Alright. I got my copy today. I just dusted off FFVII: Advent Children Complete. I'll start with that that. Sorry if these impressions are badly worded and stuff, as I'm pretty tired for some reason right now.
FF7:ACCC - Overall, I think this is a much better film than the original cut. The new scenes to the movie make the plot feel more cohesive. In the original cut, I liked the idea of Geostigma and Denzel but it was hard caring.
For one thing, Denzel's role felt minimal at best despite being a major character in the film. ACC remedies this by not only giving him a back story, but by also making his relationship with Cloud and the gang seem stronger. By the end of the version, I actually cared about the kid. This is helped by the fact that the effects of Geostigma are shown as pretty damn harsh in ACC, where as in the original cut characters inflicted with the disease merely had black marks on their infected areas.
Another issue with the original cut I had was that, while I felt the action was pretty good, the amount of action ruined the story pacing. Every other scene you would have a fight, with almost no dialgoue. In ACC -- in the first half at least -- fights are well paced between interesting character bits of character development and story development.
Finally, my biggest problem with FFVII AC was the treatment of Cloud. Near the end of FFVII, Cloud is born again hard. He sees things from a completely different light and is that much stronger after conquering his fears and past. In AC he's once again brooding and I didn't feel it fit the character. There were some new things, like the flashback with Zack, that helped flesh this matter out. While it didn't completely make me feel alright with what they did to Cloud in AC, I think he's a lot more bearable in the Complete version.
ACC doesn't only make the
movie feel more cohesive, but it also draws parallels to other FFVII related media like Crisis Core. It makes the project feel less ham fisted, more complete. At the end of the day, I think all of these changes help form a much better movie that should have been the original cut to begin with. If you even barely liked Advent Children you should check it out. It's not Kingdom of Heaven Directors Cut (the directors cut to end all DC's) but it's a vast improvement.
Final Fantasy XIII - When you first get to command Lightning against the robo scorpion, the game feels quite hands off. It takes a whilte to charge a full ATB bar, you can't control the other party member...It feels weird at first, to me at least, but eventually I got used to it.
There's definitely a learning curve. I found my attacks getting interrupted by enemies constantly. Then I realized that if I waited for them to attack, and
then unleash my string of attacks I did much better. This was especially true with the first enemy in the game, the giant robot that smashes the train Zazh and Lightning are riding in.
You will barely do any damage at all to that boss due to its hard shell. The one opportunity to do major damage is when it opens its shell, exposing its weak point. The flipside to this is that when it
does open its shell, it's preparing for a huge multi-hit attack on the party. You must hit its weakpoint before it unleashes the attack since once it does hit, you lose your command stock completely due to the damage. You have to start all over and by that time, its shell will already be closed.
Timing is key in these battles, and I like the direction.
It definitely feels like FFX-2 on steroids, but it's far more slow than that game. Probably in part that the AI takes care of the extra party members in the demo.
I even had a game over in the demo. In the fight against the Behemoth he nailed Snow for 700 hp damage when the Behemoth used a launcher and my guys couldn't heal him in time. The fight definitely managed to keep me on my toes and I can't really imagine some of the fights in the full game do the fact you won't have magic at this point.
Like I said, there's definitely a learning curve. By the end of the demo though, I was doing crazy combos and getting ranked 5 Stars. It's extremely fun.
I'm impressed, highly. Especially with the graphics. I think this is the new high standard for Japanese rpgs if this demo is any indication. There's a difference between the fmv and in game graphics, but even that's not that large of a gap anymore.
While it's true the entire demo takes place on one long linear train track, the attention to detail makes up for this. There's a million things to see in the demo; multiple scripted events occur. Whether they're planes flying overhead shooting at the party, explosions that throw Zazh into a panic, your enemies arriving at a specific battle spot a la Chrono Trigger, or even seeing a boss you will fight later on in the demo take out a bunch of people on a bridge below while you sit there completely helpless.
The atmosphere is insane and usually these events are shown from a specific camera angle where the player has no input in camera control. None of these take you out of the action, and it feels straight out of a game made in the west to me. Japanese tend to keep things like this self contained within cutscenes, especially if it's an rpg.
This is definitely Square. They did the same things during the psx era. Remember how say, in FFVIII, where an fmv would pop up and you could move Squall? It makes me feel like that, except there's no fmv doing these events at all. It was impressive then and it's equally as impressive now.
Finally, I'd like to talk about the story. I'm really feeling the cast. Lightning and Snow are both mature characters, and their personalities are immediately likable to me. It's nice to have a mature main character in the series again, which has been a long time coming. Zazh is comic relief, for sure, but to me he feels like a normal guy thrown into a crazy situation. It's obvious he's green.
After playing the demo, I get the feeling this game is going to have quite a bit of death in it. The ending to the demo was pretty touching, I thought. I hope team Nora are dead after that fall.
I can't wait for the full game. At the beginning of the game's development I was skeptical but, I'm after playing the demo I'm glad they're making something actually resembles a Final Fantasy. It's been 7 years (almost
since FFX, and I'm hungry.
