deleted by creator

The original Final Fantasy VII was a “lightning-in-a-bottle” moment in gaming history.

FFVII came at a point when Nintendo’s most beloved 3rd party partners had felt wronged by Nintendo’s semi-monopoly / greed - in that Nintendo had continued to charge a massive premium on cartridge production for anyone who wanted to sell a cart to run on their systems (think Apple pre-USB-C where everyone who wanted to make “Lightning Port” accessories basically had to pay Apple a premium every time they built any iPhone / iPad accessory), and this had only worsened with the N64 due to the increase in hardware costs (some SNES games like Chrono Trigger were already $80-$85 in the mid-1990s which was VERY expensive for the time). So 3rd party partners were willing to pivot to take a risk with SONY who was relatively unproven in video games (and who also had a very big chip on their shoulders thanks to Nintendo backing out of a hardware deal with SONY at the last second so they literally set up shop to poach 3rd party partners to bring exclusively to their new PlayStation project).

FFVII also came out at a point when there was excitement and a rush to produce new “3D” (polygonal mesh-driven assets) visuals as opposed to “2D” (traditional sprite sheet-driven assets) visuals, and the amount SquareSoft (before they merged with the Dragon Quest “Enix” guys) was willing to spend to invest in making these kinds of assets for a video game - at least at the scale they were attempting - was unheard of at the time.

Hironobu Sakaguchi had been at the helm of the Final Fantasy JRPG series for more than a decade, and had lost his mother in recent years. FFVI was already a masterpiece in storytelling (which is the main thing that JRPGs brought to the table in gaming), but he and his team had decided to try and tell a story around “life” that might resonate upon players with the same sort of feelings he had in losing his mother.

All that combined :

• the first new big SquareSoft JRPG for the “32-bit” era
• launching on MULTIPLE CDs (also a somewhat new and novel concept) instead of a cartridge
• the first to do some 3D graphics instead of 2D sprites for visuals (though backgrounds were still pre-rendered sprites)
• the first to incorporate SOME real orchestration as opposed to pure MIDI-style instrumentation
• Sakaguchi’s loss inspiring him to add that aspect to the story - which lead to one of gaming’s most impactful moments of all time at that time in an era when “storytelling” still had not evolved much… we had yet to get cinematic games like Metal Gear Solid yet - which kind of was the first truly movie-like experience with full voice performances and advanced emotive animations from character bodies, and camera actions designed to mimic cinema.

So any remake would NEVER live up to the original, because even the original cannot live up to itself anymore - because the original’s story relied on how voices played in your head, rather than some actor maybe not being up to snuff, the graphics not aging very well b/c of how early-on it was in the creation of polygonal assets and animations - which simple emotes were used to represent deeply moving emotions in some cases that you had to “imagine” as being more detailed than they really were (like with how characters may have sounded in your mind), and how there wasn’t really anything of equivalent cinematic awe in gaming that had been released yet to compete with the story-telling of JRPGs like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger, and Earthbound (Mother 2).

I think taking on the challenge of remaking it is interesting, but I always would rather an effort be made to make something new, rather than rehash anything - even things that I grew up loving… because nostalgia is always chasing a ghost… and ghosts never live up to your hopes and expectations.

All that being said, the thing I had the biggest issue with was the “style” of the characters in the remake. They are inherently very stylized in the original, and there seems to have been zero effort to maintain any of that “style” from the original, because it seems the modern interpretation was to toss out any possible “style” arbitrarily in exchange for more “realism” in the character designs… think “Disney live action remake” adaptations of characters vs their original animated character styles.

Here’s what I mean… I wanted Barret to look like THIS :

…instead of this :

Agreed on the “shifting focus” part for vignetting specifically - but everything else… outside of specifically tailoring to fit a particular “aesthetic” I think are crutches that are generally used to obscure an overall graphical presentation in order to work in a similar way to how squinting your eyes works.

I agree that highly stylized games like “Bodycam…”

…use things like a specific kind of grain, noise, distortion, aberration, etc. to create a highly appealing visual aesthetic designed to match an actual low-fidelity police body camera, but Battlefield and CoD have much less excuse in my book.

The camera aesthetic stuff only makes sense on things like the AC-130 killstreak in CoD where you’re emulating the on-aircraft cameras actually used in the real deal.

I’m okay with a little chromatic aberration and vignette.

Why? It’s literally something that pro camera tools have added in-software fixes for to remove them. Like - if you’re simulating an old JVC vidicon tube camera and wanting to make something specifically look like an image capture device from a specific time, I get it, but otherwise, it just seems like a way to hide the fact that your graphics aren’t quite hitting the realism mark and you think if you obscure it a bit, players will think it looks more “real.”

Hey now… Don’t forget camera bob, “lens dirt,” chromatic aberration, and vignette!

AKA - the video game graphics equivalent of “beer goggles.”

Thermian. One of the all-time greatest gags we lose in the streaming era.

It’s pretty great. Basically feels like Vampire Survivors 64.

The democratization of technology is a double-edged sword.

For every improvement in UX and lowering of a once impassible barrier of entry, we seem to inevitably gain a massive number of “eXpErTs” who can suddenly stand upon the now much lower skill floor.

Shortly thereafter seems to be a destruction of the general reliability of whatever field these “eXpErTs” flood - usually a field which used to be inherently cryptic and had complex prerequisites just to begin operation within, let alone master.

Like… it makes me almost miss when “using a computer” meant you had to understand how to browse a directory in DOS…

Because at least then you literally couldn’t begin to operate in the field unless you could wrap your head around understanding the basics of syntax.

Now you can just have an entire legion of dullards misspell or misspeak 30% of a malformed question to some random free LLM that still has trouble telling you “how many Rs are in the word strawberry,” and have it confidently fart back out a wrong answer that they will then copy-paste into a paper or article which will then be added to the pile of growing misinformation currently stuffing a frighteningly expanding part of our collective knowledge base.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

The same way Digimon, Monster Hunter monsters, and every other unique IP looks nothing like Pokemon. Make completely original designs that don’t look like fan art or knock offs of another artist’s specific trademark style.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

I’m a little torn on this.

On the one hand, let’s be real - clearly PalWorld takes more than a little “inspiration” on a bunch of different Pokemon IP. The illustrations, modeling, and just visual style overall matches in many ways almost perfectly for many of the creatures. They are like off-brand versions of Pokemon with the exact same eyes, mouth types, etc. in many cases as if they were illustrated by Ken Sugimori himself.

Additionally, the game involves using handheld ball devices thrown at wild world-roaming creatures you capture after cutting down their health by some amount to increase the catch percentage and different “grade” balls have increased chance for capture.

There is also a nefarious organization competing with you for capturing these wild creatures like Team Rocket.

But on the OTHER hand, the leveling up, breeding, base-building, the various ability tech-trees, item crafting, and just overall engine complexity is VASTLY superior to what appears to now be an almost EMBARRASSINGLY behind set of game design mechanics in the actual Pokemon games… it’s sort of a Saints Row vs GTA IV situation here where they were an obvious copy off, but improved in enough ways that ended up being a fun game in itself.

Copying off exact art asset styles is one thing you shouldn’t do… but taking Nintendo’s gameplay ideas and expanding upon them vastly and being told to remove said mechanics as if they stole code is asinine and sets a bad precedent.

Every time there’s been a popular game, there are a thousand copies off them that twist and evolve those mechanics until something else comes along.

Nintendo came along with platformers after Pitfall on Atari. Sonic copied 2D platforming basics from Mario like running to the right and jumping on enemies but changed so much. Final Fantasy copied off Dragon Quest, which itself was a digital idea based off of Dungeons & Dragons. Doom to games like GoldenEye to Halo to Call of Duty to PUBG to Fortnite to APEX Legends…

This feels like taking advantage of grey area in the realm of visual IP similarity to shut down someone making their gameplay design mechanics look antiquated by comparison.

Really embarrassing for Nintendo to be doing this, when clearly what Nintendo should be doing is doing like what Fortnite did when APEX came along and added location / enemy / weapon call outs and just STEALING the mechanics they weren’t clever enough to think of on their own and implement better versions in their own games… but clearly they’d just rather have a monopoly and continue lackluster work.

I just kept an eye on Micro Center’s refurbished cards for a few weeks and was able to snag a 3090Ti late last year with a 3-yr warranty for the same price I paid for a 980Ti in 2015.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator