I had a lot of fun with this: deeply nostalgic but also fresh & modern feeling. I could nit-pick some changes, and I'm still a little grumpy about splitting up the game into 3 parts, but I really enjoyed this & I'm looking forward to the next ones.
I am interested in how the mechanical evolution of JRPGs from small pixel characters on a big pixel map to modern over-the-shoulder-camera action games has impacted story-telling. To me, the older style gave a better sense of scale & scope and helped sell the stories as epic: you were a small character in a big world, fighting against enormous & mysterious forces. The modern style is more personal, and better supports nuanced & intimate character development, but it doesn't as easily convey the grand scope of the setting IMHO. And while FFVIIR does take specific moments to pull back the camera and show us Midgar, I confess I do sometimes get bored of feeling like I'm just a character running down a series of hallways.
That's not really a criticism (except the hallways bit: I felt the same about FF XIII, and SE's map design has certainly gotten better since then but it still needs to improve), just an observation about ludo-narrative synergy (that's probably the most pompous phrase I'll use this year), and how the mechanical design of a game's systems affects & is affected by its storytelling. This is a case of "something lost, something gained": I do miss how grand the older pixel-art FF games felt, but I also really enjoyed how intimate the character interactions felt in Remake.
I am interested in how the mechanical evolution of JRPGs from small pixel characters on a big pixel map to modern over-the-shoulder-camera action games has impacted story-telling. To me, the older style gave a better sense of scale & scope and helped sell the stories as epic: you were a small character in a big world, fighting against enormous & mysterious forces. The modern style is more personal, and better supports nuanced & intimate character development, but it doesn't as easily convey the grand scope of the setting IMHO. And while FFVIIR does take specific moments to pull back the camera and show us Midgar, I confess I do sometimes get bored of feeling like I'm just a character running down a series of hallways.
That's not really a criticism (except the hallways bit: I felt the same about FF XIII, and SE's map design has certainly gotten better since then but it still needs to improve), just an observation about ludo-narrative synergy (that's probably the most pompous phrase I'll use this year), and how the mechanical design of a game's systems affects & is affected by its storytelling. This is a case of "something lost, something gained": I do miss how grand the older pixel-art FF games felt, but I also really enjoyed how intimate the character interactions felt in Remake.