![]() That variety is a big part of why FF7R’s boss fights are so incredible, too. But it’s still a super fun game without all that – although, once you reach its finale, I imagine newcomers will be hopelessly lost by completely unexplained teases that I assume work to set up its sequel. ![]() That said, if this is your first experience with Final Fantasy 7, you’ll undoubtedly miss out on a lot of references, a handful of inside jokes, and that general warm and fuzzy feeling nostalgia offers. It may be a remake, but it genuinely does feel like an entirely new game at times, and you’ll generally be able to pick up the story here regardless of your experience with the original. But whether or not you need to play it before this is a little murkier. The short answer to this is yes because it’s still a great, old-school RPG. Those differences keep combat fresh the whole way through, and I loved learning the puzzle of how to take down each enemy. Sure, some of the more basic guys like Wererats and Shinra soldiers you just need to hit a lot, but others might be weak to a specific elemental magic, require you to dodge a certain attack, or cripple a body part in order to stagger them. It’s a system we’re seeing more of nowadays, but the clever twist is that every enemy’s stagger gauge fills in a different way. ![]() In addition to a health bar, enemies have a stagger gauge that stuns them and increases the damage they take when full. Though it never got super challenging on Normal difficulty, there’s enough nuance to it that just mashing square to unleash flashy basic attacks won’t get you too far. You can also dodge and guard at will, and you’ll need to do so a lot. (There is a “Classic” mode difficulty option, but all it does is automate all your actions in combat apart from ATB use, making it a strange middle ground I didn’t enjoy.)Įvery character also has a unique ability mapped to triangle that doesn’t use ATB – for example, Cloud can switch to “Punisher Mode” for extra damage but reduced speed, while Tifa can unleash a big finisher that’s powered up by one of her abilities. Pulling up the command menu to pick one of these things slows time to a crawl, letting you comfortably pick actions for your entire party in the middle of combat – but that persistent slow creep forward adds a tension to every choice that truly reminded me of the frantic decision making the original elicited. While you can hack away at enemies all you want with the square button, doing so charges up your ATB bars, which you can then use on unique weapon abilities, equippable spells, and items. And though you only directly control one character at a time, you’ll constantly be giving orders to and swapping between two more mid-fight. I’ll admit that I was initially sad to hear this remake wouldn’t use the original Final Fantasy 7’s turn-based Active Time Battle (ATB) combat, but the way that iconic system has been transformed into real-time brawling is exceptional. Thankfully, the guiding star through areas new and old is FF7R’s combat, which more than proves itself to be endlessly engaging across dozens of hours and against more than 100 different types of enemies. This new telling regularly jumps between shot-for-shot recreations of the original, welcome expansions to existing sequences, and brand-new scenes that offer either enticing new perspective or pointlessly dull padding that frequently makes you retread previously explored areas. It’s an odd decision that undoubtedly results in some structural problems, but also gives the city and its heroes more time to become fleshed out as interesting characters – even smaller ones like Avalanche’s Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge have time to become nuanced and compelling co-stars.
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