final fantasy vii: remake update/astral chain update/whatever
hello again. i'm all over the place right now!
i finished final fantasy vii: remake the week before last, and it was very good. so good, in fact, that it's been hard to transition to anything else. my last blog i made was the first game i attempted to dive into, the misadventures of tron bonne. and for a time, i was satisfied. unfortunately, it didn't jive with me for the time being—most of my comments from the last blog ended up being true, while i enjoyed the story and the aesthetics of the thing, the choppy gameplay (and the gameplay itself) never really held my attention for very long. so i'm placing that one back on the shelf, i'll wait for inspiration to hit with that one. (the article that i tried to find by games critic jeremy parish in the last blog may have never surfaced, but he just recently posted a wonderful restrospect video on the first game in the megaman legends series that i highly recommend checking out.)
so, while i was wading through my backlog to “spark joy”, i decided to whittle away at the remaining trophies in final fantasy vii: remake, and am now down to only 7 remaining! all of them will be completed in the hard-mode, which is what i will talk about, right, now,,
the hard mode in final fantasy vii: remake is very enjoyable so far, the big changes being that enemies scale with your level (so now everyone's maxed out, so, that's, cool,,), and you cannot use your items anymore—the idea is to focus much more heavily on materia management. i'm about four chapters in now and enjoying the challenge and have an even greater appreciation for the battle system. never before have i been more actively excited about getting into a battle-encounter in a final fantasy game more than this! so, that'll probably be just a static thing i'm playing for a while.
while i've cycled through a couple games in my hunt for the next long-haul, one that i've returned to several times and will probably stick with is platinum games' astral chain—so soon after nier: automata i have been seduced by their silky-smooth action-based gameplay... and i gotta say, this is way more technical than nier ever was. i'm admittedly not completely familiar with platinum games, the only one i've played being nier and the hour or two i was able to spend with bayonetta on my xbox 360 that one summer when my folks weren't around the house... sigh... so, perhaps this is a greater indicator of the depth they're capable of. and soon i will have intimate knowledge of the switch port of wonderful 101 that i kickstarted only a couple months ago! (oh, i also played star fox: zero and star fox guard, but.. let's pretend that zero never happened [i wink, solemnly, at guard, a game that would have been a perfectly-designed multiplayer 3ds game]..).
so, astral chain rules. i'm only a few hours in but it whips, literally, and is probably the closest i've ever been to feeling like i was in an anime? the greatest disappointment i have in the game is the silent protag with the chatty sibling who does all the talking for them (they should have just combined them.. it sucks..), but other than that it is so high-octane that i cannot play it before bed by at least a full hour. it is also has perhaps the smoothest framerate i've ever seen on a portable-mode switch?
for the time being, as i continue to unlock small bits like npc bloodtypes (yeah) and use swords to hack energy currents flowing through my foes' musculature, i'm gonna stick with this and see where it goes. while it lacks character in the avatar, the rest of the game absolutely gushes charm and attention to detail. there are some fantastic blogs about the game that platinum released over several months detailing different facets of the game that i intend to check out while i work on my playthrough as well!
anyway.. i gotta get back to my restrictions of writing much, much less on these, but it's been a while since i've typed out something, so.. excuse the meandering and grammatical whirlygig before you.
