Final Fantasy VII Remake (PS4/PS5)

My opinions below.

Jenuall wrote:

Fade wrote:

Jenuall wrote:

Fade wrote:

Jenuall wrote:Only thing that really irks me about the combat in this is just how easy to interrupt your actions are. Taking a bit of a pummeling in a battle and need to heal? Hold it together long enough to build your ATB so you can cast a spell or use an item ... but then as you're doing it you get hit with an attack that interrupts your action so you waste the ATB point, lose MP for casting the spell but don't actually get the benefit from it! yeah that's some shitty design.

I get what you're saying, it is annoying, but it makes the combat more tactical, it's not really that hard to get a spell off, you just need to draw agro with someone else before casting it, or wait until directly after an enemy attack.

It also gives you a reason to use less powerful spells because their casting time is much faster. In the original less powerful spells basically becsme pointless, where as here they remain useful throughout the game thanks to that risk/reward

It can make things more tactical to an extent, but being able to time things in that way is only really possible when up against one or maybe two enemies - otherwise it's impossible to track when you are about to be attacked and so it's just pot luck basically. It could also have been balanced better - you should only lose MP or consume the item if the action actually succeeds, losing ATB and the action failing should be enough of a punishment.

I'd have to disagree. 90% of enemies will go for the character you are controlling, you can usually just kite them with that character then switch to the character you want to cast a spell with or tell that character to cast it without controlling them and protect them with the other characters.

Or hide behind some cover.

Or use steelskin/lifesaver with Barret.

If you don't want to do any of that just use the faster casting spells.

I've only encountered one room in the game where none of that works, in Shinra tower there is a small room full of dogs that will just stagger you to death of you don't put them down quickly.

But then you get into the territory of actively making the game less fun or more annoying to play in order to achieve these things, having to change my actively controlled from Character A to Character B because I want A to cast a spell without being attacked is just bizarre design.

Also enemy attacks are "staged" for want of a better term - switching to another character will not immediately redirect the enemies attention away from who you were previously using, so you have to switch away, wait until all staged attacks against the first character have ended and then you can start getting them to cast.

You find it annoying, some people enjoy the challenge, if you want to be able to just spam spells you can always pop the difficulty down. The game is designed around constantly switching characters, you're not meant to stick to one character for a long time. It's not bizzare design, it's so you actually have a risk reward and have to think about what you're doing rather than just spamming the most powerful spells while a robot has a buzz saw in your face. I think it would be far stupider if you could just cast powerful spells while a boss wailed on you.

jiggles wrote:

Fade wrote:

jiggles wrote:The main thing I guess for anyone struggling is to just control Barret for the most part, keeping a mile away, but that’s basically the case for any aerial fight. Pop stagger-building abilities for Cloud and Tifa as much as you can, summon fat Chocobo and save the limits until he’s staggered. And Barret should be your healer anyway, so he can safely pop Magnified Curaga and Raise from a distance when the others are in trouble.

Why do people use magnify on spells which already have an alternative? Like why not use pray and then have magnify on barrier so you talk less damage in the first place?

Because Pray uses 2 ATB? You can’t exactly quickly react to a devastating attack with Pray unless you’re banking charges (and therefore not really using the character to the full). You also don’t have the flexibility of healing 1 or 3, and how much to heal or casting regen. Maybe some or all of your characters are using the %HP perks on your weapons and therefore only want to top one or all of them up a little. It’s basically 4 extra healing spells vs 1.

Plus, you then can have 2 characters that can cure the whole party, which again, gives much more flexibility.

It does, but if you use haste it's not that hard to build them up, especially on Aerith and Barret (Overcharge with haste gives you a ridiculous amount of ATB).

Also think of it like this: an attack does 6000 damage, barrier reduces that to 3000, and that's every time you are hit, not just a one off. It halves the amount of healing you need to do. Casting Manawall on Barret then using lifesaver saves you so much ATB on healing. Not only that but it stops you from dying from attacks that would kill you, for example if you have 1501hp and it cuts a 3000hp attack down to 1500hp

I personally have chakra on Cloud and Tifa then pray and cure on the third member. And then magnify haste on Tifa.

aayl1 wrote:

Jenuall wrote:Only thing that really irks me about the combat in this is just how easy to interrupt your actions are. Taking a bit of a pummeling in a battle and need to heal? Hold it together long enough to build your ATB so you can cast a spell or use an item ... but then as you're doing it you get hit with an attack that interrupts your action so you waste the ATB point, lose MP for casting the spell but don't actually get the benefit from it! yeah that's some shitty design.

This is SOOOO annoying. I'd be fine with being interrupted and having to re-cast if it didn't waste the ATB and mana.

You do realise they this is quasi turn based right? Most enemies attack pause attack pause etc
You need to wait your ‘turn’ even though it’s real time

Fade wrote:

Jenuall wrote:

Fade wrote:

Jenuall wrote:

Fade wrote:

Jenuall wrote:Only thing that really irks me about the combat in this is just how easy to interrupt your actions are. Taking a bit of a pummeling in a battle and need to heal? Hold it together long enough to build your ATB so you can cast a spell or use an item ... but then as you're doing it you get hit with an attack that interrupts your action so you waste the ATB point, lose MP for casting the spell but don't actually get the benefit from it! yeah that's some shitty design.

I get what you're saying, it is annoying, but it makes the combat more tactical, it's not really that hard to get a spell off, you just need to draw agro with someone else before casting it, or wait until directly after an enemy attack.

It also gives you a reason to use less powerful spells because their casting time is much faster. In the original less powerful spells basically becsme pointless, where as here they remain useful throughout the game thanks to that risk/reward

It can make things more tactical to an extent, but being able to time things in that way is only really possible when up against one or maybe two enemies - otherwise it's impossible to track when you are about to be attacked and so it's just pot luck basically. It could also have been balanced better - you should only lose MP or consume the item if the action actually succeeds, losing ATB and the action failing should be enough of a punishment.

I'd have to disagree. 90% of enemies will go for the character you are controlling, you can usually just kite them with that character then switch to the character you want to cast a spell with or tell that character to cast it without controlling them and protect them with the other characters.

Or hide behind some cover.

Or use steelskin/lifesaver with Barret.

If you don't want to do any of that just use the faster casting spells.

I've only encountered one room in the game where none of that works, in Shinra tower there is a small room full of dogs that will just stagger you to death of you don't put them down quickly.

But then you get into the territory of actively making the game less fun or more annoying to play in order to achieve these things, having to change my actively controlled from Character A to Character B because I want A to cast a spell without being attacked is just bizarre design.

Also enemy attacks are "staged" for want of a better term - switching to another character will not immediately redirect the enemies attention away from who you were previously using, so you have to switch away, wait until all staged attacks against the first character have ended and then you can start getting them to cast.

You find it annoying, some people enjoy the challenge, if you want to be able to just spam spells you can always pop the difficulty down. The game is designed around constantly switching characters, you're not meant to stick to one character for a long time. It's not bizzare design, it's so you actually have a risk reward and have to think about what you're doing rather than just spamming the most powerful spells while a robot has a buzz saw in your face. I think it would be far stupider if you could just cast powerful spells while a boss wailed on you.

I've already said it's a minor thing, I enjoy the tactical challenge the combat offers for the most part and spamming spells isn't anything that I've even remotely referenced or asked for. I just happen to think that the risk reward balance is off in this scenario because having the player sacrifice benefit on 3 fronts (ATB charge, MP or the item you are using, and the benefit that successfully using it would have brought) is too high a price to pay for a situation which is frequently beyond the players control.

I will say that I think describing the situation of being required to change character to one other than the one you are currently using in order to enable the character that you were previously using to take a specific action as "bizarre design" is a pretty reasonable statement.

Also to an extent your logic for why this is "good design" defeats itself as you describe a situation where the player can still just spam spells by switching character all the time!

When they get things right in this it's brilliant, an absolute joy of an experience!

It's just a shame that something so long in the making still has just a few too many sections that feel so crap and pointless by comparison!

I think focusing on Midgar as a single game is a worthwhile approach and was always ripe for expanding to offer more gameplay, it's just bizarre that they didn't choose to do that in a more interesting way a lot of the time. For me some of the most impressive developments are where they actually add something new to the story and experience - going topside with Biggs, Wedge and Jessie, exploring the secret Shinra facility under Sector 7 etc. Sections like that are really nicely done and actually flesh things out in a clever way, if the whole game had been a mix of things like that into the original story then it would have been much stronger overall. But so much of the expanded runtime is more pointless guff like the merc side missions (which invariably are offered to you during a point where from a story perspective everyone really should have better strawberry floating things to do!) or stuff like the sections where you slowly wander around the bottom of the plate turning of sun lamps - just tedious.

Most of the background art in this has been sublime, views from below Midgard and out over the city in particular. C15 though there’s some real wonky stuff though.

The drop off in difficulty between Normal and Easy in this is absolutely nuts. Normal has some of the most grindy bollocks I’ve ever put up with, and Easy is basically spectator mode.

So it's doing what it needs to? Sounding pretty Kotaku there.

So the last boss fight is an hour long and if you die you go back to the start. Ok game

What the strawberry float are you doing that it takes an hour on easy?

Are you even pressing buttons?

I switched back to Normal

My God the spectacle of it.

Finally done! Clocked in at 45 hours on the in-game clock but that may include some idle time where I forgot I left it on.

So I never played the original, bar maybe the opening 6 hours on Steam a few years back, but I very much enjoyed this. Wish it didn't fall into the overdone anime bombast tropes it so often finds itself in and retained more of that unique tone and feel of the original I hear so much about because as it is it really didn't feel that much different from loads of other run-of-the-mill animes/JRPGs I've seen before.

Combat did grow on me over the course of the game, however in the final few fights it felt like I just had to sit there and take a pummeling until I had a brief window to unleash whatever I had stored up. I also wish it did a better job of signposting who you would be fighting with at the end - it looked very much at the final "point of no return" that it would be a cloud-only fight, so I stripped everyone else of their good equipment/materia to give to Cloud, only for everyone to pop up and be far less effective than they'd been for the rest of the game. That said I didn't actually die on any of those final fights. In fact I didn't even need to use a Phoenix Down so I reckon I was probably over-levelled enough to be able to take the constant pummellings that those fights were dishing out.

Don't think I'll return to it any time soon - as others have said, this is a solid 25 hour game that's been filled out to a 40 hours, with some serious pacing issues and a couple of very boring dungeons. Turns out I missed a summon because I was so strawberry floating done with the Sun-Lamp bit I just cba'd going back for whatever it told me I'd missed.

Story wise - obviously I've not played the original but my flatmate who had and loved it was watching me play through this -



All in all a good experience that I doubt I'll return to. Maybe I'll have a look at the combat challenges but don't think it'll hold more than 5+ hours of my time.

A little rough around the edges here and there (some PS3-jank in certain animations and trigger points), a bit too much padding and a little too cliched anime-y for my tastes, but a great lockdown game. 7/10.

Do you think you'll return to it ever? I also felt I was done by the end and haven't been back to mop up any challenges but I'm sure I will play it again shortly before the next one releases.

Deffo won't do a whole play through again - there's just too much filler to make that palatable. Maaaay do the combat challenges and may mop up the sidequests I got locked out of on Chapter 4 but I think the next couple of days decides its fate in that regard.

If I get sidetracked by something else I'll probably leave it. I want to try and get into Bloodborne again so I think I'll get too confused playing simultaneously with FF7.

I started clearing it on hard and fun

But then got distracted and have never gone back

I'm just wrapping up the side quests in chapter 14 on hard. This is a good hard mode.

I really need to get back to this and finish it, the strawberry floating dire side quests in chapter 14 killed me off last week.

Captain Kinopio wrote:My God the spectacle of it.

I know right, the last few hours feels like it's own little animated movie. It's so insanely polished.

Finally did enough to unlock the last summon.

And I got mega flared to the death. Even poor Barret with his steel skin ability and magnified manaward doesn’t work. 9999 of pure damage.