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Post by Ex on May 13, 2020 12:10:02 GMT -5
I never cringed at a single thing in any Phantasy Star game. At least not in the original PS1-4 series.
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Post by ninjamaster on May 13, 2020 12:45:19 GMT -5
I honestly don't know if the Draw mechanic would put me off these days, either. But really, in some ways, it's just a different form of grinding. Levels are less important in this one; good junctions are what saves the day.
Yes because GF junctions are the source of party's strength and abilities!
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Post by Xeogred on May 13, 2020 18:00:35 GMT -5
The problem being that you can't hard save Junction setups and when the game often throws you over to Laguna's party, you sometimes lose Junction setups in the process. I assume the code in the game requires you to have a specific person or party setup for everything to transfer over nicely, but it doesn't always happen. That annoyed me greatly the last time I attempted to replay FF8. That and both the Draw system and enemy level scaling is a bit of an issue. Like Sarge, I will say again that I was a big fan of FF8 and still think back to that first playthrough fondly. But I've fallen off 2-3 replay attempts since then because of these issues. My thinking that Ex will absolutely hate it, watch he'll probably end up loving it and then I'll never figure him out.
And also, I think FF7 just kind of ate FF8's lunch. Many things FF8 tries to do story/character wise, etc, FF7 already did far better. And instead of some mega corp sucking up the planet's literal life energy, you get... magic army schools? The tone of FF8 is ridiculous and all over the place. And man, I can't express enough how much I hate Seifer and Rinoa. The game lacks a good recurring main antagonist. It's obviously supposed to be both Edea and Seifer to an extent, but they don't really cut it at all compared to other FF villains. I don't recall much melodramatic romance honestly, because Rinoa spends 90% of the game just whining about Seifer. Squall was fine overall though, I like Selphie, Quistis, Irvine, and Zell.. think that's the whole gang? They were all solid.
The remaster has a speed up feature. But it's got terrible reviews on Steam right now and sounds like it was a crappy effort after all. I might just play the original version on PC someday with better fan mods or something.
I don't have a lot of patience for the summon animations in the 3D games either now. I've been using them once in FF7 to revisit that animation, but that's it. Though I might keep a Bahamut Materia on somewhere haha... gotta love the dragons. But it's easy to play FF7 without utilizing the summons.
This isn't an issue in the old games at all, but I'm still trying to wonder how I should approach my own harder remix of FF6 when I replay that one. Which I'd like to do maybe this year, since Chrono Trigger and FF7 are both fresh in my mind, it'll be cool to see how FF6 holds up compared to those in my mind.
My idea would simply be that nobody can use or equip summons. Thus all characters would not get those bonus stats per level up either and I would have to focus entirely on the specialties the characters have, like in FF4 and better yet how some of DQ has obvious class roles for characters. This might force me to use Relm and Strago more. I was thinking maybe I could allow those two, or Terra and Celes to use summons and learn magic... maybe I could even get meticulous about it and build one as a white mage, the other a black mage. But I wouldn't really want to use them both in the same party. I like how the final dungeon forces you to split up the huge cast, so that could get really interesting on this kind of run.
I bet it'll still be easy overall, but putting a ban on summons should be interesting I think. Either way you cut it, FF6-FF8 are probably the easiest games in the series by far because you can easily teach every character everything basically.
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Post by Sarge on May 13, 2020 19:25:32 GMT -5
Ha, just when we think we've got each other figured out, there's a curveball. You just never know with this crew.
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Post by Xeogred on May 13, 2020 19:32:46 GMT -5
Now I just wish some of you here liked FF5 a lot like me... I'd maybe be interested in doing that Job Fiesta thing people do, just not with random people. Either way I'm excited to replay that one eventually. I plan to go through the SNES version with the GBA translation. It'll be awesome to experiment more with the job system and also bring in my knowledge of what worked and what didn't work from my first full playthrough in 2013.
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Post by Sarge on May 13, 2020 20:48:53 GMT -5
I always see the thread when folks do that over on Talking Time. I mean, I get the appeal, it just doesn't necessarily appeal to me. I'm not sure why. If I did play through it again, it would be with the GBA version.
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Post by Xeogred on May 13, 2020 20:52:43 GMT -5
The GBA version is what made me love it, but mainly just because the translation and script was excellent (compared to the crappy PSX Anthology version). I don't recall caring for any of the extra jobs and didn't do the post end game content. Seemed like there was a lot for sure though. So I won't miss these features in the SFC version. The GBA tunes were pretty good and some songs benefited from that extra chunk, but I suspect I'll like the SFC OST more overall.
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Post by Ex on May 13, 2020 21:09:33 GMT -5
My thinking that Ex will absolutely hate it, watch he'll probably end up loving it and then I'll never figure him out. Well Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals aggravated the hell out of me with something like that. There's this big grid board where you level up your party members' abilities, by assigning dozens if not a hundred Tetris pieces on it, carefully and deliberately. But when you enter the Ancient Cave all of those pieces become unassigned and the board goes blank. You have to reassign them all over again when you exit the Ancient Cave. And the game forces you into the Ancient Cave twice, so two times you lose your Tetris piece assignments. It was very very aggravating. I remember watching a roommate of mine play FF8 back around 2000. I recall him jack hammering the shit out of a button on the controller during summons. Apparently you could power up the summons by repeatedly mashing that button while the (long) summon animation played out. I recall thinking that was some terrible assed game design. You could play it without ever using magic, only physical attacks and items. Or maybe try this hack: www.romhacking.net/hacks/77/Ha, just when we think we've got each other figured out, there's a curveball. You just never know with this crew. I wasn't kidding when I said I'd like an ecchi-infused SCUBA diving game where you can play underwater chess against hot waifus. Dreamboat game right there son.
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Post by Xeogred on May 13, 2020 21:16:31 GMT -5
My thinking that Ex will absolutely hate it, watch he'll probably end up loving it and then I'll never figure him out. Well Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals aggravated the hell out of me with something like that. There's this big grid board where you level up your party members' abilities, by assigning dozens if not a hundred Tetris pieces on it, carefully and deliberately. But when you enter the Ancient Cave all of those pieces become unassigned and the board goes blank. You have to reassign them all over again when you exit the Ancient Cave. And the game forces you into the Ancient Cave twice, so two times you lose your Tetris piece assignments. It was very very aggravating. I remember watching a roommate of mine play FF8 back around 2000. I recall him jack hammering the shit out of a button on the controller during summons. Apparently you could power up the summons by repeatedly mashing that button while the (long) summon animation played out. I recall thinking that was some terrible assed game design. Oh frick, I forget about that crap.
And yeah, having to micromanage menu's constantly and very specific setups for characters is a big pet peeve of mine thesedays. In FF7, you can access a menu that shows Materia equipped to all characters. But I don't recall FF8 having anything like that with its wacky Junction gimmick. And by using those drawn, finite pieces of magic, you're effectively diminishing your own stats in the process if you keep using that magic a lot and drain its number. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?
Also, I was skimming this video and could easily see why people think the "remaster" sucks. The new character models look excellent to me, but up against the blurry backgrounds, it's extremely jarring.
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Post by toei on May 14, 2020 0:43:48 GMT -5
Xeogred I was just thinking about how FFV's final boss is a tree when reading what you wrote about the lack of great villains in FFVIII. Summon animations and any kind of elaborate magic spell in 3D PSX RPGs are always a pain. They were just thinking of impressing gamers at the time, and while it might have worked initially, it took a while before they figured out that people might want to skip that stuff after they'd seen it once or twice already.
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