FFVII: Ever Crisis Announced
- Thread starter Lex
- Start date
Suzaku
Pro Adventurer
Slightly higher quality from the livestream.
Here's the livestream itself, they go over a lot of FFVII history and aspects of creating different aspects of the Compilation and talk about EC a bit towards the end, mostly about Sephiroth.
Kazushige Nojima talks about it being difficult to create new stories set in the past because details that were once left to the imagination have to be filled in, and mentions looking at the timeline they have and gradually adding new events between the ones already there. For this story it's still a while before CC and it doesn't connect directly, so there will still be a gap; he thinks if the stories directly flowed it would be hard to show that progression of his character.
The producer said Nomura designed him immediately after they came up with the idea of including him in EC, and said that at this point he should still be pure and innocent.
Nojima mentions that Rhadore and Shinra became allied during a conflict before the Wutai war, and Shinra supplied them with weapons. However after their mutual enemies were defeated and Shinra began to develop mako technology, the Rhadorans who revered the Lifestream and had opposing ideological views about it, started to distance themselves from them.
Project: 0 stems from an earlier point when Shinra still had rivals and competitors. They created SOLDIER as a force that would allow them to secure power by force. The P0 group are Passive Model SOLDIERs, while the newer Active Model SOLDIERs have something "activated" within their bodies -- like Jenova Cells for example -- though within SOLDIER the members may not be aware of what these different designations actually mean. Nojima mentions that they've used these early parts of the SOLDIER story before but this is the first time they've made a distinction between these two different types of SOLDIERs, Passive and Active.
It seems that Active model SOLDIERs encompass all the different biologically modified SOLDIER types, including research developed by other Shinra scientists like Hollander. Basically you can think of them as "old" and "new" SOLDIER types. The producer mentioned that the old SOLDIERs are battle-tested and represent the peak of natural human ability and says that if compared to the artificially enhanced superhuman SOLDIERs that lack experience, they'll actually come out on top. This story is set in the era where that transition is starting to happen.
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Wol
None Shall Remember Those Who Do Not Fight
- AKA
- Rosarian Shield
Quennaeris looks gorgeous
Its time for them to add optional costumes for Remake, if they do they`ll certainly reuse some from EC.
cold_spirit
he/him
- AKA
- Alex T
Unfortunately, I got a bit carried away with the last featured draw, so I doubt I'll build up enough blue crystals for Aerith's outfit now. Lesson learned (but hey, got a good blizzard build now).
I have a rule to only spend money on the season pass. With The First Soldier, my rule was to spend no money at all, and you know what that got me? Service termination. So I figured I better invest something here, especially because I like The First Soldier's story so far.
To folks who play other gacha games: do "featured draws" like this typically return? Or could this be gone forever?
I have a rule to only spend money on the season pass. With The First Soldier, my rule was to spend no money at all, and you know what that got me? Service termination. So I figured I better invest something here, especially because I like The First Soldier's story so far.
To folks who play other gacha games: do "featured draws" like this typically return? Or could this be gone forever?
Suzaku
Pro Adventurer
I somehow had a feeling that they'd screw up this banner and have to compensate people who pulled, but I wasn't planning on pulling, certainly not both stamp sheets, and the bug was already over when I woke up, so no compensation for me.
I am kind of tempted to pull for it because it matches Zack's "prince" costume, but it's an MATK costume and I use Aerith as my main healer. I do have Prime Number for Matt but I don't really want to have to build Aerith two different ways.
Plus, Halloween is around the corner, and datamine indicates we'll get costumes for both Cloud and Sephiroth, who I've already invested in.
Well, we'll see. Plenty of time to change my mind.
I am kind of tempted to pull for it because it matches Zack's "prince" costume, but it's an MATK costume and I use Aerith as my main healer. I do have Prime Number for Matt but I don't really want to have to build Aerith two different ways.
Plus, Halloween is around the corner, and datamine indicates we'll get costumes for both Cloud and Sephiroth, who I've already invested in.
Well, we'll see. Plenty of time to change my mind.
Maidenofwar
They/Them
I don't know what possessed me to log on in the wee hours of the morning and pull on the new banner after deciding not yet but I'm glad I did, had over 20k blues, went down to just over 3k, but left with a haul of a new Lucia weapon, two more Bald Eagles, Tifa's beach weapon (making it the first 5* obtained for her), Sephiroth's Edge Wing, two Killer Horns, the Prism Rod, and Aerith's costume 
Seems if I hadn't bailed out after exactly 12 stamps for Aerith costume, been greedy and went for Matt costume since I got his banner weapon twice and I do like the guy I might have got compensation. The stamp card was screwed up and it switched to Matt when I wanted Aerith but I noticed and switched it back
In the few gacha games I've played costumes and things have eventually returned
Seems if I hadn't bailed out after exactly 12 stamps for Aerith costume, been greedy and went for Matt costume since I got his banner weapon twice and I do like the guy I might have got compensation. The stamp card was screwed up and it switched to Matt when I wanted Aerith but I noticed and switched it back
In the few gacha games I've played costumes and things have eventually returned
Rose_of_Night
Pro Adventurer
I think you can equip a costume just for the looks, in addition to a stat costume. Should check it again to be sure.
X-SOLDIER
Harbinger O Great Justice
- AKA
- X
You can equip a cosmetic skin for both the costume and the weapon.
On another note: here's a long translation thread on Twitter from the Livestream if anyone wants to dig around at those details a bit more:
On Random EC thoughts:
So, one of the things to address on the gacha note is that it's pretty much COMPLETELY RNG or pay-to-win, as there's still absolutely zero ability for you to play-to-win the costume that require you to complete 3 stamp cards. For reference, I play the absolute everliving holy hell out of the game, and I have never ONCE completed a second stamp card, let alone a third. There's just literally no ability to get enough crystals to do it without paying for it.
Additionally, during the first Crisis Dungeon Event, I got 496th out of the 10,000 players in Group 4... and managed that without Sephiroth's Ice outfit, his Ice weapon, or Lucia's Ice debuff weapon – all of which were MASSIVELY biased since the key bosses had ice weaknesses that could be exploited. As such, there're players who had teams with one or both characters who had a power level of ~40,000 LOWER than mine who were able to get double my score on the final mission, and some of them even made it into the top 20.
I know from experience how powerful these types of outfits are (which includes Aerith's current dress in this event), because Cloud's Murasame Battle Garb has the same type of buff which is a 35% buff to one element, so let me just highlight the sort of thing you can do and where the massive buff there comes into play.
Aerith on my team uses her Night Umbrella's Nightbloom ability as it deals a Physical & Magic defense Debuff, and Lightning Breach Materia lowers defense against Lightning so that in tandem Cloud's designed to essentially be a bit of a Lightning elemental glass cannon, but he still has a huge Physical Attack to use other elements as well.
As such, I have Cloud designed around maximizing dealing Physical Lightning Damage. Sub Equipment of Tifa's Crystal Gloves, Matt's Broadsword: Axis, and Lucia's SSR1976 at the various levels and rarities that I currently have give me Lightning Ability Damage +85%, Physical Attack +100 / +40%. JUST including the Murasame Battle Garb will raise Cloud's Attack Power massively: In the case where I screenshotted this – That change ALONE shifts him from a power of 68,634 to 75,486.
That's why the method by which these outfits get paywalled away means that you have to be able to save up for a VERY tactically specific thing... which, like with the Crisis Dungeon Event – you won't know about the specifics of until it's launched, at which point you either need to be insanely lucky or if you were to pay for every draw, it would cost you $650-$800 depending on where you live to fill out all 3 pages for both outfits.
For reference: The ONLY outfits I have obtained are Cloud's Murasame Battle Garb, Tifa's Summer Outfit, & Sephiroth's Winged Edge Training Gear (which I got the very last day of the event). I don't have Barret's Scrap outfit, Cloud, Aerith, OR Red XIII's Summer outfit, and there's absolutely no possible way for me to get Matt's current outfit, and about a 40% chance I'll be able to get Aerith's current outfit from this ongoing event in the next 4 days.
That's FOUR of the NINE outfits that have been released which I've done all the things I could POSSIBLY do that don't involve throwing money at it, and I have played to the point that I've maxed out most of the things that I can even do that generate rewards. Also, Red XIII & Tifa were core members of my team until Sephiroth came out, and I would have directly benefitted from having those. If there were ANY reasonable way to be completionist about things like this in the game itself, I would but there is LITERALLY no way to achieve that – unless you have luck that vastly is beyond statistically improbable once, let alone all the time.
That being said, I do put some cash into the game as I buy the Boost pass – because if you're grinding an absurd amount – it's absolutely beyond worth it. When you do battles with the 3x cost 3x rewards, so every 3 fights you get an entire run for free. On top of that, you get 1200 Red Crystals, which you can use for misc things like the current event's Battle Challenge Pack that gives 15 Stamina potions for 300 Red Crystals. Those are ideally how – if you want to monetarily support the game and also play the absolute everliving hell out of it – that's gonna benefit you the most of anything to be able to take on some of the bigger challenges.
THAT BEING SAID, I'm essentially using that as a means to shortcut TIME by paying for it, and in my case saving time is the only way that I can possibly be anywhere even REMOTELY close to the performance of people who just whale into the ACTUAL pay-to-win gacha elements of the game... which just further highlights the core issue even more.
This is inherently where I think that the core design philosophy of the mobile gaming industry really hits its core issue.
The people who would GLADLY want to give you a reasonable amount of money for something can't do that in a reasonable way, because the game is capitulated upon the necessity to exploitively vampire cash out of the people who lose it most easily through obfuscation of currency, normalization of gambling mechanics, and other conditioned cycles through repetition. It's so over-dependent on needing to lock on to a cash source that it often forgets that these things are ACTUALLY FUN and people would pay for them on their own if they could.
I'm personally ridiculously disappointed that the outfits come with gameplay benefits in the first place, because I'm all about supporting paid cosmetics because that's a MUCH easier way for players to willingly do something that allows them to enjoy their favourite characters AND support ongoing development for a live service. I'd infinitely prefer something like $5 costume DLC releasing every 2 weeks which is even like you'd expect for any other type of video game that you play on something that isn't a mobile device.
But instead, we've got gameplay-critical equipment that's locked behind an enormous paywall, which itself is artifically boxed into a 2 week window. While the weapons become available after the events (which is necessary otherwise it becomes essentially impossible to power them up afterwards), the outfits themselves seemingly never become available outside of those points – and even then would only be available if you paid for a Season Pass to get one of the Gear Exchange Tickets. What's even more of a subtle slap to the face is that getting 3 of the max rarity event weapon will allow you to overboost it to ☆☆★★★ which will unlock the wallpapers of those outfits... which will be able to constantly remind you of the gear that you couldn't get for those characters.
While that's true for Aerith's Beach outfit for me, I didn't even get enough of Red XIII's event weapon to even unlock that despite filling out a full card for Tifa's outfit. So... the only feedback that I have for the gacha in this game is that it's just objectively godawful, and it's still hamstringing everything else in the game. If they LITERALLY made it cost A THIRD of what it currently does – I still wouldn't get far enough to complete any EX spaces on stamp cards.
The fact that the outfits aren't just the profile artwork and the battle models, but every one of them ALSO includes individually created chibi field models if they're set as the party leader is an INSANE amount of design and development work for basically NONE of your playerbase to ever get to use. This is one of those things that I'm really hoping that people are vocal about BEFORE we start to get more of these, because it's got to be something that's coming out in the player statistics.
The underlying issue is that whales exist, as do gambling addicts, and the amount of money that gets generated there makes it so that unless the playerbase is EXTREMELY vocal about how the design sucks – because the people being impacted AREN'T paying currently, there's no incentive for the higher ups to believe that they're a monetizable part of the audience that's worth the cost of making the whales feel like everything they invested in is suddenly being massively undervalued and they're being ripped off. Imagine dropping close to $800 to get enough draws needed to unlock a second outfit only for them to pop up a few weeks later for less than 1/10th of that – that's angering the playerbase that's been artificially inflated for the game to be most dependent upon, which will only be a bigger risk the longer it persists for.
So, I'm hesitant to know whether or not it'll realistically ever get better but that's why I try to make a point of making the miscellaneous Twitter thread about it when I can, as I know that at least the support team behind the game is GREAT. They've been super communicative, I've filed a few different bugs with them, and they've been continually responsive about issues that warrant a requested response. So, like with most places – there are a lot of good people behind-the-scenes, and speaking up makes it easier for them to be able to get leverage with people who make the monetary decisions.
The craziest thing is that the game is ridiculously fun, but you can really feel JUST how hard it's fighting against that stuff to preserve that.
If anything, this is why I'm hoping above and beyond everything else for the Steam version of the game to get released sooner rather than later – because that sort of predatory gacha being pay-to-win element making the otherwise voiceless majority of the playerbase really annoyed have a means for the game to get absolutely EVISCERATED by the Steam Reviews for it – and that's probably the most publicly focused way to get the dev teams to listen as there's no mobile app store where the user reviews have that same kind of power.
X
Suzaku
Pro Adventurer
I'm not sure if this is your first gacha game or not, but you need to be aware that if you want to play without spending you can't go for every new banner, and realistically for this game you probably will only be able to focus on one costume per banner unless you manage to hoard crystals for a good while. In most cases it's probably not worth it to chase a weapon because you can just wait and wishlist it later when there's a banner with a costume you do want.
That's the nature of being F2P/minnow in a gacha game, and it's its own challenge.
For this game, the chase items are the costumes, since they are (so far) exclusive to the stamp draws and have limited availability. However, the actual power gate for the game isn't costumes, but overboosting. That's what puts whales above everyone else. An OB+2 weapon is far stronger than a baseline 5-star weapon. All other things being equal, a player with OB+5 weapons will deal like 2x or 3x the damage of a player with OB+1 weapons, from my own experience in co-op.
As for the ranking event, they did explain which elements would be favorable in the week leading up to it, and Sephiroth's weapon was one of those elements. Generally in these games, they will time gacha with events so that the gacha will give you an advantage for the event.
I personally only have two banner costumes: Murasame Battle Garb and Edged Wings Training Gear. I also have the Aerith voucher gear with the heal boost. I was able to score 124 in the ranking event with Cloud, Aerith, and Sephiroth. My highest OB gacha weapon is Murasame at OB+2, and I need four more weapon pieces to get Edged Wings to OB+2. Being able to get that score came down entirely to figuring out the correct path and trance boosts to optimize my kills while minimizing items used. Murasame and Edged Wings are also the only weapons I've taken to level 90 so far. I have like 130 mythril ore in reserve. All my other weapons (the ones worth building, at least) are at either level 80 or level 60.
Obviously it's kind of a crapshoot depending on which group you get randomly assigned to. It might be that your group was more competitive or had more whales in it than mine did. I was actually in the top 100 before the last day.
I will say I also did get extraordinarily lucky on the Sephiroth banner, getting a +5 stamp to start and multiple +3 stamps, which allowed me to clear out two stamp sheets within my blue crystal spending limit. So I've got Lucia's Bald Eagle, though honestly I haven't really used her yet. I was actually only intending to clear the first sheet and then stop, but I got it in five pulls so I was willing to hit my limit for the chance at pulling Bald Eagle and dupes of Edged Wings and Aonibi.
For the record I'm a tadpole, I've spent a grand total of $3 so far, on the legendary bundle that included a second gear voucher ticket, which I used to buy Zack's ATK boost gear. My self-imposed blue crystal limit is that I'm generally only going to spend on banner if I have enough blue crystals to reasonably guarantee clearing the first stamp sheet, while keeping enough set aside to do the same on the next banner if it surprises me with something I really want. That means, in general, I'm not going to pull on a banner unless I have 40k+ blue crystals banked (or a reasonable likelihood that I can hit it before the end of the next banner period, so maybe like 36k).
I want Aerith's dress because it's pretty, and I'm aware I can set a separate weapon and gear appearance, but being essentially F2P I know that I need to be deliberate with my crystals and I'm just not going to devote resources to building her as a mage for a single element when I've already put a fair amount of resources into making her my primary healer.
I know full well that we're likely to have an event boss coming up that will be weak to wind, but I'm personally saving for Halloween, since they've already datamined likely costumes for Cloud and Sephiroth, and those are the two characters I've put the most effort into building up. Also, as poster children for the main story and FS they are likely always going to be relevant and on the leading edge of the power curve, which makes them very safe units to focus on (along with Aerith, Zack, and Glenn).
Edit: Just one more thought on F2P vs P2W / Minnow vs Whale.
So far the only difference between top 300 (definitely achievable as a minnow) and top 10 / 100 is a cosmetic profile picture. The game's reward structure is set up so that the bulk of rewards are obtained just by participating in events.
The biggest barriers right now for F2P are actually in the new Crash event, which again basically only offers cosmetic rewards over what is achievable at a lower power level, and the VH Summon Battles and Crisis Dungeons which aren't strictly time restricted.
Personally I just cleared Shiva VH1 for the first time today, though I could have probably cleared it sooner. I used Aerith with her voucher gear and Zack and Glenn with their Ifrit weapons built for fire potency and ice resist, with Aerith built for healing and HP. My Ifrit is maxed out thanks to the co-op event we had at the start of the month.
That's the nature of being F2P/minnow in a gacha game, and it's its own challenge.
For this game, the chase items are the costumes, since they are (so far) exclusive to the stamp draws and have limited availability. However, the actual power gate for the game isn't costumes, but overboosting. That's what puts whales above everyone else. An OB+2 weapon is far stronger than a baseline 5-star weapon. All other things being equal, a player with OB+5 weapons will deal like 2x or 3x the damage of a player with OB+1 weapons, from my own experience in co-op.
As for the ranking event, they did explain which elements would be favorable in the week leading up to it, and Sephiroth's weapon was one of those elements. Generally in these games, they will time gacha with events so that the gacha will give you an advantage for the event.
I personally only have two banner costumes: Murasame Battle Garb and Edged Wings Training Gear. I also have the Aerith voucher gear with the heal boost. I was able to score 124 in the ranking event with Cloud, Aerith, and Sephiroth. My highest OB gacha weapon is Murasame at OB+2, and I need four more weapon pieces to get Edged Wings to OB+2. Being able to get that score came down entirely to figuring out the correct path and trance boosts to optimize my kills while minimizing items used. Murasame and Edged Wings are also the only weapons I've taken to level 90 so far. I have like 130 mythril ore in reserve. All my other weapons (the ones worth building, at least) are at either level 80 or level 60.
Obviously it's kind of a crapshoot depending on which group you get randomly assigned to. It might be that your group was more competitive or had more whales in it than mine did. I was actually in the top 100 before the last day.
I will say I also did get extraordinarily lucky on the Sephiroth banner, getting a +5 stamp to start and multiple +3 stamps, which allowed me to clear out two stamp sheets within my blue crystal spending limit. So I've got Lucia's Bald Eagle, though honestly I haven't really used her yet. I was actually only intending to clear the first sheet and then stop, but I got it in five pulls so I was willing to hit my limit for the chance at pulling Bald Eagle and dupes of Edged Wings and Aonibi.
For the record I'm a tadpole, I've spent a grand total of $3 so far, on the legendary bundle that included a second gear voucher ticket, which I used to buy Zack's ATK boost gear. My self-imposed blue crystal limit is that I'm generally only going to spend on banner if I have enough blue crystals to reasonably guarantee clearing the first stamp sheet, while keeping enough set aside to do the same on the next banner if it surprises me with something I really want. That means, in general, I'm not going to pull on a banner unless I have 40k+ blue crystals banked (or a reasonable likelihood that I can hit it before the end of the next banner period, so maybe like 36k).
I want Aerith's dress because it's pretty, and I'm aware I can set a separate weapon and gear appearance, but being essentially F2P I know that I need to be deliberate with my crystals and I'm just not going to devote resources to building her as a mage for a single element when I've already put a fair amount of resources into making her my primary healer.
I know full well that we're likely to have an event boss coming up that will be weak to wind, but I'm personally saving for Halloween, since they've already datamined likely costumes for Cloud and Sephiroth, and those are the two characters I've put the most effort into building up. Also, as poster children for the main story and FS they are likely always going to be relevant and on the leading edge of the power curve, which makes them very safe units to focus on (along with Aerith, Zack, and Glenn).
Edit: Just one more thought on F2P vs P2W / Minnow vs Whale.
So far the only difference between top 300 (definitely achievable as a minnow) and top 10 / 100 is a cosmetic profile picture. The game's reward structure is set up so that the bulk of rewards are obtained just by participating in events.
The biggest barriers right now for F2P are actually in the new Crash event, which again basically only offers cosmetic rewards over what is achievable at a lower power level, and the VH Summon Battles and Crisis Dungeons which aren't strictly time restricted.
Personally I just cleared Shiva VH1 for the first time today, though I could have probably cleared it sooner. I used Aerith with her voucher gear and Zack and Glenn with their Ifrit weapons built for fire potency and ice resist, with Aerith built for healing and HP. My Ifrit is maxed out thanks to the co-op event we had at the start of the month.
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Tetsujin
he/they
- AKA
- Tets
I should probably look for a decent LP of this because I dropped off the game pretty quickly. I find it so severely unfun and unengaging and actively obnoxious with its attempts to get me to spend money on bullshit. I mean, it was one thing knowing what gacha is but it is another to experience it firsthand. 
Ironically I was pushing to get to the TFS story since that is all original and therefore the most interesting part but after finally reaching and finishing chapter 1 I just lost all interest (also kind of hit a roadblock anyway and grinding or rolling for stuff to raise my power level is just sucking the joy out of life tbh)
Ironically I was pushing to get to the TFS story since that is all original and therefore the most interesting part but after finally reaching and finishing chapter 1 I just lost all interest (also kind of hit a roadblock anyway and grinding or rolling for stuff to raise my power level is just sucking the joy out of life tbh)
cold_spirit
he/him
- AKA
- Alex T
Since we're on a bit of a griefing streak:
The gold ticket drop rate as part of the current Sephiroth event is some grade A bullshit.
With the previous event, the Watermelon Challenge, you were guaranteed watermelons after every battle. So even though you had to grind that big, juicy Tonberry until it turned to dust, you could at least budget your time and stamina drinks around it.
But for this event, even though I'm grinding the "Sephiroth 9" fight, the highest level single player option available that drops gold tickets, they're not guaranteed. I was at 196 tickets today, just 4 away from completing the daily mission of 200, and I had to refight Sephiroth four times to get that last drop. And that's with the in-game stamina boost option enabled (not the paid one). Pretty frustrating.
The gold ticket drop rate as part of the current Sephiroth event is some grade A bullshit.
With the previous event, the Watermelon Challenge, you were guaranteed watermelons after every battle. So even though you had to grind that big, juicy Tonberry until it turned to dust, you could at least budget your time and stamina drinks around it.
But for this event, even though I'm grinding the "Sephiroth 9" fight, the highest level single player option available that drops gold tickets, they're not guaranteed. I was at 196 tickets today, just 4 away from completing the daily mission of 200, and I had to refight Sephiroth four times to get that last drop. And that's with the in-game stamina boost option enabled (not the paid one). Pretty frustrating.
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Makoeyes987
Listen closely, there is meaning in my words.
- AKA
- Smooth Criminal
Sometimes taking a break is a good idea. You don't have to do every damn event that floats by. I'm not in the mood for grinding on Sephiroth and I'm sitting on 50k in gems already so I'm taking a break and playing other things, just logging in for dailies.
It's best not to burn yourself out. Balance what you want to do and your resource management. I'm playing casually, not trying to do every little thing possible.
It's best not to burn yourself out. Balance what you want to do and your resource management. I'm playing casually, not trying to do every little thing possible.
Maidenofwar
They/Them
Lots of great posts, and good points here. Thanks for sending feedback X, hopefully they might take things on board.
I'm still having a blast though I admit the grind is real, since there is rare event on right now I grinded so hard I've almost cleared my gift box of free stamina pots and I used to be swimming in them in there.
Got my main team (Cloud, Aerith, Red) to L55, Sephiroth is close to L50, and Matt is another character I've been focusing on currently. Ifrit, Shiva and Ramuh are all maxed on their first special for now.
I definitely use auto for the grinding for the most part, rip to my fingers without that.
Oh yeah Halloween event tonight, free chocobo Aerith
I'm still having a blast though I admit the grind is real, since there is rare event on right now I grinded so hard I've almost cleared my gift box of free stamina pots and I used to be swimming in them in there.
Got my main team (Cloud, Aerith, Red) to L55, Sephiroth is close to L50, and Matt is another character I've been focusing on currently. Ifrit, Shiva and Ramuh are all maxed on their first special for now.
I definitely use auto for the grinding for the most part, rip to my fingers without that.
Oh yeah Halloween event tonight, free chocobo Aerith
X-SOLDIER
Harbinger O Great Justice
- AKA
- X
Oh, I'm aware of gacha and those mechanics, it's more just that the game is WILDLY internally inconsistent about how it rewards things in a way that I think objectively makes the game less interesting when it comes to the bigger picture.
Essentially, it annoys me because this is just bad game design where rather than being addressed, the issues are just obfuscated by mobile monetization strategies that mean that the people who make decisions about where to fix things incentivize them to be ignored. There are FAR better ways to make this sort of thing work and feel rewarding AND monetize them, rather than feel like the game is hoarding some of its content disproportionately for no reason, which makes it LESS engaging to interact with over time, and also doesn't address when some functional elements of those are not at all balanced equivalently.
While I was a MASSIVE fan of the Watermelon Tonberry event... the main challenge in the Sephiroth Crash one was a massive disappointment to say the least.
While the Sephiroth EX battle lists a power of 170,000 – it's balanced for that as a power requirement, but it also requires you to use ONE very specific, repetitive, and EXTREMELY uninteresting strategy to win. Literally everything else aside from that one particular approach will fail, because the guaranteed pattern of Heartless Archangel followed by Shadow Flare will wipe out the entire party unless you're sitting around on full ATB just waiting to full party heal back-to-back all the time. This also means that every party member NEEDS Cura and two different Ruin Sigils – otherwise you won't be able to break him and the charged up Shadow Flare will kill you.
The Watermelon Tonberry had a number of attacks that required specific sigil interrupts, was weak to water, and then needed a DPS rush at the end, but there were a number of different loadouts that you could have, you could rely on a distributed or dedicated healer, and it had a good element of difficulty to match the power. There was flexibility in how you played it and which team you used that just... it doesn't exist in the Sephiroth battle at all. I have a power of a little over 200,000 and I don't even come close using generalized strategies, because even if you get into the late stage, if you hit one point and don't have your main character with full ATB, you can't interrupt Masamune In Waiting, and the Octoslash will do more damage than it's possible to have HP because it's a guaranteed kill... and if your AI characters have a weapon with a Heal or Barrier ability, sometimes they'll just use that rather than attacking and get you killed anyway – so there's an equipment limitation based on the AI's behaviour that you have to compensate for on top of that.
While it's nice that there is a global bonus to all players based on how many of the Whales make it past the Crash battle in Co-Op and Singleplayer, it's just... not really an enticing challenge specifically because the game has RNG and it's about being able to focus on variety of ways to approach things. The Very Hard Shiva battle is still a challenge, but that's because I don't have much in the way of Ice Resistance, which I can definitely get and make a loadout for that will give me what I need for that by just leveling up a few weapons, but aside from "Protect from Ice & have Fire" how exactly you go about that is up to you.
That's the other issue that's linked to my tl;dr is that because overboosting weapons is where the whales thrive, those are the sorts of increasingly artificially difficult barriers that need to exist in order for them to have fun... none of which involves them having disproportionate access to the game's outfits that would be better if the main playerbase had a more viable means to obtain them.
Fingers crossed to see how they manage things during the Halloween event and see if that might have some sort of overall trend in how they're rewarding player engagement for things related to cosmetics and whatnot.
X
The ability to obtain a fully overboosted weapon for Zack because the event rewarded ELEVEN 5★ duplicates on weapons for Zack & then for Glenn with the update makes it feel extremely odd if Overboosting is the single most OP thing in the entire game. The same is also true for a reward weapon for Young Sephiroth, and then one for Barret in the Sephiroth Crash event. While Overboosting can and does give a massive power advantage, it's odd that for most weapons that's basically impossible to get without insane luck, whereas SOME event-specific weapons the game pushes above & beyond what you're ever likely to obtain even for weapons that you're using full time on characters. While only the stamp card gacha also allows you to boost the % for 5 different weapons, which you can also do for the occasional daily weapon parts quest let you lean towards some of that, it's still 0.8% per draw for getting ANY of the ones you select as a 5★, and 1% for the Event weapons.
Whaling has an advantage there specifically because the event weapons have an even higher RNG bias than the ones you set in the stamp gacha, so you can massively build up on specific weapon parts by just paying through to max out all 4 pages of those stamp cards (and even then you can technically repeat the final EX card as much as you want), so even if you don't get the specific rarity, you gain enough scrap to build up more effectively. Even if you went full out like that, you'd STILL be statistically unlikely to obtain ELEVEN 5★ of even one event weapon, let alone BOTH of them like some of the events basically just give away directly. So what the game gives as a reward for almost every normal player in gacha is a fraction of what it gives out if there's a reward playing through (though they did make this much shittier with the Golden Tickets having a 30% drop rate needed for Barret's weapon making it more of a slog compared to the vastly superior Watermelon Tonberry exchange system). Even then, that's still all contained within the weapons which all occupy the same overall placement for powering up characters, and Gear is a totally separate value that all add together into the R. Abilities a character has.
Outfits give a benefit that applies REGARDLESS of what weapon setup you have, so it's a baseline boost that's not going away if RNG throws a curveball and you have an overboosted weapon that's worth leveling up even if the ability isn't particularly excellent. That's which makes them more interesting for your generic level of player to be able to bump your stats a bit... but then not all the outfits are created equal mechanically, because for some reason (like with Materia) there's an INSANE disparity between the advantages of numerical vs. percentage-based boosts, and why focusing on outfits that give that make a massive difference – especially since you can just use a cosmetic skin of whatever you want that doesn't impact gameplay AT ALL.
While most of the outfits give something simple like +8 Magic Attack +8 Physical Defense, it's the ones that Cloud, Sephiroth, & Aerith currently have with that 35% elemental boost (Lightning, Ice, & Wind respectively) that can scale to insane heights. Those are things that mean that the gameplay value of some of those VASTLY outmatches what others will deliver even though they're all just listed as 5★ costumes because they're all obtained in Stamp cards. The fact that there's an entire system for cosmetic differentiation that most players have an extremely limited ability to utilize despite a pretty robust number of options is what feels especially rough.
The most unfortunate thing about the costumes being implemented as they are is that the variety in other players becomes vastly more limited in the Co-Op the less customizable that characters FEEL to players, not to mention that they have a less powerful baseline value. The characters who don't have ANY costumes won't have a specific baseline advantage that others do regardless of which weapons they use. The harder it is to obtain them, the less likely they are to show up as someone's main character for challenging Co-Op events. Then on top of that, there's less build variety you see within the players that you DO match up with, compared to what there SHOULD be given how many outfits that actually exist:
10 – Cloud, Barret, Tifa, Aerith, Red XIII, Zack, Glenn, Matt, Lucia, & Young Sephiroth in the game's Gear Exchange (exchange OPEN)
3 – Glenn, Matt, & Lucia story outfits (story GUARANTEED)
2 – Cloud & Barret (gacha CLOSED)
1 – Zack (gameplay CLOSED)
2 – Tifa & Red XIII (gacha CLOSED)
2 – Cloud & Aerith (gacha CLOSED)
1 – Young Sephiroth (gacha CLOSED)
2 – Matt & Aerith (gacha ACTIVE)
So pre-Halloween there are 22 different outfits implemented into the game right now... but what's especially strange is how rare the game treats those, because it makes them EXACTLY as rare as a specific 5★ weapon. You can only get a Weapon Exchange Ticket or a Gear Exchange Ticket once a month from the shop (which itself is also exclusive to a massively expensive bundle making it a whale-specific item already). The Season Pass currently has one Gear Exchange ticket about halfway in, but the main point is that those things are treated as being of equivalent value within the game's Shop & monetary ecosystem.
...which brings me back to how the game will give you ELEVEN 5★ Duplicate Weapons during some events. Even grinding the everliving hell out of just the Ifrit Summon mission for guaranteed specific weapon drops, you're still relying on RNG, and I haven't even maxed out Overboosting Zack's Ifrit Sword by the time I had enough memories to obtain Hellfire AND fully max out Ifrit's entire skill tree... And Glenn still has his own Ifrit mission weapon that will require that exact same grind to get, but now the other Ifrit memory rewards become pointless, and that's taking exponentially more effort to get what is an equivalent reward to what I got in less than a day from the Watermelon Tonberry event – which was a fully overboosted Weapon for both of them. Even THOSE summon-specific weapons are technically still exponentially easier to try and level up intentionally than any default weapon in the rest of the game, because you can actually just do gameplay grinding to specifically get them.
All the other weapons do still have that same investment capacity to level them up, but they're hard locked behind RNG that's going into which ones you have duplicates of to overboost, and thus which ones you'll have a bigger advantage for leveling up. Even with all of the RNG manipulation in place, it's still very limited how much you can reliably overpower just those specific weapons. How much the game values being able to just choose one 5★ Weapon massively varies based on which weapon it is and in what context it's being presented... but after the events are over and those weapons get added into the overall pool – they all carry the EXACT same value, which is the cost of a 5★ Weapon Exchange Ticket.
That holds the same internal ecosystem value as a Gear Exchange Ticket, except that the Gear Exchange tickets don't give ANY of the stamp card outfits and are currently ONLY valid for the 10 starting outfits and even THOSE are extremely rare (since players could LITERALLY only have obtained... I think MAYBE 5 of them if you did the season pass and purchased all the shop bundles). Seeing them measured by the same standard as a 5★ weapon that also throws in all the stamp card gacha weapons as well makes the overall value of the outfits feel just ridiculously odd, but especially since they're a stat that serves as a baseline and carries a bias on who you add to a team and who you don't.
Moreso than that though, is that the starting outfits are ALL 3★, the TFS story outfits are ALL 4★, and everything else in the game is ALL 5★... but unlike the weapons there isn't an RNG pool that has the same equivalent % of rarity associated with it. Essentially you're less likely to ever see a character in Co-Op without an outfit than you are to see them with one.
This gets back to the cosmetic vs. gameplay issue because you can choose a cosmetic skin for your main weapon to look like anything you've obtained at any rarity. I can run around with Sephiroth swinging the Northern Lights despite the fact that I don't have it leveled up at all or rare, but because it's cosmetically a better look. Those cosmetic differences are ONLY reflected in the combat, and they aren't displayed in any of the on-field or single-player specific parts of the game.
That PALES in comparison to the difference that the outfits offer... but again – you can't use them cosmetically unless you unlock them, and since there IS no % pool for you to have a 3★, 4★, or 5★ rarity of the outfits that all look different. So most cosmetic options for all the different characters remain totally removed from players in their entirety. Also, the cosmetic outfit used changes everything on the field models AND in the combat models, so there's a non-statistical, single-player gameplay element that gets altered which is perhaps one of the more important things for players to be able to have a sense of variety and customization to their characters.
While the internal ecosystem is designed for all 5★ equipment of any kind to hold the same value... but the game itself doesn't reflect that at all, and instead it makes the elements that are designed to facilitate a much larger non-mechanical impact on gameplay vastly more difficult... meanwhile it also makes SOME of those so VASTLY more mechanically valueable than others while not differentiating them at all in the game.
Whaling has an advantage there specifically because the event weapons have an even higher RNG bias than the ones you set in the stamp gacha, so you can massively build up on specific weapon parts by just paying through to max out all 4 pages of those stamp cards (and even then you can technically repeat the final EX card as much as you want), so even if you don't get the specific rarity, you gain enough scrap to build up more effectively. Even if you went full out like that, you'd STILL be statistically unlikely to obtain ELEVEN 5★ of even one event weapon, let alone BOTH of them like some of the events basically just give away directly. So what the game gives as a reward for almost every normal player in gacha is a fraction of what it gives out if there's a reward playing through (though they did make this much shittier with the Golden Tickets having a 30% drop rate needed for Barret's weapon making it more of a slog compared to the vastly superior Watermelon Tonberry exchange system). Even then, that's still all contained within the weapons which all occupy the same overall placement for powering up characters, and Gear is a totally separate value that all add together into the R. Abilities a character has.
Outfits give a benefit that applies REGARDLESS of what weapon setup you have, so it's a baseline boost that's not going away if RNG throws a curveball and you have an overboosted weapon that's worth leveling up even if the ability isn't particularly excellent. That's which makes them more interesting for your generic level of player to be able to bump your stats a bit... but then not all the outfits are created equal mechanically, because for some reason (like with Materia) there's an INSANE disparity between the advantages of numerical vs. percentage-based boosts, and why focusing on outfits that give that make a massive difference – especially since you can just use a cosmetic skin of whatever you want that doesn't impact gameplay AT ALL.
While most of the outfits give something simple like +8 Magic Attack +8 Physical Defense, it's the ones that Cloud, Sephiroth, & Aerith currently have with that 35% elemental boost (Lightning, Ice, & Wind respectively) that can scale to insane heights. Those are things that mean that the gameplay value of some of those VASTLY outmatches what others will deliver even though they're all just listed as 5★ costumes because they're all obtained in Stamp cards. The fact that there's an entire system for cosmetic differentiation that most players have an extremely limited ability to utilize despite a pretty robust number of options is what feels especially rough.
The most unfortunate thing about the costumes being implemented as they are is that the variety in other players becomes vastly more limited in the Co-Op the less customizable that characters FEEL to players, not to mention that they have a less powerful baseline value. The characters who don't have ANY costumes won't have a specific baseline advantage that others do regardless of which weapons they use. The harder it is to obtain them, the less likely they are to show up as someone's main character for challenging Co-Op events. Then on top of that, there's less build variety you see within the players that you DO match up with, compared to what there SHOULD be given how many outfits that actually exist:
10 – Cloud, Barret, Tifa, Aerith, Red XIII, Zack, Glenn, Matt, Lucia, & Young Sephiroth in the game's Gear Exchange (exchange OPEN)
3 – Glenn, Matt, & Lucia story outfits (story GUARANTEED)
2 – Cloud & Barret (gacha CLOSED)
1 – Zack (gameplay CLOSED)
2 – Tifa & Red XIII (gacha CLOSED)
2 – Cloud & Aerith (gacha CLOSED)
1 – Young Sephiroth (gacha CLOSED)
2 – Matt & Aerith (gacha ACTIVE)
So pre-Halloween there are 22 different outfits implemented into the game right now... but what's especially strange is how rare the game treats those, because it makes them EXACTLY as rare as a specific 5★ weapon. You can only get a Weapon Exchange Ticket or a Gear Exchange Ticket once a month from the shop (which itself is also exclusive to a massively expensive bundle making it a whale-specific item already). The Season Pass currently has one Gear Exchange ticket about halfway in, but the main point is that those things are treated as being of equivalent value within the game's Shop & monetary ecosystem.
...which brings me back to how the game will give you ELEVEN 5★ Duplicate Weapons during some events. Even grinding the everliving hell out of just the Ifrit Summon mission for guaranteed specific weapon drops, you're still relying on RNG, and I haven't even maxed out Overboosting Zack's Ifrit Sword by the time I had enough memories to obtain Hellfire AND fully max out Ifrit's entire skill tree... And Glenn still has his own Ifrit mission weapon that will require that exact same grind to get, but now the other Ifrit memory rewards become pointless, and that's taking exponentially more effort to get what is an equivalent reward to what I got in less than a day from the Watermelon Tonberry event – which was a fully overboosted Weapon for both of them. Even THOSE summon-specific weapons are technically still exponentially easier to try and level up intentionally than any default weapon in the rest of the game, because you can actually just do gameplay grinding to specifically get them.
All the other weapons do still have that same investment capacity to level them up, but they're hard locked behind RNG that's going into which ones you have duplicates of to overboost, and thus which ones you'll have a bigger advantage for leveling up. Even with all of the RNG manipulation in place, it's still very limited how much you can reliably overpower just those specific weapons. How much the game values being able to just choose one 5★ Weapon massively varies based on which weapon it is and in what context it's being presented... but after the events are over and those weapons get added into the overall pool – they all carry the EXACT same value, which is the cost of a 5★ Weapon Exchange Ticket.
That holds the same internal ecosystem value as a Gear Exchange Ticket, except that the Gear Exchange tickets don't give ANY of the stamp card outfits and are currently ONLY valid for the 10 starting outfits and even THOSE are extremely rare (since players could LITERALLY only have obtained... I think MAYBE 5 of them if you did the season pass and purchased all the shop bundles). Seeing them measured by the same standard as a 5★ weapon that also throws in all the stamp card gacha weapons as well makes the overall value of the outfits feel just ridiculously odd, but especially since they're a stat that serves as a baseline and carries a bias on who you add to a team and who you don't.
Moreso than that though, is that the starting outfits are ALL 3★, the TFS story outfits are ALL 4★, and everything else in the game is ALL 5★... but unlike the weapons there isn't an RNG pool that has the same equivalent % of rarity associated with it. Essentially you're less likely to ever see a character in Co-Op without an outfit than you are to see them with one.
This gets back to the cosmetic vs. gameplay issue because you can choose a cosmetic skin for your main weapon to look like anything you've obtained at any rarity. I can run around with Sephiroth swinging the Northern Lights despite the fact that I don't have it leveled up at all or rare, but because it's cosmetically a better look. Those cosmetic differences are ONLY reflected in the combat, and they aren't displayed in any of the on-field or single-player specific parts of the game.
That PALES in comparison to the difference that the outfits offer... but again – you can't use them cosmetically unless you unlock them, and since there IS no % pool for you to have a 3★, 4★, or 5★ rarity of the outfits that all look different. So most cosmetic options for all the different characters remain totally removed from players in their entirety. Also, the cosmetic outfit used changes everything on the field models AND in the combat models, so there's a non-statistical, single-player gameplay element that gets altered which is perhaps one of the more important things for players to be able to have a sense of variety and customization to their characters.
While the internal ecosystem is designed for all 5★ equipment of any kind to hold the same value... but the game itself doesn't reflect that at all, and instead it makes the elements that are designed to facilitate a much larger non-mechanical impact on gameplay vastly more difficult... meanwhile it also makes SOME of those so VASTLY more mechanically valueable than others while not differentiating them at all in the game.
Essentially, it annoys me because this is just bad game design where rather than being addressed, the issues are just obfuscated by mobile monetization strategies that mean that the people who make decisions about where to fix things incentivize them to be ignored. There are FAR better ways to make this sort of thing work and feel rewarding AND monetize them, rather than feel like the game is hoarding some of its content disproportionately for no reason, which makes it LESS engaging to interact with over time, and also doesn't address when some functional elements of those are not at all balanced equivalently.
While I was a MASSIVE fan of the Watermelon Tonberry event... the main challenge in the Sephiroth Crash one was a massive disappointment to say the least.
While the Sephiroth EX battle lists a power of 170,000 – it's balanced for that as a power requirement, but it also requires you to use ONE very specific, repetitive, and EXTREMELY uninteresting strategy to win. Literally everything else aside from that one particular approach will fail, because the guaranteed pattern of Heartless Archangel followed by Shadow Flare will wipe out the entire party unless you're sitting around on full ATB just waiting to full party heal back-to-back all the time. This also means that every party member NEEDS Cura and two different Ruin Sigils – otherwise you won't be able to break him and the charged up Shadow Flare will kill you.
The Watermelon Tonberry had a number of attacks that required specific sigil interrupts, was weak to water, and then needed a DPS rush at the end, but there were a number of different loadouts that you could have, you could rely on a distributed or dedicated healer, and it had a good element of difficulty to match the power. There was flexibility in how you played it and which team you used that just... it doesn't exist in the Sephiroth battle at all. I have a power of a little over 200,000 and I don't even come close using generalized strategies, because even if you get into the late stage, if you hit one point and don't have your main character with full ATB, you can't interrupt Masamune In Waiting, and the Octoslash will do more damage than it's possible to have HP because it's a guaranteed kill... and if your AI characters have a weapon with a Heal or Barrier ability, sometimes they'll just use that rather than attacking and get you killed anyway – so there's an equipment limitation based on the AI's behaviour that you have to compensate for on top of that.
While it's nice that there is a global bonus to all players based on how many of the Whales make it past the Crash battle in Co-Op and Singleplayer, it's just... not really an enticing challenge specifically because the game has RNG and it's about being able to focus on variety of ways to approach things. The Very Hard Shiva battle is still a challenge, but that's because I don't have much in the way of Ice Resistance, which I can definitely get and make a loadout for that will give me what I need for that by just leveling up a few weapons, but aside from "Protect from Ice & have Fire" how exactly you go about that is up to you.
That's the other issue that's linked to my tl;dr is that because overboosting weapons is where the whales thrive, those are the sorts of increasingly artificially difficult barriers that need to exist in order for them to have fun... none of which involves them having disproportionate access to the game's outfits that would be better if the main playerbase had a more viable means to obtain them.
Fingers crossed to see how they manage things during the Halloween event and see if that might have some sort of overall trend in how they're rewarding player engagement for things related to cosmetics and whatnot.
X
jazzflower92
Pro Adventurer
- AKA
- The Girl With A Strong Opinion
And this freaking confirms the long held view that Sephiroth was a lab rat. And horrifically it added something that no other fanfiction I saw do which is Hojo injected poison into him.
Cthulhu
Administrator
- AKA
- Yop
The story of this game is kinda thin and can probably be summarized in a few paragraphs.
I don't understand the issue with payment, you can do all the story without paying for it. You'll miss out on the outfits or the highest difficulty content, but that's what they want you to feel like you're missing out on.
I don't care about not being able to do the high difficulty content, ranked events, or outfits so,
Are there any gacha games on e.g. Steam? I know there's tons of collectible card games, but that's somewhat different.
I don't understand the issue with payment, you can do all the story without paying for it. You'll miss out on the outfits or the highest difficulty content, but that's what they want you to feel like you're missing out on.
I don't care about not being able to do the high difficulty content, ranked events, or outfits so,
Are there any gacha games on e.g. Steam? I know there's tons of collectible card games, but that's somewhat different.
Maidenofwar
They/Them
I think this game is coming to steam maybe Dissidia Opera Omnia too 
Going to assume Gensin is there too. I think yes 
Good luck to everyone doing the ranking event this time. If I remember right last time I ended up in the top 500 without trying very hard (couldn't beat the highest difficult) this morning so far I woke up some hours after the event started, beat Normal and Hard, and got in the top 200.
Also yaay 1000 gems Cactuar!
Going to assume Gensin is there too. I think yes Good luck to everyone doing the ranking event this time. If I remember right last time I ended up in the top 500 without trying very hard (couldn't beat the highest difficult) this morning so far I woke up some hours after the event started, beat Normal and Hard, and got in the top 200.
Also yaay 1000 gems Cactuar!
Suzaku
Pro Adventurer
The two biggest gacha games on PC that I'm aware of are Genshin Impact and I guess Another Eden. Another Eden is basically a spiritual successor to Chrono Trigger and involves a lot of the same staff in either main or guest roles, though unfortunately the battle system is nothing like CT's.The story of this game is kinda thin and can probably be summarized in a few paragraphs.
I don't understand the issue with payment, you can do all the story without paying for it. You'll miss out on the outfits or the highest difficulty content, but that's what they want you to feel like you're missing out on.
I don't care about not being able to do the high difficulty content, ranked events, or outfits so,
Are there any gacha games on e.g. Steam? I know there's tons of collectible card games, but that's somewhat different.
There are definitely others, and you can play quite a few mobile games using Android emulators like BlueStacks, but performance isn't as stellar as direct PC ports.
Square Enix has only ported two gacha games to PC so far, the first was Mobius Final Fantasy (ended service years ago) and now Ever Crisis.
ultima espio
Pro Adventurer
Someone in another thread years ago was asking about character's heights, here's a visual with some EC models and their ultimania heights:
Read the full thread for more.
Read the full thread for more.
X-SOLDIER
Harbinger O Great Justice
- AKA
- X
So, one of the things that I've liked in this event's story is that it covers the details of the Portal Materia more overtly while also adding in some existential musings about Sephiroth that I think are important given that Remake presented us with 4 different versions of the character.
Young Sephiroth:
– "It would see that the rumors are true: Portal doesn't allow you to recall what happened on the other side."
Matt:
– "No wonder Professor Hojo lost interest and scrapped his research."
This makes the previous Watermelon Tonberry event rather interesting and the note that Aerith sent through fairly interesting, as the mechanics allow for you to retain anything you had from where you come from, but not where you go to. Whether or not those sorts of mechanics are just limited to Ever Crisis as an exploration of "Another Possibility of a Remake" or if they also extend to some of the alternative world progression that we've seen in Remake/Rebirth (which I made a post about recently) isn't clear, but I also think that the conversation that follows is quite an interesting one:
Young Sephiroth:
– "Well, we didn't achieve anything, but we went in and came back, so I'd say we successfully completed out investigation of the portal."
Matt:
– "You probably did achieve something. Even if you don't remember, it's etched into your heart and body. They say 97% of people's actions are driven by their unconscious mind. So it had to have left some sort of mark. Though I bet it's different for your, Glenn. I'd say you're closer to 99%."
Lucia:
– "Don't you mean 100%?"
Glenn:
– "So I'm unconsciously a natural! I don't see a problem with that!"
Young Sephiroth:
– "If your unconscious mind is who you are, you could never take responsibility for anything since you wouldn't be aware of your own words or actions. I'm very conscious about every decision I make."
Lucia:
– "That sounds tough in this line of work."
Matt:
– "Maybe not for Sephiroth."
This covers a number of things which are important things for the player to consider in the context of the original narrative, but also as to when and whether or not they remain true when a character experiences a psychological break. For example: After Cloud has a disassociative experience and gives the Black Materia to Sephiroth at the Temple of the Ancients, he assaults Aerith. Those types of impulsive reactions of an inversion towards someone you consider close are a real part of severe PTSD attempting to cope with conflicts in cognitive dissonance about self identity and your relationship to other people.
By making Glenn someone who's extremely impulsive and Young Sephiroth his foil who's extremely calculated you're looking at two diametrically opposed individuals who are likely going to be exposed to an identical traumatic event (foreshadowing from the trailers), and seeing how it changes both of them and what type of stress coping mechanisms this creates in both of them.
What's notable is that one of the defining comments about the Nibelheim Incident is Zack saying that Sephiroth is no longer the person he once knew and also Sephiroth's total shift in personal pronouns that highlights points where we see different iterations of Sephiroth during Remake. Attempting to understand whether or not the "Young Sephiroth" we meet here who's consciously aware of all of the things that he does and the decisions that he makes is the same as the psychotically sociopathic murderer is important to how one views him as an antagonist. This sort of cognitive understanding and formative trauma are REALLY big details given Japan's history (massive warning if you intend to look up influences like the Kobe Child Murders, but they're really critical to understand how and why Japanese media has a deeply complex exploration of the nuances of those types of psychological profiles that change a LOT after the release of the original FFVII).
Personally, I find those things extremely interesting especially as the interplay of the relationship between your subconscious driven directly by your sensory system from the Amygdala and the conscious driven by your objective understanding of things from the Prefrontal Cortex and the inhibiting relationship that they have to one another is an extremely active part of my every day life (having been dealing with the cognitive & physical impacts of a stress adaptation disorder the last several years being in large part why my posting activity is still quite limited).
Suffice to say that it's really neat to see a lot of overt and explicitly detailed exposition around concepts that I've been diving into while doing tl;dr research stuff on the history of FFVII coming into direct prominence even when they're just these little side-story narratives.
Insofar as the late-October gameplay stuff:
While there have been a near-overwhelming amount of things dropped recently, it's really clear that the EC team is EXTREMELY active in paying attention to the playerbase, and finding ways to make the game better, more clear, more satisfying, etc. I've filed a few more bug reports and other things and have nothing but positive things to say having done so.
One thing that's fairly odd about the Halloween event is that Aerith's Chocobo Staff & Costume seem like they were likely planned for a different event and this was supposed to've been Glenn's Pumpkin outfit from the story – especially since that's what the Background is of just like with Zack during the Watermelon Tonberry Event. Adding on to that, the 11 event weapons that you can max out always come in pairs with an identical C. Ability:
• Zack's Beach Parasol & Glenn's Thousand Waves have "Magic Ray"
• Young Sephiroth's Torn Wing & Barret's Lefko Kypseli have "Solid Barrier"
• Aerith's Chocobo Staff & Lucia's Pumpkin Smasher have "Solid Manaward"
What's extra annoying is that Lucia's SSR1976 has "Stalwart Manaward" which is an identical (and better) C. Ability to Pumpkin Smasher's "Solid Manaward" so not only is that new weapon a weaker clone of a weapon she already has (with different R. Abilities) but even more frustratingly, is that the C. Ability "Solid Manaward" would have been a brand new utility if it were given to ANY OTHER CHARACTER EXCEPT HER. This makes it seem even more like it was supposed to have had an identical ability to whatever Glenn's lamp-keyblade-hybrid weapon has, but it got altered to match Aerith's weapon instead because the Chocobo Outfit worked as a Halloween-type costume that they needed to have at launch.
This was extra annoying for me since the SSR1976 is the only decent weapon I have for Lucia, and if an enemy has a gradually charging attack like the Guard Scorpion's Debilitating Laser, she will just repeatedly cast that on its target back-to-back instead of attacking – even if the first cast will cover the entire duration that it takes for the attack to land, so it's already an ability that's EXTREMELY unhelpful more than it is beneficial unless you're aggressively babysitting that character.
Add that to what I learned with Young Sephiroth having the Mythril Type-0 Katana (self barrier + regen) and the Aonibi (Mag Attack up + Regen) is that they'll just chain cast those abilities over and over and over again as the enemy changes between attacking to being vulnerable without ACTUALLY ever doing a goddamn thing.
That being said, the La'paina Coast Crisis Dungeon Ranked event was a ton of fun. While I don't have a super Wind specialized character for it, I've managed to do pretty decently, and even (after a great many attempts) beat the difficult boss while only taking the Score boosting Trance abilities (that being said, it didn't surpass my high score before that that I got skipping one of them, so I feel like my current placement will end up being pretty much dialed into place as other players start to go through it).
The absolute BEST thing about those events is that they're challenging and they don't cost a dungeon key OR stamina to do over and over and over again, which was one of the very first bits of feedback that I ever passed on to the EC team which is that the Crisis Dungeons are some of the most enjoyable content, but the aggressive limitation on being able to just tackle that challenge in as many ways as you can was hamstrung because of the Dungeon Key as an insanely limited resource. Personally, I hope that they just have one of those on rotation all the time as I think that gameplay-wise they are FAR AND AWAY the most fun thing to do.
The Frenzy Battle from players defeating Sephiroth being all hyped up and showing a list of their names, but the reward being given after completing a Level 1 Cactuar fight was... a strange choice to be certain. I'm grateful for it and it's neat to showcase all the players who contributed but the delivery was just a little off to where it felt like maybe they'd planned on something more showy but the event didn't lend itself to the results that they were hoping for. As such, I'm quite curious how the Iron Giant one is gonna go and if that'll be any different.
The latest updates also have some interesting charts about the probabilities for stats on Materia Synthesis and having the Shiva Co-Op event is a far more satisfying way to approach those fights compared to the Solo versions. As such, I've now managed to max out all 3 of the Summons in the game, so it'll be interesting to see what's next. They've also got an EXP campaign planned for Nov 5-12, so I'm curious if we might end up seeing another Level Cap shift or potentially get Yuffie as a character.
She seems like they'd be able to include here wherever as a combat encounter with some other stuff that's not too big of an issue where the linear progression of the FFVII story is concerned, as while I'm assuming that we'll have some various CC & TFS bits of story, the FFVII story from Kalm and onward will still be primarily held off until post-Rebirth.
At any rate – it's definitely managing to improve still and the story elements continue to be quite interesting.
X
Young Sephiroth:
– "It would see that the rumors are true: Portal doesn't allow you to recall what happened on the other side."
Matt:
– "No wonder Professor Hojo lost interest and scrapped his research."
This makes the previous Watermelon Tonberry event rather interesting and the note that Aerith sent through fairly interesting, as the mechanics allow for you to retain anything you had from where you come from, but not where you go to. Whether or not those sorts of mechanics are just limited to Ever Crisis as an exploration of "Another Possibility of a Remake" or if they also extend to some of the alternative world progression that we've seen in Remake/Rebirth (which I made a post about recently) isn't clear, but I also think that the conversation that follows is quite an interesting one:
Young Sephiroth:
– "Well, we didn't achieve anything, but we went in and came back, so I'd say we successfully completed out investigation of the portal."
Matt:
– "You probably did achieve something. Even if you don't remember, it's etched into your heart and body. They say 97% of people's actions are driven by their unconscious mind. So it had to have left some sort of mark. Though I bet it's different for your, Glenn. I'd say you're closer to 99%."
Lucia:
– "Don't you mean 100%?"
Glenn:
– "So I'm unconsciously a natural! I don't see a problem with that!"
Young Sephiroth:
– "If your unconscious mind is who you are, you could never take responsibility for anything since you wouldn't be aware of your own words or actions. I'm very conscious about every decision I make."
Lucia:
– "That sounds tough in this line of work."
Matt:
– "Maybe not for Sephiroth."
This covers a number of things which are important things for the player to consider in the context of the original narrative, but also as to when and whether or not they remain true when a character experiences a psychological break. For example: After Cloud has a disassociative experience and gives the Black Materia to Sephiroth at the Temple of the Ancients, he assaults Aerith. Those types of impulsive reactions of an inversion towards someone you consider close are a real part of severe PTSD attempting to cope with conflicts in cognitive dissonance about self identity and your relationship to other people.
By making Glenn someone who's extremely impulsive and Young Sephiroth his foil who's extremely calculated you're looking at two diametrically opposed individuals who are likely going to be exposed to an identical traumatic event (foreshadowing from the trailers), and seeing how it changes both of them and what type of stress coping mechanisms this creates in both of them.
What's notable is that one of the defining comments about the Nibelheim Incident is Zack saying that Sephiroth is no longer the person he once knew and also Sephiroth's total shift in personal pronouns that highlights points where we see different iterations of Sephiroth during Remake. Attempting to understand whether or not the "Young Sephiroth" we meet here who's consciously aware of all of the things that he does and the decisions that he makes is the same as the psychotically sociopathic murderer is important to how one views him as an antagonist. This sort of cognitive understanding and formative trauma are REALLY big details given Japan's history (massive warning if you intend to look up influences like the Kobe Child Murders, but they're really critical to understand how and why Japanese media has a deeply complex exploration of the nuances of those types of psychological profiles that change a LOT after the release of the original FFVII).
Personally, I find those things extremely interesting especially as the interplay of the relationship between your subconscious driven directly by your sensory system from the Amygdala and the conscious driven by your objective understanding of things from the Prefrontal Cortex and the inhibiting relationship that they have to one another is an extremely active part of my every day life (having been dealing with the cognitive & physical impacts of a stress adaptation disorder the last several years being in large part why my posting activity is still quite limited).
Suffice to say that it's really neat to see a lot of overt and explicitly detailed exposition around concepts that I've been diving into while doing tl;dr research stuff on the history of FFVII coming into direct prominence even when they're just these little side-story narratives.
Insofar as the late-October gameplay stuff:
While there have been a near-overwhelming amount of things dropped recently, it's really clear that the EC team is EXTREMELY active in paying attention to the playerbase, and finding ways to make the game better, more clear, more satisfying, etc. I've filed a few more bug reports and other things and have nothing but positive things to say having done so.
One thing that's fairly odd about the Halloween event is that Aerith's Chocobo Staff & Costume seem like they were likely planned for a different event and this was supposed to've been Glenn's Pumpkin outfit from the story – especially since that's what the Background is of just like with Zack during the Watermelon Tonberry Event. Adding on to that, the 11 event weapons that you can max out always come in pairs with an identical C. Ability:
• Zack's Beach Parasol & Glenn's Thousand Waves have "Magic Ray"
• Young Sephiroth's Torn Wing & Barret's Lefko Kypseli have "Solid Barrier"
• Aerith's Chocobo Staff & Lucia's Pumpkin Smasher have "Solid Manaward"
What's extra annoying is that Lucia's SSR1976 has "Stalwart Manaward" which is an identical (and better) C. Ability to Pumpkin Smasher's "Solid Manaward" so not only is that new weapon a weaker clone of a weapon she already has (with different R. Abilities) but even more frustratingly, is that the C. Ability "Solid Manaward" would have been a brand new utility if it were given to ANY OTHER CHARACTER EXCEPT HER. This makes it seem even more like it was supposed to have had an identical ability to whatever Glenn's lamp-keyblade-hybrid weapon has, but it got altered to match Aerith's weapon instead because the Chocobo Outfit worked as a Halloween-type costume that they needed to have at launch.
This was extra annoying for me since the SSR1976 is the only decent weapon I have for Lucia, and if an enemy has a gradually charging attack like the Guard Scorpion's Debilitating Laser, she will just repeatedly cast that on its target back-to-back instead of attacking – even if the first cast will cover the entire duration that it takes for the attack to land, so it's already an ability that's EXTREMELY unhelpful more than it is beneficial unless you're aggressively babysitting that character.
Add that to what I learned with Young Sephiroth having the Mythril Type-0 Katana (self barrier + regen) and the Aonibi (Mag Attack up + Regen) is that they'll just chain cast those abilities over and over and over again as the enemy changes between attacking to being vulnerable without ACTUALLY ever doing a goddamn thing.
That being said, the La'paina Coast Crisis Dungeon Ranked event was a ton of fun. While I don't have a super Wind specialized character for it, I've managed to do pretty decently, and even (after a great many attempts) beat the difficult boss while only taking the Score boosting Trance abilities (that being said, it didn't surpass my high score before that that I got skipping one of them, so I feel like my current placement will end up being pretty much dialed into place as other players start to go through it).
The absolute BEST thing about those events is that they're challenging and they don't cost a dungeon key OR stamina to do over and over and over again, which was one of the very first bits of feedback that I ever passed on to the EC team which is that the Crisis Dungeons are some of the most enjoyable content, but the aggressive limitation on being able to just tackle that challenge in as many ways as you can was hamstrung because of the Dungeon Key as an insanely limited resource. Personally, I hope that they just have one of those on rotation all the time as I think that gameplay-wise they are FAR AND AWAY the most fun thing to do.
The Frenzy Battle from players defeating Sephiroth being all hyped up and showing a list of their names, but the reward being given after completing a Level 1 Cactuar fight was... a strange choice to be certain. I'm grateful for it and it's neat to showcase all the players who contributed but the delivery was just a little off to where it felt like maybe they'd planned on something more showy but the event didn't lend itself to the results that they were hoping for. As such, I'm quite curious how the Iron Giant one is gonna go and if that'll be any different.
The latest updates also have some interesting charts about the probabilities for stats on Materia Synthesis and having the Shiva Co-Op event is a far more satisfying way to approach those fights compared to the Solo versions. As such, I've now managed to max out all 3 of the Summons in the game, so it'll be interesting to see what's next. They've also got an EXP campaign planned for Nov 5-12, so I'm curious if we might end up seeing another Level Cap shift or potentially get Yuffie as a character.
She seems like they'd be able to include here wherever as a combat encounter with some other stuff that's not too big of an issue where the linear progression of the FFVII story is concerned, as while I'm assuming that we'll have some various CC & TFS bits of story, the FFVII story from Kalm and onward will still be primarily held off until post-Rebirth.
At any rate – it's definitely managing to improve still and the story elements continue to be quite interesting.
X
Suzaku
Pro Adventurer
Wow. So the devs actually listened to the feedback about Sephiroth's face looking like his adult head on a kid's body, and changed his character model in the new patch, along with changes to some of the other character models:
Personally didn't have a problem with it and was surprised they're putting in this much effort.
Seems like they might have also adjusted the lighting or something about how all the characters are rendered, because it does look a bit different to me. Maybe just my imagination though.
Personally didn't have a problem with it and was surprised they're putting in this much effort.
Seems like they might have also adjusted the lighting or something about how all the characters are rendered, because it does look a bit different to me. Maybe just my imagination though.
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cold_spirit
he/him
- AKA
- Alex T
Comparison I saw on Twitter. Left = old, right = new.
I have no strong opinions on this, just that maybe he's a bit too baby faced now haha.
I have no strong opinions on this, just that maybe he's a bit too baby faced now haha.
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cold_spirit
he/him
- AKA
- Alex T
Beyond the Sephiroth change, they refreshed a lot (all?) of the character's pre-battle portraits. Looks nice. And I think the "Rcmd. Party" feature sucks a little less now.
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