Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

[AndyKurosaki]

I certainly won’t be bothering with anymore Queens Blood. I lost to the tutorial 😄

[Nag]

I'm amazed that's even possible...😄

[AndyKurosaki]

Well, I am dyspraxic, so there’s that 😄

Honestly, by the 4th page of explanation, it had utterly lost me. So yeah, won’t be bothering with that haha

[Nag]

Fair enough...

 

I've just opened up Chocobo usage and stuff (and Chadley)... I've no idea if I'm supposed to be trying to do all these Grassland icons now or not, I've no idea how long we're going to be here. 😅

[one-armed dwarf]

If you do all that grasslands stuff you'll be there forever, and repeating the same in Junon. Other places as well I suppose

 

Its a good game but even tho I think its better than Remake, I feel I would probably prefer Remake on replays given how Ubisoft this one is. When it comes to pc I might use cheats or something

[AndyKurosaki]

Sounds a bit like the ‘side missions in Crisis Core” then. There’s literally bloody hundreds of those 😄

[Nag]

Almost 13 hours in... still in Chapter 2 mucking around in the Grasslands.🤣

[Nag]

OK, I wasn't too far off completing the Grasslands and meeting (and beating) the Midgardsormr... very, very messily. And I think that's going to be a pattern with this game... I'm brute forcing things, I have no finesse when it comes to the combat and being as there's even more going on than Remake I think things are going to get very messy indeed.

 

Anyway, on to Chapter 3.

[one-armed dwarf]

My status update is

 

 

[mfnick]

Finally made a start, having Friday off to play this didnt go to plan. 
 

Anyway only put a couple of hours in, started chapter 2. Loving being back in this world with these characters. I’m mega confused as to what’s going on so far! Im

very rusty with this combat system too. Almost died a couple of times. Feels a lot more chaotic than I remember but hoping that’s just because I’m out of practice.

 

Got to say performance wise I’m really disappointed though. In quality mode it’s a fucking slideshow! Even the menus feel shit. But in performance the resolution hit is insane. Everything looks blurry unless it’s right in front of your face. I’m sure Remake looked better? 
 

Done 3 matches of that Queens Blood everyone’s wanking over. Seems ok I guess. Hope there’s not a huge reward for it. Doubt I’m going to be as obsessed with it as most people from my short time with it. 
 

But yea, back to the positive, I’m just incredible happy to be back playing this series. 

[Nag]

2 hours ago, mfnick said:

In quality mode it’s a fucking slideshow

 

That most be an oled thing then because it's definitely not feeling like that how I'm playing the game.

[one-armed dwarf]

Speaking as someone who found the Remake to be disappointing, like a 7/10, this might be one of the best Final Fantasies ever made, goddamn. I have nitpicks, some of them are actually really major problems (both graphics and performance mode present huge obstacles to playability, sadly), but it's the best feeling of adventure one of these games has given since possibly the actual Final Fantasy VII. Maybe X is close, but that's such a linear game

[mfnick]

Theres a lot of generic open world guff in this isn’t there…

In better news they’ve said they’re working on a patch so performance mode doesnt look so shit. 

[Metroid66]

Yeah, it's madly soft in performance. I've only played a bit of the demo but it's shocking next to the game I'm actually playing at the moment (Ghost of Tsushima, directors cut).

 

Still, my next game is remake, so hopefully that patch will be well in place by the time I get around to it.

 

I'd actually wait for the patch if I were playing it now. It's like a switch game.*

 

 

*Slight hyperbole 

[mfnick]

14 minutes ago, Metroid66 said:

patch if I were playing it now. It's like a switch game.*

The character models genuinely do look Switch quality. 
 

I even tried forcing myself to play Quakity mode last night (characters still don’t look great even in that). I kind of got used to it after about an hour but ended up with a banging head ache so had to stop. 

[one-armed dwarf]

It does have a lot of open world guff, and I wasn't thrilled to see towers of all things being in this game. Or the ridiculously stupid thing they have you do to power up summons, and that moogle chasing game. Fuck sake

 

And yet, there's a magic spell to this one where it all works and is much easier to forgive. Like I have numerous problems with the game, it's the most I've struggled with a game's visuals in a bit. Not just in terms of like 'ew, thats a bit shit looking', but that if you play on Graphics mode in Junon you will get pecked to death by birds that move too fast for 30hz, and if you play on performance you can get a headache cause the visuals are hidden beneath a sort of pixely mist (both of these might be stern arguments for playing on a 1080p LED monitor, which would mitigate both the stutter and the sicky feeling misty look). This isn't just a graphics snob kinda thing, modern games need more pixels to push their visuals or it can feel really weird

 

But that's the negative stuff, the things this game does otherwise puts it in my top 3 Final Fantasies, so far (VII, XII, this maybe?). There is so much variety in locales, activities, party composition and materia loadouts. The 'green' side quests are designed to build relationships with characters, and have much more interesting gimmicks and mini-storylines. Not on a Witcher 3 level or anything, but they complement the events of the game's story pretty well. The open world design isn't amazing, but Junon has a satisfying verticality to exploring it. All its different progression systems interface in a satisfying way, so even if you are 'hoovering up' world map icons, the progression feels meaningful unlike in a Ubisoft game. Because the game plays extremely well, the synergy skills adding such an interesting tactical flavour to how you build up momentum in a fight and because there's so much to learn there, it isn't nearly as tedious to mop up icons compared to a Ubisoft game where they are almost all pretty brainless experiences (mash square/R1, get your loot, skinner box shite)

 

There's also the way the map seamlessly integrates towns and cities without a loading screen. Critically I think what this game does so well is the thing that Tim Rogers called 'hangoutitude' in his VII Review, it just feels like a lively world that you want to chill out in. The cities and towns are so well crafted. Lower Junon is exactly as I'd imagined it would be, Upper Junon made me emotional. Although this is the type of thing where it's hard to say how much you get from it if you don't care about the original game. But unlike FFVII Remake (which I still think is close to being just a bad video game) this game absolutely captures the 'thing' that made the original FFVII so incredible, it's sense of scope and scale. It might not seem like a big game now but that was a game that felt like it was doing lots of surprising things all the time, and Remake couldn't do any of that cause it was shackled to a boring setting and it was a load of corridors. Queen's Blood is such a great activity to pace all the exploring and fighting also, that's the thing here too, even though the game isn't as well paced narratively speaking as the original FFVII it has enough diversity in things to do in the game that feel meaningful and interesting that it captures the rich texture that the classic 16bit and 32bit (specifically the latter) had to offer, something which the series has never really nailed since FFIX, a game which came out 24 years ago.

 

There's still a good chance the ending or something will fuck the whole thing up, but I'll take that over a boring game with a cool ending.

 

Anyway I wanted to give that perspective a bit to explain why I don't think the open world guff is as big a problem in a game like this, the Ubisoft formula itself isn't the issue really, when the underlying framework of systems are so strong to begin with

[mfnick]

I’ve enjoyed the couple of green missions so far, mainly because of the party interactions. But the rest of it can get in the bin. Oh & that Moogle thing! Fuck that. What a terrible addition. Least picking up crafting shit is pain free. 

I haven’t gotten my head around the Synergy system at all yet. Combat is too fast and flashy I don’t see how I can plan for that stuff yet but I’m sure it’ll come with time. 
 

Just one last thing about the image too - anyone else suffering with auto brightness? It’s like the one your Tv will have, where it automatically adjusts the back light for darker scenes. I seem to be getting that really bad in this game but I know it’s not my TV - I’ve got it turned off and it doesn’t do it in any other game. Anyone else got this? Is there a fix? It’s really annoying.

*Edit - Turns out it is the Tv from more googling. Still has a brightness adjust even with the setting turned off. Just this game fucks the OLED brightness up more than other games do so it’s adjusting itself a lot more whereas it doesn’t happen in other games. Have to turn the OLED brightness down to fix it. Man why’s this game so fucked? All the performance and open world shit is really getting me down TBH. I was so excited for this. 😢

 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

If you can push through that Grasslands area Nick you'll probably see that the game has a lot going on. I've a lot of stuff to still to back there, going to go back at some point and try to understand Yuffie's combat in low stakes areas (and I guess Cait Sith later, whenever that guy joins)

 

imo I don't recommend doing the open world stuff when you're bored by it, when you start to feel that way it's the best time to progress the main story. Cool thing with dynamic mode is apparently all that stuff will scale right up with you anyway so will be still a challenge when you get back (apparently)

[mfnick]

Is that true of the story missions? I’ve seen a lot of markers with recommended levels above my characters so felt I had to do the bullshit just for the experience? If they’re set at my current level then that sounds like the way to go. I’ll just mainline with some green side missions. 

[one-armed dwarf]

No, I mean if you leave low level quests for later and you're playing on 'dynamic mode', they will scale up to your level, not scale down. Just means they could be still interesting to play through later and you don't overlevel stuff.

 

The protorelic stuff is also interesting, tbh most of the OW stuff isn't that bad really. There's just a lot of it, but I try and just do about 70 percent (sometimes less, Corel maybe was more like 40) and move on. Cause I know I can just do some of it later as mentioned. I've also only done one summon fight, the phoenix (cause I learned it in the demo), I don't use summons at all so no interest in that