(Tagged Remake Spoilers) OG Frustration Thread/Double Standards

[Cannon_Fodder]

I'd honestly prefer if they tone down Cid's abuse towards Shera and go to greater lengths to call him out and show him reflecting on his actions and slowly redeeming himself. I don't have any personal experience with this kind of abuse--so you can take my opinion with a grain/ton of salt--but I don't know if a side story in a presumably packed RPG is the place to really delve into the kind of rough abuse Cid was originally giving Shera. I think his redemption should still be his arc, but I'm not sure there's enough time or narrative space to really unpack his original levels of abuse in a substantive way.

 

[Prism]

It might be against the spirit of the thread, but I actually really like the Huge Materia quests. Not only do they give the sub-characters a chance to shine, but they resolve the plot points set up in each town earlier on, neatly completing the arcs they set up initially. Barret’s shame based on his past in Corel? Resolved by him saving the town. Cid being an abusive housemate that never got to fulfill his dreams? Rocket Town’s huge materia quest vindicates Shera’s actions, and makes Cid grow as a person. (I honestly think they’re gonna fix his more abusive qualities and just make him hold a grudge)

It’s important to wrap up the world’s plotlines and not just focus on the Sephiroth / Ancient plot alone. The world of FFVII is only stronger because of this development, and gives the threat of Meteor more weight when you have an investment in the world.

Not to mention they’re only parts of the game with different outcomes - you can fail, which, for me, made the situations more exhilarating. It’s totally doable to get the passcode in the rocket due to Cid’s frantic hints, for instance. Giving the party situations with stakes makes the tension increase as the main plot line gets more serious.

More on topic, perhaps, the only thing I really mind now is random encounters. Exploring maps was really fun in the original, but there was always hesitation for me to do so - taking the shortest path is tempting to avoid damn enemies.

In Remake, I agree they have the ability to make the resolution for Cid’s arc much more powerful. Being up in space and seeing Earth in its entirety can make someone reconsider a lot...

 

[Rydeen]

I agree wholeheartedly with not nerfing Cid’s abuse, but instead altering the narrative to not portray it sympathetically. He needed a redemption arc, but never really got one since the abuse was played for laughs. I would be disappointed if they toned it down to the extent of which he had nothing to redeem, though. It would essentially be censorship. Really glad they didn’t do that to Reno and Rude, so I think that’s a good sign.

Also, did anyone else find the Hojo uploading his consciousness thing really contrived? That’s the kind of thing that has huge consequences on the lore but it was just used as a device for 5 minutes of drama.

 

[Prism]

On further inspection, that’s definitely true. They can’t just nerf his abuse altogether, but they have to represent it in a way that isn’t...yeah, comedic. I wonder if that’s a localization thing.

I wonder how on earth they can make him abusive yet like-able, though. Especially when he gets represented in a much more realistic medium.
Unless, maybe they don’t have to make him likable right away?

 

[looneymoon]

I think having more clarity as to what their relationship is will help. I am quite certain this will happen. They end up together in the Compilation, but the OG is a bit vague about it. I chalk that up to probably something cultural, or maybe a mistranslation somewhere.

For me at least, giving Shera more of a character would help this subplot come across better. I am sure this will happen too. The way she's been portrayed, there's an air of nobility to her dedication to Cid. I am not sure if that is something they're going to change though. IMO, It's just a bad characterization of someone in that kind of situation.

I have a feeling they might just nerf it so that he's nicer tbh. I hope not though. I don't really like how they nerfed Avalanche's culpability for anything bad that happens (yes they feel remorse, but the audience knows nothing is actually their fault). It's why I vastly prefer Barret's arc during the OG Midgar section vs the remake. The remake has time to build ofc, but that confrontation near the end with President Shinra gave me big cringe.

 

[Cannon_Fodder]

I think they could reduce the impact of the abuse without making him nicer per se. If they didn't live together but he was still just as mean when they crossed paths in town could make a huge difference. It loses the treatment of domestic abuse, yes, but I honestly don't see how they could do that treatment well.

Giving Shera more characterization and independence from Cid would help too.

 

[Torrie]

I've been reflecting on this recently after watching tons of the remake content. Funny how much I love the FF7 lore despite some continuity errors, but at the same time I remember feeling a lot of frustration when playing the OG time after time.

1. The plot gets way too abstract after the party leaves Kalm. The game rarely tells you directly where to go and what to do; some key scenes like meeting Hojo in Costa Del Sol or Zack and Cloud escaping from Shinra are easily missable. Actually, a lot of things are missable as well if the player doesn't care enough to EXPLORE like crazy.

- I always felt that both Reeve and Rufus were underutilized characters. Rufus comes across as fairly ineffectual after Midgar, showing up in a location to try to seize something only to get shut down by the party/the plot, before getting critically injured and leaving the story completely.

- Never liked the Huge Materia quest. Yes, I get that Shinra's plan to launch the rocket into Meteor is most-likely a lose-lose proposition. No, I don't know why my party is hellbent on actively sabotaging this plan, to the point of jumping on the rocket themselves and stealing the Materia, when even they don't know it will succeed.

2. ^ Very much this. Especially Rufus's journey throughout the game. We see him getting on a helicopter in Costa Del Sol and flying away somewhere, and then (please correct me if I'm wrong) he isn't seen until the Rocket town. The game never explains where he travels to and what he does. And yes, the Huge Materia quest. I fail to comprehend why the party decides to stop Shinra's attempts to extract the materia: after all, the plan to bomb the meteor isn't that bad keeping in mind there's nothing better to be done, and it doesn't seem that we can use these huge magic rocks in battles anyway. Barret says something like "I can't let Shinra do awful things to Corel again" and "When Cloud is back, I'm gonna shop him the huge materia! He'll be shocked!" That doesn't sound like a convincing explanation of why the party has to do that.

• It always irked me how there was never a flashback of Cloud and Zack interacting as normal.

3. I know that Mr. Gongaga was added in the game on relatively late stages of development, but everyone knows how incredibly important he is for the story. What if there was a scene, say, after Cloud is reunited with the party, someone would ask him things like "Hey Cloud, what was your friend like?" or "How did you two meet?", and that would trigger a flashback.

 

[crazyrabbits23]

Actually, a lot of things are missable as well if the player doesn't care enough to EXPLORE like crazy.

Yep, a lot of mid-90s JRPGs were like that. Star Ocean 2 was absolutely maddening and would probably piss off a lot of players if they knew how much content was gated behind nigh-unthinkable sidequests, backtracking and save-scumming.

To give but one example. There's an entire bonus dungeon and endgame scenario that is tied into a choice that is never apparent to the player, is given no context or foreshadowing in-game, and is completely missable unless you go through extreme experimentation/metagaming. At the end of the game, you walk through a 10-12 level dungeon, fighting enemies all the while and going through story-mandated quests. You assume the game is over at this point. There's a save point right in front of the last room with the boss. What do you do? Walk into the room? No, too easy! You turn around, walk all the way back through the now-empty dungeon, take a submersible back up to the surface, go to a coliseum area (which is filled with a ton of nameless NPCs)... and talk to one single, specific NPC in the very back of the arena, who looks like everyone else. This NPC informs you that the planet you escaped midway through the game (which was annihilated) can be revisited, and it's in your best interest to do so, because there's an entire multi-level bonus dungeon, bonus boss, and secret method of obtaining some of the game's most powerful equipment if you know what and where to get it.

This is why I hope they make some significant changes to Aerith's final Limit Break sidequest and Fort Condor. Both relied on extreme amounts of metagaming to complete, for little marginal benefit (a Limit Break only accessible for a short time afterwards/some bonus items that require you to backtrack long distances). I'm expecting them to truncate or shorten these scenarios in the second part of the remake.

 

[Clement Rage]

I like being able to miss things, it makes me feel like the world is more real, that stuff is happening beyond your characters.

Things I missed on playthrough 1.

Yuffie and Vincent.
Wutai Subquest (so I didn't dislike the Turks, or know what was then presumably the final fate of Don Corneo)
Gongaga, and all encounters therein
Thought Emerald Weapon was just a random fish. Still would kind of prefer it, TBH.
All the stuff you have to get by breeding Chocobos.
Never found Ruby Weapon, never defeated Ultimate.

 

[Ite]

I am of the other mind. I would have been much happier with the Remake if the main plots of Chapters 4, 13, and 14 were hidden sidequests. I think the modern trends of trophy hunting, 100%-ing, and un-missables have thrown the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. Sure, Great Gospel is a bad secret. It leaves no bread crumbs, no NPC rumours, nothing outside of a guidebook to even let you know there’s something to be found at all. But okay, let’s use Great Gospel as an example. First of all, what’s its purpose? You can use it in one dungeon before she dies, so as a quest reward it holds little value. So what’s its value? Well, I would suppose it’s the feeling you might get if you discover it on your own. With something as obtusely hidden as Gospel, you’d have to be a pretty keen/thorough explorer to find it without a guide book. Believe it or not — there are a lot of players that love this feeling in RPGs! I’m pretty it describes the entire Elder Scrolls fandom. For me, it’s one of the best feelings in a game. Convincing Yuffie to join the party was the first time I ever had this feeling, a feeling of empowerment, of investment and of agency in the fiction world. If the road to Great Gospel were earmarked with green arrows all along the way, that feeling would go away. So, then, what is the value of Great Gospel? The platinum, I guess. How is that less meta?

Edit: ninja’d by Clement, who put it rather more concisely!

Edit2: if you think Part 2 of Remake will complete Disc 1, you’re going to be disappointed.

 

[crazyrabbits23]

I am of the other mind. I would have been much happier with the Remake if the main plots of Chapters 4, 13, and 14 were hidden sidequests. I think the modern trends of trophy hunting, 100%-ing, and un-missables have thrown the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. Sure, Great Gospel is a bad secret. It leaves no bread crumbs, no NPC rumours, nothing outside of a guidebook to even let you know there’s something to be found at all. But okay, let’s use Great Gospel as an example. First of all, what’s its purpose? You can use it in one dungeon before she dies, so as a quest reward it holds little value. So what’s its value? Well, I would suppose it’s the feeling you might get if you discover it on your own. With something as obtusely hidden as Gospel, you’d have to be a pretty keen/thorough explorer to find it without a guide book. Believe it or not — there are a lot of players that love this feeling in RPGs! I’m pretty it describes the entire Elder Scrolls fandom. For me, it’s one of the best feelings in a game. Convincing Yuffie to join the party was the first time I ever had this feeling, a feeling of empowerment, of investment and of agency in the fiction world. If the road to Great Gospel were earmarked with green arrows all along the way, that feeling would go away. So, then, what is the value of Great Gospel? The platinum, I guess. How is that less meta?

Edit: ninja’d by Clement, who put it rather more concisely!

Edit2: if you think Part 2 of Remake will complete Disc 1, you’re going to be disappointed.

I agree, but I would also counter that you should give the player some reason to use it. Having an optional Limit Break that requires ingenuity and metagaming-like thinking to acquire is certainly cool, but if I can only use it for a very limited period, it's less an intrinsic, unique part of the world and more a symptom of pulling a fast one on the player (Aerith's death/the changed circumstance where she may have survived past the Temple). FFVII, like a lot of other JPRGs, were symbolic of a time when developers literally threw everything and the kitchen sink into games, even if they required a bizarre level of investment or metagaming to even see. You can see for yourself how maddening some of these examples are.

Take Clive's sidequest in Suikoden II, which required the player to not only recruit him, but chase after a woman named Elza through the entirety of the gameworld in 21 real-time hours. That means you have to play the game like a pseudo-speedrun, blitzing through plot points just so you can get to the final encounter near the site of the last battles. Good luck finding a gamer who didn't go the alternate route of just using a GameShark and hacking in the encounter. It's inspired game guides, tons of strategy and more (and that's just one of several elements the game never clues you into).

Or for a modern example, MGSV: The Phantom Pain. You unlock Quiet's final outfits three missions before she's

Spoiler: BIG STORY SPOILER

permanently removed from your party (barring a little-known feature that allows you to get her back if you replay a mission seven times

. I ended up utilizing a mod in the second playthrough of my game that gave her one of the two outfits (which are far and away her coolest ones) from the get-go, partially because I thought the story justification for her lack of clothing was laughable, and secondly because I was metagaming/roleplaying that I was running a proto-FOXHOUND unit with Sniper Wolf. I wouldn't have been able to get that normally (and wouldn't have known about the twist with her character) the first time I played, and it did tick me off when the plot switched gears suddenly.

I've always thought that there's a fine line between fun and frustration, and several of the sidequests in VII definitely fell into the latter. I will never legitimately do Chocobo breeding or all of the Fort Condor missions in the vanilla game again.

 

[Makoeyes987]

People are far less amenable and patient for frustration inducing gaming "busy work" that only serves to create frustration for complexity's sake.

Grinding, permanent missables, and inexplicably hidden tangible content is more and more becoming the domain of mobile gacha-esque gaming that typifies padding and unnecessary difficulty to people.

Games back in the days before streaming, DLC, and high data capacity storage mediums had to create content that met the price of value for the game. That game had to justify itself as single purchase and suck up the person for as long as possible because once it was done, it was done. But the gaming landscape has changed and those strategies are increasingly no longer seen as valuable expressions of game play.

Most people don't want to play hours and hours to find out they missed something so permanent they gotta restart their whole save file and waste their hours. They don't want to have to grind hours and hours to get a seemingly meaningless treasure that serves almost no valuable use. It's not fun or exciting. They want to enjoy the story and gameplay. The added extra value now comes from openly labeled extra content. Like repeatability and increased difficulty. Trophy challenges. Speed-running. Etc.

Pulling an FFVII/FFVIII/FFIX with inexplicable permanently missable meaningless stuff just is not going to fly today because it takes people out of the game and isn't fun. Ironically, it's the elements that ease the flow of gameplay for a player that openly show themselves, that keep most players immersed and happy.... Rather than the game leaving them be lost, confused thanks to the game reflecting reality where inattention may cause one to lose an opportunity forever.

 

[Odysseus]

I think the death of hidden story content and characters is in large part thanks to the massively increased production value of the games. Do you know how EASY it is to make new scenes for the original FF7? VERY. It is very easy to import the models and give them a few stock animations, have all the text pop up in little text boxes, etc. Making a few hidden scenes with Zack and Vincent probably barely effected the dev time at all. Yuffie is a slight exception since her quest is much more involved, but even it isn't overly complex.

By contrast, how much time and effort goes into making a scene now? Voice acting, motion capture, detailed models and a plethora of unique animations, camera positioning, complex environments, entirely unique game mechanics like the bike chase... That must have taken Square a very long time, and cost a lot of money.

I would have been much happier with the Remake if the main plots of Chapters 4, 13, and 14 were hidden sidequests.

Can you even imagine how ridiculous it would be for square to invest so much money into all the stuff that happens in those three chapters, just to make them "hidden sidequests?" Designing, voicing, and animating Roche, making unique models for the other Avalanche cell, designing and modeling the entire upper plate neighborhood, not to mention the massive underground lab in chapter 13. It's just not feasible for them to invest the time and resources into making all this stuff if it's not something they can guarantee all the players will see. The only thing I could kinda see as working as optional content is the stuff with Leslie Kyle in chapter 14, since it involves very few new assets. What would actually happen in the chapter if it was optional, though? Nothing?

I'm probably being too agro right now, sorry. I think some of these criticisms come from our perspectives being stuck in the past, though. I love secrets, I love optional content, but big budget cinematic games like this simply don't allow for it so much. There's a reason the secret content that is in the remake is pretty lacking in production value.

 

[looneymoon]

I was annoyed by that 12 hour sword thing in FFIX back in 2000. This kind of shit is a nightmare if you have completionist OCD. Personally, I can handle optional post-game that you can engage in if you choose to. The staunch unmissable shit from the PSX era is a relic of the past and I'm honestly fine leaving it there. No retrospective judgement, it's just how it was when I was 10 and didn't have time for that kind of crap without a guide.

Also, seconding the other stuff. But seriously fuck that damn sword. That kind of shit is objectively ( ) not fun unless you're one of those no-hit-run-all-3-Dark-Souls weirdos (which you can at least say takes take an insane amount of skill and focus).

(Also reiterate Ody's post above mine. But again, fuck that fucking sword.)

 

[Makoeyes987]

The secrets you uncover now are more tangibly connected to clearly marked progression quests, that offer direct real value for their effort.

The hidden affection scenes you see in Chapter 14.

The dress Tifa wears in Chapter 9.

The dress Aerith wears in Chapter 9.

Who your final battle party is at the end of the game.

The unique paths of quests for chapter 9.

The accessory you can earn at any point after beating the game that lets you limit break anytime you wish. Just by completing the Top Secret battle simulations in Chapter 16/17.

These are hidden secrets but you know they exist so you can pursue them.

I was annoyed by that 12 hour sword thing in FFIX back in 2000.

...

(Also reiterate Ody's post above mine. But again, fuck that fucking sword.)

Enkidu can take that Excalibur II and shove it where the sun don't shine. There are some quests worth leaving incomplete.

 

[crazyrabbits23]

Pulling an FFVII/FFVIII/FFIX with inexplicable permanently missable meaningless stuff just is not going to fly today because it takes people out of the game and isn't fun.

That's what killed my playthrough of IX. I went through the game aiming for 100% completion (barring Excalibur II, which I knew was an impossible task) and got halfway through the game with everything cleared, including most of Chocobo Hot and Cold, optional encounters, etc.

Then I got up to the beginning of Disc 3, and discovered that Tetra Master, which I'd been ignoring all this time because I'd presumed that there would be opportunities to get all the cards I needed before the endgame, had a time-sensitive battle that had to be completed before you left the city at the beginning of the disc. I hadn't prepared for it, meaning I was in no condition to get the bonus card(s) offered by this battle, which were part of 100% completion.

Same goes for FFX, when a combination of the Al Bhed Primers (which are hidden in such out-of-the-way locations that it's a chore to get them) and the forced Blitzball championship loss (unless you know exactly what to do, have unlocked the hidden skill and save-scum like crazy) made me drop it. I'm still trying to get back into it.

I'm aware that Tetra Master was so popular it inspired a standalone game. I'm sure there are people that love it. However, that specific circumstance was so frustrating that I quit the game and never returned. I have piles of unplayed RPGs in my Steam account, and I find that the older I get, the more responsibilities I have and the less time I have to dedicate to sidequests or material that make me jump through hoops. If the material is outlined in a certain way (as you mentioned above with the Remake, or with some like ME3, where planets with unknown/side content are clearly marked), I'm all over it because I know what to expect and can estimate how long it will take. Then again, it's the whole "fun vs. frustration" aspect.

I think the death of hidden story content and characters is in large part thanks to the massively increased production value of the games. Do you know how EASY it is to make new scenes for the original FF7? VERY. It is very easy to import the models and give them a few stock animations, have all the text pop up in little text boxes, etc. Making a few hidden scenes with Zack and Vincent probably barely effected the dev time at all. Yuffie is a slight exception since her quest is much more involved, but even it isn't overly complex.

To be fair, time and modding tools have made it considerably easier to make new/reuse assets for older games. The example I often bring up is Mass Effect 3 - eight years removed from the game's release, there are modders who have created entirely new missions, outfits, squadmates and more... but that required fanmade modding tools because Bioware wouldn't release the source code. The only way this worked is because the ME series was built on the Unreal Engine, which has similar architecture between all versions and is thus considerably more malleable for fans to work with and create tools with.

 

[Odysseus]

Excalibur II I almost respect for how bullshit it is to obtain. It's pure speedrun bragging rights. I sure as heck ain't ever going to go for it though. It's easy enough to get Steiner doing 9999 every hit without it anyway.

The accessory that gives you an instant limit break is more or less Remake's version of that, the super OP equipment, but it's tied to a proper challenge rather than 12 hours of suffering.

 

[Ite]

Can you even imagine how ridiculous it would be for square to invest so much money into all the stuff that happens in those three chapters, just to make them "hidden sidequests?" Designing, voicing, and animating Roche, making unique models for the other Avalanche cell, designing and modeling the entire upper plate neighborhood, not to mention the massive underground lab in chapter 13. It's just not feasible for them to invest the time and resources into making all this stuff if it's not something they can guarantee all the players will see.

Okay, but like, why though? It's not like players are renting the game. They own the game. They can find the content on another playthrough -- and how awesome would that be?? You can save Wedge? What a dope secret.

Hell, the game even encourages you to play through the whole thing twice -- several times, if you want to fill in that play log. I really don't see the downside of making part of the game reliant on a player's sense of exploration -- it's an RPG, isn't it?

 

[looneymoon]

I liked Triple Triad more than FF8 Tetra Master. FF9 is probably one of my favourite games ever but its also so full of stuff I'd gladly forget about upon any replay.

I agree FF7r's side content isn't great, in terms of fun or story, for the type of game it is. That said, it's at least not a total asshole about wasting your time for pointless gamer cred. I can easily put myself in that headspace into that kind of old game philosophy because I was there for it when it was normal.

If we are going to compare the OG and Remake in this way (which I think is pointless and unfair anyway), it's that FF7r lacks replayablitlity in its discoverables compared to FF7O. That being said, I honestly feel like the sense of accomplishment in overcoming a harder difficulty is more rewarding than trinket scrounging.

I'm also [finally] going through my final and most serious attempt at Dark Souls so thats the [more] modern game I am looking at right now That entire game is hard accomplishment, and the entire story is told completely through trinket scrounging. I'm not gonna be super cliche and say every modern RPG has to be Dark Souls (I am not sure how much I even care about the Dark Souls narrative right now), but I can agree that Remake could benefit from a more PSX game philosophy with item collecting, and how that can add to the world building.

 

[Odysseus]

Well, going from trophy percentages, only 50% of players even finish the game once, and the amount that go back for a second play through is going to be lower than that, so chances are a minority of players would even see that content.

I really don't see the downside of making part of the game reliant on a player's sense of exploration -- it's an RPG, isn't it?

I can think of a few downsides:

The game as it stands is about 35 to 40 hours, a decent length but still on the short side for a JRPG. How much time do you lose if you cut out 3 chapters worth of content and sideline it to optional status? Obviously if the player were to do the side quests they'd end up with the same time, but player who don't explore are going to be looking at a 25 hour game.

The game would need to be balanced without those sections in mind, so the overall level at the end of the game would be lower, and players who engaged with 3 chapters worth of side content would now be monstrously overpowered.

And I have to ask, what would be GAINED from making some of this stuff optional? A sense of discovery? Encouraging exploration? Is that really worth stunting the story and character development for Cloud and the Avalanche crew for? Chapter 4 serves the dual purpose of developing Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie so their deaths in chapter 12 are all the more heart breaking (YMMV,) and also to show Cloud coming out of his shell and warming up to the idea of working with a group. Chapter 13 sets up Wedge's role in the Shinra building (would you remove that plot development all together or have Wedge only appear if you've done the quest?) as well as allowing Tifa and Barret to process their grief in a way the original game never let them. The Leslie stuff in chapter 14 could be a side-quest comparatively, since the only overall narrative purpose it serves is to get you up to the upper plate, but again, if you skip that then literally nothing happens in the entire chapter. Just the garden scene and then you could go straight to chapter 15.

Just because this stuff wasn't in the original game doesn't mean it isn't integral to telling the story of the remake. Everything they added serves to expand the world and the characters in meaningful ways, they aren't just time-wasting padding. The remake has everything to lose and nothing to gain by hiding this stuff behind some arbitrary exploration.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

I like grinding. Just saying. For me it's the equivalent of meditation.

I find the trophy system really annoying. I am not a child who needs to be rewarded with meaningless trophies, but I am sufficiently completionist that knowing the trophies exist compels me to get them. I derive no pleasure from this; it merely staves off anxiety.

I've also realised that I don't like seeing the enemies ahead of me. One of the things that made the OG bombing mission fun for me was racing to the reactor core hoping I didn't run into too many random battles along the way.

And yet, by contrast, I like how in Dragon Quest the enemies are ambling about in the world, and you can either choose to bump into them and provoke a battle, or you can run right past them. The other day I finally figured out that you can "farm" Muddy Hands early on in the game to grind up your HP and gil very easily.

 

[Makoeyes987]

Grinding is like... Meditating to the Annoying Orange to me.

 

[looneymoon]

Grinding has taught me some very beneficial lessons about patience and determination throughout my life.

One of those includes the fact that no matter how laborious Monday-Thursday may seem, Friday will always come eventually.

That being said, if there is a specific task that I need to complete, and it starts to feel more like Monday-Friday instead of Saturday-Sunday, then it can piss right off

Pls don't @ me for loving Death Stranding for its gameplay... so much so that I platinum'ed it, even though I thought the story was mostly dumb.

I promise that despite being a grumpy old person, I'm largely relaxed when doing most things.

 

[Obsidian Fire]

I think it really depends what kind of story and game you are trying to make. Things like hidden quests and hidden items and hidden locations are great in sandbox games that have a story that can afford to take it's time being told (or doesn't care about being told at all). The Elder Scrolls franchise is the classic example here.

When you have a game that has a tight story that is linear and getting that story told is the entire point of the game though... that's when there's less hidden stuff usually. And like it or not... the FF series as a whole tells very linear stories. Letting the plot of FF games dangle for too long usually isn't a great thing or it risks characters and plot threads getting lost and forgotten. And that is something the OG really did struggle with. So I can get the Remake not having lot of out of the way things to go find.

That said, Midgar itself in the OG was very, very tight when it came to story. There's very few hidden things in the initial Midgar run in the OG. And you can't wander around most places for long before the story moves on. Once the story gets past Midgar, then there's things like how the open world will be handled to tackle. And open worlds (even semi-open worlds) are great environments to hide things for the player to find to help flesh out the world. Even if they're not ridiculous things with playtime timers attached to them!

 

[crazyrabbits23]

Okay, but like, why though? It's not like players are renting the game. They own the game. They can find the content on another playthrough -- and how awesome would that be?? You can save Wedge? What a dope secret.

Hell, the game even encourages you to play through the whole thing twice -- several times, if you want to fill in that play log. I really don't see the downside of making part of the game reliant on a player's sense of exploration -- it's an RPG, isn't it?

The problem is that it's all data-driven.

I hate how the gaming industry - specifically a large chunk of RPG developers - has become... sanitized, if you will. Decisions are driven by what people will see the most. While there are developers who buck this trend (Obsidian, Bethesda, S-E to a certain extent, Atlus), the days of RPGs being dominated by nigh-incomprehensible secrets laden upon one another are largely gone.

One of my favourite RPGs is Fallout: New Vegas - because it's a complete asshole of a game that refuses to hold your hand or tell you if you've screwed up somewhere along the line. There's plenty of missable items, encounters and sidequests. A fairly-significant gameplay mechanic (picking up and holding objects in the gameworld) is only explained in an unmarked sidequest you're only going to find 50-plus hours in. You could screw up any one of a hundred quests by killing an NPC before their purpose is fulfilled, and the game will dump a bunch of failed mission records on you without saying what you failed. Even the DLC's are prone to it. It's a game held together by Scotch tape, created by a team that was going for broke and trying to shove in as much as they could before a development deadline hit.

Now, most games are marketed by what they can sell and who will see it. Missions that may have been integral in the basegame are chopped out and sold as DLC, because they know people will play it. Items that would normally be unlockables or cosmetics are tied behind paywalls. RPGs are the only real genre that haven't been completely taken over by metrics, particularly in Japan.

Going back to my post above, I blame Bioware for a lot of the modern sensibilities regarding side content in AAA RPG titles. They were one of the originators of "telemetry", which allowed them to see what decisions players made during their game and how many accessed it. You can go back and find infographics detailing just about every facet of choice. Why put in six classes if something like the Engineer class is only played by 5% of people? Should you create compelling content if you decide to sabotage the genophage in ME3, which only 8% of players did? The devs went to a ton of effort to make Morinth in ME2 an alternate squadmate, with tons of alternate dialogue, encounters and abilities... and it seems nobody used her, since she was completely relegated to an extreme afterthought. It even informed Dragon Age Keep, which made all decisions tied into an overarching system that you could change at will before a playthrough. That kind of mentality causes huge changes for a development mindset, but it's what some devs have moved towards.