Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

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Thad
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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Mon Apr 13, 2020 1:18 pm

Niku wrote:I.

Uh.

Fuck.

Well I finished it after about three 12 hour play sessions.

That's me and the original FF7. And I didn't even have the excuse of a global pandemic keeping me from leaving my house.

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Niku » Mon Apr 13, 2020 2:13 pm

I’m dipping into hard mode now; it’s kind of a terrible cludge to add combat challenge to a linear narrative game! You basically just replay everything and manually skip every cut scene you can. You can jump to any chapter, but apparently have to complete the entire chapter to save your progress in it. I think it would have worked better using the combat simulator to just add all the new combat challenges in, but I will say getting to fight the super charged first boss with full access to your end game load out is the kind of thing I was hoping for regarding the battle system.

Also part of it is “you can’t use items, at all, ever” which a.) just gives in to all of us hoarding jrpg players anyway and b.) makes all rewards hilariously useless
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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Mon Apr 13, 2020 2:43 pm

Niku wrote:makes all rewards hilariously useless

What, in a remake of that game where if you spammed Ruby Weapon with Knights of the Round enough times, you'd get a Gold Chocobo?

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Niku » Mon Apr 13, 2020 3:26 pm

On the one hand yes, on the other hand this game will astonish you with just how many times you have to abruptly panic button a Phoenix down. Not having that option in hard mode suddenly makes every Phoenix down you find in a random crate that much more galling; I am desperately trying to turn off my “give a shit about treasure chests” brain in hard mode because there is genuinely no reason to go for anything outside of extras of certain limited Materia.
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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Friday » Mon Apr 13, 2020 5:54 pm

SPOILER ONLY FOR FRIDAY’S EYES


oh god damn it
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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Niku » Thu Apr 16, 2020 12:31 pm

annnnd that’s 100% play log and the platinum. completed at exactly 69 hours. nice. i will cherish my .1% rarity achievement for the little time i will have it,

I both incredibly love and hate this game. Some of the stuff for getting 100% is an incredible slog of replaying through certain sections over and over again. I think anyone who trips over themselves with praise for this but hated, say, FFX or FFXIII for being just “one long hallway” are bad people because this game is .. just one long hallway. It becomes much more apparent when you have to go back down the hallway again and again. The long animations on SO MANY LEVERS AND SWITCHES AND PUZZLES are goddamn interminable. Some of the added content is very bad (sup leslie).

But the combat system is everything I wish Kingdom Hearts was, challenging and frenetic and mechanically dense. Hard mode was a goddamn joy whenever I was fighting a boss. The additional tweaks and changes throughout the story are often fun. The nostalgia is both reverent and silly, and they update many things for the better. It’s really fun looking through a list of FFVII enemies and seeing how almost every single random encounter monster from the Midgar section of the game is represented here (I think there might be like .. two or three who aren’t?) and given their own unique abilities and play styles. It’s incredibly gorgeous.

10/10 A+ play it if you still love FF7.
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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Niku » Thu Apr 16, 2020 2:07 pm

NIKU'S NON-OBVIOUS PROTIPS FOR PLAYING FINAL FANTASY 7 REMAKE:

you can set the camera distance further back in the options
hold L1 when casting potions / healing out of combat to keep the menu open when healing multiple times
press R1 on the equipment screen to open ALL character's materia slots at once instead of one by one
pressing L1 when using Magnify materia will toggle between single and all-cast.
pay attention to which of your skills increase stagger, because staggering enemies is v. good
if you see a purple item chest in the world (instead of yellow) it is Important Equipment (i.e. new weapon) so do not miss
there is only one important Steal target in the game: make sure you steal from the boss of Chapter 11.
if you see or press square during a cutscene and it says MENU you can hold it down; this means you’re going into a fight DIRECTLY after the cut scene, so hold it down so you can swap any Materia or whatever before the fight begins

NIKU'S COMBAT PROTIPS FOR PLAYING FINAL FANTASY 7 REMAKE:
Cloud
triple strike is the best bread and butter atb spender. focused thrust is your stagger builder.
don't neglect punisher mode (Cloud's Triangle); guarding during it will automatically counterattack / parry.
cloud is also a very good choice for dodging, counter attacking, parrying, etc materia.

Barret
barret is so fucking good you guys
he will seem like complete trash when you first use him i know
but barret is so fucking good
HOW TO USE BARRET: when you hold down his regular attack and get the big boom at the end, he will pump his arm. if you hit triangle to charge during this animation, you get a FREE charge boost!!
barret also makes a great tank if you use steelskin/lifesaver/provoke, and an incredible healer when you don't have aerith and load him up with magic boosters because he can very safely build ATB. barret + prayer carried me through parts of hard mode.
he has some melee weapons but let's be real here

Aerith
aerith's damage is so much better than you think it is. her dinky little bolts are slow but increase in damage with each hit in a combo. her charged up triangle basically shoots out a mine that will then explode for lots of damage, so use it on stationary targets.
arcane ward will goddamn destroy anything that needs to die from magic.
SUBTIP FOR MAGIC: magic will generally have a little boom followed by a big boom, with long wind up times, so make sure your targets are not going to be moving soon when you cast.
she is the best healer, no surprise, but sometimes you will want to make cloud your healguy and let her use every drop of MP on offensive spells.

Tifa
tifa is the best character in the game and if there was a loving god we would have a battle angel game that plays exactly how tifa plays
you can use her charge-up move twice. her triangle will change from "uppercut" to "punch" to "chun-li kicks" in stages, and then downgrade each time you use it, so basically build twice, hit three times, build twice, hit three times for an easy build-and-spend combo.
her triangle move will naturally increase stagger damage!! stagger usually gives you 160% damage boost; if you hit with all three triangle moves, it'll bump up over 200%. charge up before a boss is staggered and then you can slam up that damage boost as soon as they stagger, and then you can charge and unleash again before the stagger is over and boost it even higher!
so for me it was basically FULL ATB -> L1+SQUARE TWICE -> TRIANGLE THREE TIMES -> PUNCH ATB UP -> REPEAT as fast as possible to maximize stagger damage
but that's not all!!! she also get evasive strike, which will quickly dodge you out of melee danger and then zoom back in with a stagger increasing punch!
and very late, you even get a straight up ATB-spending punch that increases stagger % damage without the combo system that is incredibly good too
tifa is the best character in the game

GENERAL COMBAT TIPS
always be bouncin'. enemies will (generally, but not always) focus on who you're controlling, so you can control the flow of combat by jumping between characters to "taunt" them toward your furthest playable character.
use your long-animation ATB attacks and then IMMEDIATELY switch to someone else. you're wasting your time and ATB if you're watching your character just do their animation!
elemental materia is your best friend for easy damage; just assess enemies to know their elemental weakness and then slap that materia on your sword or fists for extra damage. and you want to get that thing to at least level 2 because
elemental materia is even better when used defensively. level 2 elemental makes you IMMUNE to that element! and plenty of enemies use fire and lightning and so forth.
weapons don't end up obsolete; you can go back to old ones and they will continue upgrading throughout the game.

anyway i obviously have this game on the brain and just wanted to write things about it so there you go
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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby pacobird » Fri Apr 17, 2020 2:48 am

I'm now far enough to have spent some time with Aerith and I pretty much adore how she immediately reads him as a more self-serious but dramatically less competent version of Zack and so can't help but find him ridiculous
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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby mharr » Fri Apr 17, 2020 4:07 am

So how long until someone modifies a Playstation emulator to play the original in 4k by ripping the new graphics from this release?

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Friday » Fri Apr 17, 2020 5:51 am

tifa is the best character in the game


i heard it was the warrior
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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby pacobird » Fri Apr 17, 2020 12:57 pm

Friday wrote:
tifa is the best character in the game


i heard it was the warrior


it's the shinra middle-manager who wants to have political arguments on a subway with a guy who has a gatling gun for a hand
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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby pacobird » Fri Apr 17, 2020 1:01 pm

Niku wrote:Cloud
triple strike is the best bread and butter atb spender. focused thrust is your stagger builder.
don't neglect punisher mode (Cloud's Triangle); guarding during it will automatically counterattack / parry.
cloud is also a very good choice for dodging, counter attacking, parrying, etc materia.


I'm enjoying running up and using Disorder to get a big hit and immediately guarding when he lands in Punisher mode. I'm pretty bad at this game but that's addressed a lot of the mobility issues of Punisher.
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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby IGNORE ME » Wed Apr 22, 2020 1:47 am

WHEN YOU ARE IN THE AIR VENTS DO NOT TRIGGER ANY OF THE GRATE CUTSCENES.

THE BUTTON TO BACK OUT OF THIS CUTSCENE IS BROKEN AND YOU MAY HAVE NO RECOURSE BUT TO LOAD AN EARLIER SAVE. THIS HAS BEEN REPORTED BY MULTIPLE PEOPLE.

AUTOSAVE DOES NOT TRIGGER AFTER ANY OF THE OPTIONAL BATTLES OR ANY OF THE CUTSCENES BETWEEN THIS AND GETTING THE PREVIOUS KEY ITEM. YOU CAN LOSE HOURS OF GAMEPLAY IF YOU RELY ON AUTOSAVE.

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Niku » Wed Apr 22, 2020 9:53 am

oh yeah i definitely should have put that in my tips. i forgot about that massive massive obvious stupid fucking thing even though it happened to me. luckily i had made a manual save AFTER doing all the optional battles in the area prior to that but fuck guys, c'mon. at the absolute bare minimum autosave should trigger every time you do something remotely significant.

i wanted to revisit the original game but didn't feel like playing through the entire thing and instead ended up watching this entire LP from eurogamer


one of them is a lifelong diehard ff7 obsessive, the other literally knows nothing about the game outside of The Big Spoiler they fight crime. quarantine boogaloo derailed the LP for the last few episodes but they do play all the way up to grinding in the north crater. seeing someone come at the game with fresh eyes and ending up really invested and enthusiastic about it is a good time.
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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby IGNORE ME » Wed Apr 22, 2020 5:47 pm

It bears noting that even though I did lose hours of playtime to one bug that, you know, I'm fairly sure would not have made it into a shipped Final Fantasy product in 2007, and one feature that's not necessarily a bug but does kinda assure you that it's doing what video games have been doing for the last 12 years when it really isn't... I didn't mind redoing all those battles. This is a game where once you figure out the enemies it's just a matter of coordinating the most efficient way to tear them apart, and it's a real joy to do especially with Tifa's combo setups. I just wish the bosses would be more cooperative about it; there's way too many "nope" moments during some of those fights.

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby beatbandito » Thu Jun 25, 2020 4:04 pm

Can an existing FFXIV:ARR account be used on steam copies of the game without anything weird? At this point with the steam sale it would be cheaper to get the collector's edition on steam than just adding the expansion to my existing account.
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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby François » Thu Jun 25, 2020 4:58 pm

From what I gather, accounts are universally cross-platform with no issues; it's all tied in to your Mog Station login.

The main thing people complain about seems to be that any given install of the game must have the base game and all expansions purchased on the same platform, so expansions bought on Steam don't hook into a base game bought on the Square Enix shop and vice versa. So that wouldn't be a problem in your case, as long as you tie your Steam purchase to your existing Square/Mog Station account.

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Thu Jul 16, 2020 5:26 pm

Previously:

Thad wrote:Saw that FF7 (Steam) is on sale again over at Humble. It's one of those games like Doom that I occasionally think "Yeah, I should have a legit copy of this in my Steam library in case I want to replay it sometime." (I may give the remake another shot someday since everybody else seems to like it better than I liked the demo, but I've still got RSI in my right hand, so original-recipe FF7 is more my speed right now.)

I went to check on the mods over at the qhimm forums, chiefly the Reunion set of mods, which include a new translation, something I'd been thinking about since a recent Ars article about Barret as a racial stereotype (don't read the comments). And it appears that the guy in charge of Reunion got himself banned last month.

This falls under the category of "I was surprised that the single most popular thing on the forum has disappeared but I am not terribly surprised that particular poster got himself banned." This is a guy who, I shit you not, e-mailed me to argue with me because he saw the following on my blog:

Retranslation -- this could go either way. It's sure to be more competent than the game's official translation, but it's too early to tell whether it will be any fun. Fan translations of Final Fantasy 4 and 5 back in the 1990's were fun and vastly superior to Square's initial attempts at English scripts for those games, but the fan translation of 6 met a more lukewarm reception; I'm part of the group that thinks it sucks all the charm out of Woolsey's (admittedly compromised) version. Now, this 7 fan translation could end up like 4 and 5, or it could end up like 6 -- and given that the focus seems to be on debating whether the Turks should be named Reno and Elena or Leno and Yrena, I'm sadly inclined to fear the latter. But hey, at least they know how to spell mithril.


Anyway the Reunion mods are over at ff7.live now, in case anyone's curious as to whether that translation wound up being any good or not. I wouldn't expect them to work with anyone else's mods, though.


Since I wrote that I can't get the idea of trying the translation out of my head. Haven't been able to get it to work under Linux (the base game plays fine under Steam Play, but I haven't been able to get the mods to work; I suspect it's because I don't know much about WINE prefixes or where Steam is putting FF7's WINE prefix -- it's supposed to be in ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/39140/pfx but it isn't) but I've still got a Windows laptop I use for stuff that won't run under Linux. Mod seems to be working there, except I think it's supposed to replace the field models and it doesn't. (I don't like the new field models anyway, but I feel like the only way to truly experience the Reunion mod is to immerse myself in its full creative vision.)

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Thad » Fri Jul 17, 2020 10:58 pm

Played through the bombing mission to the save point right before Sector 7. My main takeaway so far is "What's the big deal?" If the opening portion of the game is anything to go by, the fan translator's major objecting to Baskett's localization is that it's riddled with typos. Which I already knew.

I haven't really noticed any changes that affect the meaning of the script, except of course for the part where Cloud doesn't tell you to "attack when it's tail's up" anymore. Barrett (his name has two T's now) still speaks in dialect, droppin' vowels an' consonants like nobody's business. Whatever the translator's gripes about Barrett talking like a cliche, he hasn't done much to remedy it.

Not much else worth reporting. Maybe I'll play more, but it hasn't done much to entice me. I was hoping for this to play like the twisted result of a singular obsession, but it's just kinda meh. It hasn't been drained of all charm like the FF6 fan translation, but neither has it done anything to distinguish itself. It feels kinda the same but with spell check.

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Re: Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

Postby Friday » Sun Jul 19, 2020 4:41 am

Huh, that's a disappointment. I was hoping for... something, after all this build up since I read about years ago on your blog.

Maybe it gets better later?
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