Can we tall about stock FFVII here? Cuz honestly, I give it a lot of grief, but deep down I think I have always genuinely enjoyed this JRPG. From the way the game narrates its story out in a fairly nonlinear manner (talking about how it reveals its backstory), to all the little secrets tucked away here and there that you could easily miss without a guide. I'm replaying it atm and these things are hitting me hard despite how cynical I've become.
FFVII is a very personal experience for me, and I think I'm giving FFVIIR all my autistic grief simply because I cant do the following, which to me constitutes the quintessential FFVII experience: 1. Learn Beta from Midgar Zolom immediately after Kalm 2. Date Yuffie at the Golden Saucer 3. Get Knights of the Round I think these are the true gameplay beats for me. What are yours? Do you have any unique/autistic ones?
How far are you right now? I'm currently right in front of Rocket Town to meet up with Cid. As for me, one thing I really like to do is look at the little unique animations that the characters do, such as Nanaki sitting on his hind legs like this.
Just got out of the Golden Sauver for the first time, going to take am hour to collect all the Enemy Skills like Mighty Guard and White Wind (and a second Beta for the other ESkill) now that I have Manipulate.
I'm running 7th Heaven mods which actually lends some clarity to these animations by giving them realistic proportions, the trick is to choose slightly lower quality models so they fit in better with the NPC models that weren't given as much love.
It's really fun doing all the mini games correctly now that I'm not 8 years old and stupid, but I will admit that some of these mini games didn't age very well. Priscilla and the jumping Dolphin is an immediate standout. I do think they were an interesting secondary loop for a JRPG to explore(at the time) nonetheless.
Luis Rodriguez
Go get big guard too, ez game
Gavin Carter
>Priscilla and the jumping Dolphin is an immediate standout. It was only years later that I figured out you don't have to move Cloud to get up there with the dolphin. Just press "square" twice and he gets up there. As for mods, I only have a toaster of a netbook from the late 00s so I'm wondering if FFVII would even run properly on something like that. At least I have the game on other platforms. I love it so much, I bought it three times.
Gabriel Martin
I never beat FF7 but I got to say the first time you leave Midgar is just a goddamn magic moment, so different and so new
It's such an opening up of the game world. It's like what FFX wanted to be. That first time you hear that world map theme start.
And it doesn't fucking restart. It picks up where it left off when switching zones.
Ahh, I just wanted FF7R to be a purist's remake.
Daniel Rivera
That's definitely next on my agenda!
Do you guys think Enemy Skill was a mistake? Or would you agree that it was good by being obtuse enough for those without a guide to eaily miss the broken bits, while offering knowledgeable players an avenue for sequence breaking? I definitely think it was clever to at least put Matra Magic immediately after you got your first Enemy Skill, to show you how useful it can be.
Carter Hernandez
Yeah, I made the assumption that the entire game was going to be in Midgar, but then it turned out it was going to be a world-wide adventure. I wish Squaresoft never got rid of the original assets, because all those prerendered backgrounds deserved to have high-res copies of them available.
I thought it was clever to make sure you defeated the enemy to be able to keep the skill, making it feel like a reward especially when it came from things like the Midgar Zolom.
David Wood
>the first time you leave Midgar is just a goddamn magic moment It really is, it's such a transformative moment too; you lost your home, a new dick just got installed into power, a silver haired menace is on the loose, it's dark and there's nowhere to go but forward, then suddenly, there's light, vast open spaces and a calming epic, sweeping melody playing in the background as you slowly see the influence of Shinra on every section of the world.
If you can stand FFVII with mods, I think that's the remake you and I wanted, user.
John Long
Wasn't there a project to upscale those backgrounds using a machine learning algorithm?
Isaiah Gray
>The Remako HD Graphics Mod is a mod that completely revamps the pre-rendered backgrounds of the classic JRPG Final Fantasy VII. All of the backgrounds now have 4 times the resolution of the original. >Using state of the art AI neural networks, this upscaling tries to emulate the detail the original renders would have had. This helps the new visuals to come as close to a higher resolution re-rendering of the original as possible with current technology.
Huh. Didn't know this was a thing until now.
Carter Bell
>Playing on the PS4 >Get done with Wutai and decide to grind for Aeris and get her level 4 limit break >Activate the X3 speed >Three hours later Cloud is level 60 and I have level 4 limit breaks for Aeris, Yuffie, Red and Level 3 limit breaks for everyone else Yeah, it's a bit much. Should have stopped at Aeris honestly.
Aaron Cruz
I just KO'd everyone in the battle party save for the one I'm grinding limits for, and then shuffled everyone around using the PHS to minimize any EXP gains. KO'd party members don't get any EXP unless they're also inactive members. Inactive members of the party get 1/2 EXP. I also made sure to kill the low-level shitters in the Mythril Cave too.
Adrian Perry
The part they don't tell you is how using it will start making your game crash at random because the larger textures fill VRAM faster. Lost two hours of running around doing random battles grinding limit breaks and stealing from enemies before doing Junon the other day, said fuck it and kept going with the story, only to have it crash as the Jenova fight loaded and for me to realize I hadn't saved in all that time either. Utterly killed my motivation to keep playing.
Aaron Nelson
>Nanaki Pretty based, if not for how the scene plays out in Cosmo Canyon
Kayden Ward
>saving and reloading 100 times to learn Beta on all Enemy Skill materia at an obscenely low level. Those were happy days. You had to get it just right because the Zolom would kick out your party members with its tail before casting Beta so if you SURVIVED long enough to even get to that point, then he kicked out the party member with the Enemy Skill Materia you needed it on, you had to reload.
But, nigga, once you got it, it was a fucking killing spree. boom, headshot. boom, headshot. boom, headshot. Like James Bond with a big ass sword. Awesome.
I did it on purpose because it was 3 times faster with the speed up option. I basically did 9 hours of mind numbing grinding in 3 hours and I'm just too strong. It will even out eventually but until then I'm basically just destroying everything.
Christopher Foster
And you had have magic resist gear on them to nullify the beta damage, then run like fuck as soon as you learned it because you'd never be able to actually kill him. If he bit you in the ass before you made it off the screen, had to start all over.
Carson Hughes
As a dumb kid I just grinded outside till my characters had over 1000 hp (it took AGES and was super suboptimal). These days we've long formalized the method, goes a little like this: 1. Elemental + Fire on Enemy Skill User's armor (reduces fire damage by a third) 2. Poison on the rest 3. Tranquilize everyone and put in back row 4. Makes sure Enemy Skill user doesn't attack, exclusively on healing duty while the other two Bio that snake's life away. 5. Buffer a Cure by E Skill user, on E Skill user immediately as Midgar Zolom casts Beta 6. Cast Beta. I've heard this technique succeed as early as level 15, though I did it at level 18 this run.
Ayden Miller
i love ff7 and love the remake. midgar is one of the coolest settings ever and im glad they spent 30-40 hours in it. i feel like they really re-captured what made ff7 so great. it had so much polish, it had little mini-games and it had dialogue choices that led to a unique scene.
i hope they make spinoff games set in midgar.
Gabriel Lopez
I would grind in the cave across the lake. Those snake things show up in packs of 5. You can AOE them down. Then run across the lake to the chocobo place to sleep and restore MP. It was one of my standard grind spots.
The only other I remember is the southern tip of Yuffie's island where packs of birds show up (again, AOE). It's been a loooong time since I played.
Blake Brooks
Would have been nice if the game renamed him with his real name after Cosmo Canyon.
There's a forced knockout on the party member that drains its HP past 1/2 if it hasn't done a knockout yet.
The game doesn't let you keep Enemy Skills unless you kill the enemy that gives it to you.
Samuel Jenkins
>The game doesn't let you keep Enemy Skills unless you kill the enemy that gives it to you. This is not correct. If you flee the battle, the ability is still learned. Unless they changed something in post-2000 versions.
Kayden Reed
>tfw you forgot and missed the enemy skill materia from Hojo I know you can get more and I got the one from Junon but still would have liked that early one.
>Do you have any unique/autistic ones? Probably not that unique but I always take Barrett and Vincent for the Hojo boss atop the Sister Ray, Barrett for getting Missing Score and Vincent for narrative reasons, I also have Vincent use Chaos for that fight
Adam Moore
This game is pretty unforgiving when it comes to missable materia, I'm fairly certain Ifrit and Ramuh are missable as you only see those Junon boat maps once and I'm not sure if you go into that Chocobo jockey holding area ever again.
Charles Ramirez
Beta nullified Ifrit. As usual, Final Fantasy games never seem to know what the fuck they're doing with summons. Usually they're just a huge waste of time.
Luis King
They are missable but it's hard to miss those materia as they stand out against the background
Christopher Davis
>new threat mod basically removed the section of the game Cid leads the party I was enjoying the mod until this
Gavin Diaz
>the tension of weapon heading towards Midgar Fuck I can't wait for this in the remake in 2045
Caleb Harris
Wait what. I'm playing it at the moment, in the Temple of the Ancients right now-
Samuel Bell
Not necessarily a mistake as it's a really cool reward of sorts through poking at the game's secrets, the problem is that its just WAY too good since the spells are ridiculously effective for little MP cost which trivialized most of the game.
>Matra Magic Tiny MP cost, hits all enemies, non-elemental high damage >Big Guard Haste/Protect/Shell in like the first 1/4 of the game >Beta Basically one/two shots every enemy including bosses for a good long time >White Wind Invalidates Cure magic until III >Magic Hammer Free Ether
Jacob Ross
I don't know how to explain it, after the slap fight and first getting the highwind I went straight to Mideel. I spoke to an npc before I even got to Cloud, and suddenly the game flips toward the end of the lifestream scene, skipping the return to Coral quest. I'm wondering if it was a glitch because why skip that specific part?
Adam Hernandez
The mod gives you a lot of options to skip story-heavy stuff like flashbacks and the like for people that have played the game a thousand times before. Maybe you skipped the Lifestream scene without wanting to?
Adrian Davis
Holy shit, same thing. It's a bug. Don't talk to that old man. I was lucky to have a save before entering Mideel. Don't talk to that dude he fucks you up.
