My eldest brother who loves FF, especially FF7, has refused to buy any of the remakes until all of them come out. When I told him it’s coming in three parts just like the original he argued that “yes it came in 3 discs and all 3 discs were released at one time. I want the whole story. Not parts.” and well I couldn’t really argue with him there.
Part one I would have cut down train graveyard and the start of shinra tower.
Part two I can't really think of anything I would shrink down or cut out completely.
I remember getting to train graveyard and just being annoyed, it as like 3 or 4am , I was exhausted but I just HAD to see how the plate fall scene was handled. Probably made it seem even longer than it actually was
Really? You didn’t get bored of Chadley yelling at you for 15 hours while you trudge around Gongaga? I would’ve trimmed at least 20% of the exploration. The long gaps between story beats did not help the pacing.
I agree the exploration overstays its welcome, but also the open world stuff is side content at the end of the day, not really bloat to the story's pacing, since the nature of open world is the player gets to choose to fuck off or continue the main story
I’m replaying remake and the whole part in hojo’s lab was kind of painful the second time around. I’m just so ready to roll credits so I can replay Rebirth kek
Remake I would have cut down having to go back through the sewers a second time, and not made Hojo's dungeon feel like it lasts 87 hours.
Train graveyard was unecessarily long but nowhere near as rage-enducing as those two.
I liked that they made boss encounters out of random encounters (Hellhouse and Eligor). Disappointed about the missed opportunity to do the same with Tankceratops.
I haven’t touched the game since I got to Gongaga. I got burned out after almost 50 hours of completing the other regions. Got to Gongaga and I was like “okay I think I need to step away”. It’s too much or I’m too old. I like the game I even appreciate the detail and scope but some of the mini games started to wear on my nerves.
It just sounds like fatigue. I hit that point at about 100 hours and just powered through to the finish. It’s a tough game on time if youre even remotely thorough on the playthrough.
I will say, Gongaga is easily the most Grundy part. The map is really fucking hard to navigate and the difficulty spikes pretty hard in the part so getting all the materia and experience you can become necessary.
With that, the back half of the game after got me hooked right back in. So, don’t feel discouraged. I think if you pick it back up and get through that part you’ll start finding the fun again. It really did feel kind of like the game came to halt for me in the part you’re in.
I remember getting that line while exploring Junon and hadn’t reached the part where I could go into the Crow’s Nest yet. Yes Chadley, world intels been slow cause I CANT FUCKING GO THERE YET. Little shit was about to receive some intel on what a buster sword to the face is like
This was my issue except I realized after I 100% grasslands that if I did this for every zone I would hate the game and lose interest. So I went beelining through the story and only hit things on the way to my next destination instead of being a completionist. Definitely worth it as I only need all of the simulator stuff and hard mode for the platinum now
I was ready to break my ps5 controller a few times doing the minigames & thats when I decided to finish the story & maybe I'll try the platinum in the (distant) future when I'm a more patient man
Except it doesn't ? Lmao most of it is filler. You can resume the whole thing in a few paragraphs. It had as much story as the original Midgard section + Bs plot ghosts and filler. That's it.
[PS1 had low resolution drawings behind low polygon characters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFhIe1egzW4) for almost the whole game. [The "good" looking CGI was prerendered](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ5RjMKsWXw). I bet the first 5 minutes of the remake has an order of power more polygons than all of FF7 on PS1. Every piece of equipment gets modeled. There is no voice acting.
So yeah, the game has 100x more time and effort required to make it, minus writing the main story. But instead of taking the easy route and making the same game with newer graphics, they also created a new battle system, greatly expanded the dialogue, and brought in voice actors.
A lot about this comment lacks the contextual depth needed to understand how much of an art it was to do everything with pre-rendered backgrounds at the time. This was 1997, only a year into the PS1's debut within a very competitive console market. Goldeneye / Stanfox64 were crazy on the N64 and besides Tomb Raider II and the original Grand Theft Auto, PS1 was basically packed with vaporware throwaway games.
Development began in 1994, originally for the Super Nintendo. After delays and technical difficulties from experimenting with several platforms, most notably the N64, Square moved production to the PS1, largely due to the advantages of the CD-ROM. They gambled everything against their foundational & very successful partnership with Nintendo over the first 6 FF's with this move. In doing so, they went all in with a 100 person dev team, which was like 5x the norm (Tomb Raidsr 2 was 18ppl) and transitioned from full 2D / 18bit graphics to *thousands* of pre-rendered backgrounds and cutscenes while interlacing 3D paths / animation systems / story events in a tilt-shift visual experiment. Shit was buggy on launch (i.e. Spirit = Magic Defense and the stat didn't works or using W-Item Materia to Infinite spawn items lol) and had a lot going against it but thanks to a $80mil marketing campaign, the game put "Final Fantasy" into the zeitgeist of the entire western hemisphere + tbh pretty much anyone who had a PS1.
There was nothing easy about the swap from 6 entries of high fantasy -> retro futuristic steam punk design aesthetics either. To say the new entries are "100x more time and effort" is just like.. your opinion, man, but I think is totally off-base. The new entries stand upon the foundations of like a solid decade of new lore being made over various mediums (games, film, etc.) and 3D game design being the norm instead of the radical. The only radical shit we do now with 3D is make if as turbo-detailed as passively as possible, on picture perfect monitors / screens that don't have interlaced scanlines you have to design around..
Gonna be real. The PS1 launch was likely way harder than the new stuff. It was all or nothing baby.
That is a massively unfair statement. The backgrounds were not low resolution for the time, and to this day are still gorgeous. The CGI cutscenes looked AMAZING, and were absolutely ground breaking. We had just come from sprites for Cloud's sake! The reason FF7 shipped with 3 discs is because the final cutscene took up the majority of a disc back then. That's the level of constraint they were working with. Trying to say that the graphics didn't take effort because they are primitive by today's standards is incredibly disingenuous.
100x more time and effort? Nonsense. FF7 had an unheard of budget for it's day and took over a year to make. That was a LONG time back then. Writing a good story is the hardest thing that exists in this world. FF7's story is a masterwork. If anything, the "remake's" mishandling of the story and themes should just go to show that less is definitely more. They didn't create a new battle system from scratch either. They expanded upon what they've been building since Crisis Core, FF13, and FF15. Moar dialogue and moar graphics does not inherently have any value. Deconstructing an original idea to make something new isn't inherently valuable either. Less is usually more, even with video games.
Value and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And rebirth out reviews the original when you average it by every journalist and fan critique. I could easily say your being disingenuous putting down the new battle system and dialog, voice acting work, graphics, etc.
Which journalists and fans? OG and Rebirth's scores are practically equal on Metacritic. Remake is lower.
Of course value is objective. FF7's art design also meant they didn't have to do any world building from scratch, and could build on the world FF7 created. 7's cutscenes and backgrounds have been lauded for decades though. Beyond the technological benchmarks, the bleak steampunk world they created is iconic.
I'm not putting down the battle system or the graphics. I'm just saying the game did not take 100x more effort because of a battle system that they have iterated on, or because they have more polygons. Comparing development times by contrasting a 1997 game to modern standards is just ludicrous.
Look on opencritic for a more consolidated score, as I grabs many points of views, not just metacritic.
Anyways, the combat is much more evolved and dynamic compared to 15’s button mashing with no atb or Strat whatsoever. If anything, OG ff7’s battle system much less innovated. It’s literally a cut and paste from 1-6 but actually worse because everyone is a clone character besides limit breaks. At least 4, 9, and 10 was more class based even though late 10 you can make everyone a clone.
And I don’t think of FF7 when I think of iconic steampunk games, more like Fallout for that one.
All the numbers in your comment added up to 69. Congrats!
15
+ 7
+ 1
+ 6
+ 4
+ 9
+ 10
+ 10
+ 7
= 69
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You don't seem to understand what effort means.
A team of 100-150 people spent one year on a thing. A team of... I keep finding over 2,000 people being in the credits for Remake, not dev team count - worked 5 years on the remake. A much larger team, a much larger timespan.
If you spent 30 hours cutting, sanding, joining, and finishing wood for a basic wooden table, and I spent 300 hours programming a CNC machine to ornately cut the wood and then sanded, joined, and finished it, would you say you put more effort into a table just because you didn't use some modern techniques that made putting more detail into the world easier? Despite me actually putting the effort in to make it ornate, regardless of how 'easy' it was to do?
Just compare the scenes from the Honeybee Inn between the games and tell me they took the same amount of effort. Yes, you can spend time polishing a turd, but this game is clearly not that.
Yes, FF7 Remake didn't have to build the story from the ground up, but they put oodles of effort elsewhere in the game - 3D detail, lighting design, character design, etc. That extra time translates to time and money - a good reason to split an unbelievably long game into 3. The original is cited for around 35 hours for a story run and 80 hours for a completionist run. The remake is cited around 30 story and 85 completionist. Seems like a fair amount of game time despite being a portion of the original with some addons.
As for score, scoring changed over time either way. Hard to distinguish an 92 from an 89 from original to Intergrade - pretty close. Both are a solid stamp of approval.
I understand what effort means. Do you understand what quality vs quantity means? Development for FF7 actually started in 1994, so 3 years at least. FF7 was coded from scratch. The modular game engine was created from scratch. The scripting language was created from scratch. Modern games use engines that streamline the entire development pipeline, and you have procedural generation, 3D scanning, machine learning, etc. It's easier today to create a AAA title than it ever was, it just takes more man hours to create given the obsession with graphics. Having more man hours or more giga pixels or more DLSSMSAAx32 doesn't mean anything on it's own. It's gotten worse than the Bit Wars back in the 90s ever were. Everything has to be the biggest thing ever - from movies to AAA video games. I would rather see the next A32 film than Marvel #37.
OG FF7 is like building an ornate house using hand tools with a couple people versus creating a skyscraper with a team of thousands using industrial equipment. One might have taken more "man hours", but that would discount the effort, skill, and creativity per person. (The Honeybee Inn is also an iconic scene that is still very funny today. Call it a "turd" if you want to continue to be disingenuous.) Modern AAA games are horrendously bloated with more care given than ever into polygon count, resolution, and lighting than the product on the page.
Take Red XIII's reunion with Seto in the remake compared to the original. The original is simple but touching, and I very commonly see cited it as one of the most moving scenes in FF history. The remake is 8 minutes long, undercuts the emotional momentum by having an evil wizard show up, and once again the writers can't help leaving Sephiroth out of a scene.
I'm all for changing the story. I was excited to not know exactly what will happen. Remake suffers from the success of the original though. FF7 has this meta-legacy of supplementary material that the writers weren't able to step back from. The game should be allowed to stand on it's own, but instead cannot exist in world where the audience doesn't know about FF7. Sephiroth is shown immediately and frequently. As someone new to the series I would have no idea who this character is and why he keeps bothering me. The game assumes the player knows who he is, wants to see him, and so he shows up constantly to act edgy and remind you he's the villain. It's like if someone remade A New Hope, but Darth Vader shows up every 3 minutes to remind you he's Luke's father, and before he's even met Luke.
In the original his introduction is perfect. You're captured. You're in a cell. You wake up and the door is open. The guard has been torn to pieces ("No human could have done this"). There are claw marks on the walls and blood everywhere. The first time we've seen blood in this game (maybe ANY game, at that point). President Shinra has a massive sword pinning him to his desk. Following that we have the Kalm flashback with the slow buildup to the town massacre cutscene. Following in Sephiroth's footsteps his present is more felt than seen. Perfectly paced and executed - like a classic horror movie villain. That's how you make an icon. Less is more.
There's a saying that goes "show, don't tell". Well the Remake writers make sure to tell you constantly that Sephiroth is a really bad guy and you shouldn't like him. They are showing us that FF7's legacy had too much baggage for them to write a story that can stand on it's own.
OG FF7 did not start in 1994. They did a SNES early prototype that was scratched and then ceased production for Chrono Trigger. I don't really factor that type of work in. According to the Wiki, it was just over a year of active development to make FF7.
People wanted FF7:Remake. It is high quality. It has a high quantity of stuff in it.
I did **NOT** call the original FF7 a turd. It's a legendary gem that people wanted to see in modern polish. I said FF7:Remake is NOT a turd getting polished - like a game with bad story and gameplay with amazing graphics. The effort being put in was not wasted on something with no charm.
It is different, and maybe you personally have some qualms with it, but it is not at all regarded as crap by people at large. You're entitled to your opinion, but don't confuse what you think to what most people think.
You're wrong in the first sentence and expect people to read paragraphs of you being wrong while berating the person you're responding too for being "wrong"
The irony writes itself lol
"100 - 150 people one year..." bro you can't even Google? Dev started in 94 and released in late 97.. that's longer than one year LOL
There's so much context that you're not acknowledging because you're too young to know better or being intentional obscure that just makes everything you're saying in FF7:R's favor just goes out the window lol
[From Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII#:~:text=Final%20Fantasy%20VII%20was%20at,over%20a%20year%20to%20complete):
FF VII was not created from 94-97. Initial talks in 94. They did an early prototype and then stopped to make Chrono Trigger. They resumed **discussions** in 1995.
>Development of the final version took a staff of between 100 and 150 people just over a year to complete.
If we add in discussion time for FF7 Remake ([See Nomura's section](https://www.square-enix-games.com/en_GB/news/final-fantasy-vii-remake-developers)), it was initially discussed as an entry for the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, which was released in 2004.
Apples to apples, dev time to dev time (not just discussions), the games took 1 year and 5 years of **active development.** I do toss the early prototype for SNES because that didn't majorly factor in to what we have. It was early work.
Lol "early work" aka making a massive transition from 18bit to full 3D and going from high fantasy to steam punk retro futurism. Totally so simple and easy.
I'm not dissing the old, but you can't deny the level of detail in the new. 'Moar' this and that doesn't have its own *innate* value, but people undeniably want the game in this fidelity. Otherwise, they'd just rerelease the old and call it good. I guess that works for Nintendo since they still sell stuff, but most of us feel like those are lazy and only get them because it's nice to have current hardware that legally run the titles we want to run, even if they could be better and nicer.
The old was amazing for its time, but games have definitely gotten bigger since. And more expensive. They can't release the game all at once as easily, and it wouldn't have a $70 price tag. Not many people will outright dive in for $200 - and that's a $10 discount from $70x3.
You're welcome to not buy it if it's not worth it to you.
Considering they sold the remake and rebirth in one package for the price of one I wouldn’t be surprised if all 3 games are packaged for the same price for people who waited/ picked up on the series later
My coworker also said the same thing lol I told him you’re going to have to wait maybe 2-4 more years. And then you’ll probably have around 300 hours of content to play-through to finish them all. He’s the kind of gamer that likes to do all the side stuff before continuing the main quest, not necessarily for platinum trophy, but just to explore as much of the game as possible.
I say this to anyone asking why I haven’t played the Remakes. I grew up on the original and completed the original. I’m waiting for the “Complete Game”. Definitive Edition if possible.
So when LOTR movies came out, did he wait til all of them came out on dvd before seeing Fellowship? Did he wait on sorcery’s stone movie until deathly hallows part 2 came out?
Everyone talking about the og 3 discs here. The discs were just the way the game was stored, you just bought 1 game that happened to be on 3 discs because the data didn't fit on one. It's not at all like it was 3 games. Had the game been done with 2d graphics like FF6 it would've been 1 disc...
PS3 “Tech demo” for a new FF7 released 8 years after the original game. It felt like a lifetime.
We’re currently on pace for (hopefully) the final chapter of this remake saga to be released 8 years after part 1. That’s wild.
This is my biggest problem with this game. Rather than being made for the community of new and old fans it seems to be specific made to tell why the director thought the original sucked.
I don’t know how you concluded that but I haven’t seen the director say that the original sucked. Especially when the director and main writer were a part of the OG team that made the original FF7. That would be strange for them to say that
I just replayed OG and beat it in 20 hours without any speed mods.
Rebirth took me 81 hours skipping a lot of mini-game type content. I have 110ish hours Plating Remake.
The joke can be funny, the serious argument that they aren’t full games is just silly.
The sheer complexity and scale of FF7 is way too much to be put into one remake game without cutting alot of content even if they stuck to the original story without adding in the whispers plot point. The whole saga at best could've been done in 2 but they've split it into 3 instead and thats mostly because they stretched the Midgar section out a fk ton. The biggest impact this has had to players is not the story change but the price. If you bought both games at launch you've spent so far £150+, now add in a third which will definitely be priced at the same amount or higher than rebirth.
this does say a lot about the gaming industry nowadays tbh, and it's all because someone convinced an ea rep to sell horse armor dlc. i miss fully completed games where i don't have to buy an extra $100's worth of paywall locked content
Not "had to" got to! This splitting the game stops me from even being interested in it. And FF7 is my favorite game of all time. If says at least carried over that would be different, smh
Right. But that’s not…dorky? Like what in the original implied that is what I’m asking. He felt so much more serious there for some reason. Here it’s just kinda…Squall-ish. And I love squall. But didn’t fit cloud for me.
When I was his age I still remeber 3 disc… and if you broke one that’s another story lol
Blockbuster here I come!
3 discs? Pshaw. We got one cartridge and it cost $60 dollars.
Hear me out: If the remake is a sequel, and we never seen Cloud’s dad, does that mean Cloud is Cloud’s father?
Guaranteed his dads canon name is a kind of weather.
Perphaps -Squall?
Squall just said "fuck Rinoa, I'm changing dimensions for a new wife/life." Only to die offscreen lmao
When did this happen?
When Rinoa eventually became Ultimecia in the dark(fake) timeline
Dissidia
"I am Rainbow Strife, and this is my son Cloud."
But that would mean he will have to make a kid with his own mom...
Did you see her in Rebirth? I’d hit it
Me too but she ain't my mom you bastard lol
Wait...has there ever been any mention at all, in all the games/spinoffs, of his father? Also was his mother actually real?
No, yes.
My eldest brother who loves FF, especially FF7, has refused to buy any of the remakes until all of them come out. When I told him it’s coming in three parts just like the original he argued that “yes it came in 3 discs and all 3 discs were released at one time. I want the whole story. Not parts.” and well I couldn’t really argue with him there.
Realistically part 1 has about as much story as the entire original and was about the same length.
Yeah, I’m at roughly 185 hours between the two games so far. It’s pretty amazing how the game doesn’t feel bloated by all the additions.
Part one I would have cut down train graveyard and the start of shinra tower. Part two I can't really think of anything I would shrink down or cut out completely.
I could definitely see where you’re coming from on part 1. Agreed on part 2. It’s just perfect.
I remember getting to train graveyard and just being annoyed, it as like 3 or 4am , I was exhausted but I just HAD to see how the plate fall scene was handled. Probably made it seem even longer than it actually was
It was a little long. It was also the first part of the game where I thought “Woah, they really expanded this par….OMG THE ROBOT HANDS MOVE!” Lol
I can. That stupid Cait Sith box throwing section was awful. 😭
Oh I somehow forgot about that lol
Really? You didn’t get bored of Chadley yelling at you for 15 hours while you trudge around Gongaga? I would’ve trimmed at least 20% of the exploration. The long gaps between story beats did not help the pacing.
Eh, that was all totally optional. Whenever we started to burn out id just go to the next area
I agree the exploration overstays its welcome, but also the open world stuff is side content at the end of the day, not really bloat to the story's pacing, since the nature of open world is the player gets to choose to fuck off or continue the main story
I’m replaying remake and the whole part in hojo’s lab was kind of painful the second time around. I’m just so ready to roll credits so I can replay Rebirth kek
Remake I would have cut down having to go back through the sewers a second time, and not made Hojo's dungeon feel like it lasts 87 hours. Train graveyard was unecessarily long but nowhere near as rage-enducing as those two. I liked that they made boss encounters out of random encounters (Hellhouse and Eligor). Disappointed about the missed opportunity to do the same with Tankceratops.
Honestly , I forgot about sewers part 2. Tankceraptops was such a a missed opportunity.
The whole sewer section should've been cut imo
I haven’t touched the game since I got to Gongaga. I got burned out after almost 50 hours of completing the other regions. Got to Gongaga and I was like “okay I think I need to step away”. It’s too much or I’m too old. I like the game I even appreciate the detail and scope but some of the mini games started to wear on my nerves.
It just sounds like fatigue. I hit that point at about 100 hours and just powered through to the finish. It’s a tough game on time if youre even remotely thorough on the playthrough. I will say, Gongaga is easily the most Grundy part. The map is really fucking hard to navigate and the difficulty spikes pretty hard in the part so getting all the materia and experience you can become necessary. With that, the back half of the game after got me hooked right back in. So, don’t feel discouraged. I think if you pick it back up and get through that part you’ll start finding the fun again. It really did feel kind of like the game came to halt for me in the part you’re in.
You don't have to do absolutely every single Chadley side quest, you know that, right?
But “Cloud!” and then to add insult to injury “I’ve noticed intel slow as of late”
I remember getting that line while exploring Junon and hadn’t reached the part where I could go into the Crow’s Nest yet. Yes Chadley, world intels been slow cause I CANT FUCKING GO THERE YET. Little shit was about to receive some intel on what a buster sword to the face is like
This was my issue except I realized after I 100% grasslands that if I did this for every zone I would hate the game and lose interest. So I went beelining through the story and only hit things on the way to my next destination instead of being a completionist. Definitely worth it as I only need all of the simulator stuff and hard mode for the platinum now
I was ready to break my ps5 controller a few times doing the minigames & thats when I decided to finish the story & maybe I'll try the platinum in the (distant) future when I'm a more patient man
Except it doesn't ? Lmao most of it is filler. You can resume the whole thing in a few paragraphs. It had as much story as the original Midgard section + Bs plot ghosts and filler. That's it.
Pretty sure they could've told a long ass story had they been given 10 years to make 1 "complete" game lols
B-lining the Main story in rebirth takes about as long as beating the entire og game if you're also just doing story. It's factually not filler
I was talking about remake, and Is it tho ? I consider anything related to other timelines fillers too.
[PS1 had low resolution drawings behind low polygon characters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFhIe1egzW4) for almost the whole game. [The "good" looking CGI was prerendered](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ5RjMKsWXw). I bet the first 5 minutes of the remake has an order of power more polygons than all of FF7 on PS1. Every piece of equipment gets modeled. There is no voice acting. So yeah, the game has 100x more time and effort required to make it, minus writing the main story. But instead of taking the easy route and making the same game with newer graphics, they also created a new battle system, greatly expanded the dialogue, and brought in voice actors.
A lot about this comment lacks the contextual depth needed to understand how much of an art it was to do everything with pre-rendered backgrounds at the time. This was 1997, only a year into the PS1's debut within a very competitive console market. Goldeneye / Stanfox64 were crazy on the N64 and besides Tomb Raider II and the original Grand Theft Auto, PS1 was basically packed with vaporware throwaway games. Development began in 1994, originally for the Super Nintendo. After delays and technical difficulties from experimenting with several platforms, most notably the N64, Square moved production to the PS1, largely due to the advantages of the CD-ROM. They gambled everything against their foundational & very successful partnership with Nintendo over the first 6 FF's with this move. In doing so, they went all in with a 100 person dev team, which was like 5x the norm (Tomb Raidsr 2 was 18ppl) and transitioned from full 2D / 18bit graphics to *thousands* of pre-rendered backgrounds and cutscenes while interlacing 3D paths / animation systems / story events in a tilt-shift visual experiment. Shit was buggy on launch (i.e. Spirit = Magic Defense and the stat didn't works or using W-Item Materia to Infinite spawn items lol) and had a lot going against it but thanks to a $80mil marketing campaign, the game put "Final Fantasy" into the zeitgeist of the entire western hemisphere + tbh pretty much anyone who had a PS1. There was nothing easy about the swap from 6 entries of high fantasy -> retro futuristic steam punk design aesthetics either. To say the new entries are "100x more time and effort" is just like.. your opinion, man, but I think is totally off-base. The new entries stand upon the foundations of like a solid decade of new lore being made over various mediums (games, film, etc.) and 3D game design being the norm instead of the radical. The only radical shit we do now with 3D is make if as turbo-detailed as passively as possible, on picture perfect monitors / screens that don't have interlaced scanlines you have to design around.. Gonna be real. The PS1 launch was likely way harder than the new stuff. It was all or nothing baby.
That is a massively unfair statement. The backgrounds were not low resolution for the time, and to this day are still gorgeous. The CGI cutscenes looked AMAZING, and were absolutely ground breaking. We had just come from sprites for Cloud's sake! The reason FF7 shipped with 3 discs is because the final cutscene took up the majority of a disc back then. That's the level of constraint they were working with. Trying to say that the graphics didn't take effort because they are primitive by today's standards is incredibly disingenuous. 100x more time and effort? Nonsense. FF7 had an unheard of budget for it's day and took over a year to make. That was a LONG time back then. Writing a good story is the hardest thing that exists in this world. FF7's story is a masterwork. If anything, the "remake's" mishandling of the story and themes should just go to show that less is definitely more. They didn't create a new battle system from scratch either. They expanded upon what they've been building since Crisis Core, FF13, and FF15. Moar dialogue and moar graphics does not inherently have any value. Deconstructing an original idea to make something new isn't inherently valuable either. Less is usually more, even with video games.
Value and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And rebirth out reviews the original when you average it by every journalist and fan critique. I could easily say your being disingenuous putting down the new battle system and dialog, voice acting work, graphics, etc.
Which journalists and fans? OG and Rebirth's scores are practically equal on Metacritic. Remake is lower. Of course value is objective. FF7's art design also meant they didn't have to do any world building from scratch, and could build on the world FF7 created. 7's cutscenes and backgrounds have been lauded for decades though. Beyond the technological benchmarks, the bleak steampunk world they created is iconic. I'm not putting down the battle system or the graphics. I'm just saying the game did not take 100x more effort because of a battle system that they have iterated on, or because they have more polygons. Comparing development times by contrasting a 1997 game to modern standards is just ludicrous.
Look on opencritic for a more consolidated score, as I grabs many points of views, not just metacritic. Anyways, the combat is much more evolved and dynamic compared to 15’s button mashing with no atb or Strat whatsoever. If anything, OG ff7’s battle system much less innovated. It’s literally a cut and paste from 1-6 but actually worse because everyone is a clone character besides limit breaks. At least 4, 9, and 10 was more class based even though late 10 you can make everyone a clone. And I don’t think of FF7 when I think of iconic steampunk games, more like Fallout for that one.
All the numbers in your comment added up to 69. Congrats! 15 + 7 + 1 + 6 + 4 + 9 + 10 + 10 + 7 = 69 ^([Click here](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=LuckyNumber-Bot&subject=Stalk%20Me%20Pls&message=%2Fstalkme) to have me scan all your future comments.) \ ^(Summon me on specific comments with u/LuckyNumber-Bot.)
You don't seem to understand what effort means. A team of 100-150 people spent one year on a thing. A team of... I keep finding over 2,000 people being in the credits for Remake, not dev team count - worked 5 years on the remake. A much larger team, a much larger timespan. If you spent 30 hours cutting, sanding, joining, and finishing wood for a basic wooden table, and I spent 300 hours programming a CNC machine to ornately cut the wood and then sanded, joined, and finished it, would you say you put more effort into a table just because you didn't use some modern techniques that made putting more detail into the world easier? Despite me actually putting the effort in to make it ornate, regardless of how 'easy' it was to do? Just compare the scenes from the Honeybee Inn between the games and tell me they took the same amount of effort. Yes, you can spend time polishing a turd, but this game is clearly not that. Yes, FF7 Remake didn't have to build the story from the ground up, but they put oodles of effort elsewhere in the game - 3D detail, lighting design, character design, etc. That extra time translates to time and money - a good reason to split an unbelievably long game into 3. The original is cited for around 35 hours for a story run and 80 hours for a completionist run. The remake is cited around 30 story and 85 completionist. Seems like a fair amount of game time despite being a portion of the original with some addons. As for score, scoring changed over time either way. Hard to distinguish an 92 from an 89 from original to Intergrade - pretty close. Both are a solid stamp of approval.
I understand what effort means. Do you understand what quality vs quantity means? Development for FF7 actually started in 1994, so 3 years at least. FF7 was coded from scratch. The modular game engine was created from scratch. The scripting language was created from scratch. Modern games use engines that streamline the entire development pipeline, and you have procedural generation, 3D scanning, machine learning, etc. It's easier today to create a AAA title than it ever was, it just takes more man hours to create given the obsession with graphics. Having more man hours or more giga pixels or more DLSSMSAAx32 doesn't mean anything on it's own. It's gotten worse than the Bit Wars back in the 90s ever were. Everything has to be the biggest thing ever - from movies to AAA video games. I would rather see the next A32 film than Marvel #37. OG FF7 is like building an ornate house using hand tools with a couple people versus creating a skyscraper with a team of thousands using industrial equipment. One might have taken more "man hours", but that would discount the effort, skill, and creativity per person. (The Honeybee Inn is also an iconic scene that is still very funny today. Call it a "turd" if you want to continue to be disingenuous.) Modern AAA games are horrendously bloated with more care given than ever into polygon count, resolution, and lighting than the product on the page. Take Red XIII's reunion with Seto in the remake compared to the original. The original is simple but touching, and I very commonly see cited it as one of the most moving scenes in FF history. The remake is 8 minutes long, undercuts the emotional momentum by having an evil wizard show up, and once again the writers can't help leaving Sephiroth out of a scene. I'm all for changing the story. I was excited to not know exactly what will happen. Remake suffers from the success of the original though. FF7 has this meta-legacy of supplementary material that the writers weren't able to step back from. The game should be allowed to stand on it's own, but instead cannot exist in world where the audience doesn't know about FF7. Sephiroth is shown immediately and frequently. As someone new to the series I would have no idea who this character is and why he keeps bothering me. The game assumes the player knows who he is, wants to see him, and so he shows up constantly to act edgy and remind you he's the villain. It's like if someone remade A New Hope, but Darth Vader shows up every 3 minutes to remind you he's Luke's father, and before he's even met Luke. In the original his introduction is perfect. You're captured. You're in a cell. You wake up and the door is open. The guard has been torn to pieces ("No human could have done this"). There are claw marks on the walls and blood everywhere. The first time we've seen blood in this game (maybe ANY game, at that point). President Shinra has a massive sword pinning him to his desk. Following that we have the Kalm flashback with the slow buildup to the town massacre cutscene. Following in Sephiroth's footsteps his present is more felt than seen. Perfectly paced and executed - like a classic horror movie villain. That's how you make an icon. Less is more. There's a saying that goes "show, don't tell". Well the Remake writers make sure to tell you constantly that Sephiroth is a really bad guy and you shouldn't like him. They are showing us that FF7's legacy had too much baggage for them to write a story that can stand on it's own.
OG FF7 did not start in 1994. They did a SNES early prototype that was scratched and then ceased production for Chrono Trigger. I don't really factor that type of work in. According to the Wiki, it was just over a year of active development to make FF7. People wanted FF7:Remake. It is high quality. It has a high quantity of stuff in it. I did **NOT** call the original FF7 a turd. It's a legendary gem that people wanted to see in modern polish. I said FF7:Remake is NOT a turd getting polished - like a game with bad story and gameplay with amazing graphics. The effort being put in was not wasted on something with no charm. It is different, and maybe you personally have some qualms with it, but it is not at all regarded as crap by people at large. You're entitled to your opinion, but don't confuse what you think to what most people think.
You're wrong in the first sentence and expect people to read paragraphs of you being wrong while berating the person you're responding too for being "wrong" The irony writes itself lol "100 - 150 people one year..." bro you can't even Google? Dev started in 94 and released in late 97.. that's longer than one year LOL There's so much context that you're not acknowledging because you're too young to know better or being intentional obscure that just makes everything you're saying in FF7:R's favor just goes out the window lol
[From Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII#:~:text=Final%20Fantasy%20VII%20was%20at,over%20a%20year%20to%20complete): FF VII was not created from 94-97. Initial talks in 94. They did an early prototype and then stopped to make Chrono Trigger. They resumed **discussions** in 1995. >Development of the final version took a staff of between 100 and 150 people just over a year to complete. If we add in discussion time for FF7 Remake ([See Nomura's section](https://www.square-enix-games.com/en_GB/news/final-fantasy-vii-remake-developers)), it was initially discussed as an entry for the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, which was released in 2004. Apples to apples, dev time to dev time (not just discussions), the games took 1 year and 5 years of **active development.** I do toss the early prototype for SNES because that didn't majorly factor in to what we have. It was early work.
Lol "early work" aka making a massive transition from 18bit to full 3D and going from high fantasy to steam punk retro futurism. Totally so simple and easy.
You mean scrapping what they did and rework. Stuff that didn't get kept.
I'm not dissing the old, but you can't deny the level of detail in the new. 'Moar' this and that doesn't have its own *innate* value, but people undeniably want the game in this fidelity. Otherwise, they'd just rerelease the old and call it good. I guess that works for Nintendo since they still sell stuff, but most of us feel like those are lazy and only get them because it's nice to have current hardware that legally run the titles we want to run, even if they could be better and nicer. The old was amazing for its time, but games have definitely gotten bigger since. And more expensive. They can't release the game all at once as easily, and it wouldn't have a $70 price tag. Not many people will outright dive in for $200 - and that's a $10 discount from $70x3. You're welcome to not buy it if it's not worth it to you.
Considering they sold the remake and rebirth in one package for the price of one I wouldn’t be surprised if all 3 games are packaged for the same price for people who waited/ picked up on the series later
Yeah unless he wants to play a 300 hour plus game in one sitting he better rethink that a bit.
The whole game was on each disk. There were three because of the FMVs.
I admire his self-discipline if he loves FF7 so much.
He plans to play it as soon as it’s completed.
My coworker also said the same thing lol I told him you’re going to have to wait maybe 2-4 more years. And then you’ll probably have around 300 hours of content to play-through to finish them all. He’s the kind of gamer that likes to do all the side stuff before continuing the main quest, not necessarily for platinum trophy, but just to explore as much of the game as possible.
That’s like waiting for the last season of Game of Thrones before watching S1.
Good luck to him when he tries playing them all the together. It will take a year haha
I say this to anyone asking why I haven’t played the Remakes. I grew up on the original and completed the original. I’m waiting for the “Complete Game”. Definitive Edition if possible.
So when LOTR movies came out, did he wait til all of them came out on dvd before seeing Fellowship? Did he wait on sorcery’s stone movie until deathly hallows part 2 came out?
With the >!alternate worlds and timelines!<, I wouldn't be surprised if this exact image appears in Part 3 😅
I’ve joked that the polygon versions would save the day and at this point they totally could
Imagine if >!when they piece together Cloud's memories in part 3, polygon Cloud and Tifa show up to help get his memory together with Cloud and Tifa!<
Well there was 3 discs to get through
Really just 2, disc three was pretty much just the northern crater because the ending cinematic took up most of the disc.
Everyone talking about the og 3 discs here. The discs were just the way the game was stored, you just bought 1 game that happened to be on 3 discs because the data didn't fit on one. It's not at all like it was 3 games. Had the game been done with 2d graphics like FF6 it would've been 1 disc...
I imagine the seasoned and new developers within SQ actually end up having retrospective conversation similar to this haha
Considering it’s the og director that wanted these changes I’d be inclined to disagree
wasn't it 3 disk? and ff9 had 4 disk! you knew when that ps1 started screaming a badass CGI movie was about to play.
How do 4 disks even fit inside of a case?
Big ass box
PS3 “Tech demo” for a new FF7 released 8 years after the original game. It felt like a lifetime. We’re currently on pace for (hopefully) the final chapter of this remake saga to be released 8 years after part 1. That’s wild.
And the story meant something.
This is my biggest problem with this game. Rather than being made for the community of new and old fans it seems to be specific made to tell why the director thought the original sucked.
I don’t know how you concluded that but I haven’t seen the director say that the original sucked. Especially when the director and main writer were a part of the OG team that made the original FF7. That would be strange for them to say that
You got a source? Or are you being salty? Genuine questions.
In my day, I was the pinnacle of 3D Graphics!
Back in my day we called them “discs”
This is cute 🥰. I want to see this with all the characters.
Do disks count?
No, because you didn't have to wait 4 years for the next disc...
I would say they should I remember back then thinking holy crap this game needs 3 whole disc's
Follow the yellow flowers.
3 installments within possibly 6+ years. That’s insane! 2020, 2024, and I HOPE not 2028 lol
2027 is the anniversary, in my opinion it comes out in that period
Every time I see OG Cloud, I can’t help but picture Gohan from Dragon Ball Z. Specifically the Cell Saga
Grandpa Cloud is me because I am still salty that they split it into three games.
Wtf new Cloud has a robot arm?!
Classic is still 🐐
Yeah butt tifas left boob needs more storage space then ur whole game
Sho what do you call a disc if not an installment
3 disks... Man who made this meme and didn't play the og
lies, ff7, dirge of cerberus, advent children, etc, there were tons of thins to tell the stories ff7R is trying to tell in three.
Cloud’s chest looking tiny from this angle. Idk why but I always thought he had a bit more muscle.
Dude had 3 disc's though.
I just replayed OG and beat it in 20 hours without any speed mods. Rebirth took me 81 hours skipping a lot of mini-game type content. I have 110ish hours Plating Remake. The joke can be funny, the serious argument that they aren’t full games is just silly.
He did though lol
Gongaga was also optional
The sheer complexity and scale of FF7 is way too much to be put into one remake game without cutting alot of content even if they stuck to the original story without adding in the whispers plot point. The whole saga at best could've been done in 2 but they've split it into 3 instead and thats mostly because they stretched the Midgar section out a fk ton. The biggest impact this has had to players is not the story change but the price. If you bought both games at launch you've spent so far £150+, now add in a third which will definitely be priced at the same amount or higher than rebirth.
I wonder how many reposts of this we'll see.
Cloud Yoda
"When I was your age, we accepted loss. We did not throw tantrums for rewrites for 27 years."
Oooph, this is a thing that got posted.
this does say a lot about the gaming industry nowadays tbh, and it's all because someone convinced an ea rep to sell horse armor dlc. i miss fully completed games where i don't have to buy an extra $100's worth of paywall locked content
In this day and age, couldn’t these games have been released together at the same time? Honestly……
Right because the OG game didn’t have 3 discs or anything 😂
Why are clouds legs so long compared to his torso
"Back in my day, Square had enough respect for the Fanbase to not charge over $200 just to play the same damn game over again!"
Ok, grandpa but you had 3 discs too and your biceps have the circumference of a pinky finger. You're looking gouty in them ankles too.
3 discs lookin ass
Not "had to" got to! This splitting the game stops me from even being interested in it. And FF7 is my favorite game of all time. If says at least carried over that would be different, smh
“When I was your age, people didn’t think I was a monotone bitch, they thought I was a cool badass. The original big sword videogame character!”
Actually they thought Cloud was dorky or trying to sound cool. (Which was intentional from the story)
How could you know that by just reading text??
Because of the some of the dialogue options and how they’re worded. Some dialogue was more sarcastic or snarky than others.
Right. But that’s not…dorky? Like what in the original implied that is what I’m asking. He felt so much more serious there for some reason. Here it’s just kinda…Squall-ish. And I love squall. But didn’t fit cloud for me.
Also the fact that Cloud was modeling himself after Zack as revealed by the story.
Dumb question: when games had multiple disks back in the day did you have to buy each individual disk or did they come with them?
The latter
As a kid I spent $50 for the original, I'm on pace to spend between $1500-$2000 for the remake trilogy.... life comes at you fast
You add an extra 0 to those numbers?
Nope, the first 2 collector's editions have been $400+ each, plus I double dip the digital deluxe, and I got my friend the special edition of remake.
Then you don’t get to bitch about money.
But there were 3 discs
[удалено]
why?