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the nifelheim dungeon in chapter 13 is so loooong. why even have the hidey spots when the magic ring makes you invincible
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Apr 6, 2019 01:12
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Relin posted:the nifelheim dungeon in chapter 13 is so loooong. why even have the hidey spots when the magic ring makes you invincible It used to be an underpowered as hell weapon, and that was a stealth section. But over time they've buffed it so much that being left with only the ring and no friends is actually a step up.
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Apr 6, 2019 02:41
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Just finished up Episode Laundry Basket and it was good! Check it out. Couple bucks off for PC at GMG if you're signed in, too. Heads up you don't have to do all the beacon things before it prompts you to keep going but I'd go ahead and do them cause the whole thing is pretty short; wish I woulda done them just for more playing time without having to load up a save.
teh_Broseph fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Apr 6, 2019 |
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Apr 6, 2019 02:58
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EvilTaytoMan posted:I seem to recall watching a video of an artist working on XV taking pictures of a rock and then rendering them in 3D. It did seem like a lot of effort for a rock but I don't know if it took them 3 days to do. The problem from what I remember is that the dude was given the task, "make the rock" and then was never given a follow up task so he just kept on working on the rock.
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Apr 7, 2019 00:32
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I don’t remember if I posted this earlier but after suffering the DS and mobile ports and remakes I can definitively say FFIV for the PSP is the best version of the game there will ever be.
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Apr 7, 2019 04:55
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Be Depressive posted:I don’t remember if I posted this earlier but after suffering the DS and mobile ports and remakes I can definitively say FFIV for the PSP is the best version of the game there will ever be. Yeah PSP IV is great without any of the slowdown issues the GBA got. I still like the DS/IOS/PC version, but treat it as a something like Master Quest for Ocarina of Time.
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Apr 7, 2019 05:04
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I thought the new animations took away from the drama, and whatever enhancements I have seen on the PSP were really good. For me it seems like the best way to play the series is 1-4 on PSP then 5 and 6 on GBA.
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Apr 7, 2019 05:21
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Be Depressive posted:I thought the new animations took away from the drama, and whatever enhancements I have seen on the PSP were really good. For me it seems like the best way to play the series is 1-4 on PSP then 5 and 6 on GBA. Yeah, even through SNES FFV with GBA script is a strong contender. FFVI on GBA is great, but needs a few romhacks to fix issues it has like music and coloring.
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Apr 7, 2019 05:38
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Captain Hotbutt posted:Is there any Longform Dissection Article Of Importance like that recent Kotaku Anthem piece, but for anything Square Enix has done? No, but here's essentially the skinny of it. - Square's project management has been in the lovely since about... oh... FF6? Even back then there were people commenting that FF was essentially 10 pounds of incomplete ideas crammed into a 5 pound bag. -Square's major production issues with delays start's with... I was say... FF12? That's the most prolific of a game taking far longer to come out than it should have and having 3 directors. -Square decides when branching into the next gen of gaming to do the Fancy latin word group. 3 games, all sharing the same mythology, but in vastly different worlds. These games are FFXIII (Main, Toriyama), FFvXIII (Side, Nomura), and AgitoXIII (Tabata). -FFXIII would essentially finish a complete dev cycle, but had sunk so much money into costs and development, and essentially left so much on the cutting room floor, that it was a financial loss for the company. XIII-2 and Lightning Returns would be made in an attempt to recoup the money. -AgitoXIII would go through its own production hell, eventually being renamed to Type-0 and being released on the PSP. Part of the issue here is that Crisis Core began development with roughly the same team. -vXIII is happening, at the same time, Nomura's doing a crapload of other work, but things are slowly trudging along. -XIV happens. -Oh poo poo. Oh gently caress. -XIV 1.0 is a loving trainwreck monster that so thoroughly drives a corkscrew into the company both via reputation and financial loss it drives Square Enix's stock into actual, literal garbage. -XIV now needs to be remade, simultaneously 1.0 needs to be maintained. -Every other project at Square essentially becomes moot until A Realm Reborn can launch in 2012-2013. This is a 2 year gap in Square Enix that accounts for essentially 2 years of death for the company as a developer.    I could keep posting images, but the basic point is in this gap, Square Enix did not develop anything that wasn't a handheld game. -Some loving genius, because we have a tonne of those, thinks that Nomura isn't busy enough, and thus also assigns him as the lead dev of the FF7 remake. They also publically announce Kingdom Hearts 3, which he is also the head of. -Due to Tabata's completion of Type-0 (Note, the release window for this game was from 2006 to 2011. For what was originally pitched as a mobile phone game) and previous experience working with Nomura (Type-0, Coded, 3rd Birthday but we don't talk about that one.) He was brought on as the director. -Nomura goes from assisting the project to being removed from the project to focus on his other two Triple A projects. -Tabata is given the unenviable task of having to essentially create the game from scratch again and get it ready for a 2015 release. (At this point, this is 3 years from the end of the XIV hellcycle) Despite all these issues, in the end, it worked out for Square. A Realm Reborn became the franchises saviour, gently caress, the COMPANY's saviour. FFXV made enough bank to make up for the sunken development costs. So this is not an Anthem situation. Anthem's hosed up development lead to a monstrously horrible position for Bioware from basically every existing angle. XV is... the product of what was essentially an internal collapse at Square Enix. That said, they still haven't learned their loving lesson. Nomura is still torn between working on KH3 and FF7RE even when loving all common sense says that you don't split a director between two major Triple-A releases. Tabata leaving the company to pursue his own independent development has cost them I think 30 billion yen? It was some stupidly high number since they had no one to replace him on the as of yet unnamed project they'll never release. I left out a whole lot of stuff of Crystal Tools and Luminous and all the other loving engine nonsense that Square tried to do, because while a big part of the sunken development costs, delays in dev time, and it simply NOT working like Square intended, it's mostly there to explain why it took so long even when there wasn't the shadow of XIV or busy issues. Where are they now? Well, Toriyama is working on Final Fantasy Mobius, which he appears to have been consigned to. Tabata, as I said, left Square Enix to pursue independent development they have yet to announce a game. And Nomura? Still more busy than god. He's doing the KH3 DLC, the FF7 Remake, and whatever other project they throw at him.
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Apr 7, 2019 05:58
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Onmi posted:No, but here's essentially the skinny of it. Everything else in this post is fine, but as far as I read into the older FF games development, I thought things seemed fine enough up till FF7? FF7 had things much differently because of the switch to 3D production and the large amounts of money being thrown around in a short time frame, but otherwise wasn't a mess as I could tell. I thought it was 8 where I started hearing there was bad project management going around.
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Apr 7, 2019 16:14
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Ventana posted:Everything else in this post is fine, but as far as I read into the older FF games development, I thought things seemed fine enough up till FF7? FF7 had things much differently because of the switch to 3D production and the large amounts of money being thrown around in a short time frame, but otherwise wasn't a mess as I could tell. I thought it was 8 where I started hearing there was bad project management going around. I say 6, 1 because FF6 has Nobuo Uematsu say that quote "FF is a collection of ideas crammed into an incomplete experience." And that could be... his own personal feeling. But the other reason I have to say this, is actually Secret of Mana. Because Secret of Mana is actually like... 3 games. One of those being Chrono Trigger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY92aPBM0ss
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Apr 7, 2019 16:17
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Onmi posted:No, but here's essentially the skinny of it. You said all of this without mentioning Spirits Within, a gently caress up so severe it literally destroyed Squaresoft.
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Apr 7, 2019 16:41
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Why did Spirits Within bomb so hard it left a crater in Squaresoft HQ, anyway?
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Apr 7, 2019 16:49
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Pureauthor posted:Why did Spirits Within bomb so hard it left a crater in Squaresoft HQ, anyway? the 90s didn't have enough mainstream anime support. even Roger Ebert liked Spirits Within
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Apr 7, 2019 16:54
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Pureauthor posted:Why did Spirits Within bomb so hard it left a crater in Squaresoft HQ, anyway? It was a garbage movie that they spent a fortune making.
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Apr 7, 2019 16:55
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Pureauthor posted:Why did Spirits Within bomb so hard it left a crater in Squaresoft HQ, anyway? It wasn't a great movie, it was bad timing in terms of audience outside of Japan, both of the first two things combined with it being ludicrously expensive for the time.
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Apr 7, 2019 16:57
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Apr 7, 2019 17:03
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About to start FF2 for the first time and I understand it’s kinda bad?
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Apr 7, 2019 18:32
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It's a very ambitious game that did not pan out
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Apr 7, 2019 18:38
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sponges posted:About to start FF2 for the first time and I understand it’s kinda bad? It's a huge kick in the junk after FF1 was one of the most traditional RPGs ever made. Everything is really different.
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Apr 7, 2019 18:49
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Red Red Blue posted:It's a very ambitious game that did not pan out What’s bad about it? I’m going to power through it regardless but I kinda want to know what I’m in for.
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Apr 7, 2019 18:51
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The leveling method is certainly something. What the emperor does is kind of awesome in a laughable kind of way. The characters are bland, but its an NES game, so whatever. Nobody remembers the guest characters except for a single reference in ff9. I can't remember anything interesting about the dungeons, but once again its an nes game. Basically its a bit bland other than one twist which is dumb but also awesome, but playable. lobster22221 fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Apr 7, 2019 |
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Apr 7, 2019 18:52
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sponges posted:About to start FF2 for the first time and I understand it’s kinda bad?
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Apr 7, 2019 18:53
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Pureauthor posted:Why did Spirits Within bomb so hard it left a crater in Squaresoft HQ, anyway? Man I should watch it again as an adult, that sounds entirely my jam these days.
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Apr 7, 2019 19:12
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It's weird that 3DS didn't get as much Final Fantasy titles on it as the DS did. (Yeah, I know the Bravely games exist. I love them, but that's not the point.) I was hoping that we'd get a V and VI remake in the vein of the III and IV DS remakes, but I guess lovely phone cash grabs were faster and more profitable. I always thought a VI remake in an art style that fully realizes Yoshitaka Amano's work would be beautiful.
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Apr 7, 2019 19:22
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Pureauthor posted:Why did Spirits Within bomb so hard it left a crater in Squaresoft HQ, anyway? It was a little too niche at the time, I think. Even my weeaboo high-school friends who worked four part-time jobs just to get imports they could barely understand found it bland and went out of a "brand loyalty" thing, rather than any actual interest. Plus it was up against the surprise success of the first Fast and Furious and the first Legally Blonde.
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Apr 7, 2019 19:32
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The 3DS got the best game in the series though.
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Apr 7, 2019 19:33
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sponges posted:What’s bad about it? I’m going to power through it regardless but I kinda want to know what I’m in for. It tried a lot of new, different things and didn't quite stick the landing. The main thing is that there's no character experience or levels, instead you have experience and levels for stats, weapon skills, and spells. You gain experience for these by using them, so attacking with a sword gives you sword XP. The overall system is fine and actually pretty interesting for a late 80s RPG, but there are some pretty big flaws: -The experience curve for weapon skills and spells is way too high. It can take up to 100 battles to get a skill up, and if you're fighting enemies that are too weak you don't get any XP at all. This was improved in the GBA and later versions. -You have to take damage to gain HP XP. If you play the game normally, you won't have enough HP to survive a lot of late game attacks. To get enough you have to actually attack your own characters in battle. This was also improved in later versions - you just get an HP up every 10 battles or so. -Evasion is highly overvalued. Lots of late game enemies have dangerous status effects attached to their main attacks, and the only way to avoid these is with evasion. Some enemies have drain attacks that do percentile damage which ignore armor. -Conversely, armor is nearly useless and even detrimental. It lowers evasion, and also makes magic less effective (the game doesn't tell you this at all). You basically have to have your characters running around naked for the majority of the game, until you get armor with stat boosts or resistances. -Instant death spells are way overpowered, particularly Toad. A character with a decently leveled Toad spell can OHKO nearly every enemy in the game (and literally every one with a specific glitch). I think it's still a decent game, but definitely play the GBA or later versions if you actually want to have fun.
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Apr 7, 2019 19:51
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Onmi posted:No, but here's essentially the skinny of it..... This was handy, thank you! I was a very tiny bit player for a couple post-production companies, and we would absolutely feel the crunch because of problems like those brought up in the Anthem article or from what you described in your post, for basically every project/film/whatever we were on. This is still an enormous industry problem for movies and video games - obviously, if people are working 100 hour weeks for Red Dead 2 and Anthem, etc. - and it seems like the video game companies are very very very slowly learning from their mistakes for their own reasons. Square Enix is only coming around because they were on the brink, and hit a lucky patch with FFXIV, as you described. Bioware has probably hired about 100 consultants and PR firms and HR whatevers to try and get their poo poo together, but that's only because things leaked.
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Apr 7, 2019 19:53
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sponges posted:What’s bad about it? I’m going to power through it regardless but I kinda want to know what I’m in for. It has some uh questionable design choices (in a dungeon, you come across 4 doors in a row next to each other. one of them leads on to the rest of the dungeon, the others lead to freaking monster closets) oh also don't forget the very limited inventory space that only gets smaller as you acquire key items that you can't drop
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Apr 7, 2019 19:53
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sponges posted:What’s bad about it? I’m going to power through it regardless but I kinda want to know what I’m in for. Final Fantasy 2 was the first time Square decided that, while they COULD just update FF1 and make bank off it again, they'd rather throw the baby out with the bathwater and experiment (A mindset I think helped the series survive, even though Dragon Quest is just as alive for essentially keeping to the same formula). So, have you ever played a SaGa game? If not, then the simple thing to explain is that rather than a level, each stat and weapon type has a level in FF2. In theory, this lets you build a party how you want and play the game in true custom fashion. In practice, this is bullshit, because the way you raise stats is stupid. Weapons are simple enough, hit enemy with weapons, but how about evasion, well you gotta dodge for that, how do you dodge? Well you can use a shield, but that's still RNG. But evasion raises with shield levels. Then it becomes "So how many swings does it take to level again?" And that's not getting into the sheer malarky of HP and MP. To raise these stats, you have to start the battle with full HP and MP and end with low HP and MP If the difference was enough, you'll gain HP = to Stamina and MP = to Magic. And then there's the loving magic system. So, all that levelling nonsense? Yeah, every SPELL has the same level requirements. Starting at 1 MP and level 1, to a cap of 16. This leads to spells like Esuna not being able to loving DO what you want Esuna to do until level 5 or 6. But status effects aren't so common that you will level it naturally. How do you level it then? Cast it uselessly in combat! This leads to many spells like Flare and Holy just feeling... pointless because you get them late in the game, but they come at level 1 so... why bother using them? The capstone for this is Ultima. This was the debut of the Ultima spell, and yes, there was a bug in the original that made it not work right, but the thing is, the idea of Ultima without the bug still sucks... let me explain. Ultima is the 'Ultimate Magic' what it does, is check the caster for all their weapon levels and all their spell levels, and use that to calculate damage. So at level 1, if you have a fully maxed spell list except for Ultima and all maxed weapon ranks, you'll do a whopping... 200 damage. Oh yeah, when you level it, it'll easily be the most powerful spell in the game... but pause, look back at that maxed out spell list, and ask yourself "How many times over could I have beaten the game, not doing this?" The answer is many. That said, FF2 has... a unique tone to the world. It's very dark, like... as dark as other FF's can be, I don't think any have ever gotten as bleak as FF2 is. Like you'll start the game and go "Oh this is Star Wars, Dreadnought? You mean Death Star, man fantasy star wars, crazy." Except you will quickly learn that someone decided to take star wars, douse it in black tar and create a crushing atmosphere of depression and death. Which was pretty impressive for a NES game. The music is also... not... great? Like there are some bangers. The Wild Rose Rebellion theme, Battle Scene A and 2, Castle Pandemonium... but then there's just... awful tunes that should have been updated. There's no reason for the Chocobo theme to BE the way it is. Is it a bad game? Ye-N-Kinda? Maybe? Not quite? It's a mix. It's definitely got elements that are bad, but... it's also pretty loving experimental, it's wholly unique in FF and not in a way that makes me want to gouge my eyes out, and it introduced a tonne of things that would become standard in FF Like Dragoons wanting to gently caress other mens wives.
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Apr 7, 2019 19:55
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zedprime posted:It was a huge downer about how our lack of environmentalism and esoteric spiritualism is going to doom the human race and the 15 minutes of cool Final Fantasy action stuff was entirely spent in the trailer and the rest was being in your face heavy about why the planets dying Cloud. This is why revisiting FF7 and the Division this year was really good. I am feeling the nihilism really hard and it was like two sides of the same coin in a pretty twisted way.
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Apr 7, 2019 20:07
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Captain Hotbutt posted:This was handy, thank you! The issues with XIII to XV are less the usual corporate crunch and more the absolutely shitshow that was the corporate culture and Square Enix. Remember, as a third party developer who don't answer to an entity like EA, there's no Eye of Sauron above that dictates things. The situation of this time is very comparable to the situation caused by Inafune's desire to "Bring Capcom to the West" Not the same idea, but the same general "This was the breaking point of the corporate culture that could not sustain itself crumbling and leading to a broken reputation for the developers." I said back in... I wanna say around the time XIII-2 came out? That Bioware was about to enter the Square Enix zone. I explained that people would defend the crap out of Square until XIII, and it wasn't that they hadn't made mistakes, or that XIII was SO BAD that they finally gave up. It's a pretty simple economic theory. When you're hot, you can make a billion gently caress ups, and it doesn't matter, because your poo poo is basically roses. But once that heat dies away even minor mistakes are going to appear large. The moment I saw the journalistic response to DA2 and the general fanbase consensus from the diehards, I already knew they were going to wind up in this place. Because it's not that Bioware wasn't doing big gently caress ups, but the shine was there still for the majority. But gently caress up after gently caress up, the dilution of the brand, the dilution of the quality... now, even minor missteps are major faults. Bethesda just had the same. After Skyrim, how could they do wrong? Well.. how about not releasing the next game in the series and trying to milk the dragon for all its worth, follow that up with substandard games, and finally even Fallout 76 hadn't been a broken failure, the tide had already turned.
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Apr 7, 2019 20:08
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Honestly I think the dungeons full of rooms that only exist to force an encounter may be the most egregious thing in the entire game
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Apr 7, 2019 20:10
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Pureauthor posted:Why did Spirits Within bomb so hard it left a crater in Squaresoft HQ, anyway? It was not only that it didn't do well at the box office, but also that they spent far more money than necessary to get it made. Even things like not taking available tax incentives that they were eligible for by making the whole thing in Hawaii.
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Apr 7, 2019 21:49
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XIII is polarising for a number of reasons, but the fact that they let you just retry a battle right away if you lost was absolutely brilliant
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Apr 7, 2019 22:10
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I’m thinking of replaying either 7 or 8... are there any new translations/randomizers/etc out there? I enjoy all the different versions of FF4-6 you can get. Obviously redoing the graphics isn’t doable, but is there anything out there?
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Apr 7, 2019 22:12
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morallyobjected posted:XIII is polarising for a number of reasons, but the fact that they let you just retry a battle right away if you lost was absolutely brilliant Mystic Quest did it first, it's more hosed up Square didn't re-use that idea until 13, though 13 at least lets you access the menu and change paradigms and whatnot before refighting the foe. Speaking of games that should copy Mystic Quest, more games should also have damaged enemy states to communicate AI changes after certain HP thresholds.
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Apr 7, 2019 22:14
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Onmi posted:That said, FF2 has... a unique tone to the world. It's very dark, like... as dark as other FF's can be, I don't think any have ever gotten as bleak as FF2 is. Like you'll start the game and go "Oh this is Star Wars, Dreadnought? You mean Death Star, man fantasy star wars, crazy." Except you will quickly learn that someone decided to take star wars, douse it in black tar and create a crushing atmosphere of depression and death. Which was pretty impressive for a NES game. FF2 has its dark moments but nothing that compares to a mad god reshaping the world, leaving it a ruined and scarred husk where multiple ancient evils roam freely. And defeating the big bad does nothing to revert that damage. FF2's bleakness is nothing compared to FF6.
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Apr 7, 2019 22:14
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Evil Fluffy posted:FF2 has its dark moments but nothing that compares to a mad god reshaping the world, leaving it a ruined and scarred husk where multiple ancient evils roam freely. And defeating the big bad does nothing to revert that damage. It's a close call. FF2 manages to literally kill off half the NPCs in the world before it ends. FF2 also has several villages completely destroyed, while in FF6 I think it's only Mobliz and Narshe that are really wrecked by the end of the world. Then again, FF6's catastrophe totally ruins the landscape, and people are certainly more hopeless and destitute in the WoR, while in FF2 nobody seems to really give a poo poo that the world is ending. The way I'll choose to interpret it, FF6 has the worst in-game darkness due to how it utterly devastates the world and the people within, while overall FF2 is the darker universe since the people within are already so hopeless and miserable that they hardly bat an eye to the Emperor destroying half the world.
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Apr 7, 2019 22:19
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