Final Fantasy VII is being remade for PS4

[Brandon Strader]

I liked their reasoning for doing the remake, because they are getting older. Not only is it a perfect time but in light of recent events it's always cool to go back and work on something you did again especially when so many people love it. Sure there's the financial aspect of it but with a lot of the same people working on the game you know they are doing it because they love it and they want to see it in an actual good form... Original FF7 looked like poo when it came out and even comparable to other PS1 RPGs looked like poo... nothing but goodness will come from this

 

I forgot to respond to this

 

 

 

 

Aeris's theme was already on piano.  

 

LIAR IT WAS ON MIDI

[Garpocalypse]

 

I forgot to respond to this

 

 

 

LIAR IT WAS ON MIDI

 

Aeris's Theme on Didgeridoo and a choir of Mongolian throat singers would be much more noteworthy methinks.  

[Toadofsky]

I don't really trust the opinions of people who claim that action games are monotonous and that's why we should instead have gameplay literally based entirely on watching people do things

like I'm sorry that people like playing video games and not just masturbating over high numbers flashing over some anime

B-buh-but anime!

So apparently the game is going to be episodic. It'll probably be done by the time PS5 is at the end of its life cycle,

[Thin Crust]

Yea, I had a feeling it would be.  It makes me think that the overworld is going to be cut out.

[Nabeel Ansari]

It makes me think that the overworld is going to be cut out.

 

Kind of glad if that's the case. For one, the every sweet step closer this game is to Crisis Core makes me want to buy it more and more day one.

 

Besides that, FF's illusion of exploration was never all that compelling to me, and trimming the fat is always a good thing.

 

If your towns/overworlds consists of freely accessible at all times NPC's that say basically a looped dialog excerpt UNLESS it is the specific time in the story when they're actually relevant, there wasn't really any point to it at all besides a really annoying, incessant reminders of "haha you're in the wrong place!".

 

Besides occasional side objectives or mini games, there's no reason to beat yourself over the head with all the mash-x-random-encounters that are required to "explore". And when a game like FF tries to tell you where to go through vague dialog, and you inevitably have no clue what it's telling you, you end up "exploring" anyway and it's a miserable waste of time (though I guess grinding for levels is a plus).

 

I don't really trust the opinions of people who claim that action games are monotonous and that's why we should instead have gameplay literally based entirely on watching people do things

like I'm sorry that people like playing video games and not just masturbating over high numbers flashing over some anime

 

I pretty much agree. I only really think turn-based combat was ever okay in two situations:

 

-Pokemon, when everything you're doing is actually giving commands to your little critters and watching them fight (that's the point)

-Super Mario RPG, where the monotony of watching numbers flash was pulverized by Nintendo's genius introduction of timed hits (which was so good as a gameplay riff on turn based combat that they used it basically verbatim with improvements in all the Paper Mario incarnations). For those who don't know, you could block enemy attacks with timed presses of the A button. In Thousand Year Door, you could even press B (with a smaller time window) to counter and react with damage to enemy attacks (with the benefit of absolutely no chip damage and with the risk of missing it and taking a full hit). Most special moves in all those games relied on rhythmic, sporatic, or other variations of timed hits. This completely de-motivated "mash A to win" and instead made you pay attention to the combat, even at the lowest level of enemies. It made random combat less of a button mashing chore and more of a practicing of your skills that you're gonna need later.

 

Sticker Star made timed hits actually coincide with the game music, which was kind of cool.

[zircon]

Remake looks awesome, I can't wait. I do think it's hasty to judge the soundtrack based on music heard in the trailer. For AAA games, it's extremely common for trailers to be done with no input from the game's composer(s) whatsoever. Sometimes it's just licensed music from a library! Other times it's written by *another* composer who didn't work on the game proper. Also, for a game of this scale, it's very likely that the music is nowhere near done and might only be finished toward the very end of development. All the more reason why they would use some other track in the trailer.

Anyway, what does everyone have against turn-based battles?! You make me so sad! It's possible to make turn-based combat tactical, fun, and fast-paced: FFX did a good job, I think. Action system are fun too (I loved Crisis Core) *but* you inevitably sacrifice some level of depth and control unless there's a system of totally pausing the action to assign commands and targets. The tradeoff is that it usually feels faster, more integrated, and responsive... which is not always better than the alternative.

So many JRPGs unfortunately fail at good turn-based combat, but that's less a failing of the combat system, and more a failing of game design, direction, and balance. In a bad turn-based system, animations take too long and break up the battle. In a good one, commands are executed almost instantly and with just enough flash to feel good, but not so much that it interrupts the flow of things. Even better is when multiple characters end up acting at once (or overlapping), like in Suikoden 2, which helps resolve things even faster.

If the optimal strategy for most battles is just 'mash X to win', that's definitely not fun, but a turn-based system doesn't necessitate that kind of design. Some of the very deepest, most tactical games out there are completely turn-based, stuff like Tales of Maj'Eyal for example.

[Wiesty]

Anything but FF13s battle system please...

[AngelCityOutlaw]

Anyway, what does everyone have against turn-based battles?! You make me so sad! It's possible to make turn-based combat tactical, fun, and fast-paced: FFX did a good job, I think. Action system are fun too (I loved Crisis Core) *but* you inevitably sacrifice some level of depth and control unless there's a system of totally pausing the action to assign commands and targets. The tradeoff is that it usually feels faster, more integrated, and responsive... which is not always better than the alternative

 

For me, as I said in the action-rpg thread, it's that it degrades 90% of these games to nothing more than a battle of numbers - even the games that try to do something different still inevitably fall victim to this. Sephiroth isn't any more "difficult" than FFVII's weakest enemy. He just has higher stats. You at least have the ability to dodge and just...do stuff at a frantic pace in an action-rpg.

 

It's really just a relic of the past. Video game RPGs being born of pen-and-paper RPGs tried to emulate the "What do you do?" question by giving you a list of choices. It's just that in a video game, your choices aren't limitless. Like, in a pen-and-paper game, the dice exist to add an element of chance to progress the story and the stats really just decide your health and how good your odds are of what you want to happen actually happening. It's totally possible for the DM to throw a powerful monster at you and the party can plan and go about the battle using whatever they can think of within the context of the story and rules. In any turn-based RPG I've ever played, you are absolutely screwed if you face a boss with stats your party can't at least match. Your only hope is to spam healing items, mana items, buffs and debuffs etc and even that might not work. Every JRPG I've played eventually puts me in a situation where in order to progress, I'd have to go back and grind stats for hours and that's just not fun.

 

The exception is tactical RPGs, because they are all about planning and usually give you a lot of ways to tip the scales: Weapon triangles, terrain, class differences, different victory conditions, unit placement on the map etc. The Fire Emblem series is exceptional at this, but it was among the first games to use such concepts.

 

For me, until technology allows us to literally tell the characters in the game what to do, turn-based gameplay will always be inferior to just about every other system

[Brushfire]

Well now you nerds have a legitimate reason to be mad.

 

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-12-07-final-fantasy-7-remake-is-episodic

[RiverSound]

It's really just a relic of the past

 

Way to make them doing away with tb combat feel even worse than it did

 

Way to make me hate everything

[lazygecko]

Turn based combat is pretty awesome. But I think the issue with that in JRPGs as a whole, is how so many developers moreso seem to treat it as a kind of nuisance they just have to put up with because of tradition or whatever, and they often design things around mitgating the "weaknesses" they perceive around the format, like automation commands to breeze through all the mundane random encounter grinding, or adding in active timed elements (like the QTE bonuses in the Mario RPGs), instead of actually reveling in its turn based nature and playing to its strengths (ie letting you take your time to properly plan the actions of your party, and really emphasize strategic gameplay).

[Thin Crust]

There will be three-member parties in Final Fantasy VII Remake and free switching between them, and while the ATB gauge will be present, it won't be the type that fills up while you wait to attack but instead its own system that "lends to the action of this game".

"Regarding the battle speed and tempo, for the sake of a stress-free battle, we want to do something on the level of Dissidia Final Fantasy," said Nomura. “As far as the degree of action goes, it’s Dissidia Final Fantasy, then Kingdom Hearts, then Final Fantasy VII Remake. There won’t be any actions that require a technique. By using the new system, we want to do action battles while also being able to fight while thinking strategically.”

Cloud looks "skinny due to his white skin and the lighting" and the scenario in which he cross-dresses for Don Corneo will remain, but has yet to be redesigned.

 

"If we were to try to fit everything into one installment, we would have to cut various parts and create a condensed version of Final Fantasy VII. But there would be no point in doing that," added Nomura. "For instance, players will be able to explore many different areas of Midgar in this game that they couldn’t access in the original─if we’re remaking this world, we want to add in areas like this and depict them with real detail.

 

Of course, there may be parts that are cut from the original for various reasons, but with all the new depiction that we’re adding to the game and the level of detail we’re incorporating, the overall amount of content is only going to increase. I’m sure everyone is anxious about the schedule, and we want everyone to get to play the game as soon as possible, too. Drawing the line on that front is another reason why we’re taking this approach."

“In addition to delving into these episodes more deeply, we’re preparing a number of mechanisms and such," Nomura added. "To those who played the original version will know the important parts and understand the story from the beginning to the end. Also for these people, I hope that they can be surprised once again.”

[Wiesty]

The whole episodic thing is a bit BS in my opinion but its a tell tale sign of the industry right now. With everything going the DLC route and VIP membership....Why make one game when you can sell 3 at 80 bucks a piece. The excuse that there is too much content for one game...I dont buy...FF7 was 3 discs and had a pretty expansive world for its day given its gameplay/graphics. They made it work, albeit on 3 discs, but they made it work. Thats just the work that used to be put into one game back then and I think that day and age has passed...

[RiverSound]

The whole episodic thing is a bit BS in my opinion but its a tell tale sign of the industry right now. With everything going the DLC route and VIP membership....Why make one game when you can sell 3 at 80 bucks a piece. The excuse that there is too much content for one game...I dont buy...FF7 was 3 discs and had a pretty expansive world for its day given its gameplay/graphics. They made it work, albeit on 3 discs, but they made it work. Thats just the work that used to be put into one game back then and I think that day and age has passed...

 

It's not that the age of putting effort into your game has passed, it's just that the developers realized they can sell each of those discs separately 

[Nabeel Ansari]

The problem with turn-based combat is that it's inherently a strategic combat type of system and Final Fantasy is *not* a strategy game. It's not Civilization, it's not Advanced Wars, Fire Emblem, etc. There's so little strategy involved in Final Fantasy (like Angel said, difficulty is essentially 1-on-1 tied to enemies hitting harder and having more HP) that it doesn't warrant strategic gameplay.

This could be improved as others said with character positioning and things like that. But then it simply approaches a Tactics game, which is something they already have done and don't need to "figure out" because Tactics was good and if that's what they wanted to do they could just do it.

[zircon]

Who says Final Fantasy can't be strategic though? That's a failure of game design, and not related at all to turn-based combat! There are so many ways to make things more interesting, many of which have been done very well in other turn-based non-tactical RPGs. Here are 5 off the top of my head.

1. Give different types of monsters properties that affect who can hit them and when. For example, flying monsters that can only be hit by certain weapons or abilities, elemental creatures, etc.

2. Re-position monsters and PCs throughout the fight, like in Chrono Trigger, affecting the hit box of various abilities.

3. Change battle conditions during combat forcing people to make tough choices on the fly. For example in FFX, there was a boss that could reliably one-shot you unless you had the zombie status. But if you had that status, you couldn't heal yourself. It was cool.

4. Don't have obvious ability scaling like Fire, Fira, Firaga, where there is no reason at all to use the lower-level spells. Make more powerful spells and abilities leave the PCs open to attack, take longer to cast, take longer to recover from, etc. Make it more of a tradeoff to use those powerful abilities.

5. Limit the resources of the player. Restrict the max # of potions, or make them harder to get. Space rest points out more. A lot of JRPGs become really easy because you can stock tons of tents and potions and just heal up after every fight. Roguelikes are turn-based too, but they are frequently way more challenging because you have very limited resources. If every lost hit point and magic point matters, that encourages players to think more about finishing battles quickly (while expending resources) vs. conserving resources but taking more damage etc.

[Mirby]

obviously there's only going to be three episodes

Episode 1 will lead up to Aeris's death

Episode 2 will end just before they head into the crater

Episode 3 will be the final dungeon

[Slimy]

The problem with turn-based combat is that it's inherently a strategic combat type of system and Final Fantasy is *not* a strategy game.

 

It's not devoid of strategy. In the original Final Fantasy game, the battle with Chaos was a balance between healing the party, buffing the fighters, and not letting anyone run out of MP. Or the Bahamut fight in FF4 where it's a race to cast reflect on your entire party. Or the fight with the CPU in FF4 where you have to figure out which attack pattern will screw you over the least.

 

Admittedly, once you get leveled up, most fights are just press X to win. And you can usually just spam tough enemies with your best magic unless the designers had a specific gimmick in mind.

 

2. Re-position monsters and PCs throughout the fight, like in Chrono Trigger, affecting the hit box of various abilities.

 

I feel that Chrono Trigger designed it's battle system explicitly around being ATB, making it inherently stronger than FInal Fantasy's ATB, which evolved from a turn based system.

 

I do think it's hasty to judge the soundtrack based on music heard in the trailer.

 

Distant Worlds has my favorite rendition of the opening battle theme, so it's nice to see it used in the official trailer, and possibly (maybe) even influence the real soundtrack.

 

The whole episodic thing is a bit BS in my opinion but its a tell tale sign of the industry right now.

 

I think it's actually justified, considering how much bigger and more detailed they (presumably) want to make it than the original. Normally I scoff at AAA companies for inflating their budgets to no benefit, but in this case I think FF7 would be worth it.

[Nabeel Ansari]

Who says Final Fantasy can't be strategic though? That's a failure of game design, and not related at all to turn-based combat! There are so many ways to make things more interesting, many of which have been done very well in other turn-based non-tactical RPGs. Here are 5 off the top of my head.

 

No, that's what I'm saying, Final Fantasy hasn't implemented turn-based combat and designed interesting strategic aspects for it in general (not per-boss fight gimmicks, but in GENERAL the way the combat works). It's not a failing of turn-based combat, it's a failing of Final Fantasy. Before I noted two examples where I saw RPG-style menu turn-based combat done right, and that was both in Pokemon and in Super Mario RPG (and related spawns of the Mario RPG variety). Obviously Fire Emblem, Advanced Wars, and games like that all work with it well too.

 

To reply to each:

1. Right, and Mario did this, so it falls into my example.

 

2. You can do this in Final Fantasy, but it has a fairly invisible stat effect. I'm not sure if going on to changing fields/areas of effect is really all that great by itself, enough to save it.

 

3. Some of the more esoteric strategies in FF were built around doing weird things to yourself to get optimal statistics for certain boss fights. If they want to do this, they need to do it in a way that isn't esoteric, i.e. not "combine these status ailments and items so that you induce a AI loop where the boss is unable to kill you!"

 

4. I agree with this, just generally.

 

5. I'm not sure I agree with this. I agree with it on difficulty for the player, but not generally in the game, and here's why; I stopped playing Final Fantasy 6 halfway through because I was fed up with losing up to an hour of progress every time I died because of the infrequent save locations in the game. Like throw-controller-at-the-TV fed up. The opera segment, for example, has no save points. You have to win the opera segment in order to stop. If you make one mistake and die, you have to do the whole segment over again. And that means listening to all that slow super nintendo opera singing, picking the lines for Celes, navigating the rafters, etc. In an era where you needed to maximize player hours to justify the price of your game, this was I guess the norm. But it doesn't work nowadays, and infrequent save locations/game exit cues hurt your game design a lot because people aren't willing to put that kind of time into their games anymore.

 

 

It's not devoid of strategy. In the original Final Fantasy game, the battle with Chaos was a balance between healing the party, buffing the fighters, and not letting anyone run out of MP. Or the Bahamut fight in FF4 where it's a race to cast reflect on your entire party. Or the fight with the CPU in FF4 where you have to figure out which attack pattern will screw you over the least.

 

Admittedly, once you get leveled up, most fights are just press X to win. And you can usually just spam tough enemies with your best magic unless the designers had a specific gimmick in mind.

 

Sorry, I didn't mean to say none of the fights had strategy, but in fact most if not all of the plain random encounters (which make up a very large portion of the games' combat time) are. In a game designed around random encounters, they need to be fun and require you to pay attention, else they're just a mash-x chore. All of the game's combat should be solid, not just clever boss fights. I also just hate random encounters in general. Pokemon allowed to you repel them, and in a lot of other styles of RPG's, they're not random at all; you get little "monster" dudes walking around on the overworld you can sneak up on or avoid. In the Mario games you could get first hits, sneak attacks, behind attacks (which were random chance in FF), etc.

 

But having vanilla menu turn-based combat and having clever fights for bosses is essentially taking a somewhat boring system and re-injecting life into it occasionally. I'd rather it be fun at its core and extend from there, or even if it was fun at its core and never extended. Timed hits in Mario were a core part of the combat, they weren't just a one-off boss mechanic you only saw once. You saw it in every fight in the game.

[MindWanderer]

I'm not a fan of quicktime elements in general, and while it was neat to see them in a few games (Mario & Luigi the first couple of times, Sonic Chronicles exactly once), I'd really rather not see them again. And I really don't want a repeat of FFXIII, which only let you "control" one character at a time and was so fast you basically had to use auto-battle anyway. (Which was a real shame, as FFXIII was designed in such a way as to make random battles more tactical than in most of the other FF games.)

But I agree that the "mash X to win" battles have seen their day. Basically, every fight needs to be as interesting as boss fights were in FFVII, and there needs to not be as many of them (and boss fights need to be more interesting still). That's an achievable goal. Little things like switching from melee attacks to lightning spells when the tail is up go a long way in making random battles more palatable. The worst is when they bothered to program enemies with multiple attacks and then made the distinction meaningless. Why does a SOLDIER choose randomly between shooting me and punching me in the face, and why do they hurt just as much?

[Nabeel Ansari]

I'm not a fan of quicktime elements in general, and while it was neat to see them in a few games (Mario & Luigi the first couple of times, Sonic Chronicles exactly once), I'd really rather not see them again. And I really don't want a repeat of FFXIII, which only let you "control" one character at a time and was so fast you basically had to use auto-battle anyway. (Which was a real shame, as FFXIII was designed in such a way as to make random battles more tactical than in most of the other FF games.)

But I agree that the "mash X to win" battles have seen their day. Basically, every fight needs to be as interesting as boss fights were in FFVII, and there needs to not be as many of them (and boss fights need to be more interesting still). That's an achievable goal. Little things like switching from melee attacks to lightning spells when the tail is up go a long way in making random battles more palatable. The worst is when they bothered to program enemies with multiple attacks and then made the distinction meaningless. Why does a SOLDIER choose randomly between shooting me and punching me in the face, and why do they hurt just as much?

 

Timed hits are not quicktime elements, though. They're anticipatory, learned gameplay elements that you get better at. It's not a "SURPRISE PRESS THIS BUTTON OR GET A SLIGHTLY WORSE CUTSCENE" it's more just a "I see you tryna punch me BUT YOU GOT BLOCKED BY DA RHYTHM FOOOOOOOL" and later when you master it, it helps you get out of particularly sticky situations because you got genuinely better at playing (not just lacking  great stats).

 

And yes to all of your second paragraph. Interesting combat all around.

[lazygecko]

Spicing things up in turn based combat with QTE elements can be fun, but in the end it's sort of scizophrenic and counter-intuitive to the core design. It's just one of several design aspects where I feel that the developer's choice of gameplay template feels almost disingenuous.

[Nabeel Ansari]

Spicing things up in turn based combat with QTE elements can be fun, but in the end it's sort of scizophrenic and counter-intuitive to the core design. It's just one of several design aspects where I feel that the developer's choice of gameplay template feels almost disingenuous.

 

I kind of disagree. I don't see why menus and action have to be mutually exclusive, and all action when boiled down is QTE (all good action gameplay is based on timing and reflex). Adding action to it removes you from being a spectator to having direct control over what happens in the game. Sure, it could then be less strategic... but... like I said, Final Fantasy's formula needs a lot of work if it wants to be a good strategy game, because as I said earlier, having clever boss fights isn't sufficient.

 

Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door is something I also see as objectively (tongue-in-cheek) the best turn-based RPG  (if not one of the best video games in general) ever made though (in gameplay design, narrative, visual aesthetic, variety, depth, music, etc.), so I'm biased here.

[Garpocalypse]

obviously there's only going to be three episodes

Episode 1 will lead up to Aeris's death

Episode 2 will end just before they head into the crater

Episode 3 will be the final dungeon

...wait aeris's WHAT?!

 

i kind of freaked for a few minutes when they said it was going to be episodic but if it means they are able elaborate extremely well on each segment of the game it'll be fine methinks.\

 

Still i'm hoping for at least 15-20 hours of play per segment and not the usual hour or two that most episodic games have been.  For once, and never again, i may be overly optimistic.    

[Bleck]

Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door is something I also see as objectively (tongue-in-cheek) the best turn-based RPG (if not one of the best video games in general) ever made

yup