What game are you playing?

[Roguey]

Finished a replay of Sonic Spinball. Good music, wonky physics. Impressed I had the dedication to see it through to the end when I was a kid.

[kyosuke]

Playing Samurai Warriors 4 DX, Super Robot Wars X and Suzerain randomly, though I might drop Suzerain cause of the game's inability to separate Nationalism from Fascism.

[Oyster Sauce]

Playing Samurai Warriors 4 DX, Super Robot Wars X and Suzerain randomly, though I might drop Suzerain cause of the game's inability to separate Nationalism from Fascism.

Are you playing as Yasuke in SW4?

[kyosuke]

Playing Samurai Warriors 4 DX, Super Robot Wars X and Suzerain randomly, though I might drop Suzerain cause of the game's inability to separate Nationalism from Fascism.

Are you playing as Yasuke in SW4?

Nope, I'm a proponent of keeping Japan Japanese and as light-skinned as possible.
Yasuke must be smited.

[Roguey]

Finished Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury. My least favorite of the Mario games I've played on the Switch, not really into the item collection business. Wonder made it fun because of the original content. With 3D World I saw the credits and then played just far enough into the first special world to unlock Rosalie and then dropped it since those levels were too demanding for my preferences. The final level in the base game was a pretty neat non-traditional boss sequence.

With Bowser's Fury I collected 50 shines, saw the ending, and called it a day. Didn't particularly like how Bowser kept showing up every few minutes to interrupt, and then it just became worse as it went along, first not going anyway until you collected a shine after you hit over 40, and then not going away at all until you've collected 50 to unlock the ending once you were at 47. The final boss sequence was fun though.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Final Fantasy VII Remake: Intergrade


PC port quality

First off, the PC port was unsatisfactory. I was playing at 4k while using a 3070ti. While I got a buttery smooth framerate for most of my 30 hours of playtime, the beginning parts of the game and the final stretch starting at the Rufus fight had tremendous amounts of one and off stuttering. The game would start stuttering whenever the Kingdom Hearts ghosts showed up too. This is puzzling, because the game should not be that demanding. There is not a huge landscape to render. It is ultimately a lot of corridors floating over an empty void with a detailed skybox of more cityscape in the background, and stuff like seemingly detailed mounds of junk are actually just low poly piles with a texture on them. There are usually not more than a half dozen enemies onscreen. There are small crowds of NPCs but they are less detailed and I don't think I had any performance issues with them. It seems odd. I just don't see what the struggle should be here. It is also frustrating as the stutters come at the most aesthetically spectacular parts of the game (namely the Rufus fight and the final battle sequence), which feature extremely fast cutscene choreography and characters lounging very quickly that will be missed. The game also crashed in the Hojo's lab dungeon.



Things I really liked about the game

This game has a lot of medium sized mechs that get a lot of fanfare. They are treated as boss fights that need your three heroes to fight, have cutscenes introducing them, and then have two or three phases where they start using new weapons or begin spinning out of control and become even more threatening. I wish more JRPGs had done this, given that often they up with really cool looking monster designs only for them to be thrown away away as fodder that you mindlessly two shot. In particular, I thought that the crab mech with visible "teeth" (which is actually two buzzsaws) and the swordipede looked neat. If I had to nitpick, a lot of the designs emphasize gatling guns over and over as opposed to hammers or pincers, etc. I also liked the sequence where Shinra personnel are loading computer cores into the Air Buster and then we see it get airdropped in, which emphasized that these were weapons of war that need to be armed and deployed.






I do wish we had gotten to see a workshop or a factory where mechs were being drawn up, parts being fabricated, mechs being assembled, etc. There was also an obvious missed opportunity when you are spying on the board rooms in the Shinra building to spy upon some engineers being tasked with creating a new mech and then pitching ideas like a butterfly mech with sawblade wings or something.

Unfortunately, I do not recall any of these medium sized boss mechs being deployed alongside human Shinra soldiers, which weirdly makes these mechs feel separate from Shinra's army when they were supposed to have been developed to fight Wutai. Another issue is that mech boss after mech boss for 30 hours feels rather one note. It would have been nice to have seen Shinra as genetic engineers and beastmasters explored, maybe with them unleashing threatening cyberbears bosses or something. In the game, we only really get to see Shinra deploy one breed of hounds as fodder trash mobs, and they are not given the same fanfare that the mechs do.




I would have liked to have seen more Third Class Soldiers sprinkled throughout the game. You fight several hundred Shinra troops in this game, but they are each very easily cut down within a couple seconds and are not a threat, which undermines the feel of Shinra as formidable empire that is threatening to crush Wutai in a war. The Third Class soldiers are the only Shinra troops that do not almost immediately keel over, but you only fight a couple towards the end of the game in the Shinra building's parking garage.

I thought Roche was pretty cool. He got in, was fun, and got out.




The weapon upgrade menu looked very cool.




During the last 40 minutes of the game, there is an aesthetic shift where the game starts looking and moving like Kingdom Hearts. You have magical sparkles, colorful portals, a character in an unusually vibrant scene that looks a little reminsicent of a Pixar movie, a giant penultimate boss that looks like it's from KH or Epic Mickey or FF13-2, characters flying around in zero gravity, and then there a lot of anime leaping during the final battle. Stuttering aside, it looks good, but it was not what I expected and feels like a different property. Much earlier and occasionally popping up throughout the game, you have ghosts that show up and also conspicuously look they are from Kingdom Hearts as opposed to being part of FF7's world.

► Show Spoiler

Some of the minigames were neat, such as Clouds playing some darts in the bar to pass the time while waiting for Avalanche to finish their meeting.

With the positives out of the way...

=========================================

This game was not engaging to keep me playing it nonstop. Often times I have found myself alt+tabbed out scrolling the web, and then I paused my playthrough to start and complete another JRPG, Trails Through Daybreak II, which I found to be much more captivating. I do not think FF7R is a "bad" game, but it is not great and is unworthy of the prestige of the Final Fantasy brand name. It is also a wonder to think about how big names who worked on fantastic classic Final Fantasy and Square games could have released a game like FF7R.

Overall I do not like how the game looks most of the time. The faces of the main characters look good in main story cutscenes when they have proper lighting on their faces. However, the faces of NPCs often look terrible. Also, outside of main story cutscenes - such as when running around in regular gameplay, or during sidequests - the main characters receive unflaterring lighting on their faces, which can make them look ugly or ghoulish. It is a sharp contrast compared to prior Final Fantasy games such the PS2 or PS3 Final Fantasies, or even much lower budget JRPGs such as the Trails series, where characters look good even when in shadow. In those games, at most moments you could grab a screenshot and the characters would look good, but in FF7R I can only grab a good looking screenshot of the characters at specific moments.

The Leviathan summon also blatantly clips through the steel floor, when other Final Fantasy games and lower budget JRPGs such as Trails would have placed a cheap effect such as a portal/a flash of light/water/etc to obscure the clipping.




There is a jarring mismatch between the main characters and most regular townsfolk NPCs. When the heroes step onto a train full of civilians, they look like they are from a completely different game. This is played for laughs, but the story has such a serious tone that it felt like the people on the train (who are on edge due to terrorism) would immediately report the heroes to the police. You then go to the slums, and while there is a weapons talk and a "neighborhood watch" that seems to take on requests to fight monsters, the watch members are just regular guys dressed in t-shirts wielding machineguns. I feel like there needs to have been more common NPCs who were designed like the heroes to make the two feel like they exist in the same world. Another issue is that there are cutscenes where Tifa introduces you to weaponshop owners and they offer to sell you stuff, it is not clear why they would have huge swords in stock or arm cannons for Barret when everyone else (Shinra troops and neighborhood watch) are using conventional firearms.




I mained Barret as a melee character with the spiked mace attachment, but in cutscenes Barret kept "aiming" his mace and characters like Dr. Hojo acted as if he was aiming a gun at him, rather than holding a bludgeon over his head. And in certain cutscenes, Barret suddenly has a gun arm he is shooting. Surely the devs could have tweaked some scenes like in their prior game, The Last Remnant, where Rush is animated differently in certain cutscenes depending on what weapon he is wielding.




I felt that Tifa's default outfit was too conspicuous for this world (besides disliking the design). No other character in the game looked like her, so I used a mod to apply her outfit from the Advent Children movie. It was funny when there were a couple prerendered movies that played and she reverted back to her tacky default design. I think she was supposed to be wearing a dress in Don Corneo's mansion, but her Advent Children mod outfit remained.

I found that the new original character of Chandley was conspicuous and inappropriate for the realism and tone the game strives for, being a very young teenager dressed in childish clothing and speaking in a highly unnatural way. He claims to be an intern for Shinra, but openly talks about fighting against Shinra, and somehow has powerful summon materia that he can hand out to you when no one else in the game uses or talks about summoning materia. I wish he had just looked like a 20 or 30 year old guy in a suit from Shinra's office who was a sympathizer to Avalanche, or he was an acquaintance working on behalf of a suit in Shinra's office selling stuff on the black market. The kid in the moogle costume is okay as he's just a kid (and speaks like a kid) who runs lemonade stands and finds random junk.




Visual effects such as spells look decent for a JRPG, though none look very memorable (except for when manawall is cast, with the purple hexagon surrounding characters). Character's unique combat abilities are not presented with cutscenes that highlight them, instead presented in a more dull way as the camera is zoomed out and detached from the action.

The dieselpunk dystopia of Midgar looked very cool in the beautiful prerendered backgrounds of the original PS1 game. However, in this game, most of the actual environments you run through look unattractive. You spend a huge amount of time running through really ugly grey corridors. Contrast this with Final Fantasy XIII and XIV, prior mainline games in the same franchise that have players run through many industrial environments, but the levels there have more visual variety than just grey corridor, and look far more artistically pleasing.



Soundtrack

This game has an absolutely humongous soundtrack. From reading VGMDB, it apparently has 8 hours of music and dozens of composers who contributed. Tracks are also orchestrated, which is expensive and a difficult endeavor to perform. Sadly, there were only a small handful of tracks that really stuck out to me, most of them being arranges or remixes of Nobuo Uematsu's tunes from the original game, which I found preferable as synths. The only original FF7R track I can somewhat remember are the heroic horns and strings in the Valkyrie mech's boss theme. Overall, the music was a dud to me.





English Voiceacting

I played this game with the English dub. As is expected of mainline Final Fantasy dubs, the characters overall sound more naturalistic than your average JRPG dub (which often sound cringeworthy). Barret often sounds a little too cartoonish than I would prefer, but he also has some good moments too. Red XIII sounded cool. Cloud is a little too dry and disinterested throughout the 30 hour long game, but I believe this has more to do with the writing/characterization. My only major gripe is that there is a tremendous amount of grunting sound effects in cutscenes. Not even "anime" JRPGs have this much grunting. I had to install a mod that trimmed a lot of it.



Gameplay

The moment-to-moment experience of the game is very sluggish, and is by far the biggest issue with the game. The classic Final Fantasies were very engaging with how you were constantly being swept from setpiece to setpiece, discovering new aesthetically pleasing locations to explore, seeing dramatic story stuff or character drama unfold, getting into exciting boss fights with cutscenes emphasizing the abilities used, and so on. But in FF7R, most of your playtime is spent slowly backtracking through the same huge ugly levels. There are a lot of segments your character is forced to a slow walk, or has to slowly get onto a ladder and climb up it, or slowly crawl under a piece of rubble, or slowly walk across a narrow bridge, etc, and you cannot force your character to immediately exit this. There are also a lot of sidequests where you have to run around and get into lengthy cutscenes with unattractive NPCs, and most sidequests are unmemorable. The Shinra building section in the last 1/4th of the game is the best as it avoids most of these issues.

Another issue is that the battle system for the first several hours is not very fun, as you often only have one or two party members and limited customization. It is not until much later into the game that you can start building a party composition or playstyle that you want. However, you never get to pick your party members, even towards the end when you have five heroes together. The cool fantastical wolf, Red XIII, is never playable, though it was nice that he could fight in addition to the three party members, so you technically can have four heroes in battle (though Red XIII cannot be affected by your team spells like Manawall or Pray).

The combat has a frustrating doomspiral, where if one party member dies the rest of the party is likely to go down quickly, especially if there is only one party member left. You also have to attack to build up a gauge in order to use any spell/item/ability, which means that you can't build a dedicated healer character who can then immediately heal someone who is about to die. That healer must first spend several seconds attacking to build up gauge, and then can begin casting a heal on the other character who might already be dead by then.

The combat lacks the usual exciting presentation of JRPGs, where you had characters dramatically posing in front of a menacing mob and cutscenes emphasizing each character's unique attacks. FF7R is an action game where you control one character at a time and have to mash buttons. The camera centers the character in the middle of the screen and is zoomed out a ways from the action.

Combined, all of these issues make for a unengaging moment to moment gameplay experience that is occasionally punctuated by some moments of excitement.



Story

The story feels bifurcated. For most of the duration, it is trying to present a realistic depiction of life and a serious view of a guerilla war, which is interesting. However, this is quite often punctuated by juvenile antics. The characters (who are guerillas) express far too much self doubt and hesitance, and often need to be cheered up and reaffirmed that they are "the good guys". Tifa, and to a lesser extent, Barret is affected by this, but also several side characters such as Jessie and Lesie too. This feels inappropriate for the realism and the war story the game goes for. The main characters are killers fighting against a powerful corporation and its army, where poor powerless civilians might betray them and sell them out, and there are criminal organizations to beware. Characters in such a situation would require convictions that they are willing to kill and die for, and some grit to endure. Also, after enough times of this exact scene playing out over and over, it becomes tiresome and makes me start fast forwarding through them. Dramatic character moments like the deaths of Biggs and Jessie are undercut by extremely long, drawn out and shlocky farewells. Serious, high tension confrontations are constantly undermined by quipping. President Shinra and general Heidegger appear as huge holograms or talk in front of regular soldiers spouting cartoonishly evil, counterintuitive statements that could easily be leaked, rather than feeling like real people.





Another issue I had is the remake goes out of its way to try to absolve the protagonists. In the original game, the protagonists willfully bombed a Mako Reactor knowing that many people would die. But in the remake, President Shinra has a bomb planted in the Mako Reactor, and that is what kills lots of people in the surrounding districts. But we are not allowed to see dead bodies or bodybags caused by the Mako Reactor explosion. When Shinra troops are "defeated", their bodies vanish into thin air like a monster rather than remaining on the floor (or the Shinra troops becoming immune to attacks and retreating/fleeing), which conflicts with the realism the game goes for. Tifa objects when Cloud suggests that to protect the group from being outted to Shinra and killed, people with loose lips should be killed. Near the end of the game, the heroes have President Shinra (their enemy) at their mercy, but then gasp and try to stop Barret when he seems like he's going to kill him. And so on. If the creators are unwilling to depict their protagonists killing people, then they should not be making games about war.






There is also a lot of slog. There is a sequence where part of a city is going to be destroyed, and the situation is extremely urgent and we are quite possible seconds away from many, many people dying. But the heroes keep stopping to get into long winded character chats or those selfdoubt moments, or long schlocky farewells. It is even more irritating when the game makes you slow walk during this. Aerith can't just burst into the bar, shout for Marlene, grab her by the hand and begin sprinting as far away as she can. Instead, she has to slow walk into the bar, spend a lot of time looking around for her, crouch down and then get into a long chat with Marlene, etc. It kills the tension tension and urgency. Many townsfolk are seen being evacuated, and most of the NPCs you interacted with apparently survived, which undermines the impact that the plate drop should have had.






================================

Overall, the game is just average, which in today's world makes it mediocre given that there are so many holistically great games available at your fingertips that you could be playing instead. My hope is that the Intergrade campaign about Yuffie will be better, as it could have been constructed from the ground up as an original vision, rather than trying to twist a twenty year old story because the creators can't cope with war anymore and want to insert Kingdom Hearts into it. Once I finish Intergrade and review it, I will probably repost this as a game review, since Intergrade and the base FF7 remake campaign are packaged together on Steam.

It is my understand that this is not just one of the most expensive Final Fantasy games, but also one of the most expensive videogames ever. However, I did not feel the expense. I felt like lower budget games such as Trails or prior FFs delivered a much more enjoyable experience both aesthetically, musically, combat wise, the moment to moment pacing, the writing, etc.

[Roguey]

Finished FEAR Extraction Point. It's more FEAR with less budget, nothing too obnoxious, so I liked it well enough. I can understand why Monolith made it non-canon; I'm sure they were seething when TimeGate killed the black man and the Korean woman for shock value. There's also no point to the story. The game is called "Extraction Point" but the final cutscene prevents you from reaching it, so you're in the same circumstances you were at the start, only a bit worse off because now all your allies are dead. "Bad game design" as the meme says.

[traxtan]

PC port quality

First off, the PC port was unsatisfactory. I was playing at 4k while using a 3070ti. While I got a buttery smooth framerate for most of my 30 hours of playtime, the beginning parts of the game and the final stretch starting at the Rufus fight had tremendous amounts of one and off stuttering. The game would start stuttering whenever the Kingdom Hearts ghosts showed up too. This is puzzling, because the game should not be that demanding. There is not a huge landscape to render. It is ultimately a lot of corridors floating over an empty void with a detailed skybox of more cityscape in the background, and stuff like seemingly detailed mounds of junk are actually just low poly piles with a texture on them. There are usually not more than a half dozen enemies onscreen. There are small crowds of NPCs but they are less detailed and I don't think I had any performance issues with them. It seems odd. I just don't see what the struggle should be here. It is also frustrating as the stutters come at the most aesthetically spectacular parts of the game (namely the Rufus fight and the final battle sequence), which feature extremely fast cutscene choreography and characters lounging very quickly that will be missed. The game also crashed in the Hojo's lab dungeon.

Common Unreal Engine issues you have described here, every time a new effect would popup on screen your computer has to compile shaders for it for example a new explosion or particle effect like dust. And in towns you would have streaming stutters when a new part of the town has to be loaded as you're walking through them.
These issues are unfixable by users and have to fixed by the developers themselves or you could play on console where it's minimized/fixed.

[rusty_shackleford]

I also recall enjoying SaGa Frontier 2 for the PS1.

backgrounds look like they've been upscaled using a cheap filter tbh


Won't even claim they used AI, could easily have an AI upscale those significantly better, fan mods have already done such.

Going to guess it's a cashgrab unless they actually did something worthy of $30. @Val the Moofia Boss any ideas?

[Vergil]

I finished Bulletstorm a couple of days ago, it was pretty good it never overstayed its welcome and it was well made.

Intense depression this never got a sequel.

[KnightoftheWind]

Best announcement by far, I was dying to play a new Everybody's Golf game on PC. Strangely, it's developed by Namco instead of the original developer, Clap Hanz. I guess it's true that they had a falling out with Sony.

[traxtan]

I finished Bulletstorm a couple of days ago, it was pretty good it never overstayed its welcome and it was well made.

Intense depression this never got a sequel.

Screenshot_2025-03-27-22-18-39-665_com.brave.browser-edit.jpg

I think everyone who made the first game left.

[Vergil]

Best announcement by far, I was dying to play a new Everybody's Golf game on PC. Strangely, it's developed by Namco instead of the original developer, Clap Hanz. I guess it's true that they had a falling out with Sony.

[KnightoftheWind]

Best announcement by far, I was dying to play a new Everybody's Golf game on PC. Strangely, it's developed by Namco instead of the original developer, Clap Hanz. I guess it's true that they had a falling out with Sony.

Yeah the art style seems like a downgrade from World Invitational, but I don't care I'm going to play the crap out of it. I've waited YEARS for this series to come to PC.

maxresdefault.jpg

[Stack of Turtles]

Best announcement by far, I was dying to play a new Everybody's Golf game on PC. Strangely, it's developed by Namco instead of the original developer, Clap Hanz. I guess it's true that they had a falling out with Sony.

Yeah the art style seems like a downgrade from World Invitational, but I don't care I'm going to play the crap out of it. I've waited YEARS for this series to come to PC.

not sure you got the point bruh

[KnightoftheWind]

Then what is the point?. I like me golf game, simple as.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Going to guess it's a cashgrab unless they actually did something worthy of $30. @Val the Moofia Boss any ideas?

Square's PC ports and so-called "remasters" are notorious. Unless it is a PS3 game or later, you should almost always emulate the original version.

[MC_Sea]

Going to guess it's a cashgrab unless they actually did something worthy of $30. @Val the Moofia Boss any ideas?

Square's PC ports and so-called "remasters" are notorious. Unless it is a PS3 game or later, you should almost always emulate the original version.

Yup. Their PC ports and "remasters" are so shoddily done that they often end up introducing bugs and issues that weren't in the original games. Not to mention the censorship and localization that is done to these games to put them into "modern standards" by their ethics committee.

[Prominent examples include: Chrono Cross, FF Pixel Remasters (They don't include the GBA/PSP content), Legend of Mana, the 3D Console FF PC Ports (so glitchy and unpolished they need mods to be played properly), and Chrono Trigger.]

[traxtan]

Did all the buddy side quests in Far Cry 2 just for all of them to get ******* gunned down.

I'm just gonna rush the main quest at this point.

► Show Spoiler

I miss my wife Michele.

Michelle_Dreichss.jpg

[Vergil]

Did all the buddy side quests in Far Cry 2 just for all of them to get ******* gunned down.

I liked blowing their brains out when they get wounded to "put them out of their misery" even when I could have easily helped them

[traxtan]

Did all the buddy side quests in Far Cry 2 just for all of them to get ******* gunned down.

I liked blowing their brains out when they get wounded to "put them out of their misery" even when I could have easily helped them

I WOULD NEVER DO THAT YOU ARE AN EVIL *******!

[Vergil]

Did all the buddy side quests in Far Cry 2 just for all of them to get ******* gunned down.

I liked blowing their brains out when they get wounded to "put them out of their misery" even when I could have easily helped them

I WOULD NEVER DO THAT YOU ARE AN EVIL *******!

Most of them are some flavor of minority so it's no skin off @Lord of Riva 's perforated backside as they say.

[Finarfin]

Just a single "white" buddy in that game tho and a white woman.

Marty Alencar (Brazilian)
Warren Clyde (some asian)
Paul Ferenc (Israeli)
Quarbani Singh (Mauritian)
Josip Idromeno (Albanian)
Hakim Echebbi (Algerian)
Frank Bilders (Northern Irish)
Andre Hyppolite (Haitian)
Xianyong Bai (Chinese)
Flora Guillen ( Cuban-Angolan)
Michele Dachss (French)
Nasreen Davar (Tajik)

[Vergil]

Just a single "white" buddy in that game tho and a white woman.

Marty Alencar (Brazilian)
Warren Clyde (some asian)
Paul Ferenc (Israeli)
Quarbani Singh (Mauritian)
Josip Idromeno (Albanian)
Hakim Echebbi (Algerian)
Frank Bilders (Northern Irish)
Andre Hyppolite (Haitian)
Xianyong Bai (Chinese)
Flora Guillen ( Cuban-Angolan)
Michele Dachss (French)
Nasreen Davar (Tajik)

Where's the White guy?

[Finarfin]

I put him in quotation marks "white" because he is oirish

[Vergil]

aye begorrah!

[traxtan]

It's Africa, no self respecting white man would go there.

[NezahualDoomer]

Cyberpunk with mods, never played the expansion and the first time I played was at release, with some mods and the updates the game becomes much better, still is not the super deep RPG we were promised but I love the city of the game, I wish it was more interactive.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have finished FFVII Remake Intergrade's Intermission campaign.

I enjoyed it a lot more than the base game. The mediocre sidequesting, the ugly corridors that go on for far too long, and the many long drawn out fluff dialogues and eyerolling pouting scenes are gone. Here, you get a much more potent experience of a concise story, getting to run through big good looking industrial environments, and fun fights. Yuffie was cute, and Sonon was a reliable man.


I liked the theme music at the beginning, which incorporates Yuffie's melody from the original game. Very playful and adventurous. I quite liked the new battle theme too. Sadly it stops playing after a certain point, and I could not remember the battle themes that followed after.




Yuffie and Sonon are much more pleasant and likeable than the base game's party. Remake's Cloud comes off as too dry and one note for 30 hours. It also started getting a little tiring seeing Cloud be cold towards every sidequest NPC for 30 hours. Tifa is pleasant in her character scenes with Cloud, but when it comes to the plot she kept being a debbie downer constantly undermining our war. I quite liked Barret, but he is abrasive towards Cloud for the first 20 hours. I actually wish my JRPG characters expressed more animosity towards other people than they usually do, but for hours and hours on end is too much. And at times, he sounded a little too comical. And Aerith's degeneracy was offputting.

But here, the two main characters are upbeat. You have the cute and silly moogle batman, and a reliable man with his act together. Sonon humors Yuffie by allowing her to be "the leader", and then decides to tag along and help her out on her personal desire to steal materia from Shinra. And the duo are also pleasant towards the other NPCs. Sonon expresses a general apathy towards Midgar - as is to be expected of someone whose home country was invaded - but it doesn't dominate him. These two are my favorite party members in this remake series thus far. If I could mix and match a party of any characters, it would be those two and Red XIII, and maybe Barret if I could have four man parties. It would also be nice if you could make a full party of solid men with Cloud, Barret, and Sonon (apparently Cid is not playable in part 2?). I was a little disappointing that you couldn't directly play as Sonon, though.





I thought Sonon's design looked cool without being over the top and out of place for Remake's world. Not like Cloud (big pauldron when no one else wears one, huge sword on his back)/Barret (has a big gatling gun arm when no one else has one)/Tifa (scandalous outfit when only Andrea and that thief girl NPC wore something like that). Except for having a rather large staff on his back, he could better fit into the Midgar crowds and not obviously look like a suspect people should call the cops on. He is more in line with Biggs who was toeing the line of conspicuousness on that train, though having magazine clips on his chest was a giveaway. Yuffie's Mog outfit was great and also made her look like kinda like a caped superhero, and yet its kitsch enough that she could blend into a crowd without scrutiny too. It also helps that her shuriken disappears underneath her cloak so she doesn't walk around with a big weapon.





The new environments overall look much better than what you spend most of the base game running through. I thought the room with the big car engine looking thing was cool.







I liked the "parkour" elements of movement through the industrial environments, where Yuffie is running along narrow ledges with airplane arms, leaping between crane ropes like Tarzan, wallrunning, climbing monkey bars, sliding down poles, etc. It makes dungeoning feel a little more adventurous.





I liked how Yuffie could throw her shuriken/boomerang to destroy crates and push levers that are placed outside of the playable game area, so you are spending more time turning the camera around looking at the environment on the lookout for those crates and switches. I also liked how how they combined the wall climbing with a turntable puzzle to give it a 3D element.

It was neat that you got to see some mechas that were halfway assembled, though not actively being worked on with people welding pieces together or lowering limbs into place. We also see a very large mech (2nd picture). Is this going to an enemy you can fight in future games? How is that going to work? It's so big. Are you going to have to control a big summon or have Cloud pilot a big mech to fight it?






I thought that the synergy/co-op attacks were neat. It's the chain attacks from Trails in the Sky the 3rd, but with a much higher budget. I hope to see them in part 2.





There is some pretty zany anime stuff happening in Intermission. Since it was an original story, I went "haha okay yeah let's do it!" instead of "why?". But I have to wonder how this stuff will be answered in remake parts 2 and 3, if at all. There is the final villain of a shounen anime like Father from Fullmetal Alchemist or Aizen from Bleach lounging on his throne underneath Midgar. Are the sequels going to deal with him? Is Rufus going to sic this guy on politely ask him to kill Sephiroth?






That being said, Chadley's scene at the very end broke my suspension of disbelief. He is is what? 12 or 13? How is he so high up in Shinra's science hierarchy that he is allowed access to their secret anime villain lounging in the basement? He is an intern. A junior assistant. And are we led to believe that replicating this Weiss guy in virtual reality is a tremendously difficult feat that veteran scientists and engineers couldn't accomplish, but Chadley could? What?





In the intermission final scene, it appears that Zach seems confused by all of the wounded people in the Church. The last scene of him from the base game showed him surviving the PSP prequel ending and making his way towards Midgar as it was being surrounded by the Kingdom Hearts ghosts, so I am guessing he was timewarped/fast forwarded from there into the future right after the plate collapse and missed everything that happened in between.


I liked the Happy Turtle mascot dancing and Yuffie humming the songs. It gives off the idea that even though we haven't seen the TV show, it exists because people are talking about it. I suppose there was that dog in the base game, but I did not recall hearing the characters talking about that show or humming it songs. The fact that the composers put in the effort into making six fictional songs that sound like real pop songs was neat, but most players probably won't even stick around by the gramophones to listen to them in full. Maybe they will be better utilized in the next game if you can get a car like in GTA or in FF15 and can listen to songs on the radio while driving to the next location.




There is a board game called Fort Condor. I think it might have been one of those "autobattlers" I heard about some years ago. It looks pretty high fidelity as far as the textures and lighting goes, so it might be the best looking autobattler? I don't know. I liked the mecha theme. It was pretty neat. I liked how you could position your laser turrets just right so they would shoot through chokepoints and also hit the enemy bases.




The woman putting on a theater skit for the kids was neat.




The writers did not make it clear as to what exactly Wutai's government desired. Yes, Sonon was monitoring Midgar in relation to Wutai, but why risk infiltrating the Shinra headquarters? Why were they running around in there risking getting caught? Did Wutai tell them to go in there, and do... what? It is not clear whether or not Yuffie was going in because she genuinely was assigned a mission to steal a new materia (what materia was it? What was their info?), or if she was assigned to dwell in Midgar and monitor the situation like with Sonon and then decided to break into Shinra HQ out of a thirst for adventure and in the hope of grabbing power for herself. Sonon might have come along just to make sure nothing bad happened to Yuffie, but he didn't seem interested in actually accomplishing anything in HQ like opening up a suit's computer and stealing the hard drive to read at a safehouse and look for any emails or docs regarding Shinra's plans in relation to Wutai.

It also seems strange that Shinra has just declared that Wutai backed a mass murder event that the people of Midgar are reflexively becoming very emotional and fearful about (and they have just learned that they intend to falseflag an even greater event with the plate drop), but Sonon does not consider whether or not Wutai agents raiding Shinra HQ would help their country at this time. They would be giving Shinra video footage (or worse, their bodies, dead or alive) to broadcast on TV of actual, real Wutai agents. At that point, the minutiae of whether or not Wutai was actually involved in the Mako reactor bombing (and the soon to follow plate drop) wouldn't matter. The objective fact is that Wutai agents infiltrated the city, broke into the capitol building, attacked (possibly killed?) many Midgar soldiers, and worked with Avalanche. There is also a scary chance that Sonon could have been recorded when he said "Midgar is going to get what is coming to them". Cue plate drop. That makes Shinra's narrative 90% true and very difficult to debunk their cassus belli. As whimsical as Yuffie is, she is also depicted as being fiercely protective of her home and agrees with Sonon about the shadow of the war last war hanging over them, so it is a little hard to believe that she too would not have been hesitant to raid Shinra HQ.




It is a little disappointing that the plot is about Yuffie breaking into Shinra HQ to steal a newly developed Materia, but we don't get any elaboration on the Materia production process. Strangely, the base game teased more about the creation of Materia, with the scene where we see scientists growing Materia in a vat, and then "contamination" happens and it bloats and then explodes, possibly killing the scientists in the room. And if Yuffie is so interested in Materia and is such a Wutai patriot, wouldn't she be interested in trying to help establish a domestic Materia industry back home? Wouldn't it be more helpful to go to the desk of an engineer, break open the desktop computer, take the hard drive, and take it back to Wutai so that her people can understand the process and create their own equipment? Give a man a fish versus teach him to fish, etc.




I did not beat the hard mode trials. I tried Bahamut three times and then decided to move on to the next game.


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Overall, I think Intermission by itself was a pretty entertaining experience. I rate it 8/10 (very good). If it was possible for people to download Intermission and play it without having to slog through the 30 hour long base game, I would recommend it. I guess maybe you can download someone else's clear save of the base game so you could just start at Intermission then. That being said, the on and off stuttering was still an issue. So holistically, I would say Intergrade is a 6/10 (fine) package.

Intermission redeemed my interest in this remake series somewhat. After finishing the base game, I was somewhat regretting that I had bought Rebirth and was wondering if I should refund it. I hope that Intermission is a sign of what the second remake game will be like, and that the performance issues will be fixed.

[Roguey]

If it was possible for people to download Intermission and play it without having to slog through the 30 hour long base game, I would recommend it. I guess maybe you can download someone else's clear save of the base game so you could just start at Intermission then.

Simply press the R2 button to see the EPISODE INTERmission title screen. You can play this episode whenever you would like, however, Square Exnix's FAQ recommends new players complete the main campaign first.

?

I played FF7R on PS4 and have it on my PC wishlist just to play the DLC, it'd be absurd even for them to make PS4 owners like me who can't even buy the DLC for that system to play the whole game over again to get to the new content.