Final Fantasy

[villa4europe]

40 minutes ago, Chindie said:

That FFO game was genuinely one of the worst things I've seen recently. It looked appallingly bad - early PS3 standard graphics and the character design and animation was dreadful. The shot were the villain jumps towards the camera with absolutely no weight and totally flat movement had me genuinely laugh out loud at how crap it was.

FFS one of the main characters is 'man in T-Shirt'.

to me it looked like koei tecmo trying to rip off devil may cry whilst under the instruction to make it look as bland as possible 

[Keyblade]

The first 6 FF's are apparently getting re-mastered. It's likely going to be an upscale-job rather than the HD-2.5 remake that Dragon Quest III is getting. Could go either way. Could be like those mobile ports with the ugly upscale jobs or like FFIV on the PSP which was gorgeous.

[hogso]

3 hours ago, Chindie said:

That FFO game was genuinely one of the worst things I've seen recently. It looked appallingly bad - early PS3 standard graphics and the character design and animation was dreadful. The shot were the villain jumps towards the camera with absolutely no weight and totally flat movement had me genuinely laugh out loud at how crap it was.

FFS one of the main characters is 'man in T-Shirt'.

And the bizarre repetition of "we're here to kill chaos", jeez. 

[hogso]

So the FFO PS5 Demo has been available for over 24 hours now, and is still completely unplayable - literally. It's not buggy, it doesn't play badly, the file which users can download is corrupt. If the game looked good and this happened, it would be bad, but the game looks terrible and they've **** the demo? 

It would make some sort of sense if they pulled the demo, knowing it was terrible or something, but this...

[hogso]

It's been reported that Final Fantasy IX is to receive an animated adaptation. It's from a French studio, so there could be some debate about whether you could call it an anime or not, but it will emulate the art style of the game at least. 

It's a good choice, tonally it's fairly light, to a point anyway... 

Will be curious to see how it turns out, the FF series doesn't have a great track record when it comes to anime - the 94 OVA series Legend of the Crystals was a loose sequel to FFV and isn't worth seeing, Final Fantasy Unlimited, whilst having some fun fan service, is again really not good...but, the FF7 Last Order OVA is excellent and FFXV Brotherhood is worth a look if you liked the game, which probably says it all. 

Edited June 22, 2021 by hogso

[Ingram85]

That 1-6 collection better come to consoles. Really don’t get Square sometimes. Proper odd company.

[hogso]

I posted some time ago about the guys at Resonant Arc doing an FFVIII story analysis series (also available as a podcast if that's your thing), and it was excellent. They followed that up with Nier Replicant, and have now started Xenogears, which is probably the ripest story in all of video games for such an analysis. 

They're releasing them weekly now too, as they hit a patreon goal, which is handy. 

They're also treating the channel / podcast as a video games book club, where they tell you to play until a certain point before the next episode the following week. They're keeping things as spoiler free as possible, which with a game like this is...really difficult if you know what's going on and have played it before! Xenogears is infamous for a number of reasons, one of them is it's incredible opening gambit, which isn't given much context for many, many hours in to the game. Once you understand, though...oof, what a game. 

For anyone who has never seen it before, here's the opening FMV (remember when they were called that!), for some extra context, this game started as a pitch for the FFVII story, and was in development between, and overlapping a bit, with FFVII and FFVIII. It seems staggering to me with that in mind, that at the same time, this was happening in the same office. 

I'll spoil you all and link the upscaled version, it certainly didn't look like this on my little CRT in my bedroom circa the year 2000 

[ender4]

Most of the older FF games are being permanently added to PS Now

[Dante_Lockhart]

22 minutes ago, ender4 said:

Most of the older FF games are being permanently added to PS Now

I think I own every FF available anyway XD

[hogso]

Confirmation of a Final Fantasy Tactics remaster has been leaked by a retailer. 

It's unclear which version is being remastered, which script would be used (a significant thing when considering the original localisation v the War of the Lions version were very different), or what exactly the remaster would entail. 

Hopefully it's something akin to the pixel remasters rather than FF7R, the suggested release date is 2023. 

Great game, probably the beat ending of any FF game, and although the jobs system is exploitable, and if you know what you're doing the game can become trivially easy, it's got some really infamous difficulty spikes. 

[Dante_Lockhart]

I'm playing through FFXII:TZA again at the moment. I've also downloaded FFX again to start afterwards.

I'm at the stage now where I can't be bothered trying new games, I'm just replaying ones I know inside and out.

[villa4europe]

[hogso]

Well, the remaster of FFXII TZA went down well, they're apparently doing a remaster of FFT now too, so it would stand to reason that Vagrant Story would be next, given it's the 'other' Ivalice game. So you never know.

What's more is that it was kind of a proto Dark Souls, albeit with a significantly different combat system, although it was limited by the technology at the time of course. It could garner some interest from that crowd.

It still looks pretty great. You wouldn't really call the graphics 'cel shaded' I don't think, but I'd suggest it was one of the best looking games on PS1, especially when you consider the character animation and facial stuff they did in it. There were some really clever tricks under the hood they employed which allowed them to do things that weren't really done at the time at all. It's not entirely exclusive to Vagrant Story, Squaresoft's games of that era generally just looked so good compared to other stuff on PS1.

[villa4europe]

Yeah the art style of VS might result in it aging pretty well

I'll be honest and say I only played it twice and that was when it came out

I think that's why I want the remaster so badly

[Keyblade]

21 hours ago, hogso said:

Confirmation of a Final Fantasy Tactics remaster has been leaked by a retailer. 

It's unclear which version is being remastered, which script would be used (a significant thing when considering the original localisation v the War of the Lions version were very different), or what exactly the remaster would entail. 

Hopefully it's something akin to the pixel remasters rather than FF7R, the suggested release date is 2023. 

Great game, probably the beat ending of any FF game, and although the jobs system is exploitable, and if you know what you're doing the game can become trivially easy, it's got some really infamous difficulty spikes. 

A Pixel Remaster would be horrible. If it's an HD-2D game like the upcoming Triangle Strategy, then it's a day 1 buy. I can't get enough of that graphic style.

[Ingram85]

PR guff will just say “FFT will get the remaster treatment, coming soon to Ouya and IPhone 6s. No plans at this time for other devices. 

[Tayls]

Never played Final Fantasy before, however been intrigued for a long time. Decided to grab FFX/X-2 today on Game Pass. Am I making a mistake starting with this one? I know they aren’t necessarily linked, but is this a good intro to the series of games? 

Edited November 6, 2021 by Tayls

[Keyblade]

2 hours ago, Tayls said:

Never played Final Fantasy before, however been intrigued for a long time. Decided to grab FFX/X-2 today on Game Pass. Am I making a mistake starting with this one? I know they aren’t necessarily linked, but is this a good intro to the series of games? 

Its kind of the black sheep of the series in terms of its gameplay as it borrows heavily from MMORPG mechanics. Haven't played much of it but it's very well regarded. Not sure it's a good intro though. I think most people would recommend X or VII as starting points.

[Chindie]

FFX is a good entry in the series. It's the classic structure they built across the series (but particularly 7/8/9) with the benefits they got from the power of the PS2 - better graphics, full voicing (though your mileage may vary on that front...), etc etc. It doesn't have the best story or characters, but it's solid. It was also the last time they did what you might call the 'classic' gameplay of FF - they moved on from the random battle, static active time battle timer system after it (for better, or worse - I hated XII so much it stopped me playing the series for a decade, equally the system they end up with FFVII remake is pretty damn good).

I've never actually played X-2 but from what I understand it's a quite different type of game and has a light-hearted tone. Iirc it has a take on the classic 'job' system from the old, old FF games, but involving putting on different outfits. Its meant to be pretty good though - people that like it seem to love it.

[hogso]

I suppose your enjoyment will come down to whether you like JRPGs in general or not. X is probably just about the right balance between being modern enough that it doesn't look or feel too old fashioned, but it's also very much part of the run of games Square developed where they could do almost no wrong. 

X has a story which may see you through to the end, there's some decent characters involved in a story that you probably wouldn't be able to predict the outcome of. 

Try not to let the first hour or so put you off either, really don't enjoy the opening sections at all, but things pick up once you get to Besaid. 

X-2 is probably the most divisive game in the series. It's a bit bonkers, in kind of a good way, but has a bizarre 100% completion system, which you need to attain to get the true ending - and you can miss something within the first, what, 5 minutes? By not speaking to a very easily missable 'NPC'... 

As an enormous fan boy of the series, I actually find it quite hard to say which game a complete new comer to the series should start with. It's probably FF7R now, cos it's a great modern game, but it isn't really indicative of the series as a whole at all!