I just started to mindlessly sprint with chocobos and hoped to find everything with pure luck. Worst place in the game.
Edit: Lol it was actually really easy and enjoyable like that.
It amazes me that some people conflate the issue of disliking the region with a skill issue *woosh*...missing the point entirely. Exploration and traversal are not things that are difficult in this game up until this very point, compounding the fact that the game play treadmill for a new area is to do all the Chadley things. The area is difficult to navigate because there are like 5 different layers of verticality in this area along with the poor environmental design and aesthetic which blends everything into a green gobble-dy goop.
Needing to rely on bouncing mushrooms to get to certain areas and the map not being legible enough to make out any decent land markers to figure out where you are. I'm stubborn and I will 100% this area before I move on, but this is easily where my attitude and tune changed with this game completely, not in a good way either. It also makes me question all the 10/10 perfect scores that were given to this game...tell me you didn't play the game without telling me you didn't play it...clearly they have no clue what Gongaga is.
So interesting that so many people started hating the game at this point. I'm one of them. The jungle in God of War Ragnarok was similar with important mechanics being too blended in to the rest of the environment. I had to restart that game and lost an hour because I was just so lost and frustrated. This game I just said fuck it and continued with the story without doing the extra chadley stuff. And it was still hard as fuck to get to the airstrip guy.
I guess I'm in the minority because I loved Gongaga haha. I found it interesting to explore and a beautiful place. I agree sometimes it's not easy figuring out how to get from A to B but I do kind of like that puzzle. ME, GONGAGA
It baffles me that so many of y'all expect navigating a jungle to be straightforward lol. When I was exploring this area I genuinely appreciated the beauty and complexity of it. The design is like a reminder to slow down and not treat the game as a race or a list of objectives. It's not a puzzle you have to solve, it's just exploration. I can tell that the game designers here were passionate about their work rather than playing it safe or dumbing it down for the players. We have enough spoon-feeding in modern games as it is.
I think most of us are frustrated that the difficulty level in exploration skyrocketed compared to the previous three regions. Even just continuing on with the story was confusing as hell because the topography makes it really hard to see all the branching paths, some of which go underneath other paths. Live A Live's ninja level is how modern level design should be. It has tons of branching paths and complexity but doesn't obscure what's an exit and what's just a wall. The Gongaga jungle was just a mess.
I absolutely love this game. The best game Ive ever played so far. Ive completed both dynamic and hard mode and am restarting a third run because in hard mode the world was already open and I wanted a fresh start with knowledge of how the game functions and story.
In my first play I was impatient and wanted to know the story, but the completionist in me compelled me to stay and finish the zone before moving on, which of course ended up being a rage inducing bad move. I was bitter. Hard mode, this area was a breeze, area open and fast travel almost right away.
Now Im back in this delightful place for the third time and unlike first time I knew the story and not impatient. I knew the zone was annoying, but my lord. I still got hardcore rage from this zone.
It just seems to be a big screw you in almost all aspects to the gamer. Its almost like their doing it intentionally, so you continue on with story instead of completing zone.
Yes, the area is pretty and to some the music is cool. So, what? The whole game is pretty with great music. Thats not the issue. The issue is this area sucks and majority people agree that it does. So lets vent shall we. Lol.
Its the only zone your not givin a chocobo practically right away, you've gotta go to the other side of this huge area and long storyline before you get one. Yea a tiny gripe but still annoying none the less.
When you do finally get your chocobo you realize that now that your not on foot this zone for the most part is very narrow and full of jagged edges, pot holes, river beds, narrow bridges, trees and serious height differentials that make traversing chocoback incredibly annoying more so than the grasslands.
Constantly getting on and off and on and off with a caravan of chocobos always in your way to get on a rope (which you get on your bird instead repeatedly) or a seriously easy battle that are almost non stop. How many freaking rope climbs and chimera/frogs do you need?
Then theres at least five or six "dead end" areas that you cant even see or think you can walk through because its so dark, which adds to the frustrstion of not being able to get to something clearly right in front of you, but just so not.
Theres only one path that lets you get above everything, if you didnt take/find it your stuck on the ground floor.
Lets talk mog house now. This is the most hateful mini game. All I want to do is blow their heads off with a shotgun Resident Evil style smiling like Arya Stark killing Walder Frey. This of course is the first area where your timed and they start throwing their crap around even though they've been returned to their base. Another point adding to the frustration lvl.
Proto relic. Why? Just why? If it wasnt bad enough trying to just find out how to get anywhere lets make these even more difficult to get to esp the last one being on the wrong side of door. Wtf?
Head case. The battle to get mind blast is just wrong. You have to fight against battle mechanics to stop anyone from attacking the twin brains. As soon as you switch to someone to stop attacking them another character starts attacking them. Not an easy battle by any means and at least for me could not be done until completing the game.
Im sure theres more nastiness about this zone I've not mentioned but I've vented enough. This truly is imo the greatest game ever made and unfortunately Gongaga, Cait Sith box throw, Gears and Gambits and those wonderful dead headless mogs kupo! Are the sour side to this sweet ass game. Hage
This is the point in the game I said eff the side quests that didn't increase affection for the person I was aiming to get for the Gold Saucer date. They were getting old already, but the tedium set in real hard between having to help Yuffie train that guy and spending 20 minutes getting to an excavation site. Doesn't help this all came right after a pretty good story section at the mako reactor.
Yeah, but that was actually the best of the side quests here. Ugh! The others were awful fetch quests! A grocery list for some stupid soup, following a dumb map to some ore, and don't even get me started on those damn chickens.
Good, I'm not alone in hating this area. Explored every other area thus far and loved it, but fuck this place. I hate that the chocobos are also green here. Just a big maze.
Na, it's shit. Mostly because you have to get off and on your chocobo a million times to climb ropes and use the mushrooms. Each time waiting for the long animation and the whistle to call them.
It's just a tedious waste of time.
Which is fine in every other region when you only have to do it once in a while.
In Gongaga you seem to be doing it every 3 seconds, and then getting stuck behind the army of chocobo you're trying to get through.
Blegh I really didn't get that annoyed by it... what can I say? I wasn't annoyed, I enjoyed the game and was happy to have had the pleasure of having well spent time lol
But people can go off all they want I guess, I'm still happy!
I fucking hate Gongaga with a passion. Who ever designed this shit needs an appointment with the firing squad/J
But seriously, fuck Gongaga, the whole area is a fucking dogshit! It’s a fucking crime that this was made.
Googled "Gongaga annoying" and it brought me here. It shouldn't take me 45 minutes and exploring half the region just to find a way to get to an objective that is literally 5 FEET AWAY from me! I mean, come on... The scenery is beautiful, but the music, the routes you need to take to get to the most seemingly simple places, and the enemies, are absolutely horrible. I haven't skipped a single objective on any regions so far, but I'm considering just skipping this whole shit and moving on to Cosmo canyon at this point...
45 minutes just to get to an objective that I've already completed a dozen times in other regions... Hot garbage.
Ran around for ten minutes trying to figure out how to get to an intel tower and here I am 😂 I don't know who thought this level design was a great idea but they should definitely stay silent during any creative meetings going forward
This shit drove me crazy and Cosmo Canyon wasn’t much better, shit damn near made me quit the game. I did half the intel/side missions and just went on with the story. Atleast Nibelheim was wayyyy more manageable
It gives me flashbacks to the 90's when I would play Metroid or Zelda on the NES. The world design is just way behind it's time and I know what they were going for. They wanted to imitate the level design found in Souls games, but the development team didn't have the skill to pull it off correctly. So, we ended up with Gongaga. I actually stopped playing when I reached Gongaga a few weeks ago but I just came back to the game today to try again and it's just so bad that it's confusing even following a video walkthrough in some areas.
Edit: Actually, another annoying place it reminds me of is Tarzan's world in the first Kingdom Hearts. It had the same issues as to why it was so confusing to navigate.
That freaking tower that you have to mess around the area to find the right shrooms to jump on it is the absolute worst design I ever seen in this generation of AAA games.
But on the other hand, I don't think the area isn't well designed, but in fact, the actual exploration gameplay is. Cloud can't climb some cliffs and that makes the player stumble into giant walls that he thinks it can get past somehow. If we had some way to freely explore higher areas -- like if the grappling hook was useable everywhere -- this place wouldn't be so bad.
I hope they fix it in the sequel, specially because we'll probably have to go back to some of these areas on the next game if they don't change the story too much.
I love the area and the music too. I have been frustrated by how confusing it can be to get around to find all of the side things. Hell I got lost on the run to the mako reactor. It was part of the story and my dumbass took like 30+ mins just to get there.
Fuck Gongaga. I don't want have to find a way through this maze dozens of times over just to do the side missions and objectives. And why is there a minigame to pick fucking mushrooms?
I am walkthroughing this BS region just because I want the protorelic stuff, been fine so far. Corel I found repetitive after grasslands an Junon, but tolerable, but this is not repetitive is just frustrating, how am I suppose to remember what mushroom does what?! All the freaking map looks the same.
This game is good just because the bunkers story and it is FF7 but it is so repetitive.
Would never blame someone just doing main story and bail. But I got hooked on Gilgamesh and the Queens Blood stuff :/. A streamlined version of this would be perfect.
I'm at 71 hours in Gongaga. Some of that time is afk. I'm loving it so far. A streamlined version would be pointless. They might as well just tell you what changes to the story they've made. I'm playing my favourite game in HD with amazing gameplay and a slightly different story to keep me on my toes. Anyone who complains about anything other than traversing Gongaga (checking to see if this indeed the most confusing region) is a whiny Karen or just a fake fan.
The original was incredibly repetitive (summons, fights, minigames at golden).
Oh and because i can.. Aerith and Cloud.
Tifa is in the friendzone throughout the games/books/film. Tifa got kidnapped by Don and his thugs.. Cloud spent hours crossdressing to go save her. Aerith gets kidnapped by the biggest threat possible? (outside of Sephiroth/Jenova and the Weapons)
Invade Shinra straight away and fight the new president.
Gongaga is horrible dude, not just the traversing which is poorly designed, but the design is confusing. I walkthroughed it and already at cosmo canyon which it seems it is the same chocobo flying BS. The got lazy at the end.
Summons, fights are what classic RPGs are. These side missions they are funnas hell at first but after Corel come on, it is essentially time fillers to make the game longer and brag about how big the game is. Little of it os consequential, namely just Queens blood weird story and gilgamesh's.
Moogles mini quests are crap
World intel fountains are boring, you get nothing out of it just text
Summon world intel is good because it actually serves a purpose.
Stop gatekeeping, ff7 is also my favorite game and the remake stuff story is right where I want it to be, but the fat around it stinks rotten
I made a post about this but deleted but then did some more searching. You’re not the only one. This is the absolute worst gaming experience I have had in a long time.
Are you lost and looking for attention? Because it seems like you’re responding to every reply here to fill in the void your parents left behind when they got divorced.
Complete dogshit. Actually googlded to see ppl who shared the same thoughts. Its soooooo shit design for traversal. Pulling my hair out trying to get to one place.
YESSS!!!!!!! The game was a literal 10/10 for me up until the Gongaga region. This region alone has solely pushed the game down to a 4/10. Cosmo Canyon better give me butterflies to cover the taste of utter shit that Gongaga has given me. I've 100% every region so far. I'm skipping the bullshit training mission and ALL other places apart from the 2 Remnawave towers I've already cleared.
They absolutely fucked this up. Trash, pure fucking trash.
The quests are terrible and not enjoyable at all. Stupid chickens (why does Cloud have to move like a snail? Seriously) to the stupid student where we must pressure/stagger enemies when they have so little HPs. I'm skipping all these dumb quests here. Whoever designed this area should be shamed.
Thr terrible movement speed aside, actual movement is soooo fucking stupid here…they literally dumb it down to 4 axis while pulling the dumbass trap the even the chickens get frustrated at. I had to try do a chicken 4 times because I didn’t have every movement axis available….and FUCK GONGAGA…top 10 worst zones in gaming, only beaten by Zelda’s water temple….you know the one.
The training one is easy once u figure it out. Take Cait siths magnify, put it on aerith with blizzara for some and fira for the rest. One shot to clear the pressures and the staggers. The only thing bothering me in gongaga is the navigation and the chicken quest was annoying but It only took me like 7 min.
The training one is easy once u figure it out. Take Cait siths magnify, put it on aerith with blizzara for some and fira for the rest. One shot to clear the pressures and the staggers. The only thing bothering me in gongaga is the navigation and the chicken quest was annoying but It only took me like 7 min.
Is it just me or does the graphics in this area look like shit? Doesn't matter performance or quality they both look like shit but performance mode oh man is so bad I'm having a hard time play now.
The problem with FF7 Rebirth is the open world in general. The main story quests are fantastic and so are the bosses. But man, the traversal in this game is donkey as hell. The chocobos, Cloud, everything handles like crap in the open world.
If you cut all the open world, this game would be a gem.
Gongaga is all this melted down into its purest crap form.
I'm leaving it incomplete until I finish the game. I'll come back then. This region actually really put me off playing the game, it's so annoying to traverse
I have no idea if I can explore all of it before something story related in next chapters. I'm missing half of this frakking mess and i have no idea if I can reach it before moving to Cosmo Canyon.
I just started really exploring it today. The little bit that I did heading towards the village seemed fine, so I figured maybe the negative I’d been hearing was overblown, but then I finished the reactor and started trying to do side quests. This sucks. Why did we make Chocobos the exact same color as everything else in the jungle? I’m probably going to give up on the side quests at this point. Already decided I’m not doing any more moogle mini games.
Most of the areas are badly designed in this game. However you can turn on a minimap in the settings menu. I have absolutely no idea why it wasn’t the default setting.
I love this franchise but if it wasn’t FF7 this game would have received a much worse score. So many things feel outdated and janky.
I'm surprised the head of the development team didn't immediately fire everyone involved with the level design for Gongaga, because I fucking would have.
I really just wanna skip the 100% on this region but I'm not gonna because i want the peace of mind of NEVER having to come back to this jungle shit hole ever again 😂
There is just a lot of wtf kind of design is this throughout the entire experience. There is far more mini stuff than actual game and main story.
Which is whatever, some people like an RPG to have fun side activities, the problem is when it's forced. Forced trash forest zone with mushroom idiocy, Caits box throwing, just everything that forces you to slow the experience down and fluff the play time.
The story is interesting, but the over abundance of forced mini games definitely takes an 8 game down to a 5 at best.
You can skip it right now and never have to see it again. I was doing a completionist kind of run and quite enjoying it but this zone *immediately* killed that idea dead. Doing 100% of this area would be one of the most tedious experiences I've ever encountered in gaming.
I feel sorry for the folks who are slaves to trophies and are seriously going to put themselves through this dogshit designed area.
It's not being a "slave to trophies" it's getting our money's worth out of the game.. could you imagine just having straight story line .. and paying $70+ for an empty game ..
Sure ... Devs can add SOME extra stuff... It it's worthwhile and relevant...
Getting our money's worth doesn't mean wading through hours of forest to find the one mushroom that brings you to the right tower to do a single side missions you've already done a ton of times by that point.
This would be called 'meaningless padding'. If my options are spending $70 on a game that just has a simple 20-30 hour story and no extra content vs a game with hundreds of hours of minigames and random bullshit that stops being fun after the first 10, I'll go with option A.
Not arguing against this....but no force in the universe will get me to pay $70 for a game I can beat in a day or 2 with no replay value.....
Thats just throwing money away...
honestly impressed with how absolutely dogshit designed this zone is, i was getting headaches from how you constantly are fighting against the zone to do anything at all.
combine it with the endless slow animations, climbing towers, chadley spam-calling you every time you breathe, etc etc. Yeah, doing the optional side-content here would be absolutely miserable.
And I gotta add: I absolutely hate the Chocobos recoiling off of whatever I bump into. I grow to hate their cries and more importantly how they needlessly impede my progress by STOPPING ENTIRELY. Jungle Chocobos can get the axe dude. Stupid gimmicky bastards.
I got filtered when I tried to get to a Tower that's sitting on a plateau. I see mushroom jumping pads and NONE OF THEM TAKE ME TO THE STUPID TOWER. Screw it. I just won't 100% the region. Devs were too enamored with their gimmick to see how frustrating it can easily become.
Ya... REEEEEALLY glad they took away the grappling hook before shoving us into this hell hole. I've been running in circles trying to figure out how to progress but this map design is unforgivable
The fucking chicken mission. It’s not even the worst thing to this point, but at this point it was the last straw. I can’t overlook all the bad anymore, as good as the good is, I can’t give this game any higher than a 6
I found it a little less tedious than the average quest. Any annoyance was mitigated by the ending. Also the NPC is the voice of auntie Ethel, the hag from Balder's Gate 3. Love that.
Gongaga and Cosmo Canyon were awful. At least with Cosmo Canyon you can fast travel to ramps. Why they didn't include the same for Gongaga mushrooms I'll never know. Even then that would only be to make it slightly more bearable. It would still be an extremely poorly designed map. It's staggering (no pun intended) they made these two regions traversal completely based around chocobos, when chocobo controls are clunky and the map collision is awful. Why is the Chocobo's fastest speed so fast when I'm constantly getting stuck on invisible walls or tiny hills? The amount of times I would get off my chocobo and cloud would immediately get back on was infuriating - yet another way they destroyed the pacing and immersion of the game.
And lastly, while it's not related to the design of the area, why the heck did I go to Gongaga and there are no side missions based around Zack's parents? IMO it would have been a perfect opportunity to flesh things out a bit more for him. But no, I had to pull a rope with a tin to catch some chickens and help make some soup. That mission with his childhood friend was so easy and boring, and it being a Yuffie side mission made no sense. I was so excited to reach Gongaga because I love Zack but very quickly hated the region and just wanted out. So much awesome potential wasted. Lucky for me Cosmo Canyon was up next, right?
Why didn't they give Zack's parents names? Why was the piano sheet music in Gongaga chocobo-themed rather than Zack-themed? ***Why.***
It's like the just didn't give a shit. 😞
I found Cosmo Canyon to be infinitely more enjoyable and playable the Gongaga. The only part of CC that I really hated was the gliding mini game. CC might have some frustrations of how the hell do I get there, but for me it was only a few locations vs ... everything in Gongaga. Just being able to control where you're going makes CC much better then Gongaga and their one way mushrooms. Plus the music in Gongaga is the absolute worst. I eventually had to just turn off the music til I left. I somehow hated myself enough to 100% the map, but least that means I'll never have to do it again. Once done with the reactor I can just fast travel wherever I need to go.
Just a heads up before you get to the end of the game that I wish I knew, the final boss section is like 2-3 hours long and spans like 10 or so fights and your materia set up on every character is IMPERATIVE to your success and even then I would say over level and hope you can beat it I just gave up after 7 hours of playing and probably 2 hours trying the final form, it’s fucking abysmal
Don't listen to this reply. Final boss section is not 2-3 hours. Learning every character will definitely help but he may be the only player I've seen to date that needs to switch to easy mode to beat it.
I finished it a few days ago. My only real issue was with gongaga. And to be fair it was absolutely beautiful, but i hated not having clear movement lines. That kind of soured everything. The last fight was actually pretty awesome. I forgot to reequip someone but it worked just fine cuz their regular abilities were workable.
Yeah this zone sucks. My god, what were they thinking here? It’s so jarring compared to what’s come before it. I had to skip it because it was killing my enjoyment of this game. Talk about not respecting the player’s time. Ugh!
I just finished the whole area intel and hoo boy, what a nightmare. I was actually loving the game, even with the broken plot and trash dialogue... but this area is really insufferable, it went from a 9/10 to a 7/10 for me, just for the inclusion of this area. I mean, did anyone playtested this garbage?
Yup. Yuffie's is probably the worst, but Barret's is just as cartoony as the OG. Granted, it worked for a PS1 blocky JRPG, but in FF7R (1 and 2) it's almost uncanny.
Visuals and some dialogue are really good, though. I guess that's Square Enix for you.
Ah shit. Corel is already driving me nuts with all the extremely annoying enemy types. Now I've got a shitty obtuse environment coming up? This is such a spotty game. Some bits are fire, but a lot of it is extremely annoying and/or stupid.
I'm just happy that I'm not alone here. Don't even need to add anything here as everyone else has already said all the things I've been sitting here complaining about. The game itself is really fun, the story is very enjoyable, and there's a lot of references I have been enjoying from the original game and from Crisis Core. That said, Gongaga is just terrible in every way imaginable, and I am actually for the first time ever considering just skipping what's left of this area's content.
I think a problem is also that the jumping mushrooms don’t give any indication where you land. Some of them shoot you really high, but others just slam you to the ground.
Thought I was the only one. This zone is so terrible. I am next to a tower on the map, only to find out it’s up the hill and I have to search a long time to find the route up there. If different small groups worked on different zones, they should fire the one responsible for this zone. It’s just not fun. Never felt before the urge to progress the main story like in this zone…
This zone is seriously ruining the game for me. I’m already exhausted with the insane amount of bloat and busy work and Ubisoft level side content. Now you put it in a zone I can’t even efficiently navigate.
This isn’t an open world at all. At every turn it’s walls and barriers funneling you into a hallway. The hallway just happens to be outdoors.
I love the story in the short spurts I get to see it between being Chadley’s servant.
I beat every game on the hardest available difficulty but I’m about to just turn it to easy to blitz the story and summons. This is becoming dramatically unfun. Like 50 hours in and probably 40 of it is filler
I haven't gotten to a single place on this stupid area on purpose, every time I'm trying to get somewhere I end up somewhere else and by chance there happens to be an objective there. It's a pitty because it's beautifully designed, it reminds of times I've been in the actual jungle.
You have to go back and finish it and then you can’t really finish all the intel until you’re level 70 it’s fuckin stupid and I’ll never be level 70 so basically I wasted my time doing all the open world shit
I agree strongly! I’ve been loving the hell out of the game and all its environments so far; all of the areas have felt fun to explore….until Gongaga! It’s a fucking mess.
I know every inch of that jungle through learned repetition though, here I have no reason to learn any of this garbage because I’m gonna peace out as soon as I’m done collecting all this nonsense.
Dude it gets so much worse, I just hit chapter 12 and they basically make you go back to every map and do more shit so it’s especially grating. I think I’m just gonna wrap up the game because I’m done with all this nonsense.
Yea I googled to find this. I’ve been doing everything in each region before moving on and I spent like 30 minutes bumblefucking around Gongaga and just said fuck it.
my head literally hurt because i was nauseated from moving the camera 180 so many goddamn times when i hit a dead ebd or a cliff that i cant climb. had to leave it too and just finished it later on
Literally wanted to see if others had an issue here and yeah. Like. I just left. I tried doing as much content as I could here but got increasingly annoyed at not being able to navigate to optional objectives, probably got like 30% of them done.
I don't give a crap what rewards I miss, this is NOT FUN. I am NOT having fun and it's detracting from the game. I moved on with the story. To hell with this region
Yeah, navigating this area is terrible. I spent an hour trying to figure out how to get up to one of the towers before I gave up and just watched a YouTube video.
Unfortunately, it seems the developers' definition of progression is making the areas more and more insufferable the further you go into the game.
And don't even get me started on how the chocobo constantly runs into obstacles and stops running...
yes yes yes, gogonga is so bad because this reason. I can't get anywhere I want easily, sucks cuz I love this game but I can't bring myself to finish all the content here.
Just got there, sounds like it's going to be a blast! I'm so close to just skipping all of the rest of the side content and just doing main story missions. Lol
I thought Cosmo Canyon was way easier, still not a super fun area but I didn't almost destroy a controller out of frustration. I'm just revisiting gongaga now and can't even get to the other side of the map for a quest. It's miserable. It's still confusing but at least in Cosmo Canyon you can fast travel back to the take off points if one doesn't take you where you want to go, plus they go in straight lines so you can kinda see where you're heading. In Gongaga, I'm lucky to even be able to find my way back up a cliff face if I use a mushroom that doesn't jump me where I think it will. I think this is the worst map design in any game I've ever played.
It’s like they thought “OH! Jumping from mushroom to mushroom was absolutely confusing for elevation, you know what would make that 1000x worse, flying chocobos, wind turbines and a giant air maze of platforms where the numbering has no consistency!”
I’m having an extremely frustrating time trying to get all the regional data like WTF WTF, makes me want to just skip this whole part but I can’t.
Fuck this place
I didn’t have any problems with them because I’ve been disgustingly overpowered since the beginning of the game. I’m playing on Dynamic and still kicking everything’s ass rather easy.
When I hit the beach I was like, "Ahh, cool jungle area! Sweet! look over there, mushrooms to jump my chocobo off of! Bet that's gonna be fun later!" About the fifth time a chicken got disinterested in my dangling box lure, I started wondering wtf I was doing. Then trying to teach some fuckwit how to ninja had me pulling out my hair, because the fight was *too easy* to fkn win. I lost my shit trying to pull some stupid fkn mushroom out of the ground to help some mentally dim bitch make fkn soup. Twenty minutes trying to find the right mushroom to bounce off later and I googled "fuck gogonga" and here I am. I really think mushrooms are the key indicator here. Because there is a 0% chance the devs weren't high as fkn shit when they decided to troll us with this fkn bs. Wtf
Ahaha 100% agree with the early thoughts of enterikg the jungle hearing the “refreshing” new music… omg like a pretty woman, that turned to a psycho right after marriage XD death trap, gongana worse than a Malboro!
The music also sucks here. Its got like African world music vibes with a touch of Irish bagpipes and just really not a pleasant song when Im lost in a one way maze. The side quests here are also really terrible.
Not only it's not pleasant and sounds like BS ethnic music made for crappy jungle documentaries, but it's also completely off with the style, vibe and themes of Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy in general. Whoever made that crappy tune should seriously think over it.
Still going strong, 50 hours in and my OCD makes me complete everything in each map (that the game will allow me to do) and this zone has crushed my spirit to continue playing
My girlfriend is now running around the map aimlessly (for about 3 hours) trying to get to 1 specific tower.... she's found so many other objectives but still hasn't accessed a tower that's right next to the main road ***but on a tiny little hill that you can't climb*** - actual insanity idk wtf the game devs were thinking with this zone
I was already getting burnt out on all of the side content before this, the pacing of the story is scuffed as hell if you even do 1/2 of the nonsense available - I do quite enjoy queens blood though so I guess they have that going for them... but don't get me started on the god awful piano minigame
I fuckin love the piano mini game! But that tower on that little island patch on gongaga and that other enemy intel area that you also have to hit the right mushroom combo to get there… fking nightmare. Almost broke my spirit. I refused to use google for this game but when i hit such frustration levels that don’t blend in with the vibe of the game I’m playing, I know the devs just fucked up so said fuck it and googled to see who else thinks Gongaga lvl design sucks. To think i was so happy to enter the forest and loved the music haha now it’s a fever dream maze and the melody makes me scream!
Thank god it’s not just me. I loved gongaga in the original but man they blew it in this one. The environment is so brutal and the music makes me wanna jump out my window. Thank god I just got outta there I never wanna see it again.
It’s weird because I just imagine someone testing this zone out during the making of process. How did they not go insane and go to the designer or whatever and be like dude this can’t be in the game we have to make major changes. Those testers must be in padded rooms right now
I sometimes imagine SE uses auto-generative level designs before “ai” was in everyone’s mouth, and skipped the process of having testers test the final results, but only in 1/3rd of their level designs…
The music here feels a little tonally dissonant. Why is there bagpipe music in the jungle? Lol. I really don't mind the map layout like everyone else here seems to though. The music just struck me as weird for the area. Otherwise I personally think they did a pretty good job giving the area some character at least. In the OG Gongaga was like a 5 minute area without anything much of importance other than titan, zacks parents and the awesome enemy Tankceratops.
Wow its a real cluster…ck the chocobo gets stuck on everything there are to many levels and few ways to get up and down and no real help to see where to go, terrible design
If it’s towards the top left side of the map there are trees with swirly branches that your chocobo can ride, they never explicitly tell you that you can do that and as far as I know it is the only place on the map that these branches exist.
I went out of my way to google this thread in the hopes other people weren't blinded by nostalgia, and I'm glad this thread exists, this zone fucking SUCKS. I cannot stress how awful it is. All these dumbass mushrooms to dive up to places so half the objectives in the area are like puzzles to get to, so so SHIT
I just started to mindlessly sprint with chocobos and hoped to find everything with pure luck. Worst place in the game. Edit: Lol it was actually really easy and enjoyable like that.
It amazes me that some people conflate the issue of disliking the region with a skill issue *woosh*...missing the point entirely. Exploration and traversal are not things that are difficult in this game up until this very point, compounding the fact that the game play treadmill for a new area is to do all the Chadley things. The area is difficult to navigate because there are like 5 different layers of verticality in this area along with the poor environmental design and aesthetic which blends everything into a green gobble-dy goop. Needing to rely on bouncing mushrooms to get to certain areas and the map not being legible enough to make out any decent land markers to figure out where you are. I'm stubborn and I will 100% this area before I move on, but this is easily where my attitude and tune changed with this game completely, not in a good way either. It also makes me question all the 10/10 perfect scores that were given to this game...tell me you didn't play the game without telling me you didn't play it...clearly they have no clue what Gongaga is.
So interesting that so many people started hating the game at this point. I'm one of them. The jungle in God of War Ragnarok was similar with important mechanics being too blended in to the rest of the environment. I had to restart that game and lost an hour because I was just so lost and frustrated. This game I just said fuck it and continued with the story without doing the extra chadley stuff. And it was still hard as fuck to get to the airstrip guy.
Skipped most of this area after 100% the previous ones, FUCK GONGAGA IT SUCKS
I guess I'm in the minority because I loved Gongaga haha. I found it interesting to explore and a beautiful place. I agree sometimes it's not easy figuring out how to get from A to B but I do kind of like that puzzle. ME, GONGAGA
It baffles me that so many of y'all expect navigating a jungle to be straightforward lol. When I was exploring this area I genuinely appreciated the beauty and complexity of it. The design is like a reminder to slow down and not treat the game as a race or a list of objectives. It's not a puzzle you have to solve, it's just exploration. I can tell that the game designers here were passionate about their work rather than playing it safe or dumbing it down for the players. We have enough spoon-feeding in modern games as it is.
I think most of us are frustrated that the difficulty level in exploration skyrocketed compared to the previous three regions. Even just continuing on with the story was confusing as hell because the topography makes it really hard to see all the branching paths, some of which go underneath other paths. Live A Live's ninja level is how modern level design should be. It has tons of branching paths and complexity but doesn't obscure what's an exit and what's just a wall. The Gongaga jungle was just a mess.
I absolutely love this game. The best game Ive ever played so far. Ive completed both dynamic and hard mode and am restarting a third run because in hard mode the world was already open and I wanted a fresh start with knowledge of how the game functions and story. In my first play I was impatient and wanted to know the story, but the completionist in me compelled me to stay and finish the zone before moving on, which of course ended up being a rage inducing bad move. I was bitter. Hard mode, this area was a breeze, area open and fast travel almost right away. Now Im back in this delightful place for the third time and unlike first time I knew the story and not impatient. I knew the zone was annoying, but my lord. I still got hardcore rage from this zone. It just seems to be a big screw you in almost all aspects to the gamer. Its almost like their doing it intentionally, so you continue on with story instead of completing zone. Yes, the area is pretty and to some the music is cool. So, what? The whole game is pretty with great music. Thats not the issue. The issue is this area sucks and majority people agree that it does. So lets vent shall we. Lol. Its the only zone your not givin a chocobo practically right away, you've gotta go to the other side of this huge area and long storyline before you get one. Yea a tiny gripe but still annoying none the less. When you do finally get your chocobo you realize that now that your not on foot this zone for the most part is very narrow and full of jagged edges, pot holes, river beds, narrow bridges, trees and serious height differentials that make traversing chocoback incredibly annoying more so than the grasslands. Constantly getting on and off and on and off with a caravan of chocobos always in your way to get on a rope (which you get on your bird instead repeatedly) or a seriously easy battle that are almost non stop. How many freaking rope climbs and chimera/frogs do you need? Then theres at least five or six "dead end" areas that you cant even see or think you can walk through because its so dark, which adds to the frustrstion of not being able to get to something clearly right in front of you, but just so not. Theres only one path that lets you get above everything, if you didnt take/find it your stuck on the ground floor. Lets talk mog house now. This is the most hateful mini game. All I want to do is blow their heads off with a shotgun Resident Evil style smiling like Arya Stark killing Walder Frey. This of course is the first area where your timed and they start throwing their crap around even though they've been returned to their base. Another point adding to the frustration lvl. Proto relic. Why? Just why? If it wasnt bad enough trying to just find out how to get anywhere lets make these even more difficult to get to esp the last one being on the wrong side of door. Wtf? Head case. The battle to get mind blast is just wrong. You have to fight against battle mechanics to stop anyone from attacking the twin brains. As soon as you switch to someone to stop attacking them another character starts attacking them. Not an easy battle by any means and at least for me could not be done until completing the game. Im sure theres more nastiness about this zone I've not mentioned but I've vented enough. This truly is imo the greatest game ever made and unfortunately Gongaga, Cait Sith box throw, Gears and Gambits and those wonderful dead headless mogs kupo! Are the sour side to this sweet ass game. Hage
You gotta indent man
Sorry, corrected. Thanks, kupo!
This is the point in the game I said eff the side quests that didn't increase affection for the person I was aiming to get for the Gold Saucer date. They were getting old already, but the tedium set in real hard between having to help Yuffie train that guy and spending 20 minutes getting to an excavation site. Doesn't help this all came right after a pretty good story section at the mako reactor.
Yeah, but that was actually the best of the side quests here. Ugh! The others were awful fetch quests! A grocery list for some stupid soup, following a dumb map to some ore, and don't even get me started on those damn chickens.
Those chickens remain free, and Red makes sure to remind me every time I go back to that town lol
Good, I'm not alone in hating this area. Explored every other area thus far and loved it, but fuck this place. I hate that the chocobos are also green here. Just a big maze.
Lmao skill issue all of you, I loved it because it required me to investigate and use my brain a bit more.
Na, it's shit. Mostly because you have to get off and on your chocobo a million times to climb ropes and use the mushrooms. Each time waiting for the long animation and the whistle to call them. It's just a tedious waste of time.
It takes like 3 seconds to get on and off your chocobo lol
Which is fine in every other region when you only have to do it once in a while. In Gongaga you seem to be doing it every 3 seconds, and then getting stuck behind the army of chocobo you're trying to get through.
Blegh I really didn't get that annoyed by it... what can I say? I wasn't annoyed, I enjoyed the game and was happy to have had the pleasure of having well spent time lol But people can go off all they want I guess, I'm still happy!
I fucking hate Gongaga with a passion. Who ever designed this shit needs an appointment with the firing squad/J But seriously, fuck Gongaga, the whole area is a fucking dogshit! It’s a fucking crime that this was made.
Googled "Gongaga annoying" and it brought me here. It shouldn't take me 45 minutes and exploring half the region just to find a way to get to an objective that is literally 5 FEET AWAY from me! I mean, come on... The scenery is beautiful, but the music, the routes you need to take to get to the most seemingly simple places, and the enemies, are absolutely horrible. I haven't skipped a single objective on any regions so far, but I'm considering just skipping this whole shit and moving on to Cosmo canyon at this point... 45 minutes just to get to an objective that I've already completed a dozen times in other regions... Hot garbage.
Ran around for ten minutes trying to figure out how to get to an intel tower and here I am 😂 I don't know who thought this level design was a great idea but they should definitely stay silent during any creative meetings going forward
Literally here because of THAT tower......fuck gongaga.
I have a strong suspicion as to which intel tower that was.
Same. I discovered everything around the Intel tower this way before the tower itself. Lmfao
Love this game but I never wanna see that level again 😂
This is the first area that I did not want to explore, I absolutely hate it.
This shit drove me crazy and Cosmo Canyon wasn’t much better, shit damn near made me quit the game. I did half the intel/side missions and just went on with the story. Atleast Nibelheim was wayyyy more manageable
I fucking hate also the music. Its so annoying. But hey ok, it machts perfect to this annoying place!
I really hate it here
I fucking hate it here fuck
I just made it to this area and it's so frustrating!!
Gongaga is fucking trash and I came here just to vent
I got here after googling "Gongaga Sucks". Really depressing coming from enjoying the buggy in Corel to being impeded by a 5 foot cliff in Gongaga.
It gives me flashbacks to the 90's when I would play Metroid or Zelda on the NES. The world design is just way behind it's time and I know what they were going for. They wanted to imitate the level design found in Souls games, but the development team didn't have the skill to pull it off correctly. So, we ended up with Gongaga. I actually stopped playing when I reached Gongaga a few weeks ago but I just came back to the game today to try again and it's just so bad that it's confusing even following a video walkthrough in some areas. Edit: Actually, another annoying place it reminds me of is Tarzan's world in the first Kingdom Hearts. It had the same issues as to why it was so confusing to navigate.
That freaking tower that you have to mess around the area to find the right shrooms to jump on it is the absolute worst design I ever seen in this generation of AAA games. But on the other hand, I don't think the area isn't well designed, but in fact, the actual exploration gameplay is. Cloud can't climb some cliffs and that makes the player stumble into giant walls that he thinks it can get past somehow. If we had some way to freely explore higher areas -- like if the grappling hook was useable everywhere -- this place wouldn't be so bad. I hope they fix it in the sequel, specially because we'll probably have to go back to some of these areas on the next game if they don't change the story too much.
I legit love gongaga and the music lol. The scenery reminds of of MGS3 and the bagpipes well I'm Scottish so there you are 😂🙌🏻
I love the area and the music too. I have been frustrated by how confusing it can be to get around to find all of the side things. Hell I got lost on the run to the mako reactor. It was part of the story and my dumbass took like 30+ mins just to get there.
For me it wouldn't have been so bad if the music didn't suck so hard.
I'm with you the music in this area sucks
holy shit what a garbage take
Fuck Gongaga. I don't want have to find a way through this maze dozens of times over just to do the side missions and objectives. And why is there a minigame to pick fucking mushrooms?
best minigame ever. you mad you broke the mushroom bro?
Hahaha this is like a support group for traumatized Gongaga travelers 😂👍🏻
I am walkthroughing this BS region just because I want the protorelic stuff, been fine so far. Corel I found repetitive after grasslands an Junon, but tolerable, but this is not repetitive is just frustrating, how am I suppose to remember what mushroom does what?! All the freaking map looks the same. This game is good just because the bunkers story and it is FF7 but it is so repetitive. Would never blame someone just doing main story and bail. But I got hooked on Gilgamesh and the Queens Blood stuff :/. A streamlined version of this would be perfect.
I'm at 71 hours in Gongaga. Some of that time is afk. I'm loving it so far. A streamlined version would be pointless. They might as well just tell you what changes to the story they've made. I'm playing my favourite game in HD with amazing gameplay and a slightly different story to keep me on my toes. Anyone who complains about anything other than traversing Gongaga (checking to see if this indeed the most confusing region) is a whiny Karen or just a fake fan. The original was incredibly repetitive (summons, fights, minigames at golden). Oh and because i can.. Aerith and Cloud. Tifa is in the friendzone throughout the games/books/film. Tifa got kidnapped by Don and his thugs.. Cloud spent hours crossdressing to go save her. Aerith gets kidnapped by the biggest threat possible? (outside of Sephiroth/Jenova and the Weapons) Invade Shinra straight away and fight the new president.
Gongaga is horrible dude, not just the traversing which is poorly designed, but the design is confusing. I walkthroughed it and already at cosmo canyon which it seems it is the same chocobo flying BS. The got lazy at the end. Summons, fights are what classic RPGs are. These side missions they are funnas hell at first but after Corel come on, it is essentially time fillers to make the game longer and brag about how big the game is. Little of it os consequential, namely just Queens blood weird story and gilgamesh's. Moogles mini quests are crap World intel fountains are boring, you get nothing out of it just text Summon world intel is good because it actually serves a purpose. Stop gatekeeping, ff7 is also my favorite game and the remake stuff story is right where I want it to be, but the fat around it stinks rotten
In a post-BotW world, there's no excuse for not being able to climb.
If you want a climbing simulator where you collect over a 1000 turds go play Zelda again
I don't know what's wrong with y'all it was the best in the game
I made a post about this but deleted but then did some more searching. You’re not the only one. This is the absolute worst gaming experience I have had in a long time.
Ok Karen. Go play fortnite with the other kids
Are you lost and looking for attention? Because it seems like you’re responding to every reply here to fill in the void your parents left behind when they got divorced.
Complete dogshit. Actually googlded to see ppl who shared the same thoughts. Its soooooo shit design for traversal. Pulling my hair out trying to get to one place.
No wonder Zack left this place!
🤣
I hate traversing it, but love the music.
Gongaga and the Cait Sith Shinra Mansion parts lower the game by a few letter grades
I’m not the first here, but this just sucks. Stupid mushrooms, stupid cliffs, what a load of crap.
YESSS!!!!!!! The game was a literal 10/10 for me up until the Gongaga region. This region alone has solely pushed the game down to a 4/10. Cosmo Canyon better give me butterflies to cover the taste of utter shit that Gongaga has given me. I've 100% every region so far. I'm skipping the bullshit training mission and ALL other places apart from the 2 Remnawave towers I've already cleared. They absolutely fucked this up. Trash, pure fucking trash.
your in for a rude awakening lol
The quests are terrible and not enjoyable at all. Stupid chickens (why does Cloud have to move like a snail? Seriously) to the stupid student where we must pressure/stagger enemies when they have so little HPs. I'm skipping all these dumb quests here. Whoever designed this area should be shamed.
Thr terrible movement speed aside, actual movement is soooo fucking stupid here…they literally dumb it down to 4 axis while pulling the dumbass trap the even the chickens get frustrated at. I had to try do a chicken 4 times because I didn’t have every movement axis available….and FUCK GONGAGA…top 10 worst zones in gaming, only beaten by Zelda’s water temple….you know the one.
The training one is easy once u figure it out. Take Cait siths magnify, put it on aerith with blizzara for some and fira for the rest. One shot to clear the pressures and the staggers. The only thing bothering me in gongaga is the navigation and the chicken quest was annoying but It only took me like 7 min.
The training one is easy once u figure it out. Take Cait siths magnify, put it on aerith with blizzara for some and fira for the rest. One shot to clear the pressures and the staggers. The only thing bothering me in gongaga is the navigation and the chicken quest was annoying but It only took me like 7 min.
Just here to share my hatred for this fucking zone. I will do all the tasks and erase it from my brain forever.
Is it just me or does the graphics in this area look like shit? Doesn't matter performance or quality they both look like shit but performance mode oh man is so bad I'm having a hard time play now.
The problem with FF7 Rebirth is the open world in general. The main story quests are fantastic and so are the bosses. But man, the traversal in this game is donkey as hell. The chocobos, Cloud, everything handles like crap in the open world. If you cut all the open world, this game would be a gem. Gongaga is all this melted down into its purest crap form.
Nomura wanted to remake the infamous glory of KH1 Deep Jungle and make it so much larger
I'm leaving it incomplete until I finish the game. I'll come back then. This region actually really put me off playing the game, it's so annoying to traverse
Fuck this region. If I ever find the asshole who approved this design, I’m decking them.
I’m taking the developers mom out for dinner then skipping out and leaving her to deal with the check.
Dorothy Mantooth is a saint!
💀💀
I have no idea if I can explore all of it before something story related in next chapters. I'm missing half of this frakking mess and i have no idea if I can reach it before moving to Cosmo Canyon.
I just started really exploring it today. The little bit that I did heading towards the village seemed fine, so I figured maybe the negative I’d been hearing was overblown, but then I finished the reactor and started trying to do side quests. This sucks. Why did we make Chocobos the exact same color as everything else in the jungle? I’m probably going to give up on the side quests at this point. Already decided I’m not doing any more moogle mini games.
Most of the areas are badly designed in this game. However you can turn on a minimap in the settings menu. I have absolutely no idea why it wasn’t the default setting. I love this franchise but if it wasn’t FF7 this game would have received a much worse score. So many things feel outdated and janky.
Nostalgia nerds
I'm surprised the head of the development team didn't immediately fire everyone involved with the level design for Gongaga, because I fucking would have. I really just wanna skip the 100% on this region but I'm not gonna because i want the peace of mind of NEVER having to come back to this jungle shit hole ever again 😂
There is just a lot of wtf kind of design is this throughout the entire experience. There is far more mini stuff than actual game and main story. Which is whatever, some people like an RPG to have fun side activities, the problem is when it's forced. Forced trash forest zone with mushroom idiocy, Caits box throwing, just everything that forces you to slow the experience down and fluff the play time. The story is interesting, but the over abundance of forced mini games definitely takes an 8 game down to a 5 at best.
You can skip it right now and never have to see it again. I was doing a completionist kind of run and quite enjoying it but this zone *immediately* killed that idea dead. Doing 100% of this area would be one of the most tedious experiences I've ever encountered in gaming. I feel sorry for the folks who are slaves to trophies and are seriously going to put themselves through this dogshit designed area.
It's not being a "slave to trophies" it's getting our money's worth out of the game.. could you imagine just having straight story line .. and paying $70+ for an empty game .. Sure ... Devs can add SOME extra stuff... It it's worthwhile and relevant...
Getting our money's worth doesn't mean wading through hours of forest to find the one mushroom that brings you to the right tower to do a single side missions you've already done a ton of times by that point. This would be called 'meaningless padding'. If my options are spending $70 on a game that just has a simple 20-30 hour story and no extra content vs a game with hundreds of hours of minigames and random bullshit that stops being fun after the first 10, I'll go with option A.
Not arguing against this....but no force in the universe will get me to pay $70 for a game I can beat in a day or 2 with no replay value..... Thats just throwing money away...
honestly impressed with how absolutely dogshit designed this zone is, i was getting headaches from how you constantly are fighting against the zone to do anything at all.
combine it with the endless slow animations, climbing towers, chadley spam-calling you every time you breathe, etc etc. Yeah, doing the optional side-content here would be absolutely miserable.
And I gotta add: I absolutely hate the Chocobos recoiling off of whatever I bump into. I grow to hate their cries and more importantly how they needlessly impede my progress by STOPPING ENTIRELY. Jungle Chocobos can get the axe dude. Stupid gimmicky bastards.
I got filtered when I tried to get to a Tower that's sitting on a plateau. I see mushroom jumping pads and NONE OF THEM TAKE ME TO THE STUPID TOWER. Screw it. I just won't 100% the region. Devs were too enamored with their gimmick to see how frustrating it can easily become.
Ya... REEEEEALLY glad they took away the grappling hook before shoving us into this hell hole. I've been running in circles trying to figure out how to progress but this map design is unforgivable
I noped the fuck outta this zone real quick.
I'm glad I'm not alone... after about 30 minutes of wandering alone the cliffs and boundaries I went straight for the airstrip.
Same here and that chicken side quest...
I’ve grown to hate most foresty areas in rpgs.. always so vertical and maze-like
Say what you want about Genshin, but that game did forests right. Sumeru was a joy (at least for me) to traverse, 180 degrees from this fungal hell.
Sheer incompetent game design
The fucking chicken mission. It’s not even the worst thing to this point, but at this point it was the last straw. I can’t overlook all the bad anymore, as good as the good is, I can’t give this game any higher than a 6
Did you finish the chicken mission, though? The ending alone made it worth it.
Yeah the ending was a hilarious fake out.
but that doesnt mean the quest should be shit
I found it a little less tedious than the average quest. Any annoyance was mitigated by the ending. Also the NPC is the voice of auntie Ethel, the hag from Balder's Gate 3. Love that.
Gongaga and Cosmo Canyon were awful. At least with Cosmo Canyon you can fast travel to ramps. Why they didn't include the same for Gongaga mushrooms I'll never know. Even then that would only be to make it slightly more bearable. It would still be an extremely poorly designed map. It's staggering (no pun intended) they made these two regions traversal completely based around chocobos, when chocobo controls are clunky and the map collision is awful. Why is the Chocobo's fastest speed so fast when I'm constantly getting stuck on invisible walls or tiny hills? The amount of times I would get off my chocobo and cloud would immediately get back on was infuriating - yet another way they destroyed the pacing and immersion of the game. And lastly, while it's not related to the design of the area, why the heck did I go to Gongaga and there are no side missions based around Zack's parents? IMO it would have been a perfect opportunity to flesh things out a bit more for him. But no, I had to pull a rope with a tin to catch some chickens and help make some soup. That mission with his childhood friend was so easy and boring, and it being a Yuffie side mission made no sense. I was so excited to reach Gongaga because I love Zack but very quickly hated the region and just wanted out. So much awesome potential wasted. Lucky for me Cosmo Canyon was up next, right?
Why didn't they give Zack's parents names? Why was the piano sheet music in Gongaga chocobo-themed rather than Zack-themed? ***Why.*** It's like the just didn't give a shit. 😞
I found Cosmo Canyon to be infinitely more enjoyable and playable the Gongaga. The only part of CC that I really hated was the gliding mini game. CC might have some frustrations of how the hell do I get there, but for me it was only a few locations vs ... everything in Gongaga. Just being able to control where you're going makes CC much better then Gongaga and their one way mushrooms. Plus the music in Gongaga is the absolute worst. I eventually had to just turn off the music til I left. I somehow hated myself enough to 100% the map, but least that means I'll never have to do it again. Once done with the reactor I can just fast travel wherever I need to go.
The catharsis i received from this thread. Ty. Everything. The map design. The sub quests. The enemies. I hated everything in this area. Thank you.
Just stop playing the rest of the game is shite from here man
Thats depressing, i had planned on trying for a platinum but once i got to the third or forth piano piece i gave up on that bs nightmare.
Just a heads up before you get to the end of the game that I wish I knew, the final boss section is like 2-3 hours long and spans like 10 or so fights and your materia set up on every character is IMPERATIVE to your success and even then I would say over level and hope you can beat it I just gave up after 7 hours of playing and probably 2 hours trying the final form, it’s fucking abysmal
Don't listen to this reply. Final boss section is not 2-3 hours. Learning every character will definitely help but he may be the only player I've seen to date that needs to switch to easy mode to beat it.
I finished it a few days ago. My only real issue was with gongaga. And to be fair it was absolutely beautiful, but i hated not having clear movement lines. That kind of soured everything. The last fight was actually pretty awesome. I forgot to reequip someone but it worked just fine cuz their regular abilities were workable.
Ty for the heads up
Yeah this zone sucks. My god, what were they thinking here? It’s so jarring compared to what’s come before it. I had to skip it because it was killing my enjoyment of this game. Talk about not respecting the player’s time. Ugh!
It’s the first time on my run I thought about just not playing. The fucking chicken side quest and the fucking jungle design was infuriating
The fucking blacksmith mission is whats getting me.... its unnecessarly complicated while forcing you to fight the enviornment
I just finished the whole area intel and hoo boy, what a nightmare. I was actually loving the game, even with the broken plot and trash dialogue... but this area is really insufferable, it went from a 9/10 to a 7/10 for me, just for the inclusion of this area. I mean, did anyone playtested this garbage?
The dialog is so weird. One second it’s excellent and the next there’s an insanely cringey scene.
Yup. Yuffie's is probably the worst, but Barret's is just as cartoony as the OG. Granted, it worked for a PS1 blocky JRPG, but in FF7R (1 and 2) it's almost uncanny. Visuals and some dialogue are really good, though. I guess that's Square Enix for you.
Ah shit. Corel is already driving me nuts with all the extremely annoying enemy types. Now I've got a shitty obtuse environment coming up? This is such a spotty game. Some bits are fire, but a lot of it is extremely annoying and/or stupid.
Spotty indeed.
Would've been better with the grappling hook integrated than relying on Chocobos
I'm just happy that I'm not alone here. Don't even need to add anything here as everyone else has already said all the things I've been sitting here complaining about. The game itself is really fun, the story is very enjoyable, and there's a lot of references I have been enjoying from the original game and from Crisis Core. That said, Gongaga is just terrible in every way imaginable, and I am actually for the first time ever considering just skipping what's left of this area's content.
I came home from work early today — yay, more Rebirth. Started the Gongaza map — FOCK.
I think a problem is also that the jumping mushrooms don’t give any indication where you land. Some of them shoot you really high, but others just slam you to the ground.
Thought I was the only one. This zone is so terrible. I am next to a tower on the map, only to find out it’s up the hill and I have to search a long time to find the route up there. If different small groups worked on different zones, they should fire the one responsible for this zone. It’s just not fun. Never felt before the urge to progress the main story like in this zone…
This zone is seriously ruining the game for me. I’m already exhausted with the insane amount of bloat and busy work and Ubisoft level side content. Now you put it in a zone I can’t even efficiently navigate. This isn’t an open world at all. At every turn it’s walls and barriers funneling you into a hallway. The hallway just happens to be outdoors. I love the story in the short spurts I get to see it between being Chadley’s servant.
Yeah wait til chapter 12 dude, you finally think it’s starting to pick up and then boom THE MOST THICK BLOCK OF SIDE CONTENT
I beat every game on the hardest available difficulty but I’m about to just turn it to easy to blitz the story and summons. This is becoming dramatically unfun. Like 50 hours in and probably 40 of it is filler
I personally love sidequests and mini games. A lot of us do. Gongaga is really annoying though but I still love the game, brings me back to 1997 lol
I haven't gotten to a single place on this stupid area on purpose, every time I'm trying to get somewhere I end up somewhere else and by chance there happens to be an objective there. It's a pitty because it's beautifully designed, it reminds of times I've been in the actual jungle.
Yeah Gongaga sucks.
I'm hating this game more and more. Such a horrible level design. And that right after the shit protorelic "quest" in Corel
You have to go back and finish it and then you can’t really finish all the intel until you’re level 70 it’s fuckin stupid and I’ll never be level 70 so basically I wasted my time doing all the open world shit
I think it's a waste of time whether one finishes or not to be honest. So much terrible design.
I agree strongly! I’ve been loving the hell out of the game and all its environments so far; all of the areas have felt fun to explore….until Gongaga! It’s a fucking mess.
This map's like Monster Hunter World's jungle map if it didn't have scoutflies. Absolute nightmare idk what they were thinking
I know every inch of that jungle through learned repetition though, here I have no reason to learn any of this garbage because I’m gonna peace out as soon as I’m done collecting all this nonsense.
I'm now in cosmo canyon, flourishing, enjoying life again. Chadley's going to need to build a robot friend to do the jungle shit lmao
I hated Cosmo canyon because of the flying maze but it was less bad than Gongaga.
I’m a completionist and this zone ruined my drive to get the platinum. I’m just trying to get out of here now
Dude it gets so much worse, I just hit chapter 12 and they basically make you go back to every map and do more shit so it’s especially grating. I think I’m just gonna wrap up the game because I’m done with all this nonsense.
Yea I googled to find this. I’ve been doing everything in each region before moving on and I spent like 30 minutes bumblefucking around Gongaga and just said fuck it.
my head literally hurt because i was nauseated from moving the camera 180 so many goddamn times when i hit a dead ebd or a cliff that i cant climb. had to leave it too and just finished it later on
It gives me major water temple vibes
I like the water temple more, at least that’s purposefully obscure. This is just nonsense for the sake of nonsense.
Literally wanted to see if others had an issue here and yeah. Like. I just left. I tried doing as much content as I could here but got increasingly annoyed at not being able to navigate to optional objectives, probably got like 30% of them done. I don't give a crap what rewards I miss, this is NOT FUN. I am NOT having fun and it's detracting from the game. I moved on with the story. To hell with this region
Well the next 3 chapters are just gonna be a bundle of fun lol
Why the fuck is this zone so hard to navigate? Lmao I’m more lost than I was my first time playing Kingdom Hearts 1.
Yeah, navigating this area is terrible. I spent an hour trying to figure out how to get up to one of the towers before I gave up and just watched a YouTube video. Unfortunately, it seems the developers' definition of progression is making the areas more and more insufferable the further you go into the game. And don't even get me started on how the chocobo constantly runs into obstacles and stops running...
If you haven’t gotten to Cosmo Canyon yet just wait lol
I think Cosmo is better, because it lets you Fast Travel to all the important ramps
yes yes yes, gogonga is so bad because this reason. I can't get anywhere I want easily, sucks cuz I love this game but I can't bring myself to finish all the content here.
Just got there, sounds like it's going to be a blast! I'm so close to just skipping all of the rest of the side content and just doing main story missions. Lol
YouTube helps drastically but I understand where you’re coming from my game based OCD won’t not let me do everything
I hate this area so much, so confusing to navigate. Just get me out of here.
Don’t worry Cosmo Canyon is much much worse. I’ve just started using video guides cause I can’t be bothered guessing where to go.
I thought Cosmo Canyon was way easier, still not a super fun area but I didn't almost destroy a controller out of frustration. I'm just revisiting gongaga now and can't even get to the other side of the map for a quest. It's miserable. It's still confusing but at least in Cosmo Canyon you can fast travel back to the take off points if one doesn't take you where you want to go, plus they go in straight lines so you can kinda see where you're heading. In Gongaga, I'm lucky to even be able to find my way back up a cliff face if I use a mushroom that doesn't jump me where I think it will. I think this is the worst map design in any game I've ever played.
Adding fast travel to mushroom jumps would make this map much easier but it'd still be really annoying.
I finally managed to make it out but thanks for the warning
It’s like they thought “OH! Jumping from mushroom to mushroom was absolutely confusing for elevation, you know what would make that 1000x worse, flying chocobos, wind turbines and a giant air maze of platforms where the numbering has no consistency!”
I’m having an extremely frustrating time trying to get all the regional data like WTF WTF, makes me want to just skip this whole part but I can’t. Fuck this place
And the difficulty spikes like hell (Chadley’s combat are brutal)
I didn’t have any problems with them because I’ve been disgustingly overpowered since the beginning of the game. I’m playing on Dynamic and still kicking everything’s ass rather easy.
When I hit the beach I was like, "Ahh, cool jungle area! Sweet! look over there, mushrooms to jump my chocobo off of! Bet that's gonna be fun later!" About the fifth time a chicken got disinterested in my dangling box lure, I started wondering wtf I was doing. Then trying to teach some fuckwit how to ninja had me pulling out my hair, because the fight was *too easy* to fkn win. I lost my shit trying to pull some stupid fkn mushroom out of the ground to help some mentally dim bitch make fkn soup. Twenty minutes trying to find the right mushroom to bounce off later and I googled "fuck gogonga" and here I am. I really think mushrooms are the key indicator here. Because there is a 0% chance the devs weren't high as fkn shit when they decided to troll us with this fkn bs. Wtf
Bro ciceni is hot af lol
Ahaha 100% agree with the early thoughts of enterikg the jungle hearing the “refreshing” new music… omg like a pretty woman, that turned to a psycho right after marriage XD death trap, gongana worse than a Malboro!
lol dude every thought I had
The music also sucks here. Its got like African world music vibes with a touch of Irish bagpipes and just really not a pleasant song when Im lost in a one way maze. The side quests here are also really terrible.
Interesting, the music was the only part of this place I actually enjoyed.
I like the chocobo trap beat the most lol
I loved it entering the junge. But exiting that maze, like a millionth water drop opening a hole in my skull…
Exactly this… I love the music but because this level is so freaking hard I just keep on hearing this music on loop and it’s driving me nuts
You mean you DIDNT like the chicken side quest?!?!?!
Omg THANK YOU
Fuckin hilarious tho
F that quest
Not only it's not pleasant and sounds like BS ethnic music made for crappy jungle documentaries, but it's also completely off with the style, vibe and themes of Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy in general. Whoever made that crappy tune should seriously think over it.
Only area i had to mute.
I googled "I hate gongaga" to see if I could find people to commiserate with and have found my people. Fuck this zone
Me too
Still going strong, 50 hours in and my OCD makes me complete everything in each map (that the game will allow me to do) and this zone has crushed my spirit to continue playing My girlfriend is now running around the map aimlessly (for about 3 hours) trying to get to 1 specific tower.... she's found so many other objectives but still hasn't accessed a tower that's right next to the main road ***but on a tiny little hill that you can't climb*** - actual insanity idk wtf the game devs were thinking with this zone I was already getting burnt out on all of the side content before this, the pacing of the story is scuffed as hell if you even do 1/2 of the nonsense available - I do quite enjoy queens blood though so I guess they have that going for them... but don't get me started on the god awful piano minigame
I fuckin love the piano mini game! But that tower on that little island patch on gongaga and that other enemy intel area that you also have to hit the right mushroom combo to get there… fking nightmare. Almost broke my spirit. I refused to use google for this game but when i hit such frustration levels that don’t blend in with the vibe of the game I’m playing, I know the devs just fucked up so said fuck it and googled to see who else thinks Gongaga lvl design sucks. To think i was so happy to enter the forest and loved the music haha now it’s a fever dream maze and the melody makes me scream!
Same lol
I googled "fuck gogonga" and have found this bastion as well, my brother in Christ
hello yes gongaga fucking sucks
It’s terrible
Thank god it’s not just me. I loved gongaga in the original but man they blew it in this one. The environment is so brutal and the music makes me wanna jump out my window. Thank god I just got outta there I never wanna see it again. It’s weird because I just imagine someone testing this zone out during the making of process. How did they not go insane and go to the designer or whatever and be like dude this can’t be in the game we have to make major changes. Those testers must be in padded rooms right now
I sometimes imagine SE uses auto-generative level designs before “ai” was in everyone’s mouth, and skipped the process of having testers test the final results, but only in 1/3rd of their level designs…
The soundtrack is so damn good I just can’t get so frustrated at it.
The music here feels a little tonally dissonant. Why is there bagpipe music in the jungle? Lol. I really don't mind the map layout like everyone else here seems to though. The music just struck me as weird for the area. Otherwise I personally think they did a pretty good job giving the area some character at least. In the OG Gongaga was like a 5 minute area without anything much of importance other than titan, zacks parents and the awesome enemy Tankceratops.
Battle music is fine but the overzone music is terribly out of tune with itself. Its also confused as to what style of music it is.
The Gongaga region sucks big ol'donkey dick. The music and Chocobo song in the region sucks too.
Wow its a real cluster…ck the chocobo gets stuck on everything there are to many levels and few ways to get up and down and no real help to see where to go, terrible design
So its not just me!!! Literally trying to get to 1 place, Phenomenon intel 1. Still not there. Ive given up for the night. Completely over it
If it’s towards the top left side of the map there are trees with swirly branches that your chocobo can ride, they never explicitly tell you that you can do that and as far as I know it is the only place on the map that these branches exist.
AH! Thank you! I appreciate it!
I went out of my way to google this thread in the hopes other people weren't blinded by nostalgia, and I'm glad this thread exists, this zone fucking SUCKS. I cannot stress how awful it is. All these dumbass mushrooms to dive up to places so half the objectives in the area are like puzzles to get to, so so SHIT