Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

[DANGERMAN]

I played through the demo of Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, and given its the start of the game, seemed more sensible to start the thread than have separate ones. 

 

If you aren't already in on the game I'm not sure it's the demo to explain the systems as it isn't the full party you'd be expecting. You mostly just play as Cloud on his own, just attacking then healing every few fights, it's not demanding a lot from you nor is it giving you a full taste of the game. It starts a little slow too, lots of cutscene then a stroll through a village, it's a little dull, but then it does give you a long run of battles. 

 

It's a decent chunk of story too, you're playing through a flashback, with Cloud narrating parts, it's well done tbf 

 

There's another female character with "female character" as her personality. She's not in it for long but it's not great writing, which is mad because it's a relationship the vast, vast majority of people have in their lives, so just write from experience. Also, without getting too in to it, run it on performance, it feels a lot better 

[AndyKurosaki]

I absolutely loved the original FF7. The remake breathed new life into it, and was so much fun. I liked how they were doing something slightly different with the story, to keep us all on our toes.

 

This is definitely going to be a strong GOTY contender…

[HandsomeDead]

1 hour ago, DANGERMAN said:

There's another female character with "female character" as her personality. She's not in it for long but it's not great writing, which is mad because it's a relationship the vast, vast majority of people have in their lives, so just write from experience. Also, without getting too in to it, run it on performance, it feels a lot better 

 

Oof, falling into the trap of assuming something intentional is bad writing.

[Nag]

Isn't it supposed to look really shit in performance mode?

[AndyKurosaki]

Here’s the thing. I’ve seen people saying it doesn’t look great, there’s frame rate issues, blah blah blah. 
I played the demo, i think it looks fantastic. And therefore don’t give a monkeys toss what the critics are saying.

[DANGERMAN]

5 hours ago, HandsomeDead said:

 

Oof, falling into the trap of assuming something intentional is bad writing.

Ah, got you 

 

Spoiler

I assumed he'd been placed with a family, not that the whole memory wasn't real (because Tifa remembers her) 

I should probably stop guessing given I didn't play this far in to the original 

[DANGERMAN]

4 hours ago, Nag said:

Isn't it supposed to look really shit in performance mode?

Looks fine to me. The monsters look a bit basic, but aside from that it looked fine. It might get worse in busier areas, and I should add that I wasn't sat in the best Digital Foundry position. Alternatively I felt like I could count the frames, which isn't to say that it's necessarily low, it could be something else causing the character to look jerky 

 

(sorry Radiofloyd) 

[Nag]

I'd read somewhere it was supposed to be pretty blurry in performance mode... I guess it was some Eurogamer headline. 

 

I'll be in resolution mode regardless so hopefully it isn't an issue.

[one-armed dwarf]

They load lower resolution assets and LOD in performance mode as well. I've not played the full demo yet but based on screenshots some of it looks kinda shocking tbh, especially compared to other stuff out there (even going back to PS4 games tbh)

[HandsomeDead]

@DANGERMAN 

Spoiler

Oh, I thought you were talking about Tifa.  Cloud's memories of his mother are real.  I guess it does gloss over the relationship with his mother by just saying she was nice and cared about him in a fairly impersonal way.  I think another thing you're meant to take away from that interaction is when she says you should find a girl older than you the manual readers will know it is an endorsement of Aerith since she's a year older, and Tifa a year younger.  It's why he has a dream of that moment earlier in the game when he does.

[one-armed dwarf]

Spoiler

Manual readers will acknowledge Claerith supremacy

 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

They patched this demo with an image quality upgrade, and a section around Junon. I finished up a remake replay last night so timing work out like that, so I played the first part of the demo. I don't think the image quality upgrade is up to much, it looks pretty bad, but maybe it looked worse before. I can't say. I played on quality

 

It's kind of an annoying demo, it can be quite boring and when it does get interesting it ends quite suddenly. I don't actually recommend playing it as it feels quite disruptive to the narrative flow, starting you off with what looks like it skips some things at the beginning and cutting away from the Sephiroth flashback before it's most consequential scene.

 

Gameplay wise it feels funky, like they cut off a lot of animation and recovery frames off everything. Cloud moves around really weird, all herky jerky. I'd say he moves around like a PS2 character but with PS4/PS5 visual fidelity, which causes that disconnect. In combat Cloud and Sephiroth kinda fling themselves around the place, instantly teleporting into aerial combos and there's a big emphasis on a new parry mechanic. Right now, I'm not sure how I feel about all that. It sort of feels like a reaction to issues people had understanding the original game's combat. I really liked the slower, more 'Dark Souls' kinda pace of the first one where you had to pick your spots and consider when it was safe, and build up resources with ATB. A lot of that is still here but it's kinda piling on a lot of new mechanics which drift much more towards the action part of the spectrum, so I'm not sure if the balance is as excellently and interestingly maintained. But that's based off a demo with a handful of fights, also I'm someone who generally doesn't enjoy parry systems in games as they can make combat feel a bit too linear and repetitive but it might not be as important later as it seems here.

 

There's a potentially interesting and cool mechanic in the game called 'synergy' though, where you develop 'synergy' by using atb skills, and then spend the synergy on moves with their own unique properties. Like a big attack, or there was one in the Junon demo where Red or Cloud will come in to block an attack and Aerith will dodge and do Aerith things (also she can teleport now, her defensive options seem improved). After using these skills you get certain buffs, eg Sephiroth got infinite mana after one. Things like that speak to a very potentially interesting system but it seems like there's a lot to figure out with it

 

Somehow the game seems like it looks worse than Remake, but a lot of that is due to the environments I think. They just struggle a bit with things that aren't industrial reactors and stuff. It's not immediately clear what's keeping this off PS4, but then again the performance and quality modes might speak to that

 

If I wasn't already a big fan of FFVII I wouldn't be in a rush to play this, but it's a different type of demo to the one the first game got where it starts off with a hype section. This starts off with a section that was already kinda boring in the original anyway, until its ending (which is cut out of this so they can ask you for your credit card information)

 

There is one move that Seph has which made me lol. Called 'Hell Dive' or something like that, but uh it's very 'iconic' looking lol

[AndyKurosaki]

See, I really enjoyed both parts of this demo, I have no issue whatsoever with the way it looks, and don’t find the Nibelheim section boring at all.

 

Im most definitely looking forward to the full game.

[one-armed dwarf]

Yo this game is fucking hard as shit. Remake was easy, this bird cunt in Chadleys VR bullshit in the Junon demo (2nd demo) had me up until 2am last night 😧

 

Now I'm completely fucked for the day, cause of that shithead 😢

 

There's so much more going on in this game's battle system and I'm not sure I'm all in love with it yet, but it does seem like a very interesting and layered set of mechanics. You've got synergy skills and synergy abilities, can't remember which is which but one is a 'filler' move similar to mashing square for ATB gain but bound to r1. It has allies come in and block attacks for you, charge up your sword with magic, chuck tifa in the air to do air combos, bounce barret's bullets off cloud's sword and spam ranged moves, get red/barret to charge down enemies with armour. It's all very situational and requires a bit of a mental stack. There's a huge amount of party interaction, a lot of it being based around the idea of one character interrupting what they're doing so that they can help cover weaknesses in another character's offense/defense options

 

Then the other synergy moves (abilities, I think) are the big flashy moves which buff you afterwards and have cool cutscenes, the Chrono Trigger dual techs. They slowed down atb gain massively as well, so they really want you to know exactly when to use the different types of moves and how to keep uptime. Red XIII in particular is mechanically quite interesting to learn, he's got a sort of royal guard thing going on, block attacks and counter and enter a rage stance. But he needs allies to make him move fast, and his guard move is very very slow, but his counter move covers huge distance so that's how he can be aggressive

 

It's very interesting but I think it might end up being offputting with the much larger amount of situational awareness, you have to keep your camera on a swivel, especially while fighting that fire bird fucker or he sucker punches you with nonsense

[AndyKurosaki]

Yeah I like the Synergy moves, it’ll be fun getting to grips with those. I did find the Junon boss to be quite a pain in the arse. Cloud’s sword attacks won’t reach it, so i was swapping from him casting magic, to Red 13 doing the same, to Aeris helping. Then dropping everything when one of my team got imprisoned in a water bubble. It felt like there was a lot going on, even on Easy.

[one-armed dwarf]

Scrambly W, but the VR bird is dead

 

 

Literally harder than anything in remake, at least I sort of understand the new systems now 😩

 

This game's combat is kinda insane, lots of stuff I'm ignoring too (perfect blocks). People complained that Remake was stiff and you couldn't cancel attacks (on PS4 anyway), so now it seems like they've developed a much more twitchy battle system to balance for allowing that. But it's much harder and there's a lot of overlapping resources now

[one-armed dwarf]

I took today, Friday and Monday off to no-life this, game seems pretty good? Better than remake anyway

 

It's Ubisoft as fuck though, you've kinda got to know your own tolerance level for the open world stuff and know when you want to leave it behind to progress the story. At the same time, that stuff has good rewards and fun interactions attached to it, ignore too much and you miss out

 

I'm on chapter 3, even with playing the demo a lot there's still a ton to learn here. Kalm is the most impressed I've been by a Final Fantasy town since like, Alexandria in FFIX or something like that. Real old school style.

[Maf]

DF tech review of the full game

 

 

The guy seems to have reached the conclusion that 30fps graphics mode is the way to go

 

They worked too hard on Tifa’s, err, design to ruin it with 1080p.

[Nag]

That's how I'm playing and tbf it feels pretty fluid in combat...

[one-armed dwarf]

Yeah, I played the demo in 60 but that was because I found the mechanics overwhelming. In the full game I find 30 fine, but the visual difference between modes is so great that I think performance mode just fucks the art and visuals up. Its very hazy

 

Game is built for 30 id say.  Perf mode doesn't look like 1080p at all

 

edit while on DF stuff, I'd agree with the vid that lighting is a disappointment. Kalm looks amazing, artistically, but the dated PS4 era lighting shows it up a bit. The excellent art isn't kept quite cohesive by its lighting. This sort of tracks with VII Remake as well which was a very inconsistent looking game, but XVI had excellent lighting