Where ya at @emainvol ? I’m 40 hours in, just dropped into Corel Prison, or whatever it’s called. Feels like 20 of my 40 hours may have been spent playing mini games.
I’m lagging, I’m on Shinra 8 right now And yeah I’m playing a ton of mini-games but they are all so [uck fay]ing fun
I seriously enjoyed the Junon parade minigame. I [uck fay]ing hated that shit in the original. It was basically just the Honeybee Inn thing from Remake, but that’s fine
The game just can’t get out of its own way. Just finished probably the most intense, exciting scene of the main story so far. It was so entertaining that I was mostly able to look past the fact that it’s completely different from the original. After it ends, everyone is eager to get to the next place. The planet is depending on us, after all! But first, some side quests! Okay, what’s first on the list? I have to… track down this woman’s… chickens… in the most annoying way possible? [uck fay]ing why? Just why?
I think the pacing suffers just a touch from how much there is to do, but I’m still enjoying doing the bulk of it. I do have a gripe so far and we’ll see how big it ends up being. Why can I not invert controls on some mini games, particularly the Pirate Rampage thing? I can’t unlearn 30+ years of gaming for mini games Square… and there’s a not insignificant portion of the player base that likely feels the same way.
The mini games are hard for me to judge because I do like a number of them a lot and have had a lot of fun playing them. But I just feel like they could have improved significantly by focusing on quality rather than quantity. Cut the number of games in half, improve the half you keep, and then carry a few of the good ones throughout the game. Oh, and cut the amount of time spent on them in half. There's just too much, and it negatively impacts the narrative. There's nothing worse than a game whose main narrative is actively creating urgency to move to the next step, but then whose gameplay forces you to do a bunch of menial tasks prior to advancing that urgent story. Queen's Blood has been very solid despite rolling out the various strategies in a weird way and never really forcing you to use anything different than the original "buff" deck you start with. I don't love the fact that there are literally no stakes to it, though. If you lose a game, or even if you see yourself about to lose a game, you can just restart and nothing happens. What's the point? The Fort Condor game was fun, but by limiting it only to that one section of the game, they made it feel more like a box to check than a game to actually spend time learning and perfecting. Would love it if they had carried this one to other regions of the game as well. The piano game is fun, if not a little oversimplified. I've perfected 3 of the 4 songs I have access to so far, and I like that they looped one of my favorite parts of these games, the music, into a mini game. Good overall, but again, a little more time spent on it, and it probably could have been made much better. I have high hopes for chocobo racing once I finally dive into it.
@Indy Since you play Apex, was wondering if you had seen this? Game was hacked mid tourney live. https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/20/apex-legends-hacker-said-he-hacked-tournament-games-for-fun/
Nah, I haven’t played Apex at all since the last season ended over a month ago. Too much going on with work, and all my game time is going to FF7 Rebirth. Didn’t see that it got hacked, but that’s pretty funny. They made a lot of changes to the game with this new season, but I haven’t read much about whether the community is happy with them or not.
I’ve read online that the fight is bugged. It’s annoying af. It’s in the same vein as the fights with “stagger” challenges where the monsters die too quickly or the one Chadley fight where you have to kill one monster first, but the other two are super weak and keep jumping in front of your attacks. Just stupidity. I agree the summons were fun early on, but they’ve become a chore. 3 separate locations and a boss-style fight is so much work, and I barely even use the damn things. Literally have not used Bahamut or the bull thing from Gongaga in a single challenging fight yet. Only used Alexander once or twice. What’s the damn point? I HIGHLY preferred Summon materia from the original game. The new approach is a creative idea but poorly implemented.
It’s hard to put into words how disappointed I am with this game’s pacing and story. Sephiroth is almost non-existent. He only ever pops up in Cloud’s visions, and if he tells Cloud to Spoiler ”bring me the black materia” one more time, I’m going to chuck my controller. They’ve spent so much time on characters that literally didn’t exist in the original game (Johnny, Kyrie, Roche, Chadley, the stupid chocobo kid, and many others), rather than devoting that time to truly developing the main cast and their relationships with one another. Much of the dialogue feels like it could have been written by a 12 year old. - “What if I become one of them (the black robed guys)?” - “You won’t, Cloud” And then they just move on. Feels like I’ve watched that exact dialogue 5 or 6 different times, and it’s so damn lazy. Very minimal recall to Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie after making their roles significantly larger in Remake. And the time it takes to do all the side shit in between 10 minutes of main story here and there is just maddening.
Eclipsed the 100 hour mark. I’m towards the end and probably about to hit the point of no return. I love Final Fantasy 7. It’s my favorite game of all time, and a story that I’ve always loved. But I have no idea how Rebirth is so highly reviewed. Did the people writing those reviews actually play it? At this point, 16 was better, imo, and there was a lot of stuff I didn’t like about 16. On story alone, it blows rebirth out of the damn water. There is no story in Rebirth. Just mini games, side quests, and pointless map icon exploring. I just had my gold saucer date with Tifa, and I felt nothing. I’ve developed their relationship all game without actually developing their relationship. Just stupid [uck fay]ing side quests and ambiguous conversation prompts where the “best” answer is literally no different than the other options. Even my wife has called it out. “Every time I see you playing it, it looks like you’re playing Mario Party. Does anything ever happen in this game?” She’s mentioned 10 looked extremely better and more fun than this game. She actually wanted to watch it.
Woke up still annoyed with this, and I’m early to my meeting, so I’m going to say more words. Character building and relationship building should be about actions and reactions between characters and their environments. God of War is a good example. Something bad happens, and Atreus reacts by losing his temper. Kratos reacts to Atreus losing his temper by scolding him and correcting him. Atreus is a kid, so he doesn’t like being scolded or corrected. It builds resentment over the course of the game, so by the time he shoots his father late in the game, it’s a huge moment with tons of meaning and significant implications for the story and their relationship. You can’t just drop that moment into the game without all that other stuff to build it up, or it just falls flat. They have to show you why that moment matters. That’s why something like, say, the date with Tifa feels kind of “whatever” in Rebirth. It’s how I suspect an upcoming scene with a certain other female character is going to feel shortly. There’s not enough build up, and what little build up exists manifests via brief, shallow conversations, and interactions with minor side characters in tedious side quests, where the focus isn’t even on the main characters and their relationship with one another. It’s just very poorly executed. The only thing drawing me to these characters is my relationship with them that was established in the original game.
Ok, last rant post: I think the worst part about it is that the people who make Final Fantasy games know how to do this shit. They just did it with 16. Why couldn't they do it with Rebirth? Look at Clive and Joshua. Clive is supposed to protect Joshua and fails, leading to Joshua's death. Clive feels tremendous guilt for it and then eventually realizes (or maybe "accepts" is the better word) that HE was actually the one who killed Joshua. Even more guilt. Even more resentment. That's what fuels his character's depression and path and makes him who he is, especially early on in the game, and by the time the two of them reunite, you, as the player, have already empathized with him and felt his pain. So you can easily imagine the relief and excitement he feels upon realizing Joshua is alive and interacting with him again. You can put yourself in Clive's shoes and feel what he's feeling. The narrative building and character development make the whole experience possible Same thing with Jill. Her giving up her powers to Clive isn't a big deal in a vacuum. But when you see the pain all of the other dominants experience when he takes their Eikons from them, and you see her as a slave, and you learn that she's a slave BECAUSE of her power, and how that power has essentially defined her entire life, you can better recognize how big of a sacrifice she's making for him. The meaning doesn't just exist. It's built up over the course of the game until the moment occurs. And they even tie it DIRECTLY to music, so when you hear the song "Jill's Offering," you know EXACTLY what emotions the song is tied to. The whole thing is extremely well done, even if I didn't like how they let Jill's "strong female character" aspects die off and disappear as the game went on. Aerith's "No Promises to Keep" song is a perfect example of the opposite. I felt more emotion hearing that song on the internet before the game even came out (because of the connection I feel to the OG game) than I felt actually witnessing it in the context of the 100 hours of the game that I had played. The reason? They don't really build Aerith's character, her relationship with Cloud, or her relationship with Zack during the game. She's just kind of forgotten. The lone exception I can think of is the photography side mission where you can "secretly" snap photos of her. But even that is not part of the "main story" content, is missable, and is part of a tedious side quest done for a completely different, inconsequential NPC.
