X's Big, Very tl;dr Remake Thoughts & Development Analysis (Here be Spoilers)
- Thread starter X-SOLDIER
- Start date
- AKA
- X
Not even remotely. Any of your personal opinions about Zack's new VA aren't reflective of anything with the game development cycle whatsoever.
That being said, I did replay all of Chapter 18 last night, and I'll compile some more detailed thoughts about development-related stuff on them a little later today.
X
Zack only has a couple of lines, and they're just rereads of existing lines for the most part. Given that and the extremely brief cameo appearance he has, Caleb Pierce wouldn't have had nearly as much prep or just time spent with the character compared the other characters' VAs, just simply due to how small his role is in the game.
The fact that he appears at the end of the game doesn't really make any difference here, since nothing suggests that he was cast or recorded him lines at any time that was different from all of the rest of the VAs doing work in the game. Actually, given the fact that most of his dialogue is pre-existing and that they use AI for the facial expression and lip sync animations, he could have recorded this even back when those scenes were just storyboards. Not to mention, all of those scenes exist in Crisis Core, so when it comes to direction, he'd have had essentially an exact version of what he was recording for to reference anyway.
This absolutely isn't in any way a part of late stage development cycle impact that Chapter 17 & 18 suffer from.
The fact that he appears at the end of the game doesn't really make any difference here, since nothing suggests that he was cast or recorded him lines at any time that was different from all of the rest of the VAs doing work in the game. Actually, given the fact that most of his dialogue is pre-existing and that they use AI for the facial expression and lip sync animations, he could have recorded this even back when those scenes were just storyboards. Not to mention, all of those scenes exist in Crisis Core, so when it comes to direction, he'd have had essentially an exact version of what he was recording for to reference anyway.
This absolutely isn't in any way a part of late stage development cycle impact that Chapter 17 & 18 suffer from.
That being said, I did replay all of Chapter 18 last night, and I'll compile some more detailed thoughts about development-related stuff on them a little later today.
X
Master Bates
Do you enjoy your life?
- AKA
- Mr. Koiwai
Nope. I definitely want Aerith and Zack dead. Their deaths are integral to (1) the plot and story, and (2) Cloud's character. Them surviving would greatly alter that, and this would no longer be a remake but an entirely different game altogether, banking on the popularity and nostalgia of the original, when most of the fans (me at least) just want to re-experience the same story, but told differently and in better graphics.
I won't jump right to bad, but I will say Zack's new voice is the only one I found jarring through my playthrough. Likely at least partially due to it being a shot-for-shot recreation of a scene that already existed (with voice over).
But also Rick Gomez was a great Zack.
But also Rick Gomez was a great Zack.
- AKA
- X
Ok, so CHAPTER 18 stuff!
X
So, let's start with the M.O.T.O.R. fight, because I didn't skip it – yes I did play it again.
I took a bit more damage than I remember on the second Helicopter & SOLDIER motorcycle fighting sequence, but that very first one is still a breeze and there's no need for Nanaki to heal you. It's still WAY more important to be able to get some of that in the M.O.T.O.R. fight, or even if it was just based on a, "when HP drops below __" value that you could only get once or twice would be super nice.
I also beat M.O.T.O.R. on my first go, but that actually doesn't change how I feel about it at all, because the information in the fight itself is incredibly poorly telegraphed, and the only reason that I understand the fight is because I've died to it countless times. Not to mention, I learned even more things about him this time than I did in two hours of dying to him before, which is just an absolute travesty. This sequence is very much something that's in the middle of the QA phase of figuring out the elements at play, and understanding how to make it work.
If you'll note my previous write-up about M.O.T.O.R.'s mechanics, you might notice that there's a particular element to his attack patterns that is COMPLETELY missing.
When you're alongside M.O.T.O.R. he will periodically tilt up the side of his body that's towards you, and then slam it down to the ground. It's a pretty clearly telegraphed attack, but it's still awkward to avoid because of the way that the sideways camera turns the controls to shit. Initially, it just seems like this is a way to keep his wheels out of the way of being damaged to prolong the fight, but there's actually more to it than that, because there is ANOTHER element to attacking him that I didn't even notice until this run: M.O.T.O.R. has three tire states and not two.
You're trying to break M.O.T.O.R.'s wheels, and most of them will spontaneously regenerate after a period of time when he's no longer staggered (because of reasons, but I'll get into that as poor boss design later). When he regenerates the wheels light up again, so that's how you know which wheels you can attack, and which you can't.
HOWEVER he can also electrify one of his wheels for a very brief period of time. If you attack or collide with one of the regenerated target wheels while it's in this state, you'll take an obscene amount of damage, exacerbated heavily by the shitty controls when you're alongside him. The activation and deactivation of this state is subtle, but it's also incredibly problematic, because unless you're knowingly looking for it, you can't tell that the wheels you need to melee attack aren't targets, but punishments, because the way that they light up more with the electricity around them is using the same basic information to communicate that they're a threat that the wheels use to communicate that they're vulnerable. You're mixing information that you're conveying to the player AND you're taking a binary "healed/broken" state, and adding in a "punishment" state – to a boss that already five different ways of attacking you that you've never seen before.
Attacks when you're behind M.O.T.O.R. change by phase, and become increasingly dangerous:
– Machine Guns
– Machine Guns, Electro Mines
– Machine Guns, Electro Mines, Charge Orbs
When alongside M.O.T.O.R.
– Machine Guns, Wheel Slam, Electrified Wheels, Twin Lasers
After Staggering M.O.T.O.R.
– Post-stagger Flamethrower
Bosses are meant to be a challenge, but they're also intended to be something that the player can understand completely as soon as they encounter them. Good boss design in an RPG is something where you run into it the very first time, and you're able to gather all of the information you need to beat it, and depending on how you ran into it you'll come out the other side feeling like you were just on the verge of dying. However, if you go into the battle knowing exactly what to do, you'll be able to breeze through the experience.
In RPGs Bad boss design is something where you have to die repeatedly while attempting to gather the necessary information (obvious exceptions to this are the Souls games where death itself is a part of the learning mechanic). Additionally, bad telegraphing of information is something that punishes the player for attempting to learn. What you need to be teaching the player is a pattern, or a sort of dance that the player needs to balance to win the boss fight. This is why the bosses in Chapter 17 & 18 feel like their counters are too sharp, because they're still in the phase of figuring out what that balance is, where they rely primarily on the QA team assessing the flow of combat – and they haven't yet nailed down the right flow to then back off how hard the counters are in order to allow the player to learn smoothly, but not be hard locked out of winning if they don't understand one of the parts, but keep attacking for a long period of time. (note: I will address an issue with this elsewhere after I finish up on M.O.T.O.R.)
Here is what you have at your disposal to beat M.O.T.O.R.
Drive up alongside him and attack his three wheels from the same side you're on.
Wait, and use L1+Triangle to attack a misc grounding of the wheels from range.
Here is what happens if you do all of the following actions, and what they teach you as a player.
APPROACHING AND ATTACKING FROM THE SIDE
1) He'll shoot at you with his machine gun
– You occasionally need to block his attacks to reduce the damage by 50%, which will impede your ability to accelerate and slow down how efficiently you can deal damage to his wheels.
– You can't maneuver efficiently enough to avoid this damage, unless you're at maximum distance behind him, so you just need to reduce it when possible, but in general accept that you'll have to take some damage to deal damage, and that you're operating on a fixed timescale of how much damage you deal vs. how much damage you take. This means that you have to prioritize the efficiency to reach and damage the target, and aggression in destroying that target that's in range.
2) He'll raise his wheels out of reach so that you can't attack them, and also slam them down on you to deal damage
– You should back off or stay away when this happens, because you lose the ability to deal damage. Additionally, you also risk taking damage if you're being too aggressive and staying alongside his wheels.
– Normally, this would be a signal for you to slow down and switch sides to attack his opposite side of wheels on the ground – but the bike's braking & acceleration don't actually allow you to do that before he's put his wheels down again. This means instead that these moments just act as an incentive you use your L1+Triangle attack to do something while you wait for Melee to become available again.
– Instead this becomes a time for you to try to figure out how to fight against the camera controls to not collide with M.O.T.O.R. or the opposing freeway wall.
3) He'll turn his body towards you, charge both arms up for several seconds and fire lasers at you
– This is the direct counter to the side attack, and you should brake and immediately and use a Ranged attack.
– This is also why the wheel raising should be giving you an opportunity to switch to his other side. Otherwise this attack is a redundant action to you presenting a threat from one side that both result in player damage for staying in the same position, and muddy up which action you should be using as a counter. Additionally, but the wheel raising and his twin lasers tend to occur much more frequently than you have access to an L1+Triangle attack available, so a majority of the time this just turns into idle time of the player doing nothing.
– Having multiple actions that give the player nothing to do means that you're making the player extra desperate to attack as soon as they can, because again – this is a battle where they are taking set damage the longer that this persists – and they take more damage for being out of position to be able to attack.
4) He'll electrify one of those wheels, so that you that you take damage from making contact with it
– Just getting as close as possible to him and attacking his non-broken wheels while he's seemingly in a vulnerable state will occasionally deal significant damage to you.
– In addition to fighting the Camera controls, this also means that during the already incredibly brief windows where his wheels aren't raised or he's not employing his twin lasers, or you're not blocking to reduce the damage from machine gun fire by 50% – if you attack quickly and desperately, you'll be hard punished for it - (and may or may be able to even tell what's causing you to take damage).
– This directly contradicts all of the other lessons that his attack patterns teach you, and it also occurs with an animation that gets telegraphed the same way vulnerable wheels do – by lighting up an active target.
ATTACKING WHEN STAGGERED
After one attack phase, you'll learn that his Stagger % maintains, rather than resetting – something unlike every other enemy type in the entire game, so you have to learn this through experience. The reason for this is that there's no way to prevent taking damage, only reduce it. This is not only an exception to the entirety of everything you've learned about the game's combat during the last 50+ hours of gameplay, it is literally the only way that the M.O.T.O.R. fight is even possible, because of the amount of damage that you take.
1) When Staggered
– M.O.T.O.R. is finally vulnerable, and you need to go all out to deal damage and increase his stagger. This means saving your Triangle or L1+Triangle attacks until he's staggered because of how much is raises the stagger % by. This also means waiting until you have a charge before destroying his last wheel. This can take a significant period of time, but it also means that the attack mechanics that are meant to provide you windows for using a ranged attack are now useless, and they're only best used as player idle time to wait for wheels to become within melee range again.
– This is the single most important phase to ensure that you are right next to M.O.T.O.R. but also as far back as possible. This means waiting until one of his back tires is the last one left before melee attacking to trigger Stagger. This also means that you're using a totally different strategy to determine when and how to attack him, that isn't based on literally any of his attack patterns whatsoever, but is based solely on prioritizing meaningful damage to him, and making the next stagger phase as effective as possible to reduce the number of phases that he has.
2) After Stagger ends: Every time
– Everything around M.O.T.O.R. is getting covered in flames. The only option for you here is to slam on the brakes and back away into a position that puts the camera facing forwards again. This is because all of M.O.T.O.R.'s phase changes involve doing driving and maneuvering challenges that aren't possible if the camera is in the side-facing position.
– Incidentally, this is also how you can learn that being at maximum distance away from M.O.T.O.R. will put you out of damage range of his Machine Gun fire, and that you can just idle and use the very slow-charging ranged attacks to weaken him at not only literally zero risk, but in a way that provides a greater net positive than engaging in ANY of the previously mentioned combat methods. This un-teaches everything about the battle system by rewarding doing nothing, and providing punishment for utilizing the standard combat system, because what was previously guaranteed damage vs. acceleration that was at best 50% damage is now 0% damage. This is encouraged even further when it becomes apparent that the only important target for melee attacking during the first Phase is one of the back wheels, because there is a way to tackle this entire phase at literally zero risk.
3) After Stagger Phase Change (2/3rds HP)
– This is where the Electro Mines come into play in addition to the Machine Gun. This is teaching you that post-stagger, being really far behind M.O.T.O.R. is the best position to remain in, in order to be able to see and dodge the mines. However, now the Truck is taking damage, so the initial time-limiter of "some damage is always being taken no matter what" is back again, only this time, now that damage is a result of AI vs. RNG, and something that you cannot control. This means that you are once again being forced not to sit at a distance any longer than possible, but push up your aggressive attack as quickly as possible, while risking taking more damage yourself.
3) After Stagger Phase Change (1/3rd HP)
– This is the reverse firing Charge Shots in addition to the Mines and Machine Gun. Now, you have to stay farther back from M.O.T.O.R. to be able to see those shots coming, while having enough road between you both to dodge his incoming fire. This is again, the opposite of the lesson from before, because now both You and the Truck are even lower on both time and life, and aggression becomes even more important.
As you'll note – the new Stagger phases that M.O.T.O.R. adds re-teach one thing that the Machine Gun initially taught – time is hard limited, and maximum aggression is the most important thing to focus on. The issue with this is that at a distance, you're looking for binary signals to inform your attack – Light Active Target vs. Dark Destroyed Target.
So, now you're approaching aggressively towards any of the Light Wheels that you can as soon as they're on the ground, and you're actually close enough to M.O.T.O.R. again to be able to hit them with your sword – which is going to slam you right into the hard punishment of sometimes those wheels are electrified and you're going to get hard punished for melee attacking them, or bumping into them. Add to that that you've been focusing on steering the bike to avoid obstacles, and now when the camera pushes to the side again, your muscle memory for controlling the bike to even get to the wheels you want to attack is going to be a struggle. Now, sometimes fighting the camera isn't going to reward you with the opportunity to deal the damage you need to win – instead sometimes, it's just going to kill you and give you a Game Over instead.
BUT HOW DO YOU FIX THAT?
I can probably fix this entire sequence with 2-3 key changes.
Change 1: Increase Acceleration & Braking Speed
You need to be able to move forwards and backwards almost as quickly as you move side-to-side. For accelerating, you need to have a brief ramp up in hitting maximum speed, and use that same ramping up speed to slow the player down when they're reaching the farthest "forward" point (so that you don't just drive away from the Truck and M.O.T.O.R. completely, since you are actually on a limited field). Braking should drop off really quickly. This will give you the ability that you need to actually get into position where you need to be, especially when M.O.T.O.R. uses his various types of attacks.
Change 2: Only Broken Wheels Get Electrified
If you want to teach the player about control and careful targeting, make sure that they know which wheels they're next to, and that they're only attacking at the vulnerable ones. Having the electricity arcing on the darken wheels will be easier to read as a threat than making the lighter ones even brighter, and it also won't teach a negative lesson that the player can't easily learn. With this, you could even have it so that at least one wheel gets broken every attack phase, and having M.O.T.O.R. start to switch the sides his wheels are on if you try to attack them at maximum range.
Change 3: Pull the Camera Back & Slightly Up When You Reach M.O.T.O.R. – Don't Turn It
There are plenty of sequences where Cloud is running along environments during Chapter 18, where the camera is pretty far back from him. That doesn't make you feel any less connected to the action. The old Motorcycle Minigame is more of a top-down look at the road, and that helps a ton in being able to see your acceleration and deceleration and know how you're moving along the field. The camera issues along are enough of a goddamned disaster, but a lot of this boss fight involves intentional maneuvering, so make sure that the player is able to take full advantage of that. Additionally, you can still angle it slightly to the right or left as they approach the "front" of the field to help them see M.O.T.O.R. from the side, but just pulling the camera away somewhat would help an insane amount in making this fight manageable.
Lastly: And this is something to remember for the next bit – Every other boss fight in the game has a unique in-game animation sequence that it goes through between each phase change: H0512 with the mako tank & minions, and even The Arsenal moving around and changing configuration. M.O.T.O.R. doesn't have phase change animations – only a death cinematic.
I took a bit more damage than I remember on the second Helicopter & SOLDIER motorcycle fighting sequence, but that very first one is still a breeze and there's no need for Nanaki to heal you. It's still WAY more important to be able to get some of that in the M.O.T.O.R. fight, or even if it was just based on a, "when HP drops below __" value that you could only get once or twice would be super nice.
I also beat M.O.T.O.R. on my first go, but that actually doesn't change how I feel about it at all, because the information in the fight itself is incredibly poorly telegraphed, and the only reason that I understand the fight is because I've died to it countless times. Not to mention, I learned even more things about him this time than I did in two hours of dying to him before, which is just an absolute travesty. This sequence is very much something that's in the middle of the QA phase of figuring out the elements at play, and understanding how to make it work.
If you'll note my previous write-up about M.O.T.O.R.'s mechanics, you might notice that there's a particular element to his attack patterns that is COMPLETELY missing.
When you're alongside M.O.T.O.R. he will periodically tilt up the side of his body that's towards you, and then slam it down to the ground. It's a pretty clearly telegraphed attack, but it's still awkward to avoid because of the way that the sideways camera turns the controls to shit. Initially, it just seems like this is a way to keep his wheels out of the way of being damaged to prolong the fight, but there's actually more to it than that, because there is ANOTHER element to attacking him that I didn't even notice until this run: M.O.T.O.R. has three tire states and not two.
You're trying to break M.O.T.O.R.'s wheels, and most of them will spontaneously regenerate after a period of time when he's no longer staggered (because of reasons, but I'll get into that as poor boss design later). When he regenerates the wheels light up again, so that's how you know which wheels you can attack, and which you can't.
HOWEVER he can also electrify one of his wheels for a very brief period of time. If you attack or collide with one of the regenerated target wheels while it's in this state, you'll take an obscene amount of damage, exacerbated heavily by the shitty controls when you're alongside him. The activation and deactivation of this state is subtle, but it's also incredibly problematic, because unless you're knowingly looking for it, you can't tell that the wheels you need to melee attack aren't targets, but punishments, because the way that they light up more with the electricity around them is using the same basic information to communicate that they're a threat that the wheels use to communicate that they're vulnerable. You're mixing information that you're conveying to the player AND you're taking a binary "healed/broken" state, and adding in a "punishment" state – to a boss that already five different ways of attacking you that you've never seen before.
Attacks when you're behind M.O.T.O.R. change by phase, and become increasingly dangerous:
– Machine Guns
– Machine Guns, Electro Mines
– Machine Guns, Electro Mines, Charge Orbs
When alongside M.O.T.O.R.
– Machine Guns, Wheel Slam, Electrified Wheels, Twin Lasers
After Staggering M.O.T.O.R.
– Post-stagger Flamethrower
Bosses are meant to be a challenge, but they're also intended to be something that the player can understand completely as soon as they encounter them. Good boss design in an RPG is something where you run into it the very first time, and you're able to gather all of the information you need to beat it, and depending on how you ran into it you'll come out the other side feeling like you were just on the verge of dying. However, if you go into the battle knowing exactly what to do, you'll be able to breeze through the experience.
In RPGs Bad boss design is something where you have to die repeatedly while attempting to gather the necessary information (obvious exceptions to this are the Souls games where death itself is a part of the learning mechanic). Additionally, bad telegraphing of information is something that punishes the player for attempting to learn. What you need to be teaching the player is a pattern, or a sort of dance that the player needs to balance to win the boss fight. This is why the bosses in Chapter 17 & 18 feel like their counters are too sharp, because they're still in the phase of figuring out what that balance is, where they rely primarily on the QA team assessing the flow of combat – and they haven't yet nailed down the right flow to then back off how hard the counters are in order to allow the player to learn smoothly, but not be hard locked out of winning if they don't understand one of the parts, but keep attacking for a long period of time. (note: I will address an issue with this elsewhere after I finish up on M.O.T.O.R.)
Here is what you have at your disposal to beat M.O.T.O.R.
Drive up alongside him and attack his three wheels from the same side you're on.
Wait, and use L1+Triangle to attack a misc grounding of the wheels from range.
Here is what happens if you do all of the following actions, and what they teach you as a player.
APPROACHING AND ATTACKING FROM THE SIDE
1) He'll shoot at you with his machine gun
– You occasionally need to block his attacks to reduce the damage by 50%, which will impede your ability to accelerate and slow down how efficiently you can deal damage to his wheels.
– You can't maneuver efficiently enough to avoid this damage, unless you're at maximum distance behind him, so you just need to reduce it when possible, but in general accept that you'll have to take some damage to deal damage, and that you're operating on a fixed timescale of how much damage you deal vs. how much damage you take. This means that you have to prioritize the efficiency to reach and damage the target, and aggression in destroying that target that's in range.
2) He'll raise his wheels out of reach so that you can't attack them, and also slam them down on you to deal damage
– You should back off or stay away when this happens, because you lose the ability to deal damage. Additionally, you also risk taking damage if you're being too aggressive and staying alongside his wheels.
– Normally, this would be a signal for you to slow down and switch sides to attack his opposite side of wheels on the ground – but the bike's braking & acceleration don't actually allow you to do that before he's put his wheels down again. This means instead that these moments just act as an incentive you use your L1+Triangle attack to do something while you wait for Melee to become available again.
– Instead this becomes a time for you to try to figure out how to fight against the camera controls to not collide with M.O.T.O.R. or the opposing freeway wall.
3) He'll turn his body towards you, charge both arms up for several seconds and fire lasers at you
– This is the direct counter to the side attack, and you should brake and immediately and use a Ranged attack.
– This is also why the wheel raising should be giving you an opportunity to switch to his other side. Otherwise this attack is a redundant action to you presenting a threat from one side that both result in player damage for staying in the same position, and muddy up which action you should be using as a counter. Additionally, but the wheel raising and his twin lasers tend to occur much more frequently than you have access to an L1+Triangle attack available, so a majority of the time this just turns into idle time of the player doing nothing.
– Having multiple actions that give the player nothing to do means that you're making the player extra desperate to attack as soon as they can, because again – this is a battle where they are taking set damage the longer that this persists – and they take more damage for being out of position to be able to attack.
4) He'll electrify one of those wheels, so that you that you take damage from making contact with it
– Just getting as close as possible to him and attacking his non-broken wheels while he's seemingly in a vulnerable state will occasionally deal significant damage to you.
– In addition to fighting the Camera controls, this also means that during the already incredibly brief windows where his wheels aren't raised or he's not employing his twin lasers, or you're not blocking to reduce the damage from machine gun fire by 50% – if you attack quickly and desperately, you'll be hard punished for it - (and may or may be able to even tell what's causing you to take damage).
– This directly contradicts all of the other lessons that his attack patterns teach you, and it also occurs with an animation that gets telegraphed the same way vulnerable wheels do – by lighting up an active target.
ATTACKING WHEN STAGGERED
After one attack phase, you'll learn that his Stagger % maintains, rather than resetting – something unlike every other enemy type in the entire game, so you have to learn this through experience. The reason for this is that there's no way to prevent taking damage, only reduce it. This is not only an exception to the entirety of everything you've learned about the game's combat during the last 50+ hours of gameplay, it is literally the only way that the M.O.T.O.R. fight is even possible, because of the amount of damage that you take.
1) When Staggered
– M.O.T.O.R. is finally vulnerable, and you need to go all out to deal damage and increase his stagger. This means saving your Triangle or L1+Triangle attacks until he's staggered because of how much is raises the stagger % by. This also means waiting until you have a charge before destroying his last wheel. This can take a significant period of time, but it also means that the attack mechanics that are meant to provide you windows for using a ranged attack are now useless, and they're only best used as player idle time to wait for wheels to become within melee range again.
– This is the single most important phase to ensure that you are right next to M.O.T.O.R. but also as far back as possible. This means waiting until one of his back tires is the last one left before melee attacking to trigger Stagger. This also means that you're using a totally different strategy to determine when and how to attack him, that isn't based on literally any of his attack patterns whatsoever, but is based solely on prioritizing meaningful damage to him, and making the next stagger phase as effective as possible to reduce the number of phases that he has.
2) After Stagger ends: Every time
– Everything around M.O.T.O.R. is getting covered in flames. The only option for you here is to slam on the brakes and back away into a position that puts the camera facing forwards again. This is because all of M.O.T.O.R.'s phase changes involve doing driving and maneuvering challenges that aren't possible if the camera is in the side-facing position.
– Incidentally, this is also how you can learn that being at maximum distance away from M.O.T.O.R. will put you out of damage range of his Machine Gun fire, and that you can just idle and use the very slow-charging ranged attacks to weaken him at not only literally zero risk, but in a way that provides a greater net positive than engaging in ANY of the previously mentioned combat methods. This un-teaches everything about the battle system by rewarding doing nothing, and providing punishment for utilizing the standard combat system, because what was previously guaranteed damage vs. acceleration that was at best 50% damage is now 0% damage. This is encouraged even further when it becomes apparent that the only important target for melee attacking during the first Phase is one of the back wheels, because there is a way to tackle this entire phase at literally zero risk.
3) After Stagger Phase Change (2/3rds HP)
– This is where the Electro Mines come into play in addition to the Machine Gun. This is teaching you that post-stagger, being really far behind M.O.T.O.R. is the best position to remain in, in order to be able to see and dodge the mines. However, now the Truck is taking damage, so the initial time-limiter of "some damage is always being taken no matter what" is back again, only this time, now that damage is a result of AI vs. RNG, and something that you cannot control. This means that you are once again being forced not to sit at a distance any longer than possible, but push up your aggressive attack as quickly as possible, while risking taking more damage yourself.
3) After Stagger Phase Change (1/3rd HP)
– This is the reverse firing Charge Shots in addition to the Mines and Machine Gun. Now, you have to stay farther back from M.O.T.O.R. to be able to see those shots coming, while having enough road between you both to dodge his incoming fire. This is again, the opposite of the lesson from before, because now both You and the Truck are even lower on both time and life, and aggression becomes even more important.
As you'll note – the new Stagger phases that M.O.T.O.R. adds re-teach one thing that the Machine Gun initially taught – time is hard limited, and maximum aggression is the most important thing to focus on. The issue with this is that at a distance, you're looking for binary signals to inform your attack – Light Active Target vs. Dark Destroyed Target.
So, now you're approaching aggressively towards any of the Light Wheels that you can as soon as they're on the ground, and you're actually close enough to M.O.T.O.R. again to be able to hit them with your sword – which is going to slam you right into the hard punishment of sometimes those wheels are electrified and you're going to get hard punished for melee attacking them, or bumping into them. Add to that that you've been focusing on steering the bike to avoid obstacles, and now when the camera pushes to the side again, your muscle memory for controlling the bike to even get to the wheels you want to attack is going to be a struggle. Now, sometimes fighting the camera isn't going to reward you with the opportunity to deal the damage you need to win – instead sometimes, it's just going to kill you and give you a Game Over instead.
BUT HOW DO YOU FIX THAT?
I can probably fix this entire sequence with 2-3 key changes.
Change 1: Increase Acceleration & Braking Speed
You need to be able to move forwards and backwards almost as quickly as you move side-to-side. For accelerating, you need to have a brief ramp up in hitting maximum speed, and use that same ramping up speed to slow the player down when they're reaching the farthest "forward" point (so that you don't just drive away from the Truck and M.O.T.O.R. completely, since you are actually on a limited field). Braking should drop off really quickly. This will give you the ability that you need to actually get into position where you need to be, especially when M.O.T.O.R. uses his various types of attacks.
Change 2: Only Broken Wheels Get Electrified
If you want to teach the player about control and careful targeting, make sure that they know which wheels they're next to, and that they're only attacking at the vulnerable ones. Having the electricity arcing on the darken wheels will be easier to read as a threat than making the lighter ones even brighter, and it also won't teach a negative lesson that the player can't easily learn. With this, you could even have it so that at least one wheel gets broken every attack phase, and having M.O.T.O.R. start to switch the sides his wheels are on if you try to attack them at maximum range.
Change 3: Pull the Camera Back & Slightly Up When You Reach M.O.T.O.R. – Don't Turn It
There are plenty of sequences where Cloud is running along environments during Chapter 18, where the camera is pretty far back from him. That doesn't make you feel any less connected to the action. The old Motorcycle Minigame is more of a top-down look at the road, and that helps a ton in being able to see your acceleration and deceleration and know how you're moving along the field. The camera issues along are enough of a goddamned disaster, but a lot of this boss fight involves intentional maneuvering, so make sure that the player is able to take full advantage of that. Additionally, you can still angle it slightly to the right or left as they approach the "front" of the field to help them see M.O.T.O.R. from the side, but just pulling the camera away somewhat would help an insane amount in making this fight manageable.
Lastly: And this is something to remember for the next bit – Every other boss fight in the game has a unique in-game animation sequence that it goes through between each phase change: H0512 with the mako tank & minions, and even The Arsenal moving around and changing configuration. M.O.T.O.R. doesn't have phase change animations – only a death cinematic.
So, this is where things are a bit weird. You can definitely tell that there are some sections that weren't implemented fully. Let's start with the VERY first area.
Cloud starts off alone. It's a battle sequence... but then your ATB Bar stops charging after about 2 sections, and it's actually a running sequence along moving and broken sections of highway. This is what should INSTANTLY tell you something's wrong. This is meant to be a standard combat sequence with Cloud where, you fight some enemies and then when it concludes, you're left in the "battle" state, and then move along the highway to a new battleground. You had these types of encounters when you were climbing the Sector 7 Plate, and also in the Shinra HQ Garage. The problem is that the combat that's supposed to occur there doesn't exist at all. That's why Cloud goes into battle for as long as it takes to initiate the combat state, but then it instantly pauses because the combat also ends, rather than him just being in normal walking controls. You cross three of those areas and then drop into a boss arena.
ALL of Chapter 18 doesn't have normal battles against any generic entities, and that's how you can tell that this sequence of the game literally isn't complete. There are no fights against the regular Whispers who he's seen throughout the entire game. There are no sections where you fight enemies or do anything even remotely time-consuming. The Whispers have been showing up en masse and blocking and impeding your progress the whole game, but they're totally absent from the one area you expect to be absolutely full of them. This is because literally ALL of the enemy encounters here have either been removed or have literally never been completed, and only the critical boss fight, and traversal segments remain. You can tell that fights against Whisper Rubrum, Viridi, & Croceo are also supposed to be spaced apart and broken up. Barret has lines like "Not these guys again!" when they show up quite literally seconds after you've beat them.
There are other running sequences after you've gotten rejoined by Barret & Tifa (in my case, but apparently this is something that can change), where they run off through a destroyed pipe that Whisper Harbinger slams his hand into. Compare those animation sequences to literally EVERYTHING else where something like that happens in the game – and it's abundantly clear that they're incomplete. This is a game where there are tiny little groups of 3D modeled rats that go running around in certain areas of the slums. There is literally zero way that these segments are completed in their current state.
Then let's talk about the Whisper Entities themselves. You always fight them at the same time. If you stagger all of them at once, whichever one you kill first, the other two will respawn with regenerated HP. Also, they don't have unique phase animations. The only one they have is when they merge into Whisper Bahamut, and even that is just bare-bones. It's nothing even CLOSE to the full cinematography and camerawork that we see for every other enemy in the game – and this is the end boss. There are some unique animation sequences of party members joining you as Sephiroth's fight phases progress, where their attack will break, hit, stop whatever thing unique to who's joining you, but that's it.
My other issue that comes up here is that we don't really get to understand the point where Cloud suddenly turns into the Endgame Cloud. In his fight against Sephiroth, we see him doing the Advent Children-type jumping over rubble and blade-beam slicing through debris back-to-back-to-back, despite the fact that our current Cloud isn't nearly that badass yet. Not to mention, when he's facing off against Sephiroth in the edge of creation, he's fucking flash-stepping to fast that he literally disappears. Our Cloud is a badass, but that kind of speed is miles away from the Triple Strike ability that he currently has.
It's VERY apparent that the Buster Sword that we see at the start of the game is the one that's planted in the ground where when Sephiroth knocks it away. It's that same weird black-textured floor and everything. This is where my comment about this game being either a sequel to the original series, or just an interpretation that the original series is what Fate is attempting to bring about comes from.
Also on a bit of a side note: The in-game animated content actually looks better than the FMV cinematics do when it comes to the characters – and it's super weird to say that. This is especially because the character designs are a little bit off from what they look like in-game (Cloud's pauldron in particular). It wasn't so bad in the VR room sequence, or even at all with the Escaping the Plate Collapse segments. It's super odd during the ending, especially because they can't use the predictive AI to match the character dialogue, you get Aerith doing this weird "shaking her head no to reply" or Cloud saying, "Sephiroth" just as we cut AWAY from his mouth. Those are little direction oddities that would VERY much have been picked and prodded at if they started to get more localized dialogue, and had time to comb over the animations and content in Chapter 18 the way that they did for the rest of the game.
If anything, they'd been using these things super sparingly throughout the game up until the last few chapters, and I suspect that it's because you can customize the characters to some degree, so if you have time for the in-game animation team to actually MAKE those scenes, you're going to be using super high-fidelity cinematics like that where you need them, but the team is gonna complete everything else in-engine. That clearly didn't happen here because even the basic parts literally aren't done. That's why the ending feels so weird and half-understandable. Even all of the dialogue just before you enter the area with the Whispers suddenly goes all anime-exposition, and departs from the natural human conversation that we've had up until this point. You've even got Red XIII who can help to deliver exposition that's weird, but he's barely used.
This should help to tell you just how hard-pushed all of the teams where to hit the release date deadline at all. You can feel where things started to slip, and I can't blame anyone for feeling gut-punched by the ending, but this literally isn't a complete game. It's got all of the necessary pieces, but this isn't how Chapters in Remake feel at all ON TOP of being something that's both new and jarring to players. It's all of those emotions at once, so I can't blame anyone for hating it in its current state. I definitely raged about it when I played.
However, going back through that whole Chapter again – I've gotta say, the ending ACTUALLY hit me emotionally this time around with that shot of Zack and that last line of Aerith's. I genuinely love this game to bits and I think that this chapter CAN be everything it's supposed to be without making the fans feel alienated at all, but man-oh-man is it having a rough time with what it is now. It's gonna be a really tough effort to get people back after that mood whiplash, but honestly, FFXV's history is still giving me every bit of confidence that they can pull it off despite what anyone feels about it right now – it IS the right path for the FFVII Remake to be taking, but it is definitely suffering from having one of its most pivotal moments being painfully underdeveloped at present – but I fully believe that the version that matches the quality that the entire rest of the game has is on the way, and that the team probably hasn't stopped working on it at all.
Either way, it's clear that the team felt confident about things being thoroughly tested and finished about all of the earlier sections of the game – but that ALL ends at the vent sequence and the H0512 boss fight for now since those have the bugs you know would have been caught, and they're the last fight that feel ALMOST but not quite complete on the same level as everything else. Those bugs would have been fully caught beforehand, so I expect that everything from that section forward is gonna be getting some significant updates over time. I don't know if they'll be happening soon or not, but I absolutely expect them to happen. How exactly that announcement gets crafted remains to be seen, but yeah. Playing Chapter 18 again made me EVEN MORE convinced that this is something where we need to give the team the confidence, understanding, and trust that got us the whole rest of the game, and wait to see what it looks like once they've actually been able to complete and deliver the sort of experience that they labored over for every other square centimeter of the game prior to this. The reception about the ending is definitely gonna be reaching and hitting them hard, and I only hope that everyone's feelings about the parts that they did complete fully is motivating to show us what it's really like, and the anger about the conclusion isn't getting them down too badly.
Cloud starts off alone. It's a battle sequence... but then your ATB Bar stops charging after about 2 sections, and it's actually a running sequence along moving and broken sections of highway. This is what should INSTANTLY tell you something's wrong. This is meant to be a standard combat sequence with Cloud where, you fight some enemies and then when it concludes, you're left in the "battle" state, and then move along the highway to a new battleground. You had these types of encounters when you were climbing the Sector 7 Plate, and also in the Shinra HQ Garage. The problem is that the combat that's supposed to occur there doesn't exist at all. That's why Cloud goes into battle for as long as it takes to initiate the combat state, but then it instantly pauses because the combat also ends, rather than him just being in normal walking controls. You cross three of those areas and then drop into a boss arena.
ALL of Chapter 18 doesn't have normal battles against any generic entities, and that's how you can tell that this sequence of the game literally isn't complete. There are no fights against the regular Whispers who he's seen throughout the entire game. There are no sections where you fight enemies or do anything even remotely time-consuming. The Whispers have been showing up en masse and blocking and impeding your progress the whole game, but they're totally absent from the one area you expect to be absolutely full of them. This is because literally ALL of the enemy encounters here have either been removed or have literally never been completed, and only the critical boss fight, and traversal segments remain. You can tell that fights against Whisper Rubrum, Viridi, & Croceo are also supposed to be spaced apart and broken up. Barret has lines like "Not these guys again!" when they show up quite literally seconds after you've beat them.
There are other running sequences after you've gotten rejoined by Barret & Tifa (in my case, but apparently this is something that can change), where they run off through a destroyed pipe that Whisper Harbinger slams his hand into. Compare those animation sequences to literally EVERYTHING else where something like that happens in the game – and it's abundantly clear that they're incomplete. This is a game where there are tiny little groups of 3D modeled rats that go running around in certain areas of the slums. There is literally zero way that these segments are completed in their current state.
Then let's talk about the Whisper Entities themselves. You always fight them at the same time. If you stagger all of them at once, whichever one you kill first, the other two will respawn with regenerated HP. Also, they don't have unique phase animations. The only one they have is when they merge into Whisper Bahamut, and even that is just bare-bones. It's nothing even CLOSE to the full cinematography and camerawork that we see for every other enemy in the game – and this is the end boss. There are some unique animation sequences of party members joining you as Sephiroth's fight phases progress, where their attack will break, hit, stop whatever thing unique to who's joining you, but that's it.
My other issue that comes up here is that we don't really get to understand the point where Cloud suddenly turns into the Endgame Cloud. In his fight against Sephiroth, we see him doing the Advent Children-type jumping over rubble and blade-beam slicing through debris back-to-back-to-back, despite the fact that our current Cloud isn't nearly that badass yet. Not to mention, when he's facing off against Sephiroth in the edge of creation, he's fucking flash-stepping to fast that he literally disappears. Our Cloud is a badass, but that kind of speed is miles away from the Triple Strike ability that he currently has.
It's VERY apparent that the Buster Sword that we see at the start of the game is the one that's planted in the ground where when Sephiroth knocks it away. It's that same weird black-textured floor and everything. This is where my comment about this game being either a sequel to the original series, or just an interpretation that the original series is what Fate is attempting to bring about comes from.
Also on a bit of a side note: The in-game animated content actually looks better than the FMV cinematics do when it comes to the characters – and it's super weird to say that. This is especially because the character designs are a little bit off from what they look like in-game (Cloud's pauldron in particular). It wasn't so bad in the VR room sequence, or even at all with the Escaping the Plate Collapse segments. It's super odd during the ending, especially because they can't use the predictive AI to match the character dialogue, you get Aerith doing this weird "shaking her head no to reply" or Cloud saying, "Sephiroth" just as we cut AWAY from his mouth. Those are little direction oddities that would VERY much have been picked and prodded at if they started to get more localized dialogue, and had time to comb over the animations and content in Chapter 18 the way that they did for the rest of the game.
If anything, they'd been using these things super sparingly throughout the game up until the last few chapters, and I suspect that it's because you can customize the characters to some degree, so if you have time for the in-game animation team to actually MAKE those scenes, you're going to be using super high-fidelity cinematics like that where you need them, but the team is gonna complete everything else in-engine. That clearly didn't happen here because even the basic parts literally aren't done. That's why the ending feels so weird and half-understandable. Even all of the dialogue just before you enter the area with the Whispers suddenly goes all anime-exposition, and departs from the natural human conversation that we've had up until this point. You've even got Red XIII who can help to deliver exposition that's weird, but he's barely used.
This should help to tell you just how hard-pushed all of the teams where to hit the release date deadline at all. You can feel where things started to slip, and I can't blame anyone for feeling gut-punched by the ending, but this literally isn't a complete game. It's got all of the necessary pieces, but this isn't how Chapters in Remake feel at all ON TOP of being something that's both new and jarring to players. It's all of those emotions at once, so I can't blame anyone for hating it in its current state. I definitely raged about it when I played.
However, going back through that whole Chapter again – I've gotta say, the ending ACTUALLY hit me emotionally this time around with that shot of Zack and that last line of Aerith's. I genuinely love this game to bits and I think that this chapter CAN be everything it's supposed to be without making the fans feel alienated at all, but man-oh-man is it having a rough time with what it is now. It's gonna be a really tough effort to get people back after that mood whiplash, but honestly, FFXV's history is still giving me every bit of confidence that they can pull it off despite what anyone feels about it right now – it IS the right path for the FFVII Remake to be taking, but it is definitely suffering from having one of its most pivotal moments being painfully underdeveloped at present – but I fully believe that the version that matches the quality that the entire rest of the game has is on the way, and that the team probably hasn't stopped working on it at all.
Either way, it's clear that the team felt confident about things being thoroughly tested and finished about all of the earlier sections of the game – but that ALL ends at the vent sequence and the H0512 boss fight for now since those have the bugs you know would have been caught, and they're the last fight that feel ALMOST but not quite complete on the same level as everything else. Those bugs would have been fully caught beforehand, so I expect that everything from that section forward is gonna be getting some significant updates over time. I don't know if they'll be happening soon or not, but I absolutely expect them to happen. How exactly that announcement gets crafted remains to be seen, but yeah. Playing Chapter 18 again made me EVEN MORE convinced that this is something where we need to give the team the confidence, understanding, and trust that got us the whole rest of the game, and wait to see what it looks like once they've actually been able to complete and deliver the sort of experience that they labored over for every other square centimeter of the game prior to this. The reception about the ending is definitely gonna be reaching and hitting them hard, and I only hope that everyone's feelings about the parts that they did complete fully is motivating to show us what it's really like, and the anger about the conclusion isn't getting them down too badly.
X
- AKA
- X
Ok, so now that I got through that, I wanted to cover a couple things from other Chapters that point to potentially different plans for things that players would be free to do during the end-game. Then go over some more evidence that things with development hit major issues right around the end sections of Chapter 16. Lastly, and most importantly, I'm now 99.9% sure that I know what caused the issues, and now everything else makes even MORE sense than it did already, and I bet I know when we're getting the update for these final chapters as well.
X
When you're gathering flowers with Aerith, there's a prompt lets you know that the decorations at the Leaf House will change, depending on which flowers you choose – This is pretty odd for something that's a one-off event in the game.
The Wall Market outfits also change depending on choices, and there are other variables that exist throughout the game, but none of those let you know about them directly. There's a whole section of those variables in the endgame menu area – but the Leaf House flower decor isn't one of them. This open callout about what it does makes me think that the Leaf House decorations aren't intended to be a one-and-done and only changed during multiple playthrough alterations. Rather, I think that they're something that you would've gained the ability to adjust from time-to-time based on an interaction with someone there if you wanted to update the look just for fun.
However, this would mean that you'd need to be able to free roam around there some time after Chapter 8, like during Chapter 14 or during the post-game. I don't think that there's actually a way to re-trigger this event and choose different flowers after you do it for the first time with Aerith (feel free to let me know if there is and I just missed it). It struck me as incredibly odd just because it's something that openly presents that there's an option for differentiation, rather than listing it as a trophy, or end-game achievement.
The Wall Market outfits also change depending on choices, and there are other variables that exist throughout the game, but none of those let you know about them directly. There's a whole section of those variables in the endgame menu area – but the Leaf House flower decor isn't one of them. This open callout about what it does makes me think that the Leaf House decorations aren't intended to be a one-and-done and only changed during multiple playthrough alterations. Rather, I think that they're something that you would've gained the ability to adjust from time-to-time based on an interaction with someone there if you wanted to update the look just for fun.
However, this would mean that you'd need to be able to free roam around there some time after Chapter 8, like during Chapter 14 or during the post-game. I don't think that there's actually a way to re-trigger this event and choose different flowers after you do it for the first time with Aerith (feel free to let me know if there is and I just missed it). It struck me as incredibly odd just because it's something that openly presents that there's an option for differentiation, rather than listing it as a trophy, or end-game achievement.
I said that I was gonna bring up something about balance when I was talking about the M.O.T.O.R. boss fight, and I'm gonna address that now as well. This is about the One-on-One battles in the Shinra VR simulators.
The VR battles were fun, but they weren't heavily tested right around the same point that everything else in the game started having issues: the One-on-One Shinra fights, so you're up against the following:
In general, you need to have a Fire & Lightning Materia. Fire+Elemental is pretty important. Lightning makes all the difference when dealing with the Cutter. Also, Aerith needs to have Debarrier for reasons that I will explain briefly.
Close-Range Fighters.
For Cloud & Tifa this is pretty straightforward. You can use Firaga against the first 4 enemies, and hit them while they're Pressured, or just keep kiting, and avoid their other attacks. For the Sahagin Prince, it's all about dodging the Frog transformation. The Phantom is just invisible a bunch of the time, waiting around for it to appear to hit it really quickly. For the Cutter, it's about again – running until you're far enough out to cast Thundaga, and following up while it's pressured.
Then come the long-range people, and things get really different.
Barret is slow as hell. He can barely stay ahead of the Grungy Bandit, but his Overcharge attack staggers and builds ATB enough to never make it a problem. Also, his use of Maximum Fury when her gets ATB charged makes it really easy to follow-up Thundaga and take down the Cutter. Overall he's tanky enough to deal with everything ok at range.
So, you've learned how to do these fights with the three characters who you initially had. These three characters get access to those battles just before the Vent-crawling & H0512 fight, which means that those three characters would have had time to test them. So then when you rescue Aerith, you want to do the one with her before continuing forward with Chapter 17... and then you run into the same issues that you're going to have with the Rufus & Arsenal fights – they require a particular setup & execution to win.
Aerith actually ONLY deals physical attack damage when she's at point-blank-range with her staff. Everything else for her standard attacks actually deals non-elemental magic damage. Additionally, unlike most characters, a large portion of her ATB moves, in addition to both of her Limit Breaks are shields or buffs meant to be used as a part of a team. The only ones that are Attacks also deal damage as some form of magic-based damage. She's designed as a Magic Glass Canon.
Then you hit the second battle against the Phantom with Aerith. Every other character using Fire+Elemental can just attack the Phantom like normal when it casts Reflect on itself during the brief windows where it reappears, and with the ATB abilities, it'll make short work of it. This is why it doesn't matter that the Phantom's Reflect – unlike every other Buff in the game... never decays or runs out.
What this means is that the second that the Phantom casts Reflect on itself (when its HP drops by about 1/3, usually after a single Firaga hit) – Aerith literally cannot deal any damage to it in any way at all. All Magic Attack-based damage, simply says, "Immune" and does nothing, same with her only ATB-attacks. If she casts a spell on it, the spell will bounce back and hit her instead. This means that literally the ONLY thing that you can do is move slowly enough that while it's invisible and can't be targeted, that appears near you and tries to use one of it's physical swiping attacks rather than cast Blizzard/Blizzaga at you. When it tries to use a close range attack, you have to dodge when it appears, and then attack it while close enough that you are pushing against the enemy character model. This is the only way that it registers her staff hits as physical damage that won't be ignored by Reflect. While you can dodge Blizzard, you can't get close enough to deal damage before it disappears again, so the kiting strategy doesn't work for her. Even with Fire+Elemental & the Bladed Critical Hit-focused Staff, at Level 50 you're looking at a tiny ~8-12 damage per hit, and maybe 3-6 hits per attempt, each of which is more than 5 seconds of doing nothing but waiting for it to show up again. So, that's only ~24-72 damage per attack window.
Given enough time, you could probably forcibly push your way through that excruciatingly long and boring experience... except – The Phantom has a massive Area of Effect HP Drain attack as well that will use every 5-6 attempts. If you're running and it's using its Blizzard spells – you'll never get hit by this attack. However, if you're moving slowly enough to reliably trigger its close ranged attacks, you'll always get hit at least once before you can sprint out of range. This single hit will damage you for ~291 damage... and heal the Phantom for 291. Given that every 6 encounters, you've dealt ~144-432 Damage. This means in the absolute BEST case scenario, if you got 6 close combat hits every time, and they were all critical hits every time, that after the HP Drain, you'd still have dealt... 141 damage – which is basically nothing. In practice, this not only nullifies but it actually reverses any progress you've made, and in a couple rounds of doing this the Phantom will gradually start to regain all of its HP, leaving your only option to quit and restart, because the buff never decays – and you literally can't damage it more than it can self-heal.
Now, that's a minor inconvenience to throw away 400 Gil and go swap out a Materia – but this is a problem none of the other characters encounter. This also means that rather than using Aerith whatever way you want and try to overcome the odds of a tough battle which is what's the most fun thing about single character battles, you have to equip her a specific way to win. On TOP of that, you also have to equip her with a Materia that none of the other characters are forced to use – all because there's an enemy who gets a status buff that never decays.
This is the sort of thing that you see when QA is only testing happy path scenarios. This is what you see when only testing this fight with the Materia & Tactics that you know you SHOULD be using to beat them – rather than being able to take time seeing if it's much harder to beat them outside of the recommended way, but still possible to do. Enemy buffs can be much longer than player ones, but shouldn't ever be permanent. Again, it's an example of something that's running against the way that standard enemies, spells, buffs, and debuffs function in the rest of the game.
Unsurprisingly, this type of balance problem is the exact issue that also exists with all of Chapter 17's bosses that I talked about earlier. The fact that I ran into this annoyance about the combat scenario in Chapter 16, but encountered the precise issue of it being impossible ONLY with Aerith, who is the character who only becomes available after the Vent & H0512 fight at the start of Chapter 17 is incredibly telling. The fights themselves aren't fun – they're tiring but possible, until you get to Aerith and they have to be done in a very specific way. This just further reinforces that right around here is the EXACT point in the game's development where the testing team had to switch from, "Make sure that everything is a fantastic, fun, and thoroughly-polished experience." and changed to "You literally only have enough time to make sure that everything from this point forward works just well enough to be completed by players under ideal circumstances."
The VR battles were fun, but they weren't heavily tested right around the same point that everything else in the game started having issues: the One-on-One Shinra fights, so you're up against the following:
- Sahagin Prince
- Phantom
- Grungy Bandit
- 3-C SOLDIER Operator
- Cutter
In general, you need to have a Fire & Lightning Materia. Fire+Elemental is pretty important. Lightning makes all the difference when dealing with the Cutter. Also, Aerith needs to have Debarrier for reasons that I will explain briefly.
Close-Range Fighters.
For Cloud & Tifa this is pretty straightforward. You can use Firaga against the first 4 enemies, and hit them while they're Pressured, or just keep kiting, and avoid their other attacks. For the Sahagin Prince, it's all about dodging the Frog transformation. The Phantom is just invisible a bunch of the time, waiting around for it to appear to hit it really quickly. For the Cutter, it's about again – running until you're far enough out to cast Thundaga, and following up while it's pressured.
Then come the long-range people, and things get really different.
Barret is slow as hell. He can barely stay ahead of the Grungy Bandit, but his Overcharge attack staggers and builds ATB enough to never make it a problem. Also, his use of Maximum Fury when her gets ATB charged makes it really easy to follow-up Thundaga and take down the Cutter. Overall he's tanky enough to deal with everything ok at range.
So, you've learned how to do these fights with the three characters who you initially had. These three characters get access to those battles just before the Vent-crawling & H0512 fight, which means that those three characters would have had time to test them. So then when you rescue Aerith, you want to do the one with her before continuing forward with Chapter 17... and then you run into the same issues that you're going to have with the Rufus & Arsenal fights – they require a particular setup & execution to win.
Aerith actually ONLY deals physical attack damage when she's at point-blank-range with her staff. Everything else for her standard attacks actually deals non-elemental magic damage. Additionally, unlike most characters, a large portion of her ATB moves, in addition to both of her Limit Breaks are shields or buffs meant to be used as a part of a team. The only ones that are Attacks also deal damage as some form of magic-based damage. She's designed as a Magic Glass Canon.
Then you hit the second battle against the Phantom with Aerith. Every other character using Fire+Elemental can just attack the Phantom like normal when it casts Reflect on itself during the brief windows where it reappears, and with the ATB abilities, it'll make short work of it. This is why it doesn't matter that the Phantom's Reflect – unlike every other Buff in the game... never decays or runs out.
What this means is that the second that the Phantom casts Reflect on itself (when its HP drops by about 1/3, usually after a single Firaga hit) – Aerith literally cannot deal any damage to it in any way at all. All Magic Attack-based damage, simply says, "Immune" and does nothing, same with her only ATB-attacks. If she casts a spell on it, the spell will bounce back and hit her instead. This means that literally the ONLY thing that you can do is move slowly enough that while it's invisible and can't be targeted, that appears near you and tries to use one of it's physical swiping attacks rather than cast Blizzard/Blizzaga at you. When it tries to use a close range attack, you have to dodge when it appears, and then attack it while close enough that you are pushing against the enemy character model. This is the only way that it registers her staff hits as physical damage that won't be ignored by Reflect. While you can dodge Blizzard, you can't get close enough to deal damage before it disappears again, so the kiting strategy doesn't work for her. Even with Fire+Elemental & the Bladed Critical Hit-focused Staff, at Level 50 you're looking at a tiny ~8-12 damage per hit, and maybe 3-6 hits per attempt, each of which is more than 5 seconds of doing nothing but waiting for it to show up again. So, that's only ~24-72 damage per attack window.
Given enough time, you could probably forcibly push your way through that excruciatingly long and boring experience... except – The Phantom has a massive Area of Effect HP Drain attack as well that will use every 5-6 attempts. If you're running and it's using its Blizzard spells – you'll never get hit by this attack. However, if you're moving slowly enough to reliably trigger its close ranged attacks, you'll always get hit at least once before you can sprint out of range. This single hit will damage you for ~291 damage... and heal the Phantom for 291. Given that every 6 encounters, you've dealt ~144-432 Damage. This means in the absolute BEST case scenario, if you got 6 close combat hits every time, and they were all critical hits every time, that after the HP Drain, you'd still have dealt... 141 damage – which is basically nothing. In practice, this not only nullifies but it actually reverses any progress you've made, and in a couple rounds of doing this the Phantom will gradually start to regain all of its HP, leaving your only option to quit and restart, because the buff never decays – and you literally can't damage it more than it can self-heal.
Now, that's a minor inconvenience to throw away 400 Gil and go swap out a Materia – but this is a problem none of the other characters encounter. This also means that rather than using Aerith whatever way you want and try to overcome the odds of a tough battle which is what's the most fun thing about single character battles, you have to equip her a specific way to win. On TOP of that, you also have to equip her with a Materia that none of the other characters are forced to use – all because there's an enemy who gets a status buff that never decays.
This is the sort of thing that you see when QA is only testing happy path scenarios. This is what you see when only testing this fight with the Materia & Tactics that you know you SHOULD be using to beat them – rather than being able to take time seeing if it's much harder to beat them outside of the recommended way, but still possible to do. Enemy buffs can be much longer than player ones, but shouldn't ever be permanent. Again, it's an example of something that's running against the way that standard enemies, spells, buffs, and debuffs function in the rest of the game.
Unsurprisingly, this type of balance problem is the exact issue that also exists with all of Chapter 17's bosses that I talked about earlier. The fact that I ran into this annoyance about the combat scenario in Chapter 16, but encountered the precise issue of it being impossible ONLY with Aerith, who is the character who only becomes available after the Vent & H0512 fight at the start of Chapter 17 is incredibly telling. The fights themselves aren't fun – they're tiring but possible, until you get to Aerith and they have to be done in a very specific way. This just further reinforces that right around here is the EXACT point in the game's development where the testing team had to switch from, "Make sure that everything is a fantastic, fun, and thoroughly-polished experience." and changed to "You literally only have enough time to make sure that everything from this point forward works just well enough to be completed by players under ideal circumstances."
This point in time is also why we got a sudden and very late confirmation about Red XIII being a Guest Character publicly. This was setting expectations about things in this part of the game to match the bare minimum viable needs for release. This wasn't ever what they intended, but this was to help the team try and manage their tightened needs around development crunch that was hitting, while shifting the expectations publicly to avoid the team taking blame when people discovered it when playing. It's easier to deal with something like that if you know about it, but they couldn't just outright say, "You guys, please buy the Remake, but the end section is literally barely completed." so they tried to communicate similar information publicly as much as possible. You can see how much information they put out about their team and development to make it so that people can tell that something about the end of the game isn't totally consistent.
The Chapter 17 Shinra VR Testing chamber is immediately outside where you get Aerith back and where you would have gotten Red XIII for the first time. You can even tell that you were meant to select a specific team to move forward with however you wanted in Aerith's room:
Everyone is standing around in her room when Cloud wakes up. All of the characters actually have two unique lines of dialogue if you bump into them and wait. However, only Aerith has dialogue that's initiated with Triangle, and she tells you about her past. The way that they're all standing around is because you're means to intentionally form two different teams here. One team with Cloud, and another team without Cloud. This is also why Chadley is set up just outside of Aerith's room – It's meant to be a place where you can take a break, and help you do training with your different team configurations, and Red XIII before you proceed forward. (Instead, this only has the Hard Mode and existing Shinra VR Challenges that weren't fully tested).
If this was the case, that would also mean that you'd have intentionally divided up two teams on your own who were capable of surviving individually. In this case, Red XIII is going to serve as the variable for which group ends up where. The team with Red XIII is going to be on the path where Nanaki has to run around the outside and activate levers (Cloud & Barret), and the other team is going to be on the other path (Tifa & Aerith). This means that rather than getting pushed into the character & team-swapping section without any warning or preparation, the game was actually designed to teach you about splitting into two different functional teams before you fall into The Drum.
Then, this was going to continue forward into Destiny's Crossroads with your fights against the Whisper Bosses, where you have two separate teams fighting against Harbinger, and the other against Rubrum, Viridi, & Croceo. Again, that requires Red XIII to be a playable character though, which they learned that they wouldn't be able to complete in time. He's clearly built up at least as much as the pre-Royale Chocobros were in XV, but there's still a lot of work that it takes to make him a fully-developed character who can stand alongside the others. It's also pretty clear that (M.O.T.O.R. fight notwithstanding) this is the main thing that everything else is dependent on for the next sections of the game.
Playable Nanaki makes sense that he'd have been absorbing a massive effort, because you can't just put out a partially-finished character. There's a ton of work that needs to be done to make him work. This explains why a bunch of testing on the end sections are odd and half-built, because they're not designed to work the way that they are. Even the lack of generic fights in Chapter 18 is likely because they're all tied to having the two dedicated teams to fight them. This is also why there are so many strange and opaque changes between teams in Chapter 17 & 18. Red XIII being playable is one of the key things that is gonna have to be completed before LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE in the game can follow.
What happened on the development side is that they knew Red XIII wasn't gonna be good enough to release, so someone in charge made the call not to include him with release. This means that everyone had to go back through everything and rework the final two chapters of the game to still function without all of the triggers and interactions. All of the boss balance wasn't being tested against the team splits that they were meant to be. Everything was only being tested against minimal interactions. This means EXTRA work on the broken chapters, not less, because it's outside of the realm of everything that you've tested, and that means that it's even more likely for bugs or broken interactions to arise. This is because the setup for important events in those chapters actually requires the ability to knowingly split up the party at the start of Chapter 17, and events later on will rely on player-specific character choice data that occurs there, and it would all have been tested using Red XIII as a key party member to do a bunch of the interactions. This is the core of literally everything broken, incomplete, and weird we see in the current final two chapters of the game.
I'd expect that while we could see bug fixes for the game in general (likely to tackle the texture weirdness), I would be willing to bet that all of the efforts of the entire development team right now are full-time buried in making Nanaki playable, and re-adding all of the the necessary updates to both Chapter 17 & 18 that require him as a part of the workflow. However those will only come as a part of a major update DLC that gets marketed as including Red XIII as a playable character front and center. This will give them a way to get everyone excited and try out the end of the game again, and also provide all of the massive improvements to the parts of the game that everyone isn't enjoying right now without directly saying, "Hey you guys, we finally fixed the end of the game."
Much like the FFXV Chocobro DLC, they know how to do all of this work at once, and release it as a major update. I don't know whether or not this will also include new post-game content, or if it will solely the main game, and post-game updates will be added as another update, but this is the thing that we should be keeping eyes out for, and the timeline that we should be thinking about before they show up.
The Chapter 17 Shinra VR Testing chamber is immediately outside where you get Aerith back and where you would have gotten Red XIII for the first time. You can even tell that you were meant to select a specific team to move forward with however you wanted in Aerith's room:
Everyone is standing around in her room when Cloud wakes up. All of the characters actually have two unique lines of dialogue if you bump into them and wait. However, only Aerith has dialogue that's initiated with Triangle, and she tells you about her past. The way that they're all standing around is because you're means to intentionally form two different teams here. One team with Cloud, and another team without Cloud. This is also why Chadley is set up just outside of Aerith's room – It's meant to be a place where you can take a break, and help you do training with your different team configurations, and Red XIII before you proceed forward. (Instead, this only has the Hard Mode and existing Shinra VR Challenges that weren't fully tested).
If this was the case, that would also mean that you'd have intentionally divided up two teams on your own who were capable of surviving individually. In this case, Red XIII is going to serve as the variable for which group ends up where. The team with Red XIII is going to be on the path where Nanaki has to run around the outside and activate levers (Cloud & Barret), and the other team is going to be on the other path (Tifa & Aerith). This means that rather than getting pushed into the character & team-swapping section without any warning or preparation, the game was actually designed to teach you about splitting into two different functional teams before you fall into The Drum.
Then, this was going to continue forward into Destiny's Crossroads with your fights against the Whisper Bosses, where you have two separate teams fighting against Harbinger, and the other against Rubrum, Viridi, & Croceo. Again, that requires Red XIII to be a playable character though, which they learned that they wouldn't be able to complete in time. He's clearly built up at least as much as the pre-Royale Chocobros were in XV, but there's still a lot of work that it takes to make him a fully-developed character who can stand alongside the others. It's also pretty clear that (M.O.T.O.R. fight notwithstanding) this is the main thing that everything else is dependent on for the next sections of the game.
Playable Nanaki makes sense that he'd have been absorbing a massive effort, because you can't just put out a partially-finished character. There's a ton of work that needs to be done to make him work. This explains why a bunch of testing on the end sections are odd and half-built, because they're not designed to work the way that they are. Even the lack of generic fights in Chapter 18 is likely because they're all tied to having the two dedicated teams to fight them. This is also why there are so many strange and opaque changes between teams in Chapter 17 & 18. Red XIII being playable is one of the key things that is gonna have to be completed before LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE in the game can follow.
What happened on the development side is that they knew Red XIII wasn't gonna be good enough to release, so someone in charge made the call not to include him with release. This means that everyone had to go back through everything and rework the final two chapters of the game to still function without all of the triggers and interactions. All of the boss balance wasn't being tested against the team splits that they were meant to be. Everything was only being tested against minimal interactions. This means EXTRA work on the broken chapters, not less, because it's outside of the realm of everything that you've tested, and that means that it's even more likely for bugs or broken interactions to arise. This is because the setup for important events in those chapters actually requires the ability to knowingly split up the party at the start of Chapter 17, and events later on will rely on player-specific character choice data that occurs there, and it would all have been tested using Red XIII as a key party member to do a bunch of the interactions. This is the core of literally everything broken, incomplete, and weird we see in the current final two chapters of the game.
I'd expect that while we could see bug fixes for the game in general (likely to tackle the texture weirdness), I would be willing to bet that all of the efforts of the entire development team right now are full-time buried in making Nanaki playable, and re-adding all of the the necessary updates to both Chapter 17 & 18 that require him as a part of the workflow. However those will only come as a part of a major update DLC that gets marketed as including Red XIII as a playable character front and center. This will give them a way to get everyone excited and try out the end of the game again, and also provide all of the massive improvements to the parts of the game that everyone isn't enjoying right now without directly saying, "Hey you guys, we finally fixed the end of the game."
Much like the FFXV Chocobro DLC, they know how to do all of this work at once, and release it as a major update. I don't know whether or not this will also include new post-game content, or if it will solely the main game, and post-game updates will be added as another update, but this is the thing that we should be keeping eyes out for, and the timeline that we should be thinking about before they show up.
X
Wol
None Shall Remember Those Who Do Not Fight
- AKA
- Rosarian Shield
Damn it makes a lot of sense, I appreciate the insights.Ok, so now that I got through that, I wanted to cover a couple things from other Chapters that point to potentially different plans for things that players would be free to do during the end-game. Then go over some more evidence that things with development hit major issues right around the end sections of Chapter 16. Lastly, and most importantly, I'm now 99.9% sure that I know what caused the issues, and now everything else makes even MORE sense than it did already, and I bet I know when we're getting the update for these final chapters as well.
When you're gathering flowers with Aerith, there's a prompt lets you know that the decorations at the Leaf House will change, depending on which flowers you choose – This is pretty odd for something that's a one-off event in the game.
The Wall Market outfits also change depending on choices, and there are other variables that exist throughout the game, but none of those let you know about them directly. There's a whole section of those variables in the endgame menu area – but the Leaf House flower decor isn't one of them. This open callout about what it does makes me think that the Leaf House decorations aren't intended to be a one-and-done and only changed during multiple playthrough alterations. Rather, I think that they're something that you would've gained the ability to adjust from time-to-time based on an interaction with someone there if you wanted to update the look just for fun.
However, this would mean that you'd need to be able to free roam around there some time after Chapter 8, like during Chapter 14 or during the post-game. I don't think that there's actually a way to re-trigger this event and choose different flowers after you do it for the first time with Aerith (feel free to let me know if there is and I just missed it). It struck me as incredibly odd just because it's something that openly presents that there's an option for differentiation, rather than listing it as a trophy, or end-game achievement.
I said that I was gonna bring up something about balance when I was talking about the M.O.T.O.R. boss fight, and I'm gonna address that now as well. This is about the One-on-One battles in the Shinra VR simulators.
The VR battles were fun, but they weren't heavily tested right around the same point that everything else in the game started having issues: the One-on-One Shinra fights, so you're up against the following:
This battle is an annoying and tedious bore on every conceivable level. In general, you NEED to have certain Materia loadouts, and several of these enemies have hard interrupt attacks that will hit you if you don't approach fighting them in a very specific way. This is a challenge in the form of tedium, where the first the time you run into it, you'll get a little ways only to eventually get screwed over by some misc enemy or at least the Cutter in the end. In fact, the main thing you learn is that one-on-one, these enemies all punish you for trying to use regular attacks against them, and most all of them mean that you just have to to kite them around the battle arena waiting.
- Sahagin Prince
- Phantom
- Grungy Bandit
- 3-C SOLDIER Operator
- Cutter
In general, you need to have a Fire & Lightning Materia. Fire+Elemental is pretty important. Lightning makes all the difference when dealing with the Cutter. Also, Aerith needs to have Debarrier for reasons that I will explain briefly.
Close-Range Fighters.
For Cloud & Tifa this is pretty straightforward. You can use Firaga against the first 4 enemies, and hit them while they're Pressured, or just keep kiting, and avoid their other attacks. For the Sahagin Prince, it's all about dodging the Frog transformation. The Phantom is just invisible a bunch of the time, waiting around for it to appear to hit it really quickly. For the Cutter, it's about again – running until you're far enough out to cast Thundaga, and following up while it's pressured.
Then come the long-range people, and things get really different.
Barret is slow as hell. He can barely stay ahead of the Grungy Bandit, but his Overcharge attack staggers and builds ATB enough to never make it a problem. Also, his use of Maximum Fury when her gets ATB charged makes it really easy to follow-up Thundaga and take down the Cutter. Overall he's tanky enough to deal with everything ok at range.
So, you've learned how to do these fights with the three characters who you initially had. These three characters get access to those battles just before the Vent-crawling & H0512 fight, which means that those three characters would have had time to test them. So then when you rescue Aerith, you want to do the one with her before continuing forward with Chapter 17... and then you run into the same issues that you're going to have with the Rufus & Arsenal fights – they require a particular setup & execution to win.
Aerith actually ONLY deals physical attack damage when she's at point-blank-range with her staff. Everything else for her standard attacks actually deals non-elemental magic damage. Additionally, unlike most characters, a large portion of her ATB moves, in addition to both of her Limit Breaks are shields or buffs meant to be used as a part of a team. The only ones that are Attacks also deal damage as some form of magic-based damage. She's designed as a Magic Glass Canon.
Then you hit the second battle against the Phantom with Aerith. Every other character using Fire+Elemental can just attack the Phantom like normal when it casts Reflect on itself during the brief windows where it reappears, and with the ATB abilities, it'll make short work of it. This is why it doesn't matter that the Phantom's Reflect – unlike every other Buff in the game... never decays or runs out.
What this means is that the second that the Phantom casts Reflect on itself (when its HP drops by about 1/3, usually after a single Firaga hit) – Aerith literally cannot deal any damage to it in any way at all. All Magic Attack-based damage, simply says, "Immune" and does nothing, same with her only ATB-attacks. If she casts a spell on it, the spell will bounce back and hit her instead. This means that literally the ONLY thing that you can do is move slowly enough that while it's invisible and can't be targeted, that appears near you and tries to use one of it's physical swiping attacks rather than cast Blizzard/Blizzaga at you. When it tries to use a close range attack, you have to dodge when it appears, and then attack it while close enough that you are pushing against the enemy character model. This is the only way that it registers her staff hits as physical damage that won't be ignored by Reflect. While you can dodge Blizzard, you can't get close enough to deal damage before it disappears again, so the kiting strategy doesn't work for her. Even with Fire+Elemental & the Bladed Critical Hit-focused Staff, at Level 50 you're looking at a tiny ~8-12 damage per hit, and maybe 3-6 hits per attempt, each of which is more than 5 seconds of doing nothing but waiting for it to show up again. So, that's only ~24-72 damage per attack window.
Given enough time, you could probably forcibly push your way through that excruciatingly long and boring experience... except – The Phantom has a massive Area of Effect HP Drain attack as well that will use every 5-6 attempts. If you're running and it's using its Blizzard spells – you'll never get hit by this attack. However, if you're moving slowly enough to reliably trigger its close ranged attacks, you'll always get hit at least once before you can sprint out of range. This single hit will damage you for ~291 damage... and heal the Phantom for 291. Given that every 6 encounters, you've dealt ~144-432 Damage. This means in the absolute BEST case scenario, if you got 6 close combat hits every time, and they were all critical hits every time, that after the HP Drain, you'd still have dealt... 141 damage – which is basically nothing. In practice, this not only nullifies but it actually reverses any progress you've made, and in a couple rounds of doing this the Phantom will gradually start to regain all of its HP, leaving your only option to quit and restart, because the buff never decays – and you literally can't damage it more than it can self-heal.
Now, that's a minor inconvenience to throw away 400 Gil and go swap out a Materia – but this is a problem none of the other characters encounter. This also means that rather than using Aerith whatever way you want and try to overcome the odds of a tough battle which is what's the most fun thing about single character battles, you have to equip her a specific way to win. On TOP of that, you also have to equip her with a Materia that none of the other characters are forced to use – all because there's an enemy who gets a status buff that never decays.
This is the sort of thing that you see when QA is only testing happy path scenarios. This is what you see when only testing this fight with the Materia & Tactics that you know you SHOULD be using to beat them – rather than being able to take time seeing if it's much harder to beat them outside of the recommended way, but still possible to do. Enemy buffs can be much longer than player ones, but shouldn't ever be permanent. Again, it's an example of something that's running against the way that standard enemies, spells, buffs, and debuffs function in the rest of the game.
Unsurprisingly, this type of balance problem is the exact issue that also exists with all of Chapter 17's bosses that I talked about earlier. The fact that I ran into this annoyance about the combat scenario in Chapter 16, but encountered the precise issue of it being impossible ONLY with Aerith, who is the character who only becomes available after the Vent & H0512 fight at the start of Chapter 17 is incredibly telling. The fights themselves aren't fun – they're tiring but possible, until you get to Aerith and they have to be done in a very specific way. This just further reinforces that right around here is the EXACT point in the game's development where the testing team had to switch from, "Make sure that everything is a fantastic, fun, and thoroughly-polished experience." and changed to "You literally only have enough time to make sure that everything from this point forward works just well enough to be completed by players under ideal circumstances."
This point in time is also why we got a sudden and very late confirmation about Red XIII being a Guest Character publicly. This was setting expectations about things in this part of the game to match the bare minimum viable needs for release. This wasn't ever what they intended, but this was to help the team try and manage their tightened needs around development crunch that was hitting, while shifting the expectations publicly to avoid the team taking blame when people discovered it when playing. It's easier to deal with something like that if you know about it, but they couldn't just outright say, "You guys, please buy the Remake, but the end section is literally barely completed." so they tried to communicate similar information publicly as much as possible. You can see how much information they put out about their team and development to make it so that people can tell that something about the end of the game isn't totally consistent.
The Chapter 17 Shinra VR Testing chamber is immediately outside where you get Aerith back and where you would have gotten Red XIII for the first time. You can even tell that you were meant to select a specific team to move forward with however you wanted in Aerith's room:
Everyone is standing around in her room when Cloud wakes up. All of the characters actually have two unique lines of dialogue if you bump into them and wait. However, only Aerith has dialogue that's initiated with Triangle, and she tells you about her past. The way that they're all standing around is because you're means to intentionally form two different teams here. One team with Cloud, and another team without Cloud. This is also why Chadley is set up just outside of Aerith's room – It's meant to be a place where you can take a break, and help you do training with your different team configurations, and Red XIII before you proceed forward. (Instead, this only has the Hard Mode and existing Shinra VR Challenges that weren't fully tested).
If this was the case, that would also mean that you'd have intentionally divided up two teams on your own who were capable of surviving individually. In this case, Red XIII is going to serve as the variable for which group ends up where. The team with Red XIII is going to be on the path where Nanaki has to run around the outside and activate levers (Cloud & Barret), and the other team is going to be on the other path (Tifa & Aerith). This means that rather than getting pushed into the character & team-swapping section without any warning or preparation, the game was actually designed to teach you about splitting into two different functional teams before you fall into The Drum.
Then, this was going to continue forward into Destiny's Crossroads with your fights against the Whisper Bosses, where you have two separate teams fighting against Harbinger, and the other against Rubrum, Viridi, & Croceo. Again, that requires Red XIII to be a playable character though, which they learned that they wouldn't be able to complete in time. He's clearly built up at least as much as the pre-Royale Chocobros were in XV, but there's still a lot of work that it takes to make him a fully-developed character who can stand alongside the others. It's also pretty clear that (M.O.T.O.R. fight notwithstanding) this is the main thing that everything else is dependent on for the next sections of the game.
Playable Nanaki makes sense that he'd have been absorbing a massive effort, because you can't just put out a partially-finished character. There's a ton of work that needs to be done to make him work. This explains why a bunch of testing on the end sections are odd and half-built, because they're not designed to work the way that they are. Even the lack of generic fights in Chapter 18 is likely because they're all tied to having the two dedicated teams to fight them. This is also why there are so many strange and opaque changes between teams in Chapter 17 & 18. Red XIII being playable is one of the key things that is gonna have to be completed before LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE in the game can follow.
What happened on the development side is that they knew Red XIII wasn't gonna be good enough to release, so someone in charge made the call not to include him with release. This means that everyone had to go back through everything and rework the final two chapters of the game to still function without all of the triggers and interactions. All of the boss balance wasn't being tested against the team splits that they were meant to be. Everything was only being tested against minimal interactions. This means EXTRA work on the broken chapters, not less, because it's outside of the realm of everything that you've tested, and that means that it's even more likely for bugs or broken interactions to arise. This is because the setup for important events in those chapters actually requires the ability to knowingly split up the party at the start of Chapter 17, and events later on will rely on player-specific character choice data that occurs there, and it would all have been tested using Red XIII as a key party member to do a bunch of the interactions. This is the core of literally everything broken, incomplete, and weird we see in the current final two chapters of the game.
I'd expect that while we could see bug fixes for the game in general (likely to tackle the texture weirdness), I would be willing to bet that all of the efforts of the entire development team right now are full-time buried in making Nanaki playable, and re-adding all of the the necessary updates to both Chapter 17 & 18 that require him as a part of the workflow. However those will only come as a part of a major update DLC that gets marketed as including Red XIII as a playable character front and center. This will give them a way to get everyone excited and try out the end of the game again, and also provide all of the massive improvements to the parts of the game that everyone isn't enjoying right now without directly saying, "Hey you guys, we finally fixed the end of the game."
Much like the FFXV Chocobro DLC, they know how to do all of this work at once, and release it as a major update. I don't know whether or not this will also include new post-game content, or if it will solely the main game, and post-game updates will be added as another update, but this is the thing that we should be keeping eyes out for, and the timeline that we should be thinking about before they show up.
X
I think Nomura said in some recent interview there are no big dlc plans because they're already in prep work for Part 2, but I would love if FFVIIR received some ongoing updates (fixes for current problems, additional VR battles, customization options..)
- AKA
- X
Glad to provide information where I can based just on QA-minded observation.
With respect, if you actually have seen that in an interview somewhere, please do me a favor and take the time to confirm if really did read it somewhere first & if you did, also link where that was stated by Kitase.
Doing this kind of really heavy in-depth analysis of development processes based solely on opaque information from the outside is a monumentally exhausting amount of work mentally. I'm trying to use and compile as much concrete contextual information as I can in this thread, and having to suddenly adjust several hours worth of analysis to accurately respond to something you think you remember seeing somewhere is... extremely frustrating to say the very least.
I hadn't ever seen that in any interviews, and when I looked through all of the Interviews that I'd read or seen that were linked in the Remake Interview thread, like the one talking about Part 2 development, the changes made for the new game, and also the most recent interview talking about the game's development – none of them mentioned anything about not releasing DLC or updates for Remake.
Essentially, please just do me a solid and fact check your own memory before you post something, rather than making me do it for you in order to see whether or not I was missing something exceptionally important about the game's current development.
While there's every possibility that that size of an update could be released at the same time as the PS5 Compatibility update, I highly doubt it.
First, in everything that I've been able to poke at around Remake and PS5 compatibility, the game is pretty much already stuffed with PS5-ready content that's baked in to the core of the game all over. I don't expect the PS5 update to be a an update that's talked about a lot outside of JUST making it have massively improved visuals and performance on the PS5 to help it show off how smooth and impressive the game is on Next Gen.
Second, from a Marketing standpoint – you absolutely do not want to run the risk of confusing your core audience that you need to have a PS5 to be able to play as Nanaki and get all of the game's Chapter updates. That's an absolute disaster from a PR standpoint, and you'd spend more time clarifying things than you would positively promoting them. Given that you're already dealing with the last two chapters in the game being in a result of extremely strained development that have gotten very polarizing reception, this is 100% something that you absolutely don't want to do. Even if they come out at the same time, you want to make sure that you talk about them EXTREMELY differently.
X
Wol
None Shall Remember Those Who Do Not Fight
- AKA
- Rosarian Shield
Better not take into consideration for now, if I find the interview I'll post it here.Glad to provide information where I can based just on QA-minded observation.
With respect, if you actually have seen that in an interview somewhere, please do me a favor and take the time to confirm if really did read it somewhere first & if you did, also link where that was stated by Kitase.
Doing this kind of really heavy in-depth analysis of development processes based solely on opaque information from the outside is a monumentally exhausting amount of work mentally. I'm trying to use and compile as much concrete contextual information as I can in this thread, and having to suddenly adjust several hours worth of analysis to accurately respond to something you think you remember seeing somewhere is... extremely frustrating to say the very least.
I hadn't ever seen that in any interviews, and when I looked through all of the Interviews that I'd read or seen that were linked in the Remake Interview thread, like the one talking about Part 2 development, the changes made for the new game, and also the most recent interview talking about the game's development – none of them mentioned anything about not releasing DLC or updates for Remake.
Essentially, please just do me a solid and fact check your own memory before you post something, rather than making me do it for you in order to see whether or not I was missing something exceptionally important about the game's current development.
While there's every possibility that that size of an update could be released at the same time as the PS5 Compatibility update, I highly doubt it.
First, in everything that I've been able to poke at around Remake and PS5 compatibility, the game is pretty much already stuffed with PS5-ready content that's baked in to the core of the game all over. I don't expect the PS5 update to be a an update that's talked about a lot outside of JUST making it have massively improved visuals and performance on the PS5 to help it show off how smooth and impressive the game is on Next Gen.
Second, from a Marketing standpoint – you absolutely do not want to run the risk of confusing your core audience that you need to have a PS5 to be able to play as Nanaki and get all of the game's Chapter updates. That's an absolute disaster from a PR standpoint, and you'd spend more time clarifying things than you would positively promoting them. Given that you're already dealing with the last two chapters in the game being in a result of extremely strained development that have gotten very polarizing reception, this is 100% something that you absolutely don't want to do. Even if they come out at the same time, you want to make sure that you talk about them EXTREMELY differently.
X
If I remember right it only mentioned big dlcs (like KHIII Remind) but I might be wrong on that one.
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Theozilla
Kaiju Member
I couldn't find any interviews about DLC for the first Remake installment (that wasn't about the summon/item bonuses), but I did find an interesting article back in February about how SE won't be doing PS5 exclusives until "further down the road", though that phrasing is extremely vague and open to interpretation. https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2020/02/26/square-enix-next-gen-exclusives/
- AKA
- X
I think that this actually matches up pretty well with the development stuff we can see in Remake, where it's all apparently designed for PS4 and also to be directly compatible with the PS4-on-PS5 hardware optimizations, and also leverage all of the new technology and updates from the PS5 overall. If that's anything to go off of, I think that we'll likely have them developing all the parts of Remake so that they're playable on either console.
That being said, I'd expect as the open world and other stuff start to get more and more detailed, that the PS5 version will very quickly be the definitive version of the game, with the PS4-compatible versions of the game needing to use a number loading gates and other memory-management techniques like Remake does that might not be present at all on the PS5 version of the game, if that continues to be the case.
I don't think that we'll be able to tell much about it for real until we can actually test out Remake on PS5 directly to see how it plays, and if there are any noticeable differences. I'm wondering if there will be any PS5-specific updates for Remake to make it functionally into a "PS5 game" in a version that's not backwards compatible with PS4. It seems like it'd be pretty easy to have an update that actually just removes a number of minor obstacles that are in place as smaller loading gates and just unnecessarily slow you down, while only keeping the ones that are connected to changing flags in the game, or the long-corridor ones that would actually require remodeling the ground in place. Those are the sorts of things that I'd expect if we start to see differences between the game versions if they keep up with the simultaneous development of Remake sequels as a PS4 & PS5 game.
X
That being said, I'd expect as the open world and other stuff start to get more and more detailed, that the PS5 version will very quickly be the definitive version of the game, with the PS4-compatible versions of the game needing to use a number loading gates and other memory-management techniques like Remake does that might not be present at all on the PS5 version of the game, if that continues to be the case.
I don't think that we'll be able to tell much about it for real until we can actually test out Remake on PS5 directly to see how it plays, and if there are any noticeable differences. I'm wondering if there will be any PS5-specific updates for Remake to make it functionally into a "PS5 game" in a version that's not backwards compatible with PS4. It seems like it'd be pretty easy to have an update that actually just removes a number of minor obstacles that are in place as smaller loading gates and just unnecessarily slow you down, while only keeping the ones that are connected to changing flags in the game, or the long-corridor ones that would actually require remodeling the ground in place. Those are the sorts of things that I'd expect if we start to see differences between the game versions if they keep up with the simultaneous development of Remake sequels as a PS4 & PS5 game.
X
Without having read your review last night, I had similar thoughts on the meta-narrative that I expressed in the Ch 18 thread:
Something else that just came to mind is, maybe the reason why Part 1 was puzzlingly called only "Remake" is because the subsequent parts are not a remake, but an AU. The dialog before you step into Sephiroth's territory strongly suggests that there are a lot of unknowns about what lies ahead. Perhaps there is a price to pay for Biggs/Wedge surviving. I am confused as to whether both survived, though. I hope not. Reviving both of them, and possibly Jessie at this rate, and immediately reviving Barret after killing him in Part 1 severely degrades what was originally a high stakes scenario. They need to be careful to not undermine the integrity of the narrative itself in this meta-narrative undertaking.
An ACC line from none other than Rufus seems to hint at Sephiroth's temporal persistence, and even an early indication of the arbiters of fate:
I do agree that making key changes could be very exciting. For example, keeping Wedge alive was a very exciting twist for me - I was expecting to find a dead guy after all that Deepground crawling. I like surprises. However, they are playing a very dangerous game here. Instead of remaking and fleshing out what is regarded as one of the best games of all time, it seems that they are trying to top it. The closing lines seem to indicate an awareness of this. They know that they are scaring the shit out of the longtime fans. But I really hope they live up to their own expectations, because their seeming failure to execute the ending to Part 1 is a bad sign. I hope they understand the magnitude of what they are taking on, and I hope that they manage to knock it out of the park.
I think they need to have a discussion with Yoko Taro. He was able to execute an elegant meta-narrative, push the medium itself to its limits, and create a game that in the minds of many people, topped even FFVII (Nier Automata).
Nope! Not even as a 12 year old did I want to revive Aerith.
What do you mean?
Something else that just came to mind is, maybe the reason why Part 1 was puzzlingly called only "Remake" is because the subsequent parts are not a remake, but an AU. The dialog before you step into Sephiroth's territory strongly suggests that there are a lot of unknowns about what lies ahead. Perhaps there is a price to pay for Biggs/Wedge surviving. I am confused as to whether both survived, though. I hope not. Reviving both of them, and possibly Jessie at this rate, and immediately reviving Barret after killing him in Part 1 severely degrades what was originally a high stakes scenario. They need to be careful to not undermine the integrity of the narrative itself in this meta-narrative undertaking.
An ACC line from none other than Rufus seems to hint at Sephiroth's temporal persistence, and even an early indication of the arbiters of fate:
I do agree that making key changes could be very exciting. For example, keeping Wedge alive was a very exciting twist for me - I was expecting to find a dead guy after all that Deepground crawling. I like surprises. However, they are playing a very dangerous game here. Instead of remaking and fleshing out what is regarded as one of the best games of all time, it seems that they are trying to top it. The closing lines seem to indicate an awareness of this. They know that they are scaring the shit out of the longtime fans. But I really hope they live up to their own expectations, because their seeming failure to execute the ending to Part 1 is a bad sign. I hope they understand the magnitude of what they are taking on, and I hope that they manage to knock it out of the park.
I think they need to have a discussion with Yoko Taro. He was able to execute an elegant meta-narrative, push the medium itself to its limits, and create a game that in the minds of many people, topped even FFVII (Nier Automata).
Nope! Not even as a 12 year old did I want to revive Aerith.
What do you mean?
Theozilla
Kaiju Member
I don’t think we’re going into in-universe AU stuff. It’s an AU in the same way various films adapt Shakespeare plays, or how the Magnificent Seven is a CowBoy!AU of Seven Samurai (or how The Samurai 7 anime is a cyberpunk adaptation of the movie). I think the future Remake parts are going to change a lot of the meat of the OG story but I expect the major plot points (i.e. the skeleton) of the OG story to remain intact.
Knights of the Round
Pro Adventurer
Re: ch 17..
Beat Motor on normal on my 3rd try. I’ve had much worse.
Don’t see what all the complaining was about, really. Played perfect for me. One of the best parts in the game.
Rufus, on the other hand... what a pain in the $&@ he was.
Don’t see what all the complaining was about, really. Played perfect for me. One of the best parts in the game.
Rufus, on the other hand... what a pain in the $&@ he was.
- AKA
- X
It's also because the only regular Game Overs I got in my playthrough were:
X
Abzu just getting a bit of an unlucky timing to not get everyone healed, solo-ing Shiva, and post-game VR Bahamut the first time I got hit by Megaflare.
While I got a TON of game overs fighting M.O.T.O.R., it's also because that's where I started QA poking at the game, because both the Rufus and The Arsenal fights were so deeply inconsistent with the other boss battles throughout the rest of the game. I didn't die during either of them, but I definitely had a really un-fun experience beating them. M.O.T.O.R. is where my spirit broke on my initial playthrough and I stopped treating the game like an immersive story experience, and started poking at it like it was a flawed piece of software that I needed to understand and exploit — ultimately, that's also why I still love the game despite it being incredibly flawed in it's current state.
The fights at the end of the game weren't fun, they were incredibly sharp and rigid. The minigame boss was badly implemented, the Whisper bosses are gimmicky and insanely easy, and Sephiroth is just a damage slog rather than a set of interesting individual boss phases. NONE of Chapters 17 & 18 feel consistent with the rest of the game's level of polish. While I definitely fault it for that, I also forgive it based on all of the aforementioned context for why it seems to be that way, and why I think that it won't be that way forever.
I also personally happen to particularly dislike driving minigames (see: Batman Arkham City), and especially when M.O.T.O.R. doesn't use the existing skillsets from the game, putting something that is giving SO MANY players even a single game over during that portion feels super bad. I don't know what your overall game over rate against bosses was, but three game overs still feels like a REALLY bad time. Even if you've had worse, it doesn't make it a good experience. By comparison: Did you get any game overs when fighting Roche during Chapter 4's motorcycle minigame?
I definitely didn't game over again Roche in Chapter 4, which is why I didn't initially worry about M.O.T.O.R., even though I also didn't do well enough to get the Jessie-related trophy on my first attempt, but that's also in the game to get you to play that section over again. There IS no trophy for being better at beating M.O.T.O.R. which should be telling about the game's level of completion. Most chapters have replay-focused trophies, but the later two don't. That's another thing that I expect to see come along with Red XIII as a playable character, even if most of them are seemingly linked to his character in those chapters — they're gonna be something that the game should have had in place initially.
While I got a TON of game overs fighting M.O.T.O.R., it's also because that's where I started QA poking at the game, because both the Rufus and The Arsenal fights were so deeply inconsistent with the other boss battles throughout the rest of the game. I didn't die during either of them, but I definitely had a really un-fun experience beating them. M.O.T.O.R. is where my spirit broke on my initial playthrough and I stopped treating the game like an immersive story experience, and started poking at it like it was a flawed piece of software that I needed to understand and exploit — ultimately, that's also why I still love the game despite it being incredibly flawed in it's current state.
The fights at the end of the game weren't fun, they were incredibly sharp and rigid. The minigame boss was badly implemented, the Whisper bosses are gimmicky and insanely easy, and Sephiroth is just a damage slog rather than a set of interesting individual boss phases. NONE of Chapters 17 & 18 feel consistent with the rest of the game's level of polish. While I definitely fault it for that, I also forgive it based on all of the aforementioned context for why it seems to be that way, and why I think that it won't be that way forever.
I also personally happen to particularly dislike driving minigames (see: Batman Arkham City), and especially when M.O.T.O.R. doesn't use the existing skillsets from the game, putting something that is giving SO MANY players even a single game over during that portion feels super bad. I don't know what your overall game over rate against bosses was, but three game overs still feels like a REALLY bad time. Even if you've had worse, it doesn't make it a good experience. By comparison: Did you get any game overs when fighting Roche during Chapter 4's motorcycle minigame?
I definitely didn't game over again Roche in Chapter 4, which is why I didn't initially worry about M.O.T.O.R., even though I also didn't do well enough to get the Jessie-related trophy on my first attempt, but that's also in the game to get you to play that section over again. There IS no trophy for being better at beating M.O.T.O.R. which should be telling about the game's level of completion. Most chapters have replay-focused trophies, but the later two don't. That's another thing that I expect to see come along with Red XIII as a playable character, even if most of them are seemingly linked to his character in those chapters — they're gonna be something that the game should have had in place initially.
X
youffie
Pro Adventurer
I got a lot of game overs from M.O.T.O.R. too, one of my sisters almost rage quit to go watch the rest of the game on youtube and the other one wrote to us yesterday asking us if we had also found the final motor chase hard. The fact that it's also right at the end almost kills the momentum. I've seen similar complaints elsewhere and here, so I definitely think there's something wrong with it.
I also found The Arsenal unfun and way too long, I felt like I couldn't find an effective way to properly damage it no matter what I did, but I assumed I was just doing something wrong. I still kinda think that
And again X, thank you for your posts, they definitely help to bring perspective to things.
I also found The Arsenal unfun and way too long, I felt like I couldn't find an effective way to properly damage it no matter what I did, but I assumed I was just doing something wrong. I still kinda think that
And again X, thank you for your posts, they definitely help to bring perspective to things.
- AKA
- Ody
Glad I'm not the only one who ate shit during the motorball fight. It's such a ridiculous difficulty spike! It's like the bike just can't accelerate fast enough to get the front wheels some of the time, and your special moves take forever to recharge. I went back and got the Jessie trophy in chapter 4, and that only took me two tries. Roche really isn't very hard. You really just aren't prepared for motorball when you get to him!
- AKA
- X
Another couple things that I neglected to mention initially about how you can tell that the areas are in a different QA state than the rest of the game:
X
First starting with H0512 (the boss fight around where things get buggy), there's a Bench and Vending Machine in the area just before the fight. This usually lets you know when there's about to be a boss battle. Normally, they're in pretty consistent and spaced out places along the playthrough. However, immediately after you beat H0512, there's another bench just next to the boss arena by Hojo's elevator. While it might be there to help the player navigate the flow forward without back-tracking, this is something where the most likely answer is that these things get placed all over so that QA can just dive through areas more easily, and then you slowly pull them back later on.
The other place you run into this is at outside the President's office around the Helipad, where they're literally on both sides of the President's office in an open area. I ended up saving and re-equipping at them really awkwardly like before the "non-boss-fight" against Sephiroth-who-is-really-clone-#2, and then again before Rufus while in the same spot, because I was headed towards the entire team on the Helipad, but then the Rufus Boss fight is a one-on-one, so I had to load and re-re-equip Cloud for a solo battle.
The opposite problem exists in The Drum, where I was constantly getting turned around and couldn't find my way back to where the last healing bench was. That happens as a result of testing just the individual sections, and not testing full run throughs of the area. Then there's the fact that none of the Whisper fights have any break or checkpoint, and the whole of that section is just two boss fights with some adjusted walking areas between them. It's about as bare bones as it could possibly be.
The other place you run into this is at outside the President's office around the Helipad, where they're literally on both sides of the President's office in an open area. I ended up saving and re-equipping at them really awkwardly like before the "non-boss-fight" against Sephiroth-who-is-really-clone-#2, and then again before Rufus while in the same spot, because I was headed towards the entire team on the Helipad, but then the Rufus Boss fight is a one-on-one, so I had to load and re-re-equip Cloud for a solo battle.
The opposite problem exists in The Drum, where I was constantly getting turned around and couldn't find my way back to where the last healing bench was. That happens as a result of testing just the individual sections, and not testing full run throughs of the area. Then there's the fact that none of the Whisper fights have any break or checkpoint, and the whole of that section is just two boss fights with some adjusted walking areas between them. It's about as bare bones as it could possibly be.
Even simple bosses like the Crab Warden have character dialogue and interactions during the Bosses' phase transitions. Those little moments of animation give a breather, so that you can focus, but also keep the fight interesting. Surprisingly, in addition to H0512 not having any of the characters' passive dialogue triggered, despite the fact that the party is still the set team of Cloud, Tifa, & Barret – none of them have dialogue during those scenes. This is especially a big deal because of the importance of the implication of things like the H0512-OPT's eyes turning all SOLDIER-like is something that the characters should IMMEDIATELY be talking about amongst each other, because it's something that's important to the story and will immediately draw attention to the link between Cloud, SOLDIER, Jenova, & Hojo's Experiments for new players.
In Jenova Dreamweaver, we get Aerith's pre-boss, "This is the source of everything" warning, but then as soon as the fight starts, Tifa just has this weird, "What's happening!?" followed by Red XIII telling her, "It's an illusion. Stay calm." and then all of the boss phase transitions for Jenova – ostensibly the big crazy boss fight for the game... don't have any dialogue. When you beat the fight, you see it transform into Tifa's neighbor Marco #49, and he falls down dead next to Jenova's body, while "Sephiroth" (soon to be revealed as Sephiroth Clone #2 from the Sector 5 Slums in disguise) carries her body outside. These are the sort of connections and moments that should get MASSIVE focus when they occur, but they don't at all. Tifa ignores it entirely to deal with Barret, who's about to come back from the dead as Cloud runs off.
These things continue through all of the boss battles, with the closest things to dialogue being during the Arsenal fight, and getting even worse when fighting against the Whispers – but again – this isn't what completed boss battles have looked like in the rest of the game. The closest thing is the transitions in Sephiroth's fight, but those all change based on which characters join you for the final battle, which is determined by some sort of friendship-type mechanic running in the background, similar to the middle-of-the-night scene with Aerith/Tifa/Barret in Chapter 14.
In Jenova Dreamweaver, we get Aerith's pre-boss, "This is the source of everything" warning, but then as soon as the fight starts, Tifa just has this weird, "What's happening!?" followed by Red XIII telling her, "It's an illusion. Stay calm." and then all of the boss phase transitions for Jenova – ostensibly the big crazy boss fight for the game... don't have any dialogue. When you beat the fight, you see it transform into Tifa's neighbor Marco #49, and he falls down dead next to Jenova's body, while "Sephiroth" (soon to be revealed as Sephiroth Clone #2 from the Sector 5 Slums in disguise) carries her body outside. These are the sort of connections and moments that should get MASSIVE focus when they occur, but they don't at all. Tifa ignores it entirely to deal with Barret, who's about to come back from the dead as Cloud runs off.
These things continue through all of the boss battles, with the closest things to dialogue being during the Arsenal fight, and getting even worse when fighting against the Whispers – but again – this isn't what completed boss battles have looked like in the rest of the game. The closest thing is the transitions in Sephiroth's fight, but those all change based on which characters join you for the final battle, which is determined by some sort of friendship-type mechanic running in the background, similar to the middle-of-the-night scene with Aerith/Tifa/Barret in Chapter 14.
X
Knights of the Round
Pro Adventurer
Sure it does. In your opinion it doesn't make it a good experience. Other opinions differ, like mine. I had a blast with it as well as the Rufus and Hundred Gunner fights. Rufus was a major PITA, but I think that's what they were going for. As the lead character you go through 10 ton mechs and 100 ft tall biological weapons just to get taken down by some p&@^ in a long white coat and shotgun near the end. It's perfect. Makes you feel helpless and demoralized and frustrated. That's how it was meant to be.
Have you never played Dark Souls or some of the other much more unforgiving games that are out there? Three Game Overs on a boss fight is nothing compared to those or some older-gen games that I've been through. Games today, including FF7 Remake, are an absolute CAKEWALK compared to much of videogame history. I could go all the way back to Karnov on NES or Mega Man 2 to show you some games that'll toss double or triple the amount of 'Game Over's for boss fights at you in a snap. How about Contra or LifeForce? Without cheating the system it's impossible to make it through them without memorizing the attack pattern of every single enemy in the game.
A good gauge of how fair a boss fight is can be progression. Am I getting closer to beating it than the last time. Each time I played MOTOR this was the case. I had to figure out the right pattern and do a better job at avoiding the shock traps. Get the wheels out quickly using the Spinning Slash on one side, then zip around to the other side and take out the rest with normal attacks while your gauge re-charges. This will allow you to stagger him much quicker, giving him less time to use his bombs and guns which just continue to drain your health and are more difficult to dodge.
To start with I was saving the strong attack (Spinning Slash) for when he was staggered. A simple adjustment made the fight a lot easier. In addition, you have to use long-range attacks when he's out ahead of you which will take out his wheels quicker.
Each time playing him I got closer to beating him. By the 4th play he was easy, even.
As a modern-day comparison - I had just as many Game Overs on Breath of the Wild bosses before figuring out their pattern or because my damn sword or bow would break for the 10th time in a critical moment of battle. Talk about some sh*&(& mechanics. Yet, people love that game. Opinions differ.
Have you never played Dark Souls or some of the other much more unforgiving games that are out there? Three Game Overs on a boss fight is nothing compared to those or some older-gen games that I've been through. Games today, including FF7 Remake, are an absolute CAKEWALK compared to much of videogame history. I could go all the way back to Karnov on NES or Mega Man 2 to show you some games that'll toss double or triple the amount of 'Game Over's for boss fights at you in a snap. How about Contra or LifeForce? Without cheating the system it's impossible to make it through them without memorizing the attack pattern of every single enemy in the game.
A good gauge of how fair a boss fight is can be progression. Am I getting closer to beating it than the last time. Each time I played MOTOR this was the case. I had to figure out the right pattern and do a better job at avoiding the shock traps. Get the wheels out quickly using the Spinning Slash on one side, then zip around to the other side and take out the rest with normal attacks while your gauge re-charges. This will allow you to stagger him much quicker, giving him less time to use his bombs and guns which just continue to drain your health and are more difficult to dodge.
To start with I was saving the strong attack (Spinning Slash) for when he was staggered. A simple adjustment made the fight a lot easier. In addition, you have to use long-range attacks when he's out ahead of you which will take out his wheels quicker.
Each time playing him I got closer to beating him. By the 4th play he was easy, even.
As a modern-day comparison - I had just as many Game Overs on Breath of the Wild bosses before figuring out their pattern or because my damn sword or bow would break for the 10th time in a critical moment of battle. Talk about some sh*&(& mechanics. Yet, people love that game. Opinions differ.
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- AKA
- X
I already very specifically addressed the Souls games and other games where experiencing a death or Game Over is an intended part of the narrative learning curve, and how the structure of this type of Pseudo-ARPG is generally different. The Souls games and other titles like it have VERY sharp bosses, where learning the attacks, staggers, timing, weaknesses and patters of the bosses are a matter of trial and error, and learning through repetition and exposure. Bosses in true ARPGs rely on extremely controlled movement, timing, and precision. Remake is still closer to a traditional JRPG, because your equipment loadout and make your tactics vary significantly, and most all of the boss fights in Remake can't be done without taking any damage if you're on your initial playthrough – especially because you have multiple party members who are spending a portion of the time acting on their own under AI command. (There is a small exception in Remake that I'll cover at the end of all this).
The reason that this is totally different than something like Souls or even Castlevania. Koji Igarashi used a hard rule in all of his games starting with Castlevania, where the boss designer had to be able to beat their boss using only a dagger & without taking any damage before it would be added to the game. This is because it ensures that no matter what kind of equipment you're using, the tactics required to win are all at your disposal no matter how injured you are when you make it to the boss room. It ensures that there aren't any types of situations where the player will get trapped by something that's poorly designed. The Souls games utilize the same sort of testing methodology, where the ability to defeat an enemy all comes down to reading attacks, knowing the patterns, and responding correctly.
This is wholly different from boss fights in Final Fantasy VII Remake purely because of the mechanics involved. It's not a full-blown ARPG at all. It's very much a JRPG with an Action-based combat system. This means that you'll have a lot of attacks that you can avoid. There are patterns to learn. The bosses will have phases where they change their attacks and weaknesses and you have to respond accordingly. The idea is that the story is a single uninterrupted narrative flow – so experiencing a Game Over and having to restart can actually reflect some level of failure on the game developers' end when it comes to balancing. It's a numbers game, so not everyone will get through everything perfectly, but the primarly goal is for a boss fight is to push the players as close to failure as possible while achieving victory while helping the player to:
There are a massive number of variables to contend with, which means that those boss fights can't ever be quite as sharp as a true ARPG, because you have less information about how the player is approaching the game, and you don't have the ability to teach them about the boss retroactively without failing and interrupting the narrative. Additionally, the purpose of the Weapon Upgrades and Materia System is specifically to allow players to approach things with a near-infinite set of approaches to all of those combat encounters. The developers are intentionally giving the player all of these ways to customize their approach to the game, and the baseline of the game isn't anywhere near as clean as a pure ARPG is – so there isn't a deeper core mechanic that makes hard punishing players who utilize a non-optimized approach with the main boss fights. You can make it a bit harder, but in general, you don't want to have them run into a boss that's suddenly pushing AGAINST the approach that they've been learning for 40+ hours already.
The exceptions here are the VR Battles & Hard Mode – since VR Battles allow for failure to occur within the context of the initial narrative, and Hard Mode challenges know that the player has already completed the narrative, so restarting sections aren't a factor in interrupting the emotional stakes and immersion.
This is why I outlined that the boss fights in all the way up to the point where the QA in the game suddenly shifts have a very different feel to them. When bosses like the Guard Scorpion put up shields, your damage gets massively reduced, so that you work towards finding a weakness, and then you can go back to the previous approach. It's why he gets more dangerous as he gets damaged to encourage aggression and player action to teach about charging ATB. Those moments are small bottlenecks of tension in the fights that help focus the players on specific things, and make it so that not every boss is just you pouring damage at it mindlessly between cutscenes, but so that they also pull the player through an emotionally exciting experience. The design increases rewards for following tactics, and decreases rewards for taking other approaches – but it doesn't stop you from going about it the long and painful way if you really REALLY want to. The good boss battles always build up on the existing skillset you have and helps you improve upon it and be better and more prepared for the next fight.
The challenge in a game like Remake is inherently the same as any ARPG, as it's about honing your skills with the base mechanics, and specializing with your chosen customizations to enhance that. To make sure that those things feel balanced to hit the right tone and feel for a wide range of players takes a lot of testing, and most of the game is utterly brilliant and follows that all perfectly. The problem with the boss fights after the point I mentioned is that do any number of things that is counter to how everything works at a fundamental level: they very often either remove or directly counter to the core combat mechanic lessons that the game has taught and tested you with over the previous 40+ hours, while also continually reducing your ability to prepare for specific fights the way even remotely in the that the game is heavily focused around.
Let me break it down as thoroughly as I think that I can:
Lastly, if it would help & if anybody wants and/or is curious about this sort of thing: I'd be happy to dissect and critique literally any other boss fight in the game if there's one that you felt wasn't well designed – especially if you can tell me what kinds of things you struggled with on it. I'll do my best to tear it down in the same level of core detail, so that I can help show what I mean about the type of gameplay polish that exists elsewhere in the game – but doesn't exist in the things I just covered as it might help to show what's different between personal less-than-ideal experiences with a boss fight vs. poorly designed / under-tested boss fights.
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The reason that this is totally different than something like Souls or even Castlevania. Koji Igarashi used a hard rule in all of his games starting with Castlevania, where the boss designer had to be able to beat their boss using only a dagger & without taking any damage before it would be added to the game. This is because it ensures that no matter what kind of equipment you're using, the tactics required to win are all at your disposal no matter how injured you are when you make it to the boss room. It ensures that there aren't any types of situations where the player will get trapped by something that's poorly designed. The Souls games utilize the same sort of testing methodology, where the ability to defeat an enemy all comes down to reading attacks, knowing the patterns, and responding correctly.
This is wholly different from boss fights in Final Fantasy VII Remake purely because of the mechanics involved. It's not a full-blown ARPG at all. It's very much a JRPG with an Action-based combat system. This means that you'll have a lot of attacks that you can avoid. There are patterns to learn. The bosses will have phases where they change their attacks and weaknesses and you have to respond accordingly. The idea is that the story is a single uninterrupted narrative flow – so experiencing a Game Over and having to restart can actually reflect some level of failure on the game developers' end when it comes to balancing. It's a numbers game, so not everyone will get through everything perfectly, but the primarly goal is for a boss fight is to push the players as close to failure as possible while achieving victory while helping the player to:
- Continually build up and improve their mastery of the core mechanics.
- Become more capable & flexible due to the expanding base skills that they have access to.
- Specialize and improve their personal strategies based on the game's wide customization options.
There are a massive number of variables to contend with, which means that those boss fights can't ever be quite as sharp as a true ARPG, because you have less information about how the player is approaching the game, and you don't have the ability to teach them about the boss retroactively without failing and interrupting the narrative. Additionally, the purpose of the Weapon Upgrades and Materia System is specifically to allow players to approach things with a near-infinite set of approaches to all of those combat encounters. The developers are intentionally giving the player all of these ways to customize their approach to the game, and the baseline of the game isn't anywhere near as clean as a pure ARPG is – so there isn't a deeper core mechanic that makes hard punishing players who utilize a non-optimized approach with the main boss fights. You can make it a bit harder, but in general, you don't want to have them run into a boss that's suddenly pushing AGAINST the approach that they've been learning for 40+ hours already.
The exceptions here are the VR Battles & Hard Mode – since VR Battles allow for failure to occur within the context of the initial narrative, and Hard Mode challenges know that the player has already completed the narrative, so restarting sections aren't a factor in interrupting the emotional stakes and immersion.
This is why I outlined that the boss fights in all the way up to the point where the QA in the game suddenly shifts have a very different feel to them. When bosses like the Guard Scorpion put up shields, your damage gets massively reduced, so that you work towards finding a weakness, and then you can go back to the previous approach. It's why he gets more dangerous as he gets damaged to encourage aggression and player action to teach about charging ATB. Those moments are small bottlenecks of tension in the fights that help focus the players on specific things, and make it so that not every boss is just you pouring damage at it mindlessly between cutscenes, but so that they also pull the player through an emotionally exciting experience. The design increases rewards for following tactics, and decreases rewards for taking other approaches – but it doesn't stop you from going about it the long and painful way if you really REALLY want to. The good boss battles always build up on the existing skillset you have and helps you improve upon it and be better and more prepared for the next fight.
The challenge in a game like Remake is inherently the same as any ARPG, as it's about honing your skills with the base mechanics, and specializing with your chosen customizations to enhance that. To make sure that those things feel balanced to hit the right tone and feel for a wide range of players takes a lot of testing, and most of the game is utterly brilliant and follows that all perfectly. The problem with the boss fights after the point I mentioned is that do any number of things that is counter to how everything works at a fundamental level: they very often either remove or directly counter to the core combat mechanic lessons that the game has taught and tested you with over the previous 40+ hours, while also continually reducing your ability to prepare for specific fights the way even remotely in the that the game is heavily focused around.
Let me break it down as thoroughly as I think that I can:
– Attacking its Left Arm or the little H0512-OPT enemies doesn't really provide any real benefit compared to just slamming damage into its body. While the animations between phases are amazing, they don't really make you alter your tactics, other than just healing when you enter the final phase and the whole arena explodes at once without any way to avoid it. In addition to the dialogue being bugged in this fight, there aren't any phases where target prioritization is clearly established, or where it's beneficial.
You should be encouraged to switch up tactics throughout those phases. Initially, the H0512-OPT know a fire and an ice spell, so there's a good window to take them down while they're still that rewards not focusing too much on the main body itself. Then after the phase change, when they become H0512-OPTα, they switch over to physical attacks that move around the arena, and are more likely to interrupt/stagger you when charging attacks. Then in its final phase, since it uses its Left Arm to shower the H0512-OPTα and transform them into the H0512-OPTß that self destruct, you should be focusing on destroying its Left Arm. Instead, the phase transitions in this fight happened so quickly I barely knew what was going on before the boss died.
You should be encouraged to switch up tactics throughout those phases. Initially, the H0512-OPT know a fire and an ice spell, so there's a good window to take them down while they're still that rewards not focusing too much on the main body itself. Then after the phase change, when they become H0512-OPTα, they switch over to physical attacks that move around the arena, and are more likely to interrupt/stagger you when charging attacks. Then in its final phase, since it uses its Left Arm to shower the H0512-OPTα and transform them into the H0512-OPTß that self destruct, you should be focusing on destroying its Left Arm. Instead, the phase transitions in this fight happened so quickly I barely knew what was going on before the boss died.
I'm not gonna cover the whole awful slog that is The Drum in detail, since that's entire experience is a whole horrible whole mess that deserves its own post more centered around Red XIII as a Playable Character.
– You can literally just Triple Slash through tentacles mindlessly with Cloud and this boss melts, especially if you have the Materia that gives an ATB Boost to your party for repeating the same attack. The only challenge is because her body becomes immune to damage periodically. This is bad design, but it's a common state where you are testing things in QA to get the feel of what the optimized fight should feel like before you soften the fight up by balancing the damage reduction and total HP of the boss.
Damage Immunity like this is bad for the Remake's combat design, because sometimes a staggered character won't be able to use an attack before Jenova re-sprouts tentacles from the floor. Several times during this fight, I watched 2 bars of ATB vanish uselessly because Aerith's Judgement Ray takes so long to power up that by the time she fired it, Jenova was immune to damage again. Unlike barriers and other armor that bosses have used previously, damage immunity is something that's hugely un-fun because it goes against the combat principles that the game has established. This is because it completely wastes resources, rather than just massively reducing their effectiveness. The game's combat is about optimizing effectiveness for ideal paths, not nullifying it for non-ideal paths.
Additionally, you can already get ATB attacks interrupted and cancelled which wastes the ATB meter. This means that the player has been taught that there are consequences to watching their timing with attacks, and the timing is most specific to the character's proximity to an enemy that can interrupt them. However, because those moves can take time for the character to initiate and execute AND and they can't be animation cancelled or something like in a true ARPG, this means that sometimes you'll initiate an attack – but the enemy can suddenly shield and block literally all damage after you've initiated an attack, but before it goes off.
That's just bad design, and is exactly the sort of thing that doesn't occur with the other bosses in the game up to this point. Even the Hell House's God Mode shields still let tiny amounts of damage through – and it telegraphs the state changes it's in incredibly clearly.
Damage Immunity like this is bad for the Remake's combat design, because sometimes a staggered character won't be able to use an attack before Jenova re-sprouts tentacles from the floor. Several times during this fight, I watched 2 bars of ATB vanish uselessly because Aerith's Judgement Ray takes so long to power up that by the time she fired it, Jenova was immune to damage again. Unlike barriers and other armor that bosses have used previously, damage immunity is something that's hugely un-fun because it goes against the combat principles that the game has established. This is because it completely wastes resources, rather than just massively reducing their effectiveness. The game's combat is about optimizing effectiveness for ideal paths, not nullifying it for non-ideal paths.
Additionally, you can already get ATB attacks interrupted and cancelled which wastes the ATB meter. This means that the player has been taught that there are consequences to watching their timing with attacks, and the timing is most specific to the character's proximity to an enemy that can interrupt them. However, because those moves can take time for the character to initiate and execute AND and they can't be animation cancelled or something like in a true ARPG, this means that sometimes you'll initiate an attack – but the enemy can suddenly shield and block literally all damage after you've initiated an attack, but before it goes off.
That's just bad design, and is exactly the sort of thing that doesn't occur with the other bosses in the game up to this point. Even the Hell House's God Mode shields still let tiny amounts of damage through – and it telegraphs the state changes it's in incredibly clearly.
Fighting against Darkstar is pretty straightforward, because it makes it clear that he's protecting Rufus & healing him, etc. That's fine, and there are good windows for focusing on Darkstar and avoiding Rufus. This is the sort of thing that you want if you want to encourage players to take a certain path. However... When you Assess him, you suddenly don't get helpful tactics, but instead you get this really cryptic bullshit: "Standard physical and magic attacks have no effect on his stagger gauge. However, hitting him with a certain attack when his guard is down will instantly stagger him."
Ok, so Staggering isn't an option. A path that you can normally rely on for getting a brief window of increased damage on every enemy you've struggled with is completely unavailable in this fight, no matter which approach you normally take. Instead, you have to use trial and error to figure out what the hell they mean, while also adjusting all of your approach to combat to specifically suit this very rigid scenario.
This runs into the issue about damage immunity from before, but increases the problems even more. Because he moves around the field so quickly and erratically, your window for being in-range to initiate an ATB attack at all is very small. Approaching this fight in any normal way will not only not do damage, but you'll get hard punished and take damage as Rufus instantly counters you instead. Your Counterattack ATB move is ineffective against several of his attacks. If you are even slightly outside the optimal range, he can hit you can cancel your ATB attack. Instead, you have to learn which attacks to block, and which ones to try to counter with Punisher mode. However, what this means in PRACTICE is that you spend most of the time running around the helipad doing nothing, as your ATB meter charges at a snail's pace.
If you've taken too much damage – you have to burn that ATB bar on healing which just results in more waiting around and doing nothing. If you are slightly too far out when he Reloads your ATB attack won't hit, or if you can't initiate it quickly enough he'll interrupt it and damage you before you reach him. There are a myriad of ways that even the most BASIC combat rules of the game are totally thrown out the window in this fight, but on top of that, it doesn't even give you anything fun to do. Like The Arsenal, you're just waiting around most of them time getting shot at.
This fight is the antithesis of the moment that leads up to it. Cloud is gonna go up against Rufus and the other troopers alone, so that everyone else can take Aerith and escape. Cloud makes Barret leave even despite how much he wants to join in... And then the fight itself doesn't make Cloud feel like a badass AT ALL – instead you spend the whole fight feeling like you're suddenly getting dunked on by some random rich punk-ass kid with literally no special super powers or anything, while your entire team just... isn't there as backup. The reason it can do this is because the game isn't building up on things that it's taught you over the last 40+ hours up to this point – which is what late-game boss fight are supposed to do. Instead, this fight is suddenly ripping away several of the core mechanics, and replacing it with something that it won't even outright tell you directly when you take the time to fill up a precious Materia slot with Assess. There are plenty of ways to make it difficult without removing things that players have learned. Again, this is what happens when you can't test a wide range of tactics, and can only finish the work to specialize a boss against the primary combat approach, and not adapt it to make it feel difficult for a wide range of players.
You wanna know how I beat the boss fight? I just intentionally kept attacking and getting countered, and just healing the damage – because it charged my ATB and Limit faster and it was more fun than just running around and whiffing attacks – and as it turns out, you can one-hit-finish him off with your Limit Break, so again. The fight felt annoying because it attempted to create challenge through arbitrary restriction and sharp counters. The fact that Tifa suddenly appears out of nowhere and saves your useless ass before telling you, "You've gotta be better than this if you're gonna play the hero" feels extra shitty, because as a player, you definitely ARE way better than you perform in that fight. It's because thatfight isn't about versatility and mastery of the combat system, it's about suddenly being forced to take a very specific approach to victory because of really shitty design choices.
Again, I'm not saying that it's impossible to enjoy the fight. I'm talking about the core design principles of the type of gameplay that the game has been teaching you over the course of the last 16 chapters and 40+ hours of gameplay that you've been doing by the time you reach this stage, and then specifically how it's punishing you for not doing something well that you've never faced.
Ok, so Staggering isn't an option. A path that you can normally rely on for getting a brief window of increased damage on every enemy you've struggled with is completely unavailable in this fight, no matter which approach you normally take. Instead, you have to use trial and error to figure out what the hell they mean, while also adjusting all of your approach to combat to specifically suit this very rigid scenario.
This runs into the issue about damage immunity from before, but increases the problems even more. Because he moves around the field so quickly and erratically, your window for being in-range to initiate an ATB attack at all is very small. Approaching this fight in any normal way will not only not do damage, but you'll get hard punished and take damage as Rufus instantly counters you instead. Your Counterattack ATB move is ineffective against several of his attacks. If you are even slightly outside the optimal range, he can hit you can cancel your ATB attack. Instead, you have to learn which attacks to block, and which ones to try to counter with Punisher mode. However, what this means in PRACTICE is that you spend most of the time running around the helipad doing nothing, as your ATB meter charges at a snail's pace.
If you've taken too much damage – you have to burn that ATB bar on healing which just results in more waiting around and doing nothing. If you are slightly too far out when he Reloads your ATB attack won't hit, or if you can't initiate it quickly enough he'll interrupt it and damage you before you reach him. There are a myriad of ways that even the most BASIC combat rules of the game are totally thrown out the window in this fight, but on top of that, it doesn't even give you anything fun to do. Like The Arsenal, you're just waiting around most of them time getting shot at.
This fight is the antithesis of the moment that leads up to it. Cloud is gonna go up against Rufus and the other troopers alone, so that everyone else can take Aerith and escape. Cloud makes Barret leave even despite how much he wants to join in... And then the fight itself doesn't make Cloud feel like a badass AT ALL – instead you spend the whole fight feeling like you're suddenly getting dunked on by some random rich punk-ass kid with literally no special super powers or anything, while your entire team just... isn't there as backup. The reason it can do this is because the game isn't building up on things that it's taught you over the last 40+ hours up to this point – which is what late-game boss fight are supposed to do. Instead, this fight is suddenly ripping away several of the core mechanics, and replacing it with something that it won't even outright tell you directly when you take the time to fill up a precious Materia slot with Assess. There are plenty of ways to make it difficult without removing things that players have learned. Again, this is what happens when you can't test a wide range of tactics, and can only finish the work to specialize a boss against the primary combat approach, and not adapt it to make it feel difficult for a wide range of players.
You wanna know how I beat the boss fight? I just intentionally kept attacking and getting countered, and just healing the damage – because it charged my ATB and Limit faster and it was more fun than just running around and whiffing attacks – and as it turns out, you can one-hit-finish him off with your Limit Break, so again. The fight felt annoying because it attempted to create challenge through arbitrary restriction and sharp counters. The fact that Tifa suddenly appears out of nowhere and saves your useless ass before telling you, "You've gotta be better than this if you're gonna play the hero" feels extra shitty, because as a player, you definitely ARE way better than you perform in that fight. It's because thatfight isn't about versatility and mastery of the combat system, it's about suddenly being forced to take a very specific approach to victory because of really shitty design choices.
Again, I'm not saying that it's impossible to enjoy the fight. I'm talking about the core design principles of the type of gameplay that the game has been teaching you over the course of the last 16 chapters and 40+ hours of gameplay that you've been doing by the time you reach this stage, and then specifically how it's punishing you for not doing something well that you've never faced.
– For The Arsenal, he's got a squad of protectors, and the first phase is all about taking them down. There's the possibility that Barret is using a Close Range weapon, and he can't attack the Barrier Drones at all, and that means making sure that he's got decent Magic attacks or moves out of cover to use ATB attacks to take them down. This phase involves taking cover and picking targets to attack as they become vulnerable.
Aerith can use an ATB ability that she got from the Bladed Staff – but hasn't had nearly any opportunity to actually use: Lustrous Shield. This will generate a flower barrier that; blocks ranged attacks from the enemy, doesn't block line of sight for you or your allies' attacks, AND and you can even stack two of them with one slightly behind each other so that you can always keep one active at all times during this fight. This lets you just stand in the open with her and unleash a literal endless barrage of attacks in total safety, compared to the issues of needing to move out from behind the pillars to reestablish safe paths to the attack the boss.
However, Aerith doesn't do super well against small moving targets as an attacker. Her physical damage is miniscule even though it seeks out targets and charges up her ATB super quickly. Sorceress Storm is only a close range AoE which isn't ideal here, and Ray of Judgement only hits slower ground-level targets which is great for The Arsenal, but not for the little drones. However, Barret excels at dealing with those kinds of targets, so the natural approach is to use his attacks and abilities to take out the Drones, and use Aerith to protect and amplify his abilities. Red XIII is just running around and backing you up the whole time.
The two playable characters you're scripted to have in this fight are designed to do exactly these two things and taking this approach with these new abilities would be great... except that the passive character AI doesn't understand how to use Lustrous Shield for cover at all. This means that the second that you switch active control from Aerith over to Barret, she actually runs AWAY from the spot where she's in full protection from any of the boss's attacks – and takes a ton of damage while running for one of the scripted protection areas around the boss arena. The added issue here is that because the scripted protection areas are massive pillars that block line of sight for all attacks – you have to manually control Barret to move him out of cover in order to be able to use his ATB attacks. If you don't, he'll just unload Maximum Fury directly into the pillar in front of him and do literally zero damage. This ends up being almost equivalent to the boss just being immune to damage like I mentioned earlier.
After being exhausted from the Rufus fight, I just stuck with this safe tactic of just using Aerith, standing about 10 meters in front of The Arsenal, and setting up two Lustrous Shields. The boss literally can't damage you, and you can take all the time you need to take it down with literally zero risk. By the time one shield dies or expired, you can easily charge up another ATB to set up another second Lustrous Shield. You can put it in front of the first when one of the two breaks if there's a window of lag in the gunfire, or just slowly create them as you back up, and then push forward later when you have 2 ATB bars to spend. It's annoyingly slow, but again – zero risk.
The same issue is present as soon as its wheels and other weak points are exposed when the drones get destroyed. The only positive thing is that its starts destroying the points of existing cover around the arena, which means that it's easier to use Barret as soon as the cover he's using gets destroyed, forcibly giving him line of sight. Eventually you can build up your Limit, use Planet Protector, and just stand in the open and pour a ton of damage into the boss from Barret with no risk so long as it's active. In the final part, the boss sets the floor on fire and boxes you in to a tiny area, but again – these attacks are literally no threat to Aerith's Lustrous Shields, and with Barret FINALLY placed into direct line of sight of The Arsenal, this part goes by super quickly.
This whole thing was just struggling to make the characters do something ridiculously obvious by trying to use an optimal tactic for this fight that Aerith would just recently have been able to acquire, and hasn't had other opportunities to take advantage of. The fact that her character even has a whole ATB ability explicitly dedicated to this exact scenario but it doesn't work the way it should is insane. Literally the only reason that this approach to the fight isn't a good tactic is only because the AI for inactive characters doesn't recognize Lustrous Shield as a point of cover. This issue means that you're both dealing significantly LESS damage than you could since you can't just fire off Barret's ATB abilities as they're available, and Aerith's only offensive ATB attack is the 2 ATB Bar, Ray of Judgement. Additionally, choosing to not just forget that Barret exists means that you're also taking way MORE damage than you should because your characters are spending more time in spaces between cover than actually in cover.
This isn't something that is important for every boss fight, which is why it probably wouldn't come up in any broad testing with Aerith. This is only something that would arise when points of cover exist in boss arenas, and it's only an ability that she even gets access to after you rescue her from Shinra HQ. This fight is specifically a ranged boss fight that completely revolves around the use of cover in an arena – and you only have two pre-set playable characters that you even can use for this fight. Aerith having this ability when this fight occurs is an intentional design choice. The fact that it doesn't work is just flat out an issue with not having the necessary bandwidth for being able to complete any deep play testing against the boss. That this sort of key character ATB ability is important in that fight is something that's incredibly obvious, especially if Barret is using a Melee weapon. This makes it feel like by this fight, even key character interactions with bosses haven't been fully completed. It's a scenario where with more development bandwidth and testing time, something like this would have been figured out, and made this fight feel totally different.
Again, this isn't a fight that everyone won't find fun, or even a fight that everyone will struggle with. It is an example of a factor of this fight clearly not having nearly as much time with playtesting as the things that came in previous Chapters, even if the main phase transition animations are completed. It's basically just reusing things that already from the Guard Scorpion battle, so the development that's unique to this boss is incredibly tiny, and it doesn't feel fully fleshed out at all.
Aerith can use an ATB ability that she got from the Bladed Staff – but hasn't had nearly any opportunity to actually use: Lustrous Shield. This will generate a flower barrier that; blocks ranged attacks from the enemy, doesn't block line of sight for you or your allies' attacks, AND and you can even stack two of them with one slightly behind each other so that you can always keep one active at all times during this fight. This lets you just stand in the open with her and unleash a literal endless barrage of attacks in total safety, compared to the issues of needing to move out from behind the pillars to reestablish safe paths to the attack the boss.
However, Aerith doesn't do super well against small moving targets as an attacker. Her physical damage is miniscule even though it seeks out targets and charges up her ATB super quickly. Sorceress Storm is only a close range AoE which isn't ideal here, and Ray of Judgement only hits slower ground-level targets which is great for The Arsenal, but not for the little drones. However, Barret excels at dealing with those kinds of targets, so the natural approach is to use his attacks and abilities to take out the Drones, and use Aerith to protect and amplify his abilities. Red XIII is just running around and backing you up the whole time.
The two playable characters you're scripted to have in this fight are designed to do exactly these two things and taking this approach with these new abilities would be great... except that the passive character AI doesn't understand how to use Lustrous Shield for cover at all. This means that the second that you switch active control from Aerith over to Barret, she actually runs AWAY from the spot where she's in full protection from any of the boss's attacks – and takes a ton of damage while running for one of the scripted protection areas around the boss arena. The added issue here is that because the scripted protection areas are massive pillars that block line of sight for all attacks – you have to manually control Barret to move him out of cover in order to be able to use his ATB attacks. If you don't, he'll just unload Maximum Fury directly into the pillar in front of him and do literally zero damage. This ends up being almost equivalent to the boss just being immune to damage like I mentioned earlier.
After being exhausted from the Rufus fight, I just stuck with this safe tactic of just using Aerith, standing about 10 meters in front of The Arsenal, and setting up two Lustrous Shields. The boss literally can't damage you, and you can take all the time you need to take it down with literally zero risk. By the time one shield dies or expired, you can easily charge up another ATB to set up another second Lustrous Shield. You can put it in front of the first when one of the two breaks if there's a window of lag in the gunfire, or just slowly create them as you back up, and then push forward later when you have 2 ATB bars to spend. It's annoyingly slow, but again – zero risk.
The same issue is present as soon as its wheels and other weak points are exposed when the drones get destroyed. The only positive thing is that its starts destroying the points of existing cover around the arena, which means that it's easier to use Barret as soon as the cover he's using gets destroyed, forcibly giving him line of sight. Eventually you can build up your Limit, use Planet Protector, and just stand in the open and pour a ton of damage into the boss from Barret with no risk so long as it's active. In the final part, the boss sets the floor on fire and boxes you in to a tiny area, but again – these attacks are literally no threat to Aerith's Lustrous Shields, and with Barret FINALLY placed into direct line of sight of The Arsenal, this part goes by super quickly.
This whole thing was just struggling to make the characters do something ridiculously obvious by trying to use an optimal tactic for this fight that Aerith would just recently have been able to acquire, and hasn't had other opportunities to take advantage of. The fact that her character even has a whole ATB ability explicitly dedicated to this exact scenario but it doesn't work the way it should is insane. Literally the only reason that this approach to the fight isn't a good tactic is only because the AI for inactive characters doesn't recognize Lustrous Shield as a point of cover. This issue means that you're both dealing significantly LESS damage than you could since you can't just fire off Barret's ATB abilities as they're available, and Aerith's only offensive ATB attack is the 2 ATB Bar, Ray of Judgement. Additionally, choosing to not just forget that Barret exists means that you're also taking way MORE damage than you should because your characters are spending more time in spaces between cover than actually in cover.
This isn't something that is important for every boss fight, which is why it probably wouldn't come up in any broad testing with Aerith. This is only something that would arise when points of cover exist in boss arenas, and it's only an ability that she even gets access to after you rescue her from Shinra HQ. This fight is specifically a ranged boss fight that completely revolves around the use of cover in an arena – and you only have two pre-set playable characters that you even can use for this fight. Aerith having this ability when this fight occurs is an intentional design choice. The fact that it doesn't work is just flat out an issue with not having the necessary bandwidth for being able to complete any deep play testing against the boss. That this sort of key character ATB ability is important in that fight is something that's incredibly obvious, especially if Barret is using a Melee weapon. This makes it feel like by this fight, even key character interactions with bosses haven't been fully completed. It's a scenario where with more development bandwidth and testing time, something like this would have been figured out, and made this fight feel totally different.
Again, this isn't a fight that everyone won't find fun, or even a fight that everyone will struggle with. It is an example of a factor of this fight clearly not having nearly as much time with playtesting as the things that came in previous Chapters, even if the main phase transition animations are completed. It's basically just reusing things that already from the Guard Scorpion battle, so the development that's unique to this boss is incredibly tiny, and it doesn't feel fully fleshed out at all.
The tl;dr on this already exists. It's a roadblock that doesn't even have the benefit of building on ANY of the regularly practiced gameplay skills from the player, and it's also got plenty of pieces that are terribly designed.
This is a simple one. Staggering multiple enemies at once is normally a good thing, and against these guys it's super annoying because there's a cutscene involved in their attack that also resets the arena. Their gimmick means that if you Stagger two of them at once, you can deal 98% of the necessary damage against one and 100% of damage against the other. But as soon as 100% of the damage is dealt, the other one will instantly regenerate at 50% health and 0% stagger, which will make you just take the extra time to take it down again. The worst part is that they're not challenging. They disintegrate super easily, and this just artificially inflates how long the fight takes.
The issue is that they're three unique entities, but we don't really get to see them interacting differently. We don't spend any time learning tactics to overcome the three of them differently from one another. They each absorb unique elements, but aside from that being an Advent Children Remnant reference, it doesn't really impact the combat against them. The animations for them barely exist, and they're not even proper cutscenes. They just show up when the fight starts, and get a brief zoom they have a stagger state. The Whisper Harbinger's body breaking at a distance when they get defeated is literally the same angle every time. There's no careful camerawork when these bosses do anything. The only real phase transition in this fight at all is when they merge into Bahamut – but that's just a camera zooming in on the animation that's literally already occurring on the battlefield. With the lack of any normal enemies, it wasn't even until Whisper Bahamut showed up that it actually felt like a boss fight at all.
On top of that, when you finally do kill all three of them... you still have to deal the killing blow to Whisper Harbinger. But that doesn't transition into its own cutscene. He's just a gigantic entity that's still floating off in the distance. Every time I've done this fight, the killing blow has just been Aerith slowly shooting tiny magic spheres off into the sky until he collapses. It is... hilariously anti-climactic. There's no way that the penultimate boss of the game who is the literal Arbiter of Fate who's been guiding Destiny and stopping you with hurricane-like power of Whisper swarms should just be accidentally & incidentally dispatched like that. Even the sections where you're running through pipes and other things, and you do get close enough to see its hand up close don't allow you to fight it. The boss phase transition animations feel half-finished for everyone.
These fights are close to the only things in the chapter, and they lack almost everything that every other boss in the game has in terms of cinematic polish. The terrain transitions are all sloppy and unnecessary. The original mechanic was clearly to have one dedicated party attacking the three Remnant-like ones, and have the other party with attacks ready for when they're staggered and it can take damage. That would have meant that the final blow to the Harbinger would happen naturally as a result of the back-and-forth flow of combat. Instead, well... it's this awkward delay to seeing Sephiroth. ESPECIALLY for the new and Enigmatic mystery of the game – there's absolutely no way that this utterly forgettable speedbump is the way that the team intended this fight to feel and play out.
The issue is that they're three unique entities, but we don't really get to see them interacting differently. We don't spend any time learning tactics to overcome the three of them differently from one another. They each absorb unique elements, but aside from that being an Advent Children Remnant reference, it doesn't really impact the combat against them. The animations for them barely exist, and they're not even proper cutscenes. They just show up when the fight starts, and get a brief zoom they have a stagger state. The Whisper Harbinger's body breaking at a distance when they get defeated is literally the same angle every time. There's no careful camerawork when these bosses do anything. The only real phase transition in this fight at all is when they merge into Bahamut – but that's just a camera zooming in on the animation that's literally already occurring on the battlefield. With the lack of any normal enemies, it wasn't even until Whisper Bahamut showed up that it actually felt like a boss fight at all.
On top of that, when you finally do kill all three of them... you still have to deal the killing blow to Whisper Harbinger. But that doesn't transition into its own cutscene. He's just a gigantic entity that's still floating off in the distance. Every time I've done this fight, the killing blow has just been Aerith slowly shooting tiny magic spheres off into the sky until he collapses. It is... hilariously anti-climactic. There's no way that the penultimate boss of the game who is the literal Arbiter of Fate who's been guiding Destiny and stopping you with hurricane-like power of Whisper swarms should just be accidentally & incidentally dispatched like that. Even the sections where you're running through pipes and other things, and you do get close enough to see its hand up close don't allow you to fight it. The boss phase transition animations feel half-finished for everyone.
These fights are close to the only things in the chapter, and they lack almost everything that every other boss in the game has in terms of cinematic polish. The terrain transitions are all sloppy and unnecessary. The original mechanic was clearly to have one dedicated party attacking the three Remnant-like ones, and have the other party with attacks ready for when they're staggered and it can take damage. That would have meant that the final blow to the Harbinger would happen naturally as a result of the back-and-forth flow of combat. Instead, well... it's this awkward delay to seeing Sephiroth. ESPECIALLY for the new and Enigmatic mystery of the game – there's absolutely no way that this utterly forgettable speedbump is the way that the team intended this fight to feel and play out.
In the Whisper fight having a random assorted party was mildly annoying – but wasn't at all a problem overall because of how often they changed it up between the configurations. While it was bothersome, in that context it was like a rolling challenge where you're all genuinely lost in this weird abyss together and struggling to fight in small groups as you're constantly split up from one another. It definitely isn't that polished, but at least there's a reason that doing that could make sense at some point if it's executed properly. The storyline itself always managed to split up the party even you were reunited, so that there were groups to move between and things to do.
The frustrating thing is that the game never justifies any actual reason WHY you can only have three people fighting at once in your party. On top of that, this is a game where there are only 4 playable characters... So you're basically just looking at which character you don't want. That's what Red XIII is supposed to alleviate. He's supposed to make it so that there's a Team of 3 and a Team of 2 that you get to plan out as the player. That's what's supposed to happen during the drop into the Drum. That's what would give the game adequate information about the player's ideal party, so that the final battle would have enough player-choice-specific data to know which two it should put together to join up with Cloud against Sephiroth. With only 4 characters – there's literally no good reason not to be able to have a party of all 4 joining together to go up against the final boss together.
So, with all of that context out of the way, we get to Sephiroth. While he does have actual phases – aside from the later one where he starts out with Shadow Flare doing what Shadow Flare does (dropping you to 1HP) – I couldn't really tell you what his individual Phases really were, or how he changed tactically, or what works best to approach him. The only thing I do remember is that you're getting random characters joining you the whole time until you have a team of 3, and then once you hit that magic number, the final playable character just shows up for the ending cutscene with the guest character Red XIII because.
So at the start of the fight, you can press Square, but it only lets you know that Cloud is in your team. It's saving the reveals for the moments in the fight. This fight was frustrating because you will take a massive amount of damage and need to focus on healing regularly – so you'd better hope that the game's very limited RNGeezus-based character data decides that the character that you have with the healing Materia setup shows up as one of those three... mine didn't – and Tifa ALSO was the character who had Assess – so I was actually required to go do this chapter all over again just to complete the Enemy Intel.
So... literally at the end of the game, up against the game's big bad guy – Instead of utilizing all of the carefully crafted three-person-team tactics and workflows for combat that I'd been dedicatedly honing throughout the entire 56 hours I'd been playing the game... I instead spent the final boss fight forced to go about spamming Items where necessary to heal. The only other alternative, was letting them die and using Arise to bring them back at full HP. All because the game wants to deliver a moment thematically that it doesn't have enough precedent for, it undercuts core elements of the game's combat functionally. That's only something that you can do IF you've done a good job of teaching that to the player, and you have enough data to make sure that the outcome is a good one. None of that exists in the current state of the game.
The fight itself wasn't really tough at all, aside from being forced to contend with the artificial difficulty of combat RNGeezus choosing my team for me. Sephiroth is so overly aggressive that you can actually use it against him by switching control off of any character, and then choose to initiate their ATB attack on them while you're not controlling them. Doing this will guarantee that it'll go off and hit, but it also means that you lose all of the cinematic cutscenes for Limit Breaks, and also the sense of YOU actually being the one fighting and defeating Sephiroth. He always aggressively targets the active player character, so as long as you know how to manage your inactive combatants with priority, this fight is stupidly easy. Plus, because Cloud has the ATB Counterattack move, you can just use that while you're on him to still be able to deal damage before rotating around through the group when he needs to take a breather. Eventually you just get him damaged enough through the rotation to win.
When this fight concluded, this is the clear sensation that it delivered:
I didn't beat the game because I got better and better and I perfected a strategy to win the day against Sephiroth. I beat the game because I just sort of happened to have enough factors together to stumble through it the first time. This wasn't a victory that was hard fought and well-earned. This was a win that I managed to scrape by despite the game removing the tools that I spent hours perfecting. That's not rewarding at all. Combine that with all of this being something that's not in the original game, and you'll exacerbate the emotions of people who don't feel good about the victory from a gameplay perspective OR what's happening now from a story perspective. You're just frustrated with the whole experience feeling... off, and everything new feels shitty, and you have a really clear target to pour out your frustrations.
The Final Boss Fight in a video game is supposed to be the apex culmination of everything you've taught the player, and them bringing all of their knowledge and tools at their disposal. The Sephiroth fight removes a vast majority of the agency that the player has to be able to approach the fight itself. Every piece of it is fundamentally a failure as the ultimate test of the player in almost every way. If you happened to have RNGeezus deliver you your optimal team – you won't feel this at all, which reinforces just how important it is for the system that executes those decisions outside of the player's control to be EXTREMELY accurate, because the alternative is that it's ruining the finale gameplay moment.
The frustrating thing is that the game never justifies any actual reason WHY you can only have three people fighting at once in your party. On top of that, this is a game where there are only 4 playable characters... So you're basically just looking at which character you don't want. That's what Red XIII is supposed to alleviate. He's supposed to make it so that there's a Team of 3 and a Team of 2 that you get to plan out as the player. That's what's supposed to happen during the drop into the Drum. That's what would give the game adequate information about the player's ideal party, so that the final battle would have enough player-choice-specific data to know which two it should put together to join up with Cloud against Sephiroth. With only 4 characters – there's literally no good reason not to be able to have a party of all 4 joining together to go up against the final boss together.
So, with all of that context out of the way, we get to Sephiroth. While he does have actual phases – aside from the later one where he starts out with Shadow Flare doing what Shadow Flare does (dropping you to 1HP) – I couldn't really tell you what his individual Phases really were, or how he changed tactically, or what works best to approach him. The only thing I do remember is that you're getting random characters joining you the whole time until you have a team of 3, and then once you hit that magic number, the final playable character just shows up for the ending cutscene with the guest character Red XIII because.
So at the start of the fight, you can press Square, but it only lets you know that Cloud is in your team. It's saving the reveals for the moments in the fight. This fight was frustrating because you will take a massive amount of damage and need to focus on healing regularly – so you'd better hope that the game's very limited RNGeezus-based character data decides that the character that you have with the healing Materia setup shows up as one of those three... mine didn't – and Tifa ALSO was the character who had Assess – so I was actually required to go do this chapter all over again just to complete the Enemy Intel.
So... literally at the end of the game, up against the game's big bad guy – Instead of utilizing all of the carefully crafted three-person-team tactics and workflows for combat that I'd been dedicatedly honing throughout the entire 56 hours I'd been playing the game... I instead spent the final boss fight forced to go about spamming Items where necessary to heal. The only other alternative, was letting them die and using Arise to bring them back at full HP. All because the game wants to deliver a moment thematically that it doesn't have enough precedent for, it undercuts core elements of the game's combat functionally. That's only something that you can do IF you've done a good job of teaching that to the player, and you have enough data to make sure that the outcome is a good one. None of that exists in the current state of the game.
The fight itself wasn't really tough at all, aside from being forced to contend with the artificial difficulty of combat RNGeezus choosing my team for me. Sephiroth is so overly aggressive that you can actually use it against him by switching control off of any character, and then choose to initiate their ATB attack on them while you're not controlling them. Doing this will guarantee that it'll go off and hit, but it also means that you lose all of the cinematic cutscenes for Limit Breaks, and also the sense of YOU actually being the one fighting and defeating Sephiroth. He always aggressively targets the active player character, so as long as you know how to manage your inactive combatants with priority, this fight is stupidly easy. Plus, because Cloud has the ATB Counterattack move, you can just use that while you're on him to still be able to deal damage before rotating around through the group when he needs to take a breather. Eventually you just get him damaged enough through the rotation to win.
When this fight concluded, this is the clear sensation that it delivered:
I didn't beat the game because I got better and better and I perfected a strategy to win the day against Sephiroth. I beat the game because I just sort of happened to have enough factors together to stumble through it the first time. This wasn't a victory that was hard fought and well-earned. This was a win that I managed to scrape by despite the game removing the tools that I spent hours perfecting. That's not rewarding at all. Combine that with all of this being something that's not in the original game, and you'll exacerbate the emotions of people who don't feel good about the victory from a gameplay perspective OR what's happening now from a story perspective. You're just frustrated with the whole experience feeling... off, and everything new feels shitty, and you have a really clear target to pour out your frustrations.
The Final Boss Fight in a video game is supposed to be the apex culmination of everything you've taught the player, and them bringing all of their knowledge and tools at their disposal. The Sephiroth fight removes a vast majority of the agency that the player has to be able to approach the fight itself. Every piece of it is fundamentally a failure as the ultimate test of the player in almost every way. If you happened to have RNGeezus deliver you your optimal team – you won't feel this at all, which reinforces just how important it is for the system that executes those decisions outside of the player's control to be EXTREMELY accurate, because the alternative is that it's ruining the finale gameplay moment.
These are the kinds of problems that exist when the core philosophy for the whole game is designed to have players to take and optimize their own personal combat strategies with a specific and carefully configured three-person-team. Materia loadouts take fucking ages to set up even with the R1 Menu to quick swap, because you want to have the characters work exactly the way you work best with them. On top of that, each of the character's individual Weapons has unique buffs and bonus specializations that help to enhance any character with particular strategies. This changes with how you're using them inside a team as well. Each set of three characters changes certain elements about how you form a team that works in tandem with one another exactly the way that you can best optimize to give yourself the clearest path to victory that is within your control as the player.
In the last two chapters – literally none of the boss fights allow you to do that, and the whole section in the Drum heavily exacerbates just how much of a slog it is swapping parties on the fly. Not only that – from a design standpoint, none of the fights build off of the progress of the understanding of the basic mechanics and careful and crafting that you've done as a player over the previous 16 chapters of the game. These chapters all have points that undercut the basics that the game presented and that you've been building off of without warning or consistency. This continues until you literally go against the final boss with a completely unknown team. While you can use the panic Square Menu prompt to re-equip Cloud at the start of the fight... you don't know who else is coming to join you while you still have any ability to customize their loadouts, which means that all of that aforementioned individual team crafting and customization is literally non-present in the final battle, unless you want to restart the game in the middle of the climactic experience, just so that you can actually be able to plan for the combat that the game already knows it's going to present to you.
This is what boss fights feel like when they're still in the early stages of being worked on. They're too sharp or too easy, because they don't have a smooth and even experience across a wide distribution of players because there isn't enough testing data to inform how to adjust them. They have new mechanics that aren't yet ironed out or refined to fit within the flow of the gameplay development for how the combat system has been growing. These are blocky changes, and they're the antithesis of what you see when a team has had time to hone and polish the experience into something that they're proud of. They're nothing like the rest of the game, and the chapters themselves echo that exact same level of those events being very rapidly "made playable" rather than being finely crafted experiences that are polished to a point where they feel "finished".
I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of folks who actually enjoy any of those battles or may have even had a super easy time with them. I'm not even saying that it's not possible to learn them and then find them easy once you understand them. All of that's just up to individual experience that shifts a lot with how you approached the situations, what kinds of things you have done before and natural strengths you have as a player, which sort of gameplay experiences you struggle with, plus a healthy helping of RNG.
However,
Compare literally ALL of those boss fights I just covered to the VR Battle against Bahamut. He is genuinely a more difficult fight than Sephiroth. He has sections where he flies around the arena and you can't engage him in combat. He can one-hit KO your entire team if you're not at full HP and adequately shielded. You have to learn how to approach the fight, and when to do what to beat him, and even then it probably still involves your whole team dying a couple of times while you get the hang of it even when you're at Max Level. This fight both harder AND more satisfying than the main game's confrontation with Sephiroth. Why?
That's why there's a slightly different design philosophy to the difficulty of the main game bosses' which are designed to push players as close as possible to the edge of a Game Over without ever getting you there, because it interrupts the narrative structure. This is the reason that Hard Mode & VR Missions exist as post-game content and they can often be even more entertaining as a gameplay challenge. This is also the reason that you can look at the bosses specifically as they're meant to be encountered through the game's initial playthrough with a different perspective – because crafting the feel of that first experience is the biggest part of the job of game development once you have the mechanics in place – and it's totally different from making bosses that are a really entertaining challenge for max-level players.
What isn't a matter of opinion is that the existing core design structure and execution itself in the final two chapters is currently full of problems that do not exist even remotely on this level in all of other Chapter and Bosses that come before this. This is why I'm talking about the issues in the game's final chapters being a problem that you have to look at as challenges related to software development difficulties, and not something just at an individual player experience level. The issues here are noticeable because they are wholly inconsistent with how amazingly polished and meticulous the QA is throughout the rest of the game.
The earlier chapters of this game are just... so insanely polished from a QA standpoint, both in level design, pacing, combat, boss design, storytelling, exploration, dialogue, presentation, cinematography, etc. Literally ALL of those things take a hit in the final chapters in different ways. You can tell over the last two chapters where the team had to individually prioritize things, and leave other parts as they were, so long as they were functional & stable. It's overwhelmingly apparent just how much time got spent on every square inch of every portion of each Chapter in the game leading up to this. There are little rats running around the slums that no one comments on or interacts with, just because they add something that you notice. There's a ton of flavor text with NPC, and places to go and things to do. The boss fights feel fluid, everything in the game just builds masterfully – but then it hits a wall where those things suddenly drop drastically.
Not everybody is gonna notice that because again – individual experiences vary on a lot of different factors. I know what this looks like from a software QA perspective. This is why I'm hyper aware of these things, but I'm also extremely forgiving towards them – because ultimately games are products, and release deadlines force decisions to happen, and things to get cut or prioritized. This is why I am genuinely expecting a huge update that will add a ton of polish to those sections of the game that's attached to Red XIII as a playable character, because there are so many other minor indicators that all point to the same sorts of issues all over the place, but they're easiest to define in the boss battles, because of how much everything about the game has to come together in those moments.
In the last two chapters – literally none of the boss fights allow you to do that, and the whole section in the Drum heavily exacerbates just how much of a slog it is swapping parties on the fly. Not only that – from a design standpoint, none of the fights build off of the progress of the understanding of the basic mechanics and careful and crafting that you've done as a player over the previous 16 chapters of the game. These chapters all have points that undercut the basics that the game presented and that you've been building off of without warning or consistency. This continues until you literally go against the final boss with a completely unknown team. While you can use the panic Square Menu prompt to re-equip Cloud at the start of the fight... you don't know who else is coming to join you while you still have any ability to customize their loadouts, which means that all of that aforementioned individual team crafting and customization is literally non-present in the final battle, unless you want to restart the game in the middle of the climactic experience, just so that you can actually be able to plan for the combat that the game already knows it's going to present to you.
This is what boss fights feel like when they're still in the early stages of being worked on. They're too sharp or too easy, because they don't have a smooth and even experience across a wide distribution of players because there isn't enough testing data to inform how to adjust them. They have new mechanics that aren't yet ironed out or refined to fit within the flow of the gameplay development for how the combat system has been growing. These are blocky changes, and they're the antithesis of what you see when a team has had time to hone and polish the experience into something that they're proud of. They're nothing like the rest of the game, and the chapters themselves echo that exact same level of those events being very rapidly "made playable" rather than being finely crafted experiences that are polished to a point where they feel "finished".
I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of folks who actually enjoy any of those battles or may have even had a super easy time with them. I'm not even saying that it's not possible to learn them and then find them easy once you understand them. All of that's just up to individual experience that shifts a lot with how you approached the situations, what kinds of things you have done before and natural strengths you have as a player, which sort of gameplay experiences you struggle with, plus a healthy helping of RNG.
However,
Compare literally ALL of those boss fights I just covered to the VR Battle against Bahamut. He is genuinely a more difficult fight than Sephiroth. He has sections where he flies around the arena and you can't engage him in combat. He can one-hit KO your entire team if you're not at full HP and adequately shielded. You have to learn how to approach the fight, and when to do what to beat him, and even then it probably still involves your whole team dying a couple of times while you get the hang of it even when you're at Max Level. This fight both harder AND more satisfying than the main game's confrontation with Sephiroth. Why?
- The VR Simulator is designed to have battles that you're meant to lose, adjust your team & tactics, and come back to again.
- The VR Simulator lets you select exactly what team you want, and take as much time as you need to plan out your plan of attack before attempting any fight either the first of the hundredth time, so you're always confronting the challenges as optimized as you want to be.
- The VR Simulator boss battles all maintain all of the core fundamental aspects of the gameplay, and their difficulty comes from just increasing the challenge that the boss itself presents, and the damage that it can do.
That's why there's a slightly different design philosophy to the difficulty of the main game bosses' which are designed to push players as close as possible to the edge of a Game Over without ever getting you there, because it interrupts the narrative structure. This is the reason that Hard Mode & VR Missions exist as post-game content and they can often be even more entertaining as a gameplay challenge. This is also the reason that you can look at the bosses specifically as they're meant to be encountered through the game's initial playthrough with a different perspective – because crafting the feel of that first experience is the biggest part of the job of game development once you have the mechanics in place – and it's totally different from making bosses that are a really entertaining challenge for max-level players.
What isn't a matter of opinion is that the existing core design structure and execution itself in the final two chapters is currently full of problems that do not exist even remotely on this level in all of other Chapter and Bosses that come before this. This is why I'm talking about the issues in the game's final chapters being a problem that you have to look at as challenges related to software development difficulties, and not something just at an individual player experience level. The issues here are noticeable because they are wholly inconsistent with how amazingly polished and meticulous the QA is throughout the rest of the game.
The earlier chapters of this game are just... so insanely polished from a QA standpoint, both in level design, pacing, combat, boss design, storytelling, exploration, dialogue, presentation, cinematography, etc. Literally ALL of those things take a hit in the final chapters in different ways. You can tell over the last two chapters where the team had to individually prioritize things, and leave other parts as they were, so long as they were functional & stable. It's overwhelmingly apparent just how much time got spent on every square inch of every portion of each Chapter in the game leading up to this. There are little rats running around the slums that no one comments on or interacts with, just because they add something that you notice. There's a ton of flavor text with NPC, and places to go and things to do. The boss fights feel fluid, everything in the game just builds masterfully – but then it hits a wall where those things suddenly drop drastically.
Not everybody is gonna notice that because again – individual experiences vary on a lot of different factors. I know what this looks like from a software QA perspective. This is why I'm hyper aware of these things, but I'm also extremely forgiving towards them – because ultimately games are products, and release deadlines force decisions to happen, and things to get cut or prioritized. This is why I am genuinely expecting a huge update that will add a ton of polish to those sections of the game that's attached to Red XIII as a playable character, because there are so many other minor indicators that all point to the same sorts of issues all over the place, but they're easiest to define in the boss battles, because of how much everything about the game has to come together in those moments.
Lastly, if it would help & if anybody wants and/or is curious about this sort of thing: I'd be happy to dissect and critique literally any other boss fight in the game if there's one that you felt wasn't well designed – especially if you can tell me what kinds of things you struggled with on it. I'll do my best to tear it down in the same level of core detail, so that I can help show what I mean about the type of gameplay polish that exists elsewhere in the game – but doesn't exist in the things I just covered as it might help to show what's different between personal less-than-ideal experiences with a boss fight vs. poorly designed / under-tested boss fights.
X
- AKA
- Minato
Lastly, if it would help & if anybody wants and/or is curious about this sort of thing: I'd be happy to dissect and critique literally any other boss fight in the game if there's one that you felt wasn't well designed – especially if you can tell me what kinds of things you struggled with on it. I'll do my best to tear it down in the same level of core detail, so that I can help show what I mean about the type of gameplay polish that exists elsewhere in the game – but doesn't exist in the things I just covered as it might help to show what's different between personal less-than-ideal experiences with a boss fight vs. poorly designed / under-tested boss fights.
X
Eligor is one fight that left me feeling "Well I won, but it took me such a ridiculous amount of time, there must've been some mechanic I wasn't getting." I've seen others on Discord express similiar thoughts.
There are fights I struggled with that I shouldn't have, and I'm afraid of hard mode, so I definitely don't think I'm great at this game, but I seriously don't understand what so many people struggled with on Motorball. All of his moves are so obviously telegraphed. It just felt like an action movie. Attack wheels, swerve away when he lifts the wheels up or fire shows up in the exhaust pipes, swerve back in and resume the attack, don't hit the wheels that glow, slam on the brakes when he starts charging the big blast, when he pulls ahead use the long range attack, when he's staggered use spin attack?
I found Roche WAY harder, I finished that fight with like 25% health. I barely took damage against Motorball.
I found Roche WAY harder, I finished that fight with like 25% health. I barely took damage against Motorball.