed buddy picks up his sword. Do the Whispers, at this point, shrug and say "Eh, close enough"? Is the ending sequence with Zack surviving and carrying Cloud into Midgar a new timeline, or is that the original timeline, and Zack dying and Cloud replacing him was, itself, a divergence?

I think it's an interesting theory but my biggest problem with it is that it presupposes an "original timeline" that definitely isn't the original timeline, because Final Fantasy 7 for PlayStation is the original timeline. I think the story works best if that's the prime timeline and the one the Whispers are trying to preserve because that's how the story is supposed to play out.

Not for nothin': Zack's death has already been retconned twice, before the remake. In the original Japanese release of the game, all you saw were notes in the lab explaining what happened to Cloud and Zack after the fight with Sephiroth. The US/international release added the cutscene depicting Zack's death. Then Crisis Core took that scene and, because it was slightly implausible to have Zack taken down by a couple of mooks at the end of a game where he'd just killed God, retconned it again so that it took an entire army to bring him down. The ending of Remake takes the ending of Crisis Core and changes it again, so that Zack lives. Which seems to explicitly contradict the events of the game you've just played through -- not because FF7R necessarily confirms that Zack is dead, but because Zack appears to be returning to Midgar at the same time as Cloud and team are leaving it. It doesn't seem to be a flashback to Cloud arriving in Midgar before the beginning of the game; it looks like Zack, with some other Cloud, is just showing up as player-Cloud is leaving town.


What all that means, presumably we'll find out in the sequels. It could be something boring like more Jenova clones (and Remake is more explicit than the original game about why you keep encountering Sephiroths that turn into Jenovas and what that has to do with all the guys shambling around with tattoos on their arms), but I expect/hope it's going to be something weirder and more meta than that.

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby nosimpleway » Mon Feb 21, 2022 7:19 pm

Thad wrote:TBF Reeve's ideas are terrible. "Let's build an expressway!" Yeah, that's what Midgar needs. Fucking freeway congestion.


If Reeve wasn't trying to build an expressway there wouldn't be anywhere to have a thrilling motorcycle chase.

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Thu Feb 24, 2022 3:21 pm



...yep, now that I get a closer look at it I can confirm that I hate the new sprites. Best of luck to modders working on the inevitable patch to restore the original ones.

I like the soundtrack, though. I'd buy that. Hey, opera house scene with real singing.


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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Niku » Thu Feb 24, 2022 8:18 pm

Huh; the change in camera angles during the opera caught me off guard. That's more work than I expected from these lousy looking ports.
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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Fri Feb 25, 2022 12:30 am

"What if, for the opening credits, we get rid of the credits, and just have them slowly walking toward the city for two minutes?"

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Fri Feb 25, 2022 2:00 pm

Hm. I wonder how long before there's an MSU-1 patch that puts the new music in the original game.

ETA I bet not long; it's already been done for 4 and 5.




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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Fri Feb 25, 2022 2:31 pm

Oh God what have I done.

I was looking at ROMhacks and I came across the Final Fantasy VI Translation Comparison at Legends of Localization.

It is a 14-part breakdown of the entire game's script, comparing the Woolsey version to the original Japanese, the Slattery version, the Sky Render version, and a Google Translate of the original Japanese.

I haven't read the whole thing yet but what's jumped out at me so far is (1) my respect for the Slattery version is vindicated and (2) wow the Sky Render translation is really bad. I mean it's famous for being really boring and overly-literal, but...it turns out it's also incompetent. It reads like a literal translation but it's not, it's full of wrong guesses and stabs in the dark.

Unstated Info
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The last line here translates as something like “Even if I try to explain, I doubt they’ll listen to me.”

Japanese sentences tend to leave out subjects, verbs, etc., and it’s assumed that you can fill in the blanks when info goes unstated. So Japanese-to-English translators need to be mind readers, basically.

In this case, translators had difficulty figuring out who’s talking about who, so only the GBA translation gets it right. The fan translation took a wild stab in the dark and missed – my hunch is that the translator didn’t fully understand the grammar at the time.

---

Not so Secret
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The Japanese script uses the word 裏 (ura), which usually means “rear”, “reverse”, or “behind here”. In some situations (but not this one) it can mean “secret”, which is why the fan translation talks about a “hidden mine”, even though it’s clearly not a secret to the Narshe guards.

[...]

Wash Your Hands, Wash Your Feet
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In English, we say you “wash your hands of ___” when you’re cutting ties with something/going legit. There’s a very similar phrase in Japanese, but you instead say that you “wash your feet of ___”. This idiom is why Google talks about feet for some reason.

Oddly, the SNES and GBA lines don’t convey this same question about Locke going legit. It’s also clear that the fan translator didn’t understand the idiom, but saw the character for “foot” in the line and added something about being quick-footed to fill in the gaps. I remember this feeling and tactic very well from my very earliest amateur days too.

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Fri Feb 25, 2022 4:53 pm

Tripping Over Dialects
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Some of the ghosts on the Phantom Train act as ordinary shop merchants. In Japanese, these ghosts speak with a very heavy Osaka dialect. Merchants in Japanese entertainment often use this dialect – even the shop guy in the Zelda 1 uses it.

Setting this Japanese dialect aside, these ghosts literally say something like: “Hey, you there, need any items? I’ll sell them cheap for you!”

As we can see, none of the translations try to force an English dialect into the text. At the same time, the machine translation struggles to handle the ghosts’ dialect, which is understandable. The fan translation clearly struggles too.

Whenever a western Japanese dialect comes up like this, many translators immediately turn to accents/dialects from the American South – it’s almost like a cookie cutter, go-to translation choice. Here we see that the official translators looked past that easy choice and focused on the more important part of the ghosts’ speech pattern: that they’re merchants. We can see how the Super NES translation tries to convey the way a salesman might talk, but the GBA version does it much better – it sounds like something you’d hear on a stereotypical TV commercial for a local business or something.

Basically, this is all to say that: 1. dialects can be tough to translate if you’re not already at a high level of Japanese competency; and 2. dialects have multiple layers to them, and localizing a Japanese dialect into an English dialect is rarely straightforward.


...does...this guy not know that "Howdy folks" is southern dialect?

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Newbie » Fri Feb 25, 2022 6:47 pm

Oh, I guess it could be, couldn't it? Without additional cues such as an explicit y'all or the kind of ornate vernacular of your Foghorn Leghorns and similar stereotypes, I just read "howdy folks" as a sort of western dialect, in the frontier sense. Still, even then it's more specific than the analysis text would have it.
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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Mongrel » Fri Feb 25, 2022 7:14 pm

We say howdy up here now though, sometimes, and in the northern states too (my guess is that it spread north via rural adoption along the the Missisippi & up into the midwest). Same way as most of the commonwealth countries have fully adopted the Aussie "no worries."

Even y'all is getting a bit of pickup - it's a useful word!

I wouldn't call 'howdy' universal, certainly not nearly as common as 'no worries', but it's used just enough to not sound weird or like an affectation outside the American South unless for some dumb reason you also decided to add a southern accent.

EDIT:

Then again, FF6 is old enough that 'howdy' was possibly more purely southern at the time of most if not all of those translations.
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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Fri Feb 25, 2022 8:07 pm



0:25

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Fri Feb 25, 2022 8:32 pm

Thad wrote:Hm. I wonder how long before there's an MSU-1 patch that puts the new music in the original game.

Oh, here it is.



Welp, off to see if it'll work with T-Edition.

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Sat Feb 26, 2022 4:10 pm

Thad wrote:Welp, off to see if it'll work with T-Edition.

Judging by the first 10 minutes of the game, it does, mostly!

I installed the T-Edition MSU-1 patch, which patches the ROM to add the new music for the T-Edition in PCM format. That gives you a bunch of PCM files with names like [ROM name]-37.pcm. These are, for the most part*, new tracks and don't overlap with the tracks from other MSU-1 patches. So I just copied all the PCM files out of the Pixel Remasters zip file into the same directory as the ROM and the other PCM files, and so far they mostly seem to work fine with the T-Edition MSU-1 patch.

When I say "mostly", I've played through to the first save point, and so far the title screen, intro, opening credits, and battle themes all work correctly. (And the victory fanfare is just the stock cartridge version, not MSU-1.) The wrong music started playing when I entered the mines. Different music than usual started playing when I entered the mines, but I looked up a T-Edition playthrough video and apparently it's supposed to do that.

When I reset after saving, the Prelude played correctly on the load screen but continued to play after I loaded my game. Other than that, no issues so far.

I can't speak to the T-Edition differences just yet except that you can hold down B to dash and Biggs and Wedge have the full set of Magitek abilities just like Terra. And there's a music player if you go to the Config menu and hit the A button on Sound. Which is useful for confirming that yep, both sets of PCM tracks are working.

So I'm not an expert on how MSU-1 patches work but from poking around a little with the patch my guess is, if there's a music prompt, it searches for the corresponding numbered PCM file and if it's there, it plays it, and if it's not, it falls back to the chiptune. I think that's why you can add PCM files that aren't included in the T-Edition MSU-1 patch and it'll play them, and in the correct place.

* tracks 56, 101, 102, and 103 overlap with track numbers from other MSU-1 patches. I can't get the PCM files to play in VLC so I don't know for sure what they are. I'm guessing since 101-103 are the last 3 tracks included with the Pixel Remasters music patch that they're the ending music, but I don't know what 56 is. My first guess was the opera, but it doesn't seem to be that, at least not any of the voiced parts, as the Pixel Remaster patch includes three tracks that are available in multiple languages which presumably correspond to the opera singing, and those are 39, 66, and 69.

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Sun Feb 27, 2022 1:39 am

Made it to South Figaro. Not much divergence from the original game yet, but:

* Most of the party characters I've seen so far (Terra, Locke, Mog, Edgar, Sabin, Celes) have new sprites. I didn't notice any difference in Shadow's, though. Evidently you can get more costumes. Terra having a cape is a nice touch.

* There are some new monster sprites too. As well as some new monsters.

* Mog's not a Berserker anymore. A Dance only lasts one turn now; you'll get a command menu again the next turn.

* The Beginner House is expanded; there's more stuff, including a trophy room for plot items and achievements. Achievements are things like stealing a lot of items, walking a lot of steps, learning every Dance, learning every Rage...

* Combat seems a little more difficult. It's still reasonable, but I'm finding I need to keep a *little* more on my toes than in the original game.

* You can talk to the bartender in South Figaro now, and you're given a dialogue choice where you can ask for information and he'll nudge you toward, er, the only spot on the map you could possibly take to proceed, or you can ask if he has a job for you and he'll send you to the cave to fight monsters and instead of the regular battle theme the battle theme is from Xenoblade Chronicles I think? Reward is some potions, Hi-Potions, and 1 Phoenix Down. Nothing special but it's the first one; I assume there will be tougher ones later with better rewards.

* Since there's a dash button, Sprint Shoes no longer exist. I have mixed feelings about this, as I didn't want to waste an accessory slot on them anyway but also holding down a button all the time is tougher on my thumb than it used to be and it's got me considering going back to that one-handed SNES controller I was using for awhile.

* Periodic glitching with the music continues. Mostly with tracks not starting or stopping when they're supposed to. I already noted the Prelude theme keeps playing after you load a save; there's also an issue where if you go to sleep the music won't start back up again. This is minor and, from what I've read, still less glitchy than the music issues you get if you play the T-Edition without the MSU-1 patch.

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Wed Mar 02, 2022 3:44 pm

Died a few times on the Lethe River. When you die, you get sent back to the title screen, instead of going back to your last save with all your experience but none of the gil/items/AP you picked up.

I don't like the change.

I get it -- it gives the game more of a classic dungeon-crawler feel, with the sense of risk assessment about whether you should keep going or return to town (or at least the last save point) -- but I don't like it for a number of reasons.

It's a particularly poor fit for places like the Lethe River, where you actually can't backtrack -- and hell, if you saved at the second save point, you can't even grind. (The first save point precedes the loop, but the second save point is a straight line to the boss.) It's not great, especially since your survival on the river comes down more to RNG rolls or grinding than skill. I died four times, all of which were a result of Banon getting hit twice in one turn; if this version of the game maintained the original's approach to dying, he would have at least gotten to keep his experience and maybe been a little less squishy by the end of it. This is the kind of balance issue devs (fan or otherwise) should really keep in mind when they make a game harder: is it fair? In this case it isn't. The original element of having to keep Banon alive, plus tougher enemies, plus not getting to keep your XP when you die, plus not being able to turn around and go back to an inn, all combine to create a situation where whether you live or die isn't based on your skill, it's based on random chance and whether or not you decided to grind before you went into the Returner base.

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Wed Mar 02, 2022 4:30 pm

It's possible I'm overcomplicating things and what I really mean to say is "Fuck escort missions."

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Mongrel » Wed Mar 02, 2022 6:25 pm

That feels like it's part of the overall trend I'm seeing with updates to old games (whether active or a remake) that include pointless, poorly thought-out, crudely-implemented increases in difficulty.

The only thing I can guess is that entirely too many people who have IDEAS about how video games SHOULD BE HARD because that's what it was like when I WAS A KID are now old enough to be in mid-level or senior staff at entirely too many game companies.
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