Which is funny, because Safer Sephiroth actually has some rudimentary dynamic difficulty scaling. It's based on three specific factors;
- All of his stats (to the tune of 30k hp, 20 def, 16 mdef, 2 atk and 5 magic) rise for each non-Aerith character at level 99
- Receives a whopping 80k hp if Knights of the Round was cast on Jenova Synthesis (which is weird because I remembered it as 'if you own KOTR at all', so you just outright skipped this one)
- His hp is reduced by a measly 100 for every time you destroyed Bizarro Sephiroth's head for a maximum total reduction of 24.9k, which I assume is to make him marginally easier if you were struggling last phase
Oh my god.
I knew that having Knights of the Round was supposed to make the final boss harder in some way. But I
also thought it was just a matter of owning the Materia at all. If I had known I would have used it on Jenova!
Ah, well. Maybe if I can manage to fix the soundtrack, I'll do another run at the endgame so I can get the proper experience of a harder Sephiroth with the correct soundtrack and learn to truly hate Supernova.
See, i don't agree with that interpretation of Blade Runner 2049.
I think there's still room for ambiguity in Deckard's status as human or replicant. I don't super wanna spoil a movie though.
So basically, i don't think anything directly says "Rick Deckard is a human". There were people who said Rick had to be human to procreate with a replicant and it mattering but i disagree with that too. The important thing isn't that a human and a replicant could procreate together, the important thing is that replicants can procreate in the first place. It's just as important and humanizing.
Like, i think the closest we get to Deckard hinting he's human is when he talks with K and he doesn't go "I am a human" he implies that it's unimportant whether he's human or not IIRC. It's been a while though.
Anyway, that's my "Rick Deckard could be a replicant, that still doesn't get disproved categorically in the sequel" bit
EDIT: My stance will always be "Oh, you think your opinion is worth more than mine just because you're the movie director and wrtier? Pfft!"
And that's entirely fair! It
is noticeable to me that 2049!Deckard is never explicitly called out as human, only implicitly through his human limitations, biological aging, and the way he talks to K. It's not a hard confirmation.
Mostly I put that bit about the sequel in there to draw an implicit analogy to Advent Children, which also does thing like 'settle ambiguous things from the original work with a 'canonical' answer that raises the question of whether a sequel can be said to change its original.'
Back to FF7R, during the ending scene at
Final Destination The Edge of Creation, something interesting to point out.
View: https://youtu.be/2TU-CEHzxBs?t=651
Yes, this fight mirrors both Cloud's final fight at the center of the mind and the Advent Children fight (notably with Cloud losing, and thus continuing his obsession with Sephiroth into the next game), but there is also a red supernova behind Cloud for most of the fight.
As
@Omicron noted, Sephiroth dies in a red burst of Lifestream in the original game. And if you look at that red Supernova (most easily noted at 12:40 or 13:20 in the video), you can see Bizarro/Safer Sephiroth's silhouette at the center of Red nova. Indeed, Cloud seems to stare directly at it while Sephiroth gives his "seven seconds" line.
Very interesting 🤔
I feel like I'm going to need to replay the Remake at some point (but Rebirth will probably come out before I have time to do that), because Remake!Sephiroth is... fascinating in the context of having now fully played through the original. Like, his characterization is so wildly off from Salty Runback Sephiroth from post-Nibelheim that I now totally see where people are coming from with the time travel and multiple Sephiroths interpretations. Like, the way he talks to Cloud in that Edge of Creation scene, he's borderline
friendly. If you told me that was
pre-Nibelheim Sephiroth there, I'd believe you.
Weird stuff going on, can't wait for Rebirth.
A longform Final Fantasy VIII review?
Cue the music:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3E-JoVhCJ8
I feel like some kind of bullet whizzed past my head and hit someone else. No idea what this is about.
Good music, though.
Speaking of, when it comes to grabbing FFVIII since I presume you'll just get it on PC/Steam like the rest of the series so far for ease of screenshots and the like, of note is that if you buy the original version instead of the Remaster it's more moddable, but also may or may not have an entire MIDI soundtrack to replace. So... for the sake of the LP, probably grab the Remaster.
Bonus: It's currently 60% off, so no better time to grab it than now even if you aren't actually playing for another few weeks.
Back when FFVIII Remastered came out, I looked at the screenshots and... I'm not sure how I feel about it.
On the one hand, yeah, better graphics, will probably run much better, the soundtrack will be fine.
On the other hand, PSX-era games tend to work with their limitations and do stuff like creatively use graphical ambiguity, and I'm not sure how having high-fidelity models for all the character in a game that wasn't designed for them will impact their emoting.
Also, more importantly, the new models stick out like
sore thumbs out of the original pre-rendered background, really injecting some of FF7's "the character models and backdrops look like they exist in two parallel universes" that VIII had gotten over right back in.
So, I don't know. I have some time to think about it anyway.
And to think on whether I want to do Tactics first.
Sans' opening "i wonder why people dont lead with their strongest attack" is up there for sure, though obviously not Supernova level. Really that part's me legitimately wondering what's 2nd.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJh9Olxigv0
I might be going too "controversial" here but boy. I really don't like any of this.
For years, I've always been pretty indifferent to the Sephirot hype, at most raising an eyebrow when he was introduced in unrelated things without seeming reason. I always reasoned "well, he's that popular, must be a reason behind it, whatever."
There are interesting details that Omi has fairly brought up and applauded (or criticized) through the whole of the game. But all of that concerned more the use the plot made of him than what he is as a character. Moreover when most of what we see of the actual Sephirot is a flashback, instead of Jenova's meatpuppet he's been except for the couple of moments where he came to the surface to seethe at Cloud. And there are very good moments there despite the roughness! But half of it is Jenova, and in the balance, my feelings about Sephirot as a character is... a very perplexed meh?
Supernova also falls flat for me, and I can't buy the comments about it. Sure, it is spectacular and we see similar cataclysmic scenes illustrating spells in many FFs. But it feels so much on the nose, trying so hard to drag the player into it, this isn't any continent, any planet, any solar system, it's
Sol, mang! I don't know, it takes me out of the fantasy. The original JP cutscene might have been shorter and less of a show, but I feel it wouldn't stick so much like a sore thumb.
And if it was truly a vision of the past, how can one reconcile the image the game has built up of Jenova as a parasite with straight up destroying the Sol system? What does it win by destroying all resources in a place before anyone even knows they must defend themselves from something? Sure, Sephirova is waiting for Meteor to destroy this planet now, but that's with the intention open up that can of tasty tasty Lifestream soda and slurp it. It's a method, not the goal. No, it doesn't feel like the blocks are quite there to support that interpretation.
@GilliamYaeger 's "this is actually Jenova pulling the Cetra's memory of losing Sol to cosmic randomness before fucking out to FFVIIland" still doesn't quite work for to me, but it at least it sounds more plausible.
About the ending, I just prepared an essay here in which
asdfsfagtarhgrashreshjargtarwehtrkrw45ryw6sadgfasggsfahdh. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
I suspect that had I played the game right now instead of following this thread, my homicidal anger would have been strong enough to throw me through time at every moment anyone had hyped Sephirot at me to slap them shut TerminalMontage style, and barge into Sakurai's office yelling "Go on, put Sephirot in Smash. I dare you, I
double dare you." Because that is not the great character I thought everyone was swearing up and down they were smashing their meat at. I keep a tally of all the times I'm disappointed on you and your tastes, Gamers, and your sins are many and horrendous. No Gamergates for you, marching into the casket down the secret basement for three decades, now.
That's a totally fair reaction!
Sephiroth is both more or less of a character than I'd anticipated. More, in that the complexity he shows in the Nibelheim flashbacks and the motives behind his breakdown was a lot more than I anticipated, and made him a lot more sympathetic. Less, in that past a certain point he stops
existing as a character. As much fun as having him play Literally Satan in Cloud's head was, after that scene, he's gone. We'll never see him again, except in additional flashbacks. His motives are inconsistent and any explanation based on Jenova influence isn't actually textual. I ultimately feel positively about him, but he's a
mess.
As for the ending, while I try to keep my experience of the game restricted to the game itself, it's impossible for me to fully separate Final Fantasy VII from the existence of the Final Fantasy VII
franchise. I know this game has several sequels by now, which means that when I look at the ending, it feels... Well, I can think that having Barret work on an oil rig is a fucking stupid decision, but while every single point of detail and characterization in Advent Children or Dirge of Cerberus or whatever may be up for debate, what their existence spells out in the broad strokes is that canonically, there
is a future for these characters, there is a world after Holy. And having that outside context helps swallow the pill of the ambiguous ending, for me.
If the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII didn't exist and this was all we got, I would probably have thrown my keyboard out of the window at that last Nanaki scene.
That cover of the iconic Bad Apple remix goes hard, yeah.
I see what you did there.
...Either that or you just typo'd 'thought' instead of 'fought' but there's no way that would happen, right?
The French language doesn't have the thorn sound ('th'), which means I have a lot of trouble making that sound correctly and remembering where it goes in words. It's why French accent is often characterized as saying "Zee" instead of "Thee" but in my case it's more of a f/v thing. This causes me to frequently make substitution typos like three/free, thought/fought, and other/over.
The more you know!
I ranted a bit about this on Discord, but here's the gist of it - MIDI was absolutely the appropriate choice here.
Back in 1997-98, the original soundtrack was written with a Roland synthesizer in mind. It would probably have been an Sound Canvas SC-88 - Nobuo Uematsu used the SC-55 and SC-88 pretty heavily in his career, and almost certainly used the SC-88 and friends to compose the FF7 soundtrack. He likely used an XP-80 for One Winged Angel and certain other tracks that required patches over and above the default SC set... and therein lies this issue.
For the PS1, the task of converting the music from an SC-88 or XP-80 was relatively straightforward - write a GS->SPU1 synth engine that can handle 16-20 voice polyphony (you *do* need to save some channels for game events, after all, and SPU1 has 24), sample the SC-88 and the custom patches, crush it down to fit into the 512KB RAM limit, done.
You, uh, can't really do that on PC.
First, nobody (who isn't already using ROMplers) is going to drop a couple hundred dollars in 1998 money for a ROMpler to play back one game's music on. Plus, neither Yamaha's MU-series modules nor the SC-55/88 have support for the level of custom patches required for this, as far as I know. Finally, Roland was very very tetchy about actually doing anything with softsynths - the SC-88 was still a valid product line and they were already really aggressive about not letting anyone use their tech without buying their hardware.
So when it came time to turn the internal PC build into a saleable game, they needed to replace the whole mess with something that people could actually, legally install on their PCs. Yamaha sold Squaresoft a license to their XG-compatible softsynth (XG is Yamaha's MIDI extension, GS is Roland's), converted the Roland files, made a custom patch bank (four, actually) to accommodate the game's wavetable soundfont needs, and that should've been the end of it, right?
Yeah, no. The XG softsynth is really good, but Yamaha didn't quite map the instruments correctly (remember, Uematsu used GS, and XG orders the extra instruments differently by default). The reason OWA sounds wrong is that parts of it are mismapped - some instruments are mapped to ones that don't exist in the soundbank, particularly the snare drum, and the vocal patch samples use the WoodBlock instrument. With a patched version of the song, it sounds a lot better, and with the softsynth, or a Creative Labs AWE-series card, or the XG-compatible YMF7xx chipset, it sounds more or less correct, right down to the vocal samples, because on those you have the soundfont loaded, preferably one of the 2MB versions or the 4MB version.
This means that basically the only way to get the intended soundtrack is to have a YMF744 PCI sound card (for somewhat less vintage machines) or an AWE32/64 or SB32 with at least 4MB of sample RAM, which requires a free ISA slot that you probably won't have after about the Pentium 3/AthlonXP era. If your system is up to snuff, you can also use the licensed XG softsynth included with the 1998 build, assuming you're running Windows 98.
I think you can also use an XG VSTi plugin with some hackery on later OSes, but don't quote me on that.
The one thing you don't do is try to play the game with the General MIDI set. The Microsoft GS set is okayish at replicating a budget SC-55, but its sample bank is 512KB. The stock Microsoft softsynth kind of understands GS and implements General MIDI as well. There's a reason the game was shipped with anywhere from a 1MB to 4MB sample bank - this game absolutely requires the custom SF2 soundfont to sound remotely correct, end of story. They do have a General MIDI variant of the tracks, which you should not touch because it's basically the XG version remapped poorly to GM with no soundfont support.
Guess which one the original Steam version took? That's right, they picked the Microsoft GS softsynth and compressed it to death! The patch, as I understand it, just uses a less-compressed version of that GS softsynth track.
In other words, of the five possible sources they could've picked for the 2012 Steam release (miniPSF dumps of the SPU1 soundtrack, the General MIDI fallback, the SoundBlaster AWE-series wavetable soundtrack, the XG-MIDI soundtrack, or the full-fat XG Softsynth), they picked the fallback emergency option.
Some of these issues like the incorrect note mappings would probably have been corrected if FF7PC had had a little more time in the oven, but somehow they managed to do worse than the original Square/Eidos release.
Thank you for this thorough breakdown, I may not grasp all the technological details there but I did find it very instructive.
Every so often in this thread I read about someone mentioning this thread
having a discord but when I attempt to search for the link I am unable find it.
Does anyone here know how to join this Discord server?
Is there some special criteria I have to fulfill in order to join it?
There isn't a Discord for this thread, I just happen to be in a couple of Discord servers unrelated to this game where I occasionally comment on my Let's Play process, and several of the posters in this thread also happen to be in one or more of these servers.
I don't know, maybe the name of the town was a coincidence?
Anyway, I can second that I listened to the audio track for the battle theme of the first steam version of FFVIII, and I recoiled in horror at how much worse the quality of the soundtrack was. It's a really huge downgrade.
However, the remaster has problems of its own, not the last of which being that the "modernized" character models are undescribably ugly compared to the original, despite having "better" graphics; they've deformed the character's faces, and I don't like the redesigns. Also, more relevantly, the new models, being more detailed, aren't capable of emoting in the same way the old models were - they lose a lot of the expressiveness - and clash horribly with their surroundings. This can be easily checked by anybody who doesn't mind spoilers - just search for original to remaster character comparisons images or videos (the latter are especially useful to get across the emoting aspect I mentioned) and give your own judgment. I'm confident the fact that these aren't the same characters will be self-evident.
So, given that, whatever its situation in the late '90s, emulation works perfectly well now, my suggestions would be to go with using a psx emulator, and just experience the original version. Also, emulators have the benefits of save states, which is a big QOL feature. A psx emulator is also how I would suggest somebody to go about playing Final Fantasy Tactics, since it's easier to use modded versions of the game on it (due to not having to save the modded game on a fresh CD), and I've been very vocal about how much better Tactics get with the right mod.
My attempts at emulating VII proved frustrating and I eventually dropped the idea, but with the experience of all the issues in VII, I might consider it again for VIII.
So now that FFVII is effectively finished, it's the right time to go back to comparing FF character building options by the most important metric there is: how good is Blue Magic in this game, anyway.
FFV Blue Magic was very powerful and versatile but suffered from practically requiring a guide to actually get it to work. Even finding which monsters could give you spells would require a lengthy trial and error process, and getting them was a chore without a secondary Beastmaster character. It was an interesting proof of concept, but very, very unrefined.
FFVI Blue Magic was easier to make work since you just needed to have a particular character present in a fight where a Blue spell was used and to not die, but it suffered from attaching Blue Magic to that particular character, who was otherwise unremarkable. If you used him often, you would get some common spells even without a guide, but there was little reason to use him. With everyone getting all other magic, Blue Magic also became a lot less versatile by comparison. Every caster is a buffer/blaster/healer/utility anyway, so aside from a few standout spells (Big Guard, White Wind), Blue Magic didn't stand out that much.
FFVII is something of a return to FFV mechanics with "the character needs to actually be hit by enemy skill to learn it" and the ability to slap the relevant materia on anyone. Though, much like in FFVI, it's going to be just a part of your skillset rather than a full half of it. It's not a regression, though. The indicator of which enemies have learnable skills cuts down on trial and error significantly, and Enemy Skill being just one materia among many means you can keep it on someone without it being a hard choice the way being a Blue Magic or having Learn assigned to a character was. It's probably the first Blue Magic Omicron has actually consistently used in a game, speaking of its usability improvement, and while it's probably less potent overall than the FFV version (much like in FFVI, because you have a bunch of other materia active), it's still a pretty useful skillset to have. The only real flaw in its implementation is the whole "each enemy skill materia is independent" thing, meaning that having two characters with usable enemy skill takes twice as much effort. Though even that could be considered an advantage as it contributes to variety between character skillsets.
As for other, lesser concerns over character building... Well, I think there is no need to speak about FFI and FFIII as they were more rough proofs of concept that would be revisited and polished in later games. FFII was an abject failure, falling down the familiar pits of "learn as you use" RPG systems that encourage you to do counterintuitive things for the sake of rising stats (like beating up each other while enemies deal you zero damage) and making it so some often used skills advance more easily than situationally useful ones. It's also the first game to make characters completely interchangeable (even if they would likely specialize in different things over the course of a playthrough), a trend of FF series that I strongly dislike.
FFIV is pure in its simplicity: every character has unique mechanics, and you have no control over your party, they come and go as plot demands. The disadvantages are obvious as you have zero say in the game's strategic aspect, limited to tactical one, but the advantages is that it makes every character feel unique, connecting them to their in-game role. And, of course, it removes choice paralysis entirely: you may not be able to break the game, but you aren't going to agonize over which job to master and which are good only for their skills.
FFV is, overall, probably the most polished of the complex FF systems so far. Simple in concept (just pick four jobs you like and use their !Abilities), it allows for surprisingly deep customization (barefisted mages! Beastmaster + Blue Mage combo! Rapid Fire Dual Wielding!), which eventually leads into Freelancer/Mime ultimate builds, themselves an improved take on Onion Knight basic concept. It's also sensible enough to give you all the toys to play with halfway through the game, freeing you to experiment and fool around before committing to the endgame. It's not flawless, though: mastering jobs takes more time than optimal, with a lot of them being padded by +X% MP/HP abilities that don't even get inherited by Freelancers/Mimes, and some jobs are duds (nobody uses a Berserker outside of self-imposed challenges). If you do know what you're doing, the endgame somewhat falls apart with everyone running on the same baseline stat-boosting classes plus the best !Abilities, though I don't think it's necessary a flaw: if you've gotten to the endgame, you've earned being absurdly powerful. My personal complaint is that it's another entry into "characters are totally interchangeable" FF trend. They will end up different, of course, as you master different jobs on different characters, but their abilities have no bearing on their in-game personalities and lore, it's up to you to decide whether Faris is going to be a Summoner who gets to reunite with her dragon in the end or not.
FFVI did a lot of new, intriguing things, but just as many feelsbadman failures. I do like the balance between customization and bespoke mechanics: every character brings something unique to the table (if not always useful) even as they all learn magic and get to use summons. This gives players control without compromising character identities, which I feel is important and worth going out of your way to enable. And the customization is truly unprecedented in FF series, with everyone being able to rise their stats as they wish and learn any magic they fancy in thematic batches, allowing for clever combos and exploits. On the other hand, espers only rising your stats if they're equipped on level up, combined with the otherwise good autoleveling mechanic, leads to a truly bizarre meta where the most optimal way to play involves avoiding leveling up as much as possible until you get the good espers, then overleveling some characters at the expense of others so they wouldn't lose out on stats when rejoining the party. None of it truly matter in the end since optimization is deeply unnecessary to complete the game when Ultima exists, but it sure feels bad to realize how much you've missed if you went at it blind, souring otherwise very ambitious and interesting mechanics. Also, unlike FFV, FFVI throws new toys at you until the very end, but like FFV you need to invest time to make use of them, which leads to things like Meltdown falling by the wayside. In addition, for all that espers are super-important to the narrative (or half of it, anyway), summons are very undercooked and often forgotten, especially compared to excellent realization in FFV.
Finally, FFVII. It continues the interchangeable characters trend, unfortunately, with everyone being defined by the materia they have equipped that could be changed at a whim. While different characters do have different limit breaks, which even matters, especially in the endgame, I feel it's not enough to make them feel truly unique, especially compared to FFVI Blitz or Trance or Rage mechanics. While FFVI sometimes struggled to make different mechanics truly unique (Blitz and Tools are Magic by another name, basically), FFVII could have used its smaller cast to better differentiate the characters from one another, and it's kind of a shame they didn't go farther than just limit breaks. Taken on their own, though, materia are a great concept. As industrialized magic, it fits the setting, its attachment to equipment allows for interesting trade-offs, and the linkage system allows for a truly staggering amounts of combos where every materia not only gives you access to the skills contained therein, but also serves several different secondary functions like granting immunities, additional effects, serving as your counter, etc. It's just a very neat concept that was realized fairly well. The downside, though, is very much like in FFVI (though with less feelsbadman): the game throws toys at you until the very last moment, but demands investment of time to make use of them, leading to potentially great materia languishing in your backpack forever. Their biggest flaw, however, is the total absence from the narrative. Espers were important (at least in early-mid game), getting new ones was often a tragic event where you witnessed an esper die. Jobs in FFV were memories of past heroes empowering you aginst the coming darkness. FFIV skills were a reflection of characters wielding them (and, in the case of Cecil, actively changing with character development). Materia are... nothing. They're theoretically a part of the setting. They're referenced by characters, sometimes. But, aside from big plot-important items that bear little resemblance to what you actually slot into your sword, they don't exist. I feel this is connected to the trend of interchangeable characters: the mechanics are divorced from the world, giving player more tools and control at a cost of immersion.
Well, whatever else can be said about FF series, it was always characterized by ambition. It's not content to recreate a working formula, it always strives to try something new, something bigger, if not always better. For all their flaws and failures, for all that I personally disagree with many choices those games make, the mechanics of each game are always interesting and worth talking about, and I, for one, can't wait for the next entries to surprise us once again.
A good analysis, I'll probably retread some of the same points in my own closing thoughts.
As for Blue Magic, the way Materia works, where each Materia is effectively only one or two spells you care about (you're never going to use Fira once you have Firaga, for instance), this makes the Enemy Skill Materia
astoundingly efficient. It would be worth the slot
just for Big Guard; it essentially makes the Barrier Materia redundant while also providing Haste, making the Time Materia redundant, all in one spell. That it allows you to carry around a Firaga and Thundaga equivalent for most of the game is only icing on the cake... and then it has like a dozen
more spells. I have been using Enemy Skill like a dumb brute, never bothering to actively hunt for spells beyond Beta, and only using Shadow Flare when I remembered I had it, and it was still one of the most valuable Materia in my whole arsenal.
Mmm. Yeah, the ambiguous ending doesn't work for me. I fact, it's committed the greatest sin a piece of entertainment can, made me feel the absolute, inargueable feeling you do not want an audience to feel.
Nothing.
I feel nothing about this sudden jump to the future. Red wasn't a bad character, but Cloud, Tifa, and Barret were characters I had substantially more emotional investment in. Without them, I don't really have something to feel attachment towards.
Like seeing Midgard all in ruins and overgrown is kinda neat, but not super neat. The whole thing falls flat. I don't buy it as some bold artistic choice, I veiw it as kin to the mini-games: something new the team wanted to try. An experiment that didn't work.
I'm still sitting there staring at a character whose defining trait was 'the last of his species' showing up with two kids after we thoroughly explored the entire planet and never found a single other of his kind.
vibes. God the ending to that movie was bleak.
