Tag: final fantasy

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Game Ramblings #185 – Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS5

This game doesn’t have the benefit of being the first in line. It comes on the heels of the astoundingly good FFVII: Remake and continues the ongoing story. However, that wasn’t really a problem for most of the game. It continued to really push the things I liked while adding a larger open world adding a huge, varied, and beautiful open world experience. However, finishing it left me a bit at a loss – the game was definitely extremely good and had I not played the final boss I would be higher on the game, but something about the way the game wrapped up left me at a place of wanting something different.

Note: This ramblings is mostly going to be spoilers, so I’m hiding it behind spoiler tags. Obviously, read at your own risk. My ramblings for the original game absolutely covers a lot of the good here, particularly with combat, so I’m not going to retreat that stuff here.

My disappointment was tied to both the final boss from a mechanical standpoint and the way the story wrapped up, but for now we’ll start with the boss fight.

Spoiler

The final fight is (unsurprisingly) against JENOVA and Sephiroth. Where Remake had a fun spectacle fight against Sephiroth and the Whisphers, this game had a slog. The final fight in this game is at least 8, or maybe 10 phases (honestly, I lost count) full of all the worst JRPG tendencies. The fight is too long, it has too many unblockable RNG attacks, it has too many party wipe elements, it’s not hard until you get immediately wiped, it changes your party without control too much. It was just not a fun fight. Spectacle, yes. Fun, no.

The party changing was really my biggest gripe with the fight, because it made a lot of the phases not particularly fun. After playing a game for 60+ hours, I kind of had some built-in likes and dislikes to my party. Aerith was always the right one for me to have in the background handling heals. Cloud was my main damage person due to his ranged/melee flexibility, but I was always comfortable swapping him with Red. Barrett and Tifa were pretty swappable for me in terms of decent damage but great stun build-up. I was never particularly effective with Yuffie, but I could make use of her as an NPC in the party due to her useful elemental switching. Cait Sith was always a black hole for me because of his ineffectiveness without the Moogle being present and the requirement to charge the ATB meter to bring it out. I’d say I could generally switch between 3-4 of them and be immediately comfortable as long as I had some of them around.

However, each phase of the boss fight swapped the party around without your control. Some phases were just Cloud/Zack solo, which is not really all that fun. Healing while also damaging while also avoiding incoming damage is a lot, and it resulted in me caching ATB charges in case I needed them for healing instead of burning the boss. Some phases had me in random combos of the non-Cloud cast, such as a phase of Rifa, Red, and Yuffie needing to take out wings that switch their magical weakness to stun Sephiroth. The unfortunate thing is….I really didn’t have the party setup for varied magic because my focus for that had been on Cloud and Aerith, neither of whom were available. Ya I could redo my materia with a reset, but I was already 40 minutes into the fight. The final phase was the real kicker though, and it wasn’t because it was hard. It was because it felt incredibly random.

I had a series of wipes that basically resulted from “lol bad timing sucker” that didn’t feel avoidable. One wipe I had just used my ATB to heal and it was followed by Sephiroth throwing out Heartless Angel, which reduces the party to 1 HP. Because I had just used my ATB, I didn’t have any leftover to heal and couldn’t avoid damage long enough to charge it. One wipe was caused by me using an ATB attack, which was long enough that Sephiroth started Skewer during my animation and triggered it right as I finished my animation, leaving me unable to avoid it. Cloud died, and Aerith didn’t have enough ATB or really much of an ability to dodge Sephiroth’s attacks long enough to build up charge to get Cloud back up and heal Cloud and heal herself. The final wipe of the night was me getting to the last phase, which involves dodging a deadly moving attack for a bit, while also requiring you to burn him down, while also requiring you to stun him before the move ends and he wipes the party.

Ultimately my problem with the last phase, and the fight in general, was that it never really felt hard but kept finding ways to just wipe my party with single attacks. It’s not fun when that happens in general, and it’s even less fun when the party setups have changed how you’re used to playing 70 hours in, and it’s even less fun when those attacks are unavoidable and you’re an hour into the fight. The way to get through the fight is to basically just not use ATB segments, keep them around just in case, then burn them when you’re hit with the big unavoidable things. For the last phase’s big final attack, keep them around, spam them when the attack starts, and just burn to the end. Chipping away with basic attacks and storing the ATB charges just made an unnecessarily long fight even longer. As I found out I was about one Thundara away from winning on my final wipe when I finished the game during my lunch break today, which is a really annoying way to have ultimately gone from about 80% health to 0 in an instant.

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On the story front, I was also kind of disappointed with how things wrapped up, though the jury is still out there based on whatever the third game ends up being.

Spoiler

It was obvious from the previous game that this one was going to end right at the point where Aerith died in the original game. I have no problem with the fact that she died here, but I do have a problem with how they arrived at that. The previous game’s entire core conceit was that the party was able to defy fate and set their own future. This entire game felt like it was doing its best to ignore that. This was as close of a step by step retread of the original game between Midgar and Aerith dying as possible, other than some sidetracking with alternate universe Zack. However, you get to the altar in the Forgotten City and Cloud blocks Sephiroth’s attack. It’s a huge moment meant to shock FF7 fans. It’s then immediately ended by a static screen that transforms it into Aerith being stabbed. That part felt like it was directly meant to evoke the same shock of the original game’s death scene, but when it immediately follows Cloud changing fate it feels deflating and unnecessary. It’s obvious that this is now Sephiroth having direct control over fate and returning it to what he wants. It makes sense. But it also feels unearned.

One of the big things about the entire ending segment is that it’s obvious that Aerith also has control over fate in some form – whether that be direct control or at least an ability to cross between different parts of the multiverse shenanigans at play. She’s able to bring Zack into the Sephiroth fight. She’s able to bring Cloud between multiverses. She’s able to join the Sephiroth fight despite dying, presumably by coming in from the Lifestream. It just feels like she died because she was resigned to dying because that’s the fate that is required to block Meteor in the original game. It feels like the hope of fighting against fate from the original game is gone because that is what was required of the story. It again feels unearned.

If the entire point of the original game was that the party can decide their own fate, this all feels wrong to me. Sephiroth being able to so easily set fate despite showing no ability to do so at this scale previously feels sudden. Aerith suddenly not wanting to decide her own fate despite being so for it previously feels sudden. My problem with all of this isn’t that these things happened, but that they feel like they were conveniently done to maintain the original storyline. Where Remake felt like it was setting up for a new future, this feels like it was purposefully to reduce new things from occurring. It feels like a setup for part 3, rather than something done to result in an interesting part 2, and in turn it weakens the impact of both Remake and the original FF7 because it all became predictable in the end. I guess I was ultimately hoping for Aerith to live, not necessarily because I wanted her specifically to live but just because I wanted part 3 to be something different. Now I feel like I know exactly what is going to happen. The excitement of possibilities I had coming out of part 1 is now just gone.

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I don’t really want all that to make the game sound like it was bad though. I was disappointed by how it was wrapped up, but ultimately I played it for 70 hours because it was fun. The combat is a refined version of what we saw in Remake and it’s still an absolute blast – as long as you’re in control of your party make up. At this point I’m now curious what part 3 will be. It feels predictable at this point to expect it to wrap up precisely how the original game did, but I’m hoping that they go in a new direction. The story team has laid enough potential places for story changes to occur instead of being a retread of the original. Remake gave me hope that we were going to get something new and interesting, and I’m hoping that they don’t miss the opportunity.

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Game Ramblings #173 – Final Fantasy XVI

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5

I was thinking about Final Fantasy XV a lot while playing this game. Not because they’re at all similar in gameplay – because they completely aren’t – but because they shared one thing in common in my head. They’re both glorious clusterfucks that I simply could not stop playing and ended up one of my favorite games of late. I can’t necessarily explain well why that is, but the game kept its hooks in me despite what are some fundamental problems with the overarching game.

It’s obvious at a glance that this isn’t your normal Final Fantasy. It’s distinctly not a JRPG. I would argue that despite it having leveling and gearing and stats, it’s not even an action RPG. None of that stuff actually ended up mattering to combat. What it is to me is a pure action game. It’s a weird blend of Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, which makes a lot of sense given members of both teams were involved, where neither side of that equation really wins out. That’s where the problems come in.

The DMC side is evident in the way that overall combat flow works. It’s heavily combo based with a strong emphasis on defensive parry and dodge mechanics to minimize damage. Overall this works very well. Enemy tells generally pretty obvious without being too easy, though overall there isn’t enough of a penalty for failing to avoid damage. There’s mechanics in place to stun enemies that really encourage smart use of your entire toolset. There’s a good mix of secondary abilities that allow you to modify your combat style to your preference, ranging from gap closing teleports to shields to elemental abilities that further help stunning. However, the combo system overall doesn’t have much depth, so it fails to live up to the full potential of DMC.

The Bayonetta side comes in during the very obvious set piece boss fights. Parts of most boss fights are traditional combat, but more often than not at least half the fight is a basically impossible to lose set piece where you’re fighting things of ridiculous scale. Those are the kaiju-style fights that were seen in a lot of preview footage. While they are ridiculously easy, they’re so exciting and visually spectacular and completely over the top that it really doesn’t matter that you can’t lose. It’s worth it for the experience of the fight, and in my brain was easy to rationalize away as the reward of getting to that point. However, because the game is fighting against the needs of the other systems, there simply aren’t enough of them. Their timing is predictable, but the time distance between them means you don’t get the pace of excitement of Bayonetta.

The traditional Final Fantasy side comes in leveling and gearing and side quests. Side quests (both NPC-granted and in the form of special hunts) is the way that you get materials to create the best gear. However, the NPC-granted quests at least are generally just in the form of boring fetch quests, so unless you’re a completionist there’s very little reason to want to finish them all. Leveling and gearing is gears at the inclusion of stats, but none of it ever felt impactful. Obviously by end game I had gained a large amount of stats in both to have an impact on my power curve, but the progression of it through each upgrade was so small that it was only the totality of it that felt important. Trash and bosses at the beginning of the game took about the same amount of time to kill as at the end of the game. If they’d have had a flat power curve and completely depended on player skill to get through the end of the game, I don’t think the experience would have been diminished.

I know reading that it probably seems that I shouldn’t have liked the game that much, but I really can’t explain why I ended up absolutely loving my time with the game. There’s an inexplicable pull to moving forward in the game that I can’t explain beyond it being one of those magic “good game” things. Trash was just fun to fight, despite having done it 1000 times before. Bosses were so spectacular that I wanted to see the next one. Exploring the way I could integrate new elements into the way I fought was interesting enough despite not having a ton of depth. If there’s really one criticism I would point at, it’s that I think the game wouldn’t have suffered from slimming down the side cruft and making it more linear of an experience. The core that is there is fun enough that it didn’t need the hamfisted smashing in of traditional Final Fantasy, because it just didn’t need it.

If there was one part that really missed for me though, it was the story. It’s not that it was bad, but it just felt underdeveloped. The whole bearers hatred in the game was an obvious attempt to hit on racism without actually tackling racism as a subject. It wasn’t even handled poorly, but felt kind of pandering to be doing a racism-focused story in 2023 where the focus of the racism could easily hide in their society. It probably didn’t help that a lot of the acting was pretty stiff, which may be an English problem but was kind of noticeable. The game also just ended at the end. This is unfortunately common in a lot of games, but wish that more games gave me a solid playable epilogue so I could at least see some of the results of what I did, rather than just leaving it to the imagination. I want to see the effect my actions had, and it feels hand wavey to the max to just end. The story just ended up being fine, which wasn’t really up to the spectacle of the rest of the game.

It’s likely to go down as one of the most controversial games in the Final Fantasy series, simply due to its departure from the style of the past, but I think Square has made a good decision here in reestablishing that Final Fantasy are at their core extraordinarily well produced games of any style at their core, and not just RPGs that have stick to a set of conventions to get by.

Game Ramblings #27 – Final Fantasy XV – DWGames

I said that at the end of my ramblings about Final Fantasy XV, and boy could I not have imagined how much further they would have gone with the next game in the series. This is an even more spectacularly far departure from the past, but I think it still holds true. Final Fantasy is where they show what happens when they put their whole studio effort behind a title. It may not be what everyone wants but the result of the effort is evident. The game is obviously the combined effort of Square pulling together members of a white variety of games and the result is something completely wild. This is a game that is a glorious clusterfuck, but it’s a game that I could not put down and it’s a game that I easily recommend.

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Game Ramblings #142 – Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin Trial Version

More Info from Square-Enix

Ramblings thread on twitter

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS5

The unveiling of this game did not do it any favors. The dialogue was TERRIBLE and you could die from a drinking game based around how many times they say chaos. There’s definitely some problems with the game, but behind all that nonsense there is a nugget of a fun game that could come out of all of this.

In general I’m not a fan of Souls-style combat. The deliberate pace of timing your attacks just kind of drags for me. I’d much rather hack and slash and use recovery skills to keep the combat pace up. However, this one does a couple of things that work out in its favor. The first is a reactionary block that if timed well allows the player to gain MP rapidly while avoiding damage. The second is an MP dump that increases the player’s damage and allows for a larger amount of the enemy’s stun meter to be chipped away. In general this encourages me to stay in close quarters more often than in my typical Souls experience.

That said, this still doesn’t feel like it’s at a point where I’m happy with the balance of it. The player’s stun meter and the ability to block damage are run through the same sort of pseudo stamina meter, so using the block too much is a huge risk. Being stunned on the boss fight was a huge risk of being 100-0’d in the second phase of the boss. That risk turns it into a slog where you stay back, chip away damage when you can, and just stay out of the way. That’s the part where the Souls-style combat really loses me.

In a perfect world for me, the block meter isn’t part of the stamina meter. You either do it right and get the advantage of having executed the mechanic well or you do it wrong and naturally lose some of your stamina meter to normal damage mechanics. In this setup the player is further encouraged to execute the block properly and stay in combat, increasing the overall pace of the game and preventing the sort of large passive slogs that a lot of these kinds of fights can become.

I think ultimately this is going to end up in a situation where I just end up playing on easy, which isn’t necessarily what I want to get out of this. I’m pretty fine with the actual level of incoming damage and the need to execute the mechanics cleanly, but if going to easy means I can get through fights in a more efficient manner, I think I’d lean into that. I’d rather just be able to treat a few things as smaller gameplay modifiers though, which is a bit disappointing.

This demo also feels kind of let down by the art style. This game has a lot of greys, which also includes the enemies. This left me in a place where a lot of the trash fights were me kind of taking more damage than I felt was practical, mostly because I was visually losing the enemies and missing their tells. It was frustrating to not have clear silhouettes, as that’s often a huge part of the experience of action games for me.

On the other hand, the job system feels like a huge perk for the overall meta game. There’s only a few classes to play here, but I set myself up around the use of the swordsman and black mage classes, and the differences in their combat pace and ability use felt pretty interesting to me. The fact that they have full skill trees is also pretty huge, as there’s an inherent power curve beyond simply getting bigger stat numbers.

There’s definitely a nugget of potential here though. The game is far better than its writing and even with me not liking this style of combat, I was still enjoying myself. I don’t think they’re really going to fix what I see as the major problems here, but we’ve also only seen a tiny slice of this game in both the unveil trailer and demo. Maybe other parts of the game have a better visual style and less ridiculous use of the word chaos. Even if they don’t, I’m left pretty surprised that I want to see more out of this game.