![]() ![]() There are four player characters, and some thought went into making their playstyles unique without having to re-learn how the combat system works. It really feels like you and the bosses are playing by the same set of rules, at least as far as connecting attacks goes. Picking a melee attack off the menu will cause you to spend resources to punch the air unless there’s actually an enemy nearby. Holding the block button really does reduce the damage you take. Running behind cover really does block the enemy’s laser, even if they roll a crit. But for the most part what we have is a well-grounded action combat system with good gamefeel and clear feedback. Sometimes you’ll push the gun button and Barret will take a step leftward for no reason and fire a full clip into a wall. There is the occasional positioning or camera snafu inherent to all 3D games. Remember missing monsters in Secret of Mana even though you watched the pixels of your weapon touch the pixels on the monster? Or getting blasted by an AOE super attack in Final Fantasy XIII because your idiots refused to spread out? Both conventions work in proper context, but the push-and-pull introduced by trying to blend them makes for frustrating situations. In an RPG you have a sword command on your menu, and you select it, and the game rolls some invisible dice, and if the dice are good, the dude takes damage even if he’s on the other side of the screen. In an action game you push the sword button, and your guy swings his sword, and if there’s a dude standing there the dude takes damage. The primary disconnect in these systems is positioning. Square-Enix has been noodling with this idea that you can blend action and menu-based RPG mechanics together since long before there was a Square-Enix. FFVIII had that pointless GF compatibility system no player ever noticed or cared about, and FFIX had limit breaks that only triggered when there was a single wounded goblin left alive, and never in tricky boss fights.) (It might actually be that the last Final Fantasy game whose gameplay was this tightly designed was the original Final Fantasy VII. I actually cared about the treasures I found because they were useful consumables or pieces of equipment, and not vendor trash or digipoop cards or whatever. The controls all made sense, there were no extraneous meters or counters, I didn’t have to keep looking up what combination of trigger buttons activated each of my six combat modes. I understood immediately how equipment and materia worked, and how to upgrade them. Remake is the first Final Fantasy game I’ve played in… golly, two decades where none of the game systems felt confusing or vestigial. I think it does us all a lot of good if, for the next ten years, developers lean towards Remake and away from Tales of Mediocrity IV-Z: Hyper Legend of Browsing the JRPG Tag on Steam (Waifu Edition). They’re games for basement-dwellers of another stripe, is what I mean. Eventually the genre changed and shifted and mutated, and nowadays it seems to be largely populated by hyper-candy anime girls and unfocused, impenetrable gameplay systems. There really was a glorious era of exceptional video games swimming in its wake. That makes me happy.īefore 1997, RPGs were nerdy fantasy stories for basement-dwellers and grognards. In the coming years more people are going to meet Noct and his bros, and roll their eyes at Ashe’s ridiculous hot pants, and hear the word “disasteriffic”, and sign up for the Four Job Fiesta. There’s a 30-year history a lot of new players are going to tumble down into purely because of this game. Remake sold like absolute gangbusters, and I know some number of people will see that splash screen for the first time, having bought FFXV after having enjoyed Remake, and feeling like they’re getting into something special. In 2016 I was like, yeah, that’s one way to categorize the entire population of planet Earth into two mututally-exclusive groups, I suppose! But I kept thinking about that screen this week. There’s this cheesy, kind of self-indulgent splash screen whenever you boot up Final Fantasy XV which declares the game to be “a Final Fantasy for fans and first-timers”. There aren’t any spoilers in this first part. First, though, I think it’s only fair we go through the good stuff. There is a major gameplay reason for this negativity, and a major story reason, and I’d like to talk about both. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |