Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

[Nag]

It's making me sad that I'm nowhere near being able to click these...

[mfnick]

Just a PSA too. Not a spoiler but if you die during the final boss encounters select the top option!!! I picked the 2nd and it sent me back 30 minutes! I almost cried.

 

Im definitely not the only one. 
 

 

[OCH]

3 hours ago, Nag said:

It's making me sad that I'm nowhere near being able to click these...

Same

[Metroid66]

10 hours ago, mfnick said:

. Every time something exciting or important was happening the pacing would grind to a standstill to explore a shitty, bland open world wasteland with the same handful of open world filler missions in each area

 

They're probably the bits I'll like.

[Nag]

I went back to this for a few hours yesterday... finished off the Gongaga region (thank fuck) moved on to Cosmo Canyon and realised that place isn't going to be much more fun to explore either...😢

 

Also, after spending almost two weeks solid with Dragon's Dogma 2, it's made this look really ropey... so thanks ruining my game DD2!

[mfnick]

You think DD2 looks better than this? I have my problems with graphically and performance wise with this but I think it looks better than DD2. 
 

But yea Comso Canyon is a twat to get around too. Slightly easier than Gongaga but still shit. The next ones is a lot more straight forward and easier at least. 

[one-armed dwarf]

DD2 looks great, it has ray traced global illumination and shadows really enhance the scenes in the towns, as does how everything is shaded. It's very cohesive looking.

 

In FFVII, stuff just sort of 'glows' all hideously and objects just stick out awkwardly and is unreactive to light sources, and the textures are dogshit. It's a shit looking game imo, one of its big flaws, worse looking than remake even

[mfnick]

3 minutes ago, one-armed dwarf said:

In FFVII, stuff just sort of 'glows' all hideously and objects just stick out awkwardly and is unreactive to light sources, and the textures are dogshit. It's a shit looking game imo, one of its big flaws, worse looking than remake even

I can’t disagree with any of this but I still think it looks better. Maybe it’s just because I prefer the visual variety and special effects. As I’ve said before I’m just not a fan of the DD2 setting. 

[Nag]

Nope... DD2 actually looks 4k....

[Nag]

These openworld areas are really damaging how I feel about this game now... Cosmo Canyon is just as fucking horrible as the previous area. It's getting to the point where i just cant be bothered carrying on.

 

If it wasn't for helpful people putting up videos on YouTube on how to navigate these shitty areas I would've given up entirely by now.

[one-armed dwarf]

I didn't do most of the open world stuff until after beating the game. Did maybe 30-40 percent of it first.

 

Cosmo Canyon you can just sort of speed through and come back later to that stuff. The postgame has a chapter select and it saves all your progress

[Snaggletooth]

I have wanted to stay away from this thread while playing to avoid opinions and views clouding my own. 

 

I am currently 90 (80 in reality)left in the pause menu when I went out. 

 

Anyway just finished what would be the regular story line for cave of the ghi. 

 

And its largely a mixed bag for me, I love the open world it feels alive. And started off wanting to explore every corner. Until I hit gongaga. 

 

Think some of it may have been burn out as started off by completing every area of the map. 

 

I Like the astetics of gongaga but its horrible to navigate, and im now at stage of feeling I just want to complete the Story. 

 

I think a lot of side content and games would have been fine. But they didnt need them all on top of the map markers / quests. 

 

Tying some into quests makes sense until they become a chore due to some having higher difficulty spikes which I was fine with to start but now if its not reasonably completed im ignoring it (bar queens blood, love that). 

 

Im all for content but they really didnt get balance right with this

 

Anyway will continue with the story tonight, hopefully it will start to flow a bit faster now with my focus on that. 

 

 

[OCH]

I think I was just about to enter Corel??🤔

[OCH]

On 11/04/2024 at 17:01, OCH said:

I think I was just about to enter Corel??🤔

Yes. After some prompting (over another game) I have got back into this. I thought that the last checkpoint I left the game on, I was about to enter the town of Corel.

Nope. Cue some more caves and mines. A Donkey Kong-like carting section and a grappling hook section that has cemented my opinion that Yuffie is utterly awful in this. She didn't have much characterisation (other than Materia Thief) before Wutai, in the original. But literally every line of dialogue and over the top reaction, has irritated me in a way few JRPG characters have over the years. Trying to do as much as I can before going to the Gold Saucer today. I think that might be a good place to come back to. If I decide to play something else.

[Nag]

Hit Chapter 12 today (yes it's taken me this long) and got hit with a load of new side missions opening up in previously visited regions... first reaction was a massive sigh and 🙄 but in some regards it's not so bad as it feels like ive been playing this for so long now that I've forgotten what the earlier areas were like.

 

And at least fast travel has fully opened up now too which helps things.

[one-armed dwarf]

Why not just not do the side stuff? I dont get it, don't do it if you don't want to.

[Nag]

I like trophies... that's the easy answer.

 

But this game has so much bollocks crammed in to it... I'm not entirely sure how it scored so highly,  cut and paste content is usually frowned upon.

[one-armed dwarf]

I don't disagree that there's a lot of copy and paste in this

 

That said, I think the game is massively underrated wrt the mechanical progression of some of the stuff in it, especially outside its (imo brilliant) battle systems. Like the strategies for Fort Condor and the gambit minigame and also the card game challenges. imo, it's really interesting to play a game like this which has so much to learn and so much tertiary scope to what you can learn. I found a lot of that stuff super rewarding, and even the more gimmicky stuff like chocobo races were a neat diversion. It's just got a richness to it that FF hasn't had since FFIX, or even VIII and VII itself maybe.

 

At the same time, yeah, there's some very trivial stuff the game paints on the map and Chadley says 'why you not doing your homework, Cloud?'. All those towers and things. Picking up the signs, pressing triangle three times on a lifecrystal. Things that aren't that interesting. There's no real discovery or challenge there either, sadly, it's just handed to you

 

But I feel the good overshadows the boring bits, and I don't really understand this whole need to platinum games if it means ruining the game for yourself, you know? I've not done it as there's a series of progressively difficult combat challenges in the post game which require a massive degree of build theory crafting and you have to do 10 back to back, 17 times or something like that. Like a bunch of bloody palace type missions. Like I might do it at some point, or I won't. I just played the game until I had enough, which was 170 hours (which seems a bit on the slow side, reading online). There were bits that dragged but I enjoyed like 90 percent of it (5 percent of the bit I did not enjoy was its ending, the other 5 percent was bullshit like wrangling chocobos and chucking boxes). But I mostly just did the things I wanted to do and it worked out really well.

 

I also thought most of the sidequests in this were pretty good, compared with Remake's terrible sidequests. There's one or two I didn't like but most were fine and delivered neat character moments, and some of them had cool dog music. There was one with a chicken which sucked but then had a hilarious ending. I dunno, I give that one a pass lol.

 

But the platinum in this is like one of those DMC5 style platinums, you got to get mad good at everything in it. Or find some cheesy way of doing things. But imo that sounds tedious.  Anyway you do you, but that is definitely one of those things I don't really get tbh, trying to get trophies if it makes the game less fun. Think this game up in the Plague Requiem thread as well

[OCH]

12 minutes ago, one-armed dwarf said:

All those towers and things. Picking up the signs, pressing triangle three times on a lifecrystal. Things that aren't that interesting. There's no real discovery or challenge there either, sadly, it's just handed to you

I really got the vibe the towers were lifted straight from Tears of the Kingdom. Someone at Square saw it, thought it looked cool and sought to recreate it without the context?

 

The cushions at the rest stops? What even is that?? Why not just a save point? I also really dislike everything about Chadley.

 

This reminds me I can return to this now I've finished FF6!

[one-armed dwarf]

Yeah it feels like an awkward application of ideas cribbed from other games. I saw some of its stuff compared with Ghost of Tsushima*, which apparently does a thing to 'guide' you to its attractions like the way Rebirth tries to with chocobo benches and life stream thingies. The towers in TOTK have an environmental puzzle to solve to unlock them, and kinda emphasise the exploration loop in the game. Whereas in Rebirth they're just sort of there, there might be a grapple point. It's unimaginative. 

 

Like, that stuff is bad. No way around that. At the same time, it's inoffensively bad, something I would do after one of the main story quests where they throw 3 boss fights at you back to back, to chill out and turn the brain off. I would save up and do the empty calorie stuff after the main story sugar rush (this food analogy makes no sense). The game is so good in other areas that it recedes into the background for me. It annoyed me more in the Grasslands where there isn't as much on the plate so to speak

 

I think it's an excellent game with the most engaging learning curve I've had in a FF, or at least equal with FFXII. But it has a very dated Ubisoft 2010-era structure. But that structure kinda ends up being a means to an end after a point.