Be Excellent To Each Other

Gears of War had the same but with Mad World spewing into your ear holes.

I saw they were pissing away thousands of pounds on Resi 6 telly ads despite being 9 months away. Fuck knows what the point of those are when you can stick it on YouTube and pay nadda.

Anyway I digress, Final Fantasy...

There's a Final Fantasy XIII-2 demo hidden away on the dash board. I've still never played a single FF so I'm downloading it now for a looky-look.

And now I'll be deleting it and will never wonder if I've missed out on anything. Ku-Kupo?

As far as I can tell from other opinions, XIII and XIII-2 aren't particularly great entrance points to the series. In fact, there hasn't been a truly great game (in my opinion at least) since the PSX, so you're not going to find it there!

They had a demo in Oxford Streets HMV, about 5 minutes play left me furious with the entire series. Like FFX which I loathe but ten times worse. Oh and there is this abomination that they did to the chocobo theme as well.

Yep this is so. I weirdly enjoyed the game sounding a little different on different PCs depending on how good the sound card was. Even a basic mod for the original to use the proper mp3s for the music would be ace.

Are all of them so absurdly kooky? This one had two normal anime characters being followed by this poorly rendered floating pig with a bulb on its head.

Plus the fight sequences looked "ok" but when you moved around the world it was distinctly horrid looking.

It didn't help that the first thing you fight is a disembodied giant hand that took ten minute of tedious floaty fighting.

They've always had their quirks, but they seem to have been getting progressively more 'WTF Japan?!' in recent years.

XIII-II got 5/10 in this month's Edge. Is that a new low rating for a Final Fantasy game? I dunno, what are you asking me for? Fucking come around here asking me stupid questions. Jesus.

Really? One of the party in VII was a stuffed slot machine....

Heh! That's nothing compared to where they're at now!

Cait Sith made no fucking sense. The actually character was supposed to be the cat on top of the slot machine, but also being remotely controlled by someone that worked for Shinra. I think. Fuck it, to the wikipedia!



Worryingly I don't remember the black materia part, but it has been yonks since I completed a playthrough.

I remember him fucking off with all the materia. The most annoying part of all that is having to put it all back again.

That's Yuffie does that.

And leaves you almost powerless in a series of random battles as you try to find her to get it back.

Yuffie and Vincent are optional characters, consequently they don't appear in any of the end-of-game FMV. I think I'm right in saying you can encounter Yuffie before too as there's a very small chance she'll appear in a random encounter battle in the forests near Wutai.

Just don't take your eyes off her

Wow, just checking into the above I found this: http://www.jegged.com/Playstation/Final ... anics.html

I had no idea stuff like that was built in. Dialogue from the word go will affect something really arbitrary quite far into the game. Neat

WTF? I wrote a big thing about what happens after the black materia is given to Tseng, but how it isn't the most annoying thing in the game (etc).

I think my brain is broken.

I've been on the date with Barret, but not Yuffie.

Pretty sure that means you're gay, man.

Reading those mechanics, to get Yuffie you'd have to make a point of doing everything you can to appease her while pissing off everyone else as much as possible.

That was basically the same as you have to do with Barret. There was no "proper" guide, though - just a list of suggestions, so you had to do it all the time!

It's also really hard to be mean to Tifa because, you know, tits.

Doesn't Cloud bang her towards the end of the game anyway? I seem to recall it being highly implied.

TGS Trailer - looks shiny. I’ve still never played the OG. Tch.

I wants it

Some of the voice acting in that trailer is pretty bad. At least the game looks like it might be decent though... or at least not just a straight-up remake

Cloud looks like Tilda Swinton in the remake.

Man, this dialogue is fucking cringe. If Cloud says he’s just in it for the money again I’ll eject the disc.

I can barely remember the combat from FFXV but this isn’t any more complex than smashing square and occasionally pressing triangle once before smashing square a ton.

Is this 30 FPS as well?

Not impressed so far...

It's very much not the combat system from the original ff7, which is why I haven't played it beyond the demo. In that I thought it were inferior and just made me sad that with every game since FF12 they've gone deeper into a well of cinematic but boring real time combat.

Can you not turn on a classic combat mode?

Oh yeah, there is a classic mode. I’ll have a sniff at that to see if it makes it any more palatable.

You can, but it's still not anything like the original I found.

It's a lot more like the original than the other mode, but yes still quite different. The game is however a stone cold fucking masterpiece and I'll allow no talking shit

This game has it all! Enforced walking painfully slowly while someone talks to you; random headaches that lead to flashbacks; horrible stilted dialogue; coming out of a cut scene and walking 5 yards (or less!) to trigger another cutscene; etc etc. So when I say it has it all, I mean design choices from 10 years ago.

I tried the classic combat too which was ... not very good. Dragon Quest was way better and I played that last year. Seems the new combat option is the lesser of two evils since at least you’ve got to do more on the fly, which is slightly more challenging and the encounters last mercifully much shorter. It’s not even turn based. Your character just auto attacks as you wait for a bar to fill up and then press a special... The cack handed might want the classic mode but you can still call up the menu for abilities, spells and items at any time and pause/slow down the fight. Meh.

There's a better thread for this.

https://www.beexcellenttoeachother.com/ ... &start=200

I’m here now.

I prefer the normal combat now. It’s like baby’s first Devil May Cry game but it’s better than doing fuck all on easy mode. The weird thing is it could have just copied Xenoblade Chronicles much better and more satisfying combat because it’s dangerously close to those mechanics. Basically XC is about waiting for moves to charge up, just like this, but much more complex than the rudimentary system here with a single AP bar.

The anime cutscenes and dialogue are as piss poor as the truly awful shit films.

The sound mixing is crap as well. I’m walking through a train and two doors close between me and the guy in front as he walks into the next carriage as I hang back to look at the NPCs. Doesn’t matter though cause he’s still talking as loud as if he’s standing right next to me.

The doors of the motel where Cloud lives open outwards!? Come on, people. THIS is a masterpiece? Fuck outta here.

This is much better since Tifa & Jessie have turned up. Even the dialogue is less irritating.

I'd assumed this was a link to the bin thread

! That's... About an hour in?

Nah, I’d just hit chapter 6 and spent some time in their company by then.

The levels don’t get any more imaginative. I’d motorcycled along a repetitive identikit tunnel that outstayed its welcome and was as long as a Battletoads level and just as fun. Then I’d fought through a repetitive identikit tunnel that was equally fun.

I can see why this took so long to make.

Wrong thread. Wrong opinion.

Everything is wrong.

As a connoisseur of the JRPG having played at least 2 of them I’m amazed that this game doesn’t have some of the QoL stuff that other JRPGs. It’s so fucking tedious healing your party after a fight and having to apply spells and potions to your crew each individually. Dragons Quest had a menu option for optimal healing that was two button presses. Menu>heal team to max. Here, I’ve got to press X>R2>spells/potions>character then do the same again if the spell/potion doesn’t heal to max, which it fucking won’t at this stage, and then repeat for each member of the party. I can’t abide a game that doesn’t respect my time.

And how come Cloud can jump like Dante to smash airborne enemies but when there’s a sentry gun 6 foot above his head he’ll dart across the floor swinging his blade like a tit and I’m forced to switch to Barret. Urgh, it’s annoying.

And how many times must we squeeze between gaps or crawl under a duct really slowly. I don’t mind hiding loading screens but have can’t we come up with some better ideas than repeat the same old crap. And Jessie has an hilarious animation as she star-jumps between gaps like a fucking nutter who’s downed a can of monster energy.

And what’s the deal with summons? It only lets you use them when the game fancies it. I’d got a Chocobo one about two hours ago but it won’t let me unleash it on anyone.

I don’t think this is the game for you.

Maybe he's pressing the wrong buttons, since he can't even post in the correct thread.

Anyway FF7 Remake was absolutely one of the gaming highlights of 2020, utterly delightful and I loved damn near every minute of it.

Case closed.

End of.

That second reactor area reminds me of Final Fantasy XV, y’know, that bit near the end where you’re wandering down samey looking corridors. Or like Halo’s Library.

Then you meet Aerith who is teeth gnashingly positive. I’ll stick with Tifa & Jessica, thankyouplease. And some of the sections with her are so fucking tedious: if I have to slowly slide through that sodding gap where those kids are I’ll smash someone’s face in; and what about dangling from the ceiling to knock a light fixture down? Could you move any slower. People were actively shooting me, knocking off 3 health, and there was zero tension as I went the wrong way and then had to sloooowwwwwlly clamber across the ceiling to Aeirth. And the second fight against the Turk has him grab your feet in an unblockable attack that locks you into a lengthy animation that you can’t escape. Fucker got me 3 times in a row as I figured out what was happening and I might as well put the pad down and made a cup of tea.

Still, I’ll tell you this: the skyboxes are bloody lovely.

Which is great as the textures of some objects are terrible. Aeirth is talking to flowers in one cut scene and the camera looks at the flowers and I swear I might as well have been playing on a Switch.

Quite enjoying it, mind. I’d had to great through the entire slum nonsense to learn that one of the plates fell once which I found really interesting for the world building.

EIGHT FUCKING MINUTES

I didn't mind those sections at all, they all felt like part of the world to me and they fitted in fine.

It seems to me that you're bouncing off the game a bit for what it wanted to be. It's not the game, it's you, man.