[FFVII-R] Discussion & News

[Caledor]

Demo Minutes, 42:00 starts
Max Demo Impressions Resume (Walltext coming!):

So far looks really good to me and i'd be lying if i said i wasn't excited. I'm liking the gameplay as well and I think they've nailed it: feels action enough without being mere button mashing or AI driven (Gambits were a mistake). I want to believe they're putting a tremendous amount of care into this, more than they've ever done to any other project. The main worry is "how much" they will expand each part and how it'll fit with the whole story, but that's probably the last thing we'll get to know.

[Kuraudo.]

Famitsu - Nomura Interview. - More accurate translation

• Nomura-san explains that the shadow that appears at the end of the latest trailer is something that has been added for the Remake. They are called "The Guardians of Destiny" (Unmei no Bannin 運命の番人, video) , and it’s a mysterious existence that appears in front of the party. He hopes that those who played the original game will enjoy these new elements.
• While the trailer did not show it, dialogue choices are in the game. Since different scenes with different reactions from the characters to these choices have been created, the size of the game has increased.
• Asked whether the events included in the original game have remained the same, Nomura-san mentioned that it depends. For instance, the cross-dressing event in the Honey Bee Inn is still included. That being said, the place itself was significantly rearranged in a modern style. When the developers tried to recreate that space, it didn’t look right, and they generally thought it was no good. They tweaked those parts that did not fit the visuals and the world view of the game.
• The game follows the original, but there are quite a few additional scenarios. While the main story has not changed, there are many new events, like the scene shown in the trailer in which Cloud and Jesse run away on the motorbike. If that wasn’t the case, the game wouldn’t require two Blu-Ray disks.
• Speaking of Aerith and Tifa, the team decided to clearly separate them visually since they have a situation with two heroines. Aerith’s beauty follows western aesthetics, while with Tifa they emphasized the cuteness of her face to follow eastern aesthetics.
• In terms of personality, Aerith has the innocence of a young girl. The Final Fantasy VII Remake conveys that strongly. But there is a gap between her appearance and inner personality, with her aspects of “innocence” and “beauty.” On the other hand, Tifa has a bold costume that exposes her a lot, but she actually isn’t that confident. She is a shy lady who doesn’t get out of her shell much. Both display a difference between their appearance and their inner personality, which makes them attractive.
• Speaking of costume design, Nomura-san explained that the team aimed for it to be quite realistic visually, taking real designs of clothes and accessories as reference. For instance, Tifa’s suspenders are inspired by real ones for military use, while her gloves reference those used for riding bikes and fighting. The body silhouette didn’t change from the original version, but the team has tried to improve such details.
• Developers wanted Tifa to have visible abs, so they gave her the body style of an athlete. There were instructions from the internal ethics department, and it was decided to constrict her chest [Editor’s Note: the context and wording indicate clearly that this refers to the tightness and design of Tifa’s clothing, not to her chest size] so that it wouldn’t look unnatural even during fierce action. Therefore, the team created a design for her upper torso, with black underwear and a body-fitting tank top replacing the original simple one. It’s a sporty design inspired by fitness.
• The battle system went through a lot of “scrap & build” during development, but now the direction is decided. While the base is action, the team wanted to make it enjoyable for those who like the original gameplay as well. Thus, the current hybrid system was born.
• The action part emphasizes the sense of realism and exhilaration, and players can fight without stress using shortcuts. However, it’s not that kind of fast action that doesn’t give you time to rest your hands. Using the ATB gauge lets you open the command menu and slow down the flow of time, and it’s designed so that you can think of it as a command-style RPG.
• How this system is used depends on the player’s style and skills. If you like to play specifically action, you can do that too. Final Fantasy is a game where you can see numerical values such as damage and the amount of HP. Command selection is also important to checking and managing resources like MP.
• Character switching is also important, as each has different abilities, as some are more suitable to fight certain enemies. For instance, this is easy to understand with the scorpion boss shown during the trailer: since it has short-range attacks, it’s a good strategy to switch to Barret and shoot from a distance. Yet, you can also attack it with Cloud by using magic. Since recovering MP requires items, you also need to manage that resource.
• Nomura-san concludes by mentioning that Final Fantasy VII has been developed more than twenty years ago. Most of today’s teens have not played it. Since times have changed, even playing the original Final Fantasy VII may feel different now for those who enjoyed it a long time ago. He hopes that people will be able to approach the Final Fantasy VII remade in the current era as a new Final Fantasy. On the other hand, there are plenty of nostalgic elements among the new ones for veterans of the game. It would be nice if even those who lost passion for gaming over such a long time could come back to Midgar once again.

New Renders:

• Cloud, Aerith

Famitsu Interview pages:

• All pages [a few HQ]

[ExDuelist]

Square Enix ethics team told developers to “tighten her chest” to avoid getting jiggly during intense action.[/li][/list]

Japanese people against jiggling, now i've seen them all.

[Izban]

Squares ethics committee is likely from the NA branch

[ExDuelist]

Squares ethics committee is likely from the NA branch

Alright then, nothing out of place.

[Kuraudo.]

New Cloud and Aerith renders. Famitsu pages... see above post.

[Manakaiser]

These renders give me a weird cosplay vibe, cant put my finger on it, possibly "too realistic" or something, not sure how to put it but they feel off

[LordUrQuan]

These renders give me a weird cosplay vibe, cant put my finger on it, possibly "too realistic" or something, not sure how to put it but they feel off

I think the term you're looking for is uncanny valley

[Kuraudo.]

There we go.

"More modern" is just a mealy-mouth way of saying "We've dumbed down because muh outraged political correct idiots."

This is another reason the original will always have a special appeal... because it will always have a feeling of being more adult and not this childish slapstick.

Ahah I knew it you're gonna comment Nomura's statement!

So far looks really good to me and i'd be lying if i said i wasn't excited. I'm liking the gameplay as well and I think they've nailed it: feels action enough without being mere button mashing or AI driven (Gambits were a mistake). I want to believe they're putting a tremendous amount of care into this, more than they've ever done to any other project. The main worry is "how much" they will expand each part and how it'll fit with the whole story, but that's probably the last thing we'll get to know.

Caledor that is a big question mark on how they'll manage the other parts. However, I agree with you, I believe that Square-Enix knows how much fans will destroy them if anything goes bad. Even though, I'm still worried of the second and third part... I feel a lot will depend from the sales.

Edit:
Gaia's term confirmed from Aerith skill.

Aaand one more for DLPB's happiness: "FFVIIのコンピレーション作品で判明した設定が新たに盛り込まれたりと、ストリーの面でも厚みが増やしている " ("Settings established in the FFVII Compilation works are newly incorporated and the story has been delved more deeply into." )

No doubts about it. 

[Kaldarasha]

The problem with the episodic thing is that every episode needs to be better than the one before. This however means, that we get bigger and bigger games and in the worst case it starts to get boring rather than entertaining. Especially in the last part of a game SE becomes very uninnovative and just pull the stats to ridicules numbers instead of being creative.
What's also interesting how they will allow the player to travel? I mean they need to merge somehow the games in the end. But I guess they will kick out the worldmap and make a fast travel system similar to FFX. This way they would have much more control.

[Izban]

I'm thinking that the bike is gonna play a big part in how we traverse midgar, assuming it's as big as they are making it sound...only problem with that is why do they leave the truck and bike at the end of midgar seeing as how useful they are in and around midgar.

Kinda hoping they make the avalanche crew temp party members for sections in place of the characters we miss out on due to locking us in midgar that would make platefall far more impactful, even though we are definitely gonna make us know Biggs, Wedge and Jessie far better anyhow

[Kuraudo.]

Other details from Playstation Blog.

• The music. My goodness, the music. I heard a few tracks during my short time with Remake, each a fully orchestrated arrangement of the original’s timeless tunes. Listen to the music in the excellent intro to Square Enix’s E3 presentation, then imagine that treatment applied to some of the game’s other songs. Yeah.
• Speaking of the music, it swaps seamlessly and dynamically between different versions of the song as you enter and exit combat. Such a cool touch!
• Major QoL upgrade: You can slide down ladders by holding R2 or clicking the left analog stick.
• Those same controls also let you sprint as long as you’re not in combat.
• You can assign commands to other characters during combat by selecting them with L2 or R2 and navigating their Tactical menus.
• After I killed an enemy with a multi-hit ability, Cloud automatically redirected the remaining hits of his attack to another nearby foe, ensuring the attack wasn’t wasted.
• The Scorpion Sentinel boss fight had some really rad phase transitions — basically mini-cutscenes that played out completely seamlessly during the encounter. Even though I’ve destroyed this thing plenty of times in the past two decades, I was glued to the screen as I took it on this time.

[Manakaiser]

You'll end up with huge parts of the original story being missed.

Expanding a small portion of the original story into a full game (which is true independent of the amount of resources inversted into visual fidelity) leads to huge parts of the original story being missed? Elaborate.
 

I also think it ruins the immersion of the story when you see your characters fighting something like this - as it then transitions to the main story and looks absurd.  In the original game,  you separated battle from story.  Here - it's part of it and looks stupid.

And no offence but this whole statement simply makes no logical sense from an objective point of view (best case scenario i could grant it being valid in your personal preference but you clearly didnt frame in that way). But if you think it does then please elaborate becasue standing like this it truly looks like a desperate attempt to be negative at all costs ^^

I mean dont take it the wrong way, (Imo) most of your replies cant be taken seriously due to obvious extreme emotional bias/attachment to the original, but they are usually relatively entertaining, but those 2 are just stilly ^^

[Manakaiser]

Pointing out what i deem exaggerated rhetoric is not aequivalent to defending the game at all costs or like a fanboy (especailly since I clearly am not emotionally invested which is often linked to what people refer to as fanboyism), not by any margin, so that line makes very little sense in the context. And actually its not me who needs to read/ word their statements properly; There is a fundamental difference between badly delivering a given story and "missing huge parts" (verbatum) of a story in a format that in fact stretches a given story out by a significant amount of time (and justifying that statement by wrongly allocated resources, which is only tangentially related as the lack of resources, given the format and context we talk about, would primarily affect quality of delivery), and that economics line was just silly/unnecessary btw.

The rest of what you said isnt really worth adressing and im sure you understand why (considering that big brain youre clearly confident to have )

But ill promise ill just smirk in silence at any of your future replies  and keep my thoughts on them to myself, so lets just agree to disagree

[-Ric-]

There's a reason why being stabbed in a cutscene and being shot in the face by Rufus in battle are not taken as the same thing [and in the remake will be forced to be because of how it's being presented].  How's it going to look when cutscenes show people being blown away and Aerith dies from a single stab wound?   

Yes, cause this was definitely never done on millions of other games. It's not we haven't had games in which main characters fight and defeat God-tier villains and yet can't open certain treasure chests at certain times. Must mean treasure chest>Villain. Unplayable! It definitely has to be 100% realistic to make sense. It's definitely a whole new concept that SE has come up with and will not make any sense. 

And you're a fanboy who'll defend it all costs "imo".

And you're a hater that will keep crying about it at all costs "imo".

[Caledor]

You should read what I wrote.  Devoting massive resources to graphics takes time away from other areas of the game.  You realize this thing has a deadline and a budget... right?

ATM i think the opposite in my optimism. My opinion is that they don't care about budget and they can parallelize work by assigning battle graphics and story to entirely different teams. About the budget i'm convinced they will probably ignore it in the belief that if they do a good job, any budget they put in it will return a hundredfold, while if they screw this up it will haunt them forever. Scrapping most of CC2's work after 2 years only reinforced this belief.

[sithlord48]

FF7Remake is unrealistic are you kidding? There are very very few parts of Pick any FF game that are realistic. That is just a poor argument.

Im going to guess you never played FF15 because if you had you would be able to tell how different the combat is. The combat does look like kinda like 15 but it doesn't function like 15. in 15 you got a few moves when your filled a bunch of attack bars In FF7R its ATB, where the bar fills over time and also with attacks (yeah i hope they drop the with attacks parts). I would have really like pure menu based ATB combat but thats unrealistic so you would hate it. I started looking into the battle system more reading and watching what those played the demo at e3 said (im sure you will just say they are paid to make it sound good).  You can do a block or standard shit attacks like a normal attack until your time bar fills up and you get a menu where you can use items etc.. I really hope there is an auto pause mode option for this as i think most of us would want to play that way and you don't have to hold a button like in FF15. Yeah you can map shortcuts for those who don't want to dig thru the menu to find an attack and or spam the same attack alot. Kinda like memory option that many menu based systems have so you can quickly get to the command you want. So i can't really hate on that feature at all as its literally a more modernized method of the memory option.

Do I think that FF7R is doing everything perfectly? NO there is a lot I have concerns about. How are saves gonna work for other parts? Will they just become DLC for this game, sadly maybe the best way to do the episodes to keep a consistent experience thought all parts. ?  Game 1 ends when you leave midgar and is two full blurays ? That alone has me worried Are all the textures 4k or 8k to future proof for ps5? is the game 100% voice acted? is it tons of cutscenes? What is all this data?  what did they add to the midgar section to make it longer? why is sephiroth showing up in midgar in what look to be around bombing mission? More i can't even think of right now. Its looking like this could be done as well as the RE2 Remake so yes I'm excited to see how it turns out.

[-Ric-]

If you have seamless battles with cutscenes showing your characters shot and stabbed - and then you see Aerith killed by a single stab, how do you reconcile those?

Creepy looking Planetary-scale being with 5 meter sword and glorious white hair>fodder lvl 10 enemy.  It's not that hard.

[sithlord48]

It's not a poor argument.  And I'm not talking about realism - I'm talking about believability in the world presented - Storytelling.  They're completely different things.  Unless you think anything should happen for any reason - which is bad story telling. Again, read what I wrote. If you have seamless battles with cutscenes showing your characters shot and stabbed - and then you see Aerith killed by a single stab, how do you reconcile those?  In the original game, you separated battle from story and suspended disbelief.  You can't do that with the remake.

Your argument is a poor argument because this is a literally a trope in the medium. So let me ask you Does this mean chrono trigger or any game where you can see the mobs on screen is shit from a realism perspective?

[obesebear]

Why does improved graphics equal poor storytelling?  Surely then we should just go back to a time before movies and video games, or even picture books.  Good storytelling is enhanced by quality visuals and audio, not the other way around.

[hotdog963al]

I thought the remake was going to be terrible, I was going to avoid it, but DLPB is making me want to give it a chance!

[-Ric-]

I can't make my position on this any clearer than that. FF12, 13, 14, 15, the spin offs, the sad "remasters", and Advent Children, and the released info and scenes so far from FF7r all point to me being right.

FF12 is amazing. FF14 is one of the most successful MMORPGs ever and 15 is fun as hell. While not as good as the others, 13 is still enjoyable. Next.

[EQ2Alyza]

12 is good, but it doesn't hold a candle to 10 and prior.

13 is not good...you can like it, that's fine. But others' liking does not convince me it's a good game. No one can change my mind on that.

14 is successful, but success only measures success. I've tried it several times after new expansion releases, and every time something just felt missing. I think it's maybe the good story tied down by boring kill/fetch quests. I don't really do well with MMOs in general.

15 I never played. I watched some videos online but nothing grabbed at my attention to warrant a PS4/game purchase. I can't knock it for that, but it's hard to praise either when first impressions weren't "fun as hell" for me.

FF7:R has my interest, but probably moreso due to nastalgia. It feels more like a battle to hold onto my beloved original, rather than trying to embrace this new vision. Gotta see more before I can begin to parse my thoughts on it.

[-Ric-]

12 is good, but it doesn't hold a candle to 10 and prior.

12's pace, voice acting, dialogues and even the combat are all amazing. The story itself is also great. Some of the characters don't have very interesting backgrounds but it's definitely one of the good Final fantasy games.

You should give 15 a go. The combat might not blow you away but the characters are all pretty good and their friendship, leading all the way to the end has some twists that you might not expect. The story isn't bad either but they screwed up by having it split into movies, game, DLC. And well, you can snatch it for PS4 for like 15 bucks so it's not all that expensive anymore.

FF7:R has my interest, but probably moreso due to nastalgia. It feels more like a battle to hold onto my beloved original, rather than trying to embrace this new vision. Gotta see more before I can begin to parse my thoughts on it.

The best thing about it, and a thing that everyone appears to overlook is that you don't need to fight that battle. You can get the remake and enjoy it, you can keep the original and enjoy it. It's a new take on FF7, not a replacement. The original will always be there for you. Available pretty much on any console, tablet, phone. I'm sure you could even get it on some of Samsung's fridges if you really wanted it.

This is why I don't get the whole crying and moaning about the remake. Don't like it? Great. The original is there for you and will always be.

[gjoerulv]

The best thing about it, and a thing that everyone appears to overlook is that you don't need to fight that battle. You can get the remake and enjoy it, you can keep the original and enjoy it. It's a new take on FF7, not a replacement. The original will always be there for you. Available pretty much on any console, tablet, phone. I'm sure you could even get it on some of Samsung's fridges if you really wanted it.

This is why I don't get the whole crying and moaning about the remake. Don't like it? Great. The original is there for you and will always be.

Welp, it's a huuuge missed opportunity to have a massive production team remaking FF7 legally, the "right(ish)" way, instead of creating FF7R: the DBZ-matrix-realism-crap reboot lol. Same with most of the other FF ports/remakes, instead here it's wasted by cheap and lazy production cycles. But, shrug, I don't really care, SE is pretty much a lost cause in the FF department as far as I'm concerned.

Whereas the cryers may cry, there are at least 10x as many who seemingly just loves whatever SE throws at them regarding FF7r. There are plenty of reaction vids out there with more cringeworthy statements to count.