First and formost, Square's "even team" is working on this one. they were responsable for FF8 which I wan't a big fan of. You can visually tell it's the same dev team from the character designs to some of the aspects of the battle system, which I will be getting into later.
Let's talk about what's diffent.
The engine uses a extramly modded version of the bouncer engine. Kind of like when FF8 used a modded version of the parasite eve engine. The Anti-alising is done in software using the "fuzzy-blur" method. It's a shame that the hardware AA is sooo slooow. Oh well, every PSX must have a critical hardware bug in it. (The original PSX had a clipping bug in the GPU, that's why clipping looked so bad in many many many games)
The fields are not pre-rendered anymore. I have mixed feelings about this. Will square give up some detail in thier renders for 3d graphics again (I know, the renders were only 320x244, but they looked good on a TV screen) The backgrounds I've seen so far have been less then stellar. The game isn't done yet though.
The battle module and the field module have been merged so the system can go from drama to battle seamlessly. There is no "whooh" with a cool mosic and then a 3d battle stage. I havn't seen if thw world map still enters battle the old way or not. When you run from a battle, the monster is still in the environment The battle menus are gon though.
The battle system has gotten cooler and dumber at the same time. Here's how it works.
The battle uses three characters like in 8, but you can swap in your other party members during battle. In the upper right hand corner there are icons of the three characters in battle with an ATB bar after them. below that you have the monsters icons and thier ATB bar (yes, you can see them now) and then the remaining characters that are "banked out" are placed under that with full ATB. I'm not too clear on how characters can be switched in.
Every character has a job class like in 9. Yuna is a summoner, lulu is a white mage. That is cool. There is also an antho-lion who is a dragoon (has the "jump command") But with sadness I must announce that the "one-shot" magic system from FF8 is back again.
There is no drawing from what I can tell. Also junctions appear to be absent. When you aqire spells from a yet-to-be-determined way. You will only have so much. The menus I saw had "blizard 8 firga 22 stop 12" selectable after the magic command was issued.
The commands are also swappable, you have three slots (as opposed to FF8 which had four) I beleave one of the battle commands can not be switched out (The "intresic" one if you will) but I've seen "item" switched for something else. The menus are semi-trasparent blue. They look pretty.
Mogs are there.
Speech! augh, square better get some good voice actors, Trust me, if we get some sort of Resident Evil voices, square would know.
That's it for my report now... comments ^_^
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YAY! I'm a CRAZY POSTER !!!!!!!
[This message has been edited by halkun (edited April 09, 2001).]
The Camera pans to behind the main character, the scene down't change. a little water ripple and the menus come up. No whoosh. oh and after you summon a beast, he is a member of your party. You contol him for the duration of the battle.
I looked at all these movies from ps2.ign.com about the previews for FFX... Here's what I noticed...
Check out the characters little bars (bottom right of screen i believe). They have an HP bar with numbers above it, AND an MP bar.
The summons cost MP I believe, I saw the summon list, each one had a number like "28" next to it.
When you summon something, it joins your party for the fight (or until it dies, or until you tell it to go away?) - while it is there, all of the characters leave except for your summoner, but you can't tell the summoner to do anything, just the summon. The summon can preform special moves, which I believe also use MP (again, you can see the summon's MP bar in the movies and you can see the MP the moves cost when you select them).
ALSO I saw a monster do an attack that absorbed MP from a character (it said "10 MP" as the damage to the character, and "10 MP" in green on the monster).
As far as MP goes, I've played all the FF games except 9 and 10, and found 8 to be the most refreshing and exciting. Not only because Squall fits my persona and looks to the letter, and the same with Rinoa and my girlfriend, but also because the storyline REALLY caught my attention. Romance and time, time and romance. I honestly don't care much about the mechanics of the game, but the one shot magic was a rather good idea, It allowed you more free reign over the magic, shuffling it between people, aligning ANY party to face the monsters they were up against rather than hoping that your magic user is there when you need him/her. It also prevents you from using ultima and other powerful, rare spells dozens of times because you bought a bunch of cheap items.
There will NOT be a CD version of FFX. There will be only a DVD version (well actually two I think - one comes on one DVD, and there's a two-DVD version that has extra features like HDTV support(?) and funky surround sound - at least I heard that somewhere). I know for a fact that there will be no CD version though.
Um, I dunno if there'll be PC... I really hope so, because I'm gonna buy a freakin' AWESOME PC in the near future and I don't wanna have to shell out more money for a PS2... If there's no PC version, I guess I'll just wait for the emulators to get good enough to play it. Its very convienient that around the time FF9 came out, emulators were supporting it, I got to keep my streak of playing every one (all 9) of the FF games on my computer and not a console.
1-shot magic system is annoying. I think FFX has MP but I'm not positive. I also like the characters to have different classes - if they all can do exactly the same stuff (i.e. FF3, 5, 6 kinda 7, 8) then it gets kind of boring. FF9 was awesome.
See, Joey, you don't have a very good track record of being able to show your claims are correct. Ever heard the story about the kid who cried wolf? Now, if you were able to give us a link to an article by Square where they said "we won't abandon CD's for a while", maybe we'd believe you.
Why would the game come out on CD?
More on the new ATB and switching out characters. Switchouts are not on the menu, most likely you push the R1 or L1 button to pull up the switch menu. The switch menu appears in the upper left corner. You highlight the reserve character to switch in. and then stitch happens. you can switch back and forth until the character you want is selected, but that once that character is "set" the ATB goes back to 0 again.
more later
ATB
The ATB is on the upper right hand corner. I will call this the ATB list. It shows when everyone will be having thier turn. For example, Yuna, Lulu, and Tida are fighting a monster The list on the right hand side shows Yuna with her ATB bar, then lulu under her with her ATB, and Tida with his ATB. Then there is a monster icon (a B) and his ATB. There is a white line along the left side of the ATB list that shows who in line is in the cuurent rounbd. The order for the next round is also shown under that with a black line to the left. Pressing the R2 button will show the turn order beyond the next two rounds. Pretty cool. If there is a character below the one who is "up" who also has ATB you can press the triangle key to use them, but you can't do as much. (longer spells are disabled, you don't have the time to cast them). After that character's attack is done, the next in line pops up and the ATB list ir re-ordered.
During summons, the characters no longer battle. All of them leave and you just control the summoned monster. The ATB list is now not used and is gone. No idea how long the summon battles last.
Along the top there is a semi-trasperent "help" bar that tells you what does what. You can turn it off using "select"
I feel better about the battle system now.
-halkun
The summon lasts
- until it dies?
- until you tell it to go away?
- until some time limit runs out?
I dunno, any of those seem like possibilities.
I'll investigate too. Screenshots / movies at ps2.ign.com.