spin up 5 projects. hire devs from all over the world, make them work on site in person. people upend their entire lives for a chance at a stock option.
cancel 2 after 10 months.
cut the teams on two of the others.
cut the teams again.
and again.
oh wait hire like crazy and overcorrect so we can
cut the teams again.
Then cancel 1d3 of remaining projects, announce <OLD IP>REMASTERED
All devs cut never neared their stock vestment, all shares returned to the mothership, start to consider spinning up 5 more new projects.
Eh… It’s not the combat in Expedition that keeps me playing. Even with the time-based perfect hits, dodges, and parries it’s not as fun as actively being in control during real-time combat.
But the story, characters, and music are incredible.
I love the combat! There’s nothing more satisfying than learning an enemy’s moves perfectly and then getting that juicy 20% experience boost for whacking them without taking a hit. The balance is a bit off sometimes, but when it’s on, it’s amazing. I finished a long, difficult fight last night with my last character being the only one standing. It was such a cool moment.
Enemies with huge, super-slow wind ups to their attacks can take a hike, though. If I can accidentally parry four-five times in the time it takes you to wind up your attack, just maybe my character should be preemptively counter attacking, y’know.
Ff16 combat is fun as hell. And FF7 remake/rebirth too. I’m sure I still would have enjoyed both games if they were turn based, as I enjoyed the original FF7 and FF8 back in the day, but I really don’t get the hate for the realtime combat. It’s tight and polished and fun.
I don’t think anybody hates real-time combat. That feels like a strawman.
I think when it comes down to it though, there are huge demographics in the gaming community that are underserved and craving something that the industry has turned its back on because of loud people hating on turn-based combat.
Expedition 33’s success is simply a validation to the gamers left waiting, and to the developers that indicates that not all gamers hate turn-based combat, and maybe it isn’t an age thing.
In a different perspective, though, I hate the executives and studios who rely on others to lead, and I see it as spineless. If you were a developer afraid to make what you thought was fun because you thought you couldn’t maximize your sales around a combat system (cough cough square enix cough), you’re chicken shit.
I don’t think anybody hates real-time combat. That feels like a strawman.
I do, but just because I have a disability that makes more button presses painful and turn-based tends to have fewer per hour. I also know others who dislike real-time because they’re bad at it. I agree with your sentiment completely, though. Liking real-time isn’t exclusive of also enjoying turn-based.
When all the decisions have to come rapid-pace, I don’t feel like I’m doing anything notable. It feels like mashing out light or strong attacks and maybe some block/dodges.
I’ll admit that there have been some action JRPGs where I just didn’t understand how the mechanics worked together, even after some explanations, because I had to play it out so quickly in combat. Those games ended up having low difficulty so that people that “weren’t getting it” could still see the story.
I’m still okay at Soulslike games where there’s not quite as many meters and illogical systems. And of course I’m okay with turn-based games having those weird systems because I can process things slowly until I get it, and am taking my turns at full speed.
60 hours in and loving it. Enemies get much harder further in. I find the lore excellent as a Dune fan. Graphics are great and gameplay is fun and challenging, every thing feels like a constant threat and achieving anything is rewarding.
Ironically, the turn based combat in Final Fantasy is the biggest reason I don’t play it. I find that the combat feels too repetitive, because its always the same animations, same music, same background per area, etc. Also, the random battle encounter mechanic annoys me when I just want to explore and I have to fight an entire army just to move from one side of an area to the other side.
I’ve loved most of the Final Fantasy games. But the PS1 games (the golden era) were the worst about this.
Pre-PS1 typically required more thought. You had to balance magic use, item use, and of course melee. But even then you had to debate whether to spend a turn reviving your healer or try to get the victory before a team wipe.
Post PS1 you had X’s rock paper scissors battle. You had to figure out who could attack who. It wasn’t too complicated but it forced variety.
XII streamlined the auto attacking and allowed you to focus on the exceptions (enemy weak against fire, use silence, cure). That could be automated too, but I liked to handle that myself.
XIII & XIII-2 forced you to balance your jobs/classes constantly in battle.
Lightning Returna, XV, and XVI were real time.
Tactics was PS1, but it definitely required more than just attack.
The PS1 games, for the most part, could be dominated with “press X”. Most of the strategy took place outside of battle.
I played FFX for like, 20 hours give or take. The combat wasn’t so obnoxious in that games like previous ones. But then I got to the Seymour Wedding part, what I can only describe as “the part where you must defeat all these enemies in order with no save points in between and if you werent prepared with 30 billion healing items and Lulu (the GOAT) gets killed, your game is basically softlocked” part. Beat that (thank you savestate scumming) and was already not having fun but that cutscene at the end of that part was frustrating to me. It felt like every character was acting extremely out of character, except maybe Seymour, and it was at that point that I decided I wasn’t having fun anymore and didn’t really care enough to try to potentially suffer more of that.
I really tried to like Final Fantasy. I want to like it. I just don’t like that kind of gameplay experience.
That part is like only like five fights against humans and robots, the only tricky part is the kicky robots will ruin you if you save them for last. And you’ve been without Yuna for a bit by that point so somebody (Kimahri or Rikku) should be filling in the healer role already. It is a weird and kinda weak story sequence but I think the game starts improving after that point.
This is certainly a good strategy but this probably assumes the player has been grinding levels. I don’t do that. I play the storyline, and do absolutely no extra grinding because it is boring. I must have been underleveled because those “just humans and robots” were getting a TPK in 2 or 3 turns of combat on I think the 4th group.
Sad to hear the game gets better, but honestly it took me 20+ hours to get to that point and I wasn’t absolutely loving the game. By the time I quit, I just kept thinking that I wished I could play as Jecht instead of Tidus. Jecht had a better design and his voice acting seemed less annoying. I understand the specific voice acting quirks of FFX, but it sure sounded like Tidus’ english actor was some random Square picked up off the street and paid $50 to read the lines. Along with other annoyances, I just decided dropping it was probably for the best. Lulu was my favorite character, with Jecht or Auron being second place. Seymour was good as a character, I just didn’t like him.
Tactics is getting more of a remaster than a remake. It’s also missing a bunch of content that was added in the PSP version. Honestly I don’t think it will sell terribly well.
I’d love to see another more standard turn based FF, but people also have to realize that the last pure turn based game was X in 2001. FF changing shit with every game is what FF does.
Final Fantasy X was also the first pure turn-based game in the mainline series since 1990.
I keep hearing people cite Final Fantasy nostalgia with Expedition 33, but pure turn-based combat with realistic graphics happened exactly once in all of Final Fantasy. I don’t get it. It’s much more of a thing in the rest of the genre, including SQEX’s other properties.
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