Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Final Fantasy VII Remake - First Impressions

Episode Date: March 2, 2020

Tim and Blessing got to play almost 4 hours of Final Fantasy 7 Remake!!!! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up guys? Welcome back to Kind of Funny First Impressions. This is the show where we give our first impressions to various video games. I'm Tim Getty's. This is Blessing at Ae Aal Yeh Jr. What's up, Tim? We got Maximum Cortez himself, Andy Cortez. Hey, guys.

Hey, guys and gals. Very exciting stuff. We're talking about Final Fantasy 7 remake today. Bless and I got to go play it. Yeah, we got to go play a lot of it. We did. Oh, man. What was it?

Almost four hours. Yeah, like three to four hours of it. And yeah. And hey, we got in there. We got really in there. Totally not jealous. Were you invited? No, I wasn't fucking invited.

I'm really excited for this game too. Wow. I must have missed a Google calendar invite or something. Yeah, yeah. No, so Andy, you did not get to play it, but you're so interested in this game. Yeah. That you're like, you know what? I want to be here on this person.

I am, because I know, I know, like, the legacy of Final Fantasy. I've just never been a huge Final Fantasy fan. I don't love turn-based-style games. So a lot of these games I've just sort of skipped out on. Pokemon, it's, you know, it's a different thing. It's a difference. Even, like, that's me, too, where I, I've always kind of wanted to be a Final Fantasy fan, but every time I tried Final Fantasy fan, it just doesn't do it for me,

and I think for Final Fantasy 7, it's been, there's been so much time that it's past that trying to go back to it every time I just fall off. But, yeah, there are, like, other JRP's, like, Pokemon or Persona that I do love, and I do enjoy despite them being, like, turn-based. I know how beloved they are, and I think one of the last Final Fantasy games I tried that was Turnbase was Final Fantasy 10, because I just, I've always loved the art of all these games. They're beautiful.

They're beautiful. Growing up as an artist, I would always draw my own characters in those worlds, even though I never played the games. But I've just been so interested. I know Final Fantasy 7 is so beloved and people love this damn franchise. I just, I want to be a part of it. So when I saw that this new one is going to be Final Fantasy 15 style, which is the last Final Fantasy game I played.

It is and it's not, and I mean that in the good way. It's all only in the good ways. Okay. Not and only in the good ways is it. So here's the thing. I played Pokemon my first RPG as well for all intents and purposes. My first introduction to Turnbase stuff. People always call it like Baby's first RPG.

And that's exactly what that is. But when Fall Fantasy 10 came out, I had been familiar with Final Fantasy. But I was like, that seems to advance me. But after Pokemon, I was like, I'm going to give this one a shot. Fell in love with it, totally went down the rabbit hole. And then I went back and had beaten almost every Final Fantasy sense. But seven was the one. Seven was the one that everyone talked about.

The people that played... If X was my first one, seven was like the generation a little bit older than me's first one. Yeah, my cousin had the game and I was like, that's so many discs. Which made it cool. Are those just the soundtracks? No, those have the game.

That's all the game. Wow. A lot of video, a lot of dope shit. But the thing is, seeing this game, now I've played through seven all the way through at least three times in my life, and I've restarted and played through the beginning at least ten times in my life.

and being able to not only just see the trailers over the last couple years for this game, but play through it now and see exactly how one-for-one things are, but also how much imaginations put into re-imagining and remaking what this game could be like. It fills in gaps in a way that my mind couldn't keep up with with the original,

and I'm completely blown away so far. I think another thing that I am just so interested with is that being a 3D artist in game dev, for several years. I am so infatuated when games get remade because I'd like to imagine that it's such a fun process to how does the goddamn red

Jaguar, whatever the hell that thing is? How does that look now in this day and age? We didn't get to see them in what we played. I'm going to start the footage right here. It's, first off, gorgeous. Yeah, it's a beautiful game. Like, the environment specifically, I think, are all, like, they all have that style.

that I imagined that File Fantasy 7 had when I went out here about it and when I'd see screenshots right but having it fully realized and looking like this I think takes it like I think they did an amazing job from what we saw on the preview but then also yeah like just the sword sitting on clouds back right in the way that it kind of shines and how good it looks and the way it has that. And the little thing is the material. The material, the little ball. You see it on the sword and when you change it out. You see it. Oh, that's really safe. And I love that type of stuff. And so what's crazy about the environments here is in the original Final Fantasy7, it was the pre-rendered backgrounds. So Final Fantasy7's backgrounds have always looked amazing. And it always had this exact vibe of this like... Because they don't need to animate.

They're just static. Yeah, like dirty future kind of vibe going on. And it's just beautifully replicated here in, you know, 2000, whatever it was, five, I want to say, when Advent Children came out. And that was the movie. That was the movie. Again, that's... Again, how much I've loved. this franchise without even playing it. I'm like, I bought that DVD immediately because I love

all the characters. I have the, I have friends that had that DVD and watch the one with them. And this game looks better than that movie. And it's more true to the spirit of Final Fantasy 7 so far that I've experienced than that movie was, which is shocking. So we're talking a lot about the visuals. The sound. Oh, dude. Not just the sound effects, but the music. Yeah, the music specifically, I think this is going to be up there. Did you feel when you were playing the music sort of dynamically ramped up in certain moments. So that's the most impressed. Exactly. And this I feel like Final Fantasy 15 did a really good job of that. But this one is, oh yeah. Honestly,

this reminds me a lot of Spider-Man. It's those feelings of like you jump off the building and it like changes how it's playing. But for this, it's iconic themes. Yeah. And like it's like when you're transitioning in and out of battle, like the ways in which they use themes that are iconic and themes that I've heard even being something who I've not played a, I've not played a crazy amount of Final Fantasy 7. I've heard that soundtrack like a lot because that soundtrack is a great soundtrack and the ways in which they take the battle theme and integrate it in ways that you wouldn't have thought of. And so like you're not even, you're not just hearing the battle theme in battles. You're hearing the battle themes as you're adventuring

through like the maker reactor and like the ways in which they kind of have that have the subtle moments of the soundtrack or they're taking the soundtrack and integrating them in subtly. It's motifs. Yeah, motifs. It's things that come back like subtly throughout different arrangements of classic songs you know. Yeah. There's like six variations. of the battle thing. There's six variations of the boss theme. They're not exactly six, but like in our time playing this, we played what, like three, four

bosses, and every single one had a different theme, but it's the same thing. But different levels of ramped up, like there's a boss that we face later, and it is a straight up fucking rock version of the boss theme. It is so hype. But I want to go back a little bit here

and talk about some of the changes that they made. So gameplay-wise, when you look at it, it kind of kind of seems like, okay, they're taking either a more Final Fantasy 15 approach or more Kingdom Hearts approach where it's action-based. It's actually not. I was in my menus at a serve. Like, once we got to the more difficult parts of the game, I was in my menus for a good amount of time for maybe as long as I was actually in the action fighting. Why is that?

So the thing is, when you look at this, like when you're just watching the video, it seems a lot more like it's kind of hack and slashy. Right? Right. It looks very DMC style. Yeah. And it's not. If you play that way, you're going to lose really, really bad. Yeah.

You have to manage what you're doing. You have to manage the different elements. So, like, each enemy has, like, weaknesses, and there are different elements to what the attacks are, right? And so you have to essentially look at your team, right? And if it's Cloud, if it's Barrett and, let's say, like, Tifa, right, on a team, you have to pay attention to their abilities. Like you would, and I assume, like, the original game, right?

You have to pay attention to their abilities and think, like, okay, what are the ways in which to implement these attacks that are going to take out my enemy's weakness? And so because of that, you're then switching between characters, but then there is the ATB gauge, is that it called? Active time battle, yeah. Active time battle gauge, right? Once you use an ability, that thing goes down by one bar, and then you have to wait for that thing to recharge.

It's a brilliant twist on the original Final Fantasy 7 type of battle system where I feel like people are going to be pleasantly surprised that loved that game of like, oh, it is a modern version of that system. It just plays a little different, and you're a bit more active of a player doing things. I'm very interested to see somebody that is newer to Final Fantasy, how well does this game give you like a tutorial on those systems translate

on all the final fantasy isms because there is quite a bit of things of learning spells and what do the spells do and what do they mean and all that? It was like that like like um... I get overwhelmed easily guys. Yeah like having played Kingdom Hearts right like the names of the attacks are kind of the same right

like fire, Faraga, Kure like all that stuff. Curig. Yeah like all that stuff kind of is is still there and you're still activating those abilities like in the menu like in the in the commands menu right which is the many that you have access to as you're playing. And is it like a quick pause sort of thing? Yeah. Yeah.

It's like super slow motion. So here's the thing is the game. I'm like, play on this bad boy. Because I want to like show you an example here about like having it teaches you pretty well. So you can see down over here. You know, I apologize for interrupting Tim.

I'm along for the ride, dude. Yeah. I'll get my feet up. So over here, obviously this is like your inputs, right? Of like what's going on. You really only have two attacks that any character can do. So you have square is your basic attack where you're kind of just mashing that thing. That is devil make cry style.

You are just kind of like action, action, action. You'll then have your triangle attack that every character has a different move, like a different thing. So with Tifa, she's a boxer, that'll be kind of her upper cut. And it's like the longer you hold it, the like, you know, more powerful it will be in like whatever. When you're hitting X though, everybody still has a different X, right? So X, you mean square? Or square, yeah, sorry. But it is just a basic attack.

So Tifa, that's just her punch. Cloud, that's just his slash. Barrett, that's just his shooting, right? But the triangle will be kind of their special. It's kind of like thinking about like a side B in Smash Brothers, right? Where everyone's A is like, they're a similar. It might be a sword or a punch, but like it's a jab. Right here, like if you look on the bottom left, it has the button prompts, right?

And if you press triangle, it says charge. And we're also covering that part chat, so sorry, or not in the chat, but whoever. Yeah, our cameras probably cover it. That's a good point, right. But if you. I can full screen it. Okay, cool. Yeah.

If you press triangle, which is charged as Barrett, you then do like a charge. The meter, the meter that you're seeing here, right? It'll start to charge a bit more. Like, every time you hit triangle, he does the thing, he goes, and it goes up about this much. And then you do it again, this much. And it keeps going. Once it's full, you can hit triangle again. It's a super powerful attack.

Oh, man. I love that attack so much. And it's really fucking satisfying. So those are Barrett's normal attacks, right? Whereas Cloud, you hit triangle, and it does a different thing called. Yeah, Punisher mode. So he has two different. modes. There's Punisher mode and

operator. Operator is kind of just your basic, you're running around and just slashing and stuff but from a distance you don't need to worry too much. Punisher mode, you're doing a lot more damage. Up front brawler style. But you have less options for defense. So with Punisher mode on, you can't dodge roll. With operator mode you can dodge roll. So you're constantly kind of switching styles and like, you know, just battle styles to be able to maneuver a bit.

And it also kind of gives that of comboing too because like if you just you can tap square as cloud and you just do like regular attacks right but you can do like square square square hit triangle change to punisher mode and then that actually adds kind of some variability to the actual combat of the game when you're in it as opposed to like just going into the menus got it yeah when you were earlier you were talking about bless knowing your team and how to focus on certain weaknesses yeah when you say weakness is are we talking like an overall elemental weakness or are we talking like we need to target the legs like When you're fighting a thing, is it...

It's both. You can actually, like, fight this one area. Let me show you this right here. So to finish out the kind of battle system real quick. So we got the triangle and square, right, but then there's also the X. You hit the X, you go into the commands menu, and that's when it becomes a bit more traditional Final Fantasy. Yeah. So you see it here.

Yep, right here. Do you see how everything slows down? It slows down enough where you can actually kind of think about what you're doing. That's where you cast your spells. That's where you kind of, like, can maneuver and decide what you're doing. You can also in that menu, I think it goes into it again. The charging thing also kind of reminds you of a cackarot, Dragon Balls E Caccarot,

where you can sort of charge your key. With Barrett, it's more so like you tap it, and then he charges like once, and then he uses it again, and then he's full. So when you go into the X menu, right, this is what it looks like. You got the abilities, you got your spells, whatever. Abilities are kind of just like even more special moves for Cloud to use a sword or Tifa to punch differently and whatever. More particle effects.

Exactly. Exactly. There are a lot of abilities. This is your ATB. This is the meter he was tied up. Constantly building as you're playing. You can use these for your different abilities, and it's just a constant thing that's happening.

Spells, that's where you're using your cure, you're using your elemental things, whatever. If you see here, you have the left and right, right. You go into this menu, if you hit left or right, you are then going over to the different characters, and this is a bit more like Final Fantasy 15, where you can control your party to do different things for coordinated. Got it, got it.

So you're running in really actiony, but then you go into the slow-mo, and then it is a bit more tactical and Yeah Dragon Age style Exactly Dragon Age acquisition Yeah yeah

But what's really cool is I want to move forward a bit So You talk about like what's it mean about like The strengths and weaknesses and shit right So the game does a really good job Of introducing you to the characters And what their strengths and weaknesses are This is a perfect example

Barrett when he's in this is the first time You really get to control him in the game And Cloud can't get up there Right? Because he only has a sword So you have him and it's like, oh, when enemies are out of reach, I have to use ranged weapons. Not that that's fucking rocket science. But the game eases you in to understanding that.

And then eventually we start getting into situations. Yeah. Where things are shooting you from above and there's people on the ground and you need to. And you're dealing with them both. At the same time. So you need Barrett to be shooting down the, you know, high things. Up in the air. While Cloud's running in and the boss fights function like that a lot.

So the Scorpion boss, there's situations where you want one of them on the legs, one of them on the legs, one of them on the tail. Got it. You know? And the coolest thing is you can switch between the characters at any time, seamlessly. By hitting the D-pad. And you switch between them. So they're doing it here in this boss fight, like, well, that just cut.

But you could just switch directly over, shoot a couple times with Barrett, switch back over to Cloud, keeps slicing. And it's so satisfying. And that's an ability right here. This is a particle effect dream, man. It's so weird this. No, the game has so many particle effects. But yeah, you see right here, right the boss jumps to the wall. And so now, yeah.

Barrett. Like, Barrett's really the only option here where you're taking him down from the far. Yeah, Cal is pretty useless here. But now, now, so are you consciously having to take care of Cloud when he's? No. Okay. So when you're not playing as a character, AI takes over. So that's the thing.

And do they get fucked up? Yes. They'll get hit and stop. Oh, yeah. Okay. So you do need to care for them. You need to cure them. Yeah, you need to heal them a lot.

You need to heal them. You have a lot of items. You have to be very aware of what's going on. Because that's an issue where, like, toward my, when I got to a later part of the game, and it was a lot harder and my characters were dying, right? It was a thing of like, oh, shoot, I'm going to have to really pay attention to what my life gauges are for each of my characters and switch to my characters that I know have healing abilities and keep track of that. Got it.

And so that's why for me, like, toward the harder parts of the game, I was in the menu, legit, like, half the time, trying to figure out, like, okay, like, legit freezing time being like, okay, let me assess the situation. This guy's weak to this. I know Cloud has, like, a fire attack. I know this character over here has heal. I know this character can keep distance and there's just me switching back and forth activating spells, activating abilities, and managing my gauges.

And at that, once you get to that level, that point, right, it really does feel like a turn-based GRP, even though like the Corvett is active. Like you are, you know, you're hack and slashing. It's turn-based, but without the chance to stop and think. Like, you were still actively at all times.

You're dodgy when you need to. Straight up, it's patting your head and rubbing in your stomach. That type of thing where you're constantly just, I'm super good at that. But it's very satisfying. Trying to do all the things at once. And it's very, very, very satisfying.

At first, it was a bit daunting to me because I even had a point where the person that was done in the game for us, like, she came to me and she was like, hey, just a heads up. You can take out this specific enemy by doing this thing. And I was like, I didn't even think about that because there's so many options to which I can do and so many different types of enemies and so many. Like, there's so much in this game as far as the combat is concerned that, you know, kept me thinking and kept me active the whole time. I was very impressed with that.

It's the type of game that you really need to pay attention to the tutorials as they come up. There is no tutorial where it's just kind of like, we're going to go through everything at once. It's as you're going through chapter one, things will pop up every once in a while. There's like, here's how you deal with this type of enemy. And like, you need to just kind of learn all the different things. At some point, Cloud learns a move called, I'm blanking on what it's called. But you can like detect. Assess.

Assess. That's what it is. You can use assess. You use some of your active time battle points. to use this move and then you know what the weaknesses are. Okay. And then you're like, oh, okay, here's how I need to strategize this boss fight or whatever. Now, again, is this the, when you assess the weaknesses, is it, the legs are more vulnerable to this attack?

To fire attacks. Okay, cool. And they'll straight up tell you that. Okay. And then it's on you to be like, okay, I'm going to have, you know, Tifa running in and punching this thing while I have barrack, you know, shooting or whatever the hell. Yeah, these are actually the guys that they were, that, um, the lady that was dead when the game told me about where she was like, oh yeah, you have to switch to punitive, oh, yeah, you have to switch to a certain mode and then do a certain thing. They warned you about this. Yeah.

So like these motherfuckers jump at you and there's like a counter you use and it like is their weakness. Got it. Okay. So yeah, that's the weakness that she told me about. And I was like, okay, cool. And was that like your parry or whatever? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Which is like a perry you can use in Punisher mode. That's sick. So we got to play, uh, like, the, the whole of chapter one, the whole of chapter two, we jumped forward, we did seven, and then we did a little bit of a later one that was just a boss fight. And that really gave us a good idea of how the game kind of progresses, the scale of the game, but also the scalability of the battle system.

It starts off fairly simple. And when you jump forward, I was like, there was parts where I am struggling right now. Yeah, no, legit. I didn't beat the last part of the demo because, well, partly because you were already finished and I didn't want to keep you waiting outside. But then also, like, I died quite a few times to a boss. That's a sick excuse right there. That just kept getting me.

By my third time, I was like, all right, I'm done, I'm out of here. I'm going to go back to San Francisco. Oh, no, it was here. It was here, yeah. It was here, that's right. So here we got to, this is later on in the game. I think this is Chapter 7, but we got to be Tifa, right? So now we have three members in the team.

So you can switch actively between each one whenever you want. And what's crazy is like they're doing such a good job, reimagining what FomnC-7 was. This is a car with machine gun hands with feet. And they make it make sense in this world. It's bizarre. And there's story beats that they've kind of changed. Dude, the story feels grounded and real and relevant in a way where I was like,

shoot, this is actually very interesting. How's the voice acting? It's great. I love it, man. Yeah. I fucking love it. It's awesome. Like, the character, like, look at Cloud's arms.

I was, like, obsessed with Cloud's arms. Like, once you actually, they see them, like, right? There's, like, a realisticness to how, like, he's kind of ripped, because he's still, like, very skinny. Oh, sure. Like, he has that kind of build to him. And legit, I couldn't stop staring at this man's arm. The thing is, like, I feel like the dialogue has been tweaked to make it less corny.

And when something is corny, it's, they kind of know. The characters act as if they're in the same world. Like, there'll be times, Barrett, the original Barrett, based off Mr. T. Yeah, I didn't, you know? Every time I had dialogue with the original Barrett, when I did try Final Face of Seven, I was like, I don't like this guy. But in this game, it's like, it's still over the top. But he'll say some shit.

He's like, can you feel the planet crying out? pain. And then the other character is kind of like, chill. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, it like, so they didn't take away the character, but like they contextualized it to be. Yeah, like it felt like they really did a good job of actually grounding what's going on, which like I, so I didn't realize like the original Final Fantasy 7 was about like environmental like destruction and activism, right? And the ways in which they kind of communicate that in this game, or the ways they at least they've communicated it in the early parts of the game that we played, right? Like, I would.

I was really into it. Like I was engaged. I was curious on like, you know, what the solutions were because they had like presented certain sides of it. They had presented like, you know, all these different aspects of corporations and all this stuff where I was like, man, like Final Fantasy 7 is real. Like that's a real story right there that you guys are telling. So some of the things that I didn't love about it are in the demo we played at least

a lot in the environments while looking amazing look very similar. And that's because they are very similar. You're kind of just doing the same thing a lot in the early parts of the original game. Like you're in a lot of these types of environments. And it's like, sure, it's beautiful. But how much of it is, at some point is it going to just kind of be like, all right. Is it going to be all these blues kind of colors, you know, palettes? Yeah.

And knowing the original game, it probably is. You know? Not that that's the worst thing ever because it is, there is still a lot of differences room to room, right? But the other thing is, like, they did stay a little, in my opinion, too, faith, with the minigame type stuff you have to do, and those feel dated, right? Like, there was the bit with the, pulled up and down on the...

Oh, yeah. It's like, this isn't fun. Yeah. Okay, I was trying to figure out what you're talking about. But, yeah, that kind of stuff isn't, like, the best. It didn't really annoy me. It's not, and this thing is, like, that's my only complaint.

Yeah, it's, like, it's kind of hard to pick it apart because they did a really great job. Like, the one thing I'll say is that it's very linear in a way where I don't have a problem with games I want to be linear, but for an RPG and for like a game that feels like it's, it wants to be, or for a game that has so much in it, that feels like it's, it has so much in it, I kind of wish that they, that there was more opportunity to kind of like walk around and explore more, which there might be in the parts that we didn't play.

And that's my thing is I imagine in the full game there will be. But you went from like one, two to seven, right? You went from chapters one and two all the way to seven. Yeah, exactly. And then I think to like, I know, like, just from having played the original, it is in between that that you would get kind of the more. A little bit. Yeah.

So, it opens them a lot, actually. And I imagine that this one will do that as well. But it does feel a lot more similar to Uncharted 4 than I expected it to. Like, the bits where you do get to kind of walk around feel as open as wherever that location was in Uncharted 4. You know what I'm talking about when you get the Jeep, right? Yeah. This is the mini game that I'm talking about. And it's like this thing where, Tifa is like giving you control.

She's like, three, two, one. And you need to like, you see how it's down on the left and up on the right? You need to do it at the right time. It's just busy work. It's just things to do. Can we pretend I did it and just not have me do it? Exactly. But here is something that, like, the video they sent us, the audio mix,

like they had the music lower that I'd want it. When we were playing, the music was fucking dangling. You can't hear it that great, but it's the boss theme. Jell plays on some really nice TV. This rock thing. The boss fights were so fun. Like, I was not expecting to enjoy the boss fights as much as I did. But you feel really involved in everything that's going on.

Yeah, so this was the most challenging boss fight for me. You had more issue with the other one that we did. This one I thought was a breeze for me. But this to me is a perfect example of why this game succeeds. The gameplay backs up the epicness, backs up big set pieces. This is a boss fight that requires great use of all three characters at different times. You're on this bridge, this big Airbuster bad guys here. And he keeps switching up what his moves are.

And as he's doing that, you have to switch between each character. Because each one is impervious to certain of those moves? It's that, but it's more just kind of like, like, oh, man, he's like, see, now he's far. So it's like, okay, Barrett has to get him or they summoned Leviathan back there. Oh, I was about to say. Oh, dude, we haven't to talk about summons or limit and all that stuff. Yeah. The hell's going on.

There's so much going on. There's so much in the game. Like, I, like, it feels like at all times. there's like one more element that you're not thinking of that is that is available to you but you know there's just so many to you yeah it's like oh shoot I could use this or I could use this or I could pull this out right like he has this limit he's about to use it right to to cross slash the airbus yeah and like look at the animation in this game is so awesome gorgeous and and I will say man like so in the background over here you can kind of see there's drones and it's the the the Shinra president kind of like talking to you and like that happens in the original game kind of like it's him talking to you but this game modernizes it and makes it like oh no it's he's not actually there on the bridge with you talking because that

doesn't make any goddamn sure yeah he's using drones to talk with you and fuck with you and like I don't want to like even get into the story beats of this but this guy that fuck me up the way they present the story in this remake is so much more clear than the original game that it just makes sense and you believe in what the characters are going through the added scenes that they they have like throughout any little any single beat that we've seen I'm like this is making this a stronger game. Were there any elements of talking to NPCs?

You kind of walk, we didn't see too many NPCs. We saw a little bit earlier in this. Yeah, yeah, I saw that little kind of commune area or whatever. Yeah, hold on. But I don't know if, I'm thinking more along the lines of like side quests, you know. So we, I imagine that the, that's something would be that we didn't get to demo. Okay, yeah, I didn't see. But yeah, so you kind of walk through here and then like dialogue.

Definitely not a commune. Yeah. It's more of a disaster area, I guess. So, so yeah, exactly, exactly. But this is, anytime like you walk by people and they're talking, little dialogue will pop up. Which I really like. Okay. How many, how much level up being were you all doing?

It was satisfying. Yeah. You know, it's like I did constantly feel like I was getting more powerful. I was always collecting something interesting. Another thing that I don't want to say was a con to it. It was just so far in my experience, it's not how I normally like to play games. I don't really have any incentive to explore. Like, there are very few corners that when you walk around them actually have something worthwhile.

Okay. Yeah, I feel that too. It's like there's one kind of set of boxes that you can slash at and then, like, there'll be something in it. Let me see if I can try to find it. But like, anything else, there's no reason to even check. Like, if you look over and you can kind of see, like, oh, there's nothing over there, there's actually nothing over there. Yeah, like the one thing I was trying to explore to find, we were potions or like healing things. I was always like, slash these boxes and find it inside.

Like, I never really felt like I was finding anything unique. But also, I do wonder if it's one of those things of just, like, the specific areas we're thrown into to explore. Like, I wonder how that stuff plays in when you're maybe, like, not in, like, a combat area or, like, a specific, like, mission. Were you all while you are, and by the way, I don't know why I said level-uping, but that's what I'm going to say now. It's a leveling up. When you were level-uping earlier, were you all unlocking abilities? new moves and stuff. And granted, the way that we played the demo,

they really kind of just, it's like, you beat it, and then you moved to the next chapter, and then anything you did, you lost. It was like a safe file. So it's like, it was hard to tell what we're learning versus what is just given to us.

Because, yeah, we go from the beginning of the game, just cloud, then you get Barrett, and then they jump you forward, and oh, Tiva's a new team. And then they jumped us forward even more, and Ayrth is in your team. Yeah. And this was the one that I didn't really get to

too much of an experience with because I fucked this boss off, boss up so fucking fast. Yeah. And how did you do it? Because they were killing me. He's a video game player. No, it's not that. It's just I lucked the hell out.

Like he has these big moves where like poison kind of like. Yeah. And I got poisoned every time. He got hit every time. I never got hit. And it was just by chance that I was like standing on. I'm all about erith's fucking move set graphics and colors. She's dope, man.

A lot of glyphs. So sick. A lot of maids shit going on. Glyph. Oh, man, I love me a glyph. Oh, we haven't even talked about the pressured and staggered thing, right? Where you're, like, building up that meter to then stagger your... Look at those flowers. What's going on there?

She's a little flower girl. While, you all were mentioning Punisher Mode and all these sort of different fighting styles, those fighting styles, are they absolutely like necessary, or is it more of a... Yeah, you could not use Punisher Mode if you don't want, if you prefer the other mode, but it's going to be a lot harder.

I mean, when you said the woman was recommending, you should punish her mode on these guys? Is it one of those things where you're like, no, but that's not the way I play. I'd rather play the other way. No. It's definitely like you're going to want to use that. You have to. It's not you have to, but it's the difference of, oh, you can

get rid of this enemy in 15 seconds and only lose this much life, or you can spend two minutes and lose that. Like, it's more of a special ability than anything than like an actual different way of fighting, right? Where like, you know, it's not a whole like methodology like actually how I attack enemies in games. It's like, no. Yeah, like for you're going to do this. For Barrett, you're going to want to press, you're going to want to use your triangle to use your overcharge so they can take out enemies. And you're going to want to use the uppercut, right? It's like a thing that is, well, I guess for Barrett, it's like a thing that's charging you get to use, right? For, for, um, Tifa. Was there uppercut charger? I never, I didn't really use much of Tifa. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was not charged. It was just, it was a strong hit that like kind of like, but after you after you, after you use it. After you use it. Does it then have to recharge? No.

You can use it. You can use a lot, yeah. It's like a long animation. Gotcha. Okay. Man, guys, video games are cool.

Like I, right. Yeah. Looking at this, this looks like such. It's a video game. This looks like such a fever dream of, oh,

the new video leaked and then everybody is like, yeah, but that's fucking like in-game cinematic bullshit. It's not actually in-engine game play. Dude, we fucking play this. This is Ifret. This is goddamn iffrit. This is goddamn ifret.

Fucking people up in. Look at this. This is. Look at that big boy! Look at this! Oh my goodness! And fucking Erit's beautiful man, like... And then you have summit abilities.

Right here, they're like, did one of the characters say, like, try this one on for size. Dude, there are so... There's a lot of that stuff. There's a lot. There was a fun moment where after you beat one of the bosses, Barrett goes, do-dood-dood do-dood-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-. Oh, cool.

That's gonna start doing that for all of them now, because they did that in Final Fantasy 15 as well. Yeah. Yeah. The one that looks like James Fawkes. That's one thing that is a bummer that the victory theme seems to be missing. Yeah. And it's sad because I love the victory theme.

Got a lot of it. Now, because one thing I really enjoyed about Final Fantasy 15 was the loop because I really enjoyed those side missions of go take down this one guy over here. There's a, not a bounty or like kind of, it was very Witcher style almost where they'd be like, hey, there's a creature over here, got to go kill it, got to go bring it back. We'll see. things over here. We didn't get any hint of that type of stuff in what we played.

What we played was very linear. And from playing the original game, that's what this is. Like, we kind of played through the bit where you take down the first tower and then, what are they called? The reactors? The reactor. You climb the tower, you unlock the first world. It jumps forward.

No, it's not like that. Like, you bomb the first reactor. Okay. And then it jumps forward and you're going after the another reactor. And it's like, so that's what a lot of the samey like locations, like, because you're literally going through the same thing. Yeah. Just a different one of the same thing.

We didn't get to play any of the stuff in between. So I think that's where we will get that kind of like, we've even seen it in the trailers already. Like there's going to be a lot of moments to, you know, deviate from going through a complete straight line. But you, I mean, we'll see. I just don't expect them. Yeah, that's like my one hope.

Like I hope it is more than just like you are going through those areas in a linear fashion and going through like the beats just to get to another one of like the React. Like, I really hope it's not that. I don't know. Because I feel like that would be the only way in which, like, this game could be above her. In my opinion, I kind of hope they do that. Really?

Yeah, because, like, so far, I'm really loving how epic everything feels. And everything feels as important as the last thing. And I feel like, hey, man, there's all this shit we got to deal with. Oh, but wait, let's go, let's go, you know, if I can deal with this bullshit. Like, it just doesn't feel believable for the stakes of which they're dealing with. That helps a lot more with pacing as well. Like, when you as a developer can sort of, sculpt what this game experience will be like and know when these, it's, it's like a stand-up set or something.

Like, this is where this big epic moment's going to happen. And then there's going to be a lull, but then this next big epic moment's going to happen where with an open world game, you can go fuck off for 30 minutes and do something else. It won't feel as important, you know. We'll see. We'll see. So far, I think this game is going to be extremely special. And I'm hoping that the, you know, it being a part one isn't going to hinder it as much as it potentially can.

because we got hints in this that they're changing things up in a way that I'm like oh fuck like I get what they're doing here and it's gonna be real good But I can see a lot of people being like all right well when's when's the rest of the game? I'm all in for all the story bits Like it seems I got the vibe that it's gonna wrap up nicely in terms like it being a part one and so like with that expectation in mind Right like I'm I'm looking forward to it I think I I have faith that's gonna do a good job of that You're thinking like a 15 to a 20-hour adventure or? Here's the thing. Tell me the thing. They've been saying it's as long as they, like this part of Final Fantasy 7 is going to be an entire modern Final Fantasy game.

And I imagine that this is going to net out somewhere around 24 hours. Yeah, that was, I was going to say 20 to 25 hours. Which is like for me what Kingdom Arch 3 was. So I can see that kind of being the same type of length. And man, I'm fucking in. Like that 24 hours of this? Oh yeah. Let's go. You know what I'm excited about?

Buying this and then being able to use that same copy on PS5. You're here to hear it here first, guys. You can buy one. No, that's totally fake. We don't know. We can kind of expect it, though. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been our first impressions for Final Fantasy 7 remake. I'm sure we'll be talking about this game a lot more in the coming weeks.

Weeks because this game comes out in weeks. Sure, it might be like, you know, eight or nine. Okay, I was going to say how many weeks? Damn, but I'm not that much, though. Geez, Louise. I thought I was thinking March already. I got Super Hornie. Oh, it was supposed to be.

This game was supposed to come out in six days. Ah, freak. Got it. As of recording. We were going to be, we would have already played last of us. Oh, my God. We were going to, about to play this game. Doom Eternal we would have played last year.

Animal Crossing. The past was a crazy time. We were supposed to play Watchdog's Leisure already. Oh, man. All right. Until next time. Love you guys.