dancingstar93

@Judal27 I kinda miss the simple box designs from the PS2 era that were just the title logo on a white background (e.g. the PAL releases of X, X-2 & XII). The steelbook of Zodiac Age had some nice cover & interior art tho'.

The version of the story I generally read was that changes were not a result of direct fan feedback but executive meddling, as regards imposing a shounen MC, and in respect of the dissonant nature of the story, due to the lead writer being replaced partway through development.

I also suspect the game ran into delays and the ending was rushed in order to get it released while the PS2 was still relevant; I found the final dungeon (whose basic concept btw appears to have been recycled from one in Final Fantasy II) struck me as brief and disappointing compared to the two main story dungeons immediately preceding (Giruvegan / Great Crystal and Pharos).

@Browny Possibly III 3D had a balance pass between DS and the mobile / Steam version, I don't remember the latter being crazy-difficult outside of the hidden post-game dungeon.

This game is also a retort to anyone who mocks "Clive" as a name for a FF prontagonist.

I don't remember this one as particularly difficult, but then the first version of FF IV I played was the Steam port of the 3D remake which even on "normal" difficulty (i.e., easier than the DS version) is somewhat mechanically tougher, & also changed a bunch of boss fight mechanics (e.g. a making certain boss attack pierce Reflect).

FF II, by the way, is where a large number of the franchise's iconic critters first put in an appearance — Bombs, Behemoths, Coeurls, Malboros, the familiar form of the flan / pudding amorphs, Chocobos, airship engineers called Cid (Cid of Lufenia was retconned into the backstory of the first game in a later release). Much of the bestiary in the original game was cribbed from the Monster Manual.

"Use skills to level them up" works in tabletop RPG (e.g. old-school Cthulhu / RuneQuest) where you have a human GM; in computer RPGs like this and Elder Scrolls it just gets horribly abuseable.

Also, did this game's writers consciously lift things from Star Wars, or were they just mining the same set of tropes Lucas used?

@CutchuSlow Apologies. With it being a ~25 year old game and so successful & influential, somehow avoiding the plot spoiler in question while having an interest in the series is something of an achievement. I will also add that while Remake is nominally an alternate-timeline retelling of the first four or 5 hours of the 1997 game, there are things in there that only make sense if you've completed the OG FFVII up to the post-credits scene.

@ItsBritneyB_tch depending on why you didn't like FF XIII you might like some of the others. There's a vocal contingent of people on the Internet who claim to be fans of this series that loudly loathe XIII.

@Jayslow this is nothing new, I believe the Western launch trailer for the original FF VII included a fairly major character death spoiler.

@LifeGirl Just mashing Square in XV (which I'll freely admit had action combat done badly) or VII-R, or for that matter spamming Auto-Battle and never changing paradigms in XIII, won't get you further than just spamming Attack in the turn-based and ATB games does.

I got the error message, but that's possibly because I had the avatar set already. These were first released a while ago.

Keeping mine (500GB super slim) mainly for Metal Gear & Ryu ga Gotoku.

@Hundred_Hand_Slap & maybe also to actually play it, I read the PS4/5 version of that was pretty broken.

@Shstrick There are 3 collections on the PS store. The "Anniversary Collection" has 8 of the older games (3rd & 4th gen) emulated from the NES / SNES / Gameboy / Mega Drive versions & is a good starting place for the classic games; the "Advance collection" has the three GBA games plus Dracula X (a remake / alternate retelling of Rondo of Blood for the SNES), and "Requiem" (exclusive to Playstation 'cos Sony paid for the minimal dev work actually involved in the release) contains emulated versions of the PSP ports of Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night that were embedded in "Dracula X Chronicles" (itself a remake of Rondo).

They come up in sales quite a lot, but if you only want to get one, get Requiem; Rondo is pretty much the culmination of the "classic" games & Symphony established the "Metroidvania" format.

Symphony is also available as an emulated version of the OG Playstation version on PS3 and that version includes the memetic Dracula-Richter dialogue in the English version which was changed in the PSP version, as well as the IMO superior ending theme "I am the Wind."

Lords of Shadow was a competent enough action game, albeit not all that original; its main problem was that (like the Haunted Castle arcade long before) it had the Castlevania branding slapped on it relatively late in development for marketing purposes (Mercury Steam's original pitch was for a retelling of Simon Belmont's story but that quickly fell by the wayside).

Konami in any case haven't been completely sitting on the Castlevania IP quite the way they have with Metal Gear, their bean-counters have likely been looking at how well things like the recent port collections, the Netflix animation and the current collab with Dead Cells do & trying to work out if it's worth actually doing anything with it that would involve them spending money up front.

Playing it (on ch. 5 so far), but alternating with a few other things including God of War 2018, replaying Nioh 2 (random aside: the first Nioh included a whole bunch of historical figures who also appeared in the other RgG samurai game as characters, wonder how many the same studio's Rise of the Ronin will share with this), & grinding through the DLC chapters of Stranger of Paradise.

@johnny30 well yeah, the "quite dated" part follows from it being a 9 year old game. It plays a lot like Yakuza Zero & compared to the PS3 / PS4 version (tho' this is from memory, it's been a year or two since I started that and never got past ch. 3 since my Japanese sucks so was constantly flicking between the game and the KHH guide) got nothing like the upgrade / working-over that the "Kiwami" versions of 1 & 2 did (& it is being sold as "Ishin Kiwami" in Japan).

@tselliot currently a vague "2024."

@thetraditional TBH while Kenzan! certainly is an early PS3 game and shows it, I found it less clunky than 3 (and a lot less clunky than Dead Souls / Of The End). It's so early in that gen that it doesn't have PSN trophies, although it has the usual in-game completion list.

But yeah, from a marketing point of view it is so old that a simple "remaster" like the mainline PS3 games got (& it would also need to be localised from scratch which would be a lot of work) probably wouldn't sell well enough at any given price point to justify the expense involved, and that's even if you disregard the persistent meme that the game's treatment of early Edo-era prostitution would cause it to run into trouble with Western ratings boards.

To be clear, this is a very limited demo which pretty much throws you in the deep end in a couple of battle scenarios with a whole bunch of trooper cards and no real explanation of anything: it's not like the demos we got for 6, Kiwami 2 or FotNS: Lost Paradise.

Yeah I got the plats on Bloodborne, Nioh & its sequel, but life's too short & my game backlog too long to attempt those for most of the Yakuza / RgG series: closest I got are on 6 (which doesn't require 100% completion list, I'm only missing "complete on Legend difficulty") & 7 / Y:LaD (only missing Super Final Millennium Tower).

I suspect the Ishin! trophy list is mostly copied from the original PS3/4 version, which apparently has a 1.6% plat rate.

Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise (a.k.a. Hokuto ga Gotoku) which was pretty much Yakuza characters cosplaying as Hokuto no Ken characters, had a similar free DLC at launch which let you swap out Kenshiro's character model for Kiryu.

@Athrum hmm Maiden is currently in the PS store sale, might check it out.

I suppose anyone who's into this series knows this already, but might be worth mentioning that on the UK / EU store this is called Project Zero which AFAIK is a closer translation of the original name. (EDIT: checked and not quite, JP name is just the kanji for "zero" with "zero" in katakana or roman script).

@Shadcai So Final Fantasy, the 1987 Famicom game, isn't Final Fantasy?

Most of the series' now-iconic critters were introduced over the course of II-VI. The first game's bestiary was largely cribbed from the Monster Manual.

Claimed, but gonna stick with Grimoire Weiss for now.

@GuttyYZ Europe, Middle East, Africa I believe.

@johncalmc They do on Steam; I have the plats for I-III & V (those for IV & VI have some heavily RNG-dependent trophies based on getting crazy-rare drops & the like).

@GorosBat The PC ports of XIII & XIII-2 have . . . issues, certainly . . . but are entirely playable even on my somewhat antiquated rig.

@Snake_V5 ESRB only lists Switch, PS4 & Windows PC.

@Constable_What Partially disagree on the deus ex machina comment. Yeah, Cid's "What does this lever do?" moments with the airship count, but what happens in the main ending and prevents Meteor destroying everything was set up on Disc 1.

Seriously, is there a "spoiler text" tag on this site? I know this is a 25 year old game we're talking about but there are still people here who haven't played it.

@Areus Okay, fair enough. That was the end of Disc 1.

@Areus Temple of the Ancients wasn't even the end of Disc 1: Unless Remake project is going to massively compress the rest of the story, that's way too early. (I typed most of what follows before reading your post)

EDIT: the comment I was replying to got edited after I posted this.

In terms of where Rebirth is going to cut off — well since we don't know how wildly the rest of the remake project is going to deviate from the story beats of the original, hard to say.

I was somewhat expecting / fearing 3 more parts of the remake project roughly following a 3-act structure for the post-Midgard story, i.e. Relived ending at Temple of the Ancients, Remember ending with Cloud's return (which would break up the Huge Materia quest chain, granted, but that wasn't all that well structured to begin with) and Reunion (like many other folk I legit thought this a likely candidate for subtitle of the last part until the Crisis Core remaster was announced) going underwater, into space, back to Midgar and to the centre of the Planet. Oh, and with a contrived Sephiroth boss fight at the end of the second and third as well.

But for a suitable dramatic breakpoint roughly midway through the post-Midgar story, Whirlwind Maze, with Revengeance or w/e beginning with the escape from Junon: and possibly Cid and Vincent's joining, or at least becoming playable, held over to then.

Tough choice. Still haven't gotten myself a PS5 & my PC is below the rec spec for Intergrade. Looking forward to all of them, even playing to check out Ever Crisis in the hope that the level of gacha & grind isn't too ghastly.

Of the three listed, probably XVI by a small margin, even though I'm not that good at spectacle fighters.

@GamingFan4Lyf Far as I can tell this is remaster not remake so will be retaining the original storyline, i.e. it will be in one of the alternate timelines that Remake acknowledges.

Probably going with the FF VII stream, though mainly hoping for news on Ever Crisis (that isn't delay / cancellation), Crisis Core would be a bonus; I played DDDA on PC but didn't get heavily into it: I have vague memories of watching the recent Dragon's Dogma animation but if I did then it wasn't very, well, memorable.

@Theaussiegamer92 haha okay the question I answered definitely wasn't what you meant then. Does this site have a spoiler-text tag for comments? If you've played OG VII you'll probably know there are a whole load of dialogue & other choices over the first disc relating to Tifa, Aerith, & some other characters, the cumulative effect of which determines which of 4 scenes plays out at a certain point towards the end of Disc 1. That was the kind of thing I meant, and it is specifically a (player) choice between Tifa & Aerith.

@Theaussiegamer92 At the start of chapter 10 (immediately after leaving Wall Market). The choice (which IIRC could be made in the original) helps determine one subsequent scene a few chapters later. Being deliberately vague here. [Also, while an answer to a literal reading of your question, that's possibly not what you meant ]

@Colour The end of FF7R explicity indicates the existence of multiple timelines, and strongly implies that some characters at least are aware of them.

@JJtheTexan AFAIK the official "Compilation" titles are the original game, Advent Children (sequel CG movie), Before Crisis (prequel phone game, never released outside Japan), Crisis Core (prequel PSP game) & Dirge of Cerberus (sequel third-person shooter for PS2). Ever Crisis (currently only advertised for mobile) is supposed to encompass all these. There have been other spin-off media including an animation called Last Order (not counted as canon to Compilation as it contradicts Crisis Core), the G-Bike game for phones, a collection of short stories, the recent First Soldier battle-royale phone game & prolly others I've forgotten or never heard of.

@Voltan For the Japanese releases, yes. The definite articles were dropped for the English-localised releases because it sounds weird if English is your first language.

@ThomasHL Have you played VII-R?

@GorosBat Haha yeah I started a series replay in number order (omitting the MMOs, I never got into 11 and quit 14 during Heavensward) when the first pixel remasters released on Steam, but kept getting sidetracked & currently a little way into 12 (just past Tomb of Raithwall).

@MisterXpoSay The story elements of Before Crisis / Crisis Core / Dirge of Cerberus are being worked into Ever Crisis which is currently only advertised for mobile. Per other comments, Ever Crisis news (or possibly a delay announcement) is one of the more likely things to come out of this coming event.

The last thing IX needs is something in the style of VII-R, even without the extended Development Hell part.

The kind of remake I'd like to see is something that keeps the general aesthetic & puts the whole game in the style & detail level of the original's pre-rendered cutscenes.

@shonenjump86 Definitely worth it. 5 runs like crap on PS3 IMO, and Yakuza 3 PS3 had a rushed and woefully incomplete localisation job.

Also, out of curiosity, why does the header image show the Chinese cover art for Zero?

@Shinnok789 "One pill . . . makes you larger
And one pill . . . makes you small
And the ones your mother gives you
Don't do anything at all."

@JustPlainLoco Per the SEGA_Europe twitter feed, yeah, this evening's livestream is going to be gameplay of the new PPT content.

@CupidStunt Remember this franchise has previously had main / major characters called Tina Branford and Cecil Harvey.
@jmac1686 We got Bartz because a more accurate romanisation of バッツ would have been the well, butt, of jokes.

Gods, whichever bored /v/ troll came up with this nonsense is laughing their arse off now it's actually getting some traction.

@Jester1701one Given the game has reportedly sold over 4 million, not all that high.
@thefirst haha yeah, had that once.

@Makina We don't know, but there's nothing in the descriptions of the announced DLC packs (6 of which are included in the most expensive digital edition) to indicate they are.

The first game's dub was a complete abomination, but that was IMO down to (a) script style being set by committee, going all out with US street slang / profanity to appeal to GTA fans while keeping Japanese honorifics and terms like "aniki" and "oyabun" and (b) poor or non-existent voice direction.

Hamill and a few others did the best they could under those conditions.

It is currently unconfirmed (read: the localisation team leader was asked point-blank about it on Twitter & basically replied that he was NDA'd on that point) whether any of the cast from the PS2 Yakuza dub will reprise their roles.

@Rash tbh that would have been one for the "Remasters and Retro" deals (wasn't in there either tho' a couple of the individual games were).

@topic, hmm, Shin Sakura Taisen deluxe edition slightly discounted (i.e. 50p less than the regular edition), that's a possible. Also tempted by the DMC bundle in the "retro" sale (don't think the Steam version ever goes on sale).

Dammit was hoping for the Kunio-kun bundle to be in that sale (a couple of the games in it are, in the Arcade Archives series) — £30 is a bit more than I'm inclined to spend on a bunch of emulated Famicom games.

idk if the entire translation was re-done from scratch; certain side content that was left out of the Western PS3 release obviously had to be done from scratch, and the entire script has at the very least had a major edit pass. Some of the localisation team have discussed this on Twitter recently.

All the name changes (some originating in the dub of the first game, some introduced in 3 like rendering あさがお, "morning glory" as "Sunshine"), plus everyone calling Kiryu by his given name have been reverted.

@shonenjump86 Not quite, Sôten no Ken.

Nitpick / observation: the article thumbnail is from a trailer for the PS3 version. One of the protagonists, rather notoriously, had his character model and voicework replaced for the PS4 version after the original actor (whose face was used for the character model) got hounded out of the industry over false & probably malicious allegations of illegal drug use.