Some of us have favorites that arrived well after starting the series.
That said, I feel the need to tap the sign: if anyone thinks mainline Final Fantasy games are bad, they need to play some genuinely bad games for perspective. There are plenty available even within the genre: Beyond the Beyond, Ancient Roman, Lunar Dragon Song, etc.
The series is constantly reinventing itself, and that’s going to leave people behind. SQEX still manages to retain consistently high production quality despite that.
Thanks. For those that don’t read Japanese (and want to drop it in their favorite MTL or what have you), here’s the relevant interview answer from creative director Jonathan Dumont:
Can we get a link? If you mean www.gamedeveloper.com, they’ve only had one article specifically on Shadows this year and it’s about a service platform for the series, not the story.
If it makes any difference, I don’t have major compulsions/FOMO to do open world content. I even regret doing as much of the Enemy Skill farming as I did. So it felt well and truly optional to me. I set most of it aside.
I had major problems with Remake myself, mostly stemming from punishing encounter design and them padding out a 6+ hour section into a full game. The catwalk lights, the lab, and other stuff obliterated the pacing, and it was painfully obvious how much better the dungeon design based on the original content was when compared to the new stuff.
The good news is, in Rebirth, that 1:1 remake feeling is front and center if you want it, instead supplemented this time by optional content. I felt like I had much more room to put together materia builds, and it has one of the best video game soundtracks I’ve ever heard. I’d be over the moon if they did a version of Final Fantasy VI that felt like most of Rebirth did.
Except for the limit breaks. Why they didn’t give those full target tracking and allowed them to whiff is an outright bizarre design decision (along with the constant splitting of the party).
Had the same thought. Plus, according to some of these reviews, there’s no information age units, so that gives them a possible fourth era to work with in upcoming DLC.
Civ7 does indeed use Denuvo. Concerning for a game like this with far more CPU usage than your typical game.
For me, Civ6 at launch felt like a couple steps forward and a couple steps back. I really appreciated the increased transparency with diplomacy, but the AI was aggressively bad in mid and late-game, something they never ended up getting right.
We still have a ways to go before reaching the inflation-adjusted, $150-per-game peak of mass market games in the 1990’s. A key difference is games back then had way higher marginal cost (it’s near zero now).
The interesting thing is that the market is becoming a lot more like it was back then, full of people that only buy one or two games a year and only play those. Of course now, the model is retaining players with DLC and MTX, whereas in 1995 it was more because people could only afford one or two games a year.
Ughh. The selective enforcement is maddening, both with this and TikTok. So much of the filed complaint especially applies to Roblox, but it’s clear that we’re only interested in protecting our consumers when it really means chipping away at a foreign rival’s burgeoning soft power.
How is Stormgate innovating? Genuine question–I’ve been avoiding it largely because it looks so much like StarCraft (and Pottinger even calls it out specifically in the article as something not innovative).