Last night I finally made my way upstairs and played through the Final Fantasy VII Remake demo available on Playstation right now. I have a weird relationship with FF7, namely because I did not own a Playstation 1 at the time in which it was released. I desperately wanted to play it, but ultimately had to wait until the PC Port came out some time later. This means I played the game with the weird midi soundtrack… which was made better by the fact that I had a sound card with a Yamaha synthesizer in it but still not quite like the CD audio. I enjoyed the game quite a bit but it wasn’t the world changing experience for me that it seemed to be for everyone else. The game that really blew my mind was Final Fantasy VI because of the extreme depth it had.
Ultimately all I am saying is that I was not pining for a remake in quite the way the rest of the world seems to have been. That said I am excited to see the final product and get my hands on it, and quite honestly enjoyed it a whole lot more than I thought I would. The moment to moment game play is really enjoyable. The boss fights are less so because they seem to drag on forever. I am hoping that this game releases with a difficulty slider because I am absolutely cranking it down so that I can more or less just experience the story again in an ARPG shell without having to worry too much about doing the right thing at the right time. There were times when the slowing down time while taking actions worked… and then there were times when it felt like I didn’t have nearly enough time to react to incoming attacks that I was supposed to be dodging.
Combat feels similar to that of Final Fantasy XV and you have a basic attack, the ability to do some special attack or shift into another attack mode and then abilities and spells. The part of combat that felt really awkward was having to wait for your ATB Gauge to fill up enough to be able to input any action other than the basic attack. This meant I would have to wait around in order to be able to access the item menu and take a healing potion, which feels real bad when everything else in the game is happening in real time. Similarly it felt odd having to wait out before I could input a special attack or magic because I was not entirely certain what caused the ATB gauge to fill faster. Evasion and Blocking also didn’t seem to work like I would have expected them to work. When you block an attack it still deals a sizable amount of damage through the block, and evasion seems to be super hit and miss if you are going to actually successfully roll out of the way of an attack.
The other negative is that on a baseline PS4, the textures were fading in and out of focus causing some moments of the game-play to look pretty ugly. I am lamenting the fact that this is going to be one of those one year exclusives for PlayStation and that I won’t simply be able to play it on my preferred platform of choice… aka my PC on day one. This game would look amazing with glorious 4k 60 fps treatment, and I am somehow doubting that the PS4 Pro even is going to be able to run it at that. I’ve held off on getting a Pro because it never really seemed like that big of a leap in either performance or graphics. Now I am on the fence as to if I play the game this year or wait until next year and pick it up on the PC.
Like I said before I think this is the sort of game that I will want to be playing on Story Mode. I don’t care to learn the nuances of this action combat system, and fighting anything other than trash mobs seems to take forever. The game does support a classic mode which is turn based, which might feel better when it comes to those tankier fights. However I think I would rather just run through on a lower difficulty and have fun slashing things to pieces with my buster sword rather than fiddling with more detailed combat. I am absolutely not a gamer that cares about the difficulty of games, and I tend to play them for a fun escape from my hectic real life rather than something I am doing to prove some nonsense to myself. I am the polar opposite of a competitive gamer and I am fine with my scrub status. I did however beat the demo and now I am on the fence if I order for PS4 or wait it out.
Isn’t there a “turn-based” mode that makes it more like the original?
Yeah I was frustrated with the combat as well. My problem with the default mode was that I hated having to constantly swap or pause to issue commands for the other party member. It just broke up the flow of combat so I couldn’t get into the action as much. Most other action JRPGs have AI for the other members. Like you said, the boss especially took forever, it was just a bullet sponge.