What Are You Playing?

Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
I've put over 70 hours into this shit and am I'm now wondering if I'll platinum it... really don't want to do all the dumb dresses or side games though.

Well, I for one am DONE.

FF7R_100-DONE.jpg

Now I can finally move on to another game... Although I might still post one last long-ass analysis of my time with this game in the future. :schnoz:
Oh and about the dresses, it's a mind-numbing chore for sure, but getting Aerith the shittiest one results in one of the funniest scene in the game. Had me actually laughing out loud.
 

Griffith

With the streak of a tear, Like morning dew
Well, I for one am DONE.

Now I can finally move on to another game... Although I might still post one last long-ass analysis of my time with this game in the future.

Congrats, man! I hope you write another deep dive on the end game mechanics too. I don't know if I'm going to be able to do all the side stuff myself, I'll end up spending twice as much time doing repetitive shit before quitting forever instead. Unless I just keep replaying it until FF7 Remake 2 comes out! I'll be partying like it's 1997 in Tifa's Seventh Heaven of Sector 7! :magni:

Oh and about the dresses, it's a mind-numbing chore for sure, but getting Aerith the shittiest one results in one of the funniest scene in the game. Had me actually laughing out loud.

:ganishka:

I didn't think it looked that bad. :farnese:
 

Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
Congrats, man! I hope you write another deep dive on the end game mechanics too. I don't know if I'm going to be able to do all the side stuff myself, I'll end up spending twice as much time doing repetitive shit before quitting forever instead. Unless I just keep replaying it until FF7 Remake 2 comes out! I'll be partying like it's 1997 in Tifa's Seventh Heaven of Sector 7! :magni:

Haha, you need to play another VR game to get over this! :slan:

I didn't think it looked that bad. :farnese:

Yeah it's not even that bad, but between the music and her being accompanied by stray animals, then Johnny pushing her... they really went for it. :ganishka:
 

Griffith

With the streak of a tear, Like morning dew
Haha, you need to play another VR game to get over this! :slan:

Well, as I'm sure you've experienced, I've actually had some VR obstacles recently, first a heat wave last week which made playing a rather unappealing proposition, and, even worse, this week I suffered a pinched nerve in my neck/back that limited my range of motion and made it so I could barely move without pain (feeling better today, thankfully). Of course, in the interim my wife and daughter have unwittingly trashed my play space with work and toys, so even getting started again will require a cleaning and reorganization (the real hurdle to VR for mainstream gamers; a clean room =). I mean, these are just the extra concerns that come with the territory for superior VR athletes like ourselves. :badbone:

Yeah it's not even that bad, but between the music and her being accompanied by stray animals, then Johnny pushing her... they really went for it. :ganishka:

Oh yeah, my favorite was her final, sad, "You put a lot of work into this. ...Did you put a lot of work into this?" I've had that conversation before. :guts:
 

Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
Well, as I'm sure you've experienced, I've actually had some VR obstacles recently, first a heat wave last week which made playing a rather unappealing proposition, and, even worse, this week I suffered a pinched nerve in my neck/back that limited my range of motion and made it so I could barely move without pain (feeling better today, thankfully). Of course, in the interim my wife and daughter have unwittingly trashed my play space with work and toys, so even getting started again will require a cleaning and reorganization (the real hurdle to VR for mainstream gamers; a clean room =). I mean, these are just the extra concerns that come with the territory for superior VR athletes like ourselves. :badbone:

Haha, indeed. Inferior couch potato gamers cannot relate to these tribulations! :troll:
 

Walter

Administrator
Staff member
Just finished FF7 Remake. Despite a number of highs, by the ending, I was very disappointed overall. It's an uneven experience, knocking so many surprising elements out of the park, then falling flat on its face in others.

In an ironic reversal, I was evangelizing this game to Griff and Aaz, who ended up more positive than me by the end. I'll try to explain what went wrong for me, along with what was worthwhile. Despite everything, I feel like Square deserves marks for nailing so many aspects of this remake, which I had no faith they could. Combating nostalgia for one of the most revered games of all time is a remarkable feat. For that alone, I'm glad this seems to have been a financial success for them.

Walking the streets of Midgar in high fidelity was an incredible experience. It swept me off my feet early on, giving me something I didn't even know I wanted, built on the visual fascination I had with the game from 25 years ago. The music is absolutely stunning, and often smartly folds in the high points of themes from other tracks (sometimes this is an unhappy marriage of themes, but oh well). I enjoyed the combat throughout the game. It justified the purchase of the game, for me. Each party member feels like they contribute something special, and they all fight differently, which is a huge and welcome change from the original, where as a result of the swappable Materia system, they are otherwise mostly distinguished by their limit breaks. There are some concerns here, like specialized boss encounters that betray the standard combat rules (I still don't quite know what I was supposed to have been doing in that chariot fight), but overall, fighting in FF7 Remake feels fluid and looks amazing. There should have been more of it... The way the game is structured, you don't get opportunities to just go into the world and grind it out, which is a frustration point for some of those 5000AP materia.

I was enjoying the game so much around the point you really meet up with Aerith (directly after the second reactor mission -- which is a high point), that I confided in Aazealh that I like this more than the original. This was premature, and by the end of the game, I ate those words. The game made me eat them -- slowly.

The fundamental weakness of this game is that Square has absolutely no idea how to properly utilize all this fidelity they've endowed Midgar with beyond wrapping you up in spectacle. Many new sequences and obstacles have been invented in what feels like an effort to pad out the game's length. "Hope you liked the sewers! Boy that was an expensive area to develop, so you'll definitely be back!" And when it's not adding fat, it's stuffing the original game's sequences with fidelity to the point of obliterating any sense of pacing they were building towards. What took 30 minutes originally now takes hours upon hours. The grossest example of this is the run from Corneo's bedroom to the Sector 7 tower. Sure it's a dire circumstance, but we gotta have a 1h sewer visit + 1h train graveyard! It's essential!

FF7 Remake is a 40 pound steak with 20 pounds of fat. Were it maybe half as long, it could have felt seamless, retaining its aspirations of grandeur without resorting to fetch quests and side sequences that either bore you to tears or pile on potential only to crash into a brick wall once the primary narrative picks up again.

Early on, you're given a completely new scenario with Jessie, a side character who gets new life breathed into her in this remake. It's a small taste of what could be ahead, and honestly it was refreshing to me. A self-contained chapter that layers on the original with a short taste of life in the suburbs of Midgar, and giving Jessie a chance to shine. Boy! How will they use all this momentum, I wondered at the time. Will Jessie disrupt Aerith and Tifa? No, that's pretty much the end for Jessie. They didn't have anything else planned. Sorry folks.

I hope my angst over new sequences doesn't get misconstrued as if I'm a purist. I'm all for Square trying out new avenues for exploring the world of FF7. This is actually what I am most interested in. I've already played the original PS1 game 3 times through (the first time in Japanese -- what a fucking nerd). A faithful 1:1 remake with this budget sounds like a waste of money and time, to me. But they're trying to skirt the line. The Whispers are a story contrivance that offers an opportunity for new encounters, character choices, and discoveries, but they don't spend any significant time fleshing out those possibilities. Instead, it's mostly focused on adding new locales, not new story or character milestones. The game invests most of its time sticking to the script -- just in a way that takes 35 more hours than the original.

All that time wasn't spent learning much more about the characters, because they rarely talk about more than the mission at hand. For example, the cast doesn't react in any way to the dramatic introduction of Sephiroth, who is initially shown as a hallucination to Cloud, then inexplicably becomes a real person without any acknowledgement (oh wait, so THIS part isn't a hallucination? Okay). No "Hey Cloud who's that dude that stabbed me? And then stabbed the president?" moment from Barrett. Being mum on details in the course of a 3-5 hour sprint through Midgar is expected. How about when it's 40 hours though? And certainly, escaping Shinra Tower wasn't the right time for the info dump that Cloud eventually gives the party at Kalm. So ... then maybe introducing Sephiroth in this new, dynamic way without any interstitial explanation is a bad decision? What the hell do new players think of all this nonsense? It's one of many decisions Square made that demonstrates to me they don't really know what they're doing here — or at least, they are putting their foot on the gas for spectacle before parsing the consequences of arriving at their destination ahead of schedule.

The other problem with fidelity is that Square tried so hard to make this beautiful world look realistic, and add nuances to the story you already know, but it never seems like they really care about congruency when they join that grounded notion to such artificial, ridiculous story scenarios. In a few seconds, Hojo goes from having a machine gun pointed to his head to waltzing over to an elevator and trapping you like a lab rat for the next 5 hours. What the fuck just happened? The lengthy Hojo lab that ends up exactly where you'd expect from the original is emblematic of a dozen or so arbitrary scenarios that were concocted to lengthen this game. More specifically, they were created to justify this small slice of FF7 being its own game. It's possible this aspect hit me particularly hard because I have such little free time to play games (~1h a night), but this game absolutely does not respect players' time, and by the end, the accumulated angst after 22 boss fights was palpable.

As it is, pacing is all over the place, and by the end, I have endured countless group shots looking at something dramatic (I'm sorry. You can't keep playing that card over and over and expect it to have the same impact). Despite the increased length, by the end of the game the characters each have LESS motivation for the next step in the story than they had before. It's all a muddled mess. I'm genuinely not even sure why we were even fighting the final few bosses. What were we trying to prevent, exactly? Do the characters even know? This isn't a question I should be having to ask.

Looking to the future, I'm hopeful they can recapture my imagination in the sequels, but I feel like it is an uphill battle. Doing a self-contained Midgar game is child's play compared to what's to come. Midgar is a straight sequence of events in one locale. Things gets scattershot as soon as the party leaves town involving several short visits at varied locations. Not sure how they'll manage that, along with the overworld. I feel like this formula they've just used won't necessarily be easy to apply, but I'm interested to see what they come up with.
 
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Rhombaad

Video Game Time Traveler
I ended up playing Unreal instead of Parasite Eve, because it turns out Parasite Eve is a sequel to a novel. :void: I'm going to read the novel first, then play the game.

Unreal was awesome. I started out not liking it much compared to Doom and Quake, but by the second half of the game I was hooked. I ended up pulling an all-nighter two days ago and finishing it off. It was a lot of fun and I can't wait to play its expansion, Return to Na Pali.

Next up is Tenchu: Stealth Assassins!
 
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Griffith

With the streak of a tear, Like morning dew
It's another FF7 double rainbow! In which I'll kind of give my own take on some of the issues Walter is citing in his review, and if and how they're affecting my own enjoyment of the game.

Final Fantasy VII (OG with Reunion+Remako mods) - I'm at the Shinra Building and took the stairs, which is always was fun. Tifa accused Barret of looking up her skirt, which I don't remember and doubt was translated clearly in the original! I'm shocked the new game passed on the opportunity to make the brief sneaking past guards behind pillars segment into an hour long stealth chapter. I was basically at the same point in both editions of the game at the start of today, the difference being in the original I went from Aerith's house to the 67th floor at will in like a half hour, meanwhile in Remake I'm now trapped in some Sector 7 secret Umbrel, err, uh, Shinra lab for the foreseeable future, then a mandatory sewer chase, scaling the way to Shinra building, getting in, etc etc. Barret was also naturally eager to rescue Aerith to repay her for saving his daughter...

Final Fantasy VII Remake - ...whereas here Barret would instead rather to go check out Sector 7 and shows almost no interest in helping Aerith at all (he even tells Marle they have no future plans, ouch =). They threw in that BS line from Aerith's mom saying it's best to wait, then they have to go see Shinra monsters in test tubes to realize, "Maybe we should help our friend?" This is one of two very problematical portions of the game where their need or desire to expand everything seriously fucks up the logic and integrity of the plot, specifically its pace.

The first is Chapter 11, which might be the most useless in the game, with largely new segments exploring Cloud's and Tifa's fear of ghosts with a made up boss and everyone forgetting that they're supposed to be rushing back to save Sector 7 from being destroyed while they consider childhood and the afterlife. Look, I get it as far as size goes, the parameters of what constitutes an area in the original, which can be as little as a single pre-rendered background, and rendering that in a 3D environment and space can't be compared, you can't just have a couple of rooms worth of sewers and train graveyards without it actually feeling truncated; it demands expansion just to match the stature of the original. The problem is they often go far beyond that, maybe because it would also suck to create all these unique assets and maps just for Cloud and friends to run through them in a matter of minutes (solution: way more combat =). That's how you end up with a slow, plodding gaiden about ghosts in the middle of what should be a race against time to save an entire borough of a city. The sewers and train graveyard should rightfully have just been combined into one Chapter you're racing through, but again, that sort of sucks for the effort. Unfortunately, as is, it stops the game dead in its tracks right when it should really be taking off.

Chapter 13 is the same deal, instead of rushing to save Aerith you're cruising the old neighborhood and going to some totally unnecessary lab addition. It arguably only gets worse in Chapter 14 as you can do like 9 side quests before deciding to stop Hojo from probing your best gal pal, then taking forever to travel there, making urgency impossible (they actually try to diffuse it).

Basically, it feels like every other Chapter is an unnecessary addition or stuffed with filler, whether you enjoy them or not. I'll even count them up: Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 6, Chapter 9 (I know it has Corneo but 90% of it is random new errands to that end), Chapter 11, Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 17. Yeah, about half the Chapters are new segments or so filled with additions the vital plot points they do cover get completely overshadowed. I might actually try a replay where I skip most of those chapters, maybe with the exceptions of 3, 9, and 14 minus side-quests, and and see how that flows.

Anyway, all that said, I'm still playing and enjoying this game! I'm enjoying replaying on hard, I'm enjoying the characterization and performances of the voice actors, I enjoyed all the endgame Chapter jumping, collecting, and simulator battles, I enjoy maximizing my characters, their weapons, materia, etc. I still like this game despite their best efforts to alienate me and my best efforts to be alienated. They made half a dozen story turns at the end of this thing that were red flags that should have turned me off completely, but I don't care and apparently still can't get enough. Ironically, part of that replayability might be that there's no shortage of granular bullshit to zoom in on once you exhaust the previous thing. All that filler I complained about up there, that bugged me along the way, paying off in the aggregate now that I'm in no hurry and story urgency is moot.

Just to make the point of how much this game has gotten into my DNA, I'll leave you with this write up of my opinion of the best Hard Mode weapons for each character, which I originally PMed to Aaz, apropos of nothing:

Hard Mode observations and opinions in case you thought we were winding this down... I've not yet had my fill!! :stop: Since we did abilities/attacks, let's do best hard mode weapons:

Aerith: Silver Staff - High magic attack, doubles mp regeneration (every 10 seconds), BOTH reduced offensive and healing mp use, receiving damage generates mp, AND reprieve. This has all the best hard mode traits and might be the best weapon in the game on paper.

Cloud: Mythril Saber - Highest combined physical and magic damage potential, 2nd highest magic damage of ANY weapon, increased physical and elemental materia damage, doubles mp regeneration, reduced offensive mp use, taking damage gives you mp. All it's missing is the healing bonus and reprieve, but it's still the best offensive weapon with the most mp generation, so despite almost all of Cloud's weapons being contenders this one sets itself apart for me (plus it's OG, not some fake end game sword like Twin Stinger =). Plus, Blade Burst scales best with this weapon and I'm testing if it pairs with Elemental Materia to essentially give you unlimited high elemental magic attack of your choice... we'll see.

Tifa: Sonic Strikers - Same as above, double mp regeneration, reduces mp use for healing, but with only decent physical and magic damage, so otherwise not as strong a case if you just want to unlock her full offensive and crit potential and leave the mp concerns to the others.

Barret: Light Machine Gun - Very good magical damage and high mp, reduced mp use for healing and reprieve, but no mp generation (I give him the mp absorption materia and two mp ups to compensate for the). Still the best of a flawed bunch for my purposes of making him a tankier mage alternative to Aerith, but like Tifa perhaps there's a better, more unique, way (Cloud is the best alternative to Aerith anyway).

I find this setup pretty versatile and efficient while still allowing you to run wild with magic, which is more fun than sticking to abilities for attack and healing and saving mp for revives.

In other nerdiness, here are the elemental magic I assigned each character outside of boss specific setups:

Cloud = Fire - Was his default here, was ice and lightning in the original, which I like better but whatever.

Tifa = Ice - I think her default too, and a good pair for her and Cloud, though the reverse makes more sense given their personalities. =)

Barret = Lightning - Also his default and sensible given he's technically a cyborg.

Aerith = Wind - A natural fit with her healing wind and storm powers, and a compliment to lightning on flying machines when she's in for Barret (especially if her Sorceress Storm already does lightning damage, I can similarly give Cloud fire AND ice on his sword with the Enemy Skill materia). Of course I match the same Summon elements as well, but where's Ramuh, damn it!? :mozgus:

In response he told me just gave them all their final available weapons and the same elemental materias as on normal mode. =)
 
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Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
In response he told me just gave them all their final available weapons and the same elemental materias as on normal mode. =)

My Hard mode tweaking involved giving Healing and Revival materias to every character, along with HP+ and MP+ ones for those that didn't have them. I removed stuff like the effects materias (Time, Subversion, etc.) as they aren't really useful.
 
So I ended up returning to the Witcher 3. I started another run of the Blood and Wine expansion, and I'm enjoying almost as much as I did the first time around, four years ago. It's easily my favorite part of this already gigantic game. The setting, the soundtrack, the quests and side-quests (which are so refreshing to do after the drab side-quests of FFVIIR), and so on. It's wonderful.

I also started another game that I got on sale a while back but only gotten in the mood for it now: Valkyria Chronicles. Nice little game, nothing mind-blowing, but a pleasant change of pace.

And most importantly, I watched a friend play Code Veronica all the way to the end. Yeah...that game is weird to say the least :ganishka:. Now I'm doubly curious how a remake of that would turn out.
 

Griffith

With the streak of a tear, Like morning dew
My Hard mode tweaking involved giving Healing and Revival materias to every character, along with HP+ and MP+ ones for those that didn't have them. I removed stuff like the effects materias (Time, Subversion, etc.) as they aren't really useful.

Yeah, the real not-so-secret formula is just use mp exclusively for reviving because character/weapon abilities are so innately powerful you hardly need offensive magic to win any fight, and there's numerous free healing (but if you don't want to even manage it, healing + magnify on a weapon with 20% mp reduction on healing spells basically makes you invulnerable). That's actually more how I played on normal because I didn't bother with items, it's only on hard where I'm really experimenting.

So I ended up returning to the Witcher 3. I started another run of the Blood and Wine expansion, and I'm enjoying almost as much as I did the first time around, four years ago. It's easily my favorite part of this already gigantic game. The setting, the soundtrack, the quests and side-quests (which are so refreshing to do after the drab side-quests of FFVIIR), and so on. It's wonderful.

Man, I need to get out of Midgar and back to... wherever that was Witcher 3 takes place. =) I'm still stuck at that wedding in Hearts of Stone, gotta to wrap it up and get moving again. I'll probably get sidetracked upgrading my bear armor and weapons again though...
 
Man, I need to get out of Midgar and back to... wherever that was Witcher 3 takes place. =) I'm still stuck at that wedding in Hearts of Stone, gotta to wrap it up and get moving again. I'll probably get sidetracked upgrading my bear armor and weapons again though...
I'd suggest waiting until you start Blood and Wine before upgrading armor. There, you'll have access to grandmaster level armor that's not only stronger but also looks great. And it will cost a lot of gold to craft too, so it's good idea to save that money.
 

Griffith

With the streak of a tear, Like morning dew
I'd suggest waiting until you start Blood and Wine before upgrading armor. There, you'll have access to grandmaster level armor that's not only stronger but also looks great. And it will cost a lot of gold to craft too, so it's good idea to save that money.

Yeah, I think I ran out of money upgrading my shit, which was frustrating at this juncture since I hadn't worried about money since at least mid-game. Don't I have to upgrade everything at every level anyway before I can get to the next level? That's been the case so far, you need a piece of the armor in its directly previous form to create the next upgraded version; do they make an exception for Grandmaster gear in B+W? I should probably just ignore all this because it doesn't matter and I easily beat the game with a high level rando sword I bought off the last merchant before the final mission. Way more efficient than going through upgrading hell only to find something comparable or better at a shop for infinitely less fake gold and real time spent.
 
Yeah, I think I ran out of money upgrading my shit, which was frustrating at this juncture since I hadn't worried about money since at least mid-game. Don't I have to upgrade everything at every level anyway before I can get to the next level? That's been the case so far, you need a piece of the armor in its directly previous form to create the next upgraded version; do they make an exception for Grandmaster gear in B+W? I should probably just ignore all this because it doesn't matter and I easily beat the game with a high level rando sword I bought off the last merchant before the final mission. Way more efficient than going through upgrading hell only to find something comparable or better at a shop for infinitely less fake gold and real time spent.
Yes, you need to craft previous level pieces. But I'd hold off on upgrading the bear armor any further until checking out the other ones, such as the wolf armor or the feline, since you may want to switch to those (if not for practical reasons, then at least for how they look). Of course, if you go for grandmaster bear armor you're already partway through anyway.
And yeah you could ignore that but since you'll be doing quests to retrieve the grandmaster diagrams, you might as well try it I think. Also, I'm playing the game on hard difficulty and new game+, so armor makes a difference in my experience (and even then, Geralt regularly gets his ass kicked--this man is made of paper!)
 

Griffith

With the streak of a tear, Like morning dew
Yes, you need to craft previous level pieces. But I'd hold off on upgrading the bear armor any further until checking out the other ones, such as the wolf armor or the feline, since you may want to switch to those (if not for practical reasons, then at least for how they look). Of course, if you go for grandmaster bear armor you're already partway through anyway.
And yeah you could ignore that but since you'll be doing quests to retrieve the grandmaster diagrams, you might as well try it I think.

Well, my whole build and offensive play style is built around strong attack and the ursine school and I'm pretty deep into upgrading the bear gear, so I probably won't be changing up.

Also, I'm playing the game on hard difficulty and new game+, so armor makes a difference in my experience (and even then, Geralt regularly gets his ass kicked--this man is made of paper!)

I do have the highest level bear armor available where I am, just not weapons, so I should be ok. We'll see when I get there. When I fought that one immortal guy whose head you eventually slice halfway off he was actually kind of a pain in the ass. Not enough I needed more than one shot at him, but enough I had to work for it a little. He's in my top 3 bosses of the game along with the first guy from the Wild Hunt you fight, where I was out of food and potion, the second Griffin or Grand Griffin you fight, where I didn't know I could protect myself from his bleed attack with that one sign, and then him where I'm sure there was some trick to do better but I probably just repeatedly dodged + attacked him to almost death. =)
 
I do have the highest level bear armor available where I am, just not weapons, so I should be ok. We'll see when I get there. When I fought that one immortal guy whose head you eventually slice halfway off he was actually kind of a pain in the ass. Not enough I needed more than one shot at him, but enough I had to work for it a little. He's in my top 3 bosses of the game along with the first guy from the Wild Hunt you fight, where I was out of food and potion, the second Griffin or Grand Griffin you fight, where I didn't know I could protect myself from his bleed attack with that one sign, and then him where I'm sure there was some trick to do better but I probably just repeatedly dodged + attacked him to almost death. =)

There's also an end-all weapon you can get in B&W that you will basically use over everything else. There's also a nice little quest that makes obtaining this weapon really worth it.
 

XionHorsey

Hi! Hi!
Still playing Love Nikki! Thank god for giftcards is all I can say. :) Also been playing Terraria: Journey's End and Borderlands 3 on occasion, but mostly Love Nikki.
 

Walter

Administrator
Staff member
Been playing Lonely Mountains: Downhill, which is on Xbox's PC game pass lineup. It's been pretty fun! Kind of like Trials if it were more focused on exploration and shortcuts, not trick execution and speed. Also, the sound design does a great job of emulating the outdoors when you're stuck inside. No music, just the pedals, sound of tires on the terrain, and nature.

 
I would definitely be playing journeys end and lonely mountains down hill. But alas I am a console peasant.

I finished final fantasy 9. It was okay. The only real thing that did not stand out to me was the music compared to the other titles that I played.

I find it funny how the 3x speed and no random battles make those games seemingly more enjoyable to me sometimes.

I could try 8 but I think that I’m done with final fantasy for a bit.

I see that tales of vesperia is on sale for switch. I’m considering getting it.

I played symphonia for the cube and most of abyss for the ps2.

Any thoughts on vesperia from anyone?
 
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Griffith

With the streak of a tear, Like morning dew
Been playing Lonely Mountains: Downhill, which is on Xbox's PC game pass lineup. It's been pretty fun! Kind of like Trials if it were more focused on exploration and shortcuts, not trick execution and speed. Also, the sound design does a great job of emulating the outdoors when you're stuck inside. No music, just the pedals, sound of tires on the terrain, and nature.

If you like recreation simulators, perhaps you'd like to try one with a twist: it's really a weird, supernatural AAA sci-fi game!


It's got great walking through nature ambiance too though if that's what you're really after.


Final Fantasy VII - I was extra annoyed to find that not only do you get to play as Red XIII immediately upon his rescue, it's actually mandatory! He starts with nice gear above yours and has Fire+All too. Now imagine if he was that cool and had a second Magnify Materia in Remake; an even more egregious missed opportunity than previously thought! Anyway, he's now permanently in my party along with Aerith since they got short shrift in the remake. I'm just past the trip across the sea after Junon and going through the mountains. I should start taking mental notes on how many chapters each part would theoretically translate into and how far they could potentially get following a similar pace in Part II, and that's not even counting all the new segments they could and likely would add. My best guesses thus far:

Chapter 1: World Introduction/some BS.
Chapter 2: Kalm/Cloud's Flashback - Good excuse for a Sephiroth fight, plus he's in your party to start! Sugoi! ^_^
Chapter 3: Chocobo Farm - Catching a Chocobo but you fight the big snake anyway because you need a chapter boss.
Chapter 4: Mythril Mines - explore CAVES vs The Turks! It's like 4 screens so expect 4 hours Remake time. Should be boring as Hell.
Chapter 5: Uhhh, that Fort Condor shit? If you even can at this point (I just skipped it, I'm not being a completionist here =).
Chapter 6: Junon Village - MINI GAMES! CPR, Dolphin Jumping! Hoo boy!
Chapter 7: Junon - Rufus' Coronation, really annoying marching, formation and shit. This whole game is a mini-game!
Chapter 8: Cargo Ship - Cross the sea, confront Sephiroth again, fight Jenova's arm.
Chapter 9: Costa Del Sol - They'll probably make this a whole dumb chapter where you gotta stop Hojo from getting laid so much.
Chapter 10: Corel Mountains - Goin' through some dumb mountains with "random" battles approximately every 3 steps.

And that's as far as I got. So already I'm past halfway through the last game in theoretical chapters (and I blazed through this shit in like a couple hours), but I'm seriously hoping they'll combine some of these segments; start the game with the flashback or move it, combine the chocobos and the mines, bypass Fort Condor, combine the Junon segments, basically pair up all these bits into single Chapters. Unfortunately, what I'm not even really accounting for, and what's more likely based on precedent in Remake, is they'd embellish those parts and add so much brand new shit that they would barely even get this far. I find that unbelievable though, they have to get somewhere of significance by the end, preferably the Forgotten Capital, but that'll require at least 20 Chapters and them sticking close to the source material (the return to Nibelheim would be the ideal compromise if they can't make it). So, no three hour segment of Cloud doing half a dozen sidequests to learn the ultimate marching routine in Junon, unless part 2 is twice as big, which it might need to be just to match the scale of the last one, and considering the rumor is 2023 (:magni:), it better be the whole rest of the game or at least enough to wrap it up in part 3 (actually possible if they, again, stick close to the original game's order). Otherwise all the fans will be dead by the time they finish and nobody will care.:shrug:
 
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Rhombaad

Video Game Time Traveler
I finished Tenchu: Stealth Assassins earlier this week. Wow. I can't believe I almost didn't play this game. It was awesome! I didn't really enjoy the supernatural turn it took halfway through, but I loved the gameplay. I can't wait to go back and play through it with Ayame once I'm all caught up with my list in about ten or twenty years, haha.

Next up is Spyro the Dragon!
 

Walter

Administrator
Staff member
It's got great walking through nature ambiance too though if that's what you're really after.

I am never playing Death Stranding :stop:

I finished Tenchu: Stealth Assassins earlier this week. Wow. I can't believe I almost didn't play this game. It was awesome!

Cool! All I remember about Tenchu was the "NEENJA!" line from enemies who spot you and the grappling hook being amazing for the time.

Aaz and I did a little shared-screen Into the Breach coaching session yesterday, and it was a good time. I learned a lot. And guys let me tell you, he's KIND OF a pro. :magni:
 

NightCrawler

Aeons gone, vast, mad and deathless
As a jaded old fart who doesn't play single player games anymore (I play some Rainbow Six Siege online from time to time, and that's it), is there anything mindblowing that I should look out for (If I had a console I'd play Bloodborne or Zelda, but that's it)?
 

Walter

Administrator
Staff member
As a jaded old fart who doesn't play single player games anymore (I play some Rainbow Six Siege online from time to time, and that's it), is there anything mindblowing that I should look out for (If I had a console I'd play Bloodborne or Zelda, but that's it)?

Partly because I've been playing it again, but even objectively speaking, I can highly recommend Into the Breach. You can get it on PC for relatively cheap, between $7-15. It's a mechs vs bugs turn-based tactics game that's incredibly well designed. There's not much of a story to speak of, but it's a "just one more turn" kind of game rather than one where the story keeps you coming back.

 
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