I never played FF7! There's a lot of FFs I never played, the ones I did play are 3, 4, 5 and 6. Then there's 9, the Tactics games and 12: Revenant Wings. Apparently FF9 was a return to the style of old FFs unlike FF7 and FF8!
I think the first RPG I played was Pokémon, I didn't really play other RPGs as a kid. Even when I did they were usually other Pokémon-like games.
Interesting that they'd release the janky Engrish translation like that, FF7 seems rather infamous for its awful translation. Weird since FF6 and FF8 both had much better ones. FF9 seemed downright well-translated!
It's funny, some of what you say about replaying FF7 is how I feel replaying MARDEK! I suppose it'd be for many people, MARDEK was some people's first real RPG.
That whole crossdressing sequence from FF7 seems rather infamous. These days they could probably still do it, they'd just need to approach it differently. I get the impression back then developers would just throw that kind of stuff in and not really bother trying to understand the niche cultures they're putting in, these days people would expect devs to know what they're talking about before putting something like that in.
I'm not sure why the models look so weird in FF7, it looks pretty awful to me! But I do know that they actually did make very elaborate 3D rendered areas and then used still images from those, highly compressed them and used those for the prerendered backgrounds. A lot of games back then (like Resident Evil!!) did that to have a high visual fidelity using 3D without needing all the 3D rendering in the actual game, which the hardware obviously couldn't handle. Sadly those original 3D environments are often lost to time, but nowadays cleverly programmed AIs can automatically upscale them to HD! It's all quite impressive.
These old games often seem to have super weird and random stuff in it that's also easily missed. These days that kind of stuff wouldn't fly for a big AAA production, where things are driven more by deadlines and economics than untamed raw developer passion or whatever.
I want to get in a bath with a bunch of friendly and burly men!! Why can't I be like Cloud?!
It also seems like these old games often have super unclear and janky writing that doesn't really add up!!
I think there is a lot of value in efficient writing, writing that can do a lot with little, rather than using a lot of dialogue to little effect. I suppose the ratio of how much needs to be established per line does differ from genre to genre, visual novels can get a way with a lot of fluff, whereas puzzle games or story-light games need to do a lot with a little.
Part of my issue with some bits in Atonal Dreams is that some dialogue boxes don't have any reason to exist beyond being set-up for some other dialogue box, often a joke. Not really furthering or establishing a character in and of themselves, while also existing in a larger whole rather than being a self-contained gag conversation. That stuff's usually better reserved for optional dialogues I think, that's how a lot of visual novels handle examining extraneous environment.
I get the impression that starting with FF6 these games all have big, heavily-scripted and quite spectacular setpiece intros! Though I have always liked how you instead go for the imagination/dream intros!
FF's always had a weird relation with sci-fi and cyberpunk stuff. FF1 randomly had some advanced sci-fi stuff in it, FF4 had those really modern things like that techno tower or everything on the moon, FF6 had Magitek... FF9 was more like old FF games, but the last disc goes right into sci-fi with alien planets and whatnot! Weird! But then even classic RPG stuff like Ultima and D&D always blended some sci-fi stuff into their palette. Why, even MARDEK did it, that originator of all Fantasy!!
The bit with the 5 gil is an example of the kind of super obscure nonsense that I hate about these old games! Did you know FF9 has an extensive sidequests where you can backtrack out of the final dungeon like 9 times to talk to some random NPC's increasingly big family?? Stupid!! [LINK]
The romantic choices is interesting, prior games just wrote preset romances or didn't bother with them, but then FF7 lets you actually pick and choose. Something that some other games have done too, like the Medabots games! And then these routes also often turn out to be super obscure and all about obtaining enough RELATIONSHIP POINTS. This Pokémon fangame I'm playing now has a relationship score with most important NPCs, which is apparently used to determine whether I see their special endings and can tag with them in multi-battles.
I wonder whether subconsciously the wanting a mother surrogate thing also applies to men attracted to men? Can I get a daddy who's also a mommy?!
Peerless?! That's a weird name for a status effect! Reminds me of "Trouble" from FF9! (Apparently it acts as a short-lasting total damage immunity!)
I'd say Pokémon has more status ailments than MARDEK does! The big five, then there's confusion, flinches, attract, curses, all sorts of weird things caused by very specific moves!
What I notice also is that these old games have super bizarre enemy designs! I do like that.
A lot of fanmade mods for games like FF7 and such do actually implement all the game's mechanics much more, and reward the player for engaging with them more while punishing boarish brute-force unga bunga play. I suppose Atonal Dreams is somewhat similar to that, you can't just bash your head against enemies all the time, sometimes the player needs to think. I like that, personally!
I always found the ATB in FF6 super messy, in that game the ATB is always progressing, even during attacks, so it's super hard to get a read on turn orders... And in FF9 Regen is always ticking up HP, even during super long attack animations, which is dumb!!
Materia sound confusing!! It seems like FF6, FF7 and FF8 had an ever-increasing use of this sort of system, after which FF9 went back to the FF4 style and then FF10 did its own thing again.
I do like segments where you get a sudden party member shake-up. Something that I'd find cool would be like if Pierce very briefly joined the party, like after the Brigrrnds kick his ass or something so they must form a TEMPORARY TRUCE before he UNEXPECTEDLY BACK-STABS them. But that'd probably require a lot of rewriting and might totally not fit the overall flow of the story!
I always found Blue Magic stuff tedious! I prefer games where they make the process easy, like having to scan enemies to get their skills, or just defeat them normally... I did like how EBF5 did it by making you catch them like in Pokémon, but with a much less RNG and more in-depth system.
This comment is long!!
1
Tobias 1104~2Y
This comment is indeed long! Which I absolutely hate because I always try and keep my own comments and blog posts short and to the point! Always!! I'm sure this one will be very brief indeed!!!
I'm surprised you haven't played what I'd consider some of the 'most important' Final Fantasies (especially VII), but have played some others, and have apparently seen mods and things of the ones you haven't played?? VIII is probably the one I played the most for some reason, though I have no idea about the whole fan/community thoughts or modding or whatever with any of them!
I remember a lot of people comparing MARDEK to Pokemon, probably because those games were their only other experiences with RPGs!
I think (I hazily remember reading about this?) that there was a lot of doubt originally that Westerners would care about JRPGs, so not much care was put into FFVII's translation... But I know FFVI (and IV?) was done by a guy called... Fred Woolsey, was it? Ted? And while his translations were imperfect, they at least made sense, and introduced some memorable turns of phrase and stuff? I think TVTropes has or had a trope called 'Woolseyisms'. Weird what happened with FFVII though. It seems worse with random NPC dialogue, and I've been noticing it more and more to the point of getting regularly annoyed!
I've been wondering if the sharper backgrounds in this port are AI generated, or if they just created higher resolution versions of the images originally and they're using those. If it was a remake/remaster, I could imagine it being AI-upscaled, but I don't think it is? But then it does have some other typical 'remaster' features (which I ignore) like a speed increase button? Weird.
Interestingly, on the topic of translation and FF9, I think that had multiple different English translations maybe?? I know I also played that with my ex, maybe with a copy she owned in Canada, and I kept noticing the wording of some lines was subtly different and more Americanised than I was used to; I remember Zidane uses the word 'nowt' - a Britishism that wouldn't make sense to Americans - in my version, but 'nada' or 'zilch' in the other? I wonder how much of this is just me imagining things though! Why would they go through the effort of multiple translations?? Pfff, the fallibility of memory!
I made a tool for planning Atonal Dreams dialogue a while back, which I mentioned in a blog post... then completely neglected after the effort I put into making it. Oh well! With that, I specified a bunch of main plot threads, and for each dialogue line I could specify whichever threads they were linked to or hinting at, which showed in a pie chart thing next to the line; it was rare that any line didn't connect to multiple threads.
BUT I also feel like sometimes lines don't have to be for any reason than their own sake. There's a specific line before you battle Pierce with the three Impotantrulfs, where he says "STOP HOPING!", "THERE'S NO POINT!", which you mentioned as being extraneous, but it's one of my favourite lines that always makes me laugh no matter how many times I go through that scene!
But I also get that other people would prefer to just get to the point - and a lot of people skip dialogue outright - so I intend to revise and trim a lot of that dialogue next week. To 'kill my babies', as a phrase that keeps coming to mind goes.
(Oh, it's 'kill your darlings'; my memory darkened that for some reason!)
I've been paying attention with FFVII, Chrono Cross recently, and all games I've been playing for months now exactly how many lines of dialogue they include in each scene. Usually it's only a handful! But it feels like enough. I just get carried away, I think, like with these blog posts and this comment. Brevity is a skill I still need to train!
I feel like at some point I knew every tiny detail about FF9, but it's been so long that I don't know if I remember that thing you linked to! Though I also don't want to look into it too deeply for fear of 'spoiling' a game I played to death years ago! I'm feeling the same with FFVII; though I 'know' everything that's coming up and everything seems familiar, there's at least some degree of surprise that I'm trying to maintain just because it's been so long.
I've wondered a lot about the sexual motivators of homosexual people (I say as if they're specimens in a jar) - or why homosexuality even exists at all - because a lot of it's contrary to all the stuff taught in the evolutionary classes I had at uni, though I suppose that's a topic for another time!!
Interestingly, I don't consider things like flinching to be a status effect, or attract, even though there's no reason why they shouldn't be? But what is a status effect? HMM.
In FF7, regen increases HP with the flow of time, so rather than periodically gaining +150 HP or something, you'd get 1 per 0.05 seconds or whatever and no numbers would be shown. Which is odd. There was this exploit I remember as a child where if you opened the Playstation lid, all the combatants would stop taking turns and just stand there, but regen would continue restoring HP, meaning you could fully restore with no negative consequences!
I've been noticing that FFVII allows you to choose your allies, but at other times forces a certain one to be included in your team for narrative purposes. Which inspired choices in MARDEK, I think? Current-me doesn't like it, though; I'd prefer something like FFX where you can switch out allies mid-battle so technically everyone is always with you, or a smaller cast who's always with you so you don't have to choose who to bring. But this is something I think about a lot, as I don't like how a customised party makes narrative stuff more difficult, but I do know players like having the option!
It's something I'll have to tackle in Atonal Dreams actually, if you have six protagonists... though it might turn out that for most of the story you have fixed parties. I was going to have Pierce join just before the end of the testing section, but I already had that wolves scene written from last time so I just decided to end it there! He'll probably join as soon as you enter the cave though, or maybe I'll rewrite the end of that scene to have him join... Hmm.
I'm surprised the EBF games had a Pokemon-like Blue Magic-esque system, and also still haven't played those games but probably should one day!!
...And this is why my characters waffle on!
1
Falcon62~2Y
The evolution of homosexuality is a hotly researched topic. Here's one article I've read recently, but you can find more if you look: [LINK]
1
Tobias 1104~2Y
Yes, I remember reading papers like that back when I was more immersed in all this back at uni. I only read the abstract of that, though I think its proposition - that homosexuality helps individuals integrate into social groups - is fairly silly considering the othering they're met with! And if that was the reason, why would it replace reproductive sex rather than adding to it as in the case of bisexuality??
But I don't really want to get into some big discussion about this in a post about Final Fantasy VII!
I think the first RPG I played was Pokémon, I didn't really play other RPGs as a kid. Even when I did they were usually other Pokémon-like games.
Interesting that they'd release the janky Engrish translation like that, FF7 seems rather infamous for its awful translation. Weird since FF6 and FF8 both had much better ones. FF9 seemed downright well-translated!
It's funny, some of what you say about replaying FF7 is how I feel replaying MARDEK! I suppose it'd be for many people, MARDEK was some people's first real RPG.
That whole crossdressing sequence from FF7 seems rather infamous. These days they could probably still do it, they'd just need to approach it differently. I get the impression back then developers would just throw that kind of stuff in and not really bother trying to understand the niche cultures they're putting in, these days people would expect devs to know what they're talking about before putting something like that in.
I'm not sure why the models look so weird in FF7, it looks pretty awful to me! But I do know that they actually did make very elaborate 3D rendered areas and then used still images from those, highly compressed them and used those for the prerendered backgrounds. A lot of games back then (like Resident Evil!!) did that to have a high visual fidelity using 3D without needing all the 3D rendering in the actual game, which the hardware obviously couldn't handle. Sadly those original 3D environments are often lost to time, but nowadays cleverly programmed AIs can automatically upscale them to HD! It's all quite impressive.
These old games often seem to have super weird and random stuff in it that's also easily missed. These days that kind of stuff wouldn't fly for a big AAA production, where things are driven more by deadlines and economics than untamed raw developer passion or whatever.
I want to get in a bath with a bunch of friendly and burly men!! Why can't I be like Cloud?!
It also seems like these old games often have super unclear and janky writing that doesn't really add up!!
I think there is a lot of value in efficient writing, writing that can do a lot with little, rather than using a lot of dialogue to little effect. I suppose the ratio of how much needs to be established per line does differ from genre to genre, visual novels can get a way with a lot of fluff, whereas puzzle games or story-light games need to do a lot with a little.
Part of my issue with some bits in Atonal Dreams is that some dialogue boxes don't have any reason to exist beyond being set-up for some other dialogue box, often a joke. Not really furthering or establishing a character in and of themselves, while also existing in a larger whole rather than being a self-contained gag conversation. That stuff's usually better reserved for optional dialogues I think, that's how a lot of visual novels handle examining extraneous environment.
I get the impression that starting with FF6 these games all have big, heavily-scripted and quite spectacular setpiece intros! Though I have always liked how you instead go for the imagination/dream intros!
FF's always had a weird relation with sci-fi and cyberpunk stuff. FF1 randomly had some advanced sci-fi stuff in it, FF4 had those really modern things like that techno tower or everything on the moon, FF6 had Magitek... FF9 was more like old FF games, but the last disc goes right into sci-fi with alien planets and whatnot! Weird! But then even classic RPG stuff like Ultima and D&D always blended some sci-fi stuff into their palette. Why, even MARDEK did it, that originator of all Fantasy!!
The bit with the 5 gil is an example of the kind of super obscure nonsense that I hate about these old games! Did you know FF9 has an extensive sidequests where you can backtrack out of the final dungeon like 9 times to talk to some random NPC's increasingly big family?? Stupid!! [LINK]
The romantic choices is interesting, prior games just wrote preset romances or didn't bother with them, but then FF7 lets you actually pick and choose. Something that some other games have done too, like the Medabots games! And then these routes also often turn out to be super obscure and all about obtaining enough RELATIONSHIP POINTS. This Pokémon fangame I'm playing now has a relationship score with most important NPCs, which is apparently used to determine whether I see their special endings and can tag with them in multi-battles.
I wonder whether subconsciously the wanting a mother surrogate thing also applies to men attracted to men? Can I get a daddy who's also a mommy?!
Peerless?! That's a weird name for a status effect! Reminds me of "Trouble" from FF9! (Apparently it acts as a short-lasting total damage immunity!)
I'd say Pokémon has more status ailments than MARDEK does! The big five, then there's confusion, flinches, attract, curses, all sorts of weird things caused by very specific moves!
What I notice also is that these old games have super bizarre enemy designs! I do like that.
A lot of fanmade mods for games like FF7 and such do actually implement all the game's mechanics much more, and reward the player for engaging with them more while punishing boarish brute-force unga bunga play. I suppose Atonal Dreams is somewhat similar to that, you can't just bash your head against enemies all the time, sometimes the player needs to think. I like that, personally!
I always found the ATB in FF6 super messy, in that game the ATB is always progressing, even during attacks, so it's super hard to get a read on turn orders... And in FF9 Regen is always ticking up HP, even during super long attack animations, which is dumb!!
Materia sound confusing!! It seems like FF6, FF7 and FF8 had an ever-increasing use of this sort of system, after which FF9 went back to the FF4 style and then FF10 did its own thing again.
I do like segments where you get a sudden party member shake-up. Something that I'd find cool would be like if Pierce very briefly joined the party, like after the Brigrrnds kick his ass or something so they must form a TEMPORARY TRUCE before he UNEXPECTEDLY BACK-STABS them. But that'd probably require a lot of rewriting and might totally not fit the overall flow of the story!
I always found Blue Magic stuff tedious! I prefer games where they make the process easy, like having to scan enemies to get their skills, or just defeat them normally... I did like how EBF5 did it by making you catch them like in Pokémon, but with a much less RNG and more in-depth system.
This comment is long!!
I'm surprised you haven't played what I'd consider some of the 'most important' Final Fantasies (especially VII), but have played some others, and have apparently seen mods and things of the ones you haven't played?? VIII is probably the one I played the most for some reason, though I have no idea about the whole fan/community thoughts or modding or whatever with any of them!
I remember a lot of people comparing MARDEK to Pokemon, probably because those games were their only other experiences with RPGs!
I think (I hazily remember reading about this?) that there was a lot of doubt originally that Westerners would care about JRPGs, so not much care was put into FFVII's translation... But I know FFVI (and IV?) was done by a guy called... Fred Woolsey, was it? Ted? And while his translations were imperfect, they at least made sense, and introduced some memorable turns of phrase and stuff? I think TVTropes has or had a trope called 'Woolseyisms'. Weird what happened with FFVII though. It seems worse with random NPC dialogue, and I've been noticing it more and more to the point of getting regularly annoyed!
I've been wondering if the sharper backgrounds in this port are AI generated, or if they just created higher resolution versions of the images originally and they're using those. If it was a remake/remaster, I could imagine it being AI-upscaled, but I don't think it is? But then it does have some other typical 'remaster' features (which I ignore) like a speed increase button? Weird.
Interestingly, on the topic of translation and FF9, I think that had multiple different English translations maybe?? I know I also played that with my ex, maybe with a copy she owned in Canada, and I kept noticing the wording of some lines was subtly different and more Americanised than I was used to; I remember Zidane uses the word 'nowt' - a Britishism that wouldn't make sense to Americans - in my version, but 'nada' or 'zilch' in the other? I wonder how much of this is just me imagining things though! Why would they go through the effort of multiple translations?? Pfff, the fallibility of memory!
I made a tool for planning Atonal Dreams dialogue a while back, which I mentioned in a blog post... then completely neglected after the effort I put into making it. Oh well! With that, I specified a bunch of main plot threads, and for each dialogue line I could specify whichever threads they were linked to or hinting at, which showed in a pie chart thing next to the line; it was rare that any line didn't connect to multiple threads.
BUT I also feel like sometimes lines don't have to be for any reason than their own sake. There's a specific line before you battle Pierce with the three Impotantrulfs, where he says "STOP HOPING!", "THERE'S NO POINT!", which you mentioned as being extraneous, but it's one of my favourite lines that always makes me laugh no matter how many times I go through that scene!
But I also get that other people would prefer to just get to the point - and a lot of people skip dialogue outright - so I intend to revise and trim a lot of that dialogue next week. To 'kill my babies', as a phrase that keeps coming to mind goes.
(Oh, it's 'kill your darlings'; my memory darkened that for some reason!)
I've been paying attention with FFVII, Chrono Cross recently, and all games I've been playing for months now exactly how many lines of dialogue they include in each scene. Usually it's only a handful! But it feels like enough. I just get carried away, I think, like with these blog posts and this comment. Brevity is a skill I still need to train!
I feel like at some point I knew every tiny detail about FF9, but it's been so long that I don't know if I remember that thing you linked to! Though I also don't want to look into it too deeply for fear of 'spoiling' a game I played to death years ago! I'm feeling the same with FFVII; though I 'know' everything that's coming up and everything seems familiar, there's at least some degree of surprise that I'm trying to maintain just because it's been so long.
I've wondered a lot about the sexual motivators of homosexual people (I say as if they're specimens in a jar) - or why homosexuality even exists at all - because a lot of it's contrary to all the stuff taught in the evolutionary classes I had at uni, though I suppose that's a topic for another time!!
Interestingly, I don't consider things like flinching to be a status effect, or attract, even though there's no reason why they shouldn't be? But what is a status effect? HMM.
In FF7, regen increases HP with the flow of time, so rather than periodically gaining +150 HP or something, you'd get 1 per 0.05 seconds or whatever and no numbers would be shown. Which is odd. There was this exploit I remember as a child where if you opened the Playstation lid, all the combatants would stop taking turns and just stand there, but regen would continue restoring HP, meaning you could fully restore with no negative consequences!
I've been noticing that FFVII allows you to choose your allies, but at other times forces a certain one to be included in your team for narrative purposes. Which inspired choices in MARDEK, I think? Current-me doesn't like it, though; I'd prefer something like FFX where you can switch out allies mid-battle so technically everyone is always with you, or a smaller cast who's always with you so you don't have to choose who to bring. But this is something I think about a lot, as I don't like how a customised party makes narrative stuff more difficult, but I do know players like having the option!
It's something I'll have to tackle in Atonal Dreams actually, if you have six protagonists... though it might turn out that for most of the story you have fixed parties. I was going to have Pierce join just before the end of the testing section, but I already had that wolves scene written from last time so I just decided to end it there! He'll probably join as soon as you enter the cave though, or maybe I'll rewrite the end of that scene to have him join... Hmm.
I'm surprised the EBF games had a Pokemon-like Blue Magic-esque system, and also still haven't played those games but probably should one day!!
...And this is why my characters waffle on!
[LINK]
But I don't really want to get into some big discussion about this in a post about Final Fantasy VII!