SO you're against the very concept of this game in general. ANd everything you're seeing you're going to interpret in a negative context because of that?
I see your attempt at a gotcha, but you're still wrong.
You're going to assume everything I see is negative because of my bias instead of reasoning and context, which I've argued and elaborated on at length and explained in depth. I even conceded that things in the additions department were warranted like some of Hojo's dialogue that was leaked.
What I'm not going to concede is I'm down on this game from the start because that gives people an out to not warrant any dialogue about the design decisions of a deliberate "remake" of a game that was tightly paced and written in the first place. If the detractors defense was "They have an opportunity to flesh out midgar" and THIS is how they flesh out midgar, I will argue that aside from the Nomura OC and other spoiler content I won't go into here that it never warranted staying here in the first place.
The fact that the game is trying to justify itself being what it is does not then make me a downer because it chose to be such. It chose to limit to Midgar, so there should be content enough to justify it, if you have quest design like this, imo, you didn't justify it.
We have a remake of the game padding out the tutorial level of the original and padding itself with four tiered rat quests in order to justify its existence. Regardless of my take on staying in Midgar and leaving that is still bad design, and I would argue if they left Midgar they wouldn't need it. Instead of saying "I hate it because it's only midgar" I'm providing context for how this would not be "mandatory" if they went into the rest of the content the original game had, because that padding would be unnecessary.
White Knight Chronicles II carries all your equipment from the first game as well. It's a pretty direct sequel, though, picks up exactly where the first one left off, but that's also precisely the case with VIIR. The issue here is that it'll definitely be a cross gen thing, but with PS5 being backwards compatible, that will likely not be a huge problem.
Neat I had no idea about that. Here's hoping that's possible.
Agreed. Junon, Costa Del Sol, the Gold Saucer...I don't know why anyone would want to spend a bunch of time in ugly metal slums when there's a whole world of cool places we could be visiting instead.
The whole time you're chasing down someone in the slums you could be at fort condor minigames or shopping at Junon. Feels bad man.
Is there a reason the new Soldier (I'm assuming this is who you're referring to) is something that feels forced? As someone who didn't even realize there were other Soldiers in the original game when I first played it (I just thought they were random Shinra grunts), I'm glad to see someone other than Zack or Sephiroth show up and be named. Makes Soldier feel like an actual division of the military.
As for the reframing, I feel like this just falls under personal taste for every player. I saw you mention the ghosts before, so I'm guessing you meant the shadow/smokey things in some of the trailers? I know there were ghosts in the Train Graveyard. I personally thought it was neat if they reframed those to give an actual explanation to their existence (aside from just random monsters). Souls from the lifestream mad that the land around Midgar is literally dead from Mako extraction? That would be a cool side-effect that's being expanded upon. Granted, not every little thing needs an explanation either. Square will need to be careful with that.
The time spent building the new SOLDIER is time that could be focused on Turks instead and/or other plot lines in Midgar. Not to mention the fact that the character seems to be there to only be an antagonist for the player and not for the story. SOLDIER was a military regiment before that was always there and present across the game, across all 3 classes of the regiment. The only ones who were special were Sephiroth and Zack because they were "First Class/Best of the Best" at the time of the original game. They tried to recontextualize it since then but the problem with having a "new" named SOLDIER is now we have to question where his role in the rest of the events of the game are as named/individual SOLDIERs were something of a rarity in the original story. This also ignores the cringe that comes with him doing ollies on a motorcycle and feeling more like a KH character with his snark and "witty" banter versus a character there to fill a specific role in the overarching plot. Could be WRONG, but I see him as being another example of Shoehorned in character by Nomura just to have "drama" there when he needs it, instead of the character being anything special to the plot.
The ghosts and stuff in the Graveyard make sense, but we now have a heartless shadow tornado enveloping the Midgar building and that's just....stupid. Even for the original FF7 it's nonsense and the whole "Capitalized Name - Arbiters of Fate" battling "Those who try to change destiny" is some of the most childish drivel I've seen put into a game that kept a mostly coherent script despite its original localization.
The issue with them as well is that they're being forced to oppose Aeris, who before was just "a weird girl who could hear some voices" but because it's modern day and fiction has to be amped to 11 we now have spooky ghosts and such. It takes away from the existential dread of "the planet will slowly die and we'll kill ourselves trying to fight before then" by reframing it as "Kill the spoopy ghosts!"
Part of the narrative of the original was in the subtext and almost lovecraftian horror of WEAPON and the planet wanting to expel humanity, and WEAPON was the biggest reveal that the planet would fight back against it. Spirits and ghosts would be fine but with the enveloping the tower thing I have reason to believe they're going to be intrinsically tied to Sephiroth/Jenova/The Lifestream and it takes what was originally a more subtle approach to writing these themes to giving them tangible form to make them an opposition for visual effect.
tl;dr they're dumbing it down in a lot of ways and adding stuff that feelsl ike it's there because Nomura is directing versus being relevant to the plot or embellishing the existing scenario, minus a few things like Hojo mentioning Gast and Ifalna earlier which I believe is a good change and needed to be there to make sense for later plot beats.
