Final Fantasy VII Remake (NO ROCHE SLANDER)

[mfnick]

8 minutes ago, Maf said:

Like I can’t tell when Cloud is in Operator or Punisher mode by just looking at him.

I’m sorry but you can absolutely tell which stance he’s in. He goes a lot slower in the punisher stance too. 
 

Also Roche is the fucking BEST!!!

[Maf]

9 minutes ago, mfnick said:

I’m sorry but you can absolutely tell which stance he’s in. He goes a lot slower in the punisher stance too. 
 

Also Roche is the fucking BEST!!!

You can tell when trying to move him. Basically I want Cloud in Punisher stance 24/7. Except to block projectile attacks, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t 

 

But when rolling he cancels out of it. And there are times when I roll to dodge an attack, press the punisher button, start mashing, but he’s attacks look so similar I’m not even sure if I’m in the right mode. 
 

I know there’s a little name at the bottom of the screen that says the mode he is in. But having to read and understand while doing all this other shit. It’s hard

 

It’d be nicer if I can just look and be like oh, that’s a Punisher attack or stance or something 

 

Anyway. Job done, food eaten and sleeping pill in heavy effect. Let’s stream this 2nd mako reactor and see how fucked up I get (hopefully this tablet keeps me cool, it’s fucking heavy)

 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

Despite being all defense force on this game I cannot stand these sections of it, I wouldn't need a sleeping pill with these giant ass, neverending PS2-era boring dungeons

 

Also if your streaming you should really add a microphone

[Maf]

What do I do 

[one-armed dwarf]

I commented on the stream, but the main thing is you dodge roll too much imo

 

Dodge is mainly for stuff with an exclamation mark like

 

 

Danger means gotta roll (they explain that in the first mission)

[Maf]

How fucking difficult and I still barely survived 

[one-armed dwarf]

Finally at the good part

[Maf]

The one thing that I really like about this game is immediate restart. All games need this. Whether fight, platforming section, mini game, whatever. Every game needs an instant retry at whatever the section is

 

However, the amount of making the player walk’n’talk and wrestling camera control away is so annoying here. It’s far from the only game to do that but I’ve run out of patience for it.
 

There’s also just unnecessary bad game here. Like a lot of running around flipping switches or trying to monkey bars across the church roof. It’s not terrible but it makes the game feel really empty because of all the extra little bit of things to do just to accomplish a simple task

 

The Airbuster fighter took a million attempts. It actually wasn’t annoying, it was kind of fun, but the AI party members really show their stupidity in that fight. My final attempt actually went well right up until the end wheee Cloud and Barret ran straight up the pathway to be hit by the big laser attack and lost almost all their health. Like they couldn’t even block? C’mon. I just lived with it. I can’t do any better than that 

 

The blue Elemental Materia that lets your regular attacks do the same magic damage it’s linked with seems really strong 

[one-armed dwarf]

The airbuster fight is the peak of the remake series so far I think tbh, between the music, mechanics and staging of it it feels like all the things they were trying to do with these games dovetail and are in perfect harmony with each other. 

 

The AI is generally passive there, you're supposed to take over and make decisions cause the things you want to do are so contextual anyway in a way that's not super automation friendly. Cloud on point, tifa for putting on pressure, Barret gets a really cool moment. It also just builds up the idea that the characters themselves are getting locked in and have developed a synergy.

 

Then the rest of the game is super boring. I think Remake is a bad game with extraordinary highs. Rebirth then is a great game with not so high highs, sort of a big plateau tbh that dips significantly towards the end, but still overall better as an experience.

 

Tankbuster is unblockable in the final phase, it has an exclamation mark. That's one mechanic where I'm not exactly sure what they want you to do. I guess it's called 'tankbuster', which in MMO parlance is a heavy hitting move that you mitigate the damage of and so maybe that's just the idea there as well. You can deal a shit ton of damage to stop it but it's an unreasonable amount I think, or you can limit break through it. But you can't block the damage (I guess they give you barrier materia which helps)

[Maf]

I genuinely can’t stand this game. It’s not even a boss fight and I just can not work out what to do

 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

The thing that's confusing about that footage is the amount of times you retry a fight that it looked like you were going to win.

 

In general there's nothing that's really a massive skill issue other than you never block with Cloud, you're always swinging and in punisher stance. The whole game will feel less scrappy and janky if you spend more time in whatever the default stance is called, blocking more often and reading the enemy tooltips and respecting their attacks. The game's combat is not built around constant offense, punisher stance is not good against groups of enemies either. It's built around an exchange of attacks between the party and enemies, damage cannot always be avoided, most of the time. Just mitigated via blocking.

 

imo, go into camera settings and pull it back to 3 and set camera shake off. Makes shit way easier to see

 

Aerith's a real problem in this game though due to the way aggro works, you can't really run point with her that often. She's way better in Rebirth, maybe the MVP if you're good at it, but not in remake (tho still powerful in her niche)

[Metroid66]

I think we're being trolled.

 

 

[Maf]

There’s winning and then there’s winning and I certainly didn’t feel like I was winning

 

I feel like this is a big problem with this game even when I’m doing it right it doesn’t feel like it 

 

There’s something deeply unrewarding about the fighting in this game

 

Some of it is down to I guess “passive damage”. Like I can get through a fight without any serious hits taken but things like gunfire will have taken a 100hp of me or something and I’m like fuck off. 
 

I can pass through a few battles of easy monsters and by the end Cloud needs healing and it’s like I didn’t even feel like I got hit 

 

I dunno. There’s something about the fighting which is not right. I don’t even mean mechanically, I mean in a way that is just “other”

[one-armed dwarf]

You are supposed to take that passive damage, if you're trying to avoid it and do perfect, zero damage gameplay it's no wonder you can't grok what the game is asking for here*.

 

It's a turn based RPG with an action game abstraction built around it, it's not Devil May Cry. If that's what you're looking for then you really should play DMC5 where this type of aggression will take you far with Nero. But if you keep pressing square and don't notice the enemy's attacks starting up, you will just get punked out of everything cause the game doesn't have mechanics to facilitate ignoring them like that.

 

The R1 button is the most important button in this, and not in punisher stance, as well as respecting enemy mechanics. Like at 2:51 the monster charges up a thing called 'Haywire Haze', it has that tooltip on screen for ages and you stinger into it with Cloud and ragequit. The proof is in the pudding here, you aren't engaging the game with the way it's asking to be played and instead trying to force the square peg of FFVIIR's turn-based action combat into the round hole of PS2 God of War or DMC.

 

Not every game is for everyone, it's fine to drop it. Play DMC5, pretty popular game right now and you can play super ignorant (not an insult, it's why I like that game)

 

*You can do this in Rebirth, but you need to be mad good, like 500 hours in the game good.

[Maf]

I saw what it was doing, I was just hoping I was faster. 

 

 

[Maf]

WHAT IS GOING ON DUDE WHY ARE THESE 3 FROGS THE HARDEST THING I’VE EVER TRIED TO FIGHT 

 

 

[Maf]

The fucking fights in this game are so bullshit. How is this sunglasses guy blocking and attacking at the same time and just using whatever special moves he has at random

 

Clearly enemies aren’t playing by the same ATB rules as the player otherwise there would be some predictability here

[one-armed dwarf]

That's literally Clouds punisher stance tho

 

The baseball bats ATB move is probably the best in the game imo, Disorder. Very atb efficient

[Maf]

Fuck that fucking house that took so long. I thought it was weak to ice so I kept hitting it with that over and over again. It took me like 2 hours to figure out you need all 4 elements to attack it's changing weakness 

 

Once I got it that fights pretty easy but damn did I just not see. I'm guessing this isn't the same for all bosses. But the house has an opening when it's readying it's special attacks and can be hit and stopped. I will try keep an eye out for that on other bosses going forward. 

 

Also cheap ass shit immediately targeting Aerith when she has a full 2 ATB. It's basically button reading grap grap grap 

[one-armed dwarf]

It's more straightforward that that, the aggro system moves to the character under direct control. With some exceptions maybe, Rebirth is like that too

 

I wish they just had a MMO style aggro table, so there was some strategy to exploiting it