SPOILERS Anyone Willing to Admit the Remake Was better then the Original?

[Leafonthebreeze]

Adding Journey as above, and Dear Esther for pretty much inventing the walking simulator trope. And Night in the Woods.

Oh and fucking Among Us, I guess.

From what I can tell from unwanted Internet osmosis, Fortnite and Five Nights at Freddie's are fucking huge with the kids. Getting towards cult house huge. Overwatch as well.

I feel a bit like my perception of this is skewed though since I mostly play cheap indie games on steam.

 

[ForceStealer]

I mean, that's an average of one every other year, how much more often could landmark games possibly come out and still be considered landmark?

I do wonder, was Witcher 3 all that defining? It's certainly a point of comparison people raise all the time, but the point that it's serving for people is "well-designed sidequests." But that wasn't some revelation, it's just that it takes a shitload of effort and man-hours to make really good sidequests, so it's not like we've seen a bunch of Witcher 3 clones. The only thing to clone would be spending a lot of money (/abusing your workforce) on sidequests

Undertale, Stardew Valley, and Hades are all good guesses.
You would have to include Demon's Souls/whichever Souls game you want in there too. I think Souls is kinda similar to Witcher 3 in that rather than find some brilliant nugget of epiphany, it was someone finally doing what should be obvious - create an answer to complaints about how hand-holdy modern games had become. BotW did kind of the same thing, just about open world games specifically.

 

[Odysseus]

I guess it depends a bit how you define things. Are we talking about games that had huge influence on game design from then on, games that had a huge fan reaction that lasted longer than a few months, or games that created a new genre?

Yeah, these things do get conflated, don't they lol.

The things that made FF7 a landmark title were probably its advancements in storytelling presentation, which marked a huge step up from what earlier RPGs had done, and the fact that it brought JRPGs to the west in a big way as a result of those advancements. In this case, revolution of technology and design were big contributing factors to the longevity of its appeal, and the influence it went on to have in the gaming sphere at large.

I guess you just don't really get a marriage of those things much these days because the bar is so much higher. Now lasting impact is decided by more fine-tuned factors. BoTW was not the first open-world game by any stretch, but it's design made the game much more broadly appealing than other games, which game companies took note of and began copying. Undertale succeeded on the quality of its writing and the ways in which it asked the player to more meaningfully engage with the game and its setting. I didn't play Witcher 3 so someone else will have to write that part of this paragraph, and so on.

Maybe we keep bringing up indie games because they're the ones who push the envelope more these days.

I wonder if FNaF and Amogus count as landmark games, or if they're just over exposed lol. FNaF basically started a genre of child-friendly murder horror games, like Hello Neighbor, Baldy's Basics, Bendy and the Ink Machine, etc. What's the difference between other devs chasing the success of a break-out title and a game being "influential" to the medium? BoTW and FNaF have certainly both garnered a hoard of imitators.

 

[Stiggie]

In the parts where remake was faithful to the OG I felt it was mostly superior. But the parts where it differed were mostly inferior IMO. Like the filler chapters, the purple blood, or the whispers.

 

[Clement Rage]

What's our benchmark for a landscape changing game? FF7 opened up the world to JRPGs, but if it hadn't, another one would have eventually.

The trend for a while was for ever increasing open worlds, but then we found out from Cyberpunk and RDR2 that the way you get those is to abuse your workforce.

Cyberpunk for me was the closest I've ever seen to a revolutionary game that changed everything, It really was like nothing else I've ever seen, I loved it... but nobody is going to copy it now, because it's too much work for too little reward. Only comparable experience on the PS4 was Xcom 2.

 

[looneymoon]

I would throw Disco Elysium and PT in there as a generation-defining games, on top of what everyone else has suggested.

 

[Makoeyes987]

Would I sound stupid if I said the last game that truly caught the zeitgeist of the gaming landscape was Undertale?

That's literally what I thought of first when I thought of more recent examples.

Yes. That's a perfect one. That game... That was unique and genre breaking. Yes. Almost all the examples I can think of now are indie games.

Breath of the Wild was an incredible masterpiece but I'm hesitant to say that it was genre defying and revolutionary. It's an open world Elder Scrolls/Skyrim-esque Zelda that actually was polished and well crafted to levels some may have never seen before. Maybe that's it's star point. But it took the open world genre to it's natural, well crafted direction, not one never even anticipated. It did create a formula a lot of other games wished to create, but it didn't do something completely unheard of. Crafting and durability were concepts that existed for a long time. It just nailed the execution and balance perfectly.

There are games that do things that are simply unreplicable. Off my head I'll say Undertale, Five Nights at Freddy's, Minecraft, No Man's Sky, Doki Doki Literature Club, Dead Space, Bloodborne, and of course Nier Automata. Like. Those are just some off the top of my head. And half of those are indy games. I don't think that's a coincidence, that's because you gotta do something wildly off the grid and genre smashing/defying to get that type of cultural movement because a lot of roads have been paved now.

EDIT: Yeah, Among Us definitely deserves to be up there too. LOL that's definitely something new that picked up during the pandemic especially. Yeah. That's another great example of a new sort of game that just exploded. That's real and genre smashing right there.

I feel like you just can't do FF7 anymore.

Exactly, because FFVII is sort of an archetype of the genre now. It happened, it's why the Remake is even here. And that's fine. It will be memorable and defining because of itself as itself. There are lots of games that are successes, huge successes because they are simply and unflinchingly good masterpieces and there are games that do something that just flips the direction and climate entirely that are good and meta defining. There are very few games that manage that. By design that's extremely rare. I think it's an unrealistic expectation to think the Remake would ever do that, it can't. It's a remake of itself. That's something for a new FF title to do.

Most games that manage to do that today, usually are indie games now. Because that's a space that allows for a lot of creative freedom and retooling that no big studio usually would feel comfortable throwing out there.

 

[Rydeen]

I think Nier Automata was a good example of a modern groundbreaking game. Because it reached beyond the realm of storytelling and engaged the player in a very direct way. It used the medium itself to its full advantage and couldn’t be replicated with another medium.

 

[Roundhouse]

Undertale
Stardew Valley
Breath of the Wild
Witcher 3
The Last of Us
Hades
Nier Automata
Dark Souls
Disco Elysium
Journey

Is what I would update my list to, then, in terms of the last ten years. Keep in mind we are all judging by a different criteria, I think. For me, I'm going by a mixture of critical reception, fan reception/popularity, but also considering how influential or innovative something is, and finally my own opinion.

The most noteworthy thing about FF7R, for me, is the concept of the project itself -- a multiple part big budget remake of one of the greatest and most important games in history.

 

[cold_spirit]

To me, Breath of the Wild was the last “big moment” in the gaming landscape. Not for the durability or crafting, which are pretty basic, but for how it applied systemic game design and physic-based puzzles to an open world. Every object has properties and these properties interact with each other in a universal and consistent way. Want to get an apple from a tree? Smack it with a club to make the apples fall, or slash it with a sword to cut the tree down and pick the apples straight from the branches. Or start the tree on fire with a torch and the apples will fall down fully cooked. These interactions are endless. I don't agree that Breath of the Wild has many imitators. It certainly does visually, with Genshin Impact and Pokemon Legends Arceus being the biggest examples, but these games fail to capture what makes Breath of the Wild so special mechanically. No game has copied Breath of the Wild's systemic game design to a similar scale. It is the best "sandbox" we have yet.

However, as others have said, it's impossible for even Breath of the Wild to have staying power these days. How we consume media now is radically different from how we did 20-30 years ago, primarily due to instant access and always online social media.

Also as others have said, it's impossible to make a comparison between the original game and Remake due to the massive difference in era, genre, and goals between them.

With all that out of the way, I will still engage with the question. "Is Remake better than the original?" No. And this is coming from someone who is overwhelmingly positive about Remake's most controversial changes (i.e. the Whispers). Remake is a mechanically bloated, all bark but no bite, anime-grunt filled action romp worthy of its trashy Butterfinger and Pasta'n'Sauce marketing campaigns. Mechanically bloated in that the game features multiple skill trees that are so awful the developers included a feature to automate their progression, items that are so unimpactful that Hard mode disables them and the game is actually better, and shoehorned sidequests that utterly fail to take or contribute anything meaningful to the setting. Remake chases cutting-edge visuals when we know, undeniably, that cutting-edge visuals will still age and the labor required to produce them is unethical. It's a modern AAA action game that looks over its shoulder at every other modern AAA action game from the past decade (specifically The Last of Us), but takes away some of the worst lessons from them (don't you just love squeezing through debris!). It displays no amount of "wisdom".

The original game, however, bursts from the screen with creativity and boldness. I don't have the time to list everything it does right, but I will say this: In every metric that actually matters, Final Fantasy VII on PS1 is better. To me, anyway.

 

[Odysseus]

I'm willing to admit my FIST...

...

....to your FACE.

I more or less agree with cold_spirit but I'm gonna wait until the series is over to judge.

 

[Tetsujin]

I admit I like the gameplay in VII Remake a lot more.

Like...A LOT.

I'm glad there's gonna be several parts because it means more games with this battle system instead of it being a one and done.

 

[Roundhouse]

Cold, your posts are always interesting even when I don't completely agree.

And Ody who are you threatening??

 

[Roundhouse]

You are a fellow Genesis fan!

 

[Odysseus]

You are a fellow Genesis fan!

no

 

[ForceStealer]

items that are so unimpactful that Hard mode disables them and the game is actually better

...wouldn't that mean that, if anything, the items were too impactful...?

 

[ph14basicbitch]

Items are, much like this topic title, "bait".

While the game is still an "action rpg", the majority of your meaningful, impactful skills are tied to ATB, and because of this, ATB essentially translates to a "turn" in a turn based rpg. It's not just skills that are tied to ATB, though, cause items are also tied to ATB. So much like in a turn based system, you must pick between using a skill, magic, or using an item with your ATB bar.

This item restriction only applies to hard mode, which is balanced around level 50 and assumes the player has learned their weapon skills and leveled up materia. If I'm in hard mode and I have 1 ATB bar / 1 "turn", would I like Aerith to (hypothetically) throw a potion to restore 700 of someone's 6000 HP? Or would I rather have her cast Thundaga and do 9999 damage and just end the battle? Because aggression feels rewarded in Remake (this is a completely separate discussion, lol), I'm going to pick Thundaga.

And IMO, this highlights what items are for and why they have flat, numerical values: to help bridge the player from "start of the game / first playthrough" to "when they've leveled up their materia and go into hard mode".

 

[cold_spirit]

I will make two concessions: The core combat of Remake is phenomenal, the perfect marriage of action and group-based tactics. I also appreciate the game's earnest approach to queerness and gender fluidity, miles better than the original game anyway.

I suppose "unimpactful" was the wrong word, but I wanted to convey that if the absence of items makes the game stronger, then their current implementation should be reevaluated. Instead of crates giving you Potions that only heal a small amount of HP and require a bit of menuing to use, why not just have the crates restore your HP immediately? Instead of having Phoenix Downs, why not implement a mechanic where you can revive allies by going to the spot where they're downed and pressing a prompt? Instead of collecting Antidotes, why not make blocking a status aliment attack reduce its effectiveness? By doing these, newcomers would still have the tools they need to survive and the combat would be more fluid overall.

Linked to items are treasure chests. Treasure chests exist to reward exploration. However, in Hard mode their reward is unsatisfying because you mostly can't even use what you get. I find this to be a huge design flaw. Remove items, implement alternatives, reduce the amount of treasure chests. This would also mitigate the amount busy work we spend scanning the environment for treasure chests and opening them for little to no payoff, making exploration a whole lot smoother.

 

[ForceStealer]

While I agree that the presence of treasure chests and items in Hard mode is an unnecessary tease, I'm not sure I agree the game that the game is unequivocally better without them. It certainly requires that you demonstrate mastery over materia combinations. But this is mostly because resting doesn't restore MP. As ph14 says, it requires and counts on you being level 50 and familiarity with the whole game. I dunno that it would have been equally enjoyable starting out that way.

 

[Roundhouse]

Anyone willing to admit the dementors will return in part two?

 

[Makoeyes987]

I suppose "unimpactful" was the wrong word, but I wanted to convey that if the absence of items makes the game stronger, then their current implementation should be reevaluated

No because there are people who play that are simply not interested in Hard Mode and need that help from items. That's valid too. Items only help the game be accessible and less difficult for those only interested in the story and getting the experience they wish with minimal stress. There's no reason to reevaluate. And if you're looking for chests, you already did that and discovered your treasure the first go around. So it's not wasted.

The game is fun and doable at its normal level and for those looking for a challenging and indepth play experience can truly dive into how the game mechanics shine in Hard Mode with items sealed off. It's not complicated and VII-R's game design definitely deserves praise for it's incredible marriage of skillful play and the sweet spot for players looking for a good time. It's gameplay system is 100% what it does right and if it's game culture is anything to go by, it has LOTS of staying power on its own simply because people are going hard exploring and exploiting what they can do with it's combat system. Status effects matter, combos exist and unique strategies for taking down mobs/bosses have been discovered. It's incredibly varied and unique; totally opposite of claims it has no staying power or impact.

 

[cold_spirit]

I'm not sure I agree the game that the game is unequivocally better without them.

Items only help the game be accessible and less difficult for those only interested in the story and getting the experience they wish with minimal stress. There's no reason to reevaluate.

I'm not suggesting items be removed full stop with no other changes. I put forward ideas that replace items, keep the gameplay accessible for easy and normal modes, and better serve the flow of battle.

 

[Roundhouse]

I honestly wasn't a big fan of the combat stuff. It felt like enemies were similar to what people call bullet sponges or whatever, where fights went on and on until it became dull. The battles felt as bloated as the general pacing in that way.

 

[ForceStealer]

Mainly because it's built around stagger. If you can stagger, you can melt basically any enemy. If not, they'll drag.

Really the only major thing I'd like to see change is the wasted damage during cutscene phase changes. At the very least each phase should have it's own/delineated health bar so you know not to blow a limit break.

 

[Ite]

At the very least each phase should have it's own/delineated health bar so you know not blow a limit break.

fgj