TheJollyCorner
Member
I'll never get the praise for FF IX. It's the most ponderous FF to date. Nothing in that game holds up to today's standards.
High-five!
I agree.
I'll never get the praise for FF IX. It's the most ponderous FF to date. Nothing in that game holds up to today's standards.
Twin Snakes is, um, interesting. There is quite a lot wrong with it, though.I didn't think it was unplayable then. That's how I feel when I try to revisit the PSX MGS nowdays... it has been completely outdone by Twin Snakes and there's not a single reason to ever revisit the original, imo. In it's own time, it was a relevant and refreshing take on a genre that was finally starting to bloom, but in my opinion, it felt a bit misplaced. Twin Snakes makes the original obsolete, if you ask me.
FFVII, however, is just a mediocre game all around and being remade or revamped wouldn't change anything. It is most definitely the worst FF game I've played (though I have yet to finish V and XII), and that includes Crystal Chronicles and 2 FFT games as well! Finishing FFIX for the first time last week just made me realize how much a of an overrated mess VII really is. I love that GAF prefers IX to VII but it saddens me to see the rest of the world think the other way around. IX is like the DQVIII of it's gen, a perfect encapsulation of it's genre done tastefully and filled to the brim with charm. FFVII looks, plays and feels like an amateur game.
It's different with MGS than it is with FFVII. I like the ideas and concepts behind the game on the PSX, I just don't think it plays that well. Especially when compared to Twin Snakes. In other words, I think MGS was a good game released too soon/on the wrong hardware. It truly comes alive in Twin Snakes (again, this is just my opinion).
FFVII, however, is just a mediocre game all around and being remade or revamped wouldn't change anything. It is most definitely the worst FF game I've played (though I have yet to finish V and XII), and that includes Crystal Chronicles and 2 FFT games as well! Finishing FFIX for the first time last week just made me realize how much a of an overrated mess VII really is. I love that GAF prefers IX to VII but it saddens me to see the rest of the world think the other way around. IX is like the DQVIII of it's gen, a perfect encapsulation of it's genre done tastefully and filled to the brim with charm. FFVII looks, plays and feels like an amateur game.
I find FF9 to be an absolute chore to play. Battles take far, far too long. I think it's a dreadful game. I will never play it again.
Beatrix alone should elevate it above being dreadful.![]()
There's an entire sequence where she has to bust out of a flooded gas chamber, crawl hand and foot down the outside of a giant tower, get chased down by hundreds of armed soldiers and make a huge leap to barely grab the dangling rope of a speeding airship.
Just something to consider any time someone complains that Tifa is a weak female lead. Just because she has romantic aspirations about Cloud saving her doesn't mean she can't take care of herself.
I find FF9 to be an absolute chore to play. Battles take far, far too long. I think it's a dreadful game. I will never play it again.
Yes, the ATB timer is ridiculously slow in this game. Go into settings and move the slider to Fastest. Now it plays at normal speed.
That aside, I find the characters and story in 9 to be ridiculously charming. I seem to prefer the FF games where characters have preset roles instead of leaving the combat open ended, so this game and VI are some of my favorites.
As far as tech goes, it looks fantastic. I love the whole pre-rendered backgrounds and FMV era of RPGs. It also finally brings your party back up to 4 members!
I'm tired of always seeing FF7 be considered as one of the best RPGs/games ever... I just don't get it. At all.
... It has got to be the worst game I've ever completed, in my opinion!
...
Now, I don't want this to turn into a hate-thread, so what I'm basically asking is... WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU PEOPLE LIKE ABOUT IT AND WHY?
It was a mindblowing game for its time, and is an excellent JRPG after all this time. I don't really understand this need to slam FFVII while things like Chrono Trigger and FFVI get effusive, blind praise.
Is it because VII was commercially successful? Because it's popular to hate on popular things?
XII International is the apex of Final Fantasy and will still hold up fifteen years from now, mark my words.
I find FF9 to be an absolute chore to play. Battles take far, far too long. I think it's a dreadful game. I will never play it again.
I don't see how anybody can say the gameplay in FF 6-9 is really all that different. And I don't think that "GAF prefers IX." I just think that discontent speaks louder than praise.
FF7 is one of my favorite games of all time, but I don't bother posting about it in every thread where people are saying it's terrible. Same with MGS4 and other games.
Now, FFVII wouldn't even make it onto my top 20 games, but if its the worst game you have ever completed, you must have better taste than everyone else here. Not only that, but you dislike everything about it, thought it worse than any other game you had previously finished, and you still sat through 30 hours of it, including every battle intro and summon sequence.
I've got to ask, is it really the worst game you've ever finished? Congrats if so. You've missed a hell of a lot of rubbish-but-playable games!
It was a mindblowing game for its time, and is an excellent JRPG after all this time. I don't really understand this need to slam FFVII while things like Chrono Trigger and FFVI get effusive, blind praise.
Is it because VII was commercially successful? Because it's popular to hate on popular things?
It was a big deal when I was 13, does not hold up now, but people are unwilling to separate the game from their age and raised standards of quality from 1997.
It was a big deal when I was 13, does not hold up now, but people are unwilling to separate the game from their age and raised standards of quality from 1997.
Battles are slow, yes. It was the only thing I didn't like. Very slow indeed.
Gameplay in 7 is not that different in 6 or 9, yeah. It's just slightly inferior (which when compared to 6 makes no sense as a decision). That's why FFVII is such an offender, imo, the gameplay is standard RPG fare with none of the charm of the other 2 and cluttered with junk and minigames as well as a system that renders all characters equal (which ruins the fun, if you ask me... picking your party should be an important thing, in FFVII it doesn't matter.
As for the GAF preffering IX to VII I was refering to the Top 100 RPG thread, in which there was no such thing as "negative voting" involved and in which IX came out ahead of VII. Even if by a small margin.
There's a reason why FFVII or any other similar JRPGs (not just Square Enix ones) have not been remade, not even the way you want them to. And it's because it's not as cheap or as guaranteed to sell gazillion copies, like you seem to think.Of course people want it, but that doesn't have to be this. Save the new tech for something new that you can actually build a franchise on, let someone else handle the muscle in taking old assets and new models and making it work in the same way it worked back in the day. You can't have a game look like that tech demo and have the same scale of FF7, you just can't. So don't try and make a faithful remake using the same methods they used 15 years ago. It's a sound plan that would generate an amazing amount of revenue.
Man, you simply refuse to understand anything you read. It was a good plan/idea that they just failed executing because they didn't have experience of doing things that way 7-8 years ago (+ they added to the original plans a lot too, which caused delays). Now they DO have experience, have learned from past mistakes AND have asked their western studios for help in making it a reality. They AREN'T repeating past mistakes, Luminous is the result of everything they've learned and it is a GOOD result. The tools are ready NOW (well, almost ready) when the next-gen hasn't even arrived instead of not really even being in the early stages when they launch and then taking forever to be finished, like Crystal Tools did.And yet, they're doing it AGAIN. It's a bad plan and they should be trying to work with the middleware that already exists unless they are planning to sell this thing they've spent 3 years making, instead of working on easy profit layup games.
They are making changes that are slowly but surely taking effect. Square Enix is simply a big company, they don't turn around in an instant and as I said they have excess package to consider with XIV2.0 & such that prevent them from moving on (but are better do be finished than forgotten).And that's great but has nothing to do with how they're running the show NOW.
Umm... they DIDN'T nail it down with PS2. They did start getting great results out of PS2, but it still came with a high cost (i.e. FFXII's development took forever, almost as long as Versus has taken now). They did learn to harness PS2's power, but their development methods were still inefficient, unable to answer to the requirements of efficient PS2 level development. They could still get by during the PS2 era since the graphics were still relatively simple, but those problems simply escalated once transitioning to PS360 development. They simply weren't ready for that kind of jump in quality. Their methods/dev pipelines were hugely inefficient to develop PS3 games that pushed the hardware relatively as much as their games pushed the PS2 hardware. THAT is why they needed something like Crystal Tools (too bad it failed). THAT is why they need Luminous Studios now.Sure, the first few years of PS2 development were rocky. They nailed that down by creating tools that work for the hardware available and keeping an open dialogue with Sony who wanted square around because, at the time, square games printed money.
DS & PSP are some of the best selling platforms EVER. You talk shit about Square Enix not wanting money yet try to make it sound like a bad thing when they release games for the best selling gaming platform ever (and one that is easily in the top 10). It wasn't really their fault that a huge number of people have no interest in paying for products others have seen huge efforts to develop if they can get things for free (that is, rampant piracy on both DS & PSP).They didn't replicate that with current gen consoles, they were left blowing in the wind because they decided that PSP and DS development would be easier and more lucrative and they could make up the different for the money and time lost by prodominately catering to one demographic on a handheld that was failing pretty much everywhere except japan,
Now you're just being stupid. You bitch and bitch and bitch about Crystal Tools being a huge mistake yet don't want them to do anything that would prevent that kind of thing ever happening in the future again.AND ALL THE WHILE have spent what must be more money than god has even known on future products that still won't be able to even begin to make up lost funding until 2015 at earliest.
Lololololol. Square Enix has done MANY things right and, again, while stuff like Crystal Tools didn't span out as they had hoped, they were right in pursuing the development such toolset that would help in game development and be used across different teams with different projects. Not only was it wise of them to fund the Luminous Studios while current generation is still going on strong, they've developed internally & funded the development of games such as The World Ends With You, Kingdom Hearts: BBS, NieR, Dragon Quest IX, Dissidia and such. And while I'm not the biggest fan of MMOs, XIV 2.0 does seem like money well spent.You cannot sit there and say that Square has done anything right this generation. The 1 smart move they've made was buying Eidos and that is the ONLY thing that has kept them alive.
Lots of faith? I say it's very little faith given how good many of their games have been and TAKING THE CONTEXT of their troubles into account. Their big mistake was to try to improve their development practices yet failing in that which has lead to some rushed games (XIII & XIV 1.0, mostly). People make mistakes and they learn from them. Personally, I've still gotten more good games from them during this generation than most other big Japanese publishers.And that's a whole lot of faith to put in a developer that has made such vivid glaring obvious mistakes. You can put your faith in them if you want, I sure as hell ain't.
Sometimes it's better to let things rest than do something half-assed. If they don't have a clear idea and resources to do it justice, then they just better focus on something else (new games).If they are doing nothing with the brand, then why is it "too important" to let other people handle it? That doesn't make sense.
500k is not 10 million. And no DS remake of a FF has sold "MILLIONS" in Japan alone, when they've hardly done that worldwide.And of course a remake would sell out the nose, FF4 sells at least 500k everytime it's re-released, and other than the DS 3D remake, which sold MILLIONS in japan alone, that's basically a quick emulator job.
No it wouldn't.An FF7 remake that simply take the existing formula and makes it palletable for today's visuals would be easy.
So you think they should make a 3d game into 2d one like Tactics Ogre? That'd be a graphical downgrade, not sure fans would eat that up, at least not 10 million copies sold worth of eating up.It doesn't have to look like FF13, it could look like Bastion or the Orge Tactics remake, and it would be one of the best sellers of the year, hands down.
The kind of remake you'd want would be much more than 5 million. It's a huge world, every room/screen would need to be remade with improved graphics, every effect redone, characters remodelled, music remastered, probably animations redone too, not to even mention the prerendered CGI would then have to be redone as well, and with their Visual Works quality those alone would probably cost a lot more than 5 million. Any kind of FFVII remake would have to be a retail release and cost more than 10$.Release it on XBLA and PSN, no hard distribution fees, probably 5 million to make and the returns would be damn near limitless.
YOU'D be a much worse mismanager of Square Enix than Wada could ever hope to be. Again, publishers usually need to focus on the future. Remakes/up-ports can bring in some easy cash, but they aren't an answer to any kind of monetary problems or something that any publisher should pursue aggressively. THAT is pure nostalgia goggles speaking. FFVII is an important game for them but not important enough that they should pursue big remake projects no matter what, when they have bigger fishes to fry (finishing XIV 2.0 and Versus XIII)It's getting to the point where it's almost irresponsible for Square to not remake FF7, or better, hire someone else to do it for them.
Sure, everyone can learn every magic, but each character is a set class with unique abilities.How is VI not open ended? Esper system is pretty much the precursor to Materia.
Sure, everyone can learn every magic, but each character is a set class with unique abilities.
You can almost swap out any characters in VII for any other character with a similar materia build and nothing much would change. Replace Sabin with Gau and now everythings sucks forever.
"The different characters are completely interchangeable!" is not a sterling compliment for an RPG's character progression system IMHO
How is it inferior from 6? For me, they're all the same except for customization (which will be YMMV), especially end game when your characters are so powerful you don't even need to use strategy. Charm is a word about as useful as visceral in that it doesn't describe anything at all.
Sure, everyone can learn every magic, but each character is a set class with unique abilities.
You can almost swap out any characters in VII for any other character with a similar materia build and nothing much would change. Replace Sabin with Gau and now everythings sucks forever.
VI did literally everything better. Better story, better music, better and more varied combat, way better and more fleshed characters, better graphics (yes, better graphics), a more varied and actually relevant character roster with unique abilities and pros/cons, and a bigger and alot more interesting quest that wasn't affraid to deal with adult themes without being all cheesy and cyberemo about it. Also, having the best antagonist in any FF, ever helps. It remains, to this day, the quintessential FFVI, it's the pinnacle of the series and the perfect crompromise of old and new.
If you don't understand what charm and visceral mean/describe go read a dictionary. In the context of IX, the charm is the setting, the lovely music, vistas and atmosphere, the way the characters interact with each other and above all the world itself. Compared to VII's industrial wasteland setting, it's alot more compelling and enjoyable.
"Nostalgia glasses" is the just the worst insisting argument ever. People actually can appreciate things that have aged based on their own standards, who woulda thunk!
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hideous, unremarkable trash, right?
Most people playing this game today are probably looking at those backgrounds blown up on huge TVs, which makes them look terrible.
VI = Mediocre.I'm tired of always seeing FF7 be considered as one of the best RPGs/games ever... I just don't get it. At all.
I love Final Fantasy! I really do! VI, IX, IX and XII are all amazing
It was the dark, gritty reboot of a well-established franchise.
It was all things to all people... or at least all 11-15 year olds living in 1997. It had emo brooding for moody kids, it had dudes turning into monsters to wreck other dudes and dudes with gatling guns for arms shooting fools, it had melodrama, the bad guy was THE MAN, and MOST IMPORTANTLY it had a harem of ambiguous love interests to suit the tastes of any young man or woman.
Sooo to answer your question what was good about FF7 was marketing and demographics. The actual game, not all that great.
"The different characters are completely interchangeable!" is not a sterling compliment for an RPG's character progression system IMHO
XII International is the apex of Final Fantasy and will still hold up fifteen years from now, mark my words.
There's a reason why FFVII or any other similar JRPGs (not just Square Enix ones) have not been remade, not even the way you want them to. And it's because it's not as cheap or as guaranteed to sell gazillion copies, like you seem to think.
Man, you simply refuse to understand anything you read. It was a good plan/idea that they just failed executing because they didn't have experience of doing things that way 7-8 years ago (+ they added to the original plans a lot too, which caused delays). Now they DO have experience, have learned from past mistakes AND have asked their western studios for help in making it a reality. They AREN'T repeating past mistakes, Luminous is the result of everything they've learned and it is a GOOD result. The tools are ready NOW (well, almost ready) when the next-gen hasn't even arrived instead of not really even being in the early stages when they launch and then taking forever to be finished, like Crystal Tools did.
Middleware isn't the answer to everything. Square Enix have their own specific needs that middleware isn't necessarily the answer to (and middleware can end up being much more expensive). Just like Obsidian has been horribly shackled by shitty middleware they've had to work with that doesn't fit the kind of games they make in the ways they make them (Gamebryo... *shudders*) and their own Onyx engine being a remedy for that.
They are making changes that are slowly but surely taking effect. Square Enix is simply a big company, they don't turn around in an instant and as I said they have excess package to consider with XIV2.0 & such that prevent them from moving on (but are better do be finished than forgotten).
Umm... they DIDN'T nail it down with PS2. They did start getting great results out of PS2, but it still came with a high cost (i.e. FFXII's development took forever, almost as long as Versus has taken now). They did learn to harness PS2's power, but their development methods were still inefficient, unable to answer to the requirements of efficient PS2 level development. They could still get by during the PS2 era since the graphics were still relatively simple, but those problems simply escalated once transitioning to PS360 development. They simply weren't ready for that kind of jump in quality. Their methods/dev pipelines were hugely inefficient to develop PS3 games that pushed the hardware relatively as much as their games pushed the PS2 hardware. THAT is why they needed something like Crystal Tools (too bad it failed). THAT is why they need Luminous Studios now.
DS & PSP are some of the best selling platforms EVER. You talk shit about Square Enix not wanting money yet try to make it sound like a bad thing when they release games for the best selling gaming platform ever (and one that is easily in the top 10). It wasn't really their fault that a huge number of people have no interest in paying for products others have seen huge efforts to develop if they can get things for free (that is, rampant piracy on both DS & PSP).
Also, they pretty much had to do things this way. You do understand that Square Enix, as a developer, is relatively small? That's why they've had to have other teams help finish games like XIII & XIV 2.0, instead of just letting separate teams do their own thing. They can't really have the same kind of output on home consoles alone anymore that they did during the PS1 era when small teams could develop big games in short time spans, so there could be a steady stream of games that pushed the edges. So they decided to have smaller teams develop games (numerous awesome ones, btw) on handhelds while bigger teams were working on home console games.
Now you're just being stupid. You bitch and bitch and bitch about Crystal Tools being a huge mistake yet don't want them to do anything that would prevent that kind of thing ever happening in the future again.
NEWS FLASH! Companies NEED to invest into their long-term future as well. Just because they might not make money back out of all the resources that has gone to the Luminous Studios until 2015 doesn't mean it's money that isn't well spent, ESPECIALLY if it means they can avoid the kind of catastrophes that FFXIII & XIV turned out to be during this generation.
Lololololol. Square Enix has done MANY things right and, again, while stuff like Crystal Tools didn't span out as they had hoped, they were right in pursuing the development such toolset that would help in game development and be used across different teams with different projects. Not only was it wise of them to fund the Luminous Studios while current generation is still going on strong, they've developed internally & funded the development of games such as The World Ends With You, Kingdom Hearts: BBS, NieR, Dragon Quest IX, Dissidia and such. And while I'm not the biggest fan of MMOs, XIV 2.0 does seem like money well spent.
Eidos is in no way the only thing that kept them alive (after all, their Eidos side has had their share of flops or games that didn't perform as well as they'd hoped), not when they've had huge sellers like Dragon Quest IX and the continued success of FFXI. The whole "Eidos is the only good thing about Square Enix nowadays" is hugely exaggerated, blind hate stupidity.
Lots of faith? I say it's very little faith given how good many of their games have been and TAKING THE CONTEXT of their troubles into account. Their big mistake was to try to improve their development practices yet failing in that which has lead to some rushed games (XIII & XIV 1.0, mostly). People make mistakes and they learn from them. Personally, I've still gotten more good games from them during this generation than most other big Japanese publishers.
Sometimes it's better to let things rest than do something half-assed. If they don't have a clear idea and resources to do it justice, then they just better focus on something else (new games).
500k is not 10 million. And no DS remake of a FF has sold "MILLIONS" in Japan alone, when they've hardly done that worldwide.
No it wouldn't.
So you think they should make a 3d game into 2d one like Tactics Ogre? That'd be a graphical downgrade, not sure fans would eat that up, at least not 10 million copies sold worth of eating up.
And making something look like Bastion (which, btw, takes a lot of shortcuts when it comes to graphics that a FFVII remake simply couldn't do) would be hugely expensive in the scope of FFVII.
The kind of remake you'd want would be much more than 5 million. It's a huge world, every room/screen would need to be remade with improved graphics, every effect redone, characters remodelled, music remastered, probably animations redone too, not to even mention the prerendered CGI would then have to be redone as well, and with their Visual Works quality those alone would probably cost a lot more than 5 million. Any kind of FFVII remake would have to be a retail release and cost more than 10$.
YOU'D be a much worse mismanager of Square Enix than Wada could ever hope to be. Again, publishers usually need to focus on the future. Remakes/up-ports can bring in some easy cash, but they aren't an answer to any kind of monetary problems or something that any publisher should pursue aggressively. THAT is pure nostalgia goggles speaking. FFVII is an important game for them but not important enough that they should pursue big remake projects no matter what, when they have bigger fishes to fry (finishing XIV 2.0 and Versus XIII)
Well yeah, because at the end of the day, those are 320x240 stills.
Imagine if they were 1920x1080.
FFXII is already outdated and surpassed by a much better RPG. It only seems good with nostalgia goggles on.
I understand what charm and visceral mean. In the context of describing something, they're largely pointless buzz-words that people use. Saying something has charm is useless. Explaining why something is appealing is not.
Annnnd, I disagree with everything you've just typed. Especially about Kefka. He's a one-dimensional, horrible villain, with horrible dialogue. So boring. Nothing entertaining to me about somebody who wants to kill all humans while spouting lines like:
Son of a sandworm!* You'll pay for this!
or
Hee-hee... Nothing beats the sweet music of hundreds of voices screaming in unison! Uwee-hee-hee!
Did I read Mzo wrong? I'm pretty sure he's agreeing with the people who think FF6's cast is better.
VI = Mediocre.
IX is good, sure.
XII is shit.
Anyhow, let's be serious now. Most old games that people rave about don't hold up. Ocarina of Time? Crap. Super Mario 64? Crap. Chrono Trigger? Crap.
These games should be judged in the context of their time. That way their impact and significance is more understandable. Revisiting these games a decade after they've released has never been a good experience in my opinion. I've yet to truly enjoy an old game which I didn't play close to when it initially released. They're all mundane.
FF7 was remarkable for its time.
FFXII is already outdated and surpassed by a much better RPG. It only seems good with nostalgia goggles on.
Which is?
I don't know, I played FFXII izjs for the first time not too long ago and quite enjoyed the combat. If RPG's want to modernise it's the direction they need to head IMO.
It had great mini games in the Golden Saucer.