|
Pyroxene Stigma posted:This isn't how Square used to operate. There were flaws, just like your post, but games by Square used to have a theme and story to lead you to discover more. Their newer projects are complete garbage, again like your post, but it didn't typically end up this way. Actually, it is your post that is garbage, and his post that is correct. Namaste.
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 14:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 07:51 |
|
|
forbidden lesbian posted:Actually, it is your post that is garbage, and his post that is correct. Namaste. A good attempt, but sadly no.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 14:57
|
|
|
Thinking about it a lot of ff13 was a huge cluster gently caress of imagination. But, the lass in the office suit with the tie between her boobs was pretty cool. Good work Nomura!
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 15:52
|
|
|
I'm thinking about doing a NSG playthrough after my current run. In my current run, I suddenly found myself really overpowering the enemies around the time I reached the Thunder Plains. The boss fights at Macalania just about put me to sleep. I haven't been intentionally grinding, though I do swap every in for their AP and try to overkill enemies as much as possible.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 16:25
|
|
|
ImpAtom posted:FFVII was the debut of the overly-long animations. Bahamut (you get relatively early and has two longer-and-more-ornate-upgrades) has a 30 second animation for each casting. To be fair, back in '97 those summon animations were so goddamn awesome you could enjoy them every time. When most spell effects in games were simple sprite animations, a huge 3D dragon floating in the sky and charging a massive beam that obliterated your enemies was  as hell.I think Eden in VIII is the first memory I have of being annoyed at a summon animation being too long.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 16:29
|
|
|
Sunning posted:According to interviews, the original world design of FFXIII was much more ambitious. Cocoon was heavily based off America in that would feature people of different eternities and have a number of wildly different urban and suburban landscapes. It would have people going about their lives in cities and smaller rural areas. Even so, most of the cutscenes in FFXIII were pre-rendered. Not CGI, since that's horribly expensive and is only used for a small number of scenes, but basically in-engine cutscenes stored as video files. They used 4xMSAA and higher quality character models, but the downside of this was that the 360 version had to use a ton of compression even to fit the game across three discs, while they're very high quality on the PS3 version. The performance in XIII must have been very fine-tuned in gameplay, because the sequels perform horribly, with only the battles managing to stay at 30 fps most of the time. Even though the first game had Gran Pulse, which had three player characters on-screen and dozens of monsters running about, XIII-2 stutters with only two characters (and a moogle), as well as only one enemy appearing on the field at a time (except for the city). Lightning Returns only has one on-screen character, and it still struggles.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 16:39
|
|
|
Kanfy posted:To be fair, back in '97 those summon animations were so goddamn awesome you could enjoy them every time. When most spell effects in games were simple sprite animations, a huge 3D dragon floating in the sky and charging a massive beam that obliterated your enemies was Eden is so long-winded that it actually becomes hilarious. It's the attack that never ends. By the time you get Eden you're already at the end of the game anyway, when GFs are rendered useless since all bosses have GF-dispelling abilities, so I think I only ever summoned Eden like...twice? Eden is the only GF that you can Boost to 250 without really much effort or button mashing. And...wasn't it like a giant flying saucer death goddess? They should bring Eden back in FF14. EDIT: Seriously what the gently caress is happening here it's like Eden turns the field into the Tron Grid and then the planet is a doomsday clock and then there's a laser beam and...damage? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meqiM6fm-2I Hell remember Pandemonium? Remember this? What the gently caress is this why does this exist? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI8MZ9QbSrk BottledBodhisvata fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Jun 7, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 16:40
|
|
|
BottledBodhisvata posted:Eden is so long-winded that it actually becomes hilarious. It's the attack that never ends. To this day I'm still not certain what exactly Eden is or what it's doing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 16:41
|
|
|
Yo Eden is an awesome summon, don't hate.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 16:54
|
|
|
Anybody who gets tired of watching The Doom Train get summoned is missing out on one of the unmitigated joys of VIII.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 16:57
|
|
|
Why are sewer levels so universally awful?
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 17:00
|
|
|
Rei_ posted:Why are sewer levels so universally awful? They're frequently low-level affairs that are consequently filled with boring, trivial encounters, are usually done in nothing but earth tones, and tend to be immensely claustrophobic and confusing affairs. I think the Garamsythe Waterway was one of the only sewer levels I've actually liked the look of.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 17:05
|
|
|
Sewer levels are usually cramped and ugly. Ni no Kuni had a good sewer level because it was pretty.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 17:09
|
|
|
I don't think anything tops the Ritardando Sewers in Eternal Sonata for sewer levels. It's a combination of being the first dungeon so the level is short and it's as pretty as a sewer could ever get.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 17:23
|
|
|
The FFXII sewers weren't bad, either.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 17:24
|
|
|
ImpAtom posted:Final Fantasy VII literally has CGI cutscenes dedicated to giving you long infodumps about how the world works on multiple occasions. It does? There's one time at Cosmo Canyon where they explain the Lifestream, every other cutscene moved the plot in some way.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 17:32
|
|
|
Oxxidation posted:To this day I'm still not certain what exactly Eden is or what it's doing. Considering everything in 8, basing the ultimate GF on the Garden of Eden is brilliant. Not sure why it has to be a robot or fire doom lasers but hey.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 17:41
|
|
|
It always looked to me like Eden was a living Garden, which was pretty cool. Definitely a "cast once to see this crazy bullshit and then resume regular play" summon though. FFVIII's combat system was so ridiculously broken it didn't matter though, especially with the card modding. Give the whole party perma-haste, initiative, items that make the whole party invincible, and ridiculous limit breaks that can wipe out every enemy in the game with ease? Why not. I still remember taking out Omega Weapon with like literally 2 of Zell's limit breaks because once you've memorized his inputs you can put in the easy attack prompts in a tenth of a second and hit him for 9,999 damage like 50 times. Or be lucky / persistent with Selphie and roll The End, which somehow works on what is supposed to be the most challenging enemy in the game  I think I played the entire game with Squall at low levels of health and just annihilated everything else with Renzokuken. Talking about VII vs. XIII did make me realize that I forgave a lot of VII's exposition just because they also took the time to make a world that seemed alive and reflected the info dumps. Being able to actually go into everyone's houses in the slums and talk to random people made it so much more organic. And also, to be fair, it's important to remember that games are still marketed with kids in mind, and so the stuff like Cloud's flashback scene and such make a lot more sense in that context. Hell, there's an amazing number of people that still have no idea what the gently caress is going on in VII to this day. I agree with whoever said that IX handled it the best. The story was really nothing special at all, but the characters and the world were just so well-made that it didn't matter. I always dream that they'll do another game in that style, but I know it won't happen. It's actually the reason I like Crystal Chronicles, which is still absolutely gorgeous even today. That art style really ages very well and fits the FF setting pretty well.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 17:45
|
|
|
Dragonatrix posted:Considering everything in 8, basing the ultimate GF on the Garden of Eden is brilliant. Not sure why it has to be a robot or fire doom lasers but hey. Not sure anyone could explain why it shouldn't.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 17:46
|
|
|
Dragonatrix posted:Considering everything in 8, basing the ultimate GF on the Garden of Eden is brilliant. Not sure why it has to be a robot or fire doom lasers but hey. Making Christian iconography poo poo lasers has been a JRPG standby since the beginning.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 17:48
|
|
|
Rei_ posted:Why are sewer levels so universally awful? about that Mr. Maltose posted:The FFXII sewers weren't bad, either. This is because you were otherwise overwhelmed by every other dungeon effectively being a sewer level. Garamsythe Waterway seemed up to par because it was, but that only work when FFXII is considered in isolation. Seriously, Otherwise, sewer levels are bad primarily because they are generally long tedious corridors, with very little variety or set pieces to keep them interesting. It doesn't help that a lot of developers use sewer levels to pull out the chutes and ladders gameplay. Not only are you practically running through the exact same corridors, you ARE running through the exact same corridor.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 17:52
|
|
|
The problems with Summons is that they're either just a strong magic spell (IV-IX, with the added benefit of tanking hits for you in VIII), or they replace your team with an attacker that is almost universally less useful than just keeping your team around (X-XIII, although X probably handled it best). I'm thinking summons would work best in a game where everyone can't do everything, because then it's hard to find a reason to summon. The summon could replace ONLY the summoner, and it could come with a full set of abilities- they'd be more like toolboxes than 1-note spells. They should apply a multiplier to the summoner's stats to derive the summon's stats, so you don't end up with a summon that is weaker than the character(s) its replacing. So for some MP or whatever you can replace a single character with a strong unit that can do things the summoner couldn't, without wrecking the party dynamic.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 19:55
|
|
|
Summons in XIII mostly functioned as an "oh poo poo i hosed up" button that does some damage and resets your team's status if you're between a rock and a hard place.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 20:00
|
|
|
Schwartzcough posted:The problems with Summons is that they're either just a strong magic spell (IV-IX, with the added benefit of tanking hits for you in VIII), or they replace your team with an attacker that is almost universally less useful than just keeping your team around (X-XIII, although X probably handled it best). This is generally how they play out in the online FF's and it works pretty well. If we got another turn-based FF (Bravely Default has the mantle now I suppose) that's how I'd like it to work. Either that or someone more creative needs to think of a very good new use for them. The cinematic summons were cool in their time but it definitely feels like they're played out and Bravely Default drove that home as I hated using them.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 20:27
|
|
|
IX almost puled it off with Garnet and Eiko, except you wouldn't want both of them in one party and so they end up being too important as healers. The idea of having someone whose only offensive skills come in the form of summons was nice though, and the strongly defined roles were one of the nice things about that game because it managed to pull of the balance of having deep characters that weren't all interchangable in terms of combat utility and skills.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 20:41
|
|
|
Kiggles posted:about that I'll admit that FF12's dungeons were not of the greatest stock, but at the same time, the game had maybe four or five proper dungeons and the rest of its areas were largely just "Interesting locations where lots of monsters are." Plus you can't tell me the Pharos wasn't baller. A loving gigantic tower that just rises and rises and rises, and the music for it was sweet too. As the game's equivalent of a final dungeon, it's pretty awesome. Raithwall's Tomb sucks though, but dude you go there by crossing oil rigs suspended over a liquid sand desert! VVV--but it looked awesome, and you murder an entire species of weird beastmen each crossing, so it actually felt pretty intense as you're smashing through mooks who aren't terribly strong, but by the end you're really getting run ragged by the sheer numbers. Plus it's a sea of liquid SAND, it's like some sort of surreal dream landscape except real and awesome. I love final fantasy the twelve. BottledBodhisvata fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Jun 7, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 21:14
|
|
|
BottledBodhisvata posted:Raithwall's Tomb sucks though, but dude you go there by crossing oil rigs suspended over a liquid sand desert! Don't remind me. That area is like twenty oil rigs too long.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 21:27
|
|
|
The White Dragon posted:Don't remind me. That area is like twenty oil rigs too long. It was my first time seeing chains of great length, which... might have been fine, had Raithwall been in any way exciting. FF XII was a handful of really awesome moments with a lot of travel in between. It's actually more LotR than Star Wars, if you're only considering pace.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 21:37
|
|
|
The pace of XII was all kinds of off, and the long, looooong stretches of just running through vast areas chopping down mooks was the major reason for it, if you ask me. I could barely keep track of the plot because it just took that long to get from one point to the next. They over did the MMO part of "single player MMO" far too much. Edit: And yes I realize that pretty much every FF game has you going through areas chopping down mooks, it's just that it felt like in XII the areas were about 4x as big as they needed to be.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 21:46
|
|
|
BottledBodhisvata posted:VVV--but it looked awesome, and you murder an entire species of weird beastmen each crossing, so it actually felt pretty intense as you're smashing through mooks who aren't terribly strong, but by the end you're really getting run ragged by the sheer numbers. Plus it's a sea of liquid SAND, it's like some sort of surreal dream landscape except real and awesome. I love final fantasy the twelve. Fighting humanoids in XII is usually pretty boring though, because most of them give lovely loot. Woohoo, another earth magicite. I love XII but the Sandsea is easily my least favorite area.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 21:59
|
|
|
BottledBodhisvata posted:I'll admit that FF12's dungeons were not of the greatest stock, but at the same time, the game had maybe four or five proper dungeons and the rest of its areas were largely just "Interesting locations where lots of monsters are." Plus you can't tell me the Pharos wasn't baller. A loving gigantic tower that just rises and rises and rises, and the music for it was sweet too. As the game's equivalent of a final dungeon, it's pretty awesome. Sand Sea already mentioned is a really good example. It looks AWESOME when you first get their. Then it just keep going. Then you get to the next half of the zone, which is even more of the same. All of which might have been fire if each platform had some intelligently designed encounters, but there is nothing worth noting from one encounter to the next. Seen one, you've seen them all, and that applies to the majority of encounters in the game. The expanses exist solely to provide space for poo poo to grind. That too might be fine, if there were an interesting character build mechanic behind it, but even International doesn't do much to address that. It's about as pure a grind as you can get. You kill poo poo, numbers go up, and that's it. Zodiack Job "system" just locks you into a particular build, but it's not really a system of choice/consequence. It's just shallow. The game had an enormous amount of potential. I like to think I like FFXII, but what I would like to think is FFXII is completely divorced from what FFXII actually is. vvv We're probably on the same page. I REALLY wanted to like FFXII. It's just really shallow in a lot of areas, and most of those areas otherwise have a lot of potential that is under utilized or simply not utilized. It was otherwise pretty good for a single playthrough. Kiggles fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Jun 7, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 23:11
|
|
|
Kiggles posted:But Pharros demonstrates the problem well. It's basically just flights of stairs. If you stop for even moment the structure is comprised of nothing but identical copy&pasted layers of stacked pillars. Virtually dungeon in the game is like this, whether the copy&pasting is lateral or vertical, there is nothing interesting about the dungeon designs. Yeah, Pharros was kinda cool, as are a lot of areas at first blush, but once you start getting into the dungeons it's pretty much the same crap stretched way too far. There are rarely any puzzles, and even fewer interesting puzzles. The few set pieces that help make any of the areas carry any degree of lore or novelty tend to be shallow at best, or quickly forgotten at worst. I agree. I mean, i like the game's game engine enough so that I don't really hate battles or anything (although I always had trouble with the high-end endgame content) and yeah, they could of made a better use of space, certainly in dungeon environments and whatnot. I guess I just love everything around it all too much to care. I didn't mind the battles were simple, because I was constantly swapping out party members, trying out new weapon types, upgrading my licenses, grinding out the bestiary for more awesome lore, finding secrets, and everything just feels so...epic. Final Fantasy X was like cool and has this atmosphere and tone and a giant space whale but on the whole it's pretty subdued in actual scale. The world is small and linear and it's a lot of talking cutscenes and there are no dungeons really--there's like maybe three actual dungeons in the game and one of those is the final dungeon. There are like two hidden zones and only one of those is actually a new place. 12 came out right around the time the FF7 EU was being shat out on us and I was pretty down on Square at the time and not looking fondly back on X either. Then 12 happened it was like: nations at war, enormous flotillas of flying fortresses, a floating island, an immense underground labyrinth beneath a gargantuan desert metropolis that was HUGE and stuffed full of people and color and sound and there were dinosaurs right outside and I could fight them and the game didn't stop me every five minutes to talk about Yuna's feelings it stopped me for three minutes to have Balthier loving own and a bunch of other not-Balthier people rather ineptly run around attempting to become the resistance but actually the resistance happens just fine without us but OKAY It felt like a Final Fantasy. It felt..fantastical. It had that oomph. And yeah, it's lacking in a lot of things--it's aimless, it has a poo poo loot system--but that's almost a virtue, because the game lets me PLAY it. I play it for hours and hours and I'm just getting lost in it and there are so many places to see and so many places to go and just when you think you've seen the world there's a whole new country you're in and there are more dinosaurs and they're EVEN BIGGER and I can ride a Chocobo around and not dodge balls and there's not six summons there's FREAKING TWELVE and they're all new and weird looking and what even is this awesome thing and holy poo poo Gilgamesh is in this game!? And yeah, by the end I was...a bit disappointed in a few things. But I didn't find the game's shortcomings particularly diminishing of the whole experience. I felt like *I* had an adventure, me. I led this band of heroes on a quest, I found the treasures, I fought the bosses. I got into the Marks and I was going around the world, slaying bigger and badder monsters and I felt like I was having a quest and I didn't have to wait for some cutscene for something to get done because I could just do it myself.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2014 23:34
|
|
|
Dragonatrix posted:Considering everything in 8, basing the ultimate GF on the Garden of Eden is brilliant. Not sure why it has to be a robot or fire doom lasers but hey. The crazy thing is, people went through the debug menu of FF8 and discovered Eden's original name was....BARTANDALUS!!! FF13 = Somehow managing to retroactively ruin the series.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2014 01:08
|
|
|
DeadBonesBrook posted:The crazy thing is, people went through the debug menu of FF8 and discovered Eden's original name was....BARTANDALUS!!! Eden is also a fal'Cie in XIII, the capital of Cocoon is named after it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2014 01:12
|
|
|
How does a game retroactively ruin another bad game when the etymology for the name existed long before the game did? I get it's a joke, but it's a pretty tired one by now.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2014 01:17
|
|
|
FF13 is literally Hitler.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2014 01:22
|
|
|
I'm playing FFX and I'm at Home at the part where you have to rescue Yuna and Tidus finds out what happens to summoners and are YOU loving SERIOUS THERE IS A SOUND CLIP GOING ON AND ON AND ON AND ON OVER AND OVER AND OVER of somebody saying what appears to be "AN ANNOYING CHANT"?
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2014 01:26
|
|
|
Sunning posted:According to interviews, the original world design of FFXIII was much more ambitious. Cocoon was heavily based off America in that would feature people of different eternities and have a number of wildly different urban and suburban landscapes. It would have people going about their lives in cities and smaller rural areas. I honestly no lie would've liked it about 200% more if they'd included town/city type areas with free roaming. You could argue that FFX was a bunch of corridors, but the difference is that FFX is a good game with a more free-roaming "alive" feel where the player was able to talk to NPCs and do sidequests and play minigames and stuff. It didn't feel restrictive at all despite being incredibly linear- in fact, it was the most linear FF game up to that point. Coccoon might've been interesting, but it just felt so empty. In the cut scenes we see all of these people milling around and going about their daily business. Where are they during the game? Are they all hiding? Did they vanish? What? It's severely lacking in the "quirky" factor, too, which made many of the past FF games likable- it takes itself so drat seriously that it's actually funny at times. All of the best Final Fantasy games have a certain campy, over-the-top value to them- which, I'll admit, might just be a product of the 90s. If only they could replicate that. Bravely Default is a good modern example. Despite this, I do have to say that I didn't HATE FFXIII like some people do. As a matter of fact, I hated FFXII and couldn't even get a quarter of the way through because it had the exact opposite problem: it was so open-ended that it felt aimless. at least FFXIII interested me enough to make me want to see what would happen next. That being said, all of the sequels are verging on ridiculous at this point. e: MrAristocrates posted:Wrong FF, mate. drat it, I quoted the wrong post. Thanks for pointing that out. Captain Mog fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Jun 8, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2014 01:28
|
|
|
X-2 Question: do Creature Creator monsters stay when I start a New Game+?
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2014 01:29
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 07:51 |
|
|
Captain Mog posted:I honestly no lie would've liked it about 200% more if they'd included town/city type areas with free roaming. You could argue that FFX was a bunch of corridors, but the difference is that FFX is a good game with a more free-roaming "alive" feel where the player was able to talk to NPCs and do sidequests and play minigames and stuff. It didn't feel restrictive at all despite being incredibly linear- in fact, it was the most linear FF game up to that point. Wrong FF, mate.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2014 01:35
|
|
