Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (Remake pt.2)

RedXIV

Right a few thoughts after playing a good chunk of Junon demo yesterday.

1. I'd argue it is a much more accurate demo for the game than Nibelheim which now feels like fanservice rather than a "demo" of what to expect. I think in hindsight, they should have just gone with Junon alone
2. They've put in enough changes in the combat so that it'll feel familiar but you'll still need to tweak things to take full advantage of the synergy abilities (which themselves have nuances that only make sense when you play with them)
3. The area in the demo is not massive but certainly big enough that I can feel it being tricky travel just by visual landmarks to get to things, you'll use the map a fair bit.
4. There is a fair chunk of challenge to the game now, the dynamic difficulty means that enemies are mostly going to require some effort rather than just going in with a single triple slash to wipe everything out.
5. The backdrop of Junon with the highwind parked on it is just cool :D

Next batch are a bit more spoiler-y so I'm putting them in a spoiler block :

Spoiler Warning

The chadley intel missions are a great way to put a spin on some of the fights and get some replayability going. Some of the fights have challenges that are tricky enough to figure out to do well. The team structure plays a huge part in this. Some fights just suits some characters better. I liked it though, one fight in particular took me about 6 tries to get all the objectives.

You see chadley in the demo and he has VR missions! Most are just introductions to the characters, with a handful of new tech but it is good to get a better feel for how RedXIII is supposed to play. His (Chadley's) final VR mission is a summon battle. Tried it 4 times last night, haven't beaten it yet. BUT you can play it on "full might" mode, or add a number of increasing handicaps so it's there for anyone to try. But I'm too stubborn to not try to beat it on full might.

There is crafting in this game. You have ingredients all over the map. these can be used to "transmute" potions, phoenix downs etc, but also gear like armour and accessories. The amount of ingredients on the map seems mental and they regenerate quickly so if you pick them up, go for a wander and come back, they are likely available to pick up again

The synergy moves seems to have multiple tiers, there's stuff you can do constantly with team mates and then there are special flashy moves that only become available after a certain amount of ATB abilities are used. These are fun to watch but the "free" versions seem less useful so far. Nice touch for world combat is that although you only fight with 3, it's not unusual to see the other characters in the background help out. Nothing major but just cool to see Barret shooting from a nearby clifftop while you're digging into a fight.

Overall, I'm enjoying this part of the demo more than Nibelheim, it gives a better insight into the game. I haven't finished it yet but will aim to do it tomorrow. Not everything is fantastic I've seen in the demo but the fights are still fun and that's the main thing.

Necro

Yeah I'd echo what Red says above. Also the scale of the game in the Junon portion (which is open world) just feels so, so vast compared to the original, and that's just a limited area for the demo. Chocobos look awesome and Red's namesake hopped aboard just might be my new favourite thing ever😂

I do feel that the characters are a little unleveled in the demo though, I guess maybe to provide a bit more of a challenge? All I know is I'm even more excited to tackle the full game from next week so the demo did it's job for me.

Zero-Cool

Have it preordered with Smyths, very tempted to try the demo but I've held out this long, will try last another week.

brady12

Demo looks like s**t. Very good though makes me think I will defo buy it on launch next week .

RedXIV

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121801798#Comment_121801798

kinda feel like the underleveled thing is to do with the dynamic leveling. Which is a weird thing, it's such a trope in JRPGs to be able to get stupidly overpowered that this will be an interesting change to the series.

Retr0gamer

Reviews coming out. Very high across the board. 9/10 from metro. 8/10 from Eurogamer.

Eurogamer and Polygon do highlight how much the games waste the players time which I'm not thrilled about after the first game had me flip flop between loving and hating it due to this reason.

johnny_ultimate

First two reviews I read led with the bloat which, given that the awful pacing killed my enjoyment of Remake, is not what I wanted to hear 😅

McFly85

So for the most part, it sounds great, but the core issue of trying to turn a 40 hour game into 3 games hundreds of hours long remains. Still very much looking forward to it though!

Zero-Cool

I remember my first playthrough of Remake and after clearing it, seeing people complain about bloat in certain sections and I thought, yeah a bit but it never annoyed me. Straight into a 2nd playthrough on hard dreading those sections but again, never felt the bloat and I **** hate bloat in games, I've quit games that wasted my time before, but with this, I was having too much fun with the combat. I seem to be in the minority but hopefully Rebirth keeps that balance for me. Looking at some of the screenshots on the review has cemented my decision to not play the demo. Some of the scenery is jaw dropping and I want to experience as much as possible in my first playthrough.

RedXIV

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121803395#Comment_121803395

Didn't want to say anything to spoil things on you, but the combat will def keep your interest again in this game. I'm dying to get back to try and finish the demo and some of the tougher fights

McFly85

I played through FF7R again over the last couple of weeks and some parts were worse than I remember for pacing/general bloat. My least favourite part by far was going from Wall Market to sector 7.

The situation is absolutely urgent to get to sector 7 as soon as possible, and on the way you have multiple bosses, a side story about helping ghost kids, lots of standing around literally saying “I hope we won’t be too late” and an entire section with Aerith that has you do nothing except run in a straight line at least 3 times before control is wrestled away from you for a cutscene. Oh and the plot ghosts showed up too.

It didn’t ruin the game for me or anything, it just felt way longer than it should.

I was hoping that the story would be streamlined and bloat reduced with the fact they have an open world to explore but that’s doesn’t seem to be the case. No doubt I’ll love it anyway but with that an 8/10 seems about right to me.

johnny_ultimate

Still reckon Hojo’s lab is the single worst designed level I’ve played in a contemporary AAA video game. Torturously slow and irritating. The sewer trips aren’t far behind, especially since they’re plural.

Retr0gamer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121803490#Comment_121803490

The sewers and return to the sewers just felt like an insult. In the original game it was literally two screens, on a mandatory boss fight and you were unlucky to even get in a random battle in the entire area.

There's a lot to like about remake but that bloat just really soured me on it. Even when I was enjoying the battle system and crazy cinematics I was constantly feeling like I was ready to move on to the next story beat well before that would happen.

I mean climbing up to shinra tower should have been something to look forward to but it was spoiled by getting stuck in what I referred to to one of my friends as sidequest hell.

brady12

I lowered the difficulty for last 4 hours id say last game just finish the thing because it drove absolutely bananas wasting my time for a finish. Not sure will I finish this if it's like that again but will get it anyways .

Zero-Cool

2nd highest review score in the FF series after FF VI, crazy.

https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1760671088911261929?t=9aBwm9Xp00iuqowQBDlNlQ&s=19

RedXIV

I think it's FFIX that has the highest score on metacritic? only because my brother was doing a top 100 project and I remember thinking that was surprising. But good to see the positivity in the reviews

RedXIV

Finished the demo last night. Ends with a boss battle which is fun, nice callbacks to the original but def not as hard as other fights in the demo. It did kind of ruin a story beat I think I would have preferred not to know before the game came out but overall it does play well and Junon village also looks cool :)

Bring on next week!

Retr0gamer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121805328#Comment_121805328

The FF fans making a big deal about this as of metacritic existed when the best FF games came out 😝

I've heard that the ending to this game absolutely fumbles it and is really bad. I'm kind of curious after the Trainwreck ending of remake.

johnny_ultimate

I do think both FF7R and FFXVI got away with murder from critics. A few outlier 'meh' to negative reviews for the latter, granted, but wild to see such obviously flawed games score in the high 80s. Can't comment on this one as I haven't played it, but the series in the recent past has gotten a far easier time than it deserved. Which is interesting, as I reckon on the whole several outlets like IGN have - to their credit - gotten a whole lot more willing to give AAA games a hard time than they have in the past. Although only fair to say that opinion between writers will always vary, and some will genuinely be extremely enthusiastic about any given game.

Necro

Read a few of the reviews and the biggest complaint does seem to be bloat, moreso the massive amount of minigames involved. That doesn't bother me personally as I'd be a massive FF nut so the longer I can stay in that world the better😂

one armed dwarf

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121806275#Comment_121806275

This is just the nature of video game reviews and the commitment required to see them through. I'm not surprised to see Rebirth review better than Remake, even if on the surface it does appear to be a better game. But the people who will be handed review code for this are more generally going to be the people who liked Remake (and many Rebirth reviews are superlative in their praise for Remake). It's a whole different thing to how films are reviewed, where you would get a certain amount of dissent.

The thing with these games though is as excessive and pandering as they are, they do manage to do a very good job with these characters and it contains one of the most mechanically interesting twists on action RPG combat in any game I've played, a high octane representation of RTWP with lots of flash. That second part in particular can't be undervalued imo, what Remake did with that system was a similar 'filling in the blanks' exercise WRT the original game as the 3D cutscenes did for character interactions. It's what 12 year old me imagined the characters were actually doing in their fights, rather than standing around a few feet from each other

It's a lopsided, uneven game and sometimes even a terrible, miserable slog, but the high points are really high. I've never seen a game do a better job of controlling multiple characters in a sequence like that, and the demo for Rebirth packs on the interactivity between them in an even more intelligent and character-expressive way, with characters popping in to cover each other's weaknesses. Cloud having an interaction with Barret that ricochets the latters bullets of Cloud's sword, Aerith being able to call in allies to cover her and allow her to punish, tifa being able to call in others to vault her up for aerial combos, Cloud being able to call in Aerith or Tifa to charge up his sword for huge pressure and ATB gain, and the situational awareness needed to know when to execute these lend battles a really engaging pace. Yes the game **** around and indulges in the weirdest sort of bullshit (remake did anyway) but it really is peerless IMO when it comes to crafting these big anime spectacle-driven combat encounters, leveraging anime style as its substance at the same time and doing it in a way that also increases the sense of comradery between characters

What I try to do at this point is look at these games as less of a remake project and more like an extended hangout session. I know the story stuff in this is going to annoy the **** out of me, just based on how it's been talked about. But there are so many other less interesting remakes out there which follow the Gus Van Sant school of adapting an existing work, so over time I've gotten a bit more forgiving of Remake's indulgent, maximalist approach cause it's hard to argue with the things it does well when it comes to how these characters interact with each other, both in battle and during story (if you are forgiving of anime eccentricities at least)

Though I will never forgive how they wasted my time with Hojo's lab. I get they wanted a final dungeon, but **** sake, come on like

johnny_ultimate

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121807025#Comment_121807025

I'm not surprised to see it review better either, and everything I've seen of the game makes it look like a step up from Remake. Hell, even having some semi-open areas is an instant improvement as one of the major pacing problems with Remake were the linear corridors and dungeons that went on forevvvver.

I also think the combat is unambiguously excellent and imaginative in Remake, and many of the characters are better realised than in the original game. But I just couldn't forgive the game for feeling that 50%+ of the game felt like that 'miserable slog' (even more so FFXVI, and the combat there is nowhere near as good or interesting as FF7R). Just a matter of priorities I guess. For some, the combat and other positives will be good enough to overlook or somewhat forgive the bad. To me the balance was simply too askew to let it pass: the payoff of the great fight scenes wasn't worth the tedium involved in getting to them, no matter how mechanically nuanced and spectacular those fights are when you get to them. It's the same deal with the big spectacle fights in FFXVI: so few and far between, whereas 75% or more of the gameplay is tedious busywork or filler encounters.

Ultimately, if I was writing a review, I don't think a game that is so much of a slog so much of the time would get anywhere near the 8/9 out of 10 mark, no matter how good the good stuff was. But different opinions and all that :)

brady12

Finished the demo . Class end to it . Game is paid for on psn so no going back now 😅

RedXIV

There was a short story released by Kazushige Nojima for anyone interested in additional lore. It's about Cloud signing up for Shinra at 14. Looks to be about 20 pages long.

Stumbled across it here -> https://x.com/ShinraArch/status/1760346888090391036?s=20

But if you don't want to read it as a series of images, you can read it here -> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OC3CDx6McCePCKNrAmWUnssX5aE_5iDxeB_YLaIBzl0/edit

Sephiroth_dude

Pre-loading atm

Zero-Cool

Good ol Smyths. *Victory time plays in my head*

Necro

So jealous... Mine doesn't unlock till midnight cos I went digital😫

RedXIV

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121827067#Comment_121827067

Looking for 1 word updates for the first day or two! Because I wanted a physical copy of the deluxe edition and when they came back on amazon I bit the bullet but looks like it won't arrive before Monday :(

Retr0gamer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121827360#Comment_121827360

Lesson learned. Always preorder with Smyth's.

RedXIV

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121827469#Comment_121827469

Ah I wanted the deluxe steelbook case which they didn't have! It's my own greedy fault. I still have pocket card jockey till release anyway :D