is up
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thread exists
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week 43!
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
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last of the treasure chests
Good luck.
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last week up
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btw have people seen the First Chapter remake announcement trailer or Opening Event Movie?
The latter shows basically the starting scene (3 minutes) of the game, neat to see it in 3D!
I wonder if we’re going to have a thread discussing the remake or something.
I guess we could already start it before it comes out, for discussing preview impressions, whether we’ll play it, etc. - I’d love to play it some time after finishing the original.
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I don’t intend to replay the remake but I’ll definitely watch some videos to see how they updated some locations. I hope the new dungeons will be more interesting…
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I’m cautiously excited about this remake, but the more little bits I hear about it the more I worry they’re some how going to ruin my favourite game. I’m probably just being paranoid 
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The remake looks nice and I’d probably give it a try, but not til I’m further out from having played this. Probably after I play the whole series so… heh. That said what bothers me a little isn’t specific to this remake, just the way remakes are recently so often getting treated as basically replacing originals that are now “too outdated” to get through. I think this sort of project to take on the same material in a different way is neat in a vacuum but the surrounding culture is making me rapidly sour on them.
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I don’t think I played any of these remakes myself but, as a concept, I think the idea of completely remaking a game and even reworking the story seems more interesting to me than the pure “remaster” trend where you just increase the pixel and polygon counts while effectively re-releasing the exact same game.
This way I would argue that it doesn’t attempt to replace the original, instead both exist side-by-side and are both worth playing because of how different the experience will be.
This is a very general opinion however, I haven’t been following this Trails remake at all.
(I should add that my view may have been tainted because I’m a big Final Fantasy fan and I consider most of the old school FF “remasters” to be a shameful corruption of the originals with no respect for the art style and should be avoided at all costs, whereas that FFVII remake at least looks interesting and worth playing).
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I fully agree with simias. I don’t think most remakes have the intention of fully replacing the original. And FF7 Remake is indeed a great example, it basically requires knowledge of the original if you want to interpret it fully, it is simply an alternative path for the story that doesn’t replace it. I love both the original and remake.
If there is sometimes an attitude of replacing the original, that’s probably the fault of some gamers and publishers. And the difficulty of keeping old games playable on modern systems (often, code is lost, or the old tools don’t work anymore).
That’s why I also wouldn’t mind some changes in the remake. The original is still well playable (at least using emulators or PC + maybe patches for voiceover), and it won’t be entirely replaced by the remake. You can always just play the original.
As simias said, there isn’t much point in doing the exact same thing again, just with more pixels and polygons. Though even that would be fine, then there’s 2 ways to play the game, one better adapted for modern systems and perhaps with QOL improvements.
(it would probably be very difficult to have drastic story changes like FF7 Remake, because then they’d have to keep these changes consistent and spin them further with each story arc of the series, if they choose to remake those too)
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I think the worst to me are things like Persona 3 Reload which kind of pretends to just be an “updated” “better” version of Persona 3 the way the aforementioned remasters would function, but makes tons of enormous changes that wreck the game, both in the aesthetics but also in destroying gameplay systems in the name of “streamlining.” It’s a full remake but is very much just Persona 3 again, but bad this time.
Anyway I’m speaking more about the health of the artform – film is more respected and taken more seriously (maybe WAS, these days… 
) so you don’t get Psycho (1998) coming out and people broadly going “finally, the movie is updated and shot on modern equipment so I can check it out!” but that doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions like The Fly where a new take on it is incredible (yeah it’s also based on written original source material, but). I can do what I want and play what I want, yeah, but when the heavy remake and remaster trend, which aren’t the same exact thing but do overlap, encourages even more aversion to the history of the medium, it’s mildly aggravating if nothing else. And I mean, they’re almost always worse, I agree with you on the remasters but I think remakes have a bad track record too. About the best things remasters can do is just leave the game in tact and make it more accessible on modern hardware. I mentioned playing Lunar Remaster recently, which I only picked up after enough research convincing me that they did basically just do that.
On a personal level the FF7 remakes are about the only ones I’ve found that I really like, and it’s probably not a coincidence that they go so far that they’re basically sequels and barely remakes at all. RE4 remake is kinda fun in a vacuum but really does just feel like “what we doing here?” when I could be playing the better original.
I think this also wraps into issues I have with a whole lot of what is considered “quality of life” and “convenience” that ends up just shaving off a lot of interesting challenges as no longer acceptable. Like the aforementioned Persona 3 used to have a fatigue system so you didn’t do the whole dungeon dive in one day, which made the time management system function way better than P4 or P5, and Reload removes it because it’s a system that puts a limit on players and actually it feels nice if you’re just not limited by anything. A lot of mainstream modern game design is about sanding off the edges that make things interesting, and I think it ties into how I feel about these types of projects that devs are pretty much going back and removing these things from the games that used to be willing to do them, too.
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It’s no fun finding hidden books if there’s a mark on the minimap telling you exactly where to find it, considering what happened with burn I’m a little concerned how the battle system is going to be changed (these fights are not balanced for nightmares = sleep plus random effect when you wake up), it’s supposedly having characters from later games mentioned/existing to tie them together better but I don’t want later characters shoehorned into places they don’t belong.
I like the portrait art and while the 3d models have been getting better it just isn’t the same. I heard with EVO everyone’s faces were at the same angle for lip syncing? (I am not a fan of surprise lip sync it freaks me out for no good reason) Original has the art drawn at different angles to good effect as we saw in the ending here. That’s already lost.
Also the battle system is meant to evolve over games as the technology in-universe is also improving, so to have super high tech stuff available from the start feels like cheating of a sorts.
I’m happy more people will likely get into the series thanks to the remake, but the more I think about all the little things that are going to annoy be there are a lot of them. Having voice acting would probably be nice though (but the voices won’t match the ones in my head and grr and grumble and complain)
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I’ve always found 2D lip flapping weird too. Some visual novels do it and it’s not like a deal breaker but I always just think it looks odd and wonder if there are people who actually like it.
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I do agree that there is a lack of respect for videogames as an art form usually (compared to movies) although garbage movie remakes are a dime a dozen too, but then those are generally panned by the critics while lazy videogame “remasters” are often well received as long as they perform well on purely technical grounds.
I keep going back to the “remasters” of the PS1 Final Fantasy games where they can’t just do a good job cheaply because of the thousands of pre-rendered backgrounds that can’t be trivially upscaled so you end up with blurry backgrounds with over-detailed 3D models awkwardly floating in front. But hey, we have to get those iPad sales one way or an other!
I think this is the most awkward generation to upgrade because older games are pure 2D and you can opt to redraw everything for relatively cheap while more modern games are pure 3D and you can just up the resolution, draw distance, filter the textures, tweak the models and bam full price “HD remaster” at your nearest store. But PS1 games are often a weird hybrid and basically need a complete overhaul to be brought to modern standards, otherwise it’s an abomination.
I agree with this too to some extent. As we’ve already discussed, you know that there are many systems of old games that I dislike (like random encounters, grind and tedious inventory management) but the problem is that often you can’t just excise those completely without ruining the balance of the game in other ways.
Like the FFVIII “remaster” that you can buy on Steam right now has a feature where you can swap the loadouts of the characters, and I think that’s a great change. It’s super tedious to do it manually in the original when you change party members. So I actually think that’s a positive change without drawbacks.
But then you also have:
Magic Booster
When Magic Booster is used, the player’s inventory of the following spells is increased by 100:
Cure, Cura, Curaga, Fire, Fira, Blizzard, Blizzara, Thunder, Thundara, Sleep, Blind, Silence, Berserk, Bio, Esuna, Aero, Confuse, Break, Zombie
Battle Assistance
Grants the following advantages in battle:
-ATB gauge always full
-HP always full
-Limit Break always available
*Characters die instantly when suffering damage that exceeds their HP.9999
Normal attacks, certain Limit Breaks, and certain G.F. attacks deal 9,999 damage.
What the hell? FFVIII is not a difficult game, at this point just watch a Youtube longplay if you really just want the story. Figuring out how to use the magic junction system and crafting spells are the most interesting and rewarding part of the gameplay, and you just completely nullify that. I always thought it was super ambitious and ahead of its time too: having a rich, complex and open-ended crafting tree in 1999.
Why would you include GameShark codes with your game?
I was also looking at the various Final Fantasy I versions out there (for the putative FF “book club”) and I’m amazed by how much some of the ports diverge from the original, basically backporting the combat system of later entries back into FF1.
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What is even the point? 
Intriguing…
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I think some people just want to play a game “for the story” which is fine by me, but I also don’t think that it means that you should wreck the gameplay of older games to cater to everybody. I like dodge systems but I’m not asking every game to implement a dodge system to please me.
I also think that Square really fundamentally thinks that this turn based combat is old and lame and bad, as proven by almost everything they’ve made since FFX, so I think at this point there’s this deeply held belief that nobody would ever want to deal with turn-based combat nowadays. So they basically give players an opt-out in newer versions.
What’s funny is that the original FFVIII already had a system in place that would let you avoid basically every single fight besides bossfights with the “No Combat” ability. But you actually have to engage with the skill system to figure out how to unlock that early on, not just toggle an option in the launcher…
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Stop recruiting @simias pls we agreed that we are not starting just now 
(or I guess don’t stop, great if we have maybe members before we start!)
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