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 What is Final Fantasy VII? I think everyone and their mother have heard of Final Fantasy VII. Released in 1997, the RPG quickly became an overwhelming success. Some people believe FF7 is the reason the PSX succeeded [citation needed]. Although it wasn't the first J-RPG for the Playstation, the game redefined the genre as it was and the companies quickly jumped on the bandwagon. It was the golden era of J-RPGs and a great time to be a gamer, but then the PS2 came and Square started taking, let's say, controversial decisions. But FF7 is not without controversies. The game was huge on its release and still has a considerable fanbase - maybe the largest of any Final Fantasy, given how Square-Enix likes to milk the franchise dry, its hands holding the teats so strongly that they leak more blood than milk. However, despite of or because of its success, FF7 is considered one of the most overrated games of all time. This isn't helped by the fact the spin-offs (for the most part) suck, the game had less than sub-par translation and every 13 years old kid wanted to name their Diablo character or ICQ Nickname as a variation of _-~SepHiROTH~-_. Regardless, the game is very well-made and like all other PS-era Final Fantasies, extremely detailed. The characters got a bit distorted over time in the spin-offs, but when not being racist FF7 features some great dialogues and attempts to do some very creative things. So what is the game about? Final Fantasy VII is set in a dystopian "modern" fantasy world with a heavy Cyberpunk theme. The game is also different from other Final Fantasies or J-RPGs (and closer to W-RPGs) in the sense that it's not afraid of talking about sexuality and featuring less than subtle gay undertones. The game also features themes that are much closer to issues from our real world like consequences from screwing up with the environment, unresolved love triangles, poverty and social issues, etc. It's by no means a treatise on those subjects but it's a nice human touch. It was also the first Final Fantasy to feature a modern world. While usually in previous games the theme was medieval, in FF7 there are cars, guns, helicopters and technology that is similar to ours. It was also the culmination of the series trend to make progressively darker games, a trend that ended somewhat on FF9. Also, like FF6 it mixes different genres, periods and cultures instead of going full-D&D. Hence you have a modern world with magic and swords and all sorts of crazy shenanigans. LP Rules * Boss fights will include a video because hey, why not? * NO SPOILERS. I met two people this year who had just started playing FF7 and did not actually know anything, even the major events everyone knows about. So it's possible there will be one or two readers who don't know either. Don't talk about anything beyond what we've seen. * Again, NO SPOILERS. This includes fake spoilers, wink-winking about spoilers, or eliminating possibilities about which we can't draw a conclusion yet. * I'm gonna break this game's combat mechanics horribly, without glitches, the "way the developers intended". You're not gonna get a raw experience when it comes to boss fights, or see me struggling. But the thing is, most of the boss fights in this game are completely irrelevant to the plot and the bosses are just stuff that happen to be in your way. Most of the fights result in the boss dying without doing anything and I do it in many, many different ways. If you enjoy seeing the game's battle system being exploited, molested and otherwise broken, you're gonna enjoy watching the videos. If you have never played the game, I still explain everything that is combat-related. Thread Rules * NO EU TALK. * Don't talk about which FF is better/worse. * THIS GAME IS NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT. From the beginning to the end, it's a roller-coaster of things that are just downright wrong. It's negative, morbid and depressive. It has humor of questionable taste. It assumes that you're an adult and can judge correctly what is going on. You're free to point out how a character is an rear end in a top hat but don't go meta and argue about how the game is not being sensitive. If you're sensitive to these things, this might not be the game for you. * Talking about other Final Fantasies or even J-RPGs is allowed. You can go OT as long as it's not about something incredibly stupid. * Do not talk about other posts. Like "People need to stop discussing X". As long as it's not a terrible nitpick debates, you can go crazy on tangents. * About FF7, you can talk about everything mentioned in the manual (like that other characters such as Cid exist) as long as you don't spoil anything about them. Similarly, you can talk about battle mechanics as long as it doesn't spoil anything, and most of the time it doesn't. So don't spoiler-tag spell names, it's not a spoiler that we get a spell called Fire 3 or that you fight Goblins. So without further ado, let's start shall we? Content: CD 1 Chapter 1 - In which we put rose-tinted glasses Chapter 2 - A Tribute to Joss Wheddon Chapter 3 - Who's Bad? Chapter 4 - In which we talk about limits Chapter 5 - A Naming of Stoners Chapter 6 - Mods and the Shinra Mafia Chapter 7 - In which we finally get to the LP title Chapter 8 - The Soap Opera Appreciation Station Chapter 9 - The Wall Market Chapter 10 - Transgender Megathread Chapter 11 - [Yahoo Questions] "Am I gay if I like crossdressing?" Chapter 12 - [E/N] How do I avoid being Friend-Zoned? Chapter 13 - poo poo Gets Real Chapter 14 - Flashbacks Chapter 15 - A Golden Shiny Wire Chapter 16 - Obligatory Puzzle Dungeon Chapter 17 - God drat it, Hojo Chapter 18 - Creepy Korean Horror Movie Hour Chapter 19 - Out of Darkness, Out of Mind Chapter 20 - A minute of chillaxation Chapter 21 - Major Plot Exposition Time Chapter 22 - Let's drink the whole whiskey bottle Chapter 23 - In which we side-quest Chapter 24 - In which we do more side-quests Chapter 25 - A Parade... of Mini-Games Chapter 26 - Trip-Hop City Chapter 27 - It's a Boat time Chapter 28 - It's a Bossa time Chapter 29 - Life's a beach Chapter 30 - VEGAS, BABE! Chapter 31 - It's Funday Sunday! Chapter 32 - A Desert Tale Chapter 33 - The Terrible Secrets of Chocobo Racing Chapter 34 - Of Side and Games Chapter 35 - Gon Ga Ga Chapter 36 - A Star Wars Holiday Special Chapter 37 - The Sealed Cave that wants to kill you Chapter 38 - Vincent, Part I Chapter 39 - Vincent, Part II Chapter 40 - Mount Piñata Chapter 41 - Rocket Town, Part I Chapter 42 - Rocket Town, Part II Chapter 43 - Wutai Chapter 44 - Smoke and Mirrors Chapter 45 - Damsel Chapter 46 - Unfinished Business Chapter 47 - The Calm Chapter 48 - Exposition Chapter 49 - Do you wanna date my Avatar? Chapter 50 - [Temple of the Ancients] Chapter 51 - Wherein the plot finally starts Chapter 52 - Nothing else materias Chapter 53 - Distress Chapter 54 - The Storm CD 2 Chapter 55 - Onward Chapter 56 - Cold Exposition, Part I Chapter 57 - Cold Exposition, Part II Chapter 58 - Holzoff Ice Chapter 59 - Iceburn Chapter 60 - Cool Cool Mountain Chapter 61 - Upward Slope Chapter 62 - Paradise Lost Chapter 63 - Climax Recap Chapter 64 - Fade to Black Chapter 65 - World of Ruin Chapter 66 - Weapon ex Machina Chapter 67 - Bad Breath Chapter 68 - Poppin' and Slappin' Chapter 69 - Sweet Ride Chapter 70 - Around the World Chapter 71 - Searching for Friends Chapter 72 - Winds of Change Chapter 73 - Visiting Mideel Chapter 74 - Preparations Chapter 75 - Mako Age Chapter 76 - Visiting Cloud Chapter 77 - A Cloud to the Past Chapter 78 - Revelations Chapter 79 - Status Quo Chapter 80 - Zephyr Chapter 81 - Update de Chocobo Chapter 82 - Capitulo de Chocobo Chapter 83 - Digging the Past, Part I Chapter 84 - Digging the Past, Part II Chapter 85 - Under the Sea Chapter 86 - Red Submarine Chapter 87 - Like a Rocket Man Chapter 88 - Rocket Queen Chapter 89 - Guidance Chapter 90 - Secrets of the Deep Chapter 91 - Redacted Chapter 92 - Hope Chapter 93 - Attack on Weapon Chapter 94 - Crossfire Chapter 95 - Measures Chapter 96 - Bungee Oogie Oogie Chapter 97 - Looting Chapter 98 - Will it Blend? Chapter 99 - Choices CD 3 Chapter 100 - Hide and Seek Chapter 101 - Jump Puzzles Chapter 102 - North Crater, Part I Chapter 103 - North Crater, Part II Chapter 104 - Weapon Chapter 105 - Into Light, Part I Chapter 106 - Into Light, Part II Bonus - A bit more into Japanese Horror and Tokusatsu Villains Bonus - Tarepanda's Notes Epilogue, Part I Epilogue, Part II Lamprey Cannon presents: Let's Play Final Fantasy VII, Famicom Edition! Part 1 - Untitled Document Part 2 - Remember when we were blue, Cloud? Part 3 - Just because he aren't sick doesn't mean he are well. Part 4 - This whole thing's stupid. Let's keep going. Part 5 - Snake? Snake! SNAAAAAKE! Part 6 - Geographical Improbabilities Part 7 - Ho Ho Hooooo! Orange Fluffy Sheep presents: FFVII Low-Level Run Extreme OCD Edition! Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Fan Art Screaming Idiot: This is something of beauty:  Screaming idiot on Hojo's crazy breeding schemes:  Sephiroth and Jenova would make a great sitcom:  Pesky Splinter: That's the question.  Pesky Splinter reveals what Scarlet is doing with the military fund:  Pesky Splinter decides to show Hojo's secret to dating hot girls:  Pesky Splinter infuses me with horrible, horrible nightmares:  I have no words to describe this, you have to see for yourself:  Faraday Cage: Faraday Cage found the successful algorithm for condensing the maximum amount of IP hype in a single image, and disguised it as a joke fanart.  HotAndColdAF: HotAndColdAF uncovers the truth of Sephiroth's arrival at Costa Del Sol:      Orange Fluffy Sheep: OFS decides to follow today's trends to make everything dark and gritty:  OFS shows what every woman knows - five Enemy Skills are better than four.  OFS knows how to teach about health hazards better than his parents ever did.   L5 Death: L5 Death shows that a year long routine of bad puns and screenshots can become an addictive combination.  ArchWizard: ArchWizard reveals Tifa's sudden change of career. The bar just wasn't working for her.  MarquiseMindfang: MarquiseMindfang shows Dr. Octavius has got nothing on Barret.  Macaluso: Macaluso shows that there's no limit to FF fans when it comes down to bizarre crossovers.  Ropnolc: Ropnolc shows the softer, almost gelatinous side of Cloud's heart.  Frogisis:  We're all cheering for your escape, Tifa.  Frogisis makes EponymousMrYar's vision come true, and Hojo's fantasies come truer.  Even Lightning wouldn't return from the iceburns.  Zeikier: Zeikier reveals what truly happened to Meteor after the game's ending. 
Elentor fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Mar 14, 2016 |
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May 29, 2011 13:47
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Chapter 1 - In which we put rose-tinted glasses Squaresoft was a great company, shame it ended.  And this is the first thing we see. Back in '97 I remember my friends going apeshit that you could have characters done in CGI now.    Who names their bar "Goblin's Bar"?  And so our adventure begins. I think it's pretty neat that for once we're starting in a big city instead of running away from a small one.  This is Midgar. Don't worry, it looks much bigger from the inside, once you get past the fact there's a building the size of Mt. Everest in it.  This opening has everything, even trains.  I like this shot. You can come back to it later and you'll see a lot of the pre-rendered areas in it. All in all it's a good opening. Square did a version of it for the PS3, which is pretty neat and I recommend for everyone to watch: It's also the closest thing we'll ever have to a remake because FF7 fans can't ever have nice things.  A bunch of people wearing bandanas jump off the train and kick some of the guards.  And this is our protagonist doing his first action in the game: Stealing a potion off a knocked guard. Unfortunately our protagonist doesn't believe in all this alternative medicine stuff so he's just gathering them to sell later, possibly on eBay.  The guards don't like that he's stealing their drinks.  This is the first battle, in which we learn our protagonist is an Ex-SOLDIER. He also wears a huge sword. It's a pretty effective intro if you think about it, FF7 is the closest thing to a ROOOLLING STAAART that we have on J-RPGs. Also, the OST starts out awesome. Around 1:10 is when the opening music ends. The music keeps playing even during battles, which is pretty neat.  For the most part, FF7 is a really easy game. You can see that the enemy barely scratches you and although this is the first fight of the game, it never gets much harder than this. You can break this game hilariously as a result, although not as hilariously as you can break FF8 if you set your heart to it.  We win the fight and move on.   Jessie: "SOLDIER? Aren't they the enemy? What's he doing with us in AVALANCHE?" Biggs: "Hold it, Jessie. He WAS in SOLDIER. He quit them and now is one of us."And with that the Caps Lock Brigade concludes the expository dialogue.  Biggs is the guy who looks like a skinny Rambo. The chick trying to open the door is Jessie. The fat dude on the corner is Wedge. When I was a kid I never realized Jessie was a chick, the polygons didn't reveal much and my English wasn't good enough to deduct.  And this is our protagonist, Mr. Cloud.  drat, son.   "Our target's the North Mako Reactor. We'll meet on the bridge in front of it."You can see that these folks are up to no good but whatever their plan is they clearly don't have much experience doing it.  Jaime Lannister, I want you to be my royal guard.  FF7 is a show of potentially offensive racial stereotypes and man, Barret is the king of them. I think they modelled Barret on Mr.T. Barret is the leader of AVALANCHE.   Cloud: What the HELL are you talking about?  I love these backgrounds. The sign alternates between "WARNING" and "INTRUDER" so the whole place knows we're here already. An interesting bit of trivia is that FF7 had backgrounds rendered in slightly higher resolution than FF8, because of disc space.  The Reactor bridge. You can see the whole thing is floating and there's a lot of buildings down there. Pretty unsettling scenery.  Once you get inside the reactor, this music starts playing. It's very fitting.    Mako as we know is the planet's blood. The concept of Mako as the world's energy was reused in the Final Fantasy movie (Spirits Within) and to an extent in FF9 and FF10/10-2. It's not original to FF7, however, but it's too early for us to talk about it.  Cloud being delicate as usual. What we know is that our band of heroes are actually off to do, well, things that are not so heroic. After that Barret decides he'll follow you around to keep a close eye. Jessie and Biggs are 1337 h4x0rs and crack the code to open the doors in a CSI fashion. Exploring a bit the reactor we find a Phoenix Down. These are used to revive fallen members. They kinda come in handy as they're expensive items and you don't find many of them around.    God drat it Cloud. So we learn that Barret is a huge hippie gone wild. You can kinda understand Cloud here. I mean, he probably thinks that Barret's new age talk is complete bullshit and he probably thinks these guys are crazy too. You have to be pretty crazy to think the powerplants are draining mystical energy from the planet that keeps it alive.    Cloud starts with two spells - Bolt and Ice. Machines are typically weak to Electricity, so they take double damage from Bolt. At the party menu we can access "Magic" but we can't do anything about it now. All we know is that Cloud is not just an elite mercenary, he's also a wizard.  And down we go further in the reactor.  WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? We find yet another potion lying around. Why would someone working in a reactor bring a potion though? Why not some soda, or water? Maybe the working conditions are really bad and you get hurt all the time. I'll go with that. At any rate Cloud takes it to sell later because he ain't drinking anything.  Our first Save-Point. While a Save-Point doesn't always indicate that there's an incoming boss, the opposite is true - there's always a Save-Point before a boss. Well, mostly, but it doesn't hurt to get ourselves ready.   See that pink bar that turned green? That's the Limit Bar. Every time you get punched by an enemy you fill a bit of it. When the bar is full your Attack Command is replaced by Limit, which is a special attack. Each character has different limits. With some exceptions, each character has 7 unique limits that you unlock over time. There are 4 sets of limits, so for example if you're locked to the first set you can choose between the first and second limits whenever the command pops up, etc. Most of the time Limits are just special attacks that do much more damage than usual. The rate at which your limit bar increases also changes depending on which limit set your character is locked into. At the first set this is very low, around 45% of your maximum HP for Cloud and Barret, so you're bound to see at least four limits between them before you die unless you screw up horribly. Barret's first limit 'Big Shot' is slightly more powerful than Cloud's, but in practice they deal similar damage at our current level. With that in mind, we fight some more enemies to fill our Limit Bar.  On the bridge to plant the bomb we find something on the ground. We can't do anything about it yet though, we'll find more about it later.  I really ought to play the Japanese version to see if I feel sorry or anger towards the translation team, but I'll give them the benefit of doubt.  There's a Zero Wing joke here somewhere.  Woah.  Apparently our main character is hearing voices. "What's wrong?" "Huh?"BOSS TIME - Guard Scorpion Our first boss fight comes out of nowhere, the Guard Scorpion.  Before attacking, Guard Scorpion will do a "Search Scope" movement to lock himself a target. The next move will be an attack to that target, then it will move on to Search Scope again.  As you may have noticed we have the Limit Breaks still active from last battle. You can do that - as long as you don't use them, that bar will remain active for as long as you want. We also haven't healed prior to the battle because healing is for sissies.  FF7 has a lot of bosses, mind that. A LOT. And most of them come out of nowhere too.   This is Guard Scorpion's gimmick - After two turns it will rise up its tail. During that, it will have increased defense but it won't do anything, so you have some turns to heal up. On the other hand if you attack it will counter-attack with Tail Laser, which inflicts massive amounts of damage. The only real danger is if you queue up two attacks while Guard Scorpion has its Tail movement queued up already. The boss will get into counter-attack mode before your attacks go out and you'll take two tail lasers in a row, which is about half of your maximum HP and a potential Game Over. The other danger comes from the script. The full script is "Barret, be careful. Attack while it's tail's up. It's gonna counterattack with its laser." which is pretty stupid because it can lead you to think you should actually ATTACK while the tail is up, which is never a good idea. There's not much you can do wrong though. It's the first boss fight in the game and your choice of commands are very limited.  We beat him in a most humiliating way.  Our loot is a new gun for Barret. Yay~!   Oh crap.  The counter keeps running everywhere - in the field, in battles, even in the menu.  Oh look, it's Jessie. Hi Jessie! At this point I decide to run away from battles. HP is very low so it's a little risky.  As it turns out, you can't leave the place without talking to Jessie   I think Jessie is gonna be a love interest to Cloud. I mean, they work together, she is a geek, and we already have the cliché of him risking himself to save her   I remember to equip the Assault Gun we just got.  The cool thing about the weapons is that they all have their own individual graphics that change in battle. The official artworks are pretty cool too. For example, this is the gattling gun:  And this is the Assault Gun:  Most Barret weapons are long-range so you can attack enemies on the back-row and do the same amount damage. Non-Long-Range weapons would only do half. Alternatively, you can also choose to put your characters in the back row and take only half physical damage. It's incredibly powerful if you're focusing on magic.  We manage to run out with 2 minutes left. It's pretty hard to run out of time unless you miss Jessie and can't really find her.  BOOOOOM.    And Jessie blows up the exit. Mission successful! AVALANCHE 1 x SHINRA 0  NEXT TIME: More Love Interests! Reactors! Flowers! Flashbacks! Slums! Paychecks! Chapter 1 Bugs & Bytes: Immediately after you start the game, right before the first battle, if you open the menu and check you'll see that Cloud is on Level 6, has 610 experience and needs 645 experience to Level 7, so 35 more. This is a bug that is auto-corrected on the first battle, when you see that Cloud needs in fact just 6 points to Level 7.  Cool Music we listened to in this Chapter: FF6,7,8 and 9 are all games with most excellent OSTs. Although which has the best is pointless to argue, FF7 has a great soundtrack that greatly adds to the mood of the game. Opening Theme + Bombing Mission - The game intro which jumps straight into the Rolling Start music. Mako Reactor - The music we listen to during the reactor level. Elentor fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Jun 3, 2011 |
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May 29, 2011 13:47
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Tengames posted:Which version are you playing, the ps1 or pc version? I'm playing the PSX. I'm planning on talking about the mods on a future update. It's actually possible to import a lot of the PC mods on the PS version, although it requires a lot of work. RoeCocoa posted:If you're going with an "absolutely no spoilers whatsoever" policy, you should probably re-upload the intro video with a different title, different tags, and comments disabled, and keep doing that for all subsequent videos. Otherwise, Youtube hands out a massive spoiler the moment the video ends. Weird, I saw the videos and didn't see any spoilers. I'll double check. Elentor fucked around with this message at 16:58 on May 29, 2011 |
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May 29, 2011 16:55
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Alright I finally got the Aps videos done. I got three updates ready  idonotlikepeas posted:I love how Barret asks Cloud whether he knows about Mako reactors and then, when Cloud says yes, completely ignores him and gives the expository dialogue anyway. I don't intend to get every single thing in the game but I'll cover every major side-quest. There are not many in FF7. X_countryguy posted:I still like FF7 even if I never need to play it again. I know you posted that this game is hugely racist. I found the game stupidly sexist. Oh, no! Jessie got her foot stuck! Helpless until Cloud helps out. See also supporting (and main) characters that appear later. Jessie and Elena aside I think FF7 did pretty well on that aspect compared to other J-RPGs from its time. Example: Star Ocean 2. The Dark Id posted:The related links on Youtube videos update with people making comments and where it is clicked from and assorted poo poo. It's best to just give uploaded videos some generic name and search parameters a bunch of rubbish with comments disabled, or else you'll get links to "BEST PART OF THE GAME: WEDGE MURDERS CLOUD AND STAGES A COUP ON SHINRA!" Yeah I can see how that sucks. But you didn't need to spoil Wedge's betrayal Sylphosaurus posted:You pretty much nailed my own opinion regarding this game. I would have prefered a proper remake, rather than all the spinoffs that just served to tarnish the original game. In my opinion everything about the spin-offs sucked. AC was cool when it was announced because we could finally see FF7's characters rendered in high-quality CGI, but the plot was mediocre at best. At least there wasn't much of it to complain, so yay for free fan-service? The spin-off games however were terrible. Crisis Core would be an ok game on its own if it was completely unrelated to FF7, but they really had to shoehorn Gackt in it. Dirge of Cerberus was just awful and I feel sorry for Dark Id. Captainsalami posted:For the record, the way limit breaks works had always mystified me until I went to gamefaqs. Seems if you're crazy enough you can cap them at low level, since I think its something like...use one 10 times, and kill a buncha enemies, but I no longer remember right. You can't get ALL of them, but enough to break the game until you can. It's just like how in FF8 you can Draw 100 spells in the first area and get ridiculously overpowered. KataraniSword posted:I will argue to my grave that Final Fantasy 7 would have been a fantastic novel but is an absolutely terrible game. I myself have never been able to stomach it much further than the first time the party actually manages to leave Midgar. There are only four major minigames and none of them are particularly hard, I even enjoy some of them, although overall yeah, they detract a bit from the experience. Still they're much better than FF10's amazing Chocobo minigame. AntiPseudonym posted:I'm one of those weird people that's never played FF7, as I never had a PS1 at all. So many people talk about it all the loving time though, so I'm gonna be following this and trying to figure out what all the fuss is about. FF7 is a great game, although for reasons that are completely unrelated to the fuss people made about. Elentor fucked around with this message at 18:08 on May 29, 2011 |
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May 29, 2011 18:02
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Viola the Mad posted:Amano's art is crazy detailed and they thought he would design something too complicated for the engine to handle. Nomura's art for FF7 is pretty simple for ease in modelling, especially when you compare it to his later stuff (BELTSZIPPERS Yeah, the idea of the script is "(If you) Attack while itss tail's up, it's gonna counter-attack." Of course that would be too obvious so the translators decided to troll out the players. Elentor fucked around with this message at 18:39 on May 29, 2011 |
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May 29, 2011 18:33
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Camel Pimp posted:Hey, minor quibble, but if you're going to insert dialogue into the game, please put it in parenthesis. Just so it's clear that said piece isn't actually in the game. I'm putting the real quotes between "", and my made-up crap without. If it's not that obvious I'll italicize then.
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May 29, 2011 18:42
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Scalding Coffee posted:It mentioning about counter-attacking was enough. How else would it counter if you don't do anything? It probably ruined the game for the same people who couldn't beat a floating barrel. I think there should be a Godwin's Law about that barrel. With every post in a discussion about a puzzle of confusing or unclear nature the chances of mentioning Sonic 3 quickly approach 100%. Adus posted:Pretty much. If it had just been another FF and never got so much attention it probably wouldn't have gotten so much backlash either. However because of its attention it also paved the way for RPGs to finally get noticed by a more mainstream audience. It never needed a sequel or movie, though. I don't think a remake would be any good, either. I'm so glad that that "emo" fad is gone. But part of that is how the image of Cloud got distorted over time. At least before certain events he's a no-bullshit kind of person in FF7, and that is very entertaining. Bellmaker posted:My biggest problem with it is that the gameplay is lacking. Materia was a good idea in theory but not in practice. I think Materia is great in practice, but the game doesn't offer enough for you to explore what you can do. This was one of the prime motivations behind FF7 modding, but I'll talk about this later. Compare it to FF10 for example, a game that gives you the option to explore its system to the fullest with a lot of optional bosses that actually assume you've mastered the game. Zeron posted:It's great to see it finally LPed here, although you could've put in a slight bit of viewer participation with the character names at least. I'll include viewer participation just not with the names. Not with the names. The White Dragon posted:I dunno, maybe it's one of those nerd bars. they serve a her Whenever I think about upper Midgar I think about how cool a MMO in it would be. Then I remember MMOs are not cool  Anyway, Chapter 2 coming sooner than later.
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May 29, 2011 21:48
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It's time for: You guys have the power to decide on which horrible Window Color Scheme you may want to torture me with  I'll be focusing on writing the updates now so you have about two or three chapters to decide.
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May 30, 2011 09:25
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Cuchulain posted:I played through this with RAINBOW windows intentionally. If you can't, you not as much of a man as I was when I was twelve. Feel free to talk as much as you want once we meet them but let's try not to get ahead of ourselves. I'm not sure I agree with the concept of "Aryan super models" from previous Final Fantasies. I'm not sure that was the intention. It was just Amano's style... and his style is very, very weird. I think he's a great artist but he does some crazy-rear end things. The Japanese did include some of THEIR minorities in the games, but of course they didn't worry about other countries' "minorities", it's the same reason no one includes pygmys and other ethnic groups everywhere. You just don't think about them. It was nowhere near the influence that came from South-Korean games later on, where everyone is indeed an aryan super-model elf fighting with no clothes and each character is, intentionally, an attempt at reaching human perfection at beauty. They became the norm and soon companies all over the place were wanting to include them. KataraniSword posted:
I think that given its cast the characters are very-well fleshed out. Even one of the optional characters. It's just that the scripts are very volatile - it's easy to miss or to skip a lot of the dialogues.
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May 30, 2011 11:54
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Really? I thought only three of them didn't get good fleshing out, and two of those three were optional characters.
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Chapter 2 - A Tribute to Joss Wheddon And as convenience would have it, our health pool is suddenly restored. Apparently blowing up reactors is a good therapy.  We get a huge close up on this as the camera moves down to the next scene. I think most people don't realize but this is actually product placement. A product placement made by fans on top of that. Basically Loveless is an album from a British band called My Bloody Valentine (you can see the band name on these posters too). The developers enjoyed that band and decided to pay homage to it. In the world of FF7, Loveless is actually a famous play, its Romeo & Juliet. It's referenced multiple times during the actual game and even more in the spin-offs. You can see other alternative rock look-a-like posters in the scene, it's kinda cool. Anyway as we move out of the reactor we get this music. It's really good.  We're approached by a flower seller. They try to sell you things when you're most vulnerable.  On second thought her 10 polygons kinda resemble the girl we saw on the opening cinematic. She's well-dressed and doing something up here in this, uh, nice neighborhood. Plus, she doesn't know I pretend to be badass all the time, so maybe I can chat her up.   Flower Girl: "Oh, these? Do you like them? They're only a gil... ?"  Flower Girl: "Oh, thank you!" Seriously though, what is this poster about? Is this a E Rated for Everyone?  I'm getting a Dark City vibe from this place.    Cloud is really wondering what he's got himself involved into.  We move further down but apparently someone followed us.  Instead of fighting we actually run. You can fight them but more will just come.  Here's something I appreciate - take a look at that house's window. There are silhouettes moving in and out. This attention to detail is lost in today's completely sterile environments.  Oh snap, we're surrounded. Guard: "That's as far as you go." Cloud: "I don't have time to be messin' around with you guys." Well, gently caress you guys.    That's what she said. Biggs: "Cloud... wonder if he was killed?" Barret: "No way!!" Jessie: "Cloud..."   When I was a kid I thought these guys were the villains.   Oh snap!  "You drat right, you're late!!" "Come waltzin' in here makin' a big scene!" "It's no bit deal. Just what I always do."  Seriously, what is there NOT to love about Cloud?   Wedge: "Hey, Cloud!! You were great back there!"  Jessie: "Oh, Cloud!! Your face is pitch-black..." Jessie: "There you go!"    You may be wondering why I'm showing this, but I think this sequence is hilarious. The two punk lovebirds just run the hell out when they see you. Somehow I picture this scene as Michael Jackson's Beat It. Biggs is just so '80s.      Jessie: "It's a map of the Midgar Rail System. Let's look at it together. I'll explain it to you." Cloud: Oh... kay.  So this is how Midgar works: The entire city is floating, supported by huge columns and divided in 8 zones. Each zone has a reactor.  In the center is a building so ridiculously out-of-scale that I think each window in it is the size of a normal building. I kinda get the idea though, the whole city is a big 1984 nightmare come true, and the main building is the Big Brother. Underneath the city are the slums. These are also numbered after the plates they're directly underneath so you have Sector 3 Slums, Sector 4 Slums, etc. Because Midgar has such strong and characteristic imagery, the city's been target of multiple remakes and fan models. At any rate, Jessie explains Cloud that at each checkpoint, the system's sensor check for the IDs. They're using fake IDs.     "It's like this train. It can't run anywhere except where its rails take it."Living in a city with 900 slums (Rio), I'll not deny that Midgar felt much closer to my reality than other games from that same time period. People move to the main city filled with dreams but have no place to live, so they go to the slums. The difference is that unlike Midgar, you can see them wherever you are.  The central plate.  And we arrive at our destination! Look at how bright the place is. The light bill from the slums must be enormous given that they have no sunlight.  "Cause the next one's gonna be bigger than that!" Not now, we're gonna explore the place a bit.   That's sad.   This is the same couple that was scared of us in the train. You can see they're still not very comfortable with our presence.  The train graveyard is to the right, but there's really nothing we can do there right now. There are random encounters here with random guards, panthers and sweepers for you to grind, I suppose.  We go to the left. If we try to go south we find these two very nice guards.  To the north we find a Save Point, finally. We save and talk to the guy.  Yeah that would be crazy.  That's what she said.  He invite us to look at his huge thing.  Barret clearly doesn't like that. And with that we're done for this update. NEXT TIME Old-School Friends! NPCs no one cares about! More reactors! More Love Interests! Chapter 2 - Bugs & Bytes  If you were an artist in 1997 you knew that these things were impressive. Doing 3D back then was a major pain - Not only actually modeling was slow and the real time previews were horrible - you need to remember that although these things are pre-rendered, someone was actually placing the models there in real-time. Compare that to what you could ACTUALLY do in real-time in 96-98 and you start to realize the pain. So you had a lot of limitations, but there were ways to work around them. One of them was batching an object in memory - for example, that stair needs only to have one-segment done, so that the others don't fill your memory with the same information over and over. Rendering capabilities were extremely limited. Although Pixar had just came out with a way to do better lighting techniques, they were still not widely known or understood. Radiosity - simulating indirect lighting - was the hot word and everythign was poorly optimized and slow. Slooooooooow. Did I mention slow? Hell yes, slow. A 640*480 render with 10k polygons could take hours and hours to render. Artists were very limited by render times, maybe more so than by memory or polygon limitations. Cool Music we listened to in this Chapter: Anxious Heart - An awesome moody song. One of the best tracks in my opinion. 
Elentor fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Jun 3, 2011 |
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May 30, 2011 13:27
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Holy carp, another update! Chapter 3 - Who's Bad?  We get a nice look at the meeting place. Why is there TEXAS written in it? It's ruining my immersion!!  The Sector 7 Slums. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.  The cool thing about Cloud is that you can pretty much answer almost every interaction in the game as a complete rear end in a top hat. Anyway, she just goes on and rambles about what we already know, that the reactor blew up.  They do as much as they can to make you well aware of that. Enough chit-chat, let's go to the meeting place.  The Seventh Heaven Bar.  Home of the worst criminals this world has ever seen.  A dreaded place.  A wicked place.  So this young lady with high-budget polygon breasts welcomes us to "home". I'm not sure Cloud agrees with that.   Tee-hee.  We meet Tifa. Tifa is Cloud's childhood friend, that's all we know for now.  Tifa: "When you were little you used to get into fights at the drop of a hat." Tifa: "You almost never see them here in the slums. A flower for me? Oh Cloud, you shouldn't have..." I told you, you can be an rear end in a top hat about everything.  But I'm a nice guy and give the flowers to Tifa.   Biggs: "Why don't you have one too?" Cloud: "Yeah, why not?" Biggs: "Oh!! That's more like it!!"  They could have named him Porkins instead.   And with that Barret leaves.   That's the best pinball machine ever.   I'm making Cloud a drunk in our LP and I ain't taking nos for an answer.  And we go down.  What is this on the TV? Some ad for LucasArts' game Afterlife?   Cloud: "None. I'm positive." Barret: "You sound pretty sure." Cloud: "If there was anyone from SOLDIER you wouldn't be standing here now." Barret: "Don't go thinking you so bad jes cuz you was in SOLDIER."  Barret: "But don't forget that your skinny rear end's workin' for AVALANCHE now!"     Cloud: "I don't care about Shinra or SOLDIER. But don't get me wrong." Cloud: "I don't care about AVALANCHE or the Planet for that matter!"Anyway I decide to talk a bit to the other members before going up.    Wedge: "You say you don't care but you came to talk to me." Wedge really, really reminds me of the Anime Roommate series.  I mean, he really does.  In this scene I learn that bars, drinks, beer and cowboys are all related to TEXAS. Back to the normal show:   Tifa: "The Planet is dying. Slowly but surely it's dying." Tifa: "Someone has to do something." Cloud: "So let Barret and his buddies do something about it." Tifa: "You forgot the promise, too. Remember... Cloud. It was seven years ago."      Yeah that seems to have worked out really well.   Fracking fangirls.  "Umm, if you get really famous and I'm ever in a bind... you come save me, all right?" "Whenever I'm in trouble, my hero will come and rescue me." Cloud proceeds to call Tifa a misogynist and leaves.  "All right... I promise."  If this was made today he would say "I could care less" and I would be pissed off because saying that wrong has become the norm in TV shows nowadays.  Holy poo poo he's climbing that. "Wait a sec big-time SOLDIER!"  Cloud: "This is my pay? Don't make me laugh. You got the next mission lined up? I'll do it for 3000."As you can see, Cloud is an rear end in a top hat about everything. Anyway, reluctantly they accept to pay you 2000 for it and all is good.  This is the one of the few games where these irrelevant questions have actually a purpose later on.   The more the merrier. "Before the next mission, I got somethin' I wanna ask you!" "I, uh... I don't really know how to use Materia! I'll give you that Materia you found. Just teach me how to use it!" If you choose to explain it then the game will offer you a tutorial. The cool thing about FF7 is that all tutorials are actually explained by Cloud. This is because Cloud is a badass McBadass. It's just like how in Vagrant Story your character is so badass he doesn't really level up or learn something new, he merely remembers it. Anyway we decide to not explain it to Barret because I'll do it for you (and also because I can't stand tutorials anymore).  Materia in the world of FF7 is how "Magic" works, although it's only seen as magic by the commonfolk. The scientists study it and, well, like to call it science. The concept is that Materia are these crystals of energy that can be absorbed and controlled. Much like everything else found in nature, the thing is commercialized.  If you look at Cloud's concept art or at his sword model, you'll see that his sword has two holes in it. These are two holes for Materia. That's also why he starts the game with precisely two spells - Lightning and Ice. Materia has its own Level which is calculated using AP instead of Exp. You only gain AP to the Materia you have equipped. The cool thing about Materia is that you can combine some of them. See how the two slots in Buster Sword have a link between them? That means these two Materia are combined. Unfortunately mixing two green (magic) Materia don't do anything. Materia is part of the game world and not just a random mechanic. Some materia are very common, while others are exceedingly rare. Equipping Green Materia also makes you physically weaker, as you can see.  There seems to be a commotion in the town.    Johnny: "...I'll be a better man! This is goodbye!" Johnny is Tifa and Cloud's childhood friend. As you may have guessed, he's decided to leave Midgar for good.   Aww   I mean, seriously, look at that Jacket.  Just beat it. The cool thing about Cloud is that it's justified in Game Mechanics why he's a badass - He's the most rounded up character of all, with high values in every attribute. There's a backstory for that too, but the point is his Magic attribute is far ahead of every other character we have now. Each Materia gives you +1 Magic so I put all of them on Cloud to maximize his Magic. Normally this would be far from optimal because Barret and Tifa's (specially Tifa's) physical damage sucks hard. But this is a 80's Gang, they ain't taking no materia anywhere, no sir.  They are taking...  GRENADES. Hell yes look at them sweet grenades.  We buy some Iron Bangles, which are armor pieces. There's virtually no difference between them and the Bronze Bangles but they give us one additional Materia slot. Remember that thing we found on the ground of the first reactor? That was a [Restore] Materia. Restore gives us the "Cure" Spell.  We also bought a Fire and another Lightning Materia because seems like we'll be dealing with more robots in the near future. Anyway we go to the bottom-right building in the slums because Barret mentioned something there for us.  We find our first blue (Support) Materia. Cool! Blue Materias exist to be combined with others. For example, when you combine [All] with, let's say, Lightning, your Bolt will strike every enemy on the screen. Neat uh?    Like I told you, Cloud is the one who teaches stuff.  SPOILER ALERT LADY!!  These guys just sit there flexing their muscles chillaxing like good bros. I think we're done here, so we just move to the take the train.   And with that AVALANCHE members are off to their next mission.  NEXT TIME: Reactors, for real! Drama! Cliffhangers! Awesome music! Chapter 3 - Bugs & Bytes: Tifa's Limits Tifa has a cool mechanic with her limits. Every time you gain a new limit with her and use it, she will also attack with ALL of the previous limits. Also when you use any of her limits you get a slot machine with Miss, Hit and YEAH where YEAH is a critical strike. It's fairly easy to get the timing on YEAHs once you get used to it. Because you can get criticals at will and because the damage adds up, early on you have the highest damage potential from Tifa unless you do some serious Luck Manipulation. Tifa's first limit set is also the one with lowest damage requirement needed to perform - about 40%. Later on we get an item called Hyper - Hyper reduces our chance to hit, but doubles the rate at which our limit bar fills up, so with Hyper this goes down to 20%. Because of this (and other reasons later) Tifa is an excellent character to do some custom challenges with. [All] Materia The [All] Materia has a bug or debug leftover - if you reach its maximum level, you'll be able to sell it for 1,500,000 Gil. While it's not a bug that Materia with higher AP sell for more, nothing really compares to that. 1.5M Gil is enough to make you rich for the whole entire game, even spend it frivolously. And the best thing? The All Materia is one of the easiest Materia to level up. Cool Music we listened to in this Chapter: In case you couldn't guess. Also this. 
Elentor fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Jun 3, 2011 |
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May 30, 2011 17:20
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Comrade Question posted:Aw, at first I thought you were going for the Barret romance, but then you kept being nice to Tifa. You can manipulate Tifa's affection level to you at will during a certain point. At any rate, all 4 options are still available. As much as I'd like to go for maximum gay level for Cloud, the sad truth is that Barret's date isn't all that interesting though meatbag posted:Will you be stealing better equipment when its available? I havent played this game for almost a decade, and I still remember the enemies in Midgar that you can steal better weapons and armor from Yeah, there's not much to steal in this game so I'll try to make good use of the few stuff we can get. Elentor fucked around with this message at 18:52 on May 30, 2011 |
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May 30, 2011 18:17
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sc0ttmst posted:You sir, just blew my mind. We're gonna be learning a lot from this LP, I can tell you that now! Glad you're enjoying  I also updated Chapter 3's Bits & Bytes.
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May 30, 2011 20:40
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Oxxidation posted:I thought those holes were how he kept the sword on his back. There's two bolts sticking out somewhere on the back on his uniform that'd fit pretty well. Honestly, the thing's controversial as hell. In Crisis Core we learn that he keeps the sword attached with magnets, but "apparently" Nomura stated somewhere that no one has a link to that the holes are used to hold the sword to the back so these two canon information contradict themselves. On the other hand, every character artwork shows their weapon with materia attached except Cloud (it shows the Buster Sword with empty slots). Materia are also bigger in FF7AC than we see in FF7's Artwork and fit the two holes in the weapon. Basically, the whole thing is a major clusterfuck. That can be said about the entirety of the expanded universe. When in doubt I say go with what is cooler. We know that weapons have Materia holes in it (even Tifa's gloves), and we know that the Buster Sword has two holes in it. Joey McChrist posted:I went past this part last night and I still don't understand what it's about/referencing. Anyone know what they're talking about/doing? I have no clue, I was hoping someone would tell me. Elentor fucked around with this message at 21:14 on May 30, 2011 |
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May 30, 2011 21:10
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Schwartzcough posted:Wait, so nonsensical gibberish is better than (possibly boring) world-building information? I don't understand that logic. The fact that half the people in Midgar don't make a drat bit of sense is one of the reasons that section of the game kind irritated me. For the most part the things they say make sense... they're just poorly worded. There are many things in the game that also make MUCH more sense if you have a grasp of the Japanese culture. You lose a lot of the subtleties if you don't, which is a shame. Midgar is a very well fleshed out city in that aspect. It's much more fleshed out than the rest of the FF7 world, which is kinda standard JRPG. This is more or less why I'm showing these minor conversations that a lot of people miss (Johnny's "arc" for example). So you have all these stereotypes. Cloud was the young boy from the small town who wanted to live in the big city fulfill his dreams. Back when I traveled I met a lot of friends who were like this. Johnny is the opposite - he went to the big city following his love-interest but found a harsh environment and couldn't do better than the slums so instead, he decided to move away once again. Again, it's a common story in Rio and São Paulo. Like when your group enters the train and everybody leaves. I haven't had a friend who was never robbed in the subway, so after a while you get paranoid. You look and go "oh yeah, I relate to that". The point is that some of these "interactions" make much more sense in a Japanese context. There are certain stereotypes that are much stronger there - for example, stalkers. Japanese people who post videos on YouTube/other video sites often favor wearing masks because of stalkers. To them, Internet fame is not worth the risks of losing your privacy. That scene however is completely bizarre, I have no idea why the two just drop on the floor. It might be something cultural, it might be a reference to a movie or a book, or it might be the field writer going mad. Who knows? Nidoking posted:I don't know whether you can get the All materia later or not, but I suspect not. Even so, you're missing out by not getting it early. You miss on the opportunity to build up its AP - as it gains levels, you can use the All effect more times per battle. It's still not the end of the world, since there will be more All materias later (I believe there's a shop where you can buy them), but it's the first one. I explained that
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May 30, 2011 23:18
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Phyein posted:Tifa's limit break early on typically does the most damage once you learn somersault, since you basically throw out two limit breaks in a row that do slightly less than braver or cross-slash or big shot. Although I've noticed in a recent game I started that occasionally big shot in particular deals double the damage on certain enemies. I'm guessing it's fire elemental maybe and I was hitting weak to fire enemies? Most limits are Non-Elemental, but they can do Critical, which is what's happening in your case.
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May 30, 2011 23:23
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Blastinus posted:Tifa's Limit Break, as mentioned, is either just a normal attack or a critical hit, depending on whether or not you get a green "Hit" or yellow "YEAH!" Timing is everything in that case, as a "Hit" tends to not be very impressive in terms of damage. Later limit breaks in the chain, at least so far as I can tell, also seem to have a lot less "YEAH!" slots and a lot more "Miss" slots, so unless you're good at timing them, the later ones are going to be a tad less useful. I'll explain in detail in the next Bugs & Bytes where we exploit the hell out of them in the next boss (oh noes spoiler!)
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May 30, 2011 23:31
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G Prestige posted:Regarding the references that wouldn't make sense to someone outside of Japanese culture, as this LP continues do you think you could point out some if you come across any and remember? I recently played through FF7 and I remember specific points of the game where I didn't know what the hell was happening and I just chalked it up to poor translation. I'll go in-depth in the Honey Bee Inn when we get there, the whole thing is a pretty unique moment in the game. KataraniSword posted:Aww. Here I was hoping you'd show off the one fourth-wall breaking tutorial that Cloud doesn't give himself. (Spoiled in case you DO want to show it off) I just hate tutorials urghh Elentor fucked around with this message at 07:33 on May 31, 2011 |
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May 31, 2011 07:26
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NikkolasKing posted:This is a few pages old but the bolded is interesting. As a Malice Mizer fan (Gackt's old band which I prefer to his solo work), I'm not sure who Edea resembles... Still, something I've never thought about. I think Edea resembles Mana, she also barely speaks.
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May 31, 2011 11:12
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FinalSin posted:This is really excellent, I'm loving the tidbits at the end, stuff I never knew about the game. Keep it up! Looking forward to Disc 2's shenanigans. There are lots of gay undertones in the game, including Barret, but the date itself is pretty lame compared to the rest.
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May 31, 2011 11:30
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I hope you guys loving love the Aps videos, I screw him up in ways that shouldn't be possible.
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May 31, 2011 12:30
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The Goog posted:I've had more than one fight with him aborted because the game just hangs after he uses his special attack. I always chalked it up to my disc being ten years old and literally held together with scotch tape, but maybe it's not just me? Don't worry I'll give you the vengeance you deserve.
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May 31, 2011 15:00
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Chapter 4 - In which we talk about limits I learned English by playing video-games.  When I was a kid my father bought me a Portuguese-to-English dictionary, taught me 'the', 'he', 'she' and that the word 'banana' is the same, and then it was just me and the dictionary.  That's probably why my English gets weird at times.  I also use a lot of "Yo"s.   Seriously what can I say? It's just Barret bullying the poor manager.  Now you're just being racist.  You know that TV actress Morena Baccarin, who did Anna in V?  Morena literally means "brunette", although nowadays it's almost always used to refer to people with any type of dark skin color.  Why would they say there will be more bombings? And when did they do that? There was barely a day of rest. Also isn't that guy a manager? Why is he going "to Midgar"? I'd imagine he already lives in Midgar. So many questions.  Funny thing is that morena used to refer to (usually white) people with dark hair, there were other words for dark-skinned people. This is because these other words were deemed pejorative so people started calling them morenos using the dark hair as the guideline.  Find a happy place, find a happy place, find a happy place.  Viewer's Participation - What do you think he's saying?  It's also worth noting that "white" doesn't mean caucasian in Brazil. Anyone with pale skin can be called white.  Our definition of "pale" is also much more lenient, while people here think I'm milky white I've seen americans calling me brown.  People who are in-between dark and pale are called pardos. It's not common but I've seen some people consider being called a pardo bad, they'd much rather be called white or black.  You know, I always felt that Shinra was just letting them do their own thing like they don't care.  What is it with Midgar chicks and that monitor? Is that the hip way to flirt with guys?  There was once this girl who was flirting me. She said she loved unwashed, dirty samurais.  She then told me that I looked like a Samurai   You see, I'm half-Japanese and that was her way of flirting with me.  I think I showered 5 times a day every day in the following weeks.  And no I don't own a Katana.  No poo poo, Jessie.  I like to imagine that Cloud is sitting there thinking "God drat how can these guys be so incompetent?"    You get a timer to move to the next car. It's enough time to talk to the guy on the back who's so impressed with us he gives us a Phoenix Down, despite the fact that a Phoenix Down could probably pay a rent for him in an ok place for months.   Another expensive item. Why would you give these things to these people running like crazy during an intruder alarm? Then again I suppose it makes sense, you're just scared they'll kill you if you don't give them your hi-potions. By the way a Hi-Potion is a potion that heals 500 points instead of 100.   Some rear end in a top hat takes the opportunity to rob us in the next car but he ain't takin' no poo poo from us.  Naturally it only makes sense Johnny would be in the same train as us.    I guess... not.  Look at that mustache.  So these guys are probably some of Barret's insiders and one of them betrayed him.  Sure, if you ignore the fact something blew off your cover and the whole city already knows you're planning to blow off another reactor and the security dept. knows now which reactor, then I suppose everything's going great. If you get caught by the timer you have to jump off earlier. The whole place is a series of tunnels exactly like this one. This is also the point where the enemies start to become slightly less mind-numbingly easy.  Sakaguchi must love Star Wars.  You see, this is a very carefully elaborate euphemism for anal sex.  Ethers restore MP, but spells cost is so negligent that I'll be also selling those.  Flying seahorses.  Truth be told putting Lightning-All in Barret's armgun is an accident waiting to happen.  This is one of the most awesome places in the game, you're basically standing in floating platforms between the reactor and the city 50 meters/15 feet below.  Sometimes I feel like making a late 90's J-RPG style game. I wonder if there would be a public for that. I also wonder how long it would take to make.  The backgrounds could be like the ones in Tales of Monkey Island.  Or would you guys prefer pre-rendered backgrounds for maximum retro?  Also, native resolution of 320*240 or 640*480?  gently caress you seahorses, you guys pissed me off in Sonic 2.  We're leveling up more than I wanted to.  A Save-Point, and that item on the ground is a tent.  So what was their job exactly? How did they arrive here before us? And why?  The reactor map is the same, but under a different color scheme. There are other subtle changes too.  Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.  That tube for example isn't broke. The place is a little more clean.  The enemies are weird, you basically have these green clock-robots and red panthers walking around a reactor.  Seriously haven't they realized how dangerous it is to hire a psychotic guy who's worked for your enemies to plant bombs?  Holy crap, flashback... maybe?     Tifa then grabs the giant sword on the ground and runs off. Truth be told, that scene is chilling the first time you see because you're really not expecting any of that.  Well, we plant the drat bomb and surprisingly, nothing comes out. You know, that's a bit suspicious. We go back, nothing really exciting happens on the way.  In case you haven't realized that's the first screen of the first reactor rotated 180 degrees.  This is one of the stupidest security devices I've ever seen, but on the other hand it's so stupid no one would guess that that's the correct procedure.  A Save Point just before the exit hmm WHAT COULD THIS MEAN?  It means getting all of our limits ready, that's what it means.  I think this scene could use some depth-of-field. Luckily for you I just made this fantastic program called Next-Genifier which automatically turns any old game in a next-gen product ready for the newest platforms:  I think this is obviously the vision that the developers intended but lacked technology in the 90's etc.  Oh crap.  That's right folks, no one saw it coming.    Cloud: "Long time no see." President Shinra: "...Long time no see? Oh... you." President Shinra: "You're the one who quit SOLDIER and joined AVALANCHE. Tell me, traitor... what was your name?"  President Shinra: "Unless you become another Sephiroth." President Shinra: "Yes, Sephiroth... He was brilliant. Perhaps too brilliant..."   Barret argues like a WoW Player.   President Shinra: "But I've made arrangements for a playmate for you all."  Hell yes BOSS FIGHT!!   Look I'm gonna be honest with you, Air Buster is the biggest joke in the game. As far as fights go, Air Buster is the lowest point. Luckily it can only go up from here.  Here's a bit of a cool info: Enemies take more damage from behind, but that damage multiplier isn't fixed. Usually they take 2x more, but in the case of Air Buster they changed his attributes so that he takes 5x. Because of that, the fact there's ALWAYS someone behind him (We're surrounding him after all) and the fact he has just 1200 HP, Air Buster is pretty much the easiest boss in the game. Naturally there's only one real way to kill him like a pro:  Grenades are just so good, so fun and so underused. They also fit the theme of the gang. But seriously now, I'm not gonna waste my grenades on him. That was just to show off the boss fight and the bunch of useless crap he does so you guys can have a nice grasp of what you're (not) missing. We're gonna screw him up real good.  That was fun, but that's not what I'm talking about. Air Buster manages to damage me with his counter and this is preposterous. "But Elentor", you say, "What else can you do? You're already two-shotting him in one turn, but he'll counter you and hurt you anyway. That's it, that's the best you can do." Oh ye of little faith.  Hahahahahaha now we're talking. You see, most limits are pretty simple. They're just your normal attacks dealing non-elemental damage and maximum hit chance, but with a damage multiplier on top. Big Shot deals 3.25x the normal damage Barret would. But Limit Breaks can also perform criticals. And every multiplier in the game stack. Now remember that I said Air Buster takes 5 times the damage from behind? So with simple math, (5)*(2) = (10) which means a critical to his back will do 10 times damage, or in this case, 32.5 times the damage a normal attack would. And you always start with the bar full because you're ambushing him, and Barret has always the first action, and Barret is always behind him. The result is that Air Buster is the only boss that you can accidentally one-shot in the game, even if you didn't do any grind whatsoever. BOSSES WHO'VE MANAGED TO EXECUTE THEIR GIMMICK BEFORE WE KILL THEM SO FAR: 0/2   What the  We beat him so hard that his explosion blew up the place.  WELL THANK YOU BARRET.  "Nope, not a drat thing."Of course he can't, if Cloud dies he doesn't need to pay his money.  I dunno Tifa, things are looking pretty grim right now.  Of course I'll be, what is that, a 150 feet fall?  Yeah man I'm just like gonna die.     Well that was a sad death. Also: CLIFFHANGERS AVALANCHE 2 x SHINRA 1 NEXT TIME: A new protagonist! Materia! Love Interests! Naming conventions! Today's update was too big so no Bugs & Bytes. Elentor fucked around with this message at 22:12 on May 31, 2011 |
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May 31, 2011 15:26
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Landwhale posted:I still don't know what in the world Jessie meant by her making Cloud's ID special ("put my heart into making it") made it trigger the alarm. Like, did she code CLOUD & JESSIE 4EVER into it instead of the right script? Any number of Sonic & Tails horrible fanarts come to my mind.
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May 31, 2011 16:10
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Kaboom Dragoon posted:I can understand, a large part of the beginning is basically 'charge forward firing like a maniac' until you unlock more weapon options. I haven't seen anything too painful so far though. Truth be told, I've found it fairly funny, all things considered. Honestly, I don't get why the entire country loves Gackt so much. It's the kind of thing that blows my mind. Mazed posted:Why, after 15 years, does Tifa Lockhart still generate metric tons of salacious fan art? I think she just became an iconic game character by now in that aspect, much like Morrigan from Darkstalkers. It's kinda ironic because in the game she's the nice girl and the "naughty girl" is now seen as a Disney fairytale princess. Crowetron posted:I like the little doodle on the boss card, Elentor Thanks  Mega64 posted:I'm loving the style of this LP. Keep it up! In my opinion FF7 is a very good game to play and slowly enjoy the ride, even if the ride is terribly translated. The "great scheme of things" of the game is nice the first time you play though, but it's not what I like the most. Again, just like Star Ocean 2. I'm just kidding, the plot of Star Ocean 2 sucks. iTrust posted:Immediately after TWD finished up Final Fantasy 9, you come roaring in here providing a new source of FF related reading material. What a dude you are. I'm glad you're enjoying. Surprisingly, my favorite opening cinematic is FF8's. Actually, my favorite FF is the first disc of FF8. To me it just goes downhill from there and while I do enjoy the game, it's not in my top 3 Final Fantasies. Lance Streetman posted:Looking forward to this LP, and looking forward to seeing how much of a train wreck this thread will become. Ok, I'll bite this. He has very valid points. He's specially right in saying that all the existing content is pretty much useless should they choose to do a full remake. But the main issue is that we're talking about Square-Enix here. He talks too much about technicalities that are problematic to amateur or indie companies, but that should not be a huge issue to major companies. For example - Lip Syncing. There are engines that do that in real-time and that requires almost no effort on your part. Lip Syncing is one of the things that have been beaten to death in the past decade because it was so painful that lots of companies focused on developing programs to automate it. But it's right that Square-Enyx is not a company that is in any way prepared to do these things. These are the guys who spent over 6 years on FF13 and still cut over half of the stuff they had planned. Allow me to put something out of the way here: As of the past years, SE is a company that has had a really, really poor project management. For all it's worth, Blizzard could have said the same about Starcraft 2. And some people think it was indeed a piss-poor decision to make the game, but as they say - "we don't care about the budget". Company has a shitload of money, but they made a shitload of money by doing the right decisions. I think there are two big issues here: The first is what he and what S-E sees as a remake. I pointed this on Cafe's thread that Nintendo's strategy with the Wii was great because they're not loving retarded. There's no point in spending more than you have to. You don't have to make FF7's remake end up being the prettiest game ever witnessed by a human being. Again with Blizzard, they did one of the most successful MMOs and the whole thing never looked really good technically because it was drat expensive based on numbers already, but it had impeccable Art Direction. You can say the same about every "Game of the Year" they did which is, well, about everything. Diablo 2 was by no means the best game of its age, nor was SC1, or Warcraft 2, etc. Blizzard, Nintendo, these are companies that know that. They do spend millions in their titles, but they know how to spend the money. And everybody with half a brain predicted many years ago that production cost would go up to extreme levels. And what happened? We now have an explosion of Indie Games, networks dedicated entirely to them supported by the biggest companies, a gigantic market for mobile casual games and Nintendo owning its generation with the weakest console. Games that cost anywhere from 5k to 1M to make in an age where the major companies spend dozens, hundreds of millions in a single game. Of course if you don't learn ANYTHING from that, if you don't learn anything from the many game companies collapsing, if you don't learn from history and if you don't learn from the development hell that FF13 was, a remake of FF7 is impossible. If you're not retarded, a remake of FF7, FF8, FF9 or whatever is well within reason. So we have these technical aspects. "Oh poo poo now you have to model Midgar so the player can see how expensive is that gonna be uh uh" and this is the very mindset that has hosed up a lot of companies before they realized they should spend more money on level design than graphics. You are centering the game around the graphics instead of the gameplay. You don't have to do things that are not necessary and you definitely don't have to do them the most expensive way. The second problem is that I don't really think S-E knows what made the game so successful in the first place, so even if a remake was made, it'd probably feature the wrong things at the wrong moments. And S-E is a company that is very intolerant of fan-made projects, so... At any rate, all this is moot, because when people think of a FF7 remake they automatically assume that it's gonna be another game that costs 20k dollars a model and makes the cost of the new Gran Turismo look like a joke. And the irony is that, like many people in this thread pointed out, a remake of FF7 would sell even if made with low standards. Actually I'd much prefer a remake of FF7 that is just FF7 HD than a full-fledged FF13-like game with horrible VA. FinalSin posted:Elentor, can you read Japanese as well? You mentioned going back to check translations. I know enough Japanese to play through some games but I don't have the Japanese version of FF7 or Script I'm also by no means an expert and Japanese is not the language I focus on learning. George posted:I think you got feet and meters swapped. You're right, I have all these values in my head but meters to feet is something I never really mastered because I never really have to think about it.
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May 31, 2011 18:26
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The White Dragon posted:Also this, I think this here is really interesting. I did a couple small undergrad-style case studies on language acquisition through video games in Pedagogical Grammar and TESOL courses, and while it's pretty cool stuff, when the time comes, it's waaaaaay too nerdy to do my grad dissertation on. Man be glad you never saw my college stuff, I think they were all about games. But then again 1/3 of my class was there because they wanted to do games. I learned English through Genesis -> PS -> Internet later on. My English classes in school were non-existent. Spanish is a given to everyone here though, because of the similarities between Spanish and Portuguese. We learn what is different and assume the rest is the same (hint: It's NEVER THE SAME). OatmealRaisin posted:Yeah, starting basically from scratch is a huge hurdle towards a remake, but every now and then it felt like the author of the article was just saying, "Guys, making games is hard." Spoiler tag this poo poo yo. Names are a very delicate issue when you're talking about FFVII. In FF7EU's defense, Barret was a much worse stereotype back then. Elentor fucked around with this message at 19:38 on May 31, 2011 |
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May 31, 2011 19:32
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whitehelm posted:Actually it's 180 degrees. Yeah, my mistake about the degrees. Apparently, I'm retarded. Cyphoderus posted:Hey what's up Rio de Janeiro learned-English-through-videogames buddy Hey buddy, high five. And yeah understanding Spanish from a native speaker is considerably harder than speaking, reading and writing D: Elentor fucked around with this message at 22:21 on May 31, 2011 |
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May 31, 2011 22:10
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Azure_Horizon posted:how men are allowed to be sexually transgressive (including going homo) but women are not and are pure and innocent and all this stuff I can speak only for Rio: Almost every woman I know is bisexual "for fun" and they're very open about that and no one cares, hell not even them. I have a friend who's 26 whose mother just bought her a dildo because she's been "datin too many chicks lately". There are lesbian couples in my building, no one cares and they have their normal jobs even though one of them fits every dyke stereotype you can conceive. There are lesbian couples in pop culture and except for the conservative old people they're well accepted, specially among the younger generations. To quote a lesbian friend of mine "we can kiss in public and no one will find it disgusting". I think gay couples have it a bit harder but, again, with one exception I have never seen a gay man or woman complaining. There are gays and lesbians everywhere and bis are by no means a minority in this city, mind that. It is HIGHLY immoral and illegal to show any kind of disrespect towards the sexual orientation of others. In the last course I was attending there was a gay and a lesbian teacher, both very open about that. No one made jokes about it, no one talked about it, and the woman was a class favorite. She was much older than us and she happened to complain a bit about people being disrespectful back then, but the current generation have it much easier. One of the most beloved singers was a lesbian called Cássia Eller. When she died and her wife didn't get custody of her son, there was a loving public outcry about it. It was major. Today gays/lesbians have the same marriage rights as heterosexual people. As for women expected to being pure and innocent, that's bullcrap. Maybe it wasn't 40 years ago, but I don't know anyone who expects women or men to be pure and innocent here. Maybe their grandparents? I did high school in a nun school and I would hear the girls counting on Monday how many guys they had kissed in the weekend - 10, 20, 30, and during events called 'micaretas' that number would go as high as 100, God knows what protected those people from herpes. Point is that anyone who didn't do that was the exception, not the rule, and you grow up used to that. These are the people - mind that - who are more or less shocked by today's youth and who are conservative by today's standards. There was a law some time ago that forced public schools to distribute condoms around because pregnancy was getting crazy common. During carnival it's impossible not to get laid unless you're trying really hard, I don't even like or go to the events and there was two ladies flirting with me, and since I was single I ended up having a nice time with one of them. Spending your carnival with just one partner is being more than conservative. Even if you want a lot of privacy you can go to a swing club, or to one of those raves with 'dark rooms' where you can pick up someone random and go there have sex. Talking of Dark Rooms, hell, there was this party in São Paulo called 'Pirigóticas'. I'm not sure if you got it from the name, but it's a goth party. Free pass to women if they are not wearing panties, and the dancefloor was ALSO the dark room, so you could go there to dance or to have goth sex... all in the same place. The whole place is still nothing compared to the funk parties in Rio, mind that. Honestly, as far as sexual freedom go, I'm not sure what would constitute as more free than that. I simply don't know a single person who holds those beliefs (that women are expected to be pure and innocent), at least not in Rio. As long as the person is nice and likes you, that's all that matters. Culture varies greatly from region to region, state to state, mind that. I'm pretty sure the folk in the far north and south are more conservative, but I honestly have no idea how much is that. I also can't say for everyone in Rio, I'm saying these things based on what I've seen, and the experiences of the people I know. As for sexually transgressive, I think it depends on what you consider sexually transgressive. There's a mind-numbingly high amount of transvestites in Rio. They're extremely common but by no means they're well accepted in society. But this talk is reserved to the Wall Mart Bugs & Bytes. Elentor fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Jun 1, 2011 |
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Jun 1, 2011 02:25
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I'm not sure why someone would say "nobody" when the majority of the people in this forums seems to love FFIX's soundtrack above others.
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Jun 1, 2011 09:34
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Fedule posted:VIII: It's like a torturer's favourite victim, only not as morally reprehensible because it's only a videogame  Bonsai Superstar posted:Thank you. I never got the passionate FFX hate, or the people who act like it's an inarguable fact the game sucked. Sure the story is mostly really linear, but there's a story based reason, the characters are mostly interesting, the world feels like it has a history, and I thought the sphere grid was fun. I mainly judge FFs on battle systems, so X and VII were my favorites. XI wasn't as funfor me to play. I hated 8's story, but LOVED the system. I love FFX. I spent more time on FFX than on FFVII and FFVIII altogether. FFX is also a great game to try to break, you just have so many tools, so many options, it's delightful George posted:Well, the most common comment I hear about it is "I guess it was okay. I don't really remember any of the tracks, so that should tell you something." To be fair FFX doesn't have much love, at least in this forum I always see people automatically assume FFX is one of the bad ones. The reason I like FFX is that, to me, it felt like a good progression to FFs. They were trying radically new things between 6 and 9. In 6 you had this crazy steampunk setting. In 8 you had... well, you could rent cars, the game scaled with your level, you had these non-SD characters. In 9 you had a huge tribute to the series and the crystal as a plot device again. In 10 you had this world that was both futuristic and medieval, and as you progressed back towards the futuristic things got progressively crazier. There was no world map and it was tied to the plot. Everything in the mechanics except that friggin Chocobo Race was somehow tied to the plot, as it always is. I think FFX is to the FFs like SA2 is to the sonic series. It's right there in the middle of these decisions that made Sega take off some of the titles to "increase the franchise's value". The poor game just wants some love quote:I do love that we've all done the inevitable rundowns of our favorite parts of the series and it hasn't turned into full-blown arguments, though. I think Elentor should get a Nobel Peace Prize or something. Yeah, given past indication I'm surprised we're in Page 7 and the only probations were for spoilers. We're all talking about Final Fantasies like civilized people here. Also we don't talk about FFXII here, the game never existed. Move along.
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Jun 1, 2011 11:38
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Screaming Idiot posted:Sure, its mechanics lent it to being breakable in so many ways... but why would you want to? I think it's because FFX eventually assumes that the player IS gonna try to break it and puts a shitload of extra-hard bosses for you to fight. I mean, the Monster Arena and the Dark Aeons are pretty much "oh you think the Weapons are easy? WELL gently caress YOU FANS." The Dark Aeon fights pretty much assume you have maxed status so it's pretty challenging trying to do a low-level run of them.
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Jun 1, 2011 12:57
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What would you guys want/expect/wish from a modern-day RPG?
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Jun 1, 2011 17:01
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Window Color I don't have any choice here, do I? The winner is Rainbow~~ which I'll proudly display after the next boss when the new protagonist appears and the game becomes a crossover with Planescape: Torment. Oh no, spoilers! I'm serious about the boss, though, but after that we'll display all the gay pride that our protagonists can muster. You go girls! ------------------------------------------------- Barret's censorship Winner: "Bollocks!! You lucky bugger!" by Namtab. I love English jokes. I also love jokes about Canadian accent even though I find it sexy. And no you guys are not ever hearing my accent. Other entries: "Crackers!! You lucky dog!" Captain Bravo watches one too many straight-to-vhs movies. "Zounds!! You lucky clodpole!" idonotlikepeas would like to see the cloudpole, am I right? "Congratulations! You lucky contestant, welcome to the Money Metro!" Lumberjack Bonanza shows what is Midgar's version of Internet Ads - People saying you're the 100,000,000th passenger on the train. "Zambozay, my brain musta' been eatin' a sandwich! You lucky mango!" I checked George's Post History and didn't see anything in the TCC. I left disappointed. "Gently caress! You lucky rear end in a top hat!" Sudonim thinks FF7 would be a much better game if it was localized to the SA Forums. I agree. So congratulations, Namtab! You're scoring 1000 points. Hope you like 'Whose Line Is It Anyway?'
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Jun 1, 2011 17:59
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Guys, guys. Update tomorrow.
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Jun 1, 2011 21:18
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I hope you guys are aware that I'll incorporate this whole FF6 talk in a future update.
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Jun 1, 2011 21:48
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AndwhatIseeisme posted:Going back to FF7 discussion, are you going to be getting all the enemy skills in the game? Or do you consider them too broken to really use much? Not that this game is hard to begin with, but I had personally forgotten how much beta in particular destroys the early game. I'm getting them for maximum breakage. I'm trying to break the game in entertaining ways though, but the more tools I have to do that, the better.
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Jun 1, 2011 22:58
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rudecyrus posted:So, Elentor, will you attempt to defeat the two superbosses, or is that too much of a hassle? It's not really a hassle as much as that ancient forest sidequest 
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Jun 2, 2011 00:47
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Azure_Horizon posted:Guh. That whole place seems almost not even worth it half the time. Me too. And I don't even fool myself with the whole "well it can't be that bad". It's always that bad. Always.
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Jun 2, 2011 01:04
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FF8 discussion, I don't want this to turn into a bad thread Urcinius posted:What's the point. All the materia you need is morph. In the very first town it becomes available is also a monster that, when morphed, gives you Power Sources. You can complete the rest of the game rolling 9s on your physical attacks easy peasy. The point is that like I already said I'm going for entertaining value here. Seeing me one-shot every boss until the end of the game doing 9999 wouldn't qualify as entertaining unless it's some unique interesting exploit almost no one knows about. I mean it's already hard as hell thinking of ways to make the boss fights fun to watch even if I don't cheese. Weird BIAS posted:Nice job so far Elentor! I'm pretty excited about this thread since it's a game I've put way too many hours into. Thanks. King of the Cosmos posted:I have to agree with you on this point. There's been a lot of speculation and reviewing of the game over the years, but you are right: Most people miss the gradual changes the characters go through. Yeah I'm gonna show all the Enemy Skills, unless I forget some in which case I'm not, but that's life. Enemy Skills are great fun. Anyway what would you guys want for the next Bugs & Bytes? I'm thinking about talking about Mods.
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Jun 2, 2011 11:01
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The White Dragon posted:Mods is interesting, fo' sho'. I'm not sure what you mean by only show up on Cloud and Barret. You mean on the field maps? Well, Cloud is the protagonist and the sword is a huge part of his character design. In the cover, you see more of the sword than him, in the main menu you just see the sword, etc. As for Barret, you don't have a choice here, do you? Half of his arm is the gun. If you mean why we only see their Initial Equip on the scripted scenes and field maps instead of whatever weapon you have, there are two reasons: 1) The models are different, you'd have to make a lower-than-low-poly version of the weapons and that would take unnecessary time. This is not the main reason though. 2) It's a narrative device. Buster Sword and Gatling Gun are part of their concepts as a whole. The Buster Sword is as part of Cloud as his hair and his clothes. It contrasts directly with the weapon the villain uses. It shows that he's stronger than a normal human is supposed to be from the first moment you see him. All these subtleties would be lost if, say, they displayed instead that weapon with a katana graphic that you can get just because it's equipped. And yeah the reason you can't sell them is because they're iconic. You're supposed to have the Buster Sword from the beginning to the end. FF7AC deals with that, even though Cloud has moved on to different weapons, he still cherishes the Buster Sword as it was part of his personality, so it would make no sense to randomly sell it. Anyway I'll do the next B&B about Rio and the one after about Mods. Elentor fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Jun 2, 2011 |
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Jun 2, 2011 12:36
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